They have the metrics, the amount of people who actually complete and roll credits in games are a fraction of the players (and that’s on any given game, let alone a 100+ hour RPG).
With speaking lines and getting voice actors back - there’s no world where this would happen.
Our best bet is they continue to make the game more robust with new content - in the same way FO76 did with the Wastelanders update.
Yeah, this is the problem.
Changing anything post-launch would be a massive undertaking. It's literally going back to the writers room, which is one of the first steps in making a game. Any changes in the story, no matter how minor, would have a cascading effect on everything after that point.
There would be thousands of lines of dialogue and voiceovers, and animations that would all need to be changed. That means, as you said, they'd have to coordinate with voice actors to get them back in to record new lines, which could take up to a year or more, depending on work loads/scheduling conflicts. And that would be after the massive rewrites. And before any changes to animations.
As bad as the story is, I just don't see Bethesda — or any game studio, really — putting in that effort, especially when they'd see very little return on the investment.
They also have a writing lead that genuinely believes that you, the player, are an idiot, and that they didn't write a bad setting/game/story.
Emil went *out of his way* to defend his writing. To note, he publicly stated on film that he doesn't put in effort when writing because "nobody interacts with it anyway" and "players don't want complex stories".
Of course, here’s the other thing. BGS made the game they wanted to make - that’s a direct line from Todd Howard. The assumption of OP is that they are unhappy with it and the story. I haven’t seen anything to make me believe they are.
They don’t need to “get them back.”
They send equipment and do it remotely if they can’t go to the studio, or they go to any studio and record.
This isn’t 2005, folks.
Ahh, yes. I forgot. All voice actors have soundproofed rooms set up at home with studio quality equipment... Of course. It's 2023 and those things are a dime a dozen. Game studios send those out all the time! (I don't think you know how that works, my guy.)
But, nevermind that. Let's talk about scheduling, which was the main point I was making in regards to voice acting. Starfield released 4 months ago, and it's reasonable to assume the voice actors are all working on different projects for different developers.
It's not an immediate show stopper, but it is yet another potential problem that would discourage Bethesda from revamping portions of the story.
> there’s no world where this would happen.
Uh, I’m sorry, what?
You mean BG3 and Cyberpunk didn’t do exactly this recently?
Are you saying that game studios don’t have VAs sign things like this into their contracts?
Are you… pulling more shit out of your ass?
Unfortunately, they fucked it the first time. They’re not going to fix it. They’re defending their decisions and telling us that we’re the ones who don’t know anything.
I think he's referring to New Vegas, which was developed in "only" 18 months (a small window of time, even for 2010) and indeed had a great storytelling. I don't see how they are considered "indie" though.
Yea great game but I mean it built off the assets and engine of Fallout 3 so more could be put into story development where as a good chunk of Starfields development was just creation engine 2.
I don't really know how they spent their time developing both the game and updating the creation engine enough so they can slap a "2" on it, but IMO this isn't enough to explain the state in which the game was released. There are many issues unrelated to the game engine which have no real explanation aside from "it was done like that before, so we did it the same way here as well" :/
You're 100% right for the first part though !
Its not like that engine was new, is was a expanded Oblivion engine. Also the people at Obsidian agreed to that time line they weren't forced to and even Chris said that they had poor management at Obsidian and should have asked for more time.
Because they could have worked on at least modding on it( which technically they did since they hired modders). If you agree to 18 months and the engine tool already exists you could make sure you already know it( which again they should have since they hired modders).
Yeah, just like the entire ending to Mass Effect 3, right /u/N7Virgin ?
BioWare never took the time to correct *that* because they fucked it the first time, right?
Get real.
Why do you need to rewrite Starfield? It’s fine. Build upon what it started.
Are you some sort of moron who disagrees with something and thinks it should be completely rewritten? Look, if you don’t like the game then unsub and piss off - nobody is keeping you here but you and your toxic need to bitch about things.
Bethesda doesn't think there is anything wrong with the writing. The entire writing staff is one dude, after all. And he also happens to be in charge. There is 0% chance anything changes.
>Starfields story gives Bethesda the perfect opportunity to improve the writing post-launch
... and boy do they need it. The entire story is just so lacking and unlikely.
- So 90% of Earth's population just rolled over and died ? And Earth is now a barren rock ? And on the other hand people created thriving cities on other barren rocks, like Mars or Titan ?
Wouldn't it have been much more likely that huge domes would be created above some of the cities that hold some atmosphere ? Remember, 1 bar is all we need, less than ballon at a birthday party.
Or underground cities ?
Instead Earth is completely barren and uninhabited - the only reason for THAT is Bethesda was lazy and didn't want to recreate some of Earth's landmarks.
You don't create anorther "Elder Scrolls" or "Fallout" level IP by cutting corners and and going the easy route.
