Games is done, person making stuff for new games leaves for new job. News.
this post was submitted on 16 Oct 2023
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Not sure who that's good for.
Imo the big problems with the game are because they outsourced so much of it.
Although there were too many fetch quests (imo), generally the game I found to be quite engaging. Just, not very deep systems; load times going into even the smallest buildings meant it's not even approaching open world; drab procedural planets and outposts in a sad attempt to bulk it up; horrid animations and NPC models that wouldn't be out of place in a game 10 years ago. Not to mention the horrendous amount of bugs I experienced.
This is why I can no longer allow myself to get excited for new games. I paid £7.99 for a month of PC gamepass to experience Starfield, if I paid full price I'd have been very unhappy. Now we pay to be bugtesters.
load times going into even the smallest buildings
Oh my god, it's such a little thing but the sheer inconsistency with what is and isn't a loading door is absurd. New Atlantis, the first city in the game is awful with this. You have "the well" where everything is on the same map, no loading. Then you go to the commercial district and it's a coin flip with little to no logic behind it.
Add the heavy reliance on fast travel to get anywhere and it just falls flat on its face on the open world exploration feeling. Sad considering the plot and dialog make such a huge deal about exploration.
Yeah they really flopped with that aspect. I saw someone refer to it as 'loading screen simulator' and couldn't disagree. I don't understand how other devs can make things seamless, but Bethesda couldn't manage it.
Other Devs try to use current gen engines, this is the same engine that Skyrim was on just with more shit added.
It's the same engine Morrowind was on.
And it really shows.
I got a feeling the next elders scroll is on the new engine, well I bloody hope it is.
But but but.... it just works.
Nonetheless... I still wouldn't trust them do a competent new engine...
You could argue the same for most games on most Engines. Half Life: Alyx is the same engine as half-life 2 with more shit added over the years (I think they've changed it with the upgrade to Source 2, but this really showed as all Valve games would run as hl2.exe, and source 2 is merely an evolution, not a rewrite).
However Bethesda's Creative Engine was already quite dated by the time Skyrim came out 12 years ago, and hasn't received any meaningful improvements since. Honestly at this point it's not a technical issue, any competent software team could have incrementally fixed and upgraded the engine over 12 years, no matter how buggy it was when Skyrim was released and how much spaghetti there was to clean up.
Bethesda just doesn't care that their game mechanics are stuck in 2009 and the management is probably too set in its ways to figure out another way to write quests or design level without loading screens, too comfortable with the ease of writing dialogue trees without mocap or even some basic "first year of film school" camera placement.
Too bad for them Baldur's Gate 3 showed the world that these things actually matter. I won't hold my breath for TES VI, the technical gap on their engine is only growing and they still haven't indicated even an acknowledgement of its flaws.
I had all of one complaint about that in all of New Atlantis. There's a tiny convenience store that's behind a loading screen. Everything else seemed ok/expected to me.
You have "the well" where everything is on the same map, no loading. Then you go to the commercial district and it's a coin flip with little to no logic behind it.
Except all of the surface levels in New Alexandria are also in the same map. You can jump down from the commecial district to the space port with no loading screens if you want. The only exceptions are interiors. All other loading screens are from teleporting the player across the map via the NAT and elevators. Saying there's "no logic" is disingenuous.
I feel like some quests the main idea of them was great.... the problems were with the lack of gameplay mechanics.... Or world elements lacking
Like ok I have to infiltrate this office and do something there.... Ok I will dress up with this clothes from the company I found and try to not get near people. Instant shooting on sight no matter what.
That's one example but most of the time I find stuff that the quest was interesting but... the actual gameplay implementation it's super bad and lacking.
I got given a great tip from someone re the stealth, that I WISH the damn game had explained.
You know how you can set your armour to 'hide when in settlement' or something similar... easy to forget that setting, turns out we're tramping around with our armour on, which makes us easy to spot and hear. So to get proper stealth you have to take your armour off (and therefore be quite vulnerable). Makes sense, once explained!
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There's nothing like walking up to a group of four of these half melted mannequin fucks just to have them all turn their heads and stare into your eyes in sync like the collective movement would give momentum to steal your soul in order to sate their empty husks. The gunplay is better though!
half melted mannequin fucks
The best (worst?) example of that for me was my companion sobbing and sniffling during a ceremony, expressing their love and commitment, all with a flat emotionless face. It's funny you said mannequin because everytime I started a conversation, for some reason my brain would say "Here comes another puppet show".
Gunplay is definitely decent, though there seemed to be no line between being overpowered and bullet sponge. Also would've liked to have seen more imaginative / futuristic weaponry considering the time period. I'm sure modders will create something more fun with the framework.
Another thing that really grated on me was the 'digital clutter'. A generation ship from hundreds of years ago should not have the same ornaments and books as a ship from the current time period!
