Starfield Analysis | A Quick Retrospective
Вставка
- Опубліковано 24 чер 2024
- Starfield.
Sections:
0:00:00 - Introduction
0:13:14 - On Design Documents
0:29:41 - Argos Extractors
0:58:45 - Worldbuilding
1:25:24 - Terra Firma
1:36:39 - A Classless Society
1:47:08 - Constellation
2:01:21 - Not My First Rodeo
2:20:49 - Temple Run
3:03:42 - The Scow
3:23:12 - Space Force
3:55:06 - Unity
4:20:47 - NASA
4:57:18 - The REAL Game
5:19:20 - UC Vanguard
5:56:20 - Ryujin
6:22:07 - Freestar Rangers
7:17:10 - The Crimson Cringe
7:53:21 - Conclusions
Starfield is a 2023 action adventure game from Bethesda Game Studios as well as Microsoft and Xbox
Sources:
Lex Fridman interview with Todd Howard - • Todd Howard: Skyrim, E...
Emil Pagliarulo presentation - • Talks from STORY: Emil...
British GQ article - archive.ph/TTgce
Talking Starfield with Todd Howard - • Constellation Question...
Bruce Nesmith clips - • Skyrim’s Lead Designer...
Fallout 4 Presentation E3 - • Fallout 4 Presentation...
Watches Breaking - archive.ph/ff6uJ
FACTS with Pete Hines - • Facts with Pete Hines ...
Emil Twitter - archive.ph/Y56uk
Writing the Worlds of Bethesda - • Writing the Worlds of ...
Todd Howard IGN 61 - • Todd Howard on Skyrim'...
Todd Howard IGN SoG - • Starfield: Developer I...
Starfield Direct - • Starfield Direct - Gam...
TKs-Mantis | Bethesda's Magnum Opus - • Starfield: Review Afte...
Pete Hines Tweet - archive.ph/k49M1
Constellation Q&A with Emil P. and Will Shen
IGN Starfield Interview w. Todd Howard - • Starfield Interview: T...
Emil Finds God - archive.ph/eI5gz
Emil P. Twitter - archive.ph/7t0fz
MattyPlays - • I PLAYED 70+ HOURS OF ...
JuiceHead - • My Starfield Review Af...
LegacyKillaHD - • STARFIELD REVIEW - 100...
WesNemo - • Starfield Review After...
Legacy Gaming - • Starfield is Bethesda'...
Star Trek Discovery & Deep Space Nine
YiiK
Retirement Tweet - archive.ph/u2ucw
Donnie Brasco
Private Sessions - / privatesessions
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#Patrician - Ігри
I appreciate the positive reception to this video. I've read the first ~1100 comments, hence all the hearted comments. If I heart a comment, that means I've read and acknowledge what was said, but didn't have a response.
Ive been in the hospital the past few days binge watching ur content thank u for everything bro i hate being here but ur content makes the stay more enjoyable
the Immortan Joe to our War Boys
So many of my thoughts on the game have been perfectly laid out here.
My main hatred for this game is the now played out multiverse premise. I feel like unless you have a game with a strong central character, one who goes through a journey with weight and personal character growth, a multiverse narrative just becomes a dead end. I can count on one hand the amount of times I've seen a decent multiverse story.
I don't know what Bethesda was thinking beyond "Wow this multiverse stuff is really popular isn't it?"
Look at my sweet grandson!
Love you, too short
"The phrase 'there is truly nothing new under the sun' is not supposed to be a design motto" honestly one of the most biting critiques I've heard in ages
It's almost if they had a meeting and asked everyone if they wanted to add stories from their favorite sci fi movies, novels, tv shows, etc and Todd just kept saying yes. Not in cool easter egg way just flat out plagiarism.
@arkeshn729 When I started this, I didnt notice he named is character Malcom Reynolds and wholeheartedly thought Bethesda added a NPC by the same name
What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun. Is there a thing of which it is said, “See, this is new”? It has been already in the ages before us. There is no remembrance of former things, nor will there be any remembrance of later things yet to be among those who come after.
@@johnwiks2597 New things come from a synthesis of the old. Soldiers, demons, and kittens existed before the 1900s, but Warhammer 40K Chaos NekoMarines did not.
Finally finished the video. And I gotta say that the line "Starfield is their most functional game to date, and yet their worst designed game ever" is a perfect summary of this game.
If you play on the series s it crashes every 2 hours and yes I started counting. And I encountered many quest bugs, and even bugs where I couldn’t complete challenges to upgrade perks.
So for everyone saying it’s their least buggy that may be true if you’re on a nice pc. I literally had less bugs playing Oblivion day 1 on 360 and Morrowind on Xbox.
And I’m not arguing btw I know we’re on the same side Starfield sucks lol just giving everyone another perspective on the bugs.
There's a big trend with Bethesda games where the honeymoon period of their games being praised unconditionally before players find the many flaws within them are getting shorter and shorter. And they aren't doing anything to reverse that trend because they're too scared to axe their "throw everything at the wall and use what sticks" approach to developing.
@@EmoScreamoForeverhow many saves you got??😅😅 Yeah I played in cloud and had few frame drops and a few crashes on series S
@@Super_Broly I’m playing BG3 now and the game has not crashed one time on the Series S. I don’t even think I’ve ran into one bug and I’m 60 hours deep. I’m so glad they came out around the same time. Bethesda has been exposed and has zero excuses.
Edit: finished campaign at 150 hours and have two more going with 10 hours each. Those two crashes were still the only ones and it was one specific instance. Otherwise a few minor graphical issues. One misspelling. 4-5 missing item titles, 2-3 missing dialogue choices. Those were the only bugs I encountered in 170 hours. That is an insane level of quality.
@@EmoScreamoForever Last time i played Oblivion i had tons of bugs i had to fix through console commands and this was on a pc with much higher reqs than what the games asks. From Oblivion onwards all of their games are still buggy pieces of garbage that run like shit in several areas and that still have many years old bugs.
An 8 hour critique of a game I don't and have no intention of owning. The perfect way to spend an evening
Right?
Oh, come on, it's "A Quick Retrospective". LOL
Honestly I'm glad that atleast a channel talking about starfield feels immediate disgust at the fact that both bethestha and the fans not only assume that starfield will have mods, but are expecting modders to literally add content to their games.
The level of entitlement is obscene.
This in light of a prominent modder completely giving up starfield because it's so damn boring that there's no point to mod it...lmao
I don't see what's so disgusting about expecting Starfield to have mods. Actually, it's even ridiculous that we're talking future tense. Starfield HAS mods. It has had mods since pretty much the second it came out.
Similarly for expecting modders to add content. Every single Bethesda game has had content added to it by modders. There is zero reason to expect that Starfield won't.
Now, people acting entitled and rude about it instead of grateful to modders is a different thing, THAT is disgusting.
@@LasherTimora I think it's more the case of Bethesda cutting corners on things like UI design, character modeling, and planetary map design with the expectation that modders will then come in and fix it for them.
It's the difference between modders adding on to a complete experience and Bethesda selling a hollow game and expecting their audience to fill it in for them. Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim were all already great - mods just made them better. Starfield could be good, but if and only if, a lot of talented modders put in a lot of time and effort to patch the holes in the game's entire structure.
@@Snarkknight5 Uh, mods were needed to make Oblivion and Skyrim worth anything. Those games without mods are some of the most bland, generic, souless RPGs with some of the worst combat in gaming.
I got Andreja's affinity based dialouge right after I drank a bottle of wine to pass the final boss persuasion check and ruined the climax for myself. She was talking about how everyone she knew has died or left her alone yada yada and I told her I would never leave her alone and would always be there for her. Then I walked into the unity.
lmao.
rofl even.
Rick James: “UNITYYYYYYYYYY”
Hahahahahahaha that will always be memorable
Well, to be fair. You now have access to an effectively infinite number of universes where that's true. Just not the one you just walked out of.
🤷♂🤷♂🤷♂
" Starfield is absolutely the game that you deserve."
I can't agree more. Bethesda fans deserve this at this point.
As a lifelong Bethesda fan I whole heartily agree.
We are gullible little goblins who see a new Bethesda logo and cream our pants immediately
@@genfleurke9230nostalgia can really ruins people in low spots
At this point I'm just waiting to see if the community that BGS has ever actually collapses to the point of nonexistence or at least an incredibly niche section of the game industry with standards below "absolute zero". At what point will the community finally say that they got a bad game? At what point will they learn and fully understand that Bethesda are hacks? If that never comes to pass I'll just be glad I left it after Fallout 4 and keep laughing at the fools who purchase/pre-order their products. A deteriorating community blindly following a deteriorating company to its bitter end couldn't be a better match.
