Starfield's been left out to dry at The Game Awards—and even dedicated fans are 'not terribly surprised'
Shooting short of the stars.
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Feel like this games gonna get the NMS treatment and be relatively playable maybe 3 years down the line..
As it stands the game has some merits (tons of planets, dungeons are compelling enough while you’re still seeing new ones) but it feels like the size of the world really caused the world design overall to suffer.
I'm sorry but Bethesda doesn't deserve three years to make a game work. They should make it work on launch and delay it until it's worth launching. They have billions of dollars and ownership from a major tech conglomerate. It's entirely unacceptable for them to release an unfinished product.
Games are never finished now with the internet. The whole industry has agreed to say "fuck it, we'll fix it in post" for basically every single project.
Yeah Bethesda doesn't get the same amount of leeway that a small dev that was clearly way in over their heads gets
They'd have to rip out and replace the entire plot, which I don't think they would do
I honestly don't think so. NMS sky started from a rock solid space exploration engine, but that was basically it, and has then layered on most of the other parts of a space sim on top since then, but most of Starfield's biggest issues seem to be because their game engine can't handle the scales needed for seamless space exploration.
So at this point Starfield devs have spent a ton of time and effort building a space sim game on an engine not suited for it, and that means that every cut scene and animation and scripted event is built around this engine, making it really time consuming just to bug test, let alone fix any problems that arise from changing or upgrading that engine, let alone designing the old missions and stuff to work with more continuous travel.
I have more faith that 5 years from now NMS will be fleshed out into a really rich and full story driven game, then that Starfield will have fixed it's fundamental exploration / loading screen problems.
NMS was purpose-built to be a space game.
Starfield was built on an ancient engine that's always been for ground-based games.
It's such a huge sunk cost fallacy that keeps Bethesda using the same dogshit engine. "We've used it for years!" Yeah but it's been fucking garbage for years too.
stuff to work with more continuous travel.
I bet you would be surprised if you were to find out that it is possible already. In space one can already move from one planet to another, only thing that is missing is the loading of new space "map" on demand. And more importantly move from one planet to another and then dock with spacestation. As shown by https://www.nexusmods.com/starfield/mods/3541.
And on planets the landing zones aren't placed in a vacuum, topological details like mountains are visible from adjacent zones. As shown by https://youtu.be/Fy0eG7MFSTM?si=ZwaE3OzmEf9IxbwZ&t=841 by 2kliksphilip.
Now you might ask the very obvious question: why isn't this correctly implemented to allow seamless travel in both space and on planets in vanilla Starfield? We may know only after someone does full introspection what happened during development but my speculative guess is that Xbox Series S which is much weaker than X is the primary reason for all this segmentation in all aspects of Starfield.
Traversal is technically possible yes, but it's not possible to traverse at a speed which would be feasible or fun, indicating that their engine isn't capable of unloading and loading new assets in fast enough as you move around. Probably the same reason that even Neon needs to be hard split in half instead of just unloading the assets from the part of the city you're not at at the moment.
And bruh blaming the S with no information is asinine when not a single other game struggles with traversal on it, including massive open world's like GTAV, Cyberpunk, Flight Simulator and even other space sims like NMS.
Given that this game also chose to procedurally spawn the same bases over and over again, I think their issues are firmly routed in their development process, not hardware limitations.
Traversal is technically possible yes, but it’s not possible to traverse at a speed which would be feasible or fun, indicating that their engine isn’t capable of unloading and loading new assets in fast enough as you move around. Probably the same reason that even Neon needs to be hard split in half instead of just unloading the assets from the part of the city you’re not at at the moment.
Speeds that the above mentioned mod adds. Until CK is added the debate of switching of one space map to another seamlessly is useless, since the current implementation is missing the hook to load the next map whilst the same hook is implemented between ship take off and space (even when player is not at the helm). Yeah, but New Atlantis is much bigger and allows the player to boost pack from the MAST top floor to another skyscrapers roof and then get down to commercial level and trade stuff without any load screens, at least on PC.
And bruh blaming the S with no information is asinine when not a single other game struggles with traversal on it, including massive open world’s like GTAV, Cyberpunk, Flight Simulator and even other space sims like NMS.
Expect of course if there were dev stories related to it sprinkling out periodically, latest being from Baldurs Gate 3 devs: https://www.pcgamer.com/baldurs-gate-3-dev-shows-off-the-level-of-optimization-achieved-for-the-xbox-series-s-port-which-bodes-well-for-future-pc-updates/
It's worth noting that out of all the platforms that Larian has developed its masterpiece for, the Xbox Series S is probably the most restrictive. This is because it only has 8GB of high-bandwidth memory, to store the game while running and use as VRAM (the remaining 2GB gets used for system functions).
The graphs start at the beginning of September, with the game using just over 5.2GB for general game RAM and around 3.5GB for VRAM. By November, though, Larian had shaved this down to 4.7GB and 2.3GB respectively. The RAM reduction is a pretty decent 10% drop but the reduction in VRAM usage is a massive 34%.
Other devs have stated these: https://www.gamesradar.com/xbox-series-s-could-bottleneck-some-next-gen-games-developers-suggest/
Gneitling pointed to the "almost non-existent" RAM increase from current-gen systems to Xbox Series S as a major pain point. Also "it always scaled on PC" is nonsense. Every AAA game in the past decade or so has their assets made once so they run on min spec. Increasing sample counts a bit here and there for high settings isn't what you could truly have done with more power. Min spec matters.
The article has many such remarks from other devs as well. So why couldn't the segmentation of Starfield be because of Xbox Series S? Keep in mind the latter article is now roughly three years old.
Because Larian specifically struggles with local co-op, not with loading new sections of the map.
As I've said, Cyberpunk runs perfectly fine on the S while loading in more geometry faster on the fly, and it's far from alone in that. Starfield's limitations are clearly a result of Bethesda's ancient engine and not hardware limitations since other devs using different engines can accomplish what they failed at on the same hardware.
The sad part is that Microsoft pulled the original 2022 release to fix a lot of the bugs.
So really the updates have to be pretty impactful.
I'm still optimistic, because fallout 76 did finally get there!
I’m still optimistic, because fallout 76 did finally get there!
This is sarcasm, right?
It really got nowhere, and then started charging premium subscriptions to cover most of the mechanics that have sucked since day 1. Repair kits? You got em. You're not constantly locked in the treadmill of deciding to do something and giving up halfway to go farm screws from office fans because your weapons have degraded to useless conditions. You pay to avoid bullshit like that.
Doesn't sound like it got there, sounds like they might have improved their netcode, which was spaghetti to be perfectly honest so easy to have improved upon, and maybe the engine use for things not T-posing and floating around. I'm sure those bat fuckers are technically internally still dragons though. The core gameplay loop still sucks. Pick a direction, veer off to fix your shit, and ultimately get annoyed because there's only so many fucking times I can go to the adhesive shed or the fucking office with all the fans before I'm just done with the worst mechanic ever invented.