Joel Burgess was previously a level designer and broader Bethesda contributor on games like Fallout 3, 4, and 76, as well as Skyrim, so now that he's studio head at new company Soft Rains, there's some "expectation" that the team, which also has Ubisoft and Capybara Games and other talent, might be cooking up a "little Skyrim." Burgess says their debut first-person sci-fi game is something very different, but the team is shooting for a similar sense of creative impact as the team behind Bethesda's legendary RPG.
"The stuff where I was personally most gratified was environments of different scales where – I use this metaphor that we talk about – we want everybody to be able to see their thumbprints on the clay of the game when they step away from it," Burgess tells 12DOVE at a GDC 2025 interview. On Skyrim, which peaked around 95 to 100 people, he says "stuff got built because somebody cared about building it," and that's the type of environment Soft Rains is fostering.
"We knew it was a big game, we knew how to proceed forward, and we created an environment in that game where you had the opportunity to make a difference on the game if you saw a way for you to do it, if you were able to use the tools and get it in and get the right collaboration," he continues. "That was a 100-person team, a big AAA game, but it's also true of when I was working with my friends at Capybara on much smaller things in a classically creative indie sort of environment. I don't think there's necessarily an optimal team size; I think it depends on the team."
Working in huge teams where dynamics and problems become so large that "I need a sociology degree to solve these" isn't a bad way to make games, Burgess says, it's just different, and not necessarily his forte. "Where I'm really happy is, hey, I know what you're good at and I know what you want to be better at but you aren't actually that good at right now, so let's collaborate on something that would challenge that and let you grow in that direction. And looking for that for myself. The dynamic and the scope of the game is gonna decide what the ideal team size is."
"The game that we are building now is different from the game that we thought we would build, you know, two years ago, in terms of some of the core mechanics, the features, the pacing, the style or scope of it," he adds. "But it's still the same game that we always wanted to set up to build in terms of that contemporaneous sci-fi and something that's going to be at a scope and scale that everybody can get their fingers on the clay."
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