Ex-Bethesda Dev Says Starfield Development Team is More Than Double That of Fallout 76

gamerant.com:

Bethesda's Starfield development team is more than double the size of Fallout 76's, due to the manpower needed to build a universe as expansive as this new Sci-Fi RPG. This comes as no surprise following Bethesda's earlier reveal that there were thousands of planets inStarfield, but as this development team size was discussed during a recent interview, it's still a nice look into the game's development.

Starfield has been in development for quite a few years now, with the game originally set to release on November 11, 2022. However, because Bethesda needed more time on the project, Starfield was delayed into 2023 alongside Redfall. Fans are now waiting for a new update on Starfield, and PC Gamer recently conducted an interview with Nate Purkeypile. Purkeypile worked at Bethesda for 14 years on projects like Fallout 3, FO4, and FO76 but recently struck out to found Just Purkey Games. Purkeypile is working on smaller projects now, a direct result of constantly working on huge gaming projects, and obviously couldn't say much.

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Yet, this interview speaks to the difficulties of game development on such a large scale. Many, for example, believe that the day of single-studio AAA games is long gone, and it's obvious why. Fallout 76, according to Purkeypile, had «200 [people] tops» working on it, while "Starfield is a much bigger project, it's like 500 people or something on the team." But such manpower is needed when building such huge games, as there are a lot of little details that must be decided upon. It may not seem like much, but everything down to metal panels, color use in video games, material use in said metal panels, differentiating those in Starfield's environments,