I appreciate the positive reception to this video. I’ve read the first ~1100 comments, hence all the hearted comments. If I heart a comment, that means I’ve read and acknowledge what was said, but didn’t have a response.

I especially hate how they build up the whole house Varuun lore and then you never even see their city. I was so interested in getting to know more about them and got nothing.

I constantly found myself thinking “why am I doing this?” while playing Starfield. Everything felt so meaningless because you get nothing and change nothing in the game really.

its not even the first time im watching this video in this universe lol

Matty the shill was mentioned)

6:52:27

1:11:02

its kinda crazy watching this video realizing that every single word in the script is plagiarized

8 hrs wtf
Well this is my sleep and work vid for the rest of week
Time to rewinded and replay everyday till I finish the entire video😮‍💨🤟🏼🫶🏻

I got the “Go undercover for us and we’ll wipe your bounty” mission after I took a 5-credit piece of cheese out of a cooler on a rooftop with nobody around. I didn’t play very long after that.

The Empty Nest is a testament to what Starfield could be. It’s so clear, man.

They missed an opportunity to have you replay the game because the universe is dying, same as earth because of the starborn (you).

wouldn’t have it any other way:)

This video is my 8 hour long on-demand therapy session <3

I agree with most of what you say but I still enjoy playing starfield. I think its faults allow me a certain level of just relaxation, I don’t have to care about lore or story and I can just go sight seeing and have fun ship battles and ground combat but at the same time I am deeply saddened this game isn’t as good as we all wish it was. There’s so many missed opportunities and cool ideas that either aren’t fleshed out or are ignored immediately after being introduced.

a quick retrospective that’s 8 hrs….

I appreciate that Outer Worlds at least came up with an interesting in-lore reason for why there are so many violently mindless bandits all across this star system.

But wtf are all these pirates doing in Starfield?

2:49:36 DUDE

Announced the dlc before game launch
Constantly repeated “uhhh the mods, but the mods though, the mods!” In every interview before the game was even released

Yeah, bethesda is hella overcooked. Fire all management that didnt voluntarily retire and start from scratch

56:06

Wild that Todd would shit on Oblivion’s step-out moment like that, then ask people to buy the remaster a few years later.

Him just saying “the ending” to their favorite part is hilarious, that look on his face says “I’ve already drafted my resignation and have offers from another company”

I can’t say i appreciated everything you said in this video, even though I agree with your general premise. You get a like because of the modding section alone.

I wish my starfinder pf2e campaign was still going, the setting is everything i wanted in a space game without the idiot developers making things bad and stupid for their own “ease of play” while ignoring bugtesting and lacking any kind of self awareness & self criticism

7:13:50 funny ragdoll

Just think, Elder Scrolls 6 Hammer fell is going to have these exact graphics and also more shit to do!

I haven’t heard anything positive about this game other than it’s as boring as death stranding which I haven’t played either. I’m hesitant to install it and try it because I don’t want to waste time I could be using beating Oblivion for the first time or Morrowind

1:05:00 cocaine is a hell of a drug emil

the color coding system mention is kind of silly because it’s “it’s not [vague description] its [exactly how it is in most other games]”

The color coding system is rarity, and it almost always denotes number (or maximum number) of potential affixes from which it can derive bonuses, only two categories tending to contradict the premise, one being Legendary (which are either templates, or have a unique to it property) or Set (which are often almost the same thing as legendary but have a secondary effect when worn with the set)

The thing of “thing is better” is gearscore, which usually trumps rarity depending on how the system calculates the value, but also something of an abstraction so not definitive.

But since the days of Diablo, a Shortsword and a Long Sword have their own base states, and a magic/blue rarity was it can be an `x sword of the y` allowing 2 affixes, and a rare could have more (and would be masked by having a “name”), but they exist in the same class of weapon of “sword”, and exist on a tiering scale

The rant about Vlads race was so unnecessary

7:57:18 I loved your video. Just finished the whole thing on normal speed. I agree with you that Starfield is a mess that can be summed down to a junk food game. As someone who enjoys traditional junk food games such as Just Cause, I really enjoy starfield. It is the kind of game you cannot take seriously, even though sometimes/most of the time it tries to take itself seriously. I heard someone call it a cozy game, and that tracks, but there are several components I wish they improved. Unfortunately, this is my first real Bethesda game. I’ve played about an hour of Skyrim and an hour of fallout 4, so I cannot really compare to other Bethesda games. I have hundreds of hours in starfield and I don’t think that would have been possible without the significant mod list I run the game with. It really didn’t click for me until I got my settings just right, after they pushed out the more detailed customization options. I truly wish they had it approached things the way that you’ve described, giving a little bit of planning or thought to how all of the systems and stories could affect each other. In many ways, starfield feels like The bones of something that had potential. Like I said, I really enjoy the game. It is the game I put on when I don’t want to think because I’ve had a long day of focused work. I wish there was more depth and I think you outlined how that could have been achieved very well. Even though we ended up with different opinions on continuing to play starfield, I really appreciate what you put together in this video. Thank you so much for the 8-hour critique.

took me three days to finish this video but I’m very happy I did. And also very happy I skipped Starfield

watching a 8 hour video about a game I only played for a few hours before boredom ultimately won and I know I will never ever play it again and honestly don’t give a damn about

There’s a Molyneux-esque quality to Todd, and we know that credit can only extend so far before people get sick of your overpromised slop.

59:35 As someone who came to Halo FROM the books (started with Ghosts of Onyx, then went back, and read the fall of reach, the flood, etc) then I really loved how Reach changed the story to be a bit more cohesive and flow better, especially centering around Noble Team and propping them up as as important as they are

Celsius is worse than Fahrenheit and Kelvin when Celsius and Kelvin at least have the same scaling while Fahrenheit just makes no sense whatsoever? American brainrot at its finest

Where is the “Good guys and bad guys” speech from? (5:01:15)

great review 🙂

Hmm…my phone’s at 3% and I just started this video. I hope this goes well.

Finally made it through. it´s very soothing to watch a so thought through, well structured video from someone who clearly loves games.
Thanks for all the effort making these.

3:57:19

This was very good. If I can look forward to similarly brief and concise summaries of games like this, I’m subscribing for sure. Don’t be too afraid to extend out to the 10-minute mark so you can get those analytics, though!

1:32:25

“Quick”

“Quick” _makes video your new 9-5_

Andreia is the portuguese way for that name, we don’t use a “j” in that name at all

Great job on this piece! Thank you! Correction: this is a fantastic piece. That Everyone should listen to.

malcom reynolds

Todd Howard ruined Bethesda like John Riticello ruined EA.

