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One of their biggest problems is that they have refused to adopt Unreal engine. They keep accumulating technical debt by refusing to rework their toolset that they built on top of an aging and now outdated engine. Bethesda only has a handful of engine devs, Epic has well over 1000, I believe, who work on Unreal. You can't compete with that. CD Projekt Red, who have a vastly superior engine in comparison, have even made the decision to move forward with Unreal. Epic won. Unreal is by far the best cutting edge engine out there. Bethesda needs to bite the bullet and switch.
I'm worried that not only did the chefs that cooked up such great games left the kitchen, that in replacing them Bethesda just hired a mass of line cooks that were only required to stick to the recipes handed down to them.
I stopped playing the game after a month after its release. There was no way I was going to spend $30 for more boredom. I just went back to No Man's Sky, who fixed their game for Free.
@@shiraisan3779 they make you purchase different components of a single skin to get the entire skin. That's the joke. Activision-Blizzard and Microsoft are the joke.
The weakest part of Skyrim was the radiant quests. Those ones that were generated with their semi random objectives that somehow still felt samey, and you'd just rush through them to get to the mission that matters. Bethesda, for some reason, thought they'd build 80% of a game around that kind of shit.
I played Starfield for maybe 50ish hours. I rescued the same scientist from the same cave at *LEAST* 15 times. I scanned the same "Melted Glacier" on hundreds of planets lightyears apart, hundreds of times. I got so good at clearing out the various POIs that I could probably qualify in speedrunning them, because every planet has 100 UC Outposts, 100 Cryo Labs, 100 Helium Plants, and they're all identical right down to where each coffee mug and pencil sits. 80% is a very generous estimate, given that the procedural content is literally infinite. You can land 5 feet from where you landed before and refresh the POIs and terrain generation. I hate it.
@@ElyonDominus Radiant quests weren't in Oblivion. Are you thinking of Radiant AI? (Which was also overpromised and underdelivered, so, you know, that's fair.)
IMHO Emil Pagliarulo needs to be replaced as a lead writer. You compared Shattered Space to Far Harbour. He wasn't involved in Far Harbour, but in Shattered Space. And IMHO it shows. I really think he is the problem of Bethesdas writing. Also just watch some of his interviews, where he claimed players would make paper planes out of the stories anyway. Is someone like this motivated to write good stories?
His 'Talks From Story' does a great job of accidentally highlighting the problems with how Bethesda develops games. He outright bragged about not using centralized design documents and letting any random employee design a quest if they wanted to. He also referred to Skyrim's story as being "biblical" and admitted they ignore criticism.
@@ElyonDominus you dont need to get rid of emil just demote him, and have someone else be the lead. emil has do some good work hes just not good as a lead.
I feel like Bethesda keep learning the wrong lessons from their game. I want a Bethesda that makes a good world that is fun to explore but now it seems too much to ask.
Its not that they cant learn, its that they are willingly ignoring the points. I dont believe anyone can be that dense without willingly ignoring reality for monetary reasons. They want to keep doing what they are doing and they just hope the gaslighting will work on the costumers enough that everyone will keep buying their half backed copy paste games.
They learned all the right things, they can churn out anything and a certain group will buy it, look at the responses to all the comments it's a who's who of Stockholmers.
Yes, it's like when Emil Pagliarulo said (and I'm paraphrasing a bit) that at the end of Fallout 3, the player would die and players hated this. The lesson that was apparently taken out of this was "the players don't care for the stories we write, they just want to keep living in the world".
I'm glad it exists but I agree it shouldn't take priority over fallout or elder scrolls. If they had released it fully complete like Oblivion or Skyrim then it'd be a different story. It's comparable to Fallout 3 for me. Needs a more satisfying ending.
I think most the time was 600,000 dialogue options and 2,400ish planets or something like that. It’s hard to make everything a tight focused existence with so much sandbox.
im glad it exists to bait bethesda out of their insanity. but this has long since been on the wall, people just kept spreading thejr wallets hoping theyd change @@NevenKnows
@@marksnow9917But a lot of that is AI Generated. It wasn't like it was hand crafted. Not only that, but we know they took NUMEROUS shortcuts, like having DECADES OLD Bugs & Glitches. But also it took extra long changing too many hands which ends up TERRIBLY 90%+ of the time!! Like it's rare to find a game that changes hands 3+ times that comes out really well.
@@ΩΜΣΔ it's not just clearly it IS cut content. Early on into Starfield's release Bethesda themselves admitted to cutting Va'ruun content from the game to keep them "mysterious". But in reality, as you said, it was cut so they could call it a "DLC" and sell it to us. Pretty scummy of Bethesda in all honesty...
How does Bethesda's dev team grow from 100 to 500 and then the number of hand crafted experiences declines? The game is the equivalent of 3 bigger cities in Skyrim without any of the dungeons in the wild. The expansion added no new dungeon patterns to planets? Incredible.
I can only imagine the working climate has devolved to exactly what happened with group projects in, like, 9th grade in school. You pretend to work, safe in the knowledge that the teacher can't single you out when the result is bad because too many people worked on it and it's unclear who did what. And everyone keeps to the social contract that tells them not to make a fuss and act like everything is as it should. It's work-to-order, just with a facade of being happy and productive.
@@Knuspabrot Modern US education in a nutshell. Forty years ago that same teacher would have instantly failed every last one of us in the group for that. If no one ever gets left behind and everyone gets a juice box you get graduates who can't think or work for beans.
Strength of vocalization matters more in a big team - its much harder for good ideas to come to the foreground if your battling through the crowd - especially if your strength is coming up with good game ideas rather than thriving in some enormous social entity. Also getting everyone to visualise a project through the same eyes would be almost impossible. Compromises get made out of the necessity of just being able to move forward to some kind of deadline.
@@jwstrick What really makes me shudder is having to work with some of these Gen-Z kids in the workplace. They cannot do _anything_ unless you hold their hand through it. The youngest member currently on our team is 34, because the kids flame out when their work gets compared against Millennials and Gen-Xers and it just doesn't measure up. I actually replaced someone who was less than half my age, and those first two months on the job cleaning up after her mess? That's what even American universities are turning out, never mind the K-12.
@@jwstrick Well, failing everyone would be wrong in another way. Group dynamics are a thing, and a single person can't do shit to stop it. But that's school. In a company that pays wages to get a product ready, something like this shouldn't be possible to happen. It's massive failure of management to ever let it go that far. But then you probably have a lot incentives for management nowadays to not care either. Caring takes effort, and you'll probably get paid either way. Studios and publisher have just gotten too big, you can't be passionate and creative if your hierarchy has 25 ranks and 500 people work at a project at once.
one of my favorite moments in Skyrim was traveling to windhelm on foot, getting lost, running from a dragon, encountering a dwarven ruin I was too weak to enter, but could loot the outside, finally reaching windhelm it was night and snowing, went under the bridge to see if anything to loot, and heard a dragon in the distance, and saw it circling over the lumber yard it was just so cool, really had nothing like that in starfield, no great moment of awe, of wonder.
Yup, We could have a thread a mile long of interesting experiences people had in Skyrim. Add in mods, and its x100. Starfield is just bland, day-old oatmeal.
@@twogruden9943 yeah what it did best was, even if it was fake and an illusion the world felt like it existed when you were not there, the dragon over the lumber yard could have just been a bad spawn, but it felt like I wasn't the target. Then in starfield your in the movie body snatchers where everyone turns to look at you as you go by.
@@wampatan9 Yeah, I absolutely loved my 30-40 hours in Skyrim in 2011 but could never get back into it after that point. Still a classic game and I can understand how some people spent countless hours in it.
Starfield wasn't irresponsibly large, it was irresponsibly empty. I bought the game at launch, I was excited for it, I have never been more bored in my life. Everything was grey, bland oatmeal. From the planets to the characters. I get a general feeling of contempt from BGS for their playerbase that's incredibly off-putting.
Yeah, they were never going to fill 1000 planets with content, that was a given, but they don't even have 1 unique encounter/location in each Solar System. The default emotion when exploring is disappointment, and that's... well, disappointing.
Considering the Bethesda expectations are Story, NPCs and fleshed out world building, the concept of "1000 planets" was bad to begin with. If I want to play a game with randomly generated planets with pre built copy paste assets and structures? I'd play No Mans Sky, because the expectations of that game is exploring uninhabited planets. That's not to say NMS has no story, NPCs or world building, but it's not exactly the thing you play the game for.
@@RorikH if they were actual good devs using procgen they could have made multiple tilesets for forests, jungles, moons, barren wastelands, frozen tundras, oceanic, and let procgen do the work of generating these tilesets when loading into a different planet. Filled with 5-10 pois that are all handcrafted with their own tilesets with different items, lore, layout, enemies, atmosphere, lighting, etc.
The fact that after a dlc launch that Starfield has half the amount of people playing it compared to Skyrim a 10+ old year game shows how big of a flop it is.
I know it's been said on many youtube videos but the issue is toxic positivity. These developers live in a bubble and get so used to lying to each other that they start to enjoy the smell of their own farts. If you can't give and receive honest criticism, then the creative endeavor will not improve.
This is the entire entertainment industry right now, its collapsing because they can't handle any criticism so they only listen to people who have a financial incentive to tell them what they want to hear. See Ubisoft saying their games are good because the people they bought Disney land vacations for gave it a good review.
I think of Skyrim and Oblivion and Morrowind the same way I think of everything else from my 20s and 30s (I was 25 when Morrowind came out.) It was a fun time, a time I remember fondly, but I'm nearing 50, I'm not the same person I was then, and I don't enjoy the same things now I did in my youth. So when Bethesda inevitably puts out "Skyrim 2, Just Somewhere Else" I'll probably give it a miss the way I wouldn't want to go on a date with my ex-wife who I divorced in 2009.
@@snickersmeh2172 So long as it isnt loading screens every five seconds and the world is continuous at least theres enough lore in the series that the fans can probably make something of it. It does Starfield no favors that its lore is so aggressively boring and dull when its supposed to be introducing us to its new world.
Starfield was successful because people put their faith in Bethesda. They were hyped to play a new Bethesda game, and I believe that a lot of them continued to play because they put money down on an expensive game from a pedigree they believed in. They didn't think Bethesda would deliver such a dud and so they stuck it out, even if they weren't exactly having a blast, because they expected to find the fun. I don't think that Bethesda can trade on this kind of faith a second time, and I hope they understand that if TES VI turns out to be garbage then their star will have fallen.
I'll admit to being one of them to a degree, though the cost wasn't an issue due to game pass. I'll be the first to admit I was surprised by how lacking the game was. Don't get me wrong, I actually do largely enjoy the game, but more as a laze around and not take it seriously game rather than the intense focus I put into a game like Skyrim or Arkham game, I don't feel the same motivation. Starfield is a fine mess around, shoot up bad guys, build mildly interesting stuff game. It's a solid high C game, not an A game like Bethesda used to make. One thing that has been mentioned, that I do agree with, they should have made the map smaller, you only need to bother with a handful of the star systems in the game and you have all the resources, and a lot of them aren't just a little empty, they're completely empty. I wouldn't mind a few empty systems, but dozens of them that amount to 90% of the game? No, and yes actual space exploration may be like that, but that doesn't make a good game. Now that I'm rambling, one thing I did think of that would be realistic that might add fun, gun jams that can ruin weapons. That would enhance difficulty. Frankly starfield was by far the easiest game i've ever played and that's boring, Bethesda shouldn't do dark souls level challenge, that's not their niche, but it shouldn't be so easy you can have a toddler beat the game.
I’d argue they already have done it twice with Starfield. The first time they did it was with fallout 76. That being said in my experience game companies and IP’s seem to have a few games worth of goodwill to burn before it really blows up in their face. If you look at folks like BioWare or Ubisoft they had 2 or 3 stinkers that were successful through inertia before things really exploded in their face. I expect that Bethesda can survive one more substandard release through inertia, especially if it’s a big Franchise title, before they get their Anthem or Skull and Bones.
@josephkwiatkowski2735 The thing with Fallout 76 is that unlike Bioware with Andromeda and Anthem Bethesda actually put in the work to fix a lot of the problems with the game. That is why 76 has a much better score on Steam these days than Starfield and Shattered Space
Bethesda is so arrogant that they think their Oblivion/Fallout 3 era game design and engine is still golden as the industry has evolved and left them in the dust. Every game they put out for the last 16 years is a regression from the previous release. They're stuck in the past and refuse to accept criticism. Anyone that is still excited for ES6 is huffing military grade copium. For Bethesda to be perceived as a top studio again, they need to ditch their shitty Creation engine and replace Todd and Emil who are the biggest weaknesses of their studio.
@@LordShadowZ people have the oddest misguided takes when the it comes to Bethesda. How can you claim they are stuck at fallout3/oblivion design wise then say they regressed? Which is it? And the engine is not the issue, it never was. If anything it's the one thing keeping them relevant along with elder scrolls. And last but not least, skyrim was their peak, and the numbers show.
The industry evolved and left them in the dust? What games exactly are you talking about? There are a few I can think of but none are either a direct comparison, or a massive upgrade. Baldur's Gate 3 is a very different game mechanically, but could compare in scale Dragon's Dogma 2 is not exactly that polished either Witcher 3 is old, and without character creation Cyberpunk only now is in a state it should've been on release 4 years ago Fromsoftware has completely different philosophy BioWare is struggling Stuff by Obsidian Entertainment is the closest anyone has come to a title of a Bethesda killer, but their games are usually a lot smaller in scale Am I missing something?
Bethesda hasn't evolved with the industry. That's the number one problem. They're still trying to peddle mechanics, gameplay, and an engine almost a decade and a half out of date. Which could work, if they hadn't completely murdered their writing room to fill it with hack writers. A solid story can make up for a lot, but we haven't had that in a Bethesda game since Skyrim. Even Fallout 4 was a massive decline when it came to narrative and the player.
Skyrims story is average at best. Oblivion was the last game with an engaging story. Both its main story, side missions and dlc storyline were fantastic.
I've said it a million times... Todd Howard ain't the guy. He got hired straight to producer in '95, was made project lead on Morrowind, and has just been copying and pasting the same game over and over again without understanding why what he learned on Morrowind was so amazing. Bethesda will never get better until Todd is gone.
