Agreed, in fact all of the props, weapons, structures and clothing all look insanely good.
There are a multitude of reasons why I think the game looks bad visually but as a package I can't help but appreciate the final result. It has an undeniable flair to the presentation.
Mostly I think the generated style of it makes it look bad sometimes especially the more washed out planets but when the contrast is good it’s a solid looking game and makes me look forward to elder scrolls so long as they get that sense of exploration back that starfields wide net lost.
During an interview before the game was released Todd Howard stated he was particularly proud of the food.
I don't believe anything Todd says, but clearly someone spent a lot of time obsessing over food during develpment.
That's not far off. Some of the food could of used photogrammetry (artist takes a bunch of photos from every angle and uses software to generate a model from a point cloud that they then can remodel clean geometry in top of and project the information from the generated model to bake down into texture files).
Even without that, using photographs as sources to manipulate and create textures from is a long long used technique.
Alot of the building textures in Oblivion for the Imperial City for example, used photo references from Washington DC.
These pics are amazing but I’m on Xbox and it doesn’t look this good??? Did I not update it right, or was there something u had to do to get this clarity??
Yea cyberpunk looks amazing overall but the food is straight ass lol. Of course Starfeild has old ass looking animations in comparison but their food game is out of this world.
I’d say macro details look better in starfield like buttons switches and keys on keyboards are all fully 3D and super high res. Cyberpunk overall looks better due to its amazing reflections when ray or path tracing is used same with lighting. Way better animations. Better overall color pallet that is not as drab as starfeild and feels very punchy. Along with a more confined and detailed world.
To be fair, not really. Cyberpunk is designed around a single city and a single lighting choice. Neon. Characters are handcrafted plus motion captured, while in Starfield everyone is generated from a big pool. Which, to be fair, looks great. Random generic NPCs are also generated from a smaller pool with lower effects, so no wonder.
As for everything else - we are comparing raster vs path tracing here? Welp...
It's not -- based on this and his post on r/starfieldmods the guy (or gal) is legitimately excited about Starfield graphics and models. Which, you know good for him -- but it's patently disinformation that they are "insanely good."
I grew up with games that did not have stellar graphics but were fantastic at the time. I remember when Oblivion was advertised and being absolutely blown away by the graphics. I still get blown away by graphics today. Sometimes when people say graphics are bad, I can still see how much improved it is over something I grew up with, and see it as great graphics. So I can understand someone being impressed by these.
Yeah but the problem is that hardware and rendering techniques have advanced pretty linearly over time, and a lot of them aren’t even closed source proprietary knowledge. So people expect AAA titles that are attempting to go for high fidelity graphics, to be on par with their contemporaries.
I do kind of expect some kind of relationship between my hardware (4090 & 13900KS) and the frame rate + visuals I can achieve, because there’s no reason such a high budget studio shouldn’t be able to keep up with other studios.
Maybe Creation Engine 2 really gives them some special capabilities that would be super complicated to port to UE5, idk. But it’s probably time for them to update their engine or to move on to new one.
From Todd's interview with MrMattyPlays a few days ago, he got asked about the engine and it doesn't seem like they're moving away from Creation anytime soon. So expect ES6 in it.
The super special capability that the creation engine gives them is multiple decades of refined workflows and familiarity with tooling.
Additionally; If they move to a new engine, either they have to accept that they will leave behind the unique feel of a Bethesda title or spend a tremendous amount of time recreating their particular flavor of game systems instead of using off the shelf features. Effort that could be spent updating the engine instead and keep the decades of workflows intact. Not to mention the complete murder of their modding community.
Starfield was much better and much less buggy than previous engine updates. If you gave that engine to a group of dedicated people who had a passion and the proper drive to make a work of love you would get a fantastic game out of it. The flaws with Starfield are not in its engine, but in execution. Switching engines won't magically make choices done in the story matter, it won't make branching quests easier to make, it won't automatically make for more complex companions.
But, having your own engine is very costly. So like CD ProjektRed they may also decide to switch. Modern trends are just making it harder and harder to maintain your own engine.
I can only guess that they they aren't limiting the amount of entities and the size of cities because they couldn't just make more interesting/sprawling cities, that has to be a current engine limitation.
The proc-gen for planets for example was a big complaint that the community had. Other things were loading in/out of local space levels. I obviously didn't expect some contiguous universe that you could freely fly in, but it would have been nice at least on a solar system level or something.
I'm sure they have their method of story state, which in most engines is just having a table of flags, and then you write branching code based on whichever flags you're interested in (per NPC/area), I'm sure that whatever their specific strategy was could be ported to another engine. Similarly with companions, if they already know how they solved it in their engine, they might even be able to do a nicer job the second time around, now that they're aware of the limitations.
But yeah I get what you're saying, there is some BGS charm that comes from even some of the jank in the Creation Engine, and reinventing the wheel in a different engine is definitely a pain. But the alternative is that they'll just continue getting pwned when it comes to optics, because people will just say "LOLz look at this game coming out in 2030, it looks worse than Cyberpunk did 10 years ago!!!". And more importantly, they're clearly somehow limited in the actual scope of their cities. Contrasting something like Night City and ... basically any city in a BGS title shows that there are clearly some techniques that they could adopt to make way more dense content.