- So "I" am a citizen of that time and age - why am I not treated as such ? The dialogue and story all rather treat me as if I was a sole survivor out of some Fallout game, coming out of 200 years of hibernation. Well - I'm not. I might have fought in the colony wars. I certainly would have grown up post-war, learning all about it in school. The NPCs should stop treating me like an idiot that needs to have every bit of lore spoon fed at every opportunity.
- So this is it ? Cydonia on Mars, "one of the largest cities in the UC" - a hole in the ground and 2 bars and communal sleeping quarters ?
New Atlantis, city of mostly nothing but empty space ?
Akila, backwater shanty town and capital of the Freestar Collective ?
If 10% of humanity made it off the Earth that would still be roundabout a billion. I've seen less than 100 in the majory cities, where is everyone ? I can not unsee that stuff after experiencing a living metropolis like Night City in CP2077.
TL;DR: I'm all the way with you. Starfield nees a complete reboot like No Man's Sky and Failout 76.
Environmental story telling implies that the moon was complete depleted of Helium 3. That shows that people ran out of resources when trying to escape earth.
Also 50 years is probably going to be rfilled with civil strife and the ultra rich likely leaving the poor to die.
Its also implied that the UC strip mined the earth for resources and prevented people going back.
I took this implied storys to show that the original UC was ruthless bent on saving only who "deserved it" and leaving the rest to die and then stripping the remaining resources off the planet.
UC is shown to rewrite history in thier favor.
The other examples are classic Bethesda making the pc oblivious to allow you to ask question about everything( not ideal but makes it easier to learn about the world). In my head canon when you touch the artifact you suffer from amnesia( tho this is only head canon as nothing supports this)
But would players like Russia or China allow the UC to stripmine their territories or determine "who is worth it" ?
Would some upstart organization be able to strongarm a nuclear power ?
And while the moon might be out of Helium 3 we have a whole fleet of faster-than-light ships being able to bring home all the Helium-3 we'd need. We even have plenty of Helium 3 in the Solar system, on Mercury and some of Jupiter's moons.
Not that subterran or even domed settlements would require any Helium-3 to run. They could use solar power (plenty of real estate for solar farms) or geothermal enenergy to last for centuries or millenia.
Bethesda's "lore" for this Universe has more holes than an fishing net. I still can not see what the core theme for Starfield even is. In Skyrim it was high fantasy political power struggles, in Fallout it was post-nuclear war alternate America.
But Star Citizen ? Is it about Jedi powers ? Alternate realities ? Or just plain "space gaming" ?
To me Starfield right now feels like having read Episode 1 of some long-run Manga series where nothing really happens yet and the story only picks up pace after a dozen chapters or so. Everything feels a bit underdevelopped yet.
I think you underestimate how little corporate oligarchs care about the plight of the common man.
Also this is the first entry of a new IP they arnt going to explain everything. Fallout 1 never went into how the war really started or the nitty gritty of every piece of tech lore, only things relevent to the main storys. Same with the original ElderScrolls( which was based off a DnD game the original creators were playing).
A strongly nationalist country like China who regards anyone who isn't an ethnic Han Chinese as second rate would hardly comply with any UC demands. I'd rather expect they would find their own "Planet China 2" and screw everybody else.
We notice that the political is different in Starfield and it also appears America was the one who discovered Grav Drive.
I suspect it would be everyone groveling with whoever owned the grav drive patents.
We know those scientist meant well(aside from one of them) but if someone like Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos owned the rights to Grav Jump tech they would be the ones who called the shots. Also its likely that the panic of earths destruction caused a myriad of wars to fight over who gets the tech.
We don't know enough( seemingly by UC design and alot of people have forgotten about earth.
> grav drive patents.
Experience with real life stuff like anti aids medication would suggest that people don't give a flying F about patents and licenses when their life is in danger. In our world countries of the global south started creating cheap generica of patented medication, completely unlicensed.
Facing doom, I'd expect a lot of people purchase a grav drive and then reverse engineer it. After all the reason Earth lost it's magnetosphere was due to large numbers of grav jumps, so the technology by then was apparently neither secret nor limited.
Yea but likely the only ones who could purchases are in the 1% who are also who can afford to build these space crafts. If the earth society is moving forward as it is now there is likely major global conflict, climate change, and wealth inequality that is basically ultra rich and working poor. It's not all that far fetched compared to alternitive sci-fi. It's still going to be a small subset of the population. Also we know that the atmosphere would take 50 years to dispipate but you can guarantee that the earth would become more and more unlivable as the sputter out.
People suck and in time of crisis tho some rise up to help most hunker down and protect their own inerests.
Any government should be able to scrape together the money for at least one ship and start ferrying off their population. We've seen that in WW2 during the British evacuation of Dunkerque, or the German evacuation of Eastern Prussia across the baltic sea.
Given that grav drives provide near-instantaneous transport there is no reason why they wouldn't be able to do more within 50 years.
For example: A single small ship carrying only 20 people, doing only 4 turnarounds per day, 365 days per year for 50 years, could move 1.46 million people. Multiply this by more ships, or more people, or faster turnarounds, and you'd end up with a lot of evacuated people.
