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

[Vic]

As long as these planets aren't as anxiety inducing as The Outer Wilds

Spoiler

I had to uninstall the game after 2 minutes on this planet.

 

[EvilWolf]

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.

Now imagine how much trouble Bethesda games ALREADY have in, even modern, Skyrim and Fallout. Hell those games even cleanup cells if you go far enough away for long enough time. NOW, go on a mental journey with me and IMAGINE the jank POSSIBILITIES with 1,000 planets and a, presumably, LIMITLESS amount of ships in space ALL with items on them. Even with procedural generation one would HOPE item locations are saved AT LEAST in ships or outposts which, again, could be limitless in number. I'd be very impressed if Todd can pull it off.

 

[Gargaune]

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.

Maybe... But that shouldn't be an issue - at least for ground vehicles - if the game's generating the terrain as you go. I'm still skeptical of that idea, I've been inclined to think the landmasses are still pre-generated and loaded from the game's assets, but we'll have to wait and see.

The Creation Engine does things no other engine currently does. [...]

Absolutely. It's the right tool for the job, it uniquely supports the sort of experience that Bethesda's known for and it benefits from an immense modding community bred around it. And for all my time with Bethesda's games, I haven't had that much trouble with catastrophic failures. They're buggy as all shit, but most of it rises to the level of recoverable nuisance. If anything, aside from Bethesda's own content, it's rather impressive how resilient the technical platform is with a hundred plugins from amateur modders kicking around within its innards.

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

I see this argument again and again, from both promoters and detractors, that the engine will have to "keep track" of all these items across a bajillion planets and I don't get it. If you move a chair somewhere, the game doesn't keep actively processing it in the background when you're not around, it writes the delta into the cell data and dumps it to the save file to keep until you come back or it expires with a cell reset.

Cell resets are, in turn, determined by visit timers or cell buffer load. It doesn't matter whether it's a million cells in Starfield or however few Oblivion had, if you somehow fill the respective game's buffer before entries expire naturally, it'll just jettison your oldest deltas to make room for the new ones. Settlement cells don't reset but they're limited in scope, a known quantity to control for. In practice, this has worked well in their past games, I don't see why it would stop now. It's really not as different as you make it out to be.

Various quest data will get processed in the the background, but those are things like timer scripts and quest calculations, they've got nothing to do with "tracking objects" you scatter about.

Hell those games even cleanup cells if you go far enough away for long enough time.

Yeah, it's cleaning your save file and resetting encounters for repeat play. I don't see the problem, Bethesda have got a pretty decent handle on the relevant timers and I wouldn't want the same raider corpses to stick around Lexington forever, it's an open world game.

I'd be very impressed if Todd can pull it off.

There's nothing to "pull off" in this regard, if you imagine that Starfield will be "a thousand times bigger" than Fallout 4, you're falling for the marketing hype. Yes, there'll be a lot more generic landmass but it will be subject to most of the same processes, and the actual scope of the systems and content will be in the same range as Fallout 4 and Skyrim. Todd ain't gonna sell us a thousand Fallout 4s for seventy bucks.

 

[AwesomeButton]

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

You don't seriously believe you'll get to explore a whole procedurally generated planet-sized area, right? It will most likely be "points of interest" limited by "possible landing zones" aka fast travel. The zones you can walk are still big, but not enough for a vehicle to make sense. Even generating thousands of landing zones the size of Skyrim's map each would be too much, and that's the ballpark if you want to have vehicles that make sense. At least that's what my ceystal ball says.

 

[EvilWolf]

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.

Maybe... But that shouldn't be an issue - at least for ground vehicles - if the game's generating the terrain as you go. I'm still skeptical of that idea, I've been inclined to think the landmasses are still pre-generated and loaded from the game's assets, but we'll have to wait and see.

The Creation Engine does things no other engine currently does. [...]

Absolutely. It's the right tool for the job, it uniquely supports the sort of experience that Bethesda's known for and it benefits from an immense modding community bred around it. And for all my time with Bethesda's games, I haven't had that much trouble with catastrophic failures. They're buggy as all shit, but most of it rises to the level of recoverable nuisance. If anything, aside from Bethesda's own content, it's rather impressive how resilient the technical platform is with a hundred plugins from amateur modders kicking around within its innards.

