Videogames: All Valves on Deck

[Caligula_K3]

Further into Elden Ring now. After defeating Margit, I got through the Stormveil Castle dungeon pretty quickly and managed to take down Godrick on my first try (albeit with some help from my pet jellyfish). I may have overleveled myself...

What a great game (so far, at least). The ends of Dark Souls games tend to be much worse than their beginnings - I hope that doesn't happen here.

[Ser Rodrigo Belmonte II]

The more I see these videos (I haven’t played starfield) , the more afraid I get for TES VI.

 

How is starfield so bad looking ?

Edited December 18, 2023 by Ser Rodrigo Belmonte II

[Werthead]

Damn. James McCaffrey has died. He was the voice of the taciturnly badass title character in Max Payne and also played the Payne-adjacent character Alex Casey in the Alan Wake games.

 

[Corvinus85]

A Total War full conversion mod of Attila set in the LOTR universe is slowly taking shape - The Dawnless Days. They had unit models long ago, settlement models, too. Now the campaign map has been shaped but plenty of places to fill. Same for various mechanics. Here is a video showcasing what has been done so far from a youtube content creator.

[Werthead]

17 minutes ago, Corvinus85 said:

A Total War full conversion mod of Attila set in the LOTR universe is slowly taking shape - The Dawnless Days. They had unit models long ago, settlement models, too. Now the campaign map has been shaped but plenty of places to fill. Same for various mechanics. Here is a video showcasing what has been done so far from a youtube content creator.

I believe the first Warscape-era game where they've managed to create a custom campaign map, which is very, very hard in the engine.

Looks decent. I'm not in love with some of the the Rome II/Atilla-era design decisions, but there's no denying that this looks the business and is a huge improvement over Third Age: Total War graphics-wise. If they do cancel Medieval II Remastered (there are some rumours that's happened behind the scenes), this is our best chance for a decent-looking LotR Total War. Unless Creative Assembly want to do an official one as their post-Warhammer III project, as they said a while back.

Haven't had time to look at the full video, does this mean naval combat is in?

[Corvinus85]

39 minutes ago, Werthead said:

Haven't had time to look at the full video, does this mean naval combat is in?

The video doesn't say.

[Werthead]

On 12/18/2023 at 3:35 PM, Ser Rodrigo Belmonte II said:

The more I see these videos (I haven’t played starfield) , the more afraid I get for TES VI.

 

How is starfield so bad looking ?

There are areas of Starfield that look really good, like the cyberpunk (ha) city of Neon, which has good lighting, crowd density, effects etc. Some of the planets also look really good with environmental effects and lighting. Overall though, no, it doesn't look as good as the three-years-older Cyberpunk 2077, which is a bit lame.

The loading screen for the elevator despite it staying in the same loading cell is completely bizarre though. They even show that in Fallout 4 - in the same engine! - they had elevators in the same area and they'd actually physically move for real (and if you hit the button from outside, they move up and down). That doesn't really happen in Starfield and it's completely baffling.

[Ser Rodrigo Belmonte II]

In another news, a Bethesda dev doubles down and goes on a long, 15 tweet rant on the gaming community being idiots is the reason people don’t like starfield:

https://www.thegamer.com/starfield-dev-complains-about-disconnect-betrween-gamers-game-development-criticism/

[polishgenius]

3 hours ago, Ser Rodrigo Belmonte II said:

In another news, a Bethesda dev doubles down and goes on a long, 15 tweet rant on the gaming community being idiots is the reason people don’t like starfield:

 

 

 

He hasn't expressed himself particularly elegantly but he didn't even come close to saying that. The article you linked to didn't say or imply he did either, so you're just straight-up lying. 

[Ser Rodrigo Belmonte II]

“Funny how disconnected some players are from the realities of game development, yet speak with complete authority” “don’t fool yourself into thinking you know how it’s made …”

 

He may not have said the word “idiot” directly but it isn’t a stretch to infer what he thought of gamers from these quoted comments.…. 
 

if there’s anything worse than making a bad game, it’s refusing to acknowledge you’ve made a bad game.Atleast CA admitted they’ve fucked up with Pharaoh. 

[Ser Rodrigo Belmonte II]

Also I’m not a game developer but I’m always baffled by the argument that it’s the Creation Engine that’s letting BGS games down in terms of technology. 
 

