UI is incredibly complex under the hood. Cryengine is also difficult to work in. There are tons of reasons games with distinct outstanding features don’t switch engines, though, and it’s usually due to the specific features said engine provides, no matter how difficult it becomes to work with as a legacy system over the years.
There is NO reason for hunts UX to as fucking terrible as it is. They literally took it from bad to straight up awful. Believe me, I know how hard to design and implement a good UI can be, I’m a software engineer. I’m not just handwaving “make it better, duh”. It’s flawed from the user requirements up. It’s like they never used their own ui before. It’s stunning how thoroughly they don’t comprehend how people have a terrible time navigating the game menus.
Last three Bioware games had plenty of time to cook. The chefs were just bad. They chose the wrong ingredients multiple times, had to start over and still ended up with something barely edible.
I know it’s popular to go “developer good, publisher bad”, but in Bioware’s case, from what I’ve read, they were mostly just given the rope to hang themselves.
I dont think his point is ‘These amazing games are what you get if you give devs tine’ but rather ‘you can only get these games from giving devs time’. Its no guaruntee by any means, but you are never going to get greatness from suits focus grouping decisions and crunching out a game.
I know it’s popular to go “developer good, publisher bad”, but in Bioware’s case, from what I’ve read, they were mostly just given the rope to hang themselves.
Ever since ME Andromeda they’ve been outsourcing a lot of the work, and/or using smaller and inexperienced studios while promoting and launching them as if made by the main studio.
They’ve been trying to “Central Engineering” things.
I worked as a massive chip company, they thought they could fix things by moving a lot of engineering out of the groups and into a single place where different groups and products could borrow and plug and play tech from.
Which was a great idea, except the groups didn’t really understand what they wanted, and central engineering just wanted to make what they thought people wanted, which often fit nobody but looked really cool.
Bioware looks like they’ve been trying to pull all the game engine stuff central, which would be fine but the frostbite engine didn’t work for half of what they wanted, and more importantly the “divisions” ended up just being pushed to make “something” to show off their best new tech, even if there was 0 story or creativity behind it (I’m looking at you Anthem).
To be fair, I’ve read that Sandfall also outsourced a lot of work for Expedition 33, which is how they’ve kept the team small.
I see no issues with outsourcing if done right: not every small developer needs to have a motion capture crew, etc.
If there are companies out there that can provide that for you at a reasonable cost, then you just need to focus on the core gameplay and the artistic aspects of your game.
This way you don’t bloat your headcount with hundreds of people that you’ll have to sack after the project is done, seems like a win for everybody.
If I am going to be completely honest, part of their outsourcing is why I waited until a few days ago to start the game.
Not because I knew, but because the initial screenshots and clips showed a very generic unreal engine level of graphics. With chromatic abberation everywhere, the exact same hair you see in every recent UE game, the same facial style that makes it easier to match mouth movements, and so on. Once I heard it actually had a good story I ended up putting in about ten hours in a day after I started. But they did suffer from outsourcing parts of the game.
It also becomes pretty obvious when you meet certain characters that obviously has weeks(probably months) of work put into just their “hair” moving. Specially when they’re standing next to a model who could have been made by someone who just finished a couple of Blender tutorials.
You can freely download old versions of steam games. You used to be able to do it through the steam console, but now you have to use an external application.
Edit: you can still do it through the Steam Console.
There’s no jubilation at “seeing a big game fail” there’s jubilation at seeing a game fail that is developed by a studio that is doing fucked up shit, or a game that is shovelling some fucked up agenda, or the like.
We dance on the graves of any game developed by Actiblizz, Ubisoft, EA, etc not because they are big games, but because they are developed by evil corporations.
RTS did go mainstream and it indeed turned into games very different from old school SC et al.
Plants vs zombies and LoL are the descendants of the genre and are or at least were, HUGE. Tower defense and moba are the two evolutionary paths that RTS took.
