The last time BGS innovated on their formula was Morrowind -> Oblivion. Since Oblivion, every subsequent game (yes, including the darling Skyrim) has removed and reduced the important features that made the games what they are. It has reached an absurd level, as evidenced by this video. Guys, you can't even swim in Starfield. Don't hold your breath for ES6.
At this point, after Fallout 4, Fallout 76 and Starfield ...yeah,the next TES game is kinda bricked. Also, they won't use Jeremy Soule so the soundtrack will be inferior from the start.
@@steveballmersbaldspot2.095 Some unfounded allegations about using his influence to chase women and the fact that he is a difficult person to work with. And also he scammed some people on Kickstarter.
I doubt modding community would again save your bad design and If you were realy from Bethesda perhaps shame would be more appropriated. Shame for not carrying how bad the game shows to your customer. Shame to be a developer who doesn't want to improve and even deliver a game which all of your clients would love. Main word here "Shame" I doubt you can even feel it.
This is the most constructive video I've ever seen on youtube: -laying out each problem -comparing it to previous games -suggesting unidealized fixes that should be within the capabilities of the studio & engine I love the way you go about it in the most fair and objective way possible; it couldn't be clearer that your intention isn't to dunk on the game, but to help them improve it for everyone's sakes
The problem is that these suggested fixes are NOT the main problems of the Creation engine or Starfield. These are just minor irks, cosmetic changes that can easily be done by the modders of the community. But they wanted to tackle the main problems first, like the endless loading screens and the fact that there are NO seamless transitions from flying through space to landing on a planet. But those problems can't be fixed within the capabilities of the Creation engine, which is why the community has pulled the plug on Starfield and declared it to be irreparably broken. There's a demo where one modder from the community tried to make a sequence for a direct landing on a planet, but the Creation engine simply kicked him out, because it can't do it. The Creation engine is old, in gaming industry terms it's even ancient, and it feels tired. It hasn't been fixed, let alone seriously updated since Fallout 3. That is something you can't "fix" with some mods or reprogramming. In order to make the Creation engine do what it needs to do, it has to be torn down almost completely and rebuilt and the question then is: is it worth it when other engines can already do what you want? So, financially speaking it would make much more sense to port Starfield to a new engine or just scrap it and start with a fresh sheet.
Everyone's sakes? The hell are you talking about? Bethesda isn't your friend and they don't care about your opinion or this guy's video. Video only got made to get views anyway, and if i'm wrong and this guy really thinks Bethesda is going to care, I feel even more sorry for him. But hey, lets not be mean assholes, you all should treat Bethesda with sugarcoated opinions, and let them down easy. Oh yeah, and you still buy their crap. You want to help others? Get out of the abusive relationship before Bethesda smacks you in the wallet again and you look even dumber. There is nothing constructive about sycophants fluffing the subject of their worship by being nice about it.
@@tjroelsma Moders have already done a bunch of these, also there's a lot of small things to find and form an understanding through the xEdit for Starfield (basically looking into the .esm files).
@@tjroelsma The creation engine is fine, it's just that it simply isn't suitable for the game Starfield wants to be. Perfectly fine for their normal style of games like skyrim or fallout.
But they don't realise a game has to be good and playable in order to make mods *enhancing* the gameplay. No one wants to mod a shitty game where nearly everything has to be rewritten.
They’re not all bad. It’s just the people calling the shots. The Artists did a great job for the most part, it’s just that they work for a shitty company. Todd’s intern is probably the one they make deal with all the flak
@@jtn191 Imagine next TES game will be just an empty planet generator with nothing on it. What do you want, magic and dragons do not exist, aren't you aware? Next gen realism.
lol - waiting for vendors to restock money is so annoying, but ironically BGS don’t make you wait at all when you’re in jail! I feel like serving some actual time (just a few minutes) with the option to break out of jail (or bribe your way out) could be quite immersive - as the stakes would be higher when committing crimes
Speeding up the waiting worked on his setup, but don't forget that this has to work for everyone in the world, across millions of different hardware configurations as well as console - so I don't think it's fair to say they set the wait time to be slow just to be vindictive. I imagine a great deal of testing went into this simple looking problem, to find a value that worked correctly everywhere.
the restraint in your voice the entirety of this video is palpable and amenable. Truly walking them through baby steps. Its really like their challenge for themselves is "how can we make our games worse while staying flashy enough to sell?"
The title is exactly what they needed to hear though. Completely ignored what made their old games good for this game, it was like someone’s first attempt at developing this type of game.
Stop putting so much effort into the wall textures that noone cares about or will ever look closely at is my best advice. Fuck your art simulation I am a GAMER.
The sad thing is so many, probably most, videos of this nature come from a place of love. People who want to see Bethesda at least do better next game even if they don’t try to improve Starfield through patches or expansion packs. Then you look at Bethesda’s response, and it seems they ignore it or worse yet view it as antagonistic.
It seems like there's too many big and fragile egos over there for them to not view any criticism of the game as inherently toxic. I mean beyond being less buggy what criticism have they even taken into account from Fallout 4 and 76 in making Starfield? The game is a massive step back in so many areas...
@@steveballmersbaldspot2.095 It a plot to make Skyrim look better by destorying all hope anything they make will be good! That Todd Howard! /jk But seriously i feel like the whole creative industries need a mental check up and sealing of egos to be good creatives.
Yeah, sadly Emil has an incredibly fragile ego and Todd + company love him deeply and would defend him with their lives; despite the fact he's quite literally one of the worst writers most of us have ever seen. His entire personality revolves around shitting on the community and calling them braindead toddlers, while his writing is that of a braindead toddler.
Couldn't have said it better myself. We want to love Starfield. And I for one love what the game already has, but I also see the potential for what it could have, and that makes me sad. Especially when replaying Elder Scrolls games and seeing what they can do if they really try.
About half of these are things I assumed I was missing somehow. Either I was doing something wrong, or there was a bug, or I just needed to upgrade something or get a skill. The first time I saw the surface map I immediately started Googling for something to fix it, cause I assumed it was a bug.
The first time I saw the surface map my game stopped to a halt... I discovered, in the worst way possible, that my PC could not handle that many dots the default surface map has so i had to discover a way to mod it. 😕
Bethesda here. When astronauts went to the moon they didn't have local maps of earth with them either because that would've been pretty dumb. So we just skipped all that. Hope this helps!
Yea I was thinking why isn’t my map working? There’s nothing there must be a bug. But no they decided that the game needed a map that wasn’t one. I mean why bother?
Considering BGS still in denial according to their steam review response, I doubt they will watch this. Especially when the lead writer/designer itself was publicly said that they ignore criticism.
that wasn't bgs who responded to the reviews that was the team that is currently doing 76 which means they stepped way out of line and bgs should tell them to stay in their lanes and mind their business or fire the person behind the reviews
??? since when did emil say that? i think you might've been high, also they clearly do listen to criticism since they made a end of year post and post on the reddit every time they release an update
@@chaserseven2886He said it during a keynote he did back in 2016. The same one where he also stated he doesn't use design documents and uses the KISS principle as a key design pillar. Very damning stuff.
@@steveballmersbaldspot2.095 also stated he wanted witches and magic in FO4. The ‘Keep it simple, stupid’ and how he essentially sees players as morons who just tear pages out of his stories to make paper airplanes and build shacks left such a bitter taste in my mouth. Egomaniacal mid-tier writer.
I am just... baffled at what BGS have been doing for about 8 years. Most of these suggestions are not only common sense in 2023, not only have they been done before, but they've been done by Bethesda themselves.
They're locked in a competition with Blizzard to see who can be the first legendary AAA studio to completely ruin what scraps of their reputation for greatness remain.
Bethesda has been milking skyrim the past 10 years and doing nothing else but paying their b team to make Starfield while the A team butchers the new Tes
If how they have been responding to negative steam reviews is anything to go off of, they do not listen to player feedback and haven’t been for a while. They have become so divorced from their fan base that their next games are all but guaranteed to be mediocre
@@Vecha302 I'll field that one. To use Fallout 76 as an example, it's true that Bethesda is a sprawling mass of many different studios etc. Fallout 76 was primarily entrusted to Bethesda Austin, who were a recently acquired studio that previously ran under the name Battlecry Studios. Battlecry Studios was already owned by Zenimax, who set it up in the first place to produce micro transaction and free to play games such as the cancelled project Battlecry. They modified the Creation engine for online play and as such are somewhat responsible for the atrocious issues FO76 had at launch. This is an example of core game production being farmed out to a 'B' team and suffering as a result, the B team being not a well established, long serving part of BGS. Of course, the 'A' team of BGS were somewhat involved in the finishing and Lore development for FO76, which was also very poor. The primary issue is that FO76 was/is a live service game, which means that the projected income is spread over time rather than being based on immediate sales. As such, more of the games development time is used on things that aren't core to the gameplay experience, like the bleeding shop, and less on polish and gameplay mechanics. They also skint on the development cost by farming it out to a 'B' team to keep production costs down. So to sum up, a 'B' team is not a core part of an established company. They are often newer or more recently established studios that aren't usually involved in flagship titles, and they are used to keep production costs down by not paying 'big talent' with equally big paychecks.
Agreed - the 1-2 credited writers point is crazy - more games media should be talking about it. I think it clearly explains why the game feels so empty.
@@RobbieB2606loads of critics have zeroed in on this being the game's single biggest downfall. I've seen (& scrolled past) literally dozens of videos calling for Emil Pagliarulo (lead writer) to be sacked.
Starfield really should have been an "The Expanse" type of video game where we have our solar system and maybe even one or two more when advancing the story with a lot more factions fighting for control and handcrafted planets. It would be smaller in scope but so much more fun to actually play.
The state of the gaming industry (besides BG3) is so fucking dire that my mind can’t even comprehend what an insanely rich studio like Bethesda could do with a handful of custom made planets, ACTUAL GOOD WRITERS, and some fucking passion could do with this premise.
@@jasper_the_ghostI absolutely DESPISE how much I agree with your comment. This is why I keep thinking that western gaming is almost as dead as modern Hollywood is. No creativity, no good writing, no passion, only the motivation of pushing dei narratives and easy money. Probably why I've been so drawn to Japanese media for a while now. Most of their studios, in gaming and other visual media, seem much more motivated by a creative vision than woke narratives and money. They aren't perfect, either though. One big problem is that a lot of them tend to find a niche and bleed it to death (i.e. isekai in anime).
No, you could have just treated it like Elder Scrolls or Fallout: give us a small part of the world and hint at the larger world. Just say that grav drives can only take you in a star system in small periods of time and that interstellar travel takes months to even years.
@@SuperBrainSandwich >This is why I keep thinking that western gaming is almost as dead as modern Hollywood is. Are you talking about AAA games specifically, or ALL games, including indie? If you include the latter, it's most DEFINITELY not, with 2023 being one of the better years in recent history, with just dumptrucks of quality games being released... If we include AAA only... >Most of their studios, in gaming and other visual media, seem much more motivated by a creative vision than woke narratives and money. Partially because their culture isnt dominated by simply Shareholders, it's dominated by "Shinra". (although, of course, money is very much king, even in Japan) Additionally, the culture is FAR more brutal and unforgiving...
ALL of this is a prime example of just how crucial developer notes are during development, ALL the lessions learned from past games, during development and tracking the changes needed when the entire development of a game is done on the fly. Base building, just throw it in and not connect it to anything or give it any real purpose.
This statement holds even more weight when you consider the fact that during the development of starfield, we had the whole pandemic going on. Those docs sure would have came in handy... I hope this is a wake-up call for Bethesda, but honestly I have little faith in them anymore.
@@frenchbologna I honestly don't think they care anymore, they just want to make a platform for recurring revenue from the Creation Club and DLC like with Skyrim, it's why Unique weapons are just RNG drops instead of handcrafted placements, the whole game is just centered around infinite content of procedural generation.
@@SynthLizard8 Also the unique weapons or suits don't feel that unique when they look identical to the regular versions and more often than not have lower stats than the regular one. I've come across so many "epic" kodamas that were less powerful than the kodama i was already carrying. Compare this to something like the dawnbreaker or cryolator and you see that they're not even stagnating, they're actively regressing.
I disagree with this as a developer who has also worked in some gaming. A lot of people say things like you need notes, documentation, etc. That tends to be backseat driving. It also tends to be people imposing their limitations on others. Good developers often don't need notes though that's not the measure of a good developer. A good developer will get the job done. If notes help them then they will use notes as an when is needed, you don't need to tell them when, this is within their own remit. This notion that all you need are to take notes and then magic simply happens tends to be exactly what leads to low quality products. You can talk about all of the aids and processes you like but at the end of the day it's all for naught without the right talent and attitudes. For a game like this, you might think they didn't even bother with a basic to-do list and this isn't a case of saying have a to-do list. When things are this broken such that people can't identify and fix a number of trivial things in a quick test play through within under an hour then you have bigger problems. The problem you have is people. Nobody likes to point out when it's people because they like to feel kind of conflict adverse but that is what the problem boils down to. It is clear that they lack respect for the player, are in the wrong mindset and may have also demoralized their best talent or leadership internally because that's what's really lacking, good leadership at this point. If you brought a random person into the studio from off the street and had them play this game for a little while, there's a good chance they would bring up a number of these issues and then take the initiative on them. This is sorely lacking in their shop.
So I actually went and explored every planet. And I mean every planet. I made a project out of filling in a bestiary/resource guide for the game. Just like you said, a sticker book really made the exploration worth it. After finishing the main quest (which I overall liked and found interesting and compelling), I decided for RP reasons that I didn't want to leave my home universe. So I started exploring. I spent 300 hours catching up on years worth of podcast backlogs and hopping from planet to planet, moon to moon, and system to system. I scanned every plant, animal, and mineral on every planet in every system. The biggest problem for me was that I had to make a gigantic google doc and do the sticker book myself. It's 2000+ pages. My browser crashes half the time when opening the tab. Literally only a handful of people are going to bother doing that. And the reason I started my grand compendium was because I wanted to use the outpost system to automate medicine production because I wanted to RP my combat medic trying to bring low-cost first aid to the Settled Systems. The idea of the universe of Starfield is brilliant, and I can see why Todd was able to get the dev team excited about this and willing to spend years bringing the game to life. During my self-imposed mission to explore the galaxy, I grew annoyed by the sameness. I avoided map markers except for the features I needed to 100% planet surveys. Why go to locations that I had already memorized? I have an excellent memory for maps and dungeon layouts, so I quickly tired of looting the exact same places over and over. I stopped looting enemies except for ammo because my guns were fine and none of the dropped items were better than what I had stumbled onto after 150 hours of swapping gear and levelling up. Most of those guns were boring too, since I prized damage output over effects and that meant I used almost all common weapons. Combat itself was fine, but fighting the same people in the same places over loot that wasn't worth picking up just felt empty. So I stopped going to those places. One thing I actually disagree on with this excellent video: there need to be planets that have no human presence AT ALL. I love the idea of exploring the far reaches of space and standing on other worlds. But it's frustrating to fly out to a system and find that some stupid pirates got here first and built a carbon copy of the same installation that you can find in 37 different places on every single planet. I want to visit worlds that nobody has been to yet, or at least that nobody has built industrial outposts all over and then proceeded to abandon for no discernable reason. But I was so tired of the same old places over and over, I really don't want to see more of them. There should be like 10-15 systems that are absolutely crammed with locations like this, but then 40-60 that have extremely sparse outpost presence and the last 20-30 might never have seen a human being before. Just throw in more natural locations like caves and unique creature encounters, or rich mining nodes with a variety of resources that are hard to find anywhere else. It's fine if 90% of players never visit a moon with nothing remarkable on it, but have something that will make a player say "gee, I'm glad I stopped here because I don't know when I might have seen an asteroid impact site with this much again." I want loot that's worth a damn, please. Not having any good loot to offload meant that I didn't really go back to my lovingly crafted home base very often except to refill on mountains of healing supplies that I made through spending hours and hours tinkering with base building. It took a ridiculous amount of time to get the storage working - I had a dozen skyscrapers of nothing but storage crates that just shoved every item as far back as it would fit, and it should not have been as weird and user-unfriendly as it was to get that working. Oh, and my RP about bringing affordable care to every person in the universe? Yeah, there wasn't a single merchant anywhere in the Settled Systems who could buy all my supplies. My grand plan was foiled by the fact that I couldn't offload my infinitely replenishing bandages and antibiotics without cleaning out every merchant in every town every time I visited. They just didn't have the money to buy anything good. I got bored of that, so I went back to filling in my custom sticker book that should have been in the game to start with. Now with all that said, please don't think I hate the game. I like Starfield a lot. I really do. But I want to love it, and with many of the flaws that I observed (most of which I saw mentioned in this video) I cannot love Starfield. Not the way that I love Skyrim - I actually watched this on a second monitor while playing Skyrim for what is probably my 60th to 70th character. I'm tabbed out of Skyrim right now just to write this. And that is Starfield's greatest problem: it could have been so much more than it is, but the drive to automate game production and cram vast universes full of meaningless crap is ruining AAA games. My advice to Bethesda is to hire the people who Larian hired to write Baldur's Gate 3 and who CDPR hired to write the Witcher games. Games need personality to be good, and procedural generation has repeatedly proven that this is the thing it cannot replicate.
finding truly desolate places is why i dropped no man's sky early on and why i still boot up elite dangerous every once in a while. it's hard to beat racing a fast ship through ice canyons no one else has ever seen before
At least two of those problems could be easily solved by mods today, there is no reason to fiddle with cargo management when they can simply be infinite. It's like 0kb mod. Unless you're on Xbox, then my condolences.
Merry Christmas! Here is a gift for BGS, our constructive feedback (mostly). How would you like BGS to change Starfield? Timestamps: 00:00:00 - Intro 00:01:59 - Disclaimer (Not A Game Dev) 00:02:41 - BGS Expert Mode 00:02:38 - Rules For A Good Game 00:04:39 - Save Files Thumbnails 00:06:51 - Flashlight Upgrade 00:10:19 - Speed Up Waiting 00:14:59 - Maps 00:16:18 - Cardinal Directions 00:17:12 - Chronomark Watch 00:18:17 - City Maps 00:19:41 - Star Map Search Function 00:21:33 - Beastiary / Index / Encyclopedia 00:22:40 - Resources 00:23:41 - Fauna & Flora 00:26:29 - Sticker Book 00:29:09 - Single Player Competition 00:30:36 - Unique Creatures 00:31:45 - Digipicking 00:33:52 - Interacting With The Scanner Up 00:35:29 - Visual Indicator For Resources 00:36:26 - Inventory / Keyring 00:37:22 - Aid & Food 00:38:12 - Books / Data Slates / Magazines / Notes 00:39:01 - Inventory Search Function 00:39:56 - Drop All For All 00:40:41 - Storage Linked To Crafting Tables 00:42:19 - Fallout 4 Item Scrapping 00:44:07 - Mark As Junk Option 00:44:28 - Aid & Food Crafting Sucks 00:46:01 - Unlockable Appearance Options 00:48:22 - Adding Modifier Effects Via Crafting 00:50:45 - Item Tier Crafting Upgrades 00:53:10 - Cleaning Item Names 00:55:12 - Unique Items 00:56:28 - How To Make Unique Items Special 01:00:11 - 4 Effects / Modifiers 01:03:28 - Other Unique Qualities 01:08:06 - Ships / Tour In Building Mode 01:09:04 - Blueprints For Ships & Outposts 01:10:04 - Buy Ship Parts As Moveable Items 01:11:58 - Traversal / Underwater Exploration 01:12:47 - Zoology Skill & Sea Life 01:13:11 - Landing At Coastal Regions 01:13:39 - Fast Boosting 01:14:49 - Drivable Vehicles 01:16:18 - Procedural Generation Is Soulless 01:18:02 - Groundhog Day / 40 Second Rule 01:19:04 - What's Important When Exploring 01:19:59 - How To Fix Points Of Interest 01:21:26 - Random Kills Lore / Purpose / Meaning 01:22:50 - Illusion Of Scope 01:24:03 - Radiant Quests 01:25:14 - Burn The Nameless NPCs 01:27:01 - Romanceable Companion Variety 01:28:30 - Money / Economy 01:30:00 - Transmog System 01:31:33 - Active Effects / Character Stats 01:33:13 - Skill Description Clarification 01:34:38 - Update Patch For Broken Skills 01:34:59 - Reset Skill Points 01:35:29 - Rebalance Experience Gains 01:36:21 - Move XP Notification Off The Crosshairs 01:36:56 - Killcams 01:37:26 - Cutscene / Animation Remover 01:38:48 - Factions / Rant 01:39:15 - Problem With BGS 01:39:53 - Starfield VS. Morrowind Faction Quests 01:42:28 - Starfield VS. Morrowind Developers 01:44:03 - Starfield VS. Morrowind Dev Power 01:46:46 - Where Are All The Factions? 01:47:26 - Possible Factions To Be Added 01:48:48 - WHAT IS THE PROBLEM? 01:49:32 - Hire More Writers NOW 01:51:18 - The Pizza Problem
I want Bethesda to stop hiring medicalists with the goal of design a game specifically to maximize human suffering. That’s all. Pretty simple one! ChatGPT has better ideas than these crackheads.
