How Bethesda Lost It's Magic - And how to get it back!
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- Опубликовано: 14 июн 2024
- There have been a lot of criticisms of Bethesda's most recent release "Starfield". From it's graphics, gameplay mechanics and quest design, everybody has given feedback. In this video, I discuss one element are consider the biggest mistake by Bethesda in this game. I explain what Bethesda magic is, why Starfield didn't have it and what Bethesda need to going forward in order to get their fabulous record back on track!
00:00 - Introduction
01:43 - How Opinions on Starfield Changed over time
04:04 - My Experience with Starfield
04:52 - What makes Bethesda Great
09:48 - How Starfield Broke the Formula
15:22 - Bethesda Magic Moments
16:45 - Compared to Other AAA Games
19:42 - Why Starfield Failed
21:05 - What I think would have made Starfield a Success
24:37 - Summary
25:32 - Outro 
Игры
Only 12 unique dungeon layouts? This is why it failed. They had this idea of using procedural generation to have infinite content... and then it ends up having barely any content at all.
Yes! Which makes exploring unrewarding. Plus for 1000 planets, it’s pretty unacceptable. They might
Claim that the planets are the dungeons, but I don’t see that as an equal replacement
Im very puzzled that they did not introduce some sort of procedural dungeon crawler mechanic, or even a simpler approach to procedurally vary bases, eg swap some room modules. I suspect even a modder will eventually add this using the base building mechanic.
I can't imagine they were unaware of this problem of repeating environments. This implies to me that surely the problem wasnt purely one of design but something went wrong in development and they couldnt finish things they surely knew were missing.
(I havent played it. This is just based on reviews. Im not much of a gamer and tend to only get games once they are at least 75% off on steam)
@@peterd9698 yes I think it’s the shock of it all. You’d expect them to have identified things like this, especially as they were the same company who made Skyrim and Fallout 4. It’s all very strange…
Theyve been doing that since they started, in morrowind it wasnt as bad because the dungeons actually had unique loot and diversive too
When they started Oblivion though, that was when you REALLY started to notice they were just generating stuff
Unique weapons and armors looked just like regular weapons and armors, sewers, oblivion realms, forts, ayleid ruins all were designed the exact same way, and alot of pointless dungeons.
Bethesda is just lazy, thats why they released the construction set and let modders take over. They dont WANT to take the time and effort to work on art and aesthetics.
Also in starfield, every alien is bland and repetitive, with the exception of the terrormorphs, I don’t remember any of the alien creatures i encountered, where in Skyrim I remember every enemy, mud crabs, chaurus, falmer, draugr, dragons, giants, etc… every enemy type is unique and almost all of them have their own lore and you remember them
Correct! Again it’s the AI creating them so they come out weird. And because it was just open plains, enemies were more of an inconvenience than anything. But then in the dungeons you’re only fighting humans. Strange because Bethesda had so much freedom to work with.
no man's sky does procdeiral alien worlds better
@@ThunderClawShocktrix I wouldn’t know, I got the game when it first released and it was preeetty bad, I’ve heard it’s pretty good now but I haven’t played it since then
@@ThunderClawShocktrix so much better
Seriously! How do you go from having 10 races on one planet in Elder Scrolls, humans, ghouls, supermutants and synths in Fallout and then have only humans in the 1000 planet, galaxy spanning space game!?
Bethesda thought they could just auto generate content and we would just continue to eat their slop while they sat on their asses and put less effort into their video games. I wonder if Starfield failed hard enough to set them back to their previous mindset
I think it will. Obviously there first reaction was to fight back and inform us that we were wrong for not liking it, but all their games prior to star field where the usual good stuff. I reckon they will return to making games that we all love.
@@AVVGaming1
i think this was a great video, it really touched on a lot of the same aspects that i really agree with, it's funny because when talking about starfield many of these examples i couldn't always think about, but when it was said in the video over and over, it really helped me really understand what i love in their games, and your right we easily forgave the bad writing and glitches when the game was filled with plenty of fun unique things to do.
i personally do like the stories, of skyrim and FO4, and Oblivion, i couldn't get into Morrowind, it was just too held back for me to want to play.
but anyway, yeah i love the games that have lots of branching stories with moral dilemma's and lots of choice in the way the game can be played.
now i personally like the voiced player character in FO4, but i do understand people's reasons of why that limits the story telling and how the game is perceived, but i believe there is a way to cater to both audiences, instead of stripping the players voice completely from the game, they should instead focus on allowing that as an optional switch, like they are doing currently with starfield's updates, i like the sliders where you can make your game change depending on on these sliders, because for me a good bethesda game offers multiple choices or choices that are seemingly unlimited, but i'm not just talking about story or dialogue either, i'm talking about how you play so the situation can change depending on your choices in the game, the Karma system in fallout is a perfect magical concept that offers far more replay ability to these games, because it depends on what you do in the game, basically choices matter.
@@user-tp5yb4hr4w thank you so much for the great feedback and kind words! I’ve literally just uploaded a video on why fallout 4 isn’t as appreciated as 3 or NV. And the dialogue part is something I cover! It’s not about having a voice acted character, the dialogue choices were just not as impactful. Up until starfield I have loved every game Bethesda have released but starfield didn’t tick enough boxes. I mention the karma system in fallout on that video too. What timing for this comment!
@@AVVGaming1
if i were to defend FO4 voiced protagonist, it would be to point out the story that they were telling, the voice really helped from that aspect.
but i agree that it limits the players gameplay choices, so it's not by the idea of having the voice alone that is of issue here, it's that the story was set in stone that the player was only this guy named nate and his wife named Nora, yes the game allows some choice on the name and the looks of these character's, but the story is limited to where Shaun is always your son.
i suppose the only mod i have tried that caters to the idea that the player is not related to Shaun is through the start me up mod, where you can choose to not be quote, nate or nora, you are just some anonymous person who just so happens to stumble on this vault and the information of a kidnapping and continue the story from an almost detective story outside of the main story, it's not perfect since it still only provides one other direction to the story but it offers the same story direction from another perspective with altered dialogue, so the player is not the same person as the end result.
that mod previously made this quest direction through splicing vanilla dialogue and it was done well, recently the mod author has been updating it by using elevenlabs tts to create new dialogue that sounds more natural so the story can go all kinds of directions, i have not tried his updated version yet but i know it's an ongoing work in progress at the moment and it could bring much potential to the game if done right.
@@user-tp5yb4hr4w it’s just like I’ve said in my recent video, that in fallout 3 or New Vegas you can decide who you want to be, an evil maniac, a friendly Samaritan or anything in between. In fallout 4 you are the hero and that’s that lol no room to move. Role playing! Great comment by the way thank you!
I vividly remember my first cave in Starfield, I landed on a planet amd was going around scanning the wildlife and vegetation when I saw a cave POI. Being a Skyrim fan I got excited and went straight for it. When I entered it was pitch black inside, so I turned on my flashlight to see corpses of the predatory wildlife littering the floor. I got a little scared, these Aliens gave me some trouble outside, so seeing their bodies littering the floor made me assume there was an Apex predator I hadn't seen yet, or maybe a colony of aliens that were gonna ambush me. I went deeper into the cave just to find that was just a large empty room with some bodies scattered around. No Apex predator, no chest or loot to grab, just an empty room. That's when I immediately knew that the exploration in this game had problems.
My "ah ha" moment was while playing the Ryugen quest line. At this point I had put plenty of hours into the game and was just forcing myself to at least finish the faction quest, but the writing for that quest line was so mind numbingly boring I just couldn't fo it anymore. One day I got bored and took a break to play something else, not long after that I uninstalled the game, and never went back
That is exactly what happened to me as well! Those caves....what a disappointment! You can see in the video I go into one and its a single empty room. What is the point in that? They had one cave with a weird layout, but nothing inside. 2 planets later I found the same cave! Was so disappointed. Plus, I did the pirate faction questline, the other two and I stopped at the Ryugen questline. That one was so boring, to the point that's when I switched off the game.
Lol my aha moment was the Ryujin questline too 😂 not that the dialogue was boring or whatever...but just that its so damn fake. Youre supposed to be basically a spy doing corporate espionage but stealth didnt actually matter and there were no consequences to anything.
Nobody in the rival company questioned why some random guy theyd never seen before was poking around their manufacturing plant and then all of a sudden their machines stopped working. Didnt matter if you were spotted by security so long as you crouched and had [hidden] as you sabotage their stuff or hack their computer or whatever the mission was at the time.
@@raptors11111 that faction quest line was awful. From the first moments where your asked to get a coffee, then go meet your colleagues, then try and sneak back in to your own base. I think I shot everyone. They said “that was naughty; anyway….” It was not a good experience lol
@@AVVGaming1 such a bummer too because it had the potential to be really fun. But other than the breaking back into Ryujin mission stealth was completely irrelevant...Bethesda had NPCs get mad/hostile if you broke into their house back in Oblivion in 2006, but couldnt have you marked as trespassing if you got caught poking around a rival company's manufacturing plant or offices in 2023 lol
@@raptors11111 yes it’s a shame, they really got to step up for the next one. I haven’t tired the new update yet but it’s more the fundamentals that have to be fixed.
Its, not it’s.
“Its” is possessive. E.g., Bethesda lost ITS magic.
"It’s” is short for “it is”. E.g., IT’S raining.
Thank you for the feedback! Now I know for the future!
Didn't actually know this. Its great being the age I am and learning new things
I find it infuriating that it's not its' tbh. But "its" is already possessive. English. It's a pain in its speakers' arses. Including this speaker's arse.
@@AVVGaming1 Think you can still update the title and preview after uploading the video.
@@greyaye8565 the problem is if I change the title it may kill the video. I did it with another video and it stopped getting views :( not sure why but it did and it’s really annoying because I’m a bit of stickler for making sure things are right. I will update it but I got to wait for the right time.
Starfield was fun for the first 30 mins but after exploring the same looking planets with repeat biomes, monsters and plants then going to locations that seem like they only have 6 locations they spread across every planet. Bethesdas gunplay has never been great but the lack of a vats like system makes the gunplay more annoying than exhilarating.
This game feels like bethesda bit more than they could chew. They should have downscaled 1000 planets to 7 and then abandon the procedual generation and hand build one to three pocket locations for each planet, not the size of skyrims map but the same size of the starfield maps but have them hand crafted with unique locations and quests that fit and not feel disconnected as someone asked me to save there ally who was attacked by the wildlife... On a baren dead rock.
100% agree! Nobody hears 1000 planets and gets excited. Nobody wants to go through that much stuff. In this video you will see me go into a cave, and it’s one room. Nothing in it. Took me 15 mins to walk to it. To travel all the way to a planet and walk 15 minutes to go into an empty cave, just so disappointing. It’s the fact this happened so often in starfield made me stop exploring. I agree with your ideas as well! You’re spot on!
But the first 30 Mins was walkin slowly thru a Mine to listen boring Dialogs 😂The Game s best FunPart was to delate it from the System and install EverSpace 2 and other Games
@@KnowToChill when walking through that first mine I wasn’t impressed. Little did I know, I was walking through the best cave in the whole game lol
I agree with the point you made, mostly. But it is what you omitted, or rather briefly covered, that begins to undermine your point.
The flaws that we "forgave them for" are STILL there, and can no longer be forgiven.
Decades ago, Bethesda reigned without competition, sharing incredible worlds with us. But over the course of 20 years, others would surpass them in all of those "ignored" categories. Writing, visuals, gameplay, RPG mechanics and interaction... Bethesda now has fallen behind the standards in all of those categories, releasing functionally the same game as Morrowind over and over with tiny improvements here and there. Starfield is their same 2004 game - how you traverse, interact, the same random junk everywhere that stays where you put it - and that cannot hold up foundationally. Cities with 3 stores and shopkeeps instead of internet or you know, not bartering cause it's the future, not medieval Europe. Same talking to people face to face, and going back and forth from quest givers (even across star systems) instead of calling them or something cause this is the future, not medieval Europe. The scant, rundown shanty towns dotting the multiple star systems even though mankind has conquered space. Like the galaxy's resort getaway being one hotel surrounded by emptiness. Or their whole history being Earth blew up 200 years ago, and there was a war 25 years ago. Or one faction of pirates outnumbers the rest of the galaxy and has a foothold on every planet mankind has explored.
