Every year, I do a full replay of Skyrim. Not just the opening few hours – I soak in its world and get obsessed with its lore all over again, leafing through books and talking to obscure NPCs, scouring old forums to read theories by gamers who have long since moved on. It’s the thing that truly got me into fantasy, and even though it’s far from my favourite RPG these days, there’s a charm in its old bones that reminds me why I love the genre so much.
Or at least, there used to be. Going back in 2024, I made it to Whiterun, slew a dragon, and quit. I still love its world and find myself occasionally stumbling down a lore rabbit hole on YouTube, but I can’t bring myself to play much more of the game itself.
The Bethesda Magic Is Gone
I wrote two years ago that Starfield had killed my hype for The Elder Scrolls 6. The Bethesda formula was getting tired, and its archaic jank was no longer charming, just frustrating. We’d expected Bethesda to improve on the unending loading screens, stilted characters, and stiff gameplay as it learned from the last decade of open-world games and RPGs as other developers had done from Skyrim. Instead, it stubbornly stayed rooted in its old ways.
Starfield’s world feels shallow and paper-thin as a result. There’s no depth, just bland characters barking exposition and a formula so surface-level that it’s impossible to ever be immersed in its world(s). When I wrote about my excitement dwindling, I had no idea that Starfield hadn’t just killed my hype for the next game, but had stripped away so much of the Bethesda magic as a whole.
Replaying Skyrim, I struggled to care about the world because all I saw were the same Bethesda-isms that have since grown grating. These games all feel the same, as much as new bells and whistles are awkwardly tied on top and paraded around like revolutions in the genre. Starfield is Fallout in space, and Fallout is The Elder Scrolls with guns. Tracing back the lineage just makes the whole thing feel exhausting.
Starfield Isn’t Different Enough
Normally, when digging through a developer’s back catalogue, you can see how it has grown and pinpoint all the lessons learned as history unfolds before you. The foundations laid for future masterpieces become clear. The Elder Scrolls series itself is no exception — Skyrim streamlined Oblivion‘s levelling system with perk trees. Oblivion meanwhile got rid of Morrowind’s invisible dice rolls to make combat more intuitive. And Morrowind abandoned the procedural generation of Daggerfall for a smaller, more detailed world.
Going from Skyrim to Starfield shows none of that progression. The same mistakes continue to be made throughout the decade, all of the worst aspects of Skyrim and Fallout 4 doubled down on. In fact, there’s a lot of regression. The lessons learned all the way back in Daggerfall have been forgotten, and we’re back to procedurally generated, bland worlds that are paraded around as being enormous as though that’s an interesting selling point when there’s nothing to do with all of that space.
We used to muse that ‘modders will fix it’, but it has become a lot less endearing now Bethesda is clearly in on the joke with the Creation Club, proudly offering up thousands of empty planets for the community to make interesting. The ‘fix it’ jokes weren’t serious. Underneath the mountain of mods, these were still great games. That just isn’t true anymore, and it shows with how little passion the fanbase has for modding Starfield.
I miss Skyrim. Or I guess, I miss how Skyrim used to feel. That snug, familiar fantasy that always felt like coming home, no matter how old it got. Starfield ripped away that facade and made all of the once charming Bethesda motifs feel mechanical. You don’t see a future in the making, anymore, you see the first domino falling. The Elder Scrolls 6 might just be the last in that line, because after so many games that refuse to grow, adapt, or learn, even its past titles are starting to lose their charm.
One of the all-time greats, The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim redefined the concept of the Western RPG. With countless awards under its belt and releases on almost every platform imaginable, you’ll find yourself engrossed in a colossal open world in your role as the Dragonborn. You must face your destiny and save the land from a formidable foe.