Skyrim co-lead designer Kurt Kuhlmann left Bethesda in late 2023 after the release of Starfield. As the lead systems designer of Bethesda’s latest RPG, Kuhlmann designed a lot of the core systems that power the RPG, but even he admits it wasn’t Bethesda’s best.
Kuhlmann, who worked alongside Bruce Nesmith on Starfield’s systems, explained in an interview with PCGamer, that “the main problem with Starfield is it didn’t fully cohere as a game”. While everything in Skyrim and Fallout 4 works together in an interconnected web of systems, Starfield feels more scattershot.
The designer explained that the size Bethesda grew to during Starfield meant that systems designers and quest designers weren’t “directly working” together like they did in prior Bethesda titles and leads were no longer “making content” like they used to.
“There would be people talking to the leads in one studio and getting an answer,” he said, “and people talking to the leads in the other studio and getting maybe a different answer.” He added: “”Decisions weren’t being made maybe when they needed to be because maybe they needed Todd to make a decision as a tiebreaker and he was busy.”
To this day, the designer believes that Starfield was a “good game”, saying “it was a releasable game, but it wasn’t the best”. While the designer explained that Todd Howard was a “very good project lead”, the amount of time he got pulled away from those responsibilities “really hurt the game”.
As most of Starfield was brand-new with overhauled weapons systems, a brand-new spaceship system, procedurally generated planets, and other additions, it was even harder than normal to work in the new format. Nothing worked while being designed and this led to developers “guessing how you should integrate” systems into their quests.
“You have both those things going on that make the game feel less cohesive, I think, because there were so many pieces that, when we started and for a long time, were up in the air or being reworked and in flux,” he said.
To this day, Kuhlmann believes that the game is “solid”, saying “it was good enough. It wasn’t, like embarrassing”. However, compared to the lightning-in-a-bottle moment of Skyrim, it simply didn’t click with a lot of players because of how fragmented it was.
“There’s this piece of the game over here, and there’s this piece of the game over here, and do they fully have much to do with each other?” the designer said. “That, to me, is where it isn’t quite as good as some of our other games.”
While Starfield worked well enough on launch, it also seems to have sold well enough. At the time of writing, Bethesda is currently working on The Elder Scrolls 6 alongside a remaster of Fallout 3. Additionally, the studio is in pre-production on Fallout 5, so Starfield hasn’t been the company destroying disaster that some gamers try to paint it as.
