Todd Howard Notes That The Length Of Starfield Was “Intentional”

gameranx.com:

Just before Starfield came out, the game’s reviews were dropped, and a consistent theme was seen within them. Specifically, these game reviewers kept talking about the amount of hours they put into the game overall, not just with the main storyline but within the whole game. Some of the reviewers had put in dozens of hours, and a few had put in over a hundred to two hundred hours into Bethesda’s new title! What that showed was that no matter what kind of gamer you were, you would have quite the adventure ahead of you. As we know now, that was by design.

Todd Howard has been talking quite a bit recently about the length of video games today, and how he and the rest of Bethesda crafted Starfield to take advantage of those gamers who liked playing long titles. While doing an interview with the Game Maker’s Notebook, he said:

“This is a game that’s intentionally made to be played for a long time. One of the things we’ve learned from our previous games, like Skyrim, like Fallout, is that people want to play them for a very long time. How do we build it such that it is allowing that in a way that feels natural, and if people have played the game and finished the main quest, you can see that.”

One of the things about this title that feels very much like a Bethesda game is that while there is the main quest to do, there are plenty of side quests for you to simply stumble in on and then find yourself doing that for a while. For example, within certain areas on certain worlds, you can become a part of different factions. You can join the Vanguards of the United Colonies and do some work for them. Or you can go to Akila City and join the Rangers to help protect the people of their space sector.

Heck, just jumping around from planet