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Starfield on PC is the best way to play - but the game still requires a lot of work
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this post was submitted on 10 Sep 2023
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Starfield
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Really? I've seen lots of people complaining about loading screens. I'm playing on Xbox and haven't had an issue with it. I'm 82 hours in and only really noticed there's a few 2 second loading screens going from orbit to walking off the ship.
I've had at times 4 loading screens consecutively in the space of seconds. They are quick but they do take me out of the experience. I think the engine is just showing its age in a way that a nice new coat of paint can't really hide for a game like this.
Fortunately I saw reviews before buying so I knew what to expect and it's not a huge deal for me after lowered my expectations for the game but I can understand people's disappointment.
It's not really an engine issue. It's a design issue. Things have to load when there's no way to predict what will be needed soon. There are lots of ways to hide loading zones when you're walking in connected spaces. Assets can be streamed in when and where they're needed. When you're fast traveling between totally disconnected spaces, there's really no way to avoid some kind of loading screen.
The best way to handle this for a space game is to hide loading the planet surface behind your ship coming down from space. You can stream them in while keeping the player and ship loaded in so it's seemless. There's no way to do it when you're just teleporting to a location though. However, it could be done better in a lot of places. For example, why does it teleport you right outside the door of the lodge. Just teleport inside and save an extra loading transition after we just had at least one to get there.
All the ways to handle making transitions better can be done in the CE I'm pretty confident. It's constantly streaming in chunks of landscape as you travel around. They have full control over the engine source anyway, so if it can't handle it they could spend some resources to build that functionality. There's no reason landing on a planet should require a loading screen. Entering structures also are usually through an airlock style door. There's no reason that couldn't be used to mask a loading transition.
I don't really think I can agree here. As much fun as I'm having, this engine is showing its limitations with this game. It's honestly amazing what they've been able to do with it especially the space aspects where there is such a vast amount of area and all the planets modelled with orbits and everything. But in 2023 when you need a loading screen when the player opens a door, it's pretty evident that this engine has some old school limitations hanging on. This is well beyond just loading when fast travelling which is of course understandable.
I get it though. These are huge technical challenges that would require serious investment.
Unreal engine is almost exactly as old.
You're comparing a Porsche to a moped.
It doesn't matter if the complaint is age.
They both have different intent behind the way their systems are designed. Admittedly, Epics main product (until Fortnite) was pretty much their engine, so it has had a lot more money invested into it. That said, Bethesda's engine is almost totally different than what it started as as well, but with less investment.
Thier complaint wasn't about the age of the engine. It was about the engine itself.
You say this, but thats just not how the engine was made.
Yes, because the engine is trash.
And unreal engine was made for an arena shooter...
Well, yeah, it's technically possible, but it was not easy enough for them to implement in that engine for it to be the most financially feasible option in order to deliver on the amount of content/other engine changes that they wanted to, is probably the more complex answer. I'm sure if Bethesda stopped at nothing to achieve no loading screens that they could do it, but at the cost of whatever instability or lost time for other engine improvements or content created, which is the choice they made.
Unless we could see the nonexistent alternate Starfield where that was the priority instead it's hard to say whether it's "because of the engine" or not, whether that is a literal thing or more of a tradeoff of labor time thing.
Well, we can see other games where they did sort out the loading screen complexity while also including all of that other stuff.
I'm not going to assume the way they made space is the same way they'd make a regular overworld in their older games. If it were easy enough to just do it like they always do, then they would've done it, I think.
No matter what I feel like that's a pretty big deal, having seamless transition through space, and it's not our place to armchair speculate that they could've done it without sacrificing much else, unless the person making the criticism is a crack programmer that could've stepped in there and been like "move aside, idiots, I'm here to cure all of your shitty design with ease and miserliness"
No, we can still criticize design choices of major studios by comparing output to other studios without being experts.
Sure, but I think it's important to try to understand the limitations and costs of these things and why it wasn't already like that. If you whittle it down to strictly design choice then it seems braindead simple to have designed it that way to begin with, so the true answer of why it was done is probably more complicated.
Should there have been less loading screens? Duh. If there were, though, there would've undoubtedly been compromises and a difference in scope of content in other areas. It's worth criticizing, but at this point I doubt anyone from Bethesda could look through the internet without tripping over a "the loading screens suck" post