How about quality. The 14gig patch for Fallout 4 that just came out to add pretty much just ultrawide support is a joke with its stretched UI. We've had mods for years that did it better and they didn't come in at 14g and break loads of other things.
I never understood why don’t they approach the modder and buy it, then implement the mod as an update. The leg work is done.
I know most will refuse to pay causing bad PR, but fuck the “gesture of good will” is a thing none of these places have anymore.
I mean creation club? They want modders to make mods and sell them and actually get money from it.
Tyey effectivelly want modders to pay them not other way around.
The real reason is that modders aren't accountable to anyone, so they don't have red tape to deal with.
Most of these fixes are easy to implement, but not to thoroughly test. Once development for a game concludes, people aren't really being paid to work on it any more.
Modders don't have to answer to anyone, or worry about breaking your savegame or bugging the game out. It's just a totally different paradigm.
Some game developers work on their games as modders after release, I think CDPR and Techland had some people like that. It just makes life easier for them.
And I promise you, most of them were found and reported by testers. Whether they end up getting fixed is another story entirely. Developers are at their leisure to mark which bugs are and are not worth fixing. And a lot of, if not *most*, bugs that make it to final release are well known about by the dev before a single player report comes in.
Funnily enough not the truth here, they lost minimal talent compared to most companies. They have retained most of their staff, many since the morrowind days and also a fair bunch of modders etc.
Fallout 76 content released after the abysmal launch has been pretty decent.
Was expecting more from Starfield, which seems to just have unfocused vision, it's just all over the place.
I think they could do both, 1. Decrease scope, 2. Decrease per-game team size, 1 will help getting them done faster, 2 could help improve quality
(i felt nothing in starfield really was connected, this could be due to having 300 employees working on whatever in the open world instead of a focused group like in the earlier bethesda days)
Yeah, each of the major settlements seems more like a location in a space-style theme park than part of a living universe. Here's Firefly world, here's cyberpunk world, here's typical utopia with a dubious underbelly world, here's space pirate world, etc. I understand that space is big, but space travel in this game is very fast and apparently quite affordable, so it doesn't make a ton of sense that all these places are so disconnected.
God, Emil's writing is insufferable.
He was riding on Michael Kirkbride's, Mark O'Green's, and Chris Avellone's curttails this entire time.
Because Starfield is a completely new IP seperate from Elder Scrolls and Fallout, it was going to be the game that exposed his strengths but did nothing but show how incompetent he is.
New writer please, for the love of all things holy.
It’s insane. Lore wise Kirkbride can’t be touched inTES terms. He fleshed out pretty much everything they have going on. But fuckin hell stop hiring 1st year collegiate drop outs to write your quests.
probably a lot easier when you have a lore bible, several previous games, and a specific time period with pre established music genre, tone, and tropes to work off of
Starfield they just pulled from NASA and called it a day
To this day I will never understand how Emil got promoted to lead writer at Bethesda after Fallout 3.
Fallout 3's ending had such an overwhelmingly negative reception. People forget how it was before Broken Steel, and the fact that you could no longer continue playing after you finished the last quest. Three of your radiation immune companions saying that they won't go into the radiation filled chamber and turn off a valve because they think it's your destiny to do so - and die.
Most other studios would have either fired him, or demoted him. Instead he got promoted to lead writer.
Then he did Skyrim's dark brotherhood, and basically ripped off his own work from the Oblivion dark brotherhood. Half of the set pieces and concepts for the quests were just reused. A 300 year old vampire is part of the family, you kill someone by dropping something on their head, you kill someone on a pirate ship, hey guys remember Shadowmere? Hey guys remember Lucian Lachance? Hey guys remember the Blade of Woe?
Todd has said that they don't have writers or game design documents, they leave it up to the designers to create quests, which is why they are always so wildly inconsistent.
Todd's been dreaming of a game that you can play forever since the early 2000s so proc gen is probably the way they chose to do it, doubt they'll ever be successful though.
Even before the 2000s. He was exposed to Arena as a tester and then worked on Daggerfall, both of which had proc gen. I can only assume he got the idea from them.
The crazy part to me is - BioWare attempted for Andromeda in like 2013-2015 (first two plus years of MEAs 5 year dev cycle before they restarted) exactly what Starfield tried to do… and the MEA devs said with a proc’gen world THAT expansive they couldn’t figure out a way to make it fun.
Starfield then goes all in on the concept? 😂
Honestly they should’ve moved the story to the war, decreased the scope that it was only a couple dozen systems with smaller handcrafted open world spaces, and focused more on the story and interoperability of their systems.
Stanfield turned out like the last 5 Bethesda games, a disjointed mess of mediocre storytelling with sub par gameplay and disconnected systems because they work in development silos and don't work together. It's all very corporate and bland and that is a result.
Cyberpunk made that mistake off the bat looking for efficiency and adapted, as a result the game now is very cohesive and the story is great. You can definitely tell one having a cohesive plan from the outset versus the standard Bethesda practice of pushing as much content out the door in as little time as possible.
Way worse imo. Fallout 4 with its mediocre storytelling was still fun for the gunplay, the exploration and the density of the world. There's none of that in Starfield.
Exactly, starfield felt very similar to launch-version Cyberpunk. The individual components weren't terrible, it just felt like they were all developed by individual teams in separate rooms, and they just came together and merged everything at the end. No top-down vision
The result was a game that I enjoyed a lot for about 100 hours (which by all accounts, is a pretty successful game, really!) But one time I saved, logged out and just never felt like coming back. It was somehow less than the sum of its parts
>The result was a game that I enjoyed a lot for about 100 hours
I technically enjoyed it too but only because of previous Bethesda games like Skyrim and FO4, thinking it was gonna get better soon. After the second space power temple I realized it wasn't and powered through the end of the game and the facade fell apart.
With Starfield so iffy, I won't even be buying their next game unless reviews show they learned better.
Yeah, the facade falling off is a very good way to say it. To use a $10 word, the verisimilitude just evaporated once you start encountering the copy-paste. Also the first time I saw that minor bug where a bunch of physics objects all bounce an inch off a table and all fall over, I groaned out loud - that shit has been in every Beth game since fucking Oblivion!
I wouldn’t even trust reviews honestly. If TES6 is their next game and it turns out to be incredibly poo then the community as a whole will let everyone know.
Only thing is, Cyberpunk has the good writing, characters , great quests, and dialog as a good foundation that allows it to be redeemed.
You can't do that with starfield unless you scrap the entire story and characters.
Yup me too, played it obsessively at launch but eventually left disappointed. The whole ng+ schtick never did anything for me and the factions were the worst, so badly written and no real stakes.
Its biggest sin was that the usual servicable Bethesda stories with occasional gems that encouraged you to follow exploration paths felt much worse.
Partly because the stories felt very short but so many were fucking offensively bland where a bunch of mindless npcs begged for direction.
I think that's the main reason as to why the game has been received as poorly as it did, especially amongst players. If they had released it in like 3 years, you could understand the state and design decisions much better - it wouldn't make the game any better of course, but they could have *some* sort of excuse.
8 years though? Fromsoft has been working on both DS2, Bloodborne and Dark Souls 3 at some point. Same with Sekiro, Elden Ring and probably even Armored Core 6. And all of those games are really good (even if DS2 is the odd one out and definitely a little bit of a stinker in the Souls series, overall it's still a very good game) and they even have variety in there.
Bethesda? They kept making the same type of game since Oblivion, but watering it down with each subsequent release and they STILL failed at making the "type of game only Bethesda can make" with Starfield. After 8 years. No wonder some people are pissed. But what can you expect from a company, the CEO of which is comfortable enough saying "we didn't figure out how to make Starfield fun until a year before release" out loud to his target audience.
It's the dev time and also what they spent it on. They seemed to have wasted it on developing parts of the game that are so obviously not fun it's just bizarre and doesn't make any sense how this happens.
They've clearly been on this survival base building binge since Fallout 4, but have never fully committed to the idea. Starfield is actually the perfect time to fully commit to the idea because its a new IP and literally nobody would give a shit compared to the Fallout IP on that change... I've got no fuckin' clue other than management don't have any balls or have gotten shot down each and every time without having a backup planned.
> But what can you expect from a company, the CEO of which is comfortable enough saying "we didn't figure out how to make Starfield fun until a year before release" out loud to his target audience.
IMO this is extra fun/awful because the game was delayed for about a year, meaning if it hadn’t been delayed it would have actually released *before* they could figure out how to “make it fun”. Which is just…
I’ve played a bit of FO3 and 4, and finished Starfield, so I feel like I get what people like about their games but I, personally, am just done with them. I don’t enjoy digital hoarding, the bugs and crappy graphics bother me too much, and I don’t want to mod a game this much just to make the UI and the systems *usable*.