In a bubble, sure, the writing is poor, but the worlds they've given us have been interesting. But taking in the whole context, there is an observable trend of their games getting worse with each release, in every aspect, since Morrowind. Because they refuse to iterate or improve their formula. Morrowind saved them, then they just made the same game but worse, 5 times now. They stripped away the freedom, the reactivity, the RPG elements and non-linearity. Then eventually, the content was stripped away.
They've always implemented proc gen elements in their games, but it was in Skyrim where they implemented in a less organic or nuanced way - it produced content. Small side content, ignorable, so everyone ignored it. In Fallout 4, it became a major component of the game, still ignorable in the grand scheme of the game, but far more integrated, and could be part of the main game. Everyone hated it. It was the most lambasted aspect of Fallout 4. So what does Bethesda do? They take 8 years, and base an entire game around the worst part of Fallout 4. Most of the moment to moment gameplay is procedural now. And on top of that, like you said, the hand crafted content is less than it's ever been, by a lot.
My point with all of this is that, after seeing every game get worse since I jumped onto the Bethesda landscape (Fallout 3) one should not expect them to suddenly turn around and make a "good" Elder Scrolls 6. Some of the hand crafted locales and map will have to come back! But... will it? Sure, some, but that percentage will be scaled back in favor of proc gen filling out the map. Maybe they will learn a lesson with Starfield and make "better" proc gen systems. Like making 100-200 variants of dungeons instead of fucking 12 that could be infinitely combined. But that's the best we can hope for - better proc gen. Not more bespoke, special hand crafted art, just a big place, with CONTENT.
We saw the magic fade away with each game. They don't want to make games like that anymore. They want to make "All of Tamriel" simulator with 1000 proc gen towns! And they'll fill it in with those Nvidia ai npcs so they wont even have to write dialog or hire actors.
Wow! That comment is awesome! You’re absolutely spot on and I omitted some things just because of timing, but everything you said is 100% right. When you go to the moon (I think it’s the moon or a moon) and there’s a farm there, and they’re like country American farmers, I was just laughing out loud. Like this is the future? Farming folk on the moon sounding like country folk? Just ridiculous childish writing and so lazy! But for my next video I am going to explain how fallout 4 is technically the better of the fallout games, but why it doesn’t get the love. The point you made it one of the main reasons! What an awesome comment! I honestly think the chances are a good ES6 is 50:50, but then that means they’d have to listen to fan feedback and adjust, which they haven’t done in a while, so more a 30% chance? Not sure why Todd’s so obsessed with bigger is better.
Hit the nail on the head. They're never going to make a better game even if everything's handcrafted, because the foundation of a good game has much higher expectations in 2024 and beyond. If Starfield came out in 2008, it would've been groundbreaking. If Skyrim or Fallout 3 released in 2024, it wouldn't get the same reception. Only people would love it are the diehards who don't like change just like Bethesda
When I was playing Fallout 4 I didn't know I was doing a radiant quest. I did this quest 3 times expecting that I could complete the quest after I passed a certain threshold. But after a 4th and 5th time I began to suspect something, so I looked up the web and learned that this is an endless radiant quest that you cannot complete. I was pissed and determined not to do any radiant quests again, but the problem is there are no distinctions, I could be doing a radiant quest and I didn't know it.
@@One.Zero.One101 I generally don’t know if anyone likes radiant quests? I’ve never really liked them, but I understand why they would be put into the game for long plays and so content doesn’t run out. But they should really just specify it’s a radiant quest. In fact, Elder Scrolls Online points out if it’s radiant or a unique quest specifically.
I thinks its cause Starfield was the final straw that broke the camels back of Bethesda telling us over and over they refuse to change with the times or listen to player feedback.
I think alot of Bethesda fans have finally made peace with that and thats why theres a massive rise in anti-bethesda rhetoric.
They went from industry darling child, to soulless corpo jst like EA and Todd is front and center.
Starfield jst doesnt respect ur time.
You’re right, and in my video I just spoke about the game design. The way they dealt with customer feedback and some of the money they charged for bad products, that’s a video for another time. Such a shame really, but maybe ES6 or FO5 will see a return to form.
@AVVGaming1 the game design took a massive leap backwards and not to mention the writting.
I believe Emil Pag(whatever) whos the main writer for Bethesda is largely to blame.
He enforced stupid rules like not using game design documents and in their industry thats basically the big S word.
Its who Starfield felt so disjointed and disorganized. How can a large team make a good space game when they dont have decent communication and documentation to go off?
I dont have much faith in TES 6 or any other title, and neither does Bethesda cause instead of giving us what we want, they rather dropped FO76 and now Starfield into out laps.
God only knows what other nonsense theyre gonna throw our way before TES6.
You made a good and unique video, well-done and goodluck with ur channel!
@@watchout5508 quick question, what are you thoughts on Fallout 4, in comparison to 3 and NV? Or even 1 and 2? For my next video…
@AVVGaming1 i havent played many of the others aside from 4.
Only truly discovered Bethesda with Skyrim in 2017 and moved around from there.
FO3 and NV were way 'ugly' for my liking, they are old games and play and especially LOOK the part.
I never realised how outdated the tech in FO4 was until I played rdr2 or ever Starfield. I play on PC btw, so the locked FOV and 60 fps really doesnt help with the jank.
But anyway, i enjoyed the world and lore of FO4 alot, i found the characters and locations intriguing and exciting due to the possibilities!
Sure 3 and NV also has alot of those great characteristics, but I cant get over how it feels like the camera has a brown-green tint over it.
Really makes it feel outdated and plain ugly for me...hope that helps.
@@watchout5508 yes it really does! Gonna have to have a good think on the next video. Will be interesting subject I reckon.
Bethesda has no reason to change and improve. The fanbois have proven that they'll buy anything and thats it for their franchises.
I think we are entering a pivotal moment for Bethesda though. They will always sell games because of what they have done in the past. But if they announced tomorrow, Fallout 5 was coming out but would have 2000 maps, all procedurally generated I think a lot of people would give it a pass. I also think that people will hold off before jumping straight in to buy their next game to gauge reaction, whereas before they would just jump straight in.
its crazy how people are rewriting history about f4.. a lot of people did not like f4 when it released
That’s my next video! Discussing why that is the case.
Weirdly it’s my favourite Bethesda game
It's always had defenders
i enjoy the game, but i was late to playing it myself, i only started playing the game about a year and a half ago.
It's not so much rewriting history but rather, it looks pretty good compared to Starfield.
I used to be a mod maker for Skyrim and Fallout 4 and was literally preparing to jump back into the scene again with Starfield. On the surface, this game should've been one of my favorites. The setting, the aesthetics, etc. All hit the nail on the head for me. But around the 180 hour mark, I realized something. I had been trying to force it. I wasn't actually enjoying myself (minus the Terrormorph questline). I could never quite place it. Killed all my modding plans. I had like eight pages of notes I had taken while playing for mod ideas. Im pretty sure they were thrown away cause I have no idea where they are anymore. Really bummed out. I hope they pull of a Phantom Liberty with Shattered Space and the stars start aligning.
Yes Cyberunk really turned it around, but I’m not sure about this. The amount of open space unused content, seems to lean so heavily on the modders, almost asking them to build the game. The quests given in the cities were fine, it’s outside of that area it falls down, and we all tried to push it because we all wanted to love it! Out of interest, which mods did you create on Skyrim and Fallout 4?
@@AVVGaming1 Agreed. Someone once said it was "as wide as an ocean but as shallow as a puddle" and I thought that was an apt way to put it. My name on the Nexus used to be 'Dreldyn' (when I modded Skyrim) but is now - 'animusynthetika' (intent on modding 2077). I still have a couple up that survived the purge. ESO Bosmeri Antlers (which should still be up) and The Bastion | Enclave Edition were my most popular ones. I had some people steal some of my work, then the Nexus drama happened and I just straight quit (not just modding but most creative endeavors as I used to make cinematic videos too). Regret it tbh but that's why I was excited when Starfield launched. I THOUGHT it would be an easy way to get back into it because I would already be familiar with the tools but there simply wasn't enough fuel to keep that fire burning. Luckily though, the TV show made me revisit the Mojave...
@@animusynthetika if you do mods for 2077, you gotta let me know! I need to do a video on that game soon. That sucks about the stealing, some people are just horrible. Fallout New Vegas is a masterpiece and I reckon it’ll have a massive surge with the show. I hope you get back into doing creative stuff!
i highly doubt shattered space will be the phantom liberty level of entertainment people think it will be, i highly doubt that will happen this soon anyway, maybe in the next 5 years that will happen.
think of FO76, the game launched in a shit state, and then they kept working on it and eventually it's started to paint a slightly better picture, i feel starfield won't reach that redemption until the next 5 years of being out, to many people over hype each update as if it's going to be enough to bring players back, but the fixes they have are nice but they aren't enough just yet, they have a very long road ahead of them before it's considered good for the majority audience.
@@user-tp5yb4hr4w it’s not an update that’s the problem. If it’s, oh the game would be 10/10 if the sky was yellow, that’s an update that can save the game. This is a much deeper fundamental problem that no real update will 100% complete. At least that’s what I think. Fallout 76 was a great example to use like you said!
The first two Elder Scrolls games relied heavily on procedural generation, especially Daggerfall which had an absolutely massive map filled with a lot of nothing. It was with Morrowind where they developed the hand crafted style that they're so known for today. Starfield is therefore a step back, an attempt to see if they can back to this technique of providing breadth instead of depth. The results of this experiment unfortunately speak for themselves.
You have said that perfect! It did feel like a step back! I just feel like hand crafted is the way to go! It's crazy, because in reality the handcrafted quantity should increase each game that comes out as the company grows! It's strange they have started to revert backwards almost. Less dungeons, less hand crafted worlds, less written quests. Just so strange as it would make sense if that was their first game and then each subsequent game permitted more hand crafted stuff as their team grew.
Yeah, you just can't do proper environmental storytelling or meaningful exploration with half-assedly implemented procedural generation. You can only create an illusion of scale, but at the cost of substance and density. Proper procedural generation of assets on that scale requires immense variety and complex interaction of elements and mechanics to make it seem non-generic. And Bethesda simply failed that assignment on every level.
This is exactly why I got bored of starfield very quick. No mystery or secrets to the game. I was really looking forward to the lore and mystery in this game. When I finished the main quest, I spent about an hour or so travelling from world to world, looking for new poi's, just to be let down. Hopefully with dlc they fix this problem
We all hoped for that! And at first it appeared it would be that. Was really upset when I figured it out. But hopefully they get some DLC and mods in there and shake it up. If not we still have the fallout and elder scrolls franchise to fall back on.
That's the conceptual problem of the writing. It's the most lame and generic possible story in the most boring and non-working setting. The world building is just so fundamentally uninteresting that there's simply no motivation to discover any mysteries within it in the first place. The lore is just lame and as empty and generic as the procedural planets.
And all of it is hidden behind infinite loading screens. What were they thinking?
Starfield is just a mashup of uninspired science fiction stapled onto a practically prehistoric game engine by pretty much all standards. I'm not saying this is the right call but Bethesda could literally switch to UE5 to have both better visuals and performance while still maintaining the healthy modding community they supposedly want to continue fostering. If they had used an engine within the past two console generations we wouldn't have had nearly as many loading screens, better feeling combat and the ability to actually fly between planets instead of them all being separate instances.
Especially if you're going to make a game with 1000 planets. Surely they must have had a meeting? To say how hard it would be to pull this off in the creation engine? Things that a 30 second loading screen to go inside a bar, is just too much. They have to adapt because they're falling behind. If you see a comparison video with Cyberpunk, it's just crazy the difference.
It's really sad to see where this game is nowadays. I've never purchased Collector's Edition stuff but this time I thought the game had what I wanted for a space exploration game (put wayyyy too much trust in Bethesda). Forked out the $300 to just drop the game within a week... Couldn't agree with you more, vid was amazing.
