[Opinion piece] Starfield Killed My Hype For The Elder Scrolls 6

I’m honestly baffled as to why people have had any faith in Bethesda Game Studios for years. Even if you liked Fallout 3 or 4, what they did with 76 should’ve obliterated any remaining trust.

Fallout 3 releases and it's good

Fallout New Vegas releases and it's great

Fallout 4 releases and it's disappointing but it's okay because it's just a blip. They had some good new ideas in there, they were just balanced out in the other direction by a lot of bad ones. Bethesda's track record is still solid, if somewhat tarnished.

Fallout 76 releases and it's disappointing but that's because they've never made (and shouldn't have made) an MMO before. A lot of the coverage is centred around the shoddy launch, which doesn't really matter for a non-MMO title.
- Fallout New Vegas was made by Obsidian
- Fallout 3 was garbage compared to Fallout 1 and 2
- FO4 settlement mechanism is amazing. It's literally a 1st person city builder. I can't think of any game similar to that yet.
- F4 has only had staying power simply because of the modding community. It's succeeded despite Bethesda. Modders took an extremely mediocre game and made it something much more rich and interesting.
- Elder scrolls online??? They didn't "make" it, but they were damn familar with the mmo scene.
As someone who went to the midnight launch of Skyrim and finished the main quest that night, ever since that moment I've been disappointed in Bethesda's direction. Skyrim was fairly uninteresting, though the mods now can bring it some life (but still can't make it as good as Morrowind, especially the huge UI downgrade we got with the switch to consoles). Fallout 4 does have some redeeming qualities I think, though generally it was also disappointing. Starfield is the last piece I think most people needed to wake up and see that they don't want to make good games anymore. They only care about making a game they can market to as many people as possible, so they can't do anything interesting with it.

The issue is most Bethesda has made at least one of many people's favorite games. Many of the people behind them still work at the company, so they could do it again. I think there's always some hope they can look at what makes games good (both their own and things like Baulder's Gate 3) and realize making generic crap isn't going to cut it anymore. It worked for Skyrim and somewhat for FO4 (though that still has some fairly unique aspects), but people have so many options for better games.
- Morrowind is the reason I'm in the game industry and has impacted my life more than any other single piece of media. It's been heartbreaking for me to see the treatment Elder Scrolls has gotten. I was so excited for Skyrim it was the only game I've ever preordered, it's the reason I originally got a Steam account, and the whole game is a let down start to finish.
  
  I was hesitantly optimistic for FO4 when I bought it, it was off-putting but I worked through the disappointment of running into invisible walls so often, and when I finally got the gear and the freedom to power armor my way to the roofs I was pumped until I discovered they put fuck all up there. Morrowind was designed with jumping and flying and they made a 3D world that was fascinating to explore, Skyrim is completely flat, FO4 pretends to have 3D space but it's a contentless liar. I'm so jaded now I didn't even get to the hesitantly optimistic step with Starfield I just assumed it was going to be empty filler
This 💯🔥

I'm at the stage where you stop complaining about videogames and you just stop buying them.

I've realised that all the people who worked in the videogames industry that made it special have either sold out, dropped out, or aged out at this point. Keep your expectations low my friends.
It did for me. Haven't touched anything new of theirs since.

Edit: was also a paying ESO customer at the time; dropped the sub and uninstalled.
I was weirdly forgiving of Fallout 76 (never played it, I'm not too hot for multiplayer games) because it was made so soon after fallout 4. It always felt like one of those DLC that got so large that it got released as a standalone game, which practically any large game studio has done and Bethesda did with Arcane's Dishonored 2 and Death of the Outsider.

A huge soft spot I have for the elder scrolls comes from the heroic fantasy exploration with enormous orchestral music and adventure in every direction, something people say about Starfield is that it's large and sparse, which is accurate for a grounded space game but goes against what makes half of Bethesda games fun. Fallout falls in the middle of the pack being far more pulpy than Starfield and in 4, I feel this was a large issue with it feeling bland; it's pulpy wackiness was toned down when it should have gone up.

