Bethesda's writing is pathetic because Bethesda doesn't hire writers. They are quoted as saying that "our level designers are our writers" as a mark of pride of their team's capabilities, but the truth is that designers aren't writers. Writers are writers. And the designers who currently write for Bethesda are bad at it.
When you're handcrafting an area (level) in an open world game, you can also write the story _for that area._ Like when you find a farmhouse where there's been some kind of battle, and you can find clues in the environment to piece together the fact that some kind of mutated animal was hunting the farmers. Then you can in-turn find and hunt the beast. Little side stories like that don't really add up to an overarching narrative, and the overarching narrative guy shouldn't need to hyperfocus on little environmental side stories.
Funny because they don't seem to be very good at environmental storytelling or at least making the environment and the story that is there work together. Like new atlantis is supposed to be a utopia but it looks poorly upkept with the plants growing over the sidewalk
@@Sue_Me_Too Just because the level designers can write the story as they are creating area, doesn't mean they have narrative skills. Writing and level design are completely different skill sets. It takes many years of learning to write good content. If you spent that time learning how to design levels, then you probably won't have those skills. If you try to do it without those skills, you end up with Starfield's writing. Where the legendary heart of mars is just some rock in an empty cave that already has a waypoint. The legendary heart of mars has the same gravitas as going to buy milk at the store. That is what happens when your writers aren't writers. Level designers should design levels, and writers should write everything. Even the small quests.
The fact that BG3 exists and was developed by a team of 450 when Bethesda has around the same size of team should tell you enough about how Bethesda has fallen.
Yep the difference in design philosophy. Both studios do this for money obviously but Larian actually cares about making art and pleasing players, Bethesda just cares about making something safe enough to maximise profits by appealing to every demographic with its blandness. Which is funny given how niche BG3 actually is gameplay wise but the risk actually caused thousands maybe even millions of people into exiting their comfort zone and enjoying a game they never thought they would.
@@jo0rd73 Larian does it for money, sure, but they also actually want to be making the games they're making. A lot of the people in charge at Bethesda, meanwhile, seem to have gotten to the point of seeing it as nothing more than a job.
What is the most insane part in this game: nothing has real consequences, nothing changes, nothing has stakes..... In a game which main twist is A STORY BASED INFINITE NEW GAME PLUS!!!!
The only real consequences if you get too high of a bounty And then get arrested the way the game punishes The player by make it harder to grind xp meaning if you get too much deep into the hole it's virtually impossible to level up again.
@@mrheroprimes Level ups aren't interesting post-Skyrim Bethesda. Woohoo, a new perk point to spend on a super boring bonus that should've come solely from just leveling the skill the perk is tied to. Fun. Their games used to soft-cap around level 30-40, at which point you didn't really feel like you needed to level up again since your skills and stats had already made you super powerful. The perks damaged this. You need to spend perks on stuff that increases armor or damage until maxed out, then you can start playing the game finally.
@@Elrohof Yeah perks that are just "increases your armor rating for light armor" on a skill that... increases your armor rating for light armor as you train it... is a really weird choice for balancing, since it means they have to reduce the increases you get from training the skills to compensate. And then the perks that aren't just base increases to numbers already supposed to be associated with just training the skill are either incredibly uninteresting or totally game breaking.
@@-tera-3345 And it's a weird choice to make the game revolve around perk upgrades, tying you to a playstyle you may not wanna commit to long term. And everything gets trivialized anyhow, since if you just get the perks for enchanting and/or alchemy you can just gimp the entire system. We don't play any real builds, we're just playing a supergrandmaster alch-encha-smith God. Every. Time.
The ending/story of Starfield was clearly supposed to be deeply philosophical and profound. Sadly it was clearly written by people whose deepest thinking was a "Dude, it's like we're all connected!" moment while smoking weed in a college dorm room.
It was actually decent, he misinterprets the priest and hunter. The priest doesn’t become the hunter, the priest is the hunter who grows tired of the endless cycle, so they settle. That’s why they know who you are after you step into the unity, knows about the hunter and expects the hunter wanted you to kill him. The religion was built by the priest to lead to the unity, and the priest knows where the pilgrim started their journey because he is the pilgrim. The hunter is the result of a player going through endless NG+, you care less and less cause resets exist. It also does kind of give a profound question, would life remain as exciting if you can experience it over and over? Would the people you love feel real, or the same after you step through? It’s not bad, but they didn’t lead us to that end decently. The emissary can’t really get a defined background because in NG+ you can avoid companions dying and the emissary would be completely random. It’s also because all companions entered unity, and the variants are not gonna be 1:1. One universe andreja is fully on board with Varuun, Cora grows up and is a star born looking for her father that died. So there was no way Bethesda could’ve given a definitive background for the emissary because one motive means 100s of variants lived the same life.
The irony is the end and the context is quite morbid more so than philosophical. The whole plot revolves around how a bunch of space wizards have manipulated and sacrificed humanity for personal gain. They wiped out the vast majority of the human race and scattered them across the stars, sitting on the brink of extinction, so that a few starborn could manifest themselves and gain more power.
@@SpliffyHuskNo it isn't. Nothing Emil has written is good because he doesn't respect writing as an art form. He knows what a good story consists of, he just can't write the stuff that needs to exist for it to work.
@@paranoiaproductions1221 will shen wrote the main quest, and it does do a pretty good job. I say decent because you never really get to get answers you’d want. You don’t have to think too hard to understand their concept with the main quest, it’s not in riddle. The hunter is the pilgrim, he creates the religion, he knows where pilgrim is cause he is pilgrim. Pilgrim is the question you’d ask with infinite resets, why? It’s not a unique question, nothing we’ve never pondered, it’s just done well because after multiple NGs you understand the hunter and pilgrim, they embody the questions and answers you’d have.
Personally, I love flying around in my ship. Exploring new planets, building bases, leveling up my character all feels amazing! I can't believe how much work and love went into this game! Even the proc-gen universe feels unique! Yeah... I love No Man's Sky
No Man's Sky even had its own horrible launch, but unlike Bethesda they actually wised up and made their game good! And they took feedback! Definitely one of the best $60 purchases I've made in YEARS. Same with Cyberpunk2077!
I honestly believe the top brass of Bethesda thought that if they sold a huge empty sandbox, that modders would build sandcastles overtime. Pretty much building a game for them.
too bad the sandbox has become more of a litterbox. So many unpolished and overcharged mods. Even the Nexus barely sees 3-4 mods a day...and they are usually saved games or chars
Also they didn't think to accommodate those modders. Give us the top ship customization system, an artstyle that doesn't require 20 years of experience to create cohesive models and a character creator that you can make awesome and varied npcs with.
It's really sad because they did it lazy as shit too. They could have made a very open game. Lemme just spit out some bullshit. You've just arrived on the frontier of space While every faction under the sun and every explorer is on the hunt for the pieces of the artifact. They grant mysterious powers and everybody wants those powers. You are here to hunt for the artifact. Or maybe join a faction hunting for the artifact. Or maybe your here to hunt pirates for profit. Or maybe you just came here to explore the unknown frontiers of space. Do what you want. If you go for the artifact you have to interact with other factions who already have pieces of the artifact. maybe you steal it. maybe you just carve a path with lasers, gunfire, and explosions. maybe you negotiate. There's like15 accessible planets that have dozens of hand crafted locations and some ai generated ones. and then there are ai generated planets. and the game is facilitated such that the ai generated planets can easily be replaced by modders content. day one modding tools. patches focused on fixing issues that pop up with modding. The status of the factions is rng. Who's allied, who's enemy's, how much control they have, etc. DLC from bethesda adds new official planets, factions, etc. Keep the ending the same that's fine. new game plua. Except in new game plus everything rerolls. You go from faction x being the dominant through diplomacy and allied to alot of people to faction x is basically non existent and has been destroyed by the rest of the factions. Like. THAT bullshit I made in 5 minutes. That sounds like a much better path for a made for modding game. I'll even give them a bonus one. In the elder scrolls universe have a game where for whatever reason, Maybe exile, maybe your an explorer. a soldier. etc. your going out on expeditions to akavir (the continent that is basically a post apocalypse wasteland to my memory.) A nice big map. Have some hand crafted areas like at the start. and further in. Like beginning, mid game and end game. and then have the rest be rng. so you can start at the hand crafted safer option. or you can start in rng territory and have to deal with random conditions. you can find artifacts worth a ton of gold with powerful magical affects. and same thing. have it be easily replacable for modders. day one modding tools. Like. I dont think its that hard to come up with this concept. Bethesda can do something like this. At least they could before they embarrassed all their talent into leaving.
You know, if Starfield were a better game, it'd be absolutely HILARIOUS to do a playthrough where you get everyone in Constellation to hate your guts early on, just absolutely tank your reputation with everyone there, then drunkenly shit-talk whoever died during the funeral. But that's not the game Starfield is. Starfield is a Disneyland ride. Starfield is unaware of its own irony, presenting a universe that the game claims is all about choice while making sure that none of your choices actually matter. It's one of the most nihilistic games I've ever played.
Bethesda: Makes games that are famous for being so big that people ignore the main story to do other things. Also Bethesda: Makes a game where they expect you to repeat the main story over and over while also not providing any significant changes or build variety that would make you want to play it more than once.
I'll never understand how they thought removing exploration was going to go over well. It's literally been the only saving grace for their games over the past decade+
@@AceRasputin It actually makes the complaint worse. It makes it so every NG+ is potentially just a speedrun to complete the most banal and repetitive parts of the game for collecting and upgrading starborn powers.
@@monody Well that’s just moving the goalposts lol. The complaint was the need to do the main story over and over, but not only is NG+ completely optional, so is doing the story over. It is what you make it. Plenty of people just play in their original universe. The game doesn’t force you to speedrun forever, any more than Skyrim forces you to make new characters or playstyles, but that’s an option that many people do and enjoy.
@@AceRasputin You can call it that if you want, but all you pointed out is that you're doing a truncated form of the main storyline. It's not even an outright skip, it just chops off most of the character interactions to focus on relic/power collection. And your edit is nothing more than having the option to not play what little the game offers for experience. It has less quests than Skyrim, less POI, less overall content. So your argued alternative is nothing more than suggesting people repeat a different smaller subset of content.
Something I don't see mentioned anywhere with starfield is that Bethesda already learned the lesson about the size of the world. Daggerfall was (before starfield) Bethesda's largest game, a vast procedural landscape with handcrafted locations. It arguably did it better than starfield, but when they made TES3 they went the other way and made a single handcrafted island. Morrowind saw great success because of its worldbuilding. Starfield feels like a modern crack at making a Daggerfall to me.
Daggerfall actually all existed as a single connected map that you could travel across, though. If anything, Starfield's design regressed even further, all the way to Arena. Arena had the same "procedurally-generated but almost entirely empty enclosed boxes of terrain generated outside of points of interest" that Starfield does. Except instead of a "you can't go any further" wall, it just looped endlessly. But you could never get from one world map location to another via overland travel.
@@-tera-3345 Yeah, this. I will not take this Daggerfall slander 😤 and was about to comment something along those lines. If Starfield was like Daggerfall, it would be infinitely better. You would be able to have different cities on the same 'map', be able to land on the adjacent tile to a city and walk over to it... I actually tried doing this once for a bandit camp - I wanted to do some recon first before going in head first. Only to realise the game wouldn't allow me, instead forcing me to land... in the middle of the bandit base. So dumb.
@@AlphaGarg That is why I said Daggerfall "arguably did it better" Daggerfall is kind of a pain to play today for a lot of reasons, and I think Morrowind's approach was the right path forward, but I get why Daggerfall is beloved, and yes it is a more complete world than Starfield. I do think the promise of Daggerfall has a place in why Starfield is the way it is though.
Don't throw Daggerfall in that Starfield garbage pile, Daggerfall works, its engaging and has a more real and living world then what Starfield could ever hope to be even in the wildest fever dream.
id like to point out the fact that the story and constellation is all based around "exploration", but the game world takes place in "the settled systems". every single planet/moon/pebble has *already been* discovered, explored, catalogued. there is literally not a single item, crafting material, mineral, weapon, armor, wonder that you cannot purchase from the first general store you come across. its actually impossible to discover anything in the whole universe, even the artifacts have hundreds of starborn that have discovered them and just want another ride on the rollercoaster.
It's not just the Bethesda Rollercoaster, it's a Bethesda Theme Park where the employees make no attempt to hype up the rides in any way and keep saying you're nothing special for riding them, and also they slap you sometimes.
The "They didn't wanna write the story-arc for the daughter being the 1 of 4 potential dead squad-mates" thing was really funny to me when I've played enough Baldur's Gate 3 to know they'd absolutely write her arc, voice act it, animate it and all in top tier fucking quality. Even while knowing many players won't see that.
And that right there is how you make a game replayable. Unlike this game which clearly wanted you to play it again but the experience is the same there is no point.
Starfield is the only game in recent memory that has suffered from a severe case of "The longer I play this the worse it gets." - there have been plenty of games that just don't click but none of them have suffered from the same level of "Wait, why does everything in this game operate off of an anti-synergy?" and once you notice it, good lord it's like taking a cheese grater over an open road rash.
I'm really conflicted with Starfield because I did play it a lot and I did have fun with it, and though I agree with you--at some point the illusion fades, you realize how empty the game is and you start to hate it--I still think it has so much potential. There is a skeleton of a really good game here, I love the way the game looks, I love customizing my ship, I love the music, I think it has a good atmosphere and vibe overall. There are genuine moments of wonder when walking around a planet, seeing ships take off in the distance, etc. This is an original IP and Bethesda has free range do whatever they want. It's a space game, there are soooo many interesting things they could do and yet I play it and there's such little creativity or imagination in the characters you meet and the missions you are tasked with, and there are so few of them. I mean I run all around New Atlantis, Akila City, Neon, and there are so few side missions, it's so empty. Forget the loading screens, if the cities in this game were just a little bigger and packed with more multi layered missions with unique item rewards, I would fucking looove this game. It's so close to being good for me, and they can still add missions through updates, they just need actual writers and creativity.
@TheParagonIsDead while the original statement may be a bit hyperbolic, you liking something doesn't invalidate someone else's experience. That's not how opinions work.
@@FopsFuzz that’s how they think opinions work. I know though. The thing is they mean “worse” as in objective decline in quality the more time you put into it, which just isn’t exactly right. Every game gets boring after a certain amount of binge playing, and this is true in starfield aswell. The thing is it’s not any more true for starfield. The game gives you a steady flow of quality content for hundreds of hours, the game is good if you let it be good.
and with that, some of us like me: took that personally. It wasn't Cloud's quest, it was mine. I was going to make Sephiroth bleed for killing Aerith as I got that invested in the story and the characters. That's why our host was disappointed in how Sam dies as there was nothing to make you care. It's more: oh.. that guy.. oh well... that's it. Aerith so many of us loved her that her death hit and hit hard in the feels
Bethesda once let you kill literal, living Gods vital to the main quest, and this could be done at any point as long as you had made sure to be strong enough to kill them. And they also provided an alternate pathway to complete the game still, should you decide you want to kill said Gods. The game was Morrowind, and people don't give it the respect it deserves.
I found Emil's comments interesting, because, well, as a former game dev, I could look at Starfield and likely guess what happened behind the scenes. Like people like to bash the generation ship quest as just being bad, all around. But I look at it and see the work of someone who really tried. Three different routes, that actually differ... effort was put in. Of course, other routes that should exist don't. The generation ship with radio tech so out of date they cannot communicate doesn't feel outdated inside. Those type of things. But that's likely not because the guy or gal doing the mission didn't think they should be there, but rather, because he wasn't given the means to allow it to happen. He did the best he could. And you see the same thing in other quests. Pirate quest line? It, most likely, could actually let you pick a side because the bounty system meant the ability to control aggro through a flag existed. That's the only reason that mission line is somewhat decent. These quest writers did the best they could with what little they were provided. And that sort of thing is everywhere in Starfield And other parts, to me, it speaks of a design constantly in flux, of things not thought through and planned beforehand. Like how could someone make a game with a story based around NG+ and not design a game that provides a reason to want to play through again? Someone had to have pointed that out. So either Bethesda was so arrogant and believed modders would provide the reason for people to do that, or they slapped the story in late in the game's development. They spent all the time on systems to generate boring planets, to customize space ships, and so on, and forgot to take the time to design everything else. In essence, they designed the systems first, then tried to make a game for it. Gee, any wonder why they had trouble finding the fun? So yeah, a lot of hard work put in by people, but people that were failed by their project leads, and mostly, the lead designers. And that means Emil. He failed to do his job properly.
