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Starfield Pre-Release Thread [GAME RELEASED, GO TO NEW THREAD]

Quillon

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But those systems are shallow and most of the times outrigth broken.
What they've been doing rigth is simple. They have a recognizable brand and decent marketing team with enough money to make huge hype campaigns guaranteeing big profits and good reviews on launch day, and they offer a very casual experience that gives of an ilusion of depth to plebs and appeals to people that like LARPing (which unfortunately is the vast majority of people that play RPG's nowadays).

You can not entice thousands of modders only with marketing. A town in Skyrim with 20 npcs with schedules, living their lives and reacting to whatever's going on individually and even their death's(if not essential) impact on your experience going through that town is much more immersive than Novigrad with a thousand of generic spawned NPCs just to look right.
 

DJOGamer PT

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The large numbers of modders is due to the fact Betheseda has that base since Morrwind and they've always given them good mod tools (well they've been getting worse Skyrim's Creation Kit is much more of a hassle to work with than Oblvion's).
NPC's with schedules have existed since Gothic, they aren't impressive in this day an age. Novigrad, unlike any of Skyrim's settlements is an actual fucking city, so the devs trying to save work and performance by making generic NPC's is to be expected (fucking beats ending up with an Imperial city situation).
Also don't nitpick systems. When I said systems I meant all of them that make up the gameplay, which are admittedly very weak.
 

Quillon

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Having modding tools is handy but modders aren't motivated to create shit just cos there are tools.

What did I nitpicked? All the systems contributing to that cliche "living world"? Which is about 2/3 of a bethesda game.

NPC schedules are impressive and probably hard to implement, else everybody would do it.

Novigrad is also impressive but I prefer persistent NPCs to generic spawns.
 

Molina

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Having modding tools is handy but modders aren't motivated to create shit just cos there are tools.

What did I nitpicked? All the systems contributing to that cliche "living world"? Which is about 2/3 of a bethesda game.

NPC schedules are impressive and probably hard to implement, else everybody would do it.

Novigrad is also impressive but I prefer persistent NPCs to generic spawns.
This forces to have immortal NPCs and also to use the compass.

Yeaaaah...
 

Quillon

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Wut how? Immortal NPCs are in nearly all RPGs, the ones with all killable NPCs are rare and NPC schedules didn't force Obsidian to have immortal NPCs in NV. Having essential NPCs is consequence of narrative requirements, not gameplay systems. Don't understand what you mean with compass.
 

Molina

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Wut how? Immortal NPCs are in nearly all RPGs, the ones with all killable NPCs are rare and NPC schedules didn't force Obsidian to have immortal NPCs in NV. Having essential NPCs is consequence of narrative requirements, not gameplay systems. Don't understand what you mean with compass.
Why they use immortal NPC in Oblivion ? If your NPC can move anywhere, especially between cities, then he can be attacked because the player is in the same cell. And if he dies because of that, even though it's not the player's will... It would sucks. It more easier to make them immortal for this unique reason.

Second, because your NPCs can move, even in minimal terms, between home and the tavern. And if the player wants to return the quest... There are three possibilities.

1) Either, it's a pretty tightly woven project, and the writers and actors are aware of the NPC pattern, and in this case, it can be included in the description of the quest "at night I'm at the tavern, and at night I'm at home". But it requires a careful organization of the 100 people working on the project.

2) Giving a tool like Daggerfall, where you ask the passer-by where the NPC in question is. But it seems incompatible with modern game design.

3) Compass.
 

Quillon

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NPCs can have and most of them have protected state between being essential and...free game for others, which means they can't be killed anyone other than the player if they are flagged as protected in gamebryo.

In the second case, it depends, using common sense to find people or waiting for them to return should work before devs put any additional effort. A modern game named KDC over delivers with how much dialogue there is for finding people or asking info about people, big waste of resources imo.
 

JDR13

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But those systems are shallow and most of the times outrigth broken.
What they've been doing rigth is simple. They have a recognizable brand and decent marketing team with enough money to make huge hype campaigns guaranteeing big profits and good reviews on launch day, and they offer a very casual experience that gives of an ilusion of depth to plebs and appeals to people that like LARPing (which unfortunately is the vast majority of people that play RPG's nowadays).