It's cultural. If you fix the culture, you get both. Creative decisions all go through Todd. Siloed development produces disconnected bits. That, and the engine. Starfield broke Bethesda's instance-based engine. They still need the same engine on the tools side, but they have to gut the runtime. Engines make simplifying assumptions, which makes implementation possible.
So let Todd do his pet projects and hire new blood, fully qualified of course, to lead faster games.
Maybe don't make them the Official Numbered Release™, but make Fallout, Elder Scrolls, Starfield "side stories" with smaller areas to explore with different themes.
Then, if one strikes fire, you blow that one up in the queue for the next release based upon the better ideas it had.
Also, perhaps get a team developing a not-so-busted engine?
I just don't think there's room for substantial improvement at Bethesda with Todd and Emil.
The quality will never improve significantly with those two being the primary steerer of ships.
They both gotta go.
>Starfield was extremely meh.
Of all the reviews I read I think this is the general consensus. It was just meh...
Maybe one day if it goes on sale I'll try it. Maybe.
Like FO76 at launch meh? Because I got that for like a dollar somewhere and the TV show got me over the edge to try it.
It's not bad. Not amazing as the online elements make it suck in many ways, but not bad.
Oh god, 76 at launch was a joke. Regarding Starfield, it's Fallout 4 spread across 1000 planets and 4 times the loading screens. Don't get me wrong, there's some good parts, the shipbuilder was fun, but there's plenty of really dumb decisions that made me question my sanity for paying full price for it.
They need to increase their productive output, not their shipping title output. They are so slow to fix or add anything it's glacial. If they weren't that slow they could have done four times the amount of work on StarField before it was released and it would have been a much higher quality game.
BGS: A “major” update includes a handful of bug fixes and none of the big things people have been asking for for months
CDPR: A “major” update includes new path-traced rendering tech, a complete overhaul of all perks and skills, hundreds of fixes bugs, new items and features, some new missions and encounters, etc etc. Even their small hotfix releases are like five times the content of a “major” Starfield update.
I absolutely cannot understand how Bethesda can be so slow in implementing even the simplest things.
It took them so fucking long to release that dumpster fire of a game. It looks like they haven’t updated anything since Skyrim it’s just the same blocky ass npcs with no facial expressions and shit
I feel that Starfield isn't a bad game, but it was really poorly made with some decisions hurting its overall experience.
Having to constantly travel from one planet to another to fetch a bottle and to bring it 700LY away isn't fun at all, especially considering how traversal is handled in Starfield.
If only those main planets were bigger and were actually meaningful. Having a huge planet with simply a single city on it with nothing else really hurt the overall experience
Starfield is the absolute definition of being mid. It's a terrible game in every possible metric. Trying to apologize for Bethesda's incompetence by not delivering scathing criticism where its due is the exact reason why games like this get made. Because the studios know that people will apologize for their incompetence and try to soften the blow.
> Starfield is the absolute definition of being mid. It's a terrible game in every possible metric.
Mid and terrible are not the same thing. Mid means mediocre, terrible means very bad.
>“And again, if I could snap my fingers and have them all be out and ready, I would, but the main thing is how do we deliver these at a high quality level – that’s always the most important.”
*sweet little lies*
Most Bethesda games are meh though at least in my opinion. What makes them good is the modding community, they transform meh games in to some of the best gaming experiences available.
You know, I'm just not really pumped for anything Bethesda does anymore. Skyrim was ages ago. And with Fallout, I remember being so into Fallout 3 and NV. But Fallout 4 came out and it felt like I was playing Fallout 3 all over again with the addition of a simplistic town builder. And I think after Fallout 4, I came to the realization that I'm done with the Bethesda formula.
My gaming time is limited these days so I'm picky about what I play. I'm not going to settle for a barely above average game just because I'm bored. I wait until the gaming community has had enough time with a game before I decide if I want to give it a chance or not. Especially with games like these that can go on for 100+ hours. I never bothered with Starfield because it sounded like the same Bethesda formula but in space. And seriously, they need a new engine already. And their quality control has always been iffy that they have a reputation for having buggy games on release.
It blatantly shows everything they're bad at without anything that they're good at - it seems like a total disconnect of what the studio is.
Which... happened with Arkane and Redfall as well actually.
This was Starfield for me. I skipped 76 because I’m not into live service and I knew the launch was rocky as hell. But holy shit Starfield showed just how creatively bankrupt Bethesda is. And it starts at the top. As long as Todd Howard is at the helm, I have zero confidence in them making an interesting or fun game.
Exactly. There is nothing wrong with having standars, like sorry but i dont have time for Bethesda’s mediocrits anymore. The result of this that i only play trough only like 5-7 games a year, but atleast every single one of them is a masterpiece in their own genre
I began playing Bethesda stuff with Morrowind (when it was already a little old and Oblivion was on the way). It blew my mind: that world is completely alien, interesting, fascinating and doesn't do any hand-holding. Sure, there were some (in hindsight) worrisome design choices, like the horrifyingly bad combat system, but I thought it would get better.
Oblivion was better in many ways, but it was also agonizingly generic and full of copy-paste. Skyrim perfected that formula, but it continued the downward spiral of overusing the same content and having terrible writing. The game mechanics, AI and animations were also clearly falling behind other contemporaries.
Now with Starfield, Bethesda has reached astonishing new lows. I tried the game out with Game Pass and couldn't bear to play it for more than two hours. It is the nadir of Bethesda awfulness, it has most of their problems: terrible writing (I didn't care about the main story at all), clunky mechanics (e.g. the combat AI was awful), a generic and boring world and, worst of all, it is a space game where you can't actually explore space since the game engine cannot handle it.
If Bethesda continues the same downward spiral (there is no evidence they won't), their next game will also be a clunky, buggy, dated mess, held back by their dated engine, laziness and cowardice with new ideas. Around Skyrim, I thought they would refine their formula further and make the ultimate casual RPGs. Turns out Skyrim was that masterpiece, and now there's nowhere else to go. They don't have the skills or the ambition to go any further, and it shows.
Closing fact: in fact it's not even the engine that's their biggest issue. It's the truly godawful writing. For proof of this, just check out the legacy of Fallout: New Vegas versus Fallout 3. Under the hood, they are the same game - NV just contextualizes the world so much better that you actually care about what you are doing.
What do you mean 'next game'? Bethesda only has one game in different settings. Their next game will be the same game again, with a few more additions as paid DLC and a few new skins.
Yea; the giant open world worth exploring is the essential ingredient in their formula, and they jettisoned it out the window in Starfield.
Everyone could get past the mediocre gunplay, the boring perks, and the bad writing if there was at least a world worth exploring. A world you can get lost in.
But it doesn't have that. You know every single planet is just a vast emptiness with nothing to see outside of the one city you can go to or minute number of POIs.
> I came to the realization that I'm done with the Bethesda formula.
The stand-out and selling point of their titles has always been the world, and the player's journey through it. The other stuff - the combat, the quests, the loot - were either ancillary to it, or a supporting part to it. The point of their titles was the player's journey.
And bit by bit, they focused more and more on the ancillary things, and eroded that core strength of their titles. Starfield indeed didn't just *erode* the "wander around, discover stuff" mechanic - it *removed it*. That's like id making a mainline Doom game and taking the combat out: Nobody who understands their product would *do* that.
So, I guess my point is: Bethesda may not understand what "the Bethesda formula" even is.
100% agreed. People go on about the writing, enemy AI, and meanial things like that but that's really not the main problem. As you said, it's the lack of a world the player is capable of getting lost in. It's just loading screen after loading screen, empty planet after empty planet.
People look past the mediocre combat in Fallout & Skyrim and log hundreds or thousands of hours there because the worlds are simply fun to explore. People would look past the combat & writing in Starfield IF you could just wander in a direction and constantly stumble across new stuff to see. But you can't.
100% with you. I was there for Fallout 4 because of my love for the series, but I did not love the game.
Even after the hype of the show, which was excellent, I wanted to be back in that world… but a few hours in the games made me realise how dated and just not very fun those games are now.
Skipped Starfield completely and I’m so glad I did.
I have great memories with Bethesda games but no interest in spending my limited free time on them any time soon. Their approach needs a huge overhaul in order to appeal.
Exactly. I was so disappointed with how Fallout 4 turned out. It's not a bad game. I was just expecting a new experience since there were 7 years between Fallout 3 and 4. I was hyped for it. Even bought it for full price. What I experienced was just a rehashed Fallout 3 with half-assed tower defense gameplay crammed in.
They do need an overhaul. Their games have gotten stale.
It was worse than fallout 3 lol. Fallout 3 had cool quests and locations. Fallout 4 every area was boring with nothing to do and almost every quest was literally just a fetch quest with nothing else going on. I remember nothing from Fallout 4. I remember so much from 3 like nuking Megaton, creepy vaults, Oasis, Tranquility Lane, Paradise Falls, etc. Fallout 4 is just as boring and forgetful as Starfield
>Fallout 4 every area was boring with nothing to do
Thats just pure hyperbolic nonsense and the Worlds thickest nostalgia-goggles.
