The quest designer Will Shena Bethesda veteran who then moved on to the new indie team Something Wicked, explained during a conference at GDC some background on the development of Starfieldincluding the particular case of final mission that was inserted urgentlyapparently having to deal with little time available and a lot of chaos.
Starfield's final quest features a notable moment action tight, which in the team's intentions should provide a worthy ending to the game, but its study and inclusion came rather late in the development and production phase.
Strangely, Bethesda had already built a large part of Starfield, making it substantially playable from start to finish, without however having yet thought about the actual ending, which was therefore added in a very advanced stage of processing, as an element characterized by strong “necessity and urgency”, as reported by Shen.
“We were at a state of the project where they could play the entire game,” Shen explained during his GDC panel, which covered the development of big titles like Starfield and Fallout.
“It became clear at that point that a big location was missing at the end, which would have to pick up the thread of the story and create an ending through a final gameplay moment,” the developer reported. “I was already implementing the various quests and leading the entire quest design team and I didn't have much time, the whole team was already work overload“.
Another element that complicated the situation, paradoxically, was the quantity of developers at work: Bethesda had gone from 100 who had worked on Skyrim to 150 on Fallout 4, then to over 350 on Fallout 76 to reach around 500 developers on Starfield, and a team of this size becomes difficult to control and manage, according to Shen, also including members taken from other teams such as Machine Games, Arkane and others.
The idea about the final quest therefore became a sort of “anti-panic button“, as reported by Shen, built very quickly to try to meet the deadlines. Despite this, the final part still has some rather surprising elements and is still well-finished, although some features that are repeated could highlight the fact of having been inserted a little at the end.
Will Shen left Bethesda and moved to Something Wicked to work on Wyrdsong, but the team has just suffered major layoffs and his current status is unclear.
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