Game news Basically, Starfield was a much more difficult RPG and Todd Howard said so!
Starfield could have been much more difficult than it is now. After Todd Howard’s statements last year, new documents reveal more about Bethesda’s initial ambitions regarding the difficulty of its latest addition.
In space, no one will hear you suffer
Last year’s event release, Starfield did not necessarily meet with the expected critical success, but still managed to offer us several dozen hours of pleasure among the stars. Bethesda’s latest title still benefits from a certain depth regarding its space exploration mechanics, while ensuring players an experience that is more or less easy to approach, while avoiding being too punitive. But originally, the software was supposed to be much more demanding than it is currently.
Todd Howard already explained it last September, the developers initially wanted to implement a rather complex system of resistances and atmospheres. But given its difficulty, this system has been widely nerfed in order not to punish the players too much. So, initially, Bethesda wanted to offer different types of spacesuits that would have allowed planets to be explored depending on their environment – radioactive, frozen, burning… a system completely abandoned, even if it indeed remains a system of environmental weaknesses.
Full throttle across the universe
Beyond this system, Bethesda also wanted to implement fuel management which would therefore have required refueling between different journeys. But once again, during tests, the studio realized how disabling such a system could prove to be. Ultimately, the developers opted for a fast travel system whose maximum distance is determined by the ship’s equipment. Recently, a player shared a glimpse of what Starfield originally looked like on Reddit.
We therefore see on this map the systems we talked about: fuel management, as well as the environmental specificities of the planet – here Leviathan IV. For example, we can see a “micrometeoroids” feature that could cause “catastrophic shutdowns.” We therefore imagine that the planet would have been difficult to approach. This type of functionality is still found in the game, but is much less restrictive than what was initially envisaged.