You can not entice thousands of modders only with marketing. A town in Skyrim with 20 npcs with schedules, living their lives and reacting to whatever's going on individually and even their death's(if not essential) impact on your experience going through that town is much more immersive than Novigrad with a thousand of generic spawned NPCs just to look right.

Speak for yourself. I didn't find Skyrim's towns more immersive than those in TW3. You're exaggerating how complex Betheda's NPCs are. Piranha Bytes was doing more realistic NPCs almost 20 years ago.
 

fantadomat

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But those systems are shallow and most of the times outrigth broken.
What they've been doing rigth is simple. They have a recognizable brand and decent marketing team with enough money to make huge hype campaigns guaranteeing big profits and good reviews on launch day, and they offer a very casual experience that gives of an ilusion of depth to plebs and appeals to people that like LARPing (which unfortunately is the vast majority of people that play RPG's nowadays).

You can not entice thousands of modders only with marketing. A town in Skyrim with 20 npcs with schedules, living their lives and reacting to whatever's going on individually and even their death's(if not essential) impact on your experience going through that town is much more immersive than Novigrad with a thousand of generic spawned NPCs just to look right.

Speak for yourself. I didn't find Skyrim's towns more immersive than those in TW3. You're exaggerating how complex Betheda's NPCs are. Piranha Bytes was doing more realistic NPCs almost 20 years ago.
LoL you can't even compare them mate. Witcher 3 has one of the best level design eva. Especially the blood and wine DLC,the towns look amazing and feel like they are alive. Most people haven't noticed it because they follow the quest marker like dogs tho.
 
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Codex Year of the Donut
But those systems are shallow and most of the times outrigth broken.
What they've been doing rigth is simple. They have a recognizable brand and decent marketing team with enough money to make huge hype campaigns guaranteeing big profits and good reviews on launch day, and they offer a very casual experience that gives of an ilusion of depth to plebs and appeals to people that like LARPing (which unfortunately is the vast majority of people that play RPG's nowadays).

You can not entice thousands of modders only with marketing. A town in Skyrim with 20 npcs with schedules, living their lives and reacting to whatever's going on individually and even their death's(if not essential) impact on your experience going through that town is much more immersive than Novigrad with a thousand of generic spawned NPCs just to look right.

Speak for yourself. I didn't find Skyrim's towns more immersive than those in TW3. You're exaggerating how complex Betheda's NPCs are. Piranha Bytes was doing more realistic NPCs almost 20 years ago.
LoL you can't even compare them mate. Witcher 3 has one of the best level design eva. Especially the blood and wine DLC,the towns look amazing and feel like they are alive. Most people haven't noticed it because they follow the quest marker like dogs tho.
meh, I kind of see where they're coming from. Giving AIs a goal and multitude of ways to get to the goal often creates pretty interesting results(even if many of them can be janky/goofy) that you just don't encounter with pre-programmed AI. I don't believe Skyrim did this, but Oblivion did to some extent.
I'll reference Oblivion again: when an NPC gets hungry, it has to obtain food. How it obtains the food is never specified, and some interesting scenarios end up happening because various systems start interacting with each other. Each NPC has a stat referred to as 'responsibility' that will determine how law abiding they are, so therefore some will resort to stealing to get items they want/need. If they get noticed stealing by a high-responsibility NPC they will be reported to the guards and the guards will confront them. Of course, Bethesda is lazy so they never implemented arresting NPCs, therefore the guard kills them for stealing a wedge of cheese.
Watching this happen and piecing together what you just saw (IMO) creates a better experience for the user than just watching a preprogrammed AI go about doing things. Instead of seeing exactly what the designers wanted you to see, you got to see one version of events out of many, and depending on how complicated it was it's possible(no longer referencing the Oblivion example) you were the only one who has ever seen this specific series of events play out before. It's why things like "Dwarf Fortress stories" are so interesting.
 

Zombra

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Watching this happen and piecing together what you just saw (IMO) creates a better experience for the user than just watching a preprogrammed AI go about doing things.
I appreciate the IMO in there. Fair enough.

