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[NakeyJakey] Bethesda's Game Design Was Outdated a Decade Ago
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this post was submitted on 10 Dec 2023
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I beat Starfield the first time before the bad reviews started overwhelming. And I still don't get it (except perhaps as hype). Bethesda games are far from perfect (people seem to forget the negativity around Skyrim being compared to Oblivion), but they scratch a particular itch that millions of gamers have and crave.
What terrifies me is that this whole "Hey look, we're getting 2006 again" attitude is exactly what's going to kill off the Bethesda "genre" the same way SquareEnix gutted the AAA Turn-Based RPG. Sure, it means we might get a black horse game out of left field (Persona 5, talking about you) but it's a shame to see so much hate on the style of game that Bethesda is.
And we need to make no mistake. While some complaints have been valid, the biggest ones that started this snowball have been things like "I shoot guns around guards and nobody comments" or "I murder an entire town and then pay a small bounty and everyone's fine with me again".
I get the "huge procedural universe is soooo boring" complaint; I don't agree with it because I loved Daggerfall and because Starfield has more hand-made content than Skyrim, but I can respect it. But that alone doesn't justify all this "worst game ever" BS. It makes Starfield sound like it's worse than initial-release NMS was (and I can say from experience, it's not).
And for me, I just crossed hour 180 with Starfield, and have not been bored once. I don't expect it to be everyone's favorite game, but it's certainly mine for 2023.
I put 150 hours into it and loved it. Bethesda is such a giant, and I guess this game had such hype that it completely distorted reality.
Funny thing is, I had no hype for the game. I didn't think I'd even play it from the early previews and announcements.
But after it came out and people figured out it followed the Bethesda formula and was "Fallout in space", then I got interested. It had been long enough that I'd played a Bethesda game that it sounded like fun, and it was.
There are a lot of things I'd like to change and refine with Starfield. But it's still a good game.
Same here. I actually expected to be disappointed from hearing the early complaints. I got an xbox subscription because there were a bunch of games I wanted to play, so I wouldn't feel bad if Starfield sucked.
Then I've ONLY been playing Starfield since.
That's the thing though- I've already played fallout. I've already played Skyrim. There are mods and expansion packs that give me more of the same already.
What I expected wasn't fallout in space, I expected innovation and iteration on a genre, not the exact same things in a new setting.
This is what's weird to me. Bethesda basically promised "Skyrim in Space", and that's what most of the hype started to come from. And they genuinely gave us exactly that.
People who don't like Skyrim won't like Starfield. People who wanted something more "innovative" than just Skyrim in Space with Better Graphics were creating their own sort of fabricated hype.
Personally, I think it feels like a bit of a mix of Oblivion and Fallout 3, but with Skyrim-like updated graphics and such. But I kinda like that anyway.
But didn't give us Skyrim in Space that's the whole point
The adventure was the point in Skyrim. There is no adventure in Starfield because "space is empty, and boring" - Todd Howard.
It's kinda hard to respond to you with this when everyone else is arguing "they gave us Skyrim in space instead of innovating at all in the last 20 years". In fact, just looked back and that's the exact family of criticism I was responding to.
Space is empty and boring but still has more hand-crafted (non-procedural) content than the entirety of Skyrim. New Atlantis is arguably as big as the 3 largest Skyrim cities combined. The main quest+faction dungeons are as big as the equivalents in Skyrim. The New London battlefield (for example) is pretty gorgeous and fairly massive.
There's a genuine argument that maybe we don't have enough "sprinkled in random places "quest starts that aren't radiant, considering it's only 50% more than Skyrim has but an dramatically larger universe. More quests that start like
Mantiscould go a long way, where you're nudged towards the quest regardless of proximity. BUT, saying "there is no adventure in Starfield" seems somewhat off to the actual facts of the game... that there's 50% more adventure in Starfield than Skyrim, but the map is 1000x larger.The thing is that for a lot of Bethesda fans the game fully missed the mark that scratches the players itch. If there's one thing people unanimously agree Bethesda games are great at it's creating a world that's interesting to explore. Starfield is by far the least interesting Bethesda game to explore, because there's nothing interesting to catch your attention?
