Comment on Starfield: The Digital Foundry Tech Review
dlpkl@lemmy.world 2 years ago
Very unfortunate that it doesn’t have seamless surface to space travel. It’s 2023 Bethesda!
Bethesda’s engine disallows that entirely. Everything has to be chunked into pieces with loading screens between – every previous Bethesda game has done that, so it’s not really a surprise.
Agree it would be neat, but I also already have No Man’s Sky, and I’m looking forward to Bethesda competing on story.
It blows my mind that Bethesda have owned id Software for over a decade and haven’t at any point got them to make a version of id Tech engine for their games.
There’s literally no reason the graphics wizards at id couldn’t make a Bethesda branch of the engine that uses similar or identical workflows to Creation but also employs all the best practices for a modern open world engine.
Like, modders have made their own Open Morrowind engine from scratch, in their spare fucking time. It runs all the same files and all the same mods work, without any of the drawbacks of the Gamebryo engine. It would be trivial for id’s engineers, with their experience and resources, to make something better. For some reason Bethesda just… keep bolting new shit to the creaking husk of their old engine.
There’s literally no reason the graphics wizards at id couldn’t make a Bethesda branch of the engine that uses similar or identical workflows to Creation but also employs all the best practices for a modern open world engine.
It's hard to take your opinion seriously with this kind of statement. It has some real "It's 2023, where is my flying car?" energy.
At the end of the day, it's a lot easier to write a wishlist of game engine features than it is to actually develop said engine.
Sounds like you’re the one who doesn’t get it.
id Tech was already an open world engine with id Tech 5, after being a regular map-based engine for id Tech 4 and the Quake engines preceding it. It was then scaled back to normal maps for id Tech 6.
They can and have made it do whatever they want. What’s missing is the will from Bethesda to pay for it.
Fallout 4 came out in 2015. They had plenty of time to start work on a new engine since then.
All about that profit
An engine doesn’t disallow anything. The engine wouldn’t work with multiplayer, but then it did. The engine wasn’t 64-bit until it was. Bethesda could have added it, but they didn’t for whatever reason they have.
Fallout 4’s elevators were loading screens but you never faded to black and load in again. There are plenty of ways to mask a loading screen (as well just leaving a loading screen while keeping things menu-free), Bethesda just chose not to.
Yeah, as soon as it became known that this is still on the Creation Engine, I knew there would be loading screens galore. Seamless exploration of planets and actual infinite space flight is just not something this engine is capable of. Hell, I’m impressed they managed to squeeze even the little space flight out of it that they did.
people on lemmy keep telling me it’s a “new engine” tho just like fallout was and skyrim was, it’s not all just morrowind underneath no no
simple@lemm.ee 2 years ago
I think digital foundry hit the nail on the head when they said “This isn’t a space simulation like No Man’s Sky or Star Citizen, it’s a Bethesda RPG with space as a background setting”. For a lot of people that’s not a bad thing, but the advertising for this game set expectations wrong.
WeLoveCastingSpellz@lemmy.fmhy.net 2 years ago
But now space travel is reduced to fast travel through menus which sucks so bad
c10l@lemmy.world 2 years ago
It’s not. Most interplanetary travel can be done without leaving the cockpit screen. Activate the scanner, point at your destination, press A, then X.