From experience I know I’ll be downvoted but it is a pretty goddamned impressive engine. And yes that is even considering that Skyrim was buggy, what, 12 years ago?
Agreed, the way they can preserve the position of any object, anywhere, with thousands of objects and an obscenely large world, is exceedingly impressive.
What I don’t get is why the hell any of that is a priority. It’s a neat party trick, but surely 99.9% of the gameplay value of arranging items for fun could be achieved on the player ship alone.
Like… it’s neat that I can pick up, interact with, and sell every single pen and fork on every table. But is it useful, with a carry weight system deincentivizing that? Fussing with my inventory to find what random crap I accidentally picked up that’s taking up my weight? Is that remarkably better than having a few key obvious and useful pickups? Is it worth giving up 60FPS on console, and having dedicated loading screens for nearly every door and ladder around?
Again, it’s cool that they have this massive procedurally generated world, that a player could spend thousands of hours in. But when that area is boring, does it really beat a handcrafted interesting world and narrative? What good is thousands of hours of content when players are bored and gone before 10 hours?
So like… from a tech perspective, I respect what Starfield is, and it’s very impressive, but as a game it feels like a waste of a lot of very talented work, suffering from a lack of good direction at the top.
Yeah I feel like people like to just bandwagon against Bethesda games, but no one makes games with as much detail as them. Hell, even Starfield has an insanely robust physics engine.
But! That’s cool for a game like KSP, where people craft rotating rings to drive circles in the artifical gravity. But in an RPG? Why do they need to track every spoons position? It just looks like they spent too much money on a too capable/complex engine and can’t really innovate because of it.
Play Skyrim and do fus to dah in a tavern or something, having all those physics objects feels amazing. Also being able to walk in a house and steal all the cutlery and junk just feels so immersive for being in the world imo. Not to mention the crafting systems in Fo4 and Starfield using those clutter objects for crafting systems.
Exactly. As a developer, the complexity of that engine blows me away. It’s a miracle they got as solid as they did honestly. If these critics are developers, they’re either lacking in empathy or they’re the kind of prodigy who cannot even comprehend the inability to think about such insanely complex systems with ease
Did you even play it, or are you just jumping on the hate bandwagon? It’s hardly perfect, but I literally didn’t find any significant bugs in over 20 hours of playtime. The game has plenty of fundamental issues certainly, but the bugs are more of a meme than anything.
Well yeah, that’s what happens when you make enormous games with basically no player safely rails. With unrestricted freedom comes unpredictable interactions and inevitable bugs. Feel free to point out any other game that comes close to the scale of a Bethesda game without being full of bugs.
Just look at the mod sites to see how many bugfixes are out there. It’s been improved in the years since it launched, but it’s far from a bug free game.
I love Elden Ring and From Soft games in general, but the way they work is completely different.
There are no dialog trees in Elden Ring, no skills outside of combat, rudimentary crafting mechanics, rudimentary “enchanting” through things like affinity or ashes of war in ER.
Blatantly put, the focus is on completely different mechanics/systems that are much more simple, meaning much easier to not run into lots of bugs.
Admittedly haven’t played it yet, but BOTW was absolutely a masterpiece.
That said, the NPC scripting and interactions are way simpler than Bethesda games, and there’s very little in terms of even marginally open ended quests. It’s a great open world, but it’s pretty on rails story wise outside the order in which you tackled areas.
From experience I know I’ll be downvoted but it is a pretty goddamned impressive engine. And yes that is even considering that Skyrim was buggy, what, 12 years ago?
Agreed, the way they can preserve the position of any object, anywhere, with thousands of objects and an obscenely large world, is exceedingly impressive.
What I don’t get is why the hell any of that is a priority. It’s a neat party trick, but surely 99.9% of the gameplay value of arranging items for fun could be achieved on the player ship alone.
