this post was submitted on 12 Dec 2023
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Starfield
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Bethesda today is no different than the Bethesda 20 years ago.
They were just so good at making big open sandboxes to play in (and making it easy to mod them to add more) that everyone ignored Bethesda's incompetence.
But theres nothing redeeming in Starfield that gives an excuse to overlook the bad decisions.. which means a lot of people are seeing Bethesda design philosphy for the first time without rose tinted glasses.
I think of this a lot differently. Look at most open world game designs from back in those days. The PS3 open worlds were bland and repetitive. Even GTA was a lot more bland and homogenous back then.
So Bethesda games fit right in on the PS2 and PS3 era of games. But when it came time for a refresh, Fallout 4 didn’t land the same on the PS4. Was it a bad game? No. But the cracks were showing in it. Bethesda needed big changes to its gameplay and engine and they didn’t bring those in FO4. I expected they would in Starfield. But they didn’t, they changed too slowly and made a PS3 era game two generations later.
The rose tinted glasses thing, if you remember what Skyrim was back in its day then it was a really good game at the time. It’s aged okay for what it was. But if you released Skyrim 2 today, I doubt people would like it. That’s what happened here. Games are a product of their time and this one is out of its time.
Skyrim back in the day was a buggy pile of shit. Theres a reason half the mods you had to install were bugfixes.
but even as a buggy piece of shit, you could at least explore a rich and interesting sandbox.
Its decently less buggy today, but its still a rich and interesting sandbox. and more so, it has a strong foundation for mods to be built on.
Starfield doesnt have a rich and interesting sandbox, and the very foundations of the game are shit.
Oh yeah id agree with that. The reason the heart of that game isn’t there though is because the design is stuck in the past. They’re dragging along antiquated techniques and it’s just not going to work to build the worlds the same way. Especially not with the vision they had for Starfield.