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

[Silverfish]

Yeah, one that conveniently paralizes you for a lengthy amount of in-game time (instead of seconds like the regular paralize effect)

She used the restoration glitch.

It also does not explain why she didn't paralize the other guy -- the one that was her actual target.

She didn't name her bow with more lethal enchantments something like "killing bow 01" or "Wesley Snipes" and spent too much time in the menu, giving Mercer the time he needed to slip away.

Or why she immediately trusts you after reviving you.

To reach that point in the Thieves Guild questline, you'd have to have already completed Brynjolf's assignment of roughing up citizens and collecting protection money and then, bafflingly, actually take your ill-gotten gains back to him rather than run off with it yourself (like some kind of thief). She figured that anyone willing to do that is either honest to a fault or so braindead as to be no threat.

 

[Gargaune]

Aye, it's not a super easy thing to implement, but it is a marketable thing (customization, terrain shenanigans, vehicles existing) and not super hard to implement either (animations are something that's entirely possible to motion capture).

Yeah, it can be done and it would be a great addition, I'd love to see something like that. All I'm saying is that it's not a minor feature, it would take plenty of work. I'd dare say full vehicle gameplay would be a bigger labour commitment than settlements all in all.

Looting while riding doesn't really require anything since Bethesda has never animated the player grabbing objects.

I meant the mechanics of it, activation and range, that sort of thing. For example, you can loot from horseback in Skyrim (or is it a mod, I forget?), but it's so awkward that you're usually better off dismounting to take care of it. Getting everything - not just this specific item - working nice and proper would take a fair bit of design, testing and iteration, it's not the coding and assets that I'm worried about.

 

[jf8350143]

The arrow part is clearly retarded and makes no sense on any level, how can you defend this shit?

I agree. It's unheard of that someone in Skyrim would do a sneak attack with a poisoned arrow.

Yeah, one that conveniently paralizes you for a lengthy amount of in-game time (instead of seconds like the regular paralize effect) so you can conveniently listen to the conversation, then get clumsily murdered while the paralizing poison also conveniently and miraculously saves your life.

It also does not explain why she didn't paralize the other guy -- the one that was her actual target. Or why she didn't bring more than one arrow. And why she thought that harebrained scheme of luring Mercer into a fucking cave buy buying a mead brewery would actually work. Or why she immediately trusts you after reviving you.

Every single element of this fucking quest is stupid. It's plot contrivances stacked upon plot holes and glued together by a nonsensical plotline and NPCs that act like morons.

Or, to put it tersely: It's a Bethesda quest.

They did explain some of it, like Mercer asks you to walk in first so she shoots you because she can't find a good angle to shoot mercer and she only have enough special poison for one arrow because it's super hard to make.

Again the explaination are pretty dumb and convinent, but it's there.

 

[Yosharian]

Holy shit it's Bethesda writing, of course it's filled with plot holes and contrivances. It ain't that deep.

 

[Assisted Living Godzilla]

The main issue, however, isn't software design, it's game design. Take the aforementioned Fo4 motorcycle mod for an example - it's a neat idea, but not very useful because the map topography and content density can't accommodate it, you can't go more than three hundred metres before you have to get off and fight something. To build vehicular gameplay, you need a giant map with open expanses, like the one in that Mad Max game. And then you need new gameplay loops to fill those expanses and keep that game "mode" as interesting as the pedestrian one, or you end up with Cyberpunk 2077's cars, i.e. pretty but dumb. You can't half-arse it (like settlements), you need a complete extra game mode so it's a pretty dramatic shift in scope. I wish Bethesda bit the bullet and gave us the full Mad Max experience in their next Fallout (if we live long enough to see it), but I wouldn't be surprised if they kept passing on it.

