Starfield will explore "what happened to Earth" before humanity moved to Mars

Starfield screenshot — (Image credit: Bethesda)

Starfield takes place in a future where Earth has seemingly been abandoned by humanity and Mars is home to a living city.

In a new video from Bethesda, lead quest designer Will Shen revealed that we will be able to visit our own real-life solar system among the Starfield star systems, but it sounds like Earth itself is no longer habitable. According to Shen, we'll get to learn about what exactly happened to Earth and actually visit the one of the Starfield cities on Mars where humanity relocated to.

"You'll be sent there on a mission from Constellation to discover the mysteries of the artifacts. And you'll get into contact with the question of 'what happened to Earth', but also you'll go to Mars. And there's actually a settlement - one of the early settlements that humanity created after they left Earth - it's called Cydonia, and that's a whole city with its own problems and people to meet."

I still think it would be neat to be able to explore Starfield's take on a ruined Earth, and Shen doesn't explicitly rule that out in this new video, but it definitely sounds like the city on Mars will be more of the focus in terms of our solar system in Starfield.

In the same video, Shen explained how Starfield's random encounters will involve whole procedural mini-quests that'll take you to different locations, which is a huge evolution from today's random encounters, which are usually just brush-ups with NPCs out in the world.