Bethesda Success Made Development Freedom Impossible According To Former Dev

When Bethesda first announced that they were releasing a new science fiction RPG called Starfield, there was a lot of interest. Fans grew to love this studio with a track record of solid RPG releases. However, when the game was ultimately released, there were some divisions among fans. Some felt the game fell flat from their expectations. One of the reasons that might have been was that Bethesda just got too successful and too big.

This news comes from PC Gamer after speaking with a former developer at Bethesda. During GDC, Nate Purkeypile, a Bethesda veteran who has since departed the studio to work on his own projects, spoke about Starfield. Nate has been vocal about his time and enjoyment with Bethesda. We even spoke with him about his game The Axis Unseen.

I was in AAA for 17 years before going solo, so I worked on games like Fallout 3, Skyrim, Fallout 4 and Starfield. 14 of those years were all at Bethesda, so I saw it grow from our tiny team in the basement of about 65 people to around 500 people across four studios (not counting all the outsourcing/co-dev) working on Starfield. I really liked working at Bethesda when the team was smaller, the amount that tiny team was able to do was amazing. It was a lot closer to an indie studio back in those days. Skyrim is still played by a lot of people to this day and that team was only around 100 people. – Nate Purkeypile

At the time, he mentioned his love for the studio working on games like Fallout 3 and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. Nate even had his hands on Starfield, but things changed for him, making it clear it was time to go. When working initially with Bethesda, Nate was among a studio that had under a hundred people involved. It made it far easier for developers to develop with far more freedom.

Talking with PC Gamer, Nate reiterated that developers at the time were able to work freely on projects. Some things that made their way to Skyrim weren’t even in the plans. Additions like Blackreach and Werewolves came from developers working on the side from passion. However, because Bethesda went so big, development freedom was taken away.

You would basically get in trouble for doing that, because everything does have a cost. It’s not even unreasonable, mind. If everyone is doing that within 500 people, it’s a mess. But with, you know, 100 people? It’s much more manageable, and where a lot of the interesting things come from. – Nate Purkeypile

Far too many meetings and structures were in place to see Starfield released. This isn’t a jab at Bethesda either because once you have 500+ developers working on a game, you can’t have people venturing away from the workflow to do something else on the side. But it also leaves some fans wondering if the game would have been more successful if Bethesda hadn’t grown to the size it is today, where developers could freely work on some interesting ideas.

Alas, that’s the double-edged sword here, as Bethesda’s success means expansions and more hands-on deck to build games, which is likely making it hard for some voices to stand out among the crowd.