- “Well it's coming out next year so there'll be a lot of time to show actual gameplay – and we'll do that closer to release, like we usually do,” he explains with impeccably practiced patience.
- “But I will say this: it is a first person and third person game, like our other ones. We like that style of gameplay. First person for us is still our prime way of playing. So you can see the world and touch all those things.
- “It's also a bit more hardcore of a role playing game than we've done. It's got some really great character systems – choosing your background, things like that. We’re going back to some things that we used to do in games long ago that we felt have really let players express the character they want to be. So I think when you see it being played, you would recognise it as something we made.”
- “Well, we like to put you in a world where we're not dragging you by the nose and saying you must do X, Y and Z, and that it's okay for you to want to test the [game’s boundaries]. You know, can I read this book? Can I pick this up? Can I do this? What if I do this? What if I do this? And the game is saying ‘yes’ a lot.
- “And it has large scale goals and storytelling, but that minute-to-minute feels rewarding for you. And if you just want to pass the time and go watch the sunset and pick flowers it's rewarding in that way too. The quiet moments feel really really good.”
- “This isn’t Star Wars, or Star Trek, it's kind of its own thing – and I think as we show more, hopefully, it'll carve out its own niche,” says Howard. “It's still a game but it does like to give you this sense of, ‘I buy the reality of it’, right?
- “So if you look at the ship – you can probably design a much sleeker ship 300 years in the future, right? But this has touchstones back to the current space programme. So in your mind, you can draw this line between them. Like there's various guns the player has, and other weapons and things like that… but the more exotic ones feel exotic in the reality of the game versus not.”
- During the course of development Howard even dropped in on his old pal Elon Musk’s Space X organisation to carry out some field research – ”to talk to people who could see further than what I was seeing right now”.
- Intriguingly Howard reveals this approach has infused not just Starfield’s look and feel, but also its gameplay too. “It's being able to play with something where the technology level and the logic of how humankind got to where they are. You know, how do the people live? How does the equipment work? What are the rules of communication? You take it for granted in the game that you could communicate from one planet to another, or some other remote thing. But we have the rules. No, they can't – that's going to take years! And then once you realise, you can be, like ‘okay…’, you can use that to your advantage.”
- “Erm… I think you might see some lasers in a vacuum,” laughs Howard sheepishly. “It is a game, let's make no mistake. But when you build those things, you can then lean in on them and they create their own vibe. There's a case in the trailer – it's a watch case, actually. You’re part of Constellation so you get this explorer’s watch. And that's part of the identity of... you know, how does this thing work? What does it do? What does it not do? Tone. A lot of it is tone.”
- There are alien races too – although Howard won’t disclose how they tie in to the game’s realistic grounding (“There is a way we approach it, I will say that”) – and planets to explore.
- “It's very big, yeah. People are still playing Skyrim and we have learned from that. We spent more time building [Starfield] to be played for a long time, if you so chose that you just wanted to keep playing it. It's got some more hooks in it for that, that we added later to a game like Skyrim… while still making sure that somebody who just wants to play it, and go through the main quests and “win”, or feel they've accomplished something large is doable.”
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