The bar is set so low for new games, especially AAA games, that "being concerned" is just the default for me now. I've been conned out of my money one too many times with exciting looking games so I temper my expectations because there's a good chance that it's not going to live up to the hype. What a time to be alive.

After cyberpunk I’m skeptical about every new game that comes

im really worried that they're going to do the bare minimum and let the modding community figure the rest out. While I do love how much freedom they give the community, it seems they might offload some of the backend onto them aswell. Im personally excited to get a UFO mod, mobbin the galaxy in a flying saucer or maybe the infamous Tic Tac is my dream

Looking forward to the performance mods for the game. Also looking forward to explore the red planet, the blue planet, the yellow planet, the black planet, the green planet, the planet with more rocks, the planet with less rocks, the planet with no rocks...

I really don't know why games think they have to go soo big. Denser, well designed, varied, and bug free planets would be fine. How about starting small with 10 planets and a great story and then expanding with quality dlc. Of the core game is good, people will come back for more.

For me, the graphics don’t matter as much as attention to detail, good characters and good story writing. As well as interesting places

I have alot of concerns but among them the main one is this: Goldilocks planets are the few smaller but mostly handcrafted, larger planets are common and mostly procedurally generated. Theyll inevitably have to reuse assets multiple times, this could kill the game sense of mystery and the unticment to explore any of it after the first few. Having 1000 planets sounds like a pretty great tag-line and idea, but a very poor concept. Imagine a field of stars with no desire to reach any of them...

I still want to know who on the dev team thought a square pop up, dead center on your screen EVERY time you get the tiniest amount of exp was a good idea. Let's do minimal HUD but put a block right in the middle!

I'm fully expecting the following to happen: 1. At least one more delay, probably two (when all is said and done, game will release in Holiday season next year) -- and STILL will be plagued with bugs, like BGS games ALWAYS are 2. Something substantial WILL be cut (could be anything from: space combat gets cut and your ship becomes nothing more than a glorified loading screen between planets; the final number of explorable planets is significantly reduced; an entire faction gets cut from the story; etc etc etc) 3. Creation Club -- or some incarnation of it, will darken the horizon

I just expect to land on every planet turn 360 degrees and that’s pretty much going to be the expectation for the rest of the planet. Planets have biomes, and even barren planets have landmarks. This feels like it’s going to be a quantity over quality experience

What i noticed and worried me was when in the gameplay reveal when the player and robot land and the robot exits the spaceship first, as the robot walks it doesn't leave any kind of footprint on the surface whatsoever... Just the first thing that stood out for me.

I was really hoping for them to make only 1 or maybe 2 systems with like 10-15 planets but very well crafted and a lot if things to do. The 1000 planet thing only adds to my concern of empty planets to build on and mine recourses to build settlements and ships and I honestly couldnt care less for mining and crafting stuff aside from gear in RPG games. Also i’ve been saying that the planets look boring and bland ever since the gameplay showcase and people somehow didnt care.

I actually enjoy some empty space. Skyrim always felt like it didn't have enough farms to support its towns, its thriving towns didn't have enough space to give their grandiose heritage justice, the seven thousand steps to the throat of the world felt like a casual Sunday jaunt. Everything felt compressed and not like a living breathing world, and it really pulled from the immersion. I always hold that in a good rpg or fantasy movie, the world should make the player feel small, not the other way around.

One thing I can think of that would make the vast open empty worlds a good thing would be that it could allow modders to create their own world without having to worry about overwriting existing locations

I get the feeling that we won't have the same level of NPC depth we had in previous games. Like, NPCs had a daily routine, job, relationships, etc. I bet in Starfield they will just populate them with filler NPCs as you show up to each location and if you follow one for a full day periood he will probably be walking around in circles around the player 24/7

I really hope they have a fair number of more survival focused barren planets and landscape where you can just go and collect resources, and fight and survive, take in the scenery, and not just fill them all up with randomly generated content.

There is only ONE rule I follow when it comes to video games: 1. Don't preorder. No matter how hyped you are. No matter how many benefits they offer. No discount or unique ingame content is ever worth it. Don't pay before you know that you want to pay. That said, I am hoping Starfield will be good. It seems like a game that I want to play.

