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[NakeyJakey] Bethesda's Game Design Was Outdated a Decade Ago
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this post was submitted on 10 Dec 2023
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I had no idea that the game is that bad. Now I really have no interest in playing it anymore.
I mean for me, I just got bored. It wasn't terrible, but I had no drive to pick it up again after 40 hours.
I'm sure too people will be like "oh but you played 40 hours! It can't be that bad" but the first 10-15 are misery from a gameplay perspective, like you're just trying to level up to get more carrying capacity and get more combat options.
There's too many basic things locked behind perk points before you can even begin doing whatever it is. Like, I spent most of a day to grind to get to be able to buy and fly a bigger ship only to then not be able to put any extra crew on the ship because that is also a perk.
That's...not really true. First, you can get to class C ships at level 4 out of 300+ if you really want to. Second, you can build some pretty decent-sized class A ships.
Honestly, is this something you've just always hated about Bethesda games, because everything about that is true to a greater extent in Elder Scrolls and Fallout games as well.
Some of it's an opinion but nothing I said isn't true. Sure, if I started the game with the goal of flying class C ships I could get there by level 4, but I didn't. I played the game for a time doing other things and then came to a point where I saw an NPC selling a ship I wanted. So I grinded to get the money, saw that I needed to rank up piloting but I didn't have any points. So I needed to level up 3 times and I needed to kill a few dozen ships. So I grinded that out and bought the ship which, with getting the money, took me the better part of a day.
Then, after I bought that ship and got the ability to fly it I couldn't add any additional crew compared to my starting ship because that is locked behind a different perk, which would mean 4 more levels (which take time now), and many more destroyed ships with X number of crew on board, to get the most crew on my ship; EXCEPT that it's a master tier perk so I would first have to sink many more points into that tree to even get there. So I guess screw whatever build I was going for, if I want more crew I have to go deep into the Social tree.
Take stealth for example. To even get a stealth meter I have to drop a point into stealth. To get a meter that is slightly better and on par with the default stealth meter in their other games I need to put in another point. Want to pickpocket an enemy? Takes a point to even unlock the ability. Want to even use a boost pack? Point.
It's fine to unlock abilities through the trees, there's more of these that I didn't mention that I'm fine with, but this does not compare with their previous games. In Skyrim, if I want to pickpocket I just try to do it. It sucks for a while but it levels up and gets better by doing it. I don't need to go grind enemies to level up so that I can get a little better at pickpocketing. If I want to be stealthy I just need to sneak around to work on leveling up the skill and I get the UI from the beginning. If I want to work on the heavy armor skill I don't first have to get through light armor.
Well, it seems contradictory to me and I'm just picking at that. If you care about class C ships, it's super-easy to unlock (compared to some of the skills in FO4's base builder). If you don't, the lack will never matter. You can easily take the Razorleaf through the entire game with few (if any) modifications.
I do the same in Skyrim when I want the Meteor spell :)
...so? Why exactly did you want to add more crew? I'm having trouble grokking this. More crew is kinda a win-more feature and down that page for a reason.
Pretty typical.
This blew my mind, but if you're somewhere you can breathe and take off the space suit, your stealth SKYROCKETs. Walking around stealthily in a heavy space suit is tough.
This one is the first one I sorta agree with. I understand thematically why there would be skill involved. But I'll give you this one. That's just not enough to sour me on an epic game like Starfield.
I disagree here. It's a UI element that is often there by default in other games from Bethesda. It's the little eye in Skyrim, it's the hidden/caution/danger bar in fallout 4.
You know I did read that and I think that's a neat touch, i wish it was explained somewhere in game (if it was I missed it) but it makes sense. I was referring to the UI again, where you upgrade the stealth meter itself slightly.
I bought a ship with 7 chairs, why can't 7 people sit in it. I understand to a point that it could be for balancing the game, but to me getting the ship with 7 slots should be balancing enough.
Looking back at the 50 hours I spent on it, I have to contextualize how much of it wasn't spent having fun. How many of those hours did I spend building an S-class ship and outposts with 4+ materials before I discovered that all of that was utterly worthless due to the main questline destroying everything? Building the ship certainly wasn't fun. Having a planet on my screen for three hours at a time while I scout for an outpost one pixel at a time was miserable. The point of those was that the reward would be worth it, but then during the main questline it all gets erased and you have to push the stone back up the hill again.
Contrast that with the game I spent the most time on this year: Hi-Fi Rush. It took me 80 hours to FC that game, and I was having a blast almost the entire way through! The tower was a bitch and a half before I learned the meta, beating Mimosa without taking damage took a good two dozen tries, but you know what Hi-Fi Rush has that Starfield doesn't? Exciting gameplay. A soundtrack. A story worth paying any attention to. Likeable characters. The Prodigy. Even though replaying every level on every difficulty setting is tedious as all hell, the process of doing it was still fun, and I can still open the game up and admire the Wall. I can't open up my Starfield file and admire my fully customized ship, the Death of Shame. It was erased along with every outpost and every relationship with every NPC.
