1y ago

Starfield design director calls out unfair game criticism: 'Don't fool yourself into thinking you know why it is the way it is'

www.pcgamer.com Starfield design director calls out unfair game criticism: 'Don't fool yourself into thinking you know why it is the way it is'

Emil Pagliarulo says an awful lot of outspoken critics are "disconnected" from the realities of game development.

110 comments

Gamers: this game is not fun
Game Design Director: Funny how disconnected some players are from the realities of game development, and yet they speak with complete authority
- Gamers: this game isn't fun.
  Game Director: we know, shithead, but not for the way you think it is.

Ok then smartass, you tell us why it's the way it is!
- they don't think it be how it is but it do
  
  It really do.
- I'd love to hear from them why the game sucks

Sorry Emilio, but when you had a reported $200 million dollars, 500 developers, and 7 years to make a game, you don't get to play the "but its really hard" card when people complain that your game is soulless corporate crap.
You're a professional, act like it.
- Not only a professional, but a professional working at "the best of the best", AAA studio
- Honestly I'd have tried the game by now if every time I thought about it the devs didn't go on some insane ramble. They should really just shut up and let people form their own opinions. A lot of people will inevitably end up liking it, even if it's garbage.

More gaslighting by bethesda
- No fuck you it's good :(
  -Bethesda
  
  I know people really like Todd for some reason, but i find it rather sad that they spend all this time and money and manpower to build his "dream game" since he was a child and that's the end result. Todd foe the live of god, maybe you should dream bigger

"The game isn't boring for the reasons that you think, it is boring for these completely secret reasons."
Ok.

These guys are getting harder and harder to take seriously. As disappointing as the game itself is, what the fuck is this? Defensively and passive-aggressively trying to argue with reviewers? Long ramblings on how unfair it is that one of the world's most significant game studios, freshly taken over by enormous capital... gets a little criticism for the flaws it its products? Do you need to be an expert Twinkie mass manufacturing engineer, really, if a new product is, let's say, a tenth of the size and tastes of sawdust?
If they're gonna insinuate it's not the obvious reasons, maybe they should've served up some less obvious reasons - I'm sure they would've been convincing.
- "People have unrealistic expectations for AAA games! It's impossible to make them as good as people expect them to be!"
  I remember lots of big studios saying that shit after Baldur's Gate 3 officially released. The work of a comparatively small studio with a Skyrim budget (100 million USD) did what many bigger budgets failed to do. How was that possible? Clearly, it's the fault of gamers for expecting too much!
  Side note: Witcher 3's budget was around 34 million USD, with less than 13m for development proper, which is another good example of a game that even at release was already looking and playing great.
  
  And those examples are not hard to come up with either. For example:
  any Nintendo game
  games with a passionate designer - "Nier: Automata* and Death Stranding come to mind
  refined, broad market appeal sequels to popular niche games - as Elden Ring is to Dark Souls
  Starfield was a mediocre rehash of their Elder Scrolls formula, but without the interesting variation that Elder Scrolls games have. And performance sucks, so you're paying a penalty for an average gameplay experience.
- Defensively and passive-aggressively trying to argue with reviewers?
  Big "Baldur's Gate 3 is an anomaly" energy.
  
  Yup, it is an anomaly in that it feels like the quality I used to expect 20 years ago when devs couldn't just patch flaws after launch and had to actually QA their games before going gold. They rely so much on after launch patches that games often aren't finished until a year after release.
- harder and harder to take seriously
  How many times does Bethesda have to shit in your mouth to realize they themselves are shit? Fallout 4 was a downgrade from NV, then fallout 76, rereleasing the same game over and over again, and now starfield.
  We should be way passed “hard to take them seriously”
  
