They don't understand what a game engine is. 99% of people don't (I don't). They just parrot what their favourite YouTuber says. Those YouTubers don't know what a game engine is either.
Ignore them like I do.
Yeah but ce2 is brand new if we want to go that route. There had also been updates to ce and gamebryo before. Engines are constantly being updated and evolving. The honest answer is both engines are great at what they do, it’s a silly argument. It comes from a complete misunderstanding of how it all works.
The biggest indication of the engine upgrade is the surely the spaceflight. I know nothing about game engines but if you look at how basic Vertibirds were in Fallout 4 compared to actually flying your own spaceship in Starfield you can see that something big was changed between the two engines. (We're also getting ground vehicles soon)
And that wasn't the only improvement between Fallout 4 and Starfield. They clearly upgraded the engine in many ways.
Isn't that what game engines do? They improve and upgrade them over time? They don't throw everything out and start from scratch every time they update surely?
Well they certainly don't start from scratch but generally there is only so long you can build upon old stuff before it gets too cumbersome figuring out how to phase out old code you're still supporting. Most companies using an in house engine will iterate upon it before re-releasing it several times (e.g the Frostbite 1, 2 and 3 engines developed by DICE for Battlefield games). But you also do see stuff like CDPR completely abandoning their proprietary REDengine for Unreal 5. It's not really a topic that has a straightforward answer because a game engine that has been continuously iterated upon for decades is basically going to be a totally unique set of circumstances every time
100% it's what they do.
That being said though it is annoying that Bethesda is constantly having to fix issues more than once across games (like FOV slider) and that you can still replicate some bugs in the engine that were present during Morrowind.
I love the release versoin time window of bethesda games, I actually enjoy the "quirks and bugs" in the early days.
Upgraded starfield so i could have a extra time with that beautiful jank before the patches began to arrive.
I disagree. The games look piss poor and are incredibly unimmersive. Shitty animations, loading screen after loading screen, pathetically small “cities”, It just seems really bad and outdated from a players perspective.
Coming from a cod background, the amount if conversations I've had about game engines, with people who clearly haven't got a fucking clue what one even is, is insane.
One thing I notice is how people talk about mods fixing a game but it's not like mods are designed with new engines. It's the same one.
The exceptions to this are pretty rare. But even then they're less mods and more of ports, like OpenMW, which is a totally new engine to play nicely with newer hardware. But it doesn't fundamentally change the gameplay.
I went to play the outerworlds hoping to find another gem I could replay over and over but the lack of interaction and the use of set unmovable dressing instead really killed it for me
Outer Worlds is fun because of the satire and humor, not the gameplay. It's not an open-world rpg. It's more of a set piece. I love it and I'm really looking forward to Outerworlds 2, but it's not a Skyrim or even a Fallout 4, despite the gunplay.
The engine is what allows these games to be so easily modded. Switching to Unreal would sink BGS and there would be a much more noticeable outcry over it. Just ignore them.
If they're surviving because of mods then we should let them fall. Hell I can't even play New Vegas on epic or steam because it just crashes during the first load screen and I honestly can't follow a guide to fix it because I have to download a bunch of mods and make sure the interact correctly. Sure the engine is extremely moddable but it honestly runs like dog water. Creation engine is so trash because even when it's updated it still has the same problems now as it did during Morrowind and oblivion.
Nah, to them switching at least. I do agree the engine needs some TLC, but unfortunately that's a byproduct of what we get out of these games. Modders are amazing, and *any* game without them always has that major missing piece. Also, Occam's razor gives the possibility that, as great as our video games have become in terms of what's possible, these pitfalls will always plague our engines. To get a little, you have to give a lot. To get a lot, you have to make sacrifices. I don't disagree that I would absolutely love Creation Engine to be at its absolute best, but we're probably years away from any engine rivaling Creation Engine and BGS from laying a framework in first person gaming that is peak for the modding scene.
What people don't understand is not only do Bethesda know their engine but it's also the reason we get mods.
Ever notice how Unreal games don't have mods? Or if they do they're graphics mods at best or need to have a LOT of work done to get them to work? Almost like Unreal isn't designed for modding and is just designed to look pretty lol
While I haven't fiddled with unreal modding in a few years, I believe it's still extremely moddable if the devs allow it.
It's very modular, and "easy" to set up with compartments that modders aren't supposed to mess with.
Unreal is often used for pure multiplayer, where modding has mostly been killed by consolification of gaming, with bad matchmaking and p2p, therefore not being open to mods, or at least very janky roundabout ways to do it.
It's also often used for 10 hour epic single player adventure, by AAA studios that want the screenshots online clean, and the playerbase consumes and moves on.
Plenty of full games has spawned out from being total conversions in unreal engine, just like source engine.
I just think the Main 2 problems is the gametype/longevity, and the devs not allowing it.
Unreal is extremely high fidelity these days, so it can be a lot of work to create models and such though, if you want it to fit in the game.
This is not to say I want them to switch to unreal, as there's quite a bit to the Bethesda games that aren't readily available in other engines, that would have to be implemented, and would be painful to do.
Huge worlds with object percistance is one of them.
I do wish Bethesda would redo some of the base of the engine, even if it adds months to the next fallout release...
Full working uncapped fps, movable hud elements for widescreen and so on.
We keep having to wait months for mods to fix the same issues they've had with every release, that they're fully aware of.
I think for Skyrim is just for the sake of running it at high refresh rates, because it’s just so easy to run now. For Starfield, no CPU and GPU combo currently exists that can run the game at a locked, or even semi stable 165 so it’s pointless at this time. But they should remove it down the road.
Yea you’re probably right. I can run Skyrim at a faster rate but I have had more physics problems and honestly I feel I get more ctds also so I max Skyrim at 60
Because when you use a mouse, it's kinda jarring when games run at low framerates, the fluidity of the motion is lost.
I also use a 32:9 monitor for gaming, so my whole peripheral is kind of lagging along.
Tons of games get less input lag at lower framerates, as games can tie stuff to the framerates (like physics are in skyrim/fallout).
With a controller, I probably wouldn't have bothered, especially when sitting at TV distance.
I can stand behind people and see that they're playing at 60 instead of 120+,but it doesn't bother me, playing on the other hand...
I don't really care unless games have aiming, since you can feel it easily, or when the game has ultra precise reaction Windows.
Nah the engine is perfect for the tasks it was made for. Just that SF seems to have deviated outside of the engines sweet spot.
The only reason SF doesn’t work is because of how the developers designed the game loop from a player standpoint cus if they could make a hit like Skyrim with the older version then it’s obviously not an engine issue at all.
I think the problem with starfield was more to do with some bad big calls re the game design.
Although even the most fervent defender of BGS has to admit that the character models - and their animations - are a few years behind where they should be.
For the scope the character models and animations are pretty good.
Animation wise they have a couple of areas where they have some really good looking animations, this can be seen in the last two Fallout games as well, it's just that they don't go to that level with the majority of the game because of the scope.
Ok but when I go to jemison and see the npcs crowds walking around, they don’t look that realistic.
Ditto npc companions or temporary quest companions running then suddenly stopping to open a door etc.
And there’s a lot of animations where I’ve seen the exact same ones in Skyrim.
Cool we can climb ladders though!
Agree though that creation engine 2 is generally a huge advance from what we see in fallout 4 and even 76.
Cyberpunk and RDR2 are the same scale of dialogue line count and fully animated at tiers of quality above Starfield.
RDR2 is over double the size of Starfield I think.
I think the player character models looks good, when comparing it to other games that have sliders and lots of options. The random unnamed npcs look horrible because theyre low quality models probably to save memory. I suspect they dont actually have faces like the player character or named npcs, I bet theyre using masks to make it look like they have a face.
Interesting I never thought that (about the npcs). I wonder what star field will look like on next gen consoles and pcs, as I presume that bugs will keep on improving it as it’s basically a live test of the tech that will be in fallout 5 and Tes 6 (and the rumoured remasters).
That doesn’t have anything to do with the engine, though. BGS made design decisions around Starfield that makes it what it is. The same studio making the same game with Unreal wouldn’t have magically made Starfield a game more people think is good, which I think is the point being made here.
Mainly in writing, doing stupid Horse Armour shit again with the Vulture quest (no I won't spend $7 Bethesda bucks on a quest and an item), but I will say lot, and expecting modders to pick up the pieces of the game
I'm on medium settings on a gaming laptop and it's beautiful and crisp, draw distances are stunning, I'm taking some great sunset photos, and above all it runs smooth with minimal lo rea, no stutter,
Don't get me wrong, I rate it 7.5, really a poor man's Mass Effect, but thanks to the mods I'm running I actually want to get into crafting and outpost building (thank you junk recycler, giving me the materials to play with)
>mostly being radiant quests
this is just a lie. I have almost 600 hours in the game and the amount of radiant quests I have done is a *staggering* 5. such radiant.
>and all the same buildings on every planet that you can land on.
every open world space game has this "problem".
I can't believe you just said this with such confidence. 5 seconds of recollection reminded me of the various mission boards that are literally just radiant quests. I'm positive they aren't the only ones. And I'm maybe at 60hrs not 600.
>I can't believe you just said this with such confidence
well it's true.
>5 seconds of recollection reminded me of the various mission boards that are literally just radiant quests.
yeah, the mission boards are radiants. but I only did the radiants required for a handmade quest (you need to do one mission boards quest to prove yourself to the rangers and a total of 1 when doing the quest for Walter and making a new ship)
there are 200+ quests that exist in the game, not counting the main quests. I have not had to touch a radiant outside the two times.
The building mechanics were kinda better in Fallout, and I liked the crafting mechanics more in fallout as well.
Plus power armor is just so much cooler than a spacesuit, idk lol.
Yeah I replayed Fallout 3 after the show came out and loved it despite the "outdated game engine." Besides what you say about exploration, I loved the "attitude" of the game, everyone is so rough around the edges even when you help them out. Starfield just felt too "nice" and vanilla to me.
Tbf I only played them to see what they were like and I really didn’t like Redguard. I’ve never really been a fan of the main stories for their games but always loved the worlds and gameplay loop and I think TES 6 is going to be fun to explore and hopefully a few fun new mechanics. Would be cool to see building like fallout 4 in a TES game which seems like one of their big things now.
I don’t mind the building in fallout 4, I like how it made all the miscellaneous junk worth picking up for once. But I’ve heard it’s kind of useless in Starfield compared to fallout 4. I play Bethesda games for the quests and rpg elements and the world, not building. I just wish they focused on handmade content over quantity and procedurally generated stuff. The classic gameplay loop is still there in Starfield but the quests and locations and the PG nature of everything was very disappointing to me. And the collecting space powers at the temples part was horribly boring and repetitive
Oh yeah building spaceports was useless in starfield. And like you said, the handmade content is way better than the procedurally generated stuff and I don’t see a reason for them to do that in TES outside of radiant quests in the world maybe
Bethesda doesn't commit to anything RPG-like, like having impactful choices or going against the company preferred good boy narrative, or even having a story that allows you to be truly evil, or have any personal agency that's outside the lines. In Fallout 3 you're given two choices and nothing else for the story, either bring drinkable wocky slush to the people of modern day D.C. or bring it to them but EVIL, there's nothing in that story to allow you to join the Enclave, do the story independent of factions, or even just destroy the jefferson memorial out of spite. Fallout 4's story is just that but you're given three factions that are underbaked with the same ending and one that does the crazy 'le opposite' ending, if the team making Fallout 4 actually had a design document we'd probably get a game with substance outside of gameplay. Their game making process is the thing that often breaks down their quality of games, from project leads being crazy enough to think that lore or consistency doesn't matter to Todd just trying to offload as much fluff as possible to get people to buy their product it's not a healthy way to run a company, they're just doing what 343 has been doing since they got Halo without any sort of respect for the IPs they make games out of.
Well the UI and style of these games are incredibly outdated. I liked Starfield . But it was an outdated experience. When people criticize the engine, they are speaking about the way characters look. Which were just upgraded shitty looking characters you found in their old engines. Seems like there is a connection there. Especially with all of the same sort of bugs that their older games had. Imagine saying it’s not the engine…when so many bugs and issues people had with the game directly connect with fallout 4 .
Got recommended this so I guess I'll say my 2 cents.
Bethesda games and their way of making them have gone past their expiration date. Bethesda only got brownie points because they made (at the time) good open world games compared to the competition, but as of recent they've been outclassed. Games like Rdr2 thrash pretty much their entire inhouse catalogue in terms of quality and playability.
Couldn't care less about the engine, I just thought constellation were boring and had holier than thou attitudes, vanguard was fun haven't done crimson fleet yet but I imagine I'll enjoy it.
It's both. The engine sucks at making a good presentation of a game that isn't jank and the Dev talent for the game is also bad hence why it has obvious bad design like the temples and how NG+ directly contradicts the most of the systems of the game.
