Starfield was meant to be the “next big game” by Bethesda. Depending on who you talk to, you’ll hear that it was “everything that was promised” or a “big empty universe that isn’t worth exploring.” I myself got so bored within the first 20 hours that I stopped playing…and have had no desire to return. Bethesda has been trying to “save face” and basically say that the game is fine and that gamers are being “too hard” on it or that they “don’t get it,” but we’re not fools. Plus, some former team members of Bethesda have come forward to explain some of the true hardships behind developing the title.
Specifically, we’re talking about former Starfield lead quest designer Will Shen, who not only worked for Bethesda for 15 years on some of their biggest titles, including Skyrim, but was a speaker at GDC 2024. There, he talked alongside another former Bethesda employee, former Fallout 76 lead-level designer Daryl Brigner about how gaming teams need true collaboration to make quests work from start to finish. And yeah, Starfield was brought up a lot in that talk, as noted by PC Gamer.
The key thing that Shen noted that there was “no time” to make the big final set piece for Starfield’s final mission, and that led to several problems:
“We were finally at a state in the project where we could play through the whole [game]. And it became very clear that we were missing the large final location that was going to tie the story together and have a satisfying action-filled payoff,” Shen said at GDC. “I was both implementing the main quest and leading the quest design team, so I had absolutely no time. The entire quest design team was already overbooked.”
You might think, “How is that possible that the entire team was overbooked?” It had to do with how big Bethesda’s development team was for the title. Skyrim only had about 100 people working on it throughout the company, but Starfield had over 500 people…many of which were spread out across several companies! That meant collaboration was almost impossible because no one had the time to do anything, and no one was willing to work with one another unless absolutely necessary.
“Every request now has to go through all the producers because we needed to check all of the contingent work,” Shen revealed. “Asking for something as simple as a chair wasn’t so simple. Do you need animations for it? Do you need sound effects for it? How much does that add to the schedule, can it not fit because one of those teams does not have the time?”
Eventually, Shen had to bring in the “panic button” level designer to help get things to its conclusion, and much like the rest of Starfield…the final mission left a lot to be desired.
This situation speaks to how AAA game development has grown “too big to control” at times. Skyrim was a masterpiece with only 100 people working together, while Starfield had 500+ people and couldn’t get its finale done without serious stress and calling in emergency help.