Emil's a petty and decrepit man. He blocks people for even the most minute criticisms (even if laden with positive comments) on the games Bethesda makes - even if it's nothing directly to do with him.
Yeah, I'm sure the individual designers were doing the best they could with what they had available. They just didn't have anything made available to them. And were left entirely to their own devices. It's really a massive fail in management. So it's really weird to see Emil give that defense, when he's the cause of the issue. I'm really curious what he was actually doing at his job the entire time. He didn't seem to be trying to ensure the story and world were consistent by checking the bits people wrote all fit together in a consistent way. We've all heard by now how much he hates wasting his time keeping a design document updated. He certainly didn't seem to be coming up with a fully fleshed-out world, or branching possibilities from either player choice or alternate universes. He wasn't editing and re-editing the dialogue and such to make sure it sounded natural or had a nice punch to it. What DID he spend all that time doing?
You're right but one thing. Bethesda doesn't have writer. Only Emil that was credited as writer. It's the Quest/Level/etc Designer that need to do double duty for that. After you realize that, it's no wonder that Skyrim, Fallout 4, and Starfield story/quest is ass.
Starfield really feels like the "Too many cooks in the kitchen" syndrom and no clear direction as if the game director wasn't even present or didn't care. Give the assets and engine to a "new" studio of about 60 people max, a budget of 20mil max, and 2-3 years and just restart, new space game, with new story and added mechanics. It's the only possible solution. My suggestion, use the Blizzards StarCraft IP to make an RPG set in that universe, it fits perfectly with the existing assets available.
To me, not giving the player meaningfull choices to make for any of the storylines is just a symptom of bethesda being bethesda, they've been doing this for a while now, it's either so ingrained in how they think about their games they're unwilling to compromise on it, or they honestly did not even see the golden opportunity to get rid of that because with the NG+ cycle it becomes incredibly tedious to do the exact same story again and again with no real changes
A large corporation like Bethesda will NEVER make anything "unsafe" again. It's not the game developers choosing what they make, it's high ups who doesn't see video games as a meidum for art, only asset for their profits.
half the reason i love fromsoftware is the fact they've made their money and still want to create strange and weird universes, unlike so many other fucking studios, looking at you ubisoft
starfield wasn't unsafe at all, it was generic, bland, copy and paste, nonsense. And to top it all off, they are still using the same engine they have been using since Skyrim? Starfield had some fun ideas, but the fun ideas were mired in the fundamental archaic mediocrity that was the rest of the game. Edit: I originally said Oblivion, Skyrim was the first to use the Creation Engine.
A lot of people are hoping that with new DLC and future updates Starfield will have some kind of redemption arc akin to Cyberpunk 2077. Let's put it to rest: it will never happen, because it's not possible. Cyberpunk's problems were mostly in technological glitches, poor mechanical balance and inconsistent performance. These are things that could have been, and were, hammered out with time. It was already built on a game world with rich lore, a gripping story and fantastic voice acting. The things that were most difficult to change after the fact were done and done well, they just needed to fix the game. Starfield's problems are intrinsic to the design philosophy of the game. The writing is bad, the plot is bad, the quest design is bad, the character design is bad, and the world design is bad. These are things that can't be fixed without going back to the drawing board, re-engineering the game and its story, and rehiring the voice cast to reprise their roles with new scripts. Starfield will never have a redemption arc because it is a fundamentally bad game.
I think it can be a partial redemption. The expansion could take place on a more limited number of planets, with better quests where choices matter. Better companion interactions there, maybe some new ones. And I think, for Bethesda's sake, it is important that it does so. Because, while I don't think it can save Starfield, the expansion being viewed as an improvement will be vital for people's anticipation of ES6.
@@Axterix13though myself a huge TES fan, hearing Indy is for "a modern audience", Microsoft all-in on DEI now called BRIDGE... Starfield using a tweaked version of the same engine that made Skyrim..... TES:O having a non-binary companion, Bethesda's predatory MTX system both store for DLC, content and mods: I already abandoned all hope that TES6 was anything but DOA
There's no need to warn for spoilers, everything that can be spoiled in starfailed is mediocre and pointless, just like how starfailed is mediocre and pointless.
The whole Emissary schtick was so phoned in it's ridiculous, and still ended up with the lamest payoff ever. "Look at this guy, he's dead! He's dead-dead, you know, REALLY dead, he's REALLY REALLY dead. Are you sad yet? Look, funeral and all, he's croaked, he's bought the farm, he drew his last breath and joined the choir eternal, this is an EX-character!......oh look he's alive just kidding he's a weird space magic alternate self. Wow aren't we the best writers ever for throwing you that curveball!"
Someone commented on another video that the undeniable proof Bethesda had lost touch was that Todd Howard was genuinely shocked that BG3 won GOTY instead of Starfield.
The quintessential Starfield moment for me came when I was "surveying" a barren rock. Surveying in Starfield of course means running in a direction with your scanner on waiting for some resource to appear so you can press the interact button on it. I was jogging in one direction on this utterly featureless planet looking for silver or helium or whatever, walking past the fifth identical cave point of interest (you know, the one where there's always a few dead miners nearby and one has a note on them that says "we hit the motherlode" or whatever), and all the while this absurd swelling of music was happening. Inon Zur's rousing theme was going and the brass was rising and I was just walking on a flat plane. The dissonance was insane. The music indicated I was supposed to be experiencing this incredible wonder and beauty and I should be feeling the bracing excitement of adventure and exploration, and I was bored to tears trying to check off the last mineral so I could get a few hundred bucks from a kiosk in the basement of Constellation.
Bethesda charging for mods that are meant to improve and fix their archaic and poorly designed game is almost rage-inducing. Just a truly deplorable move by this trash studio. I used to LOVE Bethesda. Now I wish Microsoft would finally step in and clean house.
Horse armor all over again. Also the first time they try to push paid mods idea back then, they got whiplashed hard. This time humans are gaslit by corporations so much that some of them accepts them.
All mods that are improving or fixing the game are free on nexus, none of them are paid. If you’re gonna ride the hate train like a mindless npc at least make decent points. You look like a clown
weird how the same people who go on an on about supporting modders dont want them to be employed and paid, and the mods to be meaningfully integrated and kept functional, after years of vocally complaining about that. for once, bethesda actually listened
Thank you for Sharing your explicit view on Starfield, you really are a interesting character to enjoy. I fare from share your perspective and conclutions, but you have tons of valid views and you for sure improved my day significantly. So you Got a New subscriber, who has now watched several of your TH-cam creations and I like your animated presentation. Thank you for that!
That is what bugs me the most. They call it "multiverse" yet in every iteration the game is exactly the same. Same missions, same morons comandeering you around. So where is the fun in that?
Bethesda wanted the wow-factor of a timeloop story without putting in the leg work to give meaningful narrative and philosophical explorations of that topic. You reach the bottom of the puddle with your first bombastic splash, leaving little water left for repeat attempts.
It really does seriously boggle my mind that Bethesda didn't capitalize on the NG+ concept more. Like yeah Bethesda does tend to play things safe and rarely locks the player out of content because they are basically afraid of telling the player "No" and want to let people do anything and everything in one run. But they gave themselves the PERFECT excuse to finally take some harder stances. To give the player some meaningful choices that lock them out of factions and questlines with no way to go back and change them. Because NOW they could go "Well you're in a new universe so why not explore some different options!"
If I had to guess, it is because they looked at their other games, which tons of people still play, and they figured that would be the case for Starfield as well. They probably patted themselves on the back for it, thinking how much players would enjoy being able to carry all their skills forward. Their goal was never to make a game worth replaying. They just assumed we would want to.
It's funny- cause I won't be able to finish the crimson fleet quest line. Most radiant missions are to kill crimson fleet. So I did that. I cleared some outposts on planets. And now, my bounty is over 12 million credits and every time i go to the key it's shoot on sight. So I'll have to do a NG+ run to see that questline through. Bogus.
@@Axterix13”let’s make a game people will buy like crazy (due to hype) and play for a while before ultimately getting bored and dropping it. Then we don’t have to provide content updates once the player base is low enough!”
In a world spoiled by deep cinematic widely beloved rpgs Starfield is neither modern, nor does it do anything well enough compensate for its weak points.
Comparing this with The Witcher 3's amazing cinematics and animations, where you can even tell when someone is lying... It's tragic. If there is a word to describe the game, it's outdated. A shame, because I like the concept and I love the art design.
@@JaKingScomez Better to get another game really. Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 would be pretty awesome but it was pushed from a Holiday release to Feb 2025.
The exploration really gets to me. I do agree that narrative reasons to explore are needed... but also they completely fail to even capture the splendor of real landscapes!!! Go to any national park or monument in any country. Even a simple 3D rendition of these locations could inspire awe if done halfway decently. Other planets and moons we know of lack the biosphere and plate tectonics of Earth, but they are still fascinating in a million ways. If you speak to an expert, they can spend hours telling you how fascinating a single moon or planet in our solar system is: all the ways it is different from earth, the mysteries of its formation, landforms that dwarf anything on Earth. You want to know how these bodies became the way they are, you want to imagine the lead snow on Venus, the valleys and mountains of Mars or the ice volcanos and hydrocarbon lakes of Titan! You learn about how precious and magificent Earth is as you do. That is what excites people about space! Nothing in starfield has scale, it speaks of no geologic past, no mystery. It is an insult.
Agreed. Another Issue I have with it is there is huge quality differences between locations. Some areas look unfinished with low polygon environment assets (Or have weird lack of cliff assets in logical locations) Both examples apply to outside of New Atlantis area in general. While some other areas hold up much better and mostly look fantastic such as the Vectera mining outpost. Exiting the god tier graphics found inside your spaceship to go explore the outside area of New Atlantis feels like going from a new AAA game to a early access unity asset flip and it bothers me immensely. Whenever I launch fallout 4 I'm schocked at how much better I think it looks in general with the exception of the ship interiors, which are absolutely amazing. The fantastic materials rendering with dense handcrafted and believable environments and consistent graphics do so much in Fallout 4. It also runs 8x better and is not a stuttery mess and so it feels fantastic to play in comparsion to Starfield (at least on my end)
Maybe it would have been a rehash of the Fallout formula, but imagine if Starfield was set in it's own 'verse, after some catastrophic event that left many planets ruined. Might be a bit like 40K, but it would have been something. Planets with ruins on it to explore, with rare alien weapons. The wrecks of ships orbiting around planets, toeing the line between falling down the grav well and drifting into the void.
Thank you for making these videos. I feel so validated now lol. All of these issues are things that I felt while playing. I've been frustrated because it's hard to verbalize how shallow and empty this game is, and how obvious all these issues felt to me. When I saw people defend it, it made me feel like maybe I was being snobby, but I'm not. That's literally not how my brain works. I couldn't even for a second suspend my disbelief in this game and feel engulfed in the universe. It genuinely bugged me the whole time ... I still don't understand people's argument of "just turn your brain off" and play, but it doesn't just work like that.
Captain Mack slowly transforming into the ultimate Starfield hater, and I'm absolutely loving it. As a fan of classic games like Morrowind, Oblivion, Fallout 1-2-3-Vegas, the slop Bethesda is peddling absolutely breaks my heart. The only way they will change is if we let them know, and I appreciate your work doing so.
Starfield is the type of game where the more you play it the more the bad stuff starts to stick out And you get more frustrated as time goes on until you hit a breaking point.
Every Elder Scrolls after Daggerfall and Morrowind has been slop. Starfield is almost on par with Skyrim, it's just more noticeable because Skyrim came out a decade ago and no one else really makes Bethesda style open world. Every new Bethesda title dumbs down and streamlines the previous. I almost like the procedural gen in SF, reminded me a little of Daggerfall, it just needed a ton more hand designed stuff. It won't ever be great but maybe they can polish it to decent.
Just wait till you run into variant universe where (starborn) Cora is waiting you in the Lodge because she wants to kill you as revenge. You can only talk yourself out of fight if you never let him die.
I appreciate the final section of the video acknowledging the dev team. It is astoundingly easy to criticize this game and the studio behind it, but I think it is hard to look at a bad product and still acknowledge it was made by real people. "Nobody tries to make a bad game" is a great quote to keep in mind as time goes on. Bethesda is a studio that has put out many flawed products and had a lot of VERY poor choices, but I can always appreciate looking beyond the headlines and acknowledging their flaws with an analytical approach rather than an emotional one. Thank you for being a good analyst and a great creator!
Nobody tries to make a bad game, but some people do outright refuse advice that would enable them to do so, and pursue stupid ideas right into a wall. I feel so bad for those very designers who either A, weren't allowed to make anything good, or B, made something good but then watched it be watered down and crowbarred in to the dumpster that is Starfield. Emil and Todd are both creative people who worked their way up the company, they aren't just random suits hired to terrorize the staff, but they are so bad at their jobs.
What really gets me is that there is legitimately no point. In Oblivion, why are we getting stronger? We have to stop Dagon/Umaril/Jyggalag. In Skyrim, why are we getting stronger? Oh, we have to stop Alduin/Miraak. In Fallout 4, why are we getting stronger? We have to save our kid and tame the wasteland. In Starfield why are we getting stronger? Just...because. The point of the game is to get to the end of it and do it again. We get all these powers to do nothing with them. We aren't gearing up for some big bad evil guy. We aren't saving the world. The world is already at peace and it stays at peace. At the end of the game, after you've collected every power, there is nothing to DO with them. Attack people? I already have more powerful guns. Narratively, why are we even doing this? Because Bethesda told us to?
It’s telling that Todd Howard himself can be quoted saying that Starfield was only fun 6 years into development. Starfields story, mechanics, and world design feels like each piece was designed without consideration for the rest of the projects, and Bethesda stuck the ones that worked together. Almost like there was no documentation outlining the dev teams goals.
That's because there isn't, Bethesda stopped using game design docs after Fallout 3 because they couldn't be arsed to keep on updating a game design doc every time they made a change to the game(s) they were making.
I can kind of defend that statement in specific, at least in a vacuum. Warren Spektor, for example, has also stated that Deus Ex wasn't fun until a few months before launch when they finally found the right balances between all the different systems. Though the context of Todd's statement kind of ruins it, because they didn't really have an overall vision or a bunch of systems they were trying to tune to work well together -- even after release almost none of them do.
Why would the game be fun super early? Like that is a thing, a lot of people don't understand that a game is usually not very fun until it is mostly complete...
@@SioxerNikita It's called game design. If your basic prototype or concept doesn't have a fun loop early on then what the fuck are you making? This is the problem with a lot of AAA game development these days. Let's have a checklist of things we want to cram into an open world! Then slap on some progression and microtransactions and call it a day! Without any game mechanics actually building on each other to form a solid gameplay backbone.
@@Jayy997 Tell me you don't know about game dev without telling me. Having a few fun mechanics not well put together yet does not make a fun game loop. Some are lucky they stumble onto something... Like Jesus, you are oblivious. A lot of the most beloved games were hollow husks pre-launch... Minecraft had an interesting premise, but franky, not that interesting as a game... And it was even worse before the first real bigger release on forums.... Triple A is not the issue of making the game fun early... those issues are almost completely unrelated
Let's be honest here. Skyrim and fallout 3 weren't particularly good either. Nothing there was revolutionary. However it was really lucky. Those games wrapped up a bunch of things other games had done, but put them in a single package, and deliver it to an audience that had MUCH lower expectations of games (the console market was really exploding and that generation of consoles could do things only PCs had the memory to do before) and on PCs they were in a format that was VERY mod friendly which allowed them to build a strong vibrant community to maintain hype. And right at a time gaming was getting more mainstream, and modding was becoming so so massive.
neither were Oblivion or Fallout 4. all of those games rely on the world design and people's curiosity to interact with the world to cover up for the shitty gameplay mechanics. Starfield doesn't have a world to distract you from how awful the combat, RPG progression or story writing is. It's the crapiness of all of Bethesda's modern games laid bare.
