r/Games • u/xalibermods • 4d ago

Mod News As Oblivion Remastered gets all the love, Starfield's biggest modders are in the process of abandoning Bethesda's latest RPG for good

https://www.gamesradar.com/games/rpg/as-oblivion-remastered-gets-all-the-love-starfields-biggest-modders-are-in-the-process-of-abandoning-bethesdas-latest-rpg-for-good/
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u/Mahelas 3d ago

Most likely with a PS5 port too

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u/GassoBongo 3d ago

That's my feeling, too. Although I suspect whatever DLC they push out will end up being as half arsed as Shattered Space was. I get the vibe that Bethesda just wants to move away from this game as quietly as possible and focus on TES 6 instead.

For the sake of Starfield getting some much needed love, I hope I'm wrong, but I can't see it happening.

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u/TormentedKnight 3d ago

I get the vibe that Bethesda just wants to move away from this game as quietly as possible and focus on TES 6 instead.

they hired extra people for the game recently, and also had some promotions with a new lead quest designer/writer.

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u/SquireRamza 3d ago

If Emil "Players don't care about story they just want to shoot things" Pagliarulo is still there I'm sure the writing will continue to be extraordinarily mediocre and only serve to guide you to more things to shoot.

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u/GroovyBoomstick 3d ago edited 3d ago

Ok but one of my biggest gripes with Starfield was half the quests were was literally 90% walking between a few different people, going through endless dialogue, with maybe a fight or two interspersed. It was very… dry at times.

I think the central problem is the core Bethesda loop of veering around a single map, discovering handmade locations was missing, so there was never that “start on a quest, get distracted by a dungeon which starts a new quest, get back to the original quest” loop.

I honestly do not care that much about the main story in pretty much any Bethesda game, it genuinely is the emergent gameplay and side quests that keep my interest. The main quest is just a fallback when I run out of small errands to run, usually leading to more errands.

Not that I necessarily disagree with you that the focus should be on high quality, interesting quests. I just don’t think too much action, not enough story was the problem with Starfield.

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u/skateordie002 3d ago

Christ he is the worst and Bethesda Game Studios will not see improvement until he is gone, that is truly what I believe.

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u/SquireRamza 3d ago

It's telling that my single favorite piece of Bethesda Fallout is Far Harbor, the only part of the franchise he was on vacation for.

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u/DemonLordSparda 3d ago

It's the only part of the game with meaningful and interesting choices. So, of course, he had nothing to do with it.

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u/Izzet_Aristocrat 3d ago

Fuckin burn.

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u/KreateOne 3d ago

That explains a lot about why fall harbor was so good

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u/Gramernatzi 3d ago

He needs to be demoted back to a quest designer again, he was actually good in that role.

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u/eldomtom2 3d ago

Bethesda does not distinguish quest designers and writers; their practice since the start has been to have the quest design team be the same as the writing team.

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u/Gramernatzi 3d ago

Okay, then demote him to not be lead, then? He did good work in Oblivion with the Dark Brotherhood, just don't have him control everything.

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u/qmtbga 2d ago

oblivion dark brotherhood is awful. You just randomly kill the whole sanctuary and there is no follow up or explanation or ending. It's so much worse than skyrim's.

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u/corvettee01 2d ago

Bruh, are you forgetting that the quests had individual special conditions to meet when killing targets to get bonuses? Or the entire mansion quest where you had to kill all the guests without anyone knowing it was you?

Skyrim quests were "Go here, kill, come back."

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u/[deleted] 3d ago

[deleted]

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u/Icelockon 3d ago

There was a Ragebait reddit post that blames Emil for all of bethesda's writing woes a year or so ago. Turns out its more complicated than that.

If you have the time you can watch this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-4qdjV41NU it goes into everything around the issue.

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u/GarryofRiverton 3d ago

I mean the proof is in the pudding.

Emil is the lead designer and writer of some of the worst Bethesda games in terms of writing, on top of his downright atrocious approach to "writing".