He worked on Arena as a tester for the CD-ROM version, worked as an additional designer on Daggerfall, became the project leader of Redguard and Morrowind, and has been the game director/executive producer from then onwards.
@@arbitrary_thoughts Cheers - corrected it. My point still stands though, he should not be director or executive producer... He got promoted way too quickly and clearly has no idea how to make something other than Morrowind.
@@hawkshot867 Personally I disagree, the games he's worked on have been successful. I've very much liked them and I'm far, far from being alone in having that perspective. BGS has continued to do different things and iterate. Not everything has been successful but they have done different things. Starfield feels like a blend of Daggerfall and their newer games. That's what I was expecting, and that's what I like. No other studio comes close to doing what BGS does at the same scale/scope. BGS isn't perfect, I don't like every aspect, and I certainly dislike the new monetization scheme of Creation Club/Creations. But overall, I like their games, and I've really liked Starfield. I'm not interested in the overly cinematic movie games that other AAAs make, I like BGS's gameplay of openworld rpg sandbox sims.
@@arbitrary_thoughts Yup nope, strongly disagree. From Software flipped the entire script on what makes RPGs great and Bethesda ain't it anymore. I'm glad you like Starfield and Daggerfall, but frankly those are ideas from almost 30 years ago at this point... I'm going to spend my money and limited time on new experiences and games. If I want to experience a good Bethesda experience I'll just play an extremely heavily modded playthrough of Skyrim. Starfield also didn't innovate AT ALL on the sandbox sim... Neither has Fallout 4 or 76 - I would LOVE for Elder Scrolls 6 to take the original Oblivion idea and run with it with modern tech... INNOVATE ON IT... But that's not going to happen lol.
The problem of Starfield's expansion is that it should have been day one content and the whole "open star system" concept was essentially not only a wasted endeavor but a poorly pursued one. They should have just hand crafted planets from the start, jam pack it with encounters and then have some auxiliary "randomness planets" for exploration.
and 100 systems was far too many. Each faction controlling a system at max, or at least 1 system under complete control, with perhaps a less-controlled 2nd, 2-4 systems as a kind of "conflict zone", with maybe 3-4 "unexplored" systems for absolute "end game" is what the game should have had at max.
Honestly, the game as it is would fit comfortably into just one star system and the "random exploration sites" could just be the moons and the rest of a planets surface outside of the Main POI's, cause planets are Big and space is even bigger than that.
@@EloquentiaSerpentis Exactly, this has been my thoughts on it for a while. Imagine something in just the Sol system, with the various planets and moons REALLY fleshed out, and telling a story about the discovery of alien artifacts on like Titan or Europa or something like that. Could have been so good.
For me, it was the procedural generation. I'm huge on exploration in their games, I love wandering the landscape and finding random new quests or obscure bits of lore and loot because I just happened to go "Gee I wonder what's on the other side of that mountain". With Starfield, I'd experienced every POI within a few hours. I'd cleared the same base several times, but on different planets. I'd seen the same space encounters over and over and over. It just felt like there was 5 hours of handmade content and for the rest, they just said "Fuck it, let the computer shit out the rest of the game and figure it out"
@@Boomer04888 Yeah, the world building/environmental story telling was the one saving grace of all Bethesda games. Starfield took that away...so whats left to enjoy?
@@Boomer04888 What's missing are the classic Fallout bathroom skeletons. You know, how you find what's essentially just clutter decoration that tells silly stories you can find. That was still not exactly high brow storytelling and made not much sense when you started to think critically about it, but it fit the BGS campy aesthetic and just was harmless fun. The worst thing to me in Starfield that immediately turned me off from day one was looking at the map and clearly seeing the evenly distributed rocks dotting the map. It looks like someone's first steps in using a map editor with one rock asset rotated and just pasted down. Utterly soulless and dull with nothing to see.
For me the ya can’t keep much of anything when ya new game + and not enough story and freedom of choice as they normally do content spread mostly through factions it needed another 10 years in development honestly
They’re already installed in my beloved STARFIELD. I loved the game before the mods came out, now I love it more. I never really liked Elder Scrolls and Fallout is both dystopian and way to into the 1950s for me love. STARFIELD is the game I have been waiting for, for ages, glad I finally got my Bethesda game.
@@twogruden9943 no, I am an old man who grew up on moon rockets and the science-fiction films of the 1980s so this is right up my alley. I love the solitude of it, the various airless, barren vistas of magnificent desolation. I vibe on just being a spaceman. I love outer space like so much so unlike their other (also bad story with load screens when you transition between cells) games this is in a genre I love more than any other. I’m not a child and can appreciate things like just chilling on world and watching the local star rise. Because not everyone having an opposing opinion is a bot.
Bethesda's games progressively feel like people going through the motions of making the same game over and over again. Their writing team needs fresh blood like a newborn vampire.
Hey guys the quality of your videos has really gone up. they feel tighter and better written and produced and much more informative and to the point. Been watching on and off for years and years and this is top form, you're doing the best content you've ever done.
Maybe this is a hot take, but I actually (somewhat) disagree that their formula is outdated. I think some parts are, like the zoomed conversation camera and some of the quest design. But I believe, overall, their formula is still fine. The problem is that they took *_out_* too much stuff from their formula instead of refining what was great about it. They gutted all the in depth RP systems that people loved, they stopped being creative and taking risks in their quest design, they pushed for more procedural generation, they all but abandoned the Radiant AI, the list goes on. The formula is only stale because they stripped it down made it BORING. On top of the writing just getting worse and worse and worse.
actual hot take, i disagree with your wording, their formula for the past few games has proven to be increasingly boring due to them "improving" it according to their own words by removing more features that the previous games thrived on. morrowind is ancient af, but its far more immersive then skyrim when it comes to rpg mechanics.
I agree that the idea is great, but they haven't added enough to it. That's what Starfield felt to me... Like they played it was too safe and didn't expand it enough.
One of my favorite things about Morrowind was that you had to get used to taking wacky forms of public transportation. teleportation, boats, giant fleas - it felt real. I remember when Oblivion came out and we all lost our minds because there was A Compass. Honestly, instead of putting Skyrim on every platform imaginable, they should just remake Morrowind *exactly the same* only with modern graphics. Yes, I'm one of those people.
They won't do it unless it can be made for very cheap. Majority of their playerbase won't enjoy it. That's just business perspective mixed with gamers expectations for popular titles. Someone hits some kind of roadblock, gets angry, leaves negative review and move to another title and never looks back. Personally when it comes to this more old-school way of exploration Subnautica worked well for me so there is still some niche for it but going on same scale popularity as Bethesda titles with games built on more demanding concepts... Well, it's not a surprise that their games got popular as those were easier, more accessible. Would be great to see refreshed Morrowind that isn't about quest marks etc. As much as I don't like remasters but Morrowind could have version with just slightly less bugs xD
@@andrzejnadgirl2029 yeah bc most of the players that enjoy skyrim don't actually know how to play a true rpg. They are the same camp that say bg3 is trash where as its super deep and customizable.
@@andrzejnadgirl2029 I'm pretty sure most people who love Morrowind, like myself, know that most Skyrim fans wouldn't like it. It just sucks to know that the company you loved for making a game that formed a part of your childhood is now more likely to make Skyrim Mobile Edition with a Candycrush DLC than they are to ever revisit the things about Morrowind that made it so special.
I don't think there will be a game like Morrowind again. No company is going to make a game without waypoint markers. My ideal remastered version of Morrowind would be improved graphics, better combat mechanics, and a detailed player driven map system, with pins, notes, and pens. Probably a better way to organize and search quests too.
These AAA companies spend so much money, but if your making a story driven game, then the most money should be spent on the writing. Make sure you have an editor for the writer, and then make sure the writing is something that you lonve, even before you start producing the game. The story should already be writen even before you start. I hear they have a team of writers, so why not have each of those team draft a story and then vote on which is the best? If they are incapable of producing a good story, why are they working for you?
BGS games aren't really supposed to prioritise the narrative/story. BGS games have been openworld rpg sandbox sandbox sims. Fallout started off more narrative driven, but look at their other IPs. They've just reduced the scope due to tech limitations, but they've always wanted to go big similarly to Daggerfall.
@@arbitrary_thoughts elder scrolls is a story based game, same with fallout 3-4 which includes NV. Without the story, the open world is just empty, like any of the starfield planets, you can go explore. The story is what allows you to immerse into the open world, the open world is not what makes any of the bethesda games good. You have two types of story telling, one is the physical dialog, the other is the environmental storytelling, both are lacking in starfield, that is why it sucks. Not everyone wants to create their own story, and that tends to be really boring unless you have gameplay like minecraft or the forest, or rust. Fallout 2, Morrowind and Oblivion were always about the story first, that is what made those games so good.
Now see that could actually be an interesting idea for a game world Congratulations you came up with something more interesting than Bethesda's lead writer could
As someone who did a decent amount of modding with FNV, yes the creation engine is a genuine problem. The amount of work you sometimes have to do to get the engine to do what should be simple things (like aligning specific bones in a size adjusted rig rather than just putting the skeleton in a specific position and shoving it into a set position) was frankly ridiculous. While I would agree that a lot of the “new engine” people don’t really understand what they are talking about, creation engine still has some major flaws that go back to its start as a gamebryo fork and likely can’t be fixed without breaking everything built on top of them.
@@jakecarlson3709 the thing about game engines is that they can be fixed and improved upon to the point of not resembling the old game engine it came from. Now people on the other hand usually can't be fixed in the same way and need to be removed and replaced. The issue with the game engine is all the devs fault,
@@madmax2069 Thank you, someone gets it. Bethesda's programmers are stuck in 2002 and can barely innovate or improve anymore, meanwhile you look at what modders can do with the same exact tools and it becomes obvious how much Bethesda are holding themselves back. "A poor craftsman blames his tools" and all that. Hiring programmers born in the last 30 years would probably be a huge step up for them.
Unpopular opinion time - just because Todd Howard is a walking meme, doesn't mean he's a good director at BGS. He is so delusional and out of touch with the expectations and standards of games in today's climate.
Todd is a hype man, and is incapable of putting his foot down. If he could, he would either put Emil on blast or just get rid of him. Emil is a massive issue for Bethesda, and it's sickening that he's apparently going to take up Todd's mantle when he leaves.
@@BaconMinion Im not even sure Howard has that much influence on the structure of anything. Hes at that high level where his main job is to hype stuff up but has probably moved away from directly pushing ideas. Not that things were BETTER if he was, but he like most execs seems mostly a figurehead and hype guy- where the real issues lie farther down the chain.
Todd Howard fundamentally strikes me as a man who doesn't actually like RPGs as a genre. TES and Fallout used to have more in common with Dragon Age: Origins or CRPGs like Wasteland (Fallout's literal inspiration) and the DnD games. Now, their games are basically action games with light RPG elements, like Mass Effect, except they don't even do action nicely. Bethesda needs to seriously consider what their main gameplay focus is. Is it gunplay, like Todd was going on about for Starfield? Then they need to actually hire people who've worked on games with good gunplay, like Destiny, Halo, or CoD, and they need to be prepared to give those systems more depth. Is it RPG gameplay, like being able to make a wide range of decisions with drastically different effects on the story and strongly written stories/characters? Then they need to fire Todd Howard *and* Emil Pagliarulo, and hire experienced RPG writers. Hell, even if they focus on action gameplay, they need to have more than one writer! Starfield literally credits Pagliarulo as their only writer. Even CoD and Destiny have had a strong writing team instead of just lumping it all on one poor fucker.
I like to refer to them, especially skyrim as "baby's first RPG". Skyrim is such a barebones bland game I have a hard time figuring out what people even like in it. Combat is ass, magic is ass, RPG systems are ass...
@@AsG_Alligator What I like about it is that it's not D&D levels of complexity. I wouldn't like that. It's balanced well enough between the RPG stuff vs action-adventure. Plus, the world itself is beautiful. The lore is interesting. Then, I re-installed Skyrim several times, just to be in that world and listen to the music while walking down the roads.
@@AsG_Alligator Some people are just smarter than others, it is what it is. It's been difficult to come to terms with but I've gotten to the point where I just realize most things I like in life will be dumbed down and made worse over time in order to appeal to a larger audience. Just try to get as much enjoyment out of something as you can before it gets popular, because popularity will ruin everything unless you're one of those "lowest common denominator" kind of people it's being made for.
Remember, for the price of shattered space you could buy 6 copies of Bejeweled 3 for you and the homies, which is probably a better idea since Bejeweled 3 is HEAT!
Value is also related to the other things you could purchase at the same time. There are more and more options, and smaller developers delivering better products with fewer bugs for lower prices...
changing the game engine will not change the end result for BGS. its the design philosophy of the company that is still stuck in the past and the horrible writing.
Brothers, do not preorder Elder Scrolls 6. The Bethesda we knew is long gone. The talent that brought us Morrowind through Skyrim is either gone or consumed by the corporate machine. Look to small Dev companies to find where that passion went.
Obsidian is still here and Avowed is around the corner. The Fallout: London team is going to be making an independent studio. There is hope. Bethesda has be a zombie for over a decade.
Wage increases are way bellow inflation. That is the metric people use to judge cost in their everyday life. I understand using iflation when talking about pricing decisions of companies but I don't think it's an acurate metric when talking about player percieved value.
I don't think *anyone* wants Bethesda to fail; If you are a fan of the Bethesda IP's we very much want them to succeed. However, with release after release being either bad or mid at best, frustration is definitely setting in. Especially when we try to offer constructive criticism and they seem completely tone-deaf to it.
I do want them to fail. I'm not going to chase up on Bethesda news and praying every day they bite the dust, but I don't look at their content anymore either. They've been neglecting their audience and releasing shitty games for years now. There's only so much that can be forgiven before people simply grow apathetic. Time for them to face the consequences of all their bad decisions. Wouldn't be surprised if they get another Ubisoft-esque buyout/consequences.
