Bethesda has reported a flood of information about its upcoming space RPG Starfield, if only a little, and in the latest flurry of information, we learned that Starfield’s ships will be powered by fuel. However, director Todd Howard says that while Starfield is at least close to “hard” sci-fi, you can’t run out of fuel and get stuck in space.
In the first episode of “Constellation Questions”, Howard explains that the Starfield team struggled to manage deep space travel in a more mundane science fiction setting. Howard says he’s read scientific papers about “space warping” to achieve ultra-high speeds, but ultimately the developers wanted to avoid making space travel too much of a challenge for the player: “In an extreme sci-fi video game, you die in space, it’s cold,” he says.
According to Howard, in various versions of Starfield’s gravity drive system, the ships inevitably traveled in the wrong direction and were unable to reach any habitable planets or stations.
“Your ship will run out of fuel and the game will just stop,” he says. “You just want to get back to what you were doing.”
More recently, Howard explains, the team redesigned gravity drive to automatically limit the distance you can jump based on how much fuel your ship has. This is somewhat similar to how Frame Shift Engines work in Elite Dangerous: the power of your Engines sets a limit to the maximum interstellar jump distance, and this limits the number of stars you can choose from when planning your routes on the galactic map. .
So it seems that you will only be able to launch jumps on the Starfield map when you have enough fuel to reach your chosen destination; You won’t run out of gas in deep space when you have nowhere to go. .
“Maybe in the future there will be an update or a mod that allows you to do that, but that’s what we’re doing now,” says Howard.
The short video also provides new details on the creation and attributes of the Starfield characters, so the full chat is worth watching.
We’ve got plenty more great space games on PC, and be sure to check out our Starfield city guide, which includes every known location in the game to date. The Starfield release date is expected to be in the first half of 2023.
Source : PC Gamesn
