this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2024
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The budget for Starfield was twice that of Baldur's Gate 3. Throwing more money at it isn't going to do a lot if they're allocating it poorly.
I'm not suggesting that a big budget alone is sufficient to make a good game.
However, enough budget to keep the team employed (note the many gaming industry layoffs lately) and appropriate budgeting (in terms of both money and time) affect things like code, art, and writing quality. It's kind of important.
I think it's going to require the people making the most high-level decisions to come to the realization that their old way of doing things is outdated. I don't have faith that they'll come to those conclusions.
Sadly, I don't have much faith in them either. (Hence my low expectations.)
I can still hope, though. Elder Scrolls has enough fans and lore that there's certainly potential for a great new game.
Friendly reminder that the original "loremaster" of Elder Scrolls left Bethesda before they released Elder Scrolls Online, and they replaced him with someone who has apparently been making pretty questionable decisions with ESO lore.
I mean, they always have the out of dragon breaks rewriting reality/making multiple conflicting timelines simultaneously canon (see the events of daggerfall as referenced in later games) to handwave away retcons, but overusing that just means that no lore actually matters.
I think of it as a pool from which to draw and connect story elements, rather than rigid canon. If good writers were given the chance, I think they would find plenty of material to work with.
at the end of the day they are going to make the game they want, whether we like it or not, microsoft is now involved as well so who knows how that is going to affect them with their decisions
Hopefully it'll be like Minecraft; that game has gotten way better since Microsoft.
I think that is the most controversial take I have read in my entire life.
What good has Microsoft done for Mojang/Minecraft? They kneecapped development by splitting the codebase and tying most features to their ability to run on mobile hardware, slowed development to an absolute crawl to increase long-term revenue (these motherfuckers openly develop three new features for minecon every year, then delete two of those for no reason other than "we can"), turned the console/mobile versions into garbage microtransaction boxes, started policing private speech in private servers hosted on private hardware, turned the mod-supporting version of the game into a second-class citizen, basically made for-profit private servers illegal, etc.
Minecraft was a great game that stood on its own merit when Microsoft bought it. Everything they did only brought it down, and the few good features the game has gained since then were long overdue and done despite Microsoft's meddling.
The real number is Morrowind had something like 10-20 writers that worked on it. Modern Bethesda games have 1.
Michael Kirkbride counts as 15 writers-in-one with enough cocaine.
It's a good thing that he definitely didn't leave the company years ago then!
He released his Coda, he's washed his hands of the setting.
Lol he's definitely worth it
I think I counted 6 quest designers in Starfield, which was a spot in the credits I was specifically looking for given how many quests they had and how many of them would have been better off not even existing. You can't talk about having 1000 planets and then make quests that aren't interesting to populate them.
There's a recent video that adds all of that up. Starfield had some crazy low number of quests, I think 50ish, and Morrowind had like 300+.
And of course Starfield has an astronomical number of devs on it.
There are more than 50 quests unless you're getting creative with how you count. There are over a dozen in each major faction, and those ones are mostly okay, but the ones I really take issue with are the nothing quests that aren't part of any faction; the ones that basically just have you go to a location and then report back. Those are awful. There should be zero quests in there that the quest designers themselves aren't excited about. Even the bounties that you pick up for a given faction that have you go to a place and kill an enemy mob should be more exciting than what I've already described in this sentence.
I don't know what to tell ya dude.
Perhaps "you're right", "you're wrong and also short, here's why", or even "I don't know". These would all be things you could tell them and a better response.
K
Starfield has more quests than Skyrim (both somewhere around 200 or so quests). Morrowind definitely felt like it was twice as much as those.
It's a tricky balancing act. They need to recover the investment as early as possible to pay less in capital costs but doing that will mean that later on when the product is sub-par it will cause problems and extra work.
Since the engine, game logic, art, story, testing is so heavily coupled together changing the engine a little bit could cause a month of work down the line.
I think personally the best way is to start by making an engine or taking one off the shelf and then write a mini version of the game with shit art that has a lot of bugs.
At the same time making models with hitboxes that all have the same physical properties otherwise, dialog content and recordings and all other content that can be done separately.
Once that is fun to play then you can start working creating a slightly bigger system with a single short storyline to have a cohesive experience and will have the genaral feel of the game.
Once everything above is done setting up a closed beta is the way to go. Take some feedback, add features and redo the small story to be more fun.
Then once everything is a fun experience but people just want more you do the whole everything.
While you’ve made some valid points, keep in mind this isn’t a startup, it’s a massive studio