Highly anticipated: While not an indication of quality, we've come to expect big RPGs to feature plenty of dialog. That's certainly going to be the case with Bethesda's upcoming Starfield: it will have well over twice the number of lines found in Skyrim and 40,000 more than Fallout 4.

Bethesda Game Studio's director and executive producer Todd Howard, who previously called Starfield "Skyrim in space," appeared at Xbox's Tokyo Game Show 2021 showcase to talk about the game. He said that it would have a full Japanese voiceover track, revealing that Starfield features more than 150,000 lines of dialog.

That figure puts it ahead of some of Bethesda's other massive RPGs. The evergreen Skyrim manages 60,000 lines, while the loquacious Fallout 4 comes in at 110,000 lines. BioWare, meanwhile, said Mass Effect 3 has 40,000 lines.

While it's hard to translate the figures into lines of dialog, PC Gamer notes that Beamdog co-founder Trent Oster said Baldur's Gate Enhanced Edition has close to a million words.

Starfield, Bethesda's first new IP in a quarter of a century, is still more than a year away, arriving on November 22, 2022. It will be an Xbox Series S/X exclusive---and PC, of course---thanks to Microsoft's $7.5 billion purchase of Bethesda parent ZeniMax in September 2020.

Bethesda's Senior Vice President of Global Marketing and Communications, Pete Hines, apologized to PlayStation 5 owners for the game's exclusivity earlier this year. But it seems not everyone at the company feels the same way; Howard said he felt making it exclusive to Xbox/PC was in the game's best interest.