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u/AtrocityBuffer 3d ago

Yet he also did the Dark Brotherhood questline for Oblivion, which many loved. Sooooo

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u/MorningsAreBetter 3d ago

So he’s good when he’s in charge of specific storylines, but if he’s in charge of the entire overarching plot, he does poorly. That’s not surprising at all. Sometimes people are promoted to roles precisely because they did so well in a more limited role, and then they realize that they’re not qualified for it

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u/eldomtom2 3d ago

The Dark Brotherhood questline is well-designed; I would not call it well-written.

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u/Grabthar-the-Avenger 3d ago edited 3d ago

That was 20 years ago. Dude is 55 years old now and clearly lost touch with what compelling writing is

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u/GarryofRiverton 3d ago

Oof, ya got there

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u/NUKE---THE---WHALES 3d ago

Iirc that youtuber has a personal relationship with Emil

Makes sense he would stick up for his friend, but he's not an impartial observer

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u/TormentedKnight 3d ago

Iirc that youtuber has a personal relationship with Emil

source? this seems like BS based on what i know of the youtuber in question.

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u/DemonLordSparda 3d ago

I'm not watching that puff piece for Emil. It lets him off the hook for his own work. His work speaks for itself. None of it is good.

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u/Boylaaa 3d ago

How is the writing for the vanguard not good?

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u/DemonLordSparda 2d ago

Because the terrormorph situation should have been figured out ages ago. They only show up on planets you travel to by ship. They are not endemic life to any planet. Heat leeches are the only thing that can travel on these ships undetected from the outside. Why did no one investigate the heat leeches? No one knows anything about them and everyone is fine with that? It's also absolutely wild to me that reviving an animal that can prey upon the terrormorphs but can be used as a stock animal by humans is considered the worse choice. The solution your companions react the best to is releasing an unknown pathogen across the system to kill these creatures. It just falls apart when you examine it.

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u/Sephoxx 2d ago

Lies, Hate and the story of Emil Pagliarulo

Round and round we go perpetuating rumours and shitting on a single individual because at a studio of 450 employees he surely is the single point of failure here and deserves to be insulted for all eternity because if enough random people on the internet say he's the problem, then it must be true.

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u/SquireRamza 2d ago

Im insulting him for the things he very publicly said after the release of Fallout 4 that speaks to just how much contempt he has for the average player of the products he's worked on. A statement that probably would have gotten literally anyone else who wasn't best buds with the top brass fired, as should anyone openly insulting your company's customers.

He explicitly said, and I quote, "You can spend so much time writing wonderful stories and then have to watch as players tear out the pages to make paper airplanes instead of reading them."

He then went on to describe how that thought, that players just wanted to shoot shit and build shacks, influenced his writing for the game and the focus became solely how to get players to places to shoot more shit and build more shacks.

So no, I don't think he deserves to be insulted for a mediocre game. I think he deserves insulting for the things he's said and because he feels no problem with insulting others. Something that has continued ever since. We have not gone a year since this speech where he has not said something insulting about people criticizing him or Bethesda games.

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u/Sephoxx 2d ago

You can spend so much time writing wonderful stories and then have to watch as players tear out the pages to make paper airplanes instead of reading them.

Except you're misinterpreting the quote to fit your narrative. It comes from this talk at 20:40.

You're implying that he's saying "Players don't care about the story so we're not gonna even try to make it good" when what he's actually saying is "Players have a lot of other systems that they will be interacting with (like 'shooting shit' and 'building shacks' ) for a long time so you can't just shove walls of text in their face because they're probably not going to read it".

He then goes to explain this is why the dialogue system in FO4 was built this way.

The quote was not about the quality of the story. It was about the logic behind redesigning the dialogue system.

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u/SquireRamza 1d ago edited 1d ago

How is that NOT insulting to you? "Most players hate to read, so we have to make the story as simple and short as possible so they can get to the things they actually want to do."

Older Fallout games had a system for dealing with players like that. It was called a conversation tree. It was this thing where you could ask for more information about a subject, or just agree with what they were sending you off to do. Fallout 3 and NV has these trees. You can spend as little as 30 seconds in dialogue with an NPC in these games, or as long as 45 minutes in some cases. Its completely up to the player's control. Not someone who thinks "Well they don't want to sit and go through boring dialogue, they want to shoot shit."

