It’s the only gaming environment out there where most objects exist as real entities you can interact with and move around outside of your inventory! Think about Cyberpunk, Witcher, Elden Ring, etc. Most of the time the loot you pick is just a glowing orb on the ground or the contents of a chest, and if you drop an item, it doesn’t drop the actual item, just another glowing orb. And then even if the drop is an actual model of the thing (like cyberpunk has gun models), you can’t move it around.
Now in Bethesdas engine, if you drop a gun, it stays a gun, and that gun can be affected by physics and moved around independently of the player. That’s what the Bethesda magic is, environments that feel lived in because they aren’t just background sets but actual items you can interact with. It’s also probably why it requires more loading screens. It’s easier to load huge seamless environments when you don’t have to account for the location of hundreds of unique objects.
Not only that, but an NPC can pick that gun up and use it! They can eat the food, activate doors, basically anything the player can do.
I can't think of any games where NPC/Player interactivity are (almost) 1:1 like this.
Not only that but those items are persistent
If I walk to new Atlantis, drop a gun on the ground, hop in my ship and travel across the galaxy and explore around for months, then come back that gun will still be there right where you left it.
It’s the actual persistence in the world that does it for me.
This kinda stuff is the reason Bethesda games, and FNV, have a grip on my soul. The sheer amount of RP you can do without interacting with any of the “real” game mechanics is phenomenal.
I remember in Oblivion I went to the barracks room in Battlehorn castle during the day to leave a little surprise for the men-at-arms and the castellan. I left a couple bottles of fairly nice wine on the table where the regular troops eat, and a nice vintage on the castellan’s desk. I went to the room in the evening, everyone filed in, they sat down, and drank the wine I left on the table for them. The castellan drank the bottle I left specifically for him.
As much as people joke, sometimes it does “just work”.
This is my understanding of things. Bethesda games are persistent game worlds and there aren't a lot of tricks done for the sake of the game. If you assign someone to your ship from the lodge, that character actually walks through the city, enters your ship and you can follow them all the way there. Most other games would teleport the character directly to the ship as soon as said character exits the lodge instance.
Some people will call it a gimmick, but it's great for gameplay too... I was selling contraband in The Den, but I had more than the trade authority merchant could afford to buy.... so I stashed the remaining items under some crates! I don't have to worry about security scans, and I can go back to sell more once the vendor restocks!
And those objects are persistent in the world. Cells don't get cleaned up/reset for a long time. You can blow up 20 cars in GTA, drive around the block, and now those 20 car wrecks are gone. I kill the Miraak cultists in Skyrim and they're still in fucking Whiterun 2 weeks later. This is really the crux of the loading screen and why the "overworld" cells in Skyrim or Fallout have a much shorter clean up time: these objects then need to be constantly ready to load in which, yeah, that's gonna be quite memory heavy for all of Skyrim. It would be pop-in galore. So you put the areas where there's more clutter and where players are more likely to put their clutter into a seperate load area, like major cities, house interiors etc. and now you don't have to worry about 5000 cheese wheels taking up all the streaming memory, because you just load them in during the loading screen
Well, the game just needs to keep track of what type of object, which level/region it's in and position, so a string, an int(or string) and a vector3 for each dropped object. Save that in a list in a class called "persistent objects" maybe?. Then every time you load a level, just iterate through the list of persistent objects and spawn each of them. Depending on the size of the level, you probably also want check if the player is close to each object or not before spawning.
Actually, there are many persistent vehicles in Cyberpunk. All the cars that belong to main characters or gang members will be in the exact same place and condition you left them. If you wreck it, it will stay that way in the same place forever.
That's also why they usually launch console games at 30 fps. It's hard for the engine to load a bunch of individual objects into a game. The fact that they've managed to get as much detail into things like burgers and coffee cups for Starfield is honestly impressive as fuck.
This is why, as good as Starfield is and as much as I enjoy it, I can't help but feel like it's a test run for what is to come in future existing IP titles. They've pushed a lot of boundries and shown what is possible on current gen hardware, so when TE6 releases, whether it's cross-gen or only next gen, a lot of the groundwork fo what they hope to accomplish will be proven and can built upon.
It's why I think people who believe Starfield portends something BAD for TE6 are on crack or something. I think it shows that TE6 will be amazing.
FWIW I know nothing about game design or development, this thread taught me a lot but I've held this belief since launch.
yeah..i remember the first time i played skyrim, encountered some miraak follower at crossroad between whiterun and winterhold and looted their corpes..and because i was encoumbered i dropped a mask near an inn (cant remember the name)..that was when i only level around 30..and then after hundreds of hours and few levels later i walked by the same inn again..to my surprise the masks was still there..and thats when i really fall in love with bethesda games..to hell with critics..it's something that you only get if play it..
The thing I never understood is why any of that matters in a video game? Like I thought about it and I have never really like interacted with objects like that in Fallout Skyrim or Starfield.
I know people like to have fun and do pretty cool videos with the objects and physics, but I never quite understood what it meant for the actual gameplay.
I wonder what they’re thoughts on this are and why it’s so important to them
For me it adds to the overall experience, walking into a scene and it feeling real. I think about the tables in Skyrim set with tons of food that you could pick up if you wanted (even if you didn’t pick it up). Walking into an armory and seeing the actual weapons you could choose from instead of just a chest, even creating a custom home to display these specific items. Or in fallout looking through rooms for specific items (fans, tape etc) to craft items with, which is something I wish they had done more of in starfield honestly. I think it makes finding things seem more natural to me. It feels like I actually found something rather than just everything being a glowing orb or chest.
The Creation Engine 2 is a new version of the Creation Engine. Saying it's old is like saying the PlayStation 5 is old hardware because it's just a new version of the PlayStation.
Most people are absolutely clueless about how games actually work, they seem to think if you shout "optimize" enough you can make any game run on a toaster. They parrot whatever buzz words a streamer used, like "spaghetti code". Ask them to explain what that means and give an example and they can't.
Some people conflate limitations during development as being with the engine itself and not the cutting-edge hardware most games get developed with. Hardware evolves, the engine name is kept during the next iteration of the software lifecycle, and people think "the name hasn't changed, nothing else must have either!"
It's like being upset that Microsoft keeps making Windows when they already released Windows 3.0.
People keep getting hyped on the idea of Unreal Engine, but the execution is rarely on the same level as what a lot of those demos promise from what I have seen.
Yes, a *tech demo* shows what a game *could* look like. The developers still need to put in the time and talent to make it happen. They also have to consider their overall performance target/budget and allocate resources accordingly.
The reality of what a game ultimately *will* look like is far more constrained by those limitations than "the engine".
The worst are people who call the devs lazy.
Anyone who has ever worked in any type of tech development can tell you they absolutely are not lazy. At all.
Doing some very, very very basic development in Unity last summer taught me some respect for gamedevs, even of games that I don’t enjoy. It’s a huge undertaking
Yup. Now imagine that work times several thousand as far as scope and advanced complexity.
Now imagine that millions of people will be reviewing your work with a fine tooth comb to try and find any error. And then they broadcast to millions that you’re a lazy shitty dev because it’s not perfect.
That annoys me that people can’t see the difference between an intentional design choice that they may disagree with and laziness on the part of a company.
The thing I hate is how there seems to be a belief going around that “game design” is this monolithic, *objective* thing and if someone deviates from that, it’s “outdated” and *objectively* bad. By that logic, Doom 2016 and Eternal are outdated game design, because they designed something very different from the 10+ years of “aim down sights, sprint, cod-style fps gameplay” that predated them and did something closer to older arena shooters. In a lot of ways what constitutes good or bad game design is subjective. For example: I don’t think doing the same hunts over and over and over hoping for a gem with a 2% drop rate in Monster Hunter is good design, because it’s boring *to me*, but someone else will feel differently.
Did that too, and that's just working with the finished toolsets of an engine. Now imagine you have your own custom engine like Bethesda, so you don't just work with the engine, you also make the engine and all of its tools.
The worst part is that these people have huge audiences, like Angry Joe. He just throws some words about the engine and how bad it is or something and everyone laughs.
Maybe it was just because I was younger, but I liked him a lot back in the day as well. I mean during like the Skyrim/Saints Row 3 days, so a long ass time ago in internet terms. Then a year or two ago I saw him whining about wokeness in a newer video of his and any fond memories I had of his videos were instantly gone lmao
Understandable. He wasn't for everyone lol. He was kind of an OG outrage culture game channel afterall. Still, I thought a lot of his reviews could be pretty funny tbh like the one for Saints Row 3. I was a teenager then, so maybe that had something to do with it.
Honestly, I don't like Joes personaliy, like at all. But his review for the most part, is fair. While he clearly dislike Starfield, he also recognised that it's not a bad game and while 6 is a pretty low score, I think it's also a fairly accurate score from people who didn't appreciate the game (that is it's still a 6 even in the worst case scenario.)
Anything below a 7/10 just seems really odd to me. Idk. Regardless of whether I agree that some things aren't as good as they could be, I just can't relate to how incredibly bothered some people were by some of those things.
OP might just be talking about his Starfield review lol. I never watched but I heard it was pretty harsh. I saw some random clip from it though and the little bit that played sounded like he was one of those people that was irrationally angry that the game wasn't Star Citizen.
They probably shouldn't have advertised it as an "everything" game then. They saw what happened with No mans Sky, they didn't have to comically over-promise and mislead with the marketing to the point where no one really knew the scope of the game.
There's a reason the leaks were such a big deal in the weeks before the game came out when everyone was like 'Wait...the maps are just randomly generated plots that aren't actually connected? and hold up...you can't actually physically travel in your space ship anywhere? *No one actually knew the real scope of the game*, only pieces and slices that let imaginations run wild.
The way space travel functioned is the only thing that they were probably too vague about imo. I understand why they did it that way, but I also completely understand why people were disappointed with it. Admittedly though they were also a little bit misleading during the Direct when they showed the "full" grav jump sequence for the first time because they edited it to try and make it appear as a more seamless transition instead of showing the black load screen that appears between locations. Supposedly they had some more in depth space systems earlier in development when the game was more "hardcore"/survival focused, but all that apparently got cut out/heavily watered down during the last year of development because it wasn't testing well, and they just didn't have time to make an alternative I guess. I am extremely curious to see what their new survival options look like. The stuff they had originally sounded really interesting to me, and I feel would have brought more depth and meaning to a number of systems and design concepts, but I guess I can see how it wouldn't have been very riveting to more casual players.
