Yeah I cannot think of why that was their first big announcement. RDR2s map is genuinely not that big BUT the fact that the fastest player controlled vehicle is a horse really makes it feel bigger than it is. If you added even like a Model T car into that game you'd quickly realize it's pretty small.
it's the only rover in the entire starfield universe and you have it. What a dogshit game, i remember 20 hours in i did a dungeon and the very next mission sent me to a dungeon that was exactly the same. I shut it off then and haven't picked it up since. Bethesda is dead they exist now purely on momentum from there older releases
Majority of the time the rover was useless anyway since it gets stuck on small rocks with it only coming in handy for low gravity planets making traversal 10%-20% faster otherwise it felt slower than sprinting.
Im so glad Todds take away from the DLC is that they were TOO generous in giving players too much extra content that helped solve the design issue that they created themselves. Truly a man of the people.
Todd Howard knows he overplayed his hand by focussing solely on "making the largest open world ever in a game" but refuses to back down. Starfield feels boring and broken because there simply isn't enough to do for such a huge world. When you look a bit more critically, you can see the painful truth that Howard doesn't want to admit: Starfield runs head-on into the limitations of the Creation engine again and again. The bubble design that the Creation engine uses to render the game simply doesn't lend itself for a large game, let alone a huge game. That's why you run into loading screen after loading screen; it's a limitation of the game engine that cannot be fixed. Bethesda/Howard's insistence of using the Creation engine yet again, despite its limitations, shows that they refuse to address the gigantic elephant in the room: the Creation engine has had its time. Yes, it can still render beautiful worlds, but it can't be used to seamlessly create open world games.
I was done when Fallout 4 launched the last game that was okay not as good as Morrowind but doesn’t look like they have talented developers working there anymore
It’s worth noting that of the 250,000 peak concurrent player count on steam on September 4th, in early access, 100 percent of them have the DLC for free as it was a part of the package. So the 21,000 peak for shattered space should speak volumes. Speaking from experience 😂
Same. I own it because I bought the pricier version of the game, but have no desire to play more Starfield. The patches let me know they weren't going to make the improvements the game actually needed, and the reviews of the expansion verified that that was indeed the case.
I realized how unpopular the DLC was when I completed the VERY FIRST MISSION (the prologue really) of the DLC over a month after it came out and got a "rare" diamond achievement on my Xbox lol. It said something like 1% of players have achieved finishing the very first thing of the DLC.
I'm only playing Starfield because it comes with the Game Pass. I'm having fun with it, but would never pay for it. And that has been the case since Fallout 76. I'm still playing Fallout 4 and have bought all the DLC's in a low-priced bundle because I like the game, despite all its bugs. I'm occasionally playing Fallout 76, but have not and will never buy the DLC's. The same goes for Starfield.
@@devilselbow For most sp games yes. The actually successful ones have a better ability to keep their players. More People are Still playing Bethesda other games.
@@devilselbow Not for a game from old BGS. A ton of players used to play those games for months and months. The numbers BG3 has right now, after this much time passed, Bethesda would get. Even Skyrim is still over 20k players. Them lasting 2 weeks to a month for numbers to really drop is not common for what this type of game was supposed to be.
@ to get specific I was just drawn to Todd’s quote. “We made a really solid dlc”. Like Todd. Dude. People are en masse saying you absolutely did NOT make a solid dlc. The ego to make the same awful game for like a decade now and think they’re amazing…
@@startthebengine ppl accuse Bethesda of toxic positivity but let's be real; they're just straight up delusional. They're completely and utterly deaf to all criticism. You can say "I liked Skyrim but I disliked that I could do almost all the factions (bar imperials/stormcloaks at the same time) in the same save file." And all they hear is "I liked Skyrim."
@@nothobbesmufc949 Yep. They didn't even have any shame releasing this game when it's just a janky, broken, reskin of Skyrim just with space textures. Honest to god, modders could do a better job turning Skyrim into a space sim than Bethesda did and that's no joke. Funny thing is, they aren't even deaf to it. Todd 'jokingly' acknowledged people haaaaated Fallout 76. He just literally didn't care. They're gonna make these janky, broken, creatively bankrupt reskins until Microsoft shuts them down and honestly? I'm fine with it. Maybe that company that made Baldur's Gate 3 will get a crack at making a Fallout.
I was at a small tech startup that got acquired and absorbed into a much, much larger company and boy oh boy did getting things done become like trying to run through wet cement. The external teams we had to work with who were more interested in protecting their processes than they were in getting things done, who would do things that were convenient for them rather than meaningful for the customer, was wild. So glad I got out, but there are people who absolutely thrive in that kind of environment which I will never understand, but it does help me understand what used to be the confusing behaviour of other companies now at least.
mostly because nobody else want to navigate the wet cement. If ppl are consistently rewarded for doing something, no matter how counter unintuitive, somebody will get good at it.