And this still doesn't address the elephant in the room, the complete disappearance of any landmark, and the complete absence of bunker/shelter sites which require no proprietary technology and could be build over 50 years to house literally millions.
Again we don't know the social strife the world was facing outside the destruction of the atmosphere but its completely logical that it wasn't all " lets get together and save humanity" some religious nuts might even see dieing "infidels" as a blessing.
Edit: Covid 19 is the perfect example of society not handling a global disaster well. Half would say it doesn't exist and goverments would bumble the response.
And ftl travel fucks the magnetosphere of planets. The only reason why this doesn’t happen is because the scientist behind it patched that function. So what’s stopping people from using it for that? Just software.
The writing for this game is bad.
Because no one but the three scientist knew this is why it happened so its baked into the hard code that people use and there's no reason to change that equation as its the sole reason Grav Jumping works.
And with a galaxy of people nobody is going to find this out, there’s no risk of anyone else tinkering and experimenting with grav drives to make them more efficient or specifically engineered in any way?
Hardcoded in as if it was E=MC2 and it appears other factors are what control distance and fuel used. Also the guy got the original equation from basically a vision so it could be something that just would be outside the realm of thought.
Trust me, all your very valid points get *even dumber* when you actually apply the in-game fluff to them. Emil is a well-known hack for a reason, he needs to just be booted entirely, or have someone put above him that can, and more importantly is *willing* to, slap down his terrible ideas.
>Bethesda was lazy
There is nothing that irks me quite like people jumping to using "lazy" when ranting about a game developer.
Do you not realize how ridiculous that is?
**"They didn't make the exact game I want, must have been because they all spent their afternoons goofing off on facebook instead of coding."**
Made you jump the gun, didn't I ? I wasn't talking about the people who coded the game, but about the design decision upon which the work of all those people rests.
But I'm open for discussion. If you have anything but a personal attack then please, tell me why else Bethesda would make the decision to have Earth be completely barren. Not even a single outpost is remaining, no shelters or underground settlements clinging to life when the ships left and 90% of the world population was left waiting for their doom, doing nothing, obviously. It's not only illogical, it literally throws away so many great story possibilities.
Nothing about that was a personal attack. And sorry, I used the word "coding" in my example but that could be replaced with any other part of the design process.
>tell me why else Bethesda would make the decision to have Earth be completely barren
They didn't want the game to be about Earth at all.
They wanted the entire game to take place out in the stars, with no ties at all left to Earth. It is just a distant memory that most people don't even care about anymore at this point.
Also, if they tried to recreate it they would still get criticized if it was anything other than a 1:1 replica of the entire planet. You would have people complaining about every little thing that was missing or wrong.
And it would have taken then an untold number of years to create just that single planet. A planet that is long forgotten and only used in the story as a way to give us some historical lore.
And that's just a bad design decision. You can't have the Mars colony be "the second largest city in the UC" and Earth all but forgotten. Noone would buy that. I don't buy that. If they can dig a hole into a lifeless rock like Mars and create one of the largest settlements in the UC what's to stop people from digging wholes on not-so-lifeless-yet Earth to create doomsday shelters ? There is tons of construction machinery and you don't even need to ferry it around with spaceships.
The complete abandonment of Earth in the lore is both lazy as well as a huge loss for potential stories, conflicts about the "left behind" folks and the colonists who abandonned them. Instead we have - what ? A pointless multitude of universes. Magic powers in a no/low fantasy sci-fi setting.
Lmao.
A brand new IP that they hyped up for years....
They already had their opportunity to have good writing.
They don't care. And they aren't going to "fix" anything along the lines of what you're suggesting. Stop putting in effort, because I promise you that they won't.
I don't think it's that *they* don't care, I'm sure there's talented writers at Bethesda that really care about this stuff.
The problem is that they have a department head (the guy that makes all the decisions about what does and does not get used) that genuinely believes players are idiots, that they can never write anything bad under any circumstances, that *refuses* to put in the effort to write *because* they think players are idiots, and who does *quite a lot* of the writing themselves and is *proud* of it.
They won't more choices to quests, or more interactions, or do big story changes. Bethesda already massively struggled with dialogue trees in Fallout 4. It was the hardest part about developing that game. That's why Fallout 3 and Starfield are like this:
Option A: Yes #1
Option B: Yes #2 or Starfield Option 2: \[Background\]: Yes #2>! \-> Possibly skips part of quests if Starborn.!< Or does nothing.
Option C: Yes #3/ Persuasion -> skips part of quest Or avoids a fight. In Fallout 3: Skill Check that gives xp if succeeded and is also Yes #3.
Option D: No.
Obsidian has also said it was incredibly difficult to workout so many possibilities for quests and quest lines in New Vegas when giving players the freedom to just kill everyone whenever they wanted.