I mean, at the 1-hour mark I was starting with space piracy and having a blast.
The first 10-15 are misery if you follow the breadcrumb trail and don't leave it. But the same is (more) true of Skyrim.
Yeah same here. Around the 40 hour mark. I found I moved onto something else. People spending time and resources on building big and different ship designs and building a base seemed pointless to me given the gameplay loop.
I was even kind of interested, but then I got further in the main quest and figured out what the ending is...
Then I felt like there was no point to anything I did.
It's annoying because a lot of people say it's no different to starting a new save file in any other game, but no other game encourages you to spend tens of hours on tedious pointing and clicking just to throw it away. Fallout 4's outpost system wasn't designed with the intention of deleting your settlements at any point in the story.
I don't really understand the NG+ complaints. The game warns several times in several ways you before you do it, and it is absolutely not necessary to enjoy the game. And people who know the reasons you'd want to NG+ because they read spoilers? They ALSO know that they're going to lose the previous playthrough well before they've gotten too deep into outpost design.
The most common Bethesda play pattern is to reach a point your'e so powerful you're "just done", so you go beat the game. You take a break, and come back to NG. The number of people who maintain all the FO4 settlements for hundreds of hours are quite rare. NG+ exists to give people of that most common play pattern the option to start over again and extra content they'll enjoy.
Starfield is technically bigger than Skyrim before accounting for NG+. So why punish them for a new feature that rewards what most gamers want to do?
I feel like this is a "this is why we can't have nice things" scenario. I have been wanting a fun NG+ mechanism in a Bethesda game for 15-20 years. I hate saying goodbye to my character, but I love rising through the ranks and completing major story quests in different ways.
Are you a bethesda dev? Because its like you only understand what the maybe potential intent was of the design, while being completely blind to the massive pile of neon feedback saying that the design failed to achieve the intent.
No. I like owning a home so I opted against gamedev :)
I mean, it's largely a success to me playing the game. Am I not allowed to enjoy it or struggle to understand why "Game A" might be strictly worse than "Game A plus feature B that many players really wanted"?
The difference is that the actual stated end goal of the game is to go NG+.Not defeat Aldiun, not battle for New Vegas.
So to use your words, it's not "Game A plus feature B", it's just feature B,
NG+ as a concept stresses immersion, and making it the point of the game shattered it completely. I like the idea or giving an in-game explanation, and the story they used could have worked, but it needed to be a side quest
I mean, it's "Discover the secrets of the artifacts". The main plot is never the goal of a Bethesda game.
Since when? You can say you don't like it, but it certainly technically worked.
Don't hide behind objectivity when discussing art, it's all subjective all the time, and even statements that declare something is are subjective. The immersion is shattered because that is my experience with it for the reasons I already stated.
I don't need to add an 'in my opinion' because it never will be anything but my opinion
Unfortunately, you're not the only person I'm discussing Starfield with here, and most are trying to tell me that Starfield is objectively bad. I am not "hiding behind" objectivity, I'm arguing that Starfield isn't "objectively bad".
Much like literally, objectively is often used for emphasis, and I hate it, those words shouldn't be used that way
I think people here are actually trying to make objective statements about the quality of the game (that is, lack thereof). Though they aren't really quantifying good reasons to support that high bar.
Not a great sign if your advice for the game is to not play the main game, tho, no?
The main line of fallout or skyrim or oblivion may get sidetracked, but its still a huge goal thats genuinely fun and satisfying to complete.
That's not really what I'm saying, though. Bethesda's signature is always that their faction quests are deeper and cooler than their main quests. You're allowed not to like that, but it's definitely how Bethesda works.
I agree, as I felt Starfield was satisfying to complete. It's just not the point. They call them Sandbox RPGs for a reason. For Skyrim, I would take the Companions, Thieves Guild, Dark Brotherhood, Winterhold, etc over the main plot every day. For Fallout 4, it was different because the main plot turns into "pick a faction to wipe out the Institute (unless you pick the Institute)". Yeah, NV is similar with that. It got a lot of flak for that, but I thought it worked. Fallout 3, though... "I wanna make clean water". It's fun, but not why F3 is a masterpiece.
When people watch the movie Grown Ups 2, there is a chance they might enjoy it despite it being a well recorded shit waste of time film.
That doesnt mean the entire world lied to hide a secret gemstone. It means that by chance you like an over all bad movie. No one said you arent allowed to enjoy shit films, but your single enjoyment doesnt make the film not shit.
