At a Bethesda MainStream event during Gamescom 2023, Bethesda’s head of publishing Pete Hines said that he felt Starfield didn’t really “get going” until he’d spent 50 hours finishing the main quest and another 80 hours on side quests. In a similar conversation with IGN, he said, “If I’m being honest, there’s really not an amount of time that I’m comfortable enough [with saying] ‘Now you’ve played enough Starfield to get what this game is.’ Because, like, I’m at 150, 160 hours on my current playthrough, and […] I haven’t even come close.”
The hotly anticipated space RPG is said to be so huge that there are over a thousand explorable planets and possibly hundreds of hours of gameplay, which gives me a headache just thinking about it. I’ve been excited about Starfield for a long time, and will undoubtedly get sucked into it for more time than is healthy to be staring at a screen, but to say that a game is impossible to truly understand unless you’ve sunk in hundreds of hours is indicative of something more worrying.
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This doesn’t mean that Starfield isn’t a good game. I wouldn’t know, obviously, because it hasn’t come out yet and I didn’t get a code. There’s a possibility that Hines is referring to Starfield’s mysterious New Game+ mode, which game director Todd Howard has said will feature “a unique and exciting twist” that will “incentivise continued and repeat play”. That’s a whole other thing to be confused about, because Bethesda isn’t known for having New Game+ modes in their games, which are already sprawling games that take ages to finish, and it’s a strange choice for an RPG where many prefer just start with a new character and choose an entirely different style of play.
Whatever the case, expecting players to sink hundreds of hours into a game before it kicks into hyperdrive is asking too much, especially in a year wherethere is so much competition between some very good games. For players willing to play this game for years, potentially ignoring many other new releases in the process, or those who intend to no-life it, that might be feasible. But for people like me, who value having personal time to do other things, engage in other hobbies, and go outside, it’s a stretch to imagine that I’ll be happily drowning myself in Starfield just so I can, eventually, maybe, someday, get to the point of the game.
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