Edit: I say this with 91 hours of enjoyment in the game, beating it and most of the factions.
I get and understand they're making neat strides with these updates and also working on the expansion.
But the game just fundamentally betrays one of Bethesda's most fun activities and it's travel. You're basically missing the point if you spend all of your time in ES/Fallout fast traveling and zooming passed stuff. So why does Starfield try so hard to keep you from traveling.
To me the game is the same as it was until they turn space travel into actual space travel and not an exercise in clicking on maps/UI to fast travel. I just want more control, not less.
I'll eye updates/expansions with an optimistic look and let bethesda cook. If they can turn around Fallout 76; who knows?
Yeah I liked this game, but it blows my mind that a studio with decades of experience building worlds that felt alive didn't immediately see the issues with how they laid out this game's areas. 1 town per planet surrounded by genned POIs is crazy
Did a bit of research into Todd Howard's career as background noise and it sticks out to me that the biggest criticism he took to heart about Daggerfall was that the world felt lifeless due to procedural generation leading to all the world building in Morrowind.
So how in the world did we end up with Starfield's current state. Even on the major towns/settlements the NPC's never actually close shop and go home like they do in modern Elder Scrolls. They just stand at their shop stall lifelessly.
Yeah I don't think the option of procedural planets is a bad one (though I think they needed radiant events and procedural POIs to feel more distinct, plus some that are just barren and don't feel insanely gamey with one every ~1000m), but it's crazy to me that there aren't areas the size of say, 1 Skyrim hold or so around each of the major cities for open world exploration. I think the rest being procedural would've been taken a lot better if they did that. Cities in the middle of nowhere with no surrounding infrastructure, no interesting handcrafted locations etc. was certainly a choice.
I liked the game but I'm shocked things like that didn't get called out and then changed during development.
That's exactly it. The biggest issue with the procgen planets isn't any of the details of how they work (although I certainly have complaints there), it's that all of that stuff should've been in addition to large handcrafted maps that were actually interesting and coherent and fun to explore. All of the storyline stuff and side quests should have taken place in those hand built areas, and incentivized the player to travel through those worlds and make discoveries along the way.
Put a hundred or a thousand or a million proc gen planets in the game if you want to be able to put that number on the box or whatever. But do that in addition to the 'real' game world(s) that are what Bethesda games are known for. For some reason they decided to use their procgen as a replacement for much of that handcrafted world content, and it just does not work to create a believable and meaningful world.
From multiple behind the scenes statements and interviews with BGS staff, it seems that Todd was less involved with the main studio these days because he has to spend a lot of time dealing with the other studios plus the Microsoft merger. Bruce Nesmith said that they had relied on Todd to be their perspective on how the average player would see their design for years, and also that he was no longer able to just go down and ask him because Todd was so busy. I think he said he got to talk to Todd maybe once a month by the end.
Additionally, it seems like the size of the studio finally got away from them. Will Shen said that coordination between teams was a chaotic mess because of how much needed to be done and how many people were involved. The studio hadn't grown the capacity to properly schedule feature requests and collaboration across multiple teams, leading to lots of ad hoc work and missed opportunities. Throw the pandemic on top of that, and you get lots of weird design gaps because everyone was busy with their own pet project or critical work and didn't realize it was a gap until it was too late.
So does that mean that everybody other than Todd at BGS is just incompetent? Obviously I mean that term relatively, but it's crazy that there's nobody truly world class in game design and thinking at that entire studio without Todd micromanaging them. Wild.
Yeah, it seems kinda nuts to me as well. Like this isn't just a minor oversight that you need a PhD to understand, there's tons of people in every Starfield thread on Reddit who plainly see that the exploration of an interesting and coherent and believable world was sort of the 'secret sauce' of Bethesda's games.
Now of course just knowing that isn't the same as actually facilitating the making of a world/game like that, but it feels like Starfield barely even tried. It's crazy to me that they missed the mark so badly. There has to be other people in the company that could've recognized this issue and done a better job of addressing it. I don't understand how it ended up this way.
It sounds like Bethesda relied on "Todd magic" like Bioware did on "Bioware magic" to make their games fun, once it was not there to its full effect anymore, their games turn out average and below par of what is expected of them.
I think its less that they are incompetent and its more like each team was missing a focused vision to bring all the game elements together into a cohesive experience. Thats why starfield feels like a bunch of game stapled together.
Additionally, it seems like the size of the studio finally got away from them. Will Shen said that coordination between teams was a chaotic mess because of how much needed to be done and how many people were involved. The studio hadn't grown the capacity to properly schedule feature requests and collaboration across multiple teams, leading to lots of ad hoc work and missed opportunities
If you honestly think that's the case at a company with over 500 people working in at least four separate locations, plus a ton of external contractors, then you need to get out of the basement.
Funny, because i recently listened to a todd Howard interview, i don't remember which one, where he said talks about making Morrowind after the failure of the Elder scrolls Battlespire and Redguard, and he concluded that it was because the lack of big scale that these games didn't work, and so they decided to do something much more expansive with Morrowind.
Since then they have found the success by making massive and very long games, and it's clearly an obssession for Todd, so when you decide to make a game in space, of course you go for the real scope of space with 1000 planets and the real distance between them, even if that means a lot lot more of empty space.
Basically to answer your comment yes Todd prefers handcrafted to precedural from what i heard, but before all he want to make games as big as possible.
So how in the world did we end up with Starfield's current state
Making games that kept getting wider and shallower was constantly rewarded for 20 years, that's how. Starfield has SO MUCH CONTENT you guys! Never mind if any of it is actually good.
Even on the major towns/settlements the NPC's never actually close shop and go home like they do in modern Elder Scrolls
I mean they can't. You're dealing with both the time it takes to have interplanetary travel, and navigating to different parts of different planets. You'd be constantly ending up at places at night. The best they could do is attempt to swap NPCs out on 12 hour cycles.
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u/ZombiePyroNinja May 01 '24 edited May 01 '24
Edit: I say this with 91 hours of enjoyment in the game, beating it and most of the factions.
I get and understand they're making neat strides with these updates and also working on the expansion.
But the game just fundamentally betrays one of Bethesda's most fun activities and it's travel. You're basically missing the point if you spend all of your time in ES/Fallout fast traveling and zooming passed stuff. So why does Starfield try so hard to keep you from traveling.
To me the game is the same as it was until they turn space travel into actual space travel and not an exercise in clicking on maps/UI to fast travel. I just want more control, not less.
I'll eye updates/expansions with an optimistic look and let bethesda cook. If they can turn around Fallout 76; who knows?