Just recently, Xbox boss Phil Spencer said he hopes Starfield will be a 12-year hit, just like Skyrim.
Yeah no fucking shit Phil, the fans would have loved a generation-defining megahit as well! Maybe you should have told Todd to try making the game good as well as marketable?
Maybe you should have told Todd to try making the game good as well as marketable?
But he “Plans to Release a 1st-Party Blockbuster or Highly Anticipated Title Every 3 Months”
There is no place for “when it’s done” with this attitude.
The tech debt is just glaring at this point. They need an actual new engine instead of yet another gamebryo rework.
No, they need a competent dev team. To this day, Valve is using a game engine that is, at its core, the Quake engine from 1996. Goldsrc? Source? Source 2? All increasingly heavily reworked versions of the Quake engine. And they can use it for everything from Alyx to Dota 2! If Valve can do it, why can’t Bethesda?
To this day, Valve is using a game engine that is, at its core, the Quake engine from 1996. Goldsrc? Source? Source 2? All increasingly heavily reworked versions of the Quake engine.
All Valve statements about the Source2 port of Counter-Strike say Source2 is a completely new engine.
It’s new in the sense they have rebuilt large enough parts of it to fully justify giving it a new name. Certainly it’s very far removed from Quake. It’s not like they’ve been sitting on their hands for almost 30 years. But it’s not like they rebuilt it all from scratch, either; just the parts they needed to. Old code is still being used, and even new code still sometimes uses the old as a base. The most obvious visual example that comes to mind is the pattern they still use for flickering lights which has been around since the Quake days.
It’s a bit of a Ship of Theseus situation, but I think my point still stands: Bethesda doesn’t need an entirely new engine, they need devs who can (or more likely, need to give their devs time to) properly rebuild the parts that need it.
The most obvious visual example that comes to mind is the pattern they still use for flickering lights which has been around since the Quake days.
But you wrote “To this day, Valve is using a game engine that is, at its core, the Quake engine from 1996” and that’s just untrue. Just because nobody ever saw the need to change the light flickering pattern for no reason other than to make it new, doesn’t mean that Source2 is “at its core” still Quake1. Even the community-maintained wiki (not a officially sanctioned Valve document, btw) you’ve linked only speaks about “some residual Quake code”.
Semantics.
Another to look at it is that if Valve properly managed their VCS, you could do
git ls-files HEAD^10000and see Quake/goldsrc code building the foundation for everything that came after. Every subsequent rewrite and refactor was shaped and constrained by what came before and what hadn’t been rewritten yet. If they had started with another engine, they wouldn’t have ended up here.Beyond semantics, Source 2’s lineage is still very apparent. While the engine is very good at what it does, it’s without question much better suited to a rather specific class of semi-realistic 3D games. It has a look, a feel, strengths and weaknesses. It can’t be Unity or Unreal Engine, and it would have been a ridiculous mistake to use it as a base for Elite Dangerous or Assassin’s Creed Valhalla or Terraria.
Funny that you claim deeper insight into Source2 than Valve.
Source2 was first developed for Dota. It’s way more likely that its limitations are because it was never developed as a complete allrounder, not because some minor bits and pieces like flickering pattern were developed in the 1990s because that’s also where Unreal Engine was first developed.
I mean a huge (really huge) number of game engines ultimately draw lineage from Quake. It’s either Quake or Unreal.
Nobody is denying that but the claim that Source2 is at its core just Quake 1 is just insane.
I wish people would stop saying “it’s the engine” when they don’t know what they are talking about
They need an actual new engine instead of yet another gamebryo rework.
The Starfield engine is already half idTech7 anyway.
Didn’t know that, what parts?
Didn’t know that, what parts?
At least the parts that are mentioned in performance tweaking guides that instruct users to edit config files and the parameters are all named
bTemporalAA_idTech7=0etc.
It wasn’t until they ported about 70% of Skyrim Together’s revered code to the Starfield project, though, that they bumped into a problem: “This game is fucking trash.”
“I didn’t realize this until after I actually started playing the damn game a week after launch,” they say. “The game is boring, bland, and the main draw of Bethesda games, exploration in a lively and handcrafted world, was completely gone.
The modder started working on it before playing the game. It’s kind of funny in a way, but also cool that they wanted to give people multiplayer ASAP.
Thing is Skyrim wasn’t particularly handcrafted or lively either, the models for things like dungeons were repeated all the time and the NPC liveliness was lacklustre compared to eurojank games like Gothic.
Not sure why this is downvoted, radiant quests were a big feature in Skyrim, and were technically kinda impressive, but still repetitive. Likewise, quests for the College of Bards were mostly just a dungeon fetch quests and things.
It’s still a great game, but it was great for the bits that were handcrafted.
But give it 5-10 years and I’d be very interested to see another pass at procedural generation using machine learning, especially dialogue, could open the doors to more creativity than would be possible when doing it all by hand!
