Starfield Thread - now with Shattered Space horror expansion

[Rhobar121]

The shitty engine can't render the terrain fast enough if the player is moving too fast, which is why we don't have any vehicles in Bethesda games.

No, you have it the wrong way around.

Bethesda makes abbreviated areas that don't need vehicles to get around

Why do you think there is no space travel in the game and instead we have a fast travel festival? In this aspect, the game is literally worse than ME which didn't even try to be an exploration game. .

No, that's not why

The loading screen that pops up every few moments is also not a standard in games for years.

Stop exaggerating

There were a lot of comparisons mocking the constant loading times in Starfield.

Don't buy into the youtube clickbait cringelord shit

I won't even mention the graphics because it's mainly Bethesda's incompetence, not the engine's.

The graphics and visual style in Starfield is much better than Cyberpunk or BG3

Bethesda is literally over 10 years behind any competition and it's only going to get worse.

Relax smoothbrain, you don't know anything video game engines, game development, business or aesthetics

You really are more retarded than Vic.

 

[potatojohn]

The shitty engine can't render the terrain fast enough if the player is moving too fast, which is why we don't have any vehicles in Bethesda games.

No, you have it the wrong way around.

Bethesda makes abbreviated areas that don't need vehicles to get around

Why do you think there is no space travel in the game and instead we have a fast travel festival? In this aspect, the game is literally worse than ME which didn't even try to be an exploration game. .

No, that's not why

The loading screen that pops up every few moments is also not a standard in games for years.

Stop exaggerating

There were a lot of comparisons mocking the constant loading times in Starfield.

Don't buy into the youtube clickbait cringelord shit

I won't even mention the graphics because it's mainly Bethesda's incompetence, not the engine's.

The graphics and visual style in Starfield is much better than Cyberpunk or BG3

Bethesda is literally over 10 years behind any competition and it's only going to get worse.

Relax smoothbrain, you don't know anything video game engines, game development, business or aesthetics

You really are more retarded than Vic.

 

[Vic]

You really are more retarded than @Vic.

takes one to know one

 

[Vic]

 

[Bulo]

 

[Gargaune]

For Bethesda, the situation is so bad that if they don't replace the engine quickly enough, each of their games will fall further and further behind new games, which has never ended well for anyone in the long run.

Absolutely not, the day Bethesda switches off Gamebryo is the day of their funeral. This has been discussed at length before, but in a nutshell - losing their modding community will kneecap their reach immediately and they'll face significant cannibalisation from their own prior titles in the long run, and both development costs and gameplay will have suffered immensely as the studio won't have been able to leverage their in-house expertise anymore (Bethesda used to punch above their weight class in terms of staff size).

The main problem with Starfield, as far as I can tell looking in from the outside, is precisely that it seems Bethesda have not played to their strengths in the design department. It's hard to tell to what extent that's down to their aggressive staffing expansion or their veterans simply not giving a shit anymore, but the issue isn't Gamebryo/Creation Engine's capabilities, it's Starfield's design not being adapated to those capabilities. The studio's been (lazily) building up the engine for twenty years to provide a very particular sort of gameplay experience, one which very few other developers have attempted, it's what we've all been expecting from them and, whether it's Fallout 3 or Skyrim, we more or less got it. With Starfield... less so, I guess?

The shitty engine can't render the terrain fast enough if the player is moving too fast, which is why we don't have any vehicles in Bethesda games.
Why do you think there is no space travel in the game and instead we have a fast travel festival?

Case in point, you're mixing up a bunch of things here - the lack of deep space freeflight isn't an engine limitation, it's a (catastrophic) design choice. The traversal speed limitations in Gamebryo aren't driven merely by terrain rendering, but by all the moving parts cells are typically populated with, from AI actors to various triggers and objects with physical properties. You move everything into space, you've got a lot more headroom and leeway to represent scales and, given there's no landing on planets, there's no reason that Gamebryo couldn't have represented the rest of that fantasy in a sensible fashion.

Most likely, at some point through development, someone just figured that flying between planets wouldn't be that important for the gaming experience they were pitching. They were wrong.



P.S. Since the videogaming scene's all super erect over "redemption stories" these days - if TES VI comes out in a few years and it's just Skyrim 2 running on a Gamebryo with yet more lipstick, everyone will choom their pants that "Bethesda's back!" Because that's what the engine's purpose-built for, that's what they know knew how to do and, most importantly, that's what people want from them.

 

[Vic]

P.S. Since the videogaming scene's all super erect over "redemption stories" these days - if TES VI comes out in a few years and it's just Skyrim 2 running on a Gamebryo with yet more lipstick, everyone will choom their pants that "Bethesda's back!" Because that's what the engine's purpose-built for, that's what they know knew how to do and, most importantly, that's what people want from them.

