Starfield was originally planned to be released 2 years ago. But when Microsoft took over they gave Bethesda another 2 year development time, which they mainly used for polishing if you believe the talk about that. In that case it’s not surprising that the requirements are more comparable to games of 2 years ago instead of current releases.
I’m probably thinking yeah. I mean, you could probably get it to run on HDD, but I’m thinking that if Bethesda created this game similar to their others, there is a boat load of cells per planet/in space and it would be way more than what you would load into the RAM, so SSD will significantly reduce load times.
Kinda sorta required if you want to stream assets from storage, an approach taken by many modern games. Might not be absolutely necessary depending on your setup / game settings. BG3 also said SSD required but there’s a “Slow HDD Mode” in the settings anyway, which I believe just shifts more of the streaming burden to RAM/VRAM. If you played on a HDD without enabling it, I guess you’d expect to see inconsistent pop-in as individual assets try to stream in faster than your storage can read. But playing with it enabled might also cause performance drop if your RAM/VRAM was already close to full utilization with the setting disabled
With the way they reused, dynamically loaded assets before and tried to keep world seamless, they’d probably load\unload parts of these 125 Gb a lot, with this 16 Gb RAM requirement no less. They test it with SSD and make it so it doesn’t have microstutter and loading problems on their target machine. Or, god forbid, loading screens when walking outside, like it was in TES3; or TES4 banning levitation and loading complex cities as different locations that won’t work in a space sim etc etc. BethSoft had many problems with it already. I doubt it’d refuse to work, but if they build their game around it, the result is unpredictable. Bet, it’d load low-res LOD textures and only then replace them with okay ones. That’d probably ruin the spaceship landing – one of the, possibly, most demanding and visually sweet parts of the game. It looking great is their baseline here.
It will likely still have loading times hidden behind unskippable animations. (See the door opening animation in the gameplay reveal.) You’re going to need an SSD to make that work.
HDDs have been holding back what you can do in open worlds for a while. It (and the PS5 specifically having an extra emphasis on hardware decompression to amp it up further) was the thing I was most excited about for current gen consoles. There were a lot of rumors that PS4 Spider-Man had to cap web slinging speed to allow the HDD to keep up, and we'll see what the movement options are in Starfield and how ships work (unless we know already and I haven't seen it), but even the jet pack boost thing could seriously strain loads in denser areas if it allows enough movement to feel good in opener spaces.
It’s going to depend on a lot of things, like how much system and video RAM you have, what you have running in the background, etc. I think it could be viable running on HDD under good conditions, but I remember needing to install games like Planetside 2 to SSD to stop the stuttering as you move around the map.
This game will run fine on a 2080, by the time it's been fully patched and optimised by the modding community. Honestly, can't wait till 2025 when I'll be able to play the finished game.
Reminder: do not pre-order video games. There is not a limited stock of bits and Bethesda will absolutely fuck up and fix bugs in a month. You can wait until you know it’s good or even for a sale.
We still haven't established whether some form of warp drive is doable or not. Even if you can't move faster than light, if you can distort spacetime around yourself sufficiently in the right way, you can maybe get a functionally-similar effect.
The Alcubierre drive ([alkuˈβjere]) is a speculative warp drive idea according to which a spacecraft could achieve apparent faster-than-light travel by contracting space in front of it and expanding space behind it, under the assumption that a configurable energy-density field lower than that of vacuum (that is, negative mass) could be created.[1][2] Proposed by theoretical physicist Miguel Alcubierre in 1994, the Alcubierre drive is based on a solution of Einstein's field equations. Since those solutions are metric tensors, the Alcubierre drive is also referred to as Alcubierre metric.
Objects cannot accelerate to the speed of light within normal spacetime; instead, the Alcubierre drive shifts space around an object so that the object would arrive at its destination more quickly than light would in normal space without breaking any physical laws.[3]
The local velocity relative to the deformed space-time would be subluminal, but the speed at which a spacecraft could move would be superluminal, thereby rendering possible interstellar flight, such as a visit to Proxima Centauri within a few days.
That’s the problem though. While antimatter exists, which has negative mass, it exists only in small amounts, and you’d have to have a massive amount of it to accomplish such a feat. We’d need to find a way to create it.
And don’t get me started on the other problematic aspects of it, like space debris.
Here’s the problem, you have to bend space the opposite direction it does from mass to make it work. For that, you need antigeavity. And the only way to make antigravity, is with negative energy. Which is a real thing that actually exists. Basically, the universe runs on averages. So long as a system averages to a number that works, discrete parts of it can have values that don’t make sense, so long as the rest of the system makes enough sense for the average of it to be sensible. So in a system that hovers around 0K, for example, it’s possible to have tiny fluctuations that occasionally dip to negative temperatures. The math gets weird, but generally it doesn’t matter, because those regions are too tiny and random to make any use of it.
