Starfield Thread - now with Shattered Space horror expansion

[Robotigan]

"Basically a niche title" = budgeted at tens of millions (hundreds of millions?) of dollars. This is some serious cope.

"A niche title"?

The cited inspirations are all older space games like Traveler, Wing Commander, SunDog: Frozen Legacy, and Star Control 2 and I'll be damned if it doesn't vibe that way. Most credible reviewers even remarked on this. There's no other way to explain how egregiously large and barren the planets are other and how insistent they were upon those things when responding to criticism on Steam.

Maybe they were spooked about experimenting with a game mode they'd never done before and getting bad feeback.

With it being such a major mechanic there really should have been an entire pilot questline.

Without a doubt. The game even launched with tool tips for the removed fuel mechanic. The space cells are big enough to contain entire star systems, they fully simulate planetary orbits, and the stars themselves are fully modeled. Concept art and early promotional content makes it clear the entirety of Constellation was originally going to be stationed at The Eye (guessing it would have jumped between systems to shepherd players through the main quest regardless of their fuel situation).

 

[Robotigan]

I hadn't realized they had changed that much. Isn't Todd still in charge?

Their model has changed quite a bit, it seems. iirc Skyrim was made by a team of about 100 people with Todd seemingly having a very hands-on role. Starfield was like 500 people in-house and then hundreds of people from India contracted to do various bits, and there are stories that indicate that Todd's no longer in control of what's happening and things are going on above his head without his knowledge.

The Indian thing is very overblown. Everyone contracts with these same offshore studios including critical darlings like Fromsoft. They're mostly responsible for background assets so I guess maybe you could blame them for some of the tree LODs, but even then probably not because they also contract for studios like Ubisoft who--despite everything else--have some of the best rendered background assets in gaming.

I dunno if you've played Fo4 and Starfield but there's a very clear split between Bethesda up til 2011 and Bethesda after 2011 IMO. You can tell that MW, Oblivion, Fo3 and Skyrim were all made by small-ish teams with a clear vision (whatever people might think of that vision), while Fo4 and Starfield feel very hollow and directionless both tonally and mechanically, with all kinds of mismatched shit and weird systems that can only be the result of executives making decisions based on focus groups. It is probably true that they couldn't recreate Skyrim nowadays.

Your timeline is off. Skyrim was made by a team of ~100. FO4 was made by a team of ~130. FO4 also seems to have been just as highly regarded as Skyrim within game dev circles (it won the DICE and BAFTA awards). Most of the devs who complained about the company getting too big seemed to have left during Starfield's development, Purkeypile is the first one to bring this concern up explicitly and he left in 2021. FO4 sort of gets thrown into the "downfall" because Black Isle/Obsidian fans are extra ornery about another developer touching their stuff, but the devs themselves don't see it this way.

 

[Lemming42]

The Indian thing is very overblown. Everyone contracts with these same offshore studios including critical darlings like Fromsoft. They're mostly responsible for background assets so I guess maybe you could blame them for some of the tree LODs, but even then probably not because they also contract for studios like Ubisoft who--despite everything else--have some of the best rendered background assets in gaming.

Some might say it's always a bad thing when this kind of thing starts happening - when part of the game, even a minor asset, is being made by someone half the world away it's never a good thing for the cohesion of the overall game. When the credits came up at the end of Starfield I was amazed to see just how many Indian people were credited. It's not even that they did a bad job or anything, it's just a definite departure from the "bunch of people in an office desperately trying to shit out a game while Todd walks around annoying everyone" approach that Bethesda had back in the Oblivion era, as seen in the making of documentary.

Your timeline is off. Skyrim was made by a team of ~100. FO4 was made by a team of ~130. FO4 also seems to have been just as highly regarded as Skyrim within game dev circles (it won the DICE and BAFTA awards). Most of the devs who complained about the company getting too big seemed to have left during Starfield's development, Purkeypile is the first one to bring this concern up explicitly and he left in 2021. FO4 sort of gets thrown into the "downfall" because Black Isle/Obsidian fans are extra ornery about another developer touching their stuff, but the devs themselves don't see it this way.

Personally I'd class Fo4 as part of the downfall simply because it was the first time a Bethesda game really felt soulless and bland to me on release. I live-posted my first playthrough when it released back in 2015 on this forum; you can probably find my day-one thoughts over in the release thread (though I don't know if I'd 100% stand by them now). It having "Fallout" on the box does make some of it harder to stomach given what a departure it represents from the previous games - including Fo3 - but even taken as its own thing I've never been able to enjoy Fo4 much. Something definitely seemed to have changed in the way Bethesda did things. Starfield is a big step up in most ways, I think.

