Starfield 2 May Never Happen, Says Former Bethesda Developer

Starfield 2 may never happen, at least according to a former Bethesda Game Studios developer who worked directly on the original game. Kirk Coleman, who served as the lead systems designer on Starfield, recently discussed the possibility of a sequel and said he would be very surprised if Bethesda ever moved forward with one.

His reasoning is fairly direct: Starfield simply was not successful enough to justify a second game. "I would be very surprised if there was a sequel," Coleman said. "I don't think Starfield was anywhere near successful enough to do a Starfield 2."

That might sound surprising, considering Starfield has reportedly reached tens of millions of players, but player counts don't necessarily tell the whole story. Since Bethesda is part of Xbox and Starfield is available through Game Pass, Microsoft has generally emphasized player numbers rather than traditional sales figures when discussing the game's performance.

That makes it difficult to determine exactly how many copies Starfield sold.

Bethesda did reveal that the game had reached 17 million players, while other major Bethesda releases have been discussed in terms of much larger sales milestones. Fallout 4, for example, went on to sell tens of millions of copies, while Skyrim has surpassed 60 million copies sold.

Starfield did still make the top 10 best-selling games of 2023, which was already a major year for the industry. However, its long-term player growth appears to have been much slower than at launch. The game reportedly went from around 13 million players to 17 million over roughly a year and a half, with the PlayStation 5 release included in those numbers.

That lack of momentum stands out when compared with other games that significantly changed their reputation through substantial post-launch support. Some players had hoped Bethesda could deliver a similar turnaround with Starfield, but its additional content largely followed the same path established by the base game.

Coleman's comments touch on something more interesting than sales figures.

According to him, Starfield 2 could have potentially been much closer to the game that Todd Howard originally wanted to make. "In a way, it's too bad 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," Coleman explained.

That statement suggests the original Starfield may not have fully achieved Bethesda's creative vision for it. A sequel, with the benefit of everything the studio learned from the first game, could have addressed some of those shortcomings and moved closer to that original idea.

One of the clearest examples Coleman brought up was Starfield's outpost-building system. On paper, the system fits naturally into a game about exploring an enormous galaxy. You can land on planets, gather resources, and construct your own bases across different worlds. The problem is that the system feels detached from the rest of Starfield.

You can build a sprawling outpost, though the main story doesn't really give that system much purpose. The story rarely makes your base feel like a meaningful part of your journey, and the planets you colonize don't become meaningful extensions of the story.

Coleman described the system as something that is "really cool" on its own but does not integrate particularly well with the rest of the game.

That disconnect becomes easier to understand when you look at how Bethesda handled similar mechanics in Fallout 4. Fallout 4's settlement system had a clear relationship with the game's setting. You rebuilt parts of a devastated wasteland, collected materials, constructed settlements, and brought people into those locations. Even if you never spent much time building settlements, the mechanic had a reason to exist within Fallout 4's world. It fit the game's post-apocalyptic setting and the idea of rebuilding civilization.

Starfield has none of that synergy between its building mechanics and narrative. The game allows you to build outposts on planets, but the wider story doesn't really focus on humanity spreading and building permanent settlements across the galaxy.

That makes the feature feel more like an isolated system than an important part of Starfield's larger design.

The same problem shows up elsewhere in Starfield. The game was built around a huge amount of procedural generation, giving you countless planets and locations to explore. But that massive scale doesn't always translate into meaningful exploration. You're free to explore planets and land in a variety of places, but much of what you discover can feel detached from the handcrafted quests and characters that make Bethesda's other games so memorable.

This was part of the wider criticism surrounding Starfield after launch. The game arrived with extremely high expectations because of Bethesda's reputation and the popularity of franchises such as Skyrim and Fallout. After release, much of the discussion focused on its procedural worlds, exploration, combat, bugs, quest design, and how its different systems fit together. Rather than being a problem with one mechanic, the criticism often came back to the feeling that Starfield's individual systems didn't always work toward the same overall experience.

Post-launch support did little to change that conversation completely.

