A new IP from Bethesda Zenimax has been in development for 4 and a half years, and has received “considerable” investment from the publisher.
During the Product Builders podcast on YouTube, Ben Jones, Creative Director at ZeniMax Online Studios, revealed that a new IP from Bethesda Zenimax has been in development for 4 and a half years, and has received major investment.
Jones mentioned that the project’s design team is comprised of over 50 people, and the development team as a whole consists of nearly 200 people spread all over the globe. The project has been in development for 4 and a half years, a “considerable” investment has been put into it, according Jones.
While it may be a while before the curtain is lifted from this project, Bethesda’s other new IP, Starfield, is nearing its eventual release in the first half of the year 2023. The game is said to have more than 250,000 lines of dialogue. For the sake of comparison, Fallout 4 had a total of 111,000 lines of dialogue, while The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim had 60,000.
Howard also mentioned that Starfield will return to what he terms a “classic Bethesda” style of dialogue, where you’re looking at the character and how they emote, and you have a series of dialogue choices to work with. The scope of the game, the amount of content that Bethesda is making is a bit more than the studio has done before in terms of quests.
Starfield was first unveiled publicly during Bethesda’s E3 Press Conference in 2018. The game was advertised as a “whole new, next-generation experience” set in a “completely new space-themed universe.” It will be Bethesda’s first new intellectual property in more than twenty-five years. The game is set to arrive on Microsoft Windows and Xbox Series X/S.
The Settled Systems, which spreads outward from the Solar System for around 50 light-years, is where Starfield is situated. Around the year 2310, the game’s two most powerful factions, the United Colonies and the Freestar Collective, fought a deadly Colony War. The game takes place 20 years after the Colony War, with the major groups living under an uneasy truce. Players will assume control of a member of Constellation, a space exploration organization. Starfield is playable in both first-person and third-person mode.
