Recently, Kurt Kuhlmann, Lead Systems Designer for Starfield, admitted in an interview that although the team ultimately delivered the final product, space sci-fi is not Bethesda's strong suit. The project faced numerous obstacles in production processes, technical accumulation, and team size. Ultimately, it failed to become the kind of game Todd Howard had dreamed of.
Starfield was Bethesda's first truly large-scale project involving collaboration across multiple studios, with the development team expanding to 500 people, compared to around 150 core developers for Fallout 4. Multi-team collaboration led to lengthy approval chains, with revision work taking two to three times longer than previous titles. Even lighting adjustments had to go through a complete pipeline involving multiple personnel and rounds of processing, with any minor change requiring repetition of the entire process. Creature production was similarly affected, with the workload for creating creature skeletons and animations skyrocketing, directly resulting in fewer monster types available in the final game than initially planned.
Comparing Oblivion to Fallout 3, many mature systems could be inherited and reused. However, transitioning from Fallout 4 to Starfield required building almost all core systems from scratch, including spaceships, space combat, planet generation, and outposts. Designers even had to create accompanying content before the underlying systems were stable and usable, making the development process very passive.
Kuhlmann stated that Todd had an "astonishingly ambitious" vision for Starfield, aiming for more than just a "space Skyrim." However, Bethesda had no prior experience developing vehicles or space combat, making this content a cross-disciplinary challenge. He evaluated that the project ultimately achieved quite impressive results, but looking back, given the conditions at the time, the team should not have taken on such a grand goal. Even with a team of 500, it was insufficient to fully realize all ideas, and more manpower would have been needed to completely implement the original vision.
The interview sparked heated discussion in the community after its release. Some players agreed with the analysis, believing that the root of many issues in the game stemmed from overly ambitious goals and insufficient experience. Others argued that quality problems were more a result of design trade-offs, and simply blaming the scale of development was not comprehensive.