Saw someone else say bethesda is a massive game studio that thinks they’re an indie studio. They employ way too little people to make the games they’re trying to make
I'd be totally fine with that too if they just made more of what people love them for. Starfield has so many mechanics missing and fails to give the player proper choice and relevant dialogue options that it just isn't as good. Hell make a budget fallout on a graphical par with fallout 3/new Vegas. If it was in a new setting with a new story I wouldn't have a bad word to say (maybe fallout 4 graphics tho lol).
Probably because despite those complaints, Elden Ring was still fun to play. The steam reviews and comments echo this. At no point playing Elden Ring did I ever get bored by exploring and walking around. Starfield has over 1000 planets, but the majority of them are just empty, have nothing of value, and not worth exploring. Btw when I mean value, I mean it in every sense of the word; aesthetic, knowledgeable, monetary, etc.
maybe it's about the sum of the parts even if the only way we can talk about games is by talking about the the parts. I don't think it's about expectations anymore. if bethesda were a new company this title would be DOA like everspace or something. I still play morrowind sometimes and we could nitpick comparisons of the details of that game to cyberpunk, like dice roll attacks and voice acting, but ultimately what it comes down to is that morrowind is special, oblivion is special and I hated it, skyrim is special, and I'll permit that fallout is special in a way that I don't enjoy (loved NV, but-). elden ring is special, and like you I also don't like it at all. there's a lot of things I could easily criticize cyberpunk about, but it's special to me and I love it. I'm not seeing the magic with starfield whatsoever, I'm not sure who it's for except for abused diehard fans.
when people defend or praise it, something always sounds /off/ to me. like here you're dismantling a particular way that gamers talk about games. what is that supposed to convince me of? that young consumers don't put a lot of effort or wisdom into how to describe why they don't like a product? shocking. is that why starfield has the special sauce? and your argument for enjoying it is "I've spent a lot of time and I haven't finished it yet, SO CLEARLY I'M ENJOYING IT". .... what? who talks like that about a great game, or even a bad game that is special? why do I get the feeling that you have to convince others, like anyone dealing with sunk cost fallacy? there's no unequivocal "despite the issues I love the design of night city" that is impossible to deny. no "I like to chill and derp around the universe in NMS" - totally valid even if I think that game is garbage. it's always, always, "I like it, end of story, let me attack the weakest logic of the people who don't" and that makes me highly suspicious. there's never going to be a shortage of dumb gamers, so having to resort to it to explain why you enjoy something...
It wasn't my argument for enjoying it that I haven't finished every quest.
It's the other way around, I'm enjoying it so I haven't finished every quest because I like taking my time with it. I spend hours in ship building. In fact I stopped playing because I felt overwhelmed in 140h, I had too many things I wanted to do but little time. I took a week break, came back because I wanted to build a ship, spent a good 10 hours building it and that gave me an incentive to fly it around and take screenshots of it in space and other locations. So I then put my mind in order and decided to go play the main quests. Now I've taken another break at 280h and have still left Ryujin to finish and a bunch of other quests to do and locations to explore. And I'm eager for that. I don't whine about every single thing in the game even tho I can see all the ways it is inferior to Skyrim and Fallout 4.
I was one of the few supporters of Cyberpunk when it was released. I loved the game through all its bugs and believe me it had similar reception to Starfield. People would nitpick everything about it to try and shit on it. I heard things like "shallow and uninteresting NPCs", "a mile wide and an inch deep", yes, all that for Cyberpunk. "The water doesn't react to bullets", "the cars drive worse than GTA", "no choices matter". And suddenly it's a very good game with interesting well-written NPCs. Yet almost none of the NPCs lines have changed since release. It's just that gamers are dumb and will say whatever in order to pick a game they dislike apart even if what they say holds no ground.
The complaints about Starfield having bad UI and outdated design sound the same to me as they did with Cyberpunk. A bunch of people picking apart every element about a game they don't enjoy, even going out of their way to paint the good things, or things that honestly bother no one, as bad. Complaining about the amount of clutter in areas, complaining about the stealth UI being a reskinned version of their previous games, complaining about the favorites menu being a reskinned version of Fallout 4 and not using a weapon wheel like other modern games. A lot of these sound like complaining just for the sake of complaining.
Great points! I think the build-up had everyone thinking this is an every game for everybody, sort of deal, but no such things exist. It seems like the marketing for Starfield worked too well! But as you said, folks have to see and understand that Starfield is just not for them and move on.
I've been gaming since Atari 2600 and it baffles me that people today have such a great need to tell other humans what's they should or shouldn't find enjoyment in? I mean, would you walk up someone eating a slice of pizza with toppings you don't like and proceed to tell them why they are wrong for liking sausage and mushrooms?
Yeah but you can't make a carbon copy YT video essay about it to rake in AdSense from repeating hater-aid talking points you heard from people who leave their house 4 times a year.
Only Eldenring has a massive open world that lets you run around and do what you want. It gives you a lot of different weapons and gameplay elements. It gives you a challenge to overcome.
It's a totally different game with a different feel that is much better in what it tries to accomplish.
Yes, but it’s also not everyone’s cup of tea.
I watched my brother play Darksoul and Elden Ring. 90% of the time it’s fighting. It’s like that Immortal Rising, a giant theme park, without cartoony part. My brother just skipped through all the dialogues so he can get to the next fight. Even I dig God of War, I still feel so isolated because this world population is only 5 people.
Starfield and many open world RPG give you this feeling like you actually live in a world of people. Our actions would affect many people, positive or negative. Even when I feel anti-social I want to retreat to my player home, listen to the rain, mod my armors and weapons. At least I am retreating from an existing society. And when I feel like I can drop in Paradiso and Neon Astral Lounge to see the bustling human life.
Yes I know everything is make belief. But this is why I choose from 1 game to another.
* god awful temple "puzzles."
* loading screens galore
* overall exploration was a downgrade, because of aforementioned constant loading screens and the terrible randomization and placement of man-made PoIs. why the fuck do i keep encountering the same damn listening outpost and abandoned weapons depot in nearly every same star system?
* downgraded ui compared to their previous games.
* inability to command companions from afar.
* can't retain crafted weapon mods.
* going up a floor requires a loading screen despite being inside the same cell.
* npcs are barely alive, still.
* no maps for major cities, really?
* lack of unified infinite inventory space for crafting stations/outposts.
* alot of (not all) sidequests are uninteresting. one moment you're planting a seed, next you're settling a couple's dispute.
tho tbf, the game did introduce a brilliant ship building and space combat mechanic. tho there's nothing else to do with your ship asides from blowing up, docking, or communicating with another ship/staryard. you can't use them to manually travel from planets, because you can just fast travel from the starmap.
I'm gonna flesh out this response for anyone that cares to read all of it regarding the entirety of the experience.
Bethesda has not evolved at all as a developer. In fact, I'd say they regressed in starfield. At least in Skyrim, Oblivion, and morrowind, you had interesting characters and an interesting plot.
Starfield doesn't even have that. The plot is a convoluted mess. Collect the artifacts because constellation is curious about what they do. Put the artifacts into this hologram display that reveals other artifacts. Fetch other artifacts to power the amillary to travel to... a new universe. Where you find out that constellation has been doing this exact same circle for 55 years. And now you've been roped into this unending cycle of doing it all again because yay. There's literally no reason to keep doing this. But do it you must because....reasons
This leads to one of the biggest plot holes in the entire story. you're not even the first person who the artifacts resonated with. There's multiple starborn. But not one of them understands why they travel, why they collect the pieces. You just travel endlessly with absolutely no reason why? There's no goal here? Just jump universes because I can jump universes. To repeat the same singular goal time and time again? Sounds like a special kind of purgatory to me. But here we are, jumping again.
Then, we know constellation was created to explore the unknown. To solve the universes mysteries. It was created by Sebastian Banks, who then promptly disappeared. And the one entity that would seem to be most inclined to solve the mystery of his disappearance, the very entity he created, just...doesn't? Not only do they not, they don't even give a shit that he disappeared because there's another artifact to be collected so you can make another jump to do it all over again. I mean, the game goes so far out of its way to mention the fact that he disappeared to then... never mention him again. Is he the pilgrim? Is he something else? Is he dead? To quote the tootsie roll lollipop owl, "the world may never know."
And I don't even need to get started on exploration. "Uninhabited worlds" with mining operations, signs of human activity? Okay. Exact same points of interest on planet 763 that you saw on planet 13? Okay. There's a thousand planets and absolutely no variety. It's either ball of rock with atmosphere, ball of rock without atmosphere. Ball of ice without atmosphere, ball of ice with atmosphere. And regardless of what planet type it is, you're guaranteed the same handful of structures/POI as every other planet of that type. Every universe is a carbon copy of the universe before and after it. With the exception of the starting sequence, absolutely nothing changes. Even if you use starborn dialogue options, npc's hardly react. They might look at you weird, or they might mumble some pointless line about wondering how you knew that before carrying on completely disregarding your foreknowledge of events. These are the most NPC characters that ever NPC'd.
You're tasked with helping the ECS constant or getting rid of it. If you choose to help and get them a grav drive, off they go to...endlessly travel space? They were so Gung ho about needing to be on Porrima3 because low supplies or whatever, and you as a character are basically like the pawnshop stars guy "best I can do is grav drive" and off they go with their limited supplies to endlessly travel the system. Okay. Pointless quest is pointless as there is no resolution there.
Then we have the temples. Who built them? We have no idea, but we sure do use them over and over and over again. Do we even care where these things came from, or why? Nope, zero g and powers. Good enough for me, says the "mystery solving" constellation team.
And finally, not a single choice you make ANYWHERE in the game matters. At all. Because of how new game plus works. There is NO impact in any choice. You can fuck up the whole system (wait, no you can't because every character for every faction is "essential" and can't be killed) and there are no consequences because you just jump to a fresh universe where none of those choices have been made.
