Former Starfield developers Daryl Brigner and Will Shen attended the Game Developers Conference this week in San Francisco. There, the two Starfield and Bethesda veterans gave interesting insights into the development of Todd Howard’s latest and biggest role-playing game.
According to the two developers, who have since resigned to work on new studios, the final quest in Masada 3, Entangled, was a last-minute addition to wrap up the game that came about after ‘pressing the panic button.’
Shen is formerly Starfield’s lead quest designer and is now the lead content designer for Something Wicked Games. Brigner serves as world director for the studio Soft Rains.
Shen explained that they had initially completed the game and were playing through it when they realized that it lacked a final mission to wrap things up. However, Shen’s quest design team was already overbooked and unable to design an additional mission.
Shen decided to turn to senior-level designer Steve Cornett, who had the idea of creating a mission in which the player and their team hop to different dimensions and revisit earlier locations.
The former quest lead said this was to save time and resources, as the assets were already in place and needed to be implemented.
Both Brigner and Shen attributed this difficulty in addressing development crunches to the sheer size of Starfield’s developing team. More than 500 people, spread throughout multiple studios, were working on Bethesda’s space exploration game.
Shen explained that coordinating a team this size means going through the executive level. This often results in issues in accessing or requesting resources, leaving teams unable to collaborate effectively and promptly to address bottlenecks in development.
We find this revelation amazing, as many players on Reddit have been seen praising the questline.
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