games

The criticism that there was a lack of central pre-planning/outlining for the story and/or game mechanics feels like a face-saving deflection, instead of laying blame at an overall lack of talent

I believe this is true too

but bethesda is also understaffed

they ahve tons of employees dont get me wrong

but for how "big" its supposed to be, its rather small

this is something thats also been known about him for years however, from the fallout 4 interview I posted hes always been a hack fuck

and I think starfield shows off even more why his directing style is bad

and the no design document thing becomes blatently obvious looking from that

because next to todd, he's the top dog

Yeah, their studio is TINY

For the scale of game they want to make

Esp given their resources

its 500? employees total

compared to like the thousands working on games of comparable size

Smaller I think, if you don't count QA

yes

I think it's in the ballpark of 200

From some number I saw getting thrown around

My main gripes with Starfield were the engine/technical limitations that neutered the game, which exacerbated the bad quests and other flawed systems

But, I won't give them the benefit of the doubt that even had they not been limited technically, that they would have designed sound systems

no, they still wouldnt of

Because A LOT of those are less than half-baked

but many issues would be allievated, and many problems would be less pronounced

it would be a better game

but it wouldnt be good still

And that's where I think the criticism of planning, scope management, and talent ring true

Because they were not aiming at a point that would have made Starfield a generation defining game

Despite.... Probably should of doing that

game should of been 20 planets

and they should of focused an entire year on making flying ships actually work without 20 loading screens

and people would probably call it ag ame of a deade

even if itd be mid

NMS solved the problem of in-atmosphere flying not trivializing the game, by disabling weapons

Idk of a better system

But even with that concession, they had to reach NMS launch levels of traversal

5 "settled" planets or w/e

Maybe 10 notable cities across the sector

do our solar system, 3 for UC, 3 for your cowboys, 2-3 for your snake faction and then like 5 free unclaimed random wild ones

wow

instead its 2.5 for UC+ours, 1.5 for cowboys, 0 for snakes 0 for anything else and theyre all empty

I don't like any of the cities they did make either

Other than the constellation/museum area of New Atlantis

i really really hate the cowboy town and faction

its fucking awful

you can not convince me in any world, even on the "frontier" of space, that theyd be using stone and wooden walls and all wear leather

its ridiculous and not even funny

Gotta enjoy the larp

if its some joke faction or single town sure

but this is literally

the only other "society"

you have literally just USA but in space

and then you have space cowboys

with mecha horses

I can't take seriously a lot of the lore

And tbh, the restrictions they had on themselves, I'd love to see written out

>well you see the russians believe in a giant snake god that rules everything >then everyone that wanted to be away from america, joined forces with some cowboys and they created mecha technology that no one else had

>btw this is 300 years from where we are rn

Nasacore is a cool aesthetic, but there's so much more you can do with colonies

christanity, and every other relgiion dissapeared in 300 years and now people believe in space snek god and all forms of culture and nationalism dissapeared

but accents are still there and heavy

None of it is interesting

yeah because the lore was a cliff notes document

Snakes were mysterious for a couple hours

But underwhelming once you get to the faction

lmao

That's uh, up there with Robs tat

i was really excited to join the snake faction

and after like 20 hours i realized

"wow they just dont exist huh"

Same

and if you take the

snake faction trait or whatever

one dialogue reveals that you're not actually from that faction, it doesnt change your herritege

it just means you randomly one day decided to start worshiping the snake

youre not even allowed to roleplay as related

Choosing not to have real aliens was probably a back-and-forth debate

i like it

i dont mind it honestly

I think they failed to make their space human factions interesting