Bethesda Videogame Patches: The Definitive Review

Fixes get glitches, with spoilers ahoy.

I often find it strangely fun to be in that ‘inbetween days’ state, where you’ve mopped up a world you just don’t want to leave, despite knowing you have plenty of new things to play¹, but something draws you back to unfinished threads in some other game you’ve also thoroughly rinsed, even though there’s a certified banger sitting on top your PlayStation 5, just begging to be played. I have some pathological preference to mung about in the odds and ends of that I reliably love instead of trying something new, despite glowing reviews or trusted recommendations. That classically habitual old man behaviour, dear reader, is how I managed to successfully dodge starting Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth and inexplicably return to Starfield. It wasn’t too jarring to leave Cyberpunk’s Night City in favour of whatever shit I was up to in Akila (moving plushies around on my bed, if you must know), but the new patch had given me hope that a couple of broken quests may now be completable². Concerned that I might have missed some 20-gigabyte download or other, I compared version numbers to find that miraculously, the game had managed to patch itself in the background and hence, I was off in search of quest-granted XP.

It was with some considerable delight that I found myself, some 10 minutes later, randomly jabbing my best wakizashi through an [INACCESSIBLE] door in an attempt to kill Genghis Khan. Through the glory of shabby collision volumes and chip damage, Genghis was soon vanquished and the quest re-ignited, allowing me to leisurely plod towards its conclusion. This, incidentally, saw some absolutely gorgeous environmental design that I would have missed if not for the door stabbing. The glitch, of course, was classic Bethesda. It carried that same ‘never change’ energy as its industry-leading expertise in making sure everything it makes is a tribute to some god of gemütlichkeit ersatz, where the company’s unerring dedication to being unconsciously a little bit rubbish takes on a tangibly charming, familiar quality. It's not as if Bethesda is the sole offender here. In my grudging playthrough of Phantom Liberty's main story, I encountered a fair few bumps and glitches, with a couple funnily enough involving doors that refused to open. Yet in Cyberpunk, these roadblock bugs are far more enraging as the game seems to be presenting itself as upholding a higher standard. It’s that position at the cutting edge, of being trailblazing hyper-premium AAA, where technical flawlessness is absolutely expected. This actually seems in contrast with the almost folkwoven, ramshackle nature of the Bethesda titles despite their surprisingly frequent ability to chuck in moments that can easily compete with the fancy-pants upper echelon titles. In a way, that (very much) cursed Gamebryo-derived engine is simply part of the Bethesda manner, a very deliberate part of the Bethesda style. Its own kind of quirkily edgy, outsider-art cachet. I’ve said in prior pieces that a Bethesda open-worlder without the glitches and clunk just isn’t Bethesda, so I was somewhat buoyed to find that despite two patches to fix broken quests, I still have no idea where the ECS Constant is and seemingly, neither does the game. By some ludicrous stroke of luck I did stumble across the stolen goods I lost when picked up by the Vanguard for the Crimson Fleet questline, which were somehow now kept at the copshop in Cydonia. These included borrowed uniforms from the Constant, which I took to be rare enough to be of interest at the time, so thank the heavens I ran off with them - including the ultra-prestigious captain’s outfits - before the ship did its own running off into the unknowable void.

I’d found my missing merchandise thanks to a questline that seemed to complete a fine hand of corrupt, asshole governors for some of the game’s city hubs. If I can playfully poke fun at Bethesda’s general acceptance of naffness in its content, I can at least applaud making so many of those in authority to be flawed, entitled pricks with criminal skeletons in their wardrobes. It’s a far bleaker sociology than that of either the Elder Scrolls or Fallout titles, and one where it seems that galaxy-wide commerce has simply smeared corruption across the heavens instead of morally-grey limbos or transparently polarised figureheads. Sadly, I’ve only been able to legitimately kill one of those elite-class assholes, and he was the boss of a shipbuilding company rather than a governmental high-up. Nonetheless he was cut from much the same cloth, so to actually bump him off as part of a faction quest was refreshing compared to the main-story elite-bothering of Cyberpunk and its DLC. Also to be applauded in Starfield is the dedication to having grimdark violence constantly lurk in the shadows. It seems nearly every installation you visit has some evidence of bloody murder splattered across a desk or two. While this seems in keeping with the post-apocalyptic hellscape of the Fallouts, the gleaming-white spacefaring dream that lies at the core of Starfield feels a less fitting home to such cruel, casual slaughter. Being such a common trope, one does wonder if Mr Howard is in fact some kind of serial killer obsessive, such is the sheer quantity of horrific crimes via environmental storytelling in his games. Of course in Starfield, much of that is due to the much-mocked repetition of installations across so many unfulfilling planets, this being yet another thing that felt like a classic Bethesda glitch. Yet that repetition merely amplifies the base frequency of bloodstains and civilian corpses. And it’s not as if it’s predatory aliens doing this shit - it’s humans just being assholes with a depressing degree of impunity. Fallout, of course, is full of it in a plausibly naturalistic way but I remember being surprised how much random murder there was in Oblivion and Skyrim. But then I recall that in one of the western RPG’s foundational texts, Ultima 7, there’s a surprisingly grisly murder in the starting village. Given my unshakeable belief that Bethesda took over the Garriot reins with The Elder Scrolls: Arena’s vast open world, when Lord British himself was fucking about making players do arcade river-hopping in glorious isometry during Ultima 8’s opening, it seems to align nicely that this next generation torch-bearer would love a grisly depiction or two. And that’s without going into the deliberately macabre horrors of the Dark Brotherhood or the bloodthirsty Daedrics.

