It seems silly to be talking about a game this far out from its potential launch – and I can appreciate that. However, I find myself with things to say about The Elder Scrolls VI, in part to expand upon something I touched on earlier in the year when discussing Starfield’s absolutely disgusting microtransaction marketplace, and with news breaking in 2024 that Bethesda Game Studios is ramping up development on The Elder Scrolls VI… well, it can’t hurt to share my thoughts at this early stage, right?
Let’s briefly re-tread some ground so we’re all on the same page. The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind is one of my favourite games of all-time, and I also enjoyed Oblivion, Skyrim, and Bethesda’s entries in the Fallout series. In 2023, I got swept up in the hype for Starfield… only to crash and burn on that game pretty quickly when I found it to be last-gen, small, and basically just boring. I am not any kind of “hater” of Bethesda or their games – and I’m definitely not trying to pick on any individual developers, producers, or creative folks. I approach this subject as someone who desperately wants to enjoy The Elder Scrolls VI… but I feel so incredibly turned off the game at this early stage that it would take a miracle to even convince me to play it.
Morrowind is one of my favourite games of all-time.
The Elder Scrolls VI feels vulnerable right now. Bethesda is, to be frank, coming off not just one poorly-received game… but a decade’s worth. Fallout 4, while enjoyable enough, is generally considered to be less impressive than its predecessor, with fans proclaiming Obsidian’s spin-off Fallout New Vegas as the “best” entry in that series since Bethesda acquired the license. Fallout 76 has, to my surprise I will admit, clawed back some players and gone some way to rehabilitating its reputation as a multiplayer title… but it launched in such a shockingly poor state that there was a very low bar. And then we come to Starfield and its Shattered Space expansion.
Starfield was the game that, for me, hammered home how little Bethesda has learned and how unwilling the company is to adapt and evolve. Starfield was built on the creaking reanimated corpse of a twenty-five-year-old game engine… and it showed. Massively outdated gameplay was compounded by weak world-building and an uninspired and incomplete main quest – leading me to uninstall the game after a meagre thirty hours of gameplay. I was then massively disappointed to see Bethesda add paid mods and microtransactions to this single-player title.
Starfield has led to me feeling sceptical about Bethesda’s next game.
The microtransactions really stand out to me. They reveal how Bethesda sees Starfield – and by extension, how the company will presumably treat The Elder Scrolls VI, too. Instead of making a complete game with an expansion or two – like they used to do in the Morrowind days – Bethesda sees its games as platforms for every shitty monetisation trend going. Starfield’s in-game marketplace looks like something out of a free-to-play mobile game, complete with an in-game currency that has an awkward exchange rate, tiny packs of massively overpriced skins and cosmetic items, and even whole missions locked behind a paywall. I was disgusted to see the game descend so quickly into this overly-monetised mess – even more so because Bethesda hid the extent of microtransactions during Starfield’s important first few months on sale.
Paid mods will have to be the subject of a longer piece one day, but for now it’s sufficient to say that I’m not a supporter of the idea and never have been. But to see Bethesda greedily trying to grab even more money for something they didn’t even make… it makes me sick to my stomach to see how ridiculous Starfield’s in-game marketplace is.
One of Starfield’s many microtransactions.
And that, I’m afraid, has completely changed how I feel about The Elder Scrolls VI.
I could have written off Starfield as an unsuccessful experiment; a game with some good ideas but that was let down by an overreliance on outdated tech and poor world-building that never succeeded at generating that sense of scale that a game set in space needs to have. I would have been content to put Starfield back on the digital shelf and see what Bethesda could do with the next entry in a series that I have a genuine fondness for.
There would still have been concerns, of course. The Creation Engine is so outdated that using it for yet another game feels like a seriously bad idea, one that could harm The Elder Scrolls VI immeasurably. But I would have looked past that if the story and world-building were good enough – just as I can look past the jankiness of titles like Morrowind.
Bethesda’s insistence on retaining the outdated Creation Engine was always going to be a cause for concern.
But having seen the microtransaction hell-hole that Bethesda created, paywalling off little packages of content left, right, and centre in a game that – let’s be blunt – wasn’t exactly brimming with content to begin with… I feel increasingly sure that that’s how the company plans to make games from now on. The Elder Scrolls VI may launch with no microtransactions, but if it follows the Starfield pattern they’ll be added in within the game’s first few months – and you can expect to pay extra for anything from a shiny new pair of boots to an entire questline or faction.
I loathe this approach to single-player games, and I really don’t think it’s too much to ask for to be able to buy and play a complete game. Look at other titles in the single-player action/RPG space: Cyberpunk 2077, Elden Ring, Kingdom Come: Deliverance, Baldur’s Gate 3… what do they all have in common? They might have an expansion pack or two, but they don’t paywall fan-made mods, they don’t make you pay for in-game currency, and they don’t try to sell you skins, cosmetic items, and missions.
If Baldur’s Gate 3 can succeed and turn a profit without microtransactions, why can’t Bethesda’s games?
But that’s just my personal take on Bethesda, Starfield, and how I feel about The Elder Scrolls VI. There’s more to say – and I think there are legitimate reasons for Microsoft and Bethesda to worry about the prospects of this game as it’s currently envisioned.
Starfield was in development for a long time – and Bethesda, over the past few years, has taken anywhere from four to six years on development. Rumours abound that Starfield was forcibly delayed by Microsoft in order to quash as many bugs as possible, with perhaps as much as a year of “polish” and bug-fixing after the game’s primary development was complete. It doesn’t seem unreasonable to me to think a similar five- or six-year timeframe is likely for The Elder Scrolls VI.
Starfield took Bethesda years to create.
If we generously assume that Bethesda jump-started full development on The Elder Scrolls VI the second Starfield was out the door in September 2023, that puts the game’s potential launch in late 2028 or even 2029. Forget these so-called “rumours” of a 2026 launch… that seems like a total fantasy to me. It will take time to develop a game like this… and if I dare to hope, Bethesda may be taking on board feedback from Starfield and perhaps making some changes – like reducing the need for loading screens in between areas – which may make things take even longer.
So what else might be happening in 2028 or 2029? Well… in 2024 we’re about halfway through the current generation of home consoles, right? It doesn’t seem impossible to me that the PlayStation 6 and perhaps a new Xbox console could be targeting a 2028 or 2029 launch; I’d be surprised if we don’t see the next generation of home consoles before the end of the decade. With a new console generation there will be new games – and new improvements to graphical fidelity and gameplay. That doesn’t bode well for a game that’s being created on underlying technology that will be thirty years out of date by the time it launches.
By the time The Elders Scrolls VI is ready, a new generation of home consoles could already be on the way. Pictured: A PlayStation 2 Emotion Engine chip.
I’m not saying that The Elder Scrolls VI will be exclusive to next-gen hardware; I think it’s almost guaranteed that it’ll launch on the Xbox Series S and X – with the possibility, perhaps, of a deal to bring it to PlayStation 5 further down the line. But what I am saying is that, if the game arrives in 2028 or 2029 as predicted above, it’ll be landing in a very competitive marketplace, one where people are beginning to get hyped for new consoles – or where new consoles may even have launched.
