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“As companies grow inefficiencies creep in”. – Truer words have rarely been spoken.

Not surprised the game was absolute dog shit and wasted what 8 years of people’s lives .

Starfield was a terrible Dei slop no wonder he quit

DEI blows

PoE and PoE2 hold zero appeal its system bloat after system bloat which doesn’t make it a good game and I hate being told it does. It was the same with last epoch. D4 in its new state is actually good for the player who has a little bit of time here and there to play, it’s a game not a career.

Played 0 AAA in the last two years. Rimworld is my ultimate game. I always coming back to it.

developers are the ones that make games
not the studio name
the key developers that made a game that you love end up leaving then any new sequel will feel for the most part like a different game
check the recent Mass Effect or Dragon Age games when the lead writer left. feels like massive downgrades compared to the old games

What keeps everything from looking the same when using Off the Shelf tools?

Starfield still not going PlayStation 😂

Hundred dollars for early release what a joke. Starfield changed my entire philosophy when shopping for video games.

Only after they’ve been proven and on sale

trashfield!!

Once Lost Games – Wayward Realms.

Will it successfully make it to market? What do you think?

Yeah, Boot Dev is absolutely amazing. Def try their free trial and see if programming is something you’d be into.

I’m not sure indies having access to tools for creating assets quickly is such good news if it means having literally all games looking the same instead of “just” all AAA and Unreal5 games being hard to tell apart already.
Give me a Hades, a Hollow knight or a Ori, or even good anime or pixelart style over Manor Lords shiny but pretty generic visuals any day.

Imagine spending 200 million dollars on a game and having to pull it from stores while some kind of solitaire clone was in the running for Game of the Year (Don’t actually know what Balatro is like, I’m literally just basing my opinion on a few photos and what a AAA studio exec would think.)

I can only imagine how bad it is sitting on your 5th meeting of the week when you don’t need to be there as the boss comes in to tell you to buckle down and get things done while they actively prevent you from doing so when you’re the person who’s supposed to use every available moment to work on the game…but somehow the meeting telling you to hurry is more important than hurrying.

Eiyuden Chronicles is a great example. Made by Rabbit & Bear Studio, its founder wanted to make a spiritual successor to the Suikoden games, a series of brilliant JRPGS that’ve languished in Konami’s IP dungeons for decades now.

Starfield was a flop, relatively speaking, not because of its huge team or bloat or any of the major issues with AAA development (though all of those are indeed problems), but because everyone involved in that game at a planning level seems to have not realized that people love Bethesda’s open world games in spite of all their flaws because almost no one crafts such an immersive, evocative world as they do. They sacrificed everything that makes people put up with their shitty game systems on the altar of procedural generation for scale. Skyrim wasn’t a crazy success for so long because it had great combat or interesting crafting or deep skill trees, it succeeded because the world of Skyrim sucks you in due to environmental design, music, etc, and it stuck around so long due to modding.

the elders scrolls 6 going to die before its even out lmao

Ever play a demo more than once?.? Yea that’s We Harvest Shadows for us ^^ can’t wait to see what that game becomes!.!

Derail Valley and Railroader – Challenging the train simulator market, both have small teams, and both are very highly received on Steam.

UE5 Issues still don’t justify its convenience for devs imo. Optimisation alone has cut off a significant amount of the usual indie customer base

My son and I have been playing Starfield since release and loving it. Some minor issues but non game breaking. The addition of mods changed the game for the better.

Why do people like Bethesda so much?

Terra Invicta

That game he is releasing as an indie dev is aaaaaaaawful. Granted, it might get more development time, but my attempts at playing it, along with multiple others, left us all sort of scratching our heads. It’s just… a mess. Hopefully he can pick a direction to take it further. Controls alone were a disaster.

One of the best examples of indie devs for me will always be stardew valley made by concerned ape. 8 years later he is still constantly updating the game for free mostly by himself and everyone loves it. I still play it to this day and find new things to do. Always top of my recommendation list for friends

people need to stop milking stories on Purkey, he’s an environment artist, and he has mostly good things to say about Bethesda and working there. his game is pretty, but not very engaging gameplay wise.

I don’t think Elder Scrolls 6 will be good.
Specially without the old tem and with the state that Bethseda is in now…

TLDR: Capitalism is the enemy of art.

Yes hate on everything. This is the reason I hate social media. WHY they spin everything form big corp, to be the bad guy

Fromsoftware is pretty much the only studio I would still pre-order from.

I personally might get back into Starfield now that I got my Rokid Max 2 glasses for the 215 inch screen or 17.9 feet I don’t have an Xbox anymore and cloud stream just fine but I only got an 11 inch tablet so it wasn’t enjoyable unless I played it on a 65 inch screen or bigger to get a better experience out of it

Diablo 4 is big? How? Path of Exile 2 has like 10x more end game content IN EARLY ACCESS WITH MAJOR PARTS OF THE GAME STILL MISSING, and this is coming from someone who up until PoE2 early access frequently defended D4. The ONLY thing D4 has going for it that beats PoE2 is cinematics and an insanely dedicated art team that carries the game with art, art direction, art style and super high quality assets for the characters and world. PoE2 beats it in literally everything else, IN EARLY ACCCESS.

Hmmm… capitalism working as designed so they leave to join a small studio that is more even… you guys know what that’s called?

Been playing lots of AA games lately and they been totally feeling like AAA games to me, to me anyway, being that I don’t mind subpar graphics, some jank, and funny glitches that aren’t totally game breaking or halts progress, some being…The Last Oricru, Hellpoint, Wolcen, Grimdawn, Scars Above, Elex 2 and many more those are just some I beat recently but very decent for what they are.

video starts at 2:25

Cool I’ll be laughing when starfield 2 comes out! see ya going to play Starfield now. the ppl who hate this game or Skyrim need to sleek help immediately please go get help, honestly for the sake of humanity.

These problems are not unique to BGS. It’s every field of work that has a office/corporate environment. Everything has become a lot more bureaucratic.

Poor business management has always been a hazard, and the fish rots from the head as they say. There are some fundamental dis-economies of scale to be sure, but most of the issues in the present market are a matter of bad management and the culture that supplies the workforce.

Unfortunately contributing factors to this sort of hazard have been on the rise for about the last 30 years. 60 years if you include educational trends that shape the generational mindset, and about 100 years (in the USA) for governmental legal structure. With the first half of these being quiet setup and the second half being the more noticeable trend.

Disliked just because AI thumbnail. Good video tho

Just really bad at his job!

So the future will be controlled by epic then.

Most of the bloat is due to HR, Legal….and get this DEI departments. Wishing that Bethesda would move away from the Creation Engine will not solve anything. Creation Engine is Awesome. Look at the mods we have from people with ZERO budgets.

The issue is corporate bloat and DEI Marxist practices. Games aren’t being made anymore to make great games. They’re sole purpose, from those who are corporate or have wall street funding, is indoctrination and propaganda. You should be very worried for ES6 because of this, not because of the Creation Engine.

were tired of 70 dollars and then pay 40+ more for dlc

Axiom Verge 1 and 2. both made by a single dude.

Starfield had a chance to recover with it’s first expansion but seemed to ignore the fans. They’re sticking to whatever 10 year plan they have for the game. I was hoping for some sort of No Mans Sky style recovery. Bethesda is in a decades long process of dumbing down thier games and dropping less and less content. For all that staff they aren’t making much and their technology is decaying.

Who quit? I’m not listening to a clickbait title video.

we know that large games with big teams can work but only if the management is good and effecent.
so many companys like this one just go through the motions with no real hands on management or streamlined structure, add to that a game engine that should have been scraped a long time ago and its a wounder the game ever got compleated.
its one of the games i tryed to play on game pass on day one but the performance was so bad even on low settings that i gave up on it, and i dont intend to go go back.
i am 68 so my time is short on this earth so i am very picky about what i play now.