  I bailed after Skyrim. I loved the immersiveness and scale of their previous games, but Skyrim didn't have that. It was a relatively small world, the storyline was barely even there, and the side content was a lot more limited vs other games. It looked great and had your typical gameplay improvements, but it was just a massive downgrade in terms of overall experience.
  I wanted Morrowind in space, and I got stripped-down Skyrim in space, which was already a stripped down experience. Either make a great dup (like Oblivion) or make something completely new and interesting. They went with mediocre dup in a different setting.
- Have you seen the replies they’re posting to Steam reviews? Fucking hilarious(ly sad) LOL
  
  Sad is the word. I think "um ackchyually the boredom is on purpose" was my favorite in the bunch.
- Like with pretty much all things for the last decade we hit stagnation and consistent money making with low effort.
  So clearly now everyone else is wrong or why are they making so much money? If they throw out garbage that people pay for and then complain about them why should they take the criticism seriously... I'm fact it's just bad people trying to ruin them because they are perfect and right.
  Everyone is right all the time and everything is gold no matter how lazy. No one wants the discussion they want to be told they are right and then to move on to the next thing without stopping or asking questions.
  If we can't impact their bottom lines then nothing will ever change until it collapses.

Kind of sick of devs being such cunts and denying the criticism so publically.
Starfield might not be objectively shit, but there is heaps of fair criticism. I fucking hated it for what it’s worth. Probably worst game I’ve played in 3-5 years.
- It might not be shit, but it's pretty shit for 2023 and 80 dollars.
- Kind of sick of devs being such cunts and denying the criticism so publically.
  Well this was going to be their next big cash cow game that they keep re-releasing for 10 years, and they find it hard to accept that it's not working out.
  
  Which means more efforts put into Elder scrolls 6. I dont see how this is not a win.
  Starfield will be dependent on the community who'll do something fun with the engine anyways.

"You all are just too stupid to understand why we made the game so boring to explore and didn't put a single vehicle or alien ride in the whole fkng galaxy. "
Sincerely, SF Developers

I don't need to know why it is the way it is. For AAA titles it doesn't matter. Finish the game or fuck off. If you can't do that your Company should sink and make room for those that can.
Indies proving left and right that it is possible with a lot less.
- The Outer Wilds has a more interesting solar system than Starfield and did it with 9 planets.
  Starfield is nothing but empty filler.
  
  Man, Outer Wilds was like that Bethesda magic concentrated to a fine point that stabbed right into my heart and I didn't even want to pull it out.
  Just absolutely the best of what passion can do with the mechanics and make something feel original and unique even if it has inspiration from stuff before it.
  One of the best games of the decade.
- Ok... But if anything the game was finished so it's a bad example for Starfield or I am missing something.
  
  Finishing also means optimising. If it runs like ass and is buggy as all hell, it isn't finished.
  
  Yeah it was finished, it just sucks. Big difference

Ok. But first you have to make better games.
You can’t argue me into believing the game is fun when it’s just… overall not that fun compared to other Bethesda efforts.
To be clear, it’s far from an outright “bad” game, but I’m still frustrated that I spent $70 on the fucking thing. If you charge that much, it’s completely reasonable for me to have high expectations for your game.
- I enjoyed it but I also know that it wasn’t “great”. But I’ll admit that I got it on game pass and I’m a BES nerd, so that probably elevates it more. Had I paid full price my attitude would probably be very different.
  
  Precisely. If I had paid less for it, I’d be less annoyed.
- And that's why I never buy on release. Studios have consistently rewarded waiting for months to a year since you'll pay a lower price for a better product.
  The only reasons I'd buy at launch are:
  I'm a game reviewer and somehow didn't get a free copy
  I'm a streamer, so that's the cost of doing business
  it's an MP game and I can't convince my friends to play something else
  I play almost exclusively SP games, I don't stream, and I am not a reviewer, so it's in my interest to wait several months for patches and sale prices.

