Starfield Scrapped a Major Feature from Fallout 4

Starfield had a voiced protagonist at one point in the game's development. Video games are a very unique medium because there are so many ways to tell a story. Sometimes it's very cinematic and it's told similarly to a film or TV show with gameplay interspliced. Sometimes it's less traditional and you're experiencing the story strictly through gameplay or the world around you. Sometimes the main character doesn't even have a voice or a face you can see. All of these storytelling methods are completely dependent on the type of game you're playing and some work better than others. Bethesda historically has non-voiced protagonists, instead relying on text to communicate to other characters in the game. Fallout 4 changed this, however, and allowed characters to have a voice and it worked fairly well.

Starfield almost continued with this. During a recent let's play of Starfield on Kinda Funny Games, actors Cissy Jones and Elias Toufexis revealed they were cast to play the protagonist in Starfield back in 2018. The two actors were cast to play the female and male version respectively, came in to do their lines, recorded a number of hours in the game, and then Bethesda wanted to go a different direction. Toufexis noted that he received an email from Bethesda's Todd Howard noting that they wanted the protagonist to be more of a blank slate and were scrapping the voices. The actor reflected on how disappointed he was, claiming he "just lost a $200,000 job". However, Howard was kind enough to let both the actors know that they would be recasting them in different roles that would still be very significant to Starfield. The two would return to Starfield in 2020 and Toufexis would play Sam Coe and Cissy Jones would play Andreja.

Ultimately, it seems to have been the right call. Starfield was praised for its great companions, such as Sam Coe. It also probably saved a significant amount of time for Bethesda to not have to write and do recordings for god knows how many lines of dialogue for the protagonist.