Spoiler Warning: Beware of minor spoilers for Morrowind, Skyrim, Fallout 4, and Starfield.
There seem to have been some pretty explosive outbursts from Bethesda fans online following a recent interview with studio head Todd Howard. Howard, who is also the director of the upcoming sequel to Skyrim, was quoted as saying that The Elder Scrolls VI is “still a long way off.” But we knew that already. Didn’t we?
I’m sorry, but if *anyone* genuinely believed that the next Elder Scrolls game was going to be launched next year… that’s on them. They set themselves up for disappointment by buying into a clearly and demonstrably false narrative about the game. This quote from Todd Howard shouldn’t come as a surprise, and to be honest, the only surprising thing about it for me is how genuinely hurt and upset some folks seem to be as a result. I guess that just proves that Todd Howard was right, for once, to try to tamp down some of the rumours and “cope” from die-hard fans about a release being imminent.
Todd Howard, director of The Elder Scrolls VI.
Starfield, Bethesda’s most recent game, took five years to make, with development lasting from 2018 to 2023. It launched in September 2023, and, to be realistic, much of Bethesda’s team was still dedicated to patching, updating, and preparing DLC for Starfield for at least a few months afterwards. We also know that Bethesda only works on one game at a time. We’ll get into that in a moment (because it’s an idiotic mistake for a studio this size at this point in time), but it’s also a known fact that fans should have accounted for. Knowing those two things – Starfield’s long development and Bethesda’s commitment to only working on one game at a time – how could *anyone* believe that The Elder Scrolls VI would be ready in just a couple of years? It’s going to take at least as long as Starfield; there’s no chance it’ll be ready in half the time. And if someone convinced themselves it would be… this is a rare case where I’ll defend Bethesda, to an extent, and say that that disappointment is on them.
There are plenty of things to criticise Bethesda and Todd Howard for. Fallout 4 is broken, and its “Anniversary Edition” is really just an excuse to shove paid mods and microtransactions into a decade-old game. Starfield and Shattered Space just… weren’t very good, and are also riddled with microtransactions that Bethesda deliberately hid during the game’s first few weeks on sale. The studio has failed to modernise or keep up with the competition, relying on the creaking, zombified remains of a three-decade-old game engine that is no longer fit for purpose. And, of course, The Elder Scrolls VI was announced years too early, contributing to the disappointment fans feel today.
Fallout 4′s “Anniversary Edition” has not been well-received.
I look at studios like Obsidian – once a Bethesda collaborator – as an example of how Bethesda could do so much better. Obsidian released not one but *two* massive role-playing games this year: Avowed and The Outer Worlds 2. How did they manage such a task? Well, isn’t it obvious? As they’ve gotten bigger and become more successful, they’ve been able to build up their studio a lot more, allowing them to have separate teams of developers for different projects. Bethesda could – and I would argue *should* – be looking to do the same thing.
Because it isn’t only Elder Scrolls fans who are upset. It’s now been a decade since the last single-player Fallout title, and at the current rate Bethesda is going, it’s gonna be close to *another* decade before we’ll see their version of Fallout 5. Fallout fans, already burned by the disappointments of 76 and now the “Anniversary Edition,” have every right to be upset about that – just as Elder Scrolls fans do about the long wait for their next game.
It’s been almost fifteen years since Skyrim…
So while I stand by what I said a moment ago, that any disappointment Elder Scrolls fans may feel about learning the game won’t be coming out any time soon is on them… that’s not the whole story. Bethesda has spent close to fifteen years repeatedly porting, remastering, re-releasing, and adding microtransactions to Skyrim, and the games they’ve released since then, beginning really with Fallout 4, haven’t been as well-received as they were in the 2000s. Bethesda should, after the Microsoft acquisition, have created a second development wing, and given either Starfield or The Elder Scrolls VI to them, allowing them to have both games ready in a more reasonable time frame.
Skyrim launched in November 2011. And by the time The Elder Scrolls VI launches in 2028 or 2029 (or beyond, perhaps), it’ll be closer to Skyrim’s twentieth anniversary than its fifteenth. In the intervening years, fans of role-playing games have been treated to the likes of The Witcher 3, Baldur’s Gate 3, and Elden Ring, and open-world adventures like Grand Theft Auto V (and VI), Red Dead Redemption II, and Cyberpunk 2077. And yeah, you read that right – in spite of all the memes and jokes, there’ll have been *two* Grand Theft Auto games released in between Skyrim’s 2011 launch and the eventual release of The Elder Scrolls VI.
There’ll have been two GTA games – V and VI – since Skyrim launched…
Given what happened with Starfield, with its lacklustre world-building, characters, and stories, I can’t be the only one thinking that The Elder Scrolls VI is going to struggle… can I? Bethesda seems content to double-down on the same basic approach, employing the same writing team, and using the same game engine. But isn’t that going to lead to the same kind of outcome? After all this time, is The Elder Scrolls VI going to end up as little more than a microtransaction-riddled disappointment? I hope not, but I confess that I’m sceptical. As I wrote last year, The Elder Scrolls VI is no longer a “must-buy on day one” title for me, but rather a “wait six months and see” kinda game.
There is clearly still a Bethesda fanbase, and at least some of those folks won’t care if the game feels a generation or two out-of-date, or the writing and voice acting aren’t up to par, because that “jankiness” is just part of what makes the Bethesda experience. So I’m not arguing that there’ll be no audience for The Elder Scrolls VI, but I think it’s interesting to note that, even among hard-core Bethesda fans, there’s discontent and disappointment – albeit that some of that disappointment, when it comes to the game’s release window, is rather self-inflicted!
The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind.
In 2002, I absolutely adored Morrowind, and it remains one of my favourite games to this day. But I’m struggling to get excited for another Bethesda game right now, even in a series I have a genuine fondness for, after a decade-plus of the studio focusing more on wringing money out of players than keeping up with the competition. Now that I no longer use PC Game Pass, I really don’t expect to pick up The Elder Scrolls VI until it’s been out for a while and I can assess to what extent it’s being monetised. If it looks anything like Starfield, which has a microtransaction marketplace that resembles something out of a free-to-play mobile game… I might not even pick it up at all.
So this has been an odd one. I will reluctantly defend Bethesda and Todd Howard on the timing of The Elder Scrolls VI, simply because anyone with a brain cell should have been able to understand that the game wasn’t going to be released in just a few months’ time. But at the same time, it’s still a problem of Bethesda’s own making: a massively premature announcement in 2018 led fans to believe that the game was being actively worked on, and the studio’s unwillingness to change and adapt the way it creates games means they’re *still* only working on one game at a time, despite having the resources to do more. After all, what else are they gonna spend all the money from Microsoft and those paid mods on?
All titles discussed above are the copyright of Bethesda Game Studios, Bethesda Softworks, Xbox Game Studios, and/or Microsoft. Some screenshots and promo art courtesy of Steam and IGDB. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
In March of 2006, I distinctly remember rushing out of the office as soon as the workday ended to meet a friend. I didn’t yet own an Xbox 360, but my friend did – and he’d pre-ordered the sequel to one of my favourite games of all-time! I darted from the city centre down a side road to my friend’s place, which was a tiny attic apartment with one minuscule window and a sloping ceiling. As soon as I got there, we fired up The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, and I spent the rest of the night hanging out with him as he created his character, played through the game’s iconic opening sequence, and stepped out into the world of Tamriel.
It wouldn’t be until 2008 or 2009 that I got to play Oblivion for myself, but when I did I had a whale of a time. I remember thinking that, while the game was more limited in some respects than Morrowind had been, other elements and mechanics more than made up for that deficit – and gave Oblivion a truly immersive world. All of the characters were fully voice-acted, facial animations and lip syncing looked great, and your character could mount and ride a horse! And the main storyline of Oblivion – the quest to find the Emperor’s heir and stop an invasion from another realm – was riveting stuff. I genuinely enjoyed my playthrough of Oblivion and its Shivering Isles DLC, and although I haven’t returned to the game since then, I still consider it to be a fantastic experience.
Stepping out into Oblivion’s open world for the first time is an iconic scene in gaming for everyone who played through it.
I’d been hearing rumours of a remaster or remake of Oblivion for at least a year. But as you may know, I don’t like to cover hearsay here on the website, so I was content to wait until we heard from developers Bethesda and Virtuos in an official capacity before talking about the game. Earlier today, the Oblivion remaster was shown off – and I gotta say, it looks great. It won’t be a totally modern game, as it’s still built on the same bones of the original, but it’s been updated with all new graphics, additional voice acting, and some gameplay tweaks to bring things like combat and exploration closer to modern standards. As I write this, I’m actually downloading the Oblivion remaster and I plan to play it as soon as it’s ready!
But – and you knew there had to be a “but” coming after all of that – I feel pretty sickened by Oblivion’s £10 “Deluxe Edition.”
I’ll give Xbox and Bethesda a lot of credit for bundling Oblivion’s main pieces of DLC in with this remaster. Oblivion is almost twenty years old, and it’s retailing for £50 here in the UK, so trying to charge extra for Shivering Isles or Knights of the Nine would’ve been just plain wrong. But Bethesda is a greedy company, so there’s still something extra that players can purchase separately – and it’s connected to one of the most notorious episodes in the company’s history.
The Oblivion remaster is launching with a £10 “deluxe edition.”
