Exactly this. It was only two generations ago when idTech was an open world engine, id can and have made it to do whatever they want and to suggest that despite Bethesda money (let alone MICROSOFT money) id couldn’t make a better engine with similar development workflows as Creation is just dishonest to suggest.
It’s a shame idTech is no longer released publicly. It would’ve been amazing to see what people could do with the beast of an engine that powered DOOM Eternal, especially modders.
I assume you’re talking about Rage, which had an open world map, but no where near the level of simulation systems as a Bethesda game. In fact I remember back at the time most of us saying the map was pointless as it was just a way to travel between levels with nothing to do in it.
There are no “levels of simulation systems” in Starfield. NPCs don’t even have schedules in this game, they literally just stand around in the same spot 24/7.
“keeping track of lots of variables” doesn’t cost CPU time though, since nothing that isn’t on the same map as you is ever relevant for anything. Their engine just fucking sucks.
Keeping track of variables doesn’t use CPU time? Ok man. I’m all for hating on Bethesda’s shitty engine but that’s just not true. At the very least it does track what NPCs are doing off screen which is how they end up at your ship when you tell them to go there. They will actually walk to your ship if you don’t get there first.
On the other hand it’s basically guaranteed that Bethesda spent zero effort optimizing that. I bet it’s the same code they ran for Skyrim.
ID tech is nowhere near flexible enough for something like Starfield or even Skyrim. It’s partially the reason why it’s so efficient. It simply isn’t fit for the task.
And the Bethesda developers are intimately familiar with Creation Engine, achieving the same level of productivity with something new will take a long time. Switching the engine is not an easy thing.
Not to say that Creation Engine isn’t a cumbersome mess. It has pretty awful performance, stability and is full of bugs, but on the other hand it’s extremely flexible which has allowed its games to have massive mod communities.
If Bethesda can’t take the time to do it then who can? People act like they’re some small time developer but they’re not. They simply refuse to expand their dev team to do things like a redesign.
Creation engine is not going to hold up well for another 6 years, there’s no way their cell loading system will be considered acceptable by the time ES6 comes out. The amount of loading screens in Starfield is insane for a modern game. This company needs new talent badly.
You realise custom engines are built for specific game types right? iD Tech is great for creating high fedelity FPS games with linear levels and little environment interactivity. That’s not what Bethesda make though.
They could do everything they usually do but better if they used Unreal. They don’t need a custom engine. They just need an engine that isn’t over 2 decades old with a bunch of shit taped to it to make it look modern. Not to mention, ID already did make a custom built engine that handles much of what Bethesda RPGs do when they made RAGE. They could have used that, with the only issue being learning it. Not sure what their turnover rate is like… maybe they’re just too used to GameBryo/Creation to be able to switch now. It might take too long to learn anything new. Plus it would have to be able to have a toolset. If they didn’t release those easy to use modding tools, there could be rioting in the streets.
As far as I know, Bethesda are unusual in modern Devs in that they have a small team for the size of game they make, but they have strong retention of staff so have huge amounts of institutional knowledge about how they do things. Shifting to a new engine would basically mean starting from scratch on a company level. Unlike Ubisoft or Activison, they can’t just throw several thousend Devs at a game to brute force the development either.
But that’s their biggest problem. There’s no reason for them to have a small unchanging team. It’s very very obvious that they never get an influx of new ideas. Starfield feels like it was made in 2016 and the optimization effort is comically bad. The writing is still mostly boring, campy and naive like it was written by a 15 year old Mormon. The facial animations are incrementally better than fallout but still noticeably worse than much older games like Witcher 3. I could go on.
It’s not a bad game at all but it could’ve been so much better if Bethesda execs weren’t greedy cheapasses and the dev team was open to changing their process.
This why Bethesda needs to be criticized instead of constantly getting fellated by fanboys. ES6 will be an outdated mess because Bethesda never sees any feedback except over the top praise for half-assing their games.
Fanboys downvote you but you are right, even if I love the fallout franchise, the same gameplay loop, the same engines, potato faces in 2023, outdated animations… etc, right now I would prefer Microsoft to force obsidian to take care of the next fallout, and ban Todd Howard for ever putting one foot in the dev took, even in the building. He can go fuck himself and his shit engine.