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

You're probably right, but it still seems like an odd line of logic to me. "This company we don't trust to make good games has chosen to make a poor entry in a new IP, instead of a poor entry in a series we care about! Also, their past games are shit, which is why we demand more!"

Codex otters: "The food is terrible! And the portions are too small". "This game is terrible! And each playthrough is too short!"

 

[Robotigan]

Some might say it's always a bad thing when this kind of thing starts happening - when part of the game, even a minor asset, is being made by someone half the world away it's never a good thing for the cohesion of the overall game.

Licenses and contractors are the backbone of the software and entertainment industries. It's highly implausible that all their games through 76 didn't have any contributing work outside of Zenimax and their localizers and then Starfield (and every other other game for that matter) suddenly had like 20 contracting studios. More likely, there was a recent event that pressured dev studios to start crediting their contractors. Lakshya Digital has been around since 2004. What do you think they've been doing this whole time?

Personally I'd class Fo4 as part of the downfall simply because it was the first time a Bethesda game really felt soulless and bland to me on release.

I'll bet my left nut that what players are detecting but struggling to express is a hasty implementation of a physically-based render pipeline that was merged into the engine mid-FO4 development. It results in subtle but discomforting aesthetic discrepancies where some textures look plasticky and fake because they don't reflect light the way our brain expects them to based on the visual information its getting from other objects in the scene.

Damn near every time gamers say something looks soulless it's because of a mistake with the rendering tech. We're experiencing another wave right now with shoddy face captures prompting conspiracy theories that devs are intentionally uglifying their characters. Ironically, it's usually the most corporate companies with the budget to keep sending their devs back to the grindstone that can afford to get their look on-point every time. Whereas it's long been noted that Bethesda plays it fast and loose when it comes to implementing new features.

 

[Harthwain]

The cited inspirations are all older space games like Traveler, Wing Commander, SunDog: Frozen Legacy, and Star Control 2 and I'll be damned if it doesn't vibe that way. Most credible reviewers even remarked on this. There's no other way to explain how egregiously large and barren the planets are other and how insistent they were upon those things when responding to criticism on Steam.

Inspirations don't really change the fact that Starfield isn't a niche game. The planets are large and barren, because Todd wanted players to be able to "go there" and explore. Except it was done procedurally so the large scope resulted in having too few thing on said planets. If you want to make good procedural generation, then you need to have your "building blocks" tigher to be cohesive and not result in too much empty space in-between.

 

[Lemming42]

I'll bet my left nut that what players are detecting but struggling to express is a hasty implementation of a physically-based render pipeline that was merged into the engine mid-FO4 development. It results in subtle but discomforting aesthetic discrepancies where some textures look plasticky and fake because they don't reflect light the way our brain expects them to based on the visual information its getting from other objects in the scene.

The game's aesthetic is discomfiting and plastic but it goes beyond that. The whole world feels disjointed, the mechanics feel simultaneously cynical and half-baked (weapon mods and settlement building being in the game just because someone high up assumed it's what people wanted, as those features appear in mods/other popular games), and the quests are very low-effort with perfunctory stories (MW and especially Skyrim shared this problem but both made up for it with the quality of the worldspace in general). I've heard different people worked on different quests pretty much in isolation from each other, hence the wild variations in quality and tone. I'm not sure if this is how previous Bethesda games worked too, but I've always assumed - maybe wrongly - that Oblivion/Fo3 were written pretty much entirely by Emil.

It's hard to sort through all the reasons why this is the case, especially as I haven't tried playing the game again in at least half a decade, but I remember in the release thread, a number of us were all shocked at just how bored we were and how much the game was failing to engage us, moreso than any previous Bethesda game. Oblivion is the only game in the MW/Oblivion/Fo3/Skyrim era that I don't like and even that never felt as hollow as Fo4 does. Something had definitely shifted and it wasn't just the cruddy textures and lighting. The fact that I actually like Starfield shows that I've got a high tolerance for Bethesda shit but there's something very - again, for want of a better world - soulless about Fo4.

I suppose it's entirely credible that Bethesda fucked the game up all by themselves but I've always wondered if there was some kind of executive interference at work with some of the bad decisions made with Fo4, a suspicion which was bolstered after Avellone's story about how trying to contact Todd resulted in him being shuffled around various faceless managers who spoke for Todd without The Toddler himself ever being informed, though I think this story occurred somewhwere between Fo4 and Starfield.

 

[ind33d]

I'll bet my left nut that what players are detecting but struggling to express is a hasty implementation of a physically-based render pipeline that was merged into the engine mid-FO4 development. It results in subtle but discomforting aesthetic discrepancies where some textures look plasticky and fake because they don't reflect light the way our brain expects them to based on the visual information its getting from other objects in the scene.

