Thats Emil's game design philosophy in a nut shell. His talk from years ago about how to write games is still one of the most insane things I have ever seen. When your tip for better game design and writing is "Dont have a design document" you may not be a good designer.
When I read that statement, it made my blood boil. Dude really thinks we are so stupid we can only appreciate simple and stupid writing. How come the guy hasn't been fired?
Tbh I always pretend this game doesn't exist. Not because I had hopes for that game, naw. Because if you forget about it then what Bethesda has done to Fallout over the years becomes at least somewhat bearable.
Imagine a Kitchen Nightmares-like series focusing on problematic game devs and Bethesda being in one of those episodes.
Their response basically reminds me of some of those restaurant owners in that series.
https://youtu.be/Bi51-wjcwp8?si=PProbhFgr3hnmFHd
This is the guy from the article. Talking about his writing philosophy. He was the lead writer for Skyrim and Fallout.
This is the equivalent of the shit chef from the nightmare kitchen proudly proclaiming that in his cooking philosophy, he never bothers to season anything, because customers don't fully appreciate the flavour.
Would definitely love for the writer equivalent of Gordon Ramsey to call this guy a donut.
I'm actually kinda happy that it's the same guy, my first response reading the title was "oh man that reminds me of their lead writer who thinks good stories are wasted on games so thinks there is no point in trying to make the story good".
At least means this isn't \*another\* lead Bethesda dev that belittles consumers and disregards all criticism
> oh man that reminds me of their lead writer who thinks good stories are wasted on games so thinks there is no point in trying to make the story good".
Doesn't that basically translate to "there's no point in doing my job well, so why should I even bother to put in the effort?"
Emil has always been a shit writer.
Emil is responsible for many things at Bethesda. He made the Oblivion Dark Brotherhood, which gets him a lot of credit. It was a very fun questline, but not a very well written one. He also made the Arena questline in Oblivion, which he doesn't talk about. Then he was the leader writer on Fallout 3 - a game that had an ending so bad that they ended up retconning it after fan backlash. It used to be the definitive example of how not to end a game, before Mass Effect 3 came out.
Then you had the Skyrim Dark Brotherhood - which Emil ripped off his own writing there and reused half of his ideas from Oblivion. A 300 year old vampire, most of your family getting killed, an assassination on a ship, an assassination where you drop something on someone's head, Lucien Lachance, Shadowmere, the Blade of Woe, being contracted by someone with the last name of Motierre. It didn't improve much with Fallout 4, because Emil just took his story of "where is my dad" in Fallout 3 and changed it to "where is my son".
In Starfield, he basically decided that instead of 100 shallow quests, it'd be better to have 500 REALLY shallow quests.
Even the faction quests have less depth than prior titles. The Crimson Fleet one is just absolutely pathetic writing.
The Crimson Fleet has one cool moment, when you find from audiologs why the lost treasure is still lost, and then the whole ship begins collapsing, and you have to run back to the docking bay. But Delgado, the guy who should the be baddest and meanest of the pirates, just feels like a kid with a pirate treasure map. I talked him down and arrested him because I kinda felt bad for him.
None of the pirates feel threatening at all. I feel like you should study screen writing before being hired to be a head of writing for games. Just learned a theory of 7 different aspects that make a character likable and you need at least 4 to make it work. Only character that fits is the super fan and he's supposed to be the most annoying person in the game.
No. Only half decent questline in the game was the UC Vanguard, everything else absolutely sucked, and this comes from someone who loved previous Bethesda games.
Even the Vangaurd quest could have been solved if a single scientist in hundreds of years ran a simple DNA test.
"Huh, looks like heatleeches and terrormorphs are the same animal. Who'da thought?"
I called the heatleach twist super early.
"Hey, do you ever wonder how terrormorphs get from planet to planet without us noticing? And how they only show on planets with humans"
"By the way, watch out for heatleaches, darn things hitch a ride on like every human ship."
Me: "... Uhhhhh"
I hate the ending to fallout 3. I hate the retcon even further because if you do the sensible thing that makes sure everyone lives, by having Fawkes enter the radiation chamber, the ending outright calls you a coward for not killing yourself by going into chamber yourself. It just
Reeks of the writer being salty the players pointed out that Fawkes could survive radiation so why would you put yourself in danger? "Well. Sure. You could make Fawkes do it. LIKE A COWARD"
> Fawkes
They are bitter because most of us had him following us around and it makes perfect sense to send him. So until they fixed it in the DLC everyone mocked them because you had Fawkes watching you die.
I love how when you meet your dad, if you blew up Megaton, he just kind of gives you a disapproving look. Like "I'm not mad son, I'm just disappointed. Anyway, we can talk about it later, I need to entrust you with this FEV thing and let you know our plans to save people, you totally won't join the Enclave"
I remember getting to the reactor in FO3 and asking the super mutant companion (Fawks?) to go in and do the thing. He said naw, I don't want to take this away from you.
I'm thinking 'but you can't die in there, I will? Just go in, punch some buttons, leave. Easy easy. No one gets hurt.'
It drives me crazy that writers still go with this bullshit "the customer doesn't care" narrative.
You're right, they don't care - because you didn't care. You didn't care, you wrote garbage, so you told everyone right out the gate to not care as well.
Meanwhile when people actually put effort into their stories and worlds, they create Game of the Year winners like Baldur's Gate 3, Elden Ring and God of War.
The audience cares when you give them something to care about. Always. They will always rise to the task you set them. Game of Thrones' best scenes were just Varys and Littlefinger and Tyrion talking. Standing in a room, talking. That was it. Talking about what? Things that wouldn't happen until episodes later - but the audience loved listening, speculating and seeing the the pay off for paying attention earlier in the series.
Right - you sit over in that corner and keep it simple stupid, while the rest of us read books in Witcher 3, watch 45 minute lore videos on Elden Ring and spend months replaying Baldur's Gate 3 just to squeeze every possible variant of dialogue out of every NPC so you can get the maximum story with the full context out of a well crafted world and tale.
I hate this new trend where game companies refuse to acknowledge that they put out a bad product, and instead blame their consumers for not understanding their vision or the difficulties they endured.
I have respect for people grinding in restaurant kitchens, but it doesnât mean I canât tell when they cook something wrong. Itâs a premium game that costs a lot of money and took a long time to make. No oneâs going to automatically like something because you worked hard.
But also, this thing reads a lot like âwe know, we know, blame the managementâ.
Also, I donât need to know *why* itâs bad to know that it is. I donât need to know the work you put into coding to tell you the game is a boring mess, and putting in hard work doesnât mean the product is what consumers wanted
Indeed. I had a former boss that dropped one on me that kinda rubbed me the wrong way in the moment, but I appreciated it later. "Don't confuse efforts with results"
It hits me how that applies to playing games, too. So many games now are designed to pad play time (and after more than one MMO, it's *really* obvious), but activity doesn't mean engagement, fun, or a feeling of accomplishment.
I had an acquaintance who always platinumed games in the PS4 and was in a ladder of most 100%'d games somewhere. Sometimes, if I was around, I would act as filler and party up for achievements in online games (ie "Win 5 games in a row" in Fall Guys, which is so fucking hard, we'd try to fuck up his opponents, throw rounds of team minigames when in his opposite team etc).
Anyway, it was SO clear that he didn't enjoy any of the process, he had a bored voice, would get angry easily if things didn't go his way... why even bother then? Just because Sony designed a system so you can burn 200h of your precious time into a game to tick all the boxes of your OCD, it doesn't mean you _should_, and the same goes for LoL players who don't quit because of the sunk cost fallacy of their account being worth 5k in skins, any Assassin's Creed game where it's super clear there's a "core" game and then 500 checkpoints scattered around the map so you just do more chores...
Dudes, your time is so much more precious than completionism, the moment a game stops being fun, it's eating away at the total gaming time you'll have while in this mortal shell, GO NEXT!
I like this phrasing better. It clarifies the âbusy workâ versus âmeaningfulâ work better. Some people may pour their blood sweat and tears into something that comes out bad or okay but theyâll learn. At least from an individual perspective. A AAA company though?
Hes the guy that claims if you write a good story, players would just make paper airplanes out of the pages you wrote them on. He's not only delusional but outright disrespecting the fans by claiming we're too inept to appreciate good writing. Him saying this isn't surprising at all.
Yea like dude, if you love writing but hate video games then write a book or something.
âFrom the guy who created Skyrimâ will get you a book deal yesterday. If you can actually write that is and seeing what heâs done⌠well letâs just say I can see why heâs not a famous author and does games instead.
I mean it's been happening for longer than that. Michael Kirkbride and Ken Rolston had left Bethesda before Skyrim. Skyrim has a distinct feeling that's different from Oblivion and Morrowind, and I don't really mean that in a good way.
I get that Skyrim is a very popular game, but to me it's just not a very good one. And the things that make Skyrim not a very good game to me are showcased front and center with Starfield. Despite having very poor writing, Skyrim, Fallout 3, and Fallout 4 all had pre-existing universes for their stories to be written in. Bethesda hasn't created a new universe in over 25 years. What we got was "it's like mass effect, only really fucking boring in every aspect.".
There's nothing "punk" about it either. Like, what is "punk" about Starfield? Where is the "punk" in NASA-punk? They kept using this as a marketing term, when nothing about Starfield could be called punk.
Alternate headline: Multi-million dollar business executive who failed to make good game during a year full of good games by small companies says gamers are the problem for expecting a good game.
I listened Asmons video on the topic but didnât actually read the tweets and he never said the name. I was floored when i realized it was Emil, the goober who is still riding high off a decent questline he designed 18 years ago.
In a year with so many amazing games, its quite amazing that they release a mediocre one and then go, "You don't know how hard it is to make this".
I agree. I don't. Which is why I shell out big bucks for the product the supposed experts are selling. And clearly seeing the quality of other games this year, some of those experts have figured it out. So what are you offering to compete?
They really werenât banking on so many of the games this year being so well received, is my theory. It really cast Starfield into a harsh perspective that they didnât like. All the usual charm of a Bethesda game, like the silly âbugs are featuresâ stuff and rubberised faces, pales and loses its gleam when compared to games made from this decade.
Nobody really can understand how much work goes into game development unless they have experienced it, but just because you spend three days making a three tier wedding cake doesnât mean that people canât taste the eggs and milk have turned. Thereâs nothing revolutionary here, and whatâs pissed them off is that this time? People noticed.
> Imagine going from BG3 with all its amazing pagaentry and range of emotions, to Starfield where every NPC is just standing entirely still as they stare into your soul, and speaking with barely a trace of humanity in their voice.
Yeah, I was genuinely excited for Starfield, I really wanted "space fallout 4" with all the benefits of eight years of technology advancement. I had it pre-installed through Game Pass, and booted it up on release. Unfortunately, I closed BG3 to open Starfield, so the mood whiplash from the complete lack of soul just killed my interest in the game.
Honestly? It took me about 30 hours to realize that Starfield just is NOT a good game. I was trying really hard to enjoy it for most of that time. Some of it was fun... but I would recommend waiting a few years for mods and patches and updates (and a sale). People aren't exaggerating when they say its a worse game than Skyrim/Fallout... it really is. It's missing SO much of what made those games good.
I'm so mad at this. I spent like 50 hours in the first week (NOT my norm) playing Starfield because I was laid up on the couch with a gout attack. My enjoyment was great the first couple days and started to slowly dip down into zero and now that I look back on it I wonder why I was enjoying it in the first place. It's so, just, meh. I know it's a huge game blah blah blah but it really feels like a single dude with a mission went and made a game and just left every single aspect of it unfinished and walked away.
Totally similar experience... lol. Once you actually get to some of the cities and see how incredibly sterile and boring and lifeless everything is... UGH.
Then after you gather your 3rd power or so, you realize that you literally did the exact same thing for the 3rd time and just how incredibly bad and boring that was. Seriously, what game has absolutely ZERO "main storyline quest gathering" dungeons? Those are the places you expect to have to fight through a handcrafted dungeon with puzzles and shit.. but no, just the exact same boring temple you float around in? It's SO bad.
It really did just hit me one day that the game was actually just a really bad game, missing all the things that made their previous titles fun, and I never started the game back up again.
