Anyway, apparently Bethesda hasn't been too dissuaded by the lukewarm reception its space sim got. Pagliarulo says it's now joined Fallout and Elder Scrolls on the podium as one of Bethesda's "big three”.
What a bunch of fucking clowns. Smoked too much copium it looks like.
"This is, of course, a slightly wild thing for the studio that made Morrowind (its actual best game) and Skyrim (its most popular game by miles) to say"
Emil, Howard, and Hines are why Bethesda can't make good games anymore. Corporate hacks that have pushed for more mundane gameplay with every new game.
They also spearheaded piecemeal DLCs and consistently try to find ways to monetize mods.
In August 2023, Todd Howard described his intent behind The Elder Scrolls VI as wanting to make "the ultimate fantasy-world simulator",
That's when you should have known. TES is at heart a novelistic series that is owned by a studio whose entire style is now "short term crafting and gameplay loops occurring within a physics simulation".
The same could be said of Skyrim, but tons of people loved it and it's still a great framework for modding if Bethesda themselves don't give it a good storyline.
This has been obvious for a few years now. I used to get shit on for voicing this opinion a couple years ago and now it seems almost universally agreed upon. Bethesda is truly shit now.
I don't play FO4 anymore either. I will say I appreciate the stories, but their attempts to make games you can live in just don't measure up anymore. Not when you have games like no man's land and satisfactory. We know just how comfy a game can be.
Like you telling me out of 250 developers on Starfield, nobody is losing their shit that this project isnt at all critically acclaimed like many of their other releases?
Yeah this new stock of devs just don't have it in them to deliver anything great. Their values and language likely prevent them from even considering something more visceral. Wouldn't be surprised if most of them have lived such uninteresting lives they have nothing to draw from. That's at least what they write like.
Seems they don't know why their hero kills, they don't believe in the culling the player enacts. They'd probably rather he didn't.
They seem like they'd prefer to make Animal Crossing in space, they don't really want to write about empire, conquest, terrible crimes, deep-seated hate. Ending threats.
They don't even want to know how the tools of the trade work. Just look at the animations for the models, you can tell that whoever worked on then feared being put on an FBI watchlist if they looked up a video on how pump action shotguns work.
These kinds of dev teams are fully incapable of writing good villains and a cast of characters with wildly different moralities that are grounded in something real.
They're not interested in combat games. They shouldn't touch them. They should leave and make room for those who want to.
What are you on about? Almost every top person working on Starfield has been there since the days of Oblivion/Fallout 3. Bethesda in general is known for high retention, there's a lot of the old guard there.
If anything you should be complaining that there's not enough new blood in Bethesda.
Wanting something to be true doesn’t make it so. I played, and I even enjoyed big parts of it (after heavily modding, to be fair). I think it got more hate than it deserved, but in no reality can it be considered a really good game, let alone their best.
I really enjoyed the story missions, but the procedurally generated stuff got old fast. Im going to give a few years when all the DLCs are out and someone gives is the Wildlander treatment.
What they needed was a lot less empty planets and a lot more that looked populated (not occupied by a small outpost; populated, by a civilization).
The beauty of Skyrim (and I guess fallout, though I hated the guns so much I struggled to ever get into it) was that you could just wander if you got bored. You'd just point yourself in a random direction and see what popped out as interesting. Many of those places would be moderate sized cave systems that brought you out somewhere completely different, where you were free, again, to just pick a direction and explore.
It doesn't feel like exploration to go to an empty map with a base that you kill everything in, then backtrack back to your ship every time.
Even disregarding just how bad starfield is, Emil is the literal worst person to say this. He is completely, shockingly incompetent when it comes to his job.
I agree with you, while adding that the lack of depth, especially in space exploration, economy and combat made it that much more disappointing. Like the groundwork is there, you should be able to hire pilots or have you companions run planet bases for you, but no. At least, when I played you couldn't do that.
I'm a big sci-fi nerd, and the primary quest was so, so good in my opinion. I tried out the base building feature and it really felt worthless, but the combat and story are so really fun.
I was thinking the other day that people were bashing it for the space navigation and I remembered that Mass Effect didn't let you pilot shit or even pick where to go or explore a huge planet and still was so so good.
Still not attracted because what ME was an engrossing story and amazing cast, which Bethesda never ever did in any of the games I liked. So... yeah.
But I sure hope people who took the plunge will get their money's worth!
100% agree, there’s lots to love. I admit that it has a lot of failings and they totally over promised what the game was going to be. But the way people talk you’d think it was an actual bad game.
So what do you like about it and what do you dislike about it? I haven't tried it yet, might pick it up when it costs about as much as a hamburger with fries, but probably not before.
Yes! I love Starfield. I don't know if the hate is partially band wagon or meme or what, but I absolutely don't get it.
The main complaint I've seen is that it's boring. I really just don't feel that. It's open and self-motivated to me in the same way New Vegas or Morrowind are. I personally think that's great.
It's a tale as old as the game industry itself: The company releases an okay game, everyone goes "hell yeah, a solid 7/10". ...except by now everyone expects the company to make nothing but absolute masterpieces.
It's an okay game with lots of little janky bits I don't like (surprising in sense that I of course expected there to be some jank, this is Bethesda we're talking about). The game seems to be amusing enough that I enjoy my time while playing it, but it doesn't have the magic sauce that would make me eagerly get back to the game the next day.
I wonder if there is some definition gap in what Bethesda thinks makes a good game and what make a good game in the eyes of players.
They have probably done a lot behind the scenes improvements that warrants them to say that this has been the best to work on, but clearly it's not the best to play.
Honestly it wasn't bad but it wasn't great. For the period in which it was released it was graphically meh, the combat was shit, the exploration was meh minus with copy pasta generic boring cave, enemies and boring ass loot, the NPC were dumb as rocks, the questing was about being the dog in a game of fetch, the RPGing was on rail, the storyline was... Wait there was storyline? Oh yeah, you're the one, go kill a dragon for some reason. Eh, sure whatev' and the writing was... Well... Nothing to write about. :D
And of course, if was full of bugs and glitches and unfinishable quest that borks your save as one can expect from Bethesda.