I’m sure there are plenty of reasons why Fahrenheit could be better then Celsius but it’s worse in probably the most important way: being able to communicate with other people. It’s used by such a minuscule portion of the earth’s population that it’s generally useless unless you happen to be communicating exclusively with the small amount of people who understand it.

3:51:14 “That’s too realistic of a simulation of the human condition” gee thanks, Lex Fridman, aka the Human Sleeping Pill, for such an amazing nugget of insight. Truly a fantastic display of language mastery he must have learned at Drexel.

NASA-core, not NASA-punk. Not at all

>”The United Colonies”
>Looks inside
>One colony

“Celsius is inferior to Kelvin”. that belies a critical misunderstanding of what Celsius is. It _is_ Kelvin, they are the same scale, Celsius is just an offset on the same scale.
One cannot be better than the other because they are the same thing.

One thing I hate is that fallout 3+ has exploding bodies and gore, but none of the other games do. Skyrim has rare decapitation, but you can’t explode bodies or anything. And the thing is, this carries on into so many other mechanics and features. Like killing characters. The whole essential character thing is shit. If you kill someone and it totally ruins the quest, it absolutely should just fail the quest. How have they gone so far back

I hate the companions. Not a single one of them is likable, and they keep trying to hit on me. It feels like they are Stockholm syndromed and I don’t even like them, I actively don’t want them to, but they keep hitting on me

The most linear game with the most non-linear story. Completely fails. Huge dissonance

The whole repayable thing rings so false to me. There is nothing new or fun. You see it once and it is done. There just isn’t any replayability

It wouldn’t be hard to make a minor, in game acknowledgement for a theoretical tes6 ng+. Just a throwaway line about fate or destiny when you proceed to the next ng cycle and refer to any checks or options relating to foreknowledge as a CHIM option… in the construction set. Since that would be canon (thanks battlespire). But… yeah I have no hope for bethesda.

3:00:58

1:59:30

the design doc were the friends we made along.

How could you spend so much time tamking about something this bad.

1:08:12 lmfao space Skyrim.

I don’t even think of this as a youtube video anymore. It’s like a brother to me.

3:05:59

How unfaced she walks throu that mining laser is a perfect example of the indominable human spirit and hillarious. But the fact you kept on mining like its nothing, was even funnier.

SuperRAD be like yup its terrible content time *clicks upload on a 7 hour liberal milquetoast analysis on new vegas*

Truly just. Floored that they would do any project, especially this large, without a design document. Thats building a skyscraper without a blueprint.

Maybe someone can help me understand this:
Why does Bethesda’s dialogue feel like a separate thing that sits “on top” of the world, instead of actually being a part of it?
I don’t mean from a writing quality standpoint, although that is lackluster, too. I mean from an audio experience perspective.

Starfield’s conversations feel like they’re completely separated from the world and just floating around as raw MP3s being dropped over the other game audio.

By contrast, dialogue in CyberpUnk 2077 feels much more natural, like its actually coming from the characaters in the world.
CyberPunk “feels” like you’re listening to people.
Starfield “feels” like you’re listening to a recording pasted over the game and it makes getting immersed in the world and characters impossible because the experience feels disconnected in a fundamental way.
It doesn’tfeel natural and real. It makes all dialogue feel stilted, synthetic and like it is just voice actors reading lines of dialogue at wach other. (Again, ignoring the quality of the writing itself in this context.)

I assume its something to do with sound design, but does anyone know more about why?

In the real world, there is a car fire on average of every 18 million miles driven.
If Grav Drives has a roughly similar rate of failure, then every planet in the settled systems is going to have it’s magneto-sphere stripped away and become an uninhabitable wasteland within a a few decades at most. 😂

Kingdoms of Amalur mentioned, omg xD

I stopped playing Starfield because I absolutely HATE the bougie “gentleman explorer” vibe that Constellation had, along with Space Delphine forcing herself onto me as a companion

Calling MattyPlays a shill channel is wild

huuu

So i played Starfield the first time it was released and i was mindblown … simply by the visuals and being a space nerd. I tried to play it again a few days ago but to be honest… i unistalled after 4 hours of gameplay… i dont know why but it just didnt got me hooked this time.

4:09:40 it pains me that I’ve just got no man’s sky spoiled for me on a starfield video

Also, this is an 8 hour video explaining why Emil Pagliarulo needs to be fired. Which… Yea, I guess I fully agree with.

1:07:00 I think, honestly, that they left it weak because they had every intention of returning to it as DLC. The problem with that though is that I feel they stumbled upon an interesting mechanic in general: NG+ as part of the story and game. They should have had a team whose job it was to go through and make more stuff that would benefit from doing NG+ outside of just changing a few things, getting stronger, starting a new universe to fix mod issues… Honestly, there should even be an option to refuse the Starborn ship and title, and go off as a normal peon again.

“You shouldn’t expect more than a serviceable story.”
I can accept this argument in and FPS like Call of Duty, or a puzzle game like Portal.
It’s still not a great argument, but I can accept it in the context of those genres.
Not in an RPG.
Storytelling is one of the core attributes of RPGs.
To that that argument in the context of that genre is absurd.

8 Hours of you convincing me the devs of New Vegas should have been the ones leading the fallout series, maybe they could have done better with starfield.

3 minutes in and I couldn’t disagree more. Nothing sucked more in any Bethesda game than those minutes walking through an ugly barren field doing literally nothing.

Open worlds can be incredible when there is nothing for a while. Elden Ring’s map, Red Dead 1 and 2, and Ghost of Tsushima are all games that can manage this.

This isn’t to say some maps are too overcrowded with stuff, but an open world will never be hurt because of that where as there being nothing destroys almost every open map.

Sorry, but you sound like a pretentious prick. No one “deserves” a bad game, and this analysis – especially at the end – just makes you sound insultingly entitled. I don’t play Starfield b/c I can’t afford to game period, but you just seem overly harsh and pedantic. Also, no video essay about something as simple as a video game should be over an hour at most – Please get a better editor of at least make a series out of this so you don’t basically have people watch 8 entire hours.

I’m pretty sure “morph” just means “form” or “shape”, so “scary beast”.

”Step out moment” not ” Step off moment”

I put a couple dozen hours into Starfield at release and found my computer was not quite powerful enough to do it justice. So I went out and spent 3k building a new top of the line machine to run it and then found myself not particularly interested in playing it again. I just fired up a fresh Cyberpunk 2077 run instead.

