According to a former Bethesda developer, this may have been a factor in why Bethesda Game Studios’ (BGS) new game Starfield was nowhere near as big a hit as, say, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.

Starfield went out as it came in, while No Man’s Sky kept getting updates (and the other day Hello Games announced ANOTHER update for the game). It had a lukewarm reception, then got a paid DLC (while No Man’s Sky’s updates are ALL free…), and didn’t have much of that Bethesda magic. Many people attribute the muted response to Starfield to BGS becoming a bit sterile and stiff. This sentiment was confirmed by former Bethesda developer Nate Purkeypile to PCGamer. Purkeypile quit because the amount of meetings and restrictive corporate structure wore on him over time.

“While I enjoyed working at Bethesda a lot when we were about 65 to 110 people on Fallout 3 and Skyrim, I enjoyed it a lot less as it grew and grew. We had a lot of freedom to do things. The one that people know about was Blackreach in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim… That was not planned at all. Like we just did it on the side and put it in. It was a whole side project of somebody.

Originally the werewolves were just guys with dog heads and somebody took it upon themselves to make it awesome. A lot of the great stuff in Skyrim came from having that freedom to do what you want, as opposed to a game with this whole checklist design and design by committee. If Starfield had space werewolves, you would basically get in trouble for that because everything has a cost. If you have 500 people doing it, it’s a mess. But with, you know, 100 people? It’s much more manageable, and that’s where a lot of the interesting things come from,” Purkeypile said.

So the lesson is clear: BGS has grown too big, and the individual creativity that made their previous games such a success is no longer there…

Source: PCGamer