Bethesda, simply put, doesn’t know how to react to criticism. Instead of taking this feedback and improving their product they double-down and insist that you should like it because they said so. If it’s boring it’s boring man. They are simply as disconnected as possible. Remember the whole canvas bag fiasco? Then they said “ah, canvas costs too much, we aren’t planning on doing anything with the nylon one”… deal with it in other words. Then they were puzzled why people disliked them to all hell.
I can’t believe how ignorant you are of the worldwide canvas shortage of 2018. Canvas became a global strategic resource. Lack of canvas destabilized numerous nation states.
The idea of frivolously wasting that precious canvas on a video game trinket is frankly offensive.
-Bethesda, probably.
They wasted all the canvas on influencer merchandise some months prior.
How that’s not false advertising is beyond me.
Well, there is a class action lawsuit against them in regards to that and other things FO76 related.
Dont forget about the moldy helmet, how fun.
(it was only for some exclusive edition, not the normal collector helmet, but still)
Yup. And shitty plastic shell for the rum. Then people who requested refund got their info and CC numbers leaked by their system which they took offline immediately.
they took the criticism of fallout 76 and continued working on it, still getting updates to this day when most other places would have left it to rot
I’m not 100% sure but I think FO76 is maintained by BGS Austin. They seem to be far more interested in taking feedback and making the game better than the main Bethesda studio. FO76 may be fundamentally flawed but post-launch it’s definitely getting more care than Skyrim, FO4 and Starfield combined.
They also took class action lawsuits for that game as well, so that might be affecting that push to fix the game. But even if they fix it, doesn’t negate the fact they said they don’t plan on fixing canvas issue, or any problem they caused. Only when there was an outrage they reacted. Remember the horse armor for Skyrim or when they tried to sell mods that were included in previous game. I do.
horse armor was oblivion
Thanks for the correction. Same company though.
yeah. and i guess the 2 expansion packs made up for that fuckup because i hear nothing but great things about the sheogorath expansion
“When the astronauts went to the moon, there was nothing there. They certainly weren’t bored."
Yeah I think that might be because they were on the moon and not pressing WASD to walk around a fake moon
It also bugs me that Bethesda keeps saying that the game is about exploration and finding new planets, but so far every planet I’ve visited has some kind of building upon it. Its clear that people have been on this planet before, so why the hell should I explore this planet? At least give me some incentive or a better reward for finding a true empty planet.
You’re not wrong, but OTOH, it’s pretty funny to see a planet having a building on it equated to the planet being explored, considering Earth was still being explored thousands of years after the first buildings.
Yeah thats true. In Bethesda’s dictionary exploration means: find minerals, 7 life forms and 3 unique geological formations. And by unique we mean like on the other planets.
Or because they didn’t show up at the moon after a loading screen
Cool, so I’ll wait to pick this game up until it’s $10 on a steam sale in 5 years, and play the community’s modded version.
I’m not sure the game is popular enough to get quite the modding support of the community like previous Bethesda games.
I disagree purely on the point that what Starfield is, more than anything else, an amazing platform to make a mod on. Not a great game per se, but the setting and overall theme leave a lot of room for Bethesda to cash in on the work of others as is tradition.
No Man’s Sky has had no loading screens during gameplay, and space to planet transitions on full planets, since what… 2016?
The Creation Engine is just too damn old.
Edit @Dark Arc: You’re right. Creation Engine is just too damn shitty, I guess. I called it “old” because the gameplay feels so antiquated.
“Engines” are not static things. What we call “Unreal Engine” goes back to the 90s.
These comments always bug me as a programmer because it’s like someone calling a 2023 Camero old because it doesn’t have the acceleration of a 2023 Mustang… The “age” almost certainly isn’t the problem, it’s where the effort has or hasn’t been put in to the engine and more importantly the game itself (e.g., carrying on the metaphor, the Camero might be slower getting up to speed because all the R&D for the last 3 years was on a smooth ride).
