Dennis Mejillones, a retired artist who worked on Skyrim, Fallout, and Starfield, says developers at Bethesda were already aware of the vast majority of criticisms that players raised after those games shipped. The comments, from an interview that has been recirculating this week via GamesRadar+, offer a developer’s perspective on a common complaint about Bethesda: that its games launch in unfinished states.
Mejillones said that internal teams flag the same problems players later air publicly, but that constraints prevent every concern from being resolved before release. “I can almost guarantee you that like, 95% of the stuff that players have brought up after a game was launched? Every single developer, just about, has brought [them] up as a concern in the meetings,” he said. “We’re gamers, we’re going to play the game, we play and see the same things that the gamers do.”
Todd Howard’s framing
Mejillones recalled a phrase Todd Howard used repeatedly in those meetings: “We can do anything, but we can’t do everything.” The quote captures a challenge that applies broadly to large open-world games. A project the scale of Starfield involves thousands of decisions about what makes it into a release and what gets cut or deferred. Identifying a problem is the first step; resourcing a fix before a ship date is a separate, harder one.
The argument is not that Bethesda ignores feedback, but that it operates under the same pressures any major publisher-funded studio does. Games need to reach a release date. Not everything on the internal list of concerns can be resolved within the time and budget available.
Fallout 76 as the template
Fallout 76 launched in 2018 to one of the studio’s worst receptions: bugs, missing features, and a multiplayer design that felt incomplete. Bethesda kept supporting the game through years of updates and eventually turned the situation around. It now has a stable player base and generally positive reviews. Mejillones cited it as proof that post-launch commitment matters. “They could’ve dropped the game, they could’ve just let it go, but they didn’t, they kept pushing it and improving it,” he said. “Starfield, same thing, they keep pushing it and trying to update it.”
Starfield’s path is less clear
Whether Starfield follows the same arc is uncertain. Howard has said publicly that the game is unlikely to receive a large-scale 2.0 overhaul of the kind players had hoped might address structural criticisms, including the game’s loading-screen-heavy approach to space travel and its comparatively thin planetary surfaces. The 2024 DLC Shattered Space received mixed reviews. Starfield’s player count on Steam declined sharply after launch and has not recovered to the levels seen in Bethesda’s previous titles.
Mejillones’s broader point, that developers are not indifferent to their games’ shortcomings, pushes back against a narrative that positions studios as unaware or uncaring. The gap between what developers flag in meetings and what ships is a product of time, money, and priority, not of indifference.