I think both ideas can be true: that game development is a complex, creative endeavor and that as a product, consumers can be dissatisfied with a video game they paid $70 for.
Lately, I'm finding myself waiting for sales on AAA games because so many release in a buggy, incomplete state. This paid dividends with games like Jedi Survivor, that had a big number of bugs and performance issues at launch and plays decently now several months later.
- $70
  This is why I will never buy a game brand new again.
  Company's making record profits yet still trying to convince me they need to raise prices.
  Lower quality, higher price. Fuck that noise
  
  Totally agree. Except when GTA 6 releases. R* never fails to deliver!
- Jedi survivor didn’t have a big number of bugs, there were some yes and they were patched almost immediately. Anecdotally, I played it starting week one and didn’t experience a single bug, you’re just parroting what you read about and framing it as the average experience.
  If you’re going to give an example, how about an actual buggy mess of a launch like cyberpunk, especially since you are also talking about incompleteness. Jedi survivor was an excellent and completed game on launch
  
  Anecdotally, I played cyberpunk starting day 1 and didn't experience a single bug, you're just parroting what you read about and framing it as the average experience.
  Isn't that like... Literally the point of waiting for a review? Anyone can have a game work flawlessly when others are having massive issues. Some people may want to test that for themselves, but an increasing number just don't want to deal, and will... Well, use the reviews to make a more informed decision.
  
  If you’re going to give an example, how about an actual buggy mess of a launch like cyberpunk
  Anecdotally, I played it starting day one and didn’t experience a single bug, you’re just parroting what you read about and framing it as a bad experience. Cyberpunk 2077 was an excellent and completed game on launch.

Oh I'm pretty sure I know exactly "why it is the way it is"...
It feels like every other Bethesda game ever made, because choosing to continue using the Creation Engine means you can only make games that feel this way.
- Seems to me more like they repeated all their old mistakes and made new ones. The engine might've slowed development (and gave some influences/limits etc) but design direction seems to be the issue. Being on-par with their older games would be a step up, it's like they missed the point of why people liked their worlds.
  
  I mean, at this point i don't really know why people like their games either. I loved New Vegas but never bothered after. I bought skyrim at some point and i understood why people like that game. When fallout 4 launched i was sick at home and bought it because i had nothing to do. I rebooted the game like three times because i thought i accidentally bought some asset flip scam. No the game actually looks that shit and is a horrible buggy mess. Idk if people really enjoy collecting trash for hours just to not being able to sell it, or if these games have something that i don't see.

I had fun with it. I put in about a hundred hours.
It's fine. It's not complete crap and had tons of potential. It missed the mark on a few things for sure.
These constant aggressive comments from the Dev team though... That I'm not a fan of.
- My biggest complaint is how they absolutely murdered the modding scene for the sake of greed... They wanted their cut of a thing they had NO input in so they forced their way in to have input and in the process ruined modding for those that were good at it....
  Seeing how amazing Skyrim was with mods gave me so much hope for what this game could become and now I'm just sickened by what they did... So much potential gone. Now you'll have to pick between what 4 mods you want as you'll have to spend $5+ for each one... Yeah I'm not spending $100+ just to make your game fun for you while also paying you...
  
  Free mods arent gonna disappear no matter what bethesda does on their end. Just ignore the paid shit just like we always have

Series of concessions and choices
Thats just life. But you made a number of poor concessions
- Read: console support and changes to modding so they could take more money for the lesser product they provided... The need to be on shitty older consoles kills games ambition and scope. I hate it so much.

"This game sucks!" "Don't pretend like you know why it sucks!" "Wait... wut? I was just stating my opinion O.o"
- It doesn't have "it." I don't know what "it" is, but I know Morrowind, Oblivion, Skyrim, Fallout 3 and Fallout 4 had "it" and somehow Starfield does not. It is completely devoid of that "it" factor that their other games had, even if it has everything else those games had and more. It is still missing the crucial "it."
  