I love comparing Starfield's player numbers with Fallout New Vegas. Even now Starfield only has about 3000 more players than a game that's 14 years old
@jakemaanimeikalainen248 that's the point. A 14 year old game not made by Bethesda in the same engine and Genre has an almost comparable active player base as current Bethesda
The thing to keep in mind with Starfield is the gamepass numbers. That's where it gets a lot of its players from. It's the type of game people with the pass will play when they turn on their system after a day of work but aren't quite sure what to play, look through the list of available stuff a bit, and then settle on Starfield. Not because Starfield is really what they want to play, but because it doesn't ask too much from them, but has a variety of options, so once they're in, they can find something to do. The whole "wide as an ocean, shallow as a puddle" thing really works in its favor there.
I think a lot of us were still clinging to hope that they would fix a few things with the expansion and they didn't even try. So, I didn't even bother playing it.
I got it for purchasing the version that included it. And I've yet to play the DLC. I am a high enough level in Starfield to begin the Shattered Space expansion, but why do I want to play MORE of a game that I already don't like. I put in 2 weeks worth of hours in Starfield, and the game just isn't fun. I started asking gmtself that question years ago.... "Am I having fun playing this?" and the answer for Starfield is no. Shattered Space doesn't change my feelings about the game overall. I was STILL having fun playing Fallout 4 when Far Harbor came out. Starfield just doesn't hold that bar. And THAT bar wasn't very high with FO4.
Todd is set in his ways, same with the other senior people at BGS. They don't want to evolve. Their games still sell, so they don't think they need to.
There's more people with access to consoles and PCs today than there were 10 years ago. It's almost a given that a publisher will keep getting more players every 5 years unless the game is really terrible.
I said on one of your videos that house va'ruun felt like it was already done and they cut it out and then just added it back in, also i feel like the whole numbers on release is how the industry looks at if these projects are worth continuous investment, and i dont think that's the end all of benchmarks
From someone who works in the engineering field, this is how every company operates. From video games, weapons, vehicles, aircraft’s, military, etc. It is hell trying to get shit done with how many approvals you need for a single word document. It’s an accomplishment if you can get something done or signed off on the due date ie within two weeks.
I've been a bit of a Starfield apologist to a certain extent but Shattered Space was an insult. It was very CLEARLY cut content from the base game. Aside from that they reused creature assets for the "scary phase monster" they teased as if it were something new. Ugh
26:45 the only solution I can see is to split that bloated mess into multiple smaller and more manageable studios and put them to work on different IPs. One can be dedicated exclusively to TES, one to Fallout and whoever is left can try to reboot Starfield without all the idiotic procgen wastelands and repeating quests.
IMO, BGS needs a big, grand gesture to show they are really trying to address fan concerns. Lip service isn't enough. Phil said many nice things that are consumer friendly but without action it doesn't mean anything. The restructuring can happen behind the scenes and it doesn't matter to us the end consumer.
the expansion added nothing to base game which we are used to with updated and it NEEDED it. It is a small story addon that cost more than most steam games with some of the worst dollar per hour of entertainment in existence. I don't regret the base honestly, its not perfect and needs filling in imo, but i 100% regret paying 35 dollars for that dlc that I originally assumed would essentially be a season pass or something significant like elden ring and cyberpunk which this is very much in that competition space. If this dlc were 15 dollars it would be VERY different feeling from me.
I'm very familiar with the kinds of challenges they're facing and Bethesda's clearly got major organizational problems. Not only does management seem to be disruptive, but they're a big bottleneck. I'd argue there's an over-reliance on contractors and the dependency on documentation is alarming. What they're trying to do is massively impractical and it sounds like their solution is to add more process to the pile. That only makes it harder for anyone to get real work done. Also concerning is that not once did I hear project managers come up and they're essential for a company like Bethesda. They're more valuable than a million Confluence pages and thousands of instructional videos. PMs are like traffic cops who maintain communication, help route questions and ensure everyone, including management, stays on track. Unfortunately, it's evident Todd and friends are disconnected from the day to day and only pay lip service to addressing issues.
I was so mad, i bought it at release and had weird audio issues. Spent the first chunk of hours mainly trying to fix that. Just past the refund window when i realized i had no desire to play it, and havent played since
What i took away from them saying they should have held onto the buggy for the dlc is this "We should have held on to a finished assest that will improve gameplay until our dlc comes out to improve our player numbers on launch"
Todd should provide guidance, his producers/directors enforce that guidance, and the programmers execute the guidance. When a milestone is met by a team, the producer brings their work to Todd. At that point, Todd should be able to say “heck yea that is amazing!” Or “I love this part, can we tweak this and once you do, send it and move on to the next task.” The Army has these same issues.
Also I think launching the Rev with SS would have been dumb. The Rev drop felt like a big release this summer. Which was much needed for a game starting to feel stale
It took 3 tries and now I’m invested in Starfield. I agree with Luke’s comment about the ending of Shattered Space not having a real consequence, and oddly there is another quest involving Genghis Khan that had similar story beats. I’m just finding the exploration to be interesting. It really took changing my mindset about role playing that did it for me, and now registering to comments made by Bethesda I can more readily empathize. I’ll add that I’ve modded the game plenty using both console commands and nexus mods.
If you've seen the Matty interview which I'm sure you have Luke, you'd see that Todd talked quite a bit about reading the negative feedback. It's something that him and his team have done a lot of over the years...