I don't know why people expected anything big from this to begin with. Anything with the Bethesda tied to it I automatically have low expectations and fully expect that in 1-3 years after the modding community gets their hands on it it may be worth a damn.

I look forward to buying this game a year after release, after the price has dropped and modders have actually made it good.

Well, what I've learned from the past 11 years of the gaming sceme has been that if one such as I want the same experience as in the 90's of getting a game that is playable is to wait for a year from full release and then start of thinking about buying the game.

Morrowind was an amazing game, and the map was TINY. They packed it full of stuff where you were constantly stumbling into new adventures

Pretty good summary. I guess my expectations were really low and they've met them so far. I'm taking a back seat on this one and just seeing how it ends up, so I'm not very hyped for it in general. I think it's neat they're trying something new with the sci-fi space genre. I'm hoping that the RPG elements can be more important again, like in Fallout New Vegas where your skill with the weapon type determined how accurate your shot was, so there was a mix of player skill and character skill. I don't care much about the graphics as long as they are "good enough" (and these were just about there for me). The performance could be a deal breaker, especially if simply turning down some settings doesn't fix it and it is an optimization level thing. I think the reason they just tacked on the thing at the end with the planets is because those 1000 planets are almost certainly going to be barren and used to gather resources and build settlements in the main game. Maybe it leaves it open for DLC to continue expanding to different locations. Also, modders are going to have a field day with essentially having their own planets to build on. But it really shouldn't be a main selling point of the game at this point, in my opinion.

Starfield as a modders playground is super exciting. Regardless of what issues the world may have, it's going to be a field day with modders.

My problem with the re-releases of skyrim is not the amount of them, but that they still carry the same bugs and problems as the original. I hopped in the latest re-release and got stuck within the first 40minutes because of an npc clipping through the floor and vanishing out of bounds. That to me after all these years, new improved versions and with all the help the modding community serves them, is absolutely unacceptable.

They really missed the Boat by not doing the work to make space to planet transitions seamless. Every space sim fan of games like Elite, Star Citizen, No Mans Sky etc. was SUPER HYPED for Starfield, and the decision to not implement it killed a good degree of that hype... not totally but took it from like a 10 down to a 7.

If they came out and said "we reduced the planets from 1000 to 50" that would be huge

I would honestly take a gameplay reveal trailer like this. The fact that they didn't try to hide performance and graphical issues. These can be fixed at the end of development. But it also allows people the be careful about pre ordering or even buying at launch given their history. As long as the game isn't broken, the TAA (even FSR or DLSS) and reflections can easily be added in. Some graphical issues can also easily be improved as well as doing some optimizations. I'm sure they are focusing on functionality over anything else. The only thing that is truly alarming to me is the empty worlds. But then again, I was never really big on iconic Bethesda games so I'm not really hypes or excited for this game. But I genuinely hope it's good. The gaming community as a whole deserves it. Fallout 76 was a sad sight to see. The Fallout fans didn't deserved to get rolled like that.

I know I am seeing this months after the fact but I feel that your concerns are valid. No man's sky boasted this near limited universe to explore but when I played it there wasn't much on the planets at all. I realize they added more to that game but it could be a similar thing and that's what I worry about the most. Visually I think it may not be all that bad once we get the released product but these worlds need a little more to them. The concept has so much potential if any IP were to do universe exploration but added enough to the worlds to make them interesting to explore. Some alien ruins, a mystery phenomenon and then have pay off rewards in terms of cosmetics or ship upgrades. I'm sure the faction quests and main worlds will be amazing. However, it's a monumental undertaking to populate an entire universe and keep exploration fresh. I feel that games are pushing towards this concept but really aren't ready to do it the way it needs to be done. I am still holding out some hope for Starfield. I don't think it will be all that bad when it launches. Buggy sure it is Bethesda after all :) but maybe it will turn out well still.

I really love the part where the square bore shotgun ejects round rifle shells that were never fired... so good. lol

no atmospheric flight sounds a lot like the limitations of mass effect: andromeda. click areas of interest on surface, have loading screen/landing sequence, there, now youre in this area. planets would have several of these with nothing in between (assuming there are full planets to explore, if not, it will be several maps on each planet). since i didnt hear anything about ground vehicles, im assuming the areas of interest are small enough to get everywhere on foot, and it is not full on actual planets.