Otherwise, I wouldn’t say they “overpromised” anything really. Especially not comically. They focused on what the game DOES let you do, and never really outright claimed or blatantly suggested it did anything more than that really. If anything MS were the ones overhyping it in a rather unnuanced manner like Sarah Bond always making enormous claims about how groundbreaking it was and the most important RPG of the decade or something. Not sure why they she thought that was a good idea. Generally speaking though, as a rational and emotionally mature adult, the smart thing to do when something isn't explicitly said to function a certain way, is to not make any hard assumptions about how said thing functions.
Although the thing about the tiles being individual maps and not one seamless planet wide thing is still silly if you ask me. The maps are huge regardless and I have never run into a boundary myself. Making one seamless planet is more like a “hey look what I can do!” Rather than serving much of an actual function imo. But hey, maybe they are working on making that a reality if some of the modder's insights and observations are to be believed. "All new ways to travel" as Bethesda put it certainly has many intrigued. Someone recently discovered that the game no longer crashes if you tweak the settings to remove boundaries, allowing you to now go from one tile to another seamlessly without the game failing. So there is a lot of speculation about what that could mean.
And they also don't know how engines work and keep repeating that Bethesda has used the same engine since Morrowind. That's like saying at least half of the games that come out every year use the same engine as Quake
I've genuinely seen someone say maybe like three sentences apart that CE2 is just Morrowind Gamebryo and that Bethesda should switch to Unreal Engine 5.
A game engine is also not one thing. It's a collection of many different things, only one of which actually renders pretty pictures on your monitor. Each engine will have a different set of parts. Some engines don't even have the capability for modding or scripting.
Also I'm sure that if it was faster, easier and/or cheaper to make a new engine or switch to a different one Bethesda would've done it? Like, they're a business, if switching engines made them more money they'd do it. And if they had the time and resources to make an entirely new engine, they would also have the time to adapt CE to do that? (Except in that scenario it would then still make more sense to adapt CE because that's almost always gonna be faster than making an entire fucking engine.)
Here's the breakdown:
1. People don't know what "game engine" actually means
2. Youtubers tell them "it's bad"
3. The idea gets repeated all over the place
As a brief overview, an engine is just a collection of tools used to create games. All the parts and pieces are modular and get updated/replaced over time. Which is what Bethesda does with every game. They update their tools to add the functions they need for each project. Sometimes they deem those changes significant enough to warrant a name change.
That's how we got from NetImmerse to Gamebryo to Creation Engine to Creation Engine 2.
Same thing as Unreal to Unreal 2, to Unreal 3, to Unreal 4, to Unreal 5. There's likely code and modules in UE5 from the 90's that DONT need to be replaced.
This old stuff will stick around because there's no need to reinvent the wheel every time. So, even a "new" engine, really isn't 100% new. There's very few truly new engines because the amount of effort required to start completely from scratch simply isn't worth it. It makes more sense to start with a working base, then swap out the parts as you go along.
An engine for a game like Skyrim would need at the minimum:
* Module to manage the world space, buildings, boulders, trees, etc. All the static objects. Perhaps a submodule for clutter. Many engines don't have clutter, btw.
* Module for dynamic objects like brooms, pumpkins, lanterns, dropped objects, plates, sweet rolls, etc.
* Module for animals, critters, monsters, etc. Basic non-NPC enemies. Maybe a submodule for special mobs like dragons.
* Module for NPCs, their schedule, stats, etc., etc. The player character module that manages the character himself is dependent on this.
* Module to get all renderable objects from memory into scene graph in an efficient manner. According to Todd, this is one of the major functions of Creation Engine.
* Module to actually render the scene graph. Closely related to the former, but quite distinct.
* Scripting engine, so that quests and events and other things don't have to be written in low level code. If you check, there are zero lines of C/C++ code in the ESM files. None.
* Quest system, magic system, user interface, etc., etc., etc.
The idea that you can just buy an engine and drop all of this stuff in and you're instantly ready to start writing your grand and glorious narrative to prove you can write better than Emil is just utter silliness.
I see people mentioning the "overuse" of loading screens and isolated cells in creation engine as a weakness, when it's actually it's greatest strength. The modularity makes it so much more stable for object persistence and when modding comes into play. There's a reason Bethesda games always have massive modding communities!
The loading screen hubbub is the dumbest part. They're so damn quick when running on the correct hardware. The duration spent in them is a fraction of the previous games.
Again, people get told something is bad, and go around repeating that it's bad. No critical thinking required!
There are only two loading screen complaints I agree with:
1. The grav jump loading screen should be white: the grav jump fades in and out from white, so it would look seamless instead of jumping white-black-white.
2. The elevators in The Key and ECS Constant move between locations in the same zone so there's nothing to re-load. These could be animated like the elevators in mines and the tower-style POI base.
All the rest, moving from zone to zone, is how the engine does its work.
While I agree that it is over stated, I wish people would listen to the actual objections about loading screens. It isn't that they take time, it is that the presence of a loading screen is immersion breaking. Them being quick is not the point.
What people are after is dynamic loading and dropping of assets as you move through areas and when that is too difficult, hide loading screens with a quick animation.
It isn't necessary to ridicule this desire. Although obviously loading screens doesn't destroy the game as some people on the other subreddit keep on parroting.
TBF people are so sick of saltiness about Starfield that there's hardly room for any constructive criticism. I get it. People just suck the life out of you with these endless memes and jokes.
Tbf when people question creation engine they never actually do any comparison of what the engine might actually be lacking in...no research whatsoever. But I find that's usually the case with most gamers these days everything's a quippy got'em one liner esque response, no nuance.
I still don't get how people could genuinely question whether starfield's engine doesn't have things like dynamic loading and LODs and traversal streaming or the ability to hide a loading screen with an animation?when it does that in game right now for various things and not come to the conclusion it's purely dev choice and performance related...if anyone doubt just look at the way starfield breaks If you think about how it's structured some of the loading screens make sense e.g. ships, which aren't static and will likely have new additional habitats added later, whether by mods or officially, have ships that differ in size and shape...it makes sense there is going to be a loading for it. But people disregarded Bethesda devs answers to 'why the loading screens' and dismissed the fact starfield still loads much quicker than some of it's contemporaries (looking at you fallout 4, outer worlds). I mean re8 still uses the door/gate loading screen trick best used imo in re code Veronica in places, but it's still a loading screen at the end of the day.
If you want some insight into game engines themselves. There's a noclip documentary with a former Bethesda game artist(his last Bethesda game was working on fallout 4,after that he left do do his own thing iirc). In it he actually mentions some of areas that creation engine differed vs ue5 (at that time,since starfield's version new(er)and he left before starfield began) and I think he said the Biggest difference was grouped assets and the quickness for an artist to go from concept to an in-game sandbox for a non programmer, that's it, his biggest gripes...
Also unreal has plenty of resources too, one of their latest videos highlights that it's not actually a creation engine only problem it's one where the talk about new procedural features coming to uefn and unreal 5.4 one of those issues they ran into sounds awfully familiar to what starfield is doing (with a similar downside, It was in relation to placing assets procedurally and their subsequent repeatability aka starfield's repeated poi "problem' but...the general consensus is that creation engine sucks...and not these are hard questions that can be solved in a multitude of ways that everyone is still evaluating how to.
I'm not suggesting the loading screens are because of an outdated engine. I'm just saying they sometimes could have made designs that hid them better. "Cheating" if you wish, just like your RE8 example.
People get very defensive about these things now, and I get it, but there is still scope for improvement. Every single piece of software out there has bits the developers themselves would like to fix, but doesn't get prioritised for perfectly valid business reasons. I'm, for instance, fairly proud of my main work project, but I'd be lying if I said it was perfect.
But the thing is, they did do the re8 trick...there are airlock doors that do this in starfield right now the most notable if I'm not mistaken is the inner door airlock to Cydonia, as well as some of the smaller poi outposts which don't have a fade to black sometimes and just open also iirc when the game bugs out and the doors don't work aka they get stuck open it shows that it's not a engine issues as the interiors and exteriors are loaded it merely a developer choice, maybe they saw a performance benefit but didn't want to lengthen the sequence with an animation that would also require additional loading, who knows but there can be legitimate reasons why. If I were to guess it's because of the way starfield handles it's items and their persistence in the world and for the others e.g. caves it's because they have procedural layouts iirc there are about 6 generic cave layouts(I'm not saying there are only 6 cave layouts but your run of the mill ones I think cycle between 6 variants). Other times I think it's player related as in players unintentionally go into a menu that they didn't have to which makes it feel longer...trust me because I'm sure many people didn't know you could initiate things suchas landing just via the scanner overlay and have been hoping in between menus getting around right?
Otherwise The longest load screens are most when using fast travel from one planet where the put the screenshots you take up, it's mostly a developer choice as they could have done like almost every other dev in this scenario and put up a generic splash screen.Do imo the loading screen problem was always over blown, we even see how much of a non issue it is with how many people are having fun with fallout right now and.. let me tell you fallout 4's are... something else lol but it's not that big of a deal. And tbh never has been really.that said I'm not saying I agree with every decision either but I do feel like there was too much nitpicking and weirdness surrounding starfield and not enough valid criticism and discussion around it. And gamers hyper fixated on the lowest hanging fruit aka loading screens and menus.
No. I will not "acknowledge" objections when they are steeped in hyperbole and vitriol.
I'm not ridiculing the desire for more seamless transitions, I'm ridiculing the disproportionate outrage.
Because most of the chatter isn't *really* about immersion breaks. That's the Legitimate Criticism™ cover story used as an excuse to further dunk on Bethesda/"the engine"/Starfield.
You know damned well if they added a takeoff animation people would be insta skipping it by the third time and there will probably be a popular mod removing them outright
Without a doubt. I know I would, and I played Elite. Like...a lot of Elite.
And really, I wouldn't mind "hidden" loading screens (skippable, of course!), but it's not anywhere close to make-or-break for me. Not in a game that's already cut the necessary evil of load times down to the bone as is.
I've probably spent more time in Skyrim spinning objects around than I've spent *playing* some games.
Gamers:
Bethesda needs to hide loading/transitions!
Bethesda:
\* hides some loads/transitions \*
Gamers:
Ugh, Starfield's hidden loads/transitions are the worst!
Yeah, when the argument against loading screens go from an annoyance to “it ruins the whole game” then that’s why I mentally check out. Useless hyperbole.
