Starfield has a release date

[Snowy]

I'm not sure where to star with Star Citizen, a game that has been in development for 11 years at this point and to many is just a straight long con.

Even if I believed that Star Citizen was bug free as it is now and was ever going to come out, I think first and foremost it is going along the same lines as the traditional space game so it is in the vein of Elite Dangerous or Wing Commander. So the focus has been on the space travel and I readily admitted that Starfield falls down here. From what I have seen of the ground stuff it's not much cop and as for the story stuff who knows.

Star Citizen is not an openworld rpg, which is what Starfield is and it is in that arena that I made the comment about the setting and the type of game not gelling for a mass market audience.

Well from the off I can tell you that Star Citizen is a long way away from bug free. When we travelled to the asteroid belt in my session earlier, I was advised to wear my helmet in case I happened to glitch out of the spaceship as we warped there and ended up floating in space without a space-hat - to give but one example. The ground stuff though, well it feels like any FPS if I am honest. How it plays as a shooter I have yet to find out, but it would be hard pressed to be as limp as Starfield's FPS combat from what I played of it.

I think my main point is that there is in existence a game of absolutely breath-taking ambition, which has no publisher or development house hounding it to get done and a core of people wanting to play it who are happy to pump their own money into it to continue that development.

Don't misunderstand me, I have always viewed it as a complete con that was just sucking money out of the gullible on a dream that would never, could never happen. Problem is, I have dipped a toe into what is there now. They haven't got a feature complete product yet but what is already in place is immense in scale and scope. All the things I scoffed as (and with reason, as a professional IT PM I looked on aghast as the list of promises grew with every new pledge target, thinking they were so far beyond what was possible) are there. Plus loads more. And yet more on the roadmap to be delivered complete with sprint plans showing how they are progressing.

[Raid]

Star Citizen is not an openworld rpg, which is what Starfield is and it is in that arena that I made the comment about the setting and the type of game not gelling for a mass market audience.

They're different genres, but I think the fantasy they're selling is related enough to be a point of comparison. Perhaps people haven't taken to Starfield because it was promising something (or people assumed it was promising based on the trailers) that it just didn't deliver on. Nothing in the game made me feel like a Han Solo or a Captain Kirk, and the hand-written and acted content is just too bland (at least from what I've seen) to make up for it. Bethesda need to drop their current style of presentation, with the largely inanimate talking-heads and somewhat monotonous voice acting. I know it lets them fit a conversation into any setting without it feeling out of place which is undoubtedly helpful when making a game of that size, but it's just so dull. It doesn't even have the scale to make up for it, at least outside of a superficial level. The main city you land on during the prologue *looks* impressive, but it's just a series of small environments stitched together with loading screens, which I don't think is acceptable in 2023 when Star Citizen, a game backed by probably similar resources (ignoring where those resources come from for the sake of discussion) is pushing the boundaries of world and engine design.

[Wrathbone]

Bear in mind that Star Citizen is a PC exclusive because, according to its developers, they couldn't put it on consoles even if they wanted to. On the other hand, Starfield had to work on a Series S. The Creation engine does need replacing from scratch, but I don't think you can really compare Bethesda's technical efforts with what Star Citizen is capable of without recognising that one has comparatively severe limitations imposed upon it.

[Raid]

That's a valid point. I largely admire what Microsoft have done with providing a lower-cost console, but it really does feel like it's holding games back already and the generation's only three years old.

[Lenny Solidus]

[Lenny Solidus]

https://www.pcgamer.com/starfield-desig ... way-it-is/

[Wrathbone]

While there is a reasonable point in what he's saying, it's probably one of those situations where keeping shtum is the wiser option.

[Mantis]

We know game development is hard and my sympathies go out to the devs and passionate people on the teams who are often overworked and underpaid for their talents, but his Tweets seem to suggest that you should avoid harsh criticism of something because it might hurt the feelings of the team behind it who worked really hard on it. I don't agree with that where the critics are making pretty reasonable points, and in Starfields case the game just wasn't very good.

They definitely just need to let it go and stop engaging with the media about it. It's not going to do them any favours at all.

[Wrathbone]

I saw it as more of a targeted response to comments about how Starfield shouldn’t have area transitions or should have had X feature because another game has that feature, when realistically that was never going to be feasible for Starfield.

But yeah, I agree that their overly-defensive stance is a dubious move.

[Drarok]

Emil Pagliarulo says an awful lot of outspoken critics are "disconnected" from the realities of game development.

This opening line alone got my back up. It suggests he thinks they did the best job they could within the constraints of "that's just how game development is", itself a flawed assumption.

Presumably being a "design director" comes with quite a lot of business-side work (or is director just an honorary title here?), so he should be well-versed in costs and projections, timelines, all that stuff… but none of that is an excuse or a reason. If some process or team wasn't set up in the best way to deliver the product, then change it! A "director" should have enough clout to be able to improve things, or at the very least try.

Software is built by people, working at a company that has rules, culture, etc – but none of that is set in stone. You can (and should) change things if they can be improved! It sounds very "oh no, this is the way we've always done things" which I absolutely hate – there is no good reason to keep a bad process around.

It's a failing of management, not the "boots on the ground" designers, developers, testers etc. I don't think (most/any) people are complaining those people didn't work hard, or do their best… but they aren't the people empowered to make the process and results better!

Disclosure: I'm a software engineer and have worked under some brilliant and some terrible management.

[Animalmother]

The best we could do with the tools available excuse from a massive games company is very weak. As Drarok says they wrote the software, they should literally be able to shape that to create what they envisioned. Using an outdated engine and working around it's limitations to deliver an ok product at best, just doesn't cut it anymore.

[Sly Boots]

People have been complaining about their engine since at least Fallout 4, which came out eight years ago! If this is Todd Howard's dream game, that he's wanted to make basically since forever, then really poor that they didn't put the foundations in place that would allow that vision to be properly realised.

[Raid]

I remember hating the presentation of NPC conversations in Skyrim, thinking it was bad that they hadn't improved from Oblivion. I made the same complaint about Starfield 12 years later.

I don't disrespect the developers (as there's some really stunning artistry at work in the game), I disrespect the senior management that obviously aren't willing to move away from their antiquated engine.

[Wrathbone]

The Creation engine is the problem, but the feasibility of replacing it is arguably a bigger problem. It took them several years to improve the engine for Starfield, so they could be looking at 5 to 10 years to develop a new one from scratch that does everything Creation does, performs well, offers modern graphics quality, has fewer or no transitions, is stable and is flexible enough to iterate upon. That's a huge amount of time with no games being developed, which simply isn't going to happen. I don't think adopting something like UE5 is a realistic expectation either, because they'd have to build upon that to offer things like their object tracking and persistence, which would likely take a long time. And then they'd have to train their developers to develop on a system they have no experience with, which takes time. It's all about time.

The only way they could do it that I can see is to have a dedicated team that creates a new engine in the background over however many years it takes. If they started now, they'd probably be in a place to develop whatever comes after ES6 on it.

[Alan]

They don’t stop developing, they ramp up team size. They’re filthy rich. Or just use Unreal and be done with it.