DF Direct Special: Starfield Tech Breakdown - 30FPS, Visuals, Rendering Tech + Game Impressions

foreign to another DF direct today we're talking about the most important game ever made the game that's better than Star Citizen that okay actually no this is this is Starfield and you know what it is actually a pretty amazing looking game and I'm here to talk about it with Alex who was previously a huge fan of Star Citizen previously but has given up a Star Citizen card for starfish this is true I've burned my pledge I have contacted Chris Roberts and told him how dare you no I'm kidding uh still a star citizenbacker but yeah we're here to talk today about Starfield specifically I mean what would we do at the F we look at the technology behind games so here we're actually interested kind of in what things caught our eyes technologically and what kind of information has come out about the game since the showing of the direct that is pertinent and I think John we should start with the big elephant in the room and which came out and was not actually as a part of the direct and that was after the fact uh basically the information came out that the game would be targeting 30 FPS on Xbox series consoles on Xbox series X and Series S and the specifically the things were named of 30 FPS at 4K output on Xbox series X and 30 FPS at 1440p output on Xbox series s John so what do you think about all that this uh created quite a conversation around it a tempest in a teapot if you will regarding the frame rate and 30 frames per second and it's something that's kind of been building up since I would say last year with uh I think Gotham Knight sort of triggered this discussion again wow when she was one of the first big uh New Gen exclusive games 30 frames per second only and then we've seen several other games come with the same limitation and I am unsurprised to discover that Starfield is the same but we've also seen this discussion of like well DF why is it okay for a game like Starfield to be 30 frames per second but then another game you might cover you would expect to be 60. and I think this is part of the conversation that's often lost and it's somewhat of a nuanced topic because the frame rate of a game is is it I've always maintained an actual design decision Hardware going back to the 80s has no problem executing games at 60 frames per second right like that that's always been the case it all comes down to what the developer is trying to do basically the maximum frame rate they can achieve their Vision with Starfield is a very large scale uh open Universe game I guess you could call it yeah that is designed for object permanence uh and just managing so many different Interlocking Systems to create this like wholly immersive experience and we've seen this stuff in their prior games as well but obviously it's been expanded and on Twitter I mentioned this uh the sandwich conversation right in the direct there was this joke about how one of the developers was a sandwich pirate they were stealing sandwiches dropping them on a table and they showed that and everybody laughed it was a goofy little thing but I think that's something that's really important that deserves kind of a clarification because their games are designed to store the object position of any random item that you can pick up within the game world this is a big task right you can drop anything and it has a physics properties assigned to it and that location is then stored uh this is actually something not new for creation engine games and in fact it goes back to something like Morrowind where I remember my younger sister took over who was a fiend for that game she took over all of balmora killed everyone uh took one of the houses and then started uh essentially well she took multiple houses and made a house for each type of item like this is the house where I lay all the swords out on the table this is the house where I put you know what I mean that kind of stuff well Starfield being as large as it is now there they I suppose have to track this sort of stuff across the entire game World which is Universe a thousand planets they said is that right and who even knows about like you know like deep space stations and things there's there's a lot in there so but I think there's there's more to it as well that goes beyond just item permanence like the the underlying systems here are going to be complex right AI you know they show people in the cities they go into rather large cities with a number of AI just kind of walking around and the fact that you can just go out into the Wilderness than thereafter transition kind of you know without any loading screens and things like that something which previous games didn't necessarily have um and I want to bring up what Todd Howard said specifically to mention why a 30 FPS cap and I agree with everything John said I think the game design decision here is what makes this 30 FPS and Todd uh Howard's statement about it reinforces why though 30 FPS yes so I'm going to read this off here I think it'll come as no surprise given our previous games what we go for all these huge open worlds fully Dynamic hyper detailed where anything can happen and we do want to do that it's 4k on the series X and 4040p on this s we do lock it at 30 because we want that Fidelity we want all that stuff so that's talking about like the world not it's not just talking about the resolution right I think that's a lot of confusion right he says the word Fidelity you think just Graphics but clearly as he just noted there's more to it than that yeah and we don't want to sacrifice any of that fortunately in this one we've got it running great it's often running way above that sometimes it's 60 but on the consoles we do lock it because we prefer the consistency where you're not even thinking about it so John and I are always advocating for consistency in games especially on consoles where vrr is not a given necessarily and unlocked frame rates between or going up 260 for example when they're in that no man's land of 40 to 50 FPS with no vrr on you're not getting a really good looking experience honestly you may be getting precise you may be getting an input latency experience that is okay enough but you're not getting a visually pleasing experience and I think we've seen this recently with two games well one game in a demo so there's the uh Star Wars Jedi Survivor and then the Final Fantasy 16 demo oh my gosh both of these games have a quality mode and then they have a performance mode and the performance mode in both cases I found to be frankly not good enough it's very unstable it does not feel great it often falls out of the vrr range on the PlayStation 5. it's not the way I would want to play and in those cases I would say