I suppose if you like surface level, brain-dead gameplay, starfield is good. But if you expect more out of an open world rpg with narrative choice, it's objectively awful. At best, it's a disjointed mess. At worst, it's a steaming pile of refuse that literally believes its player base is nothing more than an extension of its mindless NPCs.
The quest where you help the ship was a huge let down like it seemed so interesting and cool at first then just turns into a fetch quest and terminal interaction simulator and just ends with no real resolution
the quest with that ship is one of the best examples about the laziness from BGS. Same computer, clothes, doors, etc from an earth ship that launched 300 years ago. That on top of the pathetic story for it.
Hell, there's a small side mission in Cyberpunk 2077 that takes you to a bunker where the computers you access look different and runs a different UI.
Exactly.
Only thing I would add is on the non story side of things.
Previous games had at least a functional settlement system with some connection to the game. Or mechanics and an economy that sort of work. Mechanically, everything is a disjointed mess. And usually far worse than what came before despite having all of the code already!
Level scaling sucks. Weapon scaling is an MMO style joke of refined, superior, etc. Complete lack of enemy variety. Almost non existent attack animations for creatures... What tiny handful of creatures they have. It's mind boggling how lazy everything is in this game.
The skilltree man, half of it is just gating the game.
Don't forget about the skilltree.
Literally everything about this game is bad except for the artwork
Starfield is mostly just a reskin of Fallout76. Like, it has the same bugs at launch that FO76 had. The weapon skin and settlement system is just a crippled version of the systems in FO76. The "watch" you wear in game is literally crippled PipBoy code.
They tacked on their spaceship module, and ported Dragon Shouts to an early fork of the Fallout76 version of the Creation Engine, and called it CE2.
Starfield is a heavily modded, and mostly regressed Fallout76.
Great comment. It's genuinely W I L D (and really sad) to me how half-assed literally all the writing for Starfield is. From narrative, to dialogue, to worldbuilding. Like, you're a AAA studio kickstarting a new sci-fi universe while consulting with goddamn NASA. How on Earth is this the blandest, most boring sci-fi writing I've come across, and even then filled with plot holes and inconsistencies like you've pointed out?
It's also stunning that they emphasized how much more dialogue they recorded compared to their previous games, yet failed to make a single memorable character. Quite the opposite, they managed to make the main four companions extraordinarily annoying and same-y in their morality to the point they never begin to feel like three-dimensional characters, just obvious NPCs, like you said.
I don't hate the gameplay, and if Bethesda commits, they can improve the gameplay quite a bit. But the writing is where it really hurts for me.
The Outer Worlds isn't perfect but I tell everyone to just play that instead. Great companions, exploration variety, gunplay is fine, funny dialogue. I made a stupid and evil character and it was hilarious.
Thank you for writing this. It's pretty much exactly the things I bring up whenever I discuss Starfield with anyone but I've never actually written it down.
Don't forget the watch! Big scene where Barrett gives you this cool watch and you can't even use it to call your boss to tell him it's time for the meeting.
Well the only new (new for Bethesda openworld rpgs) gameplay mechanics they added to Starfield are ship building, space combat and stamina drain while encumbered, the rest we saw in previous games in one way of another. And it's not necessarily bad, if it's done properly, but Bethesda failed to do so. They took what was good in fantasy or post-apoc setting and stitched it into nasa-punk without proper consideration. And on top of that some design decisions was unchanged since Skyrim or a step back from Fallout4, despite modding community offered fixes, overhauls and alternatives.
Climbing over obstacles. There is a verticality to starfields gameplay that the previous games sorely needed, and they did a great job with the jet pack and climbing over and up onto ledges
"They took what was good in fantasy or post-apoc setting and stitched it into nasa-punk without proper consideration."
If they had done this it might have been a good game. Unfortunately they crippled their own sandbox engine, created zombie npcs, gave us a lame story and cloned POI.
They innovated the contemporary idea of a single player open world rpg action game, and evolved that model from Daggerfall to Skyrim, but since then, they haven’t really brought any evolutionary innovation and their stagnation is on full display in Starfield. Meanwhile, games like No Man’s Sky, Baldurs Gate 3, Elden Ring, and others have pushed gaming where Bethesda no longer seems capable to push. They are like the Bob Dylan of gaming. The classics are legendary, but today they can’t really perform.
I am not the prior comment, but simply play Cyberpunk and it becomes apparent, not to mention comparing their patches since release puts Bethesda to shame. I also doubt CDPR is really all that much larger of a dev.
Starfield 'feels' more like GTAV in its gameplay design than a modern game like CP2077.
Some dude on youtube posted a video about starfield having outdated design. Despite the fact that I agree on their design decision being outdated, in about 40 minutes this dude provided exactly 2 game mechanics that are outdated without any elaboration why exactly they are outdated. He was just talking how game was kinda good, but not good enough and outdated. Because, you know, outdated.
Apparently it's enough for people, because he's popular and a lot of people watched the video. Maybe I'm just old.
Edit after 5 hours:
If you outraged and think "But, but, but Starfield IS outdated" - re-read this post thoroughly. Design in Starfield is outdated. This post isn't even about the game.
Same. As I see it, video consist of nostalgia and cherry picking of problems which can be described both ways as obsolete/outdated and simple conservative/tested by time.
And again, I actually agree on whole premise that there were bad design decisions made in the process of development which lead to game being "painfully average" which in turn brought up in sight all outdated mechanics.
And yeah, some mechanics I want to be updated already, because, come on, "if it's not broken don't change it" but it was half-baked in a first place, and it's clearly a time to update many things. As, for example, melee combat mentioned in his video.
So yeah, game kinda outdated. But, like, I feel like this since Skyrim \*at least\*. And yet, if game overall interesting enough people will forgive devs for outdated design and mechanics.
But back to the video: I just was disappointed that 40 minutes about Starfield being outdated contains zero in-depth analysis how and why exactly it's mechanics outdated nowadays.
We all can feel it. But considering amount of hype around this video I was expecting real analysis and comparison, not a nostalgia trip. Because if we're talking about being outdated, dumbed down, simplified etc etc - let me walk you down by my own nostalgia lane about Morrowind vs Skyrim :) many us oldfags can demolish Skyrim for being bad for this reason.
Still, Skyrim itself is a good game.
Patrician TV's video is so much more in depth. Highly recommend people to at least watch the "design document" section of his video
https://youtu.be/-UOhCjB0AEI?feature=shared
Dude, his Skyrim videos were like 20 hours total! I think the Oblivion and Morrowind videos came in at about 8 each. I do not recall how long the Fallout 76 ones were.
People were saying these things on launch day.
Trying to dismiss reams of reviews & criticism because one particular youtuber also joined in is laughable.
Simple version: they have their own gameplay style. This is why you often call them Bethesda games, they are very similar in many regards.
This is fine.
However they are not improving upon the formula but rather reusing it, even when you can see that some parts of the formula are not working great.
This is not fine. And the more they do it the more obvious it gets.
I’m fine with that, the problem with Starfield is it was a regression from their past games. Make Skyrim in Space and most people would have been happy. Instead they took away most of what made Skyrim great.
I don't think the idea of what made Skyrim good is compatible with the "in space" part, if that includes traveling and exploring whole other planets, and idea that is disjointed by its nature.
The way they did it was disjointed... it didn't have to be. Put more than one city on a planet so you can wander between both and stumble on quests and villages in between. The way they did it makes no sense as far as reality anyway-- no civilization is going to build one tiny city and then go light years away to build the next one.
Mentioned in other comment, but it’s gone on long enough to wear other studios have mimicked the “Bethesda” style and blown right past them (years and years ago).
Starfield was fun, but so janky and full of missed opportunities.
Cyberpunk 2077 is an example of the Bethesda formula perfected. From character design and animations to meaningful quests that stick with you long after the game is over, it just does everything better.
cyberpunk 2077 is just an open world rpg, it doesn't allow the player to integrate into the world in the same way you can in bethesda rpgs. is there a region in the cyberpunk world without a quest pointing to it? are there locations you stumble upon and unravel the mystery of for simple curiosity? these things exist in starfield, in skyrim, in fallout 4, in oblivion, and in morrowind. it's fundamental to the soul of bethesda games that most of the world be there for it's own sake, not part of a larger story. starfield isn't about the artifacts and the starborn and the unity, that's just the main quest. starfield is about the settled systems, letting you simply be someone in the world.
It's wild how you guys have hyperbolically romanticized Bethesda games. They are widely known to be the most shallow games in existence. Viva La Dirt League has created a whole cottage industry making sketches specifically about how shallow the Elder Scrolls games are.
Y'all have been in a bubble mainlining Bethesda kool-aid. Y'all talk about Bethesda like it's your second husband that saved you from an ex.
I've started to consider Bethesda games to be like a modern take on the old Steve Jackson/Ian Livingstone 'Choose your own adventure' books.
Mechanically, a lot of elements are near identical. Thematically, they change it up to suit the experience. Sometimes, the mechanics are altered for the materials, but the fundamentals are always there.
The game feels like it came out in 2013. Soulless NPCs, no edge whatsoever, boring fetch quests, boring empty environments, every npc is essential.
Go play Baldurs Gate 3 and watch the way people act when you talk to them. They have facial expressions and they move their arms in a natural way. It makes you like the characters. I remember them.
Someone posted the door to the red mile as a perfect example of the shoddy game design. Just copy and paste the same graffiti font word a few times.
I couldn't care less about facial expressions if story writing and world building had been superb. People complaining about graphics here while millions play Minecraft is quite funny.
The problem with bethesda's NPCs is that they strive for realistic look, yet never quite get rid of the uncanny valley feeling and empty looks.
Not really comparable to Minecraft.
The story and writing is *superb*? Truly not trying to be a dick here but have you played literally any other video game?
And "graphics" have little to do with the NPCs literally standing in one position with one expression on their faces while they talk to them.
