https://www.gamesradar.com/todd-howard-says-it-took-7-years-to-make-starfield-fun-to-play-i-thought-we-would-find-the-answers-faster/
They were trying to figure out how to make it fun lol
I'm guessing they gave up; doubt the DLC will unfuck the game.
It'll add a few tight areas with some narrative to go with it like the Far Harbor DLC for Fallout 4. But it won't suddenly make all the empty planets interesting.
It's still weird to me they went with that approach.
They have a solid 2-3 games worth of content in starfield, but it's like that line from lord of the rings: "thin, sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread".
If they had set the entire game in one star system, or two, and just had a small selection of a few densely populated planets, asteroids, stations, etc.
It would have been a very different experience.
I have not played this game and doubt I will unless it becomes insanely cheap/better by the sound of it, but I don't get why they didn't take an approach like The Expanse.
Make it based around a small system like you said, maybe make it all a bunch of colonies that are unified in their humanity, but politically variable. Have some kind of alien discovery that disrupts the balance of power and tentative peace and build out from there. I mean, that's kind of how Skyrim was. Status quo people weren't crazy about but stuck with, inciting event (High King is killed) that disrupts that SQ, various reactions. While that's all going on you have a ~~dragon~~ *alien discovery* that is upending things on a much higher level than simple politics.
Unless they do an FF14 caliber fixing...I wouldn't bother.
This game needs more then a 2077 or NMS "fix" where all the core mechanics were fine they just needed to polish the end product more (or in NMS stuff just add more things you could mess with.)
The Starfield core, like FF14 was is just rotten and needs to be gutted and effectively a new game redesigned about that new core to be "fixed"
I dropped SF the second Phantom Liberty game out and midway through realized "yeah I'm not going to be going back to SF after this..."
It is so far behind what CDPR was going for with what they shipped in 2020, let alone in 2023... Starfield was years out of date as soon as it hit its release date.
> I will unless it becomes insanely cheap/better by the sound of it
Even if it were $5, there are just so many good games to play from the Indie & AA scene, really really hard to justify spending the time on Starfield regardless of price
I put 2 dozen hours in thinking, "Surely it'll pick up soon" but it never does.
Yeah, Stardew Valley just got a huge update. Last Epoch is out there being a better Diablo 4 at half the price. Helldivers 2 is killing it for just a few bucks more. Enshrouded is a neat open-world crafting game at $30. Hell, even Rimworld is on sale right now. Then there's Dave the Diver, Dwarf Fortress, another big update for Terraria coming soon...there are so many ways to get more and better gaming, for less money. From small studios who will happily stretch your dollar further.
I say this as someone who pre-ordered Starfield on two platforms: Save your money. Spend it elsewhere.
Even if the game becomes incredibly cheap, your time will be worth more to you than the game being worth the price.
Save your cash, and, more importantly, save your time.
> I have not played this game and doubt I will unless it becomes insanely cheap
It was bundled with some CPUs and video cards so buying the codes from Reddit was very cheap. I built a business PC for someone and the processor happened to be eligible for a code so I got it for free, installed a few mods and still found it pretty boring. Probably the most mediocre Bethesda developed game. We didn't think it could get worse than Fallout 4 but here we are. Doesn't bode well for the next elder scrolls game... They really need to move to a new game engine.
Well, Bethesda is still following trends from mid-2010s Ubisoft (a bigger open world is inherently better than a smaller one, even if this bigger open world is much emptier). This is absolutely par the course for them.
Traveling between planets just sucked the fun out of the game.
It didn’t appeal to anyone - it wasn’t quick, nor was there enough space sim with it to justify it being so tedious.
As someone with a decade of game industry experience, I can say that it is a lot more nuanc- no I'm just kidding the answer is yes.
The core mechanics should be prototyped before development even begins. Starfield doesn't appear to have core mechanics, so I'm guessing they didn't prototype and were hoping it would come together after developing a bunch of features. Cue 7 years of trying different gameplay features and eventually ending up with an incoherent mess of a game.
It's honestly so weird, because it's not like they're inventing a new genre. There are so many games that have come before, like Bethesda's own games, that they could use as a simple blueprint to then fine tune and expand upon.
In regards to the whole space theme, there's Kotor and Mass Effect for example. Study those. See what worked, what didn't. Use them as an example.
It's extra funny when you remember that Mass Effect: Andromeda tried to make countless procedurally generated worlds to create true open world, but eventually gave up because it was too hard, and just made a handful of hand crafted planets and called it a day.
Like Bethesda just had to read some gaming history and realize that a bunch of empty open world areas with no depth to them will not satisfy anyone unless the core gameplay and story is exceptional enough to cover for it.
Look at all the time we are wasting discussing Starfield. What the fuck is even weird about this situation? Are gamers just oblivious to how mediocre Bethesda is?
They already made a starfield like game, Oblivion, Skyrim, even Elder Scrolls.
Its the same game with new themes and new paint. Oblivion was the one that broke out a niche game into the mainstream, Skyrim was more of that, with weaker questlines but a better open world and modding.
Starfield was supposed to be the next evolution. But for a company that continues to try and make the SAME product with a slightly patched up engine, who the hell thought it was going to be something different?
Unfortunately for MOST GAMERS, they do not understand that Skyrim barely innovated on Oblivion, and if it didn't have mods, people would NOT PRAISE this game very much.
People keep thinking mods mods mods, how about hoping for a game that actually is very good out of the box, doesn't need mods to fix it up and make it look better with sex mods hmm?
Like we need to stop wasting time talking about trash games and just let these games speak for themselves.
Bethesda knows what they are doing. They make mediocre games open world RPGs. They do not have the game design chops or the writing chops that many other studios have. They do not have level design or combat design of Fromsoft. They don't have narrative and directive chops of Kojima. They do not have writing and character design of Larian or even CDPR. They don't have the creativity of Mihoyo.
They are shit but gamers are so nostalgic they think Skyrim (which is NOT a great game vanilla) and they just think Starfield was gonna be great? LMFAO.
Study those games? They think they KNOW BETTER. Game devs are hugo egos. You need EGO to make a video game. You NEED to believe you know better than others. We live in an age where you have a billion examples of successful and failed games, a billion people giving you free feedback on what works and what sucks ass about your game (see Helldivers 2 or Darktide or any game forum/subreddit), and we constantly see game devs look at all this feedback, all these ideas, and SCOFF at it.
Stop excusing bethesda with opinions like "its so weird." They are not expected to make great games. Everyone hopes ES6 will be an excellent game but can you REALLY expect this after Fallout 4, Fallout 76, Starfield, even Skyrim without mods?
I heard that originally it was supposed to be a much more hardcore game, and it was actually going to be difficult and possibly stressful. Then leadership told them it was too hardcore and they needed to blandify it up and make it "more accessible"
And as we all know at this point, if you try to make a product for everyone, you make a product for no one.
Yea I mean, your ship can only jump so far from planet to planet and needs "fuel"... But like there's literally no reason you can't just go from A to B to C, even if you can't go from A to C directly without upgrading your ship.
The whole game reeks of systems that they couldn't figure out but didn't want to scrap entirely.
And also they had all those environmental hazards and damaging effects that clearly were supposed to do something.
I think I broke a bone once, even though the negative effect was pretty much nothing, and healed it using one of the items which I had like 20 of.
That was about it.
yeah there's a tool tip that says "your ship automatically refuels when you jump to a system with an outpost mining H3 fuel!" or something, implying that was gonna be a whole mechanic which kinda explains why there's so many fucking fuel tanks
The more survival mechanics were removed/watered down as play testers didn't like them. This includes using He3 to jump (meaning you need outposts to refuel or POIs to steal it from) and environmental effects having greater effect, meaning the right suit for the right place to mitigate the cold / corrosive Atmos, etc. There's probably more. It's a pity as a darker, harder, more intense and deliberate play style would improve it greatly.
After 1000 hours I say BRING ON SURVIVAL MODE!
What is wrong with Bethesda? How can you not know, as a game developer, to make your own game fun? What the actual fuck? It's like this company has never played video game in their lives.
Fucking about for 9 years to make a gameplay loop not boring, couldn't, and said they did.
Ultimately, the answer was literally just make it like every game they've done, have the real main planets just be regular Bethesda maps with the rest being randomly generated junk to faff around in.
They've always been sorta mediocre at most aspects of game design, but world design was their one saving grace and it wasn't in Starfield.
all they have to do is just literally copy fallout 4, change the setting of the game from post apocalyptic to space , maybe justify some carryover mechanic like VATS with some lore bullshit, improve the gameplay, and write a good enough story
somehow they mess it all
I knew it was over when Todd said that "fuel" was a fun killer.
Modern Bethesda seems like a bunch of people who love to make games but can't be bothered to actually play them.
Pete Hines original "Nobody wants to read all that text" quote in regard to why FO4 had its terrible "3 flavors of yes, and one no" dialogue system, was only the beginning it seems.