go with the quality mode 30 frames per second steady good motion blur that's the way it should be given what we have even though you would like to see a stable 60. uh it's preferable to have a stable 30 versus an unstable 60 in most cases but I will say in the case of Starfield given that the Xbox's vrr support I think is better implemented than on PlayStation or at least it works better at a system level the PlayStation can support low frame recompensation but it requires the developer to do extra leg work here it's automatic so I kind of would like to see an uncapped frame rate option at least up to 60 maybe more just for vrr I don't know if they could make that work but I feel like that would actually be an okay experience maybe yeah and same maybe if not if that's too variable maybe then an uncapped up to 40 which would work on 120 hertz screens so that's true because uh one of the one of the things with vrr is that when you it's great when you're GPU bound but when your CPU bound allowing the frame rate to run free can actually cause more stutters and other weird issues right and I think we're all theorizing that this is probably a heavily CPU bound game which is why I said before even if you ran this at 720p it's unlikely that it would actually run that much better because I don't think that's for the bottleneck lies but that's not to say resolution doesn't play a role right Alex because we actually looked at some pixel counts for this game to determine the actual rendering resolution and here yeah we I counted one specific shot um and basically this shot here if you look at the background you can see that it's actually running at an internal resolution that is below 4K and appears to be being temporarily upscaled up to 4K and that internal resolution I counted was 1296p which would be like fsr2 balance mode which is actually qualitatively it's pretty okay I mean obviously it could be better it's not dlss or something like that but that's kind of what it seems so it seems like it's not a native 4K presentation in the trailer necessarily but an upscale 4K and it did look rather crisp to say the least yeah right that's about a 60 uh a 4K kind of resolution which means that yeah if we went with that for Series S we could assume then that that might be 864 p as an internal resolution right that would sound right if they did yeah we don't have any serious s footage but that's a good guess yeah so again though I think expecting native 4K even at 30 frames per second is a big ask for these machines uh all the consoles right now and it's something we do not see very often but uh in thinking about the different limitations of this game and and what they're going for you actually went back into Star Citizen right because I think start I see all these comparisons people throwing out about no man's sky and something that we should maybe discuss later yeah but I think Star Citizen is a much closer comparison in terms of what they're trying to achieve yeah I mean the reason why I want to talk about it is because you mentioned earlier we think the reason why they would lock the game at 30 FPS is because the simulation aspects of the game are taxing on the CPU and that variability of how taxing it is on the CPU makes them want to lock it down to 30 for consistency sake and I use star CIT as an example here and I'm going to send some footage to Oliver where here's me just running around a lonely desertified Moon of a planet you know it's like a planetoid it's pretty empty there's just like rocks on the ground some larger formations it's like the average no offense no man's Sky kind of planet it's like pretty it's not there's not a lot going on there uh and if you look there this is running on an RTX 2070 super in ryzen 5 3600 you'll see that on the top right hand corner we're next to GPU it says the GPU utilization percentage and there it's 99 percent and that means the GPU is the limiting factor here it's running close to 60 FPS above 60 FPS almost on this PC that's good but the game isn't all these type of barren planets a large part of the game in Star Citizen is also like we saw in the Starfield trailer you go to like larger cities and there when I go to Dallas areas and Stars this and I'm going to show there's a couple Clips here we're here one where I'm riding on um uh the monorail going through the city and you'll just see the frame rate is like at like 17 to 24 or 25 FPS it's brutal uh but if you look at the GPU utilization it's way below 100 it's like 50 and the CPU is just being destroyed uh it's like at 100 almost every single thread so this is the kind of thing that I think is maybe happening to a degree in Starfield there's areas that are much heavier on the CPU than other areas and to lock it down more consistently they thought a 30 FPS cap would be better obviously star CIS is not the exact same game of star Shield it's completely different completely different development history but it is a similar concept idea of going from different areas ones that are more sparsely populated and ones that are much much much much more populated exactly um but obviously you know I feel like that's that should hopefully give some better idea of why the frame rate is what it is and you know for better for worse mainly for worse I suppose I expect that 30 frames per second is going to once again become the most common frame rate we see in big console games and if performance modes are offered they may not be as stable as we would like and I I do think that's a bummer to some degree but I feel like it's just that's natural with this expansion towards more advanced Graphics capability uh we had this cross gen period and that was the opportunity for developers to push frame rate because they still need to Target lower end platforms but now we're seeing this stuff go way beyond that and that's definitely the case here because uh yeah I would say I said this in our previous direct but I'll say it again I think Starfield is the first truly beautiful game that Bethesda game studios has ever made not to say that there are other efforts were ugly they had some elements that looked nice but they never quite did it for me but this time I feel like they've made changes to the way they handle their rendering that produces something that I would genuinely describe as attractive and beautiful yeah there's a lot of beautiful shots in the entire direct actually yeah just the cities these Landscapes the metallic materials and all those different things coming together to create these just gorgeous scenes and it's so full of variety because you do have these sort of like Wasteland like planets uh to futuristic nightclubs and cities of Glass and Metal populated areas sparse areas you know you're inside these