A Starfield remake, of sorts, has been created in 48 hours, incorporating seamless travel between planets, something missing from the actual Bethesda RPG.
“remake” is generous of the titling editor. That’s a tech demo or a mechanic demo. Still good, though. The seamless transitions are nice.
Yeah - of course games are hard - but all he did was rough out a planet-to-space experience in Unreal Engine with a Starfield aesthetic. If he started trying to build an actual game on it… Well an 8 year timeline doesn’t seem crazy.
And this whole conversation overlooks one of the major complaints a player would have of Bethesda did the same thing.
Entering an atmosphere changes the physics and those physics are different for all sorts of reasons on every planetary body for every ship. From gravity to atmospheric density the ship would fly differently on every one and that ignores the fact that ships are near enough to infinite in configuration in this game due to the builder.
If Bethesda did this, players would be complaining it wasn’t realistic enough.
Those are solved issues in other engines, meaning not at all insurmountable.
Can you give me an example of a game that solved the above problems? I’ve never seen a game that has that issue resolved for any ship configuration that could exist.
Kerbal Space Program?
While I had forgetten about Kerbal space program, I would point out two major things about that comparison. KSP is entirely about the ship flight. That is the entire games purpose. And second, when I played it a few years after release, it was hardly stable and wouldn’t be a good representation with the atmospheric density discussion. As I remember it that problem was largely ignored.
I’ll grant you the first point, the whole game is centered on space travel simulation, but it’s also the only game I’ve seen that handles what you’re describing. You definitely need to consider atmospheric density though. Managing your speed, angle of attack, and parachutes to avoid overheating is one of the major skills you learn while playing. Some are Earth like (Kerbin), other are thinner (Moho), and some are surrounded in an atmosphere so thick that it makes any return mission a huge achievement (Eve).
That’s not an unsolvable issue, and you can always handwave it away for simplicity with some lore. The ships are already magics, like any star ship, so you can just say that the motors and calibration compensate for different planets and whatnot so the ship is easy to use everywhere.
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A loading screen lets you load different areas of the game discreetly and make the game performative. This is especially important as Starfield is a single player game, it’s not hosted on a server or anything so it can’t distribute resource load that way, its all happening client side on the player’s system. They would have to simulate the entire world on their PC alone or develop a way to stream the content out dynamically and seamlessly.
That’s not how any of it works.
We have had level streaming in Unreal for like a decade. Sure it’s more complex to do things this way, but in general the way it works is that when you approach some area (are some distance from a planet or part of a planet) the next chunk of the world loads in, together with any NPCs and logic and everything else - it’s basically a self contained map, just seamlessly integrated with other maps. There is no meaningful performance hit if done correctly. You certainly don’t simulate everything all the time.
Additionally, all the other games mentioned (NMS, Elite, Star Citizen) also have basically all of the processing on the client side. The servers don’t help the clients in any way; they only store primitive states for gameplay purposes, but all the simulation and whatnot is done on the client. And they still manage to be better optimized.
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It’s more like they really want to use their own engine (for many good reasons) and it’d probably be really hard (if not near impossible without a complete rewrite) to add such a fundamental feature to their existing engine. Even if it wasn’t that hard it’d probably still cost a shitton of developer time and they were spending it elsewhere.
This is basically what No Man’s Sky did. When Bethesda took their crappy RPG engine and mocked up interplanetary travel using loading screens and then started writing quests and storylines, NMS focused on building a very good engine that allowed you to go from surface to air to space to interplanet / stellar while mostly ignoring the rest of gameplay and storytelling.
And not to be too hard on No Man’s Sky given the resource differential, but ultimately all it is is one really rock solid system thats not quite a full game surrounded by a lot of hollow feeling stuff to kinda flesh it out on paper. Ultimately Starfield has way sharper hooks almost immediately simpy because while it has a relatively crappy engine and at time frustrating amounts of loading screens and limitations, they spent more time writing content and dialogue that makes the universe feel actually alive and rich, and polishing each individual system until it’s fun.
I think The Outer Worlds is also worth comparing to as Obsidian is even farther down the same route as Bethesda imho, making a much smaller universe that feels even less free than Starfield but having even better writing and I would argue it’s possibly the best game of the three though I have to withhold my judgement on Starfield until I atleast finish the main quests.
I love that the thumbnail for every article about Starfield is an uncomfortable close-up of a character’s dialogue face.
It’s what you see like 70% of the game.
There’s a mod for that
I’ve only seen one truly uncomfortable close up and it was when a dialogue initiated right in a doorway so the camera got pushed right up the dude’s nose and I could see the empty space in his head lol
I prefer to play 1st person and I’ve always been quite okay with the camera angle for talking to someone, personally. It’s kinda how I would see people I’m talking to face to face IRL, except I don’t have to look down. I only dislike when multiple characters are involved and it does that jump cut to zoom in on a dude across the room. That’s not natural at all.
Oblivion flashbacks
I just know what she’s saying too “we you have a free moment i need to talk to you”
Guys, this is literally just a tech demo made in Unreal, it’s not news.
