I'll gladly admit it: Baldur's Gate 3 is the best RPG to come out in the last decade. 2023 has been a really stellar year in the video game world, but Larian Studios' deeply intricate tale set in the style of a Dungeons & Dragons campaign has been taking the world by storm since its full PC release date at the beginning of August, and its dominance has only continued after it came out on the PS5 on September 6—the same day Bethesda launched its highly hyped Starfield on Xbox Series X|S and PC.
Leading up to that fated day, I had noticed a bit of a flame war raging between the two fan factions in gaming forums and social media comment sections. It was a little one-sided, with BG3 devotees trashing Starfield a lot more frequently than the other way around, but that's understandable, to an extent.
An early access version of BG3 had been available for a long time on PC, so there were already tons of people who had hands-on experience with its progress, whereas the closest anyone outside the development team had come to Starfield was a nearly hour-long showcase that practically doubled the length of the Xbox Direct that served as its opening act. Meanwhile, there wasn't nearly as much of a PR campaign for BG3, but the popularity generated by its early access version was already showing signs of its inevitable success.
Personally, I was excited for both, but I had been leaning in favor of Starfield being the superior product. Even though I have a strong preference for fantasy over sci-fi, Bethesda was coming in with a proven track record. I'd been enamored with the Fallout games since their infancy as top-down PC exclusives, and while I'd been apprehensive to see them make the jump to 3D after Bethesda bought out the IP, I was pleasantly surprised with how the developers adapted it for the shift in playstyle (although Obsidian still did it better with New Vegas). Plus, Elder Scrolls. 'Nuff said.
I just want to live the quiet life in Chorrol, Oblivion Gates be damned.
Both games have been out on console for more than a month now, and while I feel they're leading the charge for the best RPGs of the year, Starfield is a very distant second. Baldur's Gate 3 is both a better RPG and a better game overall, hands down. It faithfully captures the feel of D&D with a system that not only handles turn-based squad combat masterfully (especially in co-op multiplayer) but also somehow manages to recreate that "you can do anything" feeling that's made tabletop gaming such an enjoyable pastime. Honestly, it's that feeling that made me fall in love with the first two Fallout games, and it's making me acknowledge the shortcomings since Bethesda took over the show.
That said, Bethesda Game Studios Executive Producer Todd Howard has recently stated that he expects people to be playing Starfield for a long time. This has earned him a fair bit of shellacking across the Internet, as a lot of players have been quick to report that they've already abandoned the game despite its massive exporable galaxy, with a common theme that there's just not much to do after completion of the first new game plus.
But me, I'm not laughing. In fact, I think I agree with Howard. In further fact, I'll do him one better: BG3 has won the race, but Starfield will win the marathon.
Starfield showcases certain issues that force me to manage my hype about Bethesda's next RPG.
I'm basing that opinion on a couple of things. First, there's Bethesda's track record. I already mentioned Fallout and The Elder Scrolls, which are the two big series that have put the company on the map in the first place, and along with Starfield, they're all highly recognizable, almost looking and feeling like the same game spread across three vastly different settings.
Aside from Fallout 76, which was a very experimental MMO project that doesn't really fit in with its other games' playstyle, there hasn't been a new Fallout entry since Fallout 4 in 2015, or a new Elder Scrolls since Skyrim in 2011. Admit it, even if you're not currently running through one of these games, you probably know someone who is. They're old standards with familiar mechanics that are easy to pick up and play, and that's a big reason why people, including me, go back to them again and again once the new releases lose their initial luster.
You already know exactly who this man is and what he's saying, don't you?
And the numbers are with me on that. With the release-date hype only finally starting to cool down, over the past 24 hours (at the time of this writing), Skryim has still been pulling a little over a quarter the search traffic of Starfield and just over a fifth of BG3's numbers, which isn't too shabby for a game that came out the same year that Adele's Rolling in the Deep and Bruno Mars' Grenade were at the top of the Billboard music charts. (Yes, those songs are old now. You're old. Deal with it.)
The other reason I believe Starfield will join the Bethesda trinity of games that you never truly grow out of is a little shakier logically, but hits me on a personal level, and that's No Man's Sky. Although it underwent a series of transforations since its bare-bones, lackluster release that would make Cyberpunk 2077 want to go back to the drawing board yet again, No Man's Sky, as it stands today, offers up space combat and exploration in a universe of more than 18 quintillion procedurally generated planets. But wait, there's more.
They may not say much, but they've got some style.
It encourages exploration and resource gathering from the various mineral resources, plants, and animals you'll find scattered across its massive maps; it introduces a concept of survivability as you explore planetary biomes ranging from perpetual deep freeze to the-air-is-actively-on-fire extreme heat, and it lets you construct your own bases from a wide variety of parts practically anywhere you want.
Thermal protection: falling.
And, uh, that's Starfield too, without even mentioning the similar end goal of reaching the center of the galaxy/unity and dimension jumping to the next playthrough. In fact, the biggest difference between the games is that Starfield adds in more of a mission-centric RPG focus, while No Man's Sky makes you spend countless hours seeking out knowledge stones just so you can begin to understand what any of the other sentient alien races are talking about in their native languages ("Grah! Grah!" notwithstanding).
I can't tell you how many hours I've sunk into No Man's Sky across multiple playthroughs on two different consoles, but suffice to say, it's a lot. For me, it's joined with The Elder Scrolls and Fallout as games I'll go back to when I have nothing better to play. And for the first time, I'm starting to think I'm finally done with it, because Starfield does everything it does and a whole lot more—I won't even go into detail on shipbuilding.
For all its faults—and there are many—Starfield just fits Bethesda's time-tested mold in a new and exciting setting, and while it'll never top Baldur's Gate 3 in terms of being a quality RPG, I expect people to still be going back to it when Miley Cyrus' Flowers and Doja Cat's Paint The Town Red count as oldies.
Create your own story in Bethesda's epic open-world (or open-galaxy) RPG. With factions to join, wars to fight, and over 1000 planets to explore, Starfield is the legendary RPG developer's most ambitious game yet.
