This article speaks right out of my soul, when comparing Starfield and Cyberpunk 2077 2.0.
The quest qualtiy itself is comparable, but the delivery of Starfield makes it solely my job to create immersion (which I can and will do), while Cyberpunk 2077 2.0 grabs me by my balls and drags me into the world.
Spoiler for a small quest in CyberpunkWhen the barkeeper leans slightly forward, looks carefully right and left to make sure no one is listening and then tells me he suspects his wife sees someone else, I smell his parfume and I notice he relaxes his hurting back by stemming his arms onto the desk, because he is doing a double shift. Having Silverhand commenting on every step of the quest and turning it into a noir detctive story, making fun of me, added more immersion to a “follow person, report back”-mission. That I then can just call the quest giver on the phone, as a normal being would feels life like.
A similar quest in Starfield:
I talked to the barkeeper in Starfield from the wrong angle and he only turned his head and it was very uncanny valley, because over the whole conversation I was questioning how he can still talk with a broken neck.
I talked to the barkeeper in Starfield from the wrong angle and he only turned his head and it was very uncanny valley, because over the whole conversation I was questioning how he can still talk with a broken neck.
They might have fixed it by now but a certain little fortune teller has a very similar issue in an elevator in cyberpunk.
After helping him out I had a certain Ripperdoc showing which arm he operates with by raising it. Only his arm rotated backwards as if his elbow was turned around 180 degrees, arm clipping through his biceps.
But at least in Cyberpunk I’ve got the feeling that a bug like this is an honest oversight, whereas Starfield gives me the feeling that Creation Engine (2.0 these days?) should have have been killed, burned and buried after Skyrim. Each game since (and including) Oblivion I’ve felt like I’m looking at limitations I already noticed in the previous game built with Creation Engine or NetImmerse/GameBryo.
I haven’t played starfield and don’t intend to but I played cyberpunk on launch thanks to a covid scare and even on launch it was a good game to me. Had it’s problems but I got 300 hours out of it before the year ended.
Questgiver: “Hello, I don’t know you stranger, and I don’t trust outsiders. Can I help you? Oh, you want a quest? This evil company in Neon does bad shit and I need you to inject this virus and make sure it doesn’t get back to me. Also, the mayor here is evil AF. Don’t say that out loud, he has ears everywhere. I trust you stranger with my life. Have 8000 creds for picking up my mail, and 2000 creds and a unique purple gun for blowing up half of the city.”
I absolutely don’t get why Bethesda sold Starfield as a “new generation rpg”. It’s nothing but an archaic game with old mechanics. Don’t get me wrong, I’m really enjoying my time on the game so far (30/40h).
This is such a weird take because Cyberpunk's storytelling was a series of Grand Theft Auto phone calls occasionally interspersed with "UR DYING V, I'M KEANU REEVES AND IM GONNA TAKE UR BODY LOL". There wasn't anything interesting about Cyberpunk's storytelling. I believe a Bethesda game could be more boring than that, but it doesn't retroactively make Cyberpunk great as a result.
It blows my mind that people praise cyberpunk. They skipped straight past the character building and introduction to the city and its characters with a fucking 30 second cutscene, and then you just start getting calls from people you’ve never met like they know you. It didn’t interest me at all.
Ah so they didn’t just blow past the city and character introductions with a cutscene and then you start getting calls from fixers you don’t know, who talk to you like you have an existing relationship?
Tell me more about the incredible storyline that introduced you to the city and its inhabitants at the start
Mine was “car chase for a lizard” then the guy I just met dies, who was apparently my best friend because we played 2 missions together
V, someone in their twenties, maybe early thirties, had no life, friends, or business acquaintances or knowledge of the city before the player comes into the story.
I suppose the game should have been 25 hours longer so you could have a sit down meeting with each fixer, get to know them, maybe have some tea with them. Maybe a walking tour of Night City so that everything is spelled out for you would help?
People spent 8 years making Cyberpunk their entire personality. Of course they are going to make it seem like the best thing since stuffed crust pizza.
Ah not liking something makes me the bad guy because apparently it’s my whole personality.
Nope. Just talking about something in the thread where there’s a discussion about it. Happens to be I agree with many others that it was an overhead disappointment propped up by marketing money.