I still can't get over the fact that I had ZERO idea I was playing the final mission in starfield when I was. I literally thought I was halfway through the game maybe 2/3 but then bam, "Do you wanna reset all of your side quests and factions?"
The whole dynamic for the company has changed. They don't rely on individual game sales anymore to stay afloat. As long as the data shows a significant amount of GP subscribers in-game on Starfield, they've proven their worth to string subscribers along for another paid month. There's just no hunger anymore to keep the lights on.
I think I'd really appreciate a video on how the fallout 4 next gen patch increases load times to 1 minute, creates a ton of lag in downtown boston going down to like 20 fps and worse(back then you'd get drops to like 50-55 which is meh but it's a big difference) and a lot of the text now shows up as "lookup failed". You'd think with the success of the fallout show, they'd have some respect but right now if you buy fallout 4 as a new player(that's not too familiar with mods and such) you'd get 60 average loading times. Just frustrating to see.
The update added nothing and removed all my favorite mods, making all my old saves not work. Havent played at all since. Never giving Todd my money ever again for ruining fallout 4 ten years after release.
@vincanthofred8195 You cant rollback on xbox. They removed the mods from my console that hundreds of saves relied on to open. I had auto updates turned off and they pushed the updates anyways.
Luke should know that at CDPR you don’t talk to Janice or Ted you talk to Pawel. There’s a really good AnsweRed podcast where they talk about all the Pawels in the studio so they can’t use first names & have to use nicknames instead.
Baffling that after a year the game is STILL devoid of purpose and completely empty. Even Fallout 76 with a fraction of the content and 16x the bugs somehow developed into a more worthwhile experience in less time. I see no way that this game achieves a redemption arc.
what is fascinating to me is that every large gaming studio / publisher seems to move towards the same type of game design, generic trendy focus group profit over creativity type of product and as a result all the senior creatives leave and in the end they just fail, all these games fail - look at bioware, look at ubisoft, look at bethesda failure after failure after failure... when will they learn? ? ?
Those anti gravity systems were obviously invented for ships that don’t have gravity systems yet, but then they realised that they needed the rest of the game to have gravity in all other circumstances, or all those loose objects would float around your ship and become a hazard.
As a layman, I hear that BGS has 400 employees, way more than they used to, and I see that it takes them way longer to make worse products. I want to see half the studio purged, as I see it there's way too much bloat.
the fact they think the buggy buggies are the issue shows they have no idea what theyre doing. ive said it once, ill say it again. everything since Fallout 3 has been hot garbage
I liked fallout 4 gameplay loop but the story was meh. Skyrim was meh overall. And I'll probably never play Starfield, so yeah, last good game they made was Fallout 3. Bethesda as a whole is mediocre and they are 10-15 years behind the competition. They will never make a game with the quality of Cyberpunk or Bg3. Thet don't have the talent for it.
They should've added some area where there are rover races and maybe even add a quest line that has to do with shady gambling practices and stuff in the races. I don't know some shit.
Howard was in a catch 22. Either he puts the rovers in the DLC behind a paywall, advertise it as a feature for it, and people complain that it should've been a core feature anyway and the reviews bomb. So rightly I think he did take that to heart and just added it as a free update, but then he doesn't have anything to sell his 'story expansion' on. So really his trepidation is probably tied to his business thinking that the expansion sales would've been higher if he had done the vehicle in the DLC so more profit, and his bet didn't pay off that he could build hype in general by making it free to sell more base game units and expansion together, and now he's regretting that. If you look at all of Todd's decisions from a business perspective he's a genius, if you try to make sense of them as a game designer he's a failure. Really Bethesda had figured out the answer to would you rather have $5k, or five thousand friends(players). So he got five thousand players who probably give him $10 a month each on average. Todd played chess. And he's won again. He didn't need to change. His strategy works.
Looking at these graphs, it makes sense why publishers keep complaining about video games becoming wildly expensive. It’s because companies become huge and 30 people need to approve anything that happens
but they never get rid of those 30 ppl they get rid of the lowly ones who are actually doing all the work and then tell the remaining lowly ones to work harder.
I grabed Outer Space for free in the Epic launcher a while ago, but never played it... after playing Shattered Space, i finally installed it and played it. OMG this game is so good, i wished i had bought it on release, its worth every penny. Outer Space but 2-3 times bigger, thats what Starfield should have been... now im more exited for Outer Space 2 than Elder Scrolls 6...
It sounds to me like the lesson Bethesda is taking from this is that they shouldn't have done the free updates, and should have instead bundled all that development in the expansion to increase the perception of value... Which doesn't exactly scream No Man's Sky/2077 redemption arc.
Bethesda is like that kid in grade school that brags about how his dad is a Navy Seal, and then his dad shows up to school, and he's just a pudgy, balding middle aged man that works at a car lot.
I would consider myself a hardcore Starfield fan. I haven’t played Shattered Space yet, but mostly because of all the other good content there is to play. Still stuck on SM2 and there’s so much in the backlog
I play on PlayStation, and used to be a Bethesda fan, so I would have bought the early access. Thank God it didn't release on PS5. I just want to thank them for deciding not to release on PlayStation as it saved me from wasting a lot of money. Cheers, Todd!!! 😂😂😂😂😂😂😂
They are treating Starfield as a new Fallout 76, which was rejected by critics and the public, but managed to hold on by a bunch of fans who keeps paying the microtransactions, which is more beneficial for Bethesda in the long term.
