By most metrics, Starfield should be considered a success. At least 15 million players since release. A Metacritic score in the 80s. Enough hype to draw one million concurrent players at launch. Yet it's fair to say that most Bethesda fans consider the space RPG a disappointment – a dramatic comedown from the heights of Skyrim and Fallout 4. In any case, you probably shouldn't count on there being a direct follow-up.

"I would be very surprised [if there was a sequel]," Kurt Kuhlmann, who served as lead systems designer on the game, tells FRVR. "I don't think Starfield was anywhere near successful enough to do a Starfield 2."

Kuhlmann ultimately left Bethesda around Starfield's launch for reasons that went beyond the space game, but he still believes a sequel could better deliver on its promise. "It's, in a way, too bad," he explains, "because I think with the lessons learned on Starfield, a Starfield 2 could have been much closer to the game that Todd [Howard] had [in mind]. You can envision that game, you can imagine that game. That's not quite what Starfield really is."

We know that Todd Howard had been dreaming of a game like Starfield for decades, and it's tough to imagine that the game we got was quite what he had imagined. Sure, it's got moments of brilliance, but those moments are held back in a game which, as Kuhlmann puts it, isn't "fully coherent."

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