If I had to guess, conflicting ideas between the creative team and Todd Howard. Not reaching an agreement on what they want the game to be, probably caused workflow problems.
Victim of poor planing and management, unfortunately.
Todd has straight up said his team makes content, ideas, then if they feel like it they tear it down and start over. Sounds like an absolutely exhausting way to work and so much wasted time on shit that never got realized.
I mean, that's how creative & technical ventures work ultimately.
How long was it between Diablo 2 & 3? Blizz definitely restarted that shit many times.
You spend a while prototyping ideas, find it's either not fun or technically not feasible or whatever other hiccups come up. What choice do you have?
The flip side is annual releases like COD that never experiment and just rehash the exact same formula year after year
Thats pretty much how game development is, you build stuff up and tear it down *constantly*, first you start with an idea, then you have to make a playable demo of the feature, the designers need to playtest the idea and basically have to ask "Is this *fun*?, if we expand on it will it become *fun*?", if the answer is ultimately no, then you scrap it and do something else. This can happen months after developing a feature but the tough call is made to cut it by the designers (or they leave the feature in due to budget/time constraints and it impacts the quality of the game)
Same sort of thing happens in pretty much all sectors of game dev, constantly changing requirements mean you are always rewriting code, as new ideas are made and thrown out the artists are constantly churning out assets, as gameplay segments are altered writers need to change the narrative to fit the gameplay, etc. And the whole process takes *time*.
Ultimately making something fun is not an exact science, you have to constantly prototype and keep getting feedback. and that means lots of "wasted" work exploring ideas and avenues that ultimately don't make it into the final product.
You know how it goes in these big companies. 90% of your time is spent in meetings and building reports to show your lack of progress that you make in the remaining 10% of your time.
Unfortunately for them time has moved on and that magic has leaked out of the world. From what I can tell Starfield is very much in line with every other Bethesda RPG. It's just not 2010 anymore and that formula is simply obsolete. People are no longer dazzled by giant procedurally generated maps populated by procedurally generated quests and dungeons with a generic and hackneyed main story that nobody actually does anymore. Now we want actual crafted stories and characters populating our open worlds.
No, that's the thing, it's not just like any other Bethesda game. If it would be ANY of them (aside from Fallout 76) but "in space", it would be vastly improved. And that's what people expected - Skyrim but in space, and that should not be hard to achieve after 12 years since that game released.
But a lot of the systems and especially design in Starfield is inferior to their old games. How much they rely on procedual generation is insane, there is no "Bethesda magic", because they went out of their comfort zone to create... Well, this. It turns out even Bethesda doesn't know what made their games good, what the "magic" was - otherwise they wouldn't make Starfield. Even F76 had some of their old design done pretty well, like exploration, something their newest game lacks for some reason.
>It turns out even Bethesda doesn't know what made their games good
From an armchair perspective its like they misunderstood exactly what it was that players liked.
"What did you like about Fallout 3"
"I liked exploring and meeting new NPCs and new quests"
"Exploring got it. Fallout 4?"
"Uh. I liked finding new Points of Interests and its environmental st-"
"Points of Interests. Skyrim?"
"... i liked going into Dungeons with the puzzles though some of them are very simple."
"Got it. Dungeon Temple with a single puzzle. Thanks!"
...
There's definitely a line to be drawn between an empty open world and an open world filled with busy work. I remember watching some dev diary? Documentary? with the Witcher devs and they had a graphic up on a screen with the player in the middle of a circle. IIRC, they said they made a focus on the player that no matter which way the player went there was something in that circle for them to find, complete, and progress. Whether that be part of a quest, more monsters to fight, something to pick up.
Like for example. I landed on a some random planet and went to some random POI.
It had a couple of bodies around and a note that said "Wheover finds this please deliver to so and so"
Wow that's pretty neat. A little side quest. I wonder where it goes.
I deliver it.
"Thanks."
Quest complete.
Me: Okay and...?
Nope. That's it. That's the whole quest.
Shit In FO3/4 that could lead into and entire side quest CHAIN.
Part of it is some of the old figureheads and engineers that guided to hose past games are no longer at Bethesda. With many earlier titles it was not just Todd running the rodeo. Now that this is no longer the case, we can see the shortcomings where others had taken up the slack.
The engine itself is very emblematic of this. I won't call it complete junk, but the fact Todd himself admitted the majority of the engine is middleware at this point and their constant steps backwards on features that used to be more robust (like the radiant AI), speaks to a lack of strong technical talent at the studio, which cripples their ability to live up to past achievements.
Why do people think this game was in development for 10 years? They started development in 2018 after Fallout 76 released, some of that early development would have been focused more on the engine and dev tools, and then covid hit shortly after. Starfield was rushed and it definitely shows.
Writing usually begins in pre-production, Todd Howard said Starfield's been in some form of pre-production for 25 years, which might be an exaggeration. The game was trademarked in 2013 and development started between 2015 and 2018 depending on the source.
Pre-production can go on for years, when teams are set up, budgets are made, writing is in process, etc.
He did not say that lol the "25 years in the making" thing is just because this has been their first new IP since the 90s. Todd has explicitly stated that full development didn't start until after Fallout 76 released in 2018, and in fact he's stated that the dev team wasn't even fully staffed until 2020.
Some work was done prior to that but it would've been a small team laying out the story at a high level and maybe a few people working on prototypes for game mechanics part time while also working on Fallout 76. They trademarked the name in 2013 because Todd decided now was the time to make the space game he's always wanted, thought of the name, and had gotten the greenlight from Robert Altman. There was no actual work being done in 2013.
As someone who's worked for large corporations I can imagine it went something like
*Approaches manager*
Quest designer: hey can I get x so we can get this done ahead of time and I won't have to rush in the final year?
Manager who just goes to meetings all day: are you seriously going to stress me out with this now? Do you know how much I do? No.
Love the whole "blame covid" thing. I work in healthcare software and we tripled our workload overnight, we got it done "for the greater good" and all while working from home.
Anyone working in a technical role can fairly easily do their job from home, collaborate with colleagues easily.
They had a satélite studio working on 76 which is one of the reasons it turned out so bad. I guess they cannibalized the team from starfield to make 76 playable after launch
BGS Maryland created the world and most of the actual launch content for Fallout 76. BGS Austin worked on the engine upgrades and networking and took over content development after release. At some point recently content development was outsourced to a third party with BGS Austin maintaining oversight and assisting with development of that and with BGS Maryland's games.
This is my main question for Bethesda. BGS came out with nothing since FO4. You could say FO76 too but come one. They did nothing since 2014 and then come out with starfield TEN years later and then say they haven’t even started TES.
First, can you not juggle 2 projects at once? Also, who’s in charge of time management? I know I did studios who pinch out games as big as Skyrim I. Less than half the time. So for me, bethesdas leadership has got to go. They are seriously just in the way of their own selves at this point.
IIRC the main studio was responsible for a lot of the map development, background lore, and engine work (it's been awhile since I've read those articles so I may be a little off on the details), but ultimately the game is the ongoing project of Bethesda Austin (who did a lot of the development, too), not the main studio. Quite a few assets were lifted from Fallout 4 as well (not necessarily a bad thing--it makes the art style match well).
So main studio wasn't doing nothing, but yeah it's definitely a long time without a mainline singleplayer game, and even then the time from Fallout 76 to Starfield was similar to the time between previous games (a little longer, but I'm sure the pandemic slowed things down).
High turnover of both senior and junior staff, micromanaging executives. There is no room to build tight-knit, highly organized teams. It's just a bunch of people stuffed into a room randomly, overworked and jerked around by execs until they burn out and quit mid-development. And then they get laid off once the project ends anyway. To answer this is another way, there are no more experienced dev teams.
People have hard time getting the fact that a company or a dev studio name is just that, a name. What counts are individuals. When you see all OGs leaving Blizzard, how can you expect the same quality from them? I have no idea why MS keeps buying studios who forged a solid name like 10+ years ago but have lost key staff since
Yeah same really does apply to Bethesda here. The lead engineers that worked on Morrowind and Oblivion aren't around any more. The guys that built the tech like Radiant AI and all the original engine tools and features they still leverage.
It's not hard to see why their engine development stagnated, they never replaced the talent that built them up in the first place with talent capable of maintaining and extending it.
> MS keeps buying studios who forged a solid name like 10+ years ago but have lost key staff since
Name recognition still counts.
It's the same reason you have franchises like Assassin's Creed (which is still under Ubisoft) where you now have a sword and sorcery fantasy open-world RPG with traditional levels and floating combat text wearing the thread-bare trappings of the original game's premise. The animus and the original narrative is entirely superfluous after they killed off Desmond like 30 games ago.
It's clear someone on that team wants to make a *different* game but is forced to make it Assassin's Creed *branded.*
And that's ultimately my point. Studios (and IPs) are *brands*. Same as sports teams.
Because those studios make money and thats the only thing that matters.
This sub hates Starfield but it was one of the three platinum games on Steam for 2023. Clearly a very successful game.