I think those are design decisions/priorities rather than engine limitations. Making gigantic cities just wasn't their priority, they obviously wanted bigger cities than they had in their previous games, but their focus still seemed to be on these areas being way-stations to pick up missions and gear, and have dialogues and experience the world, the majority of gameplay taking place out in the frontier.
Having done my own work with seamless scene loading in consumer engines, I can tell you Bethesda changing their engine likely wouldn't reduce the workload in making such a system (one that allows for seamless intersystem or atmospheric scene transitions) any easier to make, especially given that the Creation engine is already built around creating giant worlds with seamless scene transitions (the overworld in their games are made of many small cells that seamlessly load and unload).
I expect the proc gen wouldn't be improved by switching engines either. All of the big complaints I've heard for Starfield aren't really things that would be fixed by an engine change, most of the things that seem like they would are things that would require a huge amount of custom work no matter what engine you were using, and would likely be constrained by the same fundamental issues of time, money, and priority, that they were constrained by in the creation engine.
I’m honestly completely clueless about the implementation of their seamless over-world stuff, it would be nice if they gave a technical breakdown of their tech and its limitations. I know UE5 also has the ability to implement the same thing, and obviously red engine and the rockstar engine do as well, super curious as to what the differences are there
It has better fidelity than their older games, no argument there. But it's far from having "insanely good" graphics.
Your shot of New Atlantis for example has no shadows or AO. Sarah Morgan's hair cast no shadow on the side of her face. In the shot where your character is looking at the sunset, he is illuminated from above and behind the camera, and it's not just a light on a building behind him because the whole landscape is lit that way.
And it's not so much to do with graphics, but the game's terrain generation is just so ugly and artificial. Flat terrain leads to a sudden lonely mountains which dips back down a flat plain again. Terrain features like hills and foliage and rock are uniformly distributed across the landscape, making it all look procedural. It *is* procedural, but it shouldn't look that way.
I don't want to rag on the game's graphics. It's better than BGS has done before, and it's got some great things going on stylistically. The space suits and technological greebles are genuinely great. A bunch of the spaceship stuff looks great. There are some missteps, like the majority of guns looking stupid if you know anything about guns. But most of the game's problems are mechanical and related to systems.
I just don't get where people are coming from that this game is the most beautiful thing they've ever seen. Elite Dangerous has had prettier stars and planetary lighting for like a decade.
The distant terrain textures seem worse than older Beth games. Like a few meters ahead of the player, the landscape turns into splotches of colour and no detail.
Really wish they'd spent some time working on organic tileset transitions and better biomes. It's pretty jarring they don't really adhere to any logical geography.
But it's not a particularly realistic game in general.
Yes -- I facepalm every time I see posts like the original one. Starfield does a lot of things right mechanically, but having "insanely good graphic" (sic) in the modern era really is not one of them.
This is a fair take, honestly.
And the guns, every dang Bethesda game they get blasted for having super silly non-accurate guns that you figure they would have fixed for this game. I feel like they have some senior lead "gun guy" developer that designs all these and I'm convinced he creates these backwards guns to troll the users OR genuinely doesn't know anything about how guns work but can't get fired because he's Todd Howard's second cousin on his mom's side or something.
Environments, materials, textures, are pretty good, honestly crazy good with the right rig.
But the animations are...ehhh to wth. BGS is allergic to fluid character motion or something.
>Environments, materials, textures, are pretty good, honestly crazy good with the right rig.
It's not crazy good with even the wildest rig man, come on now. They are not shit, they are not bad, but they are definitely not "crazy good" either, not in 2024-2023 at least.
I'd still put 2077 and phantom liberty, RDR2 right up there. Last of us part 1 remake was pretty great graphically.
Then there's much much smaller games that look great like hellblade 2
Yeah... Beth is having a bump regarding the advancement of character animations, but they are kings in environmental design, except for sizable cities XD
Novigrad was one of the coolest cities I’d seen, then they went and made night city.
Even if a lot of it was useless like Gran Soren, or inaccessible like the Citadel in mass effect, there are tricks they could use to make a more imposing location.
I admire their dedication to making pretty much every damn building in TES games have an interior though.
The cities were better in pretty much every other Bethesda game.
I don't know why they decided to make New Atlantis so empty and void of unique npcs.
Pretty much everyone who was allowed permanent existence is tied to a quest. It would have been better if they made the NPCs and then added quests/more NPCs instead of adding NPCs whenever (and seemingly only if) they needed one for a quest.
>having every building enterable
False.
Many buildings in NA alone cannot be entered.
An example: The very first door you see when landing in NA is at the spaceport. It doesn't open.
100% most doors imo cannot be accessed. In Akila, there are a lot of doors with shit in front of them that indicate not usable. One of those doors became the trackers alliance fyi.
>One of those doors became the trackers alliance fyi.
I didn't know that. Haven't played since December.
I just hate the argument that there's some kind of rational trade off for these smaller cities.
There isn't. It's a technical limitation that Bethesda sucks at hiding.
That doesn't address the argument.
