While Starfield is far from being a bad game, it’s fair to say it hasn’t lived up to all expectations. It has even proved rather disappointing in several respects, such as its rudimentary exploration.
Bruce Nesmith, who spent almost 18 years at Bethesda Game Studios (BGS), shares this opinion. The former design director, who left the studio in September 2021, was quick to point out these flaws in a recent interview. He admits that Starfield is “a good game”, but also “boring” and far from the quality of the The Elder Scrolls and Fallout, also by BGS.
“I think it’s a good game. I don’t think it’s in the same calibre as the other two, you know, Fallout or Skyrim, or Elder Scrolls rather, but I think it’s a good game. 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.”
For Nesmith, the problem lies in the procedural generation of planets.
“I’m an enormous space fan, I’m an amateur astronomer, I’m up on all that stuff, a lot of the work I did on Starfield was on the astronomical data, but space in inherently boring. It’s literally described as nothingness. So moving throughout that isn’t where the excitement is, in my opinion.
But 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. I was also disappointed when, pretty much, the only serious enemy you fought were people… 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.”