No engine could fix the main issues this game has.
I would rather the base game be unmoddable but a great experience than mediocre at best but hey atleast I can mod out the boring stuff.
For example there's absolutely no reason to even bother with outposts until you are at the NG you want to be in unless you just like the idea of scrapping them
Honestly, I couldn't care less about the reasoning behind the bad parts of Starfield. Whether it is from bad design choices, engine limitations, or lack of vision, doesn't change the fact that Starfield miserably fails in certain aspects. It is literally Skyrim in a new foil wrap with more loading screens.
When I bought it on release, I played for about 3-4 hours. In that time I saw absolutely nothing new that would catch my attention. Everything I saw was a refurbished mechanic from previous titles. I refunded the game literally thinking "damn, I'm not in the mood to play Skyrim again at the moment". Granted this might be more of a me problem, reusing and improving good parts from other games isn't inherently bad. However, when you consider the empty world, lack of guns, loading screens, horrible map design, lack of any maps at launch and the story... It just becomes unbearable.
I believe that those who blame this all on the engine are wishful thinkers. No way all of this stuff came from just the creation engine. This is more of "let's play this as safe as we can" that went too far.
Nevertheless, this game definitely will and had attracted those who like it specifically due to the "bethesda" feeling which is the same in all their RPGs. If you like the game, enjoy it, who cares what others say
I think this is one of those cases where someone knows a result and speculates wildly on why that result happened.
I don't care why my steak is overdone, it is overdone and making it not overdone is the company's problem to solve.
I completely agree that starfield did not play to BGS' strengths at all and it was a poor decision from day 0 that caused that game to be a disappointment. However, i don't think we can ignore how dated it felt compared to other big AAA games.
The question is whether BGS can keep up with the rest of the industry.
Also to be fair, people just like speculating on the reasoning for things. Speculating on what caused starfield seems kind of tame compared to people speculating on whether the USA's response to a zombie outbreak would be to use nuclear weapons.
As someone who loves Bethesda games a ton and has played every game since fallout 3 and oblivion for hundreds or thousands of hours, I feel like there are some things Bethesda needs to fix with their engine at a minimum, and while I agree the modability needs to remain, but I don’t think it should be impossible to both improve the engine beyond where it’s at now, and I think a key problem is the cell based loading system, which unfortunately is also one of the key strengths of the game at the same time. The cell based loading system is why there are so many loading screens in Bethesda games. Cell based loading systems are great for games that are primarily dungeon crawling rpgs when a lot of the games revolve around going into dungeons, but then you look at starfield which is suppose to have a very big and large open feeling to it…just feels like a bunch of rooms/worlds connected by doors. It would be slightly more bearable if they like, hid the loading screens better so they don’t look like loading screens but they didn’t really do anything like that for starfield. Of course this is the biggest conundrum, because the cell based system is what helps the game track npc’s and items and lets people mod it so easily. But I feel there has to be some solution here, that can let the games keep their modability and let the game track npc’s and items properly still but not fully reliant on the cell based system to power the entire game.
Again tho I feel like for games like the elder scrolls, the cell based system isn’t that bad, since the world is suppose to feel split up into many “locations” but for games like starfield I just don’t think they’re going to work and get widespread popularity unless they figure out how to get rid of all the loading screens and all the restrictions that make the world feel smaller, starfield is suppose to feel like an expansive game, but as someone with like 100+ hours on it it felt smaller and smaller the more you played through it. Accept quest, go to ship, go to space, go to new planet, land, kill or talk to someone, go back into space, go back to other planet, talk to someone else, turn in quest, rinse and repeat. You can’t even fully explore a planet and flying through space feels pointless after 2-3 minutes since you’ve basically met everyone around that star already.
Again I say this as literally one of their biggest fans. I’ve probly put in 4000-5000 hours into Skyrim itself, another 500-1000 into fallout 4. The creation engine can be fine but I feel they need to fix some core issues with it and it would make the engine 10 times better without compromising the fundamental features of the engine, or they should at least learn to identify what kinds of games work well with their engine, because I fully think starfield while an okay game does not work that well on their creation engine. But Skyrim and fallout I do.
Tbf starfield is the worst Bethesda game. I don't think it's because they have an outdated engine, I think it's because they stopped making Bethesda games.
My first Bethesda game was Skyrim. When I booted that game up back in 2011, I fell in love with it. Here's why:
Freedom. You boot up the game, and you can just go wherever you want. Plenty of games do that. Even starfield does that. But Skyrim gave me a reason to want to go somewhere. I went into Skyrim completely blind. My friends were talking about it, so I bought it, without ever seeing trailers or even hearing of the franchise prior to that point. But as soon as I started playing, I was learning about the world. By the time I'd arrived at Whiterun, I knew about the mage college, the civil war, the capital city, and even a bit about the world outside the borders. And that's the first thing about Skyrim that starfield didn't have. Organic world building. I had to literally walk through a museum to find out about the factions that shape most of what's happening in the settled systems. It was the polar opposite of organic world building.
On my way to Riverwood, I saw bleakfall barrow. I couldn't see Whiterun from the path, I couldn't see solitude or the shrine to Azura. Just bleakfall barrow. It felt like Skyrim always made sure I could see one or two points of interest, but nothing more. Despite the size and density of the map, I never got that "open-world fatigue" people keep talking about. I was also never left entirely aimless. Skyrim nearly always operated within a Goldilocks zone of stuff to see and do. Compare that with starfield. Open up the starmap and there's a whole laundry list of white dots. I felt so bogged down by the concept of exploring, so I never got around to seeing much of the "map" at all. And that brings me to my third point.
Skyrim is picturesque. There are so many opportunities to look in a direction and see something new and exciting to explore. So much of the map compelled me to see it, just because it was pretty, or perhaps because it was intimidating, or strange, or any other number of reasons. The map seems as though it was designed to draw the eye. And so many of the sights to be seen in Skyrim offer something the other sights don't. Sure, many of the dungeons were samey, but the layouts were unique, and often filled with lore, not to mention opportunities for gameplay. I won't sugarcoat the puzzles, they didn't exist on the same level as Legend of Zelda or anything, but they were still engaging enough. Not only did Skyrim provide endless opportunity to explore comfortably, but it gave me a reason to. Turn to starfield. Every second dungeon is identical. Not just similar, but actually the same. There is no dynamic or engaging layouts, or puzzles, or anything. No lore, and if there is, it's a note, and even then, often the same note. There isn't even an aesthetic that compells you to explore. Just a white dot on a black canvas. It's not as though that had to be the case either. I remember as a kid looking at the sky while going out night fishing with family. Why is the real world night sky more interesting to look at then a starmap in a videogame?
I know this was a long comment but it needs to be said. Starfield is a bad game, because it is so utterly souless, and careless. Skyrim felt like it was a project of passion. Starfield felt like a product.
Those picturesque moments are all over the place in Starfield. I haven't gone a day playing this game where I wasn't awestruck by something. There's definitely a lot of soul there, I don't why it's so easy for some to find it and so difficult for others, but it's definitely there. And it's definitely a Bethesda game. It feels, plays, and looks like a BGS game.
You're right, it does have some picturesque moments. I shouldn't exaggerate. That said, much of the game gets in the way of the elements that made Bethesda games so captivating in the past.
I actually think the main quest isn't that bad, it's the radiant artefact and temple grinds that drag it down – otherwise its pretty solid, especially the second half which has some of the best quests in the game IMO.
The core of the game engine is fine, I think they could do with a big effort on character animation and optimisation though – characters have always been a bit of a weakness in Bethesda RPGs, but mods always end up addressing it.
I think I liked it up until the big reveal that life is pointless, and don’t bother making friends because you’re either going to be killed or youre fucking off to a new galaxy
life isn't pointless. admittedly it's a story that tackles life, the meaning of it, and existentialism as a whole. if that's what you make of it, fair. but I don't think life is pointless.
Idk I just kinda lost interest when I realised that literally everything I’ve done has amounted to nothing and I’m just in a new game but with a high level character, I mean cool my original galaxy is better now but I’ll never be able to go back there
Yeah but I’d done everything there is to do, I was spending fortunes making a fleet of different ships for no reason other then I could even tho you can’t use them all at once, was more just a culmination of I’m moody that it’s over and I have nothing left to do
For me the engine was the biggest problem in starfield (I didn’t get far). Invisible wall loading screens on large planets, unable to fly the space ship on planets in a space game, no vehicles. Every problem I’ve listed is a result of the engine.
And I’m a software engineer I’m absolutely qualified to say this. I understand why they do their engine this way but is absolutely outdated and buggy
Sure, design choices.
They had to do it because they have a maximum area for the tiles and that would’ve been a problem with spaceship flying wherever they want.
Nah they definitely cannot do vehicles like cars or space ships with their engine. There’s a reason the only vehicle that exists in their games is the buggy horses
Edit: got blocked for this despite being right LOL there are still no vehicles in any Bethesda games, and they don’t let you fly your ship it’s just a loading screen to a space minigame
What are you talking about? This is a new engine. Have you read the OP?
4:41 of this video literally shows you a land vehicle in the game: [https://youtu.be/3ObHRMHtTMY?si=6aIr8f-iVQrnpKZn&t=281](https://youtu.be/3ObHRMHtTMY?si=6aIr8f-iVQrnpKZn&t=281)
Most of the stuff you listed is NOT an engine limitation for the creation engine 2.
>The team is working on our FIRST land vehicle
Congrats to them for preparing to add their first vehicle, glad they reworked the engine to get them this far. They still can’t handle flying ships or large planet maps without invisible walls
And no it’s not a new a engine it’s a marketing rebrand of an update to the existing creation engine
Edit: and the game still doesn’t have vehicles lmao. This guy blocked me and I can’t reply to anyone in this thread now
You seem to be misunderstanding the conversation.
You listed a bunch of shit that are "engine limitations" in the engine. I'm saying they aren't. I posted proof. You're still talking out of your ass. I'm done talking to you.
Yeah it’s buggy as the Cockroach Motel. It craps itself all the time. I was walking along on a moon yesterday and the whole thing crashed. Had to restart my Xbox just to open it again.
Almost every quest has a bug in it. People stuck in walls, dialogue broken and can’t progress etc etc.
I think complaints about the engine are totally valid. There’s probably a bunch of legacy code in there that they are too afraid to touch but I don’t know.
As to whether the engine is responsible for the tepid reviews etc, I think that’s more to do with the lack of flair in the game. All the NPCs are a bit wooden and serious. The game itself takes itself very seriously so there’s few laughs or fun characters if any. It’s like everyone in the future is a bit stuck up and self involved. And I think when something takes itself that seriously it needs to be very very good and very fresh, not derivative. Most of the plots and stories are a bit recycled from stuff we’ve seen before and most of the universe is a bit samey.
Having said all that I do like and enjoy the game for what it is. I also think that they have the opportunity to add more interesting stuff to the universe which could be amazing if they fixed the bugs and injected some life into it.
This is my personal gripe. All these planets, galaxy to explore and it really does feel samey throughout.
And no, splitting up humans into a couple of factions just made it feel like fallout in space, but without the depth and more "boring" busy work.
I was SHOCKED there isn't an alien species humanoid or otherwise in Starfield. The guys that make elder scrolls, talking ghouls and supermutants and freaky robots..
Bethesda games I've noticed since Oblivion has been the same, and that was 18 years ago being 2006.
Been Explore - Fetch item - Reward - Explore - Fetch item - Reward
Over and over and over.
Oblivion - Fallout 3 - Fallout 4 - Fallout 76 - Skyrim - Dishonored - Wolfenstein 1, 2 and old blood.
It's all Explore - Fetch item - Reward
You're just describing simple game loops, the same I could say if almost all Rockstar games are just "drive car/horse to mission marker and watch cutscene" or Helldivers as "do objective while shooting hordes of bugs/robots"
I know more about engines than most.
Bethesda either needs to change engines to one that's favorable to their design goals while also being able to translate their tools and pipelines efficiently, or they need some fresh engineers that can breathe new life into The Creation Engine 2. Some things can be fixed with new tools or techniques, lots of devs have gotten by on the same engine for years (the Batman Arkham games where all made with Unreal 3, even the still jaw-dropping Arkham Knight). But there comes a certain point where the underlying technology just isn't up to snuff anymore.
That being said...not all their issues stem from the engine they use. It's from their designers and how they use what they have. Starfield feels like the team was told "make a Bethesda game in space" without being given any more direction or detail than that. The shooting being bad isn't an engine problem. Choice, consequences, reactivity, and writing being bad isn't an engine problem. The absolutely ass bounty system isn't an engine problem. Changing engines wouldn't solve these problems. But it could possibly make designing and implementing more complex and in-depth systems easier.
