Disclaimer: I have seen PatricianTV's review in full and it and the Forbes article compelled me to write this Steam review, but otherwise most of my opinion of the game below existed before either of those came out.

For some background, I consider Fallout New Vegas to be my favorite game of all time, but I did not judge this game by that metric. I loved Skyrim as I played that first as a kid, and absolutely despise Fallout 4 and 76. I've never played older entries like Oblivion and refuse to play 76 if that's relevant too.

It's fascinating to be a hater of Bethesda's recent offerings, only to suddenly feel like being on the receiving edge of that hate after years of being an annoying "Obsidian better" kind of hater. I truly went into this game with an open mind and wanted it to succeed, yet all my friends who play games suddenly stopped talking about it about a dozen hours in. There was no hate expressed by anyone, just "I'll complete it later or at some point" or no explanation at all. BG3 replayability probably did not help, but no one except me returned to Starfield. The game just dropped out of everyone's minds.

As for me, I held on because I wanted to believe Bethesda had improved. You could see bits of it with the dialogue, the few branching side quests, and the reintroduction of some RPG mechanics like character traits. I hadn't played a Bethesda game since Fallout 4 came out, so I was ok with the fetch quests. Just like my friends though, I felt no reason to play after a while, neither for the story or exploration. Fetch quests were fun when I was new to these games, but there have been so many improvements to that RPG formula in the past decade.

I think the problem is primarily the scope of the game and capabilities of the Creation Engine, Procedurally generated worlds absolutely destroyed Bethesda's strong traits in exploration and world building, as now there are an insane amount of 5+ second loads screens coupled by "ocean wide, puddle deep" environments that cycle the same caves randomly on the map as a poor attempt at variety at subsequent visits. According to modders, land vehicles were not implemented since the engine could not stream data fast enough for cars. One sore sticking point is the fact that Bethesda are a big studio and second movers on the space exploration procgen concept. No Man's Sky had seamless spaceship landing down years ago. Mass Effect 1 had land vehicles in 2007.

Though The Outer Worlds sucked, in my opinion the scale of Starfield should've been similar to that game i.e. a single solar system and a few heavily developed planets over procgen. It's sad to see such little effort put into Creation Engine 2's capabilities that would've heavily benefitted a new, original Bethesda IP. This nukes any hope I had for TES 6.