Its going to take every blemish and unfavored trend introduced since Skyrim and double down on it. Settlement building, gimped magic, poorly written questlines, procedurally generated dungeons, a world devoid of any creativity or rich ideas introduced since the series began in favor of more generic fantasy designs. I know for a fact that when VI comes out it'll be the definitive death of Bethesda.
After Starfield came out people did a deep dive on all the smug developer videos about it and yeah...
It's all women and dysgenic mystery meat men and various flavor of "professional homosexual."
Supposedly the company has two devteams, the remnants of their A team (the ones who made Skyrim and Fallout 3/4) and their B team of new hires and DEI retards they were forced to bring on by Microsoft, since human resources are fungible like all resources, we need women in STEM, and fuck white men amirite??! The A team was too busy working (and having white men be the ones doing the actual work behind the scenes is embarrassing) to do Tiktok style videos about their office lives so that was allll the B team.
The way the story goes is Fallout 76 was supposed to be easy as shit to do -- take Fallout 4, take the cut multiplayer, shotgun a shitty fucking live services model to it, how hard can this be? -- so they had the B team do it while the A team did Starfield. Then the B team fucked up so bad that it was enough to break the illusion, especially since live services means no mods to wipe Bethesda's ass like they're used to. So the A team had to go fix Fallout 76 and leave the B team to finish off Starfield... and they royally fucked that up, too.
This is why there's shit like Vitiligo all over Starfield (it requires no devteam resources to implement), why there's "type A/B" body/walk and pronouns that are literally ignored in game (again, no real devteam work required to rename a text field), why they swapped the skintone of one of the main NPCs (the obviously Russian pirate is now black skinned for some reason), and supposedly the real fucky fucky part was they took all the ethnic specific biometric data -- scans of what actual black people, actual asians, actual old people, etc all look like and... merged it all into one giant mystery meat data file, purging the originals. Because race is a social construction, you know? That's why every randomly generated NPC looks so goddamned fucking weird, they're literally using human ethnicity data that doesn't actually exist in reality. It's also why the "main" NPCs such as the members of Constellation look, er, normal (other than the Black Russian) -- because instead of having the mystery meat generator involved, they were created by the A team and the B team wasn't allowed to fuck with them (other than Vlad's skintone).
(Another thing the modders pointed out is that the Xbox Series S can't handle a Skyrim-dense or Fallout 4-Dense game at Starfield's scale, which is why you see a LOT of weird fucking design decisions. It's highly likely they intentionally spaced things out by 400% and cut the population density to 1/4th and added shitloads of loading screens to make it so the game didn't cause frame loss on the Series S. The first mod everyone suggests installing (after the big bugfix mod) is one that fixes the mob density.)
I suspect they bailed on the Sisyphusean task of having the A team constantly wipe the ass of the B team after Starfield came out -- no having the Skyrim team try and fix Starfield, they're busy trying to make TES6 less than retarded while having to deal with Todd going "who needs role playing elements in a role playing game, SIMPLIFY IT! And add live services stuff!!" ... That would explain how Starfield basically was left to rot on the vine rather than have them swoop in with 2-4 major updates and DLC to fix it, a-la F76.
I just want another Fallout 3/4 or Skyrim/Oblivion/Morrowind type game. But that's too much effort and it's too hard for the DEI teams to do, so we get "Minecraft with Fortnite style graphics" forever. Punch tree, get wood, make workbench, make stone axe, make kiln, slit fucking wrists cause this is the same game you've played 15 times this decade alone and all it's missing is lootboxes and a fucking stamina system. Similarly, I hope you like WOW, FF14, and to a lesser extent ESO, Project Gorgon and LOTRO/DDO, becuase they're the last MMORPGs we'll ever see.
