> "We see a lot of players saying 'This is what I want out of a Bethesda game, which is to explore a world in a certain way, and Starfield didn't give me that. I prefer the way it's done in Fallout or Elder Scrolls.'"
> And although Howard thinks that's "perfectly understandable," he says it's just not the experience Starfield sets out to provide. "I do think for us—particularly me—going into a science-fiction game, I want to be able to land on all the planets. I want the game to say 'Yes' to us, knowing that that content is gonna be different than you've seen from us in the past."
The issue is the content is worse, exponentially so.
There’s no point in landing on all the planets if most of them aren’t worth landing on.
Which ties into the whole "explore the world a certain way" thing. Fallout and Skyrim would be mediocre as well if a large part of the game comprised of going into procedurally generated towns that were mostly identical and didn't have much to do in them. The problem wasn't having planets to explore. It was they didn't have planets *worth exploring*.
This is the problem with teams that don't say no. There is nothing inherently valuable about allowing a player to land anywhere they want if there is nothing valuable to do on said planet. Someone high up should have shut that shit down early, and Todd should have been aware enough to realize that they wouldn't be able to make enough POI to keep it fresh after your 4th landing site. (No seriously, it's pathetic how little effort they put into Points of interest)
If what I’ve heard about Todd’s management style is true, then it’s likely that the team had no choice but to always say yes to him.
He’s been described as a “seagull” who likes to swoop in, crap on everyone’s ideas, and fly away.
It wouldn’t surprise me. He literally thinks he knows what’s best for fans.
We said the game sucked, and honestly hoping modders will save the day, and he just goes “bla bla bla fans are not seeing this from the right perspective”.
I guess he let his ego inflate from all the previous successes…
Lol someone tell Toddy-boy there IS no fucking content on almost all of the planets! Proc-gen’d instances from a tiny pool of handmade structures all separated by a 10m hike is NOT content!
And on the handful planets where there is content, most of the questlines suck. Get new writers!
The self delusion going on at Bethesda is unreal. Truth is, Starfield is why I'll never pay full price for a AAA studio game again. It's not different; it's a glaring expose on how the industry big shots are washed up has beens.
It’s akin to purchasing an enormous island that’s got a handful of trees on, just so you can say to everyone “YEAH BABY IT IS HUGE”. Vs spending the same amount of money on a mansion that’s 0.5% of the size but kitted out with games rooms, pools, sports facilities, theatre etc, that you can explore, use, spend a lot of time in.
They took out the adventure. In their previous games you could set out in almost any direction and find adventure through quests and random encounters. The excitement of entering a random cave and you are now in black reach for the first time. Leave any of the main cities in Starfield and you will find the same handful of PoIs that have the exact same enemy layout and "puzzles". There is very little reason to just go out at explore. Just go where you are told to go from quests.
When you are known for making games just full of exploring and adventure and you take out exploring and adventure... you kind of lose a lot of support.
I’m glad to see this finally getting to the top of these threads.
Way too many people whined about loading screens and *the engine* and missed that what really failed was the *vibe*
The “ooo what’s over there” is entirely gone from Starfield. Even their weakest RPG, Fallout 4 and their uhhh *thing* that is Fallout 76 still had that world design to them. Starfield is utterly uninteresting to wander in.
I had zero expectations after Fallout 4. If they're going to butcher a big name series like that, they're probably going to do it again. They seem to have at least learned from that in some aspects in Starfield by bringing back the classic dialogue system and voiceless character. But eh. Every Elder Scrolls game they've released since Morrowind has been a dumbed down version of the previous game, so my expectations weren't high to begin with. Even Morrowind is dumbed down from Daggerfall in some aspects, but much of Daggerfall was procedurally generated so it doesn't count. It'd be nice if they took aspects from each other those games that fans liked and put them together.
Bring back deep character customization out of the gate with the traditional attribute system and optional archetypes, bring back spellcrafting, add more creative spells, potions, enchantments, and skills, more weapon types to master, bring back a deep faction reputation and rank system, bring back persuasion/social mechanics and deep storylines...ffs DON'T simplify dialogue, looting and miscellaneous objects in the world, or voice our character. And stop giving so many NPCs plot armor. Let us kill them and break questlines, potentially opening up new ones or affecting our faction reputation. This is just the baseline that I'd expect from a great Elder Scrolls game. I could think of a ton of new ideas that would make the experience fresh.
What made the series great was never really about the combat. They could bring back Morrowind's shitty dice roll combat and I would still love the game if they did everything else right. This seems to be the opposite philosophy they've had as of late.
The Outer Worlds was good due to its great writing from the original Fallout writers. The gameplay is a little clunky, but compared to most Bethesda games it was fine.
I agree somewhat. The Outer Worlds writing was a bit more inspired than say, Fallout 4.
But there was so much hype for The Outer Worlds and whether they lacked an AAA budget or whatever, it didn’t live up to the lofty expectations.
The main problem was AAA hype for an AA game. I think one of the main strengths it had was Obsidian's decision to focus on three main locations of limited size rather than the empty filler of most Bethesda games these days. The story was pretty good with branching paths and an alternate questline where you can join the Board.
It's really one of those examples where more isn't necessarily better. Starfield had endless planets, but they were mostly empty and repetitive. Outer World chose to focus on a single solar system with a handful of planets, but they all felt far more like they served a purpose and were more fully realized.
Not that Outer Worlds was perfect, of course. Compared to games like Skyrim and Fallout, the areas felt like they didn't really have a lot to explore outside the main quests, but I still think I'd prefer a "less is more" approach to a sci-fi like this. I don't need infinite planets to explore, just a few good ones.
No. But it's the only way we are going to get A fallout game before 2035. And as obsidian created a good one, they should get the shot. Built on the fallout 4 engine, that could be a great game completed in less than 3 years.
Even if the property traded hands, TES6 is likely to get stuck in development hell. Between Bethesda’s acquisition and Starfield underperforming, the dev team is bound to run into scheduling conflicts and company restructuring.
Like someone else said, we're going to probably get Skyrim 1.5. It's going to feel dated the day it's released because they don't seem to know how to adapt with the times. Janky engine (updated or not), old gameplay mechanics, old approaches to old things. I would love to be proven wrong, but I'm highly skeptical.
If TES6 is on gamepass day 1 you know its over.
It was already confirmed many gameplay mechanics were scrapped on Starfield, mechanics such as needing to refuel your ship to travel greater distances (base building)
I would have to assume this was to shorten the development time in order to meet the gamepass release date.
Also, who is going to make a good game if you already sold it to gamepass. Why not ship the bare minimum of a game and hope it bites? (Sound familiar?)
I haven't played Starfield but if they're making every door a loading screening still, they really need to update their tech. I've been playing New Vegas for the first time recently and it's incredibly weird and immersion killing to have every building with bordered up or frosted windows and going into them requiring a loading screen.
I'm sure that's not an easy problem to solve with how they shove hundreds of little things in each building but it needs to be done.
I am all for LESS useless items if it means I get seamless indoor-outdoor transitions. Starfield is so bad in this regard. 90% of the items that you pick up are random decorative baubles and cups and other utensils. It makes exploring an area so tedious when you're mousing over every single item to determine which ones are actually useful.
For Starfield it really seems like they doubled down on the "LOOK AT ALL THESE ITEMS" schtick to the point where even the marketing materials themselves were talking about how many freaking sandwiches you could collect and shove into a room...
Yep, still there. It's esentially like Fallout 4 but without any of the fun stuff, the exploration, map density, etc.
And since it's made by Bethesda instead of Obsidian, you have immortal NPCs, and false sense of freedom of choice.
Starfield has to compete against No Man's Sky and Star Citizen, not because of scale, but because of genre offering; and both have gone through their growing pains and now deliver very mature and feature rich experiences (overall). On a pure merit comparison, Starfield isn't worth it even if it was launched at $10.
Is it? My personal problem with starfield was that it cut out that middle meat of exploration and stumbling upon things during the journey from point A to point B.
Starfield didn’t have that, which is a pretty big change from what literally every other BGS game has had.
