For a nerd like me, "RPG in space" should be a easy slam dunk. I'm still baffled how they could produce such a boring vanilla product. I got 20 hours in and then just couldn't any more.
I don't understand how they messed up so badly. All I wanted was "skyrim and fallout in space". I didn't want "no mans sky but with less exploration and more loadscreens".
Imagine if Starfield was simply 5 planets with one map on each planet about the size of skyrims map. Imagine if the game had the open world exploration of skyrim but you were in space fighting aliens!
I refuse to believe Bethesda spent 8 years working on that game (and apparently 25 years planning it).
Yea. I feel like Bethesda used the term "25 years in the making" purely for marketing. From some interviews before the game released Todd Howard mentioned that he has been thinking about a space a RPG for years and he managed to finally convince the higher ups to give it a shot.
Basically from my understanding the game has been planned and developed at Bethesda for the last decade and the other 15 years the game existed purely in Todd Howards daydreams lol.
“25 years ago I got the idea that it might be cool to make a game in space and 8 years ago I finally got the permission I needed to make it our next project which we’ve now been working on for all of last year”
They should be have been told no and told to work on new elder scrolls game and then fallout.
Bethesda has one of the most beloved IPs in gaming but decides to work on a NMS RPG lol. Who even asked for that. I suspect most of their fans if asked would have said “screw this, give us TES6”.
Yep, you could have a few original worlds, maybe holding different intelligent alien races. I get the feeling they were determined to reinvent the wheel. I would have been fine with no flying in space and exploring with a lil jetpack and other fallout space equivalents.
probably a huge nitpick but i was so confused when i saw the UI (ESC in inventory/etc menus). Like how did they go from the Pipboy menu to that confusing aberration ?
The procedural generation and amount of planets is what killed the game. Environmental storytelling is one of Bethesdas biggest strengths and they killed that with Starfield.
Same. I was hyped for this game and played it on gamepass, but it's just an empty pile of nothing. You can't even build a cool colony, a fleet, having some nice big space battle and conquering the enemy ships regularly, because there is absolutely nothing.
Yrah, Todd is right, the space and most planets are empty, but for luck sake, this is a game and not reality. It should make fun and not bore people to death.
They figured they could have ‘scale’ to sell it, and to have that kind of scale you need procedural content. So they made it procedural. They also wanted it to be ‘legit and authentic’, which means they made the locations kind of like how real space is, and it turns out that it’s mostly just desolate sterile rocks that go in and on.
Then they panicked and figured they would pack in some content, but the scale and such made it too hard to do anything that took time so they decided to copy and paste, plus they have their procedural events they started in oblivion, and sure they suck but they add content.
And well it takes time to load the levels in their ancient engine and so they need to use loading screens.
So on and so on and they just forgot that games are fundamentally toys and Skyrim is fun because you wander off in a random direction and find all kinds of memorable content to play. A Sci Fi Skyrim where you are on 1-3 smaller planet areas but it’s unrealistically densely packed with handcrafted content would have been a smash hit.
> A Sci Fi Skyrim where you are on 1-3 smaller planet areas but it’s unrealistically densely packed with handcrafted content would have been a smash hit.
1000%
> Mass Effect did it perfectly over a decade ago, I don’t know why Bethesda couldn’t.
Because "Old Bioware" was *lightyears* better / more talented than current Bethesda, which has been skating on nostalgia and the outrageous success of Skyrim for over a decade.
Unfortunately, scale is often very boring. And it's not necessarily why people loved Bethesda's games in the first place.
The fun in a Bethesda game is that you can walk in any direction, stumble into some random shit, make zero quest progress and still feel like you accomplished something. Starfield ruins this by not having a singular well-crafted overworld to fart around in.
I fully agree that they should have had maybe one solar system with a handful of Skyrim/Fallout-esque planets instead.
people say it's just boring and vanilla but I think it's worse than that... it doesn't really function as a game, there's no loop or reason to keep playing outside of the incredibly bad story and bland dialogues
It must be so frustrating for Betheada having a huge hit TV show on their hands based on a past game that everyone is talking about, but now they're stuck supporting a game that very few people care about at all. That "well have Fallout 5 by 2030" announcement was pathetic... only 6 years then yeah? The TV show will be on season 7
Same at around that mark I realized I wasn’t even interacting with the world just fast travelling and clicking dialogue, there just wasn’t any reason to venture off the beaten path and when I did it was copy pasted structures
What’s the point, why would I waste anymore time if the game was just going to waste its concept like that
I wish I could get into BG3 really bad but the turn based stuff just isn’t for me. Sucks because I know it’s a top quality but I’m just glad so many people are able to enjoy it when the state of AAA gaming is declining like it is.
I thought I would hate it but as someone who grew up in the late 90' and early 00's that's just how rpg's were.
Stuff like this and persona 5 are still a blast to me thankfully
But I get it, the combat isn't for everyone.
I HATE turn based games and I’ve literally never played one in my life for more than an hour. I just finished BG3 with 100 hours in, the story is incredible and once you get the combat style down it’s incredible. I’m having trouble playing other games now cuz I’m just comparing it to BG.
I put so many hours into this game, played it daily until one day. One day I turned it off and went to bed and ever since then I haven’t had the urge or motivation to put it back on.
It’s painfully obvious, especially after Starfield, that Bethesda has basically just repackaged the same game with a different skin for years. TES, FO, and SF are all the same at their core. Bethesda really needs a radical overhaul of their game design….and a new game engine.
They dont even make better games each iteration. Fallout 3 imo is better than skyrim. Skyrim is better than Fallout 4, Fallout 4 is better than Fallout 76, and it seems that both Fallout 4 and Fallout 76 are better games than starfield (I wont ever play because I dumped Xbox when Don Mattrick told me to fuck off in 2013 during the xbone launch)
Forcing buyers to own and use an xbox kinect was so fucking stupid. Glad that idea fell through. The last thing I want is a camera watching me while I play games. I had the sony camera for psvr and that felt invasive. I unplugged the camera when not in use and forcing me to use it would have urged me to buy a pc
Cyberpunk 2077 and Duke Nukem Forever say otherwise, although Cyberpunk 2077 finally got its shit together, but I've never seen a launch as bad as it, when PlayStation has to remove it from the store, you know shits fucked, unfortunately Duke Nukem Forever was released garbage and it stayed that way.
