If you happen to’ve performed a Bethesda RPG prior to now decade you have seen loads of Nate Purkeypile’s work. The developer labored as a world/lighting artist on Fallout 3, Fallout 4, and Skyrim, was lead artist on Fallout 76, and designed a number of iconic areas like Diamond Metropolis, Little Lamplight, and Paradise Falls.
Purkeypile additionally labored on Starfield as lead lighting artist and senior world artist, however left Bethesda within the midst of the area RPG’s improvement to discovered his personal studio, Simply Purkey Video games—as a result of he is now basically a solo dev. His first sport, The Axis Unseen, is wanting nice thus far, a heavy steel bowhunting horror sport that performs like if you happen to made a complete sport out of Skyrim’s stealth archer playstyle.
At this time Purkeypile posted a trailer for The Axis Unseen on Reddit (embedded beneath), and opened up somewhat about not simply why he left Bethesda, however why he left throughout the improvement of Starfield particularly.
“I do know lots of people have ideas on Starfield and the way it’s in all probability too huge, ought to have been smaller,” Purkeypile mentioned. “I agree with quite a lot of that and whereas I loved working at Bethesda lots after we had been about 65-110 individuals on Fallout 3 and Skyrim, I loved it lots much less because it grew and grew.”
Purkeypile mentioned the variety of builders at Bethesda throughout Starfield’s improvement had exploded since its Skyrim and Fallout days. “Starfield was about 500 individuals or so and with 4 totally different firms concerned (BGS, BGS Austin, BGS Dallas, BGS Montreal), and that is not together with outsourcing.
“This simply wasn’t my model,” he mentioned. “There have been so many conferences and it wasn’t the way in which I favored to construct video games.”
This is not the primary time we have heard about how Bethesda’s development through the years has induced points for a few of its staff members. As we discovered earlier this yr from former Bethesda builders Will Shen (Starfield’s lead quest designer) and Daryl Brigner (Fallout 76 lead stage designer), Bethesda’s dimension may make it powerful to coordinate with different builders, and even know who your boss was.
“It is tougher than ever to know who does what, who you are imagined to report back to,” Brigner mentioned at GDC in March of 2024. Shen agreed, saying “each division is scrambling for sources and saying ‘no’ to collaboration requests,” and even minor requests had been difficult: “Asking for one thing so simple as a chair wasn’t so easy. Do you want animations for it? Do you want sound results for it? How a lot does that add to the schedule, can it not match as a result of a type of groups doesn’t have the time?”
Purkeypile give up Bethesda in 2021 within the midst of Starfield’s improvement. “I at all times cherished indie video games and I figured, if I did not do it now, I possibly by no means would,” he mentioned. Utilizing Unreal 5, he created The Axis Unseen, a world that’s “not procedural, however 100% hand-built. The map is about 5x the scale of Skyrim, however I attempted one thing smaller and it did not work very effectively.”
Ted lately received his palms on a demo and is fairly stoked for the total sport. “The whole lot seems like heavy steel album artwork in The Axis Unseen, a world of cryptic sandstone statues and large skeletons lurching out of the bottom,” he mentioned. You’ll be able to attempt the demo for your self on Steam, and take a look at the trailer beneath.
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