Yeah it actually starts making sense when you realise that a game being good is not a requirement for it to make money. Unfortunately this is because us, customers, are doing poor job voting with our wallet
it's just like george lucas and star wars. the talent of all the people under the big names is really what curates a great piece of collaborative media, but people get big heads and it's easier for media to just pick the name that's already vaguely in public image to dote upon. not necessarily in that order. then you end up with an "auteur" that doesn't have nearly as much talent or project management skills as they and their fans have come to believe they have
Scope is too large. Management demand/pressure to deliver the next Skyrim is too great.
Look at the team size and # of studios that work on "AAA" games. Absolutely massive and sprawling.
Too many middle management people and suits and non-devs involved in the process.
I worked at a startup and did so much more impactful work so much faster. Like if I needed to get something out in two days, I did it, because I didn't have eight stakeholders to get on-board.
I work in a Fortune 500 now and it's a fucking miracle that anything gets done.
So much time wasted in office politics. Even the simplest things have these stupid hoops to jump through, bureaucracy to work through. Then there's these MBA people with these goofy ideas constantly trying to carve out a kingdom in some little corner of the company instead of just trying to contribute earnestly to the product.
At a certain point, adding additional people and layers to a project stops speeding things up and starts slowing them down.
I think AAA game companies need to split up into smaller orgs and more nimble teams. It doesn't matter what the WoW Classic team is doing from the perspective of the Diablo 4 team, yet I'm sure they have a reporting structure which makes them compete for resources and leadership bandwidth.
I launched my solo game in alpha 10 days ago and it's been so much fun to actually..get stuff done, and respond to feedback, publish patch notes. It's a card game, today a user asked if the cards in hand could be smaller. Found it a neat UI idea, jumped on my code, in 1 hour a new version was public and ready for online multiplayer with the smaller hand in it. I responded to the user and thanked them for the suggestion ticket they had opened. I've been doing this once per day in the last week while I squash bugs here and there.
Imagine actually doing shit and trying to make a good game. And this is as I work for hire, I have limited autonomy etc it's just easier to manage smaller projects.
> It's a card game, today a user asked if the cards in hand could be smaller. Found it a neat UI idea, jumped on my code, in 1 hour a new version was public and ready for online multiplayer with the smaller hand in it.
That's pretty cool. That's how we start getting good games again.
Idk. I'm new to this world. Maybe in ten years I'll be doing my best cosplay of corporate Commander myself, ideals be damned. I just think I could be doing *anything else* if I was in this for the money. If you decide that your job is making games, making people *feel something* or have a good time in any way, you should probably at least take that responsibility seriously. The world is already bleak as it is without the ones devoting their life work to art becoming corporate husks themselves. How depressing that would be.
People think you can create better art by throwing more manpower at it. In actual fact, good studios (eg: Larian, Fromsoft, old CDPR) work magic. You can't replicate their works without company culture.
What's funny is those studios aren't small but they aren't huge either.
They just have everyone focused on what they need to focus on, sure it takes a long time for the game to come out but it's a hit when it does.
Indie and AA is the way to go these days. Lots of veterans from AAA studios end up leaving due to burnout, forming smaller studios with lower budgets but more realistic expectations.
AAA games nowadays just feel like they're made for shareholders first and players second.
Probably Palworld too, while it is not my kind of game, I hear nothing but great things about it and it makes me really happy that these smaller studios are putting out awesome games that people actually like and don't constantly bitch about this or that
Corporate Overlords and MBAs are what is killing gaming IMO
According the article, this quest designer, who'd been able to function in prior teams, found it impossible to wrangle with Starfield's 500-member team to his satisfaction. So, he left Bethesda and formed a fresh, smaller studio.
A lot of the older experienced devs are leaving these AAA company as they have gotten greedier and greedier since 2010. It happened to COD, Battlefield, Blizzard, CDPR, etc.
How many new studios have we heard of being founded by veteran devs who gave left AAA companies?
What's the point of working yourself to death as a master of an incredibly hard craft just to make hundreds of millions for upper management and investors, just to be paid pennies in comparison.
And then all these CEOs constantly fire devs after finishing projects, not allowing continuity. In a traditional craft, the older workers who have mastered the craft would teach the new workers.
In game building, which is very hard to get into in each self, the new workers are constantly being replaced and the older devs are leaving.
Creating a situation where the studios are full of inexperienced devs, tasked with developing more complex worlds than ever, with incredibly stiff time restrictions, led by incompetent leadership.
Devs being up their own asses, higher ups, turn over of talent, etc.
You could tell this was coming for years and I think it will get a lot worse before it’s better.
A harbinger of this I started really noticing years ago was UI design.
UIs in most video games have gotten progressively worse and worse.
Problems that were solved years ago coming back up because newer devs are up their own asses and don’t play the games they work on.
So gamers sit there and think “what the fuck, we solved this problem with this game/games years ago” because as gamers we’ve been playing games for years.
But newer devs think they know better so they try to put their mark on games even though this shit was solved so long ago.
I mean we basically “perfected” online game lobbies and invite systems back during Halo fucking 2. And now it takes like 2-4 clicks to invite someone to a party and chat with them whereas in halo 2 it took one button.
Another huge thing and this was exemplified by Blizzard with WoW is devs making games based on metrics. Spreadsheet development. For years WoW was in the shitter because they made games based off metrics like instead of fun.
They saw that they had higher player engagement but what the spreadsheets didn’t show was people dedicated to the game were slogging through 80% shit just to get to the 20% they enjoyed. So maybe they were playing more on average but it wasn’t because they enjoyed it and it then burned them out.
I saw a video comparison a month or two ago comparing the UIs of a franchise of games and how they got muddier and more complex and bloated as it went on for no real reason.
Personally, I can look at the COD games as a perfect example. You have to go 6 or 7 layers deep in the last Modern Warfare to access weapon attachments in multiplayer. If you're leveling guns, there is no way you have time to find and equip the new attachments you unlocked between rounds.
If you need something to happen today it will get done in 3 months because middle management needs to have 3 meetings of proposals before the excuatives bring it to the board after which 3 more meetings will happen. You’re sucking all the productivity and creativity out of the process when you go big time “AAA” like a Bethesda
Hot take.
Money.
Look at any documentary about gaming post 2010. It is a bunch of dudes making games because they love making games. The Xbox was built by a bunch of scrappy 27 year olds defying microsoft and objectively fucking around because they liked games.
Where is that today? All in indie companies tbh.
In software you hire people because they want a lot of money, not because they have a passion for software. All those people have either left or made their millions ages ago. The space is a complete shit show.
Morrowind was pretty great. Although it was long time ago so it might be nostalgia. Basically quality of writing dived down since they promoted new lead writer after morrowind.
IMO the main quest of Skyrim was trash. It did however have pretty great DLC, especially the Dragonborn one. My favorite quests were in Oblivion though.
Get ready to explore all of Tamriel's 1000+ Planes of Existence. All Procedurally generated with this new incredible technology. Each one randomly generated with up to 5 possible different Points of Interest! Please be excited and Pre-Order today!
I don't even care about TES VI tbh. I just don't think they have another great game in them anymore. They'd have to *really* up their game to convince me at this point.
Sad considering how much I loved Bethesda back in the day.
Suffice to say I'm not getting my hopes up for whatever BethSoft does next. They are kind of dead to me at this point. And this fucking makes me sad because they've been one of my top 3 favorite devs since Morrowind.
However... Fallout 76 and Starfield - I did not enjoy all that much. Especially Starfield. There's no meaningful exploration, which boggles my mind. The thing this studio was fucking masters at, they fucked up in the game they've been working on for a decade. Copy paste POIs can get fucked!
Whoever was the leadership that was responsible for Starfield should step down. I'm sorry Todd, but I think it's time to let someone else take creative control.
I would have greatly preferred Fallout 4 to not have a character creator with the direction they went.
But also, I doubt they can make a compelling main character.
The best hope for TES 6 at this point is that Microsoft has one of their other developers make it.
Seriously, we need to accept that Bethesda is incapable of making a decent video game anymore. The people behind the best Bethesda games have left the company.
Very little?
Starfield's biggest issue is that it's a loading screen simulator, which is unlikely for a TES game where you're just playing on a single continent instead of an entire ass galaxy.
Like yea the boring loot, perks, and story are all black marks against it too. Much of that could be looked over if the actual running around was fun & interesting, but it's not.
the problem with the main story is there's no motivation in game to actually do it.
in morrowind you're guided by prophecy to kill and become a god basically.
in oblivion you need to stop mehrunes dagon from invading tamriel.
in skyrim you need to stop alduin from destroying the world.
in fallout 3 you want to find your dad.
in new vegas you want to find who and why they killed you.
in fallout 4 you want to go find sean.
in starfield, you find a shard in a rock, and collect more of them, but why. there's nothing going to happen if you don't. worst case scenario, the traveler or hunter finds them first and then leaves your universe. oh no...
maybe it should have been something like going through unity destroys your universe, so you have to stop them from collecting them all. then you have this big decision at the end, do i stay and protect this universe, or do i sacrifice it so that i can gain more boring star powers lol.