Tower defense is super mainstream, but moba, while huge isn’t really mainstream in my opinion. But one things for sure, they don’t have much in common with SC except the lineage.
It already is. Check it out on Nexusmods. I did so late last week and they couldnt even fill 1 row of new mods this week. Even Morrowind still gets that done.
Yeah it’s “released”. Meaning that yes, you can buy it for money and launch it (so released), but it’s so shit they had to quickly officially declare it broken (“early access”) to save face.
Maybe because development has a high ongoing cost that they do not have any other product to take up? Star citizen has a fairly large scope, and the fact that they have even gotten to the point where a fairly high number of gameplay loops are fully integrated is quite impressive. If you look at their ship designs, for example, you can see just how much care was put into a lot of the designs (see the architectural reviews, for example)
Except scope hasn’t really changed in years? I might be wrong since I’m not trawling through every single piece of content released but I’m pretty sure most of the expansions are related to CIG figuring out details of already promised features.
I’m sure someone following the game closer can provide more details on that.
I’ve spent $49.99 on it. As a space sim fan, it’s one of the most amazing experiences I’ve ever had in a game. Blows Elite Dangerous out of the water in terms of seamlessness. If it was better optimized it’d be one of the only things I’d play.
I’m not trying to you’re wrong about anything. But for a certain customer, it’s already a pretty great experience.
When did they ever “release” it without saying its also early access?
edit - assuming downvotes are cause of a misunderstanding. im not defending early access or star citizen. I am just saying I do not recall them “backpedaling” to early access. I thought they had always advertised it as early access. Which itself is shady af
What I mean is, “early access” is just release with the makers openly admitting that everything is unfinished and broken, instead of people finding out on release day. It’s still a product X being sold money Y, just like a “real” release. And hence it should always be evaluated for what you get vs what you pay, not the promise of what you might get later. See also: Preorders (at least these are protected by a lot of laws in some countries), Kickstarters, Religions.
for the record I paid for this and am watching with hopeful eyes, but please stop pretending that being able to launch the game and walk around is playing
Playable in very loose terms. I booted it on a decent rig (13700k/32gbRAM/3080ti), after ~10min of loading screens I finally got my ship onto the pad and tried to take off from the planet; half way into the burn out of the atmosphere, I clip out of the pilot seat, through the whole ship and start free falling back to the planet while my ships continues to burn away from me…. I alt+f4’d and uninstalled that hot garbage.
Calling bullshit on this. Have a very similar rig and I load into the cities within a minute or two, and if I spawn on my ship or a station it’s faster than that.
Honestly, I don’t think it’s a big deal. But it’s just stupid as a developer to act like this.
I often ask about risk vs reward in these situations. What were they going to gain by acting like this and what were they going to risk by acting like this?
Eh. I went and looked at the comments. Sometimes people get a little lippy and it’s whatever? Shit happens. But basically telling the customer ‘i get off on you crying about this’ is definitely going to cause some issues for the company.
Could just as well have gone the other way though. Sassy CM telling some loud, annoying, entitled brat to git gud or cry more? Instant cool-dev meme. But if a lot of people feel similarly you get outrage and controversy. Just depends on the local culture on that particular day in that particular place.
It’s cool to be rude as long as you also feel that it’s warranted. It’s cool to offend people you don’t like or deride ideas you think are stupid. Everyone isMost people are always just one wrong audience away from being a horrible person.
Of course CM or PR staff have different expectations, but I can understand why they might make a gamble sometimes trying to be cool and causual.
Will, first and foremost, these were devs not CMs. Shouldn’t have been posting in the first place for exactly this reason.
But in my experience in the industry, it’s never worth the risk to try to look cool. You lose more often than you win, even when you think it’s the right time. Because even if people agree with the sentiment, there will always be people who object to the tone itself and that tips the scales against you
This revisionism is quite tiring but I guess that the development companies are counting on it.
