Nate Purkeypile’s name may not say much, but what he has worked on at Bethesda Game Studios does.
Purkeypile served as a World and Lighting Artist on Fallout 3, Fallout 4, and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, and as a Lead Artist on Fallout 76, he designed several iconic locations (Diamond City, Little Lamplight, Paradise Falls). He went on to work at Starfield as Lead Lighting Artist and Senior World Artist, but left in the middle of development to start his own team, Just Purkey Games.
So he’s essentially gone solo and is already working on his next game, The Axis Unseen, which takes the stealth archer/arrow gameplay style of Skyrim and translates it into horror. A demo is now available on Steam, and we’ve embedded the trailer. Purkeypile posted it on Reddit, where he explains why he’s fed up with Bethesda – an answer that makes sense when you think about it:
I quit working at Bethesda after 14 years during Starfield to go make my own solo indie game with no publisher, it's a heavy metal horror game where you hunt monsters from folklore – It's called The Axis Unseen
byu/JustPurkeyGames inIndieGaming
“I know a lot of people have thoughts about Starfield and how it’s probably too big, should have been smaller. I agree with a lot of that, and while I enjoyed working at Bethesda a lot when we were about 65-110 people on Fallout 3 and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, I enjoyed it a lot less as it grew and grew. Starfield was about 500 people or so with four different companies involved (Bethesda Game Studios, BGS Austin, BGS Dallas, BGS Montréal) and that’s not including outsourcing. It just wasn’t my style. There were so many meetings, and it wasn’t the way I liked to make games,” Purkeypile said.
He left Bethesda in 2021, so his work on Starfield was gone by then. And he’s not the only one who says there are too many people working around Todd Howard: Will Shen, the lead quest designer for Starfield, and Daryl Brigner, the lead level designer for Fallout 76, both spoke to PCGamer at GDC back in March…