Yeah to be honest what strikes me the most about companies like Bethesda is just how little they’ve improved over the decades. There’s nothing stopping them from making major improvements like removing loading screens, adding vehicles finally (I wonder if the ships are really a hat like the train in fallout 3), fixing the buggy ass collisions and physics, or any number of dumb shits they just keep leaving in game after game. It really speaks to the institutional inertia and spaghetti mess their code must be.
I would assume those things are just not prioritized by management because they’ve never been things that have caused sufficient outrage and/or aren’t seen as things that can increase sales… You can’t exactly use “look we fixed physics” in a marketing video to sell a new game. Maybe you can use “look we have vehicles”… but what’s the number of people that will really care? What % will that increase sales?
e.g. maybe someone would care if EA made your need for speed character able to get out of the car and walk around… Do I care? Nah.
(I bothered to look at the Wikipedia page and) they added multiplayer support to Creation Engine for Fallout 76, that was a huge undertaking.
I mean fixing these things can definitely increase sales, but you’re right not in the sense that they are directly marketable. The thing that makes games really blow up is word of mouth, people recommending them to their friends, and you get that best by making a game with overall quality. It’s basically a given at this point that Bethesda games are buggy messes that get fixed by modders. Every time you have a major bug, game crash, or save corruption it takes you out of the world and forces you to remember you’re playing a game that barely works, which makes you like it less. All of this hurts sales, if not today in the future. So yeah, they probably aren’t prioritized by management, but management is wrong. They often are.
Fair assessment, though I’d critique:
Every time you have a major bug, game crash, or save corruption it takes you out of the world and forces you to remember you’re playing a game that barely works, which makes you like it less.
These aren’t the improvements you said you wanted ;) Fixing physics, adding vehicles, etc are features/major changes that can increase instability/take a lot more time to QA.
Creation Engine is static. Others, you are right, change.
Bethesda revealed in June 2021 that they were working on a new iteration of the engine called Creation Engine 2, and that it would power their upcoming games Starfield and The Elder Scrolls VI. Creation Engine 2 features real-time global illumination and advanced volumetric lighting.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creation_Engine
Case and point
Case in point
Huh, thanks for the tip!
Casing point
Just slapping number 2 at the end doesn’t mean it’s better. That’s like how Microsoft made Edge browser by forking IE11 and it’s suppose to be better. And how big of a joke is volumetric lighting and “real-time global illumination”… hahaha. Oh my. Source 1 had that when Half-Life2 was released. Advancement.
Here’s an in-game example of that global illumination.
Creation Engine is static. Others, you are right, change.
Points out it does change.
jUst sLappInG a nUmbeR 2 aT tHe End dOesN’t mEan iT’s bEtTer
That’s like how Microsoft made Edge browser by forking IE11 and it’s suppose to be better.
It is… By a lot, ask any web developer. Even before they switched to using Blink under the hood it was a significantly better browser. Now it’s literally a reskinned Chrome. Meanwhile IE11 is a complete mess that requires a ton of hacks to get it to do what you want.
In both cases IE -> Edge and Edge -> Chrome Microsoft changed the literal browser engine. … This just kinda makes my point even more so, the general public has no idea what constitutes an “engine change” and can’t judge whether that will yield the results they want.
Oh my. Source 1 had that when Half-Life2 was released. Advancement.
You’ve seen how low poly Half-Life 2 is right…? Destiny 2 only allows certain areas to have the flashlight on because if they don’t plan for it the flash lights can tank their frame rates (seriously) – but hey “Left 4 Dead 2 had a flashlight in source engine!” /s.
I can almost guarantee Half-Life two also didn’t have “Global illumination”, maybe real time lighting for the flashlight, but Global Illumination is a much bigger thing.
This is Half-Life 2 with global illumination: https://youtu.be/WWYpKRETv8k?si=9eTDmx10m3l9nwdR
Here’s an old forum from 2005 talking about how “real global illumination isn’t yet possible” https://gamedev.net/forums/topic/348797-half-life-2-global-illumination/3282572/
Points out it does change.