This probably says more about the games I play informing different expectations--I've barely touched GTA and their clones--but I don't think the Fallout setting really needs them. Cars probably wouldn't be a big part of a post-apocalyptic future anyhow so unless your setting is stylized around them, Mad Max, they're not necessary inclusion. But I guess the older Fallouts had them (kinda) so the idea had already been implanted. I don't think a space game needs land vehicles either. You don't think of astronauts spinning donuts in flashy rides, at most you'd expect a buggie for hauling cargo. Contrast with Cyberpunk 2077. When you say "open world cyberpunk", the Akira motorcycle slide is one of the first things that pops into people's heads.

Fallout is basically ‘50s B Movie Art Deco Mad Max, I’m not really sure how it could be said cars don’t really figure into the setting. (There’s even mention of vehicles in the first game) Now, I can see why they wouldn’t figure much into the gameplay of the original Fallout games, given the turn based nature of the combat (although some kind of second combat system could’ve been done for that) in those games. But Bethesda Fallout are action game, so cars would make as much sense in those games at they do stuff like GTA, Mercenaries, and that 2015 Mad Max game Avalanche did.

This bit is directed at Gargaune with regard to having cars and map size. I’m pretty sure every Fallout game Bethesda has made has larger maps than GTA3 and Vice City. I think the maps are also larger than any single map in the first Mercenaries game. As for Bethesda going full Mad Max...as long as they’re tied to their engine that’s probably not going to happen. I am however somewhat surprised they didn’t just have Avalanche use their engine to make a Fallout spin-off as opposed to Rage 2. Like I don’t even get the thinking behind making a second Rage game when you also own the more popular Fallout series. Seems it would’ve been far more lucrative for them, and gotten far more attention, (from both the press and the public) if instead of having them do Rage 2 they were just doing Mad Max/Just Cause but with Fallout’s aesthetic and power armor.

 

[Falksi]

I'm not sold on it at all, but I'll confess the more I see the more I like what I see.

Probably still gonna be a mess, but at least there are signs of potential there.

 

[Kem0sabe]

https://www.tweaktown.com/news/9215...das-todd-howard-happy-with-results/index.html

Starfield's new Creation Engine took 'so long to do,' Bethesda's Todd Howard happy with results
Bethesda's Todd Howard praises Starfield's tech team for the new Creation Engine 2 upgrade, promises consistency and says the game 'feels great' to play.

Starfield made quite the splash in the Xbox 2023 showcase with its graphics and overall presentation, and Todd Howard says a lot of that was because of the new-and-improved Creation Engine 2.

Bethesda Game Studios has been working on the major Creation Engine 2 overhaul for quite some time. Starfield has been in development for 8 years, and during that time, the studio has been iterating on its existing Creation Engine to upgrade it for the new Xbox Series X/S console generation. While most of Starfield's development has been in-house, Microsoft's ATG (Advanced Technology Group) has been assisting Bethesda Game Studios since early 2022, helping with things like console optimization to ensure Starfield looks and runs great on both the Series S and Series X consoles.

In a recent interview with Kinda Funny Gamescast, Todd Howard shared his thoughts on the enhanced games engine and discussed things like volumetric fog and the new global illumination system.

"We are just so happy with the new engine. It took us so long to do," Howard said.

"Our tech team there are wizards, led by Chris Rodriguez and Joel Dinolt. What we're able to do in the game, and have all these things looking amazing and running from all the items that we're simulating in people's spaceships, full planets, our lighting model is just awesome...it's a real-time GI (global illumination)."

Howard goes on to highlight the volumetric lighting system, which we may have seen evidence of in some of the biomes shown off in the Starfield Direct clip.

"We didn't really show this off, and I'd love to in the future, but we have some really great volumetric fog and how that interacts with the lighting. Then you get into the physics and we start messing with gravity, it gets crazier. Our guest system...I think people are...you know there are a lot of open world games now, but I think what really makes ours different is that all these quests are running. It's not like you start a mission and we shut everything down.

"You can be on dozens of these at once, and that creates a lot of chaos sometimes in our games, we're aware of that, but it also creates these magic moments that we just love and our players love and I think that's what is really really special about it."