The problem with Cyberpunk was not “just bugs” but a 40 minutes video that tells lots of lies and was clearly stated as “fake” to drive up the hype for it.
What you see today was shown as if “ready” 4 years ago. And today we still can’t see the hacking as shown in that video.
On top of that there are all the design decision that are simply terrible but no amount of patches will fix, like the looter shooter approach to loot, levels on enemies, etc etc.
Overall, it’s not a matter of “realistic expectations”. We were lied to and that’s just it.
Starfield is the latest example, While not as crashy/ buggy as Cyberpunk was… You can see the lack of finish, the amputated systems, etc etc, that scream that it is a half finished mess, just like Cyberpunk, and was shoved out the door way too early, just like Cyberpunk.
Absolutely makes sense for most planets to be rather barren. What I found a bit disappointing so far - keeping in mind I started yesterday and I’m only a few hours in - is how mostly when you land on a planet there is a key point of interest (an outpost, a mining facility, a city etc) at a landing site and then immediately a whole lot of randomly generated nothing around it. No roads or paths, NPCs, houses etc. I haven’t really been to a place where I got that Skyrim feeling of going out into the wilderness and finding interesting things. I hope that later on there are at least a few areas with more substantial exploration. Still enjoying the game though.
It could really benefit from some sort of vehicle as well.
I land on a planet, sprint 300m to the first point of interest, 900m to the next, 700m to the next etc. and most of it is just sprinting through nothing…
Feels like it’s just wasting my time, as there is literally nothing in between. I think a little hover bike would be a great addition to the game.
I haven’t played Starfield, but that sounds like No Man’s Sky when it first released. A few points of interest per planet, nothing else of note to do there, and the entire planet just became a rather boring trip from point A to point B to point C and nothing more.
You’re saying that doesn’t describe the current state of No Man’s Sky? The only notable buildings I’ve found are the same 3 tiny cookie-cutter outposts dotted randomly all across most planets. Oh sorry, 4 now if you count the camps from the Interceptor update and happen to be on a dissonant planet.
I feel like it wouldn’t take much effort to do better so that’s sad if Starfield hasn’t.
The difference being that was NMS whole loop at launch. Exploring barren and mostly empty planets is just side content to a lot of directed story and side missions here.
that would be perfect, maybe a vehicle with scanner and some mining tool so you could analyse and collect few minerals along the way. would be great QOL improvement.
I will say, finding a vehicle and not being able to drive it was a bit disappointing. But otherwise, I just wish there were more resources on the barren worlds.
Absolutely makes sense for most planets to be rather barren.
This idea is something I’ve heard a lot about Starfield and is why I don’t think I’ll pick it up, at least until a big sale. To me, it seems like they made a fair number of design decisions around what “makes sense” rather than what’s fun.
When it comes to the barren planets, it just adds a bit of immersion IMO. Nobody is forcing you to visit those rocks, and you probably won’t ever land on most of them, but it’s cool that you can. So to me, it’s not something that has a negative effect on my enjoyment of the game.
Makes sense to wait for a sale though. Mods and updates will no doubt vastly improve the game. Personally, I just play it on gamepass.
I'm the same way. Even just going from the "lore" most planets aren't going to have colorful interesting cities in it with unique locations and things to do. A lot of the rocks are going to be desolate with nothing on it, because they should be. When you find something of interest in the desolate void of space, it's gonna be interesting. Every planet having the same formulaic procedurally shaped bar, merchant, and a fetch quest would have people foaming at the mouth about how Bethesda replaced their specific crafted environments with shitty generated ones with no soul.
I haven’t played it yet (A second play through of BG3 sounds more appealing right now), but in general for an singleplayer RPG I would prefer a small full setting to an empty large one. If the environment has almost nothing of interest in it, then I’m going to just be glued to the objective marker, which while not a deal breaker, definitely hurts the experience. In a more curated environment I would ignore the objective marker and go off in a random direction. This means my experience is more unique and gives a proper sense of exploration which can make the game feel bigger even though it is technically smaller.
