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For some Skyrim players, being a Dragonborn isn’t enough – you have to be the head of the Dark Brotherhood, the archmage of the College of Winterhold, the head of the Companions and the head of the Thieves Guild. And all this at the same time! But not in Starfield, because Bethesda is changing the approach of her a bit.
Lead quest designer Will Shen explained that while you won’t be the leader of every organization in the vast Starfield universe, you will still influence the future of each faction, even more so than in other Bethesda games. Take, for example, the Dark Brotherhood – if you join them, your choice will depend on whether to kill Cicero or let him live. Starfield looks set to get bigger.
This time, we want the stories to be more personal – you influence the direction this faction takes. Say Freestar Rangers politics – which is more important, justice or industry? Where you try to push them one way or another. So you don’t need to become the leader of every faction in the game.
You’ll encounter most of these factions as you progress through the main quest, another small change to Bethesda’s typical approach. Take at least Skyrim, where you start to carry out the quest for the Dark Brotherhood according to rumors, and you only meet with the Thieves Guild when visiting Riften. There are only a couple of factions on the main path.
One of the first decisions we made was to make sure that the main mission actually gives you a little tour of the populated systems and all the major players within them, so that we can give you an idea of what you’ll be doing. We also had a very early discussion, “OK, are we going to pit some factions against each other?”. And we decided to make sure that you can play all factions independently of each other.
