Starfield will emulate "older, hardcore RPGs" in its character creation

Starfield's devs have revealed new details on character traits and backgrounds for the upcoming RPG.

"A lot of us have been doing this for a long time together," Starfield game director Todd Howard says in the short developer diary video on the  Bethesda game just below. "The background, the traits, 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, something we used to do, doing those again in a new way," the director continued.

In short, this is Howard hinting at Bethesda's forthcoming game going back to some of the more traditional character building elements of RPGs. Bethesda Game Studios has an incredibly long history of developing atypical RPGs, including the longstanding Elder Scrolls series and the Fallout franchise, and that's not mentioning any spin-offs like Fallout 76.

In actual fact, this isn't the first time Bethesda has teased a return to the RPGs of yesteryear with Starfield. Howard revealed last year that Starfield would be "a bit more hardcore of a role-playing game than we've done," adding that it'd go "back to some things that we used to do in games long ago that we felt have really let players express the character they want to be." 

Starfield launches later this year on November 11, 2022 for PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series X, and Xbox Series S. It'll be available on day one through the Xbox Game Pass subscription service.

Check out our full upcoming Xbox Series X games guide to see everything else that's launching on Xbox's new-gen console over the coming year.