Veteran former Bethesda designer Bruce Nesmith has said that a potential Starfield sequel would be “one hell of a game”, thanks to the developer learning from the mistakes of the first.
Speaking to VideoGamer, Nesmith, who left the company in 2021 after working on many of its biggest series, including acting as lead designer for Skyrim, compared Starfield’s first entry to that of Mass Effect or Assassin’s Creed, both of which received sequels that were much more positively received than their initial release.
“I’m looking forward to Starfield 2,” he said. “I think it’s going to be one hell of a game because it will address many of the things people are saying, ‘We’re quite there. We’re missing a little bit.’ It will be able to take what’s in there right now and put in a lot of new stuff and fix a lot of those problems.”
He added: “When we built Skyrim, we had the tremendous advantage of Oblivion, which had the tremendous advantage of Morrowind. All that stuff was there for us.
“All we had to do was continue to improve and add new stuff in. We didn’t have to start from the ground up. If we’d had to start from the ground up, that would have been another two or three years of development time.”
Last month Starfield game director Todd Howard said that Bethesda’s games are “irresponsibly large”, claiming that the main reason was how little content is cut.
“My job on the games often is to be the director, a little bit like a movie director,” he said, “where you’re bringing all the parts together from the art, the cinematography, the technology that our engineers are building to bring these worlds to life.
“And obviously, [there’s] all of the writing and the quest design and the level designer, and there’s so many parts to our games that I’m in a really unique position to work with so many amazing people and bring all of that together.”