Cliff Notes – Why the tragedy of Starfield is worse than the failure of Concord
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Prolonged Development on a Flawed Game: Bethesda is investing time and resources into Starfield DLC, despite widespread disappointment, which delays future projects like The Elder Scrolls 6 and Fallout 5.
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Comparison with Concord’s Swift Closure: Unlike Starfield, which continues to receive support, Sony’s quick decision to shut down Concord after two weeks allowed for a more efficient reallocation of resources.
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Legacy of a Disappointing Launch: Starfield’s reputation as a significant failure persists, overshadowing Bethesda’s future potential, while Concord’s brief existence may soon be forgotten without lasting impact on Sony’s brand.
Why the tragedy of Starfield is worse than the failure of Concord
Starfield is two years old today (Bethesda)
A reader marks the second anniversary of Starfield and argues that Bethesda should stop making DLC for it and instead follow Sony’s lead with Concord.
If this feature is shown on Saturday, September 6 then Starfield will be exactly two years old. However, I don’t imagine many people will be celebrating that with any excitement. I’m not even sure if Bethesda will acknowledge it [they did, with the tweet below, which seems to tease something called ‘Team Armada’ – GC].
Starfield has become one of the most famous failures of this generation, although it’s not awful, not like something like MindsEye. It’s just very disappointing and Bethesda made things worse by acting like jerks about it even before it came out – especially when they didn’t let British websites review it ahead of time.
This was the first proper Bethesda game since Fallout 4 and the first new IP for over a decade, so a lot of people were really excited about it, me included. But instead of Skyrim in space what we got was a very old-fashioned action role-player that removed all the best things about Bethesda games and replaced it with bland, randomly-generated worlds and lots and lots of menus.
I’m not going to go over all the failings of Starfield now, because they’ve been talked about enough. Instead, what I want to talk about is how games are never allowed to be forgotten. Now, in some cases this is a good thing, when it’s an obscure retro game you want to see brought back into the limelight. But in other cases, when it’s a franchise dragged out for decades, it’s a bad thing.
This is a particular problem because now that games are so expensive and time-consuming to make it means there’s no time for anything else. In days gone past it wouldn’t matter that Ubisoft kept making Assassin’s Creed games or Activision Call Of Duty, because they at least made other things as well. But now they don’t. It’s just those same one or two franchises from every publisher from now until the end of time.
There’s also the idea that if a game is a failure it can be redeemed with patches and updates, which often happens with online multiplayer games, although I think the best example is No Man’s Sky – which was a disaster at launch but is now well respected. Although I have to agree with those that say it’s still not actually much fun and I’d rather the developer had just given up and made something else.
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I also wish Bethesda had done that with Starfield but they’re a proud developer and you can tell they don’t want to admit it was a failure. So now they’ve got to waste the next several years making DLC for a game no one likes. Starfield is two years old and we’ve still only had one expansion (which was awful) and it doesn’t look like the second is even going to come out this year.
The Elder Scrolls 6 is still years away and Fallout 5 is so far off it’s not even worth thinking about, and yet Bethesda are going to waste even more time in a hopeless attempt to save Starfield’s reputation.
Now consider that other big sci-fi flop of recent years: Concord. Sony famously shut it down after just two weeks, when it was obvious nobody liked it and… that was it. No slow, dragged out death (as happened with fellow live service game Suicide Squad) and no wasted time or resources on trying to pretend to themselves that the game could be saved.
Unfortunately, Sony did shut down the developer, which I don’t approve of, although I suppose it’s not surprising. What I would’ve preferred is that Sony just killed the game and had them make something else. Either way, people will soon forget all about Concord, if they haven’t already, and it won’t be a blemish on Sony’s name.
Starfield is just going to chug on forever and Bethesda will never admit it was a failure, which is frustrating when it means it will slow down work on the games people actually care about.
By reader Zeiss
The Shattered Space expansion was not very good (Bethesda)
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