Starfield Main Story Length Revealed

Bethesda’s fans of its Fallout and Elder Scrolls series still have a long while to wait for Starfield since it’s not coming out until some time next year, but ahead of that release, we now have one of our first and best indications of just how much of your time the game will take up. Todd Howard, the studio director for Bethesda Game Studios, gave an idea of how long the main quest will be recently by comparing it to games like Skyrim and Fallout 4 and saying that Starfield will be about 20% bigger than ones like those.

For those who may not remember how long it took them to beat the main stories of the past Bethesda games considering how much there is to do, that would put Starfield’s main story at about 30-40 hours of investment required to beat hit, Howard told IGN. While it could always change before the game is released, Howard said Starfield is certainly “a little bit longer” than Bethesda games before it.

Of course, those who play Bethesda’s games seldom tear through the main story and then put the game down. People tend to spend quite a while doing all of the games’ side missions or just ignore the main story completely until they’re ready to move its events along. Considering that playstyle that’s so common in these RPGs, you can go ahead and add on many, many more hours to Starfield’s expected playtime.

There’s also the modding community to consider, too. That’s naturally most present on the PC platform, though mods have come to consoles for Bethesda’s more recent games, too. It hasn’t been confirmed yet if that’ll be the case for Starfield, but the game will at least have full mod support on PC which will provide yet another way to keep players busy.

“We’ve learned that people do play our games for a really, really long time,” Howard said. “They’re still playing Skyrim – not straight for 10 years, but they leave it and they come back and there’s extra content. Certainly we’re going to be doing extra content for this game, and we love our modding community. We actually think this game, for our modding community, is going to be a dream as there’s so much they could do.”

Starfield will also have post-launch DLC, Bethesda has confirmed, so expect extensions of the story, too.