For those who have pre-ordered it is already here, the rest have to wait a little longer. Starfield is finally here! Have you bought it, why or why not? If you’ve already played it, what do you think of it? We are very curious!
Discuss all things Starfield below!
I’ll let you know in 2 years when it is on sale for at least 50% off.
and has quite a few decent mods that fix the annoying things like inventory
Boy oh boy everyone hates inventory limits and tedious management but devs still feel the need to make sure we have a reason to return towns and what not as the excuse.
Like fuck you, give me a better reason than inconveniencing the fuck out of me while I was out in your world having fun.
cough Baldur’s Gate 3 cough. Why impose an inventory limit if I can just send all the loot I’m gunna sell back to camp? And why no quick “send to camp” hotkey?! Right clickin n shiiittt
Inventory limits are a direct nerf to barrelmancy
Man, preach
Mods are the very first thing that turns me off in a game. I want to play a game, not go stack mods on top of mods just to fix the shit the studio didn’t feel like working on.
They are optional you know?
Sure, just like SkyUI is “optional” for Skyrim.
Sure, you can. But you will gouge your eyes out.
Personally I don’t like SkyUI, I prefer the base game UI. But I have to use it because so many mods require it :(
Yeah I’ll be patiently waiting for SFSE and StarUI before getting the game lol
100% true - but if people feel the need to create so many mods, then there are probably lots of things people feel aren’t good enough about the game. I’ll admit my gaming time is limited, so just researching and adding mods could easily take all my time. I mean, fuck, I sold my Warthog HOTAS and went back to a cheap thrusmaster not because I liked the thrustmaster better, but because I was spending more time writing and fixing scripts and updating my bindings than actually playing the game. And every time an update would come out that would break a script I would spend pretty much my entire gaming time budget for a couple weeks just getting it running again. It got to the point where I just didn’t play those games because every patch would change something and something (even something small) would break or be incompatible. I’m kind of over that.
Every game gets modded, the number of mods reflects how easy it is to do, not the need for them.
But Cities Skylines 1 is borderline unplayable outside of Steam because the non-steam players can’t use that one third-party traffic mod on the Steam Workshop that fixes the annoying only-one-lane traffic jams the devs did jack shit about until their recently-released sequel
DayZ has entered the chat.
It’s $120 in Australia, even at 50% off it’s still more than I’d ever spend on a game. Just gonna keep waiting
Yo HO!
Yeah we pay an 80% markup just for existing and I hate it, but the gaming industry has been dropping quality while simultaneously increasing prices for some time now.
The only games in the last couple years I’ve paid full price for are CP2077, BG3 and Battlebit. Everything else is bought during the sales, usually at a steep discount, where many of these games should be priced by default.
Fuckin corpo dogs, they’ll ruin anything and everything they can to make a buck.
Hello, fellow patient gamer!
#nopoors
Being a patient gamer isn’t strictly about money. It’s about not getting caught up in hype and making more calculated decisions. Even so, wanting to pay what you think something is worth is just good practice.
I’m not going to wait two years – though I’m opposed to preordering – but there are other benefits too. Two years down the line:
-
A bunch of bugs are patched. Even if Starfield is relatively free of bugs, there will be some.
-
The wikis for the game have been written up. Some obsessive person will have sat down and figured out the quirks of game mechanics and documented them. Understanding stuff like the relative merits of armor-piercing, bleeding, and so forth in Fallout 4 was complicated.
-
Starfield’s expansion packs will be out.
-
Mods will be out, and there will probably be some pretty “must have” ones.
-
You’ll have more hardware oomph to throw at the game, make it smoother/higher res.
-
What if I told you it’s possible to have money and not want to waste it on dumb shit?
Maybe that’s one of the reasons you have said money?
Holy crap you know I think you might be onto something
Lmao I only buy games when they’re discounted too and suddenly I have 186 games in my steam library, most of them are still unplayed . I’m not in a hurry to buy more games with such a long backlog.
Enjoy waiting!
Thanks. I might look into the endless things from 2+ years ago that are on sale now. Probably not though. Too many books to read. 😵💫
Throw some good books my way! I’m always on the lookout
Hyperion+Endymion by Dan Simmons. Such a wonderfully written book that evokes so many sad feelings.
It’s veeeery slow (basically the entire first book is build up for the second one), but it’s so rewarding watching all the threads come together by the end.
I mean, we were clearly all so patiently holding our respective breath for this absolute genius comment of yours to grace our screens, O’ wisest of asses. What’s a little longer, really?
Oh wisest spender of 60 dollars, you are the light. How will I ever decide to expend that amount over the next 24+ months. Lmao. Get your goofy ass on
You spend less than $60 in two years’ time? Your Internet bill must be the cheapest on the planet. Your grocery expenses must also be next to nothing if you’re surviving on the warmth of your hot air whinging alone . Fascinating.
Fuck preordering
Not only preordering, spending almost 50% more on the game just to play it 5 days early. The fuck is wrong with people, no wonder the industry got like it is.
I clapped. I clapped because I agree. I’m still clapping.
Removed by mod
What does this thread have to do with pre-ordering?
Did you actually read the original post?
The original post is incorrect, you didn’t have to pre-order to play early. I bought my copy after reviews dropped.
Good to know, but irrelevant to the point I was making. I wasn’t saying fuck preordering this game. But rather, fuck preordering as a practice.
