I feel personally baffled by the continued division of the two. Talking as if graphics are entirely separate to the gameplay in the context of an interactive 3D/simulated world is a wee bit strange.
There are things there that matter with how the engine can handle objects, object loading, physics, differing gameplay models and controls, that all butt right up against the ultimate visual presentation and experience.
The way the gunplay works, the way movement and pathing works, The difference between doing something of foot as a person versus controlling a vehicle (especially using a different physics model). If you're talking about an extrapolated RPG experience sure you can push the visuals and gameplay apart, in a hybrid action RPG with real time combat and gameplay, there's a certain degree of detail and stability in quality that needs to be achieved.
We can already poke discussions about where Starfield may have had to expressly compromise on such things directly because of the engine, like with the past discussion held about the fact planets and on-foot seems to be separated from space flight by load screens and scripted landing/takeoff sequences. It's not just a visual gimmick to make a planet you can seamlessly fly towards and land on. It changes things like what it means for in-atmosphere vehicles and flight, if there's any at all. It changes whether or not we could expect extended interactions between things in orbit outside of very fixed scripted events.
It limits gameplay as much as it's a bottleneck on visual presentation and quality. To a degree, that can be lived with. Compromises can be made and an enjoyable game can still be had. But how many compromises until that no longer works?
It becomes the point where, yeah, Starfield will probably still be a fun game. But you also have that lingering question, "How much better could the game have been if they weren't struggling against their own technology?"
Hoe many times do we get to ask ourselves that kind of question as new games come out and you get some new horror story about development on 76, or 2077, or Anthem?
Compromises measured against what exactly? Against some ideal standard of what could be done or what others have done in games that focused on something that this game is not focusing on?
Let's take space flight as an example. Space flight sims with user controlled take off and landings have existed since the 8 bit computer days with the original Elite and maybe others. But yet when Bioware made their Mass Effect games, which were all about spaceships travelling the galaxy, which were developed many computer tech generations later, they abstracted all of that with cut-scenes. You never actually flew ships at all in the ME games except for one atmospheric city chase scene in one of the ME2 DLC.
Was that a "compromise" or a design decision because they weren't trying to make a space flight sim? Because that wasn't their focus?
Have current games that use ray tracing set the standard that all future games must now and forever use ray tracing or whatever replaces that in 5 years? Is not using ray tracing in a new game a compromise?
Before we start talking about compromises and how many are too much we first have to figure out where our idea of what are and aren't compromises are coming from. I think some of that is coming from projecting our own wishes of what would be cool to also have. Nothing wrong with that except when you start judging what a game decided to do against your idealized wish list.
And I'm not just talking about this game. I feel the same way about any game that gets compared to some utopian development standard.
Games can make design choices and chose what features they want to develop and which they're not going to spend too much time on. I don't see that so much as compromises as I do as focused and sensible development.
"Social media gives legions of idiots the right to speak when they once only spoke at a bar after a glass of wine, without harming the community ... but now they have the same right to speak as a Nobel Prize winner. It's the invasion of the idiots”
― Umberto Eco
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?” ― CD PROJEKT RED
I feel personally baffled by the continued division of the two. Talking as if graphics are entirely separate to the gameplay in the context of an interactive 3D/simulated world is a wee bit strange.
There are things there that matter with how the engine can handle objects, object loading, physics, differing gameplay models and controls, that all butt right up against the ultimate visual presentation and experience.
The way the gunplay works, the way movement and pathing works, The difference between doing something of foot as a person versus controlling a vehicle (especially using a different physics model). If you're talking about an extrapolated RPG experience sure you can push the visuals and gameplay apart, in a hybrid action RPG with real time combat and gameplay, there's a certain degree of detail and stability in quality that needs to be achieved.
We can already poke discussions about where Starfield may have had to expressly compromise on such things directly because of the engine, like with the past discussion held about the fact planets and on-foot seems to be separated from space flight by load screens and scripted landing/takeoff sequences. It's not just a visual gimmick to make a planet you can seamlessly fly towards and land on. It changes things like what it means for in-atmosphere vehicles and flight, if there's any at all. It changes whether or not we could expect extended interactions between things in orbit outside of very fixed scripted events.
