What irks me is when game developers ties the physics engine to the framerate. We all know this will cause issues down the road, could we just… not?
Not doing it also causes issues in the form of micro stutters when some but not other frames have updated physics or not. Frame pacing is hard, and locking everything down happens to be the only sure-fire way to completely eliminate display issues. But then, of course, you have a locked frame rate.
I imagine there is some reason we still see this. Any devs in the Industry lurking?
I’m not in the industry, but I’ve dabbled in Unity and that’s just kind of how it works by default. You create a game object and it gets an Update() function that is called once per frame. You’re encouraged to perform calculations and update it’s position in that callback.
You’re supposed to use Time.deltaTime to scale your calculations based on how long it’s been since the last frame.
But that takes effort and it’s very easy to just not do that and your game will still work fine in most cases.
I think they fixed this with Fallout 76, so here’s hoping that those changes also made its way into their future projects.
Is this really a thing lately? Maybe on some Switch games, but I think most modern games can have a dynamic framerate.
Skyrim famously did this. So the concern that Starfield could have similar issues is not unfounded.
Remember Red Dead Redemption 2? On PC, your stats depleted faster the more FPS you had so with 60FPS you’d get hungry twice as fast as with 30FPS. Iirc even the sun moved faster so a day was only half as long.
“Game dev here,” Carlone writes, adding that they are a “big fan” of Dreamcast Guy. “Wanted to clarify: it’s not a sign of an unfinished game. It’s a choice. 60fps on this scale would be a large hit to the visual fidelity. My guess is they want to go for a seamless look and less ‘pop in.’ And of course, [it’s] your right to dislike the choice.”
Sure. Maybe. It could be this. Or…
Arm-chair babbling idiot who plays too much video games here, I am one hundred percent convinced that it has nothing to do with visual fidelity and everything to do with that asthmatic engine they’ve been dragging since Morrowind. Can’t prove it but… you know. Just a hunch I get from playing their games.
People constantly complain about the engine that they use but no other game engine is as flexible when it comes to modding and no other game engine has the same level of complexity when it comes to being able to pick stuff up and move it around. You can take items off a shelf or desk in skyrim and fallout and stack them somewhere else. You can if you want decide to hoard a bunch of garbage you stole and stack them into a pyramid in your home base area.
Are their quirks? Sure the physics tied to framerate in skyrim was a problem, the games are always buggy, and they arent usually the prettiest games out there(though skyrim looked decent when it first came out and the graphical fidelity mods can work magic).
As for the premise does it have to do with fidelity? Of course it does. Setting a framecap on consoles means theyre able to use higher resolution assets, better lighting effects, and more complex models. I understand the preference of giving up fidelity for some smoothness and frames but 30fps isnt totally uncommon in console spaces and this is a bethesda game not a twitch shooter or a 2d fighter.
Outside the PC space gamers hardly ever talk about or think about framer rate. Graphical effects and details and fisual fidelity are a higher priority and more important in a game where generally you mostly just walk around and explore.
It would be nice if they had an option for a lower res mode or less detailed mode and 60fps target, but I get why they made the choice they did and ideally Im sure it’ll run at a normal framerate on pc.
Now if it runs poorly on PC then we can riot.
It’s also a personal choice of Bethesda not to rename their engine. Many other studios do this same thing and reuse engines, but they often rename them after significant rewrites. Bethesda just doesn’t do that.
Also they aren’t worried about how the game will be released. Their games have legs. So a 60fps version will eventually come out. Then they’ll release it 5 more times.
But they did? For Oblivion it was Gamebryo, for Skyrim it was the Creation Engine
Arm-chair babbling idiot who plays too much video games here, I am one hundred percent convinced that it has nothing to do with visual fidelity and everything to do with that asthmatic engine they’ve been dragging since Morrowind.
Code doesn’t go bad with time, that’s not really how it works. And game engines tend to be a Ship of Theseus situation, where just because it’s still the same “engine” in theory, doesn’t mean that large parts (or all of it), haven’t eventually been replaced or refactored over the years.
Unreal Engine has been around for 30 years at this point, would you also consider that an “asthmatic engine”?
No, it’s most definitely a choice. You can make any engine run at 60 FPS if you sacrifice something else for it. The RE engine runs beautiful games at 60 FPS, but they had to make all sorts of sacrifices to fidelity to get World Tour in Street Fighter 6 to run at all, let alone at 60 FPS on current gen consoles.
