SUMMER OF GAMING 2022, 14 DE JUNIO 2022

01 🚀Ryan McCaffrey: "Welcome to Summer of gaming 2022. I'm Ryan McCaffrey here at IGN, I am always pleased to sit down even if it's remotely over the phone with Todd Howard, the game director on Starfield at Bethesda game studios. Todd how are you sir."

02🚀Todd Howard: "I'm great we're uh we're all excited today this weekend and you know, incredible response from everybody well."

03🚀 R: "That's actually where I wanted to start with you, so we're recording this, the day after the Showcase and what so were you following the community reaction? what was your reaction to the community reaction to the gameplay reveal?"

04🚀 T: "Well I'm always excited when nothing leaks so that's usually where I start, you know, the whole team obviously is spending years in the game and then when you put it out there is this moment of how's everyone going to react and I will say, you know, the fans have been really incredible in the response to what we're doing and their support , so everyone in the team is just really overjoyed and all that energy back to us is so much fuel in the tank to make this as good as it can be."

05🚀 R: "I just wanted to talk to you about a few follow-up questions I had because I like many people have been very much looking forward to this game and part of that is the scale and scope of this Todd, that you seem to really want to drive that home in the presentation the the massive scale and scope of this project most of the you've got all these planets... you know, you touched on a thousand planets... I imagine you're gonna have to procedurally generate a lot of those."

06 🚀 T: "Yeah look, I mean we're pretty aware you throw that out near the end, people are going which "what did you just say?" and then they'll have a lot of questions how that works and we will probably deep dive into that in the future. "here's how we pull it off and how it feels", we ask ourselves in the games that we love to make and that we love to play and what's great about video games, and you're going to step  into these universes, you go through in your head all the things you would want to do in a game like that, and we try to say yes as much as possible it was always for us. 

We like those kind of experiences could we eventually do one in space because, you know, that's going to involve in the way that we would want it: going to a lot of planets and being able to explore them in some way so we did.

We do a lot of procedural generation but I would keep in mind that we've always done that right and it's a big part of Skyrim in terms of questing and some other things we do. We generate landscape using procedural systems and  so we've always kind of worked on it and a planet by itself, if you think about it, is sort of in a game concept. Just one planet is infinitely big if you're going to do it in some realistic fashion, so once you're dealing with scale like that and procedural systems, the difference between say one planet that has some variation on it and a hundred planets or a thousand, but it's actually not that big of a leap if that makes sense once you have good systems working for that, but I should also add that We have done more handcrafting in this game, like content wise, we are over 200K lines of dialogue. So we still do a lot of handcrafting and if people just want to do what they're used to do in our games, and follow the main quest, and do the quest lines, then you're going to see what you kind expect from us. 

But then you have this whole other part of well  "I'm just going to wander this planet" and it's going to provide some gameplay and some random content and those kind of things kind of like a Daggerfall would right if you go way back, you know, there are a lot of ice balls in space, so that was one of our big design considerations on this game is "what's fun about an ice ball" and it's okay sometimes if ice balls aren't, you know, it is what it is you want to go land on that weird planet and check it out and build an outpost and live your life there and watch the sunset because you like the view of the moons there? Go for it.’ We love that stuff, there like we go for it, we love that stuf."

07🚀 R: "Well, you know, similarly  I wanted to ask you about the space combat. You can build a ship and you can go battle in the ship to ship combat in outer space. So when I saw that I thought well that's really cool but I did also get a little twinge of of fear that well, I hope this isn't going to be something shallow like the, you know, going with the Mako on Mass Effect one  and just roaming a bunch of mostly empty planets. So like what's can you talk a little bit about the depth of what's of what we can look forward to with the space combat."

08🚀 T: "Sure that was I would say the two things that we started on the project is we had a good basis for Tech and gameplay systems from Elder Scrolls in Fallout we started the planet stuff the procedural generation can we both and we started spacecombat... we want this to feel something unique. There's been a lot of space sims that we're fans of and space shooters from the 90s and if you look at it, you can see it in the video.  