That isn’t to say being late to the party in a console generation is always a bad thing. The Last Of Us was one of the final PlayStation 3 exclusives, for example, and it launched to critical and commercial acclaim. Microsoft could well be hoping that The Elder Scrolls VI will net Xbox a late consolation goal – ending a troubled console generation on a high note. That’s a good aspiration to have, I guess.
Is Microsoft banking on The Elder Scrolls VI to see out this generation with a bang?
But even if the PlayStation 6 and the next Xbox aren’t out by the time The Elder Scrolls VI launches, it’s quite possible that players will already be seeing trailers and teasers for those consoles’ launch titles – and those games could look bigger, better, and much more visually impressive than anything Bethesda is capable of. The Elder Scrolls VI could seem underwhelming or disappointing to an audience already preparing to move on from this console generation.
There’s also a perception – an incorrect one, but one that Bethesda inflicted upon itself – that The Elder Scrolls VI has been in development since 2018. While it’s true that early pre-production was going on during Starfield’s development, it simply won’t be true in 2028 that this game “took ten years to make.” But I already see this idea taking root, and even some commentators and critics who should know better have been talking about The Elder Scrolls VI as a game that’s been in development since 2018.
The Elder Scrolls VI was announced in 2018.
By announcing The Elder Scrolls VI so early, before any major work had been done on the game, Bethesda has set some dangerously wrong expectations. If the game is bad – or even if it’s good but not great – people will ask “what did you waste ten years doing?” or “how did a game this mid take a decade to make?” There’s nothing that can be done about that now; the 2018 announcement is out there and has been part of the gaming landscape for six years at this point. But it was an own goal from Bethesda; the company shouldn’t have rushed to announce a game that they weren’t actively working on and that they knew wouldn’t be ready any time soon.
Skyrim is, for many folks, Bethesda’s high-water mark. It was a landmark title that did a lot for the fantasy genre in gaming as well as action/RPGs. There hasn’t been a new mainline Elder Scrolls game since 2011; by 2028 we’ll be closing in on Skyrim’s 20th anniversary. Such a huge gap in between games brings with it its own expectations, and players will expect to see genuine improvements in everything from combat and exploration to world-building and voice acting. Failing to live up to those expectations will cause the game to suffer – and if there’s a gulf in between player expectations and reality, that could be catastrophic.
“Walk on, brave explorer.”
Bethesda is also a company that I would argue massively over-promises – to the point where some statements in the run-up to Starfield’s launch felt borderline deceptive. Remember “walk on, brave explorer?” Well, it turned out you could “walk on” for about ten minutes before hitting an invisible wall… which wasn’t exactly a great look. You can shout at me till you’re blue in the face that technically nothing they said was an out-and-out lie, but there’s no doubt in my mind that Starfield’s marketing was mishandled and that Bethesda deliberately encouraged excessive hype – hype that ultimately ended up harming many players’ enjoyment of the game.
The Elder Scrolls VI needs to be marketed fairly and honestly – even if it’s not actually that good! The basic job of marketing is to show a product in the best possible light, but it’s also incumbent upon a good marketing department not to set incorrect expectations nor allow hype to get out of control. That happened with Starfield, and the result was that too many players crashed down to earth pretty quickly when they hit the game’s limitations – and loading screens.
It must be some kind of visual metaphor…
For me, The Elder Scrolls VI is – at best – a game I’m going to wait a year to decide on after it launches. Bethesda was duplicitous with Starfield’s microtransactions and paid mods, concealing them as best they could during the game’s first few months on sale – and while reviews were being written – before adding them in later. If Bethesda won’t explicitly commit to having no such marketplace in The Elder Scrolls VI, then I’m going to wait at least a year to see if they add one in and how bad it is. If it’s anything like Starfield, I really don’t think anyone will be able to convince me to play it.
But there are other reasons to be sceptical of this game. Bethesda’s refusal to modernise – in terms of the underlying game engine as well as in both writing and game design – left Starfield feeling decidedly out of date; a game surpassed in so many ways not only by its contemporaries, but by games that were several years old by 2023. Without major changes internally, I worry that The Elder Scrolls VI will be in the same boat. If that’s what fans want – and some fans will clearly be satisfied with “just” another Bethesda game that’s no different from all the others – then that’s okay, I guess. But when I look ahead to the second half of the 2020s and beyond, I hope and expect to see improvements in game design… improvements that Bethesda has shown absolutely no signs of making.
Bethesda doesn’t seem to have learned anything from its competitors in the action/RPG space. Pictured: The Witcher 3 from CD Projekt Red
So that’s where I am when it comes to The Elder Scrolls VI… at least at this early stage. There are red flags galore and plenty of reasons to leave this game on the shelf, even if it launches to positive reviews. And after a difficult few years for Bethesda – a decade, basically, in which their least-bad title is arguably Fallout 76 – there is a lot riding on the success of The Elder Scrolls VI. Despite Starfield’s issues, its mediocre reviews, and a player base that seems to have largely deserted the game, Microsoft seems content at this stage to let Bethesda do its thing and push ahead with The Elder Scrolls VI. I find it impossible to think that Microsoft and Xbox will tolerate another disappointment on that scale, though.
Bethesda may have earned some goodwill through publishing titles like Doom Eternal and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle – the latter having become a surprise hit just this month. But the company’s development arm is struggling, and Microsoft has shown it can be brutal when it comes to shutting down studios that fail to deliver. It’s incredibly important for Bethesda that they get this right.
The Elder Scrolls VI is currently in development and will release on PC and Xbox Series consoles at an unknown future date. The Elder Scroll series, Starfield, and other properties discussed above are the copyright of Bethesda Softworks, ZeniMax Media, Inc., and/or Microsoft. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
Spoiler Warning: There are spoilers ahead for Starfield’s main quest – including its ending.
I know, I know: I keep telling you that I’m “done” talking about Starfield… only to pop up again a few weeks later with another new article or something else to add! So perhaps I’d better stop saying that this will be my last-ever piece about Starfield and just take it as it comes!
Over the past couple of weeks, Starfield has come back into focus for me. The recent Fallout television series has seen a surge of interest in Bethesda’s other sci-fi property, with both Fallout 76 and Fallout 4 seeing massive player numbers in April 2024. Both games were already running ahead of Starfield – which seems to have dropped out of the charts altogether by this point – but with talk of Bethesda potentially greenlighting some new Fallout project to tie in with the second season of the show, it really puts into perspective how far Starfield has fallen.
Don’t forget to check out my review of the Fallout TV series, by the way. You can find it by clicking or tapping here.
The Fallout TV series has given a big boost to the games.