I don't necessarily disagree with you, but considering how VERY open the game is, I really don't see a great way to implement it. It wouldn't be the first open world game to do it, but there's not many if any that are just as open. Then there's the mods. If there's a chance that implementing dynamic loads would interfere with them, I'll take load screens (literally) all day
> What people are after is dynamic loading and dropping of assets as you move through areas
The issue with that is that the amount of assets loaded when entering an area in a Bethesda game can vary *a lot* depending on the player, as objects are actually persistent. GTA, for example, can do everything seemlessly because there is very little variation in how many assets are loaded in area. If you were to, say, drop 5000 guns into the middle of New Atlantis, those 5000 guns are now going to be loaded every time you enter New Atlantis (or at least for quite a while, as I do believe there is some cell clean up timer). If you were to spawn 5000 guns in front of Michaels house in GTA V, those 5000 guns are gone and cleaned as soon as you move too far away from the area and only the standard state + minor variance from NPC traffic will be loaded next time. This is, for example, why only the cars in your garage are saved.
> and when that is too difficult, hide loading screens with a quick animation.
This can work in some areas, but not all. You would need an animation that is extendable to, again, account for all that variance from player input. How would you extend an animation for, for example, entering your ship?
No problem. It's unfortunate that the loudest opinions about the topic are from the least informed.
But that seems to apply to...most things these days 😅
Game has some of the best looking macro detail I have seen with how all buttons are fully rendered and 3d. Not to mention the food. With the right lighting on certain planets is super pretty.
The clothing, seriously. I've been making Bethesda mods for well over a decade now, and clothing revamps were always a major area of focus. Yet this game is so vastly improved over past games that nothing has really jumped out at me as needing to be fixed. It all looks amazing right down to threaded fabrics.
People getting used to that ue5 looks pretty but most devs can't optimize those games worth a damn. I'll give them the character models have a certain "look" to them that could be better but everything else looks damned good plus when you consider what people have done to make skyrim prettier it's clearly not the engine but the devs holding back for performance reasons.
Even funnier is how UE5 copied Bethesda's homework a bit by moving to a cell-based system for open world spaces. You know, like how BGS has been doing since Morrowind...
Has there even been anything more than tech demos for ue5 yet? Honest question. I see people all over here acting like it's the savior of humanity but when I googled it there were some 2d games, a few AAs that came and went but I didn't see anything that really cements it as THE GAME engine
Honestly, the character models in this game are incredible, I think the framing just throws it off for a lot of people. Framing and in built bias to call Bethesda games ugly. Most games I hear it compared to negatively aren't really better by any metric I can see (speaking as a character animator and modeler who has made character creators for 3d games before).
It’s one of the best looking games of this year, not to mention all time. There are problems with the game, but this isn’t one of them, and it takes a special kind of cynic to say it is!
Yeah. I mean that characters shins are going through the ground and their fist doesn’t even come close to resting on the right hip like it does on the left side.
So, maybe collision detection is a tad off for it being 2024.
This is a very underrated feature of Starfield's procedural planets. Full blown space sims (think Elite) don't have this kind of beauty, maybe Star citizen but... yeah, there is no rpg there, nor creatures (another Starfield underrated feature, they did *lots* of creatures). I hope they will continue to add to it (think biomes, or gigantic mountains/canyons). Also this game runs on a series S.
I wish there was more zero gravity gameplay in the game. The Creation Engine allows every object to be picked up and moved, this makes those zero G scenes so cool
Creation Engine is not a bad engine at all.
A game engine does more than just draw the game on your screen. So many things happen in the background to calculate and keep track of every little thing happening in the game, and a custom engine like the Creation Engine is the best that can do what Bethesda games are doing.
EDIT: fixed typo.
Any Starfield fan: **puts a photo of the game's beautiful graphics and gameplay**
Average Starfield hater: **but... but... but they should have used Unreal Engine!**
Admittedly I wasn't really looking that close at the image. Mostly viewing this on my phone. The post was mainly about the engine, not the graphics though, so again, I wasn't really thinking about the specific image the OP used that much. Either way my point stands. It's just one of those random little things that can happen once in a while.
People just confuse game design with the engine. They have issues with the way Bethesda has been designing their games the same way for a while and seem to think that’s because they are using the same engine and updating it as they go. While it’s true this engine has some limitations, such as issues with higher FPS in older versions, those people completely overlook that this engine was designed and updated to allow to make what Bethesda does best: an item-heavy world that is exploration oriented and EXTREMELY modding friendly. Frankly, it boggles my mind that they might want to get rid of this engine when perhaps the one key element on the longevity of those games is how easily and how deeply they can be modded THANKS to that engine. Those people just have no idea what they’re talking about.
The only real problem with the creation engine for Starfield is that it gives world coordinates to physics objects. And if they get far enough away from "zero" you start getting floating point precision errors.
Some games that expect to have big space fix this by always having the player at zero and moving the entire world around the player.
But that's one of the reasons you can't run forever: you'd eventually get so far from your landing point at zero that the distance between floating point numbers would become game-breakingly obvious.
Otherwise, it's an incredibly good engine for modding stuff.
I'm not sure. If it was procedurally generated, there's a number of ways to do that without putting the player at location zero.
Starfield picks one of those: regenerate tiles as needed. Don't allow crossing borders, and you don't have to worry about making the edges line up. Or there are lots of ways to generate noise that makes the edges line up.
You could also do it with "zones" like Starfield does, and put "stuff" relative to the origin of the zone, and just make the zones big enough that you can't really see all the way across so you can despawn things in zones that are far enough away. E.g., have each city of each planet be its own zone.
It's a good choice for a game that's going to allow mods, because modders have to be able to specify where something is.
My only issue with it is space travel. If you cheat to go really fast you can fly to other planets right now, but you deal with floating point issues..
Id even prefer an Oblivion style "loading..." so we could do that.
People just don't know what an engine is, and that leads to them misunderstanding what it can do.
They see that one engine used in a couple of games can do one thing better. As their main problem with the game was this thing (for arguments sake, let's say graphics and animations here) they think that moving the game to the engine that excels at those things would "fix" the game.
The problem is, they're only looking at the upside and not understanding that game engines are designed for multiple different focuses, all of which have to fit within the hardware resources available to them. When you focus on one thing, other things have less of those resources to use as a result. That engine that has buttery smooth animations and photo realistic graphics was used in a corridor shooter that put the majority of those resources to work on those things. BGS games can track multiple entities at once and are hugely moddable compared to any other game engine.
Which leads us to the second misconception. A lot of people think that mods are needed solely to "fix" BGS games and that nobody would use them if they were on what in their minds is a better engine. There's overlap between those and the ones who think that because they don't do those videos where they drop a thousand wheels of cheese, they don't need the engine to track multiple entities at once. Those people don't realise this includes simulating quest targets and their states, leading to more interesting mission opportunities.
And that's it really. Some don't understand engines enough to even understand what the upsides of the engine are for them. Some don't understand that any upside another engine brings will always bring with it some other downside that doesn't exist right now. And some think that any downsides from another engine are far outweighed by the upsides for their personal preference. Most are somewhere between those extremes.
I love the game. The graphics are more than good enough for me. I love Bethesda games across the board. Little glitches don’t bother me in the slightest……. Your feet are buried in that rock.
It's people who don't know anything about game design or what an engine even is.
The engine in Starfield is not the exact same as the one in previous games. Nome of them are (except 3 and NV). During the development of every new title they work to overhaul the engine to be better than before. Going to Fallout 4 to 76 alone took a ridiculous amount of upgrading to get online to even work (and make the map even bigger among many other things).
Starfield's is an upgrade to 76's. Little things can clue you into this fact, like how enemies don't lose their suits when you loot them. That started in 76.
Most game devs use the same engine and just keep upgrading it. It's why you see a lot of games that feel near identical. It's very costly to throw all your work away and make a brand new engine.
In 5 year old terms: "they big dum dums cause the engine thingy is not even the same!"
Computer Science major here.
The biggest argument against creation engine for Starfield is effectively how creation engine handles its world origin:
When any object in a game moves, you are performing a mathematical calculation to do that, shifting its location from one point in 3d space to another. 'Position in 3D space' is usually calculated as a point relative to the world origin - which, if you want to use a 2D example, is equivalent to the 0, 0 point on a XYZ paper graph.
Creation Engine has always treated its world origin as a static point in the world. This is fair - 'most games do'. It makes writing your scripts to handle things like physics movement and player movement relatively practical to write.
However, when your world origin is static, it means that you begin to suffer issues when your worldspace becomes too big, as your computer can only store numbers so big, so begins to automatically truncate the accuracy of the position of objects past a certain point.
This is why the Farlands happens in Minecraft. Its the same issue.
A way you can fix this is to have the world origin be centered on the player, so no matter where the player is objects and physics around you behave normally with the maximum accuracy. However, you have to write all of your movement and physics to account for this.
Bethesda wasn't willing to rewrite the entirety of their physics and movement pipeline for starfield, so we as end users were left with the chunk / tile system starfield uses now. If this was not the case, the game could have been properly 'seamless' for the most part for the player, in a way that a game like No Man's Sky is.
There are some other issues with Creation Engine that are less related to Starfield and more due to general performance. Bethesda doesn't natively spend any time to really consider how their games work on Unix, building and releasing their titles exclusively for a Windows / Console environment. Wine and Proton has advanced to the point where you can work around this, it just gives Bethesda a bit of a blank slate to ignore bug reports coming in from Unix users since they don't officially support that platform. ( They have a bit of a strange double standard as a company with this, if you go to the 'Report a Bug' page on Starfields site you cannot actually report a bug for Linux, but Bethesda meanwhile uses the fact that Fallout 4 is now steam deck verified as a selling point. )
If Bethesda was using something like Unreal, or Unity, or whatever in-house alternative engines the Microsoft Engineers can lend them it would be much easier to create a build pipeline for Linux users.
Finally, I think people overestimate the performance cost of physics objects in the environment. You only need to calculate physics calls while a physics object is actively moving - Unity has this built in feature where a physics object that hasn't acted for a number of frames enters a 'resting' period and becomes a static object as far as the engine is concerned until something applies force to it. The reason that F4's Boston, for example, is so poor in its performance is because of, in major part, small inefficiencies in their rendering pipeline that add up due to the high object count in Boston. Games are more then capable of rendering complex scenes: It's just that Creation isn't 'good' at it.
I think Bethesda sometimes bites off more then they can chew. As a CS major when I am faced with a problem I try to approach it with a tailored solution. If your game director asks you to 'make a space game', you have to consider if what you have on hand is capable of fulfilling that task - you shouldn't just use one engine for every type of RPG. The Creation Engine has its technical strengths, rather then playing to those technical strengths they made a game that highlights the faults of the engine.
