No.
Baldur’s Gate 3 is simply better than Starfield.
Starfield came out ruined.
Exactly. It ruined itself out of the gate.
Out of the Baldur’s Gate!
Ba dum-tss!
I disagree with this thesis.
The people that make the games are what matter, the labourers. The problem at bethesda isn’t just “wrong decisions” it’s the people themselves, because in order to make the “correct decisions” you have to have a different ideology.
The kinds of people who make the decisions “let’s make thousands of planets and have literally all of them be completely randomly generated in an ultra-lazy way except for these key landmarks” are making that decision because they’re the same kinds of people that believe randomly generated ai art is the future. They believe in crypto and pods and all sorts of techbro shite.
So what do these teams full of this ideology produce? Utter slop. The sloppiest slop ever. They think “people will love slop if we just make A LOT of slop”. They’re ideologically inclined to make mediocre shit and believe if the mediocre shit is just a huge, enormous, massive pile of shit then it has more value.
This isn’t something you can correct with telling them “make the correct decisions”. They are ideologically inclined to this decision and will not correct it. The wrong people are in the team. Every single person that cared about making anything good left Bethesda long ago.
I think Bethesda devs have been asking for a new game engine for a decade now, the leadership just doesn’t want to invest in that
You vastly overestimate the amount of agency developers have. They get told what to do by the higher ups and that’s it. Though ideology is very much the cause for the extremely boring and bland factions. Cowboy capitalists vs technocratic capitalists, with basically no interesting backstory.
I don’t overestimate it. The issue is that the company has been this way for more than a decade. Everyone lower down that had any creative beliefs left it a long long time ago. The whole company top to bottom will be absolutely filled with these sycophants. The people working in skilled industries that actually stay in a company like this are ideological true believers or they’re so hopelessly ignorant and naive that they can’t realise how pointless it is, but even those people give up after just a couple years in such teams.
I’ve seen entire projects sink because corporate sycophants make their way to the top. Often talentless, couldn’t even open an IDE let alone tell you anything useful about their development cycle kinda people end up running the show. The real creatives often get turned away and the posers rise. They buy the big lie and redistribute it for profit. They are retail sellers of big lies.
This isn’t something new to the game industry. It just seems like they’re getting away with it more often.
True but I reckon that the devs are several levels away from the ones who call the shots and do the actual game design in AAA studios. Even they are probably dependant on what marketing tells them. That would explain why most of them are copy paste formulaic games with no focus on quality, except when it comes to microtransactions and paid DLCs.
For contrast, here is a reddit nerd tackling a similar problem where they write a thousand word essay without mentioning ideology even once: https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/18rfwjx/why_are_bethesdas_modern_games_so_bland/
I absolutely loathed reading that.
This is why I fucking hate engineers. Everything in this is “it can be fixed by changing x system to y system”.
No it fucking can’t, because the CONTENT being written is still the fucking same no matter what systems you change. You can’t fix Starfield without completely rewriting it, because the ideology of the douchebags that wrote it is wrong and it’ll still be wrong when they try again.
No you don’t get it Starfield charcters have personalities like a damp towel because of the fast travel and inventory systems
BG3 didn’t ruin shit. As Pluto stated, it’s just better than all of the games listed above.
Y’know, games that are broken, boring, half-baked and half-assed mess, all coming from AAA devs.
Haven’t watched the video, not even gonna get into the larger argument although I think I disagree
Starfield shouldn’t even be included here, it’s dogshit in a vacuum, you don’t need something as good as BG3 to compare it to to say it’s bad. In a world where the only video games that exist are Skyrim and Fallout, Starfield is still a dogshit game.
And part of why I think that is BG3 absolutely didn’t ruin Spider-Man 2. Spider-Man 2 was great, I enjoyed every minute I spent playing it. I’m about to 100% it.
Is it quite the masterpiece BG3 is? No. But that’s fine, it doesn’t need to be. It was still very fun.
you don’t need something as good as BG3 to compare it to to say it’s bad
But it brings the differences into much sharper relief. I can at least watch a few gameplay trailers and Let’s Play videos, then get hyped enough to go out and by Starfield. But if everyone is fixated laser-like on BG3 because there’s SO MUCH MORE content and gameplay and clever permutations on the current fad to explore… Starfield gives me nothing to work with. I can spend 100 hours churning out BG3 content easy.
More than the experience of play itself, I think BG3 lends to the streamer demographic and their audience.