Nvidia doesn’t have driver problems at all…

To be honest, if they don’t properly fix Starfield, I don’t plan on buying TES VI.
If they can’t fix Starfield, it means the same thing will happen with TES VI. It’s going to be a disaster; they’ll boast that it’s the best game they’ve ever made and then go straight to ruining Fallout 5.

Starfields issue was how disjointed the world building was and how conflicting certain quests were with the implicit outcomes on the game world. Plus the NG+ changes to the explorer faction kind of just sucked?

It was so odd to have that one “populated” human settlement with like 8 high rises on a planet with next to no population density needed to create pressure to even build skyscrapers and the next area out of the city looking like the random empty homestead areas with no patchways leading back to the city “island”.

I think Starfield would have been better if it only had a fixed total of like 40 landing sites and have those completely handcrafted instead of players getting repeat tiled locations and POI slop.

20 meetings a week? That would be a dream! 😂 As a software engineering manager, I’m lucky if I only have 10 meetings a day… It is indeed soul-crushing. Constant barage of Zoom calls. By the time I’m done with all my work and life stuff, I’m barely able to squeeze in some indie dev time… But hey, just have to keep going at it. My best to everyone here trying!

Star sector, aint on steam but oh boy if it was

Star field vs stardew vs Starbound vs star citizen. Battle of staffing and budgets unlike anything else among the stars

He was a dev lead and he did not like lots of meetings? – what the actual?
As a lead on a large project having meetings to share knowledge, coordinate and fight fires is pretty much your job.
This is just a demonstration of his inexperience in the role.

kenshi

👎

I solo dev! Well, more like hobby dev. I make $0, just doing Game Jams and stuff. If we can all just make games for each other, does the games industry even need to exist? Youtube and streaming services have already answered this question for television and film industry, right? It’s only a matter of time.

11:50 so why are ue 5 games always unoptimized

all those developers and not having 10x more poi interior variety is mind boggling

Starfield, compared to New Vegas, Skyrim and Fallout 4 – is lifeless, devoid of soul. You can see it the moment you start the game and further on it becomes even more obvious.

Why should I care, Im enjoying starfield with mods 400 + hours, I dont need to care about a nobody wanting to make his hunting game. I like big budget single player games Im not interested in the problems of developers they dont care about my problems. Braid was the exception not the rule, you wanna become the next jonathan blow good luck with that cuz there are a thousand other devs in line.

“You can tell that too many teams were making it:”
Frankly, no I see the exact opposite. I ask myself every time i think about Starfield, what the f*** Bethesda was working on for 6+ years because it shure as shit wasn’t Starfield. You can’t play that game for 2 minutes without getting the feel that you’re playing some kind of E3 demo where it’s just a vertical slice of gameplay and only the path the presenter is going to walk along actually works.

– New Atlantis clearly is unfinished with the creepy placeholder NPCs with models that are less detailed than random city NPCs in Oblivion
– the vegetation in that city is clearly also placeholder art since it’s much lower detailed than the random static meshes on the planet surfaces
– Neon being much more detailed and consistenly designed is also a clear indicator that New Atlantis never even reached an Alpha stage of completeness
– No city maps ffs
– Not only are there only maybe 10 different dungeons that just get copy pasted over and over again on the 100s of planets those dungeons also all contain tablets and computers with lore text what happened here that also gets completely copy pasted over as well which I take as a clear indicator that this was not plan, because it is utterly nonsensical to have dozens of abandoned research outposts that had the same accident happen to tthe same people with the same names. Clearly they just had to somehow generate “content” because they had none.
– The outpost system is blatantly just Bethesda frantically porting over the FO4 settlement system into the game in a mad scramble to somehow pretend the game has content
– There are the environemntal hazard indicators in the hud that are just optics because that is all that would have been neccessary for an E3 demo but nothing at all other than “Level 2 Heat Hazard” showing up was implemented they have 0 effect on gameplay.
– Joining the pirate faction will break half the random dungeons because the enemies there will no longer attack you also clearly a sign that stuff was frantically thrown together in the last months, because there is no way that would have been part of a 6 year battle plan for development.

No my question stands: What in god’s name has Bethesda been doing in those 6 years? Because for a team of 100+ people over 6 years what shipped with Starfield is an utterly baffling amount of “content” or rather lack thereof. Nothing was finished, entire systems clearly were ripped out before release to somehow get to a barely playable state (starship fuel anyone?) and that then got tossed on the store shelves.

I was done after Fallout 4. It wasn’t bad just disappointing compared to Fallout 3.

I dunno, these days I don’t want games from AAA dev leaders. Most of them are activist whackos.

20 meetings a week means that you only do meetings. UE5 may be good for developers; for gamers it has the reputation of being stutter heavy.

8:56 very well said, I watched that doaceo ep too – how hasn’t this been vocalized more often?

Imagine advertising yourself with Starfield of all things.

starfield is a shallow surface game cobbled together

I have some personal experience with “Indie over AAA”. I watched Spiffing Brits videos on Rimworld back in like 2021 or 2022 and got curious.

83% of my playtime of the entire year of 2022 did sink into Rimworld. I am still baffled how this went out, because usually i am only getting hooked by Bugthesda Games (excluding Starfield, didn’t bought this, never played it, only watched reviews on it), but Rimworld was the drug i needed in 2022 i guess.
Now the rush is over by now, but still i sunk 1580,9 hours into Rimworld on Steam right now, i have a solid Modlist (which did feed the addiction a lot) and this game earned it’s place among the “always installed Games” in my Steam Games list. Usually that is reserved for games that break a lot, if you re-install them and their modlists (Thanks Todd Howard) OR other games that are massively iconic and nostalgic (like good old Age of Empires II)

I guess Rimworld just scratched an itch i had for well developed games, polished games, games with immense depth to them and storytelling, as well as base building and survival. Point given, the graphics and the Art Style are not everyone’s cup of tea (at first), but i think this is comparable with Minecraft back when that came out and now has a huge fanbase.

So yeah, i think Larian Studios’ CEO just had the absolute correct words at that Game Awards Show. Praise earned and well deserved i’d say.

😕 I actually play a lot of Starfield and there was very clear scope creep that lead to a lot of systems that never got the nessesary depth.

ES6 is doomed. All of their best talent has left over the last 5ish years and the only ones remaining are either DEI hires or those that think Starfield was a good product.

comment to hack the algorithm

20 meetings a week sounds like you aren’t able to get much hands on work done. If you are working 5 days a week, that’s 4 meetings a day. I’ve never worked anywhere where with that kind of meeting schedule. I know some people with high level management jobs that don’t have that many meetings in a week.

I get the guy was a lead artist, but if you are having that many meetings with that many teams, the process is bloated or there need another level of supervisors in between.

How I imagine a modern media company work schedule:
09:00 DEI meeting
10:00 send out critics bribes
11:00 DEI meeting
12:00 circle jerk
13:00 DEI meeting
14:00 daily firing of coders
15:00 DEI meeting

Hshaha
The way you said money at the begining
You sounded like Mr Krab

The best game I’ve played in years is _Selaco,_ made with GZDoom and plays better than most modern slop from big studios.

Its amazing, i paid for YT prenium to skip commercials and ads… and you know what? Now the creators stuffs with ADS…. ffs…

Premade free assets solo devs can use in their games are greats… So why are people hating on AI art again?

UE5 is absolutely crap.

Oh, completely forgot about Starfield…

Dude – POE is WAY bigger and has an uncomparably more content than Diablo 4. POE2 hasn’t even been released yet, so yeah no shit it’s not finished. Also how TF does it take this many people to create a cutscene simulator like Starfailed? A single dev and an AI can probably do the same job (albeit probably better)

please stop saying “cook” lol

There might be less PoE2 than D4, but not by much. And PoE2 is still not the full thing. It’s basically a beta version with only have the campaign done.

