The title for this article might sound like clickbait. But promise that the answer isn’t just because they suck or only care about money. I think the answer is nuanced, and honestly, part of the answer might be that they aren’t making games that I’m interested in anymore.

So, Bethesda, go to for a long time for the open world RPG. I will say that Oblivion and Fallout 3 were some of my favorite games. I believe Fallout 3 was the last game I can remember playing for a solid day. The worlds sucked me in, and I wanted to explore everything, and I beat the games, plus all DLCs, satisfied with my time. Next in release order was Skyrim, and it is, for me, the first sign of trouble. Skyrim was great also, a huge fantasy world to explore, and the dragon shouts were fun to find and play around with. But it started two trends that I think have caused them issues to this day. Mods as a crutch and quantity of content vs quality of content.

To this day, Skyrim, multiple versions of it, contains the top most downloaded mods on Nexus mods. Mods are okay, I’m not saying they should be banned. But I do think it’s a problem when they are seen as necessary to enjoy the base game. There’s a big difference between installing a mod that adds Thomas the Tank Engine, vs installing a mod that adds more story content, gear, or mechanics. I think you can see a clear line from this game to Fallout 4 having a menu for downloading and managing mods within the game itself and then the next step of having mods that require payment. It’s tricky to say where the line is. Do you leave the game fairly basic and just let fans mod in what they want or do you try to give a full featured game, so those mods maybe aren’t just trying to smooth out some rough edges? My opinion is that the base game should stand on its own, I should be able to play a game all the way through, beat it, and then download some mods to mess around. Starfield has the same setup, but one quirk that I find odd is that any mod that isn’t a Bethesda mod will disable your ability to gain achievements, no matter what the mod does. The silly thing here is that, of course, there are mods that bypass that block imposed by Bethesda. It’s just odd that modding their games is kind of a standard requirement in some peoples eyes, to the point that Bethesda builds the functionality into their games and then turns off achievements for those that care. I also don’t think it’s a good look that some fans would rather wait for Bethesda to release their modding toolkit before some fans jump in and play. They want the mods to exist before they’ll try the game. What does that say for the quality that is provided in the base game?

Speaking of quality, let’s talk about Bethesda’s ideas around content for a game. I loved playing through all the quests in Oblivion, and there’s a memorable one where you’re locked in a mansion, and you need to assassinate everyone. You can go the brute force route, or you can slowly tear down each person, turn them against each other, and walk out the sole survivor of the party. Fallout 3, of course, has the quest where you can decide to blow up a major town that you arrive at early in the game, a quest I know everyone did at least once, and maybe reloaded a save after. But, again, Skyrim was a turning point in their understanding of how to provide content. I can’t say I fault them for the path they took. They’re trying to fix the age-old problem of trying to make sure there is always enough content in your game when people demand more. Their thought process seemed to be that any content is good content. So Skyrim had these repeatable quests, no story behind them, and it would just be a generic NPC telling you that they left something in a cave and then ask you to get it for them. You’d go to the cave, make it to the end, and find a chest. In this chest, there would be a ring or a necklace. The game would just say that this was your quest item, no special name, no note. Just an icon next to it, signifying this is what you need to turn in. Yes, at its most basic level, this is content. But can it be considered enriched content? There’s no stakes, no story to grasp onto, and nothing to get you invested. Fallout 4 had a quest where you find a child Ghoul locked in a fridge. He makes it clear he hid out in the fridge when the bombs dropped, which the game states was a hundred or so years ago. He needs help finding his parents, and the issue I have with this quest years later is that the parents aren’t that far away. This kid was in a fridge for hundreds of years, and you’re the first one to find him, and his parents aren’t even that far away? Again, it feels like they needed a quest someone had the idea, and there wasn’t a whole lot of vetting on the quality of the story the quest is telling. Fallout 4 also has repeatable content with the constant need to free or defend settlements. It gives you something to do, but it’s not really worthwhile, and eventually, you just ignore the quests. Like, I don’t need a reason to go out, and shoot my guns, make the world fun to explore and give me good storytelling, and I’ll stay engaged.

I’ll end with Starfield, a game I was very excited for, but I can’t tell you anything memorable from it. I feel like Bethesda were stuck between a rock and a hard place for this game. In Fallout 4, they tried a different dialogue system, with a camera that wan’t glued to someone’s face and dialogue options that conveyed sentiment, rather than actual dialogue and I don’t think people were fans. The camera was a good choice it makes it feel less static, and you can give different conversations different emotions by framing the scene differently. The actual dialogue options you could pick were definitely lacking. You had just 4 options, and they would just be different feelings rather than full lines of dialogue. In theory thats should be fine, but LA Noire had the same problem of you’d pick dialogue you’d think was okay and your character would say something that you didn’t intend or was way more harsh than you wanted. So Starfield went back to the old dialogue option of front facing camera and your full dialogue options so you knew what you were going to say. The problem you have is that this system feels so archaic now. Baldur’s Gate 3 had what felt like a more engaging dialogue system and even Avowed, while having simple dialogue options, feels more intentioned with its conversations.

Starfield also had repeatable content in the vein of mission boards, and they boasted having 1000’s of planets, but there wasn’t much that made me feel like exploring. No Man’s Sky had the same problem for me. You can tell me that there are limitless areas to explore, but I need something driving me to explore. After a certain point, seeing a cool new planet can lose its luster, and that ignores the fact that Starfield is doing smaller sections of their planets with some of the same randomized buildings or points of interest. But at the end of the day, maybe these games are not catering to what I envisioned as what a Bethesda game should be. Fallout 4 and Starfield both have settlement mechanics where you can build a base or home for yourself, but there is zero reason to. In Starfield, you can build up a whole economy mining operations on various planets, but you only really need those if you’re crafting or…building settlements. So I see these games now as being more similar to Minecraft, a place to play around in and build, but it just happens to have a story. The biggest knock I can give Bethesda’s recent games is that when I pick them up and start them, I’m hooked, but if I stop playing them consistently, there is nothing to pull me back in. I’ve opened Starfield and sat there for a minute to only eventually close the game, not having a desire to re-engage. So many other games can pull me back in and can have a good time. But maybe Bethesda is  more focused on saying you can spend limitless hours in their games and they’re not asking if those hours are well spent.