"You can't expect the planets to all have handcrafted content" --- That's literally the problem. Why would I explore backwater planet #75 if I know I'm not going to find anything interesting? The GAMEPLAY LOOP has to carry then, like in Minecraft. Resource gathering, developing your own territory, defending it....which would've HELPED if Starfield was MULTI-PLAYER. If I'm supposed to be the one enjoying this massive universe, then I need a reason to explore. Morrowind is completely fair, because it's the SMALLEST. And yet it felt HUGE. Despite the walking and how slow it was with the more rudimentary travel system, every nook, every cranny, every turn held the chance of something interesting. Swim out a little ways? Find an underground ruin. Look inside a tree trunk and find loot. Deep caverns that, should you fly around and explore a little further, find even MORE loot tucked away. You were rewarded for wise use of Mark/Recall, Intervention Scrolls, Silt Striders, or even just the Boots of Blinding Speed and a little bit of working around its debilitating effect. In 8 years time, they made a chunk of galaxy that is functionally empty and worthless. In 6 years time, Larian made the most immersive campaign world ever done in D&D history. Starfield may have more voice actors, but every single one in Baldur's Gate 3 actually has a consistently strong performance, with emotion and energy. BG3's mechanics are a little janky, but the AI in Starfield is crippled at points. BG3 has texture pop-in, but I'm looking at FACES. EMOTIONS. I'm TERRIFIED of the ones in Starfield, they've regressed to worse than Fallout 4, or hell, even Fallout New Vegas (Arcade Gannon had a surprisingly good range of facial features and emotions). Starfield was doomed to fail, and I haven't bothered with anything Bethesda-related since FO4. FO76 showed me the direction the company was going, and if they couldn't make a consistently interesting world with THAT, what actual chance did they have at making a chunk of Galaxy feel alive and worth wandering through? At least No Man's Sky kept at it with procedurally generated content, and made the gameplay loops competent if not enjoyable (currently 90% of 1,254 current reviews on Steam are positive, which is astonishing). Bethesda burned their bridge a while ago, the last thing I gave them was a few bucks for Skyrim SE to get the last bits of content that I didn't have and needed for the most freedom with modding.
So nice to watch an articulate video about Starfield that isn't an hour long or more, I don't understand that trend on youtube lately. Great video, really like your Elden Ring content!
got to love How Mr Todd looks at the thumbnail like saying ''How am i going to make Starfield a GOTY?'' ? I Still play the hell out of TES3,TES4,TES5 And my Bretons knows it
I just don't think you can be that brave and creative in a setting when you're a big company and you will get criticized for anything you choose. Why Bethesda is afraid of player consequence though, I will never understand.
I hate this notion tbh. Where are those hordes of people that criticized Larian for “anything they chose”? Where are those hordes for armored core, or SM2, or elden ring or any other good received major release? Bethesda has been on a downward spiral for over a decade, maybe companies get criticized for “everything they choose” because they’ve become so out of touch, that their every decision is polarizing.
Ironically, playing it safe has backfired pretty spectacularly for Bethesda since Starfield's player counts on Steam are even lower than Fallout 4 and Skyrim. (All three games are on Game Pass, so that's not a factor.) And Bethesda's aversion to player consequence seems to be a hardwired design choice over there. The MinnMax interview with Bruce Nesmith I referenced goes into a lot more detail about how it was intentional to let the player be the head of all the guilds in Skyrim, or only have a handful of major decisions throughout the game.
It’s not those pesky haters that keep small billion dollar company down, they are in the hole of their own making. Read about Skyrim game jam from 2011. Bethesda gave its devs a week to make whatever they wanted to see in the game. They managed to implement spear, heart-fire home building system, interactive water arrows from thief, mounted combat, dragon riding, vampire and werewolf perk trees, vampire lord form and tons of other stuff. IN A WEEK. Bethesda stoped doing them after 2011, or at least publicizing them, because it showed how much they are holding back.
You hit one of my pet peeves there. There is no exploration in Starfield. Every planet you visit is already inhabited and explored by humans. And the next universe (game+) is just the same all over again. So where is the exploration?
I’d be willing to bet that there’s a crackpot nasapunk starfield build on someone’s computer that has fuel for interplanetary travel and gravity wells of planetary bodies where if you plan your trip or your trajectory wrong you’ll end up out of fuel on the drift with raiders attacking your vessel. Imagine being alone and having vultures circling and you have a limited number of harpoons or tractor beam power and you can take down a raiding ship and steal their fuel and resources. Imagine all crafting and upgrading taking place in real time and if you get attacked mid-journey you have to run from your crafting area to the bridge to defend the ship. Or maybe you have crew take their positions and do their part. Exploration could have been the main goal, like setting up settlements in Fallout 4. Frankly, Fallout 4 survival mode in space could have been amazing, getting farther and farther while keeping your oxygen levels high and setting up settlements on planets and finding new and weird enemies on planets to fight. And a space whale. Why no space whale!
