Modders Say 'Starfield' Can't Be Fixed...

Follow my other channels or I'll make you play more Starfield: linktr.ee/lukestephens

Bethesda modders not being able to fix the game is the gaming equivalent to the smartest kid in class panicking during a test they studied for

You know it's bad when Bethesda's best employees can't fix the game.

I saw on Steam earlier they had some kind of awards for different games and Starfield of all things got "most innovative gameplay" I just started laughing lmao

Outer Wilds apparently had to deal with the floating point error (its game world is a seamless solar system) and did so by moving the world around the character rather than the reverse. The character was always at the center of the game's world.

You can't fix something that doesn't exist. - Exploration - RPG - Meaningful story Doesn't exist in Starfield

You know it's bad when even modders are done lmaoo

It blows my mind that planet exploration in this game is akin to what we had in mass effect 2. And at least in mass effect we had a vehicle. The main difference being that instead of hand crafted fishbowls With three points of interest, BGS gave us Procedurally generated fishballs with three points of interest.

Goddammit. I'm Bethesda game veteran so I knew all along we weren't going to get good storytelling or deep roleplaying opportunities, and I was okay with that. The two things I was counting on was A) a good exploration experience and B) modders going crazy and using the game as a basis for amazing stuff. Then the game comes out and I learn that Bethesda failed at the two things they're actually supposed to be very good at. How do you make essentially the same game for twenty years, earning critical acclaim, a loyal fanbase and financial success, and still somehow fail to understand what you're doing right?

Bethesda just went one step further and not only let modders fix their game but their whole engine. Todd really is a visionary.

Starfield had so much potential. The best way I've described it is Bethesda wanted to give the modders an open sandbox...but they expected the modders to bring the sand too.

TLDR; one of the problems with Starfield, in his opinion, is the fishbowl effect when you load into a planet. And this problem is something he would really like to see fixed but it isn't possible due to how the game is built. He spends the rest of the time explaining the specifics.

I played starfield for the first time in 3 months today and there still aren’t city maps. The fact that a flat render couldn’t be implemented in that time makes me believe there will be nothing beyond shattered space… whatever TF that ends up being.

Modders should not make Bethesda’s life easier.

I think its important to put into context the issue that much smaller studios with Hello Games and Frontier Developments were able to achieve seamless massive scale planets over 6 years ago. With Bethesda’s size and countless other studios to get assistance from, it was absolutely a solvable problem they thought they didn’t need to solve.

A good way to visualize floats for those wondering.. Imagine you have 5 whole numbers, and 1 decimal point. You can arrange them however you want to make numbers, but the catch is the decimal point. You can put it at the front and make a really small number like .00001 Or you can put it near the end and get a really big number, like 10000. But you can't have both at the same time. Aka, you can have 0.1 or 98754, but you can't have 98754.1 This is basically how floats work, but they use binary and some low-level wizardry beyond the scope of a youtube comment xP EDIT: This is just a simplified example. Real floats use 32bits of information and can store numbers MUCH larger than 10000, but eventually you will reach a point where you can have big numbers, or precision, but not both.

As a software developer I am absolutely horrified about the way you explained the way floating points work. :volcano-green-lava-orange::face-fuchsia-wide-eyes:

Todd: We made this game for modders Modders: So you're going to make the game modder friendly? You won't randomly update causing all the mods to break? You're going to make file organization easy to use and listen to our suggestions? Todd: Nope! It's friendly to modders cause it's empty and boring!

My problem is that even if we get whole huge planets to explore, I just see no reason to do such a thing because it would just be empty and devoid of anything interesting.

EVE handled the "distance" float thing by having "grids". If you went to far, it would make a new grid with a new center. This did cause SOME issues where some grids could be manipulated to make things invisible. (if two grids were near each other, you couldn't see anything in the other grid), but they made the grids much larger and able to merge, and it was mostly solved, or at least, too difficult to abuse.