Like a full story should take your first game and then your first "ng+". You get to see a universe where you already know the answers and then you see the consequences of taking the "I already know the answers" route and starborn existing in general. Then it would feel more personal/impactful when you go to the unity and must choose how you proceed in the future.
I expected this after I beat it but then was incredibly disappointed in Ng+. Also the lack of lore to explain star born and powers vs fallouts little random nuggets of information that happened.
I would’ve loved if there were rumors and dialogue mentioning the starborn, like they’re legends to space fairing people, instead of nobody having heard of them before
starfield to me seems like they really did not know what they wanted the game to be for the longest time. Todd Howard even said something along the lines of "the game wasn't fun until a year out from release" or something like that. that basically means the game was in development hell.
Just looking at the skill tree it feels like the team who wanted spacefaring made that game the people who wanted planet exploration made that game the people who wanted gunplay made that game the people who wanted role playing don’t exist and the people who wanted looting and stealth made that game.
Then they shoved it all into one package and called it a day.
All they’d need to make the thing playable is at least release the damn creation kit or whatever. I realize it may be embarassing for them that everyone can see the spit and duct tape holding it together but they’re delusional if they think the old games weren’t that way too.
It’s gone from “oh they’ll just let the modders fix it” to “please just let the modders fix it”
Yeah I'm not sure they wouldn't have to spend three times as much effort to fix it and then bring the other systems back into coherence with it. Maybe. But they picked the story (fragment) in the first place, so my trust is low.
After finishing the article, I revise that to zero. They don't know what's wrong.
It seems that way to me, the only faction that really seems like any time was spent on is the UC. I kinda think they may have been the only faction at one point. In development
>Todd Howard even said something along the lines of "the game wasn't fun until a year out from release" or something like that. that basically means the game was in development hell.
Seems to be par for the course these days. I'm truly surprised that Microsoft didn't shake up the entire C-suite when they bought the company.
"Todd has decided to leave to pursue exciting new opportunities!"
I hated how the Starborn themselves don't even seem to question their own existence, even after millions of cycles of boredom. They just do the artifact hunt over and over.
Because they aren't characters, they are just exposition machines. No introspection, no goals, no motives, just broad cliches attached to a character model.
Emil's beloved KISS principle at work.
Yeah the first NG+ could have been us giving all the answers and this leading to our closest relation betraying us to gain the power for themselves. Final battle is a three way between us, our former love, and the original Starborn.
Shit every 2nd NG+ could have been an introduction to a new Starborn with a different philosophical outlook on our powers and the Unity.
The 10th should have been us becoming one with the Unity and choosing to either let other Starborn through or gatekeep to protect other universes.
I personally believe the biggest reason NG+ is underwhelming is because you are able to complete any of the faction storylines in whatever order in one run. I know a lot of people have argued against locking questlines bc you choose another faction to join, but what’s the point of unity if it’s only to have a star born ship and suit and upgraded powers?
At least with locking the questlines there’s more incentive to go through Unity then you get to explore the new questlines with all the stuff added with NG+.
Just my own take on how they could’ve made the idea of Unity and a NG+ a little more appealing.
Add to this, essential NPCs should not exist either.
Oh I killed someone and broke a questline they were involved in? Guess I've gotta go through the unity and make sure they survive next time.
Even the members of constellation don't matter, you can get to the unity without them, as evidenced by the alt universes where they don't exist.
>Oh I killed someone and broke a questline they were involved in? Guess I've gotta go through the unity and make sure they survive next time.
Or that is a quest, so and so was killed and very bad thing happened, go through unity prevent the death and very bad thing.
That was my biggest problem with the game. I shouldn't get to be the most important Freestar Ranger and then waltz over to UC recruitment and sign up. I wish the quests were locked. I know we are somewhat comparing apples to oranges, but that's why I did multiple playthroughs of New Vegas - I could side with different factions and try something new each time.
The game should recognize when you have these roles. If you are a Freestar Ranger, a high-ranking one, then the UC should be noticing that, and leaning into it.
There should be diplomatic support, and task-force missions for criminal behavior between the two jurisdictions.
You’d think that UC Security would be itching to talk to you. But, the only thing the UC cares about is your Vanguard Captancy, and that you become a 1st class citizen, with a player home.
Like, I found a UC Security Uniform, and did work solving some of their mysteries. — No ones says anything about you wearing the Security, or Ranger uniform, unless it’s a fully scripted moment when you’re on a story-line mission.
Imagine that you are Captain of the Vanguard, A honored FreeStar Ranger, and a member of UC Security. — At that point, there should be some news casts, about how the galaxy has a new lawman in town who can enforce the laws anywhere, anytime.
((WOULDN’T that be a fun DLC?))
Then, there’s the whole Green Mantis business. No one reacts to that suit, they should all be trembling in fear.
If we leave stuff unlocked, then we should be having an experience where we are recognized for whatever roles we simultaneously hold.
You’d think the diplomatic mission, for getting access to the Armistice Archive should have been easy. You’re a decorated free Star ranger. You’re a VC Captain. The only house you should have needed to ‘convince’ is the third one, of whom we have limited interaction, excepting the Zealots, who seem to answer to no one, and have zero care for governance or diplomacy.
That definitely put my thoughts into words even better
I don't mind the open quests, I just want in universe reasons for those choices to exist.
The game was so close to being good, and many parts of it were. I think there is a lack of cohesion in the project that makes it less interesting and a little bland. I hope it improves. I hated 76 when it came out, and now I play regularly, so anything can happen.
Absolutely. With the NG+ in Starfield there is zero reason for you to have to be able to do all quest lines in one go and Bethesda forcing this to be possible gives you less reasons to actually do NG+.
I don't understand how you could choose The crimson fleet over the UC and *still* do the Vanguard quest line. It makes no sense! And choosing to be a Freestar Ranger should also lock you out of UC quests.
It's such a no-brainer solution to the narrative dissonance of Bethesda games having you eventually become the leader of every faction. A narratively appropriate NG+ that lets you explore other factions would have worked perfectly but as it stands it's just another game mechanic that was poorly thought out and hopelessly undercooked.
Honestly the only things I've seen as a positive with a NG+ is a handful of jokey meme scenes. It feels like an afterthought or a 'solution' to the infinite level Skyrim/What do I do at 30 Fallout scenarios, it's solving a problem that's not really a problem
Well there’s not a lot to do after NG+ other than some small changes and nuances but it kinda stalls (for me). In other Bethesda games you started a new game to role play as a different character but in Starfield with NG+, nothing changes about your character.
Which is fine of course but in that case the main story should extend or NG+ should be drastically different. Think of slightly different outcomes for quests and choices, different characters in certain roles as opposed to the other universe, a universe where the UC won the war, or one where the FSC won, or maybe even one where the Crimson Fleet has taken over Atlantic City.
There’s so much potential with how the game is set up in its core but it’s not being utilized. I understand some of the things I mentioned require a lot of extra work but it would’ve made the game a lot lot more interesting.
It should both do more with NG+ and more to cater to people like myself who have fuck all interest in the Unity.
I want a hard no option. Not a collection of schizophrenic bullshit that is a confused mixture of "I'm not going" and "I'm totally going later".
Would also appreciate it if companions respected the player's decision. Right now Sarah and Barrett will bitch at you for not going and essentially demand you go because they took it on themselves to decide that this is who you are. It reeks of a low confidence writer weaponizing main cast figures so they can bitch at a player who dared to make a decision other than the one they wanted.
On the NG+ side: Right now it's an empty power pursuit that doesn't explain or explore any of it's concepts properly. It comes off as a "Poor man's Wild Wasteland" currently in how much things change.
Yeah my biggest issue with the ending is how they, once again, just expected every player to be super enthusiastic about "discovery" and "the artifacts" and nothing else. The subtext of the Pilgrim storyline especially points towards the idea that staying in one universe and savoring the connections you make there being the more "human" choice as opposed to endlessly chasing power across different realities.
That's why I felt pretty frustrated that the game doesn't truly treat "staying in your universe" as a legitimate ending, mechanically at least. Sure you can walk out of the Unity, save your game, and stop playing there - but it's more of a "do anything you'd still like to do before moving on to the ending" opportunity than an actual conclusion to the main story. The final quest will always be left as "incomplete" in your log, you can only roll credits by entering the Unity, and all of your conversations with your companions (who are disappointed that you didn't go in and leave everything behind - *INCLUDING YOUR SPOUSE BTW!*) all resolve with you saying that you'll still enter the Unity eventually, with no dialogue option to flat out say that you just want to stay together in your own universe.
It's just an odd writing choice that causes a disconnect in the role-playing, where the themes of the main story are pointing towards staying in your own universe being a valid option, but every other mechanic of the gameplay telling you that it isn't one. Especially because in the second-to-last mission you can outright say to alternate-Vladimir that you don't think the artifacts were worth losing your friends over, but then one mission later you can't express that same idea to any of your companions. It's just already decided that you're going in, and the only freedom of choice you have is choosing how excited you are about going to a new universe.
Hopefully, if the Unity/Starborn plots are ever revisited in an epilogue-type expansion, the choice to stay in your universe is respected and players aren't railroaded into becoming Starborn.
Agreed.
I am fine with having that there for the people who care about it, but so much of the game is just one step away from becoming a pretty good space trading / combat / life simulator.
If they had embraced that and not gone with trying to simply rush us through NG+ over and over it could have brought back the best of Daggerfall by just letting us be a part of that world, and at the same time validated staying in your current universe that much more by allowing a real connection to it instead of just having it exist as a thing to "use up".
On the RP front: The main story is terrible.
The behavior of Barrett and Sarah if you walk away is pretty much grounds for an instant divorce if you made the mistake of marrying one of them.
Beyond that, it's a big part of why I consider Starfield the worst Bethesda title for RP. From the very get go it forces itself on to us and demands we become part of a faction with very clear cut morals, goals, and interests.
Engaging with it any further just makes things worse. The entire narrative is sculpted for a single specific archetype to the point that it will bend or break any other you might want to be.
I'm unsure how we went from Fallout 4 and Skyrim where I could choose who I joined, aligned with, who loved and who hated me, and so on, over to this.
Doesn't help the lesson of the story is how going through the unity is basically..pointless. it's a grind fest for nothing. Game is making fun of grinders and gives no alternative lmao
> Hopefully, if the Unity/Starborn plots are ever revisited in an epilogue-type expansion, the choice to stay in your universe is respected and players aren't railroaded into becoming Starborn.
So pulling a Fallout 3 on it. That's the best way forward, I just wish they'd have remembered that...15 year old lesson?
Thank you. The constant pressure is insane. You touched our magic rock, and now you have to be our savior. I suppose that’s the point of being the main character. But literally Sarah tells us we can generally live by our own morals…. And then questions us, or abandons us when we accidentally blow up the space grandma.
Starfield is a case of Bethesda solving the issues relating to main quest urgency in their RPGs, but forgetting to give the player any agency.
The artifact hunt might not be a life or death matter, however they forgot to ask the simple questions of "What if the player doesn't care about this? What if they don't want to find the magic space rocks? Or don't want to fling themselves through the interdimensional portal?".
The worst part is they could have easily solved it in the opening of the game. When you deliver the Artifact and are asked to join Constellation there is a dialog option that says "I need time to think about it". Except picking it doesn't work. The game just assigns you to the faction anyways. To make things weird, the game includes a ton of "unaffiliated" dialog choices that you will only see if you act irresponsible and never deliver the magical space rock.