Watching artificial intelligence (however primitive) interact with an environment is fascinating ... but to unilaterally declare it "better" than, say, a believable, immersive city backdrop is very biased, implying that there is one single goal in gaming.

I liked watching Skyrim AIs lurch around and blunder through their various behaviors in their little 12-building "cities", but honestly that's not what I was there for and there are better AI-building games. Witcher 3 had an immeasurably stronger sense of place and culture, due to the scale alone if nothing else. Going back as far as Witcher 1, I never looked around a town and thought, "Well no one could actually live here, this isn't a town." In Skyrim, that Disneyland sense of artificiality is constant and impossible to ignore.
 
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Codex Year of the Donut
Watching this happen and piecing together what you just saw (IMO) creates a better experience for the user than just watching a preprogrammed AI go about doing things.
I appreciate the IMO in there. Fair enough.

Watching artificial intelligence (however primitive) interact with an environment is fascinating ... but to unilaterally declare it "better" than, say, a believable, immersive city backdrop is very biased, implying that there is one single goal in gaming.

I liked watching Skyrim AIs lurch around and blunder through their various behaviors in their little 12-building "cities", but honestly that's not what I was there for and there are better AI-building games. Witcher 3 had an immeasurably stronger sense of place and culture, due to the scale alone if nothing else. Going back as far as Witcher 1, I never looked around a town and thought, "Well no one could actually live here, this isn't a town." But in Skyrim that Disneyland sense of artificiality is constant and impossible to ignore.
I've barely played Skyrim so I can't really comment, the only reason I own it is to play Enderal :M
 

Quillon

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immersive city backdrop

It isn't immersive for me cos its built to look right therefore NPCs are more like props, they've just spawned there a few secs ago for player's viewing pleasure, where in gamebryo they are more part of the game.

ps: I'm talking about NPCs, not level design or whatever else. Ofc Novigrad & Toussaint are the best looking medieval cities in games.
 

fantadomat

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But those systems are shallow and most of the times outrigth broken.
What they've been doing rigth is simple. They have a recognizable brand and decent marketing team with enough money to make huge hype campaigns guaranteeing big profits and good reviews on launch day, and they offer a very casual experience that gives of an ilusion of depth to plebs and appeals to people that like LARPing (which unfortunately is the vast majority of people that play RPG's nowadays).

You can not entice thousands of modders only with marketing. A town in Skyrim with 20 npcs with schedules, living their lives and reacting to whatever's going on individually and even their death's(if not essential) impact on your experience going through that town is much more immersive than Novigrad with a thousand of generic spawned NPCs just to look right.

Speak for yourself. I didn't find Skyrim's towns more immersive than those in TW3. You're exaggerating how complex Betheda's NPCs are. Piranha Bytes was doing more realistic NPCs almost 20 years ago.
LoL you can't even compare them mate. Witcher 3 has one of the best level design eva. Especially the blood and wine DLC,the towns look amazing and feel like they are alive. Most people haven't noticed it because they follow the quest marker like dogs tho.
meh, I kind of see where they're coming from. Giving AIs a goal and multitude of ways to get to the goal often creates pretty interesting results(even if many of them can be janky/goofy) that you just don't encounter with pre-programmed AI. I don't believe Skyrim did this, but Oblivion did to some extent.
I'll reference Oblivion again: when an NPC gets hungry, it has to obtain food. How it obtains the food is never specified, and some interesting scenarios end up happening because various systems start interacting with each other. Each NPC has a stat referred to as 'responsibility' that will determine how law abiding they are, so therefore some will resort to stealing to get items they want/need. If they get noticed stealing by a high-responsibility NPC they will be reported to the guards and the guards will confront them. Of course, Bethesda is lazy so they never implemented arresting NPCs, therefore the guard kills them for stealing a wedge of cheese.
Watching this happen and piecing together what you just saw (IMO) creates a better experience for the user than just watching a preprogrammed AI go about doing things. Instead of seeing exactly what the designers wanted you to see, you got to see one version of events out of many, and depending on how complicated it was it's possible(no longer referencing the Oblivion example) you were the only one who has ever seen this specific series of events play out before. It's why things like "Dwarf Fortress stories" are so interesting.
Yeah,the ai routines were better in oblivion.
 