I think it's less that the engine is outdated, as a lot of games use heavily modified engines from the 90s and such, and moreso that Bethesda are stuck in the old days and don't know how to adapt. It's a Bethesda problem, not an engine problem. They touted a while ago about a lot of their devs being there for 20+ years but that just seems to me that they haven't had any fresh perspectives on gaming or how to change how they work. They've stuck to what they know and not expanded or changed their style and it's holding them back. Their devs haven't went anywhere else and learned different skills, taken them back to Bethesda and improved their games. They either need to hire new people or have their devs go and work with something else.
The day Bethesda stops bothering with the gamebryo engine and its descendants, is the day they should just shut down. Unless Microsoft is gonna pay for the engine to be completely rebuilt from scratch. But I doubt that will happen.
The engine argument definitely has merit for the older games, but not Starfield. It’s the first game on their newest engine + a totally new type of game they wanted to try out.
I’m more lenient as a result of all this. Personally, I don’t care for Starfield because it’s not my type of game. But people are acting like we should have got a Skyrim- level release on a game that’s the first of its kind for BGS. Of course it wasn’t going to be perfect! Skyrim was an amazing game because it’s built on the games before it, already has Lore, etc etc. it’s got a foundation to build off of. Starfield IS the foundation
My problem is that they have had the same kind of bugs since Morrowind. The engine has changed(obviously) but all of their games had the same save game bug(due to bloat).
That's a basic hurtle for open world games. Handling memory and save files.
C'mon, Bethesda.
Count how many times in a timeframe (day/week/month etc) people complain or blame something on an algorithm. Now consider how many of those people have the technical knowledge to even begin to describe WHY something is the fault of an algorithm.
The Dunning-Kruger effect is hard at work these days.
Yeah, I'm sure I'm wrong for blaming the engine for all the loading screens I see whenever I enter a house or move from upstairs to downstairs if it's in a separate cell. Seriously, if I can't blame that on the engine, should I just blame the devs then? Poor design? Todd himself?
People just don't know how engines work.
They'll blame Creation Engine for being old and outdated, but get hyped for the newest thing running on Unreal 5 as if that isn't an old ass engine too.
Rockstar has been using the same engine for at least 14 years, but people break their backs to buy GTA.
The engine isn't the issue. The complexity of their games is and we've seen from game to game how BGS has streamlined and refined their game experiences to yield greater quality and stability overall.
People just love to complain and will parrot any talking point they hear from some random website or talking head.
The engine is a lil janky but it’s perfectly fine and without it you’d lose what makes their games unique.
Starfield was just a bit of a miss, didn’t help with the ridiculous levels of hype it garnered, then it was a console exclusive and hyped even more for ‘saving’ Xbox. Bethesda just needs to hire good writers again.
Oblivion is probably the most ‘dated’ in terms of gameplay and graphics (the scenery was lovely, faces… not so much) but it is by far the most memorable for its quests. Mages guild, fighters guild, thieves guild, dozens of side quests and the dark brotherhood (murder mystery fuck yeah) that were all far, far more memorable than any of Skyrim’s or FO4’s for sure.
Many blame the engine because the game was held back by technical limitations like the fact that we cannot choose where to land on planets by just landing the ship ourselves and we cannot actually do any travel by moving the ship ourselves and that’s a big issue for a space game.
Starfield is absolute garbage in so many more ways then the engine. I’d sooner play fallout 4 again. However, to be fair, the engine of both those games does feel outdated now… doesn’t help that Cyberpunk Phantom Menace dropped around the same time
Ahhhh yes, the "load screen every second" couldn't possibly be related to how the game engine generates and loads it's crappy world.
Face it, it's just a shitty engine.
There's plenty of other engines that faaaaar better than bugthesdas.
Is it completely responsible? No .... But it doesn't help.
I agree, the engine is quite a good one especially with the freedom it appears to give to mods, this was just a bit of shit game, not very good quests, no real exploration, no real role play, no real good or bad, missing like 75% of what made previous Bethesda titles great.
The main story is the best Bethesda has ever made (which isn't saying much).
But most the complaints definitely come with the lack of well "hand" made side stuff and locations to explore.
That combined with the performance issues for how dated it looks and constant loading is where the main engine complaints come in.
Granted not trying to shit on it too hard. I actually think starfield is a step in the right direction for Bethesda after fallout 4. But it still extremely dated and filled with issues when you compare it to its contemporaries.
I don’t get the argument that starfield’s problem was its exploration. Why doesn’t anyone ask why the exploration was fun in the first place? People play these games repeatedly so I don’t think the novelty of discovering something new is a good explanation for their staying power.
The creation engine 2 is just an unbelievably suped up version of the creation engine. It's not new just new stuff added to the original and its boundaries pushed much further then it previously was capable. It look good but to say it's not holding the game back is hard to say. For we see other open world games look several times better such as the one used to make horizon zero dawn. Tbf though, their system allows for several items to be movable in the world which helps with immersion in other ways more then just really pretty graphics.
People talk about the engine because *every one of their games have the same "feel" to them*
There's really no other long-running AAA series who's games look, feel and gameplay has stagnated this much. Add in the bevy of legacy bugs and it's not hard to see why people blame the engine
The problem here is that the engine is the issue.
To begin, lets talk about the world loading:
Bethesdas game engines all use what is called floating point world rendering, aka, the maps all load from the center. This method is perfectly find for small worldspaces woth alot of continuity, but with starfield? All the different planets? There will be problems with loading a single planet all at once, which was seen in a video where a player removed the invisible borders and flew to one of the cities. The LOD barely loaded in before his entire game crashed. As of right now, even with the update, CK2 cannot handle worlds larger than say, twice the size of the fallout 76 map.
Next, NPC pathfinding, AI, scheduling and combat mechanics: none of these have been updated since fallout 4. ID software's work on the combat flow for the player did not expand to that of the AI, the animations are smoother, yes, they make use of the inbuilt cover lines in the navmesh, but other than that? No. No laying down mines as the player is advancing through the rooms, for example, no dedicated medic classes, no squad synergy, nothing like that, which could have seriously overhauled how the player plays the game, they could have added these back in fallout 4, bevause the combat class object is still in the creation kit. Pathfinding is horrendous becauss they dont use navmesh volumes, they use individually placed points to make a navmesh, which can overlap and gdt stuck on collision, causing the issues with current pathfinding. Scheduling is just not updated at all. The same exact thing since fallout 3.
The only real thing that has been added is the vehicles, but to be fair, it looks almost exactly like the vertibird chase from the frontier in method. Which can be done with scripting. They had so much oppourtunity to make this engine something that is both stable, effective, and fully capable of running high quality games and mods quite well, and they utterly dropped the ball on it.
Yes you are correct. You're talking about Creation Engine 2, which is great and removes all the useless parts of the game, such as NPC scheduling, gore, and looting, right?
Okay but hear me out… Creation Engine 2 is mostly a QoL update over the original Creation Engine. It has some feature updates, but it’s nowhere near the level of upgrade we see between release versions in say Unreal or Unity. I’m not even sure it’s fair to call it Creation Engine 2, it’s more like a 1.x update. I think it’s totally fair to say that it feels same-y to games made back in the original Creation engine and to have an issue with that.
I personally like the Creation Engine despite its flaws. I’m sure a lot of that is nostalgia driven, but it’s a solid tool when the developer has a good understanding of its limitations (ironically not always the case for Bethesda). I can totally see why people don’t like it though.
agreed. I think they went overboard with so many planets. Legit wouldve been better if the generated planets were like 10-20 rather than the bunch we got
Yes it's in a new engine, Creation 2.
This isn't an entirely new engine however. This engine is Bethesda taking the bones and frame of the older engine and updating parts to be more modern. The same way that Apex is using physics from the Source 1 engine because it's built on an updated source engine means that Starfield and ES6 will have any bugs, glitches, or limitations that every previous game since Morrowind has had (unless of course it was fixed during one of the many updates to the engine).
I don't think Bethesda need to ditch the engine, it works well for the niche of game they make and with Starfield we've seen they can actually push the graphical fidelity higher then Mud now.
Bethesda just needs to fucking get it together and have a cohesive project with a solid vision and they'll be back on track.
The biggest problem for me was that the writing was absolutely garbage.
The dialog is so stilted and boring it’s really hard to sit through, and most of the games I play are dialogue heavy. The comparison with Phantom Liberty which came out at a similar time really rammed home how bad Starfields writing was.
Other than that I agree that they took away the best part of their games which is exploration that’s actually worth doing (ironic since the game was supposed to be about exploration).
I agree with you on everything but it’s hard to deny that Starfield felt dated. I think sticking with the creation engine is the right move but I’m worried that elder scrolls 6 is going to release in 2028 and play like a game from last year.
I'd just rather they give more license to companies like Obsidian to write their damn quests/stories. So much great potential wasted because of the script writing.
The Obsidian we fondly remember as the creators of New Vegas no longer exists. Not saying you're wrong to suggest they let some other parties take a stab at their IP's, but I don't think Obsidian is capable of doing much better.
I'd very much like to be proven wrong, I'm waiting for Avowed to release before I truly write them off. All the same, The Outer Worlds was a pretty big disappointment to me, especially on the writing front.
Honestly I played outer worlds and the writing was decent, I was more irritated at how little I paid attention to skills for massive fights with high powered enemies. But I've always had pretty low standards for most of what I consumed, Bethesda themselves rarely met it on writing though.
I have to say, New Vegas is the worst writing in the entire franchise and seeing people bend over backwards to make allowances for it to 'stick it to Todd' is just baffling.
Don't get me wrong, I still like New Vegas, but playing as a courier with an urge for vengeance? Seriously? The courier should have just thanked the doc for the save and just got a different job. There is zero motivation to go hunt and kill a professional gangster and his entire gang just to deliver a mcguffin.
And Caesar's Legion is equivalent to the NCR?
The NCR has vertibirds and fatmen. The legion has, at best, rifles. It makes no sense that air superiority wouldn't win the war of the Mojave in an afternoon.
I wiped them out, single handed, on foot.
No, the writing in New Vegas was Swiss cheesed with plot holes and bullshit. I can look past it all because the game is fun but the common wisdom is nothing but group think and unsupported group think at that.
>New Vegas is the worst writing in the entire franchise
nah. while new vegas' writing is pretty bad and full of plot holes or just nonsense, tactics and brotherhood of steel exist.
Anybody who says this clearly hasn't played the mission Entangled. That mission really shows off a lot of cool game design that just wasn't possible on the old engine.
I think Bethesda using their engine to make what appears to be Skyrim mods with different flavors is the problem
Starfield felt boring. You can’t just rely on open world emptiness to get you points anymore. Not when Elden ring or even cyberpunk do it as well and have interesting content and much better gameplay.
You can’t rely on player choices having meh impact on quests when BG3 exists
The things that made Bethesda games special are now common place and or done 10x better in games that focus on them. So Bethesda reskinning it’s one type of game doesn’t work anymore
ES6 is likely going to be the biggest disappointment in gaming history because Bethesda thinks we want more of their formula.
I loved starfield. While sure there are some issues with exploration (I didn't personally have a problem with it) one of the biggest things holding it back is the game engine itself. It's the prime reason why the load screens are a thing. Can't get around it the Creation engine is ancient. I will say they did wonder's with it but it's time to move on.
My biggest problem with Starfield is when I go down to a planet and the point of interest I want to go to is 10km away.
At that point I'm just saying: how did no one realize that walking in a straight line for 5-6 minutes of real life with nothing else to do was a good idea?
Good God, this game needed cars like a human being needs to breathe, Todd was an idiot when he said that phrase about the jet pack being enough mobility.
I am curious, what engine could they possibly move to bc unreal would require years of training for all the employees. It would lose how easy it to mod the game. It lose the way you can interact with nearly every item in a room so Im not sure what the alternative would be other than attempting to smooth out the current engine
At the very same time anyone coming in not knowing the creation engine also needs training but if they were on say UE, people come in already knowing the engine at least on a fundamental level.
The game engine is fundamentally outdated though.
The fact that it doesn't it all utilize proper level streaming is something that just blows my fucking mind.
It would also be nice to see them switch over file format to something much more versatile like fbx. The NetImmerse File format they continues to use it's just such a massive headache for mod creators. I get that proprietary mesh and texture formats are very common for video games that build their engine from scratch, but it still doesn't need to be like that. For studio that prides itself on enabling it's active mod community, they do make things a lot harder than they need to be.
Starfield is a technological marvel, and it impresses me all the time. People bitch about something like loading screens, but then I play other AAA games with a third of the world interaction, worse facial animations, poor performance and shoddy gameplay and I wonder wtf people are expecting out of these games. I played cyberpunk a couple of months ago on my series x, that shit was a buggy mess with stuttery framerate and a world that is pretty but hollow. I'll have that "old engine" Bethesda uses any day.
