How Starfield was Ruined by "Realism"

this is a video where I talk about realism and games about Gabe new and Todd Howard's lies and about how everything ended up ruining Starfield and I know what you're thinking that isn't the problem with Starfield it's a million other things big and small and despite the obsession before release where everyone talked about the hundreds of planets and how they're all empty that's really a drop in the bucket of all the issues that Starfield has and I would tell you that I know I already made an entire hourong video about most of them but the realism in the game is something I touch on very briefly in that video and something that has a very special and enormous impact on the game more than you imagine and you're going to see soon enough realism itself in games brings up three important questions and I want to analyze them to get to the bottom of this because those questions are is the realism in Starfield good for the game the second one is what even is realism in in games anyways like what even is that and the third is is there a place for realism in games and if so when and why and while I already thought about this ever since Bethesda first ever heard her in real life there are a ton of empty planets so we have a ton of empty planets too I really didn't give too much attention to it back then because I don't overthink everything just most things but I recently watched This brilliant documentary about the development of halflife which was produced in released for the game's 25th anniversary and in it Gabe Newell says this about realism in games a design review and somebody say that's not realistic and you're like okay what does that have like explain to me why that's interesting because in the real world I have to write up lists of stuff I have to go to the grocery store to buy and I have never thought to myself that realism is fun I go play games to have fun what's fun about landing on a planet where there's potentially nothing and and that brought me back to Starfield as a person who loves games but isn't a game designer this clip is powerful I have very limited experience in making games feeling odd jobs at different game jams but mostly composing music for games I do know that I'm probably not talented enough to make them which is why I critique them it's just easier let's be honest but I try and do so with respect for the people who make them and trying to understand how they come together my number one question question when I analyze a game the one question from which every other question I ask during my big analysis videos come from is is this fun and it's a very open-ended and very subjective question with the fundamental problem that Gabe points out what is fun and so we had to come up with some notion of of what fun was but from that spiral many other questions that are very helpful for me in deciphering and understanding games and giving feedback instead of screaming I don't like it it's bad as if I had a blue check mark on Twitter because no matter what answer comes from the initial is it fun question those answers now require a lot more questions and when I ask that question to Starfield I get a lot of different answers from different systems in the game I get a lot of kind of maybe fun and a few yeah this is fun and most importantly when it comes to realism no this isn't fun so let's break this down is the realism in Starfield good or useful well it serves a couple of purposes one purpose is to have a lot of procedurally generated planets that are empty these planets provide locations for Outpost Building without any threats maybe you get stressed out by Wildlife when collecting resources so I guess this allows you to do that and and that's it pretty much that's all there useful for but they also provide you with a ton of absolutely useless menu scrolling on the map that you must mentally ignore if you're not looking for that now you could say that's a user interface issue but it is not you can't put all of the empty useless planets in a corner to only access for the practical purposes of resources or building because then Starfield wouldn't be a whole galaxy it would be a menu of cool planets and a separate very long list of extra empty planets but it wouldn't give the player the scale this massive mess of a map that tells you that the world is massive Todd Howard is quoted in an interview with Lex fredman saying we want to give people the experience in realism of empty planets but we tell the players beforehand if there's anything there or not it's all really happening and most people probably won't notice or appreciate all of that but I think it gives them the ability to say I want to go do that and see that on that place as long as we tell them hey the quest leads over here here's where the handcrafted content is that you would expect and then here's more of the open procedural Planet experience he also mentions that most people will not care or appreciate for this touch of realism but to us at Bethesda cuz they're special people you know they they really they're real artists they it's important this makes it sound like the decision isn't harmful to those who want to ignore it but adds a lot of artistic value to the game the truth is that it affects the very design of the game and camouflaging it in this way keeps us from asking the real question if it doesn't help the game to be more fun or entertaining if it doesn't offer meaningful content to the majority of players and if it's only there for most people to not care or appreciate it why did you put it in the game there's a number of potential answers for this and they go from thinking the worst of Bethesda to giving