In case you haven’t figured it out, it’s a joke that their engine doesn’t change. Whether they want it or not, they have to at least adapt some things and am well aware of that. Joke is that they do so seldomly and we don’t see much progress in quality.
By a lot, ask any web developer.
I am a web developer and have been for 20 years almost. So I know what am talking about. I know IE, whether I like it or not, so intimately I can still quote all the bugs they had from IE6 onwards. All Edge did, was drop legacy compatibility mode, nothing else. Underlying Trident engine got a minor bump. Hence why I quoted it. But by all means please enlighten me with your Google skills in order to justify the fact Bethesda scammed you out of your money once again.
You’ve seen how low poly Half-Life 2 is right
Yes, and number of polygons means nothing. Which is why there’s an ongoing joke about people needing to upgrade their computers to run Starfield, when there are better looking games out there which run much much better.
And you are equating global illumination with ray tracing, which is not the same thing. You can do partial global illumination without doing ray tracing. Only thing that means, coming from Todd Howard’s mouth is that they are not using baked in lights, which I don’t believe him either. Remember how FO76 had 16x the details? But in reality they copy and pasted foliage that many times and called it a day with same shitty textures. Yeah, that kind of Todd treatment is expected whatever he says. Even if they did do ray tracing it doesn’t matter one bit if game is boring, which it is.
Also, I gave HL2 and Source engine as an example as a joke as well, since game looked awesome and ran on pretty much any hardware. With the release of Lost Coast, which is what you should be comparing Starfield to, it was demonstrated what Source can do. Lost Coast was released in 2005 and looks significantly better and demonstrates many things Bethesda these days boasts about.
In the end, if all that matters to you is what Todd tells people and then pretends he didn’t and number of polygons so be it. I on the other hand like my games to be entertaining, regardless of how they look.
All Edge did, was drop legacy compatibility mode, nothing else. Underlying Trident engine got a minor bump.
Really? So Chakra was just a fever dream I had? (https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft-edge-gets-better-against-chrome-and-other-browsers-javascript-benchmarks)
The initial release of EdgeHTML on Windows 10 included more than 4000 interoperability fixes. (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/EdgeHTML#cite_note-13)
Initial public release of Microsoft Edge. Contains improvements to performance, support for HTML5 and CSS3.
“Minor bump” that fixed 4,000 bugs, and added HTML5 and CSS3.
I suppose ES6, C++11, Java 8, Python 3, etc are also just “minor bumps.”
I didn’t even buy the game, it didn’t seem interesting to me. I just am frustrated by the fundamental lack of understanding about what an “engine” is and the fact that they’re almost always being iterated on in different ways.
Diversity of engines is a good thing, everything shouldn’t be Unreal Engine, Blink, V8, Clang, etc
No man sky also barely has a story and has zero voice acting. It’s apples and oranges, just because they’re both fruit doesn’t mean they can be compared
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If you don’t like Bethesda games just come out and say it. Those are two games that provide completely different experiences to anything Bethesda has ever made.
Do I wish Starfield had less loading screens? Sure, but the only thing I’m really upset about is that it doesn’t show the ship animations every time I take off and land. But that’s an immersion issue and Starfield is more immersive than either nms or cyberpunk either way.
As far as technical issues go, I couldn’t play it when I had popOS installed but since I switched to Windows I’ve had zero issues on a 3080ti
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It’s relevant because it’s there. If you don’t play those parts it doesn’t mean it’s there. They put the time in other things more important to the game than transitions. Also, the engine is completely different.
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Luckily only tried it once on gamepass. For sure has some interesting parts to it (I did like the ship designer) but it hit me on the second location I explored - this is pretty much a Skyrim reskin. The are randomised dungeons everywhere for no goddamn reason whatsoever, my goddamn spaceship can only fit like 5 suits… alright. Been there, done that, I’m out.
Looking for a re-release in 5 yrs with all the add-ons and mods, maybe I will get it then.