I don't expect Bethesda to give me the video game equivalent of game of thrones but I do expect the Saturday morning cartoon that I'm equally fond of, and they still hold all the ingredients to make that recipe. Unfortunately Starfield was always tonally wrong for that, but ES6 is perfect for it.

Don't get me wrong, I'll still only buy ES6 a year or so after release, maybe 2-3 if it's really crap, but I think a fair few of the ways that they've deviated from the working formula post Skyrim may not be an issue here.
Meanwhile I actually like fallout 76, I was thinking about playing starfield but after watching my friend play it, for about 14 hours before we realized it was a dry well, I've given up on Bethesda ever making anything that might appeal to me ever again
I never played the Fallouts so I guess I didn't see most of the warnings signs

Good. Then, you can only be positively surprised.

They could just be not surprised.
- Careful! I might have a heart attack and die of not surprise.
- My exact reaction to Starfield. Will almost certainly be the same for ES6
No, you can be many more things than that. Skyrim killed my hype for anything else Bethesda made, but I was still hopeful for a cool sci-fi game with Bethesda issues. I didn't expect much from Starfield, but I was still left with a sense of disappointment. It's not that I expected anything good, but I was still somewhat hopeful that it could be interesting, but it refused to be. There wasn't any surprise element to what I felt, just a tinge of loss at what we could have had if the company tried to make good games still instead of making marketable games.
Or just have their negative belief confirmed.

Personally, I found it particularly damning, how generic all of it was. They had a really interesting, diverse world with Morrowind. Then Oblivion was already a severe step backwards with relatively generic high fantasy. And Skyrim felt even more samey to me.

Well, and now with Starfield, I already start sleeping when I hear the name. What is it supposed to be? ~~Astrology~~ Astronomy Simulator 2024? Did really no one in that management meeting have a better idea for the premise other than that it's ~~Fallout~~ in space?

To some degree, obviously it's not supposed to be fantasy, so maybe they'll actually be more creative with that, again, but with them now belonging to Microsoft, too, I just fully expect design by committee.

Did you play Starfield? It's definitely got plenty of ideas. It just chickened out of some of them and wrote checks it couldn't cash for others. (Also, I think you meant astronomy, not astrology.)
- All the new ideas in Starfield fall into one of two categories:
  
  The technology doesn't exist to implement it.
  
  The talent at Bethesda is incredibly ill-suited to implement it.
  
  The Bethesda response to fans saying their main storyline was trash was to make a game where the main storyline is the primary focus and draw of the game? That's a bold move.
  
  The NG+ stuff is a cool idea, but again, Bethesda just fundamentally lacks the talent to implement it. You can't hit what they were aiming for with a handful of gimmicks. I wouldn't even trust the team behind New Vegas, or whoever writes at Larian, to do it justice.
- All of the stories were like that in starfield. If I could sum it up it would be "jack of all trades, master of none". Too much stuff crammed in and none of it fleshed out well enough.
  
  Base building was fun, until it was tedious because they only half automated the process.
  
  Ship building was fun, except you could only customize to a point.
  
  Exploration was fun, except they only made really 10ish buildings to just spawned them everywhere instead of generating custom ones (I fought at the same building at least 2 dozen times)
  
  With exploration, we want you to wander through giant spaces and planets, but give you no explorer or vehicle to use.
  
  We also want you to explore the galaxy fully immersed, but couldn't solve the loading screen problem that yanks you out of the immersion.
  
  So so many cool ideas that you can tell the committee was just like "no, it's not with finishing that, players will be fine with it". The entire game feels like it was built by committee.
- Yeah, I did mean astronomy. Stupid charlatans co-opting postfixes.
  
  I did not play Starfield; only watched some videos about it. Which is why I didn't want to argue that it had no ideas, just that it's overarching premise is incredibly mundane.
  
  But thinking about it now, I guess, even that is the case for their other games. Like, the actual Elder Scroll items are basically irrelevant. And 'Fallout' is just a generic postapocalyptic setting. Maybe it's just that it's a new series, so it hasn't yet established an own identity, which gives the weak premise much more weight.
  
