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submitted 1 year ago by alyaza@beehaw.org to c/gaming@beehaw.org

apparently this is in response to a few threads on Reddit flaming Starfield—in general, it's been rather interesting to see Bethesda take what i can only describe as a "try to debate Starfield to popularity" approach with the game's skeptics in the past month or two. not entirely sure it's a winning strategy, personally.

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[-] t3rmit3@beehaw.org 130 points 1 year ago

Yeah, I can imagine the frustration of seeing people who don't know anything about what happened during development blame you as a dev for something that may have been design decisions or budgetary or time constraints that you had no say in or control over.

"So sure, you can dislike parts of a game," he concludes. "You can hate on a game entirely. But don't fool yourself into thinking you know why it is the way it is (unless it's somehow documented and verified), or how it got to be that way (good or bad)."

"Chances are, unless you've made a game yourself, you don't know who made certain decisions; who did specific work; how many people were actually available to do that work; any time challenges faced; or how often you had to overcome technology itself (this one is HUGE)."

This is a totally fair take. He explicitly says it's fine to not like the game, but just don't try to pretend you know what happened on the back end to make it the way it was, because you're probably gonna misplace blame.

[-] habanhero@lemmy.ca 46 points 1 year ago

You know what an even better take is? "We hear you, we'll take your feedback" or just as good, say nothing at all.

Arguing that you are smarter or wiser than your users / customers is paradoxical. You are by definition not smart if you attempt to do this.

[-] peter@feddit.uk 27 points 1 year ago

This is why we only ever get PR responses to anything that happens instead of actual information or explanations.

[-] rgb3x3@beehaw.org 19 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

It's better than arguing with the customer.

Simple explanations like "we felt we were under X constraints" or "our engine didn't handle the loading times as well as we had hoped" would be just fine.

Instead, they just seem to be telling the players they're wrong for disagreeing with many of the design decisions made

[-] t3rmit3@beehaw.org 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Where did he say he was smarter or wiser? I must have missed that quote.

[-] gamermanh@lemmy.dbzer0.com 23 points 1 year ago

Emil Pagliarulo (guy quoted in the article), lead on Starfield, is known to have this attitude towards players. He's also known to not like design documents, which explains the massively disconnected design of recent Bethesda games, especially Starfield.

Emil is one of the giant reasons their games have been the way they have been lately and it's why he's being a baby about it

[-] skulblaka@kbin.social 7 points 1 year ago

This particular dev didn't. But the Starfield team at large has been blowing up the internet recently telling people that don't like the game that their opinions are wrong.

[-] AndrasKrigare@beehaw.org 8 points 1 year ago

I was assuming this was a quote from an interview with a leading question like "what do you think about players who claim to know what went wrong in the development of Starfield?" And the quote was out of context to make him look bad.

But this was a Twitter thread. It's a completely unforced error, no one was making him do this.

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this post was submitted on 15 Dec 2023
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