How Starfield was Ruined by "Realism"
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- čas přidán 18. 06. 2024
- #starfield and it's hundreds of empty planets have been talked about up and down, but what REALLY happened to make it bad and release to such mixed review scores and opinions?
My full 1 Hour Analysis of Starfield in case you missed it: • Starfield | An In Dept...
In the middle of bad user reviews, disingenuous press regarding it's failure and player numbers, and a constant controversial source of content, Starfield is managing to continue making Bethesda look worse the more I think and dig into it.
This behaviour is unacceptable, and a very bad sign of the future of the developer ahead of Elder Scrolls 6 or future Fallout games.
This will probably be my last Starfield video. Until the DLC. I hope, I really don't like playing this game oh lord.
Chapters:
00:00 Intro / Why this Exists.
1:59 Part One: Realism in Starfield
7:26 Part Two: What is Realism in Games?
11:49 Part ??? Starfield was always doomed.
16:07 Part 4: Is there place for realism in games? - Hry
Hey you! This will be my last Starfield video until the DLC, but you should check out the channel and consider subscribing since there's a lot of better games I will be covering, and a lot of other bad games to be dissected. I hope you enjoyed the vid, and thanks for watching!
Also they could do that... No mans sky, star citizen, ect... They all do "do that" Bethesda just is incompetent.
Realism isn't the issue... Bethesda simply doesn't know what they want to do.
It's a failure to master the craft. Let alone, to utilize the idea well.
A realistic space exploration game is easy to design. But this is Bethesda, sadly.
"Explore... Expand... Terraform... All for the Emperor of Mankind.", that is realism. That is purpose. That is what it means to travel upon the unknown frontier.
Otherwise, you get a playground of sand that even children don't want to be in.
Empty Planets isn't a bad idea but what you can do with Empty Planets. What NPCs do with Empty Planets. What Empty Planets mean to those who gain from it... ... ... That is the question. The question Bethesda's failed to ask, let alone to design. Even in the brink of Random Generative Planets.
There isn't a single thought given to actual realism in Starfield - there are computers with clearly working internet, they have LITERAL WARP DRIVES, but I have to go speak to quest-givers in person every single time? Did they forget how to make phones in the 2300s??? The temples for the artifacts in the main quest are 3-400 meters from several abandoned/not really abandoned outposts? I could go on and on, noone in Bethesda thought about how society in this universe would really function. They only play at realism with this "Oh we won't include intelligent aliens or wacky space guns etc., we'll have empty boring planets because this is a serious universe".
That's an interesting idea: With FTL drives it does make sense to travel to a different system, because the information could need hundreds of years. Sending messages to someone on a different planet in the same system could take minutes to hours. But it doesn't make the slightest sense that we can't call someone in the same city. I wish they would have thought about that.
@@Treehead667 Okay, but presumably this is a society that had an interstellar war like, within a century of the events of the game. You can't have a conflict like that without the means to communicate. Also, crime bounties are updated instantly across the whole game world. You see what I mean? None of it is consistent.
Totally agree. Starfield is just a Skyrim and change the skin about space. The logistics of Starfield is in old middle ages culture, those npc are living in thousand year in the pass, talk and think like ancient people.
There is Also the Factor that True Sci-Fi is not Action packed at all, unless its Set during or in a War which Starfield is Set After said War and one of its Main Side Quests is Literally an Office Job. True Sci-Fi is just take Modern Day Life and Plunk it into the Future.
Most things we Call Science Fiction is actually Space Fantasy or Fantasy with Pseodo Scientific Themes. Even Star Trek is Actually Classified as Space Fantasy and not Sci-Fi. Because the Only Place True Sci Fi would not be Boring is a Slice of Life Anime.
@@Coconutglif they thought like Ancient People then the Game would Actually be Entertaining. I'd say they Act and think more like Corporate Workers Drones who just want to go home and thats what makes it boring because it Reminds us of Work on a Subconcious level. Especially since the Game is Grindy in the Worst way Possible its like they just took Fallout 3's Level Cap, XP Multiplier and removed the Level Cap and just plunked it in the Game if there is going to be no Level Cap then the first 50 to 80 Levels should be Easy to get to .
The thing that drives me absolutely insane is that HOWARD HIMSELF says in interviews about the environmental effects, and the survival aspects that they found out that it JUST WASNT FUN so they hacked it out. The more and more I see, the more I am CONVINCED that they made the entire game in a closed system patting each other on the back about the way it would turn out without giving a thought to how it was going and in the 11th hour opened it up to parties outside the system who just went "This isnt fun at all" and they were so deep in it that they didnt have time to start over so they just kneecapped everything they had made, crossed their fingers and threw it out the airlock.
I agree but what blows my mind about that so much is it was something like 7-12+ design studios and something way high hundreds if not low thousands of people who worked on it across the globe. I guess everyone was just content to nod their heads and collect their check. Having been "that guy" at work who does dare to say something Mao or whoever once said it was the tall blade of grass that gets mowed something like that. If there were people who cared they either clammed up or said something and got canned. I haven't seen any dev leaks like I have CA so I guess they're just happy to collect more cheese wheels.
It was fun until you simps
I wasted so much time collecting each spacesuit , with the best stats, so I'd have the proper one for each planet to finally give up because it just didn't matter at all, like everything else in this game.
Weirdly enough, aren't survival mods and the official survival mode for Skyrim both incredibly popular? Where exactly did Todd pull that info out of (other than his ass) when the evidence seems to overwhelmingly point to the opposite?
@@joshuakim5240 It appeals to the people it appeals to. Most people don’t want it at all. Just like the truck driving game.
There's a big difference between realism and BELIEVABILITY. No matter how many times I'm told that Starfield is realistic, never did I find the Settled Systems to be a BELIEVABLE setting, due to the very bad writing. Whereas less 'realistic' settings like Fallout like you mentioned (at least the non-BGS Fallouts) still felt believable because the setting was CONSISTENT, due to good writing.
tldr, Believability >>>>>> Realism
Authenticity vs accuracy. Which is a whole argument inhistorical settings.