I’m not a fan of starfield but this is just misleading. It’s a tech demo in a vastly different engine devoid of content.
And it’s demoing something Elite Dangerous has had for years.
Elite is still just cleverly hidden/styled loading screens. No Mans Sky (and apparently Star Citizen but I haven’t played it) is even better and more seamless.
Yeah elite just played a graphic on repeat for its loading screens to show seamlessness. If you have a really slow PC you can tell they’re loading screens because the graphic stutters a lot and it’ll take an insanely long time for what should be a quick transition.
Even space engineers can do that.
It is essentially just a tech demo BUT, I would say they’ve touched on what I wanted from the space travel.
You can take off, fly the ship, point it up, and then boost off into space. That’s fun, that’s what I wanted, and I don’t think it’s really expecting that much.
“It’S NoT ReAlIsTiC”, none of it’s realistic, it’s a video game ffs.
It’s a fun and engaging mechanic that I’d expect in a great space game.
Bethesda’s seeming disdain for anything that could be considered a fun and seamless mechanic is frustrating. And fanboys seemingly have no expectation that Bethesda games should actually get better and improve on their weak areas.
I think Bethesda “fanboys” (like myself) just really like the core experience (warts and all) I play NMS when I want to lose myself in a beautiful seamless scifi setting and i play starfield when my focus is on engaging with faction and character storylines and some campy space encounters. I kinda like how janky bethesda games can be, reminds me of playing tabletop RPGs and all the weird janky shit that happens in those games too. I like that I can be the golden boy of the crimson fleet and still join up with the freestar rangers. I make up a little story for my character and act it out and have a lot of fun doing so.
The only thing I could do without is the loading screens. I don’t mind that landing on a planet isn’t seamless, but i mean… loading screen to get on ship, loading screen to get into space, loading screen to fly to different planet, wait until scan finishes, loading screen to land on planet.
That’s the worse part for me. If it was just a short cut scene for landing on a planet, I think that’d be 100% fine.
I just don’t think it’s good to let a company get away with not improving.
The small improvements they have made in Starfield are alright, but it feels like the bar was set with Skyrim and they can’t even really match something from 12 years ago.
I do not have high hopes for TES VI and I’m half expecting something extremely dated, as based off FO4 and Starfield I think the studio’s best days are behind them at this point.
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Bethesda can’t even get ladders working in their engine, and y’all were expecting seamless atmospheric re-entry?
They have working ladders in Starfield. They finally did it.
Oh wow. A truely stunning achievement for this small indie studio.
I do wish I could jump -> interact with them, but yeah they do. Decent animation too, if not a bit slow lol
They do have ladders in Starfield, actually
I would be impressed if they did it in Gamebryo/Creation Engine and solve the “everything is a cell” problem. I mean, No man’s Sky and Elite Dangerous exist and have shown seem less space travel. One guy with DarkBasic did it in the Evochron games for decades.
This comes off as a hey look look at me I can do it in a cave with a box of scraps but BUGTHESDA can’t in 7 years?!
I think the problem is also that Bethesda doesn’t really “do” vehicles, probably due to engine limitations.
Usually, it’s just horses or “passenger” travel (like when you man the guns in FO4 birds). I guess one could maybe consider power armor in FO4 to be kind of like a “vehicle”, but it works more or less the same as just walking around.
Oh, there is dragon riding in Skyrim, but it’s a mess and you don’t have that much control.
I’m surprised the engine can even handle space combat, honestly. And 360° movement as well, which would have been great for dragon riding in Skyrim. But most of the dragons in TES are dead, so we probably won’t get proper dragon riding in whatever TES: VI is.
(Sidenote about dragon riding/combat: Before Larian delved further into CRPGs, they made a regular third person RPG where you could play as a dragon. It was actually pretty fun. Still didn’t have full control, and it was only in certain sections, but it was entertaining. Divinity II: Director’s Cut, in case anyone’s interested. Don’t know how well it’s aged, but I enjoyed it a few years ago.)
FO4 power armor was close to a vehicle as they got but that might as well been horse code for all I know.
It does suck they can’t do vehicles since it would be nice to have a motorcycle in Fallout or a mad max car.
Oh and Larians entire back catalog is great. They were definitely eurojank back then but Divine Divinity and Div2 is good games.
Power Armor in FO4 is actually classed as furniture in the engine, IIRC
Lol that’s great. Like that train in FO3 that was some NPC’s head
There have been a couple of mods for Fallout 4 and New Vegas to add vehicles. IIRC the only one that wasn’t just an object floating across the ground was in that big expansion mod made by sex perverts, I forget what it’s called. New something?
This is great. Amidst all the comparisons and issues with Starfield, I am learning about so many other good space exploration games in these discussions haha
Here’s a good list of space games I personally love for one reason or another:
- X3 Terran Conflict
- Elite: Dangerous
- Wing Commander
- Freelancer
- X4
- RimWorld*
- FTL
- Star Trek: Bridge Commander
- Artemis (basically bridge commander but not themed, not single player and free)
*RimWorld admittedly requires some heavy modification to make it an actual space game, but the mods I use are good enough that I can count it as such.
