I appreciate the positive reception to this video. I've read the first ~1100 comments, hence all the hearted comments. If I heart a comment, that means I've read and acknowledge what was said, but didn't have a response.
Ive been in the hospital the past few days binge watching ur content thank u for everything bro i hate being here but ur content makes the stay more enjoyable
So many of my thoughts on the game have been perfectly laid out here. My main hatred for this game is the now played out multiverse premise. I feel like unless you have a game with a strong central character, one who goes through a journey with weight and personal character growth, a multiverse narrative just becomes a dead end. I can count on one hand the amount of times I've seen a decent multiverse story. I don't know what Bethesda was thinking beyond "Wow this multiverse stuff is really popular isn't it?"
The main thing Starfield highlighted for me is how much the Elder Scrolls and Fallout series are coasting on the good writing that they _used_ to have, from people who no longer (or never did) work at Bethesda. As soon as current Bethesda tried to make a new IP that isn't built on the better ideas of better writers they no longer have access to, it all just fell apart. Everything comes into such stark relief; the lack of follow-through, the casual breaking of their own setting rules, the complete unwillingness (or inability) to explore any ideas deeper than surface level, the unwillingness to ever _say_ anything. These things have plagued the Elder Scrolls and Fallout games for _years,_ but we've always been able to ignore them, or at least excuse them because there were other cool things to look at. But here, it's all there is. It's like Fallout and the Elder Scrolls were ships built by master craftsmen that have had their parts replaced over the years, slowly but surely, by cheap, inferior knockoff parts, but were able to stay afloat because the original ships were just that well-made. Starfield is a new ship made entirely of those cheap replacement parts, and it just doesn't float.
basically.. like basically this. all of this really.. They did well with Morrowind, but then Oblivion and Skyrim just slowly took our freedom away.. Now Starfield a new IP.. they could've done whatever they wanted, they chose to make crap.
You nailed it. And Fallout was an IP already in existence. The lore and world bulding had effectively been done before Fallout 3 , outside of Bethesda. Their games have always clunked and janked along, but there was enough good stuff (eg exploration) to overlook that.
true, like TES or Fallout at their worst still have interesting elements in their settings, but Starfield is just a nothing burger of nasa concept art and unity sci fi weapon assets. It was space, the could have put ANYTHING in their game, but they put nothing of note.
Modder who started the whole concept of survival mechanics in an elderscrolls game, his mods still being seen as the defeinitive versions of those mechanics Bethesda after hiring him: You work in an excel spreadsheet and tweak the economy Modder who is one of the most famous house mod creators Bethesda after hiring her: you place random useless clutter all around the world Seems like Bethesda's main issue isn't a lack of skills or talent, but god awful leadership and managment.
Sounds like the "meat in seats" hiring and task placement that a lot of large Japanese companies use. "It says here that you have a masters in business law. Great! You're going to be working in our UI/UX coding department." - something like this happened to a friend at NEC.
Bethesda didn't even hire them they're "consultants" that weren't even offered a steady paycheck for their work. And lets be honest here, if they chose to work for Bethesda they deserved it.
@@GhostOfSnuffles Agreed. They deserve it, because they not only invested time in producing a mediocre game, but likely had to sign NDAs and non-competes that will effect their future involvement in mod creation. What ding bat goes and works for Bethesda knowing the quality of work they produce, and the reputation they've developed? Talented or not, it sounds like they were clout chasing.
@@GhostOfSnuffles Yup, 0 respect for any modder that was willing to sellout and go be a marketing point to sell the latest toddslop to the unwashed masses.
"The phrase 'there is truly nothing new under the sun' is not supposed to be a design motto" honestly one of the most biting critiques I've heard in ages
It's almost if they had a meeting and asked everyone if they wanted to add stories from their favorite sci fi movies, novels, tv shows, etc and Todd just kept saying yes. Not in cool easter egg way just flat out plagiarism.
@arkeshn729 When I started this, I didnt notice he named is character Malcom Reynolds and wholeheartedly thought Bethesda added a NPC by the same name
What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun. Is there a thing of which it is said, “See, this is new”? It has been already in the ages before us. There is no remembrance of former things, nor will there be any remembrance of later things yet to be among those who come after.
@@johnwiks2597 New things come from a synthesis of the old. Soldiers, demons, and kittens existed before the 1900s, but Warhammer 40K Chaos NekoMarines did not.
I've never actually finished this video. I've tried a few times, but every time Pat says "...no design document" I wake up naked in front of Bethesda Studio in Rockville Maryland.
Finally finished the video. And I gotta say that the line "Starfield is their most functional game to date, and yet their worst designed game ever" is a perfect summary of this game.
If you play on the series s it crashes every 2 hours and yes I started counting. And I encountered many quest bugs, and even bugs where I couldn’t complete challenges to upgrade perks. So for everyone saying it’s their least buggy that may be true if you’re on a nice pc. I literally had less bugs playing Oblivion day 1 on 360 and Morrowind on Xbox. And I’m not arguing btw I know we’re on the same side Starfield sucks lol just giving everyone another perspective on the bugs.
There's a big trend with Bethesda games where the honeymoon period of their games being praised unconditionally before players find the many flaws within them are getting shorter and shorter. And they aren't doing anything to reverse that trend because they're too scared to axe their "throw everything at the wall and use what sticks" approach to developing.
@@Super_Broly I’m playing BG3 now and the game has not crashed one time on the Series S. I don’t even think I’ve ran into one bug and I’m 60 hours deep. I’m so glad they came out around the same time. Bethesda has been exposed and has zero excuses. Edit: finished campaign at 150 hours and have two more going with 10 hours each. Those two crashes were still the only ones and it was one specific instance. Otherwise a few minor graphical issues. One misspelling. 4-5 missing item titles, 2-3 missing dialogue choices. Those were the only bugs I encountered in 170 hours. That is an insane level of quality.
@@DJWolfHouse Last time i played Oblivion i had tons of bugs i had to fix through console commands and this was on a pc with much higher reqs than what the games asks. From Oblivion onwards all of their games are still buggy pieces of garbage that run like shit in several areas and that still have many years old bugs.
I got Andreja's affinity based dialouge right after I drank a bottle of wine to pass the final boss persuasion check and ruined the climax for myself. She was talking about how everyone she knew has died or left her alone yada yada and I told her I would never leave her alone and would always be there for her. Then I walked into the unity.
Well, to be fair. You now have access to an effectively infinite number of universes where that's true. Just not the one you just walked out of. 🤷♂🤷♂🤷♂
Bethesda had the perfect excuse to have every NPC be killable, and to have multiple wildly varied and impactful outcomes for questlines, I mean it was RIGHT THERE - they wrote in a (technically) infinitely resetable universe and did NOTHING with it...
Even worse is that they throw this out in the same year we got BG3, where for the first two acts everything is killable and the game will progress normally, and pretty much you only get a few essential NPCs at the very end on Act 3 (and even then their essential status is rather temporary and it's very possible the game will be patched out in the near future to account for early deaths of said NPCs). Bethesda made a story that would easily allow the player to wreck havoc as much as they wanted and chickened out, while Larian made a game where it would be perfectly reasonable to make plenty of NPCs essential and chose to go the extra mile to allow player freedom.
@@ggwp638BC Exactly, I locked myself out of two entire questlines early on in BG3 and my reaction wasn't "Oh I wish they didn't allow me to kill these characters", it was "I really want to start another playthrough to see what I'm missing"
@@carrier_pigeon214 I'm guessing that was part of his joke, yet he goes so in depth with it. "Oh a quick Restropspective, how nice." (8 hours later) "THat was 8 hours to tell me the game is playable and decent." Which it is. Starfield has some problems but to quote TOdd Howard "It just works." And that it does, especially now with most of the major bugs fixed.
If there was ever a game for Bethesda to completely remove the training wheels, it's Starfield NG+. You have a perfect justification. Someone's been through the game once; let them sequence break, kill whoever they please, and do whatever they want. At worst, they just hard reset the universe for the next NG+ version.
Not only that but actually CHOOSE your side. Like become UC member and enemy of freestar. Think if you would be part of small attack force trying to conquer settlements and planets or trying to make people if settlement to join your faction. This was perfect chance to make a sandbox game with complex politically evolving system. What if its the reason you make outposts...to fight against enemy faction. Reason to build walls and defences. It would be awesome.
I think the Bethesda writers and quest designers just have their brains on autopilots by now. "Let's create a new quest." "Is it a fetch quest or a kill quest?" "(Flips a coin) Kill quest." "Okay, remember to make the quest giver essential, and make the guy you have to kill essential until you have to actually kill him, oh and also make every single bystander near the quest giver essential too for good measure." "Of course."
Yup, couple that with both todd and emil saying they dont ever take in criticism and don't self reflect between games, and the one writer that quit who said that everything has to go through todds approval and todd is too busy to do that effectively now due to how many studios he manages. It really explains a lot. Sprinkle in some esg score wokeness that has infected bgs like everything else for good measure.
Whenever I hear “the potential for modding is great” it kind of makes my skin crawl. It really doesn’t matter how underbaked any Bethesda game is, how lackluster and behind the curve they are, the fans will make it good. “Our consumers will do the work for us” is a marketable feature at this point. Edit: Made this comment early in the modding section then he said basically all of it verbatim lmao
The problem is also that it just isn't true. Skyrim is a decent modding platform because there's enough game that you can make it work, Fallout 4 is an okay modding platform because the gameplay still offers enough that you aren't totally turned off by the terrible story and lack of content. Starfield shows BGS has finally slipped to the point where this totally breaks down, the story sucks, the gameplay sucks, and the only thing left is... ship building? There just isn't enough game left to fix anymore.
The problem is they changed how plugin dependency work and basically made it impossible to run several dependant mods ds at once (mods looks up dependency by position), ruining entire mod ecosystem from the get go.
@@whydontyouhandledeez I think Bethesda overlooked that point. I assume Bethesda thought that so long as they made anything people would just flock to it (probably due to them huffing their own hopium) that they forgot that any game with a good modding scene had a great base or at least entertaining base game that functions mechanically. As you bring up Skyrim, even though the main quest was terrible the gameplay mechanics were fun enough that people wanted to mod it. But Starfield? The only way I could see mods taking off is if they did a whole Starfield 2.0 rework but they will not do that since I think think now instead of hopium I assume the devs are huffing copium that the dlc and mod tools will get people to come back.
You're being critical of BGS, right? Because if you're criticising people who just love modding *for modding* you're well wide of the mark. It remains to be seen exactly how good SF will be for mods. BGS have never truly appreciated the community of creators, or quite how important they are. And SF's potential might be kneecapped. We really need to see next year. But if modding "potential" is there, then that'll be awesome. I swear some people around here don't understand modding. It isn't just a nice little bonus, a peripheral sideshow. It is an enjoyable thing in and of itself - and BGS have, thus far, been pretty much unique in providing such a scale and canvas for people to create and tinker with.
Thing is, Starfield doesn't just fall short of its contemporary competitors on the gaming scene. It falls short of games made years, or even *decades* ago. Compare Neon and the Astral Lounge to Omega, and the atmosphere of its nightclub The Afterlife - that was from Mass Effect 2, released in 2010. Also from 2010 was New Vegas, and any comparison between the faction systems in those two games is a slaughter. Barrett's companion quest is a joke when measured against Jolee Bindo's companion quest from Knights of the Old Republic. The latter at least let you investigate multiple leads, follow up with different NPCs, and even represent your companion's friend in a legal hearing. And that was in *2003.* It is genuinely *shocking* how hollow and empty an experience Starfield is.
New Vegas is still crazy to me, Obsidian took Fallout 3, improved literally every aspect of it: quests, dialogue, gameplay, progression, game design, branching stories, player choice etc and Bethesda could’ve so easily taken so much inspiration from that for Fallout 4 and onwards to build on it and then Fallout 4 came out and they had learned nothing.
I compare Starfield with Wing Commander: Privateer and Privateer 2: The Darkening. Games that were released in the mid to late 1990s. Starfield falls woefully short in every aspect. Story. Trading mechanics. Space combat. Player investment. Everything Starfield does that Privateer and Privateer 2 also do, Starfield comes up woefully short in. (I just looked them up again. Wing Commander: Privateer is from 1993 and Privateer 2: The Darkening is from 1996. It says a lot about Bullshitesda that I would rather play a twenty-eight year old game. I hope the Microshaft fans are enjoying their exclusives.)
it’s funny because the robot ally in the Infinite Warfare campaign is a far stronger character with concrete development and pulls of that TARS/T2 likeable robot companion thing so much better. Bethesda’s characterization shown up by CoD campaigns lol
The planets are not empty enough to get the feeling Todd describes. There's so many abandon outposts that I never felt the pride/wonder/discovery of being the first human to land in this planet. If anything it made me feel dirty somehow, like I was part of the problem as 3 other ships landed in this same area while I searched through space trash left by other explorers.
Yeah. I kinda get that same feeling, like there should have been life, but now there isn't and here you are being a vulture coming in after the good bits of the corpse have been eaten.
Not empty enough to be striking but not full enough to be interesting. Starfield manages to thread the needle and make its planets as boring and unengaging as possible
@@C1yde902 Right, and I fucking LOVE space. I absolutely adore space. I want to like this game so badly but I'm not spending big money to play this game, bc I have to also get a console.
It would be nice if there was an option when selecting landing zones that indicated how populated an area is. That way you can still farm the POIs if you want to, but can also explore maybe more resource rich empty areas. Then again, resources would then have to be made valuable.
Doesn’t have the same feeling exploring planets in Mass Effect 1 had. Sure people raged about the clunky Mako but those planets truly felt empty, abandoned, or like you were the first person to ever land on some of them. I wish they kept that mechanic in the sequels and just worked on optimizing the vehicle and terrain but instead the sequels abandoned it entirely and so mass effect 2-3 felt like they took place in smaller and smaller universes.
One thing I should add to the "Modder's Paradise thing:" Part of why Morrowind, Oblivion, Fallout, Skyrim are so popular with modders is because there is potential in there. The base game is fun, at least to some people. If a game is meant to be heavily modded, but doesn't lure in players, it won't get many modders. There has to be something special in the game.
I think the world is too empty to begin with to inspire many people to want to expand on it. Bethesda only bothered to make a handful of major cities and factions, none of which are interesting or believable.
@@guldcat1619 they "were" masters of worldbuilding Starfield showed they aint anymore. You can easily paint a curve from Morrowind to this Game and see the decline and i doubt Starfield will get the same attention to modding like Skyrim.
@@guldcat1619 Past tense. Bethesda WERE the masters of worldbuilding. They didn't build a world in Starfield. Not even one, out of the 1000s of palette swapped Ubisoft dustballs you can go to.
The modding popularity behind TES and Fallout games are primarily fueled by attempts to fix every progressively watered-down version of two beloved IPs. Kinda like…”well this is what we got, so let’s make the best out of it”..
2:10:14 if somebody told me (seriously) that they played Death Stranding but skipped all the cutscenes so that they could experience the gameplay loop, I'd instantly assume they were an ax murderer
@@Lobsterwithinternet I disagree w the implication that what my fellow Bethesda fans and I enjoy about that company's games is modeled accurately in Death Standing's gameplay loop.
@@spiraljumper74 I haven't played it, but from the couple hours of footage in reviews I've seen, it doesn't look like a game which would be satisfying to play off purely the gameplay loop. That is to say, if the game was stripped of its narrative, I'm not confident it could be fairly considered a good game.
That said, I was largely joking. I don't actually think there's anything wrong w liking or even loving a bad game - which, as previously stated, I believe Death Stranding would be if evaluated on the gameplay loop in a vacuum. I have 280hrs on FF XIII so I will never judge someone for what games they like lol
At this point I'm just waiting to see if the community that BGS has ever actually collapses to the point of nonexistence or at least an incredibly niche section of the game industry with standards below "absolute zero". At what point will the community finally say that they got a bad game? At what point will they learn and fully understand that Bethesda are hacks? If that never comes to pass I'll just be glad I left it after Fallout 4 and keep laughing at the fools who purchase/pre-order their products. A deteriorating community blindly following a deteriorating company to its bitter end couldn't be a better match.
@@joaxarkus4648 maybe that'll be the point they actually return to what made Daggerfall and Morrowind so great, when they have no other choice but to actually listen to the lifelong fans, but at this point, I'm convinced neither my version of the future, nor yours, will ever come to pass...
The New Game+ system was the perfect opportunity for them to go back to the Morrowind style quest design of letting you kill any NPC you wanted, but with an interesting 'out' instead of just having to load an older save file. How they managed to drop the ball so hard on the one big feature they were so protective of pre-release boggles the mind
I think it's because Bethesda's "philosphy" (if you can call it that) is that the whole world is crafted around the player. Which on paper sounds good, but here's the thing - they view the player as a toddler. By removing more complex mechanics because they're not "fun", not allowing the players to kill essential NPCs and let them live with the consequences, not having a strong narrative message that the game would expore or allowing the players to role-play as NOT the chosen one, make Bethesda role-playing games, essentially, gaming fast food.
Because NG+ isn't an out for YOU, the player, it's an out for THEM, the designer, to get out of having to design new content to keep you engaged. Now they can just keep you spinning that hamster wheel infinitely!
@@simonaspalovis1204 Here's the thing tho, saying that Bethesda crafts their worlds around the player is a complete lie. Its something that sounds nice that Bethesda and Todd likes to say, but the reality couldn't be further from the truth. The reality is that Bethesda despises player input. Saying that they craft their worlds around the player necessarily implies that they take great pains to account for player actions. If they had their way, the player would just be bolted to a chair and forced to watch a movie of their shitty story. They spent like 8 years making their game and the last thing they'd ever want is some player coming in and fucking it all up. Even back in the Morrowind days this was true, they never really bothered to account for player actions, they just gave you that stupid message that tells you to reload your game because you soft-locked yourself out of quest progression. That way of doing things is "better" than how they do it now, but its still not accounting for player actions.
Why talk about the "Prophesy broken" prompt from morrowind as if it was inconvenient instead of just respecting the player's agency while still letting them know about it. It's crazy, just fucking let us play in your sandbox instead of placing random restrictions on everything for no reason.
@@caseycox1002 Because those making the decisions at Beth don't understand what they made, how and why it worked at that time. That happens surprisingly often with developers that start small and go big - they learn the wrong lessons from initial success.
The reason they aren't called "missions" and instead "quests" is because _the core of the engine hasn't changed since Morrowind._ Stimpak? those are classified as "ingestible" in the editor. You're eating your syringes. "explosive ammo"? nah, bro, that's got a fire enchantment. It's literally the same game over and over with a different skin.
@@honeybadger6275 Which wasn't made by Bethesda. Come think of it, Morrowind is the only Bethesda game that had spears and throwing weapons (that aren't grenades). Aka a melee weapon that can't use their default fly-swatting animation.
@@Zorothegallade-gg7zg Yup, notice how the only games that had scripted reloads for lever actions/pump actions were new vegas/76? Both games that had other studios making/working on them, fallout 3,4, and starfield, every single weapon is magazine fed, except for the lever actions and double barrel, which always reload a full mag.
A BGS game doesn't really need a well written story to be hugely enjoyable to play, and to support the story that matters; the player's, through RP and arrangement of the building blocks (features, factions, side stuff, characters, and MQ). I'm currently planning a Cyberpunk 2.1 character because SF's MQ has been flat out broke for me for about two months, and I'm fuckin' sick of waiting for a fix... So I won't be able to listen to most of this video. I'm sure SF's story will be disappointing. BGS have had mostly really bad writing, and main narrative, since Oblivion, so I'm not really expecting good storytelling this time. SF's general quality of *dialogue* writing is improved - mostly. A bigger issue is still the psychology of the writing and narrative, let's say. It still feels quite infantile and poorly thought out. Again, that's been there in force since Oblivion. For whatever reason, that's their culture of writing. I'm still hugely enjoying it. I mean, I was before it broke...
@@MrOnay-px1jx I mean, he's right. BGS hasn't been the greatest at main story writing in a long time. It's the side quests, environment storytelling and visuals that make them enjoyable to play. Seriously, their main stories have sucked or years now
If i can spend $100 on a “game” that was anything but fun, then i can spend $10 on someone who actually gave me 8 hours of well planned out entertainment. Thank you for your hard work and effort and I hope Bethesda is just a little ashamed of themselves any time they hear about your video.
it was the illusion of fun. i stopped playing the game because i didnt want to play it anymore... because i relised it wasnt fun, it breaks my brain trying to think about this game, and everything thats wrong with it. everything that i enjoyed and everything that i couldnt
some guy spend 100 on this game and said it was boring in 8 hours and the internet hated him because he said PHOCKING PRONOUNS once while he said 10 times THE GAME IS BOOOARING, ITS BOOOARING, MODERN DAY CALIFORNIAN SHT, BECAUSE WE ARE BOAAARING, WE ARE SOOO BOAAARING...and now he is 100% vindicated.
Holy Shit Bethesda doesn't use Design Documents!? And they're trying to make massive open world games??? Like jesus christ I can't believe I didn't know this before because this explains so goddamn much about why their games are such a mess from a design perspective. This is fucking mindboggling, I might need to make my own video just getting my thoughts out on this because like, fuck... Edit: Since people have asked, I did in fact make that video, and I honestly might make more along its line specifically examining games through the lens of how good or bad their organizational skills and documentation was.