Howard goes on to talk about if the Starfield team thought about adding in a performance mode to hit, say, 60FPS at the cost of withholding or dialing back certain features.

Q Was it ever under consideration that you would take away some of these features that you talked about with the volumetric fog?

We never looked at taking features away. Our focus was on delivering all of that, obviously we've seen all the comments. Digital Foundry, the do an incredible job, I don't think they know how everyone in the games industry watches every single one of their videos...they do a fantastic job.

Ultimately look, we boil it down to...we wanted the consistency. The game is running great but we don't want players to ever think about it. We have obviously seen other games have performance modes, we lean towards consistency overall. We talk to our fans and hear from everybody, so we're feeling really great. The game feels great in your hands. and I would say that developers know this and there are things you can do to make that look and feel great, things like motion blur, the refresh rates, all of those things matter to something feeling great. I can honestly say this is the best-feeling game that we have.

Read more: https://www.tweaktown.com/news/9215...das-todd-howard-happy-with-results/index.html

 

[Nifft Batuff]

Interesting that AMD seems to be out-dicking Team Green, though

I don't think Nvidia really cares about gaming sponsorship much anymore. Their new focus seems to be mostly on corporate AI.

They probably see gaming as a secondary market on which to offload a few overpriced cards.

Gaming GPUs are still about 1/3 of Nvidia's revenue. What if the machine learning hype dies down in a few years? Nvidia is not stupid enough to keep all their eggs in one basket.

Probably gaming will die sooner.

Starfields is one of the last hopes...

 

[Kiste]

Probably gaming will die sooner.


Starfields is one of the last hopes...

This is RPGCodex. Gaming has been dead since ~2004 around these parts.

 

[Gargaune]

Fallout is basically ‘50s B Movie Art Deco Mad Max, I’m not really sure how it could be said cars don’t really figure into the setting.

Eh, not really, Fallout's main point of reference was A Boy and His Dog, the Mad Max influences are secondary. Now look, I'm on board with cars and bikes, they'd be an awesome gameplay addition and would plug a gaping hole in the worldbuilding, but I also have to agree they're not strictly necessary to the game formula.

This bit is directed at Gargaune with regard to having cars and map size. I’m pretty sure every Fallout game Bethesda has made has larger maps than GTA3 and Vice City. I think the maps are also larger than any single map in the first Mercenaries game.

You don't need to imagine the issue, you can just try the Driveable Motorcycle Mod in Fallout 4 and see exactly what I'm talking about. You cover ground between dungeons too quickly, or rather would, if you didn't have to get off every thirty seconds to fight an encounter. And that's out in the Commonwealth, ain't even tried it in downtown Boston. You can't make a straight comparison with urban maps like in GTA or Cyberpunk because those are a criss-cross of roads separated by apartment blocks, so there's a lot more mileage to cover behind the wheel. The closest comparison would be Skyrim, which is somewhat better suited to horseback traversal, and indeed features a wider map with more open expanses.

The point is you need to design it from the ground up, whether vehicular gameplay is optional or mandatory, what the speed difference is between on foot and driving, work out all your gameplay loops and mechanics, then those things affect content density, map topography etc.

As for Bethesda going full Mad Max...as long as they’re tied to their engine that’s probably not going to happen.

We've just been talking about this, the engine's not the problem. And I'm a big proponent that Bethesda should stay married to Gamebryo.

 

[AwesomeButton]

If you want vehicles to matter, you need a much bigger map, like RDR2.

 

[Kiste]

They did explain some of it, like Mercer asks you to walk in first so she shoots you because she can't find a good angle to shoot mercer and she only have enough special poison for one arrow because it's super hard to make.

Again the explaination are pretty dumb and convinent, but it's there.

So, after 25 years of planning out every single idiotic step of her convoluted plan she didn't anticipate that maybe Mercer would bring another guy with him?

