The examples of games that made a comeback were No Man’s Sky, a sandbox game missing features where, development-wise, it’s very feasible to add in missing promised features; and Cyberpunk, a game with good bones that didn’t function a lot of the time. Starfield’s problems are deeper than that, at least from my perspective.
The tech tree and leveling system is “improve by doing”, which runs into the same problems those systems always run into, which is why no one else does them anymore. It incentivizes me to get shot in combat on purpose so that I can improve my healing, and other stupid behaviors like that. So many of the quests are thoughtless fetch quests with nothing interesting along the way, and the game would actually be better with their omission than their inclusion. The endgame mechanic is an interesting one on paper, but seeing as the major quest lines only really play out one or two slightly different ways, there’s not much that’s interesting about going back to them, and you can also do all of them in a single playthrough, so there’s no need to engage in the endgame mechanic to see it. These are some of the problems that can be fixed but will likely be so costly and time consuming when there are Elder Scrolls and Fallout games to be made that I doubt it’ll ever happen.
The more fundamental flaws are that you can’t spec your character to interact with the world in wildly different ways and get clever with its systems; the universe doesn’t flow together the way that one of their terrestrial open worlds from before do, and fast travel is now mandatory; and the story walks right up to an interesting sci-fi story and stops just short of being good. To change these things sounds a lot like making an entirely different game.
I absolutely agree. Even with skyrim, I could mod every aspect of the game, I could make combat and the graphics good add lots of new mechanics and quests. But I still couldn’t make it good. The story, the copypasted dungeons and lifeless NPCs the game is rotten to the core and even if I can fix some of it I can’t just replace the core that would be a different game like Enderal.
You’re not wrong, but I feel that level of support for one of their releases would be a bit out of character for Bethesda (Without the long-term monetization present in games like Fallout 76). Especially so with the trend of Bethesda’s comments indicating that the consumers are the ones who are wrong for not liking some of the more problematic game design decisions.
I think they mean more about reworking core mechanics of the game such as the planet generation and the fact that space flight is basically pointless outside of ship combat. I don’t foresee them being able to allow ships to fly down to planet surfaces in Creation Engine.
cyberpunk was buggy but fundamentally sound. starfield is flawed in its core, no amount of bug fixing or system tweaking is going to fix it. they’d have to cut out space and planets entirely.
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