For many games, NPCs along with the dialogue spoken by them are an important part of creating an immersive gameplay experience. One company that relies heavily on dialogue is Bethesda Game Studios. Known for its huge open-world RPGs, the company has crafted many exciting narratives for players to discover through the use of numerous NPCs. However, it appears that the developers want to keep pushing the boundaries further, as new details suggest that Starfield will feature more dialogue compared to any other game in the history of the game studio.
Recently, Microsoft’s Tokyo Game Show 2021 showed off several new announcements coming to Xbox consoles. Directed towards the company’s Japanese audience, the event unveiled news about Bethesda’s upcoming game Starfield. This news came in an announcement from the creative director of the game Todd Howard. According to Howard, the title would feature a complete localization for Japanese gamers.
Through this exciting new announcement for Japanese fans of Bethesda, players learned more about the scope of the game as well. During the presentation, Howard revealed that Starfield contains over 150,000 lines of dialogue. In addition, the studio used the voice talents of over 300 actors to record the voice lines.
This is a staggering amount of dialogue for a developer to include in their game. A couple of other large Bethesda properties, Fallout 4 and The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim, pale in comparison to the amount of dialogue in Starfield. For comparison, Fallout 4 had around 110,000 voice lines. In addition, Skyrim had approximately 60,000, meaning that Starfield contains more than double the amount of dialogue found in the 2011 RPG. The fact that Starfield has considerably more dialogue than both these previously mentioned open-world RPGs from Bethesda suggests that it is going to be massive.
This news comes as Starfield, the first new IP from Bethesda in 25 years, is slated for release in November of 2022. A trailer at E3 earlier this summer revealed a new look at the space-themed RPG. One of the features coming to the game is a character creation tool that looks to give players new levels of customization. Furthermore, due to Microsoft's acquisition of Bethesda, the game is an Xbox exclusive coming to Xbox Series X/S and PC.
With Starfield still over a year away from completion, there’s still a lot to be revealed regarding the project. However, news such as the game's Japanese localization is a nice addition for fans of Bethesda. It will be interesting to see what the developers decide to show next regarding the project.
Starfield releases for PC and Xbox Series X/S on November 11, 2022.
Source: GamesRadar