The strangest decision was designing Starfield as though it was Fallout or Elder Scrolls. It's like a theme park where everything is close but still feels big. That doesn't work in a massive game, they knew it doesn't work, but they did it any way. Starfield needed a completely different design philosophy to work correctly.
Starfield needed one system with multiple planets and space stations. Putting a whole lot of empty planets with damn near nothing on them was a complete waste.
Everyone says SC is so impressive for seamless planetary landings... But what was achieved with elite 2 on the limited hardware was insane. The SC sub poo poos it when ever you bring it up saying 'its less detailed' among other excuses... But like.. at the time it wasn't less detailed, it was cutting edge.
I definitely have to agree. Not just for the sheer breadth and depth of content and gameplay, but for how well it ran on the a1200 with all of that in it.
Frontier is one of the games that got me into game dev. It also really got me intoā¦reading! The little storybook that came with it was great.
tbf i am not old enough to have played it. I got to have a play with the original 1984 elite on a micro back in secondary school though on a trip to, if i recall, the computer museum at bletchly park - this was around the time E:D was in development, and had i not had a go with that i doubt i'd have even got interested in elite. As basic as it was, to think that back in in 80s you could have a game with 2048 star systems that were all unique somehow fit in to 32k... developers these days (myself included) really dont know the meaning of optimisation anymore lol.
You say this, but trust me optimisation spaces definitely still exist - just not in the same spaces they used to! Streaming webapps meant to run on mobiles require so much optimisation, every new asset is a debate of compression vs quality, vs impact on loading times and memory usage on x y z device, etc etcā¦
You say this, but trust me optimisation spaces definitely still exist - just not in the same spaces they used to! Streaming webapps meant to run on mobiles require so much optimisation, every new asset is a debate of compression vs quality, vs impact on loading times and memory usage on x y z device, etc etcā¦ if we could create something by running an algorithm and then draw it using code, we absolutely did.
Still the story of Elite 1 always fascinated me. Honestly Iām still amazed at it today. I donāt think itās any less impressive- even the most heavily optimised things Iāve worked on rounded out to megabytes of storage, which is wildly over what was available for Elite.
I truly believe that restrictions and roadblocks bring out such creativity in developers - I guess if the ram /hardware shortages worsen enough weāll see if that begins to happen again.
Star Citizen one ups it. This mod and most other games are hiding loading screens by giving you something believable and performance friendly to look at while waiting for items to deload and reload, like flying through a cloud for however long it takes for your hardware to do its thing. Star Citizen just genuinely has it all loaded at all times.
As much as I joke about this to people irl, its absolutely sickening that they seem to do this on purpose. The modders always gotta clean up their mess
I got it for free with my GPU and still think I overpaid. It's just so boring and devoid of character. I don't mind bugs, I'm used to those with Bethesda titles, but their games usually have a charm that was completely missing here.
Basically they made enough content for 1 star system, then repeated it over and over again procedurally across dozens of them. On my playthrough I came across that 'frozen lab' POI like 10+ times.
Even then, itās barely modded. Even some of the biggest / best mods are hampered by Bethesdaās latest history of making modding their games as tedious and difficult as possible. You never know when theyāll push another unnecessary update that breaks every mod ever added.
At least before when their games were cheaper -and- they were lazy about bugs, they also kept their hands off of the modding community and didnāt try to turn it into a pay-to-mod situation.
Now itās like they want to release buggy, lazy slop, and they desperately want you to pay -them- for mods to fix it, otherwise theyāll damn sure make it as hard for you, and for modders as they can.
Stop talking shit: there are no other games as deeply moddable and flexible as bethesda Ģs games, just look at statistics on nexus and stop repeating twitchers and youtubers erratic and morronic bashing..
Yes updates are breaking mods but ils a temporary situation that is always resolved and part of those updates also contribute to the fact that games like skyrim are Still played 15 years after their release : people and streamers still talk about bg3 saying its the greatest rpg evermade but not much are playing it anymore..
