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Starfield, coming out this November, will be the first single-player in-house Bethesda game to release in over seven years.
Thanks to Fallout 76's many shortcomings, Bethesda is left in the wake of a waning reputation as a leading RPG developer. Starfield is thus not only its next big step but also its final chance to retain its formal glory.
Thankfully, the company has already seized this incentive and addressed some of the most common cynicism points about its games. Inching into the final phase of its development, Starfield shows great promise as not only a Bethesda savior but as one of the finest RPG offerings of the current console generation.
Five ways Starfield is shaping up to be the best thing made by Bethesda Game Studios
1) Creation Engine 2
All of Bethesda's in-house games have been developed on Creation Engine or its predecessor, Gamebryo. During Morrowind's release, Gamebryo could render physics-enabled clutter to an astounding degree for its time.
Used both for the Elder Scrolls and Fallout games, the engine underwent improvements thrice: once with Oblivion, then with Skyrim, and then with Fallout 4. Admittedly, Creation Engine was starting to show its age, lagging behind the AAA standard ever since Fallout 4.
With Creation Engine 2, however, the developers claim they have made the most significant technical stride since the Oblivion days. The testament to the new render capacity and lighting system can be seen in the announcement trailer itself, which uses unmodified, raw footage enacted directly in-game.
One of the community's long-standing wishes, the engine upgrade will most likely do away with most Skyrim-era problems like level-of-detail pop-in and havok malfunctions.
2) Bethesda's open-world design pedigree
If there is one area of game design where Bethesda Game Studios indisputably claims the top spot, it is the world design. Games like Dark Souls have taken level design to an unparalleled ballpark, whereas the impressive detail found in Red Dead Redemption continues to impress years after its release.
No other Bethesda game can match the aforementioned in these specific categories, even at its best.
However, creating a large world does not automatically make its usage efficient. What Bethesda games do to actually have a legitimate claim is the ability to make compelling worlds that draw the player in.
Their open worlds, be it Cyrodiil, Skyrim, or the Capital Wasteland, have a cohesive world design that organically points users towards its exciting nooks and crannies. Even Fallout 76, for all the negative criticism that it necessitates, is no exception to this rule.
Starfield, 'made for wanderers,' will be no different.
3) Return to roots of cRPGs
The genesis of Bethesda homebrew RPGs has been in arguably the golden era of the genre. This was when Wizardry and Ultima popularized the relatively limited niche with early 3D technology.
This, in turn, had influenced the original dungeon crawling and mechanics of Arena, the first Elder Scrolls game. In this era of computer RPGs, their roots in the ruleset of tabletop role-playing games were prominent.
This strongest reliance on the authentic Dungeons and Dragon concepts is what arguably lent to their status as 'hardcore' RPGs. With time, however, role-playing games separated from this tabletop ancestry to focus more on their exclusive first-order element like real-time combat.
Bethesda, none the wiser, also tapped into this modernizing trend. This erasure of 'hardcore' features like attributes and class restrictions is visible most in newer games like Skyrim or Fallout 4.
However, with Starfield, Bethesda has the express intent of returning to its roots. In an episode of Starfield dev diary, Todd Howard put forward their commitment to bringing together 'old hardcore features' in 'a new way.'
In gameplay terms, this commitment finally means greater opportunities for role-playing the idea at the heart of the genre as it once materialized in Fallout: New Vegas.
4) Immersion
The golden age of cRPGs marked the genesis of not only 3D environments in these games but their natural gameplay implications. Arx Fatalis, a spiritual successor to Ultima Underworld, was the first game to utilize proper 3D clutter in its core gameplay ideas.
Arguably, Bethesda's first attempt at the same with Morrowind was not as functionally adapted. Until Oblivion, the gimmick with small objects remained merely a form of window-dressing, reliant on their physics-enabled interactions. This, however, is what brings Bethesda's games on the verge of an immersive sim.
Bethesda worlds have always excelled at immersion by suspending disbelief through state-of-the-art audio design and the tack to place interactable objects strewn across an open world. With the solid tech backing of the new Creation Engine 2, and Bethesda's knack for improving on their pre-existing design philosophy, the possibilities in Starfield are endless.
With some luck, fans may finally have the lifelike AAA version of a simple gameplay idea Arx Fatalis implanted all those years ago: watching dough turn into bread in real-time.
5) The modding community
Last year, in a Reddit AMA, Todd Howard confirmed that Starfield would have full mod support on release day. Nexusmods, the biggest modding platform on PCs, has already set up resources and public forums like Discord servers dedicated to Starfield modding.
More importantly, Creation Engine 2 will use a similar asset management system to all previous Bethesda titles, i.e., .bsa archives and .esp plugins. Many mod authors who have contributed to Skyrim and Fallout 4 will likely turn to making Starfield mods with relative ease.
Thus, even though the question about the codebase and the need for a script extender remains subject to speculation, fans may see a quick proliferation in the Starfield modding scene shortly after its release.
Note: This article reflects the author's views.
