At a Bethesda MainStream event during Gamescom 2023, Bethesda’s head of publishing Pete Hines said that he felt Starfield didn’t really “get going” until he’d spent 50 hours finishing the main quest and another 80 hours on side quests. In a similar conversation with IGN, he said, “If I’m being honest, there’s really not an amount of time that I’m comfortable enough [with saying] ‘Now you’ve pl💫ayed enough Starfield to get what this game is.’ Because, like, I’m at 150, 160 hours on my current playthrough, and [...] I haven’t even come close.”
The hotly anticipated space RPG is said to be so huge that there are over a thousand explorable planets and possibly hundreds of hours of gameplay, which gives me a headache just thinking about it. I’ve been excited about Starfield for a long time, and will undoubtedly get sucked into it for more time than is healthy to be staring at a screen, bu🧔t to say that a game is impossible to truly understand unless you’ve sunk in hundreds of hours is indicative of something more worrying.
Games are getting bigger and more expensive🍬 to make, and to 𒅌buy, indicating that game development is becoming more and mor🍷e unsustainable. Starfield is an outlier because of its day one Xbox Game Pass release, which is an obvious play to incentivise people to subscribe to Game Pass, but it’s also possibly one of the biggest games ever made. I enjoy a game that has plenty of things to explore – I sunk a lot of time into Skyrim as a teenager, though it’s hard to say exactly how much as I wasn&rsquo❀;t paying attention to exactly how many months of weekends I spent in my basement, playing and replaying the game. A game that unfolds to reveal more of what’s special about it as you sink deeper into it is a good game. A game that demands hundreds of hours before it✤ really “gets going” is another thing entirely.
This doesn’t mean that Starfield isn’t a good game. I wouldn’t know, obviously, because it hasn’t come out yet and I didn’t get a code. There’s a possibility that Hines is referring to Starfield’s mysterious New Game+ mode, which game director Todd Howard has said will feature “a unique and exciting twist” that will “incentivise continued and repeat play”. That’s a whole other thing to be confused about, because Bethesda isn’t known for having New Game+ modes in their games, which are already sprawling games that take ages to finish, and it’s a straꦡnge choice for an RPG where many prefer just start with a new character and choose an entirely different style of play.
Whatever the case, expecting players to sink hundreds of hours into a game before it kicks into hyperdrive is asking too much, especially in a year where there is so much compe⛎tition between some very good games. For players willing to play this game for years, potentially ignoring many other new releases in the process, or those who intend to no-life it, that might be feasible. But for people like me, who value having personal time to do other things, enga𝄹ge in other hobbies, and go outside, it’s a stretch to imagine that I’ll be happily drowning myself in Starfield just so I can, eventually, maybe, someday, get to the point of the game.