Physics is simulated for all enabled objects in all loaded cells, it’s not dependent on visible rendering. As someone else noted, this is both normal and necessary, otherwise all physics would pause simply because you weren’t looking at it.

That’s not quite how frustum culling would work in that situation. Because if there’s physics objects behind the player that could possibly fall out of culling range, the game would still need to keep track of that object. It’s not like those physics calculations means the render pipeline is clear for faster loading…

Bethesda RPGs, meanwhile, have to track *all* of that, *and* the player’s *exact* position/ camera perspective, their inventory and status of all those items, and the exact position of thousands of physics objects across the entire game world.

Yeah, that is a stupendous effect.

R&C Rift Apart basically exists to flex the insta-loading power of the SSD. I for one welcome our seamless loading overlords! 

Unless Bethesda is employing monkeys to write code, the game isn’t keeping track of non-rendered physics objects in memory. Their positions would be stored elsewhere, and be loaded when the player position or camera frustum was close enough to trigger rendering.

Any game can be optimized if it’s a priority; that’s not…

Last time I whipped my phone out and recorded it, 3:56, not quite five minutes, but memory leak is a serious issue like their previous games. And it’s absolutely installed on the internal SSD, doesn’t seem that way, it loads like Skyrim back on 360 on an old ass mechanical hard drive. 

Seriously!!  I can’t believe there was no mention of that, it looks incredible!

And how most people didn’t seem to react to Spider-man sitting there among them!

Insomniac’s games are always really, really well optimized so this isn’t too surprising, even Spidey MM and Remastered loaded insanely fast for open-world games. Designing from the ground up for PS5 clearly did this sequel wonders, they seem to have taken advantage of every bit of power on PS5, and that speedy SSD…

The raw speed is obviously very impressive, but the slickness of that transition is the real wow factor here, IMO. Open map, select fast travel, fade out/in in the exact same timeframe would be significantly less impressive than this map level geometry blending wizardry.

It’s a Spider-man game. And a sequel. How different could it possibly be? He web slings and beats the shit out of bad guys while being as simultaneously snarky and angsty as possible. I'd be disappointed if it WAS radically different, because web-slinging, ass-kicking, snarky angst is the core of Spider-man's…

I think Spider-Man games can get away with an 8 or 9 out of 10 without changing much because a) the web swinging / combat is so much fun and b) the games have always been story-driven and a great new story justifies playing a sequel without much change to the gameplay (which again, is already pretty great).

The complaint about Starfield is that BGS has failed to really innovate or push things forward for over 20 years, hell even the engine is unchanged.  And in other ways, they have actually moved backwards (proc gen, one of the dumbest ideas imaginable for their core gameplay loop).

Starfield was a sequel to Skyrim.  It just takes place way in the future. 

My most anticipated game of the year. I can’t wait to dive in (headfirst from a tall skyscraper)!

I really enjoy playing these games but I think I’m in the minority that finds the writing and plotting in them to be bad to the point of distraction.

The first game was bad for it, but Miles Morales fully toppled into some of the most laughably annoying cliches. It was a rare instance of a piece of media that actually…

“its not that much different from its predecessor”

I'd disagree. I had no fun in Starfield. It was a great sleep aid though.

Ehhhh. I think Toriyama is honestly pretty great at writing whimisical, adventure-type stories (which this seems to be). The original Dragonball and Sand Land were both pretty great.