Customer: I didn’t like the taste of this cake.
Management response: Dear customer, thank you for taking the time to try our cake. This is a cake, which is sweet and tasty by definition. We made the cake so customers can enjoy the cake and taste the typical cake ingredients which taste sweet and tasty. The cake experience as we created should appeal to everyone because cake is tasty.
Customer: Wtf, it tastes like wet socks!
Management: Cake
Customer: Hey there, customer outreach person; how does it feel to repeat yourself over and over again?
Management response: As a large-language model, I am unable to experience feelings the way humans do. Moreover…
You’re enjoying the cake wrong, it’s supposed to taste like shit
Just wait until some suckers make you a better cake for free.
The cake is a lie
“When the astronauts went to the moon, there was nothing there. They certainly weren’t bored."
Yeah I think that might be because they were on the moon and not pressing WASD to walk around a fake moon
If you landed in an in-game fake moon it would be a wonderfully interesting plot thread.
I wish these idiots would quit trying to tell the people playing the game that they are wrong for not liking it. Like, no man, listen to them, this is feedback. You can’t take all of it without a pinch of salt but if you see a common theme, then you should address it.
Some of Starfield’s planets are meant to be empty by design — but that’s not boring. “When the astronauts went to the moon, there was nothing there. They certainly weren’t bored." The intention of Starfield’s exploration is to evoke a feeling of smallness in players and make you feel overwhelmed.
May as well boot up SpaceEngine then.
It really evoked a feeling of smallness in me. Namely how small and devoid of content the universe feels.
This is made worse because every inhabited planet I go to has some elaborate situation just waiting for me to solve it. For example: I land on the landing pad, walk 30 meters through a gate and am greeted by a hostage situation in a bank where the hostage negotiator is going to let me, some random, go do his job instead of him, trusting me with the lives of everyone involved without even blinking.
Good job, guys, I’m sure that’ll fix it.
Fuck. I mean I even liked Starfield but this level of mishandling the public perception is absolutely unreal.
Honestly, this behavior of responding to player feedback and arguing about how “it’s just because you didn’t play the game right!” is kinda unhinged.
It also, to me, really takes Bethesda’s mask off and reveals what their culture must be as a company. Based on these responses, they seem so convinced that they shit gold that they’ve stopped entertaining feedback or trying to innovate much in their games much at all. Kinda confirms some of the criticism I’ve seen of them since Fallout 4 and 76 came out.
It seems to me like someone in the PR department decided they needed to “try something new,” and then didn’t actually run the idea by anyone who could say this is a stupid plan. Someone on the community management team got a promotion and thought it was time to make a bold move, and they were absolutely wrong.
Unreal 5?
Landing on the boring planets wasn’t my problem with the boring game.
The ground combat was terrible. The space flight was terrible. The space combat was terrible. And it was wedged into every activity for no reason other than lazy design to pad things.
And then there was the UI…
You can’t “feel small” when the game makes you a fiddly murder hobo in the tutorial.
amid Starfield’s ‘mixed’ user review rating of 69%.
Nice.
There may in fact be a few games where empty spaces and a sense of vastness actually contribute to the atmosphere and make for an enjoyable game. But NOT in a game that’s divided by fucking loading screens with not a single “vista” to look out at.
Hey surprise surprise a soulless corporation does soulless corporation things.
This doesn’t read soulless corporation to me. This reads Todd Howard’s bruised ego. He’s one of the directors of the whole studio after all, and could very well be behind this decision.
Slow news day, eh IGN?
Amusing that the article gets the response of the first review wrong.
The negative review doesn’t only mention that the empty planets are boring, but that the populated ones are the same locations over and over again.
I didn’t know Johnathan Blow worked for Bethesda.
… I liked it
No Man’s Sky has had no loading screens during gameplay, and space to planet transitions on full planets, since what… 2016?
The Creation Engine is just too damn old.
Edit @Dark Arc: You’re right. Creation Engine is just too damn shitty, I guess. I called it “old” because the gameplay feels so antiquated.
Bethesda games are always boring trash. The real game won’t even appear for another year or two at least (after the modders have finished fixing all the bugs, the horrible writing, the design flaws).
