With Starfield’s hugely anticipated 2023 release growing ever-closer, Bethesda has launched a new Q&A video series, and episode one sees director Todd Howard responding to a number of community queries – including sharing some thoughts on traits, dialogue, and whether Starfield can be described as a “hard sci-fi” game.
Howard began the chat by detailing a few of Starfield’s inspirations – 1984 space sim SunDog: Frozen Legacy and pen-and-paper RPG Traveller, if you’re wondering – before moving on to tackle the “hard sci-fi” question. This, he said, was a little tricky to answer insofar as different people will likely have different definitions of “hard sci-fi”, but for Bethesda, “It is more hard to us, where you can draw that line from, okay, here’s how man explored space, and [then] look at our ships and say, alright that has some visual identity back to that”.
However, he also called the question a bit of a trap, “because it’s a video game. Like, a hard science-fiction video game would be, you die in space cold.”
As an example of how hard sci-fi doesn’t always translate well in gaming, Howard revealed how the team was initially “really into fuel and how the gravity drive works, and I’m reading papers on like quantum physics and bending space in front of you”. But when Bethesda attempted to implement some of these more realistic systems, it “became very punitive for the player.”