From experience I know I’ll be downvoted but it is a pretty goddamned impressive engine. And yes that is even considering that Skyrim was buggy, what, 12 years ago?
Agreed, the way they can preserve the position of any object, anywhere, with thousands of objects and an obscenely large world, is exceedingly impressive.
What I don’t get is why the hell any of that is a priority. It’s a neat party trick, but surely 99.9% of the gameplay value of arranging items for fun could be achieved on the player ship alone.
Like… it’s neat that I can pick up, interact with, and sell every single pen and fork on every table. But is it useful, with a carry weight system deincentivizing that? Fussing with my inventory to find what random crap I accidentally picked up that’s taking up my weight? Is that remarkably better than having a few key obvious and useful pickups? Is it worth giving up 60FPS on console, and having dedicated loading screens for nearly every door and ladder around?
Again, it’s cool that they have this massive procedurally generated world, that a player could spend thousands of hours in. But when that area is boring, does it really beat a handcrafted interesting world and narrative? What good is thousands of hours of content when players are bored and gone before 10 hours?
So like… from a tech perspective, I respect what Starfield is, and it’s very impressive, but as a game it feels like a waste of a lot of very talented work, suffering from a lack of good direction at the top.
I could generally take or leave their clutter items, but persistent NPCs with dynamic schedules or the full stat and inventory systems of the PC are still extremely rare, never mind both. Most games simplify NPCs such that they don’t actually have equipment or just have one item (typically an unlootable weapon) and reduce their stats to just HP and defense stats. By contrast, the only difference between an NPC and the PC in a Bethesda game is that the player has controll over the PC.
For me, if they moved to a new engine it would need those persistent fully-featured NPCs to feel like a Bethesda game. Ten years ago, there wasn’t really anything else that did that. Now, there’s got to be something they can make work. Hell, BG3 has all this stuff, it’s just from a top-down perspective. And it can handle ladders, which Bethesda’s engine still can’t do.
See, that’s one of the problems of using Creation Engine for Starfield. The game was supposed to be about exploration and space travel, but the big focus of the engine is clutter. All the things that made Skyrim and Fallout feel “lived in”, like NPCs doing different stuff at specific times, were effectively disabled or removed in Starfield. Hell, NPCs’ (complete lack of) reaction make them feel completely “dead”; pedestrians in GTA 4 feel more way more believable and “alive”, despite serving the exact same purpose of filling the screen.
The proc-gen places also makes zero use of the engine’s strengths, it doesn’t create any “unique” places that could be filled with unimportant npcs and clutter. It’s ironic that Daggerfall, more than 20 years ago, had better proc-gen
Yeah I feel like people like to just bandwagon against Bethesda games, but no one makes games with as much detail as them. Hell, even Starfield has an insanely robust physics engine.
Exactly. As a developer, the complexity of that engine blows me away. It’s a miracle they got as solid as they did honestly. If these critics are developers, they’re either lacking in empathy or they’re the kind of prodigy who cannot even comprehend the inability to think about such insanely complex systems with ease
Also, having played hundreds of hours of their games, I would be content with the older game engine as long as there was a good story line, and decent mechanics ( not related to the op topic).
They can make bad games with this engine, for sure , but I do not want them switch out to photo realism to paint over problems .
It seems to my old self that games would be better if they were a bit ugly, and dangly, to not hide behind all that newness and flashy stuff
I get that but as a gamer I’m forced to ask why? They went through all this trouble and now they’re unwilling to abandon it while other games are sprinting past them in tech, story, and graphics.
But! That’s cool for a game like KSP, where people craft rotating rings to drive circles in the artifical gravity. But in an RPG? Why do they need to track every spoons position? It just looks like they spent too much money on a too capable/complex engine and can’t really innovate because of it.
Play Skyrim and do fus to dah in a tavern or something, having all those physics objects feels amazing. Also being able to walk in a house and steal all the cutlery and junk just feels so immersive for being in the world imo. Not to mention the crafting systems in Fo4 and Starfield using those clutter objects for crafting systems.
Star Field does not use clutter for crafting. You just literally pick up crafting material. Most of your material comes from outposts growing or mining stuff.