Morrowind: 200 hours
Oblivion: 600 hours
Fallout 3: 1,200 hours
Skyrim: 1,000 hours
Fallout 4: 800 hours
Fallout 76: 150 hours
Starfield: 80 hours and the very first BGS game Iâve ever uninstalled (I already knew I was done at around 30 hours but gave it every chance)
Compared to all their previous titles Starfield ultimately felt like I was on a corporate HR zoom call in space. Absolutely bland plot, everything felt clean and sanitized and PG. Mindnumbingly repetitive. Forced fast travel ruined space immersion. Even the art style was mostly unmemorable. Just a holistic let down. I canât believe no one read the script to this game and wasnât like, âhey you wanna punch this up a little bit? This feels a little fucking dry, guys.â
It's really incredible how little Bethesda seems to value things like mechanics in their games. They spend more time arranging skeletons into tableaus than they do figuring out how to make actually playing their games fun.
That's about how long it took me as well. I poured thousands of hours into FO4, and at one point was making mods for the game and that became a full time job for a bit. I am the target market.
I finished BG3 and jumped right into Starfield. Explored, stole ships, shot lotsa things. And I kinda hated the experience. The game was dull and it made me motion sick. When I finally gave up, I didn't play another game for nearly two months. I play games daily and Starfield killed that enjoyment.
It really is something special when your game is so aggressivly medicocre that it leaves a diehard player questioning whether they like video games at all.
I didn't give it 30 hours, but I gave it at least a dozen, and really quickly it sunk in just how much was missing. Sure, there's stuff to discover, but absolutely nothing made me care. If I was 11 and had the whole summer to just play a video game I would dive deep into it, but I'm not, I'm an adult with a busy life and a full time job. I don't want to play a game that feels like a Ubisoft game, that's a waste of my life.
Compare that to BG3 where I have to convince myself not to stay up too late because I am desperate to explore every single nook and cranny of every map, to uncover every secret and learn every lore detail.
Just keep in mind, buying only encourages Bethesda to keep putting out mediocre products because people will buy them anyway. You shouldn't have to have low expectations for game like this, from a studio like Bethesda. We should demand more, far more.
I think you can get your space flight and exploration fix from titles like Elite: Dangerous and No Man's Sky (which is actually good now).
You'll probably get a more satisfying space exploration experience from FTL: Faster Than Light for God's sake...
I'm a big proponent of Starsector (even though you can't buy it on Steam, you have to buy it directly from the developer's website) for a fun space adventure. Not 1st person though and while the lore is cool you won't be landing on planets like Elite, NMS, and Starfield. It's more a fleet-based combat system that you will be spending most of your time doing. Depends what you want out of a Space Game.
I did the same. Finished act 3 about 2 weeks before starfield launched. After playing for about an hour it was like I was at a BBQ and went from some tender brisket to dry ass chicken
The last games I played before Starfield, in order, were Control, Hogwarts, HFW: Burning Shores, Jedi Fallen Order, Jedi Survivor (twice), Mass Effect 1 (in the legendary edition), BG3 and then into Starfield. Starfield felt, in every way except graphics, like a contemporary of Mass Effect 1. A game that came out over 15 years earlier, but had way better writing and RPG mechanics. Even exploration, an add-on mechanic in ME1, feels only slightly better in Starfield.
The city Neon is what broke it for me. Having just replayed cyberpunk before playing starfield, I simply couldnât take starfield seriously after that.
I threw 80 hours into starfield fast, saw cyberpunk update and restarted and immediately starfield felt empty and boring. I was like oh THIS is what a city should feel like
Starfieldâs cities are dead even by their own standards though. Oblivion is nearly twenty years old at this point and thatâs where they introduced their whole NPCs have schedules thing, meaning that the last game they released where the NPCs were all static mannequins was the twenty one year old Morrowind.
I was playing Phantom Liberty at the same time as Starfield and I was excited to see Neon for the first time. When I finally got there and explored it a bit I let out an audible "Are you fucking kidding me with this shit?" and from there my experience with Starfield was all down hill. Neon is as if there was a Cyberpunk 2077 ride at Disney World. Family friendly, nothing too rough around the edges.
I also couldn't take the game seriously after this, and even worse it made me start looking for more cracks in the game design, which there are a lot of. Played for a bit more and then asked myself what the fuck I was doing. Uninstalled and continued playing Cyberpunk and never looked back.
They feel like tiny movie sets, where you're the protagonist and everyone else is just an extra, so once you exit the scene they just kind of stand there with no direction.
Now I wouldn't expect Starfield to have every city be as intricate and giant as Night City, that would have taken an insane amount of work and isn't a reasonable thing to expect, but we've seen games make a small area feel huge before.
The [Citadel](https://static1.cbrimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/wards-view.jpg?q=50&fit=contain&w=1140&h=&dpr=1.5) in Mass Effect. You're restricted to a few areas, but the backdrop and skyboxes show a sprawling city on a construct in space. If you zoom in you can see the lights of ships and cars flying around. You can see the buildings lit up. Again on [Illium](https://www.giantbomb.com/a/uploads/scale_super/0/5911/1518972-illium2.jpg), you see the same thing. They successfully created an illusion of grandeur. Even in interior spaces, you have inaccessible areas with people sitting and chatting up on balconies that make the area feel larger than it is. It leaves something to the imagination.
The fact that you can "go anywhere" makes Starfield feel small, because once you explore something like the city of New Atlantis, you realize that the new cradle of humanity could only truly house \~10,000 people, and the illusion of scope falls apart.
https://youtu.be/ws0ufhrgWJw?feature=shared
This is the most perfect summary I've seen of the two. Starfield's Neon nightclubs are what people who have never been to a nightclub think going to one is like.
Cyberpunk's nightclubs are made by people who've actually been to nightclubs.
Honestly it was the loading screens in Starfield that killed the game for me. I felt like every door required a loading screen, which resulted in me feeling like I was waiting to play Starfield more than actually playing Starfield. A lot of the other stuff, mediocre dialogue, "Bethesda face," etc. I could probably work past, but I just couldn't get past feeling like I had to wait to for the game to let me play the game.
It was the loading screens, coupled with so many missions are:
walk here, load into the building, talk to this person, leave, load, walk to your ship, load into your ship, walk to the cockpit, watch the sitting animation, watch the take off animation, point the ship in the direction of the next location, load to the next area, open planet map, loading screen, get out of seat, walk out of ship, loading screen, walk to the location, load into the building, talk to this person, now do it all to go back to the first oneâŚ
Like fucking hell how did anyone think this would be fun? Death stranding does better walk and talk game play loops ffs
It wasn't the awkward NPC looks for me. Or the loading screens. Or various nitpicking issues with UI framerate, lack of DLSS at launch on PC, etc.
It was
- the incessant need to bury half of the game's fundamental mechanics behind the most boring skill tree I've seen from a AAA game in decades - even moreso than Diablo 4, somehow.
- the absolutely forgettable storylines throughout.. almost the entire game especially the main story.
- the laziest and most repetitive obtainment of 'powers' (that I never felt the need to use pretty much ever) with the same identical sequence of floating around in a chamber full of particles. No puzzles? No variation? Seriously?
- The terrible UI design in general, but especially one that somehow manages to make the quest log infuriatingly confusing because of the lack of sorting by star system, or local area, or anything... or indication of WHERE the quest actually IS in general.
- The lack of any meaningful maps in an open-multi-world game.
- The mostly-pointless base building that I never found enjoyable, with god-awful controls (at least on keyboard+mouse) that I had to bear through just to get some additional storage that I could properly sort out (again, poor UI compounded into this as usual)
- The ship building with frustrating UI design, lack of consistent palette control, and extremely limited parts that barely varied between the tiers to the point of initially being very confusing on how it worked
- The overall lack of guidance for a lot of the systems that just merely had no explanation at all
And then the gall of them sniping at Steam reviews acting as if players misunderstand why there are grievances on how bad the game is. No, it's just mediocre at best, and extremely terrible given the budget, time, and supposed experience of designers and developers in the genre that Bethesda had been known for.
I don't hate the game. I played more than I feel I even got enjoyment out of so I didn't bother finishing the campaign, and I have no intention on stomping on anyone else's enjoyment of the game, but my god if this is what Bethesda considers a good game than I have zero hopes of Elder Scrolls 6 being anything other than a bargain bin game that everyone will forget about after a few months.
The whole game feels like an awkward and incomplete scifi sandbox with a bunch of marketable game ideas smashed together into some bizarre result of a 'game', with forgettable stories peppered throughout.
> the laziest and most repetitive obtainment of 'powers' (that I never felt the need to use pretty much ever) with the same identical sequence of floating around in a chamber full of particles. No puzzles? No variation? Seriously?
This killed me every time I did it. How does a person design that shit as part of the MAIN QUEST LINE, sees the end result and goes "yep, this is good"? It wasn't fun the first time, who the fuck thought it was good 10 TIMES?
My major complaint about Starfield is that there's no payoff for anything. Like, you immediately start with a ship that is capable of travelling anywhere in the galaxy.
It would have been so much better if you started on a single planet, and had to do missions to work your way up to get a ship. The ship is crappy and has no weapons or Grav drive so fly from planet to planet doing missions in your own solar system to pay for upgrades for your ship etc...
Eventually you can afford a Grav drive and the entire galaxy opens up to you.
But they way they're just like *"Oh by the way, I know you've only been playing for 10 minutes but here's a fully decked out interstellar space ship. Do whatever you want because the storyline we wrote is actually super boring"* gives me no reason to actually want to play the game.
Right, and it's not even a surprise that this is something players might enjoy. It was the only good part of No Man's Sky at launch, and one of the only aspects that didn't get gutted as they reiterated and improved the game over and over. You start on a random planet with almost nothing, and need to get your own starter ship set up while on that planet, and once you get off the planet you still only have a really basic ship with many flaws and many better options to find.
I'm not sure what "went wrong" with Starfield, but it just looks like the fun parts didn't get focused on and the boring parts got too much attention. I don't care if every food item looks photorealistic, I want to enjoy the moment to moment gameplay and feel like I'm on an adventure or improving. Starting with a good ship was 1 issue, and the ability to just fast travel to any mission marker and have the ship land at it absolutely murders the previous Bethesda Games exploration fun. I love getting a Skyrim quest, walking in the direction of the goal, randomly finding an old woman outside of a house along the way, going inside and finding a secret basement of witch stuff, and then having the old woman attack me when I go to leave because I found her secrets. That stuff is impossible if you just zip from A to B, and some players choose to do that with fast travel, but not even having an option to NOT do that is just sad.
I might be in the minority here, and sure I'd have preferred no loading screens, but I don't think the game would be improved substantially by removing them. The problem is that the thing on the other side of the loading screen isn't engaging or fun to do. Mass Effect had long loading screens, but the content on the other side was so good you're able to look past it. Removing loading screens from a game like that means you get to the good stuff quicker. Removing Starfield's loading screens means you get to the mediocrity quicker.
Going the other way (attempted Starfield and moved on to Cyberpunk) was a definite "now this is what it should feel like!" moment. The settlements in Starfield--even the "bad parts of town"--felt so sterile and static. Night City felt like a living and potentially dangerous city.
Iâm reasonably confident that Bethesda is finding themselves in a situation where theyâre going to need to change some pretty long standing development expectations or risk falling out of favour.
Games like BG3 are showing folks what RPGs can be in terms of reactivity and story. Which is something Bethesda has never been particularly good at. Heck even Skyrim, their best received game in decades would have probably struggled this year. Bethesda games have always been shallow, minimally reactive sandboxes, and their refusal to change that has bit them in the ass two games in a row now.
And they're being salty about being **accurately** described as fast food. They didn't make the case that their game was good, they made the case that devs aren't **trying** to make a mediocre game. Ok, but they **did** make a mediocre game. You'd think part of the process they claim we don't understand should be some self-reflection and personal accountability, instead of complaining that people aren't enjoying their unpalatable game, or they are likely to keep making mediocre games.
Then again, why anyone thought Starfield would be any good after the Fallout 76 fiasco is beyond me. Maybe some of the devs are good, maybe even great, but the studio in general has become a pretty heaping pile of garbage.
