Starfield will be Bethesda’s first new IP in 25 years. After decades of focusing on The Elder Scrolls and Fallout franchises, it will be hard for many fans to imagine how Bethesda might approach its new sci-fi RPG.
So far, Starfieldappears to be a large open-world game set in space, where players will have the ability to travel to and explore different worlds. While its development marks one of Bethesda’s least predictable moves in years, there are also some good reasons that the new game could show Bethesda fans that it’s time for a change.
Elder Scrolls and Fallout
Over the last ten years, many major RPG series have stagnated, unable to achieve the same critical and commercial success as earlier installments. BioWare’s Mass: Effect Andromeda, for example, and Bethesda’s own Fallout 76 have shown how RPG companies are struggling to tell new stories with old IPs. This is something that also faces The Elder Scrolls 6, and by constantly rotating TES and Fallout, the games are becoming old hat.
The Elder Scrolls series has suffered from this in the past to an extent. Events like the Warp in the West exist in the lore purely to hand-wave the different decisions made by players at the end of one game in the series. However, the Elder Scrolls’ biggest problem will be living up to Skyrim’s revolutionary legacy without changing the formula in a way that drives away certain fans.
Hopefully, a new IP like Starfield will allow Bethesda to experiment more with different ways of structuring and telling an RPG story in a way the studio would not feel comfortable with in one of its more established series. With some of Bethesda’s attempts at innovation in Fallout 76 going down poorly, it remains to be seen whether or not the studio’s experimentation will pay off.
Even if Starfield is a first-person RPG reminiscent of Fallout or The Elder Scrolls, the change in setting could still allow Bethesda to tell some more interesting and original stories which aren’t limited by previously establishes parts of the canon. The fact that it has been years since Bethesda embarked upon a new IP, however, makes the future of the game and the studio as a whole less clear than ever. This is especially true after Bethesda's acquisition by Microsoft and as the next-gen consoles prepare for launch this holiday season.
Starfield is currently in development.