For all of its other faults, especially when it comes to narrative, one of the most interesting things about Starfield has always been how the game handles its New Game+ mode. In an interview with GamesRadar, game director and executive producer Todd Howard and lead creative producer Tim Lamb have spoken about the studio’s lofty narrative goals with the system, and how it might have fallen flat for the audience.
Major spoilers for Starfield‘s ending below.
As you get to the end of the main story of Starfield, the story mission One Giant Leap presents you with a choice of partaking in the Unity. Doing so turns the player’s character into a Starborn and puts you in an entirely new universe. Through this choice, the studio integrated the idea of New Game+ into the overall narrative of Starfield, since players got to carry over all of the progress they had made throughout the story, while also “resetting” the universe around them, allowing players to start from scratch with things like character relationships, mission progression, and map data, among other things.
“The Unity was our way of doing New Game+,” Howard explained. “It was us asking you this weird, deep question that I actually think got lost on a lot of people. It asks if you are just this power gamer who wants to get everything, or are you willing to leave this world behind? How do you feel about your own life choices – would you leave that all behind and start over? Some of that pain – having to give up all of your stuff, Sarah Morgan not loving you anymore, and so on – is supposed to make you feel all of that.”
On the subject of why the studio decided to go this route with its New Game+ system, Lamb explained that feedback from playtesters led to this, since they wanted to continue their journey. “The game just ended,” he said. “The feedback we got at the time was that fans were surprised – they wanted to keep going. So we put this system into Starfield; we wanted it to be a meaningful choice, but it wasn’t meant to be suffering.”
With the release of the free Free Lanes update, Bethesda has also brought in a major change to Starfield‘s Unity ending and the subsequent New Game+ mode; players can now build a machine that allows them to bring over up to 50 items into the new universe. “If you decide to enter the Unity now, you can do it in a way that you feel that you can still continue your character and have some of your stuff – it’s stuff that you earned, after all,” explained Howard.
Interestingly, the introduction of X-Tech as a way to further raise the power of players’ weapons and equipment may have played a role in allowing players to build this device. Since players would likely be unhappy about leaving behind powerful items that they may have worked hard for, the studio decided that there should be a way to carry these items forward.
“We are introducing X-Tech to further upgrade your weapons and your gear; well, we don’t want to ask the player to put in a lot of work for a reward they are searching for, only to say, ‘no, it’s gone now.’ So once these things started coming together, we knew we absolutely had to do something like this,” said Lamb.
Howard went on to explain how, through this change to the Unity ending, Bethesda wants to further refine the “elder loop” of Starfield. This “elder loop” is essentially the long-term gameplay loop offered by Starfield, which would often involve players hopping on and off between extended periods of time. To help with this, the Free Lanes update was meant to add more game content that would give players plenty more to do aside from just the new missions.
“Take something like the Trackers Alliance, or other quests. You do them and then you’re done,” said Howard. “That’s still rewarding, but for someone who jumps back in, they might play for a few hours – and then the update didn’t serve them beyond those two or three hours. We want to be trying to do more things that update the game where it’s going to change the next 100 hours. You can tell us if we’re done our job right.”
Starfield is out on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S. For more details, take a look at our review of the PS5 release, as well as its Terran Armada expansion.