It’s a good day to look back onOblivion
Bethesda out anew video today, discussing more systems and ideas they’re working to include in space-bound RPGStarfield. Topics on the docket are factions, origins, and curiously, the persuasion system fromOblivion.
The roundtable for today’s “Into theStarfield” has Game Director Todd Howard, Design Director Emil Pagliarulo, Lead Quest Designer Will Shen, and Lead Artist Istvan Pely. The four talk about many RPG concepts you’d probably expect from a Bethesda RPG. Immersion is the starting point, but it soon segues into emergent mechanics and embracing the “chaos.”
“A lot of us have been doing this for a long time together,” said Howard. “And it’s nice withStarfieldto go back to some things we didn’t do. The backgrounds, the traits, the defining your character, all those stats. I think there’s so many games now that do those things that people are ready for something that does a lot of the things that older, hardcore RPGs, some that we used to do, doing those again in a new way.”
Another key piece of today’s dev roundtable was factions. The team highlights some of the groups you’ll deal with inStarfield, representing the different factions. TheUnited Coloniesare working toward a space republic, theFreestar Collectiveembraces the space western and frontier mindset, andRyujin Industriesis the megacorp group. TheCrimson Fleet, a.k.a. space pirates, are also a faction that the player could possibly join—or play double agent with, reporting back to the space cops all the while.
The team highlights companions too, showing a robot character calledVasco. The team wants to have characters respond to your actions and goals as you wander around, questing away. The four developers even referenceThe Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivionat one point, when discussing the persuasion system inStarfield.
“Yeah we sat down and… It was funny, we didn’t start with, ‘Let’s do an evolution of—let’s look back at the oldOblivionsystem, but there are a couple of beats there,” said Shen. “You have to think about, ‘What’s my risk here? Which one do I want to choose?’ We didn’t want it to be a system where there was definitely the right thing to say.”
Starfieldis still set to jet off into the stars later this year for PC and Xbox Series X|Son Jul 23, 2025.
