Starfield designer admits game ‘wasn’t the best’ and says why he left Bethesda

A former Bethesda employee has shared his reasons for why Starfield wasn’t the hit it should’ve been and why he left the studio.

Three years since it’s launch, it’s safe to say that Starfield isn’t going to become a beloved Bethesda franchise and is more a bump in the road towards The Elder Scrolls 6.

Post-launch updates (including its first and so far only DLC expansion) have done little to bolster its reputation and its Xbox exclusivity did nothing to encourage console sales, although it’s telling that so far, despite rumours, Microsoft still hasn’t bothered to bring it to PlayStation 5.

Recently, one of the game’s designers, Kurt Kuhlmann, commented on Starfield’s development and acknowledged that it fell short of Bethesda’s usual standards, blaming changes to the studio’s workflow and poor communication as key reasons.

Kulhmann got his start at Bethesda as a junior designer on The Elder Scrolls series in the late 90s, eventually joining full time in 2003 and becoming a senior designer on The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion.

He remained at the company for 20 years, gaining seniority and becoming The Elder Scrolls’ loremaster. He left the company in September 2023, the very month of Starfield’s launch, which he worked on as lead systems designer.

Speaking with PC Gamer, Kulhmann was quite candid about his thoughts on Starfield. While he maintained that it’s a ‘good game’ and certainly ‘releasable,’ he also admitted it ‘wasn’t the best.’

Part of this was because of, in Kuhlmann’s opinion, how many leads the project had. Bethesda’s Todd Howard is credited as director, but ‘the leads now included studio heads and producers and were from multiple studios.’

This in turn led to communication problems: ‘There would be people talking to the leads in one studio and getting an answer, and people talking to the leads in the other studio and getting maybe a different answer.’

Kuhlmann attributed this to the increasing scope of Bethesda’s projects, plus the expansion of parent company ZeniMax Media. And while he doesn’t mention it, Bethesda coming under Microsoft’s umbrella likely had an impact too, especially since Microsoft wanted Starfield to be a key Xbox exclusive.

It also didn’t help that, as a new IP, Starfield had very little, if anything to build upon. Kulhmann estimated that about 50% of Starfield is entirely new and not something Bethesda had an experience with. As such, the solution was to ‘add a bunch of people,’ which can’t have helped the management issues.

‘How do you manage that size of a team and keep everybody on the same page … we don’t have an institutional knowledge about how space works, how do spaceships work, how do we integrate that into quests?’ continued Kulhmann.

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These changes within Bethesda contributed to Kulhmann’s decision to leave the company when he did. Although, he also told PC Gamer that another reason for this was because he wasn’t put in charge of The Elder Scrolls 6, despite being promised the role years ago.

‘I was obviously one of the old-timers there and had a lot of experience. Bruce [Nesmith] and I had been the co-leads on The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim. I think most people would call it a successful project, so I thought that it wasn’t unreasonable for me to think that I could be a successful lead on The Elder Scrolls 6,’ explained Kulhmann.

‘It wasn’t just my expectation – I had been told that that was going to happen. And they made the decision, no, you’re not going to be the lead.’

Kulhmann also shared some of his ideas for the game’s plot, comparing it to The Empire Strikes Back and how the villains would ultimately triumph as a set up for an Elder Scrolls 7.

However, for as much as he wanted to spearhead Elder Scrolls 6, he acknowledged that he might not have actually enjoyed it and ‘they may have made the right decision of saying [I] shouldn’t be in this role.’

Since leaving Bethesda, Kulhmann has taken up a new position at Lightspeed L.A. as principal world designer. The studio’s currently working on Last Sentinel, an open world sci-fi game.

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