I know they don’t want to switch, but it would be worth it to make the swap to something like unreal, even if it takes a few years of customization to get the open world stuff right. Creation Engine just feels so old.
Why is it necessary to go on the attack over a past attempt that didn’t work? That’s how innovation functions. Sometimes you hit the mark and sometimes you don’t, but everyone learns from the process.
They get paid to spread FUD, lots of actors would prefer the current approach with Windows to continue, pcgamer included (just disable ublock and watch the advertisements they run, you will get an idea on why they don’t want a successful prebuilt).
Thank god one can see how it will work right now, just try to game in any desktop Linux, it works wonders.
Cause if you dont give reality checks, you end up with shit like Theranos when idiots run wild with hype and hope, and fall to their knees with mouths wide open before even knowing WTF is going on or if it works.
Valve did such a good job learning from the original Steam boxes too. The controller was weird, but the best parts lived in in the Steam Deck and the new controller. The incompatibility issues with the original Steam OS showed how critical getting Proton right would be to the Steam ecosystem. Multiple hardware configurations for each SKU made it harder to verify compatibility, so now they have just 1 for each hardware type. A dedicated Steam Link box was kind of a waste, but now Steam Link works great on Android TV, Android phones, and on Steam itself. And then they built Remote Play Together on top of Steam Link, which is amazing.
Many other companies just abandoned their failures, but Valve took the time to analyze the “why” and salvage the good parts to them. No company is perfect, but kudos to them.
The article is hardly attacking Valve. Just acknowledging how they got here with a bit of good nature ribbing. Nothing wrong with being able to laugh at ourselves.
Quite a bit, honestly as a regular player of the single-player mod, content and mechanic wise things have gotten way better.
It’s honestly the execution of matchmaking, server performance (or lack thereof), and certain balance choices holding the game back. Other than that it’s really solid, and if you mod, you can solve all 3 of those problems.
Because of matchmaking and certain decisions the Devs have made (no post-raid review), it’s very hard to accurately report cheaters or verify if you got killed by one. Due to this, many people prefer playing PVE (so you can experience the current game content without meddling humans), or modded CO-OP/single player with a mod like SPT.
Considering that the cheapest copy of the game is 30-40 USD, and SPT only requires ownership (no “edition” needed), I’d say that entry price is worth it.
In January 2019, Tencent acquired about a 36% stake in Fatshark in a deal worth approximately 500 million kr (around US$56 million). Later, in January 2021, it was reported that Tencent had acquired a majority stake in the company valued at around 2.2 billion sek (around US$260 million).
The headline seems a bit overly snarky and dismissive of a small studio dealing with the kind of licensing problems that just come with big properties and image rights to expensive actors. This isn’t the first time something like this has happened in a game.
It sounds like without the image rights, there won’t be any closeup cutscenes of Arnold’s face, but given that the game play is a 16ish bit throwback aesthetic, it actually doesn’t seem as distracting as it sounds.
Maybe they aren’t allowed to do an accurate Arnie voice impression, but if all the character audio is crunched up to feel more retro, that might not be a problem either.
That’s why I called it “16ish”. It is probably taking some liberties to improve the graphics that wouldn’t have been available in the 90s, but it is trying get those nostalgia neurons firing. Point is, the aesthetic is intentionally not photo realistic, so missing out on Arnold’s face isn’t the biggest problem in the world.
If you want to know about crap licenses to movies, there was a 8bit game for Blade Runner, but the developers couldn’t obtain the rights to do it. However, they were able to gain the rights to another part of the film.
The box art for the Blade Runner game states in rather small text on the cover, “video game interpretation of the film score”. Yes, they got the rights to the soundtrack!
Similar to the 1997 point-n-click Blade Runner game. The rights to all the aspects of that movie were such a mess that the developers decided not to use any footage or audio from the game because they honestly couldn’t figure out who owned what, and made it follow a new main character which was an obvious “Not-Deckard” who was chasing replicants in a similar but ever so changed variation on the plot of the movie.