Jake brings it up perfectly. In Skyrim you start a quest and then you start traveling to the quest location. A dragon swoops in and you fight a dragon. A spooky cave is along the way and you check it out. An hour has passed and you're not even at the quest location yet. In Starfield you start a quest, you fast travel to your ship, then you fast travel to the planet the quest is on, you land on the quest location, you walk to the actual and 10 minutes later the quest is done. Nothing interesting happened between the start of the quest and the end of the quest, except maybe for the quest itself.
In Skyrim a quest is an opportunity to explore, in Starfield a quest is a check on a checklist. I don't think Bethesda has necessarily lost its magic but I do think Starfield is missing the Bethesda magic.
The whole situation is blown out of proportion as is tradition in the modern world everybody can agree with that. But the complain is warranted in my opinion. What you might describe as a "genre"(it's a style) can also simply be arguments against a lazy studio that doesn't really progress in a meaningful way. Most of the issues people have with Starfield are the same they were having with almost all the games Bethesda makes. They simply ignore criticism about design. Of course it sells so they have an argument for continuing but that attitude made them stagnate as a studio. They never improved dialog choices. They never improved performance and optimization. They never improved npc AI. They never improved on UI design... They're just painting by the same numbers every time just with the latest new tech in paint. So while the core is kinda dumb fun most of us like, it's getting old now and we have every right to hold that against them.
We also cannot ignore all of the other studios making games in the same genre. CDprojeckt released Witcher 2 and 3 which are great example of progress and Cyberpunk which had a rocky start but was still miles in front of anything Bethesda story and role-playing wise. Obsidian themselves made a better Starfield since space exploration is a letdown in both. We just got Baldur's gate but Larian made both Original Sins that were already chock full of what makes BG so great. Add to that Kingdom Come: Deliverance, Dark Arisen, Breath of the Wild, ALL the Souls games except for Demon. All of that in between Skyrims and Starfields releases. That's a lot of competition, the genre changed and matured just like shooters did and so many other genres since. You just can't slap a new coat of paint and then act offended by the criticism. Bethesda has shown many times now that they either ignore or simply don't understand why they are getting negative feedback. Instead they rely on brand name, overpromise/lie, meme about their weaknesses (which is why I think they are lazy, they know) and then deflect criticism or blame players for being too picky.
That being said I also have over 100 hours in Starfield and I'm not saying it's a guilty pleasure. It is fun to roam around being a half god everybody fears or love and everything being entirely without meaningful consequences. But I can't ignore the shortcomings. And when I do so I keep remembering I've had the same for a decade.
Edit: I also don't think the game is a 1/10 or whatever. I'd say it's a 6 or so.
I think we can agree on some things, but I have no choice but to object to "genre = lazy". There is a massive demand for a very specific set of gaming characteristics. Not only is it a silly move not to "scratch that itch", but it's a disservice to the fans of that genre to insist that there's something inherently wrong to provide the exact itch in question.
I like obscure music from a dying genre that never really had a lot of legs. I just got introduced to a band called October Noir, and they're blowing my mind. You could call them a cheap knock-off, a lazy attempt to get one last career out of the dead Gothic Metal genre. But as someone who has never had access to as many Gothic Metal albums as the mainstream gets access to Boy Bands, fuck that.
Bethesda addicts would consume 4 "Skyrim-Style games" a year, and have as much patience with them as hardcore gamers can be toward cheap soulsborne knockoffs. And I don't think it's an insult to the fan OR the companies making such a game.
Hey it's totally fine if those games are enough then, more power to you. I still think you'd enjoy it even more if they did try a bit harder. And I'm not saying genre=lazy, I'm saying there is no such genre as a "betheda game". The lazyness is in the repetition and lack of meaningful gameplay improvement over the years.
