Starfield will emulate “older, hardcore RPGs” in its character creation

Todd Howard teases details of Starfield’s systems.

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 a short developer diary video on the Bethesda game released last month. “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.

Howard is 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.

Howard revealed last year that Starfield

would be “a bit more hardcore of a roleplaying game than we’ve done.”