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this post was submitted on 05 Nov 2023
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Started getting properly into Starfield and I had a thought pop into my head that I'd like to know if it's true or not:
Bethesda is a creatively bankrupt company. They can only take existing interesting settings (Fallout, Elder Scrolls) and build lackluster games to take place in them.
The people currently at Bethesda have never done a creative thing in their lives, so they just did Skyrim in space but without any of the interesting backing of the TES world. You've got the UC (Empire, order and bureaucracy) and the Freestars (Stormcloaks, liberty and old-fashioned values). They basically just did dragon shouts again. And the combat basically just feels like Fallout but - again - with anything unique or interesting stripped off.
It is a game utterly devoid of charm or originality because Bethesda as a company cannot create those things, they can only borrow the creative works of others to slap their shitty engine on top of.
There a scene in Starfield where you go to a night club on Neon and its just techno music with people awkwardly dancing in funny hats. I couldn't help being disappointed that THAT was what they thought a futuristic space night club would look like. Jesus. My high school prom was just some christmas lights hung in the gym and it was cooler than that
I remember the first time I got to Vivec city in Morrowind and how astounded I was. It seemed so alien and it was really cool to see a city not built by or for humans. Now 20 years later they had the opportunity to really outdo themselves. Make it weird, make it gross, make it fantastic, even if they didn't entirely stick the landing it would have been cool to experience a sense of wonder at what maybe the future could look like.
They didn't do any of that. They built the futureland section of a second rate amusement park
This is so on point. New Atlantis looks like store-brand Tomorrowland.
This is definitely a giant problem in Starfield, but I don’t think it’s why the clubs are so lame. Cause the problem isn’t just that it isn’t a cool club for a magic space future, it isn’t even a cool club for now. If I walked into that club tonight I would be like “this place is lame and dead.”
For one, it’s the most incredibly sex-less club I’ve ever seen in my life. If you’re gonna have dancers on a stage in your space bar can you try to make it at least slightly sexy?
Mass Effect 1 had a better nightclub and it’s not even very good and that game came out like 15 years ago.
Exactly. This is supposed to be a club in the grittiest, most drug addled city in the known universe and they offer dancers in funny neon hats? Wtf
It's why I fucking love The Expanse. The Belters feel absolutely distinct, with a unique culture and language that would develop from being exploited, poor, and forced to work in space without any support. It's one of the few sci-fi series to actually have a thought about what culture would look like in space and how even the (relatively, in scifi terms) short distance between Earth and Ceres would still contribute to massive social changes.
neon was such a disappointment in general
This is a rather common point, like I've seen the points on your comment basically almost everywhere actually but I'd just mention just because they are not creative it doesn't mean they can't be.
Look at hollywood now vs 20 or 30 years ago. The big studios converged into the mega franchises because it was profitable not because they can't find or don't have access to creative talent. Heck the same people that made those relatively better movies decades ago are still working today(though that is also another critique mfers never actualy retire).
People say Bethesda can't make things more creative than cookie cutter FO and TES, its true from observation but we will never know if its actualy true in a vaccuum, if you gave those teams a lot more freedom and backing to actualy be creative.
Although as I write all of this, maybe Anthem is the best counter example lol tl;dr fucked by a lead dev/designer that simply couldn't get the idea together for years
Anthem...should have been called Icarus for coming so close to greatness but sputtering and falling instead.
It feels like Bethesda is creatively bankrupt. But a lot of studios are like that these days. I'm pretty sure with Bethesda, idea pitches probably start with working from previous games' formats and then going from there.
Doing everything they can to say Skyrim but in space without saying Skyrim.
Throw in development times, crunch, and changing ideas, the creativity will be wrung out way before the game hits the shelves.
i've spent many many hours in that game, but i dropped it like a rock at some point and never looked back. it's just not got any charm to it whatsoever, there's a few specks of interesting story threads and ideas out in the cosmos that kept me clinging on, but it never really feels alive, or like the people who worked on it had a genuine vision for their universe. it's like a 6 or 7 out of ten, not because there's peaks of 10/10 and troughs of 3/10, but because every single aspect is just sorta mediocre across the board, with little to no variation
Ouch, I feel like "creatively bankrupt" is a bit harsh but I can't really think of how they aren't. It seems obvious their best days are behind them.
Starfield could've been so much better if it didn't do the "transcend humanity" which is just such a tired sci-fi trope at this point. Rehash the civil war plotline if they have to, just done right. Planet to planet, take it by means of diplomacy, intrigue, or just violence. It wouldn't have been original, but at least it would've been more entertaining than going around, faffing about in 0g while trying to hit some floating lights for 15 times, and then the story ends.
They fixed a lot of what skyrim and fallout did wrong, there are some skill checks and the character's background becomes at least a conversation item, but everything else is just so limp dicked. Ugh, I'm still mad about it even when I did not expect anything else than what we got.
Oh absolutely! I totally agree!
As a beginner game developer, I really can appreciate Starfield for it's technical complexity, and even though I want to keep playing, the game doesn't make me feel anything.
Actually, the more I think about it, the more Starfield feels like it could have been planned as an MMORPG and then pivoted to a single-player game halfway through development.