Starfield may be getting a feature film, Stephen Ford's tweets hint

Starfield is all set to launch on November 11 for Xbox and PC. As the release window comes nearer, much about the game remains enshrouded in mystery. Bethesda Game Studios have been keeping their socials busy with regular dev diary updates, but we are yet to see any gameplay.

Given Bethesda Game Studio's short ad campaigns for previous releases like Fallout 4, this cloak-and-dagger teasing of features like space flight does not appear off-brand.

Next month, we will likely see an in-depth gameplay reveal at the upcoming Summer Games Festival. The bubbling hype and rumors have also been piling up about Starfield's marketing strategy.

The word on the street is that their ad campaign will put Skyrim's to shame. Actor and director Stephen Ford, rumored to be working with Bethesda on Starfield-related projects, fuelled this notion again with tweets.

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What are the implications of Ford's tweets for pre-release Starfield content?

Earlier this month, Stephen Ford strongly hinted at his involvement in Starfield in some form. The exact nature of his involvement has since been the subject of debate in the fan community. The most prominent opinion out of these was the idea of Ford voicing a follower in the game.

However, this week, he repeated the same streak of unofficial teases with an informal job advertisement. He expressed his intention to interview freelance concept artists for his 'itty bitty sci-fi feature film'.

Given his previous history of entanglement with the game, the sci-fi label alone connects this to Starfield. Stephen Ford, however, did not stop here but bluntly suggested that the series of tweets were indeed related to the game.

If these tweets are to be taken at face value, 'sci-fi feature film' could have multiple possible implications. The most literal one points to an actual feature-length film.

Historically, video games have been the secondary vessels for adapting movie franchises. However, this dynamic has begun to reverse with the growth of the video game industry at large. We have only recently had two Sonic the Hedgehog movies and an Uncharted feature-film adaptation.

Considering this is Bethesda's first new intellectual property with no pre-existing lore resources, unlike Fallout or Elder Scrolls, a move tie-in could fill this role. A movie project collaboration between Bethesda and a third-party production company like Ford's Ascender makes sense if released right before the game.

On the other hand, the omission of the 'feature film' wording may also indicate a live-action trailer. These cinematic featurettes are set to purely build up hype about the in-game world, or sometimes even as smart lore tablets that create intrigue.

Bethesda's last two single-player releases, Fallout 4 and Skyrim, have both had cinematic live-action trailers in this vein. A third, but less likely possibility, is a live-action cut-scene that introduces the setting of the Settled Systems to the player when they start a new game.

These pre-rendered cinematics have become a dated trend as graphical fidelity gets better with each generation. For example, there were cinematics like these in Morrowind and Oblivion, but not in Skyrim.