Starfield ‘Was Not Leaning To Our Strengths’, Says Bethesda Lead
The lead systems designer on Starfield recently discussed the problems they faced during development, revealing they pulled it off, but it wasn’t their forte. In a recent interview with FRVR, lead systems designer Kurt…
The lead systems designer on Starfield recently discussed the problems they faced during development, revealing they pulled it off, but it wasn’t their forte.
In a recent interview with FRVR, lead systems designer Kurt Kuhlmann discussed the issues they faced during Starfield’s development. Problems such as the title being the first true multi-studio project for Bethesda were an issue, and much of the process had to go through a longer chain of people, which meant changes took two or three times longer than usual.
Starfield Was Not Our Forte, Says Lead Dev
Kuhlmann discussed how, in lighting alone, they had to go through a complex process that included passes from different people, which meant any changes had to go through the whole process again. This was also why the developers couldn’t include so many creatures: “as it turned out that to animate a creature rig with all the stuff it needed… it was taking two or three times longer to make a creature.”
Kuhlmann believes that although team size was a concern, Starfield didn’t have enough developers for the scale of the project. He pointed out that there was minimal difference in transitioning between games like Oblivion and Fallout 3, as much of the content and mechanics could have to be created, “but a large amount of systems could be brought forward.” However, for Fallout 4 to Starfield, almost everything had to be created from scratch, which meant that they had to develop content for systems that were not yet functional.
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The lead systems designer on Starfield also discussed how Todd Howard desired to create “the open world game space game which, to him, wasn’t Skyrim in space and you just go on this one planet and then a bit on this other planet. It is what we built.” Kuhlmann described it as having an “ambitious as hell vision,” adding that, in retrospect, he doesn’t think the dev team should have made it.
However, he feels they couldn’t really make it, explaining that they “pulled it off to quite an impressive degree,” but it was not their “forte.” The game was not leaning on their strengths, and they had to “make a space battle game right” in a situation where they hadn’t even worked on vehicles before.
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