So far I’m a few hours in and I’ve been having a great time. My hardware is closer to the minimum requirements, so I’ve had some issues with my resolution throttling back to keep framerate up in the busiest areas. So far, no significant bugs experienced, assuming the aforementioned texture resolution fuzzing was intentional.
I will say I’ve found all the complaints about loading screens to be a little silly. Again, I’m closer to the minimum hardware level on PC but most loading screens I encounter have been around 3-5 seconds, and they’re generally made up for with other conveniences like the ability, when planetside, to fast travel not just directly to your ship, but Into the pilot’s seat, so I’m spending a lot less time loading than I would have just walking through doors.
All in all so far it feels like exactly what I was expecting.
specifically to the loading screens point, I guess it’s about expectations. Since this is such a huge game advertised as exploration-based people might find too many loading screens immersion-breaking.
My experience is much like the others are saying in here. My initial response was oh wow it’s like no mans sky, but worse. I’m mostly underwhelmed with it after a few hours of game play, and I’m torn between grinding along, hoping it gets better, or getting a refund before I’ve played for too long.
I think this game will have more story focus to it than no man’s sky, which is why I’m hesitant to make such a snap decision as I’ve barely gotten into the story.
Update: I played for around 8 hours yesterday and can now say that once you get through the whole “tutorial” bit of the game, the story starts to become more evident, and I no longer feel like it’s a worse version of no man’s sky. After the first hour or two (depending on how quickly you play), it starts having the type of Bethesda RPG vibes you’d expect from a Bethesda RPG. I’ve been enjoying it.
You do the same thing in any number of space themed games. That doesn't make any of them similar. This is nothing like NMS. They are completely different types of games.
I can see why you would not like it if you were expecting NMS but it was never intended to be that. It claimed to be a BGS game in space, and so far they seem to have delivered on that.
Yeah what a retarded take. NMS is a lonely boring experience with the dullest ditch water plot (love those vague-nothing dialogues lol) and the worst gameplay loop in a while. Don’t worry they’re adding x pointless feature in an update!
Granted I’m waiting on release to play SF, but no fucking way are the games similar.
I can attest that my comment was made in isolation. I intentionally didn’t look at conversations or reviews and wanted a fresh experience all to myself. So I’m not parroting or trying to push some negative narrative.
Now that I’ve slept on it, I’m going to dive back in with my expectations reduced, and I’m hoping I’ll have lots of fun with it.
I think your comment is totally fair, you actually tried the game and came to the opinion. I’m more so confused on the zero gameplay but I know it sucks comments.
I agree and it sucks. At least on Reddit you could generally avoid pointlessly negative people, whereas here it feels like that’s the majority of comments. I hope it changes into actual conversations at some point
Reddit has toxic positivity with regards to Starfield. I find the comments I’ve read here so far to be a much more measured take. Basically that it’s a good game but it has a few minor issues that make it not live up to what was advertised.
More so this. The things I saw people saying they were gonna do once they got the game despite nothing of the sort being implied to be in the game were out of control. I’ve played the dog shit out of Skyrim and Fallout 4 and have yet to be let down by Starfield because I knew what to expect. And yes, I watched all of the ads and read the interviews, same as most, and never once felt lied to.
Played for 3 hours yesterday on a 3070, 10700k, 32GB ram. Game runs and looks incredible on high/ultra settings. I haven’t gotten far into the story, but the beginning gets into the action very fast like Skyrim.
The animations and textures make npcs feel more alive than fallout. I made it to the first city area and it looks amazing. It looks like mirrors edge type city in space
Yeahhh, I found a great deal on this monitor but I was a dumbass and didn’t know how bad the down-rez is when running 1080p on a 1440p monitor😅
Other than not being able to use raytracing in CP2077 it hasn’t been a problem, but I’m think I’m going to start running into trouble from this point on. Oh well, I was thinking of getting another monitor for my workflow anyway…
Definitely get a decent 1440p monitor with high refresh rate and GSync and then you are set. If you get it used it probably won’t even be that expensive (that’s how I got mine around 2 years ago).
Monitors last a long time so it’s not something that you will just toss, and a 3070 with 1080p is such a waste imo
Just played 4 hours. Not saying whether the game is good or bad, but I’m not seeing the point of the spaceship yet.
It’s looks like merely a medium for the fast traveling mechanic. You can’t really “move” in space (as far as ive tried), and can’t use it to fly within a planet.
I expected being able to manually travel from planet A to planet B and finding cool stuff along the way. If you wanna actually move you need to fast travel.
I also expected to be able to get in my ship and go from place A to place B within the same planet (also finding cool stuff along the way). It seems that also is just done by fast traveling only.
I did read that landing on planets is just a cutscene rather than a seamless transition, but I thought for sure you can actually fly it in space - isn't there even combat with other spaceships or random locations to check for resources?
Is there anything else to do on the spaceship, does it feel like a home base where you keep your gear, crafting benches, companions to talk to, etc? I really want that cozy starbound/kotor ebon hawk vibes if possible 🥺
There is spaceship battles, not sure about random locations, but I’m guessing you’d also need to fast travel to those.
Also the spaceship is VERY customizable, so much in fact that I found it overwhelming lmao. Not saying that’s bad thing, but you’d definitely need to come up with a lot of credits /loot first.