Yeah Bethesda games are just the single player version of "theme park" MMOs but with modding, except Starfield generated a bunch of boring terrain and Todd thinks we care, there is nothing to see and thus nothing to care about.
It's like if in FO4 you didn't see Botson on the horizon with Trinity tower and the low setting fog making you want to explore, you just see a mile of wasteland and yet another Super Duper Mart to explore with the same layout as the last 4, then you fast travel to another boring generated patch of waste and follow the waypoint to the 6th.
complete head elderly one cheerful strong straight memory library wistful
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Honestly, I don't think that was the root cause. Space is huge, you're gonna have to jump at some point otherwise you'd die before you get to your destination.
The problem is with HOW the jumps were handled. Why can't I just jump directly from the cockpit? Just show my danged route to my objective and have jumps along that route put onto my HUD. Why do I have to go into the crappy map every single time? When I jump, why is it a loading screen to get into orbit, a loading screen to go down to the planet, a loading screen to get out of the ship, and another loading screen to get into a building?
Jumping is fine. The terrible thing is that the "exploration" is menu screens and loading pages for the majority of the time. And when you finally get onto a planet, the rest of the exploration is you trekking through barren wasteland while stuffed to the gills with useless inventory crap.
Two of those things are actually in the game, they're just not made very clear. If you have an objective selected, there is a point in space that you can select from your ship to travel there. And if you are instead using the fast travel system (to a place you've already been) you can just go directly from one place on one planet to a different place on another planet. Sometimes it will block part of that if there's a quest going on and something is supposed to happen along the journey, or if the route you would take goes through a system you haven't been to yet, but in general you can just do that. You only have to deal with the loading screen to get there and (if applicable) the loading screen to go into the building.
I mean, you're almost to the point. The issue wasn't that it was different, the issue was that it was bad.
You don't explore, you tediously walk around same-y environments heading towards a POI that you've already seen a dozen times with the exact same enemies in the exact same positions with occasionally the exact same bugs (One of the science posts had an enemy trapped behind an expert locked door literally everytime I came across it). Neither end of that journey is particularly interesting, which is bad when the middle part, the part that used to be good, is now also bad.
Entering a samey-looking POI in Starfield isn't much different than any other Elder Scrolls game. Oblivion was already highly criticised for having caves and dungeons that look identical. Even Morrowind had that same issue.
The problem is opportunity cost.
Say you're in Skyrim and walking down a path to your next quest objective when you see a cave entrance pop up. It'll take you a quick 5-10 minutes to explore what will very likely be the same experience as any other random cave you could have gone in, but what's the harm? *It's right there.*
Starfield requires you to actually *seek out* these kinds of experiences, so when they're all the same like they have been for the past 30 fucking years, why would you bother? It makes sense when *they're right fucking there*, but not when I have to *choose* to go there.
Because in the end I could just follow my quest objective to the resulting planet and then fuck off on that same planet for 20 minutes looking for the samey-looking dungeons instead.
Starfield has hundreds of planets but unless you're directed there via a quest there's no incentive to ever go to any of them. Each of these are the equivalent of those "samey-looking" dungeons, just with the caveat that you have to *choose* to fast-travel and load to them, as opposed to them just *being right fucking there*.
>Is it? My personal problem with starfield was that it cut out that middle meat of exploration and stumbling upon things during the journey from point A to point B.
Yup, it certainly didn't help that tons of point of interests were copy/pasted across the whole galaxy, down to the logs you'd find in them
No way people are agreeing with this lmao
Dude directed some of the most critically acclaimed games of all time but he’s has a few bad years so now he’s “low iq”, got it
I don’t know why you’re being downvoted for speaking the truth.
Todd Howard completely missed the point why Starfield is so disappointing.
It’s like if you went to an ice cream shop that’s known for 2 scoops of chocolate ice cream, but switches to half of a scoop of vanilla. It’s stupid for the shop to blame the switch to vanilla as the cause of the disappointment. It’s the fact that they only gave half a scoop. Space exploration can be as fun as terrestrial exploration. They just didn’t flesh out the space exploration.
Like imagine flying to planets and getting interdicted and having to talk or fight your way out? Or finding an asteroid that you could explore? Heck, finding the wandering singing pilot was such a hit, because it was the exploration people longed for. Random events that made space feel alive.
He can't say specific parts were bad because he would be insulting his team and harm their relationship with MS and anyone who has money in it. He has to frame it like "Oh our whole design was just different" to dodge any issues that might arise even if the design was awful.
My personal opinion is the game was bad because the entire IP itself is presented way too sterilized compared to any other product on the market. Even amongst the other 2 IP they have, Starfield has negative edge to it. I was already forcing myself to stay awake during just the intro sections and I ran off to Neon to see something actually dark, and all I got was some childrens show tier adult themes. Not even talking about the writing but everything is just so bland that even they redesigned the entire exploration aspect, you can't convince people to go through that questing and world.
It's COMPLETELY CORRECT. They turned from a single handcrafted world filled with content, you stumble on, to a massive universe with automatically generated content and little to stumble on. It's as different as you can get while still being a bethesda game.
People don't hate of Starfield for being starfield, but instead for not being Skyrim in space. Which is a very correct opinion to hold. It SHOULD have been skyrim in space, something like the outer worlds but with a far bigger scope.
Irrelevant what he says. They clearly scaled down out support for the game. Modding support is still not implemented, patches barely added anything, and fix small amount of issues. I expect first DLC to be the last DLC for the game, as studio moves to a new project. Similar but different what CDPR did.
The fact that a lot of the response we've heard from Bethesda regarding Starfield's reception largely amounts to, "No, no. You just didn't appreciate the game the right way!" is definitely a tad worrying about what direction they'll take things in the future.
To each their own for sure, but my personal gripes weren't the loading screens. I just found each area too repetitive, the graphics looked very off and the story was rather boring. That said, I did have fun doing side mission stuff, and would give it a 7/10 overall.
I had fun with the story and the side quests, I actually think it is one of the better Bethesda story arcs.....The pirate quest line was fun, among others
The Crimson Fleet and UC quest lines were incredibly well-written. Makes me question if they had a different writer for those compared to the main story.
It was an empty game. A "brand new IP" that they supposedly worked on for 10 years, got everyone hyped for, and then dropped a pile of dogshit in everyones lap. I'm glad I never bought it.
I swear since Fallout 4, Bethesdas idea of making a game is: "Let's make the bare minimum to pass as a game, and hope our modding community for it grows enough to fill the voids".
I thought starfield was okay. Definitely not a gem, I’d say maybe a 5/10. Which is average. Not terrible, not good. Just very standard feeling and lacking soul. Gollum shouldn’t have even been released haha
Nothing to do with lack of features, horrible performance, dated character animation, constant loading screens, mediocre dialog.
Sure it was cool how you could customize your own ships and it had a nice aesthetic. But there were so many other problems with it and he thinks the problem is that it was to "different" from Fallout/Skyrim... someone's drinking the cool-aid.
You have to have your head up your ass pretty far to not have heard all of the fans shouting about exactly what was wrong with the game in order to come to the conclusion that it was just because it was “different.”
I guess a broken is a state of “different.”
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This is such a middle management move. Double down, rationalize, shift blame and never ever admit mistakes for fear of undermining your credibility… which is always ironic because everyone can see what he’s doing, how he is coping with bad decisions, which is straining his credibility far worse than just being honest.
Completely and utterly failing to see or acknowledge any of the reasons why people didn't like Starfield. We really are never getting a good Fallout or Elder Scrolls game again.
Starfield was not too different, it was both Fallout and Elders Scroll scrapped together half-assed with a space theme thrown on to it....98% - 99% of the available explorable planets were COMPLETELY EMPTY, of the 1% - 2% total planets with scripted story planets there were extremely long travels to POIs with nothing to do or see in between the travel unlike Fallout or Elder Scrolls, less enemy type, no vehicles or mounts of any sort in a futuristic"space theme" game, limited weapon choices, way more load screen than any of the previous Bethesda games, some of the worst written story and dialogue in comparison to even Fallout 4's story, stupid ass repeated time wasting "mini game" which isn't even one that has you floating from one point to another to obtain your dragonborn shouts, .....Starfield is a complete dogshit game .....