One questline that thankfully avoided any major glitching for me was that Crimson Fleet faction set. The formal content was full of fun jaunts with a cadre of absolute bellends that I simply could not wait to coldly execute when the correct narrative opportunity arose. Naturally, this came when the story decided we absolutely must storm their home base, The Key, yet there was a problem. Jazz. Apart from maybe the barman and a couple of the traders, she was one of very few decent people on The Key, being a bright and friendly engineer nerd who could put cool modules on your ship. The rest were swaggering, arrogant assholes that seemed to revel in their performative amorality a bit too much to offer any hope of redemption. They never felt pragmatically pushed towards evil in the sense that Caesar’s legion was in New Vegas, they were instead simply space pricks. A perhaps more seedy rock-and-roll counterpart to the Ecliptic Mercenaries³’ army of shiny, pompous space pricks⁴. Pity the poor Spacers as perhaps the shittest of all possible baddies, being stupendously generic fodder instead of say, the culturally-divergent underclass of The Expanse’s Belters or even the refugee-slave races of Babylon 5’s Narns or Deep Space 9’s Bajorans. I mean, the exotic isolationism and beautiful early-90s-on-70s aesthetic of House Va’Ruun, along with its predilection for brunettes, is almost pure B5 Centauri. BUT I DIGRESS: I planned ahead of storming The Key by equipping my best EM rifle and zapping my way to Jazz so she can have a nice snooze before muddling through to the station’s cute little shopping mall. I was worried that killing the Trade Authority dude there might make me unwelcome elsewhere, so I was relieved to stun everyone nice and cleanly so I could bust out my trusty silenced old-Earth shotgun and get my Anton Shigur groove on. This meant that when I cleared out The Last Nova bar, I shot Bog accidentally (I promise, your honour) and felt a bit bad, as he seemed to be a reference to the wonderful Jon Blyth, otherwise known as Log, who now operates a real pub in Nottingham. Somewhat moved by this, I quickly recomposed myself to stride through the rest of the station like the Terminator, swatting everyone like flies. I’d been so offended by what absolute dicks they all were that this felt like the game’s crowning moment of judicious combat, and a far more satisfying righting of some moral imbalance than the supposedly grittier ends to quests like when you deal with The First, or the whole mess around Vae Victus⁵. It had a particular poetry when I came across a particularly obnoxious prick from early in the questline, who’d sneered at my mere existence from their dubious position of mid-hierarchical superiority, only to kill them in one shot and find nothing worth looting on their body. That fitted too, a kind of denigration of this unrepentant, arrogant asshole into a lifeless, worthless hollow vessel. Being the embodiment of an imposition of a kind of vengeful, corrupted justice onto this lawless station of gleefully murderous bullies and braggards felt more satisfying than anything else in the game, and for my money, perhaps equal to anything in the Bethesda back catalogue. It was as if you’d infiltrated the Dark Brotherhood, got most of the nice stuff and then turned into a cleansing force for good. Superb.

