Even after three years, Starfield still feels somewhat unfinished to some players. The lack of standout new features, its shortcomings in terms of exploration, and its subpar optimization remain issues in 2026.

Kurt Kuhlmann, who served as lead systems designer on the title at Bethesda Game Studios, shared his insights during an interview with FRVR. He noted that this was the company’s first multi-studio project, with over 500 people working on it compared to about 150 on Fallout 4. As a result, development was more challenging, tasks took longer to complete, and the overall creative process was more tedious. Nevertheless, Kuhlmann believes that the team size was insufficient to bring the vision for Starfield to life.

"Even with the size of the team that we had for Starfield, it wasn’t big enough to create the amount of content that the grand idea of the game really required. Like, we needed way more.

He [Todd Howard] wanted to make a big, the open world game space game which, to him, wasn’t Skyrim in space and you just go on this one planet and then a bit on this other planet. It is what we built.

That is an ambitious as hell vision, and I don’t think, especially in retrospect, we shouldn’t have made it. We couldn’t really make it. I mean, we pulled it off to quite an impressive degree, but yeah, it was not our forte.

It was not leaning to our strengths. We had to make a space battle game right. We had never even done vehicles before."