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I think were seeing diminishing returns in graphics. Some games are almost photo realistic.
This means that any engine capable of these graphics will be largely future proof.
They should bite the bullet and build/move to a new engine. It likely won't need changing unless there is a major breakthrough.
"we can't change engines because we've figured out how to copy and paste really well"
Well; you could use that engine to produce something well-written, deep and interesting like New Vegas, but that still got dinged for being an absurdly bug-ridden release with serious performance issues. It was great despite the engine, not because.
There's some slightly-shonky open world engines that support some really impressive RPGs (eg. Baldur's Gate 3 on the Divinity engine - looks great but performance is arseholes) and some very impressive open-world engines that support some lightweight RPGs (eg. Horizon Forbidden West on the Decima engine - looks great and smooth as butter). And then you've got the Creation engine, which looks terrible and has terrible performance, and which runs bugs and glitches in a way that combines into (usually) very shallow RPGs.
Perfectly tuned to only release one buggy-ass game a decade?
From experience I know I'll be downvoted but it is a pretty goddamned impressive engine. And yes that is even considering that Skyrim was buggy, what, 12 years ago?
Agreed, the way they can preserve the position of any object, anywhere, with thousands of objects and an obscenely large world, is exceedingly impressive.
What I don't get is why the hell any of that is a priority. It's a neat party trick, but surely 99.9% of the gameplay value of arranging items for fun could be achieved on the player ship alone.
Like... it's neat that I can pick up, interact with, and sell every single pen and fork on every table. But is it useful, with a carry weight system deincentivizing that? Fussing with my inventory to find what random crap I accidentally picked up that's taking up my weight? Is that remarkably better than having a few key obvious and useful pickups? Is it worth giving up 60FPS on console, and having dedicated loading screens for nearly every door and ladder around?
Again, it's cool that they have this massive procedurally generated world, that a player could spend thousands of hours in. But when that area is boring, does it really beat a handcrafted interesting world and narrative? What good is thousands of hours of content when players are bored and gone before 10 hours?
So like... from a tech perspective, I respect what Starfield is, and it's very impressive, but as a game it feels like a waste of a lot of very talented work, suffering from a lack of good direction at the top.
Btw, Gothic (2? 3 at least) had already holes without loading screens.
Yeah I feel like people like to just bandwagon against Bethesda games, but no one makes games with as much detail as them. Hell, even Starfield has an insanely robust physics engine.
Exactly. As a developer, the complexity of that engine blows me away. It's a miracle they got as solid as they did honestly. If these critics are developers, they're either lacking in empathy or they're the kind of prodigy who cannot even comprehend the inability to think about such insanely complex systems with ease
It's still buggy after 13 years of patches and re-releases.
For all the complaints about Starfield, being Bethesda-buggy wasn't really one of them. It was possibly their most polished release.
Are you not from the same reality as me?
Not saying there weren't bugs, but the consensus seemed to be that it was the most polished, bug-free title they've ever launched.
Edit: ...which is a pretty low bar, I know. But it seemed more inline with the bugs that most "AAA" games tend to have at launch.
Well yeah, that's what happens when you make enormous games with basically no player safely rails. With unrestricted freedom comes unpredictable interactions and inevitable bugs. Feel free to point out any other game that comes close to the scale of a Bethesda game without being full of bugs.
Elden Ring?
I love Elden Ring and From Soft games in general, but the way they work is completely different.
There are no dialog trees in Elden Ring, no skills outside of combat, rudimentary crafting mechanics, rudimentary "enchanting" through things like affinity or ashes of war in ER.
Blatantly put, the focus is on completely different mechanics/systems that are much more simple, meaning much easier to not run into lots of bugs.
It's just not really a good comparison.
How quickly people forget how common it was to see Roach on rooftops in the Witcher 3.
GTAas an entire series has tons of reels of people doing ridiculous and hilarious things.
I've never understood the weird hate for Bethesda games in that regard.
Zelda TOTK?
Admittedly haven't played it yet, but BOTW was absolutely a masterpiece.
That said, the NPC scripting and interactions are way simpler than Bethesda games, and there's very little in terms of even marginally open ended quests. It's a great open world, but it's pretty on rails story wise outside the order in which you tackled areas.
People said that but I played the game I'm sure over 100 hours and bugs impacted maybe .2% of my playing time.
People remember Skyrim bugs because they're funny.