|
Alchenar posted:This article here? https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2023/12/30/starfield-attempting-a-cyberpunk-2077-reputation-repair-seems-inevitable/?sh=414ae1a72ee5 2077, for all of its many early flaws, had so much great writing in it from day one. I'd argue fixing the technical issues and game mechanics is easier than trying to retcon how much lovely writing there is in Starfield. Although now I'm reminded of the original FO3 ending where nope, can't send in the super mutant who can literally do the job without so much as a scratch - has to be you going in and getting nuked to death.
|
#
?
Jan 2, 2024 03:13
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 4, 2024 14:17 |
|
|
Cyberpunk is an interesting comparison, because CDPR said they took a big loss on fixing the game and releasing Phantom Liberty, but I bet they would still think it was absolutely the right move to do. When it comes time to reveal Witcher 4 gameplay they want everyones memories to be I played that game when Phantom Liberty came out and it was awesome and not the disaster of a launch it had. I'm really curious if BGS is going to try to restore the reputation of Starfield or if they even think they need to.
|
|
#
?
Jan 2, 2024 03:28
|
|
|
IOwnCalculus posted:Although now I'm reminded of the original FO3 ending where nope, can't send in the super mutant who can literally do the job without so much as a scratch - has to be you going in and getting nuked to death. And even tho they "fixed" that all the NPCs and the narrator give you poo poo for it if you don't follow The Vision Bethesda has a poor track record of being adult about complaints. See also the guy responding to bad steam reviews
|
|
#
?
Jan 2, 2024 03:39
|
|
|
Cyrano4747 posted:
I dunno, kinda feels like they understood it perfectly since the end of Starfield evokes the same "nothing matters, everything is pointless" feeling that Rick and Morty often espouses. What they seem to have missed is that it's occasionally interesting when you watch TV show characters grapple with it but a supremely unsatisfying and frustrating feeling to be left with after you've sunk dozens of hours into a game.
|
|
#
?
Jan 2, 2024 04:06
|
|
|
Azhais posted:And even tho they "fixed" that all the NPCs and the narrator give you poo poo for it if you don't follow The Vision "You can mine! You can loot! You can fly! You can shoot!" is something I'm never going to forget as a bad PR move.
|
|
#
?
Jan 2, 2024 04:06
|
|
|
Ironslave posted:"You can mine! You can loot! You can fly! You can shoot!" I can siiiiiiing 
|
|
#
?
Jan 2, 2024 04:20
|
|
|
FeculentWizardTits posted:I dunno, kinda feels like they understood it perfectly since the end of Starfield evokes the same "nothing matters, everything is pointless" feeling that Rick and Morty often espouses. What they seem to have missed is that it's occasionally interesting when you watch TV show characters grapple with it but a supremely unsatisfying and frustrating feeling to be left with after you've sunk dozens of hours into a game. What really amazes me is how many characters are flagged as quest vital, even in ng+. Like ok maybe gamers today won’t understand the “you hosed up the threads of fate you better reload” pop up a la Morrowind but goddamn in ng+ just let me murder the galaxy and get the pieces of the star gate via murder if I want. gently caress up this universe, who cares, just move into a new one. They can’t even do “nothing matters” right. Edit: hell if you’re REALLY clever that hard reset button lets you have actual fail states with consequences for quests. gently caress up the UC faction quest? Congrats terormorphs overrun all settled places have fun killing thousands of those assholes while you get all the star scrap metal so you can gently caress off to a galaxy you didn’t burn down.
|
|
#
?
Jan 2, 2024 05:18
|
|
|
Cyrano4747 posted:What really amazes me is how many characters are flagged as quest vital, even in ng+. Like ok maybe gamers today won’t understand the “you hosed up the threads of fate you better reload” pop up a la Morrowind but goddamn in ng+ just let me murder the galaxy and get the pieces of the star gate via murder if I want. gently caress up this universe, who cares, just move into a new one. The most "escape hatch"-thing is a child respawning or running away, and I'm sure there is some Smoke and Mirrors involved here and there, but that's fine. Wipfmetz fucked around with this message at 07:38 on Jan 2, 2024 |
|
#
?
