Bethesda's Game Design Was Outdated a Decade Ago

Break up with basic browsers. Get Opera GX here: operagx.gg/NakeyJakey2 UPDATE - putting this in pinned comment as well - bits of audio around 29:50 are missing because I used the House Building Song from RDR2 and it got copyright claimed. BUT if you turn ON captions, they should work during that section now and I also added stock youtube background music lmao so hopefully you still get the dang point!! ty for watching!! man I just hope this shit is entertaining! like im sleep deprived and nervous as hell right now ngl but if you see this I hope u enjoy the vid and have the best holidays! see u next year for Jacob Patch 1.37 that finally adds ray-tracing to my lil tiny ass
-jarby <3

You never want someone describing the quests in your game as “this could have been an email.”

I was playing the game last night and landed on some planet near Crucible, just to kinda mess around and get a quick survey off since it only had like 2 resources. I came across one of those workers you mentioned who gives you a quest to go find the guy that deserted and bring him back. So this lady gives me the quest, turns around and starts walking away, and I notice the quest marker is still on her, but the quest already updated saying "Bring back the deserter" or whatever. So I talk to her again, and she looks at me dead in the eyes, PUTS ON AN ACCENT, and says "You sure came a long way to find me. Well I'm not going back!". These geniuses forgot to populate the planet with more than one person, so the one worker was flagged as both the quest giver AND the target.

I had a pleasant experience on this game visiting my fictional parents. That is, until I dropped a stolen plate I accidentally picked up somewhere, picked it up again, and my elderly parents sprinted out of their own apartment to escape and report me to the authorities.

"Astronauts still had fun on the moon even though it's big and empty" is one of the most absurd excuses for lack of content I've ever heard. Sure, I guess since Neil and Buzz had a good time physically walking on the surface on the moon, it's my fault for being bored traversing these lifeless, empty planets through a computer screen in my bedroom.

For years people have said "Bethesda may not make the best rpg's or the most stable games, but when you add up the world, the characters, the music, it's like nothing else." And then Bethesda just decided to ignore their strengths, double down on their weaknesses, and this is what we got

Shooting on location with the exercise ball was an inspired directing choice

A thing I've noticed about Bethesda is that they'll add something to their games that's been around for years and they treat it like it's some kind of groundbreaking innovation. "Oh, you guys made a space game with procedurally generated planets? Yeah, i remember when No Man's Sky did that... 10 years ago."

The worst part about the bounty system and the pirate questline was that it makes you go to the capital planet of the faction that are hunting you down and are at war with multiple times. Having been roleplaying as a pirate, they didnt like me very much and i had a massive bounty. But there's no way to smuggle yourself in to a planet you have a bounty on. I managed to quickly land away from the city and from there fast travel to the city but once i landed i was greeted by a guard anyway. You literally cannot do the pirate questline while having a bounty against the space cops unless you just pay the fines, like a real bad ass pirate.

Just gonna pause the video right here and say I love that you went "on-location" in this one AND still brought the ball. 10/10

Todd's "You need to upgrade your PC" was Bethesda's "DO YOU NOT HAVE PHONES?" moment.

It's often said by people in the Star Wars fan circles that the reason the original trilogy succeeds, and the prequel trilogy did not (subjectively, of course) is because when George Lucas made the OG Trilogy, he was surrounded by other writers and directors that would tell him no and build off his ideas rather than obey him blindly. This resulted in a really popular series, and as a result, as Lucas kept moving forward with the series, the people who were able to tell him no were slowly replaced with people who unilaterally loved his ideas. His popularity, built on a collaborative effort, allowed him to become powerful enough to (subjectively) run the series into the ground with no oversight. This is the exact same way I feel about Todd Howard, a director who happened to be in charge of one of the best western RPGs ever made, and then coasted on that success, becoming more and more a figurehead of the series and the company, which gave him more and more power over the way the series was directed. I will never forget the interview with Todd Howard where, when Oblivion was coming out, for the first time on console systems, about how they had to "dumb down" the mechanics of morrowind for console players, which directly led to the enshallowing of the elder scrolls series as a whole.

The Miss Rachel "Fast Travel? Nooo, Loading Screen" bit had me rolling XD

Honestly Bethesda owes modders millions for fixing their games all these years.

An entire town wanting you dead in Skyrim for stealing a mug or killing a chicken was already a bit silly, but the idea that Starfield escalated that to an entire galaxy knowing what you've done is the funniest thing I've heard all week.

Bethesda has never allowed you to play an "evil" character. I remember when they announced the Dawnguard DLC for Skyrim and the trailer and gameplay previews made it seem like you could actually be an evil vampire and black out the sun. I was so excited to play a character who was going to black out the sun, sacrifice Serana, and be truly evil. When I actually played that character, I realized that the storyline was exactly the same as being on the side of Dawnguard except I was a vampire and killed the Dawnguard instead of killing the Volkihar vampires. Every other aspect of the story was the same. Sided with Serana, killed her dad, and didn't black out the sun. I was so disappointed and that was when I started to not care about Bethesda games. They have claimed for so long that "you can do anything you want" in their games, but they always railroad you into a storyline you didn't want to follow when you try to actually do that. It's frankly infuriating. I'm now at the point that I don't want to buy any Bethesda game again. They keep over-promising and under-delivering. They've been ridding on the coat tails of the modding community for too long and it really showed with Starfield.

Really cool of Jake to keep traveling back and forth to each of those locations for each shot.

Once upon a time essential npcs didn't just nap on the floor, you severed the threads of the prophecy and had to persist in the doomed world you'd created.

If you look back further, Morrowind absolutely allowed you to kill quest NPCs. It just brought up a dialog box afterwards that told you, "The line of prophecy has been severed. Reload a previous save or persist in this doomed world you have created." It has absolutely no problem with you making quests, and even the main story, uncompletable. Bethesda's problem for 20 years has been tweaking their formula to allow less customization, less options, and shallower gameplay all for the sake of accessibility (which isn't a bad thing on its own). With the level of degradation they've arrived to in 2023, I'm not surprised at all that Starfield flopped. Morrowind in space would have been far better than Skyrim in space. Actually, now that I think about it, Morrowind in space is just Knights of the Old Republic. Play that instead.

The sad thing about Bethesta stealth is that I was genuinely shocked, that you don't have to crouch in Cyberpunk to deal extra stealth damage, you just have to be undetected. Another huge pro about Cyberpunk in comparisson, the overworld and interior spaces are all connected and physically there, no loading screens in between. (Except elevators that go up and down in real time, but at least its immersive in that sense.)