The new owners are so trustworthy that they weren't even transparent about who they are. In the comments of the original announcement they defend that with:
This post wasn’t about Chosen — it was about Robin and the legacy he built over 24 years. We’re the new owners and ultimate decision-makers at Nexus Mods. We’ll share more about ourselves when we’ve earned that right. For now, we’re focused on listening, learning, and making modding even easier, and yes, you’ll see us around in the community being active.
I can't say I find that statement to be particularly trustworthy given it's coming from an NFT bro.
Although judging by this news and the first sentence on their Steam page being “…Bungie’s team-based extraction shooter.”, maybe it’s a good thing I can’t play their games.
It did at one point, but I think they were forced to change it to Prey at some point in development. It had a “Shock” title to put it in line with System Shock and Bioshock.
I watched people play the game and was wondering what the hype was all about. The game looked so dull and boring. The outside of the map looled like a game made by a single dev for his indie game. Only yesterday i watched the short film and was loke: oooooooh, i get it, because they lie.
Im so tried of all these multiplayer games, make a goddamn single player campaign, fuck it add in splitscreen or the ability to play the campaign with friends if you have too
And also knock it off with the fucking microtransactions and shit. I wouldn’t mind games costing something appropriate for inflation if we were getting complete, high quality games without the expectation that we spend even more money afterwards. As it stands, they’re complaining about the low cost of games while also milking players for every penny they can on top of the purchase price. Fuck these guys.
Precisely this. If Baldur’s Gate 3 was 100$, I still would have bought it in a heartbeat because I know that the developers are never gonna ask for any more of my money.
I would say gta is one of the only few games I would pay that much for and I know I’ll get my moneys worth, but I’m not interested in gta online. I wish we could get story dlc like we did with gta 4
I mean, we are… Gabe became a billionaire that owns a yacht collection, his money came from somewhere, there’s no reason to defend any billionaires or their companies unless you are a billionaire yourself.
Gabe heads a company which is successful because it respects its employees, customers, and suppliers instead of constantly trying to marginalize and abuse them. They are not perfect by any means, but they do fit into the definition of ethical capitalism, which should not be understated. They don’t employ anticompetitive tactics like bribing/coercing developers into exclusivity contracts. They don’t operate with a bunch of 1099 contractors so they can avoid providing benefits. Etc.
And they could do all of these good things while charging less than 30% and Gabe would be the only one feeling a negative impact on his finances.
As for contractors, they do hire them, court documents came out and their profits per actually employees are way higher than most companies, why? Contractors aren’t employees.
I mean I’ve always had an issue that digital goods could always be revoked/taken back. That’s why I didn’t buy things on steam until it became basically the only way (as consoles have less physical media). This is just a great reminder for the public that we’re consistently loosing control over our digital lives.
I’ve been an advocate for forcing companies to change the wording for digital goofs to “lease” rather than “buy”. Cause at the end of the day, no one owns their steam library.
In this instance that’s definitely the case that it’s shitty behaviour IMO but in general I still hold dear to my view that most people are good and it’s my default position on new people I meet, with some bad vibe exceptions, until proven otherwise.
It’s like the old Mr Rogers quote about looking for the helpers. I see (and try my best to also do and am so lucky to be married to someone the same) so much good in this world.
It just boggles my mind that there are people who think everyone should give complete control of their computer to Microsoft just because there are people cheating at games.
Well i already switched and I’m wondering, how does root access works on Linux ? What i mean is there games that used shitty anti cheat that are running on proton have the same access to your PC or is limited by the proton prefix ? Thank you in advance for your input on the matter!
Tl;dr : yes they are limited in their access to the rest of your PC… mostly
From what I understand, when such anticheats are configured for Linux, they’re still running in the user space and is why some developers go as far to disable support for Linux entirely.
You, the privileged user, unless logged into the root user (not recommended), are part of the “sudoers” group, which allows you to execute commands on behalf of the root user using the “sudo” command which requires your password. Games should never need this to play.
This however doesn’t mean the AC is sandboxed, its honestly beyond my knowledge exactly what it does have access to, but I can say it is far less than what Windows kernel AC has. And again why developers feeling the need for such intrusion simply pull away from linux
The anticheat can read all your files (in the home directory), and see all running processes. It can’t change much about the system, however, if you give it root once, it can keep it.
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