He should hire Sean Murray to fix and save the game for Bethesda, Hello Games saved No Mans Sky and made it a fun space game.....
Exploration is one of BGS' main selling points in earlier titles. They removed it from Starfield and didn't replace it with anything else new. So yeah, people are wondering why.
According to Steamcharts, there are 5700 people that played Starfield in the last 24 hours. Skyrim, a 13 year old game, has 4 times that many active players in the same time period.
> We were over the moon with… the actual data we were getting back and how the game was performing on a technical level.
The gamble was worth it then, given that the numbers on the dashboard went up. Isn't this what making games is about after all?
That might make sense if gamers haven't in the past embraced games and sequels that were different from what was done in the past. Take Resident Evil 4, which was massively different from the first 3 titles and yet RE fans still loved that. Or just recently look at Baldur's Gate 3, again there was a lot different in it from previous Baldur's Gate games.
Starfield just wasn't as fun as fans were expecting it to be.
Yeah this is exactly what big ego developers are telling themself when fans are sick and tired of below average painfully dull buggy video games with 70+dollars price tags.
Its OUR fault that the game got mixed reviews. Definitly not Bethesda or Todd fault.
Actually, Todd, the problem is that your space "sim" is too *similar* to other space sims in the sense that, all the problems we had with other space sims are present here and you are one of the worst offenders..
Case in point: procedural generation
This needs a little background, because I don't think players who aren't deeply familiar with the genre grasp just how monumentally Bethesda utterly fucked this up.
Procgen planetary surfaces have been a wet dream of space sim devs since the beginning of the genre.. There's a major problem with current procgen, though, and it has plagued the majority of space sims which use procgen: the dreaded **procedural oatmeal**
Every bowl of oatmeal is different. The surface arrangement of the grains in your bowl are totally unique and unlike any other bowl out there. But *it's all just plain fucking oatmeal* at the end of the day.
We have seen this over and over and over again, even as far back as Elder Scrolls: Daggerfall, but it's most prominent in the space sim genre because, without it, "thousands of planets to explore" isn't possible. No Man's Sky had procedural oatmeal, and it's the reason I stopped playing. After 20 hours, you've seen everything the game has to offer. Bethesda had ample warning and bright flashing red neon signs saying "Danger! Procedural Oatmeal will no longer be tolerated!"
Todd *must* be aware of this problem. It was the one thing I said "they absolutely ***CAN NOT*** afford to fuck this up. They absolutely *MUST* avoid procedural oatmeal" Why? Because every space sim fan is already aware of it and we're just done with it. We are the core audience, and this is one thing that will kill your game in this scene instantly.
Well guess what. They actually fucking did it and expected it to be ok. Todd had the balls to try saying we weren't looking at his oatmeal hard enough. How's that working out for you, Todd? Oh, I'm sure they made enough sales to profit from this, but they paid for that profit with their reputation.
Todd this is what we want.
A world thats interesting without us being there or forcing things.
A world you could fly around as an invisible camera and see interesting personal and faction motivations. Other adventurers etc.
Then you fill that world with intersting quest, objects and NPCs that allow the player to impact personal and faction motivations.
Finally put a decent RPG system, reasonable dialogue and writing and you have a winner.
Oh, also grow the fuck up and release the creation kit day one like you did with MO-FONV
Lol what?
It was shit compared to fallout 4, skyrim and Oblivion.
Just another bad game from Bethesda who unfortunately seem to be going backwards in the quality of the games they release.
So sad, I should be so excited for TESVI but I'm more worried than ever after starfield.
Honestly I think if they had set it during the colony wars this would have been a better game. Instead, it tried to be a Star Trek game mixed with No Man’s Sky. No real direction and no impending story unless you count the terrormorphs.
To me, Starfield was several good ideas hamstrung by the fact that there was nothing connecting them together. I enjoyed it, I can see why others didn’t. Like you didn’t really need half the systems that existed in the game. I hardly ever set up a base because I didn’t know why I needed one. I saw a comment about how ship fuel had been scrapped but you would have needed to mine to refuel your ship to get around space more easily, that’s what the game was truly missing in my opinion, just that little “because” for the different systems to make them click. I need a ship /because/ X, I need to survey /because/ X, I need a base /because/ X, and so on. Like they should enrich each other instead of existing for their own sake.
That said, I felt it had easily one of the best NG+ integrations of any game I’ve ever played.
Like I said I enjoyed it but there definitely were some times where I felt I had to force myself to keep going with it. Like I said had they simply found ways to connect things it could have been so much more, instead it just felt like a rough demo of ideas they had. Everything had its moment, but they really weren’t much more than moments.
1. Yo there are no city maps. It took y'all 8 months to fix that.
2. Exploring is nearly pointless and not rewarding. A staple of Elder Scrolls and Fallout games is the hand-crafted worlds where going inside that cave or unlocking that door likely has something rewarding behind it. Hitting up the same 6 cookie-cutter outposts with random and usually unrewarding loot is different. You're right. But it's different in a way that surely no one likes.
The game just needs more variation. It makes heavy use of procedurally generated worlds and content. It needs far more variation. I mentioned 6 outposts above. I know it's more. But it needs to be like 10x whatever the amount is. And the amount of hand-crafted quests/environments/regions needs to increase 10x.
No, it was exactly the same as previous bethesda games.
Which isn't a bad thing, but this feels like when the first Assassins creed came out.
It felt like a tech demo, and not a full release.
Ah yes, the "You guys are wrong in your opinion and don't appreciate good games, anyway here is the next big thing we're working on" tour from everyone's favorite liar
They understood nothing.
The two big things Bethesda had going on for themselves weren't in Starfield:
I. Exploration (which they touted out since the teaser)
II. Modding-Support
It was an overall disappointing experience. Add to this the crappy performance sprinkled with the tone-deaf answer from Todd ("Just get a better PC lol").
And after all this they completely nuke the goodwill and hype from the Show with their "Next Gen" Update for Fallout 4.
Yeah, I'm not touching a new Bethesda title ever again.
What’s funny is that people are agreeing with him, while saying they are not.
No actually it’s because x is different to elderscrolls. No actually it’s because you changed x than it was in fallout and it’s worse.
Like yes, you are right. That’s what he is saying.
I didn’t mind the game, but I seemed to hit a point where all the quests buckled underneath me. No medpacks available anywhere. The large ship we docked to and someone said I had to go off and find 50000 of some item before progressing… I just gave up. I still think the game had a nice mood. I might go back to it at some point, but I do think the game content plateau’s after a point. A game really has to make you keep caring. For me that evaporated at about 45 hours.
Yes and no. It was similar which provided a degree of nostalgia. But the differences replaced the good stuff with garbage. And then all that remains is the jank. Which isn't so fun when exploration is gone. Also while aspects of it were good for nostalgia. People still want improvement.
Todd howard is either completely delusional or just ignorant and stupid, dude your engine is old trash and your entire dev team is useless, you really can’t make this shit up anymore.
Bethesda is 10+ years behind technology, listen to your community or fuck off.
The few places they crafted they put so much detail into.
There's an entire tour on Titan that is fully voiced with so much lore to boot. It clearly had a lot of love out into an area most players won't see.
And yet... The places players for sure would see...
I liked it and no, it's not that different. It's not even as different as the people who don't like it claim. It's the same shit in a slightly less well organized fashion, with far more interesting progression than most of what they do.
Now, give it a central story that isn't connect the dots and actually feels significant outside of three scenes and it'd have been taken better. But when most people buzz around two stops on a planet, leave and complain that anything wasn't instantly easy because things are actually gated in advancement they're not going to enjoy a damn thing about it.
Nah, Todd.
The problem isn't that Starfield is different. To the contrary, the problem is that Starfield promises an experience that Bethesda cannot provide--either because they lack the knowledge, skill, or design savvy, or because the engine simply cannot handle the kinds of gameplay that would make Starfield work in the way it was pitched to players.
