Bethesda's Game Design Was Outdated a Decade Ago

I have made not one but two separate videos claiming that blank's game design is outdated and while I'm very proud of those videos and I pretty confidently stand by those critiques I wasn't planning on ever using the same outdated title again because I just didn't want it to become this gross youtubery Series where I'm just the outdated guy what is up Gamers welcome back to part 39 of outdated stuff today we're going to be taking a look at this expired banana on my counter if that ain't outdated then you better call the dog catrick cuz

it must be raining cats and dogs out here but when thinking about the past 10 years of Bethesda game studios catalog Fallout 4 Fallout 76 a billion more versions of Skyrim and now Starfield there is not a more succinct or accurate word to describe how I feel about these games I have personally made things that some people did not like and criticized and that's great h honestly that's fine that's exactly how it should be why am I saying that right now just to say that I know what it feels like I want to make it

clear that I have a lot of respect and appreciation for the hardworking individual devs that crunch 12-hour days to release AAA games on time that we all get to play thank you for making video games everyone who makes video games out here in the prairie so I promise I don't mean to be hyperbolic or dramatic just for the sake of it when I say I am truly baffled by Starfield it is seriously shocking to see just how little this game attempts to improve or even successfully reuse the same formula and same Frankenstein game engine that

Bethesda have been selling to their fans for well over a decade I cannot understand how this is the space adventure Todd Howard has dreamt of making for 25 years and cooked in the oven for eight but I wanted to try I really wanted to understand I wanted to love this troubled game so badly and I stayed committed to this relationship sh for hours and hours and hours ignoring every possible red flag that came my way but I can't do it anymore and I feel like I have to make this video If just purely for my

own sanity no this one is for me because this damn space game changed [Music] me people often describe Bethesda games as Bethesda games but what does that even mean in 2011 I would have said open world action RPG where you could go anywhere do anything good or evil Knight or wizard but you're definitely going to be a sneak Archer like every single time without fail to me it meant giant world with total player freedom to do what they wanted to do don't like someone shoot them in the face want someone's stuff sneak behind their waist

want to climb that mountain hump it on the face Fallout 3 was my first Betty game after convincing my dad that no I do dude it's not violent at all you you don't have to be uh violent you could choose to be good and talk your way out of every situation which was total [ __ ] bull crap yes these games might be RPGs but they heavily lean on the action part of action RPG can you sometimes do quests non-violently definitely but more often than not your to-do list revolves around you killing people and things

and spiders and Ghouls and there's usually not a whole lot of wiggle room around that part A lot of the time your choices are boiled down to okay so do you want to set him on fire first and then shoot him or just do them raw if you play Fallout New Vegas made by obsidian those are some RPG ass RPG choices where I feel like the player has way more freedom to express themselves morally ethically whatever in a given Quest but as much as I gush about New Vegas on this channel there is something missing

in this game when compared to Fallout 3 atmosphere I think Bethesda typically crushes that [ __ ] even though New Vegas is a much better game mechanically Betty World felt a lot more engrossing to explore even if a lot of the supposed Freedom promised to the player is kind of an illusion you know you can't actually kill anyone if they're an essential NPC for a quest line they just take a nap on the floor still Bethesda does a really great job at making you feel like you're on this Grand Adventure and the soundtracks dude oh

my God the Skyrim soundtrack alone might be up there with Chrono Trigger for like the greatest video game score ever made all of these songs make you feel like you're living inside of an ancient blade made of W oh my God I'm getting really [ __ ] tired of always coming home to this dude saying some more stupid crap hi I'm Jakey Jakey and Jakey attorneys at law thanks to oper GX for sponsoring this video is your browser boring does it make you want to go outside no don't go out there there's wolves out there

