LogInFormer Design Director about the decision to create over a hundred solar systems in Starfield, Bethesda's structure, and Baldur's Gate 3.
You may love or hate Starfield, but it's definitely a massive game, and its thousands of planets in over a hundred solar systems have been one of the selling points since the beginning. But how did the idea appear in the first place?
In an interview with MinnMax, former Bethesda design director and senior systems designer for Starfied Bruce Nesmith revealed that he initially wanted to restrict the development to about two dozen solar systems and focus on them, but it was pointed out, "quite legitimately", that if you make one, a hundred doesn't add too much work.
"You have to know how to build a planet so that people can walk around on it, you have to have various objects, life forms that they interact with, rocks, all that. You got to do the ice worlds, the crater worlds, I mean just doing our own solar system, all the variety that you have to do just to have that – you've done 90% of the work for the rest of it."
Image credit: Bethesda | Starfield
Todd Howard, Bethesda's boss, apparently "pulled the number 100 for the number of star systems out of thin air", but the team eventually agreed that it would work as the main activity takes place in about two dozen systems, and the rest of is open space, which players can explore.
"People love our big games, they love that open area to explore, so let's go ahead and let them have it."
Nesmith reiterated that all the studio had to do was get the formula right for one planet, and it would work with the others.
Were fans happy with this approach? Not really if the number of complaints about empty planets says anything, but as Bethesda's managing director Ashley Cheng mentioned, not every planet "is supposed to be Disney World."
Nesmith also talked about how Bethesda's structure changed through the years. He first came to the studio in the 90s and then returned in 2004. He remembered that around the time when The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion was released, the company was stable – a very rare occurrence in the game industry. "People just didn't want to leave" and this in itself was a problem as employees couldn't move up inside the studio – "when nobody's leaving, nobody gets to advance either."
During the Fallout 76 development, things started to go south because Bethesda had to change its approach in order to continue to grow, and not everyone liked the changes, which could also be difficult to enforce. Around that time, the company started to work on more projects and buy smaller studios, which led to more remote work, and this changed the dynamic inside. Then requests for multiplayer started coming from the higher-ups, and Howard eventually accepted the idea, even though he was against it for quite some time.
Image credit: Bethesda | Starfield
Nesmith also said that all decisions run through Howard, and even though he doesn't believe it's true, if you want to propose anything different from Bethesda's usual flow, you have to get in front of him.
"He has tried really really hard to not be the last say guy. It hasn't worked out that way, but that's not something that he wants intellectually, I think it ends up being that way because he's somebody who has opinions and whose opinions are highly valuable, and so it ends up being that way whether he likes it or not. But I think when you've got somebody who is at the creative center and heart of a studio, there's going to be a limit to the size you can grow to and I think Bethesda probably outgrew that."
Image credit: Bethesda | Starfield
Nesmith believes Howard would have had to give up more creative control than he wanted to for other projects to allow the company to grow and "still maintain that creative center on the things he cared the most about."
Speaking of other projects, Nesmith shared his opinion on Baldur's Gate 3, saying it's a "triumph of trying to make the tabletop experience actually happen right there in the computer." Something that impresses him the most is Larian's approach to small details that they know not everyone will find.
"They poked into all the darkest corners, they've come out and said quite bluntly: "We don't care if only 1% of the players will ever see this, those 1% that do are going to be happy and they will tell the other 99%, who will then be happy that the option existed. And at Bethesda, the games we were making were so big we had to take the approach of 'Well, everybody's got to be able to do this at some point, we can't lock off content that way.'"
In the same interview, he shared that the only reason The Elder Scrolls 6 was announced so early in 2018 is that "the pitchforks and torches were out." You can read more about it here.
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