As the newest RPG from industry veteran Bethesda Game Studios, Starfield puts decades of experience into practice to build a number of improvements over the company’s past titles. At the same time, some of Bethesda’s past games still hold a number of unique advantages. As a smash hit title that set a popular standard for open-world games to live up to in the 2010s, The Elder Scrolls 6: Skyrim makes for an interesting point of comparison in examining the ways that Starfield has both evolved and devolved from its predecessors.
Starfield and Skyrim are fundamentally different games in a number of regards, most particularly in the divide between sci-fi space-faring and a medieval fantasy setting. Despite their core differences, however, Starfield and Skyrim share enough of the same core DNA to match them up in multiple areas. Both can still be satisfying experiences that scratch different itches, but putting them side-by-side offers a look at everything a hypothetically perfect Bethesda RPG could learn from both.
One area where Skyrim makes a bigger impact than Starfield is right out of the gate with its opening material. The first lines of Skyrim uttered in the back of a cart are memorable (and perhaps slightly infamous) in a way that Starfield’s are unlikely to ever be, and the moment when a dragon first appears in the sky is downright revelatory. Starfield, on the other hand, doesn’t manage to wrangle its early content into quite the same punchiness, ultimately settling for an effective but mostly uninspiring introduction. The first open vistas revealed by the game are also some of its least striking, setting expectations for scenery unnecessarily low.
Once Starfield gets going, it’s a lot easier to be impressed by the landscapes it has to offer. Skyrim was always at its most beautiful when modded, with the base game featuring some memorable terrain but an overall homogenous environment. The variety of planets in Starfield makes it easy to hop between various forms of biome and terrain that go far beyond a wintry, mountainous land. Ignoring the photo mode feature would be a major waste, as there are plenty of unique sights to capture across the course of any Starfield journey.
Fast travel plays a big part in most Skyrim playthroughs, as the mountainous map is designed in a way that makes overland travel very time-consuming. However, most of the time spent in Skyrim is spent outside of loading screens, which will only come into play with real frequency hopping in and out of buildings inside cities. Navigating Starfield without frequent loading screens, on the other hand, is essentially impossible. They crop up repeatedly throughout the necessary sequence of embarking and disembarking during travel, damaging the sense of immersion that would make for perfect space flight.
2023-09-09 17:00:04
Link from screenrant.com
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