Jan 2, 2024 07:33
|
|
|
DancingShade posted:All that legacy Bethesda "magic" from previous decades ago was clearly just talented people who are no longer with the company in modern day. Maybe they left a long, long time ago. Here is an artist who left Bethesda after 14 years. Lead Artist on the Fallout 4 DLC, world art for Skyrim, and left part way through working on Neon. I wonder how many other stories like this will be coming out. The video is mostly about his solo project but he does talk about why he left Bethesda. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nXu7b9l-LWg
|
|
#
?
Jan 2, 2024 14:11
|
|
|
Cyrano4747 posted:50 Shades of Firefly. You've absolutely nailed how I feel about it, also just wanted to tell you that phrase made me laugh so hard I started coughing!
|
|
#
?
Jan 2, 2024 14:39
|
|
|
PeePot posted:Here is an artist who left Bethesda after 14 years. Lead Artist on the Fallout 4 DLC, world art for Skyrim, and left part way through working on Neon. I wonder how many other stories like this will be coming out. The video is mostly about his solo project but he does talk about why he left Bethesda. I don't really see a lot of controversy here? He basically says he likes the way his new game can be developed in Unreal because there are a lot of advantages and maybe not every game needs to have every imaginable system. Like does every game need crafting? One of the things he points out is actually advocating for something that's a common criticism of Starfield: that there isn't enough "stuff". The main implication seems to be that Bethesda needs to modernize their development technology?
|
|
#
?
Jan 2, 2024 16:10
|
|
|
tadashi posted:
I'd be really curious to see what their financials look like. They've got an enormous amount of technical debt stored up in an engine that they've been dragging forward for over 20 years now, and at this point the obstinacy in sticking with it has to be for some reason beyond not wanting to re-work their development pipeline. I'm sure it does a lot of interesting things and there isn't an easy one-engin drop in solution, but man it's not like they're the only game in the world doing their rough basic idea at this point. I mean, for all the debate over whether it's a good game or not, Outer Worlds used UE4 and can be broadly described as a Bethesda-style game. I wonder if it's a modding thing? I could see a UE game not having the modding potential as Gamebryo, and if they're leaning hard into trying to keep that community on-side that could explain a lot of it. In fairness to that point of view, if they'd made a basically competent game that people liked the broad strokes of a lot of the traditional Bethesda problems that are rooted in the engine would have been hand-waved away again as just how it is with them.
|
|
#
?
Jan 2, 2024 16:19
|
|
|
Cyrano4747 posted:I'd be really curious to see what their financials look like. They've got an enormous amount of technical debt stored up in an engine that they've been dragging forward for over 20 years now, and at this point the obstinacy in sticking with it has to be for some reason beyond not wanting to re-work their development pipeline. I'm sure it does a lot of interesting things and there isn't an easy one-engin drop in solution, but man it's not like they're the only game in the world doing their rough basic idea at this point. I mean, for all the debate over whether it's a good game or not, Outer Worlds used UE4 and can be broadly described as a Bethesda-style game. The technical debt thing you brought up is probably the most realistic speculation I've seen as to what's holding back Bethesda. They probably just want to keep the machine rolling and what they've used has been good enough so far, so they're just going to keep using it. I can't stress how much non-technical executives/investors/board members don't loving understand a thing about how software is made or how it works. It's worse than people think. You'd think a CTO would want to modernize and get into cutting edge tech, but it's usually the opposite. They just want to continue to expand on the empire they've built. New is scary. My guess is they're not going to switch any time soon.
|
|
#
?
Jan 2, 2024 16:26
|
|
|
They can change engines all you want them to, it's not going to change any of the things that are actually wrong with the game and that have become the chains dragging them down more and more each release Writing, quest flow, branching narratives, consequences for actions, world dynamism, creativity, not a single one of these is a barrier being imposed by the engine. After 20 years you'd think people would have realized it wasn't USING THE SAME ENGINE that made each game since Morrowind less and less, especially with Mods doing all of what we want with these games AND MORE using that same engine. Magmarashi fucked around with this message at 16:50 on Jan 2, 2024 |
|
#
?
