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sc94597 on 14 June 2023
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Otter said:

Priority in a pipeline is orientated around opportunity cost, the reward of actually taking on a task.

There are probably 100 of things that will be ahead of a unstable 60fps mode. And again, you're not talking about a reliable 60fps mode, you're talking about a mode which at least hits 45fps for VRR users which is simply not valuable for the vast majority of Xbox gamers who do not have a VRR display. Such a mode will be at the bottom of the bucket list for a game like Starfield which in terms of testing will be magnitudes higher than probably all of the games you're seeing launch with performance modes. 

And I feel like people are throwing around "open world" comparisons a lot recently as if they're all made the same. Simply having a sandbox does not make a game incredibly complex. Beyond loading environments, A game like Horizon or Spiderman (for example) is probably closer to a single player title like TLOU compared to something like Starfield. They're not games where half the objects you come across have a physics component, can be picked up, stored, utililised, with 1000s of NPCs and their dynamic impact on the environment &  story being managed in real time. Its really apples and oranges. I won't give Bethesda a pass for launching games in a buggy state, but I also think people are doing the kind of games they make a disservice by comparing them to otherwise linear sandbox games or last gen/cross gen titles.

Opportunity cost is the cost associated with performing that task rather than another task, not "the reward of actually taking on a task." This is why I mentioned that pipelining in software development (including game development) can work to reduce the effective total time lost -- aka opportunity cost. Think of it like pipelining in a CPU. If you aren't using the resources for something else because there is latency from another resource finishing up its step in the process (such as developing the content to be QA'd), then that resource could do a different thing (such as QA different performance configs in already produced content.) 

See: https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/courses/soco/projects/risc/pipelining/index.html

Given that Starfield's development team will likely be doing a lot of the necessary work to make performance modes already (on PC's of comparable specs to the Series X and S) a lot of the work that needs to be done is already being done for other purposes anyway. It's not as if Starfield is an Xbox exclusive and not already running on other performance-tiers.I don't know where you got the idea that creating a performance profile is some long arduous task with a significant marginal cost, but that isn't true at all. The PC version will have consumers optimizing it within a week on a multitude of platforms to hit different targets. Pick the best config that works well on comparable hardware to the Series X and S, then use maybe a bit more time to actually test it on a dev-kit, likely will get better results than those PC players got because of the closed-platform, and then there you go. Yes, it will likely take months for every person in the pipeline to get their part done, but not months worth of dedicated full-time effort on the part of everyone involved. It would be something one would work on while one is waiting for other more critical things.  

As to your second point, much of the interactivity we've seen so far in Starfield isn't much of a massive improvement over what we've seen in past Bethesda games. But even if it were, we've seen games with a high degree of interactivity and open-worlds that have multiple performance modes, and have had a long list of performance updates. Red Dead Redemption 2 and Cyberpunk 2077 are very notable examples, where interactivity is on-par if not in excessive of most Bethesda games. If you want to make your point stronger, it'd help if you were more specific about what in Starfield you think would add complexity to the addition of a performance mode and the actual technical reasons for it. 

Last edited by sc94597 - on 14 June 2023