Starfield director Todd Howard revealed that there was, at one point, talk about making Earth in the game the same one from the Fallout franchise.
In an interview with The Washington Post, reporter and critic Gene Park noted that, when he arrived on Earth to find the planet uninhabitable, he’d hoped he might instead discover the same nuclear wasteland he’d experienced in Fallout 3. Howard responded by saying, “We talked about it.” There was no further elaboration on the comment, except for Howard noting that there were many ideas and plans for Starfield that never came to fruition.
Related: Seeing Earth’s Fate in Starfield Broke My Heart
Spoilers for what happened to Earth in Starfield lay ahead.
When players go to Earth in Starfield, they discover that it’s a desolate wasteland with no life or buildings. The reason for this, as revealed in a museum in a key city called New Atlantis, is that scientists discovered in 2150 that Earth’s magnetosphere was collapsing. This urged humanity to band together and take to the stars. In 2203, Earth officially became uninhabitable and has since been devasted by radiation and solar winds. I, personally, found the experience of going to Earth to be a touching one, and if you look at that “Related” link above, you can find my own story of seeing our planet’s fate.
The Fallout series, which is now published and developed by Bethesda, takes place on a post-apocalyptic Earth. However, the planet’s magnetosphere does not seem to have collapsed, and there’s significantly more than on Starfield‘s version of the world. Instead, the destruction of Earth in the Fallout series is the result of a nuclear war. Called The Great War, the event took place in 2077, which is several decades before Starfield‘s scientists learned about the fate of Earth. As such, making the two timelines work together may have proven difficult without massively shifting key dates and other lore.
Starfield is available now on PC and Xbox Series X/S.
