More than Skyrim or Fallout, Todd Howard says Starfield was "intentionally made to be played for a long time" and Bethesda's looking 5+ years ahead

gamesradar.com:

Bethesda boss Todd Howard says Starfield was designed and built for longevity, even more so than RPGs like Skyrim or any of the modern Fallouts, with the studio already considering how the game will evolve for years and years to come. 

In a Game Maker's Notebook interview with Insomniac Games CEO Ted Price, Howard weighs in on the discussion about the ever-escalating scale of games, which was amplified by Baldur's Gate 3 launching back-to-back with Starfield. Price asks if games really are getting too big and wonders who's driving this "need for more complexity." 

"I think it starts with the developers," Howard responds. "It has to, right? I think it starts with technology. You're seeing new hardware, you're wanting to use it in new ways, you're looking at demos going 'we could do this, we could do this, we could present it in this way.' The scale of games, I think, I'd have to go back and look. How big were things before? The one thing I have noticed is, because more games are played for a long time, they're 'live,' the ability to update them over time creates games that people are playing right now that have been around for a long time, gotten years and years and years of updates, and that creates an expectation. When I'm going into something new, how does this compare with a mature game that I've been playing for a while?"

Howard describes the scale of Starfield as "irresponsible," partly owing to its setting. The team was "always trying to fill it given how much space is in space." And to the surprise of no one, just as he's done for the past several years, he also revisits Skyrim. 

"Even a game like Skyrim – which if you look at it at launch was still a really, really big game – if you look at it today with add-ons