Modders Say 'Starfield' Can't Be Fixed...

[@LukeStephensTV]

Follow my other channels or I'll make you play more Starfield: linktr.ee/lukestephens

[@lifeofdylan1766]

Red flaaaagggg

[@5226-p1e]

i didn't see your pol, so i'm going to put my vote in now.

[@MonkeyspankO]

bgs knows better than most, its funny people think they need to be "convinced." If only they would listen to the customer! lmao. They know and don't care. Negative feedback is just something to be managed by PR and not learned from. Tbc, the braintrust over there is 100% comfortable taking their well earned reputation to the middle of the ocean and sinking it, if its means a good quarter and bonuses all around. That's just business.

[@Personalinfo404]

random question, your tee shirts look pretty nice, what brand if you dont mind me asking? id like to pick some up.

[@5226-p1e]

@@lifeofdylan1766 what is a red flag that your talking about? sorry but without context, your comment will always be taken out of context when there is no context to draw off of.

[@computaterjones]

You know it's bad when Bethesda's best employees can't fix the game.

[@Azraelseraphim]

This is what happens when you have Nepotism and DEI in the workplace. You chase away your talent.

[@mkzhero]

'Fixing (and heck, MAKING) a game' is a job for coders... And i'm convinced they largely didn't even HAVE those employed for them at all for about two decades!

[@chilbiyito]

​@@mkzherothat happened at 343 they had to bring some in to fix halo infinite anyways

[@aarons3014]

Laughed out loud. Thank you.

[@Sxekilljoy]

More like volunteers

[@joshyoder871]

Starfield had so much potential. The best way I've described it is Bethesda wanted to give the modders an open sandbox...but they expected the modders to bring the sand too.

[@TalesOfWar]

And the box.

[@cirkleobserver3217]

What potential? Where? Building an open world space game has potential as an idea but you have to implement it.

[@drakesilmore3760]

The idea you had of Starfield had potential. The idea you had was an illusion. Bethesda did not make what you thought would have potential. Starfield, the one we got, the way that it is, never had potential.

[@AnonymousAnonposter]

The only potential this game had was realized. To be a joke that opened the eyes of many people.

[@CupGuyDude12]

bro what potential did u see in fast traveling to every quest and a loading screen for every building

[@evesixphoenix8541]

I think its important to put into context the issue that much smaller studios with Hello Games and Frontier Developments were able to achieve seamless massive scale planets over 6 years ago. With Bethesda’s size and countless other studios to get assistance from, it was absolutely a solvable problem they thought they didn’t need to solve.

[@oldm9228]

Let's just be real they wanted to save money by using the same engine they used for skyrim although it's not fit for this type of game. Todd Howard himself got high on Skyrim's success (even releasing it again and again) and could not see that the engine's limitations when it comes to making a space game.

[@Razumen]

It IS a bigger problem for Bethesda though, they have a massive amount of tech debt, which is entirely their fault because they've been dragging their feet updating the engine forever, but changing an established engine, and by necessities, its tools, so drastically, they probably might as well just start from scratch again. But again, everyone there is probably so intimately familiar with the Gamebryo engine's quirks and strengths, that doing that would basically mean EVERYONE would have to be retrained. I'm not making excuses for them tho, this is just why I think they made that decision, even if it was the wrong one.

[@TheMadmanAndre]

Bethesda have chained themselves to Creation Engine, and that thing's going to drag them down.

[@Razumen]

@@TheMadmanAndre Wouldn't have been so bad if they did a better job keeping it updated to modern standards and features, but that would actually require them to spend money on it, so of course they didn't.

[@gucciguy3408]

I really hated how they decided how they'd do civilization in Starfield and the fact the biggest cities are so small is a big point of it. I also really hate that they went with the no sentient aliens type of game to...As that makes it even more boring of a space game and means they didn't wanna create more unique species unlike there other type of aliens where they seemed to take a lot from other space themed things.

[@kylesmith8383]

It blows my mind that planet exploration in this game is akin to what we had in mass effect 2. And at least in mass effect we had a vehicle. The main difference being that instead of hand crafted fishbowls With three points of interest, BGS gave us Procedurally generated fishballs with three points of interest.

[@Ozcogger]

Tbf I played through ME recently and there is more detail on those planets than all of Starfield. It's wild.

[@TalesOfWar]

To be fair to BSG, Mass Effect 2 was using a far, far more advanced engine than Starfield. Unreal Engine 3.

[@WILLINGLYWILD]

@@TalesOfWar😂 good one

[@augustday9483]

ME2 has a much better story and writing, too.

[@Adam-wt5id]

You can literally read information and lore even on unexplorable planets in mass effect. It will tell you if it was a mining planet or a planet with colonies and give you actual world building even if it isnt more gameplay

[@sunsaintapollo11]

Bethesda modders not being able to fix the game is the gaming equivalent to the smartest kid in class panicking during a test they studied for

[@seahyx120]

Nah it's more the modders read the paper, put it down and walked out the door, saying that it's a waste of their time. The paper is blank, except for some circles.

[@jobloluther]

America first is inevitable

[@whrussy]

This particular thing doesnt need fixing. This insatiable urge to make every planet a seamless vast empty is strange. The galaxy is the "planet" in this game, and the planets are the POIs. People gotta stop trying to stick a round peg in a square hole just cause thats what they're used to. Its a new IP, with a new way to explore. Its not broken just because it isnt the same static gamespace crammed with "cool statue" or "broken down house" or "dryad tree" pois.

[@Bomberman66Hell]

@@whrussy Hi Pete Hines alt account!

[@jonathanwessner3456]

@@whrussy It isn't even the locked off planetary exploration, it is the FACT that EVERY aspect of the game was done better by someone else. It is the FACT that THIS is NOT the game they told us they were giving us. It is boring, more than just "Empty planet boring". Heck, even having SOMETHING to discover after 5 minutes of walking would be good

[@tilenkobe]

Bethesda just went one step further and not only let modders fix their game but their whole engine. Todd really is a visionary.

[@WhyteLis21]

@alexcruba4928 Imagine, 30th century holodeck and AI made by Todd's game engine. Lol.

[@elijahaitaok8624]

​@@WhyteLis21 the 30th century game can play Starfield which can play fallout 76, which can play fallout 4, which can play elder scrolls 6, which can play Skyrim, which can play oblivion, which can play fallout 3, which can play Doom.

[@WhyteLis21]

@@elijahaitaok8624 Ah, the old backward compatibility, eh? 👍

[@elijahaitaok8624]

@@WhyteLis21 not just backward compatibility, but a bit of forward compatibility too

[@DjDiversant]

Meta modding 😅

[@Chris-dy1cb]

If starfields reception isn't a wake up call for Bethesda I don't know what more we can do to prevent ES6 from being mediocre and forgettable. The developers that made the best Bethesda has to offer are long gone so it appears. Great video!

[@michaelfiori6700]

That's kinda all game studios. All the people who make ubisoft, Bethesda, bungie, rockstar, etc... They are all gone or retired.... so much knowledge and skill of game making forgotten.

[@TheDXJC56]

Woulda thought FO76 was enough, why anyone's expecting this to be any different is beyond me 😂

[@mcmarkmarkson7115]

Wake up call? They made insane cash. They will keep releasing trash for as long as people buy it

[@drewbydoobydoo2918]

I feel the same way about Bungie. D2 has had some good stuff, but a lot of crap. I've heard people suggest giving Halo back to Bungie, but I really don't think it would matter. Everyone who made Halo what it was is long gone, especially after the recent purge. I'm waiting to see how Marathon turns out, but I can't get too excited.

[@yt_hatesfreespeech]

it should be a wake up for every company that takes 10yrs to make a game, how can Ubisoft a much poorer company make a game as big as Valhalla in 3yrs while Starfield takes 10? just the main questline of Valhalla is 3 times bigger than Starfield.

[@brennanpratt1937]

Outer Wilds apparently had to deal with the floating point error (its game world is a seamless solar system) and did so by moving the world around the character rather than the reverse. The character was always at the center of the game's world.

[@TalesOfWar]

That's also a better game in many, many other ways lol. Like decisions actually meaning something and having consequences..

[@duelz9366]

@@TalesOfWarone of my favorite games tbh Amazing game

[@AlleluiaElizabeth]

So, Dr. Farnsworth worked there?

[@UristMcKerman]

There is a great KSP way of going around floating point error. Your universe coordinate consists of 2 coordinates. 1st is your precise coordinates inside current instance, it is used for physics and graphics. 2nd is instance coordinates from center of space systems, which used to render planets and calculate trajectories

[@Кирилл-с5л9г]

Also in Raft your raft is the center of the world

[@tylerpehringer5272]

Honestly, this only made me feel worse about Elder Scrolls 6. They really need to reevaluate how they make their rpgs. So many companies have improved what an open world rpg is and Bethesda just doesn't want to innovate themselves.

[@hare75]

Todd doesn't care anymore

[@Samsonfs]

Gonna come out in 2028 like 10 years outdated 😂

[@losmosquitos1108]

As long as they won‘t change the engine and most of the leading staff incl. Emil Pagliarulo and Todd (I don‘t mean naming it creation engine 3, that doesn‘t count 😉), there is no hope and I pray, also no hype, again.

[@Igor19485]

Yea expect Elder Scrolls VI to have same severely outdated engine as last 5 or so Bethesda games with same quest design and everything. They will have to rely on modders again to keep their game relevant. Honestly this company baffles me. I'm just glad that Starfield got such polarizing reception, it means people are done with their shit.

[@hexadecimal973]

Hopefully they learn from baldur's gate 3 because it won goty

[@thetroll1984]

My problem is that even if we get whole huge planets to explore, I just see no reason to do such a thing because it would just be empty and devoid of anything interesting.

[@godfatherezio]

They should have just had one single planet to explore, and even then it would have been mostly empty.

[@SobeCrunkMonster]

is that your problem? or is that everyones problem and we all already know this and we all have already said this countless times? its like saying “my problem is that every night i get tired and need to sleep until the next morning”.

[@SussedRage]

Elite did "loneliness" and exploring empty planets really well because you could fly across them, scout, look for signs of activity (crashed ships, alien bases etc) The reason Starfield does so poorly in this regard is every player knows its all fake - you're never feeling like you're finding stuff. You're having content loaded in for you to enjoy - it's a system designed by people who've forgotten the very nature of why exploration/immersion made their games successful. They've created almost like a souless AI version of what "open world" means. We all know all games are fake, but Starfield exposes it and rubs it in players faces lol

[@thetroll1984]

@@SobeCrunkMonster i do indeed have to sleep until the next morning correct

[@fuzzydude64]

@@godfatherezio Only having one planet kind of defeats the purpose of using space as a backdrop for an open-world RPG though. Still, 10 or less worlds would have been more than enough. Honestly 3-5 would be a good number along with a few small rng planets for resources. They don't even need to be full planets, no amount of openness is impressive if it's all empty and boring. I can think of multiple ways they could have gone about this, but this wasn't it.

[@seekittycat]

Todd: We made this game for modders Modders: So you're going to make the game modder friendly? You won't randomly update causing all the mods to break? You're going to make file organization easy to use and listen to our suggestions? Todd: Nope! It's friendly to modders cause it's empty and boring!

[@kremesauce]

He literally thinks that cause it’s empty that people will just fill it with stuff. Like an artist with an empty canvas. Hey Todd, artists need tools and something to go off. Not a literal complete blank canvas

[@finnz7786]

Cook

[@niceto_meet_you2528]

@@kremesauce I feel sorry for the modding community because they are literally just doing bugthesda's work but for free.

[@gyrozeppeli00]

Bethesda updates skyrim to break all the mods so only option is their paid mods, its one of their business strats, why are you even surprised 😂

[@hyperturbotechnomike]

@Kremesauce. Bethesda has a bad history with canvas. Nobody wants to paint on plastic foil.

[@RelativelyBest]

Goddammit. I'm Bethesda game veteran so I knew all along we weren't going to get good storytelling or deep roleplaying opportunities, and I was okay with that. The two things I was counting on was A) a good exploration experience and B) modders going crazy and using the game as a basis for amazing stuff. Then the game comes out and I learn that Bethesda failed at the two things they're actually supposed to be very good at. How do you make essentially the same game for twenty years, earning critical acclaim, a loyal fanbase and financial success, and still somehow fail to understand what you're doing right?

[@vishrrfa]

I think it's because they focus more on the tv show

[@Yora21]

All the Elder Scrolls modders should get together and just make their own game from scratch. They absolutely have the skills, time, and resources to make a better game foundation than Bethesda.

[@basilciccone1679]

@@Yora21they absolutely do not have the time to all get together and CREATE a whole video game you are crazy man lol

[@Yora21]

@@basilciccone1679 Tamriel Rebuilt claims to have started working on their giant mod pretty much right when Morrowind first came out in 2002. They do have time.

[@hecc7906]

Creation Kit isn't out for Starfield yet bro how're they supposed to "go crazy" with no mod tools? This video is misinformation

[@Igor19485]

You know it's bad when even modders are done lmaoo

[@benjaminamouroux8395]

Truth! Facts me!

[@noobbotgaming2173]

And the funniest part of the situation is you have the Starfield defenders say Cyberpunk 2077 needed time to be in a playable state. I always defeat those people with an uncounterable statement: Cyberpunk's story, characters, world, art style and density was solid. It simply needed polishing. You can't polish something if you don't have it. Starfield is a 2010 title released in 2023.

