"I can guess what it takes to make a Hostess Twinkie, but I don't work in the factory"

apparently this is in response to a few threads on Reddit flaming Starfield—in general, it’s been rather interesting to see Bethesda take what i can only describe as a “try to debate Starfield to popularity” approach with the game’s skeptics in the past month or two. not entirely sure it’s a winning strategy, personally.

For example, one thing I read again and again was “Starfield just wasn’t optimized, they easily could have reduced memory and bumped framerates”. Which any actual programmer will immediately feel a pit of dread in their stomach because we’ve been asked to reduce ram usage or speed something up, and that is a daunting task in our simple little apps - let alone a major AAA game.

This thing in particular was picked apart by actual devs in news articles and editorials that showed that Bethesda really didn’t optimize the game at all along with all the technical reasoning and proof showing how it could have been improved.

It’s not just the players, who for the most part, have been citing those articles when they make that particular critique. I mean, shit, they haven’t even used their own texture compression system for the last few games they made, and that’s so easy even someone with minimal modding knowledge can fix because the game already has the tools to make it work better.

Please share these articles you speak of. From developers with real world game dev experience. Without pointing me to some 2 hour rambling YouTube video.

And do you seriously think that someone with minimal modding knowledge can “fix” texture compression and the actual devs of the game hadn’t known or thought of doing so too? Say what you will about the Starfield producers and management but I absolutely 100% guarantee you if they chose not to use that feature, it was for very good reasons.

And do you seriously think that someone with minimal modding knowledge can “fix” texture compression

Yes, better textures are consistently one of the first mods to come out for every game they have released since Fallout 3.

And if you read the other half of the sentence you quoted?

Say what you will about the Starfield producers and management but I absolutely 100% guarantee you if they chose not to use that feature, it was for very good reasons.

Not the original commenter, but this whole argument you put here falls completely on it’s face since we know that modders HAVE done this and haven’t had any issues (or at the very least have been able to solve said issues), if compressing the textures and whatnot actually broke the game then the modders wouldn’t have been able to do it without breaking the game

Even if they supposedly had a reason, then it was a bad one

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