In April 2006, Bethesda released Oblivion’s horse armour DLC – one of the first pieces of small-scale cosmetic DLC for a single-player game. And the company was roundly criticised for trying to sell such a tiny and meaningless piece of content. Unfortunately for us all, and despite the relentless attacks from critics, the horse armour DLC sold reasonably well – well enough for Bethesda to keep going down this DLC road. Look at Starfield’s utterly disgusting in-game marketplace – which resembles something out of a free-to-play mobile game – to see where this approach ultimately led the company.
Other corporations in the games industry took note of both the backlash to, and the financial success of, Bethesda’s horse armour DLC… and it’s not unfair to say it was a harbinger of things to come. Many games now launch with little pieces of content hacked off to be sold separately, and it’s gotten so bad that I daresay most people won’t even bat an eye at the Oblivion remaster coming with a “deluxe edition.” But I’m afraid I do – I didn’t like it in 2006 and I like it even less now. Bethesda is, I would argue, one of the guiltiest parties in the games industry when it comes to pushing for and normalising the idea of single-player microtransactions – and that’s something which can quite literally ruin a game for me.
The original Oblivion’s horse armour DLC was incredibly controversial in 2006.
So the Oblivion remaster is launching with an expensive £10 “deluxe edition.” Contained within that is the typical bullshit you might expect: a collection of JPEGs that self-importantly claims to be an “art book,” the game’s soundtrack, and… wait, what’s that? Surely it can’t be… horse armour? Bethesda wouldn’t do that again, surely? But it is. It’s horse armour.
Oh piss off, Bethesda.
Seriously? After all of the controversy in 2006, with horse armour becoming the quintessential example of bad-value DLC, you’re really going to do this again? It must be a joke, right? A self-aware nod and wink to fans and players. But Bethesda is still earnestly asking you to cough up an additional £10 to access this “deluxe edition” content, complete with horse armour.
We’re really doing this again, huh?
I could be wrong, because I haven’t played Oblivion in more than fifteen years at this point, but the “deluxe edition” horse armour in this remastered version doesn’t look the same as the original 2006 version. But is that because it’s brand-new content or is that just the way it looks in the remastered version? Visuals have changed across the board, so I genuinely can’t tell at a glance. If it’s brand-new, I guess that’s at least marginally better. But if this is the original horse armour updated for the remaster, still being sold separately… I mean. I’m at a loss for words.
Super Extra-Special Platinum Premium Deluxe Editions of most games are usually poor value. Worse, they carve out content that was developed alongside the main game and fully-integrated into it to be sold separately for extra cash. I really do miss the days when games came feature-complete out of the box, and when expansion packs added a meaningful amount of content. But to sell a “deluxe edition” for a twenty-year-old game which is already retailing for £50 is piss-poor from Bethesda. And that’s not even mentioning that this “deluxe edition” contains the poster child for bad-value DLC; horse armour was received so universally poorly that it became a meme and remains the textbook example of this kind of single-player microtransaction to this day. Heck, I’ve used horse armour as an example of a shitty microtransaction on several occasions here on the website.
Staff at Virtuos working on the Oblivion remaster.
I thought it was a joke when I first saw the leaked image of Oblivion’s “deluxe edition.” I could believe that Bethesda and Xbox would be greedy enough to create a poor-value “deluxe edition” of a twenty-year-old game, but when I saw the horse armour bit… I genuinely thought it must’ve been a joke. It looked like something a troll had mocked up to poke fun at Bethesda and the old controversy. But no, this is real. It’s 2025 and Bethesda is asking you to pay extra for horse armour in Oblivion all over again.
I think the Oblivion remaster looks good. The presentation that Bethesda and Virtuos put together was genuinely entertaining, and the people involved all seem to be passionate Elder Scrolls players and fans. That leads me to believe the game is in good hands. I’m a Game Pass subscriber, and the Oblivion remaster is available there, so it felt like a no-brainer to fire it up and step back into that world for the first time in more than fifteen years. But this “deluxe edition” has really taken the shine off the game for me. I don’t know if anyone else cares as much as I do; this doesn’t feel like a Nintendo Switch 2 type of situation, where the price is overshadowing everything else. But would it really have been such a financial hardship for Bethesda to offer the “art book,” soundtrack, and fucking horse armour as freebies? Is that content worth £10 to anyone?
A promotional screenshot of the Oblivion remaster.
Bethesda could really use a win right now. The company has endured basically a decade of controversy, with Fallout 4, Fallout 76, Starfield, and even some of its mobile games all having issues and being criticised. With The Elder Scrolls VI still years away, this launch of the Oblivion remaster was a chance to get people talking about the company and its games more positively for a change. It was an opportunity to remind players why they liked Bethesda’s games to begin with, as well as to keep the series in our minds as production on The Elder Scrolls VI continues. I can’t help but feel this “deluxe edition” greed is getting in the way of that, at least somewhat.
And I have to ask: was it worth it? This article could’ve been titled something like “Bethesda stuns everyone by shadow-dropping a remastered version of Oblivion!” and I could’ve spent this time talking about my memories of the game, what I like best about the remaster, and how cool it is in 2025 to see a big game being released immediately after its announcement. Instead, we’re talking about horse armour again, and how Bethesda is a greedy, money-grubbing company. We could’ve been reminded of what Bethesda games were when they were close to their best, but instead we’re reminded more of Starfield’s microtransactions than Oblivion’s storytelling.
I’m gonna play the Oblivion remaster, I’m gonna try to push the stupid “deluxe edition” out of my thoughts, and if I’m lucky (and if Virtuos hasn’t screwed things up) I daresay I’ll have a fun time getting lost in the world of Tamriel all over again. But I’m disappointed that the game launched like this, and I really don’t think it would’ve been too much to ask to include those tiny pieces of content in the already-expensive price of the remaster.
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered is out now for PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series S & X. The game is also available on PC Game Pass and Xbox Game Pass. The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered is the copyright of Bethesda Game Studios, Virtuos Games, Xbox Game Studios, and/or Microsoft. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
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.
As part of Xbox’s Summer Showcase event last month, we got some big news about Bethesda’s failing space game Starfield… and it isn’t good. In fact, I’m beyond disappointed in the latest updates about the game, and I now feel incredibly sceptical about Bethesda’s longer-term future and its upcoming titles in the Elder Scrolls and Fallout franchises. Today, I’d like to talk about what it is that I don’t like – and why it should matter to fans of Starfield, haters of Starfield, and even folks who’ve never played a single Bethesda Game Studios title.
Last year, I had pretty high hopes for Starfield. But as you may already know if you’ve read my first impressions of the game – and my other post-launch articles – I didn’t enjoy what was on offer. The world-building and setting just didn’t grab me in any way, and I progressed through some pretty boring missions and bland environments not really giving a shit about the galaxy that Bethesda had created or the characters who inhabited it. After spending as much time with the game as I reasonably could, I put Starfield down and haven’t returned to it – save for taking a few screenshots here and there to use on the website.
Screenshots like this one!
But what we’re going to talk about today doesn’t come from a place of “hate.” I’m not blindly attacking these decisions from Bethesda and Xbox because Starfield left me disappointed and I want to twist the knife even more. On the contrary: it’s precisely because I’ve enjoyed other Bethesda titles and because I had hoped to enjoy new ones in the future that I feel compelled to share my criticisms.
In short, Starfield is being catastrophically over-monetised. Bethesda and Microsoft seem desperate to wring every last penny out of the game, no matter what. Not content with making a lot of money from sales and subscriptions to Game Pass, Xbox and Bethesda are greedily grabbing every penny they can using every dirty trick from the games industry playbook. Having already charged £35 extra to players who wanted to play the game on its real release date, Bethesda and Xbox have now set up an in-game marketplace that wouldn’t look out of place in a crappy free-to-play mobile game, one that charges players for basic items and even fan-made mods.
What the fuck is this shit?
Shattered Space is going to be one of several larger pieces of DLC, and I’ve always given big expansion packs a lot of leeway when it comes to criticisms like this. But the fact that Shattered Space was planned during development of the base game – and appears to contain a faction that I would argue should have been part of the main game given its prominence and relevance to the plot and to major characters – even that starts to feel shady. The fact that Bethesda and Xbox were selling pre-orders for Shattered Space before Starfield even launched last year is just more proof of that. This is basically cut content: storylines and missions developed alongside the game’s main content that were carved out to be sold separately later on.
Whether you love or loathe Starfield, you have to admit that this is a poor way to run a single-player game. Look around at some of Starfield’s biggest competitors in the single-player action-RPG space. Baldur’s Gate 3 was complete at launch, with no major DLC and only one small content pack being sold separately. Cyberpunk 2077 comes with a single piece of DLC – and it’s a massive, game-changing one. Elden Ring likewise only has the one piece of DLC, too. None of these games paywall their fan-made mods, either.
Comparable games – like Elden Ring – aren’t subject to this ridiculous level of monetisation.
If this is the route Bethesda wants to go down – and it clearly is, as we’ve already seen with Fallout 76′s microtransactions and expensive add-ons – then I don’t think I want them to make The Elder Scrolls VI any more. Or Fallout 5. The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind is one of my favourite games of all-time, and even though it’s been a while since I last played Skyrim or Oblivion, I still felt a sense of excitement knowing that a return to the world of Tamriel was on the cards. But now? Fuck it, I’m out.
Gamers have become desensitised to this kind of over-monetisation, but for a single-player title Starfield’s in-game marketplace is one of the worst and most egregious I’ve ever seen. We’re looking at a single mission that costs $10, item packs containing a scant handful of items for £10 or more, and much more besides. Players also need to buy an in-game currency – at the usual awkward exchange rate – before they can buy any of these microtransactions. More games industry bullshit from Bethesda there.
