Todd Howard says Starfield's NG+ was misunderstood and defends Bethesda's new U-turn on how it works: 'You can tell us if we're done our job right'

Starfield's recent Free Lanes update has brought changes large and small to Bethesda's somewhat-maligned space RPG, with one of the biggest being how the game's NG+ mode works. To talk about that we'll need to briefly cover the game's ending, so: spoilers ahead. Obviously.

The main story quest of Starfield involves collecting weird space artifacts from across the galaxy and, when you've collected them all, undertaking the game's final mission, which gives you the option of entering The Unity, a nexus for the multiverse. If you choose to do so, the game starts over in a new version of the universe where your character keeps all of their skills and powers, but loses everything else, while all character relationships are reset.

Oh and perhaps most importantly: some weird stuff might start happening, though unfortunately it's a bit of a roll of the dice on just how weird. In a game that felt a little unambitious, dare I even say drab, this was one of the best ideas, even if the implementation left something to be desired.

"I'm still used to saying this is a spoiler, but I don't think it is anymore," Starfield director and executive producer Todd Howard told our sister site GamesRadar+. "The Unity was our way of doing New Game+. It was us asking you this weird, deep question that I actually think got lost on a lot of people. It asks if you are just this power gamer who wants to get everything, or are you willing to leave this world behind?

"How do you feel about your own life choices? Would you leave that all behind and start over? Some of that pain—having to give up all of your stuff, Sarah Morgan not loving you anymore, and so on—is supposed to make you feel all of that."

Howard goes on to cite Edge of Tomorrow as an influence, a brilliant 2014 sci fi movie based on the novella All You Need is Kill in which Tom Cruise's character Major Cage gets locked in a timeloop during an overwhelming alien invasion of Earth.

"It's one of my favorite movies," says Howard, referencing the ending in particular (where Cage finds himself in a world he's saved, but with no-one aware of what's happened). "So we create this feeling of, 'hey, you have to leave everything you did behind', but as a gamer, you're like, 'I just want to go through the magic gate and get more power.'"

The strange thing is that this is what the Free Lanes update changes, thanks to the addition of a container that allows players to keep a selection of up to 50 items. "If you decide to enter the Unity now, you can do it in a way that you feel that you can still continue your character and have some of your stuff—it's stuff that you earned, after all," says Howard.

The about-turn is because Bethesda felt too many players were turning down the opportunity to explore the multiverse and NG+, and so were missing out on one of Starfield's big ideas. "The attachment that players felt to the things that they had gathered up to that point meant that they didn't want to part with their items," says creative producer Tim Lamb. "It was a bridge too far—a sacrifice too meaningful. There's so many exciting things that can happen in our New Game+ loop that we wanted to give a bit of encouragement."

Lamb says this is balanced-out by the addition of more upgrade opportunities for existing items. "Then we are introducing X-Tech to further upgrade your weapons and your gear," says Lamb. "We don't want to ask the player to put in a lot of work for a reward they are searching for, only to say, 'no, it's gone now.' So once these things started coming together, we knew we absolutely had to do something like this."

Still, it is a bit of an about-turn on a cool idea, and does seem to me to remove the sting in the tail that Bethesda was initially going for. Howard frames it in terms of making refinements to the "elder loop" of the game, pointing out that things like new quests might provide an additional few hours of entertainment whereas this change has a more profound impact.

"Take something like the Trackers Alliance, or other quests," says Howard. "You do them and then you're done. That's still rewarding, but for someone who jumps back in, they might play for a few hours—and then the update didn't serve them beyond those two or three hours. We want to be trying to do more things that update the game where it's going to change the next 100 hours. You can tell us if we've done our job right."

It's hard to imagine players complaining about being able to keep some of their most treasured gear, though I'm not sure that was ever the problem with Starfield's NG+. The issue is more that it can take four or five playthroughs to start seeing some of the truly weird stuff that can happen and, even if I had all the time in the universe, I can't quite imagine playing Starfield that many times.