These guys are getting harder and harder to take seriously. As disappointing as the game itself is, what the fuck is this? Defensively and passive-aggressively trying to argue with reviewers? Long ramblings on how unfair it is that one of the world’s most significant game studios, freshly taken over by enormous capital… gets a little criticism for the flaws it its products? Do you need to be an expert Twinkie mass manufacturing engineer, really, if a new product is, let’s say, a tenth of the size and tastes of sawdust?
If they’re gonna insinuate it’s not the obvious reasons, maybe they should’ve served up some less obvious reasons - I’m sure they would’ve been convincing.
Yup, it is an anomaly in that it feels like the quality I used to expect 20 years ago when devs couldn’t just patch flaws after launch and had to actually QA their games before going gold. They rely so much on after launch patches that games often aren’t finished until a year after release.
BG3 is an excellent game, but saying it’s unlike the rest of games because it “does its QA before launch” is very silly. Look at the 100GB of huge patches the game’s received, reading the pages and pages of patch notes for the bug fixes and also the basic RPG features added after launch like the ability to change your character’s appearance.
BG3 had more bugfixes and hotfixes than Starfield did by a long shot, the difference between the two is not the absence of bugs. It’s that BG3 under the bugs was a phenomenally VA’d/Mocapped game with a great story line, memorable characters, meaningful choices, and combat that doesn’t become a rote chore or a numbers go up game with randomized loot.
BG3 was a complete, enjoyable experience all the way through at launch. There were a lot of patches, but those weren’t as necessary as other games, like Cyberpunk 2077 and Fallout: New Vegas. For example, character customization is nice to have, but lots of games don’t bother.
Starfield on the other hand, was relatively bug free at launch, but it didn’t have a good gameplay loop. Outposts were repetitive, gunplay and weapon variety wasn’t particularly interesting, and cities weren’t very plentiful or interesting (Morrowind was way better in all three, and the game is ~20 years old).
Yeah, BG3 wasn’t as solid as launches before OTA updates were a thing, just it felt a lot more like that era than most of the AAA game launches in recent memory.
Like with pretty much all things for the last decade we hit stagnation and consistent money making with low effort.
So clearly now everyone else is wrong or why are they making so much money? If they throw out garbage that people pay for and then complain about them why should they take the criticism seriously… I’m fact it’s just bad people trying to ruin them because they are perfect and right.
Everyone is right all the time and everything is gold no matter how lazy. No one wants the discussion they want to be told they are right and then to move on to the next thing without stopping or asking questions.
If we can’t impact their bottom lines then nothing will ever change until it collapses.
“People have unrealistic expectations for AAA games! It’s impossible to make them as good as people expect them to be!”
I remember lots of big studios saying that shit after Baldur’s Gate 3 officially released. The work of a comparatively small studio with a Skyrim budget (100 million USD) did what many bigger budgets failed to do. How was that possible? Clearly, it’s the fault of gamers for expecting too much!
Side note: Witcher 3’s budget was around 34 million USD, with less than 13m for development proper, which is another good example of a game that even at release was already looking and playing great.
And those examples are not hard to come up with either. For example:
any Nintendo game
games with a passionate designer - "Nier: Automata* and Death Stranding come to mind
refined, broad market appeal sequels to popular niche games - as Elden Ring is to Dark Souls
Starfield was a mediocre rehash of their Elder Scrolls formula, but without the interesting variation that Elder Scrolls games have. And performance sucks, so you’re paying a penalty for an average gameplay experience.
How many times does Bethesda have to shit in your mouth to realize they themselves are shit? Fallout 4 was a downgrade from NV, then fallout 76, rereleasing the same game over and over again, and now starfield.
We should be way passed “hard to take them seriously”
I bailed after Skyrim. I loved the immersiveness and scale of their previous games, but Skyrim didn’t have that. It was a relatively small world, the storyline was barely even there, and the side content was a lot more limited vs other games. It looked great and had your typical gameplay improvements, but it was just a massive downgrade in terms of overall experience.
