Starfield - "space epic" from Bethesda Game Studios

[Gargaune]

Oh, and the creation engine is vastly superior to most other engines on the market solely on the basis that it's founded upon moddability. I don't give a shit about most of the so-called "features" engines tout nowadays, Bethesda has been shipping an engine with extensive modding support and their games come with an SDK for two decades now. Unreal has gone backwards in terms of moddability, with UE4/5 being one of the most modder unfriendly engines on the market and therefore one of the worst recent developments in video games.

Mod support is the Creation Engine's greatest asset, but it actually has some other selling points in the technical department. I keep coming back to goof around in Cyberpunk and I constantly find myself wishing X or Y were more like Bethesda Game™, like object physicality or cell handling, with how consistently the CE writes temporary deltas to the savegame. The engine's got its downsides, most notably the expensive AI and the design limitations that incurs, and a ton of patented Bethesda "it'll do" implementations, but at its core it really is a technical solution catered to a better breed of open world design.

 

[racofer]

people shit on bethesda when nobody else even tries to do what bethesda does
I hate skyrim, but its world is still significantly better than most other "open world" games, especially ones that came after skyrim and just copied the ubisoft formula e.g., twitcher 3. Skyrim's NPCs may all have some kind of mental retardation, but at least they try to some degree provoke a sense of realism compared to the static, lifeless text dumps in nearly the entire rest of the genre. So on and so forth.
If Bethesda games are "shit", then nearly every other game in the genre -- and by this, I do not mean the greater RPG genre -- are even worse. Just look at how awful Outerworlds is to the point where it makes Fallout 4 look good. KCD has some great parts, but in many areas it feels like a pale imitation of a bethesda game that falls apart when you play with it, like your parents buying you some cheap megabrïcks instead of legos.
If I had to pick a game that was the closest to a modern descendant of Ultima 7 and Ultima Underworld, the choice becomes obvious. Does that mean it's good? No, but it does mean they get an A when I'm grading on a curve.

Oh, and the creation engine is vastly superior to most other engines on the market solely on the basis that it's founded upon moddability. I don't give a shit about most of the so-called "features" engines tout nowadays, Bethesda has been shipping an engine with extensive modding support and their games come with an SDK for two decades now. Unreal has gone backwards in terms of moddability, with UE4/5 being one of the most modder unfriendly engines on the market and therefore one of the worst recent developments in video games.

All things considered, Bethesda is shit. But nearly every other developer is vastly worse. The rest of the industry needs to get their shit together.

While all of this is true, it does not make Bethesda games any less terrible. 100% reliance on mods to make the game somewhat decent, although still mostly unplayable garbage, is not something to be counted as a positive when the game itself is still a steaming pile of shit.

The past decade worth of mods was not enough to transform Skyrim into a worthwhile game. It's still dull, lacking reactivity, devoid of world building, and with everything taking place in the player's imagination. All player interaction boils down to killing things, and it does that much worse than nearly, if not all those open world games we know, even the ones following the Ubisoft formula. Fallout 4 follows the same path and is as bad today as it was back in 2015.

Also, claiming Bethesda is doing something good by providing modding tools is disingenuous, or naive. They have tried twice so far to lock modding away from players, first by selling them on Steam, which was a total disaster, and now with Bethesda.net. I honestly believe it has not gotten enough traction because of the multitude of mods available elsewhere by the time this became available, and time will tell how Bethesda will handle this for Starfield. Would you be surprised if, initially, mods were only available through Bethesda.net? Just so, you know, Todd can see how it goes with a brand new game, all for the good of the players of course.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

The paste decade worth of mods was not enough to transform Skyrim into a worthwhile game.

enderal is one of the better games released in the past decade

 

[Harthwain]

While all of this is true, it does not make Bethesda games any less terrible. 100% reliance on mods to make the game somewhat decent, although still mostly unplayable garbage, is not something to be counted as a positive when the game itself is still a steaming pile of shit.

