The designer of Diamond City, Little Lamplight, and Starfield’s Neon thinks Bethesda’s galaxy was just too big: ‘I would have done a handful of planets with bespoke layouts’

In a new episode of The Examined Game podcast (spotted by GamesRadar), longtime Bethesda environment artist and The Axis Unseen dev Nate Purkeypile spoke about his time at the legendary studio, including what he found to be Starfield’s biggest design misstep.

Purkeypile had the title of “environment artist” at Bethesda, but his work seems to have extended into what would traditionally be considered level design. In addition to setting up the layout for Starfield’s city of Neon⁠—which remained largely the same in the released game, according to Purkeypile⁠—the dev spoke about his contributions to Little Lamplight and Diamond City in Fallouts 3 and 4. He left Bethesda a year into Starfield’s development, and released his first solo game, The Axis Unseen, in 2024.

Purkeypile spoke about the importance of deliberate design and points of interest in making areas late in the interview. “I think it’s good to spend as little time as possible in menus, especially when it comes to exploration like that,” said Purkeypile. Host Steven Lake asked if this was an issue Purkeypile saw coming in Starfield’s development, a more disjointed, menu-driven system of travel.

“It’s very accurate that if I was in charge of Starfield, I would not have done it that way at all,” the developer asserted. “I would have done a handful of planets with bespoke layouts,” something that sounds like Obsidian’s approach to The Outer Worlds. “Even early on, I was drawing parallels to Mass Effect 1 and how those procedural planets with repeated dungeons panned out.

“I was like, I don’t think this is a good idea. If you’re going to do the thousands of planets thing, you really need to go the full No Man’s Sky route and have it actually be generating unique content all the time, not just stitching stuff together in slightly different ways. That’s not procedural. You go to like the major city in Starfield and it’s huge, but then like outside the city, there’s nothing. And it’s like this doesn’t even make sense as a world.”

This is certainly a big stumbling block I encountered playing Starfield, but I’m bummed to see Mass Effect 1 catching strays⁠—it feels like I’m the only person in the world who liked ME1’s uncharted worlds. But even here, I see a distinction from Starfield. There were maybe two dozen procedurally generated planets in Mass Effect, and they contrasted sharply with the more structured gameplay in the main story.

Back to Starfield, this has been a frequent topic of conversation on the PC Gamer team: There’s not really a Starfield equivalent to being on your way to Riften, only to get distracted by a dozen different sidequests en route. It’s a problem that, hopefully as a matter of basic structure, we won’t encounter in Fallout 5 or The Elder Scrolls 6. Elsewhere in the same interview, Purkeypile talked about how he’s looking forward to how the Fallout 3 remaster will change the game.