So here’s the deal: if you’ve read my first impressions of the game, or any of my other post-launch articles, you’ll know that I was underwhelmed by Starfield. There were elements of the game that had potential – but none that truly lived up to the hype. I didn’t hate Starfield by any means, and when I looked back at the worst or most disappointing gaming experiences of 2023, it didn’t seem fair to include it there, either. But the game was clearly not all it could’ve been.
Today, what I’d like to do is throw out a few of my (totally unsolicited) ideas for how Starfield could be improved. None of these are “magic bullets” capable of turning the game into a 10/10 perfect experience. I think that ship has sailed! But even within the confines of Starfield’s limitations, there are ways in which the game could be improved to make it worth returning to. I’m not proposing a total overhaul or re-making of the game, nor am I asking for something totally unrealistic like a brand-new main quest or recreating the game in a new engine. Instead, I’m trying to propose reasonable changes to certain systems or additions that wouldn’t undermine or fundamentally break the game as it currently exists.
My character on the surface of an icy moon.
If that sounds like something you’re interested in, let me begin with my usual caveats! First of all, I have no “insider information.” I’m not trying to claim that anything discussed below can, will, or must be included in a future update or expansion for Starfield. This is a wishlist from an ex-player, and nothing more.
Secondly, all of this is my entirely subjective opinion. If you loved Starfield in its original form, think the game is utterly irredeemable, or just hate all of my suggestions, that’s totally okay! There’s plenty of room in the Starfield and Bethesda fan communities for polite discussion and disagreement – and we don’t need to get into an argument about hypothetical ideas for the game that Bethesda may never include.
With all of that out of the way, let’s get started!
Number One: Empty Planets.
A man-made structure on a random planet.
Considering that one of the biggest complaints I repeatedly hear about Starfield is that “too many of the planets are empty and boring,” this might seem counter-intuitive. But bear with me, because I genuinely believe that making a portion of the game’s planets completely empty would be a significant improvement.
One of the things I wanted most of all from a game like Starfield was the sense of going “where no man has gone before,” and being the first person to set foot in an alien landscape. Like a Starfleet officer, I wanted to explore the galaxy – after all, isn’t that supposed to be the mission of Constellation, the main faction that players are forced to join in Starfield?
Landing on a planet where people have already been – and are still actively living – isn’t really “exploration,” is it?
But instead, the way Bethesda chose to create planets has meant that there are none – literally zero – that are empty. Humans have set foot on all of Starfield’s 1,000 planets, and it’s completely impossible to pick a landing zone that doesn’t already have pre-made structures, points of interest, shipwrecks, spaceship landing sites, and more. Any chance to feel like a bona fide explorer was lost… and for me, one of the single most crucial elements of a “space game” melted away as I came to realise that.
Empty planets in Starfield could serve a variety of purposes. Building outposts and habitats is one – because honestly, who wants to build their dream home or pirate base a few metres away from a spacer hideout, a commonly-used landing site, and an abandoned research tower? Such worlds could also contain more resources – and with a potential overhaul to the way resources are collected and used in-game, becoming a miner or space-trucker could become viable in-game career options.
Scanning a planetary body from orbit.
I loved the idea of finding a desolate planet, far away from civilisation, and building my luxury space penthouse there. I loved the idea of hopping from world to world, collecting rare resources that could be sold or traded, and upgrading my ship so that I could carry more and more cargo. Starfield offers the illusion of this through “mission boards,” but these are so barebones and non-interactive that they hardly even count.
I’d take the core of the Settled Systems – worlds around Sol, Alpha Centauri, and Cheyenne – and leave them more or less as they are. But the further out players get from those core worlds with their bigger settlements, the greater the number of genuinely empty planets there should be. I think this change could work wonders for Starfield, especially if it were to be combined with some of the other suggestions and proposals on this list.
Number Two: New and Modified “Points of Interest,” Including Different Variants.
Arriving at a “deserted biotics lab.”
Within my first few hours of playing Starfield, I’d been to the same “abandoned research tower” and the same “abandoned mine” four or five times each. I hoped that I was just unlucky – that there were many more of these copy-and-paste structures out there and I’d just run into the same couple of them a few times. But there really are only a few of these – some of which don’t have much going on. Considering how big the game is and how Bethesda expected players to want to spend hundreds of hours playing Starfield over the span of a decade, that’s pretty poor, and has been a huge weight around Starfield’s neck.
What the game desperately needs is many, many more of these so-called “points of interest.” Just to start, I’d say there ought to be four times as many as there currently are, and every free update should be adding new ones on top of that. But even if that were to happen, the fact that all of these structures – and everything within – are literally identical from one appearance to the next means that further changes are needed.
Discovering another copy-and-paste location.
So here’s my next proposal: each point of interest should come with multiple variants. I wouldn’t mind encountering the same structure half as much if the NPCs and loot contained within were in different configurations every time! It would make approaching one of these structures feel a bit more tense, too – you wouldn’t know whether you were about to encounter friendly NPCs, hostile enemies, alien monsters, or something else.
Taking the “abandoned research tower” as an example (because I played through several of those!) Here are some variant ideas: one variant could be the same as it is now, with hostile pirate NPCs having made the tower into their base. A second variant could contain scientists and researchers, perhaps even with a quest-giver to provide radiant quests or missions on the planet. A third could also have scientists, but be guarded by soldiers belonging to one faction or another, with players who haven’t gained enough ranks in that faction being turned away… or having to sneak in! A fourth variant could be totally empty, but with audio logs and notes suggesting something bad happened. A fifth could be filled with terrormorphs or other hostile monsters. And so on. How much more interesting would it be to approach an “abandoned research tower” if you didn’t know which variant you were going to get?
A non-hostile NPC at a random location.
There could also be unique once-per-playthrough points of interest that still appear at random but are never repeated. These could be variants of common structures or complete one-offs – ideally a mix of both. Some might spawn randomly on a certain planet or only in a certain biome, and others could be 100% random, with exclusive loot or quests to participate in. Clues could be left behind in the world to guide players to their locations.
In any case, one of the biggest things holding Starfield back is the incredibly repetitive dungeons/points of interest. I don’t think they can be entirely scrubbed from the game due to the way it’s made, but even just adding new and different variants of the current points of interest would be a start. Creating brand-new ones to add to the game ought to be a priority, too.
Number Three: Changes to the Ship-Builder. (Part One)
Starfield’s ship-building system.
Starfield’s ship-builder is one of the game’s best features… but it’s imperfect, finicky, and in serious need of some quality-of-life improvements. Firstly, it’s a pain in the arse to have to trek from one vendor to another to be able to design my ship exactly how I’d like it! Enabling players to access all ship parts at all vendors – or to unlock different constructors’ parts and use them from that point on – would massively improve the ship-building experience.
Being able to unlock different parts or groups of parts and then use them at all ship-building stations would be a massive improvement, one that this otherwise decent system desperately needs. The easiest way, I think, would be for each manufacturer to grant players a “license” (or other in-game jargon) for their pieces, permanently unlocking them. This would mean that players would still have to work to unlock all the different parts; they wouldn’t just be there by default. But it would also mean that there’d be no need to keep travelling between star stations and planets to add one component that’s only available in one location.