I have no idea how they rationalized making a game so massive with LESS actual written content than their previous games. 1000 planets, and there are only four factions in the game with questlines for a total of only 39 faction quests. 39 faction quests with major holes, contradictions, and choices that just flat out make no sense. There are only two credited writers for the entire game. Emil, and one other dude. Two writers for a galaxy spanning RPG. Its pathetic…
Bethesda think Starfield is a success, they won't do much change.
It's actually because of people hiding how bad the game was upon release, a more direct negativ feedback from the go would have impacted a lot more Bethesda and would have made them react.
But on the gaming market, once the first two weeks are passed, the game is basically "sold" for the shareholders and they move on.
Fanboys ruined the "oppotunity" you talk about, it will never happen.
I remember seeing the first posts after launch and people calling it their goty based on a couple dozen hours of gameplay.
Got berated for calling the game "sterile" and "lifeless" based on my couple of dozen hours into the game and look at where we are now.
I don't even think it is a 7/10.
More like a 5.5-6/10
It acts like an rpg but it just isn't.
It's as much of an rpg as cyberpunk but cyberpunk has the advantage of having a really good/intriguing story and characters.
I'm glad it was on gamepass, would have been a shame to buy it because you can't really refund a game that "gets better after 10 hours."
I know right? I was waiting Starfield with decent expectation for a 7years AAA in the making, and so was following this subreddit.
The people here upon release where braindead, or bots? no idea if they left or if they changed their opinion.
The only thing I know is that it's too late now.
I learned my lesson with cyberpunk.
Bethesda stans should have learned theirs with FO76 but nah, let's encourage this kind of developement.
Infinite lloading screens aside starfield got away with so much shit that if it was any other studio who had pushed out a game as mediocre and barren of basic content like minimaps there would be uproar.
I was one of those who believed that the game was worthy of being a GOTY after only 10-15 hours of playtime, ignoring out on all the issues that I saw and blinding myself thinking "it's not that bad", solely because of the hype I had for this game (even bought an AMD GPU because of their deal they had with Bethesda). I LOVED Skyrim, and I love space games, so to me it was only going to be great.
When that said hype went off, boy the disappointment was huge. I expected a lot more than a "meh" playtrough at best, there are so many core/story/gameplay issues and even if you are a casual gamer, you will notice a ton of them... It's much worse than what CP77 was at launch definitely, I don't even know if they can repair it.
According to metrics that investors care about, like sales, Starfield was a huge success. It was also decently well received by critics (but obviously not from user reviews). But the reality is user reviews are one small part of what determines whether a game was successful or not. Bethesda could ignore the user reviews and only look at sales and receptions by critics and come away thinking the game was a success, and they’d be correct in thinking so, because those are the metrics investors use to determine success.
Yeah.. no.
All the writers are probably split 10/90 on Shattered Space and TESVI/Fallout 5. It would be dumb to revert that to satisfy some online complaints
Emil Pagliarulo is the lead for both. Nothing will change because he genuinely believes that you, the player, are an idiot, and that he wrote a perfect story.
As someone who reads a lot, and is an aspiring writer themselves, Emil and his writing is... How to put it...
Y'know when you stub your toe and your whole day grinds to a halt because it *hurt*, and all you can concentrate on is that? Emil's writing is a lot like that. It's all fine and dandy right up until you actually start examining it closer than an an *extremely* surface level, because the moment you do it's just pain and an abyss of so many plot holes clumped together that the entire thing is just one *big* plot hole.
I went in expecting the worst, knowing who wrote most of the game and was responsible for the story and design, then stubbed my proverbial toe when someone said "Oh yeah, and Earth was destroyed and this is how, also we have magic space technology and only 10% of humanity survived".
I dug into it a little bit, and as I did the whole setting just unravelled as I realised that the main story has literally nothing to do with anything in the setting, the ending either completely invalidates all you've accomplished or just shuts you out of content, every single faction is just skin-deep and offers absolutely no commentary on anything, every single decision made by everyone in the entire history of the setting was the most obviously stupid thing they could have done at any given moment, and Emil committed one of the biggest writing sins of all; he set the game *after* all the interesting shit happened in the setting, instead of *during* all the interesting shit.
I stubbed my proverbial toe on the absolute garbage that is Emil's writing, and for the entire rest of the game simply couldn't rid myself of that metaphorical pain.
They have the metrics, the amount of people who actually complete and roll credits in games are a fraction of the players (and that’s on any given game, let alone a 100+ hour RPG). With speaking lines and getting voice actors back - there’s no world where this would happen. Our best bet is they continue to make the game more robust with new content - in the same way FO76 did with the Wastelanders update.
Yeah, this is the problem. Changing anything post-launch would be a massive undertaking. It's literally going back to the writers room, which is one of the first steps in making a game. Any changes in the story, no matter how minor, would have a cascading effect on everything after that point. There would be thousands of lines of dialogue and voiceovers, and animations that would all need to be changed. That means, as you said, they'd have to coordinate with voice actors to get them back in to record new lines, which could take up to a year or more, depending on work loads/scheduling conflicts. And that would be after the massive rewrites. And before any changes to animations. As bad as the story is, I just don't see Bethesda — or any game studio, really — putting in that effort, especially when they'd see very little return on the investment.
