Xbox Game Studios |OT12| The One with Starfield and Activision Blizzard King

Yeah, they need to put these stuff in the base game . It’s just a little ask I am having about Bethesda games. I like their games, but I think in that regard they’re behind other studios and I know they’re capable of adding it. Also , they need to improve skill trees which can add some fun builds

Todd Howard had a one-on-one interview with Ted Price from Insomniac, and he was giving his reasoning for the 'you can do everything approach. Funny thing is how much Ted Price loved Starfield, and you can actually see true gamers that are actually amazing developers appreciate games. Unlike most of his own fanbase.

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John Carmack is also there. Nice stream.

I haven’t played Starfield yet, waiting for the Shattered Space update. With games this massive in scale, they need the time to update and make the QoL changes. I did this with Cyberpunk, waited until now with Liberty city update and V2.1. So I’ve had an amazing experience, the game runs and plays great.

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Basically: armchair “devs” (who’ve never coded a line in their lives) making baseless assessments with an absolute fraction of actual information they’re basing said assessment on. When actual CDPR devs have defended Starfield and said it does some things better than their game, I think it cements that fact.

Games are different and that’s a good thing, not every gamer wants to play the same game 20 times like a certain fan base.

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I’ll check it out, I don’t think I ever watched that one.

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I’m not asking them to drop anything. I’m asking them to actually utilize the inherent interactivity of their engine beyond placing and moving objects around on your ship or outpost.

Like, all the pieces are there, we need to go back to the late 90’s early 00’s blobber rpg levels of interactivity.

i laughed when people used Cyberpunk with screenshots to trash starfield when just a year ago the game was being trashed

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Interesting idea for the next Elder Scrolls and that is to replace the spaceship from Starfield with a sea bearing ship.

https://gamerant.com/starfield-ship-customization-elder-scrolls-6-similar-good/

If that’s how you interpreted my comments, that was not my intent. To me saying ‘they should drop X and do Y’ is a much different statement than ‘people expect Y nowadays, if X prevents Y from happening they might need to look at the pros and cons’. I even questioned whether the limitations were technical, staffing/budget/etc. Also never said the features don’t matter, I said I don’t think they matter to a large portion of the user base.

Anyway, I think you guys are way too quick to dismiss people and throw around terms like armchair devs. I think the only reductive take here is people assuming that any criticism levied towards Starfield means we want it to be just like every other game.

Who would have thought not wanting loading screens in an open world RPG in 2028 would be so contentious.

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It’s not contentious, it’s just that other open world games have loading screens… and will probably have loading screens in 2028.

My comments were a generalization of some of the discussions that have taken place in here about Starfield. Some here have absolutely argued in favor of stripping out certain features of the game and/or having BGS switch engines which would drastically change how their games operate. My comments were directed more at those people.

I’ve said repeatedly that I have no issue with people who simply want BGS games to be better or have more robust features, etc.

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I doubt any game will get rid of loading screens completely, the best we got and will continue to get is a transition loading scene. Where we’re in a single cell and everything else loads around us like Star Wars surviver space travel.

As for how can Bethesda achieve something that will still stick with their tech, I think the best example is what RGG did when they made Yakuza 6. Where they add more physics and interactivity to their engine and made a large part of Kamurocho(still in Kamurocho in Y6, in Kiwami 2 Sotenbori got a similar treatment and they continued with it in Gaiden) that’s open to just walk in.

Not every building is like this and when they need to set up the story RGG has us go through a transition scene. But I think this approach would be a more naunce way for Bethesda to modernize their presentation and still keeping their usual interactivity.

For Bethesda, minimizing them to the least possible would be a good start. And btw what you describe is fine, probably no game gets rid of loading just having those transitions to hide it makes sense, Starfield literally had the perfect excuse with those transition areas because they’re realistic to space travel, but in the end it still had to have frequent load screens.

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Yeah, it was a bit weird that they have a transition scene for space travel that they follow up with a loading screen. Was it impossible to hide the loading screen with the transition screen?

I think a hybrid approach could work, where the city is open like In Starfield but with most/all of the shops being open as well. While keeping bigger places like palaces or large caves as separate cells with a transition scene, there’s a couple of caves in Starfield that we can just walk into without a loading screen.

I guess my main reason for not seeing it as a problem is because I fast travel more often than as I discover planets. Instead of getting on the ship, taking off and setting a course for a place I have already visited. Although we do have to do have to stay committed to traveling that way to get a large portion of encounters in space(I have had so many different and similar ones that I haven’t seen the Valentine since NG and miis the space shanties).

Also in a place like Neon where quest have us move from one side of the platform to the other, I didn’t bother going through Bayu Plaza, because I can just travel through the roof tops. If I needed to go down to the lower level jumping off the side where I could see the bottom of the platform was my go to.

Probably the amount of stuff the game has to keep track of at any moment makes it a difficult task because loading data is still a compute task as well. Having no loading screens wouldn’t be an on/off switch or something, it would be something they work on and dedicate time and resources for, and might have to give away some stuff in return.

To me it’s not a problem in the sense that it ruined the experience, but if had been seamless I believe the exploration and world would have been better appreciated.

Exploration isn’t like other Bethesda games though, so even if they had less planets people would have complained.

As the areas that are marked for us on the maps are only one tiny part of the explorable area on a planet, throw in the multiple biomes that we would need to pay attention to in other to find things like rivers or lakes that aren’t in an area Bethesda is using(New Atlantis in Jemison).

Adding more prefab or spreading the ones that aren’t as common(something like the Freestar Military base), would have helped but it would have resulted in the same issue.