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!
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Fuck preordering
I clapped. I clapped because I agree. I'm still clapping.
Did you actually read the original post?
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.
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.
Oblivion has towns behind loading screens too. Even Kvatch. There are mods that break them out into the world but they’re instanced by default.
Particularly annoying with the Imperial City.
Look at Ratchet and Clank Rift Apart. They have completely seamless transitions between entire dimensions. They use Direct Storage, which is a Microsoft API. It's not a good look when a Sony studio is able to achieve seamless transitions on a Windows game but a Microsoft game can't.
If you ignore the server performance issues and bugs, star citizen is completely playable on my system and I have below reccomended specs (for starfield & star citizen). If star citizen can have no loading screens with most planets as populated (or more populated) then starfield's planets while also having to manage server resources, then starfield has almost no excuse to have loading screens.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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 preorder, it's free with Game Pass. Just not the early play.
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.
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.
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.
Bethesda really needs to tweak their subsurface scattering for the skin and eyeballs (maybe have a separate render method of eye scatter)
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.
Careful. The last time I spoke ill of Gamebryo+++++++ I was the subject of a short-lived harassment campaign. Bethesda fans are bizarrely protective of this Frankenstein engine. Get this: you still can't climb ladders! It's fucking 2023.
Their engines have been showing it's age since Skyrim came out. The fact that they got this far is a testament to their willpower, but man, if they'd change it up it might work out really well for them.
I'm also not convinced that ladder-climbing, whether one wants it or not, is a fundamental engine limitation. It might not be in the game, but that doesn't imply that it's an engine limitation.
googles
This guy modded climbable ladders into Fallout 4, which seems like a pretty good argument that it's not an engine limitation.
https://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/62738
And not that I object per se to ladders, but when was the last time you climbed a ladder in real life? I haven't in quite some years. I mean, sure, it's one more interaction, and IIRC there are some fire escapes that had ladders somewhere in Fallout 4 in Boston. But you could make the same argument about interacting with all kinds of things, and it just seems odd for so many people here to mention specifically climbing ladders. I mean, you could fall and catch yourself, drive vehicles, rappel on a rope, skateboard, ice skate, grapple with enemies, zipline, sail a sailing boat, or God knows, any number of other player-object interaction functionality things that might be added. I suppose that any of them could theoretically add gameplay, but I don't see why the criticality of ladders.
Because it gives people something to whine about, literally it.
If it wasn’t ladders, it would be ropes that you clip through instead of tight walking.
Defending truth and facts is a hill everyone should die on, comparing about immersion breaking ladders… well that’s a very strange one…
But thank you for adding to the conversation? You didn’t really, but hey you tried and maybe that’s all that matters…?
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
The one thing Unreal still has bug wise is the fact I can't place hundreds of actors in a blueprints viewport because it lags like Satan but if I run code that spawns the same amount attached to said actor or drag the same quantity into the level itself it works without issue.
Every engine has its own different limitations.
Not everyone cares about climbing ladders so it may not be something they feel is worth the effort to add to their engine.
To say it hasn’t been updated extensively is frankly insulting and is also fundamentally wrong.
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.
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.
Yes… that’s how engines work unless you rewrite them……
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
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.
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 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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!
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 :)
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 :(
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!
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 liked the DLC with the creepy island and the robot man detective, that one was good! The main story was poppycock though. Like, a partner I didn't care for died within the first few minutes, then a baby I didn't care for got kidnapped and that was supposed to be my main motivator to get through the game?
Bethesda also kind of flops in the roleplaying department. Looking at BGIII, there's plenty of moments where you can make decisions and not know what impact it might have, there's lots of little interwoven story threads, and that's what I'd expect from an RPG. Bethesda doesn't really let you make choices.
Even No Man's Sky has deeper thoughts hidden in that sparkly, colourful, arcade sandbox. The game touches on ideas of existence, life, and self. What themes did Skyrim touch on? Racism I guess? It feels to me like they wanted to do more with Skyrim, but blew all their budget on making a big world and didn't have enough to put in it. The civil war storyline could in theory be a fantastic exploration on morals, but in reality it was just a slog.
