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Opinion: Starfield Is Not Next-Gen
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Member UncommonPosts: 12,599
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You say gameplay will be gameplay and just dismiss it... but at the end of the day, IMHO.. that is the ONLY thing that matters.
This game is still really high on my list.
All time classic MY NEW FAVORITE POST! (Keep laying those bricks)
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Maybe, they count as usual on the modding community to fix their mess?
Nowadays, I am still playing Skyrim which looks beautiful with mods. Hopefully I will enjoy Starfield the same way.
Also, a lot of people still don't have the latest and greatest GPU. Just because you support scalpers and bought an overpriced card, doesn't mean everyone else is like you.
"But technology matters. Graphics matter."
Graphics matters in the context of there should be improvements compared to their previous games. There are.
As for technology? Bethda will be releasing a final product space game that scam citizen fans have been waiting for..... how many years? I know this because I'm in the starfield subreddit, full of scam citizen fanbois and they're hyping starfield to no end.
And to be more frank, people who love Bethesda games (same with Bioware) play the games for the story and RPG, not pretty face graphics ( thats where the modders always came in).
Neither Bethesda and Bioware were ever good at rendering high quality/high detailed realistic looking characters.
CDProjekt Red is also no different with the Witcher games and latest CP2077, except for the cinematics.
What I find far more impressive, is that Bethesda is actually going to release a finished game in similar scope to Star Citizen, what Chris Roberts is still unable to deliver after many years of delays and endless feature creep! (coming out of the mouth of an day-1 backer).
Right now Doom Eternal at 4k, 60fps and raytracing enabled feels more ‘next gen’ to me than anything out there, including prettier games. Perhaps Guilty Gear Strife too, but all because of buttery smooth gameplay, insane optimization, short loading times and seamless transition between cutscenes and gameplay. I honestly couldn’t name any other title doing that moniker somewhat justice.
/Cheers,
Lahnmir
Kyleran on yours sincerely
'But there are many. You can play them entirely solo, and even offline. Also, you are wrong by default.'
Ikcin in response to yours sincerely debating whether or not single-player offline MMOs exist...
'This does not apply just to ED but SC or any other game. What they will get is Rebirth/X4, likely prettier but equally underwhelming and pointless.
It is incredibly difficult to design some meaningfull leg content that would fit a space ship game - simply because it is not a leg game.
It is just huge resource waste....'
Gdemami absolutely not being an armchair developer
On the topic of 'next-gen', I don't think that's what Bethesda really meant, but they did word it so ambiguously, and ambitiously on purpose, because they knew people would think exactly that - 'Next Gen' in general. A bit weaselly, PR-designed approach, typical of big game studios - as long as you can't prove they're lying, they will even claim the game will have 16 times the detail or some other nonsense.
While in reality it might have simply meant next-gen for Bethesda, as in 'we're finally moving past the Oblivion and Skyrim tech'. So 'Bethesda's next-gen' might actually mean just that, with no link to the broader meaning of 'next-gen' in general.
It is clear that in terms of visual quality the game will be nowhere near to what was presented or implied with the first Starfield teasers. It might be Bethesda's own internal engine revolution, but that's it. Personally, I think that if they manage to stop terrorising players with their awful character design and animations, that alone would be a great step forward.
But Bethesda used it, so they have to live up to it and Poorna has done one of his typically surgical dissections of the graphics and performance. Clearly the game does not live up to the label Bethesda are trying to put on it.
I don't need it to be next gen to play it and it does not need to be next gen to be a great game, but they said it was so the kick back is well deserved.
Will it look better on the PC, well I won't be holding my breath.
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Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
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I would rather play a game like Starfield with a huge open world, proper rpg elements, space combat, exploration, base building, proper customization and most importantly a huge mod support than a "pretty" sony game with the same old shit that every fucking of their games had in the last 5-6 years.
In your eyes graphics is the only critaria that makes a game next gen or not which is mind boggling to me. The only difference between most of sony games are graphical upgrades, story and couple of combat tweaks here and there. I'm not shitting on these games btw. I love these type of games. The argument here is "next gen".