The Axis Unseen prob didn’t get popular due to having no co-op. I swear there’s so many indie games that look good and not being co-op instantly kills them for me, same for my friends. That’s at least 4-5 sales of what could’ve been one through word of mouth and friends

I’m just going to say that for all its praise, Nanite is actually terrible for optimisation. It’s a lazy man’s tool when you have a lot of overdraw – but a well designed game should be keeping that to a minimum anyway.

I’m so excited for the rise of creative intuition and passion again. There are things I worry about still, but I want more games built with love and passion and I feel like we are on the right track. To hopefully get games on the same level as Halo: Reach. That had fantastic gameplay, story and still looked quite amazing. Halo: Reach felt like a book I didn’t want to put down cause it was so good and I haven’t felt that in awhile from a game. For so many reasons. Biggest being that people don’t think games need to be written well for some reason.

This video was a nothing sandwich

There is an upper limit to the number of people that can be managed on a project effectively.

2025 is gonna be the best year ever, rebirth will come after destruction.

For me the Game was Zero Sievert.
And I follow the development of Road to Vostok, which is also a solo dev with a lot of exp.

Skyblivion is going to be better than anything modern Bethesda has to offer

AAA gaming has become too big to succeed.

Isn’t half of this info a year old? we already had a noclip video in december of 2023 on nate and his game and how he was making it, and comparisons to working at bethesda

Balatro is cheap, accessible, clever and more addicting than crack.
This video is making me want to work on my dice game.

The Axis Unseen is a BIG bad example 😀 on the day of release, 86 people played this game… and it was the most in history. 01/01/2025 and there are 2 players online, with 8 in 24 hours. 0.0 such results will not encourage interest in the title – and this will also not encourage investors. This movie has aged badly!! ps. I just realized that the video is from 16 hours ago and you mentioned that you wrote a script for it… 2 months ago 😀

How does this differ from the asset flip games of the past?

The best games have always been made by small, small teams

Blizzard didn’t need 100 people to make Diablo

Or Warcraft 2

Or even WoW

These people steer the Titanic into the iceberg, then demand a spot in one of the life boats.
Stop tolerating this behavior, normies.

“After an Era of Bloat, Game Developers are going smaller” Good, cus its true. 3 dudes managed to make a Roblox looking Battlefield game (Battlebit Remastered), and 1 person made Manor Lords. You do not _need_ Hundreds or Thousands of people working on ONE GAME! Ultimately games are a product of passion and creativity, not THROWING HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF DOLLARS AT THE PROBLEM! And with all the Layoffs that have been happening over the past few years, I am certain we are in a time of transition. The changing of the guard is slow but it does happen.

Long Live Indie and AA Development!

Tripple a is better

I would love only 20 meetings a week. 😂

Emil, please leave.

16:09 A *fantastic* game from a minuscule team is Slay the Princess. The core team was just two devs, two voice actors, and a musician

I think one of Bethesda’s 2 biggest problems right now in my honest opinion are todd howard and the creation engine i think todd is to stuck in his ways to change things and the creation engine being one of them is so fucking ancient its not even funny its horribly optomized always carries bugs and just looks bad they need change to actually have something decent come out otherwise theyre literally going to die on their hill and itll be because they never wanted to come down off it to seek other things

There was a good NoClip with Nate some time back where he actually talked about the differences in tools between Bethesda and the Creation Engine versus moving to UE, and his statement was interesting in talking about how limited/antiquated Bethesda’s tools were.

Humanoid has got to come back Casey Hudson has to much talent to go under

TLDR: The top most played games last year were games up to 5 years or older. Let this continue and the mega corps bleed themselves dry until the point hurts their wallets which will cause change.

Dont pre-order
Dont buy Deluxe anything

Nike says ” Just do It. ”

What you should be saying is: Dont.

I just finished Mouthwashing. It was a great game by a small group. Critical Reflex is a producer that I’m following and playing their game when they release it. There are other publishers that we indie gamers usually follow like Devolver and 11 bit studios.

I’m sad to hear Humanoid studio’s shut down was looking forward to what they had cooking

Just one problem. Manorlords gameplay is basic and hasn’t seen any updates in like, a year. Hell, some of the features intended aren’t even implemented yet ffs.

“There is less path of exile 2 than there is Diablo 4” That could not be more wrong of a statement.

16 times the trainwreck

AMD Driver issues and yet this is only related to this game?

Regarding the sponsored bootcamp, please remember that a bootcamp is only as good as the connections it makes for you. Furthermore, none of my colleagues started with a bootcamp. 3 of 5 were interns while in college.

Most importantly, the industry is changing rapidly. Please be realistic.

I found Nate on tiktok, I purchased the game day one. I have really enjoyed it and I am really happy you talked about it.

Moonring and Skald: Against the Black Priory

The problem with this though is I can see salty ceos and shareholders trying to buy these engines favor if not outright and jocking up prices or making indie development less accessible just because they hate people.

Best indie game I play: Rimworld.
Worst AAA game I wish I had never bothered with 12 years ago: Star Citizen.

Its insane how much money Epic puts into their engine yet dont care to fix the issues it has, but instead expect hardware or AI features to compensate

Starfield wasnt great the DLC/expansion was absolute trash.

And people still think Bethesda is remastering oblivion

If you think *NOW* that Elder Scrolls 6 is going to be a disaster you have clearly been living too long in Todd’s dungeon. The warning signs were there since Fallout 4

I’m calling it now.
Elder Scrolls is gonna be another trainwreck.
Probably worse than Cyberpunk 2077 (which is good now) or Dying Light 2.

You are the BEST of the internet. THANK YOU. Happy new year. Hugs and love to you and your family
🫶❤️🫶

Hearing you say “let them cook” was a very nice touch to the video

A hundred people made Skyrim over a decade ago. Daily Steam player counts are typically above 20,000, still. Smaller is better.

UE5 is a cancer on gaming.

Some people don’t get it (and this makes me really frigging pissing mad) – bloated companies CAN’T create anything close to art, it all ends up generic. When there’s too many people, there’s too much delegated work and too little personal touch and deliberation, no time for anyone to have any freedom to do anything they believe is cool and they have to pass every single decision by layers and layers of superiors or down through cogs of workers until it reaches the correct worker

Bloated companies are good only as factory floors or sweatshops. And even factories are automating now.

One of the biggest issues with the gaming industry right now is how big & bloated it is, because there’s so many people there’s little to no accountability. If you ruin a product just move on to another one, it somehow no longer tarnishes your name if you’ve been attached to 5 failed products anymore where as back in the 2000s and 2010s you’d have that cloud over your head. Now we just have studios that are more like the ship of Theseus than anything else.

I’ve come to accept the ESO6 is never gonna happen, at least in it’s best form, when Starfield dropped. I think part of me already knew this was gonna be the outcome way back when 76 dropped.

I see the downfall of AAA as an absolute win. Sure there will be a lot less money being pumped into the gaming industry but we will get back smaller scale games that are actually made with passion and not compulsion from big corp wanting another unrealistic unneeded massive game that’s gonna be overhyped and will underperform massively at launch. I want smaller fun games I don’t regret buying. I’d rather spend 20€ on a 10-15h game than 60-70€ on a 200h+ game where the story feels like slob that’s just there because every game need a story

There are millions of gamers that want big budget, massively scoped titles. The gaming media gives those games unparalleled coverage.

God of War got a whole lot more attention than creative labours of love like Hi Fi Rush.

Note, when rome 1 and medievil 2 were made i bet the ca team was not that big

Valheim also dreamed up by one dev then scaled up with a small team of maybe 10 people i think.

My favourite game of all time – definitely comes from one persons vision and is uncompromising.

