Starfield design lead says players are "disconnected" from how games are actually made: "Don't fool yourself into thinking you know why it is the way it is"

alyaza [they/she]@beehaw.orgmod to Gaming@beehaw.org – 187 points –
Starfield design lead says players are "disconnected" from how games are actually made: "Don't fool yourself into thinking you know why it is the way it is"
gamesradar.com

apparently this is in response to a few threads on Reddit flaming Starfield—in general, it's been rather interesting to see Bethesda take what i can only describe as a "try to debate Starfield to popularity" approach with the game's skeptics in the past month or two. not entirely sure it's a winning strategy, personally.

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You know what an even better take is? "We hear you, we'll take your feedback" or just as good, say nothing at all.

Arguing that you are smarter or wiser than your users / customers is paradoxical. You are by definition not smart if you attempt to do this.

This is why we only ever get PR responses to anything that happens instead of actual information or explanations.

It's better than arguing with the customer.

Simple explanations like "we felt we were under X constraints" or "our engine didn't handle the loading times as well as we had hoped" would be just fine.

Instead, they just seem to be telling the players they're wrong for disagreeing with many of the design decisions made

Where did he say he was smarter or wiser? I must have missed that quote.

Emil Pagliarulo (guy quoted in the article), lead on Starfield, is known to have this attitude towards players. He's also known to not like design documents, which explains the massively disconnected design of recent Bethesda games, especially Starfield.

Emil is one of the giant reasons their games have been the way they have been lately and it's why he's being a baby about it

This particular dev didn't. But the Starfield team at large has been blowing up the internet recently telling people that don't like the game that their opinions are wrong.

I was assuming this was a quote from an interview with a leading question like "what do you think about players who claim to know what went wrong in the development of Starfield?" And the quote was out of context to make him look bad.

But this was a Twitter thread. It's a completely unforced error, no one was making him do this.