retro future spaceships all this stuff and everything looks fantastic but we also you know we're thinking about so how do they actually achieve the the look and feel of these environments and that's where I want to get into the graphical features of Starfield and we have a list here of things that kind of went through Alex you assembled some talking points for us yeah and the first one on the list I think is actually the game's real-time Global illumination yeah so for this one they I believe it was Todd Howard speaking in the direct when they mentioned this direct call out new real-time Global illumination now when people obviously hear these things these days because of we're in this uh raytracing age everyone immediately goes oh is this Ray Trace GI and that so I went through the trailer and I looked for some like very specific things that I would expect for like a per pixel race race GI solution like one you might have seen in Metro Exodus enhanced Edition and I did not find good evidence of such a ray traced you know purpose of solution and a good example I found was that 1042 in the video when they're showing off this outlaw City and they show like um kind of like a market underneath an overhang and if you look around there like behind the people behind those like uh I don't know bags of uh I don't know what the what's in the back some sort of red Supply some sort of red stuff dust uh or just you know around people or spices uh I don't know but whatever it is but if you look there there's essentially just ssao and kind of everything's glowing otherwise there's not like the usual Darkness you would see or like local lighting that you would see from like a ray traced per pixel stuff so that makes me think it is some sort of other GI solution uh we'll get back to what I what I think it is later but I still want to say that there's good examples actually of the GI in the trailer uh and what it does to the game scene for one not every Shadows just push black that's the obvious thing but another really good thing is there's a shot at 224 in the trailer where Todd Howard's like instead of saying you can go to that mountain he says you can go to that mood but anyways uh that was good that was good um but here they're on the the dark side on the back side of like a mountain or a hill and it's overcast with Shadow and then the to the right of that adjacent to it you can see uh what looks to be a gas giant you're on a moon orbiting a gas giant and usually in a game without GI this area would be completely pitch black and the thing is whatever GI solution they're using here you can actually see the light coming from the gas giant inflecting the lighting of this Shadow region here it's like yellowed one there's the reflection on the ground the really obvious reflection but also the things that are more diffuse or matte are actually yellow lit from a direction which is really cool and you know something that a lot of games don't capture yeah and it seems to be fairly large in scale I mean even uh The Legend of Zelda tears of the Kingdom has its own real-time GI solution right but it's like a probe based thing that's directly centered on link the character and it's fairly easy to break if you know where to look uh this all these shots are done without any sort of character so we're not really sure where the camera is positioned within the scene but it does suggest that it's sort of a larger scale solution as it would have to be and when you think about it it makes sense that they would have to come up with their own real-time solution because baking out lighting impossible for this for that many plant like you couldn't do it the amount of data that that would require yeah would be too much yeah I would unrealistic I would definitely say too too much um but I do actually actually I'm gonna skip ahead just a little bit John to point e on the list just because I want to talk about what I think yeah it makes more sense to do that so let's basically this this ties into the GI but you may have noticed throughout this video that there were plenty of reflective body these throughout water reflective tables metals and if you looked closely you may have spotted the complete lack of SSR artifacts because there is no screen space reflection nor are there Ray traced Reflections but that doesn't mean there aren't Reflections and this is where you'll notice uh real-time Cube Maps right Alex yeah and a really good example of this that was seen in the trailer and I think I saw someone else pointed out online uh there's at 8 49 in the trailer when all the characters are talking around the table if you look at the table itself there's no SSR there for example the characters that are standing around the table are not reflected in real time on the table surface rather you see the things behind them the room behind them and as the camera pans upward uh you can actually see that the the reflections stretch as you would imagine with a cube map because it's trying to like keep it local but then every literally I think it's every one second you can see it update and change the the reflection position which to me and I've seen this in other games before John has as well too to me this looks like real-time Cube maps that are being used yeah I think that's necessary there because without that the reflection would go quickly out of alignment with the background like technically if you say Matt use like a cube like if you map your room inside of a cube and the cube map is mapped around that it can be more easily lined up but they can't do that for every place in this game right so it seems like they're dynamically generating Cube Maps uh to sort of line up with the scene and this is actually something we saw on Horizon forbidden West as well for their water they do use SSR there but they also coupled it with Dynamic Cube maps that update to reflect the time of day the lighting conditions your position in the world and it's the same kind of thing where they're kind of updated at a much slower rate but it does help sort of tie the world together and I think it's probably a pretty smart solution and honestly at this point possibly preferable to SSR as I'm kind of tired of SSR disocclusion artifacts and the like as I know you are yeah I'm pretty tired of it but you know like mixing the two is obviously not a bad deal too like like Horizon does um but this ties back into the GI discussion so there's no SSR here uh in this footage here we presume it's going to be Xbox series X footage based upon the 30 FPS in the footage and how it wasn't maybe not yeah you know oh yeah we don't really know but uh this ties back into the GI thing that we were talking about earlier because I would imagine that there because there's no way