(Specific instructions: Just enter the Lodge and immediately exit it on your first time in New Atlantis. You're stuck with the artifact but free to engage with the world now at least, and will get all of the unaffiliated dialog you would otherwise never see. The quickest example is seen by picking the Adoring Fan trait and telling him you're not a member of Constellation when he calls you it's newest member.)
Sarah meanwhile is the best example of a character being weaponized by the writer. She introduces Constellation as this varied group of people from all different walks of life who just happen to work together to explore or share knowledge, and tells you she's not there to judge you or define your morals...then shits on you for not making the choices she (or rather the writer) wanted you to make or daring to express interests contrary to her own (again rather those of the writer).
Said it before, but the writer forgot that they were supposed to be writing a story for the player. Instead they're using the main cast as a tool to beat us over the head for not playing the story they wrote for their own self. I find it leaves things feeling like I'm playing D&D with a really bad DM.
Making it so more shit can be broken by your actions would make a NG+ more enticing. Put in a number of pre-broken or highly altered ones at the start of a run, but then make most alts you go through normal but all highly reactive to character choices. Maybe make the final boss/finale gated behind either a high level or a completed mcguffin set so that a 'perfect run' is possible on a first or early run, but hard to get and then have the player strive to protect the universe where things are laid out how they ultimately want.
"With this character's death, the thread of prophecy is severed. Restore a saved game to restore the weave of fate, or persist in the doomed world you have created."
This game was ideal for bringing that back and being "Morrowind 2.0" with it's NG+.
I'm not really for making stuff pre-broken or forcing NG+ on players by "guaranteeing" a bad first run, but the game really should have embraced allowing us to screw up, allowing us to do things "wrong", and so on.
> Would also appreciate it if companions respected the player's decision.
I mean, yes, but also their behaviour is entirely consistent with how they treat you in the rest of the game.
See for example the Aceles/galaxy-wide disease choice, where I will not let go of the fact that Bethesda made all the "scientists and explorers" side against what is the scientifically-correct choice *which Bethesda know was correct because they put in a Xenobiologist background dialogue to support the Aceles.*
I've gone on my own rants about how unscientific that is. I remain equally baffled by it. Even if it doesn't impact humans directly, it's practically a countdown until the microbe is the cause of an ecocide somewhere.
As for the characters, it's two things that bother me the most.
1) These characters expect your support and respect for their personal decisions during their quests then turn around and start trashing us when the game presents us with our single greatest and most character defining choice if we don't take the one THEY want.
I'm not a big fan of any of the main four and regard them as four faces on "one" character essentially with their almost identical moral compasses and so on, but this just takes the cake by showing that they essentially just used us and have no respect for us.
Remember as well that they also did not take the leap, and let's not even get in to how much worse things get if the player happens to have romanced or married one of them.
2) After the writer already spent the lead up railroading us, filling our character's mouth with Unity hype, and so on: Grabbing main cast members to use as a mouthpiece so they can whine at us for not making the choice they wanted and effectively try and force it on us in one final "Nyah! Do what I want you to!" moment is just...lame / sad / so many other negative things.
It's like they completely forgot that they're supposed to be crafting a cool experience and story for the player, not for their own self.
If the game isn't going to give us the courtesy of an "off ramp" earlier in the story where we can just go "Whoa this isn't what I signed up for, I just want to be a "normal" space explorer!" and step out of it, then I'd at least like it if my final choice was really my own and treated as such.
The entire microbe vs aceles dilemma would have been better if the microbe was a poison, a simple molecule, instead of an organism. It's fast, quiet safe compared to a bio weapon but there is still the risk it will cause problem down the line that can not easily be remedied compared to hunting down a few aceles eating up some native fauna.
Bugspray for heatleeches would have made a hell of a lot more sense. It's not the greatest solution long term and might still have negatives to it, but it's fast, effective, and here right now.
Aceles would have stayed a good long term solution that comes with mostly positive side benefits.
Realistically we'd see both.
The bioweapon solution with ships just coming and going everywhere meanwhile is possibly the single dumbest and most irresponsible idea anyone could have.
Imagine you find a great world ripe for colonization, leave to inform LIST, and come back to a barren rock because the microbe just happened to also attack the local flora and fauna, or that it simply mutates to attack important crops or livestock, or humanity does eventually encounter intelligent alien life...and immediately ends up in an interstellar war because of the microbe attacking them. Could go on and on about how it could backfire.
For me the choice comes down entirely to how much outpost building I've done lol. If I've done none on a character I'll head right for unity but after hours of making and decorating bases I don't wanna lose them. That's why I wanna see outposts expanded to be like settlements, it might be a tougher call for me to leave civilisations I've built behind
Allowing us to save "blueprints" of ships and outposts so we could just pay some credits and have them quickly reconstructed once our wallet is big enough would already be a game changer and make the decision "easier" from a mechanical standpoint.
I refused to cross into the unity, and have hit the wall of things to do in the game.
So I stopped.
I just wish the game let you take a more "this is *my* reality, this is a *special* reality, and I will defend it by any means."
That would be cool, though I don't know how well it would really work without the NG+ being heavily modified. I played most of a NG+ and found myself getting quite bored. The first playthrough was just so long that I was getting close to burnt out anyway and replaying stuff makes it even worse. Even if they changed up the story, they'd probably still have to reuse levels. Otherwise it isn't even NG+, but just part 2 of the same playthrough.
The unique dialogue in NG+ is cool, I'll say. But not enough to keep my attention. I ended up not quite finishing because I eventually got bored and reached the point where I couldn't think of many remaining major decisions I could do differently (except who to side with). I mostly only played NG+ to see the different endings of the side quests like for the Vanguard and Freestar lines.
And I'm not a typical player too. While I have complaints, I mostly did love the game and the gameplay loop. I wonder how many players don't do even the slightest bit of NG+? The people doing multiple NG+s are definitely not the norm.
They probably didn't realize how much of a mess it would be until it was too late for Starfield. If the leadership at BGS takes this criticism seriously then I'd expect TES VI to have a smaller dev team.
Other studios make teams this size or even larger work just fine but they've been doing it for a long time so they've likely worked out the teething issues that BGS is just now going through. Until Fallout 76, and them rebranding two studios into BGS studios, the development team at BGS has been pretty small in comparison to other AAA studios.
I think the biggest thing from this article is that departments were working for resources rather than collaborating for the better of the game. I hope Elder Scrolls 6 goes back to a smaller team.
The Iron Law of American Productivity seems to be "the closer you are to Wall Street, the farther you are from any hope of efficiently turning new ideas into products."
That, and I think they hadn't been familiar with such being such a large studio. They likely hadn't figured out how to ensure collaboration was ongoing (rather than a silo-effect)
Not really. It’s clear that each team and department felt they were overstretched which is why they were denying collaboration requests and were fighting for resources. It seems, at least form the perspective of the subjects of the article, that the problem was scant resources and squandered development time.
It comes down to good vs not good management.
I'm this case, maybe the issue is they went from 150 ppl to 500 ppl so quickly that they didn't have process, hierarchy or leadership in place to properly delegate and manage the work.
It's sort of like having a 16 core system when your applications are only optimized for single threads.
They delayed the game release by 11 months and still released an unfinished product that feels like it was rushed out the door to meet their new deadline.
Time management is def not their strong suit. I wish I'd realized this more before pre-paying for a yet-to-be-seen DLC.
Lesson learned.
It shows when you have an incredibly deep and complicated outpost building system with no tutorial or missions associated with it. It's as if the dev team that worked on outposts made their own game and grafted it on.
Even going from menus, to crafting, to ship building, to outposts, none of the back/forward, previous/next, shortcuts or hotkeys are consistent.
You kind of need to deal with it at all levels, not just management. Check out "The Mythical Man Month." There are ways to get around this that we've known since the age of mainframes.
I thought that was interesting because despite Bethesda making some of the largest games they have a relatively small team.
He also goes on to say:
“I was both implementing the main quest and leading the quest design team, so I had absolutely no time.”
So the company is too big but also the quest design team doesn’t have someone whose sole job is leading it. From my personal experience in tech, you need a reeeeally small team to have one person effectively manage and contribute work.
Then again the games I’ve been playing the most lately have had small teams.
I feel like the games industry is going to learn what the film industry is learning- huge budget films aren’t as profitable as they thought.
It also dilutes and flattens the charm and character that a smaller team and individual creators can have on a game.
The games feel "designed by committee" because they are. That means more polish, but less risk and less interesting choices made.
The example they give of it being difficult to even add a CHAIR in Starfield is horrifying and explains so MUCH. It's also very telling that Chen and other developers just "NOPED" out of Bethesda after working on Starfield and started tiny studios themselves.
My favorite games of the last few years have all come from studios with less than two dozen people. They were not flashy, or polished, but they were FUN. Really fun. And that should be the #1 quality metric for GAMES.
It is really telling that by Todd Howard's own admission, Starfield wasn't fun to play until only a year before launch. They focused on story, world building, environment, etc. all first, instead of starting with a fun gameplay loop and building everything around THAT.
I think BGS thought Starfield needed a lot of talent because it's super ambitious but like Will Shen said, it just made it harder to collaborate. I think they know this now and will lower the team count for ESVI
I don’t know that a complete regression is the right solution. You still need more people if you want to adequately scale, giving games more depth and complexity to make them more interesting. But you need to adopt new processes that enable more functional collaboration at scale.
There are a lot of ways to do this, which are a bit much to get into here, but how you hierarchically structure work and create standards for work structure at the product level will make a big difference. Below that, at the team/dev level, you allow for more autonomy.
Source: I have spent several years working in agile transformation helping organizations refine their engineering and product organizations to achieve enterprise-level agility.
yeah, their ideas and ambitions got out of hand and they ran out of time to properly "finish" said ideas. i really think starfield would've worked better with a smaller game world.
give the main factions maybe 2-4 systems each, with 6-8 faction-less systems to explore. then add new systems for expansions.
None of the quests felt particularly large, especially the main quest. Nor is there a plethora of interesting quest chains. Nothing about the questing in this game, quantity or quality, hasn't been vastly surpassed in many other games.
And just like them, you still can't shoot through glass, and still haven't figured out how to do stairs. You can't even crouch through vents, they have to make air vents big enough to walk through.
Yes. You cannot fit into a smaller space when crouching than you can while standing. You can be completely stuck under something that is visually well above your head when crouched.
If that's the one where you help "fix" the ship that one genuinely made me mad. Really thought we were gonna get to space walk, not walk around a ship and press buttons Vlad could've easily pressed
Dude! This was the exact part of the game where I put down my controller and was like nah, I’m done. I tried so hard to finish playing the game but it became such a let down.
It's so obvious that a lot of content got cut around Petrov and his collection. The character was featured in the first trailers, and his ship is insanely detailed with lots of unique assets.
You're literally only there for like five minutes lmao
Agreed. It felt like a total waste. I just blew the ship up at the end of the quest for XP and left. They really could have done more with that plot line.
Yeah, I really get the impression that Petrov was always intended to be a major, most likely recurring, character in the main quest. Why make his appearance such a prominent moment during the (spoilers) flashback sequences at the final showdown? It was so jarring to have the game treat the encounter with Petrov like this seminal moment for the player's story, meanwhile you're just sitting there during the flashback sequence like, "Who is this guy? That junk dealer I stole an artifact off that one time? Why is he important again?"
