Starfield - Bethesda Softworks - Release Date - Sep 6th 2023

[Turin]

In addition to offering a new story, it was marketed as including new worlds, locations, ship parts, weapons, suits, powers, enemies, bounties and QoL improvements. From what I can tell from reviews, it offers only one new world, all of the locations are on that one world and there are no new ship parts. The rest might be there, but it doesn't sound like it moves the needle much.

Regardless of what it was marketed as, though, it doesn't seem to be what many people wanted or thought that the game needed. That includes critics, who gave it an average score of 57/100, according to Metacritic and Opencritic, compared to 75/100 for the base game. One critic, Dalton Cooper of GameRant, even gave the base game a 10/10 score and the DLC only a 5/10. So, it's not just regular players or even the haters who are a little underwhelmed by this DLC... and the possibility, as you pointed out, that this is the last major update and chance for an overhaul has to be disappointing for players who are either unhappy with the game or happy enough with it but hoping for it to get even better and reach its potential.

That last part is kind of me. Although as time has gone on and I haven't had any desire to go back and play in the last year, I get more sour on some of the stuff I didn't like. What I did like were some of the faction stuff with the Vanguard, some of the atmosphere and I surprisingly liked the NG+ feature a ton, despite me hating the idea of a multiverse.

However there's just.. zero edge to anything, no culture anywhere.. I can't get over how stupidly shallow what's left of human culture is. And now with House Varuun having nothing particularly compelling about them after being revealed I just don't think there's any salvaging this fictional space because I don't think there's a lore mastermind in BGS who has an overarching idea for this world. Like I could think of a more compelling vision of alternate timeline humanity within 3 days than what we get in Starfield. Kurt Kuhlmann and Will Shen both being fired/leaving the studio immediately after the games release were huge red flags for me. Kuhlmann was a big lore guy for Elder Scrolls and Shen was the guy responsible for Far Harbor and a lot of the quest choice stuff.

I think it's clear now that this was a passion project from Howard that he wanted to do because of the success of his previous games, and the quality/cohesiveness of the project mattered less than just doing it to say that he could - but now that the team spent a decade on this and F76, and so much of the talent behind their success is gone, BGS just seems like a cautionary tale now.