The real problem is how basically game dev is an untenable long-term career from a AAA standpoint… or at least it is outside of Japan.
Almost every major dev is not being run by anyone with more than 10-ish years of dev experience.
Why? Because studios shut down and fire everyone, or they get bought… and fire everyone… or the grizzled vets get burnt out, or find out that work-life balance shifts when they get old enough to want to start a family, or discover (like I did) that general software pays better, has less turnover, and doesn’t shut down as often.
Look at all the major players in the FPS game for example from the past 15 years… The guys who made Perfect Dark, the original GoldenEye, Killer Instinct, Banjo Kazooie, and Conker’s Bad Fur Day? Mostly not in the industry anymore or struggling while working on small indie projects. Some of the companies still exist, but the guys who’d be in their 60s with 30 years of game dev and design mastery under their belts? Gone.
Cliff Blezinski isn’t working on games anymore. John Carmack isn’t at id. Half of Bungie’s OG staff has moved on to other stuff or switched to 343 or some other smaller studio.
I said “outside of Japan” earlier btw because meanwhile Shigeru Miyamoto is still at Nintendo. Dude’s an absolute elder god of game design, and all he’s been doing is working on them for more than 4 decades at this point.
Kojima’s been making games since the 80s, so has most of the folks at Capcom, and the From Software guys have been doing the same thing for 15+ years at this point.
And then there’s the rare tiny studio or re-org of a once awesome team like Respawn after all the Activision / Call of Duty stuff or indie effort like the guy behind Stardew Valley… but other than those handful of exceptions, there’s no one but 20-something recent grads that pad out the teams at these giant game companies like Ubisoft, Activision, EA, etc. Even Blizzard is a pale shadow of what it once was. And Valve doesn’t really make games anymore b/c they don’t have to…
They aren’t making great games - but NOT because they’re “stupid…” they’re making bad games… because they just started… and all the old farts who they should be apprenticing under like you do with ANY other respected artisan type career are gone.
And every year some $10 million / year bonus paid suit shuts down an Ensemble Studios, or a Telltale Games, or fires half of the team at Square Enix b/c the new Tomb Raider 6-year project didn’t make a bajillion dollars after some exec decided that should be their target since “Clash Royale” only took 1 year to pump out and just basically prints piles of money.
It’s been out longer and has improved over time. I’d wait until Starfield has been out for about the same length of time, see if things even out or continue to trend down.
What needs improvement in Starfield, though, isn’t likely to actually be improved. Can’t even think of a time where a game’s story was re-written over time to be better.
If only that was what he was saying. He doesn’t care whether they’re dependent on servers. The vast majority of physical games sold today are already nothing more than an entitlement and some of the game files, with the rest being downloaded after you insert the disc. He’s only concerned with Gamestop getting their cut, both in new game sales and especially in their bread-and-butter trade-in market.
Of course making money is his motive, but that does that matter?
Digital distribution only means you can’t give (or sell) your games to someone else. So with digital only the copyright holders of the video games make more money. Once it’s all digital only, next step is to require a connection to a server for them to work, so then they can shut it down to force you to buy a new console and re-buy all the old games you want to play again. What are you going to do if the decide to go that way? It’s either stop playing video games altogether, or go along with whatever scheme they feel like coming up with when they enshittify themselves like every other company inevitably does.
A physical copy means more options for the consumer, why should we care how much of the pie this corporation or that corporation makes off of it? In fact corporations in general make even more money from non-transferable digital distribution.
Given that MS have put a lot of work into making your digital 360 titles work on Series s/x and even upgrading some of them, I don’t think that’s a concern with all publishers.
I’m not sure why you’re trying to convince me of the merits of physical media? I did not, and do not, disagree. It’s a more flexible option, and more options is always better for the consumer. But the reality is that physical media, in its current iteration, doesn’t offer all that much protection. The only universal benefit of physical media is the ability to regift or resell. It’s a great benefit, but it hardly liberates consumers from dependence on servers.
As for my original point, it simply read to me as if this person was giving the GameStop exec credit for something he did not say. I wanted to make sure his comments were seen in an accurate light.
