While Starfield wasn’t quite the homerun that previous Bethesda games were, it would be disingenuous to claim that the game was not at least a financial success. Bethesda and Microsoft have stated their satisfaction with how the game has performed in standalones sales and in Game Pass, and Bethesda continues to make and release expansions for it.
When fans and industry people do debate the merits of the game, we don’t know if it really makes sense to argue about the technical issues. Bethesda games are notorious for their jank, and more popular games in their library get defended for them, because of the other aspects of the game.
On the other hand, when players complain about the game design, such as the lack of innovation compared to prior Bethesda titles, or arguments that its outdated compared to its peers, those arguments may have merits. We aren’t going to declare this or that argument is correct or incorrect, but at least we can say that they don’t seem hypocritical compared to assessments of prior Bethesda games.
There is also a narrative that Bethesda has killed their goodwill with fans after Fallout 76, which may no longer be valid given the success of the Amazon Fallout show. Interestingly enough, a former Bethesda employee brings up another possibility.
As reported by Video Games Chronicle, former Bethesda artist Dennis Mejillones revealed that Starfield revealed that the studio worked on decapitations for the game, and ultimately decided against it. He said this about the technical considerations:
“That has a lot of implications with the different suits. From a technical perspective there’s a lot that has to go with it, if you have to cut the helmet in a certain way, and it’s got to come off, and you’ve got to have meat caps for the bottom where the flesh is.
“You know, we had systems for all of that and it turned into a big rat’s nest of all these things you had to account for, with all those crazy hoses on the helmets and all that kind of stuff that we added, and now you could change the body size significantly – you know, the character creator had evolved quite a bit – so I think that was part of it.”
And then Mejillones pointed out that the studio was going for something completely different in Starfield than they had in the past with Fallout:
“Fallout is very stylized in that regard. It’s meant to be… that’s part of the tongue-in-cheek humour. You know, that [Bloody Mess] perk you get where you can make a mess out of somebody, they just blow up into goo, it’s part of the fun.
It’s like those old-school animes like Fist of the North Star – they punch each other, and gushes of blood would forever come out, it’s like nobody can hold that much blood but you’re like ‘oh man, that’s cool’.
I think for Starfield it was definitely meant to be more low-key and realistic. We were inspired a lot by things like The Expanse and Star Trek, stuff like that, so I think it just didn’t fit thematically. And on top of that you have the technical overhead cost to get it to work, so we were kind of like ‘it’s probably better not to include it in this game’.”
It’s certainly a fascinating thought experiment if gamers would have been happier with Starfield if it was gorier, and since Bethesda is still making expansions for it, it may not be too late to give it a try. Starfield: Shattered Space’s dark themes may even arguably open a window for it, but is it really what will ‘fix’ Starfield? Or should Bethesda direct their attention to other criticisms of the game? We certainly wonder if we’ll get the opportunity to find out.
