It wasn’t until they ported about 70% of Skyrim Together’s revered code to the Starfield project, though, that they bumped into a problem: “This game is fucking trash.”
“I didn’t realize this until after I actually started playing the damn game a week after launch,” they say. “The game is boring, bland, and the main draw of Bethesda games, exploration in a lively and handcrafted world, was completely gone.
The modder started working on it before playing the game. It’s kind of funny in a way, but also cool that they wanted to give people multiplayer ASAP.
Thing is Skyrim wasn’t particularly handcrafted or lively either, the models for things like dungeons were repeated all the time and the NPC liveliness was lacklustre compared to eurojank games like Gothic.
After playing elden ring I’m done with Bethesda. Haven’t even tried starfeelz
I played star field, wasn’t convinced on the prologued. Moved on on the first few quests c dropped it. It feels too bland, generic and uninspired
Eldenring was as bad if not worse with copy paste. The NPCs were certainly better in Skyrim.
Dunno why you’re getting downvoted. The game is awesome, great lore and story, great combat, great enemy design and much more. However, while the first ulcerated tree spirit is kinda cool. The 10th, isn’t as much.
How many ulcerated free spirits do you need to fight to beat the game?
big fat zero
That’s what I thought.
It’s funny that people are complaining about completely optional content now.
Not sure why this is downvoted, radiant quests were a big feature in Skyrim, and were technically kinda impressive, but still repetitive. Likewise, quests for the College of Bards were mostly just a dungeon fetch quests and things.
It’s still a great game, but it was great for the bits that were handcrafted.
But give it 5-10 years and I’d be very interested to see another pass at procedural generation using machine learning, especially dialogue, could open the doors to more creativity than would be possible when doing it all by hand!
Nothing in any of these games has been particularly hand crafted. They were a big early user of procedural generation.
people love daggerfall yet its like 99% procedural generation. maybe 100%
That’s turning things on their head though. Daggerfall created some hype in its heyday because it was procedurally generated and so huge. But it turned out to be a gimmick and nowadays it’s just a cult classic for some people due to its Elder Scrolls pedigree and a landmark in gaming history because of the procedural generation.
hey we never know what the future holds, starfield may be something like the first big game to take advantage of procedural generation for future games that do it better with even more powerful tech. or its like daggerfall again lol
The problem is that daggerfall was impressive at the time, but now that everyone else learned how to do its one trick and modify it, its become less impressive in hindsight.
Starfield didnt do anything impressive. Nothing its done is new. Even its praise is just “well its fallout in space.” So without breaking ground and boundaries, it cant play the same tune daggerfall did.
Just recently, Xbox boss Phil Spencer said he hopes Starfield will be a 12-year hit, just like Skyrim.
Yeah no fucking shit Phil, the fans would have loved a generation-defining megahit as well! Maybe you should have told Todd to try making the game good as well as marketable?
The tech debt is just glaring at this point. They need an actual new engine instead of yet another gamebryo rework.
No, they need a competent dev team. To this day, Valve is using a game engine that is, at its core, the Quake engine from 1996. Goldsrc? Source? Source 2? All increasingly heavily reworked versions of the Quake engine. And they can use it for everything from Alyx to Dota 2! If Valve can do it, why can’t Bethesda?
Except that Quake is a good engine.
GameBryo is and has always been shit. There are other games from competent devs on that engine, and they also are full of problems.
Building a house with a solid foundation is still important. Quake is bedrock. GameBryo is sand.
Why is everyone always saying GamBryo is shit? I hear this over and over again, but I never hear why.
I think it’s because it was designed to be able to handle hundreds of persistent objects in a scene as a priority over graphical performance. That’s why Bethesda games have so much collectable junk - because they can.
I think GameBryo can be good, but it needs some badass people working on it, and loads of time and money poured into it.
And unfortunately I just don’t see Bethesda dedicating the resources needed to truly overhaul it.
GameBryo doesn’t exist in their engine anymore. I’m reasonably confident that there is hardly anything left in that engine from GameBryo. Their engine has plenty of issue, but they’re technically fixable with the right investments. I always disagree that they need to switch engines, and I used to disagree that they should (because it would incur a huge technical lag). They haven’t seemed to make the investments that they need to to make it acceptable for a modern engine though, so if they aren’t willing to do that they need to change something.