All it does is incentivize developers to release incomplete games.
deleted by creator
Not gonna lie, you had me in the first half lol
It’s amazing how many people aren’t getting this joke.
If you retry character creation with the second controller expansion pack, you can get a green suit.
Wow, very surprising. Dunkey already gave it game of the year.
deleted by creator
I see exactly what I expected. I didn’t bought the hysteria on Youtube/insta/TK.
And I didn’t preorder the game because of that hysteria. The Hysteria looked a lot like the Cyberpunk Fiasco. Realistic expectations, we seem to have lost that capability with upcoming video games. When something sounds too good, It is.
I don’t know what you saw Todd say where but I just read some interviews like this one: https://www.ign.com/articles/todd-howard-interview-starfield-sgf-2023 And in nothing i’ve red from him even slightly resembles the hype around this game.
TH: “We do lock it at 30 [FPS], because we want that fidelity, we want all that stuff.”
That means 1 thing: not a real action game, more in line of FO4, maybe NMS like but more like RDR. A dogfight @30FPS is over before it starts. Beauty is more important then speed for this game.
Speaking about RDR, TH: “So I think it also as a flow, probably has more of a feeling of a [Red Dead Redemption 2]”
Here you have it literally: a game like RDR. Not NMS. Not Elite. Not StarCitizen. But like RDR. That means that the ships are more of a means of transport then a real gameplay mechanic. And space is just the theme.
TH: “this is like five or six games in one, right? It’s the spaceship game, it’s the on the ground game, it’s just a dialogue game, it’s an outpost game, it’s a crafted game. It does all of these things, and so… And it always is tricky for us to get a good game flow where those things don’t feel like they’re separate game”
That means the spaceship part is not front and center. All these things he states are just pieces for a standard RPG:
- Ground game: Loot and shoot.
- Dialogue game: standard RPG.
- Outpost game: base building.
- Crafting? Standard part of every RPG in the last decade.
Add to that it’s build with the Bethesda engine. We know it’s capabilities for what… 2 decades? We flew in FO4. But we didn’t steer… It was on rails
This all meant in my mind that the spaceship part had to be a transportation mini game.
So reading the official stuff, I always expected a mix between FO4 and Mass Effect. With a mobile “base” (your ship) with maybe some light spaceship combat. Sprinkled with some exploration.
Not a game which morphed all those separate game types. Just an FP/3rd p ARPG set in a cool science fiction universe.
I think we’re finally getting Firefly.
deleted by creator
deleted by creator
Just played 4 hours. Not saying whether the game is good or bad, but I’m not seeing the point of the spaceship yet.
It’s looks like merely a medium for the fast traveling mechanic. You can’t really “move” in space (as far as ive tried), and can’t use it to fly within a planet.
I expected being able to manually travel from planet A to planet B and finding cool stuff along the way. If you wanna actually move you need to fast travel.
I also expected to be able to get in my ship and go from place A to place B within the same planet (also finding cool stuff along the way). It seems that also is just done by fast traveling only.
So the space exploration is more like Mass Effect Andromeda instead of No Man’s Sky?
To me Mass Effect 1-3 felt more cohesive in space, because it was always clear how much you could do, whereas in SF it looks exactly like you’re in NMS, but you can’t do NMS things.
It’s not game breaking or ruining though. Just know going in that it isn’t No Mans Sky.
I haven’t played it, but that seems to be the general consensus I’ve seen.
Yes, it’s much more like Andromeda than NMS. You can also land at other points on planets and get a procedurally generated area instead of just the pre-made ones like in andromeda though.
Sounds disappointing. I’m definitely unnaturally excited with the idea of “Large vehicles” - being able to walk inside with your character, take casual actions like crafting/talking while it transports, then stepping out. It’s why I enjoyed Sea of Thieves and Subnautica, and it’s what I mainly want out of trains in games.
Reducing them to interaction prompts and cutscenes sort of undersells them to me.
I did read that landing on planets is just a cutscene rather than a seamless transition, but I thought for sure you can actually fly it in space - isn’t there even combat with other spaceships or random locations to check for resources?
Is there anything else to do on the spaceship, does it feel like a home base where you keep your gear, crafting benches, companions to talk to, etc? I really want that cozy starbound/kotor ebon hawk vibes if possible 🥺
So you can fly in space, and fight space battles there, but you can’t really fly fast enough to fly from one planet to another in real time. To move to a different point of interest in the system, you need to fast travel to it. So the meaningfully interactable part of space is just the immediate area around each fast travel point.
I’m not far enough yet to know if the interior gets more interesting after you add more modules to the ship; the starter ship is basically an RV: bed, galley, cockpit.
Yeah I meant fly as in between locations without a loading screen, kinda like in X3/X4/NMS or even Freelancer/Rebel Galaxy and older spaceship games. I get it might be harder between solar systems the way E:D does it but kinda sad it’s not real travel within one. Maybe they patch it in one day in the future? Who knows
Yeah I meant fly as in between locations without a loading screen, kinda like in X3/X4/NMS or even Freelancer/Rebel Galaxy and older spaceship games.
Ehhhh.
I dunno about No Man’s Sky.
But in X3 (and X2, for that matter), you don’t really seamlessly enter stations. In X4, you do, but it felt like a gimmick to me – there’s not much interesting gameplay on a station.