Bethesda's games post morrow wind and pre fallout 76 were really flawed but had the charm and some genuinely good elements that kept people from hating it. Generally the fun world to run around in and good dlc and sidequests were enough to excuse the shit main quest or lack of rpg mechanics. Starfield ended that streak.
I disagree. Skyrim in particular still has the best open world to me despite the game's overall problems. Not just because it looks pretty and is backed by one of the best soundtracks in gaming but because it gets that exploration is supposed to be a major focus of the game. Not just for 1 playthrough, but through all playthroughs. It does this through its random encounter system. Traveling from one location to the other in games like Elden Ring for example, are only fun the first time you do it because everything is the same. Therefore after your first playthrough, exploration just becomes a chore and the weakest part of the game when it used to be one of the strongest. Meanwhile in Skyrim if you were to save in front of one area and then travel down the road to another area where you encounter 3 events then load back and do the same thing again, then those 3 events will be completely different from last time. The events that can happen are also interesting not just because they can be funny, dynamic, or lead you down a rabbit hole to a large side quest, but also they are determined by a lot of different factors like your level, what quests you've done, if you assaulted, murdered, or stole from someone, what part of the map your on, what time of day it is etc. Its one of the only open world games where the feeling of the journey being better than the destination still stays upon multiple playthroughs because I never know what's going to happen when traveling from point A to point B. Most open world games today, even amazing ones like Elden Ring, still don't get this right.
@@rotundseal3400 No, Morrowind, Daggerfall, and Arena have problems too. The games have never been story driven rpgs, and have never sold themselves as story driven rpgs.
I feel like the big, interactive world, with deep lore and endless looting and an incredible amount of objects that can be picked up and moved or knocked around, IS sort of revolutionary. People sometimes don't realize how unique Bethesda's engine is, or at least was; Skyrim tracked where everyone was in the world at any time, including traveling merchants, and could calculate the physics for 50 items you just shouted off a table all flying around the room at once. It sounds very boring but it wasn't that long ago that worlds were almost entirely static except the specific things placed for you to pick up or shoot or whatever. Bethesda, bafflingly, went backwards. Instead of a ton of unique NPCs with schedules, we mostly get hideous proc-genned mutants. Instead of those characters interacting with items, singing along to a song or using a workbench, they just stand stock still. Instead of trying to seem somewhat realistic, everything seems plasticky and weird. They not only don't fix the things they are bad at, they don't expand on the things they are good at, and actually dump those things. It's so weird. Like a restaurant where the food is mediocre and the place itself is meh, but the desserts are fantastic and the real reason people come...so they stop offering half of their dessert menu and replace the rest with generic options.
it's so weird living in the timeline where formerly disgraced No Man's Sky now better fits Tod Howard's description of his magus opus than the actual Bethesda game, just wild.
@StuHol-jb1hh Nah, it's really not, I've enjoyed my time with starfield, I like the game, sure it's got its big flaws and issues, but it's got a charm I like, and it's not that bad honestly, it's mid and that's fine, but I do wish It could have been better. So, perhaps stop making it out to be the worst thing in gaming ever, when honestly it's just a mid game, a game with flaws just like every game ever.
@@jasperfox6821obvious flaws the devs didn't bother to change i don't want them to keep making mid games every few years when they can do better cause they have done better
Does anyone else remember the conspiracy theories about how post-war chems got into pre-war containers in FO4? Because Bethesda didn't give a single thought to the continuity of their container loot tables then, either.
Let's be honest with ourselves. We all expected Skyrim or Fallout in space. What we actually got is lightyears away from those games in terms of story, gameplay and characters. My expectation for the next elder scrolls game has burned up on re-entry.
"Skyrim in Space" is exactly what people got though. Skyrim in _empty_ space to be exact, meaning that there's nothing to distract anyone from how shit the core mechanics of the game are.
@@CErra310 Exactly, skyrim is identical to starfield if you strip out all the older elder scrolls lore that pre todd bethesda wrote. People just get distracted by the parts made by a better company and don't see skyrim for how shallow it really was.
@@CErra310 The empty part is very important, though. And Skyrim's lore gets a lot of shit given how good some of it is. Bear of Markarth, or anything else related to the Reach, for example. The civil war in general, or other world events that happened since the start of the 3rd era. Compared to FO4 or 76's brainless writing, Skyrim looks good. And Starfield is a lot closer to FO4 than it is to Skyrim.
@@honeybadger6275 Skyrim at least managed to be fun, especially in the period it came out. I can't enjoy it now as much as I did back when I was a kid because my tastes for fantasy have changed and I much prefer roleplaying games where I can *actually* roleplay a character, but the fact that Skyrim still exists in the greater zeitgeist speaks to the fact that it's a game that's enjoyed by a lot of people even despite its flaws. Hell, even Oblivion is a buggy mess but I personally like to compare it to a well-aged blue cheese. An acquired taste in the landscape of modern RPGs, due to its charming jank. Skyrim's a mild cheddar, and can be enjoyed by just about anyone that's not lactose intolerant because it's generally inoffensive. Starfield is casu marzu, which is infested with maggots.
With regards to the Hunter being the Priest, I think bethesda is trying to make a point about power corrupting and specifically drawing a parallel to the player and the way that replaying a game takes away our empathy for the characters if the world. All the loops have made him into someone who doesn't even care about the people around him, doesn't even view them as people. I don't think they succeeded, but I feel like that was the intent?
yeah they might have had a case if literally even one single character in the universe was actually likable or interesting. The way it came out it's almost the opposite message to what they intended: none of these people are worth caring about from the get-go, so why should you care about their wellbeing? Ironically it kind of proves the Hunter right under that lens.
Of course they succeeded. Think about it for a second. You, the player, the actual human being, have, first time playing, done most, if not all of the content and then gone through Unity. You acquired all the powers and moved on. Next universe, everything is the same. The only variability is that you have new temples to get powers from. You may do some quests that you particularly enjoyed and then collect your powers again and move in NG+2. Here, you start doing less quests, getting powers and going on the NG+3. Etc etc. Essentially, you are stopping to care about people in these universes and eventually, you are only running universes for powers, without doing any quests at all, just to get to NG+10 so you have max powers. And then what? Settle down into the universe and play it out again? No no. You find alternate ways to play it now, ways that mirror the Hunter in totality. They succeeded perfectly, without people being able to actually see it because they are basing their view upon the character they play, not upon themselves.
@@FlashyJoerI agree that it works well on that level: they have connected the pattern of play with this character. I think anyone on NG+3 is already playing the game the way the hunter does. Where I think they fail is in doing anything more with the idea. What message is being conveyed here? To me, it doesn't quite provide a message I can relay to my life, nor does it really inform how I play games. It points out what we miss and how unatural optimization focused play can be but... the game doesn't present characters I will feel bad for mistreating. They never react naturally to throw you out of the mindset you developed. It never stops you at NG7+ and compares you to the way you played through the first time. You don't reconcile with the damage you have done. The game encourages the Hunter style of gameplay and then that is where the message ends. You can see the monster and you can see how you could become that monster, but that occurs before you ever actually *do* and I think that is the mistake. It is an interesting character and not something more. Compare this to NieR where (spoilers) the game works to convince you it is a simple good guy vs monsters story. You do your quests to save your daughter/sister. You do what is expected from you and then you reach an unhappy ending. Then the game stops you and asks you to play through portions of the story again with a new understanding of your enemies, that they are people and not monsters. You recontextualize the actions you previously accepted as videogame logic and you realize your righteousness has doomed the world. It asks you to think about the stories we tell, both in videogames and in our own lives. Starfield fails to raise to that level. It makes an observation but it never confronts you with it in a way that asks you to confront any of your views or assumptions.
@@FlashyJoer It may have been an interesting idea if they'd actually done something with it, though. Undertale did the same thing a decade earlier, except it constantly warned the player against it, and then it directly pointed a finger at the player and called them out for it if they did it anyway. Basically saying "Well, you wanted to see every last corner of this game, no matter the cost. Now look what you've done."
Watching this video is like slowly taking a blindfold off. I've been lying to myself this whole time to force myself to like Starfield. But now I can see. 😢
I love listening to Mack talk about media he loves but I will say his passion shows through even in dislike and its entertaining as heck and can’t wait for more videos!!
Thank you! I appreciate that you enjoy them either way, I know I've been doing a lot of criticism lately. My next video is talking about something I like though, so look forward to that :)
On the priest it’s actually heavily implied that the priest is a future version of the hunter Which is as confusing and convoluted as it sounds (To be more specific its implied the priest was a version of the hunter that grew wiser & less violent)
This hurts more the more you think about it. If he gave up pursuing the artifacts, that would mean he only went back in time through the Unity one final time before becoming the priest. So he should only be in one of the universes, right? Of course the story seems to play pretty fast and loose with how much of the Starborn are "the same person going through multiple loops" and how much of them are "parallel universe versions of the same person each going through their own loops". And sometimes appears to conflate them as if they're the same thing? Nothing about the Starborn really seems to make sense. It's like they saw Everything Everywhere All At Once's idea of being connected to every parallel universe at once and were like "I want to do that, too!" but never put any thought into how that would actually work.
@@-tera-3345 I agree that they definitely play really fast and loose with wether the starborn are the same people going through multiple loops, or wether their just alternate versions Sometimes the hunter may remember you, and other times he doesn't I'm more so of the opinion that it is them going through multiple loops, but that time isn't linear So you could meet a starborn that knows who you are, then you could meet the same starborn that hasn't met you yet, or then meet a version of the starborn that did meet you, but has gone through so many loops they forget who you are
@@smirkyshadow4152 But there's also things like how the Emissary and the Hunter say they've both killed each other in numerous different universes, and they both seem to remember it. Heck, you can kill both of them in an unlimited number of universes, yourself. It's entirely possible that you've killed the Hunter in every single universe you've played through, but he still remembers you. And while there's a possibility that's just another case of the game not actually bothering to respond to any actions you may have taken outside of the "correct" ones, it's also kind of emblematic of why the story is such a mess.
@@smirkyshadow4152 Yeah the whole story, kind of comes off like none of the writers were communicating with each other in any way. In fact, that's kind of true of pretty much every aspect of the game's design. Like a bunch of separate people all made things all in isolation and then they just taped them all together as-is without checking if they fit.
Baldur's Gate 3 had the balls to let the player kill off characters, who have roles that stretch to the very end of the game, within the first few hours. Bethesda are terrified of players missing any of the mediocre content that they have in Starfield that they made the game entirely on-rails. Starfield isn't an RPG, it's an action game with levelling and slight variations on the ending depending on decisions the player makes right before the ending - there's no difference between the story design in Starfield and something like Call of Duty. Bethesda simply don't have the talent to create an engaging, branching story like Larian did in BG3. This type of narrative design was passable 10 years ago in games like Skyrim and Fallout 4, but not anymore. I pray Bethesda end up losing the Fallout and Elder Scrolls licences. Obsidian embarrassed Bethesda with New Vegas which they made in only 18 months on an out-of-date engine which they had to learn how to use from scratch, hopefully, Microsoft remember this and let other studios take a shot at developing for these IPs.
BG3 does make me play chess with my PS5. As you said, literally everything affects the game. Stepped on a bug- all insects are gone, avoided it- now Fäerûn is under oppression from huge ant overlords. Not actual game plot but that concept. Did you kill Minthara, knock her out or side with her? Did you deny the Emissary's request? literally everything has a knock on effect so that no playthrough is ever the same.
15:18 I think you just hit the nail in the head with this thought. The fact that it is a quantum choice. They are all 4 , and none at the same time. And as the death occurs it collapses the timeline. I like to think this is what Bethesda went for with this reveal. It would have been an even bigger reveal to actually learn the fact that all 4 of them exist as starborn and through you they get to meet eachother. Just imagine how cool it could have been to try and piece it all together by influenceing who "dies". And as you said, you also get to reflect on what your choices mean, and what death mean in a universe where there is proof for a multiverse. Anyway, I'm writing fanfic at this point, but I do believe they wanted to explore the idea further they just either mismanaged, or ran out of time, because deadlines exist 😔
Captain mack has to have the most underrated video essays on youtube. No one else I've seen can make such spot on complaints, and offer such good writing suggestions to show how it's not a bad story, it's a poorly executed story. I truly believe that any setting and time can make for a great story as long as characters are likeable and don't have useless filler dialog, and story elements are set up to make an impact on the reader or player. I wish more creators would use the Jojos style of character writing where complete characters are placed into a story rather than bland characters are placed to service the story. It makes characters unrelatable and boring meaning the story has less of an impact on you.
Thank you so much! I completely agree, characters should be fleshed out in their entirety, even if we aren't going to see a lot of those details in the actual game
I think you are quite right. Yes, our standards for what makes a good game is constantly evolving and changing. Both as a society and as individual gamers. The games we grew up with are always fondly remembered compared to newer games, unless they are groundbreaking in some way, like Baldur's Gate 3 or something. But the developers can't use this as an excuse, hoping we'll somehow lower the standards again. It's an evolving art. A single dev could code Pac-man and make a revolutionary game in a few weeks or months. Today, we expect more. For me, Bethesda kinda peaked with Oblivion and Skyrim. My first Bethesda game was Morrowind, but the one I still remember the fondest is actually Oblivion. The music, landscape and general "feel" in Oblivion was better than even Skyrim. Skyrim was definitely also a very good game, so if I were to rate Oblivion at a 10 when it came out, I would say Skyrim was a 9.5. Skyrim also had a lot more longevity, thanks to better graphics, more modders and just the fact that it was the last elder scrolls game before they went into MMO stuff (which doesn't interest me all that much) Starfield might have been well received in 2005. The graphics are probably the best in any Bethesda game, although it doesn't hold up to its competitors anymore. Music is also quite good, but the gameplay, story, and characters is as bland as watered down milk. It is also painfully obvious that the game engine Bethesda uses, which is basically iterations of the same engine that Morrowind ran on, is not suited for this kind of game. It doesn't support large cities, large crowds, nor proper ranged weaponry aside from bows. Also, while I think Bethesda's voice actors are doing an okay job, it might be time to hire some new talents as well. Hearing the same voices for so long gets quite weird. I had some hope for Starfield, but it just isn't good enough. The biggest problem is that it is so boring. I play games to be entertained, not to be bored, slogging through bland auto-generated planets, scanning plants and animals that all look the same, all biomes are uniform... it's so boring.
Sadly with Todd being the boss and Emil the head writer there is no hope for any future Bethesda game, they are in a feedback loop of "we can do no wrong" while doing everything wrong.
I've been actively playing Starfield while listening to this video. The only thing I can say about the game is: it doesn't demand much from me. So if I've had a shitty day or a shitty experience in another game, I can boot it up and role play with myself that I'm some roaming doctor ship captain. That said though... Starfield is still a massive disappointment. When I originally got the game, I wanted exploration, survival gameplay, and outpost building. Even to this day, survival is completely lackluster, with only ever needing to eat or drink once every hour or so in real life time, and never, ever needing to sleep. I really enjoyed survival in Fallout 4 (albeit with mods to remove the inability to save) and I was hoping to mimic some of that here, but alas. Exploration... I don't need to say anything. Everyone has already said everything I could say about it. I just wish that after playing games like Skyrim, Fallout 4, and even Fallout 76, they could have at the _very least_ fleshed out the areas surrounding major cities. But they couldn't even do that. And outposts? Loved building settlements in Fallout 4. I have over 2,000 hours in Fallout 4 because I keep booting it back up to be creative with settlements. Combined with the survival gameplay I have, I love having settlements that are designed with doctors and merchants in mind, to help patch me up and give me supplies before I venture back out into the wasteland. But in Starfield, there is _zero_ reason to hire a crew and send them to an outpost, and there's absolutely zero reason to visit the outpost beyond having a place to store all your junk for crafting... since for some god awful reason, the ship's inventory doesn't count when you're using your ship's work benches. I didn't buy Starfield for its story because I knew it would be ass after playing Skyrim and Fallout 4. (Yes, I thought Skyrim's main story was boring). But even with my low expectations, I didn't expect it to be as bad as it was. As far as I'm concerned, the Space Dragonborn don't exist and never should have. There's no multiverse ending apocalypse that justified gathering as much power as possible, so what even is the point of it all? The answer is: there isn't.