Agreed! Games don't have to be realistic in terms of the real world. But they should be coherent and make sense in the context of the world the game is set in. There's plenty that is totally unrealistic in Starfield. The vast majority of it, actually. Right at core, it is a totally unrealistic universe 300 years from now, where hardly anything has changed from today. Only "Spaceships". Where most place look like a 2023 business park. Unrealistic. Starfield's design uses "realism" as an excuse to avoid creative thought on the future. To avoid the difficult,m challengin aspects of imagining humanity 300 years from now. "It's USA 2023 in space and that's that".
There is no realism to literally every planet in the galaxy being already settled with the exact same copy pasted locations, bases, settlements as every other planet.
@@OrangeNash Mass Effect Andromeda is more believeble than Starfield and that game is set almost 800 years in the future in a whole different galaxy
Yes. It does not need to be realistic to our world but merely needs to be consistent with it's own rules. If your story takes place in a world without gravity, you cannot have a character fall to their death, because that requires something that does not exist within the setting. It breaks the story because now you know the creator will just make anything up and there are no longer any rules.
It's an indelible shame that the exploration of desert planets in Mass Effect 1 (2007) is more interesting and dynamic than in Starfield (2023). This is a terrible degradation.
Manner walling through the ship and zipping through the relays
its funny i actually like mass effects empty plannets, theres something just interesting to me about them so empty, its like the video game equivalent of ambient music (which pairs well with it throw on some weird ambient shit for depressed people while playing it’s therapeutic lol) its weird its empty its calm but also exciting in a way, and while the things you find arent usually anything special theres a handful of things that are really unique and the prothien ruins give the vibe of not an empty frontier but a place wiped clean which fits given the whole story lol, theres intent behind it not just 1000 randomized plannets that technically are more varied than mass effect 1 yet look more samey, also the mako is so shit i love it lol, and i like the fairly non linear story of cerberus in mass effect 1 found through your exploring, all of it adds up to conveying remoteness, not empty but distant a massive galaxy where as huge as the settled part is theres so much more thats still unknown, that or my autism has caused me to be fascinated by something no one else would be interested in LOL, but starfield just looks and feels so much less inspired than the strange world of mass effect 1
Still exploration in ME1 boring planets was boring anyway. But apparently better than Spacerim.
I swear, watching Starfield videos is more entertaining than playing the game.
😂😂facts
I swear, cutting my toenails is more entertaining than playing the game.
this made me bust because it's so true 🤣
I hurt my neck falling asleep playing Starfield. My head snapped back. I realized I fell asleep every time I played it.
@@arkeshn729 You should sue Bethesda.
Video games aren't meant to be realistic, they are meant to be fun. Imagine if in GTA V a trip between Sandy Shores and Los Santos took 4 IRL hours of driving through an empty road and having to stop for 20min in a gas station to watch Trevor taking a shit. This is what the hundreds of empty planets in Starfield feels like.
I laugh whenever apologists use realism as an excuse to defend a video game. Video games were never realistic. In Far Cry you're healing gunshot wounds with a bandage. In Assassin's Creed you're taking out a guard while another guard 5 feet away hears nothing. Do you know how noisy that would be in real life? If we really want to be realistic, how about when you are shot you cannot play the game for 6 months while your character is recovering? 🤣
I really dont care that 90% of the planets are empty that was to be expected
Its the planets that are meant to be the home worlds to humanities branching off factions being empty thats the problem
This, based on the story I expected much bigger human cities. Though I still play the game.
@michaelp1979 I expected each home world to be at least 3/4 the size if not the full size of skyrim/fallout 4 with multiple city's and towns and small communities throughout the maps
You know, what you'd expect from humans on their home world
And have a hand full of planets and space stations with maps half the size or 3/4 the og maps for people goi g off doing their own thing in the universe to make it feel lived in
Also the way they handled earth was lazy
They really expected us to believe that only one land mark survived in each major city
The most iconic landmark is the only thing that happend to survive, lazy
Why are there people living in a dirty, underground slum on New Atlantis when there is literally 99.99% of a very habitable planet less than a 10 minute walk from the city?
Does New Atlantis not need farms or mines or fisheries or anything else?
New Atlantis isn't built like a city. It's built like a corporate campus.
@@stirlinggerbic-forsyth3345 I was trying to figure out what was bothering me about New Atlantis while in a group chat, and all of a sudden it struck me, and I blurted out, "This is just EPCOT!" to the confusion of everyone else.
It's literally a theme park, and what little I saw of Akila indicated it'd be the same way.
@@sirdrork8616 same issue every bethesda game post-oblivion, its just more and more obvious each time.
They didn't go for procedural generation, empty ass and copy pasted locations because it was realistic, they did it because they were lazy. It being "realistic" is an excuse they came up with on the fly because "da space is emti jus lyke irl". Anyone who believes that is getting played for the fool
🍻
And they charged a lot of money too. They suck.
Just your subjective opinion….
@@dewinter1411 ah yes, the classic "i cannot disprove what you say, therefore i will try to discredit it by calling it subjective". this would work, but unfortunately for you, most of us are not as dumb as you. how about you address my points, instead of saying something so useless and stupid?
@@dewinter1411it’s not a subjective opinion it’s real
what you don’t remember Emil saying “KISS (keep it simple stupid) because our players will just take our story and rip out the pages and turn them into paper air planes….” And let me just explain something how do we turn the story into paper air planes if you can’t kill 90% of NPC’s because they are marked essential NPC’s which makes them unkillable 😂 that’s lazy writing and game development
Todd says “we want to say yes to the player as much as possible.” I have found more no’s then yes in this game….
Starfield is crappy action adventure shallow empty sandbox with horrible looter shooter elements because has scammed your brains into thinking there games are RPG’s because they have a leveling up system…..
One thing I realized a while ago that's why Starfield was never going to work: Planet-hopping is, from a gameplay perspective, the same as Island-hopping, but worse in every way.
Everything that's good about space and planets and such works just as well on islands. You can still need vehicles to (usefully) get between them. You can blockade an island's port far more realistically than you can a planet. You can still have different faction on different islands. You can still have safer areas and more dangerous ones. You can still have large stretches of ocean between things if you want.
