I enjoy most Sci-Fi entertainment, but when it comes to RPGs, for some reason I can't stand Sci-Fi settings. That's the main reason I avoided Starfield. If it were fantasy based, I probably would have bought it in spite of the mediocre reviews. Oh....and the loading screens. Come on. This isn't the Skyrim era. Time to move beyond that game engine.
both small and big studios should release freeware DLC chunks first instead of taking huge gambles on $100 million + projects only to find out later no one is interested and the game is filled with bugs. it is impossible to understand what gamers fully want 100% from inside a gaming studio. the modding scene is proof of this. start with an idea, create a short 5-10hr game, open it up to mods, ask questions, listen to gamer feedback then refine the concept
too many people forget the teams that made morrowind, oblivion, and skyrim arent there anymore, and even if they were theyd only be 1/6th of the current team at most. game are products of the teams of devs and the time/resources they are given. and bigger teams dont equal quality
This needs to keep being spammed in the comments pages until people get it, it's remarkable how many people are still surprised by this, you also see the streamers etc. not understanding. It's worse than the OG devs not being there, the new breed of developers come from university backgrounds or they're nepotists who haven't looked at a line of code in their lives and don't even know how to make a decent 3D model with correct topology. There's a reason they keep trying to push walking simulator slop and every game looks the same now, not to mention the fact they're incapable of optimising anything and get mad when their own playerbase complains.
@@lethn2929 this is also the case for pretty much EVERY well known studio. NONE of the original devs remain and are just suits now that know nothing about what they are doing.
People snould NEVER buy anything based on brand or nostalgia, those fckin corporations just milk customers on it. Always wait for trusted reviews NOT some IGN garbage or some paid shills pre release informations. Just look what happened here or CDPR, Bioware and many others.
@@Blood-PawWerewolfBUT in this specific case, Bethesda has a higher percentage of long-term staff than most other studios. Obviously some people will have moved on and their roles filled, but if any game studio Bethesda has one of the highest employee retention rates. Must just be a nice place to work.
whats sad is anytime someone does a retrospective on bethesdas games and points out flaws there is always someone there to defend it by saying "well you can mod it to be what you want" well i dont buy platforms to mod i buy games
I'm a solo dev. I couldn't get a job in the games industry despite having graduated as a game dev, so I figured I'd just.... make something. I tried recruiting friends in similar positions to join the project, but no one was interested, so now I'm working by myself. I've wanted to make games since I was a little girl, so when presented with a choice between giving up on my dreams because the industry is actively hostile to us, or going for it by myself... Well, I picked the second option.
What do you specialise in Alerara? I'm in the UK and have a similar thing, I'm an environment artist myself and have considered doing the same, I've shipped into other areas over the years too, like tech art, animation, sound/music and coding
I’m an artist but with things the way are, and mostly because i’ve been frustrated with not being able to find games that fulfill niches that i like (an anime rts for example) i’ve recently decided to dive into game dev lol. Best of luck to you.
I'm a solo indie developer, and you hit the nail on the head regarding the tools available these days. During an alpha test for my current project, I had a tester assume I'd been working on the game for 6-7 years based on how (pretty) it looked. The actual development time? 9 months. Some of that visual quality was art design, some was skill, but I honestly think most of it comes from utilizing what the engine has to offer. All in all, while the expectations, targets, and costs for AAA is ballooning into the stratosphere, the little guys are being given ammunition like never before. And I cannot wait to see what these ex-AAA developers do with these tools :)
Always love hearing about the dev process of indie devs. I saw your game on Steam and it looks promising so far, will definitely be keeping an eye on it.
To be fair, the game does look very polished visually and I can't imagine those models are just store assets with store textures. Out of curiosity, what was the biggest engine-supplied force multiplier for you? (also, wishlisted - very much up my street)
As another indie dev, I gotta say this looks very strong and polished. I would only suggest increasing the lower levels of brightness/exposure a bit, because the shadows are currently way too dark. It looks there could be a ton of cool detail hidden in those shadowed areas right now. Also, once the game gets close to a release date, think about sending a review copy to Splattercat. I feel he is going to have a fun time with it. Wish you all the best. 🙂🙂
Emil hate should've never escaped NoMutantsAllowed. The very thought of going to bat for the guy is exhausting bc I do not want to be roped in to a TH-cam argument over someone I have no strong feelings about, so I won't. What I will do is offer a little nugget of advice: if a TH-camr you're watching has singled out a specific writer/dev/etc. on a massive triple A team as a key problem, and that assertion doesn't involve them being a nightmare to work with or a literal criminal? It's hyperbole to drive engagement, especially if they make more than one video on the fucker.
@@Brazenbrewdude, you just need to see Emil writing and videos of him talking to hate him. And yes some times a specific person in a AAA it's a key problem
@@Brazenbrew Damn that's crazy, have you maybe thought that the lead person on the project and the person who's vision and writting is being used to build the world wouldn't be to blame about both the world and writing being bland and not very good consistantly across all the projects that he's worked on since 20011 onwards? I get it, I really do but some people fail upwards, especially within the creative industry, and no one is saying that everything is 100% specifically his fault but he is the lead, the buck stops with him, if the project isn't meeting expectations it is a fact that he overseen it and so should've noticed starfields many many many pitfalls.
When you got on a ship that had been isolated from the rest of space for hundreds of years and they had all the exact same assets as the rest of space.. that is when I finally lost hope for Starfield.
I wouldn't say there is little, there were some very good side quests in Starfield, the issue with it is how much of the content is randomly generated and a only a small part is handcrafted there are vast ammounts of nothing between the interesting stuff, that and the ammount of work to change planets(go to ship, change planet and then land ship) makes for a lot of dead time between actualy doing stuff. Sadly Starfield had many interesting ideas but poor implementation, and tried to have a scale way too big for what it could do.
@@HugoARSantos The game is a glorified walking sim with a few template enemy types and bases that get recycled ad nauseum there's nothing interesting going on there it's basically skyrim in space, they took their 15 years of experience and only implemented 5% of those ideas from popular player mods. Not to mention its other problems like its disneyfication and politicizing with DEI and cut corners with cheap graphics compared to other games.
@@HugoARSantos Yeah, I don't think any studio can really create such a massive universe to explore in space like in Starfield. You're either going to have to focus on a few handful of planets or do something along the lines of Mass Effect. Or just have it out in space only like with the X series.
@@XBluDiamondX Mass Effect/Outer Worlds like game with shipbuilding, gear modding/research system and perk system would have been lightyears better than the early alpha, AI generated slop that we got.
Both of those franchise are carried by the old work done on them(by more talented people in a better era), Starfield was brand new and showed what the current team can actually do when making something from scratch.
Look at Kenshi, an indie game where the sole developer was racing between getting a workable game or starving to death... a totally apropos story, considering the game's content.
@@XBluDiamondXIf you would actually pay for Kenshi 2 while 1 is in this state then you are part of the problem. Kenshi is a mess of a game. Kenshi 2 will be the same mess. You can't improve your design and code if you never addressed where the problems came from.
@@potato_mash121 Kenshi was an indie game made by 1 person and they have a team now for the second one. Don't act like it was Cyberpunk at launch lol. Plus complaining about Kenshi 1 in it's current state is weird because they'd have to make a whole new game to fix the flaws with he first one. Which they are doing. Seems like you think they're AAA grifters
I tried Kenshi 3 times, years apart (each time because people keep praising it to high heavens and each time i though "maybe i just missed something") and each and every time it was just...shit. I honestly do not see where all the hype is coming from about that game. It is empty as hell, there is practically nothing to do, nothing to achieve, no unique characters or quests. and as a sandbox its just a snore fest. And before you say anything, know that i absolutely love Rimworld, that is a proper sandbox/make your own adventure game. Kenshi is an extremely overrated snorefest as empty as its many wastelands.
People keep saying the entire video game industry is collapsing... when, in reality, the sleazy relationship between corporate publishers, their development teams, and "journalists"/ media is what is really crumbling around them. Plently of smaller scale games of great quality being made, and subsequently slandered by those same "journalists". Meanwhile, the trash being pushed as the next big thing isn't wanted, and those responsible can not cope.
Yeah, games that are coming out are absolutely amazing. People that cry that gaming is dead are just kissing the ass of AAA games and don't realize that's only around 5% of the industry that has good games once in a blue moon.
My last job (Software Engineering Manager), I had at least 20 meetings a day. Meetings double or triple booked. Meetings scheduled during the lunch hour. Meetings schedule at 5 AM or 9 PM. It sucks the life out of you.
Meetings where you ask yourself why you're there, meetings you were told you can skip but if you do, they pull you in it anyway, meetings that were done for a third time, just because you have to do it with another team again
If you think *NOW* that Elder Scrolls 6 is going to be a disaster you have clearly been living too long in Todd's dungeon. The warning signs were there since Fallout 4
they were there since oblivion. bethesda peaked at morrowind lmao. and for some strange inexplicable reason, it was after morrowind that most of the old guard left and todd and emil became prominent. curiouser curiouser.
The warnings were really there when they swapped from originally doing elder scrolls 6 to making elder scrolls online. then we got fallout 76 which is basically an MMO version of starfield. that game only has become interesting after about 3-4 years of additional development since it released. Starfield reminds me of Fallout 76 at launch. This is most likely the model bethesda is following now. you get an empty sandbox to play in, and they'll eventually add the toys in 2-5 years.
@@therim187 Tbf Elder Scrolls Online and Fallout 76 wasn't made by them, so it's even worse. They've literally done nothing since Fallout 4 but re-release Skyrim 6 times and pump out a "remaster" of Fallout 4. That being said, both those games are actually rather fun now.But that's besides the point. Bethesda model, since Fallout 3, really, but Skyrim especially, has been "release the game half-finished and modders will do the rest and for FREE"
@Helperbot-2000 what’s really weird about it is that I’ve seen Todd outright state in interviews that Morrowind was his favorite game that Bethesda made. Which is weird if true since they never made anything quite like it since then.
I think the lesson is, if you want to start a game in the modern digital age, it can be a one man passion project with a vision, from thereon if it's a hit it naturally grows a life of its own and expands.
all you really need, is to make sure the game is developed, funded and published by the same company/studio. conflict of interest between the passion of the devs, and the greed of publishers and shareholders ALWAYS leads to games either flopping, or turning out a complete failure. a lot of my favorite games, Space Engineers, Everspace 1&2, Project Zomboid and some others im forgetting all of these are independent from publishers or shareholders wanting a return ASAP. when there is passion for the game in every department, the chance of success are infinitely higher
most of the well know studios bought out by big corporation turns into shit in five years or so. Once the old guards start leaving it’s a domino effect. There is an only handful of AAA studios out there still fighting the temptation and just want to make good games.
Definitely a thing people should remember is that a studio name is just a name. The people behind it. The culture that made the games they were praised for. They can all change. I hope GTA6 is great. But, I’m not going to hold an expectation of past titles, since if I’m correct, there’s basically no one from the previous GTA games working on 6. We can only hope knowledge, skill and management were passed down well enough and retained, that it’ll still feel like Rockstar.
Star Truckers came out in September 2024. It was made by a two-person team. Basically you're a truck driver in space hauling cargo between sectors. Been playing it over Christmas and the aesthetics are beautiful and it's very immersive, having a blast with it.
The absolute worst thing that’s been happening in the aaa industry is the consolidation of almost every studios by publishers and the likes of Sony and Microsoft. With any corporate entity, control is somethings creatives will never have, because being a creative means taking risks, which is absolutely not what any corporate person wants to happen, because means money is lost, and it’s always about money; but not in saving money; it’s about getting more money than last year, so long as the quarterly earnings are showing “growth” then the execs keep their jobs, if they are down, the creatives get blamed becuase “it’s their job to make the company money”, the corporate side of the industry needs to go away, it’s getting in the way
@@Scruffynerfherder10 We're in a capitalist society where art is a commodity. Nothing is going to change for the better. Rather, it's going to get worse. The whole point is to create value for shareholders. Ever single decision in game development will be centered around that.
I mean Microsoft gave an enormous amount of freedom to their studios and got massively blindsided for it. Redfall being the best example I can think of. Devs do need budgets and deadlines or you may never get a product or you get unfinished trash. Definitely a balance to be struck at least for triple AAA devs. But mostly yes, consolidation is killing to many good games and studios.
Thats the beauty of having game dev as a hobby instead of as a profession.. the games are allowed to develop on their own and creativity can work without restrictions
@@RegiusEques This is true, Microsoft gives complete control and freedom to their devs, but the problem is they buy out the wrong ones. When these studios get a blank check, they lose the passion and hunger. They get complacent. Ffs, all Rare has done in the last 10 years has been Sea of Thieves! And the only studio Microsoft has built from the ground up, 343, is full of clowns who don't know wtf they're doing with the Halo IP.
Unfortunately AAA is never going to fully collapse. They've been going steady for way too long now. The only hope in the space is that more companies can do what Larian has done, and catapult themselves to AAA status, and still maintain their love for games, in which starts making the current titans bleed out money. It's the only way they'll even start to look towards changing their current models.
As more investors pull out of the games sphere and go into AI or whatever buzzword it is for the quarter, there will only be a few mega publishers left. Sony, microsoft, and T2. So expect studios like ubisoft to completely fall to pieces or go into one of those big three. AAA won't die, it will just consolidate.