I wanted Morrowind in space, and I got stripped-down Skyrim in space, which was already a stripped down experience. Either make a great dup (like Oblivion) or make something completely new and interesting. They went with mediocre dup in a different setting.
Emil sounds defensive but he’s right – as someone outside the gaming industry, I cannot fathom how so much effort can result in such a shallow, tepid stew of shit. But because of how much time, staff and money were thrown at it, it’s not a big stretch to assume that incompetence was involved – unless it was leprechauns that stole the game’s vision, plot, dialogue, sense of scale and exploration and replaced it with loading screens.
I know people really like Todd for some reason, but i find it rather sad that they spend all this time and money and manpower to build his “dream game” since he was a child and that’s the end result. Todd foe the live of god, maybe you should dream bigger
I only “like” Todd because of how easy it is to meme him and his bullshit. Now that Microsoft owns Bethesda, they should change the BSOD to a photo of him saying “It just works”
He was slightly less irritatingly smarmy back when. Myself, I at least took his Skyrim hype with slightly less skepticism than “lol, yeah, pull the other one” before it came out.
Sorry Emilio, but when you had a reported $200 million dollars, 500 developers, and 7 years to make a game, you don’t get to play the “but its really hard” card when people complain that your game is soulless corporate crap.
Honestly I’d have tried the game by now if every time I thought about it the devs didn’t go on some insane ramble. They should really just shut up and let people form their own opinions. A lot of people will inevitably end up liking it, even if it’s garbage.
I just finished xenosaga episode 1 and it was way better executed than starfield. Starfield felt like chores while Xenosaga managed that I tuned in completely.
I can’t believe I was ever bothered by the fact that MS bought them out. It’s almost schadenfreude to watch this train wreck knowing it’s not ever going to be something I’ll have to deal with.
I think it’s a fair point. They’re not arguing against all criticism, just the kind that comes from a place of ignorance for how games are made. There are certainly a lot of people who say things like, “why didn’t the developers just do X Y Z”, with no empathy for or understanding of how games get made. It’s possible to criticise things without spreading ignorance.
with no empathy for or understanding of how games get made.
I don’t work on the industry, but I do mess around with Godot and have fiddled with modding Skyrim and Fallout. I understand part of the limitations of Bethesda’s own engine, or at least those older versions of it. I understand how often you can find yourself “fighting” the engine. Sticking with it for a game with space exploration was probably a bad idea. That decision can be easily thrown as coming from high up, “use everything in house”, much like how EA forces nearly every game to use DICE’s Frostbite.
But then you have stranger decisions, like “space exploration is just fast traveling to specific celestial bodies”. Having fast travel is one thing, all travel being fast travel, well, it’s just not fun. “Inventory interface will be like Skyrim, but slightly better” - why use some 70% of the screen to show the model of the item? Why not make a neat table with all the info exposed like the one in SkyUI mod? You could have weight, value, quantity in different columns and still have space to show the item model.
Now, Emil could’ve explained why some decisions were made. He didn’t. So it comes out as an empty rant.
Yeah. The problem here is he’s talking to those people–which is valid–while pretending he’s never heard of the real issue: No matter the reason, the game is not good. Y’all already put it on sale because it’s not good.
You have the opportunity right now to tell us why, if you want, but you didn’t do that.
Ultimately it doesn’t matter the reason why.
You don’t get to pout and say “you don’t know how hard this is” when you’re selling your game for money. You’re not giving it away. You’re not doing charity work here. Make a better game or stop talking. Nobody out there paid $70 because they wanted your opinion about it. They paid $70 because they wanted a good game. They didn’t get it.
And yeah, it is hard. Even with all that money and all those developers, it’s hard. But nobody wants to be scolded because they experienced a bad game. That’s not your customer’s fault.
That’s fair, I 100% agree. No matter the reason for a game’s poor quality, you shouldn’t let it off the hook. Especially if it’s a commercial product.
