Thread 717700691

What were they thinking?

I’ve spoken to Bethesda devs and honestly they are as baffled as we are and want the same thing you do. All the idiotic decisions that trickle down into development come from marketing, management, and executives.
Emil and Todd and the artists start with an idea that might even be good. Then it gets strangled through executive decisions, marketing strategy, idiot quest designers who’ve been there since 2004 and never take criticism well (an ex Bethesda art lead very explicitly once posted about getting raked over the coals by peers for criticizing bad writing) and then toxic positivity within the company from an inflated ego based on their fame, they call it ‘good enough as an rpg’ since most people don’t care about RPG ‘standards’, the ground level devs know there’s problems but they’re too low on the pole to speak up. And the ones higher up don’t want to rock the boat with their colleagues or make the company look too bad.

Add in the fact Bethesda has always been historically extremely small on actual devs (fallout 3 was made by like 70 actual people total) Starfield only just recently upped the team to the hundreds with thousand or so contractors, which stressed the team which wasn’t used to all this.

You start to understand it’s literally incompetence and nepotism of a handful of people at Bethesda tainting the hard work of genuinely talented developers and artists by pushing through dumb writing by nepo-hire quest designers Todd knew in college, Emil being too nice and a Dadgamer to crack the whip or tell everyone their writing and his own suck, or that his big ideas never properly get actually properly implemented - they’re all fragmented half-baked versions of the original story he pitches.

So when they get a big ego and think HIGH SALES = GAMERS LOVE US and haters are just a vocal minority of nitpicks… They push through 76 in a unfinished state, they think Starfield’s disorganized story is better than it actually is. Etc

>>717700691 (OP)
They legitimately think shartfield is a masterpiece and can't understand how anyone would not like it.

>>717700691 (OP)
>thinking
They can't think more than 15 minutes ahead

>>717700691 (OP)
16 times the detail

>we don't need to really try because our fanbase is a fucking cult
And they were correct. Before people actually realized that the game is shit, Bethesda made a lot of money.

>>717700691 (OP)
Eyes bigger than their stomache plus "mods'll fix it" mentality that they continue to be on high on from Skyrim to this day. I also fully believe the leak from years ago saying that the ship flight took years to feel serviceable, sucking up a great deal of dev time. It's a shame because No Man's Sky is the only other game like this. If the scope was smaller, which would hopefully eliminate several loading screens (lmao), I think it would've been fine. The plot gimmick isn't even especially shit. No variety in equipment though, holy shit it's so limited.
I have yet to finish the game, mind you.
>>717701652
Any of them say anything about the totally-not-2.0-ening for the impending PS5 release?

>>717701652
I call bullshit.

>>717700691 (OP)
They thought they were making a game for me and me alone, and they succeeded

>>717700691 (OP)
Waiting didn't work. Criticism didn't work. There no longer seems to be any other option. Emil needs to die.

>>717700691 (OP)
>Look how many times we got retards to rebuy Skyrim, we are geniuses who can do no wrong!!

Probably something along those lines

>>717702294
You can literally directly message ex-Bethesda devs on Twitter and Reddit and odds are good they’ll reply, depending on who you talk to. That’s the sentiment I saw from Jonah Lobe and Nathan Purkeypile. Not being a rude rando to devs gets surprising mileage even if you don’t like their company, which they aren’t often completely loyal to.
>>717702213
No because none I could talk to worked on Starfield. I did get some cope out of Emil during release window. He said they are absolutely committed to Starfield no matter how bad it gets and hinted at internal discussions to me about some kind of game overhaul before he quit Twitter. I should note the guy is an absolutely massive dork way more than Todd and claims to take criticism but is very choosy with what criticism. Todd alluded in an interview once that Bethesda gets so much hate that they’ve tuned a lot of it out. They “have to have a thick skin” from all the constant death threats and shit since the Fallout 3 days and Jonah Lobe the ex-Art lead talked about it publicly. These days Bethesda only really listens to really big journalist opinions or if a community outrage gets really big like pre-76 or the fallout show. They’ve compartmentalized so much of the hate they get that they don’t really care about most of it. The leads, anyway.