Why wouldn't I want a scammy and dishonest studio to fall. Paid mods, false promises, literal scam with F76. List goes on and on. BGS is epitome of what's wrong with gaming industry
The only upgrade we got in the Bethesda games lifetime was Fallout New Vegas after Fallout 3. But it was only published by Bethesda, developed by Obsidian
For me its the lack of self awareness and unwilling to learn from their mistakes. Just listen to Todd and Emil. They seem unable to listen to the fans. They think they're Midas, but ever since F4, everything they touch turns to shit. I'd prefer Microsoft to sack Emil and relegate Todd to a counseling position, and hire a guy like Tim Cain to put Fallout back on track. Even better: hire CDPR to develop the next Fallout game. Im done with Bethesda.
@@Achonas get over it. It’s nearly 10 years since the Witcher 3 came out. Even without the initial Cyberpunk debacle, it’s not that weird for people to change jobs in that amount of time. And I don’t know if you played the new DLC, but there is nothing wrong with the talent of the current bunch of people at CDPR. Maybe actually wait for the game to come out to decide wether or not it’s bad.
Honestly, I think Obsidian correctly figured out the way things were going with Bethesda when they decided to make their new Pillars of Eternity game the same perspective and similar gameplay to modern TES/Fallout games. I seriously suspect they're going to try and do to the Bethesda-genre what Cities Skylines did to SimCity, and frankly I welcome it. God knows they're a bunch of great writers, at least.
I don't see $3 of value here, because no matter what is in it the result is the same. We get to float around and bop into lights until they swirl and we get a useless power so late in the game that we don't need it. Our settlements are meaningless dumps of resources that produce nothing we couldn't get easier at a shop or just by mining for a couple of minutes. The cities are bland and tiny, there are no MECHS, giant FLEET SPACE BATTLES or XENO-SWARMS despite showing us a slideshow involving all three. Nothing matters in the game, you just reset and walk around a bunch again and again through their uninspired story that might have gotten attention 20 years ago.
It was a flat-out design failure and with devs like Emil Pagliarulo saying he believes Starfield is "the best game we've ever made" it seems they are in complete denial about the games failures and wont be able to course correct in time to fix ES6 because they don't think there is anything to fix.
Shattered Space was a faction questline, with comparable content to Atlantis, Akhila, Neon, Key. If the price reflected that (like 1/4 of the base game) at ~$15 then this wouldnt be an issue.
11:07 That's called "Stockholm Syndrome". Fallout 76 is, bar none, the *worst* game I've ever had the displeasure of playing. It's broken. It's buggy. The story is crap. The dialogue is crap. The gameplay is stilted. Exploring is unrewarding. There's limits to everything you do and everything you collect. Every minor patch breaks all mods and introduce new bugs. I do NOT understand how anyone can say with a straight face that this game is anything but the single most trash game to have ever released. It gets nothing right while being overpriced and unironically asking for a subscription on top. I'd play 100 hours of Starfield over a single one of that abomination.
Would not have predicted a Buffet-relaying-Graham quote "price is what you pay, value is what you get" in the intro here. But definitely germane. Also appreciate the inflation-adjusted references to prior DLC to make the price point. Well done.
The Formula is fine, the writing is boring. The Characters are boring, the Companions are boring, the romance options are boring, the NPCs are milk toast fetch quest givers, the enemies are most of the time the same boring guys with guns over and over... the world/universe building wasn't even there for Starfield. They talk about Mechs, show us mechs, we don't get to play with Mechs, we don't get to fight Mechs, they dangle Capital Ships in front of us, we don't get to fly that, the Starborn ships, don't even have a bed or a toilet, by the time you finally get one of those your own Ship is fully decked out and ten times better and you can't customize the Starborn Ship, it isn't explained who build those or where they come from or why you even get one... every single System in Starfield feels unfinished, as if they just put a base idea out there as minimum viable product and hope for Modders to do something worthwhile with it. ...which they probably would, if at least the world was interesting and full enough of content to put in the work for it.
How cool of a perk would it be to get mech schematics by getting approval by all the major factions, now that we have the Va'ruun? That was my hope. Another trip into a deeper part of the archives to get the plans and being able to deploy it onto planets as a follower/pilot. Make it cost a lot of materials for upgrades and only can be built in a base so they have SOME use instead of being an afterthought leftover from F4.
There's like 3 enemy types that 99% of the entire game revolves around. Crimson, Ecliptics, and the occasional Zealots. I have killed more pirates from each of those factions than there are citizens in New Atlantis, like 50 times over. That's not saying much because they made New Atlantis to look like there's at most, 100 people living there.
The thing that irks me is that Emil is being just like Baghdad Bob: "Starfield is the best game ever. Shattered Space has many fans. This game is perfect."
That's exactly what I was trying to put my finger on with Fallout 4. I really dislike the story and quest design, but it is undeniably fun. It has the best combat of any fallout by far, and the crafting still knocks my pants off sometimes. We really need Fallout New Vegas, but you get Fallout 4 style gunplay and and overhauled crafting system. But then again, might as well as ask for a remaster with all the cut content put back in XD
Yeah, but who could possibly deny how much better Elden Ring would have been if every thirty feet, you encountered a loading screen? That would have been so much better than just being able to freely roam the world, uninterrupted...
I can't believe he didn't bring up the obvious reason why they didn't care about making a big expansion that changes anything.... They sold a 100 bucks edition with early access AND, MOST IMPORTANTLY, the first expansion for free. They are pretty much contractually obligated to release an expansion...All they had to do was put out an expansion, the quality never really mattered. It's crazy how some people expect Bethesda to keep working on this failure of a game. This is it. There won't be no other expansion, just some money-grubbing tiny DLC at most, like the horse armor.
My question: How many Big Macs could you buy in the year of Oblivion’s release, with the money it costed to by Oblivion. Compare that to the number of Big Macs you could buy today for the cost of Starfield on release.
This question struck a chord deep within my soul, so I did a little googling. It seems that an Oblivion was worth around 20 Big Macs, while a Starfield is worth about 12 Big Macs. Of course these are for the standard editions, not factoring in Collector's/Premium etc.
They could have kept some of that traversal discovery if they had just allowed in-system travel to be a thing, made space POI's able to exist anywhere and made it so space asteroids only showed up where it makes sense, in planetary rings and such.
They refuse to can their god awful creation engine or hire real writers. Honestly the best thing that can happen for FO5 and ES6 is to be indefinitely suspended while BGS gets their shit together (which I know won’t happen).
@@olgagaming5544graphics dont matter when the engine is literally breaking apart due to the "patches", fallout 76 is a good example of what hapoens when bethesda gets too comfy with their engine and doesnt try atleast patching up some of the holes in their previous patches, since they arent good at fixing anything according to modders who make bug fix mods on nexus and moddb
Inflation is offset by the larger gaming audience and higher sales. Compared to Shivering isles days. The gaming market/copies sold has near quad dripled. Also they have the creation club. Which is essentially microtransactions for paid mods. Which means they have more then one revenue stream already. So no reason for their DLC to be so expensive. And even then, Shattered Space is smaller and worse compared to Fallout 4 Far Harbour which was the same price.
It turns out when the game is mid, players want something to improve the core experience, not "here's a 30 dollar side theme park while the game is still in a miserable state".
Strange, now I might buy shattered space. I loved Starfield and put about 250 hours into it. I saw the poor reception of shattered space and skipped it. But if what you say is true, I might actually like it.
Good ol' Emil and his weird take of "design documents are hard". He's literally still coasting off of the fact that the first half of Oblivion's Dark Brotherhood was half decent.
I enjoyed Starfield and I don't mind it's a different experience than their other games. My issue is they don't fix bugs and they are selling mods. I tried Shattered Space. I have yet to be able to finish it due to bugs. It's been 2 weeks, there simply is no excuse as to why game breaking bugs have not been taken care of. The other issue is with their selling of mods. I don't mean player mods. I mean mods made by them. The game lacks content and suddenly, you put up a mission and new game system and ask players to pay for it? That's absurd.
Considering rockstar employs 4500 devs, I disagree. I think Bethesda’s needs to hire more developers to keep up. They have a history of keeping the company small. 500 devs really isn’t much at all.
Watched a youtuber that liked Starfield make a "review" on Shattered Space. He didn't go ultra in depth - was more like a friend chatting about their thoughts on a subject. But it all basically got wrapped up into a statement he made towards the end, and I'm paraphrasing here: "Bethesda listened to feedback, which is good, but they listened to people who already disliked Starfield. This DLC doesn't fix enough for them, and dilutes what those of us who liked the game enjoyed about it." Fact is this: They should've stuck to their guns with Starfield imo. In trying to make everyone happy, they made everyone disappointed, and I don't know how exactly they're going to get Starfield out of this ditch it's currently in.
Shattered Space was fun, but I do hope they lean back into the large scale of the game and continue to add to the proc gen/POIs and existing game systems.
@@iseru-q2m It's not the same as the main game, which is why people who actually liked the main game don't like the DLC either. You're only listening to the side that already disliked Starfield in the first place. I've listened to both sides. They tried to appease everyone and thus appeased no one. That's why both sides aren't happy right now. Don't just listen to one side of the conversation.
I read somewhere that the engagement is actually LOWER in the DLC than there were people who bought the edition with the Season Pass. Which means people were so disappointed in the game, they didn't even come back for the DLC they had already paid for. That is a tragic level of failure from a once beloved developer.
We, as a fan base, need to come to terms with the fact that the team who created Morrowind was gone by the time it shipped. Bethesda ran on the inertia of that team but have thus far had no new infusion of RPG thought nor game mechanic innovation since Oblivion when they got rid of character skill and became an action adventure studio.
I think Starfield should be accepted for what it is: An experimental passion project courtesy of our old friend Todd Howard and his team. They tried something new and I respect them for that. I don’t think we’ll be seeing a sequel to this game anytime soon, if ever, which might be for the best.
The problem is the rest of the context you left out. They charged 60 dollars for it, and 30 for this expansion. And for the last year, they've been saying it's the best game ever, it's everybody elses' fault if they don't like it, and even publicly shamed random customers for sharing negative feedback. If that earns your respect, I guess your respect isn't worth much. Personally, I'm pretty disgusted by their behavior and they've lost most of what little respect I had left for them after 15 different Skyrim releases and the FO76 debacle.
Except it's a literal $70 product and Bethesda is using their horrible development cycles wasting time on a game a lot of people don't like/are bored by. Starfield would be less irritating if Bethesda's IPs were managed better
So experimental that they were cutting features because they feared the normies wouldn't like it. What's that? Environmental effects and damage on planets? Nope, gotta cut it, it could make somebody have to reload a save because they didn't have the right equipment! Limited fuel carrying ability, without it just replenishing? Nope, gotta cut it, somebody could get stuck in space and have to call for help! And like everything Bethesda, they smooth down all the corners and make it so that you don't have to really commit to anything at all, because that could alienate some players. You don't like a thing? You can just skip it!
When you start Starfield the game has no lore so there is nothing you can "invest" into as a player, and after several hours of play, the lore is still as thin as water. There just isn't much to hold the player captive.
Fallout 4 was boring and clearly showed Bethesda's weaknesses. Weaknesses that were already starting to show with Skyrim. Anyone buying their games at this point is dreaming of a game made by a studio that hasn't existed in two decades.
You described exactly my Bethesda experience especially the Dark brotherhood reference. I remember being so disappointed with those missions in Skyrim, and at the time I was worried that they would lean too hard into procedurally generated content after being sent to the same cave three times by three different quest givers.
Bethesda lost their spark long, long ago. The last game they put out that was truly great was Morrowind. You had a world that was complete, didn't use level scaling exclusively, had hidden legendary items and tons of hidden items in general, you could just FIND amazing game changing stuff. Then they put out real honest to god expansions, not dlc's. Oblivion was decent but was definitely the point that their downfall started.
You hit the nail on the head with the discontiguous nature of Starfield. I still remember first playing Morrowind and being amazed by the expansive world, and even though Fallout 4 lost a lot of the RPG elements it still had what I call a "Bethesda World." You don't want to fast travel because there's so much cool stuff you can find in between. It can be an expansive dungeon, or just a dead guy beheaded in a bathtub surrounded by mannequins holding machetes. Starfield has no "Between," and that's what hurts it most for me. You can't just see something, turn right, and you're in a whole new unexpected adventure. It removes the sense of discovery that was one of their earlier games' greatest strengths.
