Working Volcanoes

[zalama317]

When I land in a volcanic region of a planet and it's just dark mountains I want to cut my thumbs off. A volcanoe with a death pit of lava would be nice.

[zanity]

For its time, Skyrim actually did the different geological regions quite nicely, but back then it was acceptable to do things with an aging engine that didn't look the best, providing it showed visual 'willing'.

 

The problem with Starfield is that the whole dev process was self-conscious of the extreme visual limitations of a dreadfully aging engine. So you have lab interiors dressed with very detailed bits-n-bobs. But outside and everything goes wrong. Terrible skies, awful far horizon where it is obvious the square instance comes to a hard end. No attempt to do anything 'ambitious' with water or particle effects for fear of making it clear had limited the engine really is.

 

Instead the game chooses to vastly reduce its ambition to stay close to the things the engine may just get away with. This was the design spec. Everything was conceived to operate within the engine limitations- which given the potential scope of Starfield is just laughable.

 

However, does Star Citizen, or No man's Sky, or Elite what-ever-its-called do space well either as a game? They do elements of the idea much better, but as games, sadly Starfield has them soundly beaten. At least Starfield is a real game.

 

My specific disappointment addressing your volcano issue is this. There is no technical reason, accepting the gameplay limitations of the Beth engine, why the horizon and sky could not have contained fantastic exotic alien imagery. You would not have been able to 'visit' such regions- the engine could never do that- but they could have been rendered at a conceptual 'fixed' 'infinite' distance to give the worlds a cinematic experience without exploding your GPU.

 

There are games on Steam, made by less than ten people, that explore such rendering ideas. Starfield is utterly devoid of any significant visual advance over earlier games, and merely relies on bigger textures and more triangles in the models.