Starfield
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Design Goals
Make gunplay feel more realistic and dynamic
One of our main goals was to make our weapons feel less "gamey" and err on the side of realism when possible. This meant upping the falloff range of bullets, increasing recoil, and making combat more deadly. Our initial implementation led to enemies dying on average in three to five hits, which felt particularly lethal and stood out as quite the change from previous titles. This would last for most of the game production until we upped both player and enemy health near the end of development so that skills and powers could play more of an impact.
Make gunplay flow better and reduce clunkiness
A key concern was that players weren't able to interrupt most actions. This made the game feel clunky and non-responsive. With that in mind, the guiding principle became "prioritize player intent." This meant that if the player wanted to do something - such as start sprinting while reloading - it would interrupt the reload to sprint instead of finishing the reload. This led to a much better gameplay flow during combat.
Give Each Manufacturer's weapons their own personality
With fifty base weapons in Starfield, it would be easy for some to fall by the wayside. To combat that, we wanted to make sure they each had their own unique flavor with their personality tied to their manufacturer.
- Old Earth weapons were less advanced and had the fewest mods, but extremely fun to shoot.
- Allied Armaments were heavier, but more powerful.
- Va'Ruun were mystical-looking and the most powerful, but slow firing.
- Arboron were slick and precise. They also had the single EM-only weapon.
- Kore Kinetics were expensive monster houses of damage, but they ate through ammo like crazy.
- CombaTech had faster fire rates, but did less damage. They also had access to the most mods.
- Laredo were the slowest firing, but the most accurate. They also were less advanced, so they didn't have recon sights.
Make mods feel more important
We wanted players to see a mod on a weapon and think, "I really want that!" To achieve this, we needed to make mods worthwhile and unexpected. This meant introducing new types of mods to the game, such as ammo variants. Additionally, we implemented a novel system where weapons were generated with random mods instead of in previous titles where weapons came with static mod sets. This helped foster a sense of discovery for players as they naturally found new mods and mod combinations during regular gameplay.
Lessons Learned
Making mods more impactful meant the base weapon needed room to grow
To make weapon mods feel like they were more impactful and therefore more attractive to craft, the weapon base stats needed room to grow. Our goal was to make mods give tangible bonuses so that players would easily notice the effect that mod had on their weapon. We originally had made guns very accurate and with much higher recoil, which people loved. But that meant that mods, such as the compensators and ergonomic grips, didn't make any kind of noticeable change unless you were firing at more than 50 meters (which was beyond our targeted distance of engagement). We ended up lowering accuracy across the board, which testers mostly disliked but quickly learned to be okay with once they saw mods appearing on weapons.
Don't make every weapon drop with a mod
We set up modded weapons to drop random mods in different groupings based on the level of the AI and area they were in. This meant low level weapons only had a small chance to drop with a mod or two, but higher level ones ended up dropping often with five or more mods on them. The game director asked to bring the chance of getting a modded weapon from a drop down to 10% from the initial 90% it was originally set at.
At first I disagreed, but over time I realized that was the right call. If you always got a modded weapon from drops, then there'd be little point to go craft more mods. This meant that modded weapon drops also felt more special. In the end, I believe we didn't go far enough and should have dropped the chance down to 5% as it still didn't feel like there was enough reason to craft.
At first I disagreed, but over time I realized that was the right call. If you always got a modded weapon from drops, then there'd be little point to go craft more mods. This meant that modded weapon drops also felt more special. In the end, I believe we didn't go far enough and should have dropped the chance down to 5% as it still didn't feel like there was enough reason to craft.
Make decisions a more collaborative process
Transitioning to the weapons team became a pivotal moment in my career - as I was the only designer on weapons. Before this game I had not been a lead. I had been the only level designer or the primary system designer on a project before, but I was never in a position where I was setting up and leading meetings, helping mentor people, doling out tasks, reviewing work, and giving final say on major design decisions.