The in-game currency packs at time of writing.
I get that developers need to be paid for their time and work. But this isn’t the way to do it. If Larian Studios and FromSoftware can release profitable games that don’t need to rely on this kind of shocking in-game marketplace, surely Bethesda can too. And if CD Projekt Red can recover from Cyberpunk 2077′s shockingly poor launch (and even the game’s removal from an entire platform for months) to turn a huge profit from a game that only has a single piece of DLC, why can’t Bethesda? I don’t buy the excuse that Starfield wouldn’t be profitable without this microtransaction storefront – especially given that many of the offerings are fan-made mods that didn’t cost Bethesda a penny to create.
Maybe I’m too old and times have changed, but I’ve always believed that fan-made mods should be free. They’re a passion project, something players do for a bit of fun or to tweak a game they enjoy to be more to their liking. The idea of paying for mods has never sat right with me, and while I love the idea of up-and-coming or budding developers viewing modding as a way into the industry… they shouldn’t be expecting to make modding someone else’s game their full-time job. So paid mods are already a no-no for me, but knowing that Bethesda and Xbox are taking a cut of the proceeds for something they didn’t even make? It’s sickening.
Another expensive cosmetic add-on.
I said months ago that, with Shattered Space just being the first of several pieces of planned DLC, the total cost of Starfield could soar well past the £200 mark – but I didn’t expect that warning to come true so quickly. At time of writing, just to pick up the microtransactions in the “featured” category you’ll need to spend over £50 – on top of buying the base game for £60 and Shattered Space for £35. With more microtransactions being added all the time, it won’t be long before Starfield will be asking for north of £500 or even £1,000 for the complete package. That’s completely unacceptable to me for a single-player title.
It’s not wrong to want good, high-quality, complete games from studios. Other developers are capable of turning a profit by making and releasing games, so there’s no justification for this cash-grab from Bethesda and Xbox. And if this is how the company plans to make and monetise its games, then quite frankly I hope Bethesda Game Studios goes the way of Tango Gameworks and Arkane Austin. Given the abject failure of Starfield already, and the controversy that these microtransactions are bound to cause, maybe Microsoft ought to consider taking The Elder Scrolls VI and the Fallout license away from Bethesda. The corporation has enough other studios under its umbrella at this point that it would be quite feasible to pass these titles to someone else.
Maybe someone else should make The Elder Scrolls VI.
I’ve lost all interest in The Elder Scrolls VI now, anyway. And unless Microsoft were to announce a massive change in that game’s development, I doubt I’ll pick it up. It’s clear to me now how Bethesda sees its games – less as complete experiences than as platforms for monetisation, microtransactions, and expensive in-game purchases. Rather than creating games to be published and sold, Bethesda is going all-in on live services and “recurring revenue,” hoping to monetise its titles for years after release. If the company was making multiplayer games, where this business model has worked, I’d leave them to it. But in the single-player space I find it objectionable… actually no, I find it disgusting.
This time last year, coming out of Bethesda’s big Starfield presentation, I could hardly have been more excited about the game and its prospects. A friend of mine said to me that they genuinely felt Starfield “could be the best game either of us will ever play” – such was the level of hype and excitement that Bethesda and Xbox had successfully built up. But it wasn’t meant to be.
Pre-release concept art for Starfield.
Instead, Starfield was a game that was mediocre at best; a title comprised entirely of systems and mechanics that other titles have been doing better for years. As I wrote once, Bethesda should have been less focused on turning Starfield into a “ten-year experience” and instead ought to have been spending time catching up on a decade’s worth of improvements in game design and development. The company’s executives were entirely focused on the wrong ten years!
At the end of the day, I could have overlooked bland gameplay, uninspired mission design, and even a lack of decorative and cosmetic options if the world-building and narratives present in Starfield had been up to scratch. But they weren’t – and all of this lacklustre gameplay was taking place in a boring, small-scale world that I couldn’t find a way to get invested in or care about.
Starfield’s world-building was disappointing.
All of this leads to one question: why on earth is Starfield – with its bland, uninteresting, small world and outdated, mediocre, often-buggy gameplay – worth spending more money on? The kinds of things that these microtransactions are adding should be free – and given the crap state that the game remains in almost a year after its underwhelming launch, Bethesda should be continually adding new features, new missions, new cosmetic items and the like. And if there are going to be paid-for expansion packs like Shattered Space, then realistically they need to be as big and as transformative for Starfieldas Phantom Liberty was for Cyberpunk 2077.
Without that kind of large-scale change to the game, I don’t see Starfield surviving. Many of the players who picked it up on launch day or in the latter part of 2023 have already drifted away and are finding new gaming experiences to get stuck into. It’s already a tough sell to win back disappointed ex-players, and adding microtransactions – including a single mission for $10 – is categorically not the way to do it. It would be bad enough if Starfield was a popular title with a large playerbase… but it isn’t. And this kind of egregious in-game shop isn’t going to do anything to bring players back.
Starfield’s first $10 mission. Expect to see more like it.
So I guess I really am done with Starfield. I held out hope for a while that there might be an update or DLC pack that would genuinely transform the game, bringing it closer to the original promises that Bethesda made and making it a title I might actually enjoy playing. But with the company seemingly wedded to this microtransaction and paid mods approach that wouldn’t feel out of place in a free-to-play mobile game… I’m out. This game isn’t worth it, and even if it had been a title with a fun story and great world-building, I think I’d still be so turned off by the over-monetisation that I’d walk away.
On the one hand I get it: I’m a dinosaur in a gaming marketplace that’s changed. Morrowind, with its two expansion packs, was more than twenty years ago, and many developers nowadays go down the route of microtransactions, “gold editions,” paid early access, and so on. But there are still games that don’t, especially in the single-player space, and I don’t think it’s unreasonable to ask for a game that I play alone and offline to be basically feature-complete and not try to grab every penny out of my wallet every time I want to change my character’s outfit or decorate their living space.
I’ll finish this piece with a warning for Xbox and Bethesda: players will remember what you tried to pull with Starfield when the next Fallout game or The Elder Scrolls VI are being readied for launch.
Starfield is out now for PC and Xbox Series S/X consoles. The Shattered Space DLC pack will be released in autumn 2024. Starfield is the copyright of Bethesda Game Studios, Xbox Game Studios, and 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 have to confess that I haven’t played a lot more of Starfield since I last shared my thoughts on the game, its flaws, and how Bethesda might want to respond to some of the biggest points of criticism. But as I’ve sat with the game in the month since it released, I’ve found a few more things to say that I didn’t get to mention in either of my two big post-launch pieces about Starfield. It’s these points that we’re going to talk about today – and if you ignored the spoiler warning above, please know that we’re going to discuss the ending of the main quest and Starfield’s New Game Plus mode.
I feel that Skyrim’s unprecedented success changed something at Bethesda. The company ceased viewing its games as individual stories to be created, completed, and published, and instead began seeing all of its projects as ongoing, long-running experiences. Because Skyrim remained popular for years after its release, Bethesda seems to have internalised that and expected it to become the “new normal,” deliberately taking steps to build all future games with that goal in mind. We saw that most obviously with Fallout 76, but I’d argue very strongly that it happened with Starfield as well.
Starfield has landed…
In a recent interview with Insomniac Games (creators of Marvel’s Spider-Man, among other successful projects), Bethesda executive producer Todd Howard said that Starfield was “a good base of a game to build upon,” referencing the company’s plans for future DLC and additional development for years to come. This isn’t the first time we’ve heard of talk of years-long plans for Starfield. In fact, it seems that building a kind of single-player live-service title was one of Bethesda’s main objectives when developing the game.
My question is this: was Starfield screwed over by this idea?
Find me a recent game that billed itself as having a “ten-year plan” or a “five-year roadmap” that actually went the distance. Whether we’re talking about the likes of Anthem, Marvel’s Avengers, or Halo Infinite, many titles have come along promising something like this – only to fail to deliver. Games that genuinely last a decade or more are seldom planned that way; titles like Fortnite, Grand Theft Auto V, or Skyrim are lightning in a bottle. These one-off games succeed for almost unquantifiable reasons – and a massive amount of luck. Corporate planning to replicate that kind of once-in-a-generation level of success has almost never worked. Massive developers like Rockstar have faltered, and even some of the biggest brands and properties on the planet, like Marvel, have been unable to make a “five-year experience” work.
Anthem’s “roadmap” of content that was supposed to be added to the game.
And I can’t help but feel echoes of the likes of Anthem in Starfield. Parts of the game feel barebones and incomplete, as if waiting for future “content drops” and updates to round things out. There are plenty of missions and quests to get stuck into in Starfield, for example, but where are the cosmetics and skins? Why are there so few weapon styles, outfits, skins, and the like? I said when I wrote up my first impressions of Starfield that I was pleased to see the game wasn’t being excessively monetised… but looking at the lack of cosmetic variety and skins, it seems pretty clear that Bethesda plans to add these as paid-for DLC.
The corporation is no stranger to this. In fact, I’d argue that Bethesda is actually one of the guiltiest parties in the entire games industry when it comes to microtransactions – especially in the single-player space. Oblivion’s infamous horse armour DLC in 2006 was one of the most notorious examples of bad value cosmetic DLC in a single-player game, and one of the first to attract mainstream attention. Other companies saw Bethesda essentially getting away with it, and a truly unfortunate trend accelerated.
Oblivion’s horse armour DLC was released in 2006.