Take a shot whenever a TH-camr complains about the loading screens in Starfield. It amazes me how much people love to worry on that particular bone.. it's never been a problem for me, and I have to wonder if it actually bothers anyone that much or if it's just part of the checklist content creators have to hit in order to meet the anger quota for the algorithm. Heck, if you use fast travel in Skyrim (and I'll bet you anything MOST people do, by far) you'll have just as much if not more loading time. In and out of cities. In and out of buildings. Area to area, to hit your quest locations. I should know, I've got 1300 hours in Skyrim. Loading is a constant and regular thing, but you don't hear people complaining about it. For a Fallout or Elder Scrolls game it's such a non-issue, so why is it here? The answer is simple, and silly. Starfield is not the same game as the Fallouts and the Elder Scrolls, and it's not trying to be. People complaining about loading screens are NOT comparing it to those franchises. No, they're comparing it to, what, Elite Dangerous? No Man's Sky? Star Citizen? Other games that Starfield isn't, but that they wish it was.. just because those games sure aren't perfect either (or even existing, in SC's case), or else they'd be playing them every waking hour, and not out complaining about other games. Mike gave himself away, in this vid, when he talked about 'missed potential'. Because what really has people upset is that Starfield is not some imaginary, literally impossible fusion of all the games I've just mentioned. It's not a seamless open-galaxy with high quality curated content and proc-gen when you need it, with no loading screens (except when you want there to be), and an intricate storyline but also a perfect, infinite sandbox. Nothing can be, not with today's technology. And because it's not that, everyone's just blithely taking their banked disdain for Bethesda and nitpicking Starfield to pieces. Which, sure, Bethesda deserves some of that. I like making fun of Todd, too. But given that so many people are still playing Skyrim (as shown in this video) despite it being re-released like six times, I don't think anyone's about to teach him any lessons on how to run a business. But who cares about that. Starfield's fun. I've got 150 hours in it, and I haven't even touched Shattered Space yet, or done the NG+ loop. I like how fast and sharp the melee combat feels, leagues ahead of Skyrim or Fallout 4 (though VATS would be nice, Blitz is really fun in FO4). I like the ship combat. I'm not a big ship builder so I like that it's optional, but I do also like the big-ass weird ships some of my friends have made. I like the companions; Sam is a hot cowboy dad and I will hear no ill about him, and Andreja's a sweetheart once she opens up and yet also a proper murderhobo. I like the shooting; the sniping feels good, and the weapon and suit upgrades that you can build feel meaningful and effective. I like the very nuanced difficulty options they've put in; you can make your game feel like FO4 Survival mode where everything dies super fast, including you, and that's exciting. I like the weird random space encounters, like the guy who just sings over comms, and the grandma, and the tour ship full of students, and the fact that if you're in the Mantis ship, Spacers will sometimes freak out and flee rather than fight you, like you're Space-Batman. I like how good *movement* feels, with sprinting being fast, and jetpacks adding mobility, and that thing where you grab a ledge and pull yourself up that I really wish was in Skyrim (does anyone know a mod for it?). I also do like the mods coming out for Starfield, and that I can run around naked looking like a bad sexy bitch, as the gods intended. I like the vehicle, the Not-Mako (or REV-8 or whatever it's called) for being a skittish, bouncy, 0-100 in half a second mess with guns (and that the companions comment on your driving, for better or worse). And I like the Starborn powers, which let me feel Godlike, rushing into a group of fools and blasting them onto their butts so I can stab them before they can even get up or lifting them into the air to wiggle helplessly before me. Sure, there are things I don't like, too. But I'd rather have fun than chew on them. I appreciate that everyone's gonna have their own opinion, but I also think that way too many people let said opinions get shaped by loud voices, and anger and outrage fuel clicks and engagement so that's what they'll hear, and feel. And that's just unfortunate. Because instead of having a good time, they're just, effectively, choosing to be angry over nothing. But, well. Welcome to the internet, I guess.
Unfortunately, BGS said something along the lines that a person can go to any planet and land anywhere during the marketing of the game. They didn't mention it was via loading screens. We have had games like No Man's Sky that seamlessly do this; so I think people expected something better than a few loading screens when traveling from point A to B. As you mentioned, yes, Skyrim has loading screens. It has different areas like Skyrim, Whiterun, and dungeons. But, the main area (Skyrim) is large and gives the illusion of an open world. When going from Riverwood to Whiterun, you'll probably encounter one loading screen. Fast travel in Skyrim is optional; you can play the game without fast travel if you choose; which is not the case with Starfield. So, when playing Skyrim for the first time, you can explore it seamlessly. Also, when traveling from one point to another point in Skyrim, you might encounter interesting locations like a Bandit camp or a Dungeon with an interesting mini-quest. This is a part of so-called "BGS" magic. I don't think the same can be said for Starfield with its design principle.
@@chamathamara I can see your point, and I do agree that it would be nice to have a single contiguous massive space you can travel through.. but the problem is, that was never gonna happen in Starfield. Space is just too big. If you travel from one planet to another at non-jump speed, it would take years, decades, centuries of real time. The "star field" itself is the 'big open area' in this game, and because of the very concept, it's completely unrealistic to expect to be able to just.. go wandering in it. Which leaves the planets. And you CAN wander across those.. but it's far too much space to convey their scale realistically. And even if they did, you'd still have the NMS situation of "wow this is all empty and meaningless space, I have to make my own fun or go to pre-existing checkpoint locations to find anything interesting".. which is exactly how it is, in Starfield. The problem is one of scope, and it exists both with the fans AND Bethesda getting sucked into the 'bigger is better' idea. A province like Skyrim is probably right about the perfect size for a game for humans. Stuff it full of things, be it random encounters or curated content, and people will play a million hours. The issue is that a lot of people finished playing, or decided man, if only there was MORE Skyrim. And so comes the idea of 'what if there are WHOLE PLANETS of it'. But until AI storytelling and content curating is perfected, we're not gonna have that. That said, THAT technology IS getting better. Maybe in a few years, they'll be able to inject a whole AI storyteller into Starfield. But even if they do.. will it still be meaningful? Players won't have shared experiences. But tabletop game players do still enjoy telling their war stories.. I guess we'll see. I do agree that it *would* have been cooler to simply be able to take off from and land on planets and see the whole process. It would've been more immersive. Like I said, I have my little complaints, but they're not nearly enough to make me flip on the hate switch.
The problem almost never lies with the devs. Screw ups like these happen when executives force their ideas into the product and no one is allowed to say it's an awful idea..
There's no way Shattered Space was made in response to criticism about the lack of handicrafts areas - this DLC was in the works and was always going to be what it was going to be. It just happened to sound like it was going to address a particular piece of feedback so conveniently fits the narrative of "Oh we're listening"
We're confusing devs. On one hand we'll shout "modern gaming sucks" and on the other we deplore "this dev hasn't changed since the 2000s". Our messaging is all over the place.
I mean, we're talking about a gaming studio that releases a gun for $7, that didn't work properly for weeks. I think it's safe to say BGS isn't the same BGS that released Oblivion or Fallout 3
A big part to Starfield's initial player base that a lot of people have forgotten, is that Bethesda had a pretty sizable marketing collaboration with PC hardware manufacturers upon launch where the game was bundled with CPUs, GPU, motherboards, and pre-built systems (I was building a new rig at the time and actually had codes for 2 copies of the game from the same machine without even trying). This is especially important as it was right after a lot of these manufacturers had their new model series rolling out, as well as there was a bit of a lull in the GPU overpricing trend for a while there. So a lot of people got the game for free and even if they wouldn't have necessarily paid for the game directly, since it came with something else they were already buying anyway, a lot of people were gonna try it out regardless. Cyberpunk upon initial release however had the opposite effect - while last gen consoles may have had a lot of problems on it that got a LOT of attention, I played the game on both my older (FAR outdated) system as well as my new one and never had ANY problems with it aside from self-inflicted wounds by modding. I knew OTHER people were having issues with it for months, but because *I* didn't, being aware of other people's technical issues didn't matter much to me.
Phantom liberty doesn't play like a DLC. It's like an entire standalone game with 25 hours of playtime. I would have paid double for the sheer quality of it - it's got Idris Elba and very well-used, not just cameo but an entire arc. Cinematic gameplay and some crazily well-designed levels and side quests.
Just gotta say you've made a fast fan out of me these last couple of weeks. Really measured and thorough coverage with principled criticisms that don't just amount to "DEI is the devil."
Got starfield as a gift with my graphics card so i played it and got near the end of the campaign but never finished it. I just got, bored. And for a bethesda game that was disheartening. My faith in the dlc was low so waited to see what others said. Seeing where it stands it is an easy pass
#1. This story is not compelling. It is dull. The UNC questline was better than the main story. I think it was a mistake to make such a massive space game and not at least have hints of other sentient alien species.
Very good point about the numbers. Usually if a project fails miserably there are still loads of different numbers available to paint things in a positive light. Industry standard for gaslighting.
There's a lot to do in starfield. With that said the fan backlash is dumb. Shattered space is only failing becauss of fan expectations. There's 1700 planets There's no way that everyone had done everything on every single planet, There's infinite ways to customize ships, There's 1000s of quests etc and people really expected bethesda to put out more than this? Like are you dumb the game is already huge 😂 and they're absolutely right putting in too much stuff would cause the game to break. If you want more content then make mods. I legit dont understand what the fuss is about. The quests and content were cool.
I played Cyberpunk 2077 a few months after launch on PC. It had performance issues but it was a great game. Later, mods made it even better. Cyberpunk didn't need Phantom Liberty. It had great content from the start. Never did it feel like just generic empty space with bubbles of content. DLCs don't fix games. They build upon what's already there and add to that. If you need to fix a game, you don't need a DLC, but a patch. Starfield needs patches reducing the insane amount of loading screens and patches filling the voids with content. If the base game isn't convincing, I'm not buying the DLC. Fix the base game first. Then add DLCs.
Conversely I played on PC for both games at launch. Cyberpunk was significantly better as an experience from the start. Starfield was another glitchy mess that had so many breaks in the gameplay due to the constant loading screens, it was just meh. A ok tale, semi enjoyable but never anything special. Then DLCs… Phantom Liberty was phenomenal. The elevation in gameplay when I had already platinum trophied the based game was night/day better. It wasn’t necessary, but I absolutely loved it. I loved the structure and bones of the game to invest further. I am not sure I can say that for Starfield currently. I opted for a new run at a higher difficulty in BG3 instead co-op with the spouse. One 181 hour coop run wasn’t enough.
Bethesda is like the gifted kid who never had to put effort into getting good grades, but fell off and lost motivation in college because they never developed a studying habit.
6:01 "Cyberpunk had glimmers of a vastly superior game in it." Yes, it was a mess on last gen on release, and had tons of bugs and optimization issues regardless of your rig. I played it on a fairly outdated PC and loved it. Cyberpunk 2077 was a deeply flawed masterpiece on release (now its just a masterpiece), Starfield was a reasonably function pile of mediocrity and hasn't changed much. I'd take release 2077 over Starfield in its current state everytime.
I desperately hope The Elder Scrolls 6 comes together. Glimmers of Bethesda are there, but it seems clear that project and team scale risks losing the old magic.
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Wow. A+ copium
I would prepare to be greatly disappointed
One of their biggest problems is that they have refused to adopt Unreal engine. They keep accumulating technical debt by refusing to rework their toolset that they built on top of an aging and now outdated engine. Bethesda only has a handful of engine devs, Epic has well over 1000, I believe, who work on Unreal. You can't compete with that. CD Projekt Red, who have a vastly superior engine in comparison, have even made the decision to move forward with Unreal. Epic won. Unreal is by far the best cutting edge engine out there. Bethesda needs to bite the bullet and switch.
I'm worried that not only did the chefs that cooked up such great games left the kitchen, that in replacing them Bethesda just hired a mass of line cooks that were only required to stick to the recipes handed down to them.
I stopped playing the game after a month after its release. There was no way I was going to spend $30 for more boredom. I just went back to No Man's Sky, who fixed their game for Free.
I like the part where he said "$30 is multiple indie games, or 3/4 of a mythic weapon skin in Overwatch"
Also Fallout London made by people for free.
What? 3/4 of a skin? What is happening
Any game with skins that expensive sounds like a sh*t moneygrab for fools with too much money and not enough sense.
@@shiraisan3779 they make you purchase different components of a single skin to get the entire skin. That's the joke. Activision-Blizzard and Microsoft are the joke.
as someone that has been buying a ton of indie games from 5-20$'s I can confirm that.
The weakest part of Skyrim was the radiant quests. Those ones that were generated with their semi random objectives that somehow still felt samey, and you'd just rush through them to get to the mission that matters.
Bethesda, for some reason, thought they'd build 80% of a game around that kind of shit.
I played Starfield for maybe 50ish hours. I rescued the same scientist from the same cave at *LEAST* 15 times. I scanned the same "Melted Glacier" on hundreds of planets lightyears apart, hundreds of times. I got so good at clearing out the various POIs that I could probably qualify in speedrunning them, because every planet has 100 UC Outposts, 100 Cryo Labs, 100 Helium Plants, and they're all identical right down to where each coffee mug and pencil sits.
80% is a very generous estimate, given that the procedural content is literally infinite. You can land 5 feet from where you landed before and refresh the POIs and terrain generation. I hate it.
The weakest part of Skyrim was the selling point of Oblivion. Neat how they haven't innovated, excluding paid mods, since Morrowind huh?
@@ElyonDominus Radiant quests weren't in Oblivion. Are you thinking of Radiant AI? (Which was also overpromised and underdelivered, so, you know, that's fair.)
the weakest part of skyrim was the quests period, they're all bad, surface level slop calling back to things that were better done in previous titles
The quests were bad but the world is empty and there are no meaningful RPG elements in an RPG game.
IMHO Emil Pagliarulo needs to be replaced as a lead writer. You compared Shattered Space to Far Harbour. He wasn't involved in Far Harbour, but in Shattered Space. And IMHO it shows. I really think he is the problem of Bethesdas writing. Also just watch some of his interviews, where he claimed players would make paper planes out of the stories anyway. Is someone like this motivated to write good stories?
You have to get rid of Todd to get rid of Emil.
His 'Talks From Story' does a great job of accidentally highlighting the problems with how Bethesda develops games. He outright bragged about not using centralized design documents and letting any random employee design a quest if they wanted to. He also referred to Skyrim's story as being "biblical" and admitted they ignore criticism.
@@ElyonDominus you dont need to get rid of emil just demote him, and have someone else be the lead. emil has do some good work hes just not good as a lead.
@@foxto100 a message needs to be sent. The last good work he did was in 2011 mate. He and Todd both need to go.
@@foxto100 Emil is protected by Todd. You're not getting a new lead without replacing Todd and if Todd is gone Emil is, too.
I feel like Bethesda keep learning the wrong lessons from their game. I want a Bethesda that makes a good world that is fun to explore but now it seems too much to ask.
Its not that they cant learn, its that they are willingly ignoring the points. I dont believe anyone can be that dense without willingly ignoring reality for monetary reasons. They want to keep doing what they are doing and they just hope the gaslighting will work on the costumers enough that everyone will keep buying their half backed copy paste games.
They learned all the right things, they can churn out anything and a certain group will buy it, look at the responses to all the comments it's a who's who of Stockholmers.
And I feel players just don't learn. Is the reason Bethesda (and others) keep selling "games".
Yes, it's like when Emil Pagliarulo said (and I'm paraphrasing a bit) that at the end of Fallout 3, the player would die and players hated this. The lesson that was apparently taken out of this was "the players don't care for the stories we write, they just want to keep living in the world".
Keep your expectations high, we just witnessed baldur's gate 3. Which shows what ppl are capable of creating
Starfield doesn’t feel like a game that justifies it’s long development time, priority over Elder Scrolls/Fallout, and existence.
I'm glad it exists but I agree it shouldn't take priority over fallout or elder scrolls. If they had released it fully complete like Oblivion or Skyrim then it'd be a different story. It's comparable to Fallout 3 for me. Needs a more satisfying ending.
