Starfield Director Todd Howard has shared that the environment in Starfield’s planets were meant to be harsher but decided against it in the final stages of the game’s development. Read on to know why and other details the game director has offered.
Todd Howard Says They Dialed Down on Starfield’s Planets’ Status Effects
Prioritizing Combat Over Environmental Effects
In an interview with the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences, Todd Howard spoke about designing multiple game systems and their decision-making process during game development. When asked about how he leads his team when considering applying or removing certain aspects of the game, Howard gave an example using Starfield, revealing that there was supposed to be a more complex status effect system on the planets.
In making such changes, a question that needed to be answered was "What’s more important?" in the game, said Todd Howard. He further revealed that they wanted to prioritize working on the gunplay; to focus on fine-tuning the combat, frame to frame, instead of making the environmental system of planets more complex.
The process of refining the damage system on the planets got too taxing and complicated, taking away time from working on the combat in the game.
"The way the environmental damage works in the game on planets and on your suit… you have resistances to certain types of atmosphere effects, whether that’s radiation, thermal, etc. It was a pretty complex system, actually. It was very punitive. We kept trying to tune these afflictions. And what we did at the end of the day, since it was a complicated system for players to understand, is we just nerfed the hell out of it. Where it ends up being, it matters only a little bit."
