Starfield - Your experiences!
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
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
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.
Just get Game pass for a month, it launches on there in a couple of days time.
Hello, fellow patient gamer!
#nopoors
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.
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.
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.
This is one of the more biting criticisms I've heard of the game. It results in a lack of feeling of scale and scope. The universe just feels like connected places, instead of worlds within a galaxy. No Mans Sky got this right, and it's surprising that Bethesda would fumble such a core mechanic. It looks like they tried to cover up this wart by... removing city maps.
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.
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.
Damn, I guess we've been spoiled by No Man's Sky. I was expecting it to be a completely open, manual traversal universe.
Why were people expecting this? I agree it would be awesome, but I thought they were pretty clear this wasn't going to be like no man's sky
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
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.
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.
Not gonna lie, you had me in the first half lol
If you retry character creation with the second controller expansion pack, you can get a green suit.
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:
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.
Woosh
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Old or not it's clear it needs a fundamental reworking if the same complaints persist across literal decades.
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
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.
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
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.
the side quest lines are giving me a few interesting options. try the corpo one
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.
What a time to be alive when NMS is the standard that a Bethesda game is being held up to. Hello Games have made the comeback of the century I guess.
I mean I thought fallout 4 was kinda mediocre to bad, and fallout 76 was awful, so I don't really expect much from Bethesda any more. TES 6 is gonna come out and feel like a 20 year old game, not in a good way.
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.
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
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.
There's no reason for studios to behave better when they get a bazillion pre-orders and games make a profit before they're even released. When that dynamic is in play there will always be an army of MBAs who point out that the purpose of the company is hyped releases and everything else is strictly secondary.
So to sum up, I agree. I won't be touching this until it's mature, stable, and on sale.
I'm even planning to wait until the game is out on GOG, which could be several years from now.
This is how I roll.
I’ve never been unhappy either.
Upsides:
Downsides:
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.
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! 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
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.
I only played a few hours on my Steam Deck (because it would freeze on my PC), but what I saw was slightly disappointing. The game looks great, even on the Steam Deck with FSR blurring everything, the gun mechanics are fun, the character animations are the best I've ever seen from this studio. The performance is also very good on the Deck, with stable 60FPS 30FPS (edit: when I wrote this initially I was just eyeballing it, but didn't bother to check that Steam capped the frame rate to 30 by default lol, so it was actually 30 and not 60...my bad) in indoor scenes and playable sub-30 in large outdoor areas.
...but the exploration. Man, Bethesda is known for their exploration, yet the spaceship is a gimmick at best. To be fair, I haven't played enough to get familiar with everything yet, but I don't expect that part to get much better. The game feels like Fallout, except instead of having a giant seamless open world to explore, you have a giant open world with tedious transitions between different areas. Maybe it'll grow on me, but it's not at all what I was expecting.
EDIT: update after playing some more.
The game definitely grew on me! The exploration is still shitty, but everything else makes up for it. I'm at ~9 hours on my Steam Deck, and even with all the FSR blurring I'm enjoying it a lot. I started doing a side quest collecting on bad debts for a bank, and during one of them I found a mission terminal on Mars offering a reward to anyone who surveys a distant planet, and on my way to the planet I picked up a distress call from a settler asking for help to fight off a bunch of pirates, and stumbled upon a drama between 3 settler families, then hijacked a pirate ship and found some "sentient AI" contraband inside and then... I went to sleep because it was late.
So in short, it definitely feels like a typical Bethesda game, but in a good way. Just side quests on top of side quests, but with less bugs.
The ship combat is still bland. I found it very easy. Idk if it's because it's early in the game, but no enemy has even gotten close to killing me, even when it's 3 on 1 and we're using the exact same unmodified ship. On the one hand, that's boring, but on the other hand I appreciate not having to spend a lot of time in ship combat. However, now that I discovered how to board and hijack a ship, the combat is slightly more interesting.
And again, I did all of this on Steam Deck, with the only performance issue being on Mars and New Atlantis, which are both big cities/hub areas. It was still playable, but a blurry FSR mess. I disabled FSR because I hate the blurring, and it dropped the FPS pretty hard. Luckily, I didn't have to spend a lot of time in those locations.
I think people were expecting fallout no man’s sky…and I don’t know why.