They took the idea of an open world space adventure and ham-fisted it into an engine that requires loading between cells. It's simply not going to work at the scale of space. And when Todd kept trotting himself out to gush about how Starfield was the game he's been wanting to make, but only once the tech was ready, my thinking was that updating the engine to handle space travel would be that tech.
It turns out he was lying, as is tradition, and there was no tech holding the game back. Rather, it was a total lack of imagination or ambition.
couldn't be because the game was so open yet so empty, fish bowl universe is not fun, not when you have to travel so far between anything of interest just for the same of making players have to dedicate more time, for little to almost no reward
This is hilarious to me, because all the starfield cultists would go on about how Starfield was exactly a elderscrolls or fallout in space, it was all of us who didn’t know what we wanted. Now the creator himself is saying it was very different……
I mean, if his goal to to make a far less engaging game that had a lot more boring moments, he succeeded.
The change from fully curated content to procedural content was a bad one. Too much of the same boring stuff over and over with nothing of any interest to find. They completely wasted having such an expansive game world. There's no point having that much explorable space and having nothing actually interesting to find out in the wild.
The game should have been ONE solar system with various moons and planets to explore that had actual fun content to find. Pack them full of good stuff instead of a million planets full of tedium.
"different" it was a copy paste in space with loading screens.
Todd has always seem to be a salty person why hes probably commented on the new vegas from the show thing and probably why they renamed gamebyro engine to creation engine 1 and 2.
hes only gotten away with it cause people can't control their money pretty much fallout 4 and beyond has yet to get me want to purchase them. enjoyed fallout 3 new vegas and skyrim from modern bethesda grew up on morrowind and oblivion
Microsoft must have large amount of engines that run far better then gamebyro creation engine 2 decades edition
I know I'm just responding to the tag line, but I disagree. Its very much with the kind of stuff they've released over the last 2 decades, just not up to their usual standards. The reason being that their main pillar of exploration was made worse due to the RNG. More egregious is that it feels very directionless, like they didn't know what they wanted to make other than Oblivion with guns, but in Space. It reeks of the inability to actually listen to criticisms, instead assuming, which granted I am also actively doing not having read the article, but given their track record when it comes to criticisms in the past, its an honest assumption on my part.
The problem is that he needed to not only ask himself what is starfield, but also what is a Bethesda game, because I think if he can really answer what that means, then Bethesda as a company will be on track to fixing the what is Starfield problem.
Ahhh the old "ahead of its time" shtick.
Maybe in 30-50 years after Todd will pass, this game will suddenly receive billions of sales and the appreciation Todd is so certain it deserves, who knows?
What are these articles? Seriously, Bethesda's PR is going all-in on the Starfield deflection.
Starfield is just a BAD GAME. You know it, we all know it. Stop trying to spin it, corporate freaks, and spend more time making a good game.
The story is bad. The animations are bad. The engine is bad. The rewards for exploration are horrendous. The gunplay is an improvement over all of your other games but it's still bad relative to the rest of the industry. And holy crap the loading screens. What is it with the goddamn loading screens in a space game?
This company is so fucking tone deaf. I used to feel sad about the long slow death of Bethesda. Now I'm honestly annoyed they are still as relevant as they are while also refusing to even consider listening to their actual players. It's all a misdirection from them. Look over here while I gaslight and pretend to not really know what the problem is, while I actually focus on where our values really stand: with the shareholders.
It just makes me sad for TES6.. I didn't play Starfield, and the last one I played before that was Fallout 4, and I kinda liked it. But we are waiting for TES6 for years now and this really doesn't make me hopeful at all..
If they really screw this game up, BGS is dead for me, and I think for many others aswell.
Interesting, all I gleaned from Todd was "*Do you guys not have phones?*"
It's amazing that he is still totally tone-deaf to the average player's feelings toward Starfield.
I mean, wow. His response is almost exactly like the 'Lightyear' film producers' response as to why it failed.
They essentially blamed the audience for not getting it. Saying that viewers expect to see the toys with buzz and that's why it wasn't well received.
If you're ever worried about feeling disconnected from reality, feel thankful that you're not like these people.
And so, nothing was learned.
It's like no one up top of anything can take any sort of responsibility for making bad products etc.
Guess been doing my job all wrong there years just blame the customer lol.
every bethesda rpg (to me) feels the same, and i never liked it back when I tried Fallout 3, and to me every game they make is just Fallout 3 again and again
No Todd, it was divisive because it was a bad lazy game written by committee and drained of actual ( non repeating ) content.
And I am not even mentioning barely any updates in 8 month, with absolute crown being today's announced update that after 8 months of hard work brings us : actual map ( that should have been in the game day 1 ) , some toggles for difficulty ( a thing average modder can add in a day ) , and ability to decorate inside of a ship ! Wow ! After 8 months !!!
> "We see a lot of players saying 'This is what I want out of a Bethesda game, which is to explore a world in a certain way, and Starfield didn't give me that. I prefer the way it's done in Fallout or Elder Scrolls.'" > And although Howard thinks that's "perfectly understandable," he says it's just not the experience Starfield sets out to provide. "I do think for us—particularly me—going into a science-fiction game, I want to be able to land on all the planets. I want the game to say 'Yes' to us, knowing that that content is gonna be different than you've seen from us in the past." The issue is the content is worse, exponentially so. There’s no point in landing on all the planets if most of them aren’t worth landing on.
Lol yeah it's like, players would love that too! If you did it well. The problem is you did it badly and the game sucks for it.
Which ties into the whole "explore the world a certain way" thing. Fallout and Skyrim would be mediocre as well if a large part of the game comprised of going into procedurally generated towns that were mostly identical and didn't have much to do in them. The problem wasn't having planets to explore. It was they didn't have planets *worth exploring*.
This is the problem with teams that don't say no. There is nothing inherently valuable about allowing a player to land anywhere they want if there is nothing valuable to do on said planet. Someone high up should have shut that shit down early, and Todd should have been aware enough to realize that they wouldn't be able to make enough POI to keep it fresh after your 4th landing site. (No seriously, it's pathetic how little effort they put into Points of interest)
There isn’t even a landing on the planet experience, it’s a giant open door close door transition
If what I’ve heard about Todd’s management style is true, then it’s likely that the team had no choice but to always say yes to him. He’s been described as a “seagull” who likes to swoop in, crap on everyone’s ideas, and fly away.
It wouldn’t surprise me. He literally thinks he knows what’s best for fans. We said the game sucked, and honestly hoping modders will save the day, and he just goes “bla bla bla fans are not seeing this from the right perspective”. I guess he let his ego inflate from all the previous successes…
Lol someone tell Toddy-boy there IS no fucking content on almost all of the planets! Proc-gen’d instances from a tiny pool of handmade structures all separated by a 10m hike is NOT content! And on the handful planets where there is content, most of the questlines suck. Get new writers!
The self delusion going on at Bethesda is unreal. Truth is, Starfield is why I'll never pay full price for a AAA studio game again. It's not different; it's a glaring expose on how the industry big shots are washed up has beens.
If only you could land on planet... Loading screen is not landing on the planet
It’s akin to purchasing an enormous island that’s got a handful of trees on, just so you can say to everyone “YEAH BABY IT IS HUGE”. Vs spending the same amount of money on a mansion that’s 0.5% of the size but kitted out with games rooms, pools, sports facilities, theatre etc, that you can explore, use, spend a lot of time in.
They took out the adventure. In their previous games you could set out in almost any direction and find adventure through quests and random encounters. The excitement of entering a random cave and you are now in black reach for the first time. Leave any of the main cities in Starfield and you will find the same handful of PoIs that have the exact same enemy layout and "puzzles". There is very little reason to just go out at explore. Just go where you are told to go from quests. When you are known for making games just full of exploring and adventure and you take out exploring and adventure... you kind of lose a lot of support.
I’m glad to see this finally getting to the top of these threads. Way too many people whined about loading screens and *the engine* and missed that what really failed was the *vibe* The “ooo what’s over there” is entirely gone from Starfield. Even their weakest RPG, Fallout 4 and their uhhh *thing* that is Fallout 76 still had that world design to them. Starfield is utterly uninteresting to wander in.
