All footage captured on Xbox Series X. This is the Digital Foundry deep dive in Bethesda Games Studios' highly ambitious Starfield. John Linneman shares his ...
I think digital foundry hit the nail on the head when they said “This isn’t a space simulation like No Man’s Sky or Star Citizen, it’s a Bethesda RPG with space as a background setting”. For a lot of people that’s not a bad thing, but the advertising for this game set expectations wrong.
Still, the seamlessness should be there, I don’t care how they mask it, but it should be there somewhat, again, this is 2023. It doesn’t even do simple fade to blacks, but full blown loading screens everywhere.
Also, travelling with the ship mechanic is incredibly, frustratingly cumbersome. For example, let’s say you wanted to jump to Sol for the first time, in Starfield, you’d do:
Select and mark your destination through map screen.
Somehow exit the map screen (either mash B or hold B and tap B again to exit the menu, cumbersome)
Highlight your weapons with the D-Pad and mash down button.
Highlight GRAV and mash the up button.
Enjoy game stripping controls away from you.
Go back into map screen to mark surface spot you want to go to.
Hold X.
Voilà, you’re there, insantly.
Why have an entire space mechanic, if you’re just gonna make it frustrating to interact with? Game is okay with teleporting you around at times, but not others as well. It literally disrespects your time, but not in a good way. Speaking of a game that disrespects your time well, it’s Elite, which the flow of events would be:
Open Galaxy Map with Y+Left D-Pad and select a destination.
Exit with tapping B, once.
Align your ship with the destination and throttle up.
Tap Y to initiate jump.
Enjoy being able to look around or (albeit barely) interact with your screens.
Open System Map with Y+Right D-Pad and select your destination.
Align the ship with destination.
Open Navigation Panel via X+Left D-Pad, select your target and enable Supercruise Assist.
Enjoy ship taking you there, feel free to interact with panels, photo mode, chat, etc.
Sure, it’s a lot more complicated as it is a sim, but see that you don’t really do redundant actions and you’re in control most of the time. Also, no loading screens as the jumping effect will mask the system change, and the “dropping from Supercruise” screen will mask the second loading screen. Funnily enough, you’ll wait more but feel like it took less.
I don’t want Starfield to be be Elite or Star Citizen, but it doesn’t even have the rudimentary systems in place. For example, I thought you were able to fly anywhere with your ship in the atmosphere and outside it. Just not seamlessly transition between those. That’d be “possible” to have as the game already does this technically. It just isn’t there for whatever reason.
Also this basically breaks exploration as the wast majority of travelling you’ll do is via the menus and loading screens due to the exact same issues. I remind you this game was marketed as an exploration game with 1000 and whatnot.
This is also the case for game play as well. There are just way too many loading screens. Especially weird when they already have airlocks which would mask vast majority of those perfectly.
Bethesda’s engine disallows that entirely. Everything has to be chunked into pieces with loading screens between – every previous Bethesda game has done that, so it’s not really a surprise.
Agree it would be neat, but I also already have No Man’s Sky, and I’m looking forward to Bethesda competing on story.
It blows my mind that Bethesda have owned id Software for over a decade and haven’t at any point got them to make a version of id Tech engine for their games.
There’s literally no reason the graphics wizards at id couldn’t make a Bethesda branch of the engine that uses similar or identical workflows to Creation but also employs all the best practices for a modern open world engine.
Like, modders have made their own Open Morrowind engine from scratch, in their spare fucking time. It runs all the same files and all the same mods work, without any of the drawbacks of the Gamebryo engine. It would be trivial for id’s engineers, with their experience and resources, to make something better. For some reason Bethesda just… keep bolting new shit to the creaking husk of their old engine.
I’d argue it would be smarter to upgrade CE to meet modern standards than creating a branch of id’s software while porting all of existing Bethesda tools.
we don’t have access to the source so we can’t really say things are bolted on. it’s also possible that code is removed as it’s made obsolete.
I don’t think you would have to create an entirely new engine to support elite dangerous type of warping, or elevators even now they could make the illusion better
There’s literally no reason the graphics wizards at id couldn’t make a Bethesda branch of the engine that uses similar or identical workflows to Creation but also employs all the best practices for a modern open world engine.
It’s hard to take your opinion seriously with this kind of statement. It has some real “It’s 2023, where is my flying car?” energy.
At the end of the day, it’s a lot easier to write a wishlist of game engine features than it is to actually develop said engine.
id Tech was already an open world engine with id Tech 5, after being a regular map-based engine for id Tech 4 and the Quake engines preceding it. It was then scaled back to normal maps for id Tech 6.
They can and have made it do whatever they want. What’s missing is the will from Bethesda to pay for it.
Yeah, as soon as it became known that this is still on the Creation Engine, I knew there would be loading screens galore. Seamless exploration of planets and actual infinite space flight is just not something this engine is capable of. Hell, I’m impressed they managed to squeeze even the little space flight out of it that they did.
An engine doesn’t disallow anything. The engine wouldn’t work with multiplayer, but then it did. The engine wasn’t 64-bit until it was. Bethesda could have added it, but they didn’t for whatever reason they have.
Fallout 4’s elevators were loading screens but you never faded to black and load in again. There are plenty of ways to mask a loading screen (as well just leaving a loading screen while keeping things menu-free), Bethesda just chose not to.
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Very unfortunate that it doesn’t have seamless surface to space travel. It’s 2023 Bethesda!
