I was going through a divorce when Starfield was released. I was so distraught that I bought the $100 Early access edition because I'm a Bethesda fan and desperately needed the distraction. I can safely say it helped because I was more pissed about Starfield than the divorce.
@@cdmarshall7448 I get it that is how you felt about Cyberpunk at release, I was also severely disappointed then. But after all the fixes, how do you feel about that game now? I'm just curious, I still did not play it myself but planning to play it probably later this year (after I'm done with BG3, in the very limited time I can spend on actually playing games). About Cyberpunk 2077, I do hear a lot of positive press about it now but it still did not implement some of the stuff that was hyped up and promised before launch. At least most people now seem to like the game though which is what matters. And I doubt that Starfield will ever get such a comeback because its problems are not just technical, they are also in the writing and levelling systems etc.
Wait a minute. Are you telling me you guys don't enjoy chasing the same three pirates / eclipse / outlaw spacer captain through the same three outposts over and over and over and over ..... *Falls asleep
The biggest issue for me with Starfield is a lot of it just feels pointless. It's fun to build and upgrade your ship, but there's not a lot to do with your ship other than fly from loading screen to loading screen. There's no shortage of places to explore, but nothing worthwhile to find. You can build cool outposts to farm resources, but nothing really to do with said resources. It's a lot of content, but very little of it is inspiring.
EXACTLY! hit the nail on the head. And even other games with big open worlds and exploration and recourse gathering etc suffer from this at a certain point but in Starfield it is in an all time high. When you ask a gamer to waste time on things and grind etc you have to offer the reward for it otherwise the gamer will feel that he simply wasted time of his life. Things should be rewarding, especially when they can waste a lot of time. Why should i gather recourses if those recourses don't allow me to do great stuff with them and smart ways to use them. Sure building a ship might be fun by itself to a certain point but a reason you are building it is because you want to see it out there doing cool stuff and the way you designed it have an impact. Is like asking an architect to build a great building, sure he might enjoy designing a cool awesome building but if you tell him afterwards that his amazing creation will be built in the middle of the desert where no human will ever step in it or see it then no matter how enjoyable he thought designing a cool building was he will feel disappointed. The guy probably put a lot of effort in ways his building will be great to live in and now he realises no one is gonna live in anyway.
This. I never got the hype, and will not bother even getting a goty edition, because why? There's nothing. Like I'm sorry, but No Man's Sky getting Rust mechanics doesn't fix the game being pointless. I wants NMS for the mystery and the central story. There isn't one. Just like in Starfield the central story is a nothing burger.
This. For having so many planets that you're supposed to be able to explore, there's not anything that's *actually* exciting to discover and explore. All that initial fun wears off when you realize it's the same thing over and over.
The "sandwich" thing was exciting at the time because of what it implied about the rest of the game. "If they simulate something as dumb as 1000 sandwiches, imagine what that means for the more cool stuff!" Little did we know, the sandwiches were the cool stuff.
It’s not even that cool. Yes, all objects have physics, but they all behave exactly the same, (unless they can roll, naturally). A sandwich and a brick essentially behave identically in a Bethesda game.
Its funny how they hype up the most useless shit that adds nothing to the gameplay. Remember how todd hyped up button panels in FO4? and used it as a way to drive how they cared about details? Its stupid how we fall for this shit at first thinking its awesome only to find out how little it matters in the grand scheme of things
But "I spawned 1000 cheese wheels in Skyrim" and "I spawned 1000 watermelons on the top of a mountain in Oblivion" have both been viral videos for over a decade, so I'm not even sure what was supposedly novel about it.
I'm a game designer for a AA company and i also teach it, and for me even if you fixed all of the technical issues that starfield has, it has fundamental design problems that make it feel like a chore and not a game. It has some moments of fun but but they're sandwiched between moments of mundanity and just questioning "hey why am i doing this" with a story thats just... meh.
@@lexiconprime7211 DD2 was overhyped and only got attention because journalists and fans lied about it being just as good as Elden ring. It's not even close. I bet a lot of people regret buying it.
easy way to "fix" it.., add 3x big DLCs, each bigger than Far Harbor or Nuka World, each with full explorable maps (like Far Habor or Nuka World).., having 3 big new full maps could change a lot..
Starfield feels like a project that you procrastinate on and you have to make extreme compromises and fall flat because of how late you actually started
I had the pleasure of interviewing one of the design leads from Starfield and asked him similar questions. His statement was basically the only way to fix it would be to go back in time and make the game with completely different priorities, including overhauling the entire concept of space travel. It really is not doable.
@@Thepilotepisode It was a work interview, so I won't reveal a specific name in case it can come back negatively on them. I will say it was someone who held high positions on the dev teams for multiple projects at Bethesda, not just on Starfield.
There was a point in Starfield were i realised that all those 1000 planets are actually just shallow mapseeds and there is no map for you to explore. You just get those random spots that have nothing to do with each other. And i was like what the hell, were is the world i can explore. As if i played skyrim because the story was so awesome. It was the world that was so good. And now there is no world.
One of the biggest moments for me was when I found a free Vanguard ship on the moon, just sitting there for the taking right beside where my ship landed. It was right after I just happened to join the Vanguard and thought "hey this is cool, I have a new ship to match my new faction!" I was a bit excited at first, then it really sunk in that what ship I use is completely pointless. I can go to other planets without getting inside it at all, the game doesn't recognize it as being any different than any other ship, and it serves no real purpose in the game at all.
THIS is the singular problem with Starfield. It is lacking a map (or maps) where you are free to stumble into all the little things they have hidden within it. Skyrim works because of it. Fallout works because of it.
I'm sure I saw a video or comment on that the actually seeds are also not fixed, meaning you can go to another planet then back to where you just was and that same spot will now be different because its loaded a new seed. Unless there's a base.
Starfield could have been a much better game if the story had taken place in our solar system. Spreading out quest and exploration across 1000+ planets dilutes the gameplay into something that feels far too empty and troublesome to even bother with IMO
It was obvious before release just saying, Bethesda aren't wizards who make the impossible, possible. In another console generation or so, it might be possible. I enjoyed Starfield for what it was, but the problem with gamers nowadays is creating unrealistic expectations in their heads
This reminds me of that Todd Howard interview a long long time ago around Skyrim's launch where he said something like "the stuff we want to do in elder scrolls 6 requires the industry and tools to make big leaps, so it's gonna be a long ways away." Well, the industry and tools made those big leaps. They happened. The technology exists now to, I would imagine, meet those big dreams they had for ES6. But they're not adopting any of that, they're sticking to the ol' reliable. Why did they wait so long if they were just going to turn their nose at the stuff they were waiting for?
In a NoClip documentary, Todd said there was technology that enabled Starfield now. I thought he might mean Microsoft Flight Simulator's cloud data streaming stuff. Now I can't imagine what he was talking about... What, did it take you this long to make Lego spaceships?
Because fools constantly give Bethesda money for low effort slop, as long as it has good marketing, then defend their poor choices. You will never get better because your lack of discipline does not merit better. I habe refused to pay Bethesda for anything since Skyrim, (which was also a bad RPG)
@@BigLongRandomNumberNameM-kf9vy I'm fairly certain he was referring to faster storage. If not for SSDs, one can only imagine what the loading times would be in Starfield.
There's barely 2k more people playing Starfield than are playing New Vegas right now. Pretty telling if you ask me. To compare to one of their more recent games, on steamDB Fallout 4 has 21K players whereas Starfield has 7K.
I've been heavily modding my Bethesda games since Morrowind, both as a mod consumer and mod author and i what's stuck out for me is that the modding kit Bethesda released is exactly the same as it always has been whereas the kits supplies for other game engines, such as Unreal are constantly updated and offer vastly superior end user convivences. For example, if you notice you messed up the placement of something you're adding to the game such as a piece of armor in Skyrim you have to add the model, texture, and .esp/.esl files to the games main files then load up the creation kit along side your mod which in turn loads *all* of the games files (which can take a couple of minutes) then find _your_ game files in the creation kit then load up the cell you have the object placed in inside the creation kits render window (something that can take up to a minute depending on the size of the cell) then make the changes you wanted before saving the changes and exiting the creation kit. *Then* you have to load up the game itself and check to see if the changes you wanted to make actually worked. In some cases you can leave the creation kit running in the background so you can go back and make more changes if need be but 95% of the time if you tab out/down of the creation kit to load your game it will hard crash to the point you have to restart your PC. So in other words doing something as simple as moving a piece of armor on a table can take up to 30 minutes if everything works correctly and hours if something goes wrong. With Unreal you can hotkey the dev toolkit in the game itself so if you notice you misplaced something while playing the game you can hit one key which paused the game and brings up the toolkit in the game itself, then you grab the item with the mouse and move it manually. It takes seconds.
As a fellow modder, it's actually worse than this, that USED to be a creation kit feature, but they axed it when it came time to release it for modders. Come Oblivion, the CK the devs used was objectively superior to the ones people like us got their hands on, and for whatever reason Bethesda decided to cut loads of extremely useful features and they kept trimming more and more with each game to the point that New Vegas' GECK doesn't even have debug messages in the message window. It is absolutely criminal how little Bethesda cares about the modding scene that keeps them afloat, and they've always been this way.
@@pcjpeh0f9wh Well, maybe they'll actually learn something this time. When it comes to Bethesda games, it were always the modders who brought them into an actually playable condition and then kept them relevant way, way beyond their shelf life. Now Bethesda decided to kick both modders and gamers into the teeth with their arrogance and it will hurt them dearly. FFS, modders managed to introduce working cars and motorbikes to Fallout 3 and New Vegas, but SF is so utterly broken and everything that made the game really modable ripped out of its engine apparently, modders who tried this with this game all threw the towel. Can't have players with hooverbikes realising how small your 'planets' actually are, can we, Todd? I am an older gamer, I have even played Bethesda's ice hockey manager on the Amiga 500 and their (for that time really great) Terminator game and Starfield is the very first Bethesda game ever that I could not even be bothered to finish. Gave up after 60 hours or so, then I got sick of this boring and convoluted mess. Damn, I got the game for free as part of an AMD promo and I _still_ feel ripped off somehow and after the utter disappointment that Fallout 4 was already, I am not seeing me buying and Bethesda games in the foreseeable future.
If the physics of items are so good then they should do more with it. If you grab a dart in a bar and try to throw it at a dart board you will get accused of stealing and aggro the guards. The guards will then proceed to murder you.
That's a very easy bug to fix regarding object ownership. That's an example of things that can be fixed by a modders using the creation kit (preferably within a community bugfix mod that is just a curated compilation of bugfixes). The creation kit was released in June 2024 -- problem is the GAME was released in Sep 2023. BIG MISTAKE imo.
I like how it's April 2024, and they still haven't even brought the city maps let alone the Creation Kit at all. Those poor guys at r/Starfield are starving.
i genuinely believe they released Starfield as it is because they thought, "i mean modders already fix our buggy-ass games and add entirely new companions and questlines anyway, so why wouldn't they do that for Starfield as well?"
I think Bethesda has leaned on their modding community hard over the years. They've never fixed so much of Skyrim specifically because the community patches exist. Why bother since the community did it.
@@bogatyr2473 It's not just that they don't fix current games, their new releases will have the *exact* same bugs with the *exact* same fix. Bethesda is so lazy that they can't even be bothered to literally copy and paste community made fixes.
The base game has to have enough charm to warrant someone spending a hundred hours making a mod. Oblivion and Skyrim had that kind of charm and people still mod and play those games 13 and 18 years later. Unless they do a major overhaul of the game like cyberpunk did (which also had it's own inherent charm), there's no reason to mod a game that you don't really like playing as is. I played cyberpunk at launch and even with it's bugs, on pc anyway, the story and characters kept me playing and when they dropped the major update and then the DLC, I came back and played again. I don't think a lot of people are really going to give starfield another try just to play the DLC.
@@scorpion07070 I completely agree and I hope this is the lesson Bethesda takes away from this game. People only mod games they would still enjoy if it didn't have any mods. At least, I hope that's true.
Your assumption on why CDPR switched from RedEngine to Unreal is wrong. It's not because Unreal is better, its because after the crunch and launch of CP77 they lost most of everyone that knew how to use RedEngine. The new hires weren't trained on RedEngine, they were trained on Unreal. So if CDPR doesn't want to spend at least a year retraining people to use a proprietary engine, they have to switch to one they already know.
I can't believe mistreating employees to the level CDPR did has negative consequences! Next you'll tell me game studios being shut down and everyone who knows how to make games being laid off will negatively affect games too.
Being able to drop 1000 cheese wheels into the environment and watch them roll down the mountain was hilarious and novel in Oblivion, but it really added nothing to the core experience, and prioritizing physics interactions over fewer loading screens is a really stupid justification. It's obviously not that simple and probably not the primary reason they kept the engine, but come on BGS, pick your battles.
the main reason is the modding capability, that's the short answer, because they want to make money off of the modding scene, and they now have this now, it's just most people don't like that system when in the past it was all free. but it's not just the thousand static objects, it's the engine can manage thousands more NPC AI packages all at once in real time, no engine that i have even known about use can do this as well as the creation engine. is the engine perfect? no, is the engine capable of much more? yes and no, it depends on what you are trying to accomplish. like for example they are capable of doing the hidden load screens which is what they used in FO4 for elevator's, but in starfield they didn't attempt to bother doing this for some reason. like for example i knew starfield wouldn't really involve actual space travel and that it was going to be a limited box environment game and i knew you wouldn't really fly your ship on any of these planets, why bethesda thought it would be a good idea going this route after figuring out their engine was simply incapable of this? well that's something that i doubt they would really admit to, it's probably an embarrassing reason to be honest, which means they will likely never tell us the real reason.
The loading screen problem could have been fixed if they simply hide it behind animations THEY ALREADY HAVE IN THE GAME... There is no need for a loading screen for each elevator, when a loading screen only takes 5 seconds to 10 seconds at most. You could simply add in an elevator ride. There shouldn't be a loading screen to enter Cydonia (you should be able to enter and wait in an air lock just like every other building in that are generated). The loading screen problem just doesn't make sense. There should be no loading screens because they literally have the animations needed to hide them.
@@5226-p1e That's a great point about the loading screens. I will agree with Luke that this is pretty much a worst case scenario for the Creation engine. If they had made another TES game with how this engine looks right now and a decent story, I guarantee it would've been universally praised as a solid entry. From what I understand, this was a game Todd wanted to make for a long time and unfortunately he was going to make it regardless of whether production was panning out or not.
@@REDDEADANDGTACLUB your totally correct on this, hell they did this very thing in FO4, so we know they know how to do it without issue. it might just come down to laziness at the end of the day, because again they have already proven they know how it's done when they did this very thing in FO4, now that was back when the loading took literal minutes on the vanilla game, it didn't matter you had an SSD or not, it loaded slow as fuck every time. but now it seems they fixed their slow as ass load screen issue to only a few seconds, well i agree, they could easily get rid of them to make the whole experience feel seamless, they could also make space flight feel somewhat real as well, instead of instantly getting to the destination, i mean it is a space game right, one would expect it to ya know, feel like a space game right? i know they can't do NMS level of flight, but they can simulate a sort of star trek level of flight in this engine, what the player doesn't see doesn't hurt them, all they got to do is simulate flight out of the player control after the destination has been chosen, and simulate stars passing your ship as it fly's passed objects in space, no load screen no skipping to destination immediately. for Todd Sake they can easily do the star trek model without issue.
I've described a problem with Starfield as being a Fallout/Elder Scrolls game that's had the things that make those games unique and interesting removed. There's no magic, no "wasteland", no VATS, etc. Starfield needed to have more than vestigial systems to make it stand out and be fun and interesting to play. It needed to do something that really took advantage of being a sci-fi/space setting, or else it would always just be less than their other properties.
If you take Starfield and remove all the features that were ripped straight from previous BGS games, what is left? Ship building, ship combat, and slightly reworked lockpicking/speechcraft mini games? That's all (I think) For a "new" IP there isn't very much new stuff
@@zombieranger3410 that is just straight up a redone version of dragon shouts, down to the fact you have to press RB and LB at the same time to activate them, even has blue bar that has to recharge to use them again like dragon shouts.
It's always a facepalm moment for me when I see someone saying: "They say Starfield is bad, but name another game that can do that" And then proceed to show a thousands potatoes aboard their ship... I could have been impressed by that when I was 8 years old maybe, but you don't have to be that bright to understand that it brings nothing to the actual experience.
@@LaZd- yet another person who misses the point. Like you said, just play another game, because you dont like Starfield. The issue with naysayers is they are casting the net of distaste too far and making too big of a deal about a simple concept. Interaction with clutter is apart of what makes their games and has been since at least Morrowind. Dismissing a features existence because you dont like it is foolish. Try again.
dev here, that physics issue 100% isn't the problem that comment made it out to be. Theyve already had a mechanism for solving this with cell based world streaming. The world is divided into cells that are streamed in, and the physics objects in the game already have functions for controlling if they're active/ inactive already and are only loaded in dependent on the active cell the playwr is in. It's such a good feature for doing open seamless worlds and efficiently optimizing them that this cell based world structuring was a big selling point of unreal 5. If this was the actual issue that comment made it out to be, Bethesda wouldnt have been able to make every game theyve made since oblivion since they all have giant worlds filled with crap that can simulate physics. Where the engine limitation "seems" to be is that fundamentally the engine has two types of "interor vs exterior" map/ level types and interior zones link to exterior zones and vice versa, but since each planet is an exterior zone comprised of cells wheras interior zones are not comprised of said cells, i imagine that since in starfield youre travelling to any number of "generated" exteriors on any given planet all with their own generated linked interiors, that they fundamentally couldnt make that core element of the engine architecture (which dates back to the Morrowind days) scalable with the generation tech they made to lay on top of that core architecture. If i had to expand the engine used for single world games to work with 100+ worlds, best way i could see to make it work given that core limitation is "you take off : unloads exterior world data and all linked interior -> fly to new planet : loads [stuff] needed to generate exterior cells for that planet -> land on planet : assembles and streams generated exterior and loads stuff needed for interiors matched to generated exterior" ect ect, which is basically how the game already does it which arguably makes it worse in my eyes because theyd be aware of this issue from day 1 basically. Granted this is an assumption on my end since the tools for star field aren't out yet but still, it seems pretty cut and dry
I've been in IT for over 28 years and I've learned to trust my instincts when I'm picking systems apart from a hypothetical standpoint. There's only so many ways a lot of this stuff can be done and your assumptions are probably not too far off from the reality.
Nice write up my guy appreciate it. Sad to think that even if they fixed the loading screen issue by addressing the fundamental issue you highlight it would still be a boring empty game. One of the greatest disappointments in gaming history.
Even the interior world spaces have a system where you manually have to say what to render from the player pov, so even those cells are not being loaded all the time.
How are Starfield still relying on loading screens in Neon when entering doors connecting city streets when you can jetpack around them? (above / below buildings). A lot of their loading screens seem forced for no reason.
Todd Howard knows he's a meme. I heard a story once about him going to a college to give a talk. OP bumped something and it fell over, and immediately says "damn it Todd!" Just as Todd Howard was walking passed him, he hears him and responded with "really, that's what we're doing now?" And keeps walking. He knows.
The lack of Aliens is mind boggling to me. Youre telling you the same company that made the Elder Scrolls games puts out a space game and not only are there no playable alien races but not even any intelligent aliens at all? I just dont understand. Ive thought about that type of game ever since playing Mass Effect and then Bethesda of all makes a space game and theres no playable aliens .... what was even the point?
Think of Morrowind. A genuinely alien landscape in every way with an incredible story and imnovative gameplay for its time, and.... oh, none of the people who made it still work at Bethesda.
