Kurt Kuhlmann, Starfield’s former lead systems designer, says he’d be surprised by a sequel because he doesn’t think the game was successful enough. He said lessons from Starfield could have brought a follow-up closer to Todd Howard’s vision.
Starfield has drawn at least 15 million players, scored in the 80s on Metacritic and reached one million concurrent players at launch. Despite those figures, the article says most Bethesda fans consider it a disappointment compared with Skyrim and Fallout 4.
Kuhlmann called Starfield’s outpost system “cool” as a standalone feature but said it was not integrated enough with the rest of the game. He said Fallout 4’s settlement system caused problems when integrating it with the story and missions, so it was “kind of put to the side.” He had previously suggested Bethesda should not have made Starfield because the studio could not really make it.
