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Ursine Catastrophe posted:fixing some cabinet geometry is an easy task you can check off a list and say "I fixed a bug" to your manager and your managers manager to prove you're not just faffing around This is called bikeshedding, and even halfway decent studio leadership knows--and is empowered--to prevent this at all costs. I've seen enough of it on big and small projects that I'd go as far to say that widespread bikeshedding is probably the first and most reliable sign of project/studio collapse.
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Mar 20, 2024 18:31
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I don't remember the final fight at all, I was just following the blue dot.
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Mar 20, 2024 18:57
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Chillmatic posted:halfway decent studio leadership found your problem Jack B Nimble posted:https://www.pcgamer.com/games/rpg/s...ng-final-quest/ but yeah unless it's a solo dev project, games don't fail because of individual contributor issues; some of the subjectively-best games remembered fondly for years were also huge piles of spaghetti code mess that barely function as games with people making them who had no clue what they were doing, especially back in the day where developing something for a new console meant learning how to work with/create tooling for a new architecture from scratch it's always issues with lack of direction, unclear vision, incoherent leadership, working at cross purposes, basically just plain organizational issues
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Mar 20, 2024 19:03
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gasman posted:I don't remember the final fight at all, I was just following the blue dot. I remember it because the game crashed at the last elevator with no autosave so I had to slog back through 15 minutes of dialogue and boss fights to get back again it's also funny that this thread started getting traffic again because I've been playing In Stars And Time and was just thinking about how indie games with repetition mechanics are really good at making me feel like a monster any time I even accidentally make an NPC sad by rushing through things (because I'm the kind of person who's pretty loving susceptible to that sort of heartstring-tugging), but even I was shooting the ship captain in the head to speed up the flashback sequence by the end of Starfield
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Mar 20, 2024 19:08
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It seems pretty obvious to me if they had the ability/inclination to turn starfield into a better game they would have made a better game to begin with.
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Mar 20, 2024 19:17
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apparently vaasco finally sits in the cargo hold now instead of clipping out like R2D2.
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Mar 20, 2024 19:45
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RenegadeStyle1 posted:It seems pretty obvious to me if they had the ability/inclination to turn starfield into a better game they would have made a better game to begin with. Everybody wanna be a game developer, but don't nobody wanna lift these heavy rear end JIRATASKS.
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Mar 20, 2024 20:19
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I think I disagree - "more content that is better written" would do a lot to dilute the impact of some of the existing stuff that is unfixably dumb, and is assuming less of a can opener than would be needed to fix boring gameplay. While a lot of the setting's blandness comes from being a pretty generic pastiche of space scifi tropes, a lot more came from just plopping them down without really using them for anything but window dressing. It's not just that parts of the story and setting don't hold up to scrutiny, it's that lots of it goes unexplored entirely, or we're just told about it and never shown it. Like, Constellation (and the main quest) is boring in substantial part because the stuff they have you go do boils down to an antiquarian artifact-hunting romp with a side of time-travel plot holes, and doesn't match with the grandiose glories of exploration of space rhetoric the game tries to throw at you. The artifacts are either somewhere in a hole, in the hands of people doing modern people things, or in implausibly undiscovered temples near modern people doing modern people things. If we must hunt macguffins, they could be in the hands of a society of silicate-based crystalline life forms that don't understand gender, a gestalt consciousness that formed in the energy of the artifact's handwavium field, be a part of the horrifying truth behind the Chunks main flavor chem production facility, held by rogue robots with entirely alien priorities and morals, on the surface of a planet that's cracking up, and so on. Lemme run some of those Stellaris Astral Rifts in first person to get the loot. And it didn't have to be all about a macguffin hunt. We could have had to take readings from near a black hole, gone poking around the aftermath of a system whose star just went nova, or other cool space poo poo that would involve looking at something massive, wondrous, and/or terrifying. On the other end of the scale, they could include small things like just talking to people about Constellation and what relevance it has. Even the general apathy of "Oh, you guys still exist? Huh." could have been fodder for some compelling commentary, paired with an ingame reason to get people to care - I'm sure some NASA folks who were around for the winding down of the US space program would give a writer an interview that would be some interesting material to work with, there. Same goes for the spacers and a bunch of other underbaked parts of the setting. There's compelling stories to be told there, they just ... didn't do that. edit: I guess my point is that they could still throw content like that in with what they have. Chillmatic posted:This is called bikeshedding, and even halfway decent studio leadership knows--and is empowered--to prevent this at all costs. I've seen enough of it on big and small projects that I'd go as far to say that widespread bikeshedding is probably the first and most reliable sign of project/studio collapse. I have nothing to do with software development and am not a patch-notes-connoisseur, but to my inexpert eye a lot of those notes read like this. Multiple "fiddled with position of item in location" bullet points rather than a single "adjusted positions of various items." eviltastic fucked around with this message at 20:40 on Mar 20, 2024 |
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Mar 20, 2024 20:24
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I think they can’t get the mod tools to work so they’re just padding out these patches to make it seem like they’re super busy “fixing” things. I can’t wait for those tools to finally release. Either there’s gonna be a poo poo storm of griping modders or we’ll finally have all the big boobed anime wives and realistic buttholes on terrormorphs us fans require of a Bethesda game.
