Starfield Was a Mistake | An Analytical Review
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- čas přidán 30. 06. 2024
- From the makers of Fallout 76, The Elder Scrolls: Blades, and The Elder Scrolls: Castles, comes Bethesda Softworks' most ambitious RPG yet: STARFIELD. A game DESIGNED to be played for a DECADE.
In this analytical review/deconstruction/retrospective, I look at how Bethesda utterly fails to make Starfield about anything. How they demonstrate a complete lack of understanding of the type of game they are trying to make, the genres it inhabits, market trends and advancements, and even what made their past games like Skyrim successful. As a result, Starfield turned out to be a joyless, soulless, bland mess of disjointed ideas that ended up disappointing pretty much everyone, Microsoft included.
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- More Starfield Content -
EFAP #270 - NeverKnowsBest VS. PatricianTV & Creetosis - Lies, Hate and the story of Emil Pagliarulo
• EFAP #270 - NeverKnows...
Lies, Hate and the story of Emil Pagliarulo
• Lies, Hate and the sto...
PatricianTV and I talk about our Starfield projects:
• Longform Analysis & Re...
Starfield Streams: • Starfield Streams
- Chapters -
0:00 - The Concept: Bethesda's Big Space Game
9:50 - Exploration I: Inspirations & Traveling
30:41 - Exploration II: Visuals & Dungeons
56:40 - Gameplay I: Combat
1:21:11 - Gameplay II: Skills, Leveling, Outposts & Ships
1:57:46 - Main Story I: Intro, Character Creation & The Settled Systems
2:43:53 - Main Story II: Companions, Quests & Unity
3:43:07 - A Modder's Paradise
#starfield #longformcontent #bethesda - Hry
I love how Starfield made everything optional. It was so optional I opted to do something fun instead
Yeah it was so universally received as being meh then I didn’t even bother to play it . And I used to love Bethesda games I pre-ordered 76 gave up on it came back to it a couple years later gave up on it and came back to work during Covid to give up on it for the final time
Yep. I opted to play Phantom Liberty instead...
I stopped playing it after the first temple, because I had experienced no joy or excitement during that time. I just went with the flow and kept playing, because numbers went up. But all in all, I noticed I was just wasting my time.
Astronauts weren't bored when flying to the moon, therefore your feelings about Starfield are invalid.
Couldn't have said it better myself. It just made me want to go play Elite Dangerous instead, where the space actually feels... space-y.
I think the biggest legacy Starfield leaves behind isn't "arrow in the knee" or "everyone disliked that" or anything in game, but rather these documentaries about why Starfield is bad lol
Because it's bad in a fascinating way. A prestige studio spent several years and more than $100 million building Starfield, and this is what came out? Why? How? Who let this happen?
Haha so true, CZcamsrs have been feasting on this game
These reviewers bravely waited 4 months after the game was released to drop these videos. The people with backbones released their videos within the first week of launch even though they knew the fanbois would attack them. Now that it's "safe" to not like Starfield, everybody else is dogpiling.
@@Zoabdy I disagree. I adore some of the reviewers/essayists taking down this game. But Starfield videos are aggressively unmemorable. Likely because the game itself is.
@@Truth_Teller_101You must be new here
What kills me is they make this space game with no pre-established lore holding them down but instead of making a unique galaxy full of cool alien species that maybe you could even play as, we get only humans in what feels like fallout 4 with a crusty, space themed paint job.
Its funny how spore does everything better than starfield does.
YEA a whole galaxy out there but everyone is human. The characters and story are painfully boring. I wanted to love the game but it's so bland
I’m fine with having humans as the only intelligent life if they’re going for a space western like Firefly, Outer Worlds, or Borderlands. The problem is they didn’t fill it with interesting things to see and do. It also needs a stronger sense of atmosphere to carry a premise like that.
Ironically there are aliens in Fallout 🤣
I don't have any issue with having a more grounded sci-fi setting if it's well-realized and there's good writing to back it up. Unfortunately, they completely failed on both fronts.
It’s kinda wild that Mass Effect did the whole “space opera about ancient alien artifacts, with squad combat and enjoyable planetary traversal” way, WAY better all the way back in 2007.
Like, it’s completely unacceptable that a space game set in the 24th century wouldn’t have some sort of small vehicle to traverse a planet, like the Mako from ME. And yet Bethesda really just said “Nope, you’re walking!”
Man, the Mass Effect: Legendary Edition really goes to show how well the trilogy has aged in the last decade or two. Whenever I see gameplay like Starfield, it makes me just want to boot up and play Mass Effect again.
To be fair, if only a little, the team behind Mass Effect was behind Knights of the Old Republic, you can see similarities in the story between the first 2 games of their franchises.
Starfield does have one fun aspect. Photo mode is fun, especially when you encounter glitchy NPC's. Aside from that, it's very barren. Fallout 4 even with no mods is so much better in terms of raw gameplay.
And as noted, lore is non-existent here. This Universe is pointless.
@@tommyg8570 A few signposts in the game would go a long way, like when you leave Whiterun in Skyrim there is a signpost pointing to 4 locations.
Considering the small amount of stuff in Starfield that would be an easy mod.
To be fair to bugthesda, they can't make "land based" vehicles with how old and defunct their creation engine is
Starfield killed my hype for Elder Scrolls 6
It made it abundantly clear that they did not look at how playing games has evolved in a decade. Cyberpunk 2077 blew all of this away.
same.
Like many studios, Bethesda's talented artists are long gone. And Starfield has the same designer as Fallout 76...
ES6 will likely be set in one zone like skyrim, morrowind and oblivion. ES6 will be good. starfield is just meant to be a different type of experience.
Real
"The astronauts weren't bored when they went to the moon" yeah todd they were on fraggin' moon and I'm sitting at my desk playing your shitty game.
They also had a kick-ass rover.
Rick and Morty had a joke about this in a season 6 episode where Beth banged her clone.
They've tried to save some oxygen all the time and not aimlessly running around like morons in a mmorpg.
you made my day dude 🤣🤣
lol I know right? Everyone else goes through so many elaborate counterarguments to this stupid ass point, and I'm just over here like "Well, I'm not actually on the fucking moon like they were, Todd."
In hindsight, it seems crazy now that Larian were clearly concerned that Starfield would be a bigger hit than BG3, and thus steal their thunder.
Starfield 2 preorders are going to come with dev kits and players will be tasked with making the game themselves, you craft the experience, you set the deadlines, you talk to shareholders.
Ang BGS gets the money when they sell the game you made with the dev kit you paid for, in the new creation club.
Instead of character creation, you start off with a C# prompt and a manual. And to use commands you have to grind through a bunch of lootboxes which you pay for with internal currency. Which you buy using Bethesdacoins, which you win on scratchcards. In the mobile version. Which is pre-order only, with Legacy Special Edition Starfield 1. Lol, change my mind.
They'll start selling chunks of the creation kit as DLC.
@@lionelstarkweather982 They they sue you for using their assetts.
The most unforgettable thing to me is how bland the lore of Starfield is. That's definitely something you cannot blame on technological or workforce limitations.
I thought the technological limitations confound was a wild thing to bring up in anno domini 2023. Consoles are more than powerful enough to handle any particular variety of gameplay complexity; you could maybe overwhelm them with specific implementations, but that was never going to be a gameplay issue bethesda was going to run into, not even with starfield.
Yes it is. Hire scify nerds. This is just 2001.., but shit.
@@Ruteekatreyajocks making a scyfy game...8 years of failure...fire your HR guys.
It’s the writing. It’s absolute shit
Absolutely, I couldn’t believe how bland the setting was. Why make a scifi game if you don’t have anything interesting to show the audience?
The fact that sarah morgan can be a potted plant and effectively change nothing is such a self dunk
Yeah that was wild. It broadcasted hard-core how inconsequential Starfield's followers are.
they really went and made the sexy lamp comparison to their own dang writing. not a good look.
Vlad becoming a table and it improves the game I think is funnier
Arguably, that one is better since she doesn’t talk.
You guys do realize that she's not actually a plant, right?? Like y'all aren't actually dumb enough to take that joke seriously are you?
Todd said that he wants a game grounded in reality, then proceeds to make a game about a multiverse
7 years into development they realized reality is boring and they needed more time
Which stinks because the reason I was looking forward to it was because it sounded like a more hard sci-fi setting like the Expanse
Eh, I get what you're saying, but there's a bit of a difference from a worldbuilding and storytelling perspective I think.
A world "grounded in reality" doesn't have to perfectly reflect real life, and can go so far as to be quite outlandish, so long as the processes follow logical pathways and characters react in realistic ways to the world around them.
The Elder Scrolls, whose games are of a higher quality than Starfield's, can be said to be grounded in a "historical" reality. We see familiar objects like swords and armor, we see familiar concepts like hierarchical power structures, and we even see familiar fictional concepts like magic or dragons from fantasy culture.
What makes Elder Scrolls better grounded in reality isn't Tamriel itself - A work of pure fiction that has nothing to do with Earth or the universe as we know it, whereas Starfield is based in an alternate version of the real world. What makes Tamriel better grounded in reality is its relatability to us.
