Microsoft has introduced its latest AI efforts which are capable of generating character dialogue, and it's got voice actors fearing for the future of the industry.
24.10.2023 - 16:43 / wccftech.com / Bruce Nesmith
Long-time Bethesda Game Studios designer Bruce Nesmith is featured in the latest MinnMax interview, discussing topics from The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall to Starfield.
Nesmith, who was also the Lead Designer on Skyrim, left Bethesda in September 2021 to focus full-time on his career as a writer of science fiction and fantasy novels. However, he had completed all the base work he had been assigned for Starfield at that point, including all the astrophysics data, designing systems for space combat and spaceship building, and the skill system with the built-in challenges.
When asked by MinnMax's Ben Hanson about the exploration limits criticized by some Starfield players, Nesmith pointed out that the exploration stuff suffered a bit because the team decided to create other in-depth systems, such as shipbuilding, which turned out to be a fan-favorite. Ultimately, it was a conscious choice to put some of the effort elsewhere in the game.
There was a lot of discussion about the scope of the game. At one point, I said 'You know, I bet this game would be a lot better if we restricted ourselves to about two dozen solar systems and focused on them'. The point was made quite legitimately that once you've done one solar system, you're really not adding to your work all that much by doing a hundred. Just doing our own solar system, all the variety that you have to do just to have that, you've done 90% of the work for the rest of it.
Todd pretty much pulled the number 100 for the number of star systems out of thin air, but the more we went on, the more it was like 'Okay, so all the core activity takes place in these two dozen in the Settled Systems region, and the rest of it is open space, but people love our big games, they love that open area to explore so let's go ahead and let them have it'. Then it was down to 'Okay, how do we make exploration meaningful?' Once again, you have to succeed on one planet. Once you've got that formula, you have the formula for all the planets.
But when you're also trying to do 'build your own spacecraft', which they didn't have to do, they could have given you a bunch of pre-built spacecrafts to buy.. Once they're doing all that quest work and all the huge variety of plants and animals, you got to make hard choices, and I think some of the exploration stuff just didn't come through as well as it could have because they decided to make other choices. Never misunderstand this: in every game studio on the face of this planet, they know the choices they're making and they know the things that are not going to be in there. They know what the players are going to moan about, but you've got to make a hard choice.
I think players have really gravitated to building their own ships,
Microsoft has introduced its latest AI efforts which are capable of generating character dialogue, and it's got voice actors fearing for the future of the industry.
is a massive game, touting over 100 different star systems and 1,000 planets in its enormous scope. Sadly, since the game launched, many have complained that while expansive, the Settled Systems in feel empty, making its thousand planets far less appealing and impressive. Recently, however, it's been revealed by an ex-Bethesda employee that early in the game's development, conversations took place that may have resulted in a completely different game.
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Bruce Nesmith, a former Bethesda veteran who was lead designer on The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, has said that he “probably played Skyrim for 1,000 hours" and that for "950 of those hours, it was broken”.
Stop for a second and picture your favorite video game developer or publisher. It doesn’t matter their “scale” as long as they’re prominent. More than likely, you can name-drop at least one or two people who are the “faces” of that company. For example, Nintendo has Eiji Aonuma, Shigeru Miyamoto, Doug Bowser, etc. Microsoft has Phil Spencer, Sony has/had Jim Ryan, and on it goes. For Bethesda, they have/had many people who have helped define them over the years for one reason or another. Easily, the one that most people know is Todd Howard. He’s the guy who honestly makes the biggest announcements for the company and helps crank out their best games.
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Former Skyrim lead designer Bruce Nesmith left Bethesda, and his updated role as senior systems designer, partway through Starfield's development, so he was as surprised as the rest of us when the massive space RPG was released in remarkably good condition.