Todd Howard says Starfield is channelling 'older hardcore RPGs'

pcgamer.com:

A new Starfield developer diary discusses some of the game's main factions and describes elements of the experience—then, in a moment destined to be memed forever, Todd Howard says «why are we all here?» We're here to watch another video of talking heads illustrated with concept art and clips of old games for a product that's apparently launching in eight months, Todd.

Sorry: there is new footage of Starfield here, roughly ten seconds of it when they start talking about companions (timestamped video). Sure looks like Skyrim in space! Incidentally, the funniest bit of this dev diary is when they start talking about Oblivion's chat system, and illustrate it with a Skyrim clip. You had one job.

The main takeaways from this generalised discussion are that they're going more in-depth on character creation and backstory. Todd Howard talks about this in the context of returning to «some things we didn't do [in older games]: the backgrounds, the traits, defining your character, all of those stats». Starfield's aiming for «a lot of the things that older hardcore RPGs, something we used to do, doing those again in a new way.»

There's the briefest of mentions of it being harder to persuade NPCs, which honestly could mean anything. More concrete is some chat about the various ways people get by in this galaxy: the studio has discussed the game's factions before, but adds a few more tidbits here.

«In this one we've got the United Colonies, that represents the future space republic, idealised,» says Will Shen, the game's lead quest designer. «You also have the Freestar Collective which is the space western fantasy, people that are out there on the frontier, we've got Ryujin Industries which represents corporate life, I think it has