Starfield

[mmmark]

I’ve never thought about if a game I’m playing is 60fps but I must have played some. Which means I must have gone from one to the other but never noticed ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 

 

I definitely notice when it drops below 30 though Gotham Knights. 

[Nag]

I think you need to get with the program bud.... 30fps in 2023 is literally unplayable.

[DANGERMAN]

7 hours ago, one-armed dwarf said:

In what sense?

 

I'm talking about when a game seems to be CPU bound in a more game design sense. eg, physics, AI, and whatever procedural and simulation elements this thing is going for.

 

Maybe that isn't actually the case with Starfield and it's just graphics optimising, but taking PC completely out of the equation, if someone where to ask would I be ok with them cutting back on their game design to escape a CPU bottleneck, I'll take the 30fps. Like that is a problem which can't easily be fixed with a performance mode (maybe make the draw distance a lot worse could work, I dunno)

 

TOTK is a good example of that too. Tons of systems in that game

I don't think it's doing all that much all at once tbh. You're moving slowly enough that it's not like it can't background wildlife movement on the other side of the planet. The CPUs on the consoles are pretty solid, I think they should be ok, the odd dip sure, but general play could be fine (I say this having never made a game in my life obviously, but it doesn't look that much of a leap).

 

On the 40fps, I do think that should be an option more often, but I don't agree that it's almost as good as 60

[one-armed dwarf]

I also don't want to give any impression of subject matter expertise, to be clear I have none. Or at least it doesn't go much beyond looking at a framerate graph when my own CPU is bottlenecking something. But I find it a reasonable guess that with its ambition (having skimmed through the video now, it's doing a lot) it could be simulating enough stuff that can't simply be scaled down without turning it into a different game.

 

DF have come to that conclusion anyway

 

 

Also in general I think it's exciting when a game pushes things so hard that it has to make a compromise like this to run on modern systems, it also means that it's a game that will age very well (60fps patch on ps5 pro/ps6, with all these same systems). Look at how long people played Skyrim after its release, that kinda longetivity.

[DANGERMAN]

Sure, and I'm not saying Starfield should be running at 30, Bethesda don't have the best record on performance, but regardless. However, I think you could make a game with this scope on these consoles and get it running at 60 (with open world drops), it's the ambition part I took issue with

 

With those quotes, they're very much the dumb extreme. However, they do make sense of someone's weird defensiveness on this issue, one I suspect they didn't have when Skyrim came out

[Maryokutai]

Even in relative terms in relation to the hardware they were designed for, I think Starfield looks incredibly more complex than Skyrim ever was. It's like comparing Tears of the Kindgom with Ocarina of Time – both push heir systems to their limits, but one is doing it just by being large and the other by incorporating so many different intertwining systems and mechanics that it's hard to believe it's not just falling apart.

 

Skyrim's big deal back then were the dragons, non-scripted boss encounters that had to work in plain fields, in dense ruins, against you alone or with NPCs etc. so basically a very specific challenge in terms of AI and pathfinding. In Starfield that system ist just a side effect of a perk you can choose, it's not limited to a part of planet, but an entire galaxy and it's a drop of water in the ocean of features in the game.

 

Of course none of us have played the game yet but just looking at what they've shown this is I think the most complex and ambitious production I've ever seen and I can believe that putting a game like that on a hardware with clear resource limits like a console would demand some compromises like a 30fps lock. 

[DANGERMAN]

I've clearly not explained myself well here 😅 not that any of you have to agree with me or anything, I just want to be clear I'm not knocking Bethesda. I suppose it boils down to, I don't see what Starfield is doing that isn't just the next evolution of what they've done before. The Xbox cpu isn't weak, we're not dealing with the Xbox One situation

 

I'm struggling to see why we'd have to get used to 30fps to get games like this. Maybe if/when I play it it'll be more apparent, and it is possible my opinion is just coloured by not being that impressed with what we've seen. They aren't running everything simultaneously, there isn't a cpu made that could cope with that, I'm not sure people would notice if other concessions were made, again with the massive caveat of not having played the game or being a developer, purely just looking from the outside 

 

 

Edit: it's the idea the penny needs to drop for games if this scope (not necessarily Starfield itself). That's how we get back to the 360/PS3 era of bad frame rates and tearing. There may be examples where the core reason the game is fun and interesting is what's causing an issue, but here I'm not seeing it. Scale back the scope a little and I'm not sure you get a vastly different game 

[one-armed dwarf]

I don't think it has to be as extreme as the doldrums of that era, PS2/xbox also had a lot of 30fps games but their performance and image quality was stable. It was mainly ps3 as I remember, and some 360 games pushing the HD envelope too far. PS3 was such a shit system to own for third party stuff.