@@nagger8216 Bethesda stopped following design documents during the development of Fallout 3. Emil Pagliarulo outright said as much during his 'Talks From Story' presentation.
I found the casino dungeon early on and had a blast. Little did I know that mechanic would hardly be used ever again. Which is funny considering the act of boarding an enemy ship would be a great way to do repeatable zero-g fights since the ship probably shouldn't be capable of running gravity generators at that point.
It's too hard to maintain a 50 page document? I'm going to guess that since google docs released two years before fallout 3 released, they didn't use that tech to make that job easier. Good grief
I still can't get over Sarah telling you during your initiation that Constellation accepts people from all walks of life, even if they use morally dubious methods. Only for every companion in Constellation to be Lawful Good towards anything illegal you do.
I was actually starting to gaslight myself into thinking she never actually said that, considering how allergic these companions are to anything even morally grey.
Why do Starborn exist? Like what's their endgame? The ONLY thing Starborn can do is collect these artifacts that just exist for some reason, then that makes their powers a little more powerful. They can do this hundreds of times and somehow be killed by a non-Starborn who has collected at most 24 artifacts compared to their HUNDREDS of full sets. So, clearly the power Starborn gain falls off majorly after a certain number of rounds, so, what are they still doing jumping from universe to universe if they need to collect like a thousand full sets of artifacts to get ONE percent more power for their totally not unrelenting force? What are they DOING? They're PEOPLE, what's the PURPOSE of abandoning EVERYONE you've ever known to jump from universe to universe, not forming any kind of relationship with anyone ever again because you're going to abandon them in very short order, literally leaving the universe. Are they just getting a tiny bit more powerful forever? Why? What's the POINT of literally any of this? Why don't they just get the powers in their home universe, and then KEEP THEM, and stay there, and just be the most badass mercenary in the galaxy and be rich and have whatever they want? If they REALLY wanna be immortal, just do ONE jump, then collect the 2nd set of artifacts, then just stay there and be awesome. The entire premise of the game, is POINTLESS.
They're basically Miraak, but stripped of any backstory or personal motivation, turning them in just a generic "My Schwartz is as big as yours" villain for you to stomp to prove that your Schwartz is indeed bigger than theirs.
Every quest/questline since either skyrim or fallout 3 has essentially been written in a way that things only happen to move the plot forward, no real reason for it other than it happens to forward the plot and I hate it.
@@honeybadger6275 But those games actually had plots. Like, okay, I found a thing for Liberty Prime; that might be really basic with no depth or introspection or anything, but it's at least serviceable--I'm doing something to make something happen to achieve a goal. But the Starborn thing, as he was saying, just has no point. "Come, join the Unity, by jumping onto this hamster wheel and running for eternity!"
'No design document' really is the best and most concise criticism of this game. It's not even the game is worse than the sum of its parts, there is no sum of the parts.
Starfield is just a non-game. I look at it and I see nothing, I don't know what I'm looking at. I don't know what it is. 'It' doesn't know what it is, and that comes across so clearly in all the videos I've seen of it, whether commentary, analysis, critique, or just straight gameplay.
@@Blisterdude123 well, point is the lack of a unifying design document for Starfield is more of an indictment on Bethesda's creative stagnation. Why would Todd and crew write a design document when at the end of the day they only want to make FO4 in space? And FO4 was just Skyrim with guns, and Skyrim was just FO3 with swords and better graphics, and FO3 was just Oblivion with guns, and Oblivion was just Morrowind with slightly better graphics, etc. Bethesda didn't write a design document because they never intended to make anything other than same game they've always made, and this time it really became obvious how incredibly dated and creatively bankrupt their game design is.
I wanted to LOVE Starfield. I tried to brute force an engrossing and enjoyable experience in Starfield during my entire 120 hours playing Starfield. I am not spending another 8 seconds on Starfield, let alone 8 hours. But you're still getting engagement, a like and sub from me because - holy crap you earned them with this endeavor, You LEGEND.
My biggest disappointment with Starfield was the lack of a special “classic beginning” option which starts you off in in the belly of a ship and the first thing you hear is a narrator saying “they’ve taken you from the Sol System’s Prison Colony, first by shuttle and now by freighter, to the east, to New Atlantis.”
Starfield is like meeting up with an old best friend from high school. Except now you’re older and they never grew up and are always talking about the pyramid scheme thing they’re trying to sell.
which is the same pyramid scheme he did 10 years ago, using the same dialogue he did then, wearing the same clothes he did back then, driving the same car, using the same jokes and quibs he did back then...
Bethesda has made it clear with starfield. It’s their first new Project in like decades. They could’ve made this IP/world/universe whatever as rich as Tolkien’s or broad as star wars or whatever else. They had the time, they had the staff, they had the experience and funding. People have been covering for Bethesdas past mistakes for years saying “it’s not their fault they have to stay inside the bounds of the IP that already exists, they can’t make X cool or fun because Y from 20 years ago” to cover obvious terrible design and flawed concepts…and they’ve proved to everyone with this game that the existing IPs weren’t a shackle that was holding them down, but the only thing keeping them from absolutely shïtting the bed. When left to their own devices with no lore constraints or lines to color inside of, they will make the dumbest most jumbled mess that’ll be forgotten in 3 years. It should be 1000% clear by now after the recent failures Bethesda is incompetent and unfit to continue making games with the IPs they own. I can’t imagine anyone defending them this time
The fact they consciously decided to fit the story *after* a war with Mechs and genetically engineered monsters and reduced most of it to a slide show is nuts
Yes, the magic of Bethesda is completely over. Now let’s see what studio can take their place for great open world RPG’s, it’s clearly isn’t CDPR either. I honestly felt like Warhorse did an amazing job with Kingdom Come. I would like to see them develop something with huge funding.
@Gobsmacked29 I mean, it could have worked. The original Mass Effect was set after the Rachni wars and Krogan uprising, both of which would have been interesting settings for a decisions-heavy RPG. The difference is that it actuslly had an interesting story to tell that both stood on its own and intersected with the backstory in satisfying ways (unlike later games in the series, sadly)
The company grew and got popular because they simplified the RPG genre to a point that it became an Adventure game with RPG elements, half to appeal to the lowest common denominator and the other half to work around console limitations. It's not surprising they reached this point, each time they released their newest game, more simplified than the one before, they were showered with praise.
@@CoolcleverstoneRefinement doesn't necessarily mean downsizing, that's just slimming down the team. A process can be refined without stripping its parts, it has to do with elegance and efficiency.
I remember before its final launch my greatest fear was it'd just be No Man's Sky, but with a more designed single-player campaign and format. But post-launch, I look back and think if they'd just copied No Man's Sky, but made it single-player, it would've at least been a fun game.
I imagine Todd watching this, and he’s disagreeing with everything for the first half. The second half finds him, scotch bottle in hand, sitting in his personal theater, reluctantly whispering his agreement. “Yeah, well, yeah. But we-we couldn’t…” *sips scotch*
On the intro to the game: There have been "Alternate start" mods for Oblivion, Skyrim, and Fo4 for years and years. They're some of the most popular mods for all those games. There's no way Bethesda doesn't know that people want a less rigid, more character-oriented opening to their games yet there was no effort to make Starfield any different.
It's hilarious that how contradictory Bethesda design is in several areas. They want the player to have freedom, and yet make highly restrictive, long intros that remove a lot of player expression. They want the player to explore their big world and ignore the main quest, and yet make the main quest so crucial to the game that skipping it means skipping a ton of content.
I mean, why fix what ain't broke? In this case broke being not selling. People keep buying it so they keep pumping out the same trash year after year. They've released skyrim how many times now, and has a single time not sold well? Why innovate at all?
Emil is the textbook definition of failing upwards. It's actually insane how obviously incompetent he is. They manage to drive out Will Shen who is actually decent but retain that bloody clown
Honestly I'm glad that atleast a channel talking about starfield feels immediate disgust at the fact that both bethestha and the fans not only assume that starfield will have mods, but are expecting modders to literally add content to their games.
I don't see what's so disgusting about expecting Starfield to have mods. Actually, it's even ridiculous that we're talking future tense. Starfield HAS mods. It has had mods since pretty much the second it came out. Similarly for expecting modders to add content. Every single Bethesda game has had content added to it by modders. There is zero reason to expect that Starfield won't. Now, people acting entitled and rude about it instead of grateful to modders is a different thing, THAT is disgusting.
@@LasherTimora I think it's more the case of Bethesda cutting corners on things like UI design, character modeling, and planetary map design with the expectation that modders will then come in and fix it for them. It's the difference between modders adding on to a complete experience and Bethesda selling a hollow game and expecting their audience to fill it in for them. Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim were all already great - mods just made them better. Starfield could be good, but if and only if, a lot of talented modders put in a lot of time and effort to patch the holes in the game's entire structure.
@@Snarkknight5 Uh, mods were needed to make Oblivion and Skyrim worth anything. Those games without mods are some of the most bland, generic, souless RPGs with some of the worst combat in gaming.
I wanna like this video 80 times over. You can thank NeverKnowsBest for sending me your way. Literally such a great break down of things I was already thinking or ideas that didn’t sit right and you clearly explained why it didn’t feel right.
@@n1ko_n1koHe is referring to the group of hardcore Bethesda fans that have denied his criticism of their games. The ones that don't see that the Bethesda from ages ago and the Bethesda now are completely different (if fallout 76 wasn't evidence enough). Anyway, they deserve this game.
I'm amazed Emil still has a job. Bethesda could use ChatGPT to write the script for their next game, and it would be leagues above anything Emil could puke out. It's unreal.
45 minutes in: _"YoU toUched tHe MagiC rock. You arE now The CHosEn one. Here. TaKE my SpaceSHiP and SpaCeRoboT. NoW Go and LeAVe me On this MininG OutPOsT for NO ReasOn."_
It's not that amazing once you know that Emil's friendship with Todd Howard is the reason he got the job to begin with. "It's not about what you know, but who you know" is a phrase that's completely relevant here.
Don't make me defend Emil. Even a moron is better than an ai. They will be using ai if it's accepted widely come next game. Fuck that, I'd rather Emil still be trying to sell the messiest shits than an ai.
I think it's funny that Emil talk about no Lore Bombs , "Players don't want to read books". Daggerfall and Morrowind were full of lore books. It's part of what made older elder scrolls games unique. Especially with TH-cam today. People would love making/watching videos about all the lore in those books
If only the lore was represented in the game world. X heroic sword is identical to one I could make at home. This is old Hroldan? Imagine if you went to old York, modernized as it is, and found nothing of historical value. Yet they'll pockmark the landscape with an unreasonable amount of forts and towers with no significance. The lore bombs weren't the problem. The lack of any impact craters was. Especially with a fast travel system, and in a province that is smaller than my hometown by land area, I'd have been happy to hike through "miles" of wilderness to get to that one site of an ancient battle. If there's one thing procedural generation probably can create it's wilderness. That could be an area of map creation to save human effort on. Let humans, then, write books and build the places where humans live/lived.
I get shit from my BG3 group because I have a library in my camp chest. I read and keep at least 1 copy of every book and scroll because I want to know everything the game thinks is interesting enough to be written down
I really appreciate how you address mods in this essay. The dependency on and expectation of high-quality mods in order to make Bethesda's games both playable and the bare-minimum FUN to play is so bleak. Especially when there are hundreds of games that are cohesive and enjoyable out of the gate. If there's nothing to the game (no compelling writing or gameplay for example), what possible reason do I have to play Starfield instead of those games? It's not even the only space exploration game out there with how much it borrows from No Man's Sky and others. The only thing carrying Fallout and TES for me is nostalgia for previous games and their established worlds. Starfield doesn't even have that, so what is left except this entitlement to hard-working modders? It feels like such a cynical way to exploit passionate fans.
I would like to add that bethesda treats their fans like garbage, look at how the last like 4 or so years have been for skyrim where bethesda is updating the exe file for skyrim every few months breaking every single mod that uses skse and modders have to recompile their mods to fix it. It's absolutely cancerous. You look at the nexus site and you don't get well put together quest mods like what was made for new vegas or morrowind, now its super low effort weapons/armor ports from other games/asset stores. Bethesda's lack of passion has killed a lot of modders passion.
Starfield was the first video game that I legit enjoyed watching negative videos about and before watching this retrospective I couldn't figure why. Now I get that despite being a somewhat rational and sceptical adult I felt like my inner child that expected to relive all those joys of playing Skyrim for the first time was betrayed. I guess Starfield was my last straw, I don't care about BGS games anymore.
You aren't the only one. There are thousands of games I have no interest in , don't enjoy, but don't even give them a second thought. Not one thought as to why some people may like them and i don't. But Starfield...has become a bit of a mini-obsession! Not the game - I really couldn't stand it from the first moment that nauseating sickly sweet music theme kicked in. But trying to identify what's wrong with it. And this is as someone who played all previous Bethesda games going back to Morrowind. And bemused by defenders of the game - were they running something different to my version? Were they not seeing the stilited NPCs and turgid dialog? Did their game not have the same few tasks and locations, but repeated hundreds of times? The same enemies everywhere with a brain dead AI? Eventually, some psychologist is going to analyse what it is about Bethesda games that sucks people in even though we all they are kind of bad!
I think it is a uniquely frustrating experience to see and experience something that so obviously has immense potential only for that potential to be utterly squandered. That really is the essence of Starfield to me, they could have done almost anything and had an insane budget and time to do it and then made this. I still can barely believe it, how can you have a crazy multiversal time loop story and then do barely anything with it?
@@Jupa lmao that's true but the funny part is that any legit post that is remotely negative about starfield like a modder refusing to work on the game or SF getting s mixed rating on stream gets over 1k up votes every time while the usual posts get sub 300 - 600 up votes
BGS is that dungeon master who is really proud of the story they spent ages working on and are determined that the players experience it exactly as they want, even if means railroading them like a 19th Century tycoon
lol, last week I said "Bethesda has absolutely become the Dungeon Master that promises you a campaign that you can pick any class you want, any alignment you want, go anywhere you want, then makes a face when you roll up a Neutral Evil assassin and goes "wwwwellllllllllllllll..." and railroads the party passively by making anything off the rails mind-numbingly boring. The "check engine" light came on in Fallout 4, and got worse."
@@anthonybird546 "Now guys, I'm not saying we're being railroaded, but that tower over there is the only point of interest we have come across in five whole sessions."
Starfield didn't deserve anything. It didn't even deserve a nomination. People keep saying it was 'snubbed' but like, I don't agree. It wasn't a snub, it just wasn't good enough, simple as that.
@@Blisterdude123yeah. I've never played an RPG with less "role playing" elements as Starfield. GTA 5 is literally more of an RPG than Starfield. This game doesn't deserve any awards of any category.
@@yurigagarin9765 Think Bethesda has around 150 employees when they started on SF. They aren't really that large of a company, just well known. *edit* I should add that I understood your point, lol.
It is frequently referenced when used in the making of games, especially large companies, but even two man teams like DOOM look to it constantly, obsessively even. It'll be "required reading," to even do much as QA the game, and it'll often be cited any time whatsoever there's a cross over of departments. Produces live and die by the design doc. That's why Pat said "just have one of the dozen producers do it," they should have wanted one, they should have made their own in the absence of one even. It would actually be more time and effort and extra out of your way to not have one in a team the size of Bethesda. That's why it's so fucking insane, the more you think of how useful it is the more insane it gets, ad infinitum.
@@matthewcarroll2533 Expecting 150 people to all be on the same page on a project that has AT LEAST a million lines of code is patently insane, and its instantly obvious you've never worked on a project that has taken more than a week in your life.
@@SaintJames14 but in their defence it is only now that I'm learning who's behind some of my least favorite aspects of Bethesda games for the past 13 years, and most of it seems to fall under Emil's jurisdiction. The lack of cohesion between departments because of no design document, Fathers (Complete and utter lack of) motivations in Fallout 4, etc.
@@chooseyouhandle I mean, it is a joke. I dont know if "Utter contempt" is any less personal. But for me it is at least "professionally personal". If Emil is still in his same development position for Elder Scrolls 6 I almost certainly will not buy it.
It’s sad that Bethesda used to have great writers, look at Michael Kerkbride’s work on Morrowind. The idea of a totally alien and convincing atmosphere with believable lore both from historic and religious standpoints and even a world mechanic that explains why the player has the power of save and loading is something out of this world that I still consider as the peak of lore writing. Now Bethesda can’t even explain how to cook a baked potato
As far as TES goes, they were basically profiting off the creative energy of real writers like Kirkbride up until Skyrim, when much of that energy was exhausted. With Fallout and especially now with Starfield, you see how exposed they really are -- as the core group of people that developed Morrowind, for example, had already departed Bethesda by the time Oblivion rolled around. Peak Bethesda was the early 2000s -- they've gotten worse since then, clearly. As for me, I'm sick of this shite, so I suppose it's high time I go back to indulging in Morrowind, since I have no more patience with Skyrim and its stupid paid mods system breaking my load orders AGAIN just for f*cking corporate profit...
@@josephpercy1558 Yeah Morrowind was peak TES - you could control pretty much everything about your character and have totally unique play styles. Oblivion looked lovely (at the time) but the way they drew back the character options to 'channel' you to be a certain type was a sad path to follow.
Kirkbride is one of my fav fantasy author. Afaik he literally the one who wrote vivec lesson in which the infamous event where vivec had "intimate" time with molag bal... he is the reason why TES is not just your generic fantasy story, especially with TES's metaphysical cosmology and other good weird things.
Starfield was such a slog that its taken me nine months just to have the will power to finish this video. I have probably rewatched your morrowind vid a dozen times, but starfield just drains my soul when im reminded of it. Keep up the good work, hope you get to have some more reviews you enjoy making.
@UmmerFarooq-wx4yo I'm so fascinated by the delusion that all the starfield hate comes from sony fans. I've played on Xbox and pc my entire life and starfield is pure rubbish
As a software developer. Your analysis of problems in development is spot on. It's so easy to spot some common management problems even from the outside. Because they always manifest the same way. The bugs in the finished product, the lack of cohesion, the half-finished features. It's all so familiar. To reach out for an example in another game. At one point Star Citizen pre-sold a gigantic ship before it was even implemented. It turned out, the ship they'd already sold, would turn out to be so huge and complex that it would crash their hangar system. The devs were now severely under the gun to rebuild the entire engine underlying the hangar system. Cut to people sleeping under desks, and crying, and tearing their hair out because this is all impossible and unfair. What a lot of people don't understand about development. It's not a LEGO kit. When you purchase a LEGO kit, it has already been built and re-built and simplified and re-built again by LEGO designers. Software like a new game hasn't been done before. When your manager says "we need the hangar re-built to handle bigger ships by next week". It's like saying oh hey no big deal but next week men will be walking on Mars and they'll have to farm for food so just go ahead and develop crops that will grow successfully on Mars, oh and also we need a cookbook for how to cook the crops to make them delicious and fulfill all human nutritional needs, and I need all that on my desk next Tuesday, and since I'm Todd Howard I'm going to be flying first class to Texas to sip champagne and rub elbows with Elon Musk at a SpaceX party while you're contemplating suicide. Make sure you tell your family you won't be home for Thanksgiving, because if I don't see you crunching your eyeballs out, you're fired. That's software development under one of these "it just works" managers. I've encountered a lot of them. If I could save one human being from ever having to experience it, I would.
As a software developer, totally agree. I got a strong feeling of serious development problems. For example, the spaceship building being virtually a seperate game. My guess is they wanted a deeper starsip management aspect (FTL-ish) but for some reason, that got dumped. Maybe management thought it would put off the casual gamer they were trying to attract. Maybe it technically didn't fit or took too much away from the rest of the game. Anyway, it looks very detached from the main game. Then you have dialog where NPC's and companions change character. Presumably different teams wrote different quests. Well, much of it seems to have been passed to a chatbot to write. Not paying that much attention prior to release, I hadn't realised how much was resting on this game. Earlier in the year, loads of "Starfield will save the Xbox" articles. And even worse hype "Starfield will save gaming"! So much pressure on it. And ultimately, there is nothing innovative in it at all. It's a Bethesda game phoned in. In a sense, it's a stinker that's been brewing for a while. Fallout & Skyrim have problems, flaws. Unfortunately, Starfield skipped their strong points and focussed on the weak points. Fallout 76 was a warning that something is not right there. If there's a short cut, in Starfield, they took it (another development red flag). I genuinely doubt the game we see is the game the designers and developers wanted. I think business and technical issues meant what we see is a hollow shell of what was initially imagined by "Elder Scrolls in Space". Well, I hope so, because if this really is the game exactly as imagined, then Bethesda is led by a bunch of incompetent, decades out of touch, unimaginative but very very financially greedy droids. Couldn't be that, could it? Total speculation, but I don't think Bethesda have the drive to spend 3 or 4 years transforming it as No Mans Sky or Cyberpunk have been. The fact they are arguing against any Steam reviews criticising the game suggest they aren't going to change it. Don't hold any hope for TES6. Back to software development, they said they did a ton of work on the game engine fro STarfield. They will want to tap into that for TES6. Expect tons of procedural generation. And a lack of environmental and NPC interactions. They've had 20 years to improve those and if they were going to fix that, would have done it by now. At least writing this means I don't have to do my own hour long video on Starfield! I would do it - but I can't face playing it again.