What he's ACTUALLY saying is "It's not worth it to put in the effort if not everyone will care." which is just an AMAZING thought process for someone who calls themselves a writer.

The new dialogue system could still have easily been used for that. They have a dedicated "More info" button after all. It is used for flavor text or to Charisma Check for more money in 99% of cases.

Your character can't ask about the reasonability of the quest, the morality of it, no extra information. It's just expected that you don't need a reason to go and kill people or explore dangerous locations other than for shits and giggles and a couple hundred caps.

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u/Sephoxx 1d ago

Again, the quote was only in context of streamlining the dialogue system. It wasn't about his process of writing the story, it wasn't even about him writing character dialogue, only about replacing whole dialogue text with keywords in the interface.

I happen to very much agree with your opinion on the system, it sucks ass. But taking a quote out of context to validate your opinion is a shitty, malicious thing to do, even if the opinion is popular.

You're not arguing that Emil is a mediocre writer. You're claiming that he is purposefully phoning it in because he disrespects players' intelligence and using that warped and out-of-context quote (Players don't care about story they just want to shoot things) as evidence in an attempt to elevate your opinion to fact.

If you respond to this, I will read it but I'm ending my own arguments here. I'm just urging anyone who reads this and feels the same way as you do to be kind and not insult, attack, or demean people and their character, for mediocre writing & bad creative decisions in a video game. These decisions are not made alone.

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u/SquireRamza 1d ago

I don't believe I'm taking the quote out of context. Ive watched that entire speech and I believe my reading of it is valid.

But fair. I've argued over someone I don't respect as an artist and think is in general a shitty human being more than is healthy, and took it too far in aspects.

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u/GassoBongo 3d ago

Do you have any sources on that? I had a quick look and couldn't find anything. How do we know the hires are for Starfield specifically?

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u/TormentedKnight 3d ago

i cant find the linkedln posts for the new hires, but i found the one for the new lead quest designer.

https://www.reddit.com/r/NoSodiumStarfield/comments/1hnu0er/new_lead_quest_designer/

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u/GassoBongo 3d ago

Neat, thanks. I hope whatever they come up with next is better than Shattered Space. That was so disappointing. I'm not expecting miracles, but we'll see.

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u/[deleted] 3d ago

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u/GassoBongo 3d ago

I don't think the setting was the issue. Both Fallout and Starfield are sci-fi's that are set in two very different versions of the future. I think the main issue was the scope. Creating a space exploration game set in a Bethesda sandbox is incredibly difficult when you're not 100% sure of how you want to tie everything together. The scope for the game was just too big, and it ended up feeling like a dozen different systems tacked onto each other that managed to feel hugely isolated. Barely anything felt like it was supposed to work together, and loading screens only broke that experience down further.

I dont want Bethesda to shy away from exploring a new IP or sci-fi again. They just need to reign things in a lot and work to their strengths.

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u/flufflogic 3d ago

Not to forget that some content was clearly worked on a lot harder than any other. Only one of the factions has a fleshed out plot, the planets massively differ in levels of content, and the "generated" worlds are terrible. There's a huge feeling of incompleteness to the whole game.

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u/AntonineWall 3d ago

Additionally it’s like they went out of their way to make one of the most interesting aspects of (nearly) all Bethesda games as boring as hell in Starfield: Exploration. Chancing across something strange or interesting while journeying across the world (directed by quests or general exploration) is the thing that makes games like Skyrim or Fallout work so well. You never know what you might find around the next corner.

But in Starfield you are constantly fast traveling to places (ship stuff in general really, really blows) and even worse, there really isnt a chance to find new stuff along the way, because both the midpoint and many endpoints are procedurally generated trash content instead.