@@joaxarkus4648 maybe that'll be the point they actually return to what made Daggerfall and Morrowind so great, when they have no other choice but to actually listen to the lifelong fans, but at this point, I'm convinced neither my version of the future, nor yours, will ever come to pass...
@@brandondanforth8342 at that point I believe it would have to be a new (and probably indie) developer to recapture that feel.
I think it's funny that Emil talk about no Lore Bombs , "Players don't want to read books". Daggerfall and Morrowind were full of lore books. It's part of what made older elder scrolls games unique.
Especially with UA-cam today. People would love making/watching videos about all the lore in those books
Even in Skyrim I recall making myself a little Lore library in the player home. I wanted the full set.
It's a crazy statement about open world rpgs. Readable things is the best way to add world building without having characters do lore dumps.
Also, you don’t not make things because some people don’t want them.
If only the lore was represented in the game world. X heroic sword is identical to one I could make at home. This is old Hroldan? Imagine if you went to old York, modernized as it is, and found nothing of historical value.
Yet they'll pockmark the landscape with an unreasonable amount of forts and towers with no significance.
The lore bombs weren't the problem. The lack of any impact craters was. Especially with a fast travel system, and in a province that is smaller than my hometown by land area, I'd have been happy to hike through "miles" of wilderness to get to that one site of an ancient battle.
If there's one thing procedural generation probably can create it's wilderness. That could be an area of map creation to save human effort on. Let humans, then, write books and build the places where humans live/lived.
I get shit from my BG3 group because I have a library in my camp chest. I read and keep at least 1 copy of every book and scroll because I want to know everything the game thinks is interesting enough to be written down
Thing is, Starfield doesn't just fall short of its contemporary competitors on the gaming scene. It falls short of games made years, or even *decades* ago.
Compare Neon and the Astral Lounge to Omega, and the atmosphere of its nightclub The Afterlife - that was from Mass Effect 2, released in 2010.
Also from 2010 was New Vegas, and any comparison between the faction systems in those two games is a slaughter.
Barrett's companion quest is a joke when measured against Jolee Bindo's companion quest from Knights of the Old Republic. The latter at least let you investigate multiple leads, follow up with different NPCs, and even represent your companion's friend in a legal hearing. And that was in *2003.*
It is genuinely *shocking* how hollow and empty an experience Starfield is.
The main thing Starfield highlighted for me is how much the Elder Scrolls and Fallout series are coasting on the good writing that they _used_ to have, from people who no longer (or never did) work at Bethesda. As soon as current Bethesda tried to make a new IP that isn't built on the better ideas of better writers they no longer have access to, it all just fell apart. Everything comes into such stark relief; the lack of follow-through, the casual breaking of their own setting rules, the complete unwillingness (or inability) to explore any ideas deeper than surface level, the unwillingness to ever _say_ anything. These things have plagued the Elder Scrolls and Fallout games for _years,_ but we've always been able to ignore them, or at least excuse them because there were other cool things to look at. But here, it's all there is. It's like Fallout and the Elder Scrolls were ships built by master craftsmen that have had their parts replaced over the years, slowly but surely, by cheap, inferior knockoff parts, but were able to stay afloat because the original ships were just that well-made. Starfield is a new ship made entirely of those cheap replacement parts, and it just doesn't float.
basically.. like basically this. all of this really.. They did well with Morrowind, but then Oblivion and Skyrim just slowly took our freedom away.. Now Starfield a new IP.. they could've done whatever they wanted, they chose to make crap.
You nailed it. And Fallout was an IP already in existence. The lore and world bulding had effectively been done before Fallout 3 , outside of Bethesda. Their games have always clunked and janked along, but there was enough good stuff (eg exploration) to overlook that.
Tes 6 is in deep trouble, the old lifeblood of the studio has all left
true, like TES or Fallout at their worst still have interesting elements in their settings, but Starfield is just a nothing burger of nasa concept art and unity sci fi weapon assets. It was space, the could have put ANYTHING in their game, but they put nothing of note.
I guess we finally have an answer to the ship of Theseus question
Bethesda had the perfect excuse to have every NPC be killable, and to have multiple wildly varied and impactful outcomes for questlines, I mean it was RIGHT THERE - they wrote in a (technically) infinitely resetable universe and did NOTHING with it...
I was already expecting that. Since Oblivion Bethesda has always implemented essential NPCs.
At the very least cut off the essential flags in new game plus
Even worse is that they throw this out in the same year we got BG3, where for the first two acts everything is killable and the game will progress normally, and pretty much you only get a few essential NPCs at the very end on Act 3 (and even then their essential status is rather temporary and it's very possible the game will be patched out in the near future to account for early deaths of said NPCs). Bethesda made a story that would easily allow the player to wreck havoc as much as they wanted and chickened out, while Larian made a game where it would be perfectly reasonable to make plenty of NPCs essential and chose to go the extra mile to allow player freedom.
@@ggwp638BC Exactly, I locked myself out of two entire questlines early on in BG3 and my reaction wasn't "Oh I wish they didn't allow me to kill these characters", it was "I really want to start another playthrough to see what I'm missing"
@@ggwp638BC You can kill everyone in Divinity original sin 2 and still complete the game
I feel the man who compared writing free roam RPGs to writing a great novel and having readers tear out the pages and make paper airplanes out of them, is the wrong man to write an RPG with freedom and choices.
He seems to begrudge the very nature that players consume the story in their own way rather than his.
He's a level designer not a writer. That POV is very obvious in his process and the newer BS games.
That speech was so painful to watch. Writers for RPGs need to remember that there is a model for novels as parallels to RPGS: the choose-your-own-adventure novels of the 1980s. No, they weren't great literature, but the point is that even a paperback can do branching narrative accounting for player choice. There's no reason you can't take that model and use it to tell a great story.
@@blurqeqoherds Makes me think of the bandersnatch thing on netflix, I kept restarting it just to choose another path and see what I missed. I consumed all of that content because I was curious, the exact same reason I bought BG3
Its called canon. Go outside more
@blurqeqoherds fun fact, there's a growing catalog of novels published on apps such as "hosted games" that take the choose your own adventure-model and expand on it greatly using modern technology (sort of like choice-based visual novels but text only). Some of the titles you can find there ARE pretty damn great literature (I recommend the story "The Passenger" by Jime Rólon, or the "Fallen Hero"-series by Malin Rydén)!
As someone who runs an indie studio, updating design docs is admittedly a huge pain, but it is extremely necessary for games to function properly.
True, but like 99% of software development is managing complexity. It's not like we don't know how to do that.
Just apply the same principles to a design document.
Patrician (likely intentionally, because rage gets more clicks) misrepresented what was said in multiple ways - Bethesda does keep design documentation, just not in a single large document like the olden days, and this has not been the case in the industry for quite some time. You'll much more frequently see internal forums or wikis that are more easily separated and edited for use with larger teams across longer projects. The primary source used for this claim is from an interview that directly contradicts the claim.
@@pellunderscore Mind posting it then?
Hey, good news@@user-kz7dy1tg3r, all sources are cited in the description to the video! The one you're looking for is "Writing the Worlds of Bethesda". I hope this helps!
Does said interview not mention the word wiki, and boast about not even doing the bare minimum?
Vasco is so iconic that I immediately abandoned him at Constellation headquarters and never thought about him again.
it’s funny because the robot ally in the Infinite Warfare campaign is a far stronger character with concrete development and pulls of that TARS/T2 likeable robot companion thing so much better. Bethesda’s characterization shown up by CoD campaigns lol
it’s funny because the robot ally in the Infinite Warfare campaign is a far stronger character with concrete development and pulls of that TARS/T2 likeable robot companion thing so much better. Bethesda’s characterization shown up by CoD campaigns lol
it’s funny because the robot ally in the Infinite Warfare campaign is a far stronger character with concrete development and pulls of that TARS/T2 likeable robot companion thing so much better. Bethesda’s characterization shown up by CoD campaigns lol
it’s funny because the robot ally in the Infinite Warfare campaign is a far stronger character with concrete development and pulls of that TARS/T2 likeable robot companion thing so much better. Bethesda’s characterization shown up by CoD campaigns lol
@@mananlak bro fix your internet
If there was ever a game for Bethesda to completely remove the training wheels, it's Starfield NG+. You have a perfect justification. Someone's been through the game once; let them sequence break, kill whoever they please, and do whatever they want. At worst, they just hard reset the universe for the next NG+ version.