Jan 2, 2024 16:45
|
|
|
Cyrano4747 posted:I'd be really curious to see what their financials look like. They've got an enormous amount of technical debt stored up in an engine that they've been dragging forward for over 20 years now, and at this point the obstinacy in sticking with it has to be for some reason beyond not wanting to re-work their development pipeline. I'm sure it does a lot of interesting things and there isn't an easy one-engin drop in solution, but man it's not like they're the only game in the world doing their rough basic idea at this point. I mean, for all the debate over whether it's a good game or not, Outer Worlds used UE4 and can be broadly described as a Bethesda-style game. The technical debt in the engine isn't the thing, it's the technical debt in the artists and tooling. I've been hired a few times to do maths work on game engines, like path finding/rendering tech and stuff where you suddenly need a mathematican to look at stuff. That's a totally separate thing to your tooling being poo poo, and if that's the case you've spent X years training up all your artists to use crappo tools so they can't express themselves properly. I suspect they've never paid anyone to like link Maya etc and the polygon soup the engine runs off because it was too scary or too expensive.
|
|
#
?
Jan 2, 2024 16:45
|
|
|
Engines basically *are* tooling though.
|
|
#
?
Jan 2, 2024 16:59
|
|
|
OddObserver posted:Engines basically *are* tooling though. Depends how your company is set up Edit: Sorry that was a bit abrubt - I did a couple of years work for some random company where we had to we had to rewrite their entire toolset because it hadn't been updated since the 80s. Like it had Nurbs solutions that'd you've have seen in PBS when you were a kid, the artists couldn't do poo poo with it anymore. And it was entirely obvious that the entire loving company had never invested in the artists and their training. Think it's the same thing, but I'm not an expert, just seen it a few times. Hexyflexy fucked around with this message at 17:12 on Jan 2, 2024 |
|
#
?
Jan 2, 2024 17:04
|
|
|
Technical and performance issues weren't the only thing wrong with CP2077 at launch, it certainly had problems with the skills and the lack of gta style police, but the big, huge, absolutely mammoth issue was that the game was sold on consoles it flat out didn't work on. I played it on PC, so I have to remind myself that a lot of people bought the game on PS4 and got something that can't be considered a finished and functional video game. That crisis was solved by quietly dropping support for the old consoles, and that's a very specific case of there being a massive problem with the game that was completely solved (as long as you owned a PS5 by the time 2.0 came out!) It'd be like if, a year after release, Bethesda introduced No Man's Sky style flying and space travel because it was the base PS5 holding them back. Which, to be clear, isn't going to happen, there's not that level of potential improvement here.
|
|
#
?
Jan 2, 2024 17:05
|
|
|
Starfield still makes me sad and angry because if you gave me a $billion or a Professional Games Studio - I would set out to make this game. Maybe I would turn into Todd Howard or Chris Roberts and end up as a failure/scammer, but I like the idea of a big fun space game. I like piloting and landing and fighting in Elite Dangerous, I like the style of No Man’s Sky, I like the Mass Effect Companions and combat, I like Factorio/DSP supply line poo poo, I like the time loop in Outer Wilds, I like the branching storylines and power fantasy of Escape Velocity Nova. I’m a NASA fan boy, I liked the retro aesthetic and the chunky rocket thrusters and the poofy space suits. All these elements that they tried to jam into Starfield are excellent in so many good games, and probably could work together. Some quality of life improvements from those games that could have saved Starfield: Factorio - Logistics system is actually good and can also be configured to declutter your lovely inventory so you don’t have to play Coffee Cup Weight Management Simulator. Speaking of Inventory Management you can happily carry around 500 trains in your backpack because meticulously thinking about the weight of all your knick knacks and rifles is tedious and not fun. Outer Wilds - loops are short and sweet and you feel smarter and better every time you come back. Piloting your ship and landing on weird little features is fun. Mass Effect - Starfield feels worse than ME2 in terms of writing, companions, and combat so maybe just go play the series and report back. ME:A had a similar lack of direction and coherence as Starfield but mechanically was more fun. Decorating your ship in this game also sticks around and isn’t thrown into the trash every 20 minutes which is an insanely frustrating game design decision. Elite: Moving power around makes sense, fighting in asteroid belts is fun, fighting at ground level/atmosphere is fun, trading is possible, ship inventory management isn’t a nightmare. Ship part upgrades are explicit and feel meaningful. Ship weapons provide meaningful choices and