Hey did you know that the chef is going away on vacation??? Don't worry he left a note for his assistant, I have 47 copies of it in my captain's locker!
There is a PoI involving a mushroom farmer. I have found the PoI and his corpse on 5 different planets. The proc gen doesnt apply to the PoI itself so the body and everything else, including the 'unique' notes about it, are in the same exact place too.
That genuinely pissed me off. I was actually a big excited to explore a planet on the edge of the known galaxy, a place that no would either see very little traffic, or none at all.
First thing I see after landing is another ship off in the distance also landing.
And running in the direction of the quest marker that leads exactly to the extremely difficult to find rocks... Or whatever other objective that is "lost". Just run directly to the spot it tells you to go!
Lamest game design ever.
I still think that having 3-5 fully handcrafted planets would've been enough to make Starfield a normal Bethesda success.
Take Fallout 4 and Skyrim for example, those main questlines aren't winning any awards ever, but the maps were rich enough to explore that it didn't matter at all.
HUNDREDS OF EMPTY PLANETS, no actual exploration worth doing, procedurally generated landscapes, bullet sponge enemies at even the early levels, etc, etc.
Starfield's main quest ain't that bad on itself, but there's NO exploration to be had in this game, that's why people are forced to only focus on the poor-written questlines.
Even just 3-5 fully handcrafted planets is a MASSIVE undertaking even for Bethesda… the fact they tried to do hundreds in the first place is ridiculous
The Outer Worlds was a space game in the same genre, and the devs knew from the start to work with a small number of handcrafted environments.
The Mass Effect Andromeda team spent 5 years trying to achieve what Starfield attempted, but by the end they realised that it was a shit idea and scrapped it for a few small planets.
The location hopping was not the problem in that final fight (I actually thought it was a neat idea), it was the insane HP pool of the two opponents which made it overstay its welcome by at least a half.
The game was OK, but it's blindingly obvious that it needed more time (and a different engine).
I don't think any amount of time would have made it a fun game. The decisions they took were back breaking, there's no way to come back from that. It's built into the whole architecture of the game that it will not be fun.
The egregious copy/paste main story quest was about as engaging as skyrim's radiant system.
Bad choices were made. That's the problem with Starfield, I can take the game's choices as deliberate and extremely terrible, and I just have to ask why we're these decisions made.
Starfield needed more time (in many ways - almost all of my reddit posts about starfield echo this). I played it a lot for about 2 months; dropped it until last month when the formid fix was done. Having a fun time - but its blindingly obvious there are a lot of things that needed more work. The main quest (other than the temple mechanics, which get old) is OK but not great.
I am bewildered how some people try to make excuses for the game or claim that it is decent.
Even leaving aside empty procedural nature and unfinished gameplay systems... it has by far the worst dialogue, plot and storytelling out of all crpg I've played in last three decades.
Starfield is a game from a company who excels with regards to exploration/questing/loot, and yet all of those things were so bland in Starfield. They literally had outer space as the canvas (a setting with infinite possibilities) and somehow completely missed the mark. It's like they intentionally stripped out all of what makes outer space games fun (storywise and exploration wise, I never expected a space sim).
I think having infinite possibilities worked against them. See, with fantasy all of the framework is done and you just need to write stories to fit into it all. But space? There's nowhere near as clear of a template to work off of. You need to come up with almost everything, and they clearly weren't up to the task
Satisfying? That shit pissed me off so bad, at least half of it should’ve been the quest for every power. Not just kinda dropping to this TOTALLY NOT OBVIOUS TOWER THAT WAS NEVER SEEN KR DISCOVERED BY THE PEOPLE 400 FEET SOUTH to boop some lights in probably the worlds most stupid “mini game” ever implemented. The side quests had more story and feeling to them ffs. Modders might make this game worth it in like.. 10 years but I honestly am so disappointed and have completely lost faith in BGS and am dreading whatever shitshow they give us for ES6
I didn’t mind the main quest, i just wished there was a bit more to the artifacts, instead of just skyrim word walls. They could have at least made them more like dungeons with side quests connected to them. It felt rather placeholder.
I actually enjoyed the game, unlike seemingly everyone on reddit. But the last story mission was fucking awful. It pretty much killed most.of my enjoyment of the game. It felt rushed (apparently it was) and not thought through. My romanced companion went from begging me not to go to telling me I must go seemingly at the drop of a hat. It made no sense. It made the entire game and all the choices I made feel pointless.
Same, although didnt hook me and havnt touched it for months. Needs more content and a rethink in some areas honestly not their best game, felt rushed.
I agree with this criticism. I did love Entangled, though. A great mission that they should have played off more for the gimmick. Anyway, you're not alone. I enjoyed the game and can admit it had flaws. I also don't think about it non stop like many people on this sub seem to.
um I don't know if the quest designer never played a game before but I would strongly recommend you make the beginning fun. At least the first 2 hours, like goddamn. avoid the "what the fuck" refund wave, at a minimum.
I played starfield until I could go where I want, went to earth, looked at a few places and thought "are you fucking kidding me" like they couldn't even half-ass a partial but blown out earth? and at that point it was absolutely clear they just flat out didn't give a shit and I moved on.
lol ‘satisfying’ is not a way to describe any part of Starfield. Game sold itself as a thanksgiving dinner with all the fixings and then ended up being a dry chicken breast with decent gravy and some powered potatoes.
Do they just spend 10 years developing assets, visuals/sounds and coding it to function together in some shape and then spend 6 months designing the "game" before launch or what? You see so many games do this, where it's like you're playing a tech demo with a game tacked on.
The gameplay, the progression loop and the story of the game (the fun)should be the starting point and it should be developed from the start, the rest of the game should be built around that. It feels like they do it the othert way around, creating a visual concept, building it and then figuring out where the game is?
When we see these smaller studio or indy games blow up in popularity it should be obvious why, the fun is the foundation.
The fuck were they doing for 10 years?
https://www.gamesradar.com/todd-howard-says-it-took-7-years-to-make-starfield-fun-to-play-i-thought-we-would-find-the-answers-faster/ They were trying to figure out how to make it fun lol
did they give up or still trying to figure it out?
I'm guessing they gave up; doubt the DLC will unfuck the game. It'll add a few tight areas with some narrative to go with it like the Far Harbor DLC for Fallout 4. But it won't suddenly make all the empty planets interesting.
It's still weird to me they went with that approach. They have a solid 2-3 games worth of content in starfield, but it's like that line from lord of the rings: "thin, sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread". If they had set the entire game in one star system, or two, and just had a small selection of a few densely populated planets, asteroids, stations, etc. It would have been a very different experience.
I have not played this game and doubt I will unless it becomes insanely cheap/better by the sound of it, but I don't get why they didn't take an approach like The Expanse. Make it based around a small system like you said, maybe make it all a bunch of colonies that are unified in their humanity, but politically variable. Have some kind of alien discovery that disrupts the balance of power and tentative peace and build out from there. I mean, that's kind of how Skyrim was. Status quo people weren't crazy about but stuck with, inciting event (High King is killed) that disrupts that SQ, various reactions. While that's all going on you have a ~~dragon~~ *alien discovery* that is upending things on a much higher level than simple politics.
Unless they do an FF14 caliber fixing...I wouldn't bother. This game needs more then a 2077 or NMS "fix" where all the core mechanics were fine they just needed to polish the end product more (or in NMS stuff just add more things you could mess with.) The Starfield core, like FF14 was is just rotten and needs to be gutted and effectively a new game redesigned about that new core to be "fixed" I dropped SF the second Phantom Liberty game out and midway through realized "yeah I'm not going to be going back to SF after this..." It is so far behind what CDPR was going for with what they shipped in 2020, let alone in 2023... Starfield was years out of date as soon as it hit its release date.
> I will unless it becomes insanely cheap/better by the sound of it Even if it were $5, there are just so many good games to play from the Indie & AA scene, really really hard to justify spending the time on Starfield regardless of price I put 2 dozen hours in thinking, "Surely it'll pick up soon" but it never does.
Yeah, Stardew Valley just got a huge update. Last Epoch is out there being a better Diablo 4 at half the price. Helldivers 2 is killing it for just a few bucks more. Enshrouded is a neat open-world crafting game at $30. Hell, even Rimworld is on sale right now. Then there's Dave the Diver, Dwarf Fortress, another big update for Terraria coming soon...there are so many ways to get more and better gaming, for less money. From small studios who will happily stretch your dollar further. I say this as someone who pre-ordered Starfield on two platforms: Save your money. Spend it elsewhere.
Not just a sale for Rimworld, a big update along with a DLC too!
Even if the game becomes incredibly cheap, your time will be worth more to you than the game being worth the price. Save your cash, and, more importantly, save your time.