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cuz he's a worthless piece of [ __ ] but because Bethesda games are so unique and so dearly beloved by so many fans people often give them a free pass when it comes to certain issues because eh it's a Bethesda game what are you going to do issues such as da melee combat and extremely dated gun combat even for the time brain dead enemy AI clunky UI that always have to be fixed with mods optimization and performance issues that always have to be fixed with mods enough bugs to fill aing terrarium that always have to

be fixed with mods if any other AAA Shooter had the same issues that Fallout 3 had where the guns barely even functioned and cast bullets from their mouths like spells from a wizard sleeve and the game ran at 6 frames per second on the PS3 because oops you saved too many times don't do that people would Riot but because these issues are part of a giant package and the appeal is usually greater than a sum of its janky Parts people just kind of go what are you going to do it's a Bethesda game which sure

maybe in 2008 maybe some of this stuff could be ignored but it is not 2008 anymore hell it is not even 2011 my brother in a post Skyrim world where they have re-released that game so many times and it has sold over 60 million copies now the whole but it's a Bethesda game excuse is you guessed it [ __ ] from a butt Fallout 4 was when I could no longer stay blind to bethesda's strong reluctance to leave the caveman Stone Age prehistoric time dude you can still feel all of the typical creation Jank underneath

everything you still had to edit an inii file to change the fov or turn off mouse acceleration the physics were still tied to the frame rate the load times could still go on for an eternity but hey at least they made guns function like kind of of actual guns this time which should be the bare minimum for a firstperson shooter in 2015 meanwhile Halo's 14 getting ready for her winner formal simple things for a shooter like swapping weapons or throwing grenades felt super unresponsive in wonky like the game was constantly fighting you on every delayed

input and again 2015 this this wasn't like a long time ago but man I still played the [ __ ] out of this game and it is the Fallout 4 is the most barebones RPG where Fallout New Vegas went left toward old school traditional Fallout games Fallout 4 was like all right so it's kind of like janky Minecraft but with guns which turns out is actually pretty fun the gameplay Loop of exploring a detailed Bethesda World filled with cool stuff getting Loot and supplies from fighting baddies and using Vats using those supplies to upgrade your

guns working on your settlements with the janky ass Builder that also has to be fixed with mods it was all pretty fun to me objectively my critic brain is like yeah this game has a lot of flaws and the dialogue system really sucks and the perk tree sucks and the role playing options are basically non-existent and the main story makes like zero sense if you stop and think about it because if someone was searching for their kidnapped baby son why would they stop and help a bunch of other families first and eat 100 Brad roaches

but subjectively my Bethesda brain is like oh boy I better scram up some more of these desk fans even with all its Jank and there is a lot of Jank in Fallout 4 like any area downtown just straight up doesn't run well at all for what it was I had fun with Fallout 4 but what it was was unfortunately a very Crystal Clear sign that Bethesda was falling behind the times harder than ever before also I went to kindergarten in first grade here and uh walked home from school one day and realized we got out

early because of 9/11 I don't know why I'm talking about that right now I wish I could say I was shocked when Fallout 76 turned out to be [ __ ] from a butt but dude dud I wasn't shocked at all not trying to be on some cool guy [ __ ] but the second I saw the reveal presentation and how it was going to run on the same janky ass engine that barely manages to work as a single player game and now it's going to be multiplayer online like www.com type online yeah Todd and

I'll be a monkey's uncle oh my sweet bimbo you have return you all know this story game comes out one of the worst launches ever bug terrarium is like 16 times the detail Bethesda get super scummy about refunds and then get super scummy about pushing these overly priced microtransactions also cheaps out on the canvas bag that's supposed to be included in the collector's edition it was awful Fallout 76 is like the poster child for taking advantage of a devout fan base and releasing a clearly unfinished faulty product I'll see a lot of people online chalk

up 76 is failure 2 well it wasn't Todd and his main team that made the game it was their there was their B Team Bethesda Austin but I'm pretty sure that's not the full story according to several Anonymous devs that worked on 76 as quoted in this Kotaku article that you should check out people from multiple Bethesda Studios worked on this game senior staff from Fallout 4S team staff taken away from the Starfield team staff taken away from the redfall team at Arcane which Jesus Christ that's a whole that's a whole thing on its own