To be honest I actually prefer sci-fi without aliens. It at least forces the writers to not just make mono-ethnic superempires and actually have to work to make different political entities without defaulting to "these are the strong aliens so they have the war empire" (...granted, Starfield's factions are the most milquetoast generic sci-fi factions ever but still)
@@curlyfordoge4366 I tend to agree, without aliens allows the SF to be harder. Because as far as we know there are no aliens. See also: Asimov "Foundation", Herbert "Dune", Reynolds "Revelation Space"
Sandwiches: There weren't any. Several streamers at launch tried to replicate the sandwich collection. At launch, one guy spent a whole stream looking, and found one nonphysics sandwich. The sandwich thing was probably a tech demo, and the woman who claimed to play it was lying. Further evidence: Stacking cheese wheels was a meme when physics objects were added to Elder Scrolls. Why would she pretend to replicate an old meme? Versus devs doing a tech demo to show physics objects.
I didn't care one bit about the technical limitations of Starfield. The loading screens didn't bother me--I have a very fast SSD. The worst part about Starfield is its mediocrity when it comes to quests. Barring a few good ones, most are just a dead weight and their presence doesn't make the game better.
Same here. So much just seemed so lazily implemented. Between the story/plot, the characters, and a vast majority of the quests you would think they rushed this thing out asap...
Yeah, my main issue is the writing. It feels like they went too safe and ended up with no depth and creativity, “meh” is how I describe it, although there are glimpses of good writing. The whole thing seems to have been written for 10 years old, including cringe/cheesy characters like Barrett and a pirate faction that feels menacing as a kid’s cartoon. My opinion is based on comparisons with other AAA games I played. The maelstrom from Cyberpunk 2077 feel really crazy and menacing, they have gore and behave violently.
Physics enabled Static meshes isn't really that big of a thing for most engines these days, almost all of em can do it really easily and the fact that its considered one of the main feature of creation engine speaks volume how weak it is. I make games as hobby in Unreal, and I try to keep most things as physics based as possible. You know how much time it takes to add physics to 100 different props(can add or remove in runtime) in a level ? Less than 10 mins. And people talks about bethesda's props physics as its some technological breakthrough thats yet to be outmatched 🤣.
i think when they were talking about a object that is in the world could be placed and have the physics applied to it and it will always have these tied to the game no matter where you leave said item is a cool feature, i had a experience related to this the other day i probably should have recorded it. i was playing FO4 modded, i allied myself with the gangs in Nuka world but i was getting sick of being friends with them so i pursued the kill all raider quest, well what i didn't take into consideration is how i set them up to be allied with me i also had a mod that basically saved me from death and i wanted to see what would happen with that mod so i allowed them to beat me, i was then transported somewhere in the main commonwealth and my quest was to get my stuff back, however because my gang's were allied with the minutemen i know, not lore friendly it was a beautiful moment until i wanted them dead lol, well i found out that every NPC that was a minutemen, including the ones added in by mods that dotted the entire landscape had all of my items in their inventories, thousands of objects scattered in all of their individual inventories and i had to hunt them all down within the commonwealth and Nuka world to get everything back, which involved killing every minutemen squad i had roaming around the entire commonwealth map because this was late game where i had damn nearly every settlement on my side prior to attempting on killing shank in nuka world, i killed thousands and thousands of NPC's that were previously allied with me, and they wanted me dead lol. it was the best glitch i have ever run into in this game, because it turned my game into a sort of hunting quest where i would hunt the minuteman down, i was having so much fun during this glitch that i didn't save any of my progress and eventually game CTD'd and btw, it's not that this game was tracking all objects, but it was tracking every NPC minutemen on the map in real time, who had my stuff which for some reason was scattered in countless NPC minutemen bodies inventories, so i had to kill all of them to get my shit back and it was fun as hell. i honestly don't know any game engine that could possibly do something like this event and handle so many damn resources all at once, is the creation engine perfect? no, is it unpredictable as fuck? yes lol, is it or can it be fun? yes absolutely when shit like this happens. like i honestly don't know of any other game engine that is capable of doing this all in real time like that experience, because it was so crazy and filled with opportunity, btw before this event the mod that i was using called minutemen squads was handling thousands of minutemen across the landscape and they were essentially all keeping the commonwealth clear to walk through because they were essentially always fighting some animal to robots to raiders to gunners anything within the wealth that could pose a threat to anyone, they were a true army and i know the story says the Brotherhood were big, but i highly doubt they could handle going up against the minutemen in this case as again i had thousands of them roaming the landscape killing everything that came in their path if i was with them or not, the game was doing all of this stuff in real time, not simulated like you might think, it was in real time doing all of this, that was impressive as hell to watch.
@@5226-p1e That's a cool story. And I don't think that the Creation engine is a bad engine per se, I just think it's not the right engine for the game they were trying to create with Starfield. And besides that, there are many other issues holding the game back, not related to the choice of engine at all.
@@TimvanderLeeuw i ultimately agree with you on these things. it's just i think it's a bit disingenuous to say that's all the game engine was capable of doing was through the example of the one object in the environment, i partially blame Luke for how he presented the information, because he used a very stupid example of how this interaction takes place in the engine, yes it keeps track of all objects in the world and they all have data that is kept track of via through the physics of the game. to me this is a very minor thing to point out and a better representation of the same feature of the engine would be to list the interaction i went through in that glitch situation while i played, actually it was more of a conflict with other mods than it was a glitch so all mods were working as intended, but because i did something that was off of the script that the mod authors wouldn't have likely accounted for of how you use these mods, it created this incredibly fun interaction and turned the game into an aliens vs, preditor scenario lol, i guess i was the alien, from a role play aspect you could say i was taken over by a Goa'uld symbiote lol some stargate lore sorry.
I won't easily forget how Luke kept such a level head during all the crazy Starfield hype. I thought he was a bit of a debby downer about the game until I started playing it for a little while and the reality of a second bad Bethesda game finally set in for me. Now I have a heck of a lot of respect for him and will continue to come here to get realistic and based views on games
You nailed the biggest problem without saying what it actually is called "Memory Management." To take out what is needed or not needed on the fly without any perception from a player. That's practually the lifeblood of computers now a days but is never spoken, both on a hardware and software level.
Paging in a nutshell. Working on a game, and memory management is easy when you blow away whole allocators instead of individual allocations, like in a tree.
I’ve heard them be described as “a triple A studio that thinks it’s a small indie studio”, it’s why they take no responsibility or think they can avoid it “we aren’t a huge studio, we are still learning” (despite being in the industry for 25+ years and apparently learning NOTHING)
@@samuelfawell9159 i dont think they have enough skill or talent to get a triple A chip, thats why they keep biting off more than they can chew and throwing it away when they realize they dont have what it takes to make it work.
My question is why don't they just accept that to themselves and stop trying to make these giant open worlds when even the engine can't handle it anymore? I could actually see them making smaller titles with that engine if they know it's strengths and don't tax tf out of it or even aim for a way less taxing artstyle instead of photo realism when they keep getting memed on for ugly characters
@@alphamuplays1669 starfield honestly astonishes me, their first new IP in 25 years, and they make choices that a indie studio making their first game would know, they regressed from what they have learned in their entire time. They took aspects of from their previous games and replicated them worse than originally. Emil was PROUD of not using a design documents, Todd was PROUD of having so much boring content.
My biggest issue with Creation Engine, besides it being really old and limited, is the handling and interaction with the game. For example, the Fallout franchise. I used to LOVE Fallout, and still do mostly (even though the story of 4 was *horrible*), I'd play Fallout all the time back in the day and got used to the interfacing. Now and days, after playing newer stuff, going back to Fallout games feels sooo clunky. I try to go back to Fallout 4, and find I have to reteach myself what each button does, how to bring up Pipboy, etc. Even with Fallout 76; I keep trying to get back into it, and it's a chore figuring out how to draw weapon, then change weapons, then VATS, Pipboy, etc. They're all great systems, but interfacing could be so streamlined and easier to access. Other games are so easy to go back to, pick them up, and gameplay is fluent and controls are self-explanatory. While again, returning to Bethesda/creation-engine games require an almost 5-10 minute rundown tutorial to recall how everything functions. 🤔
I feel so vindicated that I never bought this game. Used to be a huge Bethesda fan but the despicable atrocity that was Fallout 76, in a single release burned away ALL goodwill that I had for the company. They demonstrated that not only were they willing to release an appallingly broken product, but they were willing to outright lie about it. Screw Todd.
@@UmmerFarooq-wx4yo Once you are an out and out liar, you never get trusted again. I was disgusted by the way people who should know better, were riding the Starfield hype train.
You dodged a bullet, but games now in 2024 are Game Pass quality at best to be fair, too much saturation now, and servers being knocked off so you can't even play them anymore. Retro is now thriving, modern gaming is on it's knees due to the processes and practices these companies have decided to go, reminds me of the 80s crash all over again, could happen once more if things keep going the way they have.
Exactly, worst companions ever ... after 10 hours I wanted to kill them all. The "universe" seemed boring, and the cities seemed smaller than in Skyrim.
@@Whippets Betty Howser is the best, in Heinlein 1, Adrienne Bardeau, she's the only one I could stand with me every time I played as she isn't woke, is proper old school, doesn't judge and let's you be evil if you wish. The rest are just a bunch of hypocrites, Constipation more like and aren't worth using and just are a general annoyance, it's best to just go with Isolation perk for the damage buffs.
@@RocketRenton "as she isn't woke" - My brother in Christ, I beg you to touch grass and stop trying to inject your culture war BS into gaming discussion.
Yeah, people say stuff like "But Cyberpunk fixed everything?" Ok, but in Cyberpunk, the writing, worldbuilding and characters are already in place, what needed to be fixed was other less important things. Starfield is a much more stable game than Cyberpunk was at launch, but the high school grade writing will never be fixed, it just won't happen.
Here's how to fix physics load when going no loadscreens: Add a boolean that marks items at rest. Then just don't do physics for items at rest. Those thausand sandwiches in your cargo hold only move for a very short time until they just lay around somewhere and don't move until you apply a new impulse to them. There is no excuse for doing physics calculations to items known to be at rest. And all physics calculations have to detect the final state or you get wiggle bugs where stuff just jitters around even though nothing touched it for ages. Also if an item is far away, it's safe to just fasttrack it's physics calculations to teh final state and flag it as at rest immediately. This could be exploited - but in a singleplayer game nobody cares about exploits. So it'd fine. Apart from that: Their engine is a dead end. It has been created to run sortof fine on consoles with 0.5 GiB RAM. It likely could be salvaged. But the devs who made it are likely not in the company anymore. And at that point, you can as well just reimplement your game mechanics on Unreal Engine because it's way easier to find devs knowing it.
Lure of the Temptress, a 1992 game, had NPCs that would move around and even converse. Had they seen you do something sketchy, they might tell it to other NPC's that they encountered.
All their experienced and semi-capable senior devs have already cashed out with the Microsoft aquisition and left. If they purge the company roster any further, they won't have any experienced talent left. Bethesda is a dying studio which can only attract mediocre (aka. woke) talent anymore if at all. And any exceptional developers avoid any explicitly woke company like the plague. It's over.
Not gonna happen. For some God forsaken reason, Bitchthesda has no writting team, writting is let to quest designers, who are lead by Emil, who's a close friend of Todd, so Hodd Toward will never fire him, no matter how many times he shits the bed
Bruh, just like starfield , the people bringing the studio's quality down is core to the company 🤣🤣.Cannot be fixed Its a scam company disguised as a AAA studio. Now that we know everything abut starfield just go and watch the "Starfield Direct" video again, you will realize just how shameless they are.
@@chilbiyito They don't want to switch engines because both their devs and the modders are accustomed to working with Creation Engine for decades now. It's practically Bethesda's exclusive inhouse engine and switching engines would mean both significant effort and cost upfront. Besides, few engines are (or rather were) more modder friendly than Creation Engine and Bethesda completely relies on modders to finish their games and give them longevity. So instead they opted to update and improve the engine, like they have done for two decades now. But you can only put so much makeup on an old workhorse.
The core design issue at the root of all other issues is the lack of free roaming in space. The challenge of doing a classic bethesda in space (what people wanted) is the same as usual: allowing the player to explore the world (the quests themselves, while being servicable, having never been the strong suit of the company, and here are really subpart, in particular the companions and characters themselves). I have heard some people saying that there should have been less planets, but that is not the issue. Even one planet, or just one continent, or just the superficy of one real world nation would have been too much anyway. To make exploration feel good, you need handcrafted content at regular interval. Which actually could have been obtained; while in a fantasy setting the character is on foot, hence some nice handcrafted content must happen every few hundred meters, in a space game, your spaceship can go very fast, so you can find hancrafted content separated from millions of kilometers; only 2 or 3 handcrafted contents per planet for example, that the player would detect thanks to its radars, coms etc... then visit them on foot. The presence of generated landscapes is not the issue, if the generated content is only the background; just like the grass and trees in Skyrim are background. The issue is because exploration is done on foot, thequantity of necessary content is so high that they need to use prefab dungeons, which suck. There is nothing to do for this game. The only intelligence thing to do is to abandon ship, and start over with a new game.
The main problem was using procedural generated planets instead of 10 detailed planets about the same or 1/2 the size Skyrim map. We would have 2-3 Earth like planets with different variations to each. Probably one that was more forested another that had more oceans and another that was more urbanized. A couple winter like planets, a couple of desert like planets. And 2-3 planets that resemble Jupiter and Saturn. Then they could focus on writing intriguing npc’s and quest revolving around those planets. That alone could add 30+ hours along with the main storyline.
I wouldn't care so much about the procedurally generated planets, if the bases you ended up at WERE! Nothing quite like raiding the same base, 12 times on 12 different planets...down to the same datapad entries, and magazines on desks.
There is no fixing that mess. What they gonna do? Rewrite all the terrible dialogue? Fill up all the empty planets? Every system is broken from the ground up. They gonna leave that up to the modders and move on to the next project.
And most veteran modders won't even touch this hot mess with a ten foot pole. Knowing full well it's not even worth the effort because the substance just isn't there. And neither is the player base to actually use and appreciate good mods.
@@mcmarkmarkson7115 Yeah and i outright refuse to even touch the game without such mods. Because any vision of humanity's future that diverse and progressive is simply a dystopian nightmare. And not of the entertaining kind.
As consumers I think we simply have so many options with long open world games, that the risk of playing a known buggy game with tons of loading screens is painful enough to switch to other competing games without these issues. Especially given the time sink, why would I commit myself to something like Starfield when I can start a more fulfilling journey? First impressions are everything and I think they dropped the ball HARD.
I would take a handcrafted open world over no loading screens, regardless starfield needed BOTH as a game that released in 2023 under the MOST VALUABLE COMPANY IN THE WORLD
@@EastyyBlogspot yepp, especially since the game loads even when it doesn!t have to. Instead of taking the elevator, wich grants you a loading screen, you can just jump down sometimes WITHOUT it. So why is it there in the first place???
People would be more willing to overlook the technical shortcomings if the game had a compelling story and interesting characters, sadly it has neither.
This. I played Starfield at launch. By hour 20 I was already putting it down to go play other things saying "ill come back later". I did, built an outpost, realized how useless it was and said f it uninstall time.
Tale as old as time People will put up with a lot of jank and crap as long as it has good overall storytelling and such is good, even in cases where the gameplay is that met (drakengard comes to mind)
Yeeep, as much as I had a problem with the loading screens, weak exploration, and shit AI, I could deal with all of it, but the writing for some of the quest lines (specifically Ryugen) was so mind numbingly boring I couldn't force myself to play it anymore, uninstalled and have no intentions of going back
I think the best videos out there that really highlight this are the ones comparing Starfield to Cyberpunk 2077. It's not even a competition. Starfield is just... uhg... it's simultaneously hilarious and sad to see Bethesda's new baby get absolutely clowned on by an old game that many people hated on release.
@@keystrix3704 Agreed! And CDPR has had a stroke of master level genius with Phantom Liberty. There are certain moments in there... well spoiling it should be heresy and punishable by the inquisition.
They set up a universe trife with mech/xeno warfare, large scale ship battles, and land disputes just to then place the game however many years after all that has ended and everything has cooled off. The Fallout universe did the same thing, except what came after was MORE interesting than what came before.
@@MaleficMurph They can always go back to that era with some random multiverse DLC lol that had a drivable car in that recent video they made so maybe they could make mech suits and large ship battles again?
8:25 I tried to use this feature to decorate my home in Akila and outposts. I figured that if I couldn’t decorate much with the literal building decorations(because it lacks mush of those) then I could at least pick up cool items around the world and put them on my shelves and tables for display. I did this and every time I left my home and came back, the items were offset and half sunk into the furniture…
Ragdoll physics, even one of the missions on The Key at one point before they patched it made the character sink into the ground, and it warped everywhere, again they go on step forwards, two steps backwards with these patches.
Had the same issue. Then went back to play FO3 and FO New Vegas and realized those same sinking on shelves issues are in those older games as well. Bethesda has had this problem in it's Creation Engine since Fallout 3. And they have never fixed or resolved it.
I'm an amateur writer currently working on a LitRPG series... I'm backlogging chapters currently, only like 20k words into it - Anyways, the premise of the book heavily revolves around shitty gaming practices, and blaming Todd Howard for "starting it all with that damn golden armor" is in the outline. Two characters, one named Todd and the other named Howard, and they're gonna get a nice big ranty monologue directed at them lol If the project finds some success, some of the funds are definitely going towards a carboard cut-out of him for the background of my own vids about it
@@s3nate22 eh? me? not even close. I never bought this game or have a sub to gamepass or anything. I watch a video or 2 about it on youtube and thats it. if you have more than half your brain left you could see this disaster coming from the moment they announced it. but unfortunately most people have less than half a brain.
@@Mr.MasterOfTheMonsters unfortunately yes. I miss the days that games weren't technological marvels and money machines and were just created by a bunch of nerds with a passion. now the focus is maximising profit.
Please everybody understand. This is the most important thing to remember…Bethesda ACTUALLY thinks they did a good job on Starfield. They will NEVER change.
@@sagearmaggedon7307 they did the best job they would with an engine that was used to make morrowind cause that's all that engine is when you get down to it its a 3 decade old engine that desperately needs to get a proper new version not another "its the same thing with 5 new things bolted to the side of it"
@@theirishviking9278 Unreal engine 5 was built on 4 different iterations over decades. Larian has been using the divinity engine for a very long time too. If people have a problem with starfield, its Bethesda and or the players themselves that are the problem, not the creation engine. Bethesda wanted to make this game, so they used an engine that is suited for it. Bethesda wanted to make an indiana jones game, but they dont have an engine that is suited for it, so they went to Machine Games. They know what they are doing.
So 95% of the devs this guy talked to who said "this game can't be fixed because the engine is an insurmountable problem" are wrong, according to you? A game engine is just another tool in the toolbox, and Creation was the wrong tool for this particular job.
@@CiaphasKirby You cant fix what isnt broken. The game is not marred with technical issues, the “problems “ with the game were decided upon by the developers and implemented by choice. The loading screens have nothing to do with the engine. It was Bethesdas decision to make a bethesda game in space, a clash of “appropriate” design philosophy. The engine seems like an insurmountable problem, from the perspective of people that are comparing Starfield to other games. People who want seemless transitions from planet to space, and so forth. In laymans terms: if you want starfield to be more like no mans sky, cyberpunk, etc, then the engine is an issue because it doesnt do those things.
The thing about the creation engine is that despite Starfield being the most stable Bethesda release to date.... which is not saying much, we're still seeing *MORROWIND* bugs. I honestly don't know if these are inherent problem with the version of Gamebryo they were using or if Bethesda programmers are so incompetent that they cant deal with 20 year old bugs (that the community have fixed several times in a row). I starts becoming irrefutable that there has to be SOMETHING wrong with this engine. I think its widely agreed that Starfield was not the kind of game Creation Engine was built for and is a bad showcase of it, but when the company that has been using this engine for over 2 decades now still hasnt mastered it its probably time to call it quits.
