A former Bethesda developer who worked on Skyrim, Fallout 3, Fallout 4, and Fallout 76 has outlined how he would have designed Starfield had he been in charge of the game — and it sounds very different.
Nate Purkeypile worked at Bethesda Game Studios for 14 years before leaving in 2021 to found solo indie studio Just Purkey Games, which is behind 2024’s The Axis Unseen and last year’s Deedlee Doo! Carkour! He was lead lighting artist and senior world artist on Starfield before exiting the project and the studio over two years before the game came out.
In a new interview with The Examined Game, Purkeypile said he issued a warning internally about Starfield aiming to contain 1,000 planets — something that became a dominant line of its pre-release marketing. This was a huge talking point ahead of Starfield’s release — in June 2023, just a few months before the game launched, Bethesda chief Todd Howard confirmed only 10% of Starfield’s 1,000 planets would have life on them, insisting different planets served different purposes.
“For us, we view it as giving you [choices] when you look at a system,” he told Kinda Funny Games at the time. “Here’s the many things you could do. This could include visiting barren planets that are only there to collect resources, or planets with major cities and settlements for players to explore and progress the story in.
“Obviously it’s procedural, so there’s no way we’re going to go and handcraft an entire planet,” Howard continued. “What we do is we handcraft individual locations and some of those are placed specifically, [like] the main cities and other quest locations, and then we have a suite of them that are generated or placed when you land depending on that planet.”
Now, three years after Starfield came out, Purkeypile has outlined the problems Bethesda’s design approach caused, and how it played a part in Starfield not reaching the heights of the studio’s The Elder Scrolls and Fallout games.
“If I was in charge of Starfield, I would have not done it that way at all,” he said. “I would have done a handful of planets with bespoke layouts. Even playing Starfield after it came out during the main quest I was running into repeated locations, like on the main quest, and I was like, well yeah, because you’re only going to have time to make a certain number of dungeons. And if you’re going to have a thousand planets you’re going to be repeating content and it’s not actually a procedural game.
“Like, those dungeons are built. They’re not going like the full No Man’s Sky route or anything. So, even early on, I was drawing parallels to Mass Effect 1 and how those procedural planets with repeated dungeons panned out. And I was like, ‘I don’t think this is a good idea.’ Because to me, if you’re going to do the thousands 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. That’s… I call it space quilts, where it’s just chunks of things getting rearranged.”
Purkeypile was then asked if he thought the ambition of Starfield’s design simply fell short, or if it was always going to fail.
“I mean, I guess they thought that would work,” he replied. “And it’s not that I think the game is bad. I just don’t think it’s great. And I think that’s a big part of that. But I don’t think the goal ever was to go fully procedural. So, that was never the approach. And so I guess it’s just like a fundamental disagreement, that probably Todd and other people think that that works and could be a way to make a game like that. And I strongly disagree, and think a lot of what makes the Bethesda games special and the way that those landmarks are laid out and getting surprised, is not having repeated content and having a lot of intention on where things are and why.
“Because you go to the major city in Starfield and it’s huge, but then outside the city, there’s nothing,” he continued. “And it’s like, this doesn’t even make sense as a world. It’s just like, oh we didn’t have time to do more stuff obviously, because it’s spent on other planets and can only have so much time, so it’s just this city. So it’s incoherent from an environmental standpoint to me.”
Purkeypile isn’t the only former Bethesda developer to have discussed Bethesda’s planet exploration after the fact. In October 2023, just a month after the game came out, Bruce Nesmith, who was lead designer on Skyrim and senior designer on Starfield before leaving Bethesda in 2021, told MinnMax he initially proposed that it only have around two dozen systems instead of the 120 it ended up with.
“The point was made, quite legitimately, that, once you’ve done one solar system, doing 100 is really not adding to your work all that much,” he said.
“You have to know how to build a planet so people can walk around on it. You have to have various objects: life forms that they interact with, rocks, all that. You have to do the ice worlds, the crater worlds. Just doing our own solar system, all our variety that you have to have just to do that, you’ve done 90% of the work for the rest of it.”
Last month, Bethesda Game Studios reassured fans that Starfield “remains an important part of our future,” teasing Starborn DLC in 2027. Howard issued a note to fans following the huge layoffs at Xbox that saw 1,600 staff cut from Microsoft’s gaming business, and word that another 1,600 will follow during the current financial year. BGS was affected by the layoffs, although Bethesda has insisted The Elder Scrolls 6, which is the studio’s current focus, is unaffected.
Starfield largely failed to meet fan expectations upon its 2023 launch, and subsequent updates and expansions haven’t really moved the needle either. But Howard said that Starfield had seen over 17 million players, which is a huge number for any game and, you would think, enough to justify further investment despite the mixed response.
“STARFIELD CONTINUES,” Howard’s message read. “With over 17 million players logging almost a billion hours to date, Starfield remains an important part of our future. As we enter Year 3, we’ll continue expanding the Settled Systems with new stories, targeted gameplay improvements, and additional updates, while preparing for the launch of new Starborn content next year. More than 40% of players already customize their experience through Creations, and we’ll continue investing in creators and giving players new ways to make Starfield their own.”
Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at [email protected] or confidentially at [email protected].