GameBryo doesn’t exist in their engine anymore. I’m reasonably confident that there is hardly anything left in that engine from GameBryo.
The bones of it are still very much there, holding everything else together. If you’ve ever made scripts for mods, you’d know this.
I think the most telling moments are when you pick something up off a table and everything starts floating.
To this day, Valve is using a game engine that is, at its core, the Quake engine from 1996. Goldsrc? Source? Source 2? All increasingly heavily reworked versions of the Quake engine.
All Valve statements about the Source2 port of Counter-Strike say Source2 is a completely new engine.
It’s new in the sense they have rebuilt large enough parts of it to fully justify giving it a new name. Certainly it’s very far removed from Quake. It’s not like they’ve been sitting on their hands for almost 30 years. But it’s not like they rebuilt it all from scratch, either; just the parts they needed to. Old code is still being used, and even new code still sometimes uses the old as a base. The most obvious visual example that comes to mind is the pattern they still use for flickering lights which has been around since the Quake days.
It’s a bit of a Ship of Theseus situation, but I think my point still stands: Bethesda doesn’t need an entirely new engine, they need devs who can (or more likely, need to give their devs time to) properly rebuild the parts that need it.
I mean a huge (really huge) number of game engines ultimately draw lineage from Quake. It’s either Quake or Unreal.
Nobody is denying that but the claim that Source2 is at its core just Quake 1 is just insane.
I agree that is insane. It’s also insane to say the Creation Engine is GameBryo. It isn’t. They just need to invest more to update it further.
The most obvious visual example that comes to mind is the pattern they still use for flickering lights which has been around since the Quake days.
But you wrote “To this day, Valve is using a game engine that is, at its core, the Quake engine from 1996” and that’s just untrue. Just because nobody ever saw the need to change the light flickering pattern for no reason other than to make it new, doesn’t mean that Source2 is “at its core” still Quake1. Even the community-maintained wiki (not a officially sanctioned Valve document, btw) you’ve linked only speaks about “some residual Quake code”.
Semantics.
Another to look at it is that if Valve properly managed their VCS, you could do
git ls-files HEAD^10000and see Quake/goldsrc code building the foundation for everything that came after. Every subsequent rewrite and refactor was shaped and constrained by what came before and what hadn’t been rewritten yet. If they had started with another engine, they wouldn’t have ended up here.Beyond semantics, Source 2’s lineage is still very apparent. While the engine is very good at what it does, it’s without question much better suited to a rather specific class of semi-realistic 3D games. It has a look, a feel, strengths and weaknesses. It can’t be Unity or Unreal Engine, and it would have been a ridiculous mistake to use it as a base for Elite Dangerous or Assassin’s Creed Valhalla or Terraria.
Funny that you claim deeper insight into Source2 than Valve.
Source2 was first developed for Dota. It’s way more likely that its limitations are because it was never developed as a complete allrounder, not because some minor bits and pieces like flickering pattern were developed in the 1990s because that’s also where Unreal Engine was first developed.
When does the ship change from the ship of Theseus into something else?
When does the ship change from the ship of Theseus into something else?
When they decide to build a completely new ship with a steam engine and bring the lamps from the old ship because why not. They’re good lamps.
All statements Bethesda has made about Creation say the same thing. Doesn’t mean it’s true.
I think that’s the point though, they rework the engine. I eat it’s not the same engine as it was back in Half Life days.
I got a lol out of “I eat” as “i.e.” :')
This voice dictations fault that is, I hadn’t noticed that.
I agree, and the same logic applies to the creation engine. However, so many people still, when complaining, say it’s GameBryo, which is just stupid. It shows their lack of understanding of how game development functions.
The problem is that the Creation Engine 2 is, in a lot of ways, still the Gamebryo engine. It has all the same advantages, as well as all the same issues. Hell, there are literally bugs shared between Morrowind, Skyrim, Fallout 4, and even Starfield.
You can’t compared CE to something like, let’s say, the Unreal Engine. The Unreal Engine has actually had absurd amounts of resources poured into it, effectively making it a new thing. But the Creation Engine simply hasn’t been - it desperately needs more time and money put into it.
I’m confident there isn’t much, if any, GameBryo left in the creation engine. Sure, they may share some bugs, but that doesn’t mean much. They could be caused by things Bethesda introduced.