  Ultimately, they don't want a strong premise, because it's supposed to be sandbox-like. That's what their fans want. But for answering why you should play specifically Starfield, when tons of space games exist which have done a better job at the space bits, it's just not doing them any favors.
The sad thing about Oblivion is that there are in-game books in Morrowind and previous games that describe the empire as being in the middle of a bamboo jungle. The vibe comes off as the Roman Empire in South East Asia.

Instead we got generic high fantasy with the occasional guy wearing Roman armor.
- Eh, Bethesda flip-flop on that kind of stuff all the time. IIRC in Arena, the Imperial City was just in generic temperate woodland, then it was retconned in some in-game books to a jungle, then retconned again in Oblivion back to generic woodland. Same thing with the armor of imperial soldiers. Generic fantasy plate in early games, Roman in Morrowind, generic fantasy plate in Oblivion again, Roman again in Skyrim... They just can't make up their minds.
  
  I will say this, though: It's okay to retcon old lore, but only in order to make it more unique and interesting. Retconning stuff to make it more generic and bland is a high crime.
- This isn't completely fair, Bethesda addressed the issue in universe and there are multiple authors arguing about this and why that is. It plays very well with the rest of the lore which is all about conflicting accounts and variety of interpretation.
  
  If I recall correctly the three in-universe theories are (1) it's an error and there never was a jungle (2) there was a jungle but Talos CHIMed it away (3) there was a jungle when the high elves (Ayleids) lived there, but when the humans took over the white-gold tower changed the landscape to suit them.
  
  Unfortunately, /r/teslore has no fediverse equivalent that I know of so I wouldn't know where to have this kind of discussion.

Without upgrading to a new enginge, something that the entire industry has been begging Bethesda to do now for at least a decade, ES6 will feel exactly the same as pretty much all of their games since Oblivion, with the same "go here, kill everything indiscriminately, pick up trinket, deliver trinket" gameplay loop. ES lore is top tier and I'm always down for more of that, but they need to update their shit.

How would a engine change affect the game design philosophy of Bethesda?

Performance? Visuals? Alright. But game design?

Creation Engine powers Starfield and Fallout New Vegas. Quests can be complex, dynamic, with multiple endings, with lots of ways to approach them. Or they can be flat fetch quests. The tools allow both and everything in between.

Bethesda just chooses to use the current game design framework and would choose the same on any other engine.

They are actually updating their game design principles. They stopped using game design documents, they simplified the quests, they try to make sure every play through gets to see as much content as possible. Maybe they should stop updating.
- A newer engine would get rid of chests hidden into the ground for storing NPC’s items.
  
  I mean, this is an obviously laughable example but you can be sure that other quirks of the engine are holding back creativity and performance.

I loved Morrowind when I was 12, replayed it recently and it was just as good as I remembered. I was hyped on Starfield and bought it blind for 40e. I don't usually make mistakes like these but I got cocky this time. I still can't fathom how uninteresting Starfield was. I literally dropped it out of boredom. How can you manage to do this with a space game ? seriously ? how do you create something so bland from a premise so exciting ? with the funds and time you have ?

It's called design by committee

If you didn't see this after Fallout, namely 76, I dk what to tell you.

The exploration aspect has never been as good as in 76. It's the best designed fallout map, and I'm just pissed they couldn't save it for a single player game.

Morrowind and Oblivion are probably both on my top ten list of best games ever, if not top 25. I used to be a huge Bethesda fan. Starfield is perhaps the most disappointing game I have ever played. I tisk say worst, mind you, I said disappointing. Any excitement I had for ES6 is well and truly gone.

Morrowind and Oblivion into Skyrim, fallout 3/NV into 4 really opened my eyes into the enshittification before that was even a term I had read anywhere. It was a company who got too big for its breeches and thought it knew better..

