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"remake" is generous of the titling editor. That's a tech demo or a mechanic demo. Still good, though. The seamless transitions are nice.
Yeah - of course games are hard - but all he did was rough out a planet-to-space experience in Unreal Engine with a Starfield aesthetic. If he started trying to build an actual game on it... Well an 8 year timeline doesn't seem crazy.
And this whole conversation overlooks one of the major complaints a player would have of Bethesda did the same thing.
Entering an atmosphere changes the physics and those physics are different for all sorts of reasons on every planetary body for every ship. From gravity to atmospheric density the ship would fly differently on every one and that ignores the fact that ships are near enough to infinite in configuration in this game due to the builder.
If Bethesda did this, players would be complaining it wasn't realistic enough.
Those are solved issues in other engines, meaning not at all insurmountable.
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Not to mention it means solving for all the extra resources consumed by the content on the planet.
A loading screen lets you load different areas of the game discreetly and make the game performative. This is especially important as Starfield is a single player game, it's not hosted on a server or anything so it can't distribute resource load that way, its all happening client side on the player's system. They would have to simulate the entire world on their PC alone or develop a way to stream the content out dynamically and seamlessly.
This demo from the guy is fine up to a point, but once you start adding in real content it gets more complicated. Not impossible but it's not as simple as just copy-pasting some stuff into Unreal the way people are making it out to be.
There's a reason SF took 10 years, and it's not because the devs were lazy or incompetent or hadn't thought of something. I'm sure there were a lot of discussions about seamless flight.
I think the bigger deal with Bethesda's engine is that it's built to be very easy for designers to iterate on, which is why it is also so easy for users to mod. They trade a lot of efficiency for scripting systems and level editors that let them whip up sprawling open spaces in a short amount of time, and fill them with dynamic systems like NPC routines and tracking thousands of physics-enabled props. This is probably also why their games are prone to buggy behavior.
Building all of the systems Starfield has at its disposal into Unreal would probably take years, and I'm not convinced the results would be any better.
I mean, to be fair, Starfield doesn't do it well either. In the 15 hours I played, especially toward the latter end, I ran into plenty of texture pop-in, bad culling, bodies without heads and arms, heads and arms without bodies, bad shading patches, t-posing, stutter, lots of other goofy shit. And granted, my rig's not the best but I'm playing on medium with a 9600K, 3070, 32GB RAM, and the game's installed on a Samsung 870 SATA.
Sure, I was more just responding to the tendency some people have in oversimplifying the development process of any game. There are things that people who aren't devs do not know that they do not know they don't know.
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This is basically what No Man's Sky did. When Bethesda took their crappy RPG engine and mocked up interplanetary travel using loading screens and then started writing quests and storylines, NMS focused on building a very good engine that allowed you to go from surface to air to space to interplanet / stellar while mostly ignoring the rest of gameplay and storytelling.
And not to be too hard on No Man's Sky given the resource differential, but ultimately all it is is one really rock solid system thats not quite a full game surrounded by a lot of hollow feeling stuff to kinda flesh it out on paper. Ultimately Starfield has way sharper hooks almost immediately simpy because while it has a relatively crappy engine and at time frustrating amounts of loading screens and limitations, they spent more time writing content and dialogue that makes the universe feel actually alive and rich, and polishing each individual system until it's fun.
I think The Outer Worlds is also worth comparing to as Obsidian is even farther down the same route as Bethesda imho, making a much smaller universe that feels even less free than Starfield but having even better writing and I would argue it's possibly the best game of the three though I have to withhold my judgement on Starfield until I atleast finish the main quests.
I love that the thumbnail for every article about Starfield is an uncomfortable close-up of a character's dialogue face.
I just know what she's saying too "we you have a free moment i need to talk to you"
It's what you see like 70% of the game.
Wow they remade a game as big as starfield in only 48 hours? Just recording all the dialogue during that time would have been intense
he had them record at 16x speed then just slowed it down in post. pretty impressive
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Guys, this is literally just a tech demo made in Unreal, it's not news.
So basically what No Man's Sky has had for years?
Elite Dangerous too. I was really disappointed when I lauched Starfield and learned there wasn't any seamless landing for exploring planets. It was a huge bummer to me.
Elite Dangerous is by far the most fun I've ever had landing and taking off in a space ship. No other game comes even close. It genuinely never got old. The entire docking process was so damn fun with a HOTAS.
Oh wow, I haven't played since before you could land on planets. My issue with Elite was always feeling like there was exactly nothing to do at all beside mine and be bad at dog fights lol.
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Frontier: Elite 2 had it in 1993. There really is no excuse at this point.
Star Citizen as well. The game is ludicrously unfinished for how long it's been in development IMO, but it does have that at least.
Star citizen has become one of my favorite dev hell sagas. I had such high hopes for it when it was announced over a decade ago.....
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It is essentially just a tech demo BUT, I would say they’ve touched on what I wanted from the space travel.
You can take off, fly the ship, point it up, and then boost off into space. That’s fun, that’s what I wanted, and I don’t think it’s really expecting that much.
“It’S NoT ReAlIsTiC”, none of it’s realistic, it’s a video game ffs.
It’s a fun and engaging mechanic that I’d expect in a great space game.