And there are loading screens between sectors in those games. Short ones, but they’re there. Freelancer too.
Well I never said “enter” stations, I said travel between them. In X3 you used SETA to travel between stations and in X:R and X:4 you had (super)highways. Freelancer also had those rings that speed you up and you could leave them at any point - in fact, the way piracy worked was you destroy one of the rings which would interrupt the travel and drop any ships out of the hightway lane so you could attack them.
Basically, all of these games didn’t just have a loading screen when going from one station to another, there was an actual feeling of distance and travel. From what I’ve heard starfield doesn’t have it at all.
Your ship is basically a TARDIS. You pick a destination from your star map and then your ship magically disappears from one place and appears at another. There is “space” but it feels completely fake, like they tacked it on at the end. Really, so many of the games mechanics feel fake and the effort it takes to suspend disbelief is really high.
There is spaceship battles, not sure about random locations, but I’m guessing you’d also need to fast travel to those.
Also the spaceship is VERY customizable, so much in fact that I found it overwhelming lmao. Not saying that’s bad thing, but you’d definitely need to come up with a lot of credits /loot first.
Again I only have 4 hours in game, so I don’t really know much yet.
Well. Fuck.
I had this complaint early on. It was very disheartening.
20 hours in, I love that I can fast travel from one planet to another in an entirely different solar system, to the building I need to get to.
Tbh I have had a lot of fun with this game (35h in). It’s an RPG first and space explorer second, nothing necessarily wrong with that.
I also learned that if you’re tracking a quest you can use the grav drive right from the ship’s HUD by selecting the locstion marker. It does help immersion a tiny bit more.
Overall it’s what they promised, modders can anyways “fix” the shortcomings.
This is the exact thing that I expected them to implement, and the dealbreaker for me.
Y’all I thought we agreed as a society to not preorder anymore?
I didn’t pre order. I waited for review embargo to lift, then I bought it today.
This isn’t “early access”, this is Bethsda squeezing money out of game pass subscribers
I actually have no problem with this, I even almost like this.
If you want, you can spend extra cash to play it a few days earlier, otherwise you can wait and get it for “free”. This drives sales, “forces” the most hardcore players to purchase the title, and ensures that gamepass players can enjoy first party titles on day one even in the future.
which one are you in? I am in society 2.0.1B
In my defense, I preordered it after it came out.
Same. I almost always hold on games until just after release, when the preorder is still up, so I can read user reactions and gameplay videos before buying but still get the crappy preorder rewards.
I got the premium edition when I bought a new CPU and it came bundled, so I still have my Hardcore Gamer Badge.
…I also got Overwatch 2, but I’m not even going to bother redeeming that one.
Isn’t OW2 free?
Which makes it even worse
You’re right, just checked my emails and saw that the code is for “Overwatch 2 Invasion Ultimate Bundle”, which I guess is DLC or something. It was bundled with a Zotac 4090 on Amazon.
You didn’t have to pre-order it for early access.
I didn’t preorder, it’s free with Game Pass. Just not the early play.
Watched a streamer play for quite a while and my primary takeaway is that I wish Bethesda would just scrap their engine and start fresh.
It’s got the same stiffness, gliding movement, butt-ugly NPC’s, and just the general feel of 15 year old Bethesda RPGs. I expect I wouldn’t be able to enjoy it for the same reason I struggled with fallout 4.
Something about how luminescent their eyes are bothers me. But their engine is starting to show it’s age, that’s for sure.
This is their first game on this new engine, so that’s probably not it.
Calling Creation 2 a “new engine” is a little too generous.
It’s an upgrade of their previous engine, which was an upgrade to gamebryo.
Taking a Model T, and dropping the engine into a Porsche doesn’t mean you have a Porsche.
valves new games are still running off code from gold source
‘engine old’ means extremely little and i wish people would stop parroting it
New engine? Do you mean the “Creation Engine 2”, which is still gamebryo at its core? I’m not complaining though because the engine is very mod friendly, it’s just realism is not its strong suit.
RDR2 was built on RAGE, an engine originally used for a table tennis game. Things get upgraded and evolve.
From ping-pong balls to dynamically-resizing horse balls.
It’s interesting how little evolving and upgrading Bethesda does with their stuff. You can’t say that RDR2 and that table tennis game feels the same, but Oblivion and Fallout 4 feel very similar.
It’s a Bethesda problem, because other Gamebryo games don’t feel the same. Even CAVE did a better job with it.
Yep, people love to blame the engine but that’s not why their games have the same feel.
It absolutely is the fault of the engine, but that’s not because Bethesda is incompetent or anything. It’s actually a pretty complicated issue, but yes, it is due to the engine. I wrote a whole explanation for someone else who was parroting the “it’s not the engine’s fault” bs that Pete Hines & Todd Howard started perpetuating a few years ago, so I’ll put it here for you and anyone else:
The problem isn’t the engine itself, it’s that Bethesda hasn’t given it the attention it needs.
Unreal Engine 5, for example, is built from the original Unreal Engine. But there has been so much work put into it that it’s nearly impossible to tell. Meanwhile, the creation engine literally has some of the same issues that the Gambryo engine had back during Morrowind.