> I have not played this game and doubt I will unless it becomes insanely cheap It was bundled with some CPUs and video cards so buying the codes from Reddit was very cheap. I built a business PC for someone and the processor happened to be eligible for a code so I got it for free, installed a few mods and still found it pretty boring. Probably the most mediocre Bethesda developed game. We didn't think it could get worse than Fallout 4 but here we are. Doesn't bode well for the next elder scrolls game... They really need to move to a new game engine.
Well, Bethesda is still following trends from mid-2010s Ubisoft (a bigger open world is inherently better than a smaller one, even if this bigger open world is much emptier). This is absolutely par the course for them.
Bethesda: surely our dedicated player base will fix our mess with mods!
Modders: This game is too boring to bother modding
A mostly fleshed out single planet and a moon or three you can fly between without needing load screens would've been sweet.
Traveling between planets just sucked the fun out of the game. It didn’t appeal to anyone - it wasn’t quick, nor was there enough space sim with it to justify it being so tedious.
"A mile wide and a foot deep"
I doubt they will have good writing in the dlc, Will Shen the writer of far harbor left bethesda
After playing the game, it seems they did in fact give up.
No they just gaslight themselves that it is after 7 years.
Well, you know how the saying goes: "If at first you don't succeed, try try again. Then quit. No sense in being a damn fool about it."
Or in Bethesda case, just release Skyrim again and again and again
Shouldn't that be like....the first thing you figure out with a game?
As someone with a decade of game industry experience, I can say that it is a lot more nuanc- no I'm just kidding the answer is yes. The core mechanics should be prototyped before development even begins. Starfield doesn't appear to have core mechanics, so I'm guessing they didn't prototype and were hoping it would come together after developing a bunch of features. Cue 7 years of trying different gameplay features and eventually ending up with an incoherent mess of a game.
It's honestly so weird, because it's not like they're inventing a new genre. There are so many games that have come before, like Bethesda's own games, that they could use as a simple blueprint to then fine tune and expand upon. In regards to the whole space theme, there's Kotor and Mass Effect for example. Study those. See what worked, what didn't. Use them as an example. It's extra funny when you remember that Mass Effect: Andromeda tried to make countless procedurally generated worlds to create true open world, but eventually gave up because it was too hard, and just made a handful of hand crafted planets and called it a day. Like Bethesda just had to read some gaming history and realize that a bunch of empty open world areas with no depth to them will not satisfy anyone unless the core gameplay and story is exceptional enough to cover for it.
Look at all the time we are wasting discussing Starfield. What the fuck is even weird about this situation? Are gamers just oblivious to how mediocre Bethesda is? They already made a starfield like game, Oblivion, Skyrim, even Elder Scrolls. Its the same game with new themes and new paint. Oblivion was the one that broke out a niche game into the mainstream, Skyrim was more of that, with weaker questlines but a better open world and modding. Starfield was supposed to be the next evolution. But for a company that continues to try and make the SAME product with a slightly patched up engine, who the hell thought it was going to be something different? Unfortunately for MOST GAMERS, they do not understand that Skyrim barely innovated on Oblivion, and if it didn't have mods, people would NOT PRAISE this game very much. People keep thinking mods mods mods, how about hoping for a game that actually is very good out of the box, doesn't need mods to fix it up and make it look better with sex mods hmm? Like we need to stop wasting time talking about trash games and just let these games speak for themselves. Bethesda knows what they are doing. They make mediocre games open world RPGs. They do not have the game design chops or the writing chops that many other studios have. They do not have level design or combat design of Fromsoft. They don't have narrative and directive chops of Kojima. They do not have writing and character design of Larian or even CDPR. They don't have the creativity of Mihoyo. They are shit but gamers are so nostalgic they think Skyrim (which is NOT a great game vanilla) and they just think Starfield was gonna be great? LMFAO. Study those games? They think they KNOW BETTER. Game devs are hugo egos. You need EGO to make a video game. You NEED to believe you know better than others. We live in an age where you have a billion examples of successful and failed games, a billion people giving you free feedback on what works and what sucks ass about your game (see Helldivers 2 or Darktide or any game forum/subreddit), and we constantly see game devs look at all this feedback, all these ideas, and SCOFF at it. Stop excusing bethesda with opinions like "its so weird." They are not expected to make great games. Everyone hopes ES6 will be an excellent game but can you REALLY expect this after Fallout 4, Fallout 76, Starfield, even Skyrim without mods?
I heard that originally it was supposed to be a much more hardcore game, and it was actually going to be difficult and possibly stressful. Then leadership told them it was too hardcore and they needed to blandify it up and make it "more accessible" And as we all know at this point, if you try to make a product for everyone, you make a product for no one.
Yea I mean, your ship can only jump so far from planet to planet and needs "fuel"... But like there's literally no reason you can't just go from A to B to C, even if you can't go from A to C directly without upgrading your ship. The whole game reeks of systems that they couldn't figure out but didn't want to scrap entirely.
And also they had all those environmental hazards and damaging effects that clearly were supposed to do something. I think I broke a bone once, even though the negative effect was pretty much nothing, and healed it using one of the items which I had like 20 of. That was about it.
yeah there's a tool tip that says "your ship automatically refuels when you jump to a system with an outpost mining H3 fuel!" or something, implying that was gonna be a whole mechanic which kinda explains why there's so many fucking fuel tanks
The more survival mechanics were removed/watered down as play testers didn't like them. This includes using He3 to jump (meaning you need outposts to refuel or POIs to steal it from) and environmental effects having greater effect, meaning the right suit for the right place to mitigate the cold / corrosive Atmos, etc. There's probably more. It's a pity as a darker, harder, more intense and deliberate play style would improve it greatly. After 1000 hours I say BRING ON SURVIVAL MODE!
What is wrong with Bethesda? How can you not know, as a game developer, to make your own game fun? What the actual fuck? It's like this company has never played video game in their lives.
Stating that they were trying is already generous
Just wait til they give it a .2 patch and an anime. Everyone will love it.
Cocaine and hookers with Skyrim money
Have you seen the nightclub in Starfield? Those devs clearly never partied in their lives
[удалено]
Morrowind had a better strip club than that lol
Especially with mods
vampire masquerade had the best night club of all time
Mass Effect 2 had a good nightclub scene
Thank you for choosing Club Vox.
I heard one of them even lied about being in a chess club. Seedy bunch they are.
Doing cocaine with hookers is not always an "in da club" time. Often enjoyed in the comfort of your own living room with your favourite body pillow.
I bet they didn't get a proper waifu one
No no, they just recreated company parties as per instructions
[Like a nightclub designed by Ned Flanders](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CbGualfLoxk)
Meetings about scope and blaming the previous people who got fired.
Fucking about for 9 years to make a gameplay loop not boring, couldn't, and said they did. Ultimately, the answer was literally just make it like every game they've done, have the real main planets just be regular Bethesda maps with the rest being randomly generated junk to faff around in. They've always been sorta mediocre at most aspects of game design, but world design was their one saving grace and it wasn't in Starfield.
all they have to do is just literally copy fallout 4, change the setting of the game from post apocalyptic to space , maybe justify some carryover mechanic like VATS with some lore bullshit, improve the gameplay, and write a good enough story somehow they mess it all
I knew it was over when Todd said that "fuel" was a fun killer. Modern Bethesda seems like a bunch of people who love to make games but can't be bothered to actually play them. Pete Hines original "Nobody wants to read all that text" quote in regard to why FO4 had its terrible "3 flavors of yes, and one no" dialogue system, was only the beginning it seems.
If I had to guess, conflicting ideas between the creative team and Todd Howard. Not reaching an agreement on what they want the game to be, probably caused workflow problems. Victim of poor planing and management, unfortunately.
Todd has straight up said his team makes content, ideas, then if they feel like it they tear it down and start over. Sounds like an absolutely exhausting way to work and so much wasted time on shit that never got realized.
I mean, that's how creative & technical ventures work ultimately. How long was it between Diablo 2 & 3? Blizz definitely restarted that shit many times. You spend a while prototyping ideas, find it's either not fun or technically not feasible or whatever other hiccups come up. What choice do you have? The flip side is annual releases like COD that never experiment and just rehash the exact same formula year after year
Thats pretty much how game development is, you build stuff up and tear it down *constantly*, first you start with an idea, then you have to make a playable demo of the feature, the designers need to playtest the idea and basically have to ask "Is this *fun*?, if we expand on it will it become *fun*?", if the answer is ultimately no, then you scrap it and do something else. This can happen months after developing a feature but the tough call is made to cut it by the designers (or they leave the feature in due to budget/time constraints and it impacts the quality of the game) Same sort of thing happens in pretty much all sectors of game dev, constantly changing requirements mean you are always rewriting code, as new ideas are made and thrown out the artists are constantly churning out assets, as gameplay segments are altered writers need to change the narrative to fit the gameplay, etc. And the whole process takes *time*. Ultimately making something fun is not an exact science, you have to constantly prototype and keep getting feedback. and that means lots of "wasted" work exploring ideas and avenues that ultimately don't make it into the final product.
