Starfield’s Planets Are Covered In Thousands Of Dead Creatures

Edgelord_Of_Tomorrow@lemmy.world to Games@lemmy.world – 165 points –
Why Starfield’s Planets Are Covered In Thousands Of Dead Creatures
kotaku.com.au

"Just upgrade your PC"

37

Highlights:

  • Starfield's open world is made of procedural copypasta.
  • Prey species can't or won't escape predators.
  • Predators routinely wipe out their own food supply, yet somehow haven't gone extinct.

I watched some predators kill their prey and then just left it. Didn't even have an animation to eat it.

Right? Just update the behavior to stop and eat after killing one. Have the herd run away.

I don't think the Creation/Ganebryo engine is capable of such complexity.

Skyrim moddeds managed it, Bethesda is the ones lacking the ability to make it happen.

Nah it’s just a skill issue, Steam Workshop modders have been carrying the franchises of incompetent studios like Bethesda and Paradox for ages and as others here have stated, they’ve already modded this problem away within the first week of this game being on Steam.

Just like how the traffic manager mod for Cities Skylines always updates only days after all the usually pointless shit Paradox keeps doing to their games’ mechanics every other week in those stupid nickel-and-diming “patches”, because they already know the other “sick man of the gaming industry” isn’t smart enough to implement speed limits, make roundabouts act like roundabouts, make cars honor emergency vehicle sirens, set up vehicle restrictions for industrial/maintenance roads or stop virtual vehicles from using only one lane on a 3-lane highway or EMTs from collectively booking it for a tiny downtown road that cycles about 3 ambulances per green when there’s an on-ramp right next to their hospital. There’s a reason why Cities Skylines has such negative reviews on the Amazon order page for its Switch cartridge compared to its Steam page; with Nintendo sending ninjas after anyone who so much as looks at their IPs funny, there is no such opportunity for modders to cover Paradox’s ass there. Steam’s encouragement of crowdsourced, third-party bug fixes is the only reason Paradox is relevant, and also why Bethesda is.

25 years in the making!

Extra polishing will need 25 more years. Just in time for Elder scrolls V Ultimate Mega Super Ultra Universal Anniversary Remastered Remake Extreme to release.

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Describes the ai present in every sandbox or open world game ever

STALKER had a very neat AI ecosystem. Everything (including humans) is quite aggressive so they all keep each other in check without overpowering the other. Even the weather was aggressive.

There are random YouTubers who have designed more sophisticated ecologies with functional feedback loops.

The problem is though is that random chance will eventually result in some species going extinct, so either you have to spawn new ones in to replace them, and so have a check for loss of population, or just allow that to happen. The current implementation though is entry level first year student developer sophisticated.

Those random YouTubers make those ecologies with the explicit purpose of simulating an ecology in a totally closed environment, not as an additional side piece to a game.

Not even to mention how a functioning ecology can never properly exist where a player is involved. Players will just kill things without any rhyme or reason to.

I watched a massive alien war happen. Roughly 3 bigger animals attack a horde of 12 critters. Then, another 3 vs 12 battle happened nearby, followed by ANOTHER 3 VS 12.

This kept happening for at least 10 minutes as everywhere I went, there was animals fighting and a trail of bodies being left.

That's pretty dope. I hope at some point there's ground vehicles to speed up ground exploration (since we can't actually fly the ships........)

The game probably can't load the levels fast enough to allow ground vehicles. As it is it takes time to load the landing animation.

Iunno I could see them adding some sort of tiny 4x4 or even a motorcycle. Could even make it so you have to keep it in a hab on your ship so it makes sense it spawns when you land.

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well for me i'm mostly just seeing barren lands that ain't worth exploring

Or undiscovered temples surrounded by alien looking monoliths, surrounded by science and industrial complexes.

Yeah they need to dial the predator/prey action down a bit. But it hasn't been that weird IME. I mean you're on an alien world with alien flora and fauna, that's the remarkable part not that there are a lot of creatures fighting.

I would have had no complaints about this game if it was released a decade ago. Two decades ago even then I would have significantly more time to waste on it and be more forgiving, on top of it being legitimately state of the art.

You'd be more forgiving of a game decades ahead of anything released at the time? Yeah, no shit. Y'all really need to chill on the ridiculous hyperbole. Starfield has a lot of problems, but it's unmistakably a modern game.

Even a decade ago i would laugh out loud every time i saw these dead ass expressionless npc's and their clunky ai. Gta 5 released 10 years ago. But a small indie developer like Bethesda can't be bothered to make their games better

GTA V is one of the most successful games ever made. Not exactly the norm of the time period.

I wish they would just use modern game engine / build a new engine that let people have inventories rather than having to teleport things from chests hidden under the world, and allowed animating of faces.

They keep pushing the engine they have past its breaking point and then it shows.

It is not a modern game in any way. It's just Fallout 4 in space, which was Skyrim with retro futurism.

It's once again a giant shallow pond.

If this game was released 1,400 years ago, I'd have no complaints also.

Of course it’s a flop, it’s Bethesda. Not particularly known for their quality control

Gotta find something to complain about don't we? If it isn't hyper realistic, and has zero bugs, super interesting, and smart AI, must be trash...

Well yeah. It isn't an indy title so you would expect them to do something.