 

[EvilWolf]

Fallout is basically ‘50s B Movie Art Deco Mad Max, I’m not really sure how it could be said cars don’t really figure into the setting.

Eh, not really, Fallout's main point of reference was A Boy and His Dog, the Mad Max influences are secondary. Now look, I'm on board with cars and bikes, they'd be an awesome gameplay addition and would plug a gaping hole in the worldbuilding, but I also have to agree they're not strictly necessary to the game formula.

This bit is directed at Gargaune with regard to having cars and map size. I’m pretty sure every Fallout game Bethesda has made has larger maps than GTA3 and Vice City. I think the maps are also larger than any single map in the first Mercenaries game.

You don't need to imagine the issue, you can just try the Driveable Motorcycle Mod in Fallout 4 and see exactly what I'm talking about. You cover ground between dungeons too quickly, or rather would, if you didn't have to get off every thirty seconds to fight an encounter. And that's out in the Commonwealth, ain't even tried it in downtown Boston. You can't make a straight comparison with urban maps like in GTA or Cyberpunk because those are a criss-cross of roads separated by apartment blocks, so there's a lot more mileage to cover behind the wheel. The closest comparison would be Skyrim, which is somewhat better suited to horseback traversal, and indeed features a wider map with more open expanses.

The point is you need to design it from the ground up, whether vehicular gameplay is optional or mandatory, what the speed difference is between on foot and driving, work out all your gameplay loops and mechanics, then those things affect content density, map topography etc.

As for Bethesda going full Mad Max...as long as they’re tied to their engine that’s probably not going to happen.

We've just been talking about this, the engine's not the problem. And I'm a big proponent that Bethesda should stay married to Gamebryo.

NetImmerse is the reason the games are so buggy, unoptimized, and unstable. OG Skyrim was literally held together with scotch tape and paper mache, the engine was processing so much information that it was overloaded and soft locked quests whose scripts failed to initialize. If they love the engine so much they should retool the whole thing from the ground up instead of simply iterating on it.

If you want vehicles to matter, you need a much bigger map, like RDR2.

Like a whole fucking planet? What about 1,000 of them?

 

[Crispy]

If exploring planets isn't identical to Skyrim where you have invisible walls you bump up against then I'll be shocked.

I'd be even more shocked if they somehow made it such that you can literally walk around each and every world, even if they made every planet so technically small that it would only take maybe five to ten real-time hours to do so -- and 99.999% of that would likely be over boring procedurally rendered terrain.

 

[Mebrilia the Viera Queen]

If exploring planets isn't identical to Skyrim where you have invisible walls you bump up against then I'll be shocked.

I'd be even more shocked if they somehow made it such that you can literally walk around each and every world, even if they made every planet so technically small that it would only take maybe five to ten real-time hours to do so -- and 99.999% of that would likely be over boring procedurally rendered terrain.

Wildlander on space Crispy!

 

[Butter]

If exploring planets isn't identical to Skyrim where you have invisible walls you bump up against then I'll be shocked.

I'd be even more shocked if they somehow made it such that you can literally walk around each and every world, even if they made every planet so technically small that it would only take maybe five to ten real-time hours to do so -- and 99.999% of that would likely be over boring procedurally rendered terrain.

0% chance their styrofoam engine can do round planets.

 

[Mebrilia the Viera Queen]

If exploring planets isn't identical to Skyrim where you have invisible walls you bump up against then I'll be shocked.

I'd be even more shocked if they somehow made it such that you can literally walk around each and every world, even if they made every planet so technically small that it would only take maybe five to ten real-time hours to do so -- and 99.999% of that would likely be over boring procedurally rendered terrain.

0% chance their styrofoam engine can do round planets.

And yet that engine as old as may be allow creators to do game changing mods at the point that skyrim is still played today and maybe for the next decade. Dont get me wrong i know their engine is what it is. But if people are still playing the game as such great numbers because allows for deep modding. Then is still a win for me.

