I found this 10-month-old interview with Todd Howard, the president of Bethesda. As usual, there’s a lot of talk, but little of substance. Look, I get it. Given his position, he can’t be very specific, or gamers will hound him until his dying day about something he said that didn’t work out the way they wanted. But if you listen between the lines, he says something that lines up with where I think this is all going.
Given my previous and salty experience of buying the advance-availability digital deluxe version of Starfield, and then refunding it because of the nightmarish inventory management, I just went and looked at the Steam chart for Starfield.
Ouch. That seems low. So I went and looked at Skyrim too, for comparison.
Like, ouch, man. The 12-year-old Skyrim has almost ten times as many players as Starfield. Maybe this is an unfair comparison, as Skyrim has twice as many players than Elder Scrolls Online and three times as many as Fallout 76, so Skyrim is sort of a juggernaut of video games. But still. Dang.
I found another video (which I won’t bother linking), lamenting the lack of updates to Starfield since launch while the player numbers languish. He complains that the potential of the game isn’t being realized. However, the “potential” of this game is being worked on, just not in the way he’s looking for it.
When Fallout 4 released, the settlement building aspect was widely criticized as not making much sense in the context of a single-player game. You could build up all the settlements in the game, and create supply routes between them, so that you could pool all your building materials together, and then… the people of those settlements would… help you fight random encounters all over the map? Really? All those hours of effort for this benefit? It was a really good subsystem, but that was the weird part. It made you question why a great, in-game building tool had such an obviously significant development effort put into it, when the in-game utilization of it was so weak. When they eventually released Fallout 76 on the same engine, it suddenly made perfect sense.
Well, they’re doing the same thing with Starfield. It’s well understood through some online leaks of recruiting posts that the studio is working on another “untitled” MMORPG, but it seems patently obvious (at least to me, given previous history) that this will be based on Starfield. So the lack of updates with Starfield has to be understood in this context.
They are surely coordinating the direction of the inevitable single player game expansions with the work going on with the MMO version of the game. In the same way that they timed the big Fallout 76 Ghoulification update to land with the TV show, I believe they’re holding things back waiting on other teams. Don’t forget that they promised to port it to Playstation, and now people are noting that this is being hinted in the Creation store, so that’s coming, and what better way to hype that re-launch on a new platform than with the forthcoming Shattered Worlds update? And after that, the next big update will probably land with the reveal of their new MMO based on the property.