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this post was submitted on 12 Oct 2024
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Agreed, the way they can preserve the position of any object, anywhere, with thousands of objects and an obscenely large world, is exceedingly impressive.
What I don't get is why the hell any of that is a priority. It's a neat party trick, but surely 99.9% of the gameplay value of arranging items for fun could be achieved on the player ship alone.
Like... it's neat that I can pick up, interact with, and sell every single pen and fork on every table. But is it useful, with a carry weight system deincentivizing that? Fussing with my inventory to find what random crap I accidentally picked up that's taking up my weight? Is that remarkably better than having a few key obvious and useful pickups? Is it worth giving up 60FPS on console, and having dedicated loading screens for nearly every door and ladder around?
Again, it's cool that they have this massive procedurally generated world, that a player could spend thousands of hours in. But when that area is boring, does it really beat a handcrafted interesting world and narrative? What good is thousands of hours of content when players are bored and gone before 10 hours?
So like... from a tech perspective, I respect what Starfield is, and it's very impressive, but as a game it feels like a waste of a lot of very talented work, suffering from a lack of good direction at the top.
I could generally take or leave their clutter items, but persistent NPCs with dynamic schedules or the full stat and inventory systems of the PC are still extremely rare, never mind both. Most games simplify NPCs such that they don't actually have equipment or just have one item (typically an unlootable weapon) and reduce their stats to just HP and defense stats. By contrast, the only difference between an NPC and the PC in a Bethesda game is that the player has controll over the PC.
For me, if they moved to a new engine it would need those persistent fully-featured NPCs to feel like a Bethesda game. Ten years ago, there wasn't really anything else that did that. Now, there's got to be something they can make work. Hell, BG3 has all this stuff, it's just from a top-down perspective. And it can handle ladders, which Bethesda's engine still can't do.
See, that's one of the problems of using Creation Engine for Starfield. The game was supposed to be about exploration and space travel, but the big focus of the engine is clutter. All the things that made Skyrim and Fallout feel "lived in", like NPCs doing different stuff at specific times, were effectively disabled or removed in Starfield. Hell, NPCs' (complete lack of) reaction make them feel completely "dead"; pedestrians in GTA 4 feel more way more believable and "alive", despite serving the exact same purpose of filling the screen.
The proc-gen places also makes zero use of the engine's strengths, it doesn't create any "unique" places that could be filled with unimportant npcs and clutter. It's ironic that Daggerfall, more than 20 years ago, had better proc-gen
Btw, Gothic (2? 3 at least) had already holes without loading screens.