Todd has lost it if he thinks that getting the buggy spoiled us for Shattered Space. If anything not having the buggy would've made it SO much worse. People were expecting some big game mechanic addition because Starfield on its own is so mechanically shallow, and what mechanics it does have are severely underutilized. Shattered Space doesn't even have a new starborn power.
in a way the Silo structure reminds me of the legislative process for fundamental alterations to say....the Constitution. In order for such a fundamental thing to be altered, the legislative process has to go through as many hoops as possible and require as much consensus as possible because obviously those roadblocks have been put in place to stop any crazy guy from coming in, getting elected and fundamentally altering the base legislative code on which a nation is founded. In that sense, being so bureaucratic and stiff is a good thing. In software development however, if a system is not agile, it leads to any alteration being discouraged if not outright impossible.
I enjoy Starfield more when I go in thinking of it like Daggerfall in space rather than Skyrim in space. Then at least I'm expecting procedural content.
Toad Howard seems to live in the other place where the gamer's voice can't be heard even if we are living in the SNS world, or he just doesn't speak a human language, just Toad's language.
How to fix Bethesda games *Take the creation engine out back and OLD YELLER THAT FKN THING. *Todd no longer has full creative control but is still part of the process *Ban the use of procedurally generated slop because clearly as star field proved, they cant help themselves. *stop relying on modders to do EVERYTHING FOR YOU. 😊
![เจ็บที่ยังฮัก - ม่อน วรวิทย์ [ Official Mv ] จอนนี่มิวสิค](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/KALIGSRSjFs/mqdefault.jpg)
Adding a rover just meant you’d find out there’s nowhere interesting to go quicker.
😂😂😂😂😂😂
Yeah I cannot think of why that was their first big announcement. RDR2s map is genuinely not that big BUT the fact that the fastest player controlled vehicle is a horse really makes it feel bigger than it is. If you added even like a Model T car into that game you'd quickly realize it's pretty small.
it's the only rover in the entire starfield universe and you have it. What a dogshit game, i remember 20 hours in i did a dungeon and the very next mission sent me to a dungeon that was exactly the same. I shut it off then and haven't picked it up since. Bethesda is dead they exist now purely on momentum from there older releases
Exactly what Luke said. Ppl forgot how much the game sucked, and reinstalling it just reminded them.
Majority of the time the rover was useless anyway since it gets stuck on small rocks with it only coming in handy for low gravity planets making traversal 10%-20% faster otherwise it felt slower than sprinting.
Im so glad Todds take away from the DLC is that they were TOO generous in giving players too much extra content that helped solve the design issue that they created themselves.
Truly a man of the people.
they should have charged for the rovers is his takeaway 😂that really says it all.
Todd Howard knows he overplayed his hand by focussing solely on "making the largest open world ever in a game" but refuses to back down. Starfield feels boring and broken because there simply isn't enough to do for such a huge world.
When you look a bit more critically, you can see the painful truth that Howard doesn't want to admit: Starfield runs head-on into the limitations of the Creation engine again and again. The bubble design that the Creation engine uses to render the game simply doesn't lend itself for a large game, let alone a huge game. That's why you run into loading screen after loading screen; it's a limitation of the game engine that cannot be fixed. Bethesda/Howard's insistence of using the Creation engine yet again, despite its limitations, shows that they refuse to address the gigantic elephant in the room: the Creation engine has had its time. Yes, it can still render beautiful worlds, but it can't be used to seamlessly create open world games.
This is hilarious 😂
I'm just done with the nonsense.
I'm never buying bethesda products at launch ever again. I'll wait a year to see if they fix it first and buy it on sale.
Then quit playing games, that's generally a sign that you're just getting older. I still follow gaming news but I play maybe 30 hours of games a year
I've been done since Fallout 4. Nowadays, I just roll my eyes
@@seffievondionysus3198 He means he's done with BETHESDA's nonesense...and so am I
I was done when Fallout 4 launched the last game that was okay not as good as Morrowind but doesn’t look like they have talented developers working there anymore
It’s worth noting that of the 250,000 peak concurrent player count on steam on September 4th, in early access, 100 percent of them have the DLC for free as it was a part of the package. So the 21,000 peak for shattered space should speak volumes. Speaking from experience 😂
it would be interesting to see how many people who bought the early pass/expansion actually played the expansion, i know i haven't
@@pko1683 me neither. I just kind of “nothing” Starfield.
Same. I own it because I bought the pricier version of the game, but have no desire to play more Starfield. The patches let me know they weren't going to make the improvements the game actually needed, and the reviews of the expansion verified that that was indeed the case.
My first ever pre-order game....should've listened to the community. I didn't bother with the shattered space btw.