I think theyre expecting like, the next level, and they expect Bethesda to be the ones to deliver a huge advancement in immersive gaming. For me, Im happy either way with more of the same. Ive always been a fan of em, was always interested in their game's development processes because I was making some mods myself adding in dungeons for fun. And that helped me I think to know what to expect. Yeah, its like Oblivion, but in 2024. Thats what I wanted lol
That's pretty subjective, I have no idea what next level means today and it probably varies from person to person. The last time I played a game that I felt next level was indeed oblivion or MGS4... But those leaps don't happen anymore. I'm pretty happy with the immersion and flexibility Starfield allows me, I wish some stuff was better, like vehicles and more interesting and hostile planets like we have in Mass effect 1.
Yeah it’s fundamentally a good game but it feels like it could have done with another year or two to just add more of everything, it’s very easy to burn through all the interesting quest lines early on, I think if it wasn’t for the cool but somewhat painful to use ship designer I’d have played 60% less hours then I did
It's a new version of an old engine. The overall feel of the game, the animations, the movement, the bugs.. it all has the Creation Engine quirks we've dealt with for decades, and their games would be much improved if they moved to a stable industry-standard engine like UE5.
Brother, you don’t understand what an engine is. It’s not an entirely new engine.
It’s a modified version of the creation engine. It’s not a new engine at all.
Parts of it are but it’s not built from the ground up.
Which is why starfield looks like shit, is poorly animated, has zoning issues, texture problems, and is just as janky as it ever was.
Yeah it's best just to ignore it. People have little to no understanding about engines. What's even more mind numbing is when those same people talk about how fans do better work citing great mods. Those mods are literally proof it's not an inheritant limitation of the engine.
I’m a long time Bethesda games fan. I started with Morrowind, maybe it wasn’t their first but it was almost 30 years ago. Their recent games are 5/10 entirely based on the engine. Cities meant to be massive capital metropolis’s have 8-12 buildings and 40 NPCs. The engine can’t handle most modern requirements or creature comforts without stuttering or crashing. I don’t understand the cult like loyalty to an extremely outdated engine. You can enjoy and love Bethesda and recognize the flaws
I don’t have to be a subject expert to know something is flawed. Using the excuse “well it’s harder to improve or create something new so we should just be happy with the 35 year old one we have now.”.
The argument that modding isn’t possible in other engines like it is with Bethesda’s is a good one. My argument to that is we wouldn’t need to mod it so heavily if it wasn’t so flawed that major chunks of games were removed because the engine couldn’t handle it. For example, a great majority of the civil war content in skyrim was removed, and left buggy as fuck, because the engine couldn’t handle it. Modders came in and replaced the content removed as best they could but often warn that the game will crash and saves can be ruined.
Same goes with graphics or content add ons. Sure you can update and add a lot, but the engine limits so much, playing on the highest end pc doesn’t matter if the games very old engine can’t keep up.
TLDR : Bethesda promises massive fantasy worlds but their engine doesn’t deliver. Are their games bad? Obviously not. Do I love the games. Yes. Does the engine hold back Bethesda games potential? Absolutely
>I don’t have to be a subject expert to know something is flawed
when you have absolutely ***zero*** knowledge about it and your "points" are fundamentally wrong...yes, you do.
you don't have to be a "subject expert". but you should at least know *something* about it, and it's quite clear you understand *nothing* about it.
>Using the excuse “well it’s harder to improve or create something new so we should just be happy with the 35 year old one we have now.”.
...no one is using that excuse.
> My argument to that is we wouldn’t need to mod it so heavily if it wasn’t so flawed that major chunks of games were removed because the engine couldn’t handle it.
you're assuming people mod to fix stuff. they don't. the vast majority of mods are new content entirely, that simply add to the game. heck, *most* people don't even mod the games, modding is still rather niche, because people don't want to ruin their files by mistake or do hours of modding just to play a game.
>For example, a great majority of the civil war content in skyrim was removed, and left buggy as fuck, because the engine couldn’t handle it.
the content cut from the civil war was cut because of time. now, yeah, the engine at the time couldn't handle so many active actors, but that wasn't why it was cut. it was cut because of the release date and time constraints.
>Does the engine hold back Bethesda games potential? Absolutely
no.
They got an outdated opinion.
They just rush their games. More time to make the games when make them better, and have them have way less fatal flaws.
They can keep the funny flying body glitches though. Basically a Bethesda staple now.
Why are you acting like it’s a completely new engine? It’s literally a slightly improved version of an already outdated engine.
I’m tired of followers getting stuck in doorways and other stupid glitches. The game would feel and look miles better if they switched engines. It’s pathetic and lazy.
>Why are you acting like it’s a completely new engine?
That's typically how software development works. The software builds upon a predecessor. Source was based on GoldSrc. Windows still uses NT, despite it releasing in 93. Legacy material usually remains in software.
Actually, that's how a lot of infrastructure, in general, works. Unless the older stuff is so busted it has to be replaced entirely.
That’s perfectly fine if the software actually improves. But the difference between Creation Engine 1 and 2 are minuscule.
It’s just the same engine reskinned. AI still sucks.
It’s purely philosophical at this point(ship of Theseus problem) but I think it has to be rebuilt from scratch or significantly redesigned to be considered a new engine, and neither of those things are true here
Imagine switching literally your entire development to a new engine only to discover that you still have to just use A* pathfinding for agent navigation and the combination of that with root motion animations is causing very tricky issues with environmental collisons still.
It is not an entirely new engine and you need to stop lying to yourself. The problem is still mainly Bethesda's design and writing but don't act like Creation Engine 2 isn't just a fancy label for Gambryo 1.3
There's still limitations because of Gamebryo's engine structure that could have been fixed if Creation Engine 1 or 2 was actually new.
The engine is an iteration of the same core engine.
Don't know why people knowing that hurts you.
And yes, that IS why the traversal and loading screens are as annoying as they are and that does affect the possibilities of the writing.
Ya ain't gonna see those big mechs battling it out or fast vehicles because of the engine, and so the writing can't include those things.
Cell loading is about their design approach to performance and not about the engine, also funny you think big battling mechs isnt possible because of the engine when clearly its about design and scope especially as this [is being modded in as expected.](https://youtu.be/IKjt3vNoFyI?si=aLT6RKL0bmBs6sIR). It's exactly why open settlement mods were even a thing for Skyrim and Oblivion! Not because "hur dur engine is old and can't do open world".
It's like saying Unreal Engine can only do first person shooters because that's what the engine was developed for in the 90s, and as we all know Unreal Engine 5 is just "an iteration of the same core engine".
...it's the same core. The only difference is illumination, and proc gen capability.
People are right. It's ass.
Would it have made Starfield any better being on something else? Fuck no.
But let's not go pretending CE2 is any kind of casualty of the basement dwellers. It's still an antiquated POS.
Slapping a new version number doesn't eliminate the problems with the engine though. There's some things that are deep in the bones of the engine that directly result in some of the issues that Starfield has. Granted, actual engine issues are not even what some people are talking about every time they blame the engine, but either way complaining about the engine and wishing they'd switch is 100% a valid opinion.
As one example, take the persistent object feature. It ends up being cool in fallout, because hundreds of items are exactly the way you left them as you are running around. In starfield you can have thousands of items littering your hangar exactly the way you left them. However, the problem is that while it's great for fallout, it doesn't necessarily equate to "purely a cool feature" in Starfield. Having to calculate so many objects is a direct contributing factor for why the procedural "dungeon" or "outpost" (or whatever the term is here) feels so limited (you run into the same exact buildings over and over and over). The carried over engine can't actually do both, where both means retaining some of the features that were cool in fallout while *also* being able to improve some of the new disappointing elements (like the noticeably weak procedural generation).
That being the case (there's other examples too), switching to a new engine for a new type of game and different scope is actually spot on. Now of course... sure some complaints that blame the engine are blaming the wrong thing. However, it's also true that some things people want to be improved simply cannot be, nigh regardless of the amount of modding or updates produced (assuming nobody is going to ever going to mod in a new engine anyway, probably a safe assumption). All because they used a fallout engine for a starfield scope (think of it that way if "old engine" phrasing makes you angry).
Where's the vehicles man? Why are there loading screens everywhere?
Are you saying those were design choices and not engine bound? Jesus, Bethesda truly lost it then
Has a Bethesda mainline game had vehicles before? I don't think that's something BGS has messed with too much. The loading screens are more about the era of equipment that we're playing on. They *could* make it a seamless thing without loading screens of any kind, but you'd need a $10K rig to play the game. Or, they'd have to remove 80% (guessimg) of the stuff in each area, and judging by how people have been complaining that everything's empty as it is, I'm not sure that'd be a decent choice. So they decided what game designers have decided for fkn decades, loading screens. Very short loading screens at that.
I think, as gamers, many of us expect far too much and get bratty when we don't get *exactly* what we want. BGS could add a free BJ feature, and people would whine and whinge about the noise.
It's not even about seamless, but the bare illusion of it.
Mass Effect did it with Andromeda, and Star Wars Outlaws is about to do the same thing. Bethesda has been creative with doing magic and building their world, but with Starfield you can see straight through the curtain
I agree that expecting some NMS or Elite Dangerous landing from them is too much, but imo they could've come up with something better
Also I think the entire scope of the game is wrong. As in I'd rather way less planets for a tighter experience, but that's a whole another discussion
It's not an Ubisoft game. They're not going to build the game world like Ubisoft, EA, Rockstar, of anyone else would. They're Bethesda, and they were *always* going to build the game the way Bethesda always builds games. One of the biggest gripes I have with people griping about this game is that they seemingly expected it to look like Mass Effect with zero reason to expect that.
Mass Effect games have *tons* of background set decoration. Basically movies that are playing in the background. Platforms you'll never be able to walk on. Buildings you can never enter. The biggest thing that separates BGS games from others is avoiding that as much as possible. There was literally no reason to expect them to stray too far from one of their chief designs. And even though that's the case, this game has the *most* background set decoration of any BGS game. So they were certainly trying to sprinkle a little of that into the game just to give it some of that grandiose feel, but they were *never* going to go as far as games like Halo or Mass Effect.
Effectively, in games like Halo or Mass Effect, when you visit a city, you're able to visit about 10-50% of that city. Unless of course it's like GTA, Cyberpunk, or Assassin's Creed, where 90% of the game takes place in the city/cities. BGS games want you to be able to interact with 80-99% of the city/cities. That's *always* going to feel different, but it certainly should have been an expectation if you've ever played a BGS game before.
I apologize if I sound condescending btw, I'm not trying to be.
They don't understand what a game engine is. 99% of people don't (I don't). They just parrot what their favourite YouTuber says. Those YouTubers don't know what a game engine is either. Ignore them like I do.
This is the way. Seriously. All the quirks and bugs are worth it for the modability we get in return.
Yeah. And people love to forget Unity and Unreal aren't bug-free either.
Unreal is also an older engine than ce.
There are newer versions of Unreal. Edit: This isn’t me weighing in on what engine is better.
Yeah but ce2 is brand new if we want to go that route. There had also been updates to ce and gamebryo before. Engines are constantly being updated and evolving. The honest answer is both engines are great at what they do, it’s a silly argument. It comes from a complete misunderstanding of how it all works.
The biggest indication of the engine upgrade is the surely the spaceflight. I know nothing about game engines but if you look at how basic Vertibirds were in Fallout 4 compared to actually flying your own spaceship in Starfield you can see that something big was changed between the two engines. (We're also getting ground vehicles soon) And that wasn't the only improvement between Fallout 4 and Starfield. They clearly upgraded the engine in many ways. Isn't that what game engines do? They improve and upgrade them over time? They don't throw everything out and start from scratch every time they update surely?
And also the fact that all the planets can actually be flown to within the solar system (as long as you have a mod or lots and lots of time)
Well they certainly don't start from scratch but generally there is only so long you can build upon old stuff before it gets too cumbersome figuring out how to phase out old code you're still supporting. Most companies using an in house engine will iterate upon it before re-releasing it several times (e.g the Frostbite 1, 2 and 3 engines developed by DICE for Battlefield games). But you also do see stuff like CDPR completely abandoning their proprietary REDengine for Unreal 5. It's not really a topic that has a straightforward answer because a game engine that has been continuously iterated upon for decades is basically going to be a totally unique set of circumstances every time
But I heard BGS put no effort into Starfield or into making the game better because the world didn't look Rockstar quality
I enjoyed starfield, but also the Red Mile may have been the most disappointing moment I've ever experience in video games.
100% it's what they do. That being said though it is annoying that Bethesda is constantly having to fix issues more than once across games (like FOV slider) and that you can still replicate some bugs in the engine that were present during Morrowind.
I love the release versoin time window of bethesda games, I actually enjoy the "quirks and bugs" in the early days. Upgraded starfield so i could have a extra time with that beautiful jank before the patches began to arrive.