To be honest, Bethesda’s best work is probably behind them. They will sell a few more games based on brand recognition and because we are suckers, but I don’t expect much. I’m old enough to have seen many of my favorite developers go through this. It’s difficult to have overwhelming success and keep knocking it out of the park with every release. Expectations for something better than the last thing are so high, the pressure to do something new, the culture change that comes with huge growth, and they eventually lose that magic that captured us in the first place.

I'll preface this by saying that in no way do I expect that ES6 will shine more than Starfield and nothing I'm about to say should be construed as such.

I personally think that Starfield isn't a good representation of what modern Bethesda will do with ES6. Starfield is the first time any of the major players had been involved in a totally new IP.

Skyrim was mechanically good enough, but it was only interesting because it was built in a world that was already rich with lore. It built upon a strong foundation of interesting concepts, conflict, and history to move a timeline forward and on top of that allowed for modders to easily expand it further.

Fallout 3 and 4 followed the same formula as Skyrim. Build a mechanically good enough game built on a rich world and allow modders to expand it.

Fallout 76 was the first departure from building on what was already there and it was a disaster because it wasn't mechanically good enough.

Starfield is a new departure by making something that's mechanically good enough but also needing to build a whole universe from scratch which left it feeling dull for many.

ES6 represents an opportunity for Bethesda to go back to the formula that worked for them until now. There is a big risk that they will further streamline the gameplay making it less deep as they have done with every generation, but it's not a guarantee at this point in time.

If they really have been working on it since it was teased a few years ago, then I have to assume it will just be Skyrim: Again (Again)

It's a shame that it probably won't even be that much of a visual improvement, if Starfield is any indication

People in the future will realize that Skyrim was made in a perfect sweet spot at Bethesda. It was made recently enough that the controls make sense and it feels good to play, but Skyrim was still so, so ahead of it's time when it came to an open world RPG. Back then, Bethesda's writers really had a knack for making incredibly interesting settings, and just seeing an entire digital world so wonderfully realized was considered ground-breaking.

A decade later, and the same model has become stale. The gameplay is still there, but the soul is not. Idk if most of those old writers have just left Bethesda or retired after so many years in the industry, but the magic has left the studio. I'm not even really looking forward to ES6 as much as I am the upcoming Avowed from Obsidian, because their games still have plenty of soul.

Not a sweet spot.

Morrowind was amazing because it is a hand built world. Oblivion had the same core error as Starfield: an overreliance on procedural generation.

For Skyrim they did it right. Just the right amount of procedural generation with enough manual work that things worked out.

You can't overlook the modding scene either. Oblivion had a great mod community with a lot of people getting into it and cutting their teeth there. So when Skyrim came out they were experts and made a lot of amazing mods, particularly framework mods.

But almost all of them are done and gone or corrupted into paid mods(e.g. Elianora, Kinggath(FO4)). So Starfield will never get a good modding scene because the core modding community doesn't exist now.
- Morrowind had (and still has) just as vibrant a modding community as ES4 or 5. Tamriel Rebuilt alone is still the largest modding project for any Elder Scrolls game.
  
  All of that expertise was developed on and for Morrowind.
  
  We don't have the SF version of the Creation Kit yet, but all previous versions are largely similar, and FO4 modders will likely have no issue working on SF.
Skyrim was still so, so ahead of it's time when it came to an open world RPG

Not in a world that already had Dark Souls and Demon's Souls in it.

You can labor the "open world" point but in any other metric DS & DeS stood above it: quest lines, action, feel, mechanics etc.
- Look I love Dark Souls; it is an incredibly flawed game, and Demon's Souls is even moreso. Dark Souls was so far ahead of it's time that it still needed time to bake in the oven. Then with how claustrophobic DS2 and DS3's worlds were by comparison, I don't think FromSoft really surpassed Skyrim until Elden Ring.
  
  Both games are some of the greatest of all time though, so a lot of it will just come to preference. I think a lotta Dark Souls players have been spoiled by the remaster though, the original release struggled hard under the weight of Miyazaki's ambition.
It feels like Skyrim was the game they'd (and by they I mean Todd) always wanted to make, and Skyrim was the first time they had the resources and technology available to make it more or less exactly as they envisaged.