Their future is streaming not owning, first all smaller teams need to be dealt with so the only choice becomes the corpos streaming games for a monthly fee.
I can see Elder scrolls being set on an archipelago of desert islands. Most of them will be barren. The rest will have one of 5 identical ancient temples. You will travel between them on a fully customisable pirate ship. Cosmetically customisable - any travel will be via cut-screen.
I don’t have the desire to join big studios, so I wrote my own novels, trying to develop my own IP, model my characters in 3D because it’s what I love doing. Idk if this is sustainable or if it’s going to work at all. I just know I love doing it
20+ year game dev here, I'm looking to transition out of games. its an unstable industry, and I think alot of it is tax scandels with local governments if you ask me.
If you're a US citizen and can pass a background check, government contracting may be the way to go. Fair number of game design programs at universities too if you want to be a professor.
I've called Fallout 4 the worst game I ever loved; whatever else can be said about its laughably bad design, I had way too much fun actually playing it and it's my fourth most-played game of all time on Steam. Bethesda lost me for good at E3 2018.
FO4 was a game I got bored with mid-way through. I couldn't put my finger on it as to why. Then FO76 came out and skipped that because it's not my type of game. Then comes Starfield, a game I was originally excited for. Oh boy, regret sat in after playing that for a bit. Then it came to me Bethesda is just a shell of its former self. When ES6 comes out, I won't consider buying it until well after release and if most people give a thumbs up.
@@FinnishedThirdMusic I really disliked the story of Fallout 4 and some of the design at launch and I put it down after 10 hours or so then I picked it back up 5 years later and played it again (this time as female SS) with big mods like sim settlements 2 and DLCs. I have to admit that there are fatal flaws to the game but there was still enough good in there for me to be one of my favorite gaming experiences at that time. With SS rounding out the settlement mechanics and adding more story to a minuteman focused kind of game, it’s really fun. Up until you find the Institute. The whole main story with the institute doesn’t feel like Fallout in my opinion. Nuka World is like half a dlc imo. You can’t present these glaring incongruities in story and worldbuilding, it ruins the whole series when you treat your own lore with no respect. I didn’t play 76 or watch the Amazon show. It’s sad because Morrowind, Skyrim, FO3 and NV were some of my most formative games ever. I spent so much time and loved them so much. FO4 I enjoyed a lot with tinkering but I did think Far Harvor was the best content Bethesda produced ever for Fallout, and that lead should have been given narrative reigns. But yeah, he left and went indie.
Bethesda has such a strange history. They keep talking now like they're one of the big, beloved, prestige studios. But really, they're a one-hit wonder. For almost all their history, they've been this niche, B-tier studio that makes fun timewaster junk-food open-world games--to the point that the best game in their series was developed by another studio (Obsidian). Then they got massive off Skyrim and haven't seen any real success since...but keep trying to pretend like they've always been that Skyrim-grade studio. They need to stop acting like everything they touch is pure gold, stop getting high on their own farts, and actually think about the games they're making.
Hey Nate. Just discovered your channel by reading this very comment. 🙂 I am currently going through your dev logs, gonna watch them all. So did you originally start in UE4, and then migrate to UE5? Or was it a UE5 project from the get go?
If you tell your devs to make a game _they_ want to make you get A) a good game B) returning customers C) happier devs D) a stage for the next game Squeezing money out of your customers and time out of your developers is how you lose profit.
@@legna1932 I mean they have to put "diversity" in the team.... that means a lot more worldviews than 2.... which means the game will never be good, no matter how much money you put into it. Game development should not be a political thing, it should be something good and fun for people to exit reality... not be driven harder into reality... I mean putting average women (or even ugly women) is meaningless in a game... I want "my perfect world" I already live in the bad one I want the other one... if the game just reminds me about the place I live, there is a less reason to play it. Also the devs should be passionate about the game, they should like it, not just fake that they like it. Starfield felt like scam I waited the good part passionately, but there was "no good part" it seems like the game was made to be sold on Steam for people to search for the "good part" and not be able to refund... Bethesda can forget about me... I've wasted 30 hours in Starfield just to find out it's an absolutely bland uninspired game... in fact it's worst than the worst games, there is no way I play it ever again. Starfield is a 100% soulless empty game... I just gave it chance, if it was from someone else I wouldn't have done that. I'm not buying Elder Scroll 6 unless everyone plays it and says it's good, and watching a ton of videos to make sure it's true. I would watch the whole story before I buy the game.
Starfield killed all the potential hype that Elder Scrolls 6 had for me. I doubt the developers there are even passionate about their work anymore much like a lot of artist leaving these large corporations.
People like me tried to warn you about Bethesda since FO4. I myself didn’t listen to those that warned you about FO3. This is how Bethesda work. The games just become worse and worse.
I think personally that Bethesda right now, will not have enough time to make elder scrolls 6 the game it needs to, Starfield has taken a lot of steam out of workers in my opinion AND more importantly a lot of time. I swear they only just started working on elder scrolls 6 at the start of last year or this year (2025) I swear it's going to be 2030 or 2035 before elder scrolls 6. If it's going to be sooner than that means get ready for star field scrolls 6 coming soon.
@@brianeno608 I personally do not really care that much about Bethesda if they have those problems. They have great workers for sure. The issue is however that they are complacent, lazy and just keep remaking the same thing over and over again. But this time more streamlined and scaled down. They thought they were untouchable. They thought games like Skyrim and FO4 prove that their games are the best. Yet they ignore all the issues people bring up. They dismiss them as if it is all nonsense. What Bethesda needs is to get a really really big kick in the behind. They need to invovate and stop being stale. They are always something like 10 years behind the industry standard. FO4 is on par with COD4 in its shooting mechanics, and still a little behind as FO4 still do not have a throwable button. Just a reminder. COD4 was released a year before FO3, and in COD4 you can shoot through terrain. Something COD4 doesn't have. What they should do is to take more time. Cull a few of the execs and change a lot of their design philosophy. Their whole nonsense of not having anything that can be skipped or missed out needs to be removed. You shouldn't be able to be the Archmage without knowing any spells. You shouldn't be the leader of every faction without any responsibilities.
And modders probably thought they were good enough to get money, but then realized no one wants to pay for incoherent amateur slop made by 30 different people thrown into a load order blender.
Bethesda Games Studios have gotten so large they should split their development resources and work on both Elder Scrolls and Fallout. If the one kitchen is full one might as well get a new kitchen for the remainder.
Yeah, I think having two smaller teams that can each spend less time on meetings and more time making the games would almost definitely work a lot better.
I'm kinda glad people are starting to look at Starfield with a less biased view. It is a significant step down from Bethesda's last few games in all the ways that matter. I was mystified at all the reviews and reddit posts praising it as a masterpiece.
Honestly, I think the reviews are mostly just a product of having a limited amount of time to play the game before writing them, since for the first 50-ish hours it felt like I was just scratching the surface of Starfield , which seemed (to me, your milage may vary, obviously) like an incredible Universe with vast ampunts of stuff to do amd things to see, and then I hit hour 50 and I realized that I hadn't been just scratching the surface, that really was all the depth the game had.
@@_Mutto_ I hate to say it but Skyrim is very much babys first RPG. The problem is that RPGs are a niche market and fans of Skyrim set it as the 'standard' rather than a starter. For me, I was baffled how much was taken out of Oblivion (started it and FO3 around the same time, tho KoTOR was my first RPG)
I love Stardew Valley. Big respect to Eric and his vision. I've played a lot of Harvest Moon and SV has so much more quality writing, gameplay and charm. Totally blows it out of the water in every way.
Games made by 400 people are basically made by 100 people; the rest is mostly dead weight. That's why AA and indie can often out do the AAA. The usual rule in large project is that the square root of the staff will do 50% of the work, and the remaining 50% is shared between the rest. In a team of 400 people, 20 people will do 50% of the work. When those top people start leaving those large studios, the studios are in trouble.
Starfield is an ambitious game held back by an aging engine, a terrible writer and a company head that is so invested in cost saving measures that he refuses to let games reach their potential in the modern age only because of a few games they made almost 2 decades ago. Bethesda just needs to take the L and accept their game is not going to get the reception that an indie studio got years ago when they tackled close to the same idea, but better and their only other game was a Trial's clone.
You mean the game that people mercilessly savaged for years and only started pretending to like and play after seeing years of content updates and overhauls that the studio got no money for? Yeah, that game was pretty cool. Kinda sucks that it's still just rinse and repeat survival crafting building gameplay with endless fetch quests and inconsequential pretend stories, even though it's structurally, mechanically and visually executed in such a great way.
Bethesda's largest issue is they've played it safe on purpose ever since Morrowind saved them from going under. They threw everything at the wall and took risks when creating the game, because it was a must. It either succeeded and they continued as a company, or collapsed and disbanded if it failed. Every move since has been to make sure they don't get back to /that/ point again.
@@Th1sUsernameIsNotTaken Bethesda's largest issue is that they're a shit studio, that's all there is to it really. Morrowind was good for its time and that's where it stops. Fallout 1, 2 and New Vegas, the games that were good, were made by Obsidian, not them.
11:00 It's important to note that Unreal in general and nanite in particular come with a different cost: Nanite is a performance nightmare, especially on anything other than thousand $ NVidia cards, and Unreal is discontinuing support for traditional workflow and optimization methods to rely instead on AI upscaling trickery. Epic is making it very cheap to develop on their platform, at the cost of high minimum hardware specs for even the barest of games. Plus a lot of indie games are starting to have that exact same uncanny "photo-bash" look due to using the same megascan packs.
It's not even clear what the point of nanite is. It's not like you couldn't automate the generation of optimized models from high fidelity assets, people did it all the time, multiple times for each LOD level. What's the point in trying to replace that with some sort of real time AI driven model simplification thing? What does that add other than a stupid and expensive gimmick?
I heard this somewhere, but. Big game developers like EA, Ubisoft, etc. don't have employees that enjoy playing games anymore, they have employees that are there for the paycheck. Hence why big game devs are going under fast.
They seem like people who never played games, otherwise they wouldn't sound that exited when they were "testing" Starfield, when these people were sharing their thoughts, their excitement seemed genuine... now I know why... they never played games in their life, they do entirely different things, so doing this new "thing" felt exiting. But what about Tod Howard... isn't he himself played the game... how he could lie... he always does it... he just hopes "the game will be good" when it's not. Skyrim was only better because they still had people who knew what they were doing... i.e. people who really played games. It seems either these people left or the non gamers were higher in the hierarchy (which is almost always the case) but this time these people were not too high up... i.e. they actually knew what was done and didn't like it... of course they don't like it... non gamers don't like playing games so they don't understand anything about what gamers would like. Gamers don't like the real life they want another life, another world... where giants cant throw you in the sky... (which was a bug by the way), but it was a bug which made the game even better.... so... that is the thing, they made Starfield too much like the real world... you can be bad... but not really bad.... you can be a pirate... but not really... you can't make bad decisions to make people feel bad... you can't make good decisions... you have to be mediocre of everything just not to offend someone from the "outside world" i.e. the non gaming "real world:.... so that's what happened a mediocre bland politically correct game... which of course nobody would like...
@ you’re not wrong, it can be overcome. But if you are doing some kind of RPG or more fairly basic shooter, can easily be what tips sentiment over to very negative. There are a lot of passible games who get dunked on for this. If they had a more unique art style, absolutely would thrive more.
@@mattmmilli8287, Please tell me these passible games. Leave out anything that is nearly a clone in gameplay mechanics to another game, which I suspect is the actual issue, and not the UE store assets.
@@Th1sUsernameIsNotTaken the one featured in this video. Estimated 6000 sales or whatever he mentioned. I don’t think it’s the gameplay that holds it back but more a generic feeling to the art and shaders
Tainted Grail: Fall of Avalon. I just found this the other day. its amazing. its the next gen bethesda game that bethesda will never be able to make again. its like skyrim and dark souls had a baby. You guys gotta go support this one. it was too good.
EA on Steam currently. Devs already & successfully published another game in the universe. Updates are coming strong, not just 'for the sake of activity', I'd recommend!
That game is fantastic. Just keep in mind that it still has optimization issues, where some areas would cause significant frame rate drops and GPU overheating for no good reason. For comparison, The Division from 2016 has the same or higher fidelity and runs flawlessly on a GTX 680 2GB VRAM gfx card from 2012. While Avalon has issues running on a RTX 3090 24GB VRAM cards. I truly hope devs will eventually manage to figure this one out, because other than that, the game is a blast.
@@predragpesic5953 bro... its unoptimized because they are still making the game. optimasation is last. its only about 40 hours of game right now, but i promise everyone they will have more fun in that 40 hours than any amount of time in starfield or likely elder scrolls 6. Support your indie devs.
20 meetings a week is 4 a day for a full work week, if you assume they respect weekends which they probably do not. I know I'm a math genius, but it's worth being said to realize the magnitude of how stupid it is. Literally no work is getting done for that week, and the next and the next. Ive found myself stuck in similar but not quite as insane loops during my 'career' where people did weekly meetings after weekly meeting to say everytime they didn't have time to do x or y since last time we spoke.. because they were in other meetings. You start to understand why those games take so many years to make and with no time to pivot in the middle of the pipeline when they realize X or Y feature is ill thought out and needs to be rethought entirely.