[@Igor19485]

@@noobbotgaming2173 Also CD PROJEKT RED is a reputable company and they were gonna do everything they could to fix their game's disastrous launch. Bethesda just don't care and don't bother to fix their games, let the modders do it.

[@infernoeagles5812]

Starfield is a beta game that’s not finished Cyberpunk has a amazing story solid design choices and committed to everything it did unlike starfield cyberpunk was buggy but was still great

[@SobeCrunkMonster]

you know its bad when the game is tried for a few hours. the nameless faceless numberless group of modders you refer to has nothing to do with it.

[@doomskull7549]

The farlands in minecraft being caused by floating point inaccuracy is actually just a common misconception. The farlands were caused by the failure of the noise generators used for terrain generation beyond those coordinates. While floating point innaccuracy artifacts can be seen in the farlands, the innacuracy does not get so bad as to make the game unplayable until you are much further out than the start of the farlands.

[@KuroKarma]

This! I fear general audience are going to be confused about what a float is and the farlands issues after watching this video.

[@jsbarretto]

That's still an FP precision issue though, it's just manifesting in a different component of the game. Where FP precision issues manifest is never clear or straightforward since it depends on the specific calculations the game is making. You might be able to represent your position just fine, for example, but your velocity might be unworkably broken if you use something like verlet integration to do physics. It's just another expression of that loss of precision.

[@BouncingTribbles]

Yeah, he talked about it very generally including the islands and stuff, but then he showed the actually glitching later. Very misleading

[@clinch4402]

☝🤓

[@osmacar5331]

it is still a flop issue just not the same as has been said. the noise generation is having an overflow error and having to adhock a solution to not die.

[@RedlinePush]

In my opinion, the issue is not the ability to travel between tiles. The fast travel between fishbowls could be fine. The problem is there is no content. In skyrim I find it enjoyable to abstain from fast travel because I run across so much quest and story content while exploring. This to me is the core of an exploration game. Give me a reason to want to go off the beaten path.

[@Razumen]

But that's the problem with Starfield, there is no exploration, you can't discover POI's because they're either on a map, or on your hud already. Imagine if every POI was already on your map or hud in Skyrim as soon as you were 500ft away. You would never need to look for them, because long before you could even SEE them, you'd know they're there. There is no "off the beaten path" In Starfield, you either go to designated areas the developers have deigned you to be able to go, with content you know is there (RNG events don't count because random encounters is not exploration) or you simply don't, because you literally can't.

[@Crese1947]

And that's something that's potentially solvable with mods and/or major DLC. Making content additions to the procedural generation engine may be something actually feasible with the CK2

[@Razumen]

@@Crese1947 No, it's not really, for reasons this video goes into. It would require a complete overhaul of how space travel works, if that's even possible given the engine's problems with accuracy, along with all the changes that would have to be done with the current locations to get them to work within the new system. No, Bethesda isn't going to change the core game from here on, and they've made zero indications they would, because why would they? Despite the criticism the game still sold like hotcakes. And modders aren't going to be able to fIx it because they'd need access to the source code, something the modding lot will absolutely NOT provide.

[@Crese1947]

@@Razumen In context, I OBVIOUSLY didn't say that making entire planets tiles connect is feasible, I said injecting new POI's into the pregen system could be possible. It's one thing to rewrite the entire games fucking code, it's another thing to make additions to an already established base. Bethesda has a pregen system for each tile that has POI's, it shouldn't take years of work to increase the chances of POI's spawning and adding variety to the pregen system. Even if modders can't do that for reasons that have nothing to do with float points, they can still make static tiles (Non-pregenned tiles, like the major cities). It wouldn't be a stretch to say a modder could make a new planet full of custom made tiles. It wouldn't require reqriting the games code and would rely primarily on the creation kit. Nobody is stepping up to claim making planets with soley custom content is impossible, because planets are just a collection of worldspaces. Again, modders CAN fix exploration. I don't give a damn whether or not exploring a planet without bounds is possible, just that each tile (Which is said to be the size of the Skyrim map) is hand-tailored by mods, or (if possible) a shit ton of POI's are added to the pregen system. TL;DR: Modders can absolutely make use of the already existing pregen system by adding more content to it, and failing that they can just make a tile like new atlantis and fill it with content. Reading comprehension is your best friend.

[@Razumen]

@@Crese1947 Finding randomly placed POIs isn't exploration, it's just chance. Not to mention you don't discover anything in planets anyways, they're on your hud way and map long before you can see them. And if they can't fix space exploration, which they can't and won't, then they definitely can not fix exploration as a whole.

[@tessa63627]

TLDR; one of the problems with Starfield, in his opinion, is the fishbowl effect when you load into a planet. And this problem is something he would really like to see fixed but it isn't possible due to how the game is built. He spends the rest of the time explaining the specifics.

[@justanotheremptychannel2472]

Thanks

[@ScumClassWorks]

If only he could explain those specifics once, instead of repeating every point over and over.

[@LecherousLizard]

The "fishbowl effect" is literally the least problematic things about the game. Gunplay is garbage (the game has basically no melee), space fights are garbage, ship building is garbage, base building is an even bigger garbage, quests are garbage, cities are garbage, all the three random POIs are garbage, the flora and fauna are garbage (there's like a total of 15 animals that ONLY vary in names planet-to-planet). The fact the game is a loading screen simulator on top of that only exacerbates all of those problems.

[@AC-ut3nk]

You can't fix something that doesn't exist. - Exploration - RPG - Meaningful story Doesn't exist in Starfield

[@r.e.z9428]

- Characters with more depth than a thimble.

[@JediKnightoftheTifaCult]

Starfield is just a walking simulator. That's why they didn't want to give you rovers because then it wouldn't even be that. 😂

[@r.e.z9428]

@@JediKnightoftheTifaCult It would have broken the engine, even though autists modders got it to work in New Vegas.

[@chillhour6155]

Starfield is a boneless chicken

[@20tetsuo77]

You actually can... with mods. But if mods are a problem, on the other hand...

[@tiberiuskirk2593]

As a long time mod user/novice modder primarily for New Vegas I knew the "1000 planets" and "space exploration" aspect of Starfield was doomed from the start. A brief explanation of how Creation Engine (Gamebryo) games work. You have World Spaces consisting of Cells that lead into other Cells that load in as you move forward. Notably, Skyrim early on had a consistent problem with the speed of a player mounted on a horse being too fast for the game to load the content of cells. At initial release, or heavily modded, you can still experience noticable and frequent game stutter when you leave one Cell and enter a new one and feel the game load the assets and content for said Cell. Starfield does not have vehicles because you would run right into the glitches present with the Horse speed in base release Skyrim. Now, modern gaming hardware can brute force older Bethesda engine based games like New Vegas to have working vehicles, but the reason they function at all is because hardware brute forces the game engine to load cells faster. Starfield, with its modern high poly models and HD textures, all of which are woefully un-optimized for what they are, can't handle the player moving at the speed needed for a functional vehicle. But lets move to "Interiors". Creation Engine handles Interiors in an extremely antiquated way. As in, everything in an individual interior is entirely loaded into the game via a loading screen. The Creation Engine handles Interior spaces akin to a matryoshka doll. An interior leading to an interior, into another, etc. The Engine is simply outdated when it comes to Data streaming and masking loading screens. Games like Cyberpunk, RDR2, and the now older MGS5 can almost seamlessly transition from exterior game spaces to interior ones. Yes, they all use loading screens, but they mask them as much as possible giving the illusion of seamless movement. But unlike Creation Engine they all handle the retrieval and loading of data and assets in a far superior, modern fashion.

[@niceto_meet_you2528]

The ridiculous and slightly funny thing is that Starfield can't even handle the player moving at the speed needed to simulate fast walking. On pc the game stutters even on 40 series gpus. That's probably why the walking and running speed is so slow.

[@Stratocast83]

Appreciate the break down my guy 👍👍👍

[@Aovelius]

now older MGS5.... I feel my hair going grayer.

[@theholypopechodeii4367]

​@@AoveliusHaha yeah, that statement sounds odd until you realise it's gonna be 9 years old next year. Time flies.

[@hatchell18]

This is exactly why I don’t understand why Bethesda is so stubborn and refuses to update or swap their engine. Their games would be so much better on an engine that’s not outdated asf. The fact these dumbasses keep releasing new games on this antiqued engine is mind baffling

[@bo-_t_-rs1152]

I will forever be grateful to modders for all the great things they did to Skyrim. Thanks to them i still play it and it feels modern and fresh thanks to all the amazing mods they're releasing daily. Love you guys

[@Ainarc90]

Who tells him?

[@enlightendbel]

Skyrim and Fallout 4. I loved Skyrim and kept loving it thanks to modders. I hated Fallout 4, but came to love it thanks to modders and some of my own work. I hate Starfield and am sad to realize that neither me or other modders can ever make it into the game we want it to be. It's fucking sad. Luckily, Starfield being such a letdown is a big reason we've seen some new large innovations in mods for Skyrim and Fallout 4.

[@Joyride149-1]

I 100% agree! My question is why could I get Skyrim, with mods ( a lot of mods), looking more photorealistic than newer games made a decade later? Then I was running a 980ti and it could do it, moved to a 2080ti and it ran smoother yet barely utilized the card. I am now on a 4090 and max graphics on newer games still look archaic in comparison. You would think choosing "ultra" settings would mean something.

[@mariawhite7337]

I thank them for their endless love for Morrowind as well. I'm able to play as a Dremora and it's AWESOME.

[@GloomGenetics]

the elder scrolls series without Modders would have been Long Forgotten.

[@KantFromEC]

I played starfield for the first time in 3 months today and there still aren’t city maps. The fact that a flat render couldn’t be implemented in that time makes me believe there will be nothing beyond shattered space… whatever TF that ends up being.

[@Wind14011]

Honestly, I feel that making the game flyable and more open world wouldn't fix anything at all. The problem isn't how you get to the ground, but the fact that what you are doing on the ground isn't fun, interesting, varied enough or narratively cohesive. What this game needs is better systems that are worth interacting with, a survival system that requires you to invest in your suite to not die, a system that make your crew important and not suck ass, and content to do with the ship (which is probably better done while in space) The core loop of "I land on the ground and I do stuff" is broken, not because it's not functional but because the "stuff" is not worth doing most of the time.

[@exantiuse497]

A lot of people have said that Bethesda should've scrapped the concept of near unlimited randomly generated planets altogether and had the game focus entirely on one planet with one or at most a handful of different planets with well designed maps. And I agree. The core concept of the game is not something I believe most BGS fans wanted. Bethesda tried to make No Man's Sky for an audience that wanted Skyrim in space and failed in all accounts

[@Wind14011]

@exantiuse497 To be fair, I think randomly generated stuff could have worked if it was done with more...competence. Like,. the randmly generated stuff is good as background fluff, it just can't be THE content. Also there should be planets with no genereted human structures, it's so dumb that the whole theme of the game is "to go where nowhere else has ever gone" and on literal any planet there are man-made structures, it completely ruins the vibe. In fact, there should be missions that ask us to build the goddamn outposts for someone else and then give them control, currently the outpost system barely has a purpose. Make us feel like the vanguard of humanity.

[@delfinenteddyson9865]

@@Wind14011 "to go where nowhere else has ever gone" . I feel like they failed on that account when they decided how interplanetary and system travels are done lorewise. If you can instantly jump from one system to the next, then there is no opportunity-cost attached to space-travel. The only opportunity cost might be piracy.

[@Wind14011]

@@delfinenteddyson9865 I think the game needs survival elements to fully drive that home. . Fuel, life support, food, to make it feel like going somewhere takes effort. That said, even without those at the very least making sure unexplored planets are actually empty of people should have been step 1 and they didn't even make it there.

[@delfinenteddyson9865]

@@Wind14011 I agree with you, it's kinda sad the more you think about it

[@matekiss9006]

It unbelievable how Bethesda didn't think about this problem in advance... Floating point problem was taught at the university (with games mentioned particularly!) when I started learning IT... 16 years ago...

[@Spike.SpiegeI]

I'm sure they were aware of the limitations but decided to go this route anyway. It could be too expensive to build a new engine that works differently, or perhaps they figured it would take too long and they had deadlines of when they wanted this game to release. There are likely other considerations that they had to take into account.

[@AntonioOjanguren]

No it is not expensive. It is a question of take the time and work on it. CIG did it in 2013 with just a couple engineers for Cryengine 3.5. They rebuilt all the code to use 64 bit floating point. That's why Star Citizen has not a single loading screen for anything in the whole game (besides the game launch) and it's map is of 3 billion cubic kilometers. Everything in SC is seamless. But is not an easy task because once you've got your engine working on 64 bit FP you've got to "translate" that to 32 bit FP coordinates of the graphics card (yes, in 2024 the graphics cards are 32 bit FP).

[@Dushess]

@@AntonioOjanguren Now they do have them. With introducing new systems we need a way to load them. So, there is wormhole journey to reach a new instance.

[@briankale5977]

Jokes on you, the engine was made 27 years ago, so yeah they didn't really care or have the hardware to care. (Gamebryo, not Creation, since it's just an iteration and not even their own work.)

[@briankale5977]

@@AntonioOjanguren Lmao are you using that as a victory saying it can be done and as a shining example? Last I saw I couldn't walk 10 feet without the game crashing due to persistence.

[@dbzmaster1213]

I'm honestly so happy to see the Steam reviews more accurately representing the general public opinion of the game. I think it really needs to sink in for Bethesda that they did NOT release a masterpiece like they said they did.

