How Bethesda Lost It's Magic - And how to get it back!

after the success of the new Fallout show I like mostly everybody got a serious craving for a bit of Fallout the video game experience so I threw on the console and I was torn between which one to pick but I ended up going with Fallout 4 after about 30 hours of game playay I realized how much I was enjoying it I'm not sure why but I never held Fallout 4 on the same pedestal as professor's other games like Fallout 3 um obsidian's New Vegas Skyrim or even Oblivion but that being said the game obviously had some flaws but on the whole I was really enjoying it then I remembered Starfield bethesda's most recent game Fallout 4 in general does not receive the same level of respect as the other games but it still scored well averaging around N9 out of 10 from most trusted reviewers Starfield averages about six out of 10 now a lot of people have given feedback on why Starfield was criticized from the the creation engine being outdated or the dialogue options being boring the NPCs in the game looking awful loading times bad voice acting the gameplay mechanics many different reasons but oblivion's voice acting and its NPC appearances were comically awful but we still give this game 4.7 out of five stars and 94% on Metacritic even today Fallout 4's dialogue options were confusing or pretty awful really but IGN still gave that game a 9.5 obsidians New Vegas had difficult to manage combat and glitches Galore yet we still hold that game up as a masterpiece so why did Starfield get so much Flack I feel like I could and I would look past the bad writing or the awful companions or the dodgy graphics and constant crashes to be honest I didn't even really care that you couldn't fly through space properly but there was one thing that disappointed me so much and I couldn't let it go I like others have had a weird experience with Starfield I actually got to level 50 I completed a lot of the faction quests and a lot of side quests I actually joined the Starfield fan group on Facebook but if you asked me my opinion on the game I would say that it let me down now that's strange right coming from someone who got to level 50 and put a lot of hours in but in the same fan club I started to see the same thing people leaving negative posts in fact there were so many negative posts that people posted a meme that says oh I hate this game I'll go join their fan club but you see I don't think that's what happened I think most people started and enjoyed Starfield like a lot and then there's sort of like this aha moment where suddenly everything falls apart in fact if you check play count on Steam you'll see there's a massive Spike at first then a continuous drop drop as time goes by lower than any other game that beeso have ever released people still play Skyrim 13 years after it came out those same people stopped playing Starfield after 13 days so why I appreciate all the memories that bezra has given me in the past so I'm willing to look past most of the faults in their games but there's one thing that they give back in exchange for the other shortcomings and it wasn't present in Starfield in this video I will explain what I think the biggest problem is with Starfield how it impacted players of the game and what Bethesda need to do going forward to regain their reputation Bethesda games are famous and Timeless because of something called Bethesda magic this was bethesda's game that did not have any of the befesa magic quick side note I'm a new channel so please consider subscribing every single subscription means the absolute world to me and I just want to say thank you to everyone who has subbed so far anyway back to the video so like most people I was excited for the Starfield video game I booted it up I started my new character and I went through the first mini dungeon that was introduced I learned how to mine how to do combat I shot down some enemies after this I learned how to fly and I worked through another enemy dungeon now keep this dungeon in mind because this is going to become important later after this point I was sent to a major city in the game so generally standard usual Bethesda introduction as far as a game goes the main cities looked great combat felt crisper than Fallout 4 Graphics were an upgrade but no Bethesda magic so what is Bethesda magic well most people will have their own opinion but I consider it this moment or this moment or this moment or this moment you get the point it's the moment that you step out of your beginning dungeon and you're greeted to a view of a giant open world that you are now able to explore at your own Leisure it's this tingling excitement of being able to go anywhere and do anything in any order freedom I remember my first Bethesda game Oblivion the feeling of leaving the sewer and seeing that giant open open world it was a gaming moment of awe that I will never forget as soon as you enter the open world in a Bethesda game you're free to go in any direction you can ignore all Quest related stuff and just explore at your own desire you can approach it any way that you'd like now one of the things you'll notice when you exit the beginning dungeons as you walk around you'll see buildings ruins or other locations now if you walk to any of these locations they'll be added to your map once added to your map you can then fast travel to them at any time not just that though you can go into them and see what's inside now of these locations you can find anything inside it could be a dungeon it could have a unique side quest it could have a visual story to tell where you uncover what happened as you progress it could have secrets to uncover it could be a city or a town but the most important thing is it will have something something different