I know you're joking, but please stop spreading this false narrative about Bethesda not having design documents, it's just not true. Starfield sucked, but not having a design document isn't the reason for it. They do in fact do documentation just like any other studio , just not one single big design document like that the misquoted talk was referencing since that's an outdated practice from like the 90s where both games and studios were smaller. A single "design bible" is not really used at any game studio these days since it's simply not practical, instead most have internal wikis and multiple smaller documents that are easier to manage and keep up to date during development. I'd recommend you watch NeverKnowsBest's video about Emil Pagliarulo if you want to learn about the misinformation around Bethesda's games, it's a really good and well researched video essay.
@@nezfromhki NKB s video about Emil is full of lies about other creators and Blatant manipulation of the truth in order to paint certain individuals as villains. The people he "exposed" did an 11 hour reaction to his video debunking all his points. Starfield had design documentation but not a centralized version that connects all parts of the game, like people are supposed to. Please never recommend that garbage NKB video to any ever again
@@nezfromhkisaid this before, if they had a proper design document, then they for sure never properly used it. The lack of communication among devs is so clear if you actually played the game.
Please for the love of God stop talking about game development like you something because you genuinely dont. Im not even defending starfield im just Anti-BS talking point.
nah still a good call, bethesda have a lot of fans that will eat up whatever they release and defend it to their last breath. those people would've bought and played starfield over bg3 no matter what and the first week of sales is always incredibly important.
@@adthompAnd those are the people who are defending Starfield but can't say anything good about the game or just straight up lie, just like Bethesda AI generated response to Steam review.
When I was in the NASA Museum, something that destroyed my immersion was seeing all these historical artifacts just left to rot there. Humanity was able to colonize several worlds, build modular hostile environments habitation tech, etc. but no one even bothered to go back to Earth and recover the historical artifacts. Furthermore, there are no big colonies on Earth. There should be a few million people still living on Earth with the tech they have, inside domed cities.
and while we're on the topic, a museum is probably the absolute laziest way to dump lore onto the player short of an npc just vomiting out paragraphs of exposition. in a game of this scope there are so many ways to populate a rich world dense with history and leave those tidbits for the player to organically discover, but they instead went with a fucking museum. it's honestly kind of insulting, how bad the writing is. did they really think we're too stupid to notice and at every turn we would just clap our hands together like a trained seal being tossed a fish?
I forgot to add, they didn't even bother to tweak the procedural generation algorithm to not place buildings or structures on planets with temples. Going to one of these temples surrounded by floating rocks and seeing a huger refinery next to it when these temples are supposedly secret and unknown is ridiculous.
imagine being on that construction site, wondering everyday what that clearly extraterrestrial structure is, and watching all your coworkers ignore one of the most consequential and important discoveries ever made by the entirety of the human race because they were focused on building a bullshit outpost that like three people are gonna visit for the duration of its entire existence
Nothing but respect for forcing yourself through this game, I put the game down after 20 hours because it started to depress me. Just sad to see what Bethesda's a-team did for 8 years.
Lore I've been following your videos since I've came across Witcher 3 rummination, about 7-8 years ago. Consistent great commentary, thanks for your work
I’ve been playing Bethesda games since Oblivion and it’s been so sad to watch their decline and fall, they used to make essential games that had to be played and which I still play today, and it’s like the games are bigger than ever before but feel so much smaller than ever before.
Good Afternoon LoreRunner, I am admittedly a Lamentation creeper these days. Work and life have kept me out for a while. I am always impressed at how constructive and well explained the Lamentations have been. No one does constructive criticism like this channel does. I hope things are going well for you and the channel. Warm Regards, Tubes
I'm actually watching voyager for the first time along with your rumination videos on it so it's funny hearing you referring to the star trek videos as being "years ago".
I saw some of the dialogue from different streams and I just got the same feeling like when you click on a mildly interesting article and something just feels off in the text. That is, the feeling of AI generated text. Like you said Lore, everyone has the same voice. The same sentence structure. The same amount of repetition without any flagging on what has already been said. I would not at all be surprised if a large part of the first pass dialogue had some amount of AI generation in it. It feels so soulless and without substance or direction.