Zombra

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immersive city backdrop
It isn't immersive for me cos its built to look right therefore NPCs are more like props, they've just spawned there a few secs ago for player's viewing pleasure, where in gamebryo they are more part of the game.
I respect that. Witcher style environments are definitely more immersive to me, though; because it's not like I actually see the NPCs spawn. They're there, they look good, and most importantly they behave like I expect them to behave. Whereas a Skyrim AI drone is more like a broken robot spraying electricity out its eyes. To me, having weird AI routines doesn't make an NPC less of a prop. It just means there are more things to go wrong and break the illusion.
 

Quillon

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Witcher did have some NPC schedules too tho, running away from rain, people going to sleep(closed shops at nights) etc. better than nothing. And more than that would probably be too heavy on system resources/engine whatever with high NPC count, especially in cities. So I don't fault Witcher 3 for not having more, they opted for immersion in numbers and did whatever they can over that. But I fault a game like TOW for not having any such system despite low NPC count in areas, maybe even lower than Skyrim/FO4. Warhorse's efforts on KCD is admirable, Obsidian's phoning it in is despicable.
 

Zombra

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I haven't played Outer Worlds so I have no opinion there. And we've finally gotten to a post that has absolutely nothing to do with Starfield.
 

DalekFlay

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Novigrad is also impressive but I prefer persistent NPCs to generic spawns.

There's a balance to be had. Too many Bethesda games have "capital cities" that feel like small towns, where you're expected to stop and talk to nearly everyone you see. That's stupid. However Novigrad is maybe filled with too much pointless stuff, so it doesn't feel like you're being rewarded for walking around and checking things out. I think Piranha Bytes honestly nails the happy middleground, and it's one of the better aspects of even their recent games.
 

Quillon

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NPC schedules are impressive and probably hard to implement, else everybody would do it.

and here's [partly]why :D :

As much as I like the game there is one thing I don't understand: Why are there no children in this world? Their explanation was - if I remember correctly - that they didn't want players to be able to kill children.
That's the least concern. Making them invincible is an easy and quick solution. Unrealistic but fine, at first glance. After all, invincibility is in the game already, so it is a feature, and setting it to all kids would be done in matter of seconds.

The major concerns were different
a) Extra visual assets -> extra work, not enough resources
Kids are not just scaled down humans. The have different proportions. That necessitates different skeletons, and different set of animations. It would be a limited set compared to adults, but still. They would have to be colthed. Clothes scaling is already done to some degree, but again the scaling demanded by the tiny children bodies is too much. Therefore kids would need their own set of clothing items.
Not enough artists time.

b) Extra base behaviors -> extra work, not enough resources
We would simply have to devise a separate set of behavior the kids would be doing all day long. That's not just aextra content to be developed, but also maintained, tested and debugged.
Not enough scripters time.

c) Extra simulations and reactive behaviors -> unclear solutions, extra work, not enough resources
When you consider the core design principles of our game, where you can kill almost anybody, and everybody must somehow react to not just this but also a wide variety of other impulses (crime, stealth, trespass etc.), it becomes clear that some systems would have to be much wider (to consider kids), some systems would require new reaction scripts specific to kids.
What should we do with kids whose parents were killed? Should they live on their own in an empty house until the parents respawn after, what, 2 weeks?
What should a kid do when they witness a crime? Go report it? 'Of course' you might say. Conflicting design principle is that people really do carry crime info with them and they deliver it to guards. If you manage to kill the witness, the guards will never know. How do you do that when kids must be invincible? So they shouldn't report crimes? Isn't that weird? They don't care you butchering their mommy right in front of them?
There's a popular Czech phrase "past vedle pasti (pičo)" which roughly translates to "traps all around (ffs)". That's exactly what invincible kids are in terms of game desing in KCD.

