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It’s odd to think about now, but there was a time when Baldur’s Gate 3—Baldur’s Gate 3—pushed its release date forward by a whole month in order to avoid clashing with Starfield, the game once feted to be the obvious blockbuster release of 2023.
Well, things change. It’s downright uncontroversial to call BG3 one of the greatest games of all time (though I’m more of a BG1 and 2 guy myself) that still attracts tens of thousands of players every day. Starfield, meanwhile, launched to a positive reception but has since dwindled down to a 58%, mixed user review score on Steam, and it’s been a while since Bethesda said, well, much of anything about the game since a November update.
Which has rather rankled fans, who have been prodding the studio for updates all over social media. Yesterday, Bethesda finally relented, tweeting “We know you’re eager for an update, and we truly appreciate your passion for Starfield” in response to a fan pleading for more communication from the company.
“The team has been hard at work,” continued Bethesda, “and while we’re not ready to share specific details just yet, we have a lot of exciting things planned for the game this year that we can’t wait to talk about when the time is right.”
Which I guess assuaged anyone who worried that maybe Bethesda had decided it couldn’t be bothered to keep going with the game it worked on for the best part of a decade, but it didn’t do much for anybody else. “‘This year’ can mean tomorrow. It can mean 9 MONTHS away. Damn,” wrote a dejected starperson in the game’s subreddit. “It can also mean ‘we fixed these bugs’ or ‘we made Trackers Alliance 2!’ and not what people actually want like ‘we buffed shipbuilder and now there are M-class ships,” agreed another.
“They are deliberately choosing not to communicate more,” writes a user named ElegantEchoes. But frankly, I don’t know if that’s really fair. Some players share my own stance—the recognition that Bethesda is between a rock and a hard place on this one. On the one hand, saying too much will invariably have some players work themselves up into a hype frenzy, only to crash into reality when whatever patch or DLC the studio has cooking actually releases.
On the other, saying nothing risks the game’s community—already a fairly tenuous thing given Starfield’s rocky reception—losing interest entirely, or deciding the game has been abandoned (which, just to reiterate, would be absolutely loco).
And so Bethesda has ended up in the middle position of saying ‘Yes, we still exist, but that’s all we’re telling you.’ Which just kind of, well, annoys everyone. I’m not a Starfield fan, but I don’t envy the devs. Here’s hoping they’ll have more to announce than their existence in short order.
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Kurt Indovina
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