Starfield: Everything New We Learned in IGN's Todd Howard Interview

ign.com:

IGN was lucky enough to speak to Bethesda Game Studios' Todd Howard today and, in the process learned a lot more about Starfield – not to mention heard a mention of Fallout's future.

In conversation with Ryan McCaffrey, Howard followed up on a number of elements we learned about for first time during Starfield's gameplay reveal at the Xbox-Bethesda showcase last weekend. We have full news stories and quotes for every topic mentioned, linked below, but here's a quick rundown of everything new we learned.

Todd Howard has confirmed to IGN that Fallout 5 will be Bethesda Game Studios' next game after The Elder Scrolls 6, which itself will follow on from 2023's Starfield.

"Yes, Elder Scrolls 6 is in pre-production," he said, "and, you know, we’re going to be doing Fallout 5 after that, so our slate’s pretty full going forward for a while. We have some other projects that we look at from time to time as well."

Amid a huge amount of new information on Starfield from the Xbox-Bethesda showcase, likely the most-discussed detail was Todd Howard's announcement that the upcoming sci-fi RPG will include 1,000 fully explorable planets. Howard told us more about the game's approach to procedural generation, what it offers, and assured us that players can ignore them in favour of a huge amount of fully handcrafted content, if they want to.

Starfield's main quest is about 20% bigger than previous Bethesda games such as Skyrim and Fallout 4, with Todd Howard saying that means it should take around 30 to 40 hours to complete – without stepping away to do side content.

Howard said the game's main story is longer than normal due to the sheer number of quests: "This one’s ending up a little bit longer [than our previous games] and we may tune that