d) Extra NPCs in the scene -> not enough performance
We most probably wouldn't cut the number of adults. In most places there are 2 per house anyway. If there were 2-5 kids per house (as historical realism would require), not only would we need extra beds in the houses, we would also hit the limit for max 50 NPCs in player's proximity much much faster. Rattay would be nigh impossible to make and we would probably end with New Vegas-like zoning solution. That's a hard nope.
We didn't even know this was an issue back then. We would run into this problem way way late into development. Thank God we didn't even start developing them kiddos. We would have wasted a lot of work otherwise.

e) Historical accuracy vs. game conventions and game language
This is not a massive issue but it is a philosophical one. If we wanted to be accurate (and we would) there would be more kids than civilian adults. Having 60% of your NPCs invincible and weirdly limited in reactivity would imho break immersion more than the current state where we pretend that kids are... yeah, they just left, the are... err... behind the house. They just left to go pick up strawberries... in the forest.


Some more specific context:
Let's pretend we had the resources, performance wouldn't be an issue, and we knew all the solutions. It took us a whole year to develop the dog from ground up. That's new skeleton, 1 new model with 4(?) skins, movement AI, movement animation set, idle animation set. The doggo has limited combat capabilities and thus not too many combat animations. Moreover he's invisible to NPCs so they don't react to him, and he only reacts to enemies and POI proximity. 2 extra major features - point and send at target; inclusion of doggo in inventory. 2 minor features - dialog with doggo, which required some extension to existing dialog system; K-9's underlying RPG and you ability do influence it aka dog training. Interior avoidance, teleportations, and calling are basically copied from the horse - some extra work but not too much. That's just the stuff I could think off the top of my head. Point being the dog is pretty basic. 1 year of work. Kids would be several times more complex.
Just to have some invincible extras.

Comparison to other games:
So.... it is much easier and much more safe to add kids to Witcher 3 where you can't attack civilians and they don't react to anything ever. Like, really, the guards are the only people who react to you stealing shit. Civilians are just scenery, a Potemkin village (not that I mind, it's just a different design approach).
It is extremely hard and costly to add them to a game like KCD. I mean, add them in any meaningful way.



Now, I'm not saying the current state brings me any joy or that all this, despite undeniably understandable, is some ultimate excuse for us to safe a lot of work and let us focus on more substantial aspects of the game. No. I'm pretty sad about it. I mentioned several times that, for me, kids are among the top missing features in the game. And not just for immersion's sake. It also limits the kind of stories we would love to tell. And I kinda understand people who kinda bitch about 'teh sexizm' or 'trahdyshunal famuhleee' wet dream of a game for conservatives or whatnot. It is really really nigh impossible to sell why the medieval society was the way it was when you can't show that:
- women were either kids, almost ever-pregnant young adults tending to 4+ kids, or 'old' grannies since age of 40 helping the younger generation in raising their kids
- childbirth was extremely risky with high maternal mortality
- half the kids didn't survive childhood, so death was ever-present and you had to have more kids to sustain the society (refer to previous 2 points)
- anybody could can gravely sick at any time
So, kids? Fuck yea! But damn are they costly!
 

Trash

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Ultima 7 already had better npc schedules than the Bethesda games. Always boggled my mind how those games had people having a full daily schedule, including conversations, while later games hardly ever got close. Until PB that is.

Also I liked the npc schedules in The Witcher better than in The Witcher 3. Kids running after you and yelling at you for being a freak, streets clearing out when it rains with people complaining about the weather, different things happening depending on wether it was night or day. They really nailed the atmosphere in the original game and while I actually really like TW3 it felt like a step back in that department.

Anyway, Starfield. They really keep silent on that one huh?
 
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Ultima VII is still unique in some aspects and I hold it dear. Every NPC feels "living" and has something to tell you and seems to live his own individual life. As a consequence there are not so many NPCs around at all and Britain feels like a village, but in this game it never bothered me. I also think the first two Gothics found a pretty good solution for a realistic world. The reaction to enviromental aspects like rain is something I've never seen again after Witcher. It's just a detail of no importance to gameplay at all but it makes such a great difference in the overall atmosphere of the game. I only remember one other game where NPCs showed a reaction to rainfall, in an older Gothic 2-mod named Khorana (if I remember correctly). They even implemented rain puddles on the ground (something I've only seen again in the KCD-beta).
 

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