But space just forces you to deal with a bunch of things that are harder for no good reason. Planet *scale* just is never going to work well. You can make a curated island; you can't make a curated entire planet. You can make islands of different sizes that are scaled to fit what you need them to hold easily, but you can't make tiny planets without people saying that planets don't work like that. Space obstacles end up being things like black holes that don't make sense near planets because they'd just suck in the planet, whereas island obstacles like whirlpools and reefs work great. Not to mention that space forces you into the problems of 3D space -- even just making a map is harder when you can't pretend it's flat. Look at every 4X space game: the galaxy map is always shown in a plane anyway. Like if you have a leather jacket, you can show a front view and a back view and that works great. It's way easier than having UIs that need rotation on all axes to see the stamp on the golden claw thing, or whatever.
I think the way to make this work would be to do something like a futuristic AC black flag kind of a game. Keep the "NASA punk" aesthetic but with more lost technology vibes, so you make cool sci-fi-y stuff but handwave away the lack of flying craft so you can restrict it to watercraft -- maybe they need water for cooling or something. Then you could have all the gameplay of starfield, the factions, the bases, the building, the ship combat, etc, but in a way that can actually have a fun world to explore too because it doesn't have to be mostly empty.
The E3 reveal made it look like an even more boring version of Space Engineers.
The "realism" in Starfield only applies to the bs they invented for procedural litterboxes with nothing on them. Everything else flies through the window. Robotic, emotionless characters with dead AI and dialogues. Oxygen meters that work like stamina bars, and so much more experience breaking things purposefully designed for the game (or made out of inability).
Not even that, the procgen is constantly seeding POI into unrealistic locations resulting in things like animal bones and plants growing roots through caves on planets with no atmosphere, then ya also got weather effects on planets with no atmosphere, sparsely distributed facilities across most planets no matter weather conditions resources or otherwise, etc.
I got one better for you: Venus being hospitable.
You know the Titan Submarine? The one that ceased to be less than a second after its hull was breached?
That is the amount of pressure there is on the surface of Venus. Venus should be terrifying.
@@QATest4fun I like it, that sounds like a lot more fun.
@@QATest4fun Landing on a gas giant isn't really possible, but flying through its very dense atmosphere would be (until your shields gave out and your ship was crushed, I suppose). Might have been a cool mechanic to have to scoop fuel from gas giants for long jumps, but I guess it probably wasn't possible in their engine.
@@SeraphArmaros and the fuel system was basically scrapped anyway.
Half of their "realism" mechanics (fuel, local planetary time, etc) are there but completely unused.
Todd also said "We can do anything, we just can't do everything" I have no idea what they were trying to do with this game.
Something?
Want an answer? They wanted to make a game with next to no effort and charge a lot of money for it. That's the purpose of their game. "Realism" is just an excuse for it being empty.
They had a vision of a “space exploration game” but didn’t have any actual talent or passion to get a clue what gamers actually want to play
they can do anything, they can't do everything, and they won't do anything
The problem with starfield isn't that its realistic. Its problem is that its boring. Its "crowded" planets don't have enough to be interesting, and its "empty" planets have far too much stuff to feel barren.
Yes, the "empty" planets have too much stuff. They are covered with little outposts and military bases and mines and ruins... that's not empty. Even when you are supposed to be an explorer that is surveying a planet for the "first" time you find it crowded with random human-made stuff.
So many Empty Planets... Yet I can't build anything on it? I can't control the planet with an armada?
TTRPGs do better with Empty Worlds. Even under Realism.
The "You see that mountain? you can go there" wasn't just a technical marvel either. There actually was something on it or beyond it. The Throat of the World in Skyrim is something everyone was forced to take but nobody said anything about a troll being there and I found it amusing. Other mountains are there too and nothing else points to them. Go north and apparently there's a passage through the mountain leading to a village with a vampire. go south, and you'll see plenty of ruins with tons of history behind it. Go further south and you'll end up where the game began. Go west and you'll find a recluse archer actually teaching you how to hold a bow besides just levelling you up. Go around random rock elevations and you'll meet with various orc tribes each with their own issues.
Even Fallout 4 had something like that. Go beyond the MAP and you'll see almost nothing but ruins and a bunch of deathclaws. Why go there? Oh, there's a quest where you have to meet with a recluse doctor mutant. That's a little deep in the wasteland thing but you can go further and meet with a settlement of humans that nobody mentions and they give you quests.
Starfield feels like a Bethesda game but doesn't feel like a Bethesda game. It feels like a Bethesda game because it has all that jank and NPC talks and fetch quests. It doesn't feel like a Bethesda game because getting lost or attempting to push beyond charted paths just isn't rewarded anymore.
Whenever Bethesda attempts realism it tends to fail and make the gameplay feel like a parody of realism. Skyrims survival mode for example, you manage hunger but it's so laughably unrealistic. You have to choke down ten cheese wedges and end up still being "peckish". All it does is break immersion and make the gameplay end up being a chore. Starfield has a similar issue with its empty planets, less of a parody, more of a chore.
In Fallout 4 survival mode you had to chug probably 40 pints of water a day and even if you made a 5 story mega mansion with a vault bed you'd catch diseases when you slept.
That's actually just a mod, fanmade. Nothing out of the original game and it's 3 DLCs is official. Bethesda has put zero effort into the game since it released.
@@gabrielcruz2510 ah yes you're correct, I should have realized that it wasn't Bethesda made in origin because it doesn't require an unofficial patch to make it work properly. lol
@@Drak976 I mean to be fair, if you're going to sleep on a bed made out of two hundred year old cigarettes and the shirt off a murdered raider, catching parasites overnight doesn't sound entirely far-fetched. 🪳
@dreadpenguinlord340 yeah, except he didn't say that. He said a MANSION the player built themselves with a VAULT TEC BED which is one of the cleaner beds.
250 devs (not a single leather jacket amongst them) to implement an eat button. 2 months to implement and FOV slider.
cash grab/scam is how 'i would describe the game with how lazy the development is and have been
You’d think getting the Creation Kit out there would have been their top priority seeing as how modders are the reason why this company is still relevant after all this time.