Same thing here. The NG+ gambit failed, it does not do what the devs wanted. That it happens to work for you is great, for you, but doesnt change its grander failure.
Yeah, I really don't think there's any substantive way that Starfield compares to "Grown Ups 2". That's naked hyperbole.
Then just enjoy the game that's bigger than Skyrim and don't NG+. Bethesda games always include side-quests and mechanisms that some players want and others avoid.
It was an example to explain the idea of "you liking this doesnt mean everyone is gaslighting you" not a literal comparison.
The NG+ is just one part of you being the exception to the rule. Starfield isnt "an amazing game right up until they offer you NG+ then all the sudden it sucks ass." The story mode reset is just one more thing thats a problem with the design.
And... Being bigger than skyrim doesnt really matter when """bigger""" means you pick one of 10 buildings at random to respawn in front of me, forever. Its radiant quests as world building, as if radiant quests werent already a complained about issue of monotonous content.
So to be clear, you think you can demonstrate that Starfield is the "Grown Ups 2" of video games? This conversation isn't me arguing there's something wrong with you for disliking Starfield, but you trying to imply that starfield is a genuinely bad game in some objectively quantifiable way.
Specifically, Starfield is bigger than Skyrim with regards to hand-crafted content, leaving procedural content out entirely. There's more hand-crafted locations than Skyrim by square meters, and more non-Radiant quests in Starfield by a fairly large margin (apparently it's that Starfield has as many hand-crafted quests as Skyrim+Fallout4 combined).
So no, "bigger" does not mean picking one of 10 buildings at random to respawn. Those 10 buildings at random are yet another of those "added on top of the completed game that people are now complaining about" things like NG+.
Not only did I never say starfield was the grown ups 2 of anything, I literally just clarified for you that I didnt claim that. It was an example of the concept of "just because you like something, doesnt mean its good." I do not know how else to reword this for you.
If you cant grasp a very simple example, Im not sure how to continue talking with you about more nuanced topics without you completely misconstruing what I say.
I'm thinking you can't continue talking about any topics with me if it's getting incivil. I'm not looking for reddit 2.0. So I'll just agree to disagree.
Im not sure where this was uncivil, I just dont want to repeat myself 4 times per point
When a dev says that the game doesn't really "start" until you finish the main story, I feel like that means it is actually necessary to enjoy the game as they designed it. The game was designed with this form of NG+ from the very beginning. It's a bit like saying you can stop playing Nier: Automata after 2B's story. Sure, you can, but it's super not what the devs intended. Not engaging with NG+ is an option the same way quitting MW2 before No Russian is an option.
And for people who know the reasons you want to NG+, that causes a conflict. If I know from the start that I'm going to be ditching this universe, I'm not going to be invested in what it has to offer. When I reach the end of the game, _____'s death wasn't a big emotional moment because I never spent the time to develop a relationship with them.
NG+ has been sorely needed in Bethesda games for a long time, but saying this is what we've been asking for is like saying FO76 was the multiplayer Fallout experience we were asking for.
40h is where I gave up, too. I would stopped much sooner, because everything feels like the worst kind of MMO grind… but folks kept telling me “keep going, it gets better!”
Narrator: It never gets better.
In fact, it gets worse. As part of the main storyline, everything you've done is erased. It is literally not worth your time to engage with the systems in the game, because everything gets reset. The only thing the main story encourages you to spend time on is the worst game mechanic in anything outside of F.A.T.A.L.
There's this weird anti-hype going on. Realistically, for people not loving it, it's defensibly a 7 or so. There's PLENTY of us who put it a lot closer to a 10.
It's a lot of things, but it's definitely not a "bad" game.
Fair enough but it does sound very repetitive and grindy. Would you disagree?
Maybe it is not bad but it definitely didn't deliver what was promised. I know, I know, how could I expect that from Todd?
How experienced are you with Bethesda games post-1995 or so? They all have the same grind-factor. The game is tuned so you can play and win with zero grind, but it has these "treadmill" mechanics that you can either embrace or skip.
If you want to max out your perks at level 328, it's absurdly grindy. But you can beat the game around level 30 or so. If for some reason you want to max out a skill/perk you don't really use, it's a bit grindy. But if you use the skills as you get them and get the skills you'll use, you unlock their levelups asically for free.
I hear this again, and again, and again, and again. But nobody has yet to cite one promise Bethesda objective broke with Starfield. You say "how could I expect that from Todd"? That means you know what kind of games Bethesda releases. And they promised a Bethesda game in space. And they delivered a Bethesda game in space.
I underestand people who hate Bethesda games. You can toss a pebble and hit one of them. But I really don't understand the level of toxicity this time around. I actually almost didn't buy Starfield, and boy am I pissed because it was a lot better than I expected.