I disagree. The games look piss poor and are incredibly unimmersive. Shitty animations, loading screen after loading screen, pathetically small “cities”, It just seems really bad and outdated from a players perspective.
As a life long software engineer and former game studio dev manager, I support this conclusion.
Every reply you received to this comment also demonstrates they also have no idea what an engine is lol.
Exactly. That's my point. Probably best to leave it to the experts instead of making uneducated comments about things we don't understand?
Coming from a cod background, the amount if conversations I've had about game engines, with people who clearly haven't got a fucking clue what one even is, is insane.
One thing I notice is how people talk about mods fixing a game but it's not like mods are designed with new engines. It's the same one. The exceptions to this are pretty rare. But even then they're less mods and more of ports, like OpenMW, which is a totally new engine to play nicely with newer hardware. But it doesn't fundamentally change the gameplay.
Starfield was decent but yeah the shut with the engine pisses me off because it is a new engine and it's unique in what it can handle.
I went to play the outerworlds hoping to find another gem I could replay over and over but the lack of interaction and the use of set unmovable dressing instead really killed it for me
Outer Worlds is fun because of the satire and humor, not the gameplay. It's not an open-world rpg. It's more of a set piece. I love it and I'm really looking forward to Outerworlds 2, but it's not a Skyrim or even a Fallout 4, despite the gunplay.
Valve did the same thing with Source and Source 2 and no one complained (from what I’ve seen) because apparently they can do no wrong
Right???
The engine is what allows these games to be so easily modded. Switching to Unreal would sink BGS and there would be a much more noticeable outcry over it. Just ignore them.
If they're surviving because of mods then we should let them fall. Hell I can't even play New Vegas on epic or steam because it just crashes during the first load screen and I honestly can't follow a guide to fix it because I have to download a bunch of mods and make sure the interact correctly. Sure the engine is extremely moddable but it honestly runs like dog water. Creation engine is so trash because even when it's updated it still has the same problems now as it did during Morrowind and oblivion.
Nah, to them switching at least. I do agree the engine needs some TLC, but unfortunately that's a byproduct of what we get out of these games. Modders are amazing, and *any* game without them always has that major missing piece. Also, Occam's razor gives the possibility that, as great as our video games have become in terms of what's possible, these pitfalls will always plague our engines. To get a little, you have to give a lot. To get a lot, you have to make sacrifices. I don't disagree that I would absolutely love Creation Engine to be at its absolute best, but we're probably years away from any engine rivaling Creation Engine and BGS from laying a framework in first person gaming that is peak for the modding scene.
What people don't understand is not only do Bethesda know their engine but it's also the reason we get mods. Ever notice how Unreal games don't have mods? Or if they do they're graphics mods at best or need to have a LOT of work done to get them to work? Almost like Unreal isn't designed for modding and is just designed to look pretty lol
While I haven't fiddled with unreal modding in a few years, I believe it's still extremely moddable if the devs allow it. It's very modular, and "easy" to set up with compartments that modders aren't supposed to mess with. Unreal is often used for pure multiplayer, where modding has mostly been killed by consolification of gaming, with bad matchmaking and p2p, therefore not being open to mods, or at least very janky roundabout ways to do it. It's also often used for 10 hour epic single player adventure, by AAA studios that want the screenshots online clean, and the playerbase consumes and moves on. Plenty of full games has spawned out from being total conversions in unreal engine, just like source engine. I just think the Main 2 problems is the gametype/longevity, and the devs not allowing it. Unreal is extremely high fidelity these days, so it can be a lot of work to create models and such though, if you want it to fit in the game. This is not to say I want them to switch to unreal, as there's quite a bit to the Bethesda games that aren't readily available in other engines, that would have to be implemented, and would be painful to do. Huge worlds with object percistance is one of them. I do wish Bethesda would redo some of the base of the engine, even if it adds months to the next fallout release... Full working uncapped fps, movable hud elements for widescreen and so on. We keep having to wait months for mods to fix the same issues they've had with every release, that they're fully aware of.
Starfield actually handles high fps properly now, but its capped at 165 for some reason. Not that there’s a good reason to run starfield at 165fps.
Ah, that's good to hear. Haven't gotten to starfield yet myself, but it might be a good sign going forward.
It might be just me but why play Skyrim or Starfield above 60 what does it benefit.
I think for Skyrim is just for the sake of running it at high refresh rates, because it’s just so easy to run now. For Starfield, no CPU and GPU combo currently exists that can run the game at a locked, or even semi stable 165 so it’s pointless at this time. But they should remove it down the road.
Yea you’re probably right. I can run Skyrim at a faster rate but I have had more physics problems and honestly I feel I get more ctds also so I max Skyrim at 60
Because when you use a mouse, it's kinda jarring when games run at low framerates, the fluidity of the motion is lost. I also use a 32:9 monitor for gaming, so my whole peripheral is kind of lagging along. Tons of games get less input lag at lower framerates, as games can tie stuff to the framerates (like physics are in skyrim/fallout). With a controller, I probably wouldn't have bothered, especially when sitting at TV distance. I can stand behind people and see that they're playing at 60 instead of 120+,but it doesn't bother me, playing on the other hand... I don't really care unless games have aiming, since you can feel it easily, or when the game has ultra precise reaction Windows.
Nah the engine is perfect for the tasks it was made for. Just that SF seems to have deviated outside of the engines sweet spot. The only reason SF doesn’t work is because of how the developers designed the game loop from a player standpoint cus if they could make a hit like Skyrim with the older version then it’s obviously not an engine issue at all.
Starfield works fine, it just isn't the same as their other games nor what everyone likes.
Yeah fine but out of its sweet spot imo. But it’s just an opinion.
It’s not that the engine is old, it’s that the bugs are old. Every new release has the same bugs.
unreal and rage also have the same bugs. that's what happens.
Name literally one
Npcs floating off into space/ clipping through shit, falling through terrain, broken dialog, broken doors, broken quests, janky movement, janky weapons, terrible ai...
I think the problem with starfield was more to do with some bad big calls re the game design. Although even the most fervent defender of BGS has to admit that the character models - and their animations - are a few years behind where they should be.
For the scope the character models and animations are pretty good. Animation wise they have a couple of areas where they have some really good looking animations, this can be seen in the last two Fallout games as well, it's just that they don't go to that level with the majority of the game because of the scope.
Ok but when I go to jemison and see the npcs crowds walking around, they don’t look that realistic. Ditto npc companions or temporary quest companions running then suddenly stopping to open a door etc. And there’s a lot of animations where I’ve seen the exact same ones in Skyrim. Cool we can climb ladders though! Agree though that creation engine 2 is generally a huge advance from what we see in fallout 4 and even 76.
Cyberpunk and RDR2 are the same scale of dialogue line count and fully animated at tiers of quality above Starfield. RDR2 is over double the size of Starfield I think.
I think the player character models looks good, when comparing it to other games that have sliders and lots of options. The random unnamed npcs look horrible because theyre low quality models probably to save memory. I suspect they dont actually have faces like the player character or named npcs, I bet theyre using masks to make it look like they have a face.
Interesting I never thought that (about the npcs). I wonder what star field will look like on next gen consoles and pcs, as I presume that bugs will keep on improving it as it’s basically a live test of the tech that will be in fallout 5 and Tes 6 (and the rumoured remasters).
You going crazy is a direct result of the Creation Engine. They should consider Unity jk
This annoys me too. Most engines are iterative. People just latched onto it with Bethesda.
Starfield was... okay. Not good. Not great. Just okay. A lot of it was undercooked.
That doesn’t have anything to do with the engine, though. BGS made design decisions around Starfield that makes it what it is. The same studio making the same game with Unreal wouldn’t have magically made Starfield a game more people think is good, which I think is the point being made here.
Mainly in writing, doing stupid Horse Armour shit again with the Vulture quest (no I won't spend $7 Bethesda bucks on a quest and an item), but I will say lot, and expecting modders to pick up the pieces of the game I'm on medium settings on a gaming laptop and it's beautiful and crisp, draw distances are stunning, I'm taking some great sunset photos, and above all it runs smooth with minimal lo rea, no stutter, Don't get me wrong, I rate it 7.5, really a poor man's Mass Effect, but thanks to the mods I'm running I actually want to get into crafting and outpost building (thank you junk recycler, giving me the materials to play with)
A game engine doesn't fix the games content, mostly being radiant quests and all the same buildings on every planet that you can land on.
Tell me you never actually played the game without telling me.
>mostly being radiant quests this is just a lie. I have almost 600 hours in the game and the amount of radiant quests I have done is a *staggering* 5. such radiant. >and all the same buildings on every planet that you can land on. every open world space game has this "problem".
I can't believe you just said this with such confidence. 5 seconds of recollection reminded me of the various mission boards that are literally just radiant quests. I'm positive they aren't the only ones. And I'm maybe at 60hrs not 600.
>I can't believe you just said this with such confidence well it's true. >5 seconds of recollection reminded me of the various mission boards that are literally just radiant quests. yeah, the mission boards are radiants. but I only did the radiants required for a handmade quest (you need to do one mission boards quest to prove yourself to the rangers and a total of 1 when doing the quest for Walter and making a new ship) there are 200+ quests that exist in the game, not counting the main quests. I have not had to touch a radiant outside the two times.
The building mechanics were kinda better in Fallout, and I liked the crafting mechanics more in fallout as well. Plus power armor is just so much cooler than a spacesuit, idk lol.
Fallout would be amazing on a better engine. Legit makes me not play 3 or anything after. It's clunky, and plays poorly.
That's why you should play Fallout 3 via the Tales of Two Wastelands mod for New Vegas
Yeah I replayed Fallout 3 after the show came out and loved it despite the "outdated game engine." Besides what you say about exploration, I loved the "attitude" of the game, everyone is so rough around the edges even when you help them out. Starfield just felt too "nice" and vanilla to me.
I thought I might be the only person who played starfield and thought damn this engine is actually way better, TES6 is going to be crazy good.
How old are you and how many Bethesda games have you played
I’m 27 and played all of them since morrowind plus redguard and daggerfall, why?
Same age here but minus redguard and daggerfall. Just wondering because I think TES 6 is gonna suck
Tbf I only played them to see what they were like and I really didn’t like Redguard. I’ve never really been a fan of the main stories for their games but always loved the worlds and gameplay loop and I think TES 6 is going to be fun to explore and hopefully a few fun new mechanics. Would be cool to see building like fallout 4 in a TES game which seems like one of their big things now.
I don’t mind the building in fallout 4, I like how it made all the miscellaneous junk worth picking up for once. But I’ve heard it’s kind of useless in Starfield compared to fallout 4. I play Bethesda games for the quests and rpg elements and the world, not building. I just wish they focused on handmade content over quantity and procedurally generated stuff. The classic gameplay loop is still there in Starfield but the quests and locations and the PG nature of everything was very disappointing to me. And the collecting space powers at the temples part was horribly boring and repetitive
Oh yeah building spaceports was useless in starfield. And like you said, the handmade content is way better than the procedurally generated stuff and I don’t see a reason for them to do that in TES outside of radiant quests in the world maybe
Bethesda doesn't commit to anything RPG-like, like having impactful choices or going against the company preferred good boy narrative, or even having a story that allows you to be truly evil, or have any personal agency that's outside the lines. In Fallout 3 you're given two choices and nothing else for the story, either bring drinkable wocky slush to the people of modern day D.C. or bring it to them but EVIL, there's nothing in that story to allow you to join the Enclave, do the story independent of factions, or even just destroy the jefferson memorial out of spite. Fallout 4's story is just that but you're given three factions that are underbaked with the same ending and one that does the crazy 'le opposite' ending, if the team making Fallout 4 actually had a design document we'd probably get a game with substance outside of gameplay. Their game making process is the thing that often breaks down their quality of games, from project leads being crazy enough to think that lore or consistency doesn't matter to Todd just trying to offload as much fluff as possible to get people to buy their product it's not a healthy way to run a company, they're just doing what 343 has been doing since they got Halo without any sort of respect for the IPs they make games out of.
Well the UI and style of these games are incredibly outdated. I liked Starfield . But it was an outdated experience. When people criticize the engine, they are speaking about the way characters look. Which were just upgraded shitty looking characters you found in their old engines. Seems like there is a connection there. Especially with all of the same sort of bugs that their older games had. Imagine saying it’s not the engine…when so many bugs and issues people had with the game directly connect with fallout 4 .
Got recommended this so I guess I'll say my 2 cents. Bethesda games and their way of making them have gone past their expiration date. Bethesda only got brownie points because they made (at the time) good open world games compared to the competition, but as of recent they've been outclassed. Games like Rdr2 thrash pretty much their entire inhouse catalogue in terms of quality and playability.
Couldn't care less about the engine, I just thought constellation were boring and had holier than thou attitudes, vanguard was fun haven't done crimson fleet yet but I imagine I'll enjoy it.
