Highlights
- Starfield introduces customized player backgrounds, allowing players to choose their character's occupational background, influencing interactions with NPCs. This mechanic could be a great addition to future Fallout games.
- Skill checks in Starfield have been enhanced with increasing skill requirements and point rewards. Fallout could adapt this system to have more skills play a role in dialogue, replacing the traditional single dice-roll style of skill checks.
- Starfield 's open world pacing, with empty and lifeless planets, creates a sense of significance when encountering impressive cities and settlements. Fallout could benefit from bringing back the wide open wasteland of the older games and combining it with impressive locations for a more immersive experience.
It's no secret that Bethesda's newly released RPG Starfield has borrowed a lot of ideas from the Fallout series. From the expansive Sci-fi world to the combat and questing, Starfield owes quite a lot to the giants that came before it. The question now, however, is what exactly does Starfield have to offer future Bethesda titles like Fallout in return?
Much like how Bethesda's work on The Elder Scrolls went on to influence Fallout 3 and each of its sequels, Starfield may very well provide some inspiration of its own. Here is a list of some ideas that the Fallout series could Learn from Starfield.
6 Customized Player Backgrounds
Starfield introduces a new mechanic for Bethesda games that allows the player to choose their character's occupational background. This comes with its own set of tagged skills and influences interactions with NPCs. For example, the player can choose to have the background of a bounty hunter, diplomat, gangster, or even a chef, among plenty of others.
This is not a mechanic Fallout has ever had, with even the most RPG-centric games in the series (Fallout 2 and New Vegas, for example) having a defined player background of courier, tribal, or vault dweller. This would be an excellent idea for future Fallout games to experiment with.
5 Enhanced Skill Check Options
Skill checks in Starfield have received a bit of an overhaul compared to previous Bethesda games. Choosing the persuasion option will present the player with several dialogue options of increasing skill requirements and point rewards. The higher the skill requirement, the more points that dialogue option will contribute to an overall persuasion score, which must be met in order to successfully persuade an NPC. The player must choose the right combination of responses, taking into account their skill level, the level of risk each response has, and the potential point reward.
It's an interesting system that Fallout could potentially adapt for its own style of role-playing, especially since Fallout has historically been very good at having more skills than just speech play a role in dialogue. This could be a more than adequate replacement for the usual single dice-roll style of Skill checks.
4 Open World Pacing
Bethesda had stated prior to the release of Starfield that many of the game's planets would be empty and devoid of all life. No doubt this was done to capture the reality of space travel, however, it also serves as a great pacing method as the player explores the world. Seeing impressive cities and settlements over the horizon after long gaps of nothing can make them feel more significant and special. Not only does this fit within a game about space travel, but it also fits one about a post-apocalyptic wasteland.
The original Fallout games also had large swaths of nothing between major locations, though as the series progressed into the 3D era, the maps became much smaller and more densely packed due to technological limitations. Fallout bringing back some of the wide open, expansive wasteland (not unlike 2015's Mad Max game) of the older isometric games and mixing it with the impressive locations that one would see in Starfield would be a real winner.
3 Vehicle Mechanics
To date, Fallout 2 is the only game in the series to let the player drive a vehicle, at least on paper. In practice, it was mostly just a speed boost to the normal grid traversal system, though it did also serve as a second inventory space. Starfield, however, allows the player to unlock and customize their own spaceships. These ships can be bought, found, or flat-out stolen and added to the player's own personal fleet.
Imagine if the next Fallout took a similar approach with cars or other methods of transportation, where the player can build a personal vehicle like in Fallout 2 via scavenging the wasteland for parts and accessories. If the next game does indeed feature a much more open wasteland, this would be a really fun thing to have.
2 Enhanced Movement Options
Some of the more popular mods for the Fallout games have always been movement-related. For Fallout 3 and New Vegas, sprinting has several mods dedicated to it, to the point that both Skyrim and Fallout 4 would later include it. Starfield, however, adds a few new ones: mantling and sliding. Both can be found as mods for prior Bethesda games, so it's no surprise they've ended up in Starfield.
Being able to slide in combat and quickly vault over or climb objects would certainly be a welcome addition by the developers in the next Fallout game.
1 Bounties and Crime
Given that the game is set during an era of expanded Human civilization, Starfield features an actual crime and punishment system that Fallout notably lacks due to its post-civilization setting. When committing a crime in Starfield, the player can have a bounty placed on their head, which will not only cause them to run into trouble with law enforcement it will also attract the attention of bounty hunters. The laws that govern the player also seem to govern the NPCs, as the player can, in turn, pursue bounties of their own while traveling the galaxy.
Fallout traditionally has not had a system of crime and punishment nor a bounty mechanic. If the player is caught doing something bad, NPCs will often just start attacking them. There is no jail sentence or bounty placed on the player's head, which fits with a wasteland setting in theory. There are, however, plenty of areas in the Fallout universe that are developed enough to support these systems, such as the NCR's territory on the West Coast. A game set here could easily take advantage of some of Starfield's crime mechanics and perhaps take them even further.
Starfield is out now on PC and Xbox Series X/S.