Felt the same way about it. The plot device of the character potentially becoming Keanu really broke all motivation for me. Why would I complete the main plot if each mission made the infestation worse? I made this character, why would I be interested in watching them become someone else’s Gary Stue? I wanted to be my Gary, not theirs.
The story would have been much improved by dropping Johnny Mnemonic Silverhands and instead having the partner, whose name escapes me because I only got to know him through 2 missions and a 30 second montage of us getting to know each other, as the ride along personality. Instead of him taking you over, he’s fading away and you have to save him.
Throw in a heroic sacrifice from your semi AI partner at the end or a plot twist him into a villain Tyler Durdening your ass while you sleep and it could have been something magical.
The theme of cyberpunk is that you have a literal anti corp terrorist in your head, and how that is affecting V’s psyche. Like there are points in the game where you choose some dialogue options and the game is like “is that V’s opinion or Johnny’s”.
I think they should have not played up the “if left unchecked, he’s going to kill you” sense of urgency bit though. But basically every open world game has the same problem with how do you reconcile having an open world, but also have a plot that needs moved forward. Like they can’t just outright game over you if you just do side quests for a in-game week or so.
That’s where starfield actually gets it right. You aren’t the “chosen one”, you are just a guy. The main plot of the game has no sense of urgency, because it’s fully driven by how much you dig into the artifact mystery. Any one in constellation could be doing the same things you are doing, and getting the powers and finding more artifacts, they all have seen the same visions you have when they first touched one. Again, you aren’t special.
I've been seeing a ton of cyberpunk ads since starfield was released just shitting on starfield and talking up cyberpunk. This seems like a smear campaign. Frankly if your a fan of sci Fi and video games. You should probably try both when they're on sale.
Cyberpunk put ALL their money into marketing, and they’re heavily investor-pressured into showing the game is better received than it actually is. I still firmly believe that a large percentage of the praise is astroturfing. Especially when they downvote everything negative without a response
Ok here’s a response. I pirated cyberpunk on release fully expecting it to be buggy. I enjoyed bits of it at the time but I stopped because it was too buggy and unpolished.
This is CD Project Red’s track record, but somehow everyone forgot about how bad Witcher 3 was. I expected this 2.0 update eventually and I’m glad they started another marketing push, so that I can know it’s time for the game to actually be ‘done’. Obviously they paid streamers to show the game, that’s no secret. But also it looks genuinely better, just like Witcher 3. So I’ll probably actually buy it next time it goes on sale, after pirating it to see if it’s worth it now.
Meanwhile Starfield looks exactly like the milktoast Skyrim reskin I expected it to be, with nothing really standing out. Bethesda has been slowly comodifying their games since Morrowind -> Oblivion then followed an obvious template since Skyrim. It really shows in their boring designs.
Cyberpunk was trying to do too much, but Starfield isn’t doing enough.
Fair point about starfield, I haven’t played it yet but have heard many negative things.
But your point about cyberpunk, in response to me is “It was too buggy to enjoy on release and I haven’t played the late, updated version” , but you’re glad it’s being marketed on every platform?
I’m content with my ~120 hours played so far even if I don’t play again. But I probably will, especially with mods or future content. It doesn’t quite have the build flexibility of an elder scrolls game though. Hopefully they’ll add more variants to the bases etc. Generally happy if a game has 40 hours of gameplay and there’s easily 40 hours of content in Starfield.
The NG+ stuff is interesting but after playing it a bunch it’s both a plus and a minus, like it’s neat to have the options there, but also might’ve been better to start actual new characters.
Yeah I have been pretty addicted since release – getting a month’s enjoyment out of a game (in my case, 50hrs, but I’m still going back), is good value for money.
There are too many great games, especially this year, to spend all my time only playing one.
They’re good at that. I remember trying Skyrim when it was new and we all didn’t know there would be like 15 rereleases and it felt weirdly dated. I couldn’t really put my finger on why, it just felt old.
I’m all for unions. But I’m not sure how it translates to good for players. Unions exist for fair wages and working environment, not direction of how games should be made.