It limits gameplay as much as it's a bottleneck on visual presentation and quality. To a degree, that can be lived with. Compromises can be made and an enjoyable game can still be had. But how many compromises until that no longer works?
It becomes the point where, yeah, Starfield will probably still be a fun game. But you also have that lingering question, "How much better could the game have been if they weren't struggling against their own technology?"
Hoe many times do we get to ask ourselves that kind of question as new games come out and you get some new horror story about development on 76, or 2077, or Anthem?
Compromises measured against what exactly? Against some ideal standard of what could be done or what others have done in games that focused on something that this game is not focusing on?
Let's take space flight as an example. Space flight sims with user controlled take off and landings have existed since the 8 bit computer days with the original Elite and maybe others. But yet when Bioware made their Mass Effect games, which were all about spaceships travelling the galaxy, which were developed many computer tech generations later, they abstracted all of that with cut-scenes. You never actually flew ships at all in the ME games except for one atmospheric city chase scene in one of the ME2 DLC.
Was that a "compromise" or a design decision because they weren't trying to make a space flight sim? Because that wasn't their focus?
Have current games that use ray tracing set the standard that all future games must now and forever use ray tracing or whatever replaces that in 5 years? Is not using ray tracing in a new game a compromise?
Before we start talking about compromises and how many are too much we first have to figure out where our idea of what are and aren't compromises are coming from. I think some of that is coming from projecting our own wishes of what would be cool to also have. Nothing wrong with that except when you start judging what a game decided to do against your idealized wish list.
And I'm not just talking about this game. I feel the same way about any game that gets compared to some utopian development standard.
Games can make design choices and chose what features they want to develop and which they're not going to spend too much time on. I don't see that so much as compromises as I do as focused and sensible development.
Well for a short point on your ME example.
Because the game wasn't about the ships. You weren't a pilot and the narrative and gameplay focus was pretty much strictly about your antics on-foot with everything else extrapolated to cutscenes.
Bethesda is already not doing that. They put you in the pilot's seat. You fly the ship.
This makes the apt comparison then the games where you do the same kind of things, fill the same roles. Not the one where you don't.
When Bethesda has to handwave landing cutscenes and a lack of atmospheric flight as "really just not that important to the player", that does not ring as a concerted design decision to make a specific user experience. That sounds more like a dismissal of a different decision they are being less upfront about.
And it was considered a compromise in this case because of aforementioned gameplay choices that are lost. The act of moving between atmosphere and space is less so the argument than the hard division generated in mechanics and limitation of potential play options. Not getting to fly or drive a vehicle in atmosphere is limiting. The fact you can fly in space, demonstrates that you are and have both narrative and game-mechanic play ability.
Yet, there's a hard division between the two play modes.
Certainly, we should account for what is on our personal wish list versus what's actually been presented or what the design team were aiming for.
But that's the thing, and that's why my last line was there. We've seen time and again not our wishlists as customers not being met, but the devs from different studios running directly into the inability to meet ends on their own ambitions. 76 is a very pointed example of that, with some of those people who had worked and struggled on that title rolling right into Starfield even. When they had to make repeat compromises and backpedal on problems for one project, what makes you think that's not a factor in their next equally ambitious project?
It's really not a question of if there have been compromises made in development. It's only a question of how big those compromises were and how many of them there were.
EDIT: As for the ray tracing comment, that was a matter of efficiency specifically in relation to illumination of large/distant terrain.
Certainly, not everything needs to make ray tracing "standard issue", and there's many advantages to still using raster based lighting in many scenarios.
Large/distant terrain is distinctly not one of them. Raytracing frontloads it's cost in lighting through the ray count and number of bounces.
It doesn't matter how large of an area or how detailed, the cost for a raytraced light source is largely fixed.
The same cannot be said about a raster light. As object complexity increases and as scale increases, both of those impact the time and complexity of a raster based light's render.
A ray traced light for large/far terrain as a result would actually be better for any system that can leverage them, than raster will ever be.
That's not calling ray traced lights the future of everything, nor necessary for everything. However, intelligently applying them where they will be of most benefit to performance does make sense, especially if one is trying to do a lot of other ambitious things as well in runtime.
I get it. Starfield opened the door to being criticized for not being a full on space sim by adding something (dogfights in space) usually associated with full on spaceflight sims. Kindof how Cyberpunk opened the door to being compared to GTA by letting us drive cars.