To Bethesda’s credit, this isn’t entirely their fault. There’s a reason that proprietary engines have been dying out in favor of engines like Unreal, and that’s because maintaining and improving game engines is incredibly time consuming and expensive. And unless you’re directly profiting off of your engine, like Epic does, you don’t have a massive incentive to endlessly polish it. Doing so is time you could be spending working on your next game, which you do directly profit off of.
Personally, I want Bethesda to keep using the Creation Engine, or whatever they turn it into next, because of its incredible mod support. However, it’s nowhere near as polished or advanced as other engines, and understandably probably never will be. There’s really no easy solution imo.
Bethesda really needs to tweak their subsurface scattering for the skin and eyeballs (maybe have a separate render method of eye scatter)
I’ve never understood this argument, most game engines are based on 20+ year old technology and have been updated throughout the years. Can the creation engine be improved upon? Definitely yes, but the engine’s age has almost nothing to do with it.
Their point is that the engine doesn’t show signs of being improved upon during that time and is still stuck feeling like a 20 year old engine.
If you mean just the Creation Engine, that was 2011.
If you trace it back to Gamebryo, then Morrowind was 20 years ago, but I don’t think that one can say that even Skyrim looks much like Morrowind.
Skyrim literally had some of the same exact problems that Morrowind had.
Personally I want them to keep the creation engine, if only for the stellar mod support. But let’s not kid ourselves, it desperately needs an overhaul.
What specific functionality is it that you want?
I listed one feature that I’d like to have (dynamic generation of polygons in curved surfaces), which I do not consider to be a very important limitation in another comment.
But if you strongly feel that the engine imposes constraints, then I’m curious what particular functionality it is that you’re after.
EDIT: Another: I don’t think that the game can generate billboards for player-built structures (so you can see the structures you’ve built in Fallout 4 and Fallout 76 many cells away). I don’t think that that’s actually a fundamental engine limitation – you could probably do it with the existing engine, just that the game doesn’t do it today. Instead, stuff like that is generated via offline map-generation tools. But again, it’s not really a huge deal in either of the above Fallout games.
There’s no specific functionality (except maybe ladders lol) it’s more just the engine as a whole. The fact that certain bugs can be found in all of their games from Morrowind to Fallout 4 is unacceptable imo.
And the fact that someone managed to literally put the world of Fallout 4 into Skyrim, and have it just work seamlessly, really speaks volumes.
I actually wrote an explanation for someone else a while ago, so I’ll put it here if you’re curious:
The problem isn’t the engine itself, it’s that Bethesda hasn’t given it the attention it needs.
Unreal Engine 5, for example, is built from the original Unreal Engine. But there has been so much work put into it that it’s nearly impossible to tell. Meanwhile, the creation engine literally has some of the same issues that the Gambryo engine had back during Morrowind.
To Bethesda’s credit, this isn’t entirely their fault. There’s a reason that proprietary engines have been dying out in favor of engines like Unreal, and that’s because maintaining and improving game engines is incredibly time consuming and expensive. And unless you’re directly profiting off of your engine, like Epic does, you don’t have a massive incentive to endlessly polish it. Doing so is time you could be spending working on your next game, which you do directly profit off of.
Personally, I want Bethesda to keep using the Creation Engine, or whatever they turn it into next, because of its incredible mod support. However, it’s nowhere near as polished or advanced as other engines, and understandably probably never will be. There’s really no easy solution imo.
Old or not it’s clear it needs a fundamental reworking if the same complaints persist across literal decades.
It also is new, it used the creation engine 2.
It would be like arguing that UE5 isn’t new just because it’s an upgraded UE4.
Yeah, they can just append a number to it like unreal does and call it a new engine but that’s not what you actually want. It’s not a matter of a “new engine”, it’s them not investing enough into the existing one to make it feel more modern. I know some things like physics and animations are part of the “bethesda charm” but it stopped being charming after skyrim :P
Removed by mod
It is a new engine for this game.
It’s like arguing the UE5 isn’t new since it’s an upgrade UE4.
They’ve been saying a new engine for a long time. It’s just not. they change subsystems, but people are saying they can feel the morrowind in their latest titles.
I can’t feel the unreal 1 in UE5 games.
Removed by mod
Yes… that’s how engines work unless you rewrite them……
I respect the sentiment, so no disrespect to it; but in software, there’s often a lot of caution against throwing out too much code.
You often find certain modules and sections of code that really should be thrown out or overhauled. If you can convince the corporation to dedicate time to doing that, it can often, but not always, show its benefits.
Probably a lot of the popular games we still play use some old bases, but replace parts that don’t work well. I think Apex Legends is still technically using Source (HL2), they’ve just done a lot to it so it no longer looks anything like Half Life 2.
Okay but Bethesdas engine kinda sucks and source engine is still pretty good… Why keep something if it’s not very good, other than to save money of course.
I’m done paying anything above half off a Bethesda games since fallout 4/76 anyway, they were bad and awful.
we’ve never seen a source game at the scale of oblivion and have object permanence so you can’t really compare the two.
They’ve never been able to get player models and expression right. I can totally forgive it if you get the same level of open world exploration and interaction we got in New Vegas. I personally can trade quality for depth and interesting gameplay (rimworld and dwarf fortress come to mind in the extremes of this). But it does seem like they struggle to achieve standards that were set even 5 years ago.
Bethesda is a funny company. When they are on it and get it right you end up with some of the best games ever made (Skyrim) but when they’re off it just becomes this jumbled mess that got duct taped together and released at full price (fo76).