I've made my argument above but for lore nerds interested, here's an example of how Tamriel is vastly different to Earth:
Tamriel is a continent on a planet called Nirn, which exists at the center of a multiplexal realm called Mundus. Mundus is the mortal realm of the setting, and is the closest equivalent to "the universe" of the real world. It consists of Nirn, its three moons, and eight (or nine) planets, each named after one of the Divines. In fact, the planets are the realms of the Divines, and are in fact the corpses of the Divines, and are each of infinite size and mass, appearing to mortals as spheres due to mental limitations on perception. The blackness of space is the infinitely sized, infinitely many Planes of Oblivion, which are again the realms of the infinite Daedra, and are the Daedra themselves; Mundus is multiplexal, so that it paradoxically encompasses and is encompassed by Oblivion. Beyond this is Aetherius, an existence of pure magic, and where the retained memories of souls go when they die (forgotten memories are claimed by Oblivion). Encompassing it all is the Aurbis, an infinite multiverse.
Separating Mundus from the rest of this infinite cosmos is a liminal barrier generated by the planets (the Divines) and great Towers on Nirn constructed by the Divines, some of which are simultaneously present in all planes of the Aurbis.
You could go even further beyond and discuss the Dream, the Godhead, and kalpas (universal reincarnations, sort of?).
This was all a very simplified visualisation of Elder Scrolls cosmology. Most things in TES lore are not things humans can comprehend. There are no such things as "physical places" which exist as fixtures within the universe, with even Nirn (the most fixed entity) being multiversal. Everything is closer to being, in itself, a malleable state of existence.
But most people don't care about that. They want swords, they want to be called leader of the Companions, they want to shoot fire out of their hands, because that stuff is relatable. The team that made the Elder Scrolls was crazy enough to create an impossible cosmology beyond human comprehension, but smart enough to not make it the whole game, creating an interesting enough world within it to keep us grounded there.
By comparison, Starfield had to dip into multiversal concepts to compensate for poorly understood systems and a poorly written story.
Grounded in the reality of an AI demo game that ChatGPT made in 10 minutes.
Gov is cracking down on addictive elements in games, because the gaming community is a easy target, it isn't a "respectable community of people". Meanwhile, Tech companies are addicted to your personal data, using it to generate world wide conflicts for attention based ad revenue (destroying children for profit).
I never felt like an explorer as there was always a building nearby.
A copy-pasted building you've already seen and explored 10 times over on planets lightyears away, no less
Starfield has about 6.7k players on steam right now. Skyrim Special Edition has about 22.3k players. It explains itself.
Are there any other 12/13 year old games with those sort of numbers?
That's actually the case for a bunch of other AAA western games recently, Suicide Squad had 800 players (lmao) while at the same time Batman Arkham Knight had 1900, same time. A huge live service game that just came out vs a 9 year old single player game that the same studio developed in 1/4 of the time.
The colossal wave of layoffs may be sad but they're very expected, game studios are incapable of competing with their own work despite being several times larger now.
Because Starfield doesn’t have any sex mods yet lol
@@DogBackwards816 hold up, this guy is onto something lol
@@steel5897 kill the justice league player count vs old Arkham games player count is a great example.
It's fascinating how Todd talks about dumbing and watering down their games as if it's such an intellectual feat they've undertaken. I've been mad about the simplification of their games since Oblvion, and I always assumed it was a cynical way for them to just make more money. But hearing Todd talk about removing environmental hazards in such a whimsical way makes me believe he genuinely believes it's a good, clever thing to do. Just a complete lack of taste and soul, I have to wonder how much he actually had to do with Morrowind.
yeah really, fkmg delusional losers. 400 million down the drain. i blame emil after doing some research.
I hear what you're saying but I think he's just knowingly selling junk because that's his job. They may not have cynically set out to do that, but that's where they are now.
"That empty space? Let me tell you how that makes the game better!"
It is a craft in its own right and that is what he's perfected: selling dung as if it's gold.
@@ludisnemo887 I feel like I can tell when someone is full of it. Todd seemed genuine in that interview. Which is even sadder than the more cynical money-grubbing angle.
Todd's main contribution to Morrowind was pretty much just the Imperial Legion questline... the worst written faction in Morrowind. They could have had a faction storyline centered around fighting the 6th House and actually portraying this rebellion that Dagoth Ur was waging against the Empire, instead we got some random small-scale busywork quests that culminate into nothing and with no overarching story.
Yea i remember playing Skyrim the first time and one thing that stood out to me in it was the intentional layer of accessibility too it, it really seemed designed around being popular and flashy but was at least still atop a good game - one that was more brazen to me was Fallout 4, where the game literally abandons its own lore in the opening tutorial zone, giving you the types of weapons and endgame armor to kill the universes literal most dangerous monsters, deathclaws, cutting through them like swiss cheese - its clear some marketing aims to capture a vibe / aesthetic for the audience has kind of taken precedent over the other immersive rpg elements of past Bethesda titles.
Like, dont get me wrong - FO4 was right to make wearing powerarmor and actual *system*, you SHOULD feel like you're wearing a tank in the fallout universe when you're in power armor, which is why it should be end or lategame content to give you an appreciation narratively/aesthetically for what a boon power armor is for the factions who operate it. Instead its like they're so seperated from the lore of their fallout intellectual property that they just wanted a game that looks cool and is easy to play and wrapped it in a fallout coat, completely cheapening all the actual danger of the wasteland, brutalism etc, to very light elements because, look, you have cool futuristic armor and you can paint it!!!
The people behind marketing etc seem to think the best way of reaching a wide audience is creating a game MANY people can play and it seems like it's turned their games into Action games with RPG elements rather than RPG adventure experiences they actually at least were arguably across Morrowind / Oblivion / Skyrim still. They're just been cheapening their own content more and more with each title, and it's kind of like it reached the absolute widest people are willing to accept with games like 76 and Starfield haha. Bethesda doesn't think their players are smart enough in general to navigate an open world and stuff anymore, pick up narrative threads, etc.
Bethesdas world design seems like its come full circle/horse shoe too back to Daggerfall lol, where they've made a technically massive 'open world' but it's open world in a way where the exact same content is literally everywhere in the game world regardless of where you are because its all copy paste random gen.
Private Sessions: "I have to disagree that enemies are bullet sponges."
Also Private Sessions: *shows video of a random non-boss raider eating an entire magazine of headshots from a sniper rifle without dying*
Gov is cracking down on addictive elements in games, because the gaming community is a easy target, it isn't a "respectable community of people". Meanwhile, Tech companies are addicted to your personal data, using it to generate world wide conflicts for attention based ad revenue (destroying children for profit).
Even if we don't categorize Starfield as a space sim or big space game, its still a bad game in whatever category you put it in.
- Adventure? Boring.
- RPG? What role-playing is there?
- Action? Please be serious.
- Narrative? Dogshit.
The combat was great, and so were the roleplaying elements. There were plenty of choices, both dialogue and narrative. It's just the world and story that felt soulless and poorly thought out.
I would disagree. BGS has been playing catchup in terms of satisfying combat and this game still hasn't caught up to modern AAA games(or I guess AAAA games according to Ubi).
And as far as RPG elements, this could be down to personal expectations, but this was my first BGS game and heard that they have great roleplaying elements and was let down on how little my actions actually have real world consequences or just consequences within certain quests themselves. The game doesn't let me play the was I want to since it makes it an insane inconvenience to play the game as anything other than a kind, morally-sound straightshooter. All the talk about being able to play as a pirate was just hype without anything meaningful to back it up. @@Dennis-nc3vw
@@Dennis-nc3vwidk that combat is great comes from, its just a reskin of the one from fallout 4 with extremly dumb AI, if u want great combat check out stalker anomaly, npc AI there does wonders
@@Dennis-nc3vwthat and throughout my entire 100-hour playthrough I never felt any consequences for any decision I ever made, the special power you get is the most boring thing to go through to unlock them all, the combat is okay but it's nothing special, it feels like gun variety is extremely sub-par, gosh man it hurts my soul.
Idc really. I liked it as a good time waster. I dont have expectations. If it's fun and I get hours of entertainment out of it, its ok in my book.
The biggest crime is that they set the game during the most uninteresting time frame of their own universe. The big war is over, there's no conflict except someone passive aggressive peace, and any threat that rises up is very minor in the grand scheme, and then anything you do is just reset by a universe jump so none of your choices really mattered.
How this is not talked about a lot is crazy to me, something bugged me a lot during my playtime of why the game was just boring until fit just hit me. The timeline felt like the most anticlimactic point chosen.
I think the story-writing could have been a lot better too. A lot of the factions just feel like checkboxes instead of actual organizations.
The UC feels all over the place
amen, well said
Everyone complained about radiants on Skyrim and Fallout 4, the solution for them was to make the entire game a radiant 😁Scamfield was a fraud from the begin, Idk why many people were hyped by this. It just prevented tes6 and fallout 5, even if we know that they will probably suck too because gaming industry is ill nowadays and people are quitting games or going to retrogames because they are bored of this modern day trash videogames. Skyrim player are just waiting for Beyond Skyrim or Skyblivion series to come out, Fallout players are just waiting mods they could add to TTW or Fallout 4 New Vegas and Fallout Capital Wasteland for Fallout 4, everything for free. In fact, the fanbase of these TES-Fallout games are quite loyal, but many unfortunately got scammed by the ''fake light'' promoted by Scamfield. Bethesda didn't even deserve a single buck for that garbage.
by your logic any grounded FPS that doesnt take place during WW2 would not meet your standards
Starfield reviews are 100× more entertaining than Starfield itself
That'd imply starfield entertainment value is a positive number
Here we have yet another post exposing how asinine the hate campaign is for Starfield. It is just a damn video game. Why on Earth does it bring you joy to see a hate campaign at work? I will never understand what motivates people these days. It is incredibly strange to see what the internet and gaming communities have become. And why would anyone trust reviews from random people on CZcams who can push any narrative they want to fit their agendas and needs, versus actual gaming sites and actual writers where it has 86 on Metacritic. It isn't like Fallout 76 had good reviews when it came out so why would they give another horrible Bethesda game an 86?