But you see, that would take extra effort, and we all know that Bethesda hates effort.
Bethesda also thinks you're too dumb to handle having total freedom of choice.
Not only that but actually CHOOSE your side. Like become UC member and enemy of freestar. Think if you would be part of small attack force trying to conquer settlements and planets or trying to make people if settlement to join your faction. This was perfect chance to make a sandbox game with complex politically evolving system. What if its the reason you make outposts...to fight against enemy faction. Reason to build walls and defences. It would be awesome.
Whenever I feel bad about my writing, I remember that stuff like Starfield exists.
At least you feel bad about your writing and can improve. Starfield doesn't
People pushing MODDING MODDING MODDING are not modders. They are just people who take modders for GRANTED.
Modder who started the whole concept of survival mechanics in an elderscrolls game, his mods still being seen as the defeinitive versions of those mechanics
Bethesda after hiring him: You work in an excel spreadsheet and tweak the economy
Modder who is one of the most famous house mod creators
Bethesda after hiring her: you place random useless clutter all around the world
Seems like Bethesda's main issue isn't a lack of skills or talent, but god awful leadership and managment.
Sounds like the "meat in seats" hiring and task placement that a lot of large Japanese companies use. "It says here that you have a masters in business law. Great! You're going to be working in our UI/UX coding department." - something like this happened to a friend at NEC.
Where can i learn more about this?
Bethesda didn't even hire them they're "consultants" that weren't even offered a steady paycheck for their work. And lets be honest here, if they chose to work for Bethesda they deserved it.
@@GhostOfSnuffles Agreed. They deserve it, because they not only invested time in producing a mediocre game, but likely had to sign NDAs and non-competes that will effect their future involvement in mod creation.
What ding bat goes and works for Bethesda knowing the quality of work they produce, and the reputation they've developed? Talented or not, it sounds like they were clout chasing.
@@GhostOfSnuffles Yup, 0 respect for any modder that was willing to sellout and go be a marketing point to sell the latest toddslop to the unwashed masses.
Emil's entire schtick about not using design documentation earns his reputation in spades
whats design documentation?
@@JL-ek9to Writing down what you're doing in a document, so that the team can keep all the info together and reference it when needed.
It's too hard to maintain a 50 page document? I'm going to guess that since google docs released two years before fallout 3 released, they didn't use that tech to make that job easier. Good grief
Can't leak documentation if there isn't any.. :(
@@JL-ek9to Google it.
I imagine Todd watching this, and he’s disagreeing with everything for the first half. The second half find him, scotch bottle in hand, sitting in his personal theater, reluctantly whispering his agreement. “Yeah, well, yeah. But we-we couldn’t…” *sips scotch*
I love that Bethesda's reasoning for going with the "NASA-Punk" theme for space ship and building design was to keep things more "grounded" and "believable" but we also have random space magic. Good one guys.
Whenever I hear “the potential for modding is great” it kind of makes my skin crawl. It really doesn’t matter how underbaked any Bethesda game is, how lackluster and behind the curve they are, the fans will make it good. “Our consumers will do the work for us” is a marketable feature at this point.
Edit: Made this comment early in the modding section then he said basically all of it verbatim lmao
The problem is also that it just isn't true. Skyrim is a decent modding platform because there's enough game that you can make it work, Fallout 4 is an okay modding platform because the gameplay still offers enough that you aren't totally turned off by the terrible story and lack of content. Starfield shows BGS has finally slipped to the point where this totally breaks down, the story sucks, the gameplay sucks, and the only thing left is... ship building? There just isn't enough game left to fix anymore.
The problem is they changed how plugin dependency work and basically made it impossible to run several dependant mods ds at once (mods looks up dependency by position), ruining entire mod ecosystem from the get go.
@@whydontyouhandledeez I think Bethesda overlooked that point. I assume Bethesda thought that so long as they made anything people would just flock to it (probably due to them huffing their own hopium) that they forgot that any game with a good modding scene had a great base or at least entertaining base game that functions mechanically. As you bring up Skyrim, even though the main quest was terrible the gameplay mechanics were fun enough that people wanted to mod it. But Starfield? The only way I could see mods taking off is if they did a whole Starfield 2.0 rework but they will not do that since I think think now instead of hopium I assume the devs are huffing copium that the dlc and mod tools will get people to come back.
@@SinaelDOverom Finally someone explains this in a simple way, thanks!
You're being critical of BGS, right? Because if you're criticising people who just love modding *for modding* you're well wide of the mark.
It remains to be seen exactly how good SF will be for mods. BGS have never truly appreciated the community of creators, or quite how important they are. And SF's potential might be kneecapped. We really need to see next year.
But if modding "potential" is there, then that'll be awesome. I swear some people around here don't understand modding. It isn't just a nice little bonus, a peripheral sideshow. It is an enjoyable thing in and of itself - and BGS have, thus far, been pretty much unique in providing such a scale and canvas for people to create and tinker with.
16:36 Hearing Emil say they essentially scrapped Design Documents after Fallout 3 makes everything they've done since then make *so* much more sense.
Yup, couple that with both todd and emil saying they dont ever take in criticism and don't self reflect between games, and the one writer that quit who said that everything has to go through todds approval and todd is too busy to do that effectively now due to how many studios he manages. It really explains a lot. Sprinkle in some esg score wokeness that has infected bgs like everything else for good measure.
Fallout 4 dev1: so whats the story?
Fallout 4 dev2: I have no fucking idea.
@@honeybadger6275 Pretty good points all around-
Oh. You used 'woke" unironically.
Lemme guess, you got triggered by the pronouns screen, right?
@@lazaroskarmaniolas7410 Yeah, I am triggered by degenerates being used as a cudgel of the global bankers to dismantle and destroy my nation.
@@lazaroskarmaniolas7410 You woke bro? Ew
I hate how they talk about Skyrim, people aren't playing it because of you people. Folks are still playing it because of the continuous re-releases and the modding community picking up the slack for your crappy game design.
The highest downloaded mod on the nexus is SkyUI, because even how Bethesda wanted players to interface with the game is widely considered cumbersome and shit.
@@Hydrogueeven by todd howard, he talks about only playing with ui mods all the time.
@@Hydrogue That's because they wanted to make a single game without having to change it when porting it to consoles. So none of the advantages of using a keyboard or mouse are used. Ultra simplistic commands, menus that are designed to be navigated by button presses alone, and dumbed down user interface.
@@HydrogueThe Skyrim UI was built for consoles and works well with a controller most of the time. SkyUI is also required by other mods.
@@Senscion bruh skyUI is actually great with a controller because it takes less button presses to navigate the menus
My biggest disappointment with Starfield was the lack of a special “classic beginning” option which starts you off in in the belly of a ship and the first thing you hear is a narrator saying “they’ve taken you from the Sol System’s Prison Colony, first by shuttle and now by freighter, to the east, to New Atlantis.”
The planets are not empty enough to get the feeling Todd describes. There's so many abandon outposts that I never felt the pride/wonder/discovery of being the first human to land in this planet. If anything it made me feel dirty somehow, like I was part of the problem as 3 other ships landed in this same area while I searched through space trash left by other explorers.
Yeah. I kinda get that same feeling, like there should have been life, but now there isn't and here you are being a vulture coming in after the good bits of the corpse have been eaten.
Not empty enough to be striking but not full enough to be interesting. Starfield manages to thread the needle and make its planets as boring and unengaging as possible
@@C1yde902
Right, and I fucking LOVE space. I absolutely adore space. I want to like this game so badly but I'm not spending big money to play this game, bc I have to also get a console.
It would be nice if there was an option when selecting landing zones that indicated how populated an area is. That way you can still farm the POIs if you want to, but can also explore maybe more resource rich empty areas. Then again, resources would then have to be made valuable.
Doesn’t have the same feeling exploring planets in Mass Effect 1 had. Sure people raged about the clunky Mako but those planets truly felt empty, abandoned, or like you were the first person to ever land on some of them. I wish they kept that mechanic in the sequels and just worked on optimizing the vehicle and terrain but instead the sequels abandoned it entirely and so mass effect 2-3 felt like they took place in smaller and smaller universes.