@@Xsetsu I kept telling my friends it wasn't going to be good. They were shocked when it turned out I was correct. Just go play Morrowind if you want a good Bethesda game.
If the rpg aspect was phenomenal the technical issues wouldnt be a problem. If the moment to moment gameplay was phenomenal a crappy story could be overlooked. Starfield suffers in all areas. It cannot be fixed.
This exactly. Oblivions RPG aspect was enough to make me overlook its technical issues. Skyrims gameplay was enough to make me overlook its crappy story. Starfield offers nothing to overlook its flaws with.
It cant be fixed because its not broken. The only thing broken is the people clinging to their ideal of what good or perfect is and complaining that Starfield doesnt meet the expectations. All people need to do is treat this game like any other game they dont like, and go play something else. Problem solved.
@@ralphengland8559 The only thing bad here is people saying that others have “bad taste” for liking the game and being able to see value in it, and then perpetually wasting their time on a game that is apparently bad. People in these comments sections might as well be playing starfield, the way they flock here every time somebody makes one of these videos when they decide they need some views. I had more game breaking bugs and bugs in general playing BG3, guess that game was broken too.
Honestly, even if they could fix 100% of the technical issues, the lackluster story, mission design, and emergent storytelling make me question if it would even be worth trying to fix it. Then it would just be a well-optimized mediocre game
I thought a similar thing. When I saw that I just thought anything those people have to say can be completely ignored. They're delusional or something.
If you only mod on a single instance and never up or downgrade it's suprisingly fun. Not sure it's a 10 since they all have features that are unfixable since broken mods rely on those bugs and fixing them kicks the can along the road. Play around them though and it's maybe a 10 if you've either stayed on Skyrim or OpenMW. Both are equally versitile if only Skyrim didn't handle script layers like hell and OpenMW hand AI package compatibility.
@@inybisinsulate A rating of 10/10 is supposed to mean perfection in it's purpose. The Creation Engine is not all perfect. Lets take one example like its strength of being moddable. The Creation Engine still has unnecessary limitations on modability that doesn't serve newer hardware today. Like the 255 esp/esm limit that is still present. I can take a game like RimWorld and load up 1000s of individual mods without doing any hacky workaround to work with the engine's limitations like merging or defining restrictive esl plugins.
@@MqKeezy While fair, the counter point to that is most game engines aren't moddable. There's a reason Skyrim and Fallout New Vegas are two of the most modded games in history, and that's because they were easy to mod from almost the start. Unreal Engine might be ubiquitous in gaming nowadays but very few Unreal games actually are moddable (at least with any degree of depth. Not talking ini config changes or making new skins)
@@pacmonster066 Well we cant really use that point either, because if we were to use an engine's modability as a plus for remaining point(s) to be a 10/10 engine, then we subsequently must lower ratings of a lot of other engines for not being as modable. We can also look at the Creation Engine's glaring weaknesses at face value from Starfield and it should be no question that this engine is not the perfect engine even when you factor in its modability.
The individual physical objects are nice in theory, but Bethesda never really managed to do anything interesting with them. That's the problem. It's like insisting you need to have a swimming pool in your car but nobody ever uses it.
Yeah. Bethesda games scream out for the kind of things you can do in Arkane's games (like stick a trap to an object and then throw the object), but they've never taken that step. All the physics objects are cool but they rarely add much beyond comedy value when they freak out.
The non-physics nature of Morrowind actually made it easier to place items where you wanted and keep them there. Who needs to find a "safe" chest to keep all your stuff in when you can just spread it out all over the floor of the guild hall?
@@-tera-3345no kidding. In Morrowind you can actually decorate your house without dealing with the aftermath of an earthquake whenever you reenter the cell.
To me it seems that Bethesda, nowadays a big company under scrutiny by investors, has chosen an extremely conservative route when making this game, playing as safe as possible, probably making all their decisions by comitee. As a result, this game is the same kind of soulless mess as for example the new star wars trilogy. They really have not tried to inovate in any way, reusing the very same ropes they used in their previous games: For example, the dialog camera is the same Oblivion used in 2006. An other example, the laser gun looks like the Fallout4 laser gun (they also copy terms from their previous games, for example callind drugs "chems" like in fallout). They even have regressed, multiplying the loading screens compared to their previous products. This can also be seen in the quests, companions and dialogs; They have played as safe and bland as possible. The universe itself looks like it has been made by a comitee, just grabbing from everywhere anything that looked cool and pushing it into the game into an incoherent mess. Hence we end up with an inconsistent universe first trying to be "NASApunk" (with the city on Mars being at least consistent here), but also with a high tech futuristic city, a firefly cowboy city, and a cyberpunk city. An other example is the nightclub in said cyberpunk city. Or more precisely, the exotic dancers in the nightclub. I am sure someone wanted to do something a bit spicy, but the PC police replaced the exotic dancers by dudes wearing ridiculous spantex alien costumes. And BTW in this city a drug is supposed to do some ravages, but where are the addicts sleeping in the street and what not?...
There was once a Mythbusters episode where they figured out that, if you had the proper equipment, a high tolerance for disgust, and a low standard for luminosity, you could in fact polish certain species' fecal matter. Anyone hoping to "fix Starfield" should go rewatch that ep with notepad in hand, because that's pretty much what they're attempting to do.
One of the biggest problems is that Starfield’s design itself is broken. They tried to force NASApunk and explorable open world RPG mechanics together and it made a giant steaming heap of shit. Nasapunk kind of thrives on being on rails to some degree. The universe is beautiful and you can get that across if the player is somewhat restricted in what they can explore. Lone Echo is a great example of that. The problem is they wanted Skyrim or Fallout without a wacky enough, engaging world to actually explore. Instead of making dense, curiosity sparking landscapes like with their previous games, they made barren unengaging wastelands then made excuses about how many planets they put in the game. Hell, they didn’t even allow actual space exploration like No Man’s Sky did. They chose two designs in the NASApunk style, and the open world RPG genre and didn’t realize they didn’t have the incredible genius and absurd work requirement it would take to make those beneficial to each other instead of clashing. It all resulted in an unfinished, empty, boring experience that leaves EVERYTHING to be desired. Can the game be improved? Yeah. Can it be fixed? No. It’s far too late to abandon either of those design choices, and its not just the gameplay that’s broken but the entire design of the game.
Bethesda just keeps lying. From "it just works" to the lie that starfield would answer humanity's deepest questions, Bethesda has a MAJOR issue. They may need to rethink who leads this company.
No, no. We are just picking and choosing which adverts are worse than others. Cherry picking problems with the game that we dont like. Most games arent to the T accurate with their adverts.
Been writing software for nearly 40 years. Starfield absolutely can be fixed if ... Heavy duty rewrite of the AI Rewrite the dialogue and provide more quest options. Massive performance overhaul of the engine. It's all software. Of course it can be rewritten. Look at the list above, which is far from a complete list. That is some seriously heavy lifting. Does anybody really believe it's going to happen?
The loading screen issue could've been fixed with smoke and mirrors. Simply make traveling an interactive loading screen that doesn't unload the aircraft. The menus could've been integrated into the ship. In the load screen, the world origin can be reset, physics objects can be unloaded and reloaded. This isn't a solution for interiors however, and full culling of navigation, physics and rendering is only really ever possible with fully static environments.
It’s REAL simple boys. To me, the big problem with starfield is the factions, quests and random encounters. Compared to previous Bethesda games this doesn’t even compare. Quests aren’t as immersive or engaging; writing is less than I’d hope for it to be and I have a perfect example. Relating to random encounters, there just isn’t significant encounters that link to quests or environmental storytelling. I remember going to a planet and hearing enemies talking about an interesting storyline, wanting to see more of this I followed the encounter and finished it. Thought ok cool, went to another planet and ran into the same random encounter with EXACT same writing. That’s when I was done and hopped back into cyberpunk and older Bethesda games xD
I wanna say more about this. Another thing they just didn’t have well is exploring to find quests. I really loved in fallout or elder scrolls where you could just get lost exploring find someone’s little house and perhaps they have a whole quest line associated with them that you wouldn’t of found out unless you explored. Starfield does not have this, and when it does, the quests are horrible, like finding a random guy comic books throughout the galaxy. The content is just too shallow. Remember killing greltle the kind and then getting an invitation to db. Or in fallout finding the cabbot house and seeing that whole quest line which even has a random encounter associated with it. Starfield just has none of this.😢
Even the Ships have been nerfed or bugged out, you got 2 land every time on a moon or planet, now you see none, and now see people trying to make workarounds for an issue that wasn't there, but it because of the way they are handling the patch process, which by the looks of it isn't being done at all with an QA in mind, and you get more bugs, ones fixed then return and new ones. It's just an never ending nightmare from patch to patch to see what will happen with your character, even NG+ doesn't fix the issues at hand, being on Xbox as well with no console commands also puts a spanner in the works. It's reminding me of Warzone all the time and all the issues and ones still in the game 2 years on that haven't been patched and are still there.
@@RocketRenton that is horrible to hear.. especially given how cool the ship building was. These companies leaving broken mechanics in their game needs to stop. It’s especially sad because starfield could’ve been great.
Most of the problems you listed at the beginning aren't part of the problems I had. My problems were all related to the story (boring), side quests (mostly boring) and characters (predictable and boring). They would have to throw all that out and get better writers and character designers.
Yea, but all these issues come from a rotten core that is related to the game's engine which directly effects the overall game design. The problem is and has always been the outdated engine.
Fallout New Vegas used the same engine as Fallout 3, yet it's story, writing, and world building was leagues above Fallout 3 in terms of quality. Yeah the engine is still terrible, but a good enough writer/quest designer can work around that to make something truly entertaining
I found what you listed too, but I also found pretty interesting characters and conflicts, for example I tried to play one more time sticking to one side character this time been Sarah, I found her your type annoying character, super clear moral compass driven by making good, a model citizen etc., but the more time I spent with her I found her very complex, she has some real conflicts, for example her perfeccionism leading her to make bad desicions for other, her resentment with MAST and even her mission and place in constellation been flawed trough this things, I predicted her to be boring but she is not and really changed my mind, I then tried to invest in some of the side quests, and I found the same they had a lot more depth when I tried to ignore since of the flaws. Since side quests introduce you to very interesting moments like the loop time quest or the computer AI in charge of a place, or the fleet of humans in Paradiso that have spent centuries traveling not knowing the humans had conquered the known space. This is really difficult to find due to immersion been broke every time I have to wait for a loading screen or just go to map and jump from one place to another instead of traveling to one place to another. This little things made fallout great, you got to travel to a new place and maybe find si many things and new quests or factions that makes the experience of a playthrough unique, the snapping to one place to another breaks this totally. Another thing is that the different places don't feel they have a connection, yeah the different factions time over this place, but the main quest don't explore this, some side quests do like for example joining the UC vanguards and the terror morphs conflicts but the main quest ignores this completely. They could use so much more the connection through all the factions in the main quest line to make more sense than only "on the past we had a great conflict and now humanity is divided" And it still exists into the game but very very very very hidden from most of players. I think the traveling trough space could be fixed by making a screen like fallout 1 with random encounters, you might not be driving all the way through space but just watching a loading screen but a ship traveling trough it could be more interesting and aliviate the loading times. Also making some places nearer each other could have fixed this a lot. Developing more the outskirts of a few places that can lead you to find even more lore and more verticality for the places... But it's just done ideas. Fallout4 did a worse job in this sense, options to resolve quests are near 0 and most quests are going to solve place to retrieve some thing or someone. But the world felt as 1 and conflicts were inevitable. Hope the creation kit give the modders time and desire to address all of this, because this game has a lot of potencial in it.
remember that clip of Squidward when he gets to the squid town and he goes through his daily life over and over while slowly getting more bored and depressed? thats Starfield
It can't be fixed without a complete rewrite. Add maps, lose loading screens, whatever. If the characters and story are mind numbingly dull you've fixed nothing.
@@ModuliOfRiemannSurfaces F4 at least had SOME good dialogue, even if the options weren't great. And they had some interesting characters as well. Not to mention the world was fun to explore. Base building was a lot more important, and clunky as it was, I had more fun. Nothing is fun in starfield, absolutely nothing. Not even the "improved" combat.
@@mcmarkmarkson7115 Yeah I think we’re mostly in agreement. I just didn’t really like *any* of the FO4 storytelling with the exception of a couple small characters like Danse, Cait, etc
Yep, in the previous games they had Lore writers that helped bring cohension to their games. As far as I know they had no Lore writers to tie the universe of Starfield together.
You were generous. I stopped playing after 10 hours where 9.5 hours was pure boredom. Not even worth being free on game pass, because it still costs my life time. 4/10 at best. If you ask me to tell you name of any memorable NPC character after 10 hours of playing, I dont know. Most of these 10 hours I was running on Mars from mining facility at bottom to some office on top floor and surface. Was running Mars staits up and down maybe 40 times, going through 120 loading screens. After finishing Mars quest chain, I wad exhausted of this game and stopped playing. Probably worst gane design in AAA game in last 10 years or so.
Is it really even a phenomenon? BGS have been a disappointment as a studio for well over a decade now, and with the state of AAA gaming being the way it is, the entire gaming community is used to being let down at this point. Had this happened in 2014? Yeah, maybe then it's a true phenomenon. But, happening now? They're just the latest in a long line. The only thing that could save this game is an admittance to being wrong and a full scale overhaul a la Cyberpunk 2077, and those are two things that will never happen. If you continue to rely on your own customers to fix the problems of the products you release, there will eventually come a time where either that community cannot do the trick or *will* not do the trick. And keep a fucking design document, whoever replaces Emil as the lead designer on Elder Scrolls VI. The stupidity behind that decision is staggering.
As a developer of 40+ years I can honestly say that all the myriad of technical issues *are* the paper cuts. With my game master's hat on I see the missing limb as the lack of world-building, basic game design, quests, characters and the shoddy dialog as the real issue with Starfield. It could be as pretty as Phantom Liberty and it *still* wouldn't be worth the time to play as there nothing makes sense and there are zero consequences to the player's choices (inevitable for "groundhog day in space"). In short for an RPG there is no "game" (it kinda works as an FPS, sort of, and a walking simulator, sort of). I clocked up hundreds of hours (waiting for dinner to cook) on my housemate's game-pass account, and I still felt short changed. There is no exploration when everywhere is explored and abandoned already.
I'd go a step further; It wasn't just held back by its design, but by a team that has little to no desire to break out of their outdated comfort zone. Bethesda come across as a studio entirely comprised of one-trick ponies for the past 10-15 years. It is their mentality that everything they do is golden regardless that leads to this kind of stagnation and being happy with such inadequate tools. It's the gaming equivalent of when Intel sat on quad-core CPUs for as long as humanly possible.
Agreed, as gone back to Skyrim, and ESO before Starfield came along, and it hasn't evolved at all in terms of quests etc. Creation Engine wasn't the way to go either, the bugs Starfield has will take a lifetime to fix, and they just keep adding more in as they patch using Steam Beta testers which isn't the way to go as Xbox then gets hit hardest with the changes and can't cope resulting in characters lost like I have done in the past 6 months.
Yup for me it really shines in their quest design. Skyrim and fallout don’t have space ships, they don’t have insane tech that can transport you across the stars so going to a person and getting a quest makes sense in those games. In starfield it makes no sense at all, have that shit be a phone call kinda like CP2077, I should not have to talk to commander whoever, get in my personal space ship travel across a galaxy do the quest than have to return to commander dumb shit to progress a quest line. It just shows they’re stagnant in game design and they don’t care to innovate. I also love the fanboys who tried to claim “well in game they give you a lore reason so stop complaining.” Bro I am a full time worker going to online college mofucker I don’t have time to jump around a galaxy just to progress a quest one stage to then leave again and repeat.
Having hundreds of sandwiches in your ship is cool, I agree. The problem is, it's only cool once or twice. It's not some great feature people are asking for
ultimately the issue is down to the creation engine. Much of the code is legacy and has been a Frankenstein engine since its conception. It was an issue back in fallout 76, fallout 4, etc. It was at its peak during Skyrim ages ago but even then was showing its limitations. Bethesda does not want to change to a different engine or to build a new engine as it is cheaper to keep using the creation engine even if it barely working. just my 2 cents
My 2 cents is that game development has seasonse. Its really hard to keep reinventing the wheel. It's for this reason Mark my words that gta 6 will be Rockstars last great game. Its impossible to keep outdoing yourself to satisfy the gaming crowd through the years. But I stand to be corrected. Bethesda had its time. Skyrim. Oblivion. FO3. FO4. So will rockstar. But you can tell me of a studio that has been rocking gamers again and again and again AND AGAIN consistently over the past 20 years. They all come n go: nintendo, valve, capcom, ubisoft, naughty dog they all HIT BIG them fans just get tired of the formula that won em over.
@@lonewulfmo9128 It's more to do with the corporate structure of finances. Once you grow big you start playing safe and make financially conservative decisions, a game had success 15 years ago? Well you're going to make it exactly the same with a slap of new paint, that might work with movies but it doesn't work with video games.
It was my one hope them getting absorbed by Microsoft Phil would've put the hammer down on them and forced them to ditch the tech and move to either unity or unreal 4/5. I'm convinced it's not gonna happen now so all I'm hoping for now is obsidian gets fallout back and gives us a REAL successor to new vegas
@@AlphaladZXA that's an interesting view because unreal 5 apparently looks beautiful but too taxing to run beautiful graphics at 60fps + on current gen. Your not the first I've heard speak highly of new vegas, gonna give it a peak.
Entity Persistence is almost _never_ worth it, it makes for a some cool gimmicks, but in the long run it really hurts the game. Star Citizen introduced the same issue with their PES system and within days were working on culling persistent entities. You just don't need to persist an empty bottle a player drops in the woods if it hurts the rest of the game.
@@DevNug yes. That's why the dev mentions the load times, it needs to load all the items onto a level. I don't know all the details of how SF does it, but because you can fly to any planet at random it would need to pull it from disk most times, although if you left a planet then returned to it immediately hopefully it'll still be in memory but I have no idea. This has been a problem in gaming forever, I remember coding text based MUDs in College in the 1990s and we added "slime monsters" that would roam around consuming items players didn't loot from mobs, because having too many objects would cause massive lag. This was our in-universe PE Culling system. Even modern games like WoW do this, instead they just put a timer on a corpse, and they'll despawn after a set length of time destroying all items (although some items will be mailed to you). Tracking 5,000 wheels of cheese between visits to an area, not to mention all the other items that are there is intensive. The juice is rarely worth the squeeze when it comes to PES.
@@vairoalexnder no, it doesn't at all. They added aggressive culling within days. There is no real persistence in their persistence entity system. They're trying to throw more and more server virtual hardware at the problem, something a game like SF can't do because they need to run on consoles or an individual PC. The combination of static meshing and PES is a massive cost sink on the back end in a game still in Alpha after spending 700M on development. If you think it "works" you are sadly mistaken.
@@andrewshandle IKR, I remember when all the hangar areas just about anywhere you went were clogged with debris. There were many times I had to 'thread the needle' just to get my ship out of the hangar without blowing up...
