I asked Game Devs how to fix 'Starfield'...

well everyone I am bored and it's Friday when I'm filming this so we're going to talk about the one and only Starfield and in order to do that I'm going to light our Almighty Todd Howard candle so he can watch over us and protect us from Sweet Little Lies since he is the patron saint of such a thing as that seriously I kind of hope that one day Todd Howard sees one of my videos and he's just like what the hell dude he's like why do you have a candle of me why do you have a cardboard cutout of me it's because it's funny Todd that's why anyway I've been really interested in Starfield as a phenomenon because it represents sort of a a crashing and burning of a lot of people's hype it represents a lot of failed expectations it represents a lot of disappointment just for a lot of people and I've been really curious as to whether or not this can actually be fixed I mean there's obvious things like the lack of city maps and stuff like that that is probably fixable with a future patch or something but the big stuff like the constant loading screens the small fishbowls the constantly repeated environments and encounters can that stuff be altered can that stuff be remedied can that be patched out well to find out I asked a bunch of developers both inside the gaming industry and out a bunch of software engineers and modders who have worked on the creation engine and they told me the answer and uh the answer is no it can't be fixed so that's going to do it for today thanks for watching I'll see you in the next video okay my corporate overlords are telling me that I have to extend the runtime of this video a little bit longer so that's what I'm going to do and I'm going to tell you a little bit more about what they said how this little survey worked and give you the Deets it's actually quite simple I reached out to a bunch of game developers that I know of and that I've spoken to in years past I also sent the survey to some modders that I know and I also opened this survey publicly to anybody who wanted to fill it out however I did request for verifying information so I could make sure that they actually were who they said they were of course all of this is being kept confidential I'm not going to like reveal names or jobs or anything like that of anybody who participated in the survey since anonymity was kind of like the thing with this but I can confirm that when all was said and done I had 90 people that I was able to confirm actually were who they said they were worked in the gaming industry or as software Engineers outside of the gaming industry or were verified modders and those people make up all of the responses that we're going to talk about today 90 people isn't a ton but this is 90 people who know their stuff who are talking about this which is 90 times more credibility than I have when discussing issues of software engineering so I am still going to take it one of the first questions I asked everybody was how they would rate Bethesda game studios as a developer in 2024 and the responses were a little less amazing than I was expecting I mean everything averaged out to about a five out of 10 floating between fours and sixes mostly I think that represents uh the general feeling a lot of people have I think if you were to ask this question 5 years ago or 10 years ago the answers would have been much much different but because you're asking in the context of 2024 after Starfield there's a lot of disappointment and frustration in the broader Gaming Community right now and even among people that work in this industry they're not that impressed I also asked them what they thought of Starfield on a technical level and this also was not that forgiving everybody landed at about a four or five on average and it's pretty clear that software engineers and people that work in game development in general at least the ones that responded to this survey are not very impressed with Starfield whatsoever even though it was trying to do something really different really novel in term terms of simulations and in terms of broad scope a thousand planets and all of this procedural stuff it just was not that impressive to people that actually work in this industry which again I thought was interesting this was also interesting overwhelmingly people considered the creation engine to be significantly inferior to other engines that they were familiar with and individual responses we'll get into in a little bit were quite damning especially among people who used to work with with creation engine a lot either because they used to work at Bethesda game studios or an adjacent company or because they were modders who then went on to work with other engines elsewhere overwhelmingly people do not have a lot of good things to say about it after they've tried something else once they've tasted the forbidden fruit they find it extremely wanting now when I asked everybody whether they thought that starfields problems could be patched or solved through updates just under 68% of respondents straight up said no 15.6 said that yes they think that these problems could be solved and all of these other responses are individual counters that have answers that are a little bit more elaborate but most of them still fall into the no category could but won't stuff like that but this brings us to the Crux of the question which is whether or not the problems we're discussing can actually be fixed what are the problems though well I did