it includes how much they spent on making the DLC and marketing for it. Around 2/3rds of the money still went into fixing/reworking the game from what I can tell
Why do you think it didn’t go into devs? Maybe you are being cynical, but managers and CEOs are definitely devs too, they need their extra motivation to convince themselves the game is gooder.
headline number is only the equivalent of ~200-300 tech employee salaries for 3 years, less for junior, more for senior, less for designers, marketers, more for Directors, VPs, Execs…
Marketing isn’t cheap either. Can’t rely on word of mouth when that word is “shite”. Fixing the code would have been relatively cheap compared to fixing their reputation.
They went downhill since Morrowind… it was their last game that managed to capture players on its own merits, with zero mods.
People forget that Bethesda used to be a sports and arcade game developer back in the day and that Elder Scrolls was very much uncharacteristic for them. They tried and made some interesting things for a while but once they hit mainstream they never went back to the interesting stuff. It also means I don’t think we’ll see an ES6 game worth talking about.
I actually started with Skyrim:SE, had a super silent heavy armor mage and loved it, then I made something and destroyed my save file;
[overexaggeration ahead]: A week later I was riding on a unicorn as Waluigi through a HelloKitty cave, throwing spells of NSWF towards everything. Fun times.
Morrowind was excellent, but I don’t think knocking oblivion out is totally fair. Especially when you add the expansions sans horse armor dlc. Martin Septum frowns upon you.
This is the most crybaby thing to complain about. Reminds me of the reviews on Steam that are “I do not recommend” (this player has 3,432 hours logged)
The state of video games is wild to see. People will play a hundred hours of a game and say it’s lacking. Players expect endless content and it’s honestly unhealthy for gaming at large.
It’s completely unnecessary as well. We are absolutely spoiled for choice when it comes to video games, I pick up more for free than I have time to play, and with services like gamepass, offers like humble bundle, and the ever-present steam sales, there’s no reason to ever have to fork out big money for a game you feel you need to play a hundred hours in just to feel you’ve got your money’s worth. If you don’t like it after a few hours then just move on to one of the myriad games in your backlog and you’ll soon forget the boring one.
It’s a bunch of bean counters seeing trends in the markets, seeing others cutting jobs and following suit.
Bull, bear markets, trends, the whole thing is fucked.
It’s spoken about like it’s some mythical, mysterious thing and the government can try to rein it in with their levers if they must as a last resort, because we mustn’t interfere with the markets unless the outlook is bleak.
Give me a fucking break. Is anyone buying this anymore?
The old rich fucks and their old rich fuck friends and their old rich fuck companies, investment firms, hedge funds, whatever else their wrinkly old hands can get on they will move in their directions as they choose.
They don’t lose at this game and they’re pulling away at an outrageous rate, they’re killing us and the planet while they’re at it. They don’t even have to. They don’t even fucking have to. The people who have the shortest time left here are trying to suck the most out of it before they leave and leave way less of it for the rest of us.
I don’t know when others will start getting mad, but it’ll probably be too late.
I just replayed DAO last year. It holds up in a way Cyberpunk didn't manage on its first play through. The rest of the series is a trash fire though. Mass Effect is forgettable outside of the excellent world building of the first game.
Yeah nobody knew how to tell stories 10 years ago, it’s only thanks to new storytelling technology that cyberpunk can tell such a boring story with barely any variations. (YOUR BACKGROUND WILL SHAPE YOUR STORY! lol)
Barely any variations? Did you even finish the game?
There's several significantly different paths you can wind up going down in the end. Like, incredibly different endings. And your actions do influence how those endings all play out, too.
I hear this argument from people who played the background prologues and thought those were the major decisions in Cyberpunk. Mild spoiler alert to anyone who hasn’t played: they are essentially short tutorials, not major storylines.
I didn’t say anything like that. I’m asking you if you’re judging newer games against your nostalgic view of how good those games were. But you’re weirdly defensive about it so go jerk off to female Shepherd and come back with that post nut clarifty
After one week I said fuck it. Yes there is a ton of exploration, yes there are spaceships, but the whole thing is just slow, confusing and boring. Hell, if I want to play “Life”, I can just go outside.