Jiminy Cricket and a jockstrap 76 as described in this article sounded like a massive live service black hole that no one wanted to touch because the writing was all over the bug covered walls that it was never going to end well but in typical AAA Game Dev fashion QA teams get treated like total [ __ ] and upper management ignores issues raised and continue to force everyone to Crunch toward this deadline they knew they were never going to make and yeah Todd Howard may have not directed 76 but he's still listed as executive producer and

he's the one that went on the big stage and was like this is the biggest [ __ ] game we've ever made it's 16 times awesome you're all going to nut yo run that John Denver joint and the pre-orders go crazy and everyone's hyped out of their minds and then it comes out and it's atrocious and suddenly now Todd is all yeah we knew it wasn't going to be like a high Metacritic score game but you know what it sold really well it's not about how it starts it's about what it becomes thank you very

much y'll run that John Denver Jo come on man according to that same article Todd was very adamant on the whole no NPC's feature no matter how much the dev team pleaded that it was an insane choice for Bethesda you know the studio most closely associated with NPCs but also maybe Todd isn't the main bad guy responsible you know maybe he was just under a lot of pressure from big money investors of parent company zenax to make a live service Cash Cow that would exploit fans and inevitably make a ton of money I don't know

all the details but there's enough breadcrumbs to make it insane to me that someone along the food chain with authority whether Todd or otherwise didn't stop and adamantly scream hey uh let's maybe delay this game permanently but at the end of the day it doesn't really matter regardless of whose fault 76 was the damage was done and the pressure was on after an underwhelming and outdated Fallout 4 and an underbaked and severely malnourished Fallout 76 Bethesda really needed to reach for the Skyrim once again and dunk another classic into our laps but Todd he don't

play basketball he plays [Music] chess I was the kid I was writing games when I was you know 12 whatever and uh the other kids in the block would say you know I'm going to play quarterback for the Cowboys and I'd be like I'm going to make video games and everyone's going to play them like you dork go back to the chess club Who's Laughing Now yes I was in the chess club it's hard not to like Todd Howard he has this Michael Scott type Charisma that's weirdly hard to resist and I find his story

of repeatedly applying to Bethesda only to be rejected over and over really inspiring cuz once he got his leather jacket ass wearing ass through that door he would direct marind executive produce Oblivion direct both Fallout 3 and Skyrim love him or hate him the man's resume speaks for itself and good God would you look at that jacket for being considered AAA Bethesda is not a very big Studio around 100 people made Skyrim and they currently only employ like 420 people across all of their Studios for comparison at least 1,000 people worked on GTA 5 before

its release and 6,000 different people have worked on it since which is crazy to me considering how slow GTA online still is on the one hand I think it's really impressive that Bethesda is much smaller than other bigname Studios because it means they must have some really powerful paladins over there casting some serious Buffs but also when you're making that AAA money and your games continue to come out janky as [ __ ] maybe hire some more fing people to make your games actually function properly when you sell them for $70 One Source from that

same article said Bethesda is a big company that thinks it's a small company with a mentality of well the worked in the '90s so we're just going to keep doing it I mean yeah after playing Starfield that's definitely what it feels like boy I'll tell you what I I booted that some [ __ ] up it was like it was like seeing an ex for the first time in eight years a poorly optimized ex who struggles to have human-like facial expressions Starfield isn't even just Skyrim again but in space which was always Todd's elevator pitch

no it would be such an improvement if it was but no this is not a Bethesda game based on the definition the dumbass by the piano game earlier that signature Bethesda open world exploration and sense of scale and freedom and that feeling of ooh there's something interesting around every corner gone but J both there's like a thousand planets how can it get any more open world than that yeah and you want to know what you do on 99% of those thousand planets this You Walk and Walk and Walk and Sprint and jump and Jetpack jump

and get really good at watching your O2 Sprint to go up and down and up and down there is no Rover to drive there is no ship to fly you just Walk and Walk and Walk until you get to the most copy pasted structure that you have already seen a bunch of times Starfield is the exploration equivalent of holding the Player Two controller that isn't actually plugged in it is the illusion of Planetary Exploration duct taped together by a thousand loading screens and a strong desire to waste so much of your time let's talk about