[@EM-vw7im]

​@infinitysynthesis I really don't think it's Microsoft/Xbox hate. Otherwise there'd be more immediate negative reviews. I highly doubt that Sony fans would buy starfield on steam playing for hours upon hours just to review bomb it and seem legitimate.

[@Eladelia]

@@infinitysynthesis It’s a bad game. Maybe different hardware would have helped some things (loading screens particularly) but no one reasonable would have ended up under the impression it was suddenly a good game.

[@funasylumstudio]

@@infinitysynthesis The trolls would go away if Bethesda was more earnest about what they promised and what they promise to fix. The game doesn't deserve mostly negative reviews. Neither does it deserve to be completely exempt from criticism.

[@funasylumstudio]

@@EladeliaIt's not bad but it's not a good game either.

[@ectothermic]

@@infinitysynthesis This is the most random, stupid cope I've seen in a while. Lol.

[@chimeforest]

A good way to visualize floats for those wondering.. Imagine you have 5 whole numbers, and 1 decimal point. You can arrange them however you want to make numbers, but the catch is the decimal point. You can put it at the front and make a really small number like .00001 Or you can put it near the end and get a really big number, like 10000. But you can't have both at the same time. Aka, you can have 0.1 or 98754, but you can't have 98754.1 This is basically how floats work, but they use binary and some low-level wizardry beyond the scope of a youtube comment xP EDIT: This is just a simplified example. Real floats use 32bits of information and can store numbers MUCH larger than 10000, but eventually you will reach a point where you can have big numbers, or precision, but not both.

[@jazzochannel]

yep. this is how they work. no one had planet sized grids in mind when they created the terrain-engine for the early Bethesda games. and no one with authority and technical knowledge and balls has been able to convince the management that it needs to be updated in the years that followed. so here we are.

[@purplefood1]

@@jazzochannel Even if they did could you imagine them keeping their jobs after the fucking shareholders learn they authorised it. The gaming industry is so toxic and broken it'd be funny if it wasn't people's lives and careers being ruined because of their shitty practices.

[@gabsnandes7818]

​@jazzochannel I find insane that they were like, "Yeah, lets use an ancient engine with less updates than necessary for our most complex and ambitious game" Like seriously, wtf

[@nyyfandan]

By no means am I an expert, but I've dabbled in mod creation for Bethesda games and released a few things in the past. Couldn't agree more with the feeling of how pointless it feels with Starfield. The desire to make mods usually started with an idea to improve small things about the game, not fundamentally alter entire pillars of the game from the ground up.

[@natchu96]

If you're gonna do something that extensive, from where I'm looking at it you might as well just make your own game...

[@BlueBD]

​@@natchu96 that's what I said. The amount of shit that Would have to be "fixed" I thought about doing I started to think "Why am I bothering with this... I should just make my own game" If it's So broken that modders start to think Going Indie would be time better served well... Let's just say Maybe Starfield would cause a future where BGS style games start popping up in the future

[@fuzzydude64]

It took me weeks or months just to learn the GECK enough to mash two basement mods for Skyrim together. All they do is edit the same cell and I wanted to use both of them. I managed to pull it off but good god do i have a lot of respect for full-scale modders. Expecting them to fix Starfield for free is absolutely insane

[@sagearmaggedon7307]

Maybe those things dont need to be altered. Maybe people only think they do.

[@jolt187]

@@sagearmaggedon7307 I mean, I don't think it's the end of the world as we know it that we're doomed to a life of loading screens and fast travels to move from fishbowl to fishbowl. People just need to reevaluate the priorities and make the fishbowl really cool. But it's currently not really cool. People are right about that at least.

[@andyespinozam]

Modders should not make Bethesda’s life easier.

[@LordOOTFD]

Considering how the Bethesda leadership acts entitled to the modding community, I don't think they deserve it.

[@haisibanaag1563]

More like "Modders shouldn't be doing their jobs and for free."

[@kingvinoda3896]

​@@haisibanaag1563shhhhhh don't talk about money or Todd's gonna come for his cut!

[@someguy4252]

@@kingvinoda3896 yup the dredded creation club.

[@Ale-dd3ek]

Modders should sieze the means of production 😂

[@alistairbuckle3450]

‘Float’ is just a data type, which the developers chose (in the past), to store a floating point number. As an analogy, maybe think of it as something like the choice of units on a compass. You could use a compass with 360 degrees or 6400 mils. It’s easier to work in degrees: less space required to write and record, calculations are simpler therefore less expensive in time (and you didn’t need it back then so why pay for the costs). But as distances increase, then the 360 degrees are far less accurate than 6400 mils e.g. if you are trying to a hit a target miles away with artillery your bearing in degree widens over distance to be inaccurate. Changing your entire system e.g. game engine to work with more accurate units or from a new moving point of reference requires a lot of work. So they didn’t.

[@bobjoe5937]

Lol were you a 13f?

[@codystevens3418]

This is correct. Game engines use floats because they are more efficient to compute and store than larger data types like Doubles. Solving the floating-point resolution problem for a space game is not as straightforward as using a larger data type. A larger data type will indeed provide better resolution for greater distances but at the cost of increased computational power and RAM usage. It's not a viable solution for arbitrarily far distances, as you encounter other issues, such as having a moving origin. Luke's suggestion of using another paradigm for the scene's origin point is valid. However, it's not a simple implementation and, for most games, not worth the effort due to the complications it introduces, especially when dealing with a constantly moving origin. In my space simulator, I currently move all other objects in the scene relative to the ship, ensuring that the origin remains fixed. For modders, I'm not sure about the tools they have access to, but I can imagine that solving this problem effectively might be nearly impossible. As a side note, shaders, which are used for rendering and other high-speed mathematical operations, often utilize the "half" data type, which is half the size of a float. A half is represented as 16 bits, while a float uses 32 bits, and a double requires 64 bits.

[@EvanOfTheDarkness]

How to handle positions across vast distances is a fundamental problem that all space exploration games need to solve. No Man's Sky, Kerbal Space Program, etc., they all solved this problem (although you can still get funny looking glitches in KSP if you can get the origin very far away). Bethesda used a very novel approach to solve this problem - they just didn't.

[@dojelnotmyrealname4018]

I do want to point out that a double would be (approximately) 10 million times more precise than double(8 extra digits). But yes, that's a finite number, and space is fucking massive, so some form of multiple-origin solution would probably be appropriate. Also, the degrees example doesn't work that great since that's an integer example, not a float example.

[@DevNug]

@@dojelnotmyrealname4018Pretty sure Bethesda uses 32bit numerics for like every large value

[@thekwoka4707]

EVE handled the "distance" float thing by having "grids". If you went to far, it would make a new grid with a new center. This did cause SOME issues where some grids could be manipulated to make things invisible. (if two grids were near each other, you couldn't see anything in the other grid), but they made the grids much larger and able to merge, and it was mostly solved, or at least, too difficult to abuse.

[@SioxerNikita]

Oh, it was not too difficult to abuse, people did it XD

[@Selrahcnedder]

can also attempt more complicated grid system where you have staggered grids to avoid issues are the boundaries. but that is the more realistic solution instead of switching from float to doubles for everything.

[@SioxerNikita]

@@Selrahcnedder Believe me, not particularly viable. EVE has a rather fine Grid system, rarely if ever breaks and it is simple.

[@Snowfly1]

As someone who works on software that has reached its 20th year of development, this hit a lot closer to home than I would've liked. The last year of my life was spent working on a "just do this" change that was time boxed for 2 weeks.

[@BrentMalice]

f

[@TheHighborn]

Gotta love going into technical debt

[@ThickpropheT]

Just add multi-tenancy to the db, shouldn't be a problem

[@mr_confuse]

​@@ThickpropheT😢

[@devak45167]

Modders @ New Vegas “We got this” Modders @ Skyrim “Prepare to be Amazed” Modders @ Starfield “Bruuuuhhh…”

[@TheRealPentigan]

Modders @ Fallout 4 "Yeah, we can work with this"

[@skaetur1]

Bart Simpson fight Thomas the Train.

[@bishopsmith3796]

😂😂😂😂

[@GLXY23]

Modders @ Fallout 3 "We can work within reason"

[@robotron1236]

This is the only Bethesda game I have never bought. I was skeptical because I didn’t want a space game (I wanted FO or TES), and I’m glad my instincts were correct. It just looks so bland. Where’s the love Bethesda games always had? It’s just not there. It looks like they just crapped it out as a cash grab for Bill Gates.

[@TheMaskedArcanum]

They advertised the ocean, but they didnt say that it came in a bunch of fish tanks. And those fish tanks are in a warehouse where you're supposed to go in and out while they change the 4 little decorations in every tank. There's like five fish, and one of them is clearly on death's door.

[@RandomNoNamePT]

That would actually be a fire concept for a dystopian story

[@gadrianro]

As a software developer I am absolutely horrified about the way you explained the way floating points work.

[@EdadTace]

I was about to comment the same :D

[@basiicbid8032]

Same. He mentioned that gam devs use floats to represent position because they use less data, but do integers actually use more space than floats? I thought it was the other way around

[@akayame39]

My favorite part was how he described the "accuracy" dropping off in an exponential curve while the hard-edged wall of the far lands stood behind him judgingly.

[@akayame39]

@@basiicbid8032 They are the same size but floats can represent larger values.

[@DevNug]

@@akayame39He’s right about the accuracy degrading in an exponential curve, his explanation in general was bad tho

[@NightShader1]

Technical Explanation of the Minecraft phenomena: Computers work with bits. 1 bit = maximum 2 values. 0 or 1. 1 byte is 8 bits = maximum 255 values or a range from -128 to +127 1 integer (a whole number) is 4 bytes = (unsigned) 0 to 4,294,967,295 or (signed) -2,147,483,648 to 2,147,483,647 1 float (a floating point number) is 4 bytes = 3.4E +/- 38 (7 digits) 1 double (double size floating point number) is 8 bytes = 1.7E +/- 308 (15 digits) Exceeding this range makes it loop around so a (signed) byte of value 127 + 1 = -128, so you get weird results or sometimes crashes as the program gets unexpected results. The reason of the "far lands" in Minecraft is due to the procedural calculations the game makes to generate the terrain based on the player's location. It's all based on Perlin Noise (pseudo random algorithm). Due to the large input into the algorithm based on the player's location, you get crazy outputs because of rounding errors and overflowing the range of the data types.

[@theofficialtibbs]

As a software developer who's dabbled in planet generation in my free time, it cannot be overemphasized how difficult it is to make stuff "big". Virtually all modern engines are designed for flat areas of less than a few kilometers. Past that, everything breaks. Objects will flicker and move around, physics systems stop working, even rendering will have strange effects. Games have to be built for these considerations from the ground up. Many games have an entire second rendering system on top of the first for far away objects. Open world games will typically move the entire world around you once you've traveled a certain distance. And don't even get me started on what you have to deal with if the direction of "up" changes, if you have spherical worlds like No Man's Sky.

[@MontySaurusRex_]

The engine behind star citizen is insane for what it does. It's a shame it's tied to something trying to be an MMO.

[@artemshenev7422]

​@@MontySaurusRex_ not only mmo, if u don't know 😊

[@MontySaurusRex_]

@@artemshenev7422 I'll believe in Squadron 42 when I can play it.

[@artemshenev7422]

@@MontySaurusRex_ fair enough)

[@psoras]

I wonder how they did it in No Man's Sky. Remember that when it started, it was pretty much an indie game in terms of development.

[@buttergolem8584]

Just played Skyrim again and I still find places and side quests I've never seen before. Where in Starfield you walk to somewhere and there will be nothing, in Skyrim there is always something.

[@TheCommissarIsDead]

I only play 20 hours of starfield and every second of those hours all I was thinking was “damn I need to play Skyrim again” granted I have like 500 mods in my playthroughs it’s still amazing. And plus I think Skyrim looks better,somehow😂

[@ziephel-6780]

It's a shame then, that Bethesda is now demanding paid mods on Skyrim.

[@dtube441]

Really? It's the complete opposite for me.

[@mercurioslevin1877]

It gets even worse when you realise that each type of POI is copy pasted wholesale so once you know the foe layout and loot locations in one "abandoned mine" it will be the same for each over abandoned mine you encounter even down to the sticky note on the employee fridge warning others not to eat their sandwich again. poor space miners been to 10 "different" mines and all of them have sandwich thieves 😞

[@buttergolem8584]

@@TheCommissarIsDeadI don't even use mods. Last I played was on Xbox 360, this time is the Special Edition on Steam.

[@italocunha5291]

Starfield could solve this issue of loading the procedurally generated areas with ease. They could simply come up with an excuse, saying that you need to establish a signal to communicate with the ship if it's too far away, and the signal has an X-ray radius. Every time you get far from the ship, you lose communication and get lost. Just include something like this, go to the edge, place a beacon with a cutscene, and they load from behind, nothing too complicated. At least it enhances immersion.

[@wsippel]

A bunch of people wondered what the first technology mentioned in the StarEngine presentation from a few weeks ago meant: "64bit world coordinate system". This is that. Star Citizen uses a 64bit coordinate system to achieve uniform millimeter precision at solar system scale. That was the first key technology CIG developed, because without it, a seamless world of that scale simply wouldn't be possible, and everything else builds on top.

