How big is Starfield? ‘Irresponsibly large,’ says Bethesda exec
Starfield, coming this fall and already twice delayed, is an “irresponsibly large game,” according to Pete Hines, the longtime Bethesda Softworks executive who is now its head of publishing.
Hines made the comment in testimony during Thursday’s hearing, in federal court, where the U.S. Federal Trade Commission is seeking to stop Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard. The point Hines was making is that developing Starfield for platforms other than Microsoft’s Windows PC or Xbox Series would assuredly mean another delay for the newest role-playing franchise from Bethesda Softworks, which Microsoft now owns.
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Under questioning by an FTC lawyer, Hines agreed that he personally supported the decision to make Starfield an Xbox console exclusive. “As someone who has been playing it a lot and sees all this stuff to do,” Hines said, “there’s no question in my mind that being able to focus on fewer platforms to support, hardware to support, has been a big benefit to that team.”
Starfield is, by all accounts, actually a big game. “We have poured ourselves into this game, and even I’m surprised how much we can pour,” Todd Howard, the game director and creative director of Bethesda Game Studios, said in March. Starfield got its own 45-minute showcase after Xbox’s gala presentation on June 11, too.
That big-ness is Bethesda’s reason for locking the frame-rate on consoles to 30 frames per second, Howard said after the show two weeks ago. On Thursday, in a podcast with Kinda Funny Games, Howard reiterated that Bethesda Game Studios “never looked at taking features away” in order to deliver a performance-mode option at a higher frame rate.
“Ultimately, look, we boil it down to, we wanted the consistency,” Howard told
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