Starfield is My New Diablo
Open World? Spaceships? Random Generation? Loot Everywhere? Yes Please!
I was pretty darn excited for Diablo IV over the course of the last several years. Unfortunately, while the final game is a technical achievement as far as artwork, sound effects, and music go — the core game isn’t very fun to play.
It’s designed more like a slow free-to-play slog than the Diablo games of the past, almost like it was meant to benefit from the still-unfinished Microsoft Activision deal that would have seen it show up on Game Pass. On a subscription service, its cruddy pacing and microtransactions wouldn’t be nearly as much of an issue as they are inside a full priced seventy-dollar game.
Game Pass just got another big RPG in Starfield, and its direct-action gameplay and single purchase monetization design couldn’t be more different from Diablo IV, yet I think it hits many of the notes I was expecting from the next generation of the iconic hack-and-slash loot series. Starfield takes Bethesda’s traditional open-ended design and mechanics, and pairs them with a wildly huge amount of content.
The game’s marketing promises 1,000 planets to explore, and indeed, there are a ton of procedurally generated worlds in the game to go along with its impressive fully written story. These worlds function…