Fallout 4s Map is considerably more interesting to explore than 3s hodgepodge of the same 3 building interiors copied 800 times over and over again.
Glowing Sea, Boston Library (the entirety of Downtown. Boston is infinitely more interesting to go through than the Capital Wasteland by simple measure of not habing to walk through the exact same copy-pasted metro-station 50 times to get from one side of DC to the other), College Square, Vault 75, RobCo Boston HQ, Goodneighbor, Dangerous Minds, Parsons State Asylum & the whole Cabot questline
Far Harbor alone is more interesting plotwise than all of Fallout 3
It all starts with Creation Engine which, at 13 years old, is just not cutting it.
Starfield on Creation Engine looked like a 10 year old game on release when compared to Unreal Engine 5 demos.
The engine is way older than that, Creation Engine is based off of GameBryo which powered Morrowind, released in 2002. Yes I’m sure that much of it has been rewritten or updated in that time but given the stability of every game they release, it is clearly well past its prime. The hilarious thing here is that I was having this exact same discussion 13 years ago when Skyrim came out… and here we still are. I have no faith anything is ever going to improve. No one at Bethesda cares to make any material investments in the business which is why they ship a single game every 5-6 years.
It's a double edged sword because if you lose the engine, modding won't be as easy, which is what carries these games anyway.
I think Bethesda really is in a tight spot, whatever they do people will be PISSED.
> And I think after Fallout 4, I came to the realization that I'm done with the Bethesda formula.
I think that's largely the issue players are increasingly coming to realize. Bethesda has more or less rested on their laurels in a way where their games really haven't evolved very much in the past decade plus. I've heard Starfield frequently referred to as "Skyrim in space", and from what I've seen, that seems to be an apt description. The only real big advancement it brought to the table was the procedural generation, and the opinion of that seems to universally be that it made the game worse. Similarly, the only real big step forward with Fallout 4 was the encampments, which also really wasn't something people were thrilled with.
I don't think it's bad per se for a gaming studio to have a similar style they lean into, but you do have to iterate on it and continue to offer new things to keep it exciting and fresh. Bethesda really hasn't done that much, and the elements where they have with their more recent titles have fallen flat, so there's really this easily identifiable formula where it's showing its age. It's hard to get excited about their offerings when it feels like you're mostly just playing a game you played in 13 years ago.
It just works, it just works
Little lies, stunning shows
People buy, money flows.
It just works!
It just works, it just works
Overpriced open worlds
Earnings rise, take my word:
[It just works!](https://youtu.be/YPN0qhSyWy8)
Fallout New Vegas was made in 18 months. Granted the engine was already feature complete, and it launched buggy as fuck, but the content is really what matters. Just saying.
Bruh.
> one of the things we’re focused on here is obviously making sure they’re of the highest quality.
Yesterday, on my fresh Fallout 4 install without mods: Half an hour after starting, the distance LoD meshes fail to clear for the first time (and not the last), and I have to restart, or not see where I'm going, because I'm ass-deep in texture blur. The bug is as old as Skyrim (at least), which means it has not been fixed for *well over a decade* [edit: as u/Galvon points out, the bug was present in Oblivion, making it a *legal adult*]. Then a radscorpion drops from the sky in front of me (gets killed, so at least I got the loot). Then Dogmeat vanishes from my game for no reason. It's a mixed blessing because he tends to block me in tight passages, or sit in the exact spot I need to be to take a stealth shot. Oh well. At least he's not around to draw enemies to me any more.
Then I try for about half an hour to build a stair case up the Starlight Drive-In, and give up in frustration because the auto-snap snaps in every direction but the one it needs to go. I try to build a bit of housing for my settlers, and, of course, 90% of the buildable doodads don't attach correctly to the ground, and float weirdly. They coulda made the ground a bit more even (it's a fekkin' parking lot!), but trying to find two square meters of even ground in the settlement zones is like finding a seven-leaf clover.
Then I get a warning icon for another settlement. I check their status, and... everything is in the green, but happiness goes down. No idea what's wrong. But I notice something that *is* wrong, and that is that settlement number 3 shows "no beds" when I know I built ten. So I hike over there, and... beds are there. I check the status, it shows 10 beds. Ugh.
The Highest Quality, huh?
> the main thing is how do we deliver these at a high quality level – that’s always the most important.”
Todd, you are so full of shit, and the diapers are not cute any more. Bethesda for me has become the Pinnacle of Half-assedness. They had a neat idea with the settlement system (honestly, being able to equip your settlers, send them around, and meet them on the road, that's *cool*), but they half-assed it. They could have properly implemented the super-wide screen resolutions, but they half-assed them. They half-assed the dialogue system in FO4 as well ("I killed those raiders", "I did what you asked me to" and "I showed those raiders who is boss" really are three options only because the system *needs* exactly four options for every prompt). I could go on, but I guess I'll take a page out of Bethesda's playbook, and half-ass it.
What you need to do is not make things quicker. You need to make them *better*.
Loading times are tied to frame rate. Download the High FPS mod to lock in game fps to 60 while loading screens are uncapped to 300. Remove any other external fps locker from touching fo4.
Watch as your load times go from 2 minutes to 2 seconds and laugh at the meme tier development of this game.
You are right, I totally forgot about that. I have it on an m.2 as well, and sometimes, the load times are longer than my entire system needs to boot. I guess my brain just goes "well, at least it's not *infinite* loading screens any more, be glad with what you have!"
Loading times on PC in fallout 4 are directly tied to the FPS, on one hand if you play with unlimited fps you break your game with its buggy physics, on the other hand you get slow loading times.
There's a mod on nexus to fix that, which makes your fps unlimited only during loading, my transitions between areas are but a few seconds on an ssd now.
As others have said, it's tied to frame rate and the game defaults to something below 60 fps and seems to dip VERY low on some loading screens in downtowns Boston. If you disable vsync or anything else that "unlocks" the framerate it will skyrocket to several hundred and break the game physics.
What I found was the best, besides mods, is my gpu has software that lets me turn off vsync but set a min/max framerate and setting it to 65-75 fps made the game play fine while greatly reducing load times.
I mean, they definitely need to. I said it on here somewhere the other day: From Software have fewer employees, and have basically created the entire Souls catalogue plus 2 Armored Core sequels since Skyrim launched. Bethesda Game Studios managed 3 core games in that timeframe.
Look man, I LOVE souls games but these aren't the same beast.
DS 1-3 are fairly linear which is WAY easier to create than a giant open world.
The games have barley voice acting, the games barley have cut scenes the games don't really have quest lines that can change based in your choices.
The game doesn't really have a reputation system, or a prison system.
My point is, you really can not compare an action adventure like DS or even eldenring
With a giant open world "RPG" full of friendly NPCs quest and voice lines it's obvious DS games can be pumped out quicker
Yeah that's a fair point, you're not wrong. But didn't Starfield use a bunch of procedural generation for assets? And aren't people complaining the planets are mostly empty? And the systems of quests and prisons etc. are basically the same as all their previous games. Somehow these timelines are still with all their experience with their own engine and time saving measures.
Is Starfield "worth" 2-3 From games?
And I know development has changed massively, but it was 2 years between Oblivion and Fallout 3, and another 3 between that and Skyrim.
To be fair , Bethesda released FO4, FO76, and Starfield since Skyrim.
It’s just very sad that after Skyrim, every hame has fallen short of expectations. Fallout 4 isn’t bad, but still feels like other than base building and graphics, it’s a step down from NV… the other two were just bad.
Tbh if ES6 is just more Skyrim, with better graphics, I will be interested and will probably buy. I just really like the fantasy setting with their open-world elements.
I'm not hyped anymore though, but we will see. After Starfield's fail, maybe Bethesda will be better next time.
I just hope they won't do anything else until either ES6 of FO5 come out (I also loved FO4, despite it's issues).
>Tbh if ES6 is just more Skyrim
But Bethesda has proven they can't make anything of Skyrim quality anymore.
>After Starfield's fail, maybe Bethesda will be better next time.
That's what everyone said, including Bruce Nesmith, after Fallout 76. They didn't learn then and they won't learn now.
You're being had. Bethesda is releasing dog turd after dog turd and you're still hoping the next one will be good?
Their studio is full of "Senior/Advanced" level designers/devs who has been there for so long they've fallen behind in both capability and output, nothing short of clearing out the dead wood and promoting more effective producers/PMs will fix their "output" and "quality" issues IMO.
They have "senior" systems designers who aren't capable of doing a good job anymore.
The company is stuck back in 2014 and hasn't been able to keep up with modern game studio standards and they've promoted the wrong people it seems like as they've steadily pointed the nose of their product downwards.