Personally though, I don’t think he’s pretending not to have heard that point. He clarifies multiple times in the thread that he’s fine with people criticising his work. Instead, he’s speaking to a kind of criticism that claims – incorrectly – to know things about the game’s development, and that offers naive solutions to complex problems. In my opinion, that kind of criticism is pretty worthless, and takes up air that could otherwise be spent discussing the game’s real, concrete problems.
But I get the frustration. Bethesda’s response to criticism of Starfield has been dismissive on the whole, so the director of the game coming out against some criticism is tone-deaf from a PR perspective.
Also, it seems like no-one who complains about discourse online takes the time to provide examples of what they’re complaining about… So it’s hard to know what exactly Emil is talking about here.
This thread is full of people with strong opinions who have no idea how video games are made. They don’t seem aware that they are exactly proving his point.
Oh I’m pretty sure I know exactly “why it is the way it is”…
It feels like every other Bethesda game ever made, because choosing to continue using the Creation Engine means you can only make games that feel this way.
Seems to me more like they repeated all their old mistakes and made new ones. The engine might’ve slowed development (and gave some influences/limits etc) but design direction seems to be the issue. Being on-par with their older games would be a step up, it’s like they missed the point of why people liked their worlds.
I mean, at this point i don’t really know why people like their games either. I loved New Vegas but never bothered after. I bought skyrim at some point and i understood why people like that game. When fallout 4 launched i was sick at home and bought it because i had nothing to do. I rebooted the game like three times because i thought i accidentally bought some asset flip scam. No the game actually looks that shit and is a horrible buggy mess. Idk if people really enjoy collecting trash for hours just to not being able to sell it, or if these games have something that i don’t see.
For me the main draw was always being able to freely explore their beautiful handmade worlds, be it Tamriel or a post-nuclear US. You always knew you’d find something interesting around the next corner. I’d be happy with this being just Fallout in space too but it seems Starfield is mostly procedurally generated and you can’t even drive any vehicles so in that front they lost most of my interest.
For me, its the way they used procedural generation. Like its literally the same exact points of interests on every planet.
I remember going to a planet full of high level fauna and discovering a cave where you find a dead pirate that says these things are everywhere ahhhh. I thought it was cool. Next planet I went to had no fauna, and sure enough that same cave and dead pirate was in there saying the same thing with absolutely no fauna or enemy NPCs in there.
Its like they made 20 unique assets for the procedural generation tool to pick from. This is the exact laziness I found and drove me away from ESO. Just the same experience, with maybe a different faction here and there but the same points of interest over and over.
Other than that, I liked it. Basically skyrim in space. But very empty and they forced you complete like a 2 -3 hour mission before stuff opened up to you. And another 20 or so hours before a mission locked skillset is introduced. Huge waste of time IMO.
Its an alright game if you have a lot of time to kill.
I feel like that’s not even procedural generation at that point it’s just copy and pasting with a fancy name… by definition procedural generation should, you know, generate new stuff not just reuse the same couple things haha
shades of the Jamie Kennedy documentary where any time someone says they didn’t like Malibu’s Most Wanted he complains that he “worked really hard on it” as though explaining why something is shitty is just as good as making it not be shitty
If your game sucks due to design and implementation decisions that were made with sound rationale behind them, your game sucks. It doesn’t matter at all why it sucks, or that there’s no feasible way to make it better. It sucks. You can tell me that there’s no way to make it not suck, but I play plenty of games all the time that don’t suck.
If you have to be in the industry to criticize something then I guess we need to remove all online reviews since who knows RiverrFucker69’s credentials.
"You all are just too stupid to understand why we made the game so boring to explore and didn’t put a single vehicle or alien ride in the whole fkng galaxy. "
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These guys are getting harder and harder to take seriously. As disappointing as the game itself is, what the fuck is this? Defensively and passive-aggressively trying to argue with reviewers? Long ramblings on how unfair it is that one of the world’s most significant game studios, freshly taken over by enormous capital… gets a little criticism for the flaws it its products? Do you need to be an expert Twinkie mass manufacturing engineer, really, if a new product is, let’s say, a tenth of the size and tastes of sawdust?
If they’re gonna insinuate it’s not the obvious reasons, maybe they should’ve served up some less obvious reasons - I’m sure they would’ve been convincing.