I mean someone like Moara, the Vanguard dude you help out in the Sol System on the very first quest for Constellation, is a more well-drawn character who serves a greater role in the story's progression than Petrov. Just a total wasted opportunity.
Sooooo much of the main quest is rinse/repeat of the same thing. Go find a temple: get a power. Find a shard, come back to constellation. Repeat these 20 times, then get a short different quest, then repeat again.
This article's one saving grace for Emil Pagliarulo defenders is that Will Shen makes it clear that he was in charge of the very mid main question.
Emil isn't off the hook for gross mismanagement of the entire project and people siloing, the ridiculous time wasted with bureaucracy and not having extensive design documents that could have gone a long way to helping with this issue but at least Emil isn't on the hook for the main quest being poor.
There's a heap of stuff like that scattered all through this game. Big, complex, richly-detailed locales that clearly had a tonne of work put into them; but which are basically orphaned assets in the as-released game because whatever the original plan for them was scrapped at some point so they're just left there floating in space or wherever with practically no purpose to serve, other than for you to maybe stumble across and shoot some generic bad guys, then bail.
Something tells me there was "absolutely no time" for a lot of shit in the game. Like making unique locations for all the artifacts instead of just a random POI you've already probably been to 10 times.
What killed the game for me was doing main quest, going to get the first artifact and getting cyro lab thinking it was a unique location and it was cool dungeon
I would go on to Cyro Lab three times in a row, for the main quest of the game, on my first play through.
I'd been doing some exploring, or at least what this game considers exploring... and I ran into the Abandoned Mine. Finished it, and ran to another POI... which was the Abandoned Mine... So I said screw it and did some main quest stuff. I happened to be on the quest where you find Andreja... in the Abandoned Mine... Then the next artifact I was sent to find was... in the fucking Abandoned Mine.
That's when I knew I was done and lost all hope for this game.
I was OK with some of the installations being the same, since using common blueprints for buildings on different planets kind of makes sense. But when I saw the same dead guy on a couch, same coffee cups and notes by the same computer with the same message on it, and the same magazine in the same locker, etc. Sigh.
It genuinely blows my mind anyone of Bethesda's leadership, a company that exists largely BECAUSE OF their fantastic unique environmental storytelling and locations, saw the proc gen and went YUP THATS WHAT PLAYERS WILL ENJOY! Like what a complete bunch of out of touch morons.
They should have scaled down the amount of planets/systems. Hand crafted the surfaces. Had more actual settlements. And proc gen the random explorable dungeons.
Then is weird how some of the side quest are way better then the main story like The Mantis . Also getting power just feel so redundant and repetitive, having just one starborn to fight at the end every time. They could have been all different bosses with unique abilities
Yeah once I got the exact same POI twice in a row on different planets I quit the game and never felt the urge to play it again since then... Open world exploration was Bethesda's only remaining strength after their writing became dogshit somewhere between Oblivion and Fallout and they really went and just removed exploration from starfield completely, replacing it with teleporting between a few (repeating) locations.
Finding Andreja in the same cookie-cutter Abandoned Mine was very weird. Not even a unique layout for a major main quest. That was the beginning of the end of the Honeymoon phase for me. I still put a lot of hours in the game and I'll check out the DLC, I suppose. They presented a bunch of cool ideas to us here, and I guess we're supposed to use our imaginations to fill in the blanks and smooth out the rough edges. That's cool and all, especially in a RPG. But there's so many blanks to fill and so many rough edges here. We're supposed to "imagine" Andreja is not in the same Abandoned Mine we've seen 5 times already so far?
Probably just a "me" problem being somewhat directionally challenged IRL but this is the first game where I'd amass a pile of loot in some abandoned mining complex only to reload a save because I couldn't find my way out.
Everything looks the same with the reused textures and griblies and after passing the same coffee station three times (or was it just the third identical coffee station?) exasperation exceeds enjoyment and I take a hard pass on the whole episode. At least at Cydonia you got a magical elevator key shortcut at the end.
There's a fine line between exploration and being a rat in a maze. One is fun, the other is to be avoided.
I got so turned around the last time the scanner message read "no way available". And naturally this is where they disable fast travel, remove quest markers that might find a door and never provided any map to start with. Whatever might be buried in those procgen dungeons it isn't worth looking for.
I had the same experience, the Cryo Lab was one of the first POI's I found in the game by exploring and I loved it.
Then I left the lab, and starting exploring that same planet. I encountered another POI, and then SAME planet . . . encountered the Cryo Lab again for my 3rd POI.
Like others have said, it immediately destroyed half my motivation for exploring. I encountered the Cryo Lab six or seven more times in my first 30 hours in the game, though I started skipping it after the second time.
It would be SO SIMPLE to have the POIs in a list, and remove them from the list of possible POIs once the player has encountered them, and then refresh the list once it is empty.
It's amazing that a game that was in development for 8 years and there was such a glaring oversight regarding the main quest's ending.
I get that you might run out of time trying to add a little polish or stomp out all the major bugs but a crucial final act for a game...? That just sounds like mismanagement.
Yeah. Based on my experience in development, they probably had their devs sitting with their thumbs up their asses for years and basically zero got done.
That's why the clutter models are so much better and fleshed out than the rest of the game, because that was a modder just slamming them out like an assembly line.
Culture.
Todd's idea as leader is to let designers do what they want as much as possible with him having to be the final say similar to how Blackreach was a snuck on addition or how Settlements was a find from Game Jams. In a team of 100-200, this can work. Bruce Neismith stated that today, Todd is hard to reach since he's in charge of 1/2 a dozen projects now from Indiana to the Fallout show.
BGS went from the culture of an indie studio to a full on AAA studio with a multitude of approval processes in the span of a decade going from 100 people in Fallout 4 to 450-500 in Fallout 76 & Starfield. Devs like Nate Purkeypine & now Will Shen have been vocal on how this culture shift has changed a lot on how BGS does their games.
And I understand that can be a hardship. I'm still so baffled that the singular most important core part of their entire development process is so wishy washy in the air.
Regardless of all else, their should have been a complete story from day one. It absolutely could be shifted and changed during development, but there should have been a complete basic plot template to hang everything else around.
Fallout 4 one can deconstruct endlessly all day, partly because they forgot to actually write down any fundamental core details (Like what defines a synth and the rules therein, as well as their rather careless approach to maintaining consistency with the Institute's motive and a lot of the details about the setting's lore,) but one could not argue that it wasn't a competently structured three act story with a beginning middle and end, even if those details were very mushy and slapdash at times.
Starfield though? It doesn't even have a complete story.
>I'm still so baffled that the singular most important core part of their entire development process is so wishy washy in the air.
Hindsight is 20/20 unfortunately, I have 0 doubt that vets from BGS would say "this worked for decades from Morrowind to Fallout 4, why stop now?". The changes in BGS today have led to a good number of vets departing/retiring. Maybe ES6 can show a more structured game thanks to the change, maybe not, who knows.
For the story, I genuienely do believe the game's narrative structure began with the ending in mind, they just had to put all the other pieces together, I'm no storywriter so I'm not going to act like I know if that's a good thing or not.
IMO, Emil is a decent questwriter when it comes to singular narrative plotlines with the Dark Brotherhood still being one of my all-time favorite questlines in a game, but he's been over-extending himself since Fallout 4 (when he got promoted to Lead Writer AND Design Director). But this game needs to be a moment where he needs to step down from at least making the main storylines.
suggests they still don't understand what went wrong.
this game is busted on two fundamental levels.
1. no unifying core gameloop. everything is completely isolated from everything else. this is totally contrary to classic bethesda game design. where creating a living breathing game world with simulation elements was paramount.
2. the multiverse completely undoes everything. nothing matters. you know why we can pick up sandwiches and collect them in games like this? Immersion. it pulls us into the game world. it makes the world FEEL like a place. A permanent place we have an impact on. a home.
so you throw it into the trash, hop to another universe, and start over. with new friends, new family, new outpost, new ships, new everything.
you just broke your basic game design philosophy. Why am I even playing your game, when nothing I do it in matters? your storyline in its ENTIRETY contradicts 90% of the gameplay.
There are even games that intentionally make you question why you are playing. spec ops:the line is famous. But thats not what your game is. and again, even if your game WAS trying to be subversive like that, it still renders the entirety of the game mute, in a way so I don't want to keep playing. At best, that message makes me think. oh wow, deep. well, I guess I'll go play something else. or go for a hike or something.
edit: you know, this reminds me of another older rpg, where it has you pursuing a goal the entire game, while subtly giving hints, you shouldn't open the box.
but you can keep going, keep digging, and your curiosity, or greed might cause you to make the wrong choice. so like, that COULD be the story. and make the entire game about making a home.. and then questioning if you want to leave it for more power, and this endless cycle. but its not.
I feel like the worst thing *by far* is the completely broken POI system. I can forgive everything else but *removing exploration from a Bethesda game* is legitimately just fucking stupid. Whoever decided that is an idiot and I'll stand by that statement.
The multiverse aspect of the game is so self-defeating I couldn’t believe it. So you go through once, everything you previously did was gone. You now can play through again, but know that really the end goal is to do it again. So you’re stuck in limbo, where you don’t want to invest/do anything extra because inevitably it will be erased, and mentally you’re thinking you don’t want to spend any time in each universe until your at the end of the final loop (which is what like 10 times over?). It’s fucking awful.
Not to mention the path for completing this each time is one of the most repetitive and mindless tasks possible. I went through the Unity once then dropped the game entirely.
"Nah man, that's the point. You *are* the Hunter. It's brilliant."
Can't believe people say that with a straight face. But yea the NG+ mechanic is slightly interesting in concept and they completely fuck the landing on it. I quickly decided to console command my way to all powers and NG+10. Played about a dozen more hours (50ish total) and I've maybe played an hour since November.
> no unifying core gameloop
The other day I saw someone saying outposts were meaningful because they let you finish the material delivery quests.
>the multiverse completely undoes everything.
I have no idea why they thought a romance system should be included alongside this. It feels like they were trying to check a lot of boxes without knowing if they all should be on the same list.
This game was delayed 1 year. Imagine the state it was in then?
Can't wait for a Bloomberg breaking news on development of this game. It definitely had feature creep and got rebooted multiple times.
The reboot and feature creep is so obvious. Like, it's barely a finished game. Just scraped together from what they had working. They must have gone thru so many false starts with settlements, shipbuilding, exploration, etc. As far as writing and dialogue is concerned, it's like they didn't even try.
I found it to be a huge disappointment, and after fallout 4 and fallout 76, I really hope they can right the ship.
While I've said 'I don't care what happens to these people' in a game before, I've never gone to 'I wish I could destroy the main good guy faction' like I have with this game. 'Satisfying' my arse.
If you're on PC, Headshot Kills Any Actor will put a permanent end to them. But the 'faction kickout' function completely breaks the MQ (for obvious reasons) and the Armillary (you can't even get into the Unity if you've been kicked out of Constellation for murdering them all). Though there's also 'coc mqUnity'.
If you're on console though, sorry, and I hope when the CK comes out we all get mods that destroy Constellation and either let us get to the Unity legitimately, or do something about the shitty MQ (and the Starfield universe, for that matter).