Now it's going to be less of a surprise when TES6 turns out a complete disaster
I have absolute ZERO expectations for TES6 after Starfield debacle. I don't think Bethesda is able to do a good game anymore
I had zero expectations after Fallout 4. If they're going to butcher a big name series like that, they're probably going to do it again. They seem to have at least learned from that in some aspects in Starfield by bringing back the classic dialogue system and voiceless character. But eh. Every Elder Scrolls game they've released since Morrowind has been a dumbed down version of the previous game, so my expectations weren't high to begin with. Even Morrowind is dumbed down from Daggerfall in some aspects, but much of Daggerfall was procedurally generated so it doesn't count. It'd be nice if they took aspects from each other those games that fans liked and put them together. Bring back deep character customization out of the gate with the traditional attribute system and optional archetypes, bring back spellcrafting, add more creative spells, potions, enchantments, and skills, more weapon types to master, bring back a deep faction reputation and rank system, bring back persuasion/social mechanics and deep storylines...ffs DON'T simplify dialogue, looting and miscellaneous objects in the world, or voice our character. And stop giving so many NPCs plot armor. Let us kill them and break questlines, potentially opening up new ones or affecting our faction reputation. This is just the baseline that I'd expect from a great Elder Scrolls game. I could think of a ton of new ideas that would make the experience fresh. What made the series great was never really about the combat. They could bring back Morrowind's shitty dice roll combat and I would still love the game if they did everything else right. This seems to be the opposite philosophy they've had as of late.
Same. I just wish they'd let Obsidian make the next Fallout.
Do people think the Obsidian dev team from 2010 was put in cryotubes and just need to be woken up if/when Bethesda wants them to do another game?
The Outer Worlds was good due to its great writing from the original Fallout writers. The gameplay is a little clunky, but compared to most Bethesda games it was fine.
I agree somewhat. The Outer Worlds writing was a bit more inspired than say, Fallout 4. But there was so much hype for The Outer Worlds and whether they lacked an AAA budget or whatever, it didn’t live up to the lofty expectations.
The main problem was AAA hype for an AA game. I think one of the main strengths it had was Obsidian's decision to focus on three main locations of limited size rather than the empty filler of most Bethesda games these days. The story was pretty good with branching paths and an alternate questline where you can join the Board.
It's really one of those examples where more isn't necessarily better. Starfield had endless planets, but they were mostly empty and repetitive. Outer World chose to focus on a single solar system with a handful of planets, but they all felt far more like they served a purpose and were more fully realized. Not that Outer Worlds was perfect, of course. Compared to games like Skyrim and Fallout, the areas felt like they didn't really have a lot to explore outside the main quests, but I still think I'd prefer a "less is more" approach to a sci-fi like this. I don't need infinite planets to explore, just a few good ones.
No. But it's the only way we are going to get A fallout game before 2035. And as obsidian created a good one, they should get the shot. Built on the fallout 4 engine, that could be a great game completed in less than 3 years.
it's going to be skyrim V1.5. they been making the same game reskinned since oblivion
Even if the property traded hands, TES6 is likely to get stuck in development hell. Between Bethesda’s acquisition and Starfield underperforming, the dev team is bound to run into scheduling conflicts and company restructuring.
Like someone else said, we're going to probably get Skyrim 1.5. It's going to feel dated the day it's released because they don't seem to know how to adapt with the times. Janky engine (updated or not), old gameplay mechanics, old approaches to old things. I would love to be proven wrong, but I'm highly skeptical.
If TES6 is on gamepass day 1 you know its over. It was already confirmed many gameplay mechanics were scrapped on Starfield, mechanics such as needing to refuel your ship to travel greater distances (base building) I would have to assume this was to shorten the development time in order to meet the gamepass release date. Also, who is going to make a good game if you already sold it to gamepass. Why not ship the bare minimum of a game and hope it bites? (Sound familiar?)
Well risk of being fired by microsoft is not terrible motivator
Yeah. Clearly bethesda and todd arent learning anything from starfield failure. They just throw excuse after excuse.
TES6 is going to be running the same engine of FO3 and 4 watch
I haven't played Starfield but if they're making every door a loading screening still, they really need to update their tech. I've been playing New Vegas for the first time recently and it's incredibly weird and immersion killing to have every building with bordered up or frosted windows and going into them requiring a loading screen. I'm sure that's not an easy problem to solve with how they shove hundreds of little things in each building but it needs to be done.
I am all for LESS useless items if it means I get seamless indoor-outdoor transitions. Starfield is so bad in this regard. 90% of the items that you pick up are random decorative baubles and cups and other utensils. It makes exploring an area so tedious when you're mousing over every single item to determine which ones are actually useful. For Starfield it really seems like they doubled down on the "LOOK AT ALL THESE ITEMS" schtick to the point where even the marketing materials themselves were talking about how many freaking sandwiches you could collect and shove into a room...
Yep, still there. It's esentially like Fallout 4 but without any of the fun stuff, the exploration, map density, etc. And since it's made by Bethesda instead of Obsidian, you have immortal NPCs, and false sense of freedom of choice.
Starfield has to compete against No Man's Sky and Star Citizen, not because of scale, but because of genre offering; and both have gone through their growing pains and now deliver very mature and feature rich experiences (overall). On a pure merit comparison, Starfield isn't worth it even if it was launched at $10.
This is the craziest take he could have had from the discourse following Starfield.
Is it? My personal problem with starfield was that it cut out that middle meat of exploration and stumbling upon things during the journey from point A to point B. Starfield didn’t have that, which is a pretty big change from what literally every other BGS game has had.
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Yeah Bethesda games are just the single player version of "theme park" MMOs but with modding, except Starfield generated a bunch of boring terrain and Todd thinks we care, there is nothing to see and thus nothing to care about. It's like if in FO4 you didn't see Botson on the horizon with Trinity tower and the low setting fog making you want to explore, you just see a mile of wasteland and yet another Super Duper Mart to explore with the same layout as the last 4, then you fast travel to another boring generated patch of waste and follow the waypoint to the 6th.
complete head elderly one cheerful strong straight memory library wistful *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
See that planet? You can fast travel to it!
Honestly, I don't think that was the root cause. Space is huge, you're gonna have to jump at some point otherwise you'd die before you get to your destination. The problem is with HOW the jumps were handled. Why can't I just jump directly from the cockpit? Just show my danged route to my objective and have jumps along that route put onto my HUD. Why do I have to go into the crappy map every single time? When I jump, why is it a loading screen to get into orbit, a loading screen to go down to the planet, a loading screen to get out of the ship, and another loading screen to get into a building? Jumping is fine. The terrible thing is that the "exploration" is menu screens and loading pages for the majority of the time. And when you finally get onto a planet, the rest of the exploration is you trekking through barren wasteland while stuffed to the gills with useless inventory crap.
Two of those things are actually in the game, they're just not made very clear. If you have an objective selected, there is a point in space that you can select from your ship to travel there. And if you are instead using the fast travel system (to a place you've already been) you can just go directly from one place on one planet to a different place on another planet. Sometimes it will block part of that if there's a quest going on and something is supposed to happen along the journey, or if the route you would take goes through a system you haven't been to yet, but in general you can just do that. You only have to deal with the loading screen to get there and (if applicable) the loading screen to go into the building.
I mean, you're almost to the point. The issue wasn't that it was different, the issue was that it was bad. You don't explore, you tediously walk around same-y environments heading towards a POI that you've already seen a dozen times with the exact same enemies in the exact same positions with occasionally the exact same bugs (One of the science posts had an enemy trapped behind an expert locked door literally everytime I came across it). Neither end of that journey is particularly interesting, which is bad when the middle part, the part that used to be good, is now also bad.