 

Kinda my issue with this stuff is it can feel like 60fps is a bit of a dogma, and it feels like some issues are oversimplified. Scaling stuff back could be really complicated if, for instance, the reason that free-roaming exploring on a planet runs at 30 is because it is charting the position of the sun and moons in orbit to the planet you are on to calculate the global illuminated light, as well as the environment and day/night cycle. Outer Wilds did this and was hugely CPU limited on last gen systems, so even if the clockwork of Starfield isn't as intricate it is on the other hand much more vast in scale. There's ways that things like that could factor into gameplay in a way that couldn't easily be scaled back, look at what Zelda does with its weather systems, how wind affects your glider and can make smoke and fire move. It could factor into how it simulates and generates its flora and fauna

 

There's also a lot of state maintenance that these games do. Why they do it I dunno, and I know that they don't need to poll it every single seconds, but NPCs do have real schedules and even if they aren't in the viewport or current 'cell' that doesn't mean it might not be important. Some of that stuff seemingly needs to be queried from time to time. Do the NPCs in this game stay in their stations and just roam around, or do they also explore the systems? To be honest, I think it's the former or they would have told us. But even so I could see how a 'radiant' AI system would end up dramatically increasing the variables with multiple planets and intersecting questlines like this. It's a big part of why their games are so buggy after all, unintended consequences as NPC scripting from one questline collides with another cause a player performed quests in an order which had not been covered by QA.

 

To be honest, there's probably lots of sections that would run just fine on 60, but the way they word it makes it sound like it would not be that often and they didn't want the jarring juxtaposition of the game being 60 in a cave (for instance), but dropping down to 30 in space cause of how the physics are calculated with all the customisations you made to your ship. Which makes sense. At the same time, I wish console developers would actually just let the player go 'fuck it' and turn the limits off just to see, it would help a lot with backwards compatibility in the future as well

 

The thing is, these systems do have better CPUs but these CPUs also enable new design concepts with their increased power. Like how physics was such a thing in the early HD era and the gameplay impacts that had over the previous gen. The increase in open world games around that time as well was enabled by this, and I think there are arguments in favor and against going for a hard locked 60 on some games. If this was a DMC6 or Street Fighter 7 thread it would be a different argument happening, but it's a bethesda game so I think the spotlight makes a strong case for running at 30 (but 40 would be nice as well)

[mmmark]

 

[one-armed dwarf]

DF talked about the tech in the game, they also talk about the 30fps stuff

 

 

[Nag]

Did they talk about the sandwiches?

[one-armed dwarf]

They did actually, and in great detail 🥪

 

(object permenance, and its impact on CPU overhead. It's the sammichs fault it's 30

[DANGERMAN]

I'm still not sure I see the benefit of that 

[one-armed dwarf]

Huh

 

https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/23/23771828/microsoft-betheda-acquisition-starfield-playstation-exclusive

 

Sort of glad MS bought Bethesda now lol

[AndyKurosaki]

Apparently there will be no physical discs, it’s digital only. Retail versions come with just a code. Good luck anyone downloading a likely large game on a shit internet connection. 
 

That article also says that they’re not sure if the next Elder Scrolls will be Xbox exclusive, but it’s “5 years away anyway”. Fucking hell. They’ll be able to re-release Skyrim on PS6/ Xbox 2 Turbo Edition by then.

[DANGERMAN]

If I get it it'd be on pc anyway, but that's poor. I'm not liking that physical is being skipped for some bigger games now. I suspect it may be more of a thing on the xbox side

[Maryokutai]

Microsoft has been refusing to use discs with more than 100GB which I presume this game will easily top just for the sheer amount of audio and texture files. It's expected, but still disappointing to see how little they care about preservation. You could argue that the game version on the disc will be obsolete a month or two after release anyway, but it's more a matter of principle for me.

 

Ultimately this basically means subscribing to Gamepass for a year and hoping I can either finish it during that time or reach my personal saturation point, which is usually how I "complete" Bethesda games. But looking at the few Xbox games I've bought since Series X launched, I noticed none of them are first-party. Halo wasn't on the disc either, Hi-Fi Rush and Ghostwire were digital-only – pretty clear where they're headed over at MS.

[shinymcshine]

Does the 'Digital Only' reduce the likelihood of Day One huge patches - as I guess they can work on the final release much closed to release date compared to pressing & shipping discs ?

 

Furthermore I wonder if it's a greater hook to get people to sign up for Gamepass (and/or whether Gamepass Day One skew the physical demand / sales anyway).

 

Okay it's only a sliver of a silver lining....

[one-armed dwarf]

100GB feels like a bit of an excuse, like a boiled frog approach

 

100GB is going to become the normal size of a AAA video game, if it's not already

 

Maybe this is why '2 Discs' was a marketing bullet point for FFVII Rebirth. That game will be 200GB, and physical, and apparently that's about to become more rare

[retroed]