CONSTELLATION QUESTIONS, 12 OCTUBRE 2022

01🚀CM- "First thing that we want to know is What inspired Starfield" 

TH - "Oh you know, so many things.  I think the main ones... that I'm going to go back in time here. SunDog is a big one. Amazing game. Kind of like science fiction game when Ultimas were out and also has this parseless interface and kind of one of the first games when you're moving objects around and putting them together.  But great game where you had your own ship and you could explore around, that I loved.

Another one, this is a kind of pen and paper role-playing game at the time where D&D was getting popular is this game, Traveller. Traveller was a little more hard science-fiction. Other thing  there, it's one of the first games I programmed on the Apple 2 at the time. I really wanted to make a Traveller game, it was also my first time realicing that the computers had memory that you could run out of. I can already see the coments, people saying You have running computers out of memory for 40 years. But that's an easy comment, everybody. You can do better.

But those are the main ones, harkening back to those role-playing games that we loved and hey, can we pull off something like this with today's computers and consoles, etc."

02🚀CM - "You mentioned hard space or hard sci-fi, and I know that that's one of the things that's been hotly debates in the community, is Starfield considered a hard sci-fi?"

TH - "I never quite know, like, because that's always like what do they think it is if you say yes or no? I think it's more hard to us, hard science-fiction where you can draw the line from ok, here is what, here is how men explored space and you can even like look at our ships and say, all righ, that has some, you know, visual identity. Back to that, it's a trap question because it's a videogame, right? Like a hard science-fiction video game. Would be you die in space cold. You know, good example. We were really into fuel and how the gravity drive works and I’m reading papers on like quantum physics you know bending space in front of you. You Don't actually warp, you bend the space toward, you bring the space toward you. And so we were playing that and became like very punitive to the player. You ship would run out of fuel and the game would just stop. You just want to get back to what you were doing, so we've recently changed it where the fuel in your ship and the grav drive limits how far you could go at once, but it doesn’t run out of fuel. Maybe there'll be an update or mod that allows that. But that's what we're doing now."

03🚀CM - "Constellation members are excited about the character customization and the traits in the game. Can you talk more about what players will sperience with the traits?"

TH- "I love our trait list it's superfun, but each one obviously comes with some sort of negative as well and we have a way in the game king of an activity or quest you can do to remove that trait as opposed to I don't like my character, I want to start over. Each of them are something that you can solve that removes the entire trait for the rest of your playthrough."

04🚀CM - "The last question, we have speech checks and dialogue that reflect your character build. Do you want to expand upon that a all?"

TH - "Yeah, look, we have done a lot of different dialogue systems.  We've  gone back to king a, I'll call it a classic Bethesda style dialogue with you're looking at the character and how they emote, and you have a series of choices there. The scope of the game, the amount of content we're making is a bit more that we've done before in terms of quests and things like that, but the depth in some of the stuff with the dialogue, we just passed 250K lines and so that's a lot of dialogue but we've gone through it and the impact is really there and that includes my favourite speech persuasion system. It feels like it's part of the dialogue, but you're spending points to persuade them. Feels natural, not like I've entered some other mode  where we're not... I'm not doing regular dialog. I'm in this mode to persuading you to get what I want."

Fuente.