@@lordblazer This right here. Absolutely, or some other version of Magile (Magical agile) that's going to solve all the problems but the leadership doesn't understand what iterative development is all about. I don't think the software engineers were the problem, I think it's 90% management failure. I never worked at Accenture directly, but I did work at Avanade and Microsoft, and...the list goes on, since I've been a professional developer for 30 years (and hobby dev for 10 before that). The answer is always "more people" when those of us doing the work know that each person is less productive the more the team grows. More people mean more opinions and we all have strong ones when it comes to how something should be coded! The disjointed parts of the game were likely caused by having separate teams that weren't communicate and didn't know until they were told to integrate the pieces together. Just look at some of the tiny places that were created as separate zones. I believe that's a result of plug-in architecture being used in places that should have been static inclusions rather than plugged in locations (specific examples: Trade Authority in Akila, Outland Outfitters in New Atlantis, and so on). Someone in management said "the team making this zone is moving too slow, use the extensible plugins and have another team do these pieces" type of approach. The end result is a Charlie Foxtrot. All that said, it's still my favorite game this year and I'll be spending from after work tonight until bed time Sunday night playing as much as possible.
> "Total speculation, but I don't think Bethesda have the drive to spend 3 or 4 years transforming it as No Mans Sky or Cyberpunk have been." I mean, through countless ports and re-releases Bethesda haven't even managed to fix the bugs Skyrim has had since 2011. I don't expect more that bugfixes for maybe a year and maybe a DLC but I agree with you; Bethesda is not the type of company to linger on a game the way CDPR have with Cyberpunk, for example.
well to be fair, the skills arn't good enough to make you want to try something else, unless its, "okay tried these skills and they were shite, next game I will ignore."
@@HolyApplebutter yeah but does detract from the replayability, eldrscrolls and even to a smaller extent fallout is about plyaying different chars to try new things.
@@monmc6129 the issue is that by Skyrim, the races had mostly just become an aesthetic choice, the only exceptions are some of the especially decent racial powers like the Orc and Breton get, but you’ll probably forget about the racial powers anyway in favor of shouts.
@@monmc6129 I sort of get that, but they should have gone all in on it, allow you to chose new traits, new background and such. I just wish the skills were actually worth specializing in them, they feel so scatter shot that there isn't really much you would do different in a second char.
meanwhile it dropped while I was at work (USA) and youtube's still a bitch with the different bells that I never remember so I never got a notification... and now I have 6 hours before work so it'll have to wait til the weekend.... for the best, I guess...
@@brandondanforth8342 It dropped right around when I was going to work. Saw the notification not long after coming home, and it said it was posted 8 hours prior. I thought the timing was sort of funny, at least.
This video has been added to my favorite. I use it because I have insomnia. And a long video just taking about something like a video game makes me sleepy. I'm glad there is someone who makes revies this long.
@@saschaberger3212thanks for this my friend, I love longform analysis videos but I never thought to search for a playlist. Now I've got enough content to last for a good long while ❤
The most damning commentary on Starfield is that all the TH-cam channels that got big with Elder Scrolls retrospectives & analyses are rushing to get their big Starfield videos out before it's going to be completely forgotten next year.
My biggest red flag was that it’s jabo made 2 videos on Starfield before going back to the other IPs which was funny because he gutted a series he was doing to finish it quickly for launch since I guess he figured he would be on starfield from here on out.
I'm a software project manager, and I can just imagine being in a meeting where somebody says "We don't need design specs, we're Agile". And then you would hear the door click closed behind me as I head off to my next job somewhere not there.
Ha! On a related note, As someone working in the command center please, dear god, document the details for your applications and what they do and what levers to pull to fix your stuff... Unless you want me to page you at 3 AM because I can't figure it out 😅😅😅
I can forgive a lot of stuff, but my biggest problem is that they got a chance to create an entirely new sci-fi IP from scratch and this is what they came up with. They came up with literally the most uninsteresting Sci Fi setting I have ever seen. No aliens, no interesting politics, philosophy or technologies, no war, no sense of awe at the natural occurences really out there in the galaxy e.g black holes, Neutron stars. We start the game after the tiny sliver of interesting story has ended. I keep thinking about a game called Space Rangers 2.(Other than having one of the best sci fi game soundtracks of all time) It's an old game but in that game, you can go about your life menially as a trader or just doing contracts for the galaxy's government. Meanwhile a overwhelming mechanical alien force is swallowing the galaxy up system by system. This is all dynamic so if you make no attempt to stem the tide the aliens will conquer the entire galaxy and it's game over. Starfield didn't need a system as intense as this but I wish it had *something* dynamic.
I have processed alot of the criticisms, although I don't hate Starfield at all, it's a very outdated game but BGS sandboxes are still fun to screw around in. but yeah space is simply too big a canvas for their limited tech and approach to game design.
@@MikeStJacques No Man's Sky is also not finished yet. It gets updated since 7 years. I wonder how long it will take Bethesda to finish Starfield, perhaps never because they don't even attempt it and just pull the rug.
@hyperturbotechnomike Honestly, I think after the third major story expansion and I mean MAJOR expansion is when the game will finally be somewhat content dense and that's puts us at what, 2027-ish? I'm not touching starfield again till 2030 at the earliest, when most if not all DLCs are out and mods are abundant and polished.
The magnetoshpere is generated by the convection of the molten metal in the core, and the grav drive destroyed the magnetosphere. So the implication is that for some reason, the grav drive had some sort of power that was able to cause the metal in earth's core to stop being hot liquid, but did not have any other knock on effects in the process. Look, I know that technically all fiction writing is just "making stuff up" but this is ridiculous.
Just a note, planet orbits just revolve around the map's zero axis, IE, wherever your ship spawns in, for both space and on land. They do not model any sort of realistic orbit.
@@teddycouch9306when you move drastically large distances from the center of the world, things break down, akin to the farlands in Minecraft. By always centering the world position at the player ship, you prevent this rather than fix it.
The AAA gaming industry thinks they are all making 10/10 perfect games. Then a work day at a place like Bethesda is everyone running around giving thier opinions on everything. Then saying how wonderful and amazing everyone is. I would think if anyone was found watching something like this they would be off to HR to get a warning. Even talking about it would have you sent to HR. Most of the time people only work in places like this for one game or a part of development, so they can use that to get another job. Outside the gaming industry but still in the tech world.
Pardon me for being completely ignorant of this game, but every time you say the word "Starborn", it hits me like a ton of bricks. I cannot fucking believe Bethesda resorted to calling the player character the "Starborn". This might just take the cake as THE most creatively bankrupt thing in a triple A game I've EVER seen, and that's saying a lot. No matter how many times I hear it, the reality hits me anew. I personally can't wait until Elder Scrolls VI where we play as the "Scrollborn", and after that, Fallout 5, where we play as the Vaultborn. Holy Fuck.
All of the names and writing details of this game feel like very early rough draft temp names and concepts made without any of the detail to make them interesting. The factions in this game are the most barebones, undercooked, cookie cutter crap I have ever seen. You know exactly what they represent no what all of their quests are going to be like the second you meet them, there are no real surprises here. Speaking of creatively bankrupt, the quests in this game are so bad from everything I’ve seen. They’re the gameplay equivalent of an “this could have been an e-mail” (which is such a pathetic thing to have to say) it’s just mindlessly waking back and forth between two NPC’s while they go “and you go back and tell them this then” seoerated by like 5 loading screens and unskippable cinematics…
I mean that was the exact thing I *JOKED* with my friends when Todd compared Starfield to "Skyrim in space" Never believed that would actually be the thing in the finished game...
I didn't take it that way at all, the vast majority of them didn't say "MODDERS, GET ON THIS!" Most of them were saying that modding would probably fix the problems people were talking about. Sounded much more like respect of the capability the community has.
@@ICCUWANSIUT Right but why should modders bother with cleaning up Bethesda's mess at this point? Does Bethesda deserve a community like that at this point?
@@honeybadger6275 I don't think they should, but it's not right to say it's the reviewers pushing them into a negative stance or away. Blame the game, not the players.
@@ICCUWANSIUT There were definitely some comments made by some of the pro bethesda shilltubers like tks mantis that sounded a lot like they were expecting modders to make the game good.
Having the design scope of a small town or province stretched across a galaxy is so fitting as a studio who has only ever designed games for that smaller scope just didn't know how to upscale it. Also the ability to be hailed by other ships over comms but so many quests are based on the fact that there's no phone or long range communications available to the player is infuriating.
The duality of Bethesda interviews. On the one hand they want to "say yes" to the player all the time, on the other they think that Morrowind letting the player kill important NPCs was bad.
6:20:15 On the "abandoning followers on a different reality". Imagine having a relationship with someone and then deciding to ghost them so hard you set off to a different reality. And to make it worse, you are forced to ghost them if you want to progress the game. It completely destroys the notion of creating any relationships in that setting. Why make friends if you are forced to abandon them later?
It's not a foolproof explanation, but the game *does* try to establish that who your character is as a person affects the world they leave behind. Literally by having a loving marriage and abandoning it your "space dust" or whatever spreads throughout known space and makes more people develop strong bonds or something or other. (this is literally what the game says so feel free to accept it or groan at it).
@@Lightsign01 It definitely sounds like an excuse for the player character to see more value in leaving than just "exploration calls". Even if literally every constellation member more or less tells you not to look back, including your lover should you have one at the end of the game.
You are like an angel that transcends ideas of mortal love. Think of the Jedi from Star Wars: Attachments to the world stunt your spiritual growth because you wisely do not make love the whole meaning of life. That is a selfish concept that you only help people out of love rather than a sense of duty to a higher cause. Being special or chosen means you have higher aspirations than seeking out passions. Thousands of pets die every day and owners grieve thier loss. But they move on with life and don't make that bond the whole meaning of thier existence right? As a 'hero' you don't get to live a normal life. Read any Spiderman comics as a kid? The hero sacrifices his time to be spiderman at the expense of his fun being a normie. Similar to how Jedi must not let emotion cloud judgements. IE it ruins objectivity. If you had a chance to save the galaxy full of people that depend upon you or save one person (but they were a close friend, family or someone you have a crush on) would it not be selfish to choose the latter over doing what is right? Heroes sacrifice normal life to go beyond what average people think of as love. That is you must love everyone because all lives are connected. The idea of favourites doesn't exist because as hero you must be detached from this world to be the chosen. If the hero only protects people he personally likes that makes him normal like us. Jedi knights are not normal. They feel pain when loss of life occurs in the galaxy just like you do if your pet dies. (unselfish version of love for living things in general) The mortal being in a sense has short-sighted concepts of love. That being that you define it by people you met rather than everyone that impacted you that you met and also didn't personally know but helped indirectly. (such as veterans of wars that died in past for you but who you personally never met. They saved the future by sacrificing life for you people in the present day. By dying for future generations of people they would never see, is that not a form of unselfish love since they personally have no attachment to those they died for?)
I still consider it a problem that Bethesda only has 4 main writers. CDPR? Over 50. With half of them having published books. For Baldur’s Gate 3… Each main character/protagonist/Follower had its own flipping writer. Who you’know. Communicated with each other every single day
More writers doesn't equal better writing. "Too many cooks spoils the soup" or whatever. The issue is the quality of the writers and the lack of directing. And a ton of other issues we can only guess at
@@MaakaSakuranbo I honestly think that a Bethesda game could benefit from having fewer writers. Because it might limit the amount of bull occurring. But my point was simply the more writers aren't the issue. A single great writer is Vastly superior to 50 terrible ones
thats how you get disconnected stories, at their best sidequests should bleed right back to the main plot or at least have similar themes, not whatever cp2077 was doing @@kayfrenly5460
I'm at 3:45:54 - I really hate that "we want to say yes to the player" idea coming from Bethesda because, sorry what? You guys want to say yes to the player? What about if the player asks "Can I talk to draugr and learn about their culture?" - "Can I convince Ulfric I should be High King with a 100 speech check?" - "Can I not kill Parthurnaax?" - "Can I use my high lockpicking/other thief skills to catch/accuse Mercer Fry early?" - "Can I not become a Nightingale and complete the Thieve's Guild?" - "Can I use my Archmage status to influence political powers?" - "Can I use any faction membership to influence other quests?" Good grief.
16:25 This absolutely baffles me. I’m a master electrician. Ask anyone in my trade, or any trade, how we build anything. A blueprint, you say? No, actually. That just tells you WHAT you’re building. HOW to build it is in a huge document called “Specifications” that lists everything from the color of a receptacle faceplate to the kinds of conduit you can use to the thousands of various details that don’t show on the print. One of my first tasks when I go to bid on a job is to comb through the specifications and see what is in it. Are they requiring the use of an expensive material, or can I use a cheaper alternative? Do they require spare device or runways? The idea of a similarly large undertaking without a design document is amazingly idiotic. It’s not that you would list every single shrub or asset or game mechanic, but that you are giving everyone a a readily available resource to coordinate around. Think about how ugly your house would be if each trade was operating off their own print with no knowledge of what everyone else has to do. My suspicion is that so much labor and time is lost to conflicts between various design teams that are ignorant of each other’s plans. These kinds of things require an immense amount of coordination and cooperation, and refusing to use such a basic resource is just brain dead.
Nice to see a fellow electrician. And a master no less. I’m no master but this comparison is spot on from what I’ve can tell. The sheer amount of stuff that would be defunct if I never talked to plumbers or hvac and just did electrical in a vacuum would be insane. Just the other week a lighting plan in a drop grid ceiling completely changed because of space needed for hvac systems. And having been on some pretty dysfunctional job sites I can get a pretty clear picture of the havoc that is Bethesdas game development.
@@shrike_3588 Good to see a brother. Yes, that’s exactly what the teams appear to be doing. Working in a vacuum, with only higher ups being in contact. I’ve found it is much more advantageous (as well as yielding more profit) for my foremen and even journeymen to be able to work in tandem with other trades. The supervisor I have on the job is only there for large or costly change orders or issues. It is better for my business to be able to trust journeymen that can solve those kinds of problems without running it up the chain. Any sparky will know that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Would you run rigid pipe without planning the route? Maybe if you’re a shitty electrician. But being as knowledgeable as possible about what the tin knockers or plumbers are doing can save re-work by choosing a route to avoid something that has not even been installed yet. I’m not joking when I say that having guys that interface with other trades can cut hundreds of man-hours off a big job, and save thousands in materials.
@@AsymmetricalCrimes That's not true. They used a bunch of separate documents and obviously went out of sync. They did not use a centralized design doc.
I feel the man who compared writing free roam RPGs to writing a great novel and having readers tear out the pages and make paper airplanes out of them, is the wrong man to write an RPG with freedom and choices. He seems to begrudge the very nature that players consume the story in their own way rather than his.
That speech was so painful to watch. Writers for RPGs need to remember that there is a model for novels as parallels to RPGS: the choose-your-own-adventure novels of the 1980s. No, they weren't great literature, but the point is that even a paperback can do branching narrative accounting for player choice. There's no reason you can't take that model and use it to tell a great story.
@@blurqeqoherds Makes me think of the bandersnatch thing on netflix, I kept restarting it just to choose another path and see what I missed. I consumed all of that content because I was curious, the exact same reason I bought BG3
@blurqeqoherds fun fact, there's a growing catalog of novels published on apps such as "hosted games" that take the choose your own adventure-model and expand on it greatly using modern technology (sort of like choice-based visual novels but text only). Some of the titles you can find there ARE pretty damn great literature (I recommend the story "The Passenger" by Jime Rólon, or the "Fallen Hero"-series by Malin Rydén)!
It's always fascinating to hear Todd Howard talk. He's a true blue geek and nerd, and from the sounds of it (and given what he accomplished at Bethesda during his time as) a programmer with a lot of ingenuity. Hearing him talk, you can almost picture little turbo geek Todd, sat in front of his Macintosh, trying to turn 200 pages of RPG mechanics into a video game. I'd probably buy his autobiography. But. I'm not gonna buy his next game. Because Todd, I feel, isn't in the same place he used to be as a gamer, and as a programmer. He's a ceo, an ideas guy, who was always at his strongest when he was practical implementation problem solver guy. I can picture a young Todd, working on Terminator, and showing his superiors how he made flying vehicles work in a nearly-open world, several decades before Mario would be make the 3rd dimension of video games a standard of game design. "Todd, this is *amazing!* How did you do this?" they'd ask in astonished and excited tones. "It just works." He'd say, with a bashful grin. Starfield is the first game Bethesda would make since those days where a player could fly a ship. and somehow, despite decades of innovation, it's just as janky as it was before *many* of the people who bought this game were even born. In your space game about being a space explorer in a space ship exploring space in your space ship, your spaceship isn't even something satisfying (or stable) to run. I wonder sometimes, what if Todd stepped down as CEO and took a role more akin to like, senior programmer and creative supervisor. Get him in a place where people can talk to him without risking missing a board meeting with Microsoft, get him in a spot where he can get his digits on a computer and craft the things he wants to make with his own hands? Would that change things? If somebody else were the Big Boss, somebody who wouldn't consider Emil a friend and trust him to do whatever he wants, somebody who wouldn't see modders who've radically improved our games in the past as token employees hired solely to cash in on saying we hired and/or consulted them but to actually put these people to work with the tools and talent and time needed to foster better games? Or, would it be a situation like Blizzard, or Bungie, and the company would reach new lows we couldn't even fathom?
What Todd should do sounds like what Linus Sebastian from Linus Tech Tips has done. He owns Linus Media Group, but stopped being its official CEO and just let's one of his former managers run the company's day-to-day, while he does the things he wants to do.
No one there thinks like that, you know that. What Todd cares about is the same thing you would care about if you became a rich CEO. Making shareholders happy. While the lot of you are sitting here discussing the game, Todd, most of the time, discusses marketing campaigns and monetization strategies (not in front of the camera, of course). The content of the game is the least of his worries.
True, but like 99% of software development is managing complexity. It's not like we don't know how to do that. Just apply the same principles to a design document.
Patrician (likely intentionally, because rage gets more clicks) misrepresented what was said in multiple ways - Bethesda does keep design documentation, just not in a single large document like the olden days, and this has not been the case in the industry for quite some time. You'll much more frequently see internal forums or wikis that are more easily separated and edited for use with larger teams across longer projects. The primary source used for this claim is from an interview that directly contradicts the claim.
Hey, good news@@Incog-e1z, all sources are cited in the description to the video! The one you're looking for is "Writing the Worlds of Bethesda". I hope this helps!
Listening to Emil makes me wonder how many antidepressants must be consumed by his team. He sounds like the worst type of boss, he gives vague directions, blames everyone else when these directions obviously fail, but then takes credit for what it works. His description of sending random dialogues is nearly insane, he basically confessed to actively stopping work so people would massage his ego through whimsical requests. Any company, be a creative company or not, that allows a superior to act like that when handling a team will see severe burnout. If your superior keeps acting a diletante child, pursuing whatever momentary fancy of his, your work will go nowhere and it will severely stress you. Seeing your work stall then be thrown out, mishaped and taken credit of by your boss is a sure fire way to make you wanna quit. And that is just this one guy. The fact that he is allowed to work there and order people around tells me that Bethesda is an awful place. They clearly don't value employees' mental health and productivity, to let a buffon like that hold power. Edit: Just saw his bitching on XTwitter. He is a petulant man child. He uses his team as cover, blames lack of resources and then pulls a childish "how about you do better?" type of argument. If anything, he incriminates himself by saying that he was an awful reviewer and doesn't understand how a critical analysis is supposed to work. It indicates that he has zero competency to work at any leading role whatsoever. Much less a public role to antagonize your customers.
Not using design documentation seems like the perfect ploy for someone like Emil to be able to constantly change his mind about the writing's direction without taking any responsibility.
The crimson cringe sound like Powder gangers from Fallout NV ... except those were recently escaped convicts, that had matching uniforms, because that's what they stole from the guards, and were already in process of falling appart weeks after their escape.
Didn't they (powder gangers) start falling apart the moment they got free? I seem to remember that immediately after they got free many simply scattered
@@vexile1239It is pretty preposterous to assume every criminal just wants to stand around and kill anyone they spot. Bethesda never understood that though.
With design docs, I'm a one man band and I've run into problems with not having any designdocs for a concept album. Things become fragmented and it takes far longer to get anywhere. I've ended up making full songs only to realise they don't really fit and shelved them. I can't even imagine the chaos of not having proper design docs on a AAA game.
Same. Working in animation, I can't even fathom how a AAA game that big couldn't have a design document. Working on quests and game design on Starfield must have been a nightmare.
Honestly insane that Bethesda basically brags they don't use design docs. I'm working on a game project myself and I have to constantly consult my design doc. Can't imagine what bethesda employees are doing.
As a software developer. Todd is a nightmare manager. I guarantee after he dies/retires lots of people who no longer depend on him for income will write tell all memoirs that he's a disaster. Like tech debt: When you're 4 years into development and you've constantly been hacking crap to make Todd's whims happen. And now Todd wants you to add some feature. And you discover there's no way on Earth the engine can possibly do what Todd wants, especially with how broken and hacked the engine already is... That's tech debt. You eventually have to pay it if you want to move on. Cut to today when fans are still working to patch Morrowind. Just Morrowind. It's still broken today.
Gee, what a complex game. If only there was a document for its design that everyone can refer back to. But alas, we are too backward to ever comprehend such a thing.
