"I can guess what it takes to make a Hostess Twinkie, but I don't work in the factory"
apparently this is in response to a few threads on Reddit flaming Starfield—in general, it’s been rather interesting to see Bethesda take what i can only describe as a “try to debate Starfield to popularity” approach with the game’s skeptics in the past month or two. not entirely sure it’s a winning strategy, personally.
While this is true, it is a terrible way of debating with the public.
And while users may not be able to understand game design decision and background, they can well be aware that those decisions brought to a really bad game.
Not only that, but their blindness is the result of developers choices on what they share. If you don’t want people making incorrect assumptions, give them more info. Don’t tell them to just forego having any opinion on the matter.
If it looks like a decision was made cynically, prove otherwise, don’t just say ‘No, you’re wrong, you just don’t know!’
But gamers don’t actually need to understand game design or why a certain choice was made.
I said this in another thread: if it’s a shit design, it’s a shit design. Knowing why the shit design was made does not suddenly make it not shit. In fact, I do not care to know why you made that decision in the first place - if it’s bad, then just own up to it and either try to fix the issue or actually resolve to do better next time.
I don’t love how this is phrased, but it’s not wrong.
The harsh reality of creative industries is that people are gonna be uninformed, dickish smartasses on social media (and… you know, traditional media, too), but they don’t owe the creators anything, so if they don’t like a thing they don’t need to be right about why they like it.
But hey, I also don’t resent any creator for venting reasonably on social media about this stuff every now and then. I think it’s a dumb, potentially career-ending thing to do, but I get it.
Look, it’s very simple - even a cocaine addled exec can see. You remove a fair deal of your gameplay time, say 1/3, and focus budget and development time on quality control and polish. I.e quality over quantity. This is a matter of management and Bethesda’s management is dumb. It’s not rocket science, it’s just business.
Oh cry me a river. These hacks don’t deserve the pity they’re clearly trying to win because they have already proven they don’t know how to make a technologically sound game. Every single one of their games has suffered from save-breaking glitches, and yeah I might be one of the unlucky ones to have experienced at least one in all of their games but I can count the amount of developers that have given me a similar experience on one fist (yes, I mean “fist”, not hand).
I have an up-to-date system, more than meet the requirements for this flaming turd of a game and even among the insane amount of loading screens, there are still frequent hang-ups from the game needing to load while walking through a plaza while the game is running on my SSD. That’s simply not good enough. The last time I experienced such behaviour in a game was when I was playing on a potato over a decade ago or playing online with abysmal internet.
Critics don’t have to be developers to be able to spot in what ways a game is bad and neither does the general public. This is very different from “I don’t like this so it’s bad.”. This is a case of “It runs like ass, the writing is boring and the traversal of their mostly-empty crafted universe is little more than a lag-hung menu with a stupid amount of layers to access what you’re actually looking for and a whole ton of loading screens and thus it is bad.”. They haven’t crafted some grand open universe like they advertised, they made a bunch of levels, added a slow fast travel system and a standard fast travel system and called it quits. They’re now finally being called out as the bunch of half-asses they really are and they have more than earned it.
“We were riding the limits of what was possible” is a common excuse given. Then maybe don’t bite off more than you can chew.
“Overcome technology itself”. A bad craftsman blames his tools. Maybe stop using an engine that isn’t fit for purpose. The “Creation” engine - or as we might as well call it, Gamebryo - has long been cited as the cause of many problems and barely workable. Take time to retrain your developers to a user-friendly engine and you’ll quickly make up the lost time in efficiency but they insist on holding on to that dinosaur of an engine.
As a member of the general public, I can’t say I know how to make a game, let alone a good one but given the constant stutters, mostly empty world, boring writing, frequent instances of forcing grind to pad play time and ever-increasing tedium in their gameplay loop, I have to assume that Bugthesda doesn’t either. The fact they saw to set team members on reviews instead of fixing all the problems with their games, I have to say their priorities aren’t in the right place and the ones who are “disconnected” are Bethesda who seem to be under the delusion that they’ll get nothing but praise just for releasing a game, no matter the state it’s in.
Well I don’t know how to make a game, but I do know how to write interesting characters and stories, and Emil clearly doesn’t, so something something glass houses, Bethesda.
Just like I don’t need to be a ship captain to tell when the titanic is sinking. It doesn’t matter how it’s made, a product is bad if your model audience doesn’t like it. Starfield isn’t some avant-gard experimental piece, it was meant to appeal to the masses. He can’t use the excuse of opinionated craftsmanship to excuse its poor quality.
I wish people knew more about the way business works in general. Focusing on quality of product or service is a strategy only the smallest businesses can afford. In the big leagues it’s all about triggering purchasing behavior and minimizing price sensitivity by using well-proven psychological techniques to sell cheap minimally-viable and soon to be obsolete products to as many people as possible, and sell them the solutions to the problems left in the original product as “optional” add-ons. Developers all want to make good games, but the businesses they work for couldn’t care less since they make their money in other ways. Welcome to the 21t century, consumers!
Sounds like a terrible business model that deserves the problems it runs into. If a company doesn’t prioritize the quality of its offerings, why should anyone give them a cent?
Yeah but businesses typically don’t go out and rub that in their customers faces. That’s basically what most of the complaints are about: Bethesda should just shut the fuck up and swallow their pride. Is some/most of the stuff people throw at them unfair? Likely. Is it completely unwarranted? No. Should they defend it? Also no.
