Bethesda creative director Todd Howard has revealed that serious consideration was given to making Starfield’s version of Earth the very same as Fallout’s. It appears that, ironically enough, the stars just couldn’t align.
Note: Before reading ahead, just be mindful of minor spoilers if you have yet to play the game.
On the final version of our home world, players can discover the ruins of iconic buildings such as The Shard in London and the Pyramids of Giza in Cairo. Yet the scope of how much could be found and the implications behind it all might have been far greater in earlier game development.
Indeed, when asked during an interview with the Washington Post if—at one stage or another—the Earth seen in Starfield would have been the post-apocalyptic wastelands of Fallout, Howard confessed the team had “talked about it.” This sort of revelation sets the mind racing. Might we have been able to return to the Commonwealth or the Capital Wasteland and visit plenty of Easter Egg-filled tourist attractions along the way?
Well, sure we certainly might have. Howard says as much. A deeper evaluation beyond the ‘rule of cool’ reveals just how unlikely it was always going to be.
For a start, the timeline found in Starfield would have to be pushed back. Kicking off just 40 years following the conclusion of Fallout 4, whatever way you spin it, humanity’s trajectories in both stories are incompatible. This particular curiosity might have found a baked-in workaround through the mercurial Zetan race although, understandably, it remains a stretch at best.
This element very much encapsulates why such a plan was dropped early on. Finding the justifications and reasoning behind the merging of landmark properties would have been difficult during a seamless production cycle. Starfield’s was anything but. A long, long time in the oven was only extended thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Ultimately, Fallout was easier to ignore than involve, and we feel that Starfield is all the better for it.
Published: Sep 15, 2023 11:34 am