Speculation on Bethesda's new game


Video Games

101 to 150 of 166 << first < prev | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | next > last >>

I was farting around on YouTube and came across this video, and I immediately thought of this thread.


Andostre wrote:
I was farting around on YouTube and came across this video, and I immediately thought of this thread.

Ha. I think anyone expecting ELDER SCROLLS 6 to come out in 2024 is definitely leaning on the more optimistic side of things.

I know people like the idea of Bethesda now taking 3 years between games based on FALLOUT 4 (2015), FALLOUT 76 (2018) and STARFIELD (2021, probably), but they're ignoring the four-year wait between SKYRIM and FALLOUT 4, and that FALLOUT 76 was made by a near-completely different team, with the OG core Bethesda team only providing some writing and design but everything else being done by a new team focused on multiplayer games. So in reality, when STARFIELD comes out it will have been at least six years since the last full Bethesda single-player CRPG, and the game would have been in the pipeline for almost ten years (early design work on STARFIELD began shortly after SKYRIM was completed in 2011).

Bethesda do have more firepower than they used to have, with much larger teams and several new studios, but in practice all the companies that say "we have loads of teams, they can work on 2 or 3 games at once" usually find that never happens and they have to crunch all their teams on to the latest game, in the last generation and probably moreso in this one. So Rockstar, who once worked on four big games simultaneously with their myriad studios (at one point they were working on RED DEAD REDEMPTION, LA NOIRE, MAX PAYNE 3 and GRAND THEFT AUTO V all simultaneously), found they had to combine all of their studios to deliver RED DEAD REDEMPTION 2, reportedly all but halting work on GRAND THEFT AUTO VI in the process (and GTA6 is still not expected until financial year 2023-24 at the earliest, based on Take Two's marketing spending plans for the next three years). CD Projekt did the same thing, with all work on CYBERPUNK 2077 being suspended in 2013 because they needed that team to help crunch out THE WITCHER 3, and they didn't get back to it until 2016 (so a game technically in development for 8 years was actually only in real development for 5, which explains quite a lot).

Of course, we have seen Bethesda put out an ELDER SCROLLS VI teaser in 2018 (although that was pretty minimalist in terms of content), so maybe they've actually cracked it and they have a second team working on that game and really can deliver it around 2024, but my instinct it that it may be a couple more years than that.


So, I heard that Bethesda is intending for ES6 to playable for a decade, and they have set their own bar very high, so they want to take the time to get it right. Plus, I recognize that they have released ES content (2 primarily mobile games and an MMO), but honestly... it's unfathomable to me that the right people in Bethesda will look at the giant pile of money and acclaim made from Skyrim and think, "Yeah, it's fine to wait a decade-and-a-half to do that again."


Andostre wrote:
So, I heard that Bethesda is intending for ES6 to playable for a decade, and they have set their own bar very high, so they want to take the time to get it right. Plus, I recognize that they have released ES content (2 primarily mobile games and an MMO), but honestly... it's unfathomable to me that the right people in Bethesda will look at the giant pile of money and acclaim made from Skyrim and think, "Yeah, it's fine to wait a decade-and-a-half to do that again."

I think the calculation is that people are less fans of the ELDER SCROLLS individually than they are Bethesda's unique brand of open-world CRPGs, so they'll show up for that regardless of if it's ELDER SCROLLS, FALLOUT or new IP STARFIELD.

They have some justification for that: sales of OBLIVION, FALLOUT 3 and NEW VEGAS were all comparable on the same formats. FALLOUT 4 also sold comparably to SKYRIM in per-format terms, but only less in absolute terms because they released it on less formats. FALLOUT 76, seen primarily as a multiplayer game with limited singleplayer content (that is changing, but very slowly), sold far, far less than either.

THE ELDER SCROLLS ONLINE, despite being set in the ELDER SCROLLS universe and having a reasonable amount of single-player content, has also sold quite a bit less than their single-player games because the audience seems to be specifically interested in that SP-only style of gaming.

STARFIELD will be the big test of that, especially as the open-world, singleplayer CRPG space is much more crowded even than when FALLOUT 4 came out, and Bethesda may suffer if they haven't seriously updated their tech and brought on board some better writers.


And there we go.

Trailer.

Behind the scenes gubbins.

What we know:

* Set centuries in the future.
* You play a member of Constellation, the "last" human organisation interested in space exploration.
* You have your own ship which is customisable and you fly from planet to planet. The ship is called the Nova Galactic, or that might just be its class.
* Multiple planets, including various wasteland worlds with little or no settlement; a Tatooine-like frontier world with a ramshackle town; a world with a huge, technologically-advanced city; an ocean with settlements located on stilts above the water; a lush jungle world; and, obviously because Bethesda, lots of subterranean caves.
* Relatively low-tech-looking, though there's some nice flourishes. The gun the character leaves on the table has its ammo readout directly built into the surface of the weapon (no screen, the actual surface of the weapon seems to change to show ammo count and possibly some kind of charge rating).
* Apparently an "optimistic" view of the future (presumably to contrast with the less-optimistic view of FALLOUT) which will demonstrate a faith in humanity.
* Release date: 11 November 2022

Liberty's Edge RPG Superstar 2008 Top 32, 2011 Top 16

Werthead wrote:

And there we go.

Trailer.

Behind the scenes gubbins.