Man,you deserve a medal of honor for your dedication to this game developers. Unfortunately, it's sad to think that if it took the 25 years to make this "masterpiece" , we are more than likely 25+ years away from them getting around to making any of these fixes. We will undoubtedly see modders implement most,or all of these fixes long before Bethesda does.
As said, it has good bones there is just no real meat on them and nobody likes Pagliarulo because they deem him a weaker writer than the maker of a cheap dollar rack film which is why the stories have gone downhill from Morrowind. Bethesda before Morrowind was on the verge of bankruptcy and Morrowind was the hero, after though they could never match it.
Linking of ship cargo and outpost inventory should be part of the skill tree progression and visibly reflected on the star map. We need to be able to favorite / pin points of interest on the galaxy map as well
Having one internal writer is baffling, why did they hire hundreds and hundreds of 3D artists over the years and then no writers? Clearly, 10 developers developing quests is also not enough for a game the size of Starfield. They should have at a minimum like 50 quest designers. Quests are the bread and butter of the game, which needs way more manpower.
The depressing part is that they won’t bolster their writing staff because of Emil’s ego. He refuses to acknowledge any criticism, and rejects the idea of a design document which in my opinion seems like one of the reasons there isn’t more writers. With 20+ writers working on the game needing to be in cohesion with one another there needs to be that organisation there, but since BGS and Emil reject that idea it means that as far as writing goes the only way that cohesion can be done is by having one guy in charge and one guy alone, and we’ve seen how that’s panned out. They need a serious wake up call and I just hope that this release will have the chance to give that to them to reevaluate their approach and egos
I think the stories BGS write work pretty well given the near total freedom the player has in how much importance they give to any objective. & in what order they tackle things. Can you imagine having to write a story that works well for the player who main lines it in 10 hours, & equally well for the more typical Bethesda player like myself, who takes well over 200 hours, because they're mixing in side content all the time & just experiencing the world? Can you imagine hitting a point in the main quest that you can't progress because you haven't reached a certain tie in point with the vanguard quest line, or ryujin industries? I think it's clear why questlines are isolated & parallel in bgs games. I think it's a taller order than some critics imagine.
@@skyriminspace hello there 10 year old. Maybe Starfield is your very first bethesda game. We here on the internet are pleased to let you know, that Bethesda games do NOT have "near total freedom" a fuckload of it is extremely narrow. Esp the quest design. A PERFECT example of this would be the Paradiso questline of the old earth settlers. And the extremely lousy 3 options which are all 3, fucking terrible. And to finish it off, you can't even kill the board, because they are all essential NPC's (essential NPC's are usually the death of freedom. Now if you meant Obsidian's FO:NV, then you'd be correct, almost limitless player freedom. Any Betheda game, you're literally joking)
@@skyriminspace To make this even more clear than you thought. FO:NV allows you to do the exact thing you're saying is dumb. They did it in a FFFFFFFFFFFFAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRR shorter time than Bethesda does, and they made the story still work. Amazing isn't it. Fuck me, these children will literally consooom every piece of content they can find, they do not care about quality only about speed of delivery. Enjoy your loadingscreen simulator. Your fishtank flightsim. Your dead planets. The useless outposts. And extremely mediocre questdesign.
@@3217491 i agree the quest design in Bethesda games is narrow. I'm saying this is done deliberately to allow the player the freedom to approach quest lines in whichever order they choose, & to pick up & drop them in favour of other things one is able to do elsewhere in the game. It's been that way since at least Oblivion. If you're going to critique something it's best to try & understand it properly first. If you disagree that's fine but you don't need to rant. If ranting is what you're after however then knock yourself out.
1:36:57 I'd say killcams are something that anyone who played long enough with archery or magic in Skyrim most definitely does not miss. They were cool when things worked properly. But they were buggy as hell since you'd get stuck unable to do anything while the animation played if the enemy had moved out of the way of your shot. This often lead to situations where you'd get attacked or even killed during the killcam animation. I ended up getting a mod to disable ranged killcams for that exact reason.
It could be nice if they were toggle-able, and have it be that you can toggle the melee one separate from the ranged ones. That way, you can have the kill cam if you think it looks cool, and if it’s causing problems you can disable to annoying one while keeping the functional one.
The faction quest comparison was especially sobering, I guess that's what happens when you don't use design documentation and everyone puts effort into content that gets scrapped/scaled back. Seriously having an actual unified vision for a project beyond "Skyrim in space" would have done wonders for them. They definitely need way more dedicated writers and quest designers.
Not bothering with formal design documentation probably made sense when it was a team of 50 that all knew each other and worked in the same building. But trying to run an organization of 300 to a 1000 spread out over several locations in the same informal way was something that should have been seen as a bad idea before they even got started.
@@publiusdos5925 Even with 50 people, that's a lot of independent minds and ambitions to try and keep heading in coherent directions. Even just 10 people can get pretty scattered in ideas and opinions. Early bethesda had a lot of strong lore binding their franchise and people who knew the lore well. For something like The Elder Scrolls, you could have everyone handle the theme for a town and sort of independently manage their own region and quests. However, for things like Fallout, which was an acquired IP, the lack of central design comes through - ghouls need food... then they don't... then they do... and don't... fallout 4 feels incredibly disjointed and seems more like a twist on a trip through old colonial America than it does a post-apocalyptic game. They could all agree an apocalypse happened, but not what that meant or looked like in different areas of society. Even the Elder Scrolls suffers from this a bit. Is magic something anyone can pursue or is it special? Because of how Bethesda styles the game, the player is never forced to class - which is not necessarily bad, but the world itself was not really designed to handle magic and a number of quests don't take it into account. Doors can be unlocked without keys, characters brutally murdered while naked - imagine the horrors which could befall those who practiced mysticism influencing royals and guards. The world has almost no defenses against magic despite it being a real component. If it was rare and mysterious, why is there a guild? Does anyone just start taking magic classes? The guild trial in skyrim implies you can't even begin studying magic until you demonstrate your talents with magic.... but wouldn't that be dangerous to insist people study magic on their own before coming to the guild? Compare and contrast with the way magic is portrayed in Dragon Age or Enderal. There's a lot of stuff that is just not defined within Bethesda's games. I certainly agree they need design documents.
bro I *WISH* it was skyrim in space. I put like 200 hours into skyrim and every time I come back to it, I find new stuff. I bounced off starfield in like 50 hours of TRYING to enjoy it. There's just not enough compelling content!
If only they had a design document to see the number of faction quests. But you have to understand, updating the design document is such a hassle for Emil... I mean, for everyone. It just takes so much time away from developing a game, trust me guys. You don't know a thing about making games, so why you're complaining, your feedback is pointless anyway
@@darkdwarf007 Should have realized this sooner but that point is very ridiculous. For something with Starfield's budget they could have hired multiple people who's full time job is to keep the documents up to date. Certainly cheaper than the PR damage control have to do now and the damage to their reputation
Flashlight point. I'd argue you don't have to upgrade it. You start as a MINER, a profession intimately close with pitch black areas. They should have amazing lighting
The mineral, flora, fauna codex could be something you use that fancy table on your ship. You browse for something you need, where it’s located, and set a course. It would make the game more immersive and give that table a unique purpose.
U might want to try Urquan Masters (basically, it's Star Control 2), and it's free. Even though it's old and dated graphics, more fun and doesn't drag like Star Failed.
@@j.c.denton2060I think they look cool, they have no finishers or ‘moves’ like say fallout 4 mutants do, terrormorphs don’t pick us up and throw us, wildlife doesn’t grab us by the ankle as we jetpack over them, we don’t get charged off our feet by a giant dragon bull looking thing, there’s a major disconnect from the enemies in this game due to the lack of finishers/melee animations
As an actual game developer I can tell you: most of the things you ask for are completely fine for a studio of Bethesda's size to do. Not only that, several can be added even to smaller indie games with near zero difficulty (especially the beastiary stuff). Starfield is just a bad game, you are 100% correct in your complaints. At least up to the 27:35 timestamp, I haven't watched the whole video yet. I'll edit my comment once I do. Okay. I, for now, stopped at 49:49. I think most of the complaints here are also easy to work with. Again, if a small company had access to the "finished" state of Starfield, they could do a better job, and implement most of these. The whole "skin discovery system" would be so easy to implement depending on how they made the base of it... The only reason they did not put it in was due to corporate greed. "Want skins? Pay extra"! My only disagreement here is about the "item scrapping" part. From a game designer's pov, that was a terrible feature. As I see, most people hated the idea of having to clutter up their inventory just to scrap them and get OP items. It's way too grindy and unbalanced that honestly I personally ended up just cheating in the nescessary raw materials to upgrade my gear. In fact, the entire crafting system in F4 was flawed at best, and utterly broken at worst. The game was reduced to "invest all your points in crafting, create an overpowered weapon, win" cicle, with no reason to even try most other perks until you were far enough into the game. I have my own idea of remaking the crafting system in Bethesda games from scratch, but this part of the comment is long enough. I'll keep watching the video later, but for now I am really enjoying it.
I get why people like weapon modifications, and in Fallout the idea of pulling apart broken things to salvage useless components to make something new kinda fit with the world. But in Starfield the whole thing came across, to me at least, as gamey nonesene. I can travel to shipyard, get a customised interstellar craft made, to my exact specifications, ion cannons, missile launchers, a fully stocked medical bay. But I walk into a gun shop and say, "Yeah, I'll have that rifle but with a scope" the vendor looks at me for a moment and busts out laughing. Transposing the crafting mechanic so directly from Fallout to Starfield was terrible, if entirely predictable. Just off the top of my head, why not lean into the other mechanics of the game? You want a levelling, scaling buff for your weapons? Put an armoury on your ship, hire or assign an artificer to staff it, you will see them at the workbench occasionally, tinkering with a gun, or sitting in the mess hall on a break. Perhaps they could occasionally shout of you as you pass, asking if you can pick up something they need if you need to have some kind of fetchy gameplay loop attached to it. But the entire process in Starfield of getting an aftermarket red-dot sight onto your weapon, is just insane for the high tech, luxury future setting. The whole outpost system for upgrades leaves me very disappointed, The X series make far more sense, you build industrial facilities as the player for the purpose of engaging in industry, to mass produce something. Not to sew pockets on your space suit.
Around the one hour 25 min mark where he talks about the npcs (at lest in my experience as a 3D character artist in the industry) it doesn’t seem remotely plausible for the 400 devs he talks about to bang out one character each in 1 hour, unless he is talking about using the character creator
@@alexlabella1934 yeah, doing it to each NPC would be a nightmare. Maybe if you have dthe game ready and dedicate other 3 years just to that. But that's just a waste of money. Using the character creator instead of just randomizing everything would be the best idea imo.
Of all the criticisms I've heard over the past couple of months, no one brought up the save files not having thumbnails. That's insane. If I'd have played this game, I'd be so lost as to what file is what. Does it separate files by character?
the fact that we actually came down to having to upload hours long videos of lecturing bethesda how to make games, is .... mindboggling and frightening to say the least
The fact that a large amount of the points are “Do this really simple thing that you have been doing for years” is quite Depressing. It shouldn’t have to be said but is is.
The fact this game is in the top 10 of steam's most earning titles is what's mindboggling, frightening and sad. So much was promised that was just factually a lie. They clearly said that you could start running in one direction and keep going until you circumvented the planet. This is literally impossible in the game.
@@Jixxor not delivering in accidental promises is one thing (i dont want to be constantly careful what i say if i were to develope a game, and i just want to give people ideas beyond my game), ... but not at all delivering in the unspoken bare minimum that the game should be in the first place, that is the real messed up thing
I don't know. Saying you'll be able to circumvent the entire planet on foot if you wanted to about 1 month or so before release doesn't really feel like an accidental promise to me.
yea, my Steam review for Starfield was a bullet point list of dozens upon dozens of features present in BGS games dating back 20 years that were all but absent in Starfield I still can't fucking get over the fact there's no trespassing lmao
I finished the video (amazing job), but one thing I think is missing is some commentary on Starborn Power acquisition. It's a massive, almost unbelievable regression from the word walls in Skyrim. And it's not even like word walls were groundbreaking or anything... but at least they had dungeons, remote world exploration, or boss fights attached to them
Yes to this. The process of getting starborn powers is one of the biggest disappointments for me. No dungeon to go through, no enemies or baddies guarding it, the repetitive and irritating zero-g sequences that have no reason connected to them(what am I doing and why am I chasing floating star stuff?), and never more than one pathetic Starborn guard to beat afterward. So anti-climactic.
@@Kojo220the guards always spawn in the exact same places, too; so once you’ve seen the two variations of exit (the temple balcony and next to that rock that sits outside every temple) you can literally just aim at the same spot and shoot as they spawn
There is a plethora of videos and comments online about what Starfield did wrong. I appreciate so much that you did the hard work of actually suggesting changes and improvements.
Im surprised anyone actually laid out constructive criticsm. People have been doing this for over a decade and with the release of starfield, its shows that bethesda has not listened at all and instead done their same old shit.
So glad a channel that's tied closely with Bethesda content like you actual gives valid criticism instead of blindly praising this game solely because it's a Bethesda product
The real problem with bethesda is that they don't learn from their mistakes. If they were more humble and listened to the community that loves their games, they would have as much success as larian
Yeah so many of their problems could be solved just by listening to community feedback. Like I get that don't want to look at or deal with toxicity, but there's tons of constructive content like this video out there too.
Its not that did they not learn from their mistakes. They did not learn from their success either. They've removed things they did well in their other games and made it worse in Starfield (crafting system among others)
I'm sorry but i absolutely hate this take, because a LOT of starfield design stands PRECISELY from Bethesda actually listening to criticism against Fallout 4, especially by comparison to the Witcher 3 at that time. In the sense that in Starfield, like in Witcher 3 or in any other big RPG like the latest AC or Cyberpunk, exploration of interesting POI by itself has been completely turn down to be replaced by locations that exist only for a specific quests to send you here, that's how it works in the other games, but normally not in a BGS game, except the critical reception of Fallout 4 even if it sold very well, seems to be clear : plenty of people don't care about exploring just for the sake of it and plays only the quests and where the game tells you to go, and praise a game or not based on that. So in Starfield, Bethesda did just that, and put a lot more emphasis on quests, dialogue choices, voice acting, and making a silent protagonist again after the backlash against Fallout 4 voiced protagonist, but they scrapped thir exploration for that, because the noise of internet was saying that it didn't matter at the time. Since then open world pure exploration have been coming back strongly with game slike BOTW and Elden ring, but the general design of Starfield was already too much advanced to change anything. So basically i will actually say that in the case of Starfield, Bethesda listened TOO MUCH on the criticism against their previous games, and also apying too much attention and copy to the other game of the genra that came out like No Man's Sky. By biggest wish for Elder Scrolls 6 is that Bethesda gets confident again in a game THEY want to make and just make it, regardless of what is going on by the side in the gaming industry.
Community? 100 million active sony playstation users found out that a game with time exclusive was no longer a timed exclusive nor even on their console platforms. What do you think that community did? Buy a $350 xbox ($100 less than a ps5)? A $2000 pc? Nah they went on a a campaign to destroy the game by calling it "mid". Because they knew that the game was not 5/10 but 87/100. And many sony playstation users were saying how they wanted to play the game in youtube comments. Review bombs were followed by Stockholm syndrome.
It's not just a matter of writers, Bethesda don't use a design document which you can 100 percent blame, the lead writter for bgs has gone on record basically saying he cant be bothered updating a design document or having a team that updates it Until Bethesda start using design documents (that literally every single game designer use) then i really don't expect them to make anything like they used to when they had design documents
I love that he put more time into trying to gaslight people into enjoying his game on twitter (sorry, I mean, on X) than he did into writing design documents. What an absolute legend.
@@MisterNightfishemil has a lot of spare time at bgs. Tes6 wont be out until 2025 maybe 26. We will get another skyrim release, maybe two. Perhaps a fallout 4 rerelease really spice things up a bit.
That just isn’t true. It isn’t 100%. Not having design documents doesn’t affect the choice to rely more and more on radiant quest and procgen elements. Bethesda makes be choices all the time that is fundamental bad to the core of the game. I have stopped playing their games because every single game rely on bulletspunges. Fallout 3, Skyrim, Fallout 4, Fallout 76 and Starfield all rely on more attacks than tactics. In New Vegas I can be a Sniper. Sneak up on a ridge and take out enemies from far away in one clean hit. The only game that even gets close to that is Skyrim because of how OP stealth archer is. In FO4 you can’t do it.
@@lucamckenn5932 When Bethesda invests more on forum shills and bots to promote their rushed, half-baked titles, rather than improving the quality of their offerings its time to look elsewhere for innovative games.
I played almost every BGS game, even older ones like Arena and Daggerfall, making several playthroughs over the years. Though I don't think I am ever playing Starfield again. I don't know how they did it, the game feels boring and soulless. Even modders are giving up on the game.
I don't even think the modding community can fix it. I mean with almost 1000 "planets" you just can't make even 1/3 of them interesting or vast. It's a gigantic skeleton of a game and nothing else. This game has pretty much turned me off of space themed games entirely.
And if it's all so heavily procedurally generated, how are modders even supposed to begin to implement changes to the fundamental core of the game? I don't even know where modders would begin with that. At least with Fallout, Skyrim; everyone is operating on the same map. This doesn't even accomplish that... technically. Maybe you could modify a few locales relative to major cities? But there's no sense of exploration in that either. Not like Beantown/Lexington/Stumble Upon Interiors.@@j.c.denton2060
Not really. Look at the modders that got hired at BGS and what they put them to do The Frostfall modder-> in charge of designing the Economy The amazing custom homes modder-> in charge of filling interiors with junk items They can't even make use of their own employees strengths...this and the facts that every decision passes through Todd and that Emil is the sole writer in the game makes me much more simpathetic towards the average BGS employee and more jaded with the top brass that lacks a proper creative vision and the ability to delegate things that should be delegated to the right people in order to them to put their best in the game.