Per some of employee leaked information the whole realism was just BS spun by Todd because his dynamic generation couldn’t create varied content as they hoped it would do. Employees proposed doing it manually which would delayed the release and cost more $$ so Todd rejected it .
Source?
@@fallingintimeValve.
i made it the fuck up, still believable lol
I disagree. Starfield (for me) was doomed by bad dialogue, bad NPCs, meaningless exploration, and generally dull quests. Yes, the oft quoted 1000 planets really do just have rocks (realistic) and the same abandoned outposts (not realistic). I could deal with that easily because the fact is that I can ignore it, just as I can ignore outpost building and most of crafting and and many of the other game mechanics that I don't much care for. If the stories were good, the quests were good, and the NPCs something more than cardboard cutouts it would be a pretty good game. Not great, but pretty good. Combine the barren planets with menu driven space travel, bad dialogue, bad NPCs, bad missions, etc. and the game ends up being not so good.
yep. the fundamental game design is irreparably flawed. they'd have to completely rebuild the game for it to not be terrible. that isn't the fault of the gamespace by any means, in a game like what starfield was pretending to be a massive play area would only improve the experience, even if that massive play area was mostly empty.
I think that quote from Gabe really hit the nail on the head.
A game “has to be” fun, and even though that doesn’t mean it has to ALWAYS be fun, or that it has to be directly fun, or even that “fun” in trhis case has any exact and specific meaning. But every gamedesign decision should be made with the consideration of “is this fun? If so, where, why and how?”
The issue with Starfields empty planets isn’t neccessarily that they’re empty. In fact, they’re never empty - and yet there’s nothing meaningful for the player to do. Hauling deer carcasses to your camp in RDR2 one by one for the 50th time isn’t “fun” either, and yet the game facilitates that kind of tedium much better because the world around it, and the actual act of hunting or the things you find during your travels to and from your hunting grounds makes it fun. It’s one little piece of a giant puzzle that fits together to make a picture. Starfield’s mechanics are just random puzzle pieces from different
single color sets that may or may not even fit together.
It’s wild how mid Bethesda has shown themselves to be as game devs over the last decade when creating RPGs with choice and consequences. This game was the first Bethesda game I played on launch and I just learned my lesson. It’s gonna be more sad when people still attempt to praise ES6 when it’ll somehow be even more steps back in every way.
@@pelliclemean Ik there’s wacky shit lore wise in Hammerfell but knowing Bethesda they’ll fuck it up. I hope it’s interesting instead of 90% desert and emptiness and 10% actual things. Which best describes starfields disconnected world.
@@pellicle Starfield's cities aren't particularly big either, especially the secondary ones like Cydonia, and certainly don't feel like people have lived in them for 200 years. My biggest problem with New Atlantis is that while it's "big" it's also mostly empty space, which ends up encouraging you to fast travel between districts to get anything done in a reasonable time. Ultimately that made the city feel just as small as Skyrim's, if not smaller.
It is wild. Back during the days around Elder Scrolls Oblivion and before, they really were among the biggest open world developers, moving forward, with a very high degree of object interactivity.
However, it seemed once they got to the physics engine of Oblivion (which was when they first started showing stuff like lanterns that could be pushed and swing realistically, with the light source and shadows it produced showing the movement) they kind of rested on their laurels and allowed the rest of the industry to catch up and surpass them. They weren’t looking at their technology and concentrate R&D to push beyond the creation engine. All the while, others were developing new, more advanced, and streamlined technologies.
Skyrim, the first release of it, was still well received, but unbeknownst to them, other companies were near to releasing their entry into the fold. Once that happened, we got the showing of what happened 10 years ago. Others with the new improved engines, and Bethesda still with their same engine. Releasing with major bugs, as usual, where the competition released games with way more polish. But they had lots of earned good will, in the end. I think Fallout 76, especially as relatively new it is, was the biggest breaking point. By then, people lost patience with their release states, and to have a game release in even a worse state than their previous games combined?
This is kind of a tortoise and the hare style of story.
Here’s the thing. Skyrim, Oblivion, and Fallout 3 were criticized heavily for a long time by RPG enthusiasts as being too mainline, and casual. Only thing going for these games have ever been the exploration and all the dialog in between. They were amazing at world building, but when it came to choices, and RPG strategy, these games didn’t have any. It’s only just now reaching the mainstream that Bethesda is over rated. Starfield had to be a masterpiece not just mid, and they failed.
@@akaimizu1 pretty much everyone has always agreed oblivion made big technological steps, but skyrim was always a massive step back. when it was released it was only a matter of days until the forum, people who actually cared about video games, noticed literally every single part of the world revolved around you and only you. it was a shitty themepark ride.
I kind of disagree with this point: I spent a very very long time flying through a "more realistic" gigantic galaxy that was 99.99999...% empty. With my VR goggles in Elite: Dangerous just exploring Systems no one has even been to, sometimes for days. But E:D made me feel the loneliness out there and the transitions that felt more seamless were a substantial part of this. And of course the knowledge, that I will be mindlessly jumping from system to system for days to get back to civilization again. (There is no fast travel from Sagittarius A* back to the bubble)
Everywhere I go in Starfield, there is already some kind of outpost, the same you have cleared dozen of times, and there is always a ship landing a few moments later. It's never really "empty", it's just dull. Like an endless roadtrip through boring mid-sized towns, full of identical houses (only changing the color scheme), where the biggest attraction are parking lots, Walmarts and Starbucks.
Perhaps a much better way for Starfield would have been to add more freedom for the player: Make all NPCs killable and make they choices have consequences. Make the Unity available to the players no matter what they do, but when they reach it it, they feel regret what they did, reset everything and try to make it better. Or they can cause absolute chaos for a few playthroughs, take over the Crimson Cringe from the angsty teenagers that lead it and destroy the other factions. Or take the place of the Hunter, whatever...
Yep
That is one of the most stupid things in this game, that every 'uncharted' planet is littered already with massive outposts, the remains of extensive mining operations or huge military bases. It's like in this fairytale about the hare and the hedgehog, I'm here already. And yet we have to walk around for hours, scanning crap, because no one could ever be bothered to do this before we arrived. And of course it is doing wonders for immersion when you enter one of those bases and find it occupied with raiders who, despite never having seen you or knowing that you just choined their faction five minutes ago, apparently know who you are and then tell you for the umptiest time how lucky you are they won't kill you.