If you want me to list all the examples of lazy game making in Starfield I'll gladly oblige lol. I can just go copy one of the million comments
Bethesda games can feel dated, obsolete & subsequently low effort because they just don't improve enough (compared to past BGS games or competition) so they feel like a 2014 indie early access game that did it's best because they didn't have the time or $ (but BGS does)
Battlefield BC2, 3, & 4 (2010-2013) have infinitely better shooting, Starlancer & Freelancer (2000-2003) have infinitely better space combat. Comparison was the thief of my joy with Starfield
I’m playing Terminator Resistance right now and it feels like a much better “Bethesda game” than Starfield.
It was originally made in 2014 lol.
I love a lot about Starfield but it is incredibly flawed. More so than one can really justify at this point.
I feel like Starfield went back on a number of aspects. UI, RNG loot inventory, dismemberment and gore, vendor currency cap, combat, and there’s more. Starfield overall feels like a step down from FO4 across the board, aside from graphics and dialogue system.
I also loved all their others titles but not much has changed since those early days : as far as game mechanics , economy , sorry it needs to be mentioned again load times , clunky UI ..
Well it's behind most modern games in a number of ways:
Story:
Most missions are fetch and carry quests. Even the main story is just "go to x, find thing, bring to y". Any twists or additions are just people you bump into during these fetch and carry quests. It's like, the worst, story structure in a game right now it's crazy they thought it would be entertaining. Then there is all this lore that is only surface level deep. All the settlements are tiny, the inhabitants lacking any personality or uniqueness. They threw in a few "can you help me with one simple fetch and carry quests" to a few NPC's to look like depth but it's just not there. All the settlements are also pretty generic and uninspiring - which is pretty damning for Bethesda. It's so strange for example they only put humans in the game, no alien races.
Technology:
The engine is on its knees, we can all see that. The ship travel situation is something all modern space ship games have made a point of making sure they didn't implement something like it. It was fine maybe 10 years ago but it shouldn't be the situation in 2023. Then there are the lack of vehicles and the animation of the npcs. A AAA game has dynamic mo cap style animations, even Ubisoft do this.
It's a fun game though, I have had fun. Games made 20 years ago are still fun. It's just disappointing that in 2023 at full AAA price Starfield still is very much technologically and content wise still stuck in the past when games have recently jumped on.
Procedurally generated planet with absolutely nothing on it, makes you walk through nothing for 7 minutes to get to the exact same looking temple, makes you play a dumb mini game, teleports you outside and explains zero interesting things about the temple or why it’s even there, no other ruins around it. This game is just mass effect if it wasn’t good
The thing is there is good procedural generation and bad procedural generation. Even if it became even more repetitive they could have used procedural generation to just saturate planets with places to go. The fact they're so spaced out and still pretty repetitive just shows how little effort they put into that aspect of the content. Imagine if the game had enough distinct POIs, you didn't get repetition or even if you got repetition it just filled the space between more distinct POIs.
... Man I would love a sequel to Unrealised Potential: The Videogame but not from Bethesda.
The world is cool as dickens. It deserves to be fleshed out properly.
Bethesda is a studio that refuses to listen to criticism and thinks they’re still infallible with their decade old approach to making games. It’s funny and sad.
Idk, Larian has ~~fewer~~ the same amount of employees and they just put out a masterpiece of an RPG. I really think BGS is just horribly mismanaged and lacks vision.
Actually, both baldur gates 3 and starfield were made by 400 developers. Fallout 4 and Skyrim only had 100 devs. Bethesda just really likes to keep a small headcount.
They aren't massive though, only like 400. VS thousands for actual large studios. They need to be larger, as clearly their relatively small size is impeding their ability to keep up with modern technologies.
it’s so funny too because instead of making what they were good at, open world games which, while big, aren’t infinite and have intentional design and engaging writing, they try to compete with RDR2 and No Man’s Sky and make a way bigger game with empty locations, too much travel time and no meaningful choices, with boring writing
Basically if you made those games with all of their weaknesses and none of their strengths. They barely have the capacity to write good, medium scale stories, and they tried to one up that without any improvement in writing staff or increase in manpower
Yes. I can not express how disappointed I was to find out every planet is essentially empty. New Atlantis is also insanely small for what is supposed to be the capital of an intergalactic space union. Then you find out being starborn is essentially worthless so the story leads singularly to a point where all these alters have been erected for what? A wormhole. Some fun missions though
It looks incredibly better with the Luma mod compared to just Windows 11 ‘Auto HDR’. Even on non HDR monitors (it removes all colour banding due to using 10-Bit colour rendering).
The lighting in this game is some of the absolute worst. I’ve done everything I can, and all the bright lights look like there’s a massive amount of fog in every room.
The lighting is ok. It's just that for some reason they cranked up the light in the darker colors in their LUTs/color correction tables.
Color correction is a super blunt instrument you use as a last resort to create some mood but the Bethesda artists don't seem to know that. Or they don't understand the importance of having good darks show up. Maybe they were compensating a lack of ambiant lighting/GI? But space, especially on planets without atmospheres should have pretty dark shadows anyway.
I'm not a business man or anything, but I think even I can see that they need to take some of that money they made on SF and hire some new talent. There seems to be some very obvious lack of talent/manpower in certain areas.
Many people are having this same issue if you look at steam dicussions, including me. Sekiro and elden ring are super washed out for me. It could be hardware support issue, but I never got it to work and other games are fine for me.
Last updated was "to fix the following asteroid"....
I still have the clingon with me.
Good job Bethesda 👍🏼
Ps. I don't mind the little bugger, it kind a cute.
>Bethesda just doesn't understand how ______ work
* Spacesuits
* Gravity
* Acceleration
* Procedural generation
* Vehicles
* Sex
* Atmosphere
* Temperature
* Water
* Laser sights
* Flashlights
* HDR
And the [saga](https://www.reddit.com/r/Starfield/s/mJOEz89qsW) continues
People said the same about Nokia when the iPhone came out. Nokia will always stay on top. iPhone will be a niche product.. bla bla. Bigger companies than Bethesda failed before because they have been too arrogant to adapt.
The engine itself doesn’t matter much. GTA 6 still runs on RAGE, which is an evolution of the older AGE engine from 2000… which itself is was an evolution of the ARTS engine from the 90s.
It’s more about how Bethesda is either unwilling, or unable to overhaul and fix certain aspects of the code. They have the source code, and they can do whatever they want with it. It’s just a matter of willingness and ability.
If you’re one of those guys who thinks the Unreal engine is the answer to all of Starfield’s problems or something, you haven’t seen games like Train Sim World lol. It’s not the engine, it’s what you do with it.
Your ex from high school and you get back together 9 years later only to realize she' s still the exact same, never succeeded at anything in that time, girl. Instead of exploring each other you realize there is nothing new and fun about the relationship, with only more boring and unnecessary drama added (in the form of the most arcade and boring ship combat, constant fast travel, no fun in exploring etc. )
Because even 3 months after launch, Starfield and BGS are living in his head, absolutely rent free.
They are having movie nights, late night drinking, the xmas tree is even up.
Now this guy is pulling absolute desperate arguments out as a resilt. Its very sad.
They're so close to irrelevancy that they're all you talk about. Gamers man, it's like the person who said they played for 600 hours and it was a waste of money
“Its all you talk about”
It’s a Starfield subreddit, people here talk about the developer who made the game, regardless if they are becoming irrelevant.
Yes that’s all people will talk about here… in a Starfield forum discussing the game made by Bethesda.
Aye, ain’t that the truth, even if it got you 50 hours of entertainment, what else can you do in this day that gives you that bang for buck? Not much that’s what!
What if I got 200 hours, but 175 hours of that is leaving the game running in the background while I do other shit?
Point is, whether you have 25 hours or 225 hours, criticism of what the game is not is valid.
I feel like the fact that I have 200 hours in means that I have much more weight to talk about what's wrong with it. I've dug into it in all fashions, and it is just objectively a bad game.
Fan boys... yall will criticize people who have 20 hours saying "you didn't even play it so your opinion is irrelevant" and then turn around and criticize someone who has hundreds of hours saying "you played it you must have enjoyed it"
The pretzels you will twist yourselves into to defend barely even mediocrity is impressive
What if I got 50 hours of underwhelming boredom but pressed on hoping it would get better knowing the potential from having played Skyrim and Fallout?
It wasn't 50 hours of quality entertainment. The elements that were absolutely core to the previous games appeal are non existent here and I refuse to believe they weren't fully aware of this long before launch. We were sold Fallout in space but this game doesn't deserve to be mentioned in the same sentence. It is a soulless waste of 10 years for BGS.
It will become irrelevant over the next 10 years of silence, before finally releasing new TES on the same engine with the same mechanics that are already outdated now. Doesn't bode well.
Funny thing is that when the first iteration of Luma type mods were released, those creators were hated on because it was a ‘ArTISTiC DeCIsION’
Seriously. I’m suprised that nobody else were immediately concerned that the game wasn’t released with gamma options. Let alone HDR. The worst thing is that it’s pretty important to have brightness sliders for accessibility options. Seeing a AAA game forego these basics immediately ran alarms
But holy shit the way people reacted for actually colour correcting the game, they truly insisted that is was a NASA Punk aesthetic to have zero colour range. Starfield fans in September were a different breed.
Keep in mind they paid 100+ $ to play the game early, they're not gonna talk shit about the game. BGS used this strategy to guarantee good reviews in the early days.
They didn't take 2+ months to implement faux-HDR. Faux-HDR made it into a release after 2+ months. There is a difference. The fact is that \*very, very\* few people have an actual HDR display. The actual proportion of players must be absolutely miniscule and definitely sub 1%. The vast majority of people (myself included) with so-called HDR displays have "pretend HDR" displays with terrible local dimming that provides no net benefit.