[@RocketRenton]

64 bit Integers within the code, I know what you are saying, that's the problem with Starfield it can't hold more than 4 million ID's currently resulting in crashing. They are aware but don't really care. Reddit has a detailed post, it's known as the ID bug. Goes back since Creation Engine was released all those years ago.

[@domaxltv]

Programmer note: a 64bit integer is not actually any sort of advanced technology, however during the time when the creation engine was first made it essentially predated widespread use of 64 bit systems, running 32 bits instead And positioning in games is generally achieved not with integers but with floats, due to the ability to move the floating point for more precise positioning (at the cost of potential destabilisation of your world once you go far away from the center if you don't have a way to move said center of your reference)

[@Timbo6669]

@@RocketRentonright…it was a big problem with Fallout 3 and 4 so it’s unforgivable that they didn’t address it.

[@lagrangewei]

firstly space game has existed for decades, star citizen is not the first game they work on that has an open universe, you do not need 64bit to make a space game. you just have to understand the principle behind the math. and most games they don't develop their own physic engine, the issue is not with the coordinate system, it with the physic engine losing precision due to the number being too big. and how this is resolve is actually very simple. you move the 2 object that is interaction into relative space of each other and calculate in that manner. you can move where the floating point is so you are near 0. and after you are done, just add the number back to it. it really very simple math.

[@r.daneel.90]

@@lagrangewei wow, so simple, so thats why there a a lot of games like Star Citizen... So simple...

[@jinushaun]

Floats are just a way to store a number in a computer. If you wanted to remember a number like 213.86 in the game, it might be stored as 213.8600000 in the computer. That’s 3 digits left of the decimal point and 7 digits right of the decimal point for a total of 10 digits. The decimal point “floats”. Because you only have 10 slots to play with, as the left half gets bigger, the right half gets smaller. That’s why floats are very precise for small numbers but lose precision as numbers get bigger. So if you store distance as a float, as you move thousands of miles away from the center it becomes harder to track objects using inches.

[@spaghety]

This should be pinned -- great explanation

[@MasterTeeee]

It's a good explanation, if a little inaccurate (pun intended). The only thing I'd add is that floating point mathematics run with the idea of an exponent. That is to say: 12^34 Is the same as 49222352000000000000000000000000000000000000 to 8 s.f. One is very compact, and the other isn't, but they both say the same thing ultimately in terms of the number (or data) they represent. The issue becomes that as numbers get bigger (or smaller), sacrifices need to be made in how they're represented; they either need to take up more memory, or they need to be less accurate, and make concessions in using estimations, rather than absolutes. This is (and always has been) an issue in computational mathematics, and handling floating point mathematics is all the a gfx card actually does (for the most part). Thus why you see things quoted in FLOPS on GPU specs - Floating-Point Operations Per Second, and another reason why the more detailed a graphics simulation you're running, the more VRAM (memory) the simulation will require, because you're fighting that mathematical trade-off between memory and computation.

[@ARKSYN]

Thanks for commenting this. I heard his explanation of floats and went “what?” That’s not what they are at all. They’re just numbers.

[@dr.eldontyrell-rosen926]

He should consult with a maths person

[@philjones7026]

Thanks for adding this, was just about to write similar. Very frustrated with the explanation of floats as some magical storage concept. I think it's also important to point out (for benefit of other viewers who aren't programmers or have this knowledge) that this is not some 'Bethesda thing'; all software suffers from this limitation, but it is usually encountered in games and simulations that push the boundaries. KSP, for example, is another game that is well known for suffering from this limitation.

[@MrReaperofDead]

I'm a mod author. I made Nevamirr-the-Rogue for Skyrim. Even making followers is extremely difficult. I ran into issues with Creation Kit then, especially when it came to trying to set the presets to match the faces so they don't have a mixmatched head. Just imagine trying to completely overhaul the entire game of a completely outdated system. That's just madness my dude.

[@kagerouge9007]

Damn, so you even went through Navmesh hell, respect.

[@level70elf]

lmao what a joke

[@Gakusangi]

I recently had someone make the argument that it's Bethesda's design principles more than an engine limitation that made Starfield such a chore, without realizing at all the the design choices Bethesda made were in direct correlation with the limitations of the engine. They built it this way because it was the best way they found to make it actually work. This engine needs to get retired.

[@cafelatte1124]

@@Gakusangi In a lot of cases, a lot of design decisions are locked in by funding and and time that the corporate leadership will bestow on the devs. There's no way that Todd is willing to sink huge time, energy, and funding for any major upgrade to the engine for the following reasons: 1. Todd has to dish out some fast and quick for $$ and to please the investors. 2. People buy Bethesda games like hot cakes, at least historically, despite all the flaws and horrible game breaking bugs. Some news outlets report that Starfield recorded 12 million players. So even with historical failures like FO76, people still buy their games no matter what. 3. There are community of Bethesda slaves called modders that do fixing and adding content for Bethesda. Not throwing any shade at the modders but this is probably how Bethesda views them given how they treat them. So with these circumstances, there's just no reason to justify any major upgrade to the system from Todd's perspective.

[@daniellittle3249]

Making a follower is very easy in CK... Just saying

[@hereticstanlyhalo6916]

So for those who want to know more why floats work this way, it basically works like this. The generic float value has 32 bits. The float also dictates where the period is placed (for decimal numbers). Now I can't remember exactly how many values, but for sake of simplicity, if the max was like 15 numbers, that period needs to go somewhere, so u can have 9 followed by 14 numbers, or 9, decimal, 14 numbers. So as the whole digit place gets bigger, the amount of what can be in the decimal place shrinks, resulting in jittering vertices. Now I'm pretty sure it's not 15, but it's for sake of simplicity. We can however use doubles, which are 64 bit floats, but that's twice the memory usage, and for gpus to use it, you actually have to use 2 32 bit floats and do some math between the two... it's weird... A solution is to do rebasing, which is to reset the 0, 0, 0 position of the world with your character / chunk. So if you move from point 0, 0, 0 to 100, 100, 100, the game could do a rebase operation and subtract 100 from all xyz's... however this is pretty complicated in an already established engine for inhouse engines, and depending on the amount of objects, it can be expensive on some machines (although not as much as other game systems, still a thing to think about).

[@higgs7473]

Good explanation. For anyone wondering why they get less acccurate but aren't completely random, it's because the value after the decimal is represented by adding 1/2^n on each 1 in the binary, so let's say the floating point number uses up all the numbers it could except 2 before the decimal, then it could only represent 1/2, 1/4, and 1/2+1/4, so basically a max "positional change" of .25 units instead of tenths of thousands of units

[@Lttlemoi]

For those wishing even more information, the standard describing this numbering system is called IEEE 754

[@WillowTitov]

"I’ve never been certain whether the moral of the Icarus story should only be, as is generally accepted, 'Don’t try to fly too high,’ or whether it might also be thought of as ‘Forget the wax and feathers, and do a better job on the wings'." ~Stanley Kubrick

[@ferenc-x7p]

I'm a "retired" modder for both Oblivion and Skyrim (already didn't bother with Fallout) . While I only worked on some textures and did some land manipulation in Skyrim (unique places in Oblivion for those hwo played them and downloaded them) , I had no idea what BSG was doing with Starfield and how far they updated the engine or not, but I guess they didn't. The adjacent cells needed to be generated as a player moves across the world - so it looks like you are moving- while trying to avoid pop-in textures and models as best as possible and it was already messy and Skyrim already pushed the limitations on it. There was a crash problem there too, although it had to do with RAM size and pulling data from the hard drive and storing in the RAM, so it had to be conservative values, trying to find the best balance between detail pop-in vs running out of memory issues. . While the crash problem in this Starfiled video reveals another issue, that is actually worse than adjacent cell loading problem in Skyrim or Oblivion. It's basically a confirmation I was afraid of, which is the game is preset to only load those few cells around your landing zone and that's it. Trying to visit like N.Atlantis several cells away will not work, because it never gets pre-loaded , only the far-detail model, which isn't much different than the map in Skyrim. In a nutshell, don't expect to fly around the planets in the atmosphere with your spaceship it will probably never happen.

[@TheBirdboy84]

I dont even see this as a problem for the game. if you've played the game, the flying part is the worst aspect. id rather fast travel everywhere.

[@belgiumarthur]

@@TheBirdboy84 If they can remove all unnecessary loading screens (to enter buildings, to take a lift, to enter spaceship), the game would become significantly more enjoyable. After the tenth loading screen in a few minutes, I start losing concentration in this game, you are losing too much time, breaking immersion in the game. Also they need to improve the fast traveling so it does not happen via a freaking menu when it is a requirement to go places. You should be able to just point your ship to any star and jump to it, not only the current objective. And instead of the starmap (which can stay) provide another alternative holographic map inside the ship. The more you think about it, the more disappointment I feel towards the developers or game design leads.

[@amadeusagripino6862]

This adjacent cell problem was always present even on Fallout games, and it gets more evident on Fallout 4, with settlements. If a settlement area is composed with multiple cells, it may fail to take into account objects built on those unloaded cells and it may lead to wrong settlement resources values. And if a settlement has too little of some resource, like food and water, happiness will go down until you lose that settlement.

[@TheStoic84]

@@belgiumarthur All of the things you want fixed are fundamental flaws in the engine. It simply can't do those things efficiently. There's a reason every interior in Skyrim has a loading screen, and because Starfield essentially uses the same engine as Skyrim(it's a joke that they called it Creation Engine 2.0), there's no realistic fix. The moment I heard Starfield was going to be on the Creation Engine, I knew there were going to be issues. The next Elder Scrolls will have less issues, because it will simply be Skyrim 2.0. There will still be constant loading screens into interiors, but it won't have the fundamental flaws of Starfield, because there's less large-scale exploration/travel. However, I believe it will feel extremely outdated after we've seen what Cyberpunk, The Witcher, Baldur's Gate 3, etc. can do with very few, if any loading screens.

[@RealEllenDeGeneres]

@@TheBirdboy84 Your logic is astounding. So because one thing is really bad, it's ok to have another bad aspect to the game because it removes the need to experience the first bad thing. That's pure copium.

[@polo9190]

The moment you said the errors would surface when “straying too far from the ship” my heart sank. I remember the devs of Outer Wilds discussing this issue in some sort of vidoc and how that problem was solved, and I just don’t think Bethesda has showed the desire or capability to make the overhauls required

[@FrozenDozer]

I don't think Outer Wilds had this problem, but maybe I'm wrong. The gameworld in Outer Wilds really isn't all that big, it's a couple of kilometers wide. Any modern engine can support this no problem, and the game is made in Unity. Actually I just found a video where someone is 37.000km out of the Solar System and the game starts to break. The solar system in Outer Wilds is NOWHERE as wide.

[@j.trades9691]

@@FrozenDozer Outer Wilds doesn't have this problem because they made the player character the point of origin at all times (you can trigger floating point errors if you go really, really far out and come back, but that's impossible in normal play). It's discussed in the Noclip documentary.

[@polo9190]

@@FrozenDozer It did while it was in the development, but it was fixed in the way that was discussed in the video where they made the player the center point while having the solar system move around player when a movement input is made

[@The_Man_In_Red]

As an indie game developer I can confirm the relationship between the player, the world, and how the player moves through the world can cause a plethora of unseen and difficult bugs to diagnose, depending on the methods chosen to accomplish these tasks.

[@VitorHugoOliveiraSousa]

​@@FrozenDozerI don't think unity have 64bit world coordination system, and 32 bits in most engine allow for maps only 4 Km wide or something like that before the precision starts to bring problems. Outer Wilds and most game circumvent this by making the player be the point of origin and shift the position of the world and not the player through the world. That works but is not simple to implement if the engine is not built to do that. And in a game the size Starfield wants to be it's even harder, because you are dealing with really big numbers. The best solution is to rewrite the coordination system to handle 64bit precision, but that take a long ass time and effort. Just look how long it took CIG to implement this on Cryengine in the past to make solar system maps possible there.

[@whamer100]

to put it simply for the floating point math issues, floating point numbers (in this case, the IEEE-754 standard) are really good for smaller numbers, but once you start getting to numbers beyond the millions and into the billions range, there accuracy of very small deviations in numbers gets lower and lower. eventually the precision gets too low where the each increment in values is entire integers (i.e. you cant move unless your speed is so high you can move between entire blocks in a single tick, in the case of minecraft)

[@SioxerNikita]

It is also bad for smaller numbers, it all depends on what precision you need.

[@whamer100]

@@SioxerNikita while i do agree its not perfect, its good for numbers between 0 and 1

[@SioxerNikita]

@@whamer100 Depends on what precision you need.

[@Darkside-tr3sx]

One of Todd’s favorite mods for Skyrim is SkyUI. It’s a shame he didn’t learn anything from it.

[@SussedRage]

Elite Dangerous did space "loneliness" and exploring empty planets really well because you could fly to them, fly across them, scout, look for signs of activity (crashed ships, alien bases etc). But i have a feeling the average player would say that was immensely boring. Starfield does so poorly in this regard because every player knows its all fake - you're never feeling like you're finding stuff, you're having content loaded in for you to enjoy - it's a bizarre system designed by people who've forgotten the very nature of why exploration/immersion made their games successful. They've created almost like a souless AI version of what "open world" means. We all know all games are fake, but Starfield exposes it and rubs it in players faces lol They badly need to work on the proc gen variety and improve player connection to the world. Wonder what these "new ways to travel" will be hmmm.

[@Ralathar44]

That worked out so well for Elite Dangerous when they expanded their scope and added on foot exploration. That expansion was a tremendous success. Oh wait.....