It’s a pain to have to continually travel between locations to access all of the different spaceship components.
Secondly, I’d want to see Starfield combine its interior decorating – which is currently only present in the outpost builder – with ship-building. This could be optional, meaning that players who aren’t interested wouldn’t have to participate. But one area of the ship-builder that I felt really let down the whole system was the lack of interior customisation.
It’s possible for players to drop items aboard their ship and have them remain where they fall – something that was epitomised by “sandwich lady” in the Starfield Direct marketing broadcast. But this is a Bethesda game hallmark that’s been present since Morrowind… and it hasn’t been improved in any way for almost a quarter of a century. Not only that, but any modification to a ship – even if those modifications don’t change the interior or layout in any way – would lead to all items being removed and dumped in the ship’s inventory. So even that very, very basic amount of interior customisation comes with a massive downside!
It’s possible to drop and clumsily reposition items on your ship – like this wooden duck.
At the very least, I’d like to be able to choose colours for the walls, floors, and doors, as well as choose where doors and hatches in between modules will appear. At present, there are only pre-set colours and doors appear at random; this should be easily added with a modicum of effort!
If I dared to dream, I’d like to see furniture options for each module, posters and wall art to decorate the ship, and everything from rugs to kitchen appliances, all with different designs and colour variants to choose from. One of the disappointing things for me was that, despite making my ship look the way I wanted from the outside, it never really felt like “mine” when I was exploring the inside. There was a half-eaten sandwich on a table that my character didn’t bite. There were math equations on a whiteboard in my captain’s cabin that I didn’t write. And I would have never chosen such a ghastly colour scheme!
Number Four: Changes to the Ship-Builder. (Part Two)
The ship services technician on Akila.
Sticking with Starfield’s ship-builder, there are a few more places where I think improvements could be made. Firstly, having to manually “assign” weapons is finicky and annoying, and there has got to be a better way to do this. Ideally, weapons would be automatically assigned as soon as they’re added to a ship, with the same slot always being used for the same weapon type. Heck, there are only four types of shipboard weapons in the game – so ensuring that each one is always assigned the same button shouldn’t be that difficult!
Secondly, adding the option to rotate ship pieces would be nice. Maybe not every single piece would need to be rotatable – engines, for instance, as well as cockpits might be tricky. But some layouts might work better a different way around, and being able to have some hab modules running “sideways” could open up a lot more combinations. There are also visual and aesthetic reasons for wanting to be able to rotate certain ship pieces – and this must surely be achievable without ruining the ship-builder!
Having to manually “assign” weapons is a pain in the arse.
It would also be great if there was some way to preview how different ship pieces look on the inside without having to buy them. The in-game descriptions of the likes of the brig and armoury are pretty barebones, and it’s only after purchasing an expensive hab and installing it that players actually get to see what it looks like. If the look isn’t right, if it doesn’t match the rest of the ship, or if it doesn’t do what players had been expecting… it can end up being a waste of time and credits.
This could be combined with the interior decorating and doorway positioning additions that I suggested above. The preview window could show different colour variants, for instance, and also allow players to choose where to place hatches, doorways, and even ladders.
Adding a new module in the ship-builder.
Finally, if players have a particular ship component on another vessel in their fleet, it should be possible – somehow – to swap parts between ships. Even if removing a part from one ship to add it to another made the first ship un-spaceworthy, if that wasn’t the player’s currently-assigned ship, then it should be okay. It seems silly to allow players to amass a fleet of ships that could have perfectly usable components, but be unable to swap them between different vessels in the fleet. Having to buy the same part more than once – especially if other ships are unused and just sitting there – feels like something that could be avoided.
The ship-builder is definitely one of the better game modes that Starfield introduced, building on the likes of Fallout 4′s settlement system. But there are ways in which it could be improved, allowing players to really make their ship into the flying home of their dreams!
Number Five: Alternate Starting Points for Different Character Backgrounds.
Every character starts here – regardless of how they’re set up.
It never made a lot of sense to me that a xenobiologist, a professor, or a diplomat would have ended up working in a mine. Sure, an ex-soldier or a criminal on the run might’ve taken a gig like that… but some of Starfield’s backgrounds just don’t gel with the game’s opening act. Rather than changing the entire opening (starting from a prison cell would’ve worked better, IMHO) perhaps Bethesda could add just a couple of alternate starts to account for some of these different backgrounds.
Look at what Cyberpunk 2077 did with its life paths as an example. There are three different starts in that game, each of which sees V living a different life in a different place. They all come together to kick-start the main storyline, but the journey to that point is pretty different. Even though the life paths don’t matter once the game gets going (there’s one mission apiece midway through, but they were pretty basic and uninteresting), the way the game begins offers players a different role-playing experience.
Starfield could offer alternate starts that work similarly to Cyberpunk 2077′s life paths.
Each Starfield starting point could still see players grabbing an artefact on the mining planet of Vectera if that’s important to Bethesda, but how players get to that point could change depending on which start was chosen. For example, players who wanted to imagine their character as a spacefarer could begin in space, landing on the planet to transport the unearthed artefact to New Atlantis. Or players could begin working in the mine’s laboratory, studying the artefact.
I’d also like to see at least one starting point that didn’t force players down the Constellation/main quest route immediately. Players could choose not to engage with the artefact, for instance, or could choose not to accept Barrett’s offer. After the pirate attack on Vectera, players could commandeer the pirate ship instead of being given the Frontier. These are just a few ideas off the top of my head!
Many of the available backgrounds don’t line up with working in a mine at the beginning of the game.
I don’t think Bethesda would need to go overboard here. There could be two or three mining-adjacent roles that could see players on Vectera in just the right place at just the right time to pick up the artefact. But these could be different enough from one another to take into account the different player backgrounds on offer in Starfield, which is something that I think would make a lot more sense.
If nothing else, adding a couple of alternate starting points would add to the game’s replayability, as it has for Cyberpunk 2077. There are ways to implement something like this without radically changing the game’s main story or even its opening act, and when it comes to the role-playing side of things – the side that makes me want to lose myself in a character and their fictional world – it would be a huge improvement.
Number Six: Make In-Game Careers Viable.
I was unimpressed with Starfield’s mission boards.
One of the things I love to do in a big open-world game is to step away from the main story and get lost in the world. In order to do that, my character needs to be more than just a generic adventurer… so in-game career options need to exist. And no, I don’t mean getting a job with one of the factions that quickly sees the player character climb the ladder to become its leader! I mean jobs that are off to one side, not really connected to any of the main questlines.
For example, it could be possible to be an explorer: charting unexplored and unvisited planets. Players could send probes to the surface, like in Mass Effect 2, to scout landing sites, then disembark and either map the area or collect different resources. These planetary surveys – which would actually require work to complete – could then be returned to Constellation for a profit… or sold to one of the game’s other factions. As players acquire a reputation for exploration, new quests could even arise, with factions offering players bigger rewards to survey planets further and further afield.