Yout have to factor in the life sim-element of Bethesda RPGs too. You can theoretically become a mining magnate in Starfield using those planets and resource extraction outposts. That content is there for those kind of players. If you just want to do the directed side content, then as you say, you’d just follow the markets and not need to interact with it. Your exploration will be in the “dungeons” looking about for lore and loot.
Yeah, it’s all part of the freedom the game offers for what you want to do. If you want to be a cargo hauler you’ll rarely see a barren planet as you’re delivering to settlements. If you want to be a bounty hunter, you may see them once or twice when a bounty has holed up there, but if you want to be a space prospector, you will need to spend more time exploring and locating resources to set up extraction plants for.all valid methods of interacting with the universe with different needs for the barren planets.
A place can have a barren atmosphere and aesthtic while also having content to find, even if that content is more sparse or minimal, suited to that lonely environment
That's exactly what they've done.
A "barren" planet still has stuff. In the 5 minutes or so that I did random exploration I found a colonist hut that was razed by pirates with a hidden chest with like 3k credits, and a random vendor who was going a little nuts for being alone so long. Nothing incredible, but enough to make the place not feel dead on a random frozen moon.
I wouldn’t shape any of your decision to playor not play on this particular detail. It really has little to no impact on the game whatsoever. There are a lot of really interesting worlds to explore, it’s really not worth the amount of discussion lately.
Not saying this means “this is the game for you”. Just that this one facet shouldn’t enter into your assessment at all, in my opinion.
If your enjoying it then don’t worry about the negative comments. Unlike some other space games you dont do much travel yourself, you fast travel everywhere which means seeing the same non-skippable cutscenes again and again, i fast travel to the system, then fast travel to the planet, then fast travel to the surface; then if i want to go elsewhere on the planet i have to fast travel back to orbit then back down to the planet. Its “fast travel:the video game” Given that similar games have managed to let you fly your ship from space down and around the planet for years now I dont why you cant in this, im constantly pulled out of playing for a loading screen
You can’t because the engine is bad, and they need a lot of loading screens to connect the small-sized playable areas. Other Bethesda titles pull the same trick, but you don’t realize it, because there’s no loading screen. Instead it’s doors that handle that (which is quick because rooms are small) and pre-loading of neighbouring grids when you are outdoors (which is why sometimes you’ll see creatures popping out of thin air, or walking out from behind walls/trees/rocks to hide the popping.
Bethesda always advertises their “new engine”, but really it’s exactly the same engine they’ve been using since Morrowind, with minor logic improvements and updates to the graphical assets. It’s to the point where a lot of bugs have ancestry trees.
Oh yeah things were that simple, just change it ! Man who would have thought ! Hey we need your help on other issue what can we do about the economic crisis, world hunger or civils wars ?
Bethesda always advertises their “new engine”, but really it’s exactly the same engine they’ve been using since Morrowind, with minor logic improvements and updates to the graphical assets. It’s to the point where a lot of bugs have ancestry trees.
Yep. Call it Gamebryo, Call it Creation Engine, Call it what the fuck ever.
Its still NetImmerse.
They can keep slapping fresh makeup on it, and keep wraping new ducttape around it when the old stuff wears out and fails, but it’ll always be the same engine, regardless of the name changes.
They dont want to invest in making a whole new engine (which, given Bethesda, would be just as bad or worse than what they use now), and they don’t seem to want to license anyone elses engine. Which is weird, cause subsidiary studios don’t seem to have the same issue… Like, Ghostwire Tokyo is built on Unreal Engine 4.
Not arguing with the crux of your argument here, but most fast traveling I’ve done is way more direct than that. New planet, sure there’s a few stages, but anywhere you’ve been before you can pretty much fast travel to directly from anywhere.
How often are you just hopping between places you’ve already been?