I look at this game now, and I legitimately cannot believe Starfield ever got past the 'writing-ideas-on-a-whiteboard' conceptual stage. That's like, the bare bones DNA-level basic moment where you decide roughly what you want a project to grow into. What the game might end up being. It's where you paint a broad goal, for your development. But Starfield feels like a game where they NEVER had any real concept of what the game was supposed to be. It feels like they skipped even doing that bit with the whiteboard, and just started...developing nonsense and trying to glue it together.
Then, instead of listening to feedback, they actively doubled down on their lack of creativity by responding to user reviews with AI generated messages of gaslighting and defensiveness. The best Bethesda entertainment is the meta surrounding their dumb games.
@@Rannos22Tbh, they may as well be if they're not. If they just run down a list of "if customer mentions X, then respond with Y" then as far as im concerned that isnt an intelligent response. Its an artificially intelligent response.
I wonder if this is part of the reason why they felt a voiced character was so important. Aurther Morgan is a huge reason why the outlaw fantasy is sold so well.
Comparing their game where they couldn't wire together the two neurons needed to add a vehicle to make the traversal of 99% barren, featureless planets with a game where using and taking care of your mount to traverse an environment full of obstacles, challenges and encounters. They're comparing shit to parfaits and charging more for them to boot.
If the Big Mac was also somehow more expensive than the five course meal. Actually, with how expensive fast food is now, that’s probably not too far off from the truth
@AstralBelt I just hate that the aliens being shown in Starfield don't ever seem...Alien, they're too relatable to life on this planet (we're on some level related to other species on this planet) however, on some other planet... under totally separate evolutionary circumstances, it's all the same... all life made is crabs; crabs truly is peak evolution.
"Morph" means "shape" in Greek, so I don't particularly have an issue with it being in the name. (Despite what native English speakers so readily believe, English is not the origin of all languages and words, nor is it the centre of the universe.) "Shape of terror" even sounds kind of plausible for a name. That said, I do find it to be somewhat amusing, now that it's been pointed out. Could have called them "deimomorphs" or something, at least.
According to a tweet from Phil Spencer, only 14% of players (on xbox at least) have completed the In Their Footsteps achievement. Which goes to show how unengaging the main story is that so few people have even gotten to the Starborn reveal.
That's what Gamepass does, they might brag about having 10 million players or something but the average of playtime is way lower and most players don't make it past the into
But that doesn't make Starfield special. Not finishing the main quest has been a big meme in Bethesda games since forever, not necessarily because it's bad, but often because the rest of the world is just so engaging.
But that doesn't make Starfield special. Not finishing the main quest has been a big meme in Bethesda games since forever, not necessarily because it's bad, but often because the rest of the world is just so engaging.
In Armored Core 6, 28% of players completed all endings (on steam at least). Those players had to beat the game 3 times through from start to finish. There is no shortcut or save scumming to get around it. They really played through the entire game 3 times through. AC6 has no open world. Near zero choices in the story or during missions. All missions boil down to go here, kill thing. Most missions remain the same between playthroughs. Star field is less replayable than that? lol
Just noticing this now somehow... Emil says they used to have "50 page [design] documents," as if that is a huge, bloated number. For a game of their scope, that is easily under half, maybe even a quarter, the size you'd expect from any other company. 50 pages isn't even the bare minimum... That's the half finished rough draft. Which makes him saying they just couldn't keep even THAT updated even richer. Like. Wow. No wonder he thought it was useless, it probably was... I wonder how long this has been an issue. Edit: it is kinda bonkers how little Pat leans into the absurdity that they didn't have a design doc. It is like shooting a movie without a script. Actually, it's worse than that. It is hard to describe exactly how essential it is for a team the size of Bethesda to have one. DOOM was a two man team in the mid 80s, yet their design doc was so essential to them, so throughly used and in such high regard, they called it their Bible. And he does mention that Todd acted as glue in the past games, but this cannot be understated or overstressed. It is crazy that he mentions it basically once and never returns to this point. Todd acted as the design doc. Nothing went into or out of the game without going through him. He was, unironically, in a similar role Miyazaki fills for FromSoft if your familiar with his method. But once Todd stepped out of that role as a filter for everything, as a director, Garbagefield was the result because it turned out Todd was THE ONLY THING keeping them together AT ALL. They literally can't operate without him, because he was the design doc, and they don't know how to use a real one.
For anyone wondering, a design document is usually something like a detailed FAQ... Maybe better called an AQ, it will answer any probable question someone working on the game will have, whether or not it's "frequently" asked. You usually need to read the design doc to even do QA on a game. When there is a cross over of departments in any way, shape, or form, it's usually required to cite what part of the design doc you're working from. This is why Pat says "get one of the dozen producers to update it," in exasperation. Produces live and die by the design doc. I'm not even sure how they can do their job without one, and that not exaggeration, it really is that essential for them.
Bro the person making this 8 hour review stops every 30 minutes to make that joke especially early on, things like, if only they had a paper with all these designs on it, oh wait Jokes like that they do a few times throughout
By using that clip of Emil typing, he shows what kinda "writer" Emil is. I noticed immediately that Emil Doesn't sit in "ergonomic" posture while having index fingers extended for "typing". That dude works like a senior that went to "home computer basics" class once, in the nineties. :D
@woldemunster9244 I noticed that as well. He is way more awkward than my 65 years old mother trying to use a PC. He clearly hasn't spend much time on a computer.
pretty much Everything you said about DooM is wrong, the Doom bible was halfway completly disregarded since Tom Hall fundementally disagreed about the type of game DooM should have been, also Id software categorically didnt even exist in the 1980s, it was founded in 1991. during the "mid 80s" John Carmack was developing the proof of concept Super Mario rip off game
If you listen to the pre-release marketing material with a game designer ear, there's a couple times where they accidentally let red flags slip. The sheer number of planets quoted in the Starfield Direct was what got me worried first - too many to fill with meaningful stuff - and then a little while later during the on-planet exploration section Todd elaborates "we randomly spawn in interesting content near the player" (but in marketing lingo) and that was the exact moment I knew this wasn't gonna live up to the hype, considering the quality of their radiant procgen in the past...
The moment I knew I was never going to buy Starfield was the '1000s of planets'. That meant procgen. Now, here's the thing. That was fine in No Man's Sky. It wasn't a story driven singleplayer RPG with strong worldbuilding narrative elements. NMS is a multiplayer exploration sandbox, procgen dialled up to 11 for the explicit purpose of finding weird and unusual things while you explore, at your own pace. I wasn't fine with it in Starfield because I immediately knew it meant procgen in what should have been a handcrafted world, filled with narrative and storytelling touches, intrinsically designed to service that RPG worldbuilding, to personalise the character of that world. That wasn't going to happen with '1000s of planets'. And as soon as I heard that, I knew I was just waiting for all the other development problems that snowballed out of that.
@@mastah39 I think there was an entirely feasible middle ground where you had 4/5 planets with pertinent explorable 'regions' with large but manageable maps. Focus on one system, with various space stations and particular crafted areas of worlds where there are gameplay-related reasons to be. Think Outer Worlds, but you can actually do the space travel bit. I don't think anybody (or at least I wasn't, and I agree, anyone saying otherwise is nuts) should've been asking for 4/5 fully explorable worlds. But a far narrower scope with more depths and layers of world design? That's what Bethesda actually do. Maybe even that would've been beyond Bethesda's competence, but I don't know. At least it could've been vaguely achievable.
@@mastah39 imo I don't think Bethesda would've been criticized to such an extent if they went the route that guy suggested, and to many Starfield falls short of not just the Bethesda experience, but (from what I've been told from people who played those other games you mention) it fell short of ED, NMS, and especially Star Citizen. If BGS is going to try for those games' experiences then why the upset at the comparisons? I'm not sure why you hold the comfort zone thing against that guy or anyone else for that matter when I don't think that alone is why people have such harsh criticism against BGS, more like they being the second movers on all of those 'innovative' features means we can't just give them credit for trying and floundering. It's also a bit much to champion them on 'actual RPG mechanics' when they were the ones to remove them in the first place.
@@mastah39 I'm not keen on blaming consumers for not reading between the lines in face of the massive marketing and hype. TOW fans made a similar argument saying it was a AA underdog when marketing made jabs at BGS and boasted 'from creator of Fallout'. It's hard to accommodate 'compromise' and experimentation for experimentation's sake for a big company like BGS. That leads to my point that there's being safe then there's being responsible and BGS understanding limits of the concept, their own engine and studio constraints, and player expectations. A big aspect of those games was multiplayer, a no-no after F76 and Todd's reemphasis on singleplayer experiences. The procgen base thus lacks somewhat, and needs to be compensated by a good handcrafted experience to accompany the new scale which we now know was logistically impractical. You have slightly less copy-pasted and empty worlds but are now alone with the traditional expected experience detracted. On top of that the engine couldn't handle land vehicles based due to slow world streaming, load screen frequency and times borders on atrocious, among other small details. Unlike Fallout 4 that many FNV fans like me railed against for losing certain RPG elements, that game still retained a very high user score, unlike Starfield which has gradually declined in ratings not reminiscent of review bombing. Cyberpunk is more concise in scope, and I don't expect Bethesda to go the length of CDPR and free content fix the game for the next 2.5 years. They did it for F76 but there is an active revenue stream in the form of memberships for that game to incentivize it.
@@mastah39 I agree that longform reviewers are often detached from the actual buyers and fanbase, and I see where you're coming from with Cyberpunk, but I find Patrician's review really does touch on what even the general fanbase is voicing, which is a forgettable main quest and lack of compelling reasons to play long term. I push back against "different market" as its akin to what FNV fans were told when criticizing Fallout 4 which was "we're having fun, don't like it don't buy it" which often leads to the "it sold well, who cares?" reduction. In this case the overall discussion and active player count is especially down for a BGS game, the criticism more amongst the general BGS fan community and not say, an annoying Obsidian fan subsect who trash any BGS Fallout. I really don't think there is a hate or flame mob that creates said detachment here. My sense of the community overall is apathy and disappointment which is arguably worse than previous BGS titles, will severely hurt long term sales, relevancy, and active player count, which then hurts the modding community. I hope Bethesda can do it, but knowing they largely move as a single dev team of a few hundred to next game cycle after each release, I'm not so sure they'll have the resources for the necessary overhauls to bring people back.
I like his ideas, probably some of Bethesdas only recent original ideas; (not reused ideas from Tim Cain or Michael Kirkblade I mean) shame his writing wastes the potential his own ideas
@@chrisg4305 I think so too, ironic; he made the most original unique lore, he kind of made The Elder Scrolls...then they got rid of him/he removed himself for getting too experimental, Bethesda are comfortable, don't like experimentation.
@@Lightsign01I just think he’s really bad because he puts the blinders on too criticism and beliefs that aren’t his own, forcing “good morals” and ‘evil chars bad’ down our throats
I'm sorry but I want Emil fired. Gone. I'm a developer, the fact that they are PROUD of not having design documents is insane to me. They complain about being hindered by their quickly outdated docs - what in the waterfall model is this nonsense?
I'm also a game dev (designer) and I've worked in triple a studios with design directors who frown upon documentation. They're always wrong, and it 100% made the projects worse every time
Im working on a game on the side and I work in tech and not planning at that scale is just pure laziness and short sightedness...we see 0 innovation with just graphic engines getting better that's it. I went back to older games and new revisions like uo outlands.
In Freelancer (2003) your first job contact buys you a ship-- essentially a space lemon which is the cheapest thing in the market, as the reason you take the job with her.
Damn, I haven't seen Freelancer mentioned in so long. It pulls off a lot of things that games struggle with now even with the development hell that it went through. Unfortunately digital anvil got shit canned, and it's spiritual successor is... **Star Citizen.**
@@mattjk5299 It's not even that Freelancer was a perfect game or anything, it definitely has its problems, but it's managed to do things even back then which no other game has been able or wanted to bother doing, which is very frustrating. Not to mention stuff like plot which is honestly so phoned in for most games now you don't even have to be a good writer to do better, you just have to answer for a few 'why'-s
It's felt for a long time now that instead of "try to say yes to all the things players ask to do" it's more like "try to quietly railroad the player into asking the specific questions we can say yes to".
@@KunjaBihariKrishna Is that supposed to be criticism? A decade ago was when EA was ramping up their FPS slop and CDPR were riding high with Witcher 3. That's mighty high praise and calling it a "narrative" makes it sound like you aren't handing it out intentionally.
Pat is the only one who can keep me engaged for 8 hours in one sitting. I really appreciate him going into each and every point he makes in a rather easy to understand manner. Some people use words that can be too complicated for my ESL ass
@@krill87 yea and i still have the video running on my pc. But my first video of patrician was his Morrowind one as it is for a lot of subs i imagine and i watched that in one sitting. Which is what i based the claim on.
@@herudihaan6105 i took the day off work for the rogue trader game. On my days off that are too cold to work on my car (and when my wife is at work) i go full reddit mod and just spend the day on my pc. On a side note i got up early to find out this game would release at 5 pm for me so it was useless too.
it's amazing to me how many times Todd & the crew can say "it's like Skyrim in space!" then turn around and blame gamers for comparing it to Fallout & Elder Scrolls when "it's its own thing".
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I appreciate the positive reception to this video. I've read the first ~1100 comments, hence all the hearted comments. If I heart a comment, that means I've read and acknowledge what was said, but didn't have a response.
Ive been in the hospital the past few days binge watching ur content thank u for everything bro i hate being here but ur content makes the stay more enjoyable
the Immortan Joe to our War Boys
So many of my thoughts on the game have been perfectly laid out here.
My main hatred for this game is the now played out multiverse premise. I feel like unless you have a game with a strong central character, one who goes through a journey with weight and personal character growth, a multiverse narrative just becomes a dead end. I can count on one hand the amount of times I've seen a decent multiverse story.
I don't know what Bethesda was thinking beyond "Wow this multiverse stuff is really popular isn't it?"
Look at my sweet grandson!
Love you, too short
The main thing Starfield highlighted for me is how much the Elder Scrolls and Fallout series are coasting on the good writing that they _used_ to have, from people who no longer (or never did) work at Bethesda. As soon as current Bethesda tried to make a new IP that isn't built on the better ideas of better writers they no longer have access to, it all just fell apart. Everything comes into such stark relief; the lack of follow-through, the casual breaking of their own setting rules, the complete unwillingness (or inability) to explore any ideas deeper than surface level, the unwillingness to ever _say_ anything. These things have plagued the Elder Scrolls and Fallout games for _years,_ but we've always been able to ignore them, or at least excuse them because there were other cool things to look at. But here, it's all there is. It's like Fallout and the Elder Scrolls were ships built by master craftsmen that have had their parts replaced over the years, slowly but surely, by cheap, inferior knockoff parts, but were able to stay afloat because the original ships were just that well-made. Starfield is a new ship made entirely of those cheap replacement parts, and it just doesn't float.
basically.. like basically this. all of this really.. They did well with Morrowind, but then Oblivion and Skyrim just slowly took our freedom away.. Now Starfield a new IP.. they could've done whatever they wanted, they chose to make crap.
You nailed it. And Fallout was an IP already in existence. The lore and world bulding had effectively been done before Fallout 3 , outside of Bethesda. Their games have always clunked and janked along, but there was enough good stuff (eg exploration) to overlook that.
Tes 6 is in deep trouble, the old lifeblood of the studio has all left
true, like TES or Fallout at their worst still have interesting elements in their settings, but Starfield is just a nothing burger of nasa concept art and unity sci fi weapon assets. It was space, the could have put ANYTHING in their game, but they put nothing of note.
I guess we finally have an answer to the ship of Theseus question
Modder who started the whole concept of survival mechanics in an elderscrolls game, his mods still being seen as the defeinitive versions of those mechanics
Bethesda after hiring him: You work in an excel spreadsheet and tweak the economy
Modder who is one of the most famous house mod creators
Bethesda after hiring her: you place random useless clutter all around the world
Seems like Bethesda's main issue isn't a lack of skills or talent, but god awful leadership and managment.
Sounds like the "meat in seats" hiring and task placement that a lot of large Japanese companies use. "It says here that you have a masters in business law. Great! You're going to be working in our UI/UX coding department." - something like this happened to a friend at NEC.
Where can i learn more about this?
Bethesda didn't even hire them they're "consultants" that weren't even offered a steady paycheck for their work. And lets be honest here, if they chose to work for Bethesda they deserved it.
@@GhostOfSnuffles Agreed. They deserve it, because they not only invested time in producing a mediocre game, but likely had to sign NDAs and non-competes that will effect their future involvement in mod creation.
What ding bat goes and works for Bethesda knowing the quality of work they produce, and the reputation they've developed? Talented or not, it sounds like they were clout chasing.
@@GhostOfSnuffles Yup, 0 respect for any modder that was willing to sellout and go be a marketing point to sell the latest toddslop to the unwashed masses.
"The phrase 'there is truly nothing new under the sun' is not supposed to be a design motto" honestly one of the most biting critiques I've heard in ages
It's almost if they had a meeting and asked everyone if they wanted to add stories from their favorite sci fi movies, novels, tv shows, etc and Todd just kept saying yes. Not in cool easter egg way just flat out plagiarism.
@arkeshn729 When I started this, I didnt notice he named is character Malcom Reynolds and wholeheartedly thought Bethesda added a NPC by the same name
What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun. Is there a thing of which it is said, “See, this is new”? It has been already in the ages before us. There is no remembrance of former things, nor will there be any remembrance of later things yet to be among those who come after.
@@johnwiks2597 New things come from a synthesis of the old. Soldiers, demons, and kittens existed before the 1900s, but Warhammer 40K Chaos NekoMarines did not.
I've never actually finished this video. I've tried a few times, but every time Pat says "...no design document" I wake up naked in front of Bethesda Studio in Rockville Maryland.
Once you get there, you’re supposed to go to Balmora and speak to Caius Cossades.
Finally finished the video. And I gotta say that the line "Starfield is their most functional game to date, and yet their worst designed game ever" is a perfect summary of this game.
If you play on the series s it crashes every 2 hours and yes I started counting. And I encountered many quest bugs, and even bugs where I couldn’t complete challenges to upgrade perks.
So for everyone saying it’s their least buggy that may be true if you’re on a nice pc. I literally had less bugs playing Oblivion day 1 on 360 and Morrowind on Xbox.
And I’m not arguing btw I know we’re on the same side Starfield sucks lol just giving everyone another perspective on the bugs.
There's a big trend with Bethesda games where the honeymoon period of their games being praised unconditionally before players find the many flaws within them are getting shorter and shorter. And they aren't doing anything to reverse that trend because they're too scared to axe their "throw everything at the wall and use what sticks" approach to developing.
@@DJWolfHousehow many saves you got??😅😅 Yeah I played in cloud and had few frame drops and a few crashes on series S
@@Super_Broly I’m playing BG3 now and the game has not crashed one time on the Series S. I don’t even think I’ve ran into one bug and I’m 60 hours deep. I’m so glad they came out around the same time. Bethesda has been exposed and has zero excuses.
Edit: finished campaign at 150 hours and have two more going with 10 hours each. Those two crashes were still the only ones and it was one specific instance. Otherwise a few minor graphical issues. One misspelling. 4-5 missing item titles, 2-3 missing dialogue choices. Those were the only bugs I encountered in 170 hours. That is an insane level of quality.
@@DJWolfHouse Last time i played Oblivion i had tons of bugs i had to fix through console commands and this was on a pc with much higher reqs than what the games asks. From Oblivion onwards all of their games are still buggy pieces of garbage that run like shit in several areas and that still have many years old bugs.
I got Andreja's affinity based dialouge right after I drank a bottle of wine to pass the final boss persuasion check and ruined the climax for myself. She was talking about how everyone she knew has died or left her alone yada yada and I told her I would never leave her alone and would always be there for her. Then I walked into the unity.
lmao.
rofl even.
Rick James: “UNITYYYYYYYYYY”
Hahahahahahaha that will always be memorable
Well, to be fair. You now have access to an effectively infinite number of universes where that's true. Just not the one you just walked out of.
🤷♂🤷♂🤷♂
Bethesda had the perfect excuse to have every NPC be killable, and to have multiple wildly varied and impactful outcomes for questlines, I mean it was RIGHT THERE - they wrote in a (technically) infinitely resetable universe and did NOTHING with it...
I was already expecting that. Since Oblivion Bethesda has always implemented essential NPCs.
At the very least cut off the essential flags in new game plus
Even worse is that they throw this out in the same year we got BG3, where for the first two acts everything is killable and the game will progress normally, and pretty much you only get a few essential NPCs at the very end on Act 3 (and even then their essential status is rather temporary and it's very possible the game will be patched out in the near future to account for early deaths of said NPCs). Bethesda made a story that would easily allow the player to wreck havoc as much as they wanted and chickened out, while Larian made a game where it would be perfectly reasonable to make plenty of NPCs essential and chose to go the extra mile to allow player freedom.
@@ggwp638BC Exactly, I locked myself out of two entire questlines early on in BG3 and my reaction wasn't "Oh I wish they didn't allow me to kill these characters", it was "I really want to start another playthrough to see what I'm missing"
@@ggwp638BC You can kill everyone in Divinity original sin 2 and still complete the game
An 8 hour critique of a game I don't and have no intention of owning. The perfect way to spend an evening
Right?
Oh, come on, it's "A Quick Retrospective". LOL
@@carrier_pigeon214 I'm guessing that was part of his joke, yet he goes so in depth with it. "Oh a quick Restropspective, how nice." (8 hours later) "THat was 8 hours to tell me the game is playable and decent." Which it is. Starfield has some problems but to quote TOdd Howard "It just works." And that it does, especially now with most of the major bugs fixed.