The game's aesthetic is discomfiting and plastic but it goes beyond that. The whole world feels disjointed, the mechanics feel simultaneously cynical and half-baked (weapon mods and settlement building being in the game just because someone high up assumed it's what people wanted, as those features appear in mods/other popular games), and the quests are very low-effort with perfunctory stories (MW and especially Skyrim shared this problem but both made up for it with the quality of the worldspace in general). I've heard different people worked on different quests pretty much in isolation from each other, hence the wild variations in quality and tone. I'm not sure if this is how previous Bethesda games worked too, but I've always assumed - maybe wrongly - that Oblivion/Fo3 were written pretty much entirely by Emil.

It's hard to sort through all the reasons why this is the case, especially as I haven't tried playing the game again in at least half a decade, but I remember in the release thread, a number of us were all shocked at just how bored we were and how much the game was failing to engage us, moreso than any previous Bethesda game. Oblivion is the only game in the MW/Oblivion/Fo3/Skyrim era that I don't like and even that never felt as hollow as Fo4 does. Something had definitely shifted and it wasn't just the cruddy textures and lighting. The fact that I actually like Starfield shows that I've got a high tolerance for Bethesda shit but there's something very - again, for want of a better world - soulless about Fo4.

I suppose it's entirely credible that Bethesda fucked the game up all by themselves but I've always wondered if there was some kind of executive interference at work with some of the bad decisions made with Fo4, a suspicion which was bolstered after Avellone's story about how trying to contact Todd resulted in him being shuffled around various faceless managers who spoke for Todd without The Toddler himself ever being informed, though I think this story occurred somewhwere between Fo4 and Starfield.

I assume Starfield's sterile tone is to enable you to add in mods for Galaxy Quest, Star Wars, WH40K, etc. without them seeming incongruous

the companions look and talk like they could fit in with any sci-fi franchise

 

[Saint_Proverbius]

Except it was done procedurally so the large scope resulted in having too few thing on said planets. If you want to make good procedural generation, then you need to have your "building blocks" tigher to be cohesive and not result in too much empty space in-between.

This is definitely a case of procedural generation done poorly. One of the big problems is that Bethesda wants everything to look super duper fancy, which can result in blocks not fitting together well or being overly specialized. They also take longer to make, so you're making less of them. There's also the big issue of chunk loading with Gamebryo. It just wasn't really designed to do seamless loading for anything moving quickly, like a spaceship or a car. So, you end up having the problem of if you make lots of interesting places to visit all over a planet, you're going to wind up with the issue of the player wanting to visit them. The engine combined with the modeling of the blocks are two things they chose which work against how to design a game like this and make it interesting.

Is it possible to procedurally generate larger towns and small cities? Sure. And make them interesting? Sure. But you're going to need a lot of prefabs in order to do it, ones that fit together well, and be able to be loaded fairly quickly - and an engine that's capable of doing it. And that's even before you populate that area.

 

[Robotigan]

I've heard different people worked on different quests pretty much in isolation from each other, hence the wild variations in quality and tone. I'm not sure if this is how previous Bethesda games worked too, but I've always assumed - maybe wrongly - that Oblivion/Fo3 were written pretty much entirely by Emil.

Pretty sure they've always done it this way. To my knowledge Emil only wrote the Dark Brotherhood in Oblivion. Different quest designers have shuffled in and out of the studio, but I bet in Bethesda's case it might actually be the opposite. Because they retain devs for so long and they've all put down roots in the Maryland suburbs, more of the design decisions are made by people in the middle-aged parenting demo. That's going to have a distinctly different vibe than their older games or games from studios with high turnover which have younger, more mobile people making decisions.

the mechanics feel simultaneously cynical and half-baked (weapon mods and settlement building being in the game just because someone high up assumed it's what people wanted, as those features appear in mods/other popular games)

Todd himself commissioned weapon modding and the settlement system was some random dev's side project that Todd endorsed and was shoved into the game mid-development (why it feels half-baked). A lot of people assume execs just mandate whatever's popular but often it's the devs themselves playing popular games and want to make something like that. Most devs are not grumpy pseudo-novelists like Avellone. They're normal people--normies--who got really into tinkering with Blender/Unity/Unreal and never quit.

Oblivion is the only game in the MW/Oblivion/Fo3/Skyrim era that I don't like and even that never felt as hollow as Fo4 does.