A lot of these comments from developers read to me like “We really tried guys, but you don’t know what it was like.” Given this is usually without commenting that industry norms are toxic since that can get you blacklisted. Their marketing department doing damage control is of course way less sympathetic to me.
I would consider Todd Howard to be part of development (since he directs the creative and narrative angle, from what I understand).
He defended bad performance with “get better hardware”. He defended criticism of the content with “you play the game wrong”.
Both are bullshit “excuses”. The first one was even debunked by modders who showed that there was potential for optimization. And modders are far more limited than engine devs. The game doesn’t look ugly, but there are far better looking games with more scene complexity out there that run better.
And “you play it wrong” is bullshit because if enough people play it wrong to have an effect on the rating of the game, then the game is badly designed. Part of game design is making sure the game explains itself or subtly pulls players in the right direction. Either they failed with that, or there simply is no clear direction. But that’s not the players fault.
Starfield has it’s negatives for sure, but he has a point about what the communities have been like (including here on Lemmy).
There have been so many armchair gamedevs who overnight know intricacies of engines, how programming works, how 8 year old computers should be able to run brand new AAA titles at 120fps. It’s been just exhausting reading these conversations.
For example, one thing I read again and again was “Starfield just wasn’t optimized, they easily could have reduced memory and bumped framerates”. Which any actual programmer will immediately feel a pit of dread in their stomach because we’ve been asked to reduce ram usage or speed something up, and that is a daunting task in our simple little apps - let alone a major AAA game.
Again I’m not saying Starfield was perfect. It has a lot of flaws, biggest one for me is that it felt like a game that came out 10 years ago in terms of how it played. But it didn’t deserve the overall destruction it received online. Any developer knows that the only people who can say “how” their game could have been done better were the ones who actually wrote it.
For example, one thing I read again and again was “Starfield just wasn’t optimized, they easily could have reduced memory and bumped framerates”. Which any actual programmer will immediately feel a pit of dread in their stomach because we’ve been asked to reduce ram usage or speed something up, and that is a daunting task in our simple little apps - let alone a major AAA game.
This thing in particular was picked apart by actual devs in news articles and editorials that showed that Bethesda really didn’t optimize the game at all along with all the technical reasoning and proof showing how it could have been improved.
It’s not just the players, who for the most part, have been citing those articles when they make that particular critique. I mean, shit, they haven’t even used their own texture compression system for the last few games they made, and that’s so easy even someone with minimal modding knowledge can fix because the game already has the tools to make it work better.
Please share these articles you speak of. From developers with real world game dev experience. Without pointing me to some 2 hour rambling YouTube video.
And do you seriously think that someone with minimal modding knowledge can “fix” texture compression and the actual devs of the game hadn’t known or thought of doing so too? Say what you will about the Starfield producers and management but I absolutely 100% guarantee you if they chose not to use that feature, it was for very good reasons.
Say what you will about the Starfield producers and management but I absolutely 100% guarantee you if they chose not to use that feature, it was for very good reasons.
Not the original commenter, but this whole argument you put here falls completely on it’s face since we know that modders HAVE done this and haven’t had any issues (or at the very least have been able to solve said issues), if compressing the textures and whatnot actually broke the game then the modders wouldn’t have been able to do it without breaking the game
Even if they supposedly had a reason, then it was a bad one
When some rando with a mod package plugging into an undocumented ABI can dramatically improve the performance… Yeah, it’s not optimized at all. Don’t let them excuse themselves from due diligence.
To be fair, this is an old, old engine with several generation defining blockbusters making use of it. Not to mention the massive modding communities who’ve probably spent more collective hours fighting with the engine over the past few years than Bethesda has.
Yeah, I can imagine the frustration of seeing people who don’t know anything about what happened during development blame you as a dev for something that may have been design decisions or budgetary or time constraints that you had no say in or control over.
“So sure, you can dislike parts of a game,” he concludes. “You can hate on a game entirely. But don’t fool yourself into thinking you know why it is the way it is (unless it’s somehow documented and verified), or how it got to be that way (good or bad).”
“Chances are, unless you’ve made a game yourself, you don’t know who made certain decisions; who did specific work; how many people were actually available to do that work; any time challenges faced; or how often you had to overcome technology itself (this one is HUGE).”
This is a totally fair take. He explicitly says it’s fine to not like the game, but just don’t try to pretend you know what happened on the back end to make it the way it was, because you’re probably gonna misplace blame.
I get the frustration here, but it’s also kind of… idk? A “No, you just don’t understand!” response. Everyone who works in a white-collar job knows what it’s like. Everyone has different theories about why that project failed, but nobody knows the objective truth. Nobody can present a “documented and verified” list of reasons for why the project failed, not even the lead designer here. They can guess, but never reach the truth. He could repeat what he always did without changing anything in the next project, and succeed due to different circumstances, plain good luck.
You know, it’s funny. My assumptions, which I think I’ve made clear are assumptions when I talk about them, are that Starfield is what it is largely because of technical limitations. I think, if I’m wrong, the remaining possible answers are far more disappointing. Are the side quests bad because that’s what the engine allows them to feasibly build? That sucks; they should ditch their engine. Are the side quests bad because the designers don’t know how to design good quests? That’s worse. You can extend these kinds of assumptions to the way space travel works, the way their conversation system works, etc.
