Cyberpunk 2077 senior quest designer Patrick K. Mills has taken to Twitter to defend Starfield after players levelled criticism at Bethesda’s RPG for their use of Creation Engine 2 in comparison to the newly updated CD Projekt Red title, saying Starfield’s sheer scope meant granular animations were just not feasible.
Starfield uses Creation Engine 2 – an updated version of Creation Engine, which was first used back in 2011 for The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim – which players have said is at fault for long load times, “lacklustre animations” and a host of other issues, comparing the game’s quality to that of Cyberpunk 2077 and its new DLC, Phantom Liberty.
X (formerly Twitter) user SynthPotato posted a side by side of Starfield and Cyberpunk 2077 gameplay involving NPC interactions to express their disappointment in Bethesda’s newest game. “I’ve been really feeling more and more critical of Starfield after going back to Cyberpunk, with the constant load screens, awful dialogue camera and lackluster animations,” they said, “this stuff was in Cyberpunk back in 2020, I really don’t think even with patches that Starfield can ever really match this level of quality, this is fundamentally the fault of Creation Engine.”
However, CD Projekt Red’s Patrick K. Mills responded, disagreeing with SynthPotato’s complaints in an extended Twitter thread. Mills served as a senior quest designer on Cyberpunk 2077, as well as a quest designer on The Witcher 3. Mills says the way Starfield handles cinematics in comparison to Cyberpunk is “not down to engine so much as it is tools and design.”
“It’s not a focus for them for a lot of reasons, and the necessarily high level of player freedom is actually as big a deal as the tools,” Mills said. “You can’t do the Judy’s roof thing because you can have that scene play out on a hundred-something different planets, at any time.”
“They do some scenes that are staged in a more refined way, like meeting constellation for the first time, some quest sequences etc,” he went on to elaborate, “but they have vastly more scenes with a revolving cast of characters and a mind boggling number of possible locations.”
Mills went on to say that every major scene in Cyberpunk 2077 took “literal years” to make, and in comparison to the game’s small scope and staged scenes, Starfield was just built in a very different way. “In starfield I can propose to like 10 different NPCs and I can do it on any of a thousand different planets, you can’t do elaborate scene design like that, you’d be making the game forever,” he said.
Mills added that the Starfield team put their resources into “giving maximum levels of player freedom,” and that Bethesda was “just doing something different with their time, and that’s cool.” He added that making scenes more cinematic came “at a cost,” and that “not every game can do every thing” which had little to do with the engine, and more to do with resourcing and priorities.
Despite player criticisms, Starfield has smashed sales and player counts, as has Cyberpunk 2077 and the Phantom Liberty expansion. Mills raises the point of managing player expectations, and in a part of the year that has been particularly stacked with blockbuster RPGs all tackling cinematics, animation, and NPC interactions in very different ways on varying engines, it’s clear that there’s a massive variety in exactly how those elements of each game will turn out.
What are your thoughts on the Cyberpunk 2077 versus Starfield debate? Let us know in the comments below.
Lead Image Credit: CD Projekt Red
Leave a Reply