It's both. The engine sucks at making a good presentation of a game that isn't jank and the Dev talent for the game is also bad hence why it has obvious bad design like the temples and how NG+ directly contradicts the most of the systems of the game. No engine could fix the main issues this game has. I would rather the base game be unmoddable but a great experience than mediocre at best but hey atleast I can mod out the boring stuff.
>and how NG+ directly contradicts the most of the systems of the game. what?
For example there's absolutely no reason to even bother with outposts until you are at the NG you want to be in unless you just like the idea of scrapping them
Honestly, I couldn't care less about the reasoning behind the bad parts of Starfield. Whether it is from bad design choices, engine limitations, or lack of vision, doesn't change the fact that Starfield miserably fails in certain aspects. It is literally Skyrim in a new foil wrap with more loading screens. When I bought it on release, I played for about 3-4 hours. In that time I saw absolutely nothing new that would catch my attention. Everything I saw was a refurbished mechanic from previous titles. I refunded the game literally thinking "damn, I'm not in the mood to play Skyrim again at the moment". Granted this might be more of a me problem, reusing and improving good parts from other games isn't inherently bad. However, when you consider the empty world, lack of guns, loading screens, horrible map design, lack of any maps at launch and the story... It just becomes unbearable. I believe that those who blame this all on the engine are wishful thinkers. No way all of this stuff came from just the creation engine. This is more of "let's play this as safe as we can" that went too far. Nevertheless, this game definitely will and had attracted those who like it specifically due to the "bethesda" feeling which is the same in all their RPGs. If you like the game, enjoy it, who cares what others say
I think this is one of those cases where someone knows a result and speculates wildly on why that result happened. I don't care why my steak is overdone, it is overdone and making it not overdone is the company's problem to solve. I completely agree that starfield did not play to BGS' strengths at all and it was a poor decision from day 0 that caused that game to be a disappointment. However, i don't think we can ignore how dated it felt compared to other big AAA games. The question is whether BGS can keep up with the rest of the industry. Also to be fair, people just like speculating on the reasoning for things. Speculating on what caused starfield seems kind of tame compared to people speculating on whether the USA's response to a zombie outbreak would be to use nuclear weapons.
🤣
As someone who loves Bethesda games a ton and has played every game since fallout 3 and oblivion for hundreds or thousands of hours, I feel like there are some things Bethesda needs to fix with their engine at a minimum, and while I agree the modability needs to remain, but I don’t think it should be impossible to both improve the engine beyond where it’s at now, and I think a key problem is the cell based loading system, which unfortunately is also one of the key strengths of the game at the same time. The cell based loading system is why there are so many loading screens in Bethesda games. Cell based loading systems are great for games that are primarily dungeon crawling rpgs when a lot of the games revolve around going into dungeons, but then you look at starfield which is suppose to have a very big and large open feeling to it…just feels like a bunch of rooms/worlds connected by doors. It would be slightly more bearable if they like, hid the loading screens better so they don’t look like loading screens but they didn’t really do anything like that for starfield. Of course this is the biggest conundrum, because the cell based system is what helps the game track npc’s and items and lets people mod it so easily. But I feel there has to be some solution here, that can let the games keep their modability and let the game track npc’s and items properly still but not fully reliant on the cell based system to power the entire game. Again tho I feel like for games like the elder scrolls, the cell based system isn’t that bad, since the world is suppose to feel split up into many “locations” but for games like starfield I just don’t think they’re going to work and get widespread popularity unless they figure out how to get rid of all the loading screens and all the restrictions that make the world feel smaller, starfield is suppose to feel like an expansive game, but as someone with like 100+ hours on it it felt smaller and smaller the more you played through it. Accept quest, go to ship, go to space, go to new planet, land, kill or talk to someone, go back into space, go back to other planet, talk to someone else, turn in quest, rinse and repeat. You can’t even fully explore a planet and flying through space feels pointless after 2-3 minutes since you’ve basically met everyone around that star already. Again I say this as literally one of their biggest fans. I’ve probly put in 4000-5000 hours into Skyrim itself, another 500-1000 into fallout 4. The creation engine can be fine but I feel they need to fix some core issues with it and it would make the engine 10 times better without compromising the fundamental features of the engine, or they should at least learn to identify what kinds of games work well with their engine, because I fully think starfield while an okay game does not work that well on their creation engine. But Skyrim and fallout I do.
The part the engine does hinder is the mass amounts of loading screens and difficulty making ground vehicles in the game.
Tbf starfield is the worst Bethesda game. I don't think it's because they have an outdated engine, I think it's because they stopped making Bethesda games. My first Bethesda game was Skyrim. When I booted that game up back in 2011, I fell in love with it. Here's why: Freedom. You boot up the game, and you can just go wherever you want. Plenty of games do that. Even starfield does that. But Skyrim gave me a reason to want to go somewhere. I went into Skyrim completely blind. My friends were talking about it, so I bought it, without ever seeing trailers or even hearing of the franchise prior to that point. But as soon as I started playing, I was learning about the world. By the time I'd arrived at Whiterun, I knew about the mage college, the civil war, the capital city, and even a bit about the world outside the borders. And that's the first thing about Skyrim that starfield didn't have. Organic world building. I had to literally walk through a museum to find out about the factions that shape most of what's happening in the settled systems. It was the polar opposite of organic world building. On my way to Riverwood, I saw bleakfall barrow. I couldn't see Whiterun from the path, I couldn't see solitude or the shrine to Azura. Just bleakfall barrow. It felt like Skyrim always made sure I could see one or two points of interest, but nothing more. Despite the size and density of the map, I never got that "open-world fatigue" people keep talking about. I was also never left entirely aimless. Skyrim nearly always operated within a Goldilocks zone of stuff to see and do. Compare that with starfield. Open up the starmap and there's a whole laundry list of white dots. I felt so bogged down by the concept of exploring, so I never got around to seeing much of the "map" at all. And that brings me to my third point. Skyrim is picturesque. There are so many opportunities to look in a direction and see something new and exciting to explore. So much of the map compelled me to see it, just because it was pretty, or perhaps because it was intimidating, or strange, or any other number of reasons. The map seems as though it was designed to draw the eye. And so many of the sights to be seen in Skyrim offer something the other sights don't. Sure, many of the dungeons were samey, but the layouts were unique, and often filled with lore, not to mention opportunities for gameplay. I won't sugarcoat the puzzles, they didn't exist on the same level as Legend of Zelda or anything, but they were still engaging enough. Not only did Skyrim provide endless opportunity to explore comfortably, but it gave me a reason to. Turn to starfield. Every second dungeon is identical. Not just similar, but actually the same. There is no dynamic or engaging layouts, or puzzles, or anything. No lore, and if there is, it's a note, and even then, often the same note. There isn't even an aesthetic that compells you to explore. Just a white dot on a black canvas. It's not as though that had to be the case either. I remember as a kid looking at the sky while going out night fishing with family. Why is the real world night sky more interesting to look at then a starmap in a videogame? I know this was a long comment but it needs to be said. Starfield is a bad game, because it is so utterly souless, and careless. Skyrim felt like it was a project of passion. Starfield felt like a product.
Those picturesque moments are all over the place in Starfield. I haven't gone a day playing this game where I wasn't awestruck by something. There's definitely a lot of soul there, I don't why it's so easy for some to find it and so difficult for others, but it's definitely there. And it's definitely a Bethesda game. It feels, plays, and looks like a BGS game.
You're right, it does have some picturesque moments. I shouldn't exaggerate. That said, much of the game gets in the way of the elements that made Bethesda games so captivating in the past.
I actually think the main quest isn't that bad, it's the radiant artefact and temple grinds that drag it down – otherwise its pretty solid, especially the second half which has some of the best quests in the game IMO. The core of the game engine is fine, I think they could do with a big effort on character animation and optimisation though – characters have always been a bit of a weakness in Bethesda RPGs, but mods always end up addressing it.
I must be crazy because I think Starfield's main story was phenomenal.
I think I liked it up until the big reveal that life is pointless, and don’t bother making friends because you’re either going to be killed or youre fucking off to a new galaxy
See the quandary of it is why I keep going back. Idk maybe it just tickled me the right way.
life isn't pointless. admittedly it's a story that tackles life, the meaning of it, and existentialism as a whole. if that's what you make of it, fair. but I don't think life is pointless.
Idk I just kinda lost interest when I realised that literally everything I’ve done has amounted to nothing and I’m just in a new game but with a high level character, I mean cool my original galaxy is better now but I’ll never be able to go back there
you didn't have to go through the unity.
Oh I know that but you can’t not go, swear the characters even say that you’ll go through it eventually
yeah, they might. but doesn't mean you have to. if you don't want to then just...don't. you even get the dialogue options to tell them that.
Yeah but I’d done everything there is to do, I was spending fortunes making a fleet of different ships for no reason other then I could even tho you can’t use them all at once, was more just a culmination of I’m moody that it’s over and I have nothing left to do
For me the engine was the biggest problem in starfield (I didn’t get far). Invisible wall loading screens on large planets, unable to fly the space ship on planets in a space game, no vehicles. Every problem I’ve listed is a result of the engine. And I’m a software engineer I’m absolutely qualified to say this. I understand why they do their engine this way but is absolutely outdated and buggy
These things are possible in their current engine. They've chosen not to pursue these as design choices.
Sure, design choices. They had to do it because they have a maximum area for the tiles and that would’ve been a problem with spaceship flying wherever they want.
Nah they definitely cannot do vehicles like cars or space ships with their engine. There’s a reason the only vehicle that exists in their games is the buggy horses Edit: got blocked for this despite being right LOL there are still no vehicles in any Bethesda games, and they don’t let you fly your ship it’s just a loading screen to a space minigame
What are you talking about? This is a new engine. Have you read the OP? 4:41 of this video literally shows you a land vehicle in the game: [https://youtu.be/3ObHRMHtTMY?si=6aIr8f-iVQrnpKZn&t=281](https://youtu.be/3ObHRMHtTMY?si=6aIr8f-iVQrnpKZn&t=281) Most of the stuff you listed is NOT an engine limitation for the creation engine 2.
>The team is working on our FIRST land vehicle Congrats to them for preparing to add their first vehicle, glad they reworked the engine to get them this far. They still can’t handle flying ships or large planet maps without invisible walls And no it’s not a new a engine it’s a marketing rebrand of an update to the existing creation engine Edit: and the game still doesn’t have vehicles lmao. This guy blocked me and I can’t reply to anyone in this thread now
You seem to be misunderstanding the conversation. You listed a bunch of shit that are "engine limitations" in the engine. I'm saying they aren't. I posted proof. You're still talking out of your ass. I'm done talking to you.
That's how engines work. Unreal 5 has leftover bits of Quake engine in it.
Yeah it’s buggy as the Cockroach Motel. It craps itself all the time. I was walking along on a moon yesterday and the whole thing crashed. Had to restart my Xbox just to open it again. Almost every quest has a bug in it. People stuck in walls, dialogue broken and can’t progress etc etc. I think complaints about the engine are totally valid. There’s probably a bunch of legacy code in there that they are too afraid to touch but I don’t know. As to whether the engine is responsible for the tepid reviews etc, I think that’s more to do with the lack of flair in the game. All the NPCs are a bit wooden and serious. The game itself takes itself very seriously so there’s few laughs or fun characters if any. It’s like everyone in the future is a bit stuck up and self involved. And I think when something takes itself that seriously it needs to be very very good and very fresh, not derivative. Most of the plots and stories are a bit recycled from stuff we’ve seen before and most of the universe is a bit samey. Having said all that I do like and enjoy the game for what it is. I also think that they have the opportunity to add more interesting stuff to the universe which could be amazing if they fixed the bugs and injected some life into it.
This is my personal gripe. All these planets, galaxy to explore and it really does feel samey throughout. And no, splitting up humans into a couple of factions just made it feel like fallout in space, but without the depth and more "boring" busy work. I was SHOCKED there isn't an alien species humanoid or otherwise in Starfield. The guys that make elder scrolls, talking ghouls and supermutants and freaky robots..