I’d rather play nms for exploration/sandbox
And then a Bethesda space game for goofyish gunplay with a decent story.
I was kind of hoping for fallout and elite; real space flight and exploration, but with an actual story and story line to follow. I'm mostly over real-life gaming that looks like a cartoon, so I'm glad it's not nms.
Skyrim and Oblivion definitely hooked me with exploration. It was a significant reason for playing and completing those games for me. If I want story there are a thousand better games out there. One without the other feels like a loss for me.
The performance is also very good on the Deck, with stable 60FPS in indoor scenes and playable sub-60 in large outdoor areas.
Wow, really? The game has a 1070 Ti minimum requirement, I barely expected this to work on Deck
Minimum requirements are always useless.
The Steam Deck is an extremely low resolution which is why anything works.
I played a few more hours today in handheld (yesterday was on power and connected to an HDMI display).
I did notice worse performance, but that could also be because the content was different. The game is still fully playable, and I had fun murdering a bunch of pirates in an abandoned fracking station. New Atlantis (the first big hub city) ran like dogshit though. It struggled to maintain 30 and was blurry as hell, but yesterday it ran better. Idk, this isn’t scientific at all.
Just adding this extra info in case someone sees my first comment and thinks the game will run perfectly. Playable? Very much so. Recommended? Only if you can’t play on something more powerful.
I wouldn't take their word. Everything I've seen about Deck performance is it runs at a fluctuating 30fps in basic scenes but drops massively in cities etc, on lowest settings with FSR on.
How did you get it working on the Deck? I can load into the menus, but when I try to start a game it crashes.
I was having the same problem until I switched to the preview branch and installed the latest system update, and I also switched it proton experimental. My current Steam OS version is 3.4.9, although I see there's another update available.
That’s amazing. I hope I have the same luck on the deck. Got a long weekend away from home and I’m itching to playing more.
It's pretty good. I'm not super into fantasy so I think I prefer the story so far over TES. I do like a sideish plot I'm in to join a faction and potentially betray another faction.
I am running on a 3080 with no real hiccups. I get 40-80fps. It's higher indoors and on the blower side in cities. This is on Ultra with resolution scaling at 77% at 4K, which is slightly above the Ultra preset.
There are loading screens when you take off and land or enter certain areas. They're annoying, but usually just 1-2 seconds. I do wish they optimized this more.
Combat is decent. It's not the best shooter in history but it generally works okay. Space combat is again just okay. Kind of simplistic relative to something like Elite Dangerous or Star Citizen. Actually, after admittedly only a couple space battles, I actually think even No Mans Sky has better space combat. Don't take this as gospel though.
The space combat looks like it has the complexity of Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare.
It was an amazing game, but yeah kinda arcade-ish.
To be fair, the realistic space combat video game genre really doesn't exist, that I've seen.
You can get pretty hard-realistic combat aircraft sims. Not many, but they exist.
But in space combat games, you're always playing something roughly like Star Wars. Which is cool and all, but just not what actual space combat would likely look like.
googles for one of the pages talking about the issues
https://www.syfy.com/syfy-wire/real-life-space-combat-would-look-nothing-like-star-wars
What I'm learning is that I'm really glad that I told myself I wouldn't be buying it until it was on sale post-launch to see if it was even worth the sale price
👍
I waited until I could see video of people actually playing the game. I like how it looks. I decided to just purchase the base game, so I haven't played it yet but I'm okay with waiting va few days. Also I got my Steam key $5 off on Newegg so paid $65. I'll wait to buy all of the DLC in a bundle sometime down the road and it will give the game new life for another playthrough.
Random stream of consciousness:
I played about 5 hours last night. I'm playing it on a 4K monitor with a 3080TI and 5900x. I'm getting 60FPS on ultra usually, but it drops to 30 sometimes. I think I'm going to try to tweak the settings a bit, because I want higher and more stable FPS.
Edit: Apparently there is no way to lower the resolution??? So I dropped the settings from "ultra" to "high" (one setting lower), and now I'm getting 60FPS where I was getting 30 and 90FPS where I was getting 60. This feels a lot better to me.
I really am enjoying the game, but I understand why reviewers say it starts slow. Actually going on missions is really fun, but there is a lot of time between going on missions because I'm exploring so much, talking to NPCs, and managing my inventory.
