About 20 seconds in the audio cuts in loudly music wise, incredibly frustrating on my end that I missed it but I want to apologise, it’s only headphone users that will notice it as the music is still quiet but I wanted to give you all a ‘my bad’. Enjoy the video

Also I got rid of the intro in the editor cuz it sucked.

Wasn’t ambition. Was Todd and uncle Pete and Phil. Ambition made expedition 33. Ambition made baulders gate. Ambition even made Elden ring and demon souls and every classic game you can think of. Ambition under con artists and doofuses is the problem.

Lack of ambition

The issue is that regardless of Bethesda’s ambition to”fix” Starfield moving forward is that they no longer call the shots. The parent company, Microsoft, will now have the final say. I find it unlikely that they’ll be willing to devote the resources to update the game (ala No Man’s Sky or Cyberpunk 2077) to make it a retroactive success. I hope I’m proven wrong, but I don’t think I am.

The thing that bugs me is that witj Starfield, you have literally all the ingredients of a great game. You spoke about New Atlantis. It’s built, and there are quests. The easiest step would be filling out the world with just some random npcs to talk to and breath life into the world. The least expensive thing in developing the game is just to put normal content in there. Everyone who works at Bethesdas should be able to do that.

I strongly dislike their new design philosophy which is dont restrict players from anything in the game, which means no consequences for actions. Which means no stakes in any situation. They don’t hire writers, they just have all their level designers write whatever they’re doing. Maybe that works good enough in a known world but with a new ip I think it’s just not good enough. There is no hook it’s just generic milquetoast sci fi

I remember that everybody was so afraid that Starfield would bury Baldurs Gate 3. Oh how the mighty have fallen.

thank god they saved it with not being ambitious at all, now we can expect to enjoy more shit bathesda games as a waste of everyones time and money triple A game… you are talking about a triple A game dmbass, you make a nearly an hour video as if talking about an up and comer indie studio game.. you are SAD

Bethesda went with quantity not quality. They should have started it small for their first space game. A solar system would have been enough. But noooooo

A very simple change could have improved the game a lot: make the planets more empty, or in better words make each planet & moon have only 1 to 3 landable named locations where there actually are POIs – the other landing-spots being empty of human structures. And keep those the same locations for every game. This would have made the world space smaller and more meaningful. And would have allowed to add a manual editing pass over those locations, so they dont looks like randomly dropped into the world.
The other change would be unlock all the piloting, basebuilding and “jetpack” skills from the start / remove those skilltrees. Those limits felt really artificial to stretch playtime. Progressing to better ships should be done by aquiering more money, materials and “blueprints”, not unlocking “skills”.

that exploration looked legit horrible. I don’t care how long it takes to get to something; as long as there are interesting things to do along the way. Ten minutes of walking through absolutely NOTHING? With 10+ years of development time? For me that just doesn’t cut it

Starfield is a game that had a really nice idea, and then terrible execution in a bloated team. And an engine that just did not fit that type of game. Shoehorning an openworld space game with spaceships and a massive universe into an essentially small single map open world fantasy game engine just did not work. And the ugly NPC faces and subpar writing did the rest for me. The shipbuilding is nice though.

Somebody explain to me what the difference between the “official DLC” and the “paid mods” as people call them for this game are different? I understand calling them mods for Fallout 4. But for starfield they are both effectively the same thing. Both released in the creation club, that updates the game when you download it. The game stays achievement friendly and a developer is being paid by Bethesda for making it.

The worst part of Starfield is its lore which is absolute dogshit. There is literally zero immersion thanks to that.

If you’re gonna have a space rpg with ship building, space flight and space battles (unlike Mass Effect where the ship is basically a pretty loading screen), there’s an expectation that space flight will also include travelling to different planets and flying across planetary surfaces (continuous planetary surfaces). If your engine cannot do this then maybe create a game where this isn’t necessary… The fact they couldn’t even do animation to hide the loading screens is just the cherry on top!

I hope they reset it some day in the future

They shouldn’t just give up on Starfield, don’t let it just fade, No Man’s Sky was almost completely overwritten by its improvements since it’s release, and is genuinely one of the greatest space games you can play

I hope Bethesda realises they need to recognise what they did wrong and where to improve, and not just dismiss criticism, pretending they’re above it

It doesn’t matter what the goals were. Bethesda was too successful in the past, therefore the company ballooned, therefore the people in charge of money and bureaucracy gained more sway than the creatives, therefore literally anything they make was doomed to suck.

I don’t think that they lied.. Starfield IS a “Bethesda game,” with the same formula that they’ve used for 20 years, un-updated. In a 15-20 sq mile play space, that game works okay. In an “expansive 1000 planet galaxy” it doesn’t work well. Players naturally expected a scaling of the content to meet the scale of the play space, but Bethesda gave them even less stuff to do than usual.