I feel like the core complaint that every person has regardless of liking the game or not is that the travel system is just absurd and inconsistent. It is so weird how I go to my ship, pull up to orbit a planet, can see the planet from my ship but I cannot select it. Sometimes, you can! But most of the time, you cannot. This means the player then has to pull up the map and land on the planet from there, even though a simple interact to land would be much more seamless and immersive.
The map issue goes deeper, literally. Opening the map on a planet brings you to the ground-view of it, so you have to pull up one or two sub-menu levels to go from ground-view to planet view to solar system to galaxy. Literally, consistently navigating through menus - heaven forbid you pull up one menu too far because you’ll have to start over.
It shouldn’t feel quite so bad, but each interaction of these takes like 5-7 seconds. Doing that over, and over, and over again? That’s a symptom of the game as well, have you ever been in a space fight and held down E? Then you have experienced the pain of leaving the cockpit for that insanely long animation, only to have immediately sit through the insanely long sit back down animation while your ship is being shot up.
The game is full of little hold ups like this that compound into something that just feels awful to navigate.
Don’t get me wrong; I liked my first playthrough of Starfield. I actually enjoyed it quite a bit, despite these issues. But I was working through these issues. And then NG+ came around and stole everything from me (understandably with the lore). I just couldn’t bring myself to do it again. Philosophy wise, the game has some great decisions that are impactful and raise. Gameplay wise these are pretty terrible decisions.
I did everything my first playthrough, I checked out every planet every quest every follower (not the dialogue for those quests, obviously). For the most part I liked my time but the base building and the homestead quests since those seem mostly broken (gas vents were never discoverable for me). A number of hours in on NG+ for the main quests having to recollect everything… What was the point?
No, I didn’t get lucky with a crazy NG+. I shouldn’t have to replay a game 12 times to “get to the fun stuff”
I haven’t finished my first run through the game yet, but I do keep hearing about NG+. There are all of these factions to check out, some of which should be opposed to happening in the same playthrough as certain other factions, and they built a game around NG+, so why not have you commit to one faction in the course of a shorter game, and then build the opportunity to play through the other factions into NG+?
I’m not hating my time with Starfield so far, but hardly a few minutes go by while I’m playing before its obvious shortcomings annoy me. Most of them I think (and hope) I can easily attribute to their ancient tech that they probably ought to throw straight in the garbage.
The thing is that Fallout: New Vegas used the same engine, and it proved that you can do a much more interesting and engaging story and quests with Creation Engine compared to what Bethesda is capable of. Sure, Creation is still a bit of a piece of shit when it comes to engines, but it can be used for creating complex storylines etc. and not just “go there and push a button” or “go there and kill a person”
True, but in particular, I’m referring to the non-faction quests. It’s been a while since I’ve played New Vegas, but I can’t remember if that game even had the equivalent of Starfield’s “activities”. Those quests are often so bad that I wonder why they’re in the game at all.
I was assuming this was a quote from an interview with a leading question like “what do you think about players who claim to know what went wrong in the development of Starfield?” And the quote was out of context to make him look bad.
But this was a Twitter thread. It’s a completely unforced error, no one was making him do this.
Simple explanations like “we felt we were under X constraints” or “our engine didn’t handle the loading times as well as we had hoped” would be just fine.
Instead, they just seem to be telling the players they’re wrong for disagreeing with many of the design decisions made
This particular dev didn’t. But the Starfield team at large has been blowing up the internet recently telling people that don’t like the game that their opinions are wrong.
Emil Pagliarulo (guy quoted in the article), lead on Starfield, is known to have this attitude towards players. He’s also known to not like design documents, which explains the massively disconnected design of recent Bethesda games, especially Starfield.
Emil is one of the giant reasons their games have been the way they have been lately and it’s why he’s being a baby about it
Without delving into the question over how good the game is, this sounds like a company that simply has the wrong processes in place. A case of “working hard” instead of “working smart.” As a result, they waste a lot of time and resources on things that ultimately don’t matter. I’m sure the person in question worked really really hard on the game, but it’s mostly pointless and ineffectively effort.
…this sounds like a company that simply has the wrong processes in place
LOL! OMG, I totally thought you were talking about their process for dealing with negative press/reviews. What’s funny is that your comment basically applies to both your point and mine and that kinda reinforces the point for both versions…
I genuinely wonder how much it matters though. From online discussions you’ll see that Baldur’s Gate 3 is beloved by fans and held up as a benchmark for community engagement and listening to player feedback. It won GotY, had a launch far beyond anything the devs expected, and got incredible rave reviews.
But if you look at the top 20 best-selling games of the year, Starfield is #10 despite a lukewarm reception, numerous issues, and being accessible via Xbox Gamepass, while BG3 isn’t even on the list.
I think it really brings into perspective just how small a minority the people who post online about these things are, regardless of platform. Maybe the Gamers don’t know jack about your job, or maybe all their criticisms are 100% right. If it sells millions of copies either way, who cares?
Dunno if this is the case for wherever you got your sales figures from, but a lot of the places that track best-selling games only track physical releases. Or they might also track digital releases if the publisher provides them to whoever is doing that tracking, but they often don’t. BG3 does not have a physical release (yet).
And a quick google seems to back that up. According to Phil Spencer the other day, Starfield has had “over 12 million players”. I’m assuming this is a combined figure of sales and people who downloaded it through game pass. So, less than 12 million copies sold, and probably a good deal under that cuz I assume game pass would be a pretty decent chunk of those players reached. If the top result when googling is accurate, BG3 has sold 22+ million copies. Prolly enough to crack that top 20, I’d guess.