I’m hoping this is more of the former but we will see. I suspect the modding community is going to take starfield and turn it into something magical. That ship building engine plus copyrighted space ships from pop culture, sign me up.
I think the hardest thing to do is having complex facial expressions overlapping when characters talk. You could do face capture for every dialog option but that would be a massive task.
In alot of engines characters mouths are controlled by a lip sync system that uses, pitch, tone or text fed dialog to ‘mimic’ words being formed in the mouth. It’s far easier to have that and then having facial expressions as a separate animation layer that’s blended together and triggered based on a enum that’s selected by a script (say a players dialog option says “Your a mean man” and the player selects it, the NPC knows what you selected and in that dialogue option theirs a little enum (it makes more sense if you treat a dialogue option as an object) that contains the facial expression or expressions that are appropriate to use in response).
Full facial animations are used mostly for cutscenes because actors cost money while in game is just the engine trying to move the mouth using code (I know Farcry 5 had this where only the important characters had full facial animations and the rest just flapped their mouths up and down).
Would anyone else be interested in a game that aborts a dedicated “conversation mode” to just have players respond in their normal first person view? Games like Titanfall 2 did that - even though your banter with BT is inconsequential.
It could even lead to some fun “actions not words” moments. Like, a gangster explaining to you “I have the council in my pocket and every gun in the city knows your face. What’re you gonna do about it?” shoots him in the head instead of responding
Modern game engines are extremely complex machines, starting from scratch would take decades because it’s fundermental things like drawing geometry in a 3D space, getting input, memory handling, garbage collection and all that low level stuff that needs to be re-done. Physics requires lots of work, so much infact for a time HAVOK was the go to plugin for most engines (still kinda is) just because of how God damn hard it is to have nice physics and high frame rates (tried to build a physics engine from scratch in C++ and I couldn’t get past the floating point position problem so anything too far away from 0,0,0 would spaz and handling multiple collisions on an object simultaneously caused all sorts of freaky things to happen).
Then when that’s done you still need to write additional tools and plugins so developers can import assets and scripts into the engine plus a level editor for designers to place objects, triggers and all that fun stuff.
After that you can now start making the game.
Bethesda probably rewrote huge chunks of their engine to support larger texture sizes and improve performance across the board for Starfield.
If they do decide to dump it then they’re most likely to use an existing engine like Unreal or Cry rather than build one from scratch.
Personally I believe the reason why they didn’t re-write the character movement is because it would also mean altering way to much stuff on the front end.
A good example would be if I use FunctionGetVelocity in my script to determine if a player is moving and it use to return an int but now it returns a float because of the rewrite, without conversion would mean you’d probably get a crash.
Another example would be AI related. If I use a variable to get a rot data type but now that’s been replaced with a struct that needs to be split to get rot now suddenly you have to touch the code to make it compliant.
Which is why I’m sad that cdpr decided to ditch their red engine. So much work turning a buggy mess engine from Witcher 2 into a beautiful (still buggy) engine in cyberpunk. If only they would at least open source it, or sell it to another studio.
I agree. I really admired their persistence with it and it would be nice to have some actual competition to Unreal.
With nanite, live coding and lumen Unreal is unbeatable at the moment and lots of studios are hiring like crazy for Unreal Engine specialists to try and beat the competition.
If CDPR wants to compete they’ll have to do a ton of work making those tools for designers and artists easy to use (alot more in-house engines still have source 2 hammer editor style toolkits and command line conversion tools which are shit compared to Unreals drag and drop advantage).
Plus Unreal 4/5 was built to be as modular as possible so you can build whatever you want while CDPR engine was built specifically for this genre of games Cyberpunk is in. They definitely could and I see the engine having potential but afraid that’s it’s not flexible enough without serious work.
Yeah it’s really weird to feel it again in a game. Especially coming from baldurs gate 3 where the npc interactions and realness of characters is so good
To be thrown into npc dialogue straight at you with no natural movement.
Otherwise the game is really cool so far. Flight is a little complex but I guess I’ll get used to it. The robot even says it’ll be like second nature soon. Assume he was talking directly to the player
scrapping their engine is a terrible idea, and folks need to stop repeating it
just shows that you dont know what engines are, do or how they evolve
Spent a few hours trying to fix the broken ultrawide support. Eventually, the good old hex edit fix for aspect ratios on the EXE did the trick. After that, the FOV was messed up, but the game doesn’t have an FOV slider (or HDR, or DLSS)… so eventually I managed to fix that with a custom ini.
The next few hours was spent shooting pirates like I was playing Far Cry in Space, and struggling with the game’s horrifically designed UI, menus, and inventory. So far, I am feeling very angry about the game. Like we were flat-out lied to about what the game was. There is no exploration. There’s barely even “space”. You just teleport from map to map shooting pirates… with a little scanning creatures and mining rocks mixed in. I don’t understand how anyone is okay with this.
I’ll start by saying I haven’t played this, I just watched reviews online. But I see everybody agreeing in that the exploration is not actual exploration but a lot of clicking menus. And when someone complains about it, there’s always a bunch of people defending it because “it’s a bethesda game” or “the game is what it is and not what you expected it to be”. I don’t get this.
The game was overhyped, and the specific part about space exploration is (so far) a lie. Period.