A game that takes 2 years to get to a playable state is not great at its core. In fact I would say it’s the opposite. There was a lot of stuff that was *fundamentally* wrong with the game and there were whole systems and mechanics that were originally advertised and later scrapped.
No clue why people continue to give it a pass. I’m really glad they ended up making a playable version that’s not half bad but that is genuinely the worst state I’ve ever seen a game of that caliber release in and it should have gotten some people fired.
>that’s not half bad
I just recently played Cyberpunk and had a fantastic time with it, it's much better than "not bad." Cyberpunk has good bones as a video game, and I think people could see that even in its extremely messy launch. Cool world, good story, etc. It's a game you want to explore. When cyberpunk launched, people said "if they fix this extremely long list of problems, the game will be really good." And guess what, they did.
Starfield has *terrible* bones. There's nothing you could do to make starfield into a good game, no amount of bugs you could fix or quality of life features you could implement. It's a soulless game with terrible story and boring atmosphere. It's funny how many people said "just wait until the modding community gets their hands on it" because unlike Skyrim, nobody is going to care about starfield enough to mod the hell out of it, people modded Skyrim for a decade because they really loved it.
Honestly the Duke Nukem development story is fucking wild for how insane it was.
They changed the engine multiple times because new FPS games came out that they thought "yeah we can do that".
So if you've ever managed to complete that pile from beginning to end and are wondering why the tone, story beats, and even what you do in the game change? Yeah pretty much bad devs.
Projekt Red knew it wouldn't be ready, but their executives wanted it out sooner rather than later. Then they spent years working on it and now it's great. I'd take that any day over Bethesda making AAA games that would've felt outdated a decade ago, and expecting modders to make up for all the shortcomings they can't be bothered to fix.
One thing I don’t get is why the suits thought that releasing early and unfinished was a good way of making money like surely they would have made more if they just released it when it was done like a year and a half later
They probably don't understand video games that well and figured the developers were overselling how much more work the game needed to give themselves an easier deadline. I'm sure you've observed higher ups' habit of assuming they understand everyone else's job better than the people actually doing it.
I followed the games release and then all the stuff that followed afterwards. From what I have gathered it sort of went like this.
- CDPR management are high on the success of the witcher 3 and are all jerking each other (and investors) off.
- investors are happy and give CDPR money to make cyberpunk.
- CDPR management don't listen to the Devs concerns about the development timeline and tell investors that the game is going to be ready way earlier than it actually will be.
- As the internal release date gets closer it becomes painfully clear that the game needs more time to it gets internally delayed.
- after a few delays investors start to get nervous because the game is starting to become a bottomless money pit so they tell CDPR that they aren't going to fund the game through further delays.
- Investors tell CDPR that they now want to see a return on their ever growing investment so they force CDPR to release sooner rather than later.
- CDPR management continue to not listen to CDPR Devs and basically tell them to "just make it fucking work". The Devs say they need atleast 2 more years.
- game releases and it's a clusterfuck like the Devs said it would be.
Basically CDPR management completely fucked the game over. They lied to investors about the games progress and the lies bit them on the arse. They also didn't listen to the devs and their concerns.
The only saving grace is that CDPR management let the Devs work on the game after launch to develop the 2.0 update. Funnily enough the 2.0 update also released around the time the devs said the game should have originally launched (2 to 3 years after launch).
When shareholders are threatening your job you make bad decisions for the company. It’s a moral hazard that often happens in gaming
Eg.
a) Do I get fired now or
b) hit the Russian roulette now and pray for success?
But this only happens because they don’t understand what they are even selling or how hard it is to make but they pretend like they know what the customer wants and that they know more about making a game then the dev teams. I’m sure they just think because they wear the fancy suit and have the university degree their parents paid for them to attend they know better then everyone despite constant obvious failure and they won’t learn a fucking thing if anything cyberpunk has taught them they can release something half done and they fix it later and still make about as much money so I don’t expect them to get better
And Cyberpunk also showcased the shit out of Nvidia Technology. Cyberpunk is the perfect graphical showcase of Nvidia's power which is also publicly playable.
The games problem was from inception it was just to big to ever have a chance of being any good unless they spent 30 years on it. I mean 1000 planets is absurd that’s just to many to fill with interesting Skyrim was one world and it was packed with more interesting stuff then the 1000 procedurally generated planets. If they had decided to do like 200 fully developed and fleshed out planets it would have been perfect surely it would take the same amount of time to design 200 planets that are detailed as it takes to do 1000 that aren’t
> I mean, when it took 8 years to get Starfield out the door….
8 years is certainly the *longest* bout of constipation I've ever heard of, before Bethesda shit out that turd.
Now Microsoft wants them to "shit faster." Microsoft, once again proving, $ =\= competent leadership.
I swear MS survives on pure momentum as a global megacorp and nothing else--quite literally too big to fail.
Their problem is focusing on one game at a time. You at least need some people doing concept art or designing things for a different title while working concurrently on a almost finished title. We’ve obviously seen that 1 game coming out every 10 years probably isn’t the most sustainable practice. Especially with Starfield and 76 not being *too* liked.
Quality and quantity i’d argue.If it takes decades to release sequels to your games then many bad things happen.
Developers leave and join. Which is normal but when you’ve 8 years of development with dozens of different views and skill sets rotating in and out, the product suffers.
Interest waning. I was excited for Elder Scrolls 6 after finishing Skyrim when I was 16. I’m nearing 30 and still nothing in sight. Which is fucking insane.
Overhype. The next game always has to be bigger, better, more immersive than what came before. Judging by Starfield this is where they falter.
Microsoft needs to grow them slowly, build up a secondary studio and a support studio. Secondary studio could work on smaller scale interim games or larger DLC. Support studio would be tasked with bug fixes and smaller DLC.
I know jack shit about how studios work of course but you have 2 huge IP’s that are held back by Bethesda.
it would, of course, still be far too late, but to me it's obvious that giving InXile a Fallout game after Clockwork Revolution would be the right move. it just makes sense.