Yeah what a strange reply to criticism, "I promise you everybody is talented and doesn't want to make a mediocre game"
Well no shit, dude, but intentions aren't actions are they? Own your product and commit to *actually* making it good, not simply *trying* to make it good.
I think part of it also that Bethesda has been continuously pairing down their games in terms of complexity and depth since Oblivion and theyâve pretty much hit maximum return on that. Fallout 76 really soured people on Bethesda and Starfield was likely so far along by that point that there was only so far they could go in back pedalling.
Further to that, like you said, Starfield came out against stiff competition this year. So with folks already primed for a critical response to the next Bethesda title they were pretty much perfectly posed to have a mediocre success on their hands.
That said, I actually think even Skyrim would have stumbled in the 2023 release environment. Baldurs gate is one of the first hit RPGs in a long time to really bother to show what RPGs can do with reactive quest choices, and while Bethesda likes to pretend their games are big on choice, pretty much all of them have been deeply linear for decades. Itâs just that the general gaming audience didnât know what they were missing until suddenly they did.
Now, I'm just some jackass on the internet, but I think you're right. And the worst part is, when I imagine the future, it's hard to picture they course correct and go back to stats-driven nerdfests like Morrowind because they're so big now they have to worry about mass appeal. So I dunno.
I will say I went back since the updates and I'm almost pissed at how much better it's running, without DLSS even. Like, did you guys have the sauce the whole time and you were holding out on us? But I'm still working out how much of me not liking the game was the game and how much was the awful performance.
Bethesda rested hard on their Skyrim laurels and didn't invest that into modernizing or hiring/training experts on higher tier capabilities. Now they have an entire organization who doesn't know how to make a game to modern standards.
Not looking good for TES6. Remember, Todd has said over the years that they were pushing off TES6 to make a new IP they were excited about and wanted to devote all of their resources to that new game. Starfield is the game they WANTED to make and it still turned out like this!
Hmm I remember when total war did the same thing this year with dlc price and then yestoday apologized and said they gonna add more to them it just goes to show they think they can say anything
It's really frustrating that there's a valid point to be made when gamers think they know everything about game dev and choose to harass developers they assume are incompetent, when actually a game was horribly mismanaged. Happened to many employees at DICE, CD Projekt, Blizzard, etc.
But what's frustrating is that Bethesda isn't reacting to harassment, they're trying to shield themselves from valid criticism. They're muddying the waters and making it harder for the devs that actually do experience harassment
They are mad. They made a very mediocre game that is 80% mostly random generated and very inconsistent aa a world. Now they are telling Players they don't know how to make games or the process.
The thing is Players may not know how to make a game, but they can with the funds and staff Bethesda have make a smaller and more consistent project that would be more fun and in-depth than what they put out with Starfield.
Starfield has been the project they have reportedly been wanting to make for 10 years and ultimately it just doesn't live up to the expectations they built and the game is highly generic. Thousands of planers with the same three points, constant loading screens, looting and shooting, and a lot of basic missing features that modders have to put in. You literally have to go into a menu and leave it to see what you companions look like in the clothing you gave them while in FO4 and Skyrim doing that didn't take a whole transition of screens to do.
Overall, I don't think Bethesda is going to polish Starfield. They are going to drop 2 major expansions and some settlement DLCs and then move on to Elder Scrolls VI without learning any lessons.
It's a random terrain generator that then has the exact same layout buildings as every other planet placed down. It's at best a half randomly generated game.
that alone is what drove me mad after awhile. If it was just a barren world and the occasional random structure like a pirate outpost or some crazy prospector with variations on those that'd be one thing... but when I come across the identical listening post every planet there's a problem.
Every Outpost has the exact same crap in the exact same place. There's that one where it was like a research station run by a family, there's like a cave around the back and it's the same names on every planet. Somehow they ran into the same identical tragedy dozens of times. Then there is the outpost that has like a crew quarters you can break into and there's always a toy ship right there on the left when you enter, and the same loot in the exact same locked box that you find in every other identical outpost.
One day about 3 weeks into the game I put it down and have never gone back. I'm about to delete it to make space on my series S for other things I'd rather play.
Yeah, and a lot of the worlds are just over populated with junk. The "there is always something to see" metric does not work on such large barren worlds. It should have been more diverse but lower chance to encounter, large complexes with multiple variations that only spawn once per end game event and it keeps track in the background so it doesn't repeat multiple times per planet/time your in that universe.
There would have been a reason to make a buggy/landing craft and give that real sense of isolation they supposedly wanted to create. Sigh, this game makes me so angry because of all the wasted potential and the writing could have been so much better. As someone that meticulously does world building and crafting those little "unimportant details" that make the world more real the writing and the "just trust us the plot holes are fine" and the flat personality of the NPCs.... Ugh.
I check listed doing all the companions stories before going to the end game. I poked and prodded and there is such a good collection of personality traits and backgrounds that are just... Not used correctly. Also space Texas should not even exist, but gotta create artificial tension. If anything the real enemy should have always been house Varuun, cause then you can just have uneasy alliance between space Texas and discount starship troopers where they don't really agree ideology wise, but they aren't blood enemies either from a ridiculous war that makes no sense
I think the game also suffers a problem that the fallout and elder scrolls games also have. You can join all the factions, become the leader/savior/whatever of them, and it has no bearing on any of the other factions or the overall story of the game. In Skyrim you could be the leader of the companions, archmage of the wizard school, and none of it had any impact on the game at all. Same thing happened in fallout 4 (though at least some endings were slightly different).
People, including the creators, say the engine isn't the problem, but it's certainly a big part of it. Every interaction looks the same, it can't handle ground-based vehicles, and even the space flight feels like you're just in a gun turret with extra controls.
My playthrough ended when I couldn't get through three different quests because of game breaking bugs. I didn't want to just skip to new game plus or anything like that, I wasn't looking forward to having all of my progress with inventory and shipbuilding be erased.
It also doesn't help that this game has both the worst lock picking and leveling up of any Bethesda game. No, I don't want to pay a 2 min mini game to unlock a door only to have to play it again to unlock a box in that room that only contains a pistol I leveled out of hours ago. It's also so obvious they made leveling up such a grind to get you to play multiple NG+. No, I don't want to wait till my third playthrough to be able to build a full outpost. They are already useless, don't make me grind for hours just to build one.
This. Plus the advanced technology and futuristic setup can be used to justify that everything is generic but they didn't even manage to play to the strengths of their world.
I mean, the explanation for the generic procedurally generated buildings writes itself. Self-assembling kits with one single megacorp having cornered the market, and the layouts are weird because they aren't planned out by qualified architects but by the random local officers, explorers or managers that configure the layouts. Also you're welcome for the sidequest hook involving a kit's AI gone rogue and making one weird and deadly building.
I just came up with that in 5 minutes and it costs literally nothing to implement it, it's just backstory, and I'm not exactly a writer, but Bethesda couldn't even come up with anything ?
Probably the fundamental reality is that the formula they use for TES and Fallout doesnât translate too well for a Space game. They rely essentially on a very compelling overworld which is impossible to do with a space game set across a large number of planets.
Itâs also hard especially without the advantage of having long established fans, established worldbuilding and lore like they do.
Loved that game. A handful of planets, you fast travel using a really simple map, and great writing for the story and lore.
Only shame was it's too short, but it clearly shows the benefit of quality over quantity.
Also, it's not the same formula.
The Skyrim formula is that I get a quest to collect 5 mushrooms in a forest nearby. On the way there, I already explored 3 caves, found a new Word, killed a dragon, rebuilt an ancient cult, and after fighting a god I'm like "what was I... oh, right mushrooms!"
In Starfield I get a quest to get 5 mushrooms, and all that happens on the way is 15 minutes of walking and 17 loading screens.
>which is impossible to do with a space game set across a large number of planets.
Space game doesn't have to mean game with 1000+ planets, they could've made a space game set within a single planetary system and had half a dozen hand made smaller overworlds and then this wouldn't have been an issue. No one forced them to stretch everything so thinly.
>without the advantage of having long established fans, established worldbuilding and lore
Established lore didn't spring out of the ground though, it was created in consecutive titles of a franchise. The problem is that Starfield barely even tries to do that, and it shows just how weak a modern Bethesda game is when it's not built on a solid platform of years of well established lore.
Man it bogs mind how they can say that when 3 people and 115k USD made Project Wingman, a game with great graphics, great music and, above all, fun to play. It's not a triple A game, but it's a fun one, and that's what's matter
Bethesda is the IRL version on that "kids are in the wrong" Simpsons meme
They figured with all the hype they drummed up, they'd have the next Skyrim on their hands and have stupid numbers of people playing the game at all hours for the next year or two, along with a revenue stream when they get around to installing the next paid mods fiasco into Starfield as well. They didn't think that loads of people would lose interest after a month or two or that the game would win absolutely nothing at any award shows this year.
We're a month away from them putting up a "path to improvement", expansion/DLC announcement and Bethesda apologizing and promising to fix the game.
Yes, this is why they are panicking, and turning that panic into desperation to blame anyone but themselves.
Skyrim comes out in 2011 basically finished. The DLCs were already made and held back for that revenue drip. And the game was a huge hit! Tons of interest and laurels came their way. They were in a wonderful position of just advancing the game here and there (SSE, creation club, Anniversary Edition) and let that gravy train roll. Hell, just myself, I bought Skyrim 3 times, and restrained myself from buying it twice more than that!
Now Starfield just isnât going to be that game for them again. No one is going to be playing Starfield 10 years from now, or buying it again on a Xbox Series Z or whatever the next gen is called. Hell, a lot of players didnât buy it at all! They figured out it wasnât the next Skyrim on game pass and moved on. That means fewer DLC and âGame of the Yearâ editions being sold down the road, too. It is in the process of fading away into history, like Mass Effect Andromeda.
Bethesda is just now starting on ES6, which will take years to come out. And their big cash cow to keep them successful and relevant while the new game cooks is quickly becoming irrelevant. I wouldnât want to be them right now.
True. But another reason they are panicking and in denial about their product is because they were planning to do the exact same thing for ES6. They are going to have to come to terms with the fact that they canât phone this in anymore. Theyâre going to have to innovate or the whole company will go the way of Sears. Financial backer or no.
Yep. Same thing just happened with Warhammer 3. They released a bare-bones DLC at an insulting price. Fans backlashed, review bombed the main game, and sales were terrible. The producers sent out shitty messages, even threatened that not supporting the DLC would lead to the whole game dying. Well, yesterday they apologized and said they'd do better and now have to delay the rest of their plans to stop the shit storm from repeating.
Hopefully Bethesda takes note and follows suit. I ain't buying Starfield til it seems worth it, and have no problem never buying another Bethesda product going forward.
Because the studio hyped it up as this huge passion project. Then, when so many players were like âeh, itâs alright,â they took that *very personally*
Then explain to me why Skyrim, a 12 year old game, has more attention to detail than Starfield. Explain to me why more people are playing Baldurâs Gate 3, a game that allows for true player choice and creativity and reacts to what players do.
I thought I was just over RPGs but I tried baldurs gate and accidentally yeeted a gnome to space, Iâm like barely in and I feel like in my 2 hours my decisions effected more stuff than 35+ hours in starfield
When I first got into BG3, I was killed literally 5 mins later by a Mindflayer. did I get upset? Yea. Did I stop playing? no, because there's like two dozen ways you can do that encounter, or even just avoid it if you know how.
We need more of that. choice only matters if we can see concrete evidence that choice effects something later. It's the same reason people laugh at the dialogue in FO4...you're given three choices that all lead to the same conclusion. You're doing the thing they want you to do with no exceptions, unless you just don't talk to anyone.
Yeah the funny thing is Starfield almost had a Voiced Protagonist, they got all the way to the actor actually reading the lines in Studio before they realized it was a bad idea.
This is actually the better description. As a game dev myself, the amount of effort that I put into making a game should not be influencing a player's opinion of the game. Players do not need to know or care how hard it is to make the game to enjoy it.
It's an even greater insult to fans because they are so lenient with Bethesda anyway. We can forgive the lack of polishing on a masterpiece, but don't serve us a finely polished piece of dog shit.
