Starfield is so vast that much of its content will likely need to be removed if Bethesda releases it later this year.
That's according to a former Starfield developer, who worked on Bethesda's upcoming sci-fi RPG and shared various details about the game on the Resetera gaming forum (thanks, GamesRadar). User Hevy008 answered several questions about the title and suggested that it is so big that Bethesda will have to remove several unfinished features if it wants to release the game later this year.
"As for whether it will ship on time, well, they'll try, that's for sure," Hevy008 said.
"They will cut what etc. They have an overabundance of content, probably too much, so that's not the problem. Finding the fun and of course fixing bugs is the most important thing.
"The beta is this summer, that's when the picture will really clear up."
The anonymous poster also described the game as "feeling good" and said "filming feels good", but instead bluntly stated "engine sucks" and "flying is terrible atm" because this is "no fun".
However, they sang the praises of its lighting and graphics, but said that it still wasn't up to the standards of Horizon Forbidden West. There are several months left before Starfield's scheduled release, so that could all change.
The original post, along with Hevy008's account, has since been deleted, though a screenshot on Imgur shows his post in full.
Hevy008's identity as a former Starfield developer was confirmed by Bloomberg reporter Jason Schreier in an article on ResetEra. Although Schreier couldn't confirm if the details in their post, including the claims about Starfield's massive size, were true, they did say that Hevy008 is "definitely who they said they were."
Many things could change
Starfield will be released on November 11 later this year. That's not a long time in the broader context of game development; most triple-A games take several years to produce, and Starfield was originally teased back in 2018. But it still offers plenty of scope for the development team to refine its core features.
While Hevy008 takes a pretty gloomy look at Starfield, especially its flying gameplay, that doesn't mean we should be pessimistic. A lot is likely to change between now and the game's release. Also, we don't know what stage of the game's development Hevy008 has been involved in, either recently or for a long time.
Cutting the content is equal to the course with the development of the game. As projects progress from fledgling design ideas to full titles, they are gradually refined and molded into more cohesive games. This means that many design concepts originally brought to the table are changed, removed, or iterated to better fit the current state of the game.
It will be exciting to see which ideas go into the final build of Starfield and which remain on the studio floor. We wouldn't be surprised if intrepid dataminers unearth unused resources in the Starfield records once it launches, giving us a glimpse of what might have been, or if leakers like Hevy008 reveal more details about what was once planned. for the game.
As Hevy008 says, the beta version of Starfield that will be released in the middle of the year will give us an important preview of the sci-fi RPG. This will be our first hands-on opportunity to see what features the game has to offer.