 

[Crispy]

Maybe I'm wrong.

Theoretically, there should be nothing but relatively empty, sparse terrain for an "uninhabited" planet. Bethesda has had enough practice of pre-loading cells for their games, with Skyrim doing a fairly good job of it. As long as you treat the large cities and establishments as compartmentalized instances, which is exactly what they did with Skyrim's cities until mods "fixed" it, I don't see any monumental problems with them realtime generating the terrain until the algorithm of "you've walked all the way around this planet" is satisfied and you're back to where you started (assuming you somehow never varied your direction).

Maybe one of the reasons they didn't include any land vehicles -- nor, for that matter, the ability to fly your spacecraft freewill in atmosphere -- is because they didn't want to spoil the illusion of how large any given planet is supposed to be.

 

[Non-Edgy Gamer]

0% chance their styrofoam engine can do round planets.

According to an interview with Todd, supposedly they had a model that would gen wrap around cells for a whole planet.

However, he didn't say the size of it, or how big the "planet" was.

And it all could have been another tall tale that has no bearing on the actual game. Even Todd's fans have to admit: you can't trust what he says about anything.

Imo, I think this is how it will work:

You leave the main map and get actual procedural crap worse than anything in Daggerfall.
You're allowed to keep going, but will progress slowly because you have no vehicle.
Eventually, either you get a fake wrap around to the other side of the real map, which may or may not work properly, or you're expected to give up.

But if people are still playing the game as such great numbers because allows for deep modding.

It allows for easy modding. The engine itself is still garbage.

 

[soulburner]

I keep seeing posts about how good or bad an engine is.

The Creation Engine does things no other engine currently does. Same goes for Piranha Bytes' stuff. Porting everything to, for example, Unreal Engine, would probably take an unimaginable amount of time and... all we could get would probably be the same foundation with known bugs but with an Unreal renderer. Would it allow for better performance? Perhaps. But most of all, it would introduce far more *new* bugs than fix any existing ones.

Take a look at the Source Engine. Its roots go back to Quake 1. Half-Life 1 ported the Quake engine to C++, made a few changes (16 bit renderer, even in software mode, skeleton-based models, etc) and it's hardly recognizable there's Quake in there. Half-Life 2 used the same engine but enhanced it further. The map format was changed only slightly and had more Quake in it than Valve's custom code. They enhanced it further for their other releases - rewrote large portions of it to properly support multithreading, etc. Half-Life: Alyx has the same Quake foundation but nobody will say it looks or plays like Quake.

The point I'm making is Bethesda can fix their long standing bugs. They can optimize it for better performance. They can add properly functioning features. The only thing stopping them from doing it is if anyone at the management level cares and if they want to spend time and money on doing things most people outside this forum will not care about.

 

[ropetight]

0% chance their styrofoam engine can do round planets.

According to an interview with Todd, supposedly they had a model that would gen wrap around cells for a whole planet.

However, he didn't say the size of it, or how big the "planet" was.

And it all could have been another tall tale that has no bearing on the actual game. Even Todd's fans have to admit: you can't trust what he says about anything.

Imo, I think this is how it will work:

You leave the main map and get actual procedural crap worse than anything in Daggerfall.
You're allowed to keep going, but will progress slowly because you have no vehicle.
Eventually, either you get a fake wrap around to the other side of the real map, which may or may not work properly, or you're expected to give up.

But if people are still playing the game as such great numbers because allows for deep modding.

It allows for easy modding. The engine itself is still garbage.

Todd's planet is the biggest handcrafted planet in the universe!

 

[thesecret1]

A Star Wars total conversion mod might be pretty cool, and seems inevitable. Mostly looking forward to that.

 

[EvilWolf]

I keep seeing posts about how good or bad an engine is.

The Creation Engine does things no other engine currently does. Same goes for Piranha Bytes' stuff. Porting everything to, for example, Unreal Engine, would probably take an unimaginable amount of time and... all we could get would probably be the same foundation with known bugs but with an Unreal renderer. Would it allow for better performance? Perhaps. But most of all, it would introduce far more *new* bugs than fix any existing ones.

