Todd Howard reveals Starfield's persuasion system: 'It feels like it's part of the dialog'
Bethesda Softworks executive producer Todd Howard shared more about the studio's upcoming outer space epic Starfield(opens in new tab) in a recent video chat, including a look at the game's persuasion system and whether or not he considers it «hard sci-fi.»
Hard science fiction, in a very broad sense, is sci-fi that commits heavily to scientific accuracy. The definition is unavoidably subjective to some extent, but Kim Stanley Robinson's Aurora(opens in new tab), for instance, takes great pains to think through stuff like soil composition, astrophysics, and chemistry in ways that impact the plot; Star Wars, on the other hand, doesn't go out of its way to explain lightsabers. In the case of Starfield, Howard said that «it is more 'hard' to us» but added that it's a videogame first and foremost, and so concessions have to be made.
«We were really into fuel and how the gravity drive works,» Howard says in the video. «And I'm reading papers on quantum physics and bending space in front of you—you don't actually warp, you bend the space, you bring the space toward you—and so we were playing that and it became very punitive to the player. Your ship would run out of fuel and the game would just stop.»
Because of that, developers recently changed the design so ships cannot run out of fuel—instead, ships will be limited to how far they can travel in a single run.
Howard also said that Starfield has gone back to «a classic Bethesda-style dialog» system, albeit in a much larger scale than in previous games—more than 250,000 lines of dialog in total—and with a revamped persuasion system. Howard previously touched on the persuasion system back in May, saying it «feels like you're having a conversation where you're actually trying to
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