Looks solid visually, great in some ways even. But if it's only 30 FPS that's gonna be a bit disappointing. If it keeps the framepacing and jerkiness it seems to have on top of that, it's going to be really jarring and disruptive to my immersion. Some of the animations could be a bit smoother, too, such as on that companion robot; just because it's a robot doesn't mean it needs to be jerky on top of the general jerkiness of the game as it is right now.
But....the actual gameplay looks very ambitious. The things that stuck out the most to me are the outpost and ship-building features, and the fact you can hire people to help with them, gives some 4X strategy game influence in there. I didn't care as much for the gameplay, and the resource-gathering stuff (at least the way in which you do it) doesn't seem any different from games like No Man's Sky. They also talked about 1,000 planets to fully explore which is....a LOT of content.
TBH tho, breadth of content isn't necessarily what I care too much about with RPGs, it's a question if that content is genuinely good. It sounds like Bethesda are using some random content generator for a lot of those 1,000 planets most likely, random seed generation or whatever to populate them, so it's actually a crapshoot as to how fulfilling quality-wise it's going to be to explore those planets, or anything outside of the main content that you know is hand-crafted from scratch by the team. The story's also going to matter a lot as well, and how they do what they do with it, particularly with Bethesda's storytelling template which is more open-ended than most other RPGs.
If it turns out to be too ambitious, though, it could cause a strain on the engine. Which already looks like it's being pushed beyond its means with the framepacing issues. I hope it can deliver on those ambitions; it's still easily one of the games I'm most looking forward to in 2023.
You are right when you say they had the perfect opportunity to show it off right now and they didn't. The way they presented it seemed rushed, especially the first minute of footage. The 2nd mistake was they likely demo'd it on maybe mid range specs which last I heard this was also coming out on PC?
They should have maxed it out and im sure it would have looked breath taking. I see tons of people posting screens of Cyberpunk 2077 for example and it looks nothing special, but if you turn off the DLSS and max out everything it really shows how good it looks. IMO they just aren't using it to its fullest potential. For once I wish these developers would give a big FU to hardware specs and go all out, for a game like this you better go all out or don't even try.
Strongly doubt they demoed this on mid-spec PCs; why intentionally cripple your presentation when you can use high-end hardware (and that's assuming this was captured on PC; I was under the impression it was Series X footage).
These guys want to show their stuff off in the best light, so I'm guessing right now there are a lot of optimization issues with the engine to fix up because the framepacing gave it a very jerky presentation and that's completely aside it being 30 FPS (you can have a smooth framepacing even with 30 FPS).
![[Sigma]](/data/avatars/m/701/701747.jpg?1685439978){kind=avatar}