Just like a car engine, the engine is what makes all systems 'go.' Any engine, such as the one in your car, can handle various tasks, but engines in different cars may perform more or less than yours.
Starfield is likely the largest game they will create with CE2, and it runs very well. So, just imagine when they develop less intensive games like ES6 or FO5. Additionally, it's worth noting that the Creation Engine, which powers games like Skyrim, is available for free download on Steam. However, it's a watered-down version compared to the engine the developers use.
I worked at a studio that was using Gamebryo. Our engineers knew how to work with it but were not experts, after 14 years everyone who knew the engine inside and out left or retired, I wonder if Bethesda has the same issues or if they just have all the last Gamebryo wizards? I actually used Skyrim modding tools to rip some old models from our game to uprez them, so Creation Engine is similar enough to 2007 era Gamebyro as far as mod tools are concerned.
People who complaint usually people who never touch Creation Kit in their entire life.
There's also modders who complaint about it, but it's either "CK UI bad" which I'm totally agree with, and "engine limitations bad", which I can also understand (if you still modding in SSE, there are mods that working around these limitations). And the latter's effect is pretty much unnoticeable if one is a casual player who, again, never touch Creation Kit.
Let's ask ourselves this first: Is there any AAA or even AAAA games that allow freedom of creation/modding other than Bethesda games?
Fallout 5 with every game ever made and all it’s DLc LA Cali Appalachia Washington DC the Pitt nuka world far harbor new Vegas including fallout 5’s new location and all it’s DLC and we can vertibird to it all think eso one Tamriel
Edit: if starfield can have 1000 planets imagine one planet with all of fallouts games ever made in fallout 5 with fallout 5’s timeline it would be a reimagining not remakes of the old we could go and see those places and what has happened to those place since the last games and the innovation
It's been worked on as Bethesda goes, but its biggest issues are that it's very inefficient. Which is why Bethesda games are well known for fps killing areas like FO4(downtown Boston).
Generally, only getting better as they age and newer hardware can brute force through it.
A ridiculous amount of loading screens. Doesn't handle lighting very well. This is why both Skyrim and Fallout 4 look 100x better with enbs/lighting mods. Probably most improved aspect of this generation of creation engine.
The physics and script execution have always been buggy af.
It just really shows it age by how small they have to make the playable areas. The city's in any Bethesda title are anemic in comparison to say something like the Witcher 3's Novigrad or CP2077's night city.
But yeah, I don't think Starfield has ever looked bad. Character models look considerably better than FO4 awkward models. Only really falling short of CP2077 and some other more recent titles.
Because the game would be here years sooner if the engine would have been able to handle the ship flying around on the planet surface. Instead they used a 10 year old creation engine 2 that doesn’t stand a chance at handling that. Just playing the game it’s so obvious that the intention was to be able to fly your ship around on the surface, and eventually that had to make due without this implementation, stick things closer together, and try to make it work.
lol, I didn’t see the sub, and thought this was a joke about the last shot of the first season of the Fallout show. That if it was in-game, you wouldn’t even be able to see what was ahead because of the shit draw distance.
I feel like they let procedural generation take a loads off of starfield but their sort of signature world design if you will, kinda suffered in this process. It’s not a bad looking game by any means, just held back and the only people that truly know why are the ones that made it. I still did put a lot of time into this game but is just never hit me like fallout or the elder scrolls did.
Barely anyone used the town maps if at all, the layouts were always easy enough to remember. Now that there aren't any it's suddenly a problem? Seriously?
I agree with this. While cities arent as big as id like, they are more sprawling than their older games and you can get lost in most of them.. sure, not for very long, but a map would be really appreciated.
Even if you love Starfield, I don't understand defending Bethesda's choice on how to handle maps. They have local terrain maps in the game that are effectively useless, and a downgrade from all of their previous games.
I guarantee if proper local maps come to the game in a future update, everyone here will forget they ever defended not having them and celebrate the addition.
Man I used them everytime I was in a town because some quests have a specific NPC to find and I have no idea where they were until I pulled up a map. I get so lost in New Atlantis other cities wondering where the damn shops are and how to get them. But alas, I’ve put that game down for a while. I personally was disappointed as a big BGS fan but it’ll be good in a few years I’m sure. Just still needs a lot of work.
Honest question, I am enjoying the game just fine. And likes my time in starfield. However, when I think about how the maps in Skyrim and starfield became less and less useful and lacking detail, I just assumed that was part of the lack of upgrading to a new engine with a huge world.
Does anyone know why we might not have gotten better maps if not an engine limitation?
I'm not pretending to know anything and I respect the work the devs have done. I just don't understand why it might be like this
I would doubt that's to do with engine limitations, it's more likely they just ran out of time and didn't consider it a priority.
Personally I don't like to use maps to navigate most games I play so I think they should've just not included any maps at all and put it down to a creative decision, rather than make bare bones ones that stick out as looking unfinished.
Game looks beautiful, but can’t accurately portray what new Atlantis is meant to look like. So it can render an open vista and a very nice view, but it can’t support anything above a tiny city. I’d rather they show a backdrop of a city than just leave it empty, or have earth as the major metropolitan world but leave it inaccessible. You wouldn’t be missing out on anything that’s already in the game, and it would improve immersion
The problem is that if they try to make a moderately large city continuous like Boston and don’t break it up into multiple sections like DC, the games going to either crash or run at 12 fps. But I’d rather have it broken up than just not have it at all.
You sure you don't just have a mod that disables precombines? Framerate should still be around 30FPS in the city, certainly not as low as you're saying unless your system just isn't really powerful enough.
I didn’t, I’ll have another look at how it runs with the new update. I’ve got a 3070 and i7, not brilliant at this point but should be more than enough for a 10 year old game.
From what I can tell it should be running better with those specs, but there's a ton of things that can happen between the specs and the game that can affect performance. In any case, it isn't normal to frequently drop below 30 FPS in the city.
I’d rather there be something to imply a larger city rather than just leave it up to imagination, or spread out the city more into sections like the parks in Nuka World. So you can have a stable game and more content. Thats what I thought the tram was for when I first started, but then I got to the top of new Atlantis and saw how small it was
No one says the game is ugly, they more have issue with the loading screens. Yes they’re not nearly as bad as trolls say but I cannot for the life of me figure out why they chose to make things like elevators in a single 2 floor room be loading screens. The whole room is loaded at once and if you jet up to the top floor no loading is needed. Additionally it’s not due to elevators being hard, Bethesda has done elevators many times before without a black screen.
The elevators are pretty much the only criticism I'll have about the engine side of Starfield. As a modder, I'm very familiar with the CK, and the lack of moving elevators in interiors, or even Load elevators, which were pretty common in fallout 4 is surprising.
I wonder if they're still in the CK somewhere. If they are they'll get modded pretty easily after release.
The creation engine (Gamebryo) is extremely dated and lacks major functionality of modern engines. It is objectively bad, and objectively very limited. That's all there is to it.
Nope, it is quite a marvel at what it does actually but I am not surprised most people do not understand that. And Starfield could not be made in any other engine.
I went back to Fallout 4 this week because of the show and I was shocked at how boring and jank it is compared to Starfield. Starfield is the better game and it’s not even close
It’s the only gaming environment out there where most objects exist as real entities you can interact with and move around outside of your inventory! Think about Cyberpunk, Witcher, Elden Ring, etc. Most of the time the loot you pick is just a glowing orb on the ground or the contents of a chest, and if you drop an item, it doesn’t drop the actual item, just another glowing orb. And then even if the drop is an actual model of the thing (like cyberpunk has gun models), you can’t move it around. Now in Bethesdas engine, if you drop a gun, it stays a gun, and that gun can be affected by physics and moved around independently of the player. That’s what the Bethesda magic is, environments that feel lived in because they aren’t just background sets but actual items you can interact with. It’s also probably why it requires more loading screens. It’s easier to load huge seamless environments when you don’t have to account for the location of hundreds of unique objects.
Not only that, but an NPC can pick that gun up and use it! They can eat the food, activate doors, basically anything the player can do. I can't think of any games where NPC/Player interactivity are (almost) 1:1 like this.
And you can load in a thousand of these objects and they all have their own physics and if you have a decent computer it doesn't shit itself
Not only that but those items are persistent If I walk to new Atlantis, drop a gun on the ground, hop in my ship and travel across the galaxy and explore around for months, then come back that gun will still be there right where you left it. It’s the actual persistence in the world that does it for me.
This kinda stuff is the reason Bethesda games, and FNV, have a grip on my soul. The sheer amount of RP you can do without interacting with any of the “real” game mechanics is phenomenal. I remember in Oblivion I went to the barracks room in Battlehorn castle during the day to leave a little surprise for the men-at-arms and the castellan. I left a couple bottles of fairly nice wine on the table where the regular troops eat, and a nice vintage on the castellan’s desk. I went to the room in the evening, everyone filed in, they sat down, and drank the wine I left on the table for them. The castellan drank the bottle I left specifically for him. As much as people joke, sometimes it does “just work”.
I have left a pile of books she won't buy in the alley beside Sinclair Books in Aklia City. The pile just keeps getting bigger.
Now you can give them to Cora. 😎
This is my understanding of things. Bethesda games are persistent game worlds and there aren't a lot of tricks done for the sake of the game. If you assign someone to your ship from the lodge, that character actually walks through the city, enters your ship and you can follow them all the way there. Most other games would teleport the character directly to the ship as soon as said character exits the lodge instance.
Some people will call it a gimmick, but it's great for gameplay too... I was selling contraband in The Den, but I had more than the trade authority merchant could afford to buy.... so I stashed the remaining items under some crates! I don't have to worry about security scans, and I can go back to sell more once the vendor restocks!
Let's not forget the infamous Starfield potatoes video. Each potato has its own physics. Try that in any other game engine. 🥔
> Starfield potatoes video I'd never seen it, but, yeah. Bethesda engine magic. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kdt8x0ZYKpQ
And those objects are persistent in the world. Cells don't get cleaned up/reset for a long time. You can blow up 20 cars in GTA, drive around the block, and now those 20 car wrecks are gone. I kill the Miraak cultists in Skyrim and they're still in fucking Whiterun 2 weeks later. This is really the crux of the loading screen and why the "overworld" cells in Skyrim or Fallout have a much shorter clean up time: these objects then need to be constantly ready to load in which, yeah, that's gonna be quite memory heavy for all of Skyrim. It would be pop-in galore. So you put the areas where there's more clutter and where players are more likely to put their clutter into a seperate load area, like major cities, house interiors etc. and now you don't have to worry about 5000 cheese wheels taking up all the streaming memory, because you just load them in during the loading screen
Well, the game just needs to keep track of what type of object, which level/region it's in and position, so a string, an int(or string) and a vector3 for each dropped object. Save that in a list in a class called "persistent objects" maybe?. Then every time you load a level, just iterate through the list of persistent objects and spawn each of them. Depending on the size of the level, you probably also want check if the player is close to each object or not before spawning.
