Starfield [XBSX|S, PC, XGP]

[Daozang]

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.

I agree, I am just not sure if negligible is achievable in this scale..!
Either way, my point is, that it's a combination of all those things mentioned, that in my opinion necessitates some redundancy when it comes to performance.
Perhaps with some more optimization the game can run at a stable 60 framerate, but I'm not certain it can achieve that in every instance specifically because of the freedom the devs like to give to their players.
It is that freedom that I like about Bethesda games, and I'd personally rather have that instead of high fps, as long as it's ofcourse a steady framerate.

 

[Malo]

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.

You make it sound as though they are capping to 30fps on PC?

 

[see colon]

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.

Go play unpatched Skyrim on PS3 and amass a pile of anything and see how performance is affected. You've described a situation as it should be handled, but Bethesda, either through their game design or their technology, have a history of doing something differently.

 

[JoeJ]

I agree, I am just not sure if negligible is achievable in this scale..!
Either way, my point is, that it's a combination of all those things mentioned, that in my opinion necessitates some redundancy when it comes to performance.
Perhaps with some more optimization the game can run at a stable 60 framerate, but I'm not certain it can achieve that in every instance specifically because of the freedom the devs like to give to their players.
It is that freedom that I like about Bethesda games, and I'd personally rather have that instead of high fps, as long as it's ofcourse a steady framerate.

Yeah sure, the problem with optimizing complex software comes when no bottlenecks show up. We can profile it, and if we see the sum of many 'negligible costs', but no specific workload takes a seriously large amount of CPU time compared to others, then you can't expect noticeable improvements from further optimization.
But then you also can't speculate a certain system like the physics example 'causes' a too high cost. Rather we can only say the game as a whole is too large and does too much things, which makes sense here because it's a space game.
However, if we look back to previous Bethesda game, all of them were huge and open world, and they all did run at 60 fps.
The visual upgrade in Starfield does not impress me beyond the expected from a new console gen. It looks fine but not advanced. I can't see any use of RT for example, which would eventually explain higher costs. So i would rule this out for a reason too.
Also there is no increased amount of action to see on screen from the showcase. We see planets, space stations, a lot of scenery. But the places are not crowded by so many NPCs or spaceships.
I lack an explanation, and from that i assume their engine is just outdated. Optimization would likely not enable 60 fps, only a new engine would, i guess. So it's time for that, and ideally they would have done it before making Starfield.

You make it sound as though they are capping to 30fps on PC?

That's not my intent. They won't cap on PC, but on my PC it will not run at 60fps, because it's slower than XBox. Many players will enjoy 60fps without doubt, and if i would really want to play this badly, i would accept to play at 30fps.
I'm just not so much into RPGs. The freedom, the ability to go anywhere... it sounds nice on paper. But then when i play it, i lack motivation and a sense of progress. Everything feels like side quests which have no real impact or outcome.
So i always try to figure out what people love about RPGs, and so far i liked Bethesda games the most from the genre. But i do not really get it and prefer a good linear story over branching into pointless infinity.
Kind of... 'See the mountain? You can go there!' - 'Um, yes. But why should i?'
I'd love to understand how people motivate themselves, how they answer this why, and why they can sink 200h into such games. But i fail on it.

Go play unpatched Skyrim on PS3 and amass a pile of anything and see how performance is affected. You've described a situation as it should be handled, but Bethesda, either through their game design or their technology, have a history of doing something differently.

I have played (or at least tried) Skyrim and FO3 / 4. (I also try to play FO2, at least that's on my to do list.)
But idk what you mean. Bethesda does rigid body simulation like anybody else does, using the same tech and limitations of it.
Like almost everywhere, the physics simulation has only a decorative and visual effect. It's passive. Ragdolls give nice death animations, you can stack up a pile of boxes, but there is no effect on the game from physics.
A counterexample would be the new Zelda game. That's active physics, spurs creativity, and has big impact on the game.
Basically they just merged RPG + Garys Mod, but it's surely serious progress towards waking up the sleeping princess of physics simulation. I'd like to see more of that, also in Bethesda games.

