Starfield has been lingering at a "Mixed" Steam review score for basically the entirety of its life. The game's first major expansion, Shattered Space, came out just this week but is currently sitting at a "Mostly Negative" user score. Heck, even critic scores for Shattered Space are only at 52%. Still, Starfield is "the best game" Bethesda ever made, so long as you believe the words from Starfield design director Emil Pagliarulo.
In a recent interview with GamesRadar, Pagliarulo claims that while Starfield isn't "everyone's cup of tea" it is "also, in a lot of ways, the best game we've ever made." Those are some strong, bold statements to make when games like The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim exist.
"I think in a lot of ways, Starfield is the hardest thing Bethesda has ever done," Pagliarulo said. "We pushed ourselves to make something totally different. To just jam into an Xbox the biggest, richest space simulation RPG anyone could imagine. That we pulled it off makes Starfield something of a technical marvel. It's also, in a lot of ways, the best game we've ever made. But for us, most importantly, Starfield has its own unique personality, and now sits right next to Fallout and Elder Scrolls."
Perhaps most worrying about this sort of statement is how that this sort of thinking could push Bethesda to replicate Starfield's already outdated mechanics rather than refine or reiterate for future projects. One of the biggest complaints I had when reviewing Starfield is just how outdated a lot of the mechanics felt in comparison to other games released prior to it. A complacent Bethesda is a bad Bethesda.
Another option is that if you ask a musician what their favourite song that they made is they tend to say something they made recently because it's fresh, their hit song they made 15 years ago that everybody loves was made by another version of them 15 years ago, but something they made a month ago is close to their heart even if it doesn't sell well and the planets are randomly generated and boring.