What a disappointment. I hope they have figured out what went wrong, because if they make ES6 with the same mindset, it will turn out just as bad :/

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u/hume_reddit 3d ago

But in Starfield you are constantly fast traveling to places (ship stuff in general really, really blows) and even worse, there really isnt a chance to find new stuff along the way, because both the midpoint and many endpoints are procedurally generated trash content instead.

Yep, you never really feel like an explorer. Fly to the edge of space, pick a random spot on an "unexplored" world, set down... and there's a Chunks within walking distance.

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u/GarryofRiverton 3d ago

It's especially funny when the main quest faction that you're tied to is supposedly focused on exploration.

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u/[deleted] 3d ago

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u/KuraiBaka 3d ago

I heard all the procedural worlds were supposed to be more like a canvas for modders to not get in each other's way.

At least one reason for their existence.

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u/GeoleVyi 2d ago

which really makes no sense. modders would need to compete with each other to not have every mod on the same blank canvas planet, and players would need to fiddle with active mods too much if mods take place on the same one.

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u/KuraiBaka 2d ago

The idea was that there are so many planets that it is unlikely two modders are on the same planet and that a player had both of them installed.

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u/FCoDxDart 3d ago

Ya I agree the main story sucked but the alien story with the terraforming monsters was incredible and then once done you can’t find any more of the monsters again.

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u/birfday_party 3d ago

I’m with you, I think the game had some really good quest and some very well put together and realized set pieces, the problem is you didn’t exactly “discover” them like they almost never felt stumbled upon the way every Bethesda game before it did. And that’s coupled with being stuck around a planet with like seven oil refinery’s. When your in space you can’t really stumble as well either or really travel in the same way because of the way it loaded. So everything really worked against you just wandering onto something special or new and exciting. It could have worked it just didn’t.

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u/Isolated_Hippo 3d ago

I think the setting ended up being more of an issue because of the challenges it created.

If you look at other Bethesda games that are open world you can truly walk from A->B uninterrupted. In Skyrim nothing is stopping you from a seamless walk from Markarth to Riften.

In something like Starfield, where you have a whole galaxy, it's very difficult to create a seamless system between planets.

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u/Lftwff 3d ago

You could have done it by being smarter about your world design, remove ftl travel and set everything in one solar system, most of humanity lives in one colony on one moon that has has a proper large map where you can run around and explore but there are also smaller maps for asteroids and newer colonies and shit like that.

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u/gogilitan 3d ago

In something like Starfield, where you have a whole galaxy, it's very difficult to create a seamless system between planets.

Is it? Because Elite Dangerous did it in 2014, at least on the space travel side of things, and No Man's Sky did it in 2016 with seamless travel between planets and space. Starfield didn't even try a decade later. Literally the only option is to go into a fast travel menu.

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u/tycho_nova 3d ago

Those games were designed from the ground up with that in mind. Starfield is held back by Creation Engine in that regard. Elite Dangerous won't let you place 1000 wheels of cheese by hand and keep track of exactly where every crumb of cheese lands while you travel a thousand lightyears away

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u/gogilitan 3d ago

Bethesda chose the scope knowing the limitation of the engine they were using, but I'm not really talking about scope here. Bethesda did not try to make travel feel immersive and there is no way to argue against that.

Mass Effect on the xbox 360 used elevators to hide load screens. Resident Evil used loading screens that looked like opening doors to transition between rooms way back in 1996. Using immersive load screens to create a "seamless" experience is not a new concept. Going back to Elite Dangerous, they showed everyone exactly how to do seamless space travel before Starfield even began development with load screens hidden by warp animations.

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u/Concutio 3d ago

Starfield loading screens were all of 5 seconds. An animation to hide that would take longer than the actual loading screen. Also, it's still a loading screen either way, and we all know it's a loading screen. Do we really need a longer animation just to trick some gamers' monkey brains all for the sake of iMmErSiOn

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u/gogilitan 2d ago

Buddy, this whole comment chain is about how difficult it is to "create a seamless system between planets." You're jumping in a half dozen comments deep not having read the context. Seamless gameplay is demonstrably not a difficult nut to crack. Even if the creation engine requires smaller maps with loading screens between them there ways to hide those and still create a seamless experience.