Thank you so much for the great feedback! You didnt make a mistake, up until starfield Bethesda had done amazing. It was honestly a completely different experience. I can guarantee the next one will be a hit! Just
Hope they learn from it and stick to what they do best! Thanks again!
@@AVVGaming1 how can you guarantee that their next game will be a hit when they’ve given us no indication that they’ve learned any lessons yet? They’ve had a year, and they haven’t even patched Starfield up to acceptable level yet! I’m not sure if they ever will.
@@shoogagoogagunga4350 I have optimism that they will improve but just yesterday I saw a presentation from Emil (Bethesda main writer) and I tell you what it sucked a lot of that my optimism away. With their current mindset, no they won’t be as good, but you have to hope something gets through.
Well said. The procedural generated worlds feels like a weird step back when they specifically ran in the this very problem with some of the first Elder Scrolls games and decided to hand place the locations in at least Morrowind and onward, in a conscious attempt to avoid the "mile wide and an inch deep" problem from those earlier games. Though I think they said they did use "some" procedural generation on Oblivion's base terrain.
Yes but what’s surprising is you can understand them using it more when they started as a small studio, but you’d think that over time we’d see it used less and less per game and not the opposite. That’s what disappoints the most. Their best work came when they did the most hand crafted.
Exactly! I've been saying this since a few weeks after the game came out. The main and side quest content is as good (or bad if you don't like how they do that) as it's always been. The issue comes in after you've finished that. Because the world is split up into smaller randomly generated world spaces that are mostly empty and share what little content is there you end up having nothing to do once you finish the other content. The play for 10 years motto they have is completely broken in Starfield. I think they tried to fix this with the new game+ mechanic but this isn't something BGS gamers are interested in. We want a world filled with unique content where we can find new experiences even after we've been playing for years. Maybe that's asking too much, but they've done it multiple times in the past, and it's something they've conditioned us to expect from them. I really hope someone at Bethesda sees this video.
You've earned yourself a sub. Please make more content like this. 😃
Thank you so much for the kind words and the sub! I don’t think it’s too much to ask for the content you’re referring to because they did it in Morrowind, Oblivion, fallout 3, Skyrim and Fallout 4. Starfield is the first game where they broke this trend and in my opinion didn’t execute it correct. Not sure why they were so obsessed with 1000 planets. More is not always better. I personally prefer quality over quantity and from the reaction of others I feel most feel the same. Thank you for your kind comment, I’m pushing on to my next video for this weekend!
Havent played it, I was just fascinated by the infamous problem of combining an RPG with unlimited procedural worlds so I watched lots of reviews. Then I became fascinated by the inattention they payed to this problem.
I came up with a whole wishlist of ideas. The closest I came to for a solution was that Bethesda could have mapped its exploration recipe onto a purely inspace segment of the game. You could pretty much 1-1 map mountain to nebula or pulsar, dragon to space creature or vast warship, mysterious hut to a radiosignal that draws you to a small base etc. Worlds would then be sort of like castles and towns. This would still leave the problem of what all those desolate empty terrains were for, but at least the typical bethesda magic would exist in another layer of the game.
More recently though, I have begun to wonder how hard it would be for modders to add a lore friendly settled solarsystem to Fallout04.
Lorewise, it works fine because there were apparently battles on the moon before the bombs dropped. There could have been 200 years of colonisation while earth was isolated. There were also rumours that the vaults were something to do with some project to build interstellar space arks. They could be one of the special locations. For other ideas there is a cool short film on youtube called "Wanderers" by Erik Wernquist.
Implementation wise, in the simplest form you would just have several maps representing locations around the solarsystem with the ability to teleport between them. More extravagantly, I believe someone could mock up a sort of interplanetary travel mod. It is essentially a toy-sized vehicle moving on an invisible terrain towards textured spheres which are only 10s of meters across, inside a skybox of stars. Whenever you get close to the sphere (eg a meter, which looks like a hundred km above the ground) you automatically land at the nearest point of interest on that world so there is no difficult landing effects required.
It would probably be done better on fallout 4 mods rather than starfield. What’s crazy is that someone must have played the game, testing it, and just said “yeah! This is perfect!” Like when a make a video I think, would I watch it? Would I give 15-20 mins to sit down and watch this video? Bethesda should have tried to travel to all 1000 planets and maybe that would have woke them up. But the main thing is, the concept is fine, the execution was not. If the mods in fallout 4 worked as you are suggesting, well then it’s another example of modders being more in tune with the fan base than the actual creators.
I think your point is well-made and correct BUT I don't think they're going back to the old way of doing things anytime soon. They've been obsessed with procedural generation for a while now, they used it in the pre-Morrowind TES titles and only abandoned it temporarily because the technology wasn't up to snuff. They brought it back tentatively in Skyrim with those boring, repetitive, radiant quests (I HATE infinite quests, there's nothing worse in a game than getting the same quest over and over and over again from the same NPC) and have been using it more and more since then with Starfield being the culmination of those efforts.
Yes I agree with what you’ve said. My next video isn’t about the procedural generation but more about the writing from Bethesda (or lack thereof and the reason why) but I’m going to do a video about that in the future. I hate radiant quests and computer generated worlds. I just don’t get the obsession with it, and it is an obsession. They keep pushing it and it keeps failing but they keep going. It’s got to be because if they get it right there’s lots of $$$$$$
"What's over there?" This is what previous Bethesda titles had.
SF lost me when after I explored a mining operation where the CEO was replacing workers with robots... for the 3rd time.
I'm back playing Skyrim.
Yes and it’s not even that you had an experience repeat 3 times that’s the worst part. It’s the fact of how quick it happened!
I’ve actually never played a Bethesda game before.. just started playing fallout 4 not too long ago, before the new update, and I’m like almost 40 hours in now and I’m absolutely obsessed with it .. just exploring and discovering new locations , fighting enemies, looting and upgrading my weapons and armor is just a blast of a time .. I know people have issues with the story and I haven’t really cared for it much, but the gameplay loop and the world that facilitates it is just tremendous, great stuff and there’s just hours and hours of content here for me to sift through, and I’m enjoying every moment of it
It’s a great game! Not sure if you’ve seen my other video that I just put out two days ago but I basically address why Falout 4 doesn’t get as much love / respect as the older games. But just to confirm, they’re all great! I am playing all 3 at this current moment lol each have their strengths and their weaknesses. Glad you are enjoying it!!!
I'm still of the mind set that humanity should have inhabited 1 planet and that the game should have been about exploring a single solar system. 4 cities existing on a single planet makes everything else written into the game make more sense, it makes the populations and environments more believable and it makes space exploration feel more memorable and dangerous. Hand crafting 4 major city areas on one planet for us to have as our hub world and then sending us out into this 10-12 planet solar system to collect the artifacts, fight spacers and pirates and locate the Starborn would have felt like an epic adventure and our hub world would have been more fleshed out for us to explore with the other factions and everything. Rangers out taking care of Ashta and helping farming settlements and riding some kind of horse-like aliens out across the map. U.C Vanguard exploring a previous settlement of Londinium on another planet to bring back the information to protect the entire planet from Terrormorphs etc. Everything makes more sense to me when its all on one hub world, U.C vanguard plot line opens it up for people to finally expand to other planets because they are protected from the dangers and in Starfield 2 we could see 3-4 hub worlds and 3-4 solar systems to explore because of what we did with the U.C vanguard... Constellation would have been more focused on space exploration solely, because that makes sense, its the main quest in the game. Would have been about learning atmospheres and how to be someone who travels in space, bringing survival mechanics, epic weathers and 0 gravity into the mix and then they should have really leaned in on the multiverse thing as well.
This is a fantastic point! The main hub world is the hand crafted content, and meets the expectations of a giant open world normal Bethesda map. Then the space exploration is its own thing, which satisfies both sets of fans of Bethesda. And then the space exploration they could keep as procedurally generated or some handcrafted but at least that way it’s a choice. And then yes starfield 2 could grow on that. My biggest concern is that starfield seems less than fallout 4. You’d expect it to be the bigger of the two.
I’m getting back into Fallout 4 again too. With a ps5 I’m really enjoying it only 15 hours in. I played it on the ps4 but never finished it. Dunno why, it just never grabbed me but after the show I get the universe now. Amazing what happened in our culture over this.
This is a cool video man. Well done.
That’s awesome to hear! It’s one of those games that will be there forever. Like you would never trade it in because it’s always something you may be in the mood to play. I think the story does drag a bit in 4 and that’s why people don’t finish it. Good game though
Bringing up Fallout 4 as an example of magic is a bit funny.
My next video! Stay tuned! Discussing fallout 4 and 3 and NV! Why 3 and NV are considered better…that’s the concept
Fallout 4 at least had some personality and a certain charm. Also some memorable stories, locations, characters and encounters. There was some substance there, albeit somewhat flawed. Best part of it was the settlement builder feature imho. Though only with all the DLCs and tons of mods, vanilla it was horribly insipid.
Yeah Fallout 4 was the start of Bethesda's decline. Not good enough to be an FPS and not good enough to be an RPG, it's stuck in the middle, stranded in no man's land. Its financial success probably made things worse because it encouraged Bethesda to continue in the direction of this game design. I think it has aged the worst, I tried to replay it and I just couldn't stand it. I still replay Fallout 3, New Vegas, and Skyrim to this day.
It seems that for once RUclips recommended me an interesting new channel to follow so I'm going to subscribe.
I think your spot on, other Bethesda games always have a feeling of sort that just draws you in and won't let go. I can boot up skyrim for what feels like 20 minuets, but then look up and it's 8 hours later it's dark and I skipped 2 meals. That is not there in starfield, the more you play the more it feels like your watching numbers do their thing, and that's not immersive.
Thanks for the sub! If there's any particular games you are interested in let me know and I will do videos on them!
The magic, in my opinion has always been the ability to run in any direction and find unique adventures and that's what Skyrim and other Bethesda games did so well! Once they started doing procedural generated stuff, it just defeats the purpose. The adventure part is gone. There is no guarantee that adventuring will pay off in Starfield and the sad part is, it usually doesn't.
@@AVVGaming1 Exactly yes, I can get lost in an adventure in skyrim but with starfield you can feel the numbers do it's thing and picking from a small list of things to do and visit.
As for games I enjoy I could give you some ideas, but honestly mate I think you should do you. Just cover games you enjoy or want to talk about and your fun will be reflected in your videos. Asking fans what to cover can sometimes be a good thing, but the best way to make videos is to talk about stuff you want to talk about, otherwise your heart won't be in it. Trust me on that I used to make videos on an other channel that died for the very reason.
Wow! I am so glad we had these back and forth messages today. I’m new at this and advice like that is so valuable. That’s what I have been doing so far and it’s working. Thank you for the advice and if you ever have any other nuggets of information please let me know. Thank you.
@@AVVGaming1 You're welcome, I'll watch some more of your videos when I have the time and if I think of something relevant I'll let you know. For now I leave you with this, doing RUclips as a job can be really fun but it's also surprisingly hard work. Take a break when you feel like you need it, you might take a hit in the algorithm but your content will be better for it.
And take constructive criticism to heart but just ignore hate comments. Don't even engage them, that may be hard at times but you won't win against a random troll anyway because you engaging is exactly what they want. Even if you think they have something good to say, if they say it whilst insulting you they aren't worth your time.
Thank you! Somehow I’ve not really had a hate comment yet, but they will definitely come. I’m pretty tough against that though not sure why. But I work full time and can see how someone would get burned out. The main thing is that I’m really enjoying it right now so I’ll keep going and take breaks in case of burnout. So nice of you to offer the advice and take the time to write that. Let’s see where this adventure takes me!
You forgot to mention the wasted locations that we only get once in companion missions and then can never visit again. Any why when we do find a unique location, we cant put an outpoat anywhere near it?
Yes it was very strange overall. The overall concept and ideas where right it’s just the execution was wrong
Obsessive brand worship like that of the BGS fanboys are the reason Bethesda refuse to acknowledge criticism, innovate, or just put effort in even it seems.
Like how do they take so goddamn long… to make so little? There’s either a lot of fluff that goes on, serious mismanagement or the engine is SERIOUSLY holding them back and Todd is refusing to let it go. Either build a new engine from the ground up, or pay to use unreal engine and give us a truly next gen experience.
