By most metrics, Starfield should be considered a success. At least 15 million players since release. A Metacritic score in the 80s. Enough hype to draw one million concurrent players at launch. Yet it’s fair to say that most Bethesda fans consider the space RPG a disappointment – a dramatic comedown from the heights of Skyrim and Fallout 4. In any case, you probably shouldn’t count on there being a direct follow-up.
“I would be very surprised [if there was a sequel],” Kurt Kuhlmann, who served as lead systems designer on the game, tells FRVR. “I don’t think Starfield was anywhere near successful enough to do a Starfield 2.”
Kuhlmann ultimately left Bethesda around Starfield’s launch for reasons that went beyond the space game, but he still believes a sequel could better deliver on its promise. “It’s, in a way, too bad,” he explains, “because I think with the lessons learned on Starfield, a Starfield 2 could have been much closer to the game that Todd [Howard] had [in mind]. You can envision that game, you can imagine that game. That’s not quite what Starfield really is.”
We know that Todd Howard had been dreaming of a game like Starfield for decades, and it’s tough to imagine that the game we got was quite what he had imagined. Sure, it’s got moments of brilliance, but those moments are held back in a game which, as Kuhlmann puts it, isn’t “fully coherent.”
Take the outpost system as an example. “For what it is, as a standalone system, it’s cool, but it’s not nearly as integrated with the rest of the game,” Kuhlmann explains. It ultimately feels less fully baked than the settlement system in Fallout 4, which caused its own development issues – problems that weren’t solved in Starfield, either.
“It caused problems for it to be integrated with the story and the missions and stuff in Fallout 4, so it was kind of put to the side,” Kuhlmann says. “Which begs the question of, well, why is it still in the game? That’s a decision above me, it wasn’t my decision. You might say, well, we shouldn’t have it then if we’re not going to integrate it with the story, then it’s just this system sitting over there with a massive amount of work involved.”
In previous comments, Kuhlmann suggested that Bethesda “shouldn’t have made” Starfield, because “we couldn’t really make it.” It was simply too ambitious for even a studio as mighty as Bethesda to handle. Here’s hoping that The Elder Scrolls 6 takes these lessons to heart.