Oblivion would be their other game with major tech overhauls that led to inconsistent design/art direction.

a suspicion which was bolstered after Avellone's story about how trying to contact Todd resulted in him being shuffled around various faceless managers who spoke for Todd without The Toddler himself ever being informed

I think this has more to do with him getting Jeremy Soule'd because his wikipedia page has a whole section titled "Sexual misconduct accusations and subsequent retraction". Even for a corporation, Bethesda has had literal pastors on their design staff; their culture is probably a little more uptight about this stuff. On the other hand, Tim Cain still gets invited to pretty much every Fallout event.

 

[Lemming42]

Interesting stuff re: Fo4's development. I wonder why it turned out like it did if its development wasn't significantly different to that of Skyrim; I'm definitely not the only person who perceives a split between pre-Skyrim Bethesda and post-Skyrim Bethesda and I don't think it's all down to people being mad about Bethesda's handling of the Fallout license (I even like Fo3!).

Another thing that struck me in Fo4 was the amount of shit that seemed like it was just dropped mid-development. Stuff like the robot race track which is just another generic raider shootout because there are no accompanying mechanics, or the fight club which was clearly set up to allow the player to fight but which has no systems or NPCs in place for you to do that. I know there's always been abortive stuff left in the games, like Evergreen Mills in Fo3, but the Fo4 map gave the impression that people were actively being diverted away from half-finished stuff.

I think this has more to do with him getting Jeremy Soule'd because his wikipedia page has a whole section titled "Sexual misconduct accusations and subsequent retraction". Even for a corporation, Bethesda has had literal pastors on their design staff; their culture is probably a little more uptight about this stuff. On the other hand, Tim Cain still gets invited to pretty much every Fallout event.

I could understand them trying to brush off Avellone, but the interesting thing was that people were speaking on Todd's behalf and telling Avellone - wrongly - that Todd had seen and rejected his ideas, but when he did finally get through to Todd himself, Todd claimed it was the first he'd heard of any of it. So it appeared that there were some unknown people essentially usurping Todd and making decisions on his behalf. It could be as innocent and straightforward as Todd's people just thinking Avellone's ideas were shit and/or that he himself wasn't worth working with in light of the allegations and deciding not to bother Todd with it personally, but it's still strange that he apparently wasn't even consulted or made aware of the communications.

 

[Be Kind Rewind]

We're experiencing another wave right now with shoddy face captures prompting conspiracy theories that devs are intentionally uglifying their characters.

This is the biggest cope and lie of this century. I'm sure cheap face scans is what is turning even these cartoon Scottish characters into fat nigger women without even a hint of tits.

 

[ind33d]

We're experiencing another wave right now with shoddy face captures prompting conspiracy theories that devs are intentionally uglifying their characters.

This is the biggest cope and lie of this century. I'm sure cheap face scans is what is turning even these cartoon Scottish characters into fat nigger women without even a hint of tits.

the hatred against scots and redheads is because they're the real jews, but y'all ain't ready fo' dat conversation

 

[Robotigan]

Another thing that struck me in Fo4 was the amount of shit that seemed like it was just dropped mid-development. Stuff like the robot race track which is just another generic raider shootout because there are no accompanying mechanics, or the fight club which was clearly set up to allow the player to fight but which has no systems or NPCs in place for you to do that. I know there's always been abortive stuff left in the games, like Evergreen Mills in Fo3, but the Fo4 map gave the impression that people were actively being diverted away from half-finished stuff.

I think we're noticing cut features more in contemporary development as the fidelity/performance requirements get steeper so it takes more effort to get something into a launch-ready state. Things get left in whatever state they're in when feature development halts and polishing begins. As the bar for polish gets raised, that deadline gets moved earlier.

I could understand them trying to brush off Avellone, but the interesting thing was that people were speaking on Todd's behalf and telling Avellone - wrongly - that Todd had seen and rejected his ideas, but when he did finally get through to Todd himself, Todd claimed it was the first he'd heard of any of it. So it appeared that there were some unknown people essentially usurping Todd and making decisions on his behalf.

So for starters, Avellone has an ego so I wouldn't completely trust his framing of things. But secondly, this sounds like a pretty standard corporate runaround. Company reps have learned through experience that if you tell someone "You can't speak to x" they're going to keep pushing so the most convenient way to get rid of them is to simply say "I talked to x and they're not interested." This wouldn't permeate through to the creative input on games themselves as these are different divisions within the company.

This is the biggest cope and lie of this century. I'm sure cheap face scans is what is turning even these cartoon Scottish characters into fat nigger women without even a hint of tits.

