Starfield lead designer Emil Pagliarulo says you may find God in Starfield — or lose faith

polygon.com:

In the five years since Bethesda Softworks first announced Starfield, much of the conversation has been focused on the endless possibilities that await players within the game’s web of planets and choices. There’s complex character and personality creation, a spectrum of geography all tricked out with the latest lighting and physics technology, customizable spaceships and space teams from highly dimensional NPCs, and loads of other bells and whistles to take advantage of the current generation of consoles.

One thing that’s not as foregrounded in the buildup to Bethesda’s next big thing: the narrative that will carry players through this newly created world. A few weeks before the game’s Sept. 6 launch, Polygon editor Owen Good spoke to Starfield lead designer Emil Pagliarulo, a veteran of the studio whose resume includes The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim and Fallout games, about constructing a universe — full of history and ideologically driven populations — from the ground up. Pagliarulo and the Bethesda team aimed to ask bigger questions than most science fiction games of its ilk. Here’s how.

[Ed. note: This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.]

Polygon: You embarked on a hell of a creative journey by developing an entirely new IP, so how do you begin on something like that? You have trusted people around you, you have structure that you can lean on, but when you get the call of “We’re doing sci-fi and have to make it all up” — was it intimidating?

Emil Pagliarulo: No, it wasn’t, it was exciting. The scale of the project hadn’t hit me at the time. It really was just like the beginning of a Fallout game or working on Elder Scrolls stuff — it was fun. The very beginning was [game director] Todd Howard and