What we know:

* Set centuries in the future.
* You play a member of Constellation, the "last" human organisation interested in space exploration.
* You have your own ship which is customisable and you fly from planet to planet. The ship is called the Nova Galactic, or that might just be its class.
* Multiple planets, including various wasteland worlds with little or no settlement; a Tatooine-like frontier world with a ramshackle town; a world with a huge, technologically-advanced city; an ocean with settlements located on stilts above the water; a lush jungle world; and, obviously because Bethesda, lots of subterranean caves.
* Relatively low-tech-looking, though there's some nice flourishes. The gun the character leaves on the table has its ammo readout directly built into the surface of the weapon (no screen, the actual surface of the weapon seems to change to show ammo count and possibly some kind of charge rating).
* Apparently an "optimistic" view of the future (presumably to contrast with the less-optimistic view of FALLOUT) which will demonstrate a faith in humanity.
* Release date: 11 November 2022

the music was definitely reminiscent of Star Trek, reinforcing the optimistic view of the future.


Oops, forgot the obvious one.

* Not available on PlayStation 5 (and no, neither will THE ELDER SCROLLS VI, probably)


Not to be That Guy, but with how much each successive Fallout game is worse then the last one I don't have any faith that Starfield will be any good, so Xbox can have them.


Some more bits from another interview:

* First and third person gameplay, as normal.
* It's a "bit more hardcore of a roleplaying game" than they've done for a while. There's a much more in-depth background system than they've done for a long while, and Howard acknowledges that streamlining the RPG aspects over their last few games was not always the best idea and they've reversed course on that. There's CRPG systems in the game they haven't used since "long ago."
* The game is set just over 300 years in the future.
* Every button and toggle in the ship has a purpose and function (not necessarily you can hit every button in the ship, but the designers had an idea behind each one).
* The artistic direction was "NASApunk."
* The team did field research at Space X's headquarters and rocket design factories.
* The ship is actually called the Frontier.
* There's a robot on the crew called Vasco, as a nod to Vasco de Gama.
* The vibe is "Han Solo simulator." There's big story things going on and lots of little side-quests and it's up to you what you get involved with.
* There's a "more realistic" vibe than other SF games. No FTL communications. They drew a line at lasers though, acknowledging they had to have at least some lasers, and you will see them in a vacuum even though that's not really a thing.
* There's also sound in a vacuum, although it sounds like they might have an explanation for that (presumably the STAR WARS one of the computer simulating noises to provide sensory input and information).
* Player customisation and different backgrounds (but not different species, at least from the sound of it).
* There are aliens in the game, but not in a way people might be expecting (i.e. it sounds like they're not going to be playable races).
* This is still a Bethesda CRPG and anyone expecting to do an Elite Dangerous and explore billions of procedurally-generated planet is going to be disappointed. They won't reveal exactly how the worldspace works yet (but I suspect people should be thinking much more "huge Outer Worlds," with multiple maps depicting different planets, rather than the Elite approach).
* Bethesda had the rights to do a Traveler CRPG in the mid-1990s and a Star Trek CRPG a couple of years later, but they didn't happen because they were focused on the Elder Scrolls.
* The designers created concept art deliberately designed to look like movie posters.
* At the moment there are no plans for a "Fallout Shelter" kind of companion game.
* Over 450 people are working on Starfield, whilst only around 100 worked on Skyrim.
* Working from home has been challenging but they've adapted. Though many of the Maryland team are currently besieged in their homes by circadas.

In related news, the FALLOUT TV show remains in development with Jonathan Nolan and Amazon. Bethesda have rejected several pitches for an ELDER SCROLLS TV show.


Even more stuff from various analyses of the trailer:

* Inon Zur is the main composer. He has handled all the FALLOUT games under Bethesda and also seems to have taken over ELDER SCROLLS since Jeremy Soule's departure.
* What suspiciously looks like a map of High Rock and Hammerfell etched into a surface, suggesting the location for ELDER SCROLLS VI.
* Photographs of planets have the dates 2320, 2312, and 2305 stamped on them, suggesting a timescale for the game.
* A document (left unblurred on a developer's screen) mentioning "Crimson Raiders" and "Crimson Fleet", possibly the game's equivalent of pirates/bandits/raiders.
* The "United Colonies" seems to be the main faction/government in the game. Others exist, including the "Freestar Collective."
* "SysDef" - Systems Defence? - and the United Colonies Vanguard seem to be military organisations.
* The United Colonies has a joint military-civilian organisation called "MAST", the Military, Administrative and Scientific Triumvirate.
* "Ranger" appears to be a rank, although whether in Vanguard, SysDef or Constellation is unclear.
* The map table seems to show around twenty systems, but half the table is unreadable due to stuff being on it and light flare, so it might more than that. Of course, a system being on the map might not mean it's visitable. Other documents indicate settled systems including Sagan, Cheyenne, Lunara and Narion. A city or military base called New Atlantis is located on the planet Jerrison in the Alpha Centauri system.
* "Cydonia Security" is mentioned. Cydonia is a region on Mars, suggesting that Mars has been colonised.
* The "Livingstone Project", "Ferrera 4 Expedition", "New Discoveries Expedition", "The 10th Planet" and "New Age Resolution" are mentioned.
* The table shows gravity waves propagating in space, suggesting the ship may be able to travel by harnessing gravity waves in some fashion.
* There are two real books in the ship: Sailing Alone Around the World by Joshua Slocum (1900) and Omega: The Last Days of the World (1894) by Camille Flammarion about a cometary impact that will destroy all life on Earth. With Earth not appearing or being mentioned, that does suggest that Earth may have been destroyed or become uninhabitable, spurring the expansion into space.
* The ship's drive is called the GFLA, which is actually a real acronym for a theoretical drive system, the "Graviton Field Loop Array." This is a fancy name for the Alcubierre (warp) Drive. The table has "GFLA spooled" on it, suggesting the drive is wound up and ready to go, indicating FTL travel is possible (otherwise the game would be restricted to just one system).
* The Frontier is armed with two cannon systems (unclear if laser or slug-fed) and a bank of missiles.
* The ship's watches are provided by a company called Chronomark, founded in 2188. This, along with the game's own setting of ~2325, seems to firmly conclude that the game is not set in the FALLOUT universe, since in 2188 humanity was still living in radioactive ruins and is barely doing better in 2287 in FALLOUT 4 (only forty years before this game).


