Todd Howard says that hundreds of plans for Starfield “went out of the window”
Including a cool Fallout reference
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
Starfielddirector Todd Howard has spoken about plans for the game that didn’t make the final cut, including the idea for a very neatFalloutreference.
In aninterviewwith The Washington Post, journalist Gene Park mentioned that he’d hoped to find the nuclear wasteland fromFallout 3on Earth inStarfield, since the planet has a destroyed surface which is completely devoid of life. Spoiler alert: the referencewasn’tincluded, 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,Starfieldfaced 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 toStarfieldhas been generally positive now that it’s out. Yesterday, the space-exploration RPG hit anall-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 peakover one million across all platforms- including PC,Xbox Series X|S and cloud streaming.
Modders have been very busy inStarfield, too - we’ve already seenThomas the Tank Engine added to the game, as well as Todd Howard’s face (whocan now be projected from your flashlight). If you’re aStar Warsfan, you can also replace all of theUnited Colonies’ guards with Stormtroopers. They don’t bump their heads on things, though.
Get the best Black Friday deals direct to your inbox, plus news, reviews, and more.
Sign up to be the first to know about unmissable Black Friday deals on top tech, plus get all your favorite TechRadar content.
For more games to get lost in, be sure to take a look at our recommendations for thebest open-world games. You can also keep up with future releases with our roundup ofupcoming games.
Catherine is a News Writer for TechRadar Gaming. Armed with a journalism degree from The University of Sheffield, she was sucked into the games media industry after spending far too much time on her university newspaper writing about Pokémon and cool indie games, and realising that was a very cool job, actually. She previously spent 19 months working at GAMINGbible as a full-time journalist. She loves all things Nintendo, and will never stop talking about Xenoblade Chronicles.
The PS5 Pro’s PSSR upscaling gives multiple games a huge visual upgrade – can it compete with Nvidia’s DLSS 3 successor?
I’m a Nintendo Switch expert, here are the best early Black Friday deals right now
Belkin’s Travel Bag for Vision Pro has pockets and is way cheaper than Apple’s own case