Oblivion had some good quests. The expansion was really nice, but the quest that stands out most in my mind is the one where you set out to help a woman find her husband, and sleuth out that he actually managed to get trapped in the painting he was working on, after being attacked by a burglar.
Skyrim doesn't really have anything remotely like it. Just endless copy-pasted dungeons with the same condescending puzzles and boring enemies. Sure they included Sheogorath, but somehow they managed to make even him drab and grey.
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.
Well, Outer Worlds is already almost literally “Fallout 3, in space”.
Outer Worlds really did not scratch my Fallout itch.
Yeah, superficially it's similar in a number of ways, but:
For all practical purposes, the game is fairly linear. The world is open, but you have little reason to go back.
The Fallout perk system introduces a lot of interesting mechanics, is an important part of the game. The Outer Worlds perk system was almost entirely flat bonuses to one thing or another. Didn't change much how one would play the game.
I rarely found myself stumbling into new and interesting situations just walking around the world.
The weapons weren't all that interesting or customizable. That includes the uniques, other than the science weapons.
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 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.
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 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.
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
Because realistic space combat would be slow and boring.
I dunno.
Real life naval warfare is generally slow and boring, but by using a variety of tricks, like time compression and only having the player involved in actual combat, many games have made that palatable.
I think it could be done.
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!
Or we brought the wrong version 😿
Cause this isn’t Reddit lmfao
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.
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.
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.
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
You'll die someday and the sun will explode in a few billion years
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
Uh, so you shouldn't criticize games here..?
I prefer people giving their honest opinions to whatever they think the collective deems acceptable.
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
They're completely different games. If you like other BGS games (Elder Scrolls, Fallout 3/4) you'll probably like this. If you didn't, you absolutely won't like this.
I really liked Skyrim. I want another experience like that. I don't care about flying around space
I also want to be a stealth archer... In space
If you like the sci-fi setting and don't mind some flying around space (it does have it, just not seamless travel) you'll probably like it.
Thanks!
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 😂
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.
I think this game will have more story focus to it than no man's sky, which is why I'm hesitant to make such a snap decision as I've barely gotten into the story.
That's a fair point. Could you do me a favor and let me know how it is?
I plan to play some more today, so I will happily give you my impressions once I've gotten into it a bit further.
Update: I played for around 8 hours yesterday and can now say that once you get through the whole "tutorial" bit of the game, the story starts to become more evident, and I no longer feel like it's a worse version of no man's sky. After the first hour or two (depending on how quickly you play), it starts having the type of Bethesda RPG vibes you'd expect from a Bethesda RPG. I've been enjoying it.
I've only played a couple hours so far but I don't understand the comparisons to no mans sky beyond the setting. It's not a similar game at all.
You do the same thing in any number of space themed games. That doesn't make any of them similar. This is nothing like NMS. They are completely different types of games.
I can see why you would not like it if you were expecting NMS but it was never intended to be that. It claimed to be a BGS game in space, and so far they seem to have delivered on that.
Yeah what a retarded take. NMS is a lonely boring experience with the dullest ditch water plot (love those vague-nothing dialogues lol) and the worst gameplay loop in a while. Don’t worry they’re adding x pointless feature in an update!
Granted I’m waiting on release to play SF, but no fucking way are the games similar.
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.
Refunded it. It's all of the worst portions of Bethesda games put under 1 roof with space added as a flavor.
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.
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.
If you liked Fallout 1 and Fallout 2, have you tried the Wasteland series? It's what Fallout 1 was modeled on, and that series kept going.
It's not Fallout, but it's the closest I have found to "more Fallout 1 and Fallout 2".
That being said, I thought that the Fallout jump to 3D would not work well, and I think I was very much wrong there -- the series did a pretty good job jumping the gap.
feels like Fallout
If you like the desert American Southwest "New Old West" theme in Fallout 1 and 2 and New Vegas, the Wasteland series does that.
