Businesses of all kinds love to boast about whatever goods, services, or facilities said company is offering. Every other commercial is "the fastest this ever" or "the biggest that ever" or some other variation. The gaming industry is no different. So when Bethesda says their upcoming title Starfield is "25 Years in the Making," it's easy to think they are doing just that.
Starfield looks truly epic, and it serves to reason that it will be just that. Even when it has bumps in the road, Bethesda is one of the most consistently impressive developers in gaming. As it looks to make "Skyrim in Space," that pedigree will likely be present. That doesn't change the fact that Starfield has not actually been in the making for twenty-five years. That statement is merely a figure of speech, but it carries with it a lot of weight.
Bethesda certainly hasn't been in the production process on Starfield for the last twenty-five years, unless, of course, Starfield is actually the spiritual successor to The 10th Planet, finally releasing twenty-five years after its cancellation in 1997. Barring that unlikely reality, Bethesda's claim is actually a metaphor about what it has been doing over that time and what they were doing in the mid-90s. Starfield strives to be Bethesda's most ambitious IP to date, and rightly so, since its other ambitious franchise is what Bethesda was working on twenty-five years ago with the release of The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall.
Throughout the 90s, when Bethesda was just getting started, it was a bit of a grab-bag developer, doing everything from sports and racing games to movie tie-ins along with a small sampling of sci-fi adventures. It wasn't until Daggerfall released, though, that the Starfield-level Bethesda gamers know today began to form truly. Over the few years that followed Daggerfall, Bethesda began remaking itself into a publisher that only developed games it wanted in-house. From its first game in 1986 to the release of Daggerfall in 1996, Bethesda developed nineteen games. After Daggerfall's release until Oblivion's release in 2006, Bethesda developed only nine games, one of those being the much-beloved Morrowind.
Bethesda would release only one other title in 2006, and it would be the last game not in The Elder Scrolls or Fallout franchises it ever developed - only the game development team Bethesda fans know today didn't even develop it. That's because, in 2001, Bethesda Game Studios spun out from Bethesda Softworks, the publisher side of the company that continued handling the IHRA games. In total, the group that would come to make up the Starfield developer, Bethesda Game Studios, had only developed or assisted in the development of fewer than twenty titles, not counting the multiple versions of Skyrim, since Daggerfall. Of those titles, less than ten were not in The Elder Scrolls or Fallout franchises, and only none of those were in the last fifteen years.
With the expansive Starfield, Todd Howard isn't just leading Bethesda Game Studios into its first new IP in a long time. This will be the studio's first new IP ever. The Elder Scrolls was carried over from the Bethesda Softworks days, and Fallout was purchased from Interplay Entertainment. So whether he's referencing The 10th Planet or the more likely Daggerfall, one of Howard's earliest designer credits, Starfield may indeed have been twenty-five years in the making. Albeit in a more poetic sense.
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