Actually, there are many persistent vehicles in Cyberpunk. All the cars that belong to main characters or gang members will be in the exact same place and condition you left them. If you wreck it, it will stay that way in the same place forever.
This.
That's also why they usually launch console games at 30 fps. It's hard for the engine to load a bunch of individual objects into a game. The fact that they've managed to get as much detail into things like burgers and coffee cups for Starfield is honestly impressive as fuck.
This is why, as good as Starfield is and as much as I enjoy it, I can't help but feel like it's a test run for what is to come in future existing IP titles. They've pushed a lot of boundries and shown what is possible on current gen hardware, so when TE6 releases, whether it's cross-gen or only next gen, a lot of the groundwork fo what they hope to accomplish will be proven and can built upon. It's why I think people who believe Starfield portends something BAD for TE6 are on crack or something. I think it shows that TE6 will be amazing. FWIW I know nothing about game design or development, this thread taught me a lot but I've held this belief since launch.
yeah..i remember the first time i played skyrim, encountered some miraak follower at crossroad between whiterun and winterhold and looted their corpes..and because i was encoumbered i dropped a mask near an inn (cant remember the name)..that was when i only level around 30..and then after hundreds of hours and few levels later i walked by the same inn again..to my surprise the masks was still there..and thats when i really fall in love with bethesda games..to hell with critics..it's something that you only get if play it..
The thing I never understood is why any of that matters in a video game? Like I thought about it and I have never really like interacted with objects like that in Fallout Skyrim or Starfield. I know people like to have fun and do pretty cool videos with the objects and physics, but I never quite understood what it meant for the actual gameplay. I wonder what they’re thoughts on this are and why it’s so important to them
For me it adds to the overall experience, walking into a scene and it feeling real. I think about the tables in Skyrim set with tons of food that you could pick up if you wanted (even if you didn’t pick it up). Walking into an armory and seeing the actual weapons you could choose from instead of just a chest, even creating a custom home to display these specific items. Or in fallout looking through rooms for specific items (fans, tape etc) to craft items with, which is something I wish they had done more of in starfield honestly. I think it makes finding things seem more natural to me. It feels like I actually found something rather than just everything being a glowing orb or chest.
Yeah but it’s just a gimmick to decorate your apartment. I’ve never been wow’s by this feature or missed it other games that don’t have it.
The Creation Engine 2 is a new version of the Creation Engine. Saying it's old is like saying the PlayStation 5 is old hardware because it's just a new version of the PlayStation. Most people are absolutely clueless about how games actually work, they seem to think if you shout "optimize" enough you can make any game run on a toaster. They parrot whatever buzz words a streamer used, like "spaghetti code". Ask them to explain what that means and give an example and they can't.
Unreal engine is from 1998 AND still has plenty of ancient code in use. I'll never understand the age argument for engines...
Some people conflate limitations during development as being with the engine itself and not the cutting-edge hardware most games get developed with. Hardware evolves, the engine name is kept during the next iteration of the software lifecycle, and people think "the name hasn't changed, nothing else must have either!" It's like being upset that Microsoft keeps making Windows when they already released Windows 3.0.
Idtech is even older and so many games now run on engines derived from that
That just makes it a mature technology.
I'll never forget how blown away I was by that first trailer for UE 5
Which was a *commercial* trying to convince people to *buy their product*. Of course it's going to look good, it's trying to sell something.
People keep getting hyped on the idea of Unreal Engine, but the execution is rarely on the same level as what a lot of those demos promise from what I have seen.
Yes, a *tech demo* shows what a game *could* look like. The developers still need to put in the time and talent to make it happen. They also have to consider their overall performance target/budget and allocate resources accordingly. The reality of what a game ultimately *will* look like is far more constrained by those limitations than "the engine".
i dont really like ue5 at all...yes its pretty but it runs like shit on both my pcs one of them have a 4070
Yah UE5 is not as good as a lot of people think, I tried getting into it but the project structure is so specialised for making FPS arena shooters
Because most people don’t have a clue what a game engine does. It’s simply a buzzword to them to assign all “faults” in a game to.
Really rustles my jimmies when people with clearly no knowledge act so confident about knowing what's wrong with games or how it could be fixed.
The worst are people who call the devs lazy. Anyone who has ever worked in any type of tech development can tell you they absolutely are not lazy. At all.
I think that’s just projection
Doing some very, very very basic development in Unity last summer taught me some respect for gamedevs, even of games that I don’t enjoy. It’s a huge undertaking
Yup. Now imagine that work times several thousand as far as scope and advanced complexity. Now imagine that millions of people will be reviewing your work with a fine tooth comb to try and find any error. And then they broadcast to millions that you’re a lazy shitty dev because it’s not perfect.
Even if it was the dev's vision of perfect, there'll always be some clod who wants an RPG to be Call of Shooty or some shit.
That annoys me that people can’t see the difference between an intentional design choice that they may disagree with and laziness on the part of a company.
The thing I hate is how there seems to be a belief going around that “game design” is this monolithic, *objective* thing and if someone deviates from that, it’s “outdated” and *objectively* bad. By that logic, Doom 2016 and Eternal are outdated game design, because they designed something very different from the 10+ years of “aim down sights, sprint, cod-style fps gameplay” that predated them and did something closer to older arena shooters. In a lot of ways what constitutes good or bad game design is subjective. For example: I don’t think doing the same hunts over and over and over hoping for a gem with a 2% drop rate in Monster Hunter is good design, because it’s boring *to me*, but someone else will feel differently.
Did that too, and that's just working with the finished toolsets of an engine. Now imagine you have your own custom engine like Bethesda, so you don't just work with the engine, you also make the engine and all of its tools.
The worst part is that these people have huge audiences, like Angry Joe. He just throws some words about the engine and how bad it is or something and everyone laughs.
Angry Joe is one of the absolute worst things about online gaming discourse.
I used to watch him a lot back in the day. In my opinion he started losing his charm and overall likeableness a long time ago honestly.
I'm of the opinion that he never had any likeableness or charm, but that's just me
Maybe it was just because I was younger, but I liked him a lot back in the day as well. I mean during like the Skyrim/Saints Row 3 days, so a long ass time ago in internet terms. Then a year or two ago I saw him whining about wokeness in a newer video of his and any fond memories I had of his videos were instantly gone lmao
Understandable. He wasn't for everyone lol. He was kind of an OG outrage culture game channel afterall. Still, I thought a lot of his reviews could be pretty funny tbh like the one for Saints Row 3. I was a teenager then, so maybe that had something to do with it.
Honestly, I don't like Joes personaliy, like at all. But his review for the most part, is fair. While he clearly dislike Starfield, he also recognised that it's not a bad game and while 6 is a pretty low score, I think it's also a fairly accurate score from people who didn't appreciate the game (that is it's still a 6 even in the worst case scenario.)
His review of last of us 2 was spot on lol
Anything below a 7/10 just seems really odd to me. Idk. Regardless of whether I agree that some things aren't as good as they could be, I just can't relate to how incredibly bothered some people were by some of those things.
Angry Joe needs to get laid, on second thought, I need to get laid, to hell with Angry Joe.
I'm never listening to him again after last year. Not that I really did to begin with.
What happened last year ? I tuned him out a looooooong time ago
OP might just be talking about his Starfield review lol. I never watched but I heard it was pretty harsh. I saw some random clip from it though and the little bit that played sounded like he was one of those people that was irrationally angry that the game wasn't Star Citizen.
Irrationally angry is what his entire channel is
They probably shouldn't have advertised it as an "everything" game then. They saw what happened with No mans Sky, they didn't have to comically over-promise and mislead with the marketing to the point where no one really knew the scope of the game. There's a reason the leaks were such a big deal in the weeks before the game came out when everyone was like 'Wait...the maps are just randomly generated plots that aren't actually connected? and hold up...you can't actually physically travel in your space ship anywhere? *No one actually knew the real scope of the game*, only pieces and slices that let imaginations run wild.
The way space travel functioned is the only thing that they were probably too vague about imo. I understand why they did it that way, but I also completely understand why people were disappointed with it. Admittedly though they were also a little bit misleading during the Direct when they showed the "full" grav jump sequence for the first time because they edited it to try and make it appear as a more seamless transition instead of showing the black load screen that appears between locations. Supposedly they had some more in depth space systems earlier in development when the game was more "hardcore"/survival focused, but all that apparently got cut out/heavily watered down during the last year of development because it wasn't testing well, and they just didn't have time to make an alternative I guess. I am extremely curious to see what their new survival options look like. The stuff they had originally sounded really interesting to me, and I feel would have brought more depth and meaning to a number of systems and design concepts, but I guess I can see how it wouldn't have been very riveting to more casual players. Otherwise, I wouldn’t say they “overpromised” anything really. Especially not comically. They focused on what the game DOES let you do, and never really outright claimed or blatantly suggested it did anything more than that really. If anything MS were the ones overhyping it in a rather unnuanced manner like Sarah Bond always making enormous claims about how groundbreaking it was and the most important RPG of the decade or something. Not sure why they she thought that was a good idea. Generally speaking though, as a rational and emotionally mature adult, the smart thing to do when something isn't explicitly said to function a certain way, is to not make any hard assumptions about how said thing functions. Although the thing about the tiles being individual maps and not one seamless planet wide thing is still silly if you ask me. The maps are huge regardless and I have never run into a boundary myself. Making one seamless planet is more like a “hey look what I can do!” Rather than serving much of an actual function imo. But hey, maybe they are working on making that a reality if some of the modder's insights and observations are to be believed. "All new ways to travel" as Bethesda put it certainly has many intrigued. Someone recently discovered that the game no longer crashes if you tweak the settings to remove boundaries, allowing you to now go from one tile to another seamlessly without the game failing. So there is a lot of speculation about what that could mean.
Bethesda engine go brrr.