@@74153080except he clearly stated that he’s NOT A game developer lol I understand wanting Todd replaced, but not with someone who has zero experience in game design and development
@@MinosML100% I hope no one blames the devs, they crunch numbers and countless hours for our enjoyment. It's the guys at the top as usual, very upsetting
I submitted a feedback ticket to Bethesda including this video. I know the chances that it will get passed on to actual developers currently working on the game are very slim, but I felt that your feedback is so sincere and well-articulated that I had to at least try. If there's one thing the average gamer is not great at, it's providing proper constructive feedback, so thank you for filling in those gaps, Camelworks ♥
The more I hear, the more I think that the most ambitions thing about Starfield is the asking price. It looks almost like release No Man's Sky with a Bethesda-flavored lemon slice on top.
the thing is that Hello games always had a vision of what they wanted their game to be. (sure it took a LONG time to get there but the premise never really changed) Bethesda? not so much. to paraphrase southpark "make it lame and put NASA in it"
@@zeonos and what are those !? NMS has more boring features. Some are good, but most are boring, especially NPCs, side missions which are waiting simulator. Destructible ground is good, fleets are good, ocean exploring also good. Biomes are mostly fkd up in the NMS. And yes, i did play with most DLCs released except maybe last two, and Starfield was released in September, so we see will they in upcoming year improve the game.
No lie, during the demonstration of the waiting mechanic, I immediately got tempted to scrub forward in the video. I'm barely watching this fucking video on a second monitor and it was STILL excrutiating.
Same. Even as background noise as I cook dinner watching for the 10th time, I still feel cagey and want to scrub ahead when the wait mechanic comes up.
Man, after so many hours of playing Starfield, all the faction missions, traveling from one end of the available galaxy to the other end, after building my dreamship with a decent layout, and after building a system of outposts that provided me resources and funds, it hit me..... Starfield is just SUCH a user unfriendly game.
After like 6 hours I already knew, so I just droped it for good, no doubt saves me tons of frustration. Gonna pick it again after one year of hopefully good modding progress.
@@AlaiasAlias Mods cant fix core issues: loading screen simulator, horrible quest design, horrible npc's, bad writing and bad plot, very bad dialogue, bad voice acting, nonexistent exploration (not fixable in a world with 1000 planets)
Fallout 4: [exit Vault, walk a bit, talk a bit, within a few minutes you're building a settlement] Starfield: [grind for 10 hours to get the perks necessary, spend tons of money and resources researching just to unlock it, obtain a ridiculous amount of resources, craft dozens and dozens of different things requiring different materials, draw red lines between 300 different objects and it still doesn't work properly]
@@rykehuss3435 There were quest and NPC mods for previous games that even had full voice acting. The problem is: what modder is going to want to invest in doing that for a game like Starfield? The guy that made the co-op mod for Skyrim gave up on the same mod for Starfield because the game was so boring and not worth his time.
I genuinely hope that this video is taken into consideration and that many of our complaints and recommendations gets applied to future games. It’s been too long since we had a game like Skyrim.
I’m so worried that TES6 is going to be bad. It’s going to have been 15 years in between games and the expectation is very very very high. Pretty much perfection.
@@6MyUsername9 The game had basically no competition at the time. Now it completely fails to meet the baseline standards set by other games aside from accessibility. Its only strength it has above other games really seems to be the dopamine loop from dungeon crawling that I assume has been fulfilled by every looter shooter that has flooded the market since.
Bethesda has never listened to the fans of their games at pretty much any point in time after Morrowind's development, and if their recent responses to criticism on Steam are anything to go by, I wouldn't expect them to start
Couple extra thoughts: 1. For ship building, if having all ship parts at a single spaceport is not an option, then there needs to be a way in game to view all available parts and know exactly where I can go to buy it. Also give us the option to control where ladders/doors are placed. Agreed on the other things mentioned for the ship builder 2. For weapon modding, I should be able to buy attachments and attach/detach them from weapons as I see fit. It makes no sense that you can't go into a gun store and buy a supressor and a scope for that cool legendary gun you found, instead you have to throw it together yourself. 3. For outposts, there is not way to search through all of the stuff I have stored there, especially with the weight limits to containers, fallout 4 had a good solution for this with the workbench having a container that could store stuff. On that note, get rid of weight limits for containers, it's just annoying and not fun. 4. Also, this is a civilized society, why can't I bulk order things like ammo, resources etc. to my ship?
That’s a great point about bulk orders of ammo and medical equipment. If you have the purchasing power of literal planets, you should be able to at least order as much .45 ammo as you want to feed your antique pistols.
I am many hundreds of hours into this game and I never noticed that the watch face Barrett gives you is supposed to also be the little HUD on the left hand side of the screen. I had actually completely forgotten Barrett gave me that in the first place lol
They charged people like $230 for that watch in the collectors edition like it was gonna be as big of a deal as the Pip Boy. Do I feel bad for the people who bought that.
I got as far as the quest that had me recovering mining equipment. I was so bored, I switched off and did the dishes instead. Deleted it yesterday and reinstalled Oblivion.
For me, it was the Chunk's Sauce quest. You find a restaurant that's out of sauce. You volunteer to help. I was expecting to use my cooking skills to create my own sauce, or something. But no. You literally just fast travel to another restaurant, get the sauce, then fast travel back. That's it, that's the quest. Reward, 200xp. Wtf? Who designed that?
@@ichigokage Grocery shopping would have unironically been more interesting. Maybe I'd have to select the right item on the shelf, otherwise risk making a bad sauce. Maybe people get sick and the restaurant is forced to close. No, that quest was much worse than grocery shopping. I fast travelled twice and mashed "E" a dozen times, because the first dialog option is always the correct progression one.
I absolutely love this response to Starfield. Honestly the best video game review. You make sure you give constructive criticism instead of just piling on the hate with everyone else. I’ve had many thoughts similar to this and have had a hard time explaining it. You gave solutions with examples and even compared to previous BGS games. Phenomenal work
Another thing that would make 'exploring' half way bearable would be the ability to automatically call your ship from its current location to any landing surface that is discovered (i.e. landing pad at an outpost, ect). Where ships land should not be limited to a landing pad, just like No Man's Sky. The pad should just enable cost-free refueling, storage, and the like.
@@iRemainNameless you can land anywhere you like, not necessarily on landing pads. When exploring planets you're exclusively landing NOT on pads. If you build a landing pad at your outpost you can use a terminal there to bring the ship to you from anywhere & also modify/buy/sell ships. What the op is asking for is the ability to land somewhere, go exploring on foot, & instead of walking back or fast travelling back to your landed ship, having the ability to call your ship to you. There is apparently a mod which does this.
It's clear something went horribly wrong when they made this game, they lost institutional knowledge along the way. Emil Pagliarulo needs to go and they need to hire more AND better writers.
Honestly, studios like Bethesda have had their time in the sun, they peaked years ago, many of their original team members have moved on, and now its time for new up and coming developers to shine.
@@loC2ol CP as RPG sucked big time. It got same treatment as Fallout 4 and other RPGs where we got just illusion of choice. Outer worlds with much lesser budget made better AA RPG game than AAA games. For me Cyberpunk is downgrade from Witcher 3 and 2. We will see how they gonna handle next Witcher game.
@@loC2ol Nah, CDPR can tell good stories, but they can't make an immersive game even CP2077 is First Person View. Larian focus on turn-based game which is a no-go for lots of players. So im guessing we are done, no more skyrim then.
That title so funny when you realize Camel Works and to a larger extent Fudge Muppet has been covering Elder Scrolls for years. That goes to show how much better those older games were.
Starfield in a lot of ways is better on paper to Fallout 4, they did fix a lot of the problems, unfortunately its biggest failure is gameplay flow, which makes the game feel worse than it actually is.
@@matty7834 Thing is Starfield isnt even that good to begin with, which implies Fallout 4 is literal dogshit, only reason it has fans is because normies eat everything up and that its a game in an existing beloved franchise.
While I don't doubt that most of the older games are better. Though to be honest even if Starfield was amazing and blew ES and FO out of the water. There's still just so limited content to cover for Starfield that's just inherently in those other games favor. What with ES being five main games in and FO being 4 to 5. There's leagues of lore and perspectives to discuss and dissect for ages that even on Starfield's best day can't offer such sustainability for lore content for those channels.
The bestiary / database not being in the game is the biggest miss in my opinion. I found myself so frustrated trying to find planets and resources that I knew I had discovered before. Honestly probably would have kept playing a lot longer if there was something that you suggested where I could fill out a collection, sticker-book style.
Thank you! This list was cathartic to watch. On the crafting section, I'm surprised you didn't mention the glaring omission of transferrable weapon/suit mods -- that's a huge one for me! Like in Fallout 4 (and real life) you could remove a suppressor or a scope from one gun and put it on another. Also, on the unlockable appearance options 47:18 "in-game rewards for playing the game." Ohh, you sweet summer camel-child. That locked appearance tab is where Bethesda will put all the good stuff that they intend to sell us!
It’s Amazing how much of my immersion was nuked off the face of Jemison by the lack of a day of the week, date and year, ability to navigate without a out of game guide (Somehow made significantly harder than even real life) and ability to minimize/avoid fast travel. It feels borderline impossible to put yourself in the universe with zero frame of reference whatsoever in both time and space. Everything loses meaning if you don’t know what you did took 2 hours or 2 months. Even if the seasons don’t change in Skyrim, the well communicated passage of time makes it feel like the world isn’t static and only exists because of you.
I was super immersed in the game's tutorial (Vectera Mine), up until they told me I had to go and be an explorer. Yeah Lin is my supervisor but at the end of the day I have a contract with Argos Extractors, not her. You don't even get a choice because if you say no they just act like you said yes
In Real Life You have Many Points to Go Around this is some Random Game where you have no Points to move to the next Stepp it is Smaller but at the Same time this is all new.
A lot of starfields content is to mask how minimum the content really is. The map, the flashlight, the waiting, the time it takes to go to an objective, the loading screens
I felt like they are legit trying to waste players time with certain design choices so they can get an extra month of Gamepass subscription from us or keep us from playing other games. With things like the limited cash of vendors, the distance between POIs, the bloated radiant quests and the cumbersome fast travel especially in early game where your ship can't carry that much fuel and even by certain enemies being absolute bullet sponges even on normal difficulty. I've put over 20 hours into the game but when I think back I realize I did shockingly little during those long hours.
This is probably the best and fairest critique of Starfield that I've come across. Extremely well thought out and I really enjoyed watching it. You've got a new subscriber! Keep up the great content.
Other than the lack of writers, I also noticed that Starfield credit have so many producers compared to BG3. And if you watch the latest Noclip documentary of one of BGS lead artist that goes indie, he said that he did meeting with 3 different producers a week during Starfield development, far different compared to Skyrim. No wonder Starfield feel so disjointed without a single clear vision.
@@camraid9 Good leadership can make or break a company but I also feel like there's a cultural aspect to this as well. Most workplaces these days are too focused with making "safe" spaces where even well intentioned criticism can be misinterpreted as abuse or harassment. I feel like a lot of Starfields issues should have been brought up in meetings or by people saying xyz is shit or dumb.
how much experience do you have working for major companies? im not trying to be mean but this is so far from the trutth. most companies goal is to make money. employees are replaceable. those safe spaces are to cut back on having to payout millions on lawsuits of harassment and abuse.@@steveballmersbaldspot2.095
Starfield's biggest problem is too few writers. Everything else can be changed and improved, but the way the game is written and directed won't change.
I call this game the "Minimal Contractual Requirement" before everyone headed for the door. Regarding the star-search function, I would like to point out that at no point did the modding community want a hundred systems with a Bethesda game. What they wanted was the ability and room to insert some systems where their own work would have operated. Far far too many systems that serve no purpose. Actually, as I continued on the show I noticed you had quite a list, and the first words in my head were "but the modders will fix it..." I think the 'modders' are getting tired of Todd Howard's (censored), and I hope the clean-up crew understand that. In the meantime I remain hopeful. I understand some independents are putting out something in the Creation Engine in a few months time...
Modders have been taken advantage of for too long. We aren't entitled to their time or their effort, and neither is Bethesda. Thinking, "modders will fix that" is an unreasonable expectation, especially when Bethesda didn't bother to release modding tools when they released the game. I bet the people saying "modders will fix it" have never donated even a dollar to a mod maker. Their labor is expected, when it should be celebrated. It's a sad state.
So many of the design decisions BGS has been making lately are so baffling. I mean their games were always flawed, but they weren't annoying to play...
Yep, but with good exploration and stuff to do to keep you occupied for hundreds of hours and multiple playthroughs. Something I can't say about my time in Starfield.
Speak for yourself. I gave up on BGS after FO4. That game is just annoying to play through. All of their games are. Playing the Tales of Two Wastlands mod for FONV just shows how much worse FO3 is. In FO3 you go automatic and spray and prey. In Vegas you actually plan what to do.
@@Cloud_Seeker no? FONV is far more forgiving that FO3 considering how easy it is to rack up large amount of caps, Encounters and Dangerous enemies is pretty easy to avoid due to large open space and a lot of unique and top tier gears for any playstyle/Build is quite easy to acquired without much investment, there only handful of places that you need sort of plan to clear out, Quarry junction, Deathclaw promontory, Dead Wind Cavern and several cazador nests.
@@srt7248 I think you missed my point. I am not talking about how forgiving each game is. I am talking about which game is annoying to play. Fallout 3 is annoying to play. By the end of the game, all enemies will just be harder to kill because they have a lot of HP. In New Vegas I can go to Quarry junction and get ripped to shreds. I can then return to it and rip them to shreds as they are a static challenge. In Fallout 3 they should just have buffed the Deathclaws in terms of HP and damage so no matter what armor or weapon I had it should be a slog where the real struggle should be if I can find a piece of environment to break the AI pathing or if I can spam enough healing items while see how many bullets I cna put into the deathclaws. Bethesda have ALWAYS relied on bullet sponges to provide a challenge. That is why DC is filled with Super Mutant Masters and the outside is filled with Deathclaws and Albino Radscorpions at higher levels. It they are only there to give a high leveled character a challenge, when they shouldn't do it anymore. That is why you have a high level character.
@@Cloud_Seeker aside from unfair addition from Broken steel DLC, Fallout 3 combat is pretty balance. Beside that Death claw always been design to be bullet sponges, NV has better and large arsenal compare to fallout 3, you just need the right tools.
About the POIs being repetitive: why not use procedural generation? Tons of games use procedurally generated dungeons to great effect. It would've been much more fun than the however many dozen handcrafted dungeons we got that have the exact same layout, loot and enemy spawns. Bethesda used procgen for the terrain the player looks at and runs around in, but they decided not to do so for the stuff the player wants to interact with?
If Bethesda did just what is in this video it would be a better game. But they won't. I just don't have any faith in them. Especially because they know full well that modders will do a lot of this for them. I hope people don't buy future titles until some significant and repeatable trust is earned. The sheer amount of things they did in previous games but not in starfield is insane. EDIT: Also in regards to vehicles, modded skyrim can have faster horses that don't cause crashes. I use a mod for this amongst over 1500 other mods and skyrim is one of the most stable bethesda game experiences I have had after all those mods. Since starfield is supposed to be using an upgraded version of the engine I find it insane to think that they can't make vehicles for ground exploration work when modders did it years ago in a 12 year old game using an older version of the engine. There is no valid excuse for BGS being this bad.
Modders aren’t helping much anymore since some are now pulling out cause Starfield is empty. Modders work from passion. They need something to be passionate about and BGS didn’t provide. 🤷🏻♀️
@@ichigokage True. I guess the better way to put it is that BGS probably take the modding community for granted. And don't expect people to just leave the game entirely. Big difference between Skyrim and Starfield in terms of mods is that Skyrim mods make a great game better. While Starfield mods are trying to make a bad game good.
You can’t make a game with huge flaws and expect ALL the players to go and load mods on their game unit to fix the flaws in the game for it to feel like a better game. Many players are just going to refuse to go the mod route. Some those players will be lost forever from the game as well any future game that game studio releases. The studio needs to do their job and fix their game.
Flashlights in video games always confused me, in any real life scenario where your in a pitch black space, a torch can easily light up a huge area. Hell, when caving, a single match can light up a room sufficiently to see several meters around you no problem (as long as your not staring at the light source). Its really strange that most games choose to only illuminate small circles of space as opposed to, say, making a bright circle, but also increasing the overall scene brightness in the rest of the space to visible levels.
The best part? This already existed in some games where there is simulated bounce lighting. State of decay had that where there was a beam of light and a general area light, a 10 years old game that started production in 2008 btw. Now it's more appealing with Ray traced global illumination.
This is very well thought out criticism, almost like a Document with Designs for a Game. If only Bethesda had one of those *before* they made the game.
When I saw your mockup of a better map using LODs, I was actually amazed. Such a simple fix that would take it from being the worst map of all time to among the best.
The worst thing is, that’s literally exactly what they did for the local maps in Fallout 3 and Skyrim(tho they also added filters to them, which made the maps nearly useless)
"The more I play, the less I want to play" Exactly my experience, and exactly the thought I was having this morning while sitting down to continue my newest holiday playthrough of Morrowind. Also, regarding "studying game development academically"... you don't need to be a Michelin star chef to know when food tastes like ass, you just need a mouth.
What’s crazier than the effort put into this video is that this video had to be made in the first place. What the hell. Congrats on this painstaking project camel, beautiful work as always!
Youre describing features I never thought an open game could be developed without. Not just for gameplay purposes, like the flashlight, but for more complex purposes like the bestiary. Which serves as a library for discoveries to go back and find what you found but also to serve as a completionist tracker.
This video was soothing. Bethesda should have him write more beautiful things and have you reading to us. Thank you I'm 34 hours in and haven't started the main mission. I love starfield. I bought it September 6th but didn't start playing it until last week. I do t get the negative reviews but to each their own. I appreciate the content
I think their first step would be to even take the criticism aimed at the game as a form of feedback with which they could improve the dlcs and potential Starfield 2 in the future. Instead it seems they are too busy telling the people who have played the game that they are doing it wrong if they dont enjoy the game.
Another nitpicky thing that BGS didn't include - where did the gore go? That was one of the thing I loved when I first played Fallout New Vegas. I had not experienced before being able to shoot someone in the head and it pops like a balloon, and then shooting their body and it explodes into giblets. In this game, I shoot a dude square in the chest with a rocket and... he doesn't just spectacularly explode?
Honestly, I think the biggest issue with Bethesda going forward is Emil's attitude and how he's been handling even proper criticism of his writing/work ethic. As many have pointed out, he's got a couple of pretty infamous interviews/talks where he discusses his disdain for design documents, doesn't listen to/accept criticism, and how he is a vehement follower of KISS, which is just a horrible way to look at it. Yes, you should keep it simple but that doesn't mean that the writing needs to be dumbed down and adding stupid to the end just makes it feel like he's more attacking how people write than actually trying to form a coherent point. I think it also doesn't help that I'm sure that the stuff Todd went through during Morrowind's development scarred him pretty significantly. If what I've been told is true, Bethesda is one of the few game studios that doesn't force crunch time and that has a lot to do with the fact that Todd and company were pretty much forced to work 16+ hour shifts 5-7 days a week for a whole year trying to finish Morrowind in a timely manner. I know in interviews he's talked about it, how much it affected both his and his team's physical and mental health, and I'm pretty sure that has affected him negatively. It's clear he's very close to the top members of his group and I'm sure he just doesn't want to fire Emil because they're best friends who have been through a lot together. Unfortunately, no matter how much I feel for Todd and the stuff he's gone through he's gotta do something about Emil because if not Emil will drag his company down and Bethesda will just become another AAA development studio that shovels out "safe" games like Ubisoft and EA do. Which is unfortunate, because while I wasn't a big fan of Skyrim and only put maybe 50 hours into the game, I do love Oblivion and Morrowind and I would hate to see Bethesda die. I'm just hoping that with all the negativity between this and 76 that Bethesda finally gets it's ass into gear or Todd is going to find himself in the exact same situation he was when he and his team were working on Morrowind and I don't think the company is going to make it out a second time if they do.