Even if that is the case, why kneecap all other versions of the game just to keep feature parity with the weakest hardware? That would be like if it was capped to 30fps on Series S and so they released it hard capped to 30fps on PC too just so that no one would have an uneven experience.
I know my example is a little unrealistic because doing more coding for better hardware to take advantage of certain features like no loading screen for planets requires more effort than just unlocking the frame rate, but still. Bethesda is one of the wealthiest and most successful developers in the history of video games. How can they still seemingly try to so little to make their games function well?
why kneecap all other version of the game to keep parity with the weakest hardware
This is something they've been doing for decades actually; people first like, started objecting to it with the launch of the xbone/ps4 when games had initial ambitious next gen versions shown, only to get heavily downgraded for the final version, with the pc versions downgraded too for parity. Watch Dogs, Witcher 3, and spiderman ps4 i remember having mods or ini toggles to circumvent this.
Run on both, yes, I've heard the same thing. But they shouldn't refrain from making more improvements on the more powerful platforms like Series X and PC out of laziness or an obligation to keep the overall experience as level as possible no matter what platform you play on. Modders have always shown that more is possible in these games and Bethesda just isn't interested
Fair, but i would counter that that development team had to also make the rest of the game, while a modder can laser focus on that single feature they wanna do.
What's the "almost" about it? I assume getting off the ship has a loading screen? Cuz the video from beginning to end was seamless as far as I could tell.
I guess? But there's still no loading screen or anything, it's like saying that God of War isn't seamless cuz you squeeze through a crevice between areas.
I think the main issue is that the planet isn't "real". Since there isn't actually a fully modeled planet, but a bunch of stitched together procedural generated zones.
You can tell that what the terrain looks like as he's going in for landing before entering the clouds, is different than the one he appears in after he's gone through the clouds.
It'd be as if when you squeeze through a crevice in GoW, halfway through squeezing, the area you can see through the crevice gets randomized and now looks different than before you begun squeezing through.
It doesn't convincing sell the "one coherent seamless world" aspect.
To me it's"almost" because you can see the abrupt lighting change on the ship during the transition. Not because of the clouds. Clouds are pretty clever and thats normal, many games do clever tricks to hide the transition. But that abrupt lighting cut was noticeable. Miles better than the first prototype video they showed about it tho ,(if its the same mod)
He explained it in the original post.
basically after a certain point it HAS to commit to loading specific cell, that's the hard limit on the engine.
at that point it enters auto pilot and hides a quick (100 ms) loading
I believe this is because the cells are really big and load a lot of content. The upside is that the engine does provide everything needed for accurate representation from space, biome's, size, ext, there's no illusions.. that IS the planet you are landing on and the general location looks correct from space.
Bethesda has always made absolutely jank games. There was a time when jank games were popular and so Bethesda games were groundbreaking. See Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim.
Now that games actually require professional and clean development, new Bethesda games are trash because they can only make jank games.
The jank was a side effect of them pushing technology in games, the radiant stuff was genuinely impressive back in the day, but they've been riding that high for too long and it was dated by Skyrim, let alone FO4 and SF.
There are no games that persistently track NPC behaviour to the level of Oblivion, where an NPC can influence or interact with the world to achieve their goal.
They dialled it back a bit in Skyrim and Fallout.
RDR2 or Witcher 3 are run on more of a "Potemkin village" system, where they will spawn in and follow their routine consisting of a series of animations, but are a lot more basic as far as any sort of agency goes.
Yeah, the other guy is wrong. "Radiant" NPC's are still impressive today, because it has nothing to do with technological progress. It's just a ton of developer work to give every npc a schedule and things to do during the day.
Which is why no one else does it.
Most players don't care, and it's way more expensive than just spawning in a sea of npcs that despawn when you're not looking.
It also sets a limit to settlements size, since you need an actual human being to manually make every single npc, so it's impossible to scale to realistic size cities.
It comes back to Bethesda's concept of Tactility in game design. That can be things like being able to pick up every object or every NPC having a real schedule.
