5 Things The Elder Scrolls 6 Needs To Learn From Starfield’s Mistakes

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Bethesda built up excitement around Starfield, billing it as the ultimate space exploration game with hundreds of discoverable planets. Unfortunately, Starfield’s grandeur turned out to be its downfall, falling into the common trap of overstating what it could deliver. Now, Bethesda is working on The Elder Scrolls 6, and fans are anxiously waiting to see what they’ve been cooking up.

Following the setbacks of Starfield’s release, fans are concerned that The Elder Scrolls 6 could draw the wrong conclusions from its failures. While Starfield encountered numerous issues, there were certain areas where it particularly stumbled. These missteps can be attributed to Bethesda’s design choices in Starfield, and it is crucial for them to steer clear of these pitfalls in The Elder Scrolls 6. Below, you’ll find the most notable flaws, as well as suggestions for strategies Bethesda should implement to ensure a successful launch for The Elder Scrolls 6.

1) The Elder Scrolls 6 Needs to Scale Back Loading Screens

In the context of a game development studio aiming for immersive experiences, it seems that Starfield has an excessive amount of loading screens. Whether you’re sailing your ship or entering a building, expect to encounter a loading screen. Even crossing a city street will be accompanied by another loading screen. Bethesda justifies the presence of these loading screens by stating they help manage object memory in their games. Essentially, if you leave a thousand potatoes in one room and return, they’ll still be there.

It’s impressive, but is it justified to include a thousand loading screens for that level of realism? One could contend that an abundance of loading screens disrupts the game’s immersion more than forgetting where items are placed. Previous Elder Scrolls games have featured this before, but that was over a decade ago. In 2013, players didn’t mind loading screens because hardware wasn’t as advanced. However, today, it’s not acceptable. Let’s hope The Elder Scrolls 6 doesn’t have too many loading screens. If they are essential, a few can be justified. But any more than that could cause more problems than solutions.

2) Procedural Generation Needs To Go

In Starfield, more than a hundred star systems comprising over a thousand planets are present, but here’s the twist: most of these cosmic wonders are automatically generated, with only a select few star systems and cities within them being carefully designed by developers. The handcrafted aspects of this open world are truly impressive. However, the procedurally generated areas leave much to be desired. The process of procedural generation is undeniably one of Starfield’s weaknesses, as it results in vast, monotonous expanses on planets that seem to go on forever with little of interest in between. Points of interest are scarce, repetitive, and often located far away from each other.

Instead of relying on procedural generation like they might in The Elder Scrolls 6, Bethesda should opt for the immersive open-world design seen in games such as Skyrim and Oblivion. While it may be smaller than Starfield, if it offers captivating locations and engaging questlines on a single planet, that would suffice.

3) The Elder Scrolls 6 Shouldn’t Have Half-Baked Systems Like Starfield’s Space Travel

The mechanics of the spaceship in Starfield seem more like an interesting extra than a fully developed aspect. In contrast to No Man’s Sky, the flight systems in Starfield appear quite simplified. With No Man’s Sky, you can climb aboard your spacecraft, voyage into outer space, and then touch down on another planet – all without any interruptions caused by loading screens.

In Starfield, transitioning into and out of space involves cutscenes, but once in space, there’s no actual flying. Instead, movement between planets seems more like an illusion because you have to use a map for fast travel. This gives the impression that the spaceship mechanics are merely for show. If The Elder Scrolls 6 indeed includes sailing, Bethesda should make sea travel feel immersive by allowing seamless travel from one island to another without enforcing fast travel. If not, it might be better to forego this feature.

4) Starfield’s Missing Quality-of-Life Features Need To Be Present At Launch

In essence, one of the major oversights in Starfield by Bethesda at its debut was the scarcity of user-friendly features. The cities were expansive yet lacked navigational maps, leading to navigation issues. Essential settings like an adjustable Field of View (FOV) slider and an HDR calibration menu were absent. Fortunately, Bethesda rectified this by introducing city maps and updated settings menus post-release, following a significant wave of criticism from the gaming community over these missing features.

Despite Bethesda having incorporated many features in their past games, some essential qualities were absent in Starfield. For instance, when you stole someone’s clothes, they’d still be wearing them, which was reversed in previous Bethesda titles. Additionally, players couldn’t consume items directly by simply looking at them, a feature that was present in earlier Bethesda games but missing from Starfield. To avoid the backlash experienced with Starfield, it is crucial for Bethesda to include these quality-of-life features in The Elder Scrolls 6 when it launches. The absence of such features in Starfield drew a lot of criticism. Thus, Bethesda should strive to learn from this experience and ensure they don’t repeat the same mistake.

5) The Elder Scrolls 6 Better Have Fast Traversal Options

Starfield’s gameplay is expansive, with each planet featuring vast stretches of emptiness separating points of interest. Initially, the absence of ground vehicles upon launch made traveling a tedious task instead of an exciting exploration. At the outset, you could only move sluggishly through jetpacks across the landscape. Jetpack fuel depleted quickly, leaving you to wait for them to recharge. The trip from point A to point B often took a frustrating ten minutes, and there was little of interest in between to make the journey engaging.

Bethesda discovered that storytelling and exploration suffered due to this issue, eventually realizing it. Subsequently, they incorporated a buggy as a ground vehicle in an update, but it didn’t meet expectations because in such a sprawling game as Starfield, there is only one type of ground vehicle. To put it into perspective, if in the entirety of Tamriel within The Elder Scrolls 6, you could only ride a single black horse, it would be unsatisfying. Therefore, The Elder Scrolls 6 requires multiple modes of transportation to cater to both land and sea travel.

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2025-06-06 02:12