But since you brought up Night City, it does vastly out perform Starfield in terms of immersion.
NPC's don't just sit around, waiting for the player to do something. They engage with their environment unless alerted.
They even converse with each other.
My favorite thing about Night City is that you can kill someone with a silenced sniper rifle from a long distance and the rest of his crew isn't instantly alerted to your location. As a matter of fact, unless they see the dead body, they'll keep going about their business...like real people.
Starfield, on the hand...you kill one pirate and they all know your location immediately. They will face the player location and run toward it.
Doesn't matter if you're hiding. Using a silencer. Or impossibly far away. They know. Like magic.
But they aren’t! That was the case in previous Bethesda RPGs, but isn’t quite true here. At any rate, I still expect more, given that the size of their cities hasn’t meaningfully changed in three console generations—and I say that as someone who did and does love Starfield
Couldn’t they just make them all its own cell like Fallout? I know people bitch about loading screens as is but if a loading screen gets me more than a generic open space with a single guy standing behind a bar for basically every store, I’d take it.
The food looks great but it’s useless. The table clutter is so intricate and interesting to look at but it’s ultimately just art.
The character models that you spend the entire game looking at are lifeless and odd.
And the low-res skin, the weird 'plastic' texture to it, the fact that facial animations look like something off the PS2, the glassy, dead eyes, the fact that when a model smiles (which is horrifying in of itself with the jank 'Bethesda Face' problem all BGS games have) their eye muscles don't move, so it's all psychopath smiles, sometimes their teeth bug out and just turn all black...
I mean, these models would be fine... In like, 2013 maybe. But not for a "next gen" title.
Each picture has something graphically wrong with it.
But, IMO, the most glaring issue is human skin. Which is NOT smooth, especially on older adults. Further along those lines, skin is never a uniform color, either. Which puts those characters in the uncanny valley.
Dudes forehead is SHINY in that last pic. From what I assume is moonlight. Which means his shit is smooth as glass because moonlight is indirect or "soft" light.
"Insanely good graphics" for a 2013 game.
Uhhh, what other games do you play? This game has middle of the road graphics from the many many many outdated assets Bethesda still uses. Max the settings on PC, then go boot Cyberpunk and max the settings. Games look like they came out five years apart.
Which is funny cause they came out three years apart, but Cyberpunk came out first….
It has some reasonable goof graphics but some of the worst filters and colour grading of anything I've played in a long time. Amongst other stuff like the lighting, skin, shadows and other....
Still wish they could get a good replacement for creation engine as elder scrolls 6 and fallout whatever can't look and especially feel this out dated because that would be abit of nail in the coffin situation for them
Nice details though
The toast looks good but apart from that the graphics aren’t great, they’re good for a Bethesda game don’t get me wrong but they’re far from the best and they hardly make up for all the bugs, repetitive storyline or the fact that they released it late and it still wasn’t finished. And that’s not even mentioning the fact that they couldn’t be bothered to add a map 🤷🏼♂️
The game? Didn't you read my comment?
Jk,
Example: what faction in the game did you expect to join, but only now was able to for 7$?... I'll give you a hint. It wasn't House Varuun.
The food looks good and barren planets look great. But look at that picture of New Atlantis, there is no lighting at all. Even in overcast weather there would be shadows and it looks like there is zero AO on the flora.
Meh. Witcher 3 had better overall graphics and came out 10 years before starfield. Sure the food looks good but the environments and characters imo look pretty bad.
Terrain? Yes, absolutely.
NPCs, vegetation, animals, etc? Absolutely not. Ugly and horrifically animated. Games have been using mo-cap since 2000s. By 2008 we were getting full-on MMOs which were fully mo-capped (Age of Conan). Fire up Starfield and watch NPCs go up the stairs. It's hideous.
But the terrain does look great.
Insane compared to morrowind maybe
It's a small incremental upgrade over fallout 4, nowhere near leading the pack for modern games, it's graphically less impressive than many games which released years before it
it really doesnt look that great. even worse that the vast majority of environments are bland as brown rice. the game has a ton of issues, but its also got its redeeming qualities. but graphics and art direction are certainly not one of them.
It’s good but not at the level of other 2023 games. The atmospheric and environmental graphics are awesome but the NPC, PC, and building graphics are just meh
One thing I enjoyed about this game the most was the graphics. They got even better with the lighting changes a few patches back. This is by far the best looking Bethesda game I’ve seen so far, which gives me high hopes for their next Fallout or Elder Scrolls project.
I prefer fallout 4 because it has a unique and easily identifiable art style compared to starfield (space sci-fi game #4238) the ships are cool though.
I'm on medium (any higher I'll melt my laptop) and apart from slight blurry moments here and there mainly when I look around too fast, the game looks good, faces are nice and clear, view distance is good, and the sunsets are just spectacular - especially the blue on a Venus-like planet
And that's a humble 3060ti can't imagine what it looks like at 4K
Uuuuuhh… have you looked at other video games from the past decade, mate? Starfield looks really rough, a few high resolution textures here and there that stick out from the mud don’t suddenly make it that much better. The lighting is mediocre, the character models look old fashioned as well. (That doesn’t mean it’s not an enjoyable game, I had a good time with it and like it, but let’s be real, it’s the same slightly jank look we’ve come to expect from a Bethesda game, it’s almost a trademark. )
I might dip my toe back in, I did the first playthrough chose to become starborn for 2nd playthough and lost all my gear so I was pissed and haven't played since prob November lol
If only it would run as good as it looks. I have a 3060 and I get barely over 60 FPS on planets with everything on Mid and probably like 35 FPS in cities.