Now, a few years later, I’m wondering if the game has been improved enough to make it worth giving it a second try.

I was listening to this for the 3rd time as background noise for a university calculus exam and you sounded so defeated after the 6 hour mark that I thought that the video would end soon

44:00

27:00

for fucks sake ……….7 hours

6:53:36 well… that aged like fine wine

The lack of design documentation caused the same issues George RR Martin is facing with Game of Thrones books (idc the actual name of “Ice and Fire” who cares.)

Having a game be called a modders paradise should elicit the same dread reaction as calling a dilapidated house a handyman’s delight. What it means is you’re getting a barebones release with large deliberately empty stretches Bethesda expects modders to fill in for them.

Considering you put eight hours into this, I actually don’t doubt you could put an hour or two into talking about Fahrenheit supremacy.

I dont mind the soundtrack of Starfield, I dont think its bad, but as you mentioned for Akila, some of the moods tend to not match. Almost wishing they just left no music in some parts at all. Just exploring pure nothing and silence, thats space. I like Cydonia and its theme a lot though.
I still play the game. I have….days….on it, for pleasure, I enjoy it. Dont know why, but I do. Im still disappointed that the story literally has no weight or stakes. Certain “reveals” were alright but also kinda predictable, also with no lasting effect of plotlines to the world. I was hoping Bethesda could reach that level with their “next gen” game.

I was onboard until the author accused Bethesda of cultural appropriation of cowboy culture. Really? Let’s not talk about how ironic that statement is in light of… all modern country music basically. Let’s just talk about the mentality behind that thought process. Since this is a youtube comment I will highlight the nature of that mentality with just a previous quote. “I refuse to use Celsius…” That kind of insistence on a personal interpretation of shared reality only leads to distortion. Kinda in the vein of fundamentalism.

2:23:22

“When the astronauts went to the moon, there was nothing there”

Well yeah. They werent going to the moon because there was something on it. They were going to the moon just to be on the fucking moon. Not seeing it through a computer monitor, literally there in person standing on it. You cant recapture the experience of the moon landing on a screen

I’ve never seen so much contempt for making a game as Bethesda openly demonstrates and discusses

Sales = quality, well its almost correct, sales = profit. its business, it does not need to create high quality product, all it needs is to sell enough, doesnt matter what as long as its profitable. For some reason gamers think that if they buy bad games for 2 decades then developers will start making good games, why? Its actually much more logical than quality will drop cause any business will start finding ways to make more profit by cutting costs.

23:00 it should be option do you want voiced or mute character. i liked fallout 4 voiced character

Drink a shot every time he mentions design documents lmao

Great review and I agree with everything except the ships aesthetics. Resorting to making flying bricks was 100% a you issue. I found the ship builder to be the most rewarding part of the game and there are a plethora of options to make the ships aesthetically pleasing.

Love from a GuardianHQ and Vaush fan!

For some reason, the collection of clips around 2:02:13 actually just make me irrationally angry.
I think it’s the attempts at making the stiff, outdated, horrible creation engine come off as ‘epic’ when showing a soulless, uninspired mishmash of western tropes.
The “duel” at the end, with two models in default idle stances staring blankly at one another, before one hard-switches to the stock “aiming one handed weapon” animation is laughable.
Ordinarily, jank of this type is charming in a way – especially for devs who don’t have resources to do otherwise.
This is just pathetic. Soulless and aggravating.

The very first thing I did in this game when I was finally free was go to Earth to try to see some landmarks or figure out what happened. Nada, all sand, nothing interesting. I think that’s when I realized my imagination, the questions I felt were obvious that I most wanted the answers to, weren’t gonna get satisfying explanations or experiences. The game just continued to disappoint from there.

We have very different definitions of the word quick 😂

Where does Bethesda do it’s marketing? I’ve never seen anything from Bethesda 😂

A quick retrospective? It’s an 8 hour video …

This game sucks so hard. $60 wasted. I played for 74 hours btw. At least now I know that Elder Scrolls VI won’t be worth getting my hopes up. Bethesda is dead to me.

Super rad levels of dedication

If you did ever make a presentation on the downsides of Celsius as a measurement system – I’d watch that.

I think my opinion of starfield is perfectly encapsulated by the fact that when you reminded me of the multiverse thing I thought “I remember thinking that was neat. I should play it again.” Fast forward 20 minutes and I’m reinstalling Cyberpunk 2077 to play a character build I have bookmarked. In short I enjoyed Starfield at the time, but I don’t see myself playing it again when cyberpunk exists.

the thing i hate about Walter’s quest the most is that one of the best class c ship parts is locked behind doing that quest in the worst possible way which is full stealth with no killing (and when i was still playing this game the mods that unlocked all ship parts didn’t even address that one specific part which meant you still had to do that shitty quest in that stupid way).

In Guantanamo Bay they force the Islamic extremists to complete all 240 temples.

3:30:29

Ive put 80h into starfield. I liked
it.

And to think, if PatricianTV hadn’t made this analysis of Starfield, we wouldn’t have gotten one of THE greatest reveals in EFAP history.

I won’t spoil it here, but if you have 11.5 hours to spare, and let’s face it, you do, go watch EFAP episode 270.

You. Will. Not. Be. Disappointed

very dissapointed this wasn’t 8 hours of you saying “starfield will be good”.

My poor, poor friends who were so insistent that this game was top tier Bethesda and so mad at me for not liking it because “You’re the biggest fallout and elder scrolls fan we know! The game was practically made for you!” How sad that the biggest impact this game has had are the videos taking it down.

todd saying bethesda has evolved into being classless, holy shit bethesda games have achieved communism

06:17:00
Bookmarked

Celsius gang.

@55:17 I my step out moment when I rage quit the game and stepped outside after discovering neon and learning that was the last actual city I was going to discover in a game with 1200 planets

QUICK?!

Who the hell is playing on HDD in 2024? If you still got HDD you most likely cant even play Stargailed cause you got GPU from when they still had 3digits in names or something like it. Mentioning SSD in 2024 is like mentioning 3D Acceleration as a requirement.

I don’t think there’s anything quick about this retrospective 😂
All love just jokes

5:56:56 this is a wrong use of whomever

Amazing work !

It seems like Bethesda keeps adding in these complex systems – ship combat, status effects for environmental conditions, researching, addiction, etc – but then they are too afraid to actually do anything that might “upset” anyone. So they scale them back and scale them back until they are essentially worthless. If Bethesda ever wants to release a good game again, they need to bite the bullet and be prepared to punish players for their mistakes. A few whiney kids will complain, but overall, they will be MUCH better off and their games will be vastly superior to how they are now.

