Starfield: Doomed from the Beginning?

hey people of planet Earth while trying to write my video about starfields World building I've constantly found myself getting sidetracked into talking about all the terrible design flaws this game has in general many of which have nothing to do with the writing in fact much of the terrible writing is the clear result of design shortcomings Bethesda couldn't do better than make the earth a single biome Sandy Wasteland so the writing team had to come up with an excuse for why that is that's not an enviable task maybe they could have thought of an explanation that wouldn't leave every planet in the settled systems one software malfunction away from having their atmospheres jettisoned away but I digress I want to examine starfields flaws and to try to speculate on how this game ended up as the disappointing mess it is and what Bethesda could have done to make it better in some areas I have to admit there's nothing they could have done once the decision was made to go in a certain direction that's why I chose doomed from the beginning as my title on a high level the best way to describe Starfield would be to say that it sticks to the Bethesda formula in all the bad ways but abandons what worked with their formul formula in the first place everything people have always hated about Bethesda games the essential NPCs fake choices lackluster RPG mechanics terrible AI game-breaking bugs and technical issues returns with a Vengeance in Starfield think of literally anything that annoyed you in Skyrim or Fallout 4 I guarantee it's still present in Starfield did you hate having quests forced into your log because you sprinted past somebody talking did you hate hearing NPC speak over each other well don't worry they made it even worse in Starfield were you bothered by your character's lack of a physical body not to mention shadow in first person they didn't change that either loading screens just as bad as before the player walking at a different pace from NPCs of course that's still the same annoying unskippable animations for sitting down or using a workbench ditto all the problems of bethesda's Prior games are still there but this time there's no upside there's no interesting world to explore just an effectively infinite number of landscape shaped by a procedural generation system that's laughably bad compared to games made over a decade ago even they handcrafted content beyond the major faction quests are mostly fetch quests or talk to NPC quests it's boring boredom is the only emotion besides mild frustration I've ever felt while playing Starfield I know a lot of people feel the same way and we're all looking for answers to explain why the game turned out so bad as far as I'm concerned deciding that Starfield was going to feature over 1,000 realistically scaled planets sealed the game's fate from the word go I don't think any Studio the size of Bethesda could have delivered an incredible game with that insane requirement if you told Rockstar Games to make a Grand Theft Auto Style game set in space with a thousand life-sized planets when all of their previous games have taken place in small handcrafted environments I think you'd get a messy release from them too now imagine if they only had on10th the number of employees bgs is half the size of a regular AAA Studio it must have taken some serious uis on their part to think they were capable of making the biggest most technically impressive space game ever pile on a pandemic that forces everyone to work from home and the ever heightening graphical expectations modern games have to meet and it ceases to be a mystery why Starfield is such a mediocre experience regardless of how talented a studio is they will fail if you task them with the impossible instead of Chasing The Impossible Bethesda needed to be realistic from the beginning they needed to take criticism of their past games on board and come up with a sober plan for Starfield that plan needed to start with dropping two zeros from the 1,000 planets pitch and either scaling down each planet to a reasonably traversible size or only allowing the player to explore a small section of Planet whichever feels better in the end procedurally generated content has always been the weakest and most despised element of Bethesda games it should never have been made more of a focus but with infinity Landing zones to go to it had to be if there were only 10 Landing zones the size of Fallout 76 hand crafted content could have been the emphasis instead that might sound like a huge downgrade but think of it like cutting excess fat 99% of starfields planets add nothing to the game being able to land wherever you want adds nothing to the game realizing that and removing all this wasted space early on would have helped starfields development immensely with more time to work elsewhere perhaps many long-standing issues with these games could have been addressed how hard is it to get NPCs to not talk over each other it seems like a trivial issue to fix same with NPCs trying to speak to you as you sprint by them add a flag that makes them silent unless you stand still and look at them for a second it's so easy other games don't have these problems there's no excuse for Bethesda here there's also no excuse for the piss poor UI the star UI mod is Superior in every single way and it came out before the game officially released I wonder if being shown up by modders time and time again ever becomes embarrassing for the team at Bethesda the AI and Starfield feels like it's been control C control V straight from Fallout 4 Fallout 4's AI is actually a sizable Improvement compared to Fallout 3 and New Vegas enemies can take cover hop over obstacles and blind fire when not aware of the player's position they're still dumb as a sack of rocks though and Starfield needed to make further improvements it needed to be as big a leap forward but no it's about the same the player can move so quickly in Starfield it's trivially easy to circle around enemies faster than they can turn to engage you or catch them stuck in idle animations which take an unreasonably long time to exit out of I theorized player movement speed was increased near the end of development in a desperate bid to make travel time between pois shorter but the AI wasn't altered to compensate for it leaving us with pathetically inadequate opposition that's merely speculation there's no hard evidence for it but it makes a lot of sense the alternative explanation would be that Bethesda never took the player's movement speed into account when implementing