Oh yeah! I was all-in on the Wasteland 2 Kickstarter and bagged the CE of Wasteland 3. Those do scratch the itch a bit, but Fallout's universe is so much more interesting and weird. Wasteland is a lot more straight-laced, comparatively.
I'm fine with the visual presentation of Bethesda's Fallout games, but I hate the gameplay. Fallout was the ultimate exercise in player agency and consequences... so many different ways to approach situations with so many possible outcomes. It's not just shooting things. While New Vegas flirts with those principles, BG3 is the first game in 20 years to REALLY recapture that magic for me. That's the kind of game I want more of, and that's the kind of game I want Fallout to be.
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 feel bad about supporting the preorder system, but fuck me this game has been fantastic so far. Long weekend babyyyyyyy
I'm surprised at how well it's running on my machine, though I haven't messed with rhe settings much.
It's an enormous game though. That is very clear so far
Ryzen 7 3700x, 32gb DDR4, nVidia RTX 2070 Super, @ 1440p.
I mean you have a 3070 with a 1080p monitor. It would be a failure if any game didn’t run well on those specs. 1440p is more logical setup. 4K a challenging one.
I've been streaming it to my deck, I don't want to make space for it yet lol
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
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.
1080p, I’ve been too scared to upgrade to a 1440p monitor on the current rig ):
I had those downtown F4 dips too, even at 1080. This game is far from that, it feels much more polished.
I can’t even play F76 to this day without super annoying frame dips
Yeahhh, I found a great deal on this monitor but I was a dumbass and didn't know how bad the down-rez is when running 1080p on a 1440p monitor😅
Other than not being able to use raytracing in CP2077 it hasn't been a problem, but I'm think I'm going to start running into trouble from this point on. Oh well, I was thinking of getting another monitor for my workflow anyway...
Definitely get a decent 1440p monitor with high refresh rate and GSync and then you are set. If you get it used it probably won’t even be that expensive (that’s how I got mine around 2 years ago).
Monitors last a long time so it’s not something that you will just toss, and a 3070 with 1080p is such a waste imo
20 hours in, I really like it.. just wish the spaceship stuff worked more like Elite Dangerous
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.
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
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.
And yet, every other game I've tried so far (including several with better graphics) actually worked out of the box without requiring Windows or even driver updates, or having to spend ages compiling shaders. 🤷♂️
You could also drive an old hooptie with 300,000 miles on it and it might work for a period of time but don't bitch at your mechanic when the engine finally gives out.
"fix these issues" - You're the issue lmao
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.
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...
Just get a secondhand thin client like hp t620 for like $30, which is perfectly capable of running 64bit Linux/Windows with 7 watt of power.
@lemmy.world
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@lemmy.world
Welcome to the largest gaming community on Lemmy! Discussion for all kinds of games. Video games, tabletop games, card games etc.
Video games, tabletop, or otherwise. Posts not related to games will be deleted.
This community is focused on games, of all kinds. Any news item or discussion should be related to gaming in some way.
No bigotry, hardline stance. Try not to get too heated when entering into a discussion or debate.
We are here to talk and discuss about one of our passions, not fight or be exposed to hate. Posts or responses that are hateful will be deleted to keep the atmosphere good. If repeatedly violated, not only will the comment be deleted but a ban will be handed out as well. We judge each case individually.
Try to keep it to 10% self-promotion / 90% other stuff in your post history.
This is to prevent people from posting for the sole purpose of promoting their own website or social media account.
This community is mostly for discussion and news. Remember to search for the thing you're submitting before posting to see if it's already been posted.
We want to keep the quality of posts high. Therefore, memes, funny videos, low-effort posts and reposts are not allowed. We prohibit giveaways because we cannot be sure that the person holding the giveaway will actually do what they promise.
Make sure to mark your stuff or it may be removed.
No one wants to be spoiled. Therefore, always mark spoilers. Similarly mark NSFW, in case anyone is browsing in a public space or at work.
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I'll let you know in 2 years when it is on sale for at least 50% off.
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