I think digital foundry hit the nail on the head when they said “This isn’t a space simulation like No Man’s Sky or Star Citizen, it’s a Bethesda RPG with space as a background setting”. For a lot of people that’s not a bad thing, but the advertising for this game set expectations wrong.
Still, the seamlessness should be there, I don’t care how they mask it, but it should be there somewhat, again, this is 2023. It doesn’t even do simple fade to blacks, but full blown loading screens everywhere.
Also, travelling with the ship mechanic is incredibly, frustratingly cumbersome. For example, let’s say you wanted to jump to Sol for the first time, in Starfield, you’d do:
Select and mark your destination through map screen.
Somehow exit the map screen (either mash B or hold B and tap B again to exit the menu, cumbersome)
Highlight your weapons with the D-Pad and mash down button.
Highlight GRAV and mash the up button.
Enjoy game stripping controls away from you.
Go back into map screen to mark surface spot you want to go to.
Hold X.
Voilà, you’re there, insantly.
Why have an entire space mechanic, if you’re just gonna make it frustrating to interact with? Game is okay with teleporting you around at times, but not others as well. It literally disrespects your time, but not in a good way. Speaking of a game that disrespects your time well, it’s Elite, which the flow of events would be:
Open Galaxy Map with Y+Left D-Pad and select a destination.
Exit with tapping B, once.
Align your ship with the destination and throttle up.
Tap Y to initiate jump.
Enjoy being able to look around or (albeit barely) interact with your screens.
Open System Map with Y+Right D-Pad and select your destination.
Align the ship with destination.
Open Navigation Panel via X+Left D-Pad, select your target and enable Supercruise Assist.
Enjoy ship taking you there, feel free to interact with panels, photo mode, chat, etc.
Sure, it’s a lot more complicated as it is a sim, but see that you don’t really do redundant actions and you’re in control most of the time. Also, no loading screens as the jumping effect will mask the system change, and the “dropping from Supercruise” screen will mask the second loading screen. Funnily enough, you’ll wait more but feel like it took less.
I don’t want Starfield to be be Elite or Star Citizen, but it doesn’t even have the rudimentary systems in place. For example, I thought you were able to fly anywhere with your ship in the atmosphere and outside it. Just not seamlessly transition between those. That’d be “possible” to have as the game already does this technically. It just isn’t there for whatever reason.
Also this basically breaks exploration as the wast majority of travelling you’ll do is via the menus and loading screens due to the exact same issues. I remind you this game was marketed as an exploration game with 1000 and whatnot.
This is also the case for game play as well. There are just way too many loading screens. Especially weird when they already have airlocks which would mask vast majority of those perfectly.
I agree the current UX is bad but I don’t want seamless transitions… I just want a nicer UI.
But now space travel is reduced to fast travel through menus which sucks so bad
It’s not. Most interplanetary travel can be done without leaving the cockpit screen. Activate the scanner, point at your destination, press A, then X.
Bethesda’s engine disallows that entirely. Everything has to be chunked into pieces with loading screens between – every previous Bethesda game has done that, so it’s not really a surprise.
Agree it would be neat, but I also already have No Man’s Sky, and I’m looking forward to Bethesda competing on story.
It blows my mind that Bethesda have owned id Software for over a decade and haven’t at any point got them to make a version of id Tech engine for their games.
There’s literally no reason the graphics wizards at id couldn’t make a Bethesda branch of the engine that uses similar or identical workflows to Creation but also employs all the best practices for a modern open world engine.
Like, modders have made their own Open Morrowind engine from scratch, in their spare fucking time. It runs all the same files and all the same mods work, without any of the drawbacks of the Gamebryo engine. It would be trivial for id’s engineers, with their experience and resources, to make something better. For some reason Bethesda just… keep bolting new shit to the creaking husk of their old engine.
All about that profit
I’d argue it would be smarter to upgrade CE to meet modern standards than creating a branch of id’s software while porting all of existing Bethesda tools.
we don’t have access to the source so we can’t really say things are bolted on. it’s also possible that code is removed as it’s made obsolete.
I don’t think you would have to create an entirely new engine to support elite dangerous type of warping, or elevators even now they could make the illusion better
It’s hard to take your opinion seriously with this kind of statement. It has some real “It’s 2023, where is my flying car?” energy.
At the end of the day, it’s a lot easier to write a wishlist of game engine features than it is to actually develop said engine.
Sounds like you’re the one who doesn’t get it.
id Tech was already an open world engine with id Tech 5, after being a regular map-based engine for id Tech 4 and the Quake engines preceding it. It was then scaled back to normal maps for id Tech 6.
They can and have made it do whatever they want. What’s missing is the will from Bethesda to pay for it.
Fallout 4 came out in 2015. They had plenty of time to start work on a new engine since then.
Yeah, as soon as it became known that this is still on the Creation Engine, I knew there would be loading screens galore. Seamless exploration of planets and actual infinite space flight is just not something this engine is capable of. Hell, I’m impressed they managed to squeeze even the little space flight out of it that they did.
people on lemmy keep telling me it’s a “new engine” tho just like fallout was and skyrim was, it’s not all just morrowind underneath no no
An engine doesn’t disallow anything. The engine wouldn’t work with multiplayer, but then it did. The engine wasn’t 64-bit until it was. Bethesda could have added it, but they didn’t for whatever reason they have.
Fallout 4’s elevators were loading screens but you never faded to black and load in again. There are plenty of ways to mask a loading screen (as well just leaving a loading screen while keeping things menu-free), Bethesda just chose not to.