I don’t dislike it, but I want a game structured more like mainline Fallout. And Bethesda has been determinedly not making those.

Fallout 4 was released a decade ago, and their next release isn’t going to be a Fallout game. That is a very long time for a franchise to go without any entries. Since then, they’ve done a live-action multiplayer game, Fallout 76, which was not a single-player, plot oriented Fallout 5, despite players complaining that they wanted it to be more like that, with human NPCs and plot and such.

They’ve done Starfield, which had a much-improved engine, but is really oriented around being amenable to procedurally-generated content. From a technical standpoint, the procedurally-generated landscape is impressive, but it really didn’t add much from a gameplay standpoint, IMHO. I mean, again, I played it, got enjoyment from it, but it’s not Fallout 5. The main plotline was, I think, weak (and the characters themselves poke some fun at it as being hard to explain). I guess maybe what BGS was aiming for was “exploration”, since players like “exploration”, but I think what players really want was not “exploration as a theme”, but “constantly just stumbling into new placed plot-oriented content”. At least for me, the “exploration as a theme” in Starfield didn’t really do much.

And continuing a Bethesda trend, I feel like Bethesda threw a lot of resources into Starfield features that they didn’t really do much with. Like, in Fallout 4, Bethesda had in-game building. Okay, that’s a neat engine feature. But…what did they actually do with it? I mean, there’s virtually no game-oriented content, other than making a settlement slightly-less vulnerable to damage under settlement attacks. It lets a player make and maybe fantasize about living in a structure, watch the interplay of lighting in the engine, which is kind of neat, but doesn’t really feel like it adds that much game to me — and the value falls off a lot after the first construction or two. I pretty much had my fill after building an outpost or two and furnishing Home Plate. There was one mission, fighting the Mirelurk Queen at the Castle, which had any gameplay around building.

In Fallout 76, they made player camps, which could have some limited in-game impact, like letting a player sell to other players, or let a player show off their aesthetic designs to others. But…again, there’s not that much game around it.

Starfield added bases with resource production, but there just isn’t that much game to that other than hunting for an optimal collection of resources. A lot of the bases are something that one would automate and then never look at again: it’s pretty shallow. One can furnish apartments, but has little reason to ever go to them, and they’re mostly just for the aesthetic.

Starfield also permitted for building spacecraft, which at least one regularly enters…but again, the design just doesn’t matter all that much in any gameplay sense. There’s some limited impact on the spacefighting minigame, but there’s not much gameplay to that.

Like, we’re three games into the “in-game building” feature, and I don’t feel like Bethesda has really done anything with it that really excites me. It’s not that I dislike the in-game building, but there hasn’t been gameplay built around it. Like, I feel like the Sim Settlements mod for Fallout 4 did more than anything that Bethesda has to try to advance the situation. It still wasn’t what I hoped for, but it had gameplay and plot around it, tried to do quality-of-life stuff like reducing drudgery in building out a settlement, and could produce interesting and unique environments.

Bethesda now has a fancy procedural-terrain-generation system added for Starfield. I don’t know how reusable that’s going to be for them, since it seems to be kind of oriented around creating mostly-barren planets. But…they just don’t take much advantage of it. There’s no reason that one would ever need to really take much advantage of or traverse all the vast amount of terrain that they’ve made available to a player. If they want to, I don’t know, have large-scale battles that cover huge amounts of terrain, then that’d be a reason to have all this material. If they had some really hardcore survival stuff, so that terrain became important to one’s survival, finding one’s way out of slot canons that could flood or God knows what, okay. Using wildfires, I don’t know. As things stand, though, it mostly does little more than create a bit of a sense of scale. Terrain is mostly just an aesthetic. It’s pretty, but it’s basically doing the equivalent of standing around looking at some KPT Bryce renders. I just don’t feel that a lack of terrain was ever limiting Bethesda’s games.

Bethesda built a whole crew recruitment system, but…it doesn’t do that much. There’s not much reason to have specific crew loadouts, and one never does all that much walking around one’s spaceship. It adds a bit of flavor to have NPCs saying things, and one can provide some stat boosts to spacecraft or outposts, but there’s just not a lot of gameplay there. It’s not as if, oh, NPCs provide some critical roles and have their own relationship issues, a la Jagged Alliance 2.

I don’t have any problem with the space combat minigame as such, but…it’s really not much more than an elaborate minigame. It’s not the core of the game at all. I just don’t think that, given the amount of work that went into it, that it provided all that much for the game.

Honestly, what I want from Bethesda is:

• A regular release schedule of mainline Fallout games with four major DLCs, as Fallout 3 through Fallout 4 did.

• A lot of good, interesting plot-based content. Like, I want top-notch, well-written stuff. I don’t even care that much about fancy motion cap or whatnot. I feel like Bethesda already has enough features in the game to enable this.

• I’d like to be able to affect the world in interesting ways.

• I like the American Southwest, post-apocalyptic setting that three of the mainline games have had. I think that the desert badland setting works well.

• I’m not specifically married to canon plot. If they feel constrained by the existing content, I’m fine with a universe reboot or something. Whatever it’d take to put out solid, plot-oriented content. If Bethesda wants “portals” or something to other universes so that they can do whatever stories they want — and I’m a little suspicious that that’s why they did multiple planets in Starfield, so that they didn’t have to try to hack a variety of stories into a single setting — then okay, do that.

• I’d like the game to be easy to mod, easy for mod authors to produce performant code.

• I’d like mods not to break when Bethesda releases engine updates. I think that this is the largest pain point for the mod community right now, and some of that is because mod authors are having to hack in their own API rather than having Bethesda just provide a sufficiently-expansive modding API.

• I’d like the in-game building thing to be leveraged as an element of the game with some decent gameplay around it. I mean, for God’s sake, Minecraft, Factorio, there are a bunch of games that have building and have gameplay built around building. Bethesda made something visually pretty, but didn’t make use of it in a way that provided me with much. Ditto for some of the other engine and game features that I listed above, like the crew and terrain generation. Like, instead of spending so many resources building out the game engine to provide for new gameplay features, build interesting stuff with the engine that’s there.

• Right now, most of the “core game loop” in the series is the first-person-shooter gunplay. There’s some more-realistic looking AI, but honestly, in terms of tasks for the player to complete, the gameplay is not all that far off Fallout 3. If Bethesda wants to make a more-tactical game or a more-RPG-oriented game or whatever, okay, fine, but I really think that the game could benefit from some kind of interesting strengthening for whatever the core loop is. Like, I don’t know, incorporate flashbangs/smoke and visibility with the AI or something, and then make some interesting levels that leverage that. Yeah, I complained above about Bethesda spending a lot of resources on adding features, but those don’t really improve on the “core” gameplay loop – they make the game broader, more of a jack-of-all-trades.