I think most the time was 600,000 dialogue options and 2,400ish planets or something like that. It’s hard to make everything a tight focused existence with so much sandbox.
@@heroicgangster9981 Don’t forget the price at launch. We payed $70!
im glad it exists to bait bethesda out of their insanity. but this has long since been on the wall, people just kept spreading thejr wallets hoping theyd change @@NevenKnows
@@marksnow9917But a lot of that is AI Generated. It wasn't like it was hand crafted. Not only that, but we know they took NUMEROUS shortcuts, like having DECADES OLD Bugs & Glitches.
But also it took extra long changing too many hands which ends up TERRIBLY 90%+ of the time!!
Like it's rare to find a game that changes hands 3+ times that comes out really well.
Honestly shattered space is Cleary cut content with a 30 dollar price tag on it
@@ΩΜΣΔ it's not just clearly it IS cut content. Early on into Starfield's release Bethesda themselves admitted to cutting Va'ruun content from the game to keep them "mysterious". But in reality, as you said, it was cut so they could call it a "DLC" and sell it to us.
Pretty scummy of Bethesda in all honesty...
@@saerbhreathach540reminds me of destiny 1
It seems very much like unfinished content, a faction questline, that they tacked back on and made into a bigger story DLC.
@@saerbhreathach540So what's new?
@@mediumvillain They arent reasonable enough to see that
How does Bethesda's dev team grow from 100 to 500 and then the number of hand crafted experiences declines? The game is the equivalent of 3 bigger cities in Skyrim without any of the dungeons in the wild. The expansion added no new dungeon patterns to planets? Incredible.
I can only imagine the working climate has devolved to exactly what happened with group projects in, like, 9th grade in school. You pretend to work, safe in the knowledge that the teacher can't single you out when the result is bad because too many people worked on it and it's unclear who did what. And everyone keeps to the social contract that tells them not to make a fuss and act like everything is as it should. It's work-to-order, just with a facade of being happy and productive.
@@Knuspabrot Modern US education in a nutshell. Forty years ago that same teacher would have instantly failed every last one of us in the group for that. If no one ever gets left behind and everyone gets a juice box you get graduates who can't think or work for beans.
Strength of vocalization matters more in a big team - its much harder for good ideas to come to the foreground if your battling through the crowd - especially if your strength is coming up with good game ideas rather than thriving in some enormous social entity. Also getting everyone to visualise a project through the same eyes would be almost impossible. Compromises get made out of the necessity of just being able to move forward to some kind of deadline.
@@jwstrick What really makes me shudder is having to work with some of these Gen-Z kids in the workplace. They cannot do _anything_ unless you hold their hand through it. The youngest member currently on our team is 34, because the kids flame out when their work gets compared against Millennials and Gen-Xers and it just doesn't measure up. I actually replaced someone who was less than half my age, and those first two months on the job cleaning up after her mess?
That's what even American universities are turning out, never mind the K-12.
@@jwstrick Well, failing everyone would be wrong in another way. Group dynamics are a thing, and a single person can't do shit to stop it. But that's school. In a company that pays wages to get a product ready, something like this shouldn't be possible to happen. It's massive failure of management to ever let it go that far. But then you probably have a lot incentives for management nowadays to not care either. Caring takes effort, and you'll probably get paid either way. Studios and publisher have just gotten too big, you can't be passionate and creative if your hierarchy has 25 ranks and 500 people work at a project at once.
one of my favorite moments in Skyrim was traveling to windhelm on foot, getting lost, running from a dragon, encountering a dwarven ruin I was too weak to enter, but could loot the outside, finally reaching windhelm it was night and snowing, went under the bridge to see if anything to loot, and heard a dragon in the distance, and saw it circling over the lumber yard it was just so cool, really had nothing like that in starfield, no great moment of awe, of wonder.
Skyrim succeeds as an exploratory sandbox - but it's a mediocre RPG
@@wampatan9 not even there, you've seen 70% of whats in the game from 2-3 hours of exploring, and rest is just the terrible rpg.
Yup, We could have a thread a mile long of interesting experiences people had in Skyrim. Add in mods, and its x100. Starfield is just bland, day-old oatmeal.
@@twogruden9943 yeah what it did best was, even if it was fake and an illusion the world felt like it existed when you were not there, the dragon over the lumber yard could have just been a bad spawn, but it felt like I wasn't the target. Then in starfield your in the movie body snatchers where everyone turns to look at you as you go by.
@@wampatan9 Yeah, I absolutely loved my 30-40 hours in Skyrim in 2011 but could never get back into it after that point. Still a classic game and I can understand how some people spent countless hours in it.
Starfield wasn't irresponsibly large, it was irresponsibly empty. I bought the game at launch, I was excited for it, I have never been more bored in my life. Everything was grey, bland oatmeal.
From the planets to the characters.
I get a general feeling of contempt from BGS for their playerbase that's incredibly off-putting.
Yeah, they were never going to fill 1000 planets with content, that was a given, but they don't even have 1 unique encounter/location in each Solar System. The default emotion when exploring is disappointment, and that's... well, disappointing.
Considering the Bethesda expectations are Story, NPCs and fleshed out world building, the concept of "1000 planets" was bad to begin with. If I want to play a game with randomly generated planets with pre built copy paste assets and structures? I'd play No Mans Sky, because the expectations of that game is exploring uninhabited planets. That's not to say NMS has no story, NPCs or world building, but it's not exactly the thing you play the game for.
I got gamepass that month just to try it, and barely made it 1 hour before permanently uninstalling. Just an unbelievably dull game
@@RorikH if they were actual good devs using procgen they could have made multiple tilesets for forests, jungles, moons, barren wastelands, frozen tundras, oceanic, and let procgen do the work of generating these tilesets when loading into a different planet. Filled with 5-10 pois that are all handcrafted with their own tilesets with different items, lore, layout, enemies, atmosphere, lighting, etc.
But I like grey blend oatmeal, I have it as breakfast on many mornings 0.o!
But you are correct in the rest ^.^
The fact that after a dlc launch that Starfield has half the amount of people playing it compared to Skyrim a 10+ old year game shows how big of a flop it is.
I know it's been said on many youtube videos but the issue is toxic positivity. These developers live in a bubble and get so used to lying to each other that they start to enjoy the smell of their own farts. If you can't give and receive honest criticism, then the creative endeavor will not improve.
This!
The question is, when will they start listening?
It's a very toxic environment to be in where everybody's constantly blowing smoke up each other's asses
This is the entire entertainment industry right now, its collapsing because they can't handle any criticism so they only listen to people who have a financial incentive to tell them what they want to hear.
See Ubisoft saying their games are good because the people they bought Disney land vacations for gave it a good review.
@@dmdeign7116 Todd and Emil would rather burn down the entire studio than ever, ever admit they are as incompetent as they actually are.
I’ve resigned myself to the fact that ES6 is gonna be a flop, I’m honestly in pain😭
Yeah same ES6 I have no hope for that one
but fret not skyblivion and skywind will be a thing
I think of Skyrim and Oblivion and Morrowind the same way I think of everything else from my 20s and 30s (I was 25 when Morrowind came out.)
It was a fun time, a time I remember fondly, but I'm nearing 50, I'm not the same person I was then, and I don't enjoy the same things now I did in my youth.
So when Bethesda inevitably puts out "Skyrim 2, Just Somewhere Else" I'll probably give it a miss the way I wouldn't want to go on a date with my ex-wife who I divorced in 2009.
@@SimuLord Well I'm in my 30's and I'd love a "Morrowind 2, Just Somewhere Else" actually.
Yeah I lost all interest in it after soyfield.
@@snickersmeh2172 So long as it isnt loading screens every five seconds and the world is continuous at least theres enough lore in the series that the fans can probably make something of it. It does Starfield no favors that its lore is so aggressively boring and dull when its supposed to be introducing us to its new world.
Starfield was successful because people put their faith in Bethesda. They were hyped to play a new Bethesda game, and I believe that a lot of them continued to play because they put money down on an expensive game from a pedigree they believed in. They didn't think Bethesda would deliver such a dud and so they stuck it out, even if they weren't exactly having a blast, because they expected to find the fun. I don't think that Bethesda can trade on this kind of faith a second time, and I hope they understand that if TES VI turns out to be garbage then their star will have fallen.
I'll admit to being one of them to a degree, though the cost wasn't an issue due to game pass. I'll be the first to admit I was surprised by how lacking the game was. Don't get me wrong, I actually do largely enjoy the game, but more as a laze around and not take it seriously game rather than the intense focus I put into a game like Skyrim or Arkham game, I don't feel the same motivation. Starfield is a fine mess around, shoot up bad guys, build mildly interesting stuff game. It's a solid high C game, not an A game like Bethesda used to make. One thing that has been mentioned, that I do agree with, they should have made the map smaller, you only need to bother with a handful of the star systems in the game and you have all the resources, and a lot of them aren't just a little empty, they're completely empty. I wouldn't mind a few empty systems, but dozens of them that amount to 90% of the game? No, and yes actual space exploration may be like that, but that doesn't make a good game. Now that I'm rambling, one thing I did think of that would be realistic that might add fun, gun jams that can ruin weapons. That would enhance difficulty. Frankly starfield was by far the easiest game i've ever played and that's boring, Bethesda shouldn't do dark souls level challenge, that's not their niche, but it shouldn't be so easy you can have a toddler beat the game.
I’d argue they already have done it twice with Starfield. The first time they did it was with fallout 76. That being said in my experience game companies and IP’s seem to have a few games worth of goodwill to burn before it really blows up in their face. If you look at folks like BioWare or Ubisoft they had 2 or 3 stinkers that were successful through inertia before things really exploded in their face. I expect that Bethesda can survive one more substandard release through inertia, especially if it’s a big Franchise title, before they get their Anthem or Skull and Bones.
@josephkwiatkowski2735 The thing with Fallout 76 is that unlike Bioware with Andromeda and Anthem Bethesda actually put in the work to fix a lot of the problems with the game. That is why 76 has a much better score on Steam these days than Starfield and Shattered Space
It's 'successful' but will not be successful like The Elder Scrolls or Fallout were which is what they were aiming for
@@ADreamingTraveler Right. You can only produce mediocre games for so long before your new reputation catches up with you.
Bethesda is so arrogant that they think their Oblivion/Fallout 3 era game design and engine is still golden as the industry has evolved and left them in the dust. Every game they put out for the last 16 years is a regression from the previous release. They're stuck in the past and refuse to accept criticism. Anyone that is still excited for ES6 is huffing military grade copium.
For Bethesda to be perceived as a top studio again, they need to ditch their shitty Creation engine and replace Todd and Emil who are the biggest weaknesses of their studio.
And it won't happen. As we've seen with company after company, the boss rules with an iron fist, even if he's driving them off a cliff.
@@LordShadowZ people have the oddest misguided takes when the it comes to Bethesda. How can you claim they are stuck at fallout3/oblivion design wise then say they regressed? Which is it? And the engine is not the issue, it never was. If anything it's the one thing keeping them relevant along with elder scrolls. And last but not least, skyrim was their peak, and the numbers show.
@@TheanimeisformeFacts
The industry evolved and left them in the dust? What games exactly are you talking about? There are a few I can think of but none are either a direct comparison, or a massive upgrade.
Baldur's Gate 3 is a very different game mechanically, but could compare in scale
Dragon's Dogma 2 is not exactly that polished either
Witcher 3 is old, and without character creation
Cyberpunk only now is in a state it should've been on release 4 years ago
Fromsoftware has completely different philosophy
BioWare is struggling
Stuff by Obsidian Entertainment is the closest anyone has come to a title of a Bethesda killer, but their games are usually a lot smaller in scale
Am I missing something?
@BlackComet95 mods for Bethesda's own games like Fallout London?
Oh and you also forgot Read Dead Redemption 2
Bethesda hasn't evolved with the industry. That's the number one problem. They're still trying to peddle mechanics, gameplay, and an engine almost a decade and a half out of date.
Which could work, if they hadn't completely murdered their writing room to fill it with hack writers. A solid story can make up for a lot, but we haven't had that in a Bethesda game since Skyrim. Even Fallout 4 was a massive decline when it came to narrative and the player.
Pretty sure the engine is older than that
Skyrims story is average at best. Oblivion was the last game with an engaging story. Both its main story, side missions and dlc storyline were fantastic.
How has the industry evolved, exactly?
@Adoring-Fan i never played BGS games for the story.
The problem isn't the engine of the gameplay it's them producing mediocre content
I've said it a million times... Todd Howard ain't the guy. He got hired straight to producer in '95, was made project lead on Morrowind, and has just been copying and pasting the same game over and over again without understanding why what he learned on Morrowind was so amazing. Bethesda will never get better until Todd is gone.
He worked on Arena as a tester for the CD-ROM version, worked as an additional designer on Daggerfall, became the project leader of Redguard and Morrowind, and has been the game director/executive producer from then onwards.
@@arbitrary_thoughts Cheers - corrected it. My point still stands though, he should not be director or executive producer... He got promoted way too quickly and clearly has no idea how to make something other than Morrowind.
@@hawkshot867 Personally I disagree, the games he's worked on have been successful. I've very much liked them and I'm far, far from being alone in having that perspective.
BGS has continued to do different things and iterate. Not everything has been successful but they have done different things. Starfield feels like a blend of Daggerfall and their newer games. That's what I was expecting, and that's what I like. No other studio comes close to doing what BGS does at the same scale/scope. BGS isn't perfect, I don't like every aspect, and I certainly dislike the new monetization scheme of Creation Club/Creations.
But overall, I like their games, and I've really liked Starfield. I'm not interested in the overly cinematic movie games that other AAAs make, I like BGS's gameplay of openworld rpg sandbox sims.
@@arbitrary_thoughts Yup nope, strongly disagree. From Software flipped the entire script on what makes RPGs great and Bethesda ain't it anymore. I'm glad you like Starfield and Daggerfall, but frankly those are ideas from almost 30 years ago at this point... I'm going to spend my money and limited time on new experiences and games. If I want to experience a good Bethesda experience I'll just play an extremely heavily modded playthrough of Skyrim. Starfield also didn't innovate AT ALL on the sandbox sim... Neither has Fallout 4 or 76 - I would LOVE for Elder Scrolls 6 to take the original Oblivion idea and run with it with modern tech... INNOVATE ON IT... But that's not going to happen lol.
