Starfield almost had a mini resource management game before it was canned, former dev reveals

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Starfield’s senior systems designer, Bruce Nesmith, has shared one of the game’s cancelled features – a resource management game as part of the spaceship building mechanic.

This comes courtesy of an interview between Nesmith and Kiwi Talkz, in which the Bethesda veteran detailed his experiences working on Skyrim, the Fallout franchise, and then Starfield. After being asked about features taken out of Bethesda’s games that the developer had really wanted to keep in – it was Starfield which spurred on the most affectionate talk.

“That’s one of the things the studio struggled with,” he said. “You know our internal line we say when shaking our heads to other is ‘Bethesda never saw a feature it didn’t want to add to its games.’ We are feature-rich – it’s a feature-rich game.”

With Bethesda games, there’s no shortage of funky, freaky features potted about. Fallout has flying pirate ships, Skyrim lets you rob people by putting pots on their heads, and Starfield even lets you play with NPC’s hair. Nesmith tells us that Starfield almost had a “whole building ship components from natural resources [minigame] that I had personally worked on.” Unfortunately, he goes on to say that figuring out scheduling art and programming wasn’t feasible “even though a significant amount of work went into it.”

“That’s one of the things Bethesda keeps trying to get better at, making the decision to throw things away or not do something. Because they don’t lack for content in their games.”

Nesmith then goes in to describe the game in a little more detail. “We wanted a complete set of being able to mine materials, send them to a factor on another world that would then build space-ship modules that you could build your own spaceships with. We wanted an entire economy working with that as its foundation, and so it would be a kind of little strategy or resource manager game on top of that role playing game. But it was just too much. Not that nobody liked that idea, but it had to be pulled out.”

While Starfield’s mini-strategy-resource-management-game never came to see the light, perhaps in the future we could see it added back in by modders or even the big B themselves?

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Amaar Chowdhury

Amaar is a gaming journalist with an interest in covering the industry's corporations. Aside from that, he has a hankering interest in retro games that few people care about anymore.