on top of all the other stuff in Starfield one of the big disappointments to me in it was that they'd hyped it up as a big sci-fi RPG full of stuff they couldn't have done in Fallout or Elder Scrolls and then it's just... a fantasy story, in space.
Like the main conflict is literally just freedom loving colonist rebels vs big multicultural empire, there's the thieves guild city planet, there's the assassin's guild pirates, there's a weird cult that kills people for vague reasons, demi gods, the player is the chosen one, etc.
there's very little in the game that's interesting sci-fi stuff and the vast majority of it is generic adventure game stuff that could go in any setting if you dressed it up differently
And of the most scifi stuff in the game, I can't think of anything that wasn't pretty bland:
AI comes up once and the dilemma it presents is a computer is asking you nicely to get rid of the mercenaries trying to kill it
implications of FTL comes up once and you can solve it by either buying an FTL drive orrrr slavery or mass murder
terraforming/pollution comes up once but it's actually the space magic that did it
space combat exists but it's shallow and not very good
the most dangerous space itself can be to you is giving some debuffs
like I've never played a game with that much polish and budget but manages to have absolutely every aspect of it be some amount of disappointing, it does absolutely nothing well besides the graphics and the voice acting and those weren't really an improvement over FO4 anyway. the exact opposite of compelling
i feel i ought to give starfield a "proper go" now that i have the newer hardware, but i don't really want to.
The game is almost entirely the bare minimum bethesda open world that bethesda could pull off.
a lot of people's assessment of it being "without the IP itself to fall back on exposing bethesda's flaws" have the right of it.
I wanna give a marked example: Dungeons or lack thereof. Sure you have the same bunch o' settlements, caves, etc (which are all the same layout barring the quest specific ones) and the "ancient alien" ruins, anomalies, etc are the biggest example of missed opportunity the game could've had as far as dungeon content goes. you could've had a much better experience but no, Todd just had to have thirty dozen palette shifted barren rocks to play with like he's the set designer for Star Trek TOS's alien worlds or some shitfuckery.
The game Starfield IS concerns me for everything else in Bethesda's future.
Namely: Using AI to pad everything else out.