I’d I wanted to click through menus is okay elder scrolls arena. I had no faith when the game was announced so I’m not to surprised.
Thank you for the heads up on broken ultra wide. I wish this was considered a showstopper for most game developers but I digress…
Kind of wish that there was an icon in the Steam store for it, like with VR headset support.
No ultrawide, despite literally having it running on an ultrawide monitor at their Gamescom booth.
No HDR, well, except in the menu and load screens.
Yeah I got it for free with a purchase and have played a couple hours and it runs terribly, looks middling, and the gameplay is the most base aspects of previous Bethesda games except lacking even the exploration or cohesion.
deleted by creator
Coming fresh off BG3, the quality of the writing and the amount of character expression in dialog is like night and day. Honestly there was even one moment fairly early on when I said to myself “Fallout 4 would have let me extort this guy” and then I realized how egregious it was that I felt I had less agency in this quest than in FO4.
Dang, that different huh? I’m on Act III in Baldur’s Gate 3 right now and was thinking about taking a break for Starfield lol
Do it if you want some shooty-shooty gameplay, but don’t expect the writing to be as good.
I think current wisdom is to take a break from BG3 with Armored Core 6.
the side quest lines are giving me a few interesting options. try the corpo one
Unfortunately it isn’t what I wanted out of this game.
Loading screen to land on a planet, loading screen to leave my spaceship, no seamless entry into caves or buildings. Planets and space having boundaries. Can’t use my spaceship to traverse.
Glad people enjoy it, but I was looking for something more akin to NMS or Star Citizen.
This is exactly why I didn’t pre order or buy this game, I knew it was going to fall severely short of the expectation.
A bunch of non connected areas and gameplay loops.
They specifically said there were going to be loading screens and no user driven landings. I agree with not preordering games, but I also think you need to actually look at what the dev is saying before you set your expectations.
My expectations are set by the gaming landscape as a whole. For example, virtually all games releasing nowadays have a manual save feature. I expect that. A dev coming out during development to say their game doesn’t have manual saving doesn’t suddenly make that okay.
It’s an extreme example, but my point is that a dev disclosing something before release shouldn’t magically negate all criticism of it. People are allowed to be frustrated by things this game does poorly that other games excel at, even if the devs were transparent about those shortcomings.
It’s not even that, I never talked about the space to planet transition because I expected that to be a loading screen.
I’m talking about how the game itself is structured, I thought the space travel and jumping from system to system was going to be more like elite, but it’s just small instances with loading screens. Was that my fault for assuming that? I mean, they focused so hard on ship customization I assumed space travel was a big part of the game. At least the space gameplay, if not the planetary gameplay.
Bethesda was super closed off about how exactly the gameplay loop was structured because they knew the truth was going to reduce sales. So they let the reality of it just go unsaid while they kept you focused on the pretty screenshots.
Good strawman, notice how I never specified planetary landings? Cause I already knew that it was going to be a loading screen.
I’m talking about the fractured nature of the surface and the inability to fly from place to place in space. Or transition from locations in atmosphere. Everything is its own tiny location and fast traveling the rule of thumb. It seems like they kept as little information on this specific aspect as possible until the preorders were in. Probably so that the nature of the game wouldn’t drive away people looking for something with more of an interconnected holistic model of travel. They knew the truth would severely reduce their consumer base so they pretended it was “Star Citizen (with severe limitations)” instead of “Mass Effect: Andromeda (but you can customize and fly the tempest yourself)”
Someone in here said it best, “I have no idea what the purpose of including space ships and space travel even was.” If that’s a legitimate question in your space game, you failed.
At this point, what is functionally the difference between this and The Outer Worlds?
Oh no I was afraid of reading something like this. I love the concept of Star Citizen and got used to never seeing a loading screen and love the flight mechanics and ships (when it’s stable). I was hoping that Star Field could give me a similar experience. Didn’t have to be exactly like SC. I just wanted a stable, beautiful space game with game loops lol.
Guess I’ll wait on this one till there are more mods.
Could give space engineers a go
So called seamless experiences just add time and tedium, because they’re hidden loading screens. Take me to the content please.
loading-screen-lover gamer, this is definitely a first.
Give me RDR2 seamless experience every day of the week
Sorry, if you want to get to Valentine, you have to get on your horse and fast travel.
I did not bite and will avoid it until 75% off GOTY edition all DLC in etc. Patient gamer through and through, burnt way too many times. So far what I read about it, it not optimized, it’s shallow, lacks polish, etc etc. Basically, a standard AAA fare, something we sadly grew to expect from major studios. Will be watching it for a while to see what I’m missing.
One thing I can say so far after a few hours is that their advertising department and Inon Zur did a masterful job capturing a whimsical aesthetic that nostalgically reminds me of some educational TV space shows like Cosmos.
Now that I’m playing the game, it feels significantly more clunky than that, and I haven’t gotten as immersed into that aesthetic as I had hoped. Really just FEELS like Fallout in space so far, which is a bit disappointing.
There’s also significantly more load screens than I had hoped. I’ve been spoiled by No Man’s Sky, thought we’d be getting some seamless transitions to planets and cities. Seems bizarre that we just fast travel through the starmap.
I think the load screens is what will kill it for me. I’d like to be immersed in a new universe. Not just select places from a menu and then load that place in.