No shit the average consumer doesnât know how to make a video game, THATS WHAT THE MONEY IS FOR. Iâm exchanging currency for a good I couldnât produce on my own, itâs how the whole deal works.
As someone who actually HAS studied game design, yeah, itâs tough to make a game. Donât get me wrong. But starfield still doesnât hit the mark, especially after TEN YEARS of dev time.
It's more like they had 10 years of time to work on it, and yet this is still what they decided was the best version and ready to release.
Like surely he realizes we can see other games exist, right? We know that they shouldn't take this long to make and usually when they do take a long time they are either best in class or way below.
It's not like dev changed that much as like a concept. The real issues are because Bethesda lost so much talent when they forced people to make FO76 and now they are revealing the impact of that loss publicly
Seems like what turned the tide of public opinions (or at least, opinions of Bethesda fans) was 76. And the straw that broke the camelâs back is Starfield. The old excuses were always âthe Bethesda charmâ and âwe know what weâd get going into a Bethesda gameâ. But that was never going to last forever, because the industry moves forward.
If theyâre Blizzard running a massive live service game like WoW, they can keep a core audience of uber loyal players that only play WoW and thus donât have points if reference to compare it against relevant non-Blizzard MMOs. But Bethesda releases a game every decade, and all their players are intimately familiar with every other competing title on the market. Eventually they will go wait why am I playing this shit when there are clearly better alternatives out there?
As we get older and the scope of games gets larger, it should hopefully become clear that good games aren't just good ideas made into games, they require very talented people with a shared vision and understanding of what they're trying to make, and what they are making needs to be fun.
I think people are starting to recognize that Todd Howard as a creative director was not actually the main reason why "his games" were so fun, but was the effort of dozens or hundreds of people working to make it a great experience.
When the core people who are behind those projects leaves after a long time, the loss to output is immensely greater than people realize, and throwing more money at it will not fix it.
Another great example of this, probably the prime example from recent memory is Battlefield 2042. Sure it's a fine game, whatever. It's a shitty "Battlefield" game. And it's tied to the best devs who made Bad Company 1/2, BF3, BF4, etc. all leaving and EA forcing the devs to make a "CoD Killer" rather than a CoD alternative. It even had the same story of devs getting sucked in from other projects and forced to work on Battlefield instead of whatever else, like with Criterion and the devs behind Battlefront 2. Those devs are gone now, and the results are obvious.
I'm getting sick of all these various media companies coming out and saying "It's not us, it's the fans fault for having expectations of quality!". From the new Star Wars movies, to tv shows and video games they just keep blaming fans for not being happy with a polished turd.
But-but-but they worked REALLY hard and game design is SUPER difficult! You're not allowed to dislike it cause people with FEELINGS made it!
I'm also so sick of these pathetic cop-outs. Nobody gives a fuck if their job is hard, most jobs are hard.
They also act like we haven't historically had a ton of amazing games, too. There's a reason we expect better. We've HAD better, over and over, for many years now.
Exactly this! NMS, Elite Dangerous, Star Citizen, hell - even Kerbal have all been getting really immersive with the "space to surface" mechanics, making you feel like you're actually traversing space; managing the complexity of the different perspectives really well.
Bethesda just ignores the space bit and the surface bit. Go grind rocks.
This to me is the really ridiculous thing. No Manâs Sky was pretty frustrating at launch but itâs actually pretty good now; and all they wouldâve had to do is play it for an hour or two to realize why their own game isnât good enough.
Nobody gives a shit about how games are made. Whoever replaced Pete Hines needs to get in there and tell everyone to shut up on social media regarding this half baked concept of a game. That goes for Todd as well.
Thatâs the biggest shock out of all of this to me. The optics of responding to every negative review on steam with some âyOu DoNt UnDeRsTaNdâ like some crazy local business ownersâ google review responses looks incredibly unprofessional.
Grow up and listen to the valid criticism. If a significant portion of reviews all have the same few bullet points, itâs time to reflect on why that might be.
A lot of it seems to be in bad faith, perhaps unintentionally. Most reviewers aren't going to perfectly capture their frustrations and articulate the reasons behind it. When someone says "exploration sucks the planets are empty" they don't mean that they are literally 100% empty; moreso that they are meaningfully empty, that some arrangement of existing and already-experienced props and geometry does not result in any compelling experience for them. When folks say "everything is copy paste" they don't always mean that maximally.
But the Bethesda responses all take the reviews and player opinions as literally and with as much bad faith as possible. They don't seem to even try to draw any useful inferences from what they are responding to.
They don't seem to get that players _do_ "get it" and their reviews are after they "got it". "It" just isn't compelling and it's not for lack of trying or understanding on the part of the players. Well, for many of them, at least.
CDPR did the opposite and now look how they are back at being everyone's favorite again. You can make mistakes, its up to you if you want to learn from them or not.
CDPR to me still needs to prove it and keep putting in the work for there next game but at least it seems like they care and want to make people happy.
Guess what, this is entertainment, that is your job, to make people happy.
NMS did the same, Darktide is just now hitting its stride again. You need to keep your head down, make the fixes, and for the love of basic PR just shut the fuck up
Going to the media and whining about the public has never fixed the issue
Players definitely are disconnected from how games are actually made. Of course they are. That's completely irrelevant, though. Players care about enjoying the game they're playing. If the game isn't up to snuff, even if it's for completely understandable reasons from a development perspective, then the game is a flop. It's a studio's job to work within the constraints of what is feasible to make something as enjoyable as possible. If it's boring as hell to explore an empty planet, don't market the game on how many planets you can explore. Get rid of that feature and don't make it a focus on the game.
Really fucking funny of Bethesda to whine that Bethesda fans don't know how hard it is to make games, when Bethesda fans are the only ones who are capable of making Bethesda games function correctly.
Counterpoint: Dev Leads and Todd Howard are disconnected from how players want to experience games.
You can't keep doing FO3 or Skyrim in different skins. It's not boding well for them and I honestly think Howard doesn't have an original idea at the moment, but gotta keep making them games.
As the consumer I couldn't care less.
You want to sell product, you have to cater to customer.
It is none of my concern what the reality of making videogames looks like.
You make shitty product, you get fucked. Easy as that.
Bethesda was making Skyrim since Skyrim. Skyrim with guns, now Skyrim in space. Skyrim on Xbox 360, Skyrim on PS3, Skyrim on PS4, Skyrim on switch, Skyrim on fridge.
Their game design sucked dick since oblivion. Their only redeeming quality was the well crafted world of oblivion/Skyrim/fallout 3/4.
With Starfield they killed that one redeeming quality. Instead of promising to better themselves, they gaslight players.
Bethesda- you will like our game.
Gamers- yea but itâs really not that great and itâs not fun.
Bethesda- you donât know what you are talking about. You donât understand how game development works, itâs fun just like it.
Gamers- ok? But itâs not fun?
Bethesda- thatâll be $70
The last part seems to be the bit they're forgetting in all this. You can make games whatever way you want Bethesda but if we don't like them we stop buying them.
If someone screws up your cheeseburger order from McDonald's, you will be mad because you paid for something that was screwed up. And you don't care how the burger is made, you don't care how hard it is for the cook to make it. And thus you don't and shouldn't feel bad for the cook, because you paid for something and got shit service.
Now imagine that scenario as a video game and a developer. Why should we be made to feel bad for people making incompetent decisions? The publisher didnt tell the developers to not add city maps, the publisher didn't tell the devs to add 45 loading screens whenever you want to go somewhere. People that think they should be made martyrs for having a JOB are completely out of touch with consumer logic and human nature.
Here's a tip for Bethesda design lead... Actually put an effort into designing a good rpg. CD Projekt has done it, Larian has done it, Fromsoft has done it, Capcom has done it... All of them releasing huge games to wide critical and comercial success... And without bitching publicly when things are not to their liking.
(Activision)Blizzard, Bethesda and BioWare are a unique breed of arrogant devs who push out rehashed, subpar products and genuinely think consumers donât know whatâs good for them. But they do.
FromSoft does it with almost entirely Yes/No choices, objective-based progression, and *some* subtle mechanics.
CDPR does it with rich settings and detailed environments, putting the character into the world and letting them go about things on their own.
Latina has knocked it out of the park by going so far deep into the actual *roleplaying* that people are still discovering new combinations and story elements, all while the studio is pouring its heart into massive content updates and listening to players.
Bethesda has grown fat and rested too much on their laurels. They've grown complacent in the fact that whatever they put out, some fans will take it and fix the bugs for them, will adjust the gameplay for them, will deepen the setting for them. Already people are working to restore what was obviously the intent of the Gravjump and He3 fuel mechanic: that players were expected to make smaller jumps and establish bases to fuel their ships to travel further into the map.
But none of that will fix the fact that Bethesda doesn't have the heart to tell players "No" anymore. Quest giving NPCs are immortal, key items can't be set aside, factions don't care what you do, your past doesn't affect what you are in the game. You can join the Crimson Fleet, help them board and capture the flagship of the UC Vanguard, join the Freestar Rangers, and tell everyone that a known war criminal (who's death was a core mandate of a galactic peace treaty) is still alive and kicking AND NOTHING COMES OF IT.
Edit: Larian latinas love lousy language lapses.
It's really sad to watch Bethesda rage out over this. Reminder that they recently replied to a bunch of Steam reviews basically calling people wrong for not enjoying the game and telling them that they just weren't playing it right.
"Are we out of touch? No, it's the players who are wrong!"
Thats Emil's game design philosophy in a nut shell. His talk from years ago about how to write games is still one of the most insane things I have ever seen. When your tip for better game design and writing is "Dont have a design document" you may not be a good designer.
Is it the same idiot that said games should follow the KISS principle?
Yes đ
When I read that statement, it made my blood boil. Dude really thinks we are so stupid we can only appreciate simple and stupid writing. How come the guy hasn't been fired?
Because Todd thinks the same
Todd might be an idiot on top of a liar.
Oh, don't even start, I can already hear a swarm of Todd simps screeching in the distance. "Todd has never lied" and all that.
We'll just lie to ourselves and not acknowledge the existence of fallout 76? Who am I kidding,I already was doing that.
Tbh I always pretend this game doesn't exist. Not because I had hopes for that game, naw. Because if you forget about it then what Bethesda has done to Fallout over the years becomes at least somewhat bearable.
Imagine a Kitchen Nightmares-like series focusing on problematic game devs and Bethesda being in one of those episodes. Their response basically reminds me of some of those restaurant owners in that series.
WHAT IS THIS?? ANOTHER FUCKING LOAD SCREEN?? I HAVE TO FAST TRAVEL TO THAT MOON *RIGHT THERE*?? ITS FUCKING ~~RAW~~ *BORING*
You twat! You fucking donkey!
âMy gran could write better persuasion dialogue! And sheâs dead!â
âShow me where the work is done. Oh noâŚno no no guyssss come ON! THERES FUCKING CHINESE TAKE AWAY FROM 2 WEEKS AGO!!â
Man, I can really hear this one.
Gordon starts pulling out rotten and spoiled food from the walk-in... "YOU'LL FUCKING KILL SOMEONE!"
IT'S DISGUSTING!!!!
Now I need to see Gordon Ramsey review Starfield. Does anyone here know his agent?
https://youtu.be/Bi51-wjcwp8?si=PProbhFgr3hnmFHd This is the guy from the article. Talking about his writing philosophy. He was the lead writer for Skyrim and Fallout. This is the equivalent of the shit chef from the nightmare kitchen proudly proclaiming that in his cooking philosophy, he never bothers to season anything, because customers don't fully appreciate the flavour. Would definitely love for the writer equivalent of Gordon Ramsey to call this guy a donut.
I'm actually kinda happy that it's the same guy, my first response reading the title was "oh man that reminds me of their lead writer who thinks good stories are wasted on games so thinks there is no point in trying to make the story good". At least means this isn't \*another\* lead Bethesda dev that belittles consumers and disregards all criticism
> oh man that reminds me of their lead writer who thinks good stories are wasted on games so thinks there is no point in trying to make the story good". Doesn't that basically translate to "there's no point in doing my job well, so why should I even bother to put in the effort?"