The gunplay is good, not spectacular. Leaps and bounds better than Fallout 4's gunplay.
The inventory system isn't good, but the more I use it, the faster I get at it. I just learned that I could favorite weapons, so that should help keep me from pausing constantly to change weapons when one runs out of ammo.
The world feels good to move in. I like the booster packs.
The start of the story feels a little forced ("COME WITH ME." "🤷 okay"), but that doesn't really bother me too much.
I like the NPCs I have met so far.
The character creation seemed simpler than previous Bethesda games, and I mean that as a compliment. I never wanted to make a human that looked like a fish, and having the option to do that would always turn me off from the character creator, as I felt like anything I tried made my character fall into uncanny valley. So I would just choose a preset and maybe change basic stuff like eye color, hair color, etc. In this one, it was really easy to make a character look how you wanted and still look like a human.
The default keybinds for keyboard/mouse are idiotic, especially in the menus. Sometimes the game will tell me to press the wrong button for an action (the looting in space explanation was completely wrong).
I haven't got to the point where I am able to customize my ship yet, but I really want to add storage to it for all my materials, because my carry weight is way too low.
Thank you! This answered most of the questions I had!
So far I'm a few hours in and I've been having a great time. My hardware is closer to the minimum requirements, so I've had some issues with my resolution throttling back to keep framerate up in the busiest areas. So far, no significant bugs experienced, assuming the aforementioned texture resolution fuzzing was intentional.
I will say I've found all the complaints about loading screens to be a little silly. Again, I'm closer to the minimum hardware level on PC but most loading screens I encounter have been around 3-5 seconds, and they're generally made up for with other conveniences like the ability, when planetside, to fast travel not just directly to your ship, but Into the pilot's seat, so I'm spending a lot less time loading than I would have just walking through doors.
All in all so far it feels like exactly what I was expecting.
specifically to the loading screens point, I guess it's about expectations. Since this is such a huge game advertised as exploration-based people might find too many loading screens immersion-breaking.
I know I'm spoiled about this since Red Dead 2
Bought it on steam. i7 3770K. GTX 1080. Pop_os. "Whatever, it will work!"
... anybody want to donate an Xbox series X?
I saw some comment in this thread that on the Deck, someone had to set their Proton version for Starfield to Proton Experimental -- newer than the current stable release version -- and then it worked. Might try that on other Linux distros too.
IIRC it's in the Properties-Compatibility dialog for a given game.
checks ProtonDB
https://www.protondb.com/app/1716740
Many entries on ProtonDB saying "switch to Experimental". Looks like the current GloriousEggroll Proton build also works, but if you've never set that up, easier to just do Proton Experimental.
Works fine and selected Experimental as the default.
However vrr isn't working on the latest Experimental so the monitor doesn't slow down with the game.
That CPU is a little long in the tooth
Damn dude I thought my 4770 was old. Until a few months ago I had a grx770 until I cracked and found a deal on a 6800XT. So now I know what it's like to be heavily CPU-bottlenecked .
It has somehow been fine for everything I've thrown at it until now. But after a decade, "it's time to go"
A new rig with an i5 13600K and 7900XT is on the way. I'm trying to remember what game finally forced my hand at a big time upgrade last time around.
haha!
just visited my parents and could negotiate with my little brother that the drives us home so we don't have to take the train.
poor fellow thought starfield would also release on playstation 5 so I offered him my xbox series x as a reward for the drive 😅
I’m on an i7-1165g7 and 1070 on windows. 25-30 fps at 1080p.
It’s completely GPU bound. I have a 4060 ti 16 gb in the mail. We’ll see how it plays.
I'm guessing it won't work on the steam deck then
The Lemmy community desperately needs a mix of more people lol, how are most of these comments “I haven’t played but it sucks” 😂
Agreed, there's a couple comments of actually thoughtful replies but the vast majority is booo Bethesda bad because Bethesda.
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.
Lemmy overall has somehow managed to become an even more negative place to post than Reddit
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
Uh, so you shouldn't criticize games here..?
I prefer people giving their honest opinions to whatever they think the collective deems acceptable.
I like it. Still has some classic glitches, enemies jumping high into the air after you kill them, grabbing weapons out of a locked container because part of the gun was sticking was sticking out, you know, Bethesda things.
