Starfield - Epic Shit Takes from Bethestards

[Ryzer]

Skyrim radicalized me by making the Nord nationalists sympathetic.

...Until you find out that Ulfric Stormcloak is controlled by the (((thalmors)))

 

[ArchAngel]

I wonder what went wr...

Soon Guatanamo Bay will have a lot of GMs for all the islamic terrorists there.

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

Bethesda have no idea why people like their games. No one likes their main quests, their games are all about the life-sim elements, and the best thing Bethesda can do to facilite this is simply get out of the player's way. Instead they force the player into scripted, narrative-heavy scenes.

Imagine how much better Starfield would've been if the moment the player clicks "New Game" you are immediately dropped onto a random planet, in some random outpost, with some basic gear based on the class you chose. That's it. No forced dialogue or cutscenes or exposition. Just free to play and explore at your own leisure. You can choose to travel to a nearby space station or city to discover the world and main quest, or you could simply stay at the spot the game dumped you at the start and simply live out your character on that planet.

Starfield without a predetermined start would still lack an Open World (aside from procedurally-generated wastelands), still not offer the player anything to do in space other than combat (which is worse than that found in Spaceborne, created by a single person), and still be more of a 'looter-shooter' than an RPG. Not even the same type of game that established the phenomenal success of Bethesda Softworks starting with Morrowind in 2002, and not even rising to the level of quality found in Morrowind's lackluster successors.

 

[kites]

If they don’t release a contiguous space to explore as a dlc/expansion soon they will really be missing the plot as a studio. They must be aware one of the main things they’re known for is exploration, and procedural generation can’t take a designer’s place -at least not yet. Sure there are some handcrafted spaces but I have zero interest if a large amount of the game is randomly generated, even as a popcorn type of game..

 

[ind33d]

Is there an Iron Man (like XCOM, not Tony Stark) mod for Starfield? I think if you really pump up the difficulty and delete your save on death the game must get better

 

[Hellraiser]

If they don’t release a contiguous space to explore as a dlc/expansion soon they will really be missing the plot as a studio.

This is beyond their ability to implement, most likely too late and too fucking costly, even if they would abstract away the scale of interplanetary distances freelancer style. I mean for fucks sake, they dropped the ball on something as simple as space piracy. The hard parts like boarding ships and fighting the other crew in enemy ship interiors are implemented (the only really good thing in this game apart from a few quests/minor locations in a sea of half-assed filler), but not only is there jack shit in supporting such a play style (for instance a black market ship buyer/fence) despite it being low effort to implement, even worse you can't scrap ships "into razors" for cash without jumping through "no fun allowed" hoops they deliberately implemented to make it uneconomical (unless they fixed this in a patch, wasn't paying attention to the changelogs). That's just straight up retarded and a red flag as far as competence goes.

A proper expansion of such kind would need to pretty much copy the basics of how the sandbox/openworld space functioned in freelancer. Random ships going on patrol or trade mission spouting radiant lines over the radio like "we are on a mission for the shitposters guild, en route to shackleford base". Being able to follow ships to find bases and outposts (maybe the the ship stealth system would be fucking useful for something besides that 1 tutorial mission that teaches you it, lol). Wrecks, hazard zones, hidden asteroid bases and stations. Finally a fucking reputation system and some kind of rewards tied into it, so that the radiant jobs from the job board actually have some purpose. Maybe even going as far as aiding factions in turf wars and territory swapping hands.

If they had a clue in the first place they would have realized that their Bethesda open world in this game is the space part, I mean for fucks sake the systems with their planets, moons and occasional hand-placed" POI are handcrafted. You should have shit like ship schedules instead of NPC schedules, bases are their houses you can raid/rob etc. in it. Doubt they suddenly got smarter and realized that, and even if they did like I said it is likely too much effort at this point.

The surface exploration is a different can of worms and would require far more effort to salvage into something that isn't plain awful. I wouldn't be surprised if the foolish quest to make it awesome procedural and seamless (which they probably intended but were unable to get it to work) is what dragged down the whole project.

 

[deuxhero]

Bethesda have no idea why people like their games. No one likes their main quests, their games are all about the life-sim elements, and the best thing Bethesda can do to facilite this is simply get out of the player's way. Instead they force the player into scripted, narrative-heavy scenes.

Imagine how much better Starfield would've been if the moment the player clicks "New Game" you are immediately dropped onto a random planet, in some random outpost, with some basic gear based on the class you chose. That's it. No forced dialogue or cutscenes or exposition. Just free to play and explore at your own leisure. You can choose to travel to a nearby space station or city to discover the world and main quest, or you could simply stay at the spot the game dumped you at the start and simply live out your character on that planet.