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

I see this argument again and again, from both promoters and detractors, that the engine will have to "keep track" of all these items across a bajillion planets and I don't get it. If you move a chair somewhere, the game doesn't keep actively processing it in the background when you're not around, it writes the delta into the cell data and dumps it to the save file to keep until you come back or it expires with a cell reset.

Cell resets are, in turn, determined by visit timers or cell buffer load. It doesn't matter whether it's a million cells in Starfield or however few Oblivion had, if you somehow fill the respective game's buffer before entries expire naturally, it'll just jettison your oldest deltas to make room for the new ones. Settlement cells don't reset but they're limited in scope, a known quantity to control for. In practice, this has worked well in their past games, I don't see why it would stop now. It's really not as different as you make it out to be.

Various quest data will get processed in the the background, but those are things like timer scripts and quest calculations, they've got nothing to do with "tracking objects" you scatter about.

Hell those games even cleanup cells if you go far enough away for long enough time.

Yeah, it's cleaning your save file and resetting encounters for repeat play. I don't see the problem, Bethesda have got a pretty decent handle on the relevant timers and I wouldn't want the same raider corpses to stick around Lexington forever, it's an open world game.

I'd be very impressed if Todd can pull it off.

There's nothing to "pull off" in this regard, if you imagine that Starfield will be "a thousand times bigger" than Fallout 4, you're falling for the marketing hype. Yes, there'll be a lot more generic landmass but it will be subject to most of the same processes, and the actual scope of the systems and content will be in the same range as Fallout 4 and Skyrim. Todd ain't gonna sell us a thousand Fallout 4s for seventy bucks.

If you believe this is how it works in NetImmerse you've never played a Bethesda game for 100s of hours. Morrowind, Oblivion, Fallout 3, and yes Skyrim on release ALL had playthrough ending bugs that bricked your save until modders created ham fisted algorithms for cleaning it and letting you continue where you left off. Making Skyrim large address aware theoretically fixed the issue in something as simple and contained as Skyrim and Fallout 4. There's a reason settlements have build limits in Fallout 4. Making something on the scale of Starfield is pushing the limits and I can GUARANTEE that if you REALLY wanted to you could brick your save pretty quick if you ran around dropping tons of shit on the ground in all of the ships you can find or outposts you build, even with it being large address aware. I think you're underestimating where dropped items are going to be able to be saved. It's going to be pretty lame if they don't let you drop items in your ships and outposts. Assuming you can only have one outpost per planet that still leaves you with 1,000 outposts which is FAR greater than the landmass of Fallout 4 and Skyrim combined.

 

[soulburner]

[...]
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.

I don't understand how you can be so sure who works at Bethesda and what they can or cannot fix. The executable being LAA doesn't have much meaning when it's 64-bit and nobody in their right mind will compile a 32-bit program in 2023 unless needed for backwards compatibility with toasters. I'm not saying you are completely wrong about Bethesda not fixing long standing bugs but being so sure the game will surely break due to a non existing reason feels a bit off. Also, as I said in my example about the Source engine, nobody is saying Half-Life: Alyx runs on Quake, so calling Creation Engine "NetImmerse" is stupid.

I might look controversial, but I like the improvements to the engine in Fallout 76. The game has flaws associated with it's online component but technically it's pretty good. I had no issues (bugs, crashes, etc. - maybe an NPC got stuck somewhere once or twice) and the only remaining issue is the renderer being mostly single threaded, causing a slight CPU bottleneck on my aging Ryzen 3600. I stopped playing only because my son was born, so if I manage to find time for gaming, it's not going to be anything without the capability of pause

We will have to wait to find out what Bethesda did to update the engine in a way which allows them to call it Creation Engine "2". Did they just attach global illumination and new animation system on top of everything or have they made low level changes with how the engine operates - these are the questions only modders will find some answers to.

 

[Non-Edgy Gamer]

I don't understand how you can be so sure who works at Bethesda and what they can or cannot fix.

Maybe because it's been 20 years and the engine still sucks.

