apparently this is in response to a few threads on Reddit flaming Starfield—in general, it’s been rather interesting to see Bethesda take what i can only describe as a “try to debate Starfield to popularity” approach with the game’s skeptics in the past month or two. not entirely sure it’s a winning strategy, personally.
Starfield has it’s negatives for sure, but he has a point about what the communities have been like (including here on Lemmy).
There have been so many armchair gamedevs who overnight know intricacies of engines, how programming works, how 8 year old computers should be able to run brand new AAA titles at 120fps. It’s been just exhausting reading these conversations.
For example, one thing I read again and again was “Starfield just wasn’t optimized, they easily could have reduced memory and bumped framerates”. Which any actual programmer will immediately feel a pit of dread in their stomach because we’ve been asked to reduce ram usage or speed something up, and that is a daunting task in our simple little apps - let alone a major AAA game.
Again I’m not saying Starfield was perfect. It has a lot of flaws, biggest one for me is that it felt like a game that came out 10 years ago in terms of how it played. But it didn’t deserve the overall destruction it received online. Any developer knows that the only people who can say “how” their game could have been done better were the ones who actually wrote it.
This thing in particular was picked apart by actual devs in news articles and editorials that showed that Bethesda really didn’t optimize the game at all along with all the technical reasoning and proof showing how it could have been improved.
It’s not just the players, who for the most part, have been citing those articles when they make that particular critique. I mean, shit, they haven’t even used their own texture compression system for the last few games they made, and that’s so easy even someone with minimal modding knowledge can fix because the game already has the tools to make it work better.
Please share these articles you speak of. From developers with real world game dev experience. Without pointing me to some 2 hour rambling YouTube video.
And do you seriously think that someone with minimal modding knowledge can “fix” texture compression and the actual devs of the game hadn’t known or thought of doing so too? Say what you will about the Starfield producers and management but I absolutely 100% guarantee you if they chose not to use that feature, it was for very good reasons.
Yes, better textures are consistently one of the first mods to come out for every game they have released since Fallout 3.
And if you read the other half of the sentence you quoted?
Not the original commenter, but this whole argument you put here falls completely on it’s face since we know that modders HAVE done this and haven’t had any issues (or at the very least have been able to solve said issues), if compressing the textures and whatnot actually broke the game then the modders wouldn’t have been able to do it without breaking the game
Even if they supposedly had a reason, then it was a bad one
When some rando with a mod package plugging into an undocumented ABI can dramatically improve the performance… Yeah, it’s not optimized at all. Don’t let them excuse themselves from due diligence.
To be fair, this is an old, old engine with several generation defining blockbusters making use of it. Not to mention the massive modding communities who’ve probably spent more collective hours fighting with the engine over the past few years than Bethesda has.
The performance issues are only inevitable with this engine. There’s a limit to how much refactoring and “adding features” you can do. At some point you just have to start from scratch or switch to a better available solution.
Even if they could’ve done a better job “optimizing” the game, they’ll always be limited by this engine.
Although to be fair, most games and game engines today aren’t as focused on performance like they used to be.
I can’t think of any modern game engine that uses Assembly in any meaningful way, other than Exanima’s engine.
Also evident by how frequently GPU companies end up fixing and improving game performance for specific games with their drivers.
I think it was totally fine, I have Gamepass so didn’t buy it outright but the amount of space it took for what it was had me uninstalling after maybe 20 hours.
I will probably pick it up again down the road when mods are available.