Starfield launches next year, ending what has arguably been a significant wait for a big-time Xbox exclusive on the Series X|S. Bethesda's outer space epic has been framed as such a big deal that some people will probably buy an Xbox just to play it, and the pressure of that reality hasn't been lost on Todd Howard.
The Bethesda boss made an appearance on the Lex Fridman podcast (via VGC) this week, during which Howard admitted that while Starfield being an Xbox exclusive is great, it comes with a type of pressure the studio has never experienced before. “We’ve never been kind of the platform seller, you know ‘the game’ for a platform for a period of time,” Howard said. “There’s a lot of responsibility there to make sure we deliver for everybody.”
Much like The Last Of Us and God Of War are big-budget PlayStation exclusives that are expected to sell consoles, Starfield will be expected to do the same for Xbox in 2023. While being expected to create a system-selling exclusive comes with new pressures, Howard also highlighted the equally huge benefits.
“From a development side I like the ability to focus and have help from them,” Howard explained. “The top engineers at Xbox, to say we are going to make this look incredible on the new systems, from my standpoint it’s just awesome.” Starfield was actually supposed to be here by now but got pushed into 2023 earlier this year. Howard touches on that in the interview above, admitting that no one wanted to delay the game, but it was necessary to make sure the finished product lives up to the lofty expectations.
While hype for Starfield is high, the reveal that it will have a staggering 1,000 planets to explore was met with mixed reactions. Howard actually admitted this week that there could have been a lot more than that. It was only the process of having to make those planets feel distinct and give all of them unique names that led to Bethesda stopping at 1,000.