feel good to use. No Man’s Sky - I can’t believe the only aspects of this game they successfully copied is the soulless proc gen and the suffocating feeling of your backpack clogging with 1000 resources that all combine to make various flavors of Unobtanium but then you run out of room and somehow you’re missing space dirt type #3 so the entire crafting enterprise breaks. NMS is better at this and I hated this part of NMS so that says something. Some other ideas - FTL - Assigning crew to stations is meaningful and fun. Repairing space combat damage during fights is cool. Repelling boarders is fun. None of this works in Starfield. Also fuel management - the feeling of slowly running out and looking for a trader/refueling station, or the panic of turning on your emergency beacon. Elite makes fuel a fun mechanic too, although it got a bit repetitive scooping and I think you could softlock your game by running out in certain systems. BG3/Witcher - watch their cutscenes and quest design and just copy that. If I get one more Oblivion tight zoom into someone’s nostrils so they can robotically tell me to retrieve alien asses from Fuckshit Cave #27 I will kill myself. Maybe there’s an argument to NOT jam all these systems together. But you would think that if you aimed at a dozen systems you would nail at least one, and it’s crazy that Starfield missed the mark on every single one.
|
|
#
?
Jan 2, 2024 17:12
|
|
|
gamedev chatspace uncle posted:Starfield still makes me sad and angry TL;DR for this post: Yup.  In every game studio there's a tale as old as time: Designers, and the Programmers Who Hate Them. Bethesda uses an internal scripting language (also available publicly to modders) called Papyrus, and everything about it--and how it's used in their games--screams "this is a studio where programmers never, ever want to hear from those annoying designer jerks". Several systems that should have been properly made in the engine are instead hacked together by designers using Papyrus. I'm guessing that the seemingly overcombative nature of this relationship, rather than "the engine", is what holds their games back from a technical perspective. Cyrano4747 posted:I'm sure the engine does a lot of interesting things and there isn't an easy one-engin drop in solution, but man it's not like they're the only game in the world doing their rough basic idea at this point. Most baffling of all is that Starfield doesn't play to any of the creation engine's various strengths; the game could have been made in Unreal without any overall loss of yardage for the studio. quote:I wonder if it's a modding thing? I could see a UE game not having the modding potential Unreal is famously difficult to mod. Tools need to be developed for every game, and each project would need to be designed from the ground up to accommodate the mod pipeline. Hexyflexy posted:I suspect they've never paid anyone to like link Maya etc This is one area where modding likely hinders the studio pipeline. They can't publicly release their tools with links to Maya, etc. included, so the pipeline can't have any hard assumptions about this sort of thing (without drastically altering the mod tools before release) tadashi posted:I don't really see a lot of controversy here? One of the things he points out is actually advocating for something that's a common criticism of Starfield: that there isn't enough "stuff". I've never met the guy, but if I had to guess, his issue is probably that BGS chose the wrong "stuff" to go hard on, while ignoring the elements that make their past games all-time greats. Magmarashi posted:Writing, quest flow, branching narratives, consequences for actions, world dynamism, creativity, not a single one of these is a barrier being imposed by the engine. You're right, the creation engine is purpose-built to do exactly all of these things, and BGS simply didn't implement any of them in an interesting/meaningful way. Like, the tools are publicly available and I'll tell you right now that the engine is wonderful for exactly every feature you listed; it was built from the ground up--and tweaked over the years--to make it very easy for designers to do all of those things quickly and inexpensively. space uncle posted:Some quality of life improvements from those games that could have saved Starfield: There is no saving the game, there was never any chance of saving it. Any of the changes you listed would mean the game they were making was fundamentally no longer the game the public played. I understand that people want to believe some new game mode or feature will tie everything together, but Starfield is rotten from toes to nose, and there's no universe where BGS even understands why; if they did, they'd have shipped a drastically different game in the first place. The smartest move would have been to give the project a year or so in pre-production, realize the studio wasn't in a position to create a worthwhile space adventure game, and pivot to something more in their wheelhouse. The fact that they charged ahead with Starfield in spite of so many glaring issues will be something I wonder about for a very long time.