[@paintdrinker455]

Why did I read that as Ellen degeneres

[@niceto_meet_you2528]

Although it's not as popular Empyrion did it pretty well too. The whole "space loneliness" thing isn't really boring when there's a reason for it but starfield doesn't have that reason. Aside from a few perks there's no real reason to explore or go hunting for resources either since you can buy what you need and selling them doesn't give you all that much.

[@dancemeanumber6569]

​@@Ralathar44Bro going crazy with the damage control for Starfield

[@Ralathar44]

@@dancemeanumber6569 What damage control? The game is out and has been out for 3 months. 90% of the playerbase is gone. just like with Elden Ring after 3 months. If there was any damage to be controlled it would have been 2-3 months ago. Starfield is what it is at this point. It's a known value for those that love it, those that don't, and the 90% of people online who didn't even play it, just watched a streamer or youtube video or two, but still participate in discussions about it lol.

[@PixelJunks]

I am genuinely worried for the ES6 after seeing Starfield.

[@MrAnony07]

Well as long as ES6 is just one map it should be fine for the most part what Starfield is it's a Bethesda game through & through it's just missing the one part that made there game's great and made us forgive & forget all the mediocre stuff they've always been doing.

[@kirkshanghai]

I've lost all interest. I would only regain interest until after it comes out and I hear good reviews from youtubers I trust (like Luke).

[@mattgolding1642]

@@MrAnony07I’ve lost all hope in any version of the creation engine. It’s been a fossil for a while now and they refuse to retire it. It’s clearly limiting them and it pretty much safe to say it’s gonna limit ES6. In a perfect world MS would step in and force them to stop using it. It’s now a crutch for them tho

[@Jaml321]

I have no hopes for ES6 at this point. Unless a miracle happens it will be the same old same old and i do not believe in miracles.

[@Reaper-ml6ly]

Bro the writing has been on the wall since at least Skyrim.

[@awakenthechosen]

A floating point number, or float, is a number type in programming thay can hold decimal points. It's given more bytes than an integer (whole number) & it's data in memory is handled diffently at interpret/compile time. A double-float, or double, is just a float with double the bytes compared to a traditional float. The additional memory is used to enhance the accuracy of the number for the different contexts it's employed in. As far as I understand it, the further you get from the origin point, the bigger a difference a few degrees creates in calculating the player position. The distance between 2 points at a 1 degree angle 1 meter away from 0,0 is a barely noticable 1.7cm gap, but that same 1 degree angle at 100,000m away from the origin creates a 1.7km gap between the two points. A floating point number can mitigate the inaccuracies, but at some point that gap will be impossible to fill in with the limited amount of decimal places a float or double will allow for. At that point, the distance of the player/object from origin in a spatial context exceeds the game's ability to accurately define the player's position mathematically. That's the point where you get the farlands. It's actually just basic trigonometry slamming up against the limitations of binary-based computing.

[@RedheadJack]

Starfield is missing the only good thing about BGS games. A fun to explore open-world with environmental story telling.

[@SobeCrunkMonster]

yea water wets, we know. who are you telling a common observation to?

[@error_3498]

Environmental story telling= skeleton's and notes

[@vayneglory655]

​@@SobeCrunkMonster why are you even replying? Why pick a fight?

[@TheWefikus]

@@vayneglory655because the OP is just stating the obvious to farm likes

[@Dead_Goat]

But it has that. Maybe you didn't explore? Ive found abandoned factories that turned out to be not abandoned. Detailed stories about the aftermath of some moon mining operation finding moon spiders and much much more.

[@Kasaaz]

This game was so weird for me. I played it with Game Pass, so it wasn't even that I had a lot of expectations. I almost bounced off it at the start a number of times. But then I decided to just mainline the story and the game actually started pulling me back in again. I played a bit more thinking, "Okay, this might be really interesting if..." and almost before I could finish that thought, metaphorically, the game was over. "Oh..." It was a very strange experience overall.

[@mattmmilli8287]

I don’t think you know what metaphorically means

[@kenshinhimura9387]

In my opinion the main story in quest are some of the worst parts of this game because they are so mind-numbingly stupid

[@lukeshioshio]

​@@mattmmilli8287 I'm thinking the same thing

[@__-nt2wh]

Perchance.

[@Kasaaz]

You bring up a good point about Starfield. Not enough crushing turts.

[@krisschnee3151]

I've played a lot of "Empyrion: Galactic Survival", which lets you fly between stars and planets and land anywhere on a planet. The planet maps seem to be coded as rectangular, so that crossing a pole warps you to another point, and each has a longitudinal strip labeled "No Build Zone". Despite these slight limits the game lets you explore a big open area with procedural generation. And this was working years ago!

[@iyziejane]

Empyrion was/is great. Starfield is weak on survival/crafting but it delivers on what Empyrion and most indie space games are missing most, which are questlines, NPCs, factions.

[@tripleh327]

Yeah a played it to Not to mention that you could build your own vehicles with far more depth and customization from single blocks like Minecraft and not with prebuild modules Ah and there was terraforming and base construction too All of that way more interesting engaging and funny than starfield And as you mentioned You could explore the entire planet (you were not in a fishbowl) You literally travelled across planets starting from planet a taking off and arriving in another star sistem planet b landing in a different location Yeah it was a little bit overwhelming Especially building from zero But they also had a fantastic blueprint sistem and with steam workshop you could find nearly everything you needed and the. You could later modify it at will A masterpiece way underrated my the general public

[@RandomNoNamePT]

Hell, even minecraft mods were able to do it back in 2013.

[@gohunt001-5]

Huh, i wonder what kinda system No Man's Sky uses, then?

[@maxsaban1182]

I love Empyrion!

[@LievenSerge]

StarCitizen had to change from 32bit coordinates in the default CryEngine to 64bit in order to create the huge system of Stanton. Even in Arena Commander you were able to tell when you went to towards the edges of the map. If Todd would have paid attention in 2014 he could have seen this coming.

[@Spike.SpiegeI]

I also thought about star citizen as I watched this!! This just shows why it's taking them so long to release their game. It's difficult to build entire planets, an entire universe with no loading screens and persistent entities everywhere.

[@SuperStarWarsFan1138]

The main problem I have with Starfield is the procedural generation. You can "land" on different parts of the same planet, only to see the exact same cave or structure 8 times in one playthrough. With No Man's Sky, every single procedurally generated thing you see is unique and different from each other. The fact Starfield is split up into little sections because of the game engine just screams that Bethesda needs a new (or at least better) game engine.

[@TheRealPentigan]

No Man's Sky still has the same structures problem especially with the man-made ones. Pretty sure there's only two station layouts (regular and outlaw) and there's one of them in every star system acting as the local hub.

[@adepressedcatwithabadnicot246]

"every single procedurally generated thing you see is unique and different from each other. " bruh i saw the exact same things all the time, more so than starfields, idk what you're talking about, tbh despite all of starfield's issues i still enjoy it more than NMS, honestly starfield is a more fun NMS to me, anyone can disagree with me on that. but atleast starfield has some gameplay.

[@truebaptistfilms]

😂😂😂 Uh, whuuuut?

[@sawdust8691]

Eh. No Mans Sky has the same issue. However the amount of freedom in No Mans Sky kind of gives it a better vibe to me. And while it's all procedural I do think No Mans Sky is a better looking and funner game to "explore" even if there's nothing actually there. It just has a different vibe that I like more when it comes to traveling across a procedural world. Hard to nail down specifics though.

[@kingmanic]

They don't necessarily need to drop their engine but it's clear they haven't reworked the engine enough to support the gameplay experience players want. Starfield is a space game dropped on top of fall out 4. They'd need a big rework to make starfield be like no man's sky. It would be a huge effort and they haven't done it and it would be basically making a new games worth of effort for modders. I don't think it's possible.

[@3dartxsi]

The thing about the floating point issue is that this problem has been solved, not even recently, and not just by one game studio. Mojang solved it in Minecraft like a decade ago, No Man's Sky had it solved on release back in 2016. Im pretty sure Elite Dangerous has solved the problem, and these are just the examples that come to mind. I get that fixing this issue in the Creation Engine would be a challenge, but with 8 years and $200 million invested and with this being touted as Todd's "magnum opus" this is the kind of issue you solve before release.

[@Luckyleol]

There is a basic fix for it. Its Origin shifting, or a floating origin. Essentially when you go a certain distance you just move the whole world so that your camera or character is in position 0,0,0. Unreal natively supports this, and unity isnt that hard to setup a basic version of it.

[@Musicthenandnow]

but then you'd have to altar all the systems around it to accommodate the new change. Not impossible but I have a feeling they're unwilling to do that, either laziness or some other reason@@Luckyleol

[@AllyMonsters]

@@Luckyleol The Futurama fix.

[@EvanOfTheDarkness]

It's worse. Bethesda basically cannot develop their engine any more. They can add a few bits here and there, but they cannot rewrite, or even update systems, because they have no knowledge or even documentation on how these systems work. Even their employees are working from modding tutorials. It's not that they don't want to fix their engine. They *_can't._* Features, like race and body size are baked into their engine, and can't really be replaced, like with Unreal or Unity. It's an engine so specialized, that it can *_only_* create these kinds of RPS. Rewriting these baked in systems would be much harder then just switching to Unreal Engine, and they are not willing to do even that.

[@DevNug]

@@EvanOfTheDarkness I said on a different video that I’m convinced the current engineers have no idea how certain parts of the engine work since they were written years ago by different people with probably few docs. Makes the most sense honestly

[@Nightweaver1]

So what I want to know is how Hello Games -- a studio with 1/10th the staff and a fraction of the budget of Bethesda Game Studios -- was able to create a game like No Man's Sky where you COULD run around the entire planet without everything breaking, and Beth couldn't.

[@mkzhero]

Its not that Beth doucln't, its that they didn't even try. They didn't try for 20+ years lol. I'm still convinced there's either very few, or maybe not even a single programmer working for them on the actual game dev, only on keeping their sites, servers and payment services running.

[@vayneglory655]

Well, hello games is funded by Sony. They aren't THAT tiny money wise. And also no man's sky has been out for what....God...seven years now? With constant updates? It's not really a fair comparison.

[@chriswihulu]

​@@vayneglory655 and it was also bad on release, worse than Starfield was, if memory serves me right.

[@vayneglory655]

@@chriswihulu it's still bad if you ask me! Lol But yes. Much worse. It was the last game I ever preordered.

[@daniell5740]

​@@vayneglory655you're opinion is trash for that reason

[@DeuxisWasTaken]

I know explaining floats was hardly the point there, but still: floats don't "compress" anything. They're simply a way to represent a fractional value as binary data. (In fact they're essentially scientific notation for computers.) They're the default tool for that job, CPUs and especially GPUs are well optimised at dealing with them, they're used for 3D model coordinates, etc etc. You *can* use more complicated ways to store decimal coordinates, but that's it - using a more complicated tool. Floats aren't "compressed" just because they're smaller than something more complicated. edit: I guess you can consider them a way to compress big whole numbers, just like scientific notation is a way to write big numbers without having to write all the zeroes. After all you don't need fractions if you just make a meter equal a billion units. But the point is that floats aren't an optimization used by game engines, they're *the* standard tool, reaching much deeper to the very hardware and its drivers and graphics APIs.

[@Conquered]

I've been playing BGS games for 15 years and was so excited for Starfield. Almost 4 months after it released and I literally forgot it existed. Before it came out, I was wanting to start a YT channel of my own and create guide-type videos for finding cool pieces of armor or weapons scattered around the map or interesting questlines etc.. Kind of live my dream of when I was 11 watching Skyrim videos from ESO. Just videos for fun. If you couldn't already tell, this type of content isn't really viable for Starfield due to what the game is, and this in itself is my biggest letdown with the game. Where's the exploration? Finding the gear? I just reloaded a save a couple of times and rolled a good piece of armor... I use the menu to travel to a system then I use the menu again to land on a planet all so I can run in a straight like for 1,000 meters and discover... nothing. A literal hole in the ground I can scan. I had only played the game for a few hours when I started to notice the patterns for the randomly generated settlements (or whatever they are). Copy pasted "dungeons." What's the lore there? Spacers raiding an abandoned outpost again? Cool... I guess. I just can't believe what happened here it's honestly heartbreaking to play this game.

[@Soniti1324]

4 months after it came out you forgot about it.... So.... literally right now?

[@titanjakob1056]

So glad I playe Ac6 then this disaster lol

[@DWH84]

I've been playing BGS games for 15 years and that's why I knew to stay away from Starfield. You could jump or fly across the entire Morrowind map - sure it would pause for loading, but it worked back then. ES6 might just be a series of loading screens the way things are going.

[@zombiesquirel]

ngl the amount of people that were even excited for this game is depressing. People really thought it wasn't going to be total smoke and mirror bullshit? I have to admit, it was literally worse than I thought it was gonna be. I expected Fallout 4 perks but more fleshed out, but they were watered down. And the craziest thing, sometimes perks just flat out didn't work after unlocking them.

[@Soniti1324]

That sound you're hearing is me, crying over the constellation edition I preordered to try and re-sell on Ebay, and the Constellation jacket that Bethesda Merch put out (and is apparently going to be delivered tomorrow.) /facepalm @@zombiesquirel

[@SolCrown80]

I've heard lots of people saying "it's not the engine, it's not the engine!", but yeah... while this game has no shortage of shortcomings that have nothing to do with the engine, it turns out that it really is the case that the engine just doesn't support the type of game they said they were making, and there's nothing anyone can do to fix it. Bethesda just made a space exploration game where you simply can't explore space.