I do agree that UE has had a lot more development, and that’s the issue with the Creation Engine, like I said. They haven’t invested in it like they needed to. They’ve done the bare minimum to keep the renderer looking modern (though I’d argue Starfield totally failed, specifically with faces), but not updating the core engine. UE is a commercial product on its own though, and it’s designed to be a lot more versatile than CE. CE is meant to make Bethesda games and that’s it. CE shouldn’t ever be expected to compare to UE on everything.
They need an actual new engine instead of yet another gamebryo rework.
The Starfield engine is already half idTech7 anyway.
Didn’t know that, what parts?
Didn’t know that, what parts?
At least the parts that are mentioned in performance tweaking guides that instruct users to edit config files and the parameters are all named
bTemporalAA_idTech7=0etc.
I wish people would stop saying “it’s the engine” when they don’t know what they are talking about
Maybe you should have told Todd to try making the game good as well as marketable?
But he “Plans to Release a 1st-Party Blockbuster or Highly Anticipated Title Every 3 Months”
There is no place for “when it’s done” with this attitude.
Well, that’s not a good sign for Starfield’s modding future. Honestly, it feels like post-Skyrim Bethesda just assumes their games will have a robust modding community. Except that for a game to garner that kind of community it has to be, you know, good. Maybe Bethesda hopes paid modding will be the carrot that brings modders to Starfield, but even if that becomes the standard I don’t expect many people will want to make mods for a game they don’t even enjoy playing.
I think somebody said something on those lines already but there’s so much work to do to mod starfield into something good that the whole thing would be like 80% mods by the time you were finished. Unless there’s an API it’s just going to be mods interacting on top of other mods and the whole thing is going to be a nightmare.
I’ve looked into it and it’s not exactly easy considering how clearly they need modding in order to make the game a success. You would think that it would be in their interest to make it simple but, nope.
They may just actually be that incompetent.
You’re not necesarrily wrong, but modders currently have a more difficult time than with Skyrim.
As far as I’m aware, modding tools from Bethesda haven’t been released yet, kinda limiting what people can do.
Not that it can’t be done, its just more difficult and time consuming than using producer built tools. People were modding games before any one put out tools for that purpose. Notepad and a hex editor can get you a long way if you know what you’re doing, at least back then.
I guess I should say this is from the perspective of a PC gamer, primarily. I’ve used consoles in the past, sure, but my last console was an Xbox 360 and before that a PS2.
I never thought I would read that someone else had the same last consoles as me, feels good to not be alone there. I recently got a ps3 for the first time about a year ago solely to get the MGS collection and play through MGS4 since it wasn’t available anywhere else. Also some gundam games but I haven’t gotten around to getting those.
well, starfield is good. i think the issue may be the toolkit has not been released yet
I don’t think it has to be good (to attract modders). I think it has to be inspiring. And that it most certainly isn’t.
Yeah, I didn’t particularly enjoy base fallout 4, but I could see a lot of potential there. It felt like “if only I could change these things, then it will be good”.
This is why I can still play Fallout 4 heavily modded and have a lot of fun. Because the core gameplay is really good. It just needed more quest variety and RPG elements.
Starfield is wrong on a fundamental level. Exploration is a HUGE problem in Starfield and frankly with how they implemented it there’s not much you can do to fix it. However, land rovers would be a great step.
Modding FO4 is a must, and honestly adding in lighting fixes and better bullet acoustics changes the game so much with those two things. It needs a lot more but I’ve always felt those mods are so needed to make it engaging on a vanilla level.
i cant see why not
You’re still up against the limitations of the engine. There’s no way for example to mod in interstellar flight because the engine just can’t support environments like that.
Starfield might have been interesting 15 years ago
Eh, I think time will tell.
Even if Starfield isn’t a hit right out of the gate, it’s possible it will develop a small but dedicated community that will keep it alive. They could show us some cool stuff in a few years.
To be honest though, I’ve never really cared for modding.
Well maybe? Theres a lot of games with tiny mod scenes, but Bethesda was probably hoping for more than what Monster Hunter World got.
Back in 2012 I couldn’t put Skyrim down for 2 or 3 playthroughs, even without mods. Of course I’m older now and got less spare time… but I didn’t even get past the first few quests in Starfield. I don’t know why it doesn’t grab me the same way.
