Last summer, I bought a new PC just before the release of Baldur’s Gate 3. I can’t imagine how poorly my old rig would’ve handled that game, but it ran very well on my new machine and I couldn’t have been happier with it. A side benefit of this purchase was I received a code to gain a free month of Xbox Game Pass, and I thought, “Oh, neat. I can use this in September to try out Starfield!”
Starfield’s early release window rolled around, and news began to break. It was divisive. People were tearing the game apart, people were cheering it on. This article boosted a sentiment from its fans saying the game really picked up 12 hours in. I avoided reading too much into any of this, content to wait and form my own opinion once I could play the game myself.
Due to my usual weekly schedule, I didn’t check it out until the Thursday after it’s full release. I launched the game after work, I threw together my character, and I played for three hours before I decided it wasn’t working for me and I uninstalled the game.
I chatted with a few friends, trying to parse out my exact feelings. I didn’t expect to bounce off of this game so hard, so completely. Oblivion and Skyrim are two of my favorite games ever; both utterly consumed my teenage years and early adulthood. While I never had the same fondness for Fallout 3 or 4, I still played and enjoyed them, though not nearly to the same extent as the Elder Scrolls games.
I’ve thought about that experience a few times since. Frankly, I’m not sure if I can really make peace with it without writing about it, and, well, if I write about it, I might as well post it, eh? So, here’s what I’ve settled on as my reasons for bouncing off of the game: my own conclusions and some video essays for additional viewing.
A Poorly Paced Introduction
(Spoilers for the openings of several Bethesda games.)
Bethesda’s gotten worse at opening their games as time has gone on.
Now, I’ve only played from Oblivion forward, and it might just be that trajectory of experience that’s led me to that conclusion. Still, I think Oblivion’s got the best introduction of the five I’ve played. It does the least to muddle whatever thoughts you might want to bring to your character and gives you a great dungeon to explore within moments of its launch, which really shows off a major pillar of the game. Once it’s done, you have a quest, but it doesn’t feel like you need to sort that out and you can just go wherever you want. (I was one of the weirdos who enjoyed going through Oblivion gates, so I usually got to the point in the quest where they’d start opening up and then did whatever I was feeling like.)
I think Skyrim takes second place despite there being another game between the two Elder Scrolls entries. Its major weakness is how long you’re waiting before you get to define anything about your character, watching the wagons trundle on down toward Helgen. Once you’ve got the character editor open, I think it’s super solid, but launching a fresh playthrough can feel like a slog if you don’t have a holdover save from the end of the wagon ride.
Fallout 3 and 4 are some of the worst that Bethesda’s done. FO3 really drags with you playing through your character’s childhood in spurts, and it’s on firm rails. You can’t do anything about people coming at you with guns for the crime of being the child of your father at its end. Hbomberguy did an incredible takedown of the intro’s faults in this long essay from 8:30 to 15:50. (The whole video’s excellent.) And FO4 is that little bit punchier, but the game decides a lot about your character before you ever have a say – you’re married, you’ve got a kid, you’re from before the bombs dropped.
To some degree, that’s a bit unavoidable. Bethesda wants to make games that let you feel like you can go anywhere, do anything, be anyone, but there’s inherent limitations with video games. Bethesda can’t let you start anywhere unless they drop a menu on you (and they’ve got more than enough of those already), and there’s no feasible way to make a hundred or a thousand different starting scenarios match up in their fidelity and playability and excitement. They’ve got to build this reverse-funnel, this narrow entry point that then opens up to the enormous berth of their games. (And on the point of menus to choose a starting point, there are literally mods for their games to create that functionality, because the people who play these games the most would rather have that option.)
Starfield doesn’t fail in the same ways as its predecessors, but I’d call it the worst. You have these options in character creation that you can pick to really build an exciting history for your character. I think I’d chosen to be a bounty hunter, thinking it’d be a good all-round skill set for adventuring and exploring the galaxy and some traits I thought sounded interesting for that kind of hero. And the game starts with me … working in a mine? Like, I’m a good space pilot and a bounty hunter, but I’ve got to fire this laser on some iron for a bit while two NPCs chatter on and sound nothing like people as they do?
It’s simultaneously long-in-the-tooth and too quick. You’re walking behind these slow NPCs until you touch the dumb rock and it drags on forever. It’s aggressively unexciting (outside of the dogfight–I liked the dogfight) and incoherent. You touched the rock those guys wanted and it knocked you our, now the stranger who flew a spaceship here is going to stay and … mine? Kill pirates if they keep showing up? Your boss is like, “I guess this is happening now. Bye.” Last paycheck in the mail? And then you’re in a (fun, though I died the first try) dogfight and it’s a menu button to fly to the moon that is right there like you can see it on the screen but you have to go into the menus–
A Whole Lot of Loading
I thought I’d get to fly in space.
I know – technically, you do! When you’re in a dogfight. And I know, space is vast and mostly empty, but I’m not asking for a 1:1 scenario here. Let me zoom through the stars and discover derelict wrecks to explore; let me go from planet to planet; at least let me fly within a single star system. You feel more like you’re flying through space playing Mass Effect than Starfield, and in the former you’re just moving a tiny ship across ringed maps of different star systems. Hell, there are times where you have to hit a handful of loading screens to move from one region of a planet to another.
Bethesda’s had fast travel in their games at least as long as I’ve been playing them. But before, you had to walk somewhere before you could teleport there. Now, it’s just teleporting, and that really, really took me out of the experience.
Divergent Innovation
I think it’s incorrect to say that Bethesda hasn’t iterated on their formula since Oblivion. There’s a lot of new features in their games that they’ve been building and improving with their other titles. Building settlements and outposts is a whole subsystem in these games, refine out, and with a mechanical benefit for engaging with them.
Unfortunately, that’s the last thing I’m interested in when I play a Bethesda title. I’m not here to build a town, I want to go delve into caves; I want to have that awe-inspiring moment of finding Blackreach beneath Skyrim. Hell, maybe I would’ve been more invested in the system if it’d shown up in an Elder Scrolls game (that setting is just more my speed than Fallout), but I couldn’t say for sure. I certainly didn’t play Starfield long enough to engage with it there.
For me, playing Starfield didn’t feel better than playing an earlier title from Bethesda. I think the combat’s more fluid and enjoyable in Skyrim than their newest release; their gunplay just doesn’t hold up to what I expect from the industry anymore. I’m not excited to shoot the guns in Starfield when I can launch RoboQuest or Deep Rock Galactic or the original Halo game and feel like I’m having a better FPS experience.
Bethesda Shouldn’t Get a Free Pass
People loved Bethesda games; I loved Bethesda games. They were once one of the best developers, pushing the cutting edge of the tech, making the biggest worlds we’d ever seen. All that nostalgia bought them a lot of leeway these last few years. Fallout 76 hoodwinked thousands of players, both underdelivering with a buggy, misfired mess of a game, and also shipping out a bag with the collector’s deluxe edition that was not even nearly what they’d advertised. People were on the edge of their seats, waiting for Starfield to be the next must play game from the studio that defined their childhoods.
But we didn’t get it. We got another janky mess that didn’t deliver on the hype the studio kept promising.
That’s just not good enough anymore. Bethesda used to make the best games we’d ever played. Now, they make games I wouldn’t want to play for free.
And Thanks for all the Fish
So that’s where it all landed for me. If you’d like to see more, here’s a video from NakeyJakey and another from Girlfriend Reviews about their experiences with the game. Here’s hoping that Bethesda can right the ship, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.
As always, thank you for reading. Good luck out there, space cowboy.
Ben Stovall Blog 