The past decade worth of mods was not enough to transform Skyrim into a worthwhile game. It's still dull, lacking reactivity, devoid of world building, and with everything taking place in the player's imagination. All player interaction boils down to killing things, and it does that much worse than nearly, if not all those open world games we know, even the ones following the Ubisoft formula. Fallout 4 follows the same path and is as bad today as it was back in 2015.

Eh, something similar could be said about all Bethesda games, including Morrowind (sans world building).

 

[Norfleet]

Todd's main problem is that while he's pretty good at coming up with large, open worlds to explore, to this date, other than his work on Morrowind, he hasn't put in any reason to want to explore his worlds.

That's because the fundamental reasons I've found to be somewhere else in a world:

1. To get something that is found there: Requires that you PUT something specific there, otherwise there is nothing to be found.

2. To get away from someone or something else: Requires that you have someone else you'd want to get away from, like a rival faction (or other players). Also requires that you have some ability to do something once you get away from them, otherwise you're just standing in the middle of an empty field with nothing to do.

So, for an open world to have validity, there needs to be either some pull that drives you to go there, or some push that convinces you to get away from everything else. I think that's why all the interesting open world ideas tend to involve some sort of building system: You have to be able to DO something once you're in the middle of nowhere.

 

[Nifft Batuff]

From a technical point of view there are no better openworlds than Bethesda's.

 

[tritosine2k]

From a technical point of view there are no better openworlds than Bethesda's.

& that's why this stuff is going to be remotely hosted

 

[Urthor]

Todd's main problem is that while he's pretty good at coming up with large, open worlds to explore, to this date, other than his work on Morrowind, he hasn't put in any reason to want to explore his worlds. Oblivion is the most obvious example, but even Skyrim -- other than its varying landscapes and pretty trees to look at -- was just boring to walk around in after the first couple of hours.

When you take the examples of games like New Vegas and Enderal, which were obviously based on "worlds" that Bethesda created, it's painfully obvious how incapable Todd and his team is of putting any kind of creative pizzazz into his own games. They, unlike the derivative games based on them, lack any intellectual stimuli to invoke the desire to climb that mountain that he so proudly claims you can.

I completely disagree in terms of Enderal.

Enderal has many, many, many, virtues, but to me it never felt like a *truly* open world. Enderal felt like a progression of pretty level gated areas. You usually didn't have as much choice on where to go next as you'd think.

It reminded me of Gothic style level design. Gated areas by difficulty progression. Entertaining, not truly exciting.

Now, I dislike many, many aspects of Skyrim, but the way that all of the cities are *truly* destinations and all have their own virtues, was very pleasant.

I think it just goes to show that, the quality of the *world*, is really all writing and quest design. The things Skyrim does fantastically, area design of Markarth, aren't as important as the writing and quests in Markarth they didn't make quite so compelling (I love Markarth... as a concept. I felt the dialogue and NPCs weren't up to scratch).

 

[ItsChon]

I will say, the biggest weakness in Bethesda games in regards to both their open worlds and their immersion is the limitations of their engine which restricts settlements to small amounts of people/buildings. It's hard to feel a sense of grandeur/scale in Skryim when all the towns have like 10-30 people at the most, and you could massacre everyone in them if you wanted to. Bethesda has the opportunity with Starfield to create a setting where the low amount of people actually makes sense considering the remoteness of space. I hope they lean into this aspect, and that'll go a long way towards fixing my gripes regarding the believably of their settings/worlds. Of course, that just leaves the actual shit gameplay that they'll have to fix, but baby steps.

 

[GentlemanCthulhu]

Oh, and the creation engine is vastly superior to most other engines on the market solely on the basis that it's founded upon moddability. I don't give a shit about most of the so-called "features" engines tout nowadays, Bethesda has been shipping an engine with extensive modding support and their games come with an SDK for two decades now. Unreal has gone backwards in terms of moddability, with UE4/5 being one of the most modder unfriendly engines on the market and therefore one of the worst recent developments in video games.

