1 yr. ago • 85%

COVID And Working From Home Made Starfield Development "Very, Very Slow," Todd Howard Says

www.gamespot.com COVID And Working From Home Made Starfield Development "Very, Very Slow," Todd Howard Says

Bethesda reportedly had "hundreds of plans" for the game that didn't make it.

36 comments

People for once not being overworked has made it clear that the scope of modern AAA video games is unsustainable.

108
- Yep. Not every game needs to be a huge open world (or in this case galaxy.) Give me tight well written games that are complete on launch, that's all I'm asking for.
  
  58
  
  Titanfall 2's campaign is one of the best examples of this. Not very long, but high quality and ridiculously fun
  
  22
  
  We really went from
  
  2D platformer saturated To 3D platformer saturated To FPS saturated To Sandbox Saturated To 50+ hour $70 incomplete open world saturated
  
  5
- scope of modern AAA video games is unsustainable
  
  Helpful hint, it's not just video game programming. Those hijacked gas pipelines in the US, unsecured SCADA systems weren't because every sysadmin was falling asleep, it's because nobody pulling the trigger wanted to listen to the sysadmins screaming that blindly deploying shit without audits, was a bad idea.
  
  In pretty much every single technological failure, there's usually a common thread. Someone did (or forgot to do something) in the name of profit.
  
  22
  
  Sysadmin - can confirm.
  
  Have a VP wanting to ram a newly acquired Europe entity through a migration and I am just yelling in every meeting about regulations. No one gives a shit so I’m just making them sign everything they say. CYA in full deployment.
  
  16
  
  I can side with what you're saying, but I don't understand how forgetting something in the name of profit in other industries has anything to do with the pace of game development.
  
  3
- Many modern AAA games has become glorified toilet paper rolls. They tried to keep manufacture then in hopes to milk everything possible, then when you are at the end of roll they hype and sell you a new one. Make them feel like you absolutely have to play the next installment to get a closure or something new branching out.(prequel/sequel/reboot/timelines/etc.)
  
  It was unsustainable at the pace and amount pre-covid, unhealthy for hardcore gamers as well. We have to actively not buying and playing new games cause I can play certain amount per day/week.
  
  With covid and post covid, I actually finished more games compare to before. Well, the extra 2 hours not needed to commute I can do whatever I wanted.
  
  7
"I'm old, stubborn, don't know how to manage remote teams, and have no interesting in learning." - Todd Howard

Every time this guy opens his mouth, it sheds so much light on Bethesda's decades-old problems.

Edit: I'm looking forward to seeing what Ted Peterson, Vijay Lakshman, and Julian Lefay do with The Wayward Realms. These three are the actual fathers of The Elder Scrolls. Todd has been shitting on their legacy since Redguard.

80
- AAA studios were used to having local build farms, in-person build-review sessions, and testers being in the same physical space so engineers could see what's going on. They have collections of unreleased hardware that need to be distributed and secured.
  
  It's not simple to completely overhaul a setup like that and go full remote. You're moving 100s of GB a day to each dev and trying to change every one of your processes.
  
  Every AAA engineer I know complained about how how slow everything was remote. Studios are figuring that shit out now, but I don't think "hurr durr Todd Howard old" is really accurate or adding anything to the conversation here
  
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- Permanently Deleted
  
  13
  
  I am so sorry.
  
  Do these people know that Slack exists? Because that is why Slack exists.
  
  5
  
  I have slowly faded away from those daily meetings and my rate to address issues increased. Working and supporting 2 different projects while doing extra research topics to future proof our tech or migration path. I do still have those weekly meeting though but my work pace have been better without the daily ones.
  
  Even my manager ask me today if I want to do the biweekly checkup or skip, "well, we did the weekly this morning so I see no point of doing the biweekly." "Sure, let's skip."
  
  Now if I can have my own status board and progress bar on a internal page and tag it with my slack profile, maybe I can skip all the meeting?
  
  3
- There is some truth to remote being worse for engineers especially less experienced programmers that can't talk to more senior programmers face to face.
  
  11
  
  This is where tools like Slack Huddles or Zoom come in handy. Need some face time? You are a click away. Need to collaborate on one screen? That’s one more click. Need to pair program? That’s a click.
  
  There is nothing that is done face to face that can’t be done faster, better, and more efficiently using readily available digital collaboration tools.
  
  14
  
  I strongly disagree, I am a software engineer, have worked on the field for over a decade, while I understand that's not enough to be one of the extremely senior developers but nevertheless I'm a senior software engineer that can answer any and all questions posed from a beginner or even a mid leven engineer. The company I work for pairs developers when they first join so you have someone who's expected to be there to answer anything, this creates a positive climate and makes new joiners feel safe to come and ask questions, which in the long run makes them feel comfortable with doing the same.
  
  When you send a message to someone on slack he can finish what he's doing then respond, on an office setting the question will cut your thought line and cause you to lose track of what you were doing. Back when I worked at the office there were days I couldn't get any work done because after 30min of investigation someone asked me something, then I had to redo the full backtrack of what I was doing only to be interrupted again for something stupid like shown a meme or be asked if I wanted to go out for lunch. The company I worked before my current one got so efficient during COVID that there wasn't any work left to do, the managers had planned a year worth of projects and we finished them in a few months and they had to rush to try to find things for us to do. However working from home makes micromanaging harder, so managers who want to micromanage make everyone's life harder (including their own), and then complain that the engineers are producing less.
  
  12
  
  Citation needed
  
  8
  
  100% is way too subjective to claim, if I ask someone something and I can review the semantics of how they worded it as many times as I need, I'll definitely understand it better than if told me it in person and my ADHD brain just missed it
  
  3
Made Starfield Development "Very, Very Slow,"

Should have upgraded their PCs, I guess...

59
Probably not so much COVID and instead trying to coordinate 27 different outsourced studios. Why not just make it mostly inhouse like before??? If we're talking scale issues; why introduce these by aiming for deluge of samey procedurally generated worlds instead of the one quality handmade world you're already known for?

20
STFU Todd...

14
Hopefully we'll see a couple of those "plans" crop up during the game's life cycle, and hopefully a couple (hundred) bug fixes.

Plus official mod tools but I'm not too eager for them, I have full faith the modding community will perform miracles even without them.

10
That's pretty obvious from the planet surface and travel system. Apparently virtually every pixel of a planet surface is another procedurally generated map, but the UI and gameplay make them hard to access and not really useful anyway.

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