Twenty meetings a week... more evidence that a lot of AAA developers have tried to scale up to ever larger games with minimal attention to updating their tools and processes. These don't scale linearly any more than team size. Everyone is aware of the "mythical person-month" where if a project takes 2 people 100 months to complete, that doesn't mean that 100 people can complete it in 2 months. The same is true of tools and pipelines. More complex projects require greater levels of abstraction in libraries and automation pipelines. You can see how Bioware and Bethesda hit a wall in their productivity and quality in the past 5-10 years. A cooking analogy: you can't just double the oven temperature of a conventional oven to halve the cooking time. If you want to cook your food faster (or more food in the same amount of time) you need a microwave or a convection oven.
@keit99 I mean, it certainly has a rocky start, but it's an awesome game now if one likes the genre. Can't say that about Starfield. And Starfield's launch numbers couldn't top the launch numbers of Cyberpunk's DLC's launch numbers, which is hilarious.
Same thing that happened to the Veilguard Defence Force. They realised they were being petulant, rowdy children once they actually finished the game, and burned a lot of bridges in the process. They're all in hiding, hoping we'll forget their behaviour.
One of the biggest issues with the gaming industry right now is how big & bloated it is, because there's so many people there's little to no accountability. If you ruin a product just move on to another one, it somehow no longer tarnishes your name if you've been attached to 5 failed products anymore where as back in the 2000s and 2010s you'd have that cloud over your head. Now we just have studios that are more like the ship of Theseus than anything else.
Some people don't get it (and this makes me really frigging pissing mad) - bloated companies CAN'T create anything close to art, it all ends up generic. When there's too many people, there's too much delegated work and too little personal touch and deliberation, no time for anyone to have any freedom to do anything they believe is cool and they have to pass every single decision by layers and layers of superiors or down through cogs of workers until it reaches the correct worker Bloated companies are good only as factory floors or sweatshops. And even factories are automating now.
There is a challenge that as you grow in skill and experience, you get funneled more and more into boring meetings and less and less creative work. Your skills decay, you fall behind the trends and quickly find yourself dependent on a manager type role, which moves you from an asset to a liability.
The industry is a rotten bloated carcass, layoffs are a necessary purge. Sadly, some people will get fired even if they don't deserve it but there's no way around it and it's not gamers' fault. Hopefully those devs would land on their feet and get another job on a much healthier gaming industry.
Oh I long for only 20 meetings a week. It gets to the point where you have to work extra hours just to do the non-meeting things you need to do. It is the curse of large projects.
Starfield would have been wonderful as it is, loading screens and all... if the writing was any good. It all comes down to writing, we have tons of games that are extremely rough, just look at the first Mass Effect, and it's still enjoyable to play because the story is well written. Good gameplay can be put into multiplayer, single player story games can have it rough as long as the story is really good. When will this fact be understood by everyone?
What an annoying comment. 1. "Starfield would have been wonderful as it is" - For you. But many of the complaints are about ... the GAMEPLAY. 2. "It all comes down to writing" - Valheim, minecraft, Helldivers 2, Ark, Rust, KSP, Factorio, Rimworld would like to have a word. 3. "we have tons of games that are extremely rough, just look at the first Mass Effect" - Mass effect was released in 2007. Compare it to bioshock or S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl and the gameplay is fine. Bad comparison. 4. "Good gameplay can be put into multiplayer" - .... Good gameplay can be put into any game? 5. "single player story games can have it rough as long as the story is really good." - Yeah, no. The market that exclusively cares about "stories" is measurably smaller than the gameplay market. Just go to steam, top played games, you can easily calculate estimated earnings with a bit of googling. You'll find "story" focused games are relatively niche with a few success stories. 6. "When will this fact be understood by everyone?" - If "everyone" listened to you, we would get more games with stories and bad gameplay. Let's hope nobody does.
I'll disagree on the loading screens part. While it would have made them more tolerable, there's simply too many. Even when I was enjoying it (which was mainly during the UC quests), I had to quit playing because of how absolutely sick of the loading screens I was. Side note - I hope whoever wrote the UC quest line gets more write-time. Was one of the only questlines I actually found interesting and well-written. Some things were a little off, but I feel that had more to do with other sectors of BGS than it did their writing.
@@Wafflebane You're just missing the point here. You understand that it's not about being against "good gameplay", right? What I'm saying is that the gameplay doesn't really mean anything for making a classic. Mass Effect 1 was heavily criticized for its gameplay, it's rather shit; with long stretches of uninteresting drives around on barren planets for hours of cut and paste scenery. But it still is fondly remembered and still played today, because the story and characters is what pushed it to the top. And it's interesting that when I say that good gameplay is more important in multiplayer, you include multiplayer games as some counter point. Like, what? I just said that multiplayer games need the focus of good gameplay. But the other games make little sense as well because they are system gameplay games made for the point of gameplay and little to no story at all. You're not understanding what we're talking about here which is primarily games with story, like Starfield. The context here is games like Starfield and how story-based games can be rough in their gameplay as long as the story is well written and the characters are interesting. It's like you don't even get the overall point before nitpicking the details of a point you totally missed.
Dunno if it was originally from 2024 or 2023 but Surroundead is an early access game from a solo dev that I put a tonne of time into. Simple zombie survival/crafting/scavenging open world game but it just hit so very right for me. Well worth the £10 or whatever it cost.
Agreed. UE5 is a _powerful_ tool, but much like giving a chainsaw to a beaver isn't going to fell the tree faster, it's just going to end badly for the rodent. Same with inexperienced game devs trying to learn Unreal 5 on the fly.
Agreed; i actually played the demo of axis unseen and found it interesting but unoptimized, my midrange system would play mostly smooth at 40ish FPS but so many points things took a nosedive to sub 20 fps. Until this video and me looking back at the steam page i'd actually assumed it was just early access and thus unoptimized, i figured it just needed more time in the oven. it being a released game is kind of a "well, nope then" in my books.
@fxnnx unreal 5 has got to be the funniest bad game engine ive ever seen Every game ive ever seen port to unreal 5 from 4 immediently performed horribly except fortnite, but atleast the graphics were ... 5 percent better?
@@HighBoss i5-13600KF & RTX 2060. Not super high end, but modern CPU and a still okay GPU. Notable is that changing the graphics settings didn't actually notably alter performance.
Bethesda keeps saying these along the lines of "we're proud of what we made" in attempt to deflect real genuine criticism about their game. Such a sad bubble to live in.
Im still pushing Wube with Factorio out here. Internal communications necessary to get code, graphics, and comfort right, hosting lan parties to find what their audience wanted and squash bugs, and regular blog posts discussing how and why they do the things they're doing. Space age started as a mod by one of the devs and I'm still enjoying it after sinking close to 100 hours into this session alone.
Not a fan of the pricing scheme though. Raising pricing over time (instead of going down,) + no sales + DLC with the same price as the full game. The full game is now priced at €64 and it'll only ever go up - by the next DLC the full priced game will be €100+. They might be a good indie team, but their pricing structure is directly equal to paradox interactive's absurd pricing. Except they do do sales on things now and then.
@@TurikoYemontoshi Only in a vacuum. In the context of the the result, I fully respect the pricing. I would willingly pay it all again after the 1000s of hours I've dropped.
Would you actually consider making a video about how much does it cost to make a game right now with all the tools, no physical copy, and other conveniences? Because when I hear AAA games must cost 300mm, do they really? I'm really curious about how much money you do realistically need to make a proper game: big, small, etc.
He has mentioned it in part when discussing various topics in his vids. Payroll takes a huge chunk considering how much of a salary a developer commands. Then scale that up as you add a bunch of people to a team. It ends up costing a pretty penny.
When it comes to AAA, a thing to remember is from what the evidence and sources from devs and etc have shown is that they can be incredibly inefficient with management. Which is how millions get burned through for a product worse than their previous title that was cheaper. Obviously you need a big team and budget to make a AAA game, but a lot of them (especially publishers the likes of Ubisoft and blizzard) have way to many people.
I cant remember which video it was exactly but UEG did one breaking down the publicly stated division of funds. The vast majority at the time (2019-2020) was being spent on marketing and advertisement for AAA games. Like, a disproportionate amount. So much so that otherwise solid mid tier games were being considered commercial flops because of the amount of funding that went into advertising.
Marketing can often be a bloating factor too - I've mentioned it elsewhere, but one of the Modern Warfare games costed about 50 million dollars to make, but marketing cost about 200 million dollars, every time I think of that, it feels like a bad joke.
TLDR: The top most played games last year were games up to 5 years or older. Let this continue and the mega corps bleed themselves dry until the point hurts their wallets which will cause change. Dont pre-order Dont buy Deluxe anything Nike says " Just do It. " What you should be saying is: Dont.
Something I don't see enough people talking about are how most of the hit indies don't have these massive high graphic fidelity chase bs that we keep seeing and it, to me, shows that gamers don't care as much about these super cutting edge system pushing graphical giant games we just want a good game with style and that does not mean hyper real graphics.
Yes because the game is about passion of someone about something, it doesn't need much to be good, just someone to be passionate. But these days we can't have that, politicians don't like it, so they stifle it in any way possible... it's a very long discussion about why. It's becoming ridiculous, this whole thought sensitizing, this whole censorship on all levels, most people don't even realize it, but it would destroy not only AAA gaming it would also destroy movies and other types of media. Also the thing about censorship... once it starts it only gets worse... because the censors have to censor... , so they would find more and more excuses to censor things, no matter the things, no matter the excuses. Today even a game like the first Tomb Raider would not "fly" and there were many games like that back in the time... also the censorship nowadays becomes political and on many levels, not just "what's obvious" to us.
I can only imagine how bad it is sitting on your 5th meeting of the week when you don't need to be there as the boss comes in to tell you to buckle down and get things done while they actively prevent you from doing so when you're the person who's supposed to use every available moment to work on the game...but somehow the meeting telling you to hurry is more important than hurrying.
I would say that even in early access, with a smaller team, PoE2 still has way more content than Diablo IV has even now.. after running for a year.. 🤯 smh
Most of the content is carried over from POE 1, but the bigger point to be taken from this is that Diablo also had the same time to look at POE1 and steal ideas when D4 releasd. They just didnt. Why you'd develop a game ignoring competition is beyond me. If there is a new standard to hit, you want to be the first to know and to meet it. But with POE1 the standard has been there for years now and they failed to meet that. Baffling.
Here's to looking forward to Skyblivion! They just put out a video showcasing how like 95% of it is done and on track to release this year! The hype is real!
It's good that it's more and more possible for indie devs to make the games they want to make. Because we're in a time where triple A devs aren't worth looking at anymore. If we still want new games to exist, indie is where it's at. We used to live in a world where middle shelf games existed, but now triple A is just HUGE games and that's a problem!
It'd be like if the only transport choices were buying a multimillion dollar hypercar or a bus ticket. There's a MASSIVE underserved audience right there.
It’s a shame that so many big AAA devs are leaving the companies they used to be part of, but if they’re going on to create games like those then all the power to them.
nobody talking about how NVIDIA keeps slapping higher and higher prices on good video game experiences, which in turn contributes too much to people being more angry at video games in general rather than being entertained by them
the only thing I disagree with is that being a "cog in the machine" can actually meaningful IF (and only if) you agree with the cause and goal of the group/company/organization you work for. The problem is that in most cases these large companies either have shitty goals or the way they go about achieving their goals is so horrible, that regular people/workers understandably feel no attachment to anything
New to the channel not very techies myself but really enjoyed the content , I love games been a gamer since the spekky, Happy New Year to any devs out there and keep up the great art /work thanks 😊
@@JazzzRockFuzion, Regardless of numbers for Starfield, it's also a trainwreck. It's their absolute WORST rated game of all time. only 60% of reviews are positive for it. That's bad. Especially for a BGS title, where most of their games are "OVERWHELMINGLY POSITIVE" on steam.
@@JazzzRockFuzionFact is, Bethesda peaked over a decade ago, and they're not getting better. I don't know why anyone would be expecting ES6 to be a great game.
How I imagine a modern media company work schedule: 09:00 DEI meeting 10:00 send out critics bribes 11:00 DEI meeting 12:00 circle jerk 13:00 DEI meeting 14:00 daily firing of coders 15:00 DEI meeting
I seriously hope that the era of publishers looking for infinite money printers is coming to an end. It's been such a detriment to gaming as a whole. The money behind the studios never understood that those games that WERE infinite money printers were made as labors of love and pure quality. You can't rush that. They were also ALL limited scope. They didn't try to be an "everything" game for every audience. Feature and scope creep has killed SO MANY great-sounding projects. It just takes too long and too many resources. Find a core concept, execute it well, and if it takes off THEN you can start adding these ambitious goals to that game.
This "20 meetings a week" trend is the main reason why BGS can't deliver good games more often than every 5 years. Reduce the amount of meetings, gain some deep work and you win 2 years of development. I hope Godd Howard is watching this!