Werthead wrote:

And there we go.

Trailer.

Best comment from the trailer:

11/11/11 - Skyrim
11/11/22- Starfield
11/11/33- Elder Scrolls VI


I just saw on Twitter that Bethesda has pushed back Starfield and Redfall (which is ESVI) "to the first half of 2023."

So... it's hard to be disappointed, when I wasn't expecting Elders Scrolls VI in 2022 or 2023.


Andostre wrote:

I just saw on Twitter that Bethesda has pushed back Starfield and Redfall (which is ESVI) "to the first half of 2023."

So... it's hard to be disappointed, when I wasn't expecting Elders Scrolls VI in 2022 or 2023.

Redfall isn't Elder Scrolls VI, Redfall is an original game about vampires or some such.

Liberty's Edge

Honestly, all I want from them is an at least partially voiced acted recreated version of ES3 Morrowind with modern game sensibilities and the latest Unreal Engine.

That's literally all I want, and I don't even care if they have to trim/tweak/reinterpret a bunch of content either... well, as long as they don't screw up the soundtrack.

RPG Superstar 2015 Top 8

Themetricsystem wrote:

Honestly, all I want from them is an at least partially voiced acted recreated version of ES3 Morrowind with modern game sensibilities and the latest Unreal Engine.

That's literally all I want, and I don't even care if they have to trim/tweak/reinterpret a bunch of content either... well, as long as they don't screw up the soundtrack.

Bethesda won't ever be making that, but you may wish to follow the progress and development of the Skywind Project.


Phaedre wrote:
Andostre wrote:

I just saw on Twitter that Bethesda has pushed back Starfield and Redfall (which is ESVI) "to the first half of 2023."

So... it's hard to be disappointed, when I wasn't expecting Elders Scrolls VI in 2022 or 2023.

Redfall isn't Elder Scrolls VI, Redfall is an original game about vampires or some such.

Oh, good. I thought I missed something. (See next post for a fun contradiction.)


DeathQuaker wrote:
Themetricsystem wrote:

Honestly, all I want from them is an at least partially voiced acted recreated version of ES3 Morrowind with modern game sensibilities and the latest Unreal Engine.

That's literally all I want, and I don't even care if they have to trim/tweak/reinterpret a bunch of content either... well, as long as they don't screw up the soundtrack.

Bethesda won't ever be making that, but you may wish to follow the progress and development of the Skywind Project.

Skywind is still quite a ways off from being finished, right? Or am I thinking of Skyblivion? I like to just be pleasantly surprised when something is out rather than to follow too closely and get impatient and disappointed. (See previous post for a fun contradiction.)


Skyblivion was apparently 80% done last year and might be closer to 90% now. They've been steadily releasing livestreams and videos showing how close they are. It probably won't be done this year, but maybe in 12-18 months time, and I'd be surprised if it was longer than two years.

Skywind is also doing well, but I don't think it's at the same level so might be further off. They have a hell of a lot more work to do, though.

Elder Scrolls VI is probably Starfield's release+7 years (and if we get it in 5, that'll he hugely impressive), so I definitely wouldn't get too excited about that. We'll be doing well to get it this decade, and Fallout 5 won't be around until the 2030s (unless they get another studio working on it).

Silver Crusade

That sounds about right.

Liberty's Edge

I mean... I know. I do know, but I can still hope.

RPG Superstar 2015 Top 8

Andostre wrote:
DeathQuaker wrote:
Themetricsystem wrote:

Honestly, all I want from them is an at least partially voiced acted recreated version of ES3 Morrowind with modern game sensibilities and the latest Unreal Engine.

That's literally all I want, and I don't even care if they have to trim/tweak/reinterpret a bunch of content either... well, as long as they don't screw up the soundtrack.

Bethesda won't ever be making that, but you may wish to follow the progress and development of the Skywind Project.
Skywind is still quite a ways off from being finished, right? Or am I thinking of Skyblivion? I like to just be pleasantly surprised when something is out rather than to follow too closely and get impatient and disappointed. (See previous post for a fun contradiction.)

I normally take with a huge grain of salt any sort of fan-created remake/homage as such projects almost never get finished. This said, I hold some cautious optimism for these two projects because they generally offer substantive updates with some regularity. Also, while they (wisely) IMO do not publicize their production schedule, their reports suggest they have one, and have targets for release... however still far off they might be.