Here’s my source. It’s the latter case, they use digital sales figures from the companies that provide them.
You raise a good point: if Larian aren’t sharing sales figures then it’s not possible to definitively compare them. I don’t think the 22M figure is very credible (as the other commenter said it doesn’t match up with the data we do have regarding player count/copies sold, and came completions) but even 5-7M copies sold sounds like it would place BG3 on the list. There’s enough bleakness in the gaming scene as it is, so I’m glad to hear it might not be quite as bleak as I thought.
In this case, I am almost positive Larian just isn’t providing those sales figures. Before I didn’t spend more than a minute googling how many copies sold, so 22M may definitely be too high, but I would honestly still be surprised if Starfield outsold BG3 at all, even if 11.5M of Starfield’s 12M players were purchases, and not game pass, which is a super generous estimate.
But I have more than a minute now, so let’s look at steamdb. There are 4 analytics things that provide owner estimations there. The spread on these estimations is insane, ranging from 5.5M to 27.7M. But the two middle ones estimate sales at 13.3 and 14.9M. Both are higher than the 12M players Starfield has reached through both sales and gamepass. But. These are steam specific numbers for BG3. It also launched on GOG, though I’m sure those numbers are nowhere near steams numbers. More importantly, it also launched on ps5, and who knows how many copies sold there.
Or maybe the achievement extrapolation method is the most accurate and it’s between 7 and 8 million copies sold. There is still a very good chance even those lower numbers are beating Starfield in overall sales.
Regardless, this is all some nebulous as fuck guesswork, but I feel like it’s more likely than not that BG3 straight up outsold Starfield. And even if it did not, Starfield had years of hype behind it, and Bethesda has been one of the biggest names in gaming for many years now. Larian was a niche studio making niche games (yes, the D:OS series was quite succesful, I would stay say they were niche though) so the fact that they’re even in competition with the Bethesda juggernauts these days is quite impressive for them.
If the top result when googling is accurate, BG3 has sold 22+ million copies.
I would not trust that number. Larian just put out an infographic only days ago saying that 1.3M people completed the game. Using achievement data, we can extrapolate that out to somewhere between 7M and 8M copies sold.
Y’know, it’s possible people buy a game to play offline where you don’t get achievements. The numbers Larian put out could also include EA purchases from like, 5 years ago.
Achievement data is a percentage. Since there were no giveaways, PS+, or Game Pass offerings to skew the data, there’s no reason to believe that the percentage would change across other platforms or across people playing the game offline. The achievement we’re using is the one for beating the game, as is the finite number of 1.3M that Larian offered in their infographic. Yes, that number does include early access purchases. Why wouldn’t it? Those are still copies sold, and they’re still included in achievement data.
I mean, Call of Duty: Another One is one of the best selling games of the year, despite even casuals lambasting it online. I think devs want to feel like they’re making something people want to play though, rather than feeling like they’re shovelling out garbage for the hogs.
Yeah the developers are themselves just workers that don’t profit no matter how well the game sells. Some might incidentally hold some shares in the company they work for but it’s not big money. They aren’t the board and they aren’t the primary shareholders.
People like being known for having a hand in the Big Game of the Decade. People who worked on Skyrim have that as part of their resume and can point at it and gloat about this crazy thing that is beloved by many.
Conversely an attack on a game they had a hand in developing feels like an attack on their own capabilities — whether or not that has anything to do with it directly.
“But throughout that time, I actually had no inkling what game development was actually like. How hard the designers, programmers, artists, producers, and everyone else worked,” he says. “The struggle to bring a vision to life with constantly shifting resources. The stress.”
Then tell us about it. Make it heard where you get Stressed and where you rub up on the state of the art. List off what had to be finished in crunch time. What got pushed by Marketing or Management. Leaving everything up to a nebulous “you don’t know” makes any criticism easily dismissed and reduces leverage against systemic issues.
CMV: if No Man’s Sky’s gameplay was identical to Starfield in 2016, people would have been even more disappointed than they were. The only reason people gave Starfield a pass in 2023 is because we’re so conditioned to being disappointed by Bethesda that fanboys shrugged it off, and everyone else just looked at them weird. I legitimately believe NMS when it first released was a better game than Starfield.
Imo launch day nms is more varied (in generated content, at least) with less loading screens (so you get to do the fun action of atmospheric flight -> space flight yourself) - starfield is better in other ways but the end result is I find nms more fun (even on the day 1 version)
In principle, I agree, but I feel like part of that is just AAA vs. indie.
AAA games need to provide lots of lukewarm content, because many more casual players will buy them and expect much bang for their buck + haven’t seen this lukewarm content a million times already.
On the other hand, indies will basically only be bought by people more enthusiastic about the hobby. As such, they have to pick out one or two aspects and excel at them, so that it’s something new for that crowd.
Hello Games was indie and unknown at the time, so likely only attracted that gaming enthusiast crowd, which would have been more easily bored by the extremely lukewarm content in Starfield.
And I expect they were a very similar audience. So I don’t think the bar for what to expect was very different. If anything, the bar should have been much higher for the AAA game.
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Well, not like yours anymore.
While this is true, it is a terrible way of debating with the public.
And while users may not be able to understand game design decision and background, they can well be aware that those decisions brought to a really bad game.
Not only that, but their blindness is the result of developers choices on what they share. If you don’t want people making incorrect assumptions, give them more info. Don’t tell them to just forego having any opinion on the matter.
