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

sorry everyone it's another Starfield video so you know we got to break out Todd Howard he's got to join us for the conversation hold on this cardboard stuck come on you there you go they'll watch us watch over us just like that that works so fun fact I've actually been working on this video for a little while the basic premise at the very start was how I would fix Starfield I was going to come up with a bunch of things I would do to quickly adjust it change it in ways that I think would actually make a tangible difference and allow players to enjoy the game much more however I didn't want to just throw stuff out there blindly I wanted to make actual recommendations that were possible and that led me down a rabbit hole of looking into different realities of the creation engine and how they actually handle data within the engine and it basically led me to the conclusion that Starfield is probably screwed but I'm going to show you why you see as of right now everybody basically agrees that Starfield has some strengths but it also has a lot of weaknesses and most of its weaknesses are centered around exploration which is perhaps the most important element of the game's design considering it's meant to be a space exploration game a lot of this is tied up in the minutia of gameplay though running around planets aimlessly looking for interesting things to do and when paired with someone's Promises of over a thousand planets to explore and basically endless content to enjoy it makes it really difficult to enjoy the game because you're always spawned into little bitty fish bowls that you can run around in and then you have to fast travel a few times to get to a new one or to a different planet and as a result the game is just constantly held back by its own technical limitations over the first 10 20 hours of gameplay it might not bug you that much especially while you're completing narrative quest lines however the moment you go out to explore for its own sake this will rear its ugly head and people will grow more and more frustrated and I actually think this is part of the reason we've seen a recent influx of negative reviews around the game in addition to the fact that I think the lower price point 30% off introduced some new players who were perhaps a little bit more critical than those that bought it day one cuz they were so excited as fans of bgs games but if you go down here it's a lot of people who have finished the game they've gone through the whole story 40 50 60 hours 134 hours all of these people have finished the game and they simply found it wanting for various reasons but I think the reason it's taken a little bit for public opinion to change so much is because Starfield is a game that actually Bitters and sour with time it doesn't age like a fine wine and I actually have data to prove it a handful of days ago I actually sent out a survey on the channel Community page where I simply asked after Starfield are you more or less excited for the Elder Scroll 6 and of the people that responded over 70,000 of you 60% said they were less excited and only 6 % said that they were more excited which already that's not great I'm sorry Todd it's just not like you would hope after every release your audience is even more excited for whatever's coming next if you are a baker and you make a cake or bake a cake I guess technically and then you bring it to the dinner party and everybody tastes it they're going to be more excited assuming it was good for the next cake that you bring they're not going to be worried that the next cake is going to suck terribly the the only reason they would worry is if the cake you brought today wasn't actually very good you know what I'm saying this is one of those moments where I'm like okay I think I'm just hungry I keep bringing up food analogies in these videos I got to stop I need to eat before filming but anyway this wasn't actually the first time I did this poll 3 months ago shortly after the game launched I did the poll as well with 62,000 votes and of those who responded to the same question just this time with an option also for never cared to begin with but of those people 23% of respondents said they were more excited for the game and only 29% said that they were less excited so we've seen the numbers double for those who are less excited and the number not just half more than half dropped to a quarter of what it was before for the people that are more excited now what happened maybe the data pool is just fundamentally different somehow and so even though there's over 60,000 participants the samples size is skewed or something who knows I don't think my audience or the people getting this poll has changed that much in 3 months but maybe it has or has public perception actually shifted I'm more inclined to think that public perception has actually shifted as more people have played the game giving it a fair shot and just seeing that some of these things don't really work now one of the good things about this is that we're getting mods from very talented moders that are actively improving the game in various different ways this mod allows you to control the speed speed of your ship to extreme levels basically giving you what is effectively a warp drive allowing you to just in real time travel at like multiple times the speed of light if you want to so you can warp around planets really easily and explore flying between planets freely without load screens and stuff like that which is super super cool and lots of mods like this have been created you see there's some uh weird behavior on the ship but that has to do with another bug that we're going to talk about in uh in just a minute as you see it uh it freaks out a little bit when you try to go too far away from where you load it into and I will explain what that is in just a moment because that is uh kind of the Fatal flaw of Starfield that apparently is not that fixable but seriously if you want to go through some of the quests on Nexus of all the different stuff people have actually improved and changed and added and tweaked within the game already it's pretty crazy I know there's been memes and people joking that a lot