I found that it looks really blurry if I don't have it on Ultra settings, that's my only real complaint.
Turn on FSR but keep the resolution scale at 100% if you don’t want it doing any upscaling. This looks a lot sharper to me than native resolution with no FSR.
I wonder if this is because the TAA implementation lacks a sharpening pass.
You might want to check the FSR scaling if the screen looks blurry below ultra. Basically the graphics preset also changes the resolution scaling IIRC with Ultra with the highest percentage.
It took me a hot minute to figure this out.
Also even on low, with fsr up, I’m pulling a whopping 30 fps max with my 1070. My 3060 is dead and I just went ahead and upgraded ahead of the warranty check.
But I had to turn motion blur and film grain back on to make the game even marginally playable. It’s like a new record for how unoptimized it is. Seems specific to nvidia cards.
I played 4 hours last night and I really am enjoying the game. There are a few issues but I think they things that could be improved via patches. For the most part it's QOL things. I fixed the no ultra wide support with a hex editor but by far my biggest gripe is movement speeds. Walking is way too slow. Jogging is a little slow but not available if using kb&m. Run and sprint feel OK (sprint is maybe too fast). Using kb&m feels really bad. You go from very slow walking to a full run which ruins the immersion for me. Using controller is better but I prefer kb&m for combat. Even with controller though, the difference between walk, jog, run and sprint feels weird as they don't blend together. I would switch between kb&m and controller but there's not a separate setting for inverting Y for controller vs. Kb&m, which for me is a problem as I invert y on controller so switching between the two requires a change of that setting as well. For now I'm sticking with kb&m and just putting up with the fact that I feel like I'm running around like a crazy person all the time. Oh, and the fact that walk is slower for your character than it is for NPC's is so annoying. Allowing that to happen should exclude you being able to make video games! Whoever is responsible for that needs to do better.
Anybody able to talk about the steam deck experience?
If you read through this thread, there are people doing so.
It's better than I thought it would be but not a great primary experience. In space and exploring planets you can enjoy 30+ FPS, but in the main cities, your framerate will be in the 20s. I haven't encountered combat there so it's less of an issue, but still not great
I'm having a great time, but I also love FO4 and No Man's Sky. The toe-dip I've done into colony building shows that they put real thought into Astroneer-like automated manufacturing stuff, which is my crack, and something I missed in NMS and FO4. It's also clear from the first city that they know how depressing FO4 is, and wanted to add more variety.
Story and characters are a cut above any other Bethesda game so far, but that's not saying much. My wife is replaying BG3 next to me, and it makes Starfield's writing look amateurish by comparison. It's not the core of the game though, so eh.
Downsides so far have been that the minor planets/moons don't have much to do, and that inventory management is annoying with how much crafting components weigh.
Ship combat is... Fine. It's not as intricate as Elite: Dangerous or SW:Squadrons (for sim gamers, weapons are all on REALLY forgiving gimbals, which makes precision unnecessary), but not actively bad like NMS VR. I think it's a good compromise, because not everyone wants to deal with a realistic sim in what is essentially a minigame.
It's also complex, which is good, but adds some awkwardness to the beginning.
As someone who found NMS boring very fast, will I like this game? I just want a game I can sink a ton of time in with moderately fun combat and progression.
I still have to play Starfield, but the most boring aspect for me of NMS was the writing. I've found it incredibly bad, so i guess starfield is better in that regard
The lack of real stories was a disappointment but I like the whole empty world find your own fun kinda thing in NMS, we started playing after MP was fixed and within 10 mins I had a carrier 😂
I7-11/3070/32GB and I have been having a lot of fun. I play all games on very hard and this one I was thinking maybe I should tone it down. I didn’t and I didn’t regret it.
30+ hours in and after reading this thread I feel like some people just got unlucky or were expecting something like SC or SpaceBourne 2. This isn’t those games and weren’t promised to be. I play both of those games and SC is a mess 12 years and $600k later and SB2 is awesome and only made by one guy! But this game is way polished and ready by comparison. By far imo.
I was maybe 4 hours in and got sidetracked in a solar system surveying everything. I forgot about the original quest to scan a moon and just traveled to every planet and not only had a great time scanning and scouting across different moons and planets but was also helping randoms with distress calls and 3 on 1 battles against Spacers in spaceships. By the time I was done with that solar system I was 18 hours in.
