Former Bethesda lead artist says he quit during Starfield development because the team had grown too much

A former lead artist at Bethesda says he quit during the development of Starfield because he felt the team had grown too large.

Nate Purkeypile worked at Bethesda for 14 years, during which time he was lead artist on Fallout 76 and worked on other titles including Fallout 3, Fallout 4 and Skyrim. Before that, he worked at Retro Studios where he was a world artist on Metroid Prime 3.

However, Purkeypile left Bethesda in 2021 to form his own solo studio called Just Purkey Games, and has now shared a trailer from his latest game on Reddit, along with comments on why he left Bethesda in the first place (as spotted by PC Gamer).

Purkeypile said that while he enjoyed his time at Bethesda, he left during the development of Starfield because the team size had become far too large in his opinion.

“I know a lot of people have thoughts on Starfield and how it is probably too big, should have been smaller, etc,” he wrote.

“I agree with a lot of that and while I enjoyed working at Bethesda a lot when we were about 65-110 people on Fallout 3 and Skyrim, I enjoyed it a lot less as it grew and grew.

“I had a lot of fun building spaces a lot of you have probably seen like Diamond City, Blackreach [and] Little Lamplight. I was lead artist on Point Lookout and Fallout 76 and more.

“Starfield was about 500 people or so and with four different companies involved (BGS, BGS Austin, BGS Dalls, BGS Montreal), and that’s not including outsourcing. This just wasn’t my style.

“There were so many meetings and it wasn’t the way I liked to build games. I like being able to just move fast and build unique things.”

Purkeypile’s new game, The Axis Unseen, is an open world heavy metal horror game with a map he says is “about 5x the size of Skyrim” and is not procedural, but 100% hand-built”.

Last month Starfield game director Todd Howard said that Bethesda’s games are “irresponsibly large”, claiming that the main reason was how little content is cut.

“My job on the games often is to be the director, a little bit like a movie director,” he said, “where you’re bringing all the parts together from the art, the cinematography, the technology that our engineers are building to bring these worlds to life.

“And obviously, [there’s] all of the writing and the quest design and the level designer, and there’s so many parts to our games that I’m in a really unique position to work with so many amazing people and bring all of that together.”

Smirking, he then added: “Actually, we cut very little from our games at Bethesda, which is why the games are so irresponsibly large.”