![[MEGATHREAD] Starfield - Your experiences!](https://cdn.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/steam/apps/1716740/capsule_616x353.jpg?t=1692798833){kind=link}
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!
It is not in the slightest bit surprising that bethesda would have issues with an interconnected world.
All (?) interiors are still different cells that require a load screen. And, since Skyrim (and, to a lesser extent, Fallout 3), the vast majority of towns are also a separate “exterior” cell as well.
MAYBE with the requirement of an SSD/nvme we could see a return to Morrowind/Oblivion style “the entire planet is one exterior area”. But we were never going to have atmospheric transitions.
There is a reason that basically every single “seamless transition” elite game has almost entirely barren planets. Balancing simulation for an entire solar system is already hard enough (and is why star citizen and elite dangerous like the long travel times…). Combining that with a planet where you potentially have to care about more than a few containers of loot and some scannable objects becomes hell. Its why so many games will hide a loading screen as you break atmosphere (I think one of the Evochrons did this? Been a minute) and why planets with cities are generally off limits… Or you just run like dogshit if you are star citizen.
That said: I REALLY hope this is the motivation for NMS to add cities. I don’t need “open world” cities. But being able to dock at a domed city would be AMAZING. And still get rid of a lot of these issues.
Oblivion has towns behind loading screens too. Even Kvatch. There are mods that break them out into the world but they’re instanced by default.
Particularly annoying with the Imperial City.
Ah. I remembered the Imperial City being its own loading area (and kvatch was the town that gets wrecked? So that would make sense too) but I could have sworn the rest of the towns were still “open world”.
Ah well. Maybe someday I’ll play Oblivion again. But almost definitely doing Morrowind first because Morrowind was awesome and weird as fuck.
Any town with a wall around it in Oblivion is instanced.
Also, you have correctly recognized Morrowind’s superiority. I highly recommend the Tamriel Rebuilt mod that adds a lot of the land mass of the rest of the province outside of the island of Vvardenfell!
A lot of the towns are still a part of the open world, but some of them are separated by loading screens.
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.
R&C is cool as hell but it is NOT the revelation it was marketed as.
Titanfall 2 and Dishonored 2 had already done almost exactly the same gimmick years prior. And that MyHouse.wad DOOM map that everyone lost their mind over a few years back actually was ALSO doing the same trick. Hell, the Build Engine games (particularly Duke Nukem 3D) were entirely built around this trick.
The reality is not that you are “changing entire dimensions”. It is that the majority of the map is loaded into memory and you are teleporting between parts of it. This has been a solved technology for literally decades. You just have seamless “portals” between different parts of the map. But it boils down to just loading enough assets.
R&C mostly benefited from the larger memory of the PS5 (16 GB of GDDR6 versus 8 GB of DDR5 for the PS4) with the “direct storage” mostly being background in, ironically, the same way Morrowind was: You are loading a few “cells” ahead of you as you traverse the world map so that you never notice a load time (unless you use the boots of blinding speed… or are playing on a console).
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.
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.
If you ignore the server performance issues and bugs, star citizen is completely playable on my system and I have below reccomended specs (for starfield & star citizen). If star citizen can have no loading screens with most planets as populated (or more populated) then starfield’s planets while also having to manage server resources, then starfield has almost no excuse to have loading screens.