Big “Baldur’s Gate 3 is an anomaly” energy.
Yup, it is an anomaly in that it feels like the quality I used to expect 20 years ago when devs couldn’t just patch flaws after launch and had to actually QA their games before going gold. They rely so much on after launch patches that games often aren’t finished until a year after release.
BG3 is an excellent game, but saying it’s unlike the rest of games because it “does its QA before launch” is very silly. Look at the 100GB of huge patches the game’s received, reading the pages and pages of patch notes for the bug fixes and also the basic RPG features added after launch like the ability to change your character’s appearance.
BG3 had more bugfixes and hotfixes than Starfield did by a long shot, the difference between the two is not the absence of bugs. It’s that BG3 under the bugs was a phenomenally VA’d/Mocapped game with a great story line, memorable characters, meaningful choices, and combat that doesn’t become a rote chore or a numbers go up game with randomized loot.
BG3 was a complete, enjoyable experience all the way through at launch. There were a lot of patches, but those weren’t as necessary as other games, like Cyberpunk 2077 and Fallout: New Vegas. For example, character customization is nice to have, but lots of games don’t bother.
Starfield on the other hand, was relatively bug free at launch, but it didn’t have a good gameplay loop. Outposts were repetitive, gunplay and weapon variety wasn’t particularly interesting, and cities weren’t very plentiful or interesting (Morrowind was way better in all three, and the game is ~20 years old).
Yeah, BG3 wasn’t as solid as launches before OTA updates were a thing, just it felt a lot more like that era than most of the AAA game launches in recent memory.
Like with pretty much all things for the last decade we hit stagnation and consistent money making with low effort.
So clearly now everyone else is wrong or why are they making so much money? If they throw out garbage that people pay for and then complain about them why should they take the criticism seriously… I’m fact it’s just bad people trying to ruin them because they are perfect and right.
Everyone is right all the time and everything is gold no matter how lazy. No one wants the discussion they want to be told they are right and then to move on to the next thing without stopping or asking questions.
If we can’t impact their bottom lines then nothing will ever change until it collapses.
“People have unrealistic expectations for AAA games! It’s impossible to make them as good as people expect them to be!”
I remember lots of big studios saying that shit after Baldur’s Gate 3 officially released. The work of a comparatively small studio with a Skyrim budget (100 million USD) did what many bigger budgets failed to do. How was that possible? Clearly, it’s the fault of gamers for expecting too much!
Side note: Witcher 3’s budget was around 34 million USD, with less than 13m for development proper, which is another good example of a game that even at release was already looking and playing great.
And those examples are not hard to come up with either. For example:
Starfield was a mediocre rehash of their Elder Scrolls formula, but without the interesting variation that Elder Scrolls games have. And performance sucks, so you’re paying a penalty for an average gameplay experience.
How many times does Bethesda have to shit in your mouth to realize they themselves are shit? Fallout 4 was a downgrade from NV, then fallout 76, rereleasing the same game over and over again, and now starfield.
We should be way passed “hard to take them seriously”
I bailed after Skyrim. I loved the immersiveness and scale of their previous games, but Skyrim didn’t have that. It was a relatively small world, the storyline was barely even there, and the side content was a lot more limited vs other games. It looked great and had your typical gameplay improvements, but it was just a massive downgrade in terms of overall experience.
I wanted Morrowind in space, and I got stripped-down Skyrim in space, which was already a stripped down experience. Either make a great dup (like Oblivion) or make something completely new and interesting. They went with mediocre dup in a different setting.
Have you seen the replies they’re posting to Steam reviews? Fucking hilarious(ly sad) LOL
Sad is the word. I think “um ackchyually the boredom is on purpose” was my favorite in the bunch.
WeRE thE MoOn LaNDinGs BoRInG??? 😂😂
I lost it when they made that comparison. Also, ya know they actually had a rover to drive around on the moon haha
Gamers: this game is not fun
Game Design Director: Funny how disconnected some players are from the realities of game development, and yet they speak with complete authority
Gamers: this game isn’t fun.
