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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Blame is on the leads, because they are the leads, and get paid as such
I may not know how the sausage is made, but I do know if it tastes good or not.
No-o-o, you must offer a solution to be eligible for criticism111
!Man, this is such a lame argument 😅 can’t believe people use it!<
100% this. The whole process of creation and critique goes way back to the dawn of film and probably before. The entire construction of positions and job titles (creative director, design lead, etc) all draw from these theories. This requires the critique to be separate from the process of creation.
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.
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.
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.”
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!’
You don’t have to be a chef to realise that a shit sandwich tases bad.
Doesn’t really matter why it is the way it is if the way it is sucks.
Seriously. At the end of the day it’s the players who decide whether a game is good or fun. They might not understand the nuances of what went into creating a game they don’t find fun, but that doesn’t make them wrong.
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.
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.
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”.
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)
“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.
Ideally they didn’t have any crunch time.
These guys are fucking hilarious.
Okay, Todd. We are all wrong and you’re right. The game is super interesting and there aren’t six times too many loading screens. GotFY.
I have mixed feelings here, because on one hand, I actually do see where this guy is coming from. I’m a game design student on a degree course structured around live client briefs and projects for contests (ie, the stuff we make has to work for people outside the university, not just ourselves), and as design lead for the first project of the course, I was fighting with a member of my own team about design decisions throughout the entire project. Dude with zero capacity for empathy spent a considerable amount of energy arguing about how it was a waste of time developing the relationship between the characters in what was explicitly supposed to be a character-driven story. The words “character-driven” were literally in the brief, and right up until the last day he was insisting it was a waste of time focusing on the characters. So I really, really feel the Starfield design lead’s frustration on the “stop arguing about shit you know nothing about” front.
On the other hand, I don’t feel it’s very professional to air this frustration in public. If people don’t like Starfield, then they don’t like it, and the design lead complaining about it on social media isn’t going to change that, nor does it paint Bethesda in a good light. It just makes him look a bit petty, I guess?
I guess it all comes down to whether the product meets expectations. Players are disappointed in Starfield, and even if they don’t know why design decisions were made, it doesn’t change the fact that the game hasn’t achieved what it was meant to achieve. People that spent a lot of money buying it have a right to feel annoyed, and being told “I’m right, you’re wrong” by the design lead isn’t helpful. And if the project does meet expectations, and it’s only a few assholes complaining, then nobody needs to say “I’m right, you’re wrong” because the end results speak for themselves. If Starfield had been a massive, widely-loved success, a few armchair devs saying “you should have done X, Y and Z instead” wouldn’t be taken seriously.
I haven’t played this game and I’m not really apprised of what the players’ dissatisfactions are, as I’ve not been paying attention to it.
But as a working game dev, he is 100% right about that. One thing that seems… unique to gamers as hobbyists is how confident they are in their opinions and assumptions about the how and the why. It’s pretty frustrating. Everyone is entitled to their opinion about the outcome. But 97% of the rest of what gamers have to say beyond that is toilet paper.
I haven’t played it yet either (waiting for the price to come down, and I’m largely withholding judgement until I’ve played it myself), but my understanding is essentially it’s not a bad game, and if it had been launched 10 years ago, or from a much smaller studio, it wouldn’t have attracted so much criticism. But it’s using what is now a very old engine (and a notoriously buggy one, which I can confirm from having played other games with the same engine) which limited its potential. My feeling is it was a difficult decision either way: do you keep using the engine that the dev team has spent the last decade learning inside and out, or do you switch to something newer with more capabilities but then have the enormous challenge of retraining everyone? I don’t envy that choice.
I’m expecting to enjoy Starfield but not be wowed by it. But that’s fine, because I’m fine with playing games where I go “I enjoyed that” rather than “this changed my life”, and it’s also pretty rare for me to really dislike a game.
But… yeah, definitely sticking with my thinking that I totally understand the guy’s frustration with the way gamers so often think they know more than they do, but I don’t think his public response is very professional.
