Highlights
- Bethesda considered using the Fallout version of Earth in Starfield, but ultimately decided against it, resulting in limited similarities between the two games.
- The development of Starfield faced major challenges and setbacks, including the COVID-19 pandemic, which slowed progress and potentially led to the abandonment of ambitious plans.
- While modding Fallout-inspired content into Starfield is possible, it may not be as straightforward as previous modding efforts due to the advanced technology used in the game.
Bethesda had once considered using the Fallout version of Earth in Starfield, a senior company official has revealed. This bit of insight into the studio's latest hit sheds some more light on how one of Starfield's biggest mysteries, the fate of Earth, took shape.
The Maryland-based developer has long touted the opportunity to find out what happened to Starfield's Earth as 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.
And though Starfield's depiction of Earth has some overlap with Fallout, 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 the Fallout version of Earth in Starfield at some point during development. However, the prospect of placing Fallout landmarks 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 in order 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 some Fallout environments 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 of Earth landmarks in Starfield.
PC players hoping for Fallout-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 for Fallout: New Vegas, The Tale of Two Wastelands, actually managed to merge Obsidian's RPG with Bethesda's Fallout 3.
However, while those two titles effectively shared an engine, the technology powering Starfield went through over a decade's worth of additional development, and is also much newer than the version of the Creation Engine used for Fallout 4. As a result, modding Fallout landmarks into Bethesda's newest game might not be as straightforward as combining New Vegas with the series' third numbered entry, which already required some monumental efforts from dozens of enthusiasts.
Starfield is available now for PC and Xbox Series X/S.
Source: The Washington Post