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Mar 20, 2024 20:55
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The default body is apparently better than all those CBBE/BHUNP/FG bodies people spent so long building.
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Mar 20, 2024 21:23
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eviltastic posted:Same goes for the spacers and a bunch of other underbaked parts of the setting. There's compelling stories to be told there, they just ... didn't do that. Something I learned a long time ago from trying to help people working in the arts is that you cannot teach good ideas. No amount of practice or technical knowledge can instill the ability to come up with interesting, unique, or creative ideas on someone. Starfield is bad because it is creatively bankrupt.
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Mar 20, 2024 22:05
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It's sort of original/creative in unusual ways: I don't think I've ever seen a story with so little forward drive, for example. (Similarly the character progression system is unusually bad).
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Mar 20, 2024 22:17
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Holy poo poo i can finally do the final UC mission.
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Mar 20, 2024 23:09
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Paul Zuvella posted:Something I learned a long time ago from trying to help people working in the arts is that you cannot teach good ideas. No amount of practice or technical knowledge can instill the ability to come up with interesting, unique, or creative ideas on someone. The thing is there's plenty of fun, if completely forgettable, games that are entirely derivative but still fun to play mechanically; Ubisoft has been making the exact same game with better textures for a decade+ and they still sell because people who only care about moment to moment gameplay still find it fun. Starfield's biggest failing isn't any one thing, it's that it does all of the things it does so poorly that it's less than the sum of it's parts because of how the parts actively get in the way of each other, and there's no single thread of "well I can ignore all these other things as long as this part is good or interesting" for anyone to cling to
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Mar 20, 2024 23:55
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eviltastic posted:
The problem is that even if they made a kick rear end expansion it's not going to be so grand in scope that the game as it currently exists is basically an introduction to it. It's going to be a good expansion tacked onto a direly awful base game. They can't Far Harbor their way out of this. As much poo poo as we give FO4 it's not the expansions that make that game, even if one of them is noticeably above average for a Bethesda expansion.
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Mar 21, 2024 00:26
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Chillmatic posted:This is called bikeshedding, and even halfway decent studio leadership knows--and is empowered--to prevent this at all costs. I've seen enough of it on big and small projects that I'd go as far to say that widespread bikeshedding is probably the first and most reliable sign of project/studio collapse. fixing a bug is not bikeshedding lol. this was probably just something someone noticed and took 5 minutes to fix
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Mar 21, 2024 07:31
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Ursine Catastrophe posted:The thing is there's plenty of fun, if completely forgettable, games that are entirely derivative but still fun to play mechanically; Ubisoft has been making the exact same game with better textures for a decade+ and they still sell because people who only care about moment to moment gameplay still find it fun. and sometimes Ubisoft makes an AC Odyssey and it's all good
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Mar 21, 2024 08:52
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Ursine Catastrophe posted:I wouldn't go that far, I'm sure there's plenty of people involved with this game that are fully aware of the issues with it, the problem is "how exactly do you fix that"-- fixing some cabinet geometry is an easy task you can check off a list and say "I fixed a bug" to your manager and your managers manager to prove you're not just faffing around, fundamentally overhauling the game into something good is something they didn't manage after 10 years of development or however long it's been hey, gamedev here, but this is kinda bullshit the guy who fixes the geometry is not the guy who "fixes everything", bugs and fixes are generally prioritized by severity/impact and cost he idea that they only fixed this bug to make it look like they were working is false, fixing this bug *is* working We're all very disappointed with starfield but making it out like whatever junior fixed the collision geometry should have been getting to work doing more important things like the whole game is really crummy
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Mar 21, 2024 10:24
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Ursine Catastrophe posted:found your problem Yeah after reading that article, this is basically the crux of it. The studio is too big, the project is too unwieldy, nobody really has an overall creative vision. So all of these teams are putting together siloed components that don't even remotely fit together in a cohesive way. The videogame equivalent of hoping to build a Ferrari and ending up with a Homermobile
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Mar 21, 2024 10:48
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A car for the average man, and what is Starfield if not very average.