As to the people saying you can fast travel back to cities, last time (which was about 5 mins ago) i went to go back to New Atlantis i had to faat travel to the system first before i could even select the city, but other times ive been able to directly select the landing spot and fast travel there from another system so I dunno.
I just went and did stuff in Sol, i fast travelled to the system, fast travelled to the city, ran to the bar close to the landing pad, ran back to the ship, fast travelled to orbit, fast travelled to Venus, killed 3 ships, interacted with satellite, fast travelled to staryard, fought a decent amount of people which was good, fast travelled to Neptune, short fight, board, kill 3 or 4 peeps, fast travel to lodge. Then fast travel to mining planet system, fast travel to planet, talk, fast travel to different system, fast travel to planet run to ship, no bad guys just a quick convo, then fast travel back to ship, fast travel to orbit, and now fast travel to different planet.
Also fuel auto refills after every jump just seems to mean more fast travelling if you need to go further
If your enjoying it then im happy for you not trying to detract, just sharing my experience, i just wish they pushed what could be done more
I think if there’s a patrol scanning your cargo you have to hit the system before landing, otherwise you’d fast travel your way past contraband scans. I’m having a lot of fun in the game, I agree there’s too much fast traveling though.
taking the other side of the argument, planetary landings in E:D are just loading screens at 10x the length. Travelling to a planet at .3 C is neat the first time but then you look at trade routes as “how long do I sit paying attention in case of an interdiction?” StarCitizen falls into the same trap. QD is neat but then it takes you 5 minutes and a fuel stop to go from one side of a system to another. Its mundane trudging for reality rather than getting the boring monotony out of the way of the player.
Just because the tech exists doesn’t mean it makes for compelling gameplay.
I can agree with this but I do wish it involved fewer loading screens and clicking through each time. If you’re gonna skip the “realism” to make it more convenient then make it actually convenient.
With that said despite that and the fact I’d love to fly the ship over the planets manually, I’m really liking it so far (2h in).
Yeah I can’t really disagree with people’s assessment of how much travel-by-loading-screen there can be, but like… while it’s there, I just mostly haven’t noticed it. Thirty hours in now and I find I’m mixing up fast travelling wide distances with “manually” travelling by launching into orbit and jumping place to place fairly regularly, I don’t think I’d even have thought to criticize it without coming here.
I like how immersive travel can be in a game like NMS, but it’s not like it’s all that exciting or fun to pull into the atmosphere for the 500th time and maneuver to your landing pad, or spend longer than a loading screen amount of time to boost out of atmosphere to hit the jump button. We’re exchanging one form of slightly tedious load for a different one.
The best answer I have to minimizing the interaction is setting routes from your mission list. On PC this cuts down to L > click mission > R > hold X.
It is still 4 discrete inputs, which sucks, but it is substantially better than navigating by the star map which is how my brain defaulted to fast travel for most of my first play through.
There are all kinds of possibilities, and for one example of a video game system for travelling among the stars that gives you a sense of actually going somewhere without getting too dull I’d point to EVE. You can go anywhere, but there are distant and dangerous places that take actual effort to get to. It lets you get some kind of sense of the distances involved. Having made that comparison it’s hard to avoid noticing that the space combat (even against NPCs) and ship outfitting are quite good too compared to how it looks in Starfield. Planetary interaction was pretty tedious when I played it, but EVE is mostly really good at the space stuff.
Another example would be good old Star Control II, another of my favourite space games. Another one that managed to make space feel big. You had to carefully manage fuel and resources, and if you wanted to go all the way across the map you’d have a long and interesting journey during which many things would happen. Combat and navigation were primitive compared to what people expect today, but still it made it feel like you were exploring a vast space, not just a big catalogue of planets.