Take a look at the Source Engine. Its roots go back to Quake 1. Half-Life 1 ported the Quake engine to C++, made a few changes (16 bit renderer, even in software mode, skeleton-based models, etc) and it's hardly recognizable there's Quake in there. Half-Life 2 used the same engine but enhanced it further. The map format was changed only slightly and had more Quake in it than Valve's custom code. They enhanced it further for their other releases - rewrote large portions of it to properly support multithreading, etc. Half-Life: Alyx has the same Quake foundation but nobody will say it looks or plays like Quake.

The point I'm making is Bethesda can fix their long standing bugs. They can optimize it for better performance. They can add properly functioning features. The only thing stopping them from doing it is if anyone at the management level cares and if they want to spend time and money on doing things most people outside this forum will not care about.

No, no they can't. There is no one at Bethesda anymore who is capable of doing the edits NetImmerse requires to be optimized for games the scale Bethesda tries to make. The only reason people THINK Skyrim works so well with mods now is because they made Skyrim Large Address Aware in the Special Edition which relieved the pressure on the scripting engine. Something like that is only going to go so far in a game like Starfield where the engine has to keep track of tons of items on tons of planets and, according to the Direct, items on ships as well. If you thought save corrupting overflow bugs over time in Bethesda games was bad you haven't seen anything yet. The only hope they have at this point is if Microsoft holds their feet to the fire and makes them do QA to the max and fix the issues that arise. Don't expect Starfield to be able to handle script intensive mods when SFSE comes out until the "Definitive Edition" comes out.

 

[Robotigan]

If exploring planets isn't identical to Skyrim where you have invisible walls you bump up against then I'll be shocked.

I'd be even more shocked if they somehow made it such that you can literally walk around each and every world, even if they made every planet so technically small that it would only take maybe five to ten real-time hours to do so -- and 99.999% of that would likely be over boring procedurally rendered terrain.

0% chance their styrofoam engine can do round planets.

I'm pretty sure I mentioned this in this very thread sometime ago, but this isn't the huge lift you guys are making it out to be. You know how open world games are broken up into chunks--or "cells" in Bethesda parlance--and how the game only keeps the cells around the player loaded into memory? Well, how about this: when the player approaches the edge of the map you load in cells from the opposite side. Presto, now you can walk around the planet.

[o][-][-][o][P]
[o][-][-][o][o]
[-][-][-][-][-]
[-][-][-][-][-]
[e][-][-][o][o]

- = unloaded cell
o = loaded cell
e = loaded cell corresponding to cell[P.x+1%cell[P.y].length][P.y+1%cell.length]
P = player occupied cell

This would simulate a torus-shaped planet, but you get the idea. With a different configuration you can simulate a cube-shaped planet, a cylinder (by fudging the projection a bit), or something that doesn't even make sense in 3-dimensional space. And then for the skybox, its orientation already changes by time of day so just add in player position as a parameter as well. The trickiest part (or rather the only part I don't know offhand) is getting the terrain generation to line up on the edges, but that might even be something the licensed middleware does out of the box.

 

[tritosine2k]

If exploring planets isn't identical to Skyrim where you have invisible walls you bump up against then I'll be shocked.

I'd be even more shocked if they somehow made it such that you can literally walk around each and every world, even if they made every planet so technically small that it would only take maybe five to ten real-time hours to do so -- and 99.999% of that would likely be over boring procedurally rendered terrain.

Technically it's boring because heightmaps are 2.5D like Doom and the current buzzword bingo in procedural includes stuff like "erosion" thats still heightmap-ey AF, also UE5's "instancing" good recipes for "boring" . Realistically if some trillion dollar company made a "google maps" that's up to 2023 technical standard with server side streaming it would eat all this client side stuff for breakfast.