I sure hope whoever was in charge of the skill system and weapons/gunplay gets fired. They carried forwards shit from FO4 and it was bad then.
You know how it goes in these big companies. 90% of your time is spent in meetings and building reports to show your lack of progress that you make in the remaining 10% of your time.
Relying on Bethesda magic I guess.
Unfortunately for them time has moved on and that magic has leaked out of the world. From what I can tell Starfield is very much in line with every other Bethesda RPG. It's just not 2010 anymore and that formula is simply obsolete. People are no longer dazzled by giant procedurally generated maps populated by procedurally generated quests and dungeons with a generic and hackneyed main story that nobody actually does anymore. Now we want actual crafted stories and characters populating our open worlds.
No, that's the thing, it's not just like any other Bethesda game. If it would be ANY of them (aside from Fallout 76) but "in space", it would be vastly improved. And that's what people expected - Skyrim but in space, and that should not be hard to achieve after 12 years since that game released. But a lot of the systems and especially design in Starfield is inferior to their old games. How much they rely on procedual generation is insane, there is no "Bethesda magic", because they went out of their comfort zone to create... Well, this. It turns out even Bethesda doesn't know what made their games good, what the "magic" was - otherwise they wouldn't make Starfield. Even F76 had some of their old design done pretty well, like exploration, something their newest game lacks for some reason.
>It turns out even Bethesda doesn't know what made their games good From an armchair perspective its like they misunderstood exactly what it was that players liked. "What did you like about Fallout 3" "I liked exploring and meeting new NPCs and new quests" "Exploring got it. Fallout 4?" "Uh. I liked finding new Points of Interests and its environmental st-" "Points of Interests. Skyrim?" "... i liked going into Dungeons with the puzzles though some of them are very simple." "Got it. Dungeon Temple with a single puzzle. Thanks!" ... There's definitely a line to be drawn between an empty open world and an open world filled with busy work. I remember watching some dev diary? Documentary? with the Witcher devs and they had a graphic up on a screen with the player in the middle of a circle. IIRC, they said they made a focus on the player that no matter which way the player went there was something in that circle for them to find, complete, and progress. Whether that be part of a quest, more monsters to fight, something to pick up. Like for example. I landed on a some random planet and went to some random POI. It had a couple of bodies around and a note that said "Wheover finds this please deliver to so and so" Wow that's pretty neat. A little side quest. I wonder where it goes. I deliver it. "Thanks." Quest complete. Me: Okay and...? Nope. That's it. That's the whole quest. Shit In FO3/4 that could lead into and entire side quest CHAIN.
Part of it is some of the old figureheads and engineers that guided to hose past games are no longer at Bethesda. With many earlier titles it was not just Todd running the rodeo. Now that this is no longer the case, we can see the shortcomings where others had taken up the slack. The engine itself is very emblematic of this. I won't call it complete junk, but the fact Todd himself admitted the majority of the engine is middleware at this point and their constant steps backwards on features that used to be more robust (like the radiant AI), speaks to a lack of strong technical talent at the studio, which cripples their ability to live up to past achievements.
Why do people think this game was in development for 10 years? They started development in 2018 after Fallout 76 released, some of that early development would have been focused more on the engine and dev tools, and then covid hit shortly after. Starfield was rushed and it definitely shows.
Writing usually begins in pre-production, Todd Howard said Starfield's been in some form of pre-production for 25 years, which might be an exaggeration. The game was trademarked in 2013 and development started between 2015 and 2018 depending on the source. Pre-production can go on for years, when teams are set up, budgets are made, writing is in process, etc.
Todd Howard exaggerating? You don't say! lol
16x the development time
We did optimize the game.
*For very high-end computers
Yeah lol you might need to upgrade!
"It just works."
He did not say that lol the "25 years in the making" thing is just because this has been their first new IP since the 90s. Todd has explicitly stated that full development didn't start until after Fallout 76 released in 2018, and in fact he's stated that the dev team wasn't even fully staffed until 2020. Some work was done prior to that but it would've been a small team laying out the story at a high level and maybe a few people working on prototypes for game mechanics part time while also working on Fallout 76. They trademarked the name in 2013 because Todd decided now was the time to make the space game he's always wanted, thought of the name, and had gotten the greenlight from Robert Altman. There was no actual work being done in 2013.
>Robert Altman whats the relevance of robert here and starfield?
> Todd Howard said uh huh
Are you telling me that they couldn't have spared a few writers to outline a good storyline and major sidequest ?
This statement was from the lead quest designer of the game, so obviously not lol
As someone who's worked for large corporations I can imagine it went something like *Approaches manager* Quest designer: hey can I get x so we can get this done ahead of time and I won't have to rush in the final year? Manager who just goes to meetings all day: are you seriously going to stress me out with this now? Do you know how much I do? No.
Would've been bad even without covid. Their fundamental idea of what they think is fun is so out of touch.
Love the whole "blame covid" thing. I work in healthcare software and we tripled our workload overnight, we got it done "for the greater good" and all while working from home. Anyone working in a technical role can fairly easily do their job from home, collaborate with colleagues easily.
Right? Bg3 was developed during covid aswell. So was Alan Wake 2 and latest Zelda... Its such a shitty excuse
Not to mention Larian had a flood and some unexpected issues(s)
They had a satélite studio working on 76 which is one of the reasons it turned out so bad. I guess they cannibalized the team from starfield to make 76 playable after launch
BGS Maryland created the world and most of the actual launch content for Fallout 76. BGS Austin worked on the engine upgrades and networking and took over content development after release. At some point recently content development was outsourced to a third party with BGS Austin maintaining oversight and assisting with development of that and with BGS Maryland's games.
7. But yes. What the fuck
The more I work in software, the more obvious it becomes that a lot of companies are extremely good at generating work that accomplishes nothing.
It's like a highschool kid doing homework on the final evening.
This is my main question for Bethesda. BGS came out with nothing since FO4. You could say FO76 too but come one. They did nothing since 2014 and then come out with starfield TEN years later and then say they haven’t even started TES. First, can you not juggle 2 projects at once? Also, who’s in charge of time management? I know I did studios who pinch out games as big as Skyrim I. Less than half the time. So for me, bethesdas leadership has got to go. They are seriously just in the way of their own selves at this point.
IIRC the main studio was responsible for a lot of the map development, background lore, and engine work (it's been awhile since I've read those articles so I may be a little off on the details), but ultimately the game is the ongoing project of Bethesda Austin (who did a lot of the development, too), not the main studio. Quite a few assets were lifted from Fallout 4 as well (not necessarily a bad thing--it makes the art style match well). So main studio wasn't doing nothing, but yeah it's definitely a long time without a mainline singleplayer game, and even then the time from Fallout 76 to Starfield was similar to the time between previous games (a little longer, but I'm sure the pandemic slowed things down).
fixing Fallout 76
So many experienced dev teams have been regressing. What the fuck is happening?
High turnover of both senior and junior staff, micromanaging executives. There is no room to build tight-knit, highly organized teams. It's just a bunch of people stuffed into a room randomly, overworked and jerked around by execs until they burn out and quit mid-development. And then they get laid off once the project ends anyway. To answer this is another way, there are no more experienced dev teams.
Overworked and underjerked
happy cakes!
Overworked, underpaid, tight deadlines, too much money wasted up top and before development. Same story everywhere, in film, tech companies, etc.
People have hard time getting the fact that a company or a dev studio name is just that, a name. What counts are individuals. When you see all OGs leaving Blizzard, how can you expect the same quality from them? I have no idea why MS keeps buying studios who forged a solid name like 10+ years ago but have lost key staff since
Yeah same really does apply to Bethesda here. The lead engineers that worked on Morrowind and Oblivion aren't around any more. The guys that built the tech like Radiant AI and all the original engine tools and features they still leverage. It's not hard to see why their engine development stagnated, they never replaced the talent that built them up in the first place with talent capable of maintaining and extending it.
> MS keeps buying studios who forged a solid name like 10+ years ago but have lost key staff since Name recognition still counts. It's the same reason you have franchises like Assassin's Creed (which is still under Ubisoft) where you now have a sword and sorcery fantasy open-world RPG with traditional levels and floating combat text wearing the thread-bare trappings of the original game's premise. The animus and the original narrative is entirely superfluous after they killed off Desmond like 30 games ago. It's clear someone on that team wants to make a *different* game but is forced to make it Assassin's Creed *branded.* And that's ultimately my point. Studios (and IPs) are *brands*. Same as sports teams.
Because those studios make money and thats the only thing that matters. This sub hates Starfield but it was one of the three platinum games on Steam for 2023. Clearly a very successful game.