Pirated it but it wasnt worth the disk space. Tried it for a couple hours but it was so boring. I have done a quest for a bank where I was supposed to collect money. It went like this: Fast travel to the ship. Fast travel to the planet the person is on Talk with them. Fast travel back to ship Fast travel to bank planet Fast travel to bank. Talk to bank guy to get money. Next bank quest. Rinse and repeat
Badabing badaboom now that’s a $90 value
I just wonder how someone can encounter randomly generated content when all these handcrafted locations exists where all the story and quests happen.
I played like 30 hours before I even came across random generated content.
And those things definitely felt like end-game stuff.
Why get it then and support this bs? We got this trash because people kept buying Skyrim and circlejerking it
Looks like Bethesda discovered ChatGPT.
Some of those replies are as bland, hunky-dory and sanitized as can be, with a dash of “you’re playing it wrong”.
Corporate speak incentivizes bland language. Standing up for as little as possible brings as few enemies as possible, after all. Unfortunately, an empty, bland proposal can only result in empty, bland art.
Starfield frustrates me, because in many ways its a major step in the right direction. It has much better roleplaying mechanics than Skyrim or Fallout 4, but at the same time the lore is half-baked and the skill system is fairly weak. It has great potential, but a lot of it feels toned down and less “real” because of it. Space exploration has a lot of potential as well, but setting every objective so far apart on planets ruins exploration by filling it with monotonous procgen.
That’s why I’m fairly confident that once properly patched, and mods/DLCs are in full swing, it will probably be remembered very fondly despite the release state. It’ll pull a Cyberpunk.
I think everything you said here is spot on except the idea Starfield will improve pike Cyberpunk at this point because Bethesda’s attitude really doesn’t indicate that they seem to admit anything needs fixing.
With that said I doubt many people expected Cyberpunk to do as well later on so you are probably right and I hope you are for the game and genre. I really like the aesthetic of Starfield and want it to succeed.
I’m just so tired of getting such half baked stuff at release.
One annoying thing about the “make your own stories” concept is that content us going to be recycled. My followers don’t say anything new or have new things to do etc because it’s all baked in but also on this supposedly open RPG landscape.
I would agree with you if Bethesda games haven’t always been saved by modders, rather than Beth themselves. If we had to depend on Beth to fix their own game, Skyrim would’ve been abandoned long, long, long ago, same with Fallout 4.
That’s true and what worries me the most after wanting Starfield to do good. I’ve been playing Starfield for a bit only to find myself moving to Cyberpunk sooner than later lately.
No harm in waiting for Starfield! It will only get better, while Cyberpunk is largely complete. I loved cyberpunk, especially the DLC.
I hope it does and I think it will but again with the reliance Bethesda puts on the community I’m nervous.
Anyway I’ve gotten much of the way through at 100 hours and have enjoyed it - definitely got my money’s worth - but I just sort of hit a wall. To be fair you’ll do that with most games but it seems like Stanfield is just bland.
We’ll certainly see! I trust modders.
Yeah, Bethesda games have always been… playable, I guess, but hardly any good, without modding, at least as far back as Oblivion. Morrowind was the last game they made that was just good, out of the box, without needing mods.
So I figured in a year or two Starfield will be good, with mods, just like Oblivion, Skyrim, and Fallout 4 were all bland at best on release, until mods made them good.
100% I actually think Starfield has the best bones, even if it has the worst meat, so to speak, so adding meat gives it a much higher ceiling in a few years time.
The problem is that starfield is modern warfare III of Bethesda but people trying to see it as next skyrim, Bethesda ai generated almost all this game and looped it in roguelite shape, the only things evolved is mechanics as you’ve said yourself, and again as you’ve said yourself, this game will be saved by modders
Procedural generation is not AI, don’t spew nonsense.
The world is now full of technology that used to have real names, but is now called AI so that investors spunk themselves as they high five each other in shareholder meetings.
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Procedural generation has existed for many years. There’s nothing AI about it
Oh I’m anti-Bethesda and Bethesda practices, I’m just sure it will eventually be a great game once the community steps in and fixes it. It isn’t an excuse for Bethesda, but rather admiration for the modding community, and an example of why FOSS and a rejection of the profit motive is so good.