So we should reject an ally that has a shared goal simply because their motives aren’t pure enough?
It’s the old Stephen Fry quote “it’s more important to be effective than it is to be right.” We shouldn’t care so much about whether or not someone has the right reason for trying to affect a positive result. Gamestop’s motives are irrelevant, the effect of their actions are what matters.
Ok, but “It would be great if people had to buy more of the thing” is not an accurate summary either. Putting a CD drive on a console does not mean you have to buy physical media.
This is also true. With DRM, I feel like we’re missing out on a lot of property rights that should be remediated. I’m not sure what all could be done for zero day patches, though. Maybe we go back to the Windows XP days and distribute update packages via CD as well. TBH, though- if we have the ability to directly access the storage medium of a console and we are able to remove DRM, there’s no reason to make a disc drive mandatory
I went to the game’s website to see how they portrayed the game as opposed to taking whatever cherry-picked similarities Sony chose to use as their argument.
Wow. It is fucking identical. Maybe the gameplay is different, but the art is indistinguishable.
The world needs to be fleshed out so an RPG would actually be pretty good. The problem is it’s a pretty world but it isn’t really very interesting. The humans who occupy the world are frankly boring and you can only fight so many robot elk before you want to do something else.
A prequel would be interesting, detailing what happened and maybe explaining how things ended up the way they now are.
Yeah I don’t have the greatest love for Sony but they have a really good point with this.
It’s basically the same game; Robot animals have taken over the world because reasons, Humans survive in small groups and have reverted to some kind of native american inspired spirituality for some bizarre never explained reason, you play as hyper athletic female warrior type who has to fight said robot animal things, your mission is to acquire some long lost secret technology from before the world was taken over by robot animals.
I really really hope that the expectation vs reality of Starfield is the final straw that makes people pause the next time a game markets itself as having an scope and quality that is absurdly beyond anything else on the market.
We have seen this story time and time again and the claims never, ever, materialize on launch. Maybe they get closer to the initial scope over the next few years if they can afford continued development and support, but that's exactly the point, that you need way more man hours and budget than what is acceptable in a realistic development cycle to reach that kind of scope while maintaining overall quality of the game.
The next time that a game claims to have absurd size or whatever million planets or that you can be anything you want or whatever other immense thing like that, ask yourself what parts of the game have taken a significant backseat to achieve that. Because we are well past the point of the industry having proven that the limitations for the scope of a game are not technical anymore, but budgetary. And there's only so much that can be done in 8 years.
Honestly, seeing this AAA game play like a shit-tier shovelware game on my pretty fucking robust Linux gaming PC makes me kinda fine with Star Citizen taking its sweet time now.
LOL star citizen is taking its time to vacuum up money, not develop a good game. They haven’t even decided on a flight model. In a flight game. After a decade.
Its more than that. Its bland. Fucking Skyrim had more going for it than neon. Tavern wenches shows more skin than Neon Workers. People actually bleed in skyrim. Drugs even, I think skooma has better writing tham Aurora.
Okay, but just because they’re not titillating the desires of teenage boys doesn’t mean they “sold out” or “got more corporate”. They’ve been pretty consistent about presenting their creative vision for the game since the beginning.
Also, you’re premise is wrong. I just shot the hell out of someone iin the game and there were absolutely blood splatters all over the wall and floor. Have you played the game, or are you meming influencers?
That said, I would never consider Beth games to be particularly risque. They’ve always faded out sex scenes. Oblivion and Skyrim aren’t particularly bloody games. Fallout’s bloodiness is more in line with the IP and considerably tame compared to Obsidian’s games.
There is blood splatter, but it looks silly, when you loot things off of dead bodies they still have the same suit/helmet/whatever left on their bodies you supposedly just looted.
I’ve put over a hundred hours into the game, I’m not a teenager, and the game is definitely more tame/sterile/corporate in many aspects compared to previous games. Remember bloody mess in Fallout? Or the fact you can goo enemies with laser weapons? Yes fallout under beth is definitely more tame even then compared to Fallout 1 and 2 but still Starfield has none of that.