I would scan a planet, find a spot to land and drop in. Scout every place that popped up and then set another course on the same planet and repeat. Never did I feel bored or that I was going to see the same assets. Every spot felt unique and well designed. One planet felt like the American Southwest, it was so beautiful.
I highjacked a landed vessel during my surveying mission and upgraded and redesigned it for more maneuverability and storage and I have to say that the ship editor is so well done. I have 1000+ hours in FO76 and the camp building in that was really great and Bethesda has made the industry standard camp building format in SC. It is really an improvement from FO4 to current. I cannot wait until the mods really open this masterpiece up.
I haven’t even touched the base building yet btw.
The space combat is solid. From what I gather people don’t really know how to do space combat. Especially when in bulk freight ships or similar. You have to boost right at them guns blazing and then hard turn when you pass them so you can get behind them. Watch your throttle as you will only turn fast when it’s at halfway (within the white lines). I can take on 3 Spacer attackers on very hard difficulty with this method. If you can track the enemy (perk i think?) do it and just kill their shields and weapons. If you just kill their engines they love to just tumble in space and shoot at you. I usually kill two and then disable the third and board. It’s hard af and fun af.
I would like to be able to spacewalk but also see why it’s not included in Starfield. It’s fun but as I have experienced it in SC all of that extra functionality doesn’t really add to the game. It’s a pain to get out of your ship and fly over to the enemy ship and then try to gain access. I like the way Bethesda did it. Super easy.
Also the space travel is super easy. Fast traveling is great and keeps the game going without having problems finding where you want to go. SC has this problem. Their map of one solar system is terrible and doesn’t work half of the time. It’s only 1 solar system and barely works. Not to mention the navigation in SC and SB2 typically bug out and don’t work which calls for a reboot. Bethesda said fuck that and did better. Sure it’s not as immersive but immersion really has potential to take away from the game and progress.
The overall look and feel is what I was hoping in FO76. Vast improvement. The gunplay is on par with what I want and expect. Fighting on moon bases is fucking awesome. On very hard the enemies are harder, their tactics are okay, not great, but challenging enough to keep you guessing. Abandoned bases are always fun to attack. Loot is everywhere.
Some NPCs are bugged. It’s annoying but infrequent enough to not be a game breaker. The NPCs just talking to you randomly is weird, especially when you are walking through a city and your companion is already talking to you. Needs work.
I caught Shrouds stream and it looks like this game just gets better. I can’t wait to jump back in.
Thanks for the actual good comment and not the circlejerk hate comments that are surrounding this game
Won't play it until the modding scene becomes bigger
I've been playing Bethesda games vanilla for my first playthrough since Oblivion. By the time I finished my first run, usually a healthy modding scene had already developed.
Unless Bethesda fucks anything up behind the scenes, I think this modding scene is gonna be BIG.
"Bethesda, FFS can you finish a functional, polished game for once? Bugs and performance issues are not cute anymore!"
Bethesda: "No Uwu"
It's got some rough edges but it seems fine so far for me?
I have the feeling this is another Bethesda puddle game. So big, but so shallow.
Absolutely loving it. 25 hours in and a lot more to come, and I've barely scratched the surface of the game. I've already got a second play through on the mind.
This is me. Starfield, warts and all, is more engrossing than anything else I've played this year.
Well... Confirmed what I had feared. They heavily rely on dynamic resolution and DLSS/FSR instead of real optimization. Meet most of the recommended specs, except the GPU. I've got a 1660 Super and even on low settings @1080p, the game runs anywhere between 25 and 60 fps. And it's like... Backwards from what I would expect. Indoor areas are the slower areas, while outdoors is nice and snappy. But it looks blurry as fuck with the resolution scale at anything other than 100%, and even ultra settings do not put it that high.
That said, it is still playable without having to mod in lower textures and reducing clutter. Which is more than I can say about Fallout 4 at release, and I had the exact recommended specs for that one back then.
First game since I built this machine to run this poorly with settings this low. Even Baldur's Gate 3, which looks way better, runs so much better at Ultra settings than Starfield does at the minimum.
Other than that, the setting feels pretty bland, which is not what I expected considering the passionate way they talked at lengths about it. It's all very generic and very obviously just trying to make every fun sci-fi trope they like stick. I am not playing for the story or the writing, but the world building is usually one of their best features... This one is pretty lackluster with the world building, and so far has not really drawn me in.
