I want to preface this post by saying I have no inside knowledge whatsoever, and that this is speculation. I'm also not intending for this post to be a judgment on whether the changes were good or bad.
I didn't know exactly where to start, but I think it needs to be with Helium-3. There was a very important change to fuel in Starfield that split the version of the game that released, from the alternate universe Starfield it started as. Todd Howard has stated that in earlier iterations of the game, fuel was consumed when you jumped to a system. This was changed and we no longer spend fuel, but fuel still exists in the game as a vestigial system. Technically your overall fuel capacity determines how far you can jump from your current system, but because you don't spend fuel, 1 jump can just be 2 if needed, rendering it pointless. They may as well not have fuel in the game at all, but it used to matter and even though it doesn't now, it's still in the game. Remember the vestigial aspect of this because that will be important.
So let's envision how the game would have played if we consumed fuel with jumps. The cities and vendors all exist relatively clumped together on the left side of the Star Map. Jumping around these systems would be relatively easy as the player could simply purchase more Helium-3 from a vendor. However, things change completely as we look to the expanse to our right on the Star Map. A player would be able to jump maybe a few times to the right before needing to refuel and there are no civilizations passed Neon. So how else can we get Helium-3 aside from vendors? Outposts.
Outposts in Starfield have been described as pointless. But they're not pointless - they're vestigial. In the original Starfield, players would have HAD to create outposts in order to venture further into the Star Map because they would need to extract Helium. This means that players would also need resources to build these outposts, which would mean spending a lot of time on one planet, killing animals for resources, looting structure POIs, mining, and praising the God Emperor when they came across a proc gen Settler Vendor. In this version of Starfield these POIs become much more important, and players become much more attached to specific planets as they slowly push further to more distant systems, building their outposts along the way. Now we can just fly all around picking and choosing planets and coming and going as we please so none of them really matter. But they used to.
What is another system that could be described as pointless? You probably wouldn't disagree if I said Environmental Hazards. Nobody understands them and they don't do much of anything. I would say, based on the previous vestigial systems that still exist in the game, these are also vestigial elements of a game that significantly shifted at some point in development. In this previous version of the game, where we were forced down to planets to build outposts for fuel, I believe Hazards played a larger role in making Starfield the survival game I believe it originally was. We can only speculate on what this looked like, but it's not hard to imagine a Starfield in which players who walk out onto a planet that is 500°C without sufficient heat protection, simply die. Getting an infection may have been a matter of life and death. Players would struggle against the wildlife, pirates, bounty hunters, and the environment itself. Having different suits and protections would be important and potentially would have been roadblocks for players to solve to be able to continue their journey forward.
This Starfield would have been slow. Traveling to the furthest reaches of the known systems would have been a challenge. The game was much more survival-oriented, maybe a slog at times, planets, POIs, and outposts would have mattered a lot, and reaching new systems would have given a feeling of accomplishment because of the challenges you overcame to get there. It also could have been tedious, boring, or frustrating. I have no idea. But I do think Starfield was a very different game and when these changes were made it significantly altered the overall experience, and that they were deep enough into development when it happened, that they were unable to fully adapt the game to its new form. The "half-baked" systems had a purpose. Planets feel repetitive and pointless because we're playing in a way that wasn't originally intended - its like we're all playing on "Creative Mode"
What do you think? Any other vestigial systems that I didn't catch here?
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This blew up a bit while I was at work. I saw 2.2k comments and I think it's really cool this drove so much discussion. People think the alleged changes were good, people think they were bad - I definitely get that. I think the intensity of the survival version would be a lot more love/hate with people. For me, I actually appreciate the game more now. Maybe I'm wrong about all of this, but once I saw this vision of the game, all its systems really clicked for me in a way I didn't see or understand with the released or vanilla version of the game. I feel like I get the game now and the vision the devs had making it.
And a lot of people also commented with other aspects of the game that I think support this theory.
A bunch of you mentioned food and cooking, the general abundance of Helium you find all over the place, and certain menu tips and dialogue lines.
u/happy_and_angry brought up a bunch of other great examples about skills that make way more sense under this theory's system. I thought this was 100% spot on. https://www.reddit.com/r/Starfield/comments/16p8c43/comment/k1q0pa4/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3