[@bobjoe5937]

Bethesda is terrible and I wish people would never buy another product of theirs.

[@Varangian_af_Scaniae]

Who says it's not the engine? That's all I see, ignorant people blaming "the engine", it's too old, to buggy etc. When it all comes down to BGS engine programmers and the management that has a "good enough" mantra when it comes to their engine.

[@ericcarterofthehillpeople]

Right. It's not the engine, actually. It's the game design. The game they designed is incompatible with their engine.

[@InhabitantOfOddworld]

It's definitely the fucking engine. They built Morrowind on it. It's now over 20 years old, and it was an old and dated engine when Skyrim released. That was 12 years ago. In the year 2023 when other game devs are showing off SSD loading times and near instantaneous fast-travel across seamless and vast open worlds, it's a fucking embarrassment that Bethesda's flagship product after the Microsoft buy-out still relies on loading screen after loading screen as each little "cell" environment loads. And you can damn well guarantee that TESVI and Fallout 5 will be built on it too.

[@SolCrown80]

@@ericcarterofthehillpeople I suppose it depends on which way you look at it: if you think you should make the game that your tools allow you to, then it's a game design problem. If you believe that you should make the tools for the game that you're envisioning, then it's an engine problem. And if you have no vision for the game and just want to put some tape and bubble gum on your old tools so you can kick out something just good enough, then you have a Bethesda problem.

[@theincrediblefella7984]

Did you know that in order to make a certain mod work in Skyrim I had to manually delete a jail cell in Riften? There was no connection between the two, but that's what fixed its issue. These games are utter dogshit even at a foundational level.

[@merok4291]

Dude dont even get me started 400+ mods fallout 4 never had much problems with crashes. a month ago during a new game i met "this" problem where every time i used looksmenu the game would crash right after i exited it. I could not figure out what was the problem i was devastated and after some digging i found an old steam forum where a guy had similar problems and idk how he figured it out but it was becasue he had grenedes equiped. I tried it and it worked did not have a crash since using looks menu just fine again. And im still asking one how the fuck does looksmenu and equiped grenades interact to this extent. And two HOW THE FUCK HE FIGURED IT OUT?XD

[@theincrediblefella7984]

​@@merok4291oh my God lmao

[@TheNightman.]

@@merok4291 He disabled mods till the game worked, re-enabled till it failed, disabled the last one. Once he narrowed that down, disabled all mods other than the problem and try it. If it works, it's that mod + something else. If it doesn't work it's that mod. Then it's a matter of diving down to, is it something equipped, is it a certain location, is it an item so on so forth. It's fucking time consuming, but it's a very thorough way of figuring out the issue

[@ZettXXII]

don't we all start modding skyrim by cleaning the DLC files, because beth never fixed their dirty edits? You don't have to reach, it's a miracle what skyrim has become, but starfield lacks the foundation.

[@asdf11389]

Makes for some fun stories though, that's hilarious

[@smokeymoe842]

An old timer once told me "never try to polish a turd"

[@diswazzi1683]

Cyberpunk2077 has left the chat

[@ArtilleryAffictionado1648]

Developing an ENTIRE GAME where the technology to make it function is not even there is crazy!! thanks for the good journalism luke. youre the best!!

[@PicturesqueGames]

Uh. It does. No man's sky. Or, for a bit more junkier but still seamless world - elite dangerous.

[@Supersonicboom7]

He was referring to it not being "there" in Bethesda's Creation Engine@@PicturesqueGames

[@danilooliveira6580]

not surprised at all, they have been trying to make everything with the same engine since 97, creation engine is just gamebryo with some patchwork to make it work on modern machines. the fact that CE2 don't even have a way to mitigate Floating-point errors just proves that.

[@BrotherCarver]

This is what happens when you "overhaul" an engine from the 2010's, the Creation Engine just wasn't made to have all the tools available for what gamers want now, or what Todd Howard will promise us. There are other engines that would have been better game for the scope Starfield was intended to have, but no, Bethesda has to use their in-house software.

[@atomic_bomba]

@@PicturesqueGames Comparing these to Starfield is ridiculous.

[@magnanimousj]

To me, Starfield is like a big fancy mall that they opened before any stores moved in. Or a theme park that opened before any of the rides were ready. The bones are there, but there isn't any soul.

[@mohitonon-alco4287]

The mall isn't even finished, it's built using outdated techniques and materials, and they're not even welcoming anyone because there are no mod tools released

[@RealEllenDeGeneres]

It's more like if they repurposed a neighborhood into a mall by adding store signs on the front of every house. Ignore the fact that the Old Navy dressing room is actually just a closet in someone's bedroom.

[@mediumvillain]

​@@mohitonon-alco4287Like... a mall. Something from decades ago that ppl dont really use anymore.

[@catbert7]

As explained in this video, it's actually much worse than that, because it's the bones that are rotten. Starfield is a mall with a fractured foundation, on which nothing of value can be built.

[@meodrac]

I'd argue that the bones are bad as well, like it's made to look good but sucks to walk through and explore

[@EvilTim1911]

To perhaps give a better understanding of the "floating point" errors - floating point number is a term in computer science for numbers with decimal places. But they are always limited to a certain number of digits in total. For the sake of argument, let's say that limit is 5 digits (in reality it's more). So you could have a number like 1.0000. So as long as you're in the low numbers, you have plenty of digits left for the decimal places, therefore more precision. However, as you move out miles away from the (0, 0, 0) XYZ coordinates on the map, you eventually reach numbers such as 1000.0. So in this case we only have the one decimal place left since the number still has to abide by the 5 digit limit, and one decimal place doesn't leave a lot of room for precision, which is why you get weird artifacts. The "Floating Origin" solution is basically shifting the (0, 0, 0) coordinates to always follow the player and basically keeping you as the center of the world at all times. It's almost like instead of the player moving around the world, you're moving the world around the player. The player becomes a fixed point in a sense.

[@KSignalEingang]

I groaned a little at the explanation of "floats"... Here's how I'd try to explain it: "Float" is short for "floating decimal point". (I'm going to call "." a decimal point even though the internal representation is binary, dont @ me). Computers are very good at storing and manipulating whole numbers, but fractions are much more complicated. We're all familiar with fractions that don't work nicely as decimals - 1/3 is 0.3333... and so on forever. Technically an *infinite* number of 3s is required for total accuracy. Our human brains can make the leap from 0.333... to 1/3, but a machine can't, it just has to allocate what memory it can to get as much accuracy it can get. There's a lot more complexity, and I 'm not going to get into the full details of ones-complement vs twos-complement, signed floats vs unsigned, etc., but the upshot is that floats lose accuracy at higher levels of precision, meaning very small fractions cannot be accurately represented within the system. Depending on how you look at it, you get some numbers that cannot be represented at all, or you get collisions where multiple numbers have the *same* floating-point representation; this is where a lot of the "farlands" weirdness in Minecraft comes from.

[@anastasiacast]

As someone who has enjoyed 1000s of hours of fallout and elder scrolls mods…I would love to hear from some of the folks who make that possible. The creativity and passion the modding community consistently delivers is the only reason most of us still play the same Bethesda titles year after year. They’re truly doing the lords work out there.

[@WILLINGLYWILD]

Facts, BGS modders are something else, if I could pay for the ones I used on console I would

[@jazzochannel]

write a letter to bethesda and ask them to fork a fix-up version of their game engine and to set aside 5 years to that effort.

[@joanofsharc]

Let us also recall, that Bethesda actually hired some of these modders - to work on Starfield. It's a true shame to see their talents and passions being stifled. Oldest trick in the book - hire the "competition" that's more creative than you so that your work (starfield) doesn't look soo bad. Even if it isn't intentional, it's damn unfortunate.

[@EddieSpaghetti69]

I'm always amazed with what people can do. I was excited to be able to shoot potatos out of a grenade launcher; that's the top of my game. Then I see people making Skyrim into Dark Souls; making New Vegas into RDR2, or still seeing new mods for Oblivion or Morrowind. The things that people can accomplish are astounding, as we all use the same tools. It's like grabbing wood and making a handle, while another guy uses the same machine and wood to make Noahs Ark.

[@puregibberish]

I've been saying forever that major game developers and publishers have been playing with fire, seeing just how close they can come to failure and excuse it with "risk taking" and trying to say their mediocrity is just disguised as visionary design or "giving the players what they want". There's been a race to the bottom with MAJOR names sacrificing it ALL in the name of profits - brand, franchises/IP and community goodwill be damned. Bethesda is just leading the way here, taking every wrong turn. Now comes the next phase - wholesale brand toxicity - where your past failures become irredeemable, trust being all gone, new products fail simply because of the companies attached to them.

[@BruceWade-n2d]

they know they're in the endgame. bobby kotick put his resignation in a few days ago with like a week notice. the you know who's are jumping ship because...well you'll see soon enough.

[@mkzhero]

Bethesda wasn't. They where incompetent artists and writers larping as game devs who bought a game engine and only made writing and models, while not writing a single line of code in years, if not two decades! The only reason that things are this way is that they also have more ambition than ability, and insist on not hiring any coders to work on the engine and write other scripts, but keep insisting on growing their ambitions without changing a single thing in the foundation to support that shaky tower. The problem is, most people are extremely stupid and increasingly more easily distracted and entertained so they still keep afloat somehow.

[@Ralathar44]

You know there is no such things as profits without people buying the games right? If people keep buying them and playing them, and they are with Starfield, then its still doing fine. In all honestly the design of Starfield is a significant departure in many ways from the old tried and true copy paste Bethesda formula. The game actually IS taking significant risks. And its being rewarded for it. Good sales and player retention after 3 months is even with the % retained by Elden Ring. Internet convos are dumpster fires as always, but metrics wise its doing quite well.

[@fridaycaliforniaa236]

Meanwhile, KSP managed to solve the floating point problem more than 10 years ago, with almost no problem and with only a very limited dev team... That says a lot about the dev team of Starrim/Skyfield.

[@kolyashinkarev7366]

Actually if you use some mods the floating point error can sometimes surface when calculating orbits after the warp (basically your orbit changes slightly when you warp out). Had this problem and solved it by upgrading the game version

[@kolyashinkarev7366]

Actually if you use some mods the floating point error can sometimes surface when calculating orbits after the warp (basically your orbit changes slightly when you warp out). Had this problem and solved it by upgrading the game version

[@kolyashinkarev7366]

@karlwithak. Ksp is on steam dude the hell is your point? Steam also has extremely handy community mods tool and this handy little option called return the product if you don't like it

[@vilian9185]

@karlwithak.wtf are you talking about lmao

[@Umbra_TuSlayer]

@karlwithak. ​ Have you not heard of "Early Access?" "Hades" is a perfect example of how wrong you are. And sight unseen??? STEAM has a whole review section to stop just that...

[@trevorsmith470]

Another way to think of floats is like scientific notation. Writing numbers in the hundreds or thousands is not an issue. Once you want to start writing quadrillions, it becomes less convenient; just writing 7.5 * 10^15 is a lot more compact, with the tradeoff being that you can no longer represent values in increments of hundreds anymore. Floats are sort of like this, in that instead of having one value for each number, it can move the decimal point, so to speak (which is where "floating point" comes from.) The naive solution is to just use larger numbers that take up more data; this might seem like a good choice if your computer has a boatload of memory, but unfortunately you then run into the fact that modern computer processors are 64-bit; once a number has more than 2^64 possible values (i.e. what can be expressed in 64 1's or 0's,) it can no longer process it in one step, which will destroy performance. The trouble here isn't that computers can't process enough numbers or process them fast enough, because other games have solved this problem. The issue is that certain aspects of the game engine prevent the game from efficiently using what it can already do. If you're saying "but actually processors have been able to process 128 bit numbers since sandy bridge," yes, I'm aware AVX instructions exist, but these deal with integers rather than floating point numbers, and requiring later revisions will just shut out anyone who doesn't have a certain processor from playing. Not to mention the fact that both the PS5 and XBox series X/S are running on AMD zen 2 (ryzen 3000/4000 architecture,) which does not have AVX-512 anyway.

[@copperbadge1]

That's Todd's entire business model going up in flames right there.

[@RocketRenton]

If they don't hit the targets by 2027 for Game Pass as revealed in the FTC case for ABK deal, Xbox are pulling the plug on the whole project and all these companies will be left in limbo a bit like Bungie is now with Sony. They did it to Nokia and will do it again, they have enough money to take the hit as they make most of their money in Cloud computing and hit 1 trillion in value previously so 50 billion on ABK is nothing, they will simply write it all off as well as BGS. That's why they are going 3rd party and most of their own IP's are done for now e.g Halo and most games are Game Pass quality at best nowadays, paying the money they want for a half baked product to be patched later which has been the theme now since around 2008 is getting to become almost laughable and people are now voting with their wallets, F2P is also the other side of the coin with live service. Retro is thriving, modern gaming is dying, it's on it's knees now and will only get worse if they don't turn the corner soon, and I see more scams like the recent The Day Before becoming more often. I actually see some kind of crash like we had in 1983 possibly in 2024, more layoffs and consolidation is already on the cards.