DeathQuaker wrote:
I normally take with a huge grain of salt any sort of fan-created remake/homage as such projects almost never get finished. This said, I hold some cautious optimism for these two projects because they generally offer substantive updates with some regularity. Also, while they (wisely) IMO do not publicize their production schedule, their reports suggest they have one, and have targets for release... however still far off they might be.

There's a lot of professionalism in both projects, and it looks like Bethesda has been either giving some help or has gone out of its way to, well, get out of both mods' ways, and even encouraged them (in the Noclip documentary they even say they're eager to play them). I'm not ruling out that both of them become Bethesda-approved, like Valve authorised Black Mesa and allowed the team that made it to make a profit from it.

It also helps that Skyblivion really does look like it's at least 80% done, and they have massive, hours-long streams showing them completing entire quests, despite some limitations at the moment (a few areas where the travel mesh has not been enabled, so the monsters can't move).

I get the impression the main limitation is that they have people jumping in to help, getting some stuff done, and then either bailing or going quiet due to other commitments, and they're at the point where if they can get enough people on board to work on the project properly for a few months, they can probably get it over the finish line in a reasonable timeframe.

Skywind I get the impression is not as far along, which is a shame because it launched as a project earlier, but also adapting Morrowind's mechanics and especially its crazy spell freedom into Skyrim's engine is a much bigger challenge.


Morrowwind that can be played on your wristwatch!


Full deep dive with Todd "Leather Jacket" Howard.

Main takeaways:

* The first part of the demo is 100% "Fallout 4 BUT IN SPACE with slightly better graphics." Which is both fun and underwhelming.

* Rather than searching for your father/son, the game has a bit more relaxed, "track down these alien artefacts for us, but y'know, no rush," story hook.

* Settlement building is back but now you have an actually-sane overhead building system that is about a thousand times easier to parse and use.

* Having underwhelmed you, Todd Howard starts going a bit nuts. "OUR MOST IN-DEPTH CHARACTER CREATION EVER!" Complete with background traits and even pre-game careers, which is where the TRAVELLER influence is most visible (STARFIELD started as a TRAVELLER CRPG in the late 1990s, believe it or not). This looks way more in-depth than either SKYRIM or FALLOUT "is this still an RPG?" 4.

* Then he goes to 11 by saying, "YOU CAN DESIGN YOUR OWN SPACESHIPS! AND YESSSSS YOU CAN FLY THEM WHOOP WHOOP!" It looks more FREELANCER circa 2003 then ELITE: DANGEROUS or STAR CITIZEN, but hey, it's more than I was expecting, and the space combat looks serviceable.

* At the end he drops the truth bombs: "THERE ARE A THOUSAND PLANETS AND YOU CAN LAND ANYWHERE ON THEM!" I strongly suspect that 985 of those planets are procedurally-generated and there's not much on them that's fun, but it's a nice nod to people wanting a real sense of scale in the game.

Liberty's Edge RPG Superstar 2008 Top 32, 2011 Top 16

Werthead wrote:

Full deep dive with Todd "Leather Jacket" Howard.

Main takeaways:

* The first part of the demo is 100% "Fallout 4 BUT IN SPACE with slightly better graphics." Which is both fun and underwhelming.

* Rather than searching for your father/son, the game has a bit more relaxed, "track down these alien artefacts for us, but y'know, no rush," story hook.

* Settlement building is back but now you have an actually-sane overhead building system that is about a thousand times easier to parse and use.

* Having underwhelmed you, Todd Howard starts going a bit nuts. "OUR MOST IN-DEPTH CHARACTER CREATION EVER!" Complete with background traits and even pre-game careers, which is where the TRAVELLER influence is most visible (STARFIELD started as a TRAVELLER CRPG in the late 1990s, believe it or not). This looks way more in-depth than either SKYRIM or FALLOUT "is this still an RPG?" 4.

* Then he goes to 11 by saying, "YOU CAN DESIGN YOUR OWN SPACESHIPS! AND YESSSSS YOU CAN FLY THEM WHOOP WHOOP!" It looks more FREELANCER circa 2003 then ELITE: DANGEROUS or STAR CITIZEN, but hey, it's more than I was expecting, and the space combat looks serviceable.

* At the end he drops the truth bombs: "THERE ARE A THOUSAND PLANETS AND YOU CAN LAND ANYWHERE ON THEM!" I strongly suspect that 985 of those planets are procedurally-generated and there's not much on them that's fun, but it's a nice nod to people wanting a real sense of scale in the game.

Super wary of 1000 planets - not only are most going to be boring procedurally generated, but this means a lot of the game will be spent making that aspect, which in my experience means the actual game to play through will likely be weak and boring.


JoelF847 wrote:
Super wary of 1000 planets - not only are most going to be boring procedurally generated, but this means a lot of the game will be spent making that aspect, which in my experience means the actual game to play through will likely be weak and boring.

The team making this game is four times the size of the one that made FALLOUT 4, so they could have 200 people whose job was to make 5 planets each over the seven years of development, helped by procgen. And the team making the actual meat and potatoes of the game, the quests and open world elements, would still be twice the size of the team that made FALLOUT 4 and SKYRIM.


It looks like The Outer Worlds without color.


Interesting. They've dropped the fully voiced protagonist for STARFIELD, and you will stay in first-person mode for conversations. You will also apparently be able to see your full dialogue choices rather than "flavour" text, addressing some of the problems from FALLOUT 4.

