Todd Howard reflects on Starfield's development, says there were times he thought 'we had certainly bitten off far more than we could chew'

pcgamer.com:

Going from 'here is an RPG set in Boston and Massachusetts' to 'here is an RPG set in space' is a mind boggling task. Todd Howard, captain of the SS Starfield, definitely felt the weight of his mission during development, as revealed in a letter he sent to reviewers before the game's launch.

«By 2020, we had the team at its full production size of 275, just as the world turned upside down with the pandemic. We had to work in all new ways … there were many days when we thought the game may never exist, that we had certainly bitten off far more than we could chew. Development is never a straight road, it's often a winding and treacherous path.»

You can read the full thing courtesy of The Verge's Tom Warren on Twitter/X—in the letter, Howard goes on to talk about his pride in the development team, and his hope for the journey that the game's reviewers—and by extension, its players—were about to take.

I'm yet to properly sink my teeth into the game as much as PC Gamer's Christopher Livingston, who wrote our Starfield review. Considering the scope he's laid out however, I'm not surprised that the gravity of Bethesda's 1,000 planet-strong ambition weighed on its development team.

Compromises were definitely made to handle the game's bulky scope. There was plenty of hubbub in the community about the lack of atmospheric flight, and PC Gamer's Morgan Park wrote about the sting of disappointment he felt when he bumped up against the surface's planetary boundaries. 

In fairness, I don't think we needed another Daggerfall-style experience. The 1996 entry in Bethesda's Elder Scrolls catalogue had a map 3/4ths the size of Great Britain. You could run across it on foot, it took around 70 hours, and there was absolutely no value in