Post-2.0 Cyberpunk is one of the best gaming experiences I've had in a long time. You can tell it's a product of effort, and love for the project. They have taken in a considerable amount of feedback from pre-1.5.

Meanwhile, Starfield is a complete miss in just about every way imaginable, and the expansion has followed through the same footsteps. On top of that, the studio actively gaslit people who expressed disapproval, even when it was constructive criticism.

Same with No Man's Sky. It's not everyone's cup of tea, but they buckled down and delivered on almost every promise that they failed on back at release. Not only that but every update since the game came out has been for free. Both No Man's Sky and Cyberpunk are fantastic games, and they were garbage on release. Bethesda has been doing the opposite approach and avoiding feedback from fans since Skyrim came out the first time.

Cyberpunk was buggy, unoptimized, and kind of unfinished, but the fundamental game design was sound.

Starfield on the other hand is broken at its core. The Bethesda RPG experience just does not translate to the open worlds space map they built the game on. So they can't take the cyberpunk approach because they'd have to build an entirely different game from scratch.

The difference is, there is no fixing Starfield, it is rotten to the core. You would have to re-do most of the story elements and writing, and the disjointed, empty world. On top of that you'd have to fix the bugs and technical limitations like the constant loading screens. At this point you would be throwing out most of the game and basically starting from scratch with a few systems done, like the ship building and possibly gunplay.

I think cyberpunk never became what many wanted, but if you let go of your expectations, it is a good game.

I might need to revisit cyberpunk, I didn't know an expansion was ever released. I kind of hit max level doing mostly side quests within 4 months of launch and lost interest.

I mean, it all hinged in the fact that under all those glitches and bugged mechanics CDPR still had a nice game. Starfield can't be salvaged cuz the core game is just mediocre shit.

I wanna say it's a failed IP at this point, but who knows how many copies sold. What is sure is it doesn't deserve any more of my time. I have the DLC but won't reinstall that garbage

Microsoft is a fucking ghoulish, evil company. The only reason they bought Bethesda was to own their IP. They have Elder scrolls, Fallout, and Doom Because of ID games. That alone is going to bring them so much money, if they ever want to sell any of those franchises in the future, they can sell them for a fortune. That's probably the reason why they acquired Bethesda to begin with. Laying off Hi-Fi Rush after they delivered an excellent product was just pure evil.

Bethesda literally invented shitty DLC

At least horse armor was good for the memes. This is so bland no one even cares to meme about it.

Still better than Horse Armor. So no, not Bethesda’s worst DLC.

The difference is that Oblivion wasn't bad at all. It was terrific. Starfield was trash from the beginning, then delivers a trash DLC. That's much worse. No improvement.

they are a reverse midas. Anything they touch doesn't turn into gold but into shit

Bethesda was obviously already toast to anyone paying attention when Fallout '76 came out. They certainly haven't improved since.

...And I can't believe that these are the motherfuckers who own the rights to Doom now.

Story and worldbuilding wise, ES6 has a very bleak future ahead. Emilio Pagliarulo, the de facto director of Starfield and lead writer, has shown that no hole is deep enough that he won't dig it further down when it comes to lack of quality and consistency. Not that Skyrim's main story was good, but it was certainly better than Starfield's. There's also the disturbing indifference of "the world" to everything happening around it. Literally nothing you do in Starfield affects anything outside its own storyline. Hell, shooting up in the air or using fucking space magic in the middle of a city generates no reaction from npcs if nobody is hit.

The problem is Starfield isn't a one off. It's the latest in a line of progressively worse games. Every game they've released since Skyrim has been worse than the one that came before it.

If ES6 is just a refreshed Skyrim I really see no reason to buy it. There are much more interesting RPGs than the Bethesda style nowadays.

I actually liked beyond earth 🥲

I think ES6 will have the advantage that it won't be a procedurally generated world, or at least I don't hope so.

But it will probably still run on the shitty Bethesda engine that they cling onto for dear life for some reason.

I think it will never actually live up to the hype, expectations are so insanely high, and the longer it takes the higher these expectations rise it seems.

And I bet it will turn out to be another half-assed game that they hope modders will fix. Like the last bunch of games, they all require mods to be even remotely playable, but even mods can't fix core issues.

My expectations for Bethesda dropped to bare minimum with everything that came after Skyrim.