Starfield: The non-surprising flop of 2023
Starfield is Bethesda’s newest IP entry, a game that was “25 years in the making”, and to a lot of people who has been familiar with Bethesda games for the last few decades: a hopeful yet non-surprising flop. To say that this was un-expected would be a lie, unless you’re a new audience to Bethesda games.
I have never understood the hype around Bethesda’s games. I remember installing Skyrim a decade ago and played the crap out of it — as a completely new audience to the game and to Bethesda Game Studios in general after being an almost exclusively First Person Shooter gamer, it was a cool new experience. Role-playing? I can CHOOSE my own DIALOGUES? No way!
It was a cool experience as someone who was completely new to the genre. However after several replays and several years later, having played many other RPGs with dialogue options such as Dragon Age, Mass Effect, Divinity Original Sin, et cetera, upon reflection, Skyrim was okay. I came to realize that most of the dialogues in the game didn’t matter as much as I thought they would, the game’s story and narrative was almost linear despite there being “choices”. Most of the characters involved in the story who were supposed to die, just… die, un-preventably (I don’t know if that’s a real word). The characters who you can kill are mostly characters who are irrelevant to the narrative. That is why they have the NPC “protection system”: if they are important to a story, not even necessarily the main storyline but a side story, it was impossible to kill them. If you drain all of their HP they just kneel down for a few seconds before standing back up as if nothing happened. If you force kill them with cheats like console command the quest line just break and may potentially glitch your game or save.
This problem wasn’t exclusive to Skyrim but to many other RPGs to a certain extent, but that doesn’t mean that it isn’t something that can’t be criticized. In my opinion and view, there are two types of role-playing game:
The first one is you play as a set character who has a specific background/story that you cannot change, you assume that character and play his/her story such as Red Dead Redemption, The Witcher, et cetera. In this case, it is completely fine for the story to be linear since you are essentially playing a narrative of someone else.
The second one is the developers allow the players to create their own characters, customize them down to a T. In my view, this type of RPG should prioritize non-linearity as their top #1 priority, otherwise what was the whole point of allowing the players to completely create and customize a new character of their own from scratch?
Skyrim wasn’t the first one, and neither did it successfully pull off the 2nd one; however credit is given where it is due: it was still a good game released for its time. Not to mention the extremely moddable engine that allowed all kinds of mods to be created that prolonged the game and, arguably, gave Skyrim its popularity. It was a good game, but wasn’t great: because it didn’t innovate in its field, just like a lot of other RPGs.
A few years before that: Fallout 3 — same problem.
But there was one exceptional game that will forever occupy a place in my heart: Fallout New Vegas. I found it after I had finished with Skyrim and Fallout 3 after modding them both to hell, trying to fill that RPG craving. It was everything I wanted in an RPG game at the time. It was one of the most non-linear, modern RPG game of its time. There were multiple cool endings, many of your choices actually mattered and it even went further and show you the long-term consequences via a series of slideshows that tells of the consequences of your actions after the game ended, how it affected other characters, the world, et cetera. Many of its quests were interesting and featured various ways to solve it. The characters especially the companions were well-written, and even side characters also. I found out later that this game was not developed by Bethesda but by Obsidian.
I remember how intrigued I was simply watching this intro upon starting despite its terrible visuals:
“The game was rigged from the start”
The game hooked me from start to finish. It had such interesting characters, such interesting factions, and such an interesting world despite being a “desert”. I still remember how in the base game, one of the companion, Veronica, made a remark once that she wanted a dress. Then in a later released DLC called “Dead Money”, where you are sent to investigate the Sierra Madre Casino, during the gameplay I found a random dress as I was looting like a mad man and just threw that in my inventory when I recalled Veronica saying something about it.
Later after I finished the DLC, with Veronica in my party I suddenly remembered that remark and opened up her inventory and gave her the dress. Then one of the next time I interacted with her she excitedly commented on it, thanking the player.
This was one of the many memorable experience I had with New Vegas. Neither Fallout 3 nor Skyrim, Fallout 4, and now Starfield, has given me the same feelings I had when I played New Vegas. The writings, music, and non-linearity of its designs were phenomenal. When I heard that many features were cut from the game due to time-constraints, I was saddened but it is what it is.
