LogInThe studio even hired an actor but decided against it.
Image credit: Bethesda
There is a lot of content Starfield offers and some it doesn't. For example, you'll have to read the many thousands of dialogues in the game yourself as the protagonist doesn't have a voice - something Bethesda talked about last year.
But apparently, it hasn't always been this way. Starfield's lead designer Emil Pagliarulo told Polygon that early on, the character was supposed to be voiced, like in Fallout 4, and the studio even hired an actor for this. However, one voice doesn't fit all, it seems, as Bethesda decided it was "too specific" when players could create any kind of protagonist.
"So then what are the options? Do we have, like some RPGs do, four voices? Do we have one voice, but hire someone else who’s more convenient? But [in Starfield] you can make every different type of person. We realized that the only way to really do it and let the player be the person they want to be was to have an unvoiced protagonist."
Image credit: Bethesda
While main characters tended to be voiced, the studio thought fans might enjoy the game more without it. The team "played with different things" and eventually settled on what we have now.
"There’s a big argument, if in Fallout 4 and other RPGs, players don’t like reading a line of dialogue, a player response, and then they click it and get [a different spoken line]. But the problem is, then you read it, and then you click it, and you have to wait for them to say the same thing. So that’s not ideal either. So then we just arrived at, What if we just go text? and it was just really freeing. And, I mean, we have over 200,000 lines of spoken dialogue in Starfield with no voiced protagonists. And it was not having a voiced protagonist that allowed us to create such a big world."
Image credit: Bethesda
Speaking of these thousands of dialogues, Pagliarulo said Bethesda wanted to differentiate Starfield from The Elder Scrolls and Fallout, and it was a challenge because the tone was so different. Some of it had to be cut down to make conversations flow naturally. For this, Pagliarulo has a great piece of advice:
"Don’t tell the story through what we call “lore bombs.” There will be environmental storytelling that comes in; the level designers, when they build the levels, will tell half the story. And so we have a much better process in place for every quest line, having a quest designer paired up with a level designer, and then constantly talking and being in sync with each other to help tell the story visually as well as through the dialogue."
Image credit: Bethesda
Starfield is set to release in early access on September 1 and on September 6 for players with a Standard edition. So far, those who already have the game say its bugs "can be counted on one hand", and the fixes for them are incorporated into its first massive patch.
If you want to learn more about the world of Starfield, read the full interview with Pagliarulo here. Also, join our 80 Level Talent platform and our Telegram channel, follow us on Threads, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn, where we share breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.
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