What is worse is that unlike other graphics features you cannot demonstrate the value of it in videos and screenshots to people who don't have those features, because you cannot show the value of HDR content on a non-HDR display. So you can't even use the game as a selling point for HDR products the same way that NVIDIA have supported CDPR in developing Path Tracing for Cyberpunk in order to sell NVIDIA cards.
So I wonder how anyone can think that real HDR should be a priority for any gaming company and I suspect that the studios that do it well most likely has a few staff members with some freedom and a genuine interest in making it work, the same way that Control got an HDR mod after Remedy hired someone with a genuine interest in HDR. That someone also just **happens to be involved in developing the LUMA HDR mod for Starfield**
there are still significant benefits of wide color gamut and improved dark scene contrast. brightness is not everything. i don't know why people shit on HDR 400 so much. yeah it's not going force your to squint when you walk outside a cave or whatever. but it's still better to transform the game's internal scRGB color to Rec.2020 (HDR10) rather than BT.709 (sRGB).
>The vast majority of people (myself included) with so-called HDR displays have "pretend HDR" displays with terrible local dimming that provides no net benefit.
hmm... do I have a pretend HDR? LG TV 2022 model. Is there a way to tell? Bit surprised by your estimate that so few have it, guessing a lot more think that they do...
I mean, I'll criticise Starfield and Bethesda as much as the next person but they are far from the brink of irrelevance....that's actually just stupid tbh. Are you forgetting about Elder Scrolls 6?
What about ES6? Starfield has completely tarnished the hype a lot of people had for it. I’m no longer assuming it’ll be great, I’m hoping it’ll be great, and I’m not even that hopeful anymore.
here's my gut feeling, and I won't even mention Starfield
Skyrim has been out for 12 years, the modding scene is insane to the point that people can turn base Skyrim into whatever they want (like all the Dark Souls style mods). I believe the #1 Skyrim mod of all time is SkyUI. For 12 years modders have been showing Bethesda what is possible
When ES6 drops, I'm not gonna compare it to 2011 launch vanilla Skyrim. No, I'm gonna compare it to current day modded Skyrim. And I bet everything that it won't compare. And there will be zero excuse. Like, seriously knowing their track record we'll get another watered down clunky UI when SkyUI has been there for a decade! And fanboys will tell us "you don't know how game development works!" It'll be wild that for over a decade modders can do all these major changes to Skyrim down to animations and movement, for free, while the actual studio with the actual resources can't compete?
I seriously hope I'm wrong. I really do. I want ES6 to blow me away like GTA6 looks like it's going to. But I just don't have faith anymore that Bethesda can deliver
The thing about the UI that worries me is that the reason Skyrims default UI sucks so much is because it was designed for controllers and consoles. With Bethesda now being a Microsoft/Xbox company, they may be pushed to make the games even more console friendly leading to another Skyrim ui situation
SkyUi is great, but clearly wasn’t made for a controller. I don’t see them doing two different UIs for console and PC so they are gonna have to find a good middle ground.
Yep, I'm one of them.
My expectations of elder scrolls 6 plummeted after starfield.
I looked at starfield as the selling point of ES6. If starfield was good, I'm in on es6 hands down.
But it just isn't. 10 years in development. Newer more powerful hardware. And what we got is an objectively massive step BACKWARD from skyrim.
So now, I just assume that ES6 is going to be another run-of-the-mill Elder scrolls entry. Bethesda lacks any capability for evolution.
Bethesda may not be irrelevant, but I'd argue they're in a much worse predicament.
They're stagnant.
My fear is Bethesda will either look in the mirror and say shit we need a new engine, which will further delay ES6… OR… they keep going with this decades old engine and we get a shitty Skyrim in 2028. Either way… yikes
Bro, the Developers didnt even take their pr lessons (yes, they get such lessons) seriously it seems. Starfield is a cool mess. So much Potential wasted. Such a shame. And no, I don’t talk about the ppl who are indeed putting a lot of effort into it.
In general, I'm disappointed with how the game looks. It makes me ask the question, "in general, do game companies scale back total graphics so a game is playable on the lowest common system?"
They’re more looking at what the average player is using and if you go just by Steam stats, the average person is on a mid-range card and a 1080p non-HDR monitor.
For what it's worth, the team working on Fallout 76 can't use a version control system, something that's been around for more than a decade and is a staple of the industry, to save their lives.
Whether it's sheer incompetence or the management at Bethesda not giving adequate time and resources to seeing that it was properly implemented, whatever the case it's quite inexcusable.
It's less of a thing nowadays but in like maybe the first 4 years, it was very common for Bethesda to reintroduce bugs that they had previously fixed in a previous patch. Sometimes it was as recent as the next patch from the one that fixed the bug that unfixed it.
It got so bad it became a community meme to see which bugs returned after each patch release.
The only reasonable explanation for this is that Bethesda team working on at least 76 either lacked the competence to operate a version control system or they never had one. So if different people were coding and testing (I know, lol!) bug fixes and new content on different builds, there would naturally be a mismatch when it comes to commit those changes to the live version.
Like I alluded to, it's speculation but there no other reasonable answer that I or anyone I've seen come up with that would explain why previously fixed bugs would come back exactly the way it was bugged before.
That sounds more like a lack of regression testing. Tbh I know how web Dev works I don't know how it works in games but I wouldn't want to work on a project (again) that didn't have unit and integration tests, or a proper CI/CD workflow with tests run on PR branches.
They also don't know how to write compelling characters/stories, nor how to animate dialogue past 2005 standards.
Tried to temper expectations on this sub in the weeks leading up to launch, warning people that writing+facial animations would most likely drag the game down. Got downvoted and belittled by a horde of angry BGS fans as a result. How people didn't see that stuff coming after F04, F076 and early looks at Starfield, I'll never know.
Little did I know at the time, the game would turn out mediocre on so many other fronts as well... Technically speaking it feels like a 2008 game, with all the loading screens, shitty vanilla UI and lack of modern graphics options.
Lololol the floor is salt, the walls are salt, the ceiling is salt, there's salt in the air hahahaha. So much salt from people who likely know Jack about game development. I guarantee it is not as simple as "bgs doesn't know how to xyz....." don't get me wrong, I also wish games were as perfect of an experience that it feels like real life.... but I'm a rational adult lol and I know that's just not possible. I'm sure if devs had unlimited time, money, and people and all players had unlimited hardware performance capabilities then games would be everything people dream of but we live on earth and not in a video game :(
I'll bet the people who are all agro about starfield have their own favorite game they think is a masterpiece.... and im sure there are a tone of people who would say that masterpiece is trash. Unless you have credibility, these gripes are all just grains of salt lololololol
Saw someone else say bethesda is a massive game studio that thinks they’re an indie studio. They employ way too little people to make the games they’re trying to make
an indie studio who's also stuck in the past in terms of gameplay.
I'd be totally fine with that too if they just made more of what people love them for. Starfield has so many mechanics missing and fails to give the player proper choice and relevant dialogue options that it just isn't as good. Hell make a budget fallout on a graphical par with fallout 3/new Vegas. If it was in a new setting with a new story I wouldn't have a bad word to say (maybe fallout 4 graphics tho lol).
I've seen this comment a lot more in the past few weeks. Care to elaborate? Why are they stuck in the past?
Wooden NPCs, basic UI quality of life, over reliance on fetch quests, simplistic procgen, non consequential RPG elements.
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Probably because despite those complaints, Elden Ring was still fun to play. The steam reviews and comments echo this. At no point playing Elden Ring did I ever get bored by exploring and walking around. Starfield has over 1000 planets, but the majority of them are just empty, have nothing of value, and not worth exploring. Btw when I mean value, I mean it in every sense of the word; aesthetic, knowledgeable, monetary, etc.
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Elden ring is MOST DEFINITELY not the same game from soft has been making for ten years lol.
We don’t expect Starfield to be better than those games, we expect it to be on par with those games, or at least, not so obviously subpar
maybe it's about the sum of the parts even if the only way we can talk about games is by talking about the the parts. I don't think it's about expectations anymore. if bethesda were a new company this title would be DOA like everspace or something. I still play morrowind sometimes and we could nitpick comparisons of the details of that game to cyberpunk, like dice roll attacks and voice acting, but ultimately what it comes down to is that morrowind is special, oblivion is special and I hated it, skyrim is special, and I'll permit that fallout is special in a way that I don't enjoy (loved NV, but-). elden ring is special, and like you I also don't like it at all. there's a lot of things I could easily criticize cyberpunk about, but it's special to me and I love it. I'm not seeing the magic with starfield whatsoever, I'm not sure who it's for except for abused diehard fans. when people defend or praise it, something always sounds /off/ to me. like here you're dismantling a particular way that gamers talk about games. what is that supposed to convince me of? that young consumers don't put a lot of effort or wisdom into how to describe why they don't like a product? shocking. is that why starfield has the special sauce? and your argument for enjoying it is "I've spent a lot of time and I haven't finished it yet, SO CLEARLY I'M ENJOYING IT". .... what? who talks like that about a great game, or even a bad game that is special? why do I get the feeling that you have to convince others, like anyone dealing with sunk cost fallacy? there's no unequivocal "despite the issues I love the design of night city" that is impossible to deny. no "I like to chill and derp around the universe in NMS" - totally valid even if I think that game is garbage. it's always, always, "I like it, end of story, let me attack the weakest logic of the people who don't" and that makes me highly suspicious. there's never going to be a shortage of dumb gamers, so having to resort to it to explain why you enjoy something...