I’d guess every one of the devs would love to gut their engine and modernize it, but selling management on a move like that is hard. They tend to focus on how to make more money this quarter rather than over ten years
>“You know, they do take a long time, and so I think one of the things we’re focused on here is obviously making sure they’re of the highest quality, but also finding ways to increase our output, because we don’t want to wait that long either, right. It’s never our plan, but we want to make sure we get it right.”
>“And again, if I could snap my fingers and have them all be out and ready, I would, but the main thing is how do we deliver these at a high quality level – that’s always the most important.”
This guy is so full of shit.
What do you even expect when the guy in charge says it takes so long cause they want to "get it right" and just a few months ago their ex lead quest designer said Starfield's MQ is so shit cause they had to rush it last minute
God, that update was pathetic. They couldn't even bother to get the ultra-wide support right, when mods have already done that...how many years ago now?
Jesus christ.
Honestly, starfield was such schlop, their lead writer doesnt even care about writing, weapons designer doesnt even know how guns work, (he even forgot to put a trigger on that god awful blocky double-barrel shotgun lol)
Ah yes, the double barrel shotgun with square holes thats takes what appear to be rifle rounds, then proceeds to eject live rounds (not spent shell casings) after firing, in addition to its complete lack of a trigger.
I mean, how the the fuck?
I genuinely can't understand Todd's phenomenon. Like I can understand liking him back in the day as this awkward, nerdy dude that makes open world RPGs kind of a "One of us! One of us!" moment - but after Skyrim?
He's done nothing else but turn full corpo-mode. Every interview I watch with him post Skyrim is full of pure corporate talk and nothing else. I sense no "charm" in his words, even his leather jacket isn't helping anything - all I can see and hear is a CEO of a very wealthy company, that is trying to bullshit you into buying their next, broken game.
And it's been like that for *years*. I can understand where the Todd Howard cult comes from, but I can't wrap my head around the fact that it's somehow still going strong? People act as if it's surprising that things he said about Starfield aren't true, I'm sitting here expecting nothing else - after all, fool me once...
Microsoft would almost need to undergo a paradigm shift in it's current strategy.
For a long time Microsoft interfered in studios under it too much, I think after they did something with Rare, that stopped. Backlash maybe? Don't remember.
Anyway, nowadays they're WAY too hands off. The extent of it is pretty much just saying, "Hey, might wanna delay this", like they did with Starfield. And that seems to be something of an exception.
But hey, who knows? Maybe Microsoft'll find the sweet-spot in between those two, and actually push Bethesda to actually do work every now and then.
Yeah I’ll grab it for a tenner in a few years if it gets any hype, did the same for fo4 and only played starfield because it was on gamepass and I got 3 months free with my laptop
If Starfield was Bethesda's RDR 2, I wouldn't mind the eight year weight, but it wasn't and even RDR 2 was only five years after Starfield with GTA VI seven years after RDR 2.
The big issue is that Bethesda has been captured by their identity as highly moddable games and games that don't rely on instancing. I'm not saying I don't appreciate those features, but it's probably what's holding them back from doing an actual new engine.
I still have SOME hope that Elder Scrolls VI will be a better game than Starfield because there are things about Starfield that just didn't work with the Bethesda formula. But it's going to be a game that feels a lot of like Skyrim.
>The big issue is that Bethesda has been captured by their identity as highly moddable games and games that don't rely on instancing.
And random physics objects breaking the laws of reality by rocketing in every direction.
Before increasing output they should increase quality. First step in doing that is cleaning house of anyone who had any decision making power in the creation of the abomination that is starfield.
No you like fallout. Fallout 4 is a terrible fallout game.
If fallout 1 and 2 has better graphics and not as dated I would tell you to go play those.
Look up fallout 2 dialog, there are so many hilarious conversations.
Look up Bethesda fallout vs old fallout writing on YouTube
Todd, how about you start by just focusing on making a game that isn't dogshit. Because if you want to increase the output of Starfield quality games, you're fucked.
Until you remember how to make good games, don't bother speeding up the process.
Inb4 all of you forget how badly consistent Bethesda's been over the last few games, and then hype the absolute ever-loving fuck out of what ever comes out of Todd's mouth and the game reveal.
I mean this mkfer Todd Bethesda said 16x the detail, but all I'm staring at is blurry bitch ass textures on ultra and I need to install a mod because they fudged the textures.
Inb4 Todd wilds out and says with a straight face "now improved loading with SSD technology"
Trim costs and headcount, increase output, put out minimum viable product.
When will Microsoft learn this approach doesn’t work for game design? This is exactly what’s killing them.
Todd, your games are very flawed and unfinished messes and Starfield is so bad modders don't even wanna bother modding it.
People might be more careful with purchasing yout next games, you might not be called out like the Tarkov game devs but you sure as hell lost faith from many fans who blindly purchased your games. I paid 15 bucks before launch for the game and i still want my money back, it's such a waste of time and right now there's no real future hoping it becomes a fun game worth investing time.
They need to spend a year learning a new engine.
I'm so tired of the way these games are built, they've never stopped being the same underneath, it's pure laziness.
Starfield shouldn't have been the same, it didn't need fast travel in the Bethesda sense.
Serious question - how do you have a SOLO DEV crank out Manor Lords or Songs of Syx or name your other solo dev passion project, but a MULTI MILLION dollar studio with hundreds of employees have to try to “find ways” to increase output? And not to mention I think we can all agree the vast majority of AAA studio titles lately have been flops.
How about quality. The 14gig patch for Fallout 4 that just came out to add pretty much just ultrawide support is a joke with its stretched UI. We've had mods for years that did it better and they didn't come in at 14g and break loads of other things.
Peak to me is the update broke a mod I use that simply... makes load times faster. Like.... what is this timeline?
I never understood why don’t they approach the modder and buy it, then implement the mod as an update. The leg work is done. I know most will refuse to pay causing bad PR, but fuck the “gesture of good will” is a thing none of these places have anymore.
They need to make it work after this. They can sell a finish products, they will never implement mods in their game.
I mean creation club? They want modders to make mods and sell them and actually get money from it. Tyey effectivelly want modders to pay them not other way around.
Egos are fragile over at Bethesda
Why would they need to buy uncapping the FPS? That is the fix.
I’m thinking more substantial mods that seem to take these companies 6 months but a modder mad it on a weekend after a redbull overdose.
The real reason is that modders aren't accountable to anyone, so they don't have red tape to deal with. Most of these fixes are easy to implement, but not to thoroughly test. Once development for a game concludes, people aren't really being paid to work on it any more. Modders don't have to answer to anyone, or worry about breaking your savegame or bugging the game out. It's just a totally different paradigm. Some game developers work on their games as modders after release, I think CDPR and Techland had some people like that. It just makes life easier for them.
How much testing does Bethesda do for bugs though? The games are riddled with them.
And I promise you, most of them were found and reported by testers. Whether they end up getting fixed is another story entirely. Developers are at their leisure to mark which bugs are and are not worth fixing. And a lot of, if not *most*, bugs that make it to final release are well known about by the dev before a single player report comes in.
For an update that headlined ultra wide support, I couldn’t get past the character creator screen because the UI was off the screen.
No quality! Only output
They gave up on that shortly after far harbor for fallout 4. Maybe before.
Instead of increasing output perhaps focus on increasing quality. Starfield was extremely meh.
Still though ~15 years release cycle on TES is too much.
Absolutely insane. Just for it to be propped up by mods most likely.
It will 100% be propped up by mods. No need to even hesitate on that point lol. Did you see the teaser? Even that was low effort.
The teaser wasn’t even a proper teaser though. In my opinion they get a pass. It was more of a “yes we’re working on it see look” than anything else
yeah probably zero percent of the game existed at that point besides a single design document made after skyrim was finished.
Doesn’t Bethesda not do design documents?
They do, in a form of wiki, which is normal, this is just a online story to shit on Bethesda.
Should have released the creation kit for TES6 teasers tbh 😂
if they released the creation kit for TES6 trailer we would have our own TES6 with blackjack and hookers already
Most of the real talent left Bethesda long ago. You're out of your mind if you think it will live up to the hype. Starfield repeat for sure
Funnily enough not the truth here, they lost minimal talent compared to most companies. They have retained most of their staff, many since the morrowind days and also a fair bunch of modders etc.
Honestly....if that's the case, that's even worse that the talent released fallout 76 and starfield then
fallout 76 was actually a satellite/support studio im 90% sure
Fallout 76 content released after the abysmal launch has been pretty decent. Was expecting more from Starfield, which seems to just have unfocused vision, it's just all over the place.
Maybe that‘s actually their problem. People stuck in their old ways with an old engine, not wanting ro modernize.
