How Starfield Became Bethesda's Hardest Roadblock in Year 3

Three years in, you can sum up each stretch of Starfield in one word. The first year was about potential, when the question was whether the game could sit next to The Elder Scrolls and Fallout as another one of the studio's heavyweight releases. For plenty of players, it never got there.

The second year was a rebound. The idea was that the studio would find that potential through key updates, so vehicles arrived, quality-of-life settings were added, and Shattered Space closed out the year as the showcase meant to build confidence for what came next. That confidence never really showed up. Year three has been about one thing: Starfield becoming an obstacle.

It gets in the way for two groups. Players see it first. Every time Starfield gets another round of support, you can tell it comes at the expense of The Elder Scrolls and Fallout, and that bothers people because the game never justified the potential it was sold on.

For the developer, the problem is mostly about optics.

A mod went viral that lets you move from space to a planet's surface without a break, something everyone assumed the studio would handle on its own. Instead, a modder did it independently, years after launch. Mods like this spread for two reasons. People want that feature in their game, and people want to know why Bethesda never built it.

Until the studio solves that, the game will keep telling people it missed the mark, and that holds even if it goes back to what it does best with The Elder Scrolls VI and its on-foot exploration. Much of the reaction to Starfield suggested the team didn't fully grasp what fans disliked.

Then Terran Armada followed Shattered Space. It was marketed honestly as more of the same, but when players ask for change, and you double down, the message lands as a brush-off to long-time fans. That is why it counts as an obstacle in more ways than one. It stands between you and games like Fallout 5 and The Elder Scrolls VI, and it forces the studio to prove it can take feedback and act on it.

The mod behind all this comes from a single modder, whose clip spread across social media. It shows exactly what players wanted the studio to take from No Man's Sky, and the immediate reaction was that Bethesda should write this person a check if they solved what the in-house team could not.

To be fair to the developer, the mod is PC-only, and concessions may have been made because Starfield had to run down to the Series S and feel the same across every platform. Even so, it lands differently now. If you spent years defending the studio against the idea that modders fix its games, you remember how unfair that criticism felt, since those games seemed like more than enough.

With the newer releases, that defense has worn thin, because it is hard not to wonder why the feature was not figured out on even one platform.

More content is on the way. The studio confirmed it in a note months ago, saying that with more than 17 million players logging close to a billion hours, Starfield remains an important part of its future. It promised new stories, targeted gameplay improvements, and more updates in year three, with new Starborn content launching the year after.

It also said it will keep investing in creators and the Creations program, which already brought customizable assets to PlayStation that creators couldn't use there before. Looking at what Terran Armada and Free Lanes brought, it was not bad. It is more of the same, which makes the loop more fun. Zoom out, though, and that loop is not what you go to a Bethesda game for.

It feels like taking the gameplay loop of Fallout 76, stitching it into this game and turning everything into a looter-shooter. At launch, the studio pitched the game as a return to form for its traditional RPGs after Fallout 76, yet it borrows more from 76 than any other game the studio has made.

You also have to remember the quiet stretch between Shattered Space and Terran Armada. The studio went silent and gave the impression it had been cooking for a long time, and that was before the parent company's leadership change, so everyone assumed plenty of resources were committed.

With that much time behind it, you have to doubt the studio's odds of figuring out what this modder did on their own, after they came out of nowhere and said they had figured it out.

This is where you drop the internal politics and take the optical win. The studio could even give up feature parity across platforms and make the PC version the definitive one. Rockstar once paid a modder $10,000 to fix its GTA Online loading screens, and the same logic applies here.

Even a run of Game of the Year wins wouldn't stop people from saying modders fix its games. Making the game better for players is the easy win, especially since whatever time this person spent, they got it working. They might also know how to optimize things well enough to bring the feature to console, though that's a guess. Either way, this person could help clear the obstacle.

Compare the mod with Free Lanes. Free Lanes does improve exploration within star systems, but it is not what you see in the clip. Pair the two and Starfield would reach another level. It would not fix everything, since the content is still spread far apart, but the flow would be much better.

If you want The Elder Scrolls VI or Fallout 5 sooner, this game's updates should take a back seat, because there are only so many resources to go around, and the studio's own post-launch sales for The Elder Scrolls and Fallout arare strong, e they've given no such figures for this one.

The studio has rarely dropped anything outright, including Fallout 76.

After the rough 2018 launch, you probably didn't expect a Fallout 3 prequel in 2027. It stayed low and slow, kept chipping away, and when Season 1 arrived, people returned and found it wasn't nearly as bad as at launch. The same approach could apply here, and the coming Starborn content may be the next step, though the problems are so deep that you may wonder whether updates can address them.

A sequel would be the obvious fix. A former lead systems designer who left in 2023 doesn't think that is coming. He said the game was nowhere near successful enough to justify a second one, though he added that the lessons learned could have brought a sequel much closer to the game the studio's director had in mind.

That says a lot coming from someone with a long tenure and a leadership role, and it points to the same issue: Starfield blocks the projects you probably want more, like Fallout 5. Some of the issues are design choices baked into Starfield that an update can't undo.

Take New Atlantis, where you don't need loading screens to use the elevator, because you can jump up to where it takes you. Those loading screens only hide a teleport point that plays a sound and moves your character to a spawn spot, and followers use it too.

Parts of New Atlantis, like the train, do trigger a load, yet you can run there without one, or drop down from the top of the city. You fix that by starting over with a sequel, where loading screens in an open city like New Atlantis would be an easy no. Three years on, Starfield is in an awkward spot, and the Starborn content will show whether the studio can listen.