Even after devoting 14 years of his career to Bethesda, Skyrim senior artist Nate Purkeypile says the developer has changed too much for his tastes, and he would never return.
"I can pretty safely say there's not a single day that I've even contemplated going back," Purkeypile told Bloomberg in a new interview – one of many developers commenting on the freedom and agility that small teams offer in the face of AAA giants. "That scale of production is not necessarily enjoyable for a lot of people. You're very much a cog in the machine."
Things got too overwhelming while he worked as a lead artist on Starfield, Bethesda's intergalactic epic with 1,000 planets and a credits sequence that lasts 45 minutes. To be a part of Starfield, Purkeypile had to attend over 20 meetings a week, Bloomberg reports.
- Former Starfield lead says "people are fatigued" with huge games, and "I'm sorry" because "part of what happened is the success of games like Skyrim and Fallout 4"
- Former Starfield dev says the space RPG "could have existed without those" surplus loading screens, with many added after he left production
This was a very different Bethesda than the one Purkeypile first joined. While working on Skyrim, Purkeypile's fellow development team was under 100 people — a record for Bethesda at the time – who still made landmark games like Fallout 3 and Oblivion. Purkeypile has said in other interviews that, in comparison, Starfield was made by approximately 500 Bethesda developers.
"I think the best stuff that came out of those games came out of trusting people," Purkeypile says. "To do that, I think you need a smaller, more intimate team."
Missing that closeness, Purkeypile abandoned ship in 2021. Since then, he's scaled down significantly, from Bethesda's hundreds of developers to just one. As one-man studio Just Purkey Games, Purkeypile recently released "heavy metal horror game" The Axis Unseen. It's not as massive as Starfield, but few things need to be.