|
|
#
?
Jan 2, 2024 17:43
|
|
|
Reckon the designers would be the ones in charge of making the branching quests and events and overlapping possibilities, which must also be a large source of the bugginess and difficulty of making their previous games. In interviews they seemed to openly loathe those aspects of the games and had been actively trying to cut them down to a linear path with optional poo poo on the side they don't need to worry about entangling into main things.
|
|
#
?
Jan 2, 2024 17:47
|
|
|
space uncle posted:... I solved this and a bunch of other problems by putting my carry weight to 10,000. My ships storage was filled with an ever increasing amount of coffee cups and notepads. I never bothered trying to decorate my ship after putting a mannequin in an outpost and watching it disappear. Searching online led to tons of people losing their Mantis armour, etc to mannequins on outposts. Like Cyrano I spent a LOT of time building things like a power armour museum in FO4, in Skyrim I printed a checklist of every book and had them in a library. The only decorating I did in Starfield in 200 hours was a poster and a gun on a wall in my Neon Sleepcrate.
|
|
#
?
Jan 2, 2024 17:49
|
|
|
Chillmatic posted:There is no saving the game, there was never any chance of saving it. Any of the changes you listed would mean the game they were making was fundamentally no longer the game the public played. I understand that people want to believe some new game mode or feature will tie everything together, but Starfield is rotten from toes to nose, and there's no universe where BGS even understands why; if they did, they'd have shipped a drastically different game in the first place. Yeah you’re right, I guess I meant to say those design decisions and goals should have been baked in from the start. There’s no way a DLC implements any of those unless Bethesda simply buys the DSP and Factorio studios entirely and crunches them for a year to turn the dogshit colony stuff into a pure logistics sim. The rest of the game would still suck but that would be a very funny heel turn. I did the same thing Cyrano did and collected a bunch of poo poo in Morrowind and Oblivion. Less so in Skyrim although I did obsessively buy real estate. Ironically placing items in Morrowind pre-physics engine is easier than Starfields absolute jank. I loved collecting all the rare weapons and armor. In Starfield I built three lovely mining bases on featureless moons to try and collect the raw material necessary for a “real base”. I scouted out a picturesque location next to a tropical beach and a psychedelic grove. Starfield does not let you build close to the grove. Starfield lacks even the basic building poo poo that Fallout 4 had, so I ended up spending more time building the stupid Red Rocket Gas Station rooftop bar than I ever did building stuff in Starfield. The landing pads and logistics never worked consistently for me so I gave up. I got really excited about the first LIST mission when I pictured myself building a sprawling colony on a new world, recruiting eager inhabitants and scouting for new resources for them. None of that poo poo happened at all. Same with the Genesis ship - can’t wait to shepherd this fledgling colony/time capsule, oh wait, quest is over and was pointless. Also they have the same laser gun, computer, and Egg iPod three centuries ago that you have now so that’s pretty hosed up.
|
|
#
?