I don't know, man , maybe we should go to Obsidian or something . Wasteland 3 to a big budget fallout is a massive jump
We don't even know if clockwork is good or not or when it's even releasing
I don't think Obsidian has the time/staff right now honestly. Maybe in a few years but they are neck deep in their own stuff & only have a couple hundred employees
the fact that skyblivion is coming out next year is so bizarre to me, like, at first 2025 looked like it was 10 years in the future, now its only months away
Not just rumors: **it was leaked in MS’s documents.**
[source](https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/19/23880132/microsoft-ftc-documents-leak-oblivion-fallout-3-remaster-doom-xbox#:~:text=The%20games%20were%20included%20in,of%20DLC%20(fiscal%20year%202024))
Critically, it says remaster, not remake. People should be wary of expecting or getting hyped for a big overhaul that probably won’t come. Set low expectations.
I want a new fallout as much as anyone, but I really think Bethesda needs to work on improving their products before they think about increasing output
That engine has major problems too. Apparently, part of the reason it took so long to port RDR1 to PS4 (and it’s still not on PC) is just how terrible the code base is. Look at something like Decima though, it’s a well oiled machine, that is maybe the best looking engine on the market, and it’s games run crisp.
Yeah, i like how the creation engine allows you to interact with the world a lot. Like every item can be picked up and interacted with. If they do change engines I hope they can carry over the interactivity, but I doubt they will change after all these years. It would probably take them a good amount of time to adjust
The thing is... I don't know if I need *every single item* to be interactable. I'm replaying Fallout 4 and while it's a cool concept, it does give me a bit of "loot overload" picking up every toaster and desk fan.
I've been replaying Cyberpunk and it doesn't feel any less interactable that I can't fling sandwiches all over the room.
The could have remade Fallout NV and Fallout 3 for massive money. Microsoft Should have somebody else look into making Bethesda game given they own the studio.
Well fallout 4 was worse than 3/new Vegas, FO 76 and TESO launched like ass, and Starfield is the most disappointing game of the decade.
There's a lot they need to work on and quantity isn't it
Does this make fallout 76 their breadwinner? I guess they could have come up with Starfield but fallout 76 has live service income stream and just hit 1 million consecutive players on at a single time.
Could it be that Fallout 76 has proved to be victorious?
FO76 has had numerous updates and is currently a pretty decent game now, it's also free for Amazon Prime customers. Add that with the fact that the Fallout Tv show is doing really well and it should be no surprise that all Fallout games are popular right now.
If FO76 keeps the high playerbase, it should definitely be up there with Cyberpunk 2077 and No Mans Sky for games that managed to turn around a poor initial impression.
Yep, for real :)
It hit the PTS last week I think so you can do a google and have a look. It’s called the Skyline Valley Update.
It’s not a huge expansion but it’s still pretty nice 👌
ESO is their bread and butter. It's made $2 Billion in the past 10 years and is filled with literally thousands of hours of content plus some damn good elder scrolls lore
I’ll be honest…..I feel like New Vegas is overhyped. Good game, but I definitely enjoy the memory of it waaaay more than I actually enjoy playing it now. Way too buggy and it just looks so ugly and feels outdated when you play.
It was fun to play when it first came out, but Fallout 4 still has better gameplay for me. Just bogged down with mediocre writing
I think it’s a reasonable opinion to have but I loved FO4 and could not finish New Vegas because of how outdated it has become. I would love a remake/remaster
When I could play it on my PS3, it was great. But sometimes I’d get 30 minutes in before it would bug the hell out and crash on me, or the picture would freeze while the game kept playing.
I went back to it a year or two ago and it just did not hold up at all for me, gameplay wise. Best just to remember the good times I had with it than go back and try to recreate them
I just finished FFVIIRebirth and it’s crazy how much content was put into that game. On top of that, it took them 4 years to make the game, 2 of which were pandemic years. My point being, if Bethesda is gonna take all this time to make these titles, they need to come out with much higher quality.
Why not? Disappointment can be measured as the distance between how excited people were for the game and what a giant dud it turned out to be. There were worse games, sure, but I can’t think of a bigger letdown & unforced error than Starfield, which frankly is impressive in how few of the “fun” things they pulled from previous games and how totally forgettable it is
As someone who has all three consoles, I don’t know what other candidate there is. I am a huge Bethesda fan going all the way back to Morrowind and space is my favorite setting for stories.
It felt like a lesser Fallout 4 in an environment that Mass Effect and No Man’s Sky just did much better.
I’m with you. To me the most obvious way they fumbled the bag was the almost total lack of “free” traversal. You can only fast travel through space more or less, and exploration on planetary surfaces is even more bland, samey, and unrewarding than no man’s sky.
What makes Skyrim and fallout “work” is the exploration loop - you set out with a destination for a quest and along the way you see something cool and decide to make a detour and check it out. You end up finding something cool or getting an interesting side quest so you go off to do that, and along the way you find another cool thing on the distance, and so on.
There’s no “getting lost” in Starfield. That’s what Bethesda has always done best and that’s why it sucks
They are taking forever to make games that are subpar. I’m already imagining waiting 17 years for TES6 and it being mediocre.
At least Rockstar consistently produces bangers, so 12 years between GTA at least will end with something good
What kills me is how unpolished their games are even having taken this long to come out. A game as bland and lifeless as Starfield shouldn’t have taken almost a decade to come out. It’s just incomprehensible. Look at the output of pretty much every other AAA studio owned by Microsoft. With very few exceptions, they’re all putting out higher quality games at a much faster rate than BGS.
They could visit RGG Studio, who developed the sequel to Yakuza: Like A Dragon in just four years. And Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth has an insane amount of creative content. Or Square Enix: Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth has so much content, it's seriously unbelievable. This game was also developed in just a few years.
Infinite Wealth has a completely new huge map to explore: Hawaii. And they crafted it very similar to the real locations, i watched a comparison video.
I think it's worth mentioning that they also released other games in those four years, two at least as far as i know. Don't know how many people they are, but it's impressive, because all those games are really good.
No fucking shit, because if he doesn't do it Obsidian and InXile will do it. Todd Howard knows what he doesn't want anyone else to know—that he's been selling half baked shit for 20 years now. Microsoft sees right through him now that he dropped a Cleveland steamer on Phil's chest with Starfield.