Great video, doesn't hold back. Tired of those TH-camrs that are always like "oh I don't want to be negative, we try to stay positive on this channel..." like stfu. Sometimes you gotta be real
Starfield is far from the first game to have an in-universe explanation of New Game Plus. Bastion (2011) by Supergiant Games comes to mind off the top of my head. Transistor (2014) may or may not have one depending on how you interpret events (its writing is very impressionistic and vague). If you count roguelike/roguelite runs as NG+, most games in that genre have an explanation of why there are multiple runs and why there can be a metaprogression system. I'm sure there are many more. This is very far from unique, and I don't think Starfield deserves any credit for including this, because they did LITERALLY NOTHING with it other than "lol Sarah Morgan is a potted plant" memes.
i find it funny that bethesda bragged about having the most lines of dialogue in any bethesda game (250k to skyrims 60k) but the majority of what anybody says is so over fluffed and meaningless. They have so much to say but none of it matters
Really strong organization and delivery here, Captain. Some of these takes are notably long, too. As a first-time viewer, that made this whole video feel very well researched, the opposite of lazy. Thanks for helping confirm my choice to skip this one and best wishes for the channel!
Wait, you have 64k followers? I watched your last few videos on this series just assuming you were at least 500k plus just from the quality Amazing stuff, keep it up.
I dont' think there's a single good point you didn't bring up in this one. Thank you for the excellent video, top notch commentary and for fighting for our community! I gotta subscribe...
I really cant stand modern bethesda, and i dont fully comprehend how theyre still in business now. And i think the thing that makes me dislike them so much is how... i dunno scummy and dishonest their games are now. Like, ea activision and ubisoft have proven to be worse at almost every level, and i recognize that, but something about bethesda just boils my balls. I think a big part of it comes down to how the modern bethesda "creatiln process" seems to be so tired and labored, like any enthusiasm that the company had back in TES Morriwind days has been completely sucked dry. Now, their deepest "characters" are an amalgamation of exactly 1 1/2 personality traits, their "rpg mechanics" arent from rpgs at all - its literally just leveling up and getting perks and thats the only thing they can understand from an rpg, and instead of lovingly creating fun and interesting worlds and quests...theyd rather let proc gen taske care of almost all of it, even part of the main story. Theres no passion to it, therez no reason that they keep making these actikn games with character creators. They refuse to let players make a single decision, they refuse to ever plan out an alternate route, but they also refuse to just call it what it is (an action game) so the playerbase isnt forced to sit through 300 dialouge "choices" that all lead to the exact same interaction and results. Instead, we have to sit here while the game plays pretend that youre allowed to make a single legitimate decision. And then, when they get criticized for making a boring, uninteresting game, they claim that the playerbase is to blame, or they try to wring more money outta ya to make the game actually entertaining. They could make a good game. With great writing. And well thought out rpg mechanics. And companions/ npcz that are genuinely memorable. Thats what the genre they claim to be making requires. Instead, ole toddy boi is gonna double the amount of ways you can say "no, but actually yes" in dialog, and half the amount of quests eritten by actual human writers. I just cant stand it
This is why people who compare Starfield to something like cyberpunk 2077 are wrong. Cyberpunks launch was absolutely inexcusable but despite the absolute abhorrent technical difficulties and bugs at it’s core the atmosphere characters environment and gameplay that makes cyberpunk a great game we’re already there and can now shine after they fixed everything around it. Starfield is the exact opposite, it launched in a pretty polished state (for Bethesda at least) but at it’s core it’s an empty joyless derivative husk without any memorable characters good story or impressive atmosphere or environment. And I don’t think that can be fixed like the bugs In cyberpunk
To be fair... In my story, i married sarah, and it was her that died, only to discover she was one of the travellers. It was pretty impactful, though im pretty sure it wasn't on purpose 😂
So weird I discovered your channel two weeks ago, and picked up cyber punk again just this week 😂 How’d you know it’s one of my new favorite games, i blazed through the main story on launch n didn’t play it since, but now 4 years later I find myself sooo impressed by it. I know they’ve worked on it a ton, but even some of the stuff that was there before is super refreshing when I compare it to other games. Character writing, the sense of stake, and all the details that jump toward you are really like nothing else I’ve played. Came back to it with really low expectations and have been really pleasantly surprised
The onIy good thing about Starfield is the ship building system. I think Bethesda utterly failed to manage the project and it's quite obvious they cut so much corner. The biggest problem in this game is definitivelly how smalls it is. While the Elder Scrolls and Fallout could get away with having small settlement of barelly 20 people posing as regional capital, it just become laughable when you try to apply such logic to space faring societies. But an even problem is that the corner cutting aspect absolutely wreck everything. Even what is there is generaly laughable and lesser in depht than what Bethesda did. The best exemple of this is a main faction question comparison. In the federation, you get from an absolute nobody to the biggest hero of the faction in barely two quest. You get sent to fix a comm relay, then suddently, you are the new expert on how to deal with a xenomorph and must stop an alien invasion. Meanwhile, Skyrim asked you to crawl through several dungeon and participate in several battle before you could gain the thrust of the commander. You could actually obtain several promotion that helped a lot for the immersion. The biggest mistake, in my opinion, was to go for a fucking timeloop scenario with space gods or AI and shit. You litteraly are the captain of spaceship in a what is supposed to be rich galaxy filled with various faction. Why does everything made to engage in this universe is supposed to be a menial secundary quest that you can repeat ad nauseam? How are you supposed to take seriously anyone when the first random that come acros your path give you his bloody ship for no reasons? How can you pretend to be an open world when most of your gameplay is spent behind a loading screen? Like, was it to hard to make an overworld where you could pilot the bloody ship around? Honestly, I do no understand anything about that game... there is no coherence about it. I paid 60€ to buy it and it's probably one of the few times when I trully regretted my decision. This game is a legit scam.
@@bulletflight well, at some point I am not that concerned with the difference of whether an unqualified douche has a job and fails upward bc his Daddy owns the company or because his frat buddy owns it... it sucks and it results in crappy quality!
"Those losses could effect the gameplay" that's why they weren't killed. Bethesda has become deathly allergic to any in-game negative outcomes of any kind for the players' gameplay experience. They are terrified that if you can't do literally anything literally any time for the entire playthrough, you won't buy the next one.
With that mindset, they shoulda just have id or MachineGames make the next FPS because if choices don't even matter, on top of you MUST repeat everything in an infinite loop, why call it an RPG when games like Borderlands literally have New Game+ but people prefer that?
The game is just a broken mess. - Some quests are still not finishable 1 year after launch - Zero content updates (except for the buggy space buggy that controls like if Halo's Warthog had a major mechanical failure) - The story is bland and seemingly written by a 10 year old who heard of the concept of space for the first time - The entire cast of characters is unlikeable and annoying - NG+ is pretty much pointless - Basic QOL features are missing (that should've been in the game since day one, IF someone at BGS actually cared) - ALL Locations are uninteresting (no matter if they are hand-crafted or procedurally generated) - Constant loading screens (no matter how short they are) make general traversal feel like a chore even on highest-end hardware (Ryzen9 7950X3D, 4070Ti Super and 64gb of RAM, Gen5 NVME drive with 11,5gb/s) - Paid DLC before the actual base game is in a fully playable/stable state - Dialog that feels like it was entirely written by ChatGPT - Dumb AI that often just fails to react properly in combat (on the enemy and ally side) - Broken RPG elements (because equipment stats and player level barely matters in-game) - No real freedom (almost every mission still has the same outcome no matter the choices made, or if it has a different outcame it is predicatble from the first second) Those are just some things that came to mind instantly. It just feels like an Early Access title that barely is able to hold it's stuff together without breaking completely and that is not my definition of an Open World Bethesda Games Studio "Epos", it feels more like a hastily thrown together cash-grab. It's really sad to see how bad the game is because i still regularly play and enjoy Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim (Skyrim only to some extent because it already had too many flaws to enjoy it properly without community patches) but Starfield is a total no-go. I've installed and uninstalled Starfield 4 times already (because i had hope that the updates would adress some of it's core issues) but i always came to the conclusion that the game feels bland, uncreative and broken at it's core. Sorry if something in this quite long post is hard to read but i'm not a native english speaker.
I liked the game for quite a while when I first started. I did the main quest for a hot minute, then went off to explore POIs and then tried the base building. It all got stale once I started focusing on the main faction quests. Suddenly all the new POIs became the same ones over and over. None of the main characters were interesting. The skills didn't meaningfully change how the game felt. The quests gave less experience than killing single high level aliens. I wouldn't play it again.
>base whole game around the concept of ng+ >make the story extremely railroaded and bland, without branching choices, without differences Intredasting...
Hey man, this video series has been great. The state of bethesda currently makes me extremely worried about Elder Scrolls 6. If they handle their future games like they did Starfield, i'm going crazy
Fallout only has an interesting, well-designed universe because Bethesda didn't create it. You should check out the video "Bethesda NEVER Understood Fallout" to understand how much it lost in the transition to Bethesda's development.
50:10-50:16 "it only responds to things Bethesda expected you to do" And there we hit the nail on the head. Bethesda expects you to play one way and one way only around every single system they implement, thus leading to such a mess of a game where players feel like there's no roleplay options. Because there are practically none. I think this is paraphrased from a fallout:NV interview: "The trick to a believable interactable world is by having enough lines and ways to go around their intended system that it feels like they thought of everything more often than not." but I might have gotten that from somewhere completely different. I can see only two reasons someone would play starfield, one to make an epic youtube video (or multiple) with it at the center, two because somehow miraculously they're still a Bethesda fan.
I don't need to know how to make a video game to know when there's dogshit writing that takes me out of the immersion of the world. Interacting with the characters in Bethesda games has always felt like the weakest parts of the games.
I mean, it is fine if people like it. Just as fans of the game should accept that many people dislike it and have their reasons, we accept that some people love the game still. We all want different things: I really enjoy some games people think are shit. I do want to hear what makes fans enjoy the game... even if I am more interested in more critical breakdowns.
@FhtagnCthulhu Oh yeah, it's definitely fine that people enjoy the game (like what you want), but I'm gonna talk shit about it if I don't enjoy it 🤣 . For me, Starfield failed miserably on delivering a game with the "Bethesda magic" that all of their games had up until Starfield. (Nameless npcs with no routines that disappear in the distance, no unique things to find while exploring, only a handful of missions , can't enter every sensible building, picking up and moving items feels wrong somehow , an amazing g ship builder with no real reason to interact with as the starter ship can and will get you through all content , one of the most lazy skill trees I've seen , base building lacks any real reason outside of printing xp. I could go on but I'm really disappointed in this game.
Well, there's a reason the voiced protagonist thing was handled the way it was, why it doesn't feel like it was done in response to the criticism surrounding the decision in Fallout 4 - and that's that it _wasn't_ done in response to that criticism. To hear Pagliarulo tell it, they just decided it didn't work for the story they were trying to tell. They had actors for both genders hired already, apparently, but they just decided 'fuck it, never mind' one day. Bethesda isn't changing in response to criticism - and they never have. Every decision made was made to make life easier on the developers - content, features, and systems are added or removed based on how hard they are to manage, with no consideration to how something being hard to manage might be counterbalanced by the result being _worth it._ That's why Starborn choices hardly amount to anything, and it's why choices, in general, hardly amount to anything. It's why perks, traits, and status effects all feel like window dressing. It's why mechs are illegal in Starfield, and levitation is illegal in Oblivion and Skyrim. It's why magic is simplified to the point of being useless in Skyrim, and it's why Starborn powers are just dragon shouts again. Bethesda doesn't know why we're disappointed, and they don't care. We _might_ see Starfield's problems addressed in ES6, but just like the voiced protagonist thing, it won't be because we told them how terrible they were. They'll just wing it. They'll just wing everything. I'm so tired.
Ironically enough oblivion a game made by Bethesda which released in 2006 is better in terms of showing changes in the world as whilst goofy the conversations that npcs will have with one another will mention heroic or infamous feats that the player has accomplished and when you beat the game all the oblivion gates disappear.
![[LIVE] : ONE ลุมพินี 88 | คู่เอก "ป้อมเพชร vs อัสลามจอน"](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/1ZqTVVbMgbo/mqdefault.jpg)
Bethesda's writing is pathetic because Bethesda doesn't hire writers. They are quoted as saying that "our level designers are our writers" as a mark of pride of their team's capabilities, but the truth is that designers aren't writers. Writers are writers.
And the designers who currently write for Bethesda are bad at it.
When you're handcrafting an area (level) in an open world game, you can also write the story _for that area._ Like when you find a farmhouse where there's been some kind of battle, and you can find clues in the environment to piece together the fact that some kind of mutated animal was hunting the farmers. Then you can in-turn find and hunt the beast.
Little side stories like that don't really add up to an overarching narrative, and the overarching narrative guy shouldn't need to hyperfocus on little environmental side stories.
Funny because they don't seem to be very good at environmental storytelling or at least making the environment and the story that is there work together. Like new atlantis is supposed to be a utopia but it looks poorly upkept with the plants growing over the sidewalk
@@appelofdoom8211 even the example I used is from New Vegas, so not even Bethesda
@@Sue_Me_Too Just because the level designers can write the story as they are creating area, doesn't mean they have narrative skills. Writing and level design are completely different skill sets. It takes many years of learning to write good content. If you spent that time learning how to design levels, then you probably won't have those skills. If you try to do it without those skills, you end up with Starfield's writing. Where the legendary heart of mars is just some rock in an empty cave that already has a waypoint. The legendary heart of mars has the same gravitas as going to buy milk at the store. That is what happens when your writers aren't writers. Level designers should design levels, and writers should write everything. Even the small quests.
I'm pretty sure after the 76 and starfeild reviews they are only capable of making action adventure walking/loading sims
The fact that BG3 exists and was developed by a team of 450 when Bethesda has around the same size of team should tell you enough about how Bethesda has fallen.
Bethesda had over a thousand on starfield. Skyrim had like 150. Morrowind had like 20.
Yep the difference in design philosophy. Both studios do this for money obviously but Larian actually cares about making art and pleasing players, Bethesda just cares about making something safe enough to maximise profits by appealing to every demographic with its blandness. Which is funny given how niche BG3 actually is gameplay wise but the risk actually caused thousands maybe even millions of people into exiting their comfort zone and enjoying a game they never thought they would.
I love how bg3 is like only one country yet still has more interesting depth than starfield which is a literal galaxy
@@jo0rd73 Larian does it for money, sure, but they also actually want to be making the games they're making. A lot of the people in charge at Bethesda, meanwhile, seem to have gotten to the point of seeing it as nothing more than a job.
@@marcusaaronliaogo9158 not even a country, it's more like a countryside, barely a province
What is the most insane part in this game: nothing has real consequences, nothing changes, nothing has stakes.....
In a game which main twist is A STORY BASED INFINITE NEW GAME PLUS!!!!
The only real consequences if you get too high of a bounty And then get arrested the way the game punishes The player by make it harder to grind xp meaning if you get too much deep into the hole it's virtually impossible to level up again.
@@mrheroprimes Level ups aren't interesting post-Skyrim Bethesda. Woohoo, a new perk point to spend on a super boring bonus that should've come solely from just leveling the skill the perk is tied to. Fun.
Their games used to soft-cap around level 30-40, at which point you didn't really feel like you needed to level up again since your skills and stats had already made you super powerful. The perks damaged this. You need to spend perks on stuff that increases armor or damage until maxed out, then you can start playing the game finally.
Starfield.....Starfield never changes....
@@Elrohof Yeah perks that are just "increases your armor rating for light armor" on a skill that... increases your armor rating for light armor as you train it... is a really weird choice for balancing, since it means they have to reduce the increases you get from training the skills to compensate.
And then the perks that aren't just base increases to numbers already supposed to be associated with just training the skill are either incredibly uninteresting or totally game breaking.
@@-tera-3345 And it's a weird choice to make the game revolve around perk upgrades, tying you to a playstyle you may not wanna commit to long term.
And everything gets trivialized anyhow, since if you just get the perks for enchanting and/or alchemy you can just gimp the entire system.
We don't play any real builds, we're just playing a supergrandmaster alch-encha-smith God. Every. Time.
The ending/story of Starfield was clearly supposed to be deeply philosophical and profound. Sadly it was clearly written by people whose deepest thinking was a "Dude, it's like we're all connected!" moment while smoking weed in a college dorm room.