@nrXic Because Bethesda seems intent on doing the exact same thing they've been doing for the past 10 years. Creation Engine 2 is the exact same engine with the exact same 10 year old bugs, with minor visual upgrades. Starfield's story is practically space Skyrim, the space combat's defining feature is literally VATS from Fallout, we still get loading screens with even the most minor scene changes. It screams mediocrity, and it seems that Bethesda is perfectly fine with that. So much so, that they'd rather sell you even more mediocre DLC, than actually innovate.
@@Faabvk That's not laziness. That's an understandable design decision. The game is essentially supposed to be Skyrim in space. Borrowing from Fallout makes sense because people loved that. It's supposed to be a Bethesda game in space and their gameplay motifs applied to a space setting makes a lot of sense. I'm not saying it's the right decision I'm just saying that they're making what they're good at making. Looks like expecting id Software to make the next Doom a slow paced tactical shooter, and calling them lazy if they stick to their same formula. Bethesda's formula could be dated, sure. It could be something that modern gamers don't want. But for them to stick with what they're good at isn't laziness.
@@nrXic It's a design decision, for sure. But not an understandable one. It is generally accepted that you need your game to either differentiate itself, or otherwise bring something unique to players, for it to succeed. They've failed in quite a spectacular manner, and the players agree. The main game is sitting at "Mixed" reviews on Steam, and the DLC at "Mostly Negative". The Steam player count is sitting lower than Skyrim, Fallout 4 and Fallout 76, and the all-time peak didn't even beat Fallout 4. There's only one feature/gameplay element in Starfield that I can think of that Bethesda didn't already do before themselves, which is the procedurally generated planets, which they also couldn't do right. Other space games like Elite: Dangerous (1:1 scale simulation of the Milky Way) and No Man's Sky (quintillions of planets) have done that way better. Bethesda's formula is outdated. It already showed diminishing returns with Fallout 76, and Starfield was the nail in the coffin in my opinion. The writing was already on the wall, not only with Fallout 76, but with other studios also showing similar trends where their own, or other industry formulae (hero-shooters for example, with Concord and XDefiant) are no longer paying off as much as they did previously. This in particular is why I think Bethesda is lazy. The signs were there, they could've anticipated that, but went with the easier option that they thought would make more profit for them. Marketing it like the next big thing and making big promises in the process also sealed their fate. Other examples of the latter being Skull & Bones (quadruple A, seriously?) and Concord. Starfield's major fault in that is releasing a buggy, sometimes even broken game, and having your players fix it through mods quicker than Bethesda can, because they're already too busy churning out DLC to grab even more cash. Bethesda's formula is unique. While it never hooked me as a player, I can recognize why players did like their flagships like Skyrim and Fallout 4, but it has not only drawn criticism from players like me, or people completely outside of Bethesda's "sphere of influence" if you want to call it that, but also from Bethesda's own fans.
@Faabvk I understand all that and appreciate the effort you put into that response, but I think it still reinforces the idea that none of that demonstrates laziness from the developers. So much of that are miscalculations by designers. We saw the same with Halo infinite. This idea that developers are lazy is not rooted in anything real and we've been seeing it bounce around quite a bit especially with some TH-camrs. The issues with these games have to do with design, priorities pushed by publishers (often tied with monetisation), features that were priorities that shouldn't have been and vice versa, etc. Devs can be lazy, and be late in finishing work, or take some shortcuts to get work done. But in these large teams, anything that affects crucial things like performance are addressed as a team. When we put the blame on devs in this manner we let the real culprits get away with it and nothing gets better. These people in management shouldn't be getting away with it.
Not a game from this year, but Ive always felt Rimworld was a great example of an indie game made by a small team as an example of chasing their passion instead of satisfying shareholder 🤷♂️
All that remains is for the public to buy more diverse stuff. The biggest issue is almost every gamer is herding themselves to just a few massive titles, in much the way social media does. Good vid.
True. So many "gamers" just play one of the following: 1) Sports game of the year 2) Online competitive FPS 3) Mobile gatcha/gambling game 4) Car game And that's it. I know people who have only ever played FIFA and openly refuse even free gifts of games from other genres, even those from the above list. They are wilfully blind to the possibilities in front of them.
You can't put a price on peace of mind. No amount of Lamborghinis can substitute for that. Anyone truly invested in the creative process and carries passion for game development will know that deep down. Hopefully his story shines as a beacon of opportunity and potential for others looking to reset the industry the way it needs
This is such old news, I love Nates work but it's exhausting seeing "game industry news" channels constantly hauling his same sentence about game engines up every few weeks. Please do some real journalism, do your own research not just talking about soundbytes
Cyberpunk 2077 and Bg3 should be the standard by which we judge main line Bethesda games. In many ways that is the experience we expect from these games. Immersion, industry leading graphics, solid writing of characters and story, top notch facial animations and gameplay mechanics for an rpg, and a world that is as interesting as it is detailed. Cyberpunk nailed the aesthetic and feel of being in that world and made you care about the characters and enjoy the experience. Starfield felt hollow, it’s the first main Bethesda game that I thought the lore was boring. The character models and facial animations look terrible, the story overall is bland and generic, the intensity of the dialogue and situations is laughable compared to cyberpunk. The gameplay feels worse and you have less variety of weapons. And the game is just not as good as it should be. But that’s not even the worst part. It’s that they think it’s a success. They don’t understand the difference.
Yea people keep forgetting that literally all ES lore was written when Arena came out and Todd’s been coasting off of greater minds than his for decades. The one time he did something on his own? Starfeild and look how that turned out
Starfield is bad when compared to ES2, another game with procedurally (or randomly, I forgot) generated everything, that came out in 1996. On top of that most ES lore was written by Sheogorath and Julianos and later cannibalized by Pagliarullo. ES2 can easily explain you the difference between Aedra and Daedra, while ES4 and 5 can't
Most Devs with true passion and talent know better than to work for an organ grinder AAA studio that they know is going to crunch them to death. The cat is truly out of the bag, and once the AI slop truly starts spilling into gaming, the industry is going to absolutely tank
AI when uncensored is much better (*and much more passionate) than what these non gamer AAAA devs can achieve in a 100 years. The depth AI can achieve is hard to explain... it's like Alice in wonderland but a 1000 times better, though I understand why most people think AI is a "flop". All these super censored corporate models are truly bad representation of AI. It's like getting something worse than Starfield and say "this is a game".... nah this is not a game this is a corporate slop... same with AI...
Nanite is way to taxing of a tool right now. Honestly UE5 is definitely something that keeps me from buying some games. Ill take a well optimized UE4 game all day
The increase in graphical quality is no way near worth the costs. The era of massive graphical jumps every 5-10 years is long dead. Devs need to understand this.
I love indie devs and small teams but unfortunately, as can be seen with Axis Unseen, simply relying on some check-boxes in the game engine to add high graphical fidelity options, such as Lumen and Nanite, often results in poor performance and iffy graphics (see bottom). In other words, the same issues modern UE5 games have with graphics are often present in indie games and often to a more noticeable degree. This is likely due to indie devs often not having the knowledge or time needed to properly tweak the options and engine to achieve good performance. Again, same is true for AAA publishers, but the issue is often amplified with indie devs. By iffy graphics I'm referring to blur caused by TAA, poor or nonexistent reflections outside of ray tracing, low quality ray traced reflections, low quality looking Nanite textures, what appears to be extreme mouse input latency, etc.
More episodes like this please, beautiful deep dive into "...the most crucial features of developers that don't get talked about...". Genuinely, thank you
Bethesda peaked in 2006. They held that peak for five years, but then, like an athlete who retires at 30 due to a career-ending injury but still makes the Hall of Fame, they fell apart overnight.
Yeah I'm playing small dev gems currently like Art of rally, Farthest frontier, Concrete jungle (fantastic city builder puzzle made by one dude), Harvest massive encounter.
Starfield; having gone into it with 0 hype or prior knowledge on its advertising; was a game. A good game? Sometimes. Some of the quests were actually pretty good, main story was kind of cool towards the end. But overall it was a game. You did things, you saw things, mostly saw things. Not cool things but stuff like rocks and flora. Maybe some fauna.
They should have leaned HARD into space combat. I've wouldnt have imagined in my wildest dreams that Creation Engine can handle spaceships without some severe crutches yet here we are. All they had to do is port F4 combat into Starfield and center a lot of story and quests around fighting in space. Boom, done. Fire Emil too while you at that, probably.
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yeah, when you have a url-shortener for your sponsor... it's not lookin' good :D
Keep in mind, POE 2 is only in Early Access; it's only going to get better from here on out. 😈
I enjoy most Sci-Fi entertainment, but when it comes to RPGs, for some reason I can't stand Sci-Fi settings.
That's the main reason I avoided Starfield.
If it were fantasy based, I probably would have bought it in spite of the mediocre reviews.
Oh....and the loading screens. Come on. This isn't the Skyrim era. Time to move beyond that game engine.
both small and big studios should release freeware DLC chunks first instead of taking huge gambles on $100 million + projects only to find out later no one is interested and the game is filled with bugs. it is impossible to understand what gamers fully want 100% from inside a gaming studio. the modding scene is proof of this. start with an idea, create a short 5-10hr game, open it up to mods, ask questions, listen to gamer feedback then refine the concept
In the midst of layoffs, closures and pulled fundings BellularNews is the only one making money lol
too many people forget the teams that made morrowind, oblivion, and skyrim arent there anymore, and even if they were theyd only be 1/6th of the current team at most. game are products of the teams of devs and the time/resources they are given. and bigger teams dont equal quality
This needs to keep being spammed in the comments pages until people get it, it's remarkable how many people are still surprised by this, you also see the streamers etc. not understanding. It's worse than the OG devs not being there, the new breed of developers come from university backgrounds or they're nepotists who haven't looked at a line of code in their lives and don't even know how to make a decent 3D model with correct topology. There's a reason they keep trying to push walking simulator slop and every game looks the same now, not to mention the fact they're incapable of optimising anything and get mad when their own playerbase complains.
@@lethn2929 this is also the case for pretty much EVERY well known studio. NONE of the original devs remain and are just suits now that know nothing about what they are doing.
It bears repeating:
"Remember, you're not looking at your friend, you're looking at the thing that killed him." - Giles, Buffy the Vampire Slayer
People snould NEVER buy anything based on brand or nostalgia, those fckin corporations just milk customers on it.
Always wait for trusted reviews NOT some IGN garbage or some paid shills pre release informations.
Just look what happened here or CDPR, Bioware and many others.
@@Blood-PawWerewolfBUT in this specific case, Bethesda has a higher percentage of long-term staff than most other studios. Obviously some people will have moved on and their roles filled, but if any game studio Bethesda has one of the highest employee retention rates. Must just be a nice place to work.
Elder scrolls 6 is going to be a trainwreck.
I'm not even looking forward to it anymore.
"Don't worry, the modders will fix it for us"
-Bethesda
whats sad is anytime someone does a retrospective on bethesdas games and points out flaws there is always someone there to defend it by saying "well you can mod it to be what you want" well i dont buy platforms to mod i buy games
ah hell yeah, can't wait to see what trainwiz does with it.
I could see ES6 achieving Fallout 4 level of quality.
I'm a solo dev. I couldn't get a job in the games industry despite having graduated as a game dev, so I figured I'd just.... make something. I tried recruiting friends in similar positions to join the project, but no one was interested, so now I'm working by myself. I've wanted to make games since I was a little girl, so when presented with a choice between giving up on my dreams because the industry is actively hostile to us, or going for it by myself... Well, I picked the second option.
Keep on fighting the good fight. Plenty of examples of those who were successful doing that, as I'm sure I don't have to point out.
I'm on a similar path and going solo/indie seems to be the only viable option. Good luck out there!
The righteous path for sure - Keep going!!
What do you specialise in Alerara? I'm in the UK and have a similar thing, I'm an environment artist myself and have considered doing the same, I've shipped into other areas over the years too, like tech art, animation, sound/music and coding
I’m an artist but with things the way are, and mostly because i’ve been frustrated with not being able to find games that fulfill niches that i like (an anime rts for example) i’ve recently decided to dive into game dev lol. Best of luck to you.
I'm a solo indie developer, and you hit the nail on the head regarding the tools available these days. During an alpha test for my current project, I had a tester assume I'd been working on the game for 6-7 years based on how (pretty) it looked. The actual development time? 9 months. Some of that visual quality was art design, some was skill, but I honestly think most of it comes from utilizing what the engine has to offer.
All in all, while the expectations, targets, and costs for AAA is ballooning into the stratosphere, the little guys are being given ammunition like never before. And I cannot wait to see what these ex-AAA developers do with these tools :)
Big W for solo indie devs. Keep making games you find fun to play.
Solo devs add variety to gaming with their personal passion projects.
Always love hearing about the dev process of indie devs. I saw your game on Steam and it looks promising so far, will definitely be keeping an eye on it.
I've seen some serious complaints about Unreal 5 and developers not properly optimising their games.
