Summary
Bethesda had once considered using theFalloutversion of Earth inStarfield, a senior company official has revealed. This bit of insight into the studio’s latest hit sheds some more light on howone ofStarfield’sbiggest mysteries, the fate of Earth, took shape.
The Maryland-based developer has long toutedthe opportunity to find out what happened toStarfield’sEarthas one of the game’s biggest narrative allures. Without venturing into spoilers, it’s suffice to say that the galaxy-spanning RPG delivers on that promise, with its main quest eventually offering a detailed overview of the events that led to the third planet from the Sun becoming uninhabitable in the game’s lore.
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And thoughStarfield’sdepiction of Earth has some overlap withFallout, those limited similarities could have been much greater than they ended up being. Bethesda Executive Producer Todd Howard said as much in a recent interview with the Washington Post, having revealed that the studio actually considered using theFalloutversion of Earth inStarfieldat some point during development. However, the prospect of placingFalloutlandmarks throughout the space-faring RPG’s rendition of Earth was ultimately abandoned, as were hundreds of other ideas.
A lot of the more ambitious plans for the game were scrapped by 2020, when the development hit a massive roadblock in the form of the COVID-19 pandemic. Howard recalled how the company-wide need to work from home slowed progress to a crawl, exacerbating the already substantial challenges of rewriting large parts of the Creation Engine to support an open-world game spanning dozens of galaxies and over a thousand planets. The official did not confirm whether the idea of reusing someFalloutenvironments was abandoned at this point of the project or beforehand, but his comments imply that the global pandemic certainly didn’t help bolster the total number ofEarth landmarks inStarfield.
PC players hoping forFallout-inspired content in Bethesda’s latest title can plausibly place their faith in the modding community to deliver such additions in the long term. This sort of ambitious fan-made content is not without precedent, as one of the most popular total conversion mods forFallout: New Vegas,The Tale of Two Wastelands, actually managed to merge Obsidian’s RPG with Bethesda’sFallout 3.
However, while those two titles effectively shared an engine, the technology poweringStarfieldwent through over a decade’s worth of additional development, and is also much newer than the version of the Creation Engine used forFallout 4. As a result, moddingFalloutlandmarks into Bethesda’s newest game might not be as straightforward as combiningNew Vegaswith the series' third numbered entry, which already required some monumental efforts from dozens of enthusiasts.
Starfieldis available now for PC and Xbox Series X/S.
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