A friend is showing me all his cool starfield stuff and I kind of just feel bad for him. A lot of systems seem really stripped down even compared to Fallout 4. It doesn’t seem like you can, for instance, lay down foundations and build whatever building you want in whatever shape you want like you could with Fallout’s extremely janky settlement system. You have to plop down various NASA white habitat modules and you’re limited by how those modules click together. I’m not clear on whether you can layout rooms and workstations within the hab modules and at this point I’m a little afraid to ask.

The armor system in fallout where you had a clothing layer and could then add customizable armor on top of the clothing layer seems to be gone. In FO4 you could have separate armor pieces for your chest, for each arm, for each leg, plus helmets and a few other things. All the pieces could be modded with different appearances and perks. No it looks like you’re down to a set of clothing and a space suit with very limited customization options.

Combat just looks appalling bad. Beth has never had good combat, but it looks like for Starfield they tuned the combat AI down to the point where it reacts very, very slowly and doesn’t do much beyond stand there and and wait to be shot. I assume this is to compensate for the removal of VATS, which is another inexplicably absent system. VATS was notable in FO3 and FO4 for making the game much more accessible to people who didn’t play FPS games and I cannot fathom why it was removed.

The spaceship builder is okay, but it looks very limited in what it can do. Most of the ships end up looking very samey since they’re snapped together out of modules. You’re not getting anything with a single smooth external hull, nor do you have freedom to define the shape of the rooms inside the pressure vessel. There may be some large interior space modules I haven’t run in to yet. Personally I think the “Nasapunk” clean-room aesthetic conflicts with the space opera story framework. It works in kerbal because the space ships behave like space ships, but it looks weird when the space ships operate on space opera rules. Like instead of having the ship vertically oriented for launch to orbit it takes off with VTOL thrusters and then flies away like a plane despite really not being a space plane. When star wars, which runs entirely on bullshit space opera, does it it doesn’t bother me because it’s consistent with the aesthetic. But having a ship that sorta-kinda is trying to look realistically doing star-wars stuff is a big jarring.

It also suffers from millennium falcon syndrome. You can only control one ship at a time, and “control” is doing a lot of work when all you can really do is point the nose around in a very limited space combat minigame, so your ship has to be able to do everything- cargo, combat, whatever. You can’t deploy fighters or call for backup in a space fight, which has been frustrating a few people i know as they get in to space combat but their ship isn’t built properly for it. Space combat also looks very basic. You’re not going to be doing anything fancy with drone weapons, newtonian maneuvers, or turrets. You kind of just point your nose at the enemy and hold down the fire button until one of you explodes. It’s like a stripped down version of X-wing vs Tie Fighter.

Apparently there no space walk/EVA. Which… Why? Why? Why wouldn’t you make that a thing?

Bethesda’s innability or unwillingness to learn, innovate or really do anything new in very frustrating. I doubt this will make sense to most people, but I’ve spent so many hundreds of hours under the hood of these games fixing problems, fleshing out anemic systems, and so forth, it feels very disappointing to see that Beth has yet again shipped a bunch of very shallow systems without much complexity or depth.

And who am I to make these criticisms? The last version of a mod I contributed too long ago has had 400,000 downloads since 2016, is who I am. A very minor contribution, but I’ve been in the guts of these games almost as long as Todd has. And while the mod community has grown and done incredible things Beth keeps shipping stripped down, disappointing messes. I view Beth’s games as a process where Beth releases a problem and then the modding community has to fix it, over and over again, and every so often Todd tries to destroy the whole relationship by monetizing modding. without the bullshit of IP and profit motive, if Beth’s games could truly be a collaborative community process with open source code, Bethesda probably would have been forced out of the process a long time ago for causing more problems than they solve. The simple fact that the script extenders have to be re-built from scratch for each game and then arduously maintained when they’re constantly broken by updates, even after all these years, is extremely frustrating. Beth could just… integrate the script extensions natively instead of making the community hack them back together every time, but they don’t. It’s rude.

Beth games are an excellent example of how art, creatively, and inventiveness are stifled by property laws and IP.