As for Starfield, I don’t know whether it does that or not since I haven’t played it yet; I’d sort of like to find out before I spend $ on it.
you cant really compare gate-to-gate traversal to the other primary space games though. unless you are in a capital ship, generally you have a warp around 3-5 so even Niarja (minus dock workers) only takes a few seconds to cross. If we just focus on hub routes, I don’t recall the exact number, but Amarr to Jita/Dodi is between 25-60 jumps depending on your risk tolerance. That is 25 discrete load screens, with a Leopard and no 0 tick gate camps thats still around 10-20 minutes of just loading. EVE is an exceptionally bad example to pull and why I excluded it.
If you want something like Star Control then running the bubble in E:D is your best option, just never install a fuel scoop.
What I want is just something where travel takes enough time and effort that interesting problems can arise during the course of it that aren’t just generic random encounters. Something where different parts of space have local character, something like geography rather than a flat isotropic void where distance is meaningless. In each case the technology used for moving about is entirely fictional, so I don’t see a reason not to make it interesting. I was just pointing out examples of that being done, not advocating for either of them being the one true way to do it.
transit in EVE isn’t really anything to write home about though. Target, align, warp, jump, target, align, warp, jump.
Gate camps are player based RNG with a difficulty slider. Do you take the shorter run thru Niarja or do you add an extra 30 jumps for relative safety barring CODE affiliates.
if what you want is a completely bespoke experience where a system has only explicit experiences then you immediately lose out on the design intent behind Starfield and the storyline within is immediately hollowed out and meaningless.
besides, its a video game. everything is a generic random encounter rolled on a table hidden from the player. if you want a better experience, Starfinder is there.
I used to make a living hauling valuable stuff from the outer edge of low-sec in to Jita and such places. Sure it got to be pretty much routine after a while. Well, most of the time. But then it’s always possible in that game to go off and do something else instead. The experience of exploring it all for the first time though, having not yet gathered the knowledge and resources to do it in anything like safety or comfort, was fantastic. If you could just teleport instantly from one place to anywhere without significant cost it wouldn’t even be a game. I’m not saying that the mechanics of transportation should dominate every game like they do EVE, but having at least some of that sort of thing seems like a good idea in a game that’s supposed to be about exploring a space of any kind. I disable fast travel in Skyrim too. It makes things too quick and convenient.
Well, guess what? You can walk to the starport, open the door to your ship, walk into the cockpit, sit down, launch into space, target your next system navpoint, power up your grav driv, and jump to the next system. You won’t be on a planet, you will be in space. Will you find a trader? System security fighting pirates? A bounty hunter wanting to cash in on you? An old lady that wants you to come over for tea? Dunno. But you aren’t fast traveling. Genuinely the crux of your complaint has been “i dont know how it works but its bad and I dont like it”
I haven’t had a chance to play it yet. Moving and still have to get through BG3. But I’m actually excited for it. Like I see posts over and over and over and over and over and over about the the fact that it’s not NMS. Sure, kind of disappointing. And I will agree that if you keep running into the same exact structures over and over, maybe they could have done something different. Have some sort of procedurally generated structures.
But that seems to mostly be it. Every review I’ve watched talks pretty positively about the other aspects. It’s got some bugs, which is to he expected, and apperantly the melee combat isn’t clunky and awkward. But those seem to be the biggest complaints outside of not being able to land.
So I’m gonna do what I’ve seen a lot of people said to do. I’m gonna go into the Bethesda game and play it largely like it’s a Bethesda game. Gonna go through the main story, the different factions, do some side quests, etc.
It’s not No Man’s Sky. Cool. Call of Duty isn’t Escape From Tarkov. I have played both of those and loved them both for completely different reasons, and I don’t expect them both to be the same. If anything I got bored of No Man’s Sky after a bit. Partially because I’m just not into the base building, and itnfelt like that was the main thing to do outside of explore. Little to no stories. Last I heard we still don’t have the faction system they talked about when the game was first launching. Starfield has things going for it over NMS.
I think people had their expectations too high. People are expecting it to be as good as skyrim was for 2011 but in 2023, but I went in expecting it to be as good as (vanilla) skyrim is now and so far that’s what I feel like I got.
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