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.

My sister loves Beyond Earth; I still prefer Alpha Centauri.

and they ended up with something that didn't really work and shouldn't have shipped.

That sure didn't stop the marketing department, as this game was being shoved in our faces left and right as if it was the end-all-be-all game we'd be playing with our grand children in 50 years.

My guess is that this game pivoted during development

Nah, the game matches pretty well with what Lyin' Todd said he wanted to make almost 20 years ago

It's also very clearly their usual design decisions but in a new setting

If anything the issue is that they stayed stuck in EXACTLY their usual development methods: no design document because Emil doesn't like them, their writers make their quests too, and use an engine that's absolutely not meant for the kind of game they're making ON TOP of being ancient and garbage