Former Bethesda designer Bruce Nesmith thinks the only way is up for a potential sequel to Starfield, based on the RPG studio's track record with follow-ups.
Nesmith left the storied developer in 2021 after working on several of the company's biggest hits, including Starfield and his lead designer contributions on Skyrim. But now that he can play at the company's work from an outside perspective, he told Video Gamer that he's "looking forward to Starfield 2."
"I think it’s going to be one hell of a game because it will address many of the things people are saying," he said. "It will be able to take what's in there right now and put in a lot of new stuff and fix a lot of those problems."
The ex-lead points to the studio's other sequels as evidence. "When we built Skyrim, we had the tremendous advantage of Oblivion, which had the tremendous advantage of Morrowind," he explained. "All that stuff was there for us" - and the implication is that Starfield 2, when and if it ever orbits back around, can simply build off of the first game.
"All we had to do was continue to improve and add new stuff in," Nesmith said of the studio's other sequels. "We didn't have to start from the ground up. If we'd had to start from the ground up, that would have been another two or three years of development time."
With The Elder Scrolls 6 in development right now and demand soaring for another mainline Fallout, hopes for a sequel to Starfield seem like a far away dream, but studio head and creative director Todd Howard recently said that the space epic had joined the studio's pantheon of "Big Three" RPG series, hinting that there are plans to continue expanding its universe in the probably distant future.
