I think being technically the biggest RPG ever with the most solar systems and explorable regions doesn’t do much anymore these days. You can make a galaxy feel vast and rewarding to explore without having each planet as a landmass to walk on. Quality over quantity would have been the better approach here, especially as Bethesda always excelled at environmental storytelling and rewarding discoveries along the way. I still enjoyed my 100 hours with Starfield, but I think it should have had a different design philosophy. So yes, I agree with the ex-designer.
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Something I found super interesting a while back when I played Elder Scrolls Arena was how similar it felt to Starfield. It was the first Elder Scrolls game and it took place on the entire continent of Tameriel with basically all the dungeons and environments procedurally generated. I put it down for the same reason I put Starfield down, I just wasn’t drawn in (I didn’t feel invited in). The game felt vast and awe inspiring and empty. Like a really big mansion in a gated community. Like wow someone built that, but also, yeah, I don’t want to live in that. It’d be a pain to clean (or expensive with a staff), it’d feel empty and distanced from my family, and doing any little thing would become tedious.
Morrowind really changed the game for the Elder Scrolls. I don’t know if it was the first time they focused on a specific region, but that strategy certainly helped. And then Oblivion and eventually Skyrim (most of my elder scrolls experience) felt like evolutions that continued to build a deep and rich lived in world while also focusing on a more manageable area that wasn’t daunting to explore nor did it feel empty and monotonous. Starfield just has to reel in its scope and probably will with future entries. With the new IP and it being a space odyssey, I think they were just too excited to limit themselves and that ultimately became the game’s downfall. That and I don’t think Bethesda’s really changed that much right? Skyrim is Skyrim because it built upon years of work in story telling, world building, and game design. Starfield was them starting from scratch and probably unsurprisingly their start from scratch feels like a more modern version of the last time they started from scratch, 30 years ago.
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The first continent was Daggerfall, and that was proc gen as well.
Morrowind also had the same issue that every Bethesda game they make has had(Oblivion, Fallout 3, Skyrim and Fallout 4). People calling it worse than the previous entry, according to people that have been around to see the discourse.
As big as Fallout and Elder Scrolls have gotten thanks to Bethesda’s choices. They have also builded up a group of haters who have decided that Bethesda is the worse company ever and their head writer is a hack who can’t write.
Because they change things from a dead franchise that theu revieved and made popular(Fallout was so dead and buried) to be more appealing, or continued to keep involving the lore, like Nords not running around half naked in the snow, because they’re not actually immune to cold.
Or Nords adopting Imperial/Colovian gods, 200 years after Akatosh literally manifested into existence and kick Dagon’s ass(in Nord animal totem religion, the dragon is Alduin which they thought was Akatosh, which made them wary of Imperial worship of the dragon god).
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The scope to travel the whole game in real-time would be impossible would have be nice if you can have travel from earth and landed on Earth’s moon all in real time with no loading.
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Makes me think how much I’d love a game that was literally just proving time travel and relativity by breaking your mind with all the different clocks combined with far space travel.
I love Starfield I would have liked to have been able to take off and fly to a planet’s moon in real-time with no loading
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