they could bake out like a bunch of probes for all these different planets it's impossible there's too much data there way too much John was so right there but what they could do is have just a real-time Q map that follows the player camera around and updates every single time they walk anywhere every second like it looks to be here um it's actually not too far away from what Star Citizen currently does and it's in its game it actually has a real-time Cube map that follows the player character and updates every 30 frames so very similar and that's how I think they're doing some of the bounce lighting actually I feel like one example of real-time updated Cube maps that might help people better understand it is racing games yeah right like uh Gran Turismo 7 does this while racing uh the new footage of Forza Motorsport does this where rather than using like Ray traced Reflections on the cars which is more expensive they're actually displaying a cube map around that vehicle that's capturing the scene and they often updated at a lower rate like every other frame for instance so you might have uh 30 frames per second reflection updates but it's an old school way of sort of very accurately capturing the scene and for a racing game with the more like static positioning of your car it makes a lot of sense uh but you know you can also use it in other creative ways like this both for lighting and general reflection and all that it's cool to see it is really cool to see but so that covers like real-time lighting and Reflections and stuff like that okay so I think the the next issue on the list that I found interesting specifically is that they finally added and I know we can celebrate this Alex they've added per object per pixel motion blur for both the camera and well individual objects and bodies throughout the world and in an interview I believe Todd Howard actually noted that ID software played a role in this they offered to help them implement this feature in their engine and that seems to be exactly what we're seeing here that means that you know during combat for instance when things become a little bit more frenetic you're actually seeing proper per pixel blur on the objects which I think lends it a lot of weight and is also rather critical for a 30 FPS presentation these days wouldn't you agree oh yeah I mean that's one of the things that I always think separated uh like late Xbox 360 era games from their peers is people would be like wow The Last of Us Part One it wasn't called back one back then but the last of us looks really good why does it look so good it's like a lot of people actually love the motion blur and the smoothness that it uh applies to a 30 FPS update they think they don't like it but they actually do yeah but no that I thought that was really good looking here in the trailer and it really does help even though the fact that the trailer wasn't running at a consistent 30 FPS um it actually did help lend that those especially those combat scenes like a much smoother presentation because the camera is actually now quite Dynamic it's a lot more Dynamic than it is in like something like Skyrim where it's like just like moving here you actually have like a jump pack where you can move up and down really quickly that was always a problem with uh their prior games is this very like uh static camera and player movement and the way everything looked and moved never felt good this looks like they've put a lot of effort into sort of creating a combat system that actually moves and animates in a way that feels satisfying to use like for once which and this doesn't seem to have anything like Vats going on either like their recent Fallout game which is right so in my opinion which is good not a big fan of that either so yeah the combat in this actually could be great yeah I hope so I I thought the guns looked super weighty and awesome there's a variety of different ones and they're all kind of grounded as like lasers energy weapons and even ballistics which is always good to see uh I actually thought the combat looked great on this trailer I was generally shocked I agree I agree um but yeah so let's move on to another thing that I noticed in the trailer that's new to the game Brio and or creation engine and that would be screen space Shadows it's really common these days to see in other titles but it's something that's very popular definitely that they didn't ever have before you can usually see it on like the characters hands or gun models uh but specifically in the world uh like Shadow maps are good enough for like a game like this but still like in the in the environments themselves you do need a little bit more information usually and you can see it like all over the vegetation or the rocks on the ground uh that's the most important spot I think is like fine grass textures typically don't play they're they're far too fine grain to actually be able to be resolved by the shadow map right unless you have some absurdly high Shadow Maps which they're not going to do here and they don't do that so combining that with screen space shutters helps a lot and unlike SSR I find like screen space Shadows are generally not that distracting yeah you kind of if you look at them you can kind of break them but they work pretty well at doing this really fine-grained shadowing and they definitely use it here in this footage which is a good mix and that's kind of you know looking at between that and the cube maps and everything that they're doing here it kind of feels like they've finally implemented a lot of tried and true more old-school rendering techniques but they're using them all in such a great way that it actually holds up well yeah that's the thing of most of the trailer actually held up really well graphically which is something you definitely I would never have said that about Skyrim um there's there's aspects of the chiliate that did not hold up perfectly well we'll talk about a little bit later or you know General Fallout 4 again Fallout 4 is when they upgraded to physically based materials right yeah I would say that the materials looked bad in that game it was not an attractive game Fallout 4. no whereas this time I don't know if they upgraded their pipeline if they just improve the render if the artists themselves adopted a new approach they just have more experience with physically based materials but whatever it is like and also I guess the materials themselves right we're dealing more with metals and such which are typically a little bit easier uh to look great right so they've that makes such a difference in terms of the overall presentation oh definitely uh okay so another thing I mentioned earlier just like the screen space Shadows helping stuff look better on the ground