Starfield has been out for about six weeks, and as the dust settles on the honeymoon period, some players are finding that the spacefaring RPG just doesn't have the staying power of Bethesda's previous games, most notably Skyrim.
Obviously, a lot of people like Starfield. It's been enormously successful and generally well-reviewed, even if it is one of the worst-reviewed games in Bethesda's library. Our Starfield review gives it a 5/5, and the writeup from our own Leon Hurley goes to show how engrossing the game can be if you really vibe with it. (I also maintain that it's unreasonable to expect games to be bottomless, especially when you've already had a good amount of fun with them, but I digress.)
The point is, for a non-trivial amount of players, the jump from Skyrim's focused, handcrafted journey to Starfield's massive, largely procedurally generated universe has left them wanting more. This isn't an unheard-of take on Starfield, but what's struck me, six weeks into the life of a game that Todd Howard says was built with years of support in mind, is just how many Bethesda fans seem to be feeling the same exact weariness.
"It's sad, but I can't bring myself to play anymore," reads a recent post from Reddit user CarefulMode. I've seen a zillion posts like this all over the internet; again, it's not news that everyone isn't head-over-heels in love with Starfield. But this innocuous post has racked up over 9,500 upvotes on the Starfield subreddit in a day, and the replies are filled with hundreds of like-minded Bethesda fans airing out their letdowns. To sum it up, some fans were hoping Starfield would be their next Skyrim, the next impossible-to-put-down adventure, and it's just not.
"There's something missing in Starfield, a kind of feeling that I did get with every other Bethesda game but that for the life of me I can't seem to find here," CarefulMode argues. "Everything feels so... disconnected, I guess? I don't know how to explain it any better than that ... Environmental storytelling is supposed to be Bethesda's thing, but this game's world building could have been made by Ubisoft and I wouldn't have noticed a difference."
Many people are nodding along with a reply from Waferssi, who compares Starfield's quests and exploration to Skyrim's.
"Skyrim for instance, you accept a quest, see a quest marker halfway across the map, find a route you haven't taken and walk there. Along the way you come across a giant camp and take it down. You come across a ruin with some dude who needs to help his aunt protect the graves of his relatives, and you kill some draugr and a necromancer to help the guy out. After the ruin you are hit up by a thief or attacked by two sabrecats and turn them into a stain on the ground, then a dragon swoops in and you steal its soul. And only then do you get to your destination to do the thing you were supposed to do for the quest, after an hour of game time spent running across vivid landscapes, a dark ruin, all that."
Meanwhile, Waferssi reasons, Starfield's quests may well throw out other quests along the way, "but those quests are spent running across barren wasteland or at least very homogenous biomes, the caves you enter and the planets you visit don't tell a story, and most of all travel between destinations is not running across a forest or around a lake, it's a loading screen and tadaaaa, you're there. That just feels empty sometimes."
This fragmented, loading screen-filled world is a recurring criticism among some fans. "It’s not that you can fast travel. It’s that you almost always have to fast travel due to the disconnected nature of the game," writes SkronkMan.
"If the fun is in the journey and not the destination, the endless teleports killed it," echoes shinykettle.
"Why use this teleport/fast travel? Because there is nothing in between point A and B to discover. No caravans, no traveling vendor, no unmarked [points of interest]," adds NomadODST, again pointing back to Skyrim.
"Bethesda has a 'system' for their games which ensured the journey was the best part and kept you coming back for more," adds MustardTiger88. "They seem to have taken a different approach with Starfield, and not for the better."
RunnyTinkles takes aim at Starfield's reliance on procedurally generated content, which has been touched up by Bethesda, but still routinely churns out identical scenarios across planets. "The procedural generated content poisoned the rest of the game for me," they say. "The idea that a quest could lead me to a copy paste building keeps me from being motivated to complete it ... I play Bethesda games to get lost in the world and I can't do that here."
"The mystery in Starfield is really missing, there isn’t really [anything] exciting about picking a random planet to land in and explore," agrees Hurtz2pp (and these two really ought to see a urologist based on their usernames).
Hole__grain drives the point home: "I put like 80 hours into Starfield but I’ve been playing Skyrim again. It just hits different. The dungeons are so much more interesting, all handcrafted etc. The starfield copy and paste locations are so discouraging."
"I can still find new things in Skyrim 10 years after first playing it," writes ngwoo. "I stopped finding new things in Starfield 2 weeks after I started playing it."
Background-Tip-2321 sums it up as: "It’s somehow the biggest and smallest open world at the same time."
"Bethesda games are my absolute and by far favorite games but this one doesn't click the same way," says MimallahMimsy, laying out the feelings of many beleaguered fans.
Again, these sentiments aren't entirely new. But six weeks after launch, this appears to be an increasingly common feeling. After all, you can't really evaluate a game's longevity in a few days. For example, another recent and popular post fromObiyandu asks: "Skyrim is my all time favorite game but I’m struggling with Starfield, am I stupid?"
Their criticisms will sound familiar: repetitive planets and points of interest, uninteresting loot, and a longing for more bespoke, unique encounters. "I can't believe I’m saying this but maybe 3-5 Skyrim-like planets would have made for a better experience," they say of Starfield's enormous galaxy. Clearly, they're not alone.
Bethesda's committed to improving and building on Starfield based on player feedback, and it's clearly in it for the long haul, so it'll be interesting to see if baked-in design choices like this can be spruced up to bring back Skyrim devotees in the long run.
As it happens, a Starfield mathematician just killed the same level 98 elite 100 times to prove that the game's loot scaling is "laughable."
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