Starfield is definitely not Bethesda’s best game, but the studio has poured in a lot of effort to turn it around and make it into one of its crowning achievements. Has it succeeded in that respect? Not really, but the game is still significantly better now than it was when it first launched.
But success is not measured in pure quality, and when you’re running a business, everything is just a numbers game. Starfield simply wasn’t a financial hit, not on the level Bethesda would’ve wanted it to be anyway, and that’s probably why it will never get a sequel. This is according to Starfield systems designer Kurt Kuhlmann, who departed from the company shortly after the game’s launch.
Speaking to FRVR, Kuhlmann said that Starfield wasn’t “anywhere near successful enough to do a Starfield 2.” And that’s actually a bad thing, Kuhlmann argues, since he believes the studio had learned a lot during the development of Starfield, to the point where a sequel could probably soar to those stars that were just dots in the sky for the first game.
Read what’s behind the latest news in gaming (with a bit of snark) by subscribing to the Destructoid Checkpoint newsletter!
“It’s, in a way, too bad, because I think with the lessons learned on Starfield, a Starfield 2 could have been much closer to the game that Todd had [in mind],” Kuhlmann told FRVR.
One of the main issues Starfield had, Kuhlmann says, is that it was too incoherent in nature. It had a lot of very different elements and mechanics that never really meshed well together, despite the studio’s stated goal to build the “ultimate game.”
“You can travel around all these planets, you can land anywhere you want, you have total freedom. Plus, there’s this really cool story and all these cool characters. And modular spaceships, why not? Let’s put that in there. And you can build a base anywhere you want on any planet,” he points out.
Kuhlmann added that the base building was a particular problem and that it was hard to integrate with the gameplay and story in particular, and that it had the same issue in Fallout 4. Starfield simply had way too many things going for it, and none of them were particularly deep or interesting enough to keep you around.
Bethesda’s ultimate design problem is that it’s constantly trying to make the everything game, where any singular thing you do has no reflection on anything else you do in the game. You can be a member of completely contradictory factions, do things in stark opposition to one another, be everything everywhere all at once, and still have the world completely indifferent to your character.
It’s boring, and I’ve no idea how Todd Howard, of all people, keeps making this mistake when he’s the one who brought us Morrowind.
