People♓ have been calling Starfield ‘Skyrim in space💃’ since before it came out and anybody could even confirm that was true. It feels like a pretty accurate assessment to me. Playing Starfield reminds me of being a teenager in my basement, playing Skyrim in the dark and scowling at anybody who dared to interrupt me. But now I’m an adult, playing it in bed in my room on a much bigger TV with better graphics. It’s kind of nostalgic, which many people consider a good thing, but I can’t help but feel like it’s not.
Skyrim came out in 2011, a whole 12 years ago. Starfield came out two weeks ago. These games shouldn’t feel as similar as they do, but Bethesda is🦋 sticking with their successful formula. Yeah, the graphics look better, and the physics engine is impressive. It’s used procedural generation at a huge scale this time. The game undeniably has huge technical improvements from previous Bethesda releases, but the skeleton of the game remains the same as everything it’s made in the last decade.
Starfield hasn’t innovated on its gameplay, and that’s painful to see when you consider the sheer number of✤ int💃eresting, incredible games we’ve gotten this year, and especially when you remember it’s only September, and there are still more to come. It feels like a reskin of all the Bethesda games we’ve played before – companions as pack mules, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:countless fetch quests, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:exposition dumping, NPCs saying random shit to you totally unprompted. Combat is still mediocre, just with more ammo types. (So many ammo types.) You’re🥀 still fighting against encumbrance with👍 every step. You’re still talking to a ton of characters, none of which give you a reason to care about them. It’s the same gameplay loop as Skyrim and Fallout 4.
We should be expecting more at this point, considering it’s 2023. We’ve just received games like Baldur’s Gate 3 and Tears of the Kingdom, which were shockingly innovative and took players by surprise with the sheer number of things you could do with them. These games opened themselves up to players, shaping themselves to allow us to do what we wanted to do instead of shoehorning us𝕴 into a prescribed route. Developers everywhere were in awe of just how much these games could do, that the developers behind these games could even cater to so many ways of playing.
To be fair, Starfield started development seven years ago, so it’s understandably behind the curve. Perhaps we should count ourselves lucky that it didn’t turn into a multiplayer, micro-transaction-filled mess along the way. It&r𝐆squo;s also true that not every game can be a genre-maker. Some games will simply be run-of-the-mill, and Starfield is just that. It is not exciting in any long-lasting way, it doesn’t bring anything truly new or innovative, and it doesn’t even really iterate on its long-standing Bethesda formula.
I don’t wan꧟t to play yet another Bethesda game where I do the same old shit in a different setting. I want to see Bethesda try something new and exciting. Starfield was always too big to fail, which meant it was entirely safe to do exactly what it did before. Players everywhere suffer as a result. Technological improvꦦements can only get so far, and simulating the physics of ten thousand milk cartons in space is cool, but it’s nothing compared to implementing mechanics that, for once, surprise your players.