I think that's true of any game except when it isn't. Half (or more) of the complaints to me about this game in threads of this post have been about situations where they DID try harder.
Take the NG+. Not only is this the first time they went through the effort to add that, but they arguably did it because it was one of the most requested feature for Bethesda games of all time. Now everyone hates it because "it doesn't work for me with how deep I go into a playthrough building my base". Had they "tried less hard" and either not given us NG+ or not given us a base-builder, people would be happier. A Bethesda game doesn't NEED NG+ OR base-builders, after all.
Also take "how vast and boring space is". They explicitly took the biggest hand-crafted world they've ever made, and the most hand-crafted quests they've ever made, and put it on top of a Daggerfall-tier progressive wonderland. All of these things are examples of them trying really flaming hard, to me.
What it really seems to me is that they gave us the kitchen sink with everything everyone wanted, AND Polished it certified less-buggy... and most complaints from people are that they really wanted a game that held your hand a bit more, only had the planets that were hand-crafted (can't ask for more than the ones they gave, since their hand-crafted mapsize is massive), and didn't include the heavily-requested features. Oh, and a more realistic physics engine for some reason I still don't quite get.
Basically, the complaints were "this game isn't an Outer Worlds remake and that's what I was hoping for". As I see it, many of the complaints about Starfield were them doing the opposite of the complaints people had about Outer Worlds in the first place. Do you remember that awkward alien planet in OW that's only about 500 meters square with invisible walls?
EDIT: To be clear, if someone likes Outer Worlds more, that's great for them. For me, the only complaints I have are silly ones about the lack of full-lego-power of the ship builder. I'd have preferred a less friendly ship-builder that lets me make the ship happen more like outposts do. Custom doors would be so much better.
Stop using "it's a bethesda game" as an argument. It's weak and biased. It also deflects the fact that Bethesda games are actually marketed as RPG's so they have to be compared to what available from other studios when talking flaws and features. You might think it's enough but it's not a valid argument. Bad AI and meaningless quests are not stylistic choices, they're weaknesses. Also you have to address the criticism instead of pointing out other aspects of the game. Trying harder might not have been specific enough but what I meant is they don't seem to work on the major issues they get criticised for over and over again. And by "they" I also don't mean the individual devs but the company as a Whole. The presence of NG+ does nothing to improve on the abysmal npc AI or astonishing amount of loading screens and fast travelling.
In all honesty, I've never heard or read about the issues you are talking about. Even when googling about the NG+ addition it just talks about Starfield, post-release anwyay. And the complains were not "basically not an Outer Worlds sequel". It was a let down that it isn't closer, but the complains are about the lack of meat on Starfields large, dry bones. Outer Worlds is just used often as comparison because of the whole Obsidian/Bethesda past collab that make them very similar at their core especially since both are space themed. Nobody not fanboying was actually expecting Outer Worlds 2. The more optimistic were hoping some step forward but unfortunately, the pessimists were right.
That brings to your next point: bigger does not equal better. Bigger is actually a trap. The bigger the map, the harder it is to populate and bring to life in a meaningful way and Bethesda sucks at this. Here it's once again just large inaccessible buildings nobody lives in and NPC's just going nowhere 24/7. New Atlantis is the best example of a "big" map that feels completely dead. Nothing happens anywhere in any city that is not scripted anyway. Everybody is patiently waiting the player crosses the trigger that pushes "play" on the tape. I'd be way more excited if Betheda announced a game that brought back the scale to something like Fallout 3.
And you can't be honestly saying it was polished and optimized. Todd Howard himself has been consistently caught saying it was optimized in interviews post release when the game still didn't work properly on XBOX. He also blamed the gamers for poor hardware and told them they'd need to upgrade. This is bullshit, they simply didn't take enough time, they rushed the release. They also repeatedly said they know the modders will fix for free what their billion dollars microsoft backed studio can't be bothered with. And nobody is asking for more hand holding. It's actually a common complain on many AAA rpgs and openworld games that everything is a freaking waypoint on your map and you end up looking at your compass more than the scenery. Starfield is no different here, it's worse since you can rarely reach any waypoint without multiple loading screens and fast travels.
