Do you think Starfield takes place in the same Earth as Fallout? Do you think it should have been officially so? As it turns out, this was a key decision in Starfield’s development.
As reported by The Gamer, coming from a Washington Post interview with Todd Howard, Bethesda actually considered it at one point, and tried to write it to make it all come together. But they couldn’t make it work.
Without getting into Starfield spoilers, it’s actually easy to tell that Starfield couldn’t have happened in the same world where Fallout happened. The world of Fallout is a grim life after the apocalypse, when humanity had shifted towards survival instincts, instead of developing civilization.
In such an environment, it would not have been possible to invent space travel. There would have definitely been a lot of settlements that would have wanted to leave the Fallout Earth, but they would be facing up with a lack of money, lack of people, no free reign to share ideas with other space travel experts, and no way to build the facilities to even just test space travel.
There are other storyline reasons now that makes it impossible to set Starfield in the same Earth that Fallout happened, but on a philosophical level, it also would not have worked.
While gamers can make comedy and levity happen in their Fallout playthroughs, the games themselves are set in a dark time in human history. It’s hard to be hopeful in a world where the most that the most hardened survivors can hope for, is that they will be remembered for being such tough survivors. And even then, will there be anyone left to remember them after them?
Starfield, in the meantime, endeavors towards Gene Roddenberry, even Stanley Kubrick, in its vision of a humanity that has moved beyond Earth, towards the stars. While Bethesda’s idea of a space future attempts to recontextualize so many things that they would be considered normal (such as “Grandma”), it also permeates with a lot of hope, that there are more things out there for humanity to reach out to.
And, lest we forget, while Bethesda conceived of Fallout and Starfield as alternate realities, the epitome of science fiction, they turned out to be completely different worlds and aesthetics. Fallout’s pseudo 1950s retrofuturism adds a level of black comedy to affairs. On the other hand, Starfield feels like a future that we could possibly have, in our real Earth. NASA punk is more than a visual aesthetic here. It is a way of seeing the world that just can’t exist in Fallout’s world.
In the end, maybe some fans will try to somehow tie together Bethesda’s many worlds, including The Elder Scrolls to Fallout and Starfield. Ultimately, Starfield is its own thing, so that Bethesda could make its world the best that it could possibly be.