The mission board in New Atlantis.
Being a long hauler – one of the actual in-game backgrounds – could also be a career option. Using the mission boards, players could collect cargo from one planet and take it to another, either under contract or just to buy and sell. Different planets or settlements could have different resources or items that they’re asking for, and this could change week-to-week.
These missions would need to be much more interactive than they are currently, with players having to manually load and unload cargo, perhaps, or travelling to meet up with different NPCs inside settlements instead of just having a mission marked as “complete” as soon as the ship touches down! But there’s potential in this system to expand it and make it into a bona fide “space trucking simulator.”
Mining a resource.
Finally, for a game that kicked off deep inside a mine… there’s basically no reason to do any actual mining in Starfield. Resources are so worthless and sparsely spread out that I found there was absolutely no point in mining them when exploring a planet. If I desperately wanted to complete a research project or something, it was easier and quicker to loot a spacer base, sell the items for credits, and buy whatever resource I was missing.
But all of that could change! Making resources more abundant and accessible on different planets could make mining a viable in-game career. Tweaking the value of these resources could also make it much more worthwhile, and it could be strangely relaxing to spend an hour or two mining mercury or lithium to haul back to New Atlantis and sell it. I’m not alone in enjoying those kinds of slower-paced, “cosy” experiences… and it’s actually something I was hoping to get out of Starfield. As things stand, it’s way too unbalanced and grindy, but I can see the potential for a fun time hiding just under the surface!
Number Seven: An Alternate Ending/Reframe the Starborn.
One of the Starborn early in the game.
I hesitate to call this an “alternate” ending… because one of Starfield’s big narrative problems is that many of the fundamental questions present in its main story didn’t get any kind of conclusion in the first place. But that’s beside the point! What I’d like to see, as players reach the final act of the main quest, is the option to reject the Unity and to really push back against the whole concept of becoming Starborn. Not simply choosing not to go through the Unity, but actively stating how evil it is and the Starborn are and rejecting the whole thing.
The game puts Starborn adversaries in the player’s way, but most of these are unexplained, nameless non-entities that don’t really feel like actual people. The only two Starborn characters that players can engage with, the Hunter and the Emissary, have both been “reborn” hundreds or thousands of times over in many different universes – and the game actively pushes players to do the same thing. In fact, it’s the only way to fully complete the main quest.
Completing the main quest requires players to travel to a new universe.
But there are huge implications to abandoning one’s entire universe and everyone in it, and Starfield doesn’t do much more than pay lip service to this. It’s possible, for instance, for players to have a romantic partner or even get married – but their spouse doesn’t travel to a new universe with them. It’s implied that, based on choices the player has made, their universe of origin will be permanently changed in some way by their becoming Starborn… but this raises some massive ethical questions. Again, Starfield does nothing with these ideas.
So here’s my proposal: introduce new dialogue during the final act of the main quest that makes clear that the player rejects the entire concept of the Unity and becoming Starborn – and not only that, but they want to kill the Hunter and the Emissary to make sure that no one else can ever become Starborn either. However many universes these two might’ve fucked up… it ends here.
I’d like to see a “rejection” option added to the end of the main quest.
This is what I’d want to do if I found myself in that situation, confronted with a weird mirror image of myself telling me that “the Creators created everything,” and that becoming a Starborn is my destiny. No – fuck that. I’m from this universe, I want to stay in this universe, and I want to make damn sure that these Starborn clowns won’t be able to harm or kill anyone in the next universe, either. This universe-hopping quest ends here – not just for my character, but for all of the Starborn.
The Starborn and the Unity are the game’s real villains – at least until we get a proper explanation for the artefacts, their purpose, and where they came from. And I would want to see that reality reflected in the game’s final act, with players able to choose to reject the very idea of the Unity and the Starborn and ensuring they can’t go on harming people across countless parallel realities.
Number Eight: Quests with Multiple Pathways to Completion.
Battling a Spacer Captain at the climax of a quest.
One very disappointing thing about Starfield is how damn linear so many of its quests are. Most quests only have one route from beginning to end, and playing the game can feel like you’re riding a bike with training wheels half of the time. It ought to be possible to complete at least some quests in different ways, utilising different combinations of combat, tech, stealth, and even piloting skills depending on how players have set up their characters and which skills they’ve chosen to invest in.
Perhaps Starfield was harmed by comparisons with Baldur’s Gate 3, which was released just a month earlier. Actually, scratch that. Starfield was undeniably harmed by those comparisons! Baldur’s Gate 3 opens up practically all of its quests and characters, giving players a huge amount of freedom to decide how they want to tackle the game – leading to some incredibly fun gameplay moments. It’s possible for practically everyone in the game to die – something Starfield doesn’t allow with its “unkillable” NPCs – and for many quests to be tackled in radically different ways.
Baldur’s Gate 3 is overflowing with player choice and different ways to complete quests.
Where I got frustrated with Starfield was when the game presented the illusion of choice. At one now-infamous mission on Neon, players are teamed up with Walter to acquire another artefact. Walter states multiple times that there will be different ways to approach this interaction – but that turns out to be a lie. The game forces players down one path, and one path only.
Just taking this one mission as an example, it should be possible to abandon Walter and acquire the artefact alone, either by stealthily stealing it, killing the person carrying it, or causing panic at the nightclub and seizing it in the chaos. Then, after the player’s ship is impounded, there should be multiple options for escaping Neon. Players could sneak to the landing pad, knock out the guards, and disable the lockdown, or even rush over to another landing bay and steal a different ship. Just within this one mission there are so many ways things could go – but Bethesda has insisted that players must be locked onto one very specific route.
There should’ve been multiple approaches to this mission on Neon.
And there are many missions like this – both in main questlines and just out in the world. One side-story that I encountered involved a group of families on different planets and moons who found themselves in conflict with a gang of spacers. But there was only one way to complete every step of this mission – getting their communications back up and running, solving a conflict within the group, and then boarding the spacers’ station and killing them all. There should be so many different options in a mission like this – such as siding with the spacers for a reward, picking one family over the other when they argue, sneaking aboard the spacers’ station and opening all of the airlocks, or building a missile launcher on one of the moons and blowing it up from 10,000km away. Those are just a handful of ideas off the top of my head.
It’s obviously true that not every mission can have 100 different outcomes and routes to completion. But there should be some degree of choice in a role-playing game, for goodness’ sake! Even if all Bethesda can do at this point is make it so that some unkillable NPCs can now die and add one new alternate path for a handful of main story missions… that would still be a noticeable improvement.
Number Nine: More Cosmetic Items and Apparel.
It doesn’t take long to find NPCs wearing the same outfit as you!
I was quite disappointed with Starfield’s lack of cosmetic items – clothing in particular. For some reason, clothing only comes by way of whole outfits, with no option to mix and match different tops, trousers, or shoes – and there are almost no skirts, shorts, or different kinds of headgear beyond basic baseball caps and the occasional cowboy hat. Even Starfield’s omnipresent spacesuits are cosmetically limited, with the few available options having no colour variants.
