Bethesda president Todd Howard, who is also the game director for the upcoming space RPG Starfield, will be 30 to 40 hours long if you’re playing just the main storyline.

The sci-fi game’s huge number of quests is about a fifth longer than Skyrim and Fallout 4 according to an IGN interview with the director.

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

Todd Howard also clarified on the “over 1,000 planets” comment he made on the Starfield gameplay trailer.

“We’re also careful to let you know that’s what [that procedural content] is.

So, if you look at space, you know there are a lot of ice balls in space, so that was one of our big design considerations on this game is, ‘What’s fun about an ice ball?’ And it’s OK sometimes if ice balls aren’t – it is what it is.

We’d rather have them and say yes to you, ‘Hey, you can land on this.’ Here are the resources, you can survey it, and then you can land and spend ten minutes there and be like, ‘OK, now I’m going to leave and go back to the other planet that has all this other content on it, and I’m going to follow this questline.’

So, we’re pretty careful about saying, ‘Here’s where the fun is, here’s this kind of content,’ but still say yes to the player and, ‘You want to go land on that weird planet, check it out, and build an outpost, and live your life there, and watch the sunset because you like the view of the moons there? Go for it.’ We love that stuff.”

I guess he’s saying that some of these 1,000 planets will be empty places you can build your own starbase and outpost at. Better hope that fast travel loading is quick, Bethesda.

Starfield will be out in 2023 for PC and Xbox Series.