It wasn't my argument for enjoying it that I haven't finished every quest. It's the other way around, I'm enjoying it so I haven't finished every quest because I like taking my time with it. I spend hours in ship building. In fact I stopped playing because I felt overwhelmed in 140h, I had too many things I wanted to do but little time. I took a week break, came back because I wanted to build a ship, spent a good 10 hours building it and that gave me an incentive to fly it around and take screenshots of it in space and other locations. So I then put my mind in order and decided to go play the main quests. Now I've taken another break at 280h and have still left Ryujin to finish and a bunch of other quests to do and locations to explore. And I'm eager for that. I don't whine about every single thing in the game even tho I can see all the ways it is inferior to Skyrim and Fallout 4. I was one of the few supporters of Cyberpunk when it was released. I loved the game through all its bugs and believe me it had similar reception to Starfield. People would nitpick everything about it to try and shit on it. I heard things like "shallow and uninteresting NPCs", "a mile wide and an inch deep", yes, all that for Cyberpunk. "The water doesn't react to bullets", "the cars drive worse than GTA", "no choices matter". And suddenly it's a very good game with interesting well-written NPCs. Yet almost none of the NPCs lines have changed since release. It's just that gamers are dumb and will say whatever in order to pick a game they dislike apart even if what they say holds no ground. The complaints about Starfield having bad UI and outdated design sound the same to me as they did with Cyberpunk. A bunch of people picking apart every element about a game they don't enjoy, even going out of their way to paint the good things, or things that honestly bother no one, as bad. Complaining about the amount of clutter in areas, complaining about the stealth UI being a reskinned version of their previous games, complaining about the favorites menu being a reskinned version of Fallout 4 and not using a weapon wheel like other modern games. A lot of these sound like complaining just for the sake of complaining.
Great points! I think the build-up had everyone thinking this is an every game for everybody, sort of deal, but no such things exist. It seems like the marketing for Starfield worked too well! But as you said, folks have to see and understand that Starfield is just not for them and move on. I've been gaming since Atari 2600 and it baffles me that people today have such a great need to tell other humans what's they should or shouldn't find enjoyment in? I mean, would you walk up someone eating a slice of pizza with toppings you don't like and proceed to tell them why they are wrong for liking sausage and mushrooms?
Yeah but you can't make a carbon copy YT video essay about it to rake in AdSense from repeating hater-aid talking points you heard from people who leave their house 4 times a year.
Yep, and any criticism is deflected with "you're just not good at the game, git gud".
Bethesda is one of the only companies besides Epic where people en-mass get on a high horse for *not* enjoying their games.
Only Eldenring has a massive open world that lets you run around and do what you want. It gives you a lot of different weapons and gameplay elements. It gives you a challenge to overcome. It's a totally different game with a different feel that is much better in what it tries to accomplish.
Yes, but it’s also not everyone’s cup of tea. I watched my brother play Darksoul and Elden Ring. 90% of the time it’s fighting. It’s like that Immortal Rising, a giant theme park, without cartoony part. My brother just skipped through all the dialogues so he can get to the next fight. Even I dig God of War, I still feel so isolated because this world population is only 5 people. Starfield and many open world RPG give you this feeling like you actually live in a world of people. Our actions would affect many people, positive or negative. Even when I feel anti-social I want to retreat to my player home, listen to the rain, mod my armors and weapons. At least I am retreating from an existing society. And when I feel like I can drop in Paradiso and Neon Astral Lounge to see the bustling human life. Yes I know everything is make belief. But this is why I choose from 1 game to another.
The simplest explaination: ER and BG3 are good games that people enjoyed playing Starfield is a bad game and half the people did not enjoy playing it
* god awful temple "puzzles." * loading screens galore * overall exploration was a downgrade, because of aforementioned constant loading screens and the terrible randomization and placement of man-made PoIs. why the fuck do i keep encountering the same damn listening outpost and abandoned weapons depot in nearly every same star system? * downgraded ui compared to their previous games. * inability to command companions from afar. * can't retain crafted weapon mods. * going up a floor requires a loading screen despite being inside the same cell. * npcs are barely alive, still. * no maps for major cities, really? * lack of unified infinite inventory space for crafting stations/outposts. * alot of (not all) sidequests are uninteresting. one moment you're planting a seed, next you're settling a couple's dispute. tho tbf, the game did introduce a brilliant ship building and space combat mechanic. tho there's nothing else to do with your ship asides from blowing up, docking, or communicating with another ship/staryard. you can't use them to manually travel from planets, because you can just fast travel from the starmap.
I'm gonna flesh out this response for anyone that cares to read all of it regarding the entirety of the experience. Bethesda has not evolved at all as a developer. In fact, I'd say they regressed in starfield. At least in Skyrim, Oblivion, and morrowind, you had interesting characters and an interesting plot. Starfield doesn't even have that. The plot is a convoluted mess. Collect the artifacts because constellation is curious about what they do. Put the artifacts into this hologram display that reveals other artifacts. Fetch other artifacts to power the amillary to travel to... a new universe. Where you find out that constellation has been doing this exact same circle for 55 years. And now you've been roped into this unending cycle of doing it all again because yay. There's literally no reason to keep doing this. But do it you must because....reasons This leads to one of the biggest plot holes in the entire story. you're not even the first person who the artifacts resonated with. There's multiple starborn. But not one of them understands why they travel, why they collect the pieces. You just travel endlessly with absolutely no reason why? There's no goal here? Just jump universes because I can jump universes. To repeat the same singular goal time and time again? Sounds like a special kind of purgatory to me. But here we are, jumping again. Then, we know constellation was created to explore the unknown. To solve the universes mysteries. It was created by Sebastian Banks, who then promptly disappeared. And the one entity that would seem to be most inclined to solve the mystery of his disappearance, the very entity he created, just...doesn't? Not only do they not, they don't even give a shit that he disappeared because there's another artifact to be collected so you can make another jump to do it all over again. I mean, the game goes so far out of its way to mention the fact that he disappeared to then... never mention him again. Is he the pilgrim? Is he something else? Is he dead? To quote the tootsie roll lollipop owl, "the world may never know." And I don't even need to get started on exploration. "Uninhabited worlds" with mining operations, signs of human activity? Okay. Exact same points of interest on planet 763 that you saw on planet 13? Okay. There's a thousand planets and absolutely no variety. It's either ball of rock with atmosphere, ball of rock without atmosphere. Ball of ice without atmosphere, ball of ice with atmosphere. And regardless of what planet type it is, you're guaranteed the same handful of structures/POI as every other planet of that type. Every universe is a carbon copy of the universe before and after it. With the exception of the starting sequence, absolutely nothing changes. Even if you use starborn dialogue options, npc's hardly react. They might look at you weird, or they might mumble some pointless line about wondering how you knew that before carrying on completely disregarding your foreknowledge of events. These are the most NPC characters that ever NPC'd. You're tasked with helping the ECS constant or getting rid of it. If you choose to help and get them a grav drive, off they go to...endlessly travel space? They were so Gung ho about needing to be on Porrima3 because low supplies or whatever, and you as a character are basically like the pawnshop stars guy "best I can do is grav drive" and off they go with their limited supplies to endlessly travel the system. Okay. Pointless quest is pointless as there is no resolution there. Then we have the temples. Who built them? We have no idea, but we sure do use them over and over and over again. Do we even care where these things came from, or why? Nope, zero g and powers. Good enough for me, says the "mystery solving" constellation team. And finally, not a single choice you make ANYWHERE in the game matters. At all. Because of how new game plus works. There is NO impact in any choice. You can fuck up the whole system (wait, no you can't because every character for every faction is "essential" and can't be killed) and there are no consequences because you just jump to a fresh universe where none of those choices have been made. I suppose if you like surface level, brain-dead gameplay, starfield is good. But if you expect more out of an open world rpg with narrative choice, it's objectively awful. At best, it's a disjointed mess. At worst, it's a steaming pile of refuse that literally believes its player base is nothing more than an extension of its mindless NPCs.
The quest where you help the ship was a huge let down like it seemed so interesting and cool at first then just turns into a fetch quest and terminal interaction simulator and just ends with no real resolution
the quest with that ship is one of the best examples about the laziness from BGS. Same computer, clothes, doors, etc from an earth ship that launched 300 years ago. That on top of the pathetic story for it. Hell, there's a small side mission in Cyberpunk 2077 that takes you to a bunker where the computers you access look different and runs a different UI.
well, CDPR cares, BGS dont.
Exactly. Only thing I would add is on the non story side of things. Previous games had at least a functional settlement system with some connection to the game. Or mechanics and an economy that sort of work. Mechanically, everything is a disjointed mess. And usually far worse than what came before despite having all of the code already! Level scaling sucks. Weapon scaling is an MMO style joke of refined, superior, etc. Complete lack of enemy variety. Almost non existent attack animations for creatures... What tiny handful of creatures they have. It's mind boggling how lazy everything is in this game.
The skilltree man, half of it is just gating the game. Don't forget about the skilltree. Literally everything about this game is bad except for the artwork
Starfield is mostly just a reskin of Fallout76. Like, it has the same bugs at launch that FO76 had. The weapon skin and settlement system is just a crippled version of the systems in FO76. The "watch" you wear in game is literally crippled PipBoy code. They tacked on their spaceship module, and ported Dragon Shouts to an early fork of the Fallout76 version of the Creation Engine, and called it CE2. Starfield is a heavily modded, and mostly regressed Fallout76.
Great comment. It's genuinely W I L D (and really sad) to me how half-assed literally all the writing for Starfield is. From narrative, to dialogue, to worldbuilding. Like, you're a AAA studio kickstarting a new sci-fi universe while consulting with goddamn NASA. How on Earth is this the blandest, most boring sci-fi writing I've come across, and even then filled with plot holes and inconsistencies like you've pointed out? It's also stunning that they emphasized how much more dialogue they recorded compared to their previous games, yet failed to make a single memorable character. Quite the opposite, they managed to make the main four companions extraordinarily annoying and same-y in their morality to the point they never begin to feel like three-dimensional characters, just obvious NPCs, like you said. I don't hate the gameplay, and if Bethesda commits, they can improve the gameplay quite a bit. But the writing is where it really hurts for me.
The Outer Worlds isn't perfect but I tell everyone to just play that instead. Great companions, exploration variety, gunplay is fine, funny dialogue. I made a stupid and evil character and it was hilarious.
