Starfield Has 'a Classic Bethesda Style' Dialogue System, Has Over 250,000 Lines of Dialogue - News

by William D'Angelo , posted on 12 October 2022 / 4,328 Views

Bethesda Game Studios' game director and executive producer Todd Howard in a new video for Starfield has provided some more details on the upcoming space RPG by answering questions from the community.

Howard reveals the game was inspired by classic RPGs like Sundog and Traveller. The game itself is grounded in hard science fiction and is about being as accurate to science and logic as possible. However, the studio did make some concessions.

"We were really into fuel and how the gravity drive works," said Howard (and transcribed by VideoGamesChronicle). "And I’m reading papers on quantum physics and bending space in front of you. You don’t actually warp, you bend the space toward – you bring the space toward you. And so we were playing that and it became very punitive to the player. Your ship would run out of fuel and the game would just stop.

"You just want to get back to what you were doing, so we’ve recently changed it where the fuel in your ship and the grav drive limits how far you could go at once, but it doesn’t run out of fuel. Maybe there’ll be an update or a mod that allows that, but that’s what we’re doing now."

Players will be able to remove negative character traits from their character by completing quests, Howard confirmed.

"We have a way in the game, kind of an activity or quest you can do to remove that trait, as opposed to, ‘I don’t like my character, I want to start over’. Each of them are something that you can solve that removes the entire trait for the rest of your playthrough."

Starfield has "a classic Bethesda style" as it shows the player looking at characters and seeing how they emote before choosing how to interact with them.

The game has over 250,000 lines of dialogue, which is well above the 110,000 in Fallout 4 and 60,000 in Skyrim.

Starfield will launch for the Xbox Series X|S, PC, and Xbox Game Pass in the first half of 2023.

A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012 and taking over the hardware estimates in 2017. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel. You can contact the author on Twitter @TrunksWD.

18 Comments

shikamaru317 (on 12 October 2022)

250k lines is huge. That is more than Fallout 4 + Fallout New Vegas + Skyrim combined. More than GTA 5 + Skyrim combined. More than the Mass Effect Trilogy + GTA 5 combined.