Bethesda boss Todd Howard says Starfield was designed and built for longevity, even more so than RPGs like Skyrim or any of the modern Fallouts, with the studio already considering how the game will evolve for years and years to come.
11.09.2023 - 16:45 / techradar.com / Todd Howard / Out Of / Howard / Howard Says
Starfield director Todd Howard has spoken about plans for the game that didn’t make the final cut, including the idea for a very neat Fallout reference.
In an interview with The Washington Post, journalist Gene Park mentioned that he’d hoped to find the nuclear wasteland fromFallout 3 on Earth in Starfield, since the planet has a destroyed surface which is completely devoid of life. Spoiler alert: the reference wasn’t included, but Howard revealed: “We talked about it.”
He then confirmed that hundreds of other plans didn’t get included in the game's final version, either: “Oh, we planned, and those plans went out the window,” he said.
“We knew we were going to rewrite parts of the engine, so we started building technology for the planets and the outer space stuff on our previous engine and renderer.”
In general, Starfield faced some big challenges in its development. It was ported over to a new engine, and the COVID-19 pandemic meant that the developers ended up producing the game from home, too, which was “very, very slow”.
The response to Starfield has been generally positive now that it's out. Yesterday, the space-exploration RPG hit an all-time concurrent player peak of 330,723 on Steam, which surpassedSkyrim’s record of 287,411. Meanwhile, on its release date (September 6), it managed to hit a concurrent player peak over one million across all platforms — including PC, Xbox Series X|S and cloud streaming.
Modders have been very busy in Starfield, too — we’ve already seenThomas the Tank Engine added to the game, as well as Todd Howard’s face (who can now be projected from your flashlight). If you’re aStar Wars fan, you can also replace all of the United Colonies’ guards with Stormtroopers. They don’t bump their heads on things, though.
For more games to get lost in, be sure to take a look at our recommendations for the best open-world games . You can also keep up with future releases with our roundup of upcoming games .
Bethesda boss Todd Howard says Starfield was designed and built for longevity, even more so than RPGs like Skyrim or any of the modern Fallouts, with the studio already considering how the game will evolve for years and years to come.
Starfield was extensively playtested by Bethesda devs often working from home, and Todd Howard says this approach worked so well that the studio's going to apply the method to its future games, with the studio's next confirmed, albeit far-off project obviously being The Elder Scrolls 6.
I've walked on nearly 200 different planets in Starfield in environments ranging from frozen tundra to baking infernos to toxic atmospheres. And in all that time I've only suffered one affliction that I felt a need to rush to a doctor to fix: I contracted a lung condition that eventually got so bad it made sprinting consume my oxygen supply in a matter of seconds, and I didn't have the meds to cure it myself.
Bethesda is known for making big, blockbuster RPGs—but Starfield's space combat was a totally new frontier for the team. I've personally found a decent bit of fun in zipping around and knocking pirates out of the sky, even if it's clearly not the game's main focus. I don't envy the devs saddled with the task of balancing dogfights in space.
If you are bummed that planet exploration in Starfield is not as challenging as expected, Bethesda originally planned to make the system much more punitive, according to the game's director.
Starfield's planets were originally supposed to be much more punishing for players, that is until Bethesda "nerfed the hell out of it," reveals Todd Howard.
Do you think Starfield takes place in the same Earth as Fallout? Do you think it should have been officially so? As it turns out, this was a key decision in Starfield’s development.
Earth is an inhospitable wasteland in Starfield. Sounds familiar, aye? Nuclear war ravaged our little floating rock in the Fallout series, leaving much of the planet a smoking radioactive desert. However, the two games aren't connected, but Bethesda did consider setting Starfield in the Fallout universe at one point during development.
For reasons I won't get into here because it may constitute a little bit of a spoiler, the planet Earth in Starfield is a bit of a wasteland. But what if it was The Wasteland—that is, the post-nuclear hellscape of Bethesda's other big sci-fi-ish game series, Fallout? In an interview with The Washington Post, creative director Todd Howard said developers actually gave thought to the idea.
You may have heard about a little space game called Starfield, the gravitational pull from which risks swallowing all games discourse for months and possibly years to come. Perhaps that's no surprise for a game that's been in development and hyped for as long as any title that I can remember (well, ones that have shipped anyway) but it's easy to forget now the thing's in our hands that it was subject to multiple delays along the way.
Bethesda Game Studios’ Starfield is available now for Xbox Series X/S and PC, amassing over six million players and topping physical sales charts in the United Kingdom. It was also in development for eight years, and despite that, as usually happens in the industry, some plans didn’t make it in.
In an interview with Famitsu, Starfield lead and Bethesda frontman Todd Howard stated that the game's mod support «will be available next year» (obtained via machine translation), which likely refers to Starfield's equivalent to the Creation Kit modding tools for Skyrim and Fallout 4.