As a modder, the level of entitlement among Bethesda game players is unreal!

“How can we say yes as much as possible?”
“Can I kill this NPC?”
“…no”

He was right, it really is 8 hours of “Starfield will be good”

This game is fundamentally flawed.

6:57:00: Tiny correction, the HDR in Oblivion isn’t the same kinda HDR you see in the current day. HDR back then was lighting tech, today it’s color gamut stuff

at 1:26:27 he says the games procedural generation can create actual mountain ranges…. Im sorry what? I think you mean mountain-looking hills….

Fire Emil hire writer behind the latest London mod

Again Emil was bad

Starfield could have been beautiful. Corporate overreach is what made it mid. Had story made it BAD

I think it was either ActMan or asmon… But they said Bethesda problem was Todd. We wanted 100 curated planets, Todd wanted 1000 procedjrally generated blah blahblah

Pagliarulo is why es6 will suck. Mark my words. And Todd promoting a shop.

I always assumed Emil was a cokehead and man is it evident as all fuck in those group chats. Never seen a more obvious coke blink.

This game has made Starfieldion dollars

Why is it every time I hear Todd talk about game development, it sounds like this is the studios first game?? During Skyrim, they were talking about how it almost didn’t have horses because they couldn’t implement them properly. Oblivion had horses! and it’s the same engine! How is this actually difficult for you?!

In starfield, he talks about the more hardcore gameplay aspects that got toned way down, “that’s something we may address going forward” Like, you’ve made survival modes before, this isn’t new. WTH is going on at Bethesda?

3:18:45

7:16:51 this aged well lmao

5:20:42

I beat the Terrormorph on my first playthrough with a combat knife at level 12. I was trying to do a melee build before I realized melee was terrible. I also didn’t have the jump pack perk unlocked yet. It was probably the most engaging encounter of the entire game as we traded blows, I weaved in and out of combat, slashing when I could while dealing with the Terrormorph’s hallucinations. I also tried to get the guns online and was lucky enough to have the encounter happen during a thunderstorm at night, so it was incredibly creepy before we actually started fighting.

On future playthroughs when I actually knew what I was doing, it was just another road block.

The title is a lie, this was not Quick at ALL.

Overhyped dog water story with decent shooting mechanics. There.. I saved you 8hrs

I know this video isn’t pro-starfield. But the few nice things you list sort of makes me wanna give it a go. Though I won’t pay $120 aud for it, (seriously wtf).
But it’s available on Xbox gamepass. So I’ll get it that way. Xbox gamepass + being owned by microsoft probably are a bad sign in the long run though. Bethesda won’t need to adapt, because the company that owns them could always see the gamepass numbers as a W, and Bethesda could probably coast on those for at least another 10 years.

Spent more time watching your video than I did playing the game 😂

45:17

It seems like a drop in the bucket but, in context, your last sentence of the video sums up everything so perfectly. Starfield is absolutely what we, as fans, as a collective deserve.
I remember you bringing up the modding thing where Bethesda would say something like “oh this will get modded, it’s going to happen.”
I’ve never heard more blatant disrespect from a company where they would say, in effect, we can’t be bothered to care because you idiots will make the game for us.
Excellent video. Thanks for your time and effort.

Hey Pat, have you given your thoughts on survival modes in Bethesda games before? I know you don’t usually comment on modded playthroughs, and I don’t remember if you touched on the Anniversary module in your Skyrim video.

Anyways, you convinced me to give Starfield a shot as a result of this video. I’m not impressed enough to _buy_ it, ofc, but I’ll give it a looksee. While I’m generally not a fan of the tedium that comes with survival modes, Starvival might be a good option to breathe some life into this barren mess.

The question is if they had any design pillars. You don’t need design documents but you need design pillars which seems to be what Starfield is lacking

And honestly it’s very annoying to hear people talk about stuff they don’t completely understand and make judgements when they are not even professionals or experts in the field gg

I don’t know who they thought wanted a space exploration/scifi game to turn into such far fetched fantasy bullshit

3:00 “huh, this seems like a nice video essay” *checks video length* “bro, WHAT”

The fact that they got a theologian to write the agnostic and atheists organizations explains why they are treated like religions. It’s a common tactic of apologetics, to try and make nonbelievers seem like they are also idolizing and worshipping something. Makes them easier to criticize.

Andreja if it was Serbian would likely be spelled Andrezha or Andreza with the latin alphabet, because it would use an accent on the Z to make it a ZH sound, but that accent doesn’t exist in the english/western latin alphabet. A “J” would more likely be pronounced like a “Y”

I’ll assume the belief that Fahrenheit is superior is due to a preference for it’s easy applicability to human temperature norms and more precision in that range.

I’d counter by saying that the actual reason you think it’s better is 99% of the time going to just be the fact that you grew up with it, and any post hoc reasoning you come up with is just stemming from that bias, it’s only intuitive if you grow up with it and celsius is just as easy for anyone used to that instead, while being superior in many other ways.

I say this as a Canadian, who grew up using both metric and imperial measurements interchangeably, and preferred a Fahrenheit thermostat for the heating when I had one.

Honestly, even after 300 hours of Starfield, watching this video and going back to it I still had fun, it’s still a shit game, but it’s fun.

Just came to say 8 hrs is not quick, aint watching this, bye

To create something is to have to suffer those who tell you it was done wrong. A design document, in software development, would not fix this. The fix is to not tell people you don’t have a design document.

8 hours is a quick retrospective…

If editing the design docs are so much effort…. maybe don’t edit them and stick to them

I still remember putting so much time into making MULTIPLE ships in my first run before reaching the end of the MQ only to realize I lost everything for fucking nothing. Iost all my ships for some weird ship idc about. What a joke

Emil is to blame. Fire his useless ASS!

If you can’t fit everyone who is working on a game into a single meeting room, you are going to be needing a design document.

To me, Starfield’s greatest writing sin is that it’s entire main plotline is a mystery-solving plot… that ends with the mystery unsolved. Like… what? The ENTIRE plot was “What are these artifacts and where did they come from?” and that remains unanswered at the end of the game. You can even ask the multiverse version of yourself and he just gives you a circular non-answer; “Who built them? The people who built them, dumby!” which is such a slap in the face over just not being able to ask.