 

[RobotSquirrel]

Now imagine how much trouble Bethesda games ALREADY have in, even modern, Skyrim and Fallout. Hell those games even cleanup cells if you go far enough away for long enough time. NOW, go on a mental journey with me and IMAGINE the jank POSSIBILITIES with 1,000 planets and a, presumably, LIMITLESS amount of ships in space ALL with items on them. Even with procedural generation one would HOPE item locations are saved AT LEAST in ships or outposts which, again, could be limitless in number. I'd be very impressed if Todd can pull it off.

its not actually possible. None of these things will be persistent and none of them will be truly unique instances, we just don't have the computational power to do that. Even StarCitizen's approach is a pipedream.
Basically how I see it going, all the ships are going to be Oblivion Dungeons - you can place items onto ships but they'll likely be tied to the player not the ship so unless the player is there that data is unloaded.
Pretty much everything you the player do is going to be tracked, but anything else in the world won't be. Because its Bethesda we're talking about here, they won't have changed how they do it.

It's not as impressive as it might seem. Most of the database will have already been hand placed by Bethesda and they'll just keep reloading the same data over and over, only the player's data will accumulate. Also what ever data you generate ultimately has to be saved as well, so again you're really limited on the scope of what you can do. This is why full persistence is impossible on the scale Todd (Radiant AI) and Roberts have suggested in the past. It can't be done even with the technology we have today. And especially if you're targeting a games console as a lead.

X3 and X4 were probably the closest we've ever gotten for local persistence and even those games use a abstraction to pull it off.

 

[EvilWolf]

[...]
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.

I don't understand how you can be so sure who works at Bethesda and what they can or cannot fix. The executable being LAA doesn't have much meaning when it's 64-bit and nobody in their right mind will compile a 32-bit program in 2023 unless needed for backwards compatibility with toasters. I'm not saying you are completely wrong about Bethesda not fixing long standing bugs but being so sure the game will surely break due to a non existing reason feels a bit off. Also, as I said in my example about the Source engine, nobody is saying Half-Life: Alyx runs on Quake, so calling Creation Engine "NetImmerse" is stupid.

I might look controversial, but I like the improvements to the engine in Fallout 76. The game has flaws associated with it's online component but technically it's pretty good. I had no issues (bugs, crashes, etc. - maybe an NPC got stuck somewhere once or twice) and the only remaining issue is the renderer being mostly single threaded, causing a slight CPU bottleneck on my aging Ryzen 3600. I stopped playing only because my son was born, so if I manage to find time for gaming, it's not going to be anything without the capability of pause

We will have to wait to find out what Bethesda did to update the engine in a way which allows them to call it Creation Engine "2". Did they just attach global illumination and new animation system on top of everything or have they made low level changes with how the engine operates - these are the questions only modders will find some answers to.

The people who worked on the Source Engine knew what they were doing. Unless you know the history of the engine you would have no idea the Source engine is the Quake engine. The reason I KNOW no one at Bethesda has any idea how to work on the NetImmerse engine is because every "iteration" it goes through is verifiably a scotch tape and tooth paste fix so they can roll out their next game with the ABSOLUTE LEAST amount of work put in to the engine. Starfield is going to be a monumental success and I'm going to play it for AT LEAST 1,000 hours, but I've played enough Bethesda games and done enough modding and research into troubleshooting mods and understanding the engine to know Starfield has MASSIVE jank potential.

Now imagine how much trouble Bethesda games ALREADY have in, even modern, Skyrim and Fallout. Hell those games even cleanup cells if you go far enough away for long enough time. NOW, go on a mental journey with me and IMAGINE the jank POSSIBILITIES with 1,000 planets and a, presumably, LIMITLESS amount of ships in space ALL with items on them. Even with procedural generation one would HOPE item locations are saved AT LEAST in ships or outposts which, again, could be limitless in number. I'd be very impressed if Todd can pull it off.

its not actually possible. None of these things will be persistent and none of them will be truly unique instances, we just don't have the computational power to do that. Even StarCitizen's approach is a pipedream.
Basically how I see it going, all the ships are going to be Oblivion Dungeons - you can place items onto ships but they'll likely be tied to the player not the ship so unless the player is there that data is unloaded.
Pretty much everything you the player do is going to be tracked, but anything else in the world won't be. Because its Bethesda we're talking about here, they won't have changed how they do it.