Todd talks about realism. Asteroid field where the rocks are almost touching rather than being 600,000 miles apart....
If only they'd gotten rid of the grav drives too! Unrealistic. Incidentally, having the player sit for twenty-thousand-odd years in realtime to travel would have solved the loading screen issue. 😛
I like gamified realism. Realism on a sliding scale. Red Dead Redemption 2 has awesome realism in how the character moves around, GTA4 had challenging car physics that were fun to get good at. The problem with Starfield is that they didn't make realism fun in ways they could have.
Lmfao yeah one of my biggest problems is that space flight is garbage you can’t fly your ship from planet to space without loading screen and you can fly just from one planet to another with relatively fast pace like in no man’s sky and honestly Bethesda just copies and paste from other games anyways with no real thought because there writing has been trash for so long
One thing that is a missed opportunity to talk about: in project zomboid you have to reload the magazines for your gun bullet by bullet. This was used to prop up the games MAIN focus: Survival, and STRESS. You just used your last bullet, your melee weapon is broken, you have a massive horde, do you run and reload, do you run? Or do you stand and fight with your shove attack and try to go out in a blaze of glory?
I don't think realism is the problem, rather to what extent the game approximates realism. In games we can remove things that are tedious and inconvenient in the real world (we can add fast travel over large maps, but with the option to travel in real time if you want, which is what Red Dead Redemption did), while retaining an approximation of everything else. I think it's a spectrum, with Ubisoft open-world games on one end, and Farming Simulator on the other.
Authenticity and Realisim are two different things and I argue this all the time with people about video games. It’s not about how real things are so much as how much they authentically make sense in the world I inhabit while in the game.
to go further; differentiating them in the context of video game discussion is just tautology. literally no ones want traveling from planet to planet to take thousands of years in a sci-fi game and we all know what people actually mean when they say they want realism.
would it have been better within a solar system of like 5+ planets? The planets can be quite unique and full, then there could be a second solar system or an asteroid or something as a late game spice up.
Just an idea
I don't think the hard sci-fi approach to Starfield was a bad idea. It's a great idea because hard sci-fi is very underrated. The problem isn't the realism-it's quite the opposite- it just comes down to a lack of realism and effort. Imagine if they added survival mechanics to the game so that traveling to barren planets wasn't dull but necessary to collect resources or put in place an oxygen system that limits the time you can be out in space. Specific systems would make it challenging and use its setting to tell a compelling and gritty story. Instead, they put zero effort into explaining the science and only used the Nasapunk style as a texture pack instead of developing the world around realism. They used realism to be lazy. It's lacking so much depth to be called realism, and instead, it is just negligence.
The lack of realism and immersion is the problem. Realism is not imitating real life but provide the similar depth of real life.
Yep exactly. The problem is Bethesda is a complacent half-assing studio
They are not consistent in it's application. But than again. They had No design. The game feels like it was made by 100 cooks because it was. The world building lacks any sense of cohesion
I would have been happy if Starfield had a hard sci-fi approach.
Hard sci-fi is considered "underrated" because most people just don't like it. Which makes it a bad idea if you want to sell it.
@@Tattle-by-Tale
Indeed.
Tried: Elite Dangerous. It just was't for me.
When I found out Starfield was "Nasapunk" I immediately checked out. Especially since the setting is simultaneously "realistic" and utterly not believable at the same time. Games should be fun before anything else, realism be damned.
> Games should be fun before anything else, realism be damned.
Sounds like NASA. Entertaining fictions.
There’s a bit of advice when writing “if it isn’t important to the story don’t include it”.
Personally if I was developing Starfield I would’ve have a couple of important worlds with hand crafted maps and for the many of the other worlds I would have a similar system to Mass Effect using the ship scanner you can discover sources raw materials and launch probes to collect them but at the same time scanning could uncover “dungeons” pirate outposts,abandoned research stations etc landing near by and explore the facility and the surrounding area.
Is that a perfect substitute? Probably not but at the very least the diverted resources could be put into making randomly generated dungeons more unique and varied.
Violate the Law of Conservation of Detail too much, and it'll bite you in the ass.
I'd say Bethesda learned it the hard way, except they didn't even really add that much detail anyway when you boil it down. Just blandness.
The only realism this game achieve is You Die When You Are Killed, that's it.
The pursuit should be for it to be immersive. Sometimes realism helps that pursuit, but it can also hamper it plenty. Todd seems to have forgotten that.
What you're talking about is the difference between "believable" and realistic. Skyrim is immersive because it feels believable. But its not realistic of course. Gabe is right. Realism is not escapism. Unless the games purpose is to be a simulator. Starfield is neither fun. Nor a simulator. So it fails twice.
Starfield makes No Mans Sky look like a AAA hit.
Another thing about realism is that we can't experience games with all our senses. Something that's naturally pleasant and exciting (walking in the woods) can be extremely boring in game cause we're just holding down the mouse button. Games have to convey the *feeling* of walking in the woods. Designers use like perfectly placed landmarks, bears, bandits, music, sunbeams, etc. Its never enough for things just to be a scan of real life.
I love the realism in Starfield. Here's a couple of quick examples:
1 hour nap on Venus, becomes 100 hour coma
Massive Outpost containers holding 1/3 of what fits in your pockets
Yep, they were definitely aiming for "realism"
I'm kind of surprised Elon didn't see this game and say; "We can do this now... I swear, it's not that hard..."
Starfield realism “ when astronauts went to the moon they had five loading screens “
And they weren't bored!
@@Mugthief Although once they completed all the content sixty years ago, they never came back. :)
Leather Jacket in space…now that’s realism
Their claim of "realism" was just a cover for them not wanting to produce actual content for Starfield. It was a gamble that failed.