The New Game+ system was the perfect opportunity for them to go back to the Morrowind style quest design of letting you kill any NPC you wanted, but with an interesting 'out' instead of just having to load an older save file. How they managed to drop the ball so hard on the one big feature they were so protective of pre-release boggles the mind
I think it's because Bethesda's "philosphy" (if you can call it that) is that the whole world is crafted around the player. Which on paper sounds good, but here's the thing - they view the player as a toddler. By removing more complex mechanics because they're not "fun", not allowing the players to kill essential NPCs and let them live with the consequences, not having a strong narrative message that the game would expore or allowing the players to role-play as NOT the chosen one, make Bethesda role-playing games, essentially, gaming fast food.
"Say yes to the player as much as possible... except for killing our donut steel OCs."
Because NG+ isn't an out for YOU, the player, it's an out for THEM, the designer, to get out of having to design new content to keep you engaged. Now they can just keep you spinning that hamster wheel infinitely!
@@simonaspalovis1204 Here's the thing tho, saying that Bethesda crafts their worlds around the player is a complete lie. Its something that sounds nice that Bethesda and Todd likes to say, but the reality couldn't be further from the truth.
The reality is that Bethesda despises player input. Saying that they craft their worlds around the player necessarily implies that they take great pains to account for player actions. If they had their way, the player would just be bolted to a chair and forced to watch a movie of their shitty story. They spent like 8 years making their game and the last thing they'd ever want is some player coming in and fucking it all up.
Even back in the Morrowind days this was true, they never really bothered to account for player actions, they just gave you that stupid message that tells you to reload your game because you soft-locked yourself out of quest progression. That way of doing things is "better" than how they do it now, but its still not accounting for player actions.
@@matrix3509I would give ANYTHING to go back to those “problems” that Morrowind had. Morrowind was a MASTERPIECE compared to this trash.
The crimson cringe sound like Powder gangers from Fallout NV ... except those were recently escaped convicts, that had matching uniforms, because that's what they stole from the guards, and were already in process of falling appart weeks after their escape.
Didn't they (powder gangers) start falling apart the moment they got free? I seem to remember that immediately after they got free many simply scattered
The magnetoshpere is generated by the convection of the molten metal in the core, and the grav drive destroyed the magnetosphere. So the implication is that for some reason, the grav drive had some sort of power that was able to cause the metal in earth's core to stop being hot liquid, but did not have any other knock on effects in the process. Look, I know that technically all fiction writing is just "making stuff up" but this is ridiculous.
I still can't get over Sarah telling you during your initiation that Constellation accepts people from all walks of life, even if they use morally dubious methods. Only for every companion in Constellation to be Lawful Good towards anything illegal you do.
Rabidly lawful good
That’s corporate/institutionalized inclusion for ya
@@andrizzleton its always diversity of skin color but never diversity of thought
@@almalone3282100%
I was actually starting to gaslight myself into thinking she never actually said that, considering how allergic these companions are to anything even morally grey.
You put more work into this video than Bethesda into writing Starfield's story.
A BGS game doesn't really need a well written story to be hugely enjoyable to play, and to support the story that matters; the player's, through RP and arrangement of the building blocks (features, factions, side stuff, characters, and MQ).
I'm currently planning a Cyberpunk 2.1 character because SF's MQ has been flat out broke for me for about two months, and I'm fuckin' sick of waiting for a fix... So I won't be able to listen to most of this video. I'm sure SF's story will be disappointing. BGS have had mostly really bad writing, and main narrative, since Oblivion, so I'm not really expecting good storytelling this time.
SF's general quality of *dialogue* writing is improved - mostly. A bigger issue is still the psychology of the writing and narrative, let's say. It still feels quite infantile and poorly thought out. Again, that's been there in force since Oblivion. For whatever reason, that's their culture of writing.
I'm still hugely enjoying it. I mean, I was before it broke...
Daaaaaamn... and I think that isn't even exaggerated.
@@SabiJDthree paragraphs of cope
@@MrOnay-px1jx I mean, he's right. BGS hasn't been the greatest at main story writing in a long time. It's the side quests, environment storytelling and visuals that make them enjoyable to play. Seriously, their main stories have sucked or years now
Emil Pagliarilo and his writing has had terrible consequences for the Bethesda fanbase
Thank you for this short retrospective. Every Bethesda employee should be required to watch this in its entirety.
Tod speak corpo better than anyone I’ve ever heard.
He puts some real emotion in there and even pretends to stumble here and there.
By the time Tes 6 comes out he might even pass as human.
One thing I should add to the "Modder's Paradise thing:" Part of why Morrowind, Oblivion, Fallout, Skyrim are so popular with modders is because there is potential in there. The base game is fun, at least to some people. If a game is meant to be heavily modded, but doesn't lure in players, it won't get many modders. There has to be something special in the game.
I think the world is too empty to begin with to inspire many people to want to expand on it. Bethesda only bothered to make a handful of major cities and factions, none of which are interesting or believable.
@@guldcat1619 they "were" masters of worldbuilding Starfield showed they aint anymore. You can easily paint a curve from Morrowind to this Game and see the decline and i doubt Starfield will get the same attention to modding like Skyrim.
@@guldcat1619 Past tense. Bethesda WERE the masters of worldbuilding. They didn't build a world in Starfield. Not even one, out of the 1000s of palette swapped Ubisoft dustballs you can go to.
yeah, like 10 hours in I was writing my list of the mods I would create, but then by 30 hours in I just abandoned the game fully
The modding popularity behind TES and Fallout games are primarily fueled by attempts to fix every progressively watered-down version of two beloved IPs.
Kinda like…”well this is what we got, so let’s make the best out of it”..
Starfield is like meeting up with an old best friend from high school. Except now you’re older and they never grew up and are always talking about the pyramid scheme thing they’re trying to sell.
which is the same pyramid scheme he did 10 years ago, using the same dialogue he did then, wearing the same clothes he did back then, driving the same car, using the same jokes and quibs he did back then...
@@MrGeneralPBexcept now they're rusty and the cracks are showing
lmao at least he's consistent.@@MrGeneralPB
"haha remember that wild night after prom? (Skyrim). Yo I just had another wild night just like that 10 years later haha (starfield)
Coooool
And you met up with them again a few months later cause you heard they failed the first pyramid scheme and was hoping they would learn
I wanna like this video 80 times over. You can thank NeverKnowsBest for sending me your way. Literally such a great break down of things I was already thinking or ideas that didn’t sit right and you clearly explained why it didn’t feel right.
It's always fascinating to hear Todd Howard talk. He's a true blue geek and nerd, and from the sounds of it (and given what he accomplished at Bethesda during his time as) a programmer with a lot of ingenuity. Hearing him talk, you can almost picture little turbo geek Todd, sat in front of his Macintosh, trying to turn 200 pages of RPG mechanics into a video game. I'd probably buy his autobiography.
But. I'm not gonna buy his next game. Because Todd, I feel, isn't in the same place he used to be as a gamer, and as a programmer. He's a ceo, an ideas guy, who was always at his strongest when he was practical implementation problem solver guy. I can picture a young Todd, working on Terminator, and showing his superiors how he made flying vehicles work in a nearly-open world, several decades before Mario would be make the 3rd dimension of video games a standard of game design.
"Todd, this is *amazing!* How did you do this?" they'd ask in astonished and excited tones.
"It just works." He'd say, with a bashful grin.
Starfield is the first game Bethesda would make since those days where a player could fly a ship. and somehow, despite decades of innovation, it's just as janky as it was before *many* of the people who bought this game were even born. In your space game about being a space explorer in a space ship exploring space in your space ship, your spaceship isn't even something satisfying (or stable) to run.
I wonder sometimes, what if Todd stepped down as CEO and took a role more akin to like, senior programmer and creative supervisor. Get him in a place where people can talk to him without risking missing a board meeting with Microsoft, get him in a spot where he can get his digits on a computer and craft the things he wants to make with his own hands? Would that change things? If somebody else were the Big Boss, somebody who wouldn't consider Emil a friend and trust him to do whatever he wants, somebody who wouldn't see modders who've radically improved our games in the past as token employees hired solely to cash in on saying we hired and/or consulted them but to actually put these people to work with the tools and talent and time needed to foster better games? Or, would it be a situation like Blizzard, or Bungie, and the company would reach new lows we couldn't even fathom?
I still can't believe that A) Emil is a real person and also B) Someone like Emil was let anywhere near power or even a script
He's buddy with Todd, thats why
Why talk about the "Prophesy broken" prompt from morrowind as if it was inconvenient instead of just respecting the player's agency while still letting them know about it. It's crazy, just fucking let us play in your sandbox instead of placing random restrictions on everything for no reason.
