Entering The Starfield
On the history of Bethesda as an innovator in the games industry and the cultural significance of Starfield
Bethesda Game Studio’s upcoming video game Starfield isn’t just another game. After more than twenty years of building video games, Starfield appears to be a true passion project that will precede a change in human history.
In 1997, studio director Todd Howard wrote in an archived forum post, “Now a space RPG..that would be something”. At this time, Bethesda was not yet a proven success, and it would take 13 more releases to bring his studio to a point where it was ready to make this space-themed role-playing game.
Over the years, Bethesda proved themselves to be the leading innovator in the RPG space. Despite their relatively tame size peaking at about 500 employees today, they have led the development of the industry in tremendous ways. In 2002, they released The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, the first ever non-linear RPG where players could go where they want and do what they want. It also came with Construction Set, a tool that let players edit any part of the game with mods. This game also pioneered the concept of video game lore, where players could collect and read books, letters, and inscriptions to get a deeper view into the history and philosophy that set the backdrop of Tamriel.
They followed it with my personal favorite, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, which featured voice acting for every single character. Oblivion leaned into this innovation bringing a cohesive Main Quest with a cinematic grandeur and a series of more personal guild storylines that were just as riveting. Bethesda games are most known for the world, and by far the best part was its use of a “Radiant AI” world system. In Oblivion, every character has a job, family, friends, routines, and their own opinions. Randomly, characters would bump into each other in these paths and make conversation using their recorded dialogue.
The result was sometimes absurd but a glimpse into the future of autonomous agents that is now possible with LLMs. Being a player of Oblivion feels like waking up on a weekend and thinking, “what do I want to do?” Certainly, you can get to work on your main calling (saving the world by closing the gates from hell), but you could also go hunting, go fight at the Arena, or get drunk and be a nuisance to everyone in town. I started Oblivion during a particularly stressful time in my own life, so I simply explored the valleys and collected books from the churches to read while listening to the beautiful ambient soundtrack.
Oblivion was a tremendous victory for Bethesda, cementing them as a leader in the rapidly evolving RPG experience, and brought them close with Microsoft as it became a top seller on the Xbox 360. It also featured a horse armor DLC, where for $2.50 you could have a cosmetic that made your horse appear in shining armor with no gameplay effects. This seemingly innocuous innovation led to the Fortnite model: to prioritize engagement and long time player investment in the game through cosmetic acquisition over selling as many video games to as possible. Of course, many gamers still hate Bethesda to this day for this reason.
With plenty of money from their last two games and a new revenue stream to exploit, they bought out the Fallout IP from the failed Interplay Entertainment and released Fallout 3, which took the games from a birds-eye isometric camera to first person 3D graphics. I have not played Fallout 3 and thus cannot comment on its strengths but I heard that it brought a comparable experience to Oblivion but instead set within the thought experiment of what would happen in the event of nuclear disaster, and let players choices influence the ending through their actions in the main quest.
Bethesda’s following project would be their most important one. Releasing on November 2011, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim would go on to sell more than 30 million copies and win multiple Game of the Year awards. Skyrim didn’t reinvent the wheel for Bethesda games, it instead polished it as much as possible. The game’s ahead-of-the-curve visuals for the time and appealing ‘warrior versus dragon’ plot reminiscent of Beowulf made it an appealing take on the Elder Scrolls universe. Additionally, it significantly simplified the RPG mechanics and progression paths which made the game much more accessible to a casual audience. To this day, Skyrim is Bethesda's best selling game and the most modded singleplayer video game thanks to Bethesda's toolkit. Actually, it goes beyond that title because fans have even created a mod that allows multiplayer online play.
It should say something about Skyrim’s tremendous success that Skyrim is a more recognizable name than The Elder Scrolls in gaming culture. One recent trailer for Starfield features the phrase, “From the award-winning creators of Skyrim”.
One year after its release, one of Bethesda’s subsidiary studios, ZeniMax Online, released The Elder Scrolls Online, a massively multiplayer online role-playing game, or MMORPG, set in the Elder Scrolls universe. While ESO got a rocky reception at launch, it has continued to deliver new experiences for fans of the franchise, which has not received a sequel for over a decade due to the long development time associated with games of this size.
