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Starfield designer admits Bethesda's space epic isn't "the same caliber" as Fallout and Elder Scrolls because it's full of procedural generation: "The planets start to feel very samey"
It's impossible for anything – even a game by RPG god Bethesda – to completely live up to humongous expectations, and so 2023 space explorer Starfield isn't an outlier in that sense. But, compared to its siblings Fallout and Elder Scrolls, Starfield has only a mouse-sized portion of the same staying power. 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, explains to FRVR in a new interview that Starfield's infamous thousands of planets might as well be empty.
"When the planets start to feel very samey and you don’t start to feel the excitement on the planets," says Nesmith, "that's to me where it falls apart."
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There's also trouble with Starfield's vast, silver setting. Nesmith says, "a lot of the work I did on Starfield was on the astronomical data," but space is "inherently boring. It's literally described as nothingness. So moving throughout that isn't where the excitement is, in my opinion."
This sense of inertia is why Nesmith "leans towards procedural generation" as the reason Starfield hasn't matched something like 2006 game Oblivion in becoming a definitive Bethesda RPG, but that doesn't make it unpopular, either. At the moment, Oblivion Remastered currently has, for its age, an impressive 1,500 concurrent players according to SteamDB, while Starfield has a reasonable 2,900.
"If the same game had been released by not Bethesda, it would have been received differently," Nesmith remarks. "I don't think it's in the same caliber as the other two, you know, Fallout or Skyrim, or Elder Scrolls rather, but I think it's a good game."
Ashley is a Senior Writer at GamesRadar+. She's been a staff writer at Kotaku and Inverse, too, and she's written freelance pieces about horror and women in games for sites like Rolling Stone, Vulture, IGN, and Polygon. When she's not covering gaming news, she's usually working on expanding her doll collection while watching Saw movies one through 11.
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