To fix Starfield?

 

After years of build up and hype beyond the stars, Starfield finally dropped and the game was... good. I mean I enjoyed the game enough to sink 200 hours into it, but... that's about all the time I feel like I can give the game. I haven't played through every quest, I haven't explored every system exhaustively, but I just don't want to. Something about Starfield lacks that something special of past Bethesda games, and it's not mod support. I sunk ungodly hours into Skyrim years before I ever got it on PC and started down the modding rabbit hole. Bethesda games cannot and should not rely on modders to 'fix the game' as they say. I don't even know what people say when they mean 'fix the game'. There's not a single Bethesda game in history that has been fundamentally 'fixed' by a mod. That's more 'Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines' territory; Bethesda mods are more about making the game totally and entirely your own, not making the base product stand-able.

And when it comes to engaging with Starfield, I kind of feel like I'm kicking the ball of 'nothing to do' down the road. As though I know I'm going to be unsatisfied and am trying to delay that feeling with as many side activities as possible, even though none of those side activities are themselves interesting or fulfilling. I never even got that chance to do what I was saving up points for and take down the Legendary Ship battle, because the grind ahead of me for the correct skill points just so my ship will be buffed enough to stand a chance is an ungodly proposition. But I'm not just about to write off Starfield when the devs themselves have claimed they want the game to last for the next 10 years. And we can't rely on DLC to make up the gap, because for some reason the first DLC is slated for late 2024. Which is insane. So how does one 'fix' Starfield?

Recently one of the the most prolific Bethesda-centric content creators, Camelworks, published their extensive, community assisted, break-down of many of Starfield's minor pressure points, as well as it's larger shortcomings, in a very exhaustive video that I certainly recommend for those interested. Many of the points he touched on there just happen to coincide with a lot of my problems with Starfield, because despite the both of us being laymen when it comes to game design; (I have some amateur game design familiarity, but that doesn't entitle me to ultimate insight when it comes to AAA development decisions) somehow the pitfalls are blindly obvious for all to see. But not to Bethesda, who pushed this game out the door and then fought to insist it isn't boring. So what are the problems that the community can see which are blind to Bethesda?

It's boring. Exploration, I mean. Which is a problem considering that is the sole formula within the Starfield recipe which makes it distinct from Fallout and The Elder Scrolls. For neither of those games boast key design pillars as 'dynamic exploration'. Sure they will host adventures that involve exploration and are sometimes littered with Dynamic elements, but for the very art of the exploration itself to be left to the whim of a constructive algorithm? That's new. And it's dull. Why? Because Bethesda only thought of a couple dozen items to feed the exploration generator in order to keep the worlds feeling interesting. I knew they'd fail at hiding the limitations of hands-off design the moment they announced it but the extent at which they failed, presented hardly any archetypes whatsoever, implies the development team didn't even consider this an important avenue of development! In fact, I think the lionshare of development went towards the handcrafted content, which would make sense if it wasn't for the fact that the handcrafted worlds and quests make up a tiny fraction of the entirety of Starfield. How could Bethesda be so clueless? Are they stupid?

Honestly, it's probably the Skyrim bug that did it. Camelworks, admist a dozen fantastic points, labors with a rather cheap one when comparing the amount of Morrowind content compared to Starfield content- stacking up the number of faction quests that Morrowind in it's several magnitudes more than Starfield can offer. The obvious reason being here that pretty much all of Morrowind's faction quests are painfully basic collect, or talk to, or kill this person affairs with no voice acting, very little story and bread-crumbs in the place of a narrative building. Starfield doesn't make its faction quests like Morrowind did- (even though, honestly- smaller and more numerous quests would have probably fit what the team were going for a lot better.) Starfield makes it's faction quests like Skyrim did- and that's because Bethesda cannot get over it's own success.

Skyrim was the little game that could. Adventurous, dynamic, soaring. Unlike Oblivion, which remains perfect only until you play the thing and realise it's lustre is trapped beneath the adventure-game appeal of Skyrim and the RPG-coded Morrowind, Skyrim doesn't take much to compare decently well to other modern RPG games. It's accessible, decently paced, not too complicated and easy to get lost in. And Bethesda have taken advantage of that by releasing it again and again and again. Fallout 4 tried to be a bit more like Skyrim, and Starfield wanted to be a lot more like it- but what worked for Skyrim doesn't really work for every other style of game out there. Cave diving is fun in the fantasy wastes of Tamriel's frozen north- but I can't think of a single cave in Starfield that didn't make we want to hurl. Radiant bandit hunting just kind of neatly slides into the day-to-day of Dragon slaying. But bounty hunting in a galaxy as large of Starfield's is a targeted endeavour that ends up drawing startling attention to the three or four dungeon archetypes available. The sneaky Thieves Guild missions work decently well in Skyrim's rugged skin, whereas the clunky Ryujin Industries stealth-based questline is easily Starfield's worst. Bethesda can't let Skyrim go, and they need to.

I get it, I really do. I play Skryim again and again because that game was the bomb. But it shouldn't blow up the prospects of Bethesda to be creative and innovative. Starfield suffers, in my opinion, from a lack of commitment to the premise. Bethesda fell over themselves trying to describe Starfield as a 'simulation' rather than as an adventure, which summons up ideas of evolved trade route mechanics, developed exploration, thoughtful bounty hunting content- stuff like that. But they were too scared to shy away too much from the stuff that they knew. Skyrim gave it's player powers so Starfield needs to have some space mystical plotline to justify powers- most of which feel a bit underwhelming for their use cases. If Starfield had it's identity clearer to heart, which a fresh game of a franchise really should have had, then maybe we could have avoided all of this. Or maybe that 'identity' was conceived as literally just the Dragonborn with a space helmet on. I really wouldn't put it past modern Bethesda.

It really is a shocking state of affairs when currently my biggest worry is how on earth Bethesda are going to screw up the exploration of The Elder Scrolls 6 using generative technology, because I know they're going to do it. Oblivion's Ai-made dungeons were the most repetitive the franchise ever became, far downgraded from Morrowind's unparalleled dungeon design and Skyrim's decent go around- now watch The Elder Scrolls 6's generate randomly each playthrough or something equally as insane! All I want is to get that special feeling again, that Bethesda have nailed it once more, so that I can hold the same regard for the company I used to call one of my favourites again. And I don't want to think that we have to wait until Todd Howard leaves for that to happen, because the last thing I'd ever think would be Bethesda's problem is 'tripping up on it's own coat-tails'.