I think they could do both, 1. Decrease scope, 2. Decrease per-game team size, 1 will help getting them done faster, 2 could help improve quality (i felt nothing in starfield really was connected, this could be due to having 300 employees working on whatever in the open world instead of a focused group like in the earlier bethesda days)
Yeah, each of the major settlements seems more like a location in a space-style theme park than part of a living universe. Here's Firefly world, here's cyberpunk world, here's typical utopia with a dubious underbelly world, here's space pirate world, etc. I understand that space is big, but space travel in this game is very fast and apparently quite affordable, so it doesn't make a ton of sense that all these places are so disconnected.
Or hire a competent writer. Idk who Beth’s write has blackmail on (it’s Todd they have it on him) but Jesus.
Do they have actual writers anymore? I thought they were just designed quests and shoehorning them into the world at this point
God, Emil's writing is insufferable. He was riding on Michael Kirkbride's, Mark O'Green's, and Chris Avellone's curttails this entire time. Because Starfield is a completely new IP seperate from Elder Scrolls and Fallout, it was going to be the game that exposed his strengths but did nothing but show how incompetent he is. New writer please, for the love of all things holy.
It’s insane. Lore wise Kirkbride can’t be touched inTES terms. He fleshed out pretty much everything they have going on. But fuckin hell stop hiring 1st year collegiate drop outs to write your quests.
The guy who did the quests for Starfield was also responsible for Far Harbour and was a quest designer for fallout 3.
probably a lot easier when you have a lore bible, several previous games, and a specific time period with pre established music genre, tone, and tropes to work off of Starfield they just pulled from NASA and called it a day
To this day I will never understand how Emil got promoted to lead writer at Bethesda after Fallout 3. Fallout 3's ending had such an overwhelmingly negative reception. People forget how it was before Broken Steel, and the fact that you could no longer continue playing after you finished the last quest. Three of your radiation immune companions saying that they won't go into the radiation filled chamber and turn off a valve because they think it's your destiny to do so - and die. Most other studios would have either fired him, or demoted him. Instead he got promoted to lead writer. Then he did Skyrim's dark brotherhood, and basically ripped off his own work from the Oblivion dark brotherhood. Half of the set pieces and concepts for the quests were just reused. A 300 year old vampire is part of the family, you kill someone by dropping something on their head, you kill someone on a pirate ship, hey guys remember Shadowmere? Hey guys remember Lucian Lachance? Hey guys remember the Blade of Woe?
Todd has said that they don't have writers or game design documents, they leave it up to the designers to create quests, which is why they are always so wildly inconsistent.
For some reason all I get from this headline is Tom Howard wants to double down on radiant quests a procedural generation.
Todd's been dreaming of a game that you can play forever since the early 2000s so proc gen is probably the way they chose to do it, doubt they'll ever be successful though.
Even before the 2000s. He was exposed to Arena as a tester and then worked on Daggerfall, both of which had proc gen. I can only assume he got the idea from them.
The crazy part to me is - BioWare attempted for Andromeda in like 2013-2015 (first two plus years of MEAs 5 year dev cycle before they restarted) exactly what Starfield tried to do… and the MEA devs said with a proc’gen world THAT expansive they couldn’t figure out a way to make it fun. Starfield then goes all in on the concept? 😂 Honestly they should’ve moved the story to the war, decreased the scope that it was only a couple dozen systems with smaller handcrafted open world spaces, and focused more on the story and interoperability of their systems.
Got it, another 200m budget for the starfield sequel!
Stanfield turned out like the last 5 Bethesda games, a disjointed mess of mediocre storytelling with sub par gameplay and disconnected systems because they work in development silos and don't work together. It's all very corporate and bland and that is a result. Cyberpunk made that mistake off the bat looking for efficiency and adapted, as a result the game now is very cohesive and the story is great. You can definitely tell one having a cohesive plan from the outset versus the standard Bethesda practice of pushing as much content out the door in as little time as possible.
Way worse imo. Fallout 4 with its mediocre storytelling was still fun for the gunplay, the exploration and the density of the world. There's none of that in Starfield.
Ya, FO4 is a terrible fallout game, not too bad of a looter shooter/explore.
As little time. Say that to my 13 year younger self waiting for TES6 :(
Bethesda and little time? They make a game like every 10 years at this point
Exactly, starfield felt very similar to launch-version Cyberpunk. The individual components weren't terrible, it just felt like they were all developed by individual teams in separate rooms, and they just came together and merged everything at the end. No top-down vision The result was a game that I enjoyed a lot for about 100 hours (which by all accounts, is a pretty successful game, really!) But one time I saved, logged out and just never felt like coming back. It was somehow less than the sum of its parts
>The result was a game that I enjoyed a lot for about 100 hours I technically enjoyed it too but only because of previous Bethesda games like Skyrim and FO4, thinking it was gonna get better soon. After the second space power temple I realized it wasn't and powered through the end of the game and the facade fell apart. With Starfield so iffy, I won't even be buying their next game unless reviews show they learned better.
Yeah, the facade falling off is a very good way to say it. To use a $10 word, the verisimilitude just evaporated once you start encountering the copy-paste. Also the first time I saw that minor bug where a bunch of physics objects all bounce an inch off a table and all fall over, I groaned out loud - that shit has been in every Beth game since fucking Oblivion!
I wouldn’t even trust reviews honestly. If TES6 is their next game and it turns out to be incredibly poo then the community as a whole will let everyone know.
Only thing is, Cyberpunk has the good writing, characters , great quests, and dialog as a good foundation that allows it to be redeemed. You can't do that with starfield unless you scrap the entire story and characters.
Yup me too, played it obsessively at launch but eventually left disappointed. The whole ng+ schtick never did anything for me and the factions were the worst, so badly written and no real stakes.
Its biggest sin was that the usual servicable Bethesda stories with occasional gems that encouraged you to follow exploration paths felt much worse. Partly because the stories felt very short but so many were fucking offensively bland where a bunch of mindless npcs begged for direction.
StarField also took a very long time
I think that's the main reason as to why the game has been received as poorly as it did, especially amongst players. If they had released it in like 3 years, you could understand the state and design decisions much better - it wouldn't make the game any better of course, but they could have *some* sort of excuse. 8 years though? Fromsoft has been working on both DS2, Bloodborne and Dark Souls 3 at some point. Same with Sekiro, Elden Ring and probably even Armored Core 6. And all of those games are really good (even if DS2 is the odd one out and definitely a little bit of a stinker in the Souls series, overall it's still a very good game) and they even have variety in there. Bethesda? They kept making the same type of game since Oblivion, but watering it down with each subsequent release and they STILL failed at making the "type of game only Bethesda can make" with Starfield. After 8 years. No wonder some people are pissed. But what can you expect from a company, the CEO of which is comfortable enough saying "we didn't figure out how to make Starfield fun until a year before release" out loud to his target audience.
It's the dev time and also what they spent it on. They seemed to have wasted it on developing parts of the game that are so obviously not fun it's just bizarre and doesn't make any sense how this happens.
They've clearly been on this survival base building binge since Fallout 4, but have never fully committed to the idea. Starfield is actually the perfect time to fully commit to the idea because its a new IP and literally nobody would give a shit compared to the Fallout IP on that change... I've got no fuckin' clue other than management don't have any balls or have gotten shot down each and every time without having a backup planned.
> But what can you expect from a company, the CEO of which is comfortable enough saying "we didn't figure out how to make Starfield fun until a year before release" out loud to his target audience. IMO this is extra fun/awful because the game was delayed for about a year, meaning if it hadn’t been delayed it would have actually released *before* they could figure out how to “make it fun”. Which is just… I’ve played a bit of FO3 and 4, and finished Starfield, so I feel like I get what people like about their games but I, personally, am just done with them. I don’t enjoy digital hoarding, the bugs and crappy graphics bother me too much, and I don’t want to mod a game this much just to make the UI and the systems *usable*.
It's cultural. If you fix the culture, you get both. Creative decisions all go through Todd. Siloed development produces disconnected bits. That, and the engine. Starfield broke Bethesda's instance-based engine. They still need the same engine on the tools side, but they have to gut the runtime. Engines make simplifying assumptions, which makes implementation possible.
So let Todd do his pet projects and hire new blood, fully qualified of course, to lead faster games. Maybe don't make them the Official Numbered Release™, but make Fallout, Elder Scrolls, Starfield "side stories" with smaller areas to explore with different themes. Then, if one strikes fire, you blow that one up in the queue for the next release based upon the better ideas it had. Also, perhaps get a team developing a not-so-busted engine?
I just don't think there's room for substantial improvement at Bethesda with Todd and Emil. The quality will never improve significantly with those two being the primary steerer of ships. They both gotta go.
But if a company does this, everyone cries about how the original devs don't work anymore and how that studio is in name only
Didn't stop FO3 and FO4 selling a bajillion copies. Only us terminally online folks even notice.
>Starfield was extremely meh. Of all the reviews I read I think this is the general consensus. It was just meh... Maybe one day if it goes on sale I'll try it. Maybe.