To be fair, the game does look very polished visually and I can't imagine those models are just store assets with store textures. Out of curiosity, what was the biggest engine-supplied force multiplier for you? (also, wishlisted - very much up my street)
As another indie dev, I gotta say this looks very strong and polished. I would only suggest increasing the lower levels of brightness/exposure a bit, because the shadows are currently way too dark. It looks there could be a ton of cool detail hidden in those shadowed areas right now. Also, once the game gets close to a release date, think about sending a review copy to Splattercat. I feel he is going to have a fun time with it. Wish you all the best. 🙂🙂
For a second I got excited thinking that Emil quit, what a shame
Same, and a shame he ain't gone
Idk why Todd promoted his friend when he clearly isn't capable of the position
Emil hate should've never escaped NoMutantsAllowed. The very thought of going to bat for the guy is exhausting bc I do not want to be roped in to a TH-cam argument over someone I have no strong feelings about, so I won't. What I will do is offer a little nugget of advice: if a TH-camr you're watching has singled out a specific writer/dev/etc. on a massive triple A team as a key problem, and that assertion doesn't involve them being a nightmare to work with or a literal criminal? It's hyperbole to drive engagement, especially if they make more than one video on the fucker.
@@Brazenbrewdude, you just need to see Emil writing and videos of him talking to hate him.
And yes some times a specific person in a AAA it's a key problem
@@Brazenbrew Damn that's crazy, have you maybe thought that the lead person on the project and the person who's vision and writting is being used to build the world wouldn't be to blame about both the world and writing being bland and not very good consistantly across all the projects that he's worked on since 20011 onwards?
I get it, I really do but some people fail upwards, especially within the creative industry, and no one is saying that everything is 100% specifically his fault but he is the lead, the buck stops with him, if the project isn't meeting expectations it is a fact that he overseen it and so should've noticed starfields many many many pitfalls.
"6 times the loading screens, 16 times the recycled assets, all of this just works" Todd the hack.
When you got on a ship that had been isolated from the rest of space for hundreds of years and they had all the exact same assets as the rest of space.. that is when I finally lost hope for Starfield.
Its crazy how little is in starfield compared to the fallout and elder scrolls
I wouldn't say there is little, there were some very good side quests in Starfield, the issue with it is how much of the content is randomly generated and a only a small part is handcrafted there are vast ammounts of nothing between the interesting stuff, that and the ammount of work to change planets(go to ship, change planet and then land ship) makes for a lot of dead time between actualy doing stuff.
Sadly Starfield had many interesting ideas but poor implementation, and tried to have a scale way too big for what it could do.
@@HugoARSantos The game is a glorified walking sim with a few template enemy types and bases that get recycled ad nauseum there's nothing interesting going on there it's basically skyrim in space, they took their 15 years of experience and only implemented 5% of those ideas from popular player mods. Not to mention its other problems like its disneyfication and politicizing with DEI and cut corners with cheap graphics compared to other games.
@@HugoARSantos Yeah, I don't think any studio can really create such a massive universe to explore in space like in Starfield. You're either going to have to focus on a few handful of planets or do something along the lines of Mass Effect. Or just have it out in space only like with the X series.
@@XBluDiamondX Mass Effect/Outer Worlds like game with shipbuilding, gear modding/research system and perk system would have been lightyears better than the early alpha, AI generated slop that we got.
Both of those franchise are carried by the old work done on them(by more talented people in a better era), Starfield was brand new and showed what the current team can actually do when making something from scratch.
Look at Kenshi, an indie game where the sole developer was racing between getting a workable game or starving to death... a totally apropos story, considering the game's content.
Oh man, I am so looking forward to the prequel.
@@XBluDiamondXIf you would actually pay for Kenshi 2 while 1 is in this state then you are part of the problem.
Kenshi is a mess of a game. Kenshi 2 will be the same mess. You can't improve your design and code if you never addressed where the problems came from.
@@potato_mash121 Kenshi was an indie game made by 1 person and they have a team now for the second one. Don't act like it was Cyberpunk at launch lol. Plus complaining about Kenshi 1 in it's current state is weird because they'd have to make a whole new game to fix the flaws with he first one. Which they are doing. Seems like you think they're AAA grifters
@@potato_mash121You seem like the kinda guy to get nervous when girls show up to the party, if you're even invited to the party that is
I tried Kenshi 3 times, years apart (each time because people keep praising it to high heavens and each time i though "maybe i just missed something") and each and every time it was just...shit. I honestly do not see where all the hype is coming from about that game. It is empty as hell, there is practically nothing to do, nothing to achieve, no unique characters or quests. and as a sandbox its just a snore fest. And before you say anything, know that i absolutely love Rimworld, that is a proper sandbox/make your own adventure game.
Kenshi is an extremely overrated snorefest as empty as its many wastelands.
People keep saying the entire video game industry is collapsing... when, in reality, the sleazy relationship between corporate publishers, their development teams, and "journalists"/ media is what is really crumbling around them.
Plently of smaller scale games of great quality being made, and subsequently slandered by those same "journalists". Meanwhile, the trash being pushed as the next big thing isn't wanted, and those responsible can not cope.
My sympathy for Ubisoft stops after buying one or two of their old games at 80%+ discounts.
Yeah, games that are coming out are absolutely amazing. People that cry that gaming is dead are just kissing the ass of AAA games and don't realize that's only around 5% of the industry that has good games once in a blue moon.
Only collapse for AAA studios rest are doing fine minus the layoffs which is mostly AAA studios and some smaller ones.
Nothing is crumbling there are so many amazing games being released
@@callisto537Depends on genre. On shooter front its like a drought. Its so hard to find something that is more casual and fun to play.
My last job (Software Engineering Manager), I had at least 20 meetings a day. Meetings double or triple booked. Meetings scheduled during the lunch hour. Meetings schedule at 5 AM or 9 PM. It sucks the life out of you.
Meetings where you ask yourself why you're there, meetings you were told you can skip but if you do, they pull you in it anyway, meetings that were done for a third time, just because you have to do it with another team again
Meetings that could have been an email or shared notes frustrate me. 😞
Meetings where nothing gets done and visions shift making you wonder what the effort put in 3+ months ago was for, I feel that
Morbid curiousity alone wants to ask how it was possible to even have that many meetings a day, let alone _need_ that many, glad you got out of there.
It was in gaming? (Also asking to the commenters that had similar situations)
If you think *NOW* that Elder Scrolls 6 is going to be a disaster you have clearly been living too long in Todd's dungeon. The warning signs were there since Fallout 4
And skyrim
they were there since oblivion. bethesda peaked at morrowind lmao. and for some strange inexplicable reason, it was after morrowind that most of the old guard left and todd and emil became prominent. curiouser curiouser.
The warnings were really there when they swapped from originally doing elder scrolls 6 to making elder scrolls online. then we got fallout 76 which is basically an MMO version of starfield. that game only has become interesting after about 3-4 years of additional development since it released. Starfield reminds me of Fallout 76 at launch. This is most likely the model bethesda is following now. you get an empty sandbox to play in, and they'll eventually add the toys in 2-5 years.
@@therim187 Tbf Elder Scrolls Online and Fallout 76 wasn't made by them, so it's even worse. They've literally done nothing since Fallout 4 but re-release Skyrim 6 times and pump out a "remaster" of Fallout 4. That being said, both those games are actually rather fun now.But that's besides the point. Bethesda model, since Fallout 3, really, but Skyrim especially, has been "release the game half-finished and modders will do the rest and for FREE"
@Helperbot-2000 what’s really weird about it is that I’ve seen Todd outright state in interviews that Morrowind was his favorite game that Bethesda made. Which is weird if true since they never made anything quite like it since then.
I think the lesson is, if you want to start a game in the modern digital age, it can be a one man passion project with a vision, from thereon if it's a hit it naturally grows a life of its own and expands.
all you really need, is to make sure the game is developed, funded and published by the same company/studio. conflict of interest between the passion of the devs, and the greed of publishers and shareholders ALWAYS leads to games either flopping, or turning out a complete failure. a lot of my favorite games, Space Engineers, Everspace 1&2, Project Zomboid and some others im forgetting
all of these are independent from publishers or shareholders wanting a return ASAP. when there is passion for the game in every department, the chance of success are infinitely higher
Just shows how lack luster the AAA companies are, usually everything that gets into the mainstream gets manipulated by money
most of the well know studios bought out by big corporation turns into shit in five years or so. Once the old guards start leaving it’s a domino effect. There is an only handful of AAA studios out there still fighting the temptation and just want to make good games.
Definitely a thing people should remember is that a studio name is just a name.
The people behind it. The culture that made the games they were praised for. They can all change.
I hope GTA6 is great. But, I’m not going to hold an expectation of past titles, since if I’m correct, there’s basically no one from the previous GTA games working on 6. We can only hope knowledge, skill and management were passed down well enough and retained, that it’ll still feel like Rockstar.
Star Truckers came out in September 2024. It was made by a two-person team. Basically you're a truck driver in space hauling cargo between sectors.
Been playing it over Christmas and the aesthetics are beautiful and it's very immersive, having a blast with it.
@@whitewolf4961 to anyone reading, highly recommend also! Absolute blast of a game if you enjoy spaceflight sims
Ever heard of star sector, it's a phenomenal game made by like 5 people iirc might be up your alley
Played it...fun but gets boring quick af
The absolute worst thing that’s been happening in the aaa industry is the consolidation of almost every studios by publishers and the likes of Sony and Microsoft. With any corporate entity, control is somethings creatives will never have, because being a creative means taking risks, which is absolutely not what any corporate person wants to happen, because means money is lost, and it’s always about money; but not in saving money; it’s about getting more money than last year, so long as the quarterly earnings are showing “growth” then the execs keep their jobs, if they are down, the creatives get blamed becuase “it’s their job to make the company money”, the corporate side of the industry needs to go away, it’s getting in the way
@@Scruffynerfherder10 We're in a capitalist society where art is a commodity. Nothing is going to change for the better. Rather, it's going to get worse.
The whole point is to create value for shareholders. Ever single decision in game development will be centered around that.
I mean Microsoft gave an enormous amount of freedom to their studios and got massively blindsided for it. Redfall being the best example I can think of. Devs do need budgets and deadlines or you may never get a product or you get unfinished trash. Definitely a balance to be struck at least for triple AAA devs. But mostly yes, consolidation is killing to many good games and studios.
Thats the beauty of having game dev as a hobby instead of as a profession.. the games are allowed to develop on their own and creativity can work without restrictions
It's the exact same conflict of interest just as Karl Marx described a century ago.
@@RegiusEques This is true, Microsoft gives complete control and freedom to their devs, but the problem is they buy out the wrong ones. When these studios get a blank check, they lose the passion and hunger. They get complacent. Ffs, all Rare has done in the last 10 years has been Sea of Thieves! And the only studio Microsoft has built from the ground up, 343, is full of clowns who don't know wtf they're doing with the Halo IP.
Starfield is such a piece of shit, and now its Creations store is filled with paid mods that are complete trash.
@@Bejonkerss 👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼
😂you've played so recently you know what's on the mod store
@@goblin3810or he watched videos? Lol angry Bethesda employee?
I never bought a stupid game about space without aliens and a dumb time loop.
@@secondimpact7836 when you say it like that Starfield is just No Mans Sky just with more dialogue xD
When AAA is finished fully collapsing, a new Golden Age of Gaming will begin.
Unfortunately AAA is never going to fully collapse. They've been going steady for way too long now.
The only hope in the space is that more companies can do what Larian has done, and catapult themselves to AAA status, and still maintain their love for games, in which starts making the current titans bleed out money. It's the only way they'll even start to look towards changing their current models.
Reject AAA, embrace AA and Indie
"is finished fully collapsing"
Fuck that. The new age started 2 hours ago, when I hit uninstall.
As more investors pull out of the games sphere and go into AI or whatever buzzword it is for the quarter, there will only be a few mega publishers left. Sony, microsoft, and T2. So expect studios like ubisoft to completely fall to pieces or go into one of those big three. AAA won't die, it will just consolidate.
Their future is streaming not owning, first all smaller teams need to be dealt with so the only choice becomes the corpos streaming games for a monthly fee.
I can see Elder scrolls being set on an archipelago of desert islands. Most of them will be barren. The rest will have one of 5 identical ancient temples. You will travel between them on a fully customisable pirate ship. Cosmetically customisable - any travel will be via cut-screen.
I don’t have the desire to join big studios, so I wrote my own novels, trying to develop my own IP, model my characters in 3D because it’s what I love doing. Idk if this is sustainable or if it’s going to work at all. I just know I love doing it
Doing the same thing here. Keep it up!
@ You too
20+ year game dev here, I'm looking to transition out of games. its an unstable industry, and I think alot of it is tax scandels with local governments if you ask me.
If you're a US citizen and can pass a background check, government contracting may be the way to go.
Fair number of game design programs at universities too if you want to be a professor.
@@Sabagastache ha not with the new guy in charge!
yes, it's currently crashing so it's not a good industry to be joining or staying. same goes for tech.
Most "industries" are tax scandels with government. 🫤
get into military industry. drones won't write their own software to run on
I stopped caring about Bethesda after the absolute mid/lackluster FO4. We all know ES6 is going to be a dumpster fire.
I've called Fallout 4 the worst game I ever loved; whatever else can be said about its laughably bad design, I had way too much fun actually playing it and it's my fourth most-played game of all time on Steam.
Bethesda lost me for good at E3 2018.
FO4 was a game I got bored with mid-way through. I couldn't put my finger on it as to why. Then FO76 came out and skipped that because it's not my type of game. Then comes Starfield, a game I was originally excited for. Oh boy, regret sat in after playing that for a bit. Then it came to me Bethesda is just a shell of its former self. When ES6 comes out, I won't consider buying it until well after release and if most people give a thumbs up.