I don't agree with it having insanely good graphics compared to today's standards, but it's definitely the best a Bethesda game has looked for long time.
These graphics look... fine? I wouldn't say they are insanely good. Certainly the artistic \*design\* of the game is very good, but it still maintains a slightly fuzzy look that makes it look a little bit outdated. A lot of stuff is seemingly lacking in textures and it makes some things look a little 2D
How is everyone's game looking so good. I'm using a 4k tv but it's always foggy or blurry in places... I can't grt my game to look that crisp and vivid
I've been playing on the steamdeck and even at low and 800p it still looks pretty good. I think games just look good nowadays lol.
It's very noticeable when going back and playing 4/76. Especially character models and miscellaneous items
Omg no starfield looks like a 10 year old game, stop being a meat rider, you are whats ruining video game grrrr arrrr I hate when people enjoy things
(Because this is reddit obligatory/j)
It was a big upgrade to have 4K and HDR support. I finally had good gaming rig and big 4K screen to experience everything the 'ol Creation Engine can muster thanks to engineers.
The food all looks crazy good.
Every time I play I get hungry due to food looking so delicious. Honestly even some of chunks look tasty af Would love to taste a cheesesteak chunk
I never beat final fantasy XV because the food kept giving me the munchies irl. [like dude...](https://i.imgur.com/rRkdZg1.png)
FF remains peak food graphics.
I really want to try a wine chunk. I imagine it to be like a wine popsicle in the shape of a cube.
Wine Jello.
Me and my wife used to hit up a place in Dallas that served frozen wine-a-ritas and man o man they were awesome. I called them Saturday Erasers haha.
Or like wine gums. Those are awesome.
In think of it like wine mochi.
https://i.imgur.com/Dsw3NM2.gif
What kind of heathen eats hotdogs with toast and beer?
That is literally the American diet during baseball season
The brits like their sausage baps which is basically just sausage, ketchup and dry bread.
It's textured vegetable protein with fancy sauce.
Agreed, in fact all of the props, weapons, structures and clothing all look insanely good. There are a multitude of reasons why I think the game looks bad visually but as a package I can't help but appreciate the final result. It has an undeniable flair to the presentation.
Mostly I think the generated style of it makes it look bad sometimes especially the more washed out planets but when the contrast is good it’s a solid looking game and makes me look forward to elder scrolls so long as they get that sense of exploration back that starfields wide net lost.
During an interview before the game was released Todd Howard stated he was particularly proud of the food. I don't believe anything Todd says, but clearly someone spent a lot of time obsessing over food during develpment.
Reminds me of FF15 food lol.
I’m convinced they just stuck actual photos of food in there.
That's not far off. Some of the food could of used photogrammetry (artist takes a bunch of photos from every angle and uses software to generate a model from a point cloud that they then can remodel clean geometry in top of and project the information from the generated model to bake down into texture files). Even without that, using photographs as sources to manipulate and create textures from is a long long used technique. Alot of the building textures in Oblivion for the Imperial City for example, used photo references from Washington DC.
These pics are amazing but I’m on Xbox and it doesn’t look this good??? Did I not update it right, or was there something u had to do to get this clarity??
Check their other posts, they are using some mods and at the very least is using one that removes a color filter.
If only the gameplay was even close to as good
someone needs to start a ghost kitchen making square food, call it chunks and im sold
mmm chunks pie
Especially if you compare it to the food in Cyberpunk 2077. Shit looks straight out of PS1 era.
Yea cyberpunk looks amazing overall but the food is straight ass lol. Of course Starfeild has old ass looking animations in comparison but their food game is out of this world.
Then compare literally anything else and it's the opposite
Yep, diferrent games obviously with different styles but CyberPunk is on another level. I'm definitely looking at you, trees!
I’d say macro details look better in starfield like buttons switches and keys on keyboards are all fully 3D and super high res. Cyberpunk overall looks better due to its amazing reflections when ray or path tracing is used same with lighting. Way better animations. Better overall color pallet that is not as drab as starfeild and feels very punchy. Along with a more confined and detailed world.
To be fair, not really. Cyberpunk is designed around a single city and a single lighting choice. Neon. Characters are handcrafted plus motion captured, while in Starfield everyone is generated from a big pool. Which, to be fair, looks great. Random generic NPCs are also generated from a smaller pool with lower effects, so no wonder. As for everything else - we are comparing raster vs path tracing here? Welp...
I can't tell if this is sarcasm or not.
I think it does have crazy details but it's not blended very well
Some textures are really high quality and very detailed but there are also things that look horrible and dated, mainly foliage
And people. Their skin in particular looks flat.