different to any other place that you have visited on the map Fallout 3 has 163 points of interest there's 190 in New Vegas 325 in Fallout 4 and 343 in Skyrim that's a lot of places to explore but they're all different every single one so whilst out exploring these worlds you'll find a new dungeon to explore and you can guarantee that it's going to be different from anything else you've experienced up until that point now they might reuse assets from other dungeons or similar layouts but no matter what it will be different from any other dungeon you've experienced in some way you will never enter a cave and think oh I already did this cave already on the other side of the map there is no cloning every location on the map is unique and has its own characteristics they do not move around they're placed in the location on the map permanently not just that but they're all handcrafted by the design team in the game you'll experience beautiful sits deadly enemies hidden secrets and sidequest Gore just as an example in this video I had to capture video footage from Skyrim I've explored almost every entire place on the map at this point but I found a dungeon that I hadn't yet entered I walked in and I found someone who gave me a quest to save his wife from the top of the tower I had a mission to complete unique sites to see and decisions to make that's Bethesda magic the ability to go anywhere on the map and experience something unique my friend has played Skyrim for hundreds of hours but he's never completed the main quest he just enjoys going out and exploring all the caves and the Dungeons and the reason for this is that you can guarantee there is something new in each location so they're all worth your time it's not about getting from point A to point B it's the distractions on the way that make it fun the same can be said about Fallout 3 New Vegas and Fallout 4 every now and then you'll find a really creepy story or an eerie place with a heartbreaking tail basically something that will stick with you even after you finish it for example in New Vegas when you find a vault that's been taken over by plants I found this Vault by myself on my playthrough and it was so creepy as I had no idea what was going on I had to to read Terminals and journal entries just to piece together the backstory and it left such an impression on me because of this the NPCs who give the quest look awkward the voice acting is subpar the graphics aren't mind-blowing the combat is usually worse than other AAA games but it's this guarantee of Adventure that makes Bethesda in a league of its own other games just copy and paste stuff all over the map it's the same Towers the same enemy camps same this same that and it misses the point I would rather have a map dotted with 15 unique points of interest rather than 200 copy and pasted locations that's actually less than having 50 unique points and Bethesda did this better than any other game developer until Starfield so in Starfield we never receive that Bethesda magic opening moment where we see the open world in all of its glory and as its open world is space so rather than having one open world map they opted for many location planets instead of just one giant one but it's not just that we have a thousand planets to visit but we cannot fly from one to another so already this is a different model rather than one giant open world Starfield contains a thousand open worlds for us to visit so in effect it should be a thousand times as big as bethesda's of title but that is actually where you'd be wrong so as I mentioned the other Bethesda games have giant open worlds with unique location scattered across the map the map and every dungeon is handcrafted by the team Starfield does not do this they utilize AI to do the work for them the dreaded word that games fear is called procedural generation so when you land on a planet there is no map to go with it the AI has to create it so it picks from a list of pre-created assets so the code will receive a command of put five different plants five types of creatures make the ground red desert or snow and make it quite hilly then when we arrive at the planet it will appear with these characteristics now this is totally randomized so if you and I land on the same Planet at the same time chances are we're going to have a totally different experience in Fallout 3 there is a building called the Dum witch building horrible things have happened there and I can recommend that you go to visit it if you're playing Fallout 3 it's in the north part of the map for my playthrough and for your playthrough it's in the same place now if you're playing New Vegas I can tell you that quarry Junction is a death trap you can find it on the west of the map North of good Springs it's there on my playthrough and it's there on yours too now if you're playing Starfield I can't tell you anything with no handcrafted content there's nothing for me to share with you as we cannot physically experience the same thing together this takes away a lot of the fun now you can tell an AI to create this map but you cannot tell AI to make it interesting or fun AI just can't do that so most of the maps look Bland and boring despite having a thousand planets I would argue that most look exactly the same so you lose that handcrafted beautiful open world to explore as there's nothing unique to see there's no unique quests or landmarks or anything like that this is so different to what Bethesda are known for but what about the dungeons Bethesda has put them in now when the AI is creating our map for the planet that we're about to visit it will automatically add Dungeons and caves for us to visit they will be randomly selected and placed for us to discover but again it's the word random so if