Starfield's lead quest designer leaves Bethesda to join other RPG veterans making a new open-world game

Goronmon@kbin.social to Games@lemmy.world – 204 points – Starfield's lead quest designer leaves Bethesda to join other RPG veterans making a new open-world game
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Something Wicked Games snatches another veteran for their horror-RPG

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After playing Starfield, I, uh, wouldn't be chomping at the bit to hire their lead quest designer.

Don't work at Bethesda. Not going to claim this is in anyway accurate. Maybe the reason they left was because they weren't allowed to design interesting quests and thus were tired of being railroaded. I say this because any quest designer is essentially a storyteller so for quests to be so bland to lack character has to be intentional.

maybe, but also they were a /lead/ so should have had some level of agency there.

in an ideal world, maybe

I'm more trying to be realistic, It's difficult to imagine how you would hire a lead anything and not give them any agency into what they are doing. That's the whole point of lead, to lead the others in the goal of whatever that thing is.

I think that you can be marginalised and restricted, but it's pretty unlikely this person, as a lead, had no agency about quest design

That also does not mean that they couldn't do something better elsewhere. Just that assuming that they were locked down by bethesda into writing boring one note quests seems... like a reach.

Is the story lacking?

The writing is the strongest part of the game in my opinion. But the writing almost NEVER translates to interesting gameplay.

As an example, there's a quest where you're tasked with tracking some bad guys through a labyrinthine canyon, then you need to search for clues to find out where they came from, who hired them, etc. The gameplay for the quest is about the least imaginative way to interpret that story - the tracking is just following waypoint markers on your screen; the combat is just shooting four basic enemies; and finally the "search for clues" is just looting one item from the enemy leader's corpse. Then you fast travel back to the quest giver and get some credits as a reward.

Nearly every quest is like this. They present an interesting story via the dialogue, but then the actual gameplay for the quest is always just travel to a location, shoot some bad guys and/or pick up an item and/or talk to a person, then fast travel back and get some credits.

i personally find the main quest to be bethesdas best. lots of great quests i just played one a few days ago that left me speechless

That's what I'm saying. Almost all of the main quests are some of Bethesdas best ever. I really don't get all the hate for this game. It's not perfect by any means but to say it's garbage is just wrong. I'm pretty new to Lemmy and I can't help but compare it to what I see back over at reddit. More hive mind bull. The Internet told me I need to hate this thing so I hate it.

yep exactly, everything about bethesda has been shit on ever since fo4 release, and 76 made it much worse. its like nobody actually enjoys gaming anymore, its just a side picking insult throwing cult

Agreed and much like skyrim this game is better enjoyed with minimal fast traveling, the problem is that fast travel is just too convenient and people will complain that it's just talking and loading screens without actually enjoying the exploration.

I'm intrigued, how the hell do you explore in this game? I thought the only way to get from system to system and planet to planet is to click through menus. The only choice seems to be whether I'll go back to the ship and click through menus or stay where I am and click through menus.

Within a system you can bring up the "scanner tool" view in the ship to then point yourself to a planet and travel that way.

But to to travel to various systems, yes you'll need to use a menu. But then I'm not sure how you would expect to fly between systems without some form of menu to select where you want to go.

Use the scanner tool, I find I have the opposite experience most people have while exploring. Many people say there's nothing to do, I hate it when I pick a random ass moon in some god forsaken system and keep fining structures littered all over the damn place. I just wanna be the first person on this planet and find animals and shit, yet there's always a solar farm, mining rig or small lab in the middle of fucking nowhere.

You could try walking around a planet instead of fast traveling.

when i first played skyrim i fast travelled everywhere. then years later i did a no fast travel playthrough and wow, the sheer amount of quests i had never seen before was astounding

Haven't played yet is the game not good.

It's atmospheric and good, but player choice during many missions is lacking. Choices often boil down to "Yes" or "Not yet." But you'll go the way the mission wants you to go or you won't finish it.

UC Secdef: choose to remain undercover or go double agent and side with pirates

UC Vanguard: choose how to handle not just Terrormorphs but what to do about [Subject REDACTED]

Ryujin: I think there's three possible outcomes there.

There's also a few side quests that can go either way, like the beer run mission. There's quite a lot more choice and consequences for a Bethesda RPG.

You also have options that change depending on your skills and progress.

You can choose to bribe, persuade, manipulate, flex your muscles, or do them a favor. Sometimes you can choose to kill them if they're not cooperating. If a task is related to one of your skills, you can show off your knowledge.

The whole no choice paradigm was much more true for FO4 than for Starfield.

The game is fine. It's on Gamepass so I'd play it through that, I wouldn't pay the full retail for it.

Mostly I was referencing that the quests are fairly flat and uninspiring.

For what it's worth, game quality-wise, I finished one playthrough in about 80 hrs and while there's a NG+ mechanic that many seem to be enjoying, I wasn't too interested in that. I really liked the ship building mechanic, and I had a lotta fun leveling up to see all the new ship parts and play with em.

Maybe after the modding scene develops more (though it looks like it'll get there) I'll come back to it if it's still on Gamepass

It's a firm 7/10 without mods. It's a great framework but it lacks content past a certain point

It's fallout 4 with a different texture painted over the top, with all the charm removed and replaced with loading screens.

Yikes I couldn't even finish Fallout 4 it was so bad.

Eh 4 was fine.

3 was the worst, they turned such a great series into a mediocre and janky FPS.

NV got me in an aggro loop and kept me from finishing the game. Worst experience yet.

It's really good but the Bethesda hate train is still going strong. It's definitely not for everyone though, it's not a space sim by any means.

I really like it. These people are hating because it's memey to hate Bethesda.

Yep, no legitimate criticism to be found. None whatsoever. Just wait for mods, they'll fix a game for free. The multi-million dollar studio did nothing wrong.

There is legitimate criticism, but there's a lot of complete shit. I've heard people complain about procedurally generated planets that you have to go out of your way to interact with. There's complaints of bullet sponge enemies from people who insisted on going to level 40 areas at level 20. Both of those complaints are bullshit

"Why do planets have borders, I want to circumnavigate Mars"

  • Statement spoke by the utterly deranged

Agreed. I often spend 30-60 min in an area trying to find an ideal outpost location. The limuts on how far you can go on planets are already huge. From what I recall, the total area is comparable to Skyrim, though I'll have to double check that

Edit: Yeah, literally every individual explorable area in the game is larger than the entire map of Skyrim or Fallout 4. Source: https://thenerdstash.com/how-big-starfield-is-open-world-size-measured-explained/

Looking forward to talking to an NPC, going to the specified location, slaughtering every man, woman, and animal in sight, then returning to the NPC for my reward in the new Something Wicked game

What happened man I thought I just needed a new GPU man, surely Bethesda isn’t being run by a fuck wit.

Surely the last set of games and Bethesdas trajectory is solely the fault of the devs despite being across several game universes and still somehow pumping out the same shit you’ve been playing for 20 years now LOL.

Bottom of the barrel is all that’s left, sleep tight Bethesda, you had a good run

They just need to update their game engine to something more modern. Like Quake or something

I'm honestly flabbergasted. I thought Seinfeld was done decades ago.