Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Starfield is lame - Bg3 is going to win GOTY - Taking bets.

7 years of development.



Oblivion tier of 'NPC stuck in swimming action' at 2:36 with 'NPC stuck in climbing ladder animation' found.

Lawd, and not much later, 'NPC stuck in spacewalk animation' can be found as well.

Well that's Steam not metacritic I was referring to above, and we looked at a cross section of reviews on metacritic and they were not review bombs - they were mostly given mid range scores, not 0's. Bethesduh claimed they were being bombed without evidence -if you are going to carry their water for them you should at least ask for a salary.

To me this is a fascinating deconstruction of how these companies use marketing dollars to tip the scales - and how effective that actually is.

I wasn't carrying their water.

I just don't decide what's good or bad based on other people's opinions.

I’m not going to reread through the comments, but I don’t think anybody has said Starfield has a low score, ergo this should dictate anybody else’s opinion.

The conversation is about the reception of the game, which has been surprisingly mixed, to say the least.

I looked at the user reviews and it does not seem the game is getting review bombed. It’s not a lot of 0/10 scores, it’s 4 - 6 scores from people who seem genuinely disappointed by Bethesda’s lack of creative ambition and poor decision making.

Sure

Either way if you bring review scores into the argument to back up why you think a game is good or bad you are relying on other people's opinions.

And some people are review bombing. Happens to a lot of games.

A PS5 owner wanted a God of War developer fired for playing Starfield.

I'm not even sure that this deserves a 6/10 tbh:



Spaceship takes off, player character clips and falls out of it being stranded behind. The game literally barely works.

No, citing review scores isn’t relying on people’s opinions, it’s talking about people’s opinions.

And some irrational, console war review bombing is happening, sure, but most of the negative reviews I’ve seen are not that. It’s just genuinely disappointed players.

The big takeaway is that innovation and evolution matters. A game type should evolve with the times and seek to improve upon itself. Bethesda has made the same game for the last decade and a half. The same goes for Ubisoft, Activision-Blizzard, and many companies under the EA umbrella. Also, animation is as important for lifelike immersion as graphics. Finally, to reiterate a prior point, people like seamless exploration and hate loading screens, unless such loading screens are absolutely necessary and precede meaningful content.

Starfield does not seem to be a bad game. It seems to be the same game people have grown sick of playing for the last decade, and one which adds problems that prior Bethesda games did not have, like loading screens as prerequisites to exploration, and lifeless procedurally generated planets with same-feeling exploration and no sensation of feeling lived-in or alive. If I had to describe the response, I would not use terms like "bad game" or "review-bombed," actually. I would say Bethesda is being punished for its complacency and apparent out-of-touch perspective in its creative process. A large cohort of players who previously viewed Bethesda as a forefront innovator are now perceiving its products as repetitive, low-hanging fruit bordering on the mass production of a preexisting template. The players are experiencing a rude awakening.

A lot of this thread still has limited utility to Larian, however, as they do not make Bethesda-type games. Larian games do not focus on immersing the player in a new world that unfolds before them in whatever direction they travel, allowing the player to become anything or anyone and go anywhere for any reason. It would certainly be interesting for Larian to try to produce such a game while incorporating what they've done in BG3, but I would expect something on a much smaller, denser scale.

My main questions right now follow:
1. Is Starfield truly underperforming? If so, is it for the reasons I think it is underperforming?
2. What are the long-term consequences of this relatively poor performance for Bethesda and other RPG studios?
3. What does the answer to the above two questions have to do with Larian?
4. How do we want developers like Larian and Bethesda to evolve their games?

I don't know. When it comes to other people's opinions or reviews it always seems like people bring them into an argument when the scores back up their opinions.

And I do know that the majority of the reviews might be legitimate. But as long as people are allowed to post reviews on metacritic without actually playing the game I will disregard the metacritic user review score.

Well for starters simply reusing the same engine they made for TES 4 with slightly better graphics each time feels like lazy development.

What was groundbreaking all the way back then no longer is in 2023. If at least the AI issues which is the no.1 problem with beshesda games was ironed out, that alone would make the games feel a lot more immersive.

We not only have all the same bugs in every Bethesda game, but the same outdated NPC movements and animations, which just make the whole gameplay feel like one giant meme.

I don't know, there's a reason I don't pay attention to outrage clips like this: Every game has bugs. There have been multiple instances in BG3 where I could have recorded game-crashing bugs or bugs that required a reload and then used it to go "WHOA IT BARELY WORKS!" Except that would be total nonsense, the game works a majority of the time.

Um. I have genuinely no idea what Starfield is. Hasnt come across my radar.

But yes BG3 is probably the best game I've played in my life. It finally put Baldurs Gate 2: Shadows of Amn (2000) and Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines (2004) into their place. Didnt expected that to ever happen anymore.

I would have already been very happy about a game that archieved just 50% of the fun I had with BG2.

Again I'm not defending Starfield or anything, but the bugs that have been in all of their games were ultimately fixed. And those games, at least the last four releases, won Game of the Year. I don't think Starfield will win though.

And speaking of bugs and technical issues, while I haven't experienced anything major or game breaking, if you look at the technical issues subforum here a lot of people have issues with this game. One minor issue I experienced was during the coin flipping scene with Mattis where my right arm wouldn't stop moving. Just looks funny.