I seriously hope that the era of publishers looking for infinite money printers is coming to an end. It’s been such a detriment to gaming as a whole. The money behind the studios never understood that those games that WERE infinite money printers were made as labors of love and pure quality. You can’t rush that. They were also ALL limited scope. They didn’t try to be an “everything” game for every audience. Feature and scope creep has killed SO MANY great-sounding projects. It just takes too long and too many resources. Find a core concept, execute it well, and if it takes off THEN you can start adding these ambitious goals to that game.

I also have no regrets.
I don’t have to buy their garbage.
I don’t have to eat the slop.
I can do nothing, and they will fail.

Your move, games industry.

Why do smaller teams seem to do better? Because they don’t have economic decisions, art direction and political decisions forced upon them by their management. It’s only when you have all of these external forces pushed upon you that you let mediocre pass as complete.

You can’t put a price on peace of mind. No amount of Lamborghinis can substitute for that. Anyone truly invested in the creative process and carries passion for game development will know that deep down. Hopefully his story shines as a beacon of opportunity and potential for others looking to reset the industry the way it needs

Nate Purkiplier

Elder rimjob 6 is going to be sht

Subsistence.

Nate is live right now btw y’all if you wanna see a detailed overview and gameplay

Btw, Manor Lords is an almost perfect 3D copy of Lords and Villeins. But it is actually a less good game as peasants are numbers instead of people who have personalities among other things.

There are 3 problems in the games industry, GREEDY CORPORATIONS , TOXIC AF GAMERS, and GAME JOURNALISTS

The great AAA Brain Drain.

I’m the easiest Bethesda fan ever. Since 1996 with Daggerfall when the company had to send me a patch for the game on a 3.5” floppy. Enjoyed all TES and Fallout games

Starfield was boring ass. I wish I could get a refund but I accidentally played too long.

Devs leaving… has been the #1 sign to a future bad game.

I’m not hearing people leaving FromSoft or Respawn or Rockstar… just the ones who happen to be releasing broken games.

Good. Project lead probably sucked at their job, which is what led to the total failure of Starfield. Hope they dont get another opportunity to ruin another game. Bethesda is a sinking ship solely because they keep hiring these untalented slops.

bgs might die before tes 6 comes out lol and even if it does it’ll be a crushing disappointment

then there’s Genshin Impact with 2000 employees and 700 developers pushing out updates every month

Ive been wanting to make games all my life – grtting a job with anything game related is super tough it appears.. i did start a very ambitous project a few years ago, but had to put it on pause unfortunately, as I am definitely not an artist and its just something I would need help with covering.. I love immersive games though, and found a guy who has a bit of money who is willing to start this journey with me, and will now be starting to do videos on the game we will be making.. its smaller than my actual dream project, but still within the same universe, and am very excited to get it out and show what we want to do to people. I just really hope it manages to pull enough traction so I can live off of it, and make it a full time thing 🙂

They replaced people that are passionate about games with people that are passionate about money.

Hope those leads leave, create their indie companies and flood the market with amazing AA games with soul.

Worth remembering re: POE2, it’s not finished yet. It’s still in early access, and will almost double in size once the completed game goes live. It’s already about the same size as Diablo IV in main storyline, so I’m fairly sure it’ll at LEAST equal Diablo IV once it’s finished.

Personally, I’m absolutely stoked that studios like Larian, GGG, Owlcat, etc. are FINALLY getting the respect they deserve. It baffles me that these *comparatively* tiny studios are producing games that are higher quality, have better finish, better and more nuanced storylines, and make a larger portion of the gaming population happy, than studios many times their size and have drastically higher budgets. PLUS, their staff are much, MUCH happier and more excited about their products!

If you tell your devs to make a game _they_ want to make you get
A) a good game
B) returning customers
C) happier devs
D) a stage for the next game

Squeezing money out of your customers and time out of your developers is how you lose profit.

amd doesnt have much driver issues. tho the fact that most game optimization is ass plays a big role. also ue5 has massive issues of its own on the engine side.

20 meetings a week is 4 a day for a full work week, if you assume they respect weekends which they probably do not. I know I’m a math genius, but it’s worth being said to realize the magnitude of how stupid it is.
Literally no work is getting done for that week, and the next and the next.

Ive found myself stuck in similar but not quite as insane loops during my ‘career’ where people did weekly meetings after weekly meeting to say everytime they didn’t have time to do x or y since last time we spoke.. because they were in other meetings.

You start to understand why those games take so many years to make and with no time to pivot in the middle of the pipeline when they realize X or Y feature is ill thought out and needs to be rethought entirely.

gaming is getting more and more boring these days

Bethesda: Starfield was the most difficult game we’ve ever made.
Yeahhh, I have no faith.

Yall need to check out dread delusion if you like indie teams

As just an end user/player, I found this video encouraging. Over the years I have enjoyed some AAA games but I’ve also enjoyed some absolutely wonderful ‘small’ budget/team games. Indies being able to do more on their own with better tools sounds like both more total games available for me to choose from, and also possibly some reigning in of the greed of some AAA studios due to increased competition.

Amd issue is by unreal 5 lack of optimization not an amd issue 😊

Bethesda is like Blizzard and most other big studios, anyone with real talent and passion has left long ago, now only “modern” devs remain.

is this just a really long ad for Unreal Egnine 5?

Will they use Unreal Engine now?

who wants to make games with me. lol
intermediate level skill or higher in ANY area! I am a generalist. prefer u know how to work server auth multiplayer. UE5 preferred.
we can vote on a simple game to try and expand after that.

Personally I hate UE5…. every AAA company just throws TASS or something on it and hopes it fix’s the issues while making the game look like trash

20 meetings a week is not that bad. I have had 6 1h meetings a day…

I only know Bellular from WoW. Does he actually play any of these games he discusses, or just regurgitating news?

Honestly, being a lead designer for Starfield isn’t the flex I think he thinks it is.

I mean.. sure, but how many actually talented and devoted people there are to make such good games by themselves. also it is easier and more fun to make a game together with team that cares about title instead alone. the problem is that industry is moving towards monetization and globalization from more of an art and culture angle and its nothing new. same thing happened when games where moved from arcade machine to CD-rom on PC and consoles. and in the end if you are working on product that does not brings you any income and money then you probably run out of funds for living and dont finish said product anyway

The Planet Crafter is an awesome game created by one person in 2024

He made a terrible game LOL

I don’t understand, if you’re a very talented programmer who loves making games, why in the world would you want to work for a huge company run by shareholders and executives, who don’t know anything about games, only money, where you don’t get to make the decisions about games, or even really spend that much time in the creative process of making games, assuming that’s your passion, but instead spend all that time trying to explain stuff and organise stuff with a bunch of tunnel-money-visioned executive idiots who don’t know anything about games and care even less, and likely spend most of their time trying to cut down on the creativity in order to save money. That must be soul destroying for anyone who wants to make games.

For me starfield is just a far, far, far, far worse Elite Dangerous. I guess it has a better main story… But elite basically has none. Heck, original elite is a better game than Starfield. And I can visit thousands of systems without a single loading screen… On 22KB.

Want say that AMD drivers are bad? Well, so are nvidias. Most UE5 games are giving GPU crashes and even some older unity games. Nvidia drivers aren’t any better.

Too many cooks in the kitchen for games is a reality.
Big budgets, and too many people. It stymies creativity and puts people out of touch with the work. And with all that excess money as silly as it sounds, comes a lot more pressure to make it back and then some extra…

Who cares. Bethesda hasn’t done anything noteworthy since 2011.

I bought The Axis Unseen on the day of release and even though i dont find it suitable for me, i wish the guy best of luck. (Didnt refund it since i might play it in the future)

Shows up, ruins game, elaborates, leaves.

Neutral Evil.

Beyond 65 people on a project you need dedicated managers & that means you need to have meetings to manage the managers, and communication becomes problematic.