At time of writing in October 2023, the only skins available in the game come from expensive pre-order or premium editions of Starfield. That’s already a red flag, in my opinion, and it seems all but certain that future skins will also only be available as paid add-ons.
Starfield could look very different in six months or a year from now, with in-game purchases that could easily push the cost of the complete game closer to £200. Remember that in order to get the currently available skins, and pre-order Shattered Space, players are already having to fork over £100 to Bethesda for Starfield’s premium edition, so £200 when additional skins and cosmetics have been released doesn’t even seem like a stretch. By the time Bethesda finally stops working on Starfield altogether in the years ahead, the full price of the game plus all of its DLC and additional content could run to far more than that.
Skins are currently available as pre-order and special edition bonuses only.
So I’m rescinding my “doesn’t feel excessively monetised” statement from my earlier piece. Starfield feels like a game that’s being primed for additional monetisation – and rumours of paid mods have not escaped my notice, either. Paid mods will have to be the subject of a longer piece one day – but suffice to say for now that I’m not a supporter of them in any way, shape, or form.
Bethesda took a risk by turning Starfield into a single-player live-service title, and while I will say that the “base” version of the game still has a lot on offer – for people who are still interested in Bethesda games and the way they design their quests – I’m not sure it was the right decision. Building a good game with fun gameplay and an engaging story should have been priority number one – but it feels like both of these things took a back seat. Planning for a decade’s worth of add-ons and extra content became Bethesda’s main ambition. I’m not convinced all of these planned pieces of DLC will see the light of day.
This is where skins will appear – when Bethesda is ready to begin selling them.
When I really dig down, Starfield’s biggest issue for me personally isn’t actually that its gameplay feels outdated and uninspired. It’s that the game’s story just didn’t grab me and the worldbuilding was so bland and uninteresting that I didn’t care to spend any more time in it. The world of Starfield feels small, flat, and boring – and when the gameplay backing it up was lacklustre too, I couldn’t find a way to make progress. I’m someone who’ll happily play through some absolutely bog-standard gameplay if I’m enjoying a story or getting lost in a fictional world, but with Starfield offering neither an entertaining story nor an engaging world… sticking with the game lost its appeal.
I looked up spoilers online to see what happens further along Starfield’s main quest. I was bored to tears playing it, but if it picked up later on I thought I might be able to push through to get to the promised moment where the game would finally “get good.” But what I read actually surprised me – and I ended up feeling glad that I didn’t waste any more hours of my life playing through the story.
One of the artefacts at the heart of the game’s story.
What is one of the most basic pillars of storytelling? Any narrative needs a beginning, a middle, and an end. If a story revolves around a big mystery, solving that mystery is absolutely key to making it feel complete. Starfield’s writers chose to ignore this absolutely fundamental rule of narrative construction, and the result is that the game’s main story seems like it comes to a deeply unsatisfying “end.”
Starfield began by setting up a mystery: what is this artefact? What does it do? And who made it? Then the game introduces us to a team of people dedicated to figuring it all out. There are major structural weaknesses on this side of the story – like what anyone involved in Constellation actually does or has been doing for the past thirty years prior to the player character showing up – but that’s somewhat beside the point. After a series of glorified fetch quests that see us chasing different artefacts across the galaxy, Starfield introduces two antagonists and magical powers that we can learn… but then the story ends without explaining anything about what the artefacts were or who created them.
Starfield’s main story has a deeply unsatisfying ending – and the journey to get there isn’t much fun either.
Failing to solve the key mystery at the heart of the narrative, and refusing to even answer the most basic of questions about that mystery, ignores one of the fundamental tenets of storytelling. It makes the whole story – which then begins again in a weird kind of cyclical manner – feel incomplete and frustrating.
It seems to me that this aspect of the game – starting over by “travelling to an alternate reality” – is nothing more than a narrative gimmick to allow Bethesda to put a New Game Plus mode into Starfield.
And why would Bethesda want to add such a feature? None of the company’s previous titles included New Game Plus, after all. Oh, that’s right: because Starfield was built to be a “ten-year experience” rather than a complete game, and New Game Plus feels like an easy way to keep players engaged for longer.
I couldn’t even get through the game once…
So we come full-circle, and I think we can reasonably make the case that Starfield has been harmed in more ways than one by Bethesda’s insistence on planning for the long-term at the expense of the short-term. Maybe Shattered Space, or some additional piece of DLC in the future, will resolve Starfield’s big mystery. And maybe, if that happens, the main story of the game will feel complete and worth experiencing. But if the best possible spin I can put on Starfield is that it’s an incomplete experience that needs additional content to actually feel like its story has a proper ending… that’s not great. It makes it feel no different from dozens of other incomplete live-service games.
I usually avoid live-service titles, and I do so for one basic reason: I don’t like to play an incomplete game. If a film or season of TV ends on a cliffhanger, with promises of a resolution to come next time, that’s one thing. But Starfield isn’t a film or a TV show, it’s a single-player game that shouldn’t depend on future DLC or updates to actually complete its main story.
Ready for boarding?
The longer I’ve sat with Starfield, the further the game has slipped down in my estimation. There are unfavourable comparisons with other recent releases that can’t be avoided, but at its core we’re stuck with a game that feels fundamentally incomplete. As Todd Howard himself admitted, Bethesda made a “base experience” that they intend to build on over the next few years – and that they also expect modders to help with. That might’ve been okay were it not for the outdated and buggy gameplay combined with an uninteresting and bland setting.
So like with other live-service titles, maybe Starfield will be worth revisiting after those promised updates, content drops, and DLC packs have been created. Maybe the “ultra deluxe anniversary edition” will be worth playing in 2030 – so if I live that long, maybe I’ll check it out. But I’ve been wasting my time on a game that, for all of its lofty promises, just isn’t what I’d been expecting. As I said last time: part of that is on me for internalising too much of the hype and excitement that built up in the months before Starfield’s launch. But a lot of the blame lies with Bethesda for creating an uninspiring setting, a bland, incomplete story, and for building a game that feels a decade out of date.
You cannot go that way.
Forget about Starfield becoming a “ten-year experience.” Bethesda needed to catch up on at least ten years worth of improvements and changes in game design and development. Those are the ten years that Bethesda should have been focused on. The company should have been looking at what comparable games in the open-world, action-adventure, and role-playing spaces have been doing since Skyrim launched and worked to incorporate some of those elements into Starfield. Instead, Bethesda took the Skyrim formula, cut out content to introduce later by way of paid DLC and add-ons, and planned for a decade’s worth of content for a game that already feels at least ten years out of date.
I wanted to love Starfield. The game’s overall aesthetic and many of its creative choices looked to create exactly the kind of sci-fi setting that appeals most to me. Blending real-world design elements with some of the sci-fi properties that I remember fondly from years past should have been exactly what I was looking for. I was worried that I was too harsh on Starfield and that I’d been treating the game unfairly or unkindly… but the longer I’ve sat with it the more I’ve seen its “ten-year plan” laid bare. I don’t care for live-services, for incomplete experiences, or for badly-written stories with cheap endings. I think I’m done with Starfield for now – though I will give the caveat that the game could be worth picking up again once its planned add-ons have been released.
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: There are no major story spoilers for Starfield, but there may be spoilers for the game and its features and systems. This article also uses screenshots and promotional images.
Well it turns out that my last post about Starfield wasn’t enough, and that there are still more questions about the game! Starfield is my most-anticipated game right now, and along with my excitement for Bethesda’s upcoming open-galaxy sci-fi role-playing shooter, I have some concerns and some general questions about the game and how it will work. A few days ago I posed ten questions about Starfield – so click or tap here to check out those questions if you haven’t already – but I’ve already come up with ten more!
What I’m trying to do with these questions is not say “here’s a feature that I think must be part of the game,” because I don’t want to make the mistake of getting over-hyped nor building up an inaccurate picture of Starfield. Instead, what I want to do is fill in some of the gaps in our knowledge of the game, because there are things that Bethesda hasn’t clarified. There are features that seemed to be hinted at by the Starfield showcase that haven’t been confirmed, there are questions raised by statements Bethesda and Xbox made, and then there are systems and mechanics that have been included in past Bethesda or Xbox titles that may make their way to Starfield – we just don’t know yet! That’s my mindset when I pose these questions, anyway. As I said when I wrote up my Starfield “wishlist,” I have high hopes that the game will be fun regardless of whether or not it does everything that I think I want from it at this early stage!
A handgun.
I have a couple of caveats that I always give when I put together a list like this one. The first is that I have no “insider information,” nor any connection with Bethesda, Xbox, or Microsoft. I’m not claiming that anything we’re going to talk about will, won’t, or must be part of Starfield – this is a list put together by someone who’s interested in the game, based on the showcase, interviews, and other marketing material. Secondly, all of this is the subjective opinion of one person – so if you hate all of my questions and ideas, that’s totally okay!
Finally, as I said last time, I haven’t seen every single interview that Starfield’s developers and producers have given. Nor have I read every single press release, comment, or social media post – so it’s possible that I’ve missed something, or that one of the questions on this list will have already been answered. My ageing brain may not have retained everything, too!
With all of that out of the way, then, let’s jump into my list of questions!
Question #1: Is the main quest fully complete? Or: will DLC be required to complete the main story?
Starfield’s premium edition includes access to the first piece of planned DLC.
As you can see from the image above, pre-ordering the “premium edition” of Starfield grants players access to the first piece of planned DLC. I’ve already expressed my scepticism about this; it seems far too early to be considering DLC when the game isn’t even out. But the subtitle of this piece of DLC is what I’m curious about today, because Shattered Space is described as the “first story expansion” for Starfield.