But, Todd being as greedy as he is they won’t pay the license fees. SOMETHING. has to change. Emil needs to be demoted or flat out fired.
Todd needs to be replaced and a serious restructuring needs to take place.
Until then, we’re gonna continue getting 76’s and starfields. Copy pasted radiant garbage.
Great video dude, you’ve earned a sub this day ✌🏻😊
Thank you very much for the kind words and sub! I 100% agree with every point you have made though. Emil is going to get his own video soon from me. He honestly treats the fans like children and it's unacceptable writing in a lot of places. And yes they need to update the engine but after waiting for literally 8 years...we got Starfield!? If you play it, you can see it should have taken at most 2 years to make (based on what I can see in terms of content). Really disappointing and Bethesda need to make changes. 76 when released was a mess and Starfield now getting updates. They just need to look inside and make changes to get back to doing what they do best.
Great video! Looking forward to more videos regarding Bethesda games. Good luck with your new channel! 🙌
Thank so much for the kind words! Just put the next one already and it’s Bethesda related as well. Your comment really means a lot, thank you!
24:40 to be fair that’s more Amazon than Bethesda making that show. Todd just kinda got to hang out on set like a cool uncle.
Haha! I can just see it now!
Todd: "We could try doing this, maybe 16 times the detail or something like..."
Director: "Very good Todd! We will put that in the special idea box for later."
Then just ignore and get back to filming lol
I gave up on Starfield after about 5 hours.
Here, you talked about Starfield for 26 minutes, and inspired a healthy dose of comments trashing Fallout 4.
But other than that, yes, that moment when I emerged from where ever I was to first glimpse the open world to consume as I chose was absolutely magic in four Fallout games and in Skyrim.
Maybe my most memorable gaming experience though, happened in Fallout 4, when I accidentally found the Ranger Cabin and the tragic story it holds.
You all should reload Fallout 4, if only to discover the Ranger Cabin. It will break your heart.
Is that the Bethesda magic you're talking about?
That is exactly the Bethesda magic I’m talking about! A unique experience that lives with you. It’s finding those things that are special to you. Getting sidetracked and distracted and finding a mini adventure or story you weren’t expecting. So now I can go and find the rangers cabin on my play through and share that moment. Starfield doesn’t give you that option. Like, because it’s procedural generated, you could find that same cabin on a planet, but on my playthrough it would be totally different and I couldn’t find it. It takes away the uniqueness of the situation. And there are so few stories like the one you used as an example. They are mainly just blank pois with nothing inside that’s unique so no tragic stories. That’s the magic they lost in starfield and it’s in every game from Bethesda including fallout 4.
You nailed it. Nothing is perfect, so when one or two things are great, you forgive the imperfections. When nothing is special, then it's all about the imperfections. I was loving this game through the faction quests and city explorations, which made the boring grind of the rest of it all the more obvious.
Yes I was happy with the cities and the faction questlines. Played them all without taking a break. The Ryugen one I didn't as I got too bored with that one (or was burned out at that point). But the exploration part really hurt. I experienced the same cave 3 times, in a row, on 3 separate planets. Really disappointed me at that point.
The Dunwich building in Fallout 3, even you don't find it or don't bother with it, you will eventually end up going there because of one of the DLC's.
Yesss!!! The weird book which somehow made the place ever creepier lol
The main problem with what you're describing is that Bethesda should have used the procedural generation as a tool instead of making the entire game itself. If they wanted to have 1000 planets in the game, sure it's impractical to hand craft 1000 planets. They should have procedurally generated 1000 planets and then hand modified them from that point. Added hand crafted dungeons and stuff to explore to the 1000 randomly generated planets. Instead, they were lazy.
That’s exactly right, it’s more the ratio they used is unacceptable. It’s like 95% is the procedural generation and I just wanted more hand crafted content. It’d be nice as a side option, not a mandatory experience in the game if that makes sense?
The lack of exploration hit it hard. I wonder if they went for so many planets because they wanted to one-up Outer Worlds. They didn't understand. I think generation tools are fine if you spread enough artist and level designer time on top. Making a planet is exhausting. But tools that let you generate a planet with particular features, then regenerate a section with specific requirements, then make some buildings with particular requirements in a particular spot, etc etc is fine. But you need real people to fill those buildings and dungeons with interesting stuff.
Yes I totally agree with your points! I think they should have maybe gone for the outer world’s model. I think hand crafted content, quality over quantity would have been the way. And if they did want to do general procedure they needed to make more stuff because there’s barely enough content to make one planet let alone 1000
Awesome upload there! How are you doing with your channel?
Thanks Ruby! I have 73 subscribers now and only had about 18 a month ago so really happy with that :) my last video did really well! We keep going!
@@AVVGaming1 No problem and that's awesome to hear! Keep going! You're doing great (人*´∀｀)｡*ﾟ+
You explained the problem with Starfield perfectly. Great video. I’ve been trynna figure out why I haven’t enjoyed other open world games like Cyberpunk and Spider-Man in the same way I have with Fallout and Skyrim
Glad you enjoyed the video! Cyberpunk is another one that deserves a video. It’s a great game but something is missing. Starfield is the first Bethesda game (besides 76) where I felt they missed the mark
*they gotta combine Fallout, Starfield and Elder Scrolls into one mega time traveling experience 🙌 the normal is no longer acceptable, its time to go all out.*
Haha can you imagine? “Don’t worry, it’s got something for everyone, literally” lol
I've played Skyrim for almost 600 hours...I still haven't finished the main quest. Thank you for your video. This explains my issue with Starfield. I dropped it after 2 hours. You had more fortitude than I did.
It probably just means you figured out the games lack of quality before I did lol. Skyrim still really enjoyable even to this day. People keep telling me it’s just because of the mods but I actually disagree. Mods are not the sole reason why Skyrim so successful and they will not be the saving grace for Starfield. Thank you for the kind words.
@@AVVGaming1 I actually will make a few plays without mods. Only the patch. Mostly because of the fixes it makes. 🙂
@@ragebyte me too! Mods in or mods out, I still love the game. It’s kind of a let down how much Bethesda relied on mods to fill up starfields empty landscape.
Back in 2008, i played and still playing Fallout 3, with mods now but on my very first playthrough, i remember exploring every nook and cranny. Building interiors, caves, every subway tunnel, the rocks at the southwest part of the map, where i actually found a sniper guy and his wife or girlfriend, whatever the case was. Unmarked quests, weird encounters and more. It was something new to me since i did enter pc gaming in my early 30's.
The game didn’t really have any wasted space and every section had something. Fallout 3 is a fantastic game and really was one of Bethesdas best. I just started a playthrough on it myself again. If you have seen my last video (released 2 days ago) I just explained why some people love 3 more than 4.
@@AVVGaming1
I couldn't get fallout 3 to run on PC. Kept crashing after the loader.
Managed to source a borrowed Xbox to play fallout 3.
It feels old.
Omg! It's so fun. Random guys selling 'mystery meat'.
Harold.
Putting slave collars on people.
Things you'd never see in games today.
It's so dark and facetious in it's humour it's addictive.
I wanna find more content, it keeps me engaged.
What else they gonna throw at me ?
@@user-sx3pc4dj3r haha yes that’s exactly what it’s about! Just the weirdness and darkness of it all. They really need to remaster 3 and NV I think. It’s completely different to 4 which is a good thing because it means you have a reason to play them all. Really glad you’re enjoying it, I’m on a playthrough right now, going for an evil playthrough!
@@AVVGaming1 I played F3 on PS3 and had all the trophies, just that system died and hadn't played it again till recently, but man, it's so good.
At the time of remember going to work and talking about it with other friends who were also playing.
As much as 3 needs it's character control sorted, it feels clunky, I fear a remaster would neuter exactly what I'm loving and loved about this game.
It's content.
@@user-sx3pc4dj3r that’s actually 100% correct! I relayed it and although it doesn’t feel right, it does? Like the VATS I preferred on that. The game felt more strategic I guess is what it comes down too.
I'm playin the outer world and honestly that's the real Starfield
100%! That’s what I thought it’d be. That’s a game that does enough. All hand crafted! No need for 1000 planets either.
The explanation is simple. Bethesda saw that what made their previous games truly replayable over the years was the modding community.
With the addition of the creation club there is a big incentive for modders to do what they are good at in hopes of being featured.
So basically bethesda created a huge landscape with empty spaces (1000 planets) for the modders to build their game for them. And sadly im sure it will work. As more mods show up their game will become better and better
Yeah the amount of over reliance on the modders is crazy. You are 100% right in that they made a blank world for mods to be added and Todd even said it’s a modders paradise, but I just think it was too empty. Surely you have to give a bit more for a full video game?
@@AVVGaming1 oh definetly. I just think this is the start of a very bad trend for bethesda. Make vast empty spaces, wait for the modders to fill it, include the mods in the creation club and make money on their work in addition to the money you already made for the game itself. Not to mention the rereleases and special/anniversary/vr versions of one and the same game we have seen so far.
@@El.Levo77 yeah but hopefully the reception will make them up. But if no one mods starfield or not enough do, that should prove it doesn’t work.
I had that “aha!” moment very early unfortunately. I got two hangar locations back to back on two different worlds and that’s when I realized starfield would simply never have anything interesting to see or experience.
Yep! That’s the exact aha moment I was referring too. Such a disappointing moment because you know you have 1000 planets and no reason to visit them.
Great video! I agreed with all your points! I just couldn’t get into Starfield as much as I did with Fallout and Skyrim. Such a shame as well because I really wanted to love it! I enjoyed Mass Effect more which you should totally do a video on 🥰
Thank you so much for the feedback! I’ll definitely do a video on mass effect! Maybe even a video about how starfield
Could have taken a lot of ideas from Mass Effect. For example, the different races of aliens and lores. The fact there was only humans is a big disappointment and shows a lack of creativity in my opinion.
same, I completed Starfield, lv50, but somehow still disappointed. I don't think it was bad, not for my playthrough, but because I don't really feel like playing it again because I can tell there are no alternative choices to see, the world building is janky not well put together, and I hate all the companions I don't want to hear the space cowboy talk with her daughter another time ever again.
I just recently started playing Kingdom Come Deliverance, and that game has the Bethesda magic through and through, it's not any particular moment in the game. It's a realization that the game world is alive and reacts to what you're doing. On the contrary, there's the realization that this is just a video game and nothing you do matters after the current mission ends. Starfield doesn't feel interactive because you can't make any choices in the missions, you can technically kill people in cities but you can't really because it locks you out of the main quests, you can't kill any of your companions, and it's immediately obvious there are only like 7 dungeons that get pasted across the universe so you know they're not real locations they're more like some kind of AR simulation or training mode because once you go loot them it's over, they just respawn, nothing changes.
lol those conversations! You’d be getting shot like crazy and then they’re waffling on about making pancakes one day or something lol. It started strong starfield when you’re going from town to town. Once you start leaving the hand crafted stuff you will be disappointed. The faction were decent but the Riayku industries, or however you spell it was the worst. That was the part I gave up. Never played more boring quest line.
Amazing video, keep up the good work! You'll definitely grow!
Thank you so much for these kind words! It really means a lot :)
Bethesda needs to start peppering the core systems with unique POIs and quests to find and explore. Alpha Centauri, Cheyenne, Sol, Serpentis? or wherever the Va'ruun are.
There should be a density of humanity near the core systems and the outer systems should be sparse with new discoveries for science, industry, politics, fallen alien civilizations, whatever. Also Jemison and Akila should have small settlements that trade with the major cities, and the major cities should have settlers, farms, production facilities just outside the city with related quests. I have an outpost outside New Atlantis, and it's basically no different than any other planet with life. Same POI's I can find anywhere else.
These POI's should be reason why people are traveling between the planets in the system and there should be all kinds of things to discover in flight when traveling between planets. I'm talking about actual space flight like Elite Dangerous.
Yes! If they started adding stuff just like your suggesting it would make a massive difference. Your ideas are spot on! Completely agree
They should have done a single solar system like "The Expanse". Its very NASA-punk and would allow them to focus.