Game Director: we know, shithead, but not for the way you think it is.
Emil sounds defensive but he’s right – as someone outside the gaming industry, I cannot fathom how so much effort can result in such a shallow, tepid stew of shit. But because of how much time, staff and money were thrown at it, it’s not a big stretch to assume that incompetence was involved – unless it was leprechauns that stole the game’s vision, plot, dialogue, sense of scale and exploration and replaced it with loading screens.
Yeah, I don’t think anyone has any real complaints about the technical aspects (other than some performance tuning).
More gaslighting by bethesda
-Bethesda
I know people really like Todd for some reason, but i find it rather sad that they spend all this time and money and manpower to build his “dream game” since he was a child and that’s the end result. Todd foe the live of god, maybe you should dream bigger
I only “like” Todd because of how easy it is to meme him and his bullshit. Now that Microsoft owns Bethesda, they should change the BSOD to a photo of him saying “It just works”
I could never tell if people really liked him, or if that was just a meme? I’ve always found him smarmy and irritating.
He was slightly less irritatingly smarmy back when. Myself, I at least took his Skyrim hype with slightly less skepticism than “lol, yeah, pull the other one” before it came out.
Sorry Emilio, but when you had a reported $200 million dollars, 500 developers, and 7 years to make a game, you don’t get to play the “but its really hard” card when people complain that your game is soulless corporate crap.
You’re a professional, act like it.
Not only a professional, but a professional working at “the best of the best”, AAA studio
Honestly I’d have tried the game by now if every time I thought about it the devs didn’t go on some insane ramble. They should really just shut up and let people form their own opinions. A lot of people will inevitably end up liking it, even if it’s garbage.
Ok then smartass, you tell us why it’s the way it is!
I’d love to hear from them why the game sucks
they don’t think it be how it is but it do
It really do.
This seems like a deflection rather than accepting the game “is the way it is” no matter the reason.
I just finished xenosaga episode 1 and it was way better executed than starfield. Starfield felt like chores while Xenosaga managed that I tuned in completely.
I can’t believe I was ever bothered by the fact that MS bought them out. It’s almost schadenfreude to watch this train wreck knowing it’s not ever going to be something I’ll have to deal with.
I think it’s a fair point. They’re not arguing against all criticism, just the kind that comes from a place of ignorance for how games are made. There are certainly a lot of people who say things like, “why didn’t the developers just do X Y Z”, with no empathy for or understanding of how games get made. It’s possible to criticise things without spreading ignorance.
I don’t work on the industry, but I do mess around with Godot and have fiddled with modding Skyrim and Fallout. I understand part of the limitations of Bethesda’s own engine, or at least those older versions of it. I understand how often you can find yourself “fighting” the engine. Sticking with it for a game with space exploration was probably a bad idea. That decision can be easily thrown as coming from high up, “use everything in house”, much like how EA forces nearly every game to use DICE’s Frostbite.
But then you have stranger decisions, like “space exploration is just fast traveling to specific celestial bodies”. Having fast travel is one thing, all travel being fast travel, well, it’s just not fun. “Inventory interface will be like Skyrim, but slightly better” - why use some 70% of the screen to show the model of the item? Why not make a neat table with all the info exposed like the one in SkyUI mod? You could have weight, value, quantity in different columns and still have space to show the item model.
Now, Emil could’ve explained why some decisions were made. He didn’t. So it comes out as an empty rant.
It’s not a fair point when it comes from a company that relies on free labor to fix their broken games.
Yeah. The problem here is he’s talking to those people–which is valid–while pretending he’s never heard of the real issue: No matter the reason, the game is not good. Y’all already put it on sale because it’s not good.
You don’t get to pout and say “you don’t know how hard this is” when you’re selling your game for money. You’re not giving it away. You’re not doing charity work here. Make a better game or stop talking. Nobody out there paid $70 because they wanted your opinion about it. They paid $70 because they wanted a good game. They didn’t get it.
And yeah, it is hard. Even with all that money and all those developers, it’s hard. But nobody wants to be scolded because they experienced a bad game. That’s not your customer’s fault.