Upsides:
- side quests other than the radiant ones are mostly cool so far
- stealth archer isn’t so good that you can just play that way straight out, but the tree makes it looks eventually strong
- zero g combat in a derelict space station was cool. I hope there’s more of that
- base building seems fine, I’m not sure what it’s for, but it seems fine
Downsides:
- ship stuff feels bad. I don’t care about fast travel, but it’s just about the weakest ship-to-ship combat that I’ve played. Its early yet, though. Boarding a ship was cool at least.
- combat AI is not good. Enemies never seem to take any initiative, they mostly just crouch behind wherever you found them
- the setting has no… flavor? The factions feel like fallout analogues but without fun or verve. Maybe I just haven’t found the weird shit yet, but I’m not optimistic.
I feel like I’ve burned myself out a little bit on story heavy games after Baldurs Gate 3, so I cannot concentrate on the story lol
But otherwise…
Fps jumps between 30 and 90 and I feel the slowdowns (rtx3080, Ryzen 3900x here).
The graphics and animations are kind of shit. Standard Bethesda.
The menus are super fiddly.
The aesthetic is cool. I love the retro futuristic bulky style.
Music is great!
Voice acting thus far, is good.
Starship is cool but basically unnecessary. You just fast travel anyway.
Combat is pretty cool but stiff.I haven’t played super far yet so im hoping it gets a bit better soon.
Music is great!
Thanks. I specifically meant to ask about this in this thread and forgot.
I liked the music in New Vegas a lot, liked Fallout 4. Fallout 76 was a disappointment music-wise – I’m not a fan of country, and didn’t think that the DJing was good, left the radio off. Was really hoping that the Starfield music would be good.
That’s because Obsidian did new Vegas. Bethesda is good at making promises not games.
Obsidian are great at story but also iffy at game Dev. NV was standard AAA bug fest.
That seems a bit unfair to Obsidian. They were given an engine, they where unfamiliar with and had a very short 18 months of development time, very likely because of their deal with Bethesda.
i mean it explicitly was the deal they made with bethesda, they both agreed to a deadline
the lack of focus on actual bug fixes and the overconfidence with how much content they could realistically finish in those 18 months was still absolutely on obsidian
They did not treat us badly at all - even the Metacritic thing was something they added, not threatened us with… and if we’d been better with fixing bugs, we could have hit the score needed to prevent layoffs, but nope - FNV when it was released had a LOT of bugs.
Unfortunately, the other interpretation made for a better story… but even Obsidian’s CEO clarified it. That said, FNV needed to be downscoped, and production should have ended and testing begun at least 2 months earlier than it was.
Bethesda’s engine was the easiest to create content for, by far. Source control was easy, iterations were fast, the scripting language was pretty powerful – just easy to work in. Not necessarily easy to change, but if you wanted to do what we did on F:NV, which was make a bunch of new content and new features for the F3 engine, it was great.
The other person made a good point but QA before release is important and lots of bugs were dead obvious in all the games.
this was more a result of them biting off more than they can chew than an actual lack of skill
obsidian seemed like it had a hard time letting go of grand plans even when they proved to be unworkable
Still love it, maybe because it feels like they cared about making a good game. I still load up NV on occasion.
I do a play through of all the FO games every couple of years too.
I was fine with the music in Fallout 4, and Bethesda did that.
deleted by creator
Fallout 76 was a disappointment
ehehe
Removed by mod
BG3 is my first Larian game, I will absolutely be going back to play them, after a long ass break.
I had to step back from BG3 in the first week as it was already consuming my life.
I’ve been having a ton of fun with it. I’ve only played 4 hours so far, but it’s definitely the smoothest Bethesda game in terms of performance and animations, also in my experience not many bugs. Playing on a 1440p monitor with a 7900XT and I get pretty consistent 100fps (my monitor freaks out if I raise the hz higher than 100 so can’t tell how high it’ll go).
In terms of gameplay, space combat is reasonably entertaining and flying the ship is fairly well thought out. Whilst you can’t fly directly between planets like in Elite Dangerous, the primary purpose of ship control is combat and it does fairly well. On my computer, loading screens are pretty much instant, so travelling between planets isn’t a problem. Combat is fairly fun, and the AI behaviour has been much improved from previous Bethesda games. Still not always perfect but they do behave more naturally. Environmental storytelling also has a much larger presence again, with a lot of interactions and things to read. Also, this really fulfils my fantasy of being just a citizen in a sci-fi world. Walking around my ship, seeing the little bathroom and crew chambers, it’s really cool, it feels very lived in and really makes it feel like you’re an explorer on the fringes of space, living out of a ship.
There are a lot of comparisons with No Man’s Sky, but honestly I feel they’re completely different games, by design. Starfield is more Bethesda’s take on a Mass Effect style game.
Anyway, people have a lot of mixed opinions, but I’ve been loving it!
my monitor freaks out if I raise the hz higher than 100 so can’t tell how high it’ll go
Try a shorter monitor cable? I had a really long cable that did not deal well with high refresh rates.
Might also need to check what the ports on your monitor support. A high quality DisplayPort cable will probably solve the issue, but make check the spec on the HDMI and DisplayPorts on your monitor to make sure they can support higher the higher bandwidth needed for high refresh rate/high resolution monitors. If your HDMI is only v1.4, but DP is 1.2 or 1.4, definitely use DisplayPort instead.
