To clarify: I wanted Starfield to be good. I loved past Bethesda games, but they burned us with F76 and game companies don't just turn themselves around - especially if they don't have any mechanism for figuring out what the problem was in the first place.
Bethesda NEVER figured out what the core problem with F76 was other than fixing bugs and adding content. They never figured out that it could have done great if they just made it a fun co-op experience, instead of a nightmare of inventory management and repeating quests for everyone in your group. Apparently "shared quest" technology was lost in 2004 or something.
They won't figure out the problems with Starfield either - and one of them is unfixable - even with mods. They built the entire game on a bad simulation of a simulation of a Galaxy, instead of actually creating a 3D Galaxy. That is bone structure level unfixable.
Todd Howard isn't a genius, he's just an Optimism machine - to the point where it causes him to have a cognitive bias and be a poor decision maker since he ignores things that don't comport to his Optimism bias. he may have been a good executive at some point, or he just had good people around him. Those days are gone.
So I wanted it to be good, but I didn't expect it would be. Bethesda is not going to produce good games going forward. Although that won't stop them from selling well - they will just lean hard on marketing while making an inferior product.