@@caseycox1002 Because those making the decisions at Beth don't understand what they made, how and why it worked at that time. That happens surprisingly often with developers that start small and go big - they learn the wrong lessons from initial success.
I've never seen him before, but he does look like a typical asshole 😅
@@SinaelDOverom not to mention that most the people who made the intial successes possible were not retained or learned from either
"starfield is absolutely the game you deserve"
Unironically great ending line
Honesty.
I was expecting another line to mellow how fucking harsh that it was. Not that I disagree in any way.
I don't understand how the heck I deserve the game that is even worse than fallout 4 from the studio with such great potential and past.
@n1ko_n1ko you are a clown
@@n1ko_n1koHe is referring to the group of hardcore Bethesda fans that have denied his criticism of their games. The ones that don't see that the Bethesda from ages ago and the Bethesda now are completely different (if fallout 76 wasn't evidence enough). Anyway, they deserve this game.
@@xxXthehiguyXxxTodd shills aren't going to finish the video lol.
Todd Howard is literally just Michael Scott IRL. And Emil is his Dwight.
😂😂😂
That’s gold
I enjoy this running gag of you naming these deep long retrsopective videos as "quick analysis". I expect the ESVI one to be a day and a half long.
'No design document' really is the best and most concise criticism of this game. It's not even the game is worse than the sum of its parts, there is no sum of the parts.
Starfield is just a non-game. I look at it and I see nothing, I don't know what I'm looking at. I don't know what it is. 'It' doesn't know what it is, and that comes across so clearly in all the videos I've seen of it, whether commentary, analysis, critique, or just straight gameplay.
The Starfield team didn't need a design document simply because Bugthesda has been using the same design template for the last 20 years.
@@VrilWaffen At least that WAS a design document. Starfield feels like it lacked even that.
@@Blisterdude123 well, point is the lack of a unifying design document for Starfield is more of an indictment on Bethesda's creative stagnation. Why would Todd and crew write a design document when at the end of the day they only want to make FO4 in space? And FO4 was just Skyrim with guns, and Skyrim was just FO3 with swords and better graphics, and FO3 was just Oblivion with guns, and Oblivion was just Morrowind with slightly better graphics, etc. Bethesda didn't write a design document because they never intended to make anything other than same game they've always made, and this time it really became obvious how incredibly dated and creatively bankrupt their game design is.
The biggest issue with Bethesda is they want to grow and grow and make things more simple instead of trying to refine what already works.
Refinement would mean downsizing and layoffs. Unfortunately for Bethesda, that may be coming for them no matter what for their failures.
The company grew and got popular because they simplified the RPG genre to a point that it became an Adventure game with RPG elements, half to appeal to the lowest common denominator and the other half to work around console limitations.
It's not surprising they reached this point, each time they released their newest game, more simplified than the one before, they were showered with praise.
@@CoolcleverstoneRefinement doesn't necessarily mean downsizing, that's just slimming down the team. A process can be refined without stripping its parts, it has to do with elegance and efficiency.
thats honestly how i feel about most game companies right now its not about redefining what works its about being bigger and simple at the same time.
I remember before its final launch my greatest fear was it'd just be No Man's Sky, but with a more designed single-player campaign and format.
But post-launch, I look back and think if they'd just copied No Man's Sky, but made it single-player, it would've at least been a fun game.
This video has been added to my favorite. I use it because I have insomnia. And a long video just taking about something like a video game makes me sleepy. I'm glad there is someone who makes revies this long.
Long-Form Analysis playlist from MightyMorphine here on UA-cam. HF with thousands of these videos fellow insomniac
@@saschaberger3212checked it out thanks
@@saschaberger3212thanks for this my friend, I love longform analysis videos but I never thought to search for a playlist. Now I've got enough content to last for a good long while ❤
@@wakerobin9215 you're welcome. Someone else changed my life with this comment. I thought it was only fair to share
2:10:14 if somebody told me (seriously) that they played Death Stranding but skipped all the cutscenes so that they could experience the gameplay loop, I'd instantly assume they were an ax murderer
3:43:30 "If you don't like it, don't use it."
It drives me up the wall when a game considers the player choosing not to play it a win condition.
Bethesda must look at games like Celeste, or I Wanna Be The Guy, or any other precision platformer like they're eldritch monsters they could never hope to understand.
Emil- "Ignore the reviews"
Also Emil- "Let's type out a cringe gaslit 15 tweet chain about the reviewers"
"it's hard to anticipate everything the player could do"
You know who did that successfully? Obsidian, in your own game engine, and they did it in 18 months!
What's worse is that Bethesda also did it, in Morrowind.
I read that New Vegas quote like that scene from Iron Man 1 about a cave.
I'm about halfway through this video and my main takeaway so far has honestly been this: "Starfield" had an incredibly cool idea at the centre of it with the multiverse and how that can play into doing an RPG. But instead of actually working around that, they tried to make basically a normal Bethesda game with that as a gimmick. With like a handful of extra speech options and one or two more decisions.
This idea of the unity and having a multiverse fits so well with the idea of an RPG. You make sure you have deep characters, you make sure you have many very different and impactful choices. You maybe make the main quest (per universe) relatively short. But then you go hogWILD on including alternative outcomes for every universe based on both random factors and additional things the player and the starborn enemies can do based on your additional knowledge.
The game should've been built entirely around this idea. Don't focus on the 1.000 planets or the random loot or the starship building or any of that. Just set the game on one planet and focus on impactful choices and deep characters that can change between the universes in interesting ways and you've got yourself a fascinating RPG.
Emil is the textbook definition of failing upwards. It's actually insane how obviously incompetent he is. They manage to drive out Will Shen who is actually decent but retain that bloody clown
Being a software engineer I can tell you, this is a trend in the whole corporate world, especially in our industry
Smart people leave. Happens plenty with Bethesda. Look at Arkane for example.
Which only goes to show how little they care to create a half decent product at this point in their companies history. I don't even think they know why their past successes worked, and yet they claim they wanted to create another "forever game" like Skyrim with Starfield. Absolutely ignorant and shortsighted.
He's really really bad. The writing of these games have been the major flaw for me whenever he's the lead.
It says Will Shen was a lead quest designer for Starfield on his entry and left beause he was offered another job. Where did you get your info?
BGS is that dungeon master who is really proud of the story they spent ages working on and are determined that the players experience it exactly as they want, even if means railroading them like a 19th Century tycoon
Except most DM's stories wouldn't kill you of boredom like Starfield does.
lol, last week I said
"Bethesda has absolutely become the Dungeon Master that promises you a campaign that you can pick any class you want, any alignment you want, go anywhere you want, then makes a face when you roll up a Neutral Evil assassin and goes "wwwwellllllllllllllll..." and railroads the party passively by making anything off the rails mind-numbingly boring.
The "check engine" light came on in Fallout 4, and got worse."
@@anthonybird546 "Now guys, I'm not saying we're being railroaded, but that tower over there is the only point of interest we have come across in five whole sessions."
I have genuinely lost all faith in The Elders Scrolls 6 because of Skyrim and Starfield. Almost the entirety of the gaming industry has been on a sharp decline since 2019. Rather than the rare flop you have the rare gem, from AAA companies and titles no less. More than just the gaming industry is being fueled by the lack of accountability the consumers hold companies to. Your videos are great at exposing certain things others ignore or miss, and your attention to detail from your own observations over quoting others and wikis is phenomenally appreciated, across all of your videos. Much love❤
Finding it humorous that people are calling you a fraud when your entire work history on the game is public and streamed, and all the red flags and other things you pointed out while the marketing was happening before release were indeed problems.
And I'm finding it humorous that despite his work history (sources) contradicting him people are still defending him.
The entire basis of the video is a lie lmao. There is a design document. They never implied there wasn’t. He’s a fraud who wants to seem cool
@@PeckhThe basis of the video is not that Starfield has no design doc, only that it has no cohesion. Whether the design doc actually exists does not change the point of the video, which is to criticize its lack of cohesion. Pat attributed that lack of Cohesion to Emil’s repeated statements criticizing the use of design docs. Pat never claimed to have actual insight into the design of the game, onlu that the end product lacked cohesion and Emil’s stated hatred for centralized design was likely a contributor to that
Then why did he say there was no design doc@@kpro8908
@@Peckhat 16:00 he talks about how Emil utilizes more separate, smaller design docs for certain departments and not ALSO a centralized design document. Didn't daddy NKB say to fact check and not just believe something at face value? LMFAO
If i can spend $100 on a “game” that was anything but fun, then i can spend $10 on someone who actually gave me 8 hours of well planned out entertainment. Thank you for your hard work and effort and I hope Bethesda is just a little ashamed of themselves any time they hear about your video.