Jan 2, 2024 18:09
|
|
|
Khanstant posted:Reckon the designers would be the ones in charge of making the branching quests and events and overlapping possibilities, which must also be a large source of the bugginess and difficulty of making their previous games. In interviews they seemed to openly loathe those aspects of the games and had been actively trying to cut them down to a linear path with optional poo poo on the side they don't need to worry about entangling into main things. I wonder if they've also read too many of their own forums a la Bioware or focus grouped themselves into nothingness. The insistence on the player being able to do everything in one run murders the ability to have any consequences that matter at all, but that's the kind of bland accessibility that I'm thinking comes from people griping on forums about how they can't do Quest X that they read about elsewhere. poo poo, imagine if Freestar, UMC, and Corpo Who's Name I Can't Remember were mutually exclusive approaches. You can dabble with them all a little bit but at roughly the mid-point you need to pick one and go with it. Maybe it even has companion consequences. Introductory Lady who's name I also can't remember would be the obvious for the UMC, Straud could be the Corpo rep, and Space Cowboy Dad would obviously be the Freestar route. If you REALLY wanted to get in the weeds, maybe Freestar and UMC are so antithetical to each other that the companion repping them leaves, but the Corpos are broadly acceptable to everyone but then you get locked into scummy feeling corpo quests. But no, instead we get events that are so siloed that people in that faction don't react even after you've become Faction Jesus. I was doing Start Lady's companion quests, which involved us going to some admiral's office to bother him about a ship that got lost a bazillion years ago. Only I'd already done both the UMC faction line entirely AND the undercover pirate poo poo. So I'm not only the guy who was recently honored with a Citizens Only penthouse for saving the galaxy, I'm also the swashbuckling undercover cop who single handedly solved pirates. And this Admiral starts his conversation with me by asking who the gently caress I am and there was no option to say "yo I'm the hero who saved your asses, help my friend out"
|
|
#
?
Jan 2, 2024 18:14
|
|
|
PeePot posted:I solved this and a bunch of other problems by putting my carry weight to 10,000. My ships storage was filled with an ever increasing amount of coffee cups and notepads. The skill trees are loving stupid. If you want to get serious about modding stuff at your outpost, it's not enough to build just an outpost. To get into serious crafting in Starfiled, you need a lot of outposts and you have to understand how to get materials back to your main outpost without accidentally routing materials in an infinite loop. And you can't just build lots of outposts that supply your main outpost by default. You need to level your outpost management skills which is a 3rd tier unlock in your social skills. That's a different skill tree from crafting. And then... what the gently caress do you do with the poo poo you build? It's not like you can craft ship components or any suits or weapons from scratch (I think?). You can give your companions better weapons, but not better suits/armor. Even if you could, it wouldn't be worth it because they take off their space suits when they're inside. Funnily enough, crafting being held back because you couldn't excel at crafting and be competent at fighting at the same time was a problem that Star Wars: Galaxies had... over 18 years ago. My main frustration with the game is that it feels like the philosophy behind its design was similar to how they built coin-op arcade games in order to force you to pay more quarters to play longer instead of maximizing the experience of playing...
|
|
#
?
Jan 2, 2024 18:17
|
|
|
Cyrano4747 posted:. Similarly, there’s a ton of [Deputy] dialog options in the Freestar quest that just vanish even though there’s tons of places elsewhere where badge-flashing would make perfect sense.
|
|
#
?
Jan 2, 2024 18:27
|
|
|
space uncle posted:Starfield does not let you build close to the grove. Starfield lacks even the basic building poo poo that Fallout 4 had, so I ended up spending more time building the stupid Red Rocket Gas Station rooftop bar than I ever did building stuff in Starfield. The landing pads and logistics never worked consistently for me so I gave up. It amazes me how much of a step back base building is in this, the game hypothetically all about building bases on alien worlds. In vanilla as gently caress FO4 you can salvage away all the debris at your chosen base, build your own foundations, and make a custom building with your own floor plan. Are there prefabs if you don't want to gently caress around? Sure, plenty. But you can also build the power armor garage of your dreams one wall at a time. These are basic tools, minecraft it ain't, and everything tends to converge on looking like a bunker, but it has a very high degree of customization. In Starfield it's 100% prefabs with pre-determined door nodes and you just snap crap together. That has a certain utility if you're making a mining station on an airless moon, but it's really unsatisfying when you're trying to make something cool on a planet with an actual breathable atmosphere. Just a whole system that provided incredibly re-playability for people who are into it, and a ton of exposure for the game via things like youtube videos of people's insane palaces they built. Stuff like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8VrM0CCDrI
|
|
#
?