I truly believe TESVI will be another disaster a la Starfield.

 

[Rhobar121]

P.S. Since the videogaming scene's all super erect over "redemption stories" these days - if TES VI comes out in a few years and it's just Skyrim 2 running on a Gamebryo with yet more lipstick, everyone will choom their pants that "Bethesda's back!" Because that's what the engine's purpose-built for, that's what they know knew how to do and, most importantly, that's what people want from them.

I truly believe TESVI will be another disaster a la Starfield.

It depends on what CDPR (witcher 4) and From Software (elden ring 2) or Larian (bg4 or dos3) do and whether they will be released in the same year as TES6.
Regardless of the quality of these games, these will most likely be the three biggest titles that have a chance to bury Todd.
I don't know if there is any studio that has a chance for this.
Bioware will be long dead by then, Obsidian has been creatively dead for years. Maybe respawn?

 

[Rhobar121]

Out of curiosity, I checked how Starfield was doing on Steam and it's not a good sign for Todd.
The game is only in 18th place if you count everything and 10th if only SP.
Surprisingly, Bear Sex 3 beats CP2077. This means that you will almost certainly be fucked by a werebear in Witcher 4.

 

[Vic]

The game is only in 18th place if you count everything and 10th if only SP.

what? Game is the 11th most played on Steam and the second most played single player game after Cyberpunk at this moment.

 

[ind33d]

Out of curiosity, I checked how Starfield was doing on Steam and it's not a good sign for Todd.
The game is only in 18th place if you count everything and 10th if only SP.
Surprisingly, Bear Sex 3 beats CP2077. This means that you will almost certainly be fucked by a werebear in Witcher 4.

I was in a Best Buy and all the demos showed Starfield being played on Xbox. I think a lot of people would be playing it on console compared to 2077 that ran like AIDS on anything that wasn't a quantum computer

 

[Rhobar121]

Out of curiosity, I checked how Starfield was doing on Steam and it's not a good sign for Todd.
The game is only in 18th place if you count everything and 10th if only SP.
Surprisingly, Bear Sex 3 beats CP2077. This means that you will almost certainly be fucked by a werebear in Witcher 4.

I was in a Best Buy and all the demos showed Starfield being played on Xbox. I think a lot of people would be playing it on console compared to 2077 that ran like AIDS on anything that wasn't a quantum computer

I doubt that would be the case. Usually it is a more or less comparable amount, another thing is that Xbox in this generation is not as popular as PS5.
Bethesda games have always had mods that you won't see on the console. If this isn't an additional factor that should cause a greater skew towards PC, I don't know what is.

 

[Late Bloomer]

There is no way Microsoft (Bethesda) is happy with the reception both in sales (and gamepass) and by the fans reaction (user reviews, youtube, streaming). No matter how they spin it. This will not be the 5 year game they were hoping to milk.

 

[Clockwork Knight]

It didn't become the immediate hit Skyrim was but it looks like it's as well received and profitable as Fallout 4. They're probably happy enough but they'll want to get creative with TES6 so it's not Starfield with swords and fatigue sets in (I'm thinking they're using the planet exploration system for a Daggerfall-like wilderness where you mainly use fast-travel)

 

[Rhobar121]

There is no way Microsoft (Bethesda) is happy with the reception both in sales (and gamepass) and by the fans reaction (user reviews, youtube, streaming). No matter how they spin it. This will not be the 5 year game they were hoping to milk.

To think that M$ made them sit for a year and patch the game.
You can only imagine how bad it must have been back then.

 

[Rhobar121]

It didn't become the immediate hit Skyrim was but it looks like it's as well received and profitable as Fallout 4. They're probably happy enough but they'll want to get creative with TES6 so it's not Starfield with swords and fatigue sets in (I'm thinking they're using the planet exploration system for a Daggerfall-like wilderness where you mainly use fast-travel)

I would say that F4 was much better received. It's not a failure like the F76, but they would probably have to do it on purpose.

 

[Late Bloomer]

It didn't become the immediate hit Skyrim was but it looks like it's as well received and profitable as Fallout 4.

Fallout 4 was released in 2015. The industry has grown and changed in many ways. The metric for success is much greater now.

 

[Immortal]

Starfield arguably has less content and shorter faction quest lines than Skyrim.. (meaningful content, I don't count wandering in a randomly generated seed as "content")

What took so long to make? I guess based on the leaks that Beth employee posted on retardera (under his real name lol) - It really was Ship mechanics and planet exploration that burned 5 years.. it sure as fuck wasn't that ryujin faction, that was laziest shit I've ever seen. When I'm missing Oblivion factions you fucked up.