Starfield was the final nail in the coffin for my Elder Scrolls 6 hopes
Fallout 4 for me. Starfield just confirmed what I’ve been saying for the past 8 years
Na Starfield was a new IP and Universe and lore, ES6 has pre established lore, world and set time it should be fine fingers crossed though
@@drakeshotplays the gameplay is still going to be shit based on Bethesdas recent titles unfortunately... 😔
I realized how unpopular the DLC was when I completed the VERY FIRST MISSION (the prologue really) of the DLC over a month after it came out and got a "rare" diamond achievement on my Xbox lol. It said something like 1% of players have achieved finishing the very first thing of the DLC.
I'm only playing Starfield because it comes with the Game Pass. I'm having fun with it, but would never pay for it. And that has been the case since Fallout 76. I'm still playing Fallout 4 and have bought all the DLC's in a low-priced bundle because I like the game, despite all its bugs. I'm occasionally playing Fallout 76, but have not and will never buy the DLC's. The same goes for Starfield.
To be fair those are the masochists who played it without mods which disable achievements (the real number should be closer to 2% :p)
@@tjroelsma good to know you play exclusively trash games
Todd brags about the all time peak player count like the game didn’t fall off a month later
U mean two weeks
And only that cause it Takes ages to get started
Not defending Starfield, but that's pretty normal for single player games.
@@devilselbow For most sp games yes. The actually successful ones have a better ability to keep their players.
More People are Still playing Bethesda other games.
@@devilselbow Not for a game from old BGS. A ton of players used to play those games for months and months. The numbers BG3 has right now, after this much time passed, Bethesda would get. Even Skyrim is still over 20k players. Them lasting 2 weeks to a month for numbers to really drop is not common for what this type of game was supposed to be.
Because it's where the money are.
Only Todd would blame all his shortcomings on a rover update.
Bethesda responds to universally hated expansion.
“We’re sorry you didn’t like our really good dlc” lol. Nailed it, Beth.
No it's
"We're sorry we gave you free content before the DLC. We shall not do that again" which is worse imo
@ to get specific I was just drawn to Todd’s quote. “We made a really solid dlc”. Like Todd. Dude. People are en masse saying you absolutely did NOT make a solid dlc. The ego to make the same awful game for like a decade now and think they’re amazing…
@@startthebengine ppl accuse Bethesda of toxic positivity but let's be real; they're just straight up delusional.
They're completely and utterly deaf to all criticism. You can say "I liked Skyrim but I disliked that I could do almost all the factions (bar imperials/stormcloaks at the same time) in the same save file." And all they hear is "I liked Skyrim."
@@nothobbesmufc949 Yep. They didn't even have any shame releasing this game when it's just a janky, broken, reskin of Skyrim just with space textures. Honest to god, modders could do a better job turning Skyrim into a space sim than Bethesda did and that's no joke.
Funny thing is, they aren't even deaf to it. Todd 'jokingly' acknowledged people haaaaated Fallout 76. He just literally didn't care. They're gonna make these janky, broken, creatively bankrupt reskins until Microsoft shuts them down and honestly? I'm fine with it. Maybe that company that made Baldur's Gate 3 will get a crack at making a Fallout.
We’ve listened to your feedback and we totally understand where we need to be, so here’s a $7 quest that’s 10 mins long to help show that…
I was at a small tech startup that got acquired and absorbed into a much, much larger company and boy oh boy did getting things done become like trying to run through wet cement. The external teams we had to work with who were more interested in protecting their processes than they were in getting things done, who would do things that were convenient for them rather than meaningful for the customer, was wild. So glad I got out, but there are people who absolutely thrive in that kind of environment which I will never understand, but it does help me understand what used to be the confusing behaviour of other companies now at least.
mostly because nobody else want to navigate the wet cement. If ppl are consistently rewarded for doing something, no matter how counter unintuitive, somebody will get good at it.
I love comparing Starfield's player numbers with Fallout New Vegas.
Even now Starfield only has about 3000 more players than a game that's 14 years old
que salty todd stands begging to _"stop talking about noo vegos already, gooosn"_
New vegas wasn't made by bethesda though
@jakemaanimeikalainen248 that's the point. A 14 year old game not made by Bethesda in the same engine and Genre has an almost comparable active player base as current Bethesda
@@Shadowwand Yeah and they only had something like 18 months to make it. :D
The thing to keep in mind with Starfield is the gamepass numbers. That's where it gets a lot of its players from. It's the type of game people with the pass will play when they turn on their system after a day of work but aren't quite sure what to play, look through the list of available stuff a bit, and then settle on Starfield. Not because Starfield is really what they want to play, but because it doesn't ask too much from them, but has a variety of options, so once they're in, they can find something to do. The whole "wide as an ocean, shallow as a puddle" thing really works in its favor there.
I think a lot of us were still clinging to hope that they would fix a few things with the expansion and they didn't even try. So, I didn't even bother playing it.
I got it for purchasing the version that included it. And I've yet to play the DLC. I am a high enough level in Starfield to begin the Shattered Space expansion, but why do I want to play MORE of a game that I already don't like. I put in 2 weeks worth of hours in Starfield, and the game just isn't fun. I started asking gmtself that question years ago.... "Am I having fun playing this?" and the answer for Starfield is no. Shattered Space doesn't change my feelings about the game overall. I was STILL having fun playing Fallout 4 when Far Harbor came out. Starfield just doesn't hold that bar. And THAT bar wasn't very high with FO4.