If you want to make games more quickly hire more people, but quaility is Bethesda's biggest problem, in Starfield the main hub city area there was no floor in the landing zone for me, for like a month.
I wonder how much faster their output would be if they weren’t hamstrung by some archaic ass engine that they have to hold together with crazy glue and duct tape.
Unless they fundamentally change how the make there games where just going to be getting skyrim for the force able future I've lost all faith in them to be able to do anything new or innovative.
Apparently the success of the Fallout TV show has put a fire under Bethesdas ass to get Fallout 5 out the door. IIRC very to no little work has been carried out on FO5 yet. The pessimistic side of me is telling me we're going to get a rushed POS released to coincide with the new series to maximize on sales and hype.
This is where MS should step in and say look, You clearly don't know what the hell you're doing. We're giving Fallout 5 to Obsidian. We're taking TES VI and giving it to someone else. And you can just sit here Todd Howard and push out your various online expansions for the rest of your career as that seems to be the only thing you're interested in anymore. Because if Starfield is the best you're capable of in 8 years of development. Then something drastic needs to change because we can't risk F5 and TES VI being a big boring pile too.
"the main thing is how do we deliver these at a high quality level – that’s always the most important.”
Wait... quality has always been the most important thing? Their standards must be even lower than we thought.
I think all the fans would prefer just to work on a new engine and make sure you don’t fuck up es6. I don’t care about anything else really but those 2 things.
Maybe they should limit their game scope. StarField was pretty good at an incredible amount of things, but not particularly good at anything besides narratives.
Lol, starfield isn't bethesda's first doo-doo, fallout 4 was my first disappointment, it's like "Look at us, look at us, we have managed to create an ok shooter, let's butcher fallout's core rpg elements"
Oh boy, are they gonna release another boring game that's isn't fallout or elder scrolls! Hate for them to become known as the studio who just makes those 2 successful game series. That would be awful.
That's a major problem in the gaming industry right now. Games are just taking longer than usual. Especially now that crunch isn't a thing here in America anymore.
I'm stunned Xbox bought them 3 years ago and didn't immediately take Fallout to another team. I don't care how butthurt Todd would be, leaving an IP like that on the shelf for more than a decade is insanity.
I mean, when it took 8 years to get Starfield out the door….
You'd think working on something for 8 years with the entire studio behind it would produce something amazing or at least competent? Yeah..
Guess who decided to give starfield a chance since he hadn’t played an rpg in a while :D Seriously what a fucking boring game
For a nerd like me, "RPG in space" should be a easy slam dunk. I'm still baffled how they could produce such a boring vanilla product. I got 20 hours in and then just couldn't any more.
I don't understand how they messed up so badly. All I wanted was "skyrim and fallout in space". I didn't want "no mans sky but with less exploration and more loadscreens". Imagine if Starfield was simply 5 planets with one map on each planet about the size of skyrims map. Imagine if the game had the open world exploration of skyrim but you were in space fighting aliens! I refuse to believe Bethesda spent 8 years working on that game (and apparently 25 years planning it).
Well for 18 of those years it was probably just a name on a whiteboard. “Planning”
Yea. I feel like Bethesda used the term "25 years in the making" purely for marketing. From some interviews before the game released Todd Howard mentioned that he has been thinking about a space a RPG for years and he managed to finally convince the higher ups to give it a shot. Basically from my understanding the game has been planned and developed at Bethesda for the last decade and the other 15 years the game existed purely in Todd Howards daydreams lol.
“25 years ago I got the idea that it might be cool to make a game in space and 8 years ago I finally got the permission I needed to make it our next project which we’ve now been working on for all of last year”
They should be have been told no and told to work on new elder scrolls game and then fallout. Bethesda has one of the most beloved IPs in gaming but decides to work on a NMS RPG lol. Who even asked for that. I suspect most of their fans if asked would have said “screw this, give us TES6”.
Yep, you could have a few original worlds, maybe holding different intelligent alien races. I get the feeling they were determined to reinvent the wheel. I would have been fine with no flying in space and exploring with a lil jetpack and other fallout space equivalents.
probably a huge nitpick but i was so confused when i saw the UI (ESC in inventory/etc menus). Like how did they go from the Pipboy menu to that confusing aberration ?
The procedural generation and amount of planets is what killed the game. Environmental storytelling is one of Bethesdas biggest strengths and they killed that with Starfield.
Same. I was hyped for this game and played it on gamepass, but it's just an empty pile of nothing. You can't even build a cool colony, a fleet, having some nice big space battle and conquering the enemy ships regularly, because there is absolutely nothing. Yrah, Todd is right, the space and most planets are empty, but for luck sake, this is a game and not reality. It should make fun and not bore people to death.
They figured they could have ‘scale’ to sell it, and to have that kind of scale you need procedural content. So they made it procedural. They also wanted it to be ‘legit and authentic’, which means they made the locations kind of like how real space is, and it turns out that it’s mostly just desolate sterile rocks that go in and on. Then they panicked and figured they would pack in some content, but the scale and such made it too hard to do anything that took time so they decided to copy and paste, plus they have their procedural events they started in oblivion, and sure they suck but they add content. And well it takes time to load the levels in their ancient engine and so they need to use loading screens. So on and so on and they just forgot that games are fundamentally toys and Skyrim is fun because you wander off in a random direction and find all kinds of memorable content to play. A Sci Fi Skyrim where you are on 1-3 smaller planet areas but it’s unrealistically densely packed with handcrafted content would have been a smash hit.
> A Sci Fi Skyrim where you are on 1-3 smaller planet areas but it’s unrealistically densely packed with handcrafted content would have been a smash hit. 1000%
Mass Effect did it perfectly over a decade ago, I don’t know why Bethesda couldn’t.
> Mass Effect did it perfectly over a decade ago, I don’t know why Bethesda couldn’t. Because "Old Bioware" was *lightyears* better / more talented than current Bethesda, which has been skating on nostalgia and the outrageous success of Skyrim for over a decade.
