Starfield: Todd Howard reveals game's story could take 40 hours to complete

Starfield’s main quest is 20% bigger than previous Bethesda games, according to IGN, as director Todd Howard has confirmed that it should take around 30 to 40 hours to complete.

That number, amazingly, does not actually include side content, meaning that if you want to 100% the game, you’re going to need to pour a huge amount of time into Bethesda’s latest release.

The game was initially slated to release in November of this year, but has been delayed until 2023.

Still, Howard spoke to IGN after Starfield’s gameplay reveal at the Xbox-Bethesda showcase, and he revealed that the game has a very long main story.

He said: “This one’s ending up a little bit longer (than previous games) and we may tune that some still. It’s more quests, so it might be 20% more than our previous ones.”

Players mileage could vary, of course, with some quests taking longer than others.

Howard says that if the main quest of a previous game was 25 hours, Starfield “might be in the 30s, maybe 40.”

How Long To Beat claims that Skyrim takes 25.5 hours to complete, just for the main quest, while Fallout 4 takes 27 hours.

Mainlining the storyline quests are not usually how people play Bethesda games, of course; the games instead have huge amounts of side quests, and Howard has previously said that there are going to be over 1,000 fully explorable planets in the game.

Howard also says that there is an expectation that the game’s modding community will keep the game fresh.

He added: “We’ve learned that people do play our games for a really, really long time.

“They’re still playing Skyrim – not straight for 10 years, but they leave it and they come back and there’s extra content. Certainly we’re going to be doing extra content for this game, and we love