Gaming

30557 readers

33 users here now

From video gaming to card games and stuff in between, if it's gaming you can probably discuss it here!

Please Note: Gaming memes are permitted to be posted on Meme Mondays, but will otherwise be removed in an effort to allow other discussions to take place.

See also Gaming's sister community Tabletop Gaming.

This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

192

Starfield design lead says players are "disconnected" from how games are actually made: "Don't fool yourself into thinking you know why it is the way it is" (www.gamesradar.com)

submitted 11 months ago by alyaza to c/gaming

88 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 23 points 11 months ago (5 children)

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.

[–] Kolanaki@yiffit.net 29 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

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.

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.

[–] Spuddlesv2@lemmy.ca 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Claidheamh@slrpnk.net 9 points 11 months ago (1 children)

And do you seriously think that someone with minimal modding knowledge can “fix” texture compression

Yes, better textures are consistently one of the first mods to come out for every game they have released since Fallout 3.

[–] Spuddlesv2@lemmy.ca 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

And if you read the other half of the sentence you quoted?

[–] Renevar@lemmy.blahaj.zone 6 points 11 months ago

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.

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

[–] Kata1yst@kbin.social 26 points 11 months ago

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.

[–] spaduf@slrpnk.net 19 points 11 months ago

who overnight know intricacies of engines

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.

[–] hamburglar26@wilbo.tech 2 points 11 months ago

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.

load more comments (1 replies)