Bethesda’s Todd Howard is “surprised” by the creativity of Starfield players’ ships, and loves “just how far people have pushed it” when it comes to unique builds in-game.
In an interview for the Game Maker’s Notebook podcast, Howard said he “love[d] the ship building” in Starfield and what players had done with it. “We had done a lot of cool ship building. We had done some funny, interesting things. And just how far people have pushed it – how much they like to share those multi-page building guides – it’s sort of like, if you give people the tools, they will surprise you so much,” he said.
Howard said one of Starfield’s goals was to “give people these things they can play with, from outpost building to ship building” to provide the oft-mentioned player freedom Bethesda has been aiming for with the space RPG. Howard said the speed with which modders had created in-depth mods for the game was equally as impressive, calling mods a “whole other world with how fast that community gets going.”
Speaking on what systems he thought had the most potential in Starfield, Howard returned to the ship-building system. “Ship building really was the one because it was new for us,” he said. “This has a lot of potential to make something that looks really unique that you can take with you, as opposed to outpost or base building that we’ve done – that you leave behind.”
The Bethesda team apparently viewed ships as a “whole other character”, and saw how the ships were giving players a level of “creativity and agency that [Bethesda] hadn’t seen in other places, outside of maybe Kerbal Space Program, which is a totally different thing.”
Howard isn’t the only one impressed by the Starfield community’s ship-building efforts – since launch day, players have been sharing their grand-scale creations, references to other sci-fi ships, and cursed-but-somehow-still-works abominations online, despite the system initially being described by some as a frustrating experience to use.
Starfield continues to smash sales charts and player counts as more people get deep into the space-faring RPG and first new IP for Bethesda in decades, and it looks like the thriving community online in spaces like Reddit continue to surprise the studio with how they’re playing the game.
It looks like based on Howard’s comments, we may see more similar systems make their way into future Bethesda titles – and I, for one, can’t wait to see what cooked shit players do with them.
Lead Image Credit: Bethesda
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