one thing that is definitely not in the previous game Rio stuff creation engine stuff is that the ground detail is really high in this game if you actually look at a lot of shots yeah the characters moving along there's like a bunch of like scattered uh scattered rocks and things like that but the ground itself which is usually there's like terrain generation in game which is not just like a bunch of scattered objects but there's like some sort of system which like plans the slopes and hills of a game world uh based upon a height map of some sort usually and here it looks to be there's like micro detail there which appears based upon when the camera moves forward appears to be done with Hardware tessellation I can obviously be wrong there but that's what it looks like and that's something that we saw usually uh kind of in like not so many open World Games usually but we did see it in something like Battlefront 2 in Battlefront one when they came out didn't we see it in Anthem as well we did see it in Anthem you're right it was a very common frostbite feature it was totally wasn't frostbite that's a good point I forgot about Anthem like most people did uh at least Anthem did visual as well Anthem was really good looking game uh that's one thing you cannot follow the game for oh my goodness uh but yeah that I thought that was cool to see here because um with especially with this game since there's going to be so many different planets apparently that you're going to they need a way to like tile detail in a way that looks good you can't just have like straight up normal maps on the ground or something like that it looks a little awkward you could and they did go you you remember being blown away by Oblivion oh Oblivion there's vast views right it was amazing you step out and you're like looking out over the world and like wow this is the the greatest looking thing ever and I just said like their games never looked great and well this is an example of why because if you look at Oblivion you realize they just tie all the same texture over and over again across the ground and it's so plainly obvious and it looks really bad and even back then even with the vastness of this world which was impressive the presentation of that never looked great into my eye and I feel like this is the moment when they finally truly nailed that and the terrain itself is now an attractive part of the of the game it looks good yeah just walking across the planets the planets look good even before they build anything on top of them yeah just to skip ahead to point G here because it applies to the planets one thing that is actually really good is uh it's really hard to tell how they do their clouds but one part of rendering a planet isn't just the clouds themselves but like light scatters through the air even when there's no clouds present and they have this like really good scattering model so it gives them like cool sunsets as well as different types of planets like they show off planets with like more exotic atmospheres that you definitely don't see on earth like just different colors there but a thing that also is part of like atmospheric rendering is there's not just the clouds up in the air but there's clouds at ground level and games um recently they have they do it like in a way where there's like stuff close to the camera and they use Frost malign voxels usually and that stuff you see in the trailer as well too for example at 28 13. they use that for like more like indoor environments a lot where like you can see like volumetric lighting and it's stuff that you see in a lot of modern games but one thing that's less common in modern games because worlds aren't usually this big is like super long range volumetric fog and you can see that really well at yeah 3252 in the trailer it's something that we saw in Red Dead Redemption 2 I believe it's also to a degree in Horizon uh the second Horizon game for a bit Horizon forbidden West as well it's all this like sort of height fog in this Valley fog and yeah that's really important I think for representing this atmosphere of a planet yeah and that I think that because like usually if you don't have these kind of mid-ground reads that this applies to a game you could look out into those valleys and they'd look really like tiled and weird and empty just not like something you'd expect actually from any sort of Earth-like world or even alien world so I actually thought that was really great to see and I think I praised back when they shut off their initial trailer because I thought it looked really cool but I just want to talk about that again because that makes alien planets look awesome that's the thing about about rendering these large environments is like the designers have to pay close attention to both the near field and far field rendering right uh if you don't do that you end up with something inconsistent and a lot of games have faltered on this like this is one of the largest nitpicks I think we had with Halo infinite yes was that although near fear detail was actually quite good everything at a distance was lacking any sort of proper lighting fogging you know there there was no Shadows uh everything just looked flat it just falls apart and I think that they could have done so much more for it if they had just taken these things into account not to say it's easy mind you but I think that's very important for the visual quality and it's something that they absolutely get right here and I think our discussion so far kind of demonstrates how all these different singular techniques can kind of come together they coalesce into something that becomes a very consistent beautiful hole right by themselves none of these are like Cutting Edge or super impressive but when you combine them together with the strong art Direction uh you end up with something that looks great yeah I'm like I said through all throughout this trailer I was just genuinely impressed that I was actually liking the way a Bethesda game looked I especially love uh that I I'm just looking at the trailer again if you go to like 34 or 30 yeah and onward that section where they're fighting they're in the Interior right like that's just the perfect example of how awesome the materials work is and just like the general like everything coming together you get some nice Reflections on the weapons you've got you know excellent lighting all these like although you know with Ray tracing it would be neat to see I would love to see that all the there's emissive emissive lights well what should be emissive lights actually a Midian light right yeah but still even without it it looks awesome there uh but then another thing that they added to this that I think is worth talking about is uh the bokeh depth of