This raises the unpleasant spectre of an incomplete game; a “release now, fix later” title with promises of a “roadmap” to more content. This is the model often adopted by “live service” games, and it seldom works as intended. I’m all for an expansion pack, don’t get me wrong, but the way this one has been advertised has me at least a little worried.
How’s that roadmap working out for you, Anthem?
Bethesda has two points in its favour here, as I see it. The first is that, despite a very poor launch, the company has continued to support Fallout 76 with updates and expansions. Even if Starfield is released to poor critical reception, that gives me hope that support for the game will continue, and that at the very least that first planned expansion will still arrive. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, Bethesda’s single-player titles have been well-supported by expansion packs. Morrowind got massive expansions in Tribunal and Bloodmoon, and as much as we like to mock Oblivion’s horse armour DLC, that game also received the major Shivering Isles expansion pack. So the company has a solid track record here.
That being said, I’m still a little concerned about Starfield’s story potentially not being complete at launch. Given that the base game is already priced at £60 or $70, it would be nigh-on exploitative to force players to pay an additional fee of at least £25 or $30 to buy the next chapter of the story. Even more so considering that Shattered Space has been in development alongside the base game.
Question #2: Is Starfield capped at 30fps on PC? Or: is it possible to push Starfield to 60fps and beyond on higher-end PCs?
A fancy-pants gaming PC. (No, it’s not mine!)
Although it wasn’t discussed at the showcase, Starfield’s director Todd Howard subsequently confirmed in an interview that the game will be capped at 30 frames-per-second on Xbox Series S and X consoles, with the less-powerful machine also running the game at 1440p resolution. In the same interview, Howard seemed to indicate that the game can run at 60fps on PC, at least in Bethesda’s internal tests.
But what hasn’t been made clear is whether that will be an option for players on PC. Many modern PC games have frame-rate options as standard, and offer features like Vsync, where the game will match a monitor’s refresh rate. I recently upgraded to an RTX 3070 Ti – a fairly powerful GPU. I’d expect to hit at least 60fps in most titles – or at least in games that are well-optimised and have proper PC ports!
Todd Howard, Starfield’s director.
Thats being said, I’m not a stickler for frame-rate in the way some folks are. I’m not even sure I could tell much of a difference between frame-rates in a lot of cases. But 60fps isn’t even the gold standard, it’s a fairly low bar that most PC games in 2023 should be able to clear. If Starfield is so massive and so detailed that its console version needs to be frame-capped, then I guess that makes sense. But many folks have PCs with specs that far exceed the Xbox Series X.
If this isn’t an official feature, don’t despair. I wouldn’t be shocked at all to see a mod pop up in the days after Starfield’s launch that uncaps the game’s frame rate!
Question #3: What impact (if any) do different levels of gravity have on exploration and combat?
Firing a weapon in zero-G.
At the showcase we saw a zero-G section of gameplay featured prominently. Whether this is a recurring feature, or whether zero-G sections are part of scripted missions only wasn’t clear – but it was still something cool to see. We also saw that planets could have different levels of gravity, which makes sense!
But what wasn’t entirely clear from the gameplay that was shown off is what impact – if any – this will have. If I land on a high-gravity planet, for instance, does that mean I move slower, or can carry fewer items? On a low-gravity world can I jump tens of metres into the air without a jetpack? And what about firing a weapon – do projectiles have less range in high gravity than in low?
Will exploring in low gravity differ from exploring in high gravity?
I’m not banking on any of those things being true, because it seems like it would be complicated and time-consuming to create features like that. But at the same time, it would be neat if gravity was a consideration. There are so many different ways in which this could manifest, potentially impacting everything from combat to resource-gathering.
Although I’m not necessarily expecting a massive and deep gravity levels system, what I will say is this: if a planet designated as a high-gravity world and a planet designated as a low-gravity world are functionally the same, with gravity not seeming to have much of an impact on exploration or gameplay, it will raise the question of why it was even mentioned or included!
Question #4: Will DLC eventually come to Game Pass?
Game Pass is building up quite the library of titles!
As noted above, there’s already DLC planned for Starfield. But it doesn’t seem like that DLC will come to Game Pass – at least, not at first. The base game is available on Game Pass, but it’s also possible to pre-order the premium edition of Starfield, complete with the DLC. This kind of feels like a rough deal for Game Pass players – especially if the first piece of DLC won’t be ready for months or even years.
To be fair to Starfield, other games work a similar way. DLC for the likes of Age of Empires II is also something that has to be bought separately – but that doesn’t really excuse it. This is something Microsoft will have to figure out as Game Pass continues to grow, and while some optional content and DLC might still be okay to sell separately, things like Shattered Space might not be – especially if it’s vital to complete the main quest.
Game Pass players get access to one of the pre-order bonuses.
With Skyrim, the current Game Pass version includes the game’s major expansion packs. So I wonder if, at some point in the future, Starfield will be updated in a similar way. Microsoft is raking in the money from Game Pass every single month, and I’m sure that Starfield’s launch will bring an influx of new subscribers to the platform. But when Shattered Space is ready, some of those folks will be disappointed to learn that they have to pay an additional charge on top of their Game Pass subscription.
The subscription model is still new in the gaming realm, and there are questions like this that need to be sorted out! But if Game Pass is to achieve Microsoft’s aim of being “the Netflix of video games,” then it can’t get away with continuing to charge for add-ons and expansion packs, surely. Netflix doesn’t do that; you don’t get access to the first season of The Witcher then have to pay an additional fee to watch Season 2. So I’d love to see Shattered Space and any further DLC expansion packs come to Game Pass on day one.
Question #5: How important is crafting? And: can weapons and items break?
A weapon in the inventory menu.
I’m biased here: I detest weapon and item durability in practically every game. Very few titles manage to get this feature right, and more often than not it just turns into a frustrating experience. Weapons breaking partway through combat and items needing to be replaced every ten minutes may seem “realistic” in some ways… but it’s not exactly fun.
There are better ways to deal with weapons and items, such as cosmetic wear and tear, upgrades, or simply offering an abundance of choice. Rather than forcing players to a workbench or crafting station to keep re-creating or repairing tools, it’s far better – in my opinion, of course – to figure out other ways to make gameplay interesting.
This may be an in-game crafting station.
This also speaks to a potentially much larger point: what kind of role will there be for crafting in Starfield? We know that there can be a crafting station aboard a player’s spaceship, but how often will we be required to use it? What kind of items will we need to craft or upgrade? And crucially: how necessary will crafting be?
Bethesda role-playing games have always offered customisation options, even for things like weapons. Swords could be enchanted in Morrowind, for instance, and guns could be upgraded in Fallout 4. The latter also introduced settlement building, with resources needing to be collected. I feel there’s scope for a detailed and in-depth crafting system in Starfield, but I also think it’s something that may be optional for players who want a more action-forward experience.
Question #6: Can we give names to outposts and planets?
“Jemison Outpost 1” doesn’t feel like the most inspired name…
I’m fairly sure that re-naming spaceships is possible in Starfield; it certainly seems that way based on footage from the showcase. And of course the player character’s name can be freely chosen. But what about outposts and planets? We saw at the showcase several locations that were simply called “civilian outpost” or “industrial outpost,” so I’m not sure whether or not this will be possible.
It would be nice to be able to give a name to an outpost, though! Instead of making my home at the rather clinical and official-sounding “mining outpost,” it would be neat if I could give it a more personal name that reflects my character, their style, or even simply geographic features present at the base.
The moon Tau Ceti VIII-b.
While I have some hope for outpost names being possible, I’m far less convinced that re-naming planets will be part of Starfield. But again, I’d quite like this to be included in the game. Obviously we won’t be re-naming Mars or Jemison, nor any of the other named worlds that already have settlements. But if I stumble upon an uninhabited rock called something like Kepler-295 B, and decide to build the first-ever human outpost on its surface, I’d like to be able to give that world a more personal name!
Maybe this seems like something minor, and it is in a way. But these kinds of personal touches can go a long way to making the role-playing experience feel immersive; coming home to Fort Dennis on the planet Dentopia would be a lot more fun than returning to Outpost #7 on Kepler-259 B.
Question #7: How do factions work? Or: does joining one faction permanently cut off another?
The Freestar Collective is one of the main factions in Starfield.
In past Bethesda games, choosing to associate with one faction over another could permanently cut off that second faction, making it impossible to complete every available quest in a single playthrough. The example that leaps to mind are Morrowind’s Great Houses: joining one would mean the other two would be permanently unavailable.
This adds a lot of replay value to a game, especially if those factions have well-developed characters and long, detailed questlines of their own. Indeed, one of the appeals of a Bethesda role-playing game is that some of these factions and their missions can be at least as in-depth as the main quest and just as worthwhile to play.
Joining one Great House in Morrowind would permanently close off the other two in that playthrough.
We’ve seen at least a hint at something similar in Starfield via the traits menu in the character creator. Choosing to have a United Colonies background means that players can’t also choose to have a Freestar Collective background, and there are three religious affiliations which are also mutually exclusive. Whether and to what extent those traits will impact gameplay is still not known, but it’s interesting, at any rate.
Starfield will contain joinable factions in addition to the Constellation organisation, and it seems logical to assume that being a member of the Freestar Rangers might permanently cut off membership in the United Colonies’ space force. That’s just one example. If these factions are as deep and well-developed as we’d hope they would be in a Bethesda game, this feature would add a ton of replayability to Starfield.
Question #8: Are there invisible walls? Or: are landing zones limited in size?
