macabrett[they/them]

There’s also just SO MANY random and interesting encounters that you could entirely miss. There’s the person who lost a ring in a pond, but when you jump down to get it, they assault you. There’s the Nord that has been stripped naked and frozen in place by a witch. There’s the boots of blinding speed (I loved throwing these on and using the mini-map to navigate the roads).

I also loved the way you had to utilize multiple forms of fast travel to get around. “Okay, if I take the silt strider to Balmora, there’s a Mage’s Guild that will take me to-”. It was a fun world to live in.

And the factions forced you to choose between them. You couldn’t do it all with one character, because that wouldn’t make sense!

Maybe I’ll go get OpenMW and play for a bit again…

Morrowind erasure.

Unlike Star Trek, they failed to imagine humans beyond capitalism. In one of the “largest” cities in a galaxy with infinite resources, infinite space, and faster than light travel… why am I helping out a homeless shelter? Why is it literally modern problems, but in space? Surely the invention of technologies like the grav drive would leave to SOME sort of change in class structure? There’s just no creativity. You could put a green filter on everything, bomb things out a bit, and you’d assume you’re playing Fallout, but you find out Vault-Tec sent ships into space to colonize the galaxy as well.

Be fair to Fallout 4 mods, there’s probably several with more interesting writing than Starfield.

Yeah, it’s pretty underhwelming. There’s a lot of people who claim Starfield is a “great Bethesda game” but “people hyped it up too much.” In my opinion, it’s a terrible Bethesda game. The best thing those games do right is you can set off in a direction and along the way, find a world full of little things. Landmarks, unique little stories, side quests, and even just interesting items to grab. Starfield dropped all of this in favor of incredibly generic proc gen planets that have the same couple of outposts you’ll see on every planet. Like THE SAME. The interiors are THE SAME. Every safe, dead body, message log is THE SAME.

It lacks the one thing that brought me back to Bethesda games despite all their flaws.