apparently this is in response to a few threads on Reddit flaming Starfield—in general, it’s been rather interesting to see Bethesda take what i can only describe as a “try to debate Starfield to popularity” approach with the game’s skeptics in the past month or two. not entirely sure it’s a winning strategy, personally.
Yeah, I can imagine the frustration of seeing people who don’t know anything about what happened during development blame you as a dev for something that may have been design decisions or budgetary or time constraints that you had no say in or control over.
This is a totally fair take. He explicitly says it’s fine to not like the game, but just don’t try to pretend you know what happened on the back end to make it the way it was, because you’re probably gonna misplace blame.
You know what an even better take is? “We hear you, we’ll take your feedback” or just as good, say nothing at all.
Arguing that you are smarter or wiser than your users / customers is paradoxical. You are by definition not smart if you attempt to do this.
This is why we only ever get PR responses to anything that happens instead of actual information or explanations.
It’s better than arguing with the customer.
Simple explanations like “we felt we were under X constraints” or “our engine didn’t handle the loading times as well as we had hoped” would be just fine.
Instead, they just seem to be telling the players they’re wrong for disagreeing with many of the design decisions made
Where did he say he was smarter or wiser? I must have missed that quote.
Emil Pagliarulo (guy quoted in the article), lead on Starfield, is known to have this attitude towards players. He’s also known to not like design documents, which explains the massively disconnected design of recent Bethesda games, especially Starfield.
Emil is one of the giant reasons their games have been the way they have been lately and it’s why he’s being a baby about it
This particular dev didn’t. But the Starfield team at large has been blowing up the internet recently telling people that don’t like the game that their opinions are wrong.
I was assuming this was a quote from an interview with a leading question like “what do you think about players who claim to know what went wrong in the development of Starfield?” And the quote was out of context to make him look bad.
But this was a Twitter thread. It’s a completely unforced error, no one was making him do this.
You know, it’s funny. My assumptions, which I think I’ve made clear are assumptions when I talk about them, are that Starfield is what it is largely because of technical limitations. I think, if I’m wrong, the remaining possible answers are far more disappointing. Are the side quests bad because that’s what the engine allows them to feasibly build? That sucks; they should ditch their engine. Are the side quests bad because the designers don’t know how to design good quests? That’s worse. You can extend these kinds of assumptions to the way space travel works, the way their conversation system works, etc.
The thing is that Fallout: New Vegas used the same engine, and it proved that you can do a much more interesting and engaging story and quests with Creation Engine compared to what Bethesda is capable of. Sure, Creation is still a bit of a piece of shit when it comes to engines, but it can be used for creating complex storylines etc. and not just “go there and push a button” or “go there and kill a person”
True, but in particular, I’m referring to the non-faction quests. It’s been a while since I’ve played New Vegas, but I can’t remember if that game even had the equivalent of Starfield’s “activities”. Those quests are often so bad that I wonder why they’re in the game at all.
Blame is on the leads, because they are the leads, and get paid as such