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Mar 21, 2024 10:55
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webmeister posted:Yeah after reading that article, this is basically the crux of it. The studio is too big, the project is too unwieldy, nobody really has an overall creative vision. So all of these teams are putting together siloed components that don't even remotely fit together in a cohesive way. The ‘best’ outcome for the Stroud-Eklund quest happening when you persuade them to max the budget and try to do everything all at once certainly makes more sense.
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Mar 21, 2024 10:55
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Talkie Toaster posted:The ‘best’ outcome for the Stroud-Eklund quest happening when you persuade them to max the budget and try to do everything all at once certainly makes more sense. New thread title.
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Mar 21, 2024 11:04
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Chillmatic posted:This is called bikeshedding, and even halfway decent studio leadership knows--and is empowered--to prevent this at all costs. I've seen enough of it on big and small projects that I'd go as far to say that widespread bikeshedding is probably the first and most reliable sign of project/studio collapse. Picking low hanging fruit ain't bikeshedding. Look, I hate to break it to you, but Bethesda made a metric shitton of money and they'll make an even more obscene amount of money doing DLC for this because people love slop. They ain't collapsing. On the positive side, maybe it is a good thing they did the organizational expansion on a completely new IP - like get the bad swings out of the system first. Then again, arguably, looking at skyrim, fallout 4 and 76, self reflecting on design choices and lessons learned might not be in the cards..and people love slop.
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Mar 21, 2024 11:18
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Comte de Saint-Germain posted:We're all very disappointed with starfield but making it out like whatever junior fixed the collision geometry should have been getting to work doing more important things like the whole game is really crummy my entire point was "there is no one individual person who's going to fix this", in response to a comment about "why are they fixing random bullshit instead of the real issues", yes, well spotted
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Mar 21, 2024 11:20
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Ursine Catastrophe posted:my entire point was "there is no one individual person who's going to fix this", in response to a comment about "why are they fixing random bullshit instead of the real issues", yes, well spotted sorry I should have been responding to the guy who responded to you calling this "bikeshedding"
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Mar 21, 2024 11:22
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Bikeshedding would be more like spending a bunch of time and effort on filling up environments with extremely detailed sandwiches and desk calendars, while not designing or implementing a system to do anything with them
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Mar 21, 2024 11:38
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It's a new mini game where you try not to pick up the junk
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Mar 21, 2024 12:12
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tbf to bethesda, having clutter in their games is a fundamental part of their engine and design philosophy, (with the exception of fallout 4) it fulfills the same function in every game they make. They have the tools for it, the have the pipelines for it, this isextremely cheap. The fact that those items are functional in world (in that you can pick them up) is as close to "free" as you get in gamedev.
Comte de Saint-Germain fucked around with this message at 12:21 on Mar 21, 2024 |
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Mar 21, 2024 12:18
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Talkie Toaster posted:The ‘best’ outcome for the Stroud-Eklund quest happening when you persuade them to max the budget and try to do everything all at once certainly makes more sense. I wonder if Bethesda's director also dumped his responsibilities on a buddy from the hobby that's taking all his time.
