It is hard to believe that it has already been a year since Starfield was first released.
However, with Bethesda’s latest RPG having a less than positive reception, the studio believes it may know why Starfield didn’t receive the love it deserved.
Check out the trailer for the recent Starfield DLC, Shattered Space, below!
Released in September last year and currently sitting at a mixed score of 6.8 over on Metacritic, Starfield is probably considered as one of Bethesda’s least successful titles.
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Criticised for its desolate open-world, unoriginal story and uninspiring gameplay, Starfield did not live up to the hype, especially as Bethesda has quite an impressive history of big game releases.
It is hard not to compare Starfield to some previous Bethesda titles such as Fallout 4 and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim but it is this reason entirely that a former Bethesda designer thinks Starfield had a disadvantage.
According to designer Bruce Nesmith, who has previously worked on Starfield, Skyrim, Oblivion, and Fallout, Bethesda’s latest RPG did not have the stepping stone that the other titles did.
“When we built Skyrim, we had the tremendous advantage of Oblivion, which had the tremendous advantage of Morrowind,” Nesmith explained in an interview with VideoGamer.
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“All that stuff was there for us. All we had to do was continue to improve and add new stuff in.
We didn’t have to start from the ground up. If we’d had to start from the ground up, that would have been another two or three years of development time.”
Put simply, Starfield being a whole new IP made it a lot more difficult for its developers.
However, the future looks bright.
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“I’m looking forward to Starfield 2,” Nesmith continues.
“I think it’s going to be one hell of a game because it’s going to address a lot of the things people are saying.
It will be able to take what’s in there right now and put in a lot of new stuff and fix a lot of those problems…
“It takes, sadly, sometimes a second or third version of the game in order to really enrich everything.”
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So there you have it.
Hopefully Starfield 2 will do for the series what titles such as The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim did for The Elder Scrolls.
Topics: Starfield, Bethesda, Skyrim, The Elder Scrolls