@@FinnishedThirdMusic I really disliked the story of Fallout 4 and some of the design at launch and I put it down after 10 hours or so then I picked it back up 5 years later and played it again (this time as female SS) with big mods like sim settlements 2 and DLCs. I have to admit that there are fatal flaws to the game but there was still enough good in there for me to be one of my favorite gaming experiences at that time. With SS rounding out the settlement mechanics and adding more story to a minuteman focused kind of game, it’s really fun. Up until you find the Institute. The whole main story with the institute doesn’t feel like Fallout in my opinion. Nuka World is like half a dlc imo. You can’t present these glaring incongruities in story and worldbuilding, it ruins the whole series when you treat your own lore with no respect. I didn’t play 76 or watch the Amazon show. It’s sad because Morrowind, Skyrim, FO3 and NV were some of my most formative games ever. I spent so much time and loved them so much. FO4 I enjoyed a lot with tinkering but I did think Far Harvor was the best content Bethesda produced ever for Fallout, and that lead should have been given narrative reigns. But yeah, he left and went indie.
Dumpster fire. Right. You know what’s a dumpster fire? Gollum. Superman 64. Quit with the hyperbole ffs
Bethesda has such a strange history. They keep talking now like they're one of the big, beloved, prestige studios. But really, they're a one-hit wonder. For almost all their history, they've been this niche, B-tier studio that makes fun timewaster junk-food open-world games--to the point that the best game in their series was developed by another studio (Obsidian). Then they got massive off Skyrim and haven't seen any real success since...but keep trying to pretend like they've always been that Skyrim-grade studio. They need to stop acting like everything they touch is pure gold, stop getting high on their own farts, and actually think about the games they're making.
Thanks for the video about my game. It was super well done. :)
Hey Nate. Just discovered your channel by reading this very comment. 🙂 I am currently going through your dev logs, gonna watch them all. So did you originally start in UE4, and then migrate to UE5? Or was it a UE5 project from the get go?
Hey, glad to have discovered you & your game here, I'll be checking it out! 😃 Congrats on breaking away & going your own direction!
If you tell your devs to make a game _they_ want to make you get
A) a good game
B) returning customers
C) happier devs
D) a stage for the next game
Squeezing money out of your customers and time out of your developers is how you lose profit.
Also trying to bs people by calling a game AAAA instead of AAA doesnt help either
Just remember to tell them at least what they're doing, you just need 2 dudes with different views and your project's done for
@@legna1932 I mean they have to put "diversity" in the team.... that means a lot more worldviews than 2.... which means the game will never be good, no matter how much money you put into it. Game development should not be a political thing, it should be something good and fun for people to exit reality... not be driven harder into reality... I mean putting average women (or even ugly women) is meaningless in a game... I want "my perfect world" I already live in the bad one I want the other one... if the game just reminds me about the place I live, there is a less reason to play it. Also the devs should be passionate about the game, they should like it, not just fake that they like it. Starfield felt like scam I waited the good part passionately, but there was "no good part" it seems like the game was made to be sold on Steam for people to search for the "good part" and not be able to refund... Bethesda can forget about me... I've wasted 30 hours in Starfield just to find out it's an absolutely bland uninspired game... in fact it's worst than the worst games, there is no way I play it ever again. Starfield is a 100% soulless empty game... I just gave it chance, if it was from someone else I wouldn't have done that. I'm not buying Elder Scroll 6 unless everyone plays it and says it's good, and watching a ton of videos to make sure it's true. I would watch the whole story before I buy the game.
Starfield killed all the potential hype that Elder Scrolls 6 had for me. I doubt the developers there are even passionate about their work anymore much like a lot of artist leaving these large corporations.
People like me tried to warn you about Bethesda since FO4. I myself didn’t listen to those that warned you about FO3. This is how Bethesda work. The games just become worse and worse.
I think personally that Bethesda right now, will not have enough time to make elder scrolls 6 the game it needs to, Starfield has taken a lot of steam out of workers in my opinion AND more importantly a lot of time. I swear they only just started working on elder scrolls 6 at the start of last year or this year (2025) I swear it's going to be 2030 or 2035 before elder scrolls 6. If it's going to be sooner than that means get ready for star field scrolls 6 coming soon.
@@brianeno608 I personally do not really care that much about Bethesda if they have those problems. They have great workers for sure. The issue is however that they are complacent, lazy and just keep remaking the same thing over and over again. But this time more streamlined and scaled down.
They thought they were untouchable. They thought games like Skyrim and FO4 prove that their games are the best. Yet they ignore all the issues people bring up. They dismiss them as if it is all nonsense.
What Bethesda needs is to get a really really big kick in the behind. They need to invovate and stop being stale. They are always something like 10 years behind the industry standard. FO4 is on par with COD4 in its shooting mechanics, and still a little behind as FO4 still do not have a throwable button. Just a reminder. COD4 was released a year before FO3, and in COD4 you can shoot through terrain. Something COD4 doesn't have.
What they should do is to take more time. Cull a few of the execs and change a lot of their design philosophy. Their whole nonsense of not having anything that can be skipped or missed out needs to be removed. You shouldn't be able to be the Archmage without knowing any spells. You shouldn't be the leader of every faction without any responsibilities.
Bethesda probably thought modders would finish developing Starfield for them for free
And modders probably thought they were good enough to get money, but then realized no one wants to pay for incoherent amateur slop made by 30 different people thrown into a load order blender.
turns out if your game is shit enough, no one will want to make actual mods
Even hardcore modders wouldn't even want to mod this game. That's how bad this product really is.
You're just pulling things out of your @ss
@@SkintSNIPER262 Take a quick look at how many Bethesda games have a mandatory unofficial patch bro.
Bethesda Games Studios have gotten so large they should split their development resources and work on both Elder Scrolls and Fallout. If the one kitchen is full one might as well get a new kitchen for the remainder.
Yeah, I think having two smaller teams that can each spend less time on meetings and more time making the games would almost definitely work a lot better.
I'm kinda glad people are starting to look at Starfield with a less biased view. It is a significant step down from Bethesda's last few games in all the ways that matter. I was mystified at all the reviews and reddit posts praising it as a masterpiece.
Honestly, I think the reviews are mostly just a product of having a limited amount of time to play the game before writing them, since for the first 50-ish hours it felt like I was just scratching the surface of Starfield , which seemed (to me, your milage may vary, obviously) like an incredible Universe with vast ampunts of stuff to do amd things to see, and then I hit hour 50 and I realized that I hadn't been just scratching the surface, that really was all the depth the game had.
It looks as good as Skyrim and people love Skyrim for some reason despite it being painfully mediocre.
@@_Mutto_ I hate to say it but Skyrim is very much babys first RPG. The problem is that RPGs are a niche market and fans of Skyrim set it as the 'standard' rather than a starter. For me, I was baffled how much was taken out of Oblivion (started it and FO3 around the same time, tho KoTOR was my first RPG)
@@patchmoulton5438 As a lover of Morrowind...first time? 🤣
@@Arcahnslight I didnt play Morrowind until much later. I think after 76 came out.
I'm surprised he also did not mention concernd ape and stardew valley. A little one man passion project game that continues to do amazing
Such a good game. 1 time purchase and he continues to make new major content updates
I love Stardew Valley. Big respect to Eric and his vision. I've played a lot of Harvest Moon and SV has so much more quality writing, gameplay and charm. Totally blows it out of the water in every way.
You need to move on.
@@CameronCatlett-lv6ni or enjoy what you enjoy? I guess you like pre ordering new stuff that sucks 🤣
Games made by 400 people are basically made by 100 people; the rest is mostly dead weight. That's why AA and indie can often out do the AAA.
The usual rule in large project is that the square root of the staff will do 50% of the work, and the remaining 50% is shared between the rest.
In a team of 400 people, 20 people will do 50% of the work. When those top people start leaving those large studios, the studios are in trouble.
Not Emil. Rot remains.
@@editorrbr2107 Emil is the biggest problem at Bethesda followed by Todd
Starfield is an ambitious game held back by an aging engine, a terrible writer and a company head that is so invested in cost saving measures that he refuses to let games reach their potential in the modern age only because of a few games they made almost 2 decades ago.
Bethesda just needs to take the L and accept their game is not going to get the reception that an indie studio got years ago when they tackled close to the same idea, but better and their only other game was a Trial's clone.
@@wdf70 i disagree. I don't think Starfield was even that ambitious.
@@DivinityOfBLaze Ha, niice.
You mean the game that people mercilessly savaged for years and only started pretending to like and play after seeing years of content updates and overhauls that the studio got no money for? Yeah, that game was pretty cool. Kinda sucks that it's still just rinse and repeat survival crafting building gameplay with endless fetch quests and inconsequential pretend stories, even though it's structurally, mechanically and visually executed in such a great way.
Bethesda's largest issue is they've played it safe on purpose ever since Morrowind saved them from going under.
They threw everything at the wall and took risks when creating the game, because it was a must. It either succeeded and they continued as a company, or collapsed and disbanded if it failed. Every move since has been to make sure they don't get back to /that/ point again.
@@Th1sUsernameIsNotTaken Bethesda's largest issue is that they're a shit studio, that's all there is to it really. Morrowind was good for its time and that's where it stops. Fallout 1, 2 and New Vegas, the games that were good, were made by Obsidian, not them.
11:00 It's important to note that Unreal in general and nanite in particular come with a different cost: Nanite is a performance nightmare, especially on anything other than thousand $ NVidia cards, and Unreal is discontinuing support for traditional workflow and optimization methods to rely instead on AI upscaling trickery. Epic is making it very cheap to develop on their platform, at the cost of high minimum hardware specs for even the barest of games. Plus a lot of indie games are starting to have that exact same uncanny "photo-bash" look due to using the same megascan packs.
It's not even clear what the point of nanite is. It's not like you couldn't automate the generation of optimized models from high fidelity assets, people did it all the time, multiple times for each LOD level. What's the point in trying to replace that with some sort of real time AI driven model simplification thing? What does that add other than a stupid and expensive gimmick?
I heard this somewhere, but. Big game developers like EA, Ubisoft, etc. don't have employees that enjoy playing games anymore, they have employees that are there for the paycheck. Hence why big game devs are going under fast.
They seem like people who never played games, otherwise they wouldn't sound that exited when they were "testing" Starfield, when these people were sharing their thoughts, their excitement seemed genuine... now I know why... they never played games in their life, they do entirely different things, so doing this new "thing" felt exiting. But what about Tod Howard... isn't he himself played the game... how he could lie... he always does it... he just hopes "the game will be good" when it's not. Skyrim was only better because they still had people who knew what they were doing... i.e. people who really played games. It seems either these people left or the non gamers were higher in the hierarchy (which is almost always the case) but this time these people were not too high up... i.e. they actually knew what was done and didn't like it... of course they don't like it... non gamers don't like playing games so they don't understand anything about what gamers would like. Gamers don't like the real life they want another life, another world... where giants cant throw you in the sky... (which was a bug by the way), but it was a bug which made the game even better.... so... that is the thing, they made Starfield too much like the real world... you can be bad... but not really bad.... you can be a pirate... but not really... you can't make bad decisions to make people feel bad... you can't make good decisions... you have to be mediocre of everything just not to offend someone from the "outside world" i.e. the non gaming "real world:.... so that's what happened a mediocre bland politically correct game... which of course nobody would like...
video starts at 2:25
Remember when you said Starfield was a damn good video game after being fresh off the boat hating FF16 cause of minor grievances? 😂
Hard to remember something when it’s not your thoughts and you just read them from an email/paper.
Using megascans is a bad idea. People hate the generic looking UE5/Unity game look. This contributes massively to the issue
PubG is 99% Unreal store assets. No one cared. Gameplay is king.
@ you’re not wrong, it can be overcome. But if you are doing some kind of RPG or more fairly basic shooter, can easily be what tips sentiment over to very negative.
There are a lot of passible games who get dunked on for this. If they had a more unique art style, absolutely would thrive more.
@@mattmmilli8287, Please tell me these passible games. Leave out anything that is nearly a clone in gameplay mechanics to another game, which I suspect is the actual issue, and not the UE store assets.
@@poppyrider5541 If you think a AAA open-world RPG that is 99% Unreal store assets would sell well you're insane.
@@Th1sUsernameIsNotTaken the one featured in this video. Estimated 6000 sales or whatever he mentioned. I don’t think it’s the gameplay that holds it back but more a generic feeling to the art and shaders
Tainted Grail: Fall of Avalon. I just found this the other day. its amazing. its the next gen bethesda game that bethesda will never be able to make again. its like skyrim and dark souls had a baby. You guys gotta go support this one. it was too good.
@@user-lp7qo9cl8w Is this game finished?. O is in Alpha or something?.
Sorry for my bad english. I am spaniard.
EA on Steam currently.
Devs already & successfully published another game in the universe.
Updates are coming strong, not just 'for the sake of activity', I'd recommend!
Thanks for the recommendation, sounds right up my alley!
That game is fantastic. Just keep in mind that it still has optimization issues, where some areas would cause significant frame rate drops and GPU overheating for no good reason. For comparison, The Division from 2016 has the same or higher fidelity and runs flawlessly on a GTX 680 2GB VRAM gfx card from 2012. While Avalon has issues running on a RTX 3090 24GB VRAM cards. I truly hope devs will eventually manage to figure this one out, because other than that, the game is a blast.