@TheZamaron the game is playable, but I wouldn't call it decent. Mediocre at best.
@@PurpleSeaUrchen It is decent. It doesn't suck, aside from some of the RPG elements, but it's not terrible.
If there was ever a game for Bethesda to completely remove the training wheels, it's Starfield NG+. You have a perfect justification. Someone's been through the game once; let them sequence break, kill whoever they please, and do whatever they want. At worst, they just hard reset the universe for the next NG+ version.
But you see, that would take extra effort, and we all know that Bethesda hates effort.
Bethesda also thinks you're too dumb to handle having total freedom of choice.
Not only that but actually CHOOSE your side. Like become UC member and enemy of freestar. Think if you would be part of small attack force trying to conquer settlements and planets or trying to make people if settlement to join your faction. This was perfect chance to make a sandbox game with complex politically evolving system. What if its the reason you make outposts...to fight against enemy faction. Reason to build walls and defences. It would be awesome.
I think the Bethesda writers and quest designers just have their brains on autopilots by now.
"Let's create a new quest."
"Is it a fetch quest or a kill quest?"
"(Flips a coin) Kill quest."
"Okay, remember to make the quest giver essential, and make the guy you have to kill essential until you have to actually kill him, oh and also make every single bystander near the quest giver essential too for good measure."
"Of course."
@@Flufferpup I actually think it would have taken less effort overall than what they did.
16:36 Hearing Emil say they essentially scrapped Design Documents after Fallout 3 makes everything they've done since then make *so* much more sense.
Yup, couple that with both todd and emil saying they dont ever take in criticism and don't self reflect between games, and the one writer that quit who said that everything has to go through todds approval and todd is too busy to do that effectively now due to how many studios he manages. It really explains a lot. Sprinkle in some esg score wokeness that has infected bgs like everything else for good measure.
Fallout 4 dev1: so whats the story?
Fallout 4 dev2: I have no fucking idea.
@@honeybadger6275 Pretty good points all around-
Oh. You used 'woke" unironically.
Lemme guess, you got triggered by the pronouns screen, right?
@@lazaroskarmaniolas7410 Yeah, I am triggered by degenerates being used as a cudgel of the global bankers to dismantle and destroy my nation.
@@lazaroskarmaniolas7410 You woke bro? Ew
Whenever I hear “the potential for modding is great” it kind of makes my skin crawl. It really doesn’t matter how underbaked any Bethesda game is, how lackluster and behind the curve they are, the fans will make it good. “Our consumers will do the work for us” is a marketable feature at this point.
Edit: Made this comment early in the modding section then he said basically all of it verbatim lmao
The problem is also that it just isn't true. Skyrim is a decent modding platform because there's enough game that you can make it work, Fallout 4 is an okay modding platform because the gameplay still offers enough that you aren't totally turned off by the terrible story and lack of content. Starfield shows BGS has finally slipped to the point where this totally breaks down, the story sucks, the gameplay sucks, and the only thing left is... ship building? There just isn't enough game left to fix anymore.
The problem is they changed how plugin dependency work and basically made it impossible to run several dependant mods ds at once (mods looks up dependency by position), ruining entire mod ecosystem from the get go.
@@whydontyouhandledeez I think Bethesda overlooked that point. I assume Bethesda thought that so long as they made anything people would just flock to it (probably due to them huffing their own hopium) that they forgot that any game with a good modding scene had a great base or at least entertaining base game that functions mechanically. As you bring up Skyrim, even though the main quest was terrible the gameplay mechanics were fun enough that people wanted to mod it. But Starfield? The only way I could see mods taking off is if they did a whole Starfield 2.0 rework but they will not do that since I think think now instead of hopium I assume the devs are huffing copium that the dlc and mod tools will get people to come back.
@@SinaelDOverom Finally someone explains this in a simple way, thanks!
You're being critical of BGS, right? Because if you're criticising people who just love modding *for modding* you're well wide of the mark.
It remains to be seen exactly how good SF will be for mods. BGS have never truly appreciated the community of creators, or quite how important they are. And SF's potential might be kneecapped. We really need to see next year.
But if modding "potential" is there, then that'll be awesome. I swear some people around here don't understand modding. It isn't just a nice little bonus, a peripheral sideshow. It is an enjoyable thing in and of itself - and BGS have, thus far, been pretty much unique in providing such a scale and canvas for people to create and tinker with.
Thing is, Starfield doesn't just fall short of its contemporary competitors on the gaming scene. It falls short of games made years, or even *decades* ago.
Compare Neon and the Astral Lounge to Omega, and the atmosphere of its nightclub The Afterlife - that was from Mass Effect 2, released in 2010.
Also from 2010 was New Vegas, and any comparison between the faction systems in those two games is a slaughter.
Barrett's companion quest is a joke when measured against Jolee Bindo's companion quest from Knights of the Old Republic. The latter at least let you investigate multiple leads, follow up with different NPCs, and even represent your companion's friend in a legal hearing. And that was in *2003.*
It is genuinely *shocking* how hollow and empty an experience Starfield is.
New Vegas is still crazy to me, Obsidian took Fallout 3, improved literally every aspect of it: quests, dialogue, gameplay, progression, game design, branching stories, player choice etc and Bethesda could’ve so easily taken so much inspiration from that for Fallout 4 and onwards to build on it and then Fallout 4 came out and they had learned nothing.
I compare Starfield with Wing Commander: Privateer and Privateer 2: The Darkening. Games that were released in the mid to late 1990s. Starfield falls woefully short in every aspect. Story. Trading mechanics. Space combat. Player investment. Everything Starfield does that Privateer and Privateer 2 also do, Starfield comes up woefully short in. (I just looked them up again. Wing Commander: Privateer is from 1993 and Privateer 2: The Darkening is from 1996. It says a lot about Bullshitesda that I would rather play a twenty-eight year old game. I hope the Microshaft fans are enjoying their exclusives.)
Vasco is so iconic that I immediately abandoned him at Constellation headquarters and never thought about him again.
it’s funny because the robot ally in the Infinite Warfare campaign is a far stronger character with concrete development and pulls of that TARS/T2 likeable robot companion thing so much better. Bethesda’s characterization shown up by CoD campaigns lol
@@mananlak bro fix your internet
@@BlahBlah-uh8rj wtf why did this shit do this
@@mananlaklmao
Fr, i left him, but eventually came back to him to carry my shit because hes the only companion who doesnt get annoying lol
The planets are not empty enough to get the feeling Todd describes. There's so many abandon outposts that I never felt the pride/wonder/discovery of being the first human to land in this planet. If anything it made me feel dirty somehow, like I was part of the problem as 3 other ships landed in this same area while I searched through space trash left by other explorers.
Yeah. I kinda get that same feeling, like there should have been life, but now there isn't and here you are being a vulture coming in after the good bits of the corpse have been eaten.
Not empty enough to be striking but not full enough to be interesting. Starfield manages to thread the needle and make its planets as boring and unengaging as possible
@@C1yde902
Right, and I fucking LOVE space. I absolutely adore space. I want to like this game so badly but I'm not spending big money to play this game, bc I have to also get a console.
It would be nice if there was an option when selecting landing zones that indicated how populated an area is. That way you can still farm the POIs if you want to, but can also explore maybe more resource rich empty areas. Then again, resources would then have to be made valuable.
Doesn’t have the same feeling exploring planets in Mass Effect 1 had. Sure people raged about the clunky Mako but those planets truly felt empty, abandoned, or like you were the first person to ever land on some of them. I wish they kept that mechanic in the sequels and just worked on optimizing the vehicle and terrain but instead the sequels abandoned it entirely and so mass effect 2-3 felt like they took place in smaller and smaller universes.
One thing I should add to the "Modder's Paradise thing:" Part of why Morrowind, Oblivion, Fallout, Skyrim are so popular with modders is because there is potential in there. The base game is fun, at least to some people. If a game is meant to be heavily modded, but doesn't lure in players, it won't get many modders. There has to be something special in the game.
I think the world is too empty to begin with to inspire many people to want to expand on it. Bethesda only bothered to make a handful of major cities and factions, none of which are interesting or believable.
@@guldcat1619 they "were" masters of worldbuilding Starfield showed they aint anymore. You can easily paint a curve from Morrowind to this Game and see the decline and i doubt Starfield will get the same attention to modding like Skyrim.
@@guldcat1619 Past tense. Bethesda WERE the masters of worldbuilding. They didn't build a world in Starfield. Not even one, out of the 1000s of palette swapped Ubisoft dustballs you can go to.
yeah, like 10 hours in I was writing my list of the mods I would create, but then by 30 hours in I just abandoned the game fully
The modding popularity behind TES and Fallout games are primarily fueled by attempts to fix every progressively watered-down version of two beloved IPs.
Kinda like…”well this is what we got, so let’s make the best out of it”..
2:10:14 if somebody told me (seriously) that they played Death Stranding but skipped all the cutscenes so that they could experience the gameplay loop, I'd instantly assume they were an ax murderer
Or a Bethesda fan.
Hey that gameplay loop was actually pretty satisfying though. But yeah skipping all the cutscenes is pretty wild.
@@Lobsterwithinternet I disagree w the implication that what my fellow Bethesda fans and I enjoy about that company's games is modeled accurately in Death Standing's gameplay loop.
@@spiraljumper74 I haven't played it, but from the couple hours of footage in reviews I've seen, it doesn't look like a game which would be satisfying to play off purely the gameplay loop. That is to say, if the game was stripped of its narrative, I'm not confident it could be fairly considered a good game.
That said, I was largely joking. I don't actually think there's anything wrong w liking or even loving a bad game - which, as previously stated, I believe Death Stranding would be if evaluated on the gameplay loop in a vacuum. I have 280hrs on FF XIII so I will never judge someone for what games they like lol
" Starfield is absolutely the game that you deserve."
I can't agree more. Bethesda fans deserve this at this point.
As a lifelong Bethesda fan I whole heartily agree.
We are gullible little goblins who see a new Bethesda logo and cream our pants immediately
@@genfleurke9230nostalgia can really ruins people in low spots
At this point I'm just waiting to see if the community that BGS has ever actually collapses to the point of nonexistence or at least an incredibly niche section of the game industry with standards below "absolute zero". At what point will the community finally say that they got a bad game? At what point will they learn and fully understand that Bethesda are hacks? If that never comes to pass I'll just be glad I left it after Fallout 4 and keep laughing at the fools who purchase/pre-order their products. A deteriorating community blindly following a deteriorating company to its bitter end couldn't be a better match.
@@joaxarkus4648 maybe that'll be the point they actually return to what made Daggerfall and Morrowind so great, when they have no other choice but to actually listen to the lifelong fans, but at this point, I'm convinced neither my version of the future, nor yours, will ever come to pass...
@@brandondanforth8342 at that point I believe it would have to be a new (and probably indie) developer to recapture that feel.
The New Game+ system was the perfect opportunity for them to go back to the Morrowind style quest design of letting you kill any NPC you wanted, but with an interesting 'out' instead of just having to load an older save file. How they managed to drop the ball so hard on the one big feature they were so protective of pre-release boggles the mind
I think it's because Bethesda's "philosphy" (if you can call it that) is that the whole world is crafted around the player. Which on paper sounds good, but here's the thing - they view the player as a toddler. By removing more complex mechanics because they're not "fun", not allowing the players to kill essential NPCs and let them live with the consequences, not having a strong narrative message that the game would expore or allowing the players to role-play as NOT the chosen one, make Bethesda role-playing games, essentially, gaming fast food.
"Say yes to the player as much as possible... except for killing our donut steel OCs."
Because NG+ isn't an out for YOU, the player, it's an out for THEM, the designer, to get out of having to design new content to keep you engaged. Now they can just keep you spinning that hamster wheel infinitely!
@@simonaspalovis1204 Here's the thing tho, saying that Bethesda crafts their worlds around the player is a complete lie. Its something that sounds nice that Bethesda and Todd likes to say, but the reality couldn't be further from the truth.
The reality is that Bethesda despises player input. Saying that they craft their worlds around the player necessarily implies that they take great pains to account for player actions. If they had their way, the player would just be bolted to a chair and forced to watch a movie of their shitty story. They spent like 8 years making their game and the last thing they'd ever want is some player coming in and fucking it all up.
Even back in the Morrowind days this was true, they never really bothered to account for player actions, they just gave you that stupid message that tells you to reload your game because you soft-locked yourself out of quest progression. That way of doing things is "better" than how they do it now, but its still not accounting for player actions.
@@matrix3509I would give ANYTHING to go back to those “problems” that Morrowind had. Morrowind was a MASTERPIECE compared to this trash.
I still can't believe that A) Emil is a real person and also B) Someone like Emil was let anywhere near power or even a script
He's buddy with Todd, thats why
Why talk about the "Prophesy broken" prompt from morrowind as if it was inconvenient instead of just respecting the player's agency while still letting them know about it. It's crazy, just fucking let us play in your sandbox instead of placing random restrictions on everything for no reason.
@@caseycox1002 Because those making the decisions at Beth don't understand what they made, how and why it worked at that time. That happens surprisingly often with developers that start small and go big - they learn the wrong lessons from initial success.
I've never seen him before, but he does look like a typical asshole 😅
@@SinaelDOverom not to mention that most the people who made the intial successes possible were not retained or learned from either
The reason they aren't called "missions" and instead "quests" is because _the core of the engine hasn't changed since Morrowind._ Stimpak? those are classified as "ingestible" in the editor. You're eating your syringes. "explosive ammo"? nah, bro, that's got a fire enchantment. It's literally the same game over and over with a different skin.
Funny how the only game that had different projectile types was new vegas..
@@honeybadger6275 Which wasn't made by Bethesda.
Come think of it, Morrowind is the only Bethesda game that had spears and throwing weapons (that aren't grenades). Aka a melee weapon that can't use their default fly-swatting animation.
@@Zorothegallade-gg7zg Yup, notice how the only games that had scripted reloads for lever actions/pump actions were new vegas/76? Both games that had other studios making/working on them, fallout 3,4, and starfield, every single weapon is magazine fed, except for the lever actions and double barrel, which always reload a full mag.
You put more work into this video than Bethesda into writing Starfield's story.
A BGS game doesn't really need a well written story to be hugely enjoyable to play, and to support the story that matters; the player's, through RP and arrangement of the building blocks (features, factions, side stuff, characters, and MQ).
I'm currently planning a Cyberpunk 2.1 character because SF's MQ has been flat out broke for me for about two months, and I'm fuckin' sick of waiting for a fix... So I won't be able to listen to most of this video. I'm sure SF's story will be disappointing. BGS have had mostly really bad writing, and main narrative, since Oblivion, so I'm not really expecting good storytelling this time.
SF's general quality of *dialogue* writing is improved - mostly. A bigger issue is still the psychology of the writing and narrative, let's say. It still feels quite infantile and poorly thought out. Again, that's been there in force since Oblivion. For whatever reason, that's their culture of writing.
I'm still hugely enjoying it. I mean, I was before it broke...
Daaaaaamn... and I think that isn't even exaggerated.
@@SabiJDthree paragraphs of cope
@@MrOnay-px1jx I mean, he's right. BGS hasn't been the greatest at main story writing in a long time. It's the side quests, environment storytelling and visuals that make them enjoyable to play. Seriously, their main stories have sucked or years now
Emil Pagliarilo and his writing has had terrible consequences for the Bethesda fanbase
3:43:30 "If you don't like it, don't use it."
It drives me up the wall when a game considers the player choosing not to play it a win condition.
If i can spend $100 on a “game” that was anything but fun, then i can spend $10 on someone who actually gave me 8 hours of well planned out entertainment. Thank you for your hard work and effort and I hope Bethesda is just a little ashamed of themselves any time they hear about your video.
(♥$0.02) but you didn't spend $10 - it says you only gave $9.99
they've been doing this grift since daggerfall.
it was the illusion of fun. i stopped playing the game because i didnt want to play it anymore... because i relised it wasnt fun, it breaks my brain trying to think about this game, and everything thats wrong with it. everything that i enjoyed and everything that i couldnt
@@LIONGOD time for a change
some guy spend 100 on this game and said it was boring in 8 hours and the internet hated him because he said PHOCKING PRONOUNS once while he said 10 times THE GAME IS BOOOARING, ITS BOOOARING, MODERN DAY CALIFORNIAN SHT, BECAUSE WE ARE BOAAARING, WE ARE SOOO BOAAARING...and now he is 100% vindicated.
I enjoy this running gag of you naming these deep long retrsopective videos as "quick analysis". I expect the ESVI one to be a day and a half long.
Well, going by Bethesda's track record, we might get an even shallower experience. Thus a shorter video lol
If old uncle Sheo’s challenge is to be completed, it’s gonna be two years long 😅
Holy Shit Bethesda doesn't use Design Documents!? And they're trying to make massive open world games??? Like jesus christ I can't believe I didn't know this before because this explains so goddamn much about why their games are such a mess from a design perspective. This is fucking mindboggling, I might need to make my own video just getting my thoughts out on this because like, fuck...
Edit: Since people have asked, I did in fact make that video, and I honestly might make more along its line specifically examining games through the lens of how good or bad their organizational skills and documentation was.
It’s utterly baffling and just fucking STUPID from design perspective! If you make that video I’ll watch it.
I'm pretty sure it was just Starfield, not all their games. But it would explain a lot about it
Yeah, it explains why so many mechanics are just vestigial ideas that might work in one or two quests.
@@nagger8216 Bethesda stopped following design documents during the development of Fallout 3. Emil Pagliarulo outright said as much during his 'Talks From Story' presentation.
I found the casino dungeon early on and had a blast. Little did I know that mechanic would hardly be used ever again. Which is funny considering the act of boarding an enemy ship would be a great way to do repeatable zero-g fights since the ship probably shouldn't be capable of running gravity generators at that point.
Emil's entire schtick about not using design documentation earns his reputation in spades
whats design documentation?
@@JL-ek9to Writing down what you're doing in a document, so that the team can keep all the info together and reference it when needed.
It's too hard to maintain a 50 page document? I'm going to guess that since google docs released two years before fallout 3 released, they didn't use that tech to make that job easier. Good grief
Can't leak documentation if there isn't any.. :(
@@JL-ek9to Google it.
I still can't get over Sarah telling you during your initiation that Constellation accepts people from all walks of life, even if they use morally dubious methods. Only for every companion in Constellation to be Lawful Good towards anything illegal you do.
Rabidly lawful good
That’s corporate/institutionalized inclusion for ya
@@andrizzleton its always diversity of skin color but never diversity of thought
@@almalone3282100%
I was actually starting to gaslight myself into thinking she never actually said that, considering how allergic these companions are to anything even morally grey.
Why do Starborn exist?
Like what's their endgame?
The ONLY thing Starborn can do is collect these artifacts that just exist for some reason, then that makes their powers a little more powerful. They can do this hundreds of times and somehow be killed by a non-Starborn who has collected at most 24 artifacts compared to their HUNDREDS of full sets. So, clearly the power Starborn gain falls off majorly after a certain number of rounds, so, what are they still doing jumping from universe to universe if they need to collect like a thousand full sets of artifacts to get ONE percent more power for their totally not unrelenting force?
What are they DOING? They're PEOPLE, what's the PURPOSE of abandoning EVERYONE you've ever known to jump from universe to universe, not forming any kind of relationship with anyone ever again because you're going to abandon them in very short order, literally leaving the universe. Are they just getting a tiny bit more powerful forever? Why? What's the POINT of literally any of this? Why don't they just get the powers in their home universe, and then KEEP THEM, and stay there, and just be the most badass mercenary in the galaxy and be rich and have whatever they want? If they REALLY wanna be immortal, just do ONE jump, then collect the 2nd set of artifacts, then just stay there and be awesome.
The entire premise of the game, is POINTLESS.
The entire purpose of Starfield was to satisfy Todd's ego. I just don't get what the point was other than that
They're basically Miraak, but stripped of any backstory or personal motivation, turning them in just a generic "My Schwartz is as big as yours" villain for you to stomp to prove that your Schwartz is indeed bigger than theirs.
Every quest/questline since either skyrim or fallout 3 has essentially been written in a way that things only happen to move the plot forward, no real reason for it other than it happens to forward the plot and I hate it.
@@honeybadger6275 But those games actually had plots. Like, okay, I found a thing for Liberty Prime; that might be really basic with no depth or introspection or anything, but it's at least serviceable--I'm doing something to make something happen to achieve a goal. But the Starborn thing, as he was saying, just has no point. "Come, join the Unity, by jumping onto this hamster wheel and running for eternity!"
'No design document' really is the best and most concise criticism of this game. It's not even the game is worse than the sum of its parts, there is no sum of the parts.
Starfield is just a non-game. I look at it and I see nothing, I don't know what I'm looking at. I don't know what it is. 'It' doesn't know what it is, and that comes across so clearly in all the videos I've seen of it, whether commentary, analysis, critique, or just straight gameplay.
The Starfield team didn't need a design document simply because Bugthesda has been using the same design template for the last 20 years.
@@VrilWaffen At least that WAS a design document. Starfield feels like it lacked even that.