There’s dibellla in Elder Scrolls, and cannibalism, and skeletons (im mot talking about like necromancer skeletons, literally bones for corpses of prior-dead, in Starfield there are corpses but it’s always the “frozen over” look, even on warm planets with atmosphere where decomposition should definitely have taken place instead)
The blood looks way better than vanilla Skyrim did…
Also you’ve gone from calling the game “corporate” to “tame/sterile” which seems to be an admission that you now understand this was a purposeful and consistent creative choice towards building a “positive sci-fi” world ala Star Trek. A choice they were pretty clear to market and a choice you disagree with. That’s fine. It doesn’t mean it’s a bad game, it just means you weren’t paying attention and bamboozled yourself into thinking this game was ever designed for your sensibilities. Not every game made by a studio will be the same - especially when it’s a new IP. Hell, Tango made Evil Within and Ghostwire then turned around and built Hi-FI Rush.
Oh well. But since it’s a Beth game, you can be rest assured that there will be a ton of mods to help your realize your dream of watching people die and decompose in the most realistic way possible. Heck, there are probably already a bunch that do.
I disagree they said it was Star Trek like at all, this is most definitely not Star Trek utopia the game, you’ve got Neon as a shining example of the corruption and corporate espionage aspects (not that it’s a bad thing at all, just not in line with classic trek ideals)
I know newer trek has moved away from the utopia aspects a lot, partially why I don’t enjoy them nearly as much.
I do think (like with most beth games) the game itself is a great framework for modders to really make the game their own.
Oh, also, I never said it was a bad game, I just noticed they sanitized it a lot compared to what I was expecting, it was noticable to me as some who who has thousands of hours in prior beth games, modded and unmodded.
Wait, so first you were complaining it’s not dark enough and now you’re complaining it’s too dark and not utopian enough? Bro…
Also, I said they were trying to capture the tone of a positive sci-fi story like Star Trek, not create star trek fan fiction. The game world shows significant progress towards solving various social, equality, and health issues, but we haven’t quite gotten rid of money, and as such, greed. For this reason, we still have economic disparity, corporate evil, pirates that do evil things for money, and a monopoly banking system that uses it’s power to use an abuse it’s opponents.
Furthermore, there’s plenty of people who have a problem with an overbearing singular government and want to do things their way - thus why the freestar collective and crimson fleet exist.
Its earth + 1, better, but still flawed. Which is honestly, a lot more realistic than star trek ever seemed to be. Perhaps they wanted to show a “missing link” between current humanity and star trek humanity. There’s progress, but there’s still work to do. Which, given the lack of aliens, its probably a good move to make sure humanity still manufactures drama.
Regardless, the theme and tone of the game can be best described as “hopeful and wide-eyed optimism”, which is very different from the distopian unease of Fallout and sweeping fantasy epic of Skyrim and, starfield was very clearly marketed as such from day one.
No no no, I’m saying your claim that they said it’s supposed to be like Star Trek (which I never saw mentioned at all) doesn’t make sense.
Though I agree with your latter paragraphs 👍
I’ll add, I’m not a hater and have absolutely defended the game in many aspects (check my post history if you’d like), I do think there are valid criticisms and odd choices though. I’m at 177 hours with it, played through all the side quests I could find and started ng+, made it most of the way through again but now I’m already at the point of, “eh, theres not a whole lot left to do but rehash what I’ve already done for slightly better rewards”
I have high hopes for the mod community as they have been able to consistently breath life and add addition QoL fixes to Bethesda games for years, and I am massively appreciative of them giving me more reasons to jump back into some of my favorite games :)
They never said “star trek in space” because, first of all, that’s redundant, and second of all, would invite lawsuits. I’m not even necessarily saying that they’re copying star trek in any way.
I’m using Star Trek as an illustration of the positive sci-fi genre and the tone they were putting out in their marketing. No, its not literally star trek - but unlike their other titles that are either distopian sci-fi or a semi-dark epic fantasy, this one has a more positive tone - there’s a sense of hope and compassion that even persists in more distopian areas like the well, cydonia, ryujin, and ebbside. And furthermore, the main story’s focus on the excitement and wonder of exploration, and traversing the unknown, is a love note for Star Trek and all the sci-fi novels strewn about the environment.
