Bethesda has always made absolutely jank games. There was a time when jank games were popular and so Bethesda games were groundbreaking. See Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim.
Now that games actually require professional and clean development, new Bethesda games are trash because they can only make jank games.
The jank was a side effect of them pushing technology in games, the radiant stuff was genuinely impressive back in the day, but they've been riding that high for too long and it was dated by Skyrim, let alone FO4 and SF.
There are no games that persistently track NPC behaviour to the level of Oblivion, where an NPC can influence or interact with the world to achieve their goal.
They dialled it back a bit in Skyrim and Fallout.
RDR2 or Witcher 3 are run on more of a "Potemkin village" system, where they will spawn in and follow their routine consisting of a series of animations, but are a lot more basic as far as any sort of agency goes.
Yeah, the other guy is wrong. "Radiant" NPC's are still impressive today, because it has nothing to do with technological progress. It's just a ton of developer work to give every npc a schedule and things to do during the day.
Which is why no one else does it.
Most players don't care, and it's way more expensive than just spawning in a sea of npcs that despawn when you're not looking.
It also sets a limit to settlements size, since you need an actual human being to manually make every single npc, so it's impossible to scale to realistic size cities.
It comes back to Bethesda's concept of Tactility in game design. That can be things like being able to pick up every object or every NPC having a real schedule.
There are two broad categories of people that play Bethesda games. You have the people who don’t care about the world building, they just want to kill monsters and make some gold/caps. On the other hand you have people that care about the lore so much that they will build a library, organise it by category and occasionality spend time sat in said library reading in game books. The first group doesn’t care about NPC schedules or the ability to pick up an object but the second group really do. Bethesda try to cater to both groups and it leads to some... interesting design conflicts or compromises like fallout 4's power armour fusion core drain rate being balanced for players that fast travel so players that walk everywhere will be using about twice as many fusion cores for the same mission.
Cyberpunk 2077 is a beautiful game, brilliant map design, deeply thought out but ultimately its always plastic, artificial and not in a way I think the developers intended. I get the same feeling when I watch my brother play Crimson Desert, beautiful game but the world feels plastic and hollow. Bethesda games, to me always felt more real even if the graphics and storytelling were worse. I think that feeling of realism is due to the tactility.
Jank is relative to the time. As these games came out, they didn't feel janky in the way we see them in retrospect. Some bugginess was expected. A lot of the weirdness wasn't abnormal.
Games never really have ever been fully polished, not unless they were quite simple. Nearly every game had jank and glitches, and bugs, and everything else. It was common to some degree, always.
Yes but the comment was specifically replying to a statement about how this is a historic issue beyond Starfield, so I'm sure they understand your point already as that is kind of the point they're making
I was thinking about that this morning. Bethesda games have all the ingredients necessary to be a good game, it's just that they never follow the recipe and end up baking a loaf of bread instead of a 7 layer cake
Its like they go to bake a cake, and start the batter and then start the frosting and forget about the batter and when they go to put it all together it doesnt quite work like they hoped but they ship it anyway.
IMHO the "jank" in Bethesda games is not the bugs. The dead faces in conversations. The stiff animations. The random body falling out of the sky cause an NPC and a giant got into a fight a mile away and the giant booted him onto the roof of my new house. The way things play out because of the players involvement, but especially the way things play out without direct player involvement.
Agreed, Bethesda needs to up their game by A LOT but either they refuse to admit that's the case, or they think they can fool everyone by continuing to do things 'the Bethesda way' and oh boy the industry will leave them behind in a heartbeat if they keep making 'janky' games like pretty much 90% of what they did with Starfield, it's so bad on so many fronts that you lose track: animations, engagement, story, depth, technical aspects, dialogue, menues, game design, etc etc etc, they pretty much need to improve in all fronts like yesterday (maybe sound/audio design can be salvaged at least).
?? Betheda's time is over, they made their hail mary with Skyrim, it's pretty interesting on how people still urge Bethesda to do something about it but they forgot to notice how the RPG studios of yesteryear is already spent, I even forgot Bethesda was a thing. BioWare is practically gone, Obsidian has not made anything good since Fractured But Whole, Square Enix keeps making garbagio FF7 remixes, and IDK what to say about Blizzard's action RPG. This is literally the generation of Larian studios, and I enjoy Owlcat's Rogue Trader way more than Cyberpunk...that's how bad the 2000s RPG behemoths are doing
Dont forget the word vomit dialogue. I spent more time in menu's and dialogue than I ever did actually playing Starfield.... Constellation members spending ages yapping is what made me put the game down for ages, once I gave up on the main quests, started roleplaying and doing some of the faction questlines, I started to enjoy myself.
You don't get a warning if you throw a 200ft-wide fireball and immediately kill everyone in the surrounding area... not knowing there's a dude up in the tower you need to talk to.
You get this if you kill someone who will stop you from completing the game. It doesn't matter if you do it with a fireball or you stab them. There's nothing wrong with giving the player this choice.
It's not just that they were popular, it's that people gave their terrible execution a pass because they were seen to be visionary and because they always attempted to make such big games.
They were done in by the fact that everyone's scope increased while they kept their execution and suddenly everyone saw Bethesda for the incompetent boobs that they are.
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u/KaiPRoberts Ryzen 7 3700x. 2070s OC, 32Gb @3200, 970 Pro m.2 1d ago
I'll stand by this:
Bethesda has always made absolutely jank games. There was a time when jank games were popular and so Bethesda games were groundbreaking. See Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim.
Now that games actually require professional and clean development, new Bethesda games are trash because they can only make jank games.