If it looks like a decision was made cynically, prove otherwise, don’t just say ‘No, you’re wrong, you just don’t know!’
But gamers don’t actually need to understand game design or why a certain choice was made.
I said this in another thread: if it’s a shit design, it’s a shit design. Knowing why the shit design was made does not suddenly make it not shit. In fact, I do not care to know why you made that decision in the first place - if it’s bad, then just own up to it and either try to fix the issue or actually resolve to do better next time.
To borrow a phrase from Steve Hofstetter, I’ve never flown a helicopter, but if I saw one in a tree, I could still be like “dude fucked up.”
I don’t love how this is phrased, but it’s not wrong.
The harsh reality of creative industries is that people are gonna be uninformed, dickish smartasses on social media (and… you know, traditional media, too), but they don’t owe the creators anything, so if they don’t like a thing they don’t need to be right about why they like it.
But hey, I also don’t resent any creator for venting reasonably on social media about this stuff every now and then. I think it’s a dumb, potentially career-ending thing to do, but I get it.
You don’t have to be a chef to realise that a shit sandwich tases bad.
Reading that dev’s opinion is almost as much a waste of time as playing Starfield
I don’t see anything wrong with what he said. It reminds me of all the whining about jUsT fIx ThE NeTcOdE or (more recently) tHe TeEtH mAkE iT LaG
Lots of people with opinions based on other’s opinions, where nobody in the chain has my clue what they’re talking about.
Look, it’s very simple - even a cocaine addled exec can see. You remove a fair deal of your gameplay time, say 1/3, and focus budget and development time on quality control and polish. I.e quality over quantity. This is a matter of management and Bethesda’s management is dumb. It’s not rocket science, it’s just business.
Oh cry me a river. These hacks don’t deserve the pity they’re clearly trying to win because they have already proven they don’t know how to make a technologically sound game. Every single one of their games has suffered from save-breaking glitches, and yeah I might be one of the unlucky ones to have experienced at least one in all of their games but I can count the amount of developers that have given me a similar experience on one fist (yes, I mean “fist”, not hand).
I have an up-to-date system, more than meet the requirements for this flaming turd of a game and even among the insane amount of loading screens, there are still frequent hang-ups from the game needing to load while walking through a plaza while the game is running on my SSD. That’s simply not good enough. The last time I experienced such behaviour in a game was when I was playing on a potato over a decade ago or playing online with abysmal internet.
Critics don’t have to be developers to be able to spot in what ways a game is bad and neither does the general public. This is very different from “I don’t like this so it’s bad.”. This is a case of “It runs like ass, the writing is boring and the traversal of their mostly-empty crafted universe is little more than a lag-hung menu with a stupid amount of layers to access what you’re actually looking for and a whole ton of loading screens and thus it is bad.”. They haven’t crafted some grand open universe like they advertised, they made a bunch of levels, added a slow fast travel system and a standard fast travel system and called it quits. They’re now finally being called out as the bunch of half-asses they really are and they have more than earned it.
“We were riding the limits of what was possible” is a common excuse given. Then maybe don’t bite off more than you can chew. “Overcome technology itself”. A bad craftsman blames his tools. Maybe stop using an engine that isn’t fit for purpose. The “Creation” engine - or as we might as well call it, Gamebryo - has long been cited as the cause of many problems and barely workable. Take time to retrain your developers to a user-friendly engine and you’ll quickly make up the lost time in efficiency but they insist on holding on to that dinosaur of an engine.
As a member of the general public, I can’t say I know how to make a game, let alone a good one but given the constant stutters, mostly empty world, boring writing, frequent instances of forcing grind to pad play time and ever-increasing tedium in their gameplay loop, I have to assume that Bugthesda doesn’t either. The fact they saw to set team members on reviews instead of fixing all the problems with their games, I have to say their priorities aren’t in the right place and the ones who are “disconnected” are Bethesda who seem to be under the delusion that they’ll get nothing but praise just for releasing a game, no matter the state it’s in.
Well I don’t know how to make a game, but I do know how to write interesting characters and stories, and Emil clearly doesn’t, so something something glass houses, Bethesda.
Just like I don’t need to be a ship captain to tell when the titanic is sinking. It doesn’t matter how it’s made, a product is bad if your model audience doesn’t like it. Starfield isn’t some avant-gard experimental piece, it was meant to appeal to the masses. He can’t use the excuse of opinionated craftsmanship to excuse its poor quality.
This kind of silly shit is on brand for Pagliarulo.
I wish people knew more about the way business works in general. Focusing on quality of product or service is a strategy only the smallest businesses can afford. In the big leagues it’s all about triggering purchasing behavior and minimizing price sensitivity by using well-proven psychological techniques to sell cheap minimally-viable and soon to be obsolete products to as many people as possible, and sell them the solutions to the problems left in the original product as “optional” add-ons. Developers all want to make good games, but the businesses they work for couldn’t care less since they make their money in other ways. Welcome to the 21t century, consumers!
Sounds like a terrible business model that deserves the problems it runs into. If a company doesn’t prioritize the quality of its offerings, why should anyone give them a cent?
Yeah but businesses typically don’t go out and rub that in their customers faces. That’s basically what most of the complaints are about: Bethesda should just shut the fuck up and swallow their pride. Is some/most of the stuff people throw at them unfair? Likely. Is it completely unwarranted? No. Should they defend it? Also no.