(♥$0.02) but you didn't spend $10 - it says you only gave $9.99
they've been doing this grift since daggerfall.
it was the illusion of fun. i stopped playing the game because i didnt want to play it anymore... because i relised it wasnt fun, it breaks my brain trying to think about this game, and everything thats wrong with it. everything that i enjoyed and everything that i couldnt
@@LIONGOD time for a change
some guy spend 100 on this game and said it was boring in 8 hours and the internet hated him because he said PHOCKING PRONOUNS once while he said 10 times THE GAME IS BOOOARING, ITS BOOOARING, MODERN DAY CALIFORNIAN SHT, BECAUSE WE ARE BOAAARING, WE ARE SOOO BOAAARING...and now he is 100% vindicated.
bethesda being so allergic to encouraging replays in an RPG that they bake a new game plus into the games story is insane
well to be fair, the skills arn't good enough to make you want to try something else, unless its, "okay tried these skills and they were shite, next game I will ignore."
Honestly the new game + element is one of the few things I think is kind of neat from the game.
@@HolyApplebutter yeah but does detract from the replayability, eldrscrolls and even to a smaller extent fallout is about plyaying different chars to try new things.
@@monmc6129 the issue is that by Skyrim, the races had mostly just become an aesthetic choice, the only exceptions are some of the especially decent racial powers like the Orc and Breton get, but you’ll probably forget about the racial powers anyway in favor of shouts.
@@monmc6129 I sort of get that, but they should have gone all in on it, allow you to chose new traits, new background and such. I just wish the skills were actually worth specializing in them, they feel so scatter shot that there isn't really much you would do different in a second char.
Wow, if you look at the comments in chronological order, you can see exactly where the actual dialogue and discussion ended. Now it's just insults and bringing up the same tired argument that shows people didn't pay attention or watch the video at all.
NKB deliberately misrepresented the content of this video. He's a hypocrite and everyone taking sides is an idiot.
@@powerbeard5653Patrick misrepresented Emil over the course of the entire video.
@@Zach0451Please don't deadname Pat...I know we are talking about some serious things but there's no need for deadnaming--even NKB said "they" out of respect. Just c'mon pal...
@@blazelivingston4581 Is Patrick trans now or something?
@@Zach0451
They've been NB for a while. They keep it DL (they talk about it way more on discord to avoid hate)
I'm starting to wonder if the addition of the watch is because Pete wanted to expense a custom smartwatch
Coming back from the game awards with starfield getting nothing and BG3 winning GOTY is so gratifying
Starfield didn't deserve anything. It didn't even deserve a nomination. People keep saying it was 'snubbed' but like, I don't agree. It wasn't a snub, it just wasn't good enough, simple as that.
@@Blisterdude123yeah. I've never played an RPG with less "role playing" elements as Starfield. GTA 5 is literally more of an RPG than Starfield. This game doesn't deserve any awards of any category.
hater@@Blisterdude123
to be honest Starfield honestly should have been at least nominated for Game of the Year and secondly f*** you hater
@@Blisterdude123
@@Blisterdude123 it should have at least been nominated for Game of the Year and that's it also pissed off hater
Bethesda has made it clear with starfield. It’s their first new Project in like decades. They could’ve made this IP/world/universe whatever as rich as Tolkien’s or broad as star wars or whatever else. They had the time, they had the staff, they had the experience and funding. People have been covering for Bethesdas past mistakes for years saying “it’s not their fault they have to stay inside the bounds of the IP that already exists, they can’t make X cool or fun because Y from 20 years ago” to cover obvious terrible design and flawed concepts…and they’ve proved to everyone with this game that the existing IPs weren’t a shackle that was holding them down, but the only thing keeping them from absolutely shïtting the bed.
When left to their own devices with no lore constraints or lines to color inside of, they will make the dumbest most jumbled mess that’ll be forgotten in 3 years. It should be 1000% clear by now after the recent failures Bethesda is incompetent and unfit to continue making games with the IPs they own. I can’t imagine anyone defending them this time
Absolutely right
The fact they consciously decided to fit the story *after* a war with Mechs and genetically engineered monsters and reduced most of it to a slide show is nuts
Yes, the magic of Bethesda is completely over. Now let’s see what studio can take their place for great open world RPG’s, it’s clearly isn’t CDPR either. I honestly felt like Warhorse did an amazing job with Kingdom Come. I would like to see them develop something with huge funding.
@Gobsmacked29 I mean, it could have worked. The original Mass Effect was set after the Rachni wars and Krogan uprising, both of which would have been interesting settings for a decisions-heavy RPG. The difference is that it actuslly had an interesting story to tell that both stood on its own and intersected with the backstory in satisfying ways (unlike later games in the series, sadly)
The school girls cult will keep defending them till their dying breaths.
Emil reminds me of the saying, "Plans are useless, but planning is indispensable." It really feels like someone discovered that design documents quickly become defunct in long development cycles, but rather than learning to adapt them as time went on or understand how they can help creatives start from a central foundation with core principles, they just abandoned the concept altogether
The comedy of the lack of soundtrack in the end of your vid was not lost on me, thank you lad.
Black tea, cardammon, mint chocolate cookies, and an eight hour starfield analysis on a snowy evening. What a time to be alive.
meanwhile it dropped while I was at work (USA) and youtube's still a bitch with the different bells that I never remember so I never got a notification... and now I have 6 hours before work so it'll have to wait til the weekend....
for the best, I guess...
Living the dream, right there.
@@brandondanforth8342 It dropped right around when I was going to work. Saw the notification not long after coming home, and it said it was posted 8 hours prior. I thought the timing was sort of funny, at least.
I received the notification just before going to bed
Mint chocolate cookies, tea, and appreciation for winter weather? I respect that shit.
On the intro to the game: There have been "Alternate start" mods for Oblivion, Skyrim, and Fo4 for years and years. They're some of the most popular mods for all those games. There's no way Bethesda doesn't know that people want a less rigid, more character-oriented opening to their games yet there was no effort to make Starfield any different.
Bethesda's perspective on it is probably "well we wanted to make this overly long boring railroady intro, if you dont like it just mod it out!"
Makes sense given they assume modders will make it anyway like they always do ..
It's hilarious that how contradictory Bethesda design is in several areas. They want the player to have freedom, and yet make highly restrictive, long intros that remove a lot of player expression. They want the player to explore their big world and ignore the main quest, and yet make the main quest so crucial to the game that skipping it means skipping a ton of content.
I mean, why fix what ain't broke? In this case broke being not selling. People keep buying it so they keep pumping out the same trash year after year. They've released skyrim how many times now, and has a single time not sold well? Why innovate at all?
Todd has mentioned before that he always uses UI mods on Skyrim, because he doesn't like the UI. The UI that he approved for the game.
I really appreciate how you address mods in this essay. The dependency on and expectation of high-quality mods in order to make Bethesda's games both playable and the bare-minimum FUN to play is so bleak. Especially when there are hundreds of games that are cohesive and enjoyable out of the gate. If there's nothing to the game (no compelling writing or gameplay for example), what possible reason do I have to play Starfield instead of those games? It's not even the only space exploration game out there with how much it borrows from No Man's Sky and others. The only thing carrying Fallout and TES for me is nostalgia for previous games and their established worlds. Starfield doesn't even have that, so what is left except this entitlement to hard-working modders? It feels like such a cynical way to exploit passionate fans.
I would like to add that bethesda treats their fans like garbage, look at how the last like 4 or so years have been for skyrim where bethesda is updating the exe file for skyrim every few months breaking every single mod that uses skse and modders have to recompile their mods to fix it. It's absolutely cancerous. You look at the nexus site and you don't get well put together quest mods like what was made for new vegas or morrowind, now its super low effort weapons/armor ports from other games/asset stores. Bethesda's lack of passion has killed a lot of modders passion.
The yiik out of nowhere almost killed me omg
timestamp?
@@kattguldmcno 😊
@@kattguldmc 3:08:10
@@SuperZergMan thanks man :-)
a design document doesn't even have to be read, the very act of writing is like 90% of its usefulness, helping you consolidate ideas
In very small teams, sure. In a team of hundreds of people, it does *definitely* have to be read.
@@yurigagarin9765 Think Bethesda has around 150 employees when they started on SF. They aren't really that large of a company, just well known.