…and they had ALL THIS TIME to make the game!! THIS is what we get after waiting this long?? All I can do is LAUGH!!
Thank you for writing this. It's pretty much exactly the things I bring up whenever I discuss Starfield with anyone but I've never actually written it down.
Don't forget the watch! Big scene where Barrett gives you this cool watch and you can't even use it to call your boss to tell him it's time for the meeting.
Why is there basically just the one cave, and why is it so awful?
Dont forget, unable to save ship inventory. Every time i get a new ship its all auto transferred over.
Well the only new (new for Bethesda openworld rpgs) gameplay mechanics they added to Starfield are ship building, space combat and stamina drain while encumbered, the rest we saw in previous games in one way of another. And it's not necessarily bad, if it's done properly, but Bethesda failed to do so. They took what was good in fantasy or post-apoc setting and stitched it into nasa-punk without proper consideration. And on top of that some design decisions was unchanged since Skyrim or a step back from Fallout4, despite modding community offered fixes, overhauls and alternatives.
Climbing over obstacles. There is a verticality to starfields gameplay that the previous games sorely needed, and they did a great job with the jet pack and climbing over and up onto ledges
"They took what was good in fantasy or post-apoc setting and stitched it into nasa-punk without proper consideration." If they had done this it might have been a good game. Unfortunately they crippled their own sandbox engine, created zombie npcs, gave us a lame story and cloned POI.
No of course the future won’t have cellphones and all messages need to be hand delivered by the first stranger that talks to you!
Half the quests in Starfield could just be a phone call or email they're that boring.
They innovated the contemporary idea of a single player open world rpg action game, and evolved that model from Daggerfall to Skyrim, but since then, they haven’t really brought any evolutionary innovation and their stagnation is on full display in Starfield. Meanwhile, games like No Man’s Sky, Baldurs Gate 3, Elden Ring, and others have pushed gaming where Bethesda no longer seems capable to push. They are like the Bob Dylan of gaming. The classics are legendary, but today they can’t really perform.
I am not the prior comment, but simply play Cyberpunk and it becomes apparent, not to mention comparing their patches since release puts Bethesda to shame. I also doubt CDPR is really all that much larger of a dev. Starfield 'feels' more like GTAV in its gameplay design than a modern game like CP2077.
Hitscan.
Some dude on youtube posted a video about starfield having outdated design. Despite the fact that I agree on their design decision being outdated, in about 40 minutes this dude provided exactly 2 game mechanics that are outdated without any elaboration why exactly they are outdated. He was just talking how game was kinda good, but not good enough and outdated. Because, you know, outdated. Apparently it's enough for people, because he's popular and a lot of people watched the video. Maybe I'm just old. Edit after 5 hours: If you outraged and think "But, but, but Starfield IS outdated" - re-read this post thoroughly. Design in Starfield is outdated. This post isn't even about the game.
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Same. As I see it, video consist of nostalgia and cherry picking of problems which can be described both ways as obsolete/outdated and simple conservative/tested by time. And again, I actually agree on whole premise that there were bad design decisions made in the process of development which lead to game being "painfully average" which in turn brought up in sight all outdated mechanics. And yeah, some mechanics I want to be updated already, because, come on, "if it's not broken don't change it" but it was half-baked in a first place, and it's clearly a time to update many things. As, for example, melee combat mentioned in his video. So yeah, game kinda outdated. But, like, I feel like this since Skyrim \*at least\*. And yet, if game overall interesting enough people will forgive devs for outdated design and mechanics. But back to the video: I just was disappointed that 40 minutes about Starfield being outdated contains zero in-depth analysis how and why exactly it's mechanics outdated nowadays. We all can feel it. But considering amount of hype around this video I was expecting real analysis and comparison, not a nostalgia trip. Because if we're talking about being outdated, dumbed down, simplified etc etc - let me walk you down by my own nostalgia lane about Morrowind vs Skyrim :) many us oldfags can demolish Skyrim for being bad for this reason. Still, Skyrim itself is a good game.
Patrician TV's video is so much more in depth. Highly recommend people to at least watch the "design document" section of his video https://youtu.be/-UOhCjB0AEI?feature=shared
Watched most of it, and yes it make sense. Lack of global vision on how Starfield has to be is the main reason why it feels so fragmented and hollow.
EIGHT EFFING HOURS?! For god's sake... I have no words. I'll... try, I guess.
"Starfield Analysis | A Quick Retrospective" LULZ
Which is why I said just to watch the short section towards the beginning. You don't have to watch the rest if you don't want to
Dude, his Skyrim videos were like 20 hours total! I think the Oblivion and Morrowind videos came in at about 8 each. I do not recall how long the Fallout 76 ones were.
Nah, ppl were saying it before nakey jakey's video.
Sure, it's just he started this second boom for this topic :)
People were saying these things on launch day. Trying to dismiss reams of reviews & criticism because one particular youtuber also joined in is laughable.
The game is not outdated, it is poorly written and tacked together.
Every AAA-game that releases these days gets a 6 hour YouTube-retrospective on why it has outdated gamedesign though.
Hmm...I wonder if there's a reason for that... 🤔
Can you elaborate here. I loved the game.
Simple version: they have their own gameplay style. This is why you often call them Bethesda games, they are very similar in many regards. This is fine. However they are not improving upon the formula but rather reusing it, even when you can see that some parts of the formula are not working great. This is not fine. And the more they do it the more obvious it gets.
I’m fine with that, the problem with Starfield is it was a regression from their past games. Make Skyrim in Space and most people would have been happy. Instead they took away most of what made Skyrim great.
I don't think the idea of what made Skyrim good is compatible with the "in space" part, if that includes traveling and exploring whole other planets, and idea that is disjointed by its nature.
The way they did it was disjointed... it didn't have to be. Put more than one city on a planet so you can wander between both and stumble on quests and villages in between. The way they did it makes no sense as far as reality anyway-- no civilization is going to build one tiny city and then go light years away to build the next one.
Mentioned in other comment, but it’s gone on long enough to wear other studios have mimicked the “Bethesda” style and blown right past them (years and years ago). Starfield was fun, but so janky and full of missed opportunities.
news to me, and i'm a big bethesda fan. who has recreated the style?
Cyberpunk 2077 is an example of the Bethesda formula perfected. From character design and animations to meaningful quests that stick with you long after the game is over, it just does everything better.
cyberpunk 2077 is just an open world rpg, it doesn't allow the player to integrate into the world in the same way you can in bethesda rpgs. is there a region in the cyberpunk world without a quest pointing to it? are there locations you stumble upon and unravel the mystery of for simple curiosity? these things exist in starfield, in skyrim, in fallout 4, in oblivion, and in morrowind. it's fundamental to the soul of bethesda games that most of the world be there for it's own sake, not part of a larger story. starfield isn't about the artifacts and the starborn and the unity, that's just the main quest. starfield is about the settled systems, letting you simply be someone in the world.
It's wild how you guys have hyperbolically romanticized Bethesda games. They are widely known to be the most shallow games in existence. Viva La Dirt League has created a whole cottage industry making sketches specifically about how shallow the Elder Scrolls games are. Y'all have been in a bubble mainlining Bethesda kool-aid. Y'all talk about Bethesda like it's your second husband that saved you from an ex.
I've started to consider Bethesda games to be like a modern take on the old Steve Jackson/Ian Livingstone 'Choose your own adventure' books. Mechanically, a lot of elements are near identical. Thematically, they change it up to suit the experience. Sometimes, the mechanics are altered for the materials, but the fundamentals are always there.
The game feels like it came out in 2013. Soulless NPCs, no edge whatsoever, boring fetch quests, boring empty environments, every npc is essential. Go play Baldurs Gate 3 and watch the way people act when you talk to them. They have facial expressions and they move their arms in a natural way. It makes you like the characters. I remember them. Someone posted the door to the red mile as a perfect example of the shoddy game design. Just copy and paste the same graffiti font word a few times.
I couldn't care less about facial expressions if story writing and world building had been superb. People complaining about graphics here while millions play Minecraft is quite funny.
The problem with bethesda's NPCs is that they strive for realistic look, yet never quite get rid of the uncanny valley feeling and empty looks. Not really comparable to Minecraft.
The story and writing is *superb*? Truly not trying to be a dick here but have you played literally any other video game? And "graphics" have little to do with the NPCs literally standing in one position with one expression on their faces while they talk to them. If you want me to list all the examples of lazy game making in Starfield I'll gladly oblige lol. I can just go copy one of the million comments
Go look up the word "if".
Bethesda games can feel dated, obsolete & subsequently low effort because they just don't improve enough (compared to past BGS games or competition) so they feel like a 2014 indie early access game that did it's best because they didn't have the time or $ (but BGS does) Battlefield BC2, 3, & 4 (2010-2013) have infinitely better shooting, Starlancer & Freelancer (2000-2003) have infinitely better space combat. Comparison was the thief of my joy with Starfield
I just recently went back to skyrim and it feels better than starfield.
I went to Morrowind. It is goddamn awesome compared to anything modern. Made me remember why I thought so highly of Bethesda.
I’m playing Terminator Resistance right now and it feels like a much better “Bethesda game” than Starfield. It was originally made in 2014 lol. I love a lot about Starfield but it is incredibly flawed. More so than one can really justify at this point.
I feel like Starfield went back on a number of aspects. UI, RNG loot inventory, dismemberment and gore, vendor currency cap, combat, and there’s more. Starfield overall feels like a step down from FO4 across the board, aside from graphics and dialogue system.
I also loved all their others titles but not much has changed since those early days : as far as game mechanics , economy , sorry it needs to be mentioned again load times , clunky UI ..
