““We were finally at a state in the project where we could play through the whole [game]. And it became very clear that we were missing the large final location that was going to tie the story together and have a satisfying action-filled payoff,” Shen said. “I was both implementing the main quest and leading the quest design team, so I had absolutely no time. The entire quest design team was already overbooked.””
The quest design team being overbooked and not having time certainly explains a lot.
Starfield was in development for 7 years, which seems like a fair bit of time to figure out main storylines etc. Baldur’s Gate 3 is said to have taken 6 years to make. Did Bethesda only hire the quest design team in the last year or something?
That’s, oddly, a common feature of modern production. Narrative still plays second fiddle to mechanics.
Which, in this case is doubly weird since the mechanics have existed since the age of Skyrim.
That was the satisfying ending? The ending was stupid. I had to ask to make sure that really was the ending. And now, I just get to keep going? What a ripoff.
I think the “just keep going” was a Tod Howard demand, his ideal game is a LLM that generates endless radiant quests. Generated content has been a hallmark of everything he’s touched, and it’s always a low-point in that game because he expects it to stand by itself, instead of using it as a tool for the designers to build off of.
Tod doesnt want a game.
He just wants an AI sandbox that he can churn out endlessly, make shittons of money with, with little expense or effort
The worst part is that it’s the opposite of effortless, imagine what they could have with 8 years of designing a deep, rich world with compelling stories, 8 years of adding whatever features seem cool. Instead we get an endless expanse with the depth of a puddle.
My biggest issue with starfield is that it ended there. Like literally right when it got good imo. Imagine if they continued on and you did the whole time traveling thing with a dedicated story instead of just a new game+ thing. Not super original, but definitely would’ve been better than what we got.
Am I the only one that liked the ending? Maybe I just set the bar low after the endings in Fallout 3, 4, and Skyrim, but I thought it was well above any of those three. I felt like the game book-ended well: solid start and finish.
Almost everything else in between? Yeah, they obviously didn’t flesh out the story much.
Jesus people give this Bethesda company a break, they’re a brand new indie company. They have like 3 employees and this is their first game, it’s not like they have decades of experience to judge how much time designing a story could take or what issues might pop up. That’s shit you’d expect from a AAA company.
You’d think that the main quest line was one of the very first things that they’d design. Like, before they even started coding. Not something they’d rush at the very end of development.
I don’t want a long time. I want a good time.
That’s why radiant quests are rubbish and crafted storylines are the thing.