Todd’s high point was Skyrim. While Fallout 4 was a decent game, Starfield is a literal carbon copy of Skyrim with space and sci-fi themes.
The problem of Starfield's expansion is that it should have been day one content and the whole "open star system" concept was essentially not only a wasted endeavor but a poorly pursued one. They should have just hand crafted planets from the start, jam pack it with encounters and then have some auxiliary "randomness planets" for exploration.
and 100 systems was far too many. Each faction controlling a system at max, or at least 1 system under complete control, with perhaps a less-controlled 2nd, 2-4 systems as a kind of "conflict zone", with maybe 3-4 "unexplored" systems for absolute "end game" is what the game should have had at max.
Honestly, the game as it is would fit comfortably into just one star system and the "random exploration sites" could just be the moons and the rest of a planets surface outside of the Main POI's, cause planets are Big and space is even bigger than that.
@@EloquentiaSerpentis Exactly, this has been my thoughts on it for a while. Imagine something in just the Sol system, with the various planets and moons REALLY fleshed out, and telling a story about the discovery of alien artifacts on like Titan or Europa or something like that. Could have been so good.
I think the problem with Starfield is that it lacks the charm/kitsch that Fallout and Elder Scrolls has so all the “jank” stands out more.
For me, it was the procedural generation. I'm huge on exploration in their games, I love wandering the landscape and finding random new quests or obscure bits of lore and loot because I just happened to go "Gee I wonder what's on the other side of that mountain". With Starfield, I'd experienced every POI within a few hours. I'd cleared the same base several times, but on different planets. I'd seen the same space encounters over and over and over. It just felt like there was 5 hours of handmade content and for the rest, they just said "Fuck it, let the computer shit out the rest of the game and figure it out"
@@Boomer04888
Yeah, the world building/environmental story telling was the one saving grace of all Bethesda games. Starfield took that away...so whats left to enjoy?
The problem is that it's terrible.
@@Boomer04888 What's missing are the classic Fallout bathroom skeletons. You know, how you find what's essentially just clutter decoration that tells silly stories you can find. That was still not exactly high brow storytelling and made not much sense when you started to think critically about it, but it fit the BGS campy aesthetic and just was harmless fun. The worst thing to me in Starfield that immediately turned me off from day one was looking at the map and clearly seeing the evenly distributed rocks dotting the map. It looks like someone's first steps in using a map editor with one rock asset rotated and just pasted down. Utterly soulless and dull with nothing to see.
For me the ya can’t keep much of anything when ya new game + and not enough story and freedom of choice as they normally do content spread mostly through factions it needed another 10 years in development honestly
Shivering Isles was like a whole new game though, it was massive.
I loved that dlc when I played I was like ahh this is gonna be a quick one, nope I got sucked in spent so long in there and it was great
And it was good. Its still the best DLC ever made
Remember all the people last year smugly defending Starfield because "mods will fix it"? where are all the mods they were talking about?
Back to skyrim and FO becasue Starfield foundation was too ass to even fix it
They’re already installed in my beloved STARFIELD. I loved the game before the mods came out, now I love it more. I never really liked Elder Scrolls and Fallout is both dystopian and way to into the 1950s for me love. STARFIELD is the game I have been waiting for, for ages, glad I finally got my Bethesda game.
@@craig.a.glesner are you a bot?
@@twogruden9943 no, I am an old man who grew up on moon rockets and the science-fiction films of the 1980s so this is right up my alley. I love the solitude of it, the various airless, barren vistas of magnificent desolation. I vibe on just being a spaceman. I love outer space like so much so unlike their other (also bad story with load screens when you transition between cells) games this is in a genre I love more than any other. I’m not a child and can appreciate things like just chilling on world and watching the local star rise.
Because not everyone having an opposing opinion is a bot.
It's a crappy argument anyways, if your game requires mods to fix it, you do not have a good game. Period.
Bethesda's games progressively feel like people going through the motions of making the same game over and over again. Their writing team needs fresh blood like a newborn vampire.
Hey guys the quality of your videos has really gone up. they feel tighter and better written and produced and much more informative and to the point. Been watching on and off for years and years and this is top form, you're doing the best content you've ever done.
Maybe this is a hot take, but I actually (somewhat) disagree that their formula is outdated. I think some parts are, like the zoomed conversation camera and some of the quest design.
But I believe, overall, their formula is still fine. The problem is that they took *_out_* too much stuff from their formula instead of refining what was great about it. They gutted all the in depth RP systems that people loved, they stopped being creative and taking risks in their quest design, they pushed for more procedural generation, they all but abandoned the Radiant AI, the list goes on. The formula is only stale because they stripped it down made it BORING. On top of the writing just getting worse and worse and worse.
actual hot take, i disagree with your wording, their formula for the past few games has proven to be increasingly boring due to them "improving" it according to their own words by removing more features that the previous games thrived on.
morrowind is ancient af, but its far more immersive then skyrim when it comes to rpg mechanics.
@@notjimpickens7928 you literally just agreed with me 😭
This is probably another hot take but I actually kind of like being drained by Big Daddy Howard 🤷♂️
There's a lot of good things, but it needs refining. The biggest problem is the writing, it's very simple and increasingly dumbed down IMO
I agree that the idea is great, but they haven't added enough to it. That's what Starfield felt to me... Like they played it was too safe and didn't expand it enough.
One of my favorite things about Morrowind was that you had to get used to taking wacky forms of public transportation. teleportation, boats, giant fleas - it felt real. I remember when Oblivion came out and we all lost our minds because there was A Compass. Honestly, instead of putting Skyrim on every platform imaginable, they should just remake Morrowind *exactly the same* only with modern graphics. Yes, I'm one of those people.
They won't do it unless it can be made for very cheap.
Majority of their playerbase won't enjoy it. That's just business perspective mixed with gamers expectations for popular titles. Someone hits some kind of roadblock, gets angry, leaves negative review and move to another title and never looks back.
Personally when it comes to this more old-school way of exploration Subnautica worked well for me so there is still some niche for it but going on same scale popularity as Bethesda titles with games built on more demanding concepts... Well, it's not a surprise that their games got popular as those were easier, more accessible.
Would be great to see refreshed Morrowind that isn't about quest marks etc. As much as I don't like remasters but Morrowind could have version with just slightly less bugs xD
@@andrzejnadgirl2029 yeah bc most of the players that enjoy skyrim don't actually know how to play a true rpg. They are the same camp that say bg3 is trash where as its super deep and customizable.
@@andrzejnadgirl2029 I'm pretty sure most people who love Morrowind, like myself, know that most Skyrim fans wouldn't like it. It just sucks to know that the company you loved for making a game that formed a part of your childhood is now more likely to make Skyrim Mobile Edition with a Candycrush DLC than they are to ever revisit the things about Morrowind that made it so special.
@@andrzejnadgirl2029 I'm aware. If it would make $$$$ Todd would have done it.
I don't think there will be a game like Morrowind again. No company is going to make a game without waypoint markers.
My ideal remastered version of Morrowind would be improved graphics, better combat mechanics, and a detailed player driven map system, with pins, notes, and pens. Probably a better way to organize and search quests too.
These AAA companies spend so much money, but if your making a story driven game, then the most money should be spent on the writing. Make sure you have an editor for the writer, and then make sure the writing is something that you lonve, even before you start producing the game. The story should already be writen even before you start.
I hear they have a team of writers, so why not have each of those team draft a story and then vote on which is the best? If they are incapable of producing a good story, why are they working for you?
BGS games aren't really supposed to prioritise the narrative/story. BGS games have been openworld rpg sandbox sandbox sims. Fallout started off more narrative driven, but look at their other IPs. They've just reduced the scope due to tech limitations, but they've always wanted to go big similarly to Daggerfall.
@@arbitrary_thoughts elder scrolls is a story based game, same with fallout 3-4 which includes NV. Without the story, the open world is just empty, like any of the starfield planets, you can go explore. The story is what allows you to immerse into the open world, the open world is not what makes any of the bethesda games good.
You have two types of story telling, one is the physical dialog, the other is the environmental storytelling, both are lacking in starfield, that is why it sucks. Not everyone wants to create their own story, and that tends to be really boring unless you have gameplay like minecraft or the forest, or rust.
Fallout 2, Morrowind and Oblivion were always about the story first, that is what made those games so good.
Yeah look if I was half as incompetent at my job as Emil is at his, I would have been fired ages ago...
"Starfield is part of the big three" No, Starfield is NOT Curly, it is barely Shemp.
A shemp reference???
In the year of our lord 2024?
I like it.
At least people have heard of Shemp.
Starfield is more like Joe or Curly Joe.
lol!
Starfield ain't no Mazinger, Getter or Gundam. It ain't no One Piece, Naruto or Bleach.
The reason why is always going to come back to Emil Pagliarulo. As long as he's still at Bethesda, we will still keep getting this garbage.
Thousands of tiny bubbles connected together by loading screens? It's almost as though space had been shattered, or something.
Now see that could actually be an interesting idea for a game world
Congratulations you came up with something more interesting than Bethesda's lead writer could
Todd and Emil are Bethesda's biggest problems, even bigger than their engine
@@user-641g2g1szxcy "You aren't allowed to complain about something if you don't have a working knowledge of it!"
As someone who did a decent amount of modding with FNV, yes the creation engine is a genuine problem. The amount of work you sometimes have to do to get the engine to do what should be simple things (like aligning specific bones in a size adjusted rig rather than just putting the skeleton in a specific position and shoving it into a set position) was frankly ridiculous. While I would agree that a lot of the “new engine” people don’t really understand what they are talking about, creation engine still has some major flaws that go back to its start as a gamebryo fork and likely can’t be fixed without breaking everything built on top of them.
@@jakecarlson3709 It absolutely has flaws, but I'd say the director and lead writer are Bethesda's biggest problems right now
@@jakecarlson3709 the thing about game engines is that they can be fixed and improved upon to the point of not resembling the old game engine it came from. Now people on the other hand usually can't be fixed in the same way and need to be removed and replaced.
The issue with the game engine is all the devs fault,
@@madmax2069 Thank you, someone gets it. Bethesda's programmers are stuck in 2002 and can barely innovate or improve anymore, meanwhile you look at what modders can do with the same exact tools and it becomes obvious how much Bethesda are holding themselves back. "A poor craftsman blames his tools" and all that. Hiring programmers born in the last 30 years would probably be a huge step up for them.
Unpopular opinion time - just because Todd Howard is a walking meme, doesn't mean he's a good director at BGS. He is so delusional and out of touch with the expectations and standards of games in today's climate.
Todd is a hype man, and is incapable of putting his foot down. If he could, he would either put Emil on blast or just get rid of him.
Emil is a massive issue for Bethesda, and it's sickening that he's apparently going to take up Todd's mantle when he leaves.
@@BaconMinion Im not even sure Howard has that much influence on the structure of anything. Hes at that high level where his main job is to hype stuff up but has probably moved away from directly pushing ideas. Not that things were BETTER if he was, but he like most execs seems mostly a figurehead and hype guy- where the real issues lie farther down the chain.
Todd Howard fundamentally strikes me as a man who doesn't actually like RPGs as a genre. TES and Fallout used to have more in common with Dragon Age: Origins or CRPGs like Wasteland (Fallout's literal inspiration) and the DnD games. Now, their games are basically action games with light RPG elements, like Mass Effect, except they don't even do action nicely.
Bethesda needs to seriously consider what their main gameplay focus is. Is it gunplay, like Todd was going on about for Starfield? Then they need to actually hire people who've worked on games with good gunplay, like Destiny, Halo, or CoD, and they need to be prepared to give those systems more depth. Is it RPG gameplay, like being able to make a wide range of decisions with drastically different effects on the story and strongly written stories/characters? Then they need to fire Todd Howard *and* Emil Pagliarulo, and hire experienced RPG writers. Hell, even if they focus on action gameplay, they need to have more than one writer! Starfield literally credits Pagliarulo as their only writer. Even CoD and Destiny have had a strong writing team instead of just lumping it all on one poor fucker.
Bethesda fan’s tolerance for playing in glorified cat littler boxes is impressive and it helps leads to Bethesda feeling comfortable to never change.
But what if I like being raw dogged by Big Daddy Howard? What then?
I've like sandbox games ever since GTA 3. I still like the style. Keeping me on rails isn't a lot of fun for me.
I like to refer to them, especially skyrim as "baby's first RPG". Skyrim is such a barebones bland game I have a hard time figuring out what people even like in it. Combat is ass, magic is ass, RPG systems are ass...
@@AsG_Alligator What I like about it is that it's not D&D levels of complexity. I wouldn't like that. It's balanced well enough between the RPG stuff vs action-adventure. Plus, the world itself is beautiful. The lore is interesting. Then, I re-installed Skyrim several times, just to be in that world and listen to the music while walking down the roads.
@@AsG_Alligator Some people are just smarter than others, it is what it is. It's been difficult to come to terms with but I've gotten to the point where I just realize most things I like in life will be dumbed down and made worse over time in order to appeal to a larger audience. Just try to get as much enjoyment out of something as you can before it gets popular, because popularity will ruin everything unless you're one of those "lowest common denominator" kind of people it's being made for.
Remember, for the price of shattered space you could buy 6 copies of Bejeweled 3 for you and the homies, which is probably a better idea since Bejeweled 3 is HEAT!
I fucking hate bejeweled and yet i wish i spent my money on that and not this game
Value is also related to the other things you could purchase at the same time. There are more and more options, and smaller developers delivering better products with fewer bugs for lower prices...
changing the game engine will not change the end result for BGS. its the design philosophy of the company that is still stuck in the past and the horrible writing.
Bethesda is stuck in the early 2010s. Same engine, same design philosophy, same Tom Howard.
2010's? Oblivion came out 2006, and they said it was their main motivation for quest design for Starfield.
There are plenty of good games of that era. It's not a date thing.