@@lotsathedetox The reason many hate it is because for one it's shit. The second, bethesda promises the sky and give us a bunch of bollocks. Thirdly it's because they're a geniun fan of bethesda that drove them critize Starfield for the wasted potential that it represent
@@lotsathedetoxexactly… just one crappy space game. So why do you care? I’ve seen your replies everywhere lol.
End of the day this was an obscenely stupid waste of $400m, charging customers $70 promising a galaxy of things to do. It only manages to denigrate the players intelligence. I think they have a right to hate considering the numbers.
@@lotsathedetoxBethesda just wasted time, money and resources on a boring space game sure the game isn’t horrible, but it’s definitely not higher than 3/10.
At this point BGS is the guy from high school who had really good party tricks but now we're all in our late 20s early 30s and opening a bottle of beer with your teeth isn't as cool as it was 15 years ago
No, because the problem with BSG is not that it keeps doing the same thing. Starfield is very different from Morrowind in every way possible.
Yeah, an 8 year old opening beer with his teeth would be a hard act to top.
I’d say BGS is more like that really chill friend in college who was eclectic, unique, and showed you really cool electronic music and arthouse movies, introduced you to the hot goth chick on campus, but now it’s 15 years later and your old friend called you up to invest in a new cryptocurrency that they started on their laptop
@@numetal_samurai this <
same when fallout 4 released, it was so much worse than even fallout 3 let alone 1-2-vegas, if it was anywhere near the same it wouldve been great
Gov is cracking down on addictive elements in games, because the gaming community is a easy target, it isn't a "respectable community of people". Meanwhile, Tech companies are addicted to your personal data, using it to generate world wide conflicts for attention based ad revenue (destroying children for profit).
I started a new playthrough of FO4 few months ago. Been mostly exploring, haven't even been to Fort Hagen in the main quest, yet. I've explored every nook and cranny in Downtown Boston, pretty much. All the interiors, the terminals there, all the holotapes and notes I could find. Then went to Quincy, cleared out the Gunner's and went to the Wilson Atomatoys factory to get the Giddyup parts for that ghoul in the slog. When I had the parts and finally talked to the guy, I had a totally new dialogue I've never heard before. And I was baffled when suddenly Nate recognized the ghoul guy, because I didn't and I had no idea what was going on. Then Nate gave him a holotape I had discovered in the Wilson Atomatoys corporate HQ in Downtown Boston. And suddenly I understood his obsession with these Giddyup toys and it brought some tears to my eyes. In all the years I've been playing this game, I've never discovered this dialogue. And many other dialogues which one only gets by exploring the game world without starting the accompanying quests beforehand.
I highly doubt I'm gonna have such experiences in Starfield, with it's copy pasted research facilities and mines on procedurally generated planets. I sure haven't had them in the 100 hours I have played the game so far. I'm not interested enough in the game to keep playing. Replaying FO4 and Skyrim is much more enjoyable and I still discover new stuff, even after so many years.
Ever since I found that holotape of his daughter, I always bring it back to him.
With modded Fallout 4 I legit forget Starfield exists, especially with all the community made content and more on the way. Too bad the next gen update messed a lot of stuff up
I've also played F04 and Skyrim a lot. Right now my fav game is Cyberpunk 2077. I tried Starfield, bought it at launch (regret that), played 100 hours then uninstalled. So lifeless, especially compared to game like CP2077. I won't be preordering anymore Bethesda games, I'm done.
That Mom and Dad overlapping lines is just the Bethesda touch that this game both needed and didn't.
I think it's what they referred to as radiant ai in oblivion. They've really scaled it back or cleaned it up over the past three games but it's still there.
It can cause goofy or even frustrating moments, but it's also a crucial part of what makes the npcs feel like living characters.
@@skyriminspace Well, guess I'll keep looking for examples of it working as intended. Because all I see online, and experience myself, are messed up conversations that screams bugged NPC's in a video game rather then living characters.
I've never thought Bethesda NPC's feel very much alive to begin with. So when you say the Radiant AI is a crucial part to make them feel like living characters, I wonder if you've had a very different experience with the games then I have.
Maybe if I had more examples of it working as intended, rather then the buggy mess it is 9 out of 10 times.
@kopicat2429 yeah I'm so confused what he even meant by that. How could it being poorly made with 0 synchronicity or awareness be what makes it feel alive?
@@skyriminspace There are so many games that have done this better than bethsoft has ever done; literally could just have basically static or patrolling people repeating a loop and it would feel more alive for most folks.Bethesda refusing to bring out a fucking dialogue screen both kills cinematography and a naturalistic feel both.
@@skyriminspace and I loved it in Oblivion, then they purged de immersive parts like npc living their lives and now we only have the bad dialogue and repetitive empty dungeons left.
"Starfield bad" is my new favorite type of youtube documentary genre.
you and me both
Legit 😂
But is it true or is it not?
@@Swat_Dennisits a bad game. I spent enough hours playing it to know that whatever magic Bethesda used to have is completely gone.
The real question now is: will it ever come back? Can it? Is ES6 already doomed? Starfield is in the past now. Pay it no mind. No one will remember its name. This was a waste of 8 years.
My thing is that you don't need several youtubers all talking about the same crap when the faults of the game can be summed up in like 5 minutes. That Suicide Squad disaster, yeah its a dad looter shooter, most of the time they are terrible. Yeah we don't need an hour long documentary telling us.
The inability to feel immersed is what put the nail in the coffin for me. I couldn't stand it any longer. For instance, the planets the capital cities are on have so much available space, but homesteading families decide to setup shop on a barren moon/planet instead. Or how about Akila and why they automated their farms. They automated them due to a dangerous 4-legged predator. Yet, they had the technology to build mechwarriors, arms, ships, to take on the UC. Yet, they couldn't go toe-to-toe with some animal and couldn't figure out how to pave roads. It's just a mess.
The problem is that Bethesda is getting more and more arrogant. They think the players want a bad story. They don't want a good introduction. They want bugs, they want old technology, they want a bit of everything from every genre and confusion and who knows what else. And even though it's clear where this attitude comes from, namely the fact that the players actually memeify everything Bethesda fucks up, they're just wrong. It's not what the players want, but what the players forgive - if the rest of the game is great. The confidence with which Todd presents all these mistakes as great, well-considered decisions is just frightening. What I don't understand is why Microsoft doesn't step in, but just watches as this part of its empire delivers crap. Sure, Starfield was a financial success, and by the time TES 6 comes out, the players who have now lost confidence will have forgotten and will buy it anyway ... but yeah ... oh what am I talking about ... it's all pointless anyway. The players will buy everything as usual. Bethesda can do whatever it wants. In the end, Todd is right.
I don't think so. A lot of people are not buying and are stepping back and waiting. It will catch up with Bethesda eventually.
All people who buy Bethesda games at this point want is to see the Bethesda logo when they start up the game. Actual drones.
Bethesda has cone fully corporate, but they still like to pretend they're a quirky borderline indie studio where everyone gets to be creative. With the result that everyone pools ideas in the final game that don't mesh together at all
No, it's Emil who thinks we want bad story with his BS writing philosophy of KISS which doesn't belong in writing. KISS is for technical fields to ensure you don't kill people, and make tech work safely.
I'm never paying for a Bethesda product. I'll happily torrent it so that I can play it and tell my friends about how boring and shallow it'll inevitably be.
Trying to equate the majesty and significance of people actually being on the moon to people running around in a videogame is very, very bonkers.
Especially since the people on the moon had quite a lot of things to do, unlike in Starfield's wastelands.
Insignificance*
If you time-traveled to 1998 with a PC capable of running this game and a OLED monitor capable of displaying the graphics, anyone who played the game would find the analogy reasonable. Unfortunately, in the space year 2024, they are half a century too late for this to be anything other than stale, boring, and disappointing.
@@anthonykarnes6804Mankind reaching the moon was a huge significant step.
@@anubis7457 It was nothing. It was a fucking meme.
"The astronauts weren't bored when they were on the moon"
Wrong, Todd, they started playing another game (golf) just like I did
Underrated comment if ever there was one. 😂😂😂😂
Man that comment from Todd was Just retarded. Those are astronauts, beeing paid a shitton of money with limited fuel food and oxygen and the main questline consists of collect samples and run tests.
Real talk. Astronauts basically have 24/7 schedules. Because it takes billions of dollars to launch science into space. So you have a full day every day making use of it. Astronauts only get a "day off" when things are running really smooth so they finish stuff early, or things go very wrong like an experiment broke so there's a hole in the schedule. Like if you have a period where an experiment needs 30 minutes to run, you're flying to the window to take pictures while it runs. That half hour is gold.
Astronauts don't have time to be bored. Space is their job. Todd's comment only makes sense if players are doing QA because Starfield was never finished.
Or he's a liar.
Excellent
I started playing golf again also
I also recall an interview done by Bruce Nesmith where he said how Todd Howard and his team are terrified of gating off any content from the players-not just in Starfield, but across all of their titles since Morrowind-which I personally believe seriously limits the replay value of Bethesda's Games. Heck, they're even scared of having players be able to fail missions in any circumstances short of dying. Meanwhile, you've got developers like Larian and Obsidian who are more than happy to include hand-crafted content that will be missed by over 90% of players on their first playthrough. Even CDPR has tons of hidden areas, secrets and optional quest lines that many players don't know about, even years after launch.
