I think the Bethesda cycle has gone a lot faster this time around with people more or less turning on it within a month releasing long more thought out reviews than the first wave of day 1 stuff. BG3 coming out and astounding everyone immediately prior also happened to just make it the easiest thing to compare it to and unfortunately for Starfield, BG3 is a fucking masterpiece. Starfield has some interesting ideas and some interesting stuff in it, but it’s just so hampered by poor design choices and a lifeless world that it didn’t hit it for people.

In the probably dozen videos discussing it about a month after release, it’s almost universally compared to BG3, nobody thinks about Elden Ring to compare it to, and I feel like it’s for Starfield’s benefit in that regard. Elden Ring did a substantially better more interesting world to explore than anything Bethesda’s released in years. On top of that, this is probably Bethesda’s weakest world, people that were pretty into the Bethesda formula find Starfield more difficult to really click with because the worlds are barren and there’s so much homogenous slop. The other day I was looking at the steam front page and wasn’t particularly surprised to see Starfield at like the 15th top selling game on steam at the time with BG3 sitting at the top still. Starfield was losing to Skyrim in sales according to steam’s front page.

Bethesda burned through pretty much all the nostalgia and good will at this point, FO76, premium mods, the lackluster FO4 after New Vegas. That weird elder scrolls mobile game they released that everyone seems to have forgotten about. The gajillion re-releases of Skyrim. These other titles had the benefit of long franchise power and fans being established from the better titles and finding parts they could enjoy or how the lore has been expanded. Recently I watched some Fallout lore videos and they’ve certainly taken it places with the tabletop and 76 additions. Like they’ve just fully embraced adding lovecraftian ancient ones to the universe with the tabletop more or less confirming that there’s an ancient God behind the church of Atom. There’s also stuff about the mothman cult secretly being a front for worshipping some other tentacled creature. People are going to dig through this stuff much more because they basically write the stories after Bethesda throws shit around. In my time playing Starfield, I found the clean corpo UC and the space cowboys of the FC. There were references to a war between them that had since ended and that was about it. I looked around a bit for more lore but found basically nothing.

My time in Starfield ended up being mostly momentum after forcing myself to see it through for a few hours which at that point I kept going for inertia and time sunk. I wanted only a few things. To fly a cool spaceship, to build a cool base, and to shoot cool guns. None of that happened. I didn’t give a shit about the main plot and immediately ditched it the first chance I could.

With the spaceship part I did a bunch of side content looking to make money to finance a cool ship only to realize I needed to stat dump into piloting to get the best parts, which took a few hours of grinding to get to because level gates suck and destroying 30 ships takes a long fucking time. I had made a few others in the meantime and realized just how bland it really was. I was expecting a honeycomb style ship when I made my first wide ship, but the game just arbitrarily decides where doors will be placed, so have fun with that connecting hallway being a dead end and your ship snaking you around for a while. Eventually grabbed a mod that gave me all the ship parts at a single vendor and built the best ship I could and by then I couldn’t stand the remnants of the lego-style connections standing out with the ship being unsleek and looking patched together at best.

Building a base and guns I didn’t even get to start. I spent at least 20 hours grinding for resources and fighting against the game’s inventory system trying to build up some mining outposts to get me the raw resources to then build a base. But I was also trying to do gun modding which ate all my resources. Resources weigh an ungodly amount and even after patching in a mod that would remove the weight while I carried them and cheating my carry weight up like 4x, I still spent ages in the inventory menu trying to balance stuff while never having the right stuff because there are so many resources to juggle that get siphoned up by everything. After a while I was literally just playing to get these parts and I just never opened it again preferring to just open stellaris and play with gigastructural engineering.

My favorite part of FO4 was the basebuilding paired with Sim Settlements. I dumped a few hundred hours on that alone. The gameplay loop was fun, I’d go out and with a mod that removed junk weight, would pick locations clean to then build homes for people.

The big complaints I’ve seen with Starfield are that it’s a dead feeling world, the NPCs are boring, the NPCs are super rude, the essential tag is abused, they even just have certain NPCs unable to even get damaged by the player. Like why can’t I even hurt the jackass in Neon that’s murdering people in the name of profit? Why is the board of the resort planet essential where I have to either enslave or drive off a colony ship that left Earth hundreds of years prior. Other complaints are about the abysmal story making itself meaningless in the process.

There were interesting ideas but Bethesda is a fundamentally unambitious uncreative company at this point. The power system they lifted from FTL is interesting, but in the middle of a fight you’re really not going to fiddle much with it. The shipbuilding is close to being good but is limited. Basebuilding is a step back from FO4. Carry limits are more obnoxious than ever. NPC animations are back to Oblivion. James Stephanie Sterling commented that they liked the one character that was meant to be annoying because they had character that the rest of the cast did not. The animations are in the uncanny valley for me and they all seem to love puckering their lips when they talk.

NASApunk is also just a boring aesthetic