It's not as impressive as it might seem. Most of the database will have already been hand placed by Bethesda and they'll just keep reloading the same data over and over, only the player's data will accumulate. Also what ever data you generate ultimately has to be saved as well, so again you're really limited on the scope of what you can do. This is why full persistence is impossible on the scale Todd (Radiant AI) and Roberts have suggested in the past. It can't be done even with the technology we have today. And especially if you're targeting a games console as a lead.

X3 and X4 were probably the closest we've ever gotten for local persistence and even those games use a abstraction to pull it off.

Yea, but I'm talking about save bloat breaking files. Every ship can't use the same cell because they're vastle different modular interiors, and your ships, as many as you have, have to store your item placements. Same for your outposts, all of those saved items in all those locations have to be saved in your save file which the engine won't load if it exceeds a certain size. There are of course ways around this, like making the engine be capable of loading larger files but at this point the question is how large do they have to be, creating location saves and player saves, etc. All these changes to NetImmerse require someone who knows the inner workings of the engine, I doubt anyone who works at modern Bethesda has any idea how to do any of that. I hope I'm proven wrong and Todd pulls off a miracle, but given their track record it'll be more band aid methods to squeeze another golden egg out of their 6 gorillion year old engine.

 

[BruceVC]

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

This game is going to make a killing in sales. With the direct connection to Microsoft consoles sales will be huge and that applies to more casual gamers and then the real PC gamers are fortunate enough to have mods to make the vanilla game even better

So its a win-win for all gamers and then Bethesda benefits from both markets around revenue sales....its only good news for the future of Bethesda and the ES franchise

 

[EvilWolf]

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

This game is going to make a killing in sales. With the direct connection to Microsoft consoles sales will be huge and that applies to more casual gamers and then the real PC gamers are fortunate enough to have mods to make the vanilla game even better

So its a win-win for all gamers and then Bethesda benefits from both markets around revenue sales....its only good news for the future of Bethesda and the ES franchise

I can't wait to see what they do with their Starfield knowledge in the next TES and Fallout.

 

[BruceVC]

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

This game is going to make a killing in sales. With the direct connection to Microsoft consoles sales will be huge and that applies to more casual gamers and then the real PC gamers are fortunate enough to have mods to make the vanilla game even better

So its a win-win for all gamers and then Bethesda benefits from both markets around revenue sales....its only good news for the future of Bethesda and the ES franchise

I can't wait to see what they do with their Starfield knowledge in the next TES and Fallout.

I agree, Loverslabs mods will never look better

 

[taxalot]

https://twitter.com/pcgamer/status/1676121380939603968

A fully explorable galaxy, yet only 4 people might potentially date you.
Very relatable to the gamer.

 

[BruceVC]

https://twitter.com/pcgamer/status/1676121380939603968

A fully explorable galaxy, yet only 4 people might potentially date you.
Very relatable to the gamer.

Meh, Romance is maybe 10-15% of importance when it comes to party interaction for me. Its always nice to see but its not as important as things like party side quests or companion combat contribution

Also what I always do in Bethesda games is install companion mods that offer Romance and contribute towards gameplay. For example in Oblivion I used this Viconia companion mod

https://www.nexusmods.com/oblivion/mods/15200

 

[Readher]

Vanilla companions in Bethesda games suck and the """romance""" is almost non-existent, so it's really no biggie. The closest we got to a real companion was Serana, and Todd literally trolled everyone and made her non-marriageable (there's a huge ass mod that expands her and even revoices her completely that adds marriage, though). Best to wait for companion mods if you want anything of substance, and just treat the vanilla ones as pack mules on first playthroughs.

 

[BruceVC]

Vanilla companions in Bethesda games suck and the """romance""" is almost non-existent, so it's really no biggie. The closest we got to a real companion was Serana, and Todd literally trolled everyone and made her non-marriageable (there's a huge ass mod that expands her and even revoices her completely that adds marriage, though). Best to wait for companion mods if you want anything of substance, and just treat the vanilla ones as pack mules on first playthroughs.

Thats another valid point, Bethesda vanilla games never generally have Romance in the same way Bioware includes it

Which is why I mentioned in a previous post the vanilla Romance in Starfield reminds me of ME. And I am going to guess and say you will advance Romance when you on your ship?

 

[soulburner]

I never understood the point of romance in RPGs. I mean, sure, it's "role playing", but the amount of people complaining online about game X not having them or them being limited is astonishing.