I really hate when people say "it can't be fixed" ok i get that usually means "its takes too much effort to redo" but no there are ways to fix these things and the fact you guys cant see it means you really are a part of the problem in modern game design. What is bad or unsatisfactory about starfield? One thing is Loading screens, ok. how do we solve that. How about making loading screens between solar systems look like your travelling through hyperspace/ at the speed of light. Whether you like it or not, it effectively solves that problem, it would be boring regardless travelling that far unless it could be interrupted or something by pirates. For landing on a planet, first make it so ships travel much faster or conserve their momentum so you can travel to the atmosphere much quicker. It would know where your trying to land by raycast, and prepare a seed from orbit. A message will appear saying something like "entering atmosphere" and the player would lose control of the ship and wouldnt be able to see through the cockpit because of the plasma from reentry, until it gets close enough to the ground. From there you could choose to land or fly to different landing areas, land, and explore from there. For interplanetary travel they could easily make the solar system a whole map, either by size trickery, or perspective trickery, or a literal gigantic map. Many things are already "loaded"/ the game knows their position in the sky anyway, like moons and closeby planets, you could easily make it so you could travel to another planet without a loading screen. All this would require is conservation of momentum and a huge speed buff. It would also be fun to fly into the sun and die.
I think the biggest issue with Starfield's design is that the starting point for the entire premise of the game was "What if we made a Bethesda game, but in space?" instead of it being "Hey we have a good idea for a really unique game that's different from our previous games that mandates a new setting. Now how do we fit that in with the types of games we make?" In other words, Starfield suffers from a lack of identity. "It would be cool to make a sci fi game" isn't a recipe for success, you should have very very good reasons for why you want to create a new IP rather than just "we want to try making a sci fi game because we can"
Yeah it wasn’t “let’s have this cool sci fi world with aliens and factions and space pirates that do this and we’ll have this cool city that’s a crime den and dangerous.” It was “okay we got the green light for a sci fi game everyone break up into groups and come up with one sci fi trope and will fit it in where we can. 1 alien quest line entirely removed from the rest of the game? Sure why not. Space pirates? Hell yeah, but to maintain our ESRB rating you won’t be able to join them necessarily. A grimy slum world full of corruption? Nice grab one other guy and both of you build that by yourselves, also ESRB rating so don’t make it to grimy and slummy, although players liked the strip club in GTAV so do something similar.”
@@garbearfar1394 Well put. Starfield was like a test game. It answered the question "What could a Bethesda game in space look like?" And to that end it succeeded frankly. It succeeded at being proof of concept. It's an idea of a game, not a game.
@@sagearmaggedon7307 Skyrim had identity out the wazoo. Solid consistent art design, interconnected world, developed systems that interacted well in conjunction with each other. It didn't feel like a "generic fantasy game" that Oblivion for instance was accused of being on launch. Starfield on the other hand feels like a generic sci fi game that was a bunch of ideas strewn together to produce a minimum viable product.
@@GlassesAndCoffeeMugs It is a game, just one that people are not the most interested in. Most people still dont even realize the changes they have made in their design approach. The perspective in which one approaches a game will impact how it plays and what a player gets from it. I learned this lesson well with tears of the kingdom and breath of the wild.
Red's casino (I think it's called that) is a great example of the entire game, lots of things you should be able to do in a casino, poker, slots etc, however in reality, there is sod-all to do.
I don't agree that it is an engine issue. The problem is they basically only launched the engine and forgot to include immersive gameplay, story (!!), freedom of choices, and other general fun stuff to invest in it. BG3 had major issues with Act3 at launch (resource consumption) but everyone was ok with it because the "game" was brilliant.
its kinda crazy that BG3, as broken as it 3rd act was (basically unplayable in my case) won Game of the Year. I really shows how we are starved of good games crafted with passion.
@@oersza I personally never had issues in act3, guess it’s a bit random but we have to agree they fixed it very fast (as opposed to Starfield being stuck with a poor storyline)
18:00 I suspect CDPR left behind the RedEngine because they lost / fired a lot of devs during the development of Cyberpunk 2077, and it's a lot easier to onboard new devs with a licensed engine like UE5 than a proprietary engine.
On the other hand, BGS has a relatively low turnover rate and it makes sense for them to keep using the Creation Engine because it's what all their veterans have been using for decades now. So I think it's just a business decision rather than being related to how bad or good people think an engine is :)
nah. Red Engine 3 is very unstable. The tools CDPR used for TW3 Red Engine 2 didn't work on RE3. So they had to make new tools. RE3 is a lot like EA's Frostbite 3. It s just so unstable that going to another engine makes alot of sense..
My worry about every game company going over to the Unreal Engine is that all the games I played on the Unreal Engine have the same feel to them you don't get any of that charm you get from back in the day when everybody had their own in-house engine.
To me, Starfield kinda cemented something I’d been thinking for a while now - Todd Howard is the single greatest person to sell people on a Bethesda game, and if/when he retires Bethesda is Fucked. Like, we know he’s overhyping whatever it is that Bethesda is trying to sell us on, but he’s the right person for that job, sweet little lies and all. If anyone else at BGS tried to sell us on a Bethesda game, where at this point we know we’re getting a technically outdated sandbox held together by tape and modders, I don’t think it’d work. Hell, Starfield now makes 2 BGS games that ran into the problem of Modders being unable to do their thing (they may have changed that in a Fallout 76 update, idk I don’t follow that game), and I get this sinking feeling they’re just going to try and double and triple down on Paid Mods again come ES6.
Eh it's not so much him being a salesman as it is people legitimately loving older games they made and hoping newer ones will hit the same notes. In my opinion, at least.
He's a clown, I don't know who is actually listening to him on their decision to buy a game, certainly not people who know he lied as far back as TESIV oblivion. I myself wanted to try starfield because of peer hype and modding potential not because of some conman.
Todd, like Phil Spencer for Xbox, is a professional gaslighter. They'll hype up a turd calling it gold. People buy into the personas these people portray whether it's Todd, Phil, or even Kojima.
Well, he's more than just the salesman, he's literally been the lead game designer at Bethesda since the start and he pretty much has the final say on anything and everything that has gone into any of the games. This time he was just out of his depth, but with him, ES6 will at least be as good as Skyrim. Though Bethesda would probably abandon the engine and crumble after he leaves
@@GoodfellasX21I think you're exactly right. Oblivion hit me harder than any other game I've played having never played a game like that before. I really hoped Starfield would bring out that same immersive and atmospheric feeling again, but it doesn't. It sucks. It's boring. And worst of all it feels like it's trying to be immersive but just falls short in every single way.
The problem is that it's not just a technical mess but gameplay, story, and questing are all bad too. People could forgive one but it has so few redeeming qualities. Companions are dull as rocks that don't feel like developed characters with motivation and growth, dialogue is childish and poorly written, the main story is an absolute joke, terrible enemy variety, terrible AI, side quests were mostly dull, can only fly in low orbit in a SPACE GAME...I'll never forget flying around in slow motions towards those stupid flashing lights for like the 5th time my mouth agape in complete disbelief that they thought that was a good idea on paper or in execution and the complete lack of respect for players intelligence to make them do that even once let alone like 10 times, each time exactly the same. Cyberpunk launch disillusioned me but Starfield completely put the nail in the coffin of me ever getting excited for a game before it releases.
To be honest, I didn't find the engine to be the biggest let down in Starfield but rather the writing. I knew what I was getting into in terms of the engine, I knew it would be Skyrim in space. The main source of annoyance there is travel times on planet. But there's no real excuse for the lack of grip in the storyline. The characterisation is very much lacking. To be honest, Bethesda isn't really great at that either, Skyrim and Fallout didn't have characters like the Witcher has or Baldur's Gate 3 or classic sci fi games and media.
I spent about 250h in Starfield doing all the quests I was able to find and it was quite fun. But there is like no point in going back after the handcrafted content is all consumed.
Fallout 4 had a ton of the same problems, but it at least had the interconnected world with decent environmental storytelling connecting the various set pieces that allowed a lot of people to have a pretty good time with it. In Starfield it was like being left with those isolated pieces of mediocrity and nothing to tie them together.
Regarding sample size, i do survey based market research full time so i can comfortably say that while n=90 isnt huge and might not generate statistically significant hypothesis tests, in an expert population like this its enough people to get a directional idea of the trends. So it should be a fairly reliable cross section for the purposes of a non academic video
Bethesda cant say "HURR DURR WE CANT DO IT BECUASE ENGINE"... MF modders have make drivable cars in Fallout NV, Better gun mechanics in Fallout 4, IK, Interactable objects and Active ragdolls in Skyrim VR..... They have also Patched and fixed all Bugs for each game and expanded upon each game... EVEN ENGINE FIXES THAT MAKE IT RUN BETTER. I'm a Indie Dev and if I had Bethesda's budget, man power, and team knowledge... there would be a new fallout in 2-3 years, Set in New Mexico< more endings than New vegas, CO-OP, and I would hire modders to help make the game possible (They are more competent than current Betheda Members).
Starfield cannot be "fixed" because it is not a game, it's a demonstration of CE2. They didn't do a thing in 2-3 years and released this DEMO that was mounted on 3 months and tested 1 more month
One thing that I didn't see anyone mention is the fact that Starfield has the worst color grading I've seen lately, it's literally impossible to have the game use the entire dynamic range of a monitor, both in sdr and hdr, black levels are always ridiculously high, while whites are too dark in sdr and too bright in hdr, a complete mess
Personally I'm sad that CDPR is dropping redEngine, and I think BGS should drop creation engine but replace it with in house tech. The fact that unreal is gaining so much ground sucks for diversity in games. UE4 is the number cause for shader stutter on PC games, and its something they never fixed. So if everyone uses the same engine, then all games will have the same problems, and one big company will have all the money. I applaud the Japanese companies who for the most part are sticking with their in house engines, and the big boys like Bethesda have the money to develop in house tech.
They have the money but what matters is the time. Building a new engine from scratch up to the point that it's ready for a Starfield-level game is a 5-10 year effort. If they started now they might produce a brand new game on it sometime after Fallout 5 comes out.
On the topic of the sandwiches, I think it was a bait and switch. I think they were trying to paint a picture of the game where the Physics were so good that even minute things like sandwiches are subjected to it. But what we got was not what they implied we were going to get. That's a recurring theme, as you mentioned. Anyway Luke, I appreciate your video. I don't often subscribe to streamers these days, but I appreciate your format and your content. And your steaming setup is pretty sweet.
As a game dev, I'd say it's too big and complicated to fix right now. There's just too much, so it would take years to fix for very little reward. But, you could easily go the New Vegas route and make individual games with the engine and mechanics focusing on individual planets. So, start with Starfield: New York Planet, and then just keep putting out new 'planets' until eventually you pretty much have a full solar system of planets that all feel unique and full of life while profiting with every 'planet' sold. As for the main story, it really just needs to be overhauled entirely, which can't happen, but you could hire some RUclipsrs who are very aware of the source material and community's expectations to punch up the dialogue to satisfy the core audience. You could probably have that done in about a month.
They need to replace the engine! That's the only solution, even if it means no games in the near future! They are already significantly behind current industry standards due to this horribly outdated engine, and there's no update that can fix its issues.
I can’t believe the same team that gave us the blood, the guts and the gore of fallout 3. Gave us literally a G for general audiences mature game. And just the huge decline in the writing quality.
Games are much more heavily influenced by internal and external politics nowadays. A lot of games even games like Gears of War now called Gears lost their weight and Intensity. Starfields gunplay is bad because enemies are bullet sponges and there's barely any punch to the weapons.
I don't think engine limitations had anything to do with the state of starfield. What's never talked about is how the movement code and how it feels essentially hasn't changed from morrow wind on. You still have the same janky movement that's 22 years old by now the same goes for the gun play it's essentially fallout 4 and when they released that it wasn't up to par either just less egregious than fallout 3. This is a studio that puts 500 developers to work for 7 years and spends $400M in the process and then the end product has worse game feel than the first person shooter template you can download for free of the unreal store. Realizing that babies first asset flip game in unreal has better game feel than the average Bethesda title should tell you everything you need to know about their "engine limitations" there are no limitations they could get engineers to rework the engine but the studio thinks that using the same player controller from 22 years ago is acceptable and that's why Bethesda hasn't made a decent game in years. It's a mentality problem and the only thing them seem to learn are the wrong lessons they keep dumbing down their RPG mechanics even thought their most popular games feature those more etc.
I thought Starfield was like Star Citizen but with a story line, advanced rpg system, and a higher budget, but my dreams were much bigger than reality.
Star Citizen solved all of the problems Luke mentioned but at the cost of 12 years and a game still in alpha with most of the actual content left to develop.
I really did think no way would Starfield have load screen for flying straight to and landing on a planet after No Man's Sky showed it could be done 7 years ago. Little did I know...
@@ralaxgamingIndeed. The developers behind Star Citizen have been making their own tools to deliver the vision they have on the game, and they refuse to compromise.
I don't like the idea of every game using unreal engine. I like having different engines for games with their own quirks. As dated as the creation engine is, I really enjoy the games that have been made with it. With the exception of Starfield. All the Fallout games are great. 4 has the better gameplay but 3 and New Vegas are great in their own ways. Plus, I loved TES Oblivion. Much more than Skyrim. Oblivion was the first Bethesda game I played and I couldn't get enough of it back in the day. Everyone acts like Skyrim was groundbreaking. It really wasn't. Oblivion had already done everything Skyrim did years before it.
No actual expert on game engine tech would ever claim that loading times have anything to do with physics calculations. You might be mistaking persistence with physics, which would make more sense, but mistaking those two alone means neither you nor your experts are equipped to make any kind guesses about why Creation Engine has the issues it has. It's fine to criticize Bethesda games for the specific technical issues they have, but why make up stuff about things you know nothing about. Why?
Been gaming nearly 40 years (all but the last 9 months on console). I have nearly 400 hours in Starfield and even started over after it broke 200 hours in. Have never played any game more than this one. Truth is, I’m more in love with the idea of the game than the game itself. Lots of really good ideas and I love the genre. I love a lot of the customization but the ultimate lack of depth and significant repetition can’t be ignored. This was my first BGS game. Might move to Fallout 4 or something. Will keep playing off and on but it’s time to just admit that it is what it is. This was a really thoughtful survey and video. Appreciate it.
There are those that disagree but even though my introduction to Fallout was with the original games "way back in the day" i actually like Fallout 4 and keep coming back to it. (Heavily modded of course) The story isn't particularly great. It wouldn't win any graphical beauty contests (even on release day it looked a bit dated) but it's a fun world to inhabit because the world building is all there and exploring the map just by walking from one place to another felt organic and I liked that adventure. I still do, even though I now know that world map like the back of my hand and even know exactly where all the random encounter triggers are... I'll probably continue to revisit Fallout 4. But for me Bethesda seem to have lost touch with what actually makes their games work.
I was going through a divorce when Starfield was released. I was so distraught that I bought the $100 Early access edition because I'm a Bethesda fan and desperately needed the distraction. I can safely say it helped because I was more pissed about Starfield than the divorce.
Savage 💯
damn
I get it, that's how I felt when I bought Cyberpunk.
@@cdmarshall7448 I get it that is how you felt about Cyberpunk at release, I was also severely disappointed then. But after all the fixes, how do you feel about that game now?
I'm just curious, I still did not play it myself but planning to play it probably later this year (after I'm done with BG3, in the very limited time I can spend on actually playing games).
About Cyberpunk 2077, I do hear a lot of positive press about it now but it still did not implement some of the stuff that was hyped up and promised before launch. At least most people now seem to like the game though which is what matters.
And I doubt that Starfield will ever get such a comeback because its problems are not just technical, they are also in the writing and levelling systems etc.
I had the same experience, but a break up of a 5 year long relationship. But luckily I got Baldurs Gate 3 early instead of Starfield😂
Wait a minute. Are you telling me you guys don't enjoy chasing the same three pirates / eclipse / outlaw spacer captain through the same three outposts over and over and over and over .....
*Falls asleep
I quit long before that.
Starfield is a 70 dollar hamster wheel
@@leeloodog I quit within the first few hours
The biggest issue for me with Starfield is a lot of it just feels pointless.
It's fun to build and upgrade your ship, but there's not a lot to do with your ship other than fly from loading screen to loading screen.
There's no shortage of places to explore, but nothing worthwhile to find.
You can build cool outposts to farm resources, but nothing really to do with said resources.
It's a lot of content, but very little of it is inspiring.
EXACTLY! hit the nail on the head. And even other games with big open worlds and exploration and recourse gathering etc suffer from this at a certain point but in Starfield it is in an all time high.
When you ask a gamer to waste time on things and grind etc you have to offer the reward for it otherwise the gamer will feel that he simply wasted time of his life.
Things should be rewarding, especially when they can waste a lot of time.
Why should i gather recourses if those recourses don't allow me to do great stuff with them and smart ways to use them.
Sure building a ship might be fun by itself to a certain point but a reason you are building it is because you want to see it out there doing cool stuff and the way you designed it have an impact.
Is like asking an architect to build a great building, sure he might enjoy designing a cool awesome building but if you tell him afterwards that his amazing creation will be built in the middle of the desert where no human will ever step in it or see it then no matter how enjoyable he thought designing a cool building was he will feel disappointed. The guy probably put a lot of effort in ways his building will be great to live in and now he realises no one is gonna live in anyway.
This. I never got the hype, and will not bother even getting a goty edition, because why? There's nothing. Like I'm sorry, but No Man's Sky getting Rust mechanics doesn't fix the game being pointless. I wants NMS for the mystery and the central story. There isn't one. Just like in Starfield the central story is a nothing burger.
Thx to summarize my exact feelings
You hit the nail on the head
This. For having so many planets that you're supposed to be able to explore, there's not anything that's *actually* exciting to discover and explore. All that initial fun wears off when you realize it's the same thing over and over.
The "sandwich" thing was exciting at the time because of what it implied about the rest of the game. "If they simulate something as dumb as 1000 sandwiches, imagine what that means for the more cool stuff!" Little did we know, the sandwiches were the cool stuff.
It’s not even that cool. Yes, all objects have physics, but they all behave exactly the same, (unless they can roll, naturally). A sandwich and a brick essentially behave identically in a Bethesda game.
Its funny how they hype up the most useless shit that adds nothing to the gameplay. Remember how todd hyped up button panels in FO4? and used it as a way to drive how they cared about details?
Its stupid how we fall for this shit at first thinking its awesome only to find out how little it matters in the grand scheme of things
@@Brumslythank you! Finally somebody gets it.
should have called it "Sandwich Field" then
But "I spawned 1000 cheese wheels in Skyrim" and "I spawned 1000 watermelons on the top of a mountain in Oblivion" have both been viral videos for over a decade, so I'm not even sure what was supposedly novel about it.
I'm a game designer for a AA company and i also teach it, and for me even if you fixed all of the technical issues that starfield has, it has fundamental design problems that make it feel like a chore and not a game. It has some moments of fun but but they're sandwiched between moments of mundanity and just questioning "hey why am i doing this" with a story thats just... meh.
I actually can apply those same feelings and pain points to Dragon's Dogma 2 tbh.
@@lexiconprime7211 DD2 was overhyped and only got attention because journalists and fans lied about it being just as good as Elden ring. It's not even close. I bet a lot of people regret buying it.
@@Vyyc-m9g I'm not a huge fan of Elden Ring, but yes I would agree it's a more engaging experience overall than DD2 is.
Exactly problem with the Bethesda games as of late. They were just garbo designed the bugs, and things just slapped you in the face first.
easy way to "fix" it.., add 3x big DLCs, each bigger than Far Harbor or Nuka World, each with full explorable maps (like Far Habor or Nuka World).., having 3 big new full maps could change a lot..
Starfield feels like a project that you procrastinate on and you have to make extreme compromises and fall flat because of how late you actually started
I had the pleasure of interviewing one of the design leads from Starfield and asked him similar questions. His statement was basically the only way to fix it would be to go back in time and make the game with completely different priorities, including overhauling the entire concept of space travel. It really is not doable.
Then Starfield is done. Diablo 4, on the other hand, is getting reworked and people are starting to enjoy it for real now.
@@viniciusbertucciloot reborn cant come soon enough.