If you look back, many of the best AAA games were built with only around 60 people, now sure you can have additional people for QA and such, but still.

Nanite makes things look neat, but it DESTROYS performance when not properly optimized, the reason UE5 games all look the same is because devs get lazy and use singular tools in sweeping ways which makes games look worse than previous gen games & run worse too. The UE5 tools like nanite are certainly powerful & when used correctly can be very helpful, but far too often they are used lazily which leads to games that run like crap.

Bethesda hasn’t done anything note worthy since Skyrim. They haven’t done amazing since Morrowind. Elder Scrolls 6 doesn’t stand a chance.

The more passion that goes into a game the better it is.
There are always exceptions and success is never guaranteed, but solo developers take on these massive challenges because they have a dream fuelled by their passion and the player is going to touch every single piece of what they put into it, it’s very intimate and it’s not uncommon for indie devs to have a genuine fear of releasing something so personal out into the public.
If you can foster a sense of ownership and passion in a large team that’s special but it’s so easy for it to become diluted the larger a team gets, there’s no passion in being a cog in a machine contributing to someone elses idea you’ve never met and don’t really care about, i think if the studio is too large to book into a restaurant to celebrate finishing the game then the team is too large.

when did the thumbnail changew it saied youre a cog in the machine b4

always wild to see a youtuber decry the capitalistic downfall of an industry and then proceed to IMMEDIATELY straightfacedly describe a nonsense nothingburger mess techbro of a sponsor (they teach you a programming language but also are an RPG, for some reason?) as if they actually understand what those people are doing and support it and aren’t just doing mercenary ad read for a paycheck

come on man. get that bag, but come on. what’s even happening on this platform. did we learn nothing from Honey

Yes, nanite will handle stuff on its own.
I just hope that the devs dont forget about manual optimisation and dont just go “slap dlss and whatnot, or customers just gonna have to buy new gpu, whatever”

Loading Screen Simulator is one of the most boring games I’ve ever played. The only thing worse is Indiana Jones and the Golden Circle of Sensory Deprivation. Seriously once you’ve punched out one Nazi, it’s the same every other thousandth time.

Thanks for bringing the axis unseen to my attention, I watched a review and it seems interesting, also, is currently at 12. 27 dollars in GOG, I’m totally gonna grab it for for myself

Stardew Valley, while not new. Is a great example of small scale meets roaring success.

I really loved playing Skald: Against the Black Priory.

More episodes like this please, beautiful deep dive into “…the most crucial features of developers that don’t get talked about…”. Genuinely, thank you

I dunno Mr Bellular. After having played poe2 for several hundred hours now, its a bit of a hot mess. And didn’t D4 make a billion dollars off of MTX alone? Just sayin.

For the few of us that actually understand game design. Starfield is a glorious disaster. A lot of people look at the game and can clearly see that things aren’t right. They aren’t the way that they should ve. At this point, everyone knows that it’s a mess of a game.

But when you understand design, man oh man, is it ever a treat! You can see how they went back and forth in issues and NEVER settled on an answer. You can see all the rush jobs, cut corners, inconsistencies. Every single thing is bad. Nothing is right. From how useless you are without skills. Like tying ship power into player skills. But then ship skills are uselees outside of the ship. But enemies level in tandem with you and they don’t care you are specking into something else. It is gloriously bad. From the very core. Nothing is correct.

I low key love the game for that. I played it obsessively on launch. I did not enjoy a single minute and have like 80 hours in.

I have a dumptruck of money!

It’s just pennies, though.

Not Emil. Rot remains.

Nanite is not the silver bullet this video, and many others hyping it up, seem to make it out to be. It has it’s advantages yes, but you pay a cost in engine overhead. If you don’t know how to handle it you can end up with serious frame time issues, especially combined with a lot of the other UE5 features Epic hyped up, that don’t deliver unless you know exactly what to do with them. You can end up with a game that runs like garbage. UE5 actually requires a lot of optimization work to make everything run well. Don’t get me wrong, some of the features really do simplify the asset and environment production pipelines, but it’s a trade off.

The Joys of Wokeness until it goes Broke🤣

i had one job that had 1 meeting per month and i considered it soul draining because everyone had issues to talk about but i was the one that was supposed to compile everything and make a presentation talking about all those points while all my coworkers crossed their arms making me feel like i was the one making every single complaint… i made sure to list which team made wich complaint and verbally mention it but still felt horrible to work like that which explained why no one lasted that long in the role i had.

The large studios seldom produce anything new anymore, too many committees designing horses that are actually camels. Smaller companies lack the executive bloat that drives resources into pure management by numbers with profit priority one and product is merely a petty legal requirement.

why does his game feel like a more vapid version of Valheim?

Look at the update for skyblivion that just came out.. If bethesda remade oblivion it would be a lazy retexture of the original engine for 70 dorra. Inb4 skyblivion is 10x better than tes6

Starfield is known for being empty and boring. It’s the perfect example of a mile wide and an inch deep.

One of those games used to be Unturned. However over time. The developer himself fell into a toxic echo chamber and hasn’t climbed out nor realized it. So those who have modded and contributed so much are going to waste. Simply because of his situation and bringing his family->His wife into it only made it worse. As there is no transparency.

Yes! I’m working on one myself, it’s about half way to its demo. I’m really excited.

Why have amd always been sh!t? There was a minute there where they were supposed to be making more advanced graphic cards than nvidia? But that was short lived and there were still problems.

Bethesda is dead since Fallout 76.

I worked for a publishers 10-15 yrs ago. Though I agree with the point made in this vid, actually not much have changed since then. To me it’s like early-mid 2000s all over again.
Studios become to big, unmanagable and produce commercial failures, then the ‘new techengine’ will save everyone (allegedly), industry vets start new studios with a few dozen ppl and make a next big hit, meanwhile their ex-employer hires hundreds and fails.
Very small dev teams made big breakthroughs often by inventing new tech for their games. Now, in 2020s making games is cheap again because of new tech and assets. It’s cool but I don’t put much faith in it. Gameplay is KING these days just like it was 10-20-30 yrs ago. Easy access to Unreal engine (and similar tech) means all games gonna look the same, albeit very shiny and very realistic. But what about gameplay?
Just like 20 yrs ago the game’s success depends on the devs talent and vision.

D4 is really big because it was made by so many people ? Ok you have no clue what you are talking about. D4 is not even 1/10 of the content POE has and POE 2 will get.

Seems like the voice acting gig is doing well then. Good.

Twenty meetings a week… more evidence that a lot of AAA developers have tried to scale up to ever larger games with minimal attention to updating their tools and processes. These don’t scale linearly any more than team size. Everyone is aware of the “mythical person-month” where if a project takes 2 people 100 months to complete, that doesn’t mean that 100 people can complete it in 2 months. The same is true of tools and pipelines. More complex projects require greater levels of abstraction in libraries and automation pipelines. You can see how Bioware and Bethesda hit a wall in their productivity and quality in the past 5-10 years.

A cooking analogy: you can’t just double the oven temperature of a conventional oven to halve the cooking time. If you want to cook your food faster (or more food in the same amount of time) you need a microwave or a convection oven.

I just keep hoping that something changes man. This year has been so depressing. I have the unfortunate privilege of being both in the cares-about-games-industry bubble and the tabletop rpg bubble and my god its just been a shitstorm on both sides. Maybe next year will be better, but i’m not getting my hopes up. Thanks for at least keeping us all informed, chief. Looking forward to actually using my Boot Dev sub this year -__-; i’ve been on them since your first sponsorship and have yet to complete anything because life’s been busy, but ive been seeing their content library grow all year long.

The industry is a rotten bloated carcass, layoffs are a necessary purge. Sadly, some people will get fired even if they don’t deserve it but there’s no way around it and it’s not gamers’ fault. Hopefully those devs would land on their feet and get another job on a much healthier gaming industry.