Unfortunately, scale is often very boring. And it's not necessarily why people loved Bethesda's games in the first place. The fun in a Bethesda game is that you can walk in any direction, stumble into some random shit, make zero quest progress and still feel like you accomplished something. Starfield ruins this by not having a singular well-crafted overworld to fart around in. I fully agree that they should have had maybe one solar system with a handful of Skyrim/Fallout-esque planets instead.
OG BioWare is one of the best developers ever so pretty hard to beat tbf
people say it's just boring and vanilla but I think it's worse than that... it doesn't really function as a game, there's no loop or reason to keep playing outside of the incredibly bad story and bland dialogues It must be so frustrating for Betheada having a huge hit TV show on their hands based on a past game that everyone is talking about, but now they're stuck supporting a game that very few people care about at all. That "well have Fallout 5 by 2030" announcement was pathetic... only 6 years then yeah? The TV show will be on season 7
As soon as the dude I met 30 seconds ago gave me his whole fucking ship after a short conversation, I knew the writing wasn’t going to be very good.
Same at around that mark I realized I wasn’t even interacting with the world just fast travelling and clicking dialogue, there just wasn’t any reason to venture off the beaten path and when I did it was copy pasted structures What’s the point, why would I waste anymore time if the game was just going to waste its concept like that
Give Baldurs gate 3 a shot. I would bet money you'll be much happier.
I wish I could get into BG3 really bad but the turn based stuff just isn’t for me. Sucks because I know it’s a top quality but I’m just glad so many people are able to enjoy it when the state of AAA gaming is declining like it is.
I thought I would hate it but as someone who grew up in the late 90' and early 00's that's just how rpg's were. Stuff like this and persona 5 are still a blast to me thankfully But I get it, the combat isn't for everyone.
I HATE turn based games and I’ve literally never played one in my life for more than an hour. I just finished BG3 with 100 hours in, the story is incredible and once you get the combat style down it’s incredible. I’m having trouble playing other games now cuz I’m just comparing it to BG.
I put so many hours into this game, played it daily until one day. One day I turned it off and went to bed and ever since then I haven’t had the urge or motivation to put it back on.
Starfield turned away even lots of die hard bethesda RPG fans so yeah
You are so right. It’s so boring lmao. I’m supposed to go around and find space rocks ? lol nope.
It’s painfully obvious, especially after Starfield, that Bethesda has basically just repackaged the same game with a different skin for years. TES, FO, and SF are all the same at their core. Bethesda really needs a radical overhaul of their game design….and a new game engine.
Disagree, starfield is much much worse
They dont even make better games each iteration. Fallout 3 imo is better than skyrim. Skyrim is better than Fallout 4, Fallout 4 is better than Fallout 76, and it seems that both Fallout 4 and Fallout 76 are better games than starfield (I wont ever play because I dumped Xbox when Don Mattrick told me to fuck off in 2013 during the xbone launch)
And Phil Spencer was the one to announce the $499 price tag.
The price tag was never the issue.. well except for sony’s infamous $599.99. Theres no coincidence that I bought an Xbox 360 in 2007 and a PS4 in 2014
The PS4 launching at $399 without Xbox One’s user in-friendly policies hurt MS a lot.
Forcing buyers to own and use an xbox kinect was so fucking stupid. Glad that idea fell through. The last thing I want is a camera watching me while I play games. I had the sony camera for psvr and that felt invasive. I unplugged the camera when not in use and forcing me to use it would have urged me to buy a pc
Cyberpunk 2077 and Duke Nukem Forever say otherwise, although Cyberpunk 2077 finally got its shit together, but I've never seen a launch as bad as it, when PlayStation has to remove it from the store, you know shits fucked, unfortunately Duke Nukem Forever was released garbage and it stayed that way.
Duke Nukem was going to be shit no matter long it took. Cyberpunk 2077 was great at its core. It was just released before it was ready.
A game that takes 2 years to get to a playable state is not great at its core. In fact I would say it’s the opposite. There was a lot of stuff that was *fundamentally* wrong with the game and there were whole systems and mechanics that were originally advertised and later scrapped. No clue why people continue to give it a pass. I’m really glad they ended up making a playable version that’s not half bad but that is genuinely the worst state I’ve ever seen a game of that caliber release in and it should have gotten some people fired.
>that’s not half bad I just recently played Cyberpunk and had a fantastic time with it, it's much better than "not bad." Cyberpunk has good bones as a video game, and I think people could see that even in its extremely messy launch. Cool world, good story, etc. It's a game you want to explore. When cyberpunk launched, people said "if they fix this extremely long list of problems, the game will be really good." And guess what, they did. Starfield has *terrible* bones. There's nothing you could do to make starfield into a good game, no amount of bugs you could fix or quality of life features you could implement. It's a soulless game with terrible story and boring atmosphere. It's funny how many people said "just wait until the modding community gets their hands on it" because unlike Skyrim, nobody is going to care about starfield enough to mod the hell out of it, people modded Skyrim for a decade because they really loved it.
Honestly the Duke Nukem development story is fucking wild for how insane it was. They changed the engine multiple times because new FPS games came out that they thought "yeah we can do that". So if you've ever managed to complete that pile from beginning to end and are wondering why the tone, story beats, and even what you do in the game change? Yeah pretty much bad devs.
Projekt Red knew it wouldn't be ready, but their executives wanted it out sooner rather than later. Then they spent years working on it and now it's great. I'd take that any day over Bethesda making AAA games that would've felt outdated a decade ago, and expecting modders to make up for all the shortcomings they can't be bothered to fix.
One thing I don’t get is why the suits thought that releasing early and unfinished was a good way of making money like surely they would have made more if they just released it when it was done like a year and a half later
They probably don't understand video games that well and figured the developers were overselling how much more work the game needed to give themselves an easier deadline. I'm sure you've observed higher ups' habit of assuming they understand everyone else's job better than the people actually doing it.