A lot of these comments from developers read to me like “We really tried guys, but you don’t know what it was like.” Given this is usually without commenting that industry norms are toxic since that can get you blacklisted. Their marketing department doing damage control is of course way less sympathetic to me.
I would consider Todd Howard to be part of development (since he directs the creative and narrative angle, from what I understand).
He defended bad performance with “get better hardware”. He defended criticism of the content with “you play the game wrong”.
Both are bullshit “excuses”. The first one was even debunked by modders who showed that there was potential for optimization. And modders are far more limited than engine devs. The game doesn’t look ugly, but there are far better looking games with more scene complexity out there that run better.
And “you play it wrong” is bullshit because if enough people play it wrong to have an effect on the rating of the game, then the game is badly designed. Part of game design is making sure the game explains itself or subtly pulls players in the right direction. Either they failed with that, or there simply is no clear direction. But that’s not the players fault.
Starfield has it’s negatives for sure, but he has a point about what the communities have been like (including here on Lemmy).
There have been so many armchair gamedevs who overnight know intricacies of engines, how programming works, how 8 year old computers should be able to run brand new AAA titles at 120fps. It’s been just exhausting reading these conversations.
For example, one thing I read again and again was “Starfield just wasn’t optimized, they easily could have reduced memory and bumped framerates”. Which any actual programmer will immediately feel a pit of dread in their stomach because we’ve been asked to reduce ram usage or speed something up, and that is a daunting task in our simple little apps - let alone a major AAA game.
Again I’m not saying Starfield was perfect. It has a lot of flaws, biggest one for me is that it felt like a game that came out 10 years ago in terms of how it played. But it didn’t deserve the overall destruction it received online. Any developer knows that the only people who can say “how” their game could have been done better were the ones who actually wrote it.
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This thing in particular was picked apart by actual devs in news articles and editorials that showed that Bethesda really didn’t optimize the game at all along with all the technical reasoning and proof showing how it could have been improved.
It’s not just the players, who for the most part, have been citing those articles when they make that particular critique. I mean, shit, they haven’t even used their own texture compression system for the last few games they made, and that’s so easy even someone with minimal modding knowledge can fix because the game already has the tools to make it work better.
Please share these articles you speak of. From developers with real world game dev experience. Without pointing me to some 2 hour rambling YouTube video.
And do you seriously think that someone with minimal modding knowledge can “fix” texture compression and the actual devs of the game hadn’t known or thought of doing so too? Say what you will about the Starfield producers and management but I absolutely 100% guarantee you if they chose not to use that feature, it was for very good reasons.
Yes, better textures are consistently one of the first mods to come out for every game they have released since Fallout 3.
And if you read the other half of the sentence you quoted?
Not the original commenter, but this whole argument you put here falls completely on it’s face since we know that modders HAVE done this and haven’t had any issues (or at the very least have been able to solve said issues), if compressing the textures and whatnot actually broke the game then the modders wouldn’t have been able to do it without breaking the game
Even if they supposedly had a reason, then it was a bad one
When some rando with a mod package plugging into an undocumented ABI can dramatically improve the performance… Yeah, it’s not optimized at all. Don’t let them excuse themselves from due diligence.
To be fair, this is an old, old engine with several generation defining blockbusters making use of it. Not to mention the massive modding communities who’ve probably spent more collective hours fighting with the engine over the past few years than Bethesda has.
Yeah, I can imagine the frustration of seeing people who don’t know anything about what happened during development blame you as a dev for something that may have been design decisions or budgetary or time constraints that you had no say in or control over.
This is a totally fair take. He explicitly says it’s fine to not like the game, but just don’t try to pretend you know what happened on the back end to make it the way it was, because you’re probably gonna misplace blame.
I get the frustration here, but it’s also kind of… idk? A “No, you just don’t understand!” response. Everyone who works in a white-collar job knows what it’s like. Everyone has different theories about why that project failed, but nobody knows the objective truth. Nobody can present a “documented and verified” list of reasons for why the project failed, not even the lead designer here. They can guess, but never reach the truth. He could repeat what he always did without changing anything in the next project, and succeed due to different circumstances, plain good luck.
You know, it’s funny. My assumptions, which I think I’ve made clear are assumptions when I talk about them, are that Starfield is what it is largely because of technical limitations. I think, if I’m wrong, the remaining possible answers are far more disappointing. Are the side quests bad because that’s what the engine allows them to feasibly build? That sucks; they should ditch their engine. Are the side quests bad because the designers don’t know how to design good quests? That’s worse. You can extend these kinds of assumptions to the way space travel works, the way their conversation system works, etc.
And moreover, did they not play their own game?
I feel like the core complaint that every person has regardless of liking the game or not is that the travel system is just absurd and inconsistent. It is so weird how I go to my ship, pull up to orbit a planet, can see the planet from my ship but I cannot select it. Sometimes, you can! But most of the time, you cannot. This means the player then has to pull up the map and land on the planet from there, even though a simple interact to land would be much more seamless and immersive.
The map issue goes deeper, literally. Opening the map on a planet brings you to the ground-view of it, so you have to pull up one or two sub-menu levels to go from ground-view to planet view to solar system to galaxy. Literally, consistently navigating through menus - heaven forbid you pull up one menu too far because you’ll have to start over.