fast travel can you say fast travel fast travel can you say loading screen loading screen loading screen loading screen before fast travel after fast travel loading screen fast traveling to complete a quest fast traveling to start a quest that's so silly loading screen peekaboo loading screen can you say F travel wasting your time no wasting my time yes 2023 Bethesda release this in 2023 oh no can you say leather jacket in other Bethesda games you wanted to walk to your destinations because fast traveling meant you might miss out on some neat dungeon or cool unique

structure or wacky enemy along the way not only is fast travel highly recommended whenever possible in Starfield but it is straight up required you cannot fly your ship from planet to planet or even on a single planet you can enter your ship with a nice loading screen and then sit in your pilot's chair with a nice unskippable animation and then take off with another nice loading screen and then pick your destination from space and fast travel there with another loading screen and then click on the planet to land with another loading screen or if your

destination is in space do another unskippable animation to dock your ship followed by another immediate loading screen but hopefully if you've already discovered the specific location you want to go to you can just fast travel straight there the second I realized I was avoiding my ship whenever possible you know the central core part of a space exploration game it was over the most heartbreaking part is that the ship Builder is [ __ ] amazing it's like virtual Legos it is by far the best new thing Bethesda did with this game but where do you get

to fly your ship that you just lovingly spent 3 hours making in orbit yay let's [ __ ] go if you want to see your magnificent creation actually move around and fast travel on up to space and Float around fighting bad guys and running away from cops with the awful bounty system which I will get to later I will spend way too much time talking about that later what's really weird is that between the different elements you can mine on planets and the different things you can prioritize within the ship Builder there's enough breadcrumbs here

to assume that at one point Starfield was probably more of a survival type space game meaning that landing on a planet maybe served more of a purpose than just sort of wandering around aimlessly maybe the temperature changes in extreme conditions actually mattered more than they currently do which is like not really at all the ship Builder even has options to upgrade the fuel tanks or a grab drive so that you can jump further into a system but if you don't upgrade those things that's fine too you'll just have to fast travel to a closer system

at first and then fast travel to the one you actually want to go to so upgrading that stuff in your ship just saves you from seeing two loading screens and now you only see one how is this game real Starfield has a planets and I wish it had like five yeah not every planet in real life space would have a bunch of cool stuff on it either yeah duh but that's not my point my point is that this is not really a good illusion of anything other than the unfortunate passage of time no man's sky

can also have some boring ass procedurally generated planets but you know what at least you can actually fly to them playing Starfield is like watching a magician pull a rabbit out of a hat but every time he's about to do it he's like no you got to close your eyes while I do it though but what about perform what I'm not a Best Buy Geek Squad looking ass don't say I am Darfield may have been made with the shiny new creation Engine 2 but you ain't fooling anyone with that two Todd you may have slapped

a spoiler on it but it's still a [ __ ] geom Metro I'm still editing an inii file just to change the fov or turn off mouse acceleration to make aiming feel better I'm still clicking on doors and seeing that all too familiar Fade Out loading screen all the time why did you not optimize this game for PC uh we did it's running great it is a nextg PC game we really do push the technology so you may need to upgrade your PC for this game but it's got a lot of great stuff going on

in it and the fans are responding awesome all right Todd I upgraded my PC but I still can't turn on HDR or even mess with the brightness settings even though the Xbox version already has HDR and to get a decent frame rate I have to use upscaling but I have an Nvidia card and you only have FSR supported with no dlss oh someone already modded dlss into the game within like a couple days oh programmers are making comrads of breakdowns on Reddit detailing just how poorly optimized the game is nah Todd said it's optimized and

it's probably optimized I believe him I will follow my Nord brother into the Pearly Gates of sovereign guard and finally graze my hand upon that Holy leather breaking news as of November 15th Bethesda is finally patching Starfield adding an fov slider poorly implemented HDR and much needed dlss support along with clear massive performance gains for both CPU and GPU areas it's almost as if the game did in fact launch very unoptimized the timing couldn't be better 2 months after everyone already stopped playing it this game hurts my stupid giant head I can't understand it I

