Watch your knees...
Johnny Awesome
Veteran
The scope of this game is incredible.
It certainly looks like it, though it's Todd Howard who doesn't really have a good history with marketing vs reality. I'll take everything with a grain of salt until the actual game is available and the reality sinks in.
He already toned down the promises, for example, no seamless in-gameplay transition between planet and space.
Johnny Awesome
Veteran
Besides, it's not like Skyrim didn't deliver. 30 million sold is pretty amazing.
60 million now
It was a fun game but visually it was indeed a crapfest. Even for an open world one.
It's one of those games where the world was interesting enough to have our minds fill the gaps that the visuals couldnt fill, just like in the games of the 90's and early 00's
Crapfest is a bit harsh. It definitely had some rougher spots, but it was never straight up bad looking from a technical perspective, just not leading edge. And it wasn't just the world being interesting that helped the immersion, it was also the artistic direction. It was still a visually pleasing world to exist in(and arguably still is). Like, even with all the rough spots, it was still full of beautiful scenery and fantastic visual atmosphere.
For me it was mediocre at best. Artistically it was mostly suggesting the beauty (hence why our minds filled the gabs) rather than being. It was the idea of the vast world, feeling that you were in it and being able to see miles into the distance that appeared beautiful. It was a generic theme.
Fair enough if it didn't work for you, but I'd argue that you couldn't just have ANY large world that you can see far in the distance to and have it illicit the same reaction. The artistic direction played a heavy part in delivering this. Lovely clouds and skies, the fog-draped mountains, glistening water, dense evergreen trees, and an overall really coherent visual makeup.
As for the 'mind filling in the gaps' thing, I think all games still do this, we just dont realize how much we're doing it til we look back later. A lot of people dont realize how far we are still from perfectly realized, perfectly photorealistic games(especially large scale ones). Yet in all this, it's still the games with more visual merit that deliver the most immersion at the time. So I definitely find it very hard to agree that a game like Skyrim didn't do a whole lot right on the visual front, even if the technical side may only be 'mediocre.
That's only 11 million customers 5 times, though.
I'm still confused about long-time gamers bagging on Oblivion or Skyrim or Fallout 3 or 4. I mean, I get it if that's just not your kind of game, because if their tried and true recipe for single player open world isn't for you, then none of those will appeal. But every time it seems like someone wants to complain about "well they didn't get the graphics right" or "yeah but remember when the physics were stupid?" or yadda yadda.
Bethesda's open-world games have always been this way. Silly physics issues, a strangely blurry texture in the middle of a bunch of decent ones, stiff and inarticulate facial animation which still can't get anywhere near the right side of uncanny valley, arduous UI design especially around inventory management, large view distances with crazy pop-in, perhaps seven total voice actors for the entire game and the seemingly hundreds of NPCs in it, all topped off with the wonderous glaring yet easy to find bugs or OP stacking elements that permit or perhaps even encourage some very broken gameplay,
But you know what Bethesda always gets right? Huge open worlds, full of things to do, NPCs to meet, storylines to partake in, secrets to unveil, and when youre done with all of that, mods for days. It's the only thing apparently they CAN do right, and they've been doing it since the original TES back when it was a top-down scroller. I loved Morrowind, I loved Oblivion, I loved Skyrim and Skyrim SE, I loved Fallout 3 and New Vegas, I loved Fallout 4. And ya know what, now I've pre-ordered Starfield.
And ya know why? Because it's FallBliviRim 5 IIIIINNNNNNN SPPAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACE and, goddamnit, that's probably exactly what I want to play right now and for the next two years.
For the record, I only bought it twice!
Bethesda's open-world games have always been this way. Silly physics issues, a strangely blurry texture in the middle of a bunch of decent ones, stiff and inarticulate facial animation which still can't get anywhere near the right side of uncanny valley, arduous UI design especially around inventory management, large view distances with crazy pop-in, perhaps seven total voice actors for the entire game and the seemingly hundreds of NPCs in it, all topped off with the wonderous glaring yet easy to find bugs or OP stacking elements that permit or perhaps even encourage some very broken gameplay,
But you know what Bethesda always gets right? Huge open worlds, full of things to do, NPCs to meet, storylines to partake in, secrets to unveil, and when youre done with all of that, mods for days. It's the only thing apparently they CAN do right, and they've been doing it since the original TES back when it was a top-down scroller. I loved Morrowind, I loved Oblivion, I loved Skyrim and Skyrim SE, I loved Fallout 3 and New Vegas, I loved Fallout 4. And ya know what, now I've pre-ordered Starfield.