The thing is I don't see driving cars in Cyberpunk or take offs and landings in Starfield as core features that matter. They are not games about those things even if they threw in some of it. They are about other things.
Compromises would be about not doing their core features well for... reasons.
I'll let you know how I feel about Starfield after I experience its RPGness. How character development feels, what the quests are like, how I can relate to and join/betray factions.
"Social media gives legions of idiots the right to speak when they once only spoke at a bar after a glass of wine, without harming the community ... but now they have the same right to speak as a Nobel Prize winner. It's the invasion of the idiots”
― Umberto Eco
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?” ― CD PROJEKT RED
I'd share that opinion better if ships, ship customization, and flight/space physics weren't one of the big new things to the engine for Bethesda. I previously outlined how most of even the lighting and other mechanics we've seen seem to largely be things the engine was already capable of.
The exception ends up being the ship and outer space. They seemed to spend quite a while implementing something for it to be getting compared to a commuter vehicle.
Ships are pretty clearly supposed to be pretty important and personal to the player, something you customize, upgrade, dogfight, and explore in. Not just collecting a series of them to get from point A to point B.
Bethesda is the one that wants to draw relationships to sims and scientific/technical depth with their gene editing, accurately modeled ice balls and asteroids, barren planets, golden worlds, and every other buzzword Todd has come up with.
Cyberpunk opened the doors to scrutiny by showing off gameplay that ultimately didn't even exist between early showcases to release. The comparison to GTA likely had more to do with their claims about the city, crowd AI, and other tech.
Again, this isn't about comparing things to a wish list. But to the devs own words, their own ambitions. Again why 76 is so relevant there as well, it's development woes, it's compromises and cutbacks, and what that generally spells for the next project by the same company and even some of the same people.
As said previously. It's not like this is claiming Starfield is going to be a bad game. It's just the problem of "How much better could the game have been if they weren't struggling against their own technology?"
It's not a question of if there's been problems. We've already had one leak indicating such. That's not surprising at all. Just cycles back again to what compromises exactly were made, how many, and how great of a scale. The ultimate question being if it was worth it to take the route they did with development, or could have achieved so much more if not for what is on some level, hubris.
I don't think the author understands the limitations of technology and how developers get around these limitations. With an RTX 3090, I cannot play CyberPunk 2077 with raytracing at a decent framerate. Despite how CDProject Red makes the environment look large and immersive, it's a fairly small world with all the poly budget dedicated to the ground level and a 10m radius from the player. You get outside this area and its fairly blocky. Bethesda world building tends to be open. It's easy to make something look good and run well when the player is limited to a 30m x 30m area. If they were to be at the cutting edge of graphic technology, the gameplay and stability of the game would suffer.
I don't think the author understands the limitations of technology and how developers get around these limitations. With an RTX 3090, I cannot play CyberPunk 2077 with raytracing at a decent framerate. Despite how CDProject Red makes the environment look large and immersive, it's a fairly small world with all the poly budget dedicated to the ground level and a 10m radius from the player. You get outside this area and its fairly blocky. Bethesda world building tends to be open. It's easy to make something look good and run well when the player is limited to a 30m x 30m area. If they were to be at the cutting edge of graphic technology, the gameplay and stability of the game would suffer.
I don't see that, if Bethesda had said "It is not next gen but as you know we only do open worlds." That would be fine, but they are marketing it as next gen that's the issue. “the power of next-gen technology” is not about gameplay either as has been suggested, that is a reference to graphics.
As I mentioned before the game looks good enough for me, I won't be shedding a tear its not like CP2077, but you can't market a game as next gen when it is clearly not.
I don't think the author understands the limitations of technology and how developers get around these limitations. With an RTX 3090, I cannot play CyberPunk 2077 with raytracing at a decent framerate. Despite how CDProject Red makes the environment look large and immersive, it's a fairly small world with all the poly budget dedicated to the ground level and a 10m radius from the player. You get outside this area and its fairly blocky. Bethesda world building tends to be open. It's easy to make something look good and run well when the player is limited to a 30m x 30m area. If they were to be at the cutting edge of graphic technology, the gameplay and stability of the game would suffer.