It enrages me how in Skyrim, you are directed to attack camps belonging to the opposing faction during and after the civil war questline, but they made the generals at those camps INVINCIBLE for some reason. why??
To be honest creating 15k+ handcrafted maps is perfectly possible. The bar is set so low that you could have the playerbase create planets and while around 75% of them would be trash, the remaining 25% would be gold. Meanwhile procedurally generated planets are shit 99% of the time.
There's no devolution here, Bethesda has never been good. Name a single good game made by them that's not Morrowind. And even that had many issues, it's just Michael Kirkbride's writing was very good.
@@mateuscristianschannelen961 Where "...you need cheats just to survive a playthrough because the game is a buggy randomly generated mess where going into a dungeon almost guarantees you clipping through a wall and dying"? ruclips.net/video/_533_uAzrFc/видео.html Where "you need a crackpipe just to grind the fighters and the mages guild out", and there's a 50% chance that you can't ever complete the fighter's guild questline due to a bug? ruclips.net/video/_533_uAzrFc/видео.html NO, THANK YOU!
Yeah, I'm inclined to agree. I played Morrowind, I played Oblivion, Skyrim, Fallout 3. I played all of them fully, completing everything. And while there were some things to like in all of them, the only one I can say was actually a good game is Morrowind - janky and awkward though it might have been. Whenever I played Morrowind, there was a strong feeling of satisfaction the longer I played; it was like wading into waters that turned out to be ever deeper. The more time I put in, the more I got from the experience. By comparison, all of the other titles... the more time I spent with them, the more I found myself chasing the feeling that maybe satisfaction was around the next corner, only to be disappointed over and over. The more time I spent with them, the less I got out of it.
Morrowind is very impressive creatively and in how that creativity is presented, but yeah, it has nothing else going for it. Oblivion was a step in right direction technologically for its most underused feature: object permanence which allowed npcs to do things with lasting effects even while on the other side of the world from the player. If Bethesda actually focused on this idea and build a game around it, they could have a completely unique and stellar game franchise for ages. Alas, Skyrim near-completely abandoned the concept, even though the tech is still in the engine (see EtherDynamics for a modder who tries to make gameplay use out of it). A few more years fumbling at chasing trends, and Starfield is like a student project attempt to create a Witcher 3 in space.
0:05 So you decided to be part of the problem. Unless you pirated it, because why would Bethesda start putting in effort again, if you keep throwing $70 at them for the slop? 0:19 Heyyyy, me too, I just finished 100%-ing it earlier this month on OpenMW. It was a blast! 14:16 LoL, Telvanni abolitionist is how I played it too.
I definitely agree: Don't directly give Todd any of your money! But I played Starfield through Game Pass: I reactivated my subscription to play Lies of P and I was pleasantly surprised I could play Starfield on my Xbox One through cloud gaming. Had Starfield come out a few years ago (e.g. before Fallout 76), I absolutely would have shelled out the extra cash to play a Bethesda game a few days early. But nowadays, I only played their latest product when it was effectively free. How the turn tables. Also, Telvanni abolition gang rise up!
Give Starfield a few yrs like mortowind, im sure it will be considered too.... For a " not classic " game, it sure as hell has 20 million players playing currently
Easy: all these generic POI´s have no story to tell. Never designed around it. Just meaningless clutter like 95% of the things in the pocket!
Too true! And I still can't believe how badly BGS dropped the ball on proc gen anyway...
@@garrulousgoldmask Yeah i stop playing...hope they do the NMS thing out of it.
Speaking of clutter, I think most of Bethesda's budget went into it. Say whatever about Starfield, but the clutter...is amazing lol.
@@vane909090 second reason i stop playing: you cant scrap it for ressources. Guess F4 was better then i thought.
@@machinegod3000 What a grand and intoxicating innocence!