you visited dungeon a and recommended that I go and visit it I could not do that because it's random so even if you enjoy dungeon a on Planet X I may go to Planet X and get dungeon B which is nowhere near as fun so again it kills that experience of sharing stories with one another and now comes the part which destroyed the game for me the moment where that aha moment kicks in remember those figures I gave you earlier about about points of interest in the game well Starfield has a thousand planets and needs to pick from a list of handcrafted dungeons to randomly place on them so for 1,000 planets you'd probably expect a th000 Dungeons right well you'd be wrong so 200 then 100 nope the real answer is approximately 12 that's right so by the time you've visited that amount of dungeons you've pretty much experienced everything and now you start to see repeats of those same dungeons once you visit a dungeon on Starfield and you recognized you've run the same one once or twice before it's that moment where you say aha when you play the other Bethesda games you knew that every point of Interest was unique and you would have a different experience every time handcrafted stories all level Design This made it so fun to keep going out there and explore the world completely so on Starfield you were probably going to be thrown onto a random Planet which you'd probably seen many times and then you'd see dungeons that you'd already gone through multiple times you would never visit a planet which would have its own unique dungeon or its own unique point of Interest it was all selected from a list of pre-build assets and that was that as Cooper says in the Fallout show that will get sidetracked by BS every single time this is how it works in Bethesda games as well we need to get from point A to point B but on the way we'll run into Point C Point D and point e every time we investigate one of these distractions or these other dungeons we receive a reward whether that is a new experience a special weapon a story or something else so for example my wife had never played Fallout 4 I know but she's loving it now she told me the other day that she had to go to the cabat house as her main quests have been selected here so point B right next door to this building was the Pikman Gallery she had a miscellaneous side quest to investigate this place Point C so figured that she would nip him before going to the cabet house when entering there was a bunch of deceased enemies arranged in patterns like art she found a calling card on their bodies from a serial killer as she pushed through on the Pikmin Gallery there were more disturbing sites more environmental storytelling and experience with the killer himself this is Bethesda magic going somewhere getting distracted on the way and then being rewarded for it she will remember that gaming experience forever it was not the destination but the journey that counted Starfield does not have this as every randomly generated location they're not near enough to even Sidetrack you but even then the cont content is so cookie cutter copy and paste that it's not worth you checking it out you may not have visited this dungeon on this planet but you've probably already experienced that exact same dungeon template 32 times by this point Witch of three is a giant open world similar to The Elder Scrolls but that doesn't have any dungeons Red Dead Redemption 2 is another Giant open world but again that doesn't have any dungeons these two games receive iCal scores and on the whole are probably better games than Bethesda in terms of Graphics writing and gameplay but Skyrim would always be considered equal if not Superior because of its world map and its dungeons contain within it could always compete with the best games despite it being inferior in some elements because it was unique Bethesda are the only games I've known that a single player and offer so many Dungeons and optional locations to visit despite all the other things that Starfield has received negative feedback on I would say that this is the biggest sin that they've committed the fact that they didn't even make more dungeons like if you wanted to have as many dungeons as Fallout 4 325 then fair enough you'd be guaranteed at least a unique experience a third of the time out of those a thousand planets but to make no more than 12 unique dungeons for a thousand planets that's not just unacceptable it's downright lazy some poor individual has spent 300 hours of gameplay just going from planet to planet to find new unique content and he still hasn't found anything unique yet so that ah hat moment is when you realize that you've already experienced everything the game has to offer despite only visiting a sliver of its available planets now in the CI of which there are four you'll receive unique quests faction quests and other unique handcrafted content this is Starfield and its best and it is exactly the same blueprint from the other Bethesda games it's when you try and go and make your own adventure that this game shows its lack of quality and depth Bethesda magic is having an open world to explore with points of interest that you can delve into all of it handcrafted and all of it unique you guaranteed an experience whichever direction you went Starfield broke that pattern and as a result made the exploration part a complete let down procedural generation in itself is usually very unenjoyable and it doesn't really add any quality only quantity this is completely opposite to what Bethesda have done before we can forgive bad writing bad voice acting dodgy Graphics glitches and other gameplay limitations because we knew that the world out there to explore would be greater than most other game worlds that is Bethesda magic and that is why they get a