Todd neither had to fire Emil nor crunch to make Starfield good. He could keep Emil but not let him have the final say on a project's writing. And Starfield had nearly 3 time the dev cycle of the average AAA yet Todd admitted it was only ever fun 1 year from launch. Their unorthodox project management and bland design philosophy killed it.
@@TheAxebeard I feel like it does though, since if they feel a character is too important to the story they will make that character unkillable. This is fine once or twice but when too many characters are like this it starts effecting the gameplay as well.
@@PandaCake978 Unkillable NPCs in a game literally centered on a multiversal experience where you are charged, again and again, to start over in a different universe is truly the crown of baffling design decisions.
What you were describing with the naming of the weapons -reminds me a of a practice in data analytics where we might make names by combining columns. I wonder if the naming conventions in this game is just them using a quick coding solution to randomized objects with out thinking about end user experience or having any considerations for lore or world building.
It feels like not a lot of care or passion was put into the game in a lot of aspects. Now I'm fairly certain that isn't actually the case, it's just the poor execution of the final product that makes it seem that way. I think the game was probably way more ambitious at one point, but had to be scaled back immensely to make it work.
If you listen the lore for the game, it does have sense, but this current period is just after all the things that happened where world (universe) was more interesting. So because main player seems like he/she is just PUT there as one ant in entire universe, so for things to be more interesting they added powers, which honestly i think is bad main story design, because there are a lot of other things they could put in focus instead of main focus to collect artifacts and get powers. If artifacts were the main case, that should have been much more in depth, so actual story should get more interesting RPG elements where your decisions actually will change the end and have larger effect on everyone and everything. But apparently devs (not just Bethesda but rest also) are lazy, or scared to make some actual RPG elements that gonna effect entire game and playthrough.
Starfield is like an Alpha game release with lots of finishing features yet to be released. Everything you mentioned here would vastly improve the quality of gameplay. The end statistics is mind blowing.
I honestly think they went in over their heads with this game. This whole thing is an enormous undertaking. Making the world so massive and interesting at the same time is impossible, unless you have like 30 years and 1000s of devs working tirelessly. They should have known this. It was an impossible task from the get-go. With all the time and effort they put into Starfield, they could have made Elder Scrolls 6 by now and it would have been the undisputed best game ever.
CIG with Star Citizen and Squadron 42 are doing it... Squadron 42 being the single player campaign and Star Citizen being the MMO. There are i think currently 130 solar systems planned with varying degrees of hostility/civilisations including aliens etc. Bar the ones that are already completed for SQ42, CIG is focusing on making each solar system have a unique identity. Each planet and moon procedurally generated to a degree within certain parameters and then finished off by the artists from handcrafting certain aspects of landscapes to points of interest. Their approach shows that it works as in the first solar system (Stanton) people have their favourite planets/moons factions etc, let alone all the different brands from ships to guns and armour to food. Since all have an identity, personality even. Each faction also has very different architectural/aesthetic styles. The issue seems to be that Todd wants to dazzle people with quantity over quality. The same can be said for No Man's Sky and Elite Dangerous. Where in both games, gameplay is a complete afterthought. The only goal during development was the quantity of planets that they actually forgot to make a game... Skyrim only has the longevity it has because of the modding scene. The actual vanilla game is frankly terrible and even the re-release still doesn't support ultra wide monitors, same for fallout 4...meanwhile the witcher 3 on the other hand does. TES6 would suffer the same fate without drastic changes within the studio itself as its clear that they are somewhat similar to Creative Assembly in some regards and ride of past successes whilst removing from their games everything that made it good. BG3 is probably the best game to date if you exclude nostalgia. It could be usurped by Squadron 42 though, we'll find out within the next year.
@@chazz00999 As impressive as Star Citizen's advancement has been (even just the fact that they're still around is unprecedented), it isn't a good comparison to pretty much any other game due to how different and absurdly long their development has been. Star Citizen began 12 years ago now, which is already 50% longer than Starfield allegedly took and they still don't have a real release (even if parts of the game are now playable). They have also had, as of this point, more than 3 times the amount of money Starfield took to develop and are still raising more. It is entirely possible that Star Citizen will be the first game to have ever breached 1 billion dollars in development cost prior to official release. BG3 is a much better foil for other studios, as it was a traditionally developed game.
@@CheezMonsterCrazy it is a good comparison frankly. CIG is an indie studio that started out of a garage and now has 1300 employees world wide. Bethesda is an established company with established IP. They have had the funds to make something like Star Citizen for over a decade. Even NMS had 15 devs and did planetary to space flight as janky and terrible as that game is. There is no excuse for Bethesda. They are just talentless hacks riding on past successes. The amount of funding CIG has does not equate to money spent on development costs. But considering they are making 2 games currently with it, it's more akin to $300m per game so far, and SQ42 is due to be released within the year allegedly. Nowhere was I saying that Bethesda should have 130 solar systems with that much depth. But they certainly have the funds to make a handful of solar systems with a rich amount of lore and could have added more solar systems with their own story arcs through DLC. Instead, it's a game almost as soulless and devoid of life as NMS and ED.
Regarding the Pizza analogy, it kinda reminds me of a few other games I've played. I don't know how many here have played Age of Conan, but the first area of the game is hand crafted with voice acting, but once you leave that area and get dropped into the rest of the game, it's like you have a large open world filled with hardly anything, and no more voiced NPCs. It's all text from there on out.
Had they dropped the creation kit along with the launch, there would have at least been an argument for 'we rushed doing the engine right to let you guys start on awesome mods, quests will come later'. But this is just madness.
Bethesda just has incompetence. Theoretically you can still make something even with as old of bones as the creation engine into something thst works for modern gaming. The core of a the grand majority of today's engines were created in the 90's, and were adapted to work better and do more today. Bethesda is just comfortable and complacent working with jank and design philosphies that were alreadh outdated and in some ways outright downgrades from their previous work ever since 2002.
@@queuedjar4578Rockstar rage engine was also a modified old engine, the same base used for Midtown madness in 99 was used for the Rockstar proprietary engine RAGE that runs GTA IV, V and that will run VI. Bethesda just became complascient with the amount of tech they developed for their games. morrowind to oblivion there was a huge leap, oblivion to F3 and on were tiny baby steps.
Bethesda are smug better than and too inclusive to have the guts to make a game we want. Morrowind was only as good as it is because they were going for broke. All or nothing. They are no longer on the ropes. They have financial calls and shareholders to please. Not you, me, or Camel. We don't exist. SweetBaby will assist in creating TESVI and I would bet money on it@@lasarousi
Also, Bethesda claims they still work with hundreds of people on Starfield - and what do they accomplish? Two tiny todo list issues every six to ten weeks, first DLC maybe a year after release, CK will drop maybe after 1.5 years. _WHAT_ do they ffs???
This is an incredible video! It's not just pointing out issues, it's offering actual solutions while still being aware of limitations the author might not be aware of. Really impressed with this! Thanks for taking the time to put it together.
They could implement every single one of these fixes and more, and i still don't think i'll want to go back to it. For me, the single biggest issue is loading screens. There has been zero attempt to limit the amount of loading screens. There are even completely unnecessary loading screens in the game. In the nightclub on Neon, when you take the elevator, you are greeted with a loading screen ... only to find yourself still within THE SAME LOADED AREA. You can literally jump off the balcony onto the dance floor, and take the same elevator back up via loading screen. Nothing is loading, it is pure laziness. Same goes for entering your ship. Why can we not have an airlock cycling animation? Why does our immersion need to be completely and unnecessarily destroyed? I don't see how they can be proud of this game.
Being kind and understanding has only gotten us flak too. Emil already thinks players are idiots and pays zero mind to critique and reviews. Then you have Pete Hines or whoever is their PR telling fans to ‘shut the fuck up’ about TES6.
Stop. Giving. Them. Money. In late stage capitalism, the only thing that gets anyone moving is the promise of extra zeroes, or the shrinkage of those zeroes at the end of the paycheck. Ergo. If no one bought tes6 some major shit would go down. Like, colossally massive amounts of shit. Because zenimax would threaten to pull the plug. Heads would roll, people would be chastened, new reasonable people can come in and replace the less than desirables that you know for a fact are there for cheeky diversity hires. Money talks, and bgs fan base wont shut the fuk up.
@@Originalchili "Strawman" detected. You misrepresented someone's argument to make it easier to attack. "Black or white" detected. You presented one alternative state as the only possibilitiy, when in fact more possibilities exist.
On the Shipbuilding part i thought a toggle between Exterior and Interior would be the most intuitive. Inside the shipbuilder you see your ship, toggle to interior and it shows the interior inside the ship silhouette and from here you can adjust the interior.
Incredible constructive video! These 2h were a lot more interesting and fun than most of the 40h of Starfield gameplay I was patient enough to play. As a BGS fan fanboy I felt fooled and robbed. To wait so many years and get so hyped by the devs, I spent 100$, took a week off from work, and i got so disappointed that I don't have the desire to get back to Starfield anymore and absolutely regret spending 100$ But I would definitely play the game with the improvements you depicted in this amazing video. Good job, sir!
Exactly. I've been using mods to implement a lot of these suggestions just to make the game playable without getting bored and frustrated. I can now play it on PC at a point where i'm not completely annoyed at the in-game systems. Found a couple more mods and tweaks because of things in this video, like being able to mod weapons to higher tier and speed up wait time that I flagged for install.
I'm sorry, Camel, but I don't know how to fix a game that, at the core, is bad. Here's my review, and I have no idea how to fix this: I'm not a Bethesda fan boy. But I am a 67 year old Skyrim fan boy. I played Skyrim since Special Addition came out and 95% of that play time is a modded Skyrim. But Starfield? I played 74.5 hours and uninstalled it. I give the game a 4.5/10 and that's for the art department because the game looks pretty good. Excepting water. The game was over hyped, falsely advertised (simply listen to Todd explaining all the cool exploration we can't do), horrible optimization, no immersion, uses a crap engine, totally crap UI, bug filled, glitch filled, crashes, repetitive, boring, broken stealth, horrible perk system, janky base building (with little instruction), janky ship building (with little instruction), copy/pasted POI's, absolutely dreadful and contradictory companions who don't care who or what you are other than you're important, no-name citizens that walk back and forth on an invisible tether and many times get in your way, weak main and side missions, overloaded cut scenes and load screens, mediocre gun play with bullet sponge targets. Really bad circa 2011 AI. There are no real choices with consequences. Any choice you make still takes you on the direction Bethesda wants you to take. Thus, the traits and abilities you pick in character generation have little to no benefit. There is no depth or relevance to this game and its components. This game has no role playing despite it being labeled an RPG. This game has no soul. The junk you pick up is pointless, extremely underwhelming carry weight, arbitrary level farming to mend/boost your XP/perks/ money, vendors with little money, NO MAPS, companions scolding you one after the other because you chose the dialog Bethesda didn't want you too, more loading screens in five minutes of play than the entirety of Elden Ring, 300 years of human fiction with nothing to really show for it, no challenging locations or bosses. And no reason to actually make an outpost to farm stuff because you can simply purchase it at a vendor. A "2023 next gen game" with 2006 water graphics? Starfield is fundamentally flawed on so many levels. It is NOT open world. It's plagued with bad game design decisions, half baked systems, bland & uninspired writing and outdated quest design. It isn't "Skyrim in Space", nor is it "Fallout in Space". Starfield is a downgraded, mediocre and soulless mixture of Skyrim & Fallout 4, without the free world exploration and the charm of neither. It's a regression from Bethesdas previous titles in all aspects and the saddest part is that it took them 8 years to create this piece of mediocrity with unparalleled boredom. Mario Cart is more fun than the spaceship battles in Starfield. What's even worse is that devs had ALL the creative freedom to write whatever the hell they wanted; there is no established lore that restricts them from going crazy. And yet they went for the most banal unimaginative take on sci-fi. Funny thing with Londinium - I decided to try landing randomly on the planet, ignored the UC ship telling me to stay away and menu clicked my way down there. As soon as I got out, another random ship came a few hundred metres away, as they do. I wandered over, found it was a Freestar Ship that had landed at a "small settlement" or something like that. On Londinium. The planet that was quarantined because it was over-run with monsters. Sigh. Later, I’m desperate to complete the main quest so I can finally uninstall. I made it to the buried temple - which is of course just another copy paste junkyard. Sarah said she wanted to speak to me and told me that Barrett was worried about her back at the lodge. Well, Barrett fraking died on the Eye when the Hunter attacked about 30 hours ago! What little immersion I had left was instantly taken away! TLDR; Abysmal writing. The worst part is they made a world (worlds) that were already explored. It all feels like we were late to the party. Every planet is littered with copy/pasted factory’s and outposts, you are never more than a 1000 meters from a structure. The whole colonial war already happened and you just get to hear about all the cool interesting events that already occurred. No matter how far you go, there are almost always humans waiting for you there. Even the plants & wildlife that you need to scan already have names. Therefore, locations have already been discovered in the past. What really burns my backside is that New Game + merely allows you to replay the game over again with the same or different companions; ie., Sarah becomes a potted plant, all the Constellation members are children and I think the very worst is all the Constellation members are you with different personalities (and that's to name just three of the 10 or so variations you get. Not only that, when it comes to the writing and consequences of going through the Unity, Sam Coe's questline revolves around restoring a relationship with Cora's mother, Lillian Hart, yet when it comes to the Unity, Sam shows not the slightest consideration of Lillian in allowing young Cora to go through the Unity. I would think she would be devastated. Also, if you do NG+ to bring all 24 powers to level 10, that means you'd have to jump through 1200 glowy-glitter things in 240 temples. No, thanks. This game was labeled as "Next generation" gameplay? Don't stop to think Bethesda will fix anything other than the most egregious problems and that modders can "fix" the game when Bethesda won't. I've come to the realization that the game is fundamentally flawed in a way that no mod or update can actually fix. It's the base level structures of the game that are so unappealing. Modders can come very close to it, but I don't see that as a modders unpaid job. An example would be that modders made Skyrim better. But they didn't "fix" it. As I sit now with 74.5 hours into Starfield, I honestly don't think I'll ever play this game again. At least not without a Cyberpunk 2.0 and DLC type upgrade. And this Bethesda mediocrity has me very worried for Elder Scroll 6. Don't settle for mediocrity.
Yeah it feels like the game needs to be rebuilt at a fundamental level to even begin to crawl out of mediocrity. ES6 is poised to be a dumpster fire if some big changes don't happen over there.
@@afungai1649 I didn't know who or what a Nakey Jakey was so I looked it up. So I thank you for the (indirect) reference and will watch what he has to say.
I really like what you did when you compared the developers for Morrowind vs Starfield. In many fields this is referred to as a Figure Of Merit. You relate characteristics that are common to each product, usually involving dividing output (number of quests) by input (number of developers) to obtain some number for comparing the performance/quality/efficiency of each one.
![[UNCUT] บอสพอล แผลงฤทธิ์ บอสพระ-นักร้อง ก. โดนแฉยับ! I คนดังนั่งเคลียร์ I 21 ต.ค. 67](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/XKf6HeftoPI/mqdefault.jpg)
The saddest thing about Starfield isn't Starfield itself, but the foreboding feeling that the next TES game won't resemble the games we loved.
Yeah I'm honestly very apprehensive about it, we need to see some big changes over there, or at least some indication of a directional shift.
The last time BGS innovated on their formula was Morrowind -> Oblivion. Since Oblivion, every subsequent game (yes, including the darling Skyrim) has removed and reduced the important features that made the games what they are. It has reached an absurd level, as evidenced by this video. Guys, you can't even swim in Starfield. Don't hold your breath for ES6.
At this point, after Fallout 4, Fallout 76 and Starfield ...yeah,the next TES game is kinda bricked.
Also, they won't use Jeremy Soule so the soundtrack will be inferior from the start.
@@comancostin4623 What? His soundtracks are amazing why on Earth would they use anyone else?
@@steveballmersbaldspot2.095 Some unfounded allegations about using his influence to chase women and the fact that he is a difficult person to work with.
And also he scammed some people on Kickstarter.
Bethesda here. We'll forward this to the modding community. Thank you for your effort.
thank you steel5897 o7
I doubt modding community would again save your bad design and If you were realy from Bethesda perhaps shame would be more appropriated. Shame for not carrying how bad the game shows to your customer. Shame to be a developer who doesn't want to improve and even deliver a game which all of your clients would love. Main word here "Shame" I doubt you can even feel it.
@@LidiaLeeSun Hey pal, theu were def. joking. Even Bethesda knows now that modders do not care.
@@dagda1180it's really funny to imagine that it's actually Bethesda though, just giving the most tone deaf response on a random account 😂
Mods don't change the console
This is the most constructive video I've ever seen on youtube:
-laying out each problem
-comparing it to previous games
-suggesting unidealized fixes that should be within the capabilities of the studio & engine
I love the way you go about it in the most fair and objective way possible; it couldn't be clearer that your intention isn't to dunk on the game, but to help them improve it for everyone's sakes
The problem is that these suggested fixes are NOT the main problems of the Creation engine or Starfield. These are just minor irks, cosmetic changes that can easily be done by the modders of the community. But they wanted to tackle the main problems first, like the endless loading screens and the fact that there are NO seamless transitions from flying through space to landing on a planet. But those problems can't be fixed within the capabilities of the Creation engine, which is why the community has pulled the plug on Starfield and declared it to be irreparably broken. There's a demo where one modder from the community tried to make a sequence for a direct landing on a planet, but the Creation engine simply kicked him out, because it can't do it.
The Creation engine is old, in gaming industry terms it's even ancient, and it feels tired. It hasn't been fixed, let alone seriously updated since Fallout 3. That is something you can't "fix" with some mods or reprogramming. In order to make the Creation engine do what it needs to do, it has to be torn down almost completely and rebuilt and the question then is: is it worth it when other engines can already do what you want? So, financially speaking it would make much more sense to port Starfield to a new engine or just scrap it and start with a fresh sheet.
Everyone's sakes? The hell are you talking about? Bethesda isn't your friend and they don't care about your opinion or this guy's video. Video only got made to get views anyway, and if i'm wrong and this guy really thinks Bethesda is going to care, I feel even more sorry for him. But hey, lets not be mean assholes, you all should treat Bethesda with sugarcoated opinions, and let them down easy. Oh yeah, and you still buy their crap.
You want to help others? Get out of the abusive relationship before Bethesda smacks you in the wallet again and you look even dumber. There is nothing constructive about sycophants fluffing the subject of their worship by being nice about it.
@@tjroelsma Moders have already done a bunch of these, also there's a lot of small things to find and form an understanding through the xEdit for Starfield (basically looking into the .esm files).
@@tjroelsma The creation engine is fine, it's just that it simply isn't suitable for the game Starfield wants to be.
Perfectly fine for their normal style of games like skyrim or fallout.
Except that it does dunk on the game even if it's not intentional from OP. Starfield is such a disasterpiece that it literally does that itself.
I can't shake the feeling that if a Bethesda employee saw this they'd suggest you get to modding if you want any of these features.
But they don't realise a game has to be good and playable in order to make mods *enhancing* the gameplay. No one wants to mod a shitty game where nearly everything has to be rewritten.
They’re not all bad. It’s just the people calling the shots. The Artists did a great job for the most part, it’s just that they work for a shitty company. Todd’s intern is probably the one they make deal with all the flak
You're playing it wrong! Space is boring, not fun, and empty! Sorry we make realistic games! \o/
@@jtn191 Imagine next TES game will be just an empty planet generator with nothing on it. What do you want, magic and dragons do not exist, aren't you aware? Next gen realism.
Emil be like
They made waiting immersive. It's just tedious enough to make you actually feel like you're waiting. Amazing!
24:48 pause and read, I laughed.
Lol
lol - waiting for vendors to restock money is so annoying, but ironically BGS don’t make you wait at all when you’re in jail! I feel like serving some actual time (just a few minutes) with the option to break out of jail (or bribe your way out) could be quite immersive - as the stakes would be higher when committing crimes
Strand type waiting game.
