Players Disappointed By ‘Starfield’ Find New Appreciation for Other Sci-Fi Games

The grass is always greener on the other side … where you’ve already been grazing? It seems Starfield players—including those who are huge fans of game developer Bethesda Game Studios—are returning to past sci-fi video games with a new appreciation for how much better they are than Bethesda’s latest offering.

Upon release, players reported several accessibility barriers to Starfield for those who are blind, deaf, or who have motor disabilities. The game is also being panned for its lack of originality, poor writing, and weak mechanics and immersion.

For example, Maddy Myers of Polygon says the game’s reliance on fast travel “minimizes the very existence of your spaceship. You also can’t manually land on planets or satellites; instead, you press a button to dock (or, more accurately, you press a button to watch a cutscene of your ship docking, then you press a button to disembark). All of this makes the experience of traveling to mysterious galaxies and hostile planets feel less like riding in the rickety yet powerful Millennium Falcon and more like, say, using the transporter in Star Trek. But Star Trek stories focus on other ways in which space travel can be exciting and risky. Starfield, not so much.”

Although Starfield is Bethesda’s first new universe in more than 25 years, it reportedly isn’t very different from the company’s other flagship titles, including Fallout and The Elder Scrolls.

Kotaku staff writer Zack Zwiezen described Bethesda’s open-world adventures as “a warm, comforting, and utterly predictable bowl of oatmeal.” He wrote, “Starfield is a large-scale sci-fi game heavily inspired by NASA, Star Trek, and countless other space-based movies and TV shows. Yet while Starfield is filled with aliens and spaceships, it’s still a Bethesda RPG. You can almost feel the ancient bones of Morrowind and Fallout 3 poking through bits of the scenery and menus as you play.”

Unfortunately, people who voice their dislike of the game—or even just slight criticisms of some of its components—are immediately lambasted by players who claim that if you dislike Starfield, you’re a fake Besthesda fan. Of course, the Venn diagram of these people and the people who went on incredible rants about the game including pronouns in the character creator is most likely a circle, making their thoughts especially irrelevant. But when so many are defecting from Starfield or Bethesda altogether, loyalists might find value in evaluating their own love of the game—and if it doesn’t change at all, great! But harassing those who don’t like it doesn’t help a single person.

Meanwhile, players who turn their backs on Starfield—even if it’s just for now—might find a more satisfactory gaming experience by turning to backlog sci-fi titles. Fraser Brown, an editor at PC Gamer, wrote, “I want to love every game I play, but I just haven’t been able to find a lot of joy in Bethesda’s huge sandbox, even as a lover of space, science fiction, and the studio’s previous games. There have been bright spots, or I wouldn’t have played for more than 60 hours, but from its intro to its over-reliance on fast travel, I just keep being disappointed. But what it has done, and I thank it for this, is make me appreciate Cyberpunk 2077 so much more.”

Whatever your recovery game of choice after completing or abandoning Starfield, there are plenty of sci-fi titles on the market from which to choose.

(featured image: Bethesda Softworks)