The developer of Starfield, Bethesda Game Studios, has just confirmed that the controversial use of voice acting for the Fallout 4 game character will not return in her latest role-playing game. Bethesda announced a space-themed Starfield during E3 2018, and later presentations revealed that it would be launched as an Xbox exclusive. However, further details about Starfield’s space gameplay and RPG setup didn’t appear until yesterday’s Xbox and Bethesda Games Showcase—long before the game was delayed until 2023 due to quality issues.
Excited players who tuned in to yesterday’s Xbox Games Showcase live broadcast received a lot of new information about Starfield in the last minutes of the event. This includes how the game will allow players to create their own space explorers, spaceships, and home bases as they travel through a vast universe of roughly 1,000 planets. It also turned out that Starfield players will need to fend off hostile alien life forms and interact with other travelers at the last frontier of space. Starfield has naturally been compared to Bethesda’s other open-world role-playing games, such as The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim and Fallout 4, but one controversial trait from later works by top-notch studios won’t return in her latest interactive adventure.
In a recent post on the official account of Bethesda Game Studios on Twitter, the developer confirmed that the in-game dialogue of Starfield will unfold in the first person and will not voice the player’s character. This will put Starfield more in line with past Bethesda role-playing games like Skyrim than with Fallout 4. The discovery has already caused a mixed reaction from fans in the comments section: some praise Starfield for doing away with the controversial voice of the player in Fallout 4, while others believe that the voiced protagonist makes role-playing games such as Mass Effect and Cyberpunk 2077 more exciting.
Those who agree with the lack of voice acting in Starfield argue that this will allow the character to serve as a blank slate for the player so that he can immerse himself in the story. This will help prevent problems arising in the Fallout 4 universe, where a preset character voice required gamers to take on an existing personality, instead of having the freedom to create an exciting and engaging personality. Although some players enjoyed listening to the main character give comments throughout the story, perhaps Starfield will benefit greatly from the rejection of this feature.
Although voice acting will not be included in Starfield, it already seems that players will have amazing control over other aspects of character creation. The footage shown during the demo demonstrates the complex creation process with the ability to customize everything from hair color to body size. This amount of personal choice in Starfield is likely to provide a new level of immersion when traveling through the universe and give players the opportunity to truly step into the role of their personal space explorer.