Speeding up the waiting worked on his setup, but don't forget that this has to work for everyone in the world, across millions of different hardware configurations as well as console - so I don't think it's fair to say they set the wait time to be slow just to be vindictive. I imagine a great deal of testing went into this simple looking problem, to find a value that worked correctly everywhere.
the restraint in your voice the entirety of this video is palpable and amenable. Truly walking them through baby steps. Its really like their challenge for themselves is "how can we make our games worse while staying flashy enough to sell?"
What a title
What a username 👏🏼👏🏼
What a response
The title is exactly what they needed to hear though. Completely ignored what made their old games good for this game, it was like someone’s first attempt at developing this type of game.
Stop putting so much effort into the wall textures that noone cares about or will ever look closely at is my best advice. Fuck your art simulation I am a GAMER.
@@strangeflavouredquark7393what a comment section
The sad thing is so many, probably most, videos of this nature come from a place of love. People who want to see Bethesda at least do better next game even if they don’t try to improve Starfield through patches or expansion packs. Then you look at Bethesda’s response, and it seems they ignore it or worse yet view it as antagonistic.
It seems like there's too many big and fragile egos over there for them to not view any criticism of the game as inherently toxic. I mean beyond being less buggy what criticism have they even taken into account from Fallout 4 and 76 in making Starfield? The game is a massive step back in so many areas...
@@steveballmersbaldspot2.095 It a plot to make Skyrim look better by destorying all hope anything they make will be good!
That Todd Howard! /jk
But seriously i feel like the whole creative industries need a mental check up and sealing of egos to be good creatives.
Yeah, sadly Emil has an incredibly fragile ego and Todd + company love him deeply and would defend him with their lives; despite the fact he's quite literally one of the worst writers most of us have ever seen. His entire personality revolves around shitting on the community and calling them braindead toddlers, while his writing is that of a braindead toddler.
Couldn't have said it better myself.
We want to love Starfield.
And I for one love what the game already has, but I also see the potential for what it could have, and that makes me sad.
Especially when replaying Elder Scrolls games and seeing what they can do if they really try.
If they go bankrupt, it would be just desserts for their arrogance and incompetence.
About half of these are things I assumed I was missing somehow. Either I was doing something wrong, or there was a bug, or I just needed to upgrade something or get a skill. The first time I saw the surface map I immediately started Googling for something to fix it, cause I assumed it was a bug.
The first time I saw the surface map my game stopped to a halt... I discovered, in the worst way possible, that my PC could not handle that many dots the default surface map has so i had to discover a way to mod it. 😕
Bethesda here. When astronauts went to the moon they didn't have local maps of earth with them either because that would've been pretty dumb. So we just skipped all that. Hope this helps!
Yea I was thinking why isn’t my map working? There’s nothing there must be a bug. But no they decided that the game needed a map that wasn’t one. I mean why bother?
Considering BGS still in denial according to their steam review response, I doubt they will watch this. Especially when the lead writer/designer itself was publicly said that they ignore criticism.
that wasn't bgs who responded to the reviews that was the team that is currently doing 76 which means they stepped way out of line and bgs should tell them to stay in their lanes and mind their business or fire the person behind the reviews
??? since when did emil say that? i think you might've been high, also they clearly do listen to criticism since they made a end of year post and post on the reddit every time they release an update
@@chaserseven2886 Emil is a fucking hack and he shouldn't be trusted to write for fucking fortune cookies.
@@chaserseven2886He said it during a keynote he did back in 2016. The same one where he also stated he doesn't use design documents and uses the KISS principle as a key design pillar. Very damning stuff.
@@steveballmersbaldspot2.095 also stated he wanted witches and magic in FO4. The ‘Keep it simple, stupid’ and how he essentially sees players as morons who just tear pages out of his stories to make paper airplanes and build shacks left such a bitter taste in my mouth. Egomaniacal mid-tier writer.
I am just... baffled at what BGS have been doing for about 8 years. Most of these suggestions are not only common sense in 2023, not only have they been done before, but they've been done by Bethesda themselves.
They're locked in a competition with Blizzard to see who can be the first legendary AAA studio to completely ruin what scraps of their reputation for greatness remain.
@@Armoredcompany Tbh they probably gonna need a workplace scandal or two in oder to beat Blizzard.
Bethesda has been milking skyrim the past 10 years and doing nothing else but paying their b team to make Starfield while the A team butchers the new Tes
If how they have been responding to negative steam reviews is anything to go off of, they do not listen to player feedback and haven’t been for a while. They have become so divorced from their fan base that their next games are all but guaranteed to be mediocre
@@Vecha302 I'll field that one. To use Fallout 76 as an example, it's true that Bethesda is a sprawling mass of many different studios etc.
Fallout 76 was primarily entrusted to Bethesda Austin, who were a recently acquired studio that previously ran under the name Battlecry Studios. Battlecry Studios was already owned by Zenimax, who set it up in the first place to produce micro transaction and free to play games such as the cancelled project Battlecry. They modified the Creation engine for online play and as such are somewhat responsible for the atrocious issues FO76 had at launch.
This is an example of core game production being farmed out to a 'B' team and suffering as a result, the B team being not a well established, long serving part of BGS.
Of course, the 'A' team of BGS were somewhat involved in the finishing and Lore development for FO76, which was also very poor.
The primary issue is that FO76 was/is a live service game, which means that the projected income is spread over time rather than being based on immediate sales. As such, more of the games development time is used on things that aren't core to the gameplay experience, like the bleeding shop, and less on polish and gameplay mechanics. They also skint on the development cost by farming it out to a 'B' team to keep production costs down.
So to sum up, a 'B' team is not a core part of an established company. They are often newer or more recently established studios that aren't usually involved in flagship titles, and they are used to keep production costs down by not paying 'big talent' with equally big paychecks.
The last part made the entire video worth it, it was like the ultimate roast of starfield and the current industry.
Agreed - the 1-2 credited writers point is crazy - more games media should be talking about it. I think it clearly explains why the game feels so empty.
@@RobbieB2606loads of critics have zeroed in on this being the game's single biggest downfall.
I've seen (& scrolled past) literally dozens of videos calling for Emil Pagliarulo (lead writer) to be sacked.
@@skyriminspaceyet clearly it isn’t enough yet. Therefore more is necessary
Starfield really should have been an "The Expanse" type of video game where we have our solar system and maybe even one or two more when advancing the story with a lot more factions fighting for control and handcrafted planets. It would be smaller in scope but so much more fun to actually play.
The state of the gaming industry (besides BG3) is so fucking dire that my mind can’t even comprehend what an insanely rich studio like Bethesda could do with a handful of custom made planets, ACTUAL GOOD WRITERS, and some fucking passion could do with this premise.
A freeroaming The Expanse game would be brilliant! The locations, the intrigue, the combat, it is perfect for an exploratory CRPG.
@@jasper_the_ghostI absolutely DESPISE how much I agree with your comment. This is why I keep thinking that western gaming is almost as dead as modern Hollywood is. No creativity, no good writing, no passion, only the motivation of pushing dei narratives and easy money. Probably why I've been so drawn to Japanese media for a while now. Most of their studios, in gaming and other visual media, seem much more motivated by a creative vision than woke narratives and money. They aren't perfect, either though. One big problem is that a lot of them tend to find a niche and bleed it to death (i.e. isekai in anime).
No, you could have just treated it like Elder Scrolls or Fallout: give us a small part of the world and hint at the larger world. Just say that grav drives can only take you in a star system in small periods of time and that interstellar travel takes months to even years.
@@SuperBrainSandwich >This is why I keep thinking that western gaming is almost as dead as modern Hollywood is.
Are you talking about AAA games specifically, or ALL games, including indie?
If you include the latter, it's most DEFINITELY not, with 2023 being one of the better years in recent history, with just dumptrucks of quality games being released...
If we include AAA only...
>Most of their studios, in gaming and other visual media, seem much more motivated by a creative vision than woke narratives and money.
Partially because their culture isnt dominated by simply Shareholders, it's dominated by "Shinra". (although, of course, money is very much king, even in Japan)
Additionally, the culture is FAR more brutal and unforgiving...
ALL of this is a prime example of just how crucial developer notes are during development, ALL the lessions learned from past games, during development and tracking the changes needed when the entire development of a game is done on the fly.
Base building, just throw it in and not connect it to anything or give it any real purpose.
This statement holds even more weight when you consider the fact that during the development of starfield, we had the whole pandemic going on. Those docs sure would have came in handy... I hope this is a wake-up call for Bethesda, but honestly I have little faith in them anymore.
@@frenchbologna I honestly don't think they care anymore, they just want to make a platform for recurring revenue from the Creation Club and DLC like with Skyrim, it's why Unique weapons are just RNG drops instead of handcrafted placements, the whole game is just centered around infinite content of procedural generation.
Design documents are needed.
@@SynthLizard8 Also the unique weapons or suits don't feel that unique when they look identical to the regular versions and more often than not have lower stats than the regular one. I've come across so many "epic" kodamas that were less powerful than the kodama i was already carrying. Compare this to something like the dawnbreaker or cryolator and you see that they're not even stagnating, they're actively regressing.
I disagree with this as a developer who has also worked in some gaming.
A lot of people say things like you need notes, documentation, etc. That tends to be backseat driving. It also tends to be people imposing their limitations on others. Good developers often don't need notes though that's not the measure of a good developer.
A good developer will get the job done. If notes help them then they will use notes as an when is needed, you don't need to tell them when, this is within their own remit. This notion that all you need are to take notes and then magic simply happens tends to be exactly what leads to low quality products. You can talk about all of the aids and processes you like but at the end of the day it's all for naught without the right talent and attitudes.
For a game like this, you might think they didn't even bother with a basic to-do list and this isn't a case of saying have a to-do list. When things are this broken such that people can't identify and fix a number of trivial things in a quick test play through within under an hour then you have bigger problems.
The problem you have is people. Nobody likes to point out when it's people because they like to feel kind of conflict adverse but that is what the problem boils down to. It is clear that they lack respect for the player, are in the wrong mindset and may have also demoralized their best talent or leadership internally because that's what's really lacking, good leadership at this point.
If you brought a random person into the studio from off the street and had them play this game for a little while, there's a good chance they would bring up a number of these issues and then take the initiative on them. This is sorely lacking in their shop.
So I actually went and explored every planet. And I mean every planet.
I made a project out of filling in a bestiary/resource guide for the game. Just like you said, a sticker book really made the exploration worth it. After finishing the main quest (which I overall liked and found interesting and compelling), I decided for RP reasons that I didn't want to leave my home universe. So I started exploring. I spent 300 hours catching up on years worth of podcast backlogs and hopping from planet to planet, moon to moon, and system to system. I scanned every plant, animal, and mineral on every planet in every system.
The biggest problem for me was that I had to make a gigantic google doc and do the sticker book myself. It's 2000+ pages. My browser crashes half the time when opening the tab. Literally only a handful of people are going to bother doing that. And the reason I started my grand compendium was because I wanted to use the outpost system to automate medicine production because I wanted to RP my combat medic trying to bring low-cost first aid to the Settled Systems. The idea of the universe of Starfield is brilliant, and I can see why Todd was able to get the dev team excited about this and willing to spend years bringing the game to life.
During my self-imposed mission to explore the galaxy, I grew annoyed by the sameness. I avoided map markers except for the features I needed to 100% planet surveys. Why go to locations that I had already memorized? I have an excellent memory for maps and dungeon layouts, so I quickly tired of looting the exact same places over and over. I stopped looting enemies except for ammo because my guns were fine and none of the dropped items were better than what I had stumbled onto after 150 hours of swapping gear and levelling up. Most of those guns were boring too, since I prized damage output over effects and that meant I used almost all common weapons. Combat itself was fine, but fighting the same people in the same places over loot that wasn't worth picking up just felt empty. So I stopped going to those places.
One thing I actually disagree on with this excellent video: there need to be planets that have no human presence AT ALL. I love the idea of exploring the far reaches of space and standing on other worlds. But it's frustrating to fly out to a system and find that some stupid pirates got here first and built a carbon copy of the same installation that you can find in 37 different places on every single planet. I want to visit worlds that nobody has been to yet, or at least that nobody has built industrial outposts all over and then proceeded to abandon for no discernable reason. But I was so tired of the same old places over and over, I really don't want to see more of them. There should be like 10-15 systems that are absolutely crammed with locations like this, but then 40-60 that have extremely sparse outpost presence and the last 20-30 might never have seen a human being before. Just throw in more natural locations like caves and unique creature encounters, or rich mining nodes with a variety of resources that are hard to find anywhere else. It's fine if 90% of players never visit a moon with nothing remarkable on it, but have something that will make a player say "gee, I'm glad I stopped here because I don't know when I might have seen an asteroid impact site with this much again." I want loot that's worth a damn, please.
Not having any good loot to offload meant that I didn't really go back to my lovingly crafted home base very often except to refill on mountains of healing supplies that I made through spending hours and hours tinkering with base building. It took a ridiculous amount of time to get the storage working - I had a dozen skyscrapers of nothing but storage crates that just shoved every item as far back as it would fit, and it should not have been as weird and user-unfriendly as it was to get that working. Oh, and my RP about bringing affordable care to every person in the universe? Yeah, there wasn't a single merchant anywhere in the Settled Systems who could buy all my supplies. My grand plan was foiled by the fact that I couldn't offload my infinitely replenishing bandages and antibiotics without cleaning out every merchant in every town every time I visited. They just didn't have the money to buy anything good. I got bored of that, so I went back to filling in my custom sticker book that should have been in the game to start with.
Now with all that said, please don't think I hate the game. I like Starfield a lot. I really do. But I want to love it, and with many of the flaws that I observed (most of which I saw mentioned in this video) I cannot love Starfield. Not the way that I love Skyrim - I actually watched this on a second monitor while playing Skyrim for what is probably my 60th to 70th character. I'm tabbed out of Skyrim right now just to write this. And that is Starfield's greatest problem: it could have been so much more than it is, but the drive to automate game production and cram vast universes full of meaningless crap is ruining AAA games.
My advice to Bethesda is to hire the people who Larian hired to write Baldur's Gate 3 and who CDPR hired to write the Witcher games. Games need personality to be good, and procedural generation has repeatedly proven that this is the thing it cannot replicate.
finding truly desolate places is why i dropped no man's sky early on and why i still boot up elite dangerous every once in a while. it's hard to beat racing a fast ship through ice canyons no one else has ever seen before
Jesus, TL:DR
Hope you find the cure for being acoustic
@@Bug-q1z Aww, was it too much for you? Would you prefer it explained through a tik tok?
At least two of those problems could be easily solved by mods today, there is no reason to fiddle with cargo management when they can simply be infinite. It's like 0kb mod. Unless you're on Xbox, then my condolences.
Merry Christmas! Here is a gift for BGS, our constructive feedback (mostly). How would you like BGS to change Starfield?
Timestamps:
00:00:00 - Intro
00:01:59 - Disclaimer (Not A Game Dev)
00:02:41 - BGS Expert Mode
00:02:38 - Rules For A Good Game
00:04:39 - Save Files Thumbnails
00:06:51 - Flashlight Upgrade
00:10:19 - Speed Up Waiting
00:14:59 - Maps
00:16:18 - Cardinal Directions
00:17:12 - Chronomark Watch
00:18:17 - City Maps
00:19:41 - Star Map Search Function
00:21:33 - Beastiary / Index / Encyclopedia
00:22:40 - Resources
00:23:41 - Fauna & Flora
00:26:29 - Sticker Book
00:29:09 - Single Player Competition
00:30:36 - Unique Creatures
00:31:45 - Digipicking
00:33:52 - Interacting With The Scanner Up
00:35:29 - Visual Indicator For Resources
00:36:26 - Inventory / Keyring
00:37:22 - Aid & Food
00:38:12 - Books / Data Slates / Magazines / Notes
00:39:01 - Inventory Search Function
00:39:56 - Drop All For All
00:40:41 - Storage Linked To Crafting Tables
00:42:19 - Fallout 4 Item Scrapping
00:44:07 - Mark As Junk Option
00:44:28 - Aid & Food Crafting Sucks
00:46:01 - Unlockable Appearance Options
00:48:22 - Adding Modifier Effects Via Crafting
00:50:45 - Item Tier Crafting Upgrades
00:53:10 - Cleaning Item Names
00:55:12 - Unique Items
00:56:28 - How To Make Unique Items Special
01:00:11 - 4 Effects / Modifiers
01:03:28 - Other Unique Qualities
01:08:06 - Ships / Tour In Building Mode
01:09:04 - Blueprints For Ships & Outposts
01:10:04 - Buy Ship Parts As Moveable Items
01:11:58 - Traversal / Underwater Exploration
01:12:47 - Zoology Skill & Sea Life
01:13:11 - Landing At Coastal Regions
01:13:39 - Fast Boosting
01:14:49 - Drivable Vehicles
01:16:18 - Procedural Generation Is Soulless
01:18:02 - Groundhog Day / 40 Second Rule
01:19:04 - What's Important When Exploring
01:19:59 - How To Fix Points Of Interest
01:21:26 - Random Kills Lore / Purpose / Meaning
01:22:50 - Illusion Of Scope
01:24:03 - Radiant Quests
01:25:14 - Burn The Nameless NPCs
01:27:01 - Romanceable Companion Variety
01:28:30 - Money / Economy
01:30:00 - Transmog System
01:31:33 - Active Effects / Character Stats
01:33:13 - Skill Description Clarification
01:34:38 - Update Patch For Broken Skills
01:34:59 - Reset Skill Points
01:35:29 - Rebalance Experience Gains
01:36:21 - Move XP Notification Off The Crosshairs
01:36:56 - Killcams
01:37:26 - Cutscene / Animation Remover
01:38:48 - Factions / Rant
01:39:15 - Problem With BGS
01:39:53 - Starfield VS. Morrowind Faction Quests
01:42:28 - Starfield VS. Morrowind Developers
01:44:03 - Starfield VS. Morrowind Dev Power
01:46:46 - Where Are All The Factions?
01:47:26 - Possible Factions To Be Added
01:48:48 - WHAT IS THE PROBLEM?
01:49:32 - Hire More Writers NOW
01:51:18 - The Pizza Problem
Get rid of it and all memory or trace of it and just work on es6 and the new fallout games?
I want Bethesda to stop hiring medicalists with the goal of design a game specifically to maximize human suffering. That’s all. Pretty simple one! ChatGPT has better ideas than these crackheads.
Man,you deserve a medal of honor for your dedication to this game developers. Unfortunately, it's sad to think that if it took the 25 years to make this "masterpiece" , we are more than likely 25+ years away from them getting around to making any of these fixes. We will undoubtedly see modders implement most,or all of these fixes long before Bethesda does.
Seems solid as is. Mods will make it fit individual needs, but the core game is really great.
As said, it has good bones there is just no real meat on them and nobody likes Pagliarulo because they deem him a weaker writer than the maker of a cheap dollar rack film which is why the stories have gone downhill from Morrowind. Bethesda before Morrowind was on the verge of bankruptcy and Morrowind was the hero, after though they could never match it.
Starfield's flashlight can best be described as "complimentary horror game flashlight"
Pretty sure RE7 in VR on PS4 had a better working flashlight
Is it that bad?
The shitty cheaper flashlight in Lethal Company is miles better.
I refuse to read this any other way other than complimentary-horror-game flashlight.
It's funny considering Fallout the light from the pip boy has better lighting than what star field gives you.
Linking of ship cargo and outpost inventory should be part of the skill tree progression and visibly reflected on the star map. We need to be able to favorite / pin points of interest on the galaxy map as well
Having one internal writer is baffling, why did they hire hundreds and hundreds of 3D artists over the years and then no writers? Clearly, 10 developers developing quests is also not enough for a game the size of Starfield. They should have at a minimum like 50 quest designers. Quests are the bread and butter of the game, which needs way more manpower.
