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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 space-adventure RPG is no different.
For help starting your adventure, check out our Starfield tips and tricks, the Jemison Mercantile location, the Starfield quest list, and the best Starfield reactor.
How long is the Starfield campaign?
The main campaign for Starfield takes between 30-35 hours based on our playthrough of the game. Naturally while this is the average time to beat the game, there will be certain outliers depending on how you play the game.
Players on lower difficulties who are focused solely on the story will take less time, while players fully engaging with side content may take much longer. This number is just an average and you should combine this with how you play the game to gain a better understanding of how long it would take you.
It’s also a lot longer than previous Bethesda games. The 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.
How long is the full game of Starfield?
Starfield is a massive game, and it would easily take hundreds of hours to complete all of the available content Starfield has to offer. With so many planets to visit, each with their own quests and places to explore, it’s almost impossible to put a concrete number of hours on how long it would take for any completionists to see it all. Bethesda’s Pete Hines, for example, mentioned at Gamescom 2023 that he was “150-160 hours into the game”.
With over 1000 Starfield planets, the game could theoretically take up as much as 1000 hours, if not more, assuming a player wanted to fully explore every single planet and star system. Most of these worlds re fairly empty though, hosting either some alien fauna and wildlife, or presenting good opportunities for mining. There are 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 on optional content like building and developing Starfield outposts, fighting pirates, and completing side missions, side quests and exploration goals. Altogether, the whole of Starfield will take several hundred hours to complete.
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 Starfield is destined for very much the same, with a budding modding scene already pumping out mods.
So how long is Starfield? If you’re playing just for the main campaign, then 30+ hours. And if you’re aiming to take on plenty of the side content, then you’re easily looking at 200+ hours. 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.