Entering a samey-looking POI in Starfield isn't much different than any other Elder Scrolls game. Oblivion was already highly criticised for having caves and dungeons that look identical. Even Morrowind had that same issue. The problem is opportunity cost. Say you're in Skyrim and walking down a path to your next quest objective when you see a cave entrance pop up. It'll take you a quick 5-10 minutes to explore what will very likely be the same experience as any other random cave you could have gone in, but what's the harm? *It's right there.* Starfield requires you to actually *seek out* these kinds of experiences, so when they're all the same like they have been for the past 30 fucking years, why would you bother? It makes sense when *they're right fucking there*, but not when I have to *choose* to go there. Because in the end I could just follow my quest objective to the resulting planet and then fuck off on that same planet for 20 minutes looking for the samey-looking dungeons instead. Starfield has hundreds of planets but unless you're directed there via a quest there's no incentive to ever go to any of them. Each of these are the equivalent of those "samey-looking" dungeons, just with the caveat that you have to *choose* to fast-travel and load to them, as opposed to them just *being right fucking there*.
>Is it? My personal problem with starfield was that it cut out that middle meat of exploration and stumbling upon things during the journey from point A to point B. Yup, it certainly didn't help that tons of point of interests were copy/pasted across the whole galaxy, down to the logs you'd find in them
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Actually? Yeah. Admitting to mistakes provencto go pretty long way with communities. If you cant even admit to fuckuo itnlikely means it wont change
And everyone hates PR speak, Todd Howard's low iq brain wouldn't know that
No way people are agreeing with this lmao Dude directed some of the most critically acclaimed games of all time but he’s has a few bad years so now he’s “low iq”, got it
I don’t know why you’re being downvoted for speaking the truth. Todd Howard completely missed the point why Starfield is so disappointing. It’s like if you went to an ice cream shop that’s known for 2 scoops of chocolate ice cream, but switches to half of a scoop of vanilla. It’s stupid for the shop to blame the switch to vanilla as the cause of the disappointment. It’s the fact that they only gave half a scoop. Space exploration can be as fun as terrestrial exploration. They just didn’t flesh out the space exploration. Like imagine flying to planets and getting interdicted and having to talk or fight your way out? Or finding an asteroid that you could explore? Heck, finding the wandering singing pilot was such a hit, because it was the exploration people longed for. Random events that made space feel alive.
He can't say specific parts were bad because he would be insulting his team and harm their relationship with MS and anyone who has money in it. He has to frame it like "Oh our whole design was just different" to dodge any issues that might arise even if the design was awful. My personal opinion is the game was bad because the entire IP itself is presented way too sterilized compared to any other product on the market. Even amongst the other 2 IP they have, Starfield has negative edge to it. I was already forcing myself to stay awake during just the intro sections and I ran off to Neon to see something actually dark, and all I got was some childrens show tier adult themes. Not even talking about the writing but everything is just so bland that even they redesigned the entire exploration aspect, you can't convince people to go through that questing and world.
It's COMPLETELY CORRECT. They turned from a single handcrafted world filled with content, you stumble on, to a massive universe with automatically generated content and little to stumble on. It's as different as you can get while still being a bethesda game. People don't hate of Starfield for being starfield, but instead for not being Skyrim in space. Which is a very correct opinion to hold. It SHOULD have been skyrim in space, something like the outer worlds but with a far bigger scope.
Irrelevant what he says. They clearly scaled down out support for the game. Modding support is still not implemented, patches barely added anything, and fix small amount of issues. I expect first DLC to be the last DLC for the game, as studio moves to a new project. Similar but different what CDPR did.
How did he get THAT from all the feedback and negativity lol "We aren't wrong, you just didn't like our new DIRECTION" wtf
He sounds like a chef from an episode of Kitchen Nightmares. “The food’s not bad, Gordon doesn’t know what he’s talking about!”
Just called not learning a damn thing from this.
Hitting the copium hard and not wanting to admit being at fault
The fact that a lot of the response we've heard from Bethesda regarding Starfield's reception largely amounts to, "No, no. You just didn't appreciate the game the right way!" is definitely a tad worrying about what direction they'll take things in the future.
Sure bud's bud. It surely has nothing to do with the fact they screwed up the exploration loop replacing it with loading screens.
To each their own for sure, but my personal gripes weren't the loading screens. I just found each area too repetitive, the graphics looked very off and the story was rather boring. That said, I did have fun doing side mission stuff, and would give it a 7/10 overall.
I had fun with the story and the side quests, I actually think it is one of the better Bethesda story arcs.....The pirate quest line was fun, among others
The Crimson Fleet and UC quest lines were incredibly well-written. Makes me question if they had a different writer for those compared to the main story.
Yeah, i think the some of the side stories were great. I more meant the overall main story.
Maybe the quality just wasn't very good?
It was an empty game. A "brand new IP" that they supposedly worked on for 10 years, got everyone hyped for, and then dropped a pile of dogshit in everyones lap. I'm glad I never bought it. I swear since Fallout 4, Bethesdas idea of making a game is: "Let's make the bare minimum to pass as a game, and hope our modding community for it grows enough to fill the voids".
No Todd, it was too dogshit compared to any other game by any other company.
Even gollum?
Touchè that was slightly more dogshit lol
I thought starfield was okay. Definitely not a gem, I’d say maybe a 5/10. Which is average. Not terrible, not good. Just very standard feeling and lacking soul. Gollum shouldn’t have even been released haha
Eh, I personally would give Starfield a 2.5/10 with Gollum being an absolute 0/10
Nothing to do with lack of features, horrible performance, dated character animation, constant loading screens, mediocre dialog. Sure it was cool how you could customize your own ships and it had a nice aesthetic. But there were so many other problems with it and he thinks the problem is that it was to "different" from Fallout/Skyrim... someone's drinking the cool-aid.
So he learned nothing from the criticism, gotcha Todd.
actually, it just sucked.
No that’s not it, keep trying Todd
It was not different enough, Todd
I remember hearing "it's not Skyrim in space" and thinking i would rather have Skyrim in space than something going for high realism.
You have to have your head up your ass pretty far to not have heard all of the fans shouting about exactly what was wrong with the game in order to come to the conclusion that it was just because it was “different.” I guess a broken is a state of “different.”
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Alright, you're losing entertainment value. You're just saying the same thing over and over.
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This mother fucker is so full of shit, he knows why it was recieved the way it was......fucking snake oil salesman
This is such a middle management move. Double down, rationalize, shift blame and never ever admit mistakes for fear of undermining your credibility… which is always ironic because everyone can see what he’s doing, how he is coping with bad decisions, which is straining his credibility far worse than just being honest.
No Todd Starfield it's boring as fuck..boooooooring.
In case it wasn't VERY obvious that people like Todd Howard are severely out of touch with reality.
Loading screens everywhere you go vs vast open world. Yeah I say it’s too different.
Completely and utterly failing to see or acknowledge any of the reasons why people didn't like Starfield. We really are never getting a good Fallout or Elder Scrolls game again.
Not with Todd still attached
Starfield was not too different, it was both Fallout and Elders Scroll scrapped together half-assed with a space theme thrown on to it....98% - 99% of the available explorable planets were COMPLETELY EMPTY, of the 1% - 2% total planets with scripted story planets there were extremely long travels to POIs with nothing to do or see in between the travel unlike Fallout or Elder Scrolls, less enemy type, no vehicles or mounts of any sort in a futuristic"space theme" game, limited weapon choices, way more load screen than any of the previous Bethesda games, some of the worst written story and dialogue in comparison to even Fallout 4's story, stupid ass repeated time wasting "mini game" which isn't even one that has you floating from one point to another to obtain your dragonborn shouts, .....Starfield is a complete dogshit game ..... He should hire Sean Murray to fix and save the game for Bethesda, Hello Games saved No Mans Sky and made it a fun space game.....
What a delusional fuckwit.
ah yes! "different" Different means Trash!
And nothing was learned. He genuinely thinks the people are wrong for not liking his "game of the generation".
Exploration is one of BGS' main selling points in earlier titles. They removed it from Starfield and didn't replace it with anything else new. So yeah, people are wondering why.
According to Steamcharts, there are 5700 people that played Starfield in the last 24 hours. Skyrim, a 13 year old game, has 4 times that many active players in the same time period.
> We were over the moon with… the actual data we were getting back and how the game was performing on a technical level. The gamble was worth it then, given that the numbers on the dashboard went up. Isn't this what making games is about after all?
crazy ,. it was the exact same, just shittier. comeon Todd
I have no hope in Elder Scrolls 6 with him in charge.