X4 actually has a few start options that are just that (the starts with the most story, Terran Cadet and Stranded, were both added in an expansion). It also added budgeted custom start option to one of the patches that lets you pick starting stuff (already know all the sectors of the core, got a gunboat instead just a fighter, already have a bit of renown with the humans) using points you get for doing unique things across your previous playthroughs to a limit (if you've ever made a million in a single transaction you can with an extra 200,000 credits, If you've done an quest of X type before you can start with a few knowledge points, if you've ever had a crewmember reach 4 stars overall rating you can afford better starting crew). The main reason this really works is the entire X4 economy is simulated (e.g., killing off a faction's miners will, in-fact, slow down or even stop their production if you get enough to choke their resource supply) so X at start of game is more powerful than X hours into it, but it would work fine in a more static world too. (It's a feature I'd love to have in Bannerlord)

 

[gurugeorge]

There's something kind of "weightless" about the MQ lines in Bethesda games.

Following on from my own thought, I remember I spoke about this before ages ago. It's something to do with the clutter and the interchangeability (or maybe it's a kind of "modularity?") of things and items in the game. It's a bit reminiscent of the feeling you get from MMO itemization.

It's difficult to describe, but it's easier to understand by contrast with something where everything around an MQ is handmade and bespoke, as in most top-down/isometric RPGs.

The - whatever it is, let's call it modularity - fits perfectly well with open world wandering, emergent gameplay and small interesting quests you stumble across, but when something is presented as an MQ or a major SQ in a Bethesda game, you kind of feel it's just a module that's been slotted into the game, or even something that's been procedurally generated (even if it hasn't been, even if it is in fact handmade, it still produces that feeling), and that the game could easily have had any of a dozen other MQs constructed from the modular parts - neither the characters nor the story stand out from anything else in the world (they feel sort of "itemized" like in an MMO), and it never feels special. They feel like MQs made from kit parts.

 

[Decado]

In conversations about Starfield I have frequently referenced Elite, because that is currently the only game that gets spaceflight "correct" in my opinion. That level of detail and complexity is likely too much for your average Bethesda-enjoyer, but they certainly could have learned a few lessons from Frontier and built their space-flight portion of the game with a more deliberate focus, especially for a game called "Starfield."

The on-foot exploration of planets and environments is a different beast altogether. You cannot procedurally generate your way out of the chief design problem, which is that if you want a bunch of walkable and interesting planets to explore, you need designers to handcraft them or, at least, hand-finish them.

 

[Yosharian]

Elite Dangerous is hardly perfect either, there's fucking drag in space according to FDev

Sound also travels in space apparently

 

[Gargaune]

It's fascinating watching how some design flaws persist for decades across a product line. I just had this weird curiosity and checked out another Gopher Starfield video that appeared in my feed, and noticed how he was managing Andreja's inventory... Click on the "let's trade gear", she spouts off a long response line ("I have never been one to shy away from shouldering my share of a heavy load", not making this shit up), and then the inventory UI pops up.

This sort of substandard interaction queing and prioritising has been a problem in Bethesda games since forever. Basically, the game wastes your fucking time. Consider how annoying it is when Fallout 4 pulls the same crap when you engage a farming settler in conversation - they SLOOOOOOWLY put their crap away, wipe their hands and get up, and then you can finally talk. Same thing applies to sleeping NPCs, you're just standing there for ages while their dumb asses get out of bed. In fact, there was a mod for Fo4 that corrected this behaviour by having conversation initiate immediately, and the animation state change while you were already talking, but apparently it triggered some bugs (in a Bethesda game, inconceivable, I know). For another example going further back (tangential but still part of the same flawed approach), I remember my rifle jamming with a Super Mutant bearing down on me in Fallout 3, and I'm mashing the shotgun's hotkey but the game's stuck playing loops of trying to reload the bloody rifle due to its poor condition. And Skyrim had a mod that just quickened up your pointlessly-long dismount animation.

Going back to the starting example, the implementation has actually gotten worse since Skyrim because of the written line - Lydia would just gripe that she was "sworn to carry your burdens" so it was relatively quick, but now this Andreja doorknob subjects you to her life story before you get to do routine stuff. It's idiotic, the line doesn't add anything and there's no reason not to display the UI right away and have it play in the background.

