Skyrim – has it all been downhill since then? (pic: Bethesda)
A reader questions Bethesda’s post-Skyrim output and suggests games like Fallout 4 and Fallout 76 were a clear hint at Starfield’s quality.
I’ve seen all the Starfield reviews and all the arguments amongst fans of which ones ‘count’ and which ones don’t, based on how personally excited they are about the game. The low scores form sites like GameSpot and IGN clearly surprised a lot of people, but not me. I felt it was obvious the game was going to disappoint for two reasons: the lack of hands-on beforehand and the way review copies were handled. That and the fact that Bethesda as a developer has been getting worse for over a decade now.
There’s no doubting that Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim are classic games, that helped change the face of video games, especially in terms of open world role-playing games – which are more popular than ever right now. After Skyrim, though, they’ve not only constantly disappointed but they’ve got worse with each game.
Fallout 4 was a bad sequel, with very few new features, a mostly non-existent story, terrible combat, tons of bugs, and a general lack of reason for being. It wasn’t necessarily a bad game overall – it was just Fallout 3 again – but it was the start of the decline, in my opinion, and a poor follow-up to Skyrim (in terms of being the next game they released).
Then, for the next three years, they just messed around with special editions of Skyrim and VR editions, before finally we got Fallout 76 in 2018, the worst game Bethesda have ever made and an absolute shambles at launch.
This wasn’t just the developers’ lowest point but a time at which the company in general was not doing well all over. I suspect this is when Microsoft probably started taking an interesting in buying them out. It’s always when a company’s not doing so good, and their share price is low, so this was the perfect time to strike.
It wasn’t just the bugs and the missing features that made Fallout 76 so bad but the way Bethesda hyped it up and downplayed all the problems. I hear it’s better nowadays, but I would never return to it after having played it back in the day. Even if it worked perfectly, without a glitch, it’s such a cynical rehash of Fallout 4, just to try to turn it into a live service game. I don’t know how Todd Howard had the gall to pretend it was anything other than reheated trash.
Coming off the back of that, it is absolutely no surprise that Starfield has disappointed. The unwillingness to let anyone play the game before it came out, the carefully edited gameplay trailers, the dishonest way reviews were handled… everything points to the fact that Bethesda knew the game was no good and their focus was not on improving it but hiding the truth until the very last moment.
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Look carefully at the raw gameplay and you can see it’s obvious nothing has really changed, except for the addition of spaceship combat. Normally I’d say this all points to people having left the company and new developers taking over but I don’t know that they have. Most of the same people still seem to be there, I just think they’ve lost their touch and perhaps their interest.
I’ll probably still play Starfield, though. I’ve got access to Game Pass, so it won’t cost me anything extra. I absolutely expect that it’s the lower review scores that are going to prove accurate though, not the 9s and 10s. I don’t think Bethesda has got it in them to make that sort of game again. It’s been 12 years since Skyrim and things are only getting worse and worse.
By reader Big Mike
The reader’s features do not necessarily represent the views of GameCentral or Metro.
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A reader questions Bethesda’s post-Skyrim output and suggests games like Fallout 4 and Fallout 76 were a clear hint at Starfield’s quality.
