Starfield Hit the ‘Panic Button’ to Create the Game’s Final Quest in Time

According to the game's lead quest designer, Starfield hit the «panic button» in order to finish its final quest in time for the September 6, 2023 launch date. Starfield has over 1000 planets for players to explore, but the final one in the game, Masada 3, was designed extremely last-minute during the development process.

Starfield has proven to be one of Bethesda's most controversial launches to date. The game performed extremely well with critics, although Starfield wasn't quite as popular with many of its players. This has resulted in dwindling player counts for Bethesda's latest RPG of late. Still, Starfield has a ton of great quests that have that Bethesda magic, but it seems getting to that point was a race against time.

PC Gamer first reported on the quotes, which came from Starfield's lead quest designer Will Shen during a talk at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. Shen, who has since left Bethesda, claimed that «it became very clear that we were missing the large final location that was going to tie the story together and have a satisfying action-filled payoff.» With not enough time to make Starfield's ending satisfying, Shen looked to senior level designer Steve Cornett for help. Cornett was described by Shen as «our panic button,» with the former coming up with the dimension hopping concept. This allowed Starfield to reuse earlier areas of the game in the ending, cutting down the time and resources needed massively.

Shen, alongside Fallout 76's lead quest designer Daryl Brigner, also spoke of the issues created by Bethesda's expansion in recent years, with the team going from around 150 people for Fallout 4, to over 500 for the development of Starfield. Brigner said, «It's more difficult than ever to know who does what, who you're supposed to report to,» and according to Shen, «every department is scrambling for resources and saying 'no' to collaboration requests.» It's interesting to think that despite these issues, the studio has still