Starfield managed to be both one of my favorite games of 2023 and one of my biggest videogame disappointments ever. I sank well over 100 hours into it, and enjoyed the flashes of Bethesda brilliance it exhibited, but my lofty expectations weren’t matched. The developer’s renowned for making some of the best RPGs ever with Fallout and The Elder Scrolls, but Starfield couldn’t entirely replicate its past magic due to the sheer size of its galaxy. Now, a Bethesda veteran who’s worked across all three IPs has given his verdict. While adamant it’s still “a great game” that the studio should be proud of, he knows it’s nowhere near “the same calibre” as Fallout and TES.
Bruce Nesmith is a name Bethesda aficionados may be familiar with. After a long stint designing Dungeons and Dragons tabletop games, he worked as a quest designer on multiple Elder Scrolls and Fallout projects, including as the lead designer on Skyrim. Before leaving Bethesda in 2021, before Starfield’s launch, he worked on the space game as a systems designer. An authority on all things RPG-related, then.
“I think it’s a good game,” Nesmith says in an interview with FRVR. “I don’t think it’s in the same calibre as the other two, you know, Fallout or Skyrim, or Elder Scrolls rather, but I think it’s a good game. I worked on it; I’m proud of the work I did. I’m proud of the work that the people I knew did on it. I think they made a great game.”
Resonating with my experience that I mentioned at the top, he admits that Bethesda’s past reputation put huge “expectations” on Starfield that were hard to match. Nesmith also claims that “if the same game had been released by ‘not Bethesda,’ it would have been received differently.”
While outer space and alien planets have been the backdrop to so many brilliant games in the past, Starfield’s approach to a galactic RPG squandered that potential. Nesmith points to its reliance on procedural generation as the main reason why players didn’t click with it.
“I’m an enormous space fan,” he says. “I’m an amateur astronomer, I’m up on all that stuff, [and] a lot of the work I did on Starfield was on the astronomical data. But space is inherently boring. It’s literally described as nothingness. So moving throughout that isn’t where the excitement is, in my opinion.”
I’m also surprised to hear that Nesmith was underwhelmed by Starfield’s approach to aliens. While he admits there are plenty of “cool” creatures to discover and fight, “they’re like the wolves in Skyrim” rather than epic, challenging, memorable enemies. He also observes that “the only serious enemy you fought were people.”
I, like Nesmith, don’t buy into the narrative that Starfield is a ‘bad’ game – plus, with that second DLC on the way, it has another chance to change people’s perspective. However, it’s interesting to hear that the same criticisms I and many others hold are shared by at least one of the devs involved with the game.
If you do want to return to Bethesda’s galaxy and spice things up a little, be sure to check out some of the best Starfield mods. Or to get wrapped up in some wild narratives, consult our list of the best story games.
If you spent plenty of hours in Starfield, let me know what you’d change and what you love about it in the PCGamesN Discord server.