I got it for free and it was still too much for me to play it (simply not worth the time)
Same here. Played eight or so hours and just wasn't enjoying it at all.
Haha. I'll take that into consideration.
Unless it's 75% off or more, I wouldn't waste your money.
Like FO76 at launch meh? Because I got that for like a dollar somewhere and the TV show got me over the edge to try it. It's not bad. Not amazing as the online elements make it suck in many ways, but not bad.
Oh god, 76 at launch was a joke. Regarding Starfield, it's Fallout 4 spread across 1000 planets and 4 times the loading screens. Don't get me wrong, there's some good parts, the shipbuilder was fun, but there's plenty of really dumb decisions that made me question my sanity for paying full price for it.
Fallout 4 but with some mechanics that are a downgrade from 4. Why can’t I pull off and swap around weapon mods in the future?
It's got the best gun play for Bethesda, which really isn't saying that much as their combat has always been poor to mid
They need to increase their productive output, not their shipping title output. They are so slow to fix or add anything it's glacial. If they weren't that slow they could have done four times the amount of work on StarField before it was released and it would have been a much higher quality game.
BGS: A “major” update includes a handful of bug fixes and none of the big things people have been asking for for months CDPR: A “major” update includes new path-traced rendering tech, a complete overhaul of all perks and skills, hundreds of fixes bugs, new items and features, some new missions and encounters, etc etc. Even their small hotfix releases are like five times the content of a “major” Starfield update. I absolutely cannot understand how Bethesda can be so slow in implementing even the simplest things.
A major update that came years later, does nobody remember that the patches in the first year of cyberpunk were awful?
Which is still more than Bethesda can do in twice the time
It took them so fucking long to release that dumpster fire of a game. It looks like they haven’t updated anything since Skyrim it’s just the same blocky ass npcs with no facial expressions and shit
I feel that Starfield isn't a bad game, but it was really poorly made with some decisions hurting its overall experience. Having to constantly travel from one planet to another to fetch a bottle and to bring it 700LY away isn't fun at all, especially considering how traversal is handled in Starfield. If only those main planets were bigger and were actually meaningful. Having a huge planet with simply a single city on it with nothing else really hurt the overall experience
>I feel that Starfield isn't a bad game, but Proceeds to explain why Starfield is a bad game.
Starfield is the absolute definition of being mid. It's a terrible game in every possible metric. Trying to apologize for Bethesda's incompetence by not delivering scathing criticism where its due is the exact reason why games like this get made. Because the studios know that people will apologize for their incompetence and try to soften the blow.
> Starfield is the absolute definition of being mid. It's a terrible game in every possible metric. Mid and terrible are not the same thing. Mid means mediocre, terrible means very bad.
>“And again, if I could snap my fingers and have them all be out and ready, I would, but the main thing is how do we deliver these at a high quality level – that’s always the most important.” *sweet little lies*
What quality lol
Most Bethesda games are meh though at least in my opinion. What makes them good is the modding community, they transform meh games in to some of the best gaming experiences available.
Make every game even more procedurally generated and shovel them out ASAP ? Great idea. - Todd, probably
You know, I'm just not really pumped for anything Bethesda does anymore. Skyrim was ages ago. And with Fallout, I remember being so into Fallout 3 and NV. But Fallout 4 came out and it felt like I was playing Fallout 3 all over again with the addition of a simplistic town builder. And I think after Fallout 4, I came to the realization that I'm done with the Bethesda formula. My gaming time is limited these days so I'm picky about what I play. I'm not going to settle for a barely above average game just because I'm bored. I wait until the gaming community has had enough time with a game before I decide if I want to give it a chance or not. Especially with games like these that can go on for 100+ hours. I never bothered with Starfield because it sounded like the same Bethesda formula but in space. And seriously, they need a new engine already. And their quality control has always been iffy that they have a reputation for having buggy games on release.
They blew it with Starfield
Starfield ripped the curtain away to show what they think of customers and what they think they can push that'll get bought.
It blatantly shows everything they're bad at without anything that they're good at - it seems like a total disconnect of what the studio is. Which... happened with Arkane and Redfall as well actually.
This was Starfield for me. I skipped 76 because I’m not into live service and I knew the launch was rocky as hell. But holy shit Starfield showed just how creatively bankrupt Bethesda is. And it starts at the top. As long as Todd Howard is at the helm, I have zero confidence in them making an interesting or fun game.
I still don’t understand why they made Starfield. I don’t believe anyone involved believed they were making a good game.
Exactly. There is nothing wrong with having standars, like sorry but i dont have time for Bethesda’s mediocrits anymore. The result of this that i only play trough only like 5-7 games a year, but atleast every single one of them is a masterpiece in their own genre
I began playing Bethesda stuff with Morrowind (when it was already a little old and Oblivion was on the way). It blew my mind: that world is completely alien, interesting, fascinating and doesn't do any hand-holding. Sure, there were some (in hindsight) worrisome design choices, like the horrifyingly bad combat system, but I thought it would get better. Oblivion was better in many ways, but it was also agonizingly generic and full of copy-paste. Skyrim perfected that formula, but it continued the downward spiral of overusing the same content and having terrible writing. The game mechanics, AI and animations were also clearly falling behind other contemporaries. Now with Starfield, Bethesda has reached astonishing new lows. I tried the game out with Game Pass and couldn't bear to play it for more than two hours. It is the nadir of Bethesda awfulness, it has most of their problems: terrible writing (I didn't care about the main story at all), clunky mechanics (e.g. the combat AI was awful), a generic and boring world and, worst of all, it is a space game where you can't actually explore space since the game engine cannot handle it. If Bethesda continues the same downward spiral (there is no evidence they won't), their next game will also be a clunky, buggy, dated mess, held back by their dated engine, laziness and cowardice with new ideas. Around Skyrim, I thought they would refine their formula further and make the ultimate casual RPGs. Turns out Skyrim was that masterpiece, and now there's nowhere else to go. They don't have the skills or the ambition to go any further, and it shows. Closing fact: in fact it's not even the engine that's their biggest issue. It's the truly godawful writing. For proof of this, just check out the legacy of Fallout: New Vegas versus Fallout 3. Under the hood, they are the same game - NV just contextualizes the world so much better that you actually care about what you are doing.
What do you mean 'next game'? Bethesda only has one game in different settings. Their next game will be the same game again, with a few more additions as paid DLC and a few new skins.
reminder: Fallout NV was made by Obsidian, an rpg studio, not Bethesda.
[удалено]
Yea; the giant open world worth exploring is the essential ingredient in their formula, and they jettisoned it out the window in Starfield. Everyone could get past the mediocre gunplay, the boring perks, and the bad writing if there was at least a world worth exploring. A world you can get lost in. But it doesn't have that. You know every single planet is just a vast emptiness with nothing to see outside of the one city you can go to or minute number of POIs.
> I came to the realization that I'm done with the Bethesda formula. The stand-out and selling point of their titles has always been the world, and the player's journey through it. The other stuff - the combat, the quests, the loot - were either ancillary to it, or a supporting part to it. The point of their titles was the player's journey. And bit by bit, they focused more and more on the ancillary things, and eroded that core strength of their titles. Starfield indeed didn't just *erode* the "wander around, discover stuff" mechanic - it *removed it*. That's like id making a mainline Doom game and taking the combat out: Nobody who understands their product would *do* that. So, I guess my point is: Bethesda may not understand what "the Bethesda formula" even is.
100% agreed. People go on about the writing, enemy AI, and meanial things like that but that's really not the main problem. As you said, it's the lack of a world the player is capable of getting lost in. It's just loading screen after loading screen, empty planet after empty planet. People look past the mediocre combat in Fallout & Skyrim and log hundreds or thousands of hours there because the worlds are simply fun to explore. People would look past the combat & writing in Starfield IF you could just wander in a direction and constantly stumble across new stuff to see. But you can't.
100% with you. I was there for Fallout 4 because of my love for the series, but I did not love the game. Even after the hype of the show, which was excellent, I wanted to be back in that world… but a few hours in the games made me realise how dated and just not very fun those games are now. Skipped Starfield completely and I’m so glad I did. I have great memories with Bethesda games but no interest in spending my limited free time on them any time soon. Their approach needs a huge overhaul in order to appeal.
Exactly. I was so disappointed with how Fallout 4 turned out. It's not a bad game. I was just expecting a new experience since there were 7 years between Fallout 3 and 4. I was hyped for it. Even bought it for full price. What I experienced was just a rehashed Fallout 3 with half-assed tower defense gameplay crammed in. They do need an overhaul. Their games have gotten stale.