This is why I’ve resorted to waiting 6 to 12months before buying any games now. Gives time to fix bugs and optimisation and pick up the game for half the cost. Win win. Gone are the days of buying games on release day

The frame rate drops do make it look more like actual gameplay too, compared to some companies who like to fake gameplay

One of Bethesda's biggest issues is that they have used the knowledge that modders will do free work on their games to make them better for so long that I think they've become dependent on it when making games. They don't need to polish because someone else will for free. Look at how bad 76 launched as an example. If 76 was a standard Bethesda launch, modders would have been making the game playable and less broken within a week. All for free. Yeah, they would have annihilated the iAP economy, but you would have had a game that didn't poop everyone's bed. If they haven't altered course on that mentality, their games will continue to have major problems on release. For Starfield, one of my main concerns is in how they will hamstring the players because you have to hamstring players in some way. What is going to be the mechanic that prohibits me from being a badass from the start? And if it's going to be a skill tree system like they did in FO4 I'm gonna break something. There's a reason I made a save built around the skill book duplication and it's not because I wanted to. The game is intolerable by having two sets of skill systems you have to work through.

The feeling of manually landing my ship on a new, unexplored world was one of the main thing for me when I played Elite Dangerous. The process of learning how read planet stats (like gravity percentage for instance) to determine your landing strategy was something that really created a bond with you and your ship.That completely taken away is not a small thing. Thanks for a good video, you cover a lot of angles that actually flew over me the first time I watched the Bethesda presentation.

The only thing I'm slightly concerned about is the performance. But I can overlook that if the rest of the game is what has been shown. Basically if it's fallout 4 but in space... I'll be very happy 😁

There has been a lot of work that's been done over the last couple of years in the way of story generation and procedural generation. There's a chance that they'll be incorporating this effectively so that planets have events happening on them, story arcs, etc that still feel relatively unique. If we see this on release or added as a patch later though ala No Man's Sky is yet to be seen.

Nothing wrong with loving something while being hyper critical. I share these concerns as well.

Optimization usually happens at a late stage in game development. Not trying to stand up for them or anything, its just how we do things. For example an asset may not have LODs finished yet, or certain textures might not have been compressed, a script might be looping or improperly coded, etc. This happens near-completion because you want to run through performance stats of scenes once or twice to figure out what might be poorly optimized, not every 2-3 months for 4+ years when scenes get updated near daily with new assets, code refactors/rewrites, etc.

What I'm more excited for is the engine itself; as I recall, Microsoft did instruct / indicate to Bethesda to use an entirely different engine from that of Fallout 4 and Skyrim, dubbing Creation Engine 2. Besides scalability being an added feature that many of us look forward to, if Bethesda released the toolkits and/or the engine itself as a license, I could see this being another alternative to the many Unity, Unreal, and Godot projects that devs can pick up on. At best, I'm hoping for something that bridges the gap between being a game modder and a full-on developer, so we can focus more on developing and implementing assets on a world that already has a solid foundation of physics, graphical fidelity, and logic (like gMod and Source do). That seems to be the logical next step, if Microsoft wants to expand into the same industry that Valve, Unity, and Epic Games already occupy.

"The industry isn´t the same today as it was back in 2011" so true! makes me think about the fact Skyrim is the last game i bought physically. Times changed.

Todd Howard:"Over 1000 Planets to explore!" Meanwhile Modders getting ready:"Allow us to introduce ourselves."

The biggest concern for me is the micro stutter. It’s still there clearly after all these years…

Good video! Quick question, I really like those headphones of yours, could you tell me what model it is?

the problem is that certain game companies have learned providing sub par performance is okay. look at the new pokemon stuff. remember when microsoft was trying to push the 'no sharing games with friends or used games' thing? it was them testing their environment - not something impossible

I am actually looking forward to Starfield even if only the story planets are populated. It will be a good foundation for expansion's or modding that's for sure. I'm just really worried about performance on my mid range PC.