Wow i regret missing the stream. Great video as always man. There's always value in reviewing a bad game, it just so happens this game is very bad. Here's two hoping the next one is better. Not a high bar i guess. Always appreciate you Lore
You can't play warcraft 3 anymore? That makes me very sad. While I had trouble with the game (I basically had to have an AI ally who kept the AI enemy from killing me before I could build anything), I took great pleasure both in the immersive story and in the hilarious "pissed" lines you could trigger just by poking your units too often. Plus the music was great, and there was a degree of chillax involved in the building whenever I wasn't getting killed by my opponent. It was a lovely experience, and I really wanted it to come back again.
Before i didn't believe the infamy about this game. Heck, i wanted to try it out too. However, hearing lore say this game is bad makes me not want to bother.
I started Bethesda games with Morrowind and have replayed everything (I skipped 76 though) and I abandoned my first playthrough of Starfield after 130 some hours because I couldn't be bothered anymore... He's honestly going light on the game, there truly are so many problems that it would take around 7 hours to explain it all. Like how he says that the gunplay feels off: It's been like this since Skyrim or before, but the player's aiming reticle controls everything on the screen - especially NPC's. That's why when you're sneaking and you aim at someone they're more likely to start patrolling/wandering... But in this game they cranked that effect up so high that you can teleport NPCs between crouching behind a box and standing behind a corner while aiming at you, by simply turning left and right quickly (you can watch it happen with the see through walls power) But the point is that the gunplay feels off because every sway of the mouse triggers every NPC to change its behavior, and the engine prioritizes NPC actions before the player - creating a constant .15+ second lag to literally everything, while making the NPCs nauseatingly predictable. ... I'm not even sure that design flaw makes it into the top 5 problems with the game.
I was not expecting my comment to be brought up here, so imagine my shock when it was! I have an idea for your consideration Lore. My idea is basically just growing your net to catch new people when you have completed a review stream by copy-pasting it into a Steam review with a boilerplate of who you are followed by the score then at the bottom two links, one for the Golden number and how it works and lastly one for the post stream video. It's a random Idea I had that I think won't need much to due it being a copy-paste thing in my head, but I am an idiot and probably am not thinking of something. Ps "What's that? A link to the website? What is this fantasy you speak of?"
I would absolutely love a video on cyberpunk 2077 now with phantom liberty and the 2.0 update. Also because of all the little bits that have become clear over time - you know like Yorinobu trying to kill arasaka the company and stop his dad taking his body, Johnny being a completely unreliable narrator... And the fact the game actually works now! Apologies if you've already talked about this
35:00 i tried to judge Starfield on those three pillars and honestly, imo Starfield just managed to just barely clings to all three with the least effort possible making it a snoozefest as a result, I guess i might as well say it failed...
The worst part about this game after I finished it was realizing how disappointing the next elder scrolls is going to be. Especially since it’s going to be in hammerfell which is deserts and will probably be just running around the sand getting yelled at redguards the whole time
Its so sad to see what Bethesda was and the CLEAR path of them turning into what they are now, I knew Starfield was going to stink, the writing was on the walls. I have very little hope for TES 6, and I have even been debating entirely skipping the entry. Todd wanted to make another game that people would play for 10 years instead they made a game which probably isn't going to last 10 months. About half-way through your video at around 36:00, you mention how boring and bland the combat of this game is and yeah its been the same with Bethesda games for awhile outside of Doom, PatricianTV has a similar take in his Skyrim video of basically: "I'm sick of every single weapon in these games feeling like a wooden paddle". Never a more true statement.
Love you man. You actually inspire me as a writer. It's not the whole Mass Effect thing you did that I love. It's the FUN DA MEN TALS Yeah fundamental to the bacteria level. That's one of my favorite quotes any human has said, a lot of my own writing is delving into that concept, as well as concepts like flawed humans "your persona is like the sun, there are dimensions we cannot see" and so on
Hey ruminations are back! I kid, but it was nice to hear your thoughts on this in longer form, still love and miss the rumination era, but also understand the switch and am glad to see your channel still going along well! Very sad to see all my fears on this one come true, and to see that the Bethesda that made RPGs that we could cherish is pretty well gone if this is all they can do on their first big new game in so long. End of an era.