Then again, this is Emil writing, so it’s to be expected. “Hey evil Institute guys, why do you replace people with evil robots?” gets you “We just do because uh… you wouldn’t get it, bud.”

I think he mistakes “lampshading huge plot holes” as “being mysterious and cool” instead of just being absurdly dumb and a blatant rookie mistake in writing?

Wow this is such a quick retrospective

Fallout 3 had a decent hook for a Bethesda game

I hate it when I unwittingly become a star born bodhisattva traveling in strange angles to retain transkalpic knowledge .

A quick retrospective huh 😂

With no design document of course each designers favorite thing is going to be the specific thing they are working on. Everything else is just noise that needs to be tuned out in that artists mindz

Investors hate fantasy IP is the only thing I can keep thinking whenever Bethesda comes up

I was always infuriated that the museum level tells of a story that is INFINITELY cooler and seems like it would be way more fun than starfields actual main story

The idea you have to have played a game to have an opinion of it is stupid.

The only info I got from this video was to add mass effect to my steam wishlist

You are literally the only person I have ever heard speak the words ” l don’t like Fallout.” Also if it was advertised as “Skyrim in space” why would you not assume it was Skyrim in space? Aside from the fact that Bethesda oversells a lot of their shit

5:17:33

I’m disappointed with Starfield

I expected greater stability in the base game.

Please fix the game.

Conclusions – 7:53:09

“Starfield is the game you deserve” is probably the most poignant thing ever said. And I agree, 100%. I’d put all my money on a bet, that Elder Scrolls 6, despite anything they say, or how they try to gussy it up, will just be “Another Bethesda Game” instead of standing on it’s on in any genre outside of the one they’ve created for themselves, and the competition is already years ahead of them. We got Kingdom Come Deliverance 2. We got Baldur’s Gate 3. What does Bethesda really offer the industry or the artform anymore, besides the bare minimum experience, built with the smug indignation that the modding community will do most of the real work for them?

Why is Vlad black

01:52:04
This literally infuriated me the first time I replayed this quest. I couldn’t care less about this whiny cuck and his family drama.
Horrendous game design, abysmal dogsht

This video (and channel more broadly) is such a good example of length for the sake of length. Goodbye to the days of well thought out commentary and critique, now its just a contest to see how long they can keep talking masquerading as insight. Its even in the title of the video. The length is the point.

I love that “we don’t want our writing to be videogamey” line. It feels like half the time the stories don’t belong in videogames at all. it’s intentionally bad, while they’re trying to make it good.

So when I was in undergrad school getting my BA I had a final project for one of my classes where I got teamed up with this kid who absolutely despised school. Everytime in class he would brag about being an “IBM employee” (when he was just an intern) whie simultaneously stating that the skills he was learning were useless in the real world. Anyways, he ended up being pushed through to graduation despite knowing nothing about the field he was in.

Why bring up that story? Because Emil Pagliarulo is that same guy. He’s decided that he knows better than the established – and proven – principles of game design. He’s like King Midas except everything he touches turns to shit.

Todd Howard also doesn’t escape criticism for enabling people like Pagliarulo who actively harm the company and consumers. It’s quite hilarious how often Larian Studios are blamed for setting unrealistic expectations in quality when they essentially applied the very same principles of video game design that Pagliarulo chastises. The end result is that few are left who trust that BGS won’t screw up ES:VI.

I really appreciate these videos. I’ve watched the elder scrolls all the way thru 4 times

The stars in the sky look worse in starfield than in Fallout

Your consistent needling of Bethesda about design documentation kept me laughing.

57:02 There is no “step off moment” in Starfield. Every location is boxed in.

“A Quick Retrospective”

6:41:44

As someone who feels like I’m putting on a pip boy every time they put on their smart watch there is absolutely a fantasy in having a realistic pip boy. They still shilled it as a real product though.

snoring after 1minute as if i would play that stupid game 😂

“Not childkillers, actual freight hauling vehicles”

Found a fellow NotJustBikes fan, I see! XD

I tried playing Starfield this week… I hated it. My main reason being the Co² system when you’re carrying too much sh1t, nothing told me that would happen so I was confused and annoyed so I looked it up, got mad, and deleted it. Another reason being the utterly WEIRD control scheme of the ships, and majorly? It was boring as hell after awhile.

End game what i usually did after NG+ was jump around until finding the mysterious merchant and just bought the Vorunn particle rifle.

had to tune out at the freedom units justification.. good vid until then

@55:40 the guy on the right looks like a bgs npc with those soulless eyes

Oh cool a 8 minute analysis video!.

The suffix “morph” is about morphology (body shape), not about morphing into something else. Terrormorph basically means spooky body.

They are named that because the aliens in the Alien franchise are called Xenomorphs and someone at Bethesda thought that sounded cool.

Lore bomb? He probably means exposition. This is the problem with video game writers. They’re fucking stupid, probably haven’t read a book in their entire lives.

You should have black screens to coincide every time Emils hard blinks

I can’t even find the words to express how done I am with Bethesda, so it’s a good thing you’ve said it all perfectly.

My first time playing Morrowind at a sleepover I stayed up all night playing and only made it to Balmora, but it had me hooked from the moment I saw the loading screen art.

Now, after fallout 76 and seeing starflop, I’m unfortunately no longer interested in their games.. they’ve lost the plot completely.

Hard to not be a little blackpilled about the future of Bethesda and its future offerings; they peaked with Morrowind, and it’s been downhill ever since

Hey!

Near the end you talked about the “bringing more encrypted shit” to help break the encryption. At around the 7:06:20 mark.

Having more examples of something with the same encryption CAN actually help break it easier, because of how language works and how encryption CAN be cracked by detecting repetition in the encryption.

However, it’s hard to say that the guy writing the quest knew this or it was just ‘luck’ that there is a similarity between how it CAN work in real life.

Notice how I said “CAN” a lot? It’s because there are loads of encryption types and a lot of other stuff you kinda have to know or assume if this is actually helpful.

This video is amazing. It’s everything that I want right now with the oblivion rumors going on, and all. What a treat
(i still play this game)

Portugese is very similar in pronounciation to Russian for some reason and in Russian there is a male name Andrey (which has greek root that means man, so its strange for a girl to have) and there should be no j in it.
Pronounciation thing is very funny, when you listen to Portuguese you feel that its Russian, but the content is gibberish.
Well if you think about it actually may be that Andreja character supposed to be Russian and people think she’s Portugese because languages sound alike.

One thing I will say about the ship tiers is they sort of make sense. I think they were going for drivers licenses. Like how you need a class c to drive commercial semis.