It was actually decent, he misinterprets the priest and hunter. The priest doesn’t become the hunter, the priest is the hunter who grows tired of the endless cycle, so they settle. That’s why they know who you are after you step into the unity, knows about the hunter and expects the hunter wanted you to kill him. The religion was built by the priest to lead to the unity, and the priest knows where the pilgrim started their journey because he is the pilgrim.
The hunter is the result of a player going through endless NG+, you care less and less cause resets exist.
It also does kind of give a profound question, would life remain as exciting if you can experience it over and over? Would the people you love feel real, or the same after you step through?
It’s not bad, but they didn’t lead us to that end decently.
The emissary can’t really get a defined background because in NG+ you can avoid companions dying and the emissary would be completely random. It’s also because all companions entered unity, and the variants are not gonna be 1:1.
One universe andreja is fully on board with Varuun, Cora grows up and is a star born looking for her father that died.
So there was no way Bethesda could’ve given a definitive background for the emissary because one motive means 100s of variants lived the same life.
The irony is the end and the context is quite morbid more so than philosophical.
The whole plot revolves around how a bunch of space wizards have manipulated and sacrificed humanity for personal gain. They wiped out the vast majority of the human race and scattered them across the stars, sitting on the brink of extinction, so that a few starborn could manifest themselves and gain more power.
It's true I remember the dorm room
@@SpliffyHuskNo it isn't. Nothing Emil has written is good because he doesn't respect writing as an art form. He knows what a good story consists of, he just can't write the stuff that needs to exist for it to work.
@@paranoiaproductions1221 will shen wrote the main quest, and it does do a pretty good job. I say decent because you never really get to get answers you’d want. You don’t have to think too hard to understand their concept with the main quest, it’s not in riddle. The hunter is the pilgrim, he creates the religion, he knows where pilgrim is cause he is pilgrim. Pilgrim is the question you’d ask with infinite resets, why? It’s not a unique question, nothing we’ve never pondered, it’s just done well because after multiple NGs you understand the hunter and pilgrim, they embody the questions and answers you’d have.
I think he likes starfield 😊
Awww, Mack has a crush
Mack starts shaking like an angry Muppet
Mack is such a tsundere
Why does your pfp look like Diddy?😂
@@writehse Cuz it is Diddy lmao
Personally, I love flying around in my ship. Exploring new planets, building bases, leveling up my character all feels amazing! I can't believe how much work and love went into this game! Even the proc-gen universe feels unique!
Yeah... I love No Man's Sky
No Man's Sky even had its own horrible launch, but unlike Bethesda they actually wised up and made their game good! And they took feedback! Definitely one of the best $60 purchases I've made in YEARS. Same with Cyberpunk2077!
dude same
I honestly believe the top brass of Bethesda thought that if they sold a huge empty sandbox, that modders would build sandcastles overtime. Pretty much building a game for them.
too bad the sandbox has become more of a litterbox. So many unpolished and overcharged mods. Even the Nexus barely sees 3-4 mods a day...and they are usually saved games or chars
Also they didn't think to accommodate those modders. Give us the top ship customization system, an artstyle that doesn't require 20 years of experience to create cohesive models and a character creator that you can make awesome and varied npcs with.
@@jaybirdjargon So Few??? the most ambitious mod project (singular) I ever saw was a Star Wars Adaptation.
It's really sad because they did it lazy as shit too. They could have made a very open game. Lemme just spit out some bullshit.
You've just arrived on the frontier of space While every faction under the sun and every explorer is on the hunt for the pieces of the artifact. They grant mysterious powers and everybody wants those powers. You are here to hunt for the artifact. Or maybe join a faction hunting for the artifact. Or maybe your here to hunt pirates for profit. Or maybe you just came here to explore the unknown frontiers of space.
Do what you want. If you go for the artifact you have to interact with other factions who already have pieces of the artifact. maybe you steal it. maybe you just carve a path with lasers, gunfire, and explosions. maybe you negotiate.
There's like15 accessible planets that have dozens of hand crafted locations and some ai generated ones. and then there are ai generated planets. and the game is facilitated such that the ai generated planets can easily be replaced by modders content. day one modding tools. patches focused on fixing issues that pop up with modding.
The status of the factions is rng. Who's allied, who's enemy's, how much control they have, etc.
DLC from bethesda adds new official planets, factions, etc.
Keep the ending the same that's fine. new game plua. Except in new game plus everything rerolls. You go from faction x being the dominant through diplomacy and allied to alot of people to faction x is basically non existent and has been destroyed by the rest of the factions.
Like. THAT bullshit I made in 5 minutes. That sounds like a much better path for a made for modding game. I'll even give them a bonus one.
In the elder scrolls universe have a game where for whatever reason, Maybe exile, maybe your an explorer. a soldier. etc.
your going out on expeditions to akavir (the continent that is basically a post apocalypse wasteland to my memory.) A nice big map. Have some hand crafted areas like at the start. and further in. Like beginning, mid game and end game. and then have the rest be rng. so you can start at the hand crafted safer option. or you can start in rng territory and have to deal with random conditions. you can find artifacts worth a ton of gold with powerful magical affects. and same thing. have it be easily replacable for modders. day one modding tools.
Like. I dont think its that hard to come up with this concept. Bethesda can do something like this. At least they could before they embarrassed all their talent into leaving.
@@thefactory7221 That's more of a collection than a single mod if you are referring to Genesis
You know, if Starfield were a better game, it'd be absolutely HILARIOUS to do a playthrough where you get everyone in Constellation to hate your guts early on, just absolutely tank your reputation with everyone there, then drunkenly shit-talk whoever died during the funeral. But that's not the game Starfield is. Starfield is a Disneyland ride. Starfield is unaware of its own irony, presenting a universe that the game claims is all about choice while making sure that none of your choices actually matter. It's one of the most nihilistic games I've ever played.
It really does seem like some bland CEOs wet dream.
Bethesda:
Makes games that are famous for being so big that people ignore the main story to do other things.
Also Bethesda:
Makes a game where they expect you to repeat the main story over and over while also not providing any significant changes or build variety that would make you want to play it more than once.
I'll never understand how they thought removing exploration was going to go over well. It's literally been the only saving grace for their games over the past decade+
I feel like the fact that they give you a skip main story button kind of invalidates this complaint lol
@@AceRasputin It actually makes the complaint worse. It makes it so every NG+ is potentially just a speedrun to complete the most banal and repetitive parts of the game for collecting and upgrading starborn powers.
@@monody Well that’s just moving the goalposts lol. The complaint was the need to do the main story over and over, but not only is NG+ completely optional, so is doing the story over.
It is what you make it. Plenty of people just play in their original universe. The game doesn’t force you to speedrun forever, any more than Skyrim forces you to make new characters or playstyles, but that’s an option that many people do and enjoy.
@@AceRasputin You can call it that if you want, but all you pointed out is that you're doing a truncated form of the main storyline. It's not even an outright skip, it just chops off most of the character interactions to focus on relic/power collection.
And your edit is nothing more than having the option to not play what little the game offers for experience. It has less quests than Skyrim, less POI, less overall content. So your argued alternative is nothing more than suggesting people repeat a different smaller subset of content.
Something I don't see mentioned anywhere with starfield is that Bethesda already learned the lesson about the size of the world. Daggerfall was (before starfield) Bethesda's largest game, a vast procedural landscape with handcrafted locations. It arguably did it better than starfield, but when they made TES3 they went the other way and made a single handcrafted island. Morrowind saw great success because of its worldbuilding. Starfield feels like a modern crack at making a Daggerfall to me.
That's a good point, I hadn't thought about it but you're absolutely right
Daggerfall actually all existed as a single connected map that you could travel across, though. If anything, Starfield's design regressed even further, all the way to Arena. Arena had the same "procedurally-generated but almost entirely empty enclosed boxes of terrain generated outside of points of interest" that Starfield does. Except instead of a "you can't go any further" wall, it just looped endlessly. But you could never get from one world map location to another via overland travel.
@@-tera-3345 Yeah, this. I will not take this Daggerfall slander 😤 and was about to comment something along those lines.
If Starfield was like Daggerfall, it would be infinitely better. You would be able to have different cities on the same 'map', be able to land on the adjacent tile to a city and walk over to it... I actually tried doing this once for a bandit camp - I wanted to do some recon first before going in head first. Only to realise the game wouldn't allow me, instead forcing me to land... in the middle of the bandit base. So dumb.
@@AlphaGarg That is why I said Daggerfall "arguably did it better" Daggerfall is kind of a pain to play today for a lot of reasons, and I think Morrowind's approach was the right path forward, but I get why Daggerfall is beloved, and yes it is a more complete world than Starfield.
I do think the promise of Daggerfall has a place in why Starfield is the way it is though.
Don't throw Daggerfall in that Starfield garbage pile, Daggerfall works, its engaging and has a more real and living world then what Starfield could ever hope to be even in the wildest fever dream.
id like to point out the fact that the story and constellation is all based around "exploration", but the game world takes place in "the settled systems". every single planet/moon/pebble has *already been* discovered, explored, catalogued. there is literally not a single item, crafting material, mineral, weapon, armor, wonder that you cannot purchase from the first general store you come across. its actually impossible to discover anything in the whole universe, even the artifacts have hundreds of starborn that have discovered them and just want another ride on the rollercoaster.
It's not just the Bethesda Rollercoaster, it's a Bethesda Theme Park where the employees make no attempt to hype up the rides in any way and keep saying you're nothing special for riding them, and also they slap you sometimes.
The "They didn't wanna write the story-arc for the daughter being the 1 of 4 potential dead squad-mates" thing was really funny to me when I've played enough Baldur's Gate 3 to know they'd absolutely write her arc, voice act it, animate it and all in top tier fucking quality.
Even while knowing many players won't see that.
And that right there is how you make a game replayable. Unlike this game which clearly wanted you to play it again but the experience is the same there is no point.
Starfield is the only game in recent memory that has suffered from a severe case of "The longer I play this the worse it gets." - there have been plenty of games that just don't click but none of them have suffered from the same level of "Wait, why does everything in this game operate off of an anti-synergy?" and once you notice it, good lord it's like taking a cheese grater over an open road rash.
I'm really conflicted with Starfield because I did play it a lot and I did have fun with it, and though I agree with you--at some point the illusion fades, you realize how empty the game is and you start to hate it--I still think it has so much potential. There is a skeleton of a really good game here, I love the way the game looks, I love customizing my ship, I love the music, I think it has a good atmosphere and vibe overall. There are genuine moments of wonder when walking around a planet, seeing ships take off in the distance, etc.
This is an original IP and Bethesda has free range do whatever they want. It's a space game, there are soooo many interesting things they could do and yet I play it and there's such little creativity or imagination in the characters you meet and the missions you are tasked with, and there are so few of them. I mean I run all around New Atlantis, Akila City, Neon, and there are so few side missions, it's so empty.
Forget the loading screens, if the cities in this game were just a little bigger and packed with more multi layered missions with unique item rewards, I would fucking looove this game. It's so close to being good for me, and they can still add missions through updates, they just need actual writers and creativity.
@@severdislike4222 as someone with 400+ hours i can say this is completely untrue.
@@liammccarthy9388 there are multi layered missions with unique items, dude give the game another chance.
@TheParagonIsDead while the original statement may be a bit hyperbolic, you liking something doesn't invalidate someone else's experience. That's not how opinions work.
@@FopsFuzz that’s how they think opinions work. I know though.
The thing is they mean “worse” as in objective decline in quality the more time you put into it, which just isn’t exactly right.
Every game gets boring after a certain amount of binge playing, and this is true in starfield aswell. The thing is it’s not any more true for starfield.
The game gives you a steady flow of quality content for hundreds of hours, the game is good if you let it be good.
FF7 had the balls to straight up murder a party member for good, and Bethesda won't even let you fail a quest.
and with that, some of us like me: took that personally. It wasn't Cloud's quest, it was mine. I was going to make Sephiroth bleed for killing Aerith as I got that invested in the story and the characters. That's why our host was disappointed in how Sam dies as there was nothing to make you care. It's more: oh.. that guy.. oh well... that's it. Aerith so many of us loved her that her death hit and hit hard in the feels
Bethesda once let you kill literal, living Gods vital to the main quest, and this could be done at any point as long as you had made sure to be strong enough to kill them. And they also provided an alternate pathway to complete the game still, should you decide you want to kill said Gods.
The game was Morrowind, and people don't give it the respect it deserves.
@@Elrohof man Morrowind is such a breath of fresh air, "Hey go talk to this guy if you want to do this quest, oh you killed him? suck to be you then"
So did Phantasy Star 2 in fact it did it first.
you could... 20 years ago in morrowind.
I found Emil's comments interesting, because, well, as a former game dev, I could look at Starfield and likely guess what happened behind the scenes. Like people like to bash the generation ship quest as just being bad, all around. But I look at it and see the work of someone who really tried. Three different routes, that actually differ... effort was put in. Of course, other routes that should exist don't. The generation ship with radio tech so out of date they cannot communicate doesn't feel outdated inside. Those type of things. But that's likely not because the guy or gal doing the mission didn't think they should be there, but rather, because he wasn't given the means to allow it to happen. He did the best he could. And you see the same thing in other quests. Pirate quest line? It, most likely, could actually let you pick a side because the bounty system meant the ability to control aggro through a flag existed. That's the only reason that mission line is somewhat decent. These quest writers did the best they could with what little they were provided. And that sort of thing is everywhere in Starfield
And other parts, to me, it speaks of a design constantly in flux, of things not thought through and planned beforehand. Like how could someone make a game with a story based around NG+ and not design a game that provides a reason to want to play through again? Someone had to have pointed that out. So either Bethesda was so arrogant and believed modders would provide the reason for people to do that, or they slapped the story in late in the game's development. They spent all the time on systems to generate boring planets, to customize space ships, and so on, and forgot to take the time to design everything else. In essence, they designed the systems first, then tried to make a game for it. Gee, any wonder why they had trouble finding the fun?
So yeah, a lot of hard work put in by people, but people that were failed by their project leads, and mostly, the lead designers. And that means Emil. He failed to do his job properly.
Emil's a petty and decrepit man. He blocks people for even the most minute criticisms (even if laden with positive comments) on the games Bethesda makes - even if it's nothing directly to do with him.
Yeah, I'm sure the individual designers were doing the best they could with what they had available. They just didn't have anything made available to them. And were left entirely to their own devices. It's really a massive fail in management. So it's really weird to see Emil give that defense, when he's the cause of the issue.
I'm really curious what he was actually doing at his job the entire time. He didn't seem to be trying to ensure the story and world were consistent by checking the bits people wrote all fit together in a consistent way. We've all heard by now how much he hates wasting his time keeping a design document updated. He certainly didn't seem to be coming up with a fully fleshed-out world, or branching possibilities from either player choice or alternate universes. He wasn't editing and re-editing the dialogue and such to make sure it sounded natural or had a nice punch to it. What DID he spend all that time doing?
You're right but one thing. Bethesda doesn't have writer. Only Emil that was credited as writer. It's the Quest/Level/etc Designer that need to do double duty for that. After you realize that, it's no wonder that Skyrim, Fallout 4, and Starfield story/quest is ass.
Starfield really feels like the "Too many cooks in the kitchen" syndrom and no clear direction as if the game director wasn't even present or didn't care.
Give the assets and engine to a "new" studio of about 60 people max, a budget of 20mil max, and 2-3 years and just restart, new space game, with new story and added mechanics. It's the only possible solution.
My suggestion, use the Blizzards StarCraft IP to make an RPG set in that universe, it fits perfectly with the existing assets available.
To me, not giving the player meaningfull choices to make for any of the storylines is just a symptom of bethesda being bethesda, they've been doing this for a while now, it's either so ingrained in how they think about their games they're unwilling to compromise on it, or they honestly did not even see the golden opportunity to get rid of that because with the NG+ cycle it becomes incredibly tedious to do the exact same story again and again with no real changes
“Starfield sucks” is my favorite TH-cam video genre
There's a sick fascination to how a videogame can manage to be this utterly awful
It’s disappearing because the game is good now.
@@CErra310so you’ve played? That’s how you know if awful?
@@TheParagonIsDeadah cool. So… what makes it good now?