field right depth of field I would say these days has become I don't want to say it's cheap but it's become an easy way to Thrill the senses it's uh it lights up your your your mind with just like this it's it's it's wonderful to look at I've I don't know I I find it very pleasant something I like to prioritize in my photography and filmography and all that and it's something I love to see in games and I think just by adding a really high quality bokeh depth of field you can really like amp up the Cinematic quality of a game uh and they do that here in many different scenes and that would probably help a lot with the dialogue scenes as well if it weren't for one Focus issue right yeah the thing in Focus the thing in focus is mainly the character faces and then the way they animate as they move and um it's very stilted it's definitely the thing that has progressed least uh visually from their previous games uh not too far off from what you saw in Fallout 4 actually and it's it's mainly it's not it's not just the the game isn't perfectly photo realistic I don't expect them to have something like an Uncharted or The Last of Us level character model their animating to you one they're not doing a bunch of uh performance capture most likely because there's too many lines of dialogue here but whatever procedural system they use to animate the character's face to that dialogue I don't know what it is um it doesn't necessarily work out too well and with like the detail on the faces and the way the like the the face moves and stuff like that it's the thing that is most uncammy in the entire trailer you see I I've seen some people comparing this game to Horizon forbidden West which I think is a bad comparison these games are not comparable by and large but the one thing that I could see taking away from that is the original Horizon was known for its very stilted facial animations just like this uh for the sequel although they have performance capture from major cut scenes most of the NPCs you speak with it's all procedural stuff right and it looks really really good it's possible we've seen other games with this and it's something I really wish they had paid more attention to actually what about uh I I haven't looked at it but I feel like Star Citizen had some almost like Proto metahuman stuff going on and like what what do their models look like when interacting with them so there's so the way they do it there is they have like a universal facial rig that can drive almost any model which is like what meta-human does and basically there they could have a performance capture of anyone talking it would just be like a camera you can use your webcam for example for it so when someone does their like voice lines they could look into a webcam and then they map that onto like the bones in the face and they can project that onto any single model so they could even have like an alien uh having like the exact same lines of dialogue as a human and they would their lips would move in like in a way that's convincing they do it like that for that so that's why in a Star Citizen if you do go to a mission Giver they actually do look really really good uh so it's very different here but I think like once again star citizens goals were are probably very different than this game's goals so it's just that you know the points in the trailer they like say like oh and something might blossom into romance and you see them talking and it looks like two like dummies or you know like dolls like there's no emotion in the faces nothing it's just completely flat yeah and that's probably the one bug bear I think I have with the visuals that they've not corrected from their prior works and I understand this is clearly a very complicated game and I'm kind of amazed it exists at all to be honest yeah but uh I'm you know they placed a lot of emphasis on the Character Creator and so I'm a little surprised that they didn't also drastically overhaul maybe they did overhaul it and it still just doesn't look great but the facial animation stuff not awesome not but everything else I say is yeah uh just tying into that I I think we should move over since we're kind of done talking about most of the rendering features it's just talking about in general like the stuff that we saw in the trailer that peaked our eyes or made us a little bit worried just really generally uh the first thing I want to mention is the Gunplay that we talked about earlier I actually thought for the first time as the trailers running in the background here uh that shooting guns in one of these games actually look cool and the guns were animating really well uh I was generally shocked too that they had a like a competent first and third person like ability like you can go to either one and it looked pretty good uh usually that's one thing in the game that you have to really plan out from the beginning and so they must have they've had that since Skyrim I believe and they even featured that in a trailer but it never looked good no the third person mode really bad in those games it was very generous yeah very janky here it looked really awesome maybe the motion blur is doing a lot of heavy lifting there but they also could have had maybe a new way they do animations um so I thought the Gunplay looked really excellent uh RPG stuff that was the thing that is harder to get across in a trailer like this um because you're obviously not playing the game and you're not making decisions yourself but they did show off um an instance where like the character is part of your character creation you can like choose what religion you want and you can decide whether or not you want to like engage with fanaticals based upon like your religion that you originally I don't know right right your character creator and that's kind of stuff that I expect in these type of games um but yeah they've done that for a long you know but it's hard to get an exact sense of like are we looking at something that also in terms of RPG elements is really interesting that's the one thing in the trailer that I did not see as much but what I did see more often was the parts of RPGs that I don't like too much was like right when you kill an enemy there's like an XP flash in the middle of the screen and that stuff I don't actually like seeing in RPG games I'm like oh I don't I don't need that um but there It Is Well that may be true I do I do want to compliment someone ask us of their UI here they showed like when targeting items in the world they draw this very clean and simple like line dot system that like smoothly jumps from item to item which I thought was a really nice way to highlight what you get because it pops up a little box that shows this is what this is what the item is this is like the