One QoL improvement I’ve not seen here is a better journal system. When I can’t further a quest line even something vague like ‘Continue your journey so learn more’ would be great. I have spent time on some quests hunting down a person to discover the quest can only be completed in the next act multiple times now.
This was an issue I had with DOS2 as well. It was at the point I literally wrote stuff down in a notebook so that I could keep track of the side quests and what the last step was. Eventually they did overhaul the journal in that game to be a lot more useful though.
Exciting stuff. I’ve long since vowed never to pre-order anything from Bethesda ever again though, so I’ll be waiting to hear what the vibe is once other folks start playing it. Right now it very much seems like it could either be great or disappointing. We’ll see in a couple weeks’ time I s’pose
Steam muddies this a bit though, since you have two weeks or two hours of playtime to try it out and get your full money back, so it removes a lot of the risk in the first place; in some cases, it removes all of it.
No other game takes that long to compile shaders, so that could have been a red flag for a refund on its own. And you can pay attention to forums and games press in the meantime to find out when it's in a playable state before you repurchase it. But on launch day, you could have it preloaded and smoke test it with no risk.
The shader compilation time varied greatly between users. Mine were 40 minutes tops and later I think around 20 minutes. But you'd have to redo them on every update, just to try and see whether the latest patch fixed any of the issues you had. For me it basically became worse before it got better. It's particularly sad because the game itself is great. I watched countless of let's plays of both Part 1 and 2. So it's a real shame that their entry onto the PC market started with such a terrible port. It left such a sour taste that I still haven't played through it.
It's certainly not the only one though. Horizon Zero Dawn had similar long shader compilation times for me. Social media is unfortunately useless, because there's just too many fanboys that will tell you everything is great, burying any sort of valid criticism (Cyberpunk 1.5 for example).
There are also Steam reviews, reddit forums, etc. One person saying it's still a problem is more valuable than two saying it isn't. I've got Mortal Kombat 1 pre-ordered, and that series has a history of shaky PC ports, with enough cause for me to believe it could happen again. If all's well, I'll know before I finish work for the day from reviews, forums, etc., and I'll get Shang Tsung for no additional cost. If not, I get my money back, and they can earn my money from me some other time.
What do you think I was referencing there in my previous comment? /r/Diablo for example literally permabanned me for speaking out against the predatory FOMO tactics in D4, after I was attacked & insulted for it by several users that also downvoted me into oblivion. And now they can eat their own sock, now that post release the hivemind opinion swapped. Everyone on Reddit and the reviews also said how great of a game CP2077 now was after those updates. Well shit, it isn't, it just got rid of a whole bunch of launch issues, while the core issues were still the same and the game still had a massive performance bug until the next major patch. You simply cannot trust those communities anymore because everyone identifies so much with their product that they see any sort of critique as a personal insult.
But that's why I said one person saying it's still a problem is more valuable than two saying that it isn't. There are more resources beyond those. Quick looks, Digital Foundry, SkillUp, Let's Plays...and as you said, games can still have these issues beyond day 1, so at that point not pre-ordering wouldn't have saved you from it either. But two hours is certainly usually enough to find the obvious deal-breakers if the other resources fail you. Cyberpunk 2077 worked pretty damn well for me even right at launch; I didn't pre-order it, but even if I did, I probably would have been able to tell in two hours if it was horrifically broken like all of the video evidence from other players showed it was, in general. I also really enjoyed it, so that's just a difference in taste between you and I.
You seem to ignore what I am saying / the point I'm trying to make. People who say it is still a problem aren't getting heard by those who should read it, because the people who say the opposite will do everything they can to bury them. This results in you looking for opinions and just getting positive ones / yay sayers. Content creators suffer from similar issues. For starters, most of them are just clickbait bullshit deliverers and blocked immediately anyway. A lot of them tend to also fall in line with the devs though, because they often are in some sort of sponsored partner program or don't want to risk losing benefits from those game companies by being "too critical". And with how YT algorithms work, most smaller channels don't even have a chance to appear on your search.
So if those people aren't seeing the information they need, they should not pre-order. I'm confident that if you know these other avenues to find out this information, it's easy to avoid getting burned.
