I really wanted to like Starfield. The idea of Bethesda's rich environmental storytelling with a NASA-punk aesthetic, stretching out across the cosmos to take Fallout 4's settlement building to its natural conclusion, was a winning pitch. But every single trailer felt... off. The stilted animations and shooting that were passable ten years ago persisted, and by launch, little had changed. The cracks were only more obvious; the Bethesda jank that used to be charming had lost its luster, replaced by copy-and-pasted POIs and hundreds of barren, time-wasting planets.
Compared to No Man's Sky, it was wildly disappointing. Not being able to land seamlessly on a planet, and being boxed into empty zones with loading screens separating everything, made it feel more like an ambitious Skyrim mod than a needle-pushing Bethesda flagship. There was the old adage that modders would fix it, or at least keep it alive, but Starfield's modding scene peaked with the Star Wars overhaul, then kind of just petered out. Thankfully, a handful of players have stuck with it, and one has even managed to solve the problem the community has been desperate to see fixed since launch: landing on a planet...
