Starfield Exploration Took a Hit to Make Spaceship Construction Really Cool, Says Former Bethesda Designer

wccftech.com:

Long-time Bethesda Game Studios designer Bruce Nesmith is featured in the latest MinnMax interview, discussing topics from The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall to Starfield.

Nesmith, who was also the Lead Designer on Skyrim, left Bethesda in September 2021 to focus full-time on his career as a writer of science fiction and fantasy novels. However, he had completed all the base work he had been assigned for Starfield at that point, including all the astrophysics data, designing systems for space combat and spaceship building, and the skill system with the built-in challenges.

When asked by MinnMax's Ben Hanson about the exploration limits criticized by some Starfield players, Nesmith pointed out that the exploration stuff suffered a bit because the team decided to create other in-depth systems, such as shipbuilding, which turned out to be a fan-favorite. Ultimately, it was a conscious choice to put some of the effort elsewhere in the game.

There was a lot of discussion about the scope of the game. At one point, I said 'You know, I bet this game would be a lot better if we restricted ourselves to about two dozen solar systems and focused on them'. The point was made quite legitimately that once you've done one solar system, you're really not adding to your work all that much by doing a hundred. Just doing our own solar system, all the variety that you have to do just to have that, you've done 90% of the work for the rest of it.

Todd pretty much pulled the number 100 for the number of star systems out of thin air, but the more we went on, the more it was like 'Okay, so all the core activity takes place in these two dozen in the Settled Systems region, and the rest of it is open space, but people love our big games, they love