*edit* I should add that I understood your point, lol.
It is frequently referenced when used in the making of games, especially large companies, but even two man teams like DOOM look to it constantly, obsessively even. It'll be "required reading," to even do much as QA the game, and it'll often be cited any time whatsoever there's a cross over of departments. Produces live and die by the design doc. That's why Pat said "just have one of the dozen producers do it," they should have wanted one, they should have made their own in the absence of one even. It would actually be more time and effort and extra out of your way to not have one in a team the size of Bethesda. That's why it's so fucking insane, the more you think of how useful it is the more insane it gets, ad infinitum.
@@matthewcarroll2533 Expecting 150 people to all be on the same page on a project that has AT LEAST a million lines of code is patently insane, and its instantly obvious you've never worked on a project that has taken more than a week in your life.
would it REALLY help though, if all your ideas are bad?
1:58:51 I'm still waiting for the 3 hour long "Temperature Analysis | A Quick Retrospective"
Really milking it to reach that 10min mark huh?
todd howard likening the feel to rdr2 is the absolute wildest take I've ever heard
I wonder if this is part of the reason why they felt a voiced character was so important.
Aurther Morgan is a huge reason why the outlaw fantasy is sold so well.
Holy Shit Bethesda doesn't use Design Documents!? And they're trying to make massive open world games??? Like jesus christ I can't believe I didn't know this before because this explains so goddamn much about why their games are such a mess from a design perspective. This is fucking mindboggling, I might need to make my own video just getting my thoughts out on this because like, fuck...
Edit: Since people have asked, I did in fact make that video, and I honestly might make more along its line specifically examining games through the lens of how good or bad their organizational skills and documentation was.
It’s utterly baffling and just fucking STUPID from design perspective! If you make that video I’ll watch it.
I'm pretty sure it was just Starfield, not all their games. But it would explain a lot about it
Yeah, it explains why so many mechanics are just vestigial ideas that might work in one or two quests.
@@nagger8216 Bethesda stopped following design documents during the development of Fallout 3. Emil Pagliarulo outright said as much during his 'Talks From Story' presentation.
I found the casino dungeon early on and had a blast. Little did I know that mechanic would hardly be used ever again. Which is funny considering the act of boarding an enemy ship would be a great way to do repeatable zero-g fights since the ship probably shouldn't be capable of running gravity generators at that point.
One of the main problems of Starfield is that it makes no sense sociologically: society capable of interstellar travel will be orderly, bureaucratic, and heavily regulated. It makes no sense that there are pirates, that people entrust you, a stranger, to deal with their corporate matters, just give you their corporate property, that every planet is overrun with bandits. In Skyrim's essentially medieval setting, all these elements of the game made total sense. But the Bethesda rpg formula just doesn't work in a modern society setting.
Good or bad, the release of ES6 is going to be very interesting after this.
I'm a software project manager, and I can just imagine being in a meeting where somebody says "We don't need design specs, we're Agile". And then you would hear the door click closed behind me as I head off to my next job somewhere not there.
"Somewhere not there" is such a great line. Haven't read it before.
...n-not...agile scrum???
Dude, if you haven't seen the agile skit by programmers are also too, you definitely need to.
You just need to be best friends with the ceo like emil is with todd then you'll never get fired.
Ha! On a related note, As someone working in the command center please, dear god, document the details for your applications and what they do and what levers to pull to fix your stuff... Unless you want me to page you at 3 AM because I can't figure it out 😅😅😅
Drinking game: take a shot every time Patrician mentions "design document" or sarcastically alludes to it lmao
It is actually hilarious how many problems genuinely just stem from that one issue
A core vision for a creative project is essential, even if you're working alone. When I run D&D campaigns, I make documents to keep track of people, places, and things so I stay consistent.
“Let’s build a house without ANY plans or diagrams of any kind. What could go wrong?!
@@MrSpartan993 5 years later: the house has 3 bathrooms, half a kitchen, no bedroom, 42 closets, and a big pillar that goes all the way from the basement to the attic that seems to serve no purpose.
it's like they tried to build a mansion with no home plan
@@MrSpartan993it just works
The "underground merchant chest" thing **ABSOLUTELY BOGGLES MY MIND**. There's like 20 thousand better ways to do merchants than that, but no, let's keep doing the same insane thing in every game we release. Come on.
Bethesda: never change a broken half working system
4:10:23 The fact that the inventory on the Starborn is visible for a split second made me chuckle. I wonder why they decided you can't loot them.
The most damning commentary on Starfield is that all the UA-cam channels that got big with Elder Scrolls retrospectives & analyses are rushing to get their big Starfield videos out before it's going to be completely forgotten next year.
My biggest red flag was that it’s jabo made 2 videos on Starfield before going back to the other IPs which was funny because he gutted a series he was doing to finish it quickly for launch since I guess he figured he would be on starfield from here on out.
It’s already forgotten lol
Having the design scope of a small town or province stretched across a galaxy is so fitting as a studio who has only ever designed games for that smaller scope just didn't know how to upscale it. Also the ability to be hailed by other ships over comms but so many quests are based on the fact that there's no phone or long range communications available to the player is infuriating.
this was a problem for Bethesda long before Starfield, it's just fetch quests after fetch quests.
can't be overstated how perfect the opportunity was for starfield, how uniquely enabling and enviable their position was at the outset, and how bitter and disappointing it is to see them squander it with incredible hubris, and know that an opportunity this good might never exist for any other creator again
Can’t believe I’m watching this a second time
2:36:27
4:06:08
5:35:18
6:52:52
7:46:09
The duality of Bethesda interviews. On the one hand they want to "say yes" to the player all the time, on the other they think that Morrowind letting the player kill important NPCs was bad.
It’s sad that Bethesda used to have great writers, look at Michael Kerkbride’s work on Morrowind. The idea of a totally alien and convincing atmosphere with believable lore both from historic and religious standpoints and even a world mechanic that explains why the player has the power of save and loading is something out of this world that I still consider as the peak of lore writing. Now Bethesda can’t even explain how to cook a baked potato
As far as TES goes, they were basically profiting off the creative energy of real writers like Kirkbride up until Skyrim, when much of that energy was exhausted. With Fallout and especially now with Starfield, you see how exposed they really are -- as the core group of people that developed Morrowind, for example, had already departed Bethesda by the time Oblivion rolled around. Peak Bethesda was the early 2000s -- they've gotten worse since then, clearly.
As for me, I'm sick of this shite, so I suppose it's high time I go back to indulging in Morrowind, since I have no more patience with Skyrim and its stupid paid mods system breaking my load orders AGAIN just for f*cking corporate profit...
@@josephpercy1558 Yeah Morrowind was peak TES - you could control pretty much everything about your character and have totally unique play styles. Oblivion looked lovely (at the time) but the way they drew back the character options to 'channel' you to be a certain type was a sad path to follow.
Kirkbride is one of my fav fantasy author. Afaik he literally the one who wrote vivec lesson in which the infamous event where vivec had "intimate" time with molag bal... he is the reason why TES is not just your generic fantasy story, especially with TES's metaphysical cosmology and other good weird things.
What's the world mechanic explanation thingie?
@@Atlas8813 that would be CHIM. Not everyone subscribes to the idea that CHIM is a meta concept as far as saving and loading the game goes
i feel like the new comments coming in from NKB is missing the point of the video about hate and harassment
Hearing the way those devs (at 14:20) talk is giving off exactly the same vibes as when you do a group project at school, do nothing but mess around and then the teacher asks for your presentation at the end lol...
I love short-form content such as this, keep up the good work 👍
Bite sized snack 😋❤️
A mighty morsel
@@completelyroundoak fit for the absolute unit
Understood. My hatred for Todd Howard is over. Emil Pagliarulo is my nemesis now.
We can hate them both, along with Tetsuya Nomura, Neil Druckman, etc
@@SaintJames14 but in their defence it is only now that I'm learning who's behind some of my least favorite aspects of Bethesda games for the past 13 years, and most of it seems to fall under Emil's jurisdiction. The lack of cohesion between departments because of no design document, Fathers (Complete and utter lack of) motivations in Fallout 4, etc.
@@SaintJames14Neil Druckmann is actually competent except when he's in charge then he loses it
@@chooseyouhandle I mean, it is a joke. I dont know if "Utter contempt" is any less personal. But for me it is at least "professionally personal". If Emil is still in his same development position for Elder Scrolls 6 I almost certainly will not buy it.