AAA gaming is finally in the “find out” stage. Every other facet of gaming is doing very well.

Rip betheseda

imo bethesda lost when they abandoned hand-crafted dungeons, in favor on randomly generated cell dungeons. they somehow got much a larger team, but somehow had a less handcrafted experience. they allocate their employees and their employees’ time poorly in my eyes.

Starfield is completley void of all love, passion and peopel with the drive to make anything really good. Blizzard’s the war within and dragon is difrent from the rest of the expansions. And the war within is completley difrent from ANYTHING blizzard’s done before. All the worthless, pointless shit is gone, left is all the good stuff that matter. The siren isles is totaly difrent from anything im used to from blizzard. To me it feels like the devs actually care about it and it looks and feels so difrent.

The starfield creative lead was crap, i am hoping thats who you are talking about as i start the video

I can see Elder scrolls being set on an archipelago of desert islands. Most of them will be barren. The rest will have one of 5 identical ancient temples. You will travel between them on a fully customisable pirate ship. Cosmetically customisable – any travel will be via cut-screen.

Doesn’t Poe have wayyyyyy more content then dismiss 4?

Your title is misleading clickbait. The Starfield Lead is Todd Howard. But he didn’t quit.

the things that made those studios good don’t exist anymore, those people left and the rest too afraid to leave despite knowing they’ll be fired anyway
then with DEI and other mandates the games have no chance of succeeding
let these big brands die out already people

Starfield is what i would consider, the most mediocre game ever made, never have seen a game have no redeeming qualities.

The exploration is bland, boring and ultimately serves no gameplay loop, with games like skyrim or fallout while it was similar you had reasons to go out, for fallout 3 and new vegas you had genuinely interesting locations to explore, fun unique weapons to find and use, lots of things for clepto madiacs to grab, etc. For fallout 4, you had resources to collect on top of the previous reasons, settlements to establish and build.

The building, is possibly the worst building i have genuinely ever seen in any game. I dont think i need to say much more on that.

The gunplay is pretty much fallout 4 but without vats to make it make all the bullet sponge enemies to compensate for their lack of actually making real difficulty. (ps… making every enemy a bullet sponge the higher difficulty you go does not actually feel nice or make for good gameplay)

The story, oh the story. See you can have a bad story, so long as the gameplay is fun. Just look at dying light , or hell, fallout 4. It is the most run of the mill narratives i could honestly think of.

Those are the 3 pillars of gaming in my honest opinion, gameplay, exporation, and story. You have one bad pillar, the whole building wont collapse, but have 2, or even 3? You may as well not have built the thing at all.

We’ll have to see what they can pull off for gameplay in TES: VI but I’m also worried about the music. Skyrim had so many good tracks, Fallout 4 was okay but had the radio for quieter moments/exploring. Meanwhile Starfield just didn’t really seem to have any gripping music for me. If Bethesda isn’t having Jeremy Soule work on TES: VI then I don’t know how the hell that’s going to help that atmosphere of their game.

20 calls sounds like my superior’s first half of the week. He’s a great guy, but by god… He shouldn’t be working this much :/

Spoiler: It’s not Emil. Bethesda will continue to be a walking dumpster fire.

Bloated game studios.
Gaming studios have far too many developers working on one stupid game, and when you have too many developers they can’t effectively communicate properly with each other. Without communication, ideas can not properly connect with each other. Developers are given particular jobs to work on particular tasks and when their job is done is when we see the cookie cutting process. This cookie cutting process is done in order to meet financial deadlines and is why so many gamers look at games and immediately notice something feels off. Games just look off. We see so many games today that look almost stitched together and are hanging by a thread due to performance issues. It’s this lack of artistry cohesion between each of the developers own art that stylistically does not fit together properly within a scene, and what you are left with is a scene that looks inconsistent.

Cohesion and Cohesiveness Issues.
It’s difficult to describe cohesion in video games, but look at it like this… Imagine telling 10 developers to each build a building to be inserted into a brand new video game, but the catch is that each of these developers must create their own buildings without any communication of any kind or even showing each others their work during the process. So, the developers finish their building designs, turn them, you look at them, and while each building looks incredible in their own right, they will not look correct when inserted into a game with each of the buildings standing right next to each other. Everyone creates art in vastly different ways. It is why the majority of the games we see today look out of place due to a lack of cohesion that only smaller development teams, in my personal opinion, who are the teams that are able to properly nail an overall vibe with exceptional consistency. Sure, most of the time there is typically a debated and concluded upon artstyle for a video game that is agreed upon. But, with too many developers making so any assets, then those assets are given to the level designers, then the level designers place the objects, then the game world gets bigger, then developers are given the word that it’s time to wrap this game up to hit that release date, they then go into crunch mode, and now it’s too late to make all of the necessary changes for the game to look cohesive. There is a reason why you’ll see textures in games that almost look photorealistic, while other textures within the same area look like total shit. How does this happen? It is as simple as a lack of overall developer cohesiveness. Everyone needs too be on the same page.

Split up developers in teams to make more games.
Developers need to split up to work on more projects. Why risk a development team of 600 people working on one game, when you could have 6 teams of 100 developers each creating 6 new video games. It is less risky to ship 6 games than 1 game. All it takes is 1 game to take off and it in no way require such incredibly large development teams. Unless you are Rockstar, which you aren’t, so you don’t risk it. Also, developer burnout is a major reason why games look like shit. Do not keep shoving the same shit for developers to create, and they ship out the same slop every single year. Developers don’t want to create the same things over and over again. Developers need breaks between projects where they can create something different from the last thing they created, or else burnout is inevitable.

Burnout is real.
To be honest, I think burnout may be the biggest culprit as to why so many games look and play like shit today. Too many developers being overworked, creating the same crap, who end up uninterested in the projects they currently develop. Burnout can be addressed, but it requires a brand new game that is so different from what these developers ever imagined they would be working on, in order to bring back that exciting passion for creating video games. Why does FromSoft make Elden Ring and then later make the Armored Core games? 2 vastly different games that keeps their staff away from complete and utter burnout. FromSoft knows that Armored Core is not going to make nearly as much money as the Dark Souls franchise, but they have no choice but to switch genres of games in order to stay sane. Burnout is not only a developer issue. Burnout is also a customer issue. Gamers get burnt out too. Ship the same type of game over and over again and the games will become less desirable.

Great Video Dude,
– Cheers and Happy New Years!

Twenty meetings a week is four meetings a day, that would be a light meeting load for a lead in the company I work for. My boss averages about 50 percent more than that, and his boss twice that. The cog in the machine feeling is real though, there are so many dependencies that doing anything on your own is just about impossible.

Black Pine: Incident Response is lookin’ pretty good…

gg

Void Crew is that indie game for me, absolute banger. Can’t wait to see how it grows over the years.

This is a great video definitely need more eyes

Statfield lead? Now that’s a person won’t be missed

I’m quite confident we’re heading for a big restructure too. This has the potential to turn into a new golden age. 90’s-era dev sensibilities with modern-day tech. It could be GLORIOUS.

I really recommend anyone who is a fan of tower defense or rts to check out the Creeper World series. Solo dev, but the passion is there, and the concept is just so cool. You’re playing a real time with pause tower defense-rts hybrid against a liquid. You have to inhibit the flow and spread and slowly push forward and it is so cool.

I just got a ton of mega scans for free. I think today is the last day.

Not a game from this year, but Ive always felt Rimworld was a great example of an indie game made by a small team as an example of chasing their passion instead of satisfying shareholder 🤷‍♂️

how m any or those meetings could have been meetings?

