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For those who have pre-ordered it is already here, the rest have to wait a little longer. Starfield is finally here! Have you bought it, why or why not? If you've already played it, what do you think of it? We are very curious!
Discuss all things Starfield below!
Just played 4 hours. Not saying whether the game is good or bad, but I'm not seeing the point of the spaceship yet.
It's looks like merely a medium for the fast traveling mechanic. You can't really "move" in space (as far as ive tried), and can't use it to fly within a planet.
I expected being able to manually travel from planet A to planet B and finding cool stuff along the way. If you wanna actually move you need to fast travel.
I also expected to be able to get in my ship and go from place A to place B within the same planet (also finding cool stuff along the way). It seems that also is just done by fast traveling only.
This is one of the more biting criticisms I've heard of the game. It results in a lack of feeling of scale and scope. The universe just feels like connected places, instead of worlds within a galaxy. No Mans Sky got this right, and it's surprising that Bethesda would fumble such a core mechanic. It looks like they tried to cover up this wart by... removing city maps.
Look at Ratchet and Clank Rift Apart. They have completely seamless transitions between entire dimensions. They use Direct Storage, which is a Microsoft API. It's not a good look when a Sony studio is able to achieve seamless transitions on a Windows game but a Microsoft game can't.
TF2 and Dishonored accomplished this by having all the other level data loaded in memory simultaneously all as part of the same map. The instant transitions are accomplished by teleporting the player to another part of the map that is already in memory.
This is not the same trick R&C pulled, and it has far more limitations. For example, TF2’s Effect and Cause necessitates a smaller overall map than the other missions because they had to fit two different versions of the same map in memory all at once. If they wanted to let you transition between three different time periods, they would have had to make it even smaller to fit in the same memory budget.
Ratchet & Clank’s approach has no such limitations. They could let you switch between 8 different time periods and not worry about having to fit all of them in memory at once.
How Morrowind and other open world games work has very little in common with the approaches used in R&C or Titanfall 2.
This approach has its own unique limitations. In Morrowind, you cannot instantly teleport from one side of the map to the other, in theory that would only be possible between adjacent cells. Otherwise, fast traveling would be instantaneous.
The beauty of what R&C does is that there are no limitations at all. You can almost instantly teleport between any maps the game has. No hacks or trickery beyond the brief animation concealing the 1-2 seconds it takes to shuttle the data from the SSD to VRAM. This is unique, and simply wasn’t possible on spinning rust without radically simplifying your level design and visual package to fit within the limited bandwith.
Even on systems with significant memory, a slow drive will create lag in RC. Moreover, RC is doing this while also having very high graphical fidelity overall, including ray tracing, which is quite memory intensive. It's not possible without Direct storage and reasonably fast SSDs.
I'm not insulting the devs who did similar with much less. I'm insulting the devs who can't do similar with the same hardware.