I feel like this entire discussion around realism is really context dependent: when I play a survival game, I don’t mind a bit of realism within the context of a food/health/thirst meter and I need to replenish them to be able to continue to explore, craft and do my thing - I can tolerate that kind of realism because it makes sense and it imposes conditions on the game that make you balance multiple objectives and pursuits towards one overall goal, such as building a base or certain tool. When I play a flight simulator, I expect there to be a certain amount of realism in there because I’m playing a simulator based game, and I don’t mind having to monitor oil gauges and such and check flaps and make sure that I have the right vector and I am prepared properly for landing and all these other things because I’m playing a simulator game and I expect a certain level of realism to go along with that simulation. However, when I’m playing an RPG or anything outside of the realm of being a simulator type experience, I expect realism to be centered around the concept of ‘Does it make the game fun?’ Does it add a certain quality of life feature to the game that makes it easier, or is this something that’s been put in there to serve as an additional barrier by the developers to artificially extend the time of the experience and it’s being slapped with the label of fun when in reality it’s not fun at all, it’s just a hassle. I feel that if these developers actually played the games that they’re making, they’d quickly understand what the fans are complaining about what we say an experience is not fun.
Realism isn't what ruined Starfield. It's poor writing, game design, terrible leadership, lack of polish, and being bereft of focus. Content is king.
To be fair mr todd never said starfield "just works" so what did we honestly expect?
The big issue with Starfield. - Why are there airlocks to habitation pods at outposts on breathable air planets.
Those are a precaution in case you already happen to be full of carbon dioxide.
It’s called cut and paste lazy development.
Words I would use to describe Starfield:
Lethargic, Erroneous, Average, Tremendous, Haphazardly, Exhausting, Relaxing
But also
Jaded, Alright, Costly, Kinky (leave that to the modders ;) ), Enormous, Tedious.
Now @Mugthief read every first letter of the two lists.
Imo neither realism nor procedural generation is the issue in starfield. Its that it does never go all the way. It uses realism as a copout, but then theres space magic. Aliens? Cant have that! Crazy animals? Sure! Fascinating pois? Nah. Time travel? Sure!
Same goes for the randomized part. Nms did it well because everything is generated, thats cool because you know the rules, you are excited when you find a landmark that has been created by pure chance, a cave by the sea, and start building a base. In starfield, the procedural generation is limited to placement of trees and samey hills but the pois are completely static and hand crafted. You KNOW that you will only find the same things in the same places. Whilst nms is randomized to a degree where i find a space port, see random amazing looking ships landing, so i decide to watch and see if i want to buy one whilst a heavy storm is rolling along, the rain pelting my ship whilst im listening to music, lightning striking hills in the distance. Things like that dont happen naturally in starfield.
This is why I’m thrilled the tech wasn’t possible for Casey Hudson to do this with the Mass Effect trilogy. Think how different those games would have been.
When you said “maybe the empty planets are designed for modders to fill them” I literally paused te video and was like whaaaaaat? Holy shit that makes so much sense and sounds like something Bethesda would totally do at this point. The whole “realism” thing is a total cop out and it speaks volumes about how dumb they think their customers are.
Clips are rarely used these days. Typically, firearms use magazines. It doesn't matter if they use a metal or leather jacket.
I believe the saying goes "Clips are what civvies use in their hair, this is called a magazine." Much love!
i remember before the game came out some one asked if the planets would be real sized. i then pointed out that earth is about 32 million skyrims. Just think of the challenge of making that. some time realism is just way harder and more boring than people can understand
The real planets and moons in our solar system are much more interesting than their counterparts in Starfield.
In my opinion they should've just made like 50 or so handcrafted planets instead of having a thousand empty ones.
DCS world is a very realistic military flight sim, but not to the point where your plane is down for maintenance and getting an oil change. Not every bit of realism belongs in a game. Nor in Starfield.
Realism is no loading screens or fast-travel. C'mon Todd! It just sucks!
If Starfield is a "realistic" conception of the future of humanity, I'm glad I'll be dead before we get there.
You can put a list of empty planets in the corner. That's how EVE Online launched and survived it's first decade. No landing was allowed though.
What's ironic is that Starfield came so short of my expectations that I tried Fallout 76. It's not great but the feeling of exploration and discovery is infinitely better.
Imagine if you can explore the entire Milky Way irl filled with millions of civilization that's very very very similiar to each others, you get bored real quick.
Where I want realism in games:
Lighting
Physics
...that's about it
The game that balanced realism and gameplay (with fun) for me was Red Dead Redemption 2. Yes, there were long stretches of travel on horseback, but random events happened to break up the monotony (I rarely used fast travel). The world felt alive (and graphically, it was pretty) but also allowed the player to cause chaos if you wanted.
There was stuff to do (hunting, poker, blackjack, the knife game, and dominos, the 90 challenges, and environmental storytelling in the buildings you’d stumble on. The whole game took its time between the main missions and fast-paced gunplay to immerse you in the setting and characters (and with the realistic, slower animations it almost encouraged the player to also slow down and explore).
14:34
900 planets is a far cry from a realistic galaxy at a realistic scale.
Someone described the game as "having promised us the ability to swim in a vast ocean, we find that it's really only possible to go from one small goldfish bowl to a series of other small goldfish bowls". This and the fact that so much of the actual game play is mind-numbingly tedious and endlessly repetetive - even the "random encounters" are given the same scenarios and script lines over and over (and over!) again.
The playable area of my Ideal game regarding
Main Campaign was almost entirely restricted to the Single Planet, with a final upgrade to airship capable of travelling to few end-game locations like orbital space station and/or the Moon itself
Rest of the home Solar system of that planet, would consist of additional story lines, perhaps unlocked by completing sidequest, ie worked for a energy company, turn Jupitor in 2nd sun etc
Whilest outside of the Solar System is considered Multiplayer, access to which are already granted by having partially access to alien Portal Network, allowing Co-op on a individual basis.
And through the main campaign, the player Spaceship would activate a local beacon for singleplayer fast travel, but by deliberarly boosting allowing others to join
They could’ve leaned hard into realism and give us a slow paced experience like Elite Dangerous where you have to manage fuel and plan your routes properly or get hit with the consequences. But they didn’t because “running out of fuel isn’t fun”. So what we got is a consequence-free empty planet hopping simulator.