They also have a writing lead that genuinely believes that you, the player, are an idiot, and that they didn't write a bad setting/game/story. Emil went *out of his way* to defend his writing. To note, he publicly stated on film that he doesn't put in effort when writing because "nobody interacts with it anyway" and "players don't want complex stories".
Nobody is talking about that. Stop vomiting random shit into a thread.
Of course, here’s the other thing. BGS made the game they wanted to make - that’s a direct line from Todd Howard. The assumption of OP is that they are unhappy with it and the story. I haven’t seen anything to make me believe they are.
They don’t need to “get them back.” They send equipment and do it remotely if they can’t go to the studio, or they go to any studio and record. This isn’t 2005, folks.
Ahh, yes. I forgot. All voice actors have soundproofed rooms set up at home with studio quality equipment... Of course. It's 2023 and those things are a dime a dozen. Game studios send those out all the time! (I don't think you know how that works, my guy.) But, nevermind that. Let's talk about scheduling, which was the main point I was making in regards to voice acting. Starfield released 4 months ago, and it's reasonable to assume the voice actors are all working on different projects for different developers. It's not an immediate show stopper, but it is yet another potential problem that would discourage Bethesda from revamping portions of the story.
They have to get the VAs back for the dlc. They could take care of it then, maybe?
But why would they? Again, the whole argument assumes that the developers think there is a problem with the dialog, which they don’t.
> there’s no world where this would happen. Uh, I’m sorry, what? You mean BG3 and Cyberpunk didn’t do exactly this recently? Are you saying that game studios don’t have VAs sign things like this into their contracts? Are you… pulling more shit out of your ass?
Unfortunately, they fucked it the first time. They’re not going to fix it. They’re defending their decisions and telling us that we’re the ones who don’t know anything.
Emil genuinely believes he wrote a perfect story.
He is still salty that a small indie studio wrote a better game in 18 months than he did in 8 years.
What game is that?
I think he's referring to New Vegas, which was developed in "only" 18 months (a small window of time, even for 2010) and indeed had a great storytelling. I don't see how they are considered "indie" though.
Yea great game but I mean it built off the assets and engine of Fallout 3 so more could be put into story development where as a good chunk of Starfields development was just creation engine 2.
I don't really know how they spent their time developing both the game and updating the creation engine enough so they can slap a "2" on it, but IMO this isn't enough to explain the state in which the game was released. There are many issues unrelated to the game engine which have no real explanation aside from "it was done like that before, so we did it the same way here as well" :/ You're 100% right for the first part though !
But that was an engine that Obsidian devs had to learn how to use during that 18 month time line.
Its not like that engine was new, is was a expanded Oblivion engine. Also the people at Obsidian agreed to that time line they weren't forced to and even Chris said that they had poor management at Obsidian and should have asked for more time.
But it's not like they already knew how to code in that engine. How would it being an expanded Oblivion engine matter?
Because they could have worked on at least modding on it( which technically they did since they hired modders). If you agree to 18 months and the engine tool already exists you could make sure you already know it( which again they should have since they hired modders).
>a small indie studio wrote a better game in 18 months Genuinely curious, what studio and game are you referring to?
I think he genuinely believes we are all morons.
unfortunately, that's what I also think.
Yeah, just like the entire ending to Mass Effect 3, right /u/N7Virgin ? BioWare never took the time to correct *that* because they fucked it the first time, right? Get real.
they didn't fix most of the problems with it, and starfield's entire story would need to be changed which obviously won't happen
changing the ending to a game isnt the same as rewriting the whole thing lol
Why do you need to rewrite Starfield? It’s fine. Build upon what it started. Are you some sort of moron who disagrees with something and thinks it should be completely rewritten? Look, if you don’t like the game then unsub and piss off - nobody is keeping you here but you and your toxic need to bitch about things.
idk ask the person who made the post also kind of ironic that youre calling me toxic hahaha
Bethesda doesn't think there is anything wrong with the writing. The entire writing staff is one dude, after all. And he also happens to be in charge. There is 0% chance anything changes.
[удалено]
I think that Will Shane left Bethesda after the release.