Your ship has various Power Systems, a little bit of FTL there in terms of putting how much power into 3 different weapon systems and then your engines and Shields and the warp Drive is what lets you jump and sort of get out of some situations that you have to put Power to, so there is some dogfighting I have quoted up. We keep the pace fairly slow one of the games that I love that we sort of look at for Pace is like Mech Warrior, believe it or not. Nice all back there like that's probably a little bit slower, but in terms of systems and power and being able to line things up, now it's a little bit faster than that. 

But you know what I mean as opposed to a we’d rather have them and say yes to you, ‘Hey, you can land on this.’ Here are the resources, you can survey it, and then you can land and spend ten minutes there and be like, ‘OK, now I’m going to leave and go back to the other planet that has all this other content on it, and I’m going to follow this questline' twitchy dogfighter but it's not just dogfighting like the ship stuff includes you see it in the video , you can dock with other ships, you can disable them, you can dock, you can board it. There's actually some quests that involve that, you can steal the ship, there's dialogue in space, there's STAR Stations you can visit. There's smuggling. There's, you know, all the things that we would want and we'll be showing some more of that later but it's a good chunk of gameplay that we think is really fun when it comes to playing this type of sci-fi game.

09🚀R: " Oh you're getting me fired up Todd, and one of the other things actually that I that really jumped out at me, that got me fired up from  the gameplay reveal was  the character customization and the character creation, so many character backgrounds to choose from Beast Hunter, bouncer, Chef, Diplomat, gangster, Ronin. Those are some of the ones that jumped out at me how many are in there?and what's your favorite that maybe you've been messing around in a build lately that that's  you'vebeen having fun with?"

10🚀 T:  "I might get the number of wrong Ryan maybe there's 20. I think we add or remove yeah and that really is think of it like a class kind of. It's a start right here your starting skills, there is some dialogue that works into that choice and some other options in the game based on what you picked as here. You spend some time as a diplomat having a way with words might prove useful. I mean, I think the chef is kind of funny to be honest which is why it starts the video. 

I love these starting skills of like astronomy and knives and wellness , so there's some things like that that's a bit more interesting role-playing outside of your usual "I just shoot people", so we do have some really nice role-playing systems for , you know, some other options in terms of dialogue and crafting, being able to manipulate people those kind of things, leadership that I think are pretty interesting when it comes to the content we have, you know."

11🚀 R: "Something else that's always memorable in your games and your team's games is that first moment when you come out of whether, it's a jail cell or a cave or whatever, it is a vault and you see that the game World the for the very first time. Is there a handcrafted moment like that in Starfield given that there are many worlds?"

12🚀 T: "There is. Look, the way the game starts is pretty set for everybody, so we definitely have what we call the 'step-out moment'. And we probably have a few of them given the scale of the game. The early ones are the ones that we do spend time on to make sure it's impactful when you finally get to see the, you know, surface of the planet or what that planet looks like from space."

13🚀 R: "Something else that jumped out of me from the gameplay was new Atlantis, that City... this... it reminded me of maybe the Citadel on Mass Effect 1 or to go back to one of your games the Imperial City from Oblivion is what are some of the things we can do in there?, because it just it seems like a place that you're going to want to go back to time and again."

14🚀 T: "Yeah we have, you know, four main cities in the game and new Atlantis is easily the biggest city in the game and the biggest city we've ever built, kind of the capital here in the game and It has all the services you would expect, and you can work on your ship there, the factions touch that, But that’s also the headquarters for Constellation, which is the faction that you join that is the last group of space explorers – kind of this NASA-meets-Indiana Jones-meets-The League of Extraordinary Gentleman [group] and that's really where the main quest goes through that group, so that's that's where they're headquartered."

