The 'Starfield' Situation Is Just Getting Sad...

I'm sorry everyone I have to milk Starfield again in this video it's going to be tough but we'll get through it together and I promise the term milking will make sense in just a moment I I chose that word strategically I've been trying to figure out what the deal with Starfield is because we all like talking about it but I'm finding less and less people that actually like playing it like it's one of those weird games where bizarrely enough the entertainment value seems to primarily be coming from talking about the game instead of playing it which is pretty rare like other games have been like that like maybe Skull and Bones uh which hasn't even launched yet is one such game or perhaps like for a while cyberpunk 2077 was like that but here's the realization and that is that Bethesda has actually become unintentionally a LOL cow and if you don't know what the term lolcow is it's basically an internet term that's a person or group of people laugh at for actions they take despite not trying to be funny they may try to take themselves seriously but are often milked like a cow for Laughs without their knowledge and this is a term that's often applied to people like boogie2988 or Darkside Phil or Chris chan people that the internet likes to watch and finds entertaining but not for the reasons that the Creator thinks they're being found entertaining and the best example of this is actually if you go to Starfield bu steam page you can do this yourself right now to prove I'm not making this up and if you go just to like recent reviews which now are mixed but that's kind of beside the point if you go here this looks pretty standard but there's a couple of things I want to call out and we talked about this on my live stream and on my second Channel already if you're not subscribed over there you definitely should we just passed 50k so shout out to everybody who's an OG over there but it's not too late to join join us over there subscribe links in the description but I want to point these things out first of all these reviews are with like 75 hours 170 hours 150 hours 29 hours 140 hours 20 hours like these are not people who played it for 10 minutes and are like Sony ponies and so then they uninstalled it and refunded it and now wrote it negative review these are people that have actually played the entire game possibly multiple times through and have found the game wanting and they left very thoughtful reviews and I encourage you to go through and read a lot of these because some of them are very very witty frankly and very entertaining but I want to call attention to a couple of them this one from Square zero was particularly entertaining they had 100 hours on record when they wrote this review okay and they wrote this very thoughtful thing where they describe things like I never thought in my life that I would write a negative review for a bgs game the magic of bgs games is it makes you feel big in a big world this game makes you feel small in a small world that's pretending to be big that magic feeling of go anywhere be anyone do whatever you want choose any side you desire is gone we love bgs games because the world the freedom and the lore makes up for whatever the main story lacks nobody buys bgs games for the awesome story we buy them for the awesome world the freedom the lore we get games to make the worlds our worlds and that's bethesda's magic and it's magic that this game doesn't have this game just doesn't have any of that it does in theory but not in practice the story line is very linear and forced your actions don't really matter at all you can't help any faction win over any other in any kind of meaningful way you cannot shape the game World The Game's world is small pretending to be big see big space load screen into a small area but there are lots of small areas and load screens the game somehow feels smaller than Fallout 4 in previous titles the story was an accessory to the game World in this game the game world is an accessory to the story and he goes on and on and describes his frustrations with the game very very well and regardless of whether you agree with these frustrations he's had with Starfield I think at the very least you can acknowledge that this is somebody who played the game is a bgs fan and just did not connect with Starfield and he's voicing his frustrations in the form of this review so what would you expect a multi-billion dollar Corporation to do like accept the criticism as constructive criticism and move on maybe try to learn from it add to the game through DLC expansions polish whatever and improve the game I mean you could expect that or or they could go and leave a passive aggressive reply basically saying that the reviewer is wrong which is what they chose to do a Bethesda team member a Bethesda customer support team member specifically that has the developer tag so they're officially associated with the game replied and said greetings thank you for taking the time to leave a review for Starfield we're sorry that you do not landing on different planets and are finding many of them empty some of starfields planets are meant to be empty by Design but that's not boring you're WR wrong quote when the astronauts went to the moon there was nothing there they certainly weren't bored yeah yeah no if you find Starfield boring um you are being an idiot because the astronauts that actually went to the moon weren't bored when they went so you're just being a whiny pants you know what I would say to that Bethesda customer support person um those people were on the actual freaking Moon they weren't playing a video game that's supposed to be fun like of course it's a different feeling you know what Fly Me to the Moon uh let me dance Among the Stars let me see what spring is like on Jupiter and Mars and I would bet you that I will have a good time but that'll be because I'm actually in space not playing a video game where just to get there I had to sit through loading screens and put up with tons of other clunk and Jank like this is so weird to me it is literally just an employee of Bethesda whether they're outsourced or not doesn't really matter but they are an employee basically telling the customer that they're wrong and the number one rule of business is the customers always right like they are literally getting one of the most barebones basic aspects of consumer facing business completely backwards oh you didn't like our product well