11:21 That is why the Demo of that game ran like trash. Unoptimized. The Engine doesn’t “just handle it”, there are drawbacks in performance for that.

even as a former Product Manager, 20 meetings a week seem to be too much and looks very inefficient. when do you even get to work? dang son

Hands down, no contest here:
Return of the Obra Dinn

hate to break it to you all
but thats all we are
cogs in the machine
nothing you do will change that

These days if a game comes out and it doesn’t work well on one vendor’s gpu it’s not because of driver issues, but the game. Even indie Devs should test on more hardware.
Sometimes AMD can fix your game in their drivers, but that doesn’t mean the game was fine.
Unreal is a mess in that sense. Tim Sweeney proudly announced once that they develop on Nvidia cards at Epic and it shows. A big FU to a third of their customers using an amd card.

Here’s to hoping the general public finally start seeing the future of honestly good games is in the indie and AA fields and not in whatever amount of A’s industry the corpos want to tout to their shareholders (their actual customers).

Clickbait, rumormill, and or overly pessimistic?
Video filled with hawking something for revenue and or links in comments to auther ways to “support” channel?
✔️ and ✔️

Sigh tired of the doom n gloom …

There has to be a point where money has a diminishing return for studios because they do need money, but they also need to have agile teams that aren’t brought down by coc as much and to not expect every game to be a massive blockbuster, that way lies chaos.

There is less poe2 than d4? lol wut

saying diablo 4 is bigger than poe2 is actually insane.

Nanite and Lumen, the two horror words of knowing the game will run like crap. Please dont stop manually optimizing, I am tired of games running at sub 30fps on medium settings 1440p on a 2000dollar+ PC. I shouldnt need to get a 5090 to play at 60fps 1440p……… Unreal5 nanite and lumen frustrates me

Void Stranger, it was released last year, but my god that game oozes passion and character.

Todd Howard quit?

Regarding the last question: Grim Dawn. A small team of experienced devs banded together and made the best (in my opinion, obviously) ARPG ever. It gives AAA games a run for their money in terms of quantity of content and polish, but is made with passion, creative direction and respect for their community that bigger projects rarely have

I don’t want to discredit Axis Unseen, because what he’s accomplished by himself is impressive, but the game’s rough. I’m sure it’s improved since the first demo launch, but nothing really compelled me to buy it because so many critical things were unpolished — and really it comes down to: 1) I have limited time, 2) so I’m going to play what I perceive to have more love put into the finer details.

from tripple A slop to indie slop… yeah no, u can’t sell me unreal engine slop.

thanks, it needed to be said!

I can’t recall which one was first but I know either the dev from Prison Architect or the dev from RimWorld asked permissions to use the early, Early User interface and core game to create their own and both games were 1 person maybe with the help of hired help as needed.
And now days most people might not realize they started off all that similar beyond a top down management game.

That poor guy must have refused to work on another creation engine game again.

Fear and Hunger – bought an Xbox Series X and find myself going back to PC to play that low-tech indie gem

The claim that Nanite automates away the need for manual LOD optimization is contradicted by all of these games having massive performance problems, the same goes for Lumen and baked GI. In a different time it wouldn’t be a noticeable, like say if we were getting 30-50% more performance for the same money every GPU generation, but we’re hovering pretty damn close to 0% right now.

Until Emil and Todd are gone we will continue to get slop

well nanite is impressive, but it basically kills performance because many devs use it to skip out on optimization imho.

A company should have clear goals and expectations for their teams. If the people working below or above you have trust and open communication, 20 meetings a week is completely unnecessary.

I’m surprised the Axis Unseen has sold so little so far (considering how viral it went on social media, etc). Goes to show how hard it is to sell games these days…

nobody talking about how NVIDIA keeps slapping higher and higher prices on good video game experiences, which in turn contributes too much to people being more angry at video games in general rather than being entertained by them

All that remains is for the public to buy more diverse stuff. The biggest issue is almost every gamer is herding themselves to just a few massive titles, in much the way social media does.

Good vid.

Wtf happened to thumbnail space man?

You disgust me with your ai thumbnail.

look at the Indy solo devs like Spacebourne 2 an amazing game that deserves more limelight as well as Silica both solo devs doing amazing work spacebourne 2 is the space rpg ive been waiting for since freelancer in its scope and scale. if they went with a big publisher they would get more notice but they are going it alone and have to slog through all the other games just to get an eye raise

So glad Toys For Bob broke away and went independent. They are way too passionate to have Microsoft overlords destroy their games.

11:35 You put a model in the game, it works, but a game drops 10 fps. From 100. On a powerful developers machine.

The golden days of Fallout are over, let’s enjoy S.T.A.L.K.E.R.

Starfield gave me depression. First time i felt let down by Bethesda. They got the sickness too.

I feel so bad for ppl that are just coming to terms with bethesda. Zaric bros and long time lore beards will have had a decade to mourne Bethesda. It was a very hard one for me personally but i have great news because as we speak the original elderscrolls creators are making daggerfall part 2 greatest game ever boogalo and you should be hyped for it.
Wayward realms baby!

You have do have a dump truck though 😉 it just ain’t money

Put 70 hours in starfield and found one interesting quest. You had to jump between dimensions because of a lab experiment gone wrong. Was pretty fun surprisingly.

every day we’re getting closer to the day where the games industry implodes in on itself and experiences a reset. we’re slowly but surely building up to returning to the days where the forefront of the industry was experimental, creative games full of love, passion, and soul rather than corporate slop full of buzzwords created to satisfy shareholders and keep the money rolling

Thank god for morrowind and tamriel rebuilt, skyrim with beyond skyrim, and also skyoblivion and skywind. we dont need bethesda and their future slop

The only thing that annoyed me is the paid mods. (Don’t waste your time discussing with me about that).

In a world where Redfall exists, Starfield is still the worst Bethesda game.

20 meetings a week being light.

HOld up, how long are these meetings. usually a small meeting for me is ike 30-45 minutes of discussion and review, while larger gatherings are like 90 minutes to two hours. I can’t see someone fitting that many meetings within the usual work week, let alone fitting in work on the projects one would be responsible over. Yeah, the will to live would be gone.

Starfield looks one Friday afternoon meeting a month.

I’m expecting the death of AAA gaming, likely to be replaced with a (hopefully) robust indie and AA scene.

Hope Todd Howard quits next!

I saw a vid, can’t remember which one alas, wherein a senior developer of a major game studio explained how frustrated he was with working in a huge team. Instead of actually working on the game, he claimed that he spent almost all of his time telling new developers what to do and how to do it. And every time he had successfully showed someone the ropes, that person then disappeared from the team and another “newbie” took his place and he had to start all over again.

UE5 is trash. Sadly most people use it so everyone else uses it.

Thanks for the video about my game. It was super well done. 🙂

I really enjoyed Starfield but I’m the target audience and a knowledge its flaws. It should have been postponed to include the quality of life improvements they eventually made and to work on the bugs. Also the amount of loading screens are outdated but I don’t know if that can be fixed. I still think Starfield has a lot of potential the way Fallout 76.

Best solo made game ever is My Summer Car.

It’s not a solo dev that made the game but definitely under 100 developers is the finals! I love that game and hope it can get big or at least get the fam it deserves because it’s a great project for them that are still making it work

Unreal engine is double edge sword, it is real bad when the big studios use it, game looks worse and require more and more powerful hardware. I get triggered now when I hear Nanite geometry.

Yes AAA companies have a HUGE problem… they can’t listen to the actual consumers who actually buy the games they make. Therefore the devs who do care about doing the basic main goal of selling games to consumers leave so they can sell games to fans

Words well spoken. Cheers boss. Have a belting New Year.

Manor lords was really good i cant wait for the full release

literally thousands of Indians are in the credits for starfield.

thats why its slop and the game feels pieced together with no direction and vision

What people need to realize is that the gaming industry today is not a gaming industry. It’s a Hollywood wannabe who largely produce crappy bloated buggy programs. The gaming industry started with 20 people who enjoyed playing on computers and wanted to make some money. The more indie developers out there the more the industry returns to it’s real roots, people utilizing their passions, not sales people just working another job

eh… i have none.
Didn’t bought at launch….
right now starfield is at -40% on steam… (and still 6/10)
Will still wait for -70% or a better deal

Meetings are my own personal hell. i just don’t have the attention span for them.