Will we see a message like this in Starfield?
This kind of ties into a point that I raised last time: how much of the surface of an individual planet can be explored? There was mention at the showcase and in subsequent interviews about selecting a “landing zone” on a planet’s surface – with players seemingly given a completely free choice of where to land. But do those zones have limits, or is it truly going to be possible to circumnavigate a planet on foot?
If there are limits to landing zones, I hope that invisible walls won’t be the way it’s handled. Something like that would absolutely break the immersion, even if landing zones are massive in size. A game that encourages exploration will surely push players to roam far away from their spaceships.
A spaceship on the surface of a planet.
I’m not really sure how Starfield should deal with this. The best-case scenario is that exploration is completely unlimited, and players who want to will be able to go on long-distance expeditions far away from where they landed. Look at games like Minecraft, for example, and how some players will go on huge treks across vast swathes of the procedurally-generated map.
That being said, there are ways in sci-fi to generate a technobabble explanation or reason for just about anything! If it were explained at an early stage that, for example, communicators had a limited range, then maybe that could be an excuse for why roaming too far beyond where a spaceship landed isn’t possible. I think running into a random invisible wall with no explanation won’t cut it, but some kind of “turn back” message, perhaps with multiple warnings preceding it, could work.
Question #9: Are gas giants among the promised 1,000 explorable planets? Or: what role will gas giants play in Starfield?
This appears to be a moon orbiting a gas giant.
Plenty of images and clips of Starfield prominently feature gas giants – massive planets like Saturn and Jupiter that are mostly comprised of hydrogen, helium, and other gaseous material. Because of the nature of gas giants, there isn’t a “surface” to speak of that can be visited; gas giants are comprised of various layers of gases and liquids, with the “boundaries” between different densities often being very gradual.
So it doesn’t seem likely that we’ll be able to land on gas giants – but can we fly near them? Can we fly into their cloudy atmospheres at all? What about gathering resources? In real life, gas giants are known to harbour vast quantities of helium – and helium-3 is confirmed to be the material used for spaceship fuel in Starfield. So gas giants could conceivably have resources to collect… somehow.
Jupiter and its moon Io, as photographed by NASA’s Cassini probe.
But how would this work? You can’t build an outpost on a gas giant like you would on the surface of a planet, and unless spaceships can be outfitted with equipment to harvest resources – something we also haven’t seen – then I’m just not sure how we’d go about extracting anything from a gas giant in the game.
Finally, Starfield’s marketing has promised 1,000 planets to explore. In real life, the majority of planets that have been discovered so far are gas giants or ice giants; will that be true of the majority of Starfield’s 1,000 planets, too? If so, it could cut down the number of planets we can actually land on by a considerable margin.
Question #10: Are there procedurally-generated quests and missions?
Will some NPCs be randomly generated or dish out random quests?
We know that Starfield will use procedural generation for some of its planets and environments. There’s still a degree of confusion over how exactly this will function, but today I’m asking a different question! Are all of Starfield’s missions and quests hand-crafted? Or will there be procedurally-generated quests and missions?
Some games have random encounters and/or missions with set parameters but where the specific details are procedurally-generated. This could include, for example, a quest involving killing a monster – but where the quest-giver is a procedurally-generated NPC, the monster type is chosen at random, and so on.
Discovering a hand-crafted location in a random place!
Another example would be the patented “nemesis” system used in Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor and its sequel. Random NPCs in the enemy army would be promoted, depending on the actions of the player, and defeating these levelled-up enemies was an integral part of both titles. I’m not expecting anything like this in Starfield, it’s just an example of how this kind of randomness can work!
So will Starfield have anything comparable? Or have all of the game’s missions and quests been constructed by human developers from the ground up? The way Bethesda has talked about the game seems to suggest that at least some quests may take place in randomly-assigned locations.
So that’s it!
Is that a crashed spaceship?
I managed to find another ten questions that I’d love Bethesda and Xbox to answer before Starfield’s release.
As I’ve said before, the point here is not to pre-emptively criticise the game, nor to deliberately seek out things to pick on. Instead, I’m concerned that Bethesda and Microsoft ought to do more to rein in speculation when it gets out-of-hand. If a feature isn’t going to be included in the game, or won’t behave in the way players are expecting, it’s infinitely better to say so now, months before release. The alternative is that the hype train ends up going down the wrong track – before ultimately derailing when players finally get their hands on Starfield.
A good marketing team knows how to say “no” in a way that isn’t offputting, and how to redirect the conversation in a positive direction. If the interiors of spaceships can’t be customised, for example, then tell us and be up-front about that – but also shine a light on outpost building or the variety of costumes and cosmetic options elsewhere in the game. That’s just one example. But covering things up or saying “pass” when asked a basic question about an in-game system or feature that would in no way be a spoiler… well, it isn’t always a good look.
Dogfighting in space!
There are reasons why Starfield should sit in the “wait for the reviews” category. But at the same time, it’s absolutely my most-anticipated game and I can feel the hype train leaving the station. I really can’t wait to get my hands on Starfield, and even if the game doesn’t do absolutely everything that I think I want it to right now, I still think we’re in for a fun time.
There are quests in practically all of Bethesda’s older games that I still haven’t played – or even started! These games tend to be overstuffed with things to do, such that even years later I still haven’t seen or done it all. But I greatly enjoyed all of them in different ways, and the chance to take to the stars in a sci-fi role-playing game like this… it has the potential to be incredible. I haven’t felt this much excitement for a new game since Bethesda’s own Morrowind more than two decades ago!
Starfield will be released on the 6th of September 2023 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: Although there are no major story spoilers, minor spoilers may be present for Starfield and its in-game systems. This article also uses screenshots and images from the showcase and trailers.
The Starfield showcase has told us a lot about the upcoming sci-fi role-playing game and what we can expect from it. Bethesda has followed this up by putting out game director Todd Howard to participate in a number of interviews, including one in which he was strangely asked about fishing. But there are still some question-marks hanging over Starfield, at least from my perspective.
I’m not in a position to interview anyone or put these questions to Bethesda and Xbox directly. So instead I thought it could be fun to write them out here – as well as share my thoughts on what the answer may be, and what I’d want the answer to be! As I said when I wrote my Starfield wishlist, I have high hopes that the game will be enjoyable to play regardless of whether or not it does everything that I think I want right now. It’s also possible that updates and DLC will add certain features and mechanics in the months and years after the game launches – so if something seems to be “missing” that a lot of players would like to see, don’t bet against Bethesda adding it somewhere down the line.
Piloting a spaceship.
As always, I have a couple of caveats! Firstly, I have no “insider information,” and I’m not trying to claim that anything we’re going to talk about today definitely will or won’t be part of Starfield. These are questions I have about the game based on pre-release footage, the showcase, and interviews I’ve seen with Bethesda and Xbox folks. Secondly, all of this is the subjective opinion of one person; if you hate all of my questions or if I don’t ask something that seems blindingly obvious to you, that’s okay! There should be enough room in the gaming community and the Starfield fandom for different perspectives and points of view.
Finally, I haven’t seen every interview, nor read every single comment by Bethesda and Microsoft. It’s possible that I’ve missed something, or that something I’m uncertain about has been clarified already. My ageing brain may not have retained everything, too!
With all of that out of the way, let’s jump into my list of questions!
Question #1: Do planets rotate? Or: do planets have a day-night cycle?
An astronaut and a star.
We’ve seen some clips that seem to take place in the full light of day, and others that take place in darkness. So it’s obvious that night and day plays a role in Starfield, at least to an extent. But what I haven’t been able to gauge so far is whether there are day-night cycles on every planet – and if there are, would every planet behave the same way?
Past Bethesda games have had day-night cycles, with different monsters appearing at night, for example. In some games, sleeping is only permitted between certain hours, and some quests might even be time-specific in some cases. But if we’re heading out into space, planetary rotation can mean a lot more than just whether the sun is in the sky or not!
A solar system.
Some planets that lack atmospheres have extremes of temperature depending on whether they’re facing their star or not. Mercury, for instance, varies wildly between -170°C at “night” to over 400°C during its “daytime.” If we’re exploring planets comparable to Mercury in Starfield, when and where we land could determine what kind of environmental protection we’d need, for example.
The Starfield showcase seemed to suggest that planetary temperature was one factor that could affect the player character, with the HUD keeping track of temperature. But whether that changes, or whether each planet or landing site has a fixed, unchanging temperature is unclear. I’d love to know whether planets rotate, whether there are varying day-night cycles for the main cities and locations, and whether or to what extent these things could impact exploration.
Question #2: Is the entire surface of a planet explorable?
A close-up view of a planet.
If I disembark from my spaceship and head in one direction in a straight line, will I be able to keep walking, walking, and walking all the way around the circumference of a procedurally-generated planet? If I stay in that straight line without deviating, will I eventually walk all the way back to my spaceship?
There was a lot of talk at the showcase about “if you can see it, you can go there,” with a moon in the sky of a planet being pointed out. But there was also talk of players choosing a “landing zone” on each planet or moon that we’ll visit – and the implication of that could be that each “zone” has limits.
A spaceship blasts off.
I’m not sure how many people would want to walk all the way around a planet. Exploring the entire surface of even the smallest planet or moon in the solar system would be an arduous task… but gamers love to take on challenges! Walking hundreds or thousands of miles to fully circumnavigate a planet might be something that some folks will want to do.