Todd ain't the problem, it's Emil
IMHO it's worse, they are not stagnating, they are regressing when it comes to RPG elements and story telling.
@@arglebargle5531 Im waiting for Starfield New Vegas 😎
Brothers, do not preorder Elder Scrolls 6. The Bethesda we knew is long gone. The talent that brought us Morrowind through Skyrim is either gone or consumed by the corporate machine. Look to small Dev companies to find where that passion went.
Obsidian is still here and Avowed is around the corner. The Fallout: London team is going to be making an independent studio. There is hope. Bethesda has be a zombie for over a decade.
@@GundamGokuTV LMAOOOO Obsidian and Avowed you said? Oh man, OH MAN OH MAN OH MAN LMAOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
Wage increases are way bellow inflation. That is the metric people use to judge cost in their everyday life. I understand using iflation when talking about pricing decisions of companies but I don't think it's an acurate metric when talking about player percieved value.
I don't think *anyone* wants Bethesda to fail; If you are a fan of the Bethesda IP's we very much want them to succeed. However, with release after release being either bad or mid at best, frustration is definitely setting in. Especially when we try to offer constructive criticism and they seem completely tone-deaf to it.
I do want them to fail. I'm not going to chase up on Bethesda news and praying every day they bite the dust, but I don't look at their content anymore either. They've been neglecting their audience and releasing shitty games for years now. There's only so much that can be forgiven before people simply grow apathetic. Time for them to face the consequences of all their bad decisions. Wouldn't be surprised if they get another Ubisoft-esque buyout/consequences.
Why wouldn't I want a scammy and dishonest studio to fall. Paid mods, false promises, literal scam with F76. List goes on and on. BGS is epitome of what's wrong with gaming industry
The only upgrade we got in the Bethesda games lifetime was Fallout New Vegas after Fallout 3. But it was only published by Bethesda, developed by Obsidian
@@elderoy vegas also had decent dlcs, owb my beloved
For me its the lack of self awareness and unwilling to learn from their mistakes. Just listen to Todd and Emil. They seem unable to listen to the fans. They think they're Midas, but ever since F4, everything they touch turns to shit. I'd prefer Microsoft to sack Emil and relegate Todd to a counseling position, and hire a guy like Tim Cain to put Fallout back on track. Even better: hire CDPR to develop the next Fallout game. Im done with Bethesda.
lol, CDPR has dove down the DEI hole, and most of the people who made witcher 3 are gone. I wouldn't trust them with shit.
They need Joshua Sawyer and Chris Avellone and all the other writers from NV
@@Achonas get over it. It’s nearly 10 years since the Witcher 3 came out. Even without the initial Cyberpunk debacle, it’s not that weird for people to change jobs in that amount of time. And I don’t know if you played the new DLC, but there is nothing wrong with the talent of the current bunch of people at CDPR.
Maybe actually wait for the game to come out to decide wether or not it’s bad.
Honestly, I think Obsidian correctly figured out the way things were going with Bethesda when they decided to make their new Pillars of Eternity game the same perspective and similar gameplay to modern TES/Fallout games. I seriously suspect they're going to try and do to the Bethesda-genre what Cities Skylines did to SimCity, and frankly I welcome it. God knows they're a bunch of great writers, at least.
I don't see $3 of value here, because no matter what is in it the result is the same. We get to float around and bop into lights until they swirl and we get a useless power so late in the game that we don't need it. Our settlements are meaningless dumps of resources that produce nothing we couldn't get easier at a shop or just by mining for a couple of minutes. The cities are bland and tiny, there are no MECHS, giant FLEET SPACE BATTLES or XENO-SWARMS despite showing us a slideshow involving all three. Nothing matters in the game, you just reset and walk around a bunch again and again through their uninspired story that might have gotten attention 20 years ago.
Not seeing $30 of value here. Unless they fix it, might pick it up in five years time for $5 on sale.
Shattered Space is 6 quests in a buggy Creation Engine 2 engine with crappy writing. DO NOT BUY.
It was a flat-out design failure and with devs like Emil Pagliarulo saying he believes Starfield is "the best game we've ever made" it seems they are in complete denial about the games failures and wont be able to course correct in time to fix ES6 because they don't think there is anything to fix.
Starfield wasn't worth the time to click the links for the free Gamepass I had that month.
Shattered Space was a faction questline, with comparable content to Atlantis, Akhila, Neon, Key. If the price reflected that (like 1/4 of the base game) at ~$15 then this wouldnt be an issue.
Or its cut content from the base game, wrapped up separately and served to you for an extra $30
11:07 That's called "Stockholm Syndrome". Fallout 76 is, bar none, the *worst* game I've ever had the displeasure of playing. It's broken. It's buggy. The story is crap. The dialogue is crap. The gameplay is stilted. Exploring is unrewarding. There's limits to everything you do and everything you collect. Every minor patch breaks all mods and introduce new bugs. I do NOT understand how anyone can say with a straight face that this game is anything but the single most trash game to have ever released. It gets nothing right while being overpriced and unironically asking for a subscription on top. I'd play 100 hours of Starfield over a single one of that abomination.
Would not have predicted a Buffet-relaying-Graham quote "price is what you pay, value is what you get" in the intro here.
But definitely germane. Also appreciate the inflation-adjusted references to prior DLC to make the price point. Well done.
The Formula is fine, the writing is boring.
The Characters are boring, the Companions are boring, the romance options are boring, the NPCs are milk toast fetch quest givers, the enemies are most of the time the same boring guys with guns over and over... the world/universe building wasn't even there for Starfield.
They talk about Mechs, show us mechs, we don't get to play with Mechs, we don't get to fight Mechs, they dangle Capital Ships in front of us, we don't get to fly that, the Starborn ships, don't even have a bed or a toilet, by the time you finally get one of those your own Ship is fully decked out and ten times better and you can't customize the Starborn Ship, it isn't explained who build those or where they come from or why you even get one... every single System in Starfield feels unfinished, as if they just put a base idea out there as minimum viable product and hope for Modders to do something worthwhile with it. ...which they probably would, if at least the world was interesting and full enough of content to put in the work for it.
How cool of a perk would it be to get mech schematics by getting approval by all the major factions, now that we have the Va'ruun? That was my hope. Another trip into a deeper part of the archives to get the plans and being able to deploy it onto planets as a follower/pilot. Make it cost a lot of materials for upgrades and only can be built in a base so they have SOME use instead of being an afterthought leftover from F4.
There's like 3 enemy types that 99% of the entire game revolves around. Crimson, Ecliptics, and the occasional Zealots. I have killed more pirates from each of those factions than there are citizens in New Atlantis, like 50 times over. That's not saying much because they made New Atlantis to look like there's at most, 100 people living there.
I'm not sure if milk toast or milquetoast fits better. They kind of are like soggy bread.
@@Boomer04888 Problem is its not even 3 enemy types
It's 1 enemy type that can wear 3 different coloured hats
The thing that irks me is that Emil is being just like Baghdad Bob: "Starfield is the best game ever. Shattered Space has many fans. This game is perfect."
Bethesda games are boring, ubisoft games are boring, blizzard games are boring
@@rubisco5997 sounds like you think gaming is boring. =(
@@Nexx1414 thank God there are other studios huh
@@Nexx1414 there are other companies than that?
There's never been a better time to play your backlog, or try some indie stuff
@@Nexx1414 that's an incredibly small and corporate part of gaming.
Fallout 4 base game is great, not a good fallout game with its lack of choice, but what a fun game
Still streaming FO4 all the time. 😇
That's exactly what I was trying to put my finger on with Fallout 4. I really dislike the story and quest design, but it is undeniably fun. It has the best combat of any fallout by far, and the crafting still knocks my pants off sometimes. We really need Fallout New Vegas, but you get Fallout 4 style gunplay and and overhauled crafting system. But then again, might as well as ask for a remaster with all the cut content put back in XD
@@playwars3037 Give Fallout: London a shot.
FO4 a mid looter shooter, and a horrible Fallout game.
I've been saying this since a couple of weeks after FO4s release. It's a great, absolutely fantastic game.
But it's a shit Fallout game.
Yeah, but who could possibly deny how much better Elden Ring would have been if every thirty feet, you encountered a loading screen? That would have been so much better than just being able to freely roam the world, uninterrupted...
Bethesda's been crappy for going on 20 years. How are people only just now catching on to that?
Memberberries are really delicious.
I can't believe he didn't bring up the obvious reason why they didn't care about making a big expansion that changes anything....
They sold a 100 bucks edition with early access AND, MOST IMPORTANTLY, the first expansion for free. They are pretty much contractually obligated to release an expansion...All they had to do was put out an expansion, the quality never really mattered.
It's crazy how some people expect Bethesda to keep working on this failure of a game. This is it. There won't be no other expansion, just some money-grubbing tiny DLC at most, like the horse armor.
My question: How many Big Macs could you buy in the year of Oblivion’s release, with the money it costed to by Oblivion. Compare that to the number of Big Macs you could buy today for the cost of Starfield on release.
This question struck a chord deep within my soul, so I did a little googling.
It seems that an Oblivion was worth around 20 Big Macs, while a Starfield is worth about 12 Big Macs.
Of course these are for the standard editions, not factoring in Collector's/Premium etc.
They could have kept some of that traversal discovery if they had just allowed in-system travel to be a thing, made space POI's able to exist anywhere and made it so space asteroids only showed up where it makes sense, in planetary rings and such.
They still have not fixed the sniper rifle you get as a reward for playing a side quest, that you have to pay extra for.
That says it all.
They refuse to can their god awful creation engine or hire real writers. Honestly the best thing that can happen for FO5 and ES6 is to be indefinitely suspended while BGS gets their shit together (which I know won’t happen).
the fact ES6 is still going to be on this game game engine means its already over. theres no way
Idk, modded Skyrim has nice graphics and combat on the same engine XD
@@olgagaming5544graphics dont matter when the engine is literally breaking apart due to the "patches", fallout 76 is a good example of what hapoens when bethesda gets too comfy with their engine and doesnt try atleast patching up some of the holes in their previous patches, since they arent good at fixing anything according to modders who make bug fix mods on nexus and moddb
@@olgagaming5544 the fact that the game needs to be modded to be decent just validates the OPs point even more
@@olgagaming5544 ... If they have to rely on modders to fix their 25 year old engine, perhaps you're not making quite the point you think you are...
@@Boomer04888they don't have a 25 year old engine though.....so I guess neither are you? XD
Inflation is offset by the larger gaming audience and higher sales. Compared to Shivering isles days. The gaming market/copies sold has near quad dripled.
Also they have the creation club. Which is essentially microtransactions for paid mods. Which means they have more then one revenue stream already. So no reason for their DLC to be so expensive. And even then, Shattered Space is smaller and worse compared to Fallout 4 Far Harbour which was the same price.
It turns out when the game is mid, players want something to improve the core experience, not "here's a 30 dollar side theme park while the game is still in a miserable state".
Strange, now I might buy shattered space. I loved Starfield and put about 250 hours into it. I saw the poor reception of shattered space and skipped it. But if what you say is true, I might actually like it.
Feels good not having played Starfield
I am so damn happy we're getting a sequel to Alien Isolation! That game was awesome
Emil wasn't involved in Far Harbor, but he was involved in Shattered Space. Hm. Wonder what the problem is?
Good ol' Emil and his weird take of "design documents are hard".
He's literally still coasting off of the fact that the first half of Oblivion's Dark Brotherhood was half decent.
I enjoyed Starfield and I don't mind it's a different experience than their other games. My issue is they don't fix bugs and they are selling mods. I tried Shattered Space. I have yet to be able to finish it due to bugs. It's been 2 weeks, there simply is no excuse as to why game breaking bugs have not been taken care of. The other issue is with their selling of mods. I don't mean player mods. I mean mods made by them. The game lacks content and suddenly, you put up a mission and new game system and ask players to pay for it? That's absurd.
4:50 to skip the promotion
Considering rockstar employs 4500 devs, I disagree. I think Bethesda’s needs to hire more developers to keep up. They have a history of keeping the company small. 500 devs really isn’t much at all.
Watched a youtuber that liked Starfield make a "review" on Shattered Space. He didn't go ultra in depth - was more like a friend chatting about their thoughts on a subject. But it all basically got wrapped up into a statement he made towards the end, and I'm paraphrasing here: "Bethesda listened to feedback, which is good, but they listened to people who already disliked Starfield. This DLC doesn't fix enough for them, and dilutes what those of us who liked the game enjoyed about it."
Fact is this: They should've stuck to their guns with Starfield imo. In trying to make everyone happy, they made everyone disappointed, and I don't know how exactly they're going to get Starfield out of this ditch it's currently in.
Shattered Space was fun, but I do hope they lean back into the large scale of the game and continue to add to the proc gen/POIs and existing game systems.
they didnt listen at all lil bro, thats the problem
@@iseru-q2m It's not the same as the main game, which is why people who actually liked the main game don't like the DLC either. You're only listening to the side that already disliked Starfield in the first place. I've listened to both sides. They tried to appease everyone and thus appeased no one. That's why both sides aren't happy right now. Don't just listen to one side of the conversation.
Ten bucks says you're talking about habie's review
@@grantryder352 Yep. I've seen a few others but his was the one that stuck out the most.
I read somewhere that the engagement is actually LOWER in the DLC than there were people who bought the edition with the Season Pass. Which means people were so disappointed in the game, they didn't even come back for the DLC they had already paid for. That is a tragic level of failure from a once beloved developer.
They need to fire their management and their writers. They've not been able to deliver anything above a 6/10 since Far Harbor.
We, as a fan base, need to come to terms with the fact that the team who created Morrowind was gone by the time it shipped. Bethesda ran on the inertia of that team but have thus far had no new infusion of RPG thought nor game mechanic innovation since Oblivion when they got rid of character skill and became an action adventure studio.
I think Starfield should be accepted for what it is: An experimental passion project courtesy of our old friend Todd Howard and his team. They tried something new and I respect them for that. I don’t think we’ll be seeing a sequel to this game anytime soon, if ever, which might be for the best.
