Starfield & Fallout 4 Share Bethesda’s Greatest Open-World Design Flaw

Summary Settlement building in Fallout 4 and Starfield weakens the overall gameplay experience.

The empty feeling in Bethesda's newest games takes away from the studio's traditional RPG strengths.

Bethesda should refocus on the core gameplay loop in the future.

Starfield and Fallout 4 represent fairly different implementations of Bethesda's open-world formula, but when it comes to their shortcomings, they both end up falling into the same trap. There's always a certain level of familiarity to Bethesda RPGs, from the strong points like worlds full of varied possibilities, to the weaker elements like outdated engine design. Not everything has stayed the same over the years, however, and the newer ideas in Starfield and Fallout 4 are exactly why they don't measure up to the best qualities of Bethesda's most memorable games.

Although Fallout 3 bringing the series into a 3D first-person perspective might be the biggest shift in the franchise, Fallout 4's changes feel like more of a breaking point in the series in some core regards. One particular bummer was the switch to a voiced protagonist, which resulted in a simplified dialogue system that lacked the clarity and richness of prior games from Bethesda. In this case, Starfield ended up going back to the tried-and-true formula instead of following in its footsteps, but some added features that proved more generally popular have stuck around to cause more insidious problems.

Related The Most Frustrating Starfield Feature Is Officially Being Reworked Starfield creative director Todd Howard confirms that the development team is addressing one of the most widely criticized aspects of the game.

Settlement Building Makes Starfield & Fallout 4 Weaker

An Interesting Feature Damages Better Ones

The ability to build highly customized and complex settlements was one aspect of Fallout 4 that made it stand out. Settlements are a balance of both aesthetic design choices and management demands, and they play into a gameplay loop of improving equipment to tackle the Wasteland more effectively. Starfield follows these up with a similar system of building outposts, but looking at both games in overview, it's easy to see how the mechanic is causing problems with the experiences as a whole.

In both cases, building a settlement or outpost can be a cool way to feel a sense of impact on the world of the game, and it contributes in some capacity to the idea of RPG freedom that Bethesda cultivates. It can also make coming back to the game time and time again more attractive, even after completing story content. For those uninterested in these systems, they can mostly be ignored after some minimal engagement, which can make them seem like innocuous additions.

Related 10 Things Fallout 4 Does Better Than Fallout 3 & New Vegas Fallout 4 brought a lot of changes to a franchise trying to adapt to a modern audience, including improvements over Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas.

Unfortunately, examining the opening hours of Fallout 4 is one good way to see how quickly the settlement focus can negatively impact the game. The opening hours in the wastelands of Fallout 3 and New Vegas are immediately exciting, with the interesting locations of Megaton and Goodsprings immediately beckoning. In Fallout 4, those hubs of possibility are replaced with the significantly less involving area of Sanctuary, where the quests available are generally focused on settlement-building rather than memorable characters or forays into the rich lore and texture of Fallout.

Starfield Outposts Double Down On Fallout 4 Problems

Starfield Feels Emptier Than Other Bethesda RPGs

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The sense of emptiness in Fallout 4 might work for a wasteland setting, but it isn't great for the Fallout series, and confronting players with a world to build up rather than one that's interesting off the bat just isn't as compelling. This problem is compounded in Starfield, which significantly ups the scale and loses even more density as a result. Over a thousand planets populate the game, but any individual destination isn't all that likely to house any truly engaging content.

Planting outposts across the reaches of Starfield definitely has its own sense of satisfaction, but it isn't one that plays to the strengths of Bethesda games. Whether taking on the goals of endless expansion in a space-themed 4X strategy game or guiding a small establishment to prosperity in a farming sim or city-builder, there are plenty of other options that explore these avenues to more rewarding ends. No matter how many resources are put into Bethesda settlement systems, they're ultimately just side content, and letting them replace traditional RPG pillars is a mistake.

Related Starfield Confirms It’s Finally Adding One Highly-Requested Feature Starfield's adding a lot of features this month, but there's also one planned inclusion that could be even more welcome when it eventually arrives.

Any game with the freedom that Bethesda RPGs offer is going to lose some ability to control the players' experience, which can make it harder to keep the focus on a rewarding gameplay loop. Part of what used to make the studio's titles work, however, is how natural it was to fall into a satisfying rhythm. Story threads were always dangling nearby, and pulling on them would lead to interesting outcomes, usually delivered over the course of exploration and combat that revealed memorable side objectives or resulted in the acquisition of exciting loot.

This ideal certainly still appears at times in Fallout 4 and Starfield, but there's also a lot of push-pull that wasn't as present before. Managing settlements and outposts doesn't fit into this picture of consistent forward progress and movement throughout the game world, and it's a weird disconnect from the loop that games actually oriented around marrying management with RPG mechanics incorporate much more thoroughly.

Bethesda's Future Needs To Refocus Its RPG Concepts

Starfield Might Represent A Breaking Point For Bethesda RPGs

Trying out new features obviously isn't a bad thing, but it's probably time to close the door on Fallout 4 and Starfield's settlement and outpost mechanic. It's unlikely to be of benefit to The Elder Scrolls 6, and recapturing the sense of wonder and excitement that filled Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim is going to be dependent on turning back from the course that Bethesda's set. Stepping back from expanded mechanics is a tricky move that studios often don't like to make, but it would allow Bethesda to refocus on more interesting RPG features that fell by the wayside.

Settlements are obviously something that a certain percentage of players do enjoy, and there's no shame in finding fun in it. If anything, however, it might be best that the extensive modding scenes for Bethesda games take up this particular mantle so that the core games can focus on redefining a gameplay loop that's gotten muddled over time. Starfield and Fallout 4 have their strengths, but it's going to take some work for Bethesda to reclaim the image that its best games awarded it.