There's also over 160,000 lines of dialogue compared to 120,000 in FO4, but since that also included your lines, it means there'll be far, far more NPCs with full voice acting than in any prior BGS game.

captain yesterday wrote:
It looks like The Outer Worlds without color.

That first planet is very grey. But some of the other ones looked better, and that montage at the end showing lots of planets showed several that are very vibrant, much more on the NO MAN'S SKY end of things.


Some more info (and from here) on Starfield:

You can ignore the optional planets and just do the "normal" BGS stuff and you'll be fine.
You can steal ships.
Because of the tech level you can cause way more mayhem than in other BGS games. If you steal some guns from a weapon shop and run off, you can spark a major manhunt and running gun battle through the streets.
There are four "huge" cities which are much bigger than city from any prior BGS game. I assume they mean functional settlement areas, so bigger than Diamond City, not necessarily all of Boston in Fallout 4, or Rivet City versus all of Washington DC in Fallout 3.
The settlement of Akila is about four times the size of Whiterun from Skyrim. It's unclear if Akila is counted as a major city. New Atlantis is much bigger than that.
Akila, and it looks like most of the other cities, don't have gates, so there's no separate loading screen for them. Skyrim and Fallout 4 had progressed with that but there were still some locations (like Diamond City) that required it.
You can craft, steal, buy, extort or salvage parts for ship-building or base-building.
The space combat is intended to be somewhat slow and tactical, more MechWarrior than Ace Combat. Todd Howard is a huge MechWarrior fan, which shows taste.
In space combat you can switch power levels between different systems.
You can dock with other ships, or crippled them in combat and then board and loot them.
There's no "seamless flight" from ground to space. That'll be a loading screen. There'll be one focus on the traditional BGS RPG ground experience and another on space travel/combat.
Over 200,000 words of dialogue. Without your character's voice lines, probably around twice the dialogue in Fallout 4 (and FO4 had a ton of dialogue).
The procgen systems in Starfield are a natural evolution of the systems they already used in Skyrim and Fallout, it wasn't a huge technological leap.
Starfield's main story is maybe 20% bigger than in any previous BGS game, maybe ~40 hours if you just focused on it and absolutely nothing else.
The main story has major branch points leading to very different conclusions (this sounds like Fallout 4).
Elder Scrolls VI is moving from pre-production into full production as work on Starfield winds down. He does confirm that Fallout 5 is moving into pre-production.


What does BGS stand for, Werthead?

Liberty's Edge RPG Superstar 2008 Top 32, 2011 Top 16

If the optional planets aren't needed for the main story line, I hope they have a way to balance against people doing a lot of optional planets and not be overpowered for the plot quests.

Silver Crusade

Why?


Andostre wrote:
What does BGS stand for, Werthead?

Big Game Stuff?

Personally, after how bad and repetitive the main story of Fallout 4 and the radiant quest design was and how much of a buggy mess Fallout 76 is (I still regularly get T posing enemies even though I play it on a PS 5) I have no enthusiasm for this game.

Looks like I'll be waiting to get an Xbox until The Outer Worlds 2 comes out.

RPG Superstar 2015 Top 8

1 person marked this as a favorite.
Andostre wrote:
What does BGS stand for, Werthead?

I am not Werthead, but it stands for Bethesda Game Studios. Technically this is the developer half of the company; the publisher side is Bethesda Softworks. For example, Skyrim IIRC was published by Bethesda Softworks and developed by Bethesda Game Studios, while Fallout New Vegas was published by Bethesda Softworks but developed by Obsidian, and Elder Scrolls Online was published by Bethesda Softworks but developed by Zenimax Online (a sister company to Bethesda). Not sure what all the designations are now that Microsoft owns everything.

RPG Superstar 2015 Top 8

captain yesterday wrote:


Personally, after how bad and repetitive the main story of Fallout 4 and the radiant quest design was and how much of a buggy mess Fallout 76 is (I still regularly get T posing enemies even though I play it on a PS 5) I have no enthusiasm for this game.

As massively flawed as Fallout 4 is, I feel a balk at slapping the "bad" label on the main story on Fallout 4. I don't love the main story. But having played the story at about four and two half times (two half-finished playthroughs), it can't have been so awful that I actually... well, did that, given I don't even replay stuff that often. I actually like that playing as different factions does give some different story pieces and requires different approaches (which is the opposite of repetitive), and there are bright moments throughout. There are also annoying parts, including some sections that feel repetitive) don't get me wrong, but I feel the need to nitpick a bit here that as a blanket statement I find that a bit unfair (with apologies for nitpicking).

I am right there with you, however, on the radiant quest design (which also frankly was bad in Skyrim, IMO). There's merit in the radiant quest idea but it was way overimplemented and each faction relied on it too much to pad out stuff to do.

This said, especially with the recent allegations about mistreatment of QA teams published over at Kotaku (bearing in mind they are just allegations) and the general attitude of Bethesda's executives, I'm not psyched about anything they put out, and probably won't change my mind on that until and if (very unlikely) they fire Todd Howard. The more I dive into stories about goings on at Bethesda, the more he seems to ultimately be at fault for the poor direction the company has taken (he's the one who tends to prefer "BIG... but shallow...") and takes credit for other people's good ideas. Problem is he's very good at being a front man and I am sure convinces the shareholders any problems the company has is the peons' fault, not his.

This said, I always hope stuff like this will be good. We'll see.


