One former Bethesda dev thinks Starfield 2 is going to be “one hell of a game”, so it’s a shame we probably won’t get to play it for another decade

Starfield might not have had the warmest of receptions amongst all Bethesda fans, but a former Skyrim designer thinks a sequel has a good chance to be a great game.

Look, it’s not exactly a secret that Starfield wasn’t universally loved. Sure, it has its good moments, but there are plenty of reasons to be critical of it, and its first expansion Shattered Space hasn’t exactly offered much reason to be confident in it as a complete package just yet. But, in a recent interview with VideoGamer, former Skyrim designer Bruce Nesmith spoke of his excitement for a hypothetical Starfield 2, making a point of how for a title like Skyrim to be as good as it was, it wouldn’t have been if Bethesda hadn’t made Oblivion before it.

“When we built Skyrim, we had the tremendous advantage of Oblivion, which had the tremendous advantage of Morrowind,” Nesmith said. “All that stuff was there for us. All we had to do was continue to improve and add new stuff in. We didn’t have to start from the ground up. If we’d had to start from the ground up, that would have been another two or three years of development time.

“I’m looking forward to Starfield 2. I think it’s going to be one hell of a game because it’s going to address a lot of the things people are saying,’‘We’re quite there. We’re missing a little bit.’ It will be able to take what’s in there right now and put in a lot of new stuff and fix a lot of those problems.”

To help sell his point, Nesmith pointed to other now classic franchises like Dragon Age or Assassin’s Creed and saying how “the first game in a lot of IPs, they tend to show off flashes of brilliance amid a lot of other things that don’t quite catch everybody’s eye. No, they’re not quite as hot and popular. It takes, sadly, sometimes a second or third version of the game in order to really enrich everything.”

He’s not exactly wrong, sometimes it does take learning from your mistakes with previous games to make the next one even better, I guess the only problem here is that it’s almost been 13 years since Skyrim came out, and even for all of its flaws it was received a lot better at the time than Starfield was a year ago. The Elder Scrolls 6 is obviously still years out, and Fallout 5 is up next after that, so who knows when we’d even see a Starfield 2, and if there’s enough of a community around it for anyone to care? Maybe the lesson here is to make games that aren’t quite so big and flashy to speed up development a bit, ‘ey?