Starfield's biggest problem is that you can't play Skyrim for the first time again

In Sunday’s Starfield Direct, Bethesda took pains to join the dots between its established role-playing franchises and this year’s mammoth space epic. For all the vaster playspace, with a thousand planets to roam and marvel at or at least, blow up for materials, Starfield will remain a Bethesda RPG “through and through” – pitched squarely at those, like myself, who shovelled hundreds of mortal hours into the furnaces of Skyrim and Fallout 3.

The footage showed off a lot of familiar ideas – level up points! Crafting! Romanceable NPCs! – carefully positioned to spark reassuring nostalgia amid ostensibly exotic surroundings. There was a huge emphasis on the same-but-more, with certain lines from studio director Todd Howard building on Bethesda presentations from over 10 years ago. See that moon? You can go there. Oh, and here’s an Abandoned Mine, not actually abandoned, to waylay you en-route to the next story objective with the promise of a neat gun. And here’s a lounging skeleton who wants a quick word in your ear about Ye Olde Environmental Storytelling.

Starfield Direct – Gameplay Deep Dive Watch on YouTube

As my snarky intro hopefully illustrates, presenting Starfield as a game for returning players overlooks that many of Bethesda’s oldest disciples are also its biggest haters. Overfamiliarity with the developer’s teeming, rough-edged open world RPG design breeds a strange mixture of intense admiration and contempt, which I don’t think you see in responses to rival franchises like Souls or Assassin’s Creed.

The contempt springs partly from the fact that Bethesda keeps describing these games in messianic terms – in the Direct, Todd Howard often sounds like he’s seconds away from birthing a sentient AI – whereas in practice, they’re characterised by bugs and a pervasive, charming unsteadiness resulting from the sheer number of interlocking systems in play. Starfield’s trailers make it look extremely slick and cohesive, all slow pans across starkly shadowed planetscapes, sliced through by the rings of nearby gas giants, but I don’t doubt it will have its equivalent of Skyrim’s backwards-flying dragons, or Fallout 4 players getting sucker-punched during quest-critical dialogue by wandering robots.