The only “pre-order” I’ve ever done was Elden Ring, and that was only the day before release because there was a small discount on it. I was definitely going to play it anyway, so I would have been spending the money regrardless. I’m usually pretty patient in terms of gaming.
I might if I didn't just get BG3. I'll still get it pretty close to launch barring serious issues, though. Everything I've seen about the scale and what the game is is what I've been waiting for for a while.
I know Bethesda isn't perfect and I didn't love FO4, but it's in large part because of the reliance on VATS for combat instead of making guns feel OK. Gunplay looks a lot better and more dynamic and just that combined with Bethesda's world building/sense of exploration (which exists in Fallout, too; it's just overshadowed to me by the mechanics) are super promising. There are always bugs with anything as ambitious as Bethesda makes, because it takes dozens of hours of testing per 10 minute encounter to comprehensively test one, and you can't exactly unit test video games (though we might not be super far off from training AI to supplement human testing), but I rarely experience anything near as annoying as the vitriol implies and I just don't care.
I get the don't preorder principle, but it's on steam. I get to have it downloaded ahead of time and ready for launch, and if there actually are issues it's extremely simple to get my cash back. Refunds make as much (or more) impact as waiting to buy it, so if a game is actually broken my voice is theoretically louder anyways.
I’m personally not so much worried about it being buggy or broken, that stuff gets patched. I’m more worried that it’ll be fundamentally disappointing in some way, which is something that I probably wouldn’t discover until long past the refund window. To be clear, I’m cautiously optimistic, but that caution leads me to wait until a week or so after release to hear what folks are saying about it.
I’m pretty sure bethesda said playing starfield with a hard drive isn’t great 1tb SSDs aren’t too expensive anymore I’d really recommend moving away from a hard drive
M.2 SATA drives are still a thing, same port, but different slower protocol as NVMe. They are less common, but still around and available in TB size. Don’t think there is any reason to get this outside of compatibility with old hardware.
There is also mSATA, which is a different port from M.2, but has a very similar look and size. Also slower than NVMe and no reason to get them unless you have hardware that uses them (e.g. some old Beelink miniPC have them).
I definitely support the hypothesis that calling all storage drives hard drives is an old curmudgeon thing 😅 I’ve been doing computer nerdery for way over 30 years, and a hard drive is a hard drive even if it doesn’t have spinny disks in it
I think storage or storage drive is the umbrella term these days. “Hard drive” was always short for “Hard Disk Drive” (which was named in comparison to Floppy Disk Drive) but since it was the only type of drive used for non-volatile internal storage for a good 20 years or so, it became a catch-all term. These days, many people understand there’s two different kinds and a lot of systems have both, so hard drive is becoming recognized to mean the spinning disks; as opposed to SSD, which is now an umbrella term incorporating 2.5" SATA, M.2 SATA, and M.2 NVMe, which are all Solid State Drives but different combinations of interfaces and form factors.
Nah, the "SS" and "HD" bits refers to how each storage disk reads data. HDDs use hard metal disks to read & write data, hence it got the misnomer hard disk drive. SSDs use solid state flash memory to read & write data, hence it being called a solid state drive.
If you want the general category, you'd want to say "storage drive" specifically since if you say "drive", that can also refer to an optical drive (AKA the CD slot) or a USB drive (AKA flash/thumb drives).
The classic, computer science term for all of these devices is “secondary storage”, if anyone’s looking for a way to confuse people briefly before explaining that you mean “hard drives, SSDs, etc.”
Sure. And of course it remains to be seen whether Starfield is worth it, but it’s undeniable that a game of this magnitude isn’t a common occurrence. If they realize the game’s potential, then missing out on it because of a relatively inexpensive hardware upgrade seems like a shame.
I’m guessing one of those is Baldurs Gate, but I’m struggling to think of two more. There’s been some decent games for sure but none other that I’d put on the same scale. Diablo 4 had the potential but squandered it imo.
None are baldur’s gate. While I’m loving baldur’s gate, it’s far from a market disruptor. The three games I was thinking of were TOTK, Diablo 4, and FFXVI.