Yeah. It is a really bad design. Just like how my Barbarian swordmaster that never dealt with magic became the Archmage of the college in Winterhold in Skyrim. All he really did was to hit things really hard and show up for a class.
No one can convince me that starfield wasn’t the worst game of last year. Doesn’t do a single thing that hasn’t been done better by games almost ten years old at this point. What games do you have to compare it to to where Starfield looks favorably out of last year’s catalogue? King Kong and Gollum?
Gollum is the goat
Gollum and King Kong were at least laughably bad; sure, they were horrible games, but it was still a lot funnier to mock them for how terrible they were.
Starfield may not be _as_ bad as those two games speaking on an entirely objective level, but it commits the worst sin a game could possibly commit: being _boring._ I'm not even a diehard Bethesda hater; for the record, Fallout 3 is one of my favorite games of all time and I admit that I like it even more than NV for a variety of reasons, while Morrowind and Oblivion are both classics, and Skyrim is also a childhood favorite even if I recognize with age how much mods come in clutch with that game. But they somehow took all the wrong lessons from Fallout 4, a game I think is a fun "Skyrim with guns" but terrible Fallout game, and have only taken issues that were problems in the earliest Bethesda games until they were nearly-impossible to ignore anymore. Everything from the story to the worldbuilding to the gameplay is *_BORING._* I think the fact you could have several essential NPCs be replaced with a fucking object a more damning indictment on the game's lack of faith in its own writing than anything else.
You could legit kidnap a Comedy Central writer at 2 AM, bring them to an abandoned warehouse, drug them with ketamine and hallucinogenics, and force them at gunpoint to write a South Park episode in their lurid, drugged-up state in 20 minutes, and I can assure you the result would be considerably more _coherent_ than the plot of Starfield.
Starfield was undoubtedly the biggest disappointment of 23. Still, many horrendous games were released on 23, like Forspoken, Kong, Gollum, and who could forget 'The Day Before,' the biggest scam I've ever seen in gaming.
Starfield can be summed up as: "We made a game with everything, but were afraid players wouldn't want to do everything, so we made everything into nothing so players that didn't want to do everything didn't miss anything."
"No Man's Sky is such garbage!" - 2016. "No Man's Sky is a comeback story!" 2023. "Cyberpunk 2077 is the worst game of all time! What a crappy game!" - 2020. " "Cyberpunk 2077 is an amazing game!" 2023. "Starfield is the worst game of 2023!" - 2023. Gain perspective, stop listening to CZcamsrs like this...hypercritical ans clearly not able to think for himself and be happy about a game until everyone else is.
Todd howard: the scale of this game is so big
Me: played through once and ran into the same dungeons dozens of times each and the same random encounters 5-10 times each
I run into the same outpost 4 times during my first 2 hours of gameplay. I got the exact same story from a man in one base and a woman in the base I visited right after. I quit right there and then.
@@Varangian_af_Scaniae when I first played the game I explored a lot of land on Kreet where I landed and went to all the bases I found. Captured a landed ship...little did I know I would encounter duplicates of those same bases on every planet
just having unique areas would have made the game so much more endurable. i would have put up with the other boring stuff, the idea that more than 6 different enemy outposts is too much to ask for is ridiculous, seems like the head devs just don't care or know they can get away with copypaste.
I remember the first week this game came out, I would read people raising this same issue but the defenders said they played for +40 hours and never or rarely got repeat content.
@@petercottantail7850 the people saying they never got repeat content after 40 hours are just objectively lying. Given the current state of the industry I'm sure some of them were people paid by the company to run interference, something that movie studios have been proven to do. Then there are others who will blatantly lie about something in the game because they feel the truth invalidates their purchase decision. A sort of cognitive dissonance. I've seen it myself when perk bugs were discovered and reproduced with 100% surety and then someone on reddit will claim the bug doesn't exist and that you simply don't understand the game mechanics. E.g. for the first several months (idk about now) all reload speed Perks disabled when you had grenades equipped. Unequip the grenades and your reload Perks activated again, repeatable every time for everyone who got that bug
The Bethesda problem starts at the top, imo. If you look at Todd and Emil and the rest of their leadership positions, none of them are people with leadership skills. Whatever skills they may have, it doesn't extend to their ability to manage and command a large group of employees. In fact I'm not sure I'd even trust them to organize a small group of 12 effectively.
Did they put the n word in the game?
I found it funny that Ted Price in that interview was smiling in that happy, satisfied way as Todd told him how his team failed to implement a core gameplay feature.
i genuinely give props to those interviewers. if i was doing an interview with blizzard as they told me overwatch pve is cancelled my jaw would hit the floor. in journalism thats grounds for firing (or at least a demotion). im sure the interviewer knows todd is rolling for gaslight, he just cant make it obvious he knows.
This "interviews" are bunch of prepared lies to gaslight scandals.
@@_holy__ghostFunny you should say that. I just reached the 3:45:00ish or so Todd interview and Ted's mouth popped open for a few seconds, oops!
@@awereal even nerves of steel falter in the face of such unfiltered bullsht
@@_holy__ghostwhy would an interviewer not be allowed to nail them for stuff like that?
It's shallow, but I seriously can't believe that they decided to do a space game without vehicles. Insane.
I can't they made a space game without any seamless space travel and landing on planets.
I was having a moderate amount of fun with my cyberpunk-esque character, leaning into the Neon Street Rat background (in my head) and pottering through the Crimson Fleet, Ryujin and Main Quests with a nice little roleplay narrative in my head - even dipped on NG+ because it didn't suit my character. I was supressing my distaste for like, 75% of the gameplay, writing, design etc. bc my desire for a good Bethesda game was too damn high. Then I bought that overpriced apartment on Neon expecting a luxury pad with a cool view for me and Andreja to settle down in, and got a empty room with minimal, clunky, ugly, boring, expensive decoration options. It all just came crashing down. I literally said out loud "why am I even playing this?", turned the game off and cancelled my Game Pass.
It's amazing to me what modern games sometimes try to pass off as a "city." New Atlantis wouldn't even qualify for a minor settlement. There's no believability when your city is one square mile with no housing space. At least with the Citadel in ME, you could see the rest of the structure/city enough to feel like it was real.
It's honestly incredibly odd. I could understand why Bethesda settlements were small in the past, they never wanted to wall anything off. If there was a house, they believed you should be able to enter that house and there should be people to occupy it, that it shouldn't just be an empty façade to create the illusion of scale. It's that whole idea of "See that mountain? You can climb it" applied to settlements. That said, Starfield is a huge departure from this. New Atlantis is full of these empty façades, particularly the skyscrapers that have only a handful of floors open to you. If you're willing to give up on that principle because realistically having multiple fulling explorable skyscrapers would be pointless, ludicrous, and a waste of development time, why not go all the way? New Atlantis is filled with random unnamed civilians, it has plenty of unexplorable buildings, so why not scale that up and give us an at least somewhat conceivably grand sense of scale. Plopping down some more skyscrapers and just leaving them inaccessible would be a little disappointing for a Bethesda game, but at the end of the day, they already made these concessions to some extent, and isn't a puny capital far more pathetic?
@@lif6737Soyfield runs on the skyrim engine, they couldnt make anything acceptable even if they wanted to.
Disneyland is bigger than New Atlantis
@@lif6737 The reason is becausxe people cucked about Skyrim being amazing when it wasn't. The cities were super small. Smaller than Oblivion. There was no excuse for it but fanboys were like "hurr they should be small because skyrim is less populated" but the cities were never matching realistic sizes anyway so that excuse never worked. The lack of criticism led Bethesda to keep doing it. Love em or hate em, the critics are the ones who push for changes.
@@sss1029 Soyfield 😂😂😂
Man, imagine living in a world where there's a major housing crisis but an utter refusal to build new housing. Truly dystopian.
Did you know NYC has the greatest population of millionaires on Earth (340,000), while San Francisco has the greatest population of billionaires (63)? I don't know why this just popped into my head, since in Starfield neither of these cities exist anymore, just an idle thought.
Right? Good thing we don't live in a world where the majority of the dwindling housing is snapped up by rich people and corporations to use as investments rather than places to live, robbing ordinary people of being able to buy a home.
Good thing we don't live in a world where millionaires and corporations buy up the little available housing left to use as an investment instead of living in them, making it impossible for ordinary people to use them as homes.
@@WobblesandBean its really not just a matter of blaming millionaires and corporations. If you read more about the issue, for example in Beverly Hills, there is a desperate need for housing, but none of the upper middle class neighbourhoods want apartment buildings to be built in their neighbourhood. The "not in my backyard" stuff is what prevents new development from starting. Cities can also pass bylaws that restrict that kind of investment, they do so in Toronto, and it helps a little, but if there is not enough supply then no amount of laws and taxes on the rich will resolve the issue. This is overwhelmingly a problem of not enough supply to feed growing demand.
thats just canada man 😂
Bethesda games are DOA, Starfield just proves to me they’ve just lost their way and don’t care about finding the road.
The road is now a menu between two loading screens.
I think I've officially spent more hours watching videos dissecting Starfield than I've spent playing Starfield.
3:23:38 "So not only are we dealing with a multiverse story written by a bunch of people who haven't been able to write a coherent LINEAR story in over a decade, we're also dealing with a story where there's zero internal consistency with how it's universes work."
