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.
Look, it’s very simple - even a cocaine addled exec can see. You remove a fair deal of your gameplay time, say 1/3, and focus budget and development time on quality control and polish. I.e quality over quantity. This is a matter of management and Bethesda’s management is dumb. It’s not rocket science, it’s just business.
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.
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?
“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.
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.
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.
The difference here is you were having arguments with someone during development. It’s easy to look at a successful final product and say “that guy had no clue what he was talking about about!”
Bethesda is saying the same thing about their fans, but for a final product that’s not very good. It’s one thing to dismiss criticism during your process, but to dismiss criticism after you present your results is basically saying you are never open to it.
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 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.
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.
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?
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
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
Emil Pagliarulo is a hack who deserved to be sacked years ago. Utterly talentless gobshite who has milked the goodwill from writing the Dark Brotherhood Oblivion questline to death.
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.
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.
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