'Starfield' Engine And Space Flight Slammed By Former Bethesda Developer

When it comes to upcoming AAA titles, there’s not many which are promising more than Starfield. As Bethesda’s first new game universe in 25 years, it sounds like they’re going to go all out with it, with double the amount of dialogue that Skyrim has, and reportedly dozens of Skyrim sized planets. Chunky boi.

Despite currently being set to release later this year, we’ve still not seen any full gameplay trailers (although we might have had a little sneak peak at the gameplay last month), but that’s not stopped insiders from coming forward with all their juicy tidbits of knowledge. Unfortunately though, it’s not all good - as reported by TweakTown, one former Bethesda dev has been slamming the game online.

Check out the official trailer for Starfield right here.

This has all been taking place on ResetEra, and although the user has since deleted their account, their identity as a former dev has reportedly been validated by both the site admins and journalist Jason Schreier. By the sounds of it, the dev’s biggest gripes come with the engine that Starfield is using.

“The engine isn’t great and I don’t like the feel of the flying, that’s just a person’s opinion,” the user wrote. “Again, that’s to me, you may love it. So it’s hard to say, I’m really interested in knowing what some of you guys will think about the game in general. Very very curious.

“I'm particularly speaking to the usability of the engine not the capability of it, those are two different things. For example Unreal and Unity are very user friendly[,] while CryEngine is a pain in the ass but [it’s] very powerful.”

They elaborated further, revealing that apparently, playtests have been running every week since early last year: “The engine is a piece of crap[...] Starfield is looking good, weekly Thursday playtests since the beginning of [2021] and more and more [stuff] is coming online,” they said. “Shooting feels alright, flying is terrible at the moment in my opinion - it’s just not fun to me. Lighting and stuff is looking better and better, though it's not on the level of Horizon Forbidden West or anything like that. It’s still a good looking game.

“In terms of will it ship on time, Bethesda will try that’s for sure. They’ll cut what they [need to] and they have an overabundance of content, probably too much, so that's not the issue. Finding the fun and of course bug fixing is the big thing.”

Starfield is currently set to launch on Xbox Series X/S and PC on 11 November.