AI in the first place which is even worse whichever way you slice it it's unacceptable I was kind of hoping the greater draw distance in and Starfield would allow for more long range sniping encounters but unfortunately the distance at which you can see enemies is only a little bit farther than Fallout 4 maybe 250 or 300 M I guess it depends on exactly when the cell they're in unloads and from that distance enemies are totally incapable of fighting back just like Fallout 4 bullets are still hit scan which looks strange when you use the phased time power and notice that your bullets impact surfaces long before the visible Tracer makes it there why have fake tracers in a game with hit scan bullets is it just a confused play I know it's not a big deal and plenty of other games are guilty of the same thing but still this could have been handled a lot better maybe laser and particle weapons could have been hit scan and regular old guns could be projectile based that would differentiate them from each other guns would be harder to use on higher gravity planets due to Greater bullet drop but maybe lasers could do less damage I don't know it sounds like a fun idea and there's already a mod that does exactly what I've suggested but Starfield short draw distance puts a damper on the entire Prospect another annoyance is getting a bounty just for lifting up a pair of calipers or a bottle of Ale you don't have to steal an item to get a bounty merely pick it up I thought Bethesda was finished doing this after Oblivion but I guess not perhaps they wanted to prevent you from pulling the famous stunt you can do in Fallout New Vegas by grabbing all the energy weapons the Vang graphs are selling dropping them in the bathroom and then stealing them effortlessly they went about it in the laziest way possible by going back to the Oblivion system where you can get thrown in a dungeon for accidentally picking up a fork here's my idea have two levels of object theft Petty and serious picking up a petty object like a piece of food would only earn you a verbal warning but no Bounty unless you actually steal it picking up a serious object like a gun in a gun store would earn you a bounty that would solve the problem easily and most players would find it logical one of starfields biggest missteps in my book is making a Space game where space itself is a mostly optional afterthought nearly all quests take place on the ground and unless a space combat encounter is required for a quest you can always grab jump away from it the ship Builder mechanic gets a lot of praise and rightfully so but a racing game could have the best car tuning system in the world if the actual races were dog it wouldn't matter races that's a good idea why are there no race courses in Starfield that would give us something to do in space besides blast asteroids and Pirates also space travel should have been real time instead of done through a clunky menu if there was a minute or two of travel time between the three or four star systems of a better Starfield it would sell the idea that the settled systems are vast dangerous and difficult to navigate to complement this the economy could have had a supply and demand element if you read about a planet having a shortage of such and such resource maybe you could load up your ship with it and if you arrive fast enough take advantage of the shortage to sell the resources for a high price this would be a great way to encourage play styles that use faster and lighter ships building the biggest baddest ship possible would make you safer but also too slow to take advantage of economic opportunities or compete in races it's such a wasted opportunity that starfields economy is basically the same as every other Bethesda game we've had to offload loot in 48 hour periods waiting for vendor inventories to reset for what six games now seven it's long past time for a change here's my idea let the player buy a shop hire crew members to run it and stock the shelves with the stuff they've looted over time customers would buy up your stock and you'd receive credits investing in skills would help you earn more credits and it would be even better if you could link outposts to shops to sell some of your excess resources automatically for those who have no interest in being shopkeepers there could be thrift stores or pawn shops with unlimited credits but a very low buying price if you want more profit you'll have to seek out specialized vendors that have limited credits one thing nearly all video game economies neglect is expenses without expenses to drain your money supply eventually money becomes Irrelevant in most games Starfield is no exception with only ship building as a late game credit sync once you've built the best ship you can you never have to think about money again at least until you go through New Game Plus and lose it all a typical video game economy where you never lose money unless you buy something is akin to a first-person shooter where the enemies can't shoot you back unless you're reloading it's too easy people love seeing their money number increase but eventually that on its own loses its luster just like shooting NPCs with their AI disabled in Gmod can be fun for a while but eventually you want some challenge some push back if Starfield had regular expenses like crew member salaries or property taxes for your apartments and shops that would force players to engage with the economic system and make the whole game more integrated interconnected experience I feel the same way about starfields mostly cut survival mechanics without them there's no challenge in traveling from point A to B you just hold W and press space to get over obstacles if Starfield had only 10 planets each of them could have had unique environmental challenges to overcome maybe one planet could have had acid rain that would eat through weaker suits forcing you to take cover under rocks maybe another planet could have had really hot days and really cold nights which would necessitate purchasing and carrying two very different space suits these are just ideas off the top of my head there's plenty more things they could have done but it's understandable why they cut these mechanics with 1,000 cookie cutter planets and the expectation of being able to travel between them rapidly you can't have a survival system it would slow the game down too much and it seems like Bethesda wanted Starfield to move at a break neck Pace you can fast travel almost everywhere you're constantly acquiring and completing quests it's like Bethesda knew their game was boring