Yes I think focus is the key word! The expanse is a great example as well. It felt like they were trying to do too much and were up against it from the start with the end of goal of such a huge galaxy
I would not consider myself a traditional Bethesda fan. Honestly, the first Bethesda game I ever finished was actually Starfield. I've tried Skyrim I've tried Fallout 4 on a number of occasions and I just never saw what made these games so popular. I just didn't really care for them.
After beating starfield and watching The Fallout show with the next gen update for Fallout 4, I decided to give it another go as I think a lot of people have. I played the game for about 23 hours before I even reach diamond City. The exploration of something in the distance let me go see what that is. Just really hit for some reason.
I don't know if playing starfield made me change how I viewed the older Bethesda games, but at least as of right now I'm enjoying Fallout 4 quite a bit.
That’s awesome to hear! Sometimes it’s just timing. Witcher 3 is my favourite game of all time. I bought it when it came out in 2016 and returned it 3 weeks later. It took until 2020 for me to commit to it and now I’ve played it 4 times from start to finish. I think our tastes change over time. Glad you are enjoying fallout 4!
@@AVVGaming1 Witcher 3 is my favorite game as well. Such a great game.
Starfield should have went all in with ProcGen if they really wanted/needed 1000+ planets.
Instead of the 60-100 POIs that repeat, they shoild have been ProcGen like Daggerfall.
It would have still been a disappointment, but at least it wouldn't be as mind numblingly boring once you start seeing POI repeat after repeat.
That’s actually a fair point! Let it randomise every dungeon as opposed to only pick from a handful of pre made ones. That might have made it a bit better actually!
Good video. I can't totally agree with you as I love Starfield, but even I can't deny it never gave me the same Skyrim goosebumps. Here's the thing though, and I offer this only as food for thought not criticism: would you feel the same way if you had no idea Bethesda made Starfield, ie took the game on its merits without comparing it to anything else? Anyways good video, good luck with your channel!
Thanks for the kind words! And what a great question. I guess the truthful answer is no. I guess we would give more leeway to a smaller unknown developer. It’s because Bethesda, at least in my eyes, are or were the best. Their games are held to highest standards and I thin it hats a good thing. I am glad you enjoyed starfield and like I said, I got to level 50. You don’t get to level 50 if you hate a game. It’s definitely got potential for sure.
76 was a train wreck and they didn't even bother with the train in Starfield. I played it for a long time hoping something would open up. Didn't happen.
76 just is different and not what I look for in a game. I like exploring a world myself and 76 was just not ticking my boxes in a fallout game
@@AVVGaming1 The game simply took like 5 years to become decent. If someone whispers FO76 when I am sleeping a bad dream will occur. lol
@@ragingmonk6080 haha! I also really dislike repetitive activities that always happen. Some people have gotten to level 3000 on that game and I’m not sure how. I’ll be doing a video on it soon.
That's downright criminal! And that A-ha moment that you'll get is when you'' realize that you've been screwed over!!! AAA all 3 times into your you know where!!! Unacceptable! But that's what happens when people have so much money they just care about another cash grab and no longer care about making good games. A-ha!
Unfortunately your point is correct. They stop making games for the fans, more for the stock holders. Who care about selling points and microtransactions. Sad, but it’s the truth.
I feel like Bethesda has been leaning on all the base building stuff as a large part of the game, but I feel like that really appeals to such a small part of the audience. I don't know anyone who has or wants to play starfield so they can build a network of sites. Or Anyone who plays Fallout for the settlement system, don't get me wrong, I've seen what folks online can do, but MOST of us are in it for the world and the story and they seem to have forgotten that.
I 100% agree with this. It's also not very rewarding. It's a nice feature to have, but it should be just that, a feature. It was such a big part of Fallout 4 and almost one the first things they introduced. Another thing with it, is why am I doing it? It doesn't really make much of a difference to me and nobody else is really going to see it. If the settlement needs 8 beds, I could make 8 houses and 8 beds. Or I could just slap down 8 beds right in the middle of the floor. Both achieve the same result as far as the games feedback is concerned, but one takes a lot longer. Do the same people who enjoy Bethesda open world games enjoy games like Minecraft? I agree with what you're saying, sorry for the long extended comment lol
@@AVVGaming1 exactly! Like there may be some overlap but its not the core audience. Also I feel like the question "Why am I doing this?" wasn't applied much at all. Like you pointed out in your video Why should I go exploring on other planets when there isn't much to find. No need to go look at that mountain, its AI generated and I have zero expectation of a fun surprise.
Yes and someone was telling me they found unique stuff out there. But it’s the ratio. It can’t be for every 50 planets you find something interesting. It has to appear more often so we know its worth the effort. Hopefully Bethesda learn from this and focus on quality and less quantity.
BTW, procedural generation didnt need to prevent people being able to share locations. That was an entirely separate baffling choice.
Typically, you use the location as a seed to a pesudorandom number generator, so you can trivially define an entire galaxy with hundreds of billions of solar systems, and anyone who goes to the same coordinates will find the exact same world right down to the exact same procedurally generated pebble.
But they didn’t right? There were a lot of baffling decisions to be honest. I hope they hear the feedback. I don’t think we needed 1000 planets. It’s too much to make, too much to play.
@@AVVGaming1 you do realise that the game would be exactly the same if it had 10 planets???? the 10 planets are more curated that are tied to main and side missions. the other planets are procedural... meaning they didn't create them.. they made the tile sets and the items and places that spawn on them. So in reality they hadn't wasted ant time on the 990 planets.
I think of every planet as a dungeon.... they only gripe I have is that they should of in hindsight had a faster way to get to each poi... as any closer the game becomes less realistic. NMS had this issue at launch where all poi's were a stones throw from each other and it looked stupid so they separated them out more...
Ive got 300 hundred hours in the game and I play at least once a week... I'm still enjoying it... only a 1/3 through all missions... too many random encounters keeping me busy but also loot hunting.
my happiest find was these alien species called the sisters.. these look like the creatures from the alien films but also they have loads of the smaller things that look like face huggers around them. The visual story telling from this area was top tier as well the things all trying to kill me!!!!
Had quite a few experiences like this and this why exploration is satisfying. ( still could do with improvements )
In my opinion all gamers want nowadays is the same regurgitated game play and systems... remakes.... sequals etc...
We seem to not like games having there own flavor anymore and twist and its really sad!! Hate culture is as bad as woke culture and in some cases worse... ... If I don't like something I move on.... why engage in stuff you don't like or isn't for you!!!!!
@@plummleys4514 that’s really interesting! You see you’ve had experiences I would wager 99% of starfield players haven’t seen. This comment gives me hope, but the problem is the ratio. Like those moments have to be on either every planet or every other planet. It’s too much to have to siv through, players will want to be able to access the unique content quickly. I’m glad you’re still enjoying the game and I also must have put 100 hours in. There’s a game there, it’s just about finessing it for the gaming audience. Not everyone will put 300 hours in like yourself, they have to meet people half way. At least that’s my personal opinion.
@@AVVGaming1 Thanks for the reply... in response to that and I can only go by mainly from my quests that I have done but also from what I hear online.
It seems more people would of liked more quests like the terramorph ones and I can see that.
The game needs more variation in quest design that are more engaging that the typical Bethesda quests. There appears to be only two real main quests lines that people enjoyed meaning memorable. i can understand that too.
In my in my opinion the game has tried to cater for two Audiences
Main quests and side quest one and done type of player.
the other has
base building
manufacturing (Coul be a lot better)
crafting
Mission boards
Random encounters
Ship Building
Exploration (could be better)
NG+ (with a chance of a Random different Universe)
Loot Hunters.
Now some of the systems do overlap with the one and done players and its not to say these systems are perfect as some are clearly not.
Since the overview of the may 15th update all I keep seeing is ... "well that should of been in a launch"
This statement is only being used because the haters cannot change their mind on a game and this is their angle to still hate on a game.
All games can have improvements.. and its easy to say why wasn't this in at launch.
We are in an era of gaming where things can be changed or updated. 20 years ago Starfield at launch would of been it with no changes etc... Should we go back to that????
Starfield is a really good game.. can it be way better.. YES and I for one am looking forward to the future.
@@plummleys4514 at least they have provided an update. It shows at least they’re listening and making changes to accommodate fans desires. The main quest lines for the factions were the best content. But that was all hand crafted. The worst is the procedural generated stuff. I don’t think it’s so much that they have procedural generated quests, it’s more the execution that doesn’t feel right, like it’s so basic it’s not even funny.
Why do people seem to find it strange that Oblivion is considered a masterpiece? Especially considering everything else that was available at the time.
But I think Bethesda got caught in the quantity over quality trap. Go in a random direction in Skyrim or Oblivion or Fallout 3 (and I’m guessing Morrowind), you’ll not only find something, you’ll find something that’s most likely interesting.
Not sure, it blew my mind when it first came out. Never forgot that first moment walking into the open world.
I am (was!) a huge Bethesda fan especially Fallout3 and Skyrim.
I've not played SF as I have a PS, but I have read a lot about it and this seems like a very fair and balanced assessment.
You nailed it with the Bethesda moment - when the map opens up.
With Skyrim mine was after uou escape the dragon attack and that guys runs off to Riverwood and says i can come if I want. And i was just standing there thinking "wait... I can just go.... anywhere?!"
Unrepeatable for me :)
That moment is why we play the games. It’s the fact we can go anywhere and the world is so packed full of great things to find. Starfield does not have this moment. If you ever get the chance to play starfield, it will hit hard. You will see what’s wrong very quickly. It’s a shame it took them 8 years to make this as well as their time could have been spent on a new elder scrolls game.
@@AVVGaming1 Yes, the dev time certainly added to the disappointment. Can't see myself playing anymore Bethesda games with the Zenimax acquisition.
Regarding the issues with procedurally generated content, have you any insights into why No Man's Sky is so much more compelling? I've done pretty much everything there is to do, but I still nip in for a bit of base building or random exploration every 4-6 months...
No, not yet but that might be a good video for the future? There will be a few reasons, and I have a small idea of a few. What about yourself? What would be the main reason you’d say you return?
@@AVVGaming1 The expeditions were a big draw for me, but it's looking possible that the latest one may be the last one.
I'm not so much into online gaming anymore, but it's nice to jump on and silently team up with someone for a few quests.
In a way NMS also went through a similar hype/disappointment cycle and while they were able to repair the damage, I wonder if the issues you've mentioned with SF might be too fundamental.
@@Bobdibob I feel like Starfields problems are too deep to fix. It would require a complete rebuild. NMS had issues but the genera concept and engine was absolutely fine. They just added to it. I think starfield is done for now. They hoped modders will fix it, but if they don’t show, it’s going to struggle.
I agree to this anyone ever played mass effect it had the same idea with the outer space thing but they knew how to make it work because one it wasnt open world second the amount of different detail per planet you visited made it interesting to explore they also knew how to give you a world that would fit with the game's story and i think that is why i loved playing mass effect starfield on the other hand no
Do you know what’s crazy? The dialogue tree they put into fallout 4, they got inspiration from mass effect! So they knew of the game and must have played it and enjoyed it. The amount of lore and world guiding in mass effect is unbelievable and the fact they didn’t do any of this in Starfield is almost a crime lol love mass effect!
Funny enough i spent almost 100 hours, 70 in a single play through because i messed up my skill points in the first. I only did major quests and got so bored i didn't even finish the Rangers Riujin and the Mainquest. Where did all the time go?
The Riujin quest line is especially boring. I remember starting that and giving up. The first quest is literally you being sent to get a coffee down the street. And this was a main quest lol
@@AVVGaming1 yeah they could have made a corporate spy questline with hacking and stealth etc so much more interesting.
i think i had the most fun on Mars.
@@Bioshyn in my next video I’m going to talk about the writing and quest design from Bethesda, why it’s gotten worse, and how it can improve. And yes I literally have found evidence of why it’s getting worse lol but you see you already came up with a better idea, and I would have enjoyed that version more!
Cogent, precise and entertaining. Well done
Thank you so much for the kind words!
That TES 6 teaser definitely looked like a starfield-esque procedurally generated landscape, so my hopes for that game are dwindling
I hope not! I just don't know if any players actually like the procedural generation, I definitely know for me I don't like it.