@@viniciusbertuccifallout 76 and 4 was also done. It took yrs of updates and dlc, and ofc mods(4)
Really? What was his / her name?
@@Thepilotepisode It was a work interview, so I won't reveal a specific name in case it can come back negatively on them. I will say it was someone who held high positions on the dev teams for multiple projects at Bethesda, not just on Starfield.
There was a point in Starfield were i realised that all those 1000 planets are actually just shallow mapseeds and there is no map for you to explore. You just get those random spots that have nothing to do with each other. And i was like what the hell, were is the world i can explore. As if i played skyrim because the story was so awesome. It was the world that was so good. And now there is no world.
One of the biggest moments for me was when I found a free Vanguard ship on the moon, just sitting there for the taking right beside where my ship landed. It was right after I just happened to join the Vanguard and thought "hey this is cool, I have a new ship to match my new faction!" I was a bit excited at first, then it really sunk in that what ship I use is completely pointless. I can go to other planets without getting inside it at all, the game doesn't recognize it as being any different than any other ship, and it serves no real purpose in the game at all.
THIS is the singular problem with Starfield. It is lacking a map (or maps) where you are free to stumble into all the little things they have hidden within it. Skyrim works because of it. Fallout works because of it.
I'm sure I saw a video or comment on that the actually seeds are also not fixed, meaning you can go to another planet then back to where you just was and that same spot will now be different because its loaded a new seed. Unless there's a base.
Starfield could have been a much better game if the story had taken place in our solar system. Spreading out quest and exploration across 1000+ planets dilutes the gameplay into something that feels far too empty and troublesome to even bother with IMO
It was obvious before release just saying, Bethesda aren't wizards who make the impossible, possible. In another console generation or so, it might be possible. I enjoyed Starfield for what it was, but the problem with gamers nowadays is creating unrealistic expectations in their heads
This reminds me of that Todd Howard interview a long long time ago around Skyrim's launch where he said something like "the stuff we want to do in elder scrolls 6 requires the industry and tools to make big leaps, so it's gonna be a long ways away." Well, the industry and tools made those big leaps. They happened. The technology exists now to, I would imagine, meet those big dreams they had for ES6. But they're not adopting any of that, they're sticking to the ol' reliable. Why did they wait so long if they were just going to turn their nose at the stuff they were waiting for?
In a NoClip documentary, Todd said there was technology that enabled Starfield now.
I thought he might mean Microsoft Flight Simulator's cloud data streaming stuff.
Now I can't imagine what he was talking about... What, did it take you this long to make Lego spaceships?
its almost like this Todd guy likes to lie right?
@@chadhardt6136 you might be on to something
Because fools constantly give Bethesda money for low effort slop, as long as it has good marketing, then defend their poor choices. You will never get better because your lack of discipline does not merit better. I habe refused to pay Bethesda for anything since Skyrim, (which was also a bad RPG)
@@BigLongRandomNumberNameM-kf9vy I'm fairly certain he was referring to faster storage. If not for SSDs, one can only imagine what the loading times would be in Starfield.
There's barely 2k more people playing Starfield than are playing New Vegas right now. Pretty telling if you ask me.
To compare to one of their more recent games, on steamDB Fallout 4 has 21K players whereas Starfield has 7K.
Not to mention that Fo:NV is a much better game, in pretty much every aspect, and it came out almost 14 years ago.
I was setting up my next Fo4 modlist with this video playing in the background lol
@speedingpullet7400 Gameplay is better in Starfield but as an over game New vegas hands down.
Fallout 76 has 11k lol that says a lot about Star Field
Fallout 76 having more players is the ultimate meme
Missed opportunity to have Todd slowly get closer and closer behind you between cuts
Todd Howard the eldritch horror
@@stevbe1723 yeah each new bethesda game since todd howard appeared became worst and worst in terme of sandbox
hes not getting closer, youre getting closer...he is pulling you in to buy another copy of skyrim 😂😂
I've been heavily modding my Bethesda games since Morrowind, both as a mod consumer and mod author and i what's stuck out for me is that the modding kit Bethesda released is exactly the same as it always has been whereas the kits supplies for other game engines, such as Unreal are constantly updated and offer vastly superior end user convivences.
For example, if you notice you messed up the placement of something you're adding to the game such as a piece of armor in Skyrim you have to add the model, texture, and .esp/.esl files to the games main files then load up the creation kit along side your mod which in turn loads *all* of the games files (which can take a couple of minutes) then find _your_ game files in the creation kit then load up the cell you have the object placed in inside the creation kits render window (something that can take up to a minute depending on the size of the cell) then make the changes you wanted before saving the changes and exiting the creation kit.
*Then* you have to load up the game itself and check to see if the changes you wanted to make actually worked. In some cases you can leave the creation kit running in the background so you can go back and make more changes if need be but 95% of the time if you tab out/down of the creation kit to load your game it will hard crash to the point you have to restart your PC.
So in other words doing something as simple as moving a piece of armor on a table can take up to 30 minutes if everything works correctly and hours if something goes wrong.
With Unreal you can hotkey the dev toolkit in the game itself so if you notice you misplaced something while playing the game you can hit one key which paused the game and brings up the toolkit in the game itself, then you grab the item with the mouse and move it manually. It takes seconds.
As a fellow modder, it's actually worse than this, that USED to be a creation kit feature, but they axed it when it came time to release it for modders. Come Oblivion, the CK the devs used was objectively superior to the ones people like us got their hands on, and for whatever reason Bethesda decided to cut loads of extremely useful features and they kept trimming more and more with each game to the point that New Vegas' GECK doesn't even have debug messages in the message window. It is absolutely criminal how little Bethesda cares about the modding scene that keeps them afloat, and they've always been this way.
@@pcjpeh0f9wh Well, maybe they'll actually learn something this time. When it comes to Bethesda games, it were always the modders who brought them into an actually playable condition and then kept them relevant way, way beyond their shelf life. Now Bethesda decided to kick both modders and gamers into the teeth with their arrogance and it will hurt them dearly.
FFS, modders managed to introduce working cars and motorbikes to Fallout 3 and New Vegas, but SF is so utterly broken and everything that made the game really modable ripped out of its engine apparently, modders who tried this with this game all threw the towel. Can't have players with hooverbikes realising how small your 'planets' actually are, can we, Todd?
I am an older gamer, I have even played Bethesda's ice hockey manager on the Amiga 500 and their (for that time really great) Terminator game and Starfield is the very first Bethesda game ever that I could not even be bothered to finish. Gave up after 60 hours or so, then I got sick of this boring and convoluted mess. Damn, I got the game for free as part of an AMD promo and I _still_ feel ripped off somehow and after the utter disappointment that Fallout 4 was already, I am not seeing me buying and Bethesda games in the foreseeable future.
If the physics of items are so good then they should do more with it. If you grab a dart in a bar and try to throw it at a dart board you will get accused of stealing and aggro the guards. The guards will then proceed to murder you.
i thought they would improve upon morrowind, we should be living an interactive life at this point.
That's a very easy bug to fix regarding object ownership. That's an example of things that can be fixed by a modders using the creation kit (preferably within a community bugfix mod that is just a curated compilation of bugfixes). The creation kit was released in June 2024 -- problem is the GAME was released in Sep 2023. BIG MISTAKE imo.
I like how it's April 2024, and they still haven't even brought the city maps let alone the Creation Kit at all. Those poor guys at r/Starfield are starving.
anyone frequenting reddit in general is a “poor guy” lol
@@SobeCrunkMonster Comments like this makes me cringe
Makes me wonder what they're even doing at Bethesda all day
Especially when games like BG3 and helldivers are just dropping content and patches left and right. It's an embarrassing look for Bethesda.
@@daizenmarcurioReddit moment(?
i genuinely believe they released Starfield as it is because they thought, "i mean modders already fix our buggy-ass games and add entirely new companions and questlines anyway, so why wouldn't they do that for Starfield as well?"
I think Bethesda has leaned on their modding community hard over the years. They've never fixed so much of Skyrim specifically because the community patches exist. Why bother since the community did it.
@@bogatyr2473 It's not just that they don't fix current games, their new releases will have the *exact* same bugs with the *exact* same fix. Bethesda is so lazy that they can't even be bothered to literally copy and paste community made fixes.
The base game has to have enough charm to warrant someone spending a hundred hours making a mod. Oblivion and Skyrim had that kind of charm and people still mod and play those games 13 and 18 years later. Unless they do a major overhaul of the game like cyberpunk did (which also had it's own inherent charm), there's no reason to mod a game that you don't really like playing as is.
I played cyberpunk at launch and even with it's bugs, on pc anyway, the story and characters kept me playing and when they dropped the major update and then the DLC, I came back and played again. I don't think a lot of people are really going to give starfield another try just to play the DLC.
@@scorpion07070 I completely agree and I hope this is the lesson Bethesda takes away from this game. People only mod games they would still enjoy if it didn't have any mods. At least, I hope that's true.
Your assumption on why CDPR switched from RedEngine to Unreal is wrong.
It's not because Unreal is better, its because after the crunch and launch of CP77 they lost most of everyone that knew how to use RedEngine.
The new hires weren't trained on RedEngine, they were trained on Unreal. So if CDPR doesn't want to spend at least a year retraining people to use a proprietary engine, they have to switch to one they already know.
This is interesting. Do you know of somewhere I could learn more about this?
@@kaielwyn it's something that was reported just after the launch of cyberpunk 2077. I don't remember where though.
Gee I wonder why most of them left
I can't believe mistreating employees to the level CDPR did has negative consequences! Next you'll tell me game studios being shut down and everyone who knows how to make games being laid off will negatively affect games too.
That's a very bad sign for the future.
Being able to drop 1000 cheese wheels into the environment and watch them roll down the mountain was hilarious and novel in Oblivion, but it really added nothing to the core experience, and prioritizing physics interactions over fewer loading screens is a really stupid justification. It's obviously not that simple and probably not the primary reason they kept the engine, but come on BGS, pick your battles.
the main reason is the modding capability, that's the short answer, because they want to make money off of the modding scene, and they now have this now, it's just most people don't like that system when in the past it was all free.
but it's not just the thousand static objects, it's the engine can manage thousands more NPC AI packages all at once in real time, no engine that i have even known about use can do this as well as the creation engine.
is the engine perfect? no, is the engine capable of much more? yes and no, it depends on what you are trying to accomplish.
like for example they are capable of doing the hidden load screens which is what they used in FO4 for elevator's, but in starfield they didn't attempt to bother doing this for some reason.
like for example i knew starfield wouldn't really involve actual space travel and that it was going to be a limited box environment game and i knew you wouldn't really fly your ship on any of these planets, why bethesda thought it would be a good idea going this route after figuring out their engine was simply incapable of this? well that's something that i doubt they would really admit to, it's probably an embarrassing reason to be honest, which means they will likely never tell us the real reason.
@@5226-p1e but mods are free, and mods only bring back the people that already bought the game. Noone will buy a game just for a few mods.
The loading screen problem could have been fixed if they simply hide it behind animations THEY ALREADY HAVE IN THE GAME...
There is no need for a loading screen for each elevator, when a loading screen only takes 5 seconds to 10 seconds at most. You could simply add in an elevator ride.
There shouldn't be a loading screen to enter Cydonia (you should be able to enter and wait in an air lock just like every other building in that are generated).
The loading screen problem just doesn't make sense. There should be no loading screens because they literally have the animations needed to hide them.
@@5226-p1e That's a great point about the loading screens. I will agree with Luke that this is pretty much a worst case scenario for the Creation engine. If they had made another TES game with how this engine looks right now and a decent story, I guarantee it would've been universally praised as a solid entry. From what I understand, this was a game Todd wanted to make for a long time and unfortunately he was going to make it regardless of whether production was panning out or not.
@@REDDEADANDGTACLUB
your totally correct on this, hell they did this very thing in FO4, so we know they know how to do it without issue.
it might just come down to laziness at the end of the day, because again they have already proven they know how it's done when they did this very thing in FO4, now that was back when the loading took literal minutes on the vanilla game, it didn't matter you had an SSD or not, it loaded slow as fuck every time.
but now it seems they fixed their slow as ass load screen issue to only a few seconds, well i agree, they could easily get rid of them to make the whole experience feel seamless, they could also make space flight feel somewhat real as well, instead of instantly getting to the destination, i mean it is a space game right, one would expect it to ya know, feel like a space game right?
i know they can't do NMS level of flight, but they can simulate a sort of star trek level of flight in this engine, what the player doesn't see doesn't hurt them, all they got to do is simulate flight out of the player control after the destination has been chosen, and simulate stars passing your ship as it fly's passed objects in space, no load screen no skipping to destination immediately.
for Todd Sake they can easily do the star trek model without issue.
I've described a problem with Starfield as being a Fallout/Elder Scrolls game that's had the things that make those games unique and interesting removed. There's no magic, no "wasteland", no VATS, etc. Starfield needed to have more than vestigial systems to make it stand out and be fun and interesting to play. It needed to do something that really took advantage of being a sci-fi/space setting, or else it would always just be less than their other properties.
But there is the super cool constellation!!!! 🥴
If you take Starfield and remove all the features that were ripped straight from previous BGS games, what is left?
Ship building, ship combat, and slightly reworked lockpicking/speechcraft mini games? That's all (I think)
For a "new" IP there isn't very much new stuff
But it does have space magic… done in a very poor fashion.
star field is nothing like those other games
@@zombieranger3410 that is just straight up a redone version of dragon shouts, down to the fact you have to press RB and LB at the same time to activate them, even has blue bar that has to recharge to use them again like dragon shouts.
It's always a facepalm moment for me when I see someone saying:
"They say Starfield is bad, but name another game that can do that"
And then proceed to show a thousands potatoes aboard their ship...
I could have been impressed by that when I was 8 years old maybe, but you don't have to be that bright to understand that it brings nothing to the actual experience.
It does bring something to the experience.
@@sagearmaggedon7307 😅
@@sagearmaggedon7307 Yea it brings 10 seconds of boring stupidity when I can play another game and get 10 hours of fun stupidity. Try again.
@@LaZd- yet another person who misses the point.
Like you said, just play another game, because you dont like Starfield. The issue with naysayers is they are casting the net of distaste too far and making too big of a deal about a simple concept. Interaction with clutter is apart of what makes their games and has been since at least Morrowind. Dismissing a features existence because you dont like it is foolish. Try again.
@@sagearmaggedon7307 it takes a lot more than just that to make a good game
dev here, that physics issue 100% isn't the problem that comment made it out to be. Theyve already had a mechanism for solving this with cell based world streaming. The world is divided into cells that are streamed in, and the physics objects in the game already have functions for controlling if they're active/ inactive already and are only loaded in dependent on the active cell the playwr is in. It's such a good feature for doing open seamless worlds and efficiently optimizing them that this cell based world structuring was a big selling point of unreal 5. If this was the actual issue that comment made it out to be, Bethesda wouldnt have been able to make every game theyve made since oblivion since they all have giant worlds filled with crap that can simulate physics. Where the engine limitation "seems" to be is that fundamentally the engine has two types of "interor vs exterior" map/ level types and interior zones link to exterior zones and vice versa, but since each planet is an exterior zone comprised of cells wheras interior zones are not comprised of said cells, i imagine that since in starfield youre travelling to any number of "generated" exteriors on any given planet all with their own generated linked interiors, that they fundamentally couldnt make that core element of the engine architecture (which dates back to the Morrowind days) scalable with the generation tech they made to lay on top of that core architecture. If i had to expand the engine used for single world games to work with 100+ worlds, best way i could see to make it work given that core limitation is "you take off : unloads exterior world data and all linked interior -> fly to new planet : loads [stuff] needed to generate exterior cells for that planet -> land on planet : assembles and streams generated exterior and loads stuff needed for interiors matched to generated exterior" ect ect, which is basically how the game already does it
which arguably makes it worse in my eyes because theyd be aware of this issue from day 1 basically. Granted this is an assumption on my end since the tools for star field aren't out yet but still, it seems pretty cut and dry
I've been in IT for over 28 years and I've learned to trust my instincts when I'm picking systems apart from a hypothetical standpoint. There's only so many ways a lot of this stuff can be done and your assumptions are probably not too far off from the reality.
Nice write up my guy appreciate it. Sad to think that even if they fixed the loading screen issue by addressing the fundamental issue you highlight it would still be a boring empty game. One of the greatest disappointments in gaming history.
Even the interior world spaces have a system where you manually have to say what to render from the player pov, so even those cells are not being loaded all the time.
I think you actualy nailed the issue. 10/10.
How are Starfield still relying on loading screens in Neon when entering doors connecting city streets when you can jetpack around them? (above / below buildings). A lot of their loading screens seem forced for no reason.
Todd Howard knows he's a meme.
I heard a story once about him going to a college to give a talk.
OP bumped something and it fell over, and immediately says "damn it Todd!" Just as Todd Howard was walking passed him, he hears him and responded with "really, that's what we're doing now?" And keeps walking.
He knows.
0:33 waiting for Luke to find out I have a cardboard-cutout of him
I bet it has a couple well placed holes.
@@shadowminor the eyes
Don't pretend you wouldn't sleep with a cardboard cut out Tod Howard if you had one 👀
@@bagelbomb1887 it's Todd... TODD....
The lack of Aliens is mind boggling to me. Youre telling you the same company that made the Elder Scrolls games puts out a space game and not only are there no playable alien races but not even any intelligent aliens at all? I just dont understand. Ive thought about that type of game ever since playing Mass Effect and then Bethesda of all makes a space game and theres no playable aliens .... what was even the point?
Think of Morrowind. A genuinely alien landscape in every way with an incredible story and imnovative gameplay for its time, and.... oh, none of the people who made it still work at Bethesda.
To be honest I actually prefer sci-fi without aliens. It at least forces the writers to not just make mono-ethnic superempires and actually have to work to make different political entities without defaulting to "these are the strong aliens so they have the war empire" (...granted, Starfield's factions are the most milquetoast generic sci-fi factions ever but still)
@@curlyfordoge4366 The Foundation series did it well. Rimworld does it well. Bethesda are too greedy, shortsighted and incompetent to ever do it well.
@@curlyfordoge4366 I tend to agree, without aliens allows the SF to be harder. Because as far as we know there are no aliens.
See also: Asimov "Foundation", Herbert "Dune", Reynolds "Revelation Space"
Yeah aliens aren’t real, starfield is a fairly accurate space game tbh. Starfield is far better than most claims too.
Sandwiches: There weren't any. Several streamers at launch tried to replicate the sandwich collection. At launch, one guy spent a whole stream looking, and found one nonphysics sandwich. The sandwich thing was probably a tech demo, and the woman who claimed to play it was lying. Further evidence: Stacking cheese wheels was a meme when physics objects were added to Elder Scrolls. Why would she pretend to replicate an old meme? Versus devs doing a tech demo to show physics objects.
Are you saying there’s no sandwich items? Because there’s a bunch of different sandwiches in game
Bruh you can make them
I didn't care one bit about the technical limitations of Starfield. The loading screens didn't bother me--I have a very fast SSD. The worst part about Starfield is its mediocrity when it comes to quests. Barring a few good ones, most are just a dead weight and their presence doesn't make the game better.
Agreed. That being said, I did enjoy the time spent playing. It is a good game, not a great game.
Same here. So much just seemed so lazily implemented. Between the story/plot, the characters, and a vast majority of the quests you would think they rushed this thing out asap...
which is a shock cuz morrowind and oblivion had some great quests, where did those writers go?
"The constant loading screens didnt bother me because they werent long" is such a hilarious way to think. Bethesda pilled af
Yeah, my main issue is the writing. It feels like they went too safe and ended up with no depth and creativity, “meh” is how I describe it, although there are glimpses of good writing. The whole thing seems to have been written for 10 years old, including cringe/cheesy characters like Barrett and a pirate faction that feels menacing as a kid’s cartoon. My opinion is based on comparisons with other AAA games I played. The maelstrom from Cyberpunk 2077 feel really crazy and menacing, they have gore and behave violently.
