paid absolutely no attention to starfield and recently learned it doesn't have alien guys in it. and just
trend-chasing is a fixture of the games industry, right? like kart racers used to be. if a feature is deemed popular, a bunch of studios will pivot and make that, no matter how badly it fits or how embarrassing it is. zelda, mass effect, halo, sonic the hedgehog, they all suddenly decided to make open-world games. bethesda is so weird beyond what a crappy job they tend to do because I don't know that they see trends at all.
there was kind of an arc to bethesda's "main series" games, right? like arena started off functionally infinite, and then daggerfall was still incomprehensibly huge and had all sorts of weird shit like getting a mortgage to buy a house, and then morrowind pared it all down yet again and was just like, here's an island with a bunch of specific guys on it. and then they got stuck there. every game bethesda has made since 2002 has been an increasingly crappy (well, maybe skyrim's better than oblivion) attempt to make morrowind again, but each time the systems and writing gets simpler. like that post I saw a while back with a picture of a game boy that got crustier every time it was loaded by a unique IP address. they are just heads down, blinders on, ignorant of the world around them, making the same open world RPG over and over and every time it gets blander and typically less of an RPG.
this is so wild because they went all-in on a new franchise- new setting, new everything- and they didn't put aliens in it. look at mass effect, which still casts a long shadow. players go wild for aliens. they don't need tremendously creative designs, or coherent alien cultures, or even to really be characters [editor's note: liara] because players just love to see new kinds of freaks out there in space. just tell a character artist on staff "hey, draw some aliens" and put those guys in there. your players will go wild for it! but bethesda didn't even think to do this, because their administration is... ignorant? foolish? full of hubris? they were just particularly unconcerned with what they should be doing because they're seemingly incapable of that kind of self-reflection on an institutional level. it's like the thought process was "well, people would want to play as elves and orcs, but this is our new space game. so humans only!"
I am not currently accepting arguments for "but aliens wouldn't fit starfield's artistic vision" at this time. it is unclear if anyone writing for bethesda is capable of grasping an artistic vision beyond they saw something in a movie once (I believe it's come out that the reason cyrodiil went from a jungle in morrowind to europe in oblivion is explicitly because todd howard watched the fellowship of the ring)
Modern Bethesda only wants to make BAD westerns, Starfield is a game OBSESSED with cops.