I’m genuinely impressed you went through the extra effort of playing multiple playthroughs in order to get the experience Bethesda seem to have been intending. It is kinda cool the concept they were going for and makes me wish the game was interesting enough to actually play through these multiple universes.

i’ve heard Vlad is an impaler. just what i’ve heard about Vlad. not saying it’s true. he looks like an impaler, though.

It has to suck so much to work as a writer at Bethesda. Imagine your bosses, who have literally spoken about leaving the creativity to the community, or about how putting effort on the story and writing is dumb because players are too easily distracted by picking flowers and need to be constantly catered with positive reinforcement and flattery.

A world that is constantly flipping lore, theme and tone because of the “recommendation box” approach to who gets to design quests within the team, and you are on the squad that has to try and make any of it make sense… only for your boss to wake up one day and tell you “by the wary an entire faction is space cowboys now”.

The writing team is probably only doing as much as needed to punch out for the day, and honestly, I’m sympathetic to that. Never give it your all to a company that does not respect your work. Yes the player pays the price, but that’s on Bethesda’s stupid project management approach.

I wonder if paying someone (or two people) to track changes to a main design doc would cost more than what they’ve lost in the last 10 years making bad games. 🤔 Having no design doc is a thing that works great if you’re an indie studio with 8 employees working in the same tiny office. Even a company the size of Doublefine could get away with it. Not so great, as it turns out, for projects as complex as Starfield. Who knew, design docs are there for a reason?

The fall of Bethesda Softworks titles will be written in the history books. I don’t think anybody with even half a brain isn’t skeptical about TES6 now.

The most unrealistic part of the game is NOT! Musk being sober and having a stable family

Great analysis. I especially liked your comment about environments being too noisy with loot (very good to way to put it). As a loot goblin myself it was too overwhelming for me to even care to figure out high value loot spawns, as well. Especially since I rarely felt strapped for credits to begin with, and was almost always underwhelmed with the “valuable” loot that I did find.

I want to hear the hour long presentation on imperial vs metric.

2:15:15 woo represent

Starfield – no white people in space

Honestly cool features on Earth would have been nice. Imagine dropping into the Marianas trench! How cool would that have been?

5:55:38 The black box subtitles are a great standard. That’s how subtitles have been looking since the 60s. Works with any background without impacting readability. Clear to see for the visually impaired too without having to strain. Easily scaled.

really pushing that 8 minute mark huh?

The metaname for the Starfield pc is Refundkiin, Starbored. “This shit sucks!” *recorder rendition of Skyrim theme*

A quick retrospective… 8 hours long video. Anyways thank you!

Boring

6:13:45

I find it interesting that more time and effort (at moments) seems to have gone into quests to make sure they can’t be sequenced break or done early, which is fascinating to me because new game + exists.
My brain can only image the amount of players who played the game as intended once from start to finish, went for new game, only to find out that anywhere from 90 to 70% of there run will be exactly the same with few to no changes; at that point you just reading a book held up by the author with your only interaction being to turn the page.
Riveting…

2:03:59
It feels like something you would find in Borderlands

The ending, yes sadly this was my fave moment as well

With the looping multiverse ending, i almost think the main story should be shorter, and go much more poorly for everyone involved. Like ME2 bad ending levels of everyone dies but your character.

You limp to the end, and learn you can have another shot, armed with knowledge, to run the final mission better, and then better, until you finally establish yourself as a being on the same level as your antagonists.

This would give you a reason to play through the story again, and maybe open up new quests that simply weren’t possible before, since you can cut down on mission prep time in-universe.

Maybe they ultimately didnt want to do something like that because Deathloop had released fairly recently, but then again, why advertise the need to finish the main quest so explicitly?

And LEAN INTO the fact that youre not really the guy Constellation knows. Your original universe is still out there, and its still fucked. You have to grapple with saving versions of your friends, who dont have all those memories of you. Your romance from past runs, simply doesnt feel that way for you without all that time and near-death experiences. At the end, you’ve saved the day, and are this super-powerful multiverse hopping god, but you can never save that original timeline.

But, then again, im pretty sure i care more about how to fix the story; than anyone did writing the damned thing in the first place.

“We think Starfield is going to be a DREAM for modders.” Why, because there’s so much room for improvement?

Commenting at 2:24:37

4:11:29 A bit late to the party, but possibly loss of sense of self due to universe iterations?

This is a great video, but two things to note:
1, when you talk about “stepping off”, you put in clips of Todd talking about “stepping out”, and these aren’t the same thing. The “stepping out moment” refers to the visually striking moment where you see a new vista, whereas the “stepping off moment” you’re looking for is a point in the story where the player has freedom to get off the linear path and make choices. In Fallout 3 these happen to be the same moment, when you step out of the vault and see the sun (and get a big musical swell), and can go in any direction from there. In Starfield the 2 stepping out moments are when you walk out of the mine (musical swell plays) and probably when you launch into space, but the stepping off moment is in the middle of your first conversation with Sarah, as you note. Bethesda doesn’t seem to have any concern any more for the stepping off moment, as you note, but the clips you use aren’t talking about the same thing you are.
2, “morph” doesn’t mean “change” in Greek, it means “form”. It’s not called a “Terrormorph” because it changes into something terrifying, just that it has a terrifying form. The Alien is a “Xenomorph” because it has an alien form. It got the secondary meaning of “change” as a shortening of “metamorphosis” at some point, but if anything that’s a happy accident here. It could maybe be an intentional double meaning, but that would require planning and documentation, so it’s unlikely.

5:44:50

My biggest issue with Starfield is the combat.. it’s not challenging at all even at it’s highest difficulty and there isn’t much to enemy variety or their AI. Was hoping that would have vastly improved

At 36:30 I thought it was a heavily modded Fallout 3 intro for a second

“Quick” video lasts my entire work day.

If only the game+ mechanic affected more than just Constellation. I like Starfield and had fun playing it, but there is so much wasted potential. Maybe in one universe the Crimson Fleet won or in another the Va’Run zealots have conquered half of the systems. Maybe in another, the Settled systems have been overrun by the Terror Morphs. What about Akila rebuilding its mechs and restarting the war? So many missed possibilities…

If you want to have a mystery plot with universe-res

Quick retrospective. Lmao 8 hour video

The worst thing about starfield is that unlike no man’s sky or cyberpunk 2077 the base game won’t get better with time, only mods will do it.

8 hours 😱

I put sleep on when I go to watch this.