Perfect summary if Bethesda as a whole
This comment is dripping with hate and disdain, kinda sad imo
@@brkenppt2222 It's not hate, it's criticism. Learn the difference
@@brkenppt2222LOL
The grim realization during the exploration section that the footage is NOT LOOPING, and this is just different iterations of the same room over and over. Like if Groundhog Day were an FPS and also horrible.
it is quite literally a nightmare you would have from intense anxiety about your life going nowhere
This is what I felt like getting to level 100 at launch but I still had fun with the game
I was hopeful for the game at first, but I must admit that my first major point of realization that this game is *NOT* what I was hoping for was when the first 3 planets I visited all had the exact same UC Listening Post location. Within the first few hours, I had memorized a dungeon layout and scanned the exact same "melted glacier" on three different planets lightyears apart from each other.
Gov is cracking down on addictive elements in games, because the gaming community is a easy target, it isn't a "respectable community of people". Meanwhile, Tech companies are addicted to your personal data, using it to generate world wide conflicts for attention based ad revenue (destroying children for profit).
I love how you responded to the “astronauts didn’t have anything to do on the moon” quote.
You read out the exact things that ran through my mind like there was a projector in my skull lol. When I saw the quote.
There were stakes, real immense stakes that the astronauts dealt with, and SCIENCE TO BE DONE!
I was slightly sick at the total disrespect Cheng showed to the moon landing and real life Astrophysics. Those guys came back wildly popular rich heroes, having discovered a place no man had set foot in since the dawn of time. Starfield's moons are literally proc-gen flatlands full of nothing.
Also I don't believe you should grant them that they've made cities open, they didn't there's invisible walls in all directions. Yeah you can walk a little bit out of it, Skyrim cities can literally function like that in vanilla if they moved the invisible wall slightly further out and just gave you a message saying "you can't proceed any further, go back to your horse"
In Skyrim you actually can walk very far outside of the city. Provided you A) somehow get outside the walls (Markarth is an easy one to do it in) B) have decent lod generated.
There's walkable terrain with collision, some trees and mostly sane landscaping.
Open Cities mod
finally Mum and Dad's starfield videos are out and I can watch them like the unintentional companion videos that they never intended for them to be before I never think about this game ever again.
Who's the other one? Patricia?
@@kylekozlov3674yes
American families
@@kylekozlov3674 yes they were married during the 76 campaign
lol feels
Man, I will never get tired of people pointing out how shitty Starfield is.
Here we have yet another post exposing how asinine the hate campaign is for Starfield. It is just a damn video game. Why on Earth does it bring you joy to see a hate campaign at work? I will never understand what motivates people these days. It is incredibly strange to see what the internet and gaming communities have become.
@@lotsathedetox Because of the enormous hype Starfield had despite Bestheda's track record and literally everything that happened with Fallout 76. I was one of the few who tried telling people to not preorder the thing because of Fallout 76, but no, I was told I'm just a doomer and to fuck off because Bethesda can do no wrong and surely Fallout 76 was just an anomaly. "This is Todd Howard's big project, he didn't even care about F76, this'll be different." I am honestly appalled how quickly players forgot and dismissed that piece of shit, saying "oh, it wasn't that bad" and "people just hated it for clicks". Well, now it seems the majority of people is finally aware of how mediocre Bethesda is and always has been, and I for one couldn't be happier. One less overhyped dev to join the ranks of Ubisoft and ABK.
This game seemed so promising man is BS it ended up being ass
@@lotsathedetox I guess it is about communal experience. Playing it alone is not very inspiring experience, but thrashing it even in parasocial context brings some fun out of it.
@@lotsathedetoxbecause games cost money, thus when we put money in, we expect something good in return. Statistically speaking, it’s a telling sign that most of the comments on a highly thorough critique are commenting on how good the critique is, or adding onto it, with very little in terms of posing actual counterpoints to the point given. Starfield was overhyped and underperformed.
It's incredible to me that people were excited for this after 76. Todd's philosophy that it didn't matter if a game launched broken was such a massive red flag
I feel the main issue with starfield is that everything it was trying to do just either was more well executed or just flat out better in other games. Spaceflight- elite dangerous, exploration and survival- no mans sky, combat and simulation- star citizen. Starfield tried getting into a niche genre with three other more proven games already in the ring.
My biggest issue with the game is that they boasted that "space is boring, its realism that the planets are so empty" but also "we added no simulation pieces to this game because iTs NoT mEaNt tO bE rEaLiStIc"
Bethesda, you don't get to have your cake and eat it too.
The worst of both worlds
No kidding. Some poor sonuvabitch spent all the time making the packaging and 3d models for food for absolutely nothing. You never get hungry and food provides no substantial buffs (outside the UC ration encumbrance buff).
They don't get to eat their cake and still have it too.
The worst part of outposts is not that they are clunky. Its that the point of them is to get resources... but there is no use for mass amounts of resources.
You can sell resources, 20k, by visiting 300 vendors, then you go afk 48hours in game, go back sell more stuff. With that money you can...
@@KaiSoDaM Lose it all in New Game Plus
@@KaiSoDaM...do nothing
kind of the recurring theme of Starfield honestly "what is the point..." they didnt make Space wonderous and mysterious, they made it miserable and nihilistic, imagine going through the unity only to live out 1-3 weeks of life again just to repeat it, Bethesda literally explored this concept in fallout 3 with Dr. Braun torturing the other vault residents for fun....
The resources one can get from settlements weigh a ton and have virtually no value. Freaking money farms? I think not. There's no reason for settlements.
I died inside when the game told me that the Great War of among the stars happened decades ago :/
2:57:19 This is giving me flashbacks to the ME3 streams where the dead Salarian councilor showed up to Thane’s funeral in the DLC, because the writers forgot to script a sequence where the player never talks to him during the base game and he dies of natural causes
When the most fun you have playing the game is blowing up Grandma to horrify Sarah, then gaslight her into forgiving you, there is something systemically wrong with your game.
I mean, that does sound pretty fun. 😂
they brought the adoring fan back so he could be the least annoying npc
Gamers when they figure out everyone has their own definition of fun and that they can form their own opinions without basing them off 4 hour hate essays
@@5115neowell then Bethesda shouldn’t hype up their games to high heaven. They basically tried saying it was going to be red dead redemption 2 level of detail in space. In reality if you compare the two RDR2 is like deep sea diving with how much content there is versus starfield which is more like a wave pool. Wave pools can be cool but not when you market it as deep sea diving, ie they lied about a lot.
the most fun i have with fallout 3 and NV or even HL1 is killing the npc’s mid conversation. does that make those games boring?
When they were designing Starfield, they clearly focused so much on the question of “how big can we make the world(s)” that they forgot to ask “how big *should* we make the world(s)?” A gigantic, empty planet is basically just a loading screen
This has me thinking about a game I myself wanna make, a more traditional RPG in a distant future context like Starfield's
I have told myself, however, to try and keep it small - one star system, for character-specific reasons including but not limited to:
- The player's main character, Korven, has a life-long streak of misfortune and prefers staying in sparsely-populated areas to avoid causing too much collateral; this streak isn't a curse or anything that Korven can break/do something about, lady luck just hasn't been the kindest to him, but he's acquired a fair number of friends and skills to help with times where the streaks gets the better of him
- The player's second character, Omega, hails from a long-forgotten civilization of robots, equipped with a nanobot weapon named the "Phoenix Virus" and the goal to rebuild his civilization, but despite being fully autonomous Omega lacks a moral compass to use it responsibly; Korven has to be a mediator in this regard and would really rather not try his luck going to more populated systems with Omega in tow
They're not even that big, all things considered.
This is the main issue IMO. Having 100 planets with lots to do on each is way better than a thousand barren wastelands. What they should have done is trim the initial focus and release sections of the galaxy as DLC. Honestly, I think the curated content is actually decent, and the base building is in a lot of ways superior to previous titles. But the issue is that "Fallout 4 in space" suffers from all of the same problems that the barren wastelands in Fallout 4 has, except on a bigger scale.
And as I say in every comment when it comes up about Starfield, they did Earth dirty - only one building left standing in a few major cities is insulting.
No, they focused on diversity inclusion and equity the DIE concept that kills and destroys everything. It's woke. Go woke - go broke
@@kw9849i mean they are pretty massive, actually. What makes them so small is that there's pretty much nothing to do, and no impedances to slow you down
Bethesda is dead to me. Trying to sell this turd full price is a crime
70 $ game btw
Emil: "I can guess what it takes to make a hostess Twinkie, but I don't work in the factory so what do I really know? Not a lot"
Me: "Yeah but if I found a cockroach inside my Twinkie I think I could be pretty confident in stating that a lot of people in the Twinkie factory fucked up."
This game made me really appreciate how fleshed-out the world of Mass Effect 1-3 was. Take the guns for instance. Mass Effect said that the guns have a block of metal and every time you shoot, a shaving is taken off that block, about the size of a grain of sand, and propelled at absurd speeds giving it effectively endless ammunition capacity. But they couldnt solve the heat buildup, so you need to eject the heat-sink to "reload". That's a genius way to implement ammunition restrictions for gameplay within a sci-fi setting. Meanwhile in Starfield, they expect us to believe that in the age of lasers, the .45acp would still be so prolific?