Regardless, if there are limits to how far players can explore, or how much of the surface of a planetary body is explorable at one time, those limits will have to be handled carefully. Invisible walls might not cut it here… and could certainly impact the sense of immersion. But at the same time, it’s hard to see how this could be avoided, even given the game’s size and ambitious scope.
Question #3: Will there be microtransactions, an in-game shop, purchasable currencies, and the like?
The game is launching with pre-order bonus items.
If the answer to this question is anything but a solid, definitive “no” then I will be deeply concerned and very disappointed. Already we’ve seen that not all Starfields are created equal: there are pre-order bonus outfits and deluxe edition-exclusive outfits already. Pre-order bonuses are nothing new, of course, but I’d still rather that every Starfield player could have access to all in-game cosmetic items.
But the existence of these in-game skins has me worried. Are Bethesda and Microsoft planning an in-game microtransaction marketplace? If so, will there be some kind of “premium currency” to go along with it? Some titles can feel downright exploitative with their in-app purchases, with cosmetic items in Diablo IV retailing for £20/$25 in some cases.
In-game currency packs in Fall Guys.
In some ways, we can blame Bethesda for being one of the pioneers of monetisation in single-player games. Oblivion’s horse armour DLC became infamous in 2006 as an exemplar of this kind of cheap cash-grab – and Bethesda has even tried to monetise mods with its “Creation Club” in Skyrim and Fallout 4.
In free-to-play games, in-game purchases can be fine – though they must still be reasonably priced and not unfair. But in a single-player, fully-priced title like Starfield, in-game purchases will be hard to justify – if not outright impossible. Bethesda needs to be honest about this, too – and not send out one version of the game to reviewers, then sneakily add in an in-app storefront after launch. We’ve seen similar things happen with other games. It’s a concern at this point that no one at Microsoft or Bethesda has ruled out in-game monetisation.
Question #4: Will custom backgrounds be available? (A background with a customisable name and a free choice of skills.)
An example of one of the backgrounds.
The Starfield showcase showed off about sixteen different potential character backgrounds, with a handful of sci-fi staples like “bounty hunter” being joined by less common ones such as “chef!” These look like fun – but their inclusion raises a question: can we make our own custom background?
In Morrowind and Oblivion, it was possible to create a custom class. If players didn’t want to pick one of the pre-made options it was possible to become… well, anything. These custom classes also came with a free choice of starting skills. The pre-made backgrounds in Starfield each seem to come with three starter skills, so that raises the question of whether custom backgrounds exist, and if they do, whether it would be possible to have a free choice of skills to include.
Creating a custom class in Morrowind.
At the showcase, it was clear that the choice of background could lead to some unique dialogue options and possibly even unique quests within Starfield. If that’s the case, Bethesda may not want players creating their own custom backgrounds. But it was a lot of fun in Morrowind and Oblivion to become a “dark knight” or “chocolatier,” and to choose which skills to give a boost to at the beginning of the game. This might not be something everyone wants to try – and I think in my first playthrough I’ll probably pick one of the pre-made options to see how much unique content is on offer. But it could be a ton of fun!
This is something that feels like it could be relatively easy to mod, and I wouldn’t be shocked to see a “custom background” mod created fairly soon after the game’s launch if it isn’t an official feature.
Question #5: How abundant will resources be?
This cargo ship looks like it could carry a lot of resources.
We know that there will be resources to collect in Starfield, with some of these being able to be sold for cash and others perhaps being used to craft items or even in the construction of outposts and bases. But how abundant will these resources be? If you think about it, every single item ever used in the entire history of humankind has come from a single planet. All the lead, all the iron, all the uranium we’ve ever used across all of human history came from Earth. With that in mind, it might feel strange to visit a planet and find, say, 40kg of iron, half a brick of lead… and nothing else.
One of my concerns with Starfield is that a deliberate policy of forced scarcity might be used to push players to keep exploring and to keep visiting new planets and locations – or even to pay real-world money to “skip the grind.” Depending on what resources are needed for crafting, and how necessary in-game crafting will be to Starfield, this could become frustrating.
Firing a mining laser.
Not all planets and moons will have every available resource – nor should they. But there has to be a balance found that makes collecting resources feel fun and not like a chore. I would also hope that resources will be purchasable, at least in limited quantities. If I need, for example, 100kg of iron to craft something and I only have 98kg, there are going to be times where I’d rather spend a few credits than have to hop in my spaceship and seek out a planet to collect a paltry amount of a single resource!
So again, this is about balance. Exploring has to feel natural, resource collecting and crafting have to feel fun. If I want to become a miner or if I want to use resources to generate the majority of my income, that’s a different story. But for basic gameplay, it’s imperative that Starfield strikes the right balance between scarcity and abundance.
Question #6: Can spaceship interiors be customised?
Exterior spaceship customisation is part of the game.
At the showcase, a Bethesda developer was prominently shown dropping a pilfered sandwich onto a pile aboard her ship. So we can infer from that that it’s possible to place individual items aboard a spaceship and have them remain there. But is that as far as we can go when it comes to personalising the inside of our flying homes?
I’d like to think it would be possible to do things like change colours, for instance. Changing the colours of the floors, walls, consoles, or furniture would be a step in the right direction, and would go some way to making a spaceship feel personal. There’s a danger, I fear, that no matter how great a ship might look on the outside, the inside might end up feeling like little more than a collection of snapped-together pieces.
Is this a bridge or a large cockpit module?
I’d love to think that we’d have choices over things like furniture. Do we want to pick this style of chair or that one? Do we want to put extra seats in the living area? How about a bigger kitchen? These are the kinds of decisions that I’d love to be making about my spaceship!
Bethesda has suggested that outposts may have a degree of customisation, with furniture and the like able to be positioned. Again, we don’t know how much customisation is available, how many items are available, and to what extent it will be possible to rearrange a room – but that sounds positive, at least. Even though I’d have expected to have heard something about this by now if it was possible for spaceships, I’m still crossing my fingers.
Question #7: Do tiles and points of interest repeat?
Discovering a new location.
At the showcase, Bethesda developers talked about how procedurally-generated planets will work. Todd Howard confirmed that there are hand-crafted “points of interest” to visit, and these will be randomly allocated to planets through this procedural generation system. While we don’t know how many of these pre-made locations there might be, if you think about how many individual tombs, ruins, and settlements there were in a game like Morrowind, it seems fair to think that there could be at least 100 – and possibly a lot more than that.
But here’s an interesting question: if Starfield’s procedural generation allocates these at random, does that mean we could encounter the same location twice? Will two “abandoned mine” locations be identical on different planets – or different parts of the same planet, come to that? And what about the tiles that make up a planet’s surface? Will they repeat, too?
How much of a planet’s surface will be made up of repeated tiles?
If a player visits a dozen or more planets in the same category – say frozen, icy worlds like Pluto – will we eventually see the same hills, the same mountains, the same lakes, and so on? After all, there can only be a fixed number of pre-made “puzzle pieces” for each type of planet or each biome, surely. There could be hundreds and hundreds of each – but in a game that encourages long-term play, it doesn’t seem impossible that we’d eventually run out of these tiles. What happens then?
If there are hundreds, thousands, or even more of these tiles and locales, the chances of encountering two identical ones in quick succession are going to be slim. But it could be immersion-breaking to land on a planet and encounter the exact same mountain or ruin as we’d already seen and explored somewhere else.
Question #8: Are there civilian outposts, colonies, and small settlements beyond the main cities?
A spaceship at a spaceport in the Freestar Collective.
One thing that makes Bethesda’s worlds feel lived-in are the smaller towns and off-the-beaten-track settlements. Look at places like Hla Oad in Morrowind or Breakheart Banks in Fallout 4. These are small settlements with no connection to the main quests of their respective games. The player has no reason to visit them except for exploration and “to see what’s there.”
Starfield needs places like this, in my opinion. It’s great that New Atlantis will be Bethesda’s biggest-ever city, or that Neon will feel like a cyberpunk dystopia – but if there aren’t smaller places to randomly encounter in between those few big locations, Starfield’s galaxy will feel small. The population relative to the size of the map will feel unbalanced.
New Atlantis, capital of the United Colonies.
In other Bethesda games – and other open-world games by other developers, too – smaller settlements can have quests of their own. They often have unique NPCs, shops, taverns, and more. Some may be connected to a faction questline, too. So there should still be things to do in at least some of these smaller settlements!
It will feel strange, I fear, if the so-called “United Colonies” only has two cities under its banner, or if the Freestar Collective is a “collective” of no more than two settlements on two planets. Partly this is for that sense of immersion, to ensure that Starfield’s galaxy truly feels like a living, breathing, perpetual world that will exist whether or not the player character is part of it. But also it’s a question of balancing the game, and ensuring that its open world doesn’t feel too empty outside of a handful of cities.
Question #9: Is it possible to build more than one outpost on a single planet? And: is it possible to build an outpost on Earth?
Constructing an outpost.
Todd Howard has suggested that it may not be possible to build an outpost on every single one of Starfield’s planets – and that makes sense. Building an outpost right next to a major city might not be a good idea, for instance. Or planets owned by certain factions could be off-limits. But with Earth confirmed to be present in the game – and perhaps in a devastated or otherwise uninhabited state – I can’t be the only one who’s considering building an outpost there… can I?
If it’s truly possible to pick any location on a planet to land and construct an outpost, maybe some folks will want to find their home town and build an Earth outpost! I think that could be fun – even though it seems silly, in a way, to build on Earth in a game all about exploring space!
Is this structure the St. Louis Gateway Arch on Earth, as some have suggested? Insert: The St. Louis Gateway Arch as it appears today.