15🚀 R: "15 minutes is a lot of time in a showcase, but it's not really a lot of time to go over everything in something as vast as what starfield appears to be, so I wanted to ask you about the main story. Can you talk a little bit more about that? because that's something that I feel like wasn't really touched on in the video, I mean, you know, we know about constellation and you're joining but what's what's sort of the central conflic?t what can you kind of set the game up for us a little bit? " 

16 🚀 T: "Yeah, we touch on it a little bit in the demo where constellation is trying to, you know, they're still exploring and figuring out the mysteries of the universe and they also look for, you know, old Earth artifacts you'll see that and some of the stuff we hint at and the exploration and then, they've uncovered some of these artifacts that they don't know their origin, and that's the quest you kind of start on" 

17🚀R: "And speaking of the main quest, you know,  role-playing Gamers tend to be very obsessed with how much how long the game is, how you know with your games , it's there's never been a shortage of things to do, can we expect the main story to be roughly the same length kind of hours wise as we've seen from from your previous games or is that leveling up too along with the scope of everything else in Starfield?"

18🚀 T: "We usually aim for around that length if you look at our previous games but this one's ending up a little bit longer and we may tune that some still and some more quests, so it might be 20 % more than our previous ones, so if you say and your mileage may vary people generally don't straight line it, but if our previous ones, if we aimed for, let's say a 25 hour main quest, this one might be in the 30s maybe maybe 40 just for the main quest, but yeah obviously all of the other quests and faction lines and everything else we have here there's quite a bit there and we've sort of learned that people do play our games for a really really long time, you know, they're still playing Skyrim not straight for 10 years but they leave and they come back and there's extra content and certainly we're going to be doing extra content for this game and we love our modding Community. We actually think this game for our modding Community is going to be a dream, because there's so much they could do, so we think that's, you know, a great thing that we love as well, you know, 

19🚀 R: "You always aim for these these big games but you were talking about it at the beginning of our conversation that you tried to say yes to everything to everybody's ideas, for this do you do that in part because like  if we take a realistic look at your studio, and you personally, you know, you've got three major game franchises under your direct control, with the Elder Scrolls and Fallout and now Starfield, so did you take any kind of different approach to Starfield, knowing that realistically you probably won't be able to physically get around to making another one for at least five years and probably more like 10 given that you're moving on to Elder Scrolls 6 after this and presumably Fallout might be in the future down the road as well?"

20🚀 T: "Well I, no... I wouldn't say we say yes because we don't think we'll get another shot for a decade . We just think what we'd want to do in a game and how can we make that work the best it can be, and there are some things that we don't do intentionally to say oh, you know, is that really where you want to spend the time what's going to be impactful, you know, one for Starfield People have asked, ‘Can you fly the ship straight down to the planet?’ No. We decided early in the project that the on-surface is one reality, and then when you’re in space it’s another reality and if you try to like really spend a lot of time engineering the in-between like that way, you're just spending a lot of time that's really just not that important to the player, so let's make sure it's awesome when you're on the surface and awesome when you're in space and those realities look as good as they can be and play as good as they can be for those realities... but the other thing you said... Yes, Elder Scrolls 6 is in pre-production, and, you know, we’re going to be doing Fallout 5 after that, so our slate’s pretty full going forward for a while. 

We have some other projects that we look at from time to time as well but they do they do take a while I wish they came out faster. I really do we're trying as hard as we can but we want them to just be as best as they could be for everybody."

21🚀R: "Well Todd I look forward to learning a lot more about Starfield , and most importantly playing Starfield at some point between now and this time next year if all goes well. Todd, thank you as always for your time."

22🚀 T: "I really appreciate it and thanks for all the suppor everybody's given us and the folks at IGN. You guys did a great job yesterday as well so just excited for the whole industry everything that's going on and Xbox has been. I have to say is, you know, it's this is the first game we've done under that and they've just been incredible Partners with us to make this the best it can be."

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