In an alternate timeline, Starfield could have been a much bloodier game than what we actually got.
According to former Bethesda character artist Dennis Mejillones, there were once plans for Starfield to have a much more graphic depiction of violence. That included the eternal blood-filled death: decapitation.
However, heads wouldn’t literally roll in Starfield for several reasons. The first was due to technical implications with things like different spacesuits. Speaking on the Kiwi Talkz podcast, Mejillones explained that if Bethesda had ultimately gone the decapitation route, it would have required the developer to take into account all the suits and how they would react to being cut off.
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“From a technical perspective, there’s a lot of things that have to do with it, you know… If you have to cut the hull a certain way, and it has to come off, and you have to have meat caps for the bottom where the meat is “Mejillones said when asked about the lack of blood in the game.
Bethesda had “systems for all of that,” he continued, but their implementation began to become a “big rat’s nest of these things” that the team had to account for. He highlighted helmet “crazy hoses” as one of those considerations.
Mejillones added that the character creator in Starfield had evolved from the studio’s previous games and now characters’ bodies could be more different shapes and sizes, so that was a factor as well.
Away from the technical implications, Mejillones also reasoned that Starfield has a very different overall tone compared to other Bethesda games, such as the always chaotic Fallout. “Fallout is very stylized in this sense. It’s meant to be… that’s part of the tongue-in-cheek humor,” he said, commenting on Fallout 4’s Bloody Mess perk.
If you didn’t know, this buff increases the chances of enemies exploding in a bloody mess (watch the video below). This over-the-top gore and theatrics are part of the fun of Fallout, and something that translated quite well into Amazon’s TV adaptation.
“It’s like those old-school anime like Fist of the North Star: They punch each other and there’s always spurts of blood coming out. It’s just that no one can hold that much blood in, but you’re like, ‘Oh, man, that’s cool.'” adds to that style,” Mejillones continued, before concluding:
“I think Starfield was definitely meant to be more realistic and lo-fi. We took a lot of inspiration from things like The Expanse and Star Trek, things like that. So I think [over the top gore] “It just didn’t fit thematically… And on top of that, you have the cost, the technical overheads of making that work, so we thought, ‘it’s probably best not to include it in this game.'”
So would you have preferred that Starfield had featured more gore, or do you agree that it should have kept its tone more grounded?
Away from the base game, last year Bethesda released its Shattered Space expansion for Starfield, which introduced a bit of horror to spice things up.
Bethesda’s Todd Howard previously confirmed at least one more DLC for the space epic after Shattered Space. As for what that might be, fans believe a “Starborn” trademark filed by Bethesda parent company Zenimax in July could offer a clue about Starfield’s second expansion.