I waited until it dipped below $50 recently to pick it up. I knew it was not being reviewed well and a couple of my friends were happy with it.
It is a pretty game, but it is not a good game by any reasonable measurement. The story does not pull you in. The main characters are not engaging. The big city you visit feels like its full of paper dolls wearing one of 5 sets of clothing moving around in ways that makes zero sense.
What really drove me crazy was that they pair you up with a bot that walks around with you but it gets in the way all the time. Its walking on top of you most of the time.
The biggest beef I have is that I have played all of the Bethesda games since Morrowind, I even beat that game. I don’t care that Oblivion is silly and full of dumb. Its one of my favorite games because of the story development and the characters and the expansive world that is full of life. The people moving in the towns feel like they are going somewhere. The towns feel like they are put together with meaning. Skyrim is a high water mark in video gaming. We don’t even need to get into that.
Starfield falls flat many times. The enemy AI is stupid as anything I have ever experienced.
Its not a BAD game, its just not a good game. The graphics arn’t even very special.
Consumers don’t need to know how the sausage is made, but they sure as fuck know if it tastes good. Ignoring criticism because consumers don’t know how the sausage machine broke is how you get endless news articles pointing and laughing at Bethesda.
The customer is always right goes beyond the literal words. Perchance it’s a lesson that needs relearned.
Just because I don’t know how a turd sandwich was made and because I don’t know all that went into making the turd sandwich doesn’t make the turd sandwich taste any better.
He could have worked his ass off to make the turd sandwich, but it doesn’t mean we can’t criticize it and have to like it.
Removed by mod
Yeah, I agree with you there. Sorry if the point wasn’t clear in my post. Like, I do legitimately understand where his frustration is coming from, because I don’t doubt for a minute that he and the rest of the team worked their asses off, and unfortunately there is a tendency for people who know nothing about game dev to think they’re experts in it (you know, the way there is for every subject.) But just because his emotional reaction to the criticism of Starfield is valid, the way he’s behaving is not okay.
And honestly, on our course we’ve had the “you’ve got to have a thick skin in this industry, because you will spend ages making something that your boss or the fans will tell you they don’t like, and you’ve just got to deal with it and fix it” talk three times already. Criticism is tough to hear, but unless what you did was so shit that it got you fired, you take the criticism and you do better next time. Seems like Emil Pagliarulo might have skipped those lessons?
I’m a creative and a designer myself. My philosophy is that at the end of the day the products should be judged by its result. It’s unfortunate because consumers often do not truly appreciate the amount of blood and trouble that goes into works when creatives feel they deserve a break sometimes. Again, at the end of the day, providing explanations why the game is shit is not going to make the game less shit.
I completely agree! The guy can totally feel frustrated because he knows how hard his team worked, work that the consumers largely don’t appreciate, but he can’t argue people into liking the game if they don’t like it.
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!
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
who overnight know intricacies of engines
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.
deleted by creator
Gotta love Bethesda going all “You think you want it, but you really don’t.” Like Blizzard back in the days.
I have to admit, I find the entire thing immensely entertaining.
What game did Blizzard try this with? I’m just too ignorant about their games beyond Warcraft and Diablo, or was it that WoW add-on that killed WoW popularity back in the days?
It was about WoW Classic. Here’s the clip
But in the end WoW Classic did indeed become a thing.
So, they were right about knowing better, after all 😉
I actually think that this is a marketing fallacy some (?) big corporations use to create a self fulfilling prophecy of what people want. Wery rarely is it really a novel thing that just requires users to understand how good it is, very often it’s just gaslighting
In Bethesdas case, they’ve been going down this road for a while now and have just refused to listened to any criticism along the way.
Eventually that turned into F76 and Starfield.
The fact that they are telling people “they are wrong for finding the game boring” is funny. But that Beth won’t learn anything from this is just sad.
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…
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.
“Don’t fool yourself into thinking you know why it is the way it is” – Because we don’t, neither.
It just works
