Back in ye olde days of one month ago, Press Box conducted an interview with Bruce Nesmith, the lead designer on Skyrim. During it, he said something about Bethesda flop Starfield that I can’t get out of my head: if a new studio had put it out, it “would be talked about like the second coming.”
In Nesmith’s esteemed opinion, the “Bethesda” of it all cranked people’s expectations up to such a degree that it could never live up to it. On the face of it, it is a statement that most people would probably scoff at and say, “No, it is because Starfield was rubbish.” For me, though, I can’t stop thinking about it, so we are going to dive into those murky waters today.
This is not a Starfield hit job; I am a fan
Let’s start with a disclaimer: I really like Starfield. It is the catalyst which made me buy a Series X and Game Pass, and led me away from Sony. By no means is Starfield perfect, far from it, yet I enjoyed it immensely. It let me blow people up in a starship, of course, it’s great.
However, it certainly did not live up to the hype, and I do agree with Nesmith on that. Having Bethesda as its maker did not help. However, I don’t think that is the main issue. Let’s look at Fallout 76, for example. A lot of expectation on this one, and we all know how that release went. Universal disdain.
However, it gained a new lease of life because Bethesda put in the effort to make it as good as people wanted. They added NPCs, a more populated world, the Ghoul; they did the works. Where has that been on Starfield? I think it is definitely fair to say the hype was high, but the blame falls more on the developers. They gave up too easily.
A hundred empty worlds is not better than a dozen immersive ones
One of the biggest complaints about Starfield was the empty worlds. What is the point of having hundreds if each only has three landmarks? Miles away from each other. And they only added a vehicle months after release. That should have been day one. Mass Effect had the Mako. It definitely sucked, but it saved us from trudging across each barren world.
If another developer had released Starfield, they still would have rightfully been ripped apart for these barren lands. It would not have been celebrated. It would have been a flop, instead of what Bethesda made it; a disappointment. You can populate an MMORPG world, yet you can’t make Starfield worlds more interesting?
Do we really care what shape our target is as we shoot it?
Speaking of interesting, there was another quote in that interview that caught my attention. Nesmith said that the foes weren’t interesting enough, and there was a lack of variation in creatures. Has that really bothered us? In my time playing, I never really cared that I was shooting humans again. I was just enjoying the gameplay.
It is an RPG where combat is mostly done with guns. Call of Duty is wildly popular, and last I checked, the enemies were all just humans. Starfield certainly has many flaws, but a lack of enemy models to shoot in the face is not one of them, which brings us neatly onto our next point.
Nesmith thinks that Starfield is a very good game; it just isn’t. And I am speaking as someone who really enjoys it. Then again, I also liked Too Human, and that Robot Wars on the PS2, where just driving around the arena was enough to shatter your flipper at times. Sometimes, jank can be incredibly entertaining.
Starfield shipped with a catalogue of flaws that Bethesda refused to address
Starfield certainly is not jank; it’s just not great either. The gameplay is decent, and I liked the space combat but there are so many flaws. None of the companions were particularly interesting. The worlds were barren wastelands, and even the vehicle barely helped. The story was ok to start with. In the second half, though, it got really annoying and longwinded.
The problem is not the Bethesda hype. It’s that they made a subpar experience, and then refused to make any substantial efforts to improve it because it’s not Fallout or Elder Scrolls. It was an experiment that they gave up on way too quickly. I think if any small studio put it out in the way Bethesda did, hardly anyone would have bought it. In fact, the Bethesda label is probably the only way it kept shifting copies after the initial reaction.
With Bethesda’s resources, a space epic definitely has potential; they just dropped the ball. The only thing Starfield being developed by another studio could have added was maybe they wouldn’t have just walked away. Having said that, I do really enjoy it. You can design your own ship and be a literal space cowboy with the Freestar Collective. I have only now just made the connection between that and Joey’s imaginary friend in Friends. My next character will be named Maurice.
