Since its launch in 2023, Starfield has cemented a reputation as Bethesda’s okayest game. While Skyrim has been honored with what felt like 800 re-releases and Fallout’s enjoying its time in the TV adaptation spotlight, Starfield hasn’t managed to foster the same level of fondness—even with Bethesda leaving sneaky little teasers in its spacefaring RPG’s birthday card.
In an interview with FRVR, former Bethesda designer Bruce Nesmith said that while he thinks it’s “a good game,” Starfield failed to live up to its potential because its reliance on procedurally generated content didn’t align with what players expected from a Bethesda RPG.
“I don’t think it’s in the same calibre as the other two, Fallout or Skyrim—or Elder Scrolls, rather—but I think it’s a good game,” said Nesmith, who worked as a systems designer on Starfield until a year before release. “I worked on it. I’m proud of the work I did. I’m proud of the work that the people I knew did on it. I think they made a great game.”
Still, Nesmith said that “the studio that gave you Skyrim and Fallout makes a space game” is a promise with a lot of potential, and it’s one that—despite respectable sales and a subsequent expansion release—Starfield couldn’t fully realize.
“If the same game had been released by not Bethesda, it would have been received differently,” he said.
Nesmith “leans towards procedural generation” as being the central issue with Starfield’s direction, because its collection of procgen planets didn’t generate the same kind of interest as Bethesda’s hand-crafted game settings.
Nesmith—a self-described “enormous space fan” and “amateur astronomer”—said that, at the end of the day, Starfield suffers from the fact that “space is inherently boring.” Its series of procgen planets didn’t provide compelling places for players to explore.
“When the planets start to feel very samey and you don’t start to feel the excitement on the planets, that’s to me where it falls apart,” Nesmith said. And Bethesda, he said, didn’t do itself any favors with its enemy selection.
“I was also disappointed when, pretty much, the only serious enemy you fought were people,” he said. “There’s lots of cool alien creatures, but they’re like the wolves in Skyrim. They’re just there. They don’t contribute. You don’t have the variety of serious opponents that are story generators.”
Back in 2022, our Wes Fenlon was skeptical that Starfield would be anything other than “boring as hell,” and Nesmith’s assessment seems to indicate that Wes was on the mark. Me, I’m more of a mind with former PC Gamer features producer Nat Clayton, who defended the merits of the lonely, empty expanse. Games like Elite: Dangerous show that countless unpopulated space rocks can be plenty compelling if they’re framed with systems that make them feel worth your attention. Starfield’s problem is that it couldn’t find much to do with a procgen planet beyond ignoring it.
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