News on Starfield has dried up a little bit as of late, but Bethesda has now treated us to a brand-new deep dive on the game's quest system, which builds on what came before in both Skyrim and Fallout 4. In the video above, developer Will Shen takes us through some of the game's big quest-related features, while discussing what the team is aiming for with its Starfield storyline.
It sounds like Bethesda is taking a more open-ended approach with Starfield's main quest, especially when it comes to factions and your interactions with them.
"One of the early things we decided on was making sure the main quest gives you a little bit of a tour of the settled systems and all of the major players there, so that we can give you a taste of what they [the factions] are going to be up to."
"We also discussed really early on, like 'okay, do we make some of the factions in conflict with each other', and we decided we really want to make sure that you can play through all the faction lines independently of each other."
"This time around we were like 'we really want the stories to be a little more personal'. You're influencing the direction of where this faction is going to go."
The new ViDoc doesn't provide much new gameplay unfortunately, but a fresh look at Starfield shouldn't be too far off. For now, Microsoft is still aiming for the first half of 2023 with Starfield's launch.
Like the sound of all this? Let us know how you're feeling about Starfield down below.
Comments 13
Needs a release date I suspect that this might get another delay.
I'm worried about how buggy it will be. Skyrim is still full of bugs many years after releasing and I could never finish it.
@grumpypotato I hope they help them as Bethesda Quality Assurance is shocking normally.
Seeing is believing.
Deep dive? More like deep fluff. They need to take some tips from the hogwarts legacy devs on how to do it properly
@Cyberpsycho I'm sure it won't be as 'buggy' or 'broken' as games like Cyberpunk was on release, but if you expect a 'perfect' game with absolutely no bugs/glitches at all, I doubt you'll get that.
Its so much easier to 'build' a very linear game, linear plot etc. The issues come when you start to give the player much more freedom. It maybe a 'little' thing, like a side quest glitch because you happened to do something 'out of order'. Maybe found something 'early' from exploring that causes something to 'glitch'. Its impossible to 'test' for EVERY possible situation that could crop up with so much more 'Random' situations.
In a Linear game, you can control 'everything' and therefore, there is little excuse for too many 'bugs/glitches' but then they don't test to see if you can 'glitch' through something by doing some specific movement at just the right place to break the game - especially if its just some environmental 'set dressing' in an area devoid of 'reason' to even test it. There is always some players that 'explore' every inch, trying to find glitches, bugs etc, trying to reach areas meant to be 'inaccessible'.
Point is, the more 'freedom' you give a player, the more difficult it is to eradicate all bugs/glitches. H:ZD had numerous bugs/glitches and quite a few were related to that 'freedom' of being able to tackle missions and explore everywhere as you choose, finding 'something' or being able to do 'something' because you went off 'exploring' or following other missions before returning to complete those side quests.
Its when games like these get released that many bugs/glitches get 'found'. You are going from say a 100 people testing parts of the game to ensure they 'work' as expected to 'millions' all playing how they 'want' to play, accumulating millions and millions of hours worth of data, of different 'combinations' of levels, gear, choices and playstyles and why 'some' bugs/glitches won't get found before release.
The reason I am telling you this is to temper your expectation. If you are expecting a 'Perfect, bug/issue free' game from launch, its almost impossible because no 'developer' has the resources to test for 'every' possible player choices/playstyle. I do expect it to be more 'polished' than a 'typical' Bethesda release, but I also expect various patches and fixes over-time. Maybe most people won't have any issues because they'll play in a 'typical' way, tackle missions in a logical order, following 'logical' paths etc so don't experience any major issues but I'd still expect to see patches and fixes post release.
@BAMozzy I'm certainly not expecting perfection just don't want loads of game breaking bugs. For example on Skyrim still has many bugs years after launch as they don't fix them. The last straw for that game when the save corrupted after playing over 40 hours wiping my progress.
At least Cyberpunk eventually got fixed.
It’ll be a Bethesda game, everyone, and that’s how it’ll play. I thought Bethesda’s single player outings were beloved, despite their faults. Wouldn’t know that from some of these comments! Let’s all have a bit of faith. Bethesda’s taken their time with this one and I’m sure it’ll be worthwhile to play, though it’ll probably crash a couple times and have some bugs. I expect it to play like Skyrim or Fallout 4 did at launch, but if it’s also as entertaining and fun as Skyrim, that’s a win (Fallout 4 was a minor disappointment for me, but that was mostly that the story and characters simply didn’t come close to topping Fallout 3 or New Vegas for me… it was an 8/10 when I wanted a 10/10, I suppose). For me, I haven’t been pleased with one of their mainline titles since Skyrim and I’m really rooting for this one. In my eyes, that particular style for the open world genre is still unmatched and we’re due for an evolution.
@BAMozzy Well said. Agree that games like this, or any with many different systems that interact with each other are always going to have bugs, it's unavoidable. A relatively small number of Q&A, play testers and even automated systems can only try so many permutations of the game.
That said I do take @Cyberpsycho point that Skyrim STILL has some game breaking bugs over a decade later. Doubly frustrating that many of these have been fixed in unofficial fan made mods/patches on PC but weren't even addressed for the anniversary edition. While personally I was pretty lucky at launch - I only had one very minor side quest that couldn't ever be completed, and the load times that grew with game time - even amongst my small group of gaming friends there were two that had major issues. One couldn't complete one of the main faction questlines and another lost all their progress. That isn't acceptable either.
So while I agree we absolutely should expect some 'bugs' in a game as complex as this, hopefully this isn't like Skyrim and it's less buggy at launch and they patch any they find quickly afterwards.
@themightyant I agree with you too.
From my perspective, I can't imagine that 'Zenimax' would of delayed Starfield from 11.11.22 regardless of whether it was 'ready' or not. Certainly wouldn't have delayed it knowing they had 'NO' big AAA games to release and bring in revenue rather than be faced with 'investing' more time and money into a project whilst 'income' isn't coming in from sales of games.
To me, the fact that MS decided it wasn't going to be 'ready', certainly not without crunching and pushing people (which can lead to 'silly' mistakes/bugs getting in, let alone removing bugs) to meet 'deadlines', and knowing that they would take a massive PR hit, they were still prepared to 'delay' instead of release.
I doubt it will be as 'Broken' as Fallout 76, or as bad as Fallout 4 was at Launch, but I don't expect it will be 'perfect' and could still have 'major' issues at launch because they can't check every possible scenario. I don't know what caused those 'issues' in Skyrim, but it obviously didn't affect 'everyone' and it maybe very difficult to reproduce to 'fix' without potentially introducing other issues. Losing progress is 'disappointing' but its not always possible to 'recover' that either so even if they 'fix' the issue that caused progress to be lost, it doesn't 'help' those that lost data...
@Cyberpsycho @themightyant I trust Bethesda to be Bethesda.....
That said, a lot of serious problems they've had in their games over the years have been due to their abysmal third party Gaembryo engine, which they've had id working on for quite some years now. They also have a lot of script problems in their games, and FO76 was not a good look but they pretty much admitted to rushing that out the door before its time vs the delays of Starfield.
I expect it'll be a buggy mess still, but I do think the engine and the QA process is, at a minimum, not in the same place it was when Skyrim came out.
Out of all the games due to come out next year across all 3 consoles Starfield is the one I'm most excited about. Zelda TotK at second.
Fallout in space. I am ok with it taking another 3-4 years if we need.
So many statements. Just finish the game and release it. If it was that great you wouldn't have to push so hard. It's been in development for so long it will feel dated by the tike it releases.
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