BGS is Bethesda Game Studios, headed by Todd Howard, which is the team that actually makes the games. This distinguishes them from Bethesda Softworks, the publisher, and Zenimax Media, the owners, but whom everyone also calls Bethesda (Microsoft also now own Zenimax and thus all the rest).

Zenimax also owns, and Bethesda Softworks publishes, a whole bunch of other studios including Arkane (Prey, Redfall, Dishonored, Deathloop) id (Rage, Doom, Quake) and MachineGames (Wolfenstein).

It also gets confusing because Zenimax owns Zenimax Online, who make The Elder Scrolls Online, which has only fairly minimal involvement from BGS (mostly lore-related), despite BGS making the single-player Elder Scrolls games.

You also have the further enjoyment of BGS themselves having multiple teams, some based in Maryland and others in Austin (who are mostly responsible for Fallout 76).

Quote:
If the optional planets aren't needed for the main story line, I hope they have a way to balance against people doing a lot of optional planets and not be overpowered for the plot quests.

They never have before. From Morrowind onwards you could just wander around killing monsters and doing side-quests, and just be massively overpowered for the main plot (Oblivion tried to use level-scaling to overcome that, but people hated it), and I suspect that will be true here as well. But you could probably get OP just by going around doing quests and ignoring the optional planets.

Liberty's Edge RPG Superstar 2008 Top 32, 2011 Top 16

Werthead wrote:


Quote:
If the optional planets aren't needed for the main story line, I hope they have a way to balance against people doing a lot of optional planets and not be overpowered for the plot quests.

They never have before. From Morrowind onwards you could just wander around killing monsters and doing side-quests, and just be massively overpowered for the main plot (Oblivion tried to use level-scaling to overcome that, but people hated it), and I suspect that will be true here as well. But you could probably get OP just by going around doing quests and ignoring the optional planets.

That's one of the reasons I haven't played an elder scrolls game since the first one. Daggerfall?

And it's one of the biggest flaws in lots of CRPGs that if you do all of the quests, you ARE overpowered by about two thirds through the game and it's too easy (and not so much fun as a slog). It's worse when DLCs get added in the middle of the game/character advancement progression, but the rest of the game after those points isn't made more difficult.

Having tons of optional random content on top of that just makes the problem worse.

Silver Crusade

That’s universally seen as a good thing though, you do all the optional content (some of which is harder than the main content) you get rewarded for it.

That’s been a thing in RPGs since forever.

RPG Superstar 2015 Top 8

I felt like Skyrim and Fallout 4 actually handled the level scaling/management really well. In Oblivion, the problem was that the level-scaling was flat--whereever you went, you always encountered something at your level. This got silly because you'd go back to some random goblin cave at level 97 and suddenly the goblins were tanking you.

In Skyrim and Fallout 4 some things adjusted for your level (I think particularly radiant quests, which was one of their better aspects) so you could find something equal to you, but in other places level was somewhat set to a minimum and maximum level (but enemies designed to be tough would remain tough even when you were relatively high level). So if you were level 1 there were places you could go where the enemies definitely WOULD kack you on sight, and you could go back later and tear it apart because they didn't scale up... but at the same time you'd still also find appropriate places where you could fight something challenging. You got a much better sense of where you are in the world--yes, increasingly badass and able to handle more and more challenging fights, but there would also be both things that didn't scale (because it would be silly if they did) and also be something that was challenging. And what stayed weak made sense (rats, mole rats) and what was always challenging (dragons, deathclaws, mirelurk queens) made sense.

Moreover, while the main quests involved combat, particularly in Fallout 4 but also to some extent in Skyrim, a lot of the major quests only were somewhat combat reliant. There were of course major combats, and Skyrim does end with a big boss fight. But many branches were really more about getting to the right place and the right time, solving a puzzle or using an ability the right way. Fallout 4 you could pick a faction that suited your play style--so one main quest playthrough relied more on stealth and infiltration while another was more fighting, and another was gathering allies and making do with what you had. In Skyrim I think I only got to the end of the main quest once but I recall the final boss being challenging even though I had done a lot of the sidequests and was ridiculously high level. I think they must have scaled him appropriately. You also had to use certain tactics to fight him--you couldn't just wail on him, but use the right ability at the right time to get him in a position to do damage. In Fallout 4 the final fights were big mob scenes--you needed to get somewhere to get to a thing, with (appropriate for the situation) people with high tech armor and weapons mobbing you, so even if you were massively high level, you could still get overwhelmed if you weren't playing smart (and you can't lob a mini nuke at the enemy when they are all less than 5 feet from you because you'll just nuke yourself). You still had to use smarts and tactics regardless of level, and you didn't win when you fought all the enemies, you won when you got to the right MacGuffin and did the thing. (If you found a way to do it without fighting anyone, that was valid too. I do remember in my Railroad playthrough making good use of my Stealth Power Armor with Stealth Boys.)

TL;DR I really feel like they fixed the problem of overleveling. There are many reasons to not play Bethesda games (bugs, not listening to their QA testers, trying to do too much at once and making a game with 50 shallow features rather than 10 really well developed ones, etc.). But I wouldn't list that among them.


A nice touch I noticed on the first screenshots but is now confirmed to be a feature: all weapons in the game have their ammo counter integrated into the weapon in a different way.

Very cool, especially the ones that aren't obviously a screen or readout and it looks like the count is grafted on the skin of the weapon itself.


1 person marked this as a favorite.