Like the other comment says, it’s empty, but I mean it in a different way. It has no soul. Skyrim you can feel the passion in the quests, the characters, and the world. Starfield is super bland, despite being a new IP they could have done anything with, and being sci-fi, which the purpose of sci-fi is to critique our current world. It’s the most milque toast sci-fi I’ve seen. It doesn’t question the current status-quo, despite corporations literally destroying Earth. You can rarely question authority. The characters all have identical views on everything, and that’s the “good” view that doesn’t really try to change anything for the better.
Also, the connecting fibers of the game just don’t exist. No system really ties into another, besides making money but money is nearly worthless. Nothing seems to have been considered on how to make it function as a cohesive product.
Basically it fails emotionally and technically.
This is probably my favorite explanation for it.
It tries to be emotional, at least the main story. But it fucking fails miserably. I think the only part that actually got me feeling dread or interest was going to visit NASA on Earth. That shit was amazing it pisses me off we only spend ONE FUCKING MISSION on that planet and never go back for anything else.
Yeah, the NASA mission was by far the best part of the game for me.
I think a lot of this stems from doing less with more and vice-versa.
The passion people put into their creations shows in the tiniest things we don’t notice but still affect us. It’s why I think some movies can hold up for decades and others feel more like a fad, even if the former has fewer resources to work with and the latter technically ‘does more.’
To your point about small movies, I’d say it’s true of many indie games too. It isn’t about “doing less with more” more than doing more with more is their issue here. They tried to do everything, and didn’t do anything well and didn’t try to connect the pieces together to make a solid product.
Factorio, for example, knows exactly what it is and it does it perfectly. Every system in the game ties into the core system of building your factory. Skyrim doesn’t know what it is and the pieces are scattered everywhere. Your ship is totally disconnected from everything else (except as a money and skill point sink). Outposts are disconnected from everything else (again, except for those two things). They just had too many resources to spend and didn’t set up the foundations to make it all work together.
Because its empty. In skyrim you see NPCs having interesting interaction with each other and the PC. In starfield you just quick travel from empty city to empty planet
I’m there too. I was really excited for the game. Didn’t watch any promotional material. Have never seen a trailer for the game and stayed away from any media of it. I got bored so fast and I can’t force myself to keep playing it as it felt like there was nothing more to see after the first few hours
Theseus’ Ship of game development.
It happens with all art.
this game is fucking trash
Sounds about right
Does Todd Howard know how reviled he is?
That part where he talks about being made fun of for being in chess club…
…it’s like no… that’s not why people made fun of you, Todd. They made fun of you because you were the twerp claiming your uncle at NASA could get you on a spaceflight and then kept making excuses as to why the final story was your uncle taking you on a regular ass flight. People don’t like people who lie painfully obviously for attention and interest.
🎶 Tell me lies. Tell me sweet little lies. 🎶
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Just wanted to chime in that I absolutely love Starfield. I didn’t watch any trailers, didn’t read any of the hype. It’s exactly what I assumed it would be.
I didn’t watch any trailers, didn’t read any of the hype, had low expectations, and didn’t have to buy it…and Starfield still managed to disappoint me.
Same I got it for free when I built my wife’s computer. 😂 I would have refunded it. But it was free with her CPU (7800X3D)
I’ve only seen people stream it and it looks… like a Bethesda game. Like, to a fault.
I’m reading that’s what a lot of people expected, and I’m honestly surprised.
I thought Bethesda would put their jankiness aside and give us something that’s wide, deep, and polished. But it really feels like Bethesda has been releasing the same game ever since Daggerfall, just with different skins.
I guess better the devil you know? I’ll probably play it at some point when it’s finished.
I’ve only seen people stream it and it looks… like a Bethesda game. Like, to a fault.
I’m reading that’s what a lot of people expected, and I’m honestly surprised.
With one massive, at least for me, flaw. Previous Bethesda games had handcrafted maps which invited you to explore every region. There was so much to find in the most unexpected places. Starfield doesn’t have that. I mean sure, even on remote desolate planets you can find objects of interest, but in the end they do repeat very quickly. In Starfield the world is much bigger but ultimately less diverse and well built. And to me that’s a less appealing game.
And another smaller problem is that they no longer seem to want to go into the darker stories. The game does have quite some potential of exploring darker themes like the despotic parts of the UC organisation for example. But it never does dive deeper but sticks to the surface. You can imagine that there’s much more going on but you don’t get to experience this.
The game may have been 25 years in development, but their AAA standards must have also been from that time.