At first, I rushed into massive overhauls and proposals, dropping them out of nowhere on the team in our weekly meetings. I needed to approach these topics more gently and not expect people to just jump onboard with whatever I wanted to do because I was the only designer. It became much easier to get people interested when they were involved in the whole process, so I set out to make the weapons team highly collaborative.
Everyone working on weapons was encouraged to voice their opinions on not just their discipline, but design as well. We started daily meetings to look over every single weapon we had. I would lead discussions on what we wanted it to be like, not just what I wanted. Despite taking over a month to get through our vast array of weaponry, the team loved it. I strongly believe that these regular meetings are what led the team to creating such great weapons. This also made the work much more fun and helped bridge the gap of understanding. People now knew what the purpose of each weapon was and why we wanted it that way. This led to faster iteration, less reworks, and a more polished end product.
This also occurred with some of the bigger weapon changes I wanted to do. I didn't want to wait for permission from above for everything I was doing, especially when those decisions could get bottlenecked for weeks. Not wanting to wait around, I realized that if I did the work in a separate work environment and showed off video of it to the team for feedback and iteration, then that'd help get more traction as it'd give the team and those above something more tangible to look at. This increased the chance it'd get approved. Sometimes this didn't work, but often, it helped get things moving by creating comparisons to look at.
At first, I rushed into massive overhauls and proposals, dropping them out of nowhere on the team in our weekly meetings. I needed to approach these topics more gently and not expect people to just jump onboard with whatever I wanted to do because I was the only designer. It became much easier to get people interested when they were involved in the whole process, so I set out to make the weapons team highly collaborative.
Everyone working on weapons was encouraged to voice their opinions on not just their discipline, but design as well. We started daily meetings to look over every single weapon we had. I would lead discussions on what we wanted it to be like, not just what I wanted. Despite taking over a month to get through our vast array of weaponry, the team loved it. I strongly believe that these regular meetings are what led the team to creating such great weapons. This also made the work much more fun and helped bridge the gap of understanding. People now knew what the purpose of each weapon was and why we wanted it that way. This led to faster iteration, less reworks, and a more polished end product.
This also occurred with some of the bigger weapon changes I wanted to do. I didn't want to wait for permission from above for everything I was doing, especially when those decisions could get bottlenecked for weeks. Not wanting to wait around, I realized that if I did the work in a separate work environment and showed off video of it to the team for feedback and iteration, then that'd help get more traction as it'd give the team and those above something more tangible to look at. This increased the chance it'd get approved. Sometimes this didn't work, but often, it helped get things moving by creating comparisons to look at.
Feedback is tricky
There were so many different and important systems in the game that weapons were rarely the focus of a playtest, even though players used weapons nearly every time they jumped into Starfield. This led to our team not getting much feedback from testers. Changes like lowering damage and fire rates on the AA-99 weren't even noticed. The only feedback we would get was when we made sweeping changes, like when we adjusted the accuracy and recoil to make the game feel more realistic.
Eventually, I attributed it to the "no feedback is good feedback" philosophy, but I didn't want to completely rely on that. So I would occasionally make some bigger changes to test the waters on different design ideas, such as temporarily increasing the drop rate of weapons with mods to get people to experience more of them. This would usually get some fun responses in Slack. With games this large though, it can be quite difficult to get the amount of feedback you need during development. Looking back, I should have put more emphasis on getting weapon specific playtests set up instead of relying on feedback from general playtests.
Eventually, I attributed it to the "no feedback is good feedback" philosophy, but I didn't want to completely rely on that. So I would occasionally make some bigger changes to test the waters on different design ideas, such as temporarily increasing the drop rate of weapons with mods to get people to experience more of them. This would usually get some fun responses in Slack. With games this large though, it can be quite difficult to get the amount of feedback you need during development. Looking back, I should have put more emphasis on getting weapon specific playtests set up instead of relying on feedback from general playtests.
Reception
Overall, the reception has been phenomenal. Players and critics alike have said that this has been the best combat in a Bethesda game ever! They've loved the weapons and the gunplay and I'm incredibly proud of the work that the team did on these.