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

Urthor

Prophet
Patron
Joined
Mar 22, 2015
Messages
1,872
Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire
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

Resident Zoomer
Patron
Joined
Jul 1, 2018
Messages
5,381
Location
Երևան
Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
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.
 
Joined
Aug 10, 2019
Messages
1,307
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

Scholar
Joined
Apr 7, 2022
Messages
2,817
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
 
Joined
Aug 10, 2019
Messages
1,307
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?
 

BruceVC

Magister
Joined
Jul 25, 2011
Messages
7,698
Location
South Africa, Cape Town
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 :salute:
 
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Self-Ejected

HereticGuy

Self-Ejected
Joined
Sep 11, 2022
Messages
218
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

Prospernaut
Dumbfuck
Joined
Jun 20, 2022
Messages
79
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.
 
Self-Ejected

HereticGuy

Self-Ejected
Joined
Sep 11, 2022
Messages
218
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 :
screenshot_2021-04-22_at_17.23.27.png
 

notpl

Arbiter
Joined
Dec 6, 2021
Messages
1,376
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.
 
Joined
Jan 14, 2018
Messages
50,754
Codex Year of the Donut
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

Prospernaut
Dumbfuck
Joined
Jun 20, 2022
Messages
79
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

Prospernaut
Dumbfuck
Joined
Jun 20, 2022
Messages
79
Oh, they are empty, randomly generated worlds. :keepmymoney: So what's the point? Gather space scrap and space epoxy?

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

Arcane
Joined
Sep 2, 2017
Messages
1,676
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

Magister
Joined
Mar 12, 2020
Messages
3,136
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.
 
Last edited:

Caim

Arcane
Joined
Aug 1, 2013
Messages
15,465
Location
Dutchland
Todd mentions that you can do "an activity or quest" to permanently remove your traits to get rid of the negative aspect of said trait.

One of the traits is having living parents.

Fallout 3 has you going after your missing father, Fallout 4 has you going after your missing son, but in Starfield you can be good enough with guns that you do not miss.
 

KateMicucci

Arcane
Joined
Sep 2, 2017
Messages
1,676
The dialog system does seem like an improvement over the RPG standard. Higher dialog skill gives you more options, instead of a binary pass/fail.
 
Joined
Jan 14, 2018
Messages
50,754
Codex Year of the Donut


Dialogue interactions are supported by an actual game system instead of simple option/check->response templates that plague the genre. Todd, you’ve done it again.

Todd Howard: The game is inspired by Sundog and Traveller.
Codex: Wahhhh we demand more visual novels!!!
 

racofer

Thread Incliner
Joined
Apr 5, 2008
Messages
25,577
Location
Your ignore list.


Dialogue interactions are supported by an actual game system instead of simple option/check->response templates that plague the genre. Todd, you’ve done it again.

Man, Bethesda at least seems like one of the last studios still trying to make games. They could achieve so much by just putting some little effort into their games.
 

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