it's pretty obvious now to the masses that Bethesda just re badge the same game over and over. I think they're screwed.
I don't think that's a problem, though, quite the contrary, it is (was) their main selling point. There are (and have been) very few other outfits doing "that" kind of game that Bethesda does, Warhorse is the only one of late that comes to my mind, and I don't believe that the same public that swarmed all over their previous games, including the thirteen different editions of Skyrim, all of a sudden "got over" that kind of design. I realise that seems to be talking point bandied about by online critics, but you have to remember that the public, while often correctly taking umbrage to a specific product, have trouble pinpointing the proper source of their discontent - take Cyberpunk as a recent example and how many people complained about not having multiple player homes or p0lICe Ch4sEs, prompting CDPR to "address" those grievances post-release, when the title's
real problems ran far deeper and were more severe. The public were legitimately let down by Cyberpunk's designs, but they grasped at the first minutiae they could identify and formed a mob around it, as often happens.
Coming back to Starfield - and I'm still talking sight-unseen here - I think that what turned the public mood against the game and the developer was disillusion over the aspects in which we thought it would be
different from Bethesda's prior offerings, because we were so led to believe. We expected space flight. We got orbital flight instead. We expected to fly through the atmosphere and touch down on planets. We got a fast travel interface. We expected that proc-gen to support interesting exploration in
some way. We got RNG filler. As far as I can tell, Starfield compromises on some of Bethesda's traditional strong points for the sake of new features that are half-baked and disappointing.
So I'd say the masses are only upset with Bethesda rebadging the same game again because
in the case they were made to expect something else. And once that hateful pebble rolls down the mountain of public opinion, it's like an avalanche (same as it was with Cyberpunk, actually). But if Todd brings out TES6 and it's a 1:1 copy of Skyrim with just a new map and better visuals, I wouldn't be surprised if they went right back into people's good graces while YouTubers churned out video after video about how "Bethesda's back!" because that market's still there and remains mostly uncontested.
As a tangent, we're probably soon going to have a chance to evaluate just how "dated" Bethesda's standard design is, when Fallout: London comes out. Obviously, it'll be addressing a much smaller and more dedicated target demographic, but it'll be interesting to see what the public discourse will be like around it. Assuming it's at least half competent, of course, and not some Frontier-grade "material."
P.S. There's still one more act to play out in the tragedy of Starfield the Beleaguered - modding. Word's trickling down the grapevine that Todd's New Game is less accessible than its predecessors. Starfield's already struggling, if it turns out Bethesda've gimped modding too, that's gonna hit 'em hard in the gonads.