The Elder Scrolls Online was a noticeable shift of business for Bethesda with a $15 a month paid subscription, paid cosmetics more than ten times higher than Oblivion’s horse armor, and loot boxes that let players gamble real money for character power boosts that gave advantages over other players. It was clear to fans that ESO’s purpose was to make some cash to fund their real games. Despite its reception, ESO has ballooned to an impressive size with seven major expansions including Necrom, which launched last month.
Fans who may have been upset with ESO could take solace knowing that it was not distracting from the main team drilling away at their next ambitious project. In November 2015, Bethesda Game Studios released Fallout 4. Fallout 4 is still the most impressive game in the series, opening right as nuclear war begins and following the main character being put into cryostasis for 210 years, and reemerging see humanity begin to rebuild.
The game was not perfectly received. Notably, the game’s dialogue options were something like “good guy,” “bad guy,” or “sarcastic jerk” every time, greatly decreasing the player expression options. Additionally, the game’s narrative focus on finding your kidnapped son was entirely uninteresting to myself and many other players. I have played over 150 hours of the game and have never finished the main story for this reason.
While the narrative was disappointing, Fallout 4’s beautiful world and enjoyable gunplay made it a very solid experience. I did one playthrough where I used the Start Me Up mod that lets players choose their own character background story and spawn point and joined the Raiders to attack settlements. This way, I was able to experience the world of post-apocalypse New England from the opposite perspective Bethesda built it from, another showcase of the longevity and adaptability modding offers in games.
Fallout 4 continued Bethesda's tradition of caring deeply for their modding community, being the first ever video game on a console to allow mods through a platform in the bethesda.net website. Skyrim Special Edition, a re-release which would release the next year for the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 consoles would receive this functionality as well. It was also neat addition to the PC version of Fallout 4, removing the need for often difficult to use 3rd party modding tools such as Vortex. More than six years later, no other mod support features in other, including Fortnite’s UEFN and Counter-Strike 2’s Hammer 2 come even close to giving developers the ability to bring their own dreams to life within these established universes. My personal favorite mod for Fallout 4, Fallout Brotherhood - A Storyteller Quest Mod, gives a fully voice acted hour long interactive tour through the history of the Brotherhood of Steel, one of the main factions in the series.
Fallout 4 also had a really interesting settlement builder mode that let players construct settlements and build houses with materials they found in the open world. I personally did not care for this, but some players fell in love with it.
Just three years later, Bethesda would release another Fallout game, one that would set a legacy and permanently alter the public perception of Bethesda forever. On October 23, 2018, Fallout 76, a multiplayer online RPG would open its beta servers for users to stress test the servers and enjoy a glimpse at the first few hours. In true Fallout fashion, they gave it a cheeky acronym: B.E.T.A. (Break-It Early Test Application). And break it, they did.
Bethesda games have always been buggy. Once while playing Morrowind, I was sorting my inventory and accidentally dropped an item required for the main quest on the floor. I watched as it slid into a crack and then fell right through the floor geometry, unable for me to pick it up again. That was the rather unceremonious end to a game I had already put a good twenty hours into. However, most of the time, these bugs are simply funny.
But Fallout 76 took this to another level. You see, Fallout 76’s development had around two years of active development, less than half of that of Fallout 4. And in development, they had to retool the Creation Engine, which was made around having one player in the world with time centering around them, time pausing whenever they opened a menu, and the game speed being tied to the framerate. All of this infrastructure had to be rebuilt to fit an always online multiplayer world.
And then they had to build a proper Fallout game set in West Virginia 25 years after nuclear war with the high expectations the marketing team had set: a map “four times the size of Fallout 4”, having “sixteen times the detail” and “all new rendering, lighting, and landscape technology”.
And as if it couldn’t get worse, the game was not developed in Bethesda's main office, but by a relatively new studio that had never released a game before and was renamed from “BattleCry” to “Bethesda Game Studios Austin” just months before launch to trick players into thinking it was developed by the same Bethesda they knew and loved. This studio had no prior experience with the Creation Engine.
