CMV: if No Man’s Sky’s gameplay was identical to Starfield in 2016, people would have been even more disappointed than they were. The only reason people gave Starfield a pass in 2023 is because we’re so conditioned to being disappointed by Bethesda that fanboys shrugged it off, and everyone else just looked at them weird. I legitimately believe NMS when it first released was a better game than Starfield.
Imo launch day nms is more varied (in generated content, at least) with less loading screens (so you get to do the fun action of atmospheric flight -> space flight yourself) - starfield is better in other ways but the end result is I find nms more fun (even on the day 1 version)
In principle, I agree, but I feel like part of that is just AAA vs. indie.
AAA games need to provide lots of lukewarm content, because many more casual players will buy them and expect much bang for their buck + haven’t seen this lukewarm content a million times already.
On the other hand, indies will basically only be bought by people more enthusiastic about the hobby. As such, they have to pick out one or two aspects and excel at them, so that it’s something new for that crowd.
Hello Games was indie and unknown at the time, so likely only attracted that gaming enthusiast crowd, which would have been more easily bored by the extremely lukewarm content in Starfield.
And I expect they were a very similar audience. So I don’t think the bar for what to expect was very different. If anything, the bar should have been much higher for the AAA game.
What game did Blizzard try this with? I’m just too ignorant about their games beyond Warcraft and Diablo, or was it that WoW add-on that killed WoW popularity back in the days?
So, they were right about knowing better, after all 😉
I actually think that this is a marketing fallacy some (?) big corporations use to create a self fulfilling prophecy of what people want. Wery rarely is it really a novel thing that just requires users to understand how good it is, very often it’s just gaslighting
“But throughout that time, I actually had no inkling what game development was actually like. How hard the designers, programmers, artists, producers, and everyone else worked,” he says. “The struggle to bring a vision to life with constantly shifting resources. The stress.”
Then tell us about it. Make it heard where you get Stressed and where you rub up on the state of the art. List off what had to be finished in crunch time. What got pushed by Marketing or Management. Leaving everything up to a nebulous “you don’t know” makes any criticism easily dismissed and reduces leverage against systemic issues.
I genuinely wonder how much it matters though. From online discussions you’ll see that Baldur’s Gate 3 is beloved by fans and held up as a benchmark for community engagement and listening to player feedback. It won GotY, had a launch far beyond anything the devs expected, and got incredible rave reviews.
But if you look at the top 20 best-selling games of the year, Starfield is #10 despite a lukewarm reception, numerous issues, and being accessible via Xbox Gamepass, while BG3 isn’t even on the list.
I think it really brings into perspective just how small a minority the people who post online about these things are, regardless of platform. Maybe the Gamers don’t know jack about your job, or maybe all their criticisms are 100% right. If it sells millions of copies either way, who cares?
I mean, Call of Duty: Another One is one of the best selling games of the year, despite even casuals lambasting it online. I think devs want to feel like they’re making something people want to play though, rather than feeling like they’re shovelling out garbage for the hogs.
Yeah the developers are themselves just workers that don’t profit no matter how well the game sells. Some might incidentally hold some shares in the company they work for but it’s not big money. They aren’t the board and they aren’t the primary shareholders.
People like being known for having a hand in the Big Game of the Decade. People who worked on Skyrim have that as part of their resume and can point at it and gloat about this crazy thing that is beloved by many.
Conversely an attack on a game they had a hand in developing feels like an attack on their own capabilities — whether or not that has anything to do with it directly.
Dunno if this is the case for wherever you got your sales figures from, but a lot of the places that track best-selling games only track physical releases. Or they might also track digital releases if the publisher provides them to whoever is doing that tracking, but they often don't. BG3 does not have a physical release (yet).
And a quick google seems to back that up. According to Phil Spencer the other day, Starfield has had "over 12 million players". I'm assuming this is a combined figure of sales and people who downloaded it through game pass. So, less than 12 million copies sold, and probably a good deal under that cuz I assume game pass would be a pretty decent chunk of those players reached. If the top result when googling is accurate, BG3 has sold 22+ million copies. Prolly enough to crack that top 20, I'd guess.
If the top result when googling is accurate, BG3 has sold 22+ million copies.
I would not trust that number. Larian just put out an infographic only days ago saying that 1.3M people completed the game. Using achievement data, we can extrapolate that out to somewhere between 7M and 8M copies sold.
Y’know, it’s possible people buy a game to play offline where you don’t get achievements. The numbers Larian put out could also include EA purchases from like, 5 years ago.
Achievement data is a percentage. Since there were no giveaways, PS+, or Game Pass offerings to skew the data, there's no reason to believe that the percentage would change across other platforms or across people playing the game offline. The achievement we're using is the one for beating the game, as is the finite number of 1.3M that Larian offered in their infographic. Yes, that number does include early access purchases. Why wouldn't it? Those are still copies sold, and they're still included in achievement data.
Here’s my source. It’s the latter case, they use digital sales figures from the companies that provide them.
You raise a good point: if Larian aren’t sharing sales figures then it’s not possible to definitively compare them. I don’t think the 22M figure is very credible (as the other commenter said it doesn’t match up with the data we do have regarding player count/copies sold, and came completions) but even 5-7M copies sold sounds like it would place BG3 on the list. There’s enough bleakness in the gaming scene as it is, so I’m glad to hear it might not be quite as bleak as I thought.
In this case, I am almost positive Larian just isn't providing those sales figures. Before I didn't spend more than a minute googling how many copies sold, so 22M may definitely be too high, but I would honestly still be surprised if Starfield outsold BG3 at all, even if 11.5M of Starfield's 12M players were purchases, and not game pass, which is a super generous estimate.