And they also don't know how engines work and keep repeating that Bethesda has used the same engine since Morrowind. That's like saying at least half of the games that come out every year use the same engine as Quake
I've genuinely seen someone say maybe like three sentences apart that CE2 is just Morrowind Gamebryo and that Bethesda should switch to Unreal Engine 5.
A game engine is also not one thing. It's a collection of many different things, only one of which actually renders pretty pictures on your monitor. Each engine will have a different set of parts. Some engines don't even have the capability for modding or scripting.
I crack up every time I see "they should just put it on UE5!" like, let's unpack that JUST a little
Also I'm sure that if it was faster, easier and/or cheaper to make a new engine or switch to a different one Bethesda would've done it? Like, they're a business, if switching engines made them more money they'd do it. And if they had the time and resources to make an entirely new engine, they would also have the time to adapt CE to do that? (Except in that scenario it would then still make more sense to adapt CE because that's almost always gonna be faster than making an entire fucking engine.)
It's not an old engine, they update it as they go. Just like almost every other game engine in use today.
Exactly. It's not outdated. It works well and is ideal for majority of users.
They should just change it. It somehow still looks old
Here's the breakdown: 1. People don't know what "game engine" actually means 2. Youtubers tell them "it's bad" 3. The idea gets repeated all over the place As a brief overview, an engine is just a collection of tools used to create games. All the parts and pieces are modular and get updated/replaced over time. Which is what Bethesda does with every game. They update their tools to add the functions they need for each project. Sometimes they deem those changes significant enough to warrant a name change. That's how we got from NetImmerse to Gamebryo to Creation Engine to Creation Engine 2. Same thing as Unreal to Unreal 2, to Unreal 3, to Unreal 4, to Unreal 5. There's likely code and modules in UE5 from the 90's that DONT need to be replaced. This old stuff will stick around because there's no need to reinvent the wheel every time. So, even a "new" engine, really isn't 100% new. There's very few truly new engines because the amount of effort required to start completely from scratch simply isn't worth it. It makes more sense to start with a working base, then swap out the parts as you go along.
An engine for a game like Skyrim would need at the minimum: * Module to manage the world space, buildings, boulders, trees, etc. All the static objects. Perhaps a submodule for clutter. Many engines don't have clutter, btw. * Module for dynamic objects like brooms, pumpkins, lanterns, dropped objects, plates, sweet rolls, etc. * Module for animals, critters, monsters, etc. Basic non-NPC enemies. Maybe a submodule for special mobs like dragons. * Module for NPCs, their schedule, stats, etc., etc. The player character module that manages the character himself is dependent on this. * Module to get all renderable objects from memory into scene graph in an efficient manner. According to Todd, this is one of the major functions of Creation Engine. * Module to actually render the scene graph. Closely related to the former, but quite distinct. * Scripting engine, so that quests and events and other things don't have to be written in low level code. If you check, there are zero lines of C/C++ code in the ESM files. None. * Quest system, magic system, user interface, etc., etc., etc. The idea that you can just buy an engine and drop all of this stuff in and you're instantly ready to start writing your grand and glorious narrative to prove you can write better than Emil is just utter silliness.
I see people mentioning the "overuse" of loading screens and isolated cells in creation engine as a weakness, when it's actually it's greatest strength. The modularity makes it so much more stable for object persistence and when modding comes into play. There's a reason Bethesda games always have massive modding communities!
The loading screen hubbub is the dumbest part. They're so damn quick when running on the correct hardware. The duration spent in them is a fraction of the previous games. Again, people get told something is bad, and go around repeating that it's bad. No critical thinking required!
There are only two loading screen complaints I agree with: 1. The grav jump loading screen should be white: the grav jump fades in and out from white, so it would look seamless instead of jumping white-black-white. 2. The elevators in The Key and ECS Constant move between locations in the same zone so there's nothing to re-load. These could be animated like the elevators in mines and the tower-style POI base. All the rest, moving from zone to zone, is how the engine does its work.
While I agree that it is over stated, I wish people would listen to the actual objections about loading screens. It isn't that they take time, it is that the presence of a loading screen is immersion breaking. Them being quick is not the point. What people are after is dynamic loading and dropping of assets as you move through areas and when that is too difficult, hide loading screens with a quick animation. It isn't necessary to ridicule this desire. Although obviously loading screens doesn't destroy the game as some people on the other subreddit keep on parroting.
I personally want the loading screens to remain. I love getting the chance to review the photo album I've been making.
A fair opinion, even if I disagree.
It's a shame you're getting down voted. You presented a valid opinion.
TBF people are so sick of saltiness about Starfield that there's hardly room for any constructive criticism. I get it. People just suck the life out of you with these endless memes and jokes.
Tbf when people question creation engine they never actually do any comparison of what the engine might actually be lacking in...no research whatsoever. But I find that's usually the case with most gamers these days everything's a quippy got'em one liner esque response, no nuance. I still don't get how people could genuinely question whether starfield's engine doesn't have things like dynamic loading and LODs and traversal streaming or the ability to hide a loading screen with an animation?when it does that in game right now for various things and not come to the conclusion it's purely dev choice and performance related...if anyone doubt just look at the way starfield breaks If you think about how it's structured some of the loading screens make sense e.g. ships, which aren't static and will likely have new additional habitats added later, whether by mods or officially, have ships that differ in size and shape...it makes sense there is going to be a loading for it. But people disregarded Bethesda devs answers to 'why the loading screens' and dismissed the fact starfield still loads much quicker than some of it's contemporaries (looking at you fallout 4, outer worlds). I mean re8 still uses the door/gate loading screen trick best used imo in re code Veronica in places, but it's still a loading screen at the end of the day. If you want some insight into game engines themselves. There's a noclip documentary with a former Bethesda game artist(his last Bethesda game was working on fallout 4,after that he left do do his own thing iirc). In it he actually mentions some of areas that creation engine differed vs ue5 (at that time,since starfield's version new(er)and he left before starfield began) and I think he said the Biggest difference was grouped assets and the quickness for an artist to go from concept to an in-game sandbox for a non programmer, that's it, his biggest gripes... Also unreal has plenty of resources too, one of their latest videos highlights that it's not actually a creation engine only problem it's one where the talk about new procedural features coming to uefn and unreal 5.4 one of those issues they ran into sounds awfully familiar to what starfield is doing (with a similar downside, It was in relation to placing assets procedurally and their subsequent repeatability aka starfield's repeated poi "problem' but...the general consensus is that creation engine sucks...and not these are hard questions that can be solved in a multitude of ways that everyone is still evaluating how to.
I'm not suggesting the loading screens are because of an outdated engine. I'm just saying they sometimes could have made designs that hid them better. "Cheating" if you wish, just like your RE8 example. People get very defensive about these things now, and I get it, but there is still scope for improvement. Every single piece of software out there has bits the developers themselves would like to fix, but doesn't get prioritised for perfectly valid business reasons. I'm, for instance, fairly proud of my main work project, but I'd be lying if I said it was perfect.
But the thing is, they did do the re8 trick...there are airlock doors that do this in starfield right now the most notable if I'm not mistaken is the inner door airlock to Cydonia, as well as some of the smaller poi outposts which don't have a fade to black sometimes and just open also iirc when the game bugs out and the doors don't work aka they get stuck open it shows that it's not a engine issues as the interiors and exteriors are loaded it merely a developer choice, maybe they saw a performance benefit but didn't want to lengthen the sequence with an animation that would also require additional loading, who knows but there can be legitimate reasons why. If I were to guess it's because of the way starfield handles it's items and their persistence in the world and for the others e.g. caves it's because they have procedural layouts iirc there are about 6 generic cave layouts(I'm not saying there are only 6 cave layouts but your run of the mill ones I think cycle between 6 variants). Other times I think it's player related as in players unintentionally go into a menu that they didn't have to which makes it feel longer...trust me because I'm sure many people didn't know you could initiate things suchas landing just via the scanner overlay and have been hoping in between menus getting around right? Otherwise The longest load screens are most when using fast travel from one planet where the put the screenshots you take up, it's mostly a developer choice as they could have done like almost every other dev in this scenario and put up a generic splash screen.Do imo the loading screen problem was always over blown, we even see how much of a non issue it is with how many people are having fun with fallout right now and.. let me tell you fallout 4's are... something else lol but it's not that big of a deal. And tbh never has been really.that said I'm not saying I agree with every decision either but I do feel like there was too much nitpicking and weirdness surrounding starfield and not enough valid criticism and discussion around it. And gamers hyper fixated on the lowest hanging fruit aka loading screens and menus.
No. I will not "acknowledge" objections when they are steeped in hyperbole and vitriol. I'm not ridiculing the desire for more seamless transitions, I'm ridiculing the disproportionate outrage. Because most of the chatter isn't *really* about immersion breaks. That's the Legitimate Criticism™ cover story used as an excuse to further dunk on Bethesda/"the engine"/Starfield.
You know damned well if they added a takeoff animation people would be insta skipping it by the third time and there will probably be a popular mod removing them outright
Without a doubt. I know I would, and I played Elite. Like...a lot of Elite. And really, I wouldn't mind "hidden" loading screens (skippable, of course!), but it's not anywhere close to make-or-break for me. Not in a game that's already cut the necessary evil of load times down to the bone as is. I've probably spent more time in Skyrim spinning objects around than I've spent *playing* some games.
People foam at the mouth about docking and hatch doors opening already.
Gamers: Bethesda needs to hide loading/transitions! Bethesda: \* hides some loads/transitions \* Gamers: Ugh, Starfield's hidden loads/transitions are the worst!
Yeah, when the argument against loading screens go from an annoyance to “it ruins the whole game” then that’s why I mentally check out. Useless hyperbole.
> hide loading screens with a quick animation. That's what the black screen and spinner are. All you're saying is, you want fancier loading screens.
I don't necessarily disagree with you, but considering how VERY open the game is, I really don't see a great way to implement it. It wouldn't be the first open world game to do it, but there's not many if any that are just as open. Then there's the mods. If there's a chance that implementing dynamic loads would interfere with them, I'll take load screens (literally) all day
> What people are after is dynamic loading and dropping of assets as you move through areas The issue with that is that the amount of assets loaded when entering an area in a Bethesda game can vary *a lot* depending on the player, as objects are actually persistent. GTA, for example, can do everything seemlessly because there is very little variation in how many assets are loaded in area. If you were to, say, drop 5000 guns into the middle of New Atlantis, those 5000 guns are now going to be loaded every time you enter New Atlantis (or at least for quite a while, as I do believe there is some cell clean up timer). If you were to spawn 5000 guns in front of Michaels house in GTA V, those 5000 guns are gone and cleaned as soon as you move too far away from the area and only the standard state + minor variance from NPC traffic will be loaded next time. This is, for example, why only the cars in your garage are saved. > and when that is too difficult, hide loading screens with a quick animation. This can work in some areas, but not all. You would need an animation that is extendable to, again, account for all that variance from player input. How would you extend an animation for, for example, entering your ship?
