Starfield has it’s negatives for sure, but he has a point about what the communities have been like (including here on Lemmy).
There have been so many armchair gamedevs who overnight know intricacies of engines, how programming works, how 8 year old computers should be able to run brand new AAA titles at 120fps. It’s been just exhausting reading these conversations.
For example, one thing I read again and again was “Starfield just wasn’t optimized, they easily could have reduced memory and bumped framerates”. Which any actual programmer will immediately feel a pit of dread in their stomach because we’ve been asked to reduce ram usage or speed something up, and that is a daunting task in our simple little apps - let alone a major AAA game.
Again I’m not saying Starfield was perfect. It has a lot of flaws, biggest one for me is that it felt like a game that came out 10 years ago in terms of how it played. But it didn’t deserve the overall destruction it received online. Any developer knows that the only people who can say “how” their game could have been done better were the ones who actually wrote it.
For example, one thing I read again and again was “Starfield just wasn’t optimized, they easily could have reduced memory and bumped framerates”. Which any actual programmer will immediately feel a pit of dread in their stomach because we’ve been asked to reduce ram usage or speed something up, and that is a daunting task in our simple little apps - let alone a major AAA game.
This thing in particular was picked apart by actual devs in news articles and editorials that showed that Bethesda really didn’t optimize the game at all along with all the technical reasoning and proof showing how it could have been improved.
It’s not just the players, who for the most part, have been citing those articles when they make that particular critique. I mean, shit, they haven’t even used their own texture compression system for the last few games they made, and that’s so easy even someone with minimal modding knowledge can fix because the game already has the tools to make it work better.
Please share these articles you speak of. From developers with real world game dev experience. Without pointing me to some 2 hour rambling YouTube video.
And do you seriously think that someone with minimal modding knowledge can “fix” texture compression and the actual devs of the game hadn’t known or thought of doing so too? Say what you will about the Starfield producers and management but I absolutely 100% guarantee you if they chose not to use that feature, it was for very good reasons.
Say what you will about the Starfield producers and management but I absolutely 100% guarantee you if they chose not to use that feature, it was for very good reasons.
Not the original commenter, but this whole argument you put here falls completely on it’s face since we know that modders HAVE done this and haven’t had any issues (or at the very least have been able to solve said issues), if compressing the textures and whatnot actually broke the game then the modders wouldn’t have been able to do it without breaking the game
Even if they supposedly had a reason, then it was a bad one
When some rando with a mod package plugging into an undocumented ABI can dramatically improve the performance... Yeah, it's not optimized at all. Don't let them excuse themselves from due diligence.
To be fair, this is an old, old engine with several generation defining blockbusters making use of it. Not to mention the massive modding communities who’ve probably spent more collective hours fighting with the engine over the past few years than Bethesda has.
I’m guessing players will prefer flying over the mountains over climbing after the trailer unless Hello Games adds some interesting mechanics to climb.
As long as laws don’t constrain this rampant drive for short-term profit maximisation, and as long as laws permit the only truly valuable customer to be the shareholders and the C-suite’s own bonus programs, this won’t ever change.
Which in turn also already implies what needs to happen: Companies need to be prevented from caring more about the above two groups than the actual workers.
But this is difficult to pull off. The CEO (etc) should ultimately have the responsibility for the overall direction, but directly tieing them to the stability fo the workforce is tricky. It would be a way of doing it, of course. As in, loss of income of individual workers is directly judged against whatever payment/share program the C-suite managers enjoy, making them directly reponsible for not fostering an environment in which regular mass-layoffs are desirable.
Likewise, if shares automatically lost value whenever personel cost is cut (instead of gaining), firing workers would be heavily discouraged as it would decrease short-term profits and (correctly) flag a destabilizing event in the company.
All really tricky though, especially on an international level. But something ought to happen to keep this shit in check.
I’m sure you already understand this, but this is an unprecedented political project that would require the vast majority of people to stop simply sitting by reacting to political events.
This article makes some pretty sweeping claims about rumors being “thoroughly put to bed” based on a vague tweet about the DLC’s progress. I’m not sure it does anything of the sort, especially when the article didn’t even report on the exact question asked of this developer.
The reporter seems to take the quote and run with it a bit.
You don’t even have to go that far for the joke. An official Bloodborne PC port releasing first would be a miracle. God do I pray for that port release 😭
They’re squeezing whatever they can out of this game before its final whimper. The only people that would buy this $15 pack are people who don’t know anything about the game. Marketing it as a “starter pack” is so disingenuous that I can’t believe that Bungie had any other motive in mind than to con a few unaware people who are unlucky enough to pick up this game on a sale.
Maybe if they’d finally do something about the new player experience (specifically, the lack of one) this game could actually go back to its heyday. But they’re just committed to enshitifying it further with FOMO tactics, convoluted expansion/season pass/dungeon pass models.
I mean just try selling your friends on a game when you explain to them how much the upfront cost is to actually play the “real” game.
Obsidian really got the last laugh considering what Bethesda did to them with New Vegas. Now the roles have essentially been reversed. I’m really looking forward to Avowed.
I’m glad outer worlds is getting the recognition it deserves, it was drowned by the disruptive Disco Elysium but it’s still a great RPG with a great sense of humor that made billionaire fanboys mad.
If this gets more confirmed gods I hope they take Bandai Nampo to forking task over this. This is when the union needs to step up and protect its members.
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