them the benefit of the doubt maybe it was a marketing tactic making every part of the game feel more impactful and considered than it actually was it could have been a misguided attempt to give people land for those outposts and resources which were maybe planned to be a bigger part of the game maybe originally this wasn't the plan but having put in the tech to make this possible they decided to use it anyways even if it was without a real purpose or maybe they just never bothered to ask the question themselves and ended up doing it because they could and not because they should no matter why the final result is a system that makes people scroll endlessly through empty planets while looking for anything to actually do unless you for some reason enjoy exploring empty planets which hey more power to you I guess but you should know there are better games for that I hope it isn't a hot take to say that this is a decision that brings way more harm to the quality and pacing of the game then it brings any potential good unless it's designed for modders to fill the empty planets but I don't want to jump into conspiracy theories and it's in the product that we finally received and that Tod it Graces us with the opportunity to purchase but what is realism in games how on Earth are we supposed to evaluate and care about realism in a Sci-Fi space game this question is really an excuse for me to talk about how misguided the concept seems at least specifically in the case of Starfield realism in games is rarely pursued and even more rarely achieved and that's because of what Gabe Newell said real life isn't normally fun so the pursuit of realism at the very least also comes with taking away some of the more mundane and boring parts that always exist within every job but giving us access to enough realism that we can do things that are normally out of our reach or exceptionally dangerous with enough believability many people are fascinated with military operations but the risk in being involved in one isn't something that we're willing to do but milsims bridge that Gap but they don't have you doing a miname where you load bullets into Clips or hang around the base worried for days cut off from friends and family PC building simulator allows you to build a PC without the tens of thousands of dollars required to do it nor the stress of having it not work for reasons that I don't understand truck driving simulator allows you to I don't know I I I don't know about this one but it's super popular and people love it so there's something about it that's for sure viewed through this lens realism in Starfield could be compelling to many because we will probably never live out our space fairing fantasies and living them in ways that are believable could very well be something many people are interested in but nothing in the game and nothing in bethesda's catalog supports the idea of realism I doubt anyone would say Fallout is a realistic depiction of a nuclear Wasteland or that Skyrim is a realistic representation of the fantasy world of tamel where lizard men fight talking dragons and Starfield is just as wacky and Fantastical no matter how many SPAC suits and lasers you put into it and it's often better off when it leans into more of the Fantastical elements than when it tries to play it straight elements of realism as I mentioned before are best used either to prop up or support other elements in a game or they are themselves the focus that a game is built around in many FPS games no matter how unrealistic they may be the weapons you use adhere to design principles and influences from very real things for example even if real soldiers don't regenerate after standing behind a piece of cover but they are also used to ground certain mechanics in games in the realm of logic either for balancing immersion or to introduce mechanics that take advantage of this most RPGs feature inventory systems that use encumbrance limiting how many items you can carry with you and some offer movement or stamina penalties depending on how many things you're carrying which is very much a use of realism even if you are a half dragon or half puppet superhero Leon Kennedy needs to organize his inventory into his suitcase that we never see in the game and he for sure doesn't take weapons out of that suitcase mid combat but inventory and resource management is a very important part of survival horror games and they turned that into a smart and fun miname things that naturally make sense to us and are easy to understand and interact with like if I am carrying more things I get tired faster and the relationship that these things have with video games and game systems has been there for a long time and it's ever presentent these days maybe even more than we realize and it makes sense to take advantage of these things when designing your game and Starfield as well as previous Bethesda games use this stamina and other resource systems encumbrance crafting systems and even basic setups for things that happen in the story because I'm talking about all of this without mentioning how much quote unquote realism is used in storytelling and creating believable characters but the use of realism in Starfield stands out much of it is par for the course but specifically the absurd amount of empty planets doesn't it doesn't exist to prop up other things quite the contrary it brings many things down with it and if we considered it something the game is built around well well it is allow me to explain Yes dear friends there is actually a Twist because you see I think Starfield in one way or another was made with realism at at its core but not in a cool logical way and this is the primary root