Except Emil's quest design has sucked since Oblivion.
That excuse doesn't hold water about anything in relation to Starfield. The game was originally slated to launch in 2022, before Microsoft got a hold of it and extended development by a half year and then another half year. A year's a pretty long "last minute" by my clock.
Even if Starfield had a seamless world without a single loading screen, literally nothing would have changed.
Almost all but the most self-serious RPGs have stupid shit. Baldur's Gate was THE RPG of its generation and one of its main characters is a Ranger that takes orders from a hamster. Certain gamers overestimate the medium and feel compelled to be really snobby to compensate. The point is that Emil is able to execute his ideas and follows the cardinal rule of storytelling "Don't be boring." No one seriously considers him to be the Aldous Huxley of video game storytelling, don't worry.
Emil sucked when he was a game urinalist, he sucked when he worked on Thief 2, the ESG sequel to a great game, now with not just women and niggers injected, but shit level design by Emil. Everything he ever wrote sucked.
Lead writer of Fallout 4 btw.
NO!
But does it mean the full work force has been busy during all these years? Hopefully that 7 year figure is just part of the building of hype, while in reality most of the work was done in a few months. Or maybe lots time is wasted due to lack of direction.
What I'm more curious about is the headcount. Everyone knows staffing up is a case of diminishing returns, especially across distinct locations, but these numbers are pushing it. Per the PC Gamer piece, Skyrim was around 100 people, Fallout 4 at 150, Starfield's over 500... Even accounting for higher labour demands in the visuals department, is Starfield at least twice as large as Fallout 4 in terms of playable content? And I'm talking about bespoke, handcrafted designs excluding the proc-gen crap, the whole (often misguided) idea behind proc-gen is to create more content with less labour.
As someone that isn't opposed to procgen/radiant content what baffles me is how underutilized that stuff is. Prior to release there was some fear that the content would be stretched too thin and I was pretty adamant that wouldn't be the case because I naively assumed they would use some of the tricks from their previous games:
I'm in the same boat. Prior to the game's release, I actually said that "what Bethesda do well, they do very well" precisely in relation to how they've blended and rotated procedural content into a handcrafted open world, with consistent improvements from Oblivion through Skyrim and Fallout 4. But all I've seen about Starfield seems to indicate that suddenly fell out their backside.
Ship modules. They're by far the highest quality assets in the game and there's a lot of them.
They had this up until they cut it within a year of release. Helium-3 was supposed to be a major mechanic and the primary reason to construct Outposts was for refueling.