In Elite, reaching the furthest barren planet in the galaxy is an achievement because of all the time and planning that has to be put into it. Even if reaching it has no extrinsic reward, there is accomplishment in being one of the crazy few that actually did it. (And now you have to make the return trip.)
The moment then announced a 1000 procgen planets I knew Starfield was gonna suck.
This reminds me, I forget who said it, but I remember someone in their video saying something along the lines of "gamers don't want realism, they want believability"
Or for the rules no matter how fantastical to us irl, to make sense for the game world. Like a plumber jumping 10 feet into the air and spitting fire balls one game and flying through space on wooden ships with propellers many games later. Not realistic, but believable for its world where a fire breathing turtle and a scientist who made a vacuum for catching ghosts both exist.
Appreciate your input. I feel like so much of what you said in the video and in your responses to comments rings true for me. I've played Skyrim 800+ hours, Fallout 3, and Fallout 4 (like 650 hours on 4).....and I was so hyped for Starfield...and was so disappointed - though I sloughed to 200 hours of playing) - that I wrote my first ever review (it was negative) on Steam. In the two months since then my thoughts have congealed and this is how I explain it to family/friends - Starfield feels like the team at Bethesda were like the scientists at Jurassic Park. They saw this new technology - ai generated planets, and ran with things without ever asking if they should. Honestly, they could have made this game after Skyrim. I mean think about it - with all of the load screens, with inability to fully explore a planet, with the ability to actually fly onto/off of a planet etc., there's no reason they couldn't have done this game with the technology they had between Skyrim and Fallout 4. Of course, what they don't say directly is that what they didn't have was the ai to build the planets for them so they didn't have to craft 1,000+ planets themselves. The team there seems to have forgotten, or maybe never understood because FO 4 was way less incredible than Skyrim, that it's the elements of open exploration, hand crafted environments, good story lines, and surprises that made Skyrim great. As many other commentators said here and in other video reviews online, and I've said the same thing to other first before seeing these comments, they could have made a game with 10 planets, each with maps the size of Skyrim, each featuring a different type of atmosphere/biomes..... and even leaving in the same bad writing style, the same stupid main quest (which is basically skyrim in space), leaving in the same repetitive space battles, etc....and the game would be 10, 50, 100x better. 99% of gamers understand that the technology to make a game with a 1,000 + planets all with the same look/feel of a hand crafted environment like Skyrim (or event FO 4) doesn't exist yet - they're a company and need to make money so they can't hire 10,000 developers, artists, etc. and they can't build a game that only .000001% of the gaming population can afford to buy a machine to run it on. Lastly, I think the game proves how they've lost their way because leaving aside all the damn bugs that should have been caught in testing, if they had been truly open to feedback/reviews during the making of it, they would have learned that the game is empty and people don't want an empty game. Not from Bethesda. This wasn't supposed to be a "space simulator".....so again they could have stuck with much smaller planet count, focused on story and exploration, and people would have been satisfied. I mean heck, they weren't event hard working enough to program in different spawn points/options for bad guys and loot in the ai generated locations. Like at least if every time I encountered an "Abandoned research tower" or a "Deserted UC listening post" or any of the 30-40 choices the system picks from and the bad guys and the loot wasn't always in the same place.....it would have been 2x more enjoyable. How lazy/stupid are you as a AAA game developer to not think that poor choices like that wouldn't lead to angry customers. And then, to top it off, they started telling players online that no, we don't understand how to play the game. Like wtf. Every top executive should be canned for this. This is worse than the Pinto, Gremlin, Delorean, and every other car that flopped combined.
The Earth Is Flat like a leather jacket can sometimes be.
They knew this evidenced by Tim Lamb's "whats fun for the player" comment in _Starfield Direct: The Hollywood Film._ So this is already their _fun_ version. :/
"That moon in background, it is not a background picture, but a real place, you can go there..." Criss Roberts, "and you can fly over there without loading screens!"
It’s like the realistic video games in that one Rick and Morty episode…
I love realism… but not when it comes as the cost of fun and entertaining gameplay.
this ain't realism bro. This is half-assed bethesda shit.
I believe visually, people want realism, and gameplay to be plausible, not just a copy and paste of real life. This promotes immersion, which all gamers consume like a drug.
Really hit the nail on the head in my opinion. I didn't even bother with collecting resources because it was just easier to make a list of what I needed and buy it in town. So exploring was just extra pointless. I just threw on my leather jacket, flipped the game off, and stopped playing.
I think the worst part about this game are the loading screens and that you can't FLY to any planet yourself.
Elite Dangerous for example was / is pretty popular i think and there is a real galaxy to explore with millions of empty planets.
But it's just a different feeling if you go there via fast travel or take your time to actually light speed your way there.
Most players can forgive the jest and numerous flaws in Skyrim and Fallout 4 because they are games with much more "personality" than Starfield, an anachronistic, generic, and soulless game despite its astronomical cost (pun intended). It's a shame that many people were led to spend a small fortune on the game with the expectation of having as much fun as they did with other Bethesda games. It would have been better to buy a leather jacket or give Game Pass a try before making that decision.
Congratulations on the content, Mugthief! I have no idea how challenging it must be to balance video creation with other commitments and how difficult it must be to expand the channel's reach. Merry Christmas to you and your beautiful audience!
Merry Christmas to you and yours as well! Thank you so much for the support!
Realism has been so overused over the years that it's just become more of a buzzword. Besides it's kind of a vague term. You add walking in a game, and bam! Realism.
Realism? What realism? Starfield isn't even nearly realistic.
It reminds me of the Rick and Morty episode where their video game had a realism setting, and when it was put to 10 for realism, they were just drifting through the vast void of space.
No wonder my hyper realistic Drill Press Operator game didn't catch on. And I was already working on my Taking Some Hits in the Parking Lot DLC.
Sounds genuinely more exciting than roaming Starfields Galaxy. I would review it.
