Starfield has finally been released, and many fans of the brand-new franchise are enjoying the sci-fi space-faring adventure that has been delivered to their Xbox consoles. Still, according to Todd Howard in an interview with The Washington Post, there were “hundreds of plans” that sadly had to be left behind in development due to COVID and working from home.
Why Were These Plans For Starfield Cancelled Due To COVID?
Pretty much everyone in the world knows about COVID and its global impact, which took a significant toll, especially on the business world. But many tend to forget how much of an impact it made on the smallest of things. Several companies had to struggle with changing to work at home status, and that slowed down a lot of production for many companies.
Since nearly all companies like Bethesda Game Studios had to start working at home during COVID, this caused a lot of issues for developers and this created new problems that required solutions. These problems were things like communication, as companies now had to rely on group video calls to discuss certain matters.
Another issue was transferring work from company computers to home computers and tracking the progress as many people struggled with the change due to family life.
Because of these issues regarding work from home, many plans for Starfield had to be scrapped as the developers couldn’t bring them into fruition.
Even though the game was delayed to try and account for COVID and give Bethesda more time to work on these features, unfortunately, they were unable to develop certain aspects in the required time. These aspirations then had to be cancelled in order to focus on more realistic goals.
What Other Parts Of Starfield Were Affected By COVID?
When planning Starfield, Bethesda began working on new technology that they would use to run the title. Still, with COVID and working at home, this caused a lot of issues. Sadly, it made development on this technology take longer, causing the process to slow down as the team had to wait to test features on the new engine that was being developed.
With these changes to the engine, Bethesda had to make some adjustments to its development plan. As Todd Howard stated:
“We knew we were going to rewrite parts of the engine, so we started building technology for the planets and the outer space stuff on our previous engine and renderer.“
This sadly slowed down the process for Starfield eventually causing features to be removed entirely.
Even though Starfield had to go through all of these changes with some of its content being ultimately removed, it has still been one of the best games of 2023, with over 1 Million concurrent players on day one of release. As of September 7th, it had over 6 Million players, and now, with plans for an expansion in the future, there is a potential revival of the features that were previously removed.
What do you think about this news regarding Starfield and its unfortunate choice to remove content before release? Are you looking forward to playing the title sometime in the near future if you haven’t already? Let us know what you think in the comments.
Source: The Washington Post
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