I mean sure but give us the choice, damn it! :(
Depends on what is causing the framerate issues. If it’s usual fidelity (resolution, draw distance, visual effects) then yes, they can provide options for those.
If the framerate issues are due to physics, NPC/interactions, state-management then it’s unlikely they could or would want to provide options around that type of limitation.
that asthmatic engine they’ve been dragging since Morrowind
I don’t believe that’s true at all, though. At least by Wikipedia, Morrowind was NetImmerse, Oblivion was Gamebryo (modified Havok), and Skyrim was Creation. And I remember in the announcements for Skyrim that they remade the engine for the game. And Starfield is an updated engine, Creation 2
Gamebryo was called netimmerse until 2003. Creation is a modified gamebryo. So Creation 2 will also be based on it. So yes they use kinda the same engine since morrowind. Beteshda will not change away from it because gamebryo is a large reason why the modding community is as strong as it is for skyrim etc. And the modding community sells a lot of copies!
The engine also started as an engine for MMOs, which allowed them rich scripting for every NPC, as well as an inventory for every NPC.
The world fidelity that Bethesda builds, on a technical and simulation level, is unmatched — yeah, something like The Witcher 3 might look better, but it also doesn’t let you interact with basically every item in the world or pickpocket every NPC’s weapon as a way to neutralize them in combat.
It sure reads like they are saying “more fps makes game look bad”, but my assumption is that they mean " if we want this to run at higher fps we will have to reduce fidelity or the engine cant handle it". At least thats what I hope they mean
I’m sure you’re right about this. Probably the framerate bounces all over the place which feels much worse than simply locking it to 30fps and having a consistent experience. I think a PC has the potential to simply brute force it into 60fps, but an Xbox simply cannot. Which is probably fine. The game is said to run at 4k and 1440p depending on which Xbox you have, and for a game like this where exploration is going to play a big role, those visuals will do a lot of silent storytelling.
I would rather walk over a hill and see an incredible alien sunset on some moon, than have more frames, especially if those frames are bouncing around between 60 and 40 and going over that hill stutters and jerks spoiling the immersion.
This incessant nagging about fps is the most tiresome thing in gaming since gamergate.
I agree up to a point. If a game is at 30 and feels good to play, then I’m OK. For example, Zelda feels great. Controlling Link is tight and snappy.
On the other hand, if the game has bad frame pacing (like Bloodborne), playing at 30 feels real bad.
I try not to get too crazy about frames, but sometimes some games just don’t feel good.
I will say, though, that while I really like channels like Digital Foundry, I sometimes wonder if them picking apart games to show the most minor frame dips is slowly teaching us to see these things, and as a result we kind of subconsciously will be like, “Well now I noticed this game had some moments where the frames dropped during an explosion. Obviously it’s a bad game.” I know that’s some hyperbole, but still.
It’s also heavily dependend on getting used to it. There are games that have a quality and a performance mode where I sometimes start to think I’m at 60FPS until I switch to the actual 60FPS mode and realize that it’s a completely different feeling. Switching back lets those 30FPS seem pretty bad. But if I didn’t had the possibility of switching between those two, I would’ve been happy with the 30.
But as you said it has to be rock stable. I played GoW Ragnarök on my PS5 and that Quality 30FPS mode was just terrible and felt like 20FPS. That of the Final Fantasy 16 Demo is better but here it’s the overdone motion blur that bugs me enough to wan’t to switch to the 45-60FPS mode where the blur is weaker
What is the absolute most important thing about every video game? They all have it in common: there are zero video games ever made, ever, where this isn’t the absolute most important thing that there is.
The answer is: being able to play it. Is a game that crashes to desktop every time you move the camera a good game? No. If I can feel comfortable judging whether or not a video game is any good based on whether or not it passes that single metric, I feel even more comfortable to extend it to “being able to see it without motion sickness and eye strain”. Wanting your game to be optimized properly and not a juddery slide show isn’t entitlement, it’s the bare minimum of functionality.
Sure, but a game is objectively better if it can run at a higher framerate.
Bloodborne is excellent, but it would 100% be better if it ran on solid 60 FPS.
30fps for top end consoles in 2023 is absolutely pathetic.
I honestly don’t really mind if a console game runs at a steady 30 fps. I just know that it isn’t going to be steady lol