I mean... Yes, but I would have expected it to not run at all. It runs playable. Which is crazy for it not only being an unsupported GPU, but also a BGS game. It wasn't meant as a bash, other than it probably could have been supported if they didn't use DLSS/FSR as a crutch. It was praise for the stability actually being fucking solid for once.
Complaints about the looks still stand (don't need to have high fps to see the world looking nice in a still frame lol). At its best, it looks 5 years old. I've seen better recently, so it's kind of disappointing.
ai rendering is the here to stay. Especially unreal 5 titles are relying heavy on fsr/diss
My experience is much like the others are saying in here. My initial response was oh wow it's like no mans sky, but worse. I'm mostly underwhelmed with it after a few hours of game play, and I'm torn between grinding along, hoping it gets better, or getting a refund before I've played for too long.
That's the part that scares me, I've played no man's sky, it was fun for a short while but then got tired pretty quickly.
If this game keeps getting compared to no man's sky and is said to come up short, then I'm definitely gonna wait to try it for cheap.
Refunded it. It's all of the worst portions of Bethesda games put under 1 roof with space added as a flavor.
I beg to differ. It's the most beautiful of the Bethesda games by far, very immersive without having to have the main character have dialogue (fallout 4). Tons of items, crafting, research, outposts, ships. This game is huge. Absolutely love it.
I've played oblivion, skyrim and fallout 3 and 4. While it's similar engine of game, this game blew it out of the park.
I'm certainly enjoying playing. I just wish Bethesda could stop making potato people with weird talking animations and the whole muted, grainy, weird Bethesda art style, but that aside it's pretty fun. I wasn't watching a bunch of footage beforehand, so I didn't build up expectations to get let down. I think paying too much attention to things said during development (which is where lots of changes happen) is pretty dumb.
Some populated areas are lacking that nice complex shadows, without nice lighting it looks flat
Same. Loving my time with it. It's great that they've captured the things I loved about their old games (no surprise) but too bad they can't alleviate the immersion breaking issues of their old games (again no surprise).
I feel bad about supporting the preorder system, but fuck me this game has been fantastic so far. Long weekend babyyyyyyy
I still haven't completed Skyrim. or New Vegas. or FO4.... I'll be back once those are finished!
New Vegas is a blast. I went in blind after playing Fallout 4 and was blown away by how good the story was compared to Fallout 4.
The New Vegas dialog system is much better.
However, the graphics are getting kinda long in the tooth.
And it is significantly less-stable. I've definitely fallen out of the map a number of times, too.
And without hitting a wiki, you can lock yourself out of a lot of things that aren't obvious. Choices matter, but often in not-immediately-apparent ways.
I tried to play it on release, but it was so buggy I couldn't continue. I'm looking forward to seeing what I missed out on
The standard editing that comes with gamepass officially releases 9/6 in the US but due to timezones could be playable 9/5 in the evening. So it could only be a couple more days for the general release assuming you are in the US.
Played for 3 hours yesterday on a 3070, 10700k, 32GB ram. Game runs and looks incredible on high/ultra settings. I haven’t gotten far into the story, but the beginning gets into the action very fast like Skyrim.
The animations and textures make npcs feel more alive than fallout. I made it to the first city area and it looks amazing. It looks like mirrors edge type city in space
textures
What about the textures? Like, higher texture resolution?
Higher res and more details in the textures. Faces don’t look like they’re one flat texture with the npcs skin tone, for example.
The look of npcs, items, roads, rocks, hills, etc. is way better than even F4/F76.
What resolution? I'm just a tier below with a 3060Ti + 10600k and a tech review has me worried my 1440p monitor is gonna be a problem.
I don't want another situation like downtown in Fallout 4 on my last rig where I'm trying to play a FPS with framerate dips all over the place.
20 hours in, I really like it.. just wish the spaceship stuff worked more like Elite Dangerous
I can't get past the intro mission, it always crashes, and takes my whole PC with it.
Weird, I had a couple crashes, but backing off my GPU overclock got rid of them. Been smooth sailing since.
My kid has had smooth sailing with their well below specs PC. Makes me wonder what specs they used to test the game.
