Coming as a new IP from a studio that created Fallout and The Elder Scrolls, Starfield enjoyed massive hype up until its release. The story has not been the same since then. Former Bethesda dev Nate Purkeypile has shared his two cents about the game.
All the games Purkey worked on at Bethesda (Photo credit: Nate Purkeypile/LinkedIn)
Purkeypile spent 14 years at Bethesda Game Studios (2007 to 2021), before leaving to found a solo indie studio called Just Purkey Games in April 2021. Just Purkey Games has released two games so far, namely The Axis Unseen in October 2024, and Deedlee Doo! Carkour! in May 2025.
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Purkeypile appeared on The Examined Game YouTube channel on August 4, 2026, where he spoke with Steven Lake. Purkeypile talked about Fallout 3 Remaster and the issues with the original that the studio should fix. Eventually, the discussion drifted to Starfield and the extent of Purkeypile’s involvement.
“If I was in charge of Starfield, I would have not done it that way at all,” Purkeypile said. “I would have done a handful of planets with bespoke layouts. Because even playing Starfield, after it came out, during the main quest, I was running into repeated locations, like on the main quest.”
“You’re only going to have time to make a certain amount of dungeons, and if you’re going to have a thousand planets, you’re going to be repeating content, and it’s not actually a procedural game. Those dungeons are built, they’re not going to follow the No Man’s Sky route or anything.
Even early on I was drawing parallels to Mass Effect 1 and how those procedural planets would repeat a dungeon. I was like, I don’t think this is a good idea. To me, if you’re going to do the thousands of planets thing, you really need to go the full No Man’s Sky route and have it actually be generating unique content all the time. Not just stitching stuff together in slightly different ways. That’s not procedural: I call it ‘space quilts.”
What Purkeypile thinks went wrong with Starfield
Todd Howard has hailed Starfield as being exactly the game he and Bethesda wanted to make, justifying the long development process. When Lake asked if the goal for Starfield was achieved, Purkeypile said, “I guess they thought that would work, and it’s not that I think the game isn’t bad, I just don’t think it’s great”.
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“I think that’s a big part of that. I don’t think the goal was to ever go fully procedural, so that was never the approach, and I guess it’s just a fundamental disagreement, probably that Todd [Howard] and other people think that works, and could be a way to make a game like that, and I strongly disagree, and think a lot of what makes the Bethesda games special and the way that those landmarks are laid out and getting surprised is not having repeated content and having a lot of intention on where things are and why.
You go to the major city in Starfield and it’s huge, but then outside the city there’s nothing, and it’s like, this doesn’t even make sense as a world. It’s like ‘Oh, we didn’t have time to do more stuff,’ obviously, because it’s spent on other planets, and you can only have so much time, so it’s just this city. It’s kind of incoherent from an environmental standpoint, to me.”
What Purkeypile wants to see in Fallout 3 Remaster
Purkeypile is a world and lighting specialist, although he eventually played the role of lead artist on ‘The Pitt DLC’ and Fallout 3’s ‘Point Lookout’ expansion. In the same interview, he talked about how they were constrained by the technology during the making of the original Fallout 3.
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“It’s confirmed now that they’re [Bethesda] doing a Fallout 3 Remaster, but I’m personally looking forward to that because we were super tech-constrained making Fallout 3, and you could only place so many lights, and again, textures are pretty small,” Purkeypile said.
“Constantly worrying about the memory budget, or how much stuff you’re putting on screen. So, it’s not like exactly how we intended, I get why people get more upset over movie remakes and stuff, but, in the case of games, particularly the art side of it, it’s 100% not what we intended and it was very, very constrained.”
Do you agree with Purkeypile that Starfield would have been a better game if Bethesda reduced the number of planets or made the worlds procedurally generated? Share your thoughts in the comment box below.
