"Finding the fun was always our guiding star": How 'Starfield' developers balanced realism with arcade fun when approaching space combat (exclusive)

One of the most important decisions when making a space flight simulation game is choosing between realism and arcade action.

The genre spans a wide spectrum, from hyper-realistic entries like Elite Dangerous or the upcoming Starship Simulator, through to arcade shoot-em-ups like Everspace 2, where the focus is less on realistic docking or shunting power between subsystems and more on blasting enemy fighters into dust.

Starfield — Bethesda's ambitious space opera — lies somewhere in the middle of the arcade and simulation poles. While not slavishly realistic, the complex ship builder and nuances of its RPG mechanics mean it's considerably deeper than the average arcade space shooter. We chatted to Starfield's Lead Creative Producer, Tim Lamb, to find out how the team struck that balance.

A roleplaying legacy

"First and foremost, we always intended this to work in an RPG experience," starts Lamb, referring to space combat and dogfighting. "We began adding that complexity to the ship systems and more."

As the team started building in mechanics, more and more ideas were added until the process started snowballing. "When we started, there were some basic ideas of things we wanted to try," Lamb explained. "The focus was on mechanics and controls. We started relatively simple before starting to layer in more systems on top. We knew we wanted a power allocation system, multiple weapons, shields, basic maneuverability like throttle and roll."

Beyond the basic gameplay, there was the question of balancing difficulty and player growth, which in space all revolves around the interlocking systems that define your ship's capabilities.

"Many factors can influence ship performance," Lamb said. "We have the freedom of a ship builder, so all the individual modules and equipment can become important. The chosen skills of the player's character are meaningful to space combat. Additionally, the crew that the player meets along their journey can have some influence. All of these things need to work together on a scale over the course of game progression."

As you might expect, thorough testing played a significant role in the design process. The team built a custom sandbox — an asteroid field — that they could use to test out the flight model and new ships as they were added into the game. Playing around amid clusters of asteroids and targets led to one of the most fun, arcade-action elements in the dogfighting: the lateral thrusting.

"We started work on the thruster mechanic, which was sort of born out of a desire to make it easier to keep things targeted. It gave us the benefit of being able to drift and slide the ship by targets while maintaining continuous fire and added another axis of control, so just skirting by asteroids was fun."

With some of the base piloting mechanics in place, it was time to attempt an even more challenging balancing act: making sure the systems worked the same way for the bad guys.

An equal playing field

All of these systems allowed players to control their ships in intense dogfights, but Bethesda still needed to add the players' dance partners into the mix. "All of the balance and game systems that I discussed need to work for enemy pilots as well," Lamb told us. "We did a lot of tuning and iteration to make sure combat started to feel like a level playing field."

As much work as the team had poured into the flight model and making it entertaining, a lot of it would be sacrificed if it seemed like enemy pilots were cheating their way around it. Applying the same rules to NPCs ultimately led to a move back in the direction of more arcadey action — the kind you might see in space operas like Star Wars.

"We needed to weed out any advantages that an enemy pilot could have, like turning faster, firing more often, or firing with higher accuracy. We needed to keep enemies engaged, but not too close by." A big part of that was tuning combat speed.

"During travel, ships could move at incredible speeds. Targeting, projectile speed, turn rates all needed adjustments to be fun. I think this is a place where we leaned on what cinema has shown us instead of what would be realistic."

In the same vein, because the players are the heroes of the Starfield story, the developers wanted to give them a chance to extricate themselves from nasty situations. According to Lamb, that "led to the addition of more mechanics like boosting and ship repair. This, in turn, fed these mechanics back to the enemy ships and gave us more vectors to touch player skills or ship equipment interactions."

Your view of the stars

Something a little more intangible than individual mechanics is how they come together, the inscrutable "feel" of a game, which comes down to how information and feedback are given to the player.

Lamb and the team had a tremendous amount of data to convey, but didn't want to overload players with too much info in intense dogfights, which meant a clean user interface (UI) design was critical. "We have to show what target is selected, indicate its direction if out of view, give an indication if shots will land, show if missiles are locked, highlight ideal turning speeds, and more," explains Lamb. "Additionally, we have to show shields and hull health, damage to individual systems, incoming damage [...] All that information needs to be in an appealing package for the player."

In a space sim, one of the most important pieces of data a UI conveys is what a player has targeted. This is key, not only for locking on with secondary weapons like missiles, but for distinguishing often distant enemies against the vast darkness of space. Starfield takes this a step further and also allows players to target subsystems on an enemy ship.

"As all these pieces were coming together, we added the ship system targeting mechanic. This gave us the ability to slow down combat a bit and target individual systems on an enemy in the same way a player would manage their own power systems. Beyond just looking cool, this also gave us more opportunities to expand player choice with additional skills."

Being able to disable the same systems on an enemy ship that a player is juggling on their own — including during the ship creation process, where individual components must be added to enable certain subsystems — adds an additional layer of simulation-style complexity. The Starfield team also had to worry about building elements into the UI to differentiate friendly ships from foes, displaying both intent and threat level.

Finding the fun

As development continued, the goal became less about finding the perfect balance between simulation and arcade style, or "cinematic," action, and more about making sure Starfield was a satisfying role-playing game.

"Ultimately, Starfield is an RPG. We want choices, skills, and equipment to matter. We wanted moment-to-moment combat to be fun, exciting, and intuitive while also being accessible enough that a player's skill with an input device wasn't the deciding factor in every combat encounter. For those of us that have never been in a spacecraft, I think we leaned on our favorite movies for inspiration."

More than that, Lamb and the other devs at Bethesda strove to avoid getting so lost in mechanics and systems that they forgot about the most important element of game design: fun.

"Finding the fun was always our guiding star as we built out space combat. Looking back on it all…it was an iterative process. It involves multiple disciplines working on a large collection of features, and it's an approach we continue to take as we work on the future of Starfield."

Starfield is currently available to play on Xbox Series X|S and PC. It's also available via Xbox Game Pass.