Bethesda is going big once again with its upcoming sci-fi RPG Starfield. According to Todd Howard, the next project has almost three times more dialogue than fellow heavyweight Skyrim.
The director of Bethesda Game Studios appeared on a recent Tokyo Game Show 2021 Xbox livestream, highlighting the features of the upcoming game. Howard announced that Starfield (alongside Arkane Studios’ Redfall) is getting a complete Japanese localization, involving about 300 voice-over actors. This will officially be Bethesda’s “largest translation effort ever.”
In addition, Todd Howard says that Starfield clocks in almost 150,000 lines of dialogue, at least in the Japanese version of the game. That’s about three times more dialogue than The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim has to offer — the game has over 60,000 lines. For comparison, Fallout 4 has 110,000 lines, and Cyberpunk 2077 comes in at almost 100,000 lines. Surely, players will have plenty of talking in the upcoming title.
This massive scale, apparently, has a reason behind it — Starfield is the first new original Bethesda’s IP in 25 years, and the studio has to explain lots of things about its vision of the future. You probably should expect a good amount of story content with branching dialogue, as the devs said it will have more “hardcore RPG elements” than previous Bethesda games.
The hype for Starfield is starting to ramp up quickly after the studio shared its first in-engine trailer with a glimpse of the title’s original “NASA-punk” aesthetics. The ream emphasized that the game will have a grounded world with realistic-looking spacesuits, spaceships, and tech around you. The game will also have a psychedelic fish, but that’s another story.
While we still have to wait to see what exactly Starfield's gameplay has in store for us, it’s safe to assume the game will feel somewhat familiar to Fallout and The Elder Scrolls fans. Let’s just hope that this promising spacefaring RPG will be something more than “Skyrim in space,” as Howard earlier mentioned.
Starfield is expected to launch on 11 November 2022 across PC and Xbox Series X/S. And no, it is not coming to PlayStation 5 after all.