can't seem to do anything right after experiencing this so-called game oh my god I didn't even bring that up yet God damn it in Starfield you can build settlements and you have more freedom than ever with the builder but there's not a whole lot of motivators to interact with it other than harvesting resources from a planet largely void of life add that to the super confusing structure of actually trying to connect your settlements across star systems and all the Fast Travel screens in between and your ship cargo and your inventory and getting over encumbered and

in Fallout 4 it wasn't fun because the Builder was good hell no it's janky as hell and super frustrating but it was fun because you were bringing life back into the apocalypse and building off of really cool existing unique structures so that the dumbass settlers could take back the land but all of that was powered by the initial core desire of actually w wanting to go out and explore and shoot stuff oh yeah that's right you shoot guns in this game uh Starfield also has [Music] guns Starfield has perks just like Fallout 4 and one

of those perks is called rapid reload and it does exactly what you think it would do it makes your reloads faster at least that's what it should do I'm a gamer I like going fast it throw it on top send send me the bill it's on the it's on the house days later I'm playing the game and I throw my last grenade I reload my gun and it's way faster than usual what's going on here come to find out that perk hasn't worked the entire time I've had it because evidently if I have any sort

of throwable equipped rapid reload just doesn't work I thought maybe I was alone but nope I looked it up and apparently it's a common bug that at least as of November 15th still persists also you know that text that appears at the top top of the screen in Bethesda games when you're doing stealth that says hidden not only does this 2023 game use the same barebone stealth mechanics that are like 20 years old at this point seeing that text up top that's a perk now and you can spend another whole ass perk point and I

quote to upgrade the stealth meter which just shows you if you're being close to being detected which is basically exactly what the itical thing already did in sky but this is way better and worth spinning the point trust me the Gunplay in Starfield is an improvement over Fallout 4 but that's like saying a bicycle is an improvement over a Razor scooter it's still not an AK-47 the guns generally work a bit better with less delay you're a bit more agile you have a jetpack which sometimes that can be fun but as a shooter in 2023

this game is still getting lapped by games from 2012 hell games from 2007 2004 I'm serious sit down play Starfield for an hour and then go boot up Far Cry 3 or buy Bioshock or Call of Duty 4 or any game in The Orange Box and then go back to Starfield and tell me how it feels especially on controller it just feels wrong Fallout 4ce shooting was barely serviceable only because of everything that surrounded it it worked good enough because you got to explore a cool map and frequently fight cool varied enemies using Vats in

Starfield the cool map is gone the enemies are sometimes varied but it is predominantly brain dead humanoid space pirates that will just stand there and let you shoot them and Vats doesn't exist anymore so the act of shooting someone needed to feel really really good throw in the still clunky melee combat the super unintuitive UI of menus inside of menus and the d-pad weapon swapping from Fallout 4 because apparently having a weapon wheel might make the creation engine explode and what you have is a worse version of something that you have already played eight years

ago all right so what about Quest Bethesda has always been so strong strongly associated with NPCs and quests here's an example of the most common basic ass type of quest in Skyrim hey can you go to this dungeon and kill a bad guy all right sounds good you know what I'm even just going to walk over there cuz it's not that far wa what's this a dragon in this economy well I mean I'm here I may as well ladder stall Tomahawk the dragon real quick all right that's done um what what was I do oh

right the dungeon oh hold on a second there's a cave right here I mean I'm here 20 minutes later all right that was a pretty cool cave and I I feel like I got some cool [ __ ] out of that uh anyways uh oh the dungeon all right let me just stealth Archer these freaks real quick get some loot okay I'm done that was a pretty enjoyable fun hour of gameplay I just got to experience here's an example of the most common basic ass type of quest in Starfield hey we lost our scientist friends

can you go find him we don't know where he is because we don't have any walkie takies or email or texting or or cell phones in this in this planet in this world yeah sure I guess all right damn he's kind of he's kind of out there whatever I'm sure some cool stuff will happen along the way 5 minutes later man I sure am getting pretty good at sprinting and jetpacking and you know I bet the cave will have like a cool monster in it or something once I get there oh it's literally just you

