A developer who worked on Starfield says he doesn’t believe it will ever get a sequel and reach the series’ full potential.
In an interview with FRVR, Kurt Kuhlmann – who served as lead systems designer on Starfield – discussed his former employer Bethesda Game Studios and the fact that while it’s mainly focused on The Elder Scrolls 6, it continues to release DLC and updates for Starfield.
Asked whether he felt that Bethesda would want to release a new Starfield game one day, Kuhlmann replied that he didn’t see it happening.
“I would be very surprised [if there was a sequel],” Kuhlmann said. “I don’t think Starfield was anywhere near successful enough to do a Starfield 2.”
This would be a shame, he believes, because he doesn’t think Starfield lived up to director Todd Howard‘s original vision, whereas a sequel might have come closer to it.
“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],” he explained. “You can envision that game, you can imagine that game. That’s not quite what Starfield really is.”
Kulhmann cited the outpost building mechanic as an example of an idea which couldn’t quite live up to expectations, because the fact players could build their own outpost on a planet’s surface, but that outpost didn’t integrate with the game’s storyline, felt like a wasted opportunity in his eyes.
“You can travel around all these planets, you can land anywhere you want, you have total freedom,” he said. “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. For what it is, as a standalone system, it’s cool, but it’s not nearly as integrated with the rest of the game.”
He added: “It caused problems for it to be integrated with the story and the missions and stuff in Fallout 4, so it was kind of put to the side. Which begs the question of, well, why is it still in the game?
“That’s a decision above me, it wasn’t my decision. You might say, well, we shouldn’t have it then if we’re not going to integrate it with the story, then it’s just this system sitting over there with a massive amount of work involved.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Kuhlmann said the game needed a much larger development team to meet its original vision.
“Even with the size of the team that we had for Starfield, it wasn’t big enough to create the amount of content that the grand idea of the game really required,” he explained. “Like, we needed way more.”
Kuhlmann explained that the main problem was that so many of the mechanics added to Skyrim were new to the team, meaning “there were a lot of game designers were waiting… needed this new system to work before you can start building content for it. And the later that goes, the less time you have to work with it.”