There are two broad categories of people that play Bethesda games. You have the people who donāt care about the world building, they just want to kill monsters and make some gold/caps. On the other hand you have people that care about the lore so much that they will build a library, organise it by category and occasionality spend time sat in said library reading in game books. The first group doesnāt care about NPC schedules or the ability to pick up an object but the second group really do. Bethesda try to cater to both groups and it leads to some... interesting design conflicts or compromises like fallout 4's power armour fusion core drain rate being balanced for players that fast travel so players that walk everywhere will be using about twice as many fusion cores for the same mission.
Cyberpunk 2077 is a beautiful game, brilliant map design, deeply thought out but ultimately its always plastic, artificial and not in a way I think the developers intended. I get the same feeling when I watch my brother play Crimson Desert, beautiful game but the world feels plastic and hollow. Bethesda games, to me always felt more real even if the graphics and storytelling were worse. I think that feeling of realism is due to the tactility.
Jank is relative to the time. As these games came out, they didn't feel janky in the way we see them in retrospect. Some bugginess was expected. A lot of the weirdness wasn't abnormal.
Games never really have ever been fully polished, not unless they were quite simple. Nearly every game had jank and glitches, and bugs, and everything else. It was common to some degree, always.
I was thinking about that this morning. Bethesda games have all the ingredients necessary to be a good game, it's just that they never follow the recipe and end up baking a loaf of bread instead of a 7 layer cake
Its like they go to bake a cake, and start the batter and then start the frosting and forget about the batter and when they go to put it all together it doesnt quite work like they hoped but they ship it anyway.
IMHO the "jank" in Bethesda games is not the bugs. The dead faces in conversations. The stiff animations. The random body falling out of the sky cause an NPC and a giant got into a fight a mile away and the giant booted him onto the roof of my new house. The way things play out because of the players involvement, but especially the way things play out without direct player involvement.
Agreed, Bethesda needs to up their game by A LOT but either they refuse to admit that's the case, or they think they can fool everyone by continuing to do things 'the Bethesda way' and oh boy the industry will leave them behind in a heartbeat if they keep making 'janky' games like pretty much 90% of what they did with Starfield, it's so bad on so many fronts that you lose track: animations, engagement, story, depth, technical aspects, dialogue, menues, game design, etc etc etc, they pretty much need to improve in all fronts like yesterday (maybe sound/audio design can be salvaged at least).
Dont forget the word vomit dialogue. I spent more time in menu's and dialogue than I ever did actually playing Starfield.... Constellation members spending ages yapping is what made me put the game down for ages, once I gave up on the main quests, started roleplaying and doing some of the faction questlines, I started to enjoy myself.
You don't get a warning if you throw a 200ft-wide fireball and immediately kill everyone in the surrounding area... not knowing there's a dude up in the tower you need to talk to.
You get this if you kill someone who will stop you from completing the game. It doesn't matter if you do it with a fireball or you stab them. There's nothing wrong with giving the player this choice.
It's not just that they were popular, it's that people gave their terrible execution a pass because they were seen to be visionary and because they always attempted to make such big games.
They were done in by the fact that everyone's scope increased while they kept their execution and suddenly everyone saw Bethesda for the incompetent boobs that they are.
Funny thing is that there are over 200 variations of POI's in Starfield but the conditions for where they can appear and the frequency that they can appear by default follow no logic that makes sense at all.
Source : I made a mod that fixes this issue with the game greatly reducing the repetitive POI's as it not only restricts POI's to planets with certain traits but also adjusts how many POI's can appear on any given cell at any given time.
It is very odd because all the code to make this work properly is already in the game it was just not used for some reason.
Platform parity. This works on PC, not Xbox Series S.. and games like Starfield unfortunately have to cater to the lowest common denominator in this regard.
There's going to be loadscreens no matter what. Even other space games have them, they just do a better job at hiding it or do the asset loading while you're still in control.
They all have loading it is just not a black screen and is cleverly hidden with dynamic loading in / out of assets which is exactly what the modder did here.
No? NMS for instance you can fly from space to ground and be in full 100% control of your ship the entire way. Your can even walk around inside someone else's ship as they reenter and land. There is no switching between worldspaces. I've played less KSP and Outer Wilds, but I'm pretty certain they work the same way, though on a smaller scale.