That experience with New Vegas had made me aware of the potential of role-playing games, and how RPGs (the 2nd type I mentioned earlier) should be. It should have set a standard that from then on, should be continually improved upon by future RPG games, especially future Fallout games. And it also made it painfully obvious that Bethesda games are nowhere near that level. A few years after that they announced Fallout 4, and me, after still feeling the afterglow of New Vegas, was immensely excited. I preordered it with my saved up money from working in high school, and finished it completely within the first week of release.
I still remembered how I felt after I finished the game: “That’s it?”
It was a massive disappointment. The endings were overly simplified to just a few scenarios that were basically the same thing, no more slideshows that show the consequences of your actions that impacted other characters or the world. There was no memorable characters unless they’re so unironically bad that they became a living meme like Preston Garvey, and even that meme was shortlived. The story was bland and linear. The factions were uninteresting; The Institutes was cool at first but they quickly became uninteresting as well — tons of missed potential — they just had a cool outlook but no interesting quests or something whatsoever. To think a game that was worked on for far longer, and released 5 years after New Vegas, couldn’t even come close to the standard it had set. Sure, it had prettier visuals, way better gun play, but that was all. Everything else Role-playing wise, was a step backward. It had the same issues as Fallout 3 did, Skyrim did, again after so many years: the combination of choices that don’t matter and the lack of choices thereof. It failed to deliver its role-playing aspect for me, which was crucial for this type of game.
Despite my disappointment with the game, it was still mostly positively received: mostly by new audiences that Bethesda had made with its massive PR campaigns around Fallout 4 I reckon. It was probably similar to how I was when I first discovered Skyrim: the joys and blissful ignorance of a first-timer. Then there was the whole fiasco with Fallout 76 that I didn’t even bother to look at anymore after I found out what it was since it had nothing that I wanted.
And some unspoken years later: Starfield.
This time, I had completely zero expectations. I had purchased Starfield almost purely out of my expectations for the modding scene, that I’d have some fun with modding stuff in the game for a few dozen hours like I did with Skyrim and Fallout 4 before uninstalling it while turning my brain off and just try the story out, and oh boy did it still disappointed me just after 5 hours into the game. Since I was an early access player, I could not yet post a review on Steam, so I took it to a Facebook gaming group called “PC Master Race (PCMR)” to post my early impression of the game.
Just a few minutes after the post, comments started pouring in with quite mixed results. About 2/3 of it was criticizing me for judging a game too early, the other 1/3 basically agreed with me and said something along the lines of that they had already expected this. I think the latter are probably those who were familiar with Bethesda games like me, but I digress.
It didn’t take long for the post to reach almost a hundred comments, and then it got deleted by the admins there. I posted a 2nd one, with a screenshot of my first post asking why, and comments started pouring in again with similar results: 2/3 criticizing me and the rest supporting me and dissing the admins. Again, it got deleted about an hour later and I left it alone this time. After it formally released on Steam, I finally wrote my review and impressions of the game again on Steam here if you want to find out what I think about it in more detail.
Fast forward in time: the first few weeks, Starfield received mildly positive receptions: a Very Positive review rating on Steam and gaming journals talking about some of its cool stories and what not with their comment sections mixed with some agreeing it’s fun and some voices expressing their discontent with the game. Then some weeks passed by, and more and more criticisms of the game began to pour in. Until finally, after the Game Awards, criticisms of the game had grew larger than ever, with Bethesda Game Studios even responding to players’ negative reviews on Steam, or one of their veteran developer, Emil Pagliarulo, even starting a whole thread on Twitter (X) here ranting about players’ criticism of the game and calling them “disconnected”, a PR disaster (archived). The game now recorded a “Mixed Review” rating on Steam, with “Mostly Negative” recent reviews as of the date of this post, which, in my opinion, is well-deserved for such a lack-luster, $70 game. It was a game that belonged to the era of 10 years ago with brand new money. I wish I could tell those two-thirds that criticized me on Facebook: “I told ya so”, but I’m sure they already get it enough.
Imagine if Toyota or Honda or any car manufacturer releases the same exact car they had released 10 years ago that just looks better with nothing else new about them, in fact, even removing some features— that is one of Starfield’s problem (you can read more about its other problems from my Steam review I posted above).
I hope that after this fiasco, as well as the recent grand success of Baldur’s Gate 3 that sets an example and standard for (my type 2) RPGs, Bethesda Game Studios can finally have some self-reflection and improve the role-playing aspect of their game as well as finally motivated enough to update their outdated technology from now on. The un-immersive, dead AIs that barely or not react at all to anything you do including pointing a gun at their face, shooting at their surrounding should be a start. I mean, come on, GTA did this decades ago.