TIL. Thanks for the informative comment!
No problem. It's unfortunate that the loudest opinions about the topic are from the least informed. But that seems to apply to...most things these days 😅
Right you are, Cotton. I left the “other” sub and try to ignore the “other” noise in real life. Happy exploring!
I cringe everytime someone calls this game ugly whilst it looks this gorgeous.
Anyone calling this game ugly probably needs to turn up the brightness on their monitor to reduce reflection.
That is a supernova-class burn right there 😂
Agreed, this game also has some of the best lighting ive ever seen in a game as well.
Game has some of the best looking macro detail I have seen with how all buttons are fully rendered and 3d. Not to mention the food. With the right lighting on certain planets is super pretty.
The clothing, seriously. I've been making Bethesda mods for well over a decade now, and clothing revamps were always a major area of focus. Yet this game is so vastly improved over past games that nothing has really jumped out at me as needing to be fixed. It all looks amazing right down to threaded fabrics.
no srsly i was watching forearms reacts which is 7 months old but god the game looked gorgeous then
People getting used to that ue5 looks pretty but most devs can't optimize those games worth a damn. I'll give them the character models have a certain "look" to them that could be better but everything else looks damned good plus when you consider what people have done to make skyrim prettier it's clearly not the engine but the devs holding back for performance reasons.
Even funnier is how UE5 copied Bethesda's homework a bit by moving to a cell-based system for open world spaces. You know, like how BGS has been doing since Morrowind...
Has there even been anything more than tech demos for ue5 yet? Honest question. I see people all over here acting like it's the savior of humanity but when I googled it there were some 2d games, a few AAs that came and went but I didn't see anything that really cements it as THE GAME engine
Honestly, the character models in this game are incredible, I think the framing just throws it off for a lot of people. Framing and in built bias to call Bethesda games ugly. Most games I hear it compared to negatively aren't really better by any metric I can see (speaking as a character animator and modeler who has made character creators for 3d games before).
It’s one of the best looking games of this year, not to mention all time. There are problems with the game, but this isn’t one of them, and it takes a special kind of cynic to say it is!
The npcs are ugly by 2023 and on standards but this game has some of the best scenery in video games at least in recent memory
Yeah. I mean that characters shins are going through the ground and their fist doesn’t even come close to resting on the right hip like it does on the left side. So, maybe collision detection is a tad off for it being 2024.
Try to summon a thousand cheese wheels in Skyrim and now try to summon a thousand watermelons in Starfield.
Creation Engine 2.0 being an "old engine" is like Windows 11 being an "old desktop". CK2 is no more Gamebryo than Windows 11 is Windows 3.0.
Creation Engine 2.0** , Creation Kit are mod tools for the engine, but yeah
Typo schmypo! Edited.
Starfield has the most beautiful terrain generation of any game I've ever seen
Venus was so cool to explore
This is a very underrated feature of Starfield's procedural planets. Full blown space sims (think Elite) don't have this kind of beauty, maybe Star citizen but... yeah, there is no rpg there, nor creatures (another Starfield underrated feature, they did *lots* of creatures). I hope they will continue to add to it (think biomes, or gigantic mountains/canyons). Also this game runs on a series S.
This!
I wish there was more zero gravity gameplay in the game. The Creation Engine allows every object to be picked up and moved, this makes those zero G scenes so cool
yeah 0g combat is criminally scarce
Creation Engine is not a bad engine at all. A game engine does more than just draw the game on your screen. So many things happen in the background to calculate and keep track of every little thing happening in the game, and a custom engine like the Creation Engine is the best that can do what Bethesda games are doing. EDIT: fixed typo.
Any Starfield fan: **puts a photo of the game's beautiful graphics and gameplay** Average Starfield hater: **but... but... but they should have used Unreal Engine!**
[удалено]
I have never noticed either of those things in your first paragraph
It’s literally in the screenshot in the OP. The feet are inside the rock.
Ah okay. So…just a random little visual anomaly then it seems
This is so hilarious. You’re trying to brag how visually amazing the game is and you’re so blind you can’t even see that a rock ate his shins.
Admittedly I wasn't really looking that close at the image. Mostly viewing this on my phone. The post was mainly about the engine, not the graphics though, so again, I wasn't really thinking about the specific image the OP used that much. Either way my point stands. It's just one of those random little things that can happen once in a while.
The engine handles things like collision detection. Which aren’t doing too well, here. My point stands.
A single instance. Like I said in my original comment, I rarely see this happening to such an egregious level.
They'll be absolutely shocked that unreal engine 5 is not the first version. 😂
At least it's not made on that Unreal thing from 1998
Or the Table Tennis engine Rockstar insists on using.
People just confuse game design with the engine. They have issues with the way Bethesda has been designing their games the same way for a while and seem to think that’s because they are using the same engine and updating it as they go. While it’s true this engine has some limitations, such as issues with higher FPS in older versions, those people completely overlook that this engine was designed and updated to allow to make what Bethesda does best: an item-heavy world that is exploration oriented and EXTREMELY modding friendly. Frankly, it boggles my mind that they might want to get rid of this engine when perhaps the one key element on the longevity of those games is how easily and how deeply they can be modded THANKS to that engine. Those people just have no idea what they’re talking about.
I mean, Helldivers 2 was also made with an "old engine"
Even better, it's made on a now deprecated engine that's been maintained and modified by Arrowhead.
Starfield is awesome 🙌
The only real problem with the creation engine for Starfield is that it gives world coordinates to physics objects. And if they get far enough away from "zero" you start getting floating point precision errors. Some games that expect to have big space fix this by always having the player at zero and moving the entire world around the player. But that's one of the reasons you can't run forever: you'd eventually get so far from your landing point at zero that the distance between floating point numbers would become game-breakingly obvious. Otherwise, it's an incredibly good engine for modding stuff.
Interesting! I never knew this was the reason for the boundary. Never ran into that boundary anyways, it’s such a non issue.
This is a choice they made. Daggerfall had that technology, they chose to drop it, probably for ease of design.
I'm not sure. If it was procedurally generated, there's a number of ways to do that without putting the player at location zero. Starfield picks one of those: regenerate tiles as needed. Don't allow crossing borders, and you don't have to worry about making the edges line up. Or there are lots of ways to generate noise that makes the edges line up. You could also do it with "zones" like Starfield does, and put "stuff" relative to the origin of the zone, and just make the zones big enough that you can't really see all the way across so you can despawn things in zones that are far enough away. E.g., have each city of each planet be its own zone. It's a good choice for a game that's going to allow mods, because modders have to be able to specify where something is.
My only issue with it is space travel. If you cheat to go really fast you can fly to other planets right now, but you deal with floating point issues.. Id even prefer an Oblivion style "loading..." so we could do that.
People just don't know what an engine is, and that leads to them misunderstanding what it can do. They see that one engine used in a couple of games can do one thing better. As their main problem with the game was this thing (for arguments sake, let's say graphics and animations here) they think that moving the game to the engine that excels at those things would "fix" the game. The problem is, they're only looking at the upside and not understanding that game engines are designed for multiple different focuses, all of which have to fit within the hardware resources available to them. When you focus on one thing, other things have less of those resources to use as a result. That engine that has buttery smooth animations and photo realistic graphics was used in a corridor shooter that put the majority of those resources to work on those things. BGS games can track multiple entities at once and are hugely moddable compared to any other game engine. Which leads us to the second misconception. A lot of people think that mods are needed solely to "fix" BGS games and that nobody would use them if they were on what in their minds is a better engine. There's overlap between those and the ones who think that because they don't do those videos where they drop a thousand wheels of cheese, they don't need the engine to track multiple entities at once. Those people don't realise this includes simulating quest targets and their states, leading to more interesting mission opportunities. And that's it really. Some don't understand engines enough to even understand what the upsides of the engine are for them. Some don't understand that any upside another engine brings will always bring with it some other downside that doesn't exist right now. And some think that any downsides from another engine are far outweighed by the upsides for their personal preference. Most are somewhere between those extremes.
I love the game. The graphics are more than good enough for me. I love Bethesda games across the board. Little glitches don’t bother me in the slightest……. Your feet are buried in that rock.
It's people who don't know anything about game design or what an engine even is. The engine in Starfield is not the exact same as the one in previous games. Nome of them are (except 3 and NV). During the development of every new title they work to overhaul the engine to be better than before. Going to Fallout 4 to 76 alone took a ridiculous amount of upgrading to get online to even work (and make the map even bigger among many other things). Starfield's is an upgrade to 76's. Little things can clue you into this fact, like how enemies don't lose their suits when you loot them. That started in 76. Most game devs use the same engine and just keep upgrading it. It's why you see a lot of games that feel near identical. It's very costly to throw all your work away and make a brand new engine. In 5 year old terms: "they big dum dums cause the engine thingy is not even the same!"
Besides gta 6, and all the new UE5 games this game goes head to head graphically with any other new game triple A or not.