Mod support is the Creation Engine's greatest asset, but it actually has some other selling points in the technical department. I keep coming back to goof around in Cyberpunk and I constantly find myself wishing X or Y were more like Bethesda Game™, like object physicality or cell handling, with how consistently the CE writes temporary deltas to the savegame. The engine's got its downsides, most notably the expensive AI and the design limitations that incurs, and a ton of patented Bethesda "it'll do" implementations, but at its core it really is a technical solution catered to a better breed of open world design.

AFAIK, CE is the only engine that can handle fully dynamc, ai-driven NPCs that can freely operate in an open-world 3D space, at least with the level of interactivity in ToddSoft games. People meme on radiant AI, but that thing is a technical marvel.

 

[Late Bloomer]

Nate Purkeypile, a former Bethesda dev (Fallout 3, Skyrim, Fallout 4, Fallout 76, Starfield) had some interesting quotes. He says one of the reason he quit is because the colossal size of the dev team for Starfield. It of course started with Fallout 76.

Fallout 76, that was two mostly, we had a little bit of help from Montreal, but it was mostly the Austin and Maryland [Bethesda] studios working together.

Concerning Starfield

But yeah, Starfield is a much bigger project, it’s like 500 people or something on the team, whereas I think [Fallout] 76 was maybe 200, tops,

About the 1000 explorable planets (lol)

I can’t really go into the tech details of it,” says Purkypile, “the map of [Fallout] 76 is like, almost two times the size of Skyrim or so, and that was a lot of work for people to do, but yeah, it doesn’t scale. Even if you wanted to hire outsourcing, you’d have to hire, like, a country. Realistically, it’s a fraction of that team actually [working] on planets.

It's an interesting article talking with this dude who worked at the company for 17 years.

https://www.pcgamesn.com/starfield/interview-ex-Bethesda-dev

 

[GentlemanCthulhu]

Nate Purkeypile, a former Bethesda dev (Fallout 3, Skyrim, Fallout 4, Fallout 76, Starfield) had some interesting quotes. He says one of the reason he quit is because the colossal size of the dev team for Starfield. It of course started with Fallout 76.

Fallout 76, that was two mostly, we had a little bit of help from Montreal, but it was mostly the Austin and Maryland [Bethesda] studios working together.

Concerning Starfield

But yeah, Starfield is a much bigger project, it’s like 500 people or something on the team, whereas I think [Fallout] 76 was maybe 200, tops,

About the 1000 explorable planets (lol)

I can’t really go into the tech details of it,” says Purkypile, “the map of [Fallout] 76 is like, almost two times the size of Skyrim or so, and that was a lot of work for people to do, but yeah, it doesn’t scale. Even if you wanted to hire outsourcing, you’d have to hire, like, a country. Realistically, it’s a fraction of that team actually [working] on planets.

It's an interesting article talking with this dude who worked at the company for 17 years.

https://www.pcgamesn.com/starfield/interview-ex-Bethesda-dev

Why does he speak, like, a Californian?

 

[Late Bloomer]

Why does he speak, like, a Californian?

It's like a disease in the industry. It infects game dialogue too.

 

[BruceVC]

https://www.pcgamesn.com/starfield/interview-ex-Bethesda-dev

Great link, I particularly like this part

"so big in fact that it’ll have 1,000 planets to explore that can be landed on anywhere. We had some questions for Purkeypile about how this was achieved, as while it’s been previously mentioned by director Tod Howard that procedural generation is involved with the over 100 solar systems, we don’t know exactly how "

I cant wait for all the exciting " planet mods " that the industrious and brilliant modding community will create. This game is going to be epic, I can guarantee everyone

 

[soulburner]

How long before a Skyfield mod porting Skyrim to the Starfield engine is announced?

 

[HereticGuy]

How long before a Skyfield mod porting Skyrim to the Starfield engine is announced?

I laughed to your joke at first.... But then I remember Skywind and Skyblivion (As if the projects' themselves not dumb enough, they chose even dumber names)

 

[Red7]

If any of you buy this I hate you - you are Decline Enablers and should be lined up in the street and shot. This has been a post.