Nothing in any of these games has been particularly hand crafted. They were a big early user of procedural generation.
people love daggerfall yet its like 99% procedural generation. maybe 100%
After playing elden ring I’m done with Bethesda. Haven’t even tried starfeelz
I played star field, wasn’t convinced on the prologued. Moved on on the first few quests c dropped it. It feels too bland, generic and uninspired
Hard agree. This game is ridiculously mediocre for a production of this caliber
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It doesn’t get better either. The entire main story is just so contrived and boring.
That’s sad to hear.
I was pleasantly surprised with Fallout 4’s story and thought their writing team could keep up the good work.
I haven’t seen it for myself, though.
Back in 2012 I couldn’t put Skyrim down for 2 or 3 playthroughs, even without mods. Of course I’m older now and got less spare time… but I didn’t even get past the first few quests in Starfield. I don’t know why it doesn’t grab me the same way.
Because its empty. In skyrim you see NPCs having interesting interaction with each other and the PC. In starfield you just quick travel from empty city to empty planet
Theseus’ Ship of game development.
It happens with all art.
I’m there too. I was really excited for the game. Didn’t watch any promotional material. Have never seen a trailer for the game and stayed away from any media of it. I got bored so fast and I can’t force myself to keep playing it as it felt like there was nothing more to see after the first few hours
Does Todd Howard know how reviled he is?
That part where he talks about being made fun of for being in chess club…
…it’s like no… that’s not why people made fun of you, Todd. They made fun of you because you were the twerp claiming your uncle at NASA could get you on a spaceflight and then kept making excuses as to why the final story was your uncle taking you on a regular ass flight. People don’t like people who lie painfully obviously for attention and interest.
🎶 Tell me lies. Tell me sweet little lies. 🎶
Yeah pretty disappointed in 12 years since skyrim its like the same
I’ve seen plenty of other mods and that’s just 1 person’s opinion.
I will say, though: Microsoft are not a content company and never have been. So gaming isn’t their core strength.
BTW: I own both an XSX and a PS5, so I don’t have an axe to grind.
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Nah, it’s not the same. CDPR got cyberpunk to the point where it’s an amazing game, even on launch it was a good game. Bethesda will not put that work in, they will rely on modders, and oops, the modders cant be bothered with this hit trash. That means it’ll forever be known as a terrible game.
And it’s now an excellent RPG. What’s your point?
Cyberpunk 2077 is an actually great game now. Always had the potential to be one, but the devs fucked it up. But at the core, it was still a good game. And then the devs dedicated the time needed to make it actually great. If Starfield becomes the same in a couple of years, what’s wrong with picking it up then? Just don’t pick it up right now.
Yes, i didn’t mean the devs literally. I just meant cdpr.
Many of the promised features still have yet to be implemented, and the physics of the game are still janky as fuck.
Cyberpunk doesn’t get a pass just because half of the list has finally been implemented and the game has been polished……three fucking years later.
What did CDPR themselves promise that isn’t in the game?
Wall running
That was a functioning feature in the game when they were working on it, that they removed because it caused issues. That was an active choice on their part - not something they lied about.
Its nice they bothered to ship the game after two years
I had zero problems with CP2077 on PC, even from launch. I think most of the fervor was about the poor state of the console versions.
Right, I had the exact same experience. I see people parroting that it was completely unplayable at lunch, when that’s just completely untrue. I also did my first play through as soon as the game came out on PC and had no major issues.
Similar here. I mean there where some graphical glitches but had a fun time.
It depends on whether the game improves. Cyberpunk got patched into a decent state, no mans sky as well. I doubt that’ll happen with starfield, but maybe.
At least Starfield was a functional, if boring, videogame at launch
Cyberpunk was functional at launch, I beat the entire game week one. I experience no game breaking bugs, there were numerous non game breaking bugs but nothing that took me out of the experience much.
I did my playthrough on the superior PC platform though.
Nevermind the fact it was so shit on consoles they literally took it out of storefronts and the innumerous broken things regardless of platform. The game ran like ass on a fucking 3080. Even on PC it was worse than PS3 Skyrim currently, and I should know because I have like 500 hours on that (200 are loading screens)
Cyberpunk has some story telling flaws as well, but people look past that now
I’m not qualified to talk about how those games have storytelling problems, but I can say for certain that the game, on a mechanical level (i.e freedom to role play, being able to finish quests in a variety of ways, etc) was not what they pitched.
Yeah that’s true
Honestly, people who say it’s a great RPG have not played any good RPGs, but it’s a fucking legit FPS. I finished it like 3 times {including launch day} start to finish and the most enjoyable thing is the gunplay builds you can make
It’s as much of an rpg as Fallout 3 and 4. As in, it’s an fps with some very light rpg mechanics.
I’d say FO3 has more RPG mechanics than 4 and 2077.
It’s also the worst written of the 3
The headline made me think the dev gave up on his huge Skyrim mod set and said Skyrim is trash.