you're stupid it's amazing they go on to say the intention of starfields exploration is to evoke a feeling of smallness in players they achieved that and make you feel overwhelmed that's the opposite okay you can continue to explore and find worlds that do have resources un need or hidden outposts to look through and then they go on they repeat all of this stuff which is just like typical uh feature padding where they just talk about how great the game is and they say they're still actively working on the game you can provide feedback through this link blah blah blah and you might think this is just a one-off weird comment but there's other reviews like this this one with 75 hours on is frustrated that the game has a boring story story in a boring world and they actually responded to this and said we appreciate you taking the time to review blah blah blah if you feel that things are getting boring there is so much more to do than just the main mission there are many side missions where you can learn more about the people and story of Starfield you can take time to explore and then they go into the same padding of features and things I have a feeling that these are all chat GPT responses where like they ask chat GPT to read this review and then provide a counter while calling out like cool features of the game and then they just copy and pasted that because for one people don't talk like this and two I don't know how else to put it other than that this would take a while to type out and they responded to dozens upon dozens if not hundreds of these comments if you go through these like all of these negative ones they've responded to reading all of this and then responding with like a piece by piece response you know what let's actually do an experiment right now I'm going to copy this review into chat GPT and we're going to see if it spits out something similar okay here we are in chat GPT we're going to use 3.5 for this CU it'll be a little bit faster and I'm just going to say can you write a response to this game review while calling attention to the maybe features and strengths of Starfield and putting a positive spin on on it and then we're going to paste the whole review and hit submit and see what it does straight up this is what it spits out okay I understand your concerns about Starfield and it's essential to provide a balanced perspective on the game while it's true that Starfield has received mixed reviews there are some aspects of the game that can be appreciated World building graphics and Aesthetics uh ship customization certain quest lines potential for improvement uh it's understandable that as a bethesa fan you may have higher expectations and it can be disappointing when a highly anticipated game falls short however it's worth considering that the game May evolve and improve over time dude this is straight up like the exact same thing I think this is what they did I'm going to add on to this though let's see if we can get it even closer can you write a response in a professional and PR style to this game review calling attention Okay let's see if this if this works uh save and submit try it again we appreciate your feedback and the time you've taken to share your thoughts on Starfield epes game studios we value the input of our dedicate dude this is straight up exactly what it is this is definitely a case of chat GPT or or some other AI being used to respond to these comments like very very quickly with like zero thought whatsoever and I don't think they even like proof Reddit because there's a couple of these replies where there's some like little clunky typos in how they phrase things and they don't correct it in like any of the responses it looks like they're just copying and pasting it like in this one you can see it says there are so many layers to Starfield that you will find things you've never knew were possible after playing for hundreds of hours so I don't know if this was like a typo on chat gpt's part I don't think they can really make typos with the way it works but maybe like this was some sort of speech to text where they screwed it up and just didn't proofread it either way it's really really weird to have typos like that and these are copy and pasted across a few of these responses it's just really really weird but the point of all of this is that it makes Bethesda and Xbox in turn look really really bad when the customer service team is doing stuff like this basically calling their fans and customers either just liars or like stupid for feeling the way that they feel like oh you were bored while playing our games well astronauts weren't bored in space so therefore you're stupid like it's insane but it's not the first time that they've done this type of embarrassing thing if you've watched the internet historian video on the fall of Fallout 76 um or just the fall of 76 amazing video if somehow you've not watched it yet you absolutely should but in this they go through a bunch of the stuff that this customer service team did back then and it's all sorts of craziness with like people getting refused for refunds even though they qualified under their policies just getting rejected because they didn't want to submit the refunds or the other stuff where like if you got banned from the game for an exploit or maybe um using like a money glitch to get extra caps in the game to be able to buy stuff they would ban you and if you ask to be unbanned because maybe you were falsely banned or you just don't think it was fair they would require you to write like an essay but Bethesda wasn't satisfied with just Banning people no they're a progressive company Big Ideas big brain they wanted to give a Road to Redemption God so support sent out this email to Players Court cheating we would be willing to accept an essay on why the use of third party cheat software is detrimental to an online game Community it's the same team that did that like the same company the same group The Bethesda customer service team that embarrassed the crap out of them 5 years ago with Fallout 76 is doing this same insane cringe stuff now and at that point it's not a matter of like oopsy one person went awall and did this and maybe other employees joined in because they thought it was funny like this is a pattern for over 5 years now where every time they get in hot water they have a disdain for their customers and they treat them poorly and like talk down to them and lecture them like oh you got banned for for this