From experience I know I’ll be downvoted but it is a pretty goddamned impressive engine. And yes that is even considering that Skyrim was buggy, what, 12 years ago?
Agreed, the way they can preserve the position of any object, anywhere, with thousands of objects and an obscenely large world, is exceedingly impressive.
What I don’t get is why the hell any of that is a priority. It’s a neat party trick, but surely 99.9% of the gameplay value of arranging items for fun could be achieved on the player ship alone.
Like… it’s neat that I can pick up, interact with, and sell every single pen and fork on every table. But is it useful, with a carry weight system deincentivizing that? Fussing with my inventory to find what random crap I accidentally picked up that’s taking up my weight? Is that remarkably better than having a few key obvious and useful pickups? Is it worth giving up 60FPS on console, and having dedicated loading screens for nearly every door and ladder around?
Again, it’s cool that they have this massive procedurally generated world, that a player could spend thousands of hours in. But when that area is boring, does it really beat a handcrafted interesting world and narrative? What good is thousands of hours of content when players are bored and gone before 10 hours?
So like… from a tech perspective, I respect what Starfield is, and it’s very impressive, but as a game it feels like a waste of a lot of very talented work, suffering from a lack of good direction at the top.
I could generally take or leave their clutter items, but persistent NPCs with dynamic schedules or the full stat and inventory systems of the PC are still extremely rare, never mind both. Most games simplify NPCs such that they don’t actually have equipment or just have one item (typically an unlootable weapon) and reduce their stats to just HP and defense stats. By contrast, the only difference between an NPC and the PC in a Bethesda game is that the player has controll over the PC.
For me, if they moved to a new engine it would need those persistent fully-featured NPCs to feel like a Bethesda game. Ten years ago, there wasn’t really anything else that did that. Now, there’s got to be something they can make work. Hell, BG3 has all this stuff, it’s just from a top-down perspective. And it can handle ladders, which Bethesda’s engine still can’t do.
See, that’s one of the problems of using Creation Engine for Starfield. The game was supposed to be about exploration and space travel, but the big focus of the engine is clutter. All the things that made Skyrim and Fallout feel “lived in”, like NPCs doing different stuff at specific times, were effectively disabled or removed in Starfield. Hell, NPCs’ (complete lack of) reaction make them feel completely “dead”; pedestrians in GTA 4 feel more way more believable and “alive”, despite serving the exact same purpose of filling the screen.
The proc-gen places also makes zero use of the engine’s strengths, it doesn’t create any “unique” places that could be filled with unimportant npcs and clutter. It’s ironic that Daggerfall, more than 20 years ago, had better proc-gen
Btw, Gothic (2? 3 at least) had already holes without loading screens.
Yeah I feel like people like to just bandwagon against Bethesda games, but no one makes games with as much detail as them. Hell, even Starfield has an insanely robust physics engine.
Exactly. As a developer, the complexity of that engine blows me away. It’s a miracle they got as solid as they did honestly. If these critics are developers, they’re either lacking in empathy or they’re the kind of prodigy who cannot even comprehend the inability to think about such insanely complex systems with ease
Also, having played hundreds of hours of their games, I would be content with the older game engine as long as there was a good story line, and decent mechanics ( not related to the op topic).
They can make bad games with this engine, for sure , but I do not want them switch out to photo realism to paint over problems .
It seems to my old self that games would be better if they were a bit ugly, and dangly, to not hide behind all that newness and flashy stuff
I get that but as a gamer I’m forced to ask why? They went through all this trouble and now they’re unwilling to abandon it while other games are sprinting past them in tech, story, and graphics.
But! That’s cool for a game like KSP, where people craft rotating rings to drive circles in the artifical gravity. But in an RPG? Why do they need to track every spoons position? It just looks like they spent too much money on a too capable/complex engine and can’t really innovate because of it.
Play Skyrim and do fus to dah in a tavern or something, having all those physics objects feels amazing. Also being able to walk in a house and steal all the cutlery and junk just feels so immersive for being in the world imo. Not to mention the crafting systems in Fo4 and Starfield using those clutter objects for crafting systems.
Star Field does not use clutter for crafting. You just literally pick up crafting material. Most of your material comes from outposts growing or mining stuff.
That’s true, I forgot they changed it