The ground level development used to even send me private DMs saying in 2014 “Look, we understand the grievances with NMA and new Vegas fans, but us code monkeys can’t do anything about it, that’s higher up”. Wish id saved the screenshots.

As for Starfield 2.0 there was leaks they’re mocapping the old actors again for new story content and data strings talking about making the game more seamless with less loading. Like interplanetary flight being possible manually. They addressed the ridiculous walking on empty planets with vehicles but it’s more of a bandaid that should’ve been in the base game. They got carried away with empty worlds

>>717701652
>We didn't want to make everyone ugly, they forced us to do it!
I'm sick of this cope.

>>717703191
>Twitter
>Reddit

>>717703409
Yes the former devs of Bethesda use Twitter and Reddit, anon. You expect them to post on /v/? You can directly message a bunch of ex-bethesda designers even. Their contract is up and most say they’ll never work AAA again with the state of the industry so they have nothing to lose answering questions. You expect them to come here and dox themself to answer people who attribute broad strokes of blame on them?

>>717703257
>We didn't want to make everyone ugly, they forced us to do it!
>I'm sick of this cope.
It’s often the fault of overstretched sub-teams of NPC modelers who also have multiple jobs. A lot of low level designers who are probably pretty lib. They go on a very vague description from the management for any not-main NPCs and get free creative license to make them boring to check quota boxes that is in the back of everyone’s mind. It is much more pervasive in a subtle way than you think. You have to sign documents and shit with ironclad footnotes about being committed to diversity.
IIRC The Outer Worlds had so many ugly characters with wacky haircuts because they wanted to highlight the weird tastes of a distant 1920s future and the disparity between corporates, middlemen, and workers culture. When you mix that with weird diversity quotas and the bland templates of NPCs in RPGs you get a big mess of weird looking people with little harmony in aesthetics and the same dumb prefab model haircuts.

Emil specified Starfields Dev team was very committed to a diverse looking future but it’s jarring because it doesn’t feel like a ‘real’ future for that reason. No racism or prejudice, all the old religions forgotten? Weird looking diverse people in high positions in a class-stratified society but no racial biases or even aesthetic biases?

It feels fake. Star Trek even did this utopian vision better. It just feels weird to be a utopian future full of people who look like that.

But mainly it’s the engine. The NPC models are just weird. Mass Effect did all this better in 2007, too. They avoided uncanny valley with simpler haircuts and lighting tricks.

What's bad is that there's no way to save Starfield, as in make it less bad (like Cyberpunk and No Man's Sky). They should just ask a different studio to make a new sci-fi rpg, call it Starfield and replace it with the old Starfield and pretend that version never happened. And it should be free of charge for everyone that bought the original.

>>717705340
*Replace the old Starfield. Not the other way around. I'm tired. Whatever. You get it. Fuck Bethesda.

>>717705340
>free of charge
That'd be 80 dollars plus tax, plus tip.

After reading some interviews and watching a lot more its apparent the managers, team leads etc couldn't wrangle the pajeets and got swamped. They still have the nicest things to say about Todd and the old team as if they're going to get hired ever again but they are done and out.
I've known people that were sent out to India to do training and by the end of it they said whatever they could just to leave early and come back home as they treated his words like religious text on software and animations.

I suspect a lot of the nonsense repeated by these indians across the sea actually are fed bad info because they aren't picking up the actual work and can only do things by presets churning through that have to be cleaned up by the main studios. So the head studio in the states ends up just being busy work fixing imported jank than starting from scratch and making something good the first time.

Also horror stories about them breaking NDAs all the time and leaking shit, losing big contracts and damaging branches of studios all the way up the line costing people jobs already more so than h1b supplants.

>>717700691 (OP)
>"I really hope Microsoft buys us"

You know what I liked it :3

I had no expectations from this game and played it on Game Pass. It scratched the rpg game with a bunch of sidequests that aren't just fetch quests itch (yeah a Bethesda game accomplished that, not counting generated quests tho)