Funny how you went off on ONI for how it's interlocking systems caused problems for you due to the power issue you ran into. This game seems more like if every system had the kind of problems that power in ONI had, or worse.
IIRC, somebody was claiming the terrormorph mission wasn't designed like this - it is random at what time of day and in which weather you get there. So the impression it made is a coin flip, not intentional design. Disclaimer: haven't played the game, not planning on buying it.
As you mentioned in stream about mods? Several mod communities on Nexus have come out and said they absolutely are not wasting their time with Starfield because the game is quite literally not worth their time.
You communicated your points very well! I'm enjoying the game, but I could tell there were things that felt "off" everywhere. You hit the nail on the head! Well said! The most intelligent criticism I've seen on this game.
After playing this game for about 40 hours, I was terrified that I'd be the outlier and that everyone else would love this. Thought that this might be how Skyrim haters felt back in 2011 saying that Bethesda has "lost their touch." It's such a relief to see nearly every person in the gaming sphere to agree on how mediocre (at best) this game is.
I've said it elsewhere and I'll say it here.. IMO, Starfield is Bethesda at their most honest. They don't make RPGs. They make digital theme parks with RPG trappings. The fact that you've got a Firefly-inspired city, a Cyberpunk 2077-inspired city, a Star Trek-inspired city, a derivative xenomorph species, a derivative space pirate fleet and none of this looks or feels cohesive or organic. How is this any different from the Republic of Dave? Or the Institute? Or Little Lamplight? Because at least those older games were pulling from franchises they either bought or inherited. Starfield is current-day Bethesda's idea of an engaging sci-fi tale and all they can do is stand on the shoulders of giants.
..... This is genuinely a lamentation?? I get i finally got Starfield and Fallout NV for my own opinion and both those games are actually bad Fallout NV has the best examples of the being a great RPG .... Then there's the gunplay, which is the most unfortunate thing because the game has such an awesome setting, awesome dialogue awesome radio, awesome fantastic structured quests... and the guns . Ohh, my first serious gunplay scenario in primm made me want to uninstall it for several Lore Negatives. 1. The guns are just terrible I kept getting killed because my OP shotgun only did one bar of VATS damage which leads to 2. The really crappy depth perception forces the player to get accustomed to ONLY VATS as in strategic gunplay a rare feature. Then we have retarded AI enemies bashing me with melee and I'm like dying refueling my AP because the only way to shoot at all is through VATS 3. You just cannot shoot without VATS. 4. The game does not Indicate at all that the kneeling hostage guy is not to be shot at, sigh reloading time. 5. The constant refueling for Stimpaks and other goods and emptying the body inventories for really small amount of caps and I'm just unable to finish the Prim quest there is no real funding for all the ammo and AID items GRRR, 6. I'm on "Very easy", a very very bad sign not because of the difficulty but how bad your VATS shots are and free shots are missing the target and the retarded AI makes everyone run in your face and. 7. You lose health too quickly, no literally you lose more health than the enemies even on Very easy. 8. There are no rules followed that is standard in shooting games to make it enjoyable, Call of Duty 1 through 3 as well as FarCry is my standard when it comes to shooting. Not a single "gunplay" rule was followed??? Bethesda went out of their way to be anti gunplay to keep it an RPG and it shows in 8 different mind bending negatives within 4 hours from the start. So sad I actually was immersed and cared about everyone in the Starting village because of superb writing and setup 8 negatives in just the Primm location. Starfield?? WELL THANK FUCK IT JUST WORKS, and I mean literally just works, the gunplay is way better than Fallout 4, but unlike Fallout 4 and say Skyrim there is no such thing as quite writing or quest design it's all blegh. .... You just need to realize Bethesda improving their Creation engine that was actually never created but just random BS the studio thought was cool. Meanwhile Starfield deserves these negatives as well, the first intro to the shooting pirates and everything to do with shooting and Base cleaning for materials was GREAT it's just 1. The spaceship really really does move, there are no "bubbles" like the other documentaries said, I literally sat there the KM meter DOES IN FACT SHRINK. Which means that all the vacuum space is definitely open world, it's just VERY RETARDED, how fast Bethesda has you relying on fast trave than just increasing the speed so you can travel to planets in one go rather than press x to skip the IRL 3 hour flight THIS IS A BIG NEGATIVE 2. Holy shit did Bethesda just get lazy or what. Starting with Fallout 4 i started noticing NPCs just named "Pedestrian"... It defeats the biggest reason why Skyrim is one of my all time favorites, those named NPCs over there? They can die and not get replaced Omfg!! 3. I was disenchanted entirely for enjoying the plot when I realized it was basically Mass Effect Andromeda. I'm a writer I know the types of filler stories you desperately come up with because you got everything set up first and your running out of time just... "Collect pieces" the same way Andromeda was. SHAMEFUL
The second saddest part of this mess is that it deletes any anticipation we have for TES 6. The one advantage TES will have is that it has several generations of lore built up. So a lot of the stuff they were too lazy to do properly in Starfield can fall back on that for TES 6.