of all its major problems the idea that Starfield was built on the idea that was always sold to us was the same old Todd Howard speak you see the insert thing over there you can go to it that isn't just a backdrop that moon is actually there orbiting the planet yes you can visit it too but what was once an impressive feat of technology that boggled the mind and scale today begs the question but why would I go is is there something cool over there Mr Todd but alas more Todd Howard words have never been more Todd Howard spoken and that's all fine and dandy when you also put up invisible walls at the edge of your game world but what happens when you decide to promise the vast expanse of space and I believe Todd not in his marketing no but I believe that he once wanted to make that a reality and then reality itself slowly dawned on the studio I'm sure that one day an in-depth investigative bit will come out and what I'm about to say will be corroborated as truth you can feel free to quote me on this one of the most repeated things during the development of Starfield were the words we can't do that can we make the player seamlessly travel from planet to planet and have a thousand planets containing awesome stuff no Todd we can't do that can we make the player seamlessly travel from planet to planet actually no we can't do that can we not seamlessly make the player travel to planets but they have cool stuff in them no Mr Howard we actually we we can't we could create a series of landmarks and then copy and paste them all around the 1,000 planets but if we copy paste to 1,000 planets it get repetitive so let's make 90% of them empty like in real life but then players will be frustrated that they never find anything Mr Howard well then we'll just tell them where the things are but then they'll but then they'll see just as quickly that it's I'm a genius Bob have you seen my leather jacket around here okay so maybe not exactly that but some permutation of that something that had wild Ambitions and it turned out couldn't be done and at that point decisions were made and this is what we ended up with but right from the outset at the very Inception of Starfield it was flawed in its attempt at realism no not because of wanting 900 empty planets but because it wanted to feature an entire galaxy at a realistic scale and that was never compatible with what a Bethesda game does well namely creating interesting worlds to Traverse with interesting locations to explore and interesting or at least entertaining quests to embark on as I said in my full analysis of the game the move to space always came with taking away a lot of the traversal and exploration but what really led to that end point isn't moving to space it's moving to a realistic Galaxy if Starfield were more of a video game ass video game like a very big version of the outer worlds with just five or six planets but they were all varied open worlds essentially each planet like a version of bethesda's previous games it would be much better it wouldn't be fantastic for many reasons that I've covered before and won't cover again I mean it' still be me somewhere between like all right and disappointing but it'd be better than it is today and if that decision had been taken very early on we don't know what other changes they would have implemented to this stale old formula and maybe the game would be excellent what I do know is that following this system following this Pursuit definitely is one of the causes that led to the game's downfall so what about that third question is there a place for realism in games well yes and there always has been but it isn't about taking the most boring parts of reality and putting them into games it's about taking things from reality that help you build the best game you can or about presenting the most fascinating parts of reality without all of the bad parts Starfield still features encumbrance and stamina and gravity is different on different planets and that affects stuff and that's cool there's tons of small things as we've seen a million times before that are all done according to quote unquote realism but with plenty of creative Liberties to make them in service of the game because they're just fun but at its core it's based on the pursuit of offering a realistic dream to the player explore Bing a whole galaxy and just that small idea can have a tremendous domino effect on the design of a game and in this case for my money a disastrous one thank you for watching I've been mug Thief uh this video was really fun to make and I hope that you found it not only entertaining but also something that made you think a bit about stuff and how things come to get made if you want more videos like it and my ideas on all sorts of games make sure to subscribe you'll have my unending gratitude for those of you that made it to the end of the video my regular viewers already know what's coming leave a comment below and sneak in leather jacket into your comment and I'll heart every one of them that sneaks it in there as always I'll see you again very [Music] soon

Channel: Mugthief

Views: 52,443

Keywords: starfield review, bethesda starfield, starfield xbox, starfield controversy, starfield bad reviews, starfield player numbers, starfield analysis, everything wrong with starfield, dreamcastguy starfield, starfield vs skyrim, starfield vs fallout, in depth review, starfield long review, luke stephens starfield, starfield ign review, starfield gamespot, starfield impressions, mugthief, starfield critique, starfield best skill, doktor skipper, nakey jakey, video essay

Id: uFt3VlMZ_lY

Length: 17min 52sec (1072 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 21 2023