@@Blisterdude123 well, point is the lack of a unifying design document for Starfield is more of an indictment on Bethesda's creative stagnation. Why would Todd and crew write a design document when at the end of the day they only want to make FO4 in space? And FO4 was just Skyrim with guns, and Skyrim was just FO3 with swords and better graphics, and FO3 was just Oblivion with guns, and Oblivion was just Morrowind with slightly better graphics, etc. Bethesda didn't write a design document because they never intended to make anything other than same game they've always made, and this time it really became obvious how incredibly dated and creatively bankrupt their game design is.
Emil- "Ignore the reviews"
Also Emil- "Let's type out a cringe gaslit 15 tweet chain about the reviewers"
I wanted to LOVE Starfield. I tried to brute force an engrossing and enjoyable experience in Starfield during my entire 120 hours playing Starfield.
I am not spending another 8 seconds on Starfield, let alone 8 hours. But you're still getting engagement, a like and sub from me because - holy crap you earned them with this endeavor, You LEGEND.
Yeah, it's tough to look at my ~120 hours and say "that was time well spent". Felt like a lot of it was just me looking for the good parts.
@@Patricianat least 30 of those hours were probably load screens/menu surfing
My biggest disappointment with Starfield was the lack of a special “classic beginning” option which starts you off in in the belly of a ship and the first thing you hear is a narrator saying “they’ve taken you from the Sol System’s Prison Colony, first by shuttle and now by freighter, to the east, to New Atlantis.”
Starfield is like meeting up with an old best friend from high school. Except now you’re older and they never grew up and are always talking about the pyramid scheme thing they’re trying to sell.
which is the same pyramid scheme he did 10 years ago, using the same dialogue he did then, wearing the same clothes he did back then, driving the same car, using the same jokes and quibs he did back then...
@@MrGeneralPBexcept now they're rusty and the cracks are showing
lmao at least he's consistent.@@MrGeneralPB
"haha remember that wild night after prom? (Skyrim). Yo I just had another wild night just like that 10 years later haha (starfield)
Coooool
And you met up with them again a few months later cause you heard they failed the first pyramid scheme and was hoping they would learn
Bethesda has made it clear with starfield. It’s their first new Project in like decades. They could’ve made this IP/world/universe whatever as rich as Tolkien’s or broad as star wars or whatever else. They had the time, they had the staff, they had the experience and funding. People have been covering for Bethesdas past mistakes for years saying “it’s not their fault they have to stay inside the bounds of the IP that already exists, they can’t make X cool or fun because Y from 20 years ago” to cover obvious terrible design and flawed concepts…and they’ve proved to everyone with this game that the existing IPs weren’t a shackle that was holding them down, but the only thing keeping them from absolutely shïtting the bed.
When left to their own devices with no lore constraints or lines to color inside of, they will make the dumbest most jumbled mess that’ll be forgotten in 3 years. It should be 1000% clear by now after the recent failures Bethesda is incompetent and unfit to continue making games with the IPs they own. I can’t imagine anyone defending them this time
Absolutely right
The fact they consciously decided to fit the story *after* a war with Mechs and genetically engineered monsters and reduced most of it to a slide show is nuts
Yes, the magic of Bethesda is completely over. Now let’s see what studio can take their place for great open world RPG’s, it’s clearly isn’t CDPR either. I honestly felt like Warhorse did an amazing job with Kingdom Come. I would like to see them develop something with huge funding.
@Gobsmacked29 I mean, it could have worked. The original Mass Effect was set after the Rachni wars and Krogan uprising, both of which would have been interesting settings for a decisions-heavy RPG. The difference is that it actuslly had an interesting story to tell that both stood on its own and intersected with the backstory in satisfying ways (unlike later games in the series, sadly)
The school girls cult will keep defending them till their dying breaths.
The biggest issue with Bethesda is they want to grow and grow and make things more simple instead of trying to refine what already works.
Refinement would mean downsizing and layoffs. Unfortunately for Bethesda, that may be coming for them no matter what for their failures.
The company grew and got popular because they simplified the RPG genre to a point that it became an Adventure game with RPG elements, half to appeal to the lowest common denominator and the other half to work around console limitations.
It's not surprising they reached this point, each time they released their newest game, more simplified than the one before, they were showered with praise.
@@CoolcleverstoneRefinement doesn't necessarily mean downsizing, that's just slimming down the team. A process can be refined without stripping its parts, it has to do with elegance and efficiency.
thats honestly how i feel about most game companies right now its not about redefining what works its about being bigger and simple at the same time.
I remember before its final launch my greatest fear was it'd just be No Man's Sky, but with a more designed single-player campaign and format.
But post-launch, I look back and think if they'd just copied No Man's Sky, but made it single-player, it would've at least been a fun game.
I imagine Todd watching this, and he’s disagreeing with everything for the first half. The second half finds him, scotch bottle in hand, sitting in his personal theater, reluctantly whispering his agreement. “Yeah, well, yeah. But we-we couldn’t…” *sips scotch*
As if Bethesda would listen to criticism lmfao
@@Superdosis They're still human, I bet every dollar I have this video circulated in the dev teams personal cell phones at least once or twice
Bethesda used AI to write Starfield's dialogue as well as quests so calling them human at this point is a stretch @@SmartAss4123
@@SmartAss4123 Also every single Bethesda game since Fallout 3 is hard proof they don't listen to any criticism.
On the intro to the game: There have been "Alternate start" mods for Oblivion, Skyrim, and Fo4 for years and years. They're some of the most popular mods for all those games. There's no way Bethesda doesn't know that people want a less rigid, more character-oriented opening to their games yet there was no effort to make Starfield any different.
Bethesda's perspective on it is probably "well we wanted to make this overly long boring railroady intro, if you dont like it just mod it out!"
Makes sense given they assume modders will make it anyway like they always do ..
It's hilarious that how contradictory Bethesda design is in several areas. They want the player to have freedom, and yet make highly restrictive, long intros that remove a lot of player expression. They want the player to explore their big world and ignore the main quest, and yet make the main quest so crucial to the game that skipping it means skipping a ton of content.
I mean, why fix what ain't broke? In this case broke being not selling. People keep buying it so they keep pumping out the same trash year after year. They've released skyrim how many times now, and has a single time not sold well? Why innovate at all?
Todd has mentioned before that he always uses UI mods on Skyrim, because he doesn't like the UI. The UI that he approved for the game.
Emil is the textbook definition of failing upwards. It's actually insane how obviously incompetent he is. They manage to drive out Will Shen who is actually decent but retain that bloody clown
Being a software engineer I can tell you, this is a trend in the whole corporate world, especially in our industry
Smart people leave. Happens plenty with Bethesda. Look at Arkane for example.
He's really really bad. The writing of these games have been the major flaw for me whenever he's the lead.
It says Will Shen was a lead quest designer for Starfield on his entry and left beause he was offered another job. Where did you get your info?
@@BagunkaCorporations were a mistake and should be taxed and regulated MORE than other people and businesses, NOT LESS.
Honestly I'm glad that atleast a channel talking about starfield feels immediate disgust at the fact that both bethestha and the fans not only assume that starfield will have mods, but are expecting modders to literally add content to their games.
The level of entitlement is obscene.
This in light of a prominent modder completely giving up starfield because it's so damn boring that there's no point to mod it...lmao
I don't see what's so disgusting about expecting Starfield to have mods. Actually, it's even ridiculous that we're talking future tense. Starfield HAS mods. It has had mods since pretty much the second it came out.
Similarly for expecting modders to add content. Every single Bethesda game has had content added to it by modders. There is zero reason to expect that Starfield won't.
Now, people acting entitled and rude about it instead of grateful to modders is a different thing, THAT is disgusting.
@@LasherTimora I think it's more the case of Bethesda cutting corners on things like UI design, character modeling, and planetary map design with the expectation that modders will then come in and fix it for them.
It's the difference between modders adding on to a complete experience and Bethesda selling a hollow game and expecting their audience to fill it in for them. Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim were all already great - mods just made them better. Starfield could be good, but if and only if, a lot of talented modders put in a lot of time and effort to patch the holes in the game's entire structure.
@@Snarkknight5 Uh, mods were needed to make Oblivion and Skyrim worth anything. Those games without mods are some of the most bland, generic, souless RPGs with some of the worst combat in gaming.
I wanna like this video 80 times over. You can thank NeverKnowsBest for sending me your way. Literally such a great break down of things I was already thinking or ideas that didn’t sit right and you clearly explained why it didn’t feel right.
"starfield is absolutely the game you deserve"
Unironically great ending line
Honesty.
I was expecting another line to mellow how fucking harsh that it was. Not that I disagree in any way.
I don't understand how the heck I deserve the game that is even worse than fallout 4 from the studio with such great potential and past.
@n1ko_n1ko you are a clown
@@n1ko_n1koHe is referring to the group of hardcore Bethesda fans that have denied his criticism of their games. The ones that don't see that the Bethesda from ages ago and the Bethesda now are completely different (if fallout 76 wasn't evidence enough). Anyway, they deserve this game.
@@xxXthehiguyXxxTodd shills aren't going to finish the video lol.
I'm amazed Emil still has a job. Bethesda could use ChatGPT to write the script for their next game, and it would be leagues above anything Emil could puke out. It's unreal.
45 minutes in: _"YoU toUched tHe MagiC rock. You arE now The CHosEn one. Here. TaKE my SpaceSHiP and SpaCeRoboT. NoW Go and LeAVe me On this MininG OutPOsT for NO ReasOn."_
Very much agree that Emil is a nightmarishly bad writer.
It's not that amazing once you know that Emil's friendship with Todd Howard is the reason he got the job to begin with. "It's not about what you know, but who you know" is a phrase that's completely relevant here.
Or he could use ChatGPT to write a design document.
Don't make me defend Emil. Even a moron is better than an ai.
They will be using ai if it's accepted widely come next game. Fuck that, I'd rather Emil still be trying to sell the messiest shits than an ai.
I think it's funny that Emil talk about no Lore Bombs , "Players don't want to read books". Daggerfall and Morrowind were full of lore books. It's part of what made older elder scrolls games unique.
Especially with TH-cam today. People would love making/watching videos about all the lore in those books
Even in Skyrim I recall making myself a little Lore library in the player home. I wanted the full set.
It's a crazy statement about open world rpgs. Readable things is the best way to add world building without having characters do lore dumps.
Also, you don’t not make things because some people don’t want them.
If only the lore was represented in the game world. X heroic sword is identical to one I could make at home. This is old Hroldan? Imagine if you went to old York, modernized as it is, and found nothing of historical value.
Yet they'll pockmark the landscape with an unreasonable amount of forts and towers with no significance.
The lore bombs weren't the problem. The lack of any impact craters was. Especially with a fast travel system, and in a province that is smaller than my hometown by land area, I'd have been happy to hike through "miles" of wilderness to get to that one site of an ancient battle.
If there's one thing procedural generation probably can create it's wilderness. That could be an area of map creation to save human effort on. Let humans, then, write books and build the places where humans live/lived.
I get shit from my BG3 group because I have a library in my camp chest. I read and keep at least 1 copy of every book and scroll because I want to know everything the game thinks is interesting enough to be written down
I really appreciate how you address mods in this essay. The dependency on and expectation of high-quality mods in order to make Bethesda's games both playable and the bare-minimum FUN to play is so bleak. Especially when there are hundreds of games that are cohesive and enjoyable out of the gate. If there's nothing to the game (no compelling writing or gameplay for example), what possible reason do I have to play Starfield instead of those games? It's not even the only space exploration game out there with how much it borrows from No Man's Sky and others. The only thing carrying Fallout and TES for me is nostalgia for previous games and their established worlds. Starfield doesn't even have that, so what is left except this entitlement to hard-working modders? It feels like such a cynical way to exploit passionate fans.
I would like to add that bethesda treats their fans like garbage, look at how the last like 4 or so years have been for skyrim where bethesda is updating the exe file for skyrim every few months breaking every single mod that uses skse and modders have to recompile their mods to fix it. It's absolutely cancerous. You look at the nexus site and you don't get well put together quest mods like what was made for new vegas or morrowind, now its super low effort weapons/armor ports from other games/asset stores. Bethesda's lack of passion has killed a lot of modders passion.
Starfield was the first video game that I legit enjoyed watching negative videos about and before watching this retrospective I couldn't figure why. Now I get that despite being a somewhat rational and sceptical adult I felt like my inner child that expected to relive all those joys of playing Skyrim for the first time was betrayed.
I guess Starfield was my last straw, I don't care about BGS games anymore.
Same and same. I did discover a lot of great channels. Starfield comprehensive reviews got so brutal they straight up banned them in their subreddit.
Too bad. I love it. Its the same feeling I had with FO4
You aren't the only one. There are thousands of games I have no interest in , don't enjoy, but don't even give them a second thought. Not one thought as to why some people may like them and i don't. But Starfield...has become a bit of a mini-obsession! Not the game - I really couldn't stand it from the first moment that nauseating sickly sweet music theme kicked in. But trying to identify what's wrong with it. And this is as someone who played all previous Bethesda games going back to Morrowind. And bemused by defenders of the game - were they running something different to my version? Were they not seeing the stilited NPCs and turgid dialog? Did their game not have the same few tasks and locations, but repeated hundreds of times? The same enemies everywhere with a brain dead AI?
Eventually, some psychologist is going to analyse what it is about Bethesda games that sucks people in even though we all they are kind of bad!
I think it is a uniquely frustrating experience to see and experience something that so obviously has immense potential only for that potential to be utterly squandered. That really is the essence of Starfield to me, they could have done almost anything and had an insane budget and time to do it and then made this. I still can barely believe it, how can you have a crazy multiversal time loop story and then do barely anything with it?
@@Jupa lmao that's true but the funny part is that any legit post that is remotely negative about starfield like a modder refusing to work on the game or SF getting s mixed rating on stream gets over 1k up votes every time while the usual posts get sub 300 - 600 up votes
BGS is that dungeon master who is really proud of the story they spent ages working on and are determined that the players experience it exactly as they want, even if means railroading them like a 19th Century tycoon
Except most DM's stories wouldn't kill you of boredom like Starfield does.
lol, last week I said
"Bethesda has absolutely become the Dungeon Master that promises you a campaign that you can pick any class you want, any alignment you want, go anywhere you want, then makes a face when you roll up a Neutral Evil assassin and goes "wwwwellllllllllllllll..." and railroads the party passively by making anything off the rails mind-numbingly boring.
The "check engine" light came on in Fallout 4, and got worse."
@@anthonybird546 "Now guys, I'm not saying we're being railroaded, but that tower over there is the only point of interest we have come across in five whole sessions."
Coming back from the game awards with starfield getting nothing and BG3 winning GOTY is so gratifying
Starfield didn't deserve anything. It didn't even deserve a nomination. People keep saying it was 'snubbed' but like, I don't agree. It wasn't a snub, it just wasn't good enough, simple as that.
@@Blisterdude123yeah. I've never played an RPG with less "role playing" elements as Starfield. GTA 5 is literally more of an RPG than Starfield. This game doesn't deserve any awards of any category.
hater@@Blisterdude123
to be honest Starfield honestly should have been at least nominated for Game of the Year and secondly f*** you hater
@@Blisterdude123
@@Blisterdude123 it should have at least been nominated for Game of the Year and that's it also pissed off hater
Thank you for this short retrospective. Every Bethesda employee should be required to watch this in its entirety.
a design document doesn't even have to be read, the very act of writing is like 90% of its usefulness, helping you consolidate ideas
In very small teams, sure. In a team of hundreds of people, it does *definitely* have to be read.
@@yurigagarin9765 Think Bethesda has around 150 employees when they started on SF. They aren't really that large of a company, just well known.
*edit* I should add that I understood your point, lol.
It is frequently referenced when used in the making of games, especially large companies, but even two man teams like DOOM look to it constantly, obsessively even. It'll be "required reading," to even do much as QA the game, and it'll often be cited any time whatsoever there's a cross over of departments. Produces live and die by the design doc. That's why Pat said "just have one of the dozen producers do it," they should have wanted one, they should have made their own in the absence of one even. It would actually be more time and effort and extra out of your way to not have one in a team the size of Bethesda. That's why it's so fucking insane, the more you think of how useful it is the more insane it gets, ad infinitum.
@@matthewcarroll2533 Expecting 150 people to all be on the same page on a project that has AT LEAST a million lines of code is patently insane, and its instantly obvious you've never worked on a project that has taken more than a week in your life.
would it REALLY help though, if all your ideas are bad?
Understood. My hatred for Todd Howard is over. Emil Pagliarulo is my nemesis now.
We can hate them both, along with Tetsuya Nomura, Neil Druckman, etc
@@SaintJames14 but in their defence it is only now that I'm learning who's behind some of my least favorite aspects of Bethesda games for the past 13 years, and most of it seems to fall under Emil's jurisdiction. The lack of cohesion between departments because of no design document, Fathers (Complete and utter lack of) motivations in Fallout 4, etc.
@@SaintJames14Neil Druckmann is actually competent except when he's in charge then he loses it
@@chooseyouhandle I mean, it is a joke. I dont know if "Utter contempt" is any less personal. But for me it is at least "professionally personal". If Emil is still in his same development position for Elder Scrolls 6 I almost certainly will not buy it.
It’s sad that Bethesda used to have great writers, look at Michael Kerkbride’s work on Morrowind. The idea of a totally alien and convincing atmosphere with believable lore both from historic and religious standpoints and even a world mechanic that explains why the player has the power of save and loading is something out of this world that I still consider as the peak of lore writing. Now Bethesda can’t even explain how to cook a baked potato
As far as TES goes, they were basically profiting off the creative energy of real writers like Kirkbride up until Skyrim, when much of that energy was exhausted. With Fallout and especially now with Starfield, you see how exposed they really are -- as the core group of people that developed Morrowind, for example, had already departed Bethesda by the time Oblivion rolled around. Peak Bethesda was the early 2000s -- they've gotten worse since then, clearly.
As for me, I'm sick of this shite, so I suppose it's high time I go back to indulging in Morrowind, since I have no more patience with Skyrim and its stupid paid mods system breaking my load orders AGAIN just for f*cking corporate profit...
@@josephpercy1558 Yeah Morrowind was peak TES - you could control pretty much everything about your character and have totally unique play styles. Oblivion looked lovely (at the time) but the way they drew back the character options to 'channel' you to be a certain type was a sad path to follow.
Kirkbride is one of my fav fantasy author. Afaik he literally the one who wrote vivec lesson in which the infamous event where vivec had "intimate" time with molag bal... he is the reason why TES is not just your generic fantasy story, especially with TES's metaphysical cosmology and other good weird things.
What's the world mechanic explanation thingie?
@@Atlas8813 that would be CHIM. Not everyone subscribes to the idea that CHIM is a meta concept as far as saving and loading the game goes
Starfield was such a slog that its taken me nine months just to have the will power to finish this video.
I have probably rewatched your morrowind vid a dozen times, but starfield just drains my soul when im reminded of it.
Keep up the good work, hope you get to have some more reviews you enjoy making.
Because you're weaker than 100 million sony ponies.
@UmmerFarooq-wx4yo I'm so fascinated by the delusion that all the starfield hate comes from sony fans. I've played on Xbox and pc my entire life and starfield is pure rubbish
As a software developer. Your analysis of problems in development is spot on. It's so easy to spot some common management problems even from the outside. Because they always manifest the same way. The bugs in the finished product, the lack of cohesion, the half-finished features. It's all so familiar.
To reach out for an example in another game. At one point Star Citizen pre-sold a gigantic ship before it was even implemented. It turned out, the ship they'd already sold, would turn out to be so huge and complex that it would crash their hangar system. The devs were now severely under the gun to rebuild the entire engine underlying the hangar system. Cut to people sleeping under desks, and crying, and tearing their hair out because this is all impossible and unfair.
What a lot of people don't understand about development. It's not a LEGO kit. When you purchase a LEGO kit, it has already been built and re-built and simplified and re-built again by LEGO designers. Software like a new game hasn't been done before. When your manager says "we need the hangar re-built to handle bigger ships by next week". It's like saying oh hey no big deal but next week men will be walking on Mars and they'll have to farm for food so just go ahead and develop crops that will grow successfully on Mars, oh and also we need a cookbook for how to cook the crops to make them delicious and fulfill all human nutritional needs, and I need all that on my desk next Tuesday, and since I'm Todd Howard I'm going to be flying first class to Texas to sip champagne and rub elbows with Elon Musk at a SpaceX party while you're contemplating suicide. Make sure you tell your family you won't be home for Thanksgiving, because if I don't see you crunching your eyeballs out, you're fired.
That's software development under one of these "it just works" managers. I've encountered a lot of them. If I could save one human being from ever having to experience it, I would.
Why does Bethesda development cycle remind me of Accenture's interpretation of Agile being implemented in gaming?
As a software developer, totally agree. I got a strong feeling of serious development problems. For example, the spaceship building being virtually a seperate game. My guess is they wanted a deeper starsip management aspect (FTL-ish) but for some reason, that got dumped. Maybe management thought it would put off the casual gamer they were trying to attract. Maybe it technically didn't fit or took too much away from the rest of the game. Anyway, it looks very detached from the main game.
Then you have dialog where NPC's and companions change character. Presumably different teams wrote different quests. Well, much of it seems to have been passed to a chatbot to write.
Not paying that much attention prior to release, I hadn't realised how much was resting on this game. Earlier in the year, loads of "Starfield will save the Xbox" articles. And even worse hype "Starfield will save gaming"! So much pressure on it. And ultimately, there is nothing innovative in it at all. It's a Bethesda game phoned in. In a sense, it's a stinker that's been brewing for a while. Fallout & Skyrim have problems, flaws. Unfortunately, Starfield skipped their strong points and focussed on the weak points. Fallout 76 was a warning that something is not right there. If there's a short cut, in Starfield, they took it (another development red flag).
