Even the best Starfield mods won’t be enough to save Starfield. Here are five reasons why Bethesda’s space epic is beyond the saving grace of the modding community.
Bethesda’s latest RPG takes us to far, restrictive corners of the galaxy where wonders of procedural generations galore. Its vast and also somehow claustrophobic world is filled with illusions cast by a nearly 20-year-old game engine.
It is still a bit difficult to pin a rating on Starfield two months after its release. For many, it is a mixed bag of stellar moments and glaring issues. But beyond expectations and reality, Starfield is an inherently flawed game for open world and exploration, the two core elements that its developer is famously known for.
That’s why those who believe in the divine powers of the modding community shouldn’t keep their hopes up. Even the best Starfield mods won’t save Bethesda’s latest RPG.
5 Reasons Why Starfield Mods Can’t Save the Game
Starfield mods can only do so much to improve Starfield because the game’s different systems and mechanics are so poorly connected that it keeps cracking as you play more.
Indeed, some Starfield mods can bring drastic improvements to the user interface or improve immersion a bit. But that’s it. Despite knowing what the mods are capable of in many others, even the most essential Starfield mods can’t save this troubled space RPG. Moreover, there are many things Starfield players hate about the game.
1. Starfield has evolved backward in exploration.
Never completing the main quest in Skyrim is like Gaming 101 at this point. That applies to other Bethesda games, too. They allow you to stray from the main quest alone in the open world. In Skyrim, you would leave Helgen, turn left, and start running. You’re bound to bump into a cave, an abandoned mine, or a quest that will last for hours.
Skyrim was all about what you experienced while traveling to the quest objective. The journey was the point in Skyrim.
Starfield, on the other hand, offers a vast galaxy filled with star systems that dwarf the map of Skyrim. But the famous 1000 planets within these systems lack the best things of Bethesda’s open-world formula.
With non-existent curated content and poor environmental storytelling, Starfield’s open worlds amalgamate procedurally generated points of interest. They don’t complement each other or the planet on which they’re located.
Since this is an inherent issue, modders can’t “fix” it. They can improve it by adding more curated content to certain planets. But Starfield’s procedural generation and outdated engine won’t give way for compelling content that would enhance the sense of exploration.
2. Starfield is as wide as an ocean and deep as a puddle, and mods can’t fix that.
Although not coined by me, this is a brilliant description of Starfield’s open world.
Starfield is all about landing on new planets filled with mysteries. Most planets have their ecological wonders, alongside a few abandoned and functioning bases. But there isn’t a meaningful connection between these locations.
Imagine bumping into a camp of scientists and thinking they had been there for a while for research purposes. But somehow, they had been unaware of an ecological anomaly that defied gravity just a few miles away from their base. How would that be possible?
You often encounter that in the planets of Bethesda’s space opera. Things get even worse when this happens several times on other planets. Since the system uses the same points of interest with slightly different designs, Starfield can’t drive you to land and explore another planet. After all, you know that the same things will be there.
Mods can bring new ships, weapons, spacesuits, and even planets at some point. But the game’s distorted approach to exploration will always make it feel small and restricted.
Yes, Starfield comes with thousands of planets to explore. But they consist of duplicated and reskinned locations that lack tailored content. That’s why the illusion in previous Bethesda slowly disappears in Starfield. Because in Bethesda’s space RPG, the destination is the point, not the journey leading to it.
3. Mods can only do so much to improve the game’s poor environmental storytelling.
The lack of environmental storytelling finesse in Starfield’s development shows at every game stage.
In Fallout games, you would see a skeleton near a cradle in a subway station with a few feeding bottles. Maybe that was a mother who tried to find a shelter with her baby before or after the nukes turned the USA into a radioactive wasteland. Or perhaps it was someone who found a baby and wanted to protect it from ghouls years after the nukes ravaged the country. Who knows?
In Skyrim, you would find a skeleton of a person who died while trying to reach their Skooma for one last sip. Or maybe it was an antidote that the person couldn’t get to save themselves. Storytelling elements like this made you ask questions. Those very questions made Bethesda’s world more believable.
Starfield’s compartmentalized and restrictive open world replaces environmental storytelling with procedural generation. That’s why all the magic is simply gone, as the design choice here favored quantity instead of quality.
4. Fixing the non-existent spacefaring is beyond the Starfield modders’ paycheck.
We knew that we wouldn’t be able to land directly on planets in a seamless fashion. Bethesda, specifically the studio head Todd Howard, definitely didn’t trick us. But they weren’t completely transparent in this matter, too.
Starfield is a space game where you gravjump from one menu to another, traversing steep obstacles posed by a janky user interface. There is no other way of going from one planet to another. In Starfield, the concept of spacefaring is just made up of a spaceship dog fighting inside a starry box.
Probably due to its ancient game engine, Starfield doesn’t let you travel between planets using your ship. That’s understandable, considering that it would be nearly impossible to traverse the lightyears of the distance between planets.
But Starfield also doesn’t do much regarding an immersive planet landing sequence. The entire marketing process was built on the idea of “landing on a new, foreign planet, filled with mysteries,” though. Starfield lacks an immersive landing sequence and requires you to interrupt your game and click on the planet to land on it.
You can thrust full power into the massive PNG of a planet, thinking that it might trigger a cutscene. Even that would be better than clicking five buttons to land on a planet, right? No, we don’t get that as well. Unfortunately, no amount of Creation Club content will be able to improve this too.
5. Starfield’s lack of immersion requires drastic improvements.
When you take your first step into the New Atlantis, you’re only met with confusion. The look and feel of the city aren’t remotely close to what we felt when we first visited Whiterun or The Imperial City. That doesn’t have to do with the setting of these games. If that were the case, stepping into the Freeside in Fallout: New Vegas or opening the doors to Diamond City in Fallout 4 for the first time wouldn’t be so memorable.
No, just like its approach to exploration, Starfield also doesn’t have immersive cities where it feels like you can wind down after a long journey. The endless barrage of loading screens is the cherry on top, of course.
In Skyrim, modders could remove the loading screen when entering cities in Skyrim. The Open Cities mod by Arthmoor placed the cities on the world instead and allowed us to walk into any city without waiting. Even removing the loading screens at the entrance of towns boosted immersion like no other. Naturally, it became an essential mod for any Skyrim mod list.
Now, let’s consider the sheer amount of planets and locations in Starfield. A seamless transition mod wouldn’t be possible because of the game’s outdated engine. If possible, it wouldn’t have a similar effect on immersion anyway.
Wrapping Up
Bethesda is a studio known for focusing on the journey, though. They are also known for coming up with big surprises. The biggest one in their portfolio was The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. It was the game that carried the company to the top of the gaming landscape following the disappointing release of The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall. After rolling out Daggerfall, Bethesda got too close to actually shutting down.
But Morrowind, a game that offered a sense of exploration like no other, saved the company. It gave them a nearly bulletproof gameplay recipe that just worked regardless of the title’s story and the setting.
These games, when compared with the immense contributions of the modding community, became one of the gaming classics. That’s why we still play Skyrim 13 years after its launch. But Starfield, which was supposed to be the culmination of Bethesda’s years of expertise, lacks pretty much everything that makes a great Bethesda RPG. Therefore, no amount of Starfield mods or Creation Club content will save the game. Starfield’s future doesn’t seem so bright, unlike its rather optimistic sci-fi setting.
