Starfield should have been Unreal 5 engine.

[Marky]

Title says everything. Lifeless planets, bad lightning, 0 dynamic environment. Feel like a paper town most cities.

[=7CAV=SPC.Henson.K]

Populated by paper cut-out people.

[LordKuraba]

It would have been the same game because engines don't make games good or bad.

[Marky]

Originally posted by SSG Henson USA ret.:

Populated by paper cut-out people.

Yeah that is my second complaint. Really loved the story at times. Especially looking for that lost money was really brilliant. But I just cannot make myself play until they improve the game a lot.

[kdodds]

All porting to UE5 would do, besides taking another mess of years, would be to cause them to have to eliminate 90% of what makes a BGS game a BGS game. Hard pass. Besides UE still doesn't touch idTech, and idTEch is a sibling. If they wanted to do a FO or SF FPS game, maybe, sure, start on idTech, but not for a BGS RPG.

[Cephei]

Originally posted by Marky:

Title says everything. Lifeless planets, bad lightning, 0 dynamic environment. Feel like a paper town most cities.

Agreed it completely breaks any immersion. What's worse is that despite the outdated 2010s graphics you still need a powerful machine to run it properly.

[LordKuraba]

I've spent over 600 hours in this game and I feel fairly confident in saying that most of Starfield's problems would NOT be solved with a different engine. Even if the game was perfectly optimized and had zero bugs it would still be the weakest BGS game because the overall direction of the game is flawed.

Procedural generation was a mistake that UE5 wouldn't magically fix nor would it fix the terrible skill tree that makes progression feel like a slog. The tacked on outpost building and mediocre crafting also wouldn't suddenly be good just because it was on UE5 and the story would still be just as poorly written.

I don't hate Starfield, my playtime proves that, but the game needed to be more focused. They tried to do more than they were capable of doing and no engine would have fixed that.

TLDR: Starfield doesn't need a better engine, it needs better developers.

[Bnn1]

Unreal Engine has even worse issues with TAA unsharpness and other "optimizations" that are supposed to make the game look "better".

But fundamentally, it is not even the better worktool.

It might look "easy" due to its shiny colored windows and funny lines you pull around in the Editing Kit to connect functions, it seems like "coding for pre schoolers", but it's confusing, and equally hard to utilize, as just programming by manually typing in good old C# code.

I would say though that Starfield would have benefitted from UE in the way that at least the built-in glitches like object permanency issues, Stack overflows (or in Starfields case, RefID overflow) and other things would be a thing of the past, UE has a very decent garbage collection for unused Refs and other Variables, much much better than anything Bethesda could ever program.

The game would have, but it wasn't made in UE so there's no need to say "would could should" outside a few sentimental mentions.

It is what it is, and what it is, sucks, but can't be helped, it is what you get when Devs take 1 game engine, fail to make a new one, and just pile new features on the old engine, rebrand it as "BRAND NEW!" but that the Engine has references to Morrowind and Oblivion and Fallout 3 code and variables is the ultimate testament that they just copy paste an old outdated quarter century old engine, throw new funtions on it, and expect it to run.

[Winged Archon]

Originally posted by Marky:

blah blah.

Why?

[Bill]

Originally posted by Marky:

Title says everything. Lifeless planets, bad lightning, 0 dynamic environment. Feel like a paper town most cities.

UE5 ruined stalker 2 ....and alot of other games...no thanks

[PortalShifter]

Originally posted by LordKuraba:

It would have been the same game because engines don't make games good or bad.

I'm still trying to load this comment.

Can't be an engine problem though, because apparently the technical framework underlying a game has no effect on the game at all.

[Mooman]

Jank is a large part of what makes a Bethesda game a Bethesda game. Take away that jank... now anyone can make the game.

Because at the end of the day it's all about potato physics and the bugs those physics provide that adds that little extra Bethesda 'magic'.

[PortalShifter]

Originally posted by Mooman:

Take away that jank... and you have a better game.

Fixed that for you.

[ⓇⒺⓈⓄ]

Originally posted by Marky:

Title says everything. Lifeless planets, bad lightning, 0 dynamic environment. Feel like a paper town most cities.

UE5 is not friendly engine for average user to create custom mods for.
Besides UE5 engine has a lot problems too

[dannyj147]

Stalker 2 still has performance issues. UE5 isn't as great as some people think.

[MysticDaedra]

UE5 was released in 2022. If this game was made in UE5, it wouldn't be released until 2028 at the earliest, and would delay release of TES6 by another 6 years or so as well. Remember, Starfield began development back in 2015. Unless they started development in UE4, there's no scenario where they would switch to UE5 in 2022.

I think Bethesda needs to spend a ton of time and money on re-developing Gamebryo/Creation/Creation+/Creation2 from the ground-up, instead of just patching and adding and spaghetti-coding it to death. Same game engine used for Morrowind for heaven's sakes. It's over 20 years old.