New Video! How Starfield Made Me Miss The Bugs (ad-free!) (Patreon)

Hey everyone!

Just letting you know that the new video is now available to watch ad-free via the link above! Well, I made a video on Starfield's intro, now I guess it's time to talk about the rest of it. A lot has been made of the notion that Starfield is Bethesda's least buggy game to date, which is definitely the case—contrary to their other open worlds like Skyrim and the Fallout games, most of the time things appear as they should here. That said, I actually found myself missing those bugs—what bugs did appear represented perhaps the only points during my playtime where I felt much of anything at all. This got me thinking about the glorious chaos in older Bethesda titles that Starfield so lacks, as well as how imperfection can play such an important part in other artforms like music and cinema, and why games might not embrace that imperfection in quite the same way. I didn't hate Starfield. I didn't even dislike it really. It just made me feel nothing, which in many ways might be the most damning indictment of all.

I really hope you enjoy the video—the idea came to me after tens of hours with the game and I just had to get it down and out there. Was really fun to talk about non-game things even briefly. I love thinking about games in relation to other artforms, and this felt like a really good opportunity to do just that. People seem to like when I talk about that kind of stuff, so I hope you get a kick out of it.

This is almost certainly the last I'll talk about goddamn Starfield on the channel, because it's just so... bland. It kinda falls in line with another project I'm working on where I reflect on Gamescom and the nature of press, marketing cycles and massive events as they relate to coverage being limited to a certain type of game. Kinda missing the old days when I was more in touch with the indie scene and could at least weave some more of those games in with discussion of bigger titles, so I'm going to spend some time trying to do that (at least once the Ace Combat video is out of the way). That Gamescom vid is shaping up to be pretty cool even if you don't care about the show, or at least I hope it is.

Anyway, thank you all so much for your continued support—I really couldn't keep the channel going without you. You are all the best and I will see you soon with more videos.

Thanks again,

Hamish

Writing on Games