ask them that and this was sort of all over the place a lot of people agreed that issues such as constant load screens performance traversal NPC AI all of those things were issues within the game but by my count well over 95% of the responses and answers all tie back into technical restrictions that are imposed by the tool set that Bethesda is using which is the creation engine which we've been through a lot now a lot of these responses were really interesting and I had a lot of fun reading through all of these and again thank you to everybody who participated in this and while some of them bring up really good points such as the the fact that it's not as simple as just pointing to one thing and saying oh it's because of the creation engine that Starfield has problems it's not that simple there's a lot more going on but there are still core strengths and core weaknesses with the creation engine and the tools SE Bethesda is using that are specifically weak when it comes to a game like Starfield which is why I think there's a real argument to be made that Starfield was held back by its design not necessarily exclusively because of its Tech they kind of work hand inand it's almost like if you lived in a really hot climate like say you're in Phoenix Arizona or something in the summer and you're like okay I'm going to make a vacation destination it's going to be my big business idea that's what I'm going to do it's going to make so much money what I'm going to do is I'm going to make a ski slope you'd be like what why did you choose to do that like you have this beautiful like Place yeah you're in a great spot you have all these things you can do you've got lots of opportunities but that's probably the worst thing you could possibly do with what you've got in front of you with your capabilities with your location with the tools that you have before you you should instead do like a massive water park or you should do like a crazy hiking trail or like a sauna or or like some sort of crazy uh theme park or something like that why did you choose a ski slope in a desert you know you'd ask why you chose to make a poor decision that directly goes against everything that the context of the situation and your capabilities would allow you to do it it just doesn't make any sense and that's kind of what Starfield is it is a game that's a cool idea at the outset but with the creation engine specifically it's probably the worst game they could have possibly tried to make this respondent said load screens are unavoidable due to the mass amount of physics calculations and the way the engine will be handling them the engine would require new tools or a revamp in order to call physics entities in a way where they can be stored in the memory unfortunately this would be even heavier on the CPU and RAM Hardware something like performance and optimization can always be improved as they already have the game can be better programm to utilize all CPU cores for physics calculations Etc it's very dependent on the type of issue that requires solving and I think that this is a Common Thread in a lot of these responses it seems like most of the problems with the load screens tie back into one of the core strengths in many ways of the creation engine which is that every item in your inventory has a physical model and you can place that item anywhere in the game and it will stay there it will have realistic physics applied to it it will drop on the ground it'll fall off the table whatever else and it will stay where you put it which is a really cool thing to have in your game especially in something like Skyrim or or even like a Fallout 4 where every piece of junk is going to stay there and realistically interact with the world that's super super cool and not many other game engines have that or are even capable of doing that but part of the reason why other engines aren't capable of that is because they don't really want to be capable of it because when you do that there is so much data that has to be basically remembered by the computer or by the console at any given time that they have to load it in separately and that's why each of these instances when you load into a new building or you load into a new planet Fishbowl to explore they each have to be kept independently unloaded and loaded back in as you go because if they were doing a constant streaming thing where you go from this planet surface into space into that planet surface into space into that planet surface into a building down into a cave back out it would just be too much for it to handle and that's why in games like no man's sky where you can do that stuff you don't have the same level of physics simulations that you get in a game like Starfield and this is where design comes back into the equation because it's really cool to as they showed off in some of the early like reveals of Starfield it's cool to have hundred of sandwiches in your spaceship that realistically fall and Tumble down as you collect them that was one of the big things they showed off was one of their developers that would just keep all these sandwiches in the cargo hold of their spaceship that's like kind of cool but why is that important in a space game like how does a a space game about exploration and Adventure benefit from having realistic sandwich simulation I don't get it other people thought it was really cool and exciting I don't know why that was so thrilling because the cost of all of that physics simulation is that