If Todd Howard's comments around E3 2021 were anything to go by, Starfield will be taking a lot of pointers from Skyrim despite being a new IP. One of the reasons The Elder Scrolls 5 has enjoyed such longevity is its massive modding community.
While Skyrim mods range from visual changes, to mechanical overhauls, to memes, there are some that subtly tweaked Skyrim's gameplay in a way that complemented its overall design philosophy. Here are the five Skyrim mods that should influence Starfield.
Frostfall
Frostfall is one of the most downloaded Skyrim mods of all time. It adds survival mechanics to the game, turning Skyrim's weather from a simple aesthetic change to an important factor in the game that can even turn deadly. Frostfall's survival mechanics are great for incentivizing natural, immersive exploration throughout the world. Caught in a snowstorm? Taking shelter in a nearby Nord barrow might lead to a whole new adventure. Travelling between hold capitals? Frostfall makes players wary of unrealistic actions like running through rivers in the freezing cold or setting out in a storm by factoring in exposure.
Starfield could introduce survival mechanics, but unlike Frostfall it would not have to limit itself to the cold alone. The mod also factors in the armor which players are wearing, which could be particularly immersive as players explore a wide variety of environments across multiple planets in Starfield. It also adds backpacks and cloaks. The latter might not fit into Starfield's hard sci-fi look, but different backpacks certainly made exploring Skyrim's wilderness more immersive.
The same can be said for the mod's camping system. Frostfall even lets players choose the degree to which they'd like the weather to affect their game, which could be a good addition to Starfield to make sure players who aren't into survival mechanics have the option to explore the world unimpeded.
Relationship Dialogue Overhaul
Skyrim's voice actors are great, but their numbers are limited. It isn't far through Skyrim that players will begin to notice repetition, and although Skyrim improved on Oblivion's even smaller number of voice actors it can still be immersion-breaking. Even if the number of voice actors in Starfield dwarfs the number in Skyrim, it remains likely that players will still run into repetition due to the scale of Bethesda's open worlds, and the logistical and financial nightmare it would be to provide each NPC with a unique voice.
Relationship Dialogue Overhaul is a Skyrim mod which turns what could be considered a weakness, into an immersive strength. It takes the lines voiced by the same actors across the game and reworks them, mixing and matching lines among their other characters, where consistent, with the NPC's personality. Suddenly, the player has the ability to ask each Skyrim NPC a far broader range of questions, which they are able to answer.
The mod even modifies their responses to some queries based on their relationship with the player, such as whether or not the player has completed a quest for them. Repeated voice actors may be easy to spot, but noticing repeated lines in a massive open world is far harder, a fact Relationship Dialogue Overhaul takes full advantage of.
Master Of Disguise
Master of Disguise expands on a feature already found in one previous Bethesda-published RPG, Obsidian's Fallout: New Vegas. The mod allows players to don the armor of different factions and blend in with them. In the quest "Missing in Action," for example, the player can enter the Aldmeri Dominion fort and rescue Thorald Grey-Mane by putting on a Thalmor disguise, or the uniform of an allied faction. The mod even factors in choices made at character creation: An Elf or Khajiit is far more likely to go unnoticed dressed as a member of the Dominion than a human, but a human who dresses as an Imperial soldier can still make their way past the Altmer guards.
The mod isn't perfect and has a few bugs, but it expands on the faction disguise system found in Fallout: New Vegas, and factors in things like the player's distance from the people they're disguising themselves from. It's already been confirmed that Starfield will have multiple factions, and that one of them will be the space-faring faction Constellation seen in the trailer, which has its own uniform. The freedom to go undercover, and the potential to fail, could make Starfield's galaxy feel all the more thrilling.
Interesting NPCs
Another classic Skyrim mod, Interesting NPCs added a bunch of new, fully-voiced NPCs to Skyrim's world. Naturally fans can expect Starfield to contain plenty of voiced characters for them to meet, but it's the mod's super follower system that really broke the mold. Super followers have a huge amount of additional dialogue, their own backstories, and more that most Skyrim followers lack. If Bethesda wants to combine the breadth of available followers in Skyrim with the depth of followers found in Fallout 4 and other RPGs, a super follower system could do the game wonders.
Alternate Start - Live Another Life
In a game that gives players as much freedom as Skyrim, it's no surprise that modders quickly took that to the next level. Alternate Start - Live Another Life is an extremely popular and deceptively simple mod. All it does is allow the player to start the game somewhere else in the world. They can wash up on Skyrim's icy shores as the sole survivor of a shipwreck, or awaken as an impoverished Dunmer refugee in Solstheim. Nords can start in Rorikstead as Erik the Slayer's best friend. Argonians can start at the Windhelm docks. Alternate Start gives players a huge range of roleplaying alternatives.
The start of Skyrim is iconic and cinematic, but Bethesda shouldn't prioritize scripted, cinematic storytelling over what makes its RPGs stand out: The freedom they afford the player to be anyone in a large open world. Starfield could give players the choice to start at one of several different locations with unique introductory quests, fleshing out the prologue beyond Alternate Start's capabilities, Dragon Age: Origins-style. It could go full Alternate Start, and let them enter the game without any introduction at all. It may seem like a risk, but if Starfield is going to be a truly next-gen Bethesda RPG, it needs to take the studio's game's core tenet, roleplaying freedom, even further.
Starfield releases November 11, 2022 for PC and Xbox Series X/S.