Skyrim lead designer and Starfield systems designer Bruce Nesmith has pushed back against the negative reception to Bethesda Game Studios’ sci-fi RPG. A game that spent many years in development, Starfield released to middling-to-positive reviews, a pretty strong community, and a large wave of internet hate.
As someone who left Starfield two years before its completion, Nesmith never worked on the finished version of Bethesda’s sci-fi game. However, the designer believes that the game is a “very good game”, and that it would’ve been received warmly if it was made by a studio other than Bethesda.
“Bethesda’s in the bad position of having expectations being so high they cannot be met,” the historic RPG designer told Press Box PR in a recent interview. Nesmith isn’t alone with this belief. In fact, former Bethesda artist Nate Purkeypile recently said that Bethesda is in a “no-win position” with both The Elder Scrolls 6 and Fallout 5 as “there will be more death threats” even if the games are good.
Nesmith explained that “managing expectations is the number one thing a good marketing department has to do”. However, when it came to Starfield, the expectations were astronomical for a game that was simply good. For Bethesda’s reputation, a good game is a bad game, and simply being good results in years of internet hate.
“Let’s assume that a new studio had put out Starfield,” Nesmith said. “I suspect it would be talked about like the second coming. But because it was released by Bethesda, the expectations were so much higher that it was seen differently. Starfield is a good game. It’s a very good game. It’s just not the game that people expected it to be.”
The developer explained that he played Starfield “to the bitter end” and feels that a sequel would “knock that out of the park”. This isn’t the first time Nesmith has said this. In fact, in an interview with VideoGamer last year, Nesmith explained that a potential Starfield 2 could be “one hell of a game”.
“I’m looking forward to Starfield 2,” the developer said. “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, ‘We’re quite there. We’re missing a little bit.’ 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.”
Starfield was a huge departure for Bethesda with a slew of new systems the studio had never worked on before. Alongside the traditional RPG gameplay, there was spaceship combat, ship building, and intergalactic travel. Starfield has some great combat, some fantastic quests and a real sense of adventure, but a sequel simply needs to build on the connective tissue that binds everything together—something the original game did lack.
With all that said, Bethesda is seemingly still working on Starfield with a huge update supposedly in the works. While that update has been MIA for a while, YouTuber Mr Matty Plays—who has a strong relationship with the studio—has confirmed that the update is real and has been shown off behind closed doors.
