How long is Starfield?

Just how long is Starfield going to be? Bethesda Game Studios is well known for creating vast, expansive worlds with immense amounts of content, and their upcoming space-adventure RPG is set to be no different.

Answering the question ‘How long is Starfield?’ is a bit more complicated than it might initially seem, especially because we’ve still plenty to learn about the game leading up to and following the Starfield release date in September. Here, we’ll cover all the best estimates for the length of the campaign and the wider game at large.

How long is the Starfield campaign?

The main campaign for Starfield is estimated to be 30-40 hours long, according to Game Director Todd Howard. This confirmation comes from an interview that the Bethesda boss and game director held with IGN. The variation comes from the fact that different players might take less or more time to complete missions. An average will be easier to determine following the game’s launch on PC and Xbox Series X.

It’s also a lot longer than previous Bethesda games. Elder Scrolls 5 Skyrim had an estimated main story completion time of just over 25 hours. Fallout 4 meanwhile had a main campaign that took roughly 27 hours to complete on average. From what we know so far about the Starfield story and plot, the main campaign will be an expansive journey, taking players across the galaxy and into contact with the many Starfield factions. This will culminate in a story substantially longer than previous games.

How long is the full game of Starfield?

We can’t make any specific estimates for how long the entirety of the game will be, but given the highly ambitious scale, it’s safe to say that it will take players a very long time to explore everything the game can offer.

With over 1000 Starfield planets, the game could theoretically take thousands of hours, assuming a player wanted to explore every single planet and star system. We know that most of these worlds will be fairly empty though, hosting either some alien fauna and wildlife, or presenting good opportunities for mining. There will be far fewer planets like Jemison or Mars that are bustling with activity.

For now, let’s assume that we’re just talking about planets that have a significant amount going on, places with NPCs, and the average amount of time a player is likely to spend building and developing Starfield outposts, fighting pirates, and completing side missions, side quests and exploration goals. Altogether, the whole of Starfield will likely take several hundred hours to complete. We know that Skyrim had about 200 hours of content, and given that Starfield will be substantially larger, more than 200+ hours is the best specific estimate we can give.

And this is all before we even begin to factor in the almost inevitable mods. Bethesda games like Skyrim are well known for having a massive modding community and we don’t see why that would change with Starfield. There are bound to me huge amounts of fan-made content available after the first month or two that will undoubtedly add even more for players to do, bringing that play time up even further.

So how long is Starfield? We can’t be certain, but 30+ hours for the campaign and 200+ hours for all the content on offer seem like reasonable guesses. Make sure you don’t go through the experience alone though. It might be single player, but there are plenty of Starfield crew members to hire and lots of Starfield companions to share the journey with.