Starfield was originally going to be much gorier, former Bethesda artist reveals
There were decapitation systems in place for Starfield but they were removed, a character artist claims
Starfield was originally planned to be a gorier game, a former Bethesda senior artist has revealed.
In an interview with the Kiwi Talkz podcast, Dennis Mejillones – who was a senior artist at Bethesda for nearly 12 years and worked on Fallout 4, Skyrim and Starfield – was asked why Starfield wasn’t as gory as games like Fallout 4.
Mejillones replied 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’s a lot that has to go with it, if you have to cut the helmet in a certain way, and it’s got to come off, and you’ve got to have meat caps for the bottom where the flesh is.
“You know, we had systems for all of that and it turned into a big rat’s nest of all these things you had to account for, with all those crazy hoses on the helmets and all that kind of stuff that we added, and now you could change the body size significantly – you know, the character creator 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 may still not have been worth it because it could have been tonally different from what the game was aiming for.
“Fallout is very stylized in that regard,” he said. “It’s meant to be… that’s part of the tongue-in-cheek humour. You know, that [Bloody Mess] perk you get where you can make a mess out of somebody, they just blow up into goo, it’s part of the fun.
“It’s like those old-school animes like Fist of the North Star – they punch each other, and gushes of blood would forever come out, it’s like nobody can hold that much blood but you’re like ‘oh man, that’s cool’.
“I think for Starfield it was definitely meant to be more low-key and realistic. We were inspired a lot by things like The Expanse and Star Trek, stuff like that, so I think it just didn’t fit thematically. And on top of that you have the technical overhead cost to get it to work, so we were kind of like ‘it’s probably better not to include it in this game’.”
Starfield’s first expansion, Shattered Space, was released in September 2024. It sees players “embark on a journey to the handcrafted home world of House Va’ruun and unravel the mysteries surrounding the elusive followers of the Great Serpent”.