I don't see that, if Bethesda had said "It is not next gen but as you know we only do open worlds." That would be fine, but they are marketing it as next gen that's the issue. “the power of next-gen technology” is not about gameplay either as has been suggested, that is a reference to graphics.
As I mentioned before the game looks good enough for me, I won't be shedding a tear its not like CP2077, but you can't market a game as next gen when it is clearly not.
Perhaps they were referring to next gen npc character interaction tech? Next gen story telling tech? Heck, next gen UI tech even?
I actually don't think of graphics as being first in tech, perhaps because I've been involved in next gen development of software which doesn't really have graphics outside of the UI and some reports.
But our processing tech, light years of improvement....
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
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I can see their engine is not next gen, they upgrade to cope with the theme and current expectations on visuals but you can see on the details they are using traditional methods to pull off an open-world space exploration.
Such as how the landings and transitions to planets are no seamless thing they are on-rails loading map levels in, so the planets in space are just textures not physicalized stuff. That works for what they are going for, not for space sim but for space game so they don't really need to consider those details, but the fact they need on-rails transitions to new maps on the same open-world hints at the limitations of Creation Engine.
Also remember that when CP2077 failed to deliver next gen on consoles CD Project was hauled over the coals for it. Bethesda clearly is not making a new gen game, but saying it is, likewise they need pulling up.
I'd share that opinion better if ships, ship customization, and flight/space physics weren't one of the big new things to the engine for Bethesda. I previously outlined how most of even the lighting and other mechanics we've seen seem to largely be things the engine was already capable of.
The exception ends up being the ship and outer space. They seemed to spend quite a while implementing something for it to be getting compared to a commuter vehicle.
Ships are pretty clearly supposed to be pretty important and personal to the player, something you customize, upgrade, dogfight, and explore in. Not just collecting a series of them to get from point A to point B.
Bethesda is the one that wants to draw relationships to sims and scientific/technical depth with their gene editing, accurately modeled ice balls and asteroids, barren planets, golden worlds, and every other buzzword Todd has come up with.
Cyberpunk opened the doors to scrutiny by showing off gameplay that ultimately didn't even exist between early showcases to release. The comparison to GTA likely had more to do with their claims about the city, crowd AI, and other tech.
Again, this isn't about comparing things to a wish list. But to the devs own words, their own ambitions. Again why 76 is so relevant there as well, it's development woes, it's compromises and cutbacks, and what that generally spells for the next project by the same company and even some of the same people.
As said previously. It's not like this is claiming Starfield is going to be a bad game. It's just the problem of "How much better could the game have been if they weren't struggling against their own technology?"
It's not a question of if there's been problems. We've already had one leak indicating such. That's not surprising at all. Just cycles back again to what compromises exactly were made, how many, and how great of a scale. The ultimate question being if it was worth it to take the route they did with development, or could have achieved so much more if not for what is on some level, hubris.
You're leaving out a very important part of the equation.
Ray-traced atmospheric flight transitions are great, unless you can't run them at any more than 30 FPS on the majority of the PC yserbase's rigs.
Specifically with the crypto squeeze on video cards over the past decade, this idea that pushing the envelope graphically is even the best route to go is not set in stone.
Most folks can't play CyberPunk with ray-tracing on. Why spend development dollars implementing a feature the majority of your consumer base won't even be able to experience?
Ask CIG how making all these things seamless is working out performance-wise for their userbase, even without large groups of players on-screen.
On that end, there are lighter CPU based ray tracing solutions that can be run alternative to the heavy GPU bound models that were introduced and leveraged by Nvidia. Even path tracing is viable alternative there.
The irony also remains that the alternative raster based lighting solution to large/distant lighting, is still going to be more taxing on those older rigs. It's a distinct technical bottleneck that deals with quickly multiplying object complexity and shadow map data with a raster based model.
You're not saving your performance by not evolving your rendering technology.
On that end, there are lighter CPU based ray tracing solutions that can be run alternative to the heavy GPU bound models that were introduced and leveraged by Nvidia. Even path tracing is viable alternative there.
The irony also remains that the alternative raster based lighting solution to large/distant lighting, is still going to be more taxing on those older rigs. It's a distinct technical bottleneck that deals with quickly multiplying object complexity and shadow map data with a raster based model.
You're not saving your performance by not evolving your rendering technology.