The other thing with improvisation is everyone tends to be higher level than would be required if you had a design document, which is where people who are great at improvisation shine because they can show off and help others show off their skills in ways that can be difficult to make space for in a design document
This game makes me think about the new Starwars trilogy; it was probably designed by a committee, which might explain why it lacks soul: it is a disjointed mess where each element seems to have been developed in isolation from the rest, and later diluted to make them work together and appeal to the widest audience possible.
For example, consider the universe; it feels like it has been constructed by merely throwing together various popular themes:
Some envisioned a NASAPunk style, like "The Expanse," reflected in the ships, the Martian city, small settlements, and bases.
Parallel to that, they aimed for hard sci-fi high-level concepts, like in "2001: A Space Odyssey" and "Contact," and indeed the main quest is consistent with this idea.
However, it seems someone was inspired by "Firefly" or played "Red Dead Redemption 2" and wanted space cowboys. Thus, we have Akila, a city where wood (tables, stairs, etc.) is prevalent to evoke a Western vibe, on a planet without forests.
And apparently, someone else was impressed by Cyberpunk, leading to the addition of Neon. These additions really left the feeling of an inconsistent universe, strikingly different from the carefully crafted Elder Scrolls universe.
Neon is a glaring example of diluted style. They aimed for a drug-ravaged city but omitted visible addicts. They planned for a nightclub with exotic dancers but settled for men in absurd spandex alien costumes.
The game systems reflect similar issues, seeming as if teams worked in isolation. And by the end, their contributions were watered down:
The fuel system exists but is vestigial, environmental hazards are underdeveloped, etc.
Most disheartening, though unsurprising, is the gutted exploration element. Essentially, they had two paths for 'Starfield':
Option 1: Follow the "Mass Effect"/"Outer Worlds" model: Create a few handcrafted open-world maps. This would also allow for a good space-themed RPG but won't offer the "Big Space Game" feel.
Option 2: If you want to give a true feeling of immensity, you will need to integrate a space simulator for seamless exploration.
When considering design, you realize that a Bethesda game with 1000 planets requires a space simulator to maintain a constant 'relative landmark density'.
The formula is straightforward: the speed of the player multiplied by the maximum time between discoveries dictates the average distance between landmarks.
On foot, this would mean a landmark every 500 meters. Multiply this by the size of the playable area (encompassing 1000 planets), and you'd need countless landmarks, leading to the use of reusable templates, which led to the very defeat of the original purpose; nothing feels less immersive than finding the same landmark several times on different planets.
However, if they had implemented a space simulator, allowing exploration via spaceship at astronomical speeds, having only 2 or 3 landmarks per planet might have been sufficient. Hence they could have had about 200 landmarks, like in previous Bethesda games, spread over a huge empty universe that you can pass by at astronomical speed.
It appears their engine couldn't incorporate a space simulation, and they were too stubborn to embrace the necessary implications.
Just a note, planet orbits just revolve around the map's zero axis, IE, wherever your ship spawns in, for both space and on land. They do not model any sort of realistic orbit.
That's fucking weird
@@teddycouch9306when you move drastically large distances from the center of the world, things break down, akin to the farlands in Minecraft. By always centering the world position at the player ship, you prevent this rather than fix it.
Pat's Quick Retospectives are the only thing that bring me joy in life.
I understood that reference. Understanding references is my only joy in life.
Finding fellow massives in the wild is the only thing that brings me joy in life.
Long recognizes long
slice and dice, brother
Don bless. Buy Qwib gift!
If Emil is the lead writer of TES 6 then I’m not interested. Bring back Kirkbride.
Not a chance. Bethesda is never going to utilize a good writer again, we need to move on.
Personally I have high hopes for the new project from the creators of Daggerfall.
@@blurqeqoherdswhat’s the name of the project?
@@naterod The Wayward Realms.
@@blurqeqoherds thank you I’m definitely following this
@@blurqeqoherds just looked it up on steam, sounds absolutely amazing
Every game I've encountered that has had an active and impressive modding scene has shared one notable trait - a really good core base game. They may not all have perfect executions, but they have an excellent (and stable!) platform to work off of, with a clear idea for what they are. Terraria, Slay the Spire, Minecraft, Rivals of Aether, even Skyrim - they all have a very solid idea of the game they're trying to be, and maybe even more importantly, not a lot of unneeded bloat around it. You can add on little individual things, or QoL tweaks, or add whole game systems, or even entire new chunks of content, without needing to fight against what's already there.
Starfield... It's just not that. Its core gameplay isn't notably good at anything, its systems are all already fighting each other, its world is uninteresting, and the only things it provides that aren't already available in other games are just weighed down by all the bad connections. It's like what you would get if you sent out 49 teams to each make a section of a game on their own, and then had one last team desperately try to coordinate between them and then bolt it all together at the end.
Modders already have to work with the product of a team that they can't speak to or influence at all. Why would they want to work with a product that can't seem to communicate with itself?
To play Starfield after Baldurs Gate 3 is like slamming down a Big Mac after enjoying a five course meal.
Yup
If the Big Mac was also somehow more expensive than the five course meal. Actually, with how expensive fast food is now, that’s probably not too far off from the truth
I’d rather eat a Big Mac than a five course meal 😂
@@br5073 to each their own I suppose
That's an insult to Big Macs, they at least taste good. Its more like eating raw ground beef after eating a burger
Gee, what a complex game. If only there was a document for its design that everyone can refer back to. But alas, we are too backward to ever comprehend such a thing.
I look at this game now, and I legitimately cannot believe Starfield ever got past the 'writing-ideas-on-a-whiteboard' conceptual stage. That's like, the bare bones DNA-level basic moment where you decide roughly what you want a project to grow into. What the game might end up being. It's where you paint a broad goal, for your development.
But Starfield feels like a game where they NEVER had any real concept of what the game was supposed to be. It feels like they skipped even doing that bit with the whiteboard, and just started...developing nonsense and trying to glue it together.
@@Blisterdude123 Apparently this was the game Todd wanted to make. So it likely got past the conceptual stage by Todd forcing it through.
Here's my Starfield experience:
I booted up the game, made my character, got knocked out and had a dream. Then some crazy fuck told me that I had visions and need to leave my job to go join his organization. I objected, but my boss fired me because this crazy guy wanted me.
So I decide to go drop off the ship, robot and McGuffin and then go find a new job, maybe make some cash to buy my own ship and go off on a space faring adventure.
But no, despite not wanting to join Constipation, the game demanded I had to, they even stuck another companion to me.
So with no other way to avoid joining constipation, I did the only thing I could.
I uninstalled the game.
(I know I spelled it as constipation, it autocorrected to it and I went with it.)
And then Emil goes on Twitter and says "Catching up on design docs- we don't have one big one, we have a ton of small ones!!!"
Like... yeah, bullshit. And also you're just now working on your docs... months after the game's release?
What a wasted opportunity
They had the creative opportunity of a lifetime and they just used it to show how creatively bankrupt they are
Then, instead of listening to feedback, they actively doubled down on their lack of creativity by responding to user reviews with AI generated messages of gaslighting and defensiveness.
The best Bethesda entertainment is the meta surrounding their dumb games.
@@JayMaverickI don't think those responses were AI, just typical corpospeak
@@Rannos22Tbh, they may as well be if they're not. If they just run down a list of "if customer mentions X, then respond with Y" then as far as im concerned that isnt an intelligent response. Its an artificially intelligent response.
I'm amazed Emil still has a job. Bethesda could use ChatGPT to write the script for their next game, and it would be leagues above anything Emil could puke out. It's unreal.
45 minutes in: _"YoU toUched tHe MagiC rock. You arE now The CHosEn one. Here. TaKE my SpaceSHiP and SpaCeRoboT. NoW Go and LeAVe me On this MininG OutPOsT for NO ReasOn."_
Very much agree that Emil is a nightmarishly bad writer.
It's not that amazing once you know that Emil's friendship with Todd Howard is the reason he got the job to begin with. "It's not about what you know, but who you know" is a phrase that's completely relevant here.
Or he could use ChatGPT to write a design document.
Don't make me defend Emil. Even a moron is better than an ai.
They will be using ai if it's accepted widely come next game. Fuck that, I'd rather Emil still be trying to sell the messiest shits than an ai.
i have been watching this video for almost a month daily to sleep. now i finished it, thank you for that great video
Starfield is the worst Bethesda game that I have played.
It's the one game I regret buying.
Edit: finally got all the way through this and man... You did a great job of summing everything up. And the ending is A+.