1) Games used to be a purely technical field but as the industry and tooling has grown, there's been more of a tilt towards hiring lots of artists to produce assets.
2) Indie artists have always been extremely progressive relative to the general population.
3) Social media has exposed people to culture groups they wouldn't normally associate with and as a consequence everyone has starting asserting their cultural identities way more in an attempt to combat the outside influences they now experience, i.e. the "Culture Wars" mindset has taken hold.

The more you fight, the more they're gonna fight right back.

 

[ind33d]

How conceivable is a Tale of Two Wastelands between Starfield/Elder Scrolls? I want to land on Morrowind Planet, Cyrodiil Planet, Daggerfall Planet, etc. In development, I guarantee there was going to be a solar system of Elder Scrolls references, but it was probably cut.

 

[Lemming42]

How conceivable is a Tale of Two Wastelands between Starfield/Elder Scrolls? I want to land on Morrowind Planet, Cyrodiil Planet, Daggerfall Planet, etc. In development, I guarantee there was going to be a solar system of Elder Scrolls references, but it was probably cut.

OpenMW can load data from some other Gamebryo games, albeit not really in playable states. You can take your Morrowind character into the worldspaces of Oblivion, Skyrim, Fallout 3, and Fallout NV.




Maybe some Starfield stuff could be loaded.

 

[quixotic]

How conceivable is a Tale of Two Wastelands between Starfield/Elder Scrolls? I want to land on Morrowind Planet, Cyrodiil Planet, Daggerfall Planet, etc. In development, I guarantee there was going to be a solar system of Elder Scrolls references, but it was probably cut.

Unironically, OpenMW is closer to doing that then Starfield.

 

[ind33d]

How conceivable is a Tale of Two Wastelands between Starfield/Elder Scrolls? I want to land on Morrowind Planet, Cyrodiil Planet, Daggerfall Planet, etc. In development, I guarantee there was going to be a solar system of Elder Scrolls references, but it was probably cut.

OpenMW can load data from some other Gamebryo games, albeit not really in playable states. You can take your Morrowind character into the worldspaces of Oblivion, Skyrim, Fallout 3, and Fallout NV.




Maybe some Starfield stuff could be loaded.

those videos really illustrate how bad Starfield's music is in comparison, wow

 

[Tehdagah]

modern Beth isn’t even capable of making Skyrim 1, let alone Skyrim 2

Uh, what?

Makes sense to me. Skyrim, for all its flaws, still has some good/competent aspects. Bethesda don't seem capable of even reaching the standard they set 13 years ago, let alone improving on it; that's the point.

Is Codex now praising Skyrim? Dat revisionism.

 

[quixotic]

Is Codex now praising Skyrim? Dat revisionism.

Lots of mediocre and bad games have redeemable qualities. To say otherwise is foolish, it’s not all black and white.
Skyrim, overall, is a bad RPG, but it’s got okay exploration (I hate how samey the Draugr crypts and Dwemer ruins are, and the “cites” are mostly pathetic, but there’s still some cool shit to find and see out there) a stellar soundtrack, and a couple of okay quests (Blood on the Ice and The Foresworn Conspiracy come to mind).

 

[BosanskiSeljak]

200+ pages for one of the worst games in history, you should all kill yourselves. Now bring in the bethestards talking about skyrim. Again, kill yourselves.

 

[Yosharian]

modern Beth isn’t even capable of making Skyrim 1, let alone Skyrim 2

Uh, what?

Makes sense to me. Skyrim, for all its flaws, still has some good/competent aspects. Bethesda don't seem capable of even reaching the standard they set 13 years ago, let alone improving on it; that's the point.

Is Codex now praising Skyrim? Dat revisionism.

Is it high praise to say a game has some good aspects?

 

[Fedora Master]

Is it high praise to say a game has some good aspects?

No, it's revisionism.

 

[Lemming42]

Looks like the first creation-kit-made overhauls are starting to arrive. There's one here that, among changes to gameplay and mechanics, makes all kinds of grand promises about messing with the procgen to make the universe much more exciting:
https://www.nexusmods.com/starfield/mods/9785

I'm definitely starting to see how this could work. Modders create lots of unique dungeons, encounters, and fun things to go in the POI pool, then everyone plays with a mod that massively increases the rate of POI spawns. Boom, populated universe.

 

[ind33d]

200+ pages for one of the worst games in history, you should all kill yourselves. Now bring in the bethestards talking about skyrim. Again, kill yourselves.

Beth games are designed like Quake, UT, and CS. The "game" part is just a marketing ploy for the modding tools. In the 90s everybody understood this

also lol at talking shit about skyrim, a game you can turn into a harem-themed VR throne world

I owned three boxed copies of Morrowind. I have never played Morrowind without plugins. Everyone played these games modded, always