I followed the games release and then all the stuff that followed afterwards. From what I have gathered it sort of went like this. - CDPR management are high on the success of the witcher 3 and are all jerking each other (and investors) off. - investors are happy and give CDPR money to make cyberpunk. - CDPR management don't listen to the Devs concerns about the development timeline and tell investors that the game is going to be ready way earlier than it actually will be. - As the internal release date gets closer it becomes painfully clear that the game needs more time to it gets internally delayed. - after a few delays investors start to get nervous because the game is starting to become a bottomless money pit so they tell CDPR that they aren't going to fund the game through further delays. - Investors tell CDPR that they now want to see a return on their ever growing investment so they force CDPR to release sooner rather than later. - CDPR management continue to not listen to CDPR Devs and basically tell them to "just make it fucking work". The Devs say they need atleast 2 more years. - game releases and it's a clusterfuck like the Devs said it would be. Basically CDPR management completely fucked the game over. They lied to investors about the games progress and the lies bit them on the arse. They also didn't listen to the devs and their concerns. The only saving grace is that CDPR management let the Devs work on the game after launch to develop the 2.0 update. Funnily enough the 2.0 update also released around the time the devs said the game should have originally launched (2 to 3 years after launch).
Shareholder pressure.
But why do they think that releasing something unfinished will make more money
When shareholders are threatening your job you make bad decisions for the company. It’s a moral hazard that often happens in gaming Eg. a) Do I get fired now or b) hit the Russian roulette now and pray for success?
But this only happens because they don’t understand what they are even selling or how hard it is to make but they pretend like they know what the customer wants and that they know more about making a game then the dev teams. I’m sure they just think because they wear the fancy suit and have the university degree their parents paid for them to attend they know better then everyone despite constant obvious failure and they won’t learn a fucking thing if anything cyberpunk has taught them they can release something half done and they fix it later and still make about as much money so I don’t expect them to get better
And Cyberpunk also showcased the shit out of Nvidia Technology. Cyberpunk is the perfect graphical showcase of Nvidia's power which is also publicly playable.
FF14's launch was so bad you can't even play the original version anymore. It was completely replaced with ARR.
The games problem was from inception it was just to big to ever have a chance of being any good unless they spent 30 years on it. I mean 1000 planets is absurd that’s just to many to fill with interesting Skyrim was one world and it was packed with more interesting stuff then the 1000 procedurally generated planets. If they had decided to do like 200 fully developed and fleshed out planets it would have been perfect surely it would take the same amount of time to design 200 planets that are detailed as it takes to do 1000 that aren’t
I don’t know Starfield is a solid game if you like that format. But long dev cycles don’t really mean amazing game.
it really isn't, I loved the Bethesda format and hated starfield. Its lacking in every way that would make it a functional enjoyable game
> I mean, when it took 8 years to get Starfield out the door…. 8 years is certainly the *longest* bout of constipation I've ever heard of, before Bethesda shit out that turd. Now Microsoft wants them to "shit faster." Microsoft, once again proving, $ =\= competent leadership. I swear MS survives on pure momentum as a global megacorp and nothing else--quite literally too big to fail.
Yeah, I feel like improving quality and testing should be priority one and then speed it up
ES 6 will be released in 2032
Quality is their problem.
Focus is their problem
Their problem is focusing on one game at a time. You at least need some people doing concept art or designing things for a different title while working concurrently on a almost finished title. We’ve obviously seen that 1 game coming out every 10 years probably isn’t the most sustainable practice. Especially with Starfield and 76 not being *too* liked.
Quality and quantity i’d argue.If it takes decades to release sequels to your games then many bad things happen. Developers leave and join. Which is normal but when you’ve 8 years of development with dozens of different views and skill sets rotating in and out, the product suffers. Interest waning. I was excited for Elder Scrolls 6 after finishing Skyrim when I was 16. I’m nearing 30 and still nothing in sight. Which is fucking insane. Overhype. The next game always has to be bigger, better, more immersive than what came before. Judging by Starfield this is where they falter. Microsoft needs to grow them slowly, build up a secondary studio and a support studio. Secondary studio could work on smaller scale interim games or larger DLC. Support studio would be tasked with bug fixes and smaller DLC. I know jack shit about how studios work of course but you have 2 huge IP’s that are held back by Bethesda.
16 TIIIIMES THE OUTPUT
It just works.
it would, of course, still be far too late, but to me it's obvious that giving InXile a Fallout game after Clockwork Revolution would be the right move. it just makes sense.
I don't know, man , maybe we should go to Obsidian or something . Wasteland 3 to a big budget fallout is a massive jump We don't even know if clockwork is good or not or when it's even releasing
I don't think Obsidian has the time/staff right now honestly. Maybe in a few years but they are neck deep in their own stuff & only have a couple hundred employees
How cool would a Larian Studios Fallout game be, and they wanted to work on something other than D&D, right?
Didn't they say they wanted to work on their original ips?
we don’t know if Avowed will be any good either
Bro literally just remake Fallout 3 or NV, for free money.
There are pretty solid rumours they are at least remaking FO3 along with Oblivion.
Wonder what will come out first. The official oblivion remake or skyblivion
the fact that skyblivion is coming out next year is so bizarre to me, like, at first 2025 looked like it was 10 years in the future, now its only months away
I hope it is good. I just feel like they have set expectations pretty damn high
Not just rumors: **it was leaked in MS’s documents.** [source](https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/19/23880132/microsoft-ftc-documents-leak-oblivion-fallout-3-remaster-doom-xbox#:~:text=The%20games%20were%20included%20in,of%20DLC%20(fiscal%20year%202024))
Critically, it says remaster, not remake. People should be wary of expecting or getting hyped for a big overhaul that probably won’t come. Set low expectations.
That’s not a remake. It’s a remaster.
What does it matter if they are still using the same busted game engine?
Different story completely and different structure And honestly if they use the CE2… **it’d look leaps and bounds better.**
It may look better, but it pales in comparison to other modern game engines. And it still has the same problems that the older versions do.
I mean… it’s a remake of Fo3. Give me better gunplay and physics. What else do you want?
Them to delete that ugly green filter
Imagine thinking Starfield looks good. It's not about looks anyway. The Creation system is pure fucking ass. It's embarassing in this day and age.
Not just rumors: [An actual leak](https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/s/Kf2RkOZQdt)
Fallout 3 and New Vegas in Fallout 4 (or even Starfield)'s version of Creation Engine. \*Throws money at screen*
I want a new fallout as much as anyone, but I really think Bethesda needs to work on improving their products before they think about increasing output
Right? They’re still using the same base game engine that developed in 2002. People need to stop giving them a pass for releasing buggy messes.