things have to be loaded in separately and in their own instances and as this developer outlined the only way to get rid of the constant load screens would be to have some way to call physics entities just like physical objects that are rendered in a given scene but that would require such a massive undertaking to rewrite and recode how the game actually handles physical objects that it's probably not even possible in an update or any sort of iterative improvement that would be short of a full-on sequel and there's other problems as well such as the one I outlined in my last video going over how modders are just abandoning Starfield because it's too much work basically and this is the problem with using floats and how they actually calculate physical presences and procedural generation Within These worlds effectively like the further away you get from An Origin point the less accurate Things become and the worse procedural generation Tech becomes it's an ageold problem it affects did like Minecraft A decade ago it's something they were able to fix but it's something so core to the creation engine and how they handle instances when you load in because everything in the creation engine is about loading into a new instance and if you were to undo that it would just require rewriting pretty much everything so it's just a a huge problem that is really really freaking difficult to solve and would be extremely expensive to solve and it it might not even be possible at the end of the day I think this puts it well the fundamental problem with starfields is that the foundations are already set in obsolete Tech and design decisions as I mentioned in previous answers modders can resolve a good swath of the game's issues but the effort required to make a total overhaul of mods for Starfield might not be as justifiable as it was back then with Skyrim and he goes on to describe all of the smaller issues that Starfield suffers from and wraps it up with they can fix a thousand of those paper cut sized problems but the amputated limb siiz problem they can only get a Band-Aid solution for and that's the thing like they can fix broken quest lines they can fix uh like frame rates that drop they can fix even bigger Cuts such as the lack of maps within cities and things like that but the biggest problems with Starfield such as the constantly repeated environments en counters the planets that lack any sort of interesting locations the lack of free traversal from planet surface to other planets and the mind-numbing grind of constant load screens those things can't be fixed because they are just simp so massive it would require a total redesign so all of this to say it seems like the biggest issues such as the constantly repeated environments and encounters the procedural generation Tech problems the constant load screens those biggest issues can't be fixed because it's just how the game works it is Starfield there's no undoing it because it's just how it is it's tied up in the bones of the game and to replace the bones is Tech technically possible you can get in there and go crazy but it's probably going to be more trouble than it's worth and you might as well just wait for a sequel or something when you can do something much more significant much more easily beyond that the smaller issues the paper cuts as that one respondent put it can be patched or Band-Aid over and improved through patches updates and DLC and I fully expect that the DLC will introduce more content that is just as compelling as the base game but Starfield was never really a game that suffered from a lack of content its problems were always Technical and mechanical and a DLC is just frankly not going to do anything to significantly alter that they also said 4 months ago that they were working on new features we've been asking for from city maps to mod support to all new ways of traveling and what that means I don't know most likely it's like a motorcycle or a dune buggy or a Rover or something like that maybe just new jetpacks I mean that might be all it is either way they say they're working on something I hope that that makes the game better or feel less dull when you're moving from points of interest to points of interest and city maps will be great when we get those and mod support when that comes will be cool time will tell but again these are all just Band-Aids on paper cuts the missing limbs are not really being addressed because they frankly can't and so we just kind of have to deal with it and you know then we land on the elephant in the room which is like oh Bethesda should change over to the Unreal Engine they should do that and like obviously I think there's reason to be frustrated with Bethesda for sticking with the creation engine this long but I think that's exacerbated by the fact that like I said at the top Starfield is probably the worst game they could have made to showcase the creation engine's strengths like it really is just not capable of doing what they needed it to do for this game it's just not built for it it's designed for totally different games like the opposite type of game and so I think that made the creation engine look far worse than it actually is I think if you were to do another standard Fallout game or another standard Elder Scrolls game it could potentially Faire much better but I think at this point Bethesda has a bit of a PR crisis on their hands and that is that everybody views the creation engine as an albatross around their neck they view