As if needed, at this point.
"I won't be continuing development on Starfield Together. I'm not gonna put my heart and soul into a mod for a game as mediocre as this."
Woof.
"I never considered that "the modders will fix the game" only works if modders want to fix the game."
I hope this quote is literally the thing that shatters the illusion placed over Todd Howard and the management at Bethesda, that they're still on some unsinkable win-streak from Skyrim, a game that is now twelve years old, and, again, is only as popular as it is because of the modding community - they even brought mods to consoles because of Skyrim; it's not a debatable idea: Skyrim's longevity being due to modding is a fact.
The fact that Skyrim is still the best game of the last ~20 years Bethesda has made is atrocious, honestly. It shows how little Bethesda actually pay attention to, not even the people, but the trends that make their games popular. It's sad, but it's finally clear - they're not going to change until some of the old guard leave, and that has a standard 50/50 chance of ruining the company entirely or elevating it to a new golden age - we can't know.
It's like saying any of the hit releases from ~1999 were still the 'best' games their respective companies made as of 2011 (same time period as Skyrim is from today). They aren't. Some are considered classics/paragons of genre/etc, but they're not still the most popular/best-selling/most-highly-regarded games of those companies like Skyrim still is for Bethesda. Diablo 2 wasn't Blizzard's best game by 2011 - WoW came out in 2004. Ocarina of Time wasn't the best game Nintendo had made by 2011. It wasn't even the best game they'd made by 2000 - that was Majora's Mask, a brilliant example of how to expand on a game's ideas using most of its assets in a short time.
They just don't get it. They really, really don't, and it shows. Modding was left to LAST, remember? They don't get it.
When the modders give up on your game because the bones aren't worth turning into a skeleton marionette to entertain themselves with, you just know it's done. Starfield will not have the longevity of Skyrim. Not even close. It'll be 80% into its full fade from memory before 2024 is done. If they'd done mod support from minute one, things might be different. If it was easy to fix the game, people would have fixed it and enjoyed it, even if they complained it was 'easy to fix so why didn't Bethesda do it'. But the result here is that fixing it won't make it fun, and fixing all of the bad decisions about the game is, at this point, re-developing their game, and that's taking the ol 'Modders Will Fix It' a touch too far, y'know?
No amount of patching, DLC, or even, at this point, mod support, will save this game, because the fundamental design principles of the game are... Nothing. They finally stripped away everything that was interesting about a Bethesda game - and, no, incidentally good quest writing does not count, because it's clearly been on a solidly downward trend since Skyrim, clearly writers fighting to try and get good quests in the game, only to get cut down and down and down - stripping away everything that made Skyrim/Oblivion/Morrowind fun or good, and left... Mechanics, and utterlly missing the point of what made anything about their games great. Without a solid project-covering design document (yes this is basically confirmed, they do like a few pages and that's it - "the game is the design document". Fucking hell) and still sticking to the "if it doesn't work take it out" mentality, they've reduced Creation Engine games down to bare mechanics and atmosphere - neither of which are good enough alone or together in this game to be worth a damn.
Walk, run, jump, shoot, loading door, Menus, a space flight model so fucking barebones and basic it may as well be a polished weekend gamejam tech demo (even then, devs on Skyrim managed to put in full spear combat into Skyrim as a dev-what-you-want project, so there's no excuses at this point), Fallout 4 outposts with a modicum of expansion effort and no reason to use it other than resources, a passion-project ship builder that is ultimately meaningless for how sparse and shit the space gameplay is, 4 dialogue options, constant fetch/messenger quests, and Guns-In-Skyrim but slightly improved past Fallout 4 shooting, which doesn't even feel good - something that is solely based around graphics, animation tuning and sound, something so obviously tweakable and yet utterly unrefined or honed, an awful further reduction of the skill system into challenge-gated perks - not use-to-improve/unlock perks, challenges, as in, oddly specific and weird shit you might not ever do in some cases, and finally a reduction of the Radiant AI system to the extent that it's now a handful of identical facilities and caves that populate hundreds of procgen'd planets. And Dragonshouts I mean, Space Magic. Woo. Because that's why Skyrim sold well. That's part of the Bethesda Brand now. sounds of dry-heaving.
It's the skeleton of a great Bethesda game. They just needed to make... The game - the cohesive intermingling and refinement of all the above and all the things that make a Bethesda game fun... But they didn't. If it gets cut out, it doesn't come back.
It really does deserve its fully Mixed review rating on Steam. This wasn't worth crunching on, guys. Sorry.
It sold well enough that it won't tank Bethesda Game Studios, but if this was Todd Howard's Magnum Opus (he'll probably stay on to ship TES6, but after that I think he'll want out), he maybe shoulda tapped out on Skyrim. And honestly, whoever the fuckin' guy is that doesn't do design documents? Fire his ass. Like, for real. He's not doing his job well at all, in a foundational way. Not having a DD is not only a development nightmare, but it's shown time and again, especially in game development, that a good, well-maintained design document is literally a time-saver on the road to making a great game. Even if it needs to be updated regularly, even if you get a year in, and realise you need to fundamentally change something core in the design to achieve the goal, it's still saving you time compared to floundering around somehow regressing the core design of your games for 8 fucking years.