It seems a given that Bethesda and Microsoft plan to add skins as paid-for microtransactions at a future point. You can even see in the game just where these skins will appear when they’re ready to be rolled out. But in my opinion, cosmetic microtransactions have no place in a wholly single-player game, and Bethesda should’ve added a lot more cosmetic variety to Starfield for free from day one.
Clothes shopping in Starfield isn’t much fun.
As far back as Morrowind it was possible to play dress-up by choosing different trousers, tops, shoes, and even individual pieces of armour. This would already make Starfield’s whole-body costumes feel like a backwards step even if there weren’t so few of them… but a combination of a lack of different costumes combined with the inability to select individual pieces of clothing comes together to make for an apparel system that’s underwhelming in the extreme.
For me, one part of the role-playing experience is getting my character to look exactly the way I want them to, and when Starfield offers such a limited range of costumes, that’s impossible. Most outfits in Starfield fall into one of two categories: generic “futuristic” sci-fi or western/cowboy. There’s very little diversity, no way to reflect different cultures and backgrounds… and for a game that makes a selling-point of its photo mode, there’s very little worth photographing from the available outfits.
Wearing a cowboy hat in Akila City.
Things like fashion sense and personal style are, of course, incredibly subjective – so you might enjoy the outfits and spacesuits that Starfield has to offer. That’s great – but even if you like some or all of the costumes available, adding new ones into the mix, as well as expanding the existing lineup with new colour variants and designs, can only be a good thing! I’d love to see Starfield add a lot more costumes and outfits, as well as skins and colour variants – all for free. There shouldn’t be paid skins in a game of this type.
And while we’re at it, let’s create some wholly unique cosmetic items that can only be found once per playthrough. One of the fun things about past Bethesda games used to be exploring dungeons and following questlines and being rewarded with something shiny and new! The only outfit in Starfield that comes close to falling into that category is the Starborn spacesuit… and I wasn’t especially wild about the way it looks.
Number Ten: Actual Spaceflight/Piloting.
There’s not much of an opportunity to be a pilot…
Starfield is a game set in space. It encourages players to build and customise their own spacecraft. Ship-to-ship combat takes place in real-time in space. But there’s absolutely no spaceflight in this game. Let me explain what I mean by that: players can’t get in their ship and manually fly it from one location to another. The only option is a modified form of fast-travel that generates a small bubble of space around the player’s ship. As some folks have demonstrated, there are no “real” planets or objects within that bubble; they’re just jpegs floating in the background.
Of all the points I’ve raised today, this could be the hardest to fix. Starfield is built from the ground up around fast-travelling between locations, and the way in which pockets of space are generated in orbit of planets or near starstations would need to be expanded and changed in a significant way in order to make real spaceflight work. Ships, too, would need to change – with better and faster engines being options for players who long for that space-sim experience.
Starfield appears to be built around fast-travelling from the galaxy map.
So there are real logistical issues in the way of adding bona fide spaceflight to Starfield. But I think it’s worth trying, at least – because if the only option is to fast-travel between locations, much of what appeals about taking to the stars is lost. Locations don’t feel far away from one another if players can teleport there in a few seconds, meaning much of the scale of Starfield’s galaxy – something that already feels diminished in light of its tiny cities, repetitive NPCs, and copy-and-pasted points of interest – is lost.
In past Bethesda titles, the journey from place to place was a significant part of the gameplay in and of itself. Walking from Seyda Neen to Balmora in Morrowind could lead to random combat encounters, side-quests, and interactions with NPCs. In Fallout 3, travelling from Megaton to the radio tower likewise saw the player presented with new opportunities to get lost in the game’s world and have fun. Heck, the recent Fallout TV series even referenced how exploring the wasteland often leads to getting side-tracked!
Part of the fun of past Bethesda games was journeying from place to place and stumbling upon new adventures along the way.
In short, the lack of spaceflight means there are fewer opportunities for players to take their time and explore Starfield’s galaxy in their own way at their own pace. When not on the surface of a planet – or approached by a random ship in orbit – there’s basically no way for players to get side-tracked by being offered a totally different quest or mission in a way that feels natural.
Starfield having functionally no spaceflight doesn’t just harm the game from a space-sim or space game perspective, it also denies players one of the fundamental building blocks of a Bethesda open-world game, too. I don’t know how it could realistically be implemented at this stage – and flying in between star systems would probably have to remain as fast-travel only. But making an effort to get proper spaceflight up and running would be worth it as it would be a huge improvement to Starfield’s immersion and gameplay.
So that’s it!
Does Starfield need to be rushed to the medical bay?
We’ve considered ten ways that Starfield could be improved – in my humble opinion, of course.
Although I spent close to a decade working in the games industry, I’m not a developer. I don’t know whether some or all of these ideas might’ve once been considered for Starfield, but were ultimately cut because they proved to be unpopular, impractical, or unworkable. The game’s very existence is, in some respects, a technological achievement; that Bethesda managed to build something this complex using the zombified remains of a game engine that’s more than twenty-five years old should count for something, right?
But I’m not alone in finding Starfield to be an underwhelming experience to play, and the fact that it didn’t win any big awards and seems to have dropped out of our collective cultural conversation after just a few months is testament to that. Starfield was being regularly beaten by Skyrim and Fallout 4 in terms of active players even before the Fallout TV show brought renewed attention to that franchise… and unless Microsoft and Bethesda take bold action in the months and years ahead, Starfield may very well end up being forgotten.
A custom spaceship on the landing pad at New Atlantis.
I’ve said before that I believe the only way to save Starfield is if its first major expansion is at least as big and impressive as Cyberpunk 2077′s Phantom Liberty DLC was last year. Tinkering around the edges won’t cut it, and if Bethesda can’t find a way to build a significant improvement to Starfield – not just a narrative addition or the inclusion of a new questline – then I think the game’s longer-term prospects will remain bleak.
I’ve had my say, and I’ve made my suggestions! Maybe not all of them would work, and maybe some of them are impossible due to the technical limitations of Bethesda’s game engine or the less-powerful Xbox Series S console. But Starfield would be a damn sight better if they were included… and really, some of these things should have been present at launch.
Could Starfield get its redemption arc one day? Never say never…
Starfield is out now for PC and Xbox Series S & X consoles. Starfield is the copyright of Bethesda Game Studios, Bethesda Softworks, Xbox Game Studios, and/or Microsoft. Some promo images and screenshots used above courtesy of Bethesda. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
Spoiler Warning: Minor spoilers are present for some early missions in Starfield.
A strange feeling hit me yesterday. I’d taken a break from Starfield for a few days after writing up my first impressions of the game, but I booted it up again to give it another shot at getting me immersed in its sci-fi world. This was, after all, a game I’d been excited to play and had been looking forward to. But while I was playing Starfield and feeling underwhelmed by some of its basic quests and unimpressive exploration… I realised that I’d rather be playing Baldur’s Gate 3. I was planning out character ideas in my head, thinking about how to approach some early-game quests and encounters that I was unprepared for the first time around, and I even found myself more interested in writing about that game than I was in actually playing Starfield.