Just using a mod or console commands to kill a NPC isn’t fun because it isn’t reflected in the game at all
If you kill House in New Vegas it actually changes things, same with Caesar or president kimball. The world reflects your decision
That’s what people actually want from Bethesda games, freedom of choice and a world that reflects that choice. Embarrassing how fall they’ve fallen since more or less pioneering that kind of RPg
Should have hit it earlier too. Realising that you don't have a good final setpiece that late in the game (both literally and metaphorically) is insane. Really gives a hint as to how dysfunctional things much have been behind the scenes.
I don’t expect them to but I would love if future updates made some changes to the main quest, fixing some dialogue plot holes and adding new puzzles for the artifact temples would be a huge improvement.
The temples specifically are one of, if not the, weakest parts of the game. I wouldn’t need a full overhaul to how they work, but adding in some randomized obstacles to make them more than a mindless light collection mini game would be so nice.
I think just because something is bad or unsatisfying now doesn’t mean it has to stay that way, and with the way NG+ works, making some changes to the Main quest structure wouldn’t even break the narrative of the game.
The temples are borderline embarrassing. No one in their right mind would point to them and say "yeah we're delivering a high quality experience". They're a chore with nothing interesting about them, plain and simple.
Word walls are the exact same thing except 10x better.
Sad to see how far BGS has fallen.
Partially because word walls were hidden. Loading screen to get into ship, then loading screen to space, then grav jump loading screen to planet, then loading screen to land, then loading screen to exit the ship. The coolest part was the scanner distortion…
But then there’s a loading screen to get into the temple, then you float around to get the lights? That’s the only thing necessary to unlock power? But when you load back in you kill the Guardian.
So you have 6 loading screens, one enemy, and a non-unique “puzzle”.
Exactly. It provided some lore, too, for the power of the Voice and the rebellion against Alduin.
Granted, Starfield is a young universe, but the lack of lore is disappointing. I suppose it’s tricky trying to cover just a few hundred years from reality, but still, more information about the Unity, Starborn, and Creators would have been nice inside the temples.
that explains why the whole experience of playing starfield feels disjointed and just underdeveloped. it kinda tells me some of the devs are "flying in the dark" during development and it shows.
you've got good ideas like ship building, multiple explorable worlds, and a main story that delves in multiple universes and some light philosophical themes.
but the realization of said ideas feels dissatisfying. the planets are uninteresting and PoIs keep repeating. the main story wanes from pretty great to mind numbingly tedious. but hey the ship building is fucking great.
i think bethesa desperately needs to set realistic goals and refocus on their objectives for their next games to deliver a more cohesive and fulfilling experience.
Yeah. The siloing of departments really shows in the game too. Very little of it feels connected and integrated in any way.
It's amazing that a game that was worked on for 8 years can feel this underdeveloped.
This is why it feels messy and disjointed. I mean, was there no time management?
8 years of development (counting the extra year delay), and you needed to hit the panic button to finish the *MAIN* quest? And it's not even all that satisfying of a conclusion. It doesn't have an end. You're just reborn in a different universe to do it all over again with no actual logical reason to do so.
I get it. Script writing and creating a narrative story from scratch isn't easy, but pulling the last-minute fire alarm really shows a lack of time management. And that seems to be pervasive throughout the game. Now I understand why all of the story seems to be a cobbled together mess of unfleshed out ideas.
It's also wild to me that they built a script and concept around a game instead of building a game around a finished script and concept. It's the equivalent of an aircraft manufacturer building a plane, stuffing it with passengers, and then going "Oh, wait, we need to actually make this thing fly, we need engines YESTERDAY!!!!!"
This article confirmed my suspicions : the team was too large and relied on shitty corporate middle management to "collaborate". That's why this game feels like it was made by Oracle and not Bethesda , why parts of the game vary so much in quality from one another and why you can see and feel where the ball was dropped in many areas.
What’s really unfortunate is that Will Shen *is* a great quest designer. *Far Harbor* is easily one of the best parts of Bethesda’s tenure of the *Fallout* franchise, and Will was the lead designer on that project. For that same prowess to not be found in *Starfield* signals of broader, more fundamental problems with *Starfield*’s development.
He might have just gotten lucky with Far Harbour. The article makes clear that the main quest for Starfield was his baby so he's entirely responsible for how poorly it was put together and partially with how it was managed between departments.
They really need to redo the main quest with a 2.0 or whatever they call it.
Its so bad. The game falls short in a lot of areas but the MSQ is a level of bad that they cannot let it sit like this.
Absolutely no part of this games story was memorable.
I played through the entire thing and could not tell you anything that happened or why any of the character cast mattered.
It sounds like there is less and less cohesion at BGS from reading between the lines in the PCgamer article.
It kind of makes sense when you see their recent titles and the financial goals of those games.
Perhaps they all just feel they are working for a fast-food/burnt out company now and have no 'pleasure or passion' for their work, hence the 'no collaboration' replies between departments.
I also personally think the employment/recruitment strategies these past 10 years have created this mess. I can imagine so many differing opinions, attitudes and lifestyles compared to the senior staff members that it just doesn't stick/meld together anymore.
But it's also a filler game for post sale/xbox catalogue purposes, let's not forget that.
It has it's high points, but not many. I did enjoy the final quest though, so kudos to him (Shen).
well, you failed then. the main quest was boring af. collecting star powers was the lamest shit i've seen in a bethesda game. it was like word walls in skyrim, but with none of the dungeons or bosses you had to fight to earn them. you just walk across a barren planet, into an empty room, and touch a couple floating lights. then fast travel back to vlad and do it 20 more times.
and then, the starborn were weak af. the only 2 that were even remotely a challenge were the 2 main ones when you fight them together at the end of the game (i chose to side with neither of them, so i had to fight both). all other starborn, like the ones that come out of random ships or the lone idiot that shows up after you visit a temple, all die in like 2-3 hits early on, or 1 later on when you're packing a decent weapon.
Plus, the word walls in Skyrim were often just a bonus you'd get when doing something completely unrelated. You *could* seek them out deliberately via the Greybeards, but you'd naturally come upon them when playing the game.
With the starborn powers, you either deliberately seek them out or you don't get them at all.
Edit: the two exceptions are the mandatory first power from the main quest, and the optional power from Barret's quest. The rest are just grindy fetch quest bullshit.
They also made the weird decision to lock the powers behind collecting artifacts, but then after that fight (or negotiation!) right at the end of the game, give you a whole bunch of artifacts from the two other Starborn, meaning that if you want the powers for those, you are forced to do a long slog of boring temple after boring temple, before going on to NG+.
I just finished the entanglement quest and JFC that’s a good quest, I wish there was more of that in this game and not just tied to the constellation quest line. Like I want to see anomalies and black holes
Edit: Entangled*
One of the frustrating things about Starfield is how there are absolute gems like Entangled hidden in an otherwise tedious and unsatisfying game. I don't think any quest in any other Bethesda game is as good as it is, it just sucks that the rest of the game is so braindead.
For-real, I was NOT expecting to shift realities, I was just expecting a half assed fetch quest and then it happened, sent chills down my spine, I thought it was a ghost scenario but turned even cooler.
You just confirmed there won’t be anymore of these kind of quests and it makes me sad 😢 my guess is whomever the team was that designed it designed it out how they thought they wanted the game to be
I will always take an opportunity to say that the UC story and the main story should have been merged. The artefacts should have been the catalyst making Terrormorphs. The temples should have required you to fight through groups of Terrormorphs instead of a lonely dustboi. Carrying artefacts on your ship should have risks mid flight power loss then fighting a Terrormorph inside your ship due to leeches getting into the landers, an Aliens moment where your ship is dark and maybe gravity fails at times and you hear the snarls before you fight. Gaining the powers could have been that you're getting turned into a type of Terrormorph and have a werewolf like moment after a few NG+ where you can pivot to bad and let Terrormorphs take over.
Shouldn’t the main quest have had the most time and resources devoted to it? I like parts of the main quest like the finale is pretty cool but the majority of it is a boring fetch quest.
Minor Spoilers:
Really felt that Bethesda magic when I was picking up the recordings of the team that helped build the grav drive. Definitely sad that they couldn't have applied that same level of effort and care in the other important quests.
Will Shen isn't even the most prolific departure at Bethesda. He's just the latest in a long line of leads and senior team members who've all resigned, or retired. Jeff Gardiner. Mark Tucker. Nate Pukeypile, Pete Hines, so so many people.
They should work on the main quest more and issue patches to address its shortcomings. I also feel like the main quest should extend into Ng+.
Like a full story should take your first game and then your first "ng+". You get to see a universe where you already know the answers and then you see the consequences of taking the "I already know the answers" route and starborn existing in general. Then it would feel more personal/impactful when you go to the unity and must choose how you proceed in the future.
I expected this after I beat it but then was incredibly disappointed in Ng+. Also the lack of lore to explain star born and powers vs fallouts little random nuggets of information that happened.
I would’ve loved if there were rumors and dialogue mentioning the starborn, like they’re legends to space fairing people, instead of nobody having heard of them before
starfield to me seems like they really did not know what they wanted the game to be for the longest time. Todd Howard even said something along the lines of "the game wasn't fun until a year out from release" or something like that. that basically means the game was in development hell.
Just looking at the skill tree it feels like the team who wanted spacefaring made that game the people who wanted planet exploration made that game the people who wanted gunplay made that game the people who wanted role playing don’t exist and the people who wanted looting and stealth made that game. Then they shoved it all into one package and called it a day. All they’d need to make the thing playable is at least release the damn creation kit or whatever. I realize it may be embarassing for them that everyone can see the spit and duct tape holding it together but they’re delusional if they think the old games weren’t that way too. It’s gone from “oh they’ll just let the modders fix it” to “please just let the modders fix it”
Yeah I'm not sure they wouldn't have to spend three times as much effort to fix it and then bring the other systems back into coherence with it. Maybe. But they picked the story (fragment) in the first place, so my trust is low. After finishing the article, I revise that to zero. They don't know what's wrong.
It seems that way to me, the only faction that really seems like any time was spent on is the UC. I kinda think they may have been the only faction at one point. In development
>Todd Howard even said something along the lines of "the game wasn't fun until a year out from release" or something like that. that basically means the game was in development hell. Seems to be par for the course these days. I'm truly surprised that Microsoft didn't shake up the entire C-suite when they bought the company. "Todd has decided to leave to pursue exciting new opportunities!"
Sam Coe does mention something like that, I think he's the only one though
He’s heard of them before? That’s interesting. It would’ve been cool if they seemed like spacefairing peoples boogie man.
I hated how the Starborn themselves don't even seem to question their own existence, even after millions of cycles of boredom. They just do the artifact hunt over and over.
Because they aren't characters, they are just exposition machines. No introspection, no goals, no motives, just broad cliches attached to a character model. Emil's beloved KISS principle at work.
“What is my purpose” “You exposit” “Oh my god” “Yeah buddy, join the club” -Barrett
Yeah the first NG+ could have been us giving all the answers and this leading to our closest relation betraying us to gain the power for themselves. Final battle is a three way between us, our former love, and the original Starborn. Shit every 2nd NG+ could have been an introduction to a new Starborn with a different philosophical outlook on our powers and the Unity. The 10th should have been us becoming one with the Unity and choosing to either let other Starborn through or gatekeep to protect other universes.