Edit: People sure seem to get the wrong impression with my question. As I said in the very first line, I am for unions. They’re great and we should strive for fair working wages and hours, especially in 2023 where wages are stagnating while having massive inflation. We should have happy employees and I prefer my games made by happy employees. Failure to keep the wages up is creating shit ton of societal problems.
Issue is the delusion people are presenting here. Unions are not magic. It doesn’t automatically improve unrelated things. What people are missing is that there is no evidence the union has ever advocated for a better product. If one exists, despite my desperate attempt to find one, then it’s clearly a fringe case. All the replies are making a huge logical leap of simply saying happy worker produces better product with no reasoning behind it. Unions never argue for better product. That’s just not what unions do. It argues for the betterment of workers.
Unionizing increases productivity for some sectors. But they’re usually rare and only seen in specific industries. They generally have no significant impact on productivity based on research. If it straight up increased productivity and made better products, every company would love it. The argument is counter-logical. Companies do what is efficient. Even if we assumed individual productivity is increased, there’s still no evidence that these individuals would have the capacity to change the direction in which the product is being made in the upper tier.
No, it doesn’t. Pushing people to burn out doesn’t make more or better products, it just burns people out. People are more productive when they have work life balance
As someone in the industry I feel the opposite. A lot of features that are almost finished but cut despite being integral to the experience come from higher up pressure. The expectation to always overwork leaves no room to commit a little bit extra when it’s necessary because you’re always drained to begin with. There is also no room for creativity, playing around, or polish, because the deadlines are based on the bare minimum that will sell.
Of course unions can and do have more power in the direction of the game. Employees can also voice concerns to managers and owners without the fear of a bullshit termination. They’re pretty awesome for everyone.
Seems like people who are being fairly compensated in a comfortable work environment will make a better game than people being underpaid and overworked?
I don’t think that’s necessarily true. The reason wages are low is because the games industry attracts a lot of talent, so companies can get good talent for less. So I don’t expect unionizing to help in terms of quality of work produced, but it should improve wages and working conditions.
Quality of a product is not just a result of quality of talent (see: “I hate sand.”). Management, direction, and quality of life of the talent has a profound impact. If you want the highest quality product, especially in an industry that requires collaboration, you want your talent to be happy.
Maybe, but I feel like any quality gains would be minimal since people are already passionate about their roles (else why would those roles be so desired?). Then again, the Valve model really works, so it really depends on whether unions can change company culture, or if they’ll just secure better working hours and pay. The culture is the problem, and I’m not convinced a union can fix that.
Huh, well fear is a very different thing than stress. Once your stress turns into fear, you’re no longer personally invested in the project and are merely concerned about your own survival.
The video games industry definitely comes with a lot of stress, but they rely on passion to get value out of those long hours. This sounds like a situation of completely awful management, which won’t be fixed with a union (at least not immediately), since a bad manager can make life suck even if you have decent benefits, reasonable work hours, etc.
Then again, I don’t have a lot of details to go on, just that there’s allegations of “fear” at Daedelic.
With or without a union, improving wages and working conditions will improve productivity and the quality of the products being produced. This is an almost universal truth in research on the topic.
would you prefer games to be made by shareholders and execs or people who are passionate about making games and telling stories? when decisions are unilaterally made from the top down the quality of the product suffers, just look at nearly every AAA release from the last decade that have half-baked stories and enough bugs to make me start singing Hakuna Matata.
I love how this thread grouping is essentially argueing that the ends justify the means. Yeah, lets give a pass to companies in the name of capitalism.
Somehow they think less work means more game. I dunno, we’re way too deep into a circle jerk to hear any other opinions. Good for you to actually speak the obvious. Unions actually cure cancer too.
It’s worse than that, you can’t even get it for yourself at all if you already own anything in there. Or at least I don’t seem able to do anything but get it as a gift.
Apparently the publisher can either set it up like that or have the usual partial discount you mentioned, and Atlus unsurprisingly chose the most infuriating option.
I know everyone says it, but FUCK they should let Obsidian do the writing, and they need to drop that ancient game engine. Microsoft has probably killed this company.
Fallout: New Vegas had some of their best story telling. The Outer Worlds had awesome lore too. I’m really surprised they didn’t bring them along.
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.
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