Todd Howard wants you to play Starfield for years, but even some Bethesda superfans are already sick of it: "I've been playing Skyrim again, it just hits different"

gamesradar.com:

Starfield has been out for about six weeks, and as the dust settles on the honeymoon period, some players are finding that the spacefaring RPG just doesn't have the staying power of Bethesda's previous games, most notably Skyrim. 

Obviously, a lot of people like Starfield. It's been enormously successful and generally well-reviewed, even if it is one of the worst-reviewed games in Bethesda's library. Our Starfield review gives it a 5/5, and the writeup from our own Leon Hurley goes to show how engrossing the game can be if you really vibe with it. (I also maintain that it's unreasonable to expect games to be bottomless, especially when you've already had a good amount of fun with them, but I digress.) 

The point is, for a non-trivial amount of players, the jump from Skyrim's focused, handcrafted journey to Starfield's massive, largely procedurally generated universe has left them wanting more. This isn't an unheard-of take on Starfield, but what's struck me, six weeks into the life of a game that Todd Howard says was built with years of support in mind, is just how many Bethesda fans seem to be feeling the same exact weariness. 

"It's sad, but I can't bring myself to play anymore," reads a recent post from Reddit user CarefulMode. I've seen a zillion posts like this all over the internet; again, it's not news that everyone isn't head-over-heels in love with Starfield. But this innocuous post has racked up over 9,500 upvotes on the Starfield subreddit in a day, and the replies are filled with hundreds of like-minded Bethesda fans airing out their letdowns. To sum it up, some fans were hoping Starfield would be their next Skyrim, the next impossible-to-put-down adventure, and it's just not. 

"There's something missing in