You won't get away with not including rasterization, though. Not enough of the playerbase can even feasibly turn ray-tracing on to limit it in this way.
So you'll still have to develop rasterization lighting for these scenes and environments, unless I'm missing something about it?
I would bet $100 that Starfield is going to come out on consoles too. They can't design it to use the highest PC hardware, they have to make something that will run decently on today's consoles. Practical choices and compromises have to be made.
Otherwise, they could end up in an endless cycle of writing the game, and then having to upgrade their engine every few years to try to keep up with the latest in hardware. That leads to a bloated massive game that requires the best hardware, and never releases.
I would bet $100 that Starfield is going to come out on consoles too. They can't design it to use the highest PC hardware, they have to make something that will run decently on today's consoles. Practical choices and compromises have to be made.
Otherwise, they could end up in an endless cycle of writing the game, and then having to upgrade their engine every few years to try to keep up with the latest in hardware. That leads to a bloated massive game that requires the best hardware, and never releases.
This is a point I definitely cede to @Uwakionna's arguments: if they are, in fact, designing it to be playable on current consoles, Todd was silly to play up a next-gen label.
Christopher Coke: Quick we have not sold enough hardware this month. I need something controversial, so we get people visisting this website, and show our hardware sponsors how great we are.....
Poorna: Hold my beer, ....inc
Since you're name checking me (which is odd because I literally had nothing to do with this article), you should probably know this site hasn't had a single paid hardware sponsor in the entire time I've been here since 2013. At the same time, I'm having trouble thinking of a particularly controversial hardware review we've done. Can you name one? In the tech world, being controversial just to earn clicks almost always blows up in your face. No one here is paid by clicks or sales/commissions either.
Your comment can really be summed up as "I don't like Chris" and "I disagree with Poorna," but that's some venom you've got there.
Personally I think we should all randomly @ you in various posts.
All time classic MY NEW FAVORITE POST! (Keep laying those bricks)
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Article is spot on. I know SO MANY people that are skipping this game, me included. And I am genuinely going out of my way to talk more and more people away from this game.
Article is spot on. I know SO MANY people that are skipping this game, me included. And I am genuinely going out of my way to talk more and more people away from this game.
All because you do not believe it has "next gen" graphics? Seems... an odd windmill to choose.
All time classic MY NEW FAVORITE POST! (Keep laying those bricks)
"I should point out that no other company has shipped out a beta on a disc before this." - Official Mortal Online Lead Community Moderator
Proudly wearing the Harbinger badge since Dec 23, 2017.
Coined the phrase "Role-Playing a Development Team" January 2018
"Oddly Slap is the main reason I stay in these forums." - Mystichaze April 9th 2018
Regarding No Man's Sky. I see some odd takes with its mechanics being used as a standard. I feel like maybe people using NMS as a standard either haven't played a lot, or at all.
Flight really shouldn't be held up as a
standard because it is super simplistic. Touchdown and takeoff mechanics really aren't different than what we were shown in the Starfield trailer. It is
push button, just like we saw in the Starfield trailer only NMS has a
scripted event instead of a cutscene. Once you push the "landing button" in NMS you lose control of your ship.
According to Bethesda you can land
anywhere on a planet similarly to NMS. In NMS you still have to find a
place that can accept a landing. A LOT of terrain doesn't allow ship
landing. Are scripted events without cutscenes better than those with? Apparently some people here think so, but I feel it's being vastly overstated especially when being used as a "Next Gen" argument.
Combat in NMS is also one of the
weakest points of the game. FO76 ground combat is by far superior to the
experience in NMS. That's because combat in NMS really isn't a main
activity. Space combat in NMS is point and shoot. A couple clicks to
shoot shields down and a couple more to blow up the enemy. The various weapon types in NMS fall into 2 categories - those you replace asap and those that get the job done.
So, from the trailer I agree that Starfield doesn't feel next gen, but then most games that I see marketed that way don't live up to that marketing blurb which means different things to different studios. Recently it seems to mean Ray Tracing and photo realistic graphics. Those are nice, but not the most important thing to me.
And I also think there are quite a few folks here who would chafe at the amount of texture and object pop-in that happens as you approach a planet.
NMS is an awesome exploration game, but it really isn't because they've created a seamless transition onto planets with high graphical fidelity. They had to make compromises, too.