I'm worried about the "no taking off and landing" on planets because it leads me to believe its going to be similar to Mass Effect 1, where you press a button and then the Mako lands. All of the side-planets in that game were just empty squares of space. The way I'm understanding the system in Starfield makes me think there's only going to be one area to land on each planet and a small space to look around, not an entire planet. If the side-planets in Starfield are at all like Mass Effect, they're going to be awful.

The apparent sparsity of outdoors concerns me. What would be cool though is if this could be turned into a game mechanic whereby this space could be populated by player-built outposts. We know we can build outposts ourselves but imagine some networking game features that could allow sharing of player-built areas into your own game session. Similar to how player constructed objects in Death Stranding were shared and appeared in your own world?

Fallout 4 was the first one I played, I still play it. I'm playing on survival right now and it's great. I love the base building aspect. it makes me feel like an epic governor over a growing state.

Not to white knight for Bethesda. But in further developer interviews, they have always used procedural generation for world creation for their games. They place hand made content on top of it. They also said Starfield has the most handcrafted content they ever had by a large degree. I agree the gunplay looked bad. Though it could be similar like cyberpunks gunplay being bad in the early stages of the game and then you get better skills and guns later. A little odd that they would show that though.

I do think (hope) that they show these empty landscapes just to show off the engine a bit how it can draw shadows and textures really far.

I think the empty terrain of the planets are really interesting and somewhat realistic. Who knows. Maybe it looks empty from a far but when you get close there is items to be picked up or ore to be found, etc. we will never know until the game is dropped.

Honestly, if someone just makes one of the moons a death star using mods I'll be happy, also I want an imperial transport shuttle, and lightsabers, and stuff

If I'm not mistaken, Bethesda has already basically said that everything "handcrafted" about their previous games will be there, but that there will also be the extra "content" of all of these extra worlds, should anyone want to explore, build outposts, see what's out there. It's strictly for adding a little bit of a sense of the unknown to the game. And to be fair, outer space is quite literally mostly empty, and what you would find out there would mostly be barren rocks or uninhabitable gas planets. Not much to do out in the cosmos other than science-y shit.

side note i think might relate to this topic/video. i think we are entering an age of technology for gameing, that we have to make a "bernard star wait calculation". start development to early on a game and the technology that is made later will literally lap the ones we started with in the deployment.

The visuals are my least concern. There are really no bad graphics nowadays. Only better than other. I mean you pick a game from 8 to 10y ago an it still looks good today. Something like bioshock infinite or alien isolation are close to 10y now.

Not worried about performance issues, it just needs to be fun. Most modern games look good but are as fun as a trip to the dentist due to lack of content or repetitive busywork content.

i think the issue with the visuals, are not the graphics, but the lighting. I feel like if they added more warm values for example in a lot of areas and enhanced shadows, it would significantly improve how it looks.

I haven't expected any new releases to be any good for a solid 5 years now.

I haven't looked ahead at a game release in a long time. I hear about it, then watch a little about it, let it release and then sit on it for a year while I read the debacle the game is on at launch.

my new rule for games now is to wait a few months and see if its worth getting or to wait another year

Not being able to take off and land manually is a huge thing not a minor thing. Having seamless take offs and landing changes the game design allowing you to fly to different locations on a planet and it all feels like one cohesive universe.

Thank you for mentioning the motion sickness aspect. I literally couldn't play Fallout '76 due to that (not that it was a good game anyways, but still). There have been more games than I'd like to admit that I just can't play because of this.

I’m holding out hope for this one, this is the game like I’ve been wanting to play since I fired up morrowind the first time. Hopefully they pushed everything to the limit.

I hope there is mod support, so I can get day one performance and visuals mods made by the community 😅

I like that for once there's nothing visible in the environment, a lot of times in skyrim I felt like I couldn't finish a quest without being roped into another and out of the one I was doing, despite being open world sometimes the map felt very linear (like very rarely you can avoid a fight or get to a location via a different way), I don't miss any of the copypaste caves nor the repeatable missions.

I have pretty grounded expectations for this game, I'll wait to see what reviews say about it at launch. If it's not in a good state I'll wait 6-12 months for it to go on sale and for modders to get some proper content/fixes for it.

I don't think people realize planets are supposed to look like that, not just like earth.