*Todd disliked that*
I'm of the opinion that Bethesda hasn't wanted to design video *games* since Fallout 3. It's always about the world, how their engine can generate cool stuff (which is probably why they'll never let that poor thing die in peace since they know it so well) and what touches they can make. It's why Skyrim was gutted of any real RPG mechanics and interactions, why FO4 has a bunch of half-baked ideas, why FO76 didn't need NPCs, why Starfield is what it is and why I think TES 6 will be awful if Todd has anything to do with it. It's also why their games are buggy pieces of trash: They spend 80% of their time making the world and then remember that maybe they should also have a game somewhere in there, even if their world generating engine can't handle it. It's one thing if the bugs were new and exciting but the fact is that they're largely the same as in Morrowind. SF was their test of procedural generation and I'm pretty sure everyone in the office high-fived over it and then moved back to TES. It might sound cynical as hell but I'm an old fart who's been on the entire 3D ride, so from Morrowind onwards, and there's been a clear and obvious decline with every title since. Bethesda has slowly and *very* consistently gutted almost all gameplay and interesting mechanics from their titles in favor of doing more "world" things that nobody asked for. And keep in mind that these games have such a long dev cycle that there's no justifiable reason for them being so buggy and lackluster in terms of story and mechanics.
It's remarkable how the best Bethesda game since Morrowind is the one Fallout game they didn't make and forced a much smaller company to create in only 18 months, while also screwing them out of their money because they were 1 point off a metacritic score.
I don't want games to be realistic.
I want them to be consistent!
I absolutely love the Bethesda quote "the astronauts weren't bored on the moon." Like they do realize that's real life right, and you could actually experience the low-g. People play videogames because they typically offer something you can't do, whether physically or budgetary, in real life. If they could video games would be dead.
Er... What SFs "realism" even in theory has to do with it being boring trash? The problem is that it has identical objects doing identical things in incompatible environments, the problem is dysfunctional narrative, the problem is degenerate NPCs, the problem is brutal mismatch of systems and mechanics that contradict each other instead of reinforcing. Assigned pseudo-realism, mostly ignored in-game BTW, is irrelevant to the issue.
There's a good concept at the very end of video that might encapsulate the correct use of realism in videogames you mention in Part 2: "realistic dream".
For example: gravity changes between planets in Starfield; Resident Evil's inventory management (now inherent to any survival game); or the movement variation susceptible to character's equipment in plenty of RPGs.
“Environmental damage on planets works in such a way that your suit has immunities to certain types of atmospheric impacts or radiation. In the beginning, it was a more complicated system. In fact, it was very punishing,"
“In the end, we considered it too complicated a system, so we simply nerfed it. It's a matter of taste. Knowing that you are suffering is more annoying than the in-game effect itself,"
- Todd Howard
6:02- I can totally understand the idea of wanting to represent empty space to get that desolate feeling....
But that needs to be VERY well curated and roped off -- EG:
1. a meager % of planets (eg: 10%) are EMPTY and noted as such
2. War-torn / dead civilization planets
3. a galaxy section outlined and LABELLED as "the desolate sector" and then just have emptiness roped off there
4. CLEAR outlines on the map of "crafted" areas, with other areas in yellow and explain these as "cultivated/settled space"
5. SECTIONS of planets being empty (and then having settled areas being huge and populated, similar to suburban cities)
But having 90% of planets, randomly scattered... as EMPTY and encouraging exploration DIRECTLY to these?
Yeah.... no.....
NASA ruined a lot of the game. To use NASA in the game the devs had to go with NASA's vision of the future.
I totally believe you with the "we can't do that" ever since I couldn't travel Skyrim on top of a fu dragon
No it's not because of Realism. They don't give a shit about Realism.
Todd Howard boasted about 16 times the detail & 100+ planets not for realism, but for sales pitch. They did not made the planet barren because of realism, but for their lazy asses too lazy to implement meaningful traveling mechanics. It's not the pursue of realism that doomed Starfield. It's the half-assed attempt at while failing at innovating the holistic gameplay experience.
Mugthief, the problem with Starfield's realism is that it's not small enough to be hand-crafted, while being too small to let the procedural generation shine. Elite: Dangerous has a realistic galaxy, but it is so huge that less than 1% of the galaxy is explored. People explore just looking for amazing sights. Consider that Starfield does not have a single red giant, neutron star, or black hole.
Also, in the settled systems equivalent, there's an active market simulation going on, and random planets might become important trade a mission hubs.
The "Have you seen my leather jacket around here?" just got you a new subscription
As soon as I heard procedural generation from Todd, I knew Starfield was in trouble. Nothing good would come out of it, from a studio, who use to specialize in hand crafted open worlds.
Firstly, Planet implementation is a design flaw dressed up as a feature. Secondly, "features" need a reason for being so they taught us about the moon landings. Thirdly, once this confidence trick was established the "feature" could be defended "Sorry if you don't like our feature, It's a you thing!"
It's gaslighting on an industrial scale, pure n simple.
I wouldn't say a game needs to be fun, but a compelling experience that you want to see through. TLOU2 comes to mind. It's not fun per se at points, but it's one of the most compelling, intense and unforgettable experiences I've had in games.
I got into an Airplane flight Simulator, mostly because when I crashed the game didn't proclaim I died and then deleted itself. It wasn't as fun as flying an Actual plain Im sure, but actual plains are expensive, you have to take a long series of test to get a license, and when you crash. Your gone!
This also applies to Todds Greatest defense of this game. The Astronauts and the Moon landing. Yeah, in Star field you don't spend days traveling to these planets, only able to move in a compartment the size of a small Camper. Peeing into a tube and eating flavored foam. Doing motion calculations and system test for Days on end, because if you land wrong you are dead.
So that thrill of having made it to the Moon past all of that, just doesn't exist if you just push a button and suddenly your there.
The playstation one covered this starfield reality with a title called colony wars which if you can get is more exiciting and has little time for reality.
Playing no mans sky while watching this and its so baffling how it just can do all of that. I really wonder how many devs there even played this.
Knowing them I feel like they were probably too arrogant to engage and learn from NMS.
that Gabe quote at the start says it all - the grocery store is realsitic, so much realism bro! lolol Do you have fun there?
I can understand the multitude of 100's of "empty" planets, but the inhabited worlds that only have a single small city with NPC's from an early 2000's video game is what really kills it. The games major cities feel empty and dead.
I knew Starfield was going to fail since announcement when there were no humanoid alien races confirmed. The game reeked of staleness and cheap creativity from the start