Keep in mind that I haven't played Starfield despite getting excited by the hype, and then tempering my expectations after remembering getting burned by the hype and purchase of the Collector's Edition of Fallout 76. My opinions are more of a collective skepticism bolstered by post-hype reactions. The unfortunate reality of the game is that it is a "Bethesda game" with a lot of the magic stripped out.
The promise of 1000 planets rings pretty hollow when a vast majority of them are desolate chucks of rock, and procedural generation is just an exceedingly lazy way to achieve a bullet point on the hype sheet. The only reason I know it's 1000 planets is because Todd would not shut up about it like it was some type of huge achievement.
The fun of "discovery by exploration" -- going to continue on a quest and getting stopped by a dozen different interesting things along the way -- is completely broken by "fast travel". A "Bethesda game" that requires you to skip a lot of the in-between and not lose focus on a singular objective does not feel like a "Bethesda game" to me.
Some of the Bethesda charm comes from the jank of the 20-year-old Frankenstein "not Gamebryo" engine their games are built on. We give them a pass on a lot of this because it can add to the fun. Unfortunately, they spent a lot of time hyping their pride on being their "least buggy" game on release. For a game that cooked as long as Starfield did, they should've spent that time rebuilding something modern from the ground up instead of cramming their ambition into their aging platform. Given the time it took, this may be my biggest disappointment.
Interesting. I don't find "Bethesda game" to be unfortunate, and I don't agree that a lot of the magic is stripped out. No, we do not get the Iconic fallout Vault Boy attitude, but tES never managed to brand itself like that anyway. What "magic" should I be seeing missing from Starfield? It seems pretty magical to me. I'm REALLY holding my breath for a Ve'ruun expansion, maybe some "Legacy of the Starborn" style expansion that leans into the Artifacts and the cycle. And I KNOW space stations are coming (data leaks confirmed there's code for them), and I'm so excited for when they finally do.
But isn't that what you'd expect? What do people expect from this? 1000 full-size planets all lovingly hand-crafted on a $1T budget? Micro-planets like some other games did? Taking a step back, remember that Starfield has more hand-crafted content than Skyrim... THEN adds 1000 planets to explore so you have a Daggerfall-like procedural exploration game on top of it. Because a lot of us missed procedural exploration.
Are you that guy who does no-fast-travel runs in Skyrim? Quite literally, Starfield feels like the exact same amount of fast-travel as any tES game to me. FT to this city, kill this person. FT back, report what you did. FT to this area, and go find a dungeon.
For the record, that's true. Starfield was largely downright stable from day 1.
"Should" is a hard point. They're clearly trying to stay Iconic Bethesda. As far as I've heard, Creation Engine 2 is largely a from-scratch engine. The thing is, the goal was for it to still work like a Bethesda game. Largely that goal succeeded. Many of us were craving Exactly Skyrim in Space for 10-15 years now. It's weird how many people are complaining after they gave us what we asked for.
I'm IT. I get it. Sometimes you asks for things you don't really want and it's my job to say "no" to you. But I actually really wanted Skyrim in space!!!
I loved it. The reality of this game is so distorted. Yes, it's far from perfect. But in no way is it bad. Everyone has a right to their own opinion, and not everyone will enjoy it. But so many people would have you believe it's an objectively bad game, and it isn't.
I mean overall. I agree that parts of it are designed terribly.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
I dunno, many good points are made throughout this video about some objectively bad design decisions
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
It just seems terribly mediocre for a AAA game this decade. Definitely not worth $70, and not something to rush out and play. Maybe something we can enjoy a few years from now with proper updates, maybe some fixes mods.
It really isn't, which is funny. It does many things far better than Skyrim or Fallout 4, such as quest design and role playing, it just can't rely on fantastic lore written by people that either no longer work for the company or never did. Now that they are given the opportunity to be wholly original, the issues they've been having ever since Morrowind are shown at full force.
Interesting. As I haven't played the game, I have to rely on other opinions. Have you seen the video? He gave examples of quests that were in the game. Simple fetch quests (go to A, return to B, sometimes go back to A). They seemed to be designed in a very uninspiring way. Combined with the fact that you basically have to fast travel everywhere there's little to catch your attention during such quests. In Skyrim, for example, you might stumble across a cave or some ruins. To me, those are the really enjoyable moments. You just explore and start to wonder what you might find next. Is that even possible in Starfield to a similar degree? Because without that im not sure I can enjoy a Bethesda game. It's not a good shooter, the mechanics are wonky and the UI sucks. Would you disagree?
Fallout 4 was even worse, that's kind of a point I raise, that Bethesda has been riding the coattails of better lore. There are dumb fetch quests in every Bethesda game.