@@predragpesic5953 bro... its unoptimized because they are still making the game. optimasation is last. its only about 40 hours of game right now, but i promise everyone they will have more fun in that 40 hours than any amount of time in starfield or likely elder scrolls 6. Support your indie devs.
20 meetings a week is 4 a day for a full work week, if you assume they respect weekends which they probably do not. I know I'm a math genius, but it's worth being said to realize the magnitude of how stupid it is.
Literally no work is getting done for that week, and the next and the next.
Ive found myself stuck in similar but not quite as insane loops during my 'career' where people did weekly meetings after weekly meeting to say everytime they didn't have time to do x or y since last time we spoke.. because they were in other meetings.
You start to understand why those games take so many years to make and with no time to pivot in the middle of the pipeline when they realize X or Y feature is ill thought out and needs to be rethought entirely.
Twenty meetings a week... more evidence that a lot of AAA developers have tried to scale up to ever larger games with minimal attention to updating their tools and processes. These don't scale linearly any more than team size. Everyone is aware of the "mythical person-month" where if a project takes 2 people 100 months to complete, that doesn't mean that 100 people can complete it in 2 months. The same is true of tools and pipelines. More complex projects require greater levels of abstraction in libraries and automation pipelines. You can see how Bioware and Bethesda hit a wall in their productivity and quality in the past 5-10 years.
A cooking analogy: you can't just double the oven temperature of a conventional oven to halve the cooking time. If you want to cook your food faster (or more food in the same amount of time) you need a microwave or a convection oven.
What happened to the Starfield Defence Force,who were frothing at the mouth if anyone dared to criticize the game?
They're active. I just had someone say in a different thread that Starfield is better than Cyberpunk 2077 :D
@@cy-oneTalk about hot takes. Cyberpunk 2077 worse than Starfield lol.
@keit99 I mean, it certainly has a rocky start, but it's an awesome game now if one likes the genre. Can't say that about Starfield.
And Starfield's launch numbers couldn't top the launch numbers of Cyberpunk's DLC's launch numbers, which is hilarious.
@abrahamlincoln3181 still here, we just don't care if you don't enjoy the game anymore. Enjoy your fortnite or whatever
Same thing that happened to the Veilguard Defence Force. They realised they were being petulant, rowdy children once they actually finished the game, and burned a lot of bridges in the process. They're all in hiding, hoping we'll forget their behaviour.
One of the biggest issues with the gaming industry right now is how big & bloated it is, because there's so many people there's little to no accountability. If you ruin a product just move on to another one, it somehow no longer tarnishes your name if you've been attached to 5 failed products anymore where as back in the 2000s and 2010s you'd have that cloud over your head. Now we just have studios that are more like the ship of Theseus than anything else.
Some people don't get it (and this makes me really frigging pissing mad) - bloated companies CAN'T create anything close to art, it all ends up generic. When there's too many people, there's too much delegated work and too little personal touch and deliberation, no time for anyone to have any freedom to do anything they believe is cool and they have to pass every single decision by layers and layers of superiors or down through cogs of workers until it reaches the correct worker
Bloated companies are good only as factory floors or sweatshops. And even factories are automating now.
That's quite a strong claim. How are you defining art in this instance?
There is a challenge that as you grow in skill and experience, you get funneled more and more into boring meetings and less and less creative work. Your skills decay, you fall behind the trends and quickly find yourself dependent on a manager type role, which moves you from an asset to a liability.
The industry is a rotten bloated carcass, layoffs are a necessary purge. Sadly, some people will get fired even if they don't deserve it but there's no way around it and it's not gamers' fault. Hopefully those devs would land on their feet and get another job on a much healthier gaming industry.
Oh I long for only 20 meetings a week. It gets to the point where you have to work extra hours just to do the non-meeting things you need to do. It is the curse of large projects.
Indika was that game for me. The devs of that game had a vision and made it with passion
AAA games are dying left and right. And I'm all for it.
Tonight we're gonna party like it's 1983.
Skip to 2:22 to avoid the ad read.
There's an app called Sponsorblock that does that for you. Ads, self promotion, it skips it all
Just get YT ReVanced/RVX, it auto skips sponsors, ads and annoying bs.
Or use Sponsorblock to do it for you.
Starfield would have been wonderful as it is, loading screens and all... if the writing was any good. It all comes down to writing, we have tons of games that are extremely rough, just look at the first Mass Effect, and it's still enjoyable to play because the story is well written. Good gameplay can be put into multiplayer, single player story games can have it rough as long as the story is really good. When will this fact be understood by everyone?
What an annoying comment.
1. "Starfield would have been wonderful as it is" - For you. But many of the complaints are about ... the GAMEPLAY.
2. "It all comes down to writing" - Valheim, minecraft, Helldivers 2, Ark, Rust, KSP, Factorio, Rimworld would like to have a word.
3. "we have tons of games that are extremely rough, just look at the first Mass Effect" - Mass effect was released in 2007. Compare it to bioshock or S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl and the gameplay is fine. Bad comparison.
4. "Good gameplay can be put into multiplayer" - .... Good gameplay can be put into any game?
5. "single player story games can have it rough as long as the story is really good." - Yeah, no. The market that exclusively cares about "stories" is measurably smaller than the gameplay market. Just go to steam, top played games, you can easily calculate estimated earnings with a bit of googling. You'll find "story" focused games are relatively niche with a few success stories.
6. "When will this fact be understood by everyone?" - If "everyone" listened to you, we would get more games with stories and bad gameplay. Let's hope nobody does.
I'll disagree on the loading screens part. While it would have made them more tolerable, there's simply too many. Even when I was enjoying it (which was mainly during the UC quests), I had to quit playing because of how absolutely sick of the loading screens I was.
Side note - I hope whoever wrote the UC quest line gets more write-time. Was one of the only questlines I actually found interesting and well-written. Some things were a little off, but I feel that had more to do with other sectors of BGS than it did their writing.
Fallout London is a great example
Gameplay and writing is king not graphics, RTX or established brands
@@Wafflebane You're just missing the point here. You understand that it's not about being against "good gameplay", right? What I'm saying is that the gameplay doesn't really mean anything for making a classic. Mass Effect 1 was heavily criticized for its gameplay, it's rather shit; with long stretches of uninteresting drives around on barren planets for hours of cut and paste scenery. But it still is fondly remembered and still played today, because the story and characters is what pushed it to the top.
And it's interesting that when I say that good gameplay is more important in multiplayer, you include multiplayer games as some counter point. Like, what? I just said that multiplayer games need the focus of good gameplay. But the other games make little sense as well because they are system gameplay games made for the point of gameplay and little to no story at all. You're not understanding what we're talking about here which is primarily games with story, like Starfield. The context here is games like Starfield and how story-based games can be rough in their gameplay as long as the story is well written and the characters are interesting.
It's like you don't even get the overall point before nitpicking the details of a point you totally missed.
Dunno if it was originally from 2024 or 2023 but Surroundead is an early access game from a solo dev that I put a tonne of time into. Simple zombie survival/crafting/scavenging open world game but it just hit so very right for me. Well worth the £10 or whatever it cost.
sorry but nanite / ue5 games in general are extremely poorly optimized making them unapealing
Agreed. UE5 is a _powerful_ tool, but much like giving a chainsaw to a beaver isn't going to fell the tree faster, it's just going to end badly for the rodent. Same with inexperienced game devs trying to learn Unreal 5 on the fly.
Agreed; i actually played the demo of axis unseen and found it interesting but unoptimized, my midrange system would play mostly smooth at 40ish FPS but so many points things took a nosedive to sub 20 fps.
Until this video and me looking back at the steam page i'd actually assumed it was just early access and thus unoptimized, i figured it just needed more time in the oven. it being a released game is kind of a "well, nope then" in my books.
@fxnnx unreal 5 has got to be the funniest bad game engine ive ever seen
Every game ive ever seen port to unreal 5 from 4 immediently performed horribly except fortnite, but atleast the graphics were
... 5 percent better?
@@TurikoYemontoshi Wow. What cpu/gpu combo?
@@HighBoss i5-13600KF & RTX 2060. Not super high end, but modern CPU and a still okay GPU. Notable is that changing the graphics settings didn't actually notably alter performance.
Bethesda keeps saying these along the lines of "we're proud of what we made" in attempt to deflect real genuine criticism about their game. Such a sad bubble to live in.
Im still pushing Wube with Factorio out here. Internal communications necessary to get code, graphics, and comfort right, hosting lan parties to find what their audience wanted and squash bugs, and regular blog posts discussing how and why they do the things they're doing. Space age started as a mod by one of the devs and I'm still enjoying it after sinking close to 100 hours into this session alone.
I didn't know that about Space Age. You mean they hired the dev after he did the mod or was already a Factorio dev while making the mod?
@rodrigobogado8756 iirc, he was one of the devs already
Earendel is our concept artist but also contributes to game design. SA is loosely based on the SE master plan but many things changed along the way.
Not a fan of the pricing scheme though. Raising pricing over time (instead of going down,) + no sales + DLC with the same price as the full game. The full game is now priced at €64 and it'll only ever go up - by the next DLC the full priced game will be €100+. They might be a good indie team, but their pricing structure is directly equal to paradox interactive's absurd pricing. Except they do do sales on things now and then.
@@TurikoYemontoshi
Only in a vacuum.
In the context of the the result, I fully respect the pricing. I would willingly pay it all again after the 1000s of hours I've dropped.
Would you actually consider making a video about how much does it cost to make a game right now with all the tools, no physical copy, and other conveniences? Because when I hear AAA games must cost 300mm, do they really? I'm really curious about how much money you do realistically need to make a proper game: big, small, etc.
He has mentioned it in part when discussing various topics in his vids. Payroll takes a huge chunk considering how much of a salary a developer commands. Then scale that up as you add a bunch of people to a team. It ends up costing a pretty penny.
When it comes to AAA, a thing to remember is from what the evidence and sources from devs and etc have shown is that they can be incredibly inefficient with management. Which is how millions get burned through for a product worse than their previous title that was cheaper.
Obviously you need a big team and budget to make a AAA game, but a lot of them (especially publishers the likes of Ubisoft and blizzard) have way to many people.
I cant remember which video it was exactly but UEG did one breaking down the publicly stated division of funds. The vast majority at the time (2019-2020) was being spent on marketing and advertisement for AAA games. Like, a disproportionate amount. So much so that otherwise solid mid tier games were being considered commercial flops because of the amount of funding that went into advertising.
Marketing can often be a bloating factor too - I've mentioned it elsewhere, but one of the Modern Warfare games costed about 50 million dollars to make, but marketing cost about 200 million dollars, every time I think of that, it feels like a bad joke.
I am fully convinced that modern entertainment marketing is so massively expensive because it's being used for money laundering.
Former AAA dev here… left as well … not the only one. Couldn’t be happier. Going solo developing my own games.
TLDR: The top most played games last year were games up to 5 years or older. Let this continue and the mega corps bleed themselves dry until the point hurts their wallets which will cause change.
Dont pre-order
Dont buy Deluxe anything
Nike says " Just do It. "
What you should be saying is: Dont.
At this point, it takes 5 years of patching for anything AAA to be playable.
Something I don't see enough people talking about are how most of the hit indies don't have these massive high graphic fidelity chase bs that we keep seeing and it, to me, shows that gamers don't care as much about these super cutting edge system pushing graphical giant games we just want a good game with style and that does not mean hyper real graphics.
Yes because the game is about passion of someone about something, it doesn't need much to be good, just someone to be passionate. But these days we can't have that, politicians don't like it, so they stifle it in any way possible... it's a very long discussion about why. It's becoming ridiculous, this whole thought sensitizing, this whole censorship on all levels, most people don't even realize it, but it would destroy not only AAA gaming it would also destroy movies and other types of media. Also the thing about censorship... once it starts it only gets worse... because the censors have to censor... , so they would find more and more excuses to censor things, no matter the things, no matter the excuses. Today even a game like the first Tomb Raider would not "fly" and there were many games like that back in the time... also the censorship nowadays becomes political and on many levels, not just "what's obvious" to us.
prove that if everyone in a well known studio get replaced, their game lost its magic.
I can only imagine how bad it is sitting on your 5th meeting of the week when you don't need to be there as the boss comes in to tell you to buckle down and get things done while they actively prevent you from doing so when you're the person who's supposed to use every available moment to work on the game...but somehow the meeting telling you to hurry is more important than hurrying.
I would say that even in early access, with a smaller team, PoE2 still has way more content than Diablo IV has even now.. after running for a year.. 🤯 smh
Most of the content is carried over from POE 1, but the bigger point to be taken from this is that Diablo also had the same time to look at POE1 and steal ideas when D4 releasd.
They just didnt.
Why you'd develop a game ignoring competition is beyond me. If there is a new standard to hit, you want to be the first to know and to meet it.
But with POE1 the standard has been there for years now and they failed to meet that. Baffling.
lol at the Game Dev Tycoon clip in the first couple seconds. I can hear the blips and pops in my head.
Gotta download that again now, thanks.