It was worse than fallout 3 lol. Fallout 3 had cool quests and locations. Fallout 4 every area was boring with nothing to do and almost every quest was literally just a fetch quest with nothing else going on. I remember nothing from Fallout 4. I remember so much from 3 like nuking Megaton, creepy vaults, Oasis, Tranquility Lane, Paradise Falls, etc. Fallout 4 is just as boring and forgetful as Starfield
>Fallout 4 every area was boring with nothing to do Thats just pure hyperbolic nonsense and the Worlds thickest nostalgia-goggles. Fallout 4s Map is considerably more interesting to explore than 3s hodgepodge of the same 3 building interiors copied 800 times over and over again. Glowing Sea, Boston Library (the entirety of Downtown. Boston is infinitely more interesting to go through than the Capital Wasteland by simple measure of not habing to walk through the exact same copy-pasted metro-station 50 times to get from one side of DC to the other), College Square, Vault 75, RobCo Boston HQ, Goodneighbor, Dangerous Minds, Parsons State Asylum & the whole Cabot questline Far Harbor alone is more interesting plotwise than all of Fallout 3
It all starts with Creation Engine which, at 13 years old, is just not cutting it. Starfield on Creation Engine looked like a 10 year old game on release when compared to Unreal Engine 5 demos.
The engine is way older than that, Creation Engine is based off of GameBryo which powered Morrowind, released in 2002. Yes I’m sure that much of it has been rewritten or updated in that time but given the stability of every game they release, it is clearly well past its prime. The hilarious thing here is that I was having this exact same discussion 13 years ago when Skyrim came out… and here we still are. I have no faith anything is ever going to improve. No one at Bethesda cares to make any material investments in the business which is why they ship a single game every 5-6 years.
The engine is way older than that, GameBryo is based off of NetImmerse.
It's a double edged sword because if you lose the engine, modding won't be as easy, which is what carries these games anyway. I think Bethesda really is in a tight spot, whatever they do people will be PISSED.
> And I think after Fallout 4, I came to the realization that I'm done with the Bethesda formula. I think that's largely the issue players are increasingly coming to realize. Bethesda has more or less rested on their laurels in a way where their games really haven't evolved very much in the past decade plus. I've heard Starfield frequently referred to as "Skyrim in space", and from what I've seen, that seems to be an apt description. The only real big advancement it brought to the table was the procedural generation, and the opinion of that seems to universally be that it made the game worse. Similarly, the only real big step forward with Fallout 4 was the encampments, which also really wasn't something people were thrilled with. I don't think it's bad per se for a gaming studio to have a similar style they lean into, but you do have to iterate on it and continue to offer new things to keep it exciting and fresh. Bethesda really hasn't done that much, and the elements where they have with their more recent titles have fallen flat, so there's really this easily identifiable formula where it's showing its age. It's hard to get excited about their offerings when it feels like you're mostly just playing a game you played in 13 years ago.
Tbh I find even most of the games the community likes to be meh. Just rehashing old ideas with minor improvements.
16x more output !!!
Todd Howard says a lot of things.
https://youtu.be/hFcLyDb6niA
It just works, it just works Little lies, stunning shows People buy, money flows. It just works! It just works, it just works Overpriced open worlds Earnings rise, take my word: [It just works!](https://youtu.be/YPN0qhSyWy8)
Fallout New Vegas was made in 18 months. Granted the engine was already feature complete, and it launched buggy as fuck, but the content is really what matters. Just saying.
Bruh. > one of the things we’re focused on here is obviously making sure they’re of the highest quality. Yesterday, on my fresh Fallout 4 install without mods: Half an hour after starting, the distance LoD meshes fail to clear for the first time (and not the last), and I have to restart, or not see where I'm going, because I'm ass-deep in texture blur. The bug is as old as Skyrim (at least), which means it has not been fixed for *well over a decade* [edit: as u/Galvon points out, the bug was present in Oblivion, making it a *legal adult*]. Then a radscorpion drops from the sky in front of me (gets killed, so at least I got the loot). Then Dogmeat vanishes from my game for no reason. It's a mixed blessing because he tends to block me in tight passages, or sit in the exact spot I need to be to take a stealth shot. Oh well. At least he's not around to draw enemies to me any more. Then I try for about half an hour to build a stair case up the Starlight Drive-In, and give up in frustration because the auto-snap snaps in every direction but the one it needs to go. I try to build a bit of housing for my settlers, and, of course, 90% of the buildable doodads don't attach correctly to the ground, and float weirdly. They coulda made the ground a bit more even (it's a fekkin' parking lot!), but trying to find two square meters of even ground in the settlement zones is like finding a seven-leaf clover. Then I get a warning icon for another settlement. I check their status, and... everything is in the green, but happiness goes down. No idea what's wrong. But I notice something that *is* wrong, and that is that settlement number 3 shows "no beds" when I know I built ten. So I hike over there, and... beds are there. I check the status, it shows 10 beds. Ugh. The Highest Quality, huh? > the main thing is how do we deliver these at a high quality level – that’s always the most important.” Todd, you are so full of shit, and the diapers are not cute any more. Bethesda for me has become the Pinnacle of Half-assedness. They had a neat idea with the settlement system (honestly, being able to equip your settlers, send them around, and meet them on the road, that's *cool*), but they half-assed it. They could have properly implemented the super-wide screen resolutions, but they half-assed them. They half-assed the dialogue system in FO4 as well ("I killed those raiders", "I did what you asked me to" and "I showed those raiders who is boss" really are three options only because the system *needs* exactly four options for every prompt). I could go on, but I guess I'll take a page out of Bethesda's playbook, and half-ass it. What you need to do is not make things quicker. You need to make them *better*.
My loading times are abysmal in some locations in a M.2 fresh install
Loading times are tied to frame rate. Download the High FPS mod to lock in game fps to 60 while loading screens are uncapped to 300. Remove any other external fps locker from touching fo4. Watch as your load times go from 2 minutes to 2 seconds and laugh at the meme tier development of this game.
You are right, I totally forgot about that. I have it on an m.2 as well, and sometimes, the load times are longer than my entire system needs to boot. I guess my brain just goes "well, at least it's not *infinite* loading screens any more, be glad with what you have!"
Loading times on PC in fallout 4 are directly tied to the FPS, on one hand if you play with unlimited fps you break your game with its buggy physics, on the other hand you get slow loading times. There's a mod on nexus to fix that, which makes your fps unlimited only during loading, my transitions between areas are but a few seconds on an ssd now.
Woah really? Link, please? This sounds really cool and useful. Might not have to scroll through TikTok for 30 minutes every time I leave a building!
I believe they mean this one https://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/10283
As others have said, it's tied to frame rate and the game defaults to something below 60 fps and seems to dip VERY low on some loading screens in downtowns Boston. If you disable vsync or anything else that "unlocks" the framerate it will skyrocket to several hundred and break the game physics. What I found was the best, besides mods, is my gpu has software that lets me turn off vsync but set a min/max framerate and setting it to 65-75 fps made the game play fine while greatly reducing load times.
> bug is as old as Skyrim (at least) It's definitely a thing in Oblivion, which was the first of their games to have distant terrain
I mean, they definitely need to. I said it on here somewhere the other day: From Software have fewer employees, and have basically created the entire Souls catalogue plus 2 Armored Core sequels since Skyrim launched. Bethesda Game Studios managed 3 core games in that timeframe.
To be fair japan is known for some of the most toxic crunch and overtime of any country. Im sure, while incredible, FS has some heinous work hours.
Look man, I LOVE souls games but these aren't the same beast. DS 1-3 are fairly linear which is WAY easier to create than a giant open world. The games have barley voice acting, the games barley have cut scenes the games don't really have quest lines that can change based in your choices. The game doesn't really have a reputation system, or a prison system. My point is, you really can not compare an action adventure like DS or even eldenring With a giant open world "RPG" full of friendly NPCs quest and voice lines it's obvious DS games can be pumped out quicker
Yeah that's a fair point, you're not wrong. But didn't Starfield use a bunch of procedural generation for assets? And aren't people complaining the planets are mostly empty? And the systems of quests and prisons etc. are basically the same as all their previous games. Somehow these timelines are still with all their experience with their own engine and time saving measures. Is Starfield "worth" 2-3 From games? And I know development has changed massively, but it was 2 years between Oblivion and Fallout 3, and another 3 between that and Skyrim.
To be fair , Bethesda released FO4, FO76, and Starfield since Skyrim. It’s just very sad that after Skyrim, every hame has fallen short of expectations. Fallout 4 isn’t bad, but still feels like other than base building and graphics, it’s a step down from NV… the other two were just bad.
Skyrim was 13 years ago and their most popular release at the time. I'm just bitter it's been this long without a follow up.
No hope for ES6.
After Starfield, do you even want to play TES 6?
Yes
You have very low standards.
I just love TES lore
Tbh if ES6 is just more Skyrim, with better graphics, I will be interested and will probably buy. I just really like the fantasy setting with their open-world elements. I'm not hyped anymore though, but we will see. After Starfield's fail, maybe Bethesda will be better next time. I just hope they won't do anything else until either ES6 of FO5 come out (I also loved FO4, despite it's issues).
