by According to Todd Howard, Starfield was partially inspired by a ’70s tabletop RPG called Traveler, and fans of Bethesda and classic pen-and-paper games have finally started to explore what that means for the upcoming game.
Last October, a brief official Q&A with Creative Director Todd Howard broke down some of Starfield’s biggest influences. Howard went very old-fashioned, citing a 1984 Apple II game called SunDog: Frozen Legacy and Traveler, a sci-fi tabletop role-playing game originally released in 1977 with the rise in popularity of early Dungeons & Dragons. There have been many editions of Traveler since then, but Howard said he was inspired by the original to program an adaptation that, sadly, was never completed.
As a casual tabletop fan unfamiliar with anything that landed before D&D 3.5, I was very curious as to what Traveler’s influence really means for Starfield, but delving into a new TTRPG is a time investment I couldn’t make . Luckily, a veteran game master who goes by the name of Phenox and “has been running Traveler games continuously for over three years” has shared a lesson with the rest of the community about his potential influence.
The full Reddit post (opens in new tab) is worth your time, but to recap the highlights, Traveler is skill-based rather than class-based, and you strengthen those skills by using them. It certainly seems likely that this has had an impact on Bethesda for years, since that’s how the abilities have worked in much of the Elder Scrolls and Fallout series. Starfield abilities seem to use a combination of this leveling system and challenges to guide your improvement.
Traveler also lets you choose a career in character creation, which will determine your starting skills. That seems to have been picked up straight from the Starfield background system, where you have to choose a previous career like diplomat, medic, or chef to determine your starting abilities.
This is fairly familiar across a wide range of RPGs, but the specifics of starship customization are much more specific than what we see in Starfield. “In Traveler, spaceships could be built from scratch,” explains phenox. “You could build any ship you want as long as you follow the simple rules. You can have a ship as big or small as you want, with mixed and matched gun emplacements, different fusion plants, computers, engines, etc.” This sounds pretty similar to what we saw from the Starfield ship customization you were using Fully mix and match different parts like engines, cockpits, and weapons to build any type of ship you want.
That’s the stuff we know Starfield has been an influence on, but what about the features we haven’t seen yet? Traveler emphasizes the freedom of sandbox characters, and while that’s been the main appeal of Bethesda games for decades, the studio has increasingly pushed more directed narratives into the heart of games like Fallout 4. “If they’re taking Traveler influence here, it means that the game’s narrative structure may be more in line with Morrowind than later releases,” phenox speculates.
Here’s the part I find most interesting though: “The tone of the standard game Traveler is that of merchants on the fringes of the law who have to do what they have to do to make ends meet.” There are comparisons to Firefly, where groups of people with unique abilities work together to crew a ship and take jobs on both sides of the law. Starfield didn’t really show us that explicitly intricate Western space aesthetic, but seeing the idea of ​​a lawless – or lawless – frontier on the fringes of a harder sci-fi world sounds very exciting.
Starfield is scheduled for release on September 6th. A full gameplay showcase will arrive with Starfield Direct on June 11th.
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