Again I only have 4 hours in game, so I don’t really know much yet.
Your ship is basically a TARDIS. You pick a destination from your star map and then your ship magically disappears from one place and appears at another. There is "space" but it feels completely fake, like they tacked it on at the end. Really, so many of the games mechanics feel fake and the effort it takes to suspend disbelief is really high.
So you can fly in space, and fight space battles there, but you can’t really fly fast enough to fly from one planet to another in real time. To move to a different point of interest in the system, you need to fast travel to it. So the meaningfully interactable part of space is just the immediate area around each fast travel point.
I’m not far enough yet to know if the interior gets more interesting after you add more modules to the ship; the starter ship is basically an RV: bed, galley, cockpit.
Yeah I meant fly as in between locations without a loading screen, kinda like in X3/X4/NMS or even Freelancer/Rebel Galaxy and older spaceship games. I get it might be harder between solar systems the way E:D does it but kinda sad it's not real travel within one. Maybe they patch it in one day in the future? Who knows
Yeah I meant fly as in between locations without a loading screen, kinda like in X3/X4/NMS or even Freelancer/Rebel Galaxy and older spaceship games.
Ehhhh.
I dunno about No Man's Sky.
But in X3 (and X2, for that matter), you don't really seamlessly enter stations. In X4, you do, but it felt like a gimmick to me -- there's not much interesting gameplay on a station.
And there are loading screens between sectors in those games. Short ones, but they're there. Freelancer too.
Well I never said "enter" stations, I said travel between them. In X3 you used SETA to travel between stations and in X:R and X:4 you had (super)highways. Freelancer also had those rings that speed you up and you could leave them at any point - in fact, the way piracy worked was you destroy one of the rings which would interrupt the travel and drop any ships out of the hightway lane so you could attack them.
Basically, all of these games didn't just have a loading screen when going from one station to another, there was an actual feeling of distance and travel. From what I've heard starfield doesn't have it at all.
This is one of the more biting criticisms I've heard of the game. It results in a lack of feeling of scale and scope. The universe just feels like connected places, instead of worlds within a galaxy. No Mans Sky got this right, and it's surprising that Bethesda would fumble such a core mechanic. It looks like they tried to cover up this wart by... removing city maps.
It is not in the slightest bit surprising that bethesda would have issues with an interconnected world.
All (?) interiors are still different cells that require a load screen. And, since Skyrim (and, to a lesser extent, Fallout 3), the vast majority of towns are also a separate “exterior” cell as well.
MAYBE with the requirement of an SSD/nvme we could see a return to Morrowind/Oblivion style “the entire planet is one exterior area”. But we were never going to have atmospheric transitions.
There is a reason that basically every single “seamless transition” elite game has almost entirely barren planets. Balancing simulation for an entire solar system is already hard enough (and is why star citizen and elite dangerous like the long travel times…). Combining that with a planet where you potentially have to care about more than a few containers of loot and some scannable objects becomes hell. Its why so many games will hide a loading screen as you break atmosphere (I think one of the Evochrons did this? Been a minute) and why planets with cities are generally off limits… Or you just run like dogshit if you are star citizen.
That said: I REALLY hope this is the motivation for NMS to add cities. I don’t need “open world” cities. But being able to dock at a domed city would be AMAZING. And still get rid of a lot of these issues.
Look at Ratchet and Clank Rift Apart. They have completely seamless transitions between entire dimensions. They use Direct Storage, which is a Microsoft API. It’s not a good look when a Sony studio is able to achieve seamless transitions on a Windows game but a Microsoft game can’t.
R&C is cool as hell but it is NOT the revelation it was marketed as.
Titanfall 2 and Dishonored 2 had already done almost exactly the same gimmick years prior. And that MyHouse.wad DOOM map that everyone lost their mind over a few years back actually was ALSO doing the same trick. Hell, the Build Engine games (particularly Duke Nukem 3D) were entirely built around this trick.
The reality is not that you are “changing entire dimensions”. It is that the majority of the map is loaded into memory and you are teleporting between parts of it. This has been a solved technology for literally decades. You just have seamless “portals” between different parts of the map. But it boils down to just loading enough assets.
R&C mostly benefited from the larger memory of the PS5 (16 GB of GDDR6 versus 8 GB of DDR5 for the PS4) with the “direct storage” mostly being background in, ironically, the same way Morrowind was: You are loading a few “cells” ahead of you as you traverse the world map so that you never notice a load time (unless you use the boots of blinding speed… or are playing on a console).
Even on systems with significant memory, a slow drive will create lag in RC. Moreover, RC is doing this while also having very high graphical fidelity overall, including ray tracing, which is quite memory intensive. It’s not possible without Direct storage and reasonably fast SSDs.
Keep in mind that the PS4 pro and the Xbox One X both had spinning disc hard drives. Going from an HDD to an SSD, let alone a pretty good NVME, is already an insane speed-up. There is a reason most PC outlets have said over the years that getting an NVME was a more noticeable improvement than a new GPU.
Similarly, most games and visuals that people were used to fit in 8 GB. This is twice as much RAM at a higher speed.
The “direct storage” argument is almost entirely marketing. And it is fundamentally no different than learning you can Boots of Blinding Speed across the map without loading if you installed Morrowind to an SSD.
