Thanks to Amazon's fantastic new show, the world is going crazy for Fallout. The series was instantly renewed for a second season, and modders set to work cramming TV material into the game, Fallout mania! Wait, didn't Bethesda put out a big game recently, too?

Yes, "Starfield," the game everyone expected to take 2023 by storm, but in the end, ...... Well, you know what? I don't want to say too many mean things about "Starfield," but both its proximity to "Baldur's Gate 3," simply one of the best RPGs of all time, and its undeniable adherence to the Bethesda formula made it very painful. It felt like a work that had already been played before.

In a new interview with IGN discussing "Fallout," Bethesda CEO Todd Howard briefly touches on the studio's upcoming games; Howard has previously said that the broad plan is "Elder Scrolls 6" and then "Fallout 5." Is that still the case?

"I try to avoid putting dates on anything," Howard said. 'I learned that the hard way. So for now, as far as new developments, I'm obviously focused on 'The Elder Scrolls VI,' but that doesn't mean I'm not making plans for other things."

"I'm not going to put a date on anything,"

Howard said.

Howard has kind words for the Fallout 76 community ("Amazingly, it's a very, very nice apocalypse") before getting into Bethesda's latest. We do a lot of Starfield work," Howard says, "and we do a lot of Starfield work, too." So there's a lot going on here.

We have some idea what "really good" means, thanks to several teasers late last year; in a message posted on the game's subreddit, Bethesda said, "FSR3 and XeSS (Intel's upscaling technology) as well as as well as a large number of "in-progress" quest fixes, expect an update early next year". But from a gaming perspective, the more intriguing promises are the new features most requested by fans." From city maps, to mod support, to new ways to travel (stay tuned!)."

What will excite Starfielders the most will be the new ways to travel. Whether Bethesda can change that in any meaningful way remains to be seen, but as it stands, the over-reliance on fast travel undermines the whole space fantasy.

This perhaps speaks to a larger problem with "Starfield": as far as Bethesda's past work is concerned, a lot can be done with patching, and Starfield is great; it's a great game, and it's a great game! However, it seems like "fine" is all that matters.