I only ask Starfield for one thing, and that is to bring back the scale of the first The Elder Scrolls: a ridiculously big game

There is something that I find very curious about Starfield. Pretty much every time I talk about the game with someone, there’s some sort of dormant hope that the game will turn out well. It doesn’t matter if they’re die-hard Skyrim fans or if they’re just watching from the sidelines, Bethesda’s new thing is surrounded by the desire to get it right, and all this without having shown anything at all yet.

Last week, we learned that the game, which was due out on November 11 this year, was being pushed back to 2023. Frankly, though I was a bit disappointed to see this year’s landscape with fewer and fewer big games. , I am one of those who think that a late game always has the chance to be good.

But what does it mean for Starfield to be good? I’ve been thinking about this curious question all weekend. I know very little about the game, what Bethesda wanted to convey through the previews on its YouTube channel, but there is still a version that already exists, and it is the one that is in my head. Reflecting on it, I wanted to look for references in the previous works of Todd Howard’s studio and, taking advantage of the fact that the first The Elder Scrolls is free on Steam, I decided to visit the 1994 classic for the first time with a question in mind: ¿what can you learn what is new about the study of its origins?

Right off the bat, I came across something that surprised me. I’m going to be honest and say that I knew absolutely nothing about The Elder Scrolls: Arena, and seeing that I could choose where to start the game, having all the regions of Tamriel at my disposal was something that I could relate directly to the space exploration title. While it is true that Skyrim and Oblivion have a reputation for having an impressive open world, the scale of their maps is quite small compared to The Witcher 3 or Elden Ring. The world of Arena, on the other hand, is huge, and of Daggerfall, its sequel, ridiculously titanic, taking tens of hours to walk from one end to the other, as the YouTube channel “How Big is the Map?” in his video series about it.

Being honest, I think that the evolution towards something more content has greatly favored The Elder Scrolls, but Starfield is something else. When I think of space adventures, the first thing that comes to mind is something absolutely colossal. A brutal cosmos full of planets to explore; worlds full of landscapes, ruins and mysteries; an adventure designed to lose you in unknown lands, different from each other but very, very big.

It’s been 11 years since the release of Skyrim, and I think it’s the perfect time for Bethesda to flex the muscle of its Creation Engine on an unprecedented journey. In my personal Starfield, the studio wouldn’t put as much focus on giving us so many caves, settlements, and little details to find, but rather on creating something massive and letting our own imagination and personal experience fill in any possible gaps. With the wide variety of planets and possible scenarios, we no longer need a thousand things to do, but that feeling of scale and infinity that makes traveling the universe so irresistible.

Unfortunately, what was a half-year wait to be able to get on our spaceships and explore the stars has been extended. We can only look forward to more information from Todd Howard’s team and see what they have in mind for their next mega production. Personally, I still have this nagging hope that the game will be good, and I hope that the new thing from Bethesda will be as ambitious as it is revolutionary.