Todd Howard discusses Starfield’s Xbox exclusivity and its advantages

Starfield represents one of the first major Bethesda games to be released in the wake of its acquisition by Microsoft, and as previously confirmed, the game will be an Xbox console exclusive. In a recent interview, the game’s director, Todd Howard, sat down to discuss Starfield’s exclusivity as well as the advantages and disadvantages of this.

In an interview as part of the Lex Fridman podcast (and transcribed by VGC), Todd Howard, the game director for the upcoming ‘Starfield’ discussed both the advantages and disadvantages behind the acquisition of Zenimax Media by Microsoft, saying:

“We’ve had a lot of success with the games that you talked about but we’ve never been kind of the platform seller, you know ‘the game’ for a platform for a period of time, and so, there is a lot of pressure, there’s a lot of responsibility there to make sure we deliver for everybody.”

Howard continued, “Keep in mind that for us that exclusivity is not unique, even though we’ve done PlayStation stuff and I think the PS5 is just an insane machine – they’ve done a great job and we’ve had great success on PlayStation. We were traditionally a PC developer in the beginning. We transitioned to Xbox [and it] became our lead platform, like Morrowind’s basically exclusive to Xbox, Oblivion was exclusive to Xbox for a long period of time, Skyrim DLC was exclusive, so we’ve done a lot of, like, our initial stuff is all Xbox.”

Concluding on a positive note for the team, Howard claimed that “when we get into development and say we’re focused on Xbox, it’s not abnormal for us in any way, it’s been kind of the norm. And from a development side I like the ability to focus and have help from them, you know the top engineers at Xbox, to say we are going to make this look incredible on the new systems, from my standpoint it’s just awesome.”

Starfield will be by far the biggest Xbox game to release since the launch of the latest generation Series X and S, and so it will be interesting to see just how well the game performs – both in terms of actual game performance, and the reaction from critics and fans alike.

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