it as anathema as something that needs to be shed and gotten rid of and the longer that bgs doubles down on it the more out of touch it makes them seem there was a political consultant in the United States back in like the 1980s who coined the phrase that perception is reality and he was putting it forward in the context of a presidential race where like if everybody thinks that you as the president are actually like a werewolf even if that's not true even if you could prove that's not true if everybody thinks you're a werewolf you have to deal with that you have to confront that reality because that's what people perceive reality to be and in the context of selling people video games or just products in general if everybody's convinced that your Tech or your product is woefully out of date or is super behind the times and is just broken buggy and blah blah blah even if that is not technically true even if you could demonstrate that the creation engine actually is capable of doing crazy cool high-tech things the perception among consumers is that it's a 15 20 30y old engine that is held together with duct tape and glue and they've got to deal with that perception just slapping a two on the creation engine isn't going to do it I'm sure when they reveal the Elder Scroll 6 they're going to be like oh it's the creation engine 3.0 this time it's totally different and maybe this time people will listen and realize that that's not actually how that works but I just think that they're dealing with a real crisis of trust with their community and I I think that the creation engine has highlighted a lot of those shortcomings with Starfield being kind of the uh the prime example of when this goes poorly and all of this is further compounded by the fact that cdpr the guys that headed up Phantom Liberty one of the most impressive technical Showcases of any video game graphically in a hot minute they are moving away from their proprietary engine and they are developing all of their future Witcher games in the Unreal Engine 5 that is crazy because if everybody agreed that the red engine was much more powerful than the creation engine and cdpr is choosing to leave that behind to go to the Unreal Engine what does that tell you about the creation engine like what does that tell you about bethesda's tool set if everybody's like yeah the thing that cdpr abandoned was way better than this that should be concerning and I think that for consumers and for gamers that are going to be asked to engage with Elder Scroll 6 eventually you know in 15 years or whatever that's going to be a point of contention and I just think that bethesda's got a deal with this stuff and I mean I know it's not as simple as just change engines or whatever but you know I think they got to regain a lot of Goodwill with their consumers at this point and I I don't think small updates or DLC or slapping a three on the creation engine's going to do it for the next game so I guess time will tell but I I think they got some work to do but to wrap all of this up I asked a bunch of devs and modders if they thought that Starfield could be fixed and repaired and while smaller issues could be fixed according to a lot of these devs it seems like the biggest issues are not going to be fixable because it would require such a significant redesign of everything the engine does and how it works that it's just prohibitively expensive timec consuming and Troublesome if it's possible at all there were also a lot of other interesting responses that I'm not going to reveal at this moment because some of them specifically call out people within Bethesda game Studios from previous employees and I need to do some more uh like double checking and verifying before I share that stuff so if you have ever worked at Bethesda game studios and you're willing to chat reach out to me because I'd like to verify some of this stuff cuz some of the the stories are quite interesting maybe more on that later make sure to subscribe if we end up making that video if if I can verify this stuff it's pretty crazy I guess time will tell I I don't want to report anything until I've confirmed from multiple sources that it's real so I'm not going to start spreading rumors or anything but uh I will say there's some interesting like some interesting tea from developers that it seems like there's maybe some some frustrations or bad blood with some of these guys it's it's interesting lots of drama but anyway thank you for watching thanks for hanging out with me thank you for helping me beat this dead horse even further I was going to do like a whole elaborate intro where I had like a big bottle of glue then I was going to like paste the picture of starfields logo on it and then I was going to be beating it when I open the video but I thought that was maybe just a little too vague and obscure so I just decided to do whatever I did at the start of this video I've already forgotten but I'm sure we'll talk about Starfield again I still have a good amount of that candle to burn through so we've got plenty of uh of Todd incense to burn until then my friends thank you for watching thank you for subscribing thank you for for being here in the first half a million and here's to the next half a million much love my friends I'll see you in the next one hugs and kisses bye-bye

Channel: Luke Stephens

Views: 366,738

Keywords: luke stephens

Id: ab9wRFz4CbI

Length: 21min 6sec (1266 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 06 2024