Jan 2, 2024 18:27
|
|
|
Cyrano4747 posted:
|
|
#
?
Jan 2, 2024 18:37
|
|
|
PeePot posted:I solved this and a bunch of other problems by putting my carry weight to 10,000. My ships storage was filled with an ever increasing amount of coffee cups and notepads. Yeah one of my first experiences with outpost building in an area with trees was that it was a coin flip whether or not my outpost even properly existed when I came back to it-- sometimes trees and rocks would be clipping through and into hab modules, sometimes the modules themselves vanished in part or in whole. And then I saw "literally no foundations" and most of my outposts just ended up using a big circular hab module with no airlock as a "foundation" to throw down some mission terminals without having to go in and out of an airlock every time, and only because it wouldn't let me build those on the edge of a space ship landing pad
|
|
#
?
Jan 2, 2024 19:03
|
|
|
Chillmatic posted:In every game studio there's a tale as old as time: Designers, and the Programmers Who Hate Them. I think this is a misread on the situation - the designers and programmers don't hate each other, they're just too busy dealing with their own poo poo to work together. The Creation Engine is a Ship of Theseus with parts continually ripped out and upgraded with every game, and that's load-bearing stuff where if you accidentally break the lighting engine or something that blocks the designers from working on their stuff until it's fixed. The two teams can't exactly help each other with that beyond some cursory test runs. Which leads us to Papyrus. Designers are implementing features via script instead of making the engine team do it - this is actually fine. Not everything needs to be implemented at the engine level. If it's a one-off mechanic for a quest, or a low-priority system that's not time-sensitive, we can leave it as a script. We get fast turnaround on implementation and testing without accidentally breaking the entire game. Papyrus was intentionally developed so that the designers had a more powerful scripting language to do these things without the engine programmers intervening, which leads to the real problem: the designers are not trained as programmers. Papyrus is a essentially a stripped down version of a full programming language, so now your designers have to moonlight as programmers which is a wildly different skill set from art and level design. It's no wonder that so many quests have bugs or performance issues when they're being written by people without a formal background in coding, doing bare minimum work to get results so they can return to their normal job. You can quibble over the feature set of Papyrus, but replacing the old scripting engine with it was absolutely the right call. Stuff like Sim Settlements would have never been possible without it, even if Sim Settlements is stretching the limits of Papyrus to the breaking point. Near as I can see though, Bethesda's development process has slowly introduced more and more burden onto the level/quest designers as a consequence with predictable results. tadashi posted:You can give your companions better weapons, but not better suits/armor. You can give your companions new clothes/armor, you just have to hit an extra button to force them to manually equip it. Same goes with weapons actually, you can force equip a weapon even if they're carrying stuff the AI considers 'better' and would normally use instead. As far as I'm aware they keep the spacesuit equipped even when indoors as well, it's just cosmetically disabled the same way the player's suit is hidden while in cities.
|
|
#
?
Jan 2, 2024 19:10
|
|
|
Cyrano4747 posted:I wonder if they've also read too many of their own forums a la Bioware or focus grouped themselves into nothingness. The insistence on the player being able to do everything in one run murders the ability to have any consequences that matter at all, but that's the kind of bland accessibility that I'm thinking comes from people griping on forums about how they can't do Quest X that they read about elsewhere. Naw, in this case I absolutely would not blame.gpcus testing or listening to any group of players too much. They are on their own island of evaluation and have jarringly different priorities and philosophies to game design than the people playing and talking about them. The complexities players want are development mistakes the leadership does not want to recreate, they laugh at the concept in Morrowind where you could kill someone important .. and the game let's then die and carries on. They expressly want to avoid that sort of freedom as they see it as a headache on their end and an obstacle to the linear story and game they want to make. Everything being so shallow and invariable that you can easily do it all on one character in one go is a deliberate choice to avoid making things complicated for themselves by having multiple outcomes to events, let alone the complex webs of events people fantasize and hope each new iteration will advance on. They just do not want to make the evolution of the games players want. For them that progress would be a regression for what they've tried to build for themselves. The nightmare of making complicated quests smoothed over with a system so simple it can make its own quests without anyone having to finagle individuals moments and steps or even think of a point to the quest at all. They whittled complicated character creation down to strings of tightly controlled progressions without any fear a player might be unable to do something because of their character being special or unique in any way. They made it so they no longer need to painstakingly create dungeons and points of interest, just shake the Lego bag and see what pours out. They want to make these games easier for themselves to make without any of the historical headaches that create a ton of work and writing and handcrafting. Their ideal game is one in which the developers needn't wrong their hands over any event, trusting procedural systems and generous players to make something of their worlds.
