Starfield isn’t quite ‘hard sci-fi,’ Todd Howard says, but it’s close

polygon.com:

A new video from Bethesda has given us some more details on Starfield, the studio’s first new original franchise in years.

On Tuesday, the studio launched a new video series called Constellation Questions, where it brings various fan questions to game director Todd Howard. The video covers a wide variety of topics, from space flight, to dialogue options, and even traits.

First, Howard addressed the inspiration for Starfield. He recalled two games that had a particular influence: Sun Dog for the Apple 2 and Atari ST and Traveller, a pen-and-paper RPG.

This led to fans wondering whether Starfield is “hard” sci-fi — meaning more rooted in actual science — or not. Howard said that Starfield is hard sci-fi in his opinion, but that mileage will vary on what fans might think. However, Howard was clear that this is still a video game about having fun, and so the team did pull back on some of the potential frustrations that a more realistic sci-fi setting would bring. For example, the player could originally run out of fuel in space, leaving them floating. That has since been removed, and player’s fuel and grav-drive type instead limit how far players can go at once. Unrealistic, yes, but certainly less frustrating for fans.

Howard then addressed the game’s various traits, which offer both a positive effect and a negative trade-off. Here are some of the example traits that appeared in the video:

Crucially, players can remove these traits to get rid of their negative (and positive) effects by completing a quest or activity. Players who make a poor choice early on won’t need to restart the game just to re-roll their character’s traits.

Finally, Howard talked a bit about the dialogue system. Without getting too deep into it, there