The game continued to receive updates, but some recurring bugs reportedly remained an issue despite previous fixes. One example involved an asteroid becoming attached to a player's ship; the problem was reportedly addressed multiple times but continued to appear for some players.

The time between the game's release and later content also gave those criticisms plenty of time to stay in the conversation. Shattered Space tried to expand the game's lore through House Va'ruun, while Terran Armada added more to Starfield's story and gameplay.

Neither expansion, however, produced the kind of major resurgence that would have fundamentally changed the game's long-term position. Critique of the expansions also shifted to their stories and dialogue, with some players feeling they didn't provide enough narrative depth to make returning to Starfield worthwhile.

That matters because Starfield's identity is so wrapped up in its universe and its promise of exploration. If additional stories and locations do not make that universe feel more meaningful, they have a harder time giving players a reason to return. This all feeds into the question of whether Starfield has a future as a franchise.

Coleman's comments do not mean that Bethesda has officially canceled Starfield 2, because there is no indication that such a project was ever formally announced. His statement is his assessment of the situation based on his experience working at the studio. Still, his comments provide an interesting perspective because he worked directly on the original game. He believes the lessons learned from Starfield could have created a significantly different sequel.

That possibility makes Starfield 2 interesting, even if it is unlikely to happen anytime soon.

The first game established the technology, setting, and basic gameplay systems. A sequel could have refined those systems rather than introducing them, made the relationship between planets and the main story more meaningful, and integrated the outpost system into the broader game rather than leaving it largely optional.

The promise of Starfield was never simply to provide another Bethesda role-playing game. It was supposed to take the studio's familiar approach to exploration and freedom and move it into space. You could travel between planets, explore new locations, build outposts, customize ships, and interact with different factions. The scale was supposed to be one of the game's biggest strengths.

But scale can also become a weakness when the parts don't connect. A smaller, more focused world can make exploration feel meaningful because the locations relate to one another. In Starfield, the enormous number of planets can sometimes make individual discoveries feel less significant.

It could also have made the outpost system more important. Instead of being something you build because the game lets you, settlements could have been tied directly to quests, factions, resources, and the expansion of human civilization. That would have given the mechanic a clear purpose and let it become part of the game's identity rather than an optional side system.

The larger lesson from Starfield is that Bethesda had plenty of individual ideas, but not all of them were connected as strongly as they could have been.

You can build an outpost, customize a ship, explore planets, and complete faction quests, but those activities do not always feed into each other. A sequel could have taken those existing ideas and built a more cohesive experience around them.

There is also the practical issue of Bethesda's development priorities. So the studio is mainly working on The Elder Scrolls 6, but Starfield is still getting updates and more content. Bethesda's big projects take years to develop, and another Starfield game would require significant resources and time. Choosing Starfield 2 would also mean delaying another major project even further.

The original Starfield already took years to arrive, and its development was significant enough that The Elder Scrolls 6 remained in the background for much of that period. If the first game had become the kind of long-term success Bethesda expected, continuing the franchise would have been easier to justify. But if its long-term engagement and expansion performance didn't meet those expectations, committing to another full-scale sequel becomes much harder.

However, Bethesda has other priorities right now, with The Elder Scrolls 6 still high on the list. Starfield is an ongoing game with updates and more content, but a full sequel is still up in the air. Coleman's comments are therefore less about an official cancellation and more about what the current situation suggests. Starfield reached millions of players, but its long-term momentum and post-launch performance didn't seem to build the kind of foundation that would make a sequel an obvious next step.

Perhaps most interestingly, according to someone who worked on the game, Starfield 2 could have been the game that finally delivered on the original idea.

A second attempt could have taken the systems that worked, refined the ones that did not, connected exploration with the story, given outposts an actual purpose, and created a more cohesive version of Bethesda's vision for a space RPG.

For now, though, that remains hypothetical. Starfield exists as the first and only entry in the series, while Bethesda looks toward its other long-running franchises. If Coleman is right, the lessons learned from Starfield may influence Bethesda's future games without ever being used to create Starfield 2.