"I can guess what it takes to make a Hostess Twinkie, but I don't work in the factory"

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.

  • t3rmit3@beehaw.org
    0·
    11 months ago

    Yeah, I can imagine the frustration of seeing people who don’t know anything about what happened during development blame you as a dev for something that may have been design decisions or budgetary or time constraints that you had no say in or control over.

    “So sure, you can dislike parts of a game,” he concludes. “You can hate on a game entirely. But don’t fool yourself into thinking you know why it is the way it is (unless it’s somehow documented and verified), or how it got to be that way (good or bad).”

    “Chances are, unless you’ve made a game yourself, you don’t know who made certain decisions; who did specific work; how many people were actually available to do that work; any time challenges faced; or how often you had to overcome technology itself (this one is HUGE).”

    This is a totally fair take. He explicitly says it’s fine to not like the game, but just don’t try to pretend you know what happened on the back end to make it the way it was, because you’re probably gonna misplace blame.

    • Fedora@lemmy.haigner.me
      0·
      11 months ago

      I get the frustration here, but it’s also kind of… idk? A “No, you just don’t understand!” response. Everyone who works in a white-collar job knows what it’s like. Everyone has different theories about why that project failed, but nobody knows the objective truth. Nobody can present a “documented and verified” list of reasons for why the project failed, not even the lead designer here. They can guess, but never reach the truth. He could repeat what he always did without changing anything in the next project, and succeed due to different circumstances, plain good luck.

    • habanhero@lemmy.ca
      0·
      11 months ago

      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.

        • skulblaka@kbin.social
          0·
          11 months ago

          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.

        • gamermanh@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          0·
          11 months ago

          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