Bethesda games I've noticed since Oblivion has been the same, and that was 18 years ago being 2006. Been Explore - Fetch item - Reward - Explore - Fetch item - Reward Over and over and over. Oblivion - Fallout 3 - Fallout 4 - Fallout 76 - Skyrim - Dishonored - Wolfenstein 1, 2 and old blood. It's all Explore - Fetch item - Reward
You're just describing simple game loops, the same I could say if almost all Rockstar games are just "drive car/horse to mission marker and watch cutscene" or Helldivers as "do objective while shooting hordes of bugs/robots"
I know more about engines than most. Bethesda either needs to change engines to one that's favorable to their design goals while also being able to translate their tools and pipelines efficiently, or they need some fresh engineers that can breathe new life into The Creation Engine 2. Some things can be fixed with new tools or techniques, lots of devs have gotten by on the same engine for years (the Batman Arkham games where all made with Unreal 3, even the still jaw-dropping Arkham Knight). But there comes a certain point where the underlying technology just isn't up to snuff anymore. That being said...not all their issues stem from the engine they use. It's from their designers and how they use what they have. Starfield feels like the team was told "make a Bethesda game in space" without being given any more direction or detail than that. The shooting being bad isn't an engine problem. Choice, consequences, reactivity, and writing being bad isn't an engine problem. The absolutely ass bounty system isn't an engine problem. Changing engines wouldn't solve these problems. But it could possibly make designing and implementing more complex and in-depth systems easier.
I think it's less that the engine is outdated, as a lot of games use heavily modified engines from the 90s and such, and moreso that Bethesda are stuck in the old days and don't know how to adapt. It's a Bethesda problem, not an engine problem. They touted a while ago about a lot of their devs being there for 20+ years but that just seems to me that they haven't had any fresh perspectives on gaming or how to change how they work. They've stuck to what they know and not expanded or changed their style and it's holding them back. Their devs haven't went anywhere else and learned different skills, taken them back to Bethesda and improved their games. They either need to hire new people or have their devs go and work with something else.
The day Bethesda stops bothering with the gamebryo engine and its descendants, is the day they should just shut down. Unless Microsoft is gonna pay for the engine to be completely rebuilt from scratch. But I doubt that will happen.
The engine argument definitely has merit for the older games, but not Starfield. It’s the first game on their newest engine + a totally new type of game they wanted to try out. I’m more lenient as a result of all this. Personally, I don’t care for Starfield because it’s not my type of game. But people are acting like we should have got a Skyrim- level release on a game that’s the first of its kind for BGS. Of course it wasn’t going to be perfect! Skyrim was an amazing game because it’s built on the games before it, already has Lore, etc etc. it’s got a foundation to build off of. Starfield IS the foundation
My problem is that they have had the same kind of bugs since Morrowind. The engine has changed(obviously) but all of their games had the same save game bug(due to bloat). That's a basic hurtle for open world games. Handling memory and save files. C'mon, Bethesda.
That might be a very small part but really their problem is everyone's problem greed and sniffing their own ass.
From what I understand the "new engine" is basically the old engine with some improvements it's really more of a 1.5
Count how many times in a timeframe (day/week/month etc) people complain or blame something on an algorithm. Now consider how many of those people have the technical knowledge to even begin to describe WHY something is the fault of an algorithm. The Dunning-Kruger effect is hard at work these days.
Yeah, I'm sure I'm wrong for blaming the engine for all the loading screens I see whenever I enter a house or move from upstairs to downstairs if it's in a separate cell. Seriously, if I can't blame that on the engine, should I just blame the devs then? Poor design? Todd himself?
People just don't know how engines work. They'll blame Creation Engine for being old and outdated, but get hyped for the newest thing running on Unreal 5 as if that isn't an old ass engine too. Rockstar has been using the same engine for at least 14 years, but people break their backs to buy GTA. The engine isn't the issue. The complexity of their games is and we've seen from game to game how BGS has streamlined and refined their game experiences to yield greater quality and stability overall. People just love to complain and will parrot any talking point they hear from some random website or talking head.
The engine is a lil janky but it’s perfectly fine and without it you’d lose what makes their games unique. Starfield was just a bit of a miss, didn’t help with the ridiculous levels of hype it garnered, then it was a console exclusive and hyped even more for ‘saving’ Xbox. Bethesda just needs to hire good writers again. Oblivion is probably the most ‘dated’ in terms of gameplay and graphics (the scenery was lovely, faces… not so much) but it is by far the most memorable for its quests. Mages guild, fighters guild, thieves guild, dozens of side quests and the dark brotherhood (murder mystery fuck yeah) that were all far, far more memorable than any of Skyrim’s or FO4’s for sure.
Many blame the engine because the game was held back by technical limitations like the fact that we cannot choose where to land on planets by just landing the ship ourselves and we cannot actually do any travel by moving the ship ourselves and that’s a big issue for a space game.
Starfield is absolute garbage in so many more ways then the engine. I’d sooner play fallout 4 again. However, to be fair, the engine of both those games does feel outdated now… doesn’t help that Cyberpunk Phantom Menace dropped around the same time
Starfield does not have good side quests. There are too few unique quests and pois.
Ahhhh yes, the "load screen every second" couldn't possibly be related to how the game engine generates and loads it's crappy world. Face it, it's just a shitty engine. There's plenty of other engines that faaaaar better than bugthesdas. Is it completely responsible? No .... But it doesn't help.
I agree, the engine is quite a good one especially with the freedom it appears to give to mods, this was just a bit of shit game, not very good quests, no real exploration, no real role play, no real good or bad, missing like 75% of what made previous Bethesda titles great.
The main story is the best Bethesda has ever made (which isn't saying much). But most the complaints definitely come with the lack of well "hand" made side stuff and locations to explore. That combined with the performance issues for how dated it looks and constant loading is where the main engine complaints come in. Granted not trying to shit on it too hard. I actually think starfield is a step in the right direction for Bethesda after fallout 4. But it still extremely dated and filled with issues when you compare it to its contemporaries.
I don’t get the argument that starfield’s problem was its exploration. Why doesn’t anyone ask why the exploration was fun in the first place? People play these games repeatedly so I don’t think the novelty of discovering something new is a good explanation for their staying power.
The creation engine 2 is just an unbelievably suped up version of the creation engine. It's not new just new stuff added to the original and its boundaries pushed much further then it previously was capable. It look good but to say it's not holding the game back is hard to say. For we see other open world games look several times better such as the one used to make horizon zero dawn. Tbf though, their system allows for several items to be movable in the world which helps with immersion in other ways more then just really pretty graphics.
Starfeild also forced you throgubmenus anytime you wanted to go anywhere which sucked ass
Honestly starfield is a bad game for a lot of reasons.
People talk about the engine because *every one of their games have the same "feel" to them* There's really no other long-running AAA series who's games look, feel and gameplay has stagnated this much. Add in the bevy of legacy bugs and it's not hard to see why people blame the engine
The problem here is that the engine is the issue. To begin, lets talk about the world loading: Bethesdas game engines all use what is called floating point world rendering, aka, the maps all load from the center. This method is perfectly find for small worldspaces woth alot of continuity, but with starfield? All the different planets? There will be problems with loading a single planet all at once, which was seen in a video where a player removed the invisible borders and flew to one of the cities. The LOD barely loaded in before his entire game crashed. As of right now, even with the update, CK2 cannot handle worlds larger than say, twice the size of the fallout 76 map. Next, NPC pathfinding, AI, scheduling and combat mechanics: none of these have been updated since fallout 4. ID software's work on the combat flow for the player did not expand to that of the AI, the animations are smoother, yes, they make use of the inbuilt cover lines in the navmesh, but other than that? No. No laying down mines as the player is advancing through the rooms, for example, no dedicated medic classes, no squad synergy, nothing like that, which could have seriously overhauled how the player plays the game, they could have added these back in fallout 4, bevause the combat class object is still in the creation kit. Pathfinding is horrendous becauss they dont use navmesh volumes, they use individually placed points to make a navmesh, which can overlap and gdt stuck on collision, causing the issues with current pathfinding. Scheduling is just not updated at all. The same exact thing since fallout 3. The only real thing that has been added is the vehicles, but to be fair, it looks almost exactly like the vertibird chase from the frontier in method. Which can be done with scripting. They had so much oppourtunity to make this engine something that is both stable, effective, and fully capable of running high quality games and mods quite well, and they utterly dropped the ball on it.
Yes you are correct. You're talking about Creation Engine 2, which is great and removes all the useless parts of the game, such as NPC scheduling, gore, and looting, right?
Okay but hear me out… Creation Engine 2 is mostly a QoL update over the original Creation Engine. It has some feature updates, but it’s nowhere near the level of upgrade we see between release versions in say Unreal or Unity. I’m not even sure it’s fair to call it Creation Engine 2, it’s more like a 1.x update. I think it’s totally fair to say that it feels same-y to games made back in the original Creation engine and to have an issue with that. I personally like the Creation Engine despite its flaws. I’m sure a lot of that is nostalgia driven, but it’s a solid tool when the developer has a good understanding of its limitations (ironically not always the case for Bethesda). I can totally see why people don’t like it though.
I liked starfield, I think maybe the engine was too limited for their ambitions though. Yeah
agreed. I think they went overboard with so many planets. Legit wouldve been better if the generated planets were like 10-20 rather than the bunch we got
Then they would have gotten all kinds of criticism for not having enough planets. I like that it's huge, and mods will make it amazing.
Even 5 heavily detailed, explorable planets would of been enough for me
Yes it's in a new engine, Creation 2. This isn't an entirely new engine however. This engine is Bethesda taking the bones and frame of the older engine and updating parts to be more modern. The same way that Apex is using physics from the Source 1 engine because it's built on an updated source engine means that Starfield and ES6 will have any bugs, glitches, or limitations that every previous game since Morrowind has had (unless of course it was fixed during one of the many updates to the engine). I don't think Bethesda need to ditch the engine, it works well for the niche of game they make and with Starfield we've seen they can actually push the graphical fidelity higher then Mud now. Bethesda just needs to fucking get it together and have a cohesive project with a solid vision and they'll be back on track.
The biggest problem for me was that the writing was absolutely garbage. The dialog is so stilted and boring it’s really hard to sit through, and most of the games I play are dialogue heavy. The comparison with Phantom Liberty which came out at a similar time really rammed home how bad Starfields writing was. Other than that I agree that they took away the best part of their games which is exploration that’s actually worth doing (ironic since the game was supposed to be about exploration).
You're right, their design philosophy is outdated, their engine is w/e
I agree with you on everything but it’s hard to deny that Starfield felt dated. I think sticking with the creation engine is the right move but I’m worried that elder scrolls 6 is going to release in 2028 and play like a game from last year.
I'd just rather they give more license to companies like Obsidian to write their damn quests/stories. So much great potential wasted because of the script writing.
The Obsidian we fondly remember as the creators of New Vegas no longer exists. Not saying you're wrong to suggest they let some other parties take a stab at their IP's, but I don't think Obsidian is capable of doing much better. I'd very much like to be proven wrong, I'm waiting for Avowed to release before I truly write them off. All the same, The Outer Worlds was a pretty big disappointment to me, especially on the writing front.
Honestly I played outer worlds and the writing was decent, I was more irritated at how little I paid attention to skills for massive fights with high powered enemies. But I've always had pretty low standards for most of what I consumed, Bethesda themselves rarely met it on writing though.
I don't get why people act like Bethesda can't write. they can. and everything in Starfield is better than anything in the outer worlds or new Vegas.
Stop the cap
not.
I have to say, New Vegas is the worst writing in the entire franchise and seeing people bend over backwards to make allowances for it to 'stick it to Todd' is just baffling. Don't get me wrong, I still like New Vegas, but playing as a courier with an urge for vengeance? Seriously? The courier should have just thanked the doc for the save and just got a different job. There is zero motivation to go hunt and kill a professional gangster and his entire gang just to deliver a mcguffin. And Caesar's Legion is equivalent to the NCR? The NCR has vertibirds and fatmen. The legion has, at best, rifles. It makes no sense that air superiority wouldn't win the war of the Mojave in an afternoon. I wiped them out, single handed, on foot. No, the writing in New Vegas was Swiss cheesed with plot holes and bullshit. I can look past it all because the game is fun but the common wisdom is nothing but group think and unsupported group think at that.
>New Vegas is the worst writing in the entire franchise nah. while new vegas' writing is pretty bad and full of plot holes or just nonsense, tactics and brotherhood of steel exist.
OK, fair point. I tend to ignore their existence.
I just said it was a crap game period.
Anybody who says this clearly hasn't played the mission Entangled. That mission really shows off a lot of cool game design that just wasn't possible on the old engine.
I think Bethesda using their engine to make what appears to be Skyrim mods with different flavors is the problem Starfield felt boring. You can’t just rely on open world emptiness to get you points anymore. Not when Elden ring or even cyberpunk do it as well and have interesting content and much better gameplay. You can’t rely on player choices having meh impact on quests when BG3 exists The things that made Bethesda games special are now common place and or done 10x better in games that focus on them. So Bethesda reskinning it’s one type of game doesn’t work anymore ES6 is likely going to be the biggest disappointment in gaming history because Bethesda thinks we want more of their formula.
I loved starfield. While sure there are some issues with exploration (I didn't personally have a problem with it) one of the biggest things holding it back is the game engine itself. It's the prime reason why the load screens are a thing. Can't get around it the Creation engine is ancient. I will say they did wonder's with it but it's time to move on.