Emil has way too much power in the company, Bethesda has a seniority problem and it shows exponentially more the bigger they get with each new game.
It's like having a single chef in a sports bar with WAY too many tvs.
I bet it's because AI wrote a lot of it to be completely honest.
Just one competent writer would be a huge step up.
That’s why every thing felt bland and pg.
The depressing part is that they won’t bolster their writing staff because of Emil’s ego. He refuses to acknowledge any criticism, and rejects the idea of a design document which in my opinion seems like one of the reasons there isn’t more writers. With 20+ writers working on the game needing to be in cohesion with one another there needs to be that organisation there, but since BGS and Emil reject that idea it means that as far as writing goes the only way that cohesion can be done is by having one guy in charge and one guy alone, and we’ve seen how that’s panned out. They need a serious wake up call and I just hope that this release will have the chance to give that to them to reevaluate their approach and egos
I think the stories BGS write work pretty well given the near total freedom the player has in how much importance they give to any objective. & in what order they tackle things.
Can you imagine having to write a story that works well for the player who main lines it in 10 hours, & equally well for the more typical Bethesda player like myself, who takes well over 200 hours, because they're mixing in side content all the time & just experiencing the world?
Can you imagine hitting a point in the main quest that you can't progress because you haven't reached a certain tie in point with the vanguard quest line, or ryujin industries? I think it's clear why questlines are isolated & parallel in bgs games.
I think it's a taller order than some critics imagine.
@@skyriminspace hello there 10 year old.
Maybe Starfield is your very first bethesda game.
We here on the internet are pleased to let you know, that Bethesda games do NOT have "near total freedom" a fuckload of it is extremely narrow. Esp the quest design.
A PERFECT example of this would be the Paradiso questline of the old earth settlers. And the extremely lousy 3 options which are all 3, fucking terrible. And to finish it off, you can't even kill the board, because they are all essential NPC's (essential NPC's are usually the death of freedom. Now if you meant Obsidian's FO:NV, then you'd be correct, almost limitless player freedom. Any Betheda game, you're literally joking)
@@skyriminspace To make this even more clear than you thought.
FO:NV allows you to do the exact thing you're saying is dumb.
They did it in a FFFFFFFFFFFFAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRR shorter time than Bethesda does, and they made the story still work. Amazing isn't it.
Fuck me, these children will literally consooom every piece of content they can find, they do not care about quality only about speed of delivery.
Enjoy your loadingscreen simulator. Your fishtank flightsim. Your dead planets. The useless outposts. And extremely mediocre questdesign.
@@skyriminspace
Is this a serious comment?
@@3217491 i agree the quest design in Bethesda games is narrow. I'm saying this is done deliberately to allow the player the freedom to approach quest lines in whichever order they choose, & to pick up & drop them in favour of other things one is able to do elsewhere in the game. It's been that way since at least Oblivion.
If you're going to critique something it's best to try & understand it properly first.
If you disagree that's fine but you don't need to rant. If ranting is what you're after however then knock yourself out.
1:36:57 I'd say killcams are something that anyone who played long enough with archery or magic in Skyrim most definitely does not miss. They were cool when things worked properly. But they were buggy as hell since you'd get stuck unable to do anything while the animation played if the enemy had moved out of the way of your shot. This often lead to situations where you'd get attacked or even killed during the killcam animation. I ended up getting a mod to disable ranged killcams for that exact reason.
It's crazy how we'd rather not have kill cams not cuz it's cool but because we don't trust bethesda to do it good
It could be nice if they were toggle-able, and have it be that you can toggle the melee one separate from the ranged ones. That way, you can have the kill cam if you think it looks cool, and if it’s causing problems you can disable to annoying one while keeping the functional one.
The faction quest comparison was especially sobering, I guess that's what happens when you don't use design documentation and everyone puts effort into content that gets scrapped/scaled back. Seriously having an actual unified vision for a project beyond "Skyrim in space" would have done wonders for them. They definitely need way more dedicated writers and quest designers.
Not bothering with formal design documentation probably made sense when it was a team of 50 that all knew each other and worked in the same building. But trying to run an organization of 300 to a 1000 spread out over several locations in the same informal way was something that should have been seen as a bad idea before they even got started.
@@publiusdos5925
Even with 50 people, that's a lot of independent minds and ambitions to try and keep heading in coherent directions. Even just 10 people can get pretty scattered in ideas and opinions.
Early bethesda had a lot of strong lore binding their franchise and people who knew the lore well. For something like The Elder Scrolls, you could have everyone handle the theme for a town and sort of independently manage their own region and quests.
However, for things like Fallout, which was an acquired IP, the lack of central design comes through - ghouls need food... then they don't... then they do... and don't... fallout 4 feels incredibly disjointed and seems more like a twist on a trip through old colonial America than it does a post-apocalyptic game. They could all agree an apocalypse happened, but not what that meant or looked like in different areas of society.
Even the Elder Scrolls suffers from this a bit. Is magic something anyone can pursue or is it special? Because of how Bethesda styles the game, the player is never forced to class - which is not necessarily bad, but the world itself was not really designed to handle magic and a number of quests don't take it into account. Doors can be unlocked without keys, characters brutally murdered while naked - imagine the horrors which could befall those who practiced mysticism influencing royals and guards. The world has almost no defenses against magic despite it being a real component. If it was rare and mysterious, why is there a guild? Does anyone just start taking magic classes? The guild trial in skyrim implies you can't even begin studying magic until you demonstrate your talents with magic.... but wouldn't that be dangerous to insist people study magic on their own before coming to the guild?
Compare and contrast with the way magic is portrayed in Dragon Age or Enderal.
There's a lot of stuff that is just not defined within Bethesda's games. I certainly agree they need design documents.
bro I *WISH* it was skyrim in space. I put like 200 hours into skyrim and every time I come back to it, I find new stuff. I bounced off starfield in like 50 hours of TRYING to enjoy it. There's just not enough compelling content!
Yeah, Bethesda never recovered after Douglas Goodall, Michael Kirkbride, and Ken Rolston left.
Way to document all their issues in design. If only they had some way to preemtively avoid these problems!
LMAOOO
If only they had a design document to see the number of faction quests. But you have to understand, updating the design document is such a hassle for Emil... I mean, for everyone. It just takes so much time away from developing a game, trust me guys. You don't know a thing about making games, so why you're complaining, your feedback is pointless anyway
@@darkdwarf007 Should have realized this sooner but that point is very ridiculous. For something with Starfield's budget they could have hired multiple people who's full time job is to keep the documents up to date. Certainly cheaper than the PR damage control have to do now and the damage to their reputation
Like, I dunno, an ENTIRE QA department?
@@MorbidEel That's literally what producers do. They had some on staff.
Flashlight point. I'd argue you don't have to upgrade it. You start as a MINER, a profession intimately close with pitch black areas. They should have amazing lighting
Brilliant. Well said.
Starfield is absolutely full of BAFFLING decisions. I’m honestly speechless at how much is wrong with this game.
It's bizarre they don't understand their own brand, IPs, strengths, goals, or fans.
You can tell that Camel was EXTREMELY restrained in this video 🤣
Yeah he could have easily popped off like other YT'ers have in video essays.
I’m glad this is actual criticism of the game and not someone else hopping on the “Bethesda Bad gimme views” bandwagon
The mineral, flora, fauna codex could be something you use that fancy table on your ship. You browse for something you need, where it’s located, and set a course. It would make the game more immersive and give that table a unique purpose.
The alien fauna is so stupid, samey and forgettable that I never even really stopped to pay attention to it after a few hours.
This
U might want to try Urquan Masters (basically, it's Star Control 2), and it's free. Even though it's old and dated graphics, more fun and doesn't drag like Star Failed.
It would also be very fitting for Constellation. You know, the organization of people who's entire thing is exploration and discovery.
@@j.c.denton2060I think they look cool, they have no finishers or ‘moves’ like say fallout 4 mutants do, terrormorphs don’t pick us up and throw us, wildlife doesn’t grab us by the ankle as we jetpack over them, we don’t get charged off our feet by a giant dragon bull looking thing, there’s a major disconnect from the enemies in this game due to the lack of finishers/melee animations
As an actual game developer I can tell you: most of the things you ask for are completely fine for a studio of Bethesda's size to do. Not only that, several can be added even to smaller indie games with near zero difficulty (especially the beastiary stuff). Starfield is just a bad game, you are 100% correct in your complaints. At least up to the 27:35 timestamp, I haven't watched the whole video yet. I'll edit my comment once I do.
Okay. I, for now, stopped at 49:49. I think most of the complaints here are also easy to work with. Again, if a small company had access to the "finished" state of Starfield, they could do a better job, and implement most of these. The whole "skin discovery system" would be so easy to implement depending on how they made the base of it... The only reason they did not put it in was due to corporate greed. "Want skins? Pay extra"! My only disagreement here is about the "item scrapping" part. From a game designer's pov, that was a terrible feature. As I see, most people hated the idea of having to clutter up their inventory just to scrap them and get OP items. It's way too grindy and unbalanced that honestly I personally ended up just cheating in the nescessary raw materials to upgrade my gear. In fact, the entire crafting system in F4 was flawed at best, and utterly broken at worst. The game was reduced to "invest all your points in crafting, create an overpowered weapon, win" cicle, with no reason to even try most other perks until you were far enough into the game. I have my own idea of remaking the crafting system in Bethesda games from scratch, but this part of the comment is long enough.
I'll keep watching the video later, but for now I am really enjoying it.
How’s did the rest of the video hold up in terms of Plausibility?
If you haven’t finished it then consider this a reminder that this video exists.
@@americankid7782 I need to finish it, actually. Thanks for the reminder, I'll go back to it right now!
I get why people like weapon modifications, and in Fallout the idea of pulling apart broken things to salvage useless components to make something new kinda fit with the world. But in Starfield the whole thing came across, to me at least, as gamey nonesene. I can travel to shipyard, get a customised interstellar craft made, to my exact specifications, ion cannons, missile launchers, a fully stocked medical bay. But I walk into a gun shop and say, "Yeah, I'll have that rifle but with a scope" the vendor looks at me for a moment and busts out laughing. Transposing the crafting mechanic so directly from Fallout to Starfield was terrible, if entirely predictable.
Just off the top of my head, why not lean into the other mechanics of the game? You want a levelling, scaling buff for your weapons? Put an armoury on your ship, hire or assign an artificer to staff it, you will see them at the workbench occasionally, tinkering with a gun, or sitting in the mess hall on a break. Perhaps they could occasionally shout of you as you pass, asking if you can pick up something they need if you need to have some kind of fetchy gameplay loop attached to it. But the entire process in Starfield of getting an aftermarket red-dot sight onto your weapon, is just insane for the high tech, luxury future setting. The whole outpost system for upgrades leaves me very disappointed, The X series make far more sense, you build industrial facilities as the player for the purpose of engaging in industry, to mass produce something. Not to sew pockets on your space suit.
Around the one hour 25 min mark where he talks about the npcs (at lest in my experience as a 3D character artist in the industry) it doesn’t seem remotely plausible for the 400 devs he talks about to bang out one character each in 1 hour, unless he is talking about using the character creator
@@alexlabella1934 yeah, doing it to each NPC would be a nightmare. Maybe if you have dthe game ready and dedicate other 3 years just to that. But that's just a waste of money. Using the character creator instead of just randomizing everything would be the best idea imo.
Of all the criticisms I've heard over the past couple of months, no one brought up the save files not having thumbnails. That's insane. If I'd have played this game, I'd be so lost as to what file is what. Does it separate files by character?
My MAIN character who is level 160 something, does not appear in my list of available characters. He only shows up when you select show all saves.
the fact that we actually came down to having to upload hours long videos of lecturing bethesda how to make games, is .... mindboggling and frightening to say the least
the largest one i've seen is 8 hours long.
The fact that a large amount of the points are “Do this really simple thing that you have been doing for years” is quite Depressing.
It shouldn’t have to be said but is is.
The fact this game is in the top 10 of steam's most earning titles is what's mindboggling, frightening and sad. So much was promised that was just factually a lie. They clearly said that you could start running in one direction and keep going until you circumvented the planet. This is literally impossible in the game.
@@Jixxor not delivering in accidental promises is one thing (i dont want to be constantly careful what i say if i were to develope a game, and i just want to give people ideas beyond my game), ... but not at all delivering in the unspoken bare minimum that the game should be in the first place, that is the real messed up thing
I don't know. Saying you'll be able to circumvent the entire planet on foot if you wanted to about 1 month or so before release doesn't really feel like an accidental promise to me.
holy shit, it’s wild to me that being able to name your saves is no longer a thing. wtf?!
Yep it’s far to hard to code that in to be worth it. Like 2 lines or something
Baldurs Gate lets you name saves. Bethesda is just slacking.
I know right. !!??
yea, my Steam review for Starfield was a bullet point list of dozens upon dozens of features present in BGS games dating back 20 years that were all but absent in Starfield
I still can't fucking get over the fact there's no trespassing lmao
I finished the video (amazing job), but one thing I think is missing is some commentary on Starborn Power acquisition. It's a massive, almost unbelievable regression from the word walls in Skyrim. And it's not even like word walls were groundbreaking or anything... but at least they had dungeons, remote world exploration, or boss fights attached to them
Yes to this. The process of getting starborn powers is one of the biggest disappointments for me. No dungeon to go through, no enemies or baddies guarding it, the repetitive and irritating zero-g sequences that have no reason connected to them(what am I doing and why am I chasing floating star stuff?), and never more than one pathetic Starborn guard to beat afterward. So anti-climactic.
Also..."Starborn", really, that's what they called it? This was literally a meme when Elder scrolls 6 was first fake announced 🤣
@@Kojo220the guards always spawn in the exact same places, too; so once you’ve seen the two variations of exit (the temple balcony and next to that rock that sits outside every temple) you can literally just aim at the same spot and shoot as they spawn
The stupid orb chase seems like a placeholder they forgot to replace.
Really? How garbage is that? God they have lost their ability. It's embarrassing.@@FrostyFoxDrake
There is a plethora of videos and comments online about what Starfield did wrong. I appreciate so much that you did the hard work of actually suggesting changes and improvements.
Im surprised anyone actually laid out constructive criticsm. People have been doing this for over a decade and with the release of starfield, its shows that bethesda has not listened at all and instead done their same old shit.
So glad a channel that's tied closely with Bethesda content like you actual gives valid criticism instead of blindly praising this game solely because it's a Bethesda product
The real problem with bethesda is that they don't learn from their mistakes. If they were more humble and listened to the community that loves their games, they would have as much success as larian
Yeah so many of their problems could be solved just by listening to community feedback. Like I get that don't want to look at or deal with toxicity, but there's tons of constructive content like this video out there too.
Its not that did they not learn from their mistakes. They did not learn from their success either. They've removed things they did well in their other games and made it worse in Starfield (crafting system among others)
Thing is Larian believes in early access, whereas Bethesda considers it Launch, and modding and DLCs being the development.
I'm sorry but i absolutely hate this take, because a LOT of starfield design stands PRECISELY from Bethesda actually listening to criticism against Fallout 4, especially by comparison to the Witcher 3 at that time.
In the sense that in Starfield, like in Witcher 3 or in any other big RPG like the latest AC or Cyberpunk, exploration of interesting POI by itself has been completely turn down to be replaced by locations that exist only for a specific quests to send you here, that's how it works in the other games, but normally not in a BGS game, except the critical reception of Fallout 4 even if it sold very well, seems to be clear : plenty of people don't care about exploring just for the sake of it and plays only the quests and where the game tells you to go, and praise a game or not based on that.
So in Starfield, Bethesda did just that, and put a lot more emphasis on quests, dialogue choices, voice acting, and making a silent protagonist again after the backlash against Fallout 4 voiced protagonist, but they scrapped thir exploration for that, because the noise of internet was saying that it didn't matter at the time.
Since then open world pure exploration have been coming back strongly with game slike BOTW and Elden ring, but the general design of Starfield was already too much advanced to change anything.
So basically i will actually say that in the case of Starfield, Bethesda listened TOO MUCH on the criticism against their previous games, and also apying too much attention and copy to the other game of the genra that came out like No Man's Sky.
By biggest wish for Elder Scrolls 6 is that Bethesda gets confident again in a game THEY want to make and just make it, regardless of what is going on by the side in the gaming industry.
Community? 100 million active sony playstation users found out that a game with time exclusive was no longer a timed exclusive nor even on their console platforms. What do you think that community did? Buy a $350 xbox ($100 less than a ps5)? A $2000 pc?
Nah they went on a a campaign to destroy the game by calling it "mid". Because they knew that the game was not 5/10 but 87/100. And many sony playstation users were saying how they wanted to play the game in youtube comments.
Review bombs were followed by Stockholm syndrome.
It's not just a matter of writers, Bethesda don't use a design document which you can 100 percent blame, the lead writter for bgs has gone on record basically saying he cant be bothered updating a design document or having a team that updates it
Until Bethesda start using design documents (that literally every single game designer use) then i really don't expect them to make anything like they used to when they had design documents
I love that he put more time into trying to gaslight people into enjoying his game on twitter (sorry, I mean, on X) than he did into writing design documents. What an absolute legend.
That is…impressively bad.
@@MisterNightfishemil has a lot of spare time at bgs. Tes6 wont be out until 2025 maybe 26. We will get another skyrim release, maybe two. Perhaps a fallout 4 rerelease really spice things up a bit.
That just isn’t true. It isn’t 100%. Not having design documents doesn’t affect the choice to rely more and more on radiant quest and procgen elements. Bethesda makes be choices all the time that is fundamental bad to the core of the game. I have stopped playing their games because every single game rely on bulletspunges. Fallout 3, Skyrim, Fallout 4, Fallout 76 and Starfield all rely on more attacks than tactics. In New Vegas I can be a Sniper. Sneak up on a ridge and take out enemies from far away in one clean hit. The only game that even gets close to that is Skyrim because of how OP stealth archer is. In FO4 you can’t do it.
@@lucamckenn5932 When Bethesda invests more on forum shills and bots to promote their rushed, half-baked titles, rather than improving the quality of their offerings its time to look elsewhere for innovative games.
I played almost every BGS game, even older ones like Arena and Daggerfall, making several playthroughs over the years. Though I don't think I am ever playing Starfield again. I don't know how they did it, the game feels boring and soulless. Even modders are giving up on the game.
I returned it after a few hours. Worst game I have ever played
I don't even think the modding community can fix it. I mean with almost 1000 "planets" you just can't make even 1/3 of them interesting or vast. It's a gigantic skeleton of a game and nothing else. This game has pretty much turned me off of space themed games entirely.
And if it's all so heavily procedurally generated, how are modders even supposed to begin to implement changes to the fundamental core of the game?
I don't even know where modders would begin with that. At least with Fallout, Skyrim; everyone is operating on the same map. This doesn't even accomplish that... technically. Maybe you could modify a few locales relative to major cities? But there's no sense of exploration in that either. Not like Beantown/Lexington/Stumble Upon Interiors.@@j.c.denton2060
This is the best critique of Starfield I have seen. The pizza analogy is so spot on. Your suggestions are perfect. They should hire you.
He should replace Todd. No joke.
Not really. Look at the modders that got hired at BGS and what they put them to do
The Frostfall modder-> in charge of designing the Economy
The amazing custom homes modder-> in charge of filling interiors with junk items
They can't even make use of their own employees strengths...this and the facts that every decision passes through Todd and that Emil is the sole writer in the game makes me much more simpathetic towards the average BGS employee and more jaded with the top brass that lacks a proper creative vision and the ability to delegate things that should be delegated to the right people in order to them to put their best in the game.
