Starfield 2 unlikely to happen, former Bethesda designer says

Starfield won't be getting a sequel, according to Kurt Kuhlmann, the former lead systems designer at Bethesda who worked on the space RPG. Speaking to Video Games Chronicle, Kuhlmann said he would be "very surprised" if Bethesda greenlit Starfield 2, as the first game wasn't "anywhere near successful enough" commercially to justify the investment.

By conventional metrics, Starfield performed well. It attracted at least 15 million players since launch, achieved a Metacritic score in the 80s, and drew one million concurrent players at launch. Yet the game faced criticism from longtime Bethesda fans who viewed it as a disappointment compared to Skyrim and Fallout 4.

Kuhlmann, who left Bethesda around Starfield's launch, expressed regret about the missed opportunity. "It's, in a way, too bad, because I think with the lessons learned on Starfield, a Starfield 2 could have been much closer to the game that Todd had in mind," he said. "You can envision that game, you can imagine that game. That's not quite what Starfield really is."

He pointed to the outpost system as an example of features that felt disconnected from the rest of the experience. "For what it is, as a standalone system, it's cool, but it's not nearly as integrated with the rest of the game," Kuhlmann explained. The system never felt as cohesive as Fallout 4's settlement mechanics, which themselves had caused integration problems during development.

Kuhlmann has previously suggested Bethesda "shouldn't have made" Starfield, explaining that the studio "couldn't really make it" due to the project's ambition. He indicated that design compromises ultimately resulted in a game that didn't fully cohere as originally envisioned. Starfield did receive a PlayStation 5 release this year and continues to receive content support, with another year of updates planned.