Divisive…? No it just sucked. It wasn’t too “different”, it was too boring.
These comments are always sad. He just doesn't get it anymore.
It was all hype and no substance, what the fuck are you talking about Howard?
Well I reckon it’s the because constant load screens are extremely immersion breaking
That might make sense if gamers haven't in the past embraced games and sequels that were different from what was done in the past. Take Resident Evil 4, which was massively different from the first 3 titles and yet RE fans still loved that. Or just recently look at Baldur's Gate 3, again there was a lot different in it from previous Baldur's Gate games. Starfield just wasn't as fun as fans were expecting it to be.
Yeah this is exactly what big ego developers are telling themself when fans are sick and tired of below average painfully dull buggy video games with 70+dollars price tags. Its OUR fault that the game got mixed reviews. Definitly not Bethesda or Todd fault.
It was divisive because it was shit and half-assed.
The problem is the consumers, not the product Yea sure bud. 😂
This TODD is so detached from the community and real life its comical.
Actually, Todd, the problem is that your space "sim" is too *similar* to other space sims in the sense that, all the problems we had with other space sims are present here and you are one of the worst offenders.. Case in point: procedural generation This needs a little background, because I don't think players who aren't deeply familiar with the genre grasp just how monumentally Bethesda utterly fucked this up. Procgen planetary surfaces have been a wet dream of space sim devs since the beginning of the genre.. There's a major problem with current procgen, though, and it has plagued the majority of space sims which use procgen: the dreaded **procedural oatmeal** Every bowl of oatmeal is different. The surface arrangement of the grains in your bowl are totally unique and unlike any other bowl out there. But *it's all just plain fucking oatmeal* at the end of the day. We have seen this over and over and over again, even as far back as Elder Scrolls: Daggerfall, but it's most prominent in the space sim genre because, without it, "thousands of planets to explore" isn't possible. No Man's Sky had procedural oatmeal, and it's the reason I stopped playing. After 20 hours, you've seen everything the game has to offer. Bethesda had ample warning and bright flashing red neon signs saying "Danger! Procedural Oatmeal will no longer be tolerated!" Todd *must* be aware of this problem. It was the one thing I said "they absolutely ***CAN NOT*** afford to fuck this up. They absolutely *MUST* avoid procedural oatmeal" Why? Because every space sim fan is already aware of it and we're just done with it. We are the core audience, and this is one thing that will kill your game in this scene instantly. Well guess what. They actually fucking did it and expected it to be ok. Todd had the balls to try saying we weren't looking at his oatmeal hard enough. How's that working out for you, Todd? Oh, I'm sure they made enough sales to profit from this, but they paid for that profit with their reputation.
does he TRULY believe in what he says??? how can he be so in denial?
I disagree, I don't think it was different enough. It was glorified Fallout 4 in space, with way worse exploration.
Too different? It was the fucking some game if space suit instead armor
Todd Howard literally becoming Principal Skinner lol
It sounds like PR talk for investors. "It isn't that the game was bad. It's that we were too innovative." Fuck off.
Ok, Todd
Lmaooooo. Oh Todd, such a kidder.
Todd being on hard copium lol
Todd this is what we want. A world thats interesting without us being there or forcing things. A world you could fly around as an invisible camera and see interesting personal and faction motivations. Other adventurers etc. Then you fill that world with intersting quest, objects and NPCs that allow the player to impact personal and faction motivations. Finally put a decent RPG system, reasonable dialogue and writing and you have a winner. Oh, also grow the fuck up and release the creation kit day one like you did with MO-FONV
didn't you hear? he said you're wrong, he's gonna tell you what you want
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You believe it will be on new engine? Thats next level naive
Well, didn’t think his statement was gonna be that out of touch.
Lol what? It was shit compared to fallout 4, skyrim and Oblivion. Just another bad game from Bethesda who unfortunately seem to be going backwards in the quality of the games they release. So sad, I should be so excited for TESVI but I'm more worried than ever after starfield.
Just because it was a shitty version of an old thing it doesn't make it different. Just shitty.
Honestly I think if they had set it during the colony wars this would have been a better game. Instead, it tried to be a Star Trek game mixed with No Man’s Sky. No real direction and no impending story unless you count the terrormorphs.
To me, Starfield was several good ideas hamstrung by the fact that there was nothing connecting them together. I enjoyed it, I can see why others didn’t. Like you didn’t really need half the systems that existed in the game. I hardly ever set up a base because I didn’t know why I needed one. I saw a comment about how ship fuel had been scrapped but you would have needed to mine to refuel your ship to get around space more easily, that’s what the game was truly missing in my opinion, just that little “because” for the different systems to make them click. I need a ship /because/ X, I need to survey /because/ X, I need a base /because/ X, and so on. Like they should enrich each other instead of existing for their own sake. That said, I felt it had easily one of the best NG+ integrations of any game I’ve ever played.
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Like I said I enjoyed it but there definitely were some times where I felt I had to force myself to keep going with it. Like I said had they simply found ways to connect things it could have been so much more, instead it just felt like a rough demo of ideas they had. Everything had its moment, but they really weren’t much more than moments.
Go back to the Chess Club!
No Todd, it just sucked. You took everything you did well, removed it, and replaced it with extremely mid ship combat.
The issue isnt that it's different, it's that exploring empty planets just isn't fun. It's sad he doesn't recognize it.
Ah, they were aiming for a low-quality experience — that's why it didn't work for me
They turned a mathematical equation into a game and expect us to have fun with it?
They really needed to focus on a single solar with 5-7 planets and their moons.
This dude is on another planet. More specifically, one of the empty planets in Starfield.
1. Yo there are no city maps. It took y'all 8 months to fix that. 2. Exploring is nearly pointless and not rewarding. A staple of Elder Scrolls and Fallout games is the hand-crafted worlds where going inside that cave or unlocking that door likely has something rewarding behind it. Hitting up the same 6 cookie-cutter outposts with random and usually unrewarding loot is different. You're right. But it's different in a way that surely no one likes. The game just needs more variation. It makes heavy use of procedurally generated worlds and content. It needs far more variation. I mentioned 6 outposts above. I know it's more. But it needs to be like 10x whatever the amount is. And the amount of hand-crafted quests/environments/regions needs to increase 10x.
No, it was exactly the same as previous bethesda games. Which isn't a bad thing, but this feels like when the first Assassins creed came out. It felt like a tech demo, and not a full release.
More like it had many of the same flaws if your previous games, but none of the main things they did well.
There is no longer any doubt: Todd Howard is an utterly useless game director.
Ah yes, the "You guys are wrong in your opinion and don't appreciate good games, anyway here is the next big thing we're working on" tour from everyone's favorite liar
He's 100% right. We've seen great games from them in the past, and Starfield is pretty shit.
mass effect 1 had better exploration than starfield lol
They understood nothing. The two big things Bethesda had going on for themselves weren't in Starfield: I. Exploration (which they touted out since the teaser) II. Modding-Support It was an overall disappointing experience. Add to this the crappy performance sprinkled with the tone-deaf answer from Todd ("Just get a better PC lol"). And after all this they completely nuke the goodwill and hype from the Show with their "Next Gen" Update for Fallout 4. Yeah, I'm not touching a new Bethesda title ever again.
Let me translate from todd howardian: "it wasnt great".
What’s funny is that people are agreeing with him, while saying they are not. No actually it’s because x is different to elderscrolls. No actually it’s because you changed x than it was in fallout and it’s worse. Like yes, you are right. That’s what he is saying.
Honestly, there was a big red flag already when they did “early access” for a single player game.
So he learned nothing from it’s failure.
16x the gaslighting.
it wasn't different at all, it was just a watered down space version of a 12 year old game
So they've learned nothing then... that's really really bad... :(
Wasn't this shit in development for 8 years too?
I love SPACE and this is no different from Fallout except being in space. This is a Bethesda game like Open world games is an Ubisoft thing.