stats on the item this is what this corpse was carrying right it's very easy to parse that information and then when they jump into the the menu from there looking at inventory and all the other stats I also thought that was a very clean simple looking interface that is uh a far cry from some of their prior stuff oh my gosh yeah it's leagues over Fallout or my goodness Skyrim uh actually the UI and the general branding inside the game World itself is super Polished in this game based upon what they show their star map yeah pretty good actually with like the the gravity holes along the planets I thought that was really good looking they have gravity holes but not squeeze holes thankfully yeah there's no squeezers yeah that stuff is good for sure um and then this is an interesting one because you know open World Games man like it's they've kind of I feel like Bethesda game studios was one of the first to really nail this stuff back in the day I mean even going back to their older Elder Scrolls titles you know Daggerfall to some degree Arena things like that right where this idea of going out into the world exploring it was very exciting at the time but but over time just going out onto like a singular map I think it's lost a lot of luster and it's it's become a bit of a me too thing unless you really nail that atmosphere down and by expanding it to this large Universe I think that we get to see it looks more compelling as in like you might actually find interesting things to look at and do uh and just the the resource aspect of it I think could be fascinating like how when they popped up in the the Galaxy map for instance you can't get to certain areas right away because you don't have the resources to do so right yeah I think that is cool as well and also leads to some potential things like I could imagine a scenario where you're trying to make your way to a distant star system only to either be attacked run low on supplies something happens and you're forced to land on a nearby Planet maybe you have to scan the different planets nearby figure out which one you want to try to get to which one is potentially most resource heavy uh there's cool stuff there and it's something that ties into potentially the things I liked and say uh days gone with the motorcycle and the gasoline supply stuff or even like death stranding where it was more about the journey figuring out how to get to different places and I feel like the potential for that is high in this game so I'm very curious to see if they can pull it off because frankly uh one of the comparisons that keeps going around lately it's no man's sky right and for starters I don't really like this comparison because I feel conceptually yeah they they have a lot of similarities right traveling the Galaxy going to different planets getting resources but this is more of a story driven game I think whereas no man's sky is more of a Sandbox yeah so they have a very different Focus but the reason I don't like that comparison is that you'll have somebody say oh well no man's sky is 60 frames per second and then you have people that are fans of Starfield well or presumably will be fans of star field they take that almost as an attack and then they start lashing out at no man's sky in return and so you have people hating on one game or the other and I just don't like to see that like I feel like we should embrace them both especially I mean no man's sky like they've they they've paid their their dues they've made up for that initial terrible launch right and it's a uh it's a tiny team it's like what 15 guys or something like not too many yeah it's a very very tiny team making this crazy ambitious thing and I think what they made is their own thing in unique and start Starfield here is also its own unique thing made with a much much larger team uh yeah and it's it's basically like well what what if we took what if the No Man's Sky concept was merged with a Bethesda game Studio concept that's kind of what it is and that's why just saying one just comparing them directly doesn't make sense to me yeah I that's the one problem people just see space and they see um all these games are directly comparable where if you go back through the history of space games actually there's great variation even among like the simulation genre itself like there's a very big difference between Wing commander and any of the early Star Wars simulation games for example the ones where they were doing different things um so it was you know that's tough to say that's yours yeah and you know like so there's that's one thing like this new I'm very happy that we see more space games in general you should celebrate them and not just always try and directly compare them all um but yeah I think that's almost all we really have to say John uh right I guess the final question I have is do you think that Starfield can finally satisfy the goals of battlecruiser 3000 A.D uh yes I mean I don't know about like I mean I I don't know will women love me will men want to be me because I've played Starfield I don't know there's but this will find out if I know all I will say though is like uh this is the first time in a long time where any sort of like big open World Experience really excited me with its potential yeah Zelda I was excited enough for that but I kind of expected what it would be and it is brilliant but it felt less surprising somehow because of it's built on on breath of the wild not a knock this is how it is but uh it's been otherwise it's been some years since I've had real interest in exploring an open world game and this is uh this is shaping up to be possibly one of the best that's ever been made yeah I hope so anyway yeah I mean I'm super interested in how much depth they can possibly offer the character obviously there's always the worry when they say something like a thousand worlds it's a thousand empty planets where there's nothing to do and there's no reason to go to them uh but you know well I'll just have to wait to see what happens when it comes out maybe it will surprise me and actually I would assume that some of this many of those planets will be very empty and that's okay because most planets are yeah most plants in real life are really I mean of course we have Earth and then we also oh wait I shouldn't say that yeah but uh yeah I think that's gonna do it for this one Alex thank you for joining me to discuss it that was good it was good just like Starfield hopefully will be let's hope and yeah it's great to be excited about games again new stuff coming out it's good uh and yeah I guess that won't be the last you see of us talking about new stuff coming out because there's so much happening um and then yeah so thanks for watching and we'll see you next time