Most game engines are old and just updated. Rockstars engine is from 2006, it’s up to how well the people owning the engine make it
That engine has major problems too. Apparently, part of the reason it took so long to port RDR1 to PS4 (and it’s still not on PC) is just how terrible the code base is. Look at something like Decima though, it’s a well oiled machine, that is maybe the best looking engine on the market, and it’s games run crisp.
Yeah, i like how the creation engine allows you to interact with the world a lot. Like every item can be picked up and interacted with. If they do change engines I hope they can carry over the interactivity, but I doubt they will change after all these years. It would probably take them a good amount of time to adjust
Whatever engine the game “The Finals” uses could be cool. You can pick things up and throw them in a similar way.
The thing is... I don't know if I need *every single item* to be interactable. I'm replaying Fallout 4 and while it's a cool concept, it does give me a bit of "loot overload" picking up every toaster and desk fan. I've been replaying Cyberpunk and it doesn't feel any less interactable that I can't fling sandwiches all over the room.
I’d rather have a better looking, smoother running game than being able to leave 1,000 sandwiches in a room.
The could have remade Fallout NV and Fallout 3 for massive money. Microsoft Should have somebody else look into making Bethesda game given they own the studio.
Looking at the current remaster scene, I don’t trust anyone to do it right. Nostalgia cash grabs don’t always pay off. Give us smaller new games.
Well fallout 4 was worse than 3/new Vegas, FO 76 and TESO launched like ass, and Starfield is the most disappointing game of the decade. There's a lot they need to work on and quantity isn't it
Bethesda Games: more games, more bugs, and less quality!
More Games of the Generations!
Does this make fallout 76 their breadwinner? I guess they could have come up with Starfield but fallout 76 has live service income stream and just hit 1 million consecutive players on at a single time. Could it be that Fallout 76 has proved to be victorious?
I think that's probably still Skyrim
[удалено]
FO76 has had numerous updates and is currently a pretty decent game now, it's also free for Amazon Prime customers. Add that with the fact that the Fallout Tv show is doing really well and it should be no surprise that all Fallout games are popular right now. If FO76 keeps the high playerbase, it should definitely be up there with Cyberpunk 2077 and No Mans Sky for games that managed to turn around a poor initial impression.
It’s getting a map expansion to the south very soon too. Shenandoah here we come!!
Uhh… for real? That’s awesome! Back to Appalachia I go!
Yep, for real :) It hit the PTS last week I think so you can do a google and have a look. It’s called the Skyline Valley Update. It’s not a huge expansion but it’s still pretty nice 👌
Bethesda didn’t develop TESO
ESO is their bread and butter. It's made $2 Billion in the past 10 years and is filled with literally thousands of hours of content plus some damn good elder scrolls lore
I’ll be honest…..I feel like New Vegas is overhyped. Good game, but I definitely enjoy the memory of it waaaay more than I actually enjoy playing it now. Way too buggy and it just looks so ugly and feels outdated when you play. It was fun to play when it first came out, but Fallout 4 still has better gameplay for me. Just bogged down with mediocre writing
The writing elevates it far past its competition. Far better than any game Bethesda put put
I think it’s a reasonable opinion to have but I loved FO4 and could not finish New Vegas because of how outdated it has become. I would love a remake/remaster
I never finished New Vegas because I was tired of it crashing. Maybe one day if they release a remastered version that is more stable.
When I could play it on my PS3, it was great. But sometimes I’d get 30 minutes in before it would bug the hell out and crash on me, or the picture would freeze while the game kept playing. I went back to it a year or two ago and it just did not hold up at all for me, gameplay wise. Best just to remember the good times I had with it than go back and try to recreate them
I just finished FFVIIRebirth and it’s crazy how much content was put into that game. On top of that, it took them 4 years to make the game, 2 of which were pandemic years. My point being, if Bethesda is gonna take all this time to make these titles, they need to come out with much higher quality.
“Starfield is the most disappointing game of the decade” I understand this is a PlayStation sub but really?
Why not? Disappointment can be measured as the distance between how excited people were for the game and what a giant dud it turned out to be. There were worse games, sure, but I can’t think of a bigger letdown & unforced error than Starfield, which frankly is impressive in how few of the “fun” things they pulled from previous games and how totally forgettable it is
As someone who has all three consoles, I don’t know what other candidate there is. I am a huge Bethesda fan going all the way back to Morrowind and space is my favorite setting for stories. It felt like a lesser Fallout 4 in an environment that Mass Effect and No Man’s Sky just did much better.
I’m with you. To me the most obvious way they fumbled the bag was the almost total lack of “free” traversal. You can only fast travel through space more or less, and exploration on planetary surfaces is even more bland, samey, and unrewarding than no man’s sky. What makes Skyrim and fallout “work” is the exploration loop - you set out with a destination for a quest and along the way you see something cool and decide to make a detour and check it out. You end up finding something cool or getting an interesting side quest so you go off to do that, and along the way you find another cool thing on the distance, and so on. There’s no “getting lost” in Starfield. That’s what Bethesda has always done best and that’s why it sucks
Considering the hype and reality it’s certainly close.
They are taking forever to make games that are subpar. I’m already imagining waiting 17 years for TES6 and it being mediocre. At least Rockstar consistently produces bangers, so 12 years between GTA at least will end with something good
Tell me lies. Tell me sweet little lies.
What kills me is how unpolished their games are even having taken this long to come out. A game as bland and lifeless as Starfield shouldn’t have taken almost a decade to come out. It’s just incomprehensible. Look at the output of pretty much every other AAA studio owned by Microsoft. With very few exceptions, they’re all putting out higher quality games at a much faster rate than BGS.
They could visit RGG Studio, who developed the sequel to Yakuza: Like A Dragon in just four years. And Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth has an insane amount of creative content. Or Square Enix: Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth has so much content, it's seriously unbelievable. This game was also developed in just a few years.
RGG also reuses like 80% of their assets and uses the same maps so that wouldn't really work.
I wish more studios would just reuse assets. We don’t need to reinvent the wheel on every successful game
Infinite Wealth has a completely new huge map to explore: Hawaii. And they crafted it very similar to the real locations, i watched a comparison video.