Todd is set in his ways, same with the other senior people at BGS. They don't want to evolve. Their games still sell, so they don't think they need to.
Saw Todd and Luke in the thumbnail and clicked so fast lmao
Same lol 😂
I think the most telling point was, that of people who got the Special Edition, and ALREADY OWNED THE DLC prior to launch...many STILL never returned.
Yeah that's me, I really can't imagine going back to that boring game.
Hi, that's me
Your playtime counts even if you refunded.
Even if I wasn't done mentally with the game, why would I come back for a micro-expansion?
Ohhhhh shit I’m definitely saving this for my 3:00am drive in the morning gotta start my day off right
It just works!
God Howard on the job again!
He will definitely crack this case of 16 times the detail someday.
What does Todd Howard even bring the table besides his name? His creativity, direction, and leadership are all non existent.
Pre orders from Skyrim/Fallout 3 fanboys
There's more people with access to consoles and PCs today than there were 10 years ago. It's almost a given that a publisher will keep getting more players every 5 years unless the game is really terrible.
Shhhh you aren’t supposed to mention that. Or that GamePass means more people can try a shite game without the worry of wasting $$.
I said on one of your videos that house va'ruun felt like it was already done and they cut it out and then just added it back in, also i feel like the whole numbers on release is how the industry looks at if these projects are worth continuous investment, and i dont think that's the end all of benchmarks
From someone who works in the engineering field, this is how every company operates. From video games, weapons, vehicles, aircraft’s, military, etc. It is hell trying to get shit done with how many approvals you need for a single word document. It’s an accomplishment if you can get something done or signed off on the due date ie within two weeks.
I've been a bit of a Starfield apologist to a certain extent but Shattered Space was an insult. It was very CLEARLY cut content from the base game. Aside from that they reused creature assets for the "scary phase monster" they teased as if it were something new. Ugh
26:45 the only solution I can see is to split that bloated mess into multiple smaller and more manageable studios and put them to work on different IPs. One can be dedicated exclusively to TES, one to Fallout and whoever is left can try to reboot Starfield without all the idiotic procgen wastelands and repeating quests.
IMO, BGS needs a big, grand gesture to show they are really trying to address fan concerns. Lip service isn't enough. Phil said many nice things that are consumer friendly but without action it doesn't mean anything.
The restructuring can happen behind the scenes and it doesn't matter to us the end consumer.
They desperately need a new engine yesterday. It was obsolete when Skyrim launched...
Corporatization and bureacracy don't go hand in hand with creative endeavors? Who would've guessed!
No man's sky is ran so starfield could crawl.
the expansion added nothing to base game which we are used to with updated and it NEEDED it. It is a small story addon that cost more than most steam games with some of the worst dollar per hour of entertainment in existence. I don't regret the base honestly, its not perfect and needs filling in imo, but i 100% regret paying 35 dollars for that dlc that I originally assumed would essentially be a season pass or something significant like elden ring and cyberpunk which this is very much in that competition space. If this dlc were 15 dollars it would be VERY different feeling from me.
I'm very familiar with the kinds of challenges they're facing and Bethesda's clearly got major organizational problems. Not only does management seem to be disruptive, but they're a big bottleneck. I'd argue there's an over-reliance on contractors and the dependency on documentation is alarming. What they're trying to do is massively impractical and it sounds like their solution is to add more process to the pile. That only makes it harder for anyone to get real work done.
Also concerning is that not once did I hear project managers come up and they're essential for a company like Bethesda. They're more valuable than a million Confluence pages and thousands of instructional videos. PMs are like traffic cops who maintain communication, help route questions and ensure everyone, including management, stays on track.
Unfortunately, it's evident Todd and friends are disconnected from the day to day and only pay lip service to addressing issues.
I was so mad, i bought it at release and had weird audio issues. Spent the first chunk of hours mainly trying to fix that. Just past the refund window when i realized i had no desire to play it, and havent played since
Yeah I spent too much time messing around with the creator creator and getting past the mining tutorial and I was just bored.
What i took away from them saying they should have held onto the buggy for the dlc is this
"We should have held on to a finished assest that will improve gameplay until our dlc comes out to improve our player numbers on launch"
Todd should provide guidance, his producers/directors enforce that guidance, and the programmers execute the guidance. When a milestone is met by a team, the producer brings their work to Todd. At that point, Todd should be able to say “heck yea that is amazing!” Or “I love this part, can we tweak this and once you do, send it and move on to the next task.”
The Army has these same issues.
BGS is like the one guy who peaked in high school and just can't let it go after two decades have passed
Also I think launching the Rev with SS would have been dumb. The Rev drop felt like a big release this summer. Which was much needed for a game starting to feel stale
Bethesda has literally turned into a bunch of people looking for things to do other than make the game.
It took 3 tries and now I’m invested in Starfield. I agree with Luke’s comment about the ending of Shattered Space not having a real consequence, and oddly there is another quest involving Genghis Khan that had similar story beats. I’m just finding the exploration to be interesting. It really took changing my mindset about role playing that did it for me, and now registering to comments made by Bethesda I can more readily empathize. I’ll add that I’ve modded the game plenty using both console commands and nexus mods.
