Starfield has so much content that Bethesda’s Pete Hines still hasn’t finished after around 160 hours
Lost in space
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Heads up, prospectiveStarfieldplayers - you’re apparently going to be extremely busy playing Bethesda’s space-exploration RPG for quite some time. You’d better finish thatBaldur’s Gate 3playthrough while you can.
As PC Gamerreports, in an interview at Gamescom 2023 yesterday (Thursday, August 24), Bethesda’s head of publishing, Pete Hines,told IGNthat he’s been playingStarfieldfor around 150-160 hours, and hasn’t even “come close” to finishing everything.
“If I’m being honest, there’s really not an amount of time that I’m comfortable enough [to say], ‘Now you’ve played enough to get what this game is,’” Hines told IGN. “Because I’m at 150-160 hours on my current playthrough and I haven’t even come close. There is so much stuff that I have intentionally not done.
“We try to tell everybody how big this game is, and the folks that are playing it, one of the few things they will tell us is ‘Yeah, you weren’t kidding. I can’t believe how big it is.’ Its content and exploration, no matter how you want to play, there’s so much for you to do in this game.”
Last year, game directorTodd Howard told IGNthatStarfield’s main story could be between 30 and 40 hours long, but based on those new numbers given by Hines, it sounds like there’ll be heaps of optional content to get stuck into. That’s unsurprising, really, considering that it’s set to boast over 1,000 fully explorable planets, not to mention over 100 star systems. With that said, Xbox boss Phil Spencer revealed yesterday thatit takes three or four hoursbefore it “blows up in terms of its epic scale”, so don’t expect to go wandering off freely in space as soon as you load the game up for the first time.
The wait forStarfieldis almost over with it set to release on September 6 on PC andXbox Series X|S, but early access for those who’ve bought the Premium or Constellation editions kicks off on September 1. Our handyStarfieldpre-order guidetells you all you need to know about those special pricier versions of the game as well as where you can buy them from, so you can prepare for launch.
For more excitingupcoming games, be sure to check out our lists ofnew PS5 gamesandnew Xbox Series X games. Meanwhile, if you need something to play before Starfield comes out, you can read our recommendations for thebest PC games.
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Catherine is a News Writer for TechRadar Gaming. Armed with a journalism degree from The University of Sheffield, she was sucked into the games media industry after spending far too much time on her university newspaper writing about Pokémon and cool indie games, and realising that was a very cool job, actually. She previously spent 19 months working at GAMINGbible as a full-time journalist. She loves all things Nintendo, and will never stop talking about Xenoblade Chronicles.
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