I agree with you) communities solve everything
i dont know why people shit on bethesda for “letting modders fix the game”
i dont really know any other developer that embraces the modding community as much as bethesda does, and i wish other games had the same amount of modding capability that bethesda games do
I think it’s fully possible to criticize Bethesda’s incomplete and highly flawed game design and praise their willingness to support the modding community with great tools at the same time.
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When players are tired of paying to be game testers then things will change. Until then, go mine some ore or whatever, I haven’t played it.
-Bethesda, maybe
If a significant amount of people “misunderstood” you, it’s not their fault, but yours for not clearly communicating or not tailoring your communication for the target audience.
Same here: if people play the game “wrong”, you didn’t design it properly and/or marketed it completely wrong.
Sure, there will always be “dumb” (or too clever) individuals who you simply can’t properly address and satisfy, but if the group is large enough to be loud, you failed your job.
If a significant amount of people “misunderstood” you, it’s not their fault, but yours for not clearly communicating or not tailoring your communication for the target audience.
I find this ironic, because even the tutorials in the game only communicate half of the information you need. A lot of them just outright expect you to have played one of their games before. I could imagine if this was someone’s first Bethesda RPG, they’d be confused as hell. Plus there are a few things unique to Starfield that are confusing even if you’ve played every one of their games before.
I love that steam reviews can make companies take notice and is harder to shove away compared to other types of reviews with how it’s always there on the store page.
Hot take: Alan Wake 2 would have a lot of explaining to do if EPIC had a review system. My disappointment with that game was immeasurable and my weekend was ruined.
Hmm, I haven’t played it. I avoid everything epic store stuff (even though I would have gotten it for free, since I’m childhood friends with one of the devs). So I’m curious, what’s the problem? I’ve heard like three people say that it’s their game of the year already, so I’m curious what’s the issue for you?
I’d love to hear why, personally. Wasn’t a huge fan of Alan Wake 1, so the huge outcry for the sequel has been a bit odd for me, and would like to hear the other side of the coin.
It was a heart warming situation when I saw Blizzard’s game get mixed reviews. They didn’t release games anywhere else until now and getting a reality check was a much needed thing for them.
Some of Starfield’s planets are meant to be empty by design — but that’s not boring. “When the astronauts went to the moon, there was nothing there. They certainly weren’t bored." The intention of Starfield’s exploration is to evoke a feeling of smallness in players and make you feel overwhelmed.
May as well boot up SpaceEngine then.
It really evoked a feeling of smallness in me. Namely how small and devoid of content the universe feels.
This is made worse because every inhabited planet I go to has some elaborate situation just waiting for me to solve it. For example: I land on the landing pad, walk 30 meters through a gate and am greeted by a hostage situation in a bank where the hostage negotiator is going to let me, some random, go do his job instead of him, trusting me with the lives of everyone involved without even blinking.
I miss Games like Starbound. So much to see and do. Unbelievable good atmospheric Music under a Sky full of Stars while building you first Base. This was one, if not the, first game to give me a feeling of smallness in comparison to the Universe.
I also loved starbound. My problem was the late game became very gamey, with the linear planet tier progression to get better materials. Once I got past the progression and beat the final boss there was nothing fun left to do, even with all the base building stuff they put in.
There’s nothing wrong with a game ending at the final boss tbh
Is Starbound really about the bosses, though?
I really enjoyed these “Space-Dungeons” where you could Upgrade your Weapons at the End or get a Terraforming Device for an Emerald-Forrest Biome or something like that.
Me: I’m bored
Bethesda: No you’re not.
Me: Oh
The failure is absolutely deserved
You can reply to reviews on Steam???
Yeah? There’s a comment section and developers comments get highlighted on the store page. As far as I know it’s been like this for many years.
Yeah that’s how developers respond to negative reviews or problems that their players have.
A bigger open world just means less interesting things to do. This is how I’ve seen Starfield described.
