Starfield designer Emil Pagliarulo is reflecting on his time as a veteran Bethesda developer and sharing what he thinks makes the studio's games endure the test of time.
In a lengthy Twitter thread, Pagliarulo shares that his love for Bethesda began with the 1994 RPG The Elder Scrolls: Arena, the first game in the venerable open-world fantasy series. "I was in college, and my roommate and I played single-player games hotseat style," Pagliarulo writes. "I remember we had to call Bethesda tech support for help configuring the SMARTDRV memory manager. Crazy."
Almost three decades later, Pagliarulo has some serious credits under his belt; including The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion, Fallout 3, The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim, Fallout 4, and now, Starfield. Looking back, Pagliarulo says he has "one theory in particular" about why he stuck with Bethesda for so long and why fans continue to eagerly await the studio's games despite often long and delay-laden development cycles.
- Skyrim's iconic opening was done by Starfield's quest lead, but only after he was brutally called out for "everything we're doing wrong" in front of the Bethesda team
- Skyrim and Fallout veteran left Bethesda after 14 years because he'd already made 3 runaway GotY winners: "That's a really hard thing to top"
"For as long as I can remember, Bethesda's titles have been, if nothing else, different," he says. "They weren't games to be beaten - they were worlds to live in. Big, ambitious, creative, and offering something I could never get enough of: a first-person perspective.
"For me, first-person meant I was IN the game, part of the world itself. Even today, I prefer 1st over 3rd in most games. See, the promise of virtual reality was always more than the headset - it was the idea that we could truly enter a fully-realized artificial world.
"That's what Bethesda's games gave me. As as dev, that's exactly what I want to give our fans. In a lot of ways, Starfield was me pushing myself to the limit. Pretty sure every other dev on the team would say the same thing."
Speaking on Starfield specifically, Pagliarulo sounds both proud and relieved that it's finally out in the wild. "Having now had time to properly reflect on Starfield, goddamn am I proud of what we achieved. A new world to live in. A brand new IP. The beginning of a new dream. We pulled it off! A lot of it still feels surreal, to be honest. God, I was stressed for 2 years straight."
I think it's safe to say the reaction to Starfield has been largely positive, even if it hasn't yet proven to be the generation-defining RPG Bethesda had likely hoped. Our Starfield review gave it a perfect 5/5-star score and called it "the best thing Bethesda's done since Oblivion," and although not everyone feels the same, Pagliarulo says he's discovered a newfound appreciation for what he does.
"Well, I'll tell you one thing about Starfield - the game's reception has reinvigorated my love of world creation and game development," he says. "And I'm so honored to be making games for the very studio that showed me, so long ago, what it is to truly enter another world."
In almost entirely unrelated and tonally opposite news, a Skyrim player recently spent 20,000 gold buying all the food in the realms, only to eat it all at once and instantly, explosively die.
