Over 6000 hours in Fallout 4.

Less than 300 in Starfield.

I played FO4 today.

I haven’t played Starfield in nearly a year.

Good riddance to Starfield. Fast-track Fallout 5. (I know they won’t.)

I don’t dislike it, but I want a game structured more like mainline Fallout. And Bethesda has been determinedly not making those.

Fallout 4 was released a decade ago, and their next release isn’t going to be a Fallout game. That is a very long time for a franchise to go without any entries. Since then, they’ve done a live-action multiplayer game, Fallout 76, which was not a single-player, plot oriented Fallout 5, despite players complaining that they wanted it to be more like that, with human NPCs and plot and such.

They’ve done Starfield, which had a much-improved engine, but is really oriented around being amenable to procedurally-generated content. From a technical standpoint, the procedurally-generated landscape is impressive, but it really didn’t add much from a gameplay standpoint, IMHO. I mean, again, I played it, got enjoyment from it, but it’s not Fallout 5. The main plotline was, I think, weak (and the characters themselves poke some fun at it as being hard to explain). I guess maybe what BGS was aiming for was “exploration”, since players like “exploration”, but I think what players really want was not “exploration as a theme”, but “constantly just stumbling into new placed plot-oriented content”. At least for me, the “exploration as a theme” in Starfield didn’t really do much.

And continuing a Bethesda trend, I feel like Bethesda threw a lot of resources into Starfield features that they didn’t really do much with. Like, in Fallout 4, Bethesda had in-game building. Okay, that’s a neat engine feature. But…what did they actually do with it? I mean, there’s virtually no game-oriented content, other than making a settlement slightly-less vulnerable to damage under settlement attacks. It lets a player make and maybe fantasize about living in a structure, watch the interplay of lighting in the engine, which is kind of neat, but doesn’t really feel like it adds that much game to me — and the value falls off a lot after the first construction or two. I pretty much had my fill after building an outpost or two and furnishing Home Plate. There was one mission, fighting the Mirelurk Queen at the Castle, which had any gameplay around building.

In Fallout 76, they made player camps, which could have some limited in-game impact, like letting a player sell to other players, or let a player show off their aesthetic designs to others. But…again, there’s not that much game around it.

Starfield added bases with resource production, but there just isn’t that much game to that other than hunting for an optimal collection of resources. A lot of the bases are something that one would automate and then never look at again: it’s pretty shallow. One can furnish apartments, but has little reason to ever go to them, and they’re mostly just for the aesthetic.

Starfield also permitted for building spacecraft, which at least one regularly enters…but again, the design just doesn’t matter all that much in any gameplay sense. There’s some limited impact on the spacefighting minigame, but there’s not much gameplay to that.

Like, we’re three games into the “in-game building” feature, and I don’t feel like Bethesda has really done anything with it that really excites me. It’s not that I dislike the in-game building, but there hasn’t been gameplay built around it. Like, I feel like the Sim Settlements mod for Fallout 4 did more than anything that Bethesda has to try to advance the situation. It still wasn’t what I hoped for, but it had gameplay and plot around it, tried to do quality-of-life stuff like reducing drudgery in building out a settlement, and could produce interesting and unique environments.

Bethesda now has a fancy procedural-terrain-generation system added for Starfield. I don’t know how reusable that’s going to be for them, since it seems to be kind of oriented around creating mostly-barren planets. But…they just don’t take much advantage of it. There’s no reason that one would ever need to really take much advantage of or traverse all the vast amount of terrain that they’ve made available to a player. If they want to, I don’t know, have large-scale battles that cover huge amounts of terrain, then that’d be a reason to have all this material. If they had some really hardcore survival stuff, so that terrain became important to one’s survival, finding one’s way out of slot canons that could flood or God knows what, okay. Using wildfires, I don’t know. As things stand, though, it mostly does little more than create a bit of a sense of scale. Terrain is mostly just an aesthetic. It’s pretty, but it’s basically doing the equivalent of standing around looking at some KPT Bryce

Starfield would be great if it was a single solar system and they actually designed each planet by hand. Instead of these generated planets all having identical copy pasted abandoned labs and outposts…

I just want to be able to manually fly my ship around everywhere. No cutscenes, disguise planet landings with clouds or something if you have to.

And don’t need POIs evenly spaced out every 2km or so on every planet.

In my opinion, I think the best Starfield 2 would be a prequel from the early age of space flight while people were living in space, but still before the invention of the grav drive.

• It should all take place in the Sol System mostly on space stations, asteroid facilities, moon bases, capital ships, ect.
• Be about political factions, corporations, scientists, space criminals, smugglers, raiding pirates, ect.
• Focus on the ship experience including in-system flying, ship/crew management and EVA mechanics. The ship should feel like a working vessel.
• Create a living solar system with both scripted and radiant generated events at scale from player encounters to system wide events based on the current state of the solar system and the players interactions.
• Faction reputation system, with each of the factions controlling “towns” and “settlements” throughout the system.
• Implementation of traditional space game elements such as bulk cargo hauling, blockade running, escort missions, science expeditions, station raids, ect. Previously included mechanics should be revamped to make them more interesting.
• Harsh environments should require different suits and the player should have a special locker on the ship to keep them on board, Upgrading the suit should be part of the core gameplay.
• Streamlined, but present water/food/fuel mechanics, as well as an in-depth wound/injury/medical system.
• A main story about a freelance ship just trying to get by in the solar system. Taking on jobs, contracts, mercenary work. Bringing on a companion means getting their help working around the ship and unlock different stories and quest-lines.
• No galaxy ending event in the main story, instead have a game just about what it’s like to live in the world of Starfield. (although during some very exciting moments.)