This got me thinking about Bethesda, and in particular the way in which the company’s game design and creation feels… well, stagnant. Starfield, while an impressive technical achievement in many ways, also feels like a game whose core mechanics and systems haven’t really improved or moved on in more than two decades – and while that’s clearly sitting right with a lot of Bethesda fans and giving them a ton of enjoyment, it feels disappointing to me.
An empty captain’s chair.
Starfield is a Bethesda game. It’s “Skyrim in space.” And those two expressions simultaneously encompass everything Starfield fans love about the game… and everything that critics dislike about it. For the first time since I played Morrowind more than twenty years ago, I find myself wrangling with a difficult question: do I actually like Bethesda games? Or to be more accurate: are Bethesda games still enjoyable twenty years later when the formula, designs, and core gameplay mechanics haven’t really changed?
See, Starfield isn’t just “Skyrim in space.” It’s also “Oblivion in space,” “Fallout 3 in space,” and even “Morrowind in space.” Although more than twenty years have passed since we were first sitting down to play Morrowind, not a lot has changed in terms of the way a Bethesda game feels. And that’s a double-edged sword, because that familiarity is clearly something that fans adore. That style of gameplay has its audience – and it’s a big one. How else do we explain Skyrim still being popular almost twelve years later?
Morrowind was released on PC and Xbox in 2002.
But that familiarity is, at least for me, the beginning of Starfield’s undoing. The structure of a Bethesda game – with an optional main quest and plenty of side-missions to get stuck into – felt incredibly innovative in 2002, but doesn’t any more. And when many of those quests are incredibly basic, offering little if any choice of how to approach them, again it feels like Bethesda’s game design has become stagnant. Quests in Starfield operate in functionally the same way as quests did in Morrowind – and every other mainline Bethesda game since. You have two basic variants: go to place, press button to collect/interact with item, the end. Or: go to place full of enemies, kill enemies, the end.
During an early-game mission in Starfield, I found myself at a facility teeming with nameless “spacers.” This base felt no different from the dozen or so other bases I’d cleared out earlier in my playthrough, and even though it was a named quest location, it felt incredibly samey in terms of its design and its loot. Stealth was an option – but not an especially good one, as taking down one enemy would alert all the others in the vicinity. There were no real puzzles to solve, aside from picking a couple of locks, and after exploring the entire place, listening to a couple of audio logs, and talking to one NPC, I’d claimed my prize and was blasting off to the next place.
Fighting pirates in Starfield.
As I explored the facility that I was infiltrating (alright, attacking) I kept encountering interesting-looking items that I just couldn’t interact with at all. Computers that couldn’t be powered on. Gauges and switches that couldn’t be spun or flicked. Buttons that couldn’t be pressed. There was no environmental storytelling nor any way to use the environment to my advantage. I couldn’t, for example, hack into the base’s computers and set turrets to target the spacers. I couldn’t vent toxic gas into a room to knock them out. There wasn’t an alternate route to the clearly-marked destination that I could have used to sneak past the guards. In short: it was a Bethesda quest from a Bethesda game.
And I remember this exact criticism from the Morrowind days. “You’ll come across a fishing rod that you can’t use to fish,” said one reviewer at the time, using that example as a way to call out the superficial world that Morrowind offered. Because I got so hooked in by the story, the characters, the lore, and the world-building… I always felt such criticisms were silly. The world was rich and deep in story terms, even if mechanically and in terms of gameplay it wasn’t. That was good enough for me in 2002 – but it doesn’t feel good enough any more in 2023.
This computer setup (which is duplicated in many bases and locations across Starfield’s galaxy) is set dressing. It can’t be touched or interacted with in any way.
A lot of folks are playing and loving Starfield. A friend of mine, who was even more hyped for the game than I was, seems to be having a whale of a time – and I’m genuinely thrilled for them and for everyone else who’s enjoying it. But I feel like I’m watching a New Year’s Eve party through the window while standing on the cold street outside; everyone else is having fun, but I’m not.
I keep waiting for Starfield to “click.” I keep waiting for that moment where I’ll think “oh, I get it now,” and the fun can actually begin. But almost twenty-five hours in, it hasn’t. There are whole games that are shorter than that, games that get going from the very first moment and tell a wonderful story in a relatively short span of time. My pick for 2021’s game of the year was Kena: Bridge of Spirits, an indie title that was visually beautiful, emotional, and a ton of fun to play. But my playthrough of that game lasted barely twelve hours, and in that time I explored the game world, fell in love with its characters, and dragged it out as much as possible because I just didn’t want the experience to end.
Kena: Bridge of Spirits was 2021’s game of the year.
I’ve heard other critics and commentators say that Starfield doesn’t “get good” until around the six-hour mark, the twelve-hour mark, or even beyond that. But… if it takes that long for the game to get going, I don’t really consider that to be a selling-point. It’s often true that a game gets more interesting to play as the campaign goes on; your character levels up and gains more skills and abilities, giving you more options in some cases. But the basic gameplay still has to be balanced and enjoyable during those first few hours! That’s crucial to player retention. If the reason I’m not enjoying Starfield after twenty-five hours and bringing my character up to level 18 is because the game “doesn’t get good” until later… well, how much longer am I going to have to wait to have a good time?
I don’t really think that’s the issue, though. Levelling up my character and doing those basic looting and fetching activities just don’t hold the appeal they once did. The real reason for that, I fear, is that game design has moved beyond what Bethesda and its Creation Engine are capable of.
Standing on a random planet with a spaceship landing to my left and an enemy base to my right.
The world of Starfield feels regressive and, to me, more akin to Morrowind than Fallout 4 or Skyrim. Shops never close, even when it’s the middle of the night, and their NPC proprietors stand or sit behind their counters 24/7. When I aim the first-person camera down to the ground, I can’t see my character’s feet or body; I’m just a floating camera orb. Enemies and NPCs don’t feel reactive – you can run away from them and they’ll just forget you existed two minutes later, even if you’ve murdered all their companions and shot them in the face.
And the bugs. Oh god, the bugs. Starfield probably is Bethesda’s “least-buggy release ever,” as has been repeatedly claimed. But “least-buggy” doesn’t mean “there are zero bugs,” and claiming to be the least-buggy Bethesda game is like claiming to be the sewer with the fewest turds. I’ve seen dozens of bugs across my playthrough, including enemies able to shoot through doors and walls, NPCs clipping through solid objects, characters levitating, and items disappearing through the environment or floating away. There’s one particularly annoying bug where I’ll be piloting my spaceship but every crew member on board will repeatedly spout the same handful of lines of dialogue – as if the game thinks I just walked up to them.
Just one of many bugs I’ve encountered. Not game-breaking, but certainly immersion-breaking.
