Ex-Starfield Dev Doesn’t Think Game is “Great” and Blames Lack of Procedural Content

Starfield is another solid release from Bethesda, but you could argue it isn’t as highly regarded as Fallout and Elder Scrolls games. Former Bethesda developer Nate Purkeypile has talked about the game’s conception, Bethesda’s overarching idea, and what he would have done differently.

Todd Howard said that Starfield was the game he and Bethesda always wanted to make. It took years of development and perseverance to see the project through to completion, and the result was millions of players logging in to play it.

But did it reach the heights of Fallout or The Elder Scrolls?

“I Don’t Think This is a Good Idea” About Repeated Starfield Content

Who better to get the opinion of on Starfield’s development than Nate Purkeypile, who worked for Bethesda between 2007 and 2021, and oversaw some of the studio’s greatest ever games?

Nate has since formed Just Purkey Games and has developed and published The Axis Unseen and Deedlee Doo! Carkour!

He took time out of his day to speak to The Examined Game‘s Steven Lake on an August 4 video for the channel. Nate discussed his excitement for the Fallout 3 Remaster and how it should fix major “Constraints” of the original.

But the pair eventually discussed Starfield, and Nate talked about his involvement, and concerns over development and the final product:

“If I was in charge of Starfield, I would have not done it that way at all. I would have done a handful of planets with bespoke layouts. Because even playing Starfield, after it came out, during the main quest, I was running into repeated locations, like on the main quest.

You’re only going to have time to make a certain amount 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. Those dungeons are built, they’re not going to follow the No Man’s Sky route or anything.

Even early on I was drawing parallels to Mass Effect 1 and how those procedural planets would repeat a dungeon. I was like, I don’t think this is a good idea. 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: I call it ‘space quilts.’

When asked by Steven about the ambition for Starfield and if it was essentially achieved, Nate offered his overall view of the game:

“I guess they thought that would work, and it’s not that I think the game isn’t bad, I just don’t think it’s great. I think that’s a big part of that. I don’t think the goal was to ever go fully procedural, so that was never the approach, and I guess it’s just a fundamental disagreement, probably that Todd [Howard] and other people think 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.

You go to the major city in Starfield and it’s huge, but then outside the city there’s nothing, and it’s like, this doesn’t even make sense as a world. It’s like ‘Oh, we didn’t have time to do more stuff,’ obviously, because it’s spent on other planets, and you can only have so much time, so it’s just this city. It’s kind of incoherent from an environmental standpoint, to me.”

The Starfield discussion is timestamped for 45:08 onwards. To read and learn more.

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