@TheParagonIsDead *because the game is no longer relevant and much better games have been released since then.
A large corporation like Bethesda will NEVER make anything "unsafe" again. It's not the game developers choosing what they make, it's high ups who doesn't see video games as a meidum for art, only asset for their profits.
Also it's Microsoft which now calls the shots at Bethesda. It's now totally corporatized. Nothing good will ever come from this studio.
half the reason i love fromsoftware is the fact they've made their money and still want to create strange and weird universes, unlike so many other fucking studios, looking at you ubisoft
@@quantum5661 FromSoft has made the same game for over a decade now
starfield wasn't unsafe at all, it was generic, bland, copy and paste, nonsense. And to top it all off, they are still using the same engine they have been using since Skyrim? Starfield had some fun ideas, but the fun ideas were mired in the fundamental archaic mediocrity that was the rest of the game.
Edit: I originally said Oblivion, Skyrim was the first to use the Creation Engine.
@@TheCalmPsycho By your logic all games on Unreal are the same
todd wanted over $100 for this shot, we arent harsh enough
A lot of people are hoping that with new DLC and future updates Starfield will have some kind of redemption arc akin to Cyberpunk 2077. Let's put it to rest: it will never happen, because it's not possible.
Cyberpunk's problems were mostly in technological glitches, poor mechanical balance and inconsistent performance. These are things that could have been, and were, hammered out with time. It was already built on a game world with rich lore, a gripping story and fantastic voice acting. The things that were most difficult to change after the fact were done and done well, they just needed to fix the game.
Starfield's problems are intrinsic to the design philosophy of the game. The writing is bad, the plot is bad, the quest design is bad, the character design is bad, and the world design is bad. These are things that can't be fixed without going back to the drawing board, re-engineering the game and its story, and rehiring the voice cast to reprise their roles with new scripts.
Starfield will never have a redemption arc because it is a fundamentally bad game.
I think it can be a partial redemption. The expansion could take place on a more limited number of planets, with better quests where choices matter. Better companion interactions there, maybe some new ones. And I think, for Bethesda's sake, it is important that it does so. Because, while I don't think it can save Starfield, the expansion being viewed as an improvement will be vital for people's anticipation of ES6.
@@Axterix13though myself a huge TES fan, hearing Indy is for "a modern audience", Microsoft all-in on DEI now called BRIDGE... Starfield using a tweaked version of the same engine that made Skyrim..... TES:O having a non-binary companion, Bethesda's predatory MTX system both store for DLC, content and mods: I already abandoned all hope that TES6 was anything but DOA
I really don't like the story of 2077, but i agree that there was a redemption
@@Axterix13 There will be no redemption, starfailure is dead
@@TheNightman. and that's a good thing, with any luck we'll never see elder scrolls 6
You ask for the impossible, you ask for Emil Tortellini to be able to write.
His name is Emil Parallelogram
I believe its Emil Cagliari
Um, actually, it's Emil Bababooey
um its emil peperoni 🤓🤓
I thought it was pugrillio
There's no need to warn for spoilers, everything that can be spoiled in starfailed is mediocre and pointless, just like how starfailed is mediocre and pointless.
The whole Emissary schtick was so phoned in it's ridiculous, and still ended up with the lamest payoff ever.
"Look at this guy, he's dead! He's dead-dead, you know, REALLY dead, he's REALLY REALLY dead. Are you sad yet? Look, funeral and all, he's croaked, he's bought the farm, he drew his last breath and joined the choir eternal, this is an EX-character!......oh look he's alive just kidding he's a weird space magic alternate self. Wow aren't we the best writers ever for throwing you that curveball!"
@@Zorothegallade-rpg "This character is no more, he has ceased to be!"
Someone commented on another video that the undeniable proof Bethesda had lost touch was that Todd Howard was genuinely shocked that BG3 won GOTY instead of Starfield.
The quintessential Starfield moment for me came when I was "surveying" a barren rock. Surveying in Starfield of course means running in a direction with your scanner on waiting for some resource to appear so you can press the interact button on it. I was jogging in one direction on this utterly featureless planet looking for silver or helium or whatever, walking past the fifth identical cave point of interest (you know, the one where there's always a few dead miners nearby and one has a note on them that says "we hit the motherlode" or whatever), and all the while this absurd swelling of music was happening. Inon Zur's rousing theme was going and the brass was rising and I was just walking on a flat plane. The dissonance was insane. The music indicated I was supposed to be experiencing this incredible wonder and beauty and I should be feeling the bracing excitement of adventure and exploration, and I was bored to tears trying to check off the last mineral so I could get a few hundred bucks from a kiosk in the basement of Constellation.
The most entertaining thing about Starfield is that time Bethesda employees tried to debate negative Steam reviewers on whether they liked the game.
what💀
@@stevbe1723 they said "youre playing it wrong and space is empty" and a bunch of other out of touch comments. Its funny
@@BrandonDenny-we1rw Yeah I did hear about that but the idea that they're commenting that on negative steam reviews is just so absurd
@@stevbe1723 you can google it. 5 seconds.
Bethesda charging for mods that are meant to improve and fix their archaic and poorly designed game is almost rage-inducing.
Just a truly deplorable move by this trash studio.
I used to LOVE Bethesda. Now I wish Microsoft would finally step in and clean house.
Horse armor all over again. Also the first time they try to push paid mods idea back then, they got whiplashed hard.
This time humans are gaslit by corporations so much that some of them accepts them.
Almost? Lmao
All mods that are improving or fixing the game are free on nexus, none of them are paid. If you’re gonna ride the hate train like a mindless npc at least make decent points. You look like a clown
They’re going to have to clean house if anyone is getting fired. Bethesda formed “a union.” So if 1 person goes, they all go. Oooooooooogh.
weird how the same people who go on an on about supporting modders dont want them to be employed and paid, and the mods to be meaningfully integrated and kept functional, after years of vocally complaining about that. for once, bethesda actually listened
Thank you for Sharing your explicit view on Starfield, you really are a interesting character to enjoy. I fare from share your perspective and conclutions, but you have tons of valid views and you for sure improved my day significantly. So you Got a New subscriber, who has now watched several of your TH-cam creations and I like your animated presentation. Thank you for that!
That is what bugs me the most. They call it "multiverse" yet in every iteration the game is exactly the same. Same missions, same morons comandeering you around. So where is the fun in that?
Bethesda wanted the wow-factor of a timeloop story without putting in the leg work to give meaningful narrative and philosophical explorations of that topic. You reach the bottom of the puddle with your first bombastic splash, leaving little water left for repeat attempts.
It really does seriously boggle my mind that Bethesda didn't capitalize on the NG+ concept more. Like yeah Bethesda does tend to play things safe and rarely locks the player out of content because they are basically afraid of telling the player "No" and want to let people do anything and everything in one run. But they gave themselves the PERFECT excuse to finally take some harder stances. To give the player some meaningful choices that lock them out of factions and questlines with no way to go back and change them. Because NOW they could go "Well you're in a new universe so why not explore some different options!"
If I had to guess, it is because they looked at their other games, which tons of people still play, and they figured that would be the case for Starfield as well. They probably patted themselves on the back for it, thinking how much players would enjoy being able to carry all their skills forward. Their goal was never to make a game worth replaying. They just assumed we would want to.
It's funny- cause I won't be able to finish the crimson fleet quest line. Most radiant missions are to kill crimson fleet. So I did that. I cleared some outposts on planets. And now, my bounty is over 12 million credits and every time i go to the key it's shoot on sight. So I'll have to do a NG+ run to see that questline through. Bogus.
It is actually baffling to me that they built the NG+ system and did not do this. It is so obvious.
@@Axterix13”let’s make a game people will buy like crazy (due to hype) and play for a while before ultimately getting bored and dropping it.
Then we don’t have to provide content updates once the player base is low enough!”
In a world spoiled by deep cinematic widely beloved rpgs Starfield is neither modern, nor does it do anything well enough compensate for its weak points.
Im waiting for ps5 starfield
Comparing this with The Witcher 3's amazing cinematics and animations, where you can even tell when someone is lying... It's tragic. If there is a word to describe the game, it's outdated. A shame, because I like the concept and I love the art design.
@@JaKingScomez Better to get another game really. Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 would be pretty awesome but it was pushed from a Holiday release to Feb 2025.
@@dra6o0nno
@@dra6o0n do you know any fallout 4 type games
The exploration really gets to me. I do agree that narrative reasons to explore are needed... but also they completely fail to even capture the splendor of real landscapes!!! Go to any national park or monument in any country. Even a simple 3D rendition of these locations could inspire awe if done halfway decently. Other planets and moons we know of lack the biosphere and plate tectonics of Earth, but they are still fascinating in a million ways. If you speak to an expert, they can spend hours telling you how fascinating a single moon or planet in our solar system is: all the ways it is different from earth, the mysteries of its formation, landforms that dwarf anything on Earth.
You want to know how these bodies became the way they are, you want to imagine the lead snow on Venus, the valleys and mountains of Mars or the ice volcanos and hydrocarbon lakes of Titan! You learn about how precious and magificent Earth is as you do. That is what excites people about space! Nothing in starfield has scale, it speaks of no geologic past, no mystery. It is an insult.
Agreed. Another Issue I have with it is there is huge quality differences between locations. Some areas look unfinished with low polygon environment assets (Or have weird lack of cliff assets in logical locations) Both examples apply to outside of New Atlantis area in general. While some other areas hold up much better and mostly look fantastic such as the Vectera mining outpost. Exiting the god tier graphics found inside your spaceship to go explore the outside area of New Atlantis feels like going from a new AAA game to a early access unity asset flip and it bothers me immensely.
Whenever I launch fallout 4 I'm schocked at how much better I think it looks in general with the exception of the ship interiors, which are absolutely amazing. The fantastic materials rendering with dense handcrafted and believable environments and consistent graphics do so much in Fallout 4. It also runs 8x better and is not a stuttery mess and so it feels fantastic to play in comparsion to Starfield (at least on my end)
Starfield is truly one of the games of all time. The gameplay is playing, the graphics is graphing, and the music is listened
Maybe it would have been a rehash of the Fallout formula, but imagine if Starfield was set in it's own 'verse, after some catastrophic event that left many planets ruined. Might be a bit like 40K, but it would have been something. Planets with ruins on it to explore, with rare alien weapons. The wrecks of ships orbiting around planets, toeing the line between falling down the grav well and drifting into the void.
I was even thinking clan invasion from Battle Tech.
Never played the game, eh?
Thank you for making these videos. I feel so validated now lol. All of these issues are things that I felt while playing. I've been frustrated because it's hard to verbalize how shallow and empty this game is, and how obvious all these issues felt to me. When I saw people defend it, it made me feel like maybe I was being snobby, but I'm not. That's literally not how my brain works. I couldn't even for a second suspend my disbelief in this game and feel engulfed in the universe. It genuinely bugged me the whole time ... I still don't understand people's argument of "just turn your brain off" and play, but it doesn't just work like that.
Captain Mack slowly transforming into the ultimate Starfield hater, and I'm absolutely loving it. As a fan of classic games like Morrowind, Oblivion, Fallout 1-2-3-Vegas, the slop Bethesda is peddling absolutely breaks my heart. The only way they will change is if we let them know, and I appreciate your work doing so.
Starfield is the type of game where the more you play it the more the bad stuff starts to stick out And you get more frustrated as time goes on until you hit a breaking point.
@@BlueBD But I read an AI-generated generic comment from Bethesda at Steam that claimed it is going to be good after 10,000 hours.
Every Elder Scrolls after Daggerfall and Morrowind has been slop. Starfield is almost on par with Skyrim, it's just more noticeable because Skyrim came out a decade ago and no one else really makes Bethesda style open world. Every new Bethesda title dumbs down and streamlines the previous. I almost like the procedural gen in SF, reminded me a little of Daggerfall, it just needed a ton more hand designed stuff. It won't ever be great but maybe they can polish it to decent.
Bughesda didn't make Fo 1-2 or Vegas.
Which shows how bad bughesda is.
@@spiralvex2686 Skyrim was actually a fun game, starfailure will never reach that height
In NG+ I purposefully make sure Sam dies.
for me it's the leader.
Wait, what do you mean "NG+"? You beat the game? You're still playing the game...?
@@a_rat_named_mouse They told me it got better. They lied.
Just wait till you run into variant universe where (starborn) Cora is waiting you in the Lodge because she wants to kill you as revenge. You can only talk yourself out of fight if you never let him die.
@@DarkZodiacZZ Assuming I care enough to start over _again._ Besides, I'd just spawn in some Spacers or something and watch the show.
Bethesda never seems to explore any idea beyond the surface level in their games.
Yup, it's why they're often called "as wide as an ocean, as deep as a puddle". They have some nifty ideas but never really do anything with them. 😮💨
I appreciate the final section of the video acknowledging the dev team. It is astoundingly easy to criticize this game and the studio behind it, but I think it is hard to look at a bad product and still acknowledge it was made by real people. "Nobody tries to make a bad game" is a great quote to keep in mind as time goes on.
Bethesda is a studio that has put out many flawed products and had a lot of VERY poor choices, but I can always appreciate looking beyond the headlines and acknowledging their flaws with an analytical approach rather than an emotional one. Thank you for being a good analyst and a great creator!
Innate Talent is a beautiful thing, yes. It's unfortunate that it usually gets bogged down by the red tape of corporate bureaucracy though.
Nobody tries to make a bad game, but some people do outright refuse advice that would enable them to do so, and pursue stupid ideas right into a wall. I feel so bad for those very designers who either A, weren't allowed to make anything good, or B, made something good but then watched it be watered down and crowbarred in to the dumpster that is Starfield. Emil and Todd are both creative people who worked their way up the company, they aren't just random suits hired to terrorize the staff, but they are so bad at their jobs.
@@billjacobs521 I think the Day Before devs set out to make a bad game.
What really gets me is that there is legitimately no point. In Oblivion, why are we getting stronger? We have to stop Dagon/Umaril/Jyggalag. In Skyrim, why are we getting stronger? Oh, we have to stop Alduin/Miraak. In Fallout 4, why are we getting stronger? We have to save our kid and tame the wasteland.
In Starfield why are we getting stronger? Just...because. The point of the game is to get to the end of it and do it again. We get all these powers to do nothing with them. We aren't gearing up for some big bad evil guy. We aren't saving the world. The world is already at peace and it stays at peace. At the end of the game, after you've collected every power, there is nothing to DO with them. Attack people? I already have more powerful guns. Narratively, why are we even doing this? Because Bethesda told us to?
It’s telling that Todd Howard himself can be quoted saying that Starfield was only fun 6 years into development. Starfields story, mechanics, and world design feels like each piece was designed without consideration for the rest of the projects, and Bethesda stuck the ones that worked together. Almost like there was no documentation outlining the dev teams goals.
That's because there isn't, Bethesda stopped using game design docs after Fallout 3 because they couldn't be arsed to keep on updating a game design doc every time they made a change to the game(s) they were making.
I can kind of defend that statement in specific, at least in a vacuum. Warren Spektor, for example, has also stated that Deus Ex wasn't fun until a few months before launch when they finally found the right balances between all the different systems.
Though the context of Todd's statement kind of ruins it, because they didn't really have an overall vision or a bunch of systems they were trying to tune to work well together -- even after release almost none of them do.
Why would the game be fun super early? Like that is a thing, a lot of people don't understand that a game is usually not very fun until it is mostly complete...
@@SioxerNikita It's called game design. If your basic prototype or concept doesn't have a fun loop early on then what the fuck are you making? This is the problem with a lot of AAA game development these days. Let's have a checklist of things we want to cram into an open world! Then slap on some progression and microtransactions and call it a day! Without any game mechanics actually building on each other to form a solid gameplay backbone.
@@Jayy997 Tell me you don't know about game dev without telling me.
Having a few fun mechanics not well put together yet does not make a fun game loop.
Some are lucky they stumble onto something...
Like Jesus, you are oblivious. A lot of the most beloved games were hollow husks pre-launch...
Minecraft had an interesting premise, but franky, not that interesting as a game...
And it was even worse before the first real bigger release on forums....
Triple A is not the issue of making the game fun early... those issues are almost completely unrelated
Let's be honest here.
Skyrim and fallout 3 weren't particularly good either.
Nothing there was revolutionary.