Thank you for the detailed list!
But Skyrim, Witcher 3 and Mass Effect series are here to stay.
I’m no gaming expert or Bethesda fanboy, but didn’t someone the other day confirm that there is actual space travel in the game, it just takes days to get to another planet?
No, just that there are no invisible walls. After 7 hours of flying, she reached a paper-cutout of the planet.
I see. In that case I fully expect someone to make a ‘open cities’ mod for systems. If you can reach the billboards it should be possible to create a transition to planet space. Maybe.
But then we’d need something for faster flight inside a system. Like E:D does for example. I Won’t spend 7hrs traveling from planet to planet just for the immersion :D
You can fly in space towards the planets you can see. When you get there, you won’t be able to land and will be able to fly straight through the planet itself.
Planets outside of the fast travel menu aren’t really planets
Lol, that’s actually fucking hilarious.
The engine works by having square areas of playable in-game sections called cells. Unless the devs created enough cells between planets, and have them in the same world space, for a player to travel in that’s not possible.
That sounds exactly like the old Morrowind loading system. It was relatively seamless at the time for traveling about outdoors, sans the mini loading between these cells. It used to take a few seconds back in the day it was released but with modern SSDs it takes a fraction of a second.
Oblivion and Skyrim made this for the most part invisible. But loading times for indoor transitions still existed.
I am curious and exited to hear what tricks they have used.
Theres nothing in the engine reqiring to fill every cell between two cells. Might as well be empty space, or cells with random generated terrain.
Also how are they doing the ship interior cell? Loading a cell without removing the old? Why aren’t they using the same thing for interior windows in houses then?
They do for some, I think it’s to avoid unwanted AI interactions if something happens inside the house.
Aw. I was hoping to see him seamlessly fly to the Volii system, seamlessly fly to Volii Alpha, seamlessly land on the Neon landing pad, seamlessly enter the Bayu Plaza and, seamlessly interact with dozens of NPCs, many of whom have branching dialogue trees, and seamlessly loot the ever-loving crap out of hundreds of interactable objects.
If people want that, why don’t they play Elite Dangerous?
The more I’m playing starfield, the more I’m considering it. Starfield is doing a really good job of reinvigorating my excitement for the other games that have done literally everything better in the past lol
I loved the game and put 1000hrs in it but I wouldn’t recommended it anymore. Its simply past its golden age. Frontier seem to have given up on it. Its pretty much in maintenance mode after they half assed the space leg DLC and mostly ended community goals. They didn’t even include walking around in your own ship.
Its now the vibe of a MMO on its last legs. I would love to see it spark back to life, but the devs would have to pull out the big guns.
The worst thing for elite was being made by frontier as they are now. Frontier now is just a tycoon simulator game generator, that’s all they care about. It’s like the FIFA of the tycoon games… spit out another one every year or two and who gives a rats ass about the stuff we already made or haven’t completed.
I loved what elite wanted to be, I hate what the bean counters did to it…
People shit on star citizen for their dev cycle, but elite took the worse route in my opinion: they released a minimally viable product and then intended on building it into something bigger, but got cheap/lazy and just accepted that what they have out is “good enough” so they dumped all the internal ship plans (braben spoke about boarding ships and piracy on foot in a ship, that kind of thing.) They dumped so much of the simulation stuff and just stuck with the BGS… it’s frustrating to see what could have been.
Yeah, i still play it sometimes, but i think the same
How’s the Thargoid war going, both game play and story? They just started the system where they can take over a system last time I played.
Elite’s biggest issue is that it never really knew what kind of kame it wanted to be. An MMO? There aren’t enough multiplayer features for that. A (mostly) single-player space experience? It’s too shallow with no story, so it won’t satisfy the RPG fans. A space “simulator” where you just have fun flying ships? It’s probably closest to that, except you can’t fly any ship you want, and in fact it takes dozens of hours of grind to be able to switch things out so they’re fresh and you have more fun with the game again. And the simulation is very simplistic and not all that fun either, so it’s not for hardcore simulation fans either.
And because of this approach it has a bad combination of features that not only won’t fully satisfy either of the potential target groups; they also often work against each other. For example the multiplayer component is a dealbraker for me: I want a truly SP game where I can dictate how I play it - where I can mod it, or at least use cheats to find my own pacing, fly different ships on a whim, whatever. But the game simply won’t allow that.
But it’s also not a fully-fledged MMO where you could build (or at least own) systems/planets/bases whatever with your clan and compete against others for … idk, something.
And, again, it’s just not a story game that you could play from start to finish for the storytelling and worlbuilding.
Really sad, because the potential is there to have any (or perhaps even at least two) of those types of games.
I know, late for the party. Know what else has “seamless” flying from space to surface?
This tiny FOSS game here nobody heard of before: Pioneer Space Sim
Yes it is nowhere state of the art in looks but considering it’s very slow development from what’s mostly a one dev show I find that a lot more impressive.
Also yay for orbital mechanics.