And though this clarification is quite separated from it’s context now, I only brought this up to say that this game is far more hopeful and optimistic than their previous games and I feel like their marketing illustrated it quite well. And the reason it matters is beacuse the lack of the “darkness” and “grittiness” you are looking for can be explained by this difference in tone.
Or they actually enjoy it. Just because you and others don’t doesn’t mean everyone doesn’t. I didn’t pay anything for it and thoroughly enjoyed it, and will do so more when the DLC comes out. As with anything there are valid points of criticism but so much of the hate for it is fully because of people’s idiocy and not anything else, I’ve never before seen so much deeply stupid criticism for something.
I have no problem with people liking it. But I know for a fact that a lot of people really are just obsessed with it because they got bamboozled into pre-ordering, because Bethesda, and they don’t want to admit they made a mistake.
I’m sure a rational response is just going to get downvoted to oblivion, but it’s actually a fun game. Not my favorite from Bethesda, but I definitely enjoyed the 1k hours I put into it last year, and I look forward to dipping back in once the DLC drops and there are more mods (not paid creations) available.
You nailed it. The ship-building, especially with the early mods that allowed more part rotation and clipping, REALLY sucked me in. I am excited to check out the enhancements BGS added to that system when I next play.
Starfield has a lot of good aspects, but also some bone-headed gameplay and content decisions. I had a lot of fun with it for a few weeks and will come back to it if/when it gets to a better state.
It improved a bit, and then the studio began working on an overhaul internally to provide what the game should have been, sort of No Man’s Sky style… but they were shutdown by Bioware.
There’s a lot of reasons it ended up the way it did, development hell and poor management mostly. Hell, the flight mechanic, which had been added and removed several times in development, was core to the released game, and easily the best part, apparently wasn’t even decided to be a necessary feature until Patrick Soderlund, former head of EA studios, was very disappointed in a demo BioWare had shown in early 2017 that the team decided to add flying back in.
One of the core pillars of the game was essentially added just to impress an executive and keep the development going versus being canceled. Flight like in the game requires the entire map and structure of the game world to be different. If you can fly,. you now need to take advantage of the vertical space, something that simply doesn’t even get considered in most games. A mountain you can climb is not the same as needing to fill in an entire mountain range and canyon region with content.
Honestly, I'm amazed by the hatedom for Starfield. It's ... a Bethesda game (and it's actually better at being a Bethesda game than Fo4). I'm not sure what people seem to have expected?
More progress than “better at being a Bethesda game than Fo4”.
I was a die hard Bethesda fan prior to 76 and they need to do better than par to earn my favor back. They scorned me and my wallet isn’t going to forget that any time soon.
Maybe but why should I consider playing anything they have anymore? They ripped me off. I never got my canvas bag with my pre order and the whiskey was a over priced plastic shell with mediocre whiskey in it.
The whiskey wasn’t part of the deal but the pre order was and I want what I paid for damn it. There is no excuses for their shitty business practices.
Nothing. I didn’t buy it nor review bomb it. I watched the gameplay and scoffed at how yet again we were being spoon fed more mediocre Bethesda content.
The thing is, I want to love them. I used to be obsessed with the lore from Fallout and I’m embarrassed to admit how much time I spent playing ESO. It sucks but if I keep giving them my money I’m just basically saying “it’s okay you screwed me over”. If they really want my money again they have to shape up both their buggy software and their business practices.
Yup, I’m right there with you. For me it started with their paid modding nonsense with Valve. They apologized, I forgave them, and then they literally did it again with the Creation Club. Totally betrayed our trust and clearly only did it because they were so desperate to monetize their modding scene in any capacity that they were fine with going back on their word.
Fallout 76, along with the preorder BS, the atomic shop, and their overpriced subscription service, all added to my growing distrust in Bethesda. And tbh even Fallout 4 really let me down and made me nervous about future games.
All that being said, I still really wanted to like Starfield. Unfortunately I just didn’t.
