Will Starfield 2 ever happen? A former Bethesda developer doesn't think so

Kurt Kuhlmann, Bethesda's former lead systems designer and one of the people behind Starfield, just threw cold water on any hopes for a sequel. His statement is blunt: he'd be "very surprised" to ever see Starfield 2, because "the first one wasn't anywhere near successful enough to do a Starfield 2."

The numbers, to be fair, aren't exactly a flop: 15 million players since launch, a Metacritic score in the 80s, and one million concurrent users at debut. Still, among longtime Bethesda fans Starfield is seen as a step down from Skyrim and Fallout 4 - and the feeling inside the studio doesn't seem to have been all that different.

"We just couldn't really make it happen the way we wanted"

Kuhlmann admits the project's ambition pushed Bethesda outside its comfort zone, to the point that the studio "couldn't really make it" in the shape Todd Howard originally had in mind. He calls it "too bad": with the lessons learned along the way, a hypothetical sequel could have come much closer to that original vision.

Meanwhile Starfield keeps getting support - the Terran Armada expansion and Cruise mode arrived in April alongside the PlayStation 5 launch - but there's still no official word on a real sequel. We'll keep following the story: if Bethesda changes its mind, you'll hear it here first.