How big is Starfield? ‘Irresponsibly large,’ says Bethesda exec
Star fieldcoming this fall and has already been delayed twice, is an “irresponsibly big game,” said Pete Hines, longtime Bethesda Softworks executive who is now head of publishing.
Hines made the comment as testimony at Thursday’s hearing in federal court where the U.S. Federal Trade Commission is seeking to stop Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard. The point Hines was making is that it evolves Star field for platforms other than Microsoft’s Windows PC or Xbox series would certainly mean another delay for Bethesda Softworks’ latest role-playing game franchise, which Microsoft now owns.
After being questioned by an FTC attorney, Hines agreed that he personally supported the decision to be made Star field exclusive to an Xbox console. “As someone who’s played it a lot and sees all this stuff happening,” Hines said, “there’s no question that being able to focus on fewer platforms to support, hardware to support, has been a great benefit to that team.”
Star field is, in all respects, actually one big game. “We threw ourselves into this game, and even I’m amazed at how much we can pour,” Todd Howard, the game director and creative director at Bethesda Game Studios, said in March. Star field got its own 45-minute showcase even after Xbox’s gala presentation on June 11.
That big-This is Bethesda’s reason for locking the frame rate on consoles to 30 frames per second, Howard said after the show two weeks ago. into Thursday a podcast with Kinda Funny GamesHoward reiterated that Bethesda Game Studios “never looked at stripping features” to provide a performance mode option with a higher frame rate.
“Ultimately, look, the bottom line is we wanted consistency,” Howard told Kinda Funny Games. “The game runs great, but we don’t want players to ever think about it. […] We lean towards consistency in general and we talk to our fans and hear that from everyone.
Hines also touched on this point in his testimony Thursday. “When you’re trying to figure out how to make a game look the best it can and run as smoothly as possible, your programmers really need to know, ‘What am I really trying to make this run smoothly?'” he said. “Is the memory configuration — like, there’s so many technical things that are, frankly, way beyond my expertise.”
He added: “The fewer platforms you have [quality assurance testers] aiming at, the more rounds of testing they can do; if you have 100 people test two platforms, you can put 50 on each. If you have three, the math will tell you [that] you have less people on those games. You find fewer problems, you don’t go as fast. It will take longer, it will cost more.”
This is somewhat in line with Xbox Game Studios boss Matt Booty’s June 13 remarks about it Star field with “the fewest bugs of any game Bethesda has ever shipped with.” A bold claim given the sprawling nature of Bethesda’s RPGs – and a glitchy launch history that fans have been reluctant to bear. But hey, one less platform to develop for, one less QA headache, most people get that.
Star field launches on September 6 for Windows PC and Xbox Series X, and it will be a day one launch on Xbox Game Pass.