It is a nice technical achievement. But pretending it was some unique and groundbreaking action is not only buying into the marketing: It is insulting to the devs who did similar with much less.
TF2 and Dishonored accomplished this by having all the other level data loaded in memory simultaneously all as part of the same map. The instant transitions are accomplished by teleporting the player to another part of the map that is already in memory.
This is not the same trick R&C pulled, and it has far more limitations. For example, TF2’s Effect and Cause necessitates a smaller overall map than the other missions because they had to fit two different versions of the same map in memory all at once. If they wanted to let you transition between three different time periods, they would have had to make it even smaller to fit in the same memory budget.
Ratchet & Clank’s approach has no such limitations. They could let you switch between 8 different time periods and not worry about having to fit all of them in memory at once.
At the end of the day: it is all the same “trick” Morrowind used. You load N cells ahead of where the player is so that they don’t notice the load times because they have been done by the time they get there.
In this case a “cell” could be a room or it could be DM-Deck 16 or it could be all of The Imperial City. It is the same trick. Hell, I think some streaming services even do this at different quality tiers so that you have no delay between one episode and another.
Size of levels is entirely a function of available memory. PS5 had more memory than PS4 and TF2 was targeting PS4 specs (… actually, was that PS3? Let’s say PS4 so I don’t feel too old). Faster load from disk helps a lot but NVMEs alone already get you there, as anyone who has experienced zero load times while playing a game can attest.
Like I said below where I already addressed this exact same point: It is great to applaud accomplishments. But by buying into this “only with the power of direct storage is this possible” nonsense you are not only parroting marketing: you are ignoring the legacy of all the devs who already did this years (really decades) ago.
How Morrowind and other open world games work has very little in common with the approaches used in R&C or Titanfall 2.
This approach has its own unique limitations. In Morrowind, you cannot instantly teleport from one side of the map to the other, in theory that would only be possible between adjacent cells. Otherwise, fast traveling would be instantaneous.
The beauty of what R&C does is that there are no limitations at all. You can almost instantly teleport between any maps the game has. No hacks or trickery beyond the brief animation concealing the 1-2 seconds it takes to shuttle the data from the SSD to VRAM. This is unique, and simply wasn’t possible on spinning rust without radically simplifying your level design and visual package to fit within the limited bandwith.
I was going to talk about how the load times are mostly just masked but still there but you acknowledged that.
At which point: Mark and Recall (or any of the Interventions) on an NVME is nigh instantaneous. And, much like Shang Tsung got neutered, those spells were largely removed because it made it too easy to load into a cell with a LOT of resources rather than an intentionally controlled and safe (asset wise) fast travel point.
Ah. I remembered the Imperial City being its own loading area (and kvatch was the town that gets wrecked? So that would make sense too) but I could have sworn the rest of the towns were still “open world”.
Ah well. Maybe someday I’ll play Oblivion again. But almost definitely doing Morrowind first because Morrowind was awesome and weird as fuck.
Any town with a wall around it in Oblivion is instanced.
Also, you have correctly recognized Morrowind’s superiority. I highly recommend the Tamriel Rebuilt mod that adds a lot of the land mass of the rest of the province outside of the island of Vvardenfell!
If you ignore the server performance issues and bugs, star citizen is completely playable on my system and I have below reccomended specs (for starfield & star citizen). If star citizen can have no loading screens with most planets as populated (or more populated) then starfield’s planets while also having to manage server resources, then starfield has almost no excuse to have loading screens.
Yes, it's much more like Andromeda than NMS. You can also land at other points on planets and get a procedurally generated area instead of just the pre-made ones like in andromeda though.
To me Mass Effect 1-3 felt more cohesive in space, because it was always clear how much you could do, whereas in SF it looks exactly like you’re in NMS, but you can’t do NMS things.
It’s not game breaking or ruining though. Just know going in that it isn’t No Mans Sky.
Sounds disappointing. I’m definitely unnaturally excited with the idea of “Large vehicles” - being able to walk inside with your character, take casual actions like crafting/talking while it transports, then stepping out. It’s why I enjoyed Sea of Thieves and Subnautica, and it’s what I mainly want out of trains in games.
Reducing them to interaction prompts and cutscenes sort of undersells them to me.
Tbh I have had a lot of fun with this game (35h in). It’s an RPG first and space explorer second, nothing necessarily wrong with that.
I also learned that if you’re tracking a quest you can use the grav drive right from the ship’s HUD by selecting the locstion marker. It does help immersion a tiny bit more.
Overall it’s what they promised, modders can anyways “fix” the shortcomings.
One thing I can say so far after a few hours is that their advertising department and Inon Zur did a masterful job capturing a whimsical aesthetic that nostalgically reminds me of some educational TV space shows like Cosmos.
Now that I’m playing the game, it feels significantly more clunky than that, and I haven’t gotten as immersed into that aesthetic as I had hoped. Really just FEELS like Fallout in space so far, which is a bit disappointing.
There’s also significantly more load screens than I had hoped. I’ve been spoiled by No Man’s Sky, thought we’d be getting some seamless transitions to planets and cities. Seems bizarre that we just fast travel through the starmap.
I think the load screens is what will kill it for me. I’d like to be immersed in a new universe. Not just select places from a menu and then load that place in.