So yeah, I still believe if they listened and tried harder in bettering themselves, you would still get your "bethesda game" experience but better. Their games feel designed by a consulting firm that did a market evaluation and chose the easily added features instead of the core rebuild of their engine and expansion of the writing team. Shiny graphics and large maps are vague enough to hype up the people to pre-order while not actually having to improve gameplay experience, character building and meaningful world events which are hard to showcase pre-release, not to mention to actually do.
Alright. It's fun to me and had they done what everyone else is asking for I wouldn't have bought the game. And I know of thousands upon thousands fo people who feel the same way. How's that for an argument? Also bad?
Says someone who is not lacking bias. And who absolutely doesn't want to have a civil conversation because opening that way is just going to get your interlocutor's back up.
This is just a definition fallacy in action. RPGs are a massive genre with massive walls between the subdomains. Nobody ever expects a Bethesda game to compare with Final Fantasy, or Final Fantasy to compare to Baldur's Gate. Or Baldur's Gate to compare to Persona. Or any of those to my dusty copy of Advanced Dungeons and Dragons 2nd Edition.
I am a huge fan of Gothic Metal, which technically falls under "Rock and Roll". But nobody compares the Beatles to Cradle of Filth.
I never said Starfield has bad AI or meaningless quests. Therefore, I don't have to defend Bad AI or meaningless quests.
...I'm actually stopping here. I'm out of time, and everyone's hatred for Starfield is just becoming a toxic waste of my chill. It's unfortunate that in the entertainment community, some people just have to hate on things, and the more their interlocutor enjoys them, the more emotional they become. Like if Starfield is not an objectively horrible game and every fan of it is not just stupid and wrong, there's something actually wrong in the universe. I spent three hours late night on my 3rd playthrough of Starfield, and I've been waiting all day to play three hours tonight and see if I can explore a specific quest chain I haven't done yet I heard is fucking phenomenal. And that's a LOT more fun than continuing to argue about it.
Todd? Is that you? And I know you will read this, it's just human nature.
Yes it's a bad argument. It doesn't answer anything. You don't know thousands upon thousands of people not even mentionning gamers that you talked to that actually played the game and have nothing but good things to say about it. It's just unproven, unrelated statements. It would still be a bethesda game with all the things I've mentionned completely fixed. You just got caught by promises and brand recognition.
I myself said it's a 6. There's no hatred i just don't think it's the product of a great studio growing to be their best as I've thoroughly explained three times now. You just respond pointless straw man arguments when we bring forward valid criticism. You have to defend your points also, and they have to address the points others make. That's how debating work. You can't just say "but I like it" and be taken seriously.
You also don't seem to understand bias. I thought about things I didn't like and why. Contrary to you I explained with multiple examples why I came up with my opinion of Starfield but you just answer "It's a bethesda game". How is that a proper answer? And don't go with whataboutisms about how the map size is big though, Tell my why the AI got better. Tell me why the quests and choices are good and deep and why the 230000 voice lines make the game better. You go, that's how you debate. But no you only go back to "but I love it an millions do" on a post about a video (out of dozens) deep diving into the flaw of the game and studio. Tell me why my arguments are bad and why your NG+or whatever they worked so flaming hard on is correcting them.
Also don't pretend I'm not civil because you disagree and bring forward evidence of your claims. Address the criticism instead of hiding behind your fandom. Don't use straw man examples like the Beatles vs Cradle or NG+ addition bullshit unrelated arguments. It's such a bad faith argument you cannot be really believing it's in your favour. You are free to love it but this was a post about the flaws of Starfield and Bethesda as a whole and, most importantly, why. If you cannot bring anything more convincing than "it's a bethesda game what did you expect" then you are actually lying to yourself and you know what we are talking about. You just can't admit it to yourself, because you have to be Todd Howard himself or this doesn't make any sense.