@AVVGaming1 I think if Bethesda were to remove procedurally placed poi's entirely and just have a handful of unique poi's for each system (like how Mars always has a unique mech factory) it remove the problem entirely. This way the procedural terrain would work more as a backdrop to create ambiance rather than an obstacle to traverse.
It'd also make more sense that when exploring a world, you would land next to where you want to explore, rather than 500+ meters away (you own a spaceship after all)
From here, Bethesda would just need to rework Planet Surveying & Outpost Construction to make traveling to empty planets actually have a purpose.
Videos like this depress me b/c while I haven't been able to play Starfield for very long b/c my computer's too old, I've really enjoyed what little I've seen and found it to be quite charming. So to see everyone just ruthlessly shitting on it and complaining about it all over the Internet, I can't help but feel like I'm wrong for enjoying it or I'm an idiot for not seeing what flaws are supposedly right in front of me or that I'm a corporate shill or whatever. Sorry, you're not my therapist and I shouldn't be venting this to you.
Don't feel bad. The flaws don't become noticeable until you've played it for quite a while. The main and side quests are just as they always are in BGS games, as are the hand built settlements. It's when that stuff is done that you start noticing what it lacks in comparison to their previous games. It's still fun for around 100 hours or so, or at least it is for people that like the kind of games BGS makes. After that you start running out of new things to do. Of course in any other game this wouldn't be an issue. You get 100 good hours out of a game and you're usually pretty happy with it. Problem is this is a BGS game where even after you've been playing the game for 10 years you're supposed to be able to find new and interesting things to do. That's where Starfield comes up short. Hopefully this helps you feel a bit better.
You’re absolutely fine, and I love some games as well which receive really negative reviews and it makes me feel like I’m wrong as well but remember video games are art. They evoke different emotions from different people. I love them so much because of the fact some people may hate one game and someone else may love it. That’s art! Honestly I didn’t mean to completely dunk on starfield, it was just one particular element they left out which I think needs addressing. Remember, I still got to level 50 when I played it, that’s a lot of hours! It shows I was really enjoying it and had a great time with it. In my videos I try not to be 100% negative on a game because every game has good qualities. I’ve had people leave comments saying they love starfield, I still think it’s a good game, just was missing something. Thanks for you comment! Are you going to get it one day?
I was excited for Starfield hoping for that sense of exploration I got from Oblivion, FO3 & 4, Skyrim etc. Instead what I got was loading screens, limited ability to fly my ship (Hello Games figured this out years ago), and mostly copy/paste locations. I don't hate the game. I don't love the game. It's just "meh:". I enjoyed the ship and base building more than anything else.
Yeah the ship building and designs were awesome inside and out. It’s where you could fly too where it got disappointing
If youve ever played the skyrim alexa edition. That is what Starfield feels like
I haven’t, is that a real thing?
Exploration was fun in other Bethesda title but Starfield is not. Once you explored that abandon outpost, it just be the same as other places. The point of interest in Starfield doesn't pull me naturally like other Bethesda title, I actually actively avoid it lol. "What's the point" I find myself asking.
Though I'm glad Bethesda is adding vehicle on the next major update and other improvement, hopefully they found a way to make the exploration more fun and engaging.
It’s good that they have listened to some feedback and are adding vehicles to traverse the long stretches on land, but they should really add more unique POIs. Give the player a reason to hop in that vehicle to explore. Otherwise we are technically just able to get to the same outpost quicker.
If Bethesda wants to shine again, they will have to get rid of the old dinosaurs who hold that company in the past. Those people are there since ages and they are full of themselves because they had great successes but they also refuse to evolve and insist on going on with their old recipes from 20 years ago. The lead writer is one of the main problem, this guy is not an idiot but he thinks WE are idiots and that we don't want good complex stories that make sense but that we just need some simple quests, mostly radiant, to get us to what he thinks we want, killing and blowing stuff up.
So there are people who just like this and enjoy Starfield, but usually most of the players after playing games like TW3, Cyberpunk or recently BG3 just can't go back to bad dialogues, bad animations, bad stories full of short cuts and an almost non existing lore.
My next video is exactly about this. I honestly didn’t want to do another negative Bethesda video, I wanted to base it on good writing in video games and I will. But for research I hope to listen to Emils speech about the writing he does for Bethesda game players. And that line where he says good writing would be wasted on us because we just want to build shacks just riled me up too much and now I have to do it lol
I loved the game, and I know it will get even better with time.
Exploration is not worth it, I agree.
However, the missions are worth it, the experience is very different from what was expected, but I realized that straight away and went on to do what was most interesting, I built a cool base, a cool ship, cool weapons and did several very good missions.
Still, I think the game was released incomplete and should have been better than that, as the price charged does not reflect the product delivered.
I was just thinking about this last night actually; why are so many games coming out unfinished? If you sat down to explain what Starfield COULD BE I would totally be excited and was! It's just the execution. The cities are brilliant. The actual quests (non-radiant) are fantastic and I flew through them all (found Ryugen very boring though) and it's just the exploration part that let me down. But, with mods and creation packages etc. this game could end up being turned around into a masterpiece. And like I said in the video, I got to level 50! I didn't get there moaning, I was really enjoying it! It's a good solid game, but we expect the very best from Bethesda. Awesome comment!
@@AVVGaming1 I believe this happens because pre-sales are always very successful, even if the first players are used as beta testers, most games only receive essential content after 1 year of launch... the exploration of starfield was left incomplete , in order to launch the game they did not pay enough attention to the POIs and even cut the maritime exploration of the game, even the map will only be added now 8 months after launch.
But we will still have the DLC which will probably be very good, considering that bethesda has always made very good DLCs!
@@OSemRival I think also because of stock holders, they probably say "time's up!" and they have to release it earlier. I definitely fall into the camp of release it once it's ready. You look at Cyberpunk the all the bad things that game went through. If you play it today it's a maserpeice, but a lot of people won't come back to give is a second chance because of the damage that was done in the first place.
Good video, well made. My only critique would be that you’re not saying anything that hasn’t already been said many times before. Videos criticizing Bethesda or Starfield are numerous and plentiful on RUclips. I agree with most of what you’re saying, but then again so have many RUclipsrs who already said it. I’m not saying this to discourage you. Keep making videos, you have a talent for it.
Thank you mate! I tend to come up with a concept and then I commit to making the video. There’s so many ideas out there that it’ll always tough to be first. But yes in particular this subject has already been discussed many times for a long time. Thank you for the feedback and if you watch any more, keep providing that feedback as. I’ll only get better through constructive criticism
Remember that it's = it is, while its is possessive.
Thanks! I will update the title and thumbnail to reflect the correct one.
Nothing they made could ever beat Morrowind
Crazy how legendary that game still is. My next video is actually going to discuss that game a bit.
I loved this video. Absolutely great man. I really love your direct ideas about how Bethesda can improve in the future, but more so, I really like the fact that this is coming from a fans perspective and not just a critic. Please keep on doing this content because you brought to mind many things I did not even think of and I think videos like this are so important because they're not just more Cannon fodder at Bethesda. These are solutions.
Thank you so much for the positive feedback! I am definitely going to keep making videos like this and absolutely agree that if you are going to make a criticism, you must offer a solution. Honestly, comments like this really motivate me and I thank you so much for taking the time to write that.
16:27 - What makes me angry is they could have had multiple layers of prefabs, generation and sprinkling of hand-crafted dungeons, with random elements -- like diablo.
Then they could create quest types, stories, AI relations, and land destruction to add to dynamic elements of the procedural generation.
THEN, they could have had you FLY anywhere, and solve the creation engine problem of STREAMING CELLS.
Then add custom code to crashing and landing -- basic space ship physics isn't anything new.
Then..... make POINT OF INTERESTS custom from a pool of HUNDREDS.
You can literally do anything... bandits... camps... crashed ship.... ambush.... city.... etc.
How fucking hard is it to generate a random city? If you need to take EXTRA time when visiting a planet to place cities and such, go ahead (or just load in the origination cell and load others in the background).
Even basic stuff such as water, dams, towers, caves, plants, derelict civilizations, etc isn't anything new for games.
How the FUCK does their procedural generation suck THIS bad.
It’s really disappointing, especially when they say they want 1000 planets. Then to only make a handful of stuff to appear there it’s ridiculous. What you’re saying is exactly what I believe. 8 years they took for this too. Mental.
@@AVVGaming1
Yup. I could easily create a basic procedure gen system that incorporates what I describe and could easily be improved over time with new content ....
@@1337GameDev the big question I think we both have is why didn’t they do it? How did they sign off on it in this state? Like if you and I were sat down building a game together, and we said rihht we’ve got 1000 random planets and 4 locations to draw from and all of them, we’d both surely look at each other and go “hmmm let’s rethink this”. How it gets out of the studio like this is beyond me
@@AVVGaming1
The biggest reason:
Higher ups unwilling to push back go-live date, and ensure quality deliverable.
They had a hard deadline, for no real reason, and launched with what they had in a "good enough" state.
They also didn't have to enough early dev testing to identify this mechanic was pretty unfun early on and didn't want to reinvest to redo it.
Just a heads up for future videos, the procedural generation algorithm is not AI. It isn't even AI in the modern usage of the word, which is a machine learning algorithm (not real AI I'd argue). There is no learning. It's just a set of rules to follow to create something new with.
Also, the landscape I think are handcrafted chunks that the proc gen stitches together, which makes it even more bland because you'll see the same hills/mountains/valleys/whatever on every planet, maybe with a different ground texture and plants.
Thank you for the feedback. I have learned something new and will use the correct terminology going toward. I think the amount of reused assets is the biggest problem. If they’d built 5000 hills, or lakes, or desolate buildings, you’re going to have different experiences for a long time. It’s the fact that they have created just 12 dungeons, a few hills etc and it’s all seen very quickly. It is very surprising to be honest.
@@AVVGaming1 I totally agree. I wanted to like Starfield. I think their older games are all better, but I still had fun with FO4 and Skyrim. I'm a huge fan of sci-fi, so I was willing to look past a lot. Playing Starfield though just felt like they were abusing my time. You do the same content so many times, and it's not interesting. Even collecting the shards forces you to go through repeats of the same dungeons, and that's on the critical path. It's really a shame what it's come to. I hope they see what made games like Morrowind great, and probably the one with the best legacy even today, is respecting players time and taking an interest in making the world feel alive and lived in. Starfield fails at both of these.
@@lukesmith9455 when I first got to one of those dungeons to get the shards, from the outside I was ecstatic. It looked like a brand new cool dungeon. I could not have been more disappointed. If they’d just made Skyrim or fallout in space they’d have been fine. They just had to do what they do best, created giant hand crafted open worlds with unique points of interest. Morrowind was a masterpiece though.
i agree with you, i would clarify that new vegas has actually some good writing, good rpg mech, and a better game design than beth games, but its an obsidian game
Yes! The writing in NV is unbelievable and I love the whole game (beaten it 3 times in total) and I am aware that Obsidian made that game in 1.5 years. Sorry if I didn't specify in the video and someone else mentioned that as well. Thank you so much for the constructive feedback.
I just want Bethesda games with ID Tech engine
Think it will happen? Ever?
When I went to 4 outposts with the same weekly lunch menu written by the same chef I started to realize it was kinda pointless
Haha that’s the aha moment! Where you realise…wait a second…this is kind of boring lol
One afternoon I sat down to play Starfield but the sun was shining and I realised I could go for a bike ride instead. When I got back I uninstalled the game.
Haha! Nothing wrong with that! Those 1000 planets aren’t going anywhere, but the sun might! Gotta make the most of it!
Great video, explains why i found Starfield such a grind, despite enjoying the faction quests. Unlike you i didnt enjoy exploration very much in Fallout 4, much of the world is depressingly empty of interesting things, you just get attacked everywhere you go and scavenge loot. There were some exceptions e.g Silver Shroud, and i enjoyed the main quests and faction quests. They make okay games, with the exception of Skyrim, which is one of the greats, but its been downhill since then
I have done a video on fallout 4 and how it divides fans, and I think you’ll like that. I think it’s the video I did after this one, would love your thoughts on that but I tell you what’s funny, a lot of people who didn’t enjoy 4 as much say the same thing, silver shroud. When I get to goodneighbour I go straight for that quest too. It must just be good writing. But I think fallout 4 also has a moment where you’re loving it then suddenly lose interest. It’s about 20 hours for me give or take. Can’t put my finger on why, maybe it’s the radiant quests?
