Starfield former lead quest designer Will Shen and former Fallout 76 lead level designer Daryl Brigner held a joint talk session during GDC 2024. Read on to learn about their insights in collaborative development and experiences working on Bethesda games.
Bethesda Former Devs Share Challenging Experience on Developing Bethesda Games
Starfield Didn't Have a Compelling Location Set for the Final Quest
As part of their joint talk session at GDC 2024, lead quest designer Will Shen and former Fallout 76 lead level designer Daryl Brigner discussed the intricacies, processes, and importance of cohesive storytelling and gameplay mechanics in quest design for games. The two former Bethesda devs worked together for nearly 15 years on titles including Skyrim, Fallout 4, and Fallout 76.
Shen spoke about the challenges encountered during the development of Starfield, particularly regarding the final quest. According to PCGamer, the Starfield team realized by the final phases of development that the game lacked a significant final location to tie the narrative together.
"We were finally at a state in the project where we could play through the whole [game]," Shen said, according to the news site. "And it became very clear that we were missing the large final location that was going to tie the story together and have a satisfying action-filled payoff."
She further shared, "I was both implementing the main quest and leading the quest design team, so I had absolutely no time. The entire quest design team was already overbooked." Amid the realization that Starfield's main quest lacked a pivotal final set piece, Shen turned to senior level designer Steve Cornett.
Describing Cornett as the "panic button," Shen revealed that the senior level designer proposed "dimension hopping," a concept that allowed players to revisit key locations from earlier in the game, and saved them time to put the final quest together.
Starfield's Big Team Size Was Part of Development Issues
Other matters discussed was the exponential growth of the team size across Bethesda Game Studios and its collaborating partners, which Shen cited as another part of the issue during the development of Starfield. Shen and Brigner stated that the sheer number of team members working across different studios on a single game definitely caused problems.
Such a setup contributed to challenges in identifying responsibilities and navigating organizational structures, said the devs. "It's more difficult than ever to know who does what, who you're supposed to report to," Brigner explained. "A fractured team can also create a 'silo effect,' where every department is scrambling for resources and saying 'no' to collaboration requests," added Shen.
Shen noted the scrutiny each request underwent, with every detail, even as trivial as requesting a chair, needing evaluation. "Every request now has to go through all the producers because we needed to check all of the contingent work," Shen elaborated.
