The engine looks super optimized and suitable for closed areas with a variety of dense light sources. It can look super spectacular in some settings. It breaks in many other areas especially in open ones.
Its not breaking per se. Closed areas where the artists know you'll be spending a lot of time in, lighting and environment artists will spend a lot of time there, that's why it looks good. The open areas, where they aren't sure if you're going to be there, they'll spend less time on.
This is the difference between a linear title and a complete open world. Linear titles have whole teams being meticulous on every possible area a player can see, because there movement and gameplay is limited. Most players won't experience 30% of all the content in Starfield.
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The UI decision to not allow two inventories to be visible simultaneously - like previous Fallout and Elder Scrolls games - is truly baffling.
Yeah, the clunky and archaic designs are so baffling.
Glad it's an XPA. So I would be able to boot starfield pc just to use inventory mod, whenever it's released...
The game's premise is exploration though. There are key areas where the developers know the player will spend a lot of time and the game is lacking. Even in large closed areas
It’s a definitely an engine limitation. You can equally take any space in that game and dump the entire universe full of inventory in there and it will persist.
It’s not the same as another game knowing precisely what will and will not be there and maximizing their available budget.
If you could find me another game that works like this and do a cross comparison that would make sense. But comparing it to other titles where nothing persists is fairly apples to oranges comparison.
My issue with them tracking the location of every object in the universe and allowing you to collect them all in one place is why? Other than making gifs of piles of items, does it actually serve any purpose in gameplay? In the real world other people interact with things. If you leave things out and around, they'll get moved or taken by other people. Things respawn because people replace things. Overall it just doesn't make sense except in maybe particular cases like moving things around in areas where there aren't other people.
My worry is that a large part of the loading screens is basically them trying to track everything all at once and having to segment things, but I'd rather have a seamless world that didn't try to track every potato.
I didnt compare it to any other title. Surely it has its advandages and disavantages. I am not discussing the object persistence feaure though.
I am talking about the base visual presentation of areas.
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In both Elder Scrolls and Fallout games, when playing a sneaky bastard, I would often leave objects on the floor so that roaming guards/enemies would bump Ito them and make a noise. This is useful in larger environments where you couldn't see a whole floor area at once but you could hear enemies bumping into things. Likewise, you can put objects in places to obscure the view of NPCs (e.g. a bucket on a head) but again, in a hostile environment, moving a large bin onto a desk can obscure the line-of-sight to bits of the environment where you might perhaps want pick a lock or engage in outright larceny.
The gameplay advantages to collecting 400 potatoes? Hmmm..
In both Elder Scrolls and Fallout games, when playing a sneaky bastard, I would often leave objects on the floor so that roaming guards/enemies would bump Ito them and make a noise. This is useful in larger environments where you couldn't see a whole floor area at once. Likewise, you could put objects in places to obscure the view of NPCs (the bucket on a head) but again, in a hostile environment, moving a large bin onto a desk can obscure the line-of-sight to bits of the environment where you might perhaps want pick a lock or engage in outright larceny.
The gameplay advantages to collecting 400 potatoes? Hmmm..
Well moving things around while you're in the area is great. I'm talking about all of those items being moved when you return 100 days later. That level of tracking just seems odd to me.
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It was this permanent object (and corpse) tracking in Skyrim that caused issues on consoles, particularly on PS3 with its 256mb XDR/GDR memory, but also on 360 if you interacted with the world enough and the save file grew large enough.
They eventually patched Skyrim to purge moved/dropped/discarded items (and corpses) after 14 in-game days, and Fallout 4 was the same. So Jon's 10 planet test in his DF video probably won't yield a purge unless he took him sweet time about travelling around. 14 in-game days in Starfield is a long time.
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This is easy enough to do on PC with console commands. The game console isn't accessible on Xbox even with a keyboard and mouse attached, but accessing the console commands is part of the Creation Engine Kit which is how cheat mods work on Xbox and PlayStation in Skyrim and Fallout 4.
Creation engine commands rarely change, on PC it's player.placeatme [item id] [quantity]
I wanna see someone do it
that's why space games aren't for me. If I could reincarnate I'd be an astronomer, but something as vast as the universe can be overwhelming in a game. However, a super well crafted open world game, in a specific area, like Skyrim, but even better in that sense, is so appealing. That's why I cant wait for the next TES.
It’s a game design decision that they felt was important to the game. Many others have opted not to do this, but that is what variation is. They have hugely successful titles because of this so I suppose they see this as a winning formula for them
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You can become an astronomer. It's not a calling that requires you to commit at birth.
It’s hard to decouple the two here. Starfield has to save resources aside for persistence etc. just random things a player can do, so that is going to limit how much processing power they can give everything individually
I understand what you are saying, but I am not talking abut all aspects of the visuals. The game does a lot of shortcuts to avoid processing in open world environments which is understandable. Including geometry. There is full absense of RT for that reason too. But the lighting in particular is the worst offender.
Or perhaps the inverse, the lack of strong contrasting shadows in the open world when lighting is bright. Or in general the lack of shadowing is what causes flatness
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