Starfield has crossed the 14 million player mark will receive annual story additions and Shattered Space will unfold on one planet
YouTuber MrMattyPlays posted an hour-long interview with Bethesda’s Todd Howard, discussing various aspects of Starfield.
Howard shared an update on the number of players, but not the number of copies sold of the game. In December 2023, the number of registered players was 13 million, since then it has increased by only a million.
Now we have three big franchises. Starfield has 14 million players and average play time exceeds 40 hours per player. That’s a staggering amount of time in the game.
The conversation then turned to Shattered Space, the first DLC for Starfield, which is scheduled to release later this year. Todd Howard said that this “annual story expansion” is comparable in size to Fallout 4’s Far Harbor (which took about 15 hours to complete the main and side quests) and is primarily set on a single planet, maintaining the seamless exploration that characterizes Bethesda games. .
It was planned and one of the things that we’ve always loved from the beginning and I think people don’t realize is that the bulk of Shattered Space, when you get to the city and the planet, is set there.
This allows us to create a landscape like we traditionally do, have a city and quests. This story takes place there, and the content is based on what we did with Far Harbor in Fallout 4. This scale is suitable for our development and annual story expansions. We’re really excited about this and being able to do everything the way we did the previous games, giving people a different experience because it’s still Starfield…
MrMattyPlays asked Howard if this had anything to do with the community’s criticism of different types of exploration in a sci-fi RPG. However, according to Howard, Bethesda was already thinking about concentrating the action in one place even before the feedback came out.
When we created Starfield, we faced the problem of how to make exploration on large, desert planets interesting. We were happy with what we achieved, realizing that it would not satisfy the same needs as exploring more unique landscapes.
We wanted to create something like this and felt this was the way to go – with something unique, thematic, that we could put on a planet and send you there. One of the benefits of Starfield and its scale is that it allows you to do this kind of thing while still being natural…
Returning to the mention of Starfield’s annual story expansions, Howard elaborated:
We want to follow this plan, more or less. How long will this last, hopefully a very long time, but that’s what we’re planning for a later expansion. So there will be at least one more.
There is no exact release date for Shattered Space yet.
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STARFIELD: FROM THE CONTENTS OF SHATTERED SPACE TO FUTURE DLCS, TODD HOWARD SPILLS THE BEANS