A developer who worked on Starfield says the game didn’t quite live up to the original vision, and needed a much larger development team to accomplish that.
In an interview with FRVR, Kurt Kuhlmann – who served as lead systems designer on Starfield – explained that the game was Bethesda‘s first true multi-studio project, which led to the size of the team growing to around 500, versus the 150 or so who worked on Fallout 4.
As a result of this, tasks would take far longer during development. Discussing the game’s lighting, Kuhlmann said it “nded up with this extremely complex process which required multiple passes, maybe even by different people, and then it had to go through a build process. So, if you wanted to change it, it had to go through that whole process again.”
Despite the problems caused by the increased number of staff, Kuhlmann said he thinks even more developers were needed to actually meet the vision director Todd Howard had for it.
“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.”
He added: “[Todd Howard] wanted to make a big, 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.
“That is an ambitious as hell vision, and I don’t think, especially in retrospect, we shouldn’t have made it. We couldn’t really make it. I mean, we pulled it off to quite an impressive degree, but yeah, it was not our forte.
“It was not leaning to our strengths. We had to make a space battle game right. We had never even done vehicles before.”
