Starfield designer admits Bethesda’s space epic isn’t ‘of the same caliber’ as Fallout and Elder Scrolls because it’s full of procedural generation: ‘The planets are starting to feel very similar’
There’s no way anything – even a game from RPG god Bethesda – will completely live up to the enormous expectations, and so 2023’s space explorer Starfield is no exception in that sense. But, compared to its siblings Fallout and Elder Scrolls, Starfield is only about the size of a mouse of the same endurance. One of its designers thinks procedural generation is to blame.
Game designer Bruce Nesmith, a Dungeons & Dragons icon with credits on video games like Oblivion, Skyrim and Starfield, tells FRVR in a new interview that Starfield’s famous thousands of planets might as well be empty.
“When the planets start to feel very similar and you don’t start to feel the excitement on the planets,” Nesmith says, “that’s where it falls apart for me.”
There are also problems with Starfield’s vast silver setting. Nesmith says, “A lot of the work I did on Starfield was astronomical data,” but space is “inherently boring.” It is literally described as nothingness.
This feeling of inertia is why Nesmith “leans toward procedural generation” and why Starfield hasn’t matched something like the 2006 game Oblivion in becoming a definitive Bethesda RPG, but that doesn’t make it unpopular either. Right now, Oblivion Remastered has, for its age, an impressive 1,500 concurrent players according to SteamDB, while Starfield has a reasonable 2,900.
“If the same game hadn’t been published by Bethesda, it would have been received differently,” notes Nesmith. “I don’t think it’s of the same caliber as the other two, you know, Fallout or Skyrim, or Elder Scrolls, but I think it’s a good game.”
Two years later, Bethesda responded to players’ hopes and said it was improving Starfield’s space travel: “Part of the team focused on space gameplay to make travel more rewarding.”
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