I mean I thought fallout 4 was kinda mediocre to bad, and fallout 76 was awful, so I don’t really expect much from Bethesda any more. TES 6 is gonna come out and feel like a 20 year old game, not in a good way.
Game isnt running the best on my 2070 super but I've also heard its not running great on peoples 3000/4000 series cards either. Gunplay is fun. I like the challenges to level up perks. Could I have waited the 5 days to play it and save myself 30 bucks? Yes. But its a long weekend so I'll take advantage of it. I also havent played a Bethesda game since Fallout 4 came out so I find myself getting lost in the game and I played 4 hours last night and it only felt like 1.
Having a very weird “relationship” with this game.
Switched to linux for my desktop so PC gamepass is… a hassle. Which means I would be playing this on my xbox. But also? There is a full month of “early access” that I need to wait through to play the game I “own”?
Caught a few streams yesterday and it looked fun in that “Outer Worlds without the charm” kind of way. Could see myself going hard on the ship editor but… Avorion and Space Engineers already exist. Also Cosmoteer
Which makes this weird. It looks fine/good (like basically any bethesda game since Oblivion) but I kind of already am having difficulty mustering up the interest to go preload it on my xbox. Suspect I’ll just “forget” about this game until a Steam sale a few years from now. Kind of like Fallout 4 (although, I have yet to actually bother with that outside of ymfah videos).
The standard editing that comes with gamepass officially releases 9/6 in the US but due to timezones could be playable 9/5 in the evening. So it could only be a couple more days for the general release assuming you are in the US.
Watched a streamer play for quite a while and my primary takeaway is that I wish Bethesda would just scrap their engine and start fresh.
It’s got the same stiffness, gliding movement, butt-ugly NPC’s, and just the general feel of 15 year old Bethesda RPGs. I expect I wouldn’t be able to enjoy it for the same reason I struggled with fallout 4.
New engine? Do you mean the “Creation Engine 2”, which is still gamebryo at its core? I’m not complaining though because the engine is very mod friendly, it’s just realism is not its strong suit.
It’s interesting how little evolving and upgrading Bethesda does with their stuff. You can’t say that RDR2 and that table tennis game feels the same, but Oblivion and Fallout 4 feel very similar.
It’s a Bethesda problem, because other Gamebryo games don’t feel the same. Even CAVE did a better job with it.
It absolutely is the fault of the engine, but that’s not because Bethesda is incompetent or anything. It’s actually a pretty complicated issue, but yes, it is due to the engine. I wrote a whole explanation for someone else who was parroting the “it’s not the engine’s fault” bs that Pete Hines & Todd Howard started perpetuating a few years ago, so I’ll put it here for you and anyone else:
The problem isn’t the engine itself, it’s that Bethesda hasn’t given it the attention it needs.
Unreal Engine 5, for example, is built from the original Unreal Engine. But there has been so much work put into it that it’s nearly impossible to tell. Meanwhile, the creation engine literally has some of the same issues that the Gambryo engine had back during Morrowind.
To Bethesda’s credit, this isn’t entirely their fault. There’s a reason that proprietary engines have been dying out in favor of engines like Unreal, and that’s because maintaining and improving game engines is incredibly time consuming and expensive. And unless you’re directly profiting off of your engine, like Epic does, you don’t have a massive incentive to endlessly polish it. Doing so is time you could be spending working on your next game, which you do directly profit off of.
Personally, I want Bethesda to keep using the Creation Engine, or whatever they turn it into next, because of its incredible mod support. However, it’s nowhere near as polished or advanced as other engines, and understandably probably never will be. There’s really no easy solution imo.
Lol I’m not surprised you didn’t read past it, maybe you should.
My point is that the engine itself can be worked on to be better. That it, in and of itself, isn’t the sole issue, as throwing it away isn’t the only solution. But because Bethesda hasn’t worked on it as much as they need to, it’s causing problems.
Edit: And for the record, I’m actually sympathetic towards Bethesda and want them to stick with the engine.
I’ve never understood this argument, most game engines are based on 20+ year old technology and have been updated throughout the years. Can the creation engine be improved upon? Definitely yes, but the engine’s age has almost nothing to do with it.
Skyrim literally had some of the same exact problems that Morrowind had.
Personally I want them to keep the creation engine, if only for the stellar mod support. But let’s not kid ourselves, it desperately needs an overhaul.
I listed one feature that I'd like to have (dynamic generation of polygons in curved surfaces), which I do not consider to be a very important limitation in another comment.
But if you strongly feel that the engine imposes constraints, then I'm curious what particular functionality it is that you're after.
EDIT: Another: I don't think that the game can generate billboards for player-built structures (so you can see the structures you've built in Fallout 4 and Fallout 76 many cells away). I don't think that that's actually a fundamental engine limitation -- you could probably do it with the existing engine, just that the game doesn't do it today. Instead, stuff like that is generated via offline map-generation tools. But again, it's not really a huge deal in either of the above Fallout games.
There’s no specific functionality (except maybe ladders lol) it’s more just the engine as a whole. The fact that certain bugs can be found in all of their games from Morrowind to Fallout 4 is unacceptable imo.
And the fact that someone managed to literally put the world of Fallout 4 into Skyrim, and have it just work seamlessly, really speaks volumes.