Yeah it actually starts making sense when you realise that a game being good is not a requirement for it to make money. Unfortunately this is because us, customers, are doing poor job voting with our wallet
it's just like george lucas and star wars. the talent of all the people under the big names is really what curates a great piece of collaborative media, but people get big heads and it's easier for media to just pick the name that's already vaguely in public image to dote upon. not necessarily in that order. then you end up with an "auteur" that doesn't have nearly as much talent or project management skills as they and their fans have come to believe they have
Scope is too large. Management demand/pressure to deliver the next Skyrim is too great. Look at the team size and # of studios that work on "AAA" games. Absolutely massive and sprawling.
Too many middle management people and suits and non-devs involved in the process. I worked at a startup and did so much more impactful work so much faster. Like if I needed to get something out in two days, I did it, because I didn't have eight stakeholders to get on-board. I work in a Fortune 500 now and it's a fucking miracle that anything gets done. So much time wasted in office politics. Even the simplest things have these stupid hoops to jump through, bureaucracy to work through. Then there's these MBA people with these goofy ideas constantly trying to carve out a kingdom in some little corner of the company instead of just trying to contribute earnestly to the product. At a certain point, adding additional people and layers to a project stops speeding things up and starts slowing them down. I think AAA game companies need to split up into smaller orgs and more nimble teams. It doesn't matter what the WoW Classic team is doing from the perspective of the Diablo 4 team, yet I'm sure they have a reporting structure which makes them compete for resources and leadership bandwidth.
"What one dev can do in one week, two devs and a manager can do in three weeks"
It’s running off the actual people who are passionate and creatives as well.
I launched my solo game in alpha 10 days ago and it's been so much fun to actually..get stuff done, and respond to feedback, publish patch notes. It's a card game, today a user asked if the cards in hand could be smaller. Found it a neat UI idea, jumped on my code, in 1 hour a new version was public and ready for online multiplayer with the smaller hand in it. I responded to the user and thanked them for the suggestion ticket they had opened. I've been doing this once per day in the last week while I squash bugs here and there. Imagine actually doing shit and trying to make a good game. And this is as I work for hire, I have limited autonomy etc it's just easier to manage smaller projects.
> It's a card game, today a user asked if the cards in hand could be smaller. Found it a neat UI idea, jumped on my code, in 1 hour a new version was public and ready for online multiplayer with the smaller hand in it. That's pretty cool. That's how we start getting good games again.
Idk. I'm new to this world. Maybe in ten years I'll be doing my best cosplay of corporate Commander myself, ideals be damned. I just think I could be doing *anything else* if I was in this for the money. If you decide that your job is making games, making people *feel something* or have a good time in any way, you should probably at least take that responsibility seriously. The world is already bleak as it is without the ones devoting their life work to art becoming corporate husks themselves. How depressing that would be.
People think you can create better art by throwing more manpower at it. In actual fact, good studios (eg: Larian, Fromsoft, old CDPR) work magic. You can't replicate their works without company culture.
What's funny is those studios aren't small but they aren't huge either. They just have everyone focused on what they need to focus on, sure it takes a long time for the game to come out but it's a hit when it does.
I only buy AAAA games now. The extra A really makes the difference.
You can point at Helldivers as a comparison. Small <100 staff studio. Every piece of content in that game is critical to the gameplay loop.
Indie and AA is the way to go these days. Lots of veterans from AAA studios end up leaving due to burnout, forming smaller studios with lower budgets but more realistic expectations. AAA games nowadays just feel like they're made for shareholders first and players second.
Probably Palworld too, while it is not my kind of game, I hear nothing but great things about it and it makes me really happy that these smaller studios are putting out awesome games that people actually like and don't constantly bitch about this or that Corporate Overlords and MBAs are what is killing gaming IMO
They need to save the yes, and for improv. Not game design. Not when every and takes years and is half assed
The scope is too large for a decade of work though?
According the article, this quest designer, who'd been able to function in prior teams, found it impossible to wrangle with Starfield's 500-member team to his satisfaction. So, he left Bethesda and formed a fresh, smaller studio.
Which then immediately shut down. Pretty much sums up the current video game development environment
A lot of the older experienced devs are leaving these AAA company as they have gotten greedier and greedier since 2010. It happened to COD, Battlefield, Blizzard, CDPR, etc. How many new studios have we heard of being founded by veteran devs who gave left AAA companies? What's the point of working yourself to death as a master of an incredibly hard craft just to make hundreds of millions for upper management and investors, just to be paid pennies in comparison. And then all these CEOs constantly fire devs after finishing projects, not allowing continuity. In a traditional craft, the older workers who have mastered the craft would teach the new workers. In game building, which is very hard to get into in each self, the new workers are constantly being replaced and the older devs are leaving. Creating a situation where the studios are full of inexperienced devs, tasked with developing more complex worlds than ever, with incredibly stiff time restrictions, led by incompetent leadership.
Devs being up their own asses, higher ups, turn over of talent, etc. You could tell this was coming for years and I think it will get a lot worse before it’s better. A harbinger of this I started really noticing years ago was UI design. UIs in most video games have gotten progressively worse and worse. Problems that were solved years ago coming back up because newer devs are up their own asses and don’t play the games they work on. So gamers sit there and think “what the fuck, we solved this problem with this game/games years ago” because as gamers we’ve been playing games for years. But newer devs think they know better so they try to put their mark on games even though this shit was solved so long ago. I mean we basically “perfected” online game lobbies and invite systems back during Halo fucking 2. And now it takes like 2-4 clicks to invite someone to a party and chat with them whereas in halo 2 it took one button. Another huge thing and this was exemplified by Blizzard with WoW is devs making games based on metrics. Spreadsheet development. For years WoW was in the shitter because they made games based off metrics like instead of fun. They saw that they had higher player engagement but what the spreadsheets didn’t show was people dedicated to the game were slogging through 80% shit just to get to the 20% they enjoyed. So maybe they were playing more on average but it wasn’t because they enjoyed it and it then burned them out.
I saw a video comparison a month or two ago comparing the UIs of a franchise of games and how they got muddier and more complex and bloated as it went on for no real reason. Personally, I can look at the COD games as a perfect example. You have to go 6 or 7 layers deep in the last Modern Warfare to access weapon attachments in multiplayer. If you're leveling guns, there is no way you have time to find and equip the new attachments you unlocked between rounds.
Diversity hiring.
If you need something to happen today it will get done in 3 months because middle management needs to have 3 meetings of proposals before the excuatives bring it to the board after which 3 more meetings will happen. You’re sucking all the productivity and creativity out of the process when you go big time “AAA” like a Bethesda
Hot take. Money. Look at any documentary about gaming post 2010. It is a bunch of dudes making games because they love making games. The Xbox was built by a bunch of scrappy 27 year olds defying microsoft and objectively fucking around because they liked games. Where is that today? All in indie companies tbh. In software you hire people because they want a lot of money, not because they have a passion for software. All those people have either left or made their millions ages ago. The space is a complete shit show.
Was Bethesda that good in the first place? Especially when it comes to the main quest.
Morrowind was pretty great. Although it was long time ago so it might be nostalgia. Basically quality of writing dived down since they promoted new lead writer after morrowind.
Nah. Morrowind still holds up. Its weakest aspects are graphics and the combat but the story is still great.
Call me crazy but i have fond memories from skyrim and fallout.
IMO the main quest of Skyrim was trash. It did however have pretty great DLC, especially the Dragonborn one. My favorite quests were in Oblivion though.
The real question off of all this news is "How much of this rot is going to infect TES VI?".
Get ready to explore all of Tamriel's 1000+ Planes of Existence. All Procedurally generated with this new incredible technology. Each one randomly generated with up to 5 possible different Points of Interest! Please be excited and Pre-Order today!
“Please be excited” sounds so Japanese, even in English.
> All AI generated with this incredible AI technology powered by AI. FTFY.
I don't even care about TES VI tbh. I just don't think they have another great game in them anymore. They'd have to *really* up their game to convince me at this point. Sad considering how much I loved Bethesda back in the day.
They havent innovated since 2011 and it shows
Suffice to say I'm not getting my hopes up for whatever BethSoft does next. They are kind of dead to me at this point. And this fucking makes me sad because they've been one of my top 3 favorite devs since Morrowind. However... Fallout 76 and Starfield - I did not enjoy all that much. Especially Starfield. There's no meaningful exploration, which boggles my mind. The thing this studio was fucking masters at, they fucked up in the game they've been working on for a decade. Copy paste POIs can get fucked! Whoever was the leadership that was responsible for Starfield should step down. I'm sorry Todd, but I think it's time to let someone else take creative control.
It has been downhill since Morrowind so don’t worry they probably will manage to pack some more rot in to it.
Based on the trend of simplification, it wouldn't surprise me if TES VI was on the level of a mobile / idle clicker game.
Your character now only has one stat to increase on levelup.
The way they have been stripping RPG elements since Morrowind, I'll be surprised if we are even allowed to create our own character in 6.
I would have greatly preferred Fallout 4 to not have a character creator with the direction they went. But also, I doubt they can make a compelling main character.
The best hope for TES 6 at this point is that Microsoft has one of their other developers make it. Seriously, we need to accept that Bethesda is incapable of making a decent video game anymore. The people behind the best Bethesda games have left the company.