If you've seen the Matty interview which I'm sure you have Luke, you'd see that Todd talked quite a bit about reading the negative feedback. It's something that him and his team have done a lot of over the years...
I still can't get over the fact that I had ZERO idea I was playing the final mission in starfield when I was. I literally thought I was halfway through the game maybe 2/3 but then bam, "Do you wanna reset all of your side quests and factions?"
The whole dynamic for the company has changed. They don't rely on individual game sales anymore to stay afloat. As long as the data shows a significant amount of GP subscribers in-game on Starfield, they've proven their worth to string subscribers along for another paid month. There's just no hunger anymore to keep the lights on.
I refunded the game on launch and did not look back.
I think I'd really appreciate a video on how the fallout 4 next gen patch increases load times to 1 minute, creates a ton of lag in downtown boston going down to like 20 fps and worse(back then you'd get drops to like 50-55 which is meh but it's a big difference) and a lot of the text now shows up as "lookup failed". You'd think with the success of the fallout show, they'd have some respect but right now if you buy fallout 4 as a new player(that's not too familiar with mods and such) you'd get 60 average loading times. Just frustrating to see.
The update added nothing and removed all my favorite mods, making all my old saves not work. Havent played at all since. Never giving Todd my money ever again for ruining fallout 4 ten years after release.
@@RAWBOT301 well you can rollback the update version but it's not great, I agree with you.
@vincanthofred8195 You cant rollback on xbox. They removed the mods from my console that hundreds of saves relied on to open. I had auto updates turned off and they pushed the updates anyways.
@@RAWBOT301 holy crap, that's real bullshit, I didn't think about consoles
Luke should know that at CDPR you don’t talk to Janice or Ted you talk to Pawel. There’s a really good AnsweRed podcast where they talk about all the Pawels in the studio so they can’t use first names & have to use nicknames instead.
I regret preordering and I did not even touch the expansion and it came with the version I got.
As a daily user of slack, Jira, and confluence. This is hilarious
I'm imagining the workflow of a jira-level approval, then someone exporting the task lists for external approval hahaha
Todds finally come out as the leaders of TLDS, we honored the ground he walked on but hes finally been shown what he really is.
A step in the right direction, would be getting rid of Emil.
I've learned throughout almost 4 decades of gaming ( consoles and PC ) that do not "marry" to the Devs of yesteryears. It's pretty much just a name.
Baffling that after a year the game is STILL devoid of purpose and completely empty. Even Fallout 76 with a fraction of the content and 16x the bugs somehow developed into a more worthwhile experience in less time. I see no way that this game achieves a redemption arc.
what is fascinating to me is that every large gaming studio / publisher seems to move towards the same type of game design, generic trendy focus group profit over creativity type of product and as a result all the senior creatives leave and in the end they just fail, all these games fail - look at bioware, look at ubisoft, look at bethesda failure after failure after failure... when will they learn? ? ?
I never played Starfield, I just come for the trash-can fire
Those anti gravity systems were obviously invented for ships that don’t have gravity systems yet, but then they realised that they needed the rest of the game to have gravity in all other circumstances, or all those loose objects would float around your ship and become a hazard.
It's crazy when you see the graph comparing Skyrim to Starcraft and how little that did for the quality of their games.
3:54 was he watching me play? That was my exact reaction when I reinstalled and thought I’d try it again before the DLC hit
As a layman, I hear that BGS has 400 employees, way more than they used to, and I see that it takes them way longer to make worse products. I want to see half the studio purged, as I see it there's way too much bloat.
the fact they think the buggy buggies are the issue shows they have no idea what theyre doing.
ive said it once, ill say it again. everything since Fallout 3 has been hot garbage
I liked fallout 4 gameplay loop but the story was meh. Skyrim was meh overall. And I'll probably never play Starfield, so yeah, last good game they made was Fallout 3.
Bethesda as a whole is mediocre and they are 10-15 years behind the competition.
They will never make a game with the quality of Cyberpunk or Bg3. Thet don't have the talent for it.
They should've added some area where there are rover races and maybe even add a quest line that has to do with shady gambling practices and stuff in the races. I don't know some shit.
Howard was in a catch 22. Either he puts the rovers in the DLC behind a paywall, advertise it as a feature for it, and people complain that it should've been a core feature anyway and the reviews bomb. So rightly I think he did take that to heart and just added it as a free update, but then he doesn't have anything to sell his 'story expansion' on. So really his trepidation is probably tied to his business thinking that the expansion sales would've been higher if he had done the vehicle in the DLC so more profit, and his bet didn't pay off that he could build hype in general by making it free to sell more base game units and expansion together, and now he's regretting that. If you look at all of Todd's decisions from a business perspective he's a genius, if you try to make sense of them as a game designer he's a failure.
Really Bethesda had figured out the answer to would you rather have $5k, or five thousand friends(players). So he got five thousand players who probably give him $10 a month each on average. Todd played chess. And he's won again. He didn't need to change. His strategy works.
Looking at these graphs, it makes sense why publishers keep complaining about video games becoming wildly expensive. It’s because companies become huge and 30 people need to approve anything that happens
but they never get rid of those 30 ppl they get rid of the lowly ones who are actually doing all the work and then tell the remaining lowly ones to work harder.
