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It’s been over a year since Starfield launched. In that time, Bethesda’s spacefaring take on its RPG formula didn’t quite make the impact the team was hoping for. Taking what made Skyrim and Fallout so engaging and spreading it across an entire galaxy inadvertently ruined the magic. The act of exploring Bethesda games is a core part of what makes them so alluring, and Starfield lost it. If the team makes Starfield 2, though, one former Bethesda designer says this opportunity should make for a much improved game.
Now that Shattered Space is here, the general reception to Starfield has cemented itself. The RPG has some incredible quests and lore, but Bethesda’s previous tight-knit world design isn’t nearly as present. Every corner of Skyrim and Fallout 4 has something new to discover, another landmark to travel towards, and a flow that keeps you locked in. Starfield, sadly, doesn’t.
As former Starfield, Skyrim, Oblivion, and Fallout designer Bruce Nesmith puts it, however, Bethesda’s most recent release doesn’t have the same advantage as the team’s older games. Starfield is a new, daring direction for the worlds Bethesda is known for and, given the time to reevaluate, a potential sequel could be the leap needed.
“When we built Skyrim, we had the tremendous advantage of Oblivion, which had the tremendous advantage of Morrowind,” Nesmith tells VideoGamer in an interview. “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.”
“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.
“If you look at the first Dragon Age, the first Assassin’s Creed, the first game in a lot of IPs, they tend to show off flashes of brilliance amid a lot of other things that don’t quite catch everybody’s eye,” Nesmith adds. “No, they’re not quite as hot and popular. It takes, sadly, sometimes a second or third version of the game in order to really enrich everything.”
I can see exactly where Nesmith is coming from. If Starfield 2 is indeed something Bethesda ends up making, there’s the chance what made the original work can be refined. I didn’t like the overabundance of barren planets in Starfield, but still enjoyed a lot of the characters, quests, and mechanics. The sheer scale of Starfield is what lets it down, so if a sequel were to condense the experience, that would do wonders for it. Even Todd Howard himself admits Starfield was “irresponsibly large,” so maybe that’s something Bethesda wants to cut back on for the next game.
Despite the initial reception, there have still been plenty of game-changing updates for the game since its launch. Not only has the Starfield car made exploration much better, but smaller adjustments like better map visuals also make everything feel less barren.
Jump back into the Settled Systems with our look at the best Starfield mods, alongside our database with Starfield Db. Otherwise, get ready for what Bethesda is working on next with all we know about the Elder Scrolls 6 release date.
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