The heat buildup as ammo management in the first game was neat idea but I always thought when it was turned into reload based system in the sequels, they should've just had the lore say that they needed to start using bigger chunks of metal because the sand grain sized projectiles were too weak agains Geth so they now run on actual ammo instead of ejecting heat sinks, because it makes no in-universe sense to not have the old style heat dissipation system as backup when you run out of the heat sinks
Since you mentioned Mass effect. The first game was heavyly critized for having empty open world to explore. Yet, I completed all planets on both my playthrough of the 3 games. ( I'm a very lazy gamer I never replay stuff)
What I found enjoying was that every planet, no matter how empty always had (3) main objetives/quest/landmark. You could get resources, find a piece of lore, a random artefact that made you question how stuff worked on that universe. Little animals.
But the planets where just big circles with mountains, but I loved going for these pieces of lore/resources.
@@KaiSoDaM It's embarrassing how many hours I spent trying to get my Mako to sit at the highest peak on every map
@@coolsenjoyer mass effect 2 just kinda shit the bed with that and having powers on shared cooldown
@@coolsenjoyer My thought when they introduced that idea is that they could've gone for a hybrid system. Instead of just making it purely reload based, keep the heat management system while giving you a limited amount of heat sink replacements to instantly cool down the gun, explaining it as a measure to ensure troops can keep up the offensive.
Still, making it the standard reload thing in of itself was fine, though the one convo where Shepard just goes "oh it just made sense" at some guy was kinda funny.
I find it very ironic that Emils writing strategy is "keep it simple, stupid" because no one will play/pay attention to the story, even though the most common complaint I see about BGS is how subpar the writing is
I have yet to see something good out of him. It's pretty obvious that he is a horrible writer that says this to make an excuse for his incompetence. I can forgive if he at least tried but he is also extremely lazy not using documentation like everyone else and doing zero research about things related to what he is trying to write about. He is a delusional incompetent and narcissistic clown. He is stupid enough to even calls us idiots, the customers and not worthy to be spent any effort for.
He clings to that mantra because he refuses to admit he's just not that good of a writer.
Pretty funny considering the first game he worked on was one where you had to listen to conversations and read missable documents to figure out what to do
@@kay94 i think most complains about Cyberpunk was about the buggy state the game was released in, i only first played it last year when the big update released, and i must say it's an amazing game now. Thoroughly enjoyed myself for a good 100 hours. Starfield however i quit and uninstalled after 4 to 5 hours of mediocrity, not because of bugs, but because it was just a very bland game with outdated game design.
If out of touch was a person, it would be Emil
I swear, when I browse the reviews, the positive ones are basically:
"Boring, repetetive, and Bethesda's blandest game ever. Too many loading screens and it is just not that good."
And then there's a big green thumbs up to the review.
I went from playing like 20 hours of this game in hopeful boredom to getting BG3 on a whim and while BG3 frankly makes me look at ALL games differently now, the contrast between it and Starfield was so insane that I immediately uninstalled Starfield. Was legit like drinking sewer water and then being taken to the purest mountain spring
And BG3 isn't even that great compared to the oldies! RPG's have really been going through a dark age, haven't they?
@@miguelbranquinho7235baldurs gate 3 is better than any of the classic crpgs other than like planescape torment. Even then, it blows planescape torment out of the water in everything but writing.
@@schmecklin377 I'll have to play it, then, but I doubt it.
@@miguelbranquinho7235having an opinion is valid but you have to have at least played it first to decide! 😅
@@samueldalton1996 Shut up! I'll do what I want! I'm on Ultima V right now, so's I can't, okay?!?
Here’s what happened, IMHO: Todd “Dev Bro” Howard, who’s written 0 lines of code in the last 15 years, came up with a laundry list of “cool sh!t” to put in the game without any understanding of what would be required to make the mechanics work. It’s an RPG, a space sim, a builder game - all build on top of an incredibly dated engine that was designed to be a planar open world RPG. You can’t fly into the planets because it can’t model huge spherical multi-LOD objects, and it doesn’t have the graph depth needed to support all the asset loading and unloading needed to pull it off. Thus you get loading screens all over the place. This is also why you end up with boring empty procedurally generated planets - the engine needs highly explicit scene layout, with object and asset management mapping. But it doesn’t have tooling needed to support a complex procedurally generated environment.
The engine was designed in an era when map density was far simpler. For example, when looking at Skyrim and CDPR’s Night City, they’re about the same size, but the object (and related geometry and asset) density is massively higher in CP 2077. And CDPR has invested in upgrading that engine, over time. But today, CDPR, unlike Bethesda and Minimum Todd, understands that RedEngine is at the end of its lifespan, as further refits would become ever more problematic, especially to have it match functionality and tooling as compared to Unreal 5.
And this is the core problem that’s plaguing Bethesda: the engine and its tooling are ancient, but their people know the tools, so they can build “stuff” fairly quickly. Bootstrapping a project feels fast, and doesn’t require a lot of upfront engineering or learning time. But the engine lacks the scaffolding to do things needed to connect that “stuff” that Todd’s “dream game” requires together seamlessly, especially as that list of stuff (environments, locations, NPC’s, interaction mechanics, interacting objects, etc.) gets bigger and bigger because Todd’s got a big-ass game in mind. So, due to limitations, you start chopping the game elements into smaller chunks. Then you can’t figure out state management between those chunks, especially as they have bipartite dependencies that become harder and harder to manage. So you start chopping things out, making state static or driven by simpler constants, and taking short cuts. Pretty soon nothing really connects or interacts, and everything becomes “optional” or, as Todd likes to use as an excuse, a “flavor of something”. The whole process should have started with a careful requirements assessment, which probably would have led them to “we need a different and/or newer engine” plus a lot of customization (if off the shelf).
So you end up with a big, but poorly interacting game that’s not fun to play. All because Todd wanted his dream game, but didn’t want to make (and probably didn’t understand) the hard and expensive investments in core engineering to make it happen. Put another way, since Fallout 76, and now with Starfield, it’s pretty clear Todd is way out of his depth on the technical decision making around building games, and this ends up torpedoing everything downstream (including writing and quest structure).
lol at this point i want elder scrolls 6 to come out just to see how much of a mess it is
@@schmecklin377 So I worked for Satya Nadella back in the day (I worked at Microsoft for quite some time). Todd, while several rungs down the ladder in a subsidiary, is still likely going to get some of that “skip-level” intervention for f’ing up Starfield this badly. These kinds of things don’t just slide at the empire, and even Ballmer got fired for two massive successive screwups (mobile strategy and Windows 8). And believe me, getting skewered by Satya is a hilarious thing to watch because it’s like a cross between Mr. Rogers and Gordon Gekko. The guy is absolutely not full of crap, and given that Todd is completely full of it, that conversation will likely be one of the most uncomfortable of Todd’s life.
At the empire, you’re welcome to try new things, propose new products and business avenues - but the place is hard-core on corporate Darwinism. You fail, you get to leave, and you’re only as good as you are in the current fiscal year, and your past doesn’t mean jack if you F up. I liked working there because I understood the rules and was successful (and it was a great training ground for striking out on my own). But Todd doesn’t strike me as the kinda guy who will last long. So I don’t think Bethesda’s next game will be “allowed” to be the kind of mess Starfield turned into. And Microsoft has a lot of very smart, well motivated people who know a crap-ton about complex game development, that would just love to have a shot at the Elder Scrolls IP.
IMHO, I think Todd’s out before the end of the year.
@@smakfu1375 it will be very interesting to see what happens. Todd is so synonymous with Bethesda that it would honestly be shocking to see him go but if anything is gonna do it then it's gonna be this disaster known as Starfield.
Pete Hines already left and I suspect it's because he's sees the upcoming shitshow coming their way. Theres been talk about Bethesdas development process with no design documents, outdated tech, and everything having to go through Todd. If Todd isn't fired, at the very least they have to do major shake ups to the way games are made there. They run the place like they're still a little 20 man team about to go bankrupt, not a multi hundred man team with hundreds of millions of dollar budgets.
I have absolutely no faith in the current Bethesda staff to make a competent next product, but I do like the IPs so I'd be interested in seeing some new blood tackle them if the old guard gets the boot.
@@schmecklin377 Well, all I can say is there are no sacred cows at Microsoft and Todd being the face of something doesn't mean a lot. Love or hate Microsoft, they're results driven, and Todd sure didn't deliver.
The biggest mistake in exploration was for them to focus entirely ON the planets. It should have been focused on space it self, flying your ship and finding points of interest in the "Star Field", and planets just be resource/habitation hubs for quests.
Tbh they shouldn't really have done planets. They easily could have a mix of air tank timers and bioengeered safe spaces to limit planets into far more designed areas. "Highlight" segments of planets while have lore reasons and mechanics explain why exploring it all isn't needed
The biggest mistake was Bethesda's sheer arrogance and audacity in thinking they could get away with farting out such a sub-par, boring, bad, sloppy game after an entire decade on the basis 'the modders will make it good later lol'. I'm done with Bethesda, what an abhorrent attitude to take, as a major developer. What a repugnant, and unpleasant, and lazy work ethic. Charge your audience nearly a hundred bucks for a game they expect their audience to make good for free. F uck them. The sheer entitlement is absurd. I hope none of the insanely talented modders working out there touch this thing with a barge pole, Starfield deserves to be forgotten.
@@Blisterdude123 The only modding I see happening that would be worth a damn is complete overhauls into entirely new games and settings just using Starfields assets and engine as a platform, within 2 years I bet we'll see StarWars and Warhammer mod projects, pity actually if you ask me, the best setting that would work with the games assets would actually Blizzards IP of StarCraft, turned to an RPG.
