It might not be the right thing to say publicly, but it’s absolutely something they should be concerned about internally. It’s fucking astonishing how many man hours went into Starfield for such a hollow final product.
Yeah with how starfield turned out this isn’t the right thing to say imo. Nobody wants these games rushed out. Bethesda games were made with love and care, once.
What does that even mean? Do they plan to make shorter games on the same old engine?
What would those external developers do? A Skyrim sidescrolling roguelite?
Yeah I don’t understand these pushes for “switch to another engine” without defending monopolization in game engine industry. I don’t understand it even more do these years, when we are not praising or criticizing the graphics much and just want more intricately-written RPG games. Hell, even Bethesda must have broken their own expectations with how few bugs there have been in Starfield, which they are infamous for.
Even with the underlying mechanics, Unreal, for example, doesn’t produce many games with any other feeling than the base, rather rigid processing that is fortunately not much janky, for now.
Plus I don’t think that there current engine is broken beyond fixing. It does some funny things on occasion, but (from what I’ve seen) it mostly has to do with edge cases allowing objects to overlap and then how it tries to resolve that when it detects it. It’s possible that some minor changes could fix it.
Imagine if they made a deal with Larian to make another installment in the franchise (not Fallout 5, just something like New Vegas by Obsidian). How cool would that be? They specialize in turn-based, top-down RPGs and would fit perfectly.
I know Larian also takes time to polish their games but if they started now and Bethesda some time after, then we would have two very distinct Fallout games with possibly not too much break between them.
Todd Howard has said Bethesda is working on solutions to shorten the length of time between its game releases.
Get capital, spend capital to hire people, do work on games in parallel instead of serial?
I don’t care how long they take on a single game – I mean, that just translates into a higher purchase price, and I’m getting a pretty good return in terms of gameplay hours from their stuff per dollar. However, the fact that getting the next game in a series requires waiting for a huge game pipeline to clear is a pain.
Long development time per game is still a problem. It means they’re less reactive to things in the industry like new innovations or what players actually want, it means that the people who finish a project are not the ones who started it, and it means that devs get burnt out working on fewer projects by the ends of their careers with less to show for it. I’m of the opinion that dev times need to work their way back to 3 years or so. Morrowind to Oblivion to Fallout 3 to Skyrim was such a better pace compared to what Bethesda put out since.
Maybe, but I’d sooner expect the problem to be remedied by just making games smaller. Starfield had 1000 planets, but it would have been better off if it only had 5, and we know this because The Outer Worlds exists. Lots of other games are open world now that really shouldn’t be and would have better off it they were just a list of missions that you could select from a menu.
I would actually like that. I have found that now I enjoy smaller games a lot more than big ones, but I don’t see this happening any time soon. Publishers want you playing their games longer and longer, so that they can sell you cosmetics and other micro transactions. Also, when advertising, 1000 planets sounds more impactful than 5 planets.
Yeah AI sucks but could you imagine they take advantage of it in a good way? Like full conversations with NPCs either by voice or keyboard input. Give a NPC a personality and provide what information they know and it’s the player that needs to interrogate them and get the info out of the NPC. They don’t need to give them a full AI but like if you want to play as a charming hunk you could sweet talk the NPC or if you are a brute you could threaten them and get responses based on exactly what you said.
Additionally they could add a AI level difficulty where the mobs could adapt. Tell the mobs to survive at any cost.
Could maybe make a mod that bridges Skyrim to something like KoboldAI.
I don’t think that we’re there yet in reasonable performance terms, though. Or technically.
And I’m not sold that there’s enough of a corpus of text to work with for even the existing mechanisms to chew on. Like, I can make an LLM that generates text that sounds like everyday American English because I have a huge corpus of that to train on. But I don’t have a huge corpus of text of what, say, a elven archer sounds like.
I have AMD’s RX 7900 XT. Even when that thing is doing zero 3D work, as it would likely be doing in a game, existing software doesn’t permit for convincing text generation in real-time.
Unless you want to exclude them, console players don’t have a great text input mechanism. Well, I think that they can use Bluetooth keyboards, but I’d bet that only a tiny portion of people have those set up.
And I’m not sure that existing AI techniques are necessarily great at producing interesting content. Procedural content in games historically has often felt kind of flat and samish – the fact that your game has 65,535 procedurally-generated star systems isn’t the same as having them hand-crafted, not yet at any rate. Starfield caught criticism because the procedural content didn’t feel that interesting.
Like, I agree that technically, the ability to converse as a human does would be pretty potentially neat. But I think that we’re not at the point, either from a hardware or software standpoint, where that’s ready.
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