But, theoretically, it is possible to harness negative energy. It’s been a while since I looked into it, but IIRC, the best theory is to basically concentrate an enormous, mind boggling, ludicrous amount of energy, and then at the very edges of that system you should be able to bleed off tiny bits of negative energy fairly reliably. But we’re talking civilizations that move stars tech here. I think the idea was for a giant ring, that would encompass our solar system, kuiper belt and all, and get it to spin. The amount if energy required to spin something that large is mind boggling, and that’s your high energy system, then along the surface you can bleed off negative energy. But even that would be an insanely tiny trickle of negative energy. Unless some new method of bending spacetime is discovered, Alcubierre is just unfeasible. However, this could be more practical for wormholes. But even still, likely looking at a microscopic event horizon for the giant ring, it would be for communication only. But at least you can still technically scale up large scale systems like this to theoretically make something large enough for a person to enter.
That was actually explained back in the pre-disney EU, so it hasn’t been a plothole for decades. Solo just kept the existing explanation, which was pretty neat.
I will say once more. Do not preorder video games. It could be shit, it could be buggy, but what it won’t do is run out of copies. Wait until the reviews are out, or even a bit after it launches if you can. If you’re anything like me you have hundreds of games you haven’t played yet so what’s an hour or a day in the grand scheme of things.
I was burned too bad with Cyberpunk 2077 that even though Starfield seems to be all right, I’m waiting until after reviews come out before I pick up a copy. That just means I wait a few more days to reduce the risk of more pain.
Man I wish I could even get a consistent impression out of anyone. I’ve been scrounging for pre-release footage but Beth is being weirdly tight lipped about this one.
100% a wait for the reviews situation, the less they show off the more I worry they’re hiding something. Just a reminder to everyone, Fallout 76 was the last game they released…
A news article was released today that said starfield is the least buggy Bethesda game to date. Fluff but man that sure puts some expectations out there to live up too.
Honestly, with how long it’s been in development, I can totally believe it. And sure hope so. I mean, it’s been so long and I’ve also been constantly thinking about how long it’s been since Skyrim came out (since it’s been publicly stated that TES6 was blocked behind Starfield). All that time has gotta mean something. And it’s not like Bethesda doesn’t have great talent. I’ve always got the impression it was all a matter of lack of time for the size of the game.
It's also on Gamepass. You can play it instantly for a much lower cost to make sure it works. Then buy it if you still want later when it goes on sale.
Duh, the reason there’s Game Pass on PC is for people to stay on Windows. Microsoft saw the writing on the wall when Valve released SteamOS and scrambled for a way to keep people on Windows.
No, MS wanted to compete with PlayStation Plus. Linux constitutes about 2% of users on steam. MS doesn’t care about Linux gaming and steam OS is no where choose to being a threat to them.
Same, and with Game Pass it was just a $30 upgrade. The only stuff I pre-order is stuff I know I’ll like anyway - mainly Destiny expansions and TES/Fallout/Starfield. I’m gonna buy it anyway, why not pre-load it and play immediately?
I agree completely and would like to add especially if it’s a Bethesda game. I can still remember waiting for half a year for Skyrim to be playable on PS3 after buying it on launch day.
Don’t own an Xbox or PC, I’m going to wait until they decide milking money out of an old game > exclusivity and play with the future GOTY edition on a smart refrigerator or a Playdate or whatever other weird platform they repackage it for.
Well that’s just not factually accurate. The accurate thing would be it causes so little wear and tear it might as well not count. But using ANYTHING causes wear and tear to build up eventually.
In case someone's wondering about cheaper options; Samsung 980 500GB NVMe M.2 costs as much as £32 GBP (~40 USD), and 1 TB version is £52 GBP (~65 USD).
Yes. Now that all the consoles have ssds, devs are going to design their games around them. That means asset streaming is the norm. And that means hdds will cause massive pop-in and stutters.
It’s probably not 100% necessary; even Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart (which was designed to use the PS5’s fast loading speeds to switch between worlds on the fly, and supports the latest DirectStorage implementation on PC) can be played off a hard drive, tests have shown. But any PC recent enough to play Starfield on really should have an SSD.
“Playable” and “good experience” don’t necessarily mean the same thing though. Those rift transitions in R&C are rough on anything less than a decent NVMe SSD. Though there may be some room for improvement, as even high end NVMe drives struggle to handle these transitions as gracefully as the PS5.
Whether or not playing off an HDD is truly a dealbreaker though depends on where in gameplay the storage speed bottleneck causes problems. For Rift Apart, it’s mostly just an issue with these rift transitions, and the gameplay effectively pauses while it waits for them. For an open world game it could be more problematic (i.e. pervasive traversal stutter during combat.)
Honestly if you don’t have an SSD save 50$ and get one. Especially for crappier pcs it’s the most significant upgrade you can do and not even for gaming. 10 years ago SSDs were somewhat niche. They were expensive as well. Now I won’t even touch a computer without one basically.
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