Channel: Digital Foundry

Views: 437,753

Keywords:

Id: i9ikne_9iEI

Length: 45min 16sec (2716 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 15 2023

Reddit Comments

[u/TurnipTate]

So glad it’s per object motion blur. Did Fo4 use that? I don’t think so, think it was only screen blur

[u/dashKay]

This was an awesome breakdown, the DF guys are really good at presenting technical stuff in a fairly accessible and comprehensible way.

[u/SodaPop6548]

Very excited. Great video as well. I do wish 60fps was an option, but I think the game will still be good regardless. Holding out hope anyway!

I also can’t wait to see what kind of cool ships people make or wild things that can be discovered. I spent an insane amount of time in Fallout 4.

[u/Temporary_End9124]

It's an interesting point they bring up about the framerate being a design decision. I guess if the trade off for more ambitious and truly next gen games is a cut in frame rate, I'd rather have that than continue playing xbox one games with better resolution and framerate.

[u/Exorcist-138]

Honestly don’t care about the frame rate, excited to get lost in this game.

[u/ebalonabol]

meh, 30fps for a first person shooter is a strange "design decision"

[u/Schraiber]

I'd always prefer 60fps and almost always I think the trade off isn't worth it for higher graphical fidelity, but I'm guessing this game is strongly CPU bottlenecked and it's due to core simulation aspects of the game that would make it a fundamentally different game if changed. So in this case it definitely seems like a worthwhile trade off.

Also, I'll definitely always prefer a stable 30 to a gross and inconsistent 60. Elden Ring was nauseating, but unfortunately that didn't even have a 30fps cap (and if it did, it'd have awful frame pacing like all of From'a games). It'd be cool to see a 40fps mode added though. It sounds like there may be overhead for it.

Finally, good per object motion blur really really helps 30fps games look smooth, so I hope the implementation here is satisfying.

[u/NoMansWarmApplePie]

Todd said it's usually 60 fps but fluctuates so they locked it to 30 instead.

This means like a plagues tale they could probably do a 40hz mode at launch. Please Todd, do this! And other folks plz also ask and voice this!

[u/Mug_of_Diarrhea]

If this was a fighting game like Street Fighter or an action game like DMC, I'd be upset but it's not so I'm only excited.