@@AVVGaming1I watched the other video, great analysis. For context, I played Fallout 4 with a sneak build, so kept armour off as it was too noisy, so for me Fallout 4 still had that vulnerability and threat level that you didn't experience. Skyrim certainly had a threatening environment, but it didn't stop that awe inspiring sense of possibility, and you could sneak around things. I'll never forget my jaw dropping when I saw a giant and had to hide from it. It was scarey but exhilarating...blow flies and mutated crabs weren't the same.. anyway all are good games and we all have preferences. I think Skyrim seemed to be something that gave hand crafted amazing experiences to all types of players (stealth, RPG, magic , sword play) ...and it's been hard to follow one of the greatest ever...to me atleast.
@@loosegoose2466 Skyrim is still regarding as one of the greatest games and a lot of people say it’s down to mods but I’m not sure about that. Some guys just give you an experience that never gets old and Skyrim is one of those. The fact that around every corner you might have a new experience is what keeps you hooked. I remember the first time I met a giant, my mate was watching and told me to attack. Of course as I flew 100ft in the air he laughed cuz he knew it would happen lol. Thank you also for your kind words about the other video and taking the time to watch it too :)
Suscribed ❤ oblivion blowed my mind! I couldnt even finish the game after 6 years lol then i played skyrim and boy 6k hours on that game, after that i was excited for starfield but after 20 hours i couldnt play anymore, reason why? Loading screens
Thank you for the sub! Oblivion was my first and will always be the one that got me hooked. Had never played an open world game until that point. The loading screens are silly on starfield. A 20 second loading screen to get to a different part of a town, then another 20 second loading screen to get into a small bar? Just silly.
@@AVVGaming1 loading screen to travel to another planet, loading screen to get in the planet, animation of your ship landing, lading screen to exit you ship, and viceversa.... men i was so piss off i couldnt play anymore
But does Bethesda still have enough soul left to appreciate that there's a Bethesda game sized hole in players hearts?
I stopped at Skyrim (avoiding later disappointments) but literally nobody makes games like Bethesda once did. It just sucks that those were my favourite types of games to play. 😭
I hope they get it back. I really do. The fans know what they want, Bethesda just have to listen. I saw how they responded to critics to Starfield and it was very arrogant. Not seen something like that for a long time. I feel like they are so high up now they are lost in their own success and sometimes forget to play their own games! If they opened their ears to fans and were open to feedback taking it onboard, they could bring back the magic! If not, then I wouldn't hold out hope.
splitting these points of interests between worlds, therefore introducing frequent loading screens...the whole time they battled for huge open worlds, loaded cell by cell, and then they do this...wrong decision after wrong decision...even skyrim was too simplified, but it just went downhill from there...76, starfield...yikes...and thats not even talking about the quest design, the lack of RPG elements...who makes these decisions? i booted up fallout 4 few days ago, and was honestly disgusted already in the tutorial area...happy go lucky bs, laughable story setup...oops! bombs are falling! im glad i talked to that vault guy 5 seconds earlier...just so bad, wrong take on the world, the feeling...f1 and 2 were so harsh, so cool, so atmospheric - its a shame younger people will never know that feeling
Yes it really was a disaster in terms of the writing and things like that. It just doesn’t leave you fulfilled. The longer you search for some type of depth, the more disappointed you become. I generally like the worlds they build (prior to starfield) but it’s the writing and concepts and RPG elements that are a let down. Fallout 76, not sure when you last played it, but now they’ve added NPCs you can speak too, but if you do play it you’ll see it’s even worse than FO4s writing. It’s almost for children
We all expected at least one hand crafted planet/map with bethesda style design and exploration, but this? This is nothing…
If Starfield had at least one good element that sets it apart it would’ve been good…
And I think we all had that optimism and held it for quite a while whilst playing, before that moment of realisation that yes, there are 1000 procedural generated planets, that’s your lot.
Absolutely on the money
It's funny - I'd put off replaying Fallout 4 because back in the day, it got a lot of flack, and I sort of absorbed the fact that it 'wasn't as good' as FO3 and FNV.
But a few months ago I gave it a try, and 300 hours later, I felt desolate that I'd run out of missions I felt like doing. Haven't found a game I have enjoyed so much in years! So as soon as the 'next-gen' BS has settled down, and Fallout London becomes available, I will be staring a new playthrough, from scratch.
Hope the basic graphic and quality of life mods will work by then.
I've got the 'Downgrader' mod from Nexus, but I haven't used it yet.
Oh, absolutely no interest in Starfield. Did enjoy the takedowns when it came out though!
Can’t wait for Fallout London! It’s going to be amazing! Fallout 4 is a good solid game and succeeds in the aspects it was going for. But i love fallout 3 and NV as well. Starfield the only Bethesda game I’ve been very dissatisfied with.
@@AVVGaming1
I'd been low-key following development of Fallout London, and I watched the poor guy when he had to announce they had put things back after the 24th April release because of the next-gen update. He looked choked!
Starfield left me cold well before release - as soon as procedural generation (for any game) is mentioned, I'm out. I like curated games.
It has a place in gaming, but not in my gaming! Though I imagine some of it happens in the background of games I play - that doesn't bother me. If it's for clouds and mountains and suchlike - fine, no worries.
@@ZachariahJ I 100% agree with you. I have never ever experienced a procedural generated game that came close to hand crafted combat. I have always found it boring and not my cup of tea. I feel so bad for the fallout London developers, I just hope it doesn’t delay them too much and they keep their spirits high. I’m sure they will be and when it does drop, it’ll be a great day. Will be playing it for many hours straight lol
I like NMS and was naturally hyped for Starfield and I barely played it but already had realised the 'next gen' game couldnt toouch NMS in things I felt were most important to me....and that really shocked me.
Yes NMS had a rough start but I always dug it, the things I appreciated the most that made it immersive for me is being able to fly to different planets THE LONG WAY and it will let you know do that. You can fly for 20 mins, an hour whatever it takes and you will eventually get to the planet you saw in the distance.
The other thing being able to fly from space and land on the planet yoursell seamlessly with no loading screen, you can fly your ship over the surface of the planet and you can literally walk if you wanted to, around the entire fucking planet.
Like why couldn't Bethesda at least do the bare minimum by making the experice at least ON PAR with NMS.
In my mind it falls so far short it's not funny.
Great comment! I was just messaging someone else who said they keep returning to NMS but not starfield. Besides the loading screens and seamless travel, is there any other specific reasons that make it better? I want to do a video on it is why and looking for experience from players
@AVVGaming1 honestly I didn't play enough of starfield myself to give too much of a first hand account but I have watched videos on the things that held it back.
Some other things that come to mind would be:
1. NMS is multipayer! Yes I know it wasn't at launch and it caused a shitshow and all that but we have all seen the redemption arc and insane amounts of free dlcs and content they have pushed out since then, actually incredible.
2. It has that feeling of aleays being able to find something unique wherever you go and I never ever felt I was wasting my time for just exploring, like you said in the video similar to thr elder scrolls game you are rewarded for taking different turns here and there and discovering new places and outposts.
3. Starfield has 1000 planets, NMS has virtually unlimited planets and yet every time I go to a new system or planet in Nms I never really felt oh nah I've seen this before or had this exact experience. Something about how Nms did their planet generation just worked so well considering how large the scope of the game is.
4. I put many hours into NMS and probably only got half way through the main atlas quest missions i had as much fun if not more just seeing where the wind took me and finding new missions and loot along the way.
5. The amount you can customise and upgrade your ship and weapons it's very big and never did I feel like oh I'm already maxed or there's no way to improve my character anymore.
6. The variety of things you can do means there are many ways to play the game that suit different people, and it's all fine. You want to get a freighter ship and kill space pirates you can.
Do you want to just chill and put music on and mine minerals (it's kind of therapeutic in a sense) you can.
Do you want to follow the story campaign or find side quests whatever you like it's all good.
You can build your own bases it's really in-depth.
The world or Nms is so varied and colour and beautiful, when I see videos or starfield everything looks so samey and bland and I basically gave up on the once I realised you couldn't explore one single entire planet from end to end you just get a little zone around the site where you land
Too many loadings screens and as you mentioned it does not seem to have that Bethesda magic that made the Elder scrolls so damn good and repayable.
For context I am a massive fan of that series and have been playing since Morrowind. Every elder scrolls since that one and including it are some of the best Nd most immersive games ever made.
I think Bethesda needs to 1000 percent deliver or they are screwed. People are already losing faith because they don't seem to like updating their game engines lol.
The NMS team are working on a new game based on just one planet now but it looks like it will be that detailed and immersive I'm low key hyped as!
Not sure if this was too much info but I appreciate you reaching out for my opinion that means a lot, I am new tour channel today actually but you've earned an insta sub from me.
Loved your video mate keep up the great work 👍
@@ChickenatorJr not too much info! It’s absolutely perfect for what I was looking for! It’s crazy that Bethesda had starfield and still pushed it through like it was despite NMS existing lol. Surely someone in the boardroom must have pointed out how NMS was absolutely next level in comparison. That way they could maybe have reverted back to just a few planets and hand craft them. But no they decided to compete directly with a game that had done it 1000 times better.
@AVVGaming1 it's strange isn't it?
Surely quality over quantity is always better.
I wonder what TES VI will be like im almost scared to find out but I know they know it has to be top tier. Let's wait until 2030 when it comes out and see! 😉
@@ChickenatorJr 2030!? Are you crazy?!……2040 if we’re lucky lol
You keep saying dungeons. You mean unique locations with unique side quests? That might be a better way to put it. Both The Witcher 3 and RDR2 have plenty of those, along with a boatload of unique random encounters that players have when travelling to their next missions.
Yes, I mean like in Skyrim where there are lots of towers, caves, Draugr tombs, etc. These are dotted all over the map and in high quantity. The Witcher 3 and RDR2 wouldn't do these dungeons, as they would mainly focus on other things. In fact, I am going to do a video on this next. Witcher 3 came in and completely reshaped "sidequests" changing the gaming landscape.
@@AVVGaming1 awesome. I figured that's what you meant! I completely agree with the video but I do want to add that that the base game does need to be much better now. Standards for open worlds have raised so much in the last 15-20 years and some of the technical stuff that Bethesda has been releasing is too outdated to get a pass now. Somebody had a great comment where they were saying that Bethesda has basically released the same type of game since 2004.
@@AllDay3004 yes and they have. It’s crazy how they generally thought with that engine, with the loading times etc. that they would make a space game with 1000 planets. Like surely if there was ever a game where they were going to have to change engine it would be that lol. Creation engine has done its job for them for years, but it’s done now.
although i can agree bethesda makes really good games. i liked skyrim. but i just think cdpr does it better. the witcher 3 is just one of the best games ive ever played the dialogue choices in it and all the different endings for so many sidequests. and even then it feels like the new vegas world was so much more alive compared to bethesda developed games
My next video is going to be about this! Witcher 3 is my favourite game of all time! I think games need to offer the option of choice and decision. Witcher won GOTY and so did walking dead when it came out. I also think Witcher 3 redefined what a side quest should be. And the writing is unreal too. Whereas Bethesda is quite basic. That’s my next video, and the Red Baron is an example of good writing. You cannot place them, they always make you wonder whether they’re considered a bad person a good person or usually in between. They’re humans.
You are 100% right.
Thank you for the kind words!
I gotta say, i'm a new fan and i just started for the first time fallout 3 and i really don't connect with the gameplay as much and i had with the show story.. i think a fallout game that is built like red dead redemption 2 could be soo good
Have you played Fallout 4? That would probably be the best one to start with. Fallout 3 came out in 2008, so it's quite a lot to play nowadays in terms of graphics and gameplay. I would recommend trying Fallout 4 first if you haven't already. They're all great games but Fallout 4 is the most modern but its still almost 10 years old.