|
|
#
?
Jan 2, 2024 19:13
|
|
|
isndl posted:I think this is a misread on the situation - the designers and programmers don't hate each other, they're just too busy dealing with their own poo poo to work together. That definitely might be the case. My thinking is that Papyrus itself is insanely overkill. It's the most feature-rich scripting system I've honestly ever seen in a game/engine (outside of Blueprints, of course). As a designer I'd love using it, but I would just imagine that engineering never wants to hear from me, considering they gave me a scripting language that lets me go hog wild and blow my own legs off, lol. quote:Not everything needs to be implemented at the engine level. If it's a one-off mechanic for a quest, or a low-priority system that's not time-sensitive, we can leave it as a script. We get fast turnaround on implementation and testing without accidentally breaking the entire game. Papyrus was intentionally developed so that the designers had a more powerful scripting language to do these things without the engine programmers intervening Agree with all of this! As a designer I honestly prefer to be able to at least prototype my own stuff as much as possible before having to take it to engineering (if ever). I didn't mean to make it sound like I thought Papyrus is bad, on the contrary I think it's amazing, but like you said I'm pretty much the stereotypical designer who knows just enough about programming to get into deep poo poo sometimes. Engineers are mean!
|
|
#
?
Jan 2, 2024 19:21
|
|
|
tadashi posted:I don't really see a lot of controversy here? I think the other thing that stood out was Skyrim was made by a company of 110 people of whom the majority had 10+ years of tenure. Starfield was made by a company of 500 people with a significant percentage being new to the industry. space uncle posted:FTL - Assigning crew to stations is meaningful and fun. Repairing space combat damage during fights is cool. Repelling boarders is fun. None of this works in Starfield. Also fuel management - the feeling of slowly running out and looking for a trader/refueling station, or the panic of turning on your emergency beacon. Elite makes fuel a fun mechanic too, although it got a bit repetitive scooping and I think you could softlock your game by running out in certain systems. All I actually wanted from this game was a first-person FTL. ephori fucked around with this message at 19:33 on Jan 2, 2024 |
|
#
?
Jan 2, 2024 19:30
|
|
|
congrats starfieldies
|
|
#
?
Jan 2, 2024 19:40
|
|
|
Megazver posted:congrats starfieldies Innovation!
|
|
#
?
Jan 2, 2024 19:43
|
|
|
Megazver posted:congrats starfieldies lol
|
|
#
?
Jan 2, 2024 19:44
|
|
|
Truly we deserve the games we get.
|
|
#
?
Jan 2, 2024 19:57
|
|
|
It's a popularity contest on a platform that incentivizes people clicking one of each thing so they get a digital sticker they'll never use. I'd trust it about as much as a twitter poll.
|
|
#
?
Jan 2, 2024 19:59
|
|
|
Personally, when I saw Starfield was one of the nominees for the Most Innovative, I was tempted to vote for it just for lulz. It seems I wasn't the only one.
|
|
#
?
Jan 2, 2024 20:00
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 4, 2024 14:17 |
|
|
Megazver posted:Personally, when I saw Starfield was one of the nominees for the Most Innovative, I was tempted to vote for it just for lulz. Starfield is the Brexit of game awards?
|
|
#
?
Jan 2, 2024 20:04
|
|