Former Bethesda Game Studios lead systems designer Kurt Kuhlmann says he would be “very surprised [if there was a sequel]” to Starfield. His stated reason is that the first game did not earn one. Starfield was “nowhere near successful enough to do a Starfield 2”, he said.
Kuhlmann made the remarks in an on-the-record interview published September 24, 2026. He is speaking only for himself, and none of it is a Bethesda position.
He sounded regretful about it. With “the lessons learned on Starfield”, he said, a sequel “could have been much closer to the game that Todd [Howard] had [in mind]”.
Why this particular former employee is worth hearing
Kuhlmann was lead systems designer on Starfield, and he stayed on the project through to release. Before that he was co-lead designer on Skyrim.
By his own account, he joined Bethesda as a junior designer in 1996, returned in 2003, and was “involved in every major Bethesda game after that point”. His own professional post describes leaving “after 20 years at Bethesda Game Studios”.
The exit was voluntary and happened in 2023. He has said it was “almost certainly time for a change”, citing decisions “filtered through layers of management” as the studio scaled to four remote teams.
He also says Todd Howard verbally promised him the lead design role on The Elder Scrolls VI after Skyrim, and that the promise was never fulfilled. Bethesda declined to comment on that when asked.
One detail is easy to get wrong. That 2023 departure is unrelated to his July 2026 layoff from Lightspeed LA, a different employer, where he was principal world designer.
The design problem he points to
Kuhlmann’s complaint is about coherence rather than ambition. He describes a game where “you can land anywhere you want”, alongside modular spaceships, bases on any planet, and a story with its own cast.
Outposts are his lead example. In Starfield “no one introduces you to the outposts and, for technical reasons, there’s no NPC settlements for them, either”, he said. They “link into resource and crafting systems, but they’re not propped up narratively”.
He is careful about who owns that. Keeping the system in the game “was a decision above me, it wasn’t my decision”, he said, and he does not name who made it.
The success claim cannot be checked
Here is the part readers should weigh most. Neither Bethesda nor Microsoft has ever published a copies-sold or revenue figure for Starfield.
The only public numbers are player counts. Starfield’s official account said the game passed 6 million players the morning after its September 6, 2023 launch, then 10 million about two weeks later.
Those counts include Xbox Game Pass access, not just purchases. So Kuhlmann’s “not successful enough” line has no official yardstick to be measured against, in either direction.
Another former designer expects the opposite
His pessimism is not a consensus among former staff. Bruce Nesmith, Skyrim’s lead designer and a Starfield systems designer, has said publicly that he is “looking forward to Starfield 2”.
Nesmith also argues the game was judged against Bethesda’s reputation rather than on its merits. He called it “a good game” and “a very good game”, just not the one people expected.
That comes with a caveat Kuhlmann does not carry. Nesmith left Starfield two years before completion and never worked on the finished version, so he saw less of how it actually landed.
Nesmith has spoken up on Bethesda’s direction before, including on why the studio avoided New Vegas style Elder Scrolls spinoffs. Both men are describing personal views, not company plans.
What Bethesda and Microsoft have actually said
The company line has been continued support. Shattered Space, the first paid expansion, arrived September 30, 2024, and the free Free Lanes update plus the paid Terran Armada story DLC landed April 7, 2026, the same day Starfield reached PS5.
Howard said in a February 2026 interview that the next major update “is not Starfield 2.0”. He added that there is “more Starfield stuff coming up”, and that it is “something we see continuing for a while”.
Ruling out a 2.0 style overhaul is not the same as ruling out a numbered sequel. No named Bethesda or Microsoft executive has confirmed, denied, or directly addressed a Starfield 2 on the record.
So nothing about a sequel is settled, and Kuhlmann’s view does not settle it. What is not published is the figure that would: no sales or revenue total exists publicly for Starfield, and none has been promised.
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