Starfield was originally planned to be a gorier game, a former senior Bethesda artist revealed.
In an interview with the Kiwi Talkz podcast, Dennis Mejillones, who was a senior artist at Bethesda for almost 12 years and worked on Fallout 4, Skyrim, and Starfield, was asked why Starfield wasn’t as gory as games like Fallout 4.
Mejillones responded that the game was originally going to have more graphic violence, such as decapitations, but technical complications made it more trouble than it was worth.
“That has a lot of implications with the different suits,” he explained. “From a technical perspective, there are a lot of things that go into it, if you have to cut the hull a certain way, it has to come off, and you have to have meat caps for the bottom where the meat is. .
“You know, we had systems for all of that and it became a big rat’s nest with all these things you had to take into account, with all those crazy hoses in the helmets and all those kinds of things that we added, and now it could change significantly body size; You know, the creator of the character had evolved quite a bit, so I think that was part of it.”
Mejillones added that even if the team had been willing to spend more time working on gorier effects in Starfield, it still might not have been worth it because it might have been tonally different than what the game was going for.
“Fallout is very stylized in that sense,” he said. “It’s meant to be… that’s part of the ironic humor. You know, that [Bloody Mess] The benefit you get is that you can make a mess of someone, they just explode and turn into goo, it’s part of the fun.
“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 like no one can hold that much blood in, but you’re like, ‘oh man, that’s cool.’
“I think for Starfield it definitely needed to be more low-key and realistic. We took a lot of inspiration from things like The Expanse and Star Trek, things like that, so I think it just didn’t fit thematically. And on top of that, you have the technical overhead to make it work, so we thought, ‘it’s probably best not to include it in this game.'”
Starfield’s first expansion, Shattered Space, was released in September 2024. In it, players “embark on a journey to the crafted homeworld of House Va’ruun and unravel the mysteries surrounding the elusive followers of the Great Serpent.”