A 45-minute mega-deep dive.

There's some pretty good stuff here. The first and most massively obvious thing they've been working on is a graphical glow-up. This actually looks like a 2023 release, and the first time that a Bethesda game looks contemporary or even cutting-edge since Oblivion came out in 2006. It's also way, way more colourful than it looked previously.

They also go into more detail on how the game actually works. As usual you have your Bethesda Main Quest Which Is Kinda Urgent But Also Not Really and you can follow that and meet all the factions and a bunch of NPCs and that'll take ~40 hours to complete. There's also a metric butt-ton of side-quests all over the galaxy, likely your usual mix of inventive and interesting stuff and glorified fetch quests. Plus faction quests, with you being able to work for Constellation, the United Planets, the Freestar Collective, the Crimson Fleet, Ryujin Industries, the Red Mile, the House of Va'ruun and the worshippers of the Great Serpent. If you just want to do "normal Bethesda Game Studios game stuff," that'll keep you occupied for many dozens of hours.

More interesting here is the freedom the game gives you to "go anywhere" on the game's 1,000 planets, moons, asteroids and so on. How this works is that each planet/moon etc has a map which is divided into numerous tiles. Each tile is extremely large (at least a kilometre long on each axis, possibly several times that, and in the hand-crafted zones, larger still) and you can walk from one tile into the next, allowing you to walk right around the planet if you want to spend many hours doing that. It's much faster to fast-travel to your ship, take off, and land again elsewhere.

Whenever you land on a tile, the game populates it with stuff from a massive database, including abandoned mines or bases, space pirates, wildlife (friendly or not) and resources. Your experience of the game will vary from a friend's, as you might both visit the exact same tile on the exact same planet, but it'll be populated in different ways. It sounds like some hand-crafted quests and questlines will involve visiting these rando-worlds, with the location of characters and events dynamically changing depending on the situation. That will give the illusory feel of there being handcrafted content and stories even on the random side-worlds. That's quite clever, but how successful is will depend on how much of that stuff there is and how long it will take to run out.

For the most part, the game's story will take you to hand-crafted places to visit, with New Atlantis being BGS's biggest-ever city. It's so large apparently it has a monorail you need to switch between different districts (unknown if the monorail trains will be elaborate giant hats sitting on little man underneath the map, which is the tech hack Fallout 3 had to resort to to get the trains working).

A very nice touch is the variable gravity from world to world. The guy punching the enemy on Mars and them flying over the edge of the chasm fairly slowly and then hurtling towards the ground below is quite entertaining.

The game has a massive skill tree system, and there seems to be a general "stop the rot" feel to the game's RPG systems, with the systems looking much more complex than Fallout 4 or Skyrim (which both "streamlined" the RPG experience to the point of almost eliminating it).

It also looks like they erred on the side of "freedom" in allowing both starship and base customisation. The massive cargo ship that looks like Optimus Prime is most entertaining, as is the Platypus pirate ship filled with stolen sandwiches.

The space combat side of things is more involved than I thought, with you having power control systems (like X-Wing and Freespace) and the ability to board disabled ships and storm them. You can also amass an entire fleet of salvaged ships and switch between them at starports (it's unclear if you can send them off on other missions whilst your main ship is doing hero stuff, like the X series, but I assume not for now).

The crew system is also more involved. You can recruit your normal assortment of NPCs, but they can all travel with your on your ship. You can also assign any of them to other roles (including going with you on jobs), on the ship or on your bases. The NPCs have skill specialisations which can boost your ship's capabilities (i.e. stick a laser specialist on your ship's weapon consoles and your laser weapons will be more effective). You can also hire generic crewpeople, since it sounds like the number of fully-voiced, "proper" NPC companions will be limited to Skyrim/Fallout 4 levels (around a dozen) and you'll need way more than that if you're building lots of bases and you have a really massive ship.

Overall, this is looking very impressive, certainly far moreso than maybe any Bethesda game since those previews for Oblivion. And it's out in 11 weeks.


Dang, with a post like that, I don't need to watch the 45 minute deep dive!


Well, I just got myself an Xbox series X just for this game.

Now, I wait!


Bethesda has released three animated shorts, showing slice-of-life moments for people in the Starfield universe.

I particularly like that Todd Howard got a nod to his MechWarrior/BattleTech fandom in there.


With a couple of weeks in Starfield now, some thoughts.

This game is pretty much what I expected: FALLOUT/SKYRIM in space. It's a Bethesda game through-and-through, and beneath the excellent graphics (this is easily Bethesda's best-looking-on-release game since OBLIVION) and the space travel side-game, you can see the same structure and paradigm purring along. The apple has not fallen far from the tree.

On the plus side, the game has taken a step back from the streamlining/simplification of SKYRIM and FALLOUT 4. Advancement trees are a bit more involved, with you having to use your existing skills in a specific way to unlock the next point in that skill (i.e. to open the next level in Physical, you need to put in some cardio by running full-tilt for x number of metres whilst 75% encumbered). The game tells you what each goal is. This is fun, giving you lots of short-term goals for your character's advancement. You can, in superb Bethesda style though, cheese it. Your jetpack skill requires you to use your jetpack 25 times in combat, so simply aggro a bunch of bad guys three rooms over by firing a shot and then keep jetpacking into the ceiling, wait for them to give up looking for you, then rinse and repeat.

