Even after devoting 14 years of his career to Bethesd🔴a, Skyrim senior artist says the developer has changed too much for his tastes, and he would never return.
"I can pretty safely say there's not a single day that I've even contemplated going back,"🍃 Purkeypile told Bloomberg in – one of many developers commenting on the freedom and agility that small teams offer in the face of AAA giants. "That scale of production is not necessarily enjoyable for a lot of people. You're v𝕴ery much a cog in the machine."
Things got too overwhelming while he worked as a lead artist on 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Starfield, Bethesda's intergalactic epic with 1,000 planets and a credits sequence that last🔥s 45 minutes. To be a part of Starfield, Purkeypile had to attend ove🐼r 20 meetings a week, Bloomberg reports.
This was a very different Bethesda than the 💫one Purkey🌳pile first joined. While working on Skyrim, Purkeypile's fellow development team was under 100 people — a record for Bethesda at the time – who still made landmark games like Fallout 3 and Oblivion. Purkeypile has said in that, in comparison, Starfield was made by approximately 500 Bethesda developers.
"I think the best stuff that came out of t♔hose games came out of trusting people," Purkeypile says. "To do that, I think you need a smaller, more intimat🌳e team."
Missing that closeness, Purkeypile abandoned ship in 2021. Since then, he's scaled down significantly, from Bethesda's hundreds of developers to just one. As one-man studio Just Purkey Games, Purkeypile recently released "heavy metal horror game" . 👍It's not as massive as Starfield, but few things need to be.
Ashley is a Senior Writer at GamesRadar+. She's been a staff writer at Kotaku and Inverse, too, and she's written freelance pieces about ho🦋rror and women in games for sites like Rolling Stone, Vulture, IGN, and Polygon. When she's not covering gaming news, she's usually working on expanding her doll collection while watching Saw movies one through 11.
