An Old Starfield Concept Art Piece Has Players Loging For What Could Have Been

Highlights

Starfield fans are wishing for a more colorful and whimsical experience, based on early concept art depicting a lively and brightly lit spaceship interior.
The concept art features animated elements like a red-haired girl, a cowboy robot, and a black cat, sparking speculation about potential scrapped features or character designs.
While the game’s design team opted for a more realistic aesthetic, there is hope that future installments or modders could introduce the desired colorful additions to the game.

Games rarely look just like the early concept art, but one recent art piece that’s resurfaced from Starfield’s earlier days now has some fans wishing they’d got something a little more fanciful and brightly colored.

As shared on Reddit by Redditor ShriyanshPandey, the concept art in question depicts a hand-drawn scene onboard a spaceship, but it’s much more lively and colorful than the more realistic NASA-punk aesthetic that the game’s design team ultimately decided on. The concept art depicts a much more brightly lit room with blue tones accenting the greys, reds, and oranges that are much more common in the game’s spaceship interiors.

Starfield Players Baffled By Scrapped Starmap Featuring Much Cleaner Design

Starfield’s original Starmap appeared to be much cleaner, whilst also being more detailed.

Also present are a few more animated features, in the form of a red-haired little girl walking alongside an adult man in a spacesuit, as well as a hovering robot decked out in a cowboy hat and a neon pink teddy bear backpack while soldering an open panel, and a black cat.

While some fans have speculated that the girl is an earlier design of Cora Coe, who unofficially joins your crew as a tag-along if you bring along her father, Constellation member Sam Coe, others have speculated that it may have been a scrapped feature that would allow you to adopt a child, similar to what Bethesda did in another of its RPG classics, Skyrim. “I remember all kinds of hype ‘go to you ship and interact with your cat’ etc. i’m pretty sure they promoted that along with adoption…” said one person responding to the post.

While it seems like a lot of Starfield players would have preferred this more colorful and whimsical experience, which some compared to the idylllic 1950s-esque vibe of the more untouched-by-time areas in the Fallout games, it’s still possible that we could see these changes in future installments. Starfield has plans for a lot of additions to Starfield in 2024, including the release of the content expansion titled Shattered Space.

There also still exists the possibility of modders adding some additional color to Starfield’s more realistically dingy ship interiors, although whether the game commands a strong enough mod community to pull this off has yet to be seen.