Their big mistake was the concept itself. Sci-fi can work fine, but a literal boundless universe broke their formula, which had already been under severe strain for some time. The fact that both Elite Dangerous and No Man’s Sky had been around for a decade and have the roadmap for accomplishing these goals right there, ready to copy, makes it an even worse situation.

You’re right that deception is the main reason for the negative reception. If they presented it as “you are the multiverse spacedragonborn, battling against loading screens, loading into a randomly generated square to do radiant quests, in a spaceship that can’t fly anywhere unless you fast travel, and where every NPC is immortal”, I’m sure it wouldn’t have impacted their sales too much. People would still have bought the game, but they wouldn’t get confused when ship engines don’t work.

The size comparison is a neat idea, but it falls flat after a moment’s thought. Even in Fallout 4, there is a reason you might wander from one side of the map to the other. All along the way, you would find unique locations, different terrain, maybe a quest or two. You wouldn’t ever run from one side of the map to the other… because you’d find *something* along the way. With every randomly generated map in Starfield, you know exactly what you’re going to find. No matter how remote and isolated this world is, it will always have the same three dungeons, a ship full of enemies landing 40 seconds after you do, and nothing of value to look at, all the way to the map border. You wouldn’t ever run from one side of the map to the other… because you know there’s *nothing* on either side.

Your demonstration of Starfield’s fast travel was the slow, immersive way. You could have gone into your menu anywhere, selected quest from the journal that goes somewhere you want to go and hit the fast travel to objective button. 1 screen if you’ve landed there before. If you haven’t landed there before, you have to go through the star map in the menu and jump in system, then land. 2 screens.

I don’t think the game clearly tells you that, I had to figure it out.

Oh, and New Atlantis? The shops are in a giant semicircle. The average distance from any one shop to another is really high. If you look at Diamond City, that’s basically a square inside a circle inside a square, with shops and homes layered throughout. Much denser, you can quickly get from one point to another, and they had just as much quest density. Also the buildings block line of sight so it’s hard to tell how close together it all is. The cities were definitely a downgrade.

Starfield feels like the sci-fi return to Daggerfall’s design philosophy that no one asked for

0:02 “Starfield was supposed to be Bugthesda’s ‘Return to form’.”

THAT right there, is the fuckin problem. The Gaming Industry needs to stop whoring the “return to form” for over hyped AAA Games that try to use that phrase to save itself. Dragon Age Failguard and Ass Creed Shadows did the same thing. And look where Failguard ended up? The Studio that made that insulting trash shut down! The “return to form” is basically code for “This game is trash, but listen to the influencers and ‘Game Journalists’ and buy this game so we can turn a profit off this Prom Night Dumpster Baby Fire of a product”.

I’m shocked nobody said the same thing about Rocksteady and their Suicide Squad – Kill The Arkham Series….

I put it down after a couple hours but I also did the same with 76. Terrible games. I’ve moved on from Bethesda, and others should too unless they want to continue funding subpar AAA gaming.

It was woke crap. You know it.

Is it bad? No.
What? Yea, it’s bad.

Space isn’t a quality in an RPG. It’s a medium between content. If the content is microscopic and the space is tedious, it’s bad.

ambition didn’t kill starfield. If you’ve been paying attention since oblivion then starfield was the logical conclusion of everything they’ve been doing up to this point. Anyone still excited for elder scrolls 6 simply hasn’t been paying attention and deserves their disappointment.

starfield didn’t land the same because people are trying to relive their childhood. skyrim was amaing when you were 16 and had nothing to worry about. now you’re 30, dealing with life, paying the bills, getting it once a week, and , that moment’s gone — it’s not coming back. womp womp, move on with it.

Imagine defending Starfield god you Bethesda fans are insufferable. There the worst company out there. Haven’t med anything good since Morrowind.

What do you mean “not play it safe” Bethesda absolutely played it safe. That’s why it failed.

Neon and night city share more in common than looking vaguely similar to each other, they also share a main theme, it’s just cyberpunk goes deeper into it.

Weird compariso at 18:30 since you can do exactly the same sort of direct fast travel in Starfield, you just chose to do it the longest way possible

17:39 yea loading screens are a stupid complaint. Same thing with graphics. It’s like what about the CONTENT of the game??? I care about the actual game not the loading screens. I mean if there were CONSTNT super long loading screens every corner then yea obviously that sucks but starfield is not like that, I played it, it was fine.

14:15 the nightclub criticism makes no sense. Wym that’s not what a nightclub looks like? Have you been to a nightclub on a different planet hundreds of years from today? Obviously their nightclubs look different.