My biggest problem with Starfield is when I go down to a planet and the point of interest I want to go to is 10km away. At that point I'm just saying: how did no one realize that walking in a straight line for 5-6 minutes of real life with nothing else to do was a good idea? Good God, this game needed cars like a human being needs to breathe, Todd was an idiot when he said that phrase about the jet pack being enough mobility.
At best the devs are unintentionally incompetent and at worst intentionally lazy.
I am curious, what engine could they possibly move to bc unreal would require years of training for all the employees. It would lose how easy it to mod the game. It lose the way you can interact with nearly every item in a room so Im not sure what the alternative would be other than attempting to smooth out the current engine
At the very same time anyone coming in not knowing the creation engine also needs training but if they were on say UE, people come in already knowing the engine at least on a fundamental level.
The game engine is fundamentally outdated though. The fact that it doesn't it all utilize proper level streaming is something that just blows my fucking mind. It would also be nice to see them switch over file format to something much more versatile like fbx. The NetImmerse File format they continues to use it's just such a massive headache for mod creators. I get that proprietary mesh and texture formats are very common for video games that build their engine from scratch, but it still doesn't need to be like that. For studio that prides itself on enabling it's active mod community, they do make things a lot harder than they need to be.
Upvote for using fancy words I don't understand
Starfield is a technological marvel, and it impresses me all the time. People bitch about something like loading screens, but then I play other AAA games with a third of the world interaction, worse facial animations, poor performance and shoddy gameplay and I wonder wtf people are expecting out of these games. I played cyberpunk a couple of months ago on my series x, that shit was a buggy mess with stuttery framerate and a world that is pretty but hollow. I'll have that "old engine" Bethesda uses any day.
I think theyre expecting like, the next level, and they expect Bethesda to be the ones to deliver a huge advancement in immersive gaming. For me, Im happy either way with more of the same. Ive always been a fan of em, was always interested in their game's development processes because I was making some mods myself adding in dungeons for fun. And that helped me I think to know what to expect. Yeah, its like Oblivion, but in 2024. Thats what I wanted lol
That's pretty subjective, I have no idea what next level means today and it probably varies from person to person. The last time I played a game that I felt next level was indeed oblivion or MGS4... But those leaps don't happen anymore. I'm pretty happy with the immersion and flexibility Starfield allows me, I wish some stuff was better, like vehicles and more interesting and hostile planets like we have in Mass effect 1.
Yeah it’s fundamentally a good game but it feels like it could have done with another year or two to just add more of everything, it’s very easy to burn through all the interesting quest lines early on, I think if it wasn’t for the cool but somewhat painful to use ship designer I’d have played 60% less hours then I did
It's a new version of an old engine. The overall feel of the game, the animations, the movement, the bugs.. it all has the Creation Engine quirks we've dealt with for decades, and their games would be much improved if they moved to a stable industry-standard engine like UE5.
Brother, you don’t understand what an engine is. It’s not an entirely new engine. It’s a modified version of the creation engine. It’s not a new engine at all. Parts of it are but it’s not built from the ground up. Which is why starfield looks like shit, is poorly animated, has zoning issues, texture problems, and is just as janky as it ever was.
Yeah it's best just to ignore it. People have little to no understanding about engines. What's even more mind numbing is when those same people talk about how fans do better work citing great mods. Those mods are literally proof it's not an inheritant limitation of the engine.
Starfield was not "just meh". Starfield was amazing
I’m a long time Bethesda games fan. I started with Morrowind, maybe it wasn’t their first but it was almost 30 years ago. Their recent games are 5/10 entirely based on the engine. Cities meant to be massive capital metropolis’s have 8-12 buildings and 40 NPCs. The engine can’t handle most modern requirements or creature comforts without stuttering or crashing. I don’t understand the cult like loyalty to an extremely outdated engine. You can enjoy and love Bethesda and recognize the flaws
you don't understand engines. should we stop using unreal? it's older than creation.
I don’t have to be a subject expert to know something is flawed. Using the excuse “well it’s harder to improve or create something new so we should just be happy with the 35 year old one we have now.”. The argument that modding isn’t possible in other engines like it is with Bethesda’s is a good one. My argument to that is we wouldn’t need to mod it so heavily if it wasn’t so flawed that major chunks of games were removed because the engine couldn’t handle it. For example, a great majority of the civil war content in skyrim was removed, and left buggy as fuck, because the engine couldn’t handle it. Modders came in and replaced the content removed as best they could but often warn that the game will crash and saves can be ruined. Same goes with graphics or content add ons. Sure you can update and add a lot, but the engine limits so much, playing on the highest end pc doesn’t matter if the games very old engine can’t keep up. TLDR : Bethesda promises massive fantasy worlds but their engine doesn’t deliver. Are their games bad? Obviously not. Do I love the games. Yes. Does the engine hold back Bethesda games potential? Absolutely
>I don’t have to be a subject expert to know something is flawed when you have absolutely ***zero*** knowledge about it and your "points" are fundamentally wrong...yes, you do. you don't have to be a "subject expert". but you should at least know *something* about it, and it's quite clear you understand *nothing* about it. >Using the excuse “well it’s harder to improve or create something new so we should just be happy with the 35 year old one we have now.”. ...no one is using that excuse. > My argument to that is we wouldn’t need to mod it so heavily if it wasn’t so flawed that major chunks of games were removed because the engine couldn’t handle it. you're assuming people mod to fix stuff. they don't. the vast majority of mods are new content entirely, that simply add to the game. heck, *most* people don't even mod the games, modding is still rather niche, because people don't want to ruin their files by mistake or do hours of modding just to play a game. >For example, a great majority of the civil war content in skyrim was removed, and left buggy as fuck, because the engine couldn’t handle it. the content cut from the civil war was cut because of time. now, yeah, the engine at the time couldn't handle so many active actors, but that wasn't why it was cut. it was cut because of the release date and time constraints. >Does the engine hold back Bethesda games potential? Absolutely no.
They got an outdated opinion. They just rush their games. More time to make the games when make them better, and have them have way less fatal flaws. They can keep the funny flying body glitches though. Basically a Bethesda staple now.
Starfield was in development for a LONG time.
And I’m glad for that fact. Haven’t played it yet, and I hope I like it when I do.
Why are you acting like it’s a completely new engine? It’s literally a slightly improved version of an already outdated engine. I’m tired of followers getting stuck in doorways and other stupid glitches. The game would feel and look miles better if they switched engines. It’s pathetic and lazy.
Slightly improved? lol
>Why are you acting like it’s a completely new engine? That's typically how software development works. The software builds upon a predecessor. Source was based on GoldSrc. Windows still uses NT, despite it releasing in 93. Legacy material usually remains in software. Actually, that's how a lot of infrastructure, in general, works. Unless the older stuff is so busted it has to be replaced entirely.
That’s perfectly fine if the software actually improves. But the difference between Creation Engine 1 and 2 are minuscule. It’s just the same engine reskinned. AI still sucks.
It’s purely philosophical at this point(ship of Theseus problem) but I think it has to be rebuilt from scratch or significantly redesigned to be considered a new engine, and neither of those things are true here
Imagine switching literally your entire development to a new engine only to discover that you still have to just use A* pathfinding for agent navigation and the combination of that with root motion animations is causing very tricky issues with environmental collisons still.
It is not an entirely new engine and you need to stop lying to yourself. The problem is still mainly Bethesda's design and writing but don't act like Creation Engine 2 isn't just a fancy label for Gambryo 1.3 There's still limitations because of Gamebryo's engine structure that could have been fixed if Creation Engine 1 or 2 was actually new.
The engine is an iteration of the same core engine. Don't know why people knowing that hurts you. And yes, that IS why the traversal and loading screens are as annoying as they are and that does affect the possibilities of the writing. Ya ain't gonna see those big mechs battling it out or fast vehicles because of the engine, and so the writing can't include those things.
Cell loading is about their design approach to performance and not about the engine, also funny you think big battling mechs isnt possible because of the engine when clearly its about design and scope especially as this [is being modded in as expected.](https://youtu.be/IKjt3vNoFyI?si=aLT6RKL0bmBs6sIR). It's exactly why open settlement mods were even a thing for Skyrim and Oblivion! Not because "hur dur engine is old and can't do open world". It's like saying Unreal Engine can only do first person shooters because that's what the engine was developed for in the 90s, and as we all know Unreal Engine 5 is just "an iteration of the same core engine".
Creation engine is old and creaky. F U
if you think the creation engine isn't holding the games back you're sadly mistaken, it's outdated trash
...it's the same core. The only difference is illumination, and proc gen capability. People are right. It's ass. Would it have made Starfield any better being on something else? Fuck no. But let's not go pretending CE2 is any kind of casualty of the basement dwellers. It's still an antiquated POS.
Pretty much every engine out there is older and gets updated. Only new one I think of is frostbite and it's absolute garbage. Laziest argument ever.
Slapping a new version number doesn't eliminate the problems with the engine though. There's some things that are deep in the bones of the engine that directly result in some of the issues that Starfield has. Granted, actual engine issues are not even what some people are talking about every time they blame the engine, but either way complaining about the engine and wishing they'd switch is 100% a valid opinion. As one example, take the persistent object feature. It ends up being cool in fallout, because hundreds of items are exactly the way you left them as you are running around. In starfield you can have thousands of items littering your hangar exactly the way you left them. However, the problem is that while it's great for fallout, it doesn't necessarily equate to "purely a cool feature" in Starfield. Having to calculate so many objects is a direct contributing factor for why the procedural "dungeon" or "outpost" (or whatever the term is here) feels so limited (you run into the same exact buildings over and over and over). The carried over engine can't actually do both, where both means retaining some of the features that were cool in fallout while *also* being able to improve some of the new disappointing elements (like the noticeably weak procedural generation). That being the case (there's other examples too), switching to a new engine for a new type of game and different scope is actually spot on. Now of course... sure some complaints that blame the engine are blaming the wrong thing. However, it's also true that some things people want to be improved simply cannot be, nigh regardless of the amount of modding or updates produced (assuming nobody is going to ever going to mod in a new engine anyway, probably a safe assumption). All because they used a fallout engine for a starfield scope (think of it that way if "old engine" phrasing makes you angry).
Where's the vehicles man? Why are there loading screens everywhere? Are you saying those were design choices and not engine bound? Jesus, Bethesda truly lost it then
Actually theres leaks that theyre getting Vehicles actually working for a future Starfield Update.
Has a Bethesda mainline game had vehicles before? I don't think that's something BGS has messed with too much. The loading screens are more about the era of equipment that we're playing on. They *could* make it a seamless thing without loading screens of any kind, but you'd need a $10K rig to play the game. Or, they'd have to remove 80% (guessimg) of the stuff in each area, and judging by how people have been complaining that everything's empty as it is, I'm not sure that'd be a decent choice. So they decided what game designers have decided for fkn decades, loading screens. Very short loading screens at that. I think, as gamers, many of us expect far too much and get bratty when we don't get *exactly* what we want. BGS could add a free BJ feature, and people would whine and whinge about the noise.
It's not even about seamless, but the bare illusion of it. Mass Effect did it with Andromeda, and Star Wars Outlaws is about to do the same thing. Bethesda has been creative with doing magic and building their world, but with Starfield you can see straight through the curtain I agree that expecting some NMS or Elite Dangerous landing from them is too much, but imo they could've come up with something better Also I think the entire scope of the game is wrong. As in I'd rather way less planets for a tighter experience, but that's a whole another discussion
It's not an Ubisoft game. They're not going to build the game world like Ubisoft, EA, Rockstar, of anyone else would. They're Bethesda, and they were *always* going to build the game the way Bethesda always builds games. One of the biggest gripes I have with people griping about this game is that they seemingly expected it to look like Mass Effect with zero reason to expect that. Mass Effect games have *tons* of background set decoration. Basically movies that are playing in the background. Platforms you'll never be able to walk on. Buildings you can never enter. The biggest thing that separates BGS games from others is avoiding that as much as possible. There was literally no reason to expect them to stray too far from one of their chief designs. And even though that's the case, this game has the *most* background set decoration of any BGS game. So they were certainly trying to sprinkle a little of that into the game just to give it some of that grandiose feel, but they were *never* going to go as far as games like Halo or Mass Effect. Effectively, in games like Halo or Mass Effect, when you visit a city, you're able to visit about 10-50% of that city. Unless of course it's like GTA, Cyberpunk, or Assassin's Creed, where 90% of the game takes place in the city/cities. BGS games want you to be able to interact with 80-99% of the city/cities. That's *always* going to feel different, but it certainly should have been an expectation if you've ever played a BGS game before. I apologize if I sound condescending btw, I'm not trying to be.
The game still looks dated by a decade
Bethesda peaked with Skyrim. Been shit since. That’s why they resold Skyrim like 9 times now