My hot take on Bethesda is, they simply don’t do game design. They take their previous game, slap whatever is the fashionable mechanic of the day on top, and just roll with the punches until it sorta kinda works.
They haven’t done any real game design probably since Morrowind. Since then they’ve added weapon armor crafting in skyrim, base building and weapon customization in fallout 4, and now in starfield they’re adding procedural planets, resource mining, Ship building… the game is collapsing under sheer feature count.
The problem for me is, it’s not enhancing the core Bethesda experience; they are rather diluting it. All this extra crap just distracts from the actual thing I want from a Bethesda game, which is a big open designed world filled with interesting locations, characters and quests that you’re free to discover as you like. The procedural content especially is, like, antithetical to the formula.
The procedural content especially is, like, antithetical to the formula.
Agreed; I don't even understand why procedural generation is popular anymore. It was novel in its first uses, but where devs see convenient shortcuts and marketers see "infinite replayability," I see "this shit is all going to feel identical after like 5 tries tops."
Oh look, it's the skybox from 3 planets ago with the ruin from 2 planets ago and the enemy selection from 5 planets ago. And I think this might be a new shade of blue in the grass, or is that just the skybox casting a weird hue over everything?
I believe it amplifies some of the worst aspects of their games. If I think back to what I liked about Oblivion, it was a world that felt lived in. Objects had purpose, characters had homes, content was discovered. It relied a lot on procedural content, but it felt like there was a strong level of cohesion between the procedural elements and mechanics. The disparate aspects of the game fed into one another. With Starfield, you get this huge increase in scope, but each individual part feels kind of empty and boring and clunky and slow.
Here’s a contrasting example:
In Oblivion, imagine if you wanted to steal something from a vendor. You have to wait for night, you have to pick the lock, items have actual value, you have to stealth in case they catch you, you know if they can see you, there are other things to do in the city in the meantime, and during all this you might find something unexpected along the way that completely tangents you off into a different direction. All these elements come together to create interesting player stories, and none if it needs to be tied to any guided narrative.
In Starfield, all of these elements fall apart. The scope of the game means you’re constantly fast travelling from location to location. No single location has too much going on, and half the time what is there is sending you back out to space anyway, so you never really feel much connection to any physical place. The relative value of items is totally skewed because of the scale of ship related expenses compared to anything else, so what’s the value of stealing a cool rock? It’s also very difficult to tell relative weapon/item quality at a glance. I know that a steel sword is better than an iron sword; I have no clue why a Reflective Terrablazer is better than a Targeted Blurgun - and the default weapons usually don’t matter anyway because I would much rather have cool modifiers. The stealth and lockpick mechanics are both behind skill tree unlocks, so you’re far less likely to engage with those mechanics in the first place. The shops are all open 24/7 (I think? honestly don’t even know) so the day/night cycle seems irrelevant, so sneaking in to the shop is a no go, and I feel pretty limited in lockpicks and don’t really know where to reliably buy than a few at a time. And you never, ever, find anything surprising or compelling, and if you did it would be reduced to a quest checkbox.
So to summarize: I don’t know who I’m stealing from, I don’t know why I would care to steal anything, it’s not obvious how stealthy anyway I am unless I skill into it, it’s not worth using my lockpicks, I’ll never be caught, and their door is always open. There’s zero motivation to actually engage with the world in a way that makes it feel alive. But it’s critical to note: all those systems are still there! You can do all this stuff in the game! But because of how things are structured, even though the game on a fundamental level is extremely similar, the way you interact with it is totally removed from the kind of emergent fun that makes exploring those worlds so fun. It’s just a smooth path of monotony to the next thing. The systems often amount to less than the sum of their parts.
Now I’ll admit, some of this could be on me. Maybe I’ve changed. It’s possible. But man, I tried. Hey, what’s that cool cave on this planet? I’ll go check it out! Oh uhh, it’s nothing? There’s… a dead crab and a box with some old glue? Okay I guess?