@ pretty much
Speaking of the Todd
*do you own that Italian leather jacket yet* ?
I grabed Outer Space for free in the Epic launcher a while ago, but never played it... after playing Shattered Space, i finally installed it and played it. OMG this game is so good, i wished i had bought it on release, its worth every penny. Outer Space but 2-3 times bigger, thats what Starfield should have been... now im more exited for Outer Space 2 than Elder Scrolls 6...
16 times the detail!
Every space station and ship should have had a gravity controls button that you could turn off to fight in zero G.
“Our game that was free for 70% of players was our most popular”
Wow you don’t say Todd, who could have guessed???
What happened to Todd saying well Armstrong didn't use vehicles on the moon
It sounds to me like the lesson Bethesda is taking from this is that they shouldn't have done the free updates, and should have instead bundled all that development in the expansion to increase the perception of value... Which doesn't exactly scream No Man's Sky/2077 redemption arc.
Dude the intro is fire 😂😂😂😂🤣🤣🤣 0:13
I always imagine that the Todd candle starts off smelling nice but gradually goes stale and bland...then breaks.
there is nothing more self destructive than die hard bethesda fan boys that never criticize them
I had the premium edition and didn’t even play the expansion let alone finish the game 😂
Bethesda is like that kid in grade school that brags about how his dad is a Navy Seal, and then his dad shows up to school, and he's just a pudgy, balding middle aged man that works at a car lot.
its scary the fact that for Todd, the difference between poor amount of content, AND "ok-amount" of content is literally an unit of buggy LOL
I would consider myself a hardcore Starfield fan. I haven’t played Shattered Space yet, but mostly because of all the other good content there is to play. Still stuck on SM2 and there’s so much in the backlog
Its not Todd's company anymore its emil's
That company isn't going to get anywhere as long as Todd is calling all the shots.
I play on PlayStation, and used to be a Bethesda fan, so I would have bought the early access.
Thank God it didn't release on PS5. I just want to thank them for deciding not to release on PlayStation as it saved me from wasting a lot of money. Cheers, Todd!!! 😂😂😂😂😂😂😂
They are treating Starfield as a new Fallout 76, which was rejected by critics and the public, but managed to hold on by a bunch of fans who keeps paying the microtransactions, which is more beneficial for Bethesda in the long term.
Todd has lost it if he thinks that getting the buggy spoiled us for Shattered Space. If anything not having the buggy would've made it SO much worse. People were expecting some big game mechanic addition because Starfield on its own is so mechanically shallow, and what mechanics it does have are severely underutilized. Shattered Space doesn't even have a new starborn power.
in a way the Silo structure reminds me of the legislative process for fundamental alterations to say....the Constitution. In order for such a fundamental thing to be altered, the legislative process has to go through as many hoops as possible and require as much consensus as possible because obviously those roadblocks have been put in place to stop any crazy guy from coming in, getting elected and fundamentally altering the base legislative code on which a nation is founded. In that sense, being so bureaucratic and stiff is a good thing.
In software development however, if a system is not agile, it leads to any alteration being discouraged if not outright impossible.
They constantly cut out segments of the final game and sell it as DLC. This is the practice for years with these corporate parasites.
I enjoy Starfield more when I go in thinking of it like Daggerfall in space rather than Skyrim in space. Then at least I'm expecting procedural content.
@luke, be sure to call our correlations vs causations outsourcing could be a factor but likely not THE only factor
Dudes about 3 months late
How would it have seemed to have pay-gated rovers to DLC? Imagine the back-lash.
Todd dont wanna listen, dont wanna get rid of the creation engine, wants to be a stubborn nerd??? VOTE WITH YOUR WALLET!
I can't even deal with Howard anymore, absolutely delusional, that company will never improve while he's there.
Todd Coward strikes again. He never fails to disappoint the gaming community.
Todd is just sad that their expansion got zero nominations for the game of the year awards.
Toad Howard seems to live in the other place where the gamer's voice can't be heard even if we are living in the SNS world, or he just doesn't speak a human language, just Toad's language.
Todd is a clown. Hes become the Tommy Wisseau of gaming.
I just love Luke, man.
I don't think Bethesda cares whether you like their game, or not. They just want to trick you enough to get those initial sales.
Don't forget all the people who got the game for free by buying AMD products.
How to fix Bethesda games
*Take the creation engine out back and OLD YELLER THAT FKN THING.
*Todd no longer has full creative control but is still part of the process
*Ban the use of procedurally generated slop because clearly as star field proved, they cant help themselves.
*stop relying on modders to do EVERYTHING FOR YOU.
😊
Get the candle!!!
I love that Todd smells like spiced pumpkin 🤣🤣
I am one of the people who bought the deluxe edition and never came back for the dlc, idaf, I wasted so much time trying to like that game
Compare these numbers to Skyrim(13 years old) and Fallout 4(9 years old) to see the REAL quality of Starfield.
If I was Microsoft I would be fireing Bethesda employees left and right. This is Not what I paid for.
This explains why so many solo and small dev teams are kicking the AAA studios butts now.