Like… it’s neat that I can pick up, interact with, and sell every single pen and fork on every table. But is it useful, with a carry weight system deincentivizing that? Fussing with my inventory to find what random crap I accidentally picked up that’s taking up my weight? Is that remarkably better than having a few key obvious and useful pickups? Is it worth giving up 60FPS on console, and having dedicated loading screens for nearly every door and ladder around?
Again, it’s cool that they have this massive procedurally generated world, that a player could spend thousands of hours in. But when that area is boring, does it really beat a handcrafted interesting world and narrative? What good is thousands of hours of content when players are bored and gone before 10 hours?
So like… from a tech perspective, I respect what Starfield is, and it’s very impressive, but as a game it feels like a waste of a lot of very talented work, suffering from a lack of good direction at the top.
Btw, Gothic (2? 3 at least) had already holes without loading screens.
Yeah I feel like people like to just bandwagon against Bethesda games, but no one makes games with as much detail as them. Hell, even Starfield has an insanely robust physics engine.
But! That’s cool for a game like KSP, where people craft rotating rings to drive circles in the artifical gravity. But in an RPG? Why do they need to track every spoons position? It just looks like they spent too much money on a too capable/complex engine and can’t really innovate because of it.
Play Skyrim and do fus to dah in a tavern or something, having all those physics objects feels amazing. Also being able to walk in a house and steal all the cutlery and junk just feels so immersive for being in the world imo. Not to mention the crafting systems in Fo4 and Starfield using those clutter objects for crafting systems.
Exactly. As a developer, the complexity of that engine blows me away. It’s a miracle they got as solid as they did honestly. If these critics are developers, they’re either lacking in empathy or they’re the kind of prodigy who cannot even comprehend the inability to think about such insanely complex systems with ease
It’s still buggy after 13 years of patches and re-releases.
For all the complaints about Starfield, being Bethesda-buggy wasn’t really one of them. It was possibly their most polished release.
Are you not from the same reality as me?
Did you even play it, or are you just jumping on the hate bandwagon? It’s hardly perfect, but I literally didn’t find any significant bugs in over 20 hours of playtime. The game has plenty of fundamental issues certainly, but the bugs are more of a meme than anything.
I did play it, thank you, and it did have multiple bugs I’ve experienced in previous games.
Not saying there weren’t bugs, but the consensus seemed to be that it was the most polished, bug-free title they’ve ever launched.
Edit: …which is a pretty low bar, I know. But it seemed more inline with the bugs that most “AAA” games tend to have at launch.
People said that but I played the game I’m sure over 100 hours and bugs impacted maybe .2% of my playing time.
People remember Skyrim bugs because they’re funny.
Well yeah, that’s what happens when you make enormous games with basically no player safely rails. With unrestricted freedom comes unpredictable interactions and inevitable bugs. Feel free to point out any other game that comes close to the scale of a Bethesda game without being full of bugs.
RDR2
Just look at the mod sites to see how many bugfixes are out there. It’s been improved in the years since it launched, but it’s far from a bug free game.
Elden Ring?
I love Elden Ring and From Soft games in general, but the way they work is completely different.
There are no dialog trees in Elden Ring, no skills outside of combat, rudimentary crafting mechanics, rudimentary “enchanting” through things like affinity or ashes of war in ER.
Blatantly put, the focus is on completely different mechanics/systems that are much more simple, meaning much easier to not run into lots of bugs.
It’s just not really a good comparison.
How quickly people forget how common it was to see Roach on rooftops in the Witcher 3.
GTAas an entire series has tons of reels of people doing ridiculous and hilarious things.
I’ve never understood the weird hate for Bethesda games in that regard.
Zelda TOTK?
Admittedly haven’t played it yet, but BOTW was absolutely a masterpiece.
That said, the NPC scripting and interactions are way simpler than Bethesda games, and there’s very little in terms of even marginally open ended quests. It’s a great open world, but it’s pretty on rails story wise outside the order in which you tackled areas.