When Todd Howard, the central mind behind Starfield, calls something one of the inspirations for Starfield, that”s saying something. But what is the Tabletop Traveller about and what could it mean for Starfield?
Starfield hasn”t just been the talk of the town since the now hopefully final release date of 6 September 2023 was announced. But if there is one person who can draw even more attention to the upcoming role-playing game, it is Todd Howard, Game Director and Executive Producer at Bethesda Game Studios.
Over the course of the past few months, for example, he has also made a very specific group of fans sit up and take notice: The player base of the tabletop RPG Traveller. And what he has initiated is still causing heads to spin with joyful anticipation and curiosity there today.
But first to the beginning, what did Todd Howard say? The game director has called the sci-fi tabletop RPG one of the inspirations for Starfield.
What is Traveller?
The sci-fi RPG Traveller is one of the oldest tabletop games on the market: It was released in 1977, just a few years after Dungeons & Dragons revolutionised modern adventuring with friends at the living room table.
You play as a group of characters who take on different roles on a spaceship, navigating their life paths through a space that lies on the edge of civilisation.
A Standard Traveller campaign is about traders on the edge of the law who have to do whatever it takes to make ends meet.
What parallels can be found?: So some, as Reddit user (Pheanox detailed in his post). He is himself a Gamemaster for the game, he says, and has been running ongoing Traveller campaigns for three years. For some facets of Traveller, however, he is so far only holding out hope that Bethesda has been inspired by it.
The first similarity is the skill system. However, Traveller shares some facets, such as increasing individual skills, with other Bethesda RPGs like Skyrim or Oblivion. But while the latter were already sandbox experiences, Pheanox also hopes that Starfield”s approach to Traveller will result in a more open narrative structure of the main story – more like in Morrowind. Other selected points from his extensive (English-language) article are:
- The economy is an important aspect of Traveller. It offers similar depth to Egosoft”s X series too. Starfield certainly won”t offer that, but he hopes for at least the complexity that Elite: Dangerous showcases.
- What Pheanox says already looks almost identical to each other is the ship combat. Traveller, like Starfield, both rely on a soft-realistic approach – roughly comparable to Elite Dangerous with flight assist turned on.
You can find more about Starfield here in various forms, columns, news or stories from the community, which is looking forward to the quasi-Skyrim successor more and more every week.
As Starfield fans, you should mark a date in your calendar: 11 June 2023, when a large livestream will take place under the title Starfield Direct, which should give you a detailed deep dive into the game, including its development.
Do you know or have you perhaps already taken part in a Traveller campaign? If so, what do you think? Do you see the similarities between pen and paper and what Starfield has shown so far? And what feature from the tabletop game would you like to see rediscovered in the virtual world of Starfield? Tell us in the comments!