Bethesda's open world RPGs may vary wildly in setting and tone, but they very often share one thing – what Bethesda calls the 'step-out moment', the scene in which your character steps into the world properly, and sees its sheer scale. Starfield won't be bucking that trend.
Speaking to IGN after the gameplay reveal at the Xbox-Bethesda showcase, Howard was asked if Starfield had a step-out moment, and how it would create a grand reveal of its world considering it includes 1,000 different planets.
"There is. Look, the way the game starts is pretty set for everybody, so we definitely have what we call the 'step-out moment'. And we probably have a few of them given the scale of the game."
Howard didn't explain how that opening would work, nor where the step-out moment will take place, but he did tease that the game will seemingly include both the planetery surface version you might expect, and potentially 'step-outs' in space:
"The early [step-outs] are the ones that we do spend time on, to make sure that it’s impactful when you finally get to see a surface of a planet, or what that planet looks like from space."
Given that the game features 100 systems full of explorable planets, it seems more than likely that you could effectively be constructing your own step-out moments across the length of the game. That might even include one for our own Earth, which fans believe will be explorable based on hints in the latest trailer.
Starfield will arrive for Xbox and PC in 2023, and the first gameplay reveal showed off combat, introduced customization. We'll be finding out much more in the months before release, but the game already sounds enormous.
Joe Skrebels is IGN's Executive Editor of News. Follow him on Twitter. Have a tip for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Please send an email to newstips@ign.com.