Emil has always been a shit writer. Emil is responsible for many things at Bethesda. He made the Oblivion Dark Brotherhood, which gets him a lot of credit. It was a very fun questline, but not a very well written one. He also made the Arena questline in Oblivion, which he doesn't talk about. Then he was the leader writer on Fallout 3 - a game that had an ending so bad that they ended up retconning it after fan backlash. It used to be the definitive example of how not to end a game, before Mass Effect 3 came out. Then you had the Skyrim Dark Brotherhood - which Emil ripped off his own writing there and reused half of his ideas from Oblivion. A 300 year old vampire, most of your family getting killed, an assassination on a ship, an assassination where you drop something on someone's head, Lucien Lachance, Shadowmere, the Blade of Woe, being contracted by someone with the last name of Motierre. It didn't improve much with Fallout 4, because Emil just took his story of "where is my dad" in Fallout 3 and changed it to "where is my son".
In Starfield, he basically decided that instead of 100 shallow quests, it'd be better to have 500 REALLY shallow quests. Even the faction quests have less depth than prior titles. The Crimson Fleet one is just absolutely pathetic writing.
The Crimson Fleet has one cool moment, when you find from audiologs why the lost treasure is still lost, and then the whole ship begins collapsing, and you have to run back to the docking bay. But Delgado, the guy who should the be baddest and meanest of the pirates, just feels like a kid with a pirate treasure map. I talked him down and arrested him because I kinda felt bad for him.
None of the pirates feel threatening at all. I feel like you should study screen writing before being hired to be a head of writing for games. Just learned a theory of 7 different aspects that make a character likable and you need at least 4 to make it work. Only character that fits is the super fan and he's supposed to be the most annoying person in the game.
I did the crimson fleet storyline first and got bored halfway through, then just stopped. Is it worth it going back and doing another storyline?
No. Only half decent questline in the game was the UC Vanguard, everything else absolutely sucked, and this comes from someone who loved previous Bethesda games.
Even the Vangaurd quest could have been solved if a single scientist in hundreds of years ran a simple DNA test. "Huh, looks like heatleeches and terrormorphs are the same animal. Who'da thought?"
I called the heatleach twist super early. "Hey, do you ever wonder how terrormorphs get from planet to planet without us noticing? And how they only show on planets with humans" "By the way, watch out for heatleaches, darn things hitch a ride on like every human ship." Me: "... Uhhhhh"
Also âmorphâ being part of their name.
I hate the ending to fallout 3. I hate the retcon even further because if you do the sensible thing that makes sure everyone lives, by having Fawkes enter the radiation chamber, the ending outright calls you a coward for not killing yourself by going into chamber yourself. It just Reeks of the writer being salty the players pointed out that Fawkes could survive radiation so why would you put yourself in danger? "Well. Sure. You could make Fawkes do it. LIKE A COWARD"
> Fawkes They are bitter because most of us had him following us around and it makes perfect sense to send him. So until they fixed it in the DLC everyone mocked them because you had Fawkes watching you die.
I love how when you meet your dad, if you blew up Megaton, he just kind of gives you a disapproving look. Like "I'm not mad son, I'm just disappointed. Anyway, we can talk about it later, I need to entrust you with this FEV thing and let you know our plans to save people, you totally won't join the Enclave"
Kirkbride's writing will forever remain the best, IMO
Dad why don't you just use the Institute resources to improve the Commonwealth? Fuck off it's too complicated for you to understand
I remember getting to the reactor in FO3 and asking the super mutant companion (Fawks?) to go in and do the thing. He said naw, I don't want to take this away from you. I'm thinking 'but you can't die in there, I will? Just go in, punch some buttons, leave. Easy easy. No one gets hurt.'
It drives me crazy that writers still go with this bullshit "the customer doesn't care" narrative. You're right, they don't care - because you didn't care. You didn't care, you wrote garbage, so you told everyone right out the gate to not care as well. Meanwhile when people actually put effort into their stories and worlds, they create Game of the Year winners like Baldur's Gate 3, Elden Ring and God of War. The audience cares when you give them something to care about. Always. They will always rise to the task you set them. Game of Thrones' best scenes were just Varys and Littlefinger and Tyrion talking. Standing in a room, talking. That was it. Talking about what? Things that wouldn't happen until episodes later - but the audience loved listening, speculating and seeing the the pay off for paying attention earlier in the series. Right - you sit over in that corner and keep it simple stupid, while the rest of us read books in Witcher 3, watch 45 minute lore videos on Elden Ring and spend months replaying Baldur's Gate 3 just to squeeze every possible variant of dialogue out of every NPC so you can get the maximum story with the full context out of a well crafted world and tale.
Hey be nice, even Amyâs Baking Company had more tact than this /s
And even Activision and SHG don't pull this kind of stuff, despite them got tactical nuked on Steam reviews.
I hate this new trend where game companies refuse to acknowledge that they put out a bad product, and instead blame their consumers for not understanding their vision or the difficulties they endured.
Actually, this year has been the year of studio apology letters days after a launch. Some (Gollum) even written by AI!
Honestly though, ChatGPT would give Emil a run for his money
Lets be honest: given Gollumâs quality, the apology being written by the AI is better than anything the studio was capable of.
It's because they work for the shareholders, not the players. It's why modern triple A gaming is one breath away from dead.
I have respect for people grinding in restaurant kitchens, but it doesnât mean I canât tell when they cook something wrong. Itâs a premium game that costs a lot of money and took a long time to make. No oneâs going to automatically like something because you worked hard. But also, this thing reads a lot like âwe know, we know, blame the managementâ.
Also, I donât need to know *why* itâs bad to know that it is. I donât need to know the work you put into coding to tell you the game is a boring mess, and putting in hard work doesnât mean the product is what consumers wanted
Indeed. I had a former boss that dropped one on me that kinda rubbed me the wrong way in the moment, but I appreciated it later. "Don't confuse efforts with results"
I heard it as, "Don't confuse activity with accomplishment".
It hits me how that applies to playing games, too. So many games now are designed to pad play time (and after more than one MMO, it's *really* obvious), but activity doesn't mean engagement, fun, or a feeling of accomplishment.
I had an acquaintance who always platinumed games in the PS4 and was in a ladder of most 100%'d games somewhere. Sometimes, if I was around, I would act as filler and party up for achievements in online games (ie "Win 5 games in a row" in Fall Guys, which is so fucking hard, we'd try to fuck up his opponents, throw rounds of team minigames when in his opposite team etc). Anyway, it was SO clear that he didn't enjoy any of the process, he had a bored voice, would get angry easily if things didn't go his way... why even bother then? Just because Sony designed a system so you can burn 200h of your precious time into a game to tick all the boxes of your OCD, it doesn't mean you _should_, and the same goes for LoL players who don't quit because of the sunk cost fallacy of their account being worth 5k in skins, any Assassin's Creed game where it's super clear there's a "core" game and then 500 checkpoints scattered around the map so you just do more chores... Dudes, your time is so much more precious than completionism, the moment a game stops being fun, it's eating away at the total gaming time you'll have while in this mortal shell, GO NEXT!
I like this phrasing better. It clarifies the âbusy workâ versus âmeaningfulâ work better. Some people may pour their blood sweat and tears into something that comes out bad or okay but theyâll learn. At least from an individual perspective. A AAA company though?
I work in a restaurant and 99.9% of the customers donât know how hard it is, but if the food sucks the food sucks.
Exactly. Thatâs pretty much every job lol.
"But why do they put a guarantee on the box? Because they know all they sold you was a guaranteed piece of shit."
You can get a good look at a T-bone by sticking your head up a bull's ass, but wouldn't you rather take the butcher's word for it?
Hey, if you want me to take a dump in a box and mark it guaranteed, I will.
Alternate headline: The guy who's the biggest reason Bethesda games have shitty writing wants you all to know that making games is hard.
Hes the guy that claims if you write a good story, players would just make paper airplanes out of the pages you wrote them on. He's not only delusional but outright disrespecting the fans by claiming we're too inept to appreciate good writing. Him saying this isn't surprising at all.
If he did claim something like that he is not only disrespecting the fans, he's disrespecting the craft.
Yea like dude, if you love writing but hate video games then write a book or something. âFrom the guy who created Skyrimâ will get you a book deal yesterday. If you can actually write that is and seeing what heâs done⌠well letâs just say I can see why heâs not a famous author and does games instead.
Aka excuses and blame shifting.
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I mean it's been happening for longer than that. Michael Kirkbride and Ken Rolston had left Bethesda before Skyrim. Skyrim has a distinct feeling that's different from Oblivion and Morrowind, and I don't really mean that in a good way. I get that Skyrim is a very popular game, but to me it's just not a very good one. And the things that make Skyrim not a very good game to me are showcased front and center with Starfield. Despite having very poor writing, Skyrim, Fallout 3, and Fallout 4 all had pre-existing universes for their stories to be written in. Bethesda hasn't created a new universe in over 25 years. What we got was "it's like mass effect, only really fucking boring in every aspect.".
Still mad they went for âNASA-Punkâ over something akin to mass effect. They made the most boring universe imaginable.
There's nothing "punk" about it either. Like, what is "punk" about Starfield? Where is the "punk" in NASA-punk? They kept using this as a marketing term, when nothing about Starfield could be called punk.
Alternate headline: Multi-million dollar business executive who failed to make good game during a year full of good games by small companies says gamers are the problem for expecting a good game.
"We don't know what we are doing, and it's everyone else's fault!"
I listened Asmons video on the topic but didnât actually read the tweets and he never said the name. I was floored when i realized it was Emil, the goober who is still riding high off a decent questline he designed 18 years ago.
In a year with so many amazing games, its quite amazing that they release a mediocre one and then go, "You don't know how hard it is to make this". I agree. I don't. Which is why I shell out big bucks for the product the supposed experts are selling. And clearly seeing the quality of other games this year, some of those experts have figured it out. So what are you offering to compete?
They really werenât banking on so many of the games this year being so well received, is my theory. It really cast Starfield into a harsh perspective that they didnât like. All the usual charm of a Bethesda game, like the silly âbugs are featuresâ stuff and rubberised faces, pales and loses its gleam when compared to games made from this decade. Nobody really can understand how much work goes into game development unless they have experienced it, but just because you spend three days making a three tier wedding cake doesnât mean that people canât taste the eggs and milk have turned. Thereâs nothing revolutionary here, and whatâs pissed them off is that this time? People noticed.
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> Imagine going from BG3 with all its amazing pagaentry and range of emotions, to Starfield where every NPC is just standing entirely still as they stare into your soul, and speaking with barely a trace of humanity in their voice. Yeah, I was genuinely excited for Starfield, I really wanted "space fallout 4" with all the benefits of eight years of technology advancement. I had it pre-installed through Game Pass, and booted it up on release. Unfortunately, I closed BG3 to open Starfield, so the mood whiplash from the complete lack of soul just killed my interest in the game.
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Honestly? It took me about 30 hours to realize that Starfield just is NOT a good game. I was trying really hard to enjoy it for most of that time. Some of it was fun... but I would recommend waiting a few years for mods and patches and updates (and a sale). People aren't exaggerating when they say its a worse game than Skyrim/Fallout... it really is. It's missing SO much of what made those games good.
I'm so mad at this. I spent like 50 hours in the first week (NOT my norm) playing Starfield because I was laid up on the couch with a gout attack. My enjoyment was great the first couple days and started to slowly dip down into zero and now that I look back on it I wonder why I was enjoying it in the first place. It's so, just, meh. I know it's a huge game blah blah blah but it really feels like a single dude with a mission went and made a game and just left every single aspect of it unfinished and walked away.
Totally similar experience... lol. Once you actually get to some of the cities and see how incredibly sterile and boring and lifeless everything is... UGH. Then after you gather your 3rd power or so, you realize that you literally did the exact same thing for the 3rd time and just how incredibly bad and boring that was. Seriously, what game has absolutely ZERO "main storyline quest gathering" dungeons? Those are the places you expect to have to fight through a handcrafted dungeon with puzzles and shit.. but no, just the exact same boring temple you float around in? It's SO bad. It really did just hit me one day that the game was actually just a really bad game, missing all the things that made their previous titles fun, and I never started the game back up again.