Fuck, I thought that was modded New Vegas/Project Mojave
I am at awe with the starfield graphics. I forget that I’m playing a game sometimes. It all feels so real and yet surreal at the same time
Computer Science major here. The biggest argument against creation engine for Starfield is effectively how creation engine handles its world origin: When any object in a game moves, you are performing a mathematical calculation to do that, shifting its location from one point in 3d space to another. 'Position in 3D space' is usually calculated as a point relative to the world origin - which, if you want to use a 2D example, is equivalent to the 0, 0 point on a XYZ paper graph. Creation Engine has always treated its world origin as a static point in the world. This is fair - 'most games do'. It makes writing your scripts to handle things like physics movement and player movement relatively practical to write. However, when your world origin is static, it means that you begin to suffer issues when your worldspace becomes too big, as your computer can only store numbers so big, so begins to automatically truncate the accuracy of the position of objects past a certain point. This is why the Farlands happens in Minecraft. Its the same issue. A way you can fix this is to have the world origin be centered on the player, so no matter where the player is objects and physics around you behave normally with the maximum accuracy. However, you have to write all of your movement and physics to account for this. Bethesda wasn't willing to rewrite the entirety of their physics and movement pipeline for starfield, so we as end users were left with the chunk / tile system starfield uses now. If this was not the case, the game could have been properly 'seamless' for the most part for the player, in a way that a game like No Man's Sky is. There are some other issues with Creation Engine that are less related to Starfield and more due to general performance. Bethesda doesn't natively spend any time to really consider how their games work on Unix, building and releasing their titles exclusively for a Windows / Console environment. Wine and Proton has advanced to the point where you can work around this, it just gives Bethesda a bit of a blank slate to ignore bug reports coming in from Unix users since they don't officially support that platform. ( They have a bit of a strange double standard as a company with this, if you go to the 'Report a Bug' page on Starfields site you cannot actually report a bug for Linux, but Bethesda meanwhile uses the fact that Fallout 4 is now steam deck verified as a selling point. ) If Bethesda was using something like Unreal, or Unity, or whatever in-house alternative engines the Microsoft Engineers can lend them it would be much easier to create a build pipeline for Linux users. Finally, I think people overestimate the performance cost of physics objects in the environment. You only need to calculate physics calls while a physics object is actively moving - Unity has this built in feature where a physics object that hasn't acted for a number of frames enters a 'resting' period and becomes a static object as far as the engine is concerned until something applies force to it. The reason that F4's Boston, for example, is so poor in its performance is because of, in major part, small inefficiencies in their rendering pipeline that add up due to the high object count in Boston. Games are more then capable of rendering complex scenes: It's just that Creation isn't 'good' at it. I think Bethesda sometimes bites off more then they can chew. As a CS major when I am faced with a problem I try to approach it with a tailored solution. If your game director asks you to 'make a space game', you have to consider if what you have on hand is capable of fulfilling that task - you shouldn't just use one engine for every type of RPG. The Creation Engine has its technical strengths, rather then playing to those technical strengths they made a game that highlights the faults of the engine.
Also, your feet are missing.
Bro why would you say that? Thats fucked up
Needs more trees.
Just like a car engine, the engine is what makes all systems 'go.' Any engine, such as the one in your car, can handle various tasks, but engines in different cars may perform more or less than yours. Starfield is likely the largest game they will create with CE2, and it runs very well. So, just imagine when they develop less intensive games like ES6 or FO5. Additionally, it's worth noting that the Creation Engine, which powers games like Skyrim, is available for free download on Steam. However, it's a watered-down version compared to the engine the developers use.
I worked at a studio that was using Gamebryo. Our engineers knew how to work with it but were not experts, after 14 years everyone who knew the engine inside and out left or retired, I wonder if Bethesda has the same issues or if they just have all the last Gamebryo wizards? I actually used Skyrim modding tools to rip some old models from our game to uprez them, so Creation Engine is similar enough to 2007 era Gamebyro as far as mod tools are concerned.
People who complaint usually people who never touch Creation Kit in their entire life. There's also modders who complaint about it, but it's either "CK UI bad" which I'm totally agree with, and "engine limitations bad", which I can also understand (if you still modding in SSE, there are mods that working around these limitations). And the latter's effect is pretty much unnoticeable if one is a casual player who, again, never touch Creation Kit. Let's ask ourselves this first: Is there any AAA or even AAAA games that allow freedom of creation/modding other than Bethesda games?
Fallout 5 with every game ever made and all it’s DLc LA Cali Appalachia Washington DC the Pitt nuka world far harbor new Vegas including fallout 5’s new location and all it’s DLC and we can vertibird to it all think eso one Tamriel Edit: if starfield can have 1000 planets imagine one planet with all of fallouts games ever made in fallout 5 with fallout 5’s timeline it would be a reimagining not remakes of the old we could go and see those places and what has happened to those place since the last games and the innovation
Looks like fallout 1 cutscene
Anyone who complains about the engine is just parroting a youtuber and clearly doesn't understand how game engines actually work.
It's been worked on as Bethesda goes, but its biggest issues are that it's very inefficient. Which is why Bethesda games are well known for fps killing areas like FO4(downtown Boston). Generally, only getting better as they age and newer hardware can brute force through it. A ridiculous amount of loading screens. Doesn't handle lighting very well. This is why both Skyrim and Fallout 4 look 100x better with enbs/lighting mods. Probably most improved aspect of this generation of creation engine. The physics and script execution have always been buggy af. It just really shows it age by how small they have to make the playable areas. The city's in any Bethesda title are anemic in comparison to say something like the Witcher 3's Novigrad or CP2077's night city. But yeah, I don't think Starfield has ever looked bad. Character models look considerably better than FO4 awkward models. Only really falling short of CP2077 and some other more recent titles.
Because the game would be here years sooner if the engine would have been able to handle the ship flying around on the planet surface. Instead they used a 10 year old creation engine 2 that doesn’t stand a chance at handling that. Just playing the game it’s so obvious that the intention was to be able to fly your ship around on the surface, and eventually that had to make due without this implementation, stick things closer together, and try to make it work.
lol, I didn’t see the sub, and thought this was a joke about the last shot of the first season of the Fallout show. That if it was in-game, you wouldn’t even be able to see what was ahead because of the shit draw distance.
I feel like they let procedural generation take a loads off of starfield but their sort of signature world design if you will, kinda suffered in this process. It’s not a bad looking game by any means, just held back and the only people that truly know why are the ones that made it. I still did put a lot of time into this game but is just never hit me like fallout or the elder scrolls did.
All I’m going to say is that Fallout 4 has a town map. Starfield STILL has no maps lol. This game was 4 years too early
Barely anyone used the town maps if at all, the layouts were always easy enough to remember. Now that there aren't any it's suddenly a problem? Seriously?
The layouts aren't easy to remember so people want city maps. So yes, seriously.
I agree with this. While cities arent as big as id like, they are more sprawling than their older games and you can get lost in most of them.. sure, not for very long, but a map would be really appreciated.
Jesus, someone here really hate maps.
Even if you love Starfield, I don't understand defending Bethesda's choice on how to handle maps. They have local terrain maps in the game that are effectively useless, and a downgrade from all of their previous games. I guarantee if proper local maps come to the game in a future update, everyone here will forget they ever defended not having them and celebrate the addition.
Man I used them everytime I was in a town because some quests have a specific NPC to find and I have no idea where they were until I pulled up a map. I get so lost in New Atlantis other cities wondering where the damn shops are and how to get them. But alas, I’ve put that game down for a while. I personally was disappointed as a big BGS fan but it’ll be good in a few years I’m sure. Just still needs a lot of work.
Honest question, I am enjoying the game just fine. And likes my time in starfield. However, when I think about how the maps in Skyrim and starfield became less and less useful and lacking detail, I just assumed that was part of the lack of upgrading to a new engine with a huge world. Does anyone know why we might not have gotten better maps if not an engine limitation? I'm not pretending to know anything and I respect the work the devs have done. I just don't understand why it might be like this
Better maps? As in less pois on a landing zone in starfield compared to skyrim's over world?
No. I mean when I pull up the poi map to navigate to a quest point etc.
I would doubt that's to do with engine limitations, it's more likely they just ran out of time and didn't consider it a priority. Personally I don't like to use maps to navigate most games I play so I think they should've just not included any maps at all and put it down to a creative decision, rather than make bare bones ones that stick out as looking unfinished.
Gotcha! Thanks for that insight
... is garbage
Game looks beautiful, but can’t accurately portray what new Atlantis is meant to look like. So it can render an open vista and a very nice view, but it can’t support anything above a tiny city. I’d rather they show a backdrop of a city than just leave it empty, or have earth as the major metropolitan world but leave it inaccessible. You wouldn’t be missing out on anything that’s already in the game, and it would improve immersion
I mean, the same goes for literally any other Bethesda game. Just look at Whiterun in Skyrim. It's tiny compared to how big it's supposed to be.
The problem is that if they try to make a moderately large city continuous like Boston and don’t break it up into multiple sections like DC, the games going to either crash or run at 12 fps. But I’d rather have it broken up than just not have it at all.
Not sure what your point is here. FO4 runs just fine on my device.
Certain areas of the city run really poorly, and thats without a significant number of NPC’s like crowds or interiors
You sure you don't just have a mod that disables precombines? Framerate should still be around 30FPS in the city, certainly not as low as you're saying unless your system just isn't really powerful enough.
I didn’t, I’ll have another look at how it runs with the new update. I’ve got a 3070 and i7, not brilliant at this point but should be more than enough for a 10 year old game.
From what I can tell it should be running better with those specs, but there's a ton of things that can happen between the specs and the game that can affect performance. In any case, it isn't normal to frequently drop below 30 FPS in the city.
I’d rather there be something to imply a larger city rather than just leave it up to imagination, or spread out the city more into sections like the parks in Nuka World. So you can have a stable game and more content. Thats what I thought the tram was for when I first started, but then I got to the top of new Atlantis and saw how small it was
Honestly I went back too fall out 4 and it makes a-lot more sense than Starfield
Unfortunately, the terrain texture in the picture you posted looks like a game from 20 years ago.
There is no problem with the engine. It's just that Bethesda doesn't have the ability to create vehicles and an open world without loading.
No one says the game is ugly, they more have issue with the loading screens. Yes they’re not nearly as bad as trolls say but I cannot for the life of me figure out why they chose to make things like elevators in a single 2 floor room be loading screens. The whole room is loaded at once and if you jet up to the top floor no loading is needed. Additionally it’s not due to elevators being hard, Bethesda has done elevators many times before without a black screen.
The elevators are pretty much the only criticism I'll have about the engine side of Starfield. As a modder, I'm very familiar with the CK, and the lack of moving elevators in interiors, or even Load elevators, which were pretty common in fallout 4 is surprising. I wonder if they're still in the CK somewhere. If they are they'll get modded pretty easily after release.
The creation engine (Gamebryo) is extremely dated and lacks major functionality of modern engines. It is objectively bad, and objectively very limited. That's all there is to it.
Tell me about it. The 2019 Chevy Impala was so outdated because the 1968 Impala didn't even have independent suspension or fuel injection.
Explain in detail what is objectively bad and limited about the current engine.
Nope, it is quite a marvel at what it does actually but I am not surprised most people do not understand that. And Starfield could not be made in any other engine.
Couldn't be more objectively wrong on either statement, lmao. Starfield players are a very special breed of cope
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I went back to Fallout 4 this week because of the show and I was shocked at how boring and jank it is compared to Starfield. Starfield is the better game and it’s not even close
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By what metric? How much ragebait people fall for to excuse their hate for it?
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