 

[eastmen]

I agree, I am just not sure if negligible is achievable in this scale..!
Either way, my point is, that it's a combination of all those things mentioned, that in my opinion necessitates some redundancy when it comes to performance.
Perhaps with some more optimization the game can run at a stable 60 framerate, but I'm not certain it can achieve that in every instance specifically because of the freedom the devs like to give to their players.
It is that freedom that I like about Bethesda games, and I'd personally rather have that instead of high fps, as long as it's ofcourse a steady framerate.

If you are laying down and I place a small rock on you, that is negligible. If I put a few thousand rocks on you and well then you are Giles Corey.

I don't think its anyone system that is the issue. Its as you layer the different systems on each other that you quickly run out of resources.


I am also not sure if pure clock speeds will get you out of it or if more cores and better threading will solve it along with clock speeds

 

[Deleted member 11852]

Go play unpatched Skyrim on PS3 and amass a pile of anything and see how performance is affected. You've described a situation as it should be handled, but Bethesda, either through their game design or their technology, have a history of doing something differently.

I played Skyrim, from day 1, on PS3 and it took about a month of solid playing before I saw my first issues.

The cause is the way modern Bethesda games (Fallout3 on) maintain their massive game worlds which is to have a static version of the entire game world. i.e. where's NPCs are/start, where every single predefined object is in the world, then your save files begin to grow in size as you level up, chose new abilities, loot and so on as the game tracks every change from the starting game world.

The death of NPCs get recorded, including where the bodies are and their exact position of their limbs and inventories. If you move an apple from that table to this table, that gets recored and it all goes in the save file. The more you interact, the larger the difference between the starting game world and what the world is like now. NPCs can only change the game world. At launch, corpses of animals/monsters/NPCs did not decay so if you were killing loads of people your save would balloon. Likewise if you looted stuff from the game world, or moved things about delineraly, even even accidentally bumped into things.

I was lucky, with my first play through because I was playing a stealth archer, and sneaking around meant I was killing less, plus I was not trying to steal all the forks or cheese wheels. When I began to see some issues, Bethesda began the first of many patches to alleviate the problem. I remember some people were having issues within a few days tho.

Bethesda made a bunch of changes to their engine, including having all corpses decay after - IIRC - a game week. And if you bumped an object slightly and it moved just a little from it's starting location, it would just reset back when you left that game cell (game area).

I'll definitely be playing Starfield in first person and I intend to shoot a lot of people, so I'm not cool with 30fps so this makes this 60fps for me. Not unless they can get a 40fps mode in there, if not 60. So probably PC for me. A 13700+4080+32gb should be fine.

 

[JoeJ]

I played Skyrim, from day 1, on PS3 and it took about a month of solid playing before I saw my first issues.

What are the issues? Does it take too long go save / load, or is runtime performance affected too?

Maybe a database would be better than a single save file, but idk how they do this.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

What are the issues? Does it take too long go save / load, or is runtime performance affected too?

A variety of issues, but the weird one was the hit on framerate. The only reason I can think of why that happened is that Skyrim was dynamically using available memory to maintain performance, possibly by using caches in RAM to minimise loading. A large, ever growing, save meant reduced the amount of free RAM for the game to use as cache.

Early games saves were about 1mb, but could climb to 10mb to 25mb in size if a lot of NPCs or animals died near you, or a lot of items were moved near you. This is because the whole world interacted with itself, so regardless how what the player did or did not do, any changes resulting from actions near the player - like a wolf killing a dear (creating a dear corpse (with an inventory containing meat and/or hide), or an NPC bumping a table and knocking the contents on the floor- the save could grow in size quite quickly as the game struggled to preserve all these meaningless micro-interactions forever.

When you consider that PS3 only had 512mb RAM, split between 256mb XDR (main) RAM and 256mb VRAM, and of that 256mb XDR, only around 210mb was available to games (the remainder being used by the OS), having a 15mb file would really eat into that free RAM that it impacted frame rates.