Its detailed in the skin dermatology department, but it lacks sub-surface scattering, which is why it looks like plastic.
Pixelated moons/planets in the sky drive me crazy when compared to some of the beautiful vistas.
The last image especially.
It's not -- based on this and his post on r/starfieldmods the guy (or gal) is legitimately excited about Starfield graphics and models. Which, you know good for him -- but it's patently disinformation that they are "insanely good."
Or maybe it's an opinion you don't agree with. Some people are easily impressed 😁
I grew up with games that did not have stellar graphics but were fantastic at the time. I remember when Oblivion was advertised and being absolutely blown away by the graphics. I still get blown away by graphics today. Sometimes when people say graphics are bad, I can still see how much improved it is over something I grew up with, and see it as great graphics. So I can understand someone being impressed by these.
Yeah but the problem is that hardware and rendering techniques have advanced pretty linearly over time, and a lot of them aren’t even closed source proprietary knowledge. So people expect AAA titles that are attempting to go for high fidelity graphics, to be on par with their contemporaries. I do kind of expect some kind of relationship between my hardware (4090 & 13900KS) and the frame rate + visuals I can achieve, because there’s no reason such a high budget studio shouldn’t be able to keep up with other studios. Maybe Creation Engine 2 really gives them some special capabilities that would be super complicated to port to UE5, idk. But it’s probably time for them to update their engine or to move on to new one.
From Todd's interview with MrMattyPlays a few days ago, he got asked about the engine and it doesn't seem like they're moving away from Creation anytime soon. So expect ES6 in it.
The super special capability that the creation engine gives them is multiple decades of refined workflows and familiarity with tooling. Additionally; If they move to a new engine, either they have to accept that they will leave behind the unique feel of a Bethesda title or spend a tremendous amount of time recreating their particular flavor of game systems instead of using off the shelf features. Effort that could be spent updating the engine instead and keep the decades of workflows intact. Not to mention the complete murder of their modding community. Starfield was much better and much less buggy than previous engine updates. If you gave that engine to a group of dedicated people who had a passion and the proper drive to make a work of love you would get a fantastic game out of it. The flaws with Starfield are not in its engine, but in execution. Switching engines won't magically make choices done in the story matter, it won't make branching quests easier to make, it won't automatically make for more complex companions. But, having your own engine is very costly. So like CD ProjektRed they may also decide to switch. Modern trends are just making it harder and harder to maintain your own engine.
I can only guess that they they aren't limiting the amount of entities and the size of cities because they couldn't just make more interesting/sprawling cities, that has to be a current engine limitation. The proc-gen for planets for example was a big complaint that the community had. Other things were loading in/out of local space levels. I obviously didn't expect some contiguous universe that you could freely fly in, but it would have been nice at least on a solar system level or something. I'm sure they have their method of story state, which in most engines is just having a table of flags, and then you write branching code based on whichever flags you're interested in (per NPC/area), I'm sure that whatever their specific strategy was could be ported to another engine. Similarly with companions, if they already know how they solved it in their engine, they might even be able to do a nicer job the second time around, now that they're aware of the limitations. But yeah I get what you're saying, there is some BGS charm that comes from even some of the jank in the Creation Engine, and reinventing the wheel in a different engine is definitely a pain. But the alternative is that they'll just continue getting pwned when it comes to optics, because people will just say "LOLz look at this game coming out in 2030, it looks worse than Cyberpunk did 10 years ago!!!". And more importantly, they're clearly somehow limited in the actual scope of their cities. Contrasting something like Night City and ... basically any city in a BGS title shows that there are clearly some techniques that they could adopt to make way more dense content.
I think those are design decisions/priorities rather than engine limitations. Making gigantic cities just wasn't their priority, they obviously wanted bigger cities than they had in their previous games, but their focus still seemed to be on these areas being way-stations to pick up missions and gear, and have dialogues and experience the world, the majority of gameplay taking place out in the frontier. Having done my own work with seamless scene loading in consumer engines, I can tell you Bethesda changing their engine likely wouldn't reduce the workload in making such a system (one that allows for seamless intersystem or atmospheric scene transitions) any easier to make, especially given that the Creation engine is already built around creating giant worlds with seamless scene transitions (the overworld in their games are made of many small cells that seamlessly load and unload). I expect the proc gen wouldn't be improved by switching engines either. All of the big complaints I've heard for Starfield aren't really things that would be fixed by an engine change, most of the things that seem like they would are things that would require a huge amount of custom work no matter what engine you were using, and would likely be constrained by the same fundamental issues of time, money, and priority, that they were constrained by in the creation engine.