I know that it's a relatively small thing to gripe about in the sea of fail that Starfield seemingly is, but like I said, it's gotten to the point it's fascinating to observe. I've speculated that it might be due to an overfamiliarised QA crew that just stops noticing this shit, but this is a very long time to be using the same staffers in testing... I can't tell whether the point of failure is in the feedback or the receiver.

 

[Child of Malkav]

I know that it's a relatively small thing to gripe about

It's always the little things that push you over the edge.

 

[Kiste]

The - whatever it is, let's call it modularity - fits perfectly well with open world wandering, emergent gameplay and small interesting quests you stumble across, but when something is presented as an MQ or a major SQ in a Bethesda game, you kind of feel it's just a module that's been slotted into the game

That's because that's exactly what it is. The MQ in Bethesda games is just a module that's been slotted into the game and into the open world, like any other quest, whereas most other CRPGs construct their locations (more or less) around the central main quest narrative.

 

[Iucounu]

Going back to the starting example, the implementation has actually gotten worse since Skyrim because of the written line - Lydia would just gripe that she was "sworn to carry your burdens" so it was relatively quick, but now this Andreja doorknob subjects you to her life story before you get to do routine stuff. It's idiotic, the line doesn't add anything and there's no reason not to display the UI right away and have it play in the background.

I know that it's a relatively small thing to gripe about in the sea of fail that Starfield seemingly is, but like I said, it's gotten to the point it's fascinating to observe. I've speculated that it might be due to an overfamiliarised QA crew that just stops noticing this shit, but this is a very long time to be using the same staffers in testing... I can't tell whether the point of failure is in the feedback or the receiver.

This has annoyed me in a few games as well (not just Bethesda's). I suspect developers are in love with their animations and voice actors, they can't fathom that the player just wants to trade and so want to force the player to watch their cutscene masterpiece.

If developers really want players to pay attention to such generic NPC lines, there needs to be variation with lots of different lines every time, not the same tiresome one always. But even then the UI should indeed be accessible right away.

 

[gurugeorge]

It's fascinating watching how some design flaws persist for decades across a product line. I just had this weird curiosity and checked out another Gopher Starfield video that appeared in my feed, and noticed how he was managing Andreja's inventory... Click on the "let's trade gear", she spouts off a long response line ("I have never been one to shy away from shouldering my share of a heavy load", not making this shit up), and then the inventory UI pops up.

This sort of substandard interaction queing and prioritising has been a problem in Bethesda games since forever. Basically, the game wastes your fucking time. Consider how annoying it is when Fallout 4 pulls the same crap when you engage a farming settler in conversation - they SLOOOOOOWLY put their crap away, wipe their hands and get up, and then you can finally talk. Same thing applies to sleeping NPCs, you're just standing there for ages while their dumb asses get out of bed. In fact, there was a mod for Fo4 that corrected this behaviour by having conversation initiate immediately, and the animation state change while you were already talking, but apparently it triggered some bugs (in a Bethesda game, inconceivable, I know). For another example going further back (tangential but still part of the same flawed approach), I remember my rifle jamming with a Super Mutant bearing down on me in Fallout 3, and I'm mashing the shotgun's hotkey but the game's stuck playing loops of trying to reload the bloody rifle due to its poor condition. And Skyrim had a mod that just quickened up your pointlessly-long dismount animation.

Going back to the starting example, the implementation has actually gotten worse since Skyrim because of the written line - Lydia would just gripe that she was "sworn to carry your burdens" so it was relatively quick, but now this Andreja doorknob subjects you to her life story before you get to do routine stuff. It's idiotic, the line doesn't add anything and there's no reason not to display the UI right away and have it play in the background.

I know that it's a relatively small thing to gripe about in the sea of fail that Starfield seemingly is, but like I said, it's gotten to the point it's fascinating to observe. I've speculated that it might be due to an overfamiliarised QA crew that just stops noticing this shit, but this is a very long time to be using the same staffers in testing... I can't tell whether the point of failure is in the feedback or the receiver.

I think it's alright like the first couple of times you do x, to have it animated in detail and all that, because the first time you play you're engrossed in the immersion of it, it feels like a real world, etc. At least it's like that for me, and I think probably for most people who play games. First time's charming. But it's a developer sin to not make those things easily skippable - by the time you're going back and forth busy doing shit, that level of detail is a waste of time.

But of course a lot depends on how well the puppet show is done. If it's nicely done, you can enjoy it a few times, if not, then it's even more of an intrusion. Bethesda have just never been very good at the puppet show side of things.