of big modders are abandoning star fi cuz they just find the game too boring and while I think that's part of it there is a larger part which again we'll get to in just a second I'll stop teasing you with it but there there are some core issues within Starfield and the creation engine that really make it difficult apparently to do some of the expansive mods that we were hoping for for example I wrote down a big list of all the things I would like to see come to Starfield things that I think would really add to the gameplay experience for the player such as primarily opening up the fishbowls so you land on a planet you can just explore freely making it so you can basically go from one end of the planet to the other if you wanted to and pairing with that also adding Vehicles allowing you to travel quickly and as far as you needed to away from your ship still able to fast travel back but if you're not going to give me the ability to fly in my ship which I still insist would be the ideal at the very least giving me a Rover or a motorcycle or a car or something like that that I could operate on these planets would be a nice have and this is apparently something they're bringing to the game they announced this just two weeks ago saying that they're working on all sorts of different things like city maps mod support and all new ways of traveling stay tuned I don't know what this means to me it heavily implies vehicles of some sort Maybe not maybe it's just like allowing you to take a tram through different areas instead like they added to cyberpunk I have no idea but at the very least it seems like they're open to adding new forms of traversal which is cool however those immediate things that I feel would make the game significantly better specifically opening up the fishbowls allowing for multiple of these little areas to be tied together indefinitely as you explore the whole planet that apparently is not as easy a nut to crack as one would think you see pretty much the moment that the game launched people started experimenting in this case daspan over on YouTube posted a series of videos attempting to basically break the system and allow the game to load in an adjacent tile in other words Landing shortly outside of say new Atlantis and trying to load with different console commands into new Atlantis traveling over there without the game crashing or preventing him from doing so and eventually he actually was able to get it working in this secondary experiment that he did you can see the game starts to run like absolute garbage but maybe that's just because it's loading in so much data loading out data it's just kind of complicated you see stuff glitches this is not the video freezing up this is the actual recording of the game the actual game itself was stuttering like this but but he eventually reaches new Atlantis pulls up the city loads in pretty much in its entirety it's not just like a weird low poly version that you see off in the distance but then the game crashes and initially he thought that maybe this was just crashing because the game has like a built-in self-destruct when you load to a new area but apparently he after investigating some more describes in the description that he feels this is more likely due to the game unloading the spawn for point for the player which according to regular operations of the game should never happen you should always have the spawn point available in the immediate area so if you travel too far out it just breaks so there could be ways to fix that in the code you know add in a little exception where the game allows the spawn point to move with the player as you go through the world or something but at the very least it's interesting that you are able to travel to adjacent tiles and the game loads it in it's capable of doing that but I mean as you can see you can actually travel across multiple tiles the game is able to sort of render it and as he travels closer and closer you see over here warping slowly he's going to get closer and closer and then eventually the game's just going to crash and break apart but at the very least this shows promised that maybe you could actually tie these tiles together because the game is capable of doing it if you go in and disable all of the fail saves and protections that Bethesda put in the code so it's possible maybe it's something that modders could do or Bethesda could officially do maybe as an exclusive Next Generation patch right maybe they could do that and they actually did get this working in a mod that you can download if you're playing on PC right now you can try it yourself it simply removes the planetary tile boundary but it does lead into a bunch of random issues such as the game crashing the game having horrible performance when you get too far from your ship but at the very least it lets you do it however the eagle eyed among you will see that there's something a little weird about this whole thing which is that it's not been updated since September 10th very shortly after the game launched they actually had this open during the like Early Access for the game they got it working but they stopped updating it and you can read through all the the comments and stuff to kind of get a breakdown on it but basically after I spent a good chunk of this afternoon reading through these comments it's really fascinating but there are some core issues that prevent this from just working or being something that they could patch in or add it's a core problem with the engine to demonstrate this point I need to go back to like the late 2000s early 201s to early Minecraft there's this video from lentern which does a phenomenal job of breaking down the complete history of Minecraft's farlands and if you don't know what these are basically within the code of Minecraft it uses something called floats which are really common in programming and it's normally a really great way of allowing maps and different ways of storing data such as locations or in this case the generation of different worlds and things to be stored in a mass scale but while retaining some memory and compressing everything basically that's basically the super Bare Bones way of understanding it these floats are used to compress