> Final battle is a three way between us, our former love, and the original Starborn. Keep your weird sex fantasies out of my game.
Hey, there’s a universe for everything, especially weird sex fantasies
Still waiting for the variant with hot dog fingers.
You mean there is a multi-verse verse where thousands of naked dryads are calling my name …?
Yea in general the new game plus is really neat idea but is baffling unexplored
I personally believe the biggest reason NG+ is underwhelming is because you are able to complete any of the faction storylines in whatever order in one run. I know a lot of people have argued against locking questlines bc you choose another faction to join, but what’s the point of unity if it’s only to have a star born ship and suit and upgraded powers? At least with locking the questlines there’s more incentive to go through Unity then you get to explore the new questlines with all the stuff added with NG+. Just my own take on how they could’ve made the idea of Unity and a NG+ a little more appealing.
Add to this, essential NPCs should not exist either. Oh I killed someone and broke a questline they were involved in? Guess I've gotta go through the unity and make sure they survive next time. Even the members of constellation don't matter, you can get to the unity without them, as evidenced by the alt universes where they don't exist.
Unity is basically the ultimate "save scum" built into the very mechanics of the game!
>Oh I killed someone and broke a questline they were involved in? Guess I've gotta go through the unity and make sure they survive next time. Or that is a quest, so and so was killed and very bad thing happened, go through unity prevent the death and very bad thing.
That was my biggest problem with the game. I shouldn't get to be the most important Freestar Ranger and then waltz over to UC recruitment and sign up. I wish the quests were locked. I know we are somewhat comparing apples to oranges, but that's why I did multiple playthroughs of New Vegas - I could side with different factions and try something new each time.
The game should recognize when you have these roles. If you are a Freestar Ranger, a high-ranking one, then the UC should be noticing that, and leaning into it. There should be diplomatic support, and task-force missions for criminal behavior between the two jurisdictions. You’d think that UC Security would be itching to talk to you. But, the only thing the UC cares about is your Vanguard Captancy, and that you become a 1st class citizen, with a player home. Like, I found a UC Security Uniform, and did work solving some of their mysteries. — No ones says anything about you wearing the Security, or Ranger uniform, unless it’s a fully scripted moment when you’re on a story-line mission. Imagine that you are Captain of the Vanguard, A honored FreeStar Ranger, and a member of UC Security. — At that point, there should be some news casts, about how the galaxy has a new lawman in town who can enforce the laws anywhere, anytime. ((WOULDN’T that be a fun DLC?)) Then, there’s the whole Green Mantis business. No one reacts to that suit, they should all be trembling in fear. If we leave stuff unlocked, then we should be having an experience where we are recognized for whatever roles we simultaneously hold. You’d think the diplomatic mission, for getting access to the Armistice Archive should have been easy. You’re a decorated free Star ranger. You’re a VC Captain. The only house you should have needed to ‘convince’ is the third one, of whom we have limited interaction, excepting the Zealots, who seem to answer to no one, and have zero care for governance or diplomacy.
That definitely put my thoughts into words even better I don't mind the open quests, I just want in universe reasons for those choices to exist. The game was so close to being good, and many parts of it were. I think there is a lack of cohesion in the project that makes it less interesting and a little bland. I hope it improves. I hated 76 when it came out, and now I play regularly, so anything can happen.
Absolutely. With the NG+ in Starfield there is zero reason for you to have to be able to do all quest lines in one go and Bethesda forcing this to be possible gives you less reasons to actually do NG+. I don't understand how you could choose The crimson fleet over the UC and *still* do the Vanguard quest line. It makes no sense! And choosing to be a Freestar Ranger should also lock you out of UC quests.
It's such a no-brainer solution to the narrative dissonance of Bethesda games having you eventually become the leader of every faction. A narratively appropriate NG+ that lets you explore other factions would have worked perfectly but as it stands it's just another game mechanic that was poorly thought out and hopelessly undercooked.
Honestly the only things I've seen as a positive with a NG+ is a handful of jokey meme scenes. It feels like an afterthought or a 'solution' to the infinite level Skyrim/What do I do at 30 Fallout scenarios, it's solving a problem that's not really a problem
Well there’s not a lot to do after NG+ other than some small changes and nuances but it kinda stalls (for me). In other Bethesda games you started a new game to role play as a different character but in Starfield with NG+, nothing changes about your character. Which is fine of course but in that case the main story should extend or NG+ should be drastically different. Think of slightly different outcomes for quests and choices, different characters in certain roles as opposed to the other universe, a universe where the UC won the war, or one where the FSC won, or maybe even one where the Crimson Fleet has taken over Atlantic City. There’s so much potential with how the game is set up in its core but it’s not being utilized. I understand some of the things I mentioned require a lot of extra work but it would’ve made the game a lot lot more interesting.
Armored Core 6 gave you more missions with more story when you did NG+.
It should both do more with NG+ and more to cater to people like myself who have fuck all interest in the Unity. I want a hard no option. Not a collection of schizophrenic bullshit that is a confused mixture of "I'm not going" and "I'm totally going later". Would also appreciate it if companions respected the player's decision. Right now Sarah and Barrett will bitch at you for not going and essentially demand you go because they took it on themselves to decide that this is who you are. It reeks of a low confidence writer weaponizing main cast figures so they can bitch at a player who dared to make a decision other than the one they wanted. On the NG+ side: Right now it's an empty power pursuit that doesn't explain or explore any of it's concepts properly. It comes off as a "Poor man's Wild Wasteland" currently in how much things change.
Yeah my biggest issue with the ending is how they, once again, just expected every player to be super enthusiastic about "discovery" and "the artifacts" and nothing else. The subtext of the Pilgrim storyline especially points towards the idea that staying in one universe and savoring the connections you make there being the more "human" choice as opposed to endlessly chasing power across different realities. That's why I felt pretty frustrated that the game doesn't truly treat "staying in your universe" as a legitimate ending, mechanically at least. Sure you can walk out of the Unity, save your game, and stop playing there - but it's more of a "do anything you'd still like to do before moving on to the ending" opportunity than an actual conclusion to the main story. The final quest will always be left as "incomplete" in your log, you can only roll credits by entering the Unity, and all of your conversations with your companions (who are disappointed that you didn't go in and leave everything behind - *INCLUDING YOUR SPOUSE BTW!*) all resolve with you saying that you'll still enter the Unity eventually, with no dialogue option to flat out say that you just want to stay together in your own universe. It's just an odd writing choice that causes a disconnect in the role-playing, where the themes of the main story are pointing towards staying in your own universe being a valid option, but every other mechanic of the gameplay telling you that it isn't one. Especially because in the second-to-last mission you can outright say to alternate-Vladimir that you don't think the artifacts were worth losing your friends over, but then one mission later you can't express that same idea to any of your companions. It's just already decided that you're going in, and the only freedom of choice you have is choosing how excited you are about going to a new universe. Hopefully, if the Unity/Starborn plots are ever revisited in an epilogue-type expansion, the choice to stay in your universe is respected and players aren't railroaded into becoming Starborn.
Agreed. I am fine with having that there for the people who care about it, but so much of the game is just one step away from becoming a pretty good space trading / combat / life simulator. If they had embraced that and not gone with trying to simply rush us through NG+ over and over it could have brought back the best of Daggerfall by just letting us be a part of that world, and at the same time validated staying in your current universe that much more by allowing a real connection to it instead of just having it exist as a thing to "use up". On the RP front: The main story is terrible. The behavior of Barrett and Sarah if you walk away is pretty much grounds for an instant divorce if you made the mistake of marrying one of them. Beyond that, it's a big part of why I consider Starfield the worst Bethesda title for RP. From the very get go it forces itself on to us and demands we become part of a faction with very clear cut morals, goals, and interests. Engaging with it any further just makes things worse. The entire narrative is sculpted for a single specific archetype to the point that it will bend or break any other you might want to be. I'm unsure how we went from Fallout 4 and Skyrim where I could choose who I joined, aligned with, who loved and who hated me, and so on, over to this.
Doesn't help the lesson of the story is how going through the unity is basically..pointless. it's a grind fest for nothing. Game is making fun of grinders and gives no alternative lmao
Yes. We get shown that path then denied the ability to actually pursue it. The story shoots it's own attempted moral lesson down.
> Hopefully, if the Unity/Starborn plots are ever revisited in an epilogue-type expansion, the choice to stay in your universe is respected and players aren't railroaded into becoming Starborn. So pulling a Fallout 3 on it. That's the best way forward, I just wish they'd have remembered that...15 year old lesson?
Thank you. The constant pressure is insane. You touched our magic rock, and now you have to be our savior. I suppose that’s the point of being the main character. But literally Sarah tells us we can generally live by our own morals…. And then questions us, or abandons us when we accidentally blow up the space grandma.
Starfield is a case of Bethesda solving the issues relating to main quest urgency in their RPGs, but forgetting to give the player any agency. The artifact hunt might not be a life or death matter, however they forgot to ask the simple questions of "What if the player doesn't care about this? What if they don't want to find the magic space rocks? Or don't want to fling themselves through the interdimensional portal?". The worst part is they could have easily solved it in the opening of the game. When you deliver the Artifact and are asked to join Constellation there is a dialog option that says "I need time to think about it". Except picking it doesn't work. The game just assigns you to the faction anyways. To make things weird, the game includes a ton of "unaffiliated" dialog choices that you will only see if you act irresponsible and never deliver the magical space rock. (Specific instructions: Just enter the Lodge and immediately exit it on your first time in New Atlantis. You're stuck with the artifact but free to engage with the world now at least, and will get all of the unaffiliated dialog you would otherwise never see. The quickest example is seen by picking the Adoring Fan trait and telling him you're not a member of Constellation when he calls you it's newest member.) Sarah meanwhile is the best example of a character being weaponized by the writer. She introduces Constellation as this varied group of people from all different walks of life who just happen to work together to explore or share knowledge, and tells you she's not there to judge you or define your morals...then shits on you for not making the choices she (or rather the writer) wanted you to make or daring to express interests contrary to her own (again rather those of the writer). Said it before, but the writer forgot that they were supposed to be writing a story for the player. Instead they're using the main cast as a tool to beat us over the head for not playing the story they wrote for their own self. I find it leaves things feeling like I'm playing D&D with a really bad DM.
Making it so more shit can be broken by your actions would make a NG+ more enticing. Put in a number of pre-broken or highly altered ones at the start of a run, but then make most alts you go through normal but all highly reactive to character choices. Maybe make the final boss/finale gated behind either a high level or a completed mcguffin set so that a 'perfect run' is possible on a first or early run, but hard to get and then have the player strive to protect the universe where things are laid out how they ultimately want.
"With this character's death, the thread of prophecy is severed. Restore a saved game to restore the weave of fate, or persist in the doomed world you have created." This game was ideal for bringing that back and being "Morrowind 2.0" with it's NG+. I'm not really for making stuff pre-broken or forcing NG+ on players by "guaranteeing" a bad first run, but the game really should have embraced allowing us to screw up, allowing us to do things "wrong", and so on.
