What you need to know
- Bethesda's RPGs are famous for their impressive physics systems and object interactivity.
- Starfield is no different, and in this regard, even features many improvements over Skyrim and Fallout 4.
- One Starfield player showed this off by spawning 10,000 salami sandwiches on top of their ship and then taking off, raining them down on the citizens of New Atlantis. You can watch a clip of it in the embed below.
- Despite some major initial FPS drops, the game managed to stabilize, simulate where all the cold cuts would land, and kept them all in the world until the player returned to the scene.
Among other things, Bethesda's open world RPGs are famous for having some of the most impressive physics systems in all of gaming. Nearly every object in the environment is coded as an individual entity that can be picked up and moved around, and is affected by collision and knockback effects from things like explosions and Fus Ro Dah Dragonborn shouts.
Over time, players have discovered many different useful, creative, and humorous ways to have fun with this interactivity. In both Skyrim and Fallout 4, for example, you could become completely undetectable and plunder with impunity simply by plopping a bucket down on an NPC's head.
The same can be said for the studio's new galaxy-sized space RPG Starfield, in which people are stealing by physically knocking credit chips into containers and hauling them out of sight and stuffing thousands of potatoes into ship interiors just to watch them spill out when a door is opened. The interaction I've seen so far that cracked me up the most, though, is this clip from user @Fallout_Collect on X (formerly Twitter). You can watch it below.
I put 10,000 sandwiches on top of my ship and let them rain over New Atlantis on take off!🥪🥪🥪🥪🥪🥪🥪#Starfield#starfieldgame #sandwich #meme #bethesda pic.twitter.com/UdB0RzIVa9September 8, 2023
In it, @Fallout_Collect spawns roughly 10,000 of Starfield's highly detailed, scrumptious-looking salami sandwich consumables on top of their ship using console commands, chugging their framerate down to 4 FPS and filling the screen with an ocean of cold cut goodness. They then go aboard and take off over the hub city of New Atlantis, raining them all down across the metropolis in a glorious shower of lettuce and lunch meat. Upon "returning to the scene," they found sandwiches scattered across all of New Atlantis' various buildings and streets. If only food delivery was this efficient — and this free — in real life.
It's incredible to see Starfield's Creation Engine 2 rise to the challenge of simulating how thousands of sandwiches would be flung across a cityscape by a spaceship's takeoff, and it's equally impressive that the game's object permanence kept every one rendered. Ultimately, it's a testament to just how far Bethesda's engine has come, as messing around with physics on this scale would probably crash Skyrim or Fallout 4 in seconds.
Starfield is finally here, and it's undoubtedly one of the best Xbox games and best PC games for lovers of space exploration, deep RPG gameplay, and the sci-fi genre as a whole.
