Former Bethesda designer speaks on potential for Starfield 2

There are a lot of strong opinions about Starfield out there. Some, like myself, think its Bethesda's best work to date. However, a lot of fans think it is a weak effort with plenty of problems to be fixed. We have no idea if Bethesda has plans for a Starfield 2 at this stage, but former Bethesda designer, Bruce Nesmith, seems to be expecting one.

Bruce Nesmith was a veteran Bethesda developer who left the studio back in 2021, after spending a long time working on The Elder Scrolls and Fallout games. His biggest credit is as the lead designer for Skyrim, Bethesda's most celebrated-RPG ever developed.

Speaking on the prospect of a Starfield sequel, Nesmith told Videogamer that he's “looking forward” to it, adding that Bethesda was “missing a little bit” with the first game, but he expects that those holes will be plugged by taking the foundation from the first game and adding to it.

“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.”

Like other Bethesda leads, Nesmith seems to be of the opinion that Bethesda's Creation Engine is its biggest strength, with the ability to constantly build on it. Since the launch of Starfield, there have been growing calls from the fan base for Bethesda to switch to a new engine.

However, I think the opinion of a veteran developer should carry more weight in this discussion. There are so many things to consider when it comes to moving away from the Creation Engine. We're at a point now in the industry where most major AAA games are being built with Unreal Engine 5. Very few studios maintain their own in-house engines at this point and the Creation Engine offers so much freedom, not just for the developers actively working at Bethesda, but for fans too. You wouldn't have nearly the same modding potential if Starfield was built on Unreal Engine or Unity, rather than the Creation Engine.

Aside from that, we also have to consider the practical aspect of forcing hundreds of established developers to abandon the tools they know and relearn a whole new system, something that could delay development on future projects, like The Elder Scrolls 6, for years.

Bethesda has not announced any plans for a Starfield sequel as of October 2024. The company is now focused on developing the next Elder Scrolls title and after that, we're likely to get Fallout 5, which means a new Starfield game is going to be a long ways off.

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KitGuru Says: Do you think a Starfield sequel can fix the issues some fans had with the original?

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