And ya know why? Because it's FallBliviRim 5 IIIIINNNNNNN SPPAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACE and, goddamnit, that's probably exactly what I want to play right now and for the next two years.
This did elicit a chuckle from me, out loud, in real life
For the record, I only bought it twice!Silent_Buddha
Legend
I'm still confused about long-time gamers bagging on Oblivion or Skyrim or Fallout 3 or 4. I mean, I get it if that's just not your kind of game, because if their tried and true recipe for single player open world isn't for you, then none of those will appeal. But every time it seems like someone wants to complain about "well they didn't get the graphics right" or "yeah but remember when the physics were stupid?" or yadda yadda.
Bethesda's open-world games have always been this way. Silly physics issues, a strangely blurry texture in the middle of a bunch of decent ones, stiff and inarticulate facial animation which still can't get anywhere near the right side of uncanny valley, arduous UI design especially around inventory management, large view distances with crazy pop-in, perhaps seven total voice actors for the entire game and the seemingly hundreds of NPCs in it, all topped off with the wonderous glaring yet easy to find bugs or OP stacking elements that permit or perhaps even encourage some very broken gameplay,
But you know what Bethesda always gets right? Huge open worlds, full of things to do, NPCs to meet, storylines to partake in, secrets to unveil, and when youre done with all of that, mods for days. It's the only thing apparently they CAN do right, and they've been doing it since the original TES back when it was a top-down scroller. I loved Morrowind, I loved Oblivion, I loved Skyrim and Skyrim SE, I loved Fallout 3 and New Vegas, I loved Fallout 4. And ya know what, now I've pre-ordered Starfield.
And ya know why? Because it's FallBliviRim 5 IIIIINNNNNNN SPPAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACE and, goddamnit, that's probably exactly what I want to play right now and for the next two years.
This did elicit a chuckle from me, out loud, in real life
I've come to the conclusion there are 2 broad categories of gamers with maybe some overlap.
- The gameplay defines the game.
- Generally seen by them talking about the gameplay with little to no mention of graphics.
- The graphics is the game.
- Generally seen by people obsessing over the graphics and rarely talking about the gameplay.
This is mostly tongue in cheek, but broadly over generalized yet kind of truthful.
But in a bit of more seriousness, I get people obsessing over graphics a bit on a technical forum. Although there's this odd inability of some to separate technical merit (either it has the tech or it doesn't) from artistic merit (incredibly personally biased because it completely depends on the person). Some of the best looking games aren't all that technically interesting while some of the most bland looking games have the most advanced graphics tech or use of graphics tech. And some actually manage to get a mix of the two.
Regards,
SB
Or... Use mods from the start! I can't stand spiders, so I use bear spider model swap mod
Hopefully there's no space spiders in starfield
Not this good. In fact, the original gameplay showings of this last year were already impressive enough to me in terms of providing a generational leap over the graphics in Fallout 4, which is all I really expected. I would have been quite happy with that.
It seems that maybe, just maybe, this is the first indication of Microsoft buying Bethesda actually offering something positive to gamers. I think Microsoft understood this game needs to be a hit and gave it more time in the oven than Bethesda on their own would have. Not that I think it'd have been a bad game or 'rushed' under Bethesda's leadership, but probably not given a bunch of extra TLC that this seems to have gotten.
Just saw this speculation about 'tracking many objects across planets' could explain why it's only 30 fps spreading over the internet.
But why should such data management problem hurt performance so much? Makes no sense at all. Typical speculation of somebody who never worked on a game himself.
I'll try to clear this up, having some experience on the cost of physics simulation...
That's a lot of sandwiches on the table.
Usually they will be at rest. It's called 'sleeping'. They just sit there and should not cost performance.
But then, if we we pick one up, the whole stack of sandwiches will 'wake up', and eventually move a little bit.
This causes a runtime spike. From one moment to the next, we have a high simulation cost.
After they settle, they fall back to sleep mode and cost becomes nothing again.
Of all systems in a game, i would say that physics probably have the most fluctuations and inconsistency in cost. That's a problem, and there is not much we can do about it, other than making sure the number of sandwiches at one spot does not become to high.
I have never seen something like 'LOD for physics', e.g. variable timesteps / number of solver iterations to be practical yet, which might eventually be another option to minimize this problem.
Such options are possible for anything else easily. To much audio sources? Disable some of them. Too much animation? Update some only each second frame. Too much pathfinding? Timeslice the work over many frames - no one will notice the AI lag.
But if we try this for physics, bad things will happen, because it's an actual simulation, relying on constant settings.
So if you would say the cost of physics limit's the game to 30fps, i would agree that's a reasonable speculation, and might be a big reason indeed.