There would have been a period of time where Starfield’s release would be heralded as one of the greats (probably 2013-2017). But in 2023, it already looked outdated on release.
It’s been years but Daggerfall to me feels like the ideal RPG. They did make it a point to make simpler games after Daggerfall. Beginning with Morrowind, the magic categories slowly got reduced, the skills were intentionally consolidated and reduced in number. That’s the reason why the later games sold really well. Starfield still sold well despite the valid criticisms but they should have trended into more complexity for a space game. Bethesda games are the junk food of games (and sports games are Mountain Dew or something).
I’m also surprised so many people expected it to be just another underwhelming Bethesda game, because that sure was not what they were promising
I did the same and enjoy it. I think it’s embarrassing that a AAA can spend so long on a game and have it basically be fallout in space with very little in the way of innovation. But I also didn’t expect anything more, and it scratches the itch I was wanting it to scratch
I’d be happy if it was fallout in space, fallout had places to go, little things to stumble upon.
I feel like AAA games usually aren’t innovative. AAA games have large budgets and therefore need to have mass appeal which usually means a relatively safe existing formula with a lot of the budget going towards graphics and scale (and marketing). That’s not necessarily a bad thing, and I wouldn’t say no innovation happens in AAA games… but it’s not that surprising that they can be a little formulaic.
Honestly all games are kind of starting to feel the same to me and I’m not sure if it’s what I’m playing, that I’ve played too many games and “seen too much”, or that I need a break or what lol.
A break isn’t a terrible idea in my opinion. Give yourself a chance to step away and I bet by the end of your break you’ll end up getting excited to return something in particular
I’d say, after myself gaming since pacman on the atari, it’s a basic principle of taste in general:
Your palate is an exponential convergence. Ever only tried piss and puddlewater as drinks? Then you’d probably say “piss is #1”. After testing another 10 drinks, it’s probably down to #8. And another 190 drinks it’s maybe down to #200.
Saying, the more diverse items of a thing you’ll consume, the more refined your palate grows and so does your standard.
I mean, i once thought pacman or pong were graphically and gameplay-wise the absolute tits. After a felt gazillion games later, they wouldn’t exactly pass the same bar.
Starfield is totally mediocre. I didn’t expect much. Even less. I pirated it to test it, and after some hours i still wanted a refund. But it had great loading-screens!
Nah man, puddlewater beats piss 10 to 1
I see we got a connoisseur here. But that really depends on the climate, age and main ingredients in puddlewater. What if it’s 90% hobo-puke after a week in bright sun? 🤔
I expected it to be No Man’s Sky, but worse
Well, as least you got what you expected. NMS on launch day, but worse.
I played a bit of this game because of game pass. The intro was so jarringly stupid I couldn’t be compelled to continue playing.
It doesn’t get better either. The entire main story is just so contrived and boring.
That’s sad to hear.
I was pleasantly surprised with Fallout 4’s story and thought their writing team could keep up the good work.
I haven’t seen it for myself, though.
Hard agree. This game is ridiculously mediocre for a production of this caliber
The gameplay and fights are pretty fun. But the story is boring and the loading screens suck.
Personally I think the moment when Bethesda lost their way was somewhere between Skyrim and the DLC for Skyrim.
Maybe. For me it was the original Skyrim paid modding fiasco, because while they did apologize they then went back and tried paid modding again with the Creation Club, with the lame excuse that they were “mini dlc’s”, not actual mods. It was a complete betrayal, and that’s not even mentioning the fact that they’re straight up just doing paid modding now with zero excuses.
Not to mention Fallout 76 with the atomic shop, the shitty bag they tried to scam people with, the whole rum debacle, and ofc their shitty subscription service. I also didn’t love Fallout 4 so that didn’t help either.
And also also, I wasn’t the biggest fan of Fallout 3 either. Hot take, I know, but I prioritize choice and rpg mechanics, and Fallout 3 really didn’t have any outside of “good choice vs comically evil choice”. So to me it always felt like a mediocre fps game with a cool open world. But I’ve always loved Morrowind and New Vegas, and Skyrim’s modding scene has kept me playing for over a decade.
At least you could blow up megaton. Couldnt have you killing named npcs in starfield, you might miss out on shitty content!
The headline made me think the dev gave up on his huge Skyrim mod set and said Skyrim is trash.
Yeah pretty disappointed in 12 years since skyrim its like the same
