Starfield and Skyrim dev says that Bethesda games could have more “polish” | Starfield systems designer Bruce Nesmit admits that Bethesda games could “have a higher degree of polish”, but it “comes at a price.”

https://www.pcgamesn.com/starfield/dev-more-polish

45 Comments

  1. SomeoneBritish on

    I honestly don’t think Bethesda games need more polish. They instead need engaging and reactive spaces which react to my role playing.

    Less mostly empty Starfield voids, more Skyrim and Morrowind exploration.

  2. If they think the lack of polish was the problem with Starfield, then they really don’t understand what people didn’t like about the game. Doesn’t really bode well for their next one.

  3. It feels more and more like ES6 is going to be a monumental disaster, Beth devs do not seem to understand what is actually wrong with their games.

  4. KwyjiboKwyjibo on

    Take any Fallout lockpicking mini-game. This costy to propose three, four visuals… ?

    “hummm, yes, they could be more polished…” lol.

  5. last couple weeks of these Bethesda devs says just shows they are so tonedeaf on actual issues of their games.

    and what do they mean by “polish” polishing a turd doesn’t change it is still a turd.

    Drop creation engine powered by gamebyro, focus on what People liked about their older games then force bethesda to install mods on those games to see how people Would like to play. THEN take that knowledge and put it into your next game With a new engine, and bam 8/10 game still has shit ton of bugs cause bethesda still relies on modders to fix their shit.

  6. Polish what? Kielbasa? Zubr? Zabka?

    If it’s Polish language, as a Brit learning Polish, absolutely not. That language is a mind fuck.

  7. HolyPommeDeTerre on

    Three things:

    – time

    – quality

    – money

    Choose two to get. The last one will be your price. You want it fast and cheap, bad quality is to be expected.

  8. Gold_Historian_2849 on

    I’d settle for BGS games that don’t crash constantly and are even slightly optimized

  9. TransportationIll282 on

    Game studios really need to re-evaluate… Jank is fine. Jank can be good. Lots of great games had some that introduced weird fun mechanics. Looking good and having clean mechanics is nice for a bit. But it rarely is what keeps players engaged. Heck some of the most engaging games look like trash. Stop spending all your time and money on stuff that only looks good in a trailer.

  10. I really tried getting into Starfield. But after playing Cyberpunk and Baldur’s Gate 3, I just couldn’t.

    Everything felt so lifeless and stiff. It’s a game about spacefaring yet it’s mostly just fast travel + loading screens. Visually it’s decent yet feels dated.

  11. Yeah, quite literally. Instead of great games you can have marginally good games and less money. Skyrim vs Starfield is the perfect example.

  12. Polish isn’t why people are disappointed in starfield. Polish can’t fix the writing, can’t fix the lack of gameplay that was cut when comparing to their previous games and polish doesn’t fix their literal copy and paste point of interest system.

    Yep. They literally copy and paste POIs randomly inserted into worlds. As in the same named dead people will exist in the same spots in the same bases/labs multiple times on completely different worlds. This completely breaks any immersion the game had and kills bethesda’s once lauded exploration system.

  13. Better stories, better world, better quests!! Why do I feel like people keep screaming this at them and Beth keeps changing the subject

  14. Bet if the quests were more interesting, polish wouldn’t matter that much. Look at New Vegas

  15. Polish wasn’t the issue, I had little to no technical hiccups in the time I played starfield. The problem is it’s fucking boring. The setting is boring, the characters are boring, the story is just the dovakhin again.

    You don’t actually have any interesting choices to make or things you can meaningfully influence. The first thing I did when set free was try to scan a planet to completion and it was the most tedious and grindy thing I’ve done in recent memory.

    Aside from that most of my memory of the game is bunny hopping across big boring planets with nothing to do but see the same couple dungeons with the same enemy layouts and same loot locations. Even cool stuff like the red mile was a complete letdown in terms of gameplay execution.

    Even the ship builder which was my favorite part has limited milage because you can’t do anything with the ship but have repetitive dog fights, look at it and fly around empty space. Even if you take the time to decorate your interior your work just gets thrown away the second you make a minor change to the ship.

    Also just the inventory system. All of it. It’s horrible.

    Their engine and whatever isn’t the problem, they suck at making compelling rpgs now. The games problems run DEEP and I found myself very disappointed by it. I can still comfy play Skyrim or fallout 4 every now and again but I have no desire to play starfield more than I have.

    Cyberpunk is the best “bethesda” style game out right now and if TES6 can’t come close to that I worry for the future of the studio.

  16. “Comes at a price” can be translated as “we’d rather have bigger games with bugs than smaller ones with fewer bugs.”

  17. Bethesda keeps refusing to accept what the real problems are with this game. It seems like they are either in denial or are trying to change the narrative.

  18. They just make shit up to pretend to feel virtuous about continuously jacking prices up.

    Like we warned you that what we say you want will make our games more expensive.

  19. They have a foot in the grave and still won’t stop prioritizing what they believe will make them more profit….. literally just add alot of fun diverse quests

  20. sullen_agreement on

    they need to fire the people like todd who have been there a hundred years and hire some young people who remember what made the games fun

  21. KenshinBorealis on

    I keep saying Starfield was unfinished and unpolished and they let the paid mods finish it for them. Embarassing. Disappointing. Lost a life long Elderscrolls fan now worried theyre gonna dial in es6 the same way. Boo, Todd. Boo.

  22. Every time anyone from Bethesda speaks publicly you get the impression they are in complete denial. ES6 is going to be a disaster.

  23. I tried with Starfield I really did. I even got the game for free with my GPU but damn it was miserable trudging through those first 4 hours. I put the game away after that and finished Baldurs Gate 3 which had also just come out.

    If Bethesda wants me to purchase Elder Scrolls 6 or Fallout 5 they’re gonna have to at the very least get their game to the same level of polish as CP2077, BG3, RDR2, etc.

  24. DurgeDidNothingWrong on

    I’m starting to think Bethesda has no idea why starfield failed, which doesn’t give me confidence in the next elder scrolls

  25. StarFox12345678910 on

    Has the game gotten any better? I played it for a month straight post release, and I couldn’t keep playing. I felt empty. Didn’t know why I kept going through the motions. I did try to keep going. Did the updates improve the game?

  26. basicastheycome on

    As long as starfield goes, polish is least of its issues. Game is not great at the fundamental levels besides I suspect that this wording is coming before massive price hikes for their new products in the future

  27. IlConiglioUbriaco on

    Why is it always more polish, but not more Czechs more slovakians and more Serbians ?

  28. Not played Starfield but put several hundred hours into Fallout 4 & Skyrim, if they could polish off the combat, inventory, and NPC animations it would go a long way. The storytelling and exploration made those games fun for me, but the actual gamelpay was mediocre at best (yeah, I said it).

  29. They need people to playtest their games first, often the mechanics and design are inconvenient.

  30. Disastrous-Ice-5971 on

    I knew! I knew it! Finally they admit that Skyrim is missing quite a lot of “polish”. Time to tell the truth. The real name of the Dragonborn is the Geralt of Rivia!

  31. Or maybe don’t release a game with such a tiny field of vision that 30 minutes of gameplay leaves you bent over a toilet vomiting.