Bethesda's approach to fixing introducing 'rules' for how long certain changes were kept in the save, so it purged corpses and their inventories after seven in game days and world objects (good, furniture, weapons, gear etc) that were only slightly different to the default state was reset to their default starting positions. Purging hundreds/thousands of data solved the issue. This didn't all happen in one patch, they rolled out improvements across a whole bunch of patches over time.

Maybe a database would be better than a single save file, but idk how they do this.

Bethesda save file, which is really just a massive diff, was already pretty efficient. It was only saving specific changes to the world state from the default, but when you consider that many objects saved may also be storage, and you have to save the contents of the storage, and you could put some storage containers in other storage containers, it can get quite complex quite fast.

Bethesda are one of the few developers who prioritise player agency and their impact on the game world and this comes at a technical cost. In many games, even now, a complex internal environment, e.g. a room with furniture in, is often a static mesh and not something you can interact with in any meaningful way. Bethesda's environments consist of hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of individual objects just like real life. I have always really liked this because you can place objects that interact with game NPCs. There are gameplay implications for stealth players in particular. You can bump objects on the ground making a noise, alerting enemies. And you can play objects on the ground which make a noise when enemies bump into them.

It just makes the whole world feel more real.

 

[JoeJ]

Really intersting, thanks!
Now i understand how John Linneman came to this speculation, and i regret my attempt of correction.

Personally i don't like when things in games are not persistent. E.g. killing an enemy, then need to track back, and enemy just respawns.
But we can't make everything persistent, which means we have to decide in advance what matters and what not. That's bad in case players figure out unexpected ways to make meaningless things matter.
It also limits things like destruction. Even if we can make it work players could destroy whole buildings, we likely have to revert them to the initial state if the player gets distant enough. Pretty bad too, in case he comes back.
Now that games are installed on writable storage, we could lift those limits. But then we have to deal with growing storage space and hard drives eventually getting full.
Seems not worth the trouble for the games we have right now. But that's certainly an interesting option which has not yet been explored.

I have always really liked this because you can place objects that interact with game NPCs. There are gameplay implications for stealth players in particular. You can bump objects on the ground making a noise, alerting enemies. And you can play objects on the ground which make a noise when enemies bump into them.
It just makes the whole world feel more real.

Personally i have noticed this effect the strongest in the horror games form Frictional Games. It increased my immersion to no end, way beyond to what realistic graphics could do.
This had some unintended effects on me: I tried to be creative.
For example, there was a locked door. I could nudge it a little bit, and i really wanted to get in. So i took some plank of wood and tried to stick it in, to use it as a lever to pry it open.
It took me half an hour to get the prank in place, so i could apply force as intended. It should have worked. But it didn't. And after finishing the game, i found the door was meant to stay locked. It never opens, and there's nothing behind it.
Another time, i had to cross some ravine, by jumping from one column of rock to the next. I came to a room with dynamite inside that i needed elsewhere. With a text log, saying i should be careful. Shaking the dynamite would blow it up.
I thought: Ofc! I know what to do! And i tracked back, searching for planks of wood, and i used them to build a bridge over the ravine. So i don't have to jump with the dynamite in my hands when crossing it later.
I felt super smart. But again, later i found out the bridge is not needed. The dynamite did not explode even if i jumped with it over the ravine.

Although there was no reward for my creativity on problem solving, those moments remain the most memorizable from the whole game, if not from all games i've ever played.
It didn't work, but the option and the attempt alone was enough to increase the value of the game.
So if i get back at making a game, i want such options to emerge from the simulation, and ideally at least some of them should work out.
That's what i hope to get from the 'reality simulation' vs. the much more common 'smoke and mirrors' approach. I want emerging options, spurring imagination, and creative individual gameplay.

That's also why i feel related to Bethesdas games. They have a similar vision, and i like that.
But because it does not really work for me, i conclude what we want is not always what makes us happy. And it's difficult to figure out what's wrong, missing, or just too much.