Fallout 4 probably would've been in the exact same situation of the technology finally catching up to their ideas, except they completely botched the landing by adding in voiced characters.

For the author and everyone else. If they're not throwing away their entire tech stack and workflow for how they build this sort of game and starting from scratch, they're making a huge mistake. At least start with what Obsidian built for Avowed and work from there.

I think they have so much technical debt that if they tried to move away from their current stack, it would be the end of them, almost overnight. They don't have the manpower and know-how to move to Unreal or Unity or otherwise. If they did, they would have done so by now.
- I don't see a technical debt problem getting any better by ignoring the problem for longer. No better time to start than when they've got Microsoft's war chest to help aid the transition.
- That's fair enough, but then they shouldn't make a game blatantly unsuited to the tech they do have. Just make another Morrowind with a fresh coat of paint like they've been doing for the last twenty years. It's what the fans want anyway.
This is a bit unfair, for all its gigantic problems the creation engine is much better at supporting modding than unity or unreal.

Perhaps a more deterministic scripting engine would be better but it'd be easy to lose the one thing that makes their games good. I still can't believe they thought starfield would work with the modding tools MIA four months out

Games have been steadily driving away from story-oriented to action-oriented since they began. I expect ES6 to be some type of Dark Souls clone.

I've got to say...both of those sentences are an absolutely wild perspective. The first on the history of the medium, and the second for thinking that Bethesda will make anything other than the type of game they've always made for the past 30 years.
- I agree about the history thing. I'm old enough to remember a time when games were derided as mindless schlock and even stories considered laughable by modern standards were lauded as profoundly impressive. At most one could argue that emphasis on story in games has followed something of a bell curve over time, but I don't think even that is really true.
  
  But I think your time frame of Bethesda lacking ambition and innovation is a bit too broad. 30 years would include things like first-person shooters with an official Terminator license and groundbreaking graphics and controls (3D enemies and mouselook, which people usually attribute to Quake, but that came later) or hyper-realistic racing games with extensive customization of the car's drivetrain and suspension. It wasn't until they hit it big with MW that Bethesda lost their balls and started just remaking the same game over and over with different coats of paint.
Which is funny, because computer games didn't have any kind of story at the beginning (look at pong, tetris, qbert, asteroids etc.)
- Yeah, but those were meant to be quick, quarter-driven games. Think of Zork and those games (all text). Think of the old Sierra games (King's Quest 1 had text commands, KQ5(?) was point-and-click).
  
  As computer speed and graphics have grown, story has often suffered.
One of my favorite series, Phantasy Star, moved from a turn-based RPG in the 80s to an action RPG since 20 years ago (PSO, PSO2). What if I don't want to play an action game? I don't get what happened to the old style of RPG.
- We just got Baldur's Gate 3 last year, and Persona 5 is a mega hit. Turn-based RPGs are very much still alive.
- AAA games started getting too expensive and therefore risky to make since the PS3 (if not the PS2 era), and so the big companies started playing it safe by chasing trends rather than try something new and avante-garde (aside from Nintendo of course). Action-RPGs drew a wider audience, and therefore more money, so it would be silly for them to choose the option that makes less money. Capitalism ruins everything.
- "Appealing to a wider audience."
TES ain't got shit on Dark Souls in terms of story... Or lore, at least.
- Dark Souls lore seems deeper than it is because it's less coherently presented than in TES.
- I've never played, but the videos I've seen look like a button-mashing nightmare. And I think you underestimate the Elder Scrolls lore.
Of course, the DS games are filled to the absolute brim with meaningful, world-building lore. ES6 could really take from that example.
Just say it: Elden Ring is the ES6 we deserved.

It's SO LINEAR!!!!!!!!!

I want FREEDOM!!!!!! I DONT WANNA JOIN THE DORKY NASA BOYS, I WANNA CANNIBALIZE THEM!!!!!!!!!! ):< (this playthrough)