uh and now I have to take you back with me well okay apparently I can just fast travel back but I don't take you with me so I just went to tell you that your friends are looking for you and now you're finding your own way back and going back so why the hell did I even need to come find you in the first place what the hell even is this game dude I [ __ ] you not that type of quest pops up all the time and even if it is an operation go rescue

baby scientist it is something similarly mindless and uninspired a lot of quests in Starfield just play out as a game of fast travel telephone where you talk to one person and they're like hey go tell this person in another galaxy that I said this and you're like okay and you go through several fast travel loading screens and land out a place and go through another loading screen and then walk through a city and get to another place and talk to them and then you finally talk to the person and they're like well tell them that

I said this and so you do all of that again and you go through all the Fast Travel loading screens and the loading screens and the entering building loading screens and you're like all right well they said this and it's like is this what we're doing now like if I'm like 8 years old and you told me like take all the graphics and stuff away that like hey this is what video games are going to be like I'd be like what the [ __ ] and this game is not a super in-depth Choice complex branching

narrative Rich dialogue crpg like I don't expect that from Bethesda and that's fine I I never have but if you're not that and you're also o not successfully doing the thing that largely defines your games AKA satisfying and rewarding open world exploration then what the hell even are you like I don't know what genre I would even call this game oh no I'm being hold up we're collect on a bounty oh man we're we'll talk we're going to talk about the bounty in in a bit that's really funny timing all right well sorry gaming before

the game came out Phil Spencer Xbox guy uh said something along the lines of I don't remember exactly but it was like ah I played it so many hours whatever I'm going full space pirate and I got excited when I heard this because I love game systems that let you [ __ ] around and find out I'm sure some of you remember how I obsessed over The Wanted bounty system in Red Dead 2 because I just love pushing things and trying to understand how they mechanically work i think i can confidently say that the bounty

system in Starfield is far worse than in Red Dead 2 being a space pirate is so strongly discouraged that it is borderline impossible the first time you get arrested, you don't go to jail but this colonel or whatever I don't remember his name is like hey we don't actually want to throw you in jail but we want you to be an informant in the uh space pirate Fleet departed style you [ __ ] rat" I saw there was an option that said "frick u im fighting my way off this ship" so obviously I quicksaved and

then did that. it was a total blood bath like I killed so many dudes and racked up such a high Bounty but I noticed that a lot of the named NPCs wouldn't actually die when I shot them which was a bit concerning but I I just kept on fighting and eventually I fought my way all the way into the cockpit and there was a second where I was like oh [ __ ] am I about to hijack this police ship and get the [ __ ] out of here nope can't can't fly this ship and

before people go in the comments and say oh it's cuz you got to upgrade your pilot license thing nope you still can't fly it you can't fly this ship or a whole lot of other ships for that matter no matter what just just like you can't kill a lot of NPCs no matter what because Bethesda wants you to do space their way this ship bull ship uh isn't exclusive to just that Quest either if you've played the game you know that a lot of the times when you land on a planet another ship will coincidentally

land around the same time and you could see them and run over there and fight them and you would assume ah I just killed all these Pirates all right logical Next Step loot the ship take the ship but a lot of the time not every time but a lot of the time at least for me it just wouldn't let me most of the time I just saw this prompt and I I didn't know why so that Bounty I mentioned during the shootout with the space cops yeah it's very easy to quickly rack up a very

high bounty in this game and whenever you travel to a planet that has a major city they do a forced Contraband scan on your ship before you can land do I even like video games anymore they also check to see if you have a bounty in that star system Contraband can be hidden to help avoid detection on the scan but it requires having hidden cargo space on your ship why am I here why am I doing any of this normal items you can pickpocket or steal aren't marked as Contraband but they are marked as stolen

items and they have this little red icon but Contraband icon Contraband Contraband items always have this orange icon because it means they're extra illegal help me so let's start here say you want to be a grimy little space Thief so you're constantly pickpocketing and stealing stuff wherever you go in typical Bethesda fashion a lot of the time if you're sneaking in stealing you won't get caught stealing hope you spent the perk point on the stealth thing but oops sometimes you just do get detected even if no one is around to witness you murder that person