[@CrazedDanMan]

They're doing just fine without mods haha

[@marcogenovesi8570]

@@CrazedDanMan yeah I'm sure they are, with the "mostly negative" review score on Steam

[@RicoOCHO85]

They already made the cash so review.dont matter

[@marcogenovesi8570]

@@RicoOCHO85 did they though

[@Someguy6571]

Also the cities are more like settlements. They are so tiny compared to other games where cities actually feel like cities. In Starfield they are just so small.

[@ryman1933]

Bethesda has always been horrible at city design. Pick any city from a Bethesda game and its 100 times smaller than it should be. Think of solitude in skyrim, supposed to be this major city with thousands of people, but only like 15 people live in the whole city. Diamond city from fallout 4, supposed to a large city with hundreds of people and yet is mostly empty and barren. Bethesda writes the lore or these cities as if they are large wonder cities but then they make them basically the size of a village.

[@The.BrightLord]

Neon... Just a corridor sized settlement

[@BloodyKnives66]

This was a huge problem when I played on game pass... Tiny tiny little "cities" and all of them surrounded by nothing, like it was just dropped in the middle of a field 😂

[@OrginalRaxor]

When i first heard Starfield would have 1000 planets, my thought was "Bethesda is doing this, so that the Modders can fill the planets and make them awesome" Seems like i was very very wrong lol

[@davevd9944]

Exactly they should've made one system with a few planets and moons then it could've been something. Bigger isn't better more often than not it makes the game far worse. Extreme size often make it barren except if you got a talented studio that actually love their job like Larian.

[@OrginalRaxor]

@@davevd9944 Imagine a system where you could really travel freely, around the entire planet... And a Modder could "Take" a planet, fill it with cities, quests, NPCs and whatnot. Often in games you have to use the barren are on the outskirts of the map, or add more map,, or even change part of the maps in use, to make new content... Here there was a HUGE opportunity to make it so that 1 Modder, or even groups of modders could make AWESOME planets...Hole new cities, factions, quests, and everything and just tell other modders "dont take planet xxyy-11-32.." we already took this and made an awesome new addition... Biggest loss of oportunity bethesda ever made, Modders could have made that awesome,, not they are just boring, barren and unusable for modders.

[@elixwhitetail]

Modders CAN, but WILL they? That's the question Bethesda didn't seem to ask themselves.

[@OrginalRaxor]

@@elixwhitetail apparantly the old engine, and the way they buildt it, made it very hard for the modders, maybe even so hard its not really worth it at all, and they would be better of making their own game.....

[@coryjohnson2486]

It angers me that most of us have just accepted that it’s okay to just let Modders fix everything for Bethesda. It would be one thing if Bethesda was a small company with limited funds and time to put out their games, but none of that is the case. I heard that Obsidian has been trying to work with Bethesda on a Skyrim sequel/spin-off since the release of Skyrim, but Bethesda has consistently refused without any explanation. Maybe Bethesda SHOULD talk to some of the old Obsidian Devs and accept their help for TES VI. There is ZERO excuse for such a big studio to put out such half-baked, boring games these days..

[@bellissimo4520]

I always assumed it would be near impossible to open up the "fishbowls". I remember Skyrim, where opening up the cities (so that there would be no loading screen when entering one) required specific patches for each and every city. And they often added instability to the game, conflicted with other mods, required to be in a specific load order etc. But those were just a given, fixed small handful of locations - in Starfield, the entire game is like this, every single one of the thousand planets. Yeah, the Creation engine REALLY needs to go away!

[@theirishviking9278]

the creation engine is fine it just needs a new version not an updated oblivion version of it at this point its more alterations than it is the original engine

[@orbit1894]

@@theirishviking9278 new version IS updated version. Its currently what we have. They'll need to overhaul everything from ground up, then again at that point it will be Creation Engine by name. The problem we have is the new version of the updated CE.

[@j.trades9691]

@@theirishviking9278Creation Engine traces all the way back to Morrowind, not just Oblivion. And, to be fair to Bethesda, updating an engine repeatedly rather than making a new one from scratch is pretty much the industry standard for how things are done. Doom Eternal traces all the way back to the original Quake Engine, for example.

[@theirishviking9278]

@@j.trades9691 true but bethesda is obviously starting to make games that the engine just isn't made for, its not the addons and modifications, its the core of the engine that's the problem at this point

[@Sizifus]

It's not the engine's fault, it's the game development philosophy of Bethesda that needs serious fixing

[@chowder5202]

A float is a data type that stores numbers w decimals. This data type is limited at 32 bits, meaning it can only store data up to like 7 decimal digits. The larger the result of the calculation (the farther from spawn), the less accurate the data is because it can't store the data after the 7 decimals digits. Alternatively the double data type can be used to handle more decimal digits, but this data type uses 64 bits, meaning it consumes more memory/ takes longer to compute.

[@hogepief]

The reason it gets so imprecise is that part of a float is stored as the exponent. As an example in our decimal world, a float data type consisting of 6 decimal digits could be storing 4 digits for the number, and 2 to store the power of 10, i.e. mmmm x 10^xx, so 2221x10^3 and 2222x10^3 (respectively 2221000 and 2222000) are only 1000 apart (=10^3) and 2221x10^6 and 2222x10^6 are 1 million apart. So for numbers in the billions, like in the example, you have to take steps of 1 million, and for numbers in the millions you can take steps of a thousand.

[@Ceejbot]

@@hogepief These comments need to be uprated higher. This is the useful explanation of the problem, and an indication of why it won't be fixed overnight.

[@tyesamson]

Nice to find the comment thread where people actually know what floating point maths is! I spat my coffee out when Luke defined floating point as "when the spawn point floats with the character" 😅

[@Notnownev]

Is this the same reason why they cannot have moving vehicles in their engine?

[@RyoMassaki]

@@Notnownev No, that's just another example of general incompetence of Bethesda.

[@YezaOutcast]

in its infancy star citizen had the same issue with positioning on the outer areas of space maps, because the floats where getting more and more unprecice when going away from the map center, which is a big problem for space sims that need big maps. so, they switched to 64 bit maps with floating point origin, that could be made MUCH bigger without loosing precision.

[@wavion2]

And to be clear, this wasn't just flipping a switch. Like "Recompile 64bit GO!" This required a massive rewrite of the entire engine and caused a HUGE delay.

[@xevious21]

Not to mention, Star Citizen had the funding to do that.

[@blindmown]

​@@xevious21 Bethesda spent over $200m on Starfield. The reason Star Citizen is so hard and expensive is because it's online. The company behind Star Citizen have built a whole single player game as a side project to the online experience while working on tech for the online game. Starfield has $200m+ and ended up like this.. it's just so sad and smells like misappropriation of funds to me.

[@xevious21]

@@blindmown Good point, damn how did that game get made with a budget of 200 million, but Horizon Forbidden West had a budget of only 212 million? Like where did the money go? Cause Starfield looks and plays like a Fallout 4 conversion mod, with worse conversations and dialog somehow.

[@ThickpropheT]

interesting to know. i wondered how successful just allocating more space would be. 64 bit is pretty goddamn massive tho. doubt you'd ever run out of precision there. never stopped to check how many bits are in a standard float. turns out it's 32. thanks bud, i'm learnding!

[@Gunnl]

the analogy of floats using less data than integers is completely wrong. Integers represent the mathematical set of "integer" numbers (...-1, 0, 1, ...) hence the name integer... while floats represent the mathematical set of "real" numbers ( 0.1, 0.11, 0.111, ...) but using floating point arithmetic (a specific method of representing real numbers on a computer, i.e. there are other methods but modern computer mostly use floating point arithmetic) hence the name float. They can both take the same data/memory space, e.g. 32 bit, they just represent different things. The problem however with representing real numbers in a computer, with limited memory space, is what causes the loss of precision when doing calculations for very large numbers. I.e., you cant correctly represent all possible real numbers on a computer unless you would have access to unlimited memory.

[@AealoRes]

As a modder myself with some fixed errors landscapes mods in skyrim i said from the beginning, the real problem with this game is the focus in quantity(imagine one perfect made solar system instead of 1000 generic planets) the best solution to fix that now is to keep the 8x8km2 of the tile and close access to spaceship landing mechanic in every location, keep one map per planet with all biomes in the 8x8km2 tile make interesting POIs and make one fixed static landing spot in every map so u need to explore on foot or in some kind of vehicle...

[@menalgharbwalsharq648]

That was my point from early announcement. I don't know why they aimed for that scale of a game while they could make one solar system, or even à few but with one or two explorable planets. They missed the point. The people who worked on starfield don't understand what made their other game great. Both elder scrolls and fallout games have issue but they are nothing like big empty spaces without soul

[@fast1nakus]

That's a long way to say "make a better game, Tod"

[@AealoRes]

@@fast1nakus And that is true the last thing Todd make unique was Morrowind we can see this downfall of bethesda many years i love Fallouts and Scrolls but lets be honest great games but generic as hell even the story lines was mediocre we all know how superior and unique was when Obsidian try the engine with Vegas that was fundamental a superior game from all the others past morrowind era...!!!

[@kingmanic]

@@menalgharbwalsharq648 I'm sure some of the devs or maybe most of the devs knew, but leadership didn't believe it. Leadership is trying to make the skyrim/oblivion experience with less resources into making points of interest but to make procgen good you need to put more resources into making points of interest to explore than a fixed space. The leadership seems to refuse to understand that. Todd Howard seems to like the concept of procgen to make expansive places. Daggerfall attempted that, instead of hand crafting a world they just did a onetime procgen of a massive world but it was dull and poorly designed. Starfield seems to be him chasing that idea again.

[@AnotherOne-ny5ls]

Bethesda hates the idea of 1 solar system, it's one of the reasons they refuse to take criticism seriously.

[@Elagabalus711]

Good job citing sources and really demonstrating the deeper problem with how the game operates. It's so easy to toss around "fixes" for a game and not actually grasp what developers would have to do to fix those things. Reorienting an entire game around a different reference point in the code sounds just...insane. I am not surprise the game is the way it is if it has this flaw at the center of its programming and engine.

[@WrangleMcDangle]

This game is like someone's memory of a game, and that memory is fading

[@greenhowie]

Nah it's not as good as Dark Souls 2

[@GabrielOnuris]

That's it. Bethesda has dementia.

[@WrangleMcDangle]

@@GabrielOnuris Todd Howard wants us to all come to Carcosa

[@MegaChickenPunch]

TD reference

[@WrangleMcDangle]

@@MegaChickenPunch we are all in carcosa with todd howard now

[@ArchAngelWC]

My brother in gaming...we will indeed be happy running around full planets in year or so....in Star Citizen :)

[@ryanartward]

With what they would need to do for Starfield, it would become a totally different game. Hell, maybe they should make their own space-game.

[@tlothompson6935]

That is the main reason why these modders don't want to bother fixing it. The work it will take is not worth it. Modding a game should just be updating visual assets, updating UI, adding skins, or any other small changes. Changing the entire foundation to make it a great game... You mine as well make your own game.

[@Superdosis]

They should just stop making games tbh. Fallout 4 (not to mention 76) was absolute garbage already and should have been a wake-up call for many

[@PerkinsVR]

@@Superdosis fallout 4 wasn't great, but at least on a technical level it felt like a step forward for bethesda developments. this feels like a step backward onto a footstool sticking out of some mud.

[@Superdosis]

While that is TECHNICALLY (lmafo, we're talking about a BETHESDA game...) true it's also rendered moot by Bethesda's constant and numerous failures in other areas of their game: no player choice whatsoever, bare-bones RPG elements, TERRIBLE writing and overall forgettable experiences on top of dishonest marketing@@PerkinsVR

[@Kasper0822]

Modding was great for me when i wanted to play the game again, but i could have a slightly different experience because of the mods. The problem with Statfield is that i don't want to spend any more time with it. You can fix Traveling, maps, menus and numerous other things with mods and it's still not enough. The whole setting is pretty boring, and the main quest is about who gets to do a new game plus. Everyone was basically worshiping my character, why would he even want to redo everything?

[@RocketRenton]

They did put in a lot of effort in the planets if you fully survey them, but as time goes on you see the same thing over and over across the star systems like the same crystals in the ground with a slightly different colour etc.

[@chawzwan]

With the current state of gaming in the industry in general, there is a very very high chance that they will fuck up ES 6. Besides some "anomalies" (games that were actually good for the majority of critical mindful consumers) in the past years, the big publishers farted out mostly garbage. What they have done good and nearly perfected is the implementation of micro transactions and ways to milk every cent out of its consumers. hats up for this.

[@PavloskyUfanov-Trooper]

That is because AAA studios are not in the business of creating fun games, they are in the business of producing corporate business plans for the next 5-10 years, this is; game creation is secondary to the business and not the core activity. The objective is not earn money by selling a product people want, but to create as much recurring revenue stream as possible.

[@deathsheadknight2137]

@@PavloskyUfanov-Trooper Your first line perfectly summarizes FF7R. I went in *wanting* to like it and it *killed* every last bit of interest I have in the franchise

[@flow185]

Plezse play something else than CoD and FIFA

[@Lock2002ful]

@@deathsheadknight2137 Try the mobile version. It’s atrocious what they did to ff7..

[@grayavatar9766]

I hope modders don't repair the game. Such an expectation is how you end up with games like Starfield.

[@chrisfierro1719]

another problem with starfield modding is that alot of the innovations in skyrim mods that did things we didn't think were possible took over 5 years after release to get to the point where it began to be possible. I don't think that starfield is going to have the sticking power to solve the solutions

[@Mirthful_Midori]

Starfield's player counts have already dropped below Skyrim and Fallout 4. Adding in the "mostly negative" reviews on Steam points to Starfield already being dead.