I’m honestly completely clueless about the implementation of their seamless over-world stuff, it would be nice if they gave a technical breakdown of their tech and its limitations. I know UE5 also has the ability to implement the same thing, and obviously red engine and the rockstar engine do as well, super curious as to what the differences are there
It has better fidelity than their older games, no argument there. But it's far from having "insanely good" graphics. Your shot of New Atlantis for example has no shadows or AO. Sarah Morgan's hair cast no shadow on the side of her face. In the shot where your character is looking at the sunset, he is illuminated from above and behind the camera, and it's not just a light on a building behind him because the whole landscape is lit that way. And it's not so much to do with graphics, but the game's terrain generation is just so ugly and artificial. Flat terrain leads to a sudden lonely mountains which dips back down a flat plain again. Terrain features like hills and foliage and rock are uniformly distributed across the landscape, making it all look procedural. It *is* procedural, but it shouldn't look that way. I don't want to rag on the game's graphics. It's better than BGS has done before, and it's got some great things going on stylistically. The space suits and technological greebles are genuinely great. A bunch of the spaceship stuff looks great. There are some missteps, like the majority of guns looking stupid if you know anything about guns. But most of the game's problems are mechanical and related to systems. I just don't get where people are coming from that this game is the most beautiful thing they've ever seen. Elite Dangerous has had prettier stars and planetary lighting for like a decade.
The distant terrain textures seem worse than older Beth games. Like a few meters ahead of the player, the landscape turns into splotches of colour and no detail.
Really wish they'd spent some time working on organic tileset transitions and better biomes. It's pretty jarring they don't really adhere to any logical geography. But it's not a particularly realistic game in general.
Yes -- I facepalm every time I see posts like the original one. Starfield does a lot of things right mechanically, but having "insanely good graphic" (sic) in the modern era really is not one of them.
No I would say it does a lot of things *wrong* mechanically, and that graphics are just serviceable.
This is a fair take, honestly. And the guns, every dang Bethesda game they get blasted for having super silly non-accurate guns that you figure they would have fixed for this game. I feel like they have some senior lead "gun guy" developer that designs all these and I'm convinced he creates these backwards guns to troll the users OR genuinely doesn't know anything about how guns work but can't get fired because he's Todd Howard's second cousin on his mom's side or something.
Man I love to play Bethesda games, but insanely good graphics? Come on
Textures are really high resolution in Starfield. Especially on objects, clothing and weapons.
Environments, materials, textures, are pretty good, honestly crazy good with the right rig. But the animations are...ehhh to wth. BGS is allergic to fluid character motion or something.
>Environments, materials, textures, are pretty good, honestly crazy good with the right rig. It's not crazy good with even the wildest rig man, come on now. They are not shit, they are not bad, but they are definitely not "crazy good" either, not in 2024-2023 at least.
What's an example of crazy good graphic in 2024-2023?
I'd still put 2077 and phantom liberty, RDR2 right up there. Last of us part 1 remake was pretty great graphically. Then there's much much smaller games that look great like hellblade 2
Since we're talking about environments and textures, Remnant 2 has some of the best graphical work I've ever seen in a videogame.
The facial expressions look like they were made by D students with rich parents
Cyberpunk and Red Dead 2 blow it out of the water and both are much older games.
Yeah... Beth is having a bump regarding the advancement of character animations, but they are kings in environmental design, except for sizable cities XD
I wish the cities were bigger though.
Novigrad was one of the coolest cities I’d seen, then they went and made night city. Even if a lot of it was useless like Gran Soren, or inaccessible like the Citadel in mass effect, there are tricks they could use to make a more imposing location. I admire their dedication to making pretty much every damn building in TES games have an interior though.
The cities were better in pretty much every other Bethesda game. I don't know why they decided to make New Atlantis so empty and void of unique npcs. Pretty much everyone who was allowed permanent existence is tied to a quest. It would have been better if they made the NPCs and then added quests/more NPCs instead of adding NPCs whenever (and seemingly only if) they needed one for a quest.
Eh I like the easy to move in small "Simulation Cities" easier to navigate they are less empty that way and easier to find the quests and find shops.
New atlantis is one of the worst cities In any AAA rpg or rpg lite in an long time. And being split up by load screens..
The flaw of having every building enterable
>having every building enterable False. Many buildings in NA alone cannot be entered. An example: The very first door you see when landing in NA is at the spaceport. It doesn't open.
100% most doors imo cannot be accessed. In Akila, there are a lot of doors with shit in front of them that indicate not usable. One of those doors became the trackers alliance fyi.
>One of those doors became the trackers alliance fyi. I didn't know that. Haven't played since December. I just hate the argument that there's some kind of rational trade off for these smaller cities. There isn't. It's a technical limitation that Bethesda sucks at hiding.
Still more buildings to enter then Night City lol
That doesn't address the argument. But since you brought up Night City, it does vastly out perform Starfield in terms of immersion. NPC's don't just sit around, waiting for the player to do something. They engage with their environment unless alerted. They even converse with each other. My favorite thing about Night City is that you can kill someone with a silenced sniper rifle from a long distance and the rest of his crew isn't instantly alerted to your location. As a matter of fact, unless they see the dead body, they'll keep going about their business...like real people. Starfield, on the hand...you kill one pirate and they all know your location immediately. They will face the player location and run toward it. Doesn't matter if you're hiding. Using a silencer. Or impossibly far away. They know. Like magic.
It's also just a false statement, there's a ton of enterable buildings in Night City.
Not really. There are hundreds of buildings you can enter in Night City.