The tons of exploration you’re talking about are copy-pasted identical POIs, too, with the same enemies and objects in the same locations.
I honestly don’t understand what they expected us to be doing for the hundreds of hours and years they they hoped we’d be playing the game for. It’s certainly the most “ocean wide, inch deep” game for what it was marketed to be.
I think they expected a Skyrim style modding community to spring up over the next few years. To be fair, I think they might be right, since there are already Starfield mods and I'm still playing Skyrim 10 years after it came out.
And that’s what I like about it. Instead of sitting you down at telling you a story they give you a world to tell your own stories in. I like having the freedom to be creative, and I like seeing and exploring the creative ideas of other people. It’s not something I’ve seen other companies really do.
That's the problem with criticizing Bethesda games. The aspect of mod compatibility and creation is at once one of its greatest strengths, and also its most obvious and provocative criticisms, and the line between the two is very difficult to distinguish from an objective point of view.
I'm glad you're enjoying it. I tried it and decided it wasn't for me. I'd been spoilt by Baldur's Gate 3 and Starfield feels like ancient by comparison.
It's kind of the same thing for Minecraft but you can still play Minecraft vanilla and have a good time because there's plenty in there to do and explore. The difference for me is that Minecraft provides a foundation to build upon whereas Starfield is hollow to begin with so just lacks its own identity.
Yeah but dont you already have skyrim for that? What new stories is this giving you the option for that skyrim couldnt handle, except this one doesnt start with magic and does start with guns?
And did the world need to be bone dry in order to be moddable? I dont remember skyrim being devoid of interest at all.
That'd be if you're crazy enough to not do any of the major quest chains or general side quests, those almost entirely take you to unique areas with their own exploration outside of the random exploration ones that you find just by exploring the galaxy.
I think it points to a larger issue with the game, which is being able to to distinguish and access the kinds of content that you want. You could easily randomly explore and end up seeing the same installation three times, or you could also randomly find other quests and go explore three unique locations and dungeons in a row instead. There is absolutely a large amount of unique content to play, though, it's disingenuous to say otherwise.
Your point is fair and works really well on its own, but in the context of the entire game, its systems, mechanics, and the entire experience they come together to create, I just can’t help but feel genuinely bored and disappointed regardless. The writing feels uninspired and generic; contrary to what some people have been saying, the writing isn’t a product of playing safe by the outsourced writers Bethesda used - it’s just bad, like a bad paint job on your car or poorly written software.
Even trying to side with the supposedly lowlife immoral inhabitants of the game’s world, you constantly hear either that they’re all family and friends (despite seeing one murder another because they got ripped off), or that they didn’t have a choice and still try to be “good”.
This isn’t what people expect from a Bethesda game in general, and from a game with ESRB rating of Mature (17+).
Again, ignoring my expectations that the game’s marketing specifically built to be centered around me being able to tell my story and stuff, it’s just poorly written and executed in the vast majority of aspects that matter in a game like the one Starfield is trying to be - the motifs aren’t clear, the storytelling is the most basic straight-up lecture in every quest that never tries to adhere to the “show, don’t tell” principles, the tasks you have to do are just boring and generic, too; it’s 2023, Bethesda has published and made tons of games of various genres st this point, many of a larger caliber, yet they still purposefully choose to go with the cookie-cutter quests that involve no unique one-time mechanics or animations, rely on mostly generated animations that feel out of place most of the time, and have you feel like you’re playing a game from pre-2010 that you should be able to play on a toaster, but are somehow told to upgrade to the latest hardware because the company couldn’t be bothered to develop and optimize a proper experience.
The pain scratches off at way more places than just exploration in Starfield.
Two things I really like are the artstyle and building my own ships with actual interiors, but the latter actually falls short due to massive restrictions in terms of said interior designs and the fact that space is basically a big mostly empty room to teleport to and from, akin to many other places in the game; no wonder an SSD is required to play, and for the worst reasons possible in a modern AAA title of that ambition.
