The Problem With Starfield
Why Starfield underwhelmed and over-promised
It would have been just another day in the Wells Fargo Call Center, upselling customers and sharing with them just how awesome our credit cards were. I wouldn’t call the job soul-crushing, but it certainly wasn’t very exciting, at least on most days. On this particular day, I was excited, though, and not because it was sloppy joe day in the on-campus cafeteria. No, today was the day that I would get my Xbox (the very first one, with the big green circle in the middle) and pick up a copy of Morrowind, the expansive RPG from Bethesda. Morrowind had been on PC for some time and had only recently come to console, and it made me a buyer. After a quick trip to Target after work, I hurried home to play and was instantly blown away by the immersive nature of the game. I had bought a world, not just a game, and I could go off in any direction and explore. The realm felt alive with possibility. It had heart and personality along with great depth. Unlike some modern games, it did not hold your hand and respected the player’s intelligence. You might be told to go somewhere and have to look at the in-game map, without a neon-lit guidance path.
If Morrowind was my introduction to Bethesda, then Skyrim was the master class. I wrote about the extremely popular game about six months ago, explaining what set it apart and what has made it so endearing to so many gamers. In summary, the game is, once again, very alive and feels like a real place. The land is hand-crafted, and each cave, barrow, and castle has a distinct sense of place. It is a game that you live in, not simply briefly run through on the way to some insipid objective.
Bethesda Softworks has, for decades now, created these impressive worlds. With over 100 million units sold combined, the company has been richly rewarded. It is perhaps no surprise that Microsoft bought the company in its quest for relevance in the gaming space after lagging behind Sony.
I am part of a Facebook group that eagerly tracked Starfield’s developmental progress over the course of years. Starfield was to be the next big thing from Bethesda, the first release since the rough launch of Fallout 76. There was talk of it being one of the greatest games of all time, of being a true representation of the feeling of space exploration, and similar hyperbole. After all, what would anyone expect from the company that brought us Skyrim? Unlike Fallout 76, this would be a purely single-player experience.
Microsoft had high hopes for Bethesda’s first big release since the tech giant bought the company. An estimated $50 to $100 million of the reportedly $400 million budget was spent on marketing. Main character companion Sarah Morgan’s face was on Doritos at 7-Eleven, and it was hard for anyone to fully escape mention of the game. In the gaming world, it was almost as hyped as GTA 6 is now.
Finally, release day arrived. Unlike the launches of Diablo 4, Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024, and others, this one was smooth. I was able to play right away — in fact, a few days early since I bought the early access version that included the Shattered Space expansion, at the time yet to be released. The game started off promising, with a structured mission that began in a rough-and-tumble mine. New Atlantis was sufficiently impressive at first glance, and the writing was a bit clinical but passable. It took me about 40 hours before I felt that something was lacking. All of the pieces were there: endless loot, a variety of locations to explore, and the biggest game world yet. It just felt flat, kind of like an old Stephen King miniseries I saw, The Langoliers. In that movie, the cast travels back in time involuntarily via a commercial airliner’s run in with an usual aerial phenomena and discovers that while the world is still there around them, it is devoid of personality and just does not feel right. (Watch it if you like; it’s pretty good, but the CGI is horrendous.) Sound is muted, soda is flat and fuel doesn’t burn. In short, it looks like a duck, but it doesn’t quack or swim and just makes a barely audible wheezing sound.
“Nothing seems right,” a character observed in The Langoliers. “Not a damn thing. I don’t know what’s going on, but I don’t like it.” This about sums up my feelings about Starfield.
As a longtime Bethesda devotee, I felt crestfallen. I wanted the team to make The Elder Scrolls 6, the follow-up to Skyrim. Skyrim is ridiculously popular. It has been released on just about every device short of a toaster. There’s even a text-based Alexa version — no, I’m not kidding. In all, there are seven versions of the game for nine distinct devices. Why wouldn’t the crew that brought the gaming world that masterpiece want to make a follow-up? It has been written that producer Todd Howard and the team wanted to make sure the tech was up to the task. They have also been making Fallout and The Elder Scrolls for decades now, and it was time for something new. This was their baby. In any event, this was the route they went, and gamers are now all living with it.
In short, it looks like a duck, but it doesn’t quack or swim and just makes a barely audible wheezing sound.
So what exactly is wrong with Starfield? For one, the dialogue seems very safe. It does not have the edge of a GTA or the grounding in lore that Skyrim or even Oblivion had, which came between Morrowind and Skyrim. It seemed as though every line was run through standards and practices, like an ‘80s-era sitcom. It wasn’t terrible; it was just bland. Then there is the copious use of procedural generation. Yes, there are over 1,000 moons and planets to explore, but they have the same ten or so buildings and caves, repeated over and over. While Skyrim felt and likely was hand-crafted, Starfield is comparatively soulless and paint-by-numbers.
Speaking of caves, it was a trip to a cave that really cemented my opinion. I saw it on my heads-up display about ten hours into my time with the title. It took me about ten minutes to walk there on foot. As my avatar crunched over red rock and sand, I had time to wonder what was inside. Could it be a new alien species? Maybe a glyph like No Man’s Sky. The possibilities were endless.
The cave was basically empty. There was a mineral deposit, and that was about it. Expectations dashed — were this Skyrim, there would have been a trap or two, a chest, some monsters, and a babbling brook. It was perhaps realistic; not every cave in real life has anything of great interest, and space in reality is pretty barren, but I expected more. Judging from the current Metacritic score of 83, I don’t think I am alone. The game is good, just not up to the standard of Skyrim, which got a 96 by way of comparison. Bethesda can do better — here’s hoping that The Elder Scrolls 6 lives up to the high standards set by Oblivion, Skyrim and Fallout 3.
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