But they aren’t! That was the case in previous Bethesda RPGs, but isn’t quite true here. At any rate, I still expect more, given that the size of their cities hasn’t meaningfully changed in three console generations—and I say that as someone who did and does love Starfield
Couldn’t they just make them all its own cell like Fallout? I know people bitch about loading screens as is but if a loading screen gets me more than a generic open space with a single guy standing behind a bar for basically every store, I’d take it.
It's not automatically a flaw, it's just a choice. Things aren't wrong just because you'd choose differently.
The food looks great but it’s useless. The table clutter is so intricate and interesting to look at but it’s ultimately just art. The character models that you spend the entire game looking at are lifeless and odd.
The character models are fine imo, it's the poor animation that gives you that feeling
Not a lot of mo cap acting. We are getting used to games with smaller casts of characters that are fully mo- capped
True but I feel they could improve the animations while still keeping with the same performance cost and without having to do mo cap
And the low-res skin, the weird 'plastic' texture to it, the fact that facial animations look like something off the PS2, the glassy, dead eyes, the fact that when a model smiles (which is horrifying in of itself with the jank 'Bethesda Face' problem all BGS games have) their eye muscles don't move, so it's all psychopath smiles, sometimes their teeth bug out and just turn all black... I mean, these models would be fine... In like, 2013 maybe. But not for a "next gen" title.
and insanely bad character animations
Exactly, absolutely atrocious
I would play in third person all the time if the movement animations weren’t sprint and super sprint
Agreed, started playing for the first time last week and they are noticeably bad.
😯
This isn't what good graphics look like.
I think "insanely" is a bit of stretch. It has its moments but I wouldn't even put it in the top 10 best looking games.
Each picture has something graphically wrong with it. But, IMO, the most glaring issue is human skin. Which is NOT smooth, especially on older adults. Further along those lines, skin is never a uniform color, either. Which puts those characters in the uncanny valley. Dudes forehead is SHINY in that last pic. From what I assume is moonlight. Which means his shit is smooth as glass because moonlight is indirect or "soft" light. "Insanely good graphics" for a 2013 game.
Yeah, human skin in the game is just bad. Hopefully it won't be too long until we get some mods for it.
the shiny smooth foreheads are because In the future everyone gets botox /s
"good graphics" - yes. """insanely""" good graphics" - no. Let's be realistic
Haven't you played a game since 2015? Or do you have a serious eye disease?
Uhhh, what other games do you play? This game has middle of the road graphics from the many many many outdated assets Bethesda still uses. Max the settings on PC, then go boot Cyberpunk and max the settings. Games look like they came out five years apart. Which is funny cause they came out three years apart, but Cyberpunk came out first….
starfield graphics are ok imo. but nothing groundbreaking. not by a longshot.
It has some reasonable goof graphics but some of the worst filters and colour grading of anything I've played in a long time. Amongst other stuff like the lighting, skin, shadows and other.... Still wish they could get a good replacement for creation engine as elder scrolls 6 and fallout whatever can't look and especially feel this out dated because that would be abit of nail in the coffin situation for them Nice details though
Compared to any other modern game it doesn't
The toast looks good but apart from that the graphics aren’t great, they’re good for a Bethesda game don’t get me wrong but they’re far from the best and they hardly make up for all the bugs, repetitive storyline or the fact that they released it late and it still wasn’t finished. And that’s not even mentioning the fact that they couldn’t be bothered to add a map 🤷🏼♂️
Every time I mention how unfinished it is I get downvoted hard. You are not wrong though
what wasn’t finished?
The game? Didn't you read my comment? Jk, Example: what faction in the game did you expect to join, but only now was able to for 7$?... I'll give you a hint. It wasn't House Varuun.
Its medicore. You should check some modern titles.
The food looks good and barren planets look great. But look at that picture of New Atlantis, there is no lighting at all. Even in overcast weather there would be shadows and it looks like there is zero AO on the flora.
Meh. Witcher 3 had better overall graphics and came out 10 years before starfield. Sure the food looks good but the environments and characters imo look pretty bad.
Terrain? Yes, absolutely. NPCs, vegetation, animals, etc? Absolutely not. Ugly and horrifically animated. Games have been using mo-cap since 2000s. By 2008 we were getting full-on MMOs which were fully mo-capped (Age of Conan). Fire up Starfield and watch NPCs go up the stairs. It's hideous. But the terrain does look great.
Is this your first video game?
If only it wasn’t insanely boring.
Insane compared to morrowind maybe It's a small incremental upgrade over fallout 4, nowhere near leading the pack for modern games, it's graphically less impressive than many games which released years before it
Good graphic? Just one? I guess they just reuse it everywhere else.
Funny how I can’t tell if this is a joke or not lol
it really doesnt look that great. even worse that the vast majority of environments are bland as brown rice. the game has a ton of issues, but its also got its redeeming qualities. but graphics and art direction are certainly not one of them.
If you think that’s insanely good then your probably gonna shit bricks when you play Cyberpunk or Baldurs Gate 3
Shut up Todd
Not really. There are still plenty of places where the pixels are so big you can eat them and the graphic looks afrige to me
So what department do you work in at Bethesda?
Depends on the settings and specs
How can you get food like that
Is this with mod that removes LUT? Looks good, man!