I actually wrote an explanation for someone else a while ago, so I’ll put it here if you’re curious:
The problem isn’t the engine itself, it’s that Bethesda hasn’t given it the attention it needs.
Unreal Engine 5, for example, is built from the original Unreal Engine. But there has been so much work put into it that it’s nearly impossible to tell. Meanwhile, the creation engine literally has some of the same issues that the Gambryo engine had back during Morrowind.
To Bethesda’s credit, this isn’t entirely their fault. There’s a reason that proprietary engines have been dying out in favor of engines like Unreal, and that’s because maintaining and improving game engines is incredibly time consuming and expensive. And unless you’re directly profiting off of your engine, like Epic does, you don’t have a massive incentive to endlessly polish it. Doing so is time you could be spending working on your next game, which you do directly profit off of.
Personally, I want Bethesda to keep using the Creation Engine, or whatever they turn it into next, because of its incredible mod support. However, it’s nowhere near as polished or advanced as other engines, and understandably probably never will be. There’s really no easy solution imo.
UE5 doesn't still have UE2 limitations. Gamebryo still won't let me climb ladders. It's clear that UE has been upgraded extensively, while Gamebryo has not.
One thing I did want in Fallout 4 that I don't believe it presently does is dynamic generation of polygons in curves.
The game has environments with kinda curvy surfaces, but aside from the dynamic level of detail models, the engine can't go throw spare horsepower at generating more polygons to make smoother curves. I think that that's a good match with long-lived PC games, because people playing it years later on more-powerful hardware can burn their extra cycles on making things pretty.
It's not vital or anything, just think that if there's one game where it'd be neat, it'd be Bethesda-type games.
The one thing Unreal still has bug wise is the fact I can’t place hundreds of actors in a blueprints viewport because it lags like Satan but if I run code that spawns the same amount attached to said actor or drag the same quantity into the level itself it works without issue.
Yeah, they can just append a number to it like unreal does and call it a new engine but that's not what you actually want. It's not a matter of a "new engine", it's them not investing enough into the existing one to make it feel more modern. I know some things like physics and animations are part of the "bethesda charm" but it stopped being charming after skyrim :P
They’ve been saying a new engine for a long time. It’s just not. they change subsystems, but people are saying they can feel the morrowind in their latest titles.
Careful. The last time I spoke ill of Gamebryo+++++++ I was the subject of a short-lived harassment campaign. Bethesda fans are bizarrely protective of this Frankenstein engine. Get this: you still can't climb ladders! It's fucking 2023.
Their engines have been showing it’s age since Skyrim came out. The fact that they got this far is a testament to their willpower, but man, if they’d change it up it might work out really well for them.
I’ve been playing their games since oblivion, I haven’t played this one yet, but if people are complaining about the engine already then I know there’s a decent chance I’ll air the same grievances.
Though, you’re quick to pull out the grass touching, I must ask, why are you so staunch of a defender of Bethesda? Maybe we both should be touching grass.
Nope, talking in general, and thanks for proving my point as well!
So if you’ve played all their games, you should know exactly what to expect and shouldn’t have any complaints than… you’ve enjoyed the game and engine, if you want something new, don’t buy their products and support their decisions……
Where am I defending Bethesda…? I’m defending facts and truth, I’m adding a little of my own opinion, but that shouldn’t be discouraged. But everything I’ve stated is based on facts, it’s a new engine, yes it has issues, so does every other engine……
I'm also not convinced that ladder-climbing, whether one wants it or not, is a fundamental engine limitation. It might not be in the game, but that doesn't imply that it's an engine limitation.
googles
This guy modded climbable ladders into Fallout 4, which seems like a pretty good argument that it's not an engine limitation.
And not that I object per se to ladders, but when was the last time you climbed a ladder in real life? I haven't in quite some years. I mean, sure, it's one more interaction, and IIRC there are some fire escapes that had ladders somewhere in Fallout 4 in Boston. But you could make the same argument about interacting with all kinds of things, and it just seems odd for so many people here to mention specifically climbing ladders. I mean, you could fall and catch yourself, drive vehicles, rappel on a rope, skateboard, ice skate, grapple with enemies, zipline, sail a sailing boat, or God knows, any number of other player-object interaction functionality things that might be added. I suppose that any of them could theoretically add gameplay, but I don't see why the criticality of ladders.
Yeah it’s really weird to feel it again in a game. Especially coming from baldurs gate 3 where the npc interactions and realness of characters is so good
To be thrown into npc dialogue straight at you with no natural movement.
Otherwise the game is really cool so far. Flight is a little complex but I guess I’ll get used to it. The robot even says it’ll be like second nature soon. Assume he was talking directly to the player
They’ve never been able to get player models and expression right. I can totally forgive it if you get the same level of open world exploration and interaction we got in New Vegas. I personally can trade quality for depth and interesting gameplay (rimworld and dwarf fortress come to mind in the extremes of this). But it does seem like they struggle to achieve standards that were set even 5 years ago.
Bethesda is a funny company. When they are on it and get it right you end up with some of the best games ever made (Skyrim) but when they’re off it just becomes this jumbled mess that got duct taped together and released at full price (fo76).
I’m hoping this is more of the former but we will see. I suspect the modding community is going to take starfield and turn it into something magical. That ship building engine plus copyrighted space ships from pop culture, sign me up.
