Bethesda Game Studios director Todd Howard recently sat down to chat with the Kinda Funny Xcast podcast crew in episode 143. Unsurprisingly, much of the conversation centered around Starfield—Bethesda’s forthcoming open world action-RPG which is due out on September 6.
One of the several Starfield topics Howard touched on was Creation Engine 2, the new engine the team uses to create the massive world(s) of the Constellation.
What we’re able to do in the game and have all these things looking amazing and running from all of the items we’re simulating, people, spaceships, full planets. Our lighting model is just awesome [with] the realtime GI…Our quest system…I think what really makes ours different is all these quests are running, it’s not like you start a mission and we shut everything down.”
“You can be on dozens of these at once and obviously that creates a lot of chaos sometimes in our games, we’re aware of that, but it also creates these magic moments that we just love and our players love, and I think that’s what’s really special about it.”
And on a semi-related note, Howard mentions that Starfield will be a “modder’s paradise.” He elaborates,
It’s important for us to not just enable that but to participate, right? To make it easy for them, to make this where they can make it not just a hobby but a career, we’ve had a lot of great success there, so, looking forward to what everyone’s gonna do with Starfield.”
On the topic of Starfeild’s 1,000 planets—and more specifically, whether there’s anything to actually do on most of them—Howard answers:
Obviously it’s procedural okay, so there’s no way we’re going to go and handcraft an entire planet. What we do is we handcraft individual locations and some of those are placed specifically, obviously the main cities and other quest locations. And then we have a suite of them that are generated or placed when you land depending on that planet.
With Starfield now just a few months away, the anticipation for the game is at fever pitch, especially after the Starfield Direct earlier this month.