One thing space exploration games never do is add animals in space. Star Trek offers so many bizarre, fascinating creatures who just live in space, and I wish game devs would do the same.
@@Geraduss I don't think enough people are going to be interested enough in Starfield for that to happen.
There needs to be a certain underlying level of quality for people to create those kinds of total conversions.
I'm about an hour into this, and am shocked that your script still feels as tight as it is in a 4 hour long video. You don't hang on any one minor detail too long, you don't repeat any of your points too much, I was thoroughly engaged.
anyway i am definitely not going to finish this
Bethesda really needed to look at other failed games like Anthem, the original version of No Man's Sky, ME Andromeda, etc, to see how a lack of boundaries make it too hard to do, and learn from those mistakes rather than pandering to the Todd ego of "we'll just make it work" and the idea of "we'll let, erhm, get the modders fix it".
If they'd concentrated on story (as you pointed out) rather than "oooh, big", they may have done better. The thing about Morrowind is that it was not the "open world" that made it so successful (necessarily, it was definitely part of it), but that before The Elder Scrolls was "open world" it had a _huge_ amount of lore behind it (this, of course, applies to Fallout, too). So much so that Skyrim has whole swathes of the internet dedicated to revealing mysteries and solving lore stuffs. This meant that the "jank" of Oblivion and Skyrim became a "haha" rather than a "yeah, next game please", because that jank became part of the love of it. Hells, even Dragon Age Inquisition was seen as a better game than it actually was because of the nostalgia of Origins.
Starfield has none of this. They never established any lore before dropping the game, so the story had to be of _ultimate_ importance. They let themselves down.
ETA: It's like they took The Outer Worlds and decided to do everything that didn't work for that game.
Bethesda won't look at anything. They are complacent, smug, arrogant. And rich. People bought Starfield and the less discerning out there will defend it to the hilt. It's what Bethesda do. Lowest common denominator slop that sells.
What's bad is the planets on helldivers 2 look exponentially better than planets on starfield. And the engine helldivers 2 was built on was discontinued in 2018.
I was thinking the same thing playing HD2.
Helldivers 2 engine is 6 years old, team is generally new, Starfield engine and dev team are 20-25 years old.
@@p0k314COM I feel that just makes it exponentially worse. For all intents and purposes Bethesda should know every little thing about the engine, its limitations and precisely what to exploit to make it run smoothly and to ensure everything works well. Failing that, they should've made a new proprietary engine rather than spruce up one that is clearly unsuited for the task of creating a game of the size they wanted. They have the experience, manpower and resources to make that a reality.
The Helldivers engine and dev team being relatively newer and fresher than Bethesda's own really just puts into perspective that Bethesda simply has stopped caring and trying.
@@p0k314COMthat's not how engines work lol, just because it goes by the same name doesn't mean it doesn't receive tweaks and updates. You wouldn't say Unreal Engine 5 is the same as unreal 4
@@benhawk4214 In Bethesda this is what the engine situation looks like. They are outdated by about 20 years. This piece of software is complete sh*t.
This video is longer than my own playtime of Starfield since release lmao.
They are more people watching than concurrent players
I pirated Starfield, played it for like 3 hours then uninstalled from disappointing of a game it was. I felt so ripped off that I should get a refund for this pile of sh*t.
Why'd you buy it?
@@wiebitteichhabeesvergessen I didn't say I bought it.
It gets good after 4000 hours!
Starfield is honestly astonishing, focusing on Bethesdas WEAKNESSES, regressing on their strengths,
A simple trick could have made the space-flight more meaningful: stargates. Instead of just warping at any time, you would have to fly to a stargate to travel (at least once to unlock it for that location). In the space in-between, they could have put POIs, structures, missions and events.
lol youre already a better game designer than todd
"He's the type of guy who listens to a bunch of Alan Watts presentations and suddenly considers himself an expert on Eastern philosophy." I died laughing at this line because I've seen quite a few people like this online.
Nothing makes you feel as though your choices matter like resetting absolutely everything at the end of the main quest and telling them to do it again
I'm so glad you brought up the designs of the creatures in the game, and the lack of evolutionary adaptations that make sense for their environment
Its amazing that no matter how many besthesda themed videos i watch, whether on skyrim, fallout or starfield, everyone uses oblivion ambient music.
“These aren’t even plot holes, these are plot craters” 😂
And the craters have more depth then the plot
no but seriously. the video goes over it a bit, but I just really want to hammer home the idea that the grav drives were so close to perfected that a software update was all it took to stop them from stripping planets of their magnetosphere, but they still decided to go ahead with using them without the update EVEN AFTER THEY WERE WARNED THAT WOULD HAPPEN! it's absolute peak idiot plot trope and I absolutely despise the writers responsible for this travesty.
@@burnin8able agreed! & also the fact that lots of people in Starfield live on moons & planets with no atmosphere, yet EVERYONE had to abandon Earth instead of some creating domes/ habitats. ..Also, why is the Earth now buried in sand? - where did all that sand come from? & why would losing atmosphere cause that to happen in a few hundred years?! 😂
@@t-rexreximus359 it's just so baffling. a simpler explanation might have been seen as a cop-out but it at least wouldn't be as braindead as this. I fully believe they should just just fully blown up earth. say a meteor this size of our moon crashed into it, who cares.
The fact there’s only 20 real poi’s is actually insane. How could it take them that long to only create that many….
Probably restarted the game about 4 or 5 times
They only had 10 level designers on this game, total. And these people have to create all of the other interiors, exteriors, ships, shops and other spaces too. The bigger question is why they didn't either A. hire more level designers, or B. make POIs procedural. Having said that, since everything is done with the Creation Kit which has its own inbuilt cell editor, they could have just done a POI-bash week where everyone, level designer or no, spends a week creating a single small POI, and then they'd have had a few hundred to select from. They had plenty of options, they just chose to do... None of them.
they probablly spent about 7 years just trying to get spaceships to function as much as they do
@@rioplats We actually know why they didn't choose option A. Bethesda thinks it's still an indy studio, and that the games they're cranking out are being released in 2004. You can go check interviews and they just abjectly refuse to actually hire people because they think they're still small and scrappy. They're not alone in this (The Pokemon Company is the other big name I'm familiar with doing this). They refuse to grapple with the scale of what they're doing and hire more teams to match. Frankly skyrim was already lucky to have released in the basically unplayable state it did. By default a game of skyrim's notional scale would generally have like thrice the number of devs working on it.
@Ruteekatreya Yeah, I've been arguing this for years (that they still operate like an indie studio despite the scope of their titles), but I don't get why they keep going bigger without getting bigger. Game Freak, frankly, at least I understand, since their games never really get any more ambitious in overall scope, and they've never had a financial flop ever despite their ineptitude.
But Bethesda have had Fallout 76 and yet they've not either A. changed their studio approach to fit the scope or B. just kept the scope limited. That's the part I'm confused about. Is it just Todd wanting to both have his cake and eating it, I wonder?
"The greatest sin any writer can make is to make something boring"
For me it wasn't the size of starfield that made me not like it, it was the mind-numbingly boring NPC's, the tired tropes (cyberpunk city, cowboys in space city), the astonishingly mediocre music, but above all, the horribly linear way of finding content, through 'hand-holding quests on rails'. Compared to Oblivion which i feel was the defining moment of my gaming life, there was just no magic in Starfield, it was flat, dead, soulless, something i have never seen a Bethesda game be before.
What's sad is that I can lay here and watch a 4 hour documentary yet won't bother putting a single hour in the game since I stopped playing it 5 months ago.
What's sad is how much mileage people can get out of their disappointment & negativity.
maybe if you reply to more people the game will be good@@skyriminspace
@@skyriminspaceSo how sad is it for the people who spend time expressing disappointment and negativity about other people's disappointment and negativity
@@CADClicker right!
I guess i do it out of a desire for understanding.
I've had disappointments in my life too, not for anything as inconsequential as a piece of entertainment media such as a video game however.
I think on some level i'm trying to learn why humans can't just move on when something lets them down. They have to get hung up, find others with a similar issue, & then bitch about it together.
(Plus, some of the responses can be quite funny. People take it very seriously sometimes).
@@skyriminspaceare u the damage control they hired? I have a hard time believing anyone actually liked this game so much they decided to spend their next few hours responding to every comment
Starfield single-handledly brought the gaming critique genre of CZcams to a new level.
Yeah doing the exact same thing every other youtuber does and complaining about all the same things every other youtuber already complained about in their essay definitely raises the bar lmao
you forgot the day before that was criticized way before starfield in a detailed way. (yes, it released later, but only due to other issues)
I was never more excited for a game in my life.
To this day, it’s the only Bethesda game that I quit without finishing the main story.
Starfield is fun as hell for the first week of play if you get incredibly stoned while playing. I spent hours roaming those empty planets just getting lost in thought. Once that wears off and you realise how limited it really is you start to get sick of it pretty quick.
@@sensibility1174 what? Hahaha have you ever smoked before? That'd be horrible
Staring at your hands is incredibly fun at first when you're high. But unless this game comes with a pound of high-grade then it isn't worth your money.
Yeah I also remember being 12. I could kill an enitre 90% thc cart and still not feel the sligbtest but inmersed with this dumb ass game. If you wanna smoke and explore try out No Mans Sky. This game doesnt even compare to NMS.
