We all knew Starfield would be massive, but it seems that the spacefaring adventure is Bethesda’s most expansive RPG to date.
During an interview with PCGamesN, former Bethesda lead artist Nate Purkeypile explains that Starfield‘s development team is more than twice as big as any other game in the company’s history.
“The scope of that project is the main thing that’s different because, you know, Fallout 3, Skyrim, Fallout 4, that was all one team,” Purkeypile said. “Fallout 76, that was two mostly, we had a little bit of help from Montreal, but it was mostly the Austin and Maryland [Bethesda] studios working together. But yeah, Starfield is a much bigger project – it’s like 500 people or something on the team, whereas I think [Fallout 76] was maybe 200, tops.”
None of this is all that surprising to hear, given Bethesda’s frequent boasting about Starfield‘s massive cities, campaign length, and 1000 fully-explorable planets. While Purkypile couldn’t go into specifics regarding how we’ll explore all those worlds, he did give some insight into how it’s all coming together.
“The map of [Fallout 76] is like, almost two times the size of Skyrim or so, and that was a lot of work for people to do, but yeah, it doesn’t scale,” Purkypile continues. “Even if you wanted to hire outsourcing, you’d have to hire, like, a country. Realistically, it’s a fraction of that team actually [working] on planets.”
Starfield is coming out sometime in 2023 for Xbox Series X|S and PC, though there’s no firm release date yet. Clever fans have made predictions, while others are already preparing bug fixes.
Written by Kyle Campbell on behalf of GLHF.