information like where certain things are on a map or what's happening away from a central point which would be like the spawn point so if the spawn point is 0 comma 0 on the X and Y AIS then you can go out and floats allow you to store data and information on what's where much more efficiently however Minecraft had an issue where the further out you went from that initial spawn point the floats would get less and less accurate which is one of the The Faults of them is that they have really high resolution effectively at very close proximity to spawn but the further out from spawn the less accurate it becomes in other words if I pull up Ms paint the tool for Champions instead of like the accuracy for certain item locations or areas being consistent and flat whether you are one meter away or 10 kilm away this is what you would think if it was just like a spreadsheet table of different things how it works for these floats is actually much more like this where as you get further away it exponentially drops off in accuracy if this is more accurate and this is less accurate that's basically how you can think of it so when you're playing in a game and you're close to the spawn point the game has a much finer control of the data in that area but the further away you get from spawn the less accurate it becomes and in the case of Minecraft it caused the game to have all sorts of crazy bizar locations and basically the map generation system would just break and not work properly you'd start to get floating islands the ground would disappear all sorts of crazy stuff would happen and people initially thought that this was just really cool like wow it's the far lands it's the land that's far and it's magical and mysterious people thought it was part of the game when actually it was just a result of the game kind of breaking and the math at the core of it not being able to keep up with the simulation of the world now in this article from Rock Paper Shotgun that describes a lot of the same experiments that we've already gone through they also break down a conversation between a couple of modders that have been working on this particular mod in question that opens up all of these tiles for players to explore and specifically what's said is glad to see someone exploring how to solve this the problem of all of the tiles being broken apart and separated when I heard about it it made me wonder if this design Choice was related to floating Point error the greater the distance things come away from the world origin point the more chaotic so it was probably the only way to keep the physics of all the Clutter under control troll to which cybo another user and modder replied ring dingding we have a winner yes this is almost certainly the limiting factor behind bethesda's development process of the game in essence they would have needed to modify the engine to feature something like floating Point origin all World objects get offsetted such as the players in the center in other words in essence they would have needed to modify the engine to feature something like floating origin which is where everything in the world floats around the player instead of a centralized Point such as in Starfield the point of origin like your ship which as far as I can tell is where the point of origin is for Starfield it's always your ship which is why if it ever unloads it causes the game to crash he goes on there's likely other creation engine complications that would need to be solved too but floating point imprecision is most likely the source of these issues in other words if we go back to Ms paint within Starfield they tried probably early on to experiment with giving you entire plan but that was like over here in terms of scope and scale and as they tried to give players access to bigger and bigger worlds and simulations it just caused the game to basically start breaking where it wasn't able to keep track of objects properly in the world it wasn't able to keep track of where the player was and this was an issue again back in the early days of Minecraft before they solved this problem with major engine overhauls where basically the game would start to stutter uncontrollably it wouldn't work L cuz it couldn't keep track of the player's location because it couldn't actually detail where the player location was on the map with enough resolution to be able to track all of this which is really really crazy and again it would just cause the game to break down once the player got far enough away from the origin Point such that the game engine couldn't keep track of all the data and locations and things it needed to and so to be clear I'm not a game programmer I don't really know much of this stuff I have been relying on people that do understand it to explain it to me and articles breaking down how this stuff works such as this one from gamed developer.com which breaks down how these floating points work in comparison to like straight up integers whereas again integers would just be the black line straight always just as accurate as before but it requires a lot of data whereas using floats causes this huge drop in accuracy but saves you all of this extra space and data that you would have had to use otherwise a really easy way of thinking about it as they say here uh if you represent a position with a floating Point number then there are more possible points between the origin point and a point just a millimeter away if that's your unit of measurement then there are possible points between the origin and a point on the other side of the planet and this means that the Precision of your floating Point representation of a position depends on where you're standing and what units you're using and also when they say where you're standing that usually refers to the origin point and again it seems like Starfield as far as I can tell and from these discussions of modders uh that we've looked at it seems like Starfield has been crafted with the spawn point as the center of the world not the player and as a result everything just kind of breaks when the player starts to you know explore and here's the deal I spoke to one of these modders that has been working on this project or at least did a few months ago before