I was reminded of that just the other day when I saw a YT vid where someone talked about Troika's old vampire game in passing, and remarked on how good the facial animations are even to this day - and it's true, they're head and shoulders (ahem) above anything Bethesda has done.

 

[kites]

I think QoL stuff like those “small” gripes (that add up, but easily could be fixed) is due to QA being given less importance, and maybe even that teams have become so large that nobody really feels a sense of ownership over the what they are making any more. It’s just punching the clock; less enthused hobbyists, more corporate lifers who only care about the holy $$. Even in the bigger companies of the 90’s like Interplay, you have lots of people who want to play the newest build of FO1 on their own time and give feedback to the small crew to help make it great.

Another piece of the pie also probably that instead of going “gold” and creating something mostly immutable you’re able to easily push out the release of what should be considered the beta - then only patch out the game-breaking bugs people are loudest about and quickly move on to hyping up the next big thing..

 

[I eat frozen vegetables]

Bethesda tried to make their own version of No Man's Sky and they fucked it up. Unlike No Man's Sky, there's no redemption in sight.

It's fascinating watching how some design flaws persist for decades across a product line. I just had this weird curiosity and checked out another Gopher Starfield video that appeared in my feed, and noticed how he was managing Andreja's inventory... Click on the "let's trade gear", she spouts off a long response line ("I have never been one to shy away from shouldering my share of a heavy load", not making this shit up), and then the inventory UI pops up.

This sort of substandard interaction queing and prioritising has been a problem in Bethesda games since forever. Basically, the game wastes your fucking time. Consider how annoying it is when Fallout 4 pulls the same crap when you engage a farming settler in conversation - they SLOOOOOOWLY put their crap away, wipe their hands and get up, and then you can finally talk. Same thing applies to sleeping NPCs, you're just standing there for ages while their dumb asses get out of bed. In fact, there was a mod for Fo4 that corrected this behaviour by having conversation initiate immediately, and the animation state change while you were already talking, but apparently it triggered some bugs (in a Bethesda game, inconceivable, I know). For another example going further back (tangential but still part of the same flawed approach), I remember my rifle jamming with a Super Mutant bearing down on me in Fallout 3, and I'm mashing the shotgun's hotkey but the game's stuck playing loops of trying to reload the bloody rifle due to its poor condition. And Skyrim had a mod that just quickened up your pointlessly-long dismount animation.

Going back to the starting example, the implementation has actually gotten worse since Skyrim because of the written line - Lydia would just gripe that she was "sworn to carry your burdens" so it was relatively quick, but now this Andreja doorknob subjects you to her life story before you get to do routine stuff. It's idiotic, the line doesn't add anything and there's no reason not to display the UI right away and have it play in the background.

I know that it's a relatively small thing to gripe about in the sea of fail that Starfield seemingly is, but like I said, it's gotten to the point it's fascinating to observe. I've speculated that it might be due to an overfamiliarised QA crew that just stops noticing this shit, but this is a very long time to be using the same staffers in testing... I can't tell whether the point of failure is in the feedback or the receiver.

Bethesda should have taken notes from other games and allow you to move through conversations at your own pace. I've seen mobile games get this right.

 

[Gargaune]

This has annoyed me in a few games as well (not just Bethesda's). I suspect developers are in love with their animations and voice actors, they can't fathom that the player just wants to trade and so want to force the player to watch their cutscene masterpiece.

But of course a lot depends on how well the puppet show is done. If it's nicely done, you can enjoy it a few times, if not, then it's even more of an intrusion. Bethesda have just never been very good at the puppet show side of things.

I don't think it's either. In the examples I gave you, there's nothing stopping Fallout 4 from already engaging the conversation while the "get up" animation is playing (if anything, it'd look better with the dialogue camera), nor would you lose anything of value - animation or writing-wise - in covering Andreja's generic blathering with the inventory panel (or just having her say "Okay"). There's no benefit in the slow dismount animation in Skyrim, no one's ever said "boy, this Witcher 3's pretty neat but I wish Geralt took his time getting of his horse."

It just boils down to negligent UX design which is commonplace for Bethesda. Just like that other example I gave you with Fallout 3 not letting me swap weapons during a jam reload loop or how in Fallout 4 pumping water reduces thirst one level at a time, even though it's an infinite rad-free source. You can just about get away with crap like that in some dozen-hour movie-game like The Last of Us, but in titles whose main appeal is "play for a hundred hours (and then call it shit)", it's borderline criminal and part of the reason Bethesda's got a reputation for "jank."

