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Will Starfield have the staying power of Skyrim? Three months after the game's release, Xbox CEO Phil Spencer seems to believe so. He has a 'ton of confidence' riding on the long-term relevance of Bethesda's big new spacefarer RPG, as he said in an interview at the Sao Paulo Comic Con Experience 2023. While a grand advertising platform like the CCXP is not the place to express doubts or reservations, it is still quite a bold assertion.
At the time of the interview, Starfield's latest Steam user reviews had already entered the 'Mostly Negative' territory. In comparison, Skyrim enjoyed unanimous critical acclaim upon release. Bethesda's Golden Goose has since been under heavy scrutiny for curtailing RPG elements, but 12 years later, it is still going strong.
It is so strong, in fact, that its average concurrent player numbers on Steam are now twice as many as Starfield's.
Note: This article is subjective and reflects the views of the writer.
Can Starfield recreate the decade-long lifespan of Skyrim?
The declining consumer goodwill in Starfield is not some review-bombing phenomenon compounding a snowball of unfavorable reviews to engage a trend. The bad press it is getting can be traced back to Bethesda's most prevalent sin in the past decade: overselling something that cannot possibly live up to the hype.
'Made for Wanderers': The Promise vs The Product
Starfield's development vlog leading up to its release advertised it as an exploration game "Made for Wanderers". If it is not a conscious lie to earn back Betheda's reputation after the disastrous launch of Fallout 76, the game's scope for 'wanderers' is certainly lost in translation.
This game's big unique selling point over Fallout 4 is its potential to deliver endless content through procedural generation. The thousands of planets are mostly procedurally generated terrain dotted with 'hand-made' dungeons and points of interest.
In practice, this completely omits one of Bethesda's biggest merits as role-playing game developers: their handcrafted world design. The wanderers in Bethesda's latest game are left to walk through dioramas of barrenness and stop occasionally to scrape minerals out of space rock.
Where did we land on manual space travel?
An identity crisis seemingly underpins Starfield's development. Something as fundamental as space traversal and ship combat saw major revisions a few months before the game's release.
Many of its undercooked systems are conceptually interesting in a vacuum but cancel each other out in practice. Instead of trying to make the illusory vastness of its thousand-odd planets compelling, they made most of its breadth skippable and optional.
As a matter of fact, using the menu to fast travel to a previously visited node from anywhere is the most optimal way to play the game. You do not need to watch the long cutscenes of hopping onto your spaceship and taking off into orbit or maneuvering to another planetary system.
The margin in between, including outer space itself, becomes immaterial in Bethesda's lightyears-wide but paper-deep 'NASA-punk'. Even handcrafted enemy hideouts have far less variety than Skyrim or Fallout 4, reminiscent of Oblivion's infamously repetitive dungeons.
Speaking of Oblivion, the loot and progression system in Starfield is a leap forward into the wrong side of RPG game design. The randomized loot pools can initially give you the intended dopamine shot but deter the player progression experience in the long run.
Rather than returning to its RPG roots as promised, the makers of Morrowind seem to have abandoned its principle of hand-placed loot completely. Starfield is stuck at being a poorly construed looter-shooter mockup from the past era, where player progression is built on shallow RNG-based tier systems stacked on top of each other.
How 'Bethesda gameplay loop' gravitates towards mods
The gameplay elements that Bethesda gives the most attention to prop up the symptoms of a AAA zeitgeist obsessed with live-service features. Starfield is a single-player role-playing game with the frills and inexhaustible checklists of an MMO designed to keep you playing.
Bluntly put, the explore-combat-loot blueprint, otherwise termed the 'Bethesda gameplay loop,' easily lends itself to an MMO-lite environment. In the absence of a live-service model to fill up its patchy landscapes, modders must lead the charge.
Starfield's non-committal toe-dipping into every open-world cliche ironically leaves it an almost perfect blank canvas. The caveat is that Starfield's modding community needs to be its Picasso.
With enough persistence and joint effort from the modding community, a modded Starfield can re-introduce old-school progression and hand-placed loot. Just like Skyrim's 'Requiem' or 'Enairim', this game too can fill a cohesive vision dictated by your modlist.
In the same CCXP Sao Paulo interview where Phil Spencer expresses his confidence in the game's legacy, he acknowledges the importance of the modding community, saying:
"We've already told the modding community that they'll get all the mod-tools... so they can go create their own content in Starfield - which has been so important to Skyrim."
Will mods finally get me a five-star Bethesda experience?
A long-time Bethesda fan poised on the verge of buying Starfield is presented with a loaded question. "Is the game good after mods?"
Ask not whether the game lives up to its promise of being Bethesda's masterpiece. Instead, ask whether modders can fix a style-over-substance perk system or populate the game's desolate planes with engaging content.
The answer is yes to all of that, but don't hold your breath. Barring Emil Pagliarulo's hit-or-miss writing, many of the game's maladies can potentially be treated if not cured altogether.
Several big gaps need to be bridged to fix the game's conceptual flaws - including the game's failure to truly create a formidable sense of scale. After 12 years of Skyrim, Bethesda hands the scalpels to modders and unabashedly expects them to surgically stitch a broken product together.
This was the literal goal of a modder by the alias of Draspian, who tried to create big cohesive planets by stitching tile boundaries between fast travel points in Starfield.
An engine-level problem currently prevents this, but Doodlum's Light Limit Fix with Skyrim has taught us to never say never in the face of engine-level handicaps.
The technical chops of Creation Engine 2, while far behind the curve at its present state, enable this game as a modding platform in ways Skyrim never could. However, the fuel of novelty and interest may burn too quickly to foster the growth of a similarly big modding ecosystem.
The team behind Skyrim Together, the famous multiplayer mod for Skyrim, had embarked on a similar project for Starfield. Two months into development, they threw in the towel due to the most engine-level problem ever: the game is 'trash'.
Another group from the ever-expanding Bethesda modding community will perhaps pick up The Together Team's source code as a hobby project, if not to empower a game they have a soft spot for. The issue is that a modders' paradise still needs the goodwill of its modders, a resource that Todd Howard's salesmanship is currently running low on.
Starfield's second launch, the future of modding, and you
Despite this, Starfield has sold over 12 million copies this year. In time, if Bethesda pulls off a miraculous Cyberpunk 2.0 recovery with their Shatter Space DLC, modder sentiment might even return to their favor.
Meanwhile, the original problem remains: the decade-long victory lap of Skyrim has only served to deepen Bethesda's reliance on the modding scene as its life support.
Optimistic fans will expect Bethesda to finally bring their long-awaited A-game for The Elder Scrolls VI. Yet, looking at how things have been going since Fallout 4, it would be best to curb your expectations. If the sales numbers are stellar, any rigmarole of bad reviews and forewarnings may fall on deaf ears.
