Starfield: Game Breaking

     

      In two days a swarm of Starfield players will embark into Bethesda's most ambitious creation thus far. If it were possible the game would be middling and not change the very landscape of video games, but that simply isn't the case.

    25 years of leg work, at least 10 years of actual development, and the perhaps biggest undisclosed financial bailout in video games, Starfield has gone from the constant Todd Howard side project too risky to fund over Fallout 76 and ESO to a behemoth exclusive. Struggling for years under mismanaged, cash hungry Zenimax kept this spiritual successor to the massive Oblivion at bey. What the industry is staring at is the launch of a game that has had Duke Nukem: Forever incubation time with none of the constant rebooting. The amount of unaccounted resources dumped into the blackhole of Starfield is concerning without the additional fact that this is the modern day Morrowind for a modern day Xbox. Starfield is a gamble on western RPGs. The PS2 had Final Fantasy XII. Xbox had Morrowind. The consumer appetite shifted then and it is grumbling now. There is only two ways this will go.

    Starfield is a massive failure. It undermines Xbox's direction and eventually the steam runs out of the sails of D&D influencers and the self-admitted unsustainable Baldurs Gate 3. History repeats itself and we see the high budget, Western single-player RPGs diminish as East Asian developers refine the kinks and clunks down to new, sustainable RPG formulas as they turn Wizardry into Dragon Quests and Final Fantasies. The West spirals back to the "sure things" of live service, MMO likes and a bastion of "Euro jank" targeted at PC players while the East creates a new era of Korean/Japanese genre titles for Nintendo and PlayStation consoles. Maybe more Crimson Desert than Final Fantasy, maybe more Dragons Dogma than Dragons Quest, but definitely more Zelda all around. Everyone is waiting for the new season of Arcane, the new Zelda movie, and maybe even a decent Pokemon game. All hail Tencent.

    Or Starfield is a massive success and it changes the game industry completely. The combined successes of Starfield and the self-professed unsustainable Baldurs Gate 3 moves western RPGs into the top tier of industry and consumer zeitgeist at the cost of pushing the industry further into unfathomable risk. Two titles, a 6 year and a 10 year investment, play the massive success fiddle while cementing their creators and publishers at the head of a new era of gaming. Larian and Bethesda become engineers for massive IP empires. Massive failures break other companies. No longer will we see CDPR get to walk away from a Cyberpunk-like launch with their logo intact. Back to the days of the THQs and Midways crumbling as formulas fail, and big gambles bring big losses. Talent becomes mega talent. More Richard Gariots, more Peter Molyneuxs. Project Egos on the charge led by big Xbox and maybe even Apple. All hail Lady Luck.