I think the hardest thing to do is having complex facial expressions overlapping when characters talk. You could do face capture for every dialog option but that would be a massive task.
In alot of engines characters mouths are controlled by a lip sync system that uses, pitch, tone or text fed dialog to ‘mimic’ words being formed in the mouth. It’s far easier to have that and then having facial expressions as a separate animation layer that’s blended together and triggered based on a enum that’s selected by a script (say a players dialog option says “Your a mean man” and the player selects it, the NPC knows what you selected and in that dialogue option theirs a little enum (it makes more sense if you treat a dialogue option as an object) that contains the facial expression or expressions that are appropriate to use in response).
Full facial animations are used mostly for cutscenes because actors cost money while in game is just the engine trying to move the mouth using code (I know Farcry 5 had this where only the important characters had full facial animations and the rest just flapped their mouths up and down).
Would anyone else be interested in a game that aborts a dedicated “conversation mode” to just have players respond in their normal first person view? Games like Titanfall 2 did that - even though your banter with BT is inconsequential.
It could even lead to some fun “actions not words” moments. Like, a gangster explaining to you “I have the council in my pocket and every gun in the city knows your face. What’re you gonna do about it?” shoots him in the head instead of responding
Modern game engines are extremely complex machines, starting from scratch would take decades because it’s fundermental things like drawing geometry in a 3D space, getting input, memory handling, garbage collection and all that low level stuff that needs to be re-done. Physics requires lots of work, so much infact for a time HAVOK was the go to plugin for most engines (still kinda is) just because of how God damn hard it is to have nice physics and high frame rates (tried to build a physics engine from scratch in C++ and I couldn’t get past the floating point position problem so anything too far away from 0,0,0 would spaz and handling multiple collisions on an object simultaneously caused all sorts of freaky things to happen).
Then when that’s done you still need to write additional tools and plugins so developers can import assets and scripts into the engine plus a level editor for designers to place objects, triggers and all that fun stuff.
After that you can now start making the game.
Bethesda probably rewrote huge chunks of their engine to support larger texture sizes and improve performance across the board for Starfield.
If they do decide to dump it then they’re most likely to use an existing engine like Unreal or Cry rather than build one from scratch.
Personally I believe the reason why they didn’t re-write the character movement is because it would also mean altering way to much stuff on the front end.
A good example would be if I use FunctionGetVelocity in my script to determine if a player is moving and it use to return an int but now it returns a float because of the rewrite, without conversion would mean you’d probably get a crash.
Another example would be AI related. If I use a variable to get a rot data type but now that’s been replaced with a struct that needs to be split to get rot now suddenly you have to touch the code to make it compliant.
Which is why I’m sad that cdpr decided to ditch their red engine. So much work turning a buggy mess engine from Witcher 2 into a beautiful (still buggy) engine in cyberpunk. If only they would at least open source it, or sell it to another studio.
With nanite, live coding and lumen Unreal is unbeatable at the moment and lots of studios are hiring like crazy for Unreal Engine specialists to try and beat the competition.
If CDPR wants to compete they’ll have to do a ton of work making those tools for designers and artists easy to use (alot more in-house engines still have source 2 hammer editor style toolkits and command line conversion tools which are shit compared to Unreals drag and drop advantage).
Plus Unreal 4/5 was built to be as modular as possible so you can build whatever you want while CDPR engine was built specifically for this genre of games Cyberpunk is in. They definitely could and I see the engine having potential but afraid that’s it’s not flexible enough without serious work.
I respect the sentiment, so no disrespect to it; but in software, there’s often a lot of caution against throwing out too much code.
You often find certain modules and sections of code that really should be thrown out or overhauled. If you can convince the corporation to dedicate time to doing that, it can often, but not always, show its benefits.
Probably a lot of the popular games we still play use some old bases, but replace parts that don’t work well. I think Apex Legends is still technically using Source (HL2), they’ve just done a lot to it so it no longer looks anything like Half Life 2.
Okay but Bethesdas engine kinda sucks and source engine is still pretty good… Why keep something if it’s not very good, other than to save money of course.
I’m done paying anything above half off a Bethesda games since fallout 4/76 anyway, they were bad and awful.
Can I ask what your experiences are with streaming to the deck? I have a 5ghz router and still run into latency issues. Do you get good results, and if so what kinda router are you using?
My router is terrible, it’s a linksys, cost me $400 and is just horrible to configure. It is however a WiFi 6 router with 5Ghz. The wifi 6, as I understand it, is the biggest benefit.
I get a capture of 60FPS and it says I’m getting 60FPS. The other thing is I have a clear line of sight between me an the router.
I mean you have a 3070 with a 1080p monitor. It would be a failure if any game didn’t run well on those specs. 1440p is more logical setup. 4K a challenging one.
I only played a few hours on my Steam Deck (because it would freeze on my PC), but what I saw was slightly disappointing. The game looks great, even on the Steam Deck with FSR blurring everything, the gun mechanics are fun, the character animations are the best I’ve ever seen from this studio. The performance is also very good on the Deck, with stable 60FPS 30FPS (edit: when I wrote this initially I was just eyeballing it, but didn’t bother to check that Steam capped the frame rate to 30 by default lol, so it was actually 30 and not 60…my bad) in indoor scenes and playable sub-30 in large outdoor areas.