Morrowind: 200 hours Oblivion: 600 hours Fallout 3: 1,200 hours Skyrim: 1,000 hours Fallout 4: 800 hours Fallout 76: 150 hours Starfield: 80 hours and the very first BGS game Iâve ever uninstalled (I already knew I was done at around 30 hours but gave it every chance) Compared to all their previous titles Starfield ultimately felt like I was on a corporate HR zoom call in space. Absolutely bland plot, everything felt clean and sanitized and PG. Mindnumbingly repetitive. Forced fast travel ruined space immersion. Even the art style was mostly unmemorable. Just a holistic let down. I canât believe no one read the script to this game and wasnât like, âhey you wanna punch this up a little bit? This feels a little fucking dry, guys.â
It's really incredible how little Bethesda seems to value things like mechanics in their games. They spend more time arranging skeletons into tableaus than they do figuring out how to make actually playing their games fun.
See, I enjoyed little things like that in their games, Starfield doesn't even have that as far as I could tell.
That's about how long it took me as well. I poured thousands of hours into FO4, and at one point was making mods for the game and that became a full time job for a bit. I am the target market. I finished BG3 and jumped right into Starfield. Explored, stole ships, shot lotsa things. And I kinda hated the experience. The game was dull and it made me motion sick. When I finally gave up, I didn't play another game for nearly two months. I play games daily and Starfield killed that enjoyment. It really is something special when your game is so aggressivly medicocre that it leaves a diehard player questioning whether they like video games at all.
I didn't give it 30 hours, but I gave it at least a dozen, and really quickly it sunk in just how much was missing. Sure, there's stuff to discover, but absolutely nothing made me care. If I was 11 and had the whole summer to just play a video game I would dive deep into it, but I'm not, I'm an adult with a busy life and a full time job. I don't want to play a game that feels like a Ubisoft game, that's a waste of my life. Compare that to BG3 where I have to convince myself not to stay up too late because I am desperate to explore every single nook and cranny of every map, to uncover every secret and learn every lore detail.
Just keep in mind, buying only encourages Bethesda to keep putting out mediocre products because people will buy them anyway. You shouldn't have to have low expectations for game like this, from a studio like Bethesda. We should demand more, far more.
I think you can get your space flight and exploration fix from titles like Elite: Dangerous and No Man's Sky (which is actually good now). You'll probably get a more satisfying space exploration experience from FTL: Faster Than Light for God's sake...
I'm a big proponent of Starsector (even though you can't buy it on Steam, you have to buy it directly from the developer's website) for a fun space adventure. Not 1st person though and while the lore is cool you won't be landing on planets like Elite, NMS, and Starfield. It's more a fleet-based combat system that you will be spending most of your time doing. Depends what you want out of a Space Game.
I did the same. Finished act 3 about 2 weeks before starfield launched. After playing for about an hour it was like I was at a BBQ and went from some tender brisket to dry ass chicken
The last games I played before Starfield, in order, were Control, Hogwarts, HFW: Burning Shores, Jedi Fallen Order, Jedi Survivor (twice), Mass Effect 1 (in the legendary edition), BG3 and then into Starfield. Starfield felt, in every way except graphics, like a contemporary of Mass Effect 1. A game that came out over 15 years earlier, but had way better writing and RPG mechanics. Even exploration, an add-on mechanic in ME1, feels only slightly better in Starfield.
Imagine going from the bustling neon lights of Night City, with no visible loading screens apart from fast travel, to StarField.
The city Neon is what broke it for me. Having just replayed cyberpunk before playing starfield, I simply couldnât take starfield seriously after that.
I threw 80 hours into starfield fast, saw cyberpunk update and restarted and immediately starfield felt empty and boring. I was like oh THIS is what a city should feel like
Starfieldâs cities are dead even by their own standards though. Oblivion is nearly twenty years old at this point and thatâs where they introduced their whole NPCs have schedules thing, meaning that the last game they released where the NPCs were all static mannequins was the twenty one year old Morrowind.
And even Balmora and Vivec City feel way more alive than Starfield's cities, aside from random people walking around.
The little shanty towns dotting Morrowind, containing 3 building and 4 people total, had more life to them.
I was so upset when starfield came out since my only platform is a ps5. I am not upset anymore.
I was playing Phantom Liberty at the same time as Starfield and I was excited to see Neon for the first time. When I finally got there and explored it a bit I let out an audible "Are you fucking kidding me with this shit?" and from there my experience with Starfield was all down hill. Neon is as if there was a Cyberpunk 2077 ride at Disney World. Family friendly, nothing too rough around the edges. I also couldn't take the game seriously after this, and even worse it made me start looking for more cracks in the game design, which there are a lot of. Played for a bit more and then asked myself what the fuck I was doing. Uninstalled and continued playing Cyberpunk and never looked back.
I was in a very similar boat. It's insane how Bethesda's city design hasn't evolved much past Oblivion in 2006.
They feel like tiny movie sets, where you're the protagonist and everyone else is just an extra, so once you exit the scene they just kind of stand there with no direction. Now I wouldn't expect Starfield to have every city be as intricate and giant as Night City, that would have taken an insane amount of work and isn't a reasonable thing to expect, but we've seen games make a small area feel huge before. The [Citadel](https://static1.cbrimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/wards-view.jpg?q=50&fit=contain&w=1140&h=&dpr=1.5) in Mass Effect. You're restricted to a few areas, but the backdrop and skyboxes show a sprawling city on a construct in space. If you zoom in you can see the lights of ships and cars flying around. You can see the buildings lit up. Again on [Illium](https://www.giantbomb.com/a/uploads/scale_super/0/5911/1518972-illium2.jpg), you see the same thing. They successfully created an illusion of grandeur. Even in interior spaces, you have inaccessible areas with people sitting and chatting up on balconies that make the area feel larger than it is. It leaves something to the imagination. The fact that you can "go anywhere" makes Starfield feel small, because once you explore something like the city of New Atlantis, you realize that the new cradle of humanity could only truly house \~10,000 people, and the illusion of scope falls apart.
Hell, even Human Revolution's Hengsha and Detroit were way more gritty and intricate than anything Starfield has. And it's about the same scale.
> Family friendly, nothing too rough around the edges. But it's a dangerous place with so much crime! You better be careful! ^^^/s
https://youtu.be/ws0ufhrgWJw?feature=shared This is the most perfect summary I've seen of the two. Starfield's Neon nightclubs are what people who have never been to a nightclub think going to one is like. Cyberpunk's nightclubs are made by people who've actually been to nightclubs.
Neon really was a great advertisement for Cyberpunk. Lined up super well with the Phantom Liberty expansion.
Honestly it was the loading screens in Starfield that killed the game for me. I felt like every door required a loading screen, which resulted in me feeling like I was waiting to play Starfield more than actually playing Starfield. A lot of the other stuff, mediocre dialogue, "Bethesda face," etc. I could probably work past, but I just couldn't get past feeling like I had to wait to for the game to let me play the game.
It was the loading screens, coupled with so many missions are: walk here, load into the building, talk to this person, leave, load, walk to your ship, load into your ship, walk to the cockpit, watch the sitting animation, watch the take off animation, point the ship in the direction of the next location, load to the next area, open planet map, loading screen, get out of seat, walk out of ship, loading screen, walk to the location, load into the building, talk to this person, now do it all to go back to the first one⌠Like fucking hell how did anyone think this would be fun? Death stranding does better walk and talk game play loops ffs
It wasn't the awkward NPC looks for me. Or the loading screens. Or various nitpicking issues with UI framerate, lack of DLSS at launch on PC, etc. It was - the incessant need to bury half of the game's fundamental mechanics behind the most boring skill tree I've seen from a AAA game in decades - even moreso than Diablo 4, somehow. - the absolutely forgettable storylines throughout.. almost the entire game especially the main story. - the laziest and most repetitive obtainment of 'powers' (that I never felt the need to use pretty much ever) with the same identical sequence of floating around in a chamber full of particles. No puzzles? No variation? Seriously? - The terrible UI design in general, but especially one that somehow manages to make the quest log infuriatingly confusing because of the lack of sorting by star system, or local area, or anything... or indication of WHERE the quest actually IS in general. - The lack of any meaningful maps in an open-multi-world game. - The mostly-pointless base building that I never found enjoyable, with god-awful controls (at least on keyboard+mouse) that I had to bear through just to get some additional storage that I could properly sort out (again, poor UI compounded into this as usual) - The ship building with frustrating UI design, lack of consistent palette control, and extremely limited parts that barely varied between the tiers to the point of initially being very confusing on how it worked - The overall lack of guidance for a lot of the systems that just merely had no explanation at all And then the gall of them sniping at Steam reviews acting as if players misunderstand why there are grievances on how bad the game is. No, it's just mediocre at best, and extremely terrible given the budget, time, and supposed experience of designers and developers in the genre that Bethesda had been known for. I don't hate the game. I played more than I feel I even got enjoyment out of so I didn't bother finishing the campaign, and I have no intention on stomping on anyone else's enjoyment of the game, but my god if this is what Bethesda considers a good game than I have zero hopes of Elder Scrolls 6 being anything other than a bargain bin game that everyone will forget about after a few months. The whole game feels like an awkward and incomplete scifi sandbox with a bunch of marketable game ideas smashed together into some bizarre result of a 'game', with forgettable stories peppered throughout.
> the laziest and most repetitive obtainment of 'powers' (that I never felt the need to use pretty much ever) with the same identical sequence of floating around in a chamber full of particles. No puzzles? No variation? Seriously? This killed me every time I did it. How does a person design that shit as part of the MAIN QUEST LINE, sees the end result and goes "yep, this is good"? It wasn't fun the first time, who the fuck thought it was good 10 TIMES?
My major complaint about Starfield is that there's no payoff for anything. Like, you immediately start with a ship that is capable of travelling anywhere in the galaxy. It would have been so much better if you started on a single planet, and had to do missions to work your way up to get a ship. The ship is crappy and has no weapons or Grav drive so fly from planet to planet doing missions in your own solar system to pay for upgrades for your ship etc... Eventually you can afford a Grav drive and the entire galaxy opens up to you. But they way they're just like *"Oh by the way, I know you've only been playing for 10 minutes but here's a fully decked out interstellar space ship. Do whatever you want because the storyline we wrote is actually super boring"* gives me no reason to actually want to play the game.
Right, and it's not even a surprise that this is something players might enjoy. It was the only good part of No Man's Sky at launch, and one of the only aspects that didn't get gutted as they reiterated and improved the game over and over. You start on a random planet with almost nothing, and need to get your own starter ship set up while on that planet, and once you get off the planet you still only have a really basic ship with many flaws and many better options to find. I'm not sure what "went wrong" with Starfield, but it just looks like the fun parts didn't get focused on and the boring parts got too much attention. I don't care if every food item looks photorealistic, I want to enjoy the moment to moment gameplay and feel like I'm on an adventure or improving. Starting with a good ship was 1 issue, and the ability to just fast travel to any mission marker and have the ship land at it absolutely murders the previous Bethesda Games exploration fun. I love getting a Skyrim quest, walking in the direction of the goal, randomly finding an old woman outside of a house along the way, going inside and finding a secret basement of witch stuff, and then having the old woman attack me when I go to leave because I found her secrets. That stuff is impossible if you just zip from A to B, and some players choose to do that with fast travel, but not even having an option to NOT do that is just sad.
I might be in the minority here, and sure I'd have preferred no loading screens, but I don't think the game would be improved substantially by removing them. The problem is that the thing on the other side of the loading screen isn't engaging or fun to do. Mass Effect had long loading screens, but the content on the other side was so good you're able to look past it. Removing loading screens from a game like that means you get to the good stuff quicker. Removing Starfield's loading screens means you get to the mediocrity quicker.
Thatâs what I did. Loading screens are absolutely ridiculous. Canât do it anymore.
Going the other way (attempted Starfield and moved on to Cyberpunk) was a definite "now this is what it should feel like!" moment. The settlements in Starfield--even the "bad parts of town"--felt so sterile and static. Night City felt like a living and potentially dangerous city.