The problem is the rest of the context you left out. They charged 60 dollars for it, and 30 for this expansion. And for the last year, they've been saying it's the best game ever, it's everybody elses' fault if they don't like it, and even publicly shamed random customers for sharing negative feedback. If that earns your respect, I guess your respect isn't worth much.
Personally, I'm pretty disgusted by their behavior and they've lost most of what little respect I had left for them after 15 different Skyrim releases and the FO76 debacle.
Except it's a literal $70 product and Bethesda is using their horrible development cycles wasting time on a game a lot of people don't like/are bored by. Starfield would be less irritating if Bethesda's IPs were managed better
So experimental that they were cutting features because they feared the normies wouldn't like it.
What's that? Environmental effects and damage on planets? Nope, gotta cut it, it could make somebody have to reload a save because they didn't have the right equipment!
Limited fuel carrying ability, without it just replenishing? Nope, gotta cut it, somebody could get stuck in space and have to call for help!
And like everything Bethesda, they smooth down all the corners and make it so that you don't have to really commit to anything at all, because that could alienate some players. You don't like a thing? You can just skip it!
When you start Starfield the game has no lore so there is nothing you can "invest" into as a player,
and after several hours of play, the lore is still as thin as water.
There just isn't much to hold the player captive.
Fallout 4 was boring and clearly showed Bethesda's weaknesses. Weaknesses that were already starting to show with Skyrim. Anyone buying their games at this point is dreaming of a game made by a studio that hasn't existed in two decades.
You described exactly my Bethesda experience especially the Dark brotherhood reference. I remember being so disappointed with those missions in Skyrim, and at the time I was worried that they would lean too hard into procedurally generated content after being sent to the same cave three times by three different quest givers.
Bethesda lost their spark long, long ago. The last game they put out that was truly great was Morrowind. You had a world that was complete, didn't use level scaling exclusively, had hidden legendary items and tons of hidden items in general, you could just FIND amazing game changing stuff.
Then they put out real honest to god expansions, not dlc's.
Oblivion was decent but was definitely the point that their downfall started.
Morrowind had trash combat. Oblivion was the high point
You hit the nail on the head with the discontiguous nature of Starfield. I still remember first playing Morrowind and being amazed by the expansive world, and even though Fallout 4 lost a lot of the RPG elements it still had what I call a "Bethesda World." You don't want to fast travel because there's so much cool stuff you can find in between. It can be an expansive dungeon, or just a dead guy beheaded in a bathtub surrounded by mannequins holding machetes. Starfield has no "Between," and that's what hurts it most for me. You can't just see something, turn right, and you're in a whole new unexpected adventure. It removes the sense of discovery that was one of their earlier games' greatest strengths.
Take a shot whenever a TH-camr complains about the loading screens in Starfield. It amazes me how much people love to worry on that particular bone.. it's never been a problem for me, and I have to wonder if it actually bothers anyone that much or if it's just part of the checklist content creators have to hit in order to meet the anger quota for the algorithm. Heck, if you use fast travel in Skyrim (and I'll bet you anything MOST people do, by far) you'll have just as much if not more loading time. In and out of cities. In and out of buildings. Area to area, to hit your quest locations. I should know, I've got 1300 hours in Skyrim. Loading is a constant and regular thing, but you don't hear people complaining about it. For a Fallout or Elder Scrolls game it's such a non-issue, so why is it here?
The answer is simple, and silly. Starfield is not the same game as the Fallouts and the Elder Scrolls, and it's not trying to be. People complaining about loading screens are NOT comparing it to those franchises. No, they're comparing it to, what, Elite Dangerous? No Man's Sky? Star Citizen? Other games that Starfield isn't, but that they wish it was.. just because those games sure aren't perfect either (or even existing, in SC's case), or else they'd be playing them every waking hour, and not out complaining about other games.
Mike gave himself away, in this vid, when he talked about 'missed potential'. Because what really has people upset is that Starfield is not some imaginary, literally impossible fusion of all the games I've just mentioned. It's not a seamless open-galaxy with high quality curated content and proc-gen when you need it, with no loading screens (except when you want there to be), and an intricate storyline but also a perfect, infinite sandbox. Nothing can be, not with today's technology. And because it's not that, everyone's just blithely taking their banked disdain for Bethesda and nitpicking Starfield to pieces. Which, sure, Bethesda deserves some of that. I like making fun of Todd, too. But given that so many people are still playing Skyrim (as shown in this video) despite it being re-released like six times, I don't think anyone's about to teach him any lessons on how to run a business.
But who cares about that. Starfield's fun. I've got 150 hours in it, and I haven't even touched Shattered Space yet, or done the NG+ loop. I like how fast and sharp the melee combat feels, leagues ahead of Skyrim or Fallout 4 (though VATS would be nice, Blitz is really fun in FO4). I like the ship combat. I'm not a big ship builder so I like that it's optional, but I do also like the big-ass weird ships some of my friends have made. I like the companions; Sam is a hot cowboy dad and I will hear no ill about him, and Andreja's a sweetheart once she opens up and yet also a proper murderhobo. I like the shooting; the sniping feels good, and the weapon and suit upgrades that you can build feel meaningful and effective. I like the very nuanced difficulty options they've put in; you can make your game feel like FO4 Survival mode where everything dies super fast, including you, and that's exciting. I like the weird random space encounters, like the guy who just sings over comms, and the grandma, and the tour ship full of students, and the fact that if you're in the Mantis ship, Spacers will sometimes freak out and flee rather than fight you, like you're Space-Batman. I like how good *movement* feels, with sprinting being fast, and jetpacks adding mobility, and that thing where you grab a ledge and pull yourself up that I really wish was in Skyrim (does anyone know a mod for it?). I also do like the mods coming out for Starfield, and that I can run around naked looking like a bad sexy bitch, as the gods intended. I like the vehicle, the Not-Mako (or REV-8 or whatever it's called) for being a skittish, bouncy, 0-100 in half a second mess with guns (and that the companions comment on your driving, for better or worse). And I like the Starborn powers, which let me feel Godlike, rushing into a group of fools and blasting them onto their butts so I can stab them before they can even get up or lifting them into the air to wiggle helplessly before me.
Sure, there are things I don't like, too. But I'd rather have fun than chew on them. I appreciate that everyone's gonna have their own opinion, but I also think that way too many people let said opinions get shaped by loud voices, and anger and outrage fuel clicks and engagement so that's what they'll hear, and feel. And that's just unfortunate. Because instead of having a good time, they're just, effectively, choosing to be angry over nothing. But, well. Welcome to the internet, I guess.
I think people are scared to admit they enjoyed a game that the 'public' despises.
Unfortunately, BGS said something along the lines that a person can go to any planet and land anywhere during the marketing of the game. They didn't mention it was via loading screens. We have had games like No Man's Sky that seamlessly do this; so I think people expected something better than a few loading screens when traveling from point A to B. As you mentioned, yes, Skyrim has loading screens. It has different areas like Skyrim, Whiterun, and dungeons. But, the main area (Skyrim) is large and gives the illusion of an open world. When going from Riverwood to Whiterun, you'll probably encounter one loading screen. Fast travel in Skyrim is optional; you can play the game without fast travel if you choose; which is not the case with Starfield. So, when playing Skyrim for the first time, you can explore it seamlessly. Also, when traveling from one point to another point in Skyrim, you might encounter interesting locations like a Bandit camp or a Dungeon with an interesting mini-quest. This is a part of so-called "BGS" magic. I don't think the same can be said for Starfield with its design principle.
@@chamathamara I can see your point, and I do agree that it would be nice to have a single contiguous massive space you can travel through.. but the problem is, that was never gonna happen in Starfield. Space is just too big. If you travel from one planet to another at non-jump speed, it would take years, decades, centuries of real time. The "star field" itself is the 'big open area' in this game, and because of the very concept, it's completely unrealistic to expect to be able to just.. go wandering in it. Which leaves the planets. And you CAN wander across those.. but it's far too much space to convey their scale realistically. And even if they did, you'd still have the NMS situation of "wow this is all empty and meaningless space, I have to make my own fun or go to pre-existing checkpoint locations to find anything interesting".. which is exactly how it is, in Starfield.
The problem is one of scope, and it exists both with the fans AND Bethesda getting sucked into the 'bigger is better' idea. A province like Skyrim is probably right about the perfect size for a game for humans. Stuff it full of things, be it random encounters or curated content, and people will play a million hours. The issue is that a lot of people finished playing, or decided man, if only there was MORE Skyrim. And so comes the idea of 'what if there are WHOLE PLANETS of it'. But until AI storytelling and content curating is perfected, we're not gonna have that.
That said, THAT technology IS getting better. Maybe in a few years, they'll be able to inject a whole AI storyteller into Starfield. But even if they do.. will it still be meaningful? Players won't have shared experiences. But tabletop game players do still enjoy telling their war stories.. I guess we'll see.
I do agree that it *would* have been cooler to simply be able to take off from and land on planets and see the whole process. It would've been more immersive. Like I said, I have my little complaints, but they're not nearly enough to make me flip on the hate switch.
Man, yall nailed this one. Fantastic.
The worlds of Starfield lack npc simulation, which is another notch in the "discontiguous" belt.
The problem almost never lies with the devs. Screw ups like these happen when executives force their ideas into the product and no one is allowed to say it's an awful idea..
There's no way Shattered Space was made in response to criticism about the lack of handicrafts areas - this DLC was in the works and was always going to be what it was going to be. It just happened to sound like it was going to address a particular piece of feedback so conveniently fits the narrative of "Oh we're listening"
We're confusing devs. On one hand we'll shout "modern gaming sucks" and on the other we deplore "this dev hasn't changed since the 2000s".
Our messaging is all over the place.
Looked at apathy real quick and sprinted to whatever is beyond that. I didn't even realize this came out.
I mean, we're talking about a gaming studio that releases a gun for $7, that didn't work properly for weeks. I think it's safe to say BGS isn't the same BGS that released Oblivion or Fallout 3
A big part to Starfield's initial player base that a lot of people have forgotten, is that Bethesda had a pretty sizable marketing collaboration with PC hardware manufacturers upon launch where the game was bundled with CPUs, GPU, motherboards, and pre-built systems (I was building a new rig at the time and actually had codes for 2 copies of the game from the same machine without even trying). This is especially important as it was right after a lot of these manufacturers had their new model series rolling out, as well as there was a bit of a lull in the GPU overpricing trend for a while there. So a lot of people got the game for free and even if they wouldn't have necessarily paid for the game directly, since it came with something else they were already buying anyway, a lot of people were gonna try it out regardless.
Cyberpunk upon initial release however had the opposite effect - while last gen consoles may have had a lot of problems on it that got a LOT of attention, I played the game on both my older (FAR outdated) system as well as my new one and never had ANY problems with it aside from self-inflicted wounds by modding. I knew OTHER people were having issues with it for months, but because *I* didn't, being aware of other people's technical issues didn't matter much to me.
Phantom liberty doesn't play like a DLC. It's like an entire standalone game with 25 hours of playtime. I would have paid double for the sheer quality of it - it's got Idris Elba and very well-used, not just cameo but an entire arc. Cinematic gameplay and some crazily well-designed levels and side quests.
Just gotta say you've made a fast fan out of me these last couple of weeks. Really measured and thorough coverage with principled criticisms that don't just amount to "DEI is the devil."
Got starfield as a gift with my graphics card so i played it and got near the end of the campaign but never finished it. I just got, bored. And for a bethesda game that was disheartening. My faith in the dlc was low so waited to see what others said. Seeing where it stands it is an easy pass
I'm so glad you brought up Shivering Isles because it was literally what I was thinking of
#1. This story is not compelling. It is dull. The UNC questline was better than the main story. I think it was a mistake to make such a massive space game and not at least have hints of other sentient alien species.
Very good point about the numbers. Usually if a project fails miserably there are still loads of different numbers available to paint things in a positive light. Industry standard for gaslighting.
There's a lot to do in starfield. With that said the fan backlash is dumb. Shattered space is only failing becauss of fan expectations. There's 1700 planets There's no way that everyone had done everything on every single planet, There's infinite ways to customize ships, There's 1000s of quests etc and people really expected bethesda to put out more than this? Like are you dumb the game is already huge 😂 and they're absolutely right putting in too much stuff would cause the game to break. If you want more content then make mods. I legit dont understand what the fuss is about. The quests and content were cool.
I gotta agree with Zaric Zacharian here. This game was MADE for me. Big ol sandbox. I love StarField so much
I played Cyberpunk 2077 a few months after launch on PC. It had performance issues but it was a great game. Later, mods made it even better.
Cyberpunk didn't need Phantom Liberty. It had great content from the start. Never did it feel like just generic empty space with bubbles of content.
DLCs don't fix games. They build upon what's already there and add to that.
If you need to fix a game, you don't need a DLC, but a patch. Starfield needs patches reducing the insane amount of loading screens and patches filling the voids with content. If the base game isn't convincing, I'm not buying the DLC. Fix the base game first. Then add DLCs.
Conversely I played on PC for both games at launch. Cyberpunk was significantly better as an experience from the start. Starfield was another glitchy mess that had so many breaks in the gameplay due to the constant loading screens, it was just meh. A ok tale, semi enjoyable but never anything special.
Then DLCs…
Phantom Liberty was phenomenal. The elevation in gameplay when I had already platinum trophied the based game was night/day better. It wasn’t necessary, but I absolutely loved it. I loved the structure and bones of the game to invest further. I am not sure I can say that for Starfield currently. I opted for a new run at a higher difficulty in BG3 instead co-op with the spouse. One 181 hour coop run wasn’t enough.
Bethesda is like the gifted kid who never had to put effort into getting good grades, but fell off and lost motivation in college because they never developed a studying habit.
To be honest
I rather play outerworlds
Than starfield
6:01 "Cyberpunk had glimmers of a vastly superior game in it."
Yes, it was a mess on last gen on release, and had tons of bugs and optimization issues regardless of your rig. I played it on a fairly outdated PC and loved it. Cyberpunk 2077 was a deeply flawed masterpiece on release (now its just a masterpiece), Starfield was a reasonably function pile of mediocrity and hasn't changed much. I'd take release 2077 over Starfield in its current state everytime.