Start to stock some 7.62 NATO calibers then my friend. Fallout 4 thread has 6,986 entries; Skyrim modding thread has 6,092 entries. Either Todd Howard has a natural 18 Charisma + CHA buffing items; or people have a fetish on bad video games.

no reason to buy game either way. information copy is free, only retards would pay for free copy. only jewthesda game I bought was morrowind. cause I didnt had torrent back then.

the idea of paying for something that costs nothing (to copy data) should be indeed capital offense of retardation along with retards that support usury credit/banking ponzi system; u work for soemthing that bankers can do for free/print money. its the same bs.

some retards would say "how games would be funded". well, by passionate rich ppl and investors who want to make em. ofc it wont work either with retards giving money to kukolded con artists like kuk roberts. development should be funded in ongoing manner and investors should have direct supervision on how money is being spend and not pay at end for worthless/free copy.

 

[HereticGuy]

If any of you buy this I hate you - you are Decline Enablers and should be lined up in the street and shot. This has been a post.

Start to stock some 7.62 NATO calibers then my friend. Fallout 4 thread has 6,986 entries; Skyrim modding thread has 6,092 entries. Either Todd Howard has a natural 18 Charisma + CHA buffing items; or people have a fetish on bad video games.

no reason to buy game either way. information copy is free, only retards would pay for free copy. only jewthesda game I bought was morrowind. cause I didnt had torrent back then.

the idea of paying for something that costs nothing (to copy data) should be indeed capital offense of retardation along with retards that support usury credit/banking ponzi system; u work for soemthing that bankers can do for free/print money. its the same bs.

some retards would say "how games would be funded". well, by passionate rich ppl and investors who want to make em. ofc it wont work either with retards giving money to kukolded con artists like kuk roberts. development should be funded in ongoing manner and investors should have direct supervision on how money is being spend and not pay at end for worthless/free copy.

If I could draw your message, it would be something like that :

 

[notpl]

If any of you buy this I hate you - you are Decline Enablers and should be lined up in the street and shot. This has been a post.

Start to stock some 7.62 NATO calibers then my friend. Fallout 4 thread has 6,986 entries; Skyrim modding thread has 6,092 entries. Either Todd Howard has a natural 18 Charisma + CHA buffing items; or people have a fetish on bad video games.

no reason to buy game either way. information copy is free, only retards would pay for free copy. only jewthesda game I bought was morrowind. cause I didnt had torrent back then.

the idea of paying for something that costs nothing (to copy data) should be indeed capital offense of retardation along with retards that support usury credit/banking ponzi system; u work for soemthing that bankers can do for free/print money. its the same bs.

some retards would say "how games would be funded". well, by passionate rich ppl and investors who want to make em. ofc it wont work either with retards giving money to kukolded con artists like kuk roberts. development should be funded in ongoing manner and investors should have direct supervision on how money is being spend and not pay at end for worthless/free copy.

Counterpoint: rich people/investors have the worst fucking taste in the world.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

If any of you buy this I hate you - you are Decline Enablers and should be lined up in the street and shot. This has been a post.

Start to stock some 7.62 NATO calibers then my friend. Fallout 4 thread has 6,986 entries; Skyrim modding thread has 6,092 entries. Either Todd Howard has a natural 18 Charisma + CHA buffing items; or people have a fetish on bad video games.

no reason to buy game either way. information copy is free, only retards would pay for free copy. only jewthesda game I bought was morrowind. cause I didnt had torrent back then.

the idea of paying for something that costs nothing (to copy data) should be indeed capital offense of retardation along with retards that support usury credit/banking ponzi system; u work for soemthing that bankers can do for free/print money. its the same bs.

some retards would say "how games would be funded". well, by passionate rich ppl and investors who want to make em. ofc it wont work either with retards giving money to kukolded con artists like kuk roberts. development should be funded in ongoing manner and investors should have direct supervision on how money is being spend and not pay at end for worthless/free copy.

Counterpoint: rich people/investors have the worst fucking taste in the world.

Counter-Counterpoint: rich people don't know what they want so they just delegate everything to someone else and the problem isn't at the top but the middle.

