Starfield can learn some important lessons from one of Bethesda’s worst reviewed RPGs

Is Fallout 76 any good now? That’s the question on the lips of anyone who’s been a vault dweller for at least a few hours in his life. When the game first came to PS4, Xbox One, and PC in 2018, the world stopped. Not because it was amazing, no, not at all. But because the janky MMO was so… different… from the kind of jank Bethesda is known for.

The world was barren, lifeless, populated only by player characters who were hostile and just as pissed off as you, for the most part. At launch, Fallout 76 was widely regarded as the worst RPG in the series, the radioactive water-flooded nadir of a 20-year series that, until then, had been the suspiciously shiny jewel in gaming’s crown. western role playing The critics were mean, but fair. “A mindless post-apocalypse ride,” wrote one reviewer. “A weird, boring, broken mess,” said another. To this day, Fallout 76 sits at a paltry 52 on MetaCritic (and the user score is somehow even worse).

The consensus was that Fallout 76 may have looked, acted, and even smelled like its stablemates in the series, but it was rotting inside: that energy, soul, and vivacity that made Fallout games tick like a hyperactive Geiger counter was dead. inside, and the shell around it was inert. Doesn’t really inspire confidence in Bethesda’s next big RPG experiment, Starfield, does it?

But things change. Even the irradiated corpse of a failed franchise can be revived with enough effort, as Bethesda Game Studios and ZeniMax Online Studios soon began to realize. Fallout 76 is now, some five years after release, a living MMO https://www.vg247.com/fallout-76s-new-npcs-compromise-will-change-game-forever with an active and loyal player base which vocally praises the alluring world of Appalachia. For all intents and purposes, Fallout 76 is now the post-apocalyptic MMORPG that Bethesda promised all along. 13.5 million players can’t be wrong, huh?

But what does all this have to do with Starfield?

Bethesda is smart. You don’t spend 37 years in the world of video games making the same mistake twice. A myriad of delays and a lengthy development period on its latest game will help ensure Starfield doesn’t suffer the same disastrous launch that Fallout 76 suffered. But beyond that, Starfield’s gameplay reveal has already shown us what we can expect to see. a series of Fallout 76 features back in Starfield. It also shows that there are a few more philosophical lessons Bethesda has learned in the five years between Fallout 76 and Starfield. Here is a brief summary of what I mean.

outposts

Fallout 76 was praised for its CAMP system, even at launch. An evolution of Fallout 4’s settlement building, the camp implementation basically allowed you to travel to any nook or cranny on the map and nest there, creating a customizable little home there, where you could retreat to whenever you needed to. It’s quite a role-playing role, and many of the 76 players felt it added to the immersion and character of the world of Fallout.

We’ve already seen Outposts in Starfield thanks to the images on Direct, and it looks like they can be placed anywhere, too, on any of the 1,000 planets that Starfield will include. The idea of ​​sitting on the edge of a gas giant and watching the turbulent storms pass by in its atmosphere…wonderful, isn’t it?

Climate

Speaking of sitting back and watching things go by, one of the best things to ogle in the barren wastelands of Appalachia was the weather. Seeing a storm located in the distant hills that slowly made its way towards you and changed the whole atmosphere of where you were… that was special. In fact, it’s still a favorite of many players over 76. Seeing a dust storm wash over you, or seeing rain clouds start to manifest overhead – it’s a very specific feeling that evokes a great sense of place. And that will also come to Starfield.

“Just a couple of weeks ago, I landed on one of the first planets and this sandstorm broke through,” says Todd Howard in a video, talking about the game. “Enemy ships can land anywhere, right? So this ship landed, and I got into this firefight, and I got on the ship, and while I was shooting these guys on the surface, the ship took off into space… so now I’m in outer space, on another ship and I’m like ‘well, I guess that can happen!’”

There are some exciting things in that story, but the most intriguing to me is that he was running from a sandstorm, why? As? What is the intensity of this weather? I can’t wait to find out for myself.

photo mode

Ask any veteran Fallout 76 player and they’ll all tell you the same thing: Photo Mode is one of the best in games right now. Lots of granularity (poses, banners, filters, custom options, etc.) meant he could really document his journey as he saw it, something I think a lot of Photo Modes don’t seem to understand.

And from the direct images, it appears that the Photo Mode in Starfield shares much of the same user interface as Fallout 76. If Bethesda allows us to use our own photos as loading screens in Starfield like it did in Fallout 76 a again, well… that’s a huge plus (although with that SSD requirement on PC and the streaming power of Xbox Series, will we ever really see them?)

jetpacks

Oddly enough, there’s a smaller part of the Starfield experience that also started in Fallout 76: jetpacks. But, as with much of the game, jetpacks got off to a shaky start: public servers haven’t always been able to handle players wearing jetpacks, so some players have chosen not to mod them into their power armor. Slow landing animations, shady server latency, and consuming money to feed, have become something of a novelty: nice to use, but not really essential in the game.

The 2023 Xbox Games Showcase showed that, in Starfield, the sci-fi jump pack already looks like a huge step up from what came before. Besides the fact that the gravity of different planets will affect your jumping in different ways, the armor mod abilities you have access to seem to offer more control over how you jump from one place to another (along with interesting player abilities too). ).

Suffice it to say, then, that Bethesda has learned from its mistakes. Too much has been invested in making Starfield an RPG for the ages for it to be teetering out of the gates with the same lack of grace as Fallout 76. By learning lessons and fixing bugs, Bethesda gained vital experience from Fallout 76 and, from In fact, he figured out how to create a killer MMORPG in the process. We hope those essential lessons can be applied to a single player experience like Starfield as well.

Pre-order Starfield today or gear up with discounted Game Pass codes

Starfield will launch exclusively for Xbox Series X/S and PC (Windows) on September 6, 2023. Pre-order your copy of Bethesda’s upcoming action RPG from the links below and get ready for the next galactic adventure.

Players who pre-order the Premium Edition can play Starfield before September 1. That’s five days before it hits Game Pass! PC gamers who want to upgrade their PC can also get Starfield free when you buy select AMD Ryzen processors, AMD Radeon graphics cards, or a gaming system containing both.

Alternatively, you can play Starfield on Game Pass on day one. Our store here at VG247 currently offers a 5 percent off Game Pass codes and Xbox credit – just redeem the code “VG247” at checkout. The code is good through July 31, so buy now to save money on a discounted Game Pass membership or Xbox credit if you’re buying Starfield from the Xbox Store.