except that person or no one is around to witness you steal that cup except that cup suddenly everyone in the Galaxy knows that it was specifically you that stole that cup even though apparently cell phones or email or fax machines or texting don't exist based on the context of most of our [ __ ] Quest objectives I don't want to do this anymore please let me go so now you have a bounty in that star system and then you're like well if I already have the Bounty then I I guess I'll just just keep doing

it if anyone gets in my way I'll shoot him cuz I'm a freak that's my identity now I'm a freak I wasn't wasn't born this way but I was molded by Todd and his and his leather so you're traveling around stealing stuff from all these planets trying to have a grand old time and your Bounty is getting pretty stacked but oh [ __ ] there's a main story mission in a city that you haven't been to yet in a star system that you have that giant bounty in you get scanned the cops are pissed you

can choose to fight them off and grab drive fast travel away but if you want to ever enter that City you're going to have to do something about that Bounty so you wor back and this time you're like all right well I can't pay the bounty cuz it's insane so I guess take me to jail and when you go to jail in this game the cops will not only remove every single item from your inventory that was ever stolen which slowly lists away at the top of the screen one by one which this this is

never explained in the game as like some lore accurate space technology that tracks ownership it's just magic where a cop four planets away knows that you stole this specific pen but your punishment for jail time is an XP debt it will never lower your current level but it will erase any current XP progress that you've made towards leveling up and potentially even put you into the negative as well if it's high enough which it will be this is kind of like how jail time and Oblivion could randomly lower some of your skills Starfield says hey

we know we can't actually Force the player to sit in a jail cell but we want there to be some sort of consequence for being bad and part of me is like damn that's actually kind of interesting and creative except leveling up takes a long ass time in this game for example to level from Level 10 to level 11 it's around 900 XP and it only gets exponentially more grindy the higher you get so if you have a high Bounty which is not hard to get you will be in this much debt have fun crawling

out of that hole you filthy little pirate [ __ ] it's also worth noting that much like a lot of stuff in this game this mechanic is barely explained at all and the only way to realize that you are in XP debt or track it is to look at the status screen I understand having some sort of punishment for doing something bad and getting caught I I really do but when leveling is this grindy and the perks you get from leveling up don't actually work or just straight up aren't worth it in the game requires

you to be scanned in order to land on certain planets because you can't actually just [ __ ] fly the ship to the planet in this godamn space game being punished this harshly for choosing a play style that is supposed to be viable in this so-called RPG is just super disappointed Starfield would be a disappointment regardless of whatever year it came out but unfortunately for Bethesda 2023 was obscenely stacked with fantastic games in each of those specific genres that Starfield takes turns cosplaying as it is an open world exploration game with little to no actual

meaningful exploration it is a glorified looter shooter that is still catching up to games that are now old enough to be in high school and it is a role playing game with so so few meaningful roles to actually play in relationships to engage with I really want to like this game I am always going to cheer for Todd and Bethesda because they have given me so many amazing memorable experiences for the past 20 years that have largely influenced my love for gaming I want the next Elder Scrolls game to knock it out of the park

I will always root for anyone trying to make an ambitious video game but after seeing what Bethesda has put out over the last decade I just couldn't contain these thoughts and feelings any longer I hope this video was at least kind of interesting or at the very least digestible in a way that sort of made sense even though I feel like I should be in the psych ward if you could still see me right now thank you so much for watching my video and I'll see you next time this is actually my off-road ball because

when I was filming the uh campfire scenes my dumbass didn't realized that a yoga ball that I've been using for like 6 years uh shouldn't go out in the woods where there's like prickly goat head things and I popped a bunch of holes in it but fortunately my sister the same one that I stole the original yoga ball from had another gray yoga ball uh that's like got a bunch of ribs on it uh so this my this my off-road ball also I only realized recently that there's like no aliens in Starfield like big eyed

gray [ __ ] from signs not a single one