In order to achieve this insane task, they took some serious compromises to fit deadlines. Remember all that “Radiant AI” and characters and plot that made Oblivion great? All gone. The “story” of Fallout 76 would be told through “The Overseer’s Log”, a series of voice recordings, notes, and terminal entries found scattered throughout post-apocalyptic Appalachia. Because you were sharing the world with other people, the entire plot would, of course, have to be exactly the same for everyone, so player choices were out of the question. With some naive optimism, they imagined that PvP battles and interactions over voice chat would be a replacement for the character-based narrative loop.
Fallout 76 released and reviews were in and they were not happy. The game landed at a score of 58 out of 100 on game review aggregator Metacritic and a user rating score of 2.8 out of 10. YouTube user Joseph Anderson uploaded a supercut of just the buggy moments from his first ten hours of play time titled “The 1001 Glitches of Fallout 76”. That video is almost three hours long. Famous YouTube video essayist Internet Historian uploaded a video on the fiasco that ensued called “The Fall of 76”, which now has over 35 million views. Fallout 76 is on dozens of most disappointing video games of all time lists.
Players were upset, and rightfully so. Rather than selling the game on the PC platform Steam, Bethesda only released it on its own app, with a vague refund policy that soon turned to a ‘no refunds’ policy once they mistakenly gave a player a refund after 24 hours of playtime.
More importantly, players were upset because the promise of Fallout 76 was something genuinely new and interesting. The trailers depicted players exploring the sprawling vistas and autumn leaves to Country Roads, Take Me Home. People wanted a game like that. But logging into Fallout 76 would leave you disappointed almost every time.
As the months went by and Bethesda embarrassed themselves with broken patches and increasing monetization, Fallout 76 inevitably crashed and burned. While most players left, a small group remained, and they continue to love the game.
I think Fallout 76 has the best world out of any video game ever. I haven’t played the game in two years, but I still have photographic memory of most of the map. I remember feeling a sense of discovery and excitement as I wandered down to the Nuka Cola factory, a sense of sadness as I listened to The Overseer describe having to kill her husband because of his radiation poisoning, and a sense of utter fear in my heart as I did the game-ending quest, launching a nuke on Watoga to start the Scorchbeast Queen event, and meeting up with 15 other players who had joined me to take her down.
On March 13th, 2020, I received an email from Bethesda letting me know that I had been invited to sign a non-disclosure agreement to test their upcoming Wastelanders expansion early. While I had seen the basic idea of the expansion months before in trailers, I had no idea to which the scale the Wastelanders expansion would turn Fallout 76 around.
Review outlet GameSpot would call the expansion “some of the best Fallout content since New Vegas”. IGN said, “Many of the new quests rival the best from any Bethesda game in terms of storytelling.” My previously dead friend list bloomed full with people eager to play Fallout 76 again, many of which had not played since launch. The update, revamping the game’s story, adding interactable human characters, and finally ironing out many of the bugs that had remained since launch, was a tremendous success. The game also released on Steam on PC, the preferred gaming storefront to ‘mostly positive’ ratings, currently sitting at 75% of players recommending it.
But this enthusiasm didn’t remain. In an internal email dating about 16 months after the Wastelanders release date, Microsoft Gaming CEO said of Fallout 76 in its post-Wastelanders state:
In my view F76 is in this interesting place. Obviously started rough. Team stays focused on improving and finding larger audience. Feels like we either need to see this thing getting to 10M MAU across all platforms or decide to move on from it
And thus, Fallout 76’s updates slowed to irrelevance. Most of my friends who came back slowly faded away from the game as updates became smaller and sparser. In March 2022, development work was moved to Double Eleven, a small outside contract studio.
While it’s sad to see a game that once held universal hatred from fans to redeem itself only to fade into irrelevance, Fallout 76’s promise was fulfilled in the end. The game is now a gorgeous Bethesda-style world with a solid plot that you can play with your friends, and anyone who plays it today will certainly enjoy it. But the manner in which Fallout 76 was marketed and the sheer number of times customers were deceived by Bethesda has left a permanant mark. Many people swear they will never buy another game from them again, and I honestly can’t blame them.
But as Fallout 76 went through its highs and lows, another monumental shift was taking place inside Bethesda.
