Starfield – My Game Reviews

What Starfield has that Skyrim does not have

Skyrim gets much attention and praise as an incredible game. Many videos on YouTube have given the impression that its a great game. I somewhat agree with this, mainly because of how the game makes the player feel like they are in the province of the Nords. However, the game quickly becomes stale, and the most glaring issue is that its wilderness lacks depth outside the frozen northern section of the map. The cities are also too small and feel like afterthoughts in the game. People tend to overrate this game and ignore that came out. The reason that it’s so popular is the same reason that people are so nostalgic about Mario 64. It is a game that people had the most exposure to and its aesthetics, while quite colorful have put gamers into a bind where the only thing they care about is small slice of styles in games.

Starfield is a game that seeks to create a new course for Bethesda. While they respect Skyrim and the immense success it has given them, they want to try new things. Gamers have a tendency to go back and forth on this issue. Skyrim was more streamlined in comparison to any other Elder Scrolls game. However, Starfield seeks to combine cozy with a Role-playing game.

That sense of cozy is one of the unique aspects of Starfield which people are not paying enough attention to when talking about this game.

Starfield is not a game for everyone. I get such sentiments about it.

However, what is has that Skyrim does not have is the sense of being a game that does not have high stakes. What matters is the exploration for its own sake.

Starfield and the prospects for 2025 and Steam

Starfield and Steam have an uneasy relationship to say the least when one looks at the reviews. When I bought the game, the Space RPG was sitting at Mostly Positive. After people began attacking the game because YouTube’s algorithm was boosting such negative videos, the rating went to Mixed. People often call it a mixed bag and there are many reasons for such a change in the ratings that I have already talked about on here. Generally, the negative reviews are understandable however many of such criticism can be stated about Skyrim or any Ubisoft game. However, the blandness of Starfield which many people talk about is more of a product of Bethesda’s emphasis on realism. However, I strain to see how one can call it bland when one can go to Neon, which has a clear visual style in comparison to New Atlantis. These criticisms stem from a culture of stagnation in video games that are more interested in rehashing visual styles of old games on the NES and SNES then in accepting that nothing everything is going to made in that style.

Steam players are truly passionate in way that most people in Modern Western culture are not. However, they can be quite myopic with how they review games. Reviewing a game on Steam sometimes gets tied up in one’s political ideology. Another is that many people are in a nostalgic mode which I have often tried my best to avoid. I enjoy respecting the past, but video games are inherently not a media that lends itself to a style of art that stagnates.

In 2025, I hope that the developers of Starfield and the Modding community continue to improve the game. They should take what they see on Steam into account, but they have to remember that this is only slice of gamers. There are many players of Starfield who were Xbox gamers and some who also use Xbox Game Pass. Steam gamers are truly passionate about games but they can also be elitist and try to be myopic about game styles

What we see in Starfield’s reception is an industry in stagnation.

When the gaming industry was in the sixth generation with the rise of the Playstation 1, Nintendo 64 and the Sega Saturn. The games were changing quickly in the graphics. The SNES glory days of 1992 and 1993 had been transformed into the 3 dimensions of palaces and creatures in Mario 64. One can see a clear change in graphics in modern games from the early 1990s to the late 1990s. Even the early 3D games of 1992 were charming but crude by the late 1990s.

MechWarrior 2 by Activision was released in July 1995 and was a stunning game but one looks at MechWarrior 3 and MechWarrior 4, it looks as if thousands of years have past in development of gaming graphics. MechWarrior 2 was also more advanced than the original MechWarrior game of the late 1980s. However, the change between 2 and 4 is huge.

When one looks at older RTS games such as Dune 2 and then looks at Science Fiction RTS games such as Starcraft and then the Star Trek Armada games, the difference is striking. While Star Trek Armada II looks uglier than the original, a product of cutting corners to allow players on their 2001 Computers to support having hundreds of ships on the screen, the graphic fidelity is a huge canyon. While Dune 2 was a monumental game in the creation of the RTS genre, rather being more of an experimental game such as the Atari 2600 Game, Utopia, it was still a crude game that isn’t easy to replay in the current age. However, by the creation of Starcraft, RTS games had become more formalized in their designs and now one can see the current way in which RTS games appear to the player. In my view, RTS games have largely looked the same since even the time of Blizzard’s classic Warcraft I, when the company was more interested in breaking boundaries and not just relying on the IP in order to make money and sucking its creativity out of people working at the studio and ruining their own company’s visions.

People are used to what they have been seeing for the past 15 years. When it also comes to the transformative Sixth generation of consoles, many gamers grew up in that time and have fond memories about it. These people have grown up and are now writing the articles in magazines and the sites have a bias towards those games. There were many other games released in the 1990s; many such games were not that great; however some were trailblazers in new genres. Instead we are stuck on the old games and styles that were once innovative but are now preventing the industry from being able to embrace creativity or even revive old franchises that should have been given another look instead of being abandoned by the companies.

Thankfully, Starfield was made and we have the foundation to continue improving it. I hope that 2025 has many successes for Starfield and the modders who are making it more interesting and unique in its styles.

Starfield and the Modding Community in 2025

Starfield has received much criticism for being a boring game. I understand that many gamers have gotten used to certain kind of gameplay since many games are put on assembly lines and put out to the public. The criticisms are stemming from the inability of Bethesda to match up with what is on the assembly line. While the game is some sense is too big to some, this size is important to help flesh out the game’s story and gameplay mechanics. Setting it on one world would have been criticized for being too conservative and making a compromise between small and huge would have been seen as not having a vision. Starfield maybe boring to some but it isn’t to me.

There is great hope I have in the modding community, one of those bastions of the gaming culture that still has creativity and is not just about consuming batches that are given to players in order to placate them with nostalgia hits. As a young man, I have never really given into nostalgia. I think about it, but I do not allow it to control me, which is why I am looking forward to what the modding community has to offer us. Starfield has a great foundation as a game, and I hope that the modders will continue to improve the game. I think that criticism will continue as the gaming community is well known for being outspoken on the internet. This is double-edged sword in many ways, but this community is much livelier and more energetic than other community except for sports communities. However, in comparison to sports communities, gamers are more creative and interesting to engage with than other group of people in my view. That’s why I confident the modding community will continue to enhance this amazing game.