Thanks for the numerous uploads of your current ruminations. It is nice to see all of these overviews of games I haven't had the time to watch as much as I would like. I loved this game explanation and hope that your throat gets better.
Man you should really ramp this up like Eminem with his last album. Just suggestive videos of you having an aneurism and the camera turns and it's revealed you are playing through every little nook and cranny to prepare the rewrite. The PC has "hours played, 800" or something like that 😅😅😅
The vendors and selling thing is so mystifying. Bethesda modders keep on releasing shop keeping mods and they had a shitty one in 76. They could just skim top played mods and go like,, "well, we can't add sex, but the rest of these...give the players what they want!"
Its actually frightening how disjointed, disconnected and random everything is... like those criticism about design documentation must have some validitiy given this isnhow the gsme turned out to be.
Get the teddy Sharks lore. It's time to officially announce that this is a game and a little plot twist at the end "black mass Rewrite" wait... that sounds like a very cheap B horror film, kinda like you replaying the game
I would rather replay Fallout 4 for the 100th time than try and play Starfield, theres just not interesting enough backdrop to keep me invested, it becomes boring way before you start noticing the other flaws and problems.
i think the real question has to be - how does something like this happen? how can a single property so succinctly exemplify what NOT to do while making a game, that it almost seems deliberate? as if a team of people got together and wanted to do a workshop on games and common pitfalls in narrative, writing, gameplay, etc., as examples of things to avoid, and then they turned that workshop into an actual product meant for consumption. what kind of institutional rot must exist at bethesda to allow so many bad decisions into the final build, with no failsafes to prevent that kind of thing or at least prevent it from happening repeatedly. it's honestly baffling, and i think thats why so many people are making/watching starfield videos. it's because bethesda made the video game equivalent of a slow moving car crash that you can't pull your eyes away from because the car crashed in a ridiculously improbable and weird way that just doesn't make sense
I could say this game is bad. I could say this game is boring. I could say this game is ugly. But what I will say is that this game is incoorect. About most things.
Had the exact same thoughts about the dialogue. It is chatGPT level of filler. 5 paragraphs to say "no", where it would perfectly suffice (chatgpt could also explain the same voice of all characters). Som additional thoughts: The game has only a handful of factions for the whole galaxy. This represents village scale politics stretched to span an entire galaxy. Think how ridiculous this is. This isn't rebels vs the empire. This is your gang of 20 ppl vs another one like it. The largest battle between _most_ pirates and _most_ "police" is like two dozens of ships. The fact that you have one, unified pirate faction is just naive. Also, there is no reason to build outposts as you are unlikely to revisit any planet outside of quests. People liked it in F4 because you were making a dent in an existing world, here you are taking a dump on a remote, procedurally generated empty rock. It seems that they used it because the system was already coded... The weapons can be upgraded... but the basic ones do just fine. Upgrades are costly and their benefits are negligible. Ps. As to the lack of cohesion/ tone/theme shifts - to me it seemed like an engine demo, or IP test where separate teams were asked to prepare a questline based on their favourite sci-fi tropes to see what sticks. This is why you have Fallout New Vegas DLC/Treasure Planet, Cowboy Bebop/Firefly, Alien/Starship Troopers, Deus Ex/Cyberpunk, and No Man's Sky. Ps. The Vanguard quests > main quest... But naturally not the briefings for infiltration missions. Pps. The artifact collector infiltration mission was nice. That being said, this game will not only cost money, but also your time. It is just not worth it.