 

[see colon]

Really intersting, thanks!
Now i understand how John Linneman came to this speculation, and i regret my attempt of correction.

You should regret nothing, because what you described is how anyone who wanted to make a logical, performant, persistent world would do it. Bethesda just does it differently, and in a lot of ways it doesn't make sense. Though I'm sure there is a reason for it. Making a systems based open world RPG requires keeping track of a great many things.

 

[Johnny Awesome]

It's weird. I'm always excited for a new Bethesda game. I got Morrowind, Oblivion, both at launch. I also picked up Skyrim in a sale half-way into it's existence. I'm excited for Starfield.

Yet, I'm not exactly sure why. I usually abandon these games after about 20 hours of play and it feels like a bit of a shame, really. One of the things that I greatly dislike is the enemy scaling. It really turns me off.

I don't understand why they went to all the effort to simulate so much and then I get to 10th level and a giant rat can still kill me. It absolutely kills the immersion for me. I'm really hoping Starfield doesn't do this, but I have my doubts.

With that being said, I hope the game is super successful and it helps the Xbox platform.

 

[orangpelupa]

Isn't levels are just to artificially gate contents?

Like a shield requiring level 30. Or it didn't have level gates? I can't remember

 

[Deleted member 11852]

It's weird. I'm always excited for a new Bethesda game. I got Morrowind, Oblivion, both at launch. I also picked up Skyrim in a sale half-way into it's existence. I'm excited for Starfield.

For me, it's BGS's fundamental approach that there is world to explore, that you can explore how you want, using whatever tech/skill/ability you chose to pick. I appreciate the near pointlessness of tracking every object in a world, but which provides almost limitless potentially to interact with a world and its denizens.

Bethesda are masters overs making relatively small open world environments feel massive, desolate but specious in a way I still cannot rationally explain. Things that feel way apart really aren't, which achieves that magically feel of travel but without absurd travel requirements. Things in the world have purpose, but can be ignored. Their econiomgy for progression (crafting) is not predicated on tedious and endless grinding.

Todd Howard and his team produce game mechanics that underpin massive open world games in a way that work for a lot of people, evidenced by the sales numbers for their games. There are always a lot of options and never need feel like you have to do excatly X to achieve Y. This is a huge problem to solve and BGS make it look easy. It really isn't .

 

[Malo]

I'm really looking forward to a new era of modding as well. I really hope they don't lock shit down for the sake of selling mods through their store.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

I'm really looking forward to a new era of modding as well. I really hope they don't lock shit down for the sake of selling mods through their store.

Microsoft's UWP store has all sorts of lockdowns, but mods on Xbox were always more flexible than PlayStation.

This wasn't a policy thing but a tech thing; Sony chose to embed specific codecs as part of the PlayStation SDK which may supports mods supporting media that used other media codecs impossible. Will Microsoft change track now that competition with Sony isn't an incentive to be open ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

 

[Silent_Buddha]

Bethesda are one of the few developers who prioritise player agency and their impact on the game world and this comes at a technical cost. In many games, even now, a complex internal environment, e.g. a room with furniture in, is often a static mesh and not something you can interact with in any meaningful way. Bethesda's environments consist of hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of individual objects just like real life. I have always really liked this because you can place objects that interact with game NPCs. There are gameplay implications for stealth players in particular. You can bump objects on the ground making a noise, alerting enemies. And you can play objects on the ground which make a noise when enemies bump into them.

It just makes the whole world feel more real.

That's the magic of Bethesda Game Studios (formerly Bethesda Softworks) and their open world games.

None of that is in your face or seems out of place. That's because they set out to simulate a fantasy world versus creating an open game world. It's a subtle distinction, but part of the philosophy behind a simulation is to attempt to make things behave as closely as possible to their real life counterpart or some close approximation.

So, that means chairs and tables should react to player movement in a similar (but not exact way) to how they do in real life. Things on the table should also react to anything interacting with the table. Things that look like the player could pick them up should be able to be picked up, etc.