@@74153080except he clearly stated that he’s NOT A game developer lol
I understand wanting Todd replaced, but not with someone who has zero experience in game design and development
Bro deserves his own company
@@MinosML100% I hope no one blames the devs, they crunch numbers and countless hours for our enjoyment. It's the guys at the top as usual, very upsetting
I submitted a feedback ticket to Bethesda including this video. I know the chances that it will get passed on to actual developers currently working on the game are very slim, but I felt that your feedback is so sincere and well-articulated that I had to at least try.
If there's one thing the average gamer is not great at, it's providing proper constructive feedback, so thank you for filling in those gaps, Camelworks ♥
The more I hear, the more I think that the most ambitions thing about Starfield is the asking price. It looks almost like release No Man's Sky with a Bethesda-flavored lemon slice on top.
If Starfield just had half of the mechanics from NMS it would have been so much better.
$120 AUD
the thing is that Hello games always had a vision of what they wanted their game to be. (sure it took a LONG time to get there but the premise never really changed)
Bethesda? not so much. to paraphrase southpark "make it lame and put NASA in it"
@@zeonos and what are those !? NMS has more boring features. Some are good, but most are boring, especially NPCs, side missions which are waiting simulator. Destructible ground is good, fleets are good, ocean exploring also good. Biomes are mostly fkd up in the NMS. And yes, i did play with most DLCs released except maybe last two, and Starfield was released in September, so we see will they in upcoming year improve the game.
The problem is No Mans Sky did the entire concept of space sci-fi better.........with a 20 person dev team..........7 YEARS EARLIER
It would be cool if we could rotate 3D models of the creatures in the Beastiary - similar to how we could do that during FO4 & Skyrim loading screens
Been saying this, some cool aliens and I can’t remember where they are
Motherfucking DAGGERFALL had a working in game bestiary even in its DEMO.
No lie, during the demonstration of the waiting mechanic, I immediately got tempted to scrub forward in the video. I'm barely watching this fucking video on a second monitor and it was STILL excrutiating.
Same. Even as background noise as I cook dinner watching for the 10th time, I still feel cagey and want to scrub ahead when the wait mechanic comes up.
I went an made food, had to rewind a bit.
Making a documentation for Bethesda to situate themselves, this is brilliant.
Man, after so many hours of playing Starfield, all the faction missions, traveling from one end of the available galaxy to the other end, after building my dreamship with a decent layout, and after building a system of outposts that provided me resources and funds, it hit me..... Starfield is just SUCH a user unfriendly game.
After like 6 hours I already knew, so I just droped it for good, no doubt saves me tons of frustration. Gonna pick it again after one year of hopefully good modding progress.
and its fucking boring as watching paint dry
@@AlaiasAlias Mods cant fix core issues: loading screen simulator, horrible quest design, horrible npc's, bad writing and bad plot, very bad dialogue, bad voice acting, nonexistent exploration (not fixable in a world with 1000 planets)
Fallout 4: [exit Vault, walk a bit, talk a bit, within a few minutes you're building a settlement]
Starfield: [grind for 10 hours to get the perks necessary, spend tons of money and resources researching just to unlock it, obtain a ridiculous amount of resources, craft dozens and dozens of different things requiring different materials, draw red lines between 300 different objects and it still doesn't work properly]
@@rykehuss3435
There were quest and NPC mods for previous games that even had full voice acting.
The problem is: what modder is going to want to invest in doing that for a game like Starfield? The guy that made the co-op mod for Skyrim gave up on the same mod for Starfield because the game was so boring and not worth his time.
I hope this video becomes part of the mandatory training for anyone working on TES 6.
Bethesda, Bethesda never changes.
I genuinely hope that this video is taken into consideration and that many of our complaints and recommendations gets applied to future games. It’s been too long since we had a game like Skyrim.
I’m so worried that TES6 is going to be bad. It’s going to have been 15 years in between games and the expectation is very very very high. Pretty much perfection.
Have u played vanilla Skyrim lately? It's trash too
Stfu its a ancient game move on! @@6MyUsername9
@@6MyUsername9 The game had basically no competition at the time.
Now it completely fails to meet the baseline standards set by other games aside from accessibility. Its only strength it has above other games really seems to be the dopamine loop from dungeon crawling that I assume has been fulfilled by every looter shooter that has flooded the market since.
Bethesda has never listened to the fans of their games at pretty much any point in time after Morrowind's development, and if their recent responses to criticism on Steam are anything to go by, I wouldn't expect them to start
Ok, so basically Bethesda needs to remake the whole game
Yes
Oui
Ja
Si
Ken
@@MsLeVagabon
Couple extra thoughts:
1. For ship building, if having all ship parts at a single spaceport is not an option, then there needs to be a way in game to view all available parts and know exactly where I can go to buy it. Also give us the option to control where ladders/doors are placed. Agreed on the other things mentioned for the ship builder
2. For weapon modding, I should be able to buy attachments and attach/detach them from weapons as I see fit. It makes no sense that you can't go into a gun store and buy a supressor and a scope for that cool legendary gun you found, instead you have to throw it together yourself.
3. For outposts, there is not way to search through all of the stuff I have stored there, especially with the weight limits to containers, fallout 4 had a good solution for this with the workbench having a container that could store stuff. On that note, get rid of weight limits for containers, it's just annoying and not fun.
4. Also, this is a civilized society, why can't I bulk order things like ammo, resources etc. to my ship?
That’s a great point about bulk orders of ammo and medical equipment. If you have the purchasing power of literal planets, you should be able to at least order as much .45 ammo as you want to feed your antique pistols.
I am many hundreds of hours into this game and I never noticed that the watch face Barrett gives you is supposed to also be the little HUD on the left hand side of the screen. I had actually completely forgotten Barrett gave me that in the first place lol
They charged people like $230 for that watch in the collectors edition like it was gonna be as big of a deal as the Pip Boy. Do I feel bad for the people who bought that.
I got as far as the quest that had me recovering mining equipment. I was so bored, I switched off and did the dishes instead. Deleted it yesterday and reinstalled Oblivion.
Yeah, I literally decided to play Oblivion instead too
For me, it was the Chunk's Sauce quest. You find a restaurant that's out of sauce. You volunteer to help. I was expecting to use my cooking skills to create my own sauce, or something. But no. You literally just fast travel to another restaurant, get the sauce, then fast travel back. That's it, that's the quest. Reward, 200xp.
Wtf? Who designed that?
According to Bethesda,and Todd Howard himself, someone who had 25 years to work on it lol
@@cassieudy5718 you’re telling me you did someone’s grocery shopping as a side quest?
@@ichigokage Grocery shopping would have unironically been more interesting. Maybe I'd have to select the right item on the shelf, otherwise risk making a bad sauce. Maybe people get sick and the restaurant is forced to close.
No, that quest was much worse than grocery shopping. I fast travelled twice and mashed "E" a dozen times, because the first dialog option is always the correct progression one.
I absolutely love this response to Starfield. Honestly the best video game review. You make sure you give constructive criticism instead of just piling on the hate with everyone else. I’ve had many thoughts similar to this and have had a hard time explaining it. You gave solutions with examples and even compared to previous BGS games. Phenomenal work
I'm only about 40 mins in but this is a masterpiece of constructive criticism so far.
Another thing that would make 'exploring' half way bearable would be the ability to automatically call your ship from its current location to any landing surface that is discovered (i.e. landing pad at an outpost, ect). Where ships land should not be limited to a landing pad, just like No Man's Sky. The pad should just enable cost-free refueling, storage, and the like.
There is a mod for this apparently! I haven't started modding starfield yet myself but i saw it showcased somewhere.
You can only land on pads?
@@iRemainNameless you can land anywhere you like, not necessarily on landing pads. When exploring planets you're exclusively landing NOT on pads.
If you build a landing pad at your outpost you can use a terminal there to bring the ship to you from anywhere & also modify/buy/sell ships.
What the op is asking for is the ability to land somewhere, go exploring on foot, & instead of walking back or fast travelling back to your landed ship, having the ability to call your ship to you.
There is apparently a mod which does this.
It's clear something went horribly wrong when they made this game, they lost institutional knowledge along the way.
Emil Pagliarulo needs to go and they need to hire more AND better writers.
Maybe because of Covid.Maybe they scraped a lot of features, and did not have time after Covid to finish what they imagined.
Honestly, studios like Bethesda have had their time in the sun, they peaked years ago, many of their original team members have moved on, and now its time for new up and coming developers to shine.
@@stargazerspark4499seems gone are the days of Bethesda and Bioware. The new RPG big boys seemingly are CD project and Larian
@@loC2ol CP as RPG sucked big time. It got same treatment as Fallout 4 and other RPGs where we got just illusion of choice. Outer worlds with much lesser budget made better AA RPG game than AAA games. For me Cyberpunk is downgrade from Witcher 3 and 2. We will see how they gonna handle next Witcher game.
@@loC2ol Nah, CDPR can tell good stories, but they can't make an immersive game even CP2077 is First Person View. Larian focus on turn-based game which is a no-go for lots of players. So im guessing we are done, no more skyrim then.
one star system (namely: our own) would’ve been plenty, and nobody would’ve thought that wasn’t enough
That title so funny when you realize Camel Works and to a larger extent Fudge Muppet has been covering Elder Scrolls for years.
That goes to show how much better those older games were.
Yep elder scrolls is god tier starfailed is feces
Starfield in a lot of ways is better on paper to Fallout 4, they did fix a lot of the problems, unfortunately its biggest failure is gameplay flow, which makes the game feel worse than it actually is.
@@matty7834 Thing is Starfield isnt even that good to begin with, which implies Fallout 4 is literal dogshit, only reason it has fans is because normies eat everything up and that its a game in an existing beloved franchise.
While I don't doubt that most of the older games are better. Though to be honest even if Starfield was amazing and blew ES and FO out of the water. There's still just so limited content to cover for Starfield that's just inherently in those other games favor. What with ES being five main games in and FO being 4 to 5. There's leagues of lore and perspectives to discuss and dissect for ages that even on Starfield's best day can't offer such sustainability for lore content for those channels.
@@Naruku2121 plus it’s a boring generic space game and about as interesting as a wet fart in the mouth
at this point the fans have put in more effort than bethesda
“Our fans will just work (for us)”
Dude this is feeling true recently and it's so sad.
The bestiary / database not being in the game is the biggest miss in my opinion. I found myself so frustrated trying to find planets and resources that I knew I had discovered before. Honestly probably would have kept playing a lot longer if there was something that you suggested where I could fill out a collection, sticker-book style.
Thank you! This list was cathartic to watch. On the crafting section, I'm surprised you didn't mention the glaring omission of transferrable weapon/suit mods -- that's a huge one for me! Like in Fallout 4 (and real life) you could remove a suppressor or a scope from one gun and put it on another. Also, on the unlockable appearance options 47:18 "in-game rewards for playing the game." Ohh, you sweet summer camel-child. That locked appearance tab is where Bethesda will put all the good stuff that they intend to sell us!
It’s Amazing how much of my immersion was nuked off the face of Jemison by the lack of a day of the week, date and year, ability to navigate without a out of game guide (Somehow made significantly harder than even real life) and ability to minimize/avoid fast travel.
It feels borderline impossible to put yourself in the universe with zero frame of reference whatsoever in both time and space. Everything loses meaning if you don’t know what you did took 2 hours or 2 months. Even if the seasons don’t change in Skyrim, the well communicated passage of time makes it feel like the world isn’t static and only exists because of you.
I was super immersed in the game's tutorial (Vectera Mine), up until they told me I had to go and be an explorer. Yeah Lin is my supervisor but at the end of the day I have a contract with Argos Extractors, not her. You don't even get a choice because if you say no they just act like you said yes
In Real Life You have Many Points to Go Around this is some Random Game where you have no Points to move to the next Stepp it is Smaller but at the Same time this is all new.
@@masonmurphy2679emil can’t write
A lot of starfields content is to mask how minimum the content really is. The map, the flashlight, the waiting, the time it takes to go to an objective, the loading screens
I felt like they are legit trying to waste players time with certain design choices so they can get an extra month of Gamepass subscription from us or keep us from playing other games.
With things like the limited cash of vendors, the distance between POIs, the bloated radiant quests and the cumbersome fast travel especially in early game where your ship can't carry that much fuel and even by certain enemies being absolute bullet sponges even on normal difficulty.
I've put over 20 hours into the game but when I think back I realize I did shockingly little during those long hours.
This is probably the best and fairest critique of Starfield that I've come across. Extremely well thought out and I really enjoyed watching it. You've got a new subscriber! Keep up the great content.
Other than the lack of writers, I also noticed that Starfield credit have so many producers compared to BG3. And if you watch the latest Noclip documentary of one of BGS lead artist that goes indie, he said that he did meeting with 3 different producers a week during Starfield development, far different compared to Skyrim. No wonder Starfield feel so disjointed without a single clear vision.
All organizations benefit from a competent and benevolent dictator, if you're lucky enough to get one.
@@camraid9 Good leadership can make or break a company but I also feel like there's a cultural aspect to this as well. Most workplaces these days are too focused with making "safe" spaces where even well intentioned criticism can be misinterpreted as abuse or harassment. I feel like a lot of Starfields issues should have been brought up in meetings or by people saying xyz is shit or dumb.
That point is highlighted in the game itself with one of Walter's missions
how much experience do you have working for major companies? im not trying to be mean but this is so far from the trutth. most companies goal is to make money. employees are replaceable. those safe spaces are to cut back on having to payout millions on lawsuits of harassment and abuse.@@steveballmersbaldspot2.095
lmaoo. the hobbit problem all over again
Starfield's biggest problem is too few writers. Everything else can be changed and improved, but the way the game is written and directed won't change.
I call this game the "Minimal Contractual Requirement" before everyone headed for the door.
Regarding the star-search function, I would like to point out that at no point did the modding community want a hundred systems with a Bethesda game. What they wanted was the ability and room to insert some systems where their own work would have operated. Far far too many systems that serve no purpose.
Actually, as I continued on the show I noticed you had quite a list, and the first words in my head were "but the modders will fix it..." I think the 'modders' are getting tired of Todd Howard's (censored), and I hope the clean-up crew understand that.
In the meantime I remain hopeful. I understand some independents are putting out something in the Creation Engine in a few months time...
Not many modders want to work on an unpopular game they don’t like.
Minimum viable product
Modders have been taken advantage of for too long. We aren't entitled to their time or their effort, and neither is Bethesda.
Thinking, "modders will fix that" is an unreasonable expectation, especially when Bethesda didn't bother to release modding tools when they released the game.
I bet the people saying "modders will fix it" have never donated even a dollar to a mod maker. Their labor is expected, when it should be celebrated. It's a sad state.
So many of the design decisions BGS has been making lately are so baffling. I mean their games were always flawed, but they weren't annoying to play...
Yep, but with good exploration and stuff to do to keep you occupied for hundreds of hours and multiple playthroughs. Something I can't say about my time in Starfield.
Speak for yourself. I gave up on BGS after FO4. That game is just annoying to play through. All of their games are. Playing the Tales of Two Wastlands mod for FONV just shows how much worse FO3 is. In FO3 you go automatic and spray and prey. In Vegas you actually plan what to do.
@@Cloud_Seeker no? FONV is far more forgiving that FO3 considering how easy it is to rack up large amount of caps, Encounters and Dangerous enemies is pretty easy to avoid due to large open space and a lot of unique and top tier gears for any playstyle/Build is quite easy to acquired without much investment, there only handful of places that you need sort of plan to clear out,
Quarry junction, Deathclaw promontory, Dead Wind Cavern and several cazador nests.
@@srt7248 I think you missed my point. I am not talking about how forgiving each game is. I am talking about which game is annoying to play. Fallout 3 is annoying to play. By the end of the game, all enemies will just be harder to kill because they have a lot of HP.
In New Vegas I can go to Quarry junction and get ripped to shreds. I can then return to it and rip them to shreds as they are a static challenge. In Fallout 3 they should just have buffed the Deathclaws in terms of HP and damage so no matter what armor or weapon I had it should be a slog where the real struggle should be if I can find a piece of environment to break the AI pathing or if I can spam enough healing items while see how many bullets I cna put into the deathclaws.
Bethesda have ALWAYS relied on bullet sponges to provide a challenge. That is why DC is filled with Super Mutant Masters and the outside is filled with Deathclaws and Albino Radscorpions at higher levels. It they are only there to give a high leveled character a challenge, when they shouldn't do it anymore. That is why you have a high level character.
@@Cloud_Seeker aside from unfair addition from Broken steel DLC, Fallout 3 combat is pretty balance. Beside that Death claw always been design to be bullet sponges, NV has better and large arsenal compare to fallout 3, you just need the right tools.
About the POIs being repetitive: why not use procedural generation? Tons of games use procedurally generated dungeons to great effect. It would've been much more fun than the however many dozen handcrafted dungeons we got that have the exact same layout, loot and enemy spawns.
Bethesda used procgen for the terrain the player looks at and runs around in, but they decided not to do so for the stuff the player wants to interact with?
If Bethesda did just what is in this video it would be a better game. But they won't. I just don't have any faith in them. Especially because they know full well that modders will do a lot of this for them. I hope people don't buy future titles until some significant and repeatable trust is earned. The sheer amount of things they did in previous games but not in starfield is insane.
EDIT: Also in regards to vehicles, modded skyrim can have faster horses that don't cause crashes. I use a mod for this amongst over 1500 other mods and skyrim is one of the most stable bethesda game experiences I have had after all those mods. Since starfield is supposed to be using an upgraded version of the engine I find it insane to think that they can't make vehicles for ground exploration work when modders did it years ago in a 12 year old game using an older version of the engine. There is no valid excuse for BGS being this bad.
Modders aren’t helping much anymore since some are now pulling out cause Starfield is empty. Modders work from passion. They need something to be passionate about and BGS didn’t provide. 🤷🏻♀️
@@ichigokage True. I guess the better way to put it is that BGS probably take the modding community for granted. And don't expect people to just leave the game entirely.
Big difference between Skyrim and Starfield in terms of mods is that Skyrim mods make a great game better. While Starfield mods are trying to make a bad game good.
You can’t make a game with huge flaws and expect ALL the players to go and load mods on their game unit to fix the flaws in the game for it to feel like a better game. Many players are just going to refuse to go the mod route. Some those players will be lost forever from the game as well any future game that game studio releases. The studio needs to do their job and fix their game.
You can speed up the game in the console.
@@ummerfarooq5383 Yep. So what?
Flashlights in video games always confused me, in any real life scenario where your in a pitch black space, a torch can easily light up a huge area.
Hell, when caving, a single match can light up a room sufficiently to see several meters around you no problem (as long as your not staring at the light source).
Its really strange that most games choose to only illuminate small circles of space as opposed to, say, making a bright circle, but also increasing the overall scene brightness in the rest of the space to visible levels.
Worse is when the flashlight runs out of batteries after 90 seconds, and you have to turn it off and back on for a few seconds.
The best part? This already existed in some games where there is simulated bounce lighting.
State of decay had that where there was a beam of light and a general area light, a 10 years old game that started production in 2008 btw.
Now it's more appealing with Ray traced global illumination.
Right? Forget the flashlight, where's my Night Vision? Where's my advanced thermals?
The modifiers on your 'unique' Sir Livingstone's Pistol nearly killed me - well done @Camel 😂
I was actually floored to hear that Emil is the only credited writer.
This is very well thought out criticism, almost like a Document with Designs for a Game.
If only Bethesda had one of those *before* they made the game.
I love how the crafting/storage solution he wants is basically minecrafts applied energistics mod.
When I saw your mockup of a better map using LODs, I was actually amazed. Such a simple fix that would take it from being the worst map of all time to among the best.