It shouldn’t feel quite so bad, but each interaction of these takes like 5-7 seconds. Doing that over, and over, and over again? That’s a symptom of the game as well, have you ever been in a space fight and held down E? Then you have experienced the pain of leaving the cockpit for that insanely long animation, only to have immediately sit through the insanely long sit back down animation while your ship is being shot up.
The game is full of little hold ups like this that compound into something that just feels awful to navigate.
Don’t get me wrong; I liked my first playthrough of Starfield. I actually enjoyed it quite a bit, despite these issues. But I was working through these issues. And then NG+ came around and stole everything from me (understandably with the lore). I just couldn’t bring myself to do it again. Philosophy wise, the game has some great decisions that are impactful and raise. Gameplay wise these are pretty terrible decisions.
I did everything my first playthrough, I checked out every planet every quest every follower (not the dialogue for those quests, obviously). For the most part I liked my time but the base building and the homestead quests since those seem mostly broken (gas vents were never discoverable for me). A number of hours in on NG+ for the main quests having to recollect everything… What was the point?
No, I didn’t get lucky with a crazy NG+. I shouldn’t have to replay a game 12 times to “get to the fun stuff”
I haven’t finished my first run through the game yet, but I do keep hearing about NG+. There are all of these factions to check out, some of which should be opposed to happening in the same playthrough as certain other factions, and they built a game around NG+, so why not have you commit to one faction in the course of a shorter game, and then build the opportunity to play through the other factions into NG+?
I’m not hating my time with Starfield so far, but hardly a few minutes go by while I’m playing before its obvious shortcomings annoy me. Most of them I think (and hope) I can easily attribute to their ancient tech that they probably ought to throw straight in the garbage.
The thing is that Fallout: New Vegas used the same engine, and it proved that you can do a much more interesting and engaging story and quests with Creation Engine compared to what Bethesda is capable of. Sure, Creation is still a bit of a piece of shit when it comes to engines, but it can be used for creating complex storylines etc. and not just “go there and push a button” or “go there and kill a person”
True, but in particular, I’m referring to the non-faction quests. It’s been a while since I’ve played New Vegas, but I can’t remember if that game even had the equivalent of Starfield’s “activities”. Those quests are often so bad that I wonder why they’re in the game at all.
You know what an even better take is? “We hear you, we’ll take your feedback” or just as good, say nothing at all.
Arguing that you are smarter or wiser than your users / customers is paradoxical. You are by definition not smart if you attempt to do this.
I was assuming this was a quote from an interview with a leading question like “what do you think about players who claim to know what went wrong in the development of Starfield?” And the quote was out of context to make him look bad.
But this was a Twitter thread. It’s a completely unforced error, no one was making him do this.
This is why we only ever get PR responses to anything that happens instead of actual information or explanations.
It’s better than arguing with the customer.
Simple explanations like “we felt we were under X constraints” or “our engine didn’t handle the loading times as well as we had hoped” would be just fine.
Instead, they just seem to be telling the players they’re wrong for disagreeing with many of the design decisions made
Where did he say he was smarter or wiser? I must have missed that quote.
This particular dev didn’t. But the Starfield team at large has been blowing up the internet recently telling people that don’t like the game that their opinions are wrong.
Emil Pagliarulo (guy quoted in the article), lead on Starfield, is known to have this attitude towards players. He’s also known to not like design documents, which explains the massively disconnected design of recent Bethesda games, especially Starfield.
Emil is one of the giant reasons their games have been the way they have been lately and it’s why he’s being a baby about it
Blame is on the leads, because they are the leads, and get paid as such
Without delving into the question over how good the game is, this sounds like a company that simply has the wrong processes in place. A case of “working hard” instead of “working smart.” As a result, they waste a lot of time and resources on things that ultimately don’t matter. I’m sure the person in question worked really really hard on the game, but it’s mostly pointless and ineffectively effort.
LOL! OMG, I totally thought you were talking about their process for dealing with negative press/reviews. What’s funny is that your comment basically applies to both your point and mine and that kinda reinforces the point for both versions…
I genuinely wonder how much it matters though. From online discussions you’ll see that Baldur’s Gate 3 is beloved by fans and held up as a benchmark for community engagement and listening to player feedback. It won GotY, had a launch far beyond anything the devs expected, and got incredible rave reviews.
But if you look at the top 20 best-selling games of the year, Starfield is #10 despite a lukewarm reception, numerous issues, and being accessible via Xbox Gamepass, while BG3 isn’t even on the list.
I think it really brings into perspective just how small a minority the people who post online about these things are, regardless of platform. Maybe the Gamers don’t know jack about your job, or maybe all their criticisms are 100% right. If it sells millions of copies either way, who cares?
The occasional salty dev, I guess
That’s the difference between art and just a product. Starfield is just a consumer product. It sold because of heavy marketing.
If you hold up sales as a measure of success, you deserve every possible criticism.
And BG3 has some pretty gnarly performance issues.
Has the big patch made it better? I haven’t been able to try it out yet.
I’ve only played a little since the new patch but it seems a bit better but my (very mid) PC still struggles performance-wise.
The actual developers aren’t seeing any of that money, they’re getting laid off.
Dunno if this is the case for wherever you got your sales figures from, but a lot of the places that track best-selling games only track physical releases. Or they might also track digital releases if the publisher provides them to whoever is doing that tracking, but they often don’t. BG3 does not have a physical release (yet).
