Bethesda Games Studios is certainly a big studio all on their own. However, much like other big studios like Square Enix or Capcom, when they scale up their games with every generation, that adds up to more work that one studio can’t handle alone. And that was certainly the case with Starfield.
As revealed by Klobrille, Bethesda received help to make Starfield from four studios, three of which fall under the Zenimax / Bethesda umbrella. So let’s go through them one by one.
id software is the biggest studio that Bethesda acquired. The House That Doom Built is certainly one of the most successful, influential, and powerful game companies that exists to this day, with a particular vision for first person shooters that offers no compromises, and no concessions to match the current online multiplayer paradigm. Bethesda isn’t known for their online experiences either, and that’s why id’s assistance is a match made in heaven.
Another FPS specialist is MachineGames, who is closely connected to id as well. While primarily composed of former employees of Starbreeze, the studio has, up until now, worked almost exclusively on the Wolfenstein franchise. This was part of an agreement between id, MachineGames, and parent company Bethesda, and made MachineGames a capable developer with a little bit of DNA from both id and Starbreeze in it.
Arkane Studios, in spite of its recent setback with Redfall, remains one of Bethesda’s higher profile acquisitions. Having started their name with Arx Fatalis decades ago, Arkane has seen a more recent streak of successes in modern times, between the Dishonored franchise, Prey, and Deathloop. While id is a straightforward FPS studio, Arkane has demonstrated a capability to develop a wider variety of gameplay designs, and to successfully weave them together into a unified vision.
Finally, not a Bethesda studio but a major help to Bethesda Game Studios, was Microsoft’s own Xbox Game Studios Advanced Technology Group. This is the same group helping Larian Studios with porting Baldur’s Gate 3 to the Xbox Series X|S. They exist to help these studios get their games working and optimized on the Xbox’s latest.
So if you were going into Starfield thinking this was going to be auteur Todd Howard’s next big vision, think again. Todd may be a great developer, but the way Starfield was made definitely did not fit that paradigm. There’s a quality to Starfield’s FPS gameplay that puts it on a different level than what Bethesda has done with their Fallout games. Now we know that they got ample help to make that gunplay different than what they had done before.