…but the exploration. Man, Bethesda is known for their exploration, yet the spaceship is a gimmick at best. To be fair, I haven’t played enough to get familiar with everything yet, but I don’t expect that part to get much better. The game feels like Fallout, except instead of having a giant seamless open world to explore, you have a giant open world with tedious transitions between different areas. Maybe it’ll grow on me, but it’s not at all what I was expecting.
EDIT: update after playing some more.
The game definitely grew on me! The exploration is still shitty, but everything else makes up for it. I’m at ~9 hours on my Steam Deck, and even with all the FSR blurring I’m enjoying it a lot. I started doing a side quest collecting on bad debts for a bank, and during one of them I found a mission terminal on Mars offering a reward to anyone who surveys a distant planet, and on my way to the planet I picked up a distress call from a settler asking for help to fight off a bunch of pirates, and stumbled upon a drama between 3 settler families, then hijacked a pirate ship and found some “sentient AI” contraband inside and then… I went to sleep because it was late.
So in short, it definitely feels like a typical Bethesda game, but in a good way. Just side quests on top of side quests, but with less bugs.
The ship combat is still bland. I found it very easy. Idk if it’s because it’s early in the game, but no enemy has even gotten close to killing me, even when it’s 3 on 1 and we’re using the exact same unmodified ship. On the one hand, that’s boring, but on the other hand I appreciate not having to spend a lot of time in ship combat. However, now that I discovered how to board and hijack a ship, the combat is slightly more interesting.
And again, I did all of this on Steam Deck, with the only performance issue being on Mars and New Atlantis, which are both big cities/hub areas. It was still playable, but a blurry FSR mess. I disabled FSR because I hate the blurring, and it dropped the FPS pretty hard. Luckily, I didn’t have to spend a lot of time in those locations.
I liked Fallout 4. I mean, the dialog was annoying compared to New Vegas, but the story was fine. That was 2016 for the initial game, and the DLC later.
I liked the DLC with the creepy island and the robot man detective, that one was good! The main story was poppycock though. Like, a partner I didn’t care for died within the first few minutes, then a baby I didn’t care for got kidnapped and that was supposed to be my main motivator to get through the game?
Bethesda also kind of flops in the roleplaying department. Looking at BGIII, there’s plenty of moments where you can make decisions and not know what impact it might have, there’s lots of little interwoven story threads, and that’s what I’d expect from an RPG. Bethesda doesn’t really let you make choices.
Even No Man’s Sky has deeper thoughts hidden in that sparkly, colourful, arcade sandbox. The game touches on ideas of existence, life, and self. What themes did Skyrim touch on? Racism I guess? It feels to me like they wanted to do more with Skyrim, but blew all their budget on making a big world and didn’t have enough to put in it. The civil war storyline could in theory be a fantastic exploration on morals, but in reality it was just a slog.
Oblivion had some good quests. The expansion was really nice, but the quest that stands out most in my mind is the one where you set out to help a woman find her husband, and sleuth out that he actually managed to get trapped in the painting he was working on, after being attacked by a burglar.
Skyrim doesn’t really have anything remotely like it. Just endless copy-pasted dungeons with the same condescending puzzles and boring enemies. Sure they included Sheogorath, but somehow they managed to make even him drab and grey.
I was kind of hoping for fallout and elite; real space flight and exploration, but with an actual story and story line to follow. I'm mostly over real-life gaming that looks like a cartoon, so I'm glad it's not nms.
Skyrim and Oblivion definitely hooked me with exploration. It was a significant reason for playing and completing those games for me. If I want story there are a thousand better games out there. One without the other feels like a loss for me.
I think people were expecting fallout no man’s sky…and I don’t know why.
Well, Outer Worlds is already almost literally “Fallout 3, in space”. We had more, but smaller, open world areas but that isn’t much different than how The Pitt and the like were treated. Hell, it has been a minute, but I want to say DC proper was already a separate set of exterior cells that you transitioned into from the capital wasteland?
Mentioned elsewhere that I think anyone who was expecting seamless transitions just do not understand game dev (or Bethesda’s engine) in the slightest.
But it IS disappointing that there is such a massive emphasis on fast travel. Because Outer Worlds showed that traversing a space wasteland to do a few quests and find some POIs is really fun. And Bethesda have a LOT more resources than Obsidian and could have made that a much more “real” world. Even if it was mostly procedurally generated landscapes with painted in POIs.
Well, Outer Worlds is already almost literally “Fallout 3, in space”.
Outer Worlds really did not scratch my Fallout itch.
Yeah, superficially it's similar in a number of ways, but:
For all practical purposes, the game is fairly linear. The world is open, but you have little reason to go back.
The Fallout perk system introduces a lot of interesting mechanics, is an important part of the game. The Outer Worlds perk system was almost entirely flat bonuses to one thing or another. Didn't change much how one would play the game.
I rarely found myself stumbling into new and interesting situations just walking around the world.
The weapons weren't all that interesting or customizable. That includes the uniques, other than the science weapons.
I played a few more hours today in handheld (yesterday was on power and connected to an HDMI display).
I did notice worse performance, but that could also be because the content was different. The game is still fully playable, and I had fun murdering a bunch of pirates in an abandoned fracking station. New Atlantis (the first big hub city) ran like dogshit though. It struggled to maintain 30 and was blurry as hell, but yesterday it ran better. Idk, this isn’t scientific at all.
