Starfield, an RPG that excited gamers for years before release with the promise of being Skyrim in space, is ending 2023 with its Steam Recent Reviews rating at Mostly Negative. Even the overall rating is Mixed, which will doubtlessly disappoint Bethesda and Todd Howard.
Source: Starfield’s Steam rating falls to “mostly negative,” can Bethesda still save its RPG? | TechSpot
I was definitely salty when Bethesda was bought by Microsoft. Like so many others, I’ve been a long time fan of Fallout and Elder Scrolls, and was really looking forward to this one. However, as a PS5 player, I realized that Starfield and TES VI would never be coming to Playstation.
I eventually bought a new PC for the Elder Scrolls Online, and tried the digital deluxe pre-release version of Starfield on Steam. I refunded it after 12 hours. While I could see all the criticisms people are talking about with regard to the game, my particular problem was that inventory management was the worst of any open-world game I’ve seen. After this amount of time, I had collected enough “stuff” to require me to start building bases to store them, so that I could eventually build the interesting items, and start working on ships.
I discovered, to my dismay, that unlimited storage containers do not exist, as there are in Skyrim and Fallout 4. Not only that, but it was going to take precious resources to build containers that were — at their largest — still pitifully small. By the time I realized what was happening, I only had enough resources to build a single-base’s limit of storage containers, and it barely made a dent in my inventory.
The whole thing came crashing down at once. The exercise of breaking down and storing my junk — which had become a very efficient and quick abstraction in Fallout 76 — was going to be many, many more hours of work to tame, and it would never not be a chore. To me, there was simply no excuse for this.
So not only do I now view Bethesda suspiciously (even though I continue to play ESO), but I also hate Microsoft from “back in the day,” because I’ve been a fan of Linux since the start, and I watched them buy up any and all competition in the 90’s, and then use the courts and their bought-and-paid for trade press to try to kill Linux.
And above all of this, I hate the trend towards nation-state corporations having more power than governments, and I hate the reduction in choice and increased price by such moves, all while they funnel all the profits from becoming more and more integrated straight to the top.
I’m not trying to start a fight with Windows and Xbox fans. I just say all of this to preface saying this, in response to this news:
And I hope they have a terrible time with The Elder Scrolls 6 now, whatever it will be called.