Bethesda wowed us all during the Starfield launch, taking three weeks to reach an impressive record of 10 million players. However, once the dust settled, people started noticing the bits and pieces they didn’t like about the game and were laying it all out on the Internet.
Players are reporting bugs left and right, many of which have been fixed by the first Community Patch that came out a few days ago.
However, the modders have their work cut out for them - there are still more than 300 known issues in Starfield that they need to work on for future updates.
YouTube channel Minnmax reached out to Bruce Nesmith, the former senior systems designer for Starfield who left in the middle of development, for his thoughts on what’s going on with the game otherwise considered Bethesda’s most successful launch.
Nesmith admitted that he was surprised with the quality of the game when it was released on September 6, describing it as “smooth as glass to begin with.”
More than a month after the launch, players have begun complaining about the procedurally generated landscape in Starfield’s more than 1,600 planets.
PC Gamer’s Fraser Brown said that, after hundreds of hours exploring hundreds of planets, you’ll eventually realize that every planet is basically the same - it could be a hub of resources, a pirate base, or dead and barren.
Nesmith weighed in on that, revealing that he had suggested limiting the number of solar systems to 24. However, Todd Howard overruled him and pulled the number of systems to 100.
Eventually, Nesmith said, the team decided to take advantage of procedural generation as it significantly reduces the work to create more than a thousand worlds for the game.
The former Bethesda dev suggested that his former colleagues made tradeoffs due to the game's scope.
“[O]nce they're doing all that quest work, and all the variety of plants and animals, you gotta make hard choices. I think some of the exploration stuff didn't come through as well as it could've,” he opined.