 

[Red7]

If any of you buy this I hate you - you are Decline Enablers and should be lined up in the street and shot. This has been a post.

Start to stock some 7.62 NATO calibers then my friend. Fallout 4 thread has 6,986 entries; Skyrim modding thread has 6,092 entries. Either Todd Howard has a natural 18 Charisma + CHA buffing items; or people have a fetish on bad video games.

no reason to buy game either way. information copy is free, only retards would pay for free copy. only jewthesda game I bought was morrowind. cause I didnt had torrent back then.

the idea of paying for something that costs nothing (to copy data) should be indeed capital offense of retardation along with retards that support usury credit/banking ponzi system; u work for soemthing that bankers can do for free/print money. its the same bs.

some retards would say "how games would be funded". well, by passionate rich ppl and investors who want to make em. ofc it wont work either with retards giving money to kukolded con artists like kuk roberts. development should be funded in ongoing manner and investors should have direct supervision on how money is being spend and not pay at end for worthless/free copy.

Counterpoint: rich people/investors have the worst fucking taste in the world.

Counter-Counterpoint: rich people don't know what they want so they just delegate everything to someone else and the problem isn't at the top but the middle.

nobody really knows what they want till they try it. its why rich ppl know what they want in general cause they can afford to fucking try everything.
excess breeds wisdom; u never know whats enough untill u know whats too much.

while its true most rich ppl are retards, on average they should be better than plebs simply cause if u are retarded u will go broke eventually, unless your daddy is joe biden and even then its still not so sure.

also i would like to point out to those claiming modern art is garbgae; its good thing. cause art has no value really, it only exist to launder money by nazi/jewish banking cartel.
it only makes sense to price banana in a frame at 400k rather than some stupid painting of tranvestite like mona lisa that some retard wasted his time painting.

games are not meant to be art in economic/speculative sense, they are meant to be consumables.

 

[Red7]

Oh, they are empty, randomly generated worlds. So what's the point? Gather space scrap and space epoxy?

Once you build a ship in Starfield, you can fly it to any of 1,000 worlds.

https://www.gamerevolution.com/guides/708556-starfield-spaceship-can-you-build-fly-ship

first of, nothing is random. randomness is only math abstract promoted by jews to retards that dont know what even math is (btw math is not science u retards); deterministic or external causality driven machines cannot produce by definition anything random. its just procedural output based on input.

second, the whole point is, naturally, to rape your all custom modded waifu crew on 1000 diferent planets. at least 20 of em should make good enough scenery.

 

[KateMicucci]

Nate Purkeypile, a former Bethesda dev (Fallout 3, Skyrim, Fallout 4, Fallout 76, Starfield) had some interesting quotes. He says one of the reason he quit is because the colossal size of the dev team for Starfield. It of course started with Fallout 76.

Fallout 76, that was two mostly, we had a little bit of help from Montreal, but it was mostly the Austin and Maryland [Bethesda] studios working together.

Concerning Starfield

But yeah, Starfield is a much bigger project, it’s like 500 people or something on the team, whereas I think [Fallout] 76 was maybe 200, tops,

About the 1000 explorable planets (lol)

I can’t really go into the tech details of it,” says Purkypile, “the map of [Fallout] 76 is like, almost two times the size of Skyrim or so, and that was a lot of work for people to do, but yeah, it doesn’t scale. Even if you wanted to hire outsourcing, you’d have to hire, like, a country. Realistically, it’s a fraction of that team actually [working] on planets.

It's an interesting article talking with this dude who worked at the company for 17 years.

https://www.pcgamesn.com/starfield/interview-ex-Bethesda-dev

Wasn't Enderal made by six guys and just as big as Skyrim? Why wouldn't the map scale?

 

[Gargaune]

Wasn't Enderal made by six guys and just as big as Skyrim?

Enderal had a core team of between one and two dozen, if I recall correctly, but the complete list of contributors through its five-year development cycle is more than a hundred. Like for like, it's probably in the same general league as Skyrim in terms of development man-hours where content is concerned.

 

[LarryTyphoid]

It'll still be better than the Outer Worlds.