Then there’s the idea of building multiple outposts on a single planet. If I come across a great planet with abundant resources, I might want to set up a mining camp there to generate resources and/or income. But would I want to build my dream home on top of a busy mine? Probably not!
So it would be neat if it would be possible to build different outposts on a single planet, perhaps with different functions for each one. An automated mining outpost could be chugging away in the background while my house is hundreds of miles away. That’s just one example – but there could be other reasons for wanting to do this, such as different resources being present in different locations.
Question #10: Has Bethesda over-promised? Or: is Starfield being over-hyped?
Todd Howard, Bethesda Game Studios executive producer and Starfield’s director.
Too much hype can be toxic to any game, especially if players are allowed to build up an inaccurate picture of what the game could be before it’s launched. This happened in different ways to games like No Man’s Sky and Cyberpunk 2077, as players came to believe that they were going to get a once-in-a-lifetime, genre-busting experience. Sound familiar?
A good marketing campaign knows how to set appropriate limits and how to say “no” in a way that isn’t offputting. So far, I don’t think we’ve seen enough of this from Bethesda and Xbox, and there’s a danger that some players are getting the wrong idea about the scope of Starfield or about what may be possible in the game. This is something that has to be addressed as quickly as possible!
Phil Spencer and Matt Booty of Xbox Game Studios.
It’s totally understandable that Microsoft and Bethesda want to paint Starfield in the best possible light, showing the game at its best and making the most of key features. But that kind of positive approach has to be both truthful and balanced; it mustn’t oversell in-game systems nor promise features that won’t be present. It’s also important to quash speculation if it gets out-of-hand.
There are going to be limits to Starfield. There will be places that we can’t go, things we can’t do when building spaceships and outposts, and limits to both exploration and customisation. It’s also distinctly possible that the game will launch with some bugs and glitches, or even missing features that may be promised to be coming as part of an update. At the end of the day, Starfield is still a video game – one that is naturally limited by the technology available to its developers.
So that’s it.
An unknown character.
Those are ten questions that I have about Starfield.
As I’ve said on other occasions, I’m trying to rein in the excitement and hype that I have for this game! There are solid reasons to put Starfield in the “wait for the reviews” category – such as Bethesda’s reputation, the shocking state of many recent PC releases, the Fallout 76 mess, and more. And I will be checking out reviews before I commit to Starfield in September – especially if the game appears to be poorly-optimised or not running well on PC. I don’t need another Jedi: Survivor debacle!
I’d love to see Bethesda address all of these questions head-on, and to provide answers before Starfield is released. I’ve done my part on my small corner of the internet – but it will be up to bigger publications who have the access and the opportunity to hold Bethesda and Xbox leaders to account.
The Freestar Collective.
Some of the questions that have been asked of Bethesda and Microsoft have been missed opportunities, in my opinion. The question about fishing leaps to mind as the stupidest example of a nonsense question, but there have been plenty of others. If I were able, these ten questions would be the ones I’d pose to the senior folks at Bethesda and Xbox.
So that’s all for today! I know we’ve talked about Starfield a lot on the website over the past couple of weeks – but that’s because it’s my most-anticipated game at the moment. And every time I think I’ve said enough, something else comes to mind, or I read another article or watch another interview! There may be even more to say in the days and weeks ahead… so stay tuned! When Starfield is released I’ll also do my best to share my first impressions of the game, as well as talk about some of its systems and features.
Until next time!
Starfield will be released on the 6th of September 2023 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.
Xbox recently hosted its Games Showcase event – an addendum to Summer Games Fest, which has effectively replaced this year’s E3 industry event. The Showcase was generally pretty decent, with a focus being on games that will be released over the next twelve months. Some big games like Valheim and Redfall took centre stage, and there was news or updates about the likes of Grounded, Microsoft Flight Simulator, and even Fall Guys – the latter of which is belatedly launching on Xbox (and Nintendo Switch) in just a few days’ time.
Having recently been gobbled up by Microsoft’s expanding gaming division, Bethesda had a lot to say about Starfield. Though the game has recently been delayed until the first half of 2023, the Xbox Games Showcase event provided a massive update on the game and showed players a first look at gameplay. That’s what we should be talking about; that should be the headline for Bethesda coming out of their big summer presentation. But it isn’t, at least not in a lot of publications.
Bethesda chief Todd Howard chose to drop the “announcement” – if we can even call it that – that Fallout 5 will be the studio’s next-but-one big project, and that news has grabbed headlines and stolen attention away from Starfield right at the moment when you’d think its marketing campaign should be beginning in earnest. I just don’t really understand why it was necessary to make this so-called “announcement” and confirm what most players and fans had already been assuming.
Firstly, if Starfield brings in rave reviews, massive player numbers, and goes on to be the success that Bethesda and Microsoft must be hoping for, then surely a sequel should enter the conversation. By stating now, before Starfield has even launched, that Fallout 5 will follow The Elder Scrolls VI as Bethesda’s next-but-one project, that seems to push any kind of Starfield sequel even further away. If decisions need to be made in future to change that around for whatever reason, some people are going to be left upset. There’s literally no upside to talking about Fallout 5 at this juncture.
The same could have been said, arguably, about The Elder Scrolls VI when that was similarly “announced” at E3 in 2018. With the game so far off, talking about it so soon seemed premature at best. In that case, though, there was a case to be made that the constant stream of re-releases for Skyrim, the fact that there had never been such a long gap in between Elder Scrolls games, the releases of not one but two Fallout titles, and Starfield being in active development all combined to make it worthwhile to make a commitment to Elder Scrolls fans that their series hadn’t been forgotten.
With Fallout, there just isn’t any need. Fallout 4 was released in November 2015, and that was followed up by the (disastrous and unplayable) Fallout 76 just three years later. Fallout 76 continues to receive attention and updates, some of which have been pretty substantial, so there isn’t that same feeling of abandonment that some Elder Scrolls fans had been feeling in the wake of a lack of follow-up to Skyrim. Though I’d still suggest that announcing The Elder Scrolls VI in 2018 was premature, at least there was a kind of logic to it – a logic that this “announcement” of Fallout 5 lacks.
The Elder Scrolls VI was also announced with a slick teaser – obviously no gameplay, but at least a look at a pretty landscape and a logo. Fallout 5 got no such fanfare, with the news of its planned existence seemingly being an off-the-cuff remark dropped haphazardly in an interview with IGN. Perhaps someone at Microsoft or Bethesda needs to help Todd Howard with his interviews so this kind of thing doesn’t happen again!
Starfield has been Bethesda’s biggest and longest project to date, having been worked on for at least a decade. Production officially began following the release of Fallout 4 in 2015 and ramped up in the wake of Fallout 76′s launch in 2018, so this has been a massive undertaking. The Elder Scrolls VI will be comparable in scale, and if it follows a similar timeline to Starfield it may not be ready until 2027 or 2028. If Fallout 5 likewise takes five-plus years in active development, we’re potentially talking about a release window sometime in the early/mid-2030s. So why on earth should we be talking about this game now?!
One of the reasons why video game corporations like sequels is that there’s a built-in fanbase. Fans of Fallout 3 turned up for Fallout 4; fans of Oblivion turned up for Skyrim… and so on. Starfield represents much more of a risk compared with the likes of a new Elder Scrolls or Fallout title, and as a result it needs to be handled carefully, marketed cleverly, and not overshadowed by the bigger and more illustrious franchises that its parent company owns.
The mere act of mentioning Fallout 5 – which had not been discussed by anyone senior at Bethesda or Microsoft prior to this – has completely stolen Starfield’s thunder coming out of the Xbox Games Showcase, and that shouldn’t have been allowed to happen. Bethesda’s mistakes and stumbles – some of which go back several years – have already meant that there’s a bit of a caveat in the minds of some players when they think about Starfield, so the game needs every boost it can possibly get. Being overshadowed by a new title, especially one that’s probably ten years away from being released, doesn’t help and has actually hurt Starfield at the moment players should be beginning to pay attention and, from Bethesda’s point of view at least, get excited for its launch next year.
Maybe this was just a mistake; a throwaway remark that Todd Howard didn’t really intend to make. If so, I guess it’s fair to say that we all make mistakes, these things happen, and to try to move on from it and refocus on Starfield. But it won’t be easy to do. There are already a ton of articles about Fallout 5 being “announced,” and that will lead to questions from fans and the gaming press drawing attention away from Starfield at what was supposed to be its first moment in the spotlight.
We could have spent today talking about the gameplay that was shown off, how things like jumping and jetpacking look like fun, and how incredibly excited I am to design and build my own spaceship! But instead we’re talking about a marketing screw-up and a game that, to be blunt, I’m not sure I’m going to live long enough to see! It was a mistake to even mention Fallout 5 this early, and if Starfield exceeds expectations and becomes Bethesda and Microsoft’s “next big thing,” I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see a sequel planned sooner than expected. That could push back work on Fallout 5, upsetting fans. There was literally no upside to this at all, and the resultant reaction to Todd Howard’s statement has drawn attention away from Starfield at the precise moment when fans should have been excitedly talking about its gameplay reveal, new features, and the scale of the galaxy that Bethesda has created. What a mess!
Starfield will be released in the first half of 2023 for Xbox Series S/X and PC and will also be available via Xbox Game Pass. Fallout 5 has no release date scheduled. Starfield, the Fallout franchise, the Elder Scrolls franchise, and other titles and properties mentioned above are the copyright of Microsoft and Bethesda Softworks. Some promotional images courtesy of IGDB. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
Trekking with Dennis 