For those who have pre-ordered it is already here, the rest have to wait a little longer. Starfield is finally here! Have you bought it, why or why not? If you’ve already played it, what do you think of it? We are very curious!

Discuss all things Starfield below!

  • martenh@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    157·
    1 year ago

    I’ve never understood this argument, most game engines are based on 20+ year old technology and have been updated throughout the years. Can the creation engine be improved upon? Definitely yes, but the engine’s age has almost nothing to do with it.

    • snooggums@kbin.social
      276·
      1 year ago

      Their point is that the engine doesn’t show signs of being improved upon during that time and is still stuck feeling like a 20 year old engine.

      • tal@kbin.social
        103·
        1 year ago

        If you mean just the Creation Engine, that was 2011.

        If you trace it back to Gamebryo, then Morrowind was 20 years ago, but I don’t think that one can say that even Skyrim looks much like Morrowind.

        • CaptainEffort@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          85·
          1 year ago

          Skyrim literally had some of the same exact problems that Morrowind had.

          Personally I want them to keep the creation engine, if only for the stellar mod support. But let’s not kid ourselves, it desperately needs an overhaul.

          • tal@kbin.social
            42·
            1 year ago

            What specific functionality is it that you want?

            I listed one feature that I’d like to have (dynamic generation of polygons in curved surfaces), which I do not consider to be a very important limitation in another comment.

            But if you strongly feel that the engine imposes constraints, then I’m curious what particular functionality it is that you’re after.

            EDIT: Another: I don’t think that the game can generate billboards for player-built structures (so you can see the structures you’ve built in Fallout 4 and Fallout 76 many cells away). I don’t think that that’s actually a fundamental engine limitation – you could probably do it with the existing engine, just that the game doesn’t do it today. Instead, stuff like that is generated via offline map-generation tools. But again, it’s not really a huge deal in either of the above Fallout games.

            • CaptainEffort@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
              23·
              1 year ago

              There’s no specific functionality (except maybe ladders lol) it’s more just the engine as a whole. The fact that certain bugs can be found in all of their games from Morrowind to Fallout 4 is unacceptable imo.

              And the fact that someone managed to literally put the world of Fallout 4 into Skyrim, and have it just work seamlessly, really speaks volumes.

              I actually wrote an explanation for someone else a while ago, so I’ll put it here if you’re curious:

              The problem isn’t the engine itself, it’s that Bethesda hasn’t given it the attention it needs.

              Unreal Engine 5, for example, is built from the original Unreal Engine. But there has been so much work put into it that it’s nearly impossible to tell. Meanwhile, the creation engine literally has some of the same issues that the Gambryo engine had back during Morrowind.

              To Bethesda’s credit, this isn’t entirely their fault. There’s a reason that proprietary engines have been dying out in favor of engines like Unreal, and that’s because maintaining and improving game engines is incredibly time consuming and expensive. And unless you’re directly profiting off of your engine, like Epic does, you don’t have a massive incentive to endlessly polish it. Doing so is time you could be spending working on your next game, which you do directly profit off of.

              Personally, I want Bethesda to keep using the Creation Engine, or whatever they turn it into next, because of its incredible mod support. However, it’s nowhere near as polished or advanced as other engines, and understandably probably never will be. There’s really no easy solution imo.

    • Narte@lemmy.mlEnglish
      101·
      1 year ago

      Old or not it’s clear it needs a fundamental reworking if the same complaints persist across literal decades.

    • Kaldo@kbin.social
      7·
      1 year ago

      Yeah, they can just append a number to it like unreal does and call it a new engine but that’s not what you actually want. It’s not a matter of a “new engine”, it’s them not investing enough into the existing one to make it feel more modern. I know some things like physics and animations are part of the “bethesda charm” but it stopped being charming after skyrim :P