In principle, I agree, but I feel like part of that is just AAA vs. indie.

AAA games need to provide lots of lukewarm content, because many more casual players will buy them and expect much bang for their buck + haven’t seen this lukewarm content a million times already.

On the other hand, indies will basically only be bought by people more enthusiastic about the hobby. As such, they have to pick out one or two aspects and excel at them, so that it’s something new for that crowd.

Hello Games was indie and unknown at the time, so likely only attracted that gaming enthusiast crowd, which would have been more easily bored by the extremely lukewarm content in Starfield.

I guess, why my interpretation is different, is because I’m a developer as well. And to us, modding can be more fun than actually playing a game.

So, if you assume the game will be good, you’ll probably just dive into the modding right away. Especially if you want to ride along the initial hype wave, so that your mods are immediately appreciated by lots of players.

If you do then start playing the game and notice that it doesn’t match your expectations, even if that were an entirely personal problem, that just robs you of your motivation to continue with the modding.

And I guess, that is really what the guy is pissed about. That he wasted time, because the marketing evoked wrong expectations in him.

Personally, I would consider myself wiser than that, because I’ve been burned by Bethesda’s marketing beforehand (Skyrim), but I’m certainly not wishing that kind of wisdom onto other people.

If that helps you discredit his opinion, I guess, he must be.

Well, it sounds like the guy started out by modding the game for a week before really playing it. Don’t think, you can still get a refund at that point…

Yeah, maybe it could look like that, but obviously they haven’t actually implemented everything to make it look like that, so it’s still completely up in the air, whether it actually will look like that.

I watched it on my phone in 1080p60 and the scale didn’t bother me. It’s not like I have to read a lot of text and the precise position of the player character is mostly irrelevant, too. Like, if you get hit by a train or something, the screen will flash red and you’ll react to it, too, so I’ll know what’s going on.

Well, and I don’t look at the screen at all times anyways. 🙃

Would like to see more of this journey…

The modding community won’t be terribly motivated to build on top of their base game either, if the base game doesn’t feel worth playing for long…

Believe me, I really don’t care to defend Bethesda. I’m not saying their engine is incredibly good.
I’m mostly saying, I feel like their games would be different and even more AAA-generic, if they built it on top of Unreal or Unity. And I’m giving them mild props for not just buying into the duopoly.

But I’m also just saying that, as a result of building their own engine, Bethesda can’t just quickly prototype something. To see what the final game looks/feels like, they have to invest years into engine development.

I feel like it’s not impossible for them to be fun, for example the Everspace series does focus on action gameplay, but yeah, tons of titles try to go for realism and showing off the scale correctly, which is neat for space nerds, but quite contrary to actual fun.

I feel like this is emblematic of why many AAA titles are so dull.

I mean, you gotta give Bethesda some props here for developing their own engine. Indies don’t do that.
But still, 8 years ago, they had this idea of a Bethesda game in space. Maybe they should have seen it coming that this concept won’t work out terribly well, but ultimately someone decided to go ahead with it and then they spent 7 years building a space physics simulation, procedural planet generation and so on.

There was no way, they could have not released this game after realizing the concept doesn’t work out terribly well. Or taken a step back and shifted the focus of the game towards space flight. Or taken a step back and deviate from the Bethesda-typical formula for this space theme.
These are options you have, when you’ve spent a few months prototyping, not after multiple years. They had to roll with the concept and basically try to bruteforce the fun into it.

Yeah, I fell out of love with Bethesda with Skyrim, and I’ve never been big on scifi, so I knew it wasn’t going to be for me, but even with my lowered expectations, it just looked so incredibly generic.

I guess, I forgot to factor in that it’s also a AAA title. Those are, of course, prohibited by law from containing any resemblance of fun. But yeah, I don’t know, it just looked like generic space game + generic shooter + generic Bethesda game. And then, as you’ve said, we’ve seen plenty games in each of those categories. Merely combining the categories, doesn’t yet make for a good game.

Ah, so it’s just that you can play singleplayer already before release, but it will also be available to everyone who buys the game after release?

I interpreted this sentence:

VGC’s Modern Warfare 3 review says of the campaign: “Sold as a pre-order bonus and […]"

…to mean that it would only be available to those who pre-ordered. Which would certainly be wild, but I thought, maybe that is why it’s so short then.

Wow, the whole singleplayer campaign is a pre-order bonus? It really must be bad, if they’re so hellbent on getting people to buy it before they know what they’ll get.

Or if you can’t, then at least don’t promise all kinds of features that you obviously won’t be able to implement. No one forced them to build up all that hype.

It is definitely possible, yeah. Tailscale and similar don’t do magic either.

I’m not sure on the specifics, though. I think, you want a TURN server or a STUN server.

Yeah, I was considering giving that technicality its room, especially because ESO exists. ESO is kind of FO76 in the TES universe.

But at the same time, ESO wasn’t really what most TES fans hoped for either, so from that average consumer view, it may actually even feel like another project that’s somewhat misguided, while waiting for TES6.

Well, active development. Especially for TES fans, it may be difficult to grasp why they would not start with TES6 right after the release + bugfixing of Skyrim. Others may understand that they’ll do Fallout 4 in between.

But doing two Fallouts + Fallout in Space Starfield, it would have deserved a comment from Bethesda.

They did put a pretty massive gap between Skyrim and ES6. Of course, fans will start to wonder, whether anything’s in the pipeline, when it could have realistically been close to release in 2018 already. I guess, they focused on Fallout for a few years, which is a valid decision, but I don’t think, they ever announced that this means ES6 isn’t yet in the works.

Gamedev is all about smokes and mirrors. A conventional software engineer will actively resent the shitfuckery you have to do, to make games run well (for good reason; it introduces complexity into already insanely complex systems).

Some performance work, you cannot defer, like fundamental design decisions (3D vs. 2D, raytracing or not) or if you’ve coded a tiny feature and for some reason, it completely obliterates performance.

But there’s always going to be tons of features that have been implemented well, they don’t obliterate performance, but if you replace them with an unintuitive/complex smoke-and-mirror solution, then you may be able to shave off 20% execution time for that feature. Or not. Often no real way to know, except to try it out.

Some of these do need to be tackled throughout development, too, but it’s easy to end up with a big block at the end of development.
Especially, if you had to rush a number of features that marketing promised, so that you can make the release date that marketing promised many months before anyone has any fucking clue how long it’ll take.

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