  Well crafted lovely little places to discover even if they have no impact on the grander story.
  That's it. Auto generated planets and straight forward hub locations makes for boring exploration but in the fallout games you could discover a school that was feeding their kids radioactive slime because they got paid too and it was just a side story. Skyrim games you could stumble upon a house that had been ravaged by accidental tunnels into a cave full of nightmares cracking open in the basement.
  Things that you stumble upon naturally while exploring and feel crafted carefully to just be a fun side off thing but if they have to put up a neon sign and make you fast travel to a location to find their little joke of a raider camp then it doesn't feel special. It's just a bunch of disjointed maps stuck together through a menu.
  
  I would go out on a limb and say it's probably the joys of traveling and discovering things along the way. The Bethesda "magic" is their approach in open world game design. In almost every corner, there's something interesting to discover (side quests, well crafted environment, and characters). When you take that away and replace it with just mundane fast traveling, loading screens, and procedurally generated empty maps, then you get Starfield. It's a Bethesda game missing that Bethesda "magic"
  
  If your talking about MW3, I wouldn't know. But the MW franchise and COD in general is an objectively shitty game. It's just cool because you can launch it in minutes and instantly have 14 year Olds in your ear telling you how much weight your mother had recently gained. And if you were angry you could take it out in the game, and then when you loose you can just say "FUCK. OH well this game is a piece of shite anyway". There is a certain allure to a game that perfectly manages those experiences and the MW franchise certainly had that...

TES6 lore Q&A gonna be like:
Don't fool yourself into thinking you know why it is the way it is

I don't care why it is the way it is. I care if it's fun or not.

If you have to be in the industry to criticize something then I guess we need to remove all online reviews since who knows RiverrFucker69's credentials.

Sounds like they're getting a bit bitter, not a good look

Follow that up with why or I'll just assume it's complicity with a heavy reliance on the ~~missing~~ modding community
- There are great smaller game devs that actually incorporate modders with their contributions into the game with mentioning and a certain amount of the future revenue. This makes mods basically commercial pull requests. Bethesda should be honest and do that too.

Like devs are disconnected from the promises they make and gaming in general.
- I think they know exactly what they are doing.
  The thing is that this industry(AAA) runs on poor impuls control and maybe on younger people wo don't know it any other way.
  Why should they(AAA) change? They make profit so there is no incentive.
  And If no one would buy that shit on release they would blame the market ("there just isn't enought people wanting singleplayer expiriences"). Like a child who blames the dog for the fartsmell.
  In my opinion it is best to just ignore them(AAA). There are enought devs(AA, A, indie) who deserve my money and, what is more important, NEED the money.
  And with those i am more inclined to listen why it couldn't be the game they promised. NMS for example with their flooded office.
  
  Fair enough, but as far as NMS goes they way over promised what was coming out on release day. They have since really done a good job of cleaning it all up and making a good game, but all they had to do was set realistic expectations rather than the PR nightmare they stirred up.

I can’t believe I was ever bothered by the fact that MS bought them out. It’s almost schadenfreude to watch this train wreck knowing it’s not ever going to be something I’ll have to deal with.

Emil sounds defensive but he's right -- as someone outside the gaming industry, I cannot fathom how so much effort can result in such a shallow, tepid stew of shit. But because of how much time, staff and money were thrown at it, it's not a big stretch to assume that incompetence was involved -- unless it was leprechauns that stole the game's vision, plot, dialogue, sense of scale and exploration and replaced it with loading screens.
- Yeah, I don't think anyone has any real complaints about the technical aspects (other than some performance tuning).

Don't fool yourself I to thinking we don't understand why your shit game is shit, Emil.
- Dude needed to be fired years ago

shades of the Jamie Kennedy documentary where any time someone says they didn't like Malibu's Most Wanted he complains that he "worked really hard on it" as though explaining why something is shitty is just as good as making it not be shitty
If your game sucks due to design and implementation decisions that were made with sound rationale behind them, your game sucks. It doesn't matter at all why it sucks, or that there's no feasible way to make it better. It sucks. You can tell me that there's no way to make it not suck, but I play plenty of games all the time that don't suck.

