CD Projekt Red veteran developer has now sided with Starfield to defend it against criticisms of its game character animations.
Cyberpunk 2077 launch day was quite disastrous, which earned them ire throughout the few months it was available online. It was even pulled out from the PlayStation Store for a while. After numerous updates, the devs turned things around for the better and has now earned a lot of fans especially with the latest version and expansion. Unfortunately, it has been used as a comparison for another triple-A game called Starfield.
One of its critics, Twitter user @SynthPotato stated Creation Engine had to go, which was the game engine used to make Starfield. They criticized the game’s dialogue animations which they thought were outdated compared to today’s Cyberpunk 2077 which was way different by a big margin. They even criticized its “constant load screens, awful dialogue camera, and lackluster animations.”
CDPR Senior Quest Designer Patrick K. Mills then argued that the way both games handle cinematics and animations is more down to tools and design than the engine they were built on. He even mentions that he likes Starfield a lot. He also pointed out that the game actually offers a tremendous amount of freedom on a mammoth scale. “They do some scenes that are staged in a more refined way, like meeting constellation for the first time, some quest sequences etc,” he said. “But they have vastly more scenes with a revolving cast of characters and a mind boggling number of possible locations.”
Mills points out that each of Cyberpunk 2077’s major scenes took years to develop, which was not possible to do in a game as huge as Starfield. “Instead, [Bethesda Game Studios] puts their resources into giving maximum levels of player freedom, they are just doing something different with their time and that’s cool. You can want their scenes to be more cinematic or whatever, and that’s fair, but it comes at a cost.”
