Yeah, I thought that Starfield was fine as a game. There are some things I dislike about it, but that’s also true of all their past games too. I had plenty of good hours in it.

That being said, relative to its time, it wasn’t as impactful as the mainline Fallout games.

I sat down to try to figure out the people who were really upset about it, because it’s rare for my opinion to diverge that much from many people. There were a couple “groups”:

• Some people apparently expected it to be a space combat flight sim and were really disappointed in that. On one hand, I get how one could feel that way if one had that expectation. On the hand, I have a hard time figuring out how someone winds up with that expectation. I saw someone disparaging calling it “Skyrim in space”, which…was kind of what I was expecting, but clearly not what they did. I do think that there’s a market for space opera combat flight sims, as evidenced by the amount of money that people have thrown at Star Citizen.

• I found one comment on Reddit about someone on YouTube who had a really good hour-long review listing all of the problems. IIRC, “Synthetic Man” was the reviewer. I went and watched it. There were a couple of complaints. One was around the fact that he liked killing a lot of people in Fallout and was upset that Starfield had a lot more major plot people marked essential, to avoid breaking plotlines. Okay, I don’t personally go around killing a lot of major plot characters, but I guess if someone did, it could be frustrating, feel like you’re “on rails”. He felt that Fallout’s world was unique, had an unusual world, whereas Starfield was “generic sci-fi” a lot like the present day. Okay, I guess I could see that, though I have also seen a lot of people criticize the world-building in the later Fallout games as being just a nod to concepts introduced in the first two, that the real world-building happened there. But most of his complaints were kinda of the hard-right variety. Like, he was pissed that women were in authority positions (“of course the President is a woman”). He was angry that there were a lot of non-white people doing things lile running the military, and that there were so many of them. Now, okay, that was kinda distasteful to me, and I was thinking about commenting how you’d expect that in a society with more population movement and such, but it did sorta make me think more deeply about why people liked the Fallout series. Fallout—I believe that the name is something of a pun, refers not just to the radioacrive fallout, but to the social fallout, what a post-apocalyptic society would look like—is kinda a prepper fantasy. Like, society breaks down, and most people die, and the people who come out on top are those who are armed and have the will to change the world. I think that a lot of the appeal of prepping is maybe because it lets people fantasize about a world where there’s a social reset, and the things that make people important or influential in the current world go away and they’re a lot more prominent or relatively better off. And I think that maybe applies to a lot of different things. Marx called religion the “opium of the masses”—you can believe that things that you find unjust in the current world don’t matter. People die and there’s an afterlife and all the unrighteous are punished and the believers—you—are the ones on top. I think that a lot of the appeal of many things is enabling a fantasy like that. But, okay, to stay on track…from that perspective, Fallout was really appealing to some people because it created a fantasy world that they liked imagining themselves in. Starfield didn’t—it imagined a more-or-less progressive extension of our current world. One of the cardinal sins I think a media series can do is to try to change up its demographic. Liie, once you build a userbase, you want to make games that appeal to that userbase. It could be that the creators of the series had, perhaps unintentionally, built a world that had a lot of appeal to a demographic, and then unintentionally shifted it.

• Some people I saw didn’t like the procedurally-generated aspect of it. I think that the procedural aspect, which clearly soaked up a lot of resources, didn’t buy much gameplay. You had infinite planet surface, but no real reson to venture our over it. I think that for games to benefit from procedural generation, the way roguelikes and roguelites do, they really need to have the generated content change the way one plays. The only real “game” aspect to the terrain was finding an outpost location with multiple resources, which isn’t very interesting, or very rarely needing to traverse some more-difficult terrain. That is, the terrain was mostly just cosmetic. I think that what was needed was for the terrain to matter a lot more to gameplay. Maybe enemes act differently around it or utilize it or player abilities are tied to it so that it affects combat. Flip side is, though…while I don’t think that the terrain generation bought much, disn’t create much gameplay, I don’t see as how it hurt things much either. Not much reason to go on a trek through infinite terrain, but not as if you needed to, either.

• The main plot wasn’t great. Yeah, I do agree there. Bethesda had a history of dramatic openings, like Skyrim or Fallout 4. By comparison, Starfield had an underwhelming intro. The main questline was maybe one of the more-uninteresting questlines (though I remember people who didn’t like the main Fallout 4 questline too). I think that Bethesda heard that people liked exploring, by which they meant they liked walking around a handcrafted map full of handcrafted plot, and interpreted it as “I want exploration thematically”, which they didn’t. On the other hand, I don’t really think that the main questline was really the core appeal of Fallout or Elder Scrolls games either, so…shrugs.

Todd moved into a leadership role around the time of the development of Oblivion and his fingerprints have been visible on it since then.

One thing that comes to mind specifically, and this isn’t game breaking, really, but I think it neatly illustrates the larger problem -

You ever notice coming from Morrowind to Oblivion that Oblivion has about a quarter or less of the actual story and dialogue that Morrowind had? This was, if I recall correctly (and I might not, it’s been a while) a Todd decision. This happened because voice acted dialogue was considered a hard requirement for Oblivion to have, except… they didn’t have enough space on the disk to actually hold all of these audio files and still have a decent amount of game. So a lot of the dialogue and nuance was cut completely, dumbing down the entire game by a significant degree. NPC’s now only have a half dozen lines or so apiece, with the exception of (some) main quest NPC’s, because of this design decision.

If you want to know more about this, I’ll recommend you this heckin’ chonker of a video from PatricianTV (it’s literally 12 hours long, that’s not a joke, be warned) which goes over the game itself in pretty obsessive detail but more importantly pulls back the curtain on a lot of the development cycle.

To be clear, I don’t think that Todd is the entirety of the problem at Bethesda. But I do get the impression that he’s a significant blocker to forward progress. He has to go first, before the rest of the studio can start to regroup and recover.

Same guy also has an 18 hour long Skyrim retrospective in the same style that goes into a lot of Todd’s further antics post-Oblivion.