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Mar 21, 2024 14:03
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Comte de Saint-Germain posted:tbf to bethesda, having clutter in their games is a fundamental part of their engine and design philosophy, (with the exception of fallout 4) it fulfills the same function in every game they make. They have the tools for it, the have the pipelines for it, this isextremely cheap. The fact that those items are functional in world (in that you can pick them up) is as close to "free" as you get in gamedev. Yeah but the thing is how has that clutter actually made the gameplay better at this point? While it's still there in the game for those particular "special gamers", for the general game player does it really matter if you can pick up that coffee mug and craft it into 1 ceramic unit so you have to get 8 of them to make an armor upgrade that's bound to one instance of a space suit? In starfield the points of interests aren't even like the old Fallout 3 locales where you could throw a grenade and all the microscopes and burned books would go flying. This is sort of the same issue I had with Pacific Drive. Gathering garbage to make more garbage that breaks so you can interact with some component builder instead of having anything like an engaging plot or dynamic gameplay.
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Mar 21, 2024 16:39
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Octopus Magic posted:Yeah but the thing is how has that clutter actually made the gameplay better at this point? While it's still there in the game for those particular "special gamers", for the general game player does it really matter if you can pick up that coffee mug and craft it into 1 ceramic unit so you have to get 8 of them to make an armor upgrade that's bound to one instance of a space suit? In starfield the points of interests aren't even like the old Fallout 3 locales where you could throw a grenade and all the microscopes and burned books would go flying. Picking up clutter made sense narratively in Fallout 4, where the main theme was "rebuilding out of the plenty of the before-times". Not so much in the progressive spacefuture.
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Mar 21, 2024 16:42
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I've never heard anyone complain about the clutter in Morrowind; this feels like something that only grates if you're having a bad time to begin with. Mostly pointless decor objects that you can vacuum up at low levels, loot if it's the more valuable kind (ex: silver candlestick holder), or you personally want it for your house, or ignore otherwise is all fine, it adds to the sim aspects of these games.
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Mar 21, 2024 16:47
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Jack B Nimble posted:I've never heard anyone complain about the clutter in Morrowind; this feels like something that only grates if you're having a bad time to begin with. Mostly pointless decor objects that you can vacuum up at low levels, loot if it's the more valuable kind (ex: silver candlestick holder), or you personally want it for your house, or ignore otherwise is all fine, it adds to the sim aspects of these games. Because Morrowind doesn't have a stupid crafting system requiring random items indistinguishable from clutter. Is that office tape clutter? Or will I need 14 of them to craft a gun sight? Ah poo poo, I'll pick it up and add it to the pile...
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Mar 21, 2024 16:55
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The best version of Fallout 4 is when you are playing on survival mode, mostly ignoring the story and treating it as a wander around exploring random places and having it be a survival sim light game. The looking for valuable salvage loop is a really good one. Maybe it doesn't make sense in a narrative point of view of Starfield, but neither does most of that game.
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Mar 21, 2024 17:04
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Octopus Magic posted:This is sort of the same issue I had with Pacific Drive. Gathering garbage to make more garbage that breaks so you can interact with some component builder instead of having anything like an engaging plot or dynamic gameplay. PD is great wtf
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Mar 21, 2024 17:06
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Jack B Nimble posted:I've never heard anyone complain about the clutter in Morrowind; this feels like something that only grates if you're having a bad time to begin with. Mostly pointless decor objects that you can vacuum up at low levels, loot if it's the more valuable kind (ex: silver candlestick holder), or you personally want it for your house, or ignore otherwise is all fine, it adds to the sim aspects of these games. It makes sense in TES games because you're a murder hobo and the basic gameplay loop in the early game is steal poo poo/kill people to steal their poo poo -> sell their poo poo to merchants -> buy stuff. After a certain point you are rich enough that you stop caring about hoovering up every candlestick in Whiterun, but early on it's a core part of how you afford those steel boots you've got your eyes on. Basically the same thing in FO3/FONV, with FO4 adding the crafting stuff to give it even more meaning. It feels dumb in Starfield because there is major tonal clash with being all nasapunk and exploring the galaxy and then stealing people's clipboards and office tchotckies to sell to merchants who look like they're totally above the board but in reality the general store owner is totally fine with buying your massive arm load of military grade weapons and still bloody body armor. It's just another symptom of them not actually knowing what game they were making and not asking themselves if the mechanics that worked in a vaguely medieval high fantasy setting or a post apocalyptic setting were appropriate for their futuristic space adventure.
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Mar 21, 2024 18:15
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I've never bothered stealing random poo poo in Skyrim because once you've actually gone through the effort to unlock a fence, you're well beyond the need to hock dishes and housewares. Still feels tonally different though.