Again, though, I won't argue that Todd and Bethesda didn't pull a CDPR so far with how they've approached marketing Starfield.
I would point out a difference in that anecdote in in-atmosphere vehicles and flight mechanics. The ability to use your ship to navigate and scan terrain without flying back up into space.
A mechanical gameplay component missing by pushing landing into a scripted sequence initiated in orbit, as opposed to being done as a much shorter sequence pertaining to landing in a general spot.
Comments
Let's take space flight as an example. Space flight sims with user controlled take off and landings have existed since the 8 bit computer days with the original Elite and maybe others. But yet when Bioware made their Mass Effect games, which were all about spaceships travelling the galaxy, which were developed many computer tech generations later, they abstracted all of that with cut-scenes. You never actually flew ships at all in the ME games except for one atmospheric city chase scene in one of the ME2 DLC.
Was that a "compromise" or a design decision because they weren't trying to make a space flight sim? Because that wasn't their focus?
Have current games that use ray tracing set the standard that all future games must now and forever use ray tracing or whatever replaces that in 5 years? Is not using ray tracing in a new game a compromise?
Before we start talking about compromises and how many are too much we first have to figure out where our idea of what are and aren't compromises are coming from. I think some of that is coming from projecting our own wishes of what would be cool to also have. Nothing wrong with that except when you start judging what a game decided to do against your idealized wish list.
And I'm not just talking about this game. I feel the same way about any game that gets compared to some utopian development standard.
Games can make design choices and chose what features they want to develop and which they're not going to spend too much time on. I don't see that so much as compromises as I do as focused and sensible development.
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?”
― CD PROJEKT RED
Because the game wasn't about the ships. You weren't a pilot and the narrative and gameplay focus was pretty much strictly about your antics on-foot with everything else extrapolated to cutscenes.
Bethesda is already not doing that. They put you in the pilot's seat. You fly the ship.
This makes the apt comparison then the games where you do the same kind of things, fill the same roles. Not the one where you don't.
When Bethesda has to handwave landing cutscenes and a lack of atmospheric flight as "really just not that important to the player", that does not ring as a concerted design decision to make a specific user experience. That sounds more like a dismissal of a different decision they are being less upfront about.
And it was considered a compromise in this case because of aforementioned gameplay choices that are lost. The act of moving between atmosphere and space is less so the argument than the hard division generated in mechanics and limitation of potential play options. Not getting to fly or drive a vehicle in atmosphere is limiting. The fact you can fly in space, demonstrates that you are and have both narrative and game-mechanic play ability.
Yet, there's a hard division between the two play modes.
Certainly, we should account for what is on our personal wish list versus what's actually been presented or what the design team were aiming for.
But that's the thing, and that's why my last line was there. We've seen time and again not our wishlists as customers not being met, but the devs from different studios running directly into the inability to meet ends on their own ambitions. 76 is a very pointed example of that, with some of those people who had worked and struggled on that title rolling right into Starfield even. When they had to make repeat compromises and backpedal on problems for one project, what makes you think that's not a factor in their next equally ambitious project?
It's really not a question of if there have been compromises made in development. It's only a question of how big those compromises were and how many of them there were.
EDIT: As for the ray tracing comment, that was a matter of efficiency specifically in relation to illumination of large/distant terrain.
Certainly, not everything needs to make ray tracing "standard issue", and there's many advantages to still using raster based lighting in many scenarios.
Large/distant terrain is distinctly not one of them. Raytracing frontloads it's cost in lighting through the ray count and number of bounces.
It doesn't matter how large of an area or how detailed, the cost for a raytraced light source is largely fixed.
The same cannot be said about a raster light. As object complexity increases and as scale increases, both of those impact the time and complexity of a raster based light's render.
A ray traced light for large/far terrain as a result would actually be better for any system that can leverage them, than raster will ever be.
That's not calling ray traced lights the future of everything, nor necessary for everything. However, intelligently applying them where they will be of most benefit to performance does make sense, especially if one is trying to do a lot of other ambitious things as well in runtime.
The thing is I don't see driving cars in Cyberpunk or take offs and landings in Starfield as core features that matter. They are not games about those things even if they threw in some of it. They are about other things.
