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Ex-Bethesda artist Nate Purkeypile: Starfield should have used fewer bespoke planets

Nate Purkeypile, a longtime Bethesda environment artist and creator of 2024 indie The Axis Unseen, criticized Starfield's approach to planetary design. He says Bethesda's thousands-of-planets model produced repetitive, stitched-together content and large cities surrounded by empty space, and that travel became a disjointed, menu-driven experience. Purkeypile argues the game would have been stronger with a smaller number of handcrafted planets featuring bespoke layouts.

• Purkeypile worked as an environment artist at Bethesda and contributed to Fallout's Little Lamplight and Diamond City, and to the layout of Starfield's Neon city, which he says remained largely the same in the released game.
• He left Bethesda a year into Starfield's development and released his first solo game, The Axis Unseen, in 2024.
• He criticizes Starfield's procedural approach as repeating similar dungeons and creating empty areas outside major cities rather than consistently generating unique content.
• He recommends a design of a handful of bespoke planets with carefully crafted layouts, comparing that approach to Mass Effect 1 and Obsidian's The Outer Worlds rather than a No Man's Sky-style mass-generation model.