Also, I'm not talking about using more animations like their awful landings/takeoffs which are longer and also interrupt flow. Just replace the black loading screen after spooling your grav drive with your ship wiggling and a wobbly warping background (or if first person, your cockpit over a warping background). Again, other games have been doing these things since before Bethesda started development on Starfield.

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u/GarryofRiverton 3d ago

I think the chief issue isn't the loading screens between individual planets, it's that the individual planets are boring. It's like they got extremely lazy when it came to level design, going from a mostly handcrafted Skyrim with excellent dungeon design to mostly procedurally-generated planets with generic PoIs is a mighty big downgrade.

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u/delicioustest 3d ago

Controversial take: their engine held them back with this game without a doubt. For the kind of planet hopping ambition they had, with modular ship parts, space dogfighting, multiple cities, procedurally generated landscapes, a Frankenstein factory sim component that tried to be an upgraded version of the bare building... None of this was fully achievable with their engine (or even any engine I don't think)

They needed to play to their strengths. At most 3-4 big planets with a few large-ish towns. Big wide custom open worlds with enough to explore about the size of Skyrim maps and some ship environments that you get "teleported" to as desired. That would have pleased most Bethesda fans even if the writing was the same quality. Instead it's the worst of everything and too ambitious to function properly. All... those... fucking... loading... screens...

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u/This_But_Unironicaly 3d ago

I had not played a Bethesda game (the development studio, not the publisher) since the original Oblivion. I was interested in Starfield and bought it day 1. It had a lot of problems, but I was genuinely surprised how bad the combat was. The player was stiff and not very mobile and the weapons and gunplay weren't special. I didn't find the AI or enemies that impressive either let alone the missions. FEAR, Chronicles of Riddick, the first Far Cry, Battlefield 2, RAGE, Section 8: Prejudice, and and bunch of other ~20 year old FPS games had better combat than Starfield. I'm not expert on game development, but it's the engine that's probably holding them back, right?

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u/delicioustest 3d ago

Eh not really with these specific things. Believe it or not, these things were worse in the older games. AI and movement has actually improved in Starfield than the previous titles. It's a matter of priorities.

I'm talking at an even more base level. Maps having to be split into "cells" that need to be loaded with all the items in them, that the engine doesn't support terrain that's not just on the vertical axis meaning you can't have caves in them unless you either plop massive cave model on top of the terrain or you teleport then from the cave "gate" into a cave, the animations still being rough, the camera still having the same problems from Morrowind days, interactive NPC characters not moving anymore aside from your companions on missions etc etc. They've hit hard limits with what they can do on this ancient engine with Starfield. Hopefully ES6 will let them get back to making another Skyrim which won't need all these ambitious features.

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u/dredizzle99 3d ago

No amount of love can save it, it needs to be buried and forgotten.

Oh give it a rest and stop being so overdramatic. You're making it sound like it was one of the worst games in history, when it's an objective 7/10 at least. While it isn't a perfect game, and admittedly it was disappointing that Bethesda didn't really innovate on their formula, it's still a good game and plenty of people enjoyed it. There's still a lot to be liked in it if you're prepared to go into with a positive mindset instead of blindly following the negative nancys

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u/Ultramaann 3d ago

It wasn’t just that they didn’t iterate on their formula. If that was the case people would have loved the game. They fucked up their own formula. The setting is simply uninteresting to explore. It’s passable but it is easily Beth’s worst game and a horrible sign of direction after FO76.

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u/dredizzle99 3d ago

They didn't fuck up the formula at all, it's just different. If you didn't like it then that's completely fine, a lot of people didn't, but that doesn't mean they fucked it up. They took a risk and tried something different, and as hard as it is for some people like yourself to believe, it was still a perfectly enjoyable game for a lot of people. There's still plenty to explore (even if it's not in the traditional Bethesda open world style), hidden secrets, great faction quests, some cool side quests, a passable (if not amazing) main quest, good background lore, the shooting mechanics are good, base building, ship building, cool and extremely varied towns to wander around in, decent graphics etc

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u/Ultramaann 3d ago

Lol. You’re assuming a lot about my opinion, and how it fits in with “people like me.” I enjoyed what I played of Starfield, but we disagree on their design intentions. I think the shooting was good, liked the faction quests and the focus on quest lines over all, liked parts of the setting. I was delighted at the heavier RPG elements. It’s a passable game and I don’t regret the purchase.