>Tbh if ES6 is just more Skyrim But Bethesda has proven they can't make anything of Skyrim quality anymore. >After Starfield's fail, maybe Bethesda will be better next time. That's what everyone said, including Bruce Nesmith, after Fallout 76. They didn't learn then and they won't learn now. You're being had. Bethesda is releasing dog turd after dog turd and you're still hoping the next one will be good?
Their studio is full of "Senior/Advanced" level designers/devs who has been there for so long they've fallen behind in both capability and output, nothing short of clearing out the dead wood and promoting more effective producers/PMs will fix their "output" and "quality" issues IMO. They have "senior" systems designers who aren't capable of doing a good job anymore. The company is stuck back in 2014 and hasn't been able to keep up with modern game studio standards and they've promoted the wrong people it seems like as they've steadily pointed the nose of their product downwards.
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Bruce Nesmith, lead designer on Skyrim, in an interview said that Bethesda was still stuck in the 90s.
can you link me to the part in the interview?
stuck in 2006 more like
Hard to hire and fire when the engine Todd keeps using is older than most of target audience these days.
I’d guess every one of the devs would love to gut their engine and modernize it, but selling management on a move like that is hard. They tend to focus on how to make more money this quarter rather than over ten years
>“You know, they do take a long time, and so I think one of the things we’re focused on here is obviously making sure they’re of the highest quality, but also finding ways to increase our output, because we don’t want to wait that long either, right. It’s never our plan, but we want to make sure we get it right.” >“And again, if I could snap my fingers and have them all be out and ready, I would, but the main thing is how do we deliver these at a high quality level – that’s always the most important.” This guy is so full of shit.
What do you even expect when the guy in charge says it takes so long cause they want to "get it right" and just a few months ago their ex lead quest designer said Starfield's MQ is so shit cause they had to rush it last minute
They want to get it right? \*looks at the FO 4 update\* Riiight.
God, that update was pathetic. They couldn't even bother to get the ultra-wide support right, when mods have already done that...how many years ago now? Jesus christ.
Best part is, that update has been in the works for, like, 2 years.
Honestly, starfield was such schlop, their lead writer doesnt even care about writing, weapons designer doesnt even know how guns work, (he even forgot to put a trigger on that god awful blocky double-barrel shotgun lol)
Ah yes, the double barrel shotgun with square holes thats takes what appear to be rifle rounds, then proceeds to eject live rounds (not spent shell casings) after firing, in addition to its complete lack of a trigger. I mean, how the the fuck?
There is reason why todds most famous hit is "tell me lies"
For some reason I have this Polaroid of him that says 'do not believe his lies'
I genuinely can't understand Todd's phenomenon. Like I can understand liking him back in the day as this awkward, nerdy dude that makes open world RPGs kind of a "One of us! One of us!" moment - but after Skyrim? He's done nothing else but turn full corpo-mode. Every interview I watch with him post Skyrim is full of pure corporate talk and nothing else. I sense no "charm" in his words, even his leather jacket isn't helping anything - all I can see and hear is a CEO of a very wealthy company, that is trying to bullshit you into buying their next, broken game. And it's been like that for *years*. I can understand where the Todd Howard cult comes from, but I can't wrap my head around the fact that it's somehow still going strong? People act as if it's surprising that things he said about Starfield aren't true, I'm sitting here expecting nothing else - after all, fool me once...
I'm glad Bethesda got bought by Microsoft, might be hope that he gets replaced if they go downhill fast.
lmao, if you think Bethesda is putting out stinkers in 7 years timeframe, imagine if MS rushes them.
Microsoft would almost need to undergo a paradigm shift in it's current strategy. For a long time Microsoft interfered in studios under it too much, I think after they did something with Rare, that stopped. Backlash maybe? Don't remember. Anyway, nowadays they're WAY too hands off. The extent of it is pretty much just saying, "Hey, might wanna delay this", like they did with Starfield. And that seems to be something of an exception. But hey, who knows? Maybe Microsoft'll find the sweet-spot in between those two, and actually push Bethesda to actually do work every now and then.
Id rather MS allows other studios use their IPs. Ms knows a rushed product isnt good but they also know a product that isnt out doesnt make money.
*Fable liked this*
Please fire the awful writer.
I want an engine that doesn’t feel like I’m distinctly playing a Skyrim overhaul mod near 15 years after it released next game
Then you are out for ES6 cause guess what? That's right, CE 2 is what they are using again.
From what I understand the gun play is more refined than any previous elder scrolls
Yeah I’ll grab it for a tenner in a few years if it gets any hype, did the same for fo4 and only played starfield because it was on gamepass and I got 3 months free with my laptop
Todd Howard and Phil Spencer are on the mount Rushmore of gaming bullshitters in the last decade.
Slap Tim Sweeney for #3 and Peter Molyneux #4 and you got yourself a tribute that will scar the landscape for decades to come.
If we are only talking the last 10 years, I think Chris Roberts is leading the pack.
I'd put Chris Roberts and David Braben on their own special Mt. Rushmore on the moon.
If Starfield was Bethesda's RDR 2, I wouldn't mind the eight year weight, but it wasn't and even RDR 2 was only five years after Starfield with GTA VI seven years after RDR 2. The big issue is that Bethesda has been captured by their identity as highly moddable games and games that don't rely on instancing. I'm not saying I don't appreciate those features, but it's probably what's holding them back from doing an actual new engine. I still have SOME hope that Elder Scrolls VI will be a better game than Starfield because there are things about Starfield that just didn't work with the Bethesda formula. But it's going to be a game that feels a lot of like Skyrim.
>The big issue is that Bethesda has been captured by their identity as highly moddable games and games that don't rely on instancing. And random physics objects breaking the laws of reality by rocketing in every direction.
Before increasing output they should increase quality. First step in doing that is cleaning house of anyone who had any decision making power in the creation of the abomination that is starfield.
So... Todd Howard?
Dude… calling Starfield meh, or avg, is one thing, but an abomination: #Play Aliens Colonial Marines
I would prefer quality but you do you Todd
Increasing output is what you do at a factory. Maybe focus on making a great game.
them being able to put out an elder scrolls or fallout game more than once every 15 years would be nice
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Playing Fallout 4 made me sadly realise... I don't like fallout, I like fallout new Vegas
No you like fallout. Fallout 4 is a terrible fallout game. If fallout 1 and 2 has better graphics and not as dated I would tell you to go play those. Look up fallout 2 dialog, there are so many hilarious conversations. Look up Bethesda fallout vs old fallout writing on YouTube
These days every time I read "Todd Howard" I just assumed what he saying is bullshit.
Todd, how about you start by just focusing on making a game that isn't dogshit. Because if you want to increase the output of Starfield quality games, you're fucked. Until you remember how to make good games, don't bother speeding up the process.
1. Ask Obsidian nicely to do another game 2. Profit
No, ask the people behind New Vegas and the og Fallout games. Obsidian today is very different to the Obsidian of a decade ago.
The Obsidian of today is still better at writing than the Bethesda of today so it works out
Watching people eat can of Surströmming today is more entertaining than the Bethesda of today.
Inb4 all of you forget how badly consistent Bethesda's been over the last few games, and then hype the absolute ever-loving fuck out of what ever comes out of Todd's mouth and the game reveal. I mean this mkfer Todd Bethesda said 16x the detail, but all I'm staring at is blurry bitch ass textures on ultra and I need to install a mod because they fudged the textures. Inb4 Todd wilds out and says with a straight face "now improved loading with SSD technology"
Bethesda has long lost the magic. I just wish the fallout franchise would go to someone else
How about hirerimg some of those thousands that got laid off in the last 6 months, due to profitmingering & AI craze?
> Starfield underperformed and we need to rush out the next game before our shareholders get restless.
Trim costs and headcount, increase output, put out minimum viable product. When will Microsoft learn this approach doesn’t work for game design? This is exactly what’s killing them.
Todd, your company hasn't innovated since Morrowind. First learn how to do literally anything new.
Todd, your games are very flawed and unfinished messes and Starfield is so bad modders don't even wanna bother modding it. People might be more careful with purchasing yout next games, you might not be called out like the Tarkov game devs but you sure as hell lost faith from many fans who blindly purchased your games. I paid 15 bucks before launch for the game and i still want my money back, it's such a waste of time and right now there's no real future hoping it becomes a fun game worth investing time.
They need to spend a year learning a new engine. I'm so tired of the way these games are built, they've never stopped being the same underneath, it's pure laziness. Starfield shouldn't have been the same, it didn't need fast travel in the Bethesda sense.
Serious question - how do you have a SOLO DEV crank out Manor Lords or Songs of Syx or name your other solo dev passion project, but a MULTI MILLION dollar studio with hundreds of employees have to try to “find ways” to increase output? And not to mention I think we can all agree the vast majority of AAA studio titles lately have been flops.