It's tough to make games, so I cut the Devs a lot of slack. Starfield was definitely too ambitious for the engine they built it on but it's probably the best it could possibly be... With that engine.
- I'm sure that's a factor in exploration but the engine doesn't prevent them from adding a more interesting story, lore, and decent voice acting.
- I disagree, I'm pretty sure the same-y dungeons and lack of interesting space traversal (but requirement to engage in it) was a design choice, not an engine limitation. I'm happy to cut them slack on a lot of things, but not game design.

It's shit because it is.

This seems like a deflection rather than accepting the game "is the way it is" no matter the reason.

I just finished xenosaga episode 1 and it was way better executed than starfield. Starfield felt like chores while Xenosaga managed that I tuned in completely.

Lemmy. Where capitalism ruins everything...
Except video games. Those are ruined by the damned lying greedy developers!
- … whom are the greedy capitalists that ruin everything in this example.
  
  People who care about money don't become game developers. It doesn't pay well.

I think it's a fair point. They're not arguing against all criticism, just the kind that comes from a place of ignorance for how games are made. There are certainly a lot of people who say things like, "why didn't the developers just do X Y Z", with no empathy for or understanding of how games get made. It's possible to criticise things without spreading ignorance.
- Yeah. The problem here is he's talking to those people--which is valid--while pretending he's never heard of the real issue: No matter the reason, the game is not good. Y'all already put it on sale because it's not good.
  You have the opportunity right now to tell us why, if you want, but you didn't do that.
  Ultimately it doesn't matter the reason why.
  You don't get to pout and say "you don't know how hard this is" when you're selling your game for money. You're not giving it away. You're not doing charity work here. Make a better game or stop talking. Nobody out there paid $70 because they wanted your opinion about it. They paid $70 because they wanted a good game. They didn't get it.
  And yeah, it is hard. Even with all that money and all those developers, it's hard. But nobody wants to be scolded because they experienced a bad game. That's not your customer's fault.
  
  That's fair, I 100% agree. No matter the reason for a game's poor quality, you shouldn't let it off the hook. Especially if it's a commercial product.
  Personally though, I don't think he's pretending not to have heard that point. He clarifies multiple times in the thread that he's fine with people criticising his work. Instead, he's speaking to a kind of criticism that claims -- incorrectly -- to know things about the game's development, and that offers naive solutions to complex problems. In my opinion, that kind of criticism is pretty worthless, and takes up air that could otherwise be spent discussing the game's real, concrete problems.
  But I get the frustration. Bethesda's response to criticism of Starfield has been dismissive on the whole, so the director of the game coming out against some criticism is tone-deaf from a PR perspective.
  Also, it seems like no-one who complains about discourse online takes the time to provide examples of what they're complaining about... So it's hard to know what exactly Emil is talking about here.
- It’s not a fair point when it comes from a company that relies on free labor to fix their broken games.
- with no empathy for or understanding of how games get made.
  I don't work on the industry, but I do mess around with Godot and have fiddled with modding Skyrim and Fallout. I understand part of the limitations of Bethesda's own engine, or at least those older versions of it. I understand how often you can find yourself "fighting" the engine. Sticking with it for a game with space exploration was probably a bad idea. That decision can be easily thrown as coming from high up, "use everything in house", much like how EA forces nearly every game to use DICE's Frostbite.
  But then you have stranger decisions, like "space exploration is just fast traveling to specific celestial bodies". Having fast travel is one thing, all travel being fast travel, well, it's just not fun. "Inventory interface will be like Skyrim, but slightly better" - why use some 70% of the screen to show the model of the item? Why not make a neat table with all the info exposed like the one in SkyUI mod? You could have weight, value, quantity in different columns and still have space to show the item model.
  Now, Emil could've explained why some decisions were made. He didn't. So it comes out as an empty rant.
- This thread is full of people with strong opinions who have no idea how video games are made. They don't seem aware that they are exactly proving his point.
  
  That you, Todd?
  
  Don't have to know anything about how the food's cooked to say "wow, this is bland. This cost $80?".

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