When watching the gunplay all I am focused on is the healthbar and level, half the time I barely see the enemy

I definitely understand your concerns on this. As its Bethesda and as much as i do have fun with their games I'm not expecting anything impressive which is indeed a shame. Cause you're right Force. We cant just keep expecting a low bar and just waving it off "aww its Bethesda, look at how hard they try." No, if you're going to be a game developer then....develop your games. You need to advance and get better and learn and progress. Not stay stagnant. Us gamers just accepting that only enables them to continue doing the dumb stuff they've been doing. But we also need to be encouraging them, and other game developer to do better. You can't have the desire to improve when all your getting is lambasted for the things you've done in the past. Bethesda has great potential and interesting universe and storylines, they can do better and they need to know that.

I'm wanting travel to function like in No Man's Sky. I want to be able to take off in my ship, go literally ANYWHERE and land literally anywhere.

I’m upset about how worrying this is because I conceptually love some of what they show off. I expect it to be buggy, but I hope the content is actually there. If it’s bad though or it’s missing a bunch of stuff, I the only potential hope is modders. I don’t really like vanilla Skyrim and fallout 4, but they are among my most played games because the mods make the game more playable and more fun. The 1000 planets thing really worries me. I really think the game should have taken place in a single solar system so that that more details can be included. We will just have to wait and see since we still know very little about the game.

I just hope it has at least 16 times the detail

I hope at least the core game will be optimised enough. The gameplay bit itself is going to be made good after a few months by the modding community. It is per tradition when it comes to Bethesda games.

Love your videos man. You present a balanced and measured perspective.

I do want to point out that with lots of worlds, and if they are expecting anything like the life time of Skyrim with a modding community plus DLC / expansions, having so many worlds allows a lot of scope for additions that can be made in game. That's just an idea - it's not ground to push aside any concerns mentioned however. I have my own worries about using the expanse as an excuse for boring resource gathering for forced crafting elements and janky base building.

Im curious what engine they plan on using. Considering the huge update in unreal engine 5.1 and its huge performance boost.

I really prefer hand crafted worlds over randomly generated ones, it is better in almost every aspect.

I recently started playing Elder Scrolls Oblivion, which is my first single-played Bethesda rpg; I see what everyone liked about it, but yeah, I completely echo your concerns for Starfield.

I'm genuinely excited for starfield - ive loved all BGS games since morrowind save for 76 - im easy to please - so many complaints, and yet I can't think of a single game thats done everything right. The thing is, once the games off the shelf its everyone's game. I'll start modding and changing the game to my standard, and thanking the others that publish the same to the public - it will be a living and changing game, tailored to the player for their preferred experience. I played skyrim heavily molded just last week for a bit - in 10 years ill still be playing and changing starfield. That's the best 65 bucks you can spend. Thousands of hours of entertainment for the cost of a few movie tickets and some popcorn, maybe a nice dinner and a few drinks. I call that a win of the highest proportions. KotOR was amazing, but the future is here lol

I feel like a lot of the gaming community is really focused on nitpicking the ever living nipple out of every pixel in first looks and trailers, but in 6 years when you're shooting the breeze with your buddy about your favorite moments in starfield, you're not going to be complaining at him about antialiasing and the jiggle physics you didn't get. You're going to be talking to him about the time you were putting space buckets on npc's heads to steal their fusion rifle and space suit.

I love videos like this! Your asking all the right questions and covering what everyone else is thinking. Keep it up!

I see the 1000 planets as a bonus for modders, a lot of mods in previous titles would conflict because mods tried to change different things in the same area, with a 1000 planets this gives modders so much freedom creating what ever they what and I am really looking forward to when starfield to be 5 to 10 years old

There are arguments against switching to an off the shelf engine, but I feel that a lot of woes wrt performance and visuals will be resolved by just switching to a different more modern engine… I’m sure they’ve put a lot of work into the engine that they used over the years and it’s custom built to do many of the thing that makes their games unique, but it just isn’t holding up anymore.

I thought this was a keemstar gaming channel from the thumbnail. I'm glad I was wrong

Great summary, totally captures my doubts. I see the problem right across the space exploration genre. The broad reaches of space are a seductive idea for exploration in a game but I've yet to play one that didn't just feel like a lifeless void. The strength of Bethesda games has been in exploring environments that flow between wilderness and habitation, something Starfield has not demonstrated any similarity with.