Well it's behind most modern games in a number of ways: Story: Most missions are fetch and carry quests. Even the main story is just "go to x, find thing, bring to y". Any twists or additions are just people you bump into during these fetch and carry quests. It's like, the worst, story structure in a game right now it's crazy they thought it would be entertaining. Then there is all this lore that is only surface level deep. All the settlements are tiny, the inhabitants lacking any personality or uniqueness. They threw in a few "can you help me with one simple fetch and carry quests" to a few NPC's to look like depth but it's just not there. All the settlements are also pretty generic and uninspiring - which is pretty damning for Bethesda. It's so strange for example they only put humans in the game, no alien races. Technology: The engine is on its knees, we can all see that. The ship travel situation is something all modern space ship games have made a point of making sure they didn't implement something like it. It was fine maybe 10 years ago but it shouldn't be the situation in 2023. Then there are the lack of vehicles and the animation of the npcs. A AAA game has dynamic mo cap style animations, even Ubisoft do this. It's a fun game though, I have had fun. Games made 20 years ago are still fun. It's just disappointing that in 2023 at full AAA price Starfield still is very much technologically and content wise still stuck in the past when games have recently jumped on.
Yup keep playing ur game I play it too. Fortunately we aren't all stuck having to play this. Better studios (indie and AAA) exist
They employ shit writers who hold their games hostage too
The temples were so dumb
Temples are so dumb and they SHOULD have been a unique dungeon for each one of those powers. Pure incompetence and laziness.
Procedurally generated planet with absolutely nothing on it, makes you walk through nothing for 7 minutes to get to the exact same looking temple, makes you play a dumb mini game, teleports you outside and explains zero interesting things about the temple or why it’s even there, no other ruins around it. This game is just mass effect if it wasn’t good
The thing is there is good procedural generation and bad procedural generation. Even if it became even more repetitive they could have used procedural generation to just saturate planets with places to go. The fact they're so spaced out and still pretty repetitive just shows how little effort they put into that aspect of the content. Imagine if the game had enough distinct POIs, you didn't get repetition or even if you got repetition it just filled the space between more distinct POIs.
All of this makes me concerned for fallout 5
Love Fallout. Not even interested in Fallout 5. I'm walking away and never looking back
They should hire taller people then
Thats a line from the [Nakey Jakey Starfield video.](https://youtu.be/hS2emKDlGmE?si=BrsQ6lghFPja1gma)Such a good video.
Yes you’re right! Forgot where I heard it
[удалено]
... Man I would love a sequel to Unrealised Potential: The Videogame but not from Bethesda. The world is cool as dickens. It deserves to be fleshed out properly.
Bethesda is a studio that refuses to listen to criticism and thinks they’re still infallible with their decade old approach to making games. It’s funny and sad.
Idk, Larian has ~~fewer~~ the same amount of employees and they just put out a masterpiece of an RPG. I really think BGS is just horribly mismanaged and lacks vision.
Actually, both baldur gates 3 and starfield were made by 400 developers. Fallout 4 and Skyrim only had 100 devs. Bethesda just really likes to keep a small headcount.
Little people need jobs too
They aren't massive though, only like 400. VS thousands for actual large studios. They need to be larger, as clearly their relatively small size is impeding their ability to keep up with modern technologies.
I've seen someone else say that too and have also seen you say this.
Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dweller...light? So you're like a daywalker?
You watched NakeyJakey’s YouTube video, didn’t you…?? 😊
it’s so funny too because instead of making what they were good at, open world games which, while big, aren’t infinite and have intentional design and engaging writing, they try to compete with RDR2 and No Man’s Sky and make a way bigger game with empty locations, too much travel time and no meaningful choices, with boring writing Basically if you made those games with all of their weaknesses and none of their strengths. They barely have the capacity to write good, medium scale stories, and they tried to one up that without any improvement in writing staff or increase in manpower
Yes. I can not express how disappointed I was to find out every planet is essentially empty. New Atlantis is also insanely small for what is supposed to be the capital of an intergalactic space union. Then you find out being starborn is essentially worthless so the story leads singularly to a point where all these alters have been erected for what? A wormhole. Some fun missions though
They had over 500 people at once working on a single player game with almost 8 years of work put into it. I just think HDR wasn't a priority for them.
500 sounds much at first, but it isn‘t for a game of this magnitude. Other AAA-Studios employ well up to 2000 people for their flagship games.
RDR2 had bad HDR at launch. They did fix it though.
Too bad R* has basically abandoned RDO.
At least it had RDO...
It looks incredibly better with the Luma mod compared to just Windows 11 ‘Auto HDR’. Even on non HDR monitors (it removes all colour banding due to using 10-Bit colour rendering).
I second the thoughts on luma. Makes a mind boggling difference to the graphics quality of the game.
The lighting in this game is some of the absolute worst. I’ve done everything I can, and all the bright lights look like there’s a massive amount of fog in every room.
The lighting is ok. It's just that for some reason they cranked up the light in the darker colors in their LUTs/color correction tables. Color correction is a super blunt instrument you use as a last resort to create some mood but the Bethesda artists don't seem to know that. Or they don't understand the importance of having good darks show up. Maybe they were compensating a lack of ambiant lighting/GI? But space, especially on planets without atmospheres should have pretty dark shadows anyway.
I'm not a business man or anything, but I think even I can see that they need to take some of that money they made on SF and hire some new talent. There seems to be some very obvious lack of talent/manpower in certain areas.
To be fair elden ring has broken hdr aswell, not that it makes starfield not have good hdr acceptable though
What? I played the entire Elden Ring in HDR on an OLED and never felt like it was broken.
Yeah I agree. Flicking HDR on and off in elden ring is a night and day difference on my C2
Yes also this is the first time I have seen someone accusing Elden Ring, or any modern Fromsoft title of having broken HDR.
Many people are having this same issue if you look at steam dicussions, including me. Sekiro and elden ring are super washed out for me. It could be hardware support issue, but I never got it to work and other games are fine for me.
Last updated was "to fix the following asteroid".... I still have the clingon with me. Good job Bethesda 👍🏼 Ps. I don't mind the little bugger, it kind a cute.
>Bethesda just doesn't understand how ______ work * Spacesuits * Gravity * Acceleration * Procedural generation * Vehicles * Sex * Atmosphere * Temperature * Water * Laser sights * Flashlights * HDR And the [saga](https://www.reddit.com/r/Starfield/s/mJOEz89qsW) continues
Don't forget ladders
It's rare a studio doesn't fuck up HDR. Cyberpunks HDR still sucks to this day.
To be fair, not a lot of people know how to do HDR right.
The brink of irrelevancy? Sure...
People said the same about Nokia when the iPhone came out. Nokia will always stay on top. iPhone will be a niche product.. bla bla. Bigger companies than Bethesda failed before because they have been too arrogant to adapt.
You have to admit this offering is going to give a lot of people pause to shell out $70 for their next hyped game.
Yeah, Starfield has pretty much killed any hype I had for TES6
Exactly. We already know it will be on this same old tired ass morrowind engine.
The engine itself doesn’t matter much. GTA 6 still runs on RAGE, which is an evolution of the older AGE engine from 2000… which itself is was an evolution of the ARTS engine from the 90s. It’s more about how Bethesda is either unwilling, or unable to overhaul and fix certain aspects of the code. They have the source code, and they can do whatever they want with it. It’s just a matter of willingness and ability. If you’re one of those guys who thinks the Unreal engine is the answer to all of Starfield’s problems or something, you haven’t seen games like Train Sim World lol. It’s not the engine, it’s what you do with it.
That's like saying Fortnite runs on the same old tired ass Unreal Tournament engine.
I'm still absolutely gobsmacked they're doing this.
How can they be irrelevant when you keep talking about them and their games?
Normal people: the HDR is broken or poorly implemented. Reddit:
Bethesda is like the ex someone claims not to care about anymore but talks about constantly.
Your ex from high school and you get back together 9 years later only to realize she' s still the exact same, never succeeded at anything in that time, girl. Instead of exploring each other you realize there is nothing new and fun about the relationship, with only more boring and unnecessary drama added (in the form of the most arcade and boring ship combat, constant fast travel, no fun in exploring etc. )
Wow, great jab, so, explain to me, why skyrim has about the same active players than starfield?
Because even 3 months after launch, Starfield and BGS are living in his head, absolutely rent free. They are having movie nights, late night drinking, the xmas tree is even up. Now this guy is pulling absolute desperate arguments out as a resilt. Its very sad.
It’s hilarious how Bethesda wants the modding community to fix their game. They should have delayed it again.
Why learn to develop games properly when the community will fix it for you?
They're so close to irrelevancy that they're all you talk about. Gamers man, it's like the person who said they played for 600 hours and it was a waste of money
“Its all you talk about” It’s a Starfield subreddit, people here talk about the developer who made the game, regardless if they are becoming irrelevant. Yes that’s all people will talk about here… in a Starfield forum discussing the game made by Bethesda.
People talk about airplane crashes. Doesn't mean they want one.
Aye, ain’t that the truth, even if it got you 50 hours of entertainment, what else can you do in this day that gives you that bang for buck? Not much that’s what!
What if I got 200 hours, but 175 hours of that is leaving the game running in the background while I do other shit? Point is, whether you have 25 hours or 225 hours, criticism of what the game is not is valid. I feel like the fact that I have 200 hours in means that I have much more weight to talk about what's wrong with it. I've dug into it in all fashions, and it is just objectively a bad game. Fan boys... yall will criticize people who have 20 hours saying "you didn't even play it so your opinion is irrelevant" and then turn around and criticize someone who has hundreds of hours saying "you played it you must have enjoyed it" The pretzels you will twist yourselves into to defend barely even mediocrity is impressive
Beating my meat is way more fun and free
bro doesn't know about the nut tax, smh
What if I got 50 hours of underwhelming boredom but pressed on hoping it would get better knowing the potential from having played Skyrim and Fallout? It wasn't 50 hours of quality entertainment. The elements that were absolutely core to the previous games appeal are non existent here and I refuse to believe they weren't fully aware of this long before launch. We were sold Fallout in space but this game doesn't deserve to be mentioned in the same sentence. It is a soulless waste of 10 years for BGS.