"People say our game sucks because of loading screens and empty worlds..."
" But at least that coffee mug in your inventory has real physics"
Uh ..
If it doesn't break when dropped, it doesn't really do the physics very well!
Physics enabled Static meshes isn't really that big of a thing for most engines these days, almost all of em can do it really easily and the fact that its considered one of the main feature of creation engine speaks volume how weak it is.
I make games as hobby in Unreal, and I try to keep most things as physics based as possible. You know how much time it takes to add physics to 100 different props(can add or remove in runtime) in a level ? Less than 10 mins.
And people talks about bethesda's props physics as its some technological breakthrough thats yet to be outmatched 🤣.
i think when they were talking about a object that is in the world could be placed and have the physics applied to it and it will always have these tied to the game no matter where you leave said item is a cool feature, i had a experience related to this the other day i probably should have recorded it.
i was playing FO4 modded, i allied myself with the gangs in Nuka world but i was getting sick of being friends with them so i pursued the kill all raider quest, well what i didn't take into consideration is how i set them up to be allied with me i also had a mod that basically saved me from death and i wanted to see what would happen with that mod so i allowed them to beat me, i was then transported somewhere in the main commonwealth and my quest was to get my stuff back, however because my gang's were allied with the minutemen i know, not lore friendly it was a beautiful moment until i wanted them dead lol, well i found out that every NPC that was a minutemen, including the ones added in by mods that dotted the entire landscape had all of my items in their inventories, thousands of objects scattered in all of their individual inventories and i had to hunt them all down within the commonwealth and Nuka world to get everything back, which involved killing every minutemen squad i had roaming around the entire commonwealth map because this was late game where i had damn nearly every settlement on my side prior to attempting on killing shank in nuka world, i killed thousands and thousands of NPC's that were previously allied with me, and they wanted me dead lol.
it was the best glitch i have ever run into in this game, because it turned my game into a sort of hunting quest where i would hunt the minuteman down, i was having so much fun during this glitch that i didn't save any of my progress and eventually game CTD'd and btw, it's not that this game was tracking all objects, but it was tracking every NPC minutemen on the map in real time, who had my stuff which for some reason was scattered in countless NPC minutemen bodies inventories, so i had to kill all of them to get my shit back and it was fun as hell.
i honestly don't know any game engine that could possibly do something like this event and handle so many damn resources all at once, is the creation engine perfect? no, is it unpredictable as fuck? yes lol, is it or can it be fun? yes absolutely when shit like this happens.
like i honestly don't know of any other game engine that is capable of doing this all in real time like that experience, because it was so crazy and filled with opportunity,
btw before this event the mod that i was using called minutemen squads was handling thousands of minutemen across the landscape and they were essentially all keeping the commonwealth clear to walk through because they were essentially always fighting some animal to robots to raiders to gunners anything within the wealth that could pose a threat to anyone, they were a true army and i know the story says the Brotherhood were big, but i highly doubt they could handle going up against the minutemen in this case as again i had thousands of them roaming the landscape killing everything that came in their path if i was with them or not, the game was doing all of this stuff in real time, not simulated like you might think, it was in real time doing all of this, that was impressive as hell to watch.
@@5226-p1e That's a cool story. And I don't think that the Creation engine is a bad engine per se, I just think it's not the right engine for the game they were trying to create with Starfield.
And besides that, there are many other issues holding the game back, not related to the choice of engine at all.
@@TimvanderLeeuw
i ultimately agree with you on these things. it's just i think it's a bit disingenuous to say that's all the game engine was capable of doing was through the example of the one object in the environment, i partially blame Luke for how he presented the information, because he used a very stupid example of how this interaction takes place in the engine, yes it keeps track of all objects in the world and they all have data that is kept track of via through the physics of the game.
to me this is a very minor thing to point out and a better representation of the same feature of the engine would be to list the interaction i went through in that glitch situation while i played, actually it was more of a conflict with other mods than it was a glitch so all mods were working as intended, but because i did something that was off of the script that the mod authors wouldn't have likely accounted for of how you use these mods, it created this incredibly fun interaction and turned the game into an aliens vs, preditor scenario lol, i guess i was the alien, from a role play aspect you could say i was taken over by a Goa'uld symbiote lol some stargate lore sorry.
I won't easily forget how Luke kept such a level head during all the crazy Starfield hype. I thought he was a bit of a debby downer about the game until I started playing it for a little while and the reality of a second bad Bethesda game finally set in for me. Now I have a heck of a lot of respect for him and will continue to come here to get realistic and based views on games
You nailed the biggest problem without saying what it actually is called "Memory Management." To take out what is needed or not needed on the fly without any perception from a player.
That's practually the lifeblood of computers now a days but is never spoken, both on a hardware and software level.
Paging in a nutshell. Working on a game, and memory management is easy when you blow away whole allocators instead of individual allocations, like in a tree.
Bethesda is a double A studio with a triple A budget, they are aiming over their abilities and its no suprise they keep falling.
I’ve heard them be described as “a triple A studio that thinks it’s a small indie studio”, it’s why they take no responsibility or think they can avoid it “we aren’t a huge studio, we are still learning” (despite being in the industry for 25+ years and apparently learning NOTHING)
@@samuelfawell9159 i dont think they have enough skill or talent to get a triple A chip, thats why they keep biting off more than they can chew and throwing it away when they realize they dont have what it takes to make it work.
My question is why don't they just accept that to themselves and stop trying to make these giant open worlds when even the engine can't handle it anymore? I could actually see them making smaller titles with that engine if they know it's strengths and don't tax tf out of it or even aim for a way less taxing artstyle instead of photo realism when they keep getting memed on for ugly characters
@@alphamuplays1669 starfield honestly astonishes me, their first new IP in 25 years, and they make choices that a indie studio making their first game would know, they regressed from what they have learned in their entire time.
They took aspects of from their previous games and replicated them worse than originally.
Emil was PROUD of not using a design documents, Todd was PROUD of having so much boring content.
Bethesda doesn't understand what made their games good, so they keep clipping off bits of the charm with every release.
My biggest issue with Creation Engine, besides it being really old and limited, is the handling and interaction with the game.
For example, the Fallout franchise. I used to LOVE Fallout, and still do mostly (even though the story of 4 was *horrible*), I'd play Fallout all the time back in the day and got used to the interfacing.
Now and days, after playing newer stuff, going back to Fallout games feels sooo clunky.
I try to go back to Fallout 4, and find I have to reteach myself what each button does, how to bring up Pipboy, etc. Even with Fallout 76; I keep trying to get back into it, and it's a chore figuring out how to draw weapon, then change weapons, then VATS, Pipboy, etc. They're all great systems, but interfacing could be so streamlined and easier to access.
Other games are so easy to go back to, pick them up, and gameplay is fluent and controls are self-explanatory. While again, returning to Bethesda/creation-engine games require an almost 5-10 minute rundown tutorial to recall how everything functions. 🤔
I feel so vindicated that I never bought this game. Used to be a huge Bethesda fan but the despicable atrocity that was Fallout 76, in a single release burned away ALL goodwill that I had for the company. They demonstrated that not only were they willing to release an appallingly broken product, but they were willing to outright lie about it. Screw Todd.
You're right on the money. I wont care about anything from Bethesda til Todd Howard and his fellow old timers are fired or retire.
People are upset that they were lied to about starfield being bad. They're playing the game now
@@Thorn_416 Absolutely. That, or any BGS game has been out for at least 3 months with consistently glowing reviews and is now in the discount bin.
@@UmmerFarooq-wx4yo Once you are an out and out liar, you never get trusted again. I was disgusted by the way people who should know better, were riding the Starfield hype train.
You dodged a bullet, but games now in 2024 are Game Pass quality at best to be fair, too much saturation now, and servers being knocked off so you can't even play them anymore. Retro is now thriving, modern gaming is on it's knees due to the processes and practices these companies have decided to go, reminds me of the 80s crash all over again, could happen once more if things keep going the way they have.
The writing, worldbuilding and characters are something that can't be fixed.
Exactly, worst companions ever ... after 10 hours I wanted to kill them all. The "universe" seemed boring, and the cities seemed smaller than in Skyrim.
@@Whippets Betty Howser is the best, in Heinlein 1, Adrienne Bardeau, she's the only one I could stand with me every time I played as she isn't woke, is proper old school, doesn't judge and let's you be evil if you wish.
The rest are just a bunch of hypocrites, Constipation more like and aren't worth using and just are a general annoyance, it's best to just go with Isolation perk for the damage buffs.
@@RocketRenton Haha, instead of Constellation the group should be called Constipation.
@@RocketRenton "as she isn't woke" - My brother in Christ, I beg you to touch grass and stop trying to inject your culture war BS into gaming discussion.
Yeah, people say stuff like "But Cyberpunk fixed everything?" Ok, but in Cyberpunk, the writing, worldbuilding and characters are already in place, what needed to be fixed was other less important things. Starfield is a much more stable game than Cyberpunk was at launch, but the high school grade writing will never be fixed, it just won't happen.
Here's how to fix physics load when going no loadscreens: Add a boolean that marks items at rest. Then just don't do physics for items at rest. Those thausand sandwiches in your cargo hold only move for a very short time until they just lay around somewhere and don't move until you apply a new impulse to them. There is no excuse for doing physics calculations to items known to be at rest. And all physics calculations have to detect the final state or you get wiggle bugs where stuff just jitters around even though nothing touched it for ages.
Also if an item is far away, it's safe to just fasttrack it's physics calculations to teh final state and flag it as at rest immediately. This could be exploited - but in a singleplayer game nobody cares about exploits. So it'd fine.
Apart from that: Their engine is a dead end. It has been created to run sortof fine on consoles with 0.5 GiB RAM. It likely could be salvaged. But the devs who made it are likely not in the company anymore. And at that point, you can as well just reimplement your game mechanics on Unreal Engine because it's way easier to find devs knowing it.
The absence of radiant ai killed it for me. Npcs just standing forever at the same place. Nothing is happening.
Lure of the Temptress, a 1992 game, had NPCs that would move around and even converse. Had they seen you do something sketchy, they might tell it to other NPC's that they encountered.
Bethesda needs to cut loose all the people bringing the studio's quality down. They can start with the horrid writing.
All their experienced and semi-capable senior devs have already cashed out with the Microsoft aquisition and left. If they purge the company roster any further, they won't have any experienced talent left. Bethesda is a dying studio which can only attract mediocre (aka. woke) talent anymore if at all. And any exceptional developers avoid any explicitly woke company like the plague. It's over.
Not gonna happen. For some God forsaken reason, Bitchthesda has no writting team, writting is let to quest designers, who are lead by Emil, who's a close friend of Todd, so Hodd Toward will never fire him, no matter how many times he shits the bed
Bruh, just like starfield , the people bringing the studio's quality down is core to the company 🤣🤣.Cannot be fixed
Its a scam company disguised as a AAA studio.
Now that we know everything abut starfield just go and watch the "Starfield Direct" video again, you will realize just how shameless they are.
They need to bring in programmers or just switch engines but thats another ordeal of getting people accustomed to another engine
@@chilbiyito They don't want to switch engines because both their devs and the modders are accustomed to working with Creation Engine for decades now.
It's practically Bethesda's exclusive inhouse engine and switching engines would mean both significant effort and cost upfront.
Besides, few engines are (or rather were) more modder friendly than Creation Engine and Bethesda completely relies on modders to finish their games and give them longevity.
So instead they opted to update and improve the engine, like they have done for two decades now. But you can only put so much makeup on an old workhorse.
The core design issue at the root of all other issues is the lack of free roaming in space.
The challenge of doing a classic bethesda in space (what people wanted) is the same as usual: allowing the player to explore the world (the quests themselves, while being servicable, having never been the strong suit of the company, and here are really subpart, in particular the companions and characters themselves).
I have heard some people saying that there should have been less planets, but that is not the issue. Even one planet, or just one continent, or just the superficy of one real world nation would have been too much anyway.
To make exploration feel good, you need handcrafted content at regular interval. Which actually could have been obtained; while in a fantasy setting the character is on foot, hence some nice handcrafted content must happen every few hundred meters, in a space game, your spaceship can go very fast, so you can find hancrafted content separated from millions of kilometers; only 2 or 3 handcrafted contents per planet for example, that the player would detect thanks to its radars, coms etc... then visit them on foot.
The presence of generated landscapes is not the issue, if the generated content is only the background; just like the grass and trees in Skyrim are background.
The issue is because exploration is done on foot, thequantity of necessary content is so high that they need to use prefab dungeons, which suck.
There is nothing to do for this game. The only intelligence thing to do is to abandon ship, and start over with a new game.
The main problem was using procedural generated planets instead of 10 detailed planets about the same or 1/2 the size Skyrim map. We would have 2-3 Earth like planets with different variations to each. Probably one that was more forested another that had more oceans and another that was more urbanized. A couple winter like planets, a couple of desert like planets. And 2-3 planets that resemble Jupiter and Saturn. Then they could focus on writing intriguing npc’s and quest revolving around those planets. That alone could add 30+ hours along with the main storyline.
I wouldn't care so much about the procedurally generated planets, if the bases you ended up at WERE! Nothing quite like raiding the same base, 12 times on 12 different planets...down to the same datapad entries, and magazines on desks.
I completely agree
There is no fixing that mess. What they gonna do? Rewrite all the terrible dialogue? Fill up all the empty planets? Every system is broken from the ground up.
They gonna leave that up to the modders and move on to the next project.
And most veteran modders won't even touch this hot mess with a ten foot pole. Knowing full well it's not even worth the effort because the substance just isn't there. And neither is the player base to actually use and appreciate good mods.
@@axelhopfinger533 Nexus even banned a mod for removing the gender ideology stuff
@@mcmarkmarkson7115 Yeah and i outright refuse to even touch the game without such mods. Because any vision of humanity's future that diverse and progressive is simply a dystopian nightmare. And not of the entertaining kind.
Yes, obviously fixing a game into working as intended doesn't help much if that working state was bad from the beginning.
@@axelhopfinger533 Fash, go visit the Barbara pit for about 1 eternity
As consumers I think we simply have so many options with long open world games, that the risk of playing a known buggy game with tons of loading screens is painful enough to switch to other competing games without these issues. Especially given the time sink, why would I commit myself to something like Starfield when I can start a more fulfilling journey? First impressions are everything and I think they dropped the ball HARD.
Honestly, its the loading screens for me that killed it. Everything else I can deal with but the loading screens make it impossible to deal with.
I would take a handcrafted open world over no loading screens, regardless starfield needed BOTH as a game that released in 2023 under the MOST VALUABLE COMPANY IN THE WORLD
People defended it by saying use an ssd...but it is still bad its just less bad than an hdd lol
the glory of the gamebryo engine only using cells to load the world
but most of those loading screens are lit like 3 seconds. i never viewed it as a big problem like everyone here does.
@@EastyyBlogspot yepp, especially since the game loads even when it doesn!t have to. Instead of taking the elevator, wich grants you a loading screen, you can just jump down sometimes WITHOUT it. So why is it there in the first place???
People would be more willing to overlook the technical shortcomings if the game had a compelling story and interesting characters, sadly it has neither.
This. I played Starfield at launch. By hour 20 I was already putting it down to go play other things saying "ill come back later". I did, built an outpost, realized how useless it was and said f it uninstall time.
Tale as old as time
People will put up with a lot of jank and crap as long as it has good overall storytelling and such is good, even in cases where the gameplay is that met (drakengard comes to mind)
Yeeep, as much as I had a problem with the loading screens, weak exploration, and shit AI, I could deal with all of it, but the writing for some of the quest lines (specifically Ryugen) was so mind numbingly boring I couldn't force myself to play it anymore, uninstalled and have no intentions of going back
I think the best videos out there that really highlight this are the ones comparing Starfield to Cyberpunk 2077. It's not even a competition. Starfield is just... uhg... it's simultaneously hilarious and sad to see Bethesda's new baby get absolutely clowned on by an old game that many people hated on release.
@@keystrix3704 Agreed! And CDPR has had a stroke of master level genius with Phantom Liberty. There are certain moments in there... well spoiling it should be heresy and punishable by the inquisition.
16:00 I mean fair but also who’s fault is that? It’s Bethesdas. It’s hard to empathize with them when they consistently make incompetent decisions
The bland lore and world building are my biggest issues with the game, which can't be fixed
DLC can fix some of it
@@ZombieGangsterin this case DLC would be putting patches over a rotting foundation, without actually addressing the rot.
@@ZombieGangster Bethesda already has a bad track record with retcons, none of which are any good.
They set up a universe trife with mech/xeno warfare, large scale ship battles, and land disputes just to then place the game however many years after all that has ended and everything has cooled off. The Fallout universe did the same thing, except what came after was MORE interesting than what came before.
@@MaleficMurph They can always go back to that era with some random multiverse DLC lol that had a drivable car in that recent video they made so maybe they could make mech suits and large ship battles again?
8:25 I tried to use this feature to decorate my home in Akila and outposts. I figured that if I couldn’t decorate much with the literal building decorations(because it lacks mush of those) then I could at least pick up cool items around the world and put them on my shelves and tables for display. I did this and every time I left my home and came back, the items were offset and half sunk into the furniture…
Ragdoll physics, even one of the missions on The Key at one point before they patched it made the character sink into the ground, and it warped everywhere, again they go on step forwards, two steps backwards with these patches.
Had the same issue. Then went back to play FO3 and FO New Vegas and realized those same sinking on shelves issues are in those older games as well. Bethesda has had this problem in it's Creation Engine since Fallout 3. And they have never fixed or resolved it.
I'm an amateur writer currently working on a LitRPG series... I'm backlogging chapters currently, only like 20k words into it - Anyways, the premise of the book heavily revolves around shitty gaming practices, and blaming Todd Howard for "starting it all with that damn golden armor" is in the outline. Two characters, one named Todd and the other named Howard, and they're gonna get a nice big ranty monologue directed at them lol
If the project finds some success, some of the funds are definitely going towards a carboard cut-out of him for the background of my own vids about it
This channel is keeping Starfield alive. Without it we'd all have forgotten about it already.
because its "content", it makes him money and people keep clicking it. welcome to modern internet. its a stinking pile of sh*t.
@@cyborgchimpy r/Starfield users detected
@@cyborgchimpy "a stinking pile of sh*t", like most AAA games nowadays.
@@s3nate22 eh? me? not even close. I never bought this game or have a sub to gamepass or anything. I watch a video or 2 about it on youtube and thats it.
if you have more than half your brain left you could see this disaster coming from the moment they announced it. but unfortunately most people have less than half a brain.
@@Mr.MasterOfTheMonsters unfortunately yes.
I miss the days that games weren't technological marvels and money machines and were just created by a bunch of nerds with a passion. now the focus is maximising profit.
Please everybody understand. This is the most important thing to remember…Bethesda ACTUALLY thinks they did a good job on Starfield. They will NEVER change.
They did do a good job in my book. I would have liked some things to be different, but I got over myself. People should try it, it’s liberating.
@@sagearmaggedon7307 they did the best job they would with an engine that was used to make morrowind
cause that's all that engine is when you get down to it
its a 3 decade old engine that desperately needs to get a proper new version not another "its the same thing with 5 new things bolted to the side of it"
@@theirishviking9278 Unreal engine 5 was built on 4 different iterations over decades. Larian has been using the divinity engine for a very long time too. If people have a problem with starfield, its Bethesda and or the players themselves that are the problem, not the creation engine. Bethesda wanted to make this game, so they used an engine that is suited for it. Bethesda wanted to make an indiana jones game, but they dont have an engine that is suited for it, so they went to Machine Games. They know what they are doing.