[@Sypher474]

64 bit floating points was one of the first things StarCitizen had to implement to allow planetary and solar system scale gameplay. This was many years ago at this stage. BGS has no excuse for not implementing this change other than laziness.

[@ummerfarooq5383]

64bit fp isn't found in many gpus. On top of that, starfield is much more detailed than star citizen

[@Sypher474]

@@ummerfarooq5383 lol what? This has nothing to do with the GPU. Also in what universe is Starfield more 'detailed' than StarCitizen? Have you flown around Lorville, or New Babbage? There is infinitely more detail there already.

[@GhostCodeRG]

​@@ummerfarooq5383 im not the biggest fan of SC but to say starfield is more detailed...is just stupid and inaccurate

[@Tsudico]

@@ummerfarooq5383 They convert from 64 bit world space to a 32 bit view space when rendering frames.

[@Rippedyanu1]

@@ummerfarooq5383 dude just a single ship in star citizen has more detail and care put into it than a planet in starfield. To say star citizen is less detailed than starfield is laughable

[@JedDevs]

Professional Game Programmer here, hit the nail on the head. The moment Bethesda announced it would be built on Creation Engine again, every dev everywhere knew these issues would irreparably exist. You can't build a game like Starfield on an engine built like any normal engine where Vector 0,0,0 is the centre of the world and the player moves around this point rather than being this point. The EulerAngle/CoordinateFrame/Vector that make up our understanding of the 3D space could in a game as vast as space become so large and unreliable that everything we've built on top collapses. Starfield (if using existing base principles) would have to flip the expectation, a static player and a "dynamic" (moving) world to simulate an endless expanse.

[@codythompson7756]

Being a professional game dev you should know that you can offset the world once the player passes a threshold. Bringing everything back to the origin. No engine work is required. Outer Wilds is a great example of this.

[@Felice_Enellen]

@@codythompson7756 Indeed, I'm an engine-oriented game dev and this is pretty much what we've always done, internal to the engine and build tools. As long as the creative people authored tiles with local origins in whatever 3D sculpt app we happened to be using, you could render the world with local accuracy at or near the camera without any game-level code intervention. It's crazy that the Creation Engine doesn't do this, especially since it's been an open-world engine from day one as DAoC's Gamebryo engine. It's like they actually disabled the feature or something.

[@razzledazzle84921]

I don’t understand how they had the “travelling between cells” problem solved in e.g., Skyrim, but now it’s this unsolvable problem in a more recent game?

[@keungwan5901]

These floating point imprecision problems at a distance, sound like polar co-ordinates, is that right?

[@keungwan5901]

@@razzledazzle84921 I don't think was 'solved' per se. As in, they solved it by making you slow, even on Shadowmare (?), so it didn't trouble the game engine underneath. It wouldn't glitch. So, in the more 'recent' game, you have high def polys and textures, for chars, buildings, boxes, canisters, dinner trays etc. This takes a shit load more loading, so you are effectively back to square one - slow

[@Questionthis1]

Well now we have the CK and this aged horribly

[@TheHerrDoktorr]

Haha yea this video sucks now that the CK is out the game has a thriving modding community and the game is fixed. Hold on what's that? The most popular mod for the game just fixes the ship lights and it only has a couple thousand dowloads? That's crazy.

[@Questionthis1]

@@TheHerrDoktorr Ha ha yeah cuz popular means good right? Crazy how we’ve now got land vehicles and not everyone who plays the game has a PC and downloaded mods like Astrogate that prove how fundamentally wrong everything said in this video is about the game engine.

[@TheHerrDoktorr]

@@Questionthis1 i use the term popular lightly. Few thousand downloads is nothing.

[@calebbarbosa22]

Yeah I remember first reading about the fishbowl and having a hunch this was the problem after reading about a similar thing happening to Skyrim modders years ago with the Beyond Skyrim project. Originally they wanted to build the entire map of Tamriel as one large landmass, but when testing, they found the the game would become increasingly unstable the further you got from the center of skyrims map, which is why they eventually separated it into segments. I believe the physics in particular began to run wild.

[@Luckyleol]

And i would imagine origin shifting doesn't work or isn't possible for the engine?

[@si_w8201]

And it's still not out...

[@theemperorofmankind3739]

​@@Luckyleol As far as I know no one has a solution for origin shifting to be able to be implemented into the game through mods. It might be possible, emphasis on the might but it is most likely that you would need to rework the engine itself to implement it

[@niceto_meet_you2528]

@@si_w8201 it is out or at least a part of it is anyway. There's a mod that lets you travel south to Cyrodil and visit Bruma.

[@drksideofthewal]

If you’ve followed Star Citizen for a long time, you already know the problem: Creation Engine does not have 64 bit double precision floating point. This took several years for CIG to solve, and they basically needed to make a new engine.

[@brody7714]

Not fair to compare anything to that dumpster fire of a game - best to ignore Star Citizen entirely.

[@Felice_Enellen]

BS. I was an industry engine programmer. We did open world on PS2-era hardware, not even using floats. We used 8-, 16-, and 32-bit fixed point to store data, and we tried to avoid ever needing 32-bit data because it would be so much bigger. You only need double precision if you have absolutely no idea what you're doing and your only solution is to change your type across the board from float to double, which is lazy and ignorant. The only floats you ever need are the ones you do the final math on with the GPU, and by that time, it's all relative to the camera or, at worst, the origin of the tile you're in.

[@project.jericho]

No one is talking about Star Citizen, the conversation is about STARFIELD. Creation Engine is not StarEngine.

[@araaraavery]

ignorant L take@@brody7714

[@MapleSwish]

@@brody7714did u just call an Alpha a dumpster fire of a game?😂 Atleast they adding to it and listening to feedback bozo

[@Carlizawwsum]

Can you imagine if the new form of traversal is just a grappling hook

[@TheSGBrown]

And, Horse Armor; er, no, wait. . .

[@BryanOrion-m5i]

I can see them adding something like boost packs, that give you a short burst of speed while you run and then it has to recharge....essentially a stamina wheel.

[@joewasmund5173]

I'm almost certain it won't be anything we're actually asking for, otherwise they would have been slightly more clear in an effort to improve the negativity. They didn't, though. They are being vague because it's the same shit they did during their marketing campaign. Keep it vague because when it's less than what we really led you to believe, we didn't technically lie.

[@MSpotatoes]

Custom Titanium Cobalt plasma boots. To run faster.

[@TheSGBrown]

@@MSpotatoes No, no, no. Running faster would make each TILE seem smaller. Bethesda will want to sell Unobtanium Boots that actually make your character run slower, so that each player shall have more time to 'discover' their own fun! :)

[@peterd.meredith3580]

It's been obvious for a while now that the Creation Engine is what's holding back Starfield. But of course Bethesda are compelled to use it, even if it's FUBAR.

[@Rudimaentaer]

5:20 That is why Star Citizen's 64bit coordinates engine is so exciting. Also the same struggle as Starfield has, many other games have. Thats why game worlds mostly limited in size and need tricks to do so. When i saw the spacecraft struggle, It remindet my at Minecrafts journey to the farlands when everything beggins to get sideways, because the engine struggels to stay precise.

[@jerichothegrey]

There's TWO things I thought of that could solve almost every one of Starfields issues. Lower the planet count: You don't need 1000 planets to make a good space game. Players can still feel a sense of awe and vastness of space with 5 or 6 planets. Hand-crafted Open Worlds: Now with the lowered planet count, Bethesda can really focus in on making a handcrafted Skyrim-sized map on each planet, full of their own conflicts, cities, ruins, settlements. Each one being drastically different from the other. A snow planet, a desert planet, a rainforest, etc. We all agree that Bethesda is great at making open worlds. Well, Starfield removes the open world and replaces it with markers on a map. I think that's why so many people were disappointed.

[@Chris-cf1hs]

Like outer worlds

[@lordofchaosinc.261]

Or just do it like Xenoblade X, one huge handcrafted open world with several biomes. Start crashed ship scenario then gather the five parts of the artefact of doom. Lots of space to embed those interior cells in they love so much. Throw in giant mecha combat for good measure.

[@pfeilspitze]

TBH, "space" scale is always just a worse version of island-hopping. Going for space just opts you into a whole bunch of expectations that will never be practical for manual curation. Not to mention that even just making maps and navigation and physics is way harder in 3D than in the normal "pretend the earth is flat" setup. Going between islands is, in gameplay, functionally the same as going between planets. Except that it works better in every way.

[@dakat5131]

After all, Skyrim is one province and there's plenty of places to go. The story for the game gives your character a reason to be there and not trying to explore the whole world, let alone multiple planets. They can have a campaign with exploration and planet hopping while still reigning players into areas that could plausibly have meaningful content.

[@J----L]

Have you *seen* the people making these games? I mean, in the dev trailer? What makes you think they could come up with something interesting? They're deeply corporate pod people. If they could observe people -- a requirement for writing good stories -- they would also observe themselves and die of cringe. You're asking for the impossible, just let it go. Move on.

[@leightonpetty4817]

And you know the funniest thing about this? Modders have _repeatedly_ proven that "this is impossible" is never true. You say "it would require remaking it from the ground up", and there are modders who do all that and more in pursuit of their insane vision. Unfortunately, that requires passion. And for passionate modders, you need a game to inspire passion.

[@ziephel-6780]

Because Starfield has the most boring story-setting that we've ever seen in any game?

[@invalidusername4011]

Starfield has nothing for itself in the first place, so why even bother. If I were a coder inclined to mod, I wouldn't waste my time on this.

[@tlothompson6935]

That's a long way to say the work needs to be worth the outcome...

[@sam23696]

You're right that there are modders out there who will put that work in. But also don't use that to understate what they would need to fix. The task would take modders _years_ to pull off, they would be on the same time scale as the people making Skyblivion or Skywind. There's no way around the fact that they would have to do the work of a 1500 person development team by themselves. This video made the point better. They would need to update the engine to Floating Origin, which means at the minimum they would have to rebuild every city, town and location manually, rock by rock, decal by decal.

[@harrygreenfeld4964]

Skyrim, Fallout etc aren't procedurally generated. That's where Starfield would cause most modders to give up. The cities etc, no problem. But yeah, mods would need to effectively rebuild the game, at which point, is it still a mod or is it...a remake? I think that's why Minecraft is used as the example here, as it's closer to how the planets behave than the fallout wastelands or the Skyrim tundra. Bethesda created this problem themselves by using procedural generation in an engine that just isn't fit for purpose.

[@yphoenix5957]

As always, much respect and thanks to the amazing video game modders of our internet, enriching my gaming experiences for the love of it! This was something I read in a review article just before Starfield came out, apologies I can't recall the name of it but I clearly remember it. During the development of Starfield the director had a notion that was shared among the development team, it was their main interest is to create Starfield as a sandbox or foundation that could be easily modded in the future, thus the lack of in-depth design or detail of anything. "If their hard work was enviably going to get replaced by something better by some unknowably talented person, why go the extra mile?" That line always stuck in my head whenever StarField is brought up. Todd and Bethesda wanted to create a game people could come back to decades later and have a new experiences with whatever mods modders came up with. I don't know how to say this in any other way for lack of better words, especially when it comes to a videogame that had big effort by many put into it I don't like to insult, but StarField was frankly lacking.

[@Sad_Elf]

Its amazing that we've looped right back around to the same problems we had back in morrowind where the game would only load one cell at a time until modders gave us distant lands

[@ApocGuy]

Same problem, twenty years later... It's Beth we're talking about, why is this such a surprise?

[@Sad_Elf]

@@ApocGuy its like using an engine made in 1997 might lead to some issues in the modern age

[@ApocGuy]

@@Sad_Elf not might, but deff WILL lead to major problems in future games.

[@alandab]

FYI: Star Citizen experienced this same issue early on in the project. They solved it by converting their engine to 64 bit, from 32 bit. That gave them much, much more precison to track objects no matter how far they left to spawn point.

[@karisasani7006]

But it did pay off in the end for them. Im guessing due to the freaking Creation engine being just not able to handle that, bethesda wasn't able to bother

[@beeman4266]

I don't know much about game engines but I'm shocked they were using a 32 bit engine. Weren't they using a modified cryengine for star citizen? I just think back to old school runescape, it's a 32 bit game engine hence why the max stack of coins or anything else is 2.147 billion or whatever the 32 bit integer is. Runescape came out in 2004 but iirc the engine (runescript) was based on actual old school from like 2001. I'm just shocked anyone would be using a 32 bit engine still, that couldn't have been easy for them to convert star citizens engine to 64 bit.

[@alandab]

@@beeman4266 Cryengine, as is MOST engines, is 32 bit.

[@beeman4266]

@@alandab Interesting, that's surprising. I guess I'm thinking about it in operating system terms, we switched over to 64 bit years ago because 32bit was limited to low ram or something right? I figured game engines would be the same, but if they're just modified holdovers from years ago I guess it makes sense.

[@alandab]

@@beeman4266 For the vast majority of games, 32 bit is more than enough. But for a "space game" where you need to track objects billions of kilometers away without loading screens, 64-bit is a necessity.

[@baitposter]

Worth mentioning that we're still waiting on the Starfield Creation Kit, which every Bethesda game's modding scene hinges on (in part). That's what'll make or break its ultimate replayability. (I've authored mods using every construction set/CK since Morrowind)