Part of what skyrim so great especially for its time is that it was jam packed with content. Towns under towns, 80% of npc's had some sort of unique quest. Entire factions and guilds and you had complete freedom to play how you want. It was a perfect mix of simple and complex, but not so complex that it was straining to play.. crafting was simple, skills were simple, upgrading was simple. But there was a near infinite amount of possibilities.

I was really looking forward to Star Field, I don’t mind the emptiness, Elite is mostly empty and I’ve played that for hundreds if not thousands of hours. But what has me somewhat concerned, is that this is starting to look a whole lot like Fallout in space to me. And honestly, I’m kind of over that formula, I don’t need the same game in a different setting AGAIN. Not knocking anyone who’d love that btw, different strokes for different folks, it’s just not for me (anymore)

I really like that the color palette isn’t vibrant. I think the more muddied colors lends itself to this setting way better than vibrance would. It’s not trying to be no man’s sky with crazy vibrant worlds. It’s trying to be a more grounded take on this setting. I think the outdoor environments look fantastic, I really disagree.

I was cautiously optimistic for starfield with this trailer still leaving me feeling indifferent for this title, however I am now more worried for TES:6 as that is a game I will be buying and playing. I dont expect Bethesda to be perfect but I do expect them to step up in all aspects and Im not seeing that here with starfield. I do hope that once starfield has been released and public opinion comes in that it will help them determine what improvements are necessary before releasing their next elder scrolls title because you'd think that Bethesda under Microsoft would have better access to more resources like improved studios and servers to make a more refined gaming experience.

I agree with everything you're saying. One point though about the 1000 planets: I agree that I think it will be in ADDITION to the hand crafted planets - which will probably be more like... TEN well crafted planets. What I think they WILL do - is incorporate their sort of "radiant system" into ALL planets you're on. Go to one of the 1000 planets - a random event or quest may trigger at any time

i dont mind a few framerate hitches or graphical shortcomings when the base gameplay is solid. Coming from 8 bit Atari machines, graphics are good enough nowadays imo. I am up for Skyrim in space.

Wouldn't it be great if we could skip to ten years after Starfield is released? Seeing what people have done with Skyrim, can you imagine what people have done with hundreds of empty planets? Biomes, seasons, weather, points of interest, flora and fauna, quests... content. All significantly improved to miraculous degrees when compared to the released product.

I think some of the outdoor environments look pretty good actually.

Even if it's empty, the main story is still there. Starfield is not a space simulator, go play star citizen if you so want a game like that but starfield is a story based RPG. You don't have to explore all 1000 planets, no one is forcing you to do it and is just there to stimulate the vastness of space.

The reason Skyrim is where it is, is because of the mod support and the amazing mod developers that permanently keep the game fresh and have massively improved it over the years, on all aspects. I hope they plan on having mod support for Starfield, because if not, the future for this looks grim. Especially if the performance is going to be the same on release.

I expect most planets not central to the game will be containers for one or two features (read 'dungeons'), the gamer will want to explore.

Starfield will be one of THE MOST amazing games ever made!!! . . . Two years after launch... . . . ...Thanks to the modding community!

I get your point. I also feel this way every time a new "AAA" is announced. (we should start calling these "big budget games" instead of "AAA" games, there is clearly nothing "AAA" about them and quality now is found in other places within the gaming industry, Divinity Original Sin 2 as an example).

You have some interesting points. I didn't really looked at the frame rate.

The issue with the performance is that the problems are likely engine-level. Which means they *can't* get fixed. Big games get developed as a core engine, and then a game is built on top of it like a house of cards. If you're releasing *next year* you're already *waaay* beyond making engine fixes; any minor change you make could have massive ramifications and would require rechecking *everything.* EG, you change how gravity works at engine level, you now have to check *all* your already placed assets for clipping issues. You change how shadows are defined, certain model types stop casting shadows for some reason. Chasing engine bugs with most of a game built on top quickly cascades. This late in development most performance gains come from reducing the amount of stuff in a scene, or optimising placed assets individually for polygons, or disabling engine graphics features. You only change the core engine if something breaks so badly that the product won't even start up. For a better explanation of this, see Nimso Ny's Sonic Frontiers video.