Also… there are definitely nightclubs that look like that my guy

Also one of the problems with starfield is that it wasn’t far enough into the future. We already have fallout which is sci fi in a slightly advanced world, so starfield just felt like fallout but cleaner and in space. It should’ve been more sci fi more advanced technology. And if they did that maybe the planets would be more built up and less boring as well.

Astrogate is the most immersive exploration mod out there. It fixes so much of the immersion breaking exploration issues

…. ambition? The game feels like anything but ambitious. Mishandled, poor concept, bad execution ect ect.

I also sympathise with peoples anger here, while getting a new series would be cool it came at the cost of delaying ES6 which at this moment has not started development, the last game in 2011 was great and the reason bethesda became the household name but that was the last gold game from that studio

0:50 exactly es6 would’ve been an easy sell because that’s WHAT WE WANTED!!! Hard disagree from me dude, it wasn’t bravery it was disrespect. Instead of making the game we all wanted they said no and foolishly decided to do something nobody asked for and failed at it.

I like Starfield and play it often but I despise Shattered Space for its horrible design decision to force the player to join a despised Religion if you want to play it. No join no play. I consider it a waste of money. I liked the main quest line and Vanguard but I had no interest in being a pirate or corporate executive so about half the game was essentially off limits. Being a Free Star Ranger was interesting too.

The way I approach Starfield is to treat everything inside the engine as a black box and take the game as a user experience. “The engine sux” becomes “Bethesda failed to solve these important technical problems” . I probably should do my own Starfield videos. Take the residential district. Look at the last building at the very end. It appears to have a tower, but does it? The elevator shaft is below mid air. So the actual residences must be BELOW the entrance, in the cliff face on the other side… OK, so what the hell is that tower-like thing on the roof? Or go to an moon somewhere, and there is a picnic table — in the open, and a flower pot, in the open, on an airless planet. One time I was on an icy-hell planet. I went to a settlement and there were people on a pile of shipping containers, no shelter, no viable way for these people to be alive for more than a few hours, but they didn’t care… What I’m getting at is that it’s a never-ending stream of utter logic fails that destroys it…

06:41 …I think I see where you’re going with this, and so far I disagree. As a person who also likes Starfield, the problems arise the moment you decide to try and “do your own thing”, like you could in other Bethesda Titles. The moment you start trying to do that, that’s when the game stops being fun and engaging. If I wanted to roleplay a psychopathic k*ller, and just start shooting everyone in Constellation, there’s no Dark Brotherhood equivalent that’ll try to recruit me. All I end up doing is p*ssing off a large group of immortal NPCs and ruin my save until I pay money – that’s lame.

What if I really decide to make a place like New Atlantis my home and roleplay as a vagrant looking for shelter, welp, can’t do that because it’s thematically inconsistent with the story, and even if you push for it, finding decent housing is tied into the UC Vanguard Quest. What I’m saying is~ too many things are on-rails for no good reason, and there’s no engaging alternatives outside of it. There’s very little to get lost in, going off-the-beaten path (i.e. repeating POIs), which is weird for a Bethesda game. 🤔

It’s also the quality level of writing and story/world building, I really think Starfield was some of the weakest writing and story/world building that they’ve had any other games

Dleihraz

The size of the chunks of the maps in starfield was never really the issue, like you said you never really notice it much. It’s that they’re boring and empty.

I have no idea why people don’t connect lockdown with why this game was trash.
They spent over 2 years building games over Zoom/Teams…

Starfield fails because it lacks the one thing that made all previous Bethesda games successful: the one big map that you can explore at your leisure. You know, the huge sprawling expanse that the player character can explore on foot that encompasses all of the locations in the game, either on that map or accessible via locations on that map. This is the thing that ties all previous major Bethesda games together, from Oblivion with its Cyrodiil map, to Fallout 76 with its West Virginia map. All of those games were built around exploration of those regions, which the developers filled with hand-crafted smaller locations, characters, quests and so on. Traveling through those maps to a specific location was always hard because the player was constantly being distracted along the way. That was a major part of those games’ charm.

BGS abandoned that in a misguided attempt to mimic the scale of a galaxy with hundreds of planets. The one big map in this game is the galaxy map with all of the planets. That map obviously cannot be explored on foot. It requires a spaceship to fast-travel to each individual planet, then explore those locations. That is the source of the “loading screens” complaint. In Starfield, random exploration is made vastly more cumbersome by having to use the ship to fly to each individual planet. The loading screens aren’t that long, but the constant requirement to sit through them breaks up the *flow* of exploration. That was never the case in the previous games, where the player could simply explore on foot and detour to whatever caught their eye.

