Starfield, Bethesda’s open world sci-fi game, was one of the most eagerly awaited games of 2023. It did receive its share of criticism, but was still one of the best video games to see a release last year, though.
It makes sense, then, that many are clamoring for a sequel to Maryland-based studio Bethesda’s sci-fi adventure. And recently former studio dev Bruce Nesmith has said that a Starfield sequel would be “one hell of a game”, in an interview with VideoGamer. Nesmith was a designer on Starfield before abandoning the studio before Microsoft’s takeover in 2023.
Speaking of the criticism leveled at Starfield, Nesmith admitted the game had its rough edges. And it’s true that Starfield, despite having a 83 score on review aggregator site Metacritic, does have its share of issues. It was as buggy on release as Bethesda games typically are, many of its 1000 explorable planets felt barren (apparently by design), and it mostly stuck to the traditional Bethesda RPG formula instead of trying to innovate, and wasn’t particularly exciting to play at times…
But Starfield being a wholly original IP was a factor here, unlike other games like The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim with Bethesda improving on what it had already done with its earlier Morrowind and Oblivion games.
“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”, said the former Bethesda man. “If we’d had to start from the ground up, that would have been another two or three years of development time”, added Nesmith.
Nesmith also referred to games like Assassin’s Creed, the first entry of which did not set the world alight, with the franchise improving with the latter entries. “It takes, sadly, sometimes a second or third to version of the game in order to really enrich everything”, said the man.
So Starfield 2 will be great because, according to Nesmith, the studio “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”.
A Starfield sequel wont’ be arriving anytime soon, though.
Back in 2022, Bethesda explained the reasons why it chose to release Starfield before The Elder Scrolls VI, but it’s clear that the next entry in its storied medieval fantasy RPG series is coming next.
There’s plenty of rumor and speculation surrounding the release date of the next Elder Scrolls game. Evidence coming out of the Microsoft vs the FTC trial (when the latter was trying to block the Redmond giant’s buyout of Activision Blizzard) suggests it won’t release any earlier than 2026. Microsoft’s gaming division boss Phil Spencer has put the game’s launch date as far out as 2028, saying that “we’re talking about a game that’s like five-plus years away”. This means it would be a next-gen console and PC game, coming out for the next generation of Xbox and PlayStation in a couple of years’ time.
There’s also the fact that Bethesda game director Todd Howard said in an interview with IGN that the studio will be doing Fallout 5 after its done with the upcoming Elder Scrolls VI.
“Yes, Elder Scrolls 6 is in pre-production and, you know, we’re going to be doing Fallout 5 after that, so our slate’s pretty full going forward for a while. We have some other projects that we look at from time to time as well”, Howard told IGN.
So maybe the legendary game creator doesn’t feel so good about announcing the next Elder Scrolls game at E3 2018, as it may be the case the game won’t be hitting the shelves until more than a decade after its announcement…
Also, taking into account that work on Starfield began in 2015, and the game did not arrive until 2023, it’s likely Fallout 5 will take as long to develop. But say Bethesda is able to cut down development time in half somehow, and that game is ready in four years, and also that the Elder Scrolls VI arrives in 2026 – this means Starfield 2 won’t be launching until the 2030s. That is, unless Bethesda can make several games in parallel, something which has not been its modus operandi thus far.
There’s also the fact that Bethesda has not even announced a Starfield sequel (even if one is surely on the cards), so obviously The Elder Scrolls VI and Fallout 5 will come first.
Nonetheless, it’s almost a certainty that Starfield will be getting a sequel someday. A Bethesda veteran recently said that the game is “developing its own unique fanbase” and that it “sits right next to Fallout and Elder Scrolls”.
And creating a massive, space-faring RPG like Starfield must have been a big undertaking for Bethesda (even with the support of Microsoft), and valuable lessons must have been learned. So it would be great if Starfield 2 turns out to be a jolly good ride when it arrives in the distant future, then.