However it was really lucky.
Those games wrapped up a bunch of things other games had done, but put them in a single package, and deliver it to an audience that had MUCH lower expectations of games (the console market was really exploding and that generation of consoles could do things only PCs had the memory to do before) and on PCs they were in a format that was VERY mod friendly which allowed them to build a strong vibrant community to maintain hype. And right at a time gaming was getting more mainstream, and modding was becoming so so massive.
neither were Oblivion or Fallout 4. all of those games rely on the world design and people's curiosity to interact with the world to cover up for the shitty gameplay mechanics.
Starfield doesn't have a world to distract you from how awful the combat, RPG progression or story writing is. It's the crapiness of all of Bethesda's modern games laid bare.
Bethesda's games post morrow wind and pre fallout 76 were really flawed but had the charm and some genuinely good elements that kept people from hating it. Generally the fun world to run around in and good dlc and sidequests were enough to excuse the shit main quest or lack of rpg mechanics. Starfield ended that streak.
I disagree. Skyrim in particular still has the best open world to me despite the game's overall problems. Not just because it looks pretty and is backed by one of the best soundtracks in gaming but because it gets that exploration is supposed to be a major focus of the game. Not just for 1 playthrough, but through all playthroughs. It does this through its random encounter system. Traveling from one location to the other in games like Elden Ring for example, are only fun the first time you do it because everything is the same. Therefore after your first playthrough, exploration just becomes a chore and the weakest part of the game when it used to be one of the strongest. Meanwhile in Skyrim if you were to save in front of one area and then travel down the road to another area where you encounter 3 events then load back and do the same thing again, then those 3 events will be completely different from last time. The events that can happen are also interesting not just because they can be funny, dynamic, or lead you down a rabbit hole to a large side quest, but also they are determined by a lot of different factors like your level, what quests you've done, if you assaulted, murdered, or stole from someone, what part of the map your on, what time of day it is etc. Its one of the only open world games where the feeling of the journey being better than the destination still stays upon multiple playthroughs because I never know what's going to happen when traveling from point A to point B. Most open world games today, even amazing ones like Elden Ring, still don't get this right.
@@rotundseal3400 No, Morrowind, Daggerfall, and Arena have problems too.
The games have never been story driven rpgs, and have never sold themselves as story driven rpgs.
I feel like the big, interactive world, with deep lore and endless looting and an incredible amount of objects that can be picked up and moved or knocked around, IS sort of revolutionary. People sometimes don't realize how unique Bethesda's engine is, or at least was; Skyrim tracked where everyone was in the world at any time, including traveling merchants, and could calculate the physics for 50 items you just shouted off a table all flying around the room at once. It sounds very boring but it wasn't that long ago that worlds were almost entirely static except the specific things placed for you to pick up or shoot or whatever. Bethesda, bafflingly, went backwards. Instead of a ton of unique NPCs with schedules, we mostly get hideous proc-genned mutants. Instead of those characters interacting with items, singing along to a song or using a workbench, they just stand stock still. Instead of trying to seem somewhat realistic, everything seems plasticky and weird. They not only don't fix the things they are bad at, they don't expand on the things they are good at, and actually dump those things. It's so weird. Like a restaurant where the food is mediocre and the place itself is meh, but the desserts are fantastic and the real reason people come...so they stop offering half of their dessert menu and replace the rest with generic options.
Wow, a part 3 so soon. This man put so much work in his videos.
it's so weird living in the timeline where formerly disgraced No Man's Sky now better fits Tod Howard's description of his magus opus than the actual Bethesda game, just wild.
Starfield was such a dissapointment, even for me that hasn't had high expectations after Fallout 76 and F4. Pathetic excuse of a game.
It's not that bad sheesh
@jasperfox6821
It's very much that bad, game is dogshit in every way possible.
@@jasperfox6821 It's dead dogshit
@StuHol-jb1hh Nah, it's really not, I've enjoyed my time with starfield, I like the game, sure it's got its big flaws and issues, but it's got a charm I like, and it's not that bad honestly, it's mid and that's fine, but I do wish It could have been better. So, perhaps stop making it out to be the worst thing in gaming ever, when honestly it's just a mid game, a game with flaws just like every game ever.
@@jasperfox6821obvious flaws the devs didn't bother to change i don't want them to keep making mid games every few years when they can do better cause they have done better
Does anyone else remember the conspiracy theories about how post-war chems got into pre-war containers in FO4? Because Bethesda didn't give a single thought to the continuity of their container loot tables then, either.
The weird thing about the Starborn ship is that it's pretty awful. Once you earn the credits, it's better to ditch it for something better.
After a couple going through the unity the ship gets much better but even then you’re right. Once you got the money you can make something better.
17:40 I like to IMAGINE Todd saying these lines during the pitch meeting :P
Me when Mack criticizes a game that I don't like: 😊
Me when Mack criticized an anime I did enjoy: 😡
Good video mate.
Let's be honest with ourselves. We all expected Skyrim or Fallout in space. What we actually got is lightyears away from those games in terms of story, gameplay and characters. My expectation for the next elder scrolls game has burned up on re-entry.
"Skyrim in Space" is exactly what people got though. Skyrim in _empty_ space to be exact, meaning that there's nothing to distract anyone from how shit the core mechanics of the game are.
@@CErra310 Exactly, skyrim is identical to starfield if you strip out all the older elder scrolls lore that pre todd bethesda wrote. People just get distracted by the parts made by a better company and don't see skyrim for how shallow it really was.
Skyrim was beautiful but it’s a shallow rpg experience
Just compare the quests and rpg mechanics to Oblivion to Skyrim
Night and day difference
@@CErra310 The empty part is very important, though. And Skyrim's lore gets a lot of shit given how good some of it is. Bear of Markarth, or anything else related to the Reach, for example. The civil war in general, or other world events that happened since the start of the 3rd era. Compared to FO4 or 76's brainless writing, Skyrim looks good. And Starfield is a lot closer to FO4 than it is to Skyrim.
@@honeybadger6275 Skyrim at least managed to be fun, especially in the period it came out. I can't enjoy it now as much as I did back when I was a kid because my tastes for fantasy have changed and I much prefer roleplaying games where I can *actually* roleplay a character, but the fact that Skyrim still exists in the greater zeitgeist speaks to the fact that it's a game that's enjoyed by a lot of people even despite its flaws.
Hell, even Oblivion is a buggy mess but I personally like to compare it to a well-aged blue cheese. An acquired taste in the landscape of modern RPGs, due to its charming jank. Skyrim's a mild cheddar, and can be enjoyed by just about anyone that's not lactose intolerant because it's generally inoffensive. Starfield is casu marzu, which is infested with maggots.
With regards to the Hunter being the Priest, I think bethesda is trying to make a point about power corrupting and specifically drawing a parallel to the player and the way that replaying a game takes away our empathy for the characters if the world. All the loops have made him into someone who doesn't even care about the people around him, doesn't even view them as people.
I don't think they succeeded, but I feel like that was the intent?
yeah they might have had a case if literally even one single character in the universe was actually likable or interesting. The way it came out it's almost the opposite message to what they intended: none of these people are worth caring about from the get-go, so why should you care about their wellbeing? Ironically it kind of proves the Hunter right under that lens.
Of course they succeeded. Think about it for a second. You, the player, the actual human being, have, first time playing, done most, if not all of the content and then gone through Unity. You acquired all the powers and moved on. Next universe, everything is the same. The only variability is that you have new temples to get powers from. You may do some quests that you particularly enjoyed and then collect your powers again and move in NG+2. Here, you start doing less quests, getting powers and going on the NG+3. Etc etc. Essentially, you are stopping to care about people in these universes and eventually, you are only running universes for powers, without doing any quests at all, just to get to NG+10 so you have max powers. And then what? Settle down into the universe and play it out again? No no. You find alternate ways to play it now, ways that mirror the Hunter in totality.
They succeeded perfectly, without people being able to actually see it because they are basing their view upon the character they play, not upon themselves.
@@FlashyJoerI agree that it works well on that level: they have connected the pattern of play with this character. I think anyone on NG+3 is already playing the game the way the hunter does. Where I think they fail is in doing anything more with the idea. What message is being conveyed here?
To me, it doesn't quite provide a message I can relay to my life, nor does it really inform how I play games. It points out what we miss and how unatural optimization focused play can be but... the game doesn't present characters I will feel bad for mistreating. They never react naturally to throw you out of the mindset you developed. It never stops you at NG7+ and compares you to the way you played through the first time. You don't reconcile with the damage you have done. The game encourages the Hunter style of gameplay and then that is where the message ends. You can see the monster and you can see how you could become that monster, but that occurs before you ever actually *do* and I think that is the mistake. It is an interesting character and not something more.
Compare this to NieR where (spoilers) the game works to convince you it is a simple good guy vs monsters story. You do your quests to save your daughter/sister. You do what is expected from you and then you reach an unhappy ending. Then the game stops you and asks you to play through portions of the story again with a new understanding of your enemies, that they are people and not monsters. You recontextualize the actions you previously accepted as videogame logic and you realize your righteousness has doomed the world. It asks you to think about the stories we tell, both in videogames and in our own lives. Starfield fails to raise to that level. It makes an observation but it never confronts you with it in a way that asks you to confront any of your views or assumptions.
@@FhtagnCthulhu Thanks for further clarifying your point - its 100% spot on, couldn't agree more on those grounds. :)
@@FlashyJoer It may have been an interesting idea if they'd actually done something with it, though. Undertale did the same thing a decade earlier, except it constantly warned the player against it, and then it directly pointed a finger at the player and called them out for it if they did it anyway. Basically saying "Well, you wanted to see every last corner of this game, no matter the cost. Now look what you've done."
Watching this video is like slowly taking a blindfold off. I've been lying to myself this whole time to force myself to like Starfield.
But now I can see. 😢
I love listening to Mack talk about media he loves but I will say his passion shows through even in dislike and its entertaining as heck and can’t wait for more videos!!
Thank you! I appreciate that you enjoy them either way, I know I've been doing a lot of criticism lately. My next video is talking about something I like though, so look forward to that :)
On the priest it’s actually heavily implied that the priest is a future version of the hunter
Which is as confusing and convoluted as it sounds
(To be more specific its implied the priest was a version of the hunter that grew wiser & less violent)
This hurts more the more you think about it. If he gave up pursuing the artifacts, that would mean he only went back in time through the Unity one final time before becoming the priest. So he should only be in one of the universes, right?
Of course the story seems to play pretty fast and loose with how much of the Starborn are "the same person going through multiple loops" and how much of them are "parallel universe versions of the same person each going through their own loops". And sometimes appears to conflate them as if they're the same thing?
Nothing about the Starborn really seems to make sense. It's like they saw Everything Everywhere All At Once's idea of being connected to every parallel universe at once and were like "I want to do that, too!" but never put any thought into how that would actually work.
@@-tera-3345 I agree that they definitely play really fast and loose with wether the starborn are the same people going through multiple loops, or wether their just alternate versions
Sometimes the hunter may remember you, and other times he doesn't
I'm more so of the opinion that it is them going through multiple loops, but that time isn't linear
So you could meet a starborn that knows who you are, then you could meet the same starborn that hasn't met you yet, or then meet a version of the starborn that did meet you, but has gone through so many loops they forget who you are
@@smirkyshadow4152 But there's also things like how the Emissary and the Hunter say they've both killed each other in numerous different universes, and they both seem to remember it. Heck, you can kill both of them in an unlimited number of universes, yourself. It's entirely possible that you've killed the Hunter in every single universe you've played through, but he still remembers you.
And while there's a possibility that's just another case of the game not actually bothering to respond to any actions you may have taken outside of the "correct" ones, it's also kind of emblematic of why the story is such a mess.
@@-tera-3345 To me it just feels like Bethesda had two separate ideas for how it works that conflict with eachother
and just did both
@@smirkyshadow4152 Yeah the whole story, kind of comes off like none of the writers were communicating with each other in any way. In fact, that's kind of true of pretty much every aspect of the game's design. Like a bunch of separate people all made things all in isolation and then they just taped them all together as-is without checking if they fit.
Thank you for your hard work mack, ive really enjoyed this video series. See you next stream
Do more of these. I keep watching them over and over. Like your comedy style
Thank you! I certainly plan to
Baldur's Gate 3 had the balls to let the player kill off characters, who have roles that stretch to the very end of the game, within the first few hours. Bethesda are terrified of players missing any of the mediocre content that they have in Starfield that they made the game entirely on-rails. Starfield isn't an RPG, it's an action game with levelling and slight variations on the ending depending on decisions the player makes right before the ending - there's no difference between the story design in Starfield and something like Call of Duty. Bethesda simply don't have the talent to create an engaging, branching story like Larian did in BG3. This type of narrative design was passable 10 years ago in games like Skyrim and Fallout 4, but not anymore. I pray Bethesda end up losing the Fallout and Elder Scrolls licences. Obsidian embarrassed Bethesda with New Vegas which they made in only 18 months on an out-of-date engine which they had to learn how to use from scratch, hopefully, Microsoft remember this and let other studios take a shot at developing for these IPs.
BG3 does make me play chess with my PS5. As you said, literally everything affects the game. Stepped on a bug- all insects are gone, avoided it- now Fäerûn is under oppression from huge ant overlords. Not actual game plot but that concept. Did you kill Minthara, knock her out or side with her? Did you deny the Emissary's request? literally everything has a knock on effect so that no playthrough is ever the same.
15:18 I think you just hit the nail in the head with this thought. The fact that it is a quantum choice. They are all 4 , and none at the same time. And as the death occurs it collapses the timeline. I like to think this is what Bethesda went for with this reveal. It would have been an even bigger reveal to actually learn the fact that all 4 of them exist as starborn and through you they get to meet eachother. Just imagine how cool it could have been to try and piece it all together by influenceing who "dies". And as you said, you also get to reflect on what your choices mean, and what death mean in a universe where there is proof for a multiverse.
Anyway, I'm writing fanfic at this point, but I do believe they wanted to explore the idea further they just either mismanaged, or ran out of time, because deadlines exist 😔
Just seeing you standing on a character's shoulder made me subscribe. Really enjoy hearing your perspective and your humor. 🤙
Captain mack has to have the most underrated video essays on youtube. No one else I've seen can make such spot on complaints, and offer such good writing suggestions to show how it's not a bad story, it's a poorly executed story. I truly believe that any setting and time can make for a great story as long as characters are likeable and don't have useless filler dialog, and story elements are set up to make an impact on the reader or player.
I wish more creators would use the Jojos style of character writing where complete characters are placed into a story rather than bland characters are placed to service the story. It makes characters unrelatable and boring meaning the story has less of an impact on you.
Thank you so much! I completely agree, characters should be fleshed out in their entirety, even if we aren't going to see a lot of those details in the actual game
I think you are quite right. Yes, our standards for what makes a good game is constantly evolving and changing. Both as a society and as individual gamers. The games we grew up with are always fondly remembered compared to newer games, unless they are groundbreaking in some way, like Baldur's Gate 3 or something. But the developers can't use this as an excuse, hoping we'll somehow lower the standards again. It's an evolving art. A single dev could code Pac-man and make a revolutionary game in a few weeks or months. Today, we expect more.
For me, Bethesda kinda peaked with Oblivion and Skyrim. My first Bethesda game was Morrowind, but the one I still remember the fondest is actually Oblivion. The music, landscape and general "feel" in Oblivion was better than even Skyrim. Skyrim was definitely also a very good game, so if I were to rate Oblivion at a 10 when it came out, I would say Skyrim was a 9.5.
Skyrim also had a lot more longevity, thanks to better graphics, more modders and just the fact that it was the last elder scrolls game before they went into MMO stuff (which doesn't interest me all that much)
Starfield might have been well received in 2005. The graphics are probably the best in any Bethesda game, although it doesn't hold up to its competitors anymore. Music is also quite good, but the gameplay, story, and characters is as bland as watered down milk. It is also painfully obvious that the game engine Bethesda uses, which is basically iterations of the same engine that Morrowind ran on, is not suited for this kind of game. It doesn't support large cities, large crowds, nor proper ranged weaponry aside from bows.
Also, while I think Bethesda's voice actors are doing an okay job, it might be time to hire some new talents as well. Hearing the same voices for so long gets quite weird.
