A former Bethesda developer has revealed in an interview that the studio has assembled the biggest team they have every put together to make Starfield.
The developer in question is one Nate Purkeypile, who worked at the company for 14 years. He was there since Fallout 3, and decided to leave around the time the company was working at Starfield.
In a way, Starfield is the reason Purkeypile left the company. To be clear, he does not have any negative things to say about the game. However, it was precisely the fact that he was seeing so many people getting hired to make the game,that prodded him to strike out on his own.
Nate says that he believes at least 500 people have been assembled to help make Starfield. Contextually, this is the largest number of people Bethesda have assembled to work on a single project. They had 200 people working on Fallout 76 around the same time. Unfortunately, that may have been a mistake on Bethesda’s part as the game’s poor launch revealed a lack of attention paid to the project.
Interestingly enough, this isn’t that big when compared to how games are being made by the industry. Grand Theft Auto V had 1,000 developers working on it over the course of several years, and this definitely also includes work on Grand Theft Auto Online. The Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild, Nintendo’s largest undertaking thus far, required 400 staffers to work on it, including 100 people from Monolith Soft. Subsequently, there are now over 700 people working on Fortnite.
To be clear, open world games do not necessarily need bigger game studios. Hello Games was a very small studio when they launched No Man’s Sky. The juggernauts in the game industry do scale up their most high profile games, not necessarily to get the most work, but to get more people making the best output, and doing so more quickly.
Getting back to Starfield, Nate says a lot of the effort being put on the game was to build an entire new gaming universe from scratch. Small details like how metal panels will look have to be decided on. But the company promised this universe would have over 1,000 planets to explore. Todd Howard has explained that they will be using procedural generation to make this happen. We do know that, going back to Hello Games, they had enabled the possibility to generate 1,000 planets for players as well in the considerably smaller No Man’s Sky.
Nate claims that they don’t have that many people working on planet generation at all. Bethesda has settled on a creative solution that should ensure Starfield’s planets won’t look like those of other games, such as, of course, No Man’s Sky.
Lastly, Nate claims that Bethesda has Starfield slated to release before The Elder Scrolls 6, for the purpose of setting expectations for how big that game is going to be. Nate notes that it’s been over a decade since a new The Elder Scrolls game. Fans are going to have to wait a little longer because that game is going to be even bigger than any The Elder Scrolls game before it.
Starfield will be releasing for PC and Xbox Series X/S. We just recently reported on what seems to be a change of release date to December 29, 2023.
Source: PCGamesN