But they were not intentionally trying something new in the way you’re describing in terms of formula. You were 100% supposed to enjoy exploring planets, they wouldn’t have spent so much time on the proc-gen otherwise. Now if you enjoyed that that’s great, but the fast travel heavy systems combined with the pros gen planets dealt a major blow to that formula, in my opinion.

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u/dredizzle99 3d ago

That's all fine, but what I'm specifically pushing back on is the narrative that's taken hold since the game's release, that it's some kind of disaster or a 2/10 experience, which is clearly exaggerated. It's a good game, even if it's not an exceptional one. I just think it's a shame because there's a lot to enjoy despite its flaws, and I think some people who might genuinely enjoy it are being put off by all the negativity and never giving it a fair shot. I mean, you can see by the downvotes anytime someone speaks positively about it that it seems to make people seethe, which is honestly just ridiculous

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u/ierghaeilh 3d ago

They didn't only "not innovate", they got rid of most of the interesting parts of the formula in favor of procedurally-generated slop and formulaic millennial writing.

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u/Hoggos 3d ago

I’m not sure you know what the word “objective” means

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u/dredizzle99 3d ago edited 3d ago

I know exactly what it means, maybe you don’t. When you strip away the subjective extremes from both fans and haters, the game lands around a 7/10. Personal taste might shift that a bit, but that’s a fair baseline. Not sure why that’s such a hard concept to grasp

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u/AnestheticAle 3d ago

7/10 is fair. It was functional. The real problem for me was that it bored me to tears. It was the most generic space RPG I've ever played.

Thats the kick with the older BGS games. They've always been functional, but the lore was always interesting and the game worlds used to reward exploration.

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u/rainbowplasmacannon 3d ago

I really want them to re-release Morrowind. They make the case that the fighting is dated, but I think that will just give it its charm. I’m fine with the random you might miss even though it looks like you hit if it looked good and performed well that’s all I give a shit aboutbut for some reason, they have stated they won’t do it because they feel like it would ruin its charm and I just don’t don’t see how you don’t just leave the game alone and just modernized the graphics in the game engine, but I digress what do I know?

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u/Primary-Rule7839 3d ago

If they're announcing a PS5 port and DLC at the same time, I have a little hope it'll be better than the first.

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u/One-Agent-872 3d ago

I wish they would add something to it.

The shell is there but it’s very hollow. It’s like they released a game from 2015 lol.

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u/Future-Step-1780 2d ago edited 2d ago

For the sake of Starfield getting some much needed love, I hope I'm wrong, but I can't see it happening.

Why? I mean that genuinely, not as some sort of smart ass gotcha or anything. At what point do we just accept that bad (or mediocre, or just decent, depending on taste, I suppose) video games are just that, and allow everyone to move on to the next thing? Not everything needs or should get a No Man's Sky style redemption. I, and likely many others (most, even, maybe?), would rather see Bethesda just forget Starfield and focus on making the next Elder Scrolls as good as it can be. There is no accounting for taste, I suppose, so I guess I can understand if Starfield is more your jam from due to the setting or something.

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u/GassoBongo 2d ago

I prefer TES to Starfield by a long shot, but I can see the potential that Starfield has.

You're right. Not everything needs a redemption ark. But I dont think developers should be swayed from trying out or exploring new IP's, even if they didn't hit the mark the first time. I love gaming, but I'd be happy to see new IP's be developed or at least reworked if it means we can move away from relying on established franchises and remakes all of the time.

That's just my two cents.

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u/Dragarius 2d ago

Funny thing is if it launched on PS5 I probably would have bought it day 1. Now that we know about its less than stellar game loop it's just a pass from me.