"Starfield" is not a very happy new year. Bethesda's groundbreaking RPG (designed to be played for a long time) has had "mostly negative" recent Steam reviews as of this writing, with only 29% of reviews giving it a positive score in the past 30 days. The overall rating is still "Mixed," with 64% of reviews positive.

Before we continue, there are a few things to keep in mind. First of all, Steam reviews are from the community, and while helpful, they are more an expression of emotion than quality. Second, reviews are binary. That is, a mediocre game will suffer in the long run; "Mostly Negative" is much more dramatic than "75%.

Turning a thumbs-down into a thumbs-up is critical, and a recent industry trend has emerged in which developers try to turn reviews upside down by responding directly; "Starfield" was no exception and drew flak because the developer's response was a copy-pasted version.

Still, we are talking about Bethesda, and while "Fallout 76" was an equally rough entry, it can be put away as experimental. This is Bethesda's mainline RPG; games like Skyrim and Fallout 3 have left their mark on the gaming world. Starfield, by contrast, has not captured the public imagination in the same way. Why is that?

Asking the community in November, when the game's overall rating dropped to Mixed, the essential "magic" seems to be missing. Some players believe that freedom of choice is hampered by a deluge of unkillable NPCs and sycophantic companions. There is no shadow of the great exploration typical of this studio, replaced by loading screens and barren worlds. Even the core fan base was not surprised when the game failed to garner more than one nomination for a game award.

Last month, while writing about the game's biggest flaw, my fellow staff writer Christopher Livingston (who also wrote the review) said that in a game like "Skyrim," any quest should encounter "some interesting encounter along the way." It might be simple combat. It might be a simple battle, but you might meet an NPC, find a cave inhabited, stumble upon a strange hut, or get lost in a new quest. In "Starfield," on the other hand, you will be "running around from randomly placed box to box. It's not disastrous. But it is not memorable.

This lack of emergent interest means that the story elements, always thin in Bethesda's games, are more noticeably dry. my opinion of Vasco, which I wrote about in September, is the same as the rest of the game: "Starfield" is not really interested in telling a story about anything. It's not interested in talking about anything, its themes are superficial, like it's just making vague gestures about a work of science fiction without actually discussing it. As far as world-building goes, there is a sense that the interesting stuff has already happened.

The way the story is presented also suffers. Bethesda's creepy zoom-ins are outdated, especially when "Baldur's Gate 3" has emotional motion-capture acting for the companions. I'm not saying that flashy graphics are necessary to capture people's imagination; CRPGs have accomplished a lot with text boxes over the years, but those games put evocative fantasy fiction in there. I have a solid idea of how the durances in Pillars of Eternity move, speak, and smell without the high-budget bells and whistles.

After all, Bethesda has some really important lessons to learn from "Starfield." The studio is planning a six-week update that will include a cargo hold filled with New Year's resolutions, a "new way to travel," and city maps, but whether that will salvage the game from this fire remains to be seen.

Is "Starfield" really a diamond in the rough that just needs to be scraped off, or, like the infamous "Keep It Simple, Stupid" adage of a few years ago, is the core design philosophy that Bethesda has followed completely I wonder if it is necessary to completely discard the core design philosophy that Bethesda has adhered to. Blizzard made a turnaround in "World of Warcraft" by "abandoning the old stubbornness," and I think the same applies here.