Starfield is Bethesda’s big new role-playing game. Accordingly, the expectations of players for the ambitious space adventure have been and are high. Just under a month after the release, Starfield’s chief Todd Howard stated that players today have changed expectations.
Who is it about?
- Todd Howard is the Game Director and Executive Producer for Bethesda Game Studios and is responsible for Starfield.
- Additionally, Howard is responsible for the development of the Fallout and Elder Scrolls series.
- Howard leads Bethesda along with Studio Director Ashley Cheng and before the release, was the only person allowed to talk about new information regarding Starfield at Bethesda.
On September 25, 2023, Todd Howard was a guest on the “AIAS Game Makers Notebook Podcast” where he spoke with Ted Price, the CEO of Insomniac Games (Spyro, Ratches & Clank, Marvel’s Spider-Man).
During the podcast, Price asked whether players’ expectations for an RPG have changed over time and whether it has changed what is important in a role-playing game (via YouTube).
“You can choose any game you want. That’s somehow flowed in”
What does Howard say? Howard believes that players’ expectations have changed “dramatically” because the RPG genre mixes with everything. He can no longer look at a game without it having experience points and a leveling system. This has somehow flowed into the games.
Howard loves the genre himself because it can be anything. He further explains that an RPG can have action or merge with other types of games. Even a racing game can become an RPG; it just depends on what you focus on. An old school RPG fan probably has their own list of things that define the genre for them (via YouTube).
According to Howard, Bethesda tries to stay true to what they want to see in a game and thinks about how to incorporate elements that they believe belong in an RPG. They mix things within the genre and have also developed a space shooter with Starfield.
What does Howard mean by saying that the RPG genre mixes with everything? Many games that are not classic role-playing games today also have RPG mechanics.
In addition to dialogue options and skill trees (i.e., the character system), leveling up your character and enemies that also level up during the game are elements that make up a role-playing game. Making decisions that have consequences is also important.
But all this has long since ceased to exist only in role-playing games and can also be found in other genres. For example, Assassins’s Creed has increasingly incorporated RPG elements with Origins, Odyssey, and Valhalla.
Dying Light 2 also offers RPG mechanics such as interaction with NPCs and the leveling system without being a classic RPG. More and more games borrow elements from the genre.
In the podcast with Ted Price, Todd Howard also revealed that Bethesda intentionally made the enemy ships “really dumb”:
Starfield: Todd Howard reveals, Bethesda had to make enemy ships “really dumb”
