Will Starfield Have Multiplayer, Co-Op, or PVP Modes?

Back in 2018, during E3 Conference, Bethesda Game Studios announced a new and upcoming action RPG title called Starfield – considering the success of The Elder Scrolls, Starfield has a lot of people hyped. One aspect of the game people are wondering about the most is support for multiplayer mode. So, will Starfield Have multiplayer, Co-Op, and PvP modes?

Not much is known at the moment but, currently, Bethesda has no plans to implement Multiplayer, Co-Op, or PvP modes. Back in 2020, Todd Howard confirmed it will be a single-player game. There is no indication to believe it will feature any type of multiplayer mode

Now that you have the short answer it’s time to analyze the game itself and see why exactly Starfield doesn’t seem like a multiplayer experience.

Starfield Setting  

Starfield will be set in the Solar System, to be more precise it will be set in the zone called „The systems“ which is an area that expands 50 light-years outwardly from the Solar system. Like in most RPGs there is a theme of faction conflict. Two of the Games’ biggest factions – The United Colonies and Freestar Collective were in conflict 50 years prior to the Games setting, and nowadays they are under an unstable and uneasy peace treaty.

Your own Character will be a part of a group called Constellation, a band of space explorers. And trust me, there will be a lot of space to explore. Todd Howard confirmed you will be able to explore all planets in the system, to be more precise „over a thousand planets, all open for you to visit“

What do we know about Starfield so far?

Once again, not much is known about starfield since the game is set to be released somewhere in the first half of 2023. But here are the things we know so far:

• Customization: You will be able to customize both your character and your ship.
• Leveling: There will be a multitude of traits to choose from and skills will be leveled up by using them.
• Crafting: You will be able to craft things, and even build your own outposts.
• Gameplay: You will be able to explore planets, fly and even engage in ship combat, you will also be able to use a jetpack.
• The game will be available for Xbox and PC, but it will not be released on PlayStation (at least not at first)
• The game’s content will be unique and „hand-crafted“ while some aspects of the game will naturally be procedurally generated.
• Environment: Both Planets and wildlife will have variations as you explore planets and moons.

Will Starfield Have Multiplayer, Co-Op, and PvP modes?

Things confirmed so far suggest that it will not. Starfield will put great emphasis on single-player experience which is in line with previous Bethesda’s IP-s. While both The Elder Scrolls and Fallout Franchises eventually got their own MMOs, they weren’t nearly as popular as their single-player counterparts. Nevertheless, Both Elder Scrolls Online and Fallout 76 were a good learning experience for Bethesda and experienced moderate success. Traditionally we have learned to expect ultimate singleplayer experience from their games and Starfield will only continue that tradition.

The next issue Starfield is facing when it comes to Multiplayer is their own in-house engine– creation engine. The creation engine is basically a modified and updated Gamebryo engine that was used to develop Morrowind, Oblivion, and Fallout 3. Since the Gamebryo engine was starting to become obsolete too fast they decided to modify it by enhancing its physical rendering and graphical capabilities. They even worked with Nvidia to implement volumetric lightning through hardware tesselation.

That new engine was called Creation engine and was used to develop Skyrim, Fallout 4, and Fallout 76 (and it shows).  The engine had to be modified once more to support multiplayer for Fallout 76. And it had to be modified once again – Creation Engine 2- in preparation for Starfield and The Elder Scrolls VI. Even though the Creation engine can, and does, support multiplayer, it is questionable whether it would support multiplayer on such a massive scale.

Verdict?

It doesn’t seem likely that Starfield will feature multiplayer game modes of any type. Currently, Bethesda is trying to keep up with the tradition of their mega-successful previous single-player titles. And Since Starfield is a completely new title they will probably see what kind of reception it will get before dumping resources into developing multiplayer versions – or game modes. Starfield was envisioned as a single-player experience only and a lot of fans prefer it that way.