Like full teasers that are filled up with Cheap B style horror movie vibes of you suffering from a cyber chip in your brain, that would be the fun little narrative gimics
I'm only surprised it wasn't titled Starfield Lamentation. Also, why I do I suspect this will be an actual rumination instead of the post-stream summaries we've been calling such? None of them got an announcement. Could be wrong though.
This game seems like the most barebones delivery device for "bethesda arpg in space" that could ever have been made Imagine the most bland, stale, hard tortilla chip, then breaking off a tiny piece of that, dip it in "bethesda space game" sauce, and that's Starfield.
I think lots of people want to be engaged by their games, but sadly, not everyone does. Some people just want a fun little time waster...even if that time waster is 50-60 or 70 dollars. I accepted that about Starfield. I was ok calling it an ok game. I understood it was bad but I was willing to overlook it's many flaws. Then I got to the "gut punch" moment in the main quest and I did indeed feel the gut punch. Not in the way they intended but in the most artificial way possible. Do you remember that politician who was giving his speech and no one applauded when he expected them to so he prompted them with a "Please clap." And they clapped. At the gut punch moment I could feel Todd Howard saying, "Please feel sad, now." I became utterly disgusted at that point. You have to care for the gut punch to work and the game never, ever, gives you a reason to care. When the Emperor, who you only spend a very short time with, died in Oblivion, I vowed to stomp on every Mythic Dawn member I could find. So much so that in Skyrim when I found one trying to open a museum...well let's just say he'll never have any visitors to his museum. Starfield has nothing like that. I stopped playing the main quest and just did Ranger side missions, the same Ranger side missions, for the next 30 or so hours. I will never progress any further in that game. If I play it will be as a Ranger shooting the same bad guys because there is literally nothing worthwhile about this game.
I've always seemed to justify their use of the creation engine under the supposition that their foundation-level game design (the way the PC interacts with NPCs, the way every item and NPC's location is being tracked in real-time, etc) had not only already been developed, but that the engine's been cultivated over the years to be decent at doing so in a way other engines are not. This would matter because the formula of the modern bethsoft game is built upon these core design elements. If their engine--the absolute mess it is--is still able to handle 1000 NPC's exact locations moment-by-moment better than any newer engine, it makes a grudging sense why they would continue to use it at the expense of other gameplay mechanics. Am I missing something, or have I not considered something here?
I remember watching your stream when this game had a 30 minute showcase. You said that the story would be crap, but you were hoiyped anyway. Which must have made the disappointment and frustration all the more pointed. We've all been there, and you have my sincerest sympathies.
I agree with a lot of your points, but strongly disagree on this one: I think the limited storage is one the few design decisions they got RIGHT, and feels like a holdover from a better version of the game they ruined. As the game is, it's so much fluff, so easy... the combat is a breeze (I had to go Ironman style on Very Hard to pose a challenge to myself in the game), you don't need any environmental suits (they scrapped that), you don't need fuel (they scrapped that), you can do quest lines that feel mutually exclusive because Todd will never tell the player no... But the weight limit ACTUALLY feels like something providing fun and friction and challenge to one aspect of the game. Not only do I like that, I wish they'd actually kept all the other survival elements they scrapped to make exploration feel meaningful and not like wading through endless vanilla pudding.
I would actually agree with you on this IF the connected systems were better designed. I actually rather enjoy a properly limited inventory if there's actual gameplay to it (old example; Resident Evil 4), but in this... thing I fear all it does is just make all the other systems worse.
20 years since the conception and 8 years in development, Starfield used its time to the fullest! While games from Bethesda are bad and I can't expect "good" from it, it makes me extra sad because of setting. Quite unfortunate of how big of a failure that game is.