Compromises would be about not doing their core features well for... reasons.
I'll let you know how I feel about Starfield after I experience its RPGness. How character development feels, what the quests are like, how I can relate to and join/betray factions.
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?”
― CD PROJEKT RED
The exception ends up being the ship and outer space. They seemed to spend quite a while implementing something for it to be getting compared to a commuter vehicle.
Ships are pretty clearly supposed to be pretty important and personal to the player, something you customize, upgrade, dogfight, and explore in. Not just collecting a series of them to get from point A to point B.
Bethesda is the one that wants to draw relationships to sims and scientific/technical depth with their gene editing, accurately modeled ice balls and asteroids, barren planets, golden worlds, and every other buzzword Todd has come up with.
Cyberpunk opened the doors to scrutiny by showing off gameplay that ultimately didn't even exist between early showcases to release. The comparison to GTA likely had more to do with their claims about the city, crowd AI, and other tech.
Again, this isn't about comparing things to a wish list. But to the devs own words, their own ambitions. Again why 76 is so relevant there as well, it's development woes, it's compromises and cutbacks, and what that generally spells for the next project by the same company and even some of the same people.
As said previously. It's not like this is claiming Starfield is going to be a bad game. It's just the problem of "How much better could the game have been if they weren't struggling against their own technology?"
It's not a question of if there's been problems. We've already had one leak indicating such. That's not surprising at all. Just cycles back again to what compromises exactly were made, how many, and how great of a scale. The ultimate question being if it was worth it to take the route they did with development, or could have achieved so much more if not for what is on some level, hubris.
Bethesda world building tends to be open. It's easy to make something look good and run well when the player is limited to a 30m x 30m area. If they were to be at the cutting edge of graphic technology, the gameplay and stability of the game would suffer.
As I mentioned before the game looks good enough for me, I won't be shedding a tear its not like CP2077, but you can't market a game as next gen when it is clearly not.
I actually don't think of graphics as being first in tech, perhaps because I've been involved in next gen development of software which doesn't really have graphics outside of the UI and some reports.
But our processing tech, light years of improvement....
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Such as how the landings and transitions to planets are no seamless thing they are on-rails loading map levels in, so the planets in space are just textures not physicalized stuff. That works for what they are going for, not for space sim but for space game so they don't really need to consider those details, but the fact they need on-rails transitions to new maps on the same open-world hints at the limitations of Creation Engine.
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Ray-traced atmospheric flight transitions are great, unless you can't run them at any more than 30 FPS on the majority of the PC yserbase's rigs.
Specifically with the crypto squeeze on video cards over the past decade, this idea that pushing the envelope graphically is even the best route to go is not set in stone.
Most folks can't play CyberPunk with ray-tracing on. Why spend development dollars implementing a feature the majority of your consumer base won't even be able to experience?
Ask CIG how making all these things seamless is working out performance-wise for their userbase, even without large groups of players on-screen.
The irony also remains that the alternative raster based lighting solution to large/distant lighting, is still going to be more taxing on those older rigs. It's a distinct technical bottleneck that deals with quickly multiplying object complexity and shadow map data with a raster based model.
You're not saving your performance by not evolving your rendering technology.
So you'll still have to develop rasterization lighting for these scenes and environments, unless I'm missing something about it?
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I would consider that a self-inflicted wound.
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Seems... an odd windmill to choose.
All time classic MY NEW FAVORITE POST! (Keep laying those bricks)
"I should point out that no other company has shipped out a beta on a disc before this." - Official Mortal Online Lead Community Moderator
Proudly wearing the Harbinger badge since Dec 23, 2017.
Coined the phrase "Role-Playing a Development Team" January 2018
"Oddly Slap is the main reason I stay in these forums." - Mystichaze April 9th 2018
While I personally disagree on the gunplay, as I feel it's quite stifled, the point was how much the game was held back by technical issue across the board.
NMS is an awesome exploration game, but it really isn't because they've created a seamless transition onto planets with high graphical fidelity. They had to make compromises, too.
Again, though, I won't argue that Todd and Bethesda didn't pull a CDPR so far with how they've approached marketing Starfield.
A mechanical gameplay component missing by pushing landing into a scripted sequence initiated in orbit, as opposed to being done as a much shorter sequence pertaining to landing in a general spot.