Hasn’t Rockstar been using the same engine since GTA 4? Hasn’t CDPR used the RED Engine since Witcher 2 till CP2077? Hasn’t Larian iterated on their engine from Divinity till BG3? It’s all to do with BGS devs own failure to update their design….if they wanted to,they could upgrade the Creation Engine to modern standards. 

Edited December 20, 2023 by Ser Rodrigo Belmonte II

[Heartofice]

Yeah I can't disagree with anything that guy said. Video game fans are some of the angriest most entitled people on the planet and it's almost impossible to satisfy them. 

Making such a huge game involves so many moving pieces and if a game ends up being shit it's probably not because of the developers, but probably the result of numerous business decisions made along the way that hamper the work on the project. 

Just watching the shit show at CA regarding Total War, it is clear that far too many decisions were made from a commercial basis rather than based on what fans wanted and what devs could deliver. You could ask questions as to why they didn't update their engine or try and fix the problems, but when you are working with endless tech debt and being pushed into tight deadlines it becomes impossible to do your best work. 

[Ser Rodrigo Belmonte II]

I mean other companies who’ve had half of Bethesda’s game and budget and time have delivered far superior games…so let’s not claim BGS hasn’t had the necessary business support to deliver good games. Especially since MS has been bankrolling them.

[Heartofice]

57 minutes ago, Ser Rodrigo Belmonte II said:

I mean other companies who’ve had half of Bethesda’s game and budget and time have delivered far superior games…so let’s not claim BGS hasn’t had the necessary business support to deliver good games. Especially since MS has been bankrolling them.

Point being it's not always about budget and time, there are a number of different factors that can get in the way.

[polishgenius]

4 hours ago, Ser Rodrigo Belmonte II said:

“Funny how disconnected some players are from the realities of game development, yet speak with complete authority” “don’t fool yourself into thinking you know how it’s made …”

 

He may not have said the word “idiot” directly but it isn’t a stretch to infer what he thought of gamers from these quoted comments.…. 
 

if there’s anything worse than making a bad game, it’s refusing to acknowledge you’ve made a bad game.Atleast CA admitted they’ve fucked up with Pharaoh. 

It's not a stretch, you're right. It is, as I say, just lying. Because to get to your position from what he said you have to deliberately leave out the parts where he explicitly stated gamers have every right to be disappointed and complain. His only point is he doesn't like when people assume reasons.

[Werthead]

4 hours ago, Ser Rodrigo Belmonte II said:

Also I’m not a game developer but I’m always baffled by the argument that it’s the Creation Engine that’s letting BGS games down in terms of technology. 

Hasn’t Rockstar been using the same engine since GTA 4? Hasn’t CDPR used the RED Engine since Witcher 2 till CP2077? Hasn’t Larian iterated on their engine from Divinity till BG3? It’s all to do with BGS devs own failure to update their design….if they wanted to,they could upgrade the Creation Engine to modern standards. 

Those engines have evolved much more significantly in the meantime. To be fair, they started off much later with a much better underlying tech base. RAGE was fundamentally rebuilt to make Red Dead Redemption 2 possible and it looks like they've thoroughly revamped it again for GTA6. RED was also updated, but it has ceilings and limitations on what it can do, and CDPR bumped into those limitations heavily CP77, resulting eventually in them abandoning it.

Creation's issue is that it hasn't been updated enough. You can see the underlying shape of the modern engine in Starfield right back in Morrowind, and common issues like the stodgy movement have been present since right back then. There is an upgrade path, but this has been mostly focused on graphics, shaders, lighting and other rendering elements: fundamentals have often not been touched. In that sense the GameBryo Engine used for Morrowind feels much closer to Starfield's Creation 2 Engine than RDR2 feels to GTA4, despite half the time elapsing for the latter.

Something that would help would be being able to use a mocap character animation system. BGS games are insanely stiff compared to the competition with their mocap systems that have been operating for a decade or more.

Bethesda's reasons for sticking with Creation seem to be rooted in that the company knows how to use it and they have optimised some things in the engine (like remembering the location of every single item in the game at all times, and NPC scheduling although the latter was switched off for Starfield) that they think would be too time-consuming to replicate in a new engine or an off-the-shelf solution like Unreal.

However, given Starfield's eight-year gestation period, which should have been more than sufficient to build/adopt a new engine, optimise it and make the full game, they really need to be asking if they actually are saving time in a worthwhile manner by continuing to use it.

