Bri Guy Todd Howard asked on-air why Bethesda didn't optimise Starfield for PC: 'We did [...] you may need to upgrade your PC'
👁️👄👁️They did lol, and that’s a really dumb question by a tech illiterate. Optimization isn’t a boolean state, it’s a constant ongoing process that still needs more work.
That they know they won't do
My entire comment is about why your response doesn’t make sense, they do and it’s not a process that’s ever “done”. It’s whether how optimized is it and if it runs well on targeted specs.
Always irks me when gamers talk about optimization like it was a specific process or just changing a setting
Todd Just had to toggle the “make game run good” button, massive over sight to be honest.
/s
So what's this about modders immediately being able to improve performance with mods within a week after release?
It’s usually a small thing, like stopping the game from reading a 5GB file several times over and over again.
They only meant to say that Bethesda did optimize throughout the development process. You can’t do gamedev without continually optimizing.
That does not mean, Bethesda pushed those optimizations particularly far. And you can definitely say that Bethesda should have done more.
Point is, if you ask “Why didn’t you optimize?”, Todd Howard will give you a shit-eating-grin response that they did, and technically he is right with that.
Also optimization happens between a minimum and a maximum. If Bethesda defines that the game should have a certain minimal visual quality (texture and model resolution, render distance, etc), that will lead to the minimum that hardware has to offer to handle it.
What modders so far did, was to lower the minimum further (for example by replacing textures with lower resolutions). That’s a good way to make it run on older hardware, but it’s no optimization Bethesda would or should do, because that’s not what they envisioned for their game.