thing and you think that was unfair well write me an essay and maybe I'll consider unbanning you like go screw yourself dude what are you talking about or this you found our game boring well astronauts when they were in space weren't bored as if that's a response like this is a company culture problem that's been consistent for many years now and at this point I think I've just accepted that it's really really freaking funny and I'm not going to uh pretend as though it's not they are masters of accidental cringe and it's not necessarily just Todd and and his Mary band of henchmen that do funny stuff I mean yeah I think some of the design decisions within Starfield were laughable certainly but I think it's a broader company issue and I don't know if that lands on Todd's shoulders as the head of the company or if it's some middle managers that are doing this but it's really bad it's really bad and very stupid but listen at the end of the day when we're playing Starfield and actually trying to enjoy the game all that really matters is if you have a good time with it and you have fun and some people honestly have had a good time and have had fun and for them this is their game of the year and for that and for those people I'm very happy for them I hope that everybody has a game that they're just blown away by every single year because when you have that it's a really really remarkable feeling but there is no doubt at this point that the more people have played Starfield the more and more they've become disenfranchised and disappointed with the things that they're discovering the holes in the design the weird like outdated elements that just are lacking frankly compared to other games I mean one of the biggest and most damaging things for Starfield I think this year was just the fact that we got cyberpunk 2077 2.0 update and the Phantom Liberty expansion in the same year I think that made this look so ancient in comparison cuz you just compare it and they're not even in the same ballpark they look like they're from two completely separate console Generations even though they're technically and literally not cyberpunk was built to also run on the PS4 and Xbox One and granted they didn't run very well over there I get that and the 2.0 update doesn't even run over there anyways but still like this is supposed to be the next Generation Bethesda game and it's only running on this hardware and it runs way way worse is limited by all of these constant load screens little bitty Fishbowl areas to explore and it only really works if you don't go full Truman Show on it and start exploring beyond the barriers and then realize that you're just a small guy in a small world and like that review said it doesn't work because this entire game is built on giving you the feeling of being a small character with a big impact in a basically Limitless Universe of Worlds to explore but instead every time you try to play the game you are reminded that you're actually a small player in a very very small Fishbowl and so it constantly butts heads in terms of theming and what you actually experience while playing and that's why I person personally think Starfield would have been much better served if they had gone with like 3 four five six planets and then really built those out made the massive seamless while you explore and then ignored the extra thousand planets that frankly don't add much to it and I think most people would agree with that maybe sound off in the comments if you agree I think Starfield would have been much better served if they had stopped trying to do this sort of procedural thing and just focused on what they could actually manage to do well cuz these copy and pasted locations and points of interest just frankly aren't very interesting in the context of the entire game and the little bitty things and frustrations like the traversal the fact I have to run around on foot when I have a literal freaking spaceship there that could fly I mean how did it get there it flew but I can't fly it myself around the planet because Todd didn't think that was a good idea did you did you sorry I'm getting hated I need to calm down or the other thing that made Starfield really look at outdated was the drop of the star engine demo from the guys over at Star Citizen and I know Star Citizen is kind of a meme at this point I totally totally understand I've done plenty of videos on it but this is a demo showing you what actually works in the game in the engine what they're able to do technologically with everything that they've developed with like their $600 million raised they show seamless space down to surface transitions with streaming in entire cities metropolises s is that a word I don't even know and running this seamlessly and then they go on and this is a full 20 minute seamless demo showing the camera sweeping Inside Planet interior showing NPCs walking around and then sweeping past that across the planet and then they pull out of the planet and show like if I even go like double speed on this and just show you how crazy the data streaming Tech is like they're able to run this without skipping a beat maybe an occasional frame drop or this or that you can go right into the ship seamlessly without needing a load screen or anything and all of this just screams the future real-time biome generation the camera is running in real time again no load screens just warping to the other side of the actual planet and this again just shows how freaking outdated the the creation engine is in comparison I mean it's just frankly not even close and all of the other stuff they show with the dynamic biomes with the the seamless transitions between not just planet to space and space to Planet but also between planets there's this moment here where they literally warp to a different planet and without a separate load screen without taking a break without concept art being flashed up they just warp to a different planet and zoom in right on it and travel down to that planet surface right here and make it look like it's nothing right on to like a straight up Empire Strikes Back I forget what the city's called The Floating whatever Cloud City I don't remember it's been a while since I saw Star Wars but like look at that it's crazy and it just reminds everybody that Starfield can't do that and you know I app appreciate that Starfield was ambitious I get that but as time has gone on and as we're seeing videos like this as demos are being dropped as we get