Those eagerly waiting on Bethesda’s new Starfield game to launch later this year got another taste of the space-faring RPG this week with the release of another dev diary video. Game director Todd Howard, design director Emil Pagliarulo, lead quest designer Will Shen, and lead artist Istvan Pely all spoke in a roundtable discussion about the player choice element of Starfield among other topics. Through those conversations, we got to learn a bit more about the factions that make up Starfield.
We’ve learned about those factions before to a degree, but much of what was said previously dealt only with the names of the groups that players can align themselves with or fight against. Players begin their journeys as members of the Constellation, a group of explorers, but you’ll encounter all sorts as you travel through Starfield.
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“One of the big choices is, “Which part of the game world am I going to engage in?” said Shen. “We always make a bunch of different groups that represent some of the major factions in every game. And in this one we’ve got the United Colonies, that represents the future of space republic idealized. You also have the Freestar Collective which is the space western fantasy. People that are out there on the frontier. We’ve got Ryujin Industries which represents corporate life. I think it has one of the best starts of any of the factions.”
Howard referenced the Crimson Fleet group, the pirates who seem most like a Raider-type faction if you’re comparing this RPG to the Fallout games. Pagliarulo added that there are several different routes the player can take when interacting with this group including taking on the role of a “space cop” should they so choose.
“The cool thing about Crimson Fleet, what if you’re a good person and you want to be a good player?” Pagliarulo said about the Crimson Fleet faction. “And you don’t want to play as a bad guy? You can side with pirates or you can report back to your superiors. And be this space cop type of thing. So it lets you be a good person and still play with the bad guys. I think that’s really cool too.”
If Bethesda’s past RPGs are any indications of what to expect, we’ll see some deep, lengthy storylines revolving around each of these factions that’ll most likely take more than one playthrough to experience in full. That likely won’t be an issue for those who already can’t wait for Starfield, but we’ll have to wait until the game’s release to see how all these groups interact with one another.
Starfield releases for the Xbox Series X|S and PC platforms on November 11th.