I genuinely doubt the game we see is the game the designers and developers wanted. I think business and technical issues meant what we see is a hollow shell of what was initially imagined by "Elder Scrolls in Space". Well, I hope so, because if this really is the game exactly as imagined, then Bethesda is led by a bunch of incompetent, decades out of touch, unimaginative but very very financially greedy droids. Couldn't be that, could it?
Total speculation, but I don't think Bethesda have the drive to spend 3 or 4 years transforming it as No Mans Sky or Cyberpunk have been. The fact they are arguing against any Steam reviews criticising the game suggest they aren't going to change it. Don't hold any hope for TES6. Back to software development, they said they did a ton of work on the game engine fro STarfield. They will want to tap into that for TES6. Expect tons of procedural generation. And a lack of environmental and NPC interactions. They've had 20 years to improve those and if they were going to fix that, would have done it by now.
At least writing this means I don't have to do my own hour long video on Starfield! I would do it - but I can't face playing it again.
As a software development student I am now terrified
@@lordblazer This right here. Absolutely, or some other version of Magile (Magical agile) that's going to solve all the problems but the leadership doesn't understand what iterative development is all about. I don't think the software engineers were the problem, I think it's 90% management failure. I never worked at Accenture directly, but I did work at Avanade and Microsoft, and...the list goes on, since I've been a professional developer for 30 years (and hobby dev for 10 before that). The answer is always "more people" when those of us doing the work know that each person is less productive the more the team grows. More people mean more opinions and we all have strong ones when it comes to how something should be coded!
The disjointed parts of the game were likely caused by having separate teams that weren't communicate and didn't know until they were told to integrate the pieces together. Just look at some of the tiny places that were created as separate zones. I believe that's a result of plug-in architecture being used in places that should have been static inclusions rather than plugged in locations (specific examples: Trade Authority in Akila, Outland Outfitters in New Atlantis, and so on). Someone in management said "the team making this zone is moving too slow, use the extensible plugins and have another team do these pieces" type of approach. The end result is a Charlie Foxtrot.
All that said, it's still my favorite game this year and I'll be spending from after work tonight until bed time Sunday night playing as much as possible.
> "Total speculation, but I don't think Bethesda have the drive to spend 3 or 4 years transforming it as No Mans Sky or Cyberpunk have been."
I mean, through countless ports and re-releases Bethesda haven't even managed to fix the bugs Skyrim has had since 2011.
I don't expect more that bugfixes for maybe a year and maybe a DLC but I agree with you; Bethesda is not the type of company to linger on a game the way CDPR have with Cyberpunk, for example.
bethesda being so allergic to encouraging replays in an RPG that they bake a new game plus into the games story is insane
well to be fair, the skills arn't good enough to make you want to try something else, unless its, "okay tried these skills and they were shite, next game I will ignore."
Honestly the new game + element is one of the few things I think is kind of neat from the game.
@@HolyApplebutter yeah but does detract from the replayability, eldrscrolls and even to a smaller extent fallout is about plyaying different chars to try new things.
@@monmc6129 the issue is that by Skyrim, the races had mostly just become an aesthetic choice, the only exceptions are some of the especially decent racial powers like the Orc and Breton get, but you’ll probably forget about the racial powers anyway in favor of shouts.
@@monmc6129 I sort of get that, but they should have gone all in on it, allow you to chose new traits, new background and such. I just wish the skills were actually worth specializing in them, they feel so scatter shot that there isn't really much you would do different in a second char.
Black tea, cardammon, mint chocolate cookies, and an eight hour starfield analysis on a snowy evening. What a time to be alive.
meanwhile it dropped while I was at work (USA) and youtube's still a bitch with the different bells that I never remember so I never got a notification... and now I have 6 hours before work so it'll have to wait til the weekend....
for the best, I guess...
Living the dream, right there.
@@brandondanforth8342 It dropped right around when I was going to work. Saw the notification not long after coming home, and it said it was posted 8 hours prior. I thought the timing was sort of funny, at least.
I received the notification just before going to bed
Mint chocolate cookies, tea, and appreciation for winter weather? I respect that shit.
This video has been added to my favorite. I use it because I have insomnia. And a long video just taking about something like a video game makes me sleepy. I'm glad there is someone who makes revies this long.
Long-Form Analysis playlist from MightyMorphine here on TH-cam. HF with thousands of these videos fellow insomniac
@@saschaberger3212checked it out thanks
@@saschaberger3212thanks for this my friend, I love longform analysis videos but I never thought to search for a playlist. Now I've got enough content to last for a good long while ❤
@@wakerobin9215 you're welcome. Someone else changed my life with this comment. I thought it was only fair to share
The most damning commentary on Starfield is that all the TH-cam channels that got big with Elder Scrolls retrospectives & analyses are rushing to get their big Starfield videos out before it's going to be completely forgotten next year.
My biggest red flag was that it’s jabo made 2 videos on Starfield before going back to the other IPs which was funny because he gutted a series he was doing to finish it quickly for launch since I guess he figured he would be on starfield from here on out.
It’s already forgotten lol
I'm a software project manager, and I can just imagine being in a meeting where somebody says "We don't need design specs, we're Agile". And then you would hear the door click closed behind me as I head off to my next job somewhere not there.
"Somewhere not there" is such a great line. Haven't read it before.
...n-not...agile scrum???
Dude, if you haven't seen the agile skit by programmers are also too, you definitely need to.
You just need to be best friends with the ceo like emil is with todd then you'll never get fired.
Ha! On a related note, As someone working in the command center please, dear god, document the details for your applications and what they do and what levers to pull to fix your stuff... Unless you want me to page you at 3 AM because I can't figure it out 😅😅😅
I can forgive a lot of stuff, but my biggest problem is that they got a chance to create an entirely new sci-fi IP from scratch and this is what they came up with. They came up with literally the most uninsteresting Sci Fi setting I have ever seen. No aliens, no interesting politics, philosophy or technologies, no war, no sense of awe at the natural occurences really out there in the galaxy e.g black holes, Neutron stars. We start the game after the tiny sliver of interesting story has ended.
I keep thinking about a game called Space Rangers 2.(Other than having one of the best sci fi game soundtracks of all time) It's an old game but in that game, you can go about your life menially as a trader or just doing contracts for the galaxy's government. Meanwhile a overwhelming mechanical alien force is swallowing the galaxy up system by system. This is all dynamic so if you make no attempt to stem the tide the aliens will conquer the entire galaxy and it's game over. Starfield didn't need a system as intense as this but I wish it had *something* dynamic.
I have processed alot of the criticisms, although I don't hate Starfield at all, it's a very outdated game but BGS sandboxes are still fun to screw around in.
but yeah space is simply too big a canvas for their limited tech and approach to game design.
It took them *how many* years to develop Star Field?!? Now people understand why Star Citizen is taking so long.
@@MikeStJacques No Man's Sky is also not finished yet. It gets updated since 7 years. I wonder how long it will take Bethesda to finish Starfield, perhaps never because they don't even attempt it and just pull the rug.
@hyperturbotechnomike Honestly, I think after the third major story expansion and I mean MAJOR expansion is when the game will finally be somewhat content dense and that's puts us at what, 2027-ish? I'm not touching starfield again till 2030 at the earliest, when most if not all DLCs are out and mods are abundant and polished.
You should play the Mass Effect trilogy and if you wanna go retro then check out Freelancer
The magnetoshpere is generated by the convection of the molten metal in the core, and the grav drive destroyed the magnetosphere. So the implication is that for some reason, the grav drive had some sort of power that was able to cause the metal in earth's core to stop being hot liquid, but did not have any other knock on effects in the process. Look, I know that technically all fiction writing is just "making stuff up" but this is ridiculous.
Just a note, planet orbits just revolve around the map's zero axis, IE, wherever your ship spawns in, for both space and on land. They do not model any sort of realistic orbit.
That's fucking weird
@@teddycouch9306when you move drastically large distances from the center of the world, things break down, akin to the farlands in Minecraft. By always centering the world position at the player ship, you prevent this rather than fix it.
Leadership at Bethesda needs to put this on for a single work day and all watch it together. Nothing could possibly be more productive for the studio.
Seeing Emil's twitter posts I seriously doubt they will, more likely they'll ignore it entirely.
@@Somebody374-bv8cdsome though it was a response to nakeyjakey lol
@@chilbiyito but his video was actually super supportive and positive, yet of course disappointed.
The AAA gaming industry thinks they are all making 10/10 perfect games. Then a work day at a place like Bethesda is everyone running around giving thier opinions on everything. Then saying how wonderful and amazing everyone is. I would think if anyone was found watching something like this they would be off to HR to get a warning. Even talking about it would have you sent to HR. Most of the time people only work in places like this for one game or a part of development, so they can use that to get another job. Outside the gaming industry but still in the tech world.
Pardon me for being completely ignorant of this game, but every time you say the word "Starborn", it hits me like a ton of bricks.
I cannot fucking believe Bethesda resorted to calling the player character the "Starborn". This might just take the cake as THE most creatively bankrupt thing in a triple A game I've EVER seen, and that's saying a lot. No matter how many times I hear it, the reality hits me anew.
I personally can't wait until Elder Scrolls VI where we play as the "Scrollborn", and after that, Fallout 5, where we play as the Vaultborn.
Holy Fuck.
All of the names and writing details of this game feel like very early rough draft temp names and concepts made without any of the detail to make them interesting. The factions in this game are the most barebones, undercooked, cookie cutter crap I have ever seen. You know exactly what they represent no what all of their quests are going to be like the second you meet them, there are no real surprises here.
Speaking of creatively bankrupt, the quests in this game are so bad from everything I’ve seen. They’re the gameplay equivalent of an “this could have been an e-mail” (which is such a pathetic thing to have to say) it’s just mindlessly waking back and forth between two NPC’s while they go “and you go back and tell them this then” seoerated by like 5 loading screens and unskippable cinematics…
The first time I watched a starfield reviewer refer to MC as "Starborn" I assumed it was a joke.
It kinda is, though.
The term "Starborn" isn't just for the player character. It's for a group of people.
Isn't an imaginative name so I can see why you're frustrated.
I mean that was the exact thing I *JOKED* with my friends when Todd compared Starfield to "Skyrim in space"
Never believed that would actually be the thing in the finished game...
It sounds like the name of a really cringe mid-70's David Bowie cover band
People pushing MODDING MODDING MODDING are not modders. They are just people who take modders for GRANTED.
I really despised all the "influencers" that were practically expecting mods for everything in their starfield reviews.
I didn't take it that way at all, the vast majority of them didn't say "MODDERS, GET ON THIS!"
Most of them were saying that modding would probably fix the problems people were talking about. Sounded much more like respect of the capability the community has.
@@ICCUWANSIUT Right but why should modders bother with cleaning up Bethesda's mess at this point? Does Bethesda deserve a community like that at this point?
@@honeybadger6275 I don't think they should, but it's not right to say it's the reviewers pushing them into a negative stance or away.
Blame the game, not the players.
@@ICCUWANSIUT There were definitely some comments made by some of the pro bethesda shilltubers like tks mantis that sounded a lot like they were expecting modders to make the game good.
Having the design scope of a small town or province stretched across a galaxy is so fitting as a studio who has only ever designed games for that smaller scope just didn't know how to upscale it. Also the ability to be hailed by other ships over comms but so many quests are based on the fact that there's no phone or long range communications available to the player is infuriating.
this was a problem for Bethesda long before Starfield, it's just fetch quests after fetch quests.
The duality of Bethesda interviews. On the one hand they want to "say yes" to the player all the time, on the other they think that Morrowind letting the player kill important NPCs was bad.
6:20:15 On the "abandoning followers on a different reality". Imagine having a relationship with someone and then deciding to ghost them so hard you set off to a different reality. And to make it worse, you are forced to ghost them if you want to progress the game. It completely destroys the notion of creating any relationships in that setting. Why make friends if you are forced to abandon them later?
It's not a foolproof explanation, but the game *does* try to establish that who your character is as a person affects the world they leave behind. Literally by having a loving marriage and abandoning it your "space dust" or whatever spreads throughout known space and makes more people develop strong bonds or something or other. (this is literally what the game says so feel free to accept it or groan at it).
@@StrifeRixagenuine thanks for sharing that but oh my god that is dreadful
@@StrifeRixa This is a good idea that is so poorly thought out it becomes so contrived/confusing, damn...endless questions
@@Lightsign01 It definitely sounds like an excuse for the player character to see more value in leaving than just "exploration calls". Even if literally every constellation member more or less tells you not to look back, including your lover should you have one at the end of the game.
You are like an angel that transcends ideas of mortal love. Think of the Jedi from Star Wars: Attachments to the world stunt your spiritual growth because you wisely do not make love the whole meaning of life. That is a selfish concept that you only help people out of love rather than a sense of duty to a higher cause.
Being special or chosen means you have higher aspirations than seeking out passions. Thousands of pets die every day and owners grieve thier loss. But they move on with life and don't make that bond the whole meaning of thier existence right? As a 'hero' you don't get to live a normal life. Read any Spiderman comics as a kid? The hero sacrifices his time to be spiderman at the expense of his fun being a normie. Similar to how Jedi must not let emotion cloud judgements. IE it ruins objectivity. If you had a chance to save the galaxy full of people that depend upon you or save one person (but they were a close friend, family or someone you have a crush on) would it not be selfish to choose the latter over doing what is right?
Heroes sacrifice normal life to go beyond what average people think of as love. That is you must love everyone because all lives are connected. The idea of favourites doesn't exist because as hero you must be detached from this world to be the chosen. If the hero only protects people he personally likes that makes him normal like us. Jedi knights are not normal. They feel pain when loss of life occurs in the galaxy just like you do if your pet dies. (unselfish version of love for living things in general)
The mortal being in a sense has short-sighted concepts of love. That being that you define it by people you met rather than everyone that impacted you that you met and also didn't personally know but helped indirectly. (such as veterans of wars that died in past for you but who you personally never met. They saved the future by sacrificing life for you people in the present day. By dying for future generations of people they would never see, is that not a form of unselfish love since they personally have no attachment to those they died for?)
Todd Howard is literally just Michael Scott IRL. And Emil is his Dwight.
😂😂😂
That’s gold
I disagree. Dwight Schrute is actually likable.
I still consider it a problem that Bethesda only has 4 main writers.
CDPR? Over 50. With half of them having published books.
For Baldur’s Gate 3… Each main character/protagonist/Follower had its own flipping writer.
Who you’know. Communicated with each other every single day
More writers doesn't equal better writing.
"Too many cooks spoils the soup" or whatever.
The issue is the quality of the writers and the lack of directing.
And a ton of other issues we can only guess at
@@bloodygypsy3740 Think it's more about 4 writers being spread thin on this kinda game
@@MaakaSakuranbo I honestly think that a Bethesda game could benefit from having fewer writers.
Because it might limit the amount of bull occurring.
But my point was simply the more writers aren't the issue.
A single great writer is Vastly superior to 50 terrible ones
Too many cooks. But yeah, you need some more writers for handling poop work like writing quests and just 1 writer to handle the overall story.
thats how you get disconnected stories, at their best sidequests should bleed right back to the main plot or at least have similar themes, not whatever cp2077 was doing @@kayfrenly5460
I'm at 3:45:54 - I really hate that "we want to say yes to the player" idea coming from Bethesda because, sorry what? You guys want to say yes to the player? What about if the player asks "Can I talk to draugr and learn about their culture?" - "Can I convince Ulfric I should be High King with a 100 speech check?" - "Can I not kill Parthurnaax?" - "Can I use my high lockpicking/other thief skills to catch/accuse Mercer Fry early?" - "Can I not become a Nightingale and complete the Thieve's Guild?" - "Can I use my Archmage status to influence political powers?" - "Can I use any faction membership to influence other quests?" Good grief.
And Starfield itself is a great example with one simple question - can I kill this named NP.. NO. No you can't.
"can I proceed with the companions questline without becoming a werewolf and thus selling my immortal soul to Hircine?"
I love short-form content such as this, keep up the good work 👍
Bite sized snack 😋❤️
A mighty morsel
@@completelyroundoak fit for the absolute unit
Whenever I feel bad about my writing, I remember that stuff like Starfield exists.
At least you feel bad about your writing and can improve. Starfield doesn't
16:25 This absolutely baffles me. I’m a master electrician. Ask anyone in my trade, or any trade, how we build anything. A blueprint, you say? No, actually. That just tells you WHAT you’re building. HOW to build it is in a huge document called “Specifications” that lists everything from the color of a receptacle faceplate to the kinds of conduit you can use to the thousands of various details that don’t show on the print. One of my first tasks when I go to bid on a job is to comb through the specifications and see what is in it. Are they requiring the use of an expensive material, or can I use a cheaper alternative? Do they require spare device or runways?
The idea of a similarly large undertaking without a design document is amazingly idiotic. It’s not that you would list every single shrub or asset or game mechanic, but that you are giving everyone a a readily available resource to coordinate around.
Think about how ugly your house would be if each trade was operating off their own print with no knowledge of what everyone else has to do. My suspicion is that so much labor and time is lost to conflicts between various design teams that are ignorant of each other’s plans. These kinds of things require an immense amount of coordination and cooperation, and refusing to use such a basic resource is just brain dead.
Strange how people don't think this logic applies to creative works, having a solid foundation is always important in group work
Nice to see a fellow electrician. And a master no less.
I’m no master but this comparison is spot on from what I’ve can tell. The sheer amount of stuff that would be defunct if I never talked to plumbers or hvac and just did electrical in a vacuum would be insane.
Just the other week a lighting plan in a drop grid ceiling completely changed because of space needed for hvac systems. And having been on some pretty dysfunctional job sites I can get a pretty clear picture of the havoc that is Bethesdas game development.
@@shrike_3588 Good to see a brother. Yes, that’s exactly what the teams appear to be doing. Working in a vacuum, with only higher ups being in contact. I’ve found it is much more advantageous (as well as yielding more profit) for my foremen and even journeymen to be able to work in tandem with other trades. The supervisor I have on the job is only there for large or costly change orders or issues. It is better for my business to be able to trust journeymen that can solve those kinds of problems without running it up the chain.
Any sparky will know that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Would you run rigid pipe without planning the route? Maybe if you’re a shitty electrician. But being as knowledgeable as possible about what the tin knockers or plumbers are doing can save re-work by choosing a route to avoid something that has not even been installed yet. I’m not joking when I say that having guys that interface with other trades can cut hundreds of man-hours off a big job, and save thousands in materials.
They did use a design document for Starfield. PatricianTV knowingly lied about BGS not using them to make this video.
@@AsymmetricalCrimes That's not true. They used a bunch of separate documents and obviously went out of sync. They did not use a centralized design doc.
I feel the man who compared writing free roam RPGs to writing a great novel and having readers tear out the pages and make paper airplanes out of them, is the wrong man to write an RPG with freedom and choices.
He seems to begrudge the very nature that players consume the story in their own way rather than his.
He's a level designer not a writer. That POV is very obvious in his process and the newer BS games.
That speech was so painful to watch. Writers for RPGs need to remember that there is a model for novels as parallels to RPGS: the choose-your-own-adventure novels of the 1980s. No, they weren't great literature, but the point is that even a paperback can do branching narrative accounting for player choice. There's no reason you can't take that model and use it to tell a great story.
@@blurqeqoherds Makes me think of the bandersnatch thing on netflix, I kept restarting it just to choose another path and see what I missed. I consumed all of that content because I was curious, the exact same reason I bought BG3
Its called canon. Go outside more
@blurqeqoherds fun fact, there's a growing catalog of novels published on apps such as "hosted games" that take the choose your own adventure-model and expand on it greatly using modern technology (sort of like choice-based visual novels but text only). Some of the titles you can find there ARE pretty damn great literature (I recommend the story "The Passenger" by Jime Rólon, or the "Fallen Hero"-series by Malin Rydén)!
It's always fascinating to hear Todd Howard talk. He's a true blue geek and nerd, and from the sounds of it (and given what he accomplished at Bethesda during his time as) a programmer with a lot of ingenuity. Hearing him talk, you can almost picture little turbo geek Todd, sat in front of his Macintosh, trying to turn 200 pages of RPG mechanics into a video game. I'd probably buy his autobiography.
But. I'm not gonna buy his next game. Because Todd, I feel, isn't in the same place he used to be as a gamer, and as a programmer. He's a ceo, an ideas guy, who was always at his strongest when he was practical implementation problem solver guy. I can picture a young Todd, working on Terminator, and showing his superiors how he made flying vehicles work in a nearly-open world, several decades before Mario would be make the 3rd dimension of video games a standard of game design.
"Todd, this is *amazing!* How did you do this?" they'd ask in astonished and excited tones.
"It just works." He'd say, with a bashful grin.
Starfield is the first game Bethesda would make since those days where a player could fly a ship. and somehow, despite decades of innovation, it's just as janky as it was before *many* of the people who bought this game were even born. In your space game about being a space explorer in a space ship exploring space in your space ship, your spaceship isn't even something satisfying (or stable) to run.
