Starfield may have been an impressive technical feat for Bethesda, especially when one considers its inclusion of a thousand explorable planets. However, veteran Bethesda developer Nate Purkeypile has said that he would have approached the creation of these planets in a different way than what Bethesda opted for. In a YouTube video, Purkeypile criticized the studio’s use of procedural generation for these planets, and said that he would prefer to have fewer hand-crafted ones instead.
Noting that he had worked on Starfield for a year before leaving Bethesda, Purkeypile said, “It’s very accurate that if I was in charge of Starfield, I would not have done it that way at all.” Offering further explanation, he said that the procedurally-generated planets, which can often end up being quite boring, were quite antithetical to the typical Bethesda style of RPG. “I would have done a handful of planets with bespoke layouts,” he explained.
“Even early on, I was drawing parallels to Mass Effect 1 and how those, you know, procedural planets with repeated dungeons panned out. And I was like, I don’t think this is a good idea. If you’re going to do the 1000s of planets thing, you really need to go the full No Man’s Sky route and have it actually be generating unique content all the time, not just stitching stuff together in slightly different ways. That’s not procedural.”
Starfield’s reliance on procedural generation, he said, prevented players from being able to scan the horizon for interesting landmarks and then trying to get there. The random generation also meant that players had to face “repeated content” rather than the development team being more intentional with “where things are and why”. This was perfectly encapsulated by Purkeypile when he compared leaving a major city in Starfield.
“You go to like the major city in Starfield, and it’s huge, but then like outside the city, there’s nothing. And it’s like this doesn’t even make sense as a world.”
Meanwhile, despite its rocky start, Starfield has gone on to be incredibly successful for Bethesda, with the company recently confirming that it had accumulated more than 17 million players. Bethesda has also said that it will continue to be an “important part of our future”, and that work has started on “new stories, targeted gameplay improvements, and additional updates, while preparing for the launch of new Starborn content next year.”
Starfield is available on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S, and rumors from earlier this year have indicated that Bethesda is also working on bringing the space-faring RPG to the Nintendo Switch 2. While no official announcement has yet been made, a rating for Starfield was spotted on the Taiwan Entertainment Software Rating Information website, where it was rated R thanks to its inclusion of violence, drugs, and inappropriate language.
For more details, check out our review of the game from back when it came to PS5 earlier this year. While you’re at it, also take a look at our thoughts on its two expansions – Shattered Space and Terran Armada.
