Elite dangerous did it better. A mix of both maybe.
Comment on [MEGATHREAD] Starfield - Your experiences!
JasSmith@kbin.social 9 months agoThis is one of the more biting criticisms I've heard of the game. It results in a lack of feeling of scale and scope. The universe just feels like connected places, instead of worlds within a galaxy. No Mans Sky got this right, and it's surprising that Bethesda would fumble such a core mechanic. It looks like they tried to cover up this wart by... removing city maps.
Ataraxia@lemm.ee 9 months ago
Puzzle_Sluts_4Ever@lemmy.world 9 months ago
It is not in the slightest bit surprising that bethesda would have issues with an interconnected world.
All (?) interiors are still different cells that require a load screen. And, since Skyrim (and, to a lesser extent, Fallout 3), the vast majority of towns are also a separate “exterior” cell as well.
MAYBE with the requirement of an SSD/nvme we could see a return to Morrowind/Oblivion style “the entire planet is one exterior area”. But we were never going to have atmospheric transitions.
dojan@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Oblivion has towns behind loading screens too. Even Kvatch. There are mods that break them out into the world but they’re instanced by default.
Particularly annoying with the Imperial City.
Puzzle_Sluts_4Ever@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Ah. I remembered the Imperial City being its own loading area (and kvatch was the town that gets wrecked? So that would make sense too) but I could have sworn the rest of the towns were still “open world”.
Ah well. Maybe someday I’ll play Oblivion again. But almost definitely doing Morrowind first because Morrowind was awesome and weird as fuck.
marlowe221@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Any town with a wall around it in Oblivion is instanced.
Also, you have correctly recognized Morrowind’s superiority. I highly recommend the Tamriel Rebuilt mod that adds a lot of the land mass of the rest of the province outside of the island of Vvardenfell!
CaptainEffort@sh.itjust.works 9 months ago
A lot of the towns are still a part of the open world, but some of them are separated by loading screens.
rDrDr@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Look at Ratchet and Clank Rift Apart. They have completely seamless transitions between entire dimensions. They use Direct Storage, which is a Microsoft API. It’s not a good look when a Sony studio is able to achieve seamless transitions on a Windows game but a Microsoft game can’t.
Puzzle_Sluts_4Ever@lemmy.world 9 months ago
R&C is cool as hell but it is NOT the revelation it was marketed as.
Titanfall 2 and Dishonored 2 had already done almost exactly the same gimmick years prior. And that MyHouse.wad DOOM map that everyone lost their mind over a few years back actually was ALSO doing the same trick. Hell, the Build Engine games (particularly Duke Nukem 3D) were entirely built around this trick.
The reality is not that you are “changing entire dimensions”. It is that the majority of the map is loaded into memory and you are teleporting between parts of it. This has been a solved technology for literally decades. You just have seamless “portals” between different parts of the map. But it boils down to just loading enough assets.
R&C mostly benefited from the larger memory of the PS5 (16 GB of GDDR6 versus 8 GB of DDR5 for the PS4) with the “direct storage” mostly being background in, ironically, the same way Morrowind was: You are loading a few “cells” ahead of you as you traverse the world map so that you never notice a load time (unless you use the boots of blinding speed… or are playing on a console).
beefcat@lemmy.world 9 months ago
TF2 and Dishonored accomplished this by having all the other level data loaded in memory simultaneously. This means you can only switch between any number of maps you can actually fit in memory, and the more you want to switch between the smaller they have to be.
Being able to instantly load level data from an SSD means each map can use the full memory budget and there are no limits on how many you can switch between.
rDrDr@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Even on systems with significant memory, a slow drive will create lag in RC. Moreover, RC is doing this while also having very high graphical fidelity overall, including ray tracing, which is quite memory intensive. It’s not possible without Direct storage and reasonably fast SSDs.
arudesalad@sh.itjust.works 9 months ago
If you ignore the server performance issues and bugs, star citizen is completely playable on my system and I have below reccomended specs (for starfield & star citizen). If star citizen can have no loading screens with most planets as populated (or more populated) then starfield’s planets while also having to manage server resources, then starfield has almost no excuse to have loading screens.