@@AVVGaming1 it's not actually the age of the game that bothers me.. like i had tons of fun with all of the bioshock games, and the first 2 fallouts looks to me pretty fun, it's just boring after you get out of the vault and the gunplay is just straight up bad
@@harel_b3197 RDR2 is a masterpiece in my opinion. Did you know Todd Howard actually said they used RDR2 as an example when making starfield? lol it couldn’t be more different really. But that game in itself indicates how far behind Bethesda are starting to fall now. The games around them keep improving and they have to catch up soon!
A good TV show does mean the game studio " got its magic back".
Did you mean "doesn't"? If so, yes I agree with that. It's a good thing but definitely not something that is going to show signs of how the next game would be.
i have 10,000 hours in skyrim on PC. but i have been taking a break from skyrim for the last year and a half playing FO4, and FO4 has it's issues but it has that bethesda magic as you say because every location is unique.
Yes! I’ve just done a video now on why people don’t love FO4 as much as the earlier ones, but it still has the magic of hand crafted open world. That’s when Bethesda are at their best in my opinion!
@@AVVGaming1
well i feel the only aspects the other games did better was the story and outcome of the story through dialogue, everywhere else from mechanics to gameplay elements to stability, FO4 does a far better job, still flawed to all hell, but i also understand at least for NV they only had 18 months to develop the game from beginning to end when bethesda themselves take roughly a decade to make their games in general with the same tools.
i feel it was unfair for bethesda to look down on their job of the game when they were only given so much time in comparison, and yet people love the story telling and choices in that game far more than the current games.
so there are some good and bad things in both games, i think bethesda does well for the mechanics side and Obsidian did well on the story telling and branching of the quests, i feel that Microsoft just needs to turn them into one massive game making machine team to get the best outcome for the game to be considered good for most players.
@@user-tp5yb4hr4w it’s crazy because we know all the elements that we love in their games, if they’d just put them altogether we’d see masterpiece after masterpiece! Just less procedurally generated content though, that trend is not helping.
@@AVVGaming1
i agree, to much proc gen makes the game a bit of a slog, i feel like half of the settlement locations in FO4 should have been shaved down a bit, i can't remember how many they are in the game but, at least half of them weren't needed, or the ones they placed in problem areas of the city was also a bad idea in my opinion, hang mans ally, if i ever use that work shop area i scrap everything in the location just to improve performance, even if it's almost nothing of an improvement and never use the location for a settlement because it's just too performance heavy.
i swear bethesda doesn't test their games before they launch them, because even the recommended hardware can't run FO4 Boston location at launch, they left so much shit in that area of the game that it bogles the mind how they didn't notice how bad it was going to be for the player.
but then again it appears Todd Howard only cares about visual fidelity, which in his eyes means adding a bunch of crap to the scene to the point where all stability is gone lol.
my point is the game couldn't run well on the hardware it was meant for, the only people i see these days who can run the game in that location with ease are the people running with the 4090s lol, it's so bad, however the recent update has helped some people, on consoles i hear it's helped significantly, but on PC it's a shit show, only people with specific hardware seem to be having a good time, where everyone else hates what bethesda did, because once again it feels like they didn't bug test or play test anything.
@@AVVGaming1
you know it's really weird, i brought up the topic of putting both studios of Obsidian and Bethesda together, and i may get my wish, however it's kind of bad for a bunch of other games right now, there is some new controversy having to do with Microsoft that owns all these studios is shutting down a lot of studios and possibly putting some of them together, so my hope is they put these two together.
but at the same time this news is also bad because it's Microsoft who screwed up this situation.
anyway it's just breaking right now.
I have faith that Elder Scrolls 6 will be a good title, because I am the king of wishful thinking (and know the modding community will carry it to completion)
I’m also a positive wishful thinker and have the same mindset as you. I think as long as they hand craft the stuff and no procedural generation or limited amount, it’ll be eveutning we want. It doesn’t have to be a perfect game just a Bethesda game thst we have come to know and love!
Yeah around 2:50 makes perfect sense. I too was in a Starfield fan group, joined it prior to release because i was hoping for it to be good.
Played about 20-25 hours before i finally had my "aha" moment as you put it. Then i got to about 30 hours and havent touched the game since.
It’s crazy when you think about the fact this is the same company that made Oblivion, Skyrim, Fallout. It’s a totally different experience and not one I loved lol. Thanks for the comment and nice to know I wasn’t alone with the experience lol
@@AVVGaming1 no kidding! Loved Oblivion, its the game that got me into Bethesda. They were such a good company from 2006-2015. They lost the plot with F76 and Starfield, really hope Elder Scrolls 6 is a return to form!
@@raptors11111 yes I am looking forward to the London mod too, got a video on that either coming out today or tomorrow, and I played 76 and it’s not the same. Im a single player person lol just built into me after years lol
Excatly.
BETHESDA, always only had 1 really good thing going for them, and that was the openworlds they created. All of them had unique location, and exploring them felt epic.
the story and their other systems were always, nothing more than passable. but the world made up for it.
Now it more a focus on building and being HUGE!. look at starfield. modders barely even touch it.
Without the open world, the rest has to be compared to other games and they will always lose in that respect. The adventure made the games other attributes a background feature, now they’re brought to the forefront.
Bethesda hasn't released a good game since Morrowind and a great game since Daggerfall... Julian Lefey is what they need, instead of Todd Howard.
My next video references Morrowind
And why people love that game so much. That’s a lot of reasons, but the main one I hear is “freedom” ability to do anything.
@@AVVGaming1 You can break that game, like crafting can break that game, but if you're just starting, going in blind it's rough, it's tedious... The man I mentioned, Julian Lefey, left mid-development of Morrowind and it shows in many ways the beginning of the path Bethesda is on right now. With each new game less and less RPG and more action is being added. Todd's wet dream of making "The Elder Scrolls Adventures: Redguard" again. But go further, go back to Daggerfall and notice a thread that leads to Starfield - procedural generation. People back then also complained, just as you did in this video, basically the same points...
@@NevermoreNeverAgain yeah you’re going to love my next video! It’s why people like fallout 3/new vegas more than 4. And it comes down to them having additional RPG elements. That’s why Morrowind is so enjoyed. It’s a shame the graphics have aged because new gamers most likely couldn’t work through it. Thank you so much for the comments to, I learned a lot!
@@AVVGaming1 It's not the graphics that keep most players away. Launching Morrowind these days can be tricky, the way you talk with NPCs is very old-school, skills are harder to comprehend and quests can be really cryptic (and not in "doesn't hold your hand" way, but rather "doesn't make any bloody sense" way - pro tip - don't join the thieves guild). It was in that weird transitional era of 3D just about getting there and, graphically speaking, the models aren't as big of an issue as the drab art direction and lack of colour, which contrasted nicely with released the same year GTA: Vice City, a vibrant, colourful game. But then you discover that you can become a god in the game, and I don't mean the Nerevarine, I mean flying, making gamebreaking potions and the like, and you're thinking to yourself "I didn't use any cheat codes and yet..." - that's something only Morrowind can give you.
As for Follout... that one's personal for me. Bethesda doesn't understand Fallout, the philosophy of the first two games is completely lost, so I'm more in the camp of treating Fallout 3/4/76/Shelter as subpar fan games and New Vegas as proper Fallout 3. But that's what happens when people like Todd Howard are involved in making games. The depth is illusionary and what matters most is the initial adrenaline rush.
@@NevermoreNeverAgain I completely agree
With you about the fallout games. It seems like Bethesda have not been heading in the right direction at all. I hope they turn it back around but not sure. I honestly don’t even count fallout 76 in discussions because it’s so different. What surprised me is Todd Howard hasn’t played ESO, stating it’s not his type of game. So strange from someone who made an online Falout game. You’d hope they’d take positives and negatives from games like that. I don’t know, almost seems like arrogance.
Just one more banger and we’ll all come crawling back. Pls
Elder scrolls 6? Surely another banger!
Fallout NV was made in 18 months by obsidian who where mostly made up of ex fallout 2 devs, even on Bethesda engine they did a great job
I’m a Fallout NV fan and I will do a video on that game alone one day. That they achieved is unbelievable. Even playing it today you still appreciate it. One of those games where you keep saying out loud “I cannot believe they did this in 18 months”
Very well put, agree totally
Thank you very much for the kind words and feedback
i just wanted to say i love this video and enjoyed it and i have played fallout 3 all of it's dlc and the final dlc for fallout 3 was ehh and i think i fully explored fall out 3 and i think Skyrim too? but with fallout 3 and Skyrim i followed the main quest for each game and side quest just doing follow waypoint a to waypoint b and played oblivion years ago never played morrowind but watching this video makes me want to replay fallout 3 and Skyrim map completely 100% and i think they did use some procedural generation in those games but i think not to the extent as starfield?
Thank you so much for the kind words! The procedural generation used in Skyrim, was very low, mainly with some quests like enter x dungeon to get x item. Besides that, it was hand crafted and same with fallout 3. It’s okay to use these tools to help, but I feel like Bethesda over used in starfield. In my next video I am covering fallout 3 a lot! So I had to replay it and it’s still amazing!
@@AVVGaming1 ty :) and watching your youtube video talking about fallout 3 and skyrim really wants me to go back and play them but since i got all of the fallout games from epic game store years ago except for fallout 4 XD am going to go threw and take my time and type up some notes for the fallout games and correct me if am wrong on this but wasn't fallout 1 and 2 all handcrafted by then without procedural generation? P.S. i thought the 1000 planets with starfield was a bit much as well even though i have never played the game myself personally but i mainly watch game updates about it
@@mcfluffy28655 procedural generation is something that some players like but a lot don’t. The constant repetition is quite boring and lazy from the developers. Very little was used in Morrowind, or Oblivion if any. Same for fallout 3 and New Vegas. It was all hand crafted. Then, they released Skyrim which had a tiny amount but nothing that would interfere with your game. 4 added more and then starfield just based their whole game around it. They’re all great games and worth playing again! I am feeling a bit of Skyrim myself tonight I reckon!
@@AVVGaming1 wow! wait i remember you talking about in the video that skyrim for the dungeons had a copy and pasted assets but each dungeon was unique in they own way
Modern day over profit for triple AAA companies. They will use even more procedural generation tech in the future, because its more easy and cheap to create huge worlds fast. At that time i believe the next Elder Scroll will be the same with Starfield. Companies like Beth and Blizzard, EA are now milking the old fans-gamers, they do not care if they loose 3 gamers which paid 70$ each if they can get 500$ from one overfan gamer. This is the reason we get WOW classic, Diablo immortal and all the similar games, low quality games.
It’s so upsetting when you think about it. But I generally believe in my heart, that those games don’t do that, will end up out surviving the others. Once people catch on. I honestly hate the mindset that AAA companies have adopted.
So I do find issues with this video
"Other games copy and paste..." so skyrims stormcloak and imperial camps don't really look any different from eachother, they are copy and pasted. Also, witcher 3, kcd, so many games DO NOT copy & paste. Generalising games like this is awful
That being said, betheada done this random gen in their original es games, I think trying again is a smart idea, it just didn't work
Personally Im not into many space games, even less starfield.. it was a failure but I'd say skyrum was where the dip began
I enjoyed skyrim and fallout 4 but they didnt have the same "wow, thats amazing" moment as fallout 3 leaving the vault or oblivions leaving the sewer
Skyrims story felt somewhat lackluster, by the end after a fight with a world ending dragon that barely felt difficult the civ war goes nowhere
For fallout 4, i only completed it once, mods made that game worth it for me... fo4 for me just didnt have a story i wanted to interact with. Im one of the few who LOVED the building mechanic despite its stupid questing shit with the min men
I made it to the city in starfield and ended it there, it was an awful game and shouldnt have been made imo
I feel the same way in that the Bethesda games are starting to drop in quality as time passes. As far as the copy and paste statement I think I did over generalise what I meant. Mainly I see it in Ubisoft open world games were it is literally the same tower or
Something over and over again. Bethesda no matter what, prior to starfield made each dungeon unique. Even if I looked exactly the same as other dungeons it would have at least something different. This made it respectable to the players time because we know it was with checking out always.