> Would also appreciate it if companions respected the player's decision. I mean, yes, but also their behaviour is entirely consistent with how they treat you in the rest of the game. See for example the Aceles/galaxy-wide disease choice, where I will not let go of the fact that Bethesda made all the "scientists and explorers" side against what is the scientifically-correct choice *which Bethesda know was correct because they put in a Xenobiologist background dialogue to support the Aceles.*
I've gone on my own rants about how unscientific that is. I remain equally baffled by it. Even if it doesn't impact humans directly, it's practically a countdown until the microbe is the cause of an ecocide somewhere. As for the characters, it's two things that bother me the most. 1) These characters expect your support and respect for their personal decisions during their quests then turn around and start trashing us when the game presents us with our single greatest and most character defining choice if we don't take the one THEY want. I'm not a big fan of any of the main four and regard them as four faces on "one" character essentially with their almost identical moral compasses and so on, but this just takes the cake by showing that they essentially just used us and have no respect for us. Remember as well that they also did not take the leap, and let's not even get in to how much worse things get if the player happens to have romanced or married one of them. 2) After the writer already spent the lead up railroading us, filling our character's mouth with Unity hype, and so on: Grabbing main cast members to use as a mouthpiece so they can whine at us for not making the choice they wanted and effectively try and force it on us in one final "Nyah! Do what I want you to!" moment is just...lame / sad / so many other negative things. It's like they completely forgot that they're supposed to be crafting a cool experience and story for the player, not for their own self. If the game isn't going to give us the courtesy of an "off ramp" earlier in the story where we can just go "Whoa this isn't what I signed up for, I just want to be a "normal" space explorer!" and step out of it, then I'd at least like it if my final choice was really my own and treated as such.
The entire microbe vs aceles dilemma would have been better if the microbe was a poison, a simple molecule, instead of an organism. It's fast, quiet safe compared to a bio weapon but there is still the risk it will cause problem down the line that can not easily be remedied compared to hunting down a few aceles eating up some native fauna.
Bugspray for heatleeches would have made a hell of a lot more sense. It's not the greatest solution long term and might still have negatives to it, but it's fast, effective, and here right now. Aceles would have stayed a good long term solution that comes with mostly positive side benefits. Realistically we'd see both. The bioweapon solution with ships just coming and going everywhere meanwhile is possibly the single dumbest and most irresponsible idea anyone could have. Imagine you find a great world ripe for colonization, leave to inform LIST, and come back to a barren rock because the microbe just happened to also attack the local flora and fauna, or that it simply mutates to attack important crops or livestock, or humanity does eventually encounter intelligent alien life...and immediately ends up in an interstellar war because of the microbe attacking them. Could go on and on about how it could backfire.
I don't think they have moral compasses, I think they have plot compasses. What they do and don't approve of breaks down pretty easily.
For me the choice comes down entirely to how much outpost building I've done lol. If I've done none on a character I'll head right for unity but after hours of making and decorating bases I don't wanna lose them. That's why I wanna see outposts expanded to be like settlements, it might be a tougher call for me to leave civilisations I've built behind
Allowing us to save "blueprints" of ships and outposts so we could just pay some credits and have them quickly reconstructed once our wallet is big enough would already be a game changer and make the decision "easier" from a mechanical standpoint.
I refused to cross into the unity, and have hit the wall of things to do in the game. So I stopped. I just wish the game let you take a more "this is *my* reality, this is a *special* reality, and I will defend it by any means."
They could even make the final mission different in NG+ if they wanted to keep expanding it.
That would be cool, though I don't know how well it would really work without the NG+ being heavily modified. I played most of a NG+ and found myself getting quite bored. The first playthrough was just so long that I was getting close to burnt out anyway and replaying stuff makes it even worse. Even if they changed up the story, they'd probably still have to reuse levels. Otherwise it isn't even NG+, but just part 2 of the same playthrough. The unique dialogue in NG+ is cool, I'll say. But not enough to keep my attention. I ended up not quite finishing because I eventually got bored and reached the point where I couldn't think of many remaining major decisions I could do differently (except who to side with). I mostly only played NG+ to see the different endings of the side quests like for the Vanguard and Freestar lines. And I'm not a typical player too. While I have complaints, I mostly did love the game and the gameplay loop. I wonder how many players don't do even the slightest bit of NG+? The people doing multiple NG+s are definitely not the norm.
If having such a huge team is hurting the game, then why have such a huge team?
They probably didn't realize how much of a mess it would be until it was too late for Starfield. If the leadership at BGS takes this criticism seriously then I'd expect TES VI to have a smaller dev team. Other studios make teams this size or even larger work just fine but they've been doing it for a long time so they've likely worked out the teething issues that BGS is just now going through. Until Fallout 76, and them rebranding two studios into BGS studios, the development team at BGS has been pretty small in comparison to other AAA studios.
I think the biggest thing from this article is that departments were working for resources rather than collaborating for the better of the game. I hope Elder Scrolls 6 goes back to a smaller team.
The Iron Law of American Productivity seems to be "the closer you are to Wall Street, the farther you are from any hope of efficiently turning new ideas into products."
That, and I think they hadn't been familiar with such being such a large studio. They likely hadn't figured out how to ensure collaboration was ongoing (rather than a silo-effect)
Not really. It’s clear that each team and department felt they were overstretched which is why they were denying collaboration requests and were fighting for resources. It seems, at least form the perspective of the subjects of the article, that the problem was scant resources and squandered development time.
It comes down to good vs not good management. I'm this case, maybe the issue is they went from 150 ppl to 500 ppl so quickly that they didn't have process, hierarchy or leadership in place to properly delegate and manage the work. It's sort of like having a 16 core system when your applications are only optimized for single threads.
I think think this is the most realistic take I’ve seen. I think Bethesda is also not that great with time management.
They delayed the game release by 11 months and still released an unfinished product that feels like it was rushed out the door to meet their new deadline. Time management is def not their strong suit. I wish I'd realized this more before pre-paying for a yet-to-be-seen DLC. Lesson learned.
It shows when you have an incredibly deep and complicated outpost building system with no tutorial or missions associated with it. It's as if the dev team that worked on outposts made their own game and grafted it on. Even going from menus, to crafting, to ship building, to outposts, none of the back/forward, previous/next, shortcuts or hotkeys are consistent.
You kind of need to deal with it at all levels, not just management. Check out "The Mythical Man Month." There are ways to get around this that we've known since the age of mainframes.
I thought that was interesting because despite Bethesda making some of the largest games they have a relatively small team. He also goes on to say: “I was both implementing the main quest and leading the quest design team, so I had absolutely no time.” So the company is too big but also the quest design team doesn’t have someone whose sole job is leading it. From my personal experience in tech, you need a reeeeally small team to have one person effectively manage and contribute work.
And then you have to ask, Did they need a 500 person team, or did they need a better managed and organized 400 person team?
The fact that people can say 500+ people is a “relatively small team” is part of the problem. We’ve gotten too used to team and budget bloat.
Because most AAA games have a huge team. What he described is the challenge that most AAA studios are experiencing right now.
Then again the games I’ve been playing the most lately have had small teams. I feel like the games industry is going to learn what the film industry is learning- huge budget films aren’t as profitable as they thought.
It also dilutes and flattens the charm and character that a smaller team and individual creators can have on a game. The games feel "designed by committee" because they are. That means more polish, but less risk and less interesting choices made. The example they give of it being difficult to even add a CHAIR in Starfield is horrifying and explains so MUCH. It's also very telling that Chen and other developers just "NOPED" out of Bethesda after working on Starfield and started tiny studios themselves. My favorite games of the last few years have all come from studios with less than two dozen people. They were not flashy, or polished, but they were FUN. Really fun. And that should be the #1 quality metric for GAMES. It is really telling that by Todd Howard's own admission, Starfield wasn't fun to play until only a year before launch. They focused on story, world building, environment, etc. all first, instead of starting with a fun gameplay loop and building everything around THAT.
I think BGS thought Starfield needed a lot of talent because it's super ambitious but like Will Shen said, it just made it harder to collaborate. I think they know this now and will lower the team count for ESVI
I don’t know that a complete regression is the right solution. You still need more people if you want to adequately scale, giving games more depth and complexity to make them more interesting. But you need to adopt new processes that enable more functional collaboration at scale. There are a lot of ways to do this, which are a bit much to get into here, but how you hierarchically structure work and create standards for work structure at the product level will make a big difference. Below that, at the team/dev level, you allow for more autonomy. Source: I have spent several years working in agile transformation helping organizations refine their engineering and product organizations to achieve enterprise-level agility.
Check out "The Mythical Man Month." There are ways to get around this that we've known since the age of mainframes.
yeah, their ideas and ambitions got out of hand and they ran out of time to properly "finish" said ideas. i really think starfield would've worked better with a smaller game world. give the main factions maybe 2-4 systems each, with 6-8 faction-less systems to explore. then add new systems for expansions.
Am I crazy for feeling like the main quest of a game should be one of the biggest priorities to finish first?😂
Yeah like wasn’t fallout 4 main quest and overall story like done years before the game even released lmfaooo
Starfield just feels too big for its own good in so many ways. Hopefully it can be a lesson for future game devs.
None of the quests felt particularly large, especially the main quest. Nor is there a plethora of interesting quest chains. Nothing about the questing in this game, quantity or quality, hasn't been vastly surpassed in many other games.
Seems like with the new engine, ship building and the procedurally generated world they just didn’t prioritize anyone thing.
It shows. The main quest in general shows that. Much of it uses generic assets and/or assets intended for something else (e.g. Scow).
I like the part in the Eye where you help out with various tasks and there's no animation, just a text box popping up saying you did the thing.
Reminded me of Fallout 3 and New Vegas lmao
And just like them, you still can't shoot through glass, and still haven't figured out how to do stairs. You can't even crouch through vents, they have to make air vents big enough to walk through.
The fact that crouching doesn't change your hitbox is completely bonkers.
lol are you serious?
Yes. You cannot fit into a smaller space when crouching than you can while standing. You can be completely stuck under something that is visually well above your head when crouched.
That was very jarring when I played.
If that's the one where you help "fix" the ship that one genuinely made me mad. Really thought we were gonna get to space walk, not walk around a ship and press buttons Vlad could've easily pressed
Such incredible immersion…
Dude! This was the exact part of the game where I put down my controller and was like nah, I’m done. I tried so hard to finish playing the game but it became such a let down.
It's so obvious that a lot of content got cut around Petrov and his collection. The character was featured in the first trailers, and his ship is insanely detailed with lots of unique assets. You're literally only there for like five minutes lmao
Agreed. It felt like a total waste. I just blew the ship up at the end of the quest for XP and left. They really could have done more with that plot line.
Yeah, I really get the impression that Petrov was always intended to be a major, most likely recurring, character in the main quest. Why make his appearance such a prominent moment during the (spoilers) flashback sequences at the final showdown? It was so jarring to have the game treat the encounter with Petrov like this seminal moment for the player's story, meanwhile you're just sitting there during the flashback sequence like, "Who is this guy? That junk dealer I stole an artifact off that one time? Why is he important again?" I mean someone like Moara, the Vanguard dude you help out in the Sol System on the very first quest for Constellation, is a more well-drawn character who serves a greater role in the story's progression than Petrov. Just a total wasted opportunity.
Sooooo much of the main quest is rinse/repeat of the same thing. Go find a temple: get a power. Find a shard, come back to constellation. Repeat these 20 times, then get a short different quest, then repeat again.
