Bethesda fans are starting to notice the flaws in Bethesda’s game design. These flaws have arguably existed since Oblivion and have worsened with each successive game. Now, with the release of Starfield, criticism of Bethesda has become mainstream.
It’s easy to see why Bethesda games are popular. No other developer offers large and spectacular yet familiar open worlds populated with NPCs with names, unique dialogue, homes, jobs, and routines, objects with their own physics that can be picked up, used, and sold, universally enterable buildings, a plenitude of factions and side quests that at least present the aesthetic of quest variety if not actual variety, and mechanics that enable a wide range of gameplay styles.
Starfield made many of the same promises and technically delivered most of them. It has sold millions of copies, although fewer than Bethesda hoped. It received generally positive reviews from professional critics, but the response from gamers has been mixed. Online discussions on Starfield are largely negative, as is most YouTube content being made about it.
Defenders of Starfield claim that this doesn’t mean anything—the internet always complains about popular new games. Therefore, the backlash towards Starfield can be dismissed as the usual negativity from terminally online nerds who do not represent the average person.
This is the typical response to widespread online criticism. People on the internet may be more critical towards media than the average person, but that doesn’t mean they never have good reason. Different games receive different amounts of criticism. Some games even receive universal praise. Some games receive a lot of hate but are redeemed over time.
Widespread internet hate is rarely blind; usually, there is a reason behind it. And sometimes that reason is valid.
The reasons people give for disliking Starfield mirror what people like me have been saying for years.
People are criticising Starfield for its lacklustre story, protagonist syndrome, stiff-faced characters, unintelligent AI, janky gun mechanics, unharmonious blend of features, repetitive and simplistic mission objectives, uninspired worldbuilding, abundance of loading screens, refusal to allow players to make meaningful decisions during quests, and empty, self-contained maps.
There are other criticisms, but there’s no need to be exhaustive—I wouldn’t want to be associated with all those toxic internet goblins 🙂
Many of these issues have existed in Bethesda games since Oblivion and Fallout 3. Some issues are new, such as Starfield’s self-contained levels—forcing players to sit through more loading screens than ever before—and the emptiness of its procedurally generated worlds. Everything else, from the janky mechanics to the stiff animations, the weak writing, and the lack of challenging moral choices, were present in Oblivion and Fallout 3.
These issues were more forgivable then. Technology was weaker and Bethesda was smaller and less experienced. Plus, as with every Bethesda game, Oblivion and Fallout 3 are greater than the sum of their parts. It’s easy to find fault with each individual feature, but when put together, they make for some amazing experiences.
You would expect Bethesda to fix these issues in subsequent games—especially after Obsidian dropped Fallout: New Vegas and showed the world what a Bethesda game COULD be. But they didn’t. In fact, Bethesda doubled down on the practices and design philosophies that created many of these problems in the first place.
From Fallout 3 on, Bethesda endeavoured to ‘streamline’ their games—which is to say, they simplified their games in the belief that casual audiences love shallow experiences that don’t even offer the potential for deeper engagement.
Progression systems were simplified, quests became more repetitive, playstyle diversity was diluted, the writing got lazier, the voice actors continued to receive their script lines in alphabetical order, moral choices were removed, meaningful dialogue options were removed from Fallout 4, and the worldbuilding became increasingly derivative and contradictory. The only features Bethesda endeavoured to improve were the size and detail of their worlds and the smoothness of Fallout 4’s gunplay.
Skyrim was a huge success not because its quests were well-crafted or its combat engaging or its NPC interesting—they weren’t. Skyrim’s vast, spectacular world carried that game. Its other features—all lacklustre by themselves—were okay, just okay, when put together. This enabled players to go through the motions and appreciate the world, which was the main draw. Skyrim, as with every Bethesda game before it, was greater than the sum of its parts.
The same was true for Fallout 4, although the writing and dialogue system were handled so poorly that a decent number of people began to view Bethesda more critically. The overall consensus, though, is that Fallout 4 was great. Like Skyrim, it was considered greater than the sum of its parts—although the degrading quality of those parts was growing harder to ignore.
Starfield is not receiving the same level of praise. Something has shifted. The perceived age of the creation engine, the disappointment of many of Starfield’s most hyped features (particularly its interplanetary traversal, which involves mandatory loading screens), and the continued worsening of Bethesda’s flaws, particularly in the writing department, have made Bethesda’s weaknesses as a game development studio impossible for many to continue to ignore.
Starfield isn’t even silly enough to endear gamers to its flaws, as Oblivion’s NPCs endeared gamers to Oblivion’s clunkiness. No one is making memes about Starfield. Its universe and characters are too sterile.
The defensive response of Emil Pagliarulo and a few other Bethesda staff members towards critics on Twitter indicates they have noticed that the tide of opinion has turned against them. Whereas before they could do no wrong and trust their fans to shout down their critics, no matter how valid their criticisms were, now they find that fan discussions are dominated by the notion that their game design is “outdated” (an idea popularised by NakeyJakey‘s video), that the creation engine has fallen behind the competition, and that Bethesda’s writers are bad and seemingly have no intention to learn how to write well.
Some games get better with hindsight. That’s not going to happen with Starfield.
The Bethesda magic is wearing off. Their bad design decisions have become too egregious to ignore. Bethesda games have always been greater than the sum of their parts—but now the parts are failing and the whole machine is starting to rattle.
Bethesda’s next game will be The Elder Scrolls 6. With it, Bethesda has a choice: do they quintuple down on their ‘streamlining’ strategy and persist in preserving incompetent writers like Emil in their positions, or do they do as successful RPGs like Baldur’s Gate 3 have done and make a game with moral and mechanical depth that everyone from causal fans to hardcore internet goblins can love?