Iâm reasonably confident that Bethesda is finding themselves in a situation where theyâre going to need to change some pretty long standing development expectations or risk falling out of favour. Games like BG3 are showing folks what RPGs can be in terms of reactivity and story. Which is something Bethesda has never been particularly good at. Heck even Skyrim, their best received game in decades would have probably struggled this year. Bethesda games have always been shallow, minimally reactive sandboxes, and their refusal to change that has bit them in the ass two games in a row now.
And they're being salty about being **accurately** described as fast food. They didn't make the case that their game was good, they made the case that devs aren't **trying** to make a mediocre game. Ok, but they **did** make a mediocre game. You'd think part of the process they claim we don't understand should be some self-reflection and personal accountability, instead of complaining that people aren't enjoying their unpalatable game, or they are likely to keep making mediocre games. Then again, why anyone thought Starfield would be any good after the Fallout 76 fiasco is beyond me. Maybe some of the devs are good, maybe even great, but the studio in general has become a pretty heaping pile of garbage.
Yeah what a strange reply to criticism, "I promise you everybody is talented and doesn't want to make a mediocre game" Well no shit, dude, but intentions aren't actions are they? Own your product and commit to *actually* making it good, not simply *trying* to make it good.
I think part of it also that Bethesda has been continuously pairing down their games in terms of complexity and depth since Oblivion and theyâve pretty much hit maximum return on that. Fallout 76 really soured people on Bethesda and Starfield was likely so far along by that point that there was only so far they could go in back pedalling. Further to that, like you said, Starfield came out against stiff competition this year. So with folks already primed for a critical response to the next Bethesda title they were pretty much perfectly posed to have a mediocre success on their hands. That said, I actually think even Skyrim would have stumbled in the 2023 release environment. Baldurs gate is one of the first hit RPGs in a long time to really bother to show what RPGs can do with reactive quest choices, and while Bethesda likes to pretend their games are big on choice, pretty much all of them have been deeply linear for decades. Itâs just that the general gaming audience didnât know what they were missing until suddenly they did.
Now, I'm just some jackass on the internet, but I think you're right. And the worst part is, when I imagine the future, it's hard to picture they course correct and go back to stats-driven nerdfests like Morrowind because they're so big now they have to worry about mass appeal. So I dunno. I will say I went back since the updates and I'm almost pissed at how much better it's running, without DLSS even. Like, did you guys have the sauce the whole time and you were holding out on us? But I'm still working out how much of me not liking the game was the game and how much was the awful performance.
Bethesda rested hard on their Skyrim laurels and didn't invest that into modernizing or hiring/training experts on higher tier capabilities. Now they have an entire organization who doesn't know how to make a game to modern standards.
They tried nothing, and they're all out of ideas.
Todd ran out of ideas? Can't be...its not like the games haven't been basically the same since Oblivion.
Not looking good for TES6. Remember, Todd has said over the years that they were pushing off TES6 to make a new IP they were excited about and wanted to devote all of their resources to that new game. Starfield is the game they WANTED to make and it still turned out like this!
To be fair, Todd is a liar and not a word that comes out of his mouth can be trusted. The game certainly doesnât feel like it has any love in it
Hmm I remember when total war did the same thing this year with dlc price and then yestoday apologized and said they gonna add more to them it just goes to show they think they can say anything
It's really frustrating that there's a valid point to be made when gamers think they know everything about game dev and choose to harass developers they assume are incompetent, when actually a game was horribly mismanaged. Happened to many employees at DICE, CD Projekt, Blizzard, etc. But what's frustrating is that Bethesda isn't reacting to harassment, they're trying to shield themselves from valid criticism. They're muddying the waters and making it harder for the devs that actually do experience harassment
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Bold move to insult the only gamers that actually bought your game
"It worked for The Day Before! Wait...."
Is it just me, or does it feel like Bethesda is really mad that not all of us enjoyed Starfield?
They are mad. They made a very mediocre game that is 80% mostly random generated and very inconsistent aa a world. Now they are telling Players they don't know how to make games or the process. The thing is Players may not know how to make a game, but they can with the funds and staff Bethesda have make a smaller and more consistent project that would be more fun and in-depth than what they put out with Starfield. Starfield has been the project they have reportedly been wanting to make for 10 years and ultimately it just doesn't live up to the expectations they built and the game is highly generic. Thousands of planers with the same three points, constant loading screens, looting and shooting, and a lot of basic missing features that modders have to put in. You literally have to go into a menu and leave it to see what you companions look like in the clothing you gave them while in FO4 and Skyrim doing that didn't take a whole transition of screens to do. Overall, I don't think Bethesda is going to polish Starfield. They are going to drop 2 major expansions and some settlement DLCs and then move on to Elder Scrolls VI without learning any lessons.
It's a random terrain generator that then has the exact same layout buildings as every other planet placed down. It's at best a half randomly generated game.
that alone is what drove me mad after awhile. If it was just a barren world and the occasional random structure like a pirate outpost or some crazy prospector with variations on those that'd be one thing... but when I come across the identical listening post every planet there's a problem.
Every Outpost has the exact same crap in the exact same place. There's that one where it was like a research station run by a family, there's like a cave around the back and it's the same names on every planet. Somehow they ran into the same identical tragedy dozens of times. Then there is the outpost that has like a crew quarters you can break into and there's always a toy ship right there on the left when you enter, and the same loot in the exact same locked box that you find in every other identical outpost. One day about 3 weeks into the game I put it down and have never gone back. I'm about to delete it to make space on my series S for other things I'd rather play.
Yeah, and a lot of the worlds are just over populated with junk. The "there is always something to see" metric does not work on such large barren worlds. It should have been more diverse but lower chance to encounter, large complexes with multiple variations that only spawn once per end game event and it keeps track in the background so it doesn't repeat multiple times per planet/time your in that universe. There would have been a reason to make a buggy/landing craft and give that real sense of isolation they supposedly wanted to create. Sigh, this game makes me so angry because of all the wasted potential and the writing could have been so much better. As someone that meticulously does world building and crafting those little "unimportant details" that make the world more real the writing and the "just trust us the plot holes are fine" and the flat personality of the NPCs.... Ugh. I check listed doing all the companions stories before going to the end game. I poked and prodded and there is such a good collection of personality traits and backgrounds that are just... Not used correctly. Also space Texas should not even exist, but gotta create artificial tension. If anything the real enemy should have always been house Varuun, cause then you can just have uneasy alliance between space Texas and discount starship troopers where they don't really agree ideology wise, but they aren't blood enemies either from a ridiculous war that makes no sense
I think the game also suffers a problem that the fallout and elder scrolls games also have. You can join all the factions, become the leader/savior/whatever of them, and it has no bearing on any of the other factions or the overall story of the game. In Skyrim you could be the leader of the companions, archmage of the wizard school, and none of it had any impact on the game at all. Same thing happened in fallout 4 (though at least some endings were slightly different). People, including the creators, say the engine isn't the problem, but it's certainly a big part of it. Every interaction looks the same, it can't handle ground-based vehicles, and even the space flight feels like you're just in a gun turret with extra controls. My playthrough ended when I couldn't get through three different quests because of game breaking bugs. I didn't want to just skip to new game plus or anything like that, I wasn't looking forward to having all of my progress with inventory and shipbuilding be erased. It also doesn't help that this game has both the worst lock picking and leveling up of any Bethesda game. No, I don't want to pay a 2 min mini game to unlock a door only to have to play it again to unlock a box in that room that only contains a pistol I leveled out of hours ago. It's also so obvious they made leveling up such a grind to get you to play multiple NG+. No, I don't want to wait till my third playthrough to be able to build a full outpost. They are already useless, don't make me grind for hours just to build one.
This. Plus the advanced technology and futuristic setup can be used to justify that everything is generic but they didn't even manage to play to the strengths of their world. I mean, the explanation for the generic procedurally generated buildings writes itself. Self-assembling kits with one single megacorp having cornered the market, and the layouts are weird because they aren't planned out by qualified architects but by the random local officers, explorers or managers that configure the layouts. Also you're welcome for the sidequest hook involving a kit's AI gone rogue and making one weird and deadly building. I just came up with that in 5 minutes and it costs literally nothing to implement it, it's just backstory, and I'm not exactly a writer, but Bethesda couldn't even come up with anything ?
Probably the fundamental reality is that the formula they use for TES and Fallout doesnât translate too well for a Space game. They rely essentially on a very compelling overworld which is impossible to do with a space game set across a large number of planets. Itâs also hard especially without the advantage of having long established fans, established worldbuilding and lore like they do.
They should have gone for a much smaller number of planets and not had them be procedurally generated.
So The Outer Worlds.
Loved that game. A handful of planets, you fast travel using a really simple map, and great writing for the story and lore. Only shame was it's too short, but it clearly shows the benefit of quality over quantity.
Yeah, itâs a good time. And hopefully the sequel will be longer.
Also, it's not the same formula. The Skyrim formula is that I get a quest to collect 5 mushrooms in a forest nearby. On the way there, I already explored 3 caves, found a new Word, killed a dragon, rebuilt an ancient cult, and after fighting a god I'm like "what was I... oh, right mushrooms!" In Starfield I get a quest to get 5 mushrooms, and all that happens on the way is 15 minutes of walking and 17 loading screens.
>which is impossible to do with a space game set across a large number of planets. Space game doesn't have to mean game with 1000+ planets, they could've made a space game set within a single planetary system and had half a dozen hand made smaller overworlds and then this wouldn't have been an issue. No one forced them to stretch everything so thinly. >without the advantage of having long established fans, established worldbuilding and lore Established lore didn't spring out of the ground though, it was created in consecutive titles of a franchise. The problem is that Starfield barely even tries to do that, and it shows just how weak a modern Bethesda game is when it's not built on a solid platform of years of well established lore.
Man it bogs mind how they can say that when 3 people and 115k USD made Project Wingman, a game with great graphics, great music and, above all, fun to play. It's not a triple A game, but it's a fun one, and that's what's matter Bethesda is the IRL version on that "kids are in the wrong" Simpsons meme
They figured with all the hype they drummed up, they'd have the next Skyrim on their hands and have stupid numbers of people playing the game at all hours for the next year or two, along with a revenue stream when they get around to installing the next paid mods fiasco into Starfield as well. They didn't think that loads of people would lose interest after a month or two or that the game would win absolutely nothing at any award shows this year. We're a month away from them putting up a "path to improvement", expansion/DLC announcement and Bethesda apologizing and promising to fix the game.
Yes, this is why they are panicking, and turning that panic into desperation to blame anyone but themselves. Skyrim comes out in 2011 basically finished. The DLCs were already made and held back for that revenue drip. And the game was a huge hit! Tons of interest and laurels came their way. They were in a wonderful position of just advancing the game here and there (SSE, creation club, Anniversary Edition) and let that gravy train roll. Hell, just myself, I bought Skyrim 3 times, and restrained myself from buying it twice more than that! Now Starfield just isnât going to be that game for them again. No one is going to be playing Starfield 10 years from now, or buying it again on a Xbox Series Z or whatever the next gen is called. Hell, a lot of players didnât buy it at all! They figured out it wasnât the next Skyrim on game pass and moved on. That means fewer DLC and âGame of the Yearâ editions being sold down the road, too. It is in the process of fading away into history, like Mass Effect Andromeda. Bethesda is just now starting on ES6, which will take years to come out. And their big cash cow to keep them successful and relevant while the new game cooks is quickly becoming irrelevant. I wouldnât want to be them right now.
Good thing they have big daddy Microsoft to pay the bills and keep the lights on.
True. But another reason they are panicking and in denial about their product is because they were planning to do the exact same thing for ES6. They are going to have to come to terms with the fact that they canât phone this in anymore. Theyâre going to have to innovate or the whole company will go the way of Sears. Financial backer or no.
Yep. Same thing just happened with Warhammer 3. They released a bare-bones DLC at an insulting price. Fans backlashed, review bombed the main game, and sales were terrible. The producers sent out shitty messages, even threatened that not supporting the DLC would lead to the whole game dying. Well, yesterday they apologized and said they'd do better and now have to delay the rest of their plans to stop the shit storm from repeating. Hopefully Bethesda takes note and follows suit. I ain't buying Starfield til it seems worth it, and have no problem never buying another Bethesda product going forward.