And a quick google seems to back that up. According to Phil Spencer the other day, Starfield has had “over 12 million players”. I’m assuming this is a combined figure of sales and people who downloaded it through game pass. So, less than 12 million copies sold, and probably a good deal under that cuz I assume game pass would be a pretty decent chunk of those players reached. If the top result when googling is accurate, BG3 has sold 22+ million copies. Prolly enough to crack that top 20, I’d guess.
Here’s my source. It’s the latter case, they use digital sales figures from the companies that provide them.
You raise a good point: if Larian aren’t sharing sales figures then it’s not possible to definitively compare them. I don’t think the 22M figure is very credible (as the other commenter said it doesn’t match up with the data we do have regarding player count/copies sold, and came completions) but even 5-7M copies sold sounds like it would place BG3 on the list. There’s enough bleakness in the gaming scene as it is, so I’m glad to hear it might not be quite as bleak as I thought.
In this case, I am almost positive Larian just isn’t providing those sales figures. Before I didn’t spend more than a minute googling how many copies sold, so 22M may definitely be too high, but I would honestly still be surprised if Starfield outsold BG3 at all, even if 11.5M of Starfield’s 12M players were purchases, and not game pass, which is a super generous estimate.
But I have more than a minute now, so let’s look at steamdb. There are 4 analytics things that provide owner estimations there. The spread on these estimations is insane, ranging from 5.5M to 27.7M. But the two middle ones estimate sales at 13.3 and 14.9M. Both are higher than the 12M players Starfield has reached through both sales and gamepass. But. These are steam specific numbers for BG3. It also launched on GOG, though I’m sure those numbers are nowhere near steams numbers. More importantly, it also launched on ps5, and who knows how many copies sold there.
Or maybe the achievement extrapolation method is the most accurate and it’s between 7 and 8 million copies sold. There is still a very good chance even those lower numbers are beating Starfield in overall sales.
Regardless, this is all some nebulous as fuck guesswork, but I feel like it’s more likely than not that BG3 straight up outsold Starfield. And even if it did not, Starfield had years of hype behind it, and Bethesda has been one of the biggest names in gaming for many years now. Larian was a niche studio making niche games (yes, the D:OS series was quite succesful, I would stay say they were niche though) so the fact that they’re even in competition with the Bethesda juggernauts these days is quite impressive for them.
I would not trust that number. Larian just put out an infographic only days ago saying that 1.3M people completed the game. Using achievement data, we can extrapolate that out to somewhere between 7M and 8M copies sold.
Y’know, it’s possible people buy a game to play offline where you don’t get achievements. The numbers Larian put out could also include EA purchases from like, 5 years ago.
Achievement data is a percentage. Since there were no giveaways, PS+, or Game Pass offerings to skew the data, there’s no reason to believe that the percentage would change across other platforms or across people playing the game offline. The achievement we’re using is the one for beating the game, as is the finite number of 1.3M that Larian offered in their infographic. Yes, that number does include early access purchases. Why wouldn’t it? Those are still copies sold, and they’re still included in achievement data.
I mean, Call of Duty: Another One is one of the best selling games of the year, despite even casuals lambasting it online. I think devs want to feel like they’re making something people want to play though, rather than feeling like they’re shovelling out garbage for the hogs.
Yeah the developers are themselves just workers that don’t profit no matter how well the game sells. Some might incidentally hold some shares in the company they work for but it’s not big money. They aren’t the board and they aren’t the primary shareholders.
People like being known for having a hand in the Big Game of the Decade. People who worked on Skyrim have that as part of their resume and can point at it and gloat about this crazy thing that is beloved by many.
Conversely an attack on a game they had a hand in developing feels like an attack on their own capabilities — whether or not that has anything to do with it directly.
Then tell us about it. Make it heard where you get Stressed and where you rub up on the state of the art. List off what had to be finished in crunch time. What got pushed by Marketing or Management. Leaving everything up to a nebulous “you don’t know” makes any criticism easily dismissed and reduces leverage against systemic issues.
Ideally they didn’t have any crunch time.
CMV: if No Man’s Sky’s gameplay was identical to Starfield in 2016, people would have been even more disappointed than they were. The only reason people gave Starfield a pass in 2023 is because we’re so conditioned to being disappointed by Bethesda that fanboys shrugged it off, and everyone else just looked at them weird. I legitimately believe NMS when it first released was a better game than Starfield.
Imo launch day nms is more varied (in generated content, at least) with less loading screens (so you get to do the fun action of atmospheric flight -> space flight yourself) - starfield is better in other ways but the end result is I find nms more fun (even on the day 1 version)
Lol people gave Starfield a pass? My feeds were (and still are, see this thread) overwhelming hatred towards it.
The so-called “supporters” aren’t even arguing that it’s a great game. Their argument is “it’s not that bad”.
In principle, I agree, but I feel like part of that is just AAA vs. indie.
AAA games need to provide lots of lukewarm content, because many more casual players will buy them and expect much bang for their buck + haven’t seen this lukewarm content a million times already.
On the other hand, indies will basically only be bought by people more enthusiastic about the hobby. As such, they have to pick out one or two aspects and excel at them, so that it’s something new for that crowd.
Hello Games was indie and unknown at the time, so likely only attracted that gaming enthusiast crowd, which would have been more easily bored by the extremely lukewarm content in Starfield.
I don’t know how accurate this data is, but it would seem NMS and Starfield had a similar number of players in their first month:
And I expect they were a very similar audience. So I don’t think the bar for what to expect was very different. If anything, the bar should have been much higher for the AAA game.