For me "next gen" means innovation. I'm not saying Starfield is the epidome of the innovation here but compered to the games that only challange themselves with more graphical upgrades, it is hell of a more innovative game in my eyes.
While I can enjoy one of those games for couple of hours, I can't even imagine how many hours I will put into Starfield with 1000 planets (I know most of them are barren and empty) and a modding community which is ready to create wonders on those planets. Imagine the Star Wars themed modes that we will get in the future...
Obviously for those of use that have dumped thousands of hours into each Bethesda game, that's not going to be a deal breaker.
But it's still more than visuals. It just happens graphics is the earliest lead indicator we have for seeing what degree of changes was made.
And as Scot pointed out. If Bethesda themselves are the ones claiming next gen, then it puts the onus on them to put out. Last I knew they still hadn't put in a fully functioning version of PBR into 76 and their version of subsurface was to blur light over the edge of a model. If they want to be called next gen and they can't even handle a handful of raster lights and a cubemap.
This stands out, because it brings up questions about how the performance may be bottlenecked. If they are still using a raster based lighting system for far-render terrain, then they are storing rather large shadow maps in your memory most likely. This stands out, because memory management and leaks is one of Bethesda long-term issues with their engine. This would also be a more costly solution ironically than if they had implemented a decent version of ray tracing for global scene lighting. A single raytraced light for large scale terrain has an overall smaller performance hit than the equivalent with raster.
Something I found interesting with that Digital Foundry video is something I feel was an oversight on their analysis as well. Being object density and distance of details in terrain. By default, Skyrim, Fallout 4, or even 76 may not render too much by just generic contrast, but that isn't a hard engine limitation, that's a presented settings limitation. The engine can already render very dense terrain detail and foliage out to massive draw distances, assuming you modify system settings properly and your hardware can handle it. How much they actually tuned that up ends up being debatable. I'm sure it's got room for getting more optimized, but that also falls back into the memory management realm that Bethesda has been historically bad at.
The lighting section was also off on things as well. The callout of flat lighting was largely on the fault of the devs for their heavy use of area lights uniformly lighting surfaces and having shadow casting disabled most of the time. That's why Vault 1080 even exists as a tech showcase, using cast directional lights and consistently enabled object occlusion. Even volumetric light and fog. None of that is new as of Starfield. It's just finally being leveraged better by the devs that stuck it in, in the first place. One would hope that means they spent time optimizing it at least, but point here was that there's a reason lighting overhaul mods look so damn good for the current games already, and Starfield is not making a notable jump there.
There's tons more than can be nitpicked, but the point of this was to demonstrate the reason some may have concern. Simply being, the amount of improvement over what the engine is known to already have been capable of, speaks a lot to the amount which the devs were actually improve the engine and by extension the game mechanics/gameplay. When Bethesda wants to tout how much effort they've put into upgrading the engine, and calling it next-gen, it doesn't really seem to stack up under scrutiny on that end. Especially considering the classic rendering methods they use well, are also features known to already exist in the last gen of the engine.
Ultimately means that there's a relatively narrow band in which we're seeing new tech, and it's likely focused into specific parts of the game and gameplay (like the space/flight section, long-distance lighting) while other parts are largely untouched (like ground combat, character animations, cubemaps, raster/projection lighting, object rendering).
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2024: 47 years on the Net.
After a year or so and the modders fix it and make it a good game, I might try it after I see reviews from a lot of players that are not just fanboi's
Agree and SO SO do not agree. Will try it out...but
Will not be anywhere near release that I will try it out.
Have learned that lesson at least :P
Still rocking a 1080 vid card. Gonna get 200% value out of that card and if and when it dies, then I will go get a new card. So all the fancy graphics and such, meh, care a lot more that the game is fun, and runs decent at least. So will be a while after release for me.
It doesn't matter, though - the fans who idolize Bethesda will automatically buy anything they release regardless of anything (the visual style or the performance or amount of bugs), same goes for people who only enjoy repetitive grindy activities in games and don't care for anything else. Bethesda could've made Starfield look like Minecraft and plenty of people would buy it anyway. Whether you like it or not, that's just how it is.