Starfield is the first new franchise in twenty-five years from the developers of
The Elder Scrolls and
Fallout series. The title was officially announced during Bethesda's E3 2018 press conference with a short, pretty enigmatic teaser featuring a beautiful sunrise over a peaceful, alien planet. The show ended with a short trailer for the highly-anticipated sixth chapter in
The Elder Scrolls series.
Both teasers didn't reveal too much and left the worldwide audience with rather mixed feelings, as Bethesda seemingly managed to make the officially announcement of the next installment of one of the most beloved franchises on Earth unexciting. According to Bethesda Executive Producer Todd Howard, the publisher revealed both games so far from release because of
Fallout 76 and
The Elder Scrolls: Blades.
Speaking to Eurogamer at Gamelab in Spain, Todd Howard had a chance to explain the controversial decision. "
There were two things in our heads about that. One, we’re going to E3 and showing a new Fallout game [Fallout 76] which is very different than we usually do, and then we’re going to show you an Elder Scrolls game [the mobile game Blades] that is very different than we would usually do, and if we leave it just at that, our fans are like, ‘… Are you still going to do the things I love?’”
Game Awards founder Geoff Keighley also had a chance to
interview Howard during Gamelab, and the producer revealed that Bethesda’s creative team thought about
Starfield for at least 10 years and the team started working on it full time after the official release of
Fallout 4 three years ago. “
We go back and reinterpret and replay old games,” he said. “
The difference with Starfield is there is no one to go back to. The ideas were all over the map. I enjoy “plus one” sequels as a player. I don’t enjoy making them," Howard said.
Bethesda's
The Elder Scrolls 6 and
Starfield don’t have confirmed release dates yet, with some reports claiming that both games won't be released for the current generation of consoles.