Although Starfield stands as one of Bethesda Game Studios‘ most ambitious RPG projects to date, it didn’t exactly outshine the likes of The Elder Scrolls or Fallout – and that may just be because it was a bit too ambitious.
Speaking to FRVR, Starfield lead systems designer Kurt Kuhlmann admits as much, first explaining how everything being “new” – because, you know, the space RPG did see the “largest engine overhaul” from Bethesda since the original Oblivion – complicated things right off the bat.
Developers “needed this new system to work” before building on it, he says, “and the later that goes, the less time you have to work with it.” The size of the team working on Starfield was simply not it either, considering the sheer scope.
“Even with the size of the team that we had for Starfield, it wasn’t big enough to create the amount of content that the grand idea of the game really required,” as Kuhlmann recalls. “Like, we needed way more [devs].”
Why was the scope so wide for Starfield, though? Well, Bethesda head Todd Howard wanted it to be one heck of a game.
“He wanted to make a big open-world space game which, to him, wasn’t Skyrim in space and you just go on this one planet and then a bit on this other planet,” says Kuhlmann.
And, while “it is what we built,” the lead says it might’ve been a bad idea. “That is an ambitious as hell vision, and I don’t think, especially in retrospect, we shouldn’t have made it. We couldn’t really make it.” Bethesda did do its best, however.
As Kuhlmann concludes, “We pulled it off to quite an impressive degree, but yeah, it was not our forte. It was not leaning to our strengths.”
I suppose I can see that – as a usual fan of all things Bethesda myself, Starfield didn’t exactly mesh well with my tastes. I would’ve much rather played The Elder Scrolls 6 (sigh), but I am glad to see studios try new things – even if they don’t always work out as well as they could’ve.