Summary
Starfield’s first story expansion,Shattered Space, is out now. While itisn’t going down great on Steam, it gives Starfield players a new area to explore, as well as a new story to dive into.
To mark its launch, Starfield’s lead writer, Emil Pagliarulo, is reflecting on howBethesdaapproaches DLC in its games. In an interview withGamesRadarPagliarulo says that Bethesda thinks about DLC “more than any other studio”, and it all goes back to the backlash againstFallout 3’s ending.
Bethesda’s Approach To DLC Was Influenced By The Reaction To Fallout 3’s Original Ending - Which Killed Players
For those of you who need a refresher, Fallout 3 launched in 2008. At launch, anyone who got to the end of the game was presented with a choice: either you or an NPC, Sarah Lyons, had to go into a heavily irradiated chamber and activate a water purifier. Whoever did it would die, so if you sent Sarah in there, the ending slides pretty much called you a coward. Thus, many players were killed off.
Sounds fair enough, right? Well, it would be, if it wasn’t for the fact that three of the companions you can bring into the final mission are either partially orcompletelyimmune to radiation. Youcouldask them to go in there and do it for you, but they’d all say no, with Fawkes the super mutant infamously telling us it was our “destiny” to die for no reason.
“Let me tell you, players did not like that,” says Pagliarulo. “And that was really the moment we realized that our fans don’t want to play our games - they want to live in the worlds we create. That means their experiences never end, and the content, whatever it is, works together as seamlessly as we can make it.”
True enough, Bethesda later launched the expansion Broken Steel, which continued the story regardless of the decision you made. If you made the sacrifice, you actually made a full recovery. But more importantly, you could now ask your radiation-resistant companions to pop into the chamber real quick and get the job done themselves.
It’s interesting to see what Bethesda took away from this backlash. Ever since Fallout 3, every Bethesda game has let you keep playing after the main quest. Whether or not the quality of these endings has improved is often a topic of debate.
In any case, we can expect plenty of more adventures with Starfield. It has been repeatedly said that Bethesda and Xboxwant it to be a 12-year game like Skyrim, so Shattered Space is only the beginning.
Fallout 3
WHERE TO PLAY
Fallout 3 takes place in a ruined area around Washington D.C. two hundred years after the Great War. In a game met with critical acclaim, you must traverse this wasteland looking for your father, while solving the mystery of his disappearance.