The worst thing is, that’s literally exactly what they did for the local maps in Fallout 3 and Skyrim(tho they also added filters to them, which made the maps nearly useless)
"The more I play, the less I want to play"
Exactly my experience, and exactly the thought I was having this morning while sitting down to continue my newest holiday playthrough of Morrowind.
Also, regarding "studying game development academically"... you don't need to be a Michelin star chef to know when food tastes like ass, you just need a mouth.
With 630 hours in and I watched this whole video rather than play...
I do agree with well over 90% of what you said, and thanks for all the work.
What’s crazier than the effort put into this video is that this video had to be made in the first place. What the hell. Congrats on this painstaking project camel, beautiful work as always!
Youre describing features I never thought an open game could be developed without. Not just for gameplay purposes, like the flashlight, but for more complex purposes like the bestiary. Which serves as a library for discoveries to go back and find what you found but also to serve as a completionist tracker.
This video was soothing. Bethesda should have him write more beautiful things and have you reading to us. Thank you I'm 34 hours in and haven't started the main mission. I love starfield. I bought it September 6th but didn't start playing it until last week. I do t get the negative reviews but to each their own. I appreciate the content
This video brings me too tears just realising everything this game is missing and so sorely needs to make it playable.
I think their first step would be to even take the criticism aimed at the game as a form of feedback with which they could improve the dlcs and potential Starfield 2 in the future. Instead it seems they are too busy telling the people who have played the game that they are doing it wrong if they dont enjoy the game.
They are doing it wrong. It's 30 minute a day game. A relaxing game. An asmr game. A game for stars. It's not a button mashing casino.
Wow can’t wait 50 years for starfield 2 maybe it will have things other games have in launch this time
@@ummerfarooq5383 Thanks, I'll go play a free mobile game instead of spending 70$ on this one then.
Another nitpicky thing that BGS didn't include - where did the gore go? That was one of the thing I loved when I first played Fallout New Vegas. I had not experienced before being able to shoot someone in the head and it pops like a balloon, and then shooting their body and it explodes into giblets. In this game, I shoot a dude square in the chest with a rocket and... he doesn't just spectacularly explode?
That's a Fallout-only thing. BGS doesn't do violent gore in non-fallout games. Look at Skyrim, no gore.
@@markjackson1989You can decapitate enemies in Skyrim. It’s unlocked via a Perk.
Honestly, I think the biggest issue with Bethesda going forward is Emil's attitude and how he's been handling even proper criticism of his writing/work ethic. As many have pointed out, he's got a couple of pretty infamous interviews/talks where he discusses his disdain for design documents, doesn't listen to/accept criticism, and how he is a vehement follower of KISS, which is just a horrible way to look at it. Yes, you should keep it simple but that doesn't mean that the writing needs to be dumbed down and adding stupid to the end just makes it feel like he's more attacking how people write than actually trying to form a coherent point.
I think it also doesn't help that I'm sure that the stuff Todd went through during Morrowind's development scarred him pretty significantly. If what I've been told is true, Bethesda is one of the few game studios that doesn't force crunch time and that has a lot to do with the fact that Todd and company were pretty much forced to work 16+ hour shifts 5-7 days a week for a whole year trying to finish Morrowind in a timely manner. I know in interviews he's talked about it, how much it affected both his and his team's physical and mental health, and I'm pretty sure that has affected him negatively.
It's clear he's very close to the top members of his group and I'm sure he just doesn't want to fire Emil because they're best friends who have been through a lot together. Unfortunately, no matter how much I feel for Todd and the stuff he's gone through he's gotta do something about Emil because if not Emil will drag his company down and Bethesda will just become another AAA development studio that shovels out "safe" games like Ubisoft and EA do. Which is unfortunate, because while I wasn't a big fan of Skyrim and only put maybe 50 hours into the game, I do love Oblivion and Morrowind and I would hate to see Bethesda die.
I'm just hoping that with all the negativity between this and 76 that Bethesda finally gets it's ass into gear or Todd is going to find himself in the exact same situation he was when he and his team were working on Morrowind and I don't think the company is going to make it out a second time if they do.
Todd neither had to fire Emil nor crunch to make Starfield good. He could keep Emil but not let him have the final say on a project's writing. And Starfield had nearly 3 time the dev cycle of the average AAA yet Todd admitted it was only ever fun 1 year from launch. Their unorthodox project management and bland design philosophy killed it.
Bad writing doesn't affect the shit gameplay though.
There’s a lot more wrong with the game than the writing. This same game with a better story would still be disappointing
@@TheAxebeard I feel like it does though, since if they feel a character is too important to the story they will make that character unkillable.
This is fine once or twice but when too many characters are like this it starts effecting the gameplay as well.
@@PandaCake978 Unkillable NPCs in a game literally centered on a multiversal experience where you are charged, again and again, to start over in a different universe is truly the crown of baffling design decisions.
What you were describing with the naming of the weapons -reminds me a of a practice in data analytics where we might make names by combining columns. I wonder if the naming conventions in this game is just them using a quick coding solution to randomized objects with out thinking about end user experience or having any considerations for lore or world building.
It feels like not a lot of care or passion was put into the game in a lot of aspects. Now I'm fairly certain that isn't actually the case, it's just the poor execution of the final product that makes it seem that way. I think the game was probably way more ambitious at one point, but had to be scaled back immensely to make it work.
@@steveballmersbaldspot2.095it definitely was scaled back that's for sure. Will be scaled up in the future?
@@ummerfarooq5383 by modders sure. i wouldnt pay for it tho and they want ya to pay for it.
If you listen the lore for the game, it does have sense, but this current period is just after all the things that happened where world (universe) was more interesting. So because main player seems like he/she is just PUT there as one ant in entire universe, so for things to be more interesting they added powers, which honestly i think is bad main story design, because there are a lot of other things they could put in focus instead of main focus to collect artifacts and get powers. If artifacts were the main case, that should have been much more in depth, so actual story should get more interesting RPG elements where your decisions actually will change the end and have larger effect on everyone and everything. But apparently devs (not just Bethesda but rest also) are lazy, or scared to make some actual RPG elements that gonna effect entire game and playthrough.
Not only did you concisely list the problems, but you also offered solutions
Starfield is like an Alpha game release with lots of finishing features yet to be released. Everything you mentioned here would vastly improve the quality of gameplay. The end statistics is mind blowing.
100% on the Bestiary. I like the layout and it would make sense to have that in any game. It should update when you find out new information.
I honestly think they went in over their heads with this game. This whole thing is an enormous undertaking. Making the world so massive and interesting at the same time is impossible, unless you have like 30 years and 1000s of devs working tirelessly. They should have known this. It was an impossible task from the get-go. With all the time and effort they put into Starfield, they could have made Elder Scrolls 6 by now and it would have been the undisputed best game ever.
CIG with Star Citizen and Squadron 42 are doing it... Squadron 42 being the single player campaign and Star Citizen being the MMO. There are i think currently 130 solar systems planned with varying degrees of hostility/civilisations including aliens etc. Bar the ones that are already completed for SQ42, CIG is focusing on making each solar system have a unique identity. Each planet and moon procedurally generated to a degree within certain parameters and then finished off by the artists from handcrafting certain aspects of landscapes to points of interest.
Their approach shows that it works as in the first solar system (Stanton) people have their favourite planets/moons factions etc, let alone all the different brands from ships to guns and armour to food. Since all have an identity, personality even. Each faction also has very different architectural/aesthetic styles.
The issue seems to be that Todd wants to dazzle people with quantity over quality. The same can be said for No Man's Sky and Elite Dangerous. Where in both games, gameplay is a complete afterthought. The only goal during development was the quantity of planets that they actually forgot to make a game...
Skyrim only has the longevity it has because of the modding scene. The actual vanilla game is frankly terrible and even the re-release still doesn't support ultra wide monitors, same for fallout 4...meanwhile the witcher 3 on the other hand does. TES6 would suffer the same fate without drastic changes within the studio itself as its clear that they are somewhat similar to Creative Assembly in some regards and ride of past successes whilst removing from their games everything that made it good.
BG3 is probably the best game to date if you exclude nostalgia. It could be usurped by Squadron 42 though, we'll find out within the next year.
@@chazz00999 As impressive as Star Citizen's advancement has been (even just the fact that they're still around is unprecedented), it isn't a good comparison to pretty much any other game due to how different and absurdly long their development has been. Star Citizen began 12 years ago now, which is already 50% longer than Starfield allegedly took and they still don't have a real release (even if parts of the game are now playable). They have also had, as of this point, more than 3 times the amount of money Starfield took to develop and are still raising more. It is entirely possible that Star Citizen will be the first game to have ever breached 1 billion dollars in development cost prior to official release.
BG3 is a much better foil for other studios, as it was a traditionally developed game.
@@CheezMonsterCrazy it is a good comparison frankly. CIG is an indie studio that started out of a garage and now has 1300 employees world wide. Bethesda is an established company with established IP. They have had the funds to make something like Star Citizen for over a decade. Even NMS had 15 devs and did planetary to space flight as janky and terrible as that game is. There is no excuse for Bethesda. They are just talentless hacks riding on past successes.
The amount of funding CIG has does not equate to money spent on development costs. But considering they are making 2 games currently with it, it's more akin to $300m per game so far, and SQ42 is due to be released within the year allegedly.
Nowhere was I saying that Bethesda should have 130 solar systems with that much depth. But they certainly have the funds to make a handful of solar systems with a rich amount of lore and could have added more solar systems with their own story arcs through DLC. Instead, it's a game almost as soulless and devoid of life as NMS and ED.
Regarding the Pizza analogy, it kinda reminds me of a few other games I've played. I don't know how many here have played Age of Conan, but the first area of the game is hand crafted with voice acting, but once you leave that area and get dropped into the rest of the game, it's like you have a large open world filled with hardly anything, and no more voiced NPCs. It's all text from there on out.
Had they dropped the creation kit along with the launch, there would have at least been an argument for 'we rushed doing the engine right to let you guys start on awesome mods, quests will come later'. But this is just madness.
Bethesda just has incompetence. Theoretically you can still make something even with as old of bones as the creation engine into something thst works for modern gaming. The core of a the grand majority of today's engines were created in the 90's, and were adapted to work better and do more today. Bethesda is just comfortable and complacent working with jank and design philosphies that were alreadh outdated and in some ways outright downgrades from their previous work ever since 2002.
@@queuedjar4578Rockstar rage engine was also a modified old engine, the same base used for Midtown madness in 99 was used for the Rockstar proprietary engine RAGE that runs GTA IV, V and that will run VI.
Bethesda just became complascient with the amount of tech they developed for their games. morrowind to oblivion there was a huge leap, oblivion to F3 and on were tiny baby steps.
Bethesda are smug better than and too inclusive to have the guts to make a game we want. Morrowind was only as good as it is because they were going for broke. All or nothing. They are no longer on the ropes. They have financial calls and shareholders to please. Not you, me, or Camel. We don't exist.
SweetBaby will assist in creating TESVI and I would bet money on it@@lasarousi
Also, Bethesda claims they still work with hundreds of people on Starfield - and what do they accomplish? Two tiny todo list issues every six to ten weeks, first DLC maybe a year after release, CK will drop maybe after 1.5 years. _WHAT_ do they ffs???
I really hope bethesda sees this video and implements these changes. Especially the beastiary!
Im sure Bethesda will get right on this...
In 20 years when they Rererelease Starfield Ultra-Super-Mega Edition.
This is an incredible video! It's not just pointing out issues, it's offering actual solutions while still being aware of limitations the author might not be aware of. Really impressed with this! Thanks for taking the time to put it together.
They could implement every single one of these fixes and more, and i still don't think i'll want to go back to it.
For me, the single biggest issue is loading screens. There has been zero attempt to limit the amount of loading screens. There are even completely unnecessary loading screens in the game. In the nightclub on Neon, when you take the elevator, you are greeted with a loading screen ... only to find yourself still within THE SAME LOADED AREA. You can literally jump off the balcony onto the dance floor, and take the same elevator back up via loading screen. Nothing is loading, it is pure laziness.
Same goes for entering your ship. Why can we not have an airlock cycling animation? Why does our immersion need to be completely and unnecessarily destroyed?
I don't see how they can be proud of this game.
You're being too kind and positive, Bethesda just needs to have people tear them a new one until they actually have a reason to try.
Being kind and understanding has only gotten us flak too. Emil already thinks players are idiots and pays zero mind to critique and reviews. Then you have Pete Hines or whoever is their PR telling fans to ‘shut the fuck up’ about TES6.
Being kind doesn't work. Never. Especially not in this monetary kind of relationship.
@@ichigokagecool, then try trolling, see if that gets you anywhere
Stop. Giving. Them. Money. In late stage capitalism, the only thing that gets anyone moving is the promise of extra zeroes, or the shrinkage of those zeroes at the end of the paycheck.
Ergo. If no one bought tes6 some major shit would go down. Like, colossally massive amounts of shit. Because zenimax would threaten to pull the plug. Heads would roll, people would be chastened, new reasonable people can come in and replace the less than desirables that you know for a fact are there for cheeky diversity hires.
Money talks, and bgs fan base wont shut the fuk up.
@@Originalchili "Strawman" detected. You misrepresented someone's argument to make it easier to attack. "Black or white" detected. You presented one alternative state as the only possibilitiy, when in fact more possibilities exist.
On the Shipbuilding part i thought a toggle between Exterior and Interior would be the most intuitive.
Inside the shipbuilder you see your ship, toggle to interior and it shows the interior inside the ship silhouette and from here you can adjust the interior.
Incredible constructive video! These 2h were a lot more interesting and fun than most of the 40h of Starfield gameplay I was patient enough to play. As a BGS fan fanboy I felt fooled and robbed. To wait so many years and get so hyped by the devs, I spent 100$, took a week off from work, and i got so disappointed that I don't have the desire to get back to Starfield anymore and absolutely regret spending 100$
But I would definitely play the game with the improvements you depicted in this amazing video. Good job, sir!
Exactly. I've been using mods to implement a lot of these suggestions just to make the game playable without getting bored and frustrated. I can now play it on PC at a point where i'm not completely annoyed at the in-game systems. Found a couple more mods and tweaks because of things in this video, like being able to mod weapons to higher tier and speed up wait time that I flagged for install.
I'm sorry, Camel, but I don't know how to fix a game that, at the core, is bad. Here's my review, and I have no idea how to fix this:
I'm not a Bethesda fan boy. But I am a 67 year old Skyrim fan boy. I played Skyrim since Special Addition came out and 95% of that play time is a modded Skyrim. But Starfield? I played 74.5 hours and uninstalled it. I give the game a 4.5/10 and that's for the art department because the game looks pretty good. Excepting water.
The game was over hyped, falsely advertised (simply listen to Todd explaining all the cool exploration we can't do), horrible optimization, no immersion, uses a crap engine, totally crap UI, bug filled, glitch filled, crashes, repetitive, boring, broken stealth, horrible perk system, janky base building (with little instruction), janky ship building (with little instruction), copy/pasted POI's, absolutely dreadful and contradictory companions who don't care who or what you are other than you're important, no-name citizens that walk back and forth on an invisible tether and many times get in your way, weak main and side missions, overloaded cut scenes and load screens, mediocre gun play with bullet sponge targets. Really bad circa 2011 AI. There are no real choices with consequences. Any choice you make still takes you on the direction Bethesda wants you to take. Thus, the traits and abilities you pick in character generation have little to no benefit. There is no depth or relevance to this game and its components. This game has no role playing despite it being labeled an RPG.
This game has no soul.
The junk you pick up is pointless, extremely underwhelming carry weight, arbitrary level farming to mend/boost your XP/perks/ money, vendors with little money, NO MAPS, companions scolding you one after the other because you chose the dialog Bethesda didn't want you too, more loading screens in five minutes of play than the entirety of Elden Ring, 300 years of human fiction with nothing to really show for it, no challenging locations or bosses. And no reason to actually make an outpost to farm stuff because you can simply purchase it at a vendor. A "2023 next gen game" with 2006 water graphics?
Starfield is fundamentally flawed on so many levels. It is NOT open world. It's plagued with bad game design decisions, half baked systems, bland & uninspired writing and outdated quest design. It isn't "Skyrim in Space", nor is it "Fallout in Space". Starfield is a downgraded, mediocre and soulless mixture of Skyrim & Fallout 4, without the free world exploration and the charm of neither. It's a regression from Bethesdas previous titles in all aspects and the saddest part is that it took them 8 years to create this piece of mediocrity with unparalleled boredom. Mario Cart is more fun than the spaceship battles in Starfield.
What's even worse is that devs had ALL the creative freedom to write whatever the hell they wanted; there is no established lore that restricts them from going crazy. And yet they went for the most banal unimaginative take on sci-fi. Funny thing with Londinium - I decided to try landing randomly on the planet, ignored the UC ship telling me to stay away and menu clicked my way down there. As soon as I got out, another random ship came a few hundred metres away, as they do. I wandered over, found it was a Freestar Ship that had landed at a "small settlement" or something like that. On Londinium. The planet that was quarantined because it was over-run with monsters. Sigh. Later, I’m desperate to complete the main quest so I can finally uninstall. I made it to the buried temple - which is of course just another copy paste junkyard. Sarah said she wanted to speak to me and told me that Barrett was worried about her back at the lodge. Well, Barrett fraking died on the Eye when the Hunter attacked about 30 hours ago! What little immersion I had left was instantly taken away! TLDR; Abysmal writing.
The worst part is they made a world (worlds) that were already explored. It all feels like we were late to the party. Every planet is littered with copy/pasted factory’s and outposts, you are never more than a 1000 meters from a structure. The whole colonial war already happened and you just get to hear about all the cool interesting events that already occurred. No matter how far you go, there are almost always humans waiting for you there. Even the plants & wildlife that you need to scan already have names. Therefore, locations have already been discovered in the past.
What really burns my backside is that New Game + merely allows you to replay the game over again with the same or different companions; ie., Sarah becomes a potted plant, all the Constellation members are children and I think the very worst is all the Constellation members are you with different personalities (and that's to name just three of the 10 or so variations you get. Not only that, when it comes to the writing and consequences of going through the Unity, Sam Coe's questline revolves around restoring a relationship with Cora's mother, Lillian Hart, yet when it comes to the Unity, Sam shows not the slightest consideration of Lillian in allowing young Cora to go through the Unity. I would think she would be devastated. Also, if you do NG+ to bring all 24 powers to level 10, that means you'd have to jump through 1200 glowy-glitter things in 240 temples. No, thanks.
This game was labeled as "Next generation" gameplay? Don't stop to think Bethesda will fix anything other than the most egregious problems and that modders can "fix" the game when Bethesda won't. I've come to the realization that the game is fundamentally flawed in a way that no mod or update can actually fix. It's the base level structures of the game that are so unappealing. Modders can come very close to it, but I don't see that as a modders unpaid job. An example would be that modders made Skyrim better. But they didn't "fix" it. As I sit now with 74.5 hours into Starfield, I honestly don't think I'll ever play this game again. At least not without a Cyberpunk 2.0 and DLC type upgrade.
And this Bethesda mediocrity has me very worried for Elder Scroll 6. Don't settle for mediocrity.
Yeah it feels like the game needs to be rebuilt at a fundamental level to even begin to crawl out of mediocrity. ES6 is poised to be a dumpster fire if some big changes don't happen over there.
@@steveballmersbaldspot2.095 I agree
Someone watched a little too much NakeyJakey lmao
@@afungai1649 I didn't know who or what a Nakey Jakey was so I looked it up. So I thank you for the (indirect) reference and will watch what he has to say.
@@afungai1649 He's 67 I think he has better things to do
I really like what you did when you compared the developers for Morrowind vs Starfield. In many fields this is referred to as a Figure Of Merit. You relate characteristics that are common to each product, usually involving dividing output (number of quests) by input (number of developers) to obtain some number for comparing the performance/quality/efficiency of each one.