This really cuts to the heart of the matter.

1. Is Starfield truly underperforming? If so, is it for the reasons I think it is underperforming?

The figure that bethesda keeps touting is "6 million" copies sold - and that it is "outperforming Skyrim" when it launched. Lets go ahead and use that number - despite qualms as to its accuracy.

The GLOBAL video game market was 65 Billion in 2011 when Skyrim came out. The video game market in 2022 -the last year we have figures for - was 183 Billion globally.

Skyrim sold 7 Million units the first week it was shipped.

Conclusion: Starfield is VASTLY underperforming in the 2023 game market and comparing it to Skyrim is just nonsense. Skyrim was much more successful compared to the size of the market.


2. What are the long-term consequences of this relatively poor performance for Bethesda and other RPG studios?

Everyone who has a decent amount of business acumen will see that Starfield is getting torn to pieces despite Microsoft/Bethesda spending as much as a theatrical movie release on marketing. I doubt the game is even profitable yet and Todd can't hide this failure with his perma-press smile and pathological optimism. If Microsoft doesn't gut Bethesda and make major changes in the next year or two I will be shocked. This is such a monumental failure that it really can't be ignored.

MOST of the major studios are going to try to ignore that the market has changed. Some, like Blizzard, will likely continue to churn out trash that people will buy - Diablo was successful despite being a terrible game with really bad monetization. The smaller studios are paying careful attention and with Studios like Larian and FromSoftware out there getting major props it's got to hurt them to watch GOTY getting passed to better studios that have less resources.

3. What does the answer to the above two questions have to do with Larian?

Larian is at a crossroads right now. Most people don't see it but I don't think the WOTC partnership worked out very well. I put this 100% on WOTC, Hasbro is the kind of company that is too capitalistic in it's guiding ideologies and I am 100% sure they are the reason we don't have more robust mod tools.

This is unfortunate because if WOTC/Hasbro just relaxed a bit on the need to control 3rd party use of their license they could really open up the D&D CRPG market with exclusive titles and free marketing from adoring fans. They seem to be intentionally ignoring how D&D gets marketed to new players - and that is mostly through third party creators, word of mouth and use of the platform in media and at events. Shit, Harmontown alone probably brought in tens of thousands of new players and that is one niche media thing that Dan Harmon does for shits and giggles. Critical Role has probably brought in hundreds of thousands.

I really don't want Larian going back to the Divinity ruleset, because I think it's not as good as the 5e system. There is no reason that a story can't be adapted to any ruleset or world - for the most part. So we will have to see what happens there.

BG3 has been WOTC's biggest success in a string of failures and they need to pay attention to that - I support Larian holding the line though on the 3rd party stuff.

4. How do we want developers like Larian and Bethesda to evolve their games?

Bethesda needs to be stripped down to its core, they need to purge the salespeople from the executive, get the creative people back in charge and maybe show Todd his retirement package. Then they might be able to start really creating new games. Bethesda needs to deliver a better core product for their modders to build on and do more to incorporate great mods into the core platform. 4 Editions of Skyrim and they never did this - managing a package of 40-60 mods is a goddamn nightmare and it shouldn't be a requirement to enjoy the game.

Larian needs to hold to their values and not blink. If we need to go back to Divinity before WOTC wakes up to the opportunity they have then so be it.

Bethesda has never said 6 million copies sold. It’s 6 million players, including game pass. All we can glean from this is they have sold less than 6 million copies, though we don’t know the exact number. Still, Starfield is dominating the sales charts, so it’s still doing well. How well isn’t known, but I don’t have any doubt that it will be sufficiently profitable over its lifetime. Even that dumpster fire of Cyberpunk was very successful. Marketing is sometimes more important than building your game.

As of this second, BG3 is ahead of Starfield on Global Steam sellers at #2 behind CSGO. Either BG3 is performing at top tier AAA level, or Starfield is performing poorly on Steam.

But that 6 million number wasn't "first week" sales. I don't even think starfield has been out for a week. That 6 million number came after like, a day or two.

As for the rest of your post, I mean look. It seems to me like a lot of people are really INVESTED in the idea Starfield must fail. Like, they WANT the outcome to be that it fails, independent of what the actual facts are, and often in spite of not having actually played the game themselves. It honestly seems very strange to me. I DON'T actually see any evidence that Starfield is getting torn to pieces. I think we're probably going to need to wait more than a week from release to let the dust settle and see how it actually does.

I also think you've got an odd idea of what Larian is going to do. BG3 was never a "let's transition to using DnD rules from now on" proposition or a "We're just going to make DnD games from now on" proposition. I fully expect they'll move back to their own custom systems after this. I also think you are giving Larian way too much credit. The beginning of this game is very fun and polished. The end of this game is untested, the combat falls apart, has awful writing, and is buggy in a way that would *never in a thousand years* be forgiven if a larger studio released a game in the same state. Larian did not set some grand example with BG3. It has some very fun highs, but this is the game that actually convinced me to never buy a Larian game on release ever again. They too consistently drop the ball on the second half of their games.

Oh, crap! Everybody scramble, quick, the mods are here!

What? Where? I need a hiding place!

It's 2023, this year has been abysmal for games. I not seen anything I was super excited from since 2016. Winning goty means Jack diddle squat, when all the other games this year are wet turds with some polished sprinkles.