Starfaild
real
Starfailed.
Snorefield
Just because you hate a game doesn't mean it's a failure 🤡
@@SkintSNIPER262 sorry to hear about your TBI buddy, I know your noggin hasn't been the same since
"in this video, we deal with the fallout" incredibly well done pun for someone that made fallout.
There is an upper limit to the number of people that can be managed on a project effectively.
Here's to looking forward to Skyblivion! They just put out a video showcasing how like 95% of it is done and on track to release this year! The hype is real!
It's good that it's more and more possible for indie devs to make the games they want to make.
Because we're in a time where triple A devs aren't worth looking at anymore. If we still want new games to exist, indie is where it's at.
We used to live in a world where middle shelf games existed, but now triple A is just HUGE games and that's a problem!
It'd be like if the only transport choices were buying a multimillion dollar hypercar or a bus ticket.
There's a MASSIVE underserved audience right there.
It’s a shame that so many big AAA devs are leaving the companies they used to be part of, but if they’re going on to create games like those then all the power to them.
nobody talking about how NVIDIA keeps slapping higher and higher prices on good video game experiences, which in turn contributes too much to people being more angry at video games in general rather than being entertained by them
"You know what blows? Being a cog in the machine."
-The cogiest of cogs in the cog machine.
the only thing I disagree with is that being a "cog in the machine" can actually meaningful IF (and only if) you agree with the cause and goal of the group/company/organization you work for. The problem is that in most cases these large companies either have shitty goals or the way they go about achieving their goals is so horrible, that regular people/workers understandably feel no attachment to anything
New to the channel not very techies myself but really enjoyed the content , I love games been a gamer since the spekky, Happy New Year to any devs out there and keep up the great art /work thanks 😊
I think its safe to say elder scrolls 6 is going to a train wreck
Considering the only thing close to a “train wreck” BGS ever released was FO76, you’re way off the mark with your ‘prediction’, bud
@@JazzzRockFuzion, Regardless of numbers for Starfield, it's also a trainwreck. It's their absolute WORST rated game of all time. only 60% of reviews are positive for it. That's bad. Especially for a BGS title, where most of their games are "OVERWHELMINGLY POSITIVE" on steam.
@@JazzzRockFuzionFact is, Bethesda peaked over a decade ago, and they're not getting better. I don't know why anyone would be expecting ES6 to be a great game.
"As companies grow inefficiencies creep in". - Truer words have rarely been spoken.
How I imagine a modern media company work schedule:
09:00 DEI meeting
10:00 send out critics bribes
11:00 DEI meeting
12:00 circle jerk
13:00 DEI meeting
14:00 daily firing of coders
15:00 DEI meeting
I seriously hope that the era of publishers looking for infinite money printers is coming to an end. It's been such a detriment to gaming as a whole. The money behind the studios never understood that those games that WERE infinite money printers were made as labors of love and pure quality. You can't rush that. They were also ALL limited scope. They didn't try to be an "everything" game for every audience. Feature and scope creep has killed SO MANY great-sounding projects. It just takes too long and too many resources. Find a core concept, execute it well, and if it takes off THEN you can start adding these ambitious goals to that game.
16:09 A *fantastic* game from a minuscule team is Slay the Princess. The core team was just two devs, two voice actors, and a musician
Yeah that game is crazy good. That game shows you don't need good graphics to make a good game.
This "20 meetings a week" trend is the main reason why BGS can't deliver good games more often than every 5 years.
Reduce the amount of meetings, gain some deep work and you win 2 years of development. I hope Godd Howard is watching this!
Never forget: Jason Schreier didn't report on
Blizzard sexual misconduct until it was financially expedient
Wow I'm early. I was disappointed by Starfield's mediocrity since the beginning. Bethesda is lazy.
How are they lazy? How are any development team lazy?
@nrXic Because Bethesda seems intent on doing the exact same thing they've been doing for the past 10 years. Creation Engine 2 is the exact same engine with the exact same 10 year old bugs, with minor visual upgrades. Starfield's story is practically space Skyrim, the space combat's defining feature is literally VATS from Fallout, we still get loading screens with even the most minor scene changes. It screams mediocrity, and it seems that Bethesda is perfectly fine with that. So much so, that they'd rather sell you even more mediocre DLC, than actually innovate.
@@Faabvk That's not laziness. That's an understandable design decision. The game is essentially supposed to be Skyrim in space. Borrowing from Fallout makes sense because people loved that. It's supposed to be a Bethesda game in space and their gameplay motifs applied to a space setting makes a lot of sense.
I'm not saying it's the right decision I'm just saying that they're making what they're good at making. Looks like expecting id Software to make the next Doom a slow paced tactical shooter, and calling them lazy if they stick to their same formula.
Bethesda's formula could be dated, sure. It could be something that modern gamers don't want. But for them to stick with what they're good at isn't laziness.
@@nrXic It's a design decision, for sure. But not an understandable one. It is generally accepted that you need your game to either differentiate itself, or otherwise bring something unique to players, for it to succeed. They've failed in quite a spectacular manner, and the players agree. The main game is sitting at "Mixed" reviews on Steam, and the DLC at "Mostly Negative". The Steam player count is sitting lower than Skyrim, Fallout 4 and Fallout 76, and the all-time peak didn't even beat Fallout 4.
There's only one feature/gameplay element in Starfield that I can think of that Bethesda didn't already do before themselves, which is the procedurally generated planets, which they also couldn't do right. Other space games like Elite: Dangerous (1:1 scale simulation of the Milky Way) and No Man's Sky (quintillions of planets) have done that way better.
Bethesda's formula is outdated. It already showed diminishing returns with Fallout 76, and Starfield was the nail in the coffin in my opinion. The writing was already on the wall, not only with Fallout 76, but with other studios also showing similar trends where their own, or other industry formulae (hero-shooters for example, with Concord and XDefiant) are no longer paying off as much as they did previously. This in particular is why I think Bethesda is lazy. The signs were there, they could've anticipated that, but went with the easier option that they thought would make more profit for them.
Marketing it like the next big thing and making big promises in the process also sealed their fate. Other examples of the latter being Skull & Bones (quadruple A, seriously?) and Concord. Starfield's major fault in that is releasing a buggy, sometimes even broken game, and having your players fix it through mods quicker than Bethesda can, because they're already too busy churning out DLC to grab even more cash.
Bethesda's formula is unique. While it never hooked me as a player, I can recognize why players did like their flagships like Skyrim and Fallout 4, but it has not only drawn criticism from players like me, or people completely outside of Bethesda's "sphere of influence" if you want to call it that, but also from Bethesda's own fans.
@Faabvk I understand all that and appreciate the effort you put into that response, but I think it still reinforces the idea that none of that demonstrates laziness from the developers. So much of that are miscalculations by designers. We saw the same with Halo infinite.
This idea that developers are lazy is not rooted in anything real and we've been seeing it bounce around quite a bit especially with some TH-camrs.
The issues with these games have to do with design, priorities pushed by publishers (often tied with monetisation), features that were priorities that shouldn't have been and vice versa, etc.
Devs can be lazy, and be late in finishing work, or take some shortcuts to get work done. But in these large teams, anything that affects crucial things like performance are addressed as a team.
When we put the blame on devs in this manner we let the real culprits get away with it and nothing gets better. These people in management shouldn't be getting away with it.
Not a game from this year, but Ive always felt Rimworld was a great example of an indie game made by a small team as an example of chasing their passion instead of satisfying shareholder 🤷♂️
All that remains is for the public to buy more diverse stuff. The biggest issue is almost every gamer is herding themselves to just a few massive titles, in much the way social media does.
Good vid.
True. So many "gamers" just play one of the following:
1) Sports game of the year
2) Online competitive FPS
3) Mobile gatcha/gambling game
4) Car game
And that's it.
I know people who have only ever played FIFA and openly refuse even free gifts of games from other genres, even those from the above list.
They are wilfully blind to the possibilities in front of them.
You can't put a price on peace of mind. No amount of Lamborghinis can substitute for that. Anyone truly invested in the creative process and carries passion for game development will know that deep down. Hopefully his story shines as a beacon of opportunity and potential for others looking to reset the industry the way it needs
New Era of AAA going Bankrupt, sure I agree.
I look forward to seeing what New Game Companies rise from the Asses, Make Good Games Again...
Shows up, ruins game, elaborates, leaves.
Neutral Evil.
Found Path of Achra recently. A ton of fun and I'm looking forward to the dev's next game as well!
well nanite is impressive, but it basically kills performance because many devs use it to skip out on optimization imho.
11:21 That is why the Demo of that game ran like trash. Unoptimized. The Engine doesn't "just handle it", there are drawbacks in performance for that.
Yes! I'm working on one myself, it's about half way to its demo. I'm really excited.
Name and synopsis? Always interested in indie devs.
This is such old news, I love Nates work but it's exhausting seeing "game industry news" channels constantly hauling his same sentence about game engines up every few weeks. Please do some real journalism, do your own research not just talking about soundbytes
You are the BEST of the internet. THANK YOU. Happy new year. Hugs and love to you and your family
🫶❤️🫶
Cyberpunk 2077 and Bg3 should be the standard by which we judge main line Bethesda games. In many ways that is the experience we expect from these games. Immersion, industry leading graphics, solid writing of characters and story, top notch facial animations and gameplay mechanics for an rpg, and a world that is as interesting as it is detailed. Cyberpunk nailed the aesthetic and feel of being in that world and made you care about the characters and enjoy the experience. Starfield felt hollow, it’s the first main Bethesda game that I thought the lore was boring. The character models and facial animations look terrible, the story overall is bland and generic, the intensity of the dialogue and situations is laughable compared to cyberpunk. The gameplay feels worse and you have less variety of weapons. And the game is just not as good as it should be. But that’s not even the worst part. It’s that they think it’s a success. They don’t understand the difference.
The only reason elder scrolls lore is interesting is because of what the former writers did 20 years ago. Same thing with Fallout
Yea people keep forgetting that literally all ES lore was written when Arena came out and Todd’s been coasting off of greater minds than his for decades. The one time he did something on his own? Starfeild and look how that turned out
Bethesda games and Cyberpunk 2077 do actually have a lot in common. That being requiring years to become playable.
Starfield is superior to cyberpunk. It has gameplay beyond the stories.
Starfield is bad when compared to ES2, another game with procedurally (or randomly, I forgot) generated everything, that came out in 1996. On top of that most ES lore was written by Sheogorath and Julianos and later cannibalized by Pagliarullo. ES2 can easily explain you the difference between Aedra and Daedra, while ES4 and 5 can't
Most Devs with true passion and talent know better than to work for an organ grinder AAA studio that they know is going to crunch them to death. The cat is truly out of the bag, and once the AI slop truly starts spilling into gaming, the industry is going to absolutely tank
AI when uncensored is much better (*and much more passionate) than what these non gamer AAAA devs can achieve in a 100 years. The depth AI can achieve is hard to explain... it's like Alice in wonderland but a 1000 times better, though I understand why most people think AI is a "flop". All these super censored corporate models are truly bad representation of AI. It's like getting something worse than Starfield and say "this is a game".... nah this is not a game this is a corporate slop... same with AI...
Nanite is way to taxing of a tool right now. Honestly UE5 is definitely something that keeps me from buying some games. Ill take a well optimized UE4 game all day
The increase in graphical quality is no way near worth the costs.
The era of massive graphical jumps every 5-10 years is long dead.
Devs need to understand this.
16:00 To answer the question partially... not from this year- but NMS was that game a decade ago and still holds up now.
I love indie devs and small teams but unfortunately, as can be seen with Axis Unseen, simply relying on some check-boxes in the game engine to add high graphical fidelity options, such as Lumen and Nanite, often results in poor performance and iffy graphics (see bottom). In other words, the same issues modern UE5 games have with graphics are often present in indie games and often to a more noticeable degree. This is likely due to indie devs often not having the knowledge or time needed to properly tweak the options and engine to achieve good performance. Again, same is true for AAA publishers, but the issue is often amplified with indie devs.
By iffy graphics I'm referring to blur caused by TAA, poor or nonexistent reflections outside of ray tracing, low quality ray traced reflections, low quality looking Nanite textures, what appears to be extreme mouse input latency, etc.
More episodes like this please, beautiful deep dive into "...the most crucial features of developers that don't get talked about...". Genuinely, thank you
Bethesda peaked in 2011
Bethesda peaked in 2006. They held that peak for five years, but then, like an athlete who retires at 30 due to a career-ending injury but still makes the Hall of Fame, they fell apart overnight.
Yeah I'm playing small dev gems currently like Art of rally, Farthest frontier, Concrete jungle (fantastic city builder puzzle made by one dude), Harvest massive encounter.
Starfield; having gone into it with 0 hype or prior knowledge on its advertising; was a game. A good game? Sometimes. Some of the quests were actually pretty good, main story was kind of cool towards the end. But overall it was a game. You did things, you saw things, mostly saw things. Not cool things but stuff like rocks and flora. Maybe some fauna.
They should have leaned HARD into space combat. I've wouldnt have imagined in my wildest dreams that Creation Engine can handle spaceships without some severe crutches yet here we are. All they had to do is port F4 combat into Starfield and center a lot of story and quests around fighting in space. Boom, done. Fire Emil too while you at that, probably.