 

[Yosharian]

Negligent design in general is commonplace for Bethesda

 

[Child of Malkav]

Just like that other example I gave you with Fallout 3 not letting me swap weapons during a jam reload loop or how in Fallout 4 pumping water reduces thirst one level at a time, even though it's an infinite rad-free source. You can just about get away with crap like that in some dozen-hour movie-game like The Last of Us, but in titles whose main appeal is "play for a hundred hours (and then call it shit)", it's borderline criminal and part of the reason Bethesda's got a reputation for "jank."

This reminds me of the criticism raised against RDR2 for having a bunch of detailed, long animations for every action of the main character. While that's nice, having to see them for the entire duration of the game, over and over became maddening at some point.
Far Cry also had this issue with gathering plants and skins and searching enemies but in FC4 they added an option to just tap or hold a key to just loot the "containers" while completely skipping the animations, in other words that option disabled the animations for looting. And those animations weren't long but they were associated with actions that the player performed so often that it drew mountains of critique towards it. They listened to that and added that option in the settings.
This is also the reason why I despise mini games for lockpicking/hacking/etc. now. Nothing but a waste of time. Games like Thief 1 and 2, Deus Ex 1, Dark Messiah, VTMB1, The outer worlds and others have done it well. No mini games just a certain duration or resource check to unlock something.
For NV and FO4 there are mods that check to see if your skill i high enough to unlock a locked door/safe/terminal etc and then if you do you just press a rebindable hotkey to just instantly unlock whatever it is you want to access or go through. Saves so much time it's unreal.

 

[Cologno]

This is also the reason why I despise mini games for lockpicking/hacking/etc. now. Nothing but a waste of time. Games like Thief 1 and 2, Deus Ex 1, Dark Messiah, VTMB1, The outer worlds and others have done it well. No mini games just a certain duration or resource check to unlock something.
For NV and FO4 there are mods that check to see if your skill i high enough to unlock a locked door/safe/terminal etc and then if you do you just press a rebindable hotkey to just instantly unlock whatever it is you want to access or go through. Saves so much time it's unreal.

Kingdom Come was bad about this too. But it was the other way that the mini game was so piss-easy as to be pointless. Really, lockpicking amounted to nothing more than how well you draw a circle with your mouse.

 

[Bulo]

It's fake quality. Rhinestone polish. Bethesda bolster their games with gimmicks because they know that they have nothing else to offer. (Really, it's more likely that they just have poor taste, but I like my characterisation more.) Imagine pressing E on a locked chest in an (unmodded) Elder Scrolls game and having it open instantly? How hollow it would feel? Odd, because most RPGs have done it that way since forever

Related, I played through Mass Effect 2 recently, and the first and only mod I installed was one which skips the hacking minigame. Someone should make a mod that skips the main quest

 

[Camel]

Emil and Todd clearly like """"epic"""" quests with high stakes and plenty of cinematic action, but I think shit like Dawnguard proves that you can do that in a non-intrusive way that isn't forced on the player.

The Morrowind's MQ is also non-intrusive and you can ignore it without the game even nudging you to complete it.Only the final stage has reactivity and you can play after finishing the MQ.

 

[Gargaune]

For NV and FO4 there are mods that check to see if your skill i high enough to unlock a locked door/safe/terminal etc and then if you do you just press a rebindable hotkey to just instantly unlock whatever it is you want to access or go through. Saves so much time it's unreal.

Kingdom Come was bad about this too. But it was the other way that the mini game was so piss-easy as to be pointless. Really, lockpicking amounted to nothing more than how well you draw a circle with your mouse.

On that topic, they're all iterating on Fo3's lockpicking mechanic, all the way to the latest Starfield "digilock" or whatever. I'll give Bethesda this much, at least theirs was a bit of a time waste but not too annoying (KCD's I found very annoying and dunno about Starfield). But, quite ironically, the inspiration for Bethesda's implementation is probably the best lockpicking mechanic ever - the one in Thief: Deadly Shadows. Same idea as the original Thief, your primary resource is time to avoid detection, but it better involves the player in the act. But avoiding detection is rarely a factor in looting in Bethesda games so having it play out real-time wouldn't do anything and they decided to swap to an inventory resource. You could make Beth's mechanic work better if lockpicks were super rare, but I imagine that wouldn't play well with general audiences.

 

[Child of Malkav]

the best lockpicking mechanic ever - the one in Thief: Deadly Shadows

How is it any different from than any of the other minigames? The minigames in bethesda games also involve the player.