![[MEGATHREAD] Starfield - Your experiences!](https://cdn.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/steam/apps/1716740/capsule_616x353.jpg?t=1692798833){kind=link}
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!
This is one of the more biting criticisms I’ve heard of the game. It results in a lack of feeling of scale and scope. The universe just feels like connected places, instead of worlds within a galaxy. No Mans Sky got this right, and it’s surprising that Bethesda would fumble such a core mechanic. It looks like they tried to cover up this wart by… removing city maps.
It is not in the slightest bit surprising that bethesda would have issues with an interconnected world.
All (?) interiors are still different cells that require a load screen. And, since Skyrim (and, to a lesser extent, Fallout 3), the vast majority of towns are also a separate “exterior” cell as well.
MAYBE with the requirement of an SSD/nvme we could see a return to Morrowind/Oblivion style “the entire planet is one exterior area”. But we were never going to have atmospheric transitions.
There is a reason that basically every single “seamless transition” elite game has almost entirely barren planets. Balancing simulation for an entire solar system is already hard enough (and is why star citizen and elite dangerous like the long travel times…). Combining that with a planet where you potentially have to care about more than a few containers of loot and some scannable objects becomes hell. Its why so many games will hide a loading screen as you break atmosphere (I think one of the Evochrons did this? Been a minute) and why planets with cities are generally off limits… Or you just run like dogshit if you are star citizen.
That said: I REALLY hope this is the motivation for NMS to add cities. I don’t need “open world” cities. But being able to dock at a domed city would be AMAZING. And still get rid of a lot of these issues.
Oblivion has towns behind loading screens too. Even Kvatch. There are mods that break them out into the world but they’re instanced by default.
Particularly annoying with the Imperial City.
Ah. I remembered the Imperial City being its own loading area (and kvatch was the town that gets wrecked? So that would make sense too) but I could have sworn the rest of the towns were still “open world”.
Ah well. Maybe someday I’ll play Oblivion again. But almost definitely doing Morrowind first because Morrowind was awesome and weird as fuck.
Any town with a wall around it in Oblivion is instanced.
Also, you have correctly recognized Morrowind’s superiority. I highly recommend the Tamriel Rebuilt mod that adds a lot of the land mass of the rest of the province outside of the island of Vvardenfell!
A lot of the towns are still a part of the open world, but some of them are separated by loading screens.
Look at Ratchet and Clank Rift Apart. They have completely seamless transitions between entire dimensions. They use Direct Storage, which is a Microsoft API. It’s not a good look when a Sony studio is able to achieve seamless transitions on a Windows game but a Microsoft game can’t.
R&C is cool as hell but it is NOT the revelation it was marketed as.
Titanfall 2 and Dishonored 2 had already done almost exactly the same gimmick years prior. And that MyHouse.wad DOOM map that everyone lost their mind over a few years back actually was ALSO doing the same trick. Hell, the Build Engine games (particularly Duke Nukem 3D) were entirely built around this trick.
The reality is not that you are “changing entire dimensions”. It is that the majority of the map is loaded into memory and you are teleporting between parts of it. This has been a solved technology for literally decades. You just have seamless “portals” between different parts of the map. But it boils down to just loading enough assets.
R&C mostly benefited from the larger memory of the PS5 (16 GB of GDDR6 versus 8 GB of DDR5 for the PS4) with the “direct storage” mostly being background in, ironically, the same way Morrowind was: You are loading a few “cells” ahead of you as you traverse the world map so that you never notice a load time (unless you use the boots of blinding speed… or are playing on a console).
TF2 and Dishonored accomplished this by having all the other level data loaded in memory simultaneously all as part of the same map. The instant transitions are accomplished by teleporting the player to another part of the map that is already in memory.
This is not the same trick R&C pulled, and it has far more limitations. For example, TF2’s Effect and Cause necessitates a smaller overall map than the other missions because they had to fit two different versions of the same map in memory all at once. If they wanted to let you transition between three different time periods, they would have had to make it even smaller to fit in the same memory budget.
Ratchet & Clank’s approach has no such limitations. They could let you switch between 8 different time periods and not worry about having to fit all of them in memory at once.
At the end of the day: it is all the same “trick” Morrowind used. You load N cells ahead of where the player is so that they don’t notice the load times because they have been done by the time they get there.
In this case a “cell” could be a room or it could be DM-Deck 16 or it could be all of The Imperial City. It is the same trick. Hell, I think some streaming services even do this at different quality tiers so that you have no delay between one episode and another.
Size of levels is entirely a function of available memory. PS5 had more memory than PS4 and TF2 was targeting PS4 specs (… actually, was that PS3? Let’s say PS4 so I don’t feel too old). Faster load from disk helps a lot but NVMEs alone already get you there, as anyone who has experienced zero load times while playing a game can attest.
Like I said below where I already addressed this exact same point: It is great to applaud accomplishments. But by buying into this “only with the power of direct storage is this possible” nonsense you are not only parroting marketing: you are ignoring the legacy of all the devs who already did this years (really decades) ago.
How Morrowind and other open world games work has very little in common with the approaches used in R&C or Titanfall 2.
This approach has its own unique limitations. In Morrowind, you cannot instantly teleport from one side of the map to the other, in theory that would only be possible between adjacent cells. Otherwise, fast traveling would be instantaneous.
The beauty of what R&C does is that there are no limitations at all. You can almost instantly teleport between any maps the game has. No hacks or trickery beyond the brief animation concealing the 1-2 seconds it takes to shuttle the data from the SSD to VRAM. This is unique, and simply wasn’t possible on spinning rust without radically simplifying your level design and visual package to fit within the limited bandwith.
I was going to talk about how the load times are mostly just masked but still there but you acknowledged that.
At which point: Mark and Recall (or any of the Interventions) on an NVME is nigh instantaneous. And, much like Shang Tsung got neutered, those spells were largely removed because it made it too easy to load into a cell with a LOT of resources rather than an intentionally controlled and safe (asset wise) fast travel point.
Even on systems with significant memory, a slow drive will create lag in RC. Moreover, RC is doing this while also having very high graphical fidelity overall, including ray tracing, which is quite memory intensive. It’s not possible without Direct storage and reasonably fast SSDs.
Yeah…
Keep in mind that the PS4 pro and the Xbox One X both had spinning disc hard drives. Going from an HDD to an SSD, let alone a pretty good NVME, is already an insane speed-up. There is a reason most PC outlets have said over the years that getting an NVME was a more noticeable improvement than a new GPU.
Similarly, most games and visuals that people were used to fit in 8 GB. This is twice as much RAM at a higher speed.
The “direct storage” argument is almost entirely marketing. And it is fundamentally no different than learning you can Boots of Blinding Speed across the map without loading if you installed Morrowind to an SSD.
It is a nice technical achievement. But pretending it was some unique and groundbreaking action is not only buying into the marketing: It is insulting to the devs who did similar with much less.
I’m not insulting the devs who did similar with much less. I’m insulting the devs who can’t do similar with the same hardware.
If you ignore the server performance issues and bugs, star citizen is completely playable on my system and I have below reccomended specs (for starfield & star citizen). If star citizen can have no loading screens with most planets as populated (or more populated) then starfield’s planets while also having to manage server resources, then starfield has almost no excuse to have loading screens.
Elite dangerous did it better. A mix of both maybe.