To be clear, of the ones listed I only care about TOTK and BG3. I’m looking at “megaton games” by a general ascertainment of how relevant they are to the enthusiast gamers, and how much they sell. FFXVI came out and kinda did not great for an FF game so I’ll concede there. No idea about Diablo 4, I assume it was middling or “as expected”, while TOTK sold 18 million in its first 6 weeks; though I may largely be familiar with that due to being in proximity of Nintendo-related circles.
It really is subjective what measure we’re using though. BG3’s been amazing in relative terms to what would typically be expected of “DnD RPG” (maybe there’s a better term), and developers have been reacting to it far more than they would most other megaton games. TOTK’s no slouch on its own, impressing developers over its extremely impressive yet performent physics engine.
All fair points. I wasn’t trying to argue, just to have a friendly discourse :) My calling it a “game of magnitude” is obviously very open to interpretation.
For what it’s worth what I was trying to say was that this game has the potential to be unlike any game before it, so it’d be a shame to miss out on it just to avoid a minor hardware upgrade. But that in itself is of course also subjective. Suffice to say I myself won’t be missing out… :p
Fair say! I’m personally not someone who particularly vibes with the aesthetic of bethesda games so I’ll be missing out, but I hope it’s as good as fans expect ❤️
Is a game like Starfield “missable” though? Games like this’ll realistically be accessible for years (decades?) to come (not even counting Bethesda’s love of rereleasing their latest hit a la Skyrim lol). They might miss out on the cultural discussion if the game’s a hit though, that’s definitely a trade-off of late adoption, like what I’m experiencing with BG3 lol.
Yeah that’s fair. It might even be worth waiting a year so the community can fix all the bugs :p I know I’m too impulsive to wait that long though. Played through Cyberpunk at launch and loved it!
We have gone from cartridges, to CDs, to kind-of cartridges.
We have kinda gone full circle! Now we need something lile a holocron or like a Cortana AI chip to store an even bigger amount.
Not really the place for it, but why do some people still get so annoyed about the size of games these days?
If you want games to continue improving then the file sizes are going to increase. Maybe devs could do more, but at the same time it’s just a fact that high res textures and larger scale games need more space.
All consumers want it fast, want it cheap, want it good, want it on their machine, want it maintained in perpetuity, want it small, and want it to load quickly. Nevermind that a number of those are diametrically opposed ideals.
Yeah, people bitching like "nobody needs those big ass textures and high quality uncompressed audio." Maybe you don't need it, but high quality, textures are one of the easiest ways to improve graphic quality without putting that much load on the GPU. And I still rip my CDs as FLACs, so I want good audio quality in my games as well.
It’s not that nobody wants those super high def graphics, it’s that most people have no use for them. Most people won’t be able to play a game like Starfield at maxed out graphics, so why should they have to download and store an extra 30gb of textures?
Isn't this usually just LOD stuff where the high-quality stuff is when you're up close and the low quality stuff is for when you're far away? So you're just about always seeing the high-quality stuff, and it's the stuff that's actually processed in real time like shadows and stuff, that take up practically no space, that are getting toggled when you turn down settings. That's how I understand it anyway.
What LOD does is it uses multiples of the same textures in different sizes so that it doesn’t display the larger ones if it doesn’t need to. That takes up space due to duplicates, but 4K resolution textures take up 4 times the space that 2K resolution textures do. I’m sure compression reduces some of that, but in terms of size, they are 4 times larger. So if your system can’t handle 4K textures, then why use them at all? There’s a lot of stuff that you’ll never look at close enough that a 4K texture will ever serve a purpose. For a 1080p screen, you’d have to be close enough to the object that you’re only seeing a fraction of the texture at once, and they can use other tricks to make close-up textures look better without using bigger ones.
If you have a top-of-the-line PC, it makes sense to install those huge textures, but if you’re running an old GPU with 2GB of memory, what use do you have for them? You may as well not install them at all.
while i fully agree it should be an extra download that not everyone should be required to download. i see lots of sentiment here that people feel they shouldn’t even make them cause most cant use it. but why should those that can make use of the textures not have them, also helps the game stay more relevant graphically for longer as more people have systems that can make use of the textures
It would be ridiculous to hamstring new games just because some people can’t run them at max graphics. It definitely makes more sense to make the high-requirement features optional, not to cut them out entirely. People who buy high-end hardware shouldn’t be held back by those who can’t afford it, but those who can’t afford it shouldn’t be held back for the benefit of those who can either.