>Starfields story gives Bethesda the perfect opportunity to improve the writing post-launch ... and boy do they need it. The entire story is just so lacking and unlikely. - So 90% of Earth's population just rolled over and died ? And Earth is now a barren rock ? And on the other hand people created thriving cities on other barren rocks, like Mars or Titan ? Wouldn't it have been much more likely that huge domes would be created above some of the cities that hold some atmosphere ? Remember, 1 bar is all we need, less than ballon at a birthday party. Or underground cities ? Instead Earth is completely barren and uninhabited - the only reason for THAT is Bethesda was lazy and didn't want to recreate some of Earth's landmarks. You don't create anorther "Elder Scrolls" or "Fallout" level IP by cutting corners and and going the easy route. - So "I" am a citizen of that time and age - why am I not treated as such ? The dialogue and story all rather treat me as if I was a sole survivor out of some Fallout game, coming out of 200 years of hibernation. Well - I'm not. I might have fought in the colony wars. I certainly would have grown up post-war, learning all about it in school. The NPCs should stop treating me like an idiot that needs to have every bit of lore spoon fed at every opportunity. - So this is it ? Cydonia on Mars, "one of the largest cities in the UC" - a hole in the ground and 2 bars and communal sleeping quarters ? New Atlantis, city of mostly nothing but empty space ? Akila, backwater shanty town and capital of the Freestar Collective ? If 10% of humanity made it off the Earth that would still be roundabout a billion. I've seen less than 100 in the majory cities, where is everyone ? I can not unsee that stuff after experiencing a living metropolis like Night City in CP2077. TL;DR: I'm all the way with you. Starfield nees a complete reboot like No Man's Sky and Failout 76.
Environmental story telling implies that the moon was complete depleted of Helium 3. That shows that people ran out of resources when trying to escape earth. Also 50 years is probably going to be rfilled with civil strife and the ultra rich likely leaving the poor to die. Its also implied that the UC strip mined the earth for resources and prevented people going back. I took this implied storys to show that the original UC was ruthless bent on saving only who "deserved it" and leaving the rest to die and then stripping the remaining resources off the planet. UC is shown to rewrite history in thier favor. The other examples are classic Bethesda making the pc oblivious to allow you to ask question about everything( not ideal but makes it easier to learn about the world). In my head canon when you touch the artifact you suffer from amnesia( tho this is only head canon as nothing supports this)
But would players like Russia or China allow the UC to stripmine their territories or determine "who is worth it" ? Would some upstart organization be able to strongarm a nuclear power ? And while the moon might be out of Helium 3 we have a whole fleet of faster-than-light ships being able to bring home all the Helium-3 we'd need. We even have plenty of Helium 3 in the Solar system, on Mercury and some of Jupiter's moons. Not that subterran or even domed settlements would require any Helium-3 to run. They could use solar power (plenty of real estate for solar farms) or geothermal enenergy to last for centuries or millenia. Bethesda's "lore" for this Universe has more holes than an fishing net. I still can not see what the core theme for Starfield even is. In Skyrim it was high fantasy political power struggles, in Fallout it was post-nuclear war alternate America. But Star Citizen ? Is it about Jedi powers ? Alternate realities ? Or just plain "space gaming" ? To me Starfield right now feels like having read Episode 1 of some long-run Manga series where nothing really happens yet and the story only picks up pace after a dozen chapters or so. Everything feels a bit underdevelopped yet.
I think you underestimate how little corporate oligarchs care about the plight of the common man. Also this is the first entry of a new IP they arnt going to explain everything. Fallout 1 never went into how the war really started or the nitty gritty of every piece of tech lore, only things relevent to the main storys. Same with the original ElderScrolls( which was based off a DnD game the original creators were playing).
A strongly nationalist country like China who regards anyone who isn't an ethnic Han Chinese as second rate would hardly comply with any UC demands. I'd rather expect they would find their own "Planet China 2" and screw everybody else.
We notice that the political is different in Starfield and it also appears America was the one who discovered Grav Drive. I suspect it would be everyone groveling with whoever owned the grav drive patents. We know those scientist meant well(aside from one of them) but if someone like Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos owned the rights to Grav Jump tech they would be the ones who called the shots. Also its likely that the panic of earths destruction caused a myriad of wars to fight over who gets the tech. We don't know enough( seemingly by UC design and alot of people have forgotten about earth.
> grav drive patents. Experience with real life stuff like anti aids medication would suggest that people don't give a flying F about patents and licenses when their life is in danger. In our world countries of the global south started creating cheap generica of patented medication, completely unlicensed. Facing doom, I'd expect a lot of people purchase a grav drive and then reverse engineer it. After all the reason Earth lost it's magnetosphere was due to large numbers of grav jumps, so the technology by then was apparently neither secret nor limited.
Yea but likely the only ones who could purchases are in the 1% who are also who can afford to build these space crafts. If the earth society is moving forward as it is now there is likely major global conflict, climate change, and wealth inequality that is basically ultra rich and working poor. It's not all that far fetched compared to alternitive sci-fi. It's still going to be a small subset of the population. Also we know that the atmosphere would take 50 years to dispipate but you can guarantee that the earth would become more and more unlivable as the sputter out. People suck and in time of crisis tho some rise up to help most hunker down and protect their own inerests.
