Recently, a former Bethesda Game Studios designer gave an interview during which he shared memories of working on Starfield. According to the specialist, the space action RPG turned out to be too large-scale and ambitious for the studio.
In a conversation with FRVR, Kurt Kuhlmann explained that Starfield is the first game for Bethesda where several studios were involved in its development. The team grew to over 500 people.
As a result, Kurt explains, tasks that were previously simple, such as dungeon design, began to take significantly more time. For comparison: the main part of Fallout 4 was worked on by only about 150 people.
The developer spoke about creating Starfield's lighting. This game used an "extremely complex solution" that required many passes. There were similar difficulties when working on animations: "In the end, we had fewer creatures than originally planned," because the developers realized that creating one new creature "took 2-3 times longer."
Kurt likes the concept of combining procedurally generated planets, but the problem arises if there isn't enough content in the game: "For [such a system] to work and be interesting, it requires a huge amount of content so that you don't encounter the same things over and over."
In Starfield, developers had to create many things from scratch; for example, Kurt reminded that Bethesda had "never created games with vehicles before":
Kurt Kuhlmann believes that Bethesda should not have started developing Starfield — it was too ambitious and large-scale a project for the studio:
It was a very ambitious idea, and looking back, I think we shouldn't have taken it on at all. We simply wouldn't have been able to implement it at the proper level. Although, to be honest, we still achieved quite an impressive result. But space combat is clearly not our strong suit. This direction did not align with our core skills.