I can’t imagine the work that goes into these videos. Loved them at first watch. I watch them in chunks over a couple days and don’t skip anything. Thank you.

A “quick retrospective”, 8 hours long huh? I got time. Begin the retrospectiving!

No joke, I’m still excited for this game to be made into something worth playing by the remnant of modders, and I don’t mind waiting a decade for it

Very quick indeed

Knowing Bethesda lacked a GDD for Starfield (Edit: AND FO4? jfc) explains…so…so much. And simultaneously makes me sad for the scattered mess TES:VI is surely going to be.

I’ll say this, not having a design document isn’t uncommon in the phases before production. It actually makes sense to not have one because creating a game is an iterative processes, so you’d pretty much be wasting 90% of the effort put into creating and maintaining a design document when you’re prototyping the core mechanics.

The difference here is that once you’re satisfied with a well-received vertical slice, and you’re ready to go into full production with a team of artists, programmers, etc, etc… you then NEED to develop a design document, one that shouldn’t be changed all that often because you did all that iterative design prior, and ironed out the core vision of the game. not having a design document, specifically one that is broken into sections for their relevant teams (Sound for sound team, music for music team, etc, etc..) would make large productions completely incoherent and messy.

I’m not a software jockey but I think the shader cache specifically can’t be diagnosed by file verification because the shaders have to be compiled by the PC. That’s because the hardware of PC’s are, of course, non-standard, so while consoles can have shaders simply sent out to them, the PC’s architecture needs to figure it out for itself. So there can’t be a “correct” structure for Steam to use to verify the shader cache. That’s my best guess.

7:08:25 “Actual cowboy outfit” reminds me of the Moon hillbilly from Futurama with the three robot daughters.
Ah, Crushinator.

Starfielf: Sharted Aids

I can totally see Emil Pagliuaro being told to watch this video, then saying “it’s just one guys opinion”, failing to notice to 34,000 likes on it.

Inb4 TES 6 is just Elder Scrolls flavored GMOD. “here’s a bunch of tools and random props dumped into a physics engine, install some mods and make your own fun!”

finally finished this, great video

Watched the whole video twice still like the game it appeases my simple monkey mind

Fallout 4 was the last straw for me, after that disaster I have lost all hope for Bethesda.

1:58:53 only wrong thing in the video

They cant do the panning away shots well with their engine so they just…don’t. Go back and play Oblivion and Skyrim and their two quests where your put up in the air. You’ll notice the world looks like fucking shit.

Starfield as in Garfield

Quark is never not entertaining

I really appreciate what was said here. If there is well read authority and voice for those of us who are frustrated with Bethesda I think you’ve taken 1st place. I determined I’m no longer purchasing products from Bethesda after the announcement of an Oblivion remake. Tired of giving them money for increasingly worse products.

There is still that small spark of hope in my heart that they somehow manage to make TES6 amazing even though I know better. Just can’t quite kill that spark.

7:16:50 Well, Pat. You laughed for days eventually 🤣

7:21:45

It’s absolutely true that the ships are more attractive than the human characters. Ship building is actually the only part of the game I enjoyed. My favorite was a ship I built shaped like an H; cockpit and quarters in a small hull in the center, two massive pylons for thrusters and weapons in full view from the cockpit (awesome), connected to the main hull by the warp and power plant modules hiding the cargo racks underneath. Painted with an OD and FDE color scheme. Everything was smooth and connected in a natural looking way. The thing was so sexy I actually liked watching the landing animation. It’s just a shame it’s not attached to a better game.

“quick”

“a quick retrospective”
~8 hour video

Imagine if Bethesda made a good game?

Sure, I got some time to spare

4:07:55 me who rewatched the video a week later because I was bored:

When I first played the game, I was astonished at how beautiful it was. The soundscapes, the world, all made with some supreme quality. But what I was missing was the magic and escapism that Skyrim is. Starfield has amazing potential as long as more creative, artistic people get on board with the team of developers.

It was shit, forget this exists. Save yourself the time.

A quick retrospective?!?! It’s 8 hours!! Great video BTW

You know it’s a bad game when I’m bored by the review

This isn’t a slight against Patrician, Starfield is just that generic

Never seen so much bitching and wining from you had to turn this shit off, this is some cinema cins level critiquing lmao. Sad pathetic redditor

After playing starfield, I knew it was trash. After watching this, I now know that starfield is MEGA trash

Dude, you’re gay. Shut up.

Holy shit. This quickie will take me days to finish *crack knuckles*

Oh this video is the hardest of your videos to watch, its so frustrating to listen to the intervie- Oops, I meant SALESPITCHES. It’s so fucking galling.

Pat gotta be SO MAD that Elon is becoming more and more of a superhero every day.😂

Step out != Step off

5:08:50

4:25:53

4:19:09

Actually getting to the end of this video and I’m kinda sad it almost over

I still can’t fucking believe they called it Starborn. Someone in that chat said spacerborn as a joke when they showed the power, and that’s literally what they did in the game for real. I’ll never get over it lol.

6:56:48

7:17:20

53:40

3:26:30. This is not what a human face looks like

imma need the temerature unit rant asap

2:52:59

That ending line is COLD, nothing worse than being cynical and being proven right at every turn

“Quick” Retrospective…

30:59

6:06:15 leaving this comment so i can return later

It was so weird to me playing Skyrim for the first time how disappointing the companions quest, you know the one that most beginning players run into and start first. Ended up actually avoiding Skyrim for a few months after that just assuming the rest of the game was that quality since that was the first impression they wanted to give me.

Man. I love traveller.

Customer: Do you like just destroying our games we felt were beloved and had mechanics and ideas no other
games have tried to do or implement.

Bethesda who wants to say yes to everyone: Yes dear customer we revel in destroying our IPs and using modders to fix what our lazy director and producers refuse to acknowledge as a problem. Yes dear customer. Yes to all.

*”Quick” ..* 8:00:00

Masterpiece of a critique!

I tried to complain to Bethesda about how bad their game is but Todd Howard insisted i buy three more copies of Skyrim before he would finish hearing me out.

I bet sometimes Emil wakes up in the middle of the night screaming; drenched in sweat, shivering, with 3 words painfully echoing through his mind still…

*_”No design document”_*

I don’t know about anyone else, but I wouldn’t mind a one-hour rant about how Fahrenheit is superior to Celsius.