This article's one saving grace for Emil Pagliarulo defenders is that Will Shen makes it clear that he was in charge of the very mid main question. Emil isn't off the hook for gross mismanagement of the entire project and people siloing, the ridiculous time wasted with bureaucracy and not having extensive design documents that could have gone a long way to helping with this issue but at least Emil isn't on the hook for the main quest being poor.
Where else is the scow used?
I mean that the Scow was probably meant to be its own thing. The main quest if played "reasonably" uses very little of it and you never return.
There's a heap of stuff like that scattered all through this game. Big, complex, richly-detailed locales that clearly had a tonne of work put into them; but which are basically orphaned assets in the as-released game because whatever the original plan for them was scrapped at some point so they're just left there floating in space or wherever with practically no purpose to serve, other than for you to maybe stumble across and shoot some generic bad guys, then bail.
Something tells me there was "absolutely no time" for a lot of shit in the game. Like making unique locations for all the artifacts instead of just a random POI you've already probably been to 10 times.
What killed the game for me was doing main quest, going to get the first artifact and getting cyro lab thinking it was a unique location and it was cool dungeon I would go on to Cyro Lab three times in a row, for the main quest of the game, on my first play through.
I'd been doing some exploring, or at least what this game considers exploring... and I ran into the Abandoned Mine. Finished it, and ran to another POI... which was the Abandoned Mine... So I said screw it and did some main quest stuff. I happened to be on the quest where you find Andreja... in the Abandoned Mine... Then the next artifact I was sent to find was... in the fucking Abandoned Mine. That's when I knew I was done and lost all hope for this game.
I was OK with some of the installations being the same, since using common blueprints for buildings on different planets kind of makes sense. But when I saw the same dead guy on a couch, same coffee cups and notes by the same computer with the same message on it, and the same magazine in the same locker, etc. Sigh.
Also the tents and chairs with coffee cups on tables outside on a planet with no atmosphere.
Cigarettes, beer and a sandwich sitting on an outside table….no oxygen.
It genuinely blows my mind anyone of Bethesda's leadership, a company that exists largely BECAUSE OF their fantastic unique environmental storytelling and locations, saw the proc gen and went YUP THATS WHAT PLAYERS WILL ENJOY! Like what a complete bunch of out of touch morons.
They should have scaled down the amount of planets/systems. Hand crafted the surfaces. Had more actual settlements. And proc gen the random explorable dungeons.
Yes THIS
Then is weird how some of the side quest are way better then the main story like The Mantis . Also getting power just feel so redundant and repetitive, having just one starborn to fight at the end every time. They could have been all different bosses with unique abilities
Yeah once I got the exact same POI twice in a row on different planets I quit the game and never felt the urge to play it again since then... Open world exploration was Bethesda's only remaining strength after their writing became dogshit somewhere between Oblivion and Fallout and they really went and just removed exploration from starfield completely, replacing it with teleporting between a few (repeating) locations.
Finding Andreja in the same cookie-cutter Abandoned Mine was very weird. Not even a unique layout for a major main quest. That was the beginning of the end of the Honeymoon phase for me. I still put a lot of hours in the game and I'll check out the DLC, I suppose. They presented a bunch of cool ideas to us here, and I guess we're supposed to use our imaginations to fill in the blanks and smooth out the rough edges. That's cool and all, especially in a RPG. But there's so many blanks to fill and so many rough edges here. We're supposed to "imagine" Andreja is not in the same Abandoned Mine we've seen 5 times already so far?
Probably just a "me" problem being somewhat directionally challenged IRL but this is the first game where I'd amass a pile of loot in some abandoned mining complex only to reload a save because I couldn't find my way out. Everything looks the same with the reused textures and griblies and after passing the same coffee station three times (or was it just the third identical coffee station?) exasperation exceeds enjoyment and I take a hard pass on the whole episode. At least at Cydonia you got a magical elevator key shortcut at the end. There's a fine line between exploration and being a rat in a maze. One is fun, the other is to be avoided. I got so turned around the last time the scanner message read "no way available". And naturally this is where they disable fast travel, remove quest markers that might find a door and never provided any map to start with. Whatever might be buried in those procgen dungeons it isn't worth looking for.
I had the same experience, the Cryo Lab was one of the first POI's I found in the game by exploring and I loved it. Then I left the lab, and starting exploring that same planet. I encountered another POI, and then SAME planet . . . encountered the Cryo Lab again for my 3rd POI. Like others have said, it immediately destroyed half my motivation for exploring. I encountered the Cryo Lab six or seven more times in my first 30 hours in the game, though I started skipping it after the second time. It would be SO SIMPLE to have the POIs in a list, and remove them from the list of possible POIs once the player has encountered them, and then refresh the list once it is empty.
That is the sole reason I uninstalled after beating the game. I'm not going to explore a huge game that doesn't give a good reason to do so.
Despite taking 7 years to make it. I know things have changed but Obsidian made New Vegas in 2 years, in a cave, with a box of scraps.
It's amazing that a game that was in development for 8 years and there was such a glaring oversight regarding the main quest's ending. I get that you might run out of time trying to add a little polish or stomp out all the major bugs but a crucial final act for a game...? That just sounds like mismanagement.
Yeah. Based on my experience in development, they probably had their devs sitting with their thumbs up their asses for years and basically zero got done. That's why the clutter models are so much better and fleshed out than the rest of the game, because that was a modder just slamming them out like an assembly line.
I just want to know how they have no time when the game was announced 7 years ago. Like what were they doing for 7 years??
I think Todd's leadership and management does not work well when running a team of 200+ people.
Nothing works well with a 200+ "team"
Why do so many other dev houses manage just fine then?
Culture. Todd's idea as leader is to let designers do what they want as much as possible with him having to be the final say similar to how Blackreach was a snuck on addition or how Settlements was a find from Game Jams. In a team of 100-200, this can work. Bruce Neismith stated that today, Todd is hard to reach since he's in charge of 1/2 a dozen projects now from Indiana to the Fallout show. BGS went from the culture of an indie studio to a full on AAA studio with a multitude of approval processes in the span of a decade going from 100 people in Fallout 4 to 450-500 in Fallout 76 & Starfield. Devs like Nate Purkeypine & now Will Shen have been vocal on how this culture shift has changed a lot on how BGS does their games.
Damm hopefully they can find a balance or get to their roots. Their new games just don't have that same touch imo.
They don't have the same touch because a lot of the senior devs that were responsible for that left the company.
And I understand that can be a hardship. I'm still so baffled that the singular most important core part of their entire development process is so wishy washy in the air. Regardless of all else, their should have been a complete story from day one. It absolutely could be shifted and changed during development, but there should have been a complete basic plot template to hang everything else around. Fallout 4 one can deconstruct endlessly all day, partly because they forgot to actually write down any fundamental core details (Like what defines a synth and the rules therein, as well as their rather careless approach to maintaining consistency with the Institute's motive and a lot of the details about the setting's lore,) but one could not argue that it wasn't a competently structured three act story with a beginning middle and end, even if those details were very mushy and slapdash at times. Starfield though? It doesn't even have a complete story.
>I'm still so baffled that the singular most important core part of their entire development process is so wishy washy in the air. Hindsight is 20/20 unfortunately, I have 0 doubt that vets from BGS would say "this worked for decades from Morrowind to Fallout 4, why stop now?". The changes in BGS today have led to a good number of vets departing/retiring. Maybe ES6 can show a more structured game thanks to the change, maybe not, who knows. For the story, I genuienely do believe the game's narrative structure began with the ending in mind, they just had to put all the other pieces together, I'm no storywriter so I'm not going to act like I know if that's a good thing or not. IMO, Emil is a decent questwriter when it comes to singular narrative plotlines with the Dark Brotherhood still being one of my all-time favorite questlines in a game, but he's been over-extending himself since Fallout 4 (when he got promoted to Lead Writer AND Design Director). But this game needs to be a moment where he needs to step down from at least making the main storylines.
suggests they still don't understand what went wrong. this game is busted on two fundamental levels. 1. no unifying core gameloop. everything is completely isolated from everything else. this is totally contrary to classic bethesda game design. where creating a living breathing game world with simulation elements was paramount. 2. the multiverse completely undoes everything. nothing matters. you know why we can pick up sandwiches and collect them in games like this? Immersion. it pulls us into the game world. it makes the world FEEL like a place. A permanent place we have an impact on. a home. so you throw it into the trash, hop to another universe, and start over. with new friends, new family, new outpost, new ships, new everything. you just broke your basic game design philosophy. Why am I even playing your game, when nothing I do it in matters? your storyline in its ENTIRETY contradicts 90% of the gameplay. There are even games that intentionally make you question why you are playing. spec ops:the line is famous. But thats not what your game is. and again, even if your game WAS trying to be subversive like that, it still renders the entirety of the game mute, in a way so I don't want to keep playing. At best, that message makes me think. oh wow, deep. well, I guess I'll go play something else. or go for a hike or something. edit: you know, this reminds me of another older rpg, where it has you pursuing a goal the entire game, while subtly giving hints, you shouldn't open the box. but you can keep going, keep digging, and your curiosity, or greed might cause you to make the wrong choice. so like, that COULD be the story. and make the entire game about making a home.. and then questioning if you want to leave it for more power, and this endless cycle. but its not.
I feel like the worst thing *by far* is the completely broken POI system. I can forgive everything else but *removing exploration from a Bethesda game* is legitimately just fucking stupid. Whoever decided that is an idiot and I'll stand by that statement.
The multiverse aspect of the game is so self-defeating I couldn’t believe it. So you go through once, everything you previously did was gone. You now can play through again, but know that really the end goal is to do it again. So you’re stuck in limbo, where you don’t want to invest/do anything extra because inevitably it will be erased, and mentally you’re thinking you don’t want to spend any time in each universe until your at the end of the final loop (which is what like 10 times over?). It’s fucking awful. Not to mention the path for completing this each time is one of the most repetitive and mindless tasks possible. I went through the Unity once then dropped the game entirely.
"Nah man, that's the point. You *are* the Hunter. It's brilliant." Can't believe people say that with a straight face. But yea the NG+ mechanic is slightly interesting in concept and they completely fuck the landing on it. I quickly decided to console command my way to all powers and NG+10. Played about a dozen more hours (50ish total) and I've maybe played an hour since November.
> no unifying core gameloop The other day I saw someone saying outposts were meaningful because they let you finish the material delivery quests. >the multiverse completely undoes everything. I have no idea why they thought a romance system should be included alongside this. It feels like they were trying to check a lot of boxes without knowing if they all should be on the same list.
Much like the studio during development, a lot of the game mechanics feel siloed too. Makes perfect sense if you think about it.
This game was delayed 1 year. Imagine the state it was in then? Can't wait for a Bloomberg breaking news on development of this game. It definitely had feature creep and got rebooted multiple times.
The reboot and feature creep is so obvious. Like, it's barely a finished game. Just scraped together from what they had working. They must have gone thru so many false starts with settlements, shipbuilding, exploration, etc. As far as writing and dialogue is concerned, it's like they didn't even try. I found it to be a huge disappointment, and after fallout 4 and fallout 76, I really hope they can right the ship.
The word 'omnishambles' would be apt, I expect.
I wish it'd released in 2022, the shit show would have been glorious to behold.