So 95% of the devs this guy talked to who said "this game can't be fixed because the engine is an insurmountable problem" are wrong, according to you?
A game engine is just another tool in the toolbox, and Creation was the wrong tool for this particular job.
@@CiaphasKirby You cant fix what isnt broken. The game is not marred with technical issues, the “problems “ with the game were decided upon by the developers and implemented by choice. The loading screens have nothing to do with the engine. It was Bethesdas decision to make a bethesda game in space, a clash of “appropriate” design philosophy. The engine seems like an insurmountable problem, from the perspective of people that are comparing Starfield to other games. People who want seemless transitions from planet to space, and so forth.
In laymans terms: if you want starfield to be more like no mans sky, cyberpunk, etc, then the engine is an issue because it doesnt do those things.
The thing about the creation engine is that despite Starfield being the most stable Bethesda release to date.... which is not saying much, we're still seeing *MORROWIND* bugs. I honestly don't know if these are inherent problem with the version of Gamebryo they were using or if Bethesda programmers are so incompetent that they cant deal with 20 year old bugs (that the community have fixed several times in a row). I starts becoming irrefutable that there has to be SOMETHING wrong with this engine. I think its widely agreed that Starfield was not the kind of game Creation Engine was built for and is a bad showcase of it, but when the company that has been using this engine for over 2 decades now still hasnt mastered it its probably time to call it quits.
Truly the most Bethesda game of all time
It feels like this flew over people's head far too much. I mean what did people expect. It is Bethesda being Bethesda and making a Bethesda game.
@@Xsetsu I kept telling my friends it wasn't going to be good. They were shocked when it turned out I was correct. Just go play Morrowind if you want a good Bethesda game.
Indeed
If the rpg aspect was phenomenal the technical issues wouldnt be a problem. If the moment to moment gameplay was phenomenal a crappy story could be overlooked.
Starfield suffers in all areas. It cannot be fixed.
This exactly. Oblivions RPG aspect was enough to make me overlook its technical issues. Skyrims gameplay was enough to make me overlook its crappy story. Starfield offers nothing to overlook its flaws with.
It cant be fixed because its not broken. The only thing broken is the people clinging to their ideal of what good or perfect is and complaining that Starfield doesnt meet the expectations. All people need to do is treat this game like any other game they dont like, and go play something else. Problem solved.
@@sagearmaggedon7307 no... it's pretty broken. There's just no accounting for bad taste.
@@ralphengland8559 The only thing bad here is people saying that others have “bad taste” for liking the game and being able to see value in it, and then perpetually wasting their time on a game that is apparently bad. People in these comments sections might as well be playing starfield, the way they flock here every time somebody makes one of these videos when they decide they need some views. I had more game breaking bugs and bugs in general playing BG3, guess that game was broken too.
@@sagearmaggedon7307 BG3 was broken as shit but the sheep wont mention it
Honestly, even if they could fix 100% of the technical issues, the lackluster story, mission design, and emergent storytelling make me question if it would even be worth trying to fix it. Then it would just be a well-optimized mediocre game
Those 3 that rated Bethesda and the Creation Engine a 10 must work there.
I thought a similar thing. When I saw that I just thought anything those people have to say can be completely ignored. They're delusional or something.
If you only mod on a single instance and never up or downgrade it's suprisingly fun. Not sure it's a 10 since they all have features that are unfixable since broken mods rely on those bugs and fixing them kicks the can along the road. Play around them though and it's maybe a 10 if you've either stayed on Skyrim or OpenMW. Both are equally versitile if only Skyrim didn't handle script layers like hell and OpenMW hand AI package compatibility.
@@inybisinsulate A rating of 10/10 is supposed to mean perfection in it's purpose. The Creation Engine is not all perfect. Lets take one example like its strength of being moddable. The Creation Engine still has unnecessary limitations on modability that doesn't serve newer hardware today. Like the 255 esp/esm limit that is still present. I can take a game like RimWorld and load up 1000s of individual mods without doing any hacky workaround to work with the engine's limitations like merging or defining restrictive esl plugins.
@@MqKeezy While fair, the counter point to that is most game engines aren't moddable. There's a reason Skyrim and Fallout New Vegas are two of the most modded games in history, and that's because they were easy to mod from almost the start.
Unreal Engine might be ubiquitous in gaming nowadays but very few Unreal games actually are moddable (at least with any degree of depth. Not talking ini config changes or making new skins)
@@pacmonster066 Well we cant really use that point either, because if we were to use an engine's modability as a plus for remaining point(s) to be a 10/10 engine, then we subsequently must lower ratings of a lot of other engines for not being as modable. We can also look at the Creation Engine's glaring weaknesses at face value from Starfield and it should be no question that this engine is not the perfect engine even when you factor in its modability.
The individual physical objects are nice in theory, but Bethesda never really managed to do anything interesting with them. That's the problem. It's like insisting you need to have a swimming pool in your car but nobody ever uses it.
Yeah. Bethesda games scream out for the kind of things you can do in Arkane's games (like stick a trap to an object and then throw the object), but they've never taken that step. All the physics objects are cool but they rarely add much beyond comedy value when they freak out.
The non-physics nature of Morrowind actually made it easier to place items where you wanted and keep them there. Who needs to find a "safe" chest to keep all your stuff in when you can just spread it out all over the floor of the guild hall?
@@-tera-3345no kidding. In Morrowind you can actually decorate your house without dealing with the aftermath of an earthquake whenever you reenter the cell.
To me it seems that Bethesda, nowadays a big company under scrutiny by investors, has chosen an extremely conservative route when making this game, playing as safe as possible, probably making all their decisions by comitee. As a result, this game is the same kind of soulless mess as for example the new star wars trilogy.
They really have not tried to inovate in any way, reusing the very same ropes they used in their previous games:
For example, the dialog camera is the same Oblivion used in 2006.
An other example, the laser gun looks like the Fallout4 laser gun (they also copy terms from their previous games, for example callind drugs "chems" like in fallout).
They even have regressed, multiplying the loading screens compared to their previous products.
This can also be seen in the quests, companions and dialogs; They have played as safe and bland as possible.
The universe itself looks like it has been made by a comitee, just grabbing from everywhere anything that looked cool and pushing it into the game into an incoherent mess. Hence we end up with an inconsistent universe first trying to be "NASApunk" (with the city on Mars being at least consistent here), but also with a high tech futuristic city, a firefly cowboy city, and a cyberpunk city.
An other example is the nightclub in said cyberpunk city. Or more precisely, the exotic dancers in the nightclub. I am sure someone wanted to do something a bit spicy, but the PC police replaced the exotic dancers by dudes wearing ridiculous spantex alien costumes.
And BTW in this city a drug is supposed to do some ravages, but where are the addicts sleeping in the street and what not?...
There was once a Mythbusters episode where they figured out that, if you had the proper equipment, a high tolerance for disgust, and a low standard for luminosity, you could in fact polish certain species' fecal matter.
Anyone hoping to "fix Starfield" should go rewatch that ep with notepad in hand, because that's pretty much what they're attempting to do.
One of the biggest problems is that Starfield’s design itself is broken. They tried to force NASApunk and explorable open world RPG mechanics together and it made a giant steaming heap of shit. Nasapunk kind of thrives on being on rails to some degree. The universe is beautiful and you can get that across if the player is somewhat restricted in what they can explore. Lone Echo is a great example of that. The problem is they wanted Skyrim or Fallout without a wacky enough, engaging world to actually explore. Instead of making dense, curiosity sparking landscapes like with their previous games, they made barren unengaging wastelands then made excuses about how many planets they put in the game. Hell, they didn’t even allow actual space exploration like No Man’s Sky did. They chose two designs in the NASApunk style, and the open world RPG genre and didn’t realize they didn’t have the incredible genius and absurd work requirement it would take to make those beneficial to each other instead of clashing. It all resulted in an unfinished, empty, boring experience that leaves EVERYTHING to be desired. Can the game be improved? Yeah. Can it be fixed? No. It’s far too late to abandon either of those design choices, and its not just the gameplay that’s broken but the entire design of the game.
Or, you could just roll it in glitter.
Bethesda just keeps lying. From "it just works" to the lie that starfield would answer humanity's deepest questions, Bethesda has a MAJOR issue. They may need to rethink who leads this company.
It's called advertising and people are still dumb enough to fall for it.
@NPK476 yea but it's more than just advertising with Bethesda. It's straight up lies.
No, no. We are just picking and choosing which adverts are worse than others. Cherry picking problems with the game that we dont like. Most games arent to the T accurate with their adverts.
@@sagearmaggedon7307 lol ok
@@House_of_Schmidt 😁
Been writing software for nearly 40 years. Starfield absolutely can be fixed if ...
Heavy duty rewrite of the AI
Rewrite the dialogue and provide more quest options.
Massive performance overhaul of the engine.
It's all software. Of course it can be rewritten. Look at the list above, which is far from a complete list. That is some seriously heavy lifting. Does anybody really believe it's going to happen?
The loading screen issue could've been fixed with smoke and mirrors. Simply make traveling an interactive loading screen that doesn't unload the aircraft. The menus could've been integrated into the ship. In the load screen, the world origin can be reset, physics objects can be unloaded and reloaded.
This isn't a solution for interiors however, and full culling of navigation, physics and rendering is only really ever possible with fully static environments.
It’s REAL simple boys. To me, the big problem with starfield is the factions, quests and random encounters. Compared to previous Bethesda games this doesn’t even compare. Quests aren’t as immersive or engaging; writing is less than I’d hope for it to be and I have a perfect example. Relating to random encounters, there just isn’t significant encounters that link to quests or environmental storytelling. I remember going to a planet and hearing enemies talking about an interesting storyline, wanting to see more of this I followed the encounter and finished it. Thought ok cool, went to another planet and ran into the same random encounter with EXACT same writing. That’s when I was done and hopped back into cyberpunk and older Bethesda games xD
I wanna say more about this. Another thing they just didn’t have well is exploring to find quests. I really loved in fallout or elder scrolls where you could just get lost exploring find someone’s little house and perhaps they have a whole quest line associated with them that you wouldn’t of found out unless you explored. Starfield does not have this, and when it does, the quests are horrible, like finding a random guy comic books throughout the galaxy. The content is just too shallow. Remember killing greltle the kind and then getting an invitation to db. Or in fallout finding the cabbot house and seeing that whole quest line which even has a random encounter associated with it. Starfield just has none of this.😢
Even the Ships have been nerfed or bugged out, you got 2 land every time on a moon or planet, now you see none, and now see people trying to make workarounds for an issue that wasn't there, but it because of the way they are handling the patch process, which by the looks of it isn't being done at all with an QA in mind, and you get more bugs, ones fixed then return and new ones. It's just an never ending nightmare from patch to patch to see what will happen with your character, even NG+ doesn't fix the issues at hand, being on Xbox as well with no console commands also puts a spanner in the works. It's reminding me of Warzone all the time and all the issues and ones still in the game 2 years on that haven't been patched and are still there.
@@RocketRenton that is horrible to hear.. especially given how cool the ship building was. These companies leaving broken mechanics in their game needs to stop. It’s especially sad because starfield could’ve been great.
As far as random space encounters I came across the same ecounter 5 times in short time frame.
@@Ronuk1996 damn bro.. that’s so sad😭 they really dropped the ball on random encounters and glad other people feel the same way
I think the best summary of Starfield was "At its core, it's just not that enjoyable of a game"
Most of the problems you listed at the beginning aren't part of the problems I had. My problems were all related to the story (boring), side quests (mostly boring) and characters (predictable and boring). They would have to throw all that out and get better writers and character designers.
Yea, but all these issues come from a rotten core that is related to the game's engine which directly effects the overall game design. The problem is and has always been the outdated engine.
Fallout New Vegas used the same engine as Fallout 3, yet it's story, writing, and world building was leagues above Fallout 3 in terms of quality. Yeah the engine is still terrible, but a good enough writer/quest designer can work around that to make something truly entertaining
I found what you listed too, but I also found pretty interesting characters and conflicts, for example I tried to play one more time sticking to one side character this time been Sarah, I found her your type annoying character, super clear moral compass driven by making good, a model citizen etc., but the more time I spent with her I found her very complex, she has some real conflicts, for example her perfeccionism leading her to make bad desicions for other, her resentment with MAST and even her mission and place in constellation been flawed trough this things, I predicted her to be boring but she is not and really changed my mind, I then tried to invest in some of the side quests, and I found the same they had a lot more depth when I tried to ignore since of the flaws. Since side quests introduce you to very interesting moments like the loop time quest or the computer AI in charge of a place, or the fleet of humans in Paradiso that have spent centuries traveling not knowing the humans had conquered the known space.
This is really difficult to find due to immersion been broke every time I have to wait for a loading screen or just go to map and jump from one place to another instead of traveling to one place to another. This little things made fallout great, you got to travel to a new place and maybe find si many things and new quests or factions that makes the experience of a playthrough unique, the snapping to one place to another breaks this totally.
Another thing is that the different places don't feel they have a connection, yeah the different factions time over this place, but the main quest don't explore this, some side quests do like for example joining the UC vanguards and the terror morphs conflicts but the main quest ignores this completely. They could use so much more the connection through all the factions in the main quest line to make more sense than only "on the past we had a great conflict and now humanity is divided" And it still exists into the game but very very very very hidden from most of players. I think the traveling trough space could be fixed by making a screen like fallout 1 with random encounters, you might not be driving all the way through space but just watching a loading screen but a ship traveling trough it could be more interesting and aliviate the loading times. Also making some places nearer each other could have fixed this a lot. Developing more the outskirts of a few places that can lead you to find even more lore and more verticality for the places... But it's just done ideas. Fallout4 did a worse job in this sense, options to resolve quests are near 0 and most quests are going to solve place to retrieve some thing or someone. But the world felt as 1 and conflicts were inevitable. Hope the creation kit give the modders time and desire to address all of this, because this game has a lot of potencial in it.
You either leave the game development industry a hero, or stay long enough to become a meme.
Unless you're id software
Lord British is OFFENDED lol
@@StrengthScholar0 Carmack is a meme after his time at Facebook though
Todd's a meme because he lies and overhypes what turn out to be mediocre or outright bad games, he deserves to be ridiculed for that
remember that clip of Squidward when he gets to the squid town and he goes through his daily life over and over while slowly getting more bored and depressed?
thats Starfield
Oh god that and this playing this game is quickly become depressing at this point
It can't be fixed without a complete rewrite.
Add maps, lose loading screens, whatever. If the characters and story are mind numbingly dull you've fixed nothing.
Yeah, especially in a game attempting to call itself an RPG.
In fairness, Fallout 4 can be made pretty fun while also having abysmal storytelling. The basic world design in Starfield really is the worst part.
@@ModuliOfRiemannSurfaces F4 at least had SOME good dialogue, even if the options weren't great. And they had some interesting characters as well. Not to mention the world was fun to explore. Base building was a lot more important, and clunky as it was, I had more fun.
Nothing is fun in starfield, absolutely nothing. Not even the "improved" combat.
@@mcmarkmarkson7115
Yeah I think we’re mostly in agreement. I just didn’t really like *any* of the FO4 storytelling with the exception of a couple small characters like Danse, Cait, etc
Yep, in the previous games they had Lore writers that helped bring cohension to their games. As far as I know they had no Lore writers to tie the universe of Starfield together.
I gave this game a 6/10 and the fans accused me of "obvious trolling".
I was called a liar and a Sony pony, I had to post my steam refund to show people, no I am not lying. And no $169.95 AUD wasn't a lie either 😑
@@Pickle_Maniac a big chunk of bethesda fanboys are now just xbox fanboys, and they'll even sell their mums to defend the game
I’d say 5/10 at best. It’s not Fallout 76 levels of bad, but it’s just boring.
You were generous. I stopped playing after 10 hours where 9.5 hours was pure boredom. Not even worth being free on game pass, because it still costs my life time. 4/10 at best. If you ask me to tell you name of any memorable NPC character after 10 hours of playing, I dont know. Most of these 10 hours I was running on Mars from mining facility at bottom to some office on top floor and surface. Was running Mars staits up and down maybe 40 times, going through 120 loading screens. After finishing Mars quest chain, I wad exhausted of this game and stopped playing. Probably worst gane design in AAA game in last 10 years or so.
Is it really even a phenomenon? BGS have been a disappointment as a studio for well over a decade now, and with the state of AAA gaming being the way it is, the entire gaming community is used to being let down at this point. Had this happened in 2014? Yeah, maybe then it's a true phenomenon. But, happening now? They're just the latest in a long line. The only thing that could save this game is an admittance to being wrong and a full scale overhaul a la Cyberpunk 2077, and those are two things that will never happen. If you continue to rely on your own customers to fix the problems of the products you release, there will eventually come a time where either that community cannot do the trick or *will* not do the trick. And keep a fucking design document, whoever replaces Emil as the lead designer on Elder Scrolls VI. The stupidity behind that decision is staggering.
As a developer of 40+ years I can honestly say that all the myriad of technical issues *are* the paper cuts. With my game master's hat on I see the missing limb as the lack of world-building, basic game design, quests, characters and the shoddy dialog as the real issue with Starfield. It could be as pretty as Phantom Liberty and it *still* wouldn't be worth the time to play as there nothing makes sense and there are zero consequences to the player's choices (inevitable for "groundhog day in space"). In short for an RPG there is no "game" (it kinda works as an FPS, sort of, and a walking simulator, sort of). I clocked up hundreds of hours (waiting for dinner to cook) on my housemate's game-pass account, and I still felt short changed. There is no exploration when everywhere is explored and abandoned already.
I'd go a step further; It wasn't just held back by its design, but by a team that has little to no desire to break out of their outdated comfort zone. Bethesda come across as a studio entirely comprised of one-trick ponies for the past 10-15 years. It is their mentality that everything they do is golden regardless that leads to this kind of stagnation and being happy with such inadequate tools. It's the gaming equivalent of when Intel sat on quad-core CPUs for as long as humanly possible.
Agreed, as gone back to Skyrim, and ESO before Starfield came along, and it hasn't evolved at all in terms of quests etc.
Creation Engine wasn't the way to go either, the bugs Starfield has will take a lifetime to fix, and they just keep adding more in as they patch using Steam Beta testers which isn't the way to go as Xbox then gets hit hardest with the changes and can't cope resulting in characters lost like I have done in the past 6 months.
Yup for me it really shines in their quest design. Skyrim and fallout don’t have space ships, they don’t have insane tech that can transport you across the stars so going to a person and getting a quest makes sense in those games. In starfield it makes no sense at all, have that shit be a phone call kinda like CP2077, I should not have to talk to commander whoever, get in my personal space ship travel across a galaxy do the quest than have to return to commander dumb shit to progress a quest line. It just shows they’re stagnant in game design and they don’t care to innovate. I also love the fanboys who tried to claim “well in game they give you a lore reason so stop complaining.” Bro I am a full time worker going to online college mofucker I don’t have time to jump around a galaxy just to progress a quest one stage to then leave again and repeat.
Having hundreds of sandwiches in your ship is cool, I agree. The problem is, it's only cool once or twice. It's not some great feature people are asking for
ultimately the issue is down to the creation engine. Much of the code is legacy and has been a Frankenstein engine since its conception. It was an issue back in fallout 76, fallout 4, etc. It was at its peak during Skyrim ages ago but even then was showing its limitations. Bethesda does not want to change to a different engine or to build a new engine as it is cheaper to keep using the creation engine even if it barely working. just my 2 cents
My 2 cents is that game development has seasonse. Its really hard to keep reinventing the wheel. It's for this reason Mark my words that gta 6 will be Rockstars last great game. Its impossible to keep outdoing yourself to satisfy the gaming crowd through the years. But I stand to be corrected.
