Starfield Dev: The Game Needed Far More People to Match Its Vision

A developer who worked on Starfield has opened up about how the game failed to fully realize its ambitious vision, admitting the project needed a significantly larger team and that open-world space design simply was not what Bethesda does best.

A Team That Tripled in Size and Still Came Up Short

Kurt Kuhlmann, who served as lead systems designer on Starfield, spoke candidly in an interview covered by Video Games Chronicle. He explained that Starfield was Bethesda’s first true multi-studio project, which caused the development team to balloon to around 500 people compared to the roughly 150 who worked on Fallout 4. Despite that dramatic growth, Kuhlmann says it was still not enough.

“Even with the size of the team that we had for Starfield, it wasn’t big enough to create the amount of content that the grand idea of the game really required,” Kuhlmann said. “Like, we needed way more.”

He pointed to a cascading development problem where new systems had to be built before designers could populate the game with content. The longer those systems took to finalize, the less time designers had to actually work with them. Lighting alone became a logistical headache, requiring multiple passes, potentially by different team members, followed by a lengthy build process that made even small changes expensive in time and effort.

Not Built to Bethesda’s Strengths

According to Video Games Chronicle, Kuhlmann was direct about where Starfield pushed Bethesda outside its comfort zone. Director Todd Howard envisioned a sprawling, multi-planet open-world space game rather than something more contained, and the studio struggled to deliver on that scope.

“That is an ambitious as hell vision, and I don’t think, especially in retrospect, we shouldn’t have made it. We couldn’t really make it,” Kuhlmann said. “I mean, we pulled it off to quite an impressive degree, but yeah, it was not our forte.”

He noted that Bethesda had never built vehicles before Starfield, and designing functional space combat was a brand new challenge for the team. Many of the mechanics added during development were new territory for the studio, compounding the resource and time pressures already created by the multi-studio structure.

Honest Reflection, Not a Condemnation

Kuhlmann’s comments are notable for their candor but are not a wholesale rejection of what Starfield accomplished. He framed the shortcomings as the natural consequence of attempting something well outside the studio’s established playbook rather than a failure of effort or intent. Bethesda built a massive game under difficult conditions, he acknowledged, even if the final product landed some distance from where Howard originally aimed.

Starfield launched in September 2023 and received a mixed reception, with praise for its RPG depth alongside criticism of the fragmented open world. Kuhlmann’s reflections add useful context to that reception and raise broader questions about how studios scale ambition against resources.

Sources: Video Games Chronicle