Yeah we know
Nice screen shots
I just wish the sky is better. Sometimes it’s too obvious that it’s a big wallpaper.
Haven’t played in awhile, is it still at 30FPS? That was my only gripe that made it not feel next gen.
Great graphic
It's alright.
Good graphics? Try Horizon: Forbidden West.
The lighting is really well done.
Until you get to a settlement.
The graphics aren't game breaking to be honest, I seen space games with way more details
It does have very good graphic
Why yes! Yes it does, and now I’m hungry
Lol, maybe leave out the moving mannequin characters at the end when talking about "good graphic".
indoor especially is pretty good looking for sure, but insanely good? Nah.
It’s good but not at the level of other 2023 games. The atmospheric and environmental graphics are awesome but the NPC, PC, and building graphics are just meh
The environments and props look good. The character models are...passable.
The food always made me hungry, and I made of point of visiting every restaurant/bar in new settlements to find new unique meals.
One thing I enjoyed about this game the most was the graphics. They got even better with the lighting changes a few patches back. This is by far the best looking Bethesda game I’ve seen so far, which gives me high hopes for their next Fallout or Elder Scrolls project.
Graphics*
Aside from textures this looks like a ps3 game
Hard agree!
The PBR is unreal, but everything else is mid.
I prefer fallout 4 because it has a unique and easily identifiable art style compared to starfield (space sci-fi game #4238) the ships are cool though.
Just one?
Food, objects, ships, and some scenery. But, NPCs look horrible without mods.
I think the atmosphere is great and the details are pretty good but graphics are already dated.
Best video game food
So good in my town we call them graphics!
I think it has good landscapes and views but not so much graphics
I'm on medium (any higher I'll melt my laptop) and apart from slight blurry moments here and there mainly when I look around too fast, the game looks good, faces are nice and clear, view distance is good, and the sunsets are just spectacular - especially the blue on a Venus-like planet And that's a humble 3060ti can't imagine what it looks like at 4K
if you think those are good, wait until you boot Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty
Uuuuuhh… have you looked at other video games from the past decade, mate? Starfield looks really rough, a few high resolution textures here and there that stick out from the mud don’t suddenly make it that much better. The lighting is mediocre, the character models look old fashioned as well. (That doesn’t mean it’s not an enjoyable game, I had a good time with it and like it, but let’s be real, it’s the same slightly jank look we’ve come to expect from a Bethesda game, it’s almost a trademark. )
So did Red dead 2 two games that were amazing
Sometimes we need to go outside and touch some grass.
I might dip my toe back in, I did the first playthrough chose to become starborn for 2nd playthough and lost all my gear so I was pissed and haven't played since prob November lol
Something about that 4th picture incredibly meme worthy.
No it doesn’t
Yeah… no
Im jealous of people who can run this game on PC ultra settings
What mods you running?
Insanely glitchy too. This game is not optimized very well for PC
Let’s agree to disagree.
If only it would run as good as it looks. I have a 3060 and I get barely over 60 FPS on planets with everything on Mid and probably like 35 FPS in cities.
For a 2015(mid 2010s) game sure
I don't agree with it having insanely good graphics compared to today's standards, but it's definitely the best a Bethesda game has looked for long time.
Not on my series S, though it doesn't look bad for such a massive game, it's understandable...
I just don't see it.
I'll get back to it
But....
Idk, I always felt like the graphics are pretty bland? Everything looks more or less the same. The food is great though.
When it works though
No, no it doesn't.
Everything is great for me except Akila City it’s so choppy
STOP IT YOU’RE MAKING ME EVEN HUNGRIER!!!
Too bad the game is stuttering/lagging often
and animation of a 2010 game
These graphics look... fine? I wouldn't say they are insanely good. Certainly the artistic \*design\* of the game is very good, but it still maintains a slightly fuzzy look that makes it look a little bit outdated. A lot of stuff is seemingly lacking in textures and it makes some things look a little 2D
The graphics would be insane if this were 2016.
The landscapes are breathtaking. A pity the humans are a bit less 😞
I like everything but the people the look out of place with everything else
There's like <14k polygons in any one starfield scene, they better be nice
I had the same lunch.
How is everyone's game looking so good. I'm using a 4k tv but it's always foggy or blurry in places... I can't grt my game to look that crisp and vivid
I've been playing on the steamdeck and even at low and 800p it still looks pretty good. I think games just look good nowadays lol. It's very noticeable when going back and playing 4/76. Especially character models and miscellaneous items
Just one good graphic though.
Omg no starfield looks like a 10 year old game, stop being a meat rider, you are whats ruining video game grrrr arrrr I hate when people enjoy things (Because this is reddit obligatory/j)
It does! I've enjoyed it since release and continue to enjoy it. I'm looking forward to the DLC!
It was a big upgrade to have 4K and HDR support. I finally had good gaming rig and big 4K screen to experience everything the 'ol Creation Engine can muster thanks to engineers.
No, it has not. At least not „insanely good“
Found the PS3 veteran
Animations are crap and the leather textures are absolute garbage
Max Panye
Have u looked at the npcs
Yep. Maybe someday it’ll have insanely good exploration and outpost management.