When I continued from where I left off in Starfield, it did actually load me in the Akila apartment, staring at my bed. Plushies were everywhere and, true to form, the patch hadn’t solved the problem of objects randomly sinking by 20% or so into the surface they’re on. In fact, it seemed as if the problem had got worse and afflicted nearly everything I’d neatly laid out. As I said before, it was almost a warm welcome, a cosy reassurance that despite the patch, Bethesda was still gonna Bethesda the shit out this game. When I think of the rehabilitation that Cyberpunk 2077 underwent thanks to people returning for Phantom Liberty, I’m sure I’m mirroring Bethesda in hoping Shattered Space grants not just the content boost you’d hope, but encourages a revision of Starfield’s reputation. Going by non-fan opinion on Reddit and other socials, the prevailing narrative is one of empty exploration and ageing mechanics, despite the objective truth that Starfield’s interactive template is still well ahead of its contemporaries. But that contention from my September review feels to me stronger than ever; Starfield is the end of a cycle of Gen-X wish fulfilment, so it’s no surprise that Millennial and Gen-Z voices are more disdainful. Perhaps rightfully so for their contexts, and we really should be allowing different gaming and cultural histories to appraise videogames with different outcomes. To segue slightly, If we remember Zero Punctuation for anything, it's for Yahtzee willingly labouring a joke. And in his Starfield review, one headline witticism played on the sheer number of doors Starfield throws in your way. Of course, this frequency has a lot to do with that legacy engine, but at the same time, I always found them to be true to the simulated continuity - fucking about in space would probably involve a whole lotta airlocks, and compartmentalising space-faring structures with that many internal doors is actually a sensible safety feature, as hull breaches can be quickly contained. But then Bethesda did drop the ball by not leaning as ferociously on the harder end of Science Fiction as perhaps it could. One of Starfield’s deeper flaws is its deference to please the mediocre player - that mediocrity being in skill, determination and/or taste. In this sense, Starfield compromises itself to make sure the player isn’t too challenged by the minutiae of spaceborne living, right down to making interstellar trips a simple button press and almost neutering over-encumbrance. This almost pathological aversion to giving the player any kind of friction feels like some hasty plastering over those glaring cracks in the game’s content. A kind of surrendered prostration, like some guilty dog offering its belly as a sign of fearful compliance. I can’t help but feel that a default calibration with more rigorous space-realism austerity would have garnered far more respect for its principles than the oddly compliant, offence-avoidant personality the game actually has. Many of Starfield’s starker environments almost beg for the systems embedded within them to have sharper edges and pointier corners, yet Starfield allows any environmental consequence to be cleansed with a simple visit to a doctor. There simply is no sense of peril or consequence. Likewise, the entire spaceflight experience seems so thin despite the very basic decency of ship-to-ship combat. A real shame given the hours you can put into making a personal spacecraft to truly love. When you think of the likes of Elite Dangerous, No Man’s Sky or Star Citizen, you perhaps find some homology in Starfield’s barebones implementation, but having played something as remarkably quixotic as Objects in Space highlights another path where Starfield could have ploughed a far more grittier and individual furrow.

As fleeting as my Richard Garriot reference was earlier in this text, I have no doubt that The Elder Scrolls has always been a 3-D translation of Ultima’s most fabulous promise. Fallout 3 the same leap and Starfield something to cap it all off. With Fallouts 4 and 76 enjoying a brief reconsideration thanks to Amazon, this particular set of Bethesda conventions, ideals and standards seems like it’s still perfectly acceptable to the contemporary player population, even if the last chances have run thin to threadbare. Bethesda’s next great step in The Elder Scrolls must absolutely be a giant one, a reinstatement of true modernity, a technical leap in terms of engine and base capabilities as much as assets or interactivity. Yet, I really do hope it’s far from perfect whenever it arrives. I remain utterly committed to my belief that Bethesda games must be broken to really carry the charm. As much as I treasure the uniqueness of Bethesda’s interactive resolution and its offerings of so many spaces to explore and inhabit at your leisure, I think I treasure the naffness and glitchiness just as much. It feels so much more human than some gleaming, polished, hyper-tested piece of safely reliable AAA modernity. After all, by shamelessly erring with a characteristic certainty does Bethesda, inadvertently or otherwise, make its games like Starfield more equitable with us as flawed humans? Are we not all similarly naff, glitchy and imperfect? And don’t we love each other all the more for those imperfections? No? Oh well fuck off, then. I still love this game.

[21]

1. I'm so fucking sorry, Rollerdrome.

2. Weirdly, much has been made of a famed mission with zero-G combat in a space station and I have never seen this mission. WTF. I presumed it was some faction shit, but I've now done all the factions. Mystifying, but I don't want to go spoiler-digging to find it.

3. It remains to be seen if Ecliptic is just another set of premium cannon fodder ala Fallout 3’s Talon Company, or will get some decent fleshing out in Shattered Space. Seeing as that seems to point towards expanding the House Va'Ruun exotica, perhaps the poor old Ecliptics will get some humanising characters and content. That said, I think I found  their home base by accident and wiped the place out, just for laughs.

4. OK, fine, if you must… "ECLIPTICS? ECLIPDICKS, MORE LIKE!"

5. A notably crushing disappointment, I was initially thrilled to have Vae Victus turn into a top-secret quest-giver, then bitterly rug-pulled when they turned to be no different to the bounty boards. If there was ever a decent setup for challenging, Hitman-like stealth kills, this was it. And in true Bethesda fashion, they took the most boring way out.