I think vendors being open 24/7 was a quality of life choice. Different planets work on different time-scales. In skyrim, you fast travel from Riverwood to Whiterun, and it only takes a few in-game hours. You leave Riverwood at day and likely load into Whiterun at day as well, so shops and quest-givers are more likely to be up and open.
In Starfield, the day/night cycle and the distances are so different and vast that every time you jumped anywhere it would be a 50/50 on it being night and you having to find a bed or chair to wait or not. I think that would get tedious, so the shoddy solution is that everything is open 24/7.
Oh you’re definitely correct. But I think many decisions were made in this way, and it compromises the core experience. There’s all these friction points between the different systems that make the experience feel disjointed. They are each fine in isolation, but they don’t talk to each other very well, in my opinion.
Even Skyrim arguably suffered a little from problem of locations not mattering, but at least you needed to first visit the place to unlock it as a fast travel point, which meant you needed to travel there on foot, which meant exploring the world, which requires other design work that supports that experience. But for Starfield of course, these are planets so you can just fly there. It makes sense for what the game is, but it doesn’t make for a compelling experience. See that mountain? You can go to your map and fast travel there.*
*I know it doesn’t work that way once you land on a planet, but you know what I mean
It doesn’t have the same impact from the world design or story telling. It’s generic. It’s boring. It’s bland. The game play is exactly the same, but the motivation to give a shit about anything is gone because nothing about the world is very interesting aside from the aesthetics.
Shit, man, even the books in the game are just excerpts from real books. Like… humans haven’t written anything new in the 200 something years since Earth’s exodus? Cmon.
I don’t think it’s a bad game at all. But the Bethesda formula is definitely showing its age and the muted tone and presentation of Starfield, compared to Elder Scrolls and Fallout, accentuates this. I have like a dozen other games vying for my attention and a huge backlog of other titles, and I’ve been struggling to find motivation to play Starfield as a result. If I’d paid CDN$90 for the privilege I’d probably feel more strongly about it either way.
I did actually enjoy starfield (it wasn’t amazing or anything, but I don’t regret my purchase), but I have to say, I hate this argument.
For one thing, being a Bethesda game doesn’t just immediately grant a pass for being bad in all the ways Bethesda games are generally always bad (bugs, bad facial animations, outdated mechanics, etc). Each game should be judged for how good of a game it is, not how good a " Bethesda game" it is.
Secondly, and more importantly, the fact is that this time around is especially bad simply because all the typical “Bethesda” issues are just starting to become more and more egregious as time goes on. The fact is that if you handed me this game and told me that it was a heavily modded copy of FO4 I’d 100% believe you. Nothing in this game really shows a meaningful step forward either in tech or gameplay from what we’ve seen before. The only real “new” thing is ship to ship combat, which is frankly very lackluster.
As for what people expected? Better. That’s pretty much the long and the short of it. They expected it to feel less clunky than FO4, they expected space travel mechanics that weren’t just glorified fast travel menus, and new gameplay that doesn’t just feel like the same shit Bethesda has been doing since Morrowind.
That being said, the worldbuilding is phenomenal, as is typical of Bethesda, and at least for me, that’s where most of the fun came in, just wandering around and doing side quests to explore more of the world. But once you’ve more or less explored the world, there’s not much left to draw you in. The gameplay itself certainly hasn’t been fun enough to make me seriously consider a newgame+ any time soon.
Their biggest, most consistent fault isn’t bugs orjank, it’s the stale as fuck writing. They desperately need the hand the reigns to some new talent in that area.
It feels like they’ve been incapable of writing a compelling narrative with interesting characters for decades now.
Skyrim had some very compelling narratives, however it has the prior games lore buildup to build off of
I feel like Starfield is a lot more “matter of fact” about it, wherein things are told to you moreso rather then needing to go out and “find” the lore.
I also don’t know of any mysteries in the Starfield world that aren’t just… Explainable
For example, terrormorphs or starborn, the game just tells you the details with hardly any effort needed to uncover the info yourself.
Maybe I’m just way to into the FromSoft narrative style at this point where there’s tons of deep lore but they don’t just hand it to you on a platter, makes it more fun to theorize and dig
gamespot.com
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