pass on other gameplay aspects but when they took that away and they had the nerve to only create 12 unique dungeons to cover a thousand generated planets it hurt it hurt really bad not one of those a thousand planets had anything unique to see it said that they didn't appreciate the players time and thought that we'd be happy to slug through a thousand Bland planets and complete the same 12 dungeons over and over again 100 times each once the player figured this out that's when the bad reviews would come out the negative feedback and the anger towards the title it was lazy and for a company that had always added more content for each game that they released and usually more content than all of their competitors this was the ultimate letdown so how could they have fixed this well first of all they should have scrapped the 1,000 planets rubbish anyway as no one is going to visit a thousand of them it's too much they should also have scrapped the procedural generation World creator as well these AI tools can help in creating some elements but right now games are played by humans only a human can make something that we can appreciate at this current time AI won't understand what a human needs they can make it work but AI can't make it fun they had four major cities in the game I'd suggest that rather than having a thousand planets they should have just created four to six each planet would have a major city which they'd already built and then have other small supporting towns each planet would be handcrafted and would have points of interest placed there all of which were unique and handcrafted as well we would then have a spaceship which we could actually fly through space to fly from one planet to another which the system would have been able to handle so essentially you take the map from Skyrim the map from Fallout 3 the map from Fallout 4 and even New Vegas you put them all into one game you give each planet approximately 7 to 100 unique points of interest meaning your game will have approximately 280 handcrafted dungeons that's better than a th000 AI created plant so it's just a bigger version of other Bethesda titles without the sacrificing quality this would have given us a unique space map all handcrafted with unique quests and Dungeons and fulfilled the fans desire for that peresta magic it's Fallout 4 but with four unique maps all of which look different now I understand there have been many other complaints about the game including its Graphics NPC DC appearances glitches boring storytelling and many other things but I feel like this is the main problem with Starfield but feser has never had the best stories the best characters the best graphics or gameplay mechanics in fact they have usually been lacking in all of these but that open world full of unique places to visit always made up for the shortcomings Bethesda never had to exceeding Graphics gameplay or writing but Bethesda only had to exceed in being Bethesda without the Bethesda handcrafted open world all of their other shortcomings came to the four and now they have to have their game compared to other games based on these things and unfortunately they are always going to lose I saw someone compare the shooting mechanic to Destiny 2 we didn't compare Fallout to Call of Duty because they were separate games Call of Duty has a single player campaign that lasted a few few hours Fallout 4 had a giant open world and over 200 hours worth of content to explore when Starfield doesn't have that same open world mechanic then it will be compared to games like Destiny 2 which it will always lose to so my point is that beesa needs to go back to doing what they did so well before the good news is Starfield was a unique IP and when they return to Fallout and the Elder Scrolls Brands they should hopefully go back to their original gameplay design the one that we all know and love them for as long as they keep doing what they've done before and they use as little procedural generation as possible they will earn the fans trust again and everyone will be able to once again say it just has that Bethesda magic handcrafted open worlds with points of interest that are all handcrafted to Unique to one another give us that excitement to explore again with the assurance that this is worth our time because unfortunately starfields a thousand planets were not but that being said with the new Fallout show being so successful it shows to me that Bethesda still have that ability to make the magic that they're known for Starfield was a disappointment and it broke the mold and it hurt bethesda's reputation a little bit but I would remain optimistic that they are still who they are they didn't make that fantastic list of great games and then suddenly forget how to do it Starfield was an experiment that didn't work but I have no doubt that Bethesda will be back to its best either via Fallout 5 or the Elder Scroll 6 anyway that's it for this one I mean what do you guys think do you agree that this was the main problem in Starfield or is there something else that you would consider more of a standout uh or did you enjoy Starfield more than any other Bethesda title and if so why let me know your thoughts in the comments if you enjoyed the video please leave a like and if you're new here please consider subscribing I'm AV gaming where we focus on single player game analysis identifying what makes great games great and what could make good games great as well thanks for watching AV out

Channel: AVV Gaming

Views: 12,972

Keywords: bethesda game studios, starfield update, starfield news, fallout 3, fallout 4, fallout series, the elder scrolls skyrim, starfield review, the elder scrolls oblivion

Id: UAziTkmBOww

Length: 25min 56sec (1556 seconds)

Published: Wed May 01 2024