expansions like Phantom Liberty it just shows us that what Todd was able to deliver was not anywhere near on the level of what people were hoping for and were dreaming of and it it's just like another punch in the gut for uh those Among Us who were excited for Starfield and really hoping that it would be another Amazing Adventure game but instead now a lot of bethesda's most hardcore fans I've seen kind of turn a little bit and instead of Defending Bethesda sycophantically and impassioned uh as they normally would they've instead turned and been like you know what Starfield it's got problems and I think we've got some some things to talk about and I think that that is great for the broader Community but it's something I never saw coming even after Fallout 4 with a lot of issues there and with Fallout 76 even a game which is I would argue still pretty rough to this day but some people have found you know enjoyment with it but even the most hardcore bgs fans have defended Fallout 76 through thick and thin and with Starfield this is the straw that broke the camels back and a lot of them are deciding to start calling it out and I want to be clear that that is exactly what should be happening that's how you grow as a community that's how you hold your favorite dev Studios to higher standards s and help them grow and improve if you pretend like starfields fine it it's not going to help anything but if you call it out and say listen this is just not where it needs to be for 2023 you can do better than this and frankly you should doesn't matter if it's on Game Pass or not you should do better than this that's what's going to help them improve and that's what's going to make the eldr scroll 6 even better and I hope that they pull it off but frankly the thing that should really wake Bethesda up more than anything else is just simply the fact that when I did a survey um and I've talked about this in previous videos on Starfield and I asked my community at least what they thought of the Elder Scrolls 6 after playing Starfield 45% of you said that you were less excited for the Elder Scroll 6 after playing Starfield and that is such a damning stat I don't even know how to put it into words if it's not scary to you to begin with like that should be the biggest wake-up call ever for bgs and yet I feel like they're just pretending as though everything is fine and that's the bigger concern with these horrifically cringy responses to negative reviews from customers is that it shows that Bethesda is not really taking negative feedback very seriously they're dismissing it and excusing it as either the the stances of ignoramuses people who are just not aware that astronauts when they were in space weren't that bored so for them to say that exploring a a moon themselves is boring in a video game is ridiculous they're just coming up with excuses to not have to take the critique seriously and that is such a red flag I can't even put it into words I mean I I get crap every once in a while cuz I like to uh play my odd Assassin's Creed game you know I I like some Ubisoft titles and I have mentioned that I like them when I do cuz I'm going to tell tell you what I actually think people like L Luke likes Ubisoft cringe I totally get it and honestly it is a little funny but with Ubisoft when I've called them out like with Assassin's Creed Valhalla I've called that game a travesty of open world design is is I think exactly what I said in my review and I phrased that to them and I explained my opinion of the game to them and they said you know what we're upset and we're we're frustrated that you didn't like the game we get that but you know we hope that you like our fure projects and we'll take your feedback and go back to the team with it and um hopefully we can improve I've never heard Bethesda ever say anything close to that every time they get a critique it's always well you know haters going to hate and that is such a terrible way of dealing with criticism that's meant to be constructive and that's why I really do feel that Bethesda at this point has become just a glorified multi-billion doll law cow like they don't realize that they're being funny and entertaining for all the wrong reasons and they take themselves very very seriously even though everybody else is laughing and they don't seem to be in on the joke and I I know that at this point it's like can we stop talking about Starfield and I agree with that but you know what if you clicked on this video even after all this time with Starfield being out in the Zeitgeist and everybody talking about it I think that just reaffirms that a lot of us still find find the game and Bethesda as a company entertaining but not for the reasons we should considering they are a game development Studio we find them funny and entertaining for all the wrong reasons which should be a wakeup call for Todd and everybody over there and I wish them the best because a decade ago they were making some amazing games and they've had some stumbling blocks and they've had some oopsies and I'm afraid that if they continue to take themselves too seriously and refuse to accept criticism and and critiques it's only going to be downhill from here which is tough to imagine but uh wouldn't put it past them you know what I think that'll do it I am ready to not talk about Starfield for a while um Tuesday GTA 6 is being announced so I will look forward to talking about that and a bunch of other stuff that's coming up with game reviews and previews and stuff I'm doing behind the scenes um it's going to be a crazy month so uh just buckle up I think December is going to be a fun one so I will see you in the next video thank you to everybody who's watching and subscribing and all that make sure to follow me on Tik Tok we make those now I'm hip like the other youths so make sure to follow me there just look up Luke Stevens um on Tik Tok and of course subscribe to my second Channel again we just hit 50,000 Subs over there we're on our way to 100 and I'd love to have you there while we're still pretty little channel so head over there say hi I'd love to have you but with that thank you for watching I love you all and I'll see you in the next video hugs and kisses bye-bye

Channel: Luke Stephens

Views: 569,935

Keywords: luke stephens, starfield update, starfield, todd howard, bethsda game studios, luke stephens starfield

Id: prXWnZN5wsk

Length: 26min 2sec (1562 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 02 2023