I think it’s pretty clear they were struggling to incorporate all the elements together, which ate a lot of their time. In the end, that resulted in player colonies basically getting thrown out and the game being a lot smaller than if they had just dedicated all of their time to worldbuilding.
The game had a satisfying final quest? Did I miss it??
For those that did finish the final quest – how was it?
It was fine, just not anything all that amazing. I did finish it
I’m surprised anyone would make it that far
In the few years I’ve been making games for shits and giggles, the best rule I’ve developed is Always Be Shipping. You can tweak like crazy in the last hours of a project. You can build whole concepts only to throw them out. So long as you have A Game to push out the door, day-of, you are free to do whatever the hell you want.
Doing your first level first or your last level last is absolute rookie shit.
I don’t quite understand what you’re saying. Could you elaborate what you mean with “Doing your first level first or your last level last is absolute rookie shit.”?
They are saying: do the most important bits first, so that if you run out of time, you still have the important parts in place.
This also goes for many things in general, not just gamedev. I used to be a teaching assistant at the University that I was studying at, and this was the main thing people seemed to get wrong in their projects. Instead of going for the basics and building from there, they just went for all the fancy cool features, or the most optimal algorithm. Then, when the deadline inevitably came around, they would have basically nothing working correctly. Sometimes I even warned them, and yet it still went wrong.
500 people and 9 years and they ran out of time.
I have zero hope for Elder Scrolls 6 now. How in the world can you not plan out a game given all those resources? And it was a blank slate too, they could have done anything at all with Starfield.
Every Bethesda game since Skyrim (and arguably Skyrim, depending on who you talk to) has followed the exact same script: exponentially longer development time to shart out marginal graphics improvements, dumbed-down mechanics and vastly less engaging storytelling.
Up until Starfield I had managed to enjoy all of them for what they were (with modders’ help of course). But Starfield is so aggressively dull I had a free 30-day trial of Microsoft GPU and could only manage maybe a week of playing it on the cloud before I was literally too bored to bother.
Given Bethesda’s trajectory, I have to agree with you. ES6 is going to be pure shit.
Don’t forget, Starfield was Todd’s dream game.
Yeah, he just have been dreaming it was a good game
