Starfield might have been reaching for the stars both literally and figuratively, but its approach to generating 1,000 explorable planets didn't quite work for one veteran Bethesda Game Studios developer.
Having contributed to everything from Fallout 3 and Skyrim to Fallout 4 and the early years of Starfield as a senior artist, Nate Purkeypile recently gave his thoughts about the studio's latest RPG in an interview with The Examined Game YouTube channel. Long story short, "It's very accurate that if I was in charge of Starfield, I would not have done it that way at all."
The veteran developer's main criticism is that the way Starfield handles its endless void of planets clashes with what traditionally makes Bethesda games tick. "I would have done a handful of planets with bespoke layouts," Purkeypile says, explaining that he would often run into repeated content during the main quest since the game doesn't procedurally generate wildly different dungeon layouts and such.
"Even early on, I was drawing parallels to Mass Effect 1 and how those, you know, procedural planets with repeated dungeons panned out. And I was like, I don't think this is a good idea," he adds. "If you're going to do the 1000s of planets thing, you really need to go the full No Man's Sky route and have it actually be generating unique content all the time, not just stitching stuff together in slightly different ways. That's not procedural."
Part of what makes Bethesda's special sauce so special is the surprise that comes from exploration - running toward a landmark in the far off distance, following an NPC that looks slightly sus, going down a footpath that's totally out of the way and finding handmade, sometimes hilarious, sometimes brilliant side stories almost every time. Purkeypile explains that having so much "repeated content" and not being really intentional with "where things are and why" robs Starfield of that Bethesda surprise.
"You go to like the major city in Starfield and it's huge, but then like outside the city, there's nothing. And it's like this doesn't even make sense as a world." Purkeypile doesn't think Starfield is a bad game, however, he'd just change how it's organized somewhat.
Nowadays, Purkeypile runs his own indie developer Just Purkey Games.