Yeah that last part was odd to me too. I will say overall there's a lot more scenic clutter, which isn't so bad.
What ever will they do without the man who designed compelling quests such as "go to this cave and grab this item" and "go to this outpost and kill this nameless dude"?
This is literally every quest in every game, though
You could boil chess down to "go to this place and kill this dude" if you wanted
Yeah... No. That's not even every quest in Starfield, much less every game. I get that you are being hyperbolic, but to imply there is no difference between the generic mission board quests (i.e. Transport Passenger, Kill Target, Survey Planet, etc) and the more handcrafted quest lines (i.e. infiltrating the Crimson Fleet) is overtly reductive and disingenuous.
And while Starfiled does have some actually engaging quests, mostly in the Faction quest lines, its flatout dishonest to try and sweep the problem of its numerous boring generic quests under the rug of "that's every quest if you get pedantic enough!".
I wasn't saying there's no difference, I was pointing out the absurdity of reducing all of Starfield's quests to "go to this cave and grab this object." The quest design in Starfield is actually pretty good. If they had simply not added those odd job radiant quests, I doubt people would be complaining about the game lacking good quests.
As I mentioned earlier, I understand you were being hyperbolic, and I acknowledge that Starfield does feature quests that are more engaging than the generic missions. However, even at its peak, the quest design is of mediocre to subpar quality. The recurring pattern of "travel to location X, eliminate target Y, or retrieve item Z" becomes repetitive. Additionally, the process of reaching these objectives consistently follows the same formula: fast-travel to the nearest point, follow the waypoint marker, enter through the front entrance, navigate through a dungeon that is a copy and paste job, and optionally return to the quest giver.
I recognize that this issue partially stems from the game's ambitious scope, but it's a consequence of spreading resources too thin.
Discussing the intricacies of quality quest design is a complex topic, and while Starfield's quests may lack inspiration at times, it's important to remember that it can still be an enjoyable game. However, when you compare it to titles like Baldur's Gate 3, Fallout: New Vegas, System Shock 2, Deus Ex, etc, it becomes evident that Bethesda had to make concessions in quest design to accommodate the game's vast scale. For a prime example of the same studio achieving more with less in terms of questing, one need only look at Oblivion's Dark Brotherhood questline
And while removing the radiant quests would have made the problem less agregious, more effort still would have needed to be invested in the handcrafted quests to remedy the problem.
The thing is tho, that's all the quests in Starfield are even written as. What makes the quest interesting isn't the goal, but the story surrounding it. The story surrounding a good bulk of the quests in Starfield are literally just "go here and get this. Why? Because we need it."
Idunno, there are quests in Starfield that I liked. Sarah's companion mission and the whole Crimson Fleet one come to mind.
Hell, I once bought and played 15ish iterations of a game where the whole goal was to get some broad out of a castle. You never seem to get her out, either. 0/10 terrible design, avoid Nario if you can (I think that's how it's spelled).
Folk are gonna try to defend Mario's quest design because of its generation, ignoring that games like Final Fantasy and The Legend of Zelda managed to have incredible world building and deep stories with the same technology in the same era
Not to dunk on Mario, there's a reason it's widely considered one of the greatest games of all time
I guess the instructions of a quest are just the tip of the iceberg. The goal of mario was just to go right all the way. The real design was the obstacles in the way.
Learn sentences to become a skilled swordman.
This comment has confused me for the last 17 hours, I gotta be missing something here
Cos you haven't played that game?
Well yeah, the quest could have very simple instructions, but the actual map is designed so achieving the goal requires strategic decision making. I guess the hard is making it so the player self selects the difficulty that is the most fun for them.
Which I think is honestly a lot of players' fault. Like yeah if you play an RPG, avoid all the sidequests and just go straight to max level as fast as you can, it's pretty freaking hard for the game designer to make the right guardrails to force you to actually enjoy the game lmao.
That used to be every quest in every game, over a decade ago.
But Starfield released in 2023, and even Ubisoft of all godforsaken developers does a better job at side quests than Starfield did.
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Hopefully, between devs from Bioware, Bethesda, and Obsidian, they can come up with a good RPG. The Iberian horror-fantasy angle sounds interesting, but it still sounds like they are a ways from having anything to show off.
most of the quests were pretty lackluster, honestly. It was an interesting game. I put quite a bit of time into it but Phantom Liberty dropping pretty much killed my interest in finishing it. I know that's sort of a cliche statement at this point but it's true. I was on the last mission when PL finished downloading and I turned off Starfield and am about to uninstall it and never touch it again.
Probably going to see a lot of this since Microsoft bought them and is still apparently allowed to be basically a monopoly. Microsoft does one thing well: shelve beloved series to never be seen again.
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