‘Starfield: Shattered Space is a disaster so here’s my 6 point plan to fix Bethesda’-GameCentral-Entertainment – Metro

Starfield: Shattered Space – a unanimous reception (Bethesda)

A Reader’s Feature is appalled at the recent Shattered Space DLC for Starfield but offers some constructive criticism on how to rebound from it.

In a week in which we learnt that Blizzard had cancelled 17 different games over the last few years I can’t help thinking that Bethesda should’ve taken a leaf out of their book, if not with Starfield itself then definitely with Shattered Space. I might only be DLC, but I have never seen a game from a major developer get such a negative response, with the Metacritic score for both critics and fans in absolute lockstep. As I type this one is 57 and the other is 5.7. I’ve never seen anything like it.

According to GC’s review most of the DLC was probably designed before Starfield came out, so couldn’t really react to people’s complaints about the main game. But that just makes things worse: if Bethesda couldn’t see the problems beforehand what are they even doing?

Since it’s on Game Pass I have played the game, but I couldn’t get through it all. It just all seems so… amateurish. It feels more like a mod than the actual fan made mods, with its constant bugs and glitches, embarrassing dialogue, bland combat, and predictable quests. How can this be the same developer that made the groundbreaking Skyrim?

Skyrim is one of the most important video games ever made (and apparently still more popular than Starfield). It’s impossible to talk about role-playing games without mentioning it, especially Western titles. Morrowind was the real groundbreaker in terms of how open-ended it was, with a whole world where you could do anything you want in whatever way you thought best: fight, use magic, stealth, or talk your way out of trouble.

Back in 2002, open world games didn’t really exist and certainly not with the complexity and amount of detail as Morrowind. Most Western games were pre-rendered and isometric, like the early Fallout games, but Morrowind created a new standard. Oblivion refined it but it was Skyrim which took it mainstream. Everyone knows what Skyrim is and now, over a decade later, people are still playing it and adding to it.

They are not adding to Skyrim. The amount of mods being created is tiny compared to Skyrim and Fallout, and it’s no wonder. Starfield is boring and old-fashioned, with nothing to see and do on any of the planets and not a single interesting character in the whole game. The dialogue is awful and even the voice-acting – something Bethesda don’t directly do themselves – is bad.

How is this possible? If I was Microsoft I’d be asking for my money back. Although I suppose after Fallout blew up on Amazon they can make all their money from that and the games don’t matter so much. Well… good job making a hit out of a Starfield show!

Despite how much I love Skyrim, Bethesda has always seemed very arrogant and people that just do not listen to criticism at all. How long have fans been complaining about bad facial animation now? And things like that dodgy dialogue has always been a problem, it’s just we’ve had other things to distract us from it before.

If The Elder Scrolls 6 (i.e. the sequel to Skyrim) is their next game Bethesda need to do the following:

Create an entirely new graphics engine, including good facial animation.

Fire all their writers and get new ones, ideally people who have spoken to human beings before in their life.

Drastically improve the combat and make the action in general seem more free-flowing and fun, not the slog it is in Starfield.

Don’t make half of your game inventory management. This problem is in a lot of role-players at the moment but just stop it. My reward for completing a quest shouldn’t be fiddling with a menu for 10 minutes.

Make sure the game has a full year of QA and bug fixing. Nintendo did it for Zelda: Tears Of The Kingdom, so there’s no excuse not to.

Put actual new ideas in your game. Don’t just be Skyrim with better graphics.

Do I think they’ll do any of these things, let alone them all? Not really, no. But they need to because otherwise they’re just going to fall even far behind the curve and into total irrelevance.

By reader Gordo

The reader’s features do not necessarily represent the views of GameCentral or Metro.

You can submit your own 500 to 600-word reader feature at any time, which if used will be published in the next appropriate weekend slot. Just contact us at gamecentral@metro.co.uk or use our Submit Stuff page and you won’t need to send an email.

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