A former Bethesda designer has some theories on why Starfield didn’t take off the same way the company’s other marquee RPG franchises did.
Speaking to FRVR, developer Bruce Nesmith, who worked as a systems designer for Starfield before leaving Bethesda in 2021, complimented the space-set RPG, while opining that it didn’t reach the same heights as The Elder Scrolls or Fallout.
“I think it’s a good game,” Nesmith said. “I don’t think it’s in the same calibre as the other two, you know, Fallout or Skyrim, or Elder Scrolls rather, but I think it’s a good game.” Nesmith added that he remains proud of the work that he and his former colleagues contributed to the game.
In fact, if another studio had released Starfield, “it would have been received differently,” Nesmith argued. The designer said that Starfield failed to meet expectations set by being a space game from the makers of Skyrim and Fallout.
Possibly contributing to a comparatively muted response to Starfield was the game’s procedural generation, Nesmith theorized.
“I’m an enormous space fan, I’m an amateur astronomer, I’m up on all that stuff, a lot of the work I did on Starfield was on the astronomical data,” Nesmith said. “… but space is inherently boring. It’s literally described as nothingness. So moving throughout that isn’t where the excitement is, in my opinion.”
To Nesmith, procedural generation made the planets feel very “samey” and less exciting, which is “where it falls apart.” Nesmith also lamented the lack of enemy variety, saying that regular humans were the only serious enemies despite the presence of “cool alien creatures.”
There’s weight to Nesmith’s comments given his resume–the designer was at Bethesda since 2004 before his departure, and after significant contributions to The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and Fallout 3, he served as the lead designer for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. These days, he’s working on the fantasy literary RPG series Glory Seeker.
While some fans lost hope for Starfield’s future, Bethesda did confirm that the NASA-core RPG will receive additional story DLC. For those who don’t have the game on Xbox Series X|S or PC, reports suggest that Starfield could come to PlayStation 5 and Nintendo Switch 2 in the future.
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