You really want lossless audio in games? Do you know how big FLACs are in comparison to OGGs? Could most people really hear the difference? Keep in mind the quality of the average headset or desktop speakers. I don’t think any games store lossless audio. If they did, I’d bet they would be much, much bigger.
Actually... no, you're completely right. That's why I just wrote "good audio quality", whatever that means. I actually read in some of those "why are games so big today" posts that people suggested that game devs don't compress their audio files enough. Some people don't get that this would come at a cost.
The average gamer might play with pretty shitty headsets but I think developers should go a little bit further than that and also satisfy enthusiasts. Up to a certain degree of course. That's why I think it's completely reasonable to demand ultra wide support or the physics not breaking above 60 fps.
(I actually expected a much worse reply) Nah I willingly interpreted what you said in the most extreme way possible. But in my mind there’s something of a ceiling when it comes to noticable improvements in audio quality, especially when compared to visuals, and it’s much lower than lossless. Besides, encoding is far from the only determining factor of audio quality. I think now, as discussed in other threads, the primary factor of ballooning file size is sheer quantity. We want more dialogue, more varied and adaptive music, more immersive soundscapes - and there’s no trick to achieving this other than more content, meaning more disk space. Maybe one day we’ll find an audio compression algorithm that will perform miracles, but until then audio still forms a significant portion of any game’s install, compressed or not.
This seems to be a point across all media at the moment, people watching/listening on sub-par equipment then complaining because the content is designed for higher quality gear.
“This film was too dark on my laptop screen” when it’s designed for a HDR enabled screen, “Nolan’s sound was mangled though my TV speakers” when it’s designed for at least a decent DTS set up. Etc. The same thing now seems to have infected games, “why is this 2023 game not designed for my 2018 rig and it’s limitations”.
Not everyone has large SSDs with space to spare to play multiple games, it seems like it would be pretty straight forward to have HD texture pack downloadable as DLC or something like Skyrim had back in the day, I wonder why more devs don’t do that? That would give players a choice of which to use.
Requires even more work and even more budget. I understand the problem but it has always been there. There are people now who can’t afford 1tb and there were people 20 years ago who couldn’t afford 50gb when that was the equivalent. This won’t ever go away. And it’s fault by consumers who expect bigger and better things for less and less money. You can only optimize so much on your budget. I still understand this is a problem it’s just not one that will get solved anytime soon, which is a shame.
It really doesn’t. They include both anyway, there’s no reason they can’t do it as a separate download. Rainbow 6 Siege did it back in 2015 with their ultra high definition textures pack which is a 30gb download for a game that’s 60gb without it. Lots of players have no use for the ridiculously high-definition textures, it would definitely make sense to separate them from the main package and cut possibly several hours or even days of download time for some people.
You’re right that it would take budget and time of course, but it doesn’t seem like a huge amount of work for most dev studios compared to making their game more accessible to a wider audience? I feel like there’s some marketing thing of “our game is so awesome it takes 1000GB of disk space!” going on, which is really stupid, but it’s probably working sadly!
You’re not quite right about 20 years ago, though - I was a gamer 20 years ago (yes, your comment did make me feel old) and disk space wasn’t really something people complained about, at least with respect to games. Even Sims 2 with all it’s 18 expansions only took up around 10GB or so, whereas most games were 5GB or less, they had to be otherwise you couldn’t fit them on a DVD. Most gamers had at least 100GB+ hard drives, 200GB+ was more common. Starfield requires 130GB of disk space, and according to the Steam Hardware Survey, at least 18% of gamers don’t have that much to spare, and significantly fewer aren’t going to have that to spare on an SSD and will suffer the indignity of slow load times :)
I remember buying my first hard drive for 2000 sek which is arround 180 dollars. So that’s actually more expensive than 1tb today. That was more than 20 years ago but I only got 20gb worth of space. A few years later and we should arrive at the 20 years-ago-mark which made me write 50. I def wouldn’t say most people had 200gb hard drives 20 years ago. If they did no one could complain 20 years later