'Starfield' director Todd Howard has explained the game's "hard sci-fi" approach.

The highly anticipated Bethesda title is set to launch in 2023, and the game's director has opened up about how the studio has approached the science fiction genre.

Speaking in Bethesda's new 'Constellation Questions' Q and A video series, he said: "It is more hard to us, where you can draw that line from, okay, here's how man explored space, and [then] look at our ships and say, alright that has some visual identity back to that."

He insisted being asked if 'Starfield' is a "hard sci-fi" game is a trap because people have their own definitions of the term.

He added: "It's a video game. Like, a hard science-fiction video game would be, you die in space cold."

He noted that the team initially focused a lot on "fuel and how the gravity drive works", while he was "reading papers on like quantum physics and bending space in front of you".

However, he explained: "Your ship would run out of fuel and the game would just stop. You just want get back to what you were doing.

"So we've recently changed it where the fuel in your ship and the grav drive limits how far you can go at once. But it doesn't run out of fuel."

Meanwhile, he also revealed the game's dialogue system will mark a return to "classic Bethesda-style dialogue", with over 250,000 lines letting players look at a character to see how they emote, and then pick from a series of options.

He added: "We've gone through it and the impact is really there. And that includes my favourite speech persuasion system.

"It feels like it's part of the dialogue, but you're spending points to persuade them. It feels natural, not like I've entered some other mode where I'm not doing regular dialogues."