Starfield’s Eternal New Game Plus loop was not a good decision on Bethesda’s part

Although I really love most As for Starfield, one thing I didn’t agree with from the beginning was the immense focus on not only the structure of the game, but also the structure of its core game. history be fully at the service of the New Game Plus concept.

To talk about this, we’re going to have to go into spoilersbut I tried to wait long enough so that many people have at least finished the main campaign once.

About two-thirds of the way through the main story, once you meet the Starborn and understand that they’re not aliens but some kind of interdimensional humans, I thought I knew where this was going, given everything Bethesda had previously said about the only ones”. New Game Plus concept.

I thought we were going to become Starborn and do the cycle again, now with knowledge of what’s coming and the ability to make different decisions. So, mainly how a normal New Game Plus works plus an important story reason for it. This is exactly what happened.

The problem is that the New Game Plus loop is in direct opposition to the way most people play Bethesda games. You feel like you’re missing the core concept of the game if No Do New Game Plus to discover changes and small bonuses and occasionally weird things like otherworldly openings (the rest of the run is exactly the same). But if you do this, you will lose almost everything in the entire game.

New Game Plus works best in single-player games that don’t rely heavily on looting, crafting, and building. But even in those games, you can often keep the weapons you’ve acquired in new playthroughs, perhaps increasing the difficulty as you progress.

In Starfield you lose everything. All your weapons and armor, all your credits. All missions are cleared and New Game Plus only gives you the opportunity to skip the main mission. But it’s not just that. In a game that encourages creative ship and base building, you lose all that, all your designs and materials and everything you’ve built up to that point. And for a game that encourages exploration, you lose all your survey data on all the worlds you’ve ever bothered to catalogue.

Why… would they design the game like that? I understand that a lot of people start new save files in Bethesda games to create new characters, make new decisions, and try out different settings. But not delete your old character to do that. And in this version the only thing that I can’t What you need to do is try a new version, because Bethesda won’t let you delete any of your skill points and put them somewhere else for any reason. So if you were a combat character and you wanted to start exploring and building bases better, you have to work your way through higher levels to get those skill points now, which takes much, much longer than before.

What this all leads to is that at a certain point, if you want to “max out” the game like you would with a normal Bethesda RPG, you just have to pick a spot and sit down. For me, that was NG+2, as I was tired of losing all my progress, and the fast-running NG+ loops, which is possible with campaign skipping and easy artifact hunting, weren’t enjoyable either once I figured it out. Note that the “alternate” openings were random and did nothing meaningful except give you a fun intro.

I don’t think structuring New Game Plus to lose all progress but your skill points was a good decision for a game like this, and it spoiled the ending of what I thought was an otherwise great game. I also think the main story suffered as it ended with no real answers as to who created this loop in the first place with all these temples and strange artifact technology, because it surely wasn’t the human Starborn. Maybe that answer is in DLC, but I don’t like that either. This whole concept could have been so much better.

follow me On twitter, Threads, Youtube, and instagram.

Pick up my science fiction novels herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.