Starfield designer reflects on launch and development: "God, I was stressed for 2 years straight"

gamesradar.com:

Starfield designer Emil Pagliarulo is reflecting on his time as a veteran Bethesda developer and sharing what he thinks makes the studio's games endure the test of time.

In a lengthy Twitter thread, Pagliarulo shares that his love for Bethesda began with the 1994 RPG The Elder Scrolls: Arena, the first game in the venerable open-world fantasy series. "I was in college, and my roommate and I played single-player games hotseat style," Pagliarulo writes. "I remember we had to call Bethesda tech support for help configuring the SMARTDRV memory manager. Crazy."

Almost three decades later, Pagliarulo has some serious credits under his belt; including The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion, Fallout 3, The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim, Fallout 4, and now, Starfield. Looking back, Pagliarulo says he has "one theory in particular" about why he stuck with Bethesda for so long and why fans continue to eagerly await the studio's games despite often long and delay-laden development cycles.

"For as long as I can remember, Bethesda's titles have been, if nothing else, different," he says. "They weren't games to be beaten - they were worlds to live in. Big, ambitious, creative, and offering something I could never get enough of: a first-person perspective.

"For me, first-person meant I was IN the game, part of the world itself. Even today, I prefer 1st over 3rd in most games. See, the promise of virtual reality was always more than the headset - it was the idea that we could truly enter a fully-realized artificial world.

"That's what Bethesda's games gave me. As as dev, that's exactly what I want to give our fans. In a lot of ways, Starfield was me pushing myself to the limit. Pretty sure every other dev on the team would say the same thing."

Speaking