To those who blame Todd Howard

[O'Connell]

Your argument is shallow when Howard stands behind a lot of solid titles and a lot of good years with Bethsda Softworks.

If you are looking to cast blame, then I invite you to look a little deeper at the general culture of games today and then join me in looking in the mirror.

First off, I am not enjoying this game and I harbor some distaste with Vault 76 or Fallout 76.

Look at our degenerative peers who think dying armpit hair is creative and that they should be paid for it.
In addition to lack of creativity, what more is lacking is any kind of personal accountability.

Yesterday another great talent I personally know retired from XBOX.
The great talents from the days of YORE are leaving daily.
Todd Howard will leave the game industry and you will stand up and cheer.
While talent leaving on a daily basis for retirement is not a problem,
the problem is ...
There is a shortage of creative people with work ethic.
It doesn't just impact gaming.
great screenplays reduced to Netflix, modern literature is reduced to manga porn the list can go very deep but until we take a hard look at what is wrong with us instead of opting to an easy way out we aren't going to see good material.

Or, might as well blame Donald Trump for video games sucking too. as long as we don't look at the real problem we can be angry and offended all the time as a defense and then attack everyone else.

Take aim at me all you want, because I believe I am just as culpable.

This gentleman makes better points than anyone I have met in the industry. My views aren't reflective of his but pay close attention to his remarks of "passion" about the project.

https://youtu.be/LMVQ30c7TcA

[HuffingJenkem]

You shouldn't just blame Todd, you should also blame Emil Pagliarulo. At least Todd knows he isn't a good writer.

[Jarsonne]

Originally posted by Box:

People who blame one singular factor as the source of problem are missing the point. Tons of reasons Starfield took a bump this bad

• Complete lack of design document which is a disaster move for a game of this size.

That's false, there's no global very detailed document, but they need design documents to communicate, it can't be just oral traditions.

And I doubt any game proceed as you suggest, or they are a clone of previous project eventually. Agile, prototyping, testing, adapting, that's how works modern dev, to accept it cannot be a magic mind design and just do it.

Originally posted by Box:

Todd was leading development when they were releasing hits after hits so logically he didn't just forget how to make good games. But mismanagement can affect anyone's vision.

A reminder, the procedure generated areas appeared only in mid of dev or even past it when removing the extra year requested by Microsoft.

For once the team had more ambition and took risk with a serious blueprint change and the tech/engine/budget could not fit it properly enough for most players.

It's clearly impossible that Starfield could:
- Either included like 4/5 Skyrim.
- Either has 4/5 areas 1/4 or 1/5 of Skyrim size and still work properly for exploration aspect.

Procedure generation appeared only later, so they probably initially planed something like 5 areas and try include 1.5 Skyrim so roughly each area with size of 30% of Skyrim. They realized the problem to make this content and have areas that small and still working properly. This leading to procedure generation.

Then they ended with seamless problems and decided use more loads.

Then they had to release the game despite one extra year asked by Microsoft and ended with a too small pool of POI to insert in procedure generation.

Then they realized areas procedure generated hadn't enough exploration quality but failed solve the problem better.

On start, Todd or not it's the Starfiled base idea which is wrong, it was a risk, they took it, they half succeed, half failed.