I wonder sometimes, what if Todd stepped down as CEO and took a role more akin to like, senior programmer and creative supervisor. Get him in a place where people can talk to him without risking missing a board meeting with Microsoft, get him in a spot where he can get his digits on a computer and craft the things he wants to make with his own hands? Would that change things? If somebody else were the Big Boss, somebody who wouldn't consider Emil a friend and trust him to do whatever he wants, somebody who wouldn't see modders who've radically improved our games in the past as token employees hired solely to cash in on saying we hired and/or consulted them but to actually put these people to work with the tools and talent and time needed to foster better games? Or, would it be a situation like Blizzard, or Bungie, and the company would reach new lows we couldn't even fathom?
What Todd should do sounds like what Linus Sebastian from Linus Tech Tips has done. He owns Linus Media Group, but stopped being its official CEO and just let's one of his former managers run the company's day-to-day, while he does the things he wants to do.
No one there thinks like that, you know that. What Todd cares about is the same thing you would care about if you became a rich CEO. Making shareholders happy. While the lot of you are sitting here discussing the game, Todd, most of the time, discusses marketing campaigns and monetization strategies (not in front of the camera, of course). The content of the game is the least of his worries.
I am so glad Patrician uses Todd's own words to reinforce points the bethdrones will try to side-slip on.
As someone who runs an indie studio, updating design docs is admittedly a huge pain, but it is extremely necessary for games to function properly.
True, but like 99% of software development is managing complexity. It's not like we don't know how to do that.
Just apply the same principles to a design document.
Patrician (likely intentionally, because rage gets more clicks) misrepresented what was said in multiple ways - Bethesda does keep design documentation, just not in a single large document like the olden days, and this has not been the case in the industry for quite some time. You'll much more frequently see internal forums or wikis that are more easily separated and edited for use with larger teams across longer projects. The primary source used for this claim is from an interview that directly contradicts the claim.
@@pellunderscore Mind posting it then?
Hey, good news@@Incog-e1z, all sources are cited in the description to the video! The one you're looking for is "Writing the Worlds of Bethesda". I hope this helps!
Does said interview not mention the word wiki, and boast about not even doing the bare minimum?
Listening to Emil makes me wonder how many antidepressants must be consumed by his team. He sounds like the worst type of boss, he gives vague directions, blames everyone else when these directions obviously fail, but then takes credit for what it works. His description of sending random dialogues is nearly insane, he basically confessed to actively stopping work so people would massage his ego through whimsical requests.
Any company, be a creative company or not, that allows a superior to act like that when handling a team will see severe burnout. If your superior keeps acting a diletante child, pursuing whatever momentary fancy of his, your work will go nowhere and it will severely stress you. Seeing your work stall then be thrown out, mishaped and taken credit of by your boss is a sure fire way to make you wanna quit.
And that is just this one guy. The fact that he is allowed to work there and order people around tells me that Bethesda is an awful place. They clearly don't value employees' mental health and productivity, to let a buffon like that hold power.
Edit: Just saw his bitching on XTwitter. He is a petulant man child. He uses his team as cover, blames lack of resources and then pulls a childish "how about you do better?" type of argument. If anything, he incriminates himself by saying that he was an awful reviewer and doesn't understand how a critical analysis is supposed to work. It indicates that he has zero competency to work at any leading role whatsoever. Much less a public role to antagonize your customers.
Not using design documentation seems like the perfect ploy for someone like Emil to be able to constantly change his mind about the writing's direction without taking any responsibility.
I'm sure dozens of companies would love an attempt at making a better Fallout or Elder Scrolls than Bethesda, maybe they should lease out the IP.
@@honeybadger6275 IP doesnt come into it, just money and creative freedom
@@honeybadger6275 Yeah, imagine a TES6 made by Larian instead of Bethesda...
@@Immopimmo The bears would probably try to have sex with the player.
The crimson cringe sound like Powder gangers from Fallout NV ... except those were recently escaped convicts, that had matching uniforms, because that's what they stole from the guards, and were already in process of falling appart weeks after their escape.
Didn't they (powder gangers) start falling apart the moment they got free? I seem to remember that immediately after they got free many simply scattered
@@vexile1239It is pretty preposterous to assume every criminal just wants to stand around and kill anyone they spot. Bethesda never understood that though.
With design docs, I'm a one man band and I've run into problems with not having any designdocs for a concept album. Things become fragmented and it takes far longer to get anywhere. I've ended up making full songs only to realise they don't really fit and shelved them. I can't even imagine the chaos of not having proper design docs on a AAA game.
Same. Working in animation, I can't even fathom how a AAA game that big couldn't have a design document. Working on quests and game design on Starfield must have been a nightmare.
Honestly insane that Bethesda basically brags they don't use design docs.
I'm working on a game project myself and I have to constantly consult my design doc. Can't imagine what bethesda employees are doing.
@@commanderpanda9356probably wishing they had a design document.
As a software developer. Todd is a nightmare manager. I guarantee after he dies/retires lots of people who no longer depend on him for income will write tell all memoirs that he's a disaster.
Like tech debt: When you're 4 years into development and you've constantly been hacking crap to make Todd's whims happen. And now Todd wants you to add some feature. And you discover there's no way on Earth the engine can possibly do what Todd wants, especially with how broken and hacked the engine already is... That's tech debt. You eventually have to pay it if you want to move on. Cut to today when fans are still working to patch Morrowind. Just Morrowind. It's still broken today.
Gee, what a complex game. If only there was a document for its design that everyone can refer back to. But alas, we are too backward to ever comprehend such a thing.
I look at this game now, and I legitimately cannot believe Starfield ever got past the 'writing-ideas-on-a-whiteboard' conceptual stage. That's like, the bare bones DNA-level basic moment where you decide roughly what you want a project to grow into. What the game might end up being. It's where you paint a broad goal, for your development.
But Starfield feels like a game where they NEVER had any real concept of what the game was supposed to be. It feels like they skipped even doing that bit with the whiteboard, and just started...developing nonsense and trying to glue it together.
@@Blisterdude123 Apparently this was the game Todd wanted to make. So it likely got past the conceptual stage by Todd forcing it through.
What a wasted opportunity
They had the creative opportunity of a lifetime and they just used it to show how creatively bankrupt they are
Then, instead of listening to feedback, they actively doubled down on their lack of creativity by responding to user reviews with AI generated messages of gaslighting and defensiveness.
The best Bethesda entertainment is the meta surrounding their dumb games.
@@JayMaverickI don't think those responses were AI, just typical corpospeak
@@Rannos22Tbh, they may as well be if they're not. If they just run down a list of "if customer mentions X, then respond with Y" then as far as im concerned that isnt an intelligent response. Its an artificially intelligent response.
The comedy of the lack of soundtrack in the end of your vid was not lost on me, thank you lad.
todd howard likening the feel to rdr2 is the absolute wildest take I've ever heard
I wonder if this is part of the reason why they felt a voiced character was so important.
Aurther Morgan is a huge reason why the outlaw fantasy is sold so well.
Comparing their game where they couldn't wire together the two neurons needed to add a vehicle to make the traversal of 99% barren, featureless planets with a game where using and taking care of your mount to traverse an environment full of obstacles, challenges and encounters.
They're comparing shit to parfaits and charging more for them to boot.
To play Starfield after Baldurs Gate 3 is like slamming down a Big Mac after enjoying a five course meal.
Yup
If the Big Mac was also somehow more expensive than the five course meal. Actually, with how expensive fast food is now, that’s probably not too far off from the truth
I’d rather eat a Big Mac than a five course meal 😂
@@br5073 to each their own I suppose
That's an insult to Big Macs, they at least taste good. Its more like eating raw ground beef after eating a burger
The TerraMorph reveal is the maddeningly near equivalent of someone saying in the Fallout Games: "Omg, Deathclaws claws'...cause death!?"
i feel like the worst thing is that they're actually just some animal and not made by human experimentation
@AstralBelt I just hate that the aliens being shown in Starfield don't ever seem...Alien, they're too relatable to life on this planet (we're on some level related to other species on this planet) however, on some other planet... under totally separate evolutionary circumstances, it's all the same... all life made is crabs; crabs truly is peak evolution.
Hey! Watch out, she’s a Deathclaw! She can claw you to death with her claws!
"Morph" means "shape" in Greek, so I don't particularly have an issue with it being in the name. (Despite what native English speakers so readily believe, English is not the origin of all languages and words, nor is it the centre of the universe.) "Shape of terror" even sounds kind of plausible for a name. That said, I do find it to be somewhat amusing, now that it's been pointed out. Could have called them "deimomorphs" or something, at least.
@@LumosX Terra is Earth so they're probably Earth-Shapers
I'm starting to wonder if the addition of the watch is because Pete wanted to expense a custom smartwatch
Pat's Quick Retospectives are the only thing that bring me joy in life.
I understood that reference. Understanding references is my only joy in life.
Finding fellow massives in the wild is the only thing that brings me joy in life.
Long recognizes long
slice and dice, brother
Don bless. Buy Qwib gift!
According to a tweet from Phil Spencer, only 14% of players (on xbox at least) have completed the In Their Footsteps achievement. Which goes to show how unengaging the main story is that so few people have even gotten to the Starborn reveal.
That's what Gamepass does, they might brag about having 10 million players or something but the average of playtime is way lower and most players don't make it past the into
But that doesn't make Starfield special. Not finishing the main quest has been a big meme in Bethesda games since forever, not necessarily because it's bad, but often because the rest of the world is just so engaging.
But that doesn't make Starfield special. Not finishing the main quest has been a big meme in Bethesda games since forever, not necessarily because it's bad, but often because the rest of the world is just so engaging.
In Armored Core 6, 28% of players completed all endings (on steam at least).
Those players had to beat the game 3 times through from start to finish. There is no shortcut or save scumming to get around it. They really played through the entire game 3 times through.
AC6 has no open world. Near zero choices in the story or during missions. All missions boil down to go here, kill thing. Most missions remain the same between playthroughs.
Star field is less replayable than that? lol
@@uniquename6925 yup, it is less replayable than AC6.
Just noticing this now somehow... Emil says they used to have "50 page [design] documents," as if that is a huge, bloated number. For a game of their scope, that is easily under half, maybe even a quarter, the size you'd expect from any other company. 50 pages isn't even the bare minimum... That's the half finished rough draft. Which makes him saying they just couldn't keep even THAT updated even richer. Like. Wow. No wonder he thought it was useless, it probably was... I wonder how long this has been an issue.
Edit: it is kinda bonkers how little Pat leans into the absurdity that they didn't have a design doc. It is like shooting a movie without a script. Actually, it's worse than that. It is hard to describe exactly how essential it is for a team the size of Bethesda to have one. DOOM was a two man team in the mid 80s, yet their design doc was so essential to them, so throughly used and in such high regard, they called it their Bible. And he does mention that Todd acted as glue in the past games, but this cannot be understated or overstressed. It is crazy that he mentions it basically once and never returns to this point. Todd acted as the design doc. Nothing went into or out of the game without going through him. He was, unironically, in a similar role Miyazaki fills for FromSoft if your familiar with his method. But once Todd stepped out of that role as a filter for everything, as a director, Garbagefield was the result because it turned out Todd was THE ONLY THING keeping them together AT ALL. They literally can't operate without him, because he was the design doc, and they don't know how to use a real one.
For anyone wondering, a design document is usually something like a detailed FAQ... Maybe better called an AQ, it will answer any probable question someone working on the game will have, whether or not it's "frequently" asked. You usually need to read the design doc to even do QA on a game. When there is a cross over of departments in any way, shape, or form, it's usually required to cite what part of the design doc you're working from. This is why Pat says "get one of the dozen producers to update it," in exasperation. Produces live and die by the design doc. I'm not even sure how they can do their job without one, and that not exaggeration, it really is that essential for them.
Bro the person making this 8 hour review stops every 30 minutes to make that joke especially early on, things like, if only they had a paper with all these designs on it, oh wait
Jokes like that they do a few times throughout
By using that clip of Emil typing, he shows what kinda "writer" Emil is.
I noticed immediately that Emil Doesn't sit in "ergonomic" posture while having index fingers extended for "typing".
That dude works like a senior that went to "home computer basics" class once, in the nineties. :D
@woldemunster9244
I noticed that as well.
He is way more awkward than my 65 years old mother trying to use a PC.
He clearly hasn't spend much time on a computer.
pretty much Everything you said about DooM is wrong, the Doom bible was halfway completly disregarded since Tom Hall fundementally disagreed about the type of game DooM should have been, also Id software categorically didnt even exist in the 1980s, it was founded in 1991. during the "mid 80s" John Carmack was developing the proof of concept Super Mario rip off game
To quote a friend after showing them this video, "I've seen 40-page design documents for Minecraft modpacks." They're *important,* people.
Albeit a Minecraft modpack would have to have an insane level of scope to need a design document
If you listen to the pre-release marketing material with a game designer ear, there's a couple times where they accidentally let red flags slip. The sheer number of planets quoted in the Starfield Direct was what got me worried first - too many to fill with meaningful stuff - and then a little while later during the on-planet exploration section Todd elaborates "we randomly spawn in interesting content near the player" (but in marketing lingo) and that was the exact moment I knew this wasn't gonna live up to the hype, considering the quality of their radiant procgen in the past...
The moment I knew I was never going to buy Starfield was the '1000s of planets'.
That meant procgen. Now, here's the thing. That was fine in No Man's Sky. It wasn't a story driven singleplayer RPG with strong worldbuilding narrative elements. NMS is a multiplayer exploration sandbox, procgen dialled up to 11 for the explicit purpose of finding weird and unusual things while you explore, at your own pace.
I wasn't fine with it in Starfield because I immediately knew it meant procgen in what should have been a handcrafted world, filled with narrative and storytelling touches, intrinsically designed to service that RPG worldbuilding, to personalise the character of that world. That wasn't going to happen with '1000s of planets'. And as soon as I heard that, I knew I was just waiting for all the other development problems that snowballed out of that.
@@mastah39 I think there was an entirely feasible middle ground where you had 4/5 planets with pertinent explorable 'regions' with large but manageable maps. Focus on one system, with various space stations and particular crafted areas of worlds where there are gameplay-related reasons to be.
Think Outer Worlds, but you can actually do the space travel bit. I don't think anybody (or at least I wasn't, and I agree, anyone saying otherwise is nuts) should've been asking for 4/5 fully explorable worlds. But a far narrower scope with more depths and layers of world design? That's what Bethesda actually do.
Maybe even that would've been beyond Bethesda's competence, but I don't know. At least it could've been vaguely achievable.
@@mastah39 imo I don't think Bethesda would've been criticized to such an extent if they went the route that guy suggested, and to many Starfield falls short of not just the Bethesda experience, but (from what I've been told from people who played those other games you mention) it fell short of ED, NMS, and especially Star Citizen. If BGS is going to try for those games' experiences then why the upset at the comparisons?
I'm not sure why you hold the comfort zone thing against that guy or anyone else for that matter when I don't think that alone is why people have such harsh criticism against BGS, more like they being the second movers on all of those 'innovative' features means we can't just give them credit for trying and floundering. It's also a bit much to champion them on 'actual RPG mechanics' when they were the ones to remove them in the first place.
@@mastah39 I'm not keen on blaming consumers for not reading between the lines in face of the massive marketing and hype. TOW fans made a similar argument saying it was a AA underdog when marketing made jabs at BGS and boasted 'from creator of Fallout'. It's hard to accommodate 'compromise' and experimentation for experimentation's sake for a big company like BGS.
That leads to my point that there's being safe then there's being responsible and BGS understanding limits of the concept, their own engine and studio constraints, and player expectations. A big aspect of those games was multiplayer, a no-no after F76 and Todd's reemphasis on singleplayer experiences. The procgen base thus lacks somewhat, and needs to be compensated by a good handcrafted experience to accompany the new scale which we now know was logistically impractical. You have slightly less copy-pasted and empty worlds but are now alone with the traditional expected experience detracted. On top of that the engine couldn't handle land vehicles based due to slow world streaming, load screen frequency and times borders on atrocious, among other small details.
Unlike Fallout 4 that many FNV fans like me railed against for losing certain RPG elements, that game still retained a very high user score, unlike Starfield which has gradually declined in ratings not reminiscent of review bombing. Cyberpunk is more concise in scope, and I don't expect Bethesda to go the length of CDPR and free content fix the game for the next 2.5 years. They did it for F76 but there is an active revenue stream in the form of memberships for that game to incentivize it.
@@mastah39 I agree that longform reviewers are often detached from the actual buyers and fanbase, and I see where you're coming from with Cyberpunk, but I find Patrician's review really does touch on what even the general fanbase is voicing, which is a forgettable main quest and lack of compelling reasons to play long term.
I push back against "different market" as its akin to what FNV fans were told when criticizing Fallout 4 which was "we're having fun, don't like it don't buy it" which often leads to the "it sold well, who cares?" reduction. In this case the overall discussion and active player count is especially down for a BGS game, the criticism more amongst the general BGS fan community and not say, an annoying Obsidian fan subsect who trash any BGS Fallout.
I really don't think there is a hate or flame mob that creates said detachment here. My sense of the community overall is apathy and disappointment which is arguably worse than previous BGS titles, will severely hurt long term sales, relevancy, and active player count, which then hurts the modding community.
I hope Bethesda can do it, but knowing they largely move as a single dev team of a few hundred to next game cycle after each release, I'm not so sure they'll have the resources for the necessary overhauls to bring people back.
It warms my heart to see the rage against Emil, hands down the worst writer ive had to suffer through.
I like his ideas, probably some of Bethesdas only recent original ideas; (not reused ideas from Tim Cain or Michael Kirkblade I mean) shame his writing wastes the potential his own ideas
@@Lightsign01 kirkbride was the goat
@@chrisg4305 I think so too, ironic; he made the most original unique lore, he kind of made The Elder Scrolls...then they got rid of him/he removed himself for getting too experimental, Bethesda are comfortable, don't like experimentation.
@@Lightsign01I just think he’s really bad because he puts the blinders on too criticism and beliefs that aren’t his own, forcing “good morals” and ‘evil chars bad’ down our throats
Cannot wait until he’s gone
I'm sorry but I want Emil fired. Gone. I'm a developer, the fact that they are PROUD of not having design documents is insane to me. They complain about being hindered by their quickly outdated docs - what in the waterfall model is this nonsense?
Someone said it best when they stated that Bethesda is a big corporation ran by people who are LARPing as indie developers.
@@Zorothegallade-gg7zg I kinda wanted to say the same thing. They act like they're this big company, but they only have like 400 employees.
I'm also a game dev (designer) and I've worked in triple a studios with design directors who frown upon documentation.
They're always wrong, and it 100% made the projects worse every time
Im working on a game on the side and I work in tech and not planning at that scale is just pure laziness and short sightedness...we see 0 innovation with just graphic engines getting better that's it. I went back to older games and new revisions like uo outlands.
@@dumbfish97Of course they're wrong. Having a unified vision that is documented is always better than winging it. Case and point: the ending.
This video aged like fine wine
it always does
In Freelancer (2003) your first job contact buys you a ship-- essentially a space lemon which is the cheapest thing in the market, as the reason you take the job with her.
Damnit @patriciantv you should try out that game
Now that was a fun game!
Damn, I haven't seen Freelancer mentioned in so long. It pulls off a lot of things that games struggle with now even with the development hell that it went through. Unfortunately digital anvil got shit canned, and it's spiritual successor is... **Star Citizen.**
StarLancer was really good too.@@mattjk5299
@@mattjk5299 It's not even that Freelancer was a perfect game or anything, it definitely has its problems, but it's managed to do things even back then which no other game has been able or wanted to bother doing, which is very frustrating. Not to mention stuff like plot which is honestly so phoned in for most games now you don't even have to be a good writer to do better, you just have to answer for a few 'why'-s
Bethesda sees player choice as a problem to be fixed. Larian saw it as something to explore and reward.
Obviously breaking quests is a real issue all RPGs face, it's just their solution is lazy and shit.
I remember this narrative from a decade ago. Back then it was EA and CD Project RED
It's felt for a long time now that instead of "try to say yes to all the things players ask to do" it's more like "try to quietly railroad the player into asking the specific questions we can say yes to".
@@KunjaBihariKrishna Is that supposed to be criticism? A decade ago was when EA was ramping up their FPS slop and CDPR were riding high with Witcher 3. That's mighty high praise and calling it a "narrative" makes it sound like you aren't handing it out intentionally.
Same, the fact that Starfield original launch date released it just post Elden Ring is like dogging a bullet into another bullet (Baulders Gate 3)
Pat is the only one who can keep me engaged for 8 hours in one sitting. I really appreciate him going into each and every point he makes in a rather easy to understand manner. Some people use words that can be too complicated for my ESL ass
you wrote this the same hour after this video came out
@@krill87 yea and i still have the video running on my pc. But my first video of patrician was his Morrowind one as it is for a lot of subs i imagine and i watched that in one sitting. Which is what i based the claim on.
SMH, the compliment is nice, but I hope you're moving and stretching a lot during those 8 hours of video :P
Bro I'm not the authority to say this but please take walks and go outside
@@herudihaan6105 i took the day off work for the rogue trader game. On my days off that are too cold to work on my car (and when my wife is at work) i go full reddit mod and just spend the day on my pc. On a side note i got up early to find out this game would release at 5 pm for me so it was useless too.
it's amazing to me how many times Todd & the crew can say "it's like Skyrim in space!" then turn around and blame gamers for comparing it to Fallout & Elder Scrolls when "it's its own thing".