as but they thought that maybe by pushing the accelerator pedal they could feed our brains enough dopamine to keep it interesting unfortunately there's still plenty of very slow awkward mechanics like Inventory management Digi picking and weapon modification that bring the pace to a grinding halt whenever you engage with them it's like driving into a brick wall speaking of driving I doubt will ever see vehicles in Starfield thanks to asset streaming issues using the player. force a speed malt command which only works properly in first person because just like Fallout 4 first and third person movement speeds are disconnected from each other they didn't fix that stay calm stay focused if you set the player speed to 1,000 around 10 times its original value you'll notice unacceptable amounts of stuttering especially when large points of interest load in my CPU is about twice as fast as the Xbox series consoles so the stutter would be even worse there unless Bethesda can somehow massively improve the streaming don't expect to see fast-moving vehicles coming from them the modding Community is going to have trouble adding vehicles too for the same reason if only Bethesda had spent all the time they wasted on procedural generation on improving asset streaming instead we could have had drivable mechs Rovers ATVs hovercraft but their priorities were in the wrong place I don't have a segue but I want to talk about Outpost building a little with any building system you have two types of players to please one type is creative they want to build beautiful structures replete with detail and the other type is more interested in the utilitarian side of things they want to make a factory that produces beneficial resources well starfields Outpost building completely fails to satisfy either crowd much like how in Fallout 4 You Could Only build Rusty decrepit Shacks in Starfield even on planets with earthlike atmospheres you have to build an airlock and create a sealed environment why at least in Fallout 4 you can place walls and Floors individually which you can't do in Starfield Fallout 4 also has flat foundations you can build upon which are sorely missed in Starfield uh all I wanted to do was build a nicel looking house to display my items but I have to resort to mods to have access to a house model it's pathetic there are decent looking pre-built houses in Starfield why can't I build something that looks like that another thing Skyrim had working book shelves 12 years ago why doesn't Starfield have them trying to place books on a shelf is a nightmare and you can't read books without picking them up so good luck getting them back in the Shelf once you're done reading there's nothing worth reading anyways it's mostly single paragraphs of old Charles Dickens novels that are no longer under copyright protection the way books look is lazy too instead of a 3D model with turning Pages like Skyrim had 12 years ago Starfield presents a generic message box it's so cheap if being more dated than a 12-year-old game wasn't bad enough in some ways Starfield is more dated than the 27-year-old Elder Scrolls 2 Daggerfall Daggerfall had rotatable 3D dungeon maps that were incredibly useful Starfield doesn't have a local map at all thankfully you can fast travel out of Interiors if you ever get stuck but why didn't Bethesda add a 3D map to Starfield if making a working Auto map was so impossibly difficult hell they could apply this idea to exteriors too why not make the map a 3D render of the landscape from above instead of a useless Point Cloud again Skyrim did this better over a decade ago the more I think about Starfield the more disappointed I get I can't even get angry it's just sad we waited 8 years for a game that is at best barely on par with Skyrim and Fallout 4 and in most areas it's worse it's depressing that all those years were wasted building a boring procedural generation system and Bland NASA Punk art assets chasing the L latest graphical Trends is unfortunately what makes these games take so damn long now this never would have happened it's kind of like wishing Oblivion hadn't made the mistake of going down the full voice acting path but I really wish that Bethesda had done what no other AAA game developer had the stones to do and deliberately placed itself 5 or 10 years behind in the graphical arms race fact is they're already behind despite trying their best it would have been a genius move if Fallout 4 had released with the same graphical quality as Skyrim they could have made a 60f PS game on consoles and nobody would have ever had to hear the word pre-combine the only downsides for us players are no God Rays what a terrible loss maybe there would be fewer Shadow casting lights oh no it doesn't sound too bad does it it sure would have saved Bethesda tons of money because they wouldn't have had to increase their team size the only problem for them would be public criticism over how bad the game looks but if there's anyone who could put a positive spin on a game having outdated Graphics it's Todd Howard he could sell buckets of sand on a beach and people would buy it I can easily imagine him talking about how 60 FPS is a significant improvement over 30 and how much better msaa looks compared to shader-based anti-aliasing methods and he'd be right if Bethesda abandoned this insane pursuit of the latest Graphics techniques that would allow them to refine older methods and Achieve better performance and image quality if Starfield had the graphics of Fallout 4 maybe it could have released in 2022 like it was originally slated to and maybe Bethesda could have gotten closer to achieving their original Vision if they didn't have to worry about keeping up with other Studios it's fun to dream about what could have been but eventually you have to wake up and smell the turd over the past decade or so Bethesda has made bad but understandable in hindsight decisions that have crippled them they've messed up in many ways that I didn't have time to cover in this video and some thoughts I'm saving for my world building video that will eventually come later in this year I need to space out my time dealing with Starfield because I'm in danger of nodding off to sleep if I play it for too long I hope you like this video there's something more positive coming next week toodles everybody nine patrons wow I barely have enough space to list you all

Channel: Pancuronium

Views: 66,424

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Id: rO0DvyfLAeo

Length: 17min 9sec (1029 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 23 2024