Starfield accidentally ignites another dev discussion about how games lie to players: "Gamers found out about the rain box - pack it up boys, it's over"

After Starfield players had the revelation that the in-game rain system is actually just a box developers place around environments to simulate an actual weather event, game developers from a bunch of different studios are sharing other dirty little secrets they use to deceive us.

In case you missed it, an explosive Reddit post was shared the other day absolutely blowing the lid off of Starfield's phony rain façade. As you can see just below, it looks like Redditor thelastfastbender was able to play around with Starfield's photo mode enough to see that rain is nothing but a confined collection of raindrops falling on a localized space, as if it's all coming from the same source.

...Wait.

In Starfield, rain only exists in a small area around the player. from r/gaming

In seriousness, this is actually a common technique developers use to make it look like it's raining everywhere without having to render the amount of rain drops it would take to *actually* cover a big area - especially where the player can't even see.

Tom Francis, lead VFX artist over at Red Hook Games, pointed out that Bethesda could've avoided this whole scandal if it had just attached the "rain box" to the POV camera instead of the character model, which apparently would've made it it nigh-impossible for the player to step out of bounds and spot the trickery.

The creator of Iron Lung, one of the scariest indie games of 2022, is proper freaked out that the masses have discovered the big, wet lie.

Other developers have joined the conversation both to shed light on interesting tricks of the trade, or to simply laugh at us gamers for not knowing anything.,

"Wait till they learn all those elevator rides, shimmying against walls, etc are just glorified loading screens lmao," said Bungie associate world designer Collin MacGregor.

Indie developer Robin Johnson shared that "enemies are often deliberately worse shots when the player has their back to them," adding, "It changed how I thought about games. Your goal isn't to simulate a world, it's to create an experience."

"Every time an AAA-game comes out Gamers™ have a meltdown about it not being a perfect simulation of reality but the truth is that one of the best things about games is how they're made of nothing but weird ass tricks," said game developer Marika Redmud.

"They know now...the magic has been exposed. It's like if Disney World removed the walls and exposed the outside world to the park," said QA analyst Corey "Big Slice" Strobbe.

Undertow Games solo developer and FakeFish programmer Regalis said: "Looking forward to gamers finding out about backface culling."

"Usually only the sides of an object that are facing the camera are rendered, so in a sense the 'other side' of any object becomes invisible when you're not looking at it," they added.

A lot of this probably won't be a surprise to anyone who's dabbled in game design, but it's nonetheless fascinating when a group of professionals comes together to offer their own unique insights and peaks behind the curtain. 

I know I'll be fine just so long as you don't tell me video game loading bars are fake.