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Mar 21, 2024 18:17
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No you steal stuff to put in your museum.
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Mar 21, 2024 18:19
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I like having the clutter around but you can’t say having it is non-impacting since it probably has an effect on every single team, from the engine folks trying to keep the game at an unsteady 17fps on consoles to the quest scripters trying to make sure NPCs don’t knock over liquor bottles everywhere they go.
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Mar 21, 2024 18:27
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Cyrano4747 posted:The problem is that even if they made a kick rear end expansion it's not going to be so grand in scope that the game as it currently exists is basically an introduction to it. It's going to be a good expansion tacked onto a direly awful base game. I agree, and I think what Ursine Catastrophe said is apt - the game has a bunch of parts that don't mesh well and none are good enough alone to carry the experience. But with the writing, specifically, I think the issue isn't so much that it's rotten to the core, as it is that it's vapid and so the flaws in what's there stand out glaringly. The game as it currently exists is, itself, a lousy introduction to the game world. Cyberpunk comes up as a point of contrast because it's just dripping with cues to contextualize the setting. By the time V and Jackie first go to grab a bite to eat, we've already been shown a whole lot of how society they live in functions, in ways that directly inform subsequent key scenes. Starfield will never be Cyberpunk, but they could backfill in more content and make the world more vibrant and interesting to explore. It's small things and not (just) big things that are missing. It's easy to talk about flaws, so I'll pick something that mostly* works as an example. One of the first things that happened when I was initially exploring New Atlantis, Cydonia, and Akila City was some kind of NPC encounter showing something about the experience of moving into the town. On Cydonia, it was economic migrants who came expecting work, and might be in dire straits upon not finding it. We learn that it's a place where people go out of desperation. In both New Atlantis and Akila City, I bumped into a kinda sketchy person from Neon with money wanting to own property. From that, we learn that Neon's a place where money talks and is the expected tool to grease the gears of society. New Atlantis shown to be a place where social status and property rights are a function of legally defined social classes that are explicitly enforced in ways that bribes can't gloss over. Akila City is a place where what matters is your bloodline and pedigree, and that results in unwritten social codes that money also can't fix in an old money / new money way. That provides context for other things we encounter, like nervous colonists leaving New Atlantis to start a settlement or Sam Coe's decision to gently caress off and go roam around space with his daughter in tow being the defining factor in his relationship with his dad. A society where a will from some blue blood twit who died forty years ago can resurface and upend who owns what, but somehow isn't (or maybe it is!) rampant with document fraud seems interesting and I'd like to learn more about it! The problem is that I had to sit and think for a bit to come up with that example. Cyberpunk would probably have something within any random five minutes of gameplay. Tons of Starfield is instead introduced like Eleos, where we are explicitly told and not shown who goes there and why and what their problems are. The result is half the people in the game come across as though they're sitting around waiting for a player character to show up so that they can give their speech, get their murder/fetchquest needs handled, and get on with whatever we're shown of their lives. One of the most egregious examples I saw was an encounter with a brother and sister off in the wilderness of I forget where. One of them was wounded and needed medical attention and...that was it. The whole encounter. I don't remember learning anything about who they were, why they were there, or what was supposed to happen to them afterward. I sat around staring at them for a minute because it seemed like there had to be something more to a life and death situation off in the wild...but nope. They were just there, waiting for me to show up and help, then they sat there, waiting for me to leave. That's jarringly bad but it's fixable with, like, a handful of lines of dialogue and maybe a followup quest to bring them back to a civilian outpost. More POIs that aren't just another outpost clogged with dead scientists and faceless space orcs and more NPC interactions that aren't just Telling The Player How It Is won't fix the game mechanic reasons that exploring dungeons is unrewarding or "just loot and reboot 'cause lol nothing matters" being a key plot element, but it'd help a lot with making the moment to moment gameplay compelling. * I don't really think the resulting context for Constellation itself was at all intended; we're invited to live for free in a mansion built by a megarich dude that is literally built on top of the city's destitute underclass so that we can help him track down space curios, and this was never examined at all before I bounced off. eviltastic fucked around with this message at 19:31 on Mar 21, 2024 |
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Mar 21, 2024 18:56
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