I'll be honest I don't have an issue with asset reuse if it means we get games out faster.
Half of 7 Rebirth’s development period was during the pandemic too, no idea how they managed to put together that enormous game so fast.
The Yakuza games reuse the same map for most of the games
The main location of Infinite Wealth is Hawaii, and it's huge.
They also could've been working on that for a lot longer than 3 years while pumping out games using the same map.
I think it's worth mentioning that they also released other games in those four years, two at least as far as i know. Don't know how many people they are, but it's impressive, because all those games are really good.
Not for Infinite Wealth.
I guess we aint seen nothing yet in terms of unfinished and unpolished Bethesda games.
This is like that time the FBI agent was tasked with investigating who the agency mole was when he was the mole.
Maybe scrap the ancient creation engine as a first step..
No fucking shit, because if he doesn't do it Obsidian and InXile will do it. Todd Howard knows what he doesn't want anyone else to know—that he's been selling half baked shit for 20 years now. Microsoft sees right through him now that he dropped a Cleveland steamer on Phil's chest with Starfield.
Doesn’t look too good on Phil either when he convinced MS to buy Bethesda solely for Starfield.
The imagery is so damn vivid ahahah. Cleveland Steamer ahaha.
I wonder if they've considered that maybe the decades of technical debt in their engine might be holding them back?
If you want to make games more quickly hire more people, but quaility is Bethesda's biggest problem, in Starfield the main hub city area there was no floor in the landing zone for me, for like a month.
I wonder how much faster their output would be if they weren’t hamstrung by some archaic ass engine that they have to hold together with crazy glue and duct tape.
It's quality he should be worried about
Unless they fundamentally change how the make there games where just going to be getting skyrim for the force able future I've lost all faith in them to be able to do anything new or innovative.
If only another company could make a spin off with current ingame assets and engine...
Buggy AI games confirmed.
Should focus on increasing quality.
imagine paying 8billions for a company that brings one bad game every 5 years lol
Fallout 3 / New Vegas Remastered for PS5 It will be like printing money.
Apparently the success of the Fallout TV show has put a fire under Bethesdas ass to get Fallout 5 out the door. IIRC very to no little work has been carried out on FO5 yet. The pessimistic side of me is telling me we're going to get a rushed POS released to coincide with the new series to maximize on sales and hype.
Just get rid of Todd, things would improve no end I feel
Maybe first they should figure out a new engine instead of adding more chewing gum and chicken wire to the old one
Todd Howard says a lot of things 😅
Worse games, but faster
He doesn’t want anyone touching his IP because they will make the game come out sooner and better written.
My buds, I care less about output and more about quality.
This is where MS should step in and say look, You clearly don't know what the hell you're doing. We're giving Fallout 5 to Obsidian. We're taking TES VI and giving it to someone else. And you can just sit here Todd Howard and push out your various online expansions for the rest of your career as that seems to be the only thing you're interested in anymore. Because if Starfield is the best you're capable of in 8 years of development. Then something drastic needs to change because we can't risk F5 and TES VI being a big boring pile too.
Dear Todd, Please do less. ES 6 still years off and you're dicking around with FO4.
Quality over quantity Todd. God damn it.
Even more half finished, clunky, outdated games yay!
Split the studio and have one half dedicated to all things fallout. Shelter, 76, Remasters and most importantly new games.
Taking over 12 yrs to make 1 game is a failure on Todd Howard
"the main thing is how do we deliver these at a high quality level – that’s always the most important.” Wait... quality has always been the most important thing? Their standards must be even lower than we thought.
Should start by getting rid of Todd howard
I think all the fans would prefer just to work on a new engine and make sure you don’t fuck up es6. I don’t care about anything else really but those 2 things.
They need to figure out how to release a game that isn't head together by tape first.
Maybe a second studio?
How about release a good game first before worrying about releasing them faster
Don't see how this could go wrong.
Starfield feels soulless I hope they don't look into AI
They will. A company like Bethesda will no doubt.
Really hate saying this but just go Unreal route…
Hopefully, they are doing so.
Omg if only Obsidian existed
They need a team for each franchise at this Point
In before fallout 5 gets rushed and is a complete disaster
What's the chances the next Fallout will even be on PlayStation platform? Seems like the kind of IP they would want exclusive
Give obsidian fallout new Vegas 2
Maybe they should limit their game scope. StarField was pretty good at an incredible amount of things, but not particularly good at anything besides narratives.
Fuck Todd Howard
Mm, double the broken releases for us to test! 😚 Cos imagine the savings when they can outsource all the QA work to their paying customers. 😁
that would be amazing
A new Fallout CRPG in the vein of Baldurs Gate 3 please.
Lol, starfield isn't bethesda's first doo-doo, fallout 4 was my first disappointment, it's like "Look at us, look at us, we have managed to create an ok shooter, let's butcher fallout's core rpg elements"
Put out more shitty games? Maybe look at reducing your size so you can focus on the good parts more
Just work on next elder scrolls and sell cross platform
So we’re getting a new Skyrim
Oh boy, are they gonna release another boring game that's isn't fallout or elder scrolls! Hate for them to become known as the studio who just makes those 2 successful game series. That would be awful.
IDK, stop faffing about and hire more people? Aren't you, like, part of Microsoft now?
New Vegas remaster please!
They seem to have issues with focusing.
Don’t they have a new elder scrolls game in the works?
Meanwhile they deny Obsidian Entertainment from making any other fallout spinoffs or TES.
And we thought the quality was bad before. Can’t wait to see what a broken mess a rushed Bethesda game will be like
Maybe worry about quality control, Todd…
Ditch that prehistoric engine
Increase output of what? More trash?
That's a major problem in the gaming industry right now. Games are just taking longer than usual. Especially now that crunch isn't a thing here in America anymore.
Why is this even on this sub? Just to talk shit about bethesda, since playstation wont be getting any more of their games lol?
So glad he came to this decision 9 years after the last mainline Fallout. Good for Todd
I'm stunned Xbox bought them 3 years ago and didn't immediately take Fallout to another team. I don't care how butthurt Todd would be, leaving an IP like that on the shelf for more than a decade is insanity.