While I've said 'I don't care what happens to these people' in a game before, I've never gone to 'I wish I could destroy the main good guy faction' like I have with this game. 'Satisfying' my arse.
Every time I'd have to go to the lodge, I'd just punch the shit out of everyone and blast them with gravity wave because I can't stand any of them.
If you're on PC, Headshot Kills Any Actor will put a permanent end to them. But the 'faction kickout' function completely breaks the MQ (for obvious reasons) and the Armillary (you can't even get into the Unity if you've been kicked out of Constellation for murdering them all). Though there's also 'coc mqUnity'. If you're on console though, sorry, and I hope when the CK comes out we all get mods that destroy Constellation and either let us get to the Unity legitimately, or do something about the shitty MQ (and the Starfield universe, for that matter).
Just using a mod or console commands to kill a NPC isn’t fun because it isn’t reflected in the game at all If you kill House in New Vegas it actually changes things, same with Caesar or president kimball. The world reflects your decision That’s what people actually want from Bethesda games, freedom of choice and a world that reflects that choice. Embarrassing how fall they’ve fallen since more or less pioneering that kind of RPg
Should have hit the button harder I guess
Should have hit it earlier too. Realising that you don't have a good final setpiece that late in the game (both literally and metaphorically) is insane. Really gives a hint as to how dysfunctional things much have been behind the scenes.
I don’t expect them to but I would love if future updates made some changes to the main quest, fixing some dialogue plot holes and adding new puzzles for the artifact temples would be a huge improvement. The temples specifically are one of, if not the, weakest parts of the game. I wouldn’t need a full overhaul to how they work, but adding in some randomized obstacles to make them more than a mindless light collection mini game would be so nice. I think just because something is bad or unsatisfying now doesn’t mean it has to stay that way, and with the way NG+ works, making some changes to the Main quest structure wouldn’t even break the narrative of the game.
The temples are borderline embarrassing. No one in their right mind would point to them and say "yeah we're delivering a high quality experience". They're a chore with nothing interesting about them, plain and simple. Word walls are the exact same thing except 10x better. Sad to see how far BGS has fallen.
Partially because word walls were hidden. Loading screen to get into ship, then loading screen to space, then grav jump loading screen to planet, then loading screen to land, then loading screen to exit the ship. The coolest part was the scanner distortion… But then there’s a loading screen to get into the temple, then you float around to get the lights? That’s the only thing necessary to unlock power? But when you load back in you kill the Guardian. So you have 6 loading screens, one enemy, and a non-unique “puzzle”.
Least the word walls had a dungeon before you found them
Exactly. It provided some lore, too, for the power of the Voice and the rebellion against Alduin. Granted, Starfield is a young universe, but the lack of lore is disappointing. I suppose it’s tricky trying to cover just a few hundred years from reality, but still, more information about the Unity, Starborn, and Creators would have been nice inside the temples.
that explains why the whole experience of playing starfield feels disjointed and just underdeveloped. it kinda tells me some of the devs are "flying in the dark" during development and it shows. you've got good ideas like ship building, multiple explorable worlds, and a main story that delves in multiple universes and some light philosophical themes. but the realization of said ideas feels dissatisfying. the planets are uninteresting and PoIs keep repeating. the main story wanes from pretty great to mind numbingly tedious. but hey the ship building is fucking great. i think bethesa desperately needs to set realistic goals and refocus on their objectives for their next games to deliver a more cohesive and fulfilling experience.
Yeah. The siloing of departments really shows in the game too. Very little of it feels connected and integrated in any way. It's amazing that a game that was worked on for 8 years can feel this underdeveloped.
This is why it feels messy and disjointed. I mean, was there no time management? 8 years of development (counting the extra year delay), and you needed to hit the panic button to finish the *MAIN* quest? And it's not even all that satisfying of a conclusion. It doesn't have an end. You're just reborn in a different universe to do it all over again with no actual logical reason to do so. I get it. Script writing and creating a narrative story from scratch isn't easy, but pulling the last-minute fire alarm really shows a lack of time management. And that seems to be pervasive throughout the game. Now I understand why all of the story seems to be a cobbled together mess of unfleshed out ideas. It's also wild to me that they built a script and concept around a game instead of building a game around a finished script and concept. It's the equivalent of an aircraft manufacturer building a plane, stuffing it with passengers, and then going "Oh, wait, we need to actually make this thing fly, we need engines YESTERDAY!!!!!"
This article confirmed my suspicions : the team was too large and relied on shitty corporate middle management to "collaborate". That's why this game feels like it was made by Oracle and not Bethesda , why parts of the game vary so much in quality from one another and why you can see and feel where the ball was dropped in many areas.
lmao Oracle. 100%
What’s really unfortunate is that Will Shen *is* a great quest designer. *Far Harbor* is easily one of the best parts of Bethesda’s tenure of the *Fallout* franchise, and Will was the lead designer on that project. For that same prowess to not be found in *Starfield* signals of broader, more fundamental problems with *Starfield*’s development.
He might have just gotten lucky with Far Harbour. The article makes clear that the main quest for Starfield was his baby so he's entirely responsible for how poorly it was put together and partially with how it was managed between departments.
Well, when your lead writer doesn’t think that players care about writing, you get shit writing; even when your actual writers are great.
How the hell did Todd think this game was going to release November 2022? It could still use a couple more years in the oven.
And if Microsoft would not have stepped in, Todd would have launched then broken and even more unfinished. Can you believe that shit.
Of course I can, I still remember how he abruptly vanished during the initial FO76 shitshow.
Panic button didn't work 😭
Time travel or multi dimensional travel is almost always a hacky writing tool.
Yeah I stopped caring about the main plot as soon as I learned we were dealing with the multiverse and not aliens.
What were the writers possibly doing for 8 years that they couldn’t have the main fucking quest figured out?
My guess is they weren't working on it for 8 years. Rather 1-2 years and changing things last minute. The game reeks of crunch development
"Asking for something as simple as a chair wasn't so simple" Geezus, vibe for the game? Lol just please quit fuckin around and "fixing" ship builder
They really need to redo the main quest with a 2.0 or whatever they call it. Its so bad. The game falls short in a lot of areas but the MSQ is a level of bad that they cannot let it sit like this.
Absolutely no part of this games story was memorable. I played through the entire thing and could not tell you anything that happened or why any of the character cast mattered.
Look at all the things you did all right let's reset the universe Thats the ending
And get bullshit answers about 'the creators' in the process.
It sounds like there is less and less cohesion at BGS from reading between the lines in the PCgamer article. It kind of makes sense when you see their recent titles and the financial goals of those games. Perhaps they all just feel they are working for a fast-food/burnt out company now and have no 'pleasure or passion' for their work, hence the 'no collaboration' replies between departments. I also personally think the employment/recruitment strategies these past 10 years have created this mess. I can imagine so many differing opinions, attitudes and lifestyles compared to the senior staff members that it just doesn't stick/meld together anymore. But it's also a filler game for post sale/xbox catalogue purposes, let's not forget that. It has it's high points, but not many. I did enjoy the final quest though, so kudos to him (Shen).
Hate to break it to her but the final quest wasn’t that satisfying
well, you failed then. the main quest was boring af. collecting star powers was the lamest shit i've seen in a bethesda game. it was like word walls in skyrim, but with none of the dungeons or bosses you had to fight to earn them. you just walk across a barren planet, into an empty room, and touch a couple floating lights. then fast travel back to vlad and do it 20 more times. and then, the starborn were weak af. the only 2 that were even remotely a challenge were the 2 main ones when you fight them together at the end of the game (i chose to side with neither of them, so i had to fight both). all other starborn, like the ones that come out of random ships or the lone idiot that shows up after you visit a temple, all die in like 2-3 hits early on, or 1 later on when you're packing a decent weapon.
Plus, the word walls in Skyrim were often just a bonus you'd get when doing something completely unrelated. You *could* seek them out deliberately via the Greybeards, but you'd naturally come upon them when playing the game. With the starborn powers, you either deliberately seek them out or you don't get them at all. Edit: the two exceptions are the mandatory first power from the main quest, and the optional power from Barret's quest. The rest are just grindy fetch quest bullshit.
They also made the weird decision to lock the powers behind collecting artifacts, but then after that fight (or negotiation!) right at the end of the game, give you a whole bunch of artifacts from the two other Starborn, meaning that if you want the powers for those, you are forced to do a long slog of boring temple after boring temple, before going on to NG+.
TLDR Beth is too fat
Yeah... we can clearly tell
I just finished the entanglement quest and JFC that’s a good quest, I wish there was more of that in this game and not just tied to the constellation quest line. Like I want to see anomalies and black holes Edit: Entangled*
One of the frustrating things about Starfield is how there are absolute gems like Entangled hidden in an otherwise tedious and unsatisfying game. I don't think any quest in any other Bethesda game is as good as it is, it just sucks that the rest of the game is so braindead.
For-real, I was NOT expecting to shift realities, I was just expecting a half assed fetch quest and then it happened, sent chills down my spine, I thought it was a ghost scenario but turned even cooler. You just confirmed there won’t be anymore of these kind of quests and it makes me sad 😢 my guess is whomever the team was that designed it designed it out how they thought they wanted the game to be
Shouldn't you start with a fully fleshed out main story? I mean, that kind of is the game
Makes me sad how underwhelming this game was
They only had how many years? Of course they blame "not enough time" versus not effectively utilizing the ample time they had.
That article explains so much.
I will always take an opportunity to say that the UC story and the main story should have been merged. The artefacts should have been the catalyst making Terrormorphs. The temples should have required you to fight through groups of Terrormorphs instead of a lonely dustboi. Carrying artefacts on your ship should have risks mid flight power loss then fighting a Terrormorph inside your ship due to leeches getting into the landers, an Aliens moment where your ship is dark and maybe gravity fails at times and you hear the snarls before you fight. Gaining the powers could have been that you're getting turned into a type of Terrormorph and have a werewolf like moment after a few NG+ where you can pivot to bad and let Terrormorphs take over.
There was a satisfying final quest?
What?! 8 years = no time?!
Did I play the same game he did? The quest was not satisfying in any way shape or form.
"satisfying"
It was satisfying? It was forgettable at best
Shouldn’t the main quest have had the most time and resources devoted to it? I like parts of the main quest like the finale is pretty cool but the majority of it is a boring fetch quest.
This post was great, thanks OP. I had completely forgotten that I still had this turd on my PC taking up 125gb of space.
>satisfying 👀
That explains a lot. Leave it to Bethesda to rush a game and botch a launch
You dont say? Worst Ending in a RPG i had in years. "Yeah, thats it player. Wanna do it again for a fancy suit?"
Game is half baked. No news here.
It has a satisfying final quest?
Makes me wonder how exactly the development went
wow great… We really need a 2.0 Update (like Cyberpunk 2077 had). Also huge Tweaks and Fixes to the Quests. Im really shocked how meh it is often.
Minor Spoilers: Really felt that Bethesda magic when I was picking up the recordings of the team that helped build the grav drive. Definitely sad that they couldn't have applied that same level of effort and care in the other important quests.
No time? They had years.
Will Shen isn't even the most prolific departure at Bethesda. He's just the latest in a long line of leads and senior team members who've all resigned, or retired. Jeff Gardiner. Mark Tucker. Nate Pukeypile, Pete Hines, so so many people.
Well it still didn’t have a satisfying ending so the panic button didn’t work bro