Sounds like a you problem
Game isnt running the best on my 2070 super but I've also heard its not running great on peoples 3000/4000 series cards either. Gunplay is fun. I like the challenges to level up perks. Could I have waited the 5 days to play it and save myself 30 bucks? Yes. But its a long weekend so I'll take advantage of it. I also havent played a Bethesda game since Fallout 4 came out so I find myself getting lost in the game and I played 4 hours last night and it only felt like 1.
Did the game pass for a month. No way I'll spend 70. So far not impressed. I really don't care for the start of the game
No VR.
Not gonna buy until the VR modding community catches up to it and the game is on sale.
"Graphics card not supported."
Find out I have to update Windows.
Hadn't updated since around 2018 and everything worked fine, but OK, fine, let's try it.
Can't figure out how to reenable Windows update (it kept trying to come back, like a dog swallowing and revomiting its own puke, so at some point I'd disabled it with extreme prejudice, and it seems it stuck).
Manage to find a Microsoft tool that'll update Windows 10 to the latest version without going through Windows update.
Upgrade assistant does its thing and at seventy-something percent complains VirtualBox isn't compatible and must be uninstalled. Yeah, not doing that, got my family's mail server in there. I was only 2 major versions behind, shouldn't've been a problem, but all right, have it your way.
Update VirtualBox, looks like Upgrade assistant is finally happy, after a couple aeons Windows is updated.
"Graphics card not supported." Fuck. You.
Update graphics drivers (couple more aeons; in for a penny, in for a pounding).
While Nvidia does its thing, try to start the VMs in the new version of VirtualBox. "Can't start operating system". Well, fuck.
Eventually figure out that at some point around version 6 VHD support got fubared and Oracle never fixed it. This is why I don't update.
Start converting VHD disks to VDIs, which should fix it. What's a few more aeons between friends.
While I'm at it the drivers finish updating. Try to start the game again, third time's the charm.
Fans reach take off speed! Main screen goes black! Logos start showing! It lives!
"Compiling 1 of 7000 shaders"
(╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻
System grinds to a halt. Finally manage to open program manager and kill the game. Probably shouldn't have started it while I was migrating the virtual disks. (The fact that it's a 980ti probably doesn't help either, but hey, it's worked perfectly till now, including with Cyberpunk 2077 and Baldur's Gate 3, and by jingo it'll work with Starfield).
"It just works."
Anyway, meanwhile the disks finish migrating, and at least now the VMs work. Update the VirtualBox extensions just to be sure, reboot the VM...
Black screen.
(╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻
Find out at some point the display drivers got fubared for Windows 2003 / XP and Oracle never fixed it. Manage to start the VM in safe mode and uninstall the VirtualBox extensions; after fixing the display settings, it sort of works again. Yay. Second VM is staying with v5.x extensions, thank you very much.
Say what you want about Bethesda (they almost certainly deserve it), but at least they ain't Oracle.
Sigh.
Gonna eat something, relax a bit, and leave the game to compile shaders while I sleep.
With luck, tomorrow it'll be done, and it'll just work.
You're throwing back "It just works." at them because you failed to maintain a Windows VM that you haven't updated in FIVE YEARS? Not to mention that you really expect game dev studios test and support running a game in virtual box??
If you want to do something tech savvy, that's on you to do the tech part.
This has to be one of the most wild "gamer" complaints I've ever seen.
VirtualBox isn’t compatible and must be uninstalled. Yeah, not doing that, got my family’s mail server in there
In all seriousness, might be worth just setting up a physical server separate from your gaming system.
I mean, I've thrown out many computers that would be entirely capable of running a mail server and the like.
I’d disown you if you were family and I found out you were hosting my email on a VM in a 5 years-out-of-date windows PC. Some things are simply unforgivable.
Yeah, probably, though computers take space, and electricity... though, admittedly, these days you can probably run a mail server on a raspberry pi (if you can get your hands on one) powered by a potato... 🤔
The plan sort of was to eventually (once I can afford a new machine) move everything to VMs, with GPU pass through for the gaming one (I can't afford a dedicated gaming machine — nor have the space for it — and I want something I can easily reset to a clean installation in case of Denuvo and similar malware without messing with my work software), but moving the servers and firewall to a small dedicated machine might indeed be a more realistic (and maybe even cheaper) approach...