But it has nothing to do with sandwiches on another planet. Because you won't simulate or process them at all. It also dos not matter where they come from, or what's their former path of travel through the infinite Todd universe.
And while i'm at it, i want to expand this topic to the idea 'frame interpolation helps to reduce CPU costs'.
This holds only for simple games which don't do much with simulation. But it doesn't hold for the cool stuff we may actually want.
Working on robotic ragdolls, it currently seems i need to run physics at 120 Hz. If i try to go lower, my characters could not maintain balance, and would fall on their nose.
Another example is racing games, which often run simulations at 500 or 1000 Hz. If we go lower, cars will crash into each other, killing innocent pedestrians. And you surely can't control your car in the way you expect anymore.
So that's why i personally - having some expectations on interesting simulation in games - rather think the claim is a marketing lie, and frame interpolation is only good to turn high framerates into even higher ones.
Idk if path traced CP 2077 indeed runs its game loop only <20 times a second, but since it's enemies felt like static bullet sponges which do not move, maybe yes.
But much more likely games still need to run simulations at target (and constant) framerate, and the only work you can spare is gfx API calls for not rendering a frame.
[ there's always a way to put some rant and proper agenda into posts \
/ ]DavidGraham
Veteran
It's not that, people say Frame Generation helps hide the CPU limitations of some game code, not reduce the cost of CPU.
Many recent games have bad CPU scaling across many cores, and are single threaded in nature, which caps fps to a certain limit, you can't go past that limit no matter what you do, and you end up with underutilized GPUs, fps drops, and hitches .. etc. Frame Generation bypasses this problem, boosting fps beyond that limit, and smoothing out most of the drops.
There is the tracking, that is being done in the background for game assets such as npcs, (according to Bethesda they are being rudimentary tracked and updated even if the player is not there and it kind of makes sense), and in this game, I'm certain that this requirement has gone up in terms of how many things the engine must track.
Then there is the fact that Beth lets the player stack 300 sandwiches in the first place.
Usually, the devs manage how many objects are displayed in a scene at any given time.
They also manage how many objects are interactable at any given time.
Yet in Beth games, you can loot a thousand swords, pile them on a table in your home, and then pick up the one that holds them all in place.
Or roll 10K cheese wheels down a cliff...
In this extreme example, It will become a slideshow (or crash spectacularly in case you go with the cheese
) nonetheless, but having some excess in terms of performance, is never a bad thing, for those times that the player actions are borderline, and not well into, extreme territory.I think the assertion does not have to do with data tracking, but the fact the game lets you do whatever you want in the first place.
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Agreed. But many people say many things and misunderstand some of them as well.
Regarding the 'main thread bottleneck', which in cases is impossible to address with more cores, i recently thought about this:
What if we had a CPU with just one high performance core at higher clocks for main thread stuff, with many slower cores for parallel stuff?
Maybe this would be better than Intels P and E cores.
Legacy engines which simply do not utilize many threads enough yet is another problem ofc.
And my speculation about the Starfield fps cap is that most people actually think the reason is more likely related to this, than about maintaining a consistently high visual standard.
If it were about visuals, and 4K works with 30 fps, then they could easily do full HD at 60 fps.
So i guess those people i have mentioned don't buy it.
Ofc. that's not what i think. I simply don't know. But sadly i have to scratch Starfield from my wishlist, because my CPU is a bit less powerful than current XBox. Too bad.
I've never worked on AAA rpgs. But i would implement those 'background NPCs' in an abstract way so the cost becomes negligible. I'm sure they do this. But telling people NPCs are just a point with some stats, and they can teleport through space instead walking on found paths would not sound awesome. Just saying 'even characters out of view are still simulated, process daily routines and do their jobs or even fight' sounds much better.
Yeah, i've had some fun with piling up corpses and seeing how jitter increases, until they started to do jumpy movements and acted like zombies with Parkinson. [not 100% sure which game it was, could have been from another studio]
It's cool that this works regardless. And i like this and many other things of how Bethesda makes their games.
But that's not a reason to cap your game at 30 fps, just because some bored player might try out silly things to break the game.
You do it because it can't run faster even in the regular case of gameplay as expected.
On console, with shitty gamepads, 30 fps is not the end of the world. But on PC with mouse it is. And with those games being pretty expensive already, i'm disappointed and will pass.
I would prefer a 60 fps game which is smaller, or does just less things. I'm also fine with using minimal gfx settings and resolution to get my 60 fps. But like with the latest Halo, i assume this won't help.
Then i see games like Spiderman, with actually many more things going on, and it runs 60fps on PS5. But doesn't help either, because Spiderman and other Power Fantasy Rangers can shove themselves up their own ass. ;D
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