Bethesda had its time. Skyrim. Oblivion. FO3. FO4. So will rockstar.
But you can tell me of a studio that has been rocking gamers again and again and again AND AGAIN
consistently over the past 20 years. They all come n go: nintendo, valve, capcom, ubisoft, naughty dog they all HIT BIG them fans just get tired of the formula that won em over.
@@lonewulfmo9128 It's more to do with the corporate structure of finances. Once you grow big you start playing safe and make financially conservative decisions, a game had success 15 years ago? Well you're going to make it exactly the same with a slap of new paint, that might work with movies but it doesn't work with video games.
It was my one hope them getting absorbed by Microsoft Phil would've put the hammer down on them and forced them to ditch the tech and move to either unity or unreal 4/5. I'm convinced it's not gonna happen now so all I'm hoping for now is obsidian gets fallout back and gives us a REAL successor to new vegas
@@akatsukicloak I hear you...
@@AlphaladZXA that's an interesting view because unreal 5 apparently looks beautiful but too taxing to run beautiful graphics at 60fps + on current gen. Your not the first I've heard speak highly of new vegas, gonna give it a peak.
Entity Persistence is almost _never_ worth it, it makes for a some cool gimmicks, but in the long run it really hurts the game. Star Citizen introduced the same issue with their PES system and within days were working on culling persistent entities.
You just don't need to persist an empty bottle a player drops in the woods if it hurts the rest of the game.
So I’m a developer but not game dev so I have a question. Are they persisting the state of all physical game entities to disk?
@@DevNug yes. That's why the dev mentions the load times, it needs to load all the items onto a level.
I don't know all the details of how SF does it, but because you can fly to any planet at random it would need to pull it from disk most times, although if you left a planet then returned to it immediately hopefully it'll still be in memory but I have no idea.
This has been a problem in gaming forever, I remember coding text based MUDs in College in the 1990s and we added "slime monsters" that would roam around consuming items players didn't loot from mobs, because having too many objects would cause massive lag. This was our in-universe PE Culling system.
Even modern games like WoW do this, instead they just put a timer on a corpse, and they'll despawn after a set length of time destroying all items (although some items will be mailed to you).
Tracking 5,000 wheels of cheese between visits to an area, not to mention all the other items that are there is intensive.
The juice is rarely worth the squeeze when it comes to PES.
but it worked in star citizen star citizen
@@vairoalexnder no, it doesn't at all. They added aggressive culling within days. There is no real persistence in their persistence entity system.
They're trying to throw more and more server virtual hardware at the problem, something a game like SF can't do because they need to run on consoles or an individual PC. The combination of static meshing and PES is a massive cost sink on the back end in a game still in Alpha after spending 700M on development. If you think it "works" you are sadly mistaken.
@@andrewshandle IKR, I remember when all the hangar areas just about anywhere you went were clogged with debris. There were many times I had to 'thread the needle' just to get my ship out of the hangar without blowing up...
I really hate when people say "it can't be fixed" ok i get that usually means "its takes too much effort to redo" but no there are ways to fix these things and the fact you guys cant see it means you really are a part of the problem in modern game design.
What is bad or unsatisfactory about starfield? One thing is Loading screens, ok. how do we solve that.
How about making loading screens between solar systems look like your travelling through hyperspace/ at the speed of light. Whether you like it or not, it effectively solves that problem, it would be boring regardless travelling that far unless it could be interrupted or something by pirates.
For landing on a planet, first make it so ships travel much faster or conserve their momentum so you can travel to the atmosphere much quicker. It would know where your trying to land by raycast, and prepare a seed from orbit. A message will appear saying something like "entering atmosphere" and the player would lose control of the ship and wouldnt be able to see through the cockpit because of the plasma from reentry, until it gets close enough to the ground. From there you could choose to land or fly to different landing areas, land, and explore from there.
For interplanetary travel they could easily make the solar system a whole map, either by size trickery, or perspective trickery, or a literal gigantic map. Many things are already "loaded"/ the game knows their position in the sky anyway, like moons and closeby planets, you could easily make it so you could travel to another planet without a loading screen. All this would require is conservation of momentum and a huge speed buff. It would also be fun to fly into the sun and die.
I think the biggest issue with Starfield's design is that the starting point for the entire premise of the game was "What if we made a Bethesda game, but in space?" instead of it being "Hey we have a good idea for a really unique game that's different from our previous games that mandates a new setting. Now how do we fit that in with the types of games we make?"
In other words, Starfield suffers from a lack of identity. "It would be cool to make a sci fi game" isn't a recipe for success, you should have very very good reasons for why you want to create a new IP rather than just "we want to try making a sci fi game because we can"
Yeah it wasn’t “let’s have this cool sci fi world with aliens and factions and space pirates that do this and we’ll have this cool city that’s a crime den and dangerous.” It was “okay we got the green light for a sci fi game everyone break up into groups and come up with one sci fi trope and will fit it in where we can. 1 alien quest line entirely removed from the rest of the game? Sure why not. Space pirates? Hell yeah, but to maintain our ESRB rating you won’t be able to join them necessarily. A grimy slum world full of corruption? Nice grab one other guy and both of you build that by yourselves, also ESRB rating so don’t make it to grimy and slummy, although players liked the strip club in GTAV so do something similar.”
@@garbearfar1394 Well put. Starfield was like a test game. It answered the question "What could a Bethesda game in space look like?" And to that end it succeeded frankly. It succeeded at being proof of concept. It's an idea of a game, not a game.
Bethesdas identity has always been in “lacking identity”. They make a bunch of different things and patchwork it together. This is not new.
@@sagearmaggedon7307 Skyrim had identity out the wazoo. Solid consistent art design, interconnected world, developed systems that interacted well in conjunction with each other. It didn't feel like a "generic fantasy game" that Oblivion for instance was accused of being on launch. Starfield on the other hand feels like a generic sci fi game that was a bunch of ideas strewn together to produce a minimum viable product.
@@GlassesAndCoffeeMugs It is a game, just one that people are not the most interested in. Most people still dont even realize the changes they have made in their design approach. The perspective in which one approaches a game will impact how it plays and what a player gets from it. I learned this lesson well with tears of the kingdom and breath of the wild.
It'll be interesting to see the state of Starfield and BGS around the time ES6 is coming out. I'm not optimistic, just intrigued.
I wonder if we will still be alive in 15 years
The real question is if we'll see the PS6 release of Skyrim come out before Elder Scrolls 6.
@@jimmyv3170lol, imagine xbox fully dies before Es6 comes out 💀
Red's casino (I think it's called that) is a great example of the entire game, lots of things you should be able to do in a casino, poker, slots etc, however in reality, there is sod-all to do.
I don't agree that it is an engine issue. The problem is they basically only launched the engine and forgot to include immersive gameplay, story (!!), freedom of choices, and other general fun stuff to invest in it. BG3 had major issues with Act3 at launch (resource consumption) but everyone was ok with it because the "game" was brilliant.
its kinda crazy that BG3, as broken as it 3rd act was (basically unplayable in my case) won Game of the Year. I really shows how we are starved of good games crafted with passion.
@@oersza I personally never had issues in act3, guess it’s a bit random but we have to agree they fixed it very fast (as opposed to Starfield being stuck with a poor storyline)
18:00 I suspect CDPR left behind the RedEngine because they lost / fired a lot of devs during the development of Cyberpunk 2077, and it's a lot easier to onboard new devs with a licensed engine like UE5 than a proprietary engine.
On the other hand, BGS has a relatively low turnover rate and it makes sense for them to keep using the Creation Engine because it's what all their veterans have been using for decades now. So I think it's just a business decision rather than being related to how bad or good people think an engine is :)
they are only using UE5 for witcher games and Red engine for Cyberpunk games
nah. Red Engine 3 is very unstable. The tools CDPR used for TW3 Red Engine 2 didn't work on RE3. So they had to make new tools. RE3 is a lot like EA's Frostbite 3. It s just so unstable that going to another engine makes alot of sense..
@@yamasaa Well, it helps that they've had a fanbase to develop the most important parts of their games for them for a good while now.
@@ainzu4062 Nope, it's over for Red Engine completely. Next Cyberpunk will be on UE as well.
My worry about every game company going over to the Unreal Engine is that all the games I played on the Unreal Engine have the same feel to them you don't get any of that charm you get from back in the day when everybody had their own in-house engine.
I feel nobody is talking about this issue, yet
To me, Starfield kinda cemented something I’d been thinking for a while now - Todd Howard is the single greatest person to sell people on a Bethesda game, and if/when he retires Bethesda is Fucked.
Like, we know he’s overhyping whatever it is that Bethesda is trying to sell us on, but he’s the right person for that job, sweet little lies and all. If anyone else at BGS tried to sell us on a Bethesda game, where at this point we know we’re getting a technically outdated sandbox held together by tape and modders, I don’t think it’d work. Hell, Starfield now makes 2 BGS games that ran into the problem of Modders being unable to do their thing (they may have changed that in a Fallout 76 update, idk I don’t follow that game), and I get this sinking feeling they’re just going to try and double and triple down on Paid Mods again come ES6.
Eh it's not so much him being a salesman as it is people legitimately loving older games they made and hoping newer ones will hit the same notes. In my opinion, at least.
He's a clown, I don't know who is actually listening to him on their decision to buy a game, certainly not people who know he lied as far back as TESIV oblivion. I myself wanted to try starfield because of peer hype and modding potential not because of some conman.
Todd, like Phil Spencer for Xbox, is a professional gaslighter. They'll hype up a turd calling it gold. People buy into the personas these people portray whether it's Todd, Phil, or even Kojima.
Well, he's more than just the salesman, he's literally been the lead game designer at Bethesda since the start and he pretty much has the final say on anything and everything that has gone into any of the games. This time he was just out of his depth, but with him, ES6 will at least be as good as Skyrim. Though Bethesda would probably abandon the engine and crumble after he leaves
@@GoodfellasX21I think you're exactly right. Oblivion hit me harder than any other game I've played having never played a game like that before. I really hoped Starfield would bring out that same immersive and atmospheric feeling again, but it doesn't. It sucks. It's boring. And worst of all it feels like it's trying to be immersive but just falls short in every single way.
The problem is that it's not just a technical mess but gameplay, story, and questing are all bad too. People could forgive one but it has so few redeeming qualities. Companions are dull as rocks that don't feel like developed characters with motivation and growth, dialogue is childish and poorly written, the main story is an absolute joke, terrible enemy variety, terrible AI, side quests were mostly dull, can only fly in low orbit in a SPACE GAME...I'll never forget flying around in slow motions towards those stupid flashing lights for like the 5th time my mouth agape in complete disbelief that they thought that was a good idea on paper or in execution and the complete lack of respect for players intelligence to make them do that even once let alone like 10 times, each time exactly the same. Cyberpunk launch disillusioned me but Starfield completely put the nail in the coffin of me ever getting excited for a game before it releases.
To be honest, I didn't find the engine to be the biggest let down in Starfield but rather the writing. I knew what I was getting into in terms of the engine, I knew it would be Skyrim in space. The main source of annoyance there is travel times on planet.
But there's no real excuse for the lack of grip in the storyline. The characterisation is very much lacking. To be honest, Bethesda isn't really great at that either, Skyrim and Fallout didn't have characters like the Witcher has or Baldur's Gate 3 or classic sci fi games and media.
I sure hope not! The bigger the crash, the sooner the build back by independent devs.
I feel a crash is on it's way just like 1983 all over again, only it will be copies of Starfield in the desert, not E.T lol.
I spent about 250h in Starfield doing all the quests I was able to find and it was quite fun. But there is like no point in going back after the handcrafted content is all consumed.
Explain that to those of us who have 1000 hours in the game
@@UmmerFarooq-wx4yoyou are smooth brained, try going outside
@@UmmerFarooq-wx4yo lol
Yeah, unfortunately the game doesn’t have the same staying power as there previous games… unless you like building stuff
@@sagearmaggedon7307 not if you're role playing like panning for gold.
the problem is larger then the Engine, fixing the engine doens't make dungeon design better, or the quest and dialogue
Fallout 4 had a ton of the same problems, but it at least had the interconnected world with decent environmental storytelling connecting the various set pieces that allowed a lot of people to have a pretty good time with it. In Starfield it was like being left with those isolated pieces of mediocrity and nothing to tie them together.
Regarding sample size, i do survey based market research full time so i can comfortably say that while n=90 isnt huge and might not generate statistically significant hypothesis tests, in an expert population like this its enough people to get a directional idea of the trends. So it should be a fairly reliable cross section for the purposes of a non academic video
Bethesda cant say "HURR DURR WE CANT DO IT BECUASE ENGINE"...
MF modders have make drivable cars in Fallout NV, Better gun mechanics in Fallout 4, IK, Interactable objects and Active ragdolls in Skyrim VR..... They have also Patched and fixed all Bugs for each game and expanded upon each game... EVEN ENGINE FIXES THAT MAKE IT RUN BETTER.
I'm a Indie Dev and if I had Bethesda's budget, man power, and team knowledge... there would be a new fallout in 2-3 years, Set in New Mexico< more endings than New vegas, CO-OP, and I would hire modders to help make the game possible (They are more competent than current Betheda Members).
Hell, even Morrowind has movable boats and walking silt striders now.
Starfield cannot be "fixed" because it is not a game, it's a demonstration of CE2.
They didn't do a thing in 2-3 years and released this DEMO that was mounted on 3 months and tested 1 more month
One thing that I didn't see anyone mention is the fact that Starfield has the worst color grading I've seen lately, it's literally impossible to have the game use the entire dynamic range of a monitor, both in sdr and hdr, black levels are always ridiculously high, while whites are too dark in sdr and too bright in hdr, a complete mess
Personally I'm sad that CDPR is dropping redEngine, and I think BGS should drop creation engine but replace it with in house tech. The fact that unreal is gaining so much ground sucks for diversity in games. UE4 is the number cause for shader stutter on PC games, and its something they never fixed. So if everyone uses the same engine, then all games will have the same problems, and one big company will have all the money. I applaud the Japanese companies who for the most part are sticking with their in house engines, and the big boys like Bethesda have the money to develop in house tech.
I'm sure the Unreal bubble will burst sooner rather than later
They have the money but what matters is the time. Building a new engine from scratch up to the point that it's ready for a Starfield-level game is a 5-10 year effort. If they started now they might produce a brand new game on it sometime after Fallout 5 comes out.
On the topic of the sandwiches, I think it was a bait and switch. I think they were trying to paint a picture of the game where the Physics were so good that even minute things like sandwiches are subjected to it.
But what we got was not what they implied we were going to get. That's a recurring theme, as you mentioned.
Anyway Luke, I appreciate your video. I don't often subscribe to streamers these days, but I appreciate your format and your content. And your steaming setup is pretty sweet.
As a game dev, I'd say it's too big and complicated to fix right now. There's just too much, so it would take years to fix for very little reward.
But, you could easily go the New Vegas route and make individual games with the engine and mechanics focusing on individual planets.
So, start with Starfield: New York Planet, and then just keep putting out new 'planets' until eventually you pretty much have a full solar system of planets that all feel unique and full of life while profiting with every 'planet' sold.
As for the main story, it really just needs to be overhauled entirely, which can't happen, but you could hire some RUclipsrs who are very aware of the source material and community's expectations to punch up the dialogue to satisfy the core audience. You could probably have that done in about a month.
They need to replace the engine! That's the only solution, even if it means no games in the near future! They are already significantly behind current industry standards due to this horribly outdated engine, and there's no update that can fix its issues.
I can’t believe the same team that gave us the blood, the guts and the gore of fallout 3. Gave us literally a G for general audiences mature game. And just the huge decline in the writing quality.
Games are much more heavily influenced by internal and external politics nowadays. A lot of games even games like Gears of War now called Gears lost their weight and Intensity. Starfields gunplay is bad because enemies are bullet sponges and there's barely any punch to the weapons.
Fallout 3 was a shit game compared to Fallout new vegas, with 3x the dev time and resources.
Bethesda has always been bad
I don't think engine limitations had anything to do with the state of starfield. What's never talked about is how the movement code and how it feels essentially hasn't changed from morrow wind on. You still have the same janky movement that's 22 years old by now the same goes for the gun play it's essentially fallout 4 and when they released that it wasn't up to par either just less egregious than fallout 3. This is a studio that puts 500 developers to work for 7 years and spends $400M in the process and then the end product has worse game feel than the first person shooter template you can download for free of the unreal store. Realizing that babies first asset flip game in unreal has better game feel than the average Bethesda title should tell you everything you need to know about their "engine limitations" there are no limitations they could get engineers to rework the engine but the studio thinks that using the same player controller from 22 years ago is acceptable and that's why Bethesda hasn't made a decent game in years. It's a mentality problem and the only thing them seem to learn are the wrong lessons they keep dumbing down their RPG mechanics even thought their most popular games feature those more etc.
When it comes to ANY project, the worst feeling is the slow realization you need to rewrite everything.
I thought Starfield was like Star Citizen but with a story line, advanced rpg system, and a higher budget, but my dreams were much bigger than reality.
Star Citizen solved all of the problems Luke mentioned but at the cost of 12 years and a game still in alpha with most of the actual content left to develop.
Both suck.
I really did think no way would Starfield have load screen for flying straight to and landing on a planet after No Man's Sky showed it could be done 7 years ago. Little did I know...
@@ralaxgamingIndeed. The developers behind Star Citizen have been making their own tools to deliver the vision they have on the game, and they refuse to compromise.
@@BalthazarB2 Sure. Even if they do...
I don't like the idea of every game using unreal engine. I like having different engines for games with their own quirks. As dated as the creation engine is, I really enjoy the games that have been made with it. With the exception of Starfield. All the Fallout games are great. 4 has the better gameplay but 3 and New Vegas are great in their own ways. Plus, I loved TES Oblivion. Much more than Skyrim. Oblivion was the first Bethesda game I played and I couldn't get enough of it back in the day. Everyone acts like Skyrim was groundbreaking. It really wasn't. Oblivion had already done everything Skyrim did years before it.
Got it: Starfield is Indiana Jones in a Lead-Lined Refrigerator called Creation Engine.
I sometimes think about how different the world and my life have become since Fallout 4 came out.
No actual expert on game engine tech would ever claim that loading times have anything to do with physics calculations. You might be mistaking persistence with physics, which would make more sense, but mistaking those two alone means neither you nor your experts are equipped to make any kind guesses about why Creation Engine has the issues it has.
It's fine to criticize Bethesda games for the specific technical issues they have, but why make up stuff about things you know nothing about. Why?
Been gaming nearly 40 years (all but the last 9 months on console). I have nearly 400 hours in Starfield and even started over after it broke 200 hours in. Have never played any game more than this one.
Truth is, I’m more in love with the idea of the game than the game itself. Lots of really good ideas and I love the genre. I love a lot of the customization but the ultimate lack of depth and significant repetition can’t be ignored.
This was my first BGS game. Might move to Fallout 4 or something. Will keep playing off and on but it’s time to just admit that it is what it is.
This was a really thoughtful survey and video. Appreciate it.
Fallout 4, Skyrim and New Vegas are gonna become your best friends soon and you’ll see what everyone is talking about.
Sad!
There are those that disagree but even though my introduction to Fallout was with the original games "way back in the day" i actually like Fallout 4 and keep coming back to it. (Heavily modded of course) The story isn't particularly great. It wouldn't win any graphical beauty contests (even on release day it looked a bit dated) but it's a fun world to inhabit because the world building is all there and exploring the map just by walking from one place to another felt organic and I liked that adventure. I still do, even though I now know that world map like the back of my hand and even know exactly where all the random encounter triggers are...
I'll probably continue to revisit Fallout 4. But for me Bethesda seem to have lost touch with what actually makes their games work.