"You can't expect the planets to all have handcrafted content" --- That's literally the problem. Why would I explore backwater planet #75 if I know I'm not going to find anything interesting? The GAMEPLAY LOOP has to carry then, like in Minecraft. Resource gathering, developing your own territory, defending it....which would've HELPED if Starfield was MULTI-PLAYER. If I'm supposed to be the one enjoying this massive universe, then I need a reason to explore. Morrowind is completely fair, because it's the SMALLEST. And yet it felt HUGE. Despite the walking and how slow it was with the more rudimentary travel system, every nook, every cranny, every turn held the chance of something interesting. Swim out a little ways? Find an underground ruin. Look inside a tree trunk and find loot. Deep caverns that, should you fly around and explore a little further, find even MORE loot tucked away. You were rewarded for wise use of Mark/Recall, Intervention Scrolls, Silt Striders, or even just the Boots of Blinding Speed and a little bit of working around its debilitating effect.
In 8 years time, they made a chunk of galaxy that is functionally empty and worthless. In 6 years time, Larian made the most immersive campaign world ever done in D&D history. Starfield may have more voice actors, but every single one in Baldur's Gate 3 actually has a consistently strong performance, with emotion and energy. BG3's mechanics are a little janky, but the AI in Starfield is crippled at points. BG3 has texture pop-in, but I'm looking at FACES. EMOTIONS. I'm TERRIFIED of the ones in Starfield, they've regressed to worse than Fallout 4, or hell, even Fallout New Vegas (Arcade Gannon had a surprisingly good range of facial features and emotions).
Starfield was doomed to fail, and I haven't bothered with anything Bethesda-related since FO4. FO76 showed me the direction the company was going, and if they couldn't make a consistently interesting world with THAT, what actual chance did they have at making a chunk of Galaxy feel alive and worth wandering through? At least No Man's Sky kept at it with procedurally generated content, and made the gameplay loops competent if not enjoyable (currently 90% of 1,254 current reviews on Steam are positive, which is astonishing). Bethesda burned their bridge a while ago, the last thing I gave them was a few bucks for Skyrim SE to get the last bits of content that I didn't have and needed for the most freedom with modding.
Ok Todd, if you thought players got bored of the same dungeons in Daggerfall, what made you think they wouldn't get bored in Starfield?
So nice to watch an articulate video about Starfield that isn't an hour long or more, I don't understand that trend on youtube lately. Great video, really like your Elden Ring content!
What's wrong with long videos
got to love How Mr Todd looks at the thumbnail like saying
''How am i going to make Starfield a GOTY?''
?
I Still play the hell out of TES3,TES4,TES5
And my Bretons knows it
I just don't think you can be that brave and creative in a setting when you're a big company and you will get criticized for anything you choose. Why Bethesda is afraid of player consequence though, I will never understand.
I hate this notion tbh. Where are those hordes of people that criticized Larian for “anything they chose”? Where are those hordes for armored core, or SM2, or elden ring or any other good received major release?
Bethesda has been on a downward spiral for over a decade, maybe companies get criticized for “everything they choose” because they’ve become so out of touch, that their every decision is polarizing.
Ironically, playing it safe has backfired pretty spectacularly for Bethesda since Starfield's player counts on Steam are even lower than Fallout 4 and Skyrim. (All three games are on Game Pass, so that's not a factor.)
And Bethesda's aversion to player consequence seems to be a hardwired design choice over there. The MinnMax interview with Bruce Nesmith I referenced goes into a lot more detail about how it was intentional to let the player be the head of all the guilds in Skyrim, or only have a handful of major decisions throughout the game.
It’s not those pesky haters that keep small billion dollar company down, they are in the hole of their own making. Read about Skyrim game jam from 2011. Bethesda gave its devs a week to make whatever they wanted to see in the game. They managed to implement spear, heart-fire home building system, interactive water arrows from thief, mounted combat, dragon riding, vampire and werewolf perk trees, vampire lord form and tons of other stuff. IN A WEEK.
Bethesda stoped doing them after 2011, or at least publicizing them, because it showed how much they are holding back.
@@max7971we don't need most of that stuff just make a great rpg. Stop trying to shoe horn crap from other games. We come to play a rpg not minecraft.
@@elvangulley3210 on the contrary, TES games are immersive sims and they yearn for more tangible interactive mechanics.
Starfield sucks unfortunately and people praising it will only tell Bethesda that they don't have to work that hard on TES6 cause people are dumb.
My favorite part of starfield was unleashing Ghengis Khan on the galaxy
You hit one of my pet peeves there. There is no exploration in Starfield. Every planet you visit is already inhabited and explored by humans. And the next universe (game+) is just the same all over again. So where is the exploration?
