The big takeaway is that innovation and evolution matters. A game type should evolve with the times and seek to improve upon itself. Bethesda has made the same game for the last decade and a half. The same goes for Ubisoft, Activision-Blizzard, and many companies under the EA umbrella. Also, animation is as important for lifelike immersion as graphics. Finally, to reiterate a prior point, people like seamless exploration and hate loading screens, unless such loading screens are absolutely necessary and precede meaningful content.
Starfield does not seem to be a bad game. It seems to be the same game people have grown sick of playing for the last decade, and one which adds problems that prior Bethesda games did not have, like loading screens as prerequisites to exploration, and lifeless procedurally generated planets with same-feeling exploration and no sensation of feeling lived-in or alive. If I had to describe the response, I would not use terms like "bad game" or "review-bombed," actually. I would say Bethesda is being punished for its complacency and apparent out-of-touch perspective in its creative process. A large cohort of players who previously viewed Bethesda as a forefront innovator are now perceiving its products as repetitive, low-hanging fruit bordering on the mass production of a preexisting template. The players are experiencing a rude awakening.
A lot of this thread still has limited utility to Larian, however, as they do not make Bethesda-type games. Larian games do not focus on immersing the player in a new world that unfolds before them in whatever direction they travel, allowing the player to become anything or anyone and go anywhere for any reason. It would certainly be interesting for Larian to try to produce such a game while incorporating what they've done in BG3, but I would expect something on a much smaller, denser scale.
My main questions right now follow: 1. Is Starfield truly underperforming? If so, is it for the reasons I think it is underperforming? 2. What are the long-term consequences of this relatively poor performance for Bethesda and other RPG studios? 3. What does the answer to the above two questions have to do with Larian? 4. How do we want developers like Larian and Bethesda to evolve their games?
Remember the human (This is a forum for a video game):
