I can live with small inventories and boring loot if the core story telling/role playing part of the game was next gen. I can’t think of anything in the chats etc you have with anyone that had any evolved concepts. I saw examples of conversations you couldn’t steer in the direction you wanted - topics mentioned by the character that you couldn’t question them around. I thought there was an AI system in there that would talk around topics and increase choices but I don’t know if that’s true. I feel we should have been able to say “wow the Starfield quest stuff was truly next level, I’ve never seen anything do that before” and that be the bar everyone has to reach but it hasn’t raised the bar or even updated it in any particularly standout/noticeable way.
Oblivion and Skyrim had the same questing style and due to technical constraints the level of interaction and story branching was acceptable and the games were very enjoyable. Starfield uses the same style but feels like there are less choices to make and there should be the technical capability now to do something better. What Skyrim had over Starfield in particular was walking out of a door and being able to walk to any location on the map discovering stuff on the way. People have make entire stealth archer playthroughs just role playing hiding in bushes and sniping their way across the whole map. But there are loads of sandbox games now. You can do that kind of stuff without it being a Bethesda title so what’s left to differentiate Bethesda and every other game is Bethesdas reputation for solid world building. For Starfield that feels that it’s showing its age now. It’s not enough and ES6 can’t be the same system over again.
