WTF?! It’s not a Bethesda game if you can’t hoard thousands of useless little items in a room. Starfield retains this amusing trait of the developer’s previous titles and takes it to a new level with shockingly advanced physics calculations.
A Starfield player recently posted a video that shows the extent of the game’s impressive physics engine in the funniest way imaginable. Bethesda previously joked about allowing players to fill their ship with dozens of stolen sandwiches, but that doesn’t even scratch the surface.
The video, posted by Redditor Moozipan, begins with one of the game’s main NPCs, Sarah, noticing that the player has too much junk on their ship. The player then opens a hatch that reveals a room full of 20,000 potatoes. Some pour through the door with amazing realism. Then the hatch closes, pushing the spilled potatoes through in an equally natural way. A second clip shows Sarah about to explode amidst all the potatoes (which Mozzipan created using console commands on the PC). hurls them across the room.
The gag is a nod to the Skyrim player who thrown 2,000 loaves of goat cheese in a single room. Multiplying the number of objects by 10 (Mozzipan admitted Starfield couldn’t handle 100,000 potatoes) shows how far Bethesda’s technology has come since Skyrim’s release in 2011. It’s also an impressive challenge for the video, which shows 3,000 barrels collapsing and exploding in the original Crysis.
This is actually pretty amazing. The fact that these objects all have physics is impressive.
— John Linneman (@dark1x) September 5, 2023
The potato clips highlight an impressive facet of Bethesda’s games – object permanence. Starfield reviews confirm that, like previous Bethesda releases, the game tracks the location of everything the player has ever moved, down to small pieces of junk, even after many light years.
Complex interactions between physics and NPC behavior are likely a major reason Starfield runs at 30 frames per second on Xbox – a debatable performance profile given that 60fps console titles are becoming more common. It could also be why, as one commenter noted, Bethesda continues to develop games like Starfield on its in-house Creation Kit engine, which grew out of the Gamebryo tools the company has used since The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind in 2002 used. Switching to Unreal Engine could make Bethesda’s games look better, run smoother, or allow anyone with Unreal Engine experience to work on them. However, tricks like spilling 20,000 potatoes on the ground or using the physics engine for amusing cheats may not be possible.
Players use Starfield’s object permanence to bypass their ships’ strict carrying capacities by physically dropping loot onto the deck, where it doesn’t take up inventory space. Mozzipan advises caution with this tactic, as items can slip through walls depending on location. It wasn’t a completely reliable method of storing items in previous Bethesda titles either.
Mozzipan also used the post to draw attention to Starfield’s relative lack of accessibility features like a FOV slider or color blind mode. Steve Saylor, a legally blind YouTuber who rates video games based on their accessibility features, appreciated the game’s large font mode and customizable controls, but criticized the lack of further UI customization options and the vague map screen. Mozzipan added that although Starfield is still in early development, modders have already added accessibility features for PC users. The game officially launches on Wednesday September 6th.