Starfield Is Confirmed to Have Over 150,000 Lines of Dialogue
Starfield, a sci-fi RPG from Bethesda, was recently showcased by Microsoft at the recently concluded Tokyo Game Show. One of the big announcements with regards to the game was that the game will be entirely localized into Japanese, as part of the studio’s largest translation project in the company’s history.
According to Creative Director Todd Howard, they called on over 300 actors to record more than 150,000 lines of dialogue for the game’s Japanese localization. “Todd Howard has appeared on stream to announce that Starfield will have a complete Japanese localization—just like Redfall, and mentioned that the game has over 150,000 lines of dialogue, apparently,” someone shared on social media.
Howard’s announcement puts Starfield’s voice line count well above both Skyrim and Fallout 4. The latter reportedly has 110,000 lines of dialogue in total, while the former has just over half that amount at 60,000 lines of dialogue. With that said, it is safe to say that Starfield will, indeed, be a big and dense game. However, being a product from Bethesda, the gaming community expected nothing less, anyway.
Dialogue counts are oftentimes regarded as an efficient quantifier of complexity and depth in the more serious RPGs that are in the market today. It is one of the key features that game developers include in their marketing spiels to indicate how big their game is.
For instance, BioWare told the gaming public that Mass Effect 3 was going to have 40,000 lines of dialogue—which is double the amount of dialogue in the original game. Beamdog also revealed a year later that Baldur’s Gate Enhanced Edition was going to feature “close to a million words of dialogue.” The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt was also marketed to have a script of at least 450,000 words, while Obsidian’s Tyranny was claimed to have over 600,000.
Starfield has already been scheduled to launch in November 2022 across PC and Xbox consoles.