Bethesda’s seeming disdain for anything that could be considered a fun and seamless mechanic is frustrating. And fanboys seemingly have no expectation that Bethesda games should actually get better and improve on their weak areas.
I think Bethesda "fanboys" (like myself) just really like the core experience (warts and all) I play NMS when I want to lose myself in a beautiful seamless scifi setting and i play starfield when my focus is on engaging with faction and character storylines and some campy space encounters. I kinda like how janky bethesda games can be, reminds me of playing tabletop RPGs and all the weird janky shit that happens in those games too. I like that I can be the golden boy of the crimson fleet and still join up with the freestar rangers. I make up a little story for my character and act it out and have a lot of fun doing so.
The only thing I could do without is the loading screens. I don't mind that landing on a planet isn't seamless, but i mean... loading screen to get on ship, loading screen to get into space, loading screen to fly to different planet, wait until scan finishes, loading screen to land on planet.
That's the worse part for me. If it was just a short cut scene for landing on a planet, I think that'd be 100% fine.
I just don’t think it’s good to let a company get away with not improving.
The small improvements they have made in Starfield are alright, but it feels like the bar was set with Skyrim and they can’t even really match something from 12 years ago.
I do not have high hopes for TES VI and I’m half expecting something extremely dated, as based off FO4 and Starfield I think the studio’s best days are behind them at this point.
Starfield seems like a pretty stark improvement over Fallout 4's shortcomings, so I don't think it is fair to say that they aren't improving. Just looking at my own playtime, I bailed out of Fallout 4 at the 20 hour mark, but I'm 60 hours into Starfield and haven't slowed down at all.
The small improvements they have made in Starfield are alright, but it feels like the bar was set with Skyrim and they can’t even really match something from 12 years ago.
Or maybe game development is just hard? Why haven't other "better" developers created a game that improves upon Skyrim?
Look at Baldur's Gate 3. It's "small improvements" to the type of game that Larian has been working on for many years at this point.
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Bethesda can't even get ladders working in their engine, and y'all were expecting seamless atmospheric re-entry?
They have working ladders in Starfield. They finally did it.
Oh wow. A truely stunning achievement for this small indie studio.
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They do have ladders in Starfield, actually
This is great. Amidst all the comparisons and issues with Starfield, I am learning about so many other good space exploration games in these discussions haha
Here's a good list of space games I personally love for one reason or another:
- X3 Terran Conflict
- Elite: Dangerous
- Wing Commander
- Freelancer
- X4
- RimWorld*
- FTL
- Star Trek: Bridge Commander
- Artemis (basically bridge commander but not themed, not single player and free)
*RimWorld admittedly requires some heavy modification to make it an actual space game, but the mods I use are good enough that I can count it as such.
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I would be impressed if they did it in Gamebryo/Creation Engine and solve the "everything is a cell" problem. I mean, No man's Sky and Elite Dangerous exist and have shown seem less space travel. One guy with DarkBasic did it in the Evochron games for decades.
This comes off as a hey look look at me I can do it in a cave with a box of scraps but BUGTHESDA can't in 7 years?!
I think the problem is also that Bethesda doesn't really "do" vehicles, probably due to engine limitations.
Usually, it's just horses or "passenger" travel (like when you man the guns in FO4 birds). I guess one could maybe consider power armor in FO4 to be kind of like a "vehicle", but it works more or less the same as just walking around.
Oh, there is dragon riding in Skyrim, but it's a mess and you don't have that much control.
I'm surprised the engine can even handle space combat, honestly. And 360° movement as well, which would have been great for dragon riding in Skyrim. But most of the dragons in TES are dead, so we probably won't get proper dragon riding in whatever TES: VI is.
(Sidenote about dragon riding/combat: Before Larian delved further into CRPGs, they made a regular third person RPG where you could play as a dragon. It was actually pretty fun. Still didn't have full control, and it was only in certain sections, but it was entertaining. Divinity II: Director's Cut, in case anyone's interested. Don't know how well it's aged, but I enjoyed it a few years ago.)
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I'm no gaming expert or Bethesda fanboy, but didn't someone the other day confirm that there is actual space travel in the game, it just takes days to get to another planet?
No, just that there are no invisible walls. After 7 hours of flying, she reached a paper-cutout of the planet.
You can fly in space towards the planets you can see. When you get there, you won't be able to land and will be able to fly straight through the planet itself.
Planets outside of the fast travel menu aren't really planets
Lol, that's actually fucking hilarious.
Aw. I was hoping to see him seamlessly fly to the Volii system, seamlessly fly to Volii Alpha, seamlessly land on the Neon landing pad, seamlessly enter the Bayu Plaza and, seamlessly interact with dozens of NPCs, many of whom have branching dialogue trees, and seamlessly loot the ever-loving crap out of hundreds of interactable objects.
If people want that, why don't they play Elite Dangerous?
The more I'm playing starfield, the more I'm considering it. Starfield is doing a really good job of reinvigorating my excitement for the other games that have done literally everything better in the past lol
I loved the game and put 1000hrs in it but I wouldn't recommended it anymore. Its simply past its golden age. Frontier seem to have given up on it. Its pretty much in maintenance mode after they half assed the space leg DLC and mostly ended community goals. They didn't even include walking around in your own ship.
Its now the vibe of a MMO on its last legs. I would love to see it spark back to life, but the devs would have to pull out the big guns.
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this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2023
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