The people who worked on the Source Engine knew what they were doing. Unless you know the history of the engine you would have no idea the Source engine is the Quake engine. The reason I KNOW no one at Bethesda has any idea how to work on the NetImmerse engine is because every "iteration" it goes through is verifiably a scotch tape and tooth paste fix so they can roll out their next game with the ABSOLUTE LEAST amount of work put in to the engine. Starfield is going to be a monumental success and I'm going to play it for AT LEAST 1,000 hours, but I've played enough Bethesda games and done enough modding and research into troubleshooting mods and understanding the engine to know Starfield has MASSIVE jank potential.

I get it. I remember reading some technical analysis of the first iteration of Creation Engine soon after Skyrim was released & it did contain code dating back to gamebryo and netimmerse, however it wasn't anything crucial. Just stuff that you don't need to update unless you want to reinvent the wheel, just like the flickering light in Quake -> HL: Alyx. If you or anyone else can find this blog post/article/whatever, it would be great to refresh my memory.

Call me naive, but I do hope Microsoft's influence on the game could include fixing more stuff in their bug tracker.

PS: I'm probably in the minority, but my first Skyrim playthrough back in the day was without mods. Absolutely zero - I might have added SkyUI very late and that's it. I managed to finish the game and Dragonborn DLC just fine and I did not have any showstopper bugs, maybe a few occurences of a rag doll flying in a random direction. I recall having at least 140 hours on my last save. Furthermore, I played Fallout 4 on release without any mods, because there weren't any yet. Aside from single threaded renderer which bottlenecked the shit out of Diamond City it was a very fine experience. So... while I am aware of the disadvantages of the engine, I do believe most opinions about it are blown way out of proportion.

 

[Zanthia]

I'm probably in the minority, but my first Skyrim playthrough back in the day was without mods.

Same, and people do overblow how necessary they are, but I do remember there were some early patches, too.

---

I wonder if they've changed how saving works and there's a file per planet now or something. That would take care of any issues with items.

 

[Readher]

I never understood the point of romance in RPGs. I mean, sure, it's "role playing", but the amount of people complaining online about game X not having them or them being limited is astonishing.

There are probably several reasons for that.

• I'd wager a lot of gamers are schizoids who will never experience love themselves, so they want to do it by proxy in media instead, including games.
• Some people are just lonely and horny.
• It helps to connect with characters if done right and also adds more party dynamics (assuming the game has a party system and reactivity to romances).
• For whatever reason, waifu/husbando "wars" often keep discussion about games running for much longer than they otherwise would.
• Romance is commonplace in the real world, why shouldn't it be in games? Hell, it's commonplace in other media as well - almost every film or book has at least a romantic subplot. Games being an interactive medium allows expanding on it and giving the player a choice on who to end up with (as opposed to being at the author's mercy). RPGs are sadly pretty much the only medium with actual interactivity and C&C as far as story/relationships go, so if someone wants to partake in romance that has an interactive element, they're mostly limited to RPGs, of which there are few. That's why every time an RPG pops up, there are people who immediately ask about romance - there are very few examples of games in different genres that allow for romance that's not part of the linear main plot. Furthermore, games are in a unique position where running/reading time constrains aren't as much of an issue, allowing for romance that's not rushed, which is otherwise reserved to long-running TV series or book anthologies (sadly, they usually end up rushed anyway).

 

[Readher]

 

[Nifft Batuff]

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.

 

[thesecret1]

I've never seen romance options in an RPG that weren't cringe shit that added nothing to the game. Even the often mentioned Bioware ones were shit. If you want a touching romance story, go read a visual novel or something.

Bethesda games have many flaws, but lack of romanceable companions ain't one.

 

[Readher]

I've never seen romance options in an RPG that weren't cringe shit that added nothing to the game.

That's mostly because writing good romance is very hard. It's to be expected that video game writers, most of whom are total hacks that can't even write normal stuff well, are not up to the task.

 

[jaekl]

You agree with and be nice to a woman at every opportunity and then you smooch in your underwear an hour before the final battle. That's just how life works.

 

[Readher]

You agree with and be nice to a woman at every opportunity and then you smooch in your underwear an hour before the final battle. That's just how life works.

Final battle in game: saving the world, saving the galaxy, killing a god

Final battle in life: open relationship discussion