it was kind of abandoned and while he didn't want to go public or on camera or anything he's just not comfortable with that which I totally understand this is a little weird if you're not used to it I get that uh what he did tell me was that the work involved to make this not a problem anymore would be tantamount to just starting over it would require an overhaul of everything because again everything in the game is built around the center point of the spawn of the world everything coming off of that Central spoke of the wheel and coming off of that point so you'd have to rework how all of the procedural Generation stuff works because it's built around that same concept you'd have to rework how player movement functions you'd have to rework how NPCs spawn everything would start to fall apart this is why it's not as simple as just H combine the tiles easy it's not that simple according to the people that know what they're doing and are way smarter than me this is such a huge problem that it's not even really worth trying to solve because it would require such a major effort and that's why for these open world world like Adventure improvements that I was hoping to describe in this video it just doesn't seem like it's really possible it's just not doable with the foundation that they laid who knows maybe they're off in a cave somewhere hard at work trying to get it working and they'll overhaul it and we'll all be happy running around full planets in a year or two I don't know but these modders seem pretty confident that they are not going to be able to do that and that Starfield is just going to be like this pretty much forever but I do really want to have a modder on here to discuss this either on Luke Stevens live my second Channel or here on the main Channel show these modders some love in the comment section below encourage them to come on and talk about this stuff CU I know you guys would be fascinated to hear what they think I would love to talk to those guys I think they're just a little shy and not used to this whole thing so show them some love show them some love it'll be okay it'll be a good time come on guys if you're a Moder that's worked on this stuff hit me up I'd love to talk to you it'd be super fun so you know what it's frustrating this video was supposed to be sort of a fun trip through the different things I would do to improve Starfield and fix it because I can't stand when like YouTubers or streamers bash a game but offer no constructive criticism so I try to often have a counter example or a counter thing yeah this sucks do this instead and in this case I have a list of things I'd like to see in the game but it just frankly seems like it's not possible and at that point I can understand now why all of these modders have basically been giving up because any of the cool stuff they wanted to do like make an entire planet themed around Christmas or an entire planet that's just a recreation of like the shadow of War games and so it's just the shadow of War planet that you can download through a mod like all of those cool ideas that these modders had are apparently not possible given how everything has been programmed and due to the limitations of the creation engine there's just not anything they can do so it just kind of is a a sucky situation and I don't really know what to say other than w i you know all of this is just another example of why game development is so difficult and how just a quick decision years and years and years ago within your engine can come back to haunt you all of these decades later a decision early on in the Xbox 360 generation to base Big World exploration around a spawn point didn't seem like that crazy of an idea I'm sure but now trying to make something like Starfield you see it rear its ugly head because previously it was just frankly never considered that players would be able to explore an entire planet but now that the technology is there not being able to achieve that because of the technological restraints while still promising that players effectively could leaves a bad taste in everybody's mouths because it's the worst of Both Worlds your promis A full world to explore but giving it to them in such an inconvenient way that they might as well not have it at all so again uh it's just another sad story so uh I'm going to shut up now and we can all just feel bad about ourselves if you're interested in any of the stuff I went through today I encourage you to look it up it is very very fascinating all the article for like how float Point numbers work in video games cuz it's fascinating and pretty much every engine uses this even uh like an engine like um Unreal Engine uses floats but they what are called Doubles to give twice as much control or or resolution basically to the data as far as I can understand it it's really really fascinating how much stuff happens under the hood within game development and this is just another example of players being like well it's easy just connect the tiles and then do that and it's like it's actually not that easy and if you try to do that everything will break and it's just you know video games are always a Marvel if they launch at all and so we can meme on Star field we can meme on all of these other games but the fact that they run in the first place is also kind of a miracle as well and I think it's important to appreciate that every once in a while as well but that's going to do it for me thank you for watching have a wonderful rest of your year I will have one more video going up before the new year it's going to be my Roundup of the worst games of 2023 I've asked over a 100,000 of you to vote on which is the worst and uh the results may surprise you just kidding they totally won't it's super predictable but I'm going to make you wait to find out until that video goes up because that's uh that's what YouTubers do now we promise stuff and then we don't deliver but okay seriously I love you all I'll see you in the next one hugy kisses bye-bye

Channel: Luke Stephens

Views: 912,032

Keywords: luke stephens, luke stephens starfield, starfield, starfeild, starfield mod

Id: E7kCFkFi0Cc

Length: 23min 43sec (1423 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 28 2023