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[Opinion piece] Starfield Killed My Hype For The Elder Scrolls 6
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this post was submitted on 25 Feb 2024
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People in the future will realize that Skyrim was made in a perfect sweet spot at Bethesda. It was made recently enough that the controls make sense and it feels good to play, but Skyrim was still so, so ahead of it's time when it came to an open world RPG. Back then, Bethesda's writers really had a knack for making incredibly interesting settings, and just seeing an entire digital world so wonderfully realized was considered ground-breaking.
A decade later, and the same model has become stale. The gameplay is still there, but the soul is not. Idk if most of those old writers have just left Bethesda or retired after so many years in the industry, but the magic has left the studio. I'm not even really looking forward to ES6 as much as I am the upcoming Avowed from Obsidian, because their games still have plenty of soul.
Not a sweet spot.
Morrowind was amazing because it is a hand built world. Oblivion had the same core error as Starfield: an overreliance on procedural generation.
For Skyrim they did it right. Just the right amount of procedural generation with enough manual work that things worked out.
You can't overlook the modding scene either. Oblivion had a great mod community with a lot of people getting into it and cutting their teeth there. So when Skyrim came out they were experts and made a lot of amazing mods, particularly framework mods.
But almost all of them are done and gone or corrupted into paid mods(e.g. Elianora, Kinggath(FO4)). So Starfield will never get a good modding scene because the core modding community doesn't exist now.
Morrowind had (and still has) just as vibrant a modding community as ES4 or 5. Tamriel Rebuilt alone is still the largest modding project for any Elder Scrolls game.
All of that expertise was developed on and for Morrowind.
We don't have the SF version of the Creation Kit yet, but all previous versions are largely similar, and FO4 modders will likely have no issue working on SF.
It feels like Skyrim was the game they'd (and by they I mean Todd) always wanted to make, and Skyrim was the first time they had the resources and technology available to make it more or less exactly as they envisaged.
Fallout 4 probably would've been in the exact same situation of the technology finally catching up to their ideas, except they completely botched the landing by adding in voiced characters.
Not in a world that already had Dark Souls and Demon's Souls in it.
You can labor the "open world" point but in any other metric DS & DeS stood above it: quest lines, action, feel, mechanics etc.
Look I love Dark Souls; it is an incredibly flawed game, and Demon's Souls is even moreso. Dark Souls was so far ahead of it's time that it still needed time to bake in the oven. Then with how claustrophobic DS2 and DS3's worlds were by comparison, I don't think FromSoft really surpassed Skyrim until Elden Ring.
Both games are some of the greatest of all time though, so a lot of it will just come to preference. I think a lotta Dark Souls players have been spoiled by the remaster though, the original release struggled hard under the weight of Miyazaki's ambition.