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Starfield is a “bizarrely worse experience” on Nvidia and Intel, says Digital Foundry
(www.theverge.com)
this post was submitted on 11 Sep 2023
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Starfield
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Don't worry though, Todd Howard himself said that Bethesda definitely did a lot of work on optimizing Starfield. This is all still the fault of the end users, who just need to "upgrade their hardware." Just ignore the decrepit Gamebryo engine that still has all the same old bugs and quirks that it's had for nearly two decades.
Indeed. "this would have the fewest bugs any Bethesda game ever shipped with." as said by MS.
Which is probably the platonic ideal of "damning with faint praise."
I mean, to their credit, the game is relatively bug-free. Still a few oddities here and there and AI that probably needs a tweak or two, but otherwise it's been stable for me and I've not soft locked myself out of major quests...yet...
The AI is straight broken. Combat isn't a challenge because enemies get stuck in ladders, hide behind 2' chairs, and last night I found the last enemy sitting down staring off into space.
Then we get all the dialogue bugs. Invisible companions, people talking to you walking away, facing wrong directions, whatever is happening is facial expressions.
The fact it doesn't soft lock isn't a high bar.
I've had 2 main quest lines that completely broke. The first I could fix with commands, the other one I could not. So consider yourself lucky so far.
Out of curiosity, what were your two issues? The only one I've experienced is groundpounder (side quest) locking in a couple spots. Other than that and CTDs (because I'm under minspec), it's been basically big free for me too.
That's like when you call your insurance company and get sent a survey, "Did we exceed your expectations?"
Well, my expectations were so low that actually speaking to a person means you exceeded them. So sure, I guess.
No! It's Creation Engine 2! Ignore that it's just Gamebryo with yet another new coat of paint!
Unreal engine 5 is just Unreal engine 1 with yet another new coat of paint, what's your point?
Just because the initial release date of an engine is decades old, doesn't mean the actual engine is. Game engines get updated and fitted with new features and capabilities on top of what's there already, Devs don't waste time rewriting the engines from scratch on each new version.
The issue with Gamebryo is more that key bugs are just not getting fixed. How long have NPCs walked away mid-conversation? How long has enemy AI just found itself stuck without taking actions. How long have companions been getting stuck in doors and blocking your path?
The frustrating part isn't that they're reusing the same engine. It's that they're endlessly tacking on more shiny baubles, without ever fixing issues that have been present across all of their games. Hell the newest bauble they added, the new facial animations, are already breaking down in bizarre ways.
At this point, it feels like there's so much technical debt from half-implemented features that starting from scratch or licensing an engine from someone else might be the best route forward.