Starfield’s lack of one big explorable-on-foot map also means there is less to explore when the player does reach a planet. As you show in your video, AJTS, the individual planets have about the same surface area as the Fallout 4 map, but are relatively barren of locations, with just a handful of randomized things to visit. This is done because re-creating the scale of a galaxy — that is, making each planet a unique, handcrafted location — is impossible as a practical matter. Doing that would require the developers put in several hundred times the work of creating a Skyrim map or a Commonwealth one. So the developers hoped instead that procedural generation could instead make locations varied enough that they would seem to be handcrafted. Spoiler: procedural generation cannot do that.

Yet another “muh Starfield dead” video. So tired of these.

There’s an excellent talk by ex bethesda dev will shen which goes some way to explaining why starfield was so unfinished in some areas.

The company expanded massively to cope with the ambitious project, & they had to adapt to all the problems (mainly compartmentalisation) that goes along with that. No doubt exacerbated by “Covid” & working from home.

In some ways it’s a miracle starfield arrived in any sort of playable state at all. 😂

Unfinished masterpiece is how i feel about this game.

I just paused at the starborn powers & temples part of the vid & that is one of the best examples of that feeling many of us had with the game.
They almost seem like a placeholder for what the studio really wanted to develop but, just ran out of time.

That said, even in it’s prematurely born release state, i loved this game from the minute i figured out what it actually was. NOT skyrim or Fallout in space. Something, different.

Official updates & the insane modding scene are slowly unlocking starfield’s wild potential.

Great vid, cheers! 👍

The scale of their cities was my biggest issue by far, it feels so trapped in 2012 still. Go to Cyberpunk and that is a city. Bethesda never focused on dense urban places, but the capital on Jemison felt so so so SMALL that it broke immersion

I respect they took a chance. People complain when no one tries new stuff and then complain when they do but botch the final product. Why get so heated at Bethesda for this? It is so bizarre the anger this title generates, like dude….they tried and failed just move on. What games have these complainers made? None

Incredible writing and Bethesda are two things that have been separated for almost 20 years now.

It should be “How Bethesda’s laziness killed Starfied”, if you compare it to games like Cyberpunk and RDR2 in terms of writing, tech, systems, presentation, production quality etc, Starfield is lightyears behind. Even indies and AAs like KCD2 and Tainted Grail spits in it

The vanilla version of this game is Garbage!

ambition or delusion

200 hours into the game and I stopped. I would’ve stopped at 10 hours, but I had to endure the torture to see and do it all. Ambition is never the word I would use for Starfield or Bethesda

ROFL! Ambition killed Starfield? Starfield is the least ambitious thing I’ve ever seen from Bethesda. It’s devoid of any originality or creativity and did nothing to move the formula further. I’d argue that its biggest failure is it’s lack of ambition. This game has zero.

Only 518 views? Thats odd this is a really good video and you have 10k subscribers

This reminded me of Cybertruck reviews. Five minutes of objective critique pointing out pretty awful stuff, ended by “best truck I’ve ever had!”. But I guess I’m glad someone still enjoys their games..

I actually like the game a good story but they could have done better with constellation or explaining more about the starborn

37,000 players daily just on steam you have a weird definition of dead considering only 30% of starfield players playing on pc and most on Xbox do your homework and stop being a pick me content creator.

Why do you think theyve given up on Starfield? Im still expecting an update, DLC, and ps5 release to be announced by end of August.

They already said exciting things are happeninig this year, so we cant really ignore that

not only ambition, but vision cuts due to the Series S RAM…, Starfield was envisioned on a PS5, no wonder Starfield was in talks to go PS5 exclusive …as they knew, the Series S couldnt support their vision.. (+ add forced DEI mandates & lying to Todd about multiplat), NO SUPRISE TODD LOST HIS PASSION FOR STARFIELD, and mentally moved on to the Fallout TV show production & Indiana Jones during Starfield development on Xbox ….

starfield.

My biggest complaint is that no matter who you side with or the actions you take, nothing in the world changes.
Great vid, you hit it on the nose.

Fun fact about the Crimson Fleet questline. You can do the quest without the undercover parts. Just commit a crime to start the quest, and refuse to work with SysDef (or just shoot your way off the ship like I did)

Next time you go to Cydonia someone will come up to you and the quest will start

Very unpopular opinion, but I still think Starfield was the best game BGS made since Oblivion.

I can’t exactly act like it got hate for no reason though. BGS really should’ve stepped in once people started speculating some crazy things. They just left things too open. I remember even I told people to lower their expectations, but saying that at the time got you crucified

IMO it was proof of concept at best. Needed five years and mechs!

In the amount of missed potential alone, Starfield is as “Bethesda” as it gets. Nearly everywhere I looked my brain couldn’t help but imagine how great it could be. Skyrim and Fallout captured my imagination and only gave me little moments of “this could be better” but Starfield… I wonder what stuff the team made that Todd said no to.

Just came to say I love Starfield.

Love the vid, cant wait fo this to age like milk 😂

It just works…

Felt like I was watching a documentary, good vid