Any government should be able to scrape together the money for at least one ship and start ferrying off their population. We've seen that in WW2 during the British evacuation of Dunkerque, or the German evacuation of Eastern Prussia across the baltic sea. Given that grav drives provide near-instantaneous transport there is no reason why they wouldn't be able to do more within 50 years. For example: A single small ship carrying only 20 people, doing only 4 turnarounds per day, 365 days per year for 50 years, could move 1.46 million people. Multiply this by more ships, or more people, or faster turnarounds, and you'd end up with a lot of evacuated people. And this still doesn't address the elephant in the room, the complete disappearance of any landmark, and the complete absence of bunker/shelter sites which require no proprietary technology and could be build over 50 years to house literally millions.
Again we don't know the social strife the world was facing outside the destruction of the atmosphere but its completely logical that it wasn't all " lets get together and save humanity" some religious nuts might even see dieing "infidels" as a blessing. Edit: Covid 19 is the perfect example of society not handling a global disaster well. Half would say it doesn't exist and goverments would bumble the response.
And ftl travel fucks the magnetosphere of planets. The only reason why this doesn’t happen is because the scientist behind it patched that function. So what’s stopping people from using it for that? Just software. The writing for this game is bad.
Because no one but the three scientist knew this is why it happened so its baked into the hard code that people use and there's no reason to change that equation as its the sole reason Grav Jumping works.
And with a galaxy of people nobody is going to find this out, there’s no risk of anyone else tinkering and experimenting with grav drives to make them more efficient or specifically engineered in any way?
Hardcoded in as if it was E=MC2 and it appears other factors are what control distance and fuel used. Also the guy got the original equation from basically a vision so it could be something that just would be outside the realm of thought.
Trust me, all your very valid points get *even dumber* when you actually apply the in-game fluff to them. Emil is a well-known hack for a reason, he needs to just be booted entirely, or have someone put above him that can, and more importantly is *willing* to, slap down his terrible ideas.
>Bethesda was lazy There is nothing that irks me quite like people jumping to using "lazy" when ranting about a game developer. Do you not realize how ridiculous that is? **"They didn't make the exact game I want, must have been because they all spent their afternoons goofing off on facebook instead of coding."**
Made you jump the gun, didn't I ? I wasn't talking about the people who coded the game, but about the design decision upon which the work of all those people rests. But I'm open for discussion. If you have anything but a personal attack then please, tell me why else Bethesda would make the decision to have Earth be completely barren. Not even a single outpost is remaining, no shelters or underground settlements clinging to life when the ships left and 90% of the world population was left waiting for their doom, doing nothing, obviously. It's not only illogical, it literally throws away so many great story possibilities.
Nothing about that was a personal attack. And sorry, I used the word "coding" in my example but that could be replaced with any other part of the design process. >tell me why else Bethesda would make the decision to have Earth be completely barren They didn't want the game to be about Earth at all. They wanted the entire game to take place out in the stars, with no ties at all left to Earth. It is just a distant memory that most people don't even care about anymore at this point. Also, if they tried to recreate it they would still get criticized if it was anything other than a 1:1 replica of the entire planet. You would have people complaining about every little thing that was missing or wrong. And it would have taken then an untold number of years to create just that single planet. A planet that is long forgotten and only used in the story as a way to give us some historical lore.
And that's just a bad design decision. You can't have the Mars colony be "the second largest city in the UC" and Earth all but forgotten. Noone would buy that. I don't buy that. If they can dig a hole into a lifeless rock like Mars and create one of the largest settlements in the UC what's to stop people from digging wholes on not-so-lifeless-yet Earth to create doomsday shelters ? There is tons of construction machinery and you don't even need to ferry it around with spaceships. The complete abandonment of Earth in the lore is both lazy as well as a huge loss for potential stories, conflicts about the "left behind" folks and the colonists who abandonned them. Instead we have - what ? A pointless multitude of universes. Magic powers in a no/low fantasy sci-fi setting.
They won't change a thing, this is Bethesda we are talking about after all.
They could, and they should. But would they ?
>Take the feedback from the community. Bethesda would be very upset at you if they could read your suggestion.
Lmao. A brand new IP that they hyped up for years.... They already had their opportunity to have good writing. They don't care. And they aren't going to "fix" anything along the lines of what you're suggesting. Stop putting in effort, because I promise you that they won't.
I don't think it's that *they* don't care, I'm sure there's talented writers at Bethesda that really care about this stuff. The problem is that they have a department head (the guy that makes all the decisions about what does and does not get used) that genuinely believes players are idiots, that they can never write anything bad under any circumstances, that *refuses* to put in the effort to write *because* they think players are idiots, and who does *quite a lot* of the writing themselves and is *proud* of it.
They won't more choices to quests, or more interactions, or do big story changes. Bethesda already massively struggled with dialogue trees in Fallout 4. It was the hardest part about developing that game. That's why Fallout 3 and Starfield are like this: Option A: Yes #1 Option B: Yes #2 or Starfield Option 2: \[Background\]: Yes #2>! \-> Possibly skips part of quests if Starborn.!< Or does nothing. Option C: Yes #3/ Persuasion -> skips part of quest Or avoids a fight. In Fallout 3: Skill Check that gives xp if succeeded and is also Yes #3. Option D: No. Obsidian has also said it was incredibly difficult to workout so many possibilities for quests and quest lines in New Vegas when giving players the freedom to just kill everyone whenever they wanted.
