Todd Howard talks Starfield's "hard sci-fi" approach in new developer video

With Starfield’s hugely anticipated 2023 release growing ever-closer, Bethesda has launched a new Q&A video series, and episode one sees director Todd Howard responding to a number of community queries – including sharing some thoughts on traits, dialogue, and whether Starfield can be described as a “hard sci-fi” game.

Howard began the chat by detailing a few of Starfield’s inspirations – 1984 space sim SunDog: Frozen Legacy and pen-and-paper RPG Traveller, if you’re wondering – before moving on to tackle the “hard sci-fi” question. This, he said, was a little tricky to answer insofar as different people will likely have different definitions of “hard sci-fi”, but for Bethesda, “It is more hard to us, where you can draw that line from, okay, here’s how man explored space, and [then] look at our ships and say, alright that has some visual identity back to that”.

However, he also called the question a bit of a trap, “because it’s a video game. Like, a hard science-fiction video game would be, you die in space cold.”