Likewise if you move something, it should still be there when you come back. Even if it's halfway around the world. Unless an NPC moves it. That guard you killed, should still be dead. Those people you stole from and caught you should still know that you stole from them, etc.

It goes a long way towards making it feel like a real world and not "just" a game. That's likely why it proves to be so approachable and appealing to so many people that aren't "gamers". They don't see a sandwich or cheese wheel on a table, think about picking it up and then run into the typical "game world" situation of it just being a static part of the scenery. They don't kill an NPC and then come back and that NPC is magically just alive again with no knowledge of them killing it.

And because it isn't done in a "Hey look at me!" flashy sort of way, it mostly goes unnoticed. It's a LOT of work to make the world both believable and transparent (it just works). And so, many people just really really have no concept or appreciation of just how much goes into making a Bethesda open world an actual world and not a game setting (all other open "world" games with Rockstar coming the closest for a AAA developer in crafting a believable open world setting).

From the original TES, it's always been about the developers going, "What would it be like to live in a fantasy world and be whomever you want to be." It's less of a game than it is a simulation, at least originally. As they've iterated on TES over the years, the simulation has both contracted (things removed) and expanded (new things added). One of those things added or enhanced/expanded is actually having a meaningful story versus being just a skeleton of a story to go along with the world simulation.

Regards,
SB

 

[Malo]

Microsoft's UWP store has all sorts of lockdowns, but mods on Xbox were always more flexible than PlayStation.

Starfield is a long term game, there's no way I'm playing it on game pass. Steam version only.

MS has relaxed security on game pass with the option for developers to allow a mod switch opening up all the files.

 

[Seanspeed]

One of the things that I greatly dislike is the enemy scaling. It really turns me off.

I don't understand why they went to all the effort to simulate so much and then I get to 10th level and a giant rat can still kill me.

Well that's not how it works at all, though I've seen many thinking it does.

In fact, most enemies in Skyrim outside special named enemies and dragons do not scale at all.

A giant rat(skeever) or Bandit Outlaw or whatever will always be the same level. What does happen though, is that as you level up, new more dangerous variants will pop up. So at like level 10, you may come across Trolls, but by level 20 you might also start coming across Frost Trolls. There's also some scaling with certain human enemy types like bandits in terms of their equipment, so while there's no bandit types higher than level 28, they can still scale up their armor as you level up further.

Lesser enemy types still appear at higher levels, just less frequently. And you will absolutely be able to just decimate them, as you'd expect to. But while something like a Bandit Outlaw can still appear, they will probably be alongside a Bandit Marauder or something which is much tougher.

I feel the system works quite well in order to aid the 'explore anywhere, anytime' sort of style of design they go for.

 

[eastmen]

It's weird. I'm always excited for a new Bethesda game. I got Morrowind, Oblivion, both at launch. I also picked up Skyrim in a sale half-way into it's existence. I'm excited for Starfield.

Yet, I'm not exactly sure why. I usually abandon these games after about 20 hours of play and it feels like a bit of a shame, really. One of the things that I greatly dislike is the enemy scaling. It really turns me off.

I don't understand why they went to all the effort to simulate so much and then I get to 10th level and a giant rat can still kill me. It absolutely kills the immersion for me. I'm really hoping Starfield doesn't do this, but I have my doubts.

With that being said, I hope the game is super successful and it helps the Xbox platform.

I don't remember what site I saw it at but there is a apparently a difficulty gage for level when you are looking at what planet to go too

 

[arandomguy]

Microsoft's UWP store has all sorts of lockdowns, but mods on Xbox were always more flexible than PlayStation.

This wasn't a policy thing but a tech thing; Sony chose to embed specific codecs as part of the PlayStation SDK which may supports mods supporting media that used other media codecs impossible. Will Microsoft change track now that competition with Sony isn't an incentive to be open ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I think the ongoing concern here is that ever since later into Skyrim's life Bethesda's increasingly explored the idea of monetizing modding and has done so, and what the end game that they might look to eventually push might be in that area (eg. the defacto standard ends up being mods are paid for).