After multiple years of rumors, on September 9th, 2020, Microsoft announced it would be buying Bethesda for $7.5 Billion in cash. This gave them exclusive access to everything from Bethesda Game Studios, as well as popular franchises from the other studios under the Bethesda name, including Doom, Prey, and Wolfenstein. This purchase was a significant help to the stagnating Xbox brand as they pivoted to a “Game Pass” Netflix-esque subscription model.
This certainly explains why Fallout 76 was the failure it ended up being. It is widely considered that Bethesda shoved the game out the gate to up their cash flow and profits to make them look more immediately appealing to their acquirer.
Many industry pundits believed this to be a bad deal, citing the general stagnation and mediocrity of many of these franchises, especially with no new Elder Scrolls or Fallout game in sight for another decade.
But interestingly, one prominent name on that announcement was a game that didn’t even exist. Starfield, which had only been announced in a 1-minute vague trailer back in 2018, was listed next to their top-tier franchises.
I believe Starfield will shape up to be one of if not the best pieces of art from the 21st century. I believe Todd Howard and the Bethesda Game Studio’s entire project have built every previous game in service of this one. And I believe that this game will culturally shift humanity’s goals permanently, pushing the desire to colonize the stars to the forefront of humanity’s collective mind.
Starfield is Bethesda's space exploration RPG. It follows Bethesda's traditional design of building a character and traveling wherever you want, this time beyond just our planet, instead one thousand planets.
Each of Bethesda’s projects of the past have been building directly toward this goal, each fleshing out designs, features, and systems upon which Starfield is now being built.
As the character creator, base builder, first-person combat mechanics, story design, world design, and the Xbox console finally hit its apex with the Series X console, Bethesda’s Starfield is finally ready to hit the world.
And who could forget, Bethesda’s work with Microsoft to bring it to life. This is a tremendous accomplishment no doubt only possible due to their collaborative work with Microsoft. In order to reach the insane task of creating the one thousand planets, I am fairly certain that Bethesda leveraged Microsoft’s cutting-edge AI development teams to procedurally generate them. It’s likely that Bethesda chose to be acquired by Microsoft, or even at all, because of Microsoft’s strength in AI.
But more important than the technological and economic forces that it took to bring Starfield together, it stands to release at one of the most interesting points in humanity’s history.
While we’ve always gazed into the night stars and asked “What’s out there?”, it would take until the 20th century for us to reach the moon, the first step made off the planet (or who knows, I’m not gonna tell you what to believe). It’s now been 50 years and we haven’t done it again.
In the years since, nearly every part of life has become less stable and problems such as inequality, environmental degradation, information control, privacy, and our collective identity through religion and nationality have become much worse, and solutions even more difficult. It’s getting easier to look at the desire of space colonization and ask: “Why worry about that now?”
Especially within my short lifetime, the coronavirus pandemic significantly exacerbated every one of these issues in only two years, shocking everybody with just what sits squarely in front of us.
While the wills of the populace have always pushed for myopic small reformations to make life slightly more bearable, art has been one of the few things that has challenged us to imagine something greater, such as space travel.
In these past 50 years, Star Wars provided this influence for some time. But over time, their theatrical films became Disney-ified trash and the extended universe began to lose its charm. Star Wars’ premiere project of the covid-era was The Mandalorian, a much more phoned in small adventure following one guy trying to save his pet. Passable entertainment, but certainly not challenging our greatest imaginations of the beauty and possibility of the universe. And the warriors fighting for this have noticed the Star Wars absence.
Enter Elon Musk.
During the now-defunct games industry event E3 in 2019, Todd Howard joined the billionaire space-venturing oligarch Elon Musk to discuss Starfield. Here he told the public that he had his SpaceX company assist Bethesda developers in ensuring the accuracy of space travel. And more interestingly, why:
I think movies, video games, (and really, I think people spend a lot more time on video games than movies these days) can be pretty thought-provoking and inspiring about what’s the future that we want
After over twenty years of figuring out exactly how to build the role-playing game, Bethesda will release Starfield on September 6th, 2023. Starfield will bring the space imperative to a new generation of youth. Advances in game design, graphics technology, AI, and the Xbox console are all just now ready to execute a truly great video game about space exploration. You’re going to notice the impact.