Every time Starfield has a chance at getting me to feel a crumb of immersion in its sci-fi future, something comes along that rips it away again. Maybe it’s walking into a cabin on my ship to see one of my crew members clipping through a box. Maybe it’s realising that a shopkeeper doesn’t have a life outside of the few seconds I spend in his always-open shop. Maybe it’s landing on a supposedly “unexplored” planet or moon only to find two spacer bases, a mining outpost, and another spaceship landing right next to me. But I can’t go more than a few minutes without something in Starfield reminding me that I’m playing a video game – and a video game that feels years out of date.
After taking part in yet another quest that didn’t seem to be any different from any of the others I’ve tried, I kind of felt myself hit the wall. Should I keep pressing on, following one uninspiring story after another in an empty world that I couldn’t give a shit about? Should I keep trying to pretend that these last-gen, waxy-skinned Madame Tussauds rejects are “people,” even as their dead eyes and ridiculous faces break what little immersion I can find? Should I keep waiting for Starfield to “get good?”
A pair of NPCs.
Setting my own feelings aside, I wonder what lessons can be learned from Starfield from Bethesda’s point of view. As the company begins to develop new entries in The Elder Scrolls and Fallout series, as well as potential DLC for Starfield, what should the key takeaways be? As I asked at the beginning: where does Bethesda go from here?
Despite how I feel – and how you may feel, too, if you happen to agree with me – Starfield has been well-received by Bethesda fans. The game had six million players shortly after launch, making it the biggest Bethesda release ever. And it’s racked up decent reviews on platforms like Steam and Metacritic, with the positive reviews outweighing the negative ones from both professional critics and players alike. There’s a market for this kind of game, then… so Bethesda doesn’t need to change anything. Right?
Starfield’s ratings on Metacritic as of mid-September 2023.
I look at Starfield – and by extension, Bethesda games in general – the same way I’ve looked at Nintendo games since the mid-2000s. Nintendo threw in the towel and gave up on trying to compete with PlayStation and Xbox on power and graphics, focusing instead on carving out its own niche. Nintendo games rarely if ever compete with other studios in terms of things like visuals or scale, and yet it’s found success with 2D games, retro games, kids’ games, smaller and more simplistic games, and so on. The company has gone from strength to strength with the Wii and the Switch – with a bit of a blip during the short-lived Wii U era!
Bethesda may just be going down a similar path. Instead of trying to keep up with open-world developers like Rockstar or role-playing studios like Larian, Bethesda is sticking to what’s worked in the past. Instead of developing new technologies and innovating, the company is doubling- and tripling-down on its existing technology, knowing that its fanbase will forgive a degree of bugginess and jankiness. Instead of learning from what other companies have done with tech like procedural generation, Bethesda is content to muddle through and do things its own way.
Shops in Starfield never close, and shopkeepers never leave their posts.
And who am I to say that’s a bad thing? I don’t like every Nintendo game that comes out, but their heavy-hitters are still worth turning up for. Whether it’s Animal Crossing: New Horizons, Super Mario Odyssey, or Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, Nintendo knows what its fans want and serves them just enough of it to keep them coming back. Are those games innovative masterpieces that push boundaries and drive gaming forward? No… but do they need to be?
Did Starfield need to be?
I bought into too much of the excitement for Starfield and internalised too much of the hype. That one’s on me, and after playing games for more than thirty years I should’ve known better than to place any new release on such a pedestal. But there’s also a lesson here for Bethesda – one that the company should have learned already from similar experiences in the past! Over-hyping a game and being frightened of telling players “no” can lead to excessively high expectations and ultimately disappointment. That’s part of the Starfield problem. The Starfield showcase earlier this year was great, but what came after it should have shut down speculation, explained clearly the boundaries that would be present, and done more to lower sky-high expectations. Over-selling a game might lead to a temporary boost in sales, but it’s almost never worth it in the long-run.
Bethesda executive producer Todd Howard.
Beyond just marketing, though, there are questions for Bethesda in terms of the fundamentals of development and game design. Does the company have both the ability and the desire to keep up with its competitors? If so… why didn’t we see that in Starfield?
Procedural generation has been able to create massive, expansive worlds for a long time. So why are Starfield’s planets restricted to tiny, non-contiguous landing zones? Minecraft generated massive worlds with varied biomes more than a decade ago, and No Man’s Sky took procedural generation to space all the way back in 2016. The same for spaceflight: why can’t I fly my ship from one planet to the next in the same solar system?
My customised spaceship.
Look at open-world games like Grand Theft Auto V – which is now a decade old. That game’s linear missions at least offered some variety in terms of the way they played. Why does every quest in Starfield feel functionally the same? Where’s the diversity of items to at least make the looting side of the game feel worthwhile?
When I explore a city in Starfield that’s supposedly the capital of humanity’s extrasolar colonies, why does it feel so lifeless and empty? For all its problems – and my god were there problems – Cyberpunk 2077 at least managed to create the feel of a bustling city, replete with skyscrapers, traffic, and countless individual NPCs.
New Atlantis – the biggest city ever made for a Bethesda game – feels small and empty.
These are just some of the areas where Starfield feels deficient. And my question isn’t “how will Bethesda fix them?” but rather… does Bethesda even consider these things problems that need to be fixed? Or is the company content to take this formula and repeat it yet again in its next title? If so, will that be good enough for Bethesda fans when The Elder Scrolls VI rolls around in 2028? Or when Fallout 5 graces our screens in the 2030s?
The answer is a solid “maybe.”
So where does Bethesda go from here? The way I see it, there are two paths open to the company. One sees it continuing to double-down on its existing technology and design philosophy, becoming “the Nintendo of role-playing games,” where graphical fidelity, quest design, characters, and more are all a couple of generations behind. Abandoning innovation in this way will probably lead to The Elder Scrolls VI being referred to as “Starfield in a fantasy setting,” whenever that game is ready!
Another bug that I encountered during my playthrough.
Alternatively, Bethesda could recognise the deficiencies in its technologies and processes, look around at what other games in the action/adventure, open-world, and role-playing spaces have been doing over the past few years, and try to catch up. Realistically this almost certainly means dumping the Creation Engine in order to create or license something more powerful that can really stand up to the rigours of modern game development.
After trying to give Starfield a fair shot but finding it came up short, I know what I’d rather see. But given Starfield’s critical and commercial success, perhaps I’m in the minority here. It seems that millions of players are absolutely fine with playing “just another Bethesda game” in a different setting, and if that’s the case in 2023, who’s to say it will change by the time the next Bethesda title is ready? Like Nintendo, the company clearly has a dedicated fanbase who are willing to overlook and even embrace its flaws. I thought I was one of those fans… but Starfield has shown me that I’m not.
Starfield is out now for PC and Xbox Series S & X consoles. Starfield is the copyright of Bethesda Game Studios, Bethesda Softworks, Xbox Game Studios, and/or Microsoft. Some promo images and screenshots used above courtesy of Bethesda. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
Trekking with Dennis 