This long term policy of railroading the player into terrible plots really came to a head this time around simply because Constellation doesn’t need you. They already have 2 artifacts found by other people. Sera knows Mora who has one as well + a soldier who knows how to find more. So… Sera has no urgency to find these things on her own. Constellation is wealthy and has Walter as a member yet they only have one ship… and more importantly, the player adds no skills or equipment they need… Yeah, no thanks. I’ll stop playing here.

The quest designers either knew about all these issues with the plot of the main quest and didn’t care/think the player would notice or they really didn’t know. I figured if this was the care and attention put into the introduction then I had no hope it would “get good” at some point 40 hours in.

Quite honestly, for as bad as the world building and story telling is… I think the game would have been far better received had the space exploration been the replacement for the open world of their previous games because it would have at least given the game some pacing between the jank. Now the awful is in the players face constantly and so there is little time for the player to forget about it till the next piece of terrible content like in previous games.

I get Todd wants to be big shot producer man and thats fine, but he should at least find a decent creative successor before all thats left of the studio’s foundation is rebar.

Sorry I’m still stuck on “starborn”

Starfield is a great game and I still enjoy my time with it.

quick retrospective. 8 hours long.

where’s the clip at 5:01:12 from

No video needs to be 8 hours Jesus

Quick? Bro this video is 8 hours long

As a native Portuguese speaker, I can assure you nobody here has ever been named Andreja, so there is no “Portuguese Pronunciation of Andreja”. We do have the very common name Andreia, but it’s pronounced as you were saying it, not as the voice actors were saying it.

Oh gods, we have a still alive imperial measurements fan. Get with the program, luddite. Forget your silly inches and lobsters already.

QUICK retrospective, QUICK. 8 hours.

We need to work on your definition of quick

I just looked at the time 😂

This video is outdate.

But was it as good as you remembered 1 year later?

7:17:00

The multiverse thing and the temple run section legit almost gave me a panic attack

2:56:00
(bookmark for myself)

6:15:51 I love how todd is literally describing a better game and is just like “so we did the other thing”

its like someone at bethesda took notes on your oblivion and skyrim videos, and someone else picked it up and thought it was the design doc for star field. except we know that didn’t happen because starfield didn’t have a goddamn design doc!

Just started the video and wanted to say, really good starting point. I think the reason fallout 4 never clicked with me was because it needed more of these moments where you just walk the wastland appreciating the scenery taking it all in. It sucks in starfield tho, the nature of it being a fast travel simulator makes it really annoying to have to walk a barren landscape after loading screen gauntlett. Just feels like to long before you get to do anything. In fallout 4 there is enough stuff that I could use a break. In starfield in desperatly looking for something to do.

For myself: 5:02:30

With Starfield i had a fool me once, fool me twice moment.
I remember pre-ordering Fallout 4 with the whole season pass being absolutely sure that “it is fallout, come on”. And then getting a game so disappointing my teeth hurt.
And then i became stupid and pre ordered Starfield with season pass. I remember finishing the game by going through Unity, understanding how fucked up the whole premise is, what a massive nothing burger is this game and how i was fooled into loosing money and time on this mediocre slop. But yeah, fool me twice – shame on me. I only hope i will not be stupid enough to buy Elder scrolls 6.

Thanks to the author of this video, i had more fun watching it than playing Starfield.

The Starborn you domed just ragdolled in the saddest way possible

There is nothing portuguese about “Andreja”.

“ignoring the reviews” is a line that sums up Bethesda actions on this game

KEKKK LMAOOOO THEY LET PATRICIAN GET HIS REACTION ON DISCORD 1:48:58

The classless system is superior, I reference Runescape when I bring this up. Bethesda is fumbling the ball here. You CAN pick up Melee or Ranged or Magic after getting to Combat Level 138, but you know you’re going to suck at it. You can do more than just a two-pronged hybrid build, you really can mix and match anything available in the game. Use the Ancient or Holy prayers. Use the Ancient, Lunar, Arceuus or Tower spellbook. Spells aren’t just for wizards either, Vengeance is super fun to use. Use the ability from another weapon to swap back to your main weapon. Use a piece of magic armor to block a specific attack. You can’t just pick up something you don’t know nothing about and expect it to be useful, that’s the point of training. They limited trainers and the ability to train with spells

“A quick retrospective”

8 hours long

1 year ago: “I’m sure I’ll make more fallout videos come the day I have to pay for a house or kids, but my heart won’t be in it.”
Now: “Fallout Research Stream 2”
Pat?

You know the part where you go to the city of New Atlantis and visit a museum? In that museum are mechs as part of an exhibit about a mech war that already happened outside the narrative frame of the story. How much more interesting would it have been if _STARFIELD_ had been set during a period of factional interstellar war?

“Recently unionized” QA testers. Of course it failed. There won’t be another great Elder Scrolls game.

Starfield needs a remaster/remake already

3:24:28

When this game dropped, I recently got a series x and of course gamepass.

The bros were insistent that I was a hater because after an hour or two of Starfield I was over it. So I played the game, which isn’t really like me but I did it.

I have new the bros now and we play morrowind.

“A quick retrospective”

Proceeds to 8 hours long video

3:04:51 Activated siri on my phone lmao

If they made each background have its own introduction events like cyberpunk, I think people would appreciate this game more

the part where Vasco kills the two droids is easily the most entertaining thing from Starfield I’ve seen.

Emil really is the JJ Abrahams of videogames

Fellow yiik fan identified

Its so frustrating that the potential for a good game is there, but I have no hope Bethesda will/would be able to bring it about

Quick?

When Fallout 4 came out, I played it for about 30 minutes before giving up (about as long as it took me to give up on Oblivion). A few years later, I came back to the game, and I spent 40 hours, not hyperbole, modding the game before I played it. I got about 60 hours in it before giving up. Compare that to over 3,000 hours in Morrowind, not including modding. If you include modding, I have over 1,500 hours in Skyrim, easy. Skyrim mods have been out since day one, thanks to the fact the game was out a week early. I have spent so much time modding mods to work with other mods, or just so the game engine wouldn’t crash. I liked having one super character who could switch playstyles at will and try all sorts of different things, but I liked keeping my world. It was a total clusterfuck; Skyrim would regularly use more than 22GB of RAM, loading screens would get longer, etc., but I had this fucking save going for years. Then Tod adds fucking fishing! HE ADDED FISHING AND BROKE EVERYTHING. I made the mistake of setting up this save on my Steam install instead of my pirated copy. FYI my Steam install is actually my second copy because my first copy is a box set that is useless without the Steam key inside. After that I decided that one, I am never buying another Bethesda game, and two, I am only modding pirated copies of games.