I thought it was Emil Pagliarulo for a second. Dang, if only.

Feel like if you can’t stand your job being mostly a bunch of meetings, being a director isn’t a good fit for you. I don’t think that really speaks for whether or not AAA studios are soul crushing. Putting years of work into an indie game that doesn’t sell would probably crush your soul too tbh.

Spacebourne II is an incredible project apparently only done by 1 dev. Already it has more complex systems than Starfield, with space and planet exploration.

He might not regret Starfield but I certainly did.

Games are a medium of art just like literature, music, and cinema. Corporations will try grind it down like revenue alchemy and wonder why banality won’t sell.

should watch some of the Threat Interactive videos before you praise unreal engine 5 to much

steam kinda sounds like a solid graping. youre not indie, you work for valve as contract labor. should get a 1099 from em.

@crldashi >There’s obviously an epstein list, but where was the mention of any Youtube executives? You seem to just be spouting nonsense.

Someone seems unreasonably butthurt about someone else pointing out that the billionaire-club tends to consist of “minor attracted persons” 😀

Nanite is a scam that is contributing to every unreal game running like crap. Model optimization can be and was automated. It’s not hard.

IT JUST WOOOOORKS! 💀

Starfield had some fun game play elements but is mostly unstable garbage.

Older Bethesda games had that B-movie quality to them, they were kinda jank but they were charming and fun. Starfield has no fun or charm. The city of Neon is a perfect example. It’s a soulless, generic attempt at a “cyberpunk” city (likely designed as a last minute reaction to Cyberpunk 2077). They couldn’t even be bothered to think of a creative name so they just called it “Neon” because hey, cyberpunk cities have lots of neon lights!

I don’t know what it is about your voice but it makes me automatically zone out and unable to concentrate on what you are saying. The opposite effect happens when you are talking in your chill gamer voice talking about wow

see that mountain over there? You can go there!

“in this video, we deal with the fallout” incredibly well done pun for someone that made fallout.

starfield was good but it really should have been a MMO!!

People give Epic a lot of shit but they have a solid game engine and they’re pumping a lot of money into the indie game dev ecosystem. A lot of good indie games wouldn’t exist without their grants and one year exclusivity deals.

No one wants to work in the same company as Emil.

Save your money, buy indie. These AAAA companies are fuct.

Always _kick-ass_ video-game reporting here! 🌞

What say you, about the chances that UbiSoft will finally bite the dust, lock, stock and barrel, _BEFORE_ 2025 is over? 🧐 And what are the chances that _another_ -AAA- FFF company will find itself on thin ice before the ball drops to start 2026? 💰🔥

If only that Emile guy would quit too he’s been making mediocre stories at Bethesda for too long

But fallout 4 by itself was bad too
i mean the entire fallout universe is like a censored disney land version of what an actual post apocalyptic wasteland would be like
the writing is so fking lazy that they genuinely thought bottle caps would make a credible currency in a world with no infrastructure

frankly the entire setting of fallout is basically “murica but a10 years from now”

nice hairline

my rule of thumb for games is: i want to play your Ideas not how much money you can throw at a dev to half ass it. i want amazing graphic. yes no one wants to play something that looks like dog shit but it needs to be a good games first graphics can take a back seat until the games idea is sold

20 meetings a week sounds like a punishment for serious crimes, not a business strategy.

I’m a solo indie developer, and you hit the nail on the head regarding the tools available these days. During an alpha test for my current project, I had a tester assume I’d been working on the game for 6-7 years based on how (pretty) it looked. The actual development time? 9 months. Some of that visual quality was art design, some was skill, but I honestly think most of it comes from utilizing what the engine has to offer.

All in all, while the expectations, targets, and costs for AAA is ballooning into the stratosphere, the little guys are being given ammunition like never before. And I cannot wait to see what these ex-AAA developers do with these tools 🙂

Couldn’t care less about Bethesda TES/Fallout projects anymore. Wish they’d give Obsidian the Fallout IP.

it is what it is, there will be a small renaissance where everyone feels like theres been change, then THOSE studios will sell out to the corpos AGAIN, just like they did last time.
idk why yall DONT see this is cyclical. now that gaming is “the most lucrative form of entertainment” we will never be the drivers of what games are made for anymore.
its always about money. itll always be about money. once yall accept that and realize on the flip side that yall all are a locust swarm of FOMO rtards hopin in and consuming everything in a game in 2 weeks then its old news and back to hunting for mediocrity. we can all just pretend that 2 weeks of early access is a hit game that rocks but on week 3 wtf are you playing that slop for….. thats how it is.

The lengths the channel goes through to provide context to all of these wild numbers and business decisions is inspiring.

Never understood why big companies just keep a look out for smaller games that are good and then just upscale them.

“Starfield lead” is not something i would put on my resume…. 😂😂😂

Islanders

im still baffled how many people pre ordered or still bought starfield without looking at it for a second, the advertisement literally tells you it’s not a good game

I just don’t see how people have any real hope for Bethesda

Looks like we’ll never have a good Elder Scrolls again boys

Someone said that the next elder scrolls will be a shit show. I tell you guys it is already the case that almost EVERY game nowadays is a shit show. Almost every game

The future of highest quality games lies in indie studios. Reward them, don’t give money to AIctivision firing all their artists in favour of AI generated slop

When everyone quits and goes indie, nobody is— hmm it doesn’t work

Fallout4 was my last bethesda game and my clue to avoid the brand.
Starfield proved me right.
I do other hobbies now and stopped gaming except for honkai starrail on the phone when I get bored with real life.
Until there is a non windows operating system just for games I will not be building another gaming rig.
So the industry not only lost my money they lost my interest.
Thanks

Negates all your Statistics , by 1 logic , Gamers. , Gamers will buy any good game. unless you want to include Concord? Indies have another goal in mind. “The Long Game” all we need to do is Support the game in a long duration. and the influx on Money will come regardless of cuts , this is better than the alternative. a big fat Zilch.

A cool/small indie game that came out this year and that I absolutely loved was Crow Country. It’s a retro, PS1-style survival horror game about exploring an abandoned amusement park. If you like horror games and theme park history, I’d definitely check it out.

Lol he feels like we do

The people who kade the games we love either leave or are forced out. Which is why i separate the devs from their product. Because 9-1 odds the guy who made something great isnt there anymore… or its tod and Emile who are there and would be better off just shutting up.

Kenshi

I am so glad you get it now back me with some coverage and we can get a few of these devs employed and making a real game. We will hold at 50 devs total period

Bethesda keeps saying these along the lines of “we’re proud of what we made” in attempt to deflect real genuine criticism about their game. Such a sad bubble to live in.

There was extreme bloat and inefficiency where I used to work on computers all day, five days a week for twenty years. My main relief comes from no longer having unfireable supervisors, or worse, working where one or two supervisors above me aren’t replaced when they leave. The ‘company’ of today has learned to overwork its geniuses, and put in charge above them idiot supervisors who can’t be fired due to gender or race. It’s a sick work place. Glad I retired!!!

Games made by 400 people are basically made by 100 people; the rest is mostly dead weight. That’s why AA and indie can often out do the AAA.

The usual rule in large project is that the square root of the staff will do 50% of the work, and the remaining 50% is shared between the rest.
In a team of 400 people, 20 people will do 50% of the work. When those top people start leaving those large studios, the studios are in trouble.

His wife might fire him for missing revenue targets though

The more I hear about the current gaming industry the more I wonder how much could be fixed if they fired half the managers and forced the other half to read the mythical man month before they’re allowed to speak to a dev again