I’d be willing to bet that there’s a crackpot nasapunk starfield build on someone’s computer that has fuel for interplanetary travel and gravity wells of planetary bodies where if you plan your trip or your trajectory wrong you’ll end up out of fuel on the drift with raiders attacking your vessel. Imagine being alone and having vultures circling and you have a limited number of harpoons or tractor beam power and you can take down a raiding ship and steal their fuel and resources. Imagine all crafting and upgrading taking place in real time and if you get attacked mid-journey you have to run from your crafting area to the bridge to defend the ship. Or maybe you have crew take their positions and do their part. Exploration could have been the main goal, like setting up settlements in Fallout 4. Frankly, Fallout 4 survival mode in space could have been amazing, getting farther and farther while keeping your oxygen levels high and setting up settlements on planets and finding new and weird enemies on planets to fight. And a space whale. Why no space whale!
That american, functional transportation jab was hilarious
Great video, thank you
How can you compare that masterpiece with Starfield, lol?
It enrages me how in Skyrim, you are directed to attack camps belonging to the opposing faction during and after the civil war questline, but they made the generals at those camps INVINCIBLE for some reason. why??
To be honest creating 15k+ handcrafted maps is perfectly possible.
The bar is set so low that you could have the playerbase create planets and while around 75% of them would be trash, the remaining 25% would be gold.
Meanwhile procedurally generated planets are shit 99% of the time.
There's no devolution here, Bethesda has never been good.
Name a single good game made by them that's not Morrowind.
And even that had many issues, it's just Michael Kirkbride's writing was very good.
Daggerfall.
@@mateuscristianschannelen961
Where "...you need cheats just to survive a playthrough because the game is a buggy randomly generated mess where going into a dungeon almost guarantees you clipping through a wall and dying"? ruclips.net/video/_533_uAzrFc/видео.html
Where "you need a crackpipe just to grind the fighters and the mages guild out", and there's a 50% chance that you can't ever complete the fighter's guild questline due to a bug?
ruclips.net/video/_533_uAzrFc/видео.html
NO, THANK YOU!
Yeah, I'm inclined to agree. I played Morrowind, I played Oblivion, Skyrim, Fallout 3. I played all of them fully, completing everything. And while there were some things to like in all of them, the only one I can say was actually a good game is Morrowind - janky and awkward though it might have been. Whenever I played Morrowind, there was a strong feeling of satisfaction the longer I played; it was like wading into waters that turned out to be ever deeper. The more time I put in, the more I got from the experience.
By comparison, all of the other titles... the more time I spent with them, the more I found myself chasing the feeling that maybe satisfaction was around the next corner, only to be disappointed over and over. The more time I spent with them, the less I got out of it.
Morrowind is very impressive creatively and in how that creativity is presented, but yeah, it has nothing else going for it.
Oblivion was a step in right direction technologically for its most underused feature: object permanence which allowed npcs to do things with lasting effects even while on the other side of the world from the player. If Bethesda actually focused on this idea and build a game around it, they could have a completely unique and stellar game franchise for ages.
Alas, Skyrim near-completely abandoned the concept, even though the tech is still in the engine (see EtherDynamics for a modder who tries to make gameplay use out of it). A few more years fumbling at chasing trends, and Starfield is like a student project attempt to create a Witcher 3 in space.
0:05 So you decided to be part of the problem. Unless you pirated it, because why would Bethesda start putting in effort again, if you keep throwing $70 at them for the slop?
0:19 Heyyyy, me too, I just finished 100%-ing it earlier this month on OpenMW. It was a blast!
14:16 LoL, Telvanni abolitionist is how I played it too.
I definitely agree: Don't directly give Todd any of your money! But I played Starfield through Game Pass: I reactivated my subscription to play Lies of P and I was pleasantly surprised I could play Starfield on my Xbox One through cloud gaming.
Had Starfield come out a few years ago (e.g. before Fallout 76), I absolutely would have shelled out the extra cash to play a Bethesda game a few days early. But nowadays, I only played their latest product when it was effectively free. How the turn tables.
Also, Telvanni abolition gang rise up!
Wise up you mean...
Cant see the video
You may have found it before it had finished rendering, try now 😊
Give Starfield a few yrs like mortowind, im sure it will be considered too.... For a " not classic " game, it sure as hell has 20 million players playing currently
And Taylor swift has millions of fans. There's a lot of idiots with bad taste out there.
@@elvangulley3210 so just cause you don't like something, every one else shouldn't? Bro that the most IDIOTIC logic i done heard....
@@amitansurkar1769 you can all the trash you want it's still trash
Why does he talk like that ? Ameuwica, Mowwowind....
dont be like that babe
Why would you name your channel after the objectively worst fromsoft npc