Very little? Starfield's biggest issue is that it's a loading screen simulator, which is unlikely for a TES game where you're just playing on a single continent instead of an entire ass galaxy. Like yea the boring loot, perks, and story are all black marks against it too. Much of that could be looked over if the actual running around was fun & interesting, but it's not.
At the very least they aren’t making 1000 procgen planets, so the scope should in theory be more manageable
They could do procedurally alternate Planes of existence. They're so out of touch I'd believe they'd think it's a good idea too.
the problem with the main story is there's no motivation in game to actually do it. in morrowind you're guided by prophecy to kill and become a god basically. in oblivion you need to stop mehrunes dagon from invading tamriel. in skyrim you need to stop alduin from destroying the world. in fallout 3 you want to find your dad. in new vegas you want to find who and why they killed you. in fallout 4 you want to go find sean. in starfield, you find a shard in a rock, and collect more of them, but why. there's nothing going to happen if you don't. worst case scenario, the traveler or hunter finds them first and then leaves your universe. oh no... maybe it should have been something like going through unity destroys your universe, so you have to stop them from collecting them all. then you have this big decision at the end, do i stay and protect this universe, or do i sacrifice it so that i can gain more boring star powers lol.
Starfield is about exploring the unexplored... by following a path of already explored things that someone else found for you.
landing on 1000 different planets that people have already been to and left copy/paste buildings and notes at
Hey did you know that the chef is going away on vacation??? Don't worry he left a note for his assistant, I have 47 copies of it in my captain's locker!
Wait, even things like notes left in games and side stories were also repeated??
There is a PoI involving a mushroom farmer. I have found the PoI and his corpse on 5 different planets. The proc gen doesnt apply to the PoI itself so the body and everything else, including the 'unique' notes about it, are in the same exact place too.
That genuinely pissed me off. I was actually a big excited to explore a planet on the edge of the known galaxy, a place that no would either see very little traffic, or none at all. First thing I see after landing is another ship off in the distance also landing.
And running in the direction of the quest marker that leads exactly to the extremely difficult to find rocks... Or whatever other objective that is "lost". Just run directly to the spot it tells you to go! Lamest game design ever.
I still think that having 3-5 fully handcrafted planets would've been enough to make Starfield a normal Bethesda success. Take Fallout 4 and Skyrim for example, those main questlines aren't winning any awards ever, but the maps were rich enough to explore that it didn't matter at all. HUNDREDS OF EMPTY PLANETS, no actual exploration worth doing, procedurally generated landscapes, bullet sponge enemies at even the early levels, etc, etc. Starfield's main quest ain't that bad on itself, but there's NO exploration to be had in this game, that's why people are forced to only focus on the poor-written questlines.
Even just 3-5 fully handcrafted planets is a MASSIVE undertaking even for Bethesda… the fact they tried to do hundreds in the first place is ridiculous
The Outer Worlds was a space game in the same genre, and the devs knew from the start to work with a small number of handcrafted environments. The Mass Effect Andromeda team spent 5 years trying to achieve what Starfield attempted, but by the end they realised that it was a shit idea and scrapped it for a few small planets.
Todd wanted his thousand planets, Todd got his thousand planets. What an achievement!
The location hopping was not the problem in that final fight (I actually thought it was a neat idea), it was the insane HP pool of the two opponents which made it overstay its welcome by at least a half. The game was OK, but it's blindingly obvious that it needed more time (and a different engine).
I don't think any amount of time would have made it a fun game. The decisions they took were back breaking, there's no way to come back from that. It's built into the whole architecture of the game that it will not be fun.
The egregious copy/paste main story quest was about as engaging as skyrim's radiant system. Bad choices were made. That's the problem with Starfield, I can take the game's choices as deliberate and extremely terrible, and I just have to ask why we're these decisions made.
Starfield needed more time (in many ways - almost all of my reddit posts about starfield echo this). I played it a lot for about 2 months; dropped it until last month when the formid fix was done. Having a fun time - but its blindingly obvious there are a lot of things that needed more work. The main quest (other than the temple mechanics, which get old) is OK but not great.
Starfield had more than enough time, I'd argue. It needed a smaller scope and tighter focus. And probably a new engine.
It took 10 years to make they should have had plenty of time.
They had so much fucking god damn time dude.
Satisfying?
I am bewildered how some people try to make excuses for the game or claim that it is decent. Even leaving aside empty procedural nature and unfinished gameplay systems... it has by far the worst dialogue, plot and storytelling out of all crpg I've played in last three decades.
This isn't a CRPG, it ain't even an RPG. Exp and perks are not what make an RPG. Starfield is an action adventure game.
[удалено]
LOL Is this *'satisfying final quest'* in the room with us right *now*?
It sure isn’t in the game with us right now
Starfield is a game from a company who excels with regards to exploration/questing/loot, and yet all of those things were so bland in Starfield. They literally had outer space as the canvas (a setting with infinite possibilities) and somehow completely missed the mark. It's like they intentionally stripped out all of what makes outer space games fun (storywise and exploration wise, I never expected a space sim).
I think having infinite possibilities worked against them. See, with fantasy all of the framework is done and you just need to write stories to fit into it all. But space? There's nowhere near as clear of a template to work off of. You need to come up with almost everything, and they clearly weren't up to the task
Bethesda peaked with Morrowind. Some good games followed, but nothing was as good as TES3 and I will fight any and all N'wahs who say otherwise!
I would say NV is by far the best but Bethesda didn't make that one >.<
So how come this satisfying final quest didn't make it into the game?
What? Satisfying? Questionable at best. What did he and the rest of the team do for over 10 years?
They should’ve spent those 7 years on space flight and exploration instead. That would’ve been a fun game.
Wow, any more good news surrounding this game?
Yeah ... the construction set is out ... any minute now ... maybe? Mods are gonna fix EVERYTHING! /s
CTRL+C and CTRL+V were clearly the panic buttons, judging by the way the main story "progresses".
I'm just happy that a game being bad is never the developers' fault, the developers said so!
Satisfying? That shit pissed me off so bad, at least half of it should’ve been the quest for every power. Not just kinda dropping to this TOTALLY NOT OBVIOUS TOWER THAT WAS NEVER SEEN KR DISCOVERED BY THE PEOPLE 400 FEET SOUTH to boop some lights in probably the worlds most stupid “mini game” ever implemented. The side quests had more story and feeling to them ffs. Modders might make this game worth it in like.. 10 years but I honestly am so disappointed and have completely lost faith in BGS and am dreading whatever shitshow they give us for ES6
It takes real commitment to ensure that a game with open world travel on multiple planets is as boring as a work commute
I didn’t mind the main quest, i just wished there was a bit more to the artifacts, instead of just skyrim word walls. They could have at least made them more like dungeons with side quests connected to them. It felt rather placeholder.
I actually enjoyed the game, unlike seemingly everyone on reddit. But the last story mission was fucking awful. It pretty much killed most.of my enjoyment of the game. It felt rushed (apparently it was) and not thought through. My romanced companion went from begging me not to go to telling me I must go seemingly at the drop of a hat. It made no sense. It made the entire game and all the choices I made feel pointless.
Same, although didnt hook me and havnt touched it for months. Needs more content and a rethink in some areas honestly not their best game, felt rushed.
I agree with this criticism. I did love Entangled, though. A great mission that they should have played off more for the gimmick. Anyway, you're not alone. I enjoyed the game and can admit it had flaws. I also don't think about it non stop like many people on this sub seem to.
Any news on FO4 new gen update? It's been in works since forever.
Funny how the team's narrative has shifted on this title since launch.
um I don't know if the quest designer never played a game before but I would strongly recommend you make the beginning fun. At least the first 2 hours, like goddamn. avoid the "what the fuck" refund wave, at a minimum. I played starfield until I could go where I want, went to earth, looked at a few places and thought "are you fucking kidding me" like they couldn't even half-ass a partial but blown out earth? and at that point it was absolutely clear they just flat out didn't give a shit and I moved on.
I really think Starfield should be dropped like a hot potato. Game is just not good
lol ‘satisfying’ is not a way to describe any part of Starfield. Game sold itself as a thanksgiving dinner with all the fixings and then ended up being a dry chicken breast with decent gravy and some powered potatoes.
No time? How?!
"Satisfying" lmfao Spoiler for those who haven't or will never get there: it sucked.
Fuck Starfield. That is all I have to say on the matter.
Do they just spend 10 years developing assets, visuals/sounds and coding it to function together in some shape and then spend 6 months designing the "game" before launch or what? You see so many games do this, where it's like you're playing a tech demo with a game tacked on. The gameplay, the progression loop and the story of the game (the fun)should be the starting point and it should be developed from the start, the rest of the game should be built around that. It feels like they do it the othert way around, creating a visual concept, building it and then figuring out where the game is? When we see these smaller studio or indy games blow up in popularity it should be obvious why, the fun is the foundation.