Combat is much improved, with more physicality to the weapons and the jetpack allowing you to dynamically move across the battlefield quickly. Enemy AI is still dumb but not as dumb as before, and will occasionally make impressive moves (trying to stunlock you with an electrical attack before rushing in to melee, for example). It's still pretty easy, especially as the game seems to prioritise criticals if you shoot someone in the head.

Quest design remains the Bethesda standard, but better. The main questline is fairly rote sci-fi, but it has a couple of shifts that I wasn't expecting. The faction storylines are better, sometimes leading to really great rewards (the Freestar Rangers storyline leads you to getting a really cool starship, far better than your starting one). It's the barking mad side-quests where the game excels, including a riff on ALIEN and another one which is pure STAR TREK (a bunch of slower-than-light generation ship colonists have arrived at a planet they have a legal claim to to find some people showed up a century and a half earlier via FTL and have colonised their planet). If you choose the "Have Parents" starting perk, you get supportive parents who consistently show up through the game, visiting you at work for maximum cringe and even bumping into you whilst on vacation on other planets.

The biggest departure from the Bethesda norm is how it treats exploration. In most Bethesda games you have a large-feeling map and various objectives, and as you walk towards those objectives, you bump into random encounters or new locations along the way, which may open side-quests or you decide to explore a cave or vault you've found on a whim. By it's nature Starfield can't have that, and instead you find yourself traversing the map screens to get to destinations. This encourages even hardcore FALLOUT and SKYRIM fan who refused to ever use fast travel to just fast travel everywhere.

You can avoid this by selecting your quest, manually taking off from the planet, selecting the target destination in your ship's HUD, jumping to the target system and then autopiloting to your destination. This gives the game a chance to trigger random space events and even entire quest chains, which are surprisingly numerous, which otherwise you'd just bypass altogether. For example, with this method I encountered a bunch of quarrelling farmers whose system had been invaded by pirates, and I undertook a quest to resolve their differences and forge them into a fleet capable of destroying the pirate threat, which resulted in several massive space battles and a final storming of the pirate headquarters on an old space station.

Once on planets, each area you can visit is surprisingly massive - about the size of FALLOUT 4's map, maybe larger, and usually have a few Points of Interest. As well as that, dynamic quests can generate on any planet (so you might encounter a specific quest on Planet Feeblenarge and your friend might encounter the same quest on Planet Tricklephase), and random events can also occur, such as a ship crash-landing nearby and you can help out (or ignore them). There are potentially thousands of landing points on each planet, and over 1,000 planets (including moon, some asteroids, and space stations), so there is a virtually infinite amount of land to explore, but not a vast amount of reason to do so (aside from the often-gorgeous vistas). Most people I think will follow the main quests and only visit random locations for resources if they decide to pursue settlement building.

Both ship-building and settlement-building are fun, but the former is very, very fiddly and the latter is, weirdly, less involved than FALLOUT 4's settlement system.

Overall, this is a solid Bethesda game, but it's still a Bethesda game moderately improved, with a somewhat fiddlier system for getting around. There is a lot to enjoy here, but I'm not sure it makes a strong argument it needs to exist more than ELDER SCROLLS VI or FALLOUT 5 (in particular, STARFIELD's reliance on guns and underground bases and total lack of vehicles makes it feel a lot like FALLOUT, a surprising amount of the time).

Scarab Sages

My coworker’s been playing Starfield and enjoying it thoroughly. He told me I’d probably like it, but I don’t see myself playing anytime soon. Mostly because (a) I really don’t do a lot of video games, and (b) I’ve got like two other video games waiting before I get tired of playing Diablo 4.

Still, I might eventually give it a try.


I figured I'd play Starfield eventually, but I don't have a lot of time for video games in my life. I tend to play games that I'm already familiar with so that I don't have to re-learn the mechanics or remember my goals since the last time I played the game.

However, learning that Starfield is a classic Bethesda model game, it's making me nostalgic for that feeling of playing this sort of game for the first time, so I'll probably try playing it sooner rather than later.


Finally got my WiFi hooked up in my new place so I plan on cracking this open over the weekend!


I've been playing SHATTERED SPACE, the first big expansion for STARFIELD. I hadn't logged in for a while and missed a bunch of big updates, so it was a surprise to find vastly improved maps, a buggy for much-improved surface travel, and much better wayfinding.

The actual new expansion is fairly generous, featuring a huge, creepy space station to explore and then a visit to the Va'ruun homeworld. This is a completely bespoke-created planet with a fairly large map, lots of new (handcrafted!) points of interest and a surprisingly large array of quests and sub-quests to go through.

It does feel a bit like Bethesda retreating from their own design ideas in the game (so no space travel is needed after reaching the planet), which is a bit dull, but they are trying to double down on a more familiar, ELDER SCOLLS/FALLOUT-y design, which works okay.

Still can't help feeling that they missed out on a lot of potential here, and when faced with the prospect of doing something new or just reskinning OBLIVION again, they chose the latter. Oh well.


Fairly generous?! Are you getting paid by Bethesda (genuine question) because 5-6 hours of story content and absolutely nothing else new about it for $30 US dollars is NOT "fairly generous" it's a cash grab.

Shadows of the Erdtree, THAT was generous (basically a whole other game for $40).

101 to 150 of 166 << first < prev | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | next > last >>
Community / Forums / Gamer Life / Entertainment / Video Games / Speculation on Bethesda's new game All Messageboards

Want to post a reply? Sign in.