I loved the game at first, but a lot of that was due to my huge interest in the niche it could cover, space, and science fiction, and white unfortunately, I’ve discovered way too many prominent flaws while simply trying to have fun like I always managed in similar games, even from Bethesda.
I hope that mods and DLCs may save the game, but none of that is ever going to fix the game’s broken carcass of poor writing and uninspired practices.
Overall pretty valid criticisms, I am able to enjoy the game pretty well because my expectations were very tempered, and I still find it to be enjoyable in most of the Bethesda ways I've come to expect, which is really a culmination of too many small touches for me to exert the effort of writing down and cataloging.
The only thing I'll say to all of that is that when you said that the writing quality wasn't what we expect of Bethesda or a mature game, that's a bit silly. I'm a Bethesda fanboy, basically, and even so I've only ever expected serviceable to middlingly poor writing out of any of their games, and that's about what I feel the internet expects as well, not that that makes the criticism invalid, the writing is... well, serviceable at best or middlingly poor at worst, and I don't really come in with any expectations for good writing out of a game rated mature, either.
All a mature rating means is whatever specific traits are listed on the rating, leisure suit Larry box office bust is rated mature, and that game's writing is not emotionally mature by any means.
You are correct about most of these issues, though. Somehow, by sheer amount of story content and stuff to acquire and build, I'll probably still spend about a hundred hours in it before modding, and modding will probably take it to unknown lengths. I do believe when Todd Howard says the game was made to be played for a long time that he's indirectly talking about the mod support and the game's premise and interplanetary setup being the most ripe for user generated content, and I believe that that'll add much beyond the game's natural life, in an even larger ratio than older Bethesda games, which is its own possible criticism.
Even still, I'd have to say that the game lets down on enough critical fronts that it'll be my least favorite Bethesda game, with the top two spots going to Oblivion and Fallout 4, for me, personally. I do also have to admit, when I look at the big picture, getting more than a hundred hours of enjoyment out of a game, even for the full $70, is good value for time spent, to me, and I do enjoy the game. I don't enjoy it massively, but I can spend time in the world and accomplish tasks and feel satisfied, or enjoy the gunplay or conversations enough that I can't complain.
I've bought other games of higher critical opinion that I spent far, far less time in, and didn't get the same amount of cumulative enjoyment out of, because they just don't tap into my brain in whatever primal way that Bethesda games fit in, even Starfield, puzzlingly enough.
It was incredibly disappointing when I was exploring a world and landed near a factory, killed everything then I pick a random spot and I land once more near a factory, to my surprise EVERY SINGLE THING was completely the same the same Vaa Run loot hidden in the vents, the exact same food in the living quarters, the same locked weapon rack and the same enemies at the same positions. This is the laziest fucking game I’ve seen in a while.
When you work on something for longer than 5 years, the tech and expectations from competing games will run ahead of you.
And you can’t just rewrite the story and engine and map and characters every time you get delayed.
So you should just shoot every AAA project that lags more than 5 years on the spot. It’s way too late for it at that time. And start from market analysis, not just rewriting everything in the ‘current engine and style’.
Not sure why some people are blaming Microsoft for this, they’ve got nothing to do with it. Their amazing backwards compatibility allowed people to play RDR on their consoles for years at 4K already, but rockstar are the ones that chose to not release the port on Xbox.
This is semi good news. While obviously it ain’t great that people lost their jobs, there’s a good change a few of them will be like “now that I have a few months of pay, how bout I try creating that cool idea I had a while ago?”
i wish i knew. i can tell you when i was laid off (in software), i was given an nda and non-disparagement contract that my severance was contingent upon so based on that experience, these companies consider severance a “gift”
edit: i think it also (duh) depends on the state - many states are “employment at will”, and i would guess in those states since they can dismiss you without cause (save for discrimination), you aren’t required to pay severance. most companies still do, but i imagine the requirement wouldn’t mesh with the concept of at will employment
games
Najnowsze
Magazyn ze zdalnego serwera może być niekompletny. Zobacz więcej na oryginalnej instancji.