--

Side Tangent:

I was bitching about this in the CP thread too.. Why are these 20 hour long games taking 8 years to make?
These game dev studios are twice as big...
Cyberpunk 2077 and Starfield had twice the budget as Skyrim and Witcher 3..
The games take more than twice as long to complete..

And yet here we are.. these games are ankle deep in content and lack a single creative though behind them.. Are developers just shit now? Too much WFH & Avocado toast? This industry needs a serious crash.. wipe it out and start fresh.

 

[Rhobar121]

Starfield arguably has less content and shorter faction quest lines than Skyrim.. (meaningful content, I don't count wandering in a randomly generated seed as "content")

What took so long to make? I guess based on the leaks that Beth employee posted on retardera (under his real name lol) - It really was Ship mechanics and planet exploration that burned 5 years.. it sure as fuck wasn't that ryujin faction, that was laziest shit I've ever seen. When I'm missing Oblivion factions you fucked up.

--

Side Tangent:

I was bitching about this in the CP thread too.. Why are these 20 hour long games taking 8 years to make?
These game dev studios are twice as big...
Cyberpunk 2077 and Starfield had twice the budget as Skyrim and Witcher 3..
The games take more than twice as long to complete..

And yet here we are.. these games are ankle deep in content and lack a single creative though behind them.. Are developers just shit now? Too much WFH & Avocado toast? This industry needs a serious crash.. wipe it out and start fresh.

In the case of CP77, it can be said that the design is completely unlike previous games.
I remember reading an interview in which the developer said that in previous games they used tricks that simply did not work in CP77.
The game was also reset at least once.

As for SF, I don't see anything that could take them so long and wasn't present in previous games.

 

[ind33d]

It didn't become the immediate hit Skyrim was but it looks like it's as well received and profitable as Fallout 4. They're probably happy enough but they'll want to get creative with TES6 so it's not Starfield with swords and fatigue sets in (I'm thinking they're using the planet exploration system for a Daggerfall-like wilderness where you mainly use fast-travel)

I would say that F4 was much better received. It's not a failure like the F76, but they would probably have to do it on purpose.

Ironically after patching 76 is a better game than F4, but review scores never get updated post-launch

 

[Bigfass]

For Bethesda, the situation is so bad that if they don't replace the engine quickly enough, each of their games will fall further and further behind new games, which has never ended well for anyone in the long run.

The same engine 10+ years ago was used to make a good game (FONV). Game being good or bad has nothing to do with "muh engine", or 200 mocap actors, or a gajillion voice lines. Stay within the limits and tell good stories. BG3 gets brought up a lot not because it has some amazing tech or unprecedented eyecandy. It's just a ton of fun content with characters that feel alive, and you end up caring one way or the other, despite you knowing they're degenerate coomers.

Bethesda's problem is they said fuck staying in the limits, and fuck telling good stories. "Let's remake No Man's Sky with an engine absolutely not suited for it, and stay on that level with the quests too."

Sure, a new engine (just buy Hello Games for their 7-year-old tech lol) would have made the space parts better. The game would have still been shit.

What took so long to make?

Stop being racist and sexist, diversity is a strength.

 

[AlwaysBrotoMen]

Started playing starfield and liking it more than Skyrim. But fallout new vegas is the best Bethesda game i have played.

 

[Rhobar121]

Started playing starfield and liking it more than Skyrim. But fallout new vegas is the best Bethesda game i have played.

That's because it's not a Bethesda game

 

[Late Bloomer]

I guess based on the leaks that Beth employee posted on retardera (under his real name lol) - It really was Ship mechanics and planet exploration that burned 5 years

Do you have any links? I would like to read about that.

 

[Gargaune]

Here's an interesting little "mod"...

Consistent World - Custom Seed

Planet names and planet biome data are fixed and stored in the game files. The "landings" however are procedurally generated (points of interests and landscape) based on the Seed. Game subsystem, "Planet Content Manager" has a Seed value. Seed is randomly generated each time you create new character and is written into savegames. Same character will carry the same seed, but as soon as you create a new one - new char will explore a different universe.

[...]

There is a way however to change the seed midgame [...].

As a result, everyone playing with the same Seed will see exactly the same world. It will be procedural but not random.

And I'm a bit confused why this wasn't the approach Bethesda took to begin with. Is there really gameplay value in having each character explore a "random" universe as opposed to a static, more consistent space?


And another thing - if I'm reading this correctly, wouldn't that mean that initial reports that the game generates "new" spaces once you come back to a previously discarded landing zone is incorrect? If you got your landing pixel-perfect, shouldn't you get the same map that you got before on the same character seed?