Starfield lead draws inspiration from Cyberpunk 2077 as "seriously impressive"

Starfield's lead designer and writer has cited Spider-Man and Cyberpunk 2077 as impressive inspirations.

In an interview published yesterday on the official Bethesda website, Starfield lead Emil Pagliarulo spoke briefly about sources of inspiration. While mentioning that the "whole team" working on Starfield draws a lot of inspiration from other games, Pagliarulo made sure to namecheck both Insomniac's Spider-Man and CD Projekt Red's Cyberpunk 2077 as personal sources of inspiration.

"I really love playing games that just make me shake my head, like, 'Wow. I know how they did that, and it is a crazy accomplishment,'" said Pagliarulo, adding that Spider-Man did just that for him. The lead designer also cited Cyberpunk 2077 as being "seriously impressive," from the standpoint of creating a "giant, open-ended environment" in Night City.

Pagliarulo is actually a 19-year veteran of working at Bethesda Game Studios, beginning his journey with the studio by working on the Bloodmoon expansion for The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind. The now-lead cites Fallout 3 as being one of the favorite things he's worked on, pointing to working on the V.A.T.S. systems and meeting Liam Neeson as high points of his career.

Now though, there's just over half a year until Starfield is finally here, as Bethesda's first new IP in over two decades will be with us on November 11, launching for PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S via Xbox Game Pass. We haven't seen a massive amount from the upcoming RPG so far, but Bethesda Game Studios head Todd Howard has hinted that we can likely expect big news later this year in Summer.

Check out our Starfield preview for why it needs to be more than just "Skyrim in space."