Technically outdated? On the contrary, Starfield has made a huge impression on our editor in at least one respect – and it’s still months after release.
Starfield has broken promises, left dreams unfulfilled and failed to realize potential.It is one of the most controversial games of recent years.And there are objective criticisms of Bethesda’s open-world role-playing game.
But Starfield is also technically damn impressive. How so? The answer lies in space.
An often overlooked strength
Shortly after release, the physics in Starfield were actually an issue. When 20,000 potatoes rolled out of an airlock, the internet held its breath for a moment:
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But the amazement didn’t last longand quickly Starfield’s gameplay and technical weaknesses were back in the spotlight. And yes, I understand that – I mean, have you seen the water effects?
Bethesda truly did not cover itself in glory with this one, even though I remain convinced to this day that behind all the controversy, there is solid to good role-playing game I’m still amazed at how detail-oriented the programmers at Starfield were when it comes to simulating thousands of tiny objects in the game.
You may have heard that Bethesda Softworks’ open worlds have been based on the Creation Engine since Skyrim (an evolution of the Gamebyte Engine, which was launched in 1997). And you may even know that the Creation Engine is particularly good at remembering the position of each individual object, thereby creating a persistence that only Star Citizen is currently trying to beat.
In any case, I have never seen scenes like the ones I recently noticed in the DLC Shattered Space in any other game:
The wrong focus?
Now the question must be asked about the sense of such gimmicks if Starfield has simultaneously uncreatively designed planets out of thin air and has a disappointing approach to the spaceship passages (keyword: fast travel).
Wouldn’t the development resources responsible for object physics have been better spent elsewhere? I say: yes.
But I also say: other developers are welcome to take at least this aspect of Starfield as a model.
What other studios should not imitate, though, is how inconsistent Starfield is when it comes to physics. On the one hand, there are some truly impressive interactions between hundreds of billiard balls On the other hand, the game lags far behind the competition when it comes to destruction effects and NPC reactions.
So has Starfield since the “bucket on head” times of Skyrim, and it is setting new benchmarks, especially in the weightless space. At the same time, however, it has the same problem here that makes it one of the weaker Bethesda titles in so many areas: It doesn’t fully realize its great potential.