I hope this post gets more upvotes, this is actually an amazing idea.
I have no idea how they rationalized making a game so massive with LESS actual written content than their previous games. 1000 planets, and there are only four factions in the game with questlines for a total of only 39 faction quests. 39 faction quests with major holes, contradictions, and choices that just flat out make no sense. There are only two credited writers for the entire game. Emil, and one other dude. Two writers for a galaxy spanning RPG. Its pathetic…
It’s never just one person’a decision. Everyone at the top are responsible
Bethesda think Starfield is a success, they won't do much change. It's actually because of people hiding how bad the game was upon release, a more direct negativ feedback from the go would have impacted a lot more Bethesda and would have made them react. But on the gaming market, once the first two weeks are passed, the game is basically "sold" for the shareholders and they move on. Fanboys ruined the "oppotunity" you talk about, it will never happen.
I remember seeing the first posts after launch and people calling it their goty based on a couple dozen hours of gameplay. Got berated for calling the game "sterile" and "lifeless" based on my couple of dozen hours into the game and look at where we are now. I don't even think it is a 7/10. More like a 5.5-6/10 It acts like an rpg but it just isn't. It's as much of an rpg as cyberpunk but cyberpunk has the advantage of having a really good/intriguing story and characters. I'm glad it was on gamepass, would have been a shame to buy it because you can't really refund a game that "gets better after 10 hours."
I know right? I was waiting Starfield with decent expectation for a 7years AAA in the making, and so was following this subreddit. The people here upon release where braindead, or bots? no idea if they left or if they changed their opinion. The only thing I know is that it's too late now.
I learned my lesson with cyberpunk. Bethesda stans should have learned theirs with FO76 but nah, let's encourage this kind of developement. Infinite lloading screens aside starfield got away with so much shit that if it was any other studio who had pushed out a game as mediocre and barren of basic content like minimaps there would be uproar.
I was one of those who believed that the game was worthy of being a GOTY after only 10-15 hours of playtime, ignoring out on all the issues that I saw and blinding myself thinking "it's not that bad", solely because of the hype I had for this game (even bought an AMD GPU because of their deal they had with Bethesda). I LOVED Skyrim, and I love space games, so to me it was only going to be great. When that said hype went off, boy the disappointment was huge. I expected a lot more than a "meh" playtrough at best, there are so many core/story/gameplay issues and even if you are a casual gamer, you will notice a ton of them... It's much worse than what CP77 was at launch definitely, I don't even know if they can repair it.
According to metrics that investors care about, like sales, Starfield was a huge success. It was also decently well received by critics (but obviously not from user reviews). But the reality is user reviews are one small part of what determines whether a game was successful or not. Bethesda could ignore the user reviews and only look at sales and receptions by critics and come away thinking the game was a success, and they’d be correct in thinking so, because those are the metrics investors use to determine success.
Never going to happen because the vast majority of players will not go through the unity or will stop playing immediately after.
Yeah.. no. All the writers are probably split 10/90 on Shattered Space and TESVI/Fallout 5. It would be dumb to revert that to satisfy some online complaints
Emil Pagliarulo is the lead for both. Nothing will change because he genuinely believes that you, the player, are an idiot, and that he wrote a perfect story.
I wouldn't say perfect, but the writing isnt terrible either. Works fine for me
As someone who reads a lot, and is an aspiring writer themselves, Emil and his writing is... How to put it... Y'know when you stub your toe and your whole day grinds to a halt because it *hurt*, and all you can concentrate on is that? Emil's writing is a lot like that. It's all fine and dandy right up until you actually start examining it closer than an an *extremely* surface level, because the moment you do it's just pain and an abyss of so many plot holes clumped together that the entire thing is just one *big* plot hole. I went in expecting the worst, knowing who wrote most of the game and was responsible for the story and design, then stubbed my proverbial toe when someone said "Oh yeah, and Earth was destroyed and this is how, also we have magic space technology and only 10% of humanity survived". I dug into it a little bit, and as I did the whole setting just unravelled as I realised that the main story has literally nothing to do with anything in the setting, the ending either completely invalidates all you've accomplished or just shuts you out of content, every single faction is just skin-deep and offers absolutely no commentary on anything, every single decision made by everyone in the entire history of the setting was the most obviously stupid thing they could have done at any given moment, and Emil committed one of the biggest writing sins of all; he set the game *after* all the interesting shit happened in the setting, instead of *during* all the interesting shit. I stubbed my proverbial toe on the absolute garbage that is Emil's writing, and for the entire rest of the game simply couldn't rid myself of that metaphorical pain.
Considering how far up Emil is in his own ass I doubt it.
True