If you just used an old cable that came with something for free, I would buy a proper cable that supports the newer DP or HDMI specs from someone like KableDirekt.
Thank you for the advice!
Unfortunately I’ve tried a number of very expensive cables, as well as multiple graphics cards. The monitors used to be fine, but over time they started getting all these horizontal lines across the screen if I go above 100hz. I’ve also tried Mac and Windows and same problem with both.
I’ve looked it up though and seems to be a common problem for AOC Agon monitors, so my fault for cheaping out, even though they still cost me $550aud per monitor :(
Thank you! Unfortunately I’ve tried multiple cables with different lengths, as well as DP and HDMI, different GPU’s and different OS’s, iGPU vs discrete, the only common failure is the monitor. Unfortunately it’s happening on both of them, same model of monitor and seems to be a common flaw. They are about 6 years old now though
For old monitors breaking or acting weird a lot of times it’s capacitors going bad & popping. I love looking around at the insides of tech things that stopped working right to try seeing why & maybe fixing them so just curious what could be causing it :)
if I may ask, I see you say that the loading screens are fast for you so the way to travel is not bad in your opinion. Would you say you are OK with the exploration being menu based? (which seems to be the biggest complain so far)
Yeah for me personally it’s not a subtractor to the experience. For one, they make those menus super convenient.
But then, as somebody who’s played quite a lot of Elite Dangerous, I don’t really feel there’s that much missing. I know lots of people will disagree with me here, but whilst I agree it’d be awesome to be able to fly from planet to planet, most of the other games that do this it’s just flying at a dot in space, waiting until the number next to it gets smaller. Space is big, and really really empty. And while I would still enjoy having that aspect in the game too, I think it’s not a bad tradeoff for having much more immersive planets, cities and gameplay. Also most of Elite Dangerous is sitting in a ship traversing menus, selecting a planet and then jumping there. While you can’t directly fly between, Starfield has that same game loop. You can just select a planet, mark it as your destination, then jump into the cockpit, line it up and turn on the grab drive to jump to that place. So I feel that it lives up to my personal expectations.
I don’t want to invalidate anyone else’s feelings or expiriencds though. I’m having a ton of fun playing and seeing the Starfield universe. However I’ll leave an update if that changes.
Personally having put in several hundred hours with Elite Dangerous (pre-landings, even), I’m glad to read this comment of yours. I don’t disagree about the game loop comparison, and yet I was hoping that Starfield would succeed where ED stayed limp all these years: quadrant-spanning politics, faction progress, living economies and similar. Hell, after knocking out my Merchant elite rank, I just focused on baggin’ griefers until Combat ranked up as well, but… menu scrolling for hours to tick that last box? I just couldn’t find the time. Especially when planets had no atmosphere, outposts were a joke, and even artifact sites were a half-baked afterthought by an obviously overdrawn team. 😅🥹🤷🏼♂️
Just… Dammit. Why.
Thanks for the insight!
The Lemmy community desperately needs a mix of more people lol, how are most of these comments “I haven’t played but it sucks” 😂
it’s because a lot of us didn’t pay for early access. so we have to wait.
Or we brought the wrong version 😿
I can spend what I saved for the game. I can’t spend 100 bucks for the version that let’s you play 5 days early. 😢
Lemmy overall has somehow managed to become an even more negative place to post than Reddit
Reddit has toxic positivity with regards to Starfield. I find the comments I’ve read here so far to be a much more measured take. Basically that it’s a good game but it has a few minor issues that make it not live up to what was advertised.
Or at least the expectations people had made for themselves.
More so this. The things I saw people saying they were gonna do once they got the game despite nothing of the sort being implied to be in the game were out of control. I’ve played the dog shit out of Skyrim and Fallout 4 and have yet to be let down by Starfield because I knew what to expect. And yes, I watched all of the ads and read the interviews, same as most, and never once felt lied to.
so if I don’t like the game I should just avoid commenting because it isn’t positive? I prefer to see everyone’s take thanks
I agree and it sucks. At least on Reddit you could generally avoid pointlessly negative people, whereas here it feels like that’s the majority of comments. I hope it changes into actual conversations at some point
You’ll die someday and the sun will explode in a few billion years
Not soon enough, that glowing bastard has it coming!
Uh, so you shouldn’t criticize games here…?
I prefer people giving their honest opinions to whatever they think the collective deems acceptable.
Agreed, there’s a couple comments of actually thoughtful replies but the vast majority is booo Bethesda bad because Bethesda.
Cause this isn’t Reddit lmfao
I was hoping that would be a good thing, but yeah… feels like a site-wide echo chamber almost lol
I can attest that my comment was made in isolation. I intentionally didn’t look at conversations or reviews and wanted a fresh experience all to myself. So I’m not parroting or trying to push some negative narrative.
Now that I’ve slept on it, I’m going to dive back in with my expectations reduced, and I’m hoping I’ll have lots of fun with it.
I think your comment is totally fair, you actually tried the game and came to the opinion. I’m more so confused on the zero gameplay but I know it sucks comments.
you don’t have to play a game to comment on it, especially when there’s so much material about it online because it is such a relevant title.
I would never comment on an indie game because of a tweet I read. But this is not that and there’s a lot of info about it.
![[MEGATHREAD] Starfield - Your experiences!](https://cdn.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/steam/apps/1716740/capsule_616x353.jpg?t=1692798833){kind=link}