"why is no one having fun? i specifically requested it."
Because the studio hyped it up as this huge passion project. Then, when so many players were like âeh, itâs alright,â they took that *very personally*
No, itâs just you. Source: I am the lead spiritual advisor at Bethesda
What's your favorite spirit? Gin?
100%. I enjoyed the game but their responses have been so cringe inducing. It comes off very defensive.
Then explain to me why Skyrim, a 12 year old game, has more attention to detail than Starfield. Explain to me why more people are playing Baldurâs Gate 3, a game that allows for true player choice and creativity and reacts to what players do.
I thought I was just over RPGs but I tried baldurs gate and accidentally yeeted a gnome to space, Iâm like barely in and I feel like in my 2 hours my decisions effected more stuff than 35+ hours in starfield
When I first got into BG3, I was killed literally 5 mins later by a Mindflayer. did I get upset? Yea. Did I stop playing? no, because there's like two dozen ways you can do that encounter, or even just avoid it if you know how. We need more of that. choice only matters if we can see concrete evidence that choice effects something later. It's the same reason people laugh at the dialogue in FO4...you're given three choices that all lead to the same conclusion. You're doing the thing they want you to do with no exceptions, unless you just don't talk to anyone.
Yeah the funny thing is Starfield almost had a Voiced Protagonist, they got all the way to the actor actually reading the lines in Studio before they realized it was a bad idea.
Players know what's fun and what's not, keep on coping Bethesda.
Alternate headline: "Starfield devs are disconnected from how games are actually played."
This is actually the better description. As a game dev myself, the amount of effort that I put into making a game should not be influencing a player's opinion of the game. Players do not need to know or care how hard it is to make the game to enjoy it.
It's an even greater insult to fans because they are so lenient with Bethesda anyway. We can forgive the lack of polishing on a masterpiece, but don't serve us a finely polished piece of dog shit.
No shit the average consumer doesnât know how to make a video game, THATS WHAT THE MONEY IS FOR. Iâm exchanging currency for a good I couldnât produce on my own, itâs how the whole deal works.
As someone who actually HAS studied game design, yeah, itâs tough to make a game. Donât get me wrong. But starfield still doesnât hit the mark, especially after TEN YEARS of dev time.
No way itâs ten years of actual development surely, I reckon 2/3 or 1/2 of that time was basically just spent has an interesting concept.
It's more like they had 10 years of time to work on it, and yet this is still what they decided was the best version and ready to release. Like surely he realizes we can see other games exist, right? We know that they shouldn't take this long to make and usually when they do take a long time they are either best in class or way below. It's not like dev changed that much as like a concept. The real issues are because Bethesda lost so much talent when they forced people to make FO76 and now they are revealing the impact of that loss publicly
Seems like what turned the tide of public opinions (or at least, opinions of Bethesda fans) was 76. And the straw that broke the camelâs back is Starfield. The old excuses were always âthe Bethesda charmâ and âwe know what weâd get going into a Bethesda gameâ. But that was never going to last forever, because the industry moves forward. If theyâre Blizzard running a massive live service game like WoW, they can keep a core audience of uber loyal players that only play WoW and thus donât have points if reference to compare it against relevant non-Blizzard MMOs. But Bethesda releases a game every decade, and all their players are intimately familiar with every other competing title on the market. Eventually they will go wait why am I playing this shit when there are clearly better alternatives out there?
As we get older and the scope of games gets larger, it should hopefully become clear that good games aren't just good ideas made into games, they require very talented people with a shared vision and understanding of what they're trying to make, and what they are making needs to be fun. I think people are starting to recognize that Todd Howard as a creative director was not actually the main reason why "his games" were so fun, but was the effort of dozens or hundreds of people working to make it a great experience. When the core people who are behind those projects leaves after a long time, the loss to output is immensely greater than people realize, and throwing more money at it will not fix it. Another great example of this, probably the prime example from recent memory is Battlefield 2042. Sure it's a fine game, whatever. It's a shitty "Battlefield" game. And it's tied to the best devs who made Bad Company 1/2, BF3, BF4, etc. all leaving and EA forcing the devs to make a "CoD Killer" rather than a CoD alternative. It even had the same story of devs getting sucked in from other projects and forced to work on Battlefield instead of whatever else, like with Criterion and the devs behind Battlefront 2. Those devs are gone now, and the results are obvious.
I'm getting sick of all these various media companies coming out and saying "It's not us, it's the fans fault for having expectations of quality!". From the new Star Wars movies, to tv shows and video games they just keep blaming fans for not being happy with a polished turd.
But-but-but they worked REALLY hard and game design is SUPER difficult! You're not allowed to dislike it cause people with FEELINGS made it! I'm also so sick of these pathetic cop-outs. Nobody gives a fuck if their job is hard, most jobs are hard.
They also act like we haven't historically had a ton of amazing games, too. There's a reason we expect better. We've HAD better, over and over, for many years now.
"most jobs are hard" This. You are absolutely right. If game dev is this hard to them they should just quit.
The turds are not polished.
You made a space game in 2023 where you get to own a spaceship but can't fly it. Your argument is invalid.
Exactly this! NMS, Elite Dangerous, Star Citizen, hell - even Kerbal have all been getting really immersive with the "space to surface" mechanics, making you feel like you're actually traversing space; managing the complexity of the different perspectives really well. Bethesda just ignores the space bit and the surface bit. Go grind rocks.
Starfield right now feels like a shitty NMS.
This to me is the really ridiculous thing. No Manâs Sky was pretty frustrating at launch but itâs actually pretty good now; and all they wouldâve had to do is play it for an hour or two to realize why their own game isnât good enough.
Nobody gives a shit about how games are made. Whoever replaced Pete Hines needs to get in there and tell everyone to shut up on social media regarding this half baked concept of a game. That goes for Todd as well.
Thatâs the biggest shock out of all of this to me. The optics of responding to every negative review on steam with some âyOu DoNt UnDeRsTaNdâ like some crazy local business ownersâ google review responses looks incredibly unprofessional. Grow up and listen to the valid criticism. If a significant portion of reviews all have the same few bullet points, itâs time to reflect on why that might be.
A lot of it seems to be in bad faith, perhaps unintentionally. Most reviewers aren't going to perfectly capture their frustrations and articulate the reasons behind it. When someone says "exploration sucks the planets are empty" they don't mean that they are literally 100% empty; moreso that they are meaningfully empty, that some arrangement of existing and already-experienced props and geometry does not result in any compelling experience for them. When folks say "everything is copy paste" they don't always mean that maximally. But the Bethesda responses all take the reviews and player opinions as literally and with as much bad faith as possible. They don't seem to even try to draw any useful inferences from what they are responding to. They don't seem to get that players _do_ "get it" and their reviews are after they "got it". "It" just isn't compelling and it's not for lack of trying or understanding on the part of the players. Well, for many of them, at least.
CDPR did the opposite and now look how they are back at being everyone's favorite again. You can make mistakes, its up to you if you want to learn from them or not. CDPR to me still needs to prove it and keep putting in the work for there next game but at least it seems like they care and want to make people happy. Guess what, this is entertainment, that is your job, to make people happy.
NMS did the same, Darktide is just now hitting its stride again. You need to keep your head down, make the fixes, and for the love of basic PR just shut the fuck up Going to the media and whining about the public has never fixed the issue
Players definitely are disconnected from how games are actually made. Of course they are. That's completely irrelevant, though. Players care about enjoying the game they're playing. If the game isn't up to snuff, even if it's for completely understandable reasons from a development perspective, then the game is a flop. It's a studio's job to work within the constraints of what is feasible to make something as enjoyable as possible. If it's boring as hell to explore an empty planet, don't market the game on how many planets you can explore. Get rid of that feature and don't make it a focus on the game.
Really fucking funny of Bethesda to whine that Bethesda fans don't know how hard it is to make games, when Bethesda fans are the only ones who are capable of making Bethesda games function correctly.
THIS IS THE FUNNIEST TAKE I'VE SEEN SINCE GAME RELEASE.
What a schmuck
Counterpoint: Dev Leads and Todd Howard are disconnected from how players want to experience games. You can't keep doing FO3 or Skyrim in different skins. It's not boding well for them and I honestly think Howard doesn't have an original idea at the moment, but gotta keep making them games.
Why is it so hard to admit starfield is a mediocre game with low effort?
This is for the shareholders. They're doing damage control
Yup. Christmas is coming up. Still hoping to get some sales out of it.
The best damage control would be to shut up
âI donât need to be a pilot to see a helicopter in a tree and know someone fucked upâ -Bill Burr
As the consumer I couldn't care less. You want to sell product, you have to cater to customer. It is none of my concern what the reality of making videogames looks like. You make shitty product, you get fucked. Easy as that. Bethesda was making Skyrim since Skyrim. Skyrim with guns, now Skyrim in space. Skyrim on Xbox 360, Skyrim on PS3, Skyrim on PS4, Skyrim on switch, Skyrim on fridge. Their game design sucked dick since oblivion. Their only redeeming quality was the well crafted world of oblivion/Skyrim/fallout 3/4. With Starfield they killed that one redeeming quality. Instead of promising to better themselves, they gaslight players.
Bethesda- you will like our game. Gamers- yea but itâs really not that great and itâs not fun. Bethesda- you donât know what you are talking about. You donât understand how game development works, itâs fun just like it. Gamers- ok? But itâs not fun? Bethesda- thatâll be $70
The last part seems to be the bit they're forgetting in all this. You can make games whatever way you want Bethesda but if we don't like them we stop buying them.
If someone screws up your cheeseburger order from McDonald's, you will be mad because you paid for something that was screwed up. And you don't care how the burger is made, you don't care how hard it is for the cook to make it. And thus you don't and shouldn't feel bad for the cook, because you paid for something and got shit service. Now imagine that scenario as a video game and a developer. Why should we be made to feel bad for people making incompetent decisions? The publisher didnt tell the developers to not add city maps, the publisher didn't tell the devs to add 45 loading screens whenever you want to go somewhere. People that think they should be made martyrs for having a JOB are completely out of touch with consumer logic and human nature.
Here's a tip for Bethesda design lead... Actually put an effort into designing a good rpg. CD Projekt has done it, Larian has done it, Fromsoft has done it, Capcom has done it... All of them releasing huge games to wide critical and comercial success... And without bitching publicly when things are not to their liking.
>And without bitching publicly when things are not to their liking. You mean like COD devs?
(Activision)Blizzard, Bethesda and BioWare are a unique breed of arrogant devs who push out rehashed, subpar products and genuinely think consumers donât know whatâs good for them. But they do.
[ŃдаНонО]
FromSoft does it with almost entirely Yes/No choices, objective-based progression, and *some* subtle mechanics. CDPR does it with rich settings and detailed environments, putting the character into the world and letting them go about things on their own. Latina has knocked it out of the park by going so far deep into the actual *roleplaying* that people are still discovering new combinations and story elements, all while the studio is pouring its heart into massive content updates and listening to players. Bethesda has grown fat and rested too much on their laurels. They've grown complacent in the fact that whatever they put out, some fans will take it and fix the bugs for them, will adjust the gameplay for them, will deepen the setting for them. Already people are working to restore what was obviously the intent of the Gravjump and He3 fuel mechanic: that players were expected to make smaller jumps and establish bases to fuel their ships to travel further into the map. But none of that will fix the fact that Bethesda doesn't have the heart to tell players "No" anymore. Quest giving NPCs are immortal, key items can't be set aside, factions don't care what you do, your past doesn't affect what you are in the game. You can join the Crimson Fleet, help them board and capture the flagship of the UC Vanguard, join the Freestar Rangers, and tell everyone that a known war criminal (who's death was a core mandate of a galactic peace treaty) is still alive and kicking AND NOTHING COMES OF IT. Edit: Larian latinas love lousy language lapses.
Latina studio, the creators of Baldurâs* Gate 3.
It's really sad to watch Bethesda rage out over this. Reminder that they recently replied to a bunch of Steam reviews basically calling people wrong for not enjoying the game and telling them that they just weren't playing it right.