Look, I don’t actually mind Starfield. It’s a relatively inoffensive game with some decent ideas and a whole lot of flaws. In other words, a perfect 7/10.
But in case you missed the news, Bethesda is allegedly planning a rework of Starfield to fix up some of its biggest flaws and make massive improvements to the game.
That’s a great idea, I’d say. Although I find Starfield to be quite mid, there are some excellent ideas under the surface there and there just needed to be a better execution. Any improvements Bethesda can make to that formula, I say go for it.
From the sounds of it, we’re at least getting some much-needed changes to Starfield’s travel mechanics. It’s reported that a future patch will remove all of the additional loading screens when taking flight, which is fantastic news in my opinion.
It’s such a bore to have a loading screen when you enter your ship, another loading screen when you lift off the planet, and then potentially much more waiting depending on where you want to go next. If you want to fly from one planet to another, it’s around four loading screens. Yawn.
Compare this to something like No Man’s Sky, which does this all seamlessly without you ever needing to wait for a loading screen, and it’s pretty wild just how much more fluid it feels. So, if Bethesda can trim down on that, I think fans would appreciate it.
However, I don’t feel like it’ll be enough to win back players, as it still doesn’t get to the rotten core of Starfield’s biggest issues. What’s worse, I don’t think there’s any way to fix these issues without fundamentally changing the game.
Exploration is the Rotten Core of Starfield‘s Biggest Flaw
Bethesda prided itself on Starfield being a game where you could go to any planet, explore any part of its surface, and not feel restricted in what you wanted to do.
In essence, it took Todd Howard’s “See that mountain? You can go there” philosophy to a whole new level.
The issue is that these worlds ended up feeling rather lacking, with nothing really that interesting to do. The Point-of-Interests are largely recycled, and most planets are barren with only a few resources to discover. There’s very little incentive to go out there and find something cool, which is something previous Bethesda games like The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and Fallout 4 did really well.
I don’t think this is going to ever be improved with a potential overhaul though. The problem is that these issues exist due to each planet in Starfield being procedurally generated. It lacks the personal touch that artists can put into an environment like the Commonwealth Wasteland or Tamriel, because there’s simply too much here to do by hand.
Of course, you can’t fix this without completely overhauling how planet exploration works. You’d have to add hundreds, maybe even thousands of new Points of Interests, unique loot and quests to go with them, and you’d also have to ensure they’re used sparingly so players aren’t running into repeated content constantly.
This would require time, money, and resources that Bethesda simply doesn’t have. It’d take years to even get to something closely resembling this, and I doubt Bethesda is going to want to invest in that when its fans are just begging for The Elder Scrolls VI to come out already.
The Outer Worlds 2 Did ‘Space Fallout’ Better Than Starfield Did
If you ask me, Bethesda should have done something closer to how Obsidian Entertainment handled planets in The Outer Worlds 2. This game accomplishes a lot of the same ideas Bethesda was trying with Starfield, except the maps are relegated to small playable spaces set on a handful of planets. It very much feels like it fits the “Fallout but in space” premise that Starfield wanted to have.
Obviously, it’s too late now for Bethesda to go and do that. No matter what it does to Starfield’s exploration, it’s never going to fully satisfy fans, nor will it be able to transform the game’s exploration into something that feels compelling. Any changes it does make to exploration is just going to draw attention to the fact that it’s just a rather dull feature.
I’m hoping that future Starfield patches focus on what the game did best: the hand-crafted stuff. Add more cities, more quests, more isolated locations that aren’t just a part of the game’s rotation of procedurally generated Points of Interest. I’d love to see more of this. Even if it doesn’t fully fix Starfield’s fundamental issues, it can at least build on what the game did best.
