Starfield Lead Quest Designer Had "Absolutely No Time" For Final Quest

thegamer.com:

Speaking at the Game Developers Conference earlier this week, Starfield lead quest designer Will Shen said that he had "no time" when it came to designing the last main quest.

"We were finally at a state in the project where we could play through the whole [game]. And it became very clear that we were missing the large final location that was going to the story together and have a satisfying action-filled payoff," Shen said (as reported by PC Gamer). "I was both implementing the main quest and leading the quest design team, so I had absolutely no time. The entire quest design team was already overbooked."

I had absolutely no time. The entire quest design team was already overbooked.

To bring it all together, Shen went to senior level designer Steve Cornett, who he describes as the team's "panic button". Cornett suggested the dimension hopping that leads the player through areas they've already visited from a new perspective, saving development time and resources as they no longer had to build entirely new locations from scratch.

Despite this scramble towards the end to tie the story up in one cohesive knot, Starfield launched to favourable reviews, with an aggregate score of 83 on Metacritic.

Features Editor Ben Sledge gave it four out of five stars in our review here at TheGamer, praising its story as one of "the best that Bethesda has ever produced". However, the community has taken to Steam to complain about its bugs and dull progression, dropping the review score to "Mostly Negative".

At any rate, it doesn't look like we're done with Bethesda's space-fairing RPG just yet, as the Shattered Space DLC appears to have been added to Steam's backend.

Starfield is the first new IP from Bethesda in a quarter of a century, launched for the next-gen Xbox Series X|S and PC. Taking place outside our own Solar System, you play a member of the Constellation, a collective of explorers set on discovering new worlds.