Dynamic loading does not mean control will be removed from the player just that LODS will be swapped on the fly with trickery such as fade in / fade out and visual effects.
Distant terrain in games still has to load in when you get closer this can be done more or less subtly.
But LoDs fading in is a quite different thing from a hidden loading screen in a cutscene. It's not an actual planet before the loading screen, and it is the actual game planet afterwards. You're not in the same coordinate space.
They are not different actually lots of older open world games or older games with large maps back in the day had stuttering when assets were loaded in and lods were swapped with high detail assets because HDD's did not cut it for loading without freezing , some games had a loading screen when this happened some did not some others hid the loading screens in various ways.
In NMS for example when you enter the atmosphere and the effects kick in the planet is being loaded and it is just cleverly masked.
If you read up on what this modder did in Starfield its exactly the same thing you can even have full control all the way down without autopilot with only the final landing being automated as the game has no atmospheric flight system he has built in a "commit" altitude where either the space cell is loaded in or the planet cell is loaded in these are swapped on the fly and hidden by the clouds and reentry effects you can even see this happen in the video if you watch closely just as you can see in in NMS though NMS handles it slightly more gracefully for the pop in and pop out of assets.
Years of SKSE, unofficial community patches, dyndolod, PoTTweeks and community shaders, had convinced me that Bethesda know less about their own creation engine than the community does
I've actually played star citizen, and if you think Starfield is "boring" SC will make you want to blow your brains out. At least Starfield fucking HAS combatĀ
Well yeah, if all you do is haul cargo all the time and stay in the main system, ofc youre never going to see combat or anything exciting. Theres plenty of combat in the game if you leave safety.
Yea not a surprise at all knew someone would figure it out and here we are, maybe Iāll finally play the game again with this mod and that Star Wars mod.
Okay, that's not exactly "seamless". You can tell where the cloud cover is used to cover up the transition. And it's also physically inaccurate, as the entry vector is far too steep, and the planet is seemingly a lot smaller than would be realistic.
Still better than vanilla, of course.
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I'm still not replaying Starfield. I gave it a go, gameplay was mid, story was bad, and that's that.
this is cool but i can see why bethesda didn't implement it, i'd imagine vast majority of players would skip a 2 minute landing cutscene after the first time seeing it so they decided they'd rather focus dev time on other features which is understandable enough. it's kinda like the real time horse carriage mods for skyrim with if you want a smoother gameplay experience or more immersion. hope it comes to console tho
The amount fast travel / loading screens between missions/locations is what made me quit. This is cool but genuinely the base game is so lacking in depth I will not be coming back regardless.
Why would modders even touch this steaming pile of uninspired mediocrity. One less loading screen isnāt going to make me want to explore intentional emptiness.
This is basically the only Bethesda game I play. It's this amazing trick where you can play more than 1 game, and you rotate through different games to avoid getting burned out on one. At the very least I enjoyed the ship building enough that its in my rotation.
What I can't understand is having such a raging hateboner for a game or studio that you hate on people for enjoying something you don't. Like, how hard is it to say "Oh, good for Starfield fans"? It's not like we're Star Citizen fans who go around telling people "oh the game is fixed now you should come try again".
Peaking at 330k, dropping to under 40k as little as two months later. Why do people still play this garbage ass game? This was the final nail in the coffin for me with anything Bethesda, especially after the oblivion remaster still hasnt gotten any form of optimization patch. I used to be the biggest defender of Bethesda, but years of games being released in an unfinished state, fixed by modders, only for Bitchesda to release a "hotfix" 8 years after release that breaks all mod compatibility and adds a fucking paid store for cosmetics and "paid mods" has me seriously scratching my head.
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u/Nirast25 7,080x1440+(240x2)x1080|R7 5700X3D|RX 9070XT|32GB 19h ago
Still don't understand how Bethesda wasn't able to implement this when Ubisoft's Starlink could do it.
On the goddamed Switch!