That’s fair, I 100% agree. No matter the reason for a game’s poor quality, you shouldn’t let it off the hook. Especially if it’s a commercial product.
Personally though, I don’t think he’s pretending not to have heard that point. He clarifies multiple times in the thread that he’s fine with people criticising his work. Instead, he’s speaking to a kind of criticism that claims – incorrectly – to know things about the game’s development, and that offers naive solutions to complex problems. In my opinion, that kind of criticism is pretty worthless, and takes up air that could otherwise be spent discussing the game’s real, concrete problems.
But I get the frustration. Bethesda’s response to criticism of Starfield has been dismissive on the whole, so the director of the game coming out against some criticism is tone-deaf from a PR perspective.
Also, it seems like no-one who complains about discourse online takes the time to provide examples of what they’re complaining about… So it’s hard to know what exactly Emil is talking about here.
This thread is full of people with strong opinions who have no idea how video games are made. They don’t seem aware that they are exactly proving his point.
That you, Todd?
Don’t have to know anything about how the food’s cooked to say “wow, this is bland. This cost $80?”.
Oh I’m pretty sure I know exactly “why it is the way it is”…
It feels like every other Bethesda game ever made, because choosing to continue using the Creation Engine means you can only make games that feel this way.
Seems to me more like they repeated all their old mistakes and made new ones. The engine might’ve slowed development (and gave some influences/limits etc) but design direction seems to be the issue. Being on-par with their older games would be a step up, it’s like they missed the point of why people liked their worlds.
I mean, at this point i don’t really know why people like their games either. I loved New Vegas but never bothered after. I bought skyrim at some point and i understood why people like that game. When fallout 4 launched i was sick at home and bought it because i had nothing to do. I rebooted the game like three times because i thought i accidentally bought some asset flip scam. No the game actually looks that shit and is a horrible buggy mess. Idk if people really enjoy collecting trash for hours just to not being able to sell it, or if these games have something that i don’t see.
For me the main draw was always being able to freely explore their beautiful handmade worlds, be it Tamriel or a post-nuclear US. You always knew you’d find something interesting around the next corner. I’d be happy with this being just Fallout in space too but it seems Starfield is mostly procedurally generated and you can’t even drive any vehicles so in that front they lost most of my interest.
For me, its the way they used procedural generation. Like its literally the same exact points of interests on every planet.
I remember going to a planet full of high level fauna and discovering a cave where you find a dead pirate that says these things are everywhere ahhhh. I thought it was cool. Next planet I went to had no fauna, and sure enough that same cave and dead pirate was in there saying the same thing with absolutely no fauna or enemy NPCs in there.
Its like they made 20 unique assets for the procedural generation tool to pick from. This is the exact laziness I found and drove me away from ESO. Just the same experience, with maybe a different faction here and there but the same points of interest over and over.
Other than that, I liked it. Basically skyrim in space. But very empty and they forced you complete like a 2 -3 hour mission before stuff opened up to you. And another 20 or so hours before a mission locked skillset is introduced. Huge waste of time IMO.
Its an alright game if you have a lot of time to kill.
I feel like that’s not even procedural generation at that point it’s just copy and pasting with a fancy name… by definition procedural generation should, you know, generate new stuff not just reuse the same couple things haha
shades of the Jamie Kennedy documentary where any time someone says they didn’t like Malibu’s Most Wanted he complains that he “worked really hard on it” as though explaining why something is shitty is just as good as making it not be shitty
If your game sucks due to design and implementation decisions that were made with sound rationale behind them, your game sucks. It doesn’t matter at all why it sucks, or that there’s no feasible way to make it better. It sucks. You can tell me that there’s no way to make it not suck, but I play plenty of games all the time that don’t suck.
If you have to be in the industry to criticize something then I guess we need to remove all online reviews since who knows RiverrFucker69’s credentials.
Sincerely, SF Developers
Don’t fool yourself I to thinking we don’t understand why your shit game is shit, Emil.
Dude needed to be fired years ago