But I have more than a minute now, so let's look at steamdb. There are 4 analytics things that provide owner estimations there. The spread on these estimations is insane, ranging from 5.5M to 27.7M. But the two middle ones estimate sales at 13.3 and 14.9M. Both are higher than the 12M players Starfield has reached through both sales and gamepass. But. These are steam specific numbers for BG3. It also launched on GOG, though I'm sure those numbers are nowhere near steams numbers. More importantly, it also launched on ps5, and who knows how many copies sold there.
Or maybe the achievement extrapolation method is the most accurate and it's between 7 and 8 million copies sold. There is still a very good chance even those lower numbers are beating Starfield in overall sales.
Regardless, this is all some nebulous as fuck guesswork, but I feel like it's more likely than not that BG3 straight up outsold Starfield. And even if it did not, Starfield had years of hype behind it, and Bethesda has been one of the biggest names in gaming for many years now. Larian was a niche studio making niche games (yes, the D:OS series was quite succesful, I would stay say they were niche though) so the fact that they're even in competition with the Bethesda juggernauts these days is quite impressive for them.
While this is true, it is a terrible way of debating with the public.
And while users may not be able to understand game design decision and background, they can well be aware that those decisions brought to a really bad game.
Not only that, but their blindness is the result of developers choices on what they share. If you don’t want people making incorrect assumptions, give them more info. Don’t tell them to just forego having any opinion on the matter.
If it looks like a decision was made cynically, prove otherwise, don’t just say ‘No, you’re wrong, you just don’t know!’
I don't love how this is phrased, but it's not wrong.
The harsh reality of creative industries is that people are gonna be uninformed, dickish smartasses on social media (and... you know, traditional media, too), but they don't owe the creators anything, so if they don't like a thing they don't need to be right about why they like it.
But hey, I also don't resent any creator for venting reasonably on social media about this stuff every now and then. I think it's a dumb, potentially career-ending thing to do, but I get it.
But gamers don’t actually need to understand game design or why a certain choice was made.
I said this in another thread: if it’s a shit design, it’s a shit design. Knowing why the shit design was made does not suddenly make it not shit. In fact, I do not care to know why you made that decision in the first place - if it’s bad, then just own up to it and either try to fix the issue or actually resolve to do better next time.
Emil Pagliarulo is a hack who deserved to be sacked years ago. Utterly talentless gobshite who has milked the goodwill from writing the Dark Brotherhood Oblivion questline to death.
Seriously. At the end of the day it’s the players who decide whether a game is good or fun. They might not understand the nuances of what went into creating a game they don’t find fun, but that doesn’t make them wrong.
Oh cry me a river. These hacks don’t deserve the pity they’re clearly trying to win because they have already proven they don’t know how to make a technologically sound game. Every single one of their games has suffered from save-breaking glitches, and yeah I might be one of the unlucky ones to have experienced at least one in all of their games but I can count the amount of developers that have given me a similar experience on one fist (yes, I mean “fist”, not hand).
I have an up-to-date system, more than meet the requirements for this flaming turd of a game and even among the insane amount of loading screens, there are still frequent hang-ups from the game needing to load while walking through a plaza while the game is running on my SSD. That’s simply not good enough. The last time I experienced such behaviour in a game was when I was playing on a potato over a decade ago or playing online with abysmal internet.
Critics don’t have to be developers to be able to spot in what ways a game is bad and neither does the general public. This is very different from “I don’t like this so it’s bad.”. This is a case of “It runs like ass, the writing is boring and the traversal of their mostly-empty crafted universe is little more than a lag-hung menu with a stupid amount of layers to access what you’re actually looking for and a whole ton of loading screens and thus it is bad.”. They haven’t crafted some grand open universe like they advertised, they made a bunch of levels, added a slow fast travel system and a standard fast travel system and called it quits. They’re now finally being called out as the bunch of half-asses they really are and they have more than earned it.
“We were riding the limits of what was possible” is a common excuse given. Then maybe don’t bite off more than you can chew. “Overcome technology itself”. A bad craftsman blames his tools. Maybe stop using an engine that isn’t fit for purpose. The “Creation” engine - or as we might as well call it, Gamebryo - has long been cited as the cause of many problems and barely workable. Take time to retrain your developers to a user-friendly engine and you’ll quickly make up the lost time in efficiency but they insist on holding on to that dinosaur of an engine.
As a member of the general public, I can’t say I know how to make a game, let alone a good one but given the constant stutters, mostly empty world, boring writing, frequent instances of forcing grind to pad play time and ever-increasing tedium in their gameplay loop, I have to assume that Bugthesda doesn’t either. The fact they saw to set team members on reviews instead of fixing all the problems with their games, I have to say their priorities aren’t in the right place and the ones who are “disconnected” are Bethesda who seem to be under the delusion that they’ll get nothing but praise just for releasing a game, no matter the state it’s in.
Without delving into the question over how good the game is, this sounds like a company that simply has the wrong processes in place. A case of "working hard" instead of "working smart." As a result, they waste a lot of time and resources on things that ultimately don't matter. I'm sure the person in question worked really really hard on the game, but it's mostly pointless and ineffectively effort.
…this sounds like a company that simply has the wrong processes in place
LOL! OMG, I totally thought you were talking about their process for dealing with negative press/reviews. What’s funny is that your comment basically applies to both your point and mine and that kinda reinforces the point for both versions…
I’m guessing players will prefer flying over the mountains over climbing after the trailer unless Hello Games adds some interesting mechanics to climb.
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Aktywne