A Starfield Developer Just Said the 1,000 Planets Was the Wrong Call
A developer who spent years working on Starfield says he would have built the game's planets completely differently, and the reason he gives lines up with exactly what players have been complaining about since launch.
Nate Purkeypile spent 14 years at Bethesda, from Fallout 3 through Skyrim and Fallout 4, before leaving during Starfield's production where he'd led the lighting team. Talking to Steven Lake on The Examined Game, he put it plainly: he would not have done it that way at all. "I would have done a handful of planets with bespoke layouts," he said, instead of the thousand Starfield ended up with.
The Actual Problem
Purkeypile's issue isn't the number itself, it's that Starfield never fully committed to either side of the tradeoff. He said he was drawing comparisons to Mass Effect 1 early in development, another game that tried procedural planets with repeated dungeons stitched together, and didn't love where that road led. His read on Starfield's version: if you're going to chase thousands of planets, you need something closer to No Man's Sky, actually generating new content each time instead of rearranging the same handmade pieces. "That's not procedural," he said. What Bethesda built instead sits in between, too much repetition for hand-crafted exploration to feel special, not enough real variation for procedural generation to cover the gap.
Why the Cities Feel Hollow
I've felt this exact thing without ever being able to name it as clearly as Purkeypile does. He pointed to Starfield's major cities as the clearest example, dense and detailed up close, then essentially empty the moment you step past the edge of them, "this doesn't even make sense as a world." That's not a bug, it's a straightforward math problem. Building a thousand planets and a handful of handcrafted cities out of the same development budget means the space in between never gets the attention Bethesda's other games spend on exactly that kind of connective tissue, the footpath that leads somewhere, the NPC who's acting slightly off. Losing that is losing the specific thing people show up to Bethesda games for.
Where Starfield Actually Stands Now
None of this reads as Purkeypile trying to torch the game on his way out. He's said flatly that he doesn't think it's bad, just that it isn't what it could have been. Bethesda's own messaging lately has leaned hard on Starfield still mattering, pointing to over 17 million accounts and more Starborn content landing as part of a stated Year 3 plan. Purkeypile's now running his own studio, Just Purkey Games, making the kind of tightly scoped, handcrafted games that sound like a direct answer to the problem he's describing.