They will be using it for Elder Scrolls VI because it's already in pre-production and Microsoft will likely be demanding the game ASAP to make up with the disappointment of Starfield, but for Fallout 5 they should really be looking at a new engine, and maybe taking a look at what Obsidian have been doing with the two Outer Worlds games and Avowed by adapting Unreal 4/5 to a Creation-style system.

[Ser Rodrigo Belmonte II]

20 minutes ago, Werthead said:

Those engines have evolved much more significantly in the meantime. To be fair, they started off much later with a much better underlying tech base. RAGE was fundamentally rebuilt to make Red Dead Redemption 2 possible and it looks like they've thoroughly revamped it again for GTA6. RED was also updated, but it has ceilings and limitations on what it can do, and CDPR bumped into those limitations heavily CP77, resulting eventually in them abandoning it.

Creation's issue is that it hasn't been updated enough. You can see the underlying shape of the modern engine in Starfield right back in Morrowind, and common issues like the stodgy movement have been present since right back then. There is an upgrade path, but this has been mostly focused on graphics, shaders, lighting and other rendering elements: fundamentals have often not been touched. In that sense the GameBryo Engine used for Morrowind feels much closer to Starfield's Creation 2 Engine than RDR2 feels to GTA4, despite half the time elapsing for the latter.

Something that would help would be being able to use a mocap character animation system. BGS games are insanely stiff compared to the competition with their mocap systems that have been operating for a decade or more.

Bethesda's reasons for sticking with Creation seem to be rooted in that the company knows how to use it and they have optimised some things in the engine (like remembering the location of every single item in the game at all times, and NPC scheduling although the latter was switched off for Starfield) that they think would be too time-consuming to replicate in a new engine or an off-the-shelf solution like Unreal.

However, given Starfield's eight-year gestation period, which should have been more than sufficient to build/adopt a new engine, optimise it and make the full game, they really need to be asking if they actually are saving time in a worthwhile manner by continuing to use it.

They will be using it for Elder Scrolls VI because it's already in pre-production and Microsoft will likely be demanding the game ASAP to make up with the disappointment of Starfield, but for Fallout 5 they should really be looking at a new engine, and maybe taking a look at what Obsidian have been doing with the two Outer Worlds games and Avowed by adapting Unreal 4/5 to a Creation-style system.

Was MS really disappointed with Starfield though ? Critically and fan reception has been polarised yes but I think commercially it has been really successful like previous BGS games.

[IlyaP]

5 hours ago, Ser Rodrigo Belmonte II said:

“Funny how disconnected some players are from the realities of game development, yet speak with complete authority” “don’t fool yourself into thinking you know how it’s made …”

 

He may not have said the word “idiot” directly but it isn’t a stretch to infer what he thought of gamers from these quoted comments.…. 
 

if there’s anything worse than making a bad game, it’s refusing to acknowledge you’ve made a bad game. Atleast CA admitted they’ve fucked up with Pharaoh. 

Not a dis - more a stylesheet question (maybe for @Ran?) but what's going on with the formatting of text here, @Ser Rodrigo Belmonte II? It's rendering *really* oddly on my screen as large Calibri? text with a white background. 

[IlyaP]

4 hours ago, Ser Rodrigo Belmonte II said:

Hasn’t Rockstar been using the same engine since GTA 4? Hasn’t CDPR used the RED Engine since Witcher 2 till CP2077?

Can't address Rockstar, but Witcher 2 was still the NWN Aurora engine, whereas Witcher 3 was the Red Engine - the same one used in CP77. 

[Werthead]

9 minutes ago, Ser Rodrigo Belmonte II said:

Was MS really disappointed with Starfield though ? Critically and fan reception has been polarised yes but I think commercially it has been really successful like previous BGS games.

Reports of the box copy sales are all over the place, but one figure was 2 million, which would be shockingly low. Obviously for MS it's more important how Starfield serviced Game Pass and they're saying it's done well with over 12 million people playing the game. But given anyone with Game Pass can play the game for twenty minutes, that's not really saying much.

Even if it did okay in sales/Game Pass subs, Microsoft will definitely want the acclaim as well, and seeing Starfield not get just curb-stomped critically but utterly atomised by Baldur's Gate III and Phantom Liberty will have been disappointing. They wanted a game that could dominate the discourse like Skyrim did.