@@crupt1023 hahahah you sound like an absolute clown
it really does feel like a giant chatgpt prompt on the human experience in space
Hey now! That’s a bit harsh! Chatgpt would write something much better than this
calling this game as deep as a puddle would be an insult to puddles.
At least with puddles, you can splash around in and have fun.
It's a dry puddle.
It’s pretty deep… stuff has consequences, there are multiple routes, well written relationships and quests.
As deep as a mirage.
so true, i have fun in puddles
This is Bethesda worst game ever. Even the little enjoyable moments are not worth playing as is fleeting.
The main quest was the nail in the coffin for me. I HATE multiverse stories (Even more-so time travel stories). It removes consequences for the writers and the actions of the player. “Oh this person died, but they are back because of the multiverse”. What does Starfield 2 look like? I can’t imagine a consequential Starfield 2.
"Why have stairs next to a ramp?"
Wheelchair accessibility. But in all seriousness, the real reason why we didn't get vehicles is likely because it would make the maps feel much smaller and Bethesda likely wanted to milk the playtime numbers for Gamepass by slowing down exploration. Not to mention it would increase the chances that someone would pass the 2 hour Steam refund mark before realizing that the exploration part in a game focused on exploration is boring.
Yes, in a game where ANTIGRAVITY AND JET PACKS ARE A THING, clearly we must be mindful to keep everything wheelchair accessible in a fictional video game.
It's because they can't manage the memory load of a vast world without suffering the consequences of the game crashing or freezing during a memory refresh. Their idea of a huge world for exploration that's being procedurally generated is a double-edged sword because on one edge, it's boring; on the other edge, it's a technical nightmare to get something like that working fluidly in a 3D game and the developers KNOW it wouldn't work so they don't bother with vehicles.
I noticed the ramp too, but even if it isn't, it felt like virtue signaling. Why not just have a ramp like pretty much all space ships ever, from old UFO ships to the Millennium Falcon? It just comes off as illogical in universe. Not a real issue, but I feel it shows how the devs think and what priorities they have.
I have always said this since starfields launch and I really am surprised that they didn't do this. They should have just made an area maybe about 1/4 the size of Skyrim for each major world and fully fleshed out that area. Call it a "Settled Zone" or something and keep the randomly generated stuff for the rest of the planet, just call it a "Wilderness Zone" or something. Put all the big cities in the center of these settled zones and make a bunch of interesting encounters, caves, minor settlements etc etc around them. All the story quests and big events would happen in the fully fleshed out settled areas so you could stumble across interesting caves and random encounters as you went between the quests (so no running 12km with literally nothing happening). But you still have the vast expanse of the world outside this area to make your own settlements in. Plus you have the perfect excuse for all the quests happening in these zones because "Well these zones are where 99% of people live so obviously it would be where all the quests happen". It's such an obvious way to do this but they decided to do the dumbest way instead.
So the Outer Worlds
@@ULTRAOutdoorsmanYes
I like this ongoing competition on who can make the longest video explaining why Starfield is a bad game. We've seen hour long videos, we've seen 2+ hours, now we've seen an over 4 hour video. How far can we go?
8 hour with PatricianTV
gotta love how cyberpunk has basically no loading screens yet starfield gets a loading screen when going to buy some meds in new atlantis
I am not a psychopath but I do miss the dismemberment and melee animations from older BGS titles. They would have done wonders in the small zero g areas.
the lack of any kind of gore whatsoever does make it feel pretty limp to me ngl. I don't need limb-accurate dismemberment or anything, but have a piece fall off when I hack at an enemy with a blade
@@Romanticoutlaw I agree just something would have been nice, not to mention it would make the heavy weapons feel more punchy. Such a shame because besides the melee this is the best any BSG combat has ever felt.
@@aersla1731 hey, someone said something positive about starfield!
@aersla1731 it's not like the bar was set very high in the first place
That and suit breaches. Everyone is using guns against space suits, and causing wounds, but no suits ever leak oxygen apparently. With the oxygen system they have implemented it could just count as permanent fatigue until it gets repaired
Bethesda style cities are really immersion breaking in a modern/sci-fi setting like this. The scale is just completely off. Mass Effect or KotoR did this really well because you only ever got to visit parts of a much larger location which made it feel real and believable.
At least in Skyrim I could kind of suspend disbelief and excuse it with the fact that this was a fantasy setting where cities wouldn't have been that large. And in fallout it's a hard-scrabble post-apocalyptic setting. This is a space odessey and the "metropolitan mega-city" of new Atlantis looked more like the entry area to Epcot centre. Pitiful.
@@thirdtooth4069for skyrim, that only got me so far. For the small minor settlements, sure, but if you've been to actual medieval cities... It breaks very quickly again
@@anna-flora999 yeah, point taken, but it was still easier to suspend disbelief over that than trying to imagine away why the largest city in the distant future would be something you can walk across in a few minutes
Developers have switched to increasing team sizes, instead of in the past when they would increase the amount of teams the company has working on different games. Too many chefs in the kitchen for a genre that needs micro details all over- there isn’t time for all the middle-manager approval rounds, ideas just need to be implimented
I hate that a story about alternate universes and using them they were afraid of making the quests more divisive or change more, imagine if you could only choose one faction to be a part of due to political reasons, and every loop let's you encounter more of those factions and the actual quests can change more of that individual universe...
Bugthesda's new corporate outline of "look at all the work we didn't do" is going to be their downfall.
Shortcuts, shortcuts, more shortcuts, insisting on staying with a highly flawed game engine, and KNOWING the game is boring as hell even before they realized it, is no way to keep a business on top.
I truly fear for the future of Elder Scrolls titles.
This is what you get for thinking any triple A studios are going to actually make an interesting or compelling game.
The hype was real. I just have no idea where it came from.
@@elasmojonesSock puppets, mostly. They like to call themselves brand ambassadors, though. Shills are what they are. Like that 40 year old dad that had the exact same reaction to both Diablo 4 and Starfield. Such a blatant attempt to shift the narrative in the most retarded way.
They're going to be shit so you won't need to care either way.
@@elasmojones Todd Howard.
Something fascinating about this video is that, usually when you look at works from the same dev studio, the hindsight you apply on things works differently. "This feature / function being better in the new thing makes me see the old thing in a new light, how it easily could've been better," that sort of thing. Starfield pulled the reverse; it's not just you Private Sessions, but Pat more or less made the same point about how Starfield was somehow regressive in Bethesda's ability to craft, and there is newfound appreciation for how previous games of theirs did particular things. Hearing praise for Fallout 3 for example, it really does make you think.
the moment i noticed that was when i needed like rank 4 weapon mods to make the crappy pirate rifle into semi-auto
What a fantastic, thorough video. I would actually suggest adding somewhere in the title that it contains guides as well, so people who could use them might find this video. Cuz your suggestions for the best use of the leveling system, ship building, etc could be so useful for players stubbornly trying to play this clunky game. Maybe some timestamps in a pinned comment for when each type of advice occurs, since there's a lot of video to go through.
You put so much work into summarizing the best methods to wrestle this game's systems into usefulness, & I wouldn't want that to go to waste.
Either that, or maybe you could take those parts & make a shorter video of just those, which would help them better find their intended audience. 🙂
enemies can grav jump out during space battles, but I've only seen them do it when you're piloting the razorleaf and they recognize you as the mantis. inevitably, it happened when I was actively trying to complete a skill challenge that required ship combat. wasn't even sure what happened the first few times because three different characters were talking over each other and I just tuned out the cacophony. it's amazing the extent to which this games mechanics work against each other.
Octavia Butler was inspired to write after she saw an awful sci-fi movie, Devil Girl From Mars, and thought she could do better.
Just mentioning that to let you know that if you do create your sci-fi world after being "inspired" by Starfield, you're in good company.
It slowly crept up on me that the absolute weirdest thing about Starfield is that it is ostensibly set in our universe. Yknow, like a Modern Warfare or a GTA game; this ain't the Witcher or Star Wars, these are supposed to be normal humans in the good ol' Milky Way galaxy. And its so damn weird, because there's not a trace of reality to them. They are Oblivion npcs in an Oblivion location set: all is formulaic, stingy with detail, somewhat theatrical, and self-contained to the point of lacking any context that is not some very concise fictional addition. Beyond superficial references, the world is completely cut off from the history and realities of the world it supposedly depicts.
the best thing about Starfield was that it got me try Cyberpunk 2077 again and boy, what a treat that game was thanks to all the fixes.
Playing Starfield felt like i was constantly running towards something, something that's fun, but when i finally caught up to it i realized, nothing of this was fun. It was work, not just work, but tedious work. When i realized that i shouted out loud: "Fuck you Todd! WHY? WHY?" This had so much potential but you sucked all life out of it. The saddest part is i wasn't even expecting much, but still i was disappointed. It was like a roller coaster, from: "yeah now its getting good", to "oh OK i have to do this but then its getting good", to "no again the same bullshit". Its just so sad.
I only just remembered how deceptive the launch was as well. Judging by comments and videos in the weeks leading up to release it really seemed like a large portion of the fans didn't actually know what the game would be. I for one expected to actually be able to fly my ship between planets and potentially fly down to the surface. In no way did I expect the bogus tile system with uninteresting POI placed 1km apart from each other.
Elder Scrolls 6 is gonna be shit.....
I've watched all of these long analyses about Starfield. More time than I've spent playing the game at this point, and i still learn something new each time that's baffling...
It was sad learning they had basically removed any survival mechanics in the game because they think players are just apparently too stupid to deal with them.