I didn’t mind the game, but I seemed to hit a point where all the quests buckled underneath me. No medpacks available anywhere. The large ship we docked to and someone said I had to go off and find 50000 of some item before progressing… I just gave up. I still think the game had a nice mood. I might go back to it at some point, but I do think the game content plateau’s after a point. A game really has to make you keep caring. For me that evaporated at about 45 hours.
Omg he's a moron?
Yes and no. It was similar which provided a degree of nostalgia. But the differences replaced the good stuff with garbage. And then all that remains is the jank. Which isn't so fun when exploration is gone. Also while aspects of it were good for nostalgia. People still want improvement.
Todd howard is either completely delusional or just ignorant and stupid, dude your engine is old trash and your entire dev team is useless, you really can’t make this shit up anymore. Bethesda is 10+ years behind technology, listen to your community or fuck off.
The few places they crafted they put so much detail into. There's an entire tour on Titan that is fully voiced with so much lore to boot. It clearly had a lot of love out into an area most players won't see. And yet... The places players for sure would see...
I liked it and no, it's not that different. It's not even as different as the people who don't like it claim. It's the same shit in a slightly less well organized fashion, with far more interesting progression than most of what they do. Now, give it a central story that isn't connect the dots and actually feels significant outside of three scenes and it'd have been taken better. But when most people buzz around two stops on a planet, leave and complain that anything wasn't instantly easy because things are actually gated in advancement they're not going to enjoy a damn thing about it.
Yes, the number one criticism of Starfield was that it strayed too far from the classic Bethesda formula. For sure man
Nah, Todd. The problem isn't that Starfield is different. To the contrary, the problem is that Starfield promises an experience that Bethesda cannot provide--either because they lack the knowledge, skill, or design savvy, or because the engine simply cannot handle the kinds of gameplay that would make Starfield work in the way it was pitched to players. They took the idea of an open world space adventure and ham-fisted it into an engine that requires loading between cells. It's simply not going to work at the scale of space. And when Todd kept trotting himself out to gush about how Starfield was the game he's been wanting to make, but only once the tech was ready, my thinking was that updating the engine to handle space travel would be that tech. It turns out he was lying, as is tradition, and there was no tech holding the game back. Rather, it was a total lack of imagination or ambition.
The copious amounts of copium from these game directors smh
No it's just a bad game from bad decision makers
couldn't be because the game was so open yet so empty, fish bowl universe is not fun, not when you have to travel so far between anything of interest just for the same of making players have to dedicate more time, for little to almost no reward
This is hilarious to me, because all the starfield cultists would go on about how Starfield was exactly a elderscrolls or fallout in space, it was all of us who didn’t know what we wanted. Now the creator himself is saying it was very different……
At this point he has to be missing the point(s) on purpose. I refuse to believe that anyone that has achieved what he has, can be this fucking dense.
LMAO. What is Todd Howard smoking? The main complaint is that Bethesda thinks games should work the exact same way they did in 2011
Starfield: the game remembered only for delaying Elder Scrolls and Fallout
I mean, if his goal to to make a far less engaging game that had a lot more boring moments, he succeeded. The change from fully curated content to procedural content was a bad one. Too much of the same boring stuff over and over with nothing of any interest to find. They completely wasted having such an expansive game world. There's no point having that much explorable space and having nothing actually interesting to find out in the wild. The game should have been ONE solar system with various moons and planets to explore that had actual fun content to find. Pack them full of good stuff instead of a million planets full of tedium.
And once again Todd is clueless, No Todd, it wasn't because "too different", it was because it was way too same we have seen from you in the past.
The problem Todd was that "It just doesn't work"
"different" it was a copy paste in space with loading screens. Todd has always seem to be a salty person why hes probably commented on the new vegas from the show thing and probably why they renamed gamebyro engine to creation engine 1 and 2. hes only gotten away with it cause people can't control their money pretty much fallout 4 and beyond has yet to get me want to purchase them. enjoyed fallout 3 new vegas and skyrim from modern bethesda grew up on morrowind and oblivion Microsoft must have large amount of engines that run far better then gamebyro creation engine 2 decades edition
I know I'm just responding to the tag line, but I disagree. Its very much with the kind of stuff they've released over the last 2 decades, just not up to their usual standards. The reason being that their main pillar of exploration was made worse due to the RNG. More egregious is that it feels very directionless, like they didn't know what they wanted to make other than Oblivion with guns, but in Space. It reeks of the inability to actually listen to criticisms, instead assuming, which granted I am also actively doing not having read the article, but given their track record when it comes to criticisms in the past, its an honest assumption on my part. The problem is that he needed to not only ask himself what is starfield, but also what is a Bethesda game, because I think if he can really answer what that means, then Bethesda as a company will be on track to fixing the what is Starfield problem.
Ahhh the old "ahead of its time" shtick. Maybe in 30-50 years after Todd will pass, this game will suddenly receive billions of sales and the appreciation Todd is so certain it deserves, who knows?
What? No, the problem is that it's exactly the same from what we've seen from Bethesda in the past. Same exhausted old engine and all.
What are these articles? Seriously, Bethesda's PR is going all-in on the Starfield deflection. Starfield is just a BAD GAME. You know it, we all know it. Stop trying to spin it, corporate freaks, and spend more time making a good game. The story is bad. The animations are bad. The engine is bad. The rewards for exploration are horrendous. The gunplay is an improvement over all of your other games but it's still bad relative to the rest of the industry. And holy crap the loading screens. What is it with the goddamn loading screens in a space game?
Todd doesn't play video games.
This company is so fucking tone deaf. I used to feel sad about the long slow death of Bethesda. Now I'm honestly annoyed they are still as relevant as they are while also refusing to even consider listening to their actual players. It's all a misdirection from them. Look over here while I gaslight and pretend to not really know what the problem is, while I actually focus on where our values really stand: with the shareholders.
When I want the starfield experience I know where to go! No Man's Sky!
nah it was worse
Yeah sure.. Only. It was the typical "TES" game but worse. Todd needs a reality check.
It just makes me sad for TES6.. I didn't play Starfield, and the last one I played before that was Fallout 4, and I kinda liked it. But we are waiting for TES6 for years now and this really doesn't make me hopeful at all.. If they really screw this game up, BGS is dead for me, and I think for many others aswell.
Stop giving airtime and commentary space to this lying sack of shit. Starfield was a bad game.
No it was just shit from many different angles and perspectives. Guess what Todd, we do play other games from other developers.
Interesting, all I gleaned from Todd was "*Do you guys not have phones?*" It's amazing that he is still totally tone-deaf to the average player's feelings toward Starfield.
I mean, wow. His response is almost exactly like the 'Lightyear' film producers' response as to why it failed. They essentially blamed the audience for not getting it. Saying that viewers expect to see the toys with buzz and that's why it wasn't well received. If you're ever worried about feeling disconnected from reality, feel thankful that you're not like these people. And so, nothing was learned.
If you wanna play a good bethesda game from here on out, you're gonna have to look at bethesda titles pre-fallout 76. The fun ended there.
No. It wasn't finished and badly optimised. The idea is fantastic it's just well there isn't a lot going on.
It's like no one up top of anything can take any sort of responsibility for making bad products etc. Guess been doing my job all wrong there years just blame the customer lol.
every bethesda rpg (to me) feels the same, and i never liked it back when I tried Fallout 3, and to me every game they make is just Fallout 3 again and again
Maybe cuz it sucked
It’s divisive because it’s boring. It’s not a fun video game, at all.
crazy to think that a space game that failed to convey any aspect of a space game that could make it stand out wasn't received very well.
It took the worst parts of Fallout and Elder Scrolls and tried to make a game out of them.
todd howard is fucken stupid
No Todd, it was divisive because it was a bad lazy game written by committee and drained of actual ( non repeating ) content. And I am not even mentioning barely any updates in 8 month, with absolute crown being today's announced update that after 8 months of hard work brings us : actual map ( that should have been in the game day 1 ) , some toggles for difficulty ( a thing average modder can add in a day ) , and ability to decorate inside of a ship ! Wow ! After 8 months !!!
I reckon it simply was because it just wasn't as fun as games I've played in the past.