Bethesda Game Studio’s creative director, Todd Howard, wasn’t expecting our Starfield ships to be so damn cool.
In an interview with Insomniac Games’ founder Ted Price, for the Game Maker’s Notebook podcast, Howard talked about the community’s creativity when it comes down to making fancy spacecraft. “We love the ship building,” Howard said, “We had done a lot of cool ship building. We had done some funny, interesting things. And just how far people have pushed it - how much they like to share those multi-page building guides - it’s sort of like, if you give people the tools, they will surprise you so much.”
Howard says that developing these open-ended systems is the studio’s guiding goal: “And that’s what we try to do. Give people these things that they can play with, from outpost building to the ship building.” The Bethesda boss also gave a shoutout to the quick-footed modding community: “Mods are a whole other world with how fast that community gets going.”
Howard was then asked about the systems that he thought had the most potential in the future. The answer was, again, the ships. “Ship building really was the one because it was new for us,” Howard continued. “This has a lot of potential to make something that looks really unique that you can take with you, as opposed to outpost or base building that we’ve done - that you leave behind.” Howard then adds that the team “viewed ships as a whole other character”, and were excited by it since it gave players “creativeity and agency that we hadn’t seen in other places, outside of maybe Kerbal Space Program, which is a totally different thing.”
Who can blame Howard for being surprised? Especially with the wild, wild vessels that spacefarers have built so far. Speaking of multi-page guides, one explorer created the Star Wars Imperial Destroyer - a ship that’s so big, that you need a 21-page how-to guide to make it yourself. Apart from that, players have already recreated their favourite machinery from Star Wars, Halo, and locomotive icon Thomas The Tank Engine.