I had some hope for Starfield, but it just isn't good enough. The biggest problem is that it is so boring. I play games to be entertained, not to be bored, slogging through bland auto-generated planets, scanning plants and animals that all look the same, all biomes are uniform... it's so boring.
a game who's story is about how cool new game plus is, with a pointless new game plus
You gained a new subscriber, while i may not agree with some of your takes, you are a breath of fresh air
Sadly with Todd being the boss and Emil the head writer there is no hope for any future Bethesda game, they are in a feedback loop of "we can do no wrong" while doing everything wrong.
Recent interviews about shattered space show how little they've learned 😔
I've been actively playing Starfield while listening to this video. The only thing I can say about the game is: it doesn't demand much from me. So if I've had a shitty day or a shitty experience in another game, I can boot it up and role play with myself that I'm some roaming doctor ship captain.
That said though... Starfield is still a massive disappointment.
When I originally got the game, I wanted exploration, survival gameplay, and outpost building.
Even to this day, survival is completely lackluster, with only ever needing to eat or drink once every hour or so in real life time, and never, ever needing to sleep. I really enjoyed survival in Fallout 4 (albeit with mods to remove the inability to save) and I was hoping to mimic some of that here, but alas.
Exploration... I don't need to say anything. Everyone has already said everything I could say about it. I just wish that after playing games like Skyrim, Fallout 4, and even Fallout 76, they could have at the _very least_ fleshed out the areas surrounding major cities. But they couldn't even do that.
And outposts? Loved building settlements in Fallout 4. I have over 2,000 hours in Fallout 4 because I keep booting it back up to be creative with settlements. Combined with the survival gameplay I have, I love having settlements that are designed with doctors and merchants in mind, to help patch me up and give me supplies before I venture back out into the wasteland. But in Starfield, there is _zero_ reason to hire a crew and send them to an outpost, and there's absolutely zero reason to visit the outpost beyond having a place to store all your junk for crafting... since for some god awful reason, the ship's inventory doesn't count when you're using your ship's work benches.
I didn't buy Starfield for its story because I knew it would be ass after playing Skyrim and Fallout 4. (Yes, I thought Skyrim's main story was boring). But even with my low expectations, I didn't expect it to be as bad as it was. As far as I'm concerned, the Space Dragonborn don't exist and never should have. There's no multiverse ending apocalypse that justified gathering as much power as possible, so what even is the point of it all? The answer is: there isn't.
Great video, doesn't hold back. Tired of those TH-camrs that are always like "oh I don't want to be negative, we try to stay positive on this channel..." like stfu. Sometimes you gotta be real
Starfield is far from the first game to have an in-universe explanation of New Game Plus. Bastion (2011) by Supergiant Games comes to mind off the top of my head. Transistor (2014) may or may not have one depending on how you interpret events (its writing is very impressionistic and vague). If you count roguelike/roguelite runs as NG+, most games in that genre have an explanation of why there are multiple runs and why there can be a metaprogression system. I'm sure there are many more.
This is very far from unique, and I don't think Starfield deserves any credit for including this, because they did LITERALLY NOTHING with it other than "lol Sarah Morgan is a potted plant" memes.
i find it funny that bethesda bragged about having the most lines of dialogue in any bethesda game (250k to skyrims 60k) but the majority of what anybody says is so over fluffed and meaningless. They have so much to say but none of it matters
Really strong organization and delivery here, Captain. Some of these takes are notably long, too. As a first-time viewer, that made this whole video feel very well researched, the opposite of lazy. Thanks for helping confirm my choice to skip this one and best wishes for the channel!
Thank you very much! I'm really glad you got something out of it
Video so good it cured me of cancer, 10/10
I felt more like a space explorer playing Ratchet and Clank for ps2.
Wait, you have 64k followers? I watched your last few videos on this series just assuming you were at least 500k plus just from the quality
Amazing stuff, keep it up.
Thank you, that's really kind of you to say!
I dont' think there's a single good point you didn't bring up in this one.
Thank you for the excellent video, top notch commentary and for fighting for our community!
I gotta subscribe...
I really cant stand modern bethesda, and i dont fully comprehend how theyre still in business now. And i think the thing that makes me dislike them so much is how... i dunno scummy and dishonest their games are now. Like, ea activision and ubisoft have proven to be worse at almost every level, and i recognize that, but something about bethesda just boils my balls. I think a big part of it comes down to how the modern bethesda "creatiln process" seems to be so tired and labored, like any enthusiasm that the company had back in TES Morriwind days has been completely sucked dry. Now, their deepest "characters" are an amalgamation of exactly 1 1/2 personality traits, their "rpg mechanics" arent from rpgs at all - its literally just leveling up and getting perks and thats the only thing they can understand from an rpg, and instead of lovingly creating fun and interesting worlds and quests...theyd rather let proc gen taske care of almost all of it, even part of the main story. Theres no passion to it, therez no reason that they keep making these actikn games with character creators. They refuse to let players make a single decision, they refuse to ever plan out an alternate route, but they also refuse to just call it what it is (an action game) so the playerbase isnt forced to sit through 300 dialouge "choices" that all lead to the exact same interaction and results. Instead, we have to sit here while the game plays pretend that youre allowed to make a single legitimate decision. And then, when they get criticized for making a boring, uninteresting game, they claim that the playerbase is to blame, or they try to wring more money outta ya to make the game actually entertaining. They could make a good game. With great writing. And well thought out rpg mechanics. And companions/ npcz that are genuinely memorable. Thats what the genre they claim to be making requires. Instead, ole toddy boi is gonna double the amount of ways you can say "no, but actually yes" in dialog, and half the amount of quests eritten by actual human writers.
I just cant stand it
This is why people who compare Starfield to something like cyberpunk 2077 are wrong.
Cyberpunks launch was absolutely inexcusable but despite the absolute abhorrent technical difficulties and bugs at it’s core the atmosphere characters environment and gameplay that makes cyberpunk a great game we’re already there and can now shine after they fixed everything around it.
Starfield is the exact opposite, it launched in a pretty polished state (for Bethesda at least) but at it’s core it’s an empty joyless derivative husk without any memorable characters good story or impressive atmosphere or environment. And I don’t think that can be fixed like the bugs In cyberpunk
To be fair... In my story, i married sarah, and it was her that died, only to discover she was one of the travellers. It was pretty impactful, though im pretty sure it wasn't on purpose 😂
So weird I discovered your channel two weeks ago, and picked up cyber punk again just this week 😂 How’d you know it’s one of my new favorite games, i blazed through the main story on launch n didn’t play it since, but now 4 years later I find myself sooo impressed by it. I know they’ve worked on it a ton, but even some of the stuff that was there before is super refreshing when I compare it to other games. Character writing, the sense of stake, and all the details that jump toward you are really like nothing else I’ve played. Came back to it with really low expectations and have been really pleasantly surprised
I like to imagine in one of those alternate universes that starfield was better
The onIy good thing about Starfield is the ship building system.
I think Bethesda utterly failed to manage the project and it's quite obvious they cut so much corner.
The biggest problem in this game is definitivelly how smalls it is. While the Elder Scrolls and Fallout could get away with having small settlement of barelly 20 people posing as regional capital, it just become laughable when you try to apply such logic to space faring societies.
But an even problem is that the corner cutting aspect absolutely wreck everything. Even what is there is generaly laughable and lesser in depht than what Bethesda did. The best exemple of this is a main faction question comparison.
In the federation, you get from an absolute nobody to the biggest hero of the faction in barely two quest. You get sent to fix a comm relay, then suddently, you are the new expert on how to deal with a xenomorph and must stop an alien invasion.
Meanwhile, Skyrim asked you to crawl through several dungeon and participate in several battle before you could gain the thrust of the commander. You could actually obtain several promotion that helped a lot for the immersion.
The biggest mistake, in my opinion, was to go for a fucking timeloop scenario with space gods or AI and shit. You litteraly are the captain of spaceship in a what is supposed to be rich galaxy filled with various faction. Why does everything made to engage in this universe is supposed to be a menial secundary quest that you can repeat ad nauseam?
How are you supposed to take seriously anyone when the first random that come acros your path give you his bloody ship for no reasons? How can you pretend to be an open world when most of your gameplay is spent behind a loading screen? Like, was it to hard to make an overworld where you could pilot the bloody ship around?
Honestly, I do no understand anything about that game... there is no coherence about it. I paid 60€ to buy it and it's probably one of the few times when I trully regretted my decision. This game is a legit scam.
Emil Pagliarulio is spiteful, petty, and immature and has no business being in the position he is.
He blocks people who even minutely criticize games he worked on. He's a nepo hire.
@@StarComrade26Wrong, he's a level designer for Thief who's been promoted beyond his capacity to come up with creative world-building.
@@bulletflight well, at some point I am not that concerned with the difference of whether an unqualified douche has a job and fails upward bc his Daddy owns the company or because his frat buddy owns it... it sucks and it results in crappy quality!
"Those losses could effect the gameplay"
that's why they weren't killed. Bethesda has become deathly allergic to any in-game negative outcomes of any kind for the players' gameplay experience. They are terrified that if you can't do literally anything literally any time for the entire playthrough, you won't buy the next one.
With that mindset, they shoulda just have id or MachineGames make the next FPS because if choices don't even matter, on top of you MUST repeat everything in an infinite loop, why call it an RPG when games like Borderlands literally have New Game+ but people prefer that?
The game is just a broken mess.
- Some quests are still not finishable 1 year after launch
- Zero content updates (except for the buggy space buggy that controls like if Halo's Warthog had a major mechanical failure)
- The story is bland and seemingly written by a 10 year old who heard of the concept of space for the first time
- The entire cast of characters is unlikeable and annoying
- NG+ is pretty much pointless
- Basic QOL features are missing (that should've been in the game since day one, IF someone at BGS actually cared)
- ALL Locations are uninteresting (no matter if they are hand-crafted or procedurally generated)
- Constant loading screens (no matter how short they are) make general traversal feel like a chore even on highest-end hardware (Ryzen9 7950X3D, 4070Ti Super and 64gb of RAM, Gen5 NVME drive with 11,5gb/s)
- Paid DLC before the actual base game is in a fully playable/stable state
- Dialog that feels like it was entirely written by ChatGPT
- Dumb AI that often just fails to react properly in combat (on the enemy and ally side)
- Broken RPG elements (because equipment stats and player level barely matters in-game)
- No real freedom (almost every mission still has the same outcome no matter the choices made, or if it has a different outcame it is predicatble from the first second)
Those are just some things that came to mind instantly. It just feels like an Early Access title that barely is able to hold it's stuff together without breaking completely and that is not my definition of an Open World Bethesda Games Studio "Epos", it feels more like a hastily thrown together cash-grab. It's really sad to see how bad the game is because i still regularly play and enjoy Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim (Skyrim only to some extent because it already had too many flaws to enjoy it properly without community patches) but Starfield is a total no-go. I've installed and uninstalled Starfield 4 times already (because i had hope that the updates would adress some of it's core issues) but i always came to the conclusion that the game feels bland, uncreative and broken at it's core.
Sorry if something in this quite long post is hard to read but i'm not a native english speaker.
Starfield needs a No Man Sky (NMS) style overhaul. I just don't know is Bethesda is able or willing to do it.
@@Harrison11106 They aren't
I liked the game for quite a while when I first started. I did the main quest for a hot minute, then went off to explore POIs and then tried the base building. It all got stale once I started focusing on the main faction quests. Suddenly all the new POIs became the same ones over and over. None of the main characters were interesting. The skills didn't meaningfully change how the game felt. The quests gave less experience than killing single high level aliens. I wouldn't play it again.
4 minutes in and i feel like Mack is one step away from becoming Red Hood or The Punisher
>base whole game around the concept of ng+
>make the story extremely railroaded and bland, without branching choices, without differences
Intredasting...
Hey man, this video series has been great. The state of bethesda currently makes me extremely worried about Elder Scrolls 6. If they handle their future games like they did Starfield, i'm going crazy
Fallout only has an interesting, well-designed universe because Bethesda didn't create it. You should check out the video "Bethesda NEVER Understood Fallout" to understand how much it lost in the transition to Bethesda's development.
Oh believe me, I know. Bethesda has been coasting off of other people's work for a long time
TES wasn't Bethesda's either, it was Michael Kirkbride predominantly who created it
50:10-50:16 "it only responds to things Bethesda expected you to do"
And there we hit the nail on the head. Bethesda expects you to play one way and one way only around every single system they implement, thus leading to such a mess of a game where players feel like there's no roleplay options. Because there are practically none.
I think this is paraphrased from a fallout:NV interview: "The trick to a believable interactable world is by having enough lines and ways to go around their intended system that it feels like they thought of everything more often than not." but I might have gotten that from somewhere completely different.
I can see only two reasons someone would play starfield, one to make an epic youtube video (or multiple) with it at the center, two because somehow miraculously they're still a Bethesda fan.
Starfield is NOT forgettable!
…I’ll never forget how disappointed I was after playing it 😂
yeah but could you name a single character before watching macks videos, I sure couldn't
Thanks for making videos that are easy to listen to, makes my 10 hour work shift go by a little quicker.
I don't need to know how to make a video game to know when there's dogshit writing that takes me out of the immersion of the world. Interacting with the characters in Bethesda games has always felt like the weakest parts of the games.
"Starfield spoilers" lmao as if you could spoil something thats already rotten. 🤣
41:17 - "Half-thought through, half-written." - You are very generous.
Hm. What a fresh and unexplored topic. Thank you for your unique insights!
Sorry babe a youtuber I've never heard of uploaded an hour long video essay
i am addicted to watching starfield rant videos instead of playing the game lol
Im so tired of people trying to defend this game , it's a bad game and that's okay .
nah it's not even okay that it's bad, considering all the paid mod bs and lying Todd does
I mean, it is fine if people like it. Just as fans of the game should accept that many people dislike it and have their reasons, we accept that some people love the game still. We all want different things: I really enjoy some games people think are shit. I do want to hear what makes fans enjoy the game... even if I am more interested in more critical breakdowns.
@FhtagnCthulhu Oh yeah, it's definitely fine that people enjoy the game (like what you want), but I'm gonna talk shit about it if I don't enjoy it 🤣 .
For me, Starfield failed miserably on delivering a game with the "Bethesda magic" that all of their games had up until Starfield. (Nameless npcs with no routines that disappear in the distance, no unique things to find while exploring, only a handful of missions , can't enter every sensible building, picking up and moving items feels wrong somehow , an amazing g ship builder with no real reason to interact with as the starter ship can and will get you through all content , one of the most lazy skill trees I've seen , base building lacks any real reason outside of printing xp.
I could go on but I'm really disappointed in this game.
Well, there's a reason the voiced protagonist thing was handled the way it was, why it doesn't feel like it was done in response to the criticism surrounding the decision in Fallout 4 - and that's that it _wasn't_ done in response to that criticism. To hear Pagliarulo tell it, they just decided it didn't work for the story they were trying to tell. They had actors for both genders hired already, apparently, but they just decided 'fuck it, never mind' one day.
Bethesda isn't changing in response to criticism - and they never have. Every decision made was made to make life easier on the developers - content, features, and systems are added or removed based on how hard they are to manage, with no consideration to how something being hard to manage might be counterbalanced by the result being _worth it._ That's why Starborn choices hardly amount to anything, and it's why choices, in general, hardly amount to anything. It's why perks, traits, and status effects all feel like window dressing. It's why mechs are illegal in Starfield, and levitation is illegal in Oblivion and Skyrim. It's why magic is simplified to the point of being useless in Skyrim, and it's why Starborn powers are just dragon shouts again.
Bethesda doesn't know why we're disappointed, and they don't care. We _might_ see Starfield's problems addressed in ES6, but just like the voiced protagonist thing, it won't be because we told them how terrible they were. They'll just wing it. They'll just wing everything.
I'm so tired.
Ironically enough oblivion a game made by Bethesda which released in 2006 is better in terms of showing changes in the world as whilst goofy the conversations that npcs will have with one another will mention heroic or infamous feats that the player has accomplished and when you beat the game all the oblivion gates disappear.
Bravo! such a true and well put critique, starfield is, SADLY, a tragedy... back to playing skyrim
With all of the fundamental issues that exist in Starfield, I can only imagine how BGS will screw up elder scrolls 6.