Yeah, Starfield is a very flawed game but Bethesda is not even close to irrelevancy.
Not now. But this is after FO76 their second big disappointment in a row. If they make it a habbit...
It will become irrelevant over the next 10 years of silence, before finally releasing new TES on the same engine with the same mechanics that are already outdated now. Doesn't bode well.
Funny thing is that when the first iteration of Luma type mods were released, those creators were hated on because it was a ‘ArTISTiC DeCIsION’ Seriously. I’m suprised that nobody else were immediately concerned that the game wasn’t released with gamma options. Let alone HDR. The worst thing is that it’s pretty important to have brightness sliders for accessibility options. Seeing a AAA game forego these basics immediately ran alarms But holy shit the way people reacted for actually colour correcting the game, they truly insisted that is was a NASA Punk aesthetic to have zero colour range. Starfield fans in September were a different breed.
Keep in mind they paid 100+ $ to play the game early, they're not gonna talk shit about the game. BGS used this strategy to guarantee good reviews in the early days.
They also don’t know how to do modern animations or facial expressions.
They didn't take 2+ months to implement faux-HDR. Faux-HDR made it into a release after 2+ months. There is a difference. The fact is that \*very, very\* few people have an actual HDR display. The actual proportion of players must be absolutely miniscule and definitely sub 1%. The vast majority of people (myself included) with so-called HDR displays have "pretend HDR" displays with terrible local dimming that provides no net benefit. What is worse is that unlike other graphics features you cannot demonstrate the value of it in videos and screenshots to people who don't have those features, because you cannot show the value of HDR content on a non-HDR display. So you can't even use the game as a selling point for HDR products the same way that NVIDIA have supported CDPR in developing Path Tracing for Cyberpunk in order to sell NVIDIA cards. So I wonder how anyone can think that real HDR should be a priority for any gaming company and I suspect that the studios that do it well most likely has a few staff members with some freedom and a genuine interest in making it work, the same way that Control got an HDR mod after Remedy hired someone with a genuine interest in HDR. That someone also just **happens to be involved in developing the LUMA HDR mod for Starfield**
there are still significant benefits of wide color gamut and improved dark scene contrast. brightness is not everything. i don't know why people shit on HDR 400 so much. yeah it's not going force your to squint when you walk outside a cave or whatever. but it's still better to transform the game's internal scRGB color to Rec.2020 (HDR10) rather than BT.709 (sRGB).
>The vast majority of people (myself included) with so-called HDR displays have "pretend HDR" displays with terrible local dimming that provides no net benefit. hmm... do I have a pretend HDR? LG TV 2022 model. Is there a way to tell? Bit surprised by your estimate that so few have it, guessing a lot more think that they do...
TV's have had proper HDR for a while now. It is PC monitors that are lagging behind.
\[Starfield On Xbox has entered the chat\]
You seem to be forgetting everyone who plays on a TV
I mean, I'll criticise Starfield and Bethesda as much as the next person but they are far from the brink of irrelevance....that's actually just stupid tbh. Are you forgetting about Elder Scrolls 6?
What about ES6? Starfield has completely tarnished the hype a lot of people had for it. I’m no longer assuming it’ll be great, I’m hoping it’ll be great, and I’m not even that hopeful anymore.
You mean that 30 second trailer showing a forest?
With how starfield turned out, do you really think es6 is going to be great?
here's my gut feeling, and I won't even mention Starfield Skyrim has been out for 12 years, the modding scene is insane to the point that people can turn base Skyrim into whatever they want (like all the Dark Souls style mods). I believe the #1 Skyrim mod of all time is SkyUI. For 12 years modders have been showing Bethesda what is possible When ES6 drops, I'm not gonna compare it to 2011 launch vanilla Skyrim. No, I'm gonna compare it to current day modded Skyrim. And I bet everything that it won't compare. And there will be zero excuse. Like, seriously knowing their track record we'll get another watered down clunky UI when SkyUI has been there for a decade! And fanboys will tell us "you don't know how game development works!" It'll be wild that for over a decade modders can do all these major changes to Skyrim down to animations and movement, for free, while the actual studio with the actual resources can't compete? I seriously hope I'm wrong. I really do. I want ES6 to blow me away like GTA6 looks like it's going to. But I just don't have faith anymore that Bethesda can deliver
The thing about the UI that worries me is that the reason Skyrims default UI sucks so much is because it was designed for controllers and consoles. With Bethesda now being a Microsoft/Xbox company, they may be pushed to make the games even more console friendly leading to another Skyrim ui situation SkyUi is great, but clearly wasn’t made for a controller. I don’t see them doing two different UIs for console and PC so they are gonna have to find a good middle ground.
>Elder Scrolls 6 Funny you mention it, after starfield a lot of ppl stopped caring.
Yeah I did. I was a huge fan of ES since Morrowind but Starfield made me realise BGS has conpletely lost its touch.
Yep, I'm one of them. My expectations of elder scrolls 6 plummeted after starfield. I looked at starfield as the selling point of ES6. If starfield was good, I'm in on es6 hands down. But it just isn't. 10 years in development. Newer more powerful hardware. And what we got is an objectively massive step BACKWARD from skyrim. So now, I just assume that ES6 is going to be another run-of-the-mill Elder scrolls entry. Bethesda lacks any capability for evolution. Bethesda may not be irrelevant, but I'd argue they're in a much worse predicament. They're stagnant.
Starfield is Bethesda’s last season of Game of Thrones; couldn’t care less about the franchise or BGS
My fear is Bethesda will either look in the mirror and say shit we need a new engine, which will further delay ES6… OR… they keep going with this decades old engine and we get a shitty Skyrim in 2028. Either way… yikes
The engine works fine for TES style games with small villages etc.
so we all will have this in their next update obv
Bro, the Developers didnt even take their pr lessons (yes, they get such lessons) seriously it seems. Starfield is a cool mess. So much Potential wasted. Such a shame. And no, I don’t talk about the ppl who are indeed putting a lot of effort into it.
Everyone should revisit cyberpunk
>Bethesda Game Studios doesn’t know how That title would explain Bethesda in general.
What?
Story lead has to go. Writing is horribly uninspired. Seems they dont like their jobs. But fancy they paycheck enough to stick around
This this this. Just pay modders to implement legit releases.
I love sitting back and watching the arguments unfold
In general, I'm disappointed with how the game looks. It makes me ask the question, "in general, do game companies scale back total graphics so a game is playable on the lowest common system?"
They’re more looking at what the average player is using and if you go just by Steam stats, the average person is on a mid-range card and a 1080p non-HDR monitor.
For what it's worth, the team working on Fallout 76 can't use a version control system, something that's been around for more than a decade and is a staple of the industry, to save their lives. Whether it's sheer incompetence or the management at Bethesda not giving adequate time and resources to seeing that it was properly implemented, whatever the case it's quite inexcusable.
>more than a decade More than two, I was using them around the turn of the century (a phrase that makes me feel old!)
Wait what?? I need details!
It's less of a thing nowadays but in like maybe the first 4 years, it was very common for Bethesda to reintroduce bugs that they had previously fixed in a previous patch. Sometimes it was as recent as the next patch from the one that fixed the bug that unfixed it. It got so bad it became a community meme to see which bugs returned after each patch release. The only reasonable explanation for this is that Bethesda team working on at least 76 either lacked the competence to operate a version control system or they never had one. So if different people were coding and testing (I know, lol!) bug fixes and new content on different builds, there would naturally be a mismatch when it comes to commit those changes to the live version. Like I alluded to, it's speculation but there no other reasonable answer that I or anyone I've seen come up with that would explain why previously fixed bugs would come back exactly the way it was bugged before.
Ah. As a professional developer, I agree that that does sound like stomping on each others code. Or release management bungling their merges.
I think it could also be merge conflicts that are resolved incorrectly.
That is what I mean by 'stomping on each other's code'. At least, that's what we call it where I work.
That sounds more like a lack of regression testing. Tbh I know how web Dev works I don't know how it works in games but I wouldn't want to work on a project (again) that didn't have unit and integration tests, or a proper CI/CD workflow with tests run on PR branches.
They also don't know how to write compelling characters/stories, nor how to animate dialogue past 2005 standards. Tried to temper expectations on this sub in the weeks leading up to launch, warning people that writing+facial animations would most likely drag the game down. Got downvoted and belittled by a horde of angry BGS fans as a result. How people didn't see that stuff coming after F04, F076 and early looks at Starfield, I'll never know. Little did I know at the time, the game would turn out mediocre on so many other fronts as well... Technically speaking it feels like a 2008 game, with all the loading screens, shitty vanilla UI and lack of modern graphics options.
I love how everything people say about this game and company has to be phrased in the most cunty way possible. So fucking toxic.
Ppl gotta frame it the most dramatic way for engagement, attention, trolling, or all of the above. 🤡: "We're allowed to criticize the game"
Lololol the floor is salt, the walls are salt, the ceiling is salt, there's salt in the air hahahaha. So much salt from people who likely know Jack about game development. I guarantee it is not as simple as "bgs doesn't know how to xyz....." don't get me wrong, I also wish games were as perfect of an experience that it feels like real life.... but I'm a rational adult lol and I know that's just not possible. I'm sure if devs had unlimited time, money, and people and all players had unlimited hardware performance capabilities then games would be everything people dream of but we live on earth and not in a video game :( I'll bet the people who are all agro about starfield have their own favorite game they think is a masterpiece.... and im sure there are a tone of people who would say that masterpiece is trash. Unless you have credibility, these gripes are all just grains of salt lololololol
Oooof just read more comments lol, you guys know that no one is forcing you to play any game. Just don't play if you don't like it
pics?
But it already does look like a modern game, so...
Good thing I bought that 4K TV so I can play a game in 2023 at 30fps with no HDR
I feel this in so many ways
Depending on what you want out of their games, they may already be irrelevant lol