Just adding this extra info in case someone sees my first comment and thinks the game will run perfectly. Playable? Very much so. Recommended? Only if you can’t play on something more powerful.
I wouldn’t take their word. Everything I’ve seen about Deck performance is it runs at a fluctuating 30fps in basic scenes but drops massively in cities etc, on lowest settings with FSR on.
I was having the same problem until I switched to the preview branch and installed the latest system update, and I also switched it proton experimental. My current Steam OS version is 3.4.9, although I see there’s another update available.
Being a patient gamer isn’t strictly about money. It’s about not getting caught up in hype and making more calculated decisions. Even so, wanting to pay what you think something is worth is just good practice.
I'm not going to wait two years -- though I'm opposed to preordering -- but there are other benefits too. Two years down the line:
A bunch of bugs are patched. Even if Starfield is relatively free of bugs, there will be some.
The wikis for the game have been written up. Some obsessive person will have sat down and figured out the quirks of game mechanics and documented them. Understanding stuff like the relative merits of armor-piercing, bleeding, and so forth in Fallout 4 was complicated.
Starfield's expansion packs will be out.
Mods will be out, and there will probably be some pretty "must have" ones.
You'll have more hardware oomph to throw at the game, make it smoother/higher res.
Lmao I only buy games when they’re discounted too and suddenly I have 186 games in my steam library, most of them are still unplayed . I’m not in a hurry to buy more games with such a long backlog.
Mods are the very first thing that turns me off in a game. I want to play a game, not go stack mods on top of mods just to fix the shit the studio didn't feel like working on.
100% true - but if people feel the need to create so many mods, then there are probably lots of things people feel aren't good enough about the game. I'll admit my gaming time is limited, so just researching and adding mods could easily take all my time. I mean, fuck, I sold my Warthog HOTAS and went back to a cheap thrusmaster not because I liked the thrustmaster better, but because I was spending more time writing and fixing scripts and updating my bindings than actually playing the game. And every time an update would come out that would break a script I would spend pretty much my entire gaming time budget for a couple weeks just getting it running again. It got to the point where I just didn't play those games because every patch would change something and something (even something small) would break or be incompatible. I'm kind of over that.
But Cities Skylines 1 is borderline unplayable outside of Steam because the non-steam players can’t use that one third-party traffic mod on the Steam Workshop that fixes the annoying only-one-lane traffic jams the devs did jack shit about until their recently-released sequel
Boy oh boy everyone hates inventory limits and tedious management but devs still feel the need to make sure we have a reason to return towns and what not as the excuse.
Like fuck you, give me a better reason than inconveniencing the fuck out of me while I was out in your world having fun.
cough Baldur’s Gate 3 cough. Why impose an inventory limit if I can just send all the loot I’m gunna sell back to camp? And why no quick “send to camp” hotkey?! Right clickin n shiiittt
Hyperion+Endymion by Dan Simmons. Such a wonderfully written book that evokes so many sad feelings.
It’s veeeery slow (basically the entire first book is build up for the second one), but it’s so rewarding watching all the threads come together by the end.
I mean, we were clearly all so patiently holding our respective breath for this absolute genius comment of yours to grace our screens, O’ wisest of asses. What’s a little longer, really?
You spend less than $60 in two years’ time? Your Internet bill must be the cheapest on the planet. Your grocery expenses must also be next to nothing if you’re surviving on the warmth of your hot air whinging alone . Fascinating.
Yeah we pay an 80% markup just for existing and I hate it, but the gaming industry has been dropping quality while simultaneously increasing prices for some time now.
The only games in the last couple years I’ve paid full price for are CP2077, BG3 and Battlebit. Everything else is bought during the sales, usually at a steep discount, where many of these games should be priced by default.
Fuckin corpo dogs, they’ll ruin anything and everything they can to make a buck.
However, the graphics are getting kinda long in the tooth.
And it is significantly less-stable. I've definitely fallen out of the map a number of times, too.
And without hitting a wiki, you can lock yourself out of a lot of things that aren't obvious. Choices matter, but often in not-immediately-apparent ways.
If you liked Fallout 1 and Fallout 2, have you tried the Wasteland series? It's what Fallout 1 was modeled on, and that series kept going.
It's not Fallout, but it's the closest I have found to "more Fallout 1 and Fallout 2".
That being said, I thought that the Fallout jump to 3D would not work well, and I think I was very much wrong there -- the series did a pretty good job jumping the gap.
feels like Fallout
If you like the desert American Southwest "New Old West" theme in Fallout 1 and 2 and New Vegas, the Wasteland series does that.
Oh yeah! I was all-in on the Wasteland 2 Kickstarter and bagged the CE of Wasteland 3. Those do scratch the itch a bit, but Fallout's universe is so much more interesting and weird. Wasteland is a lot more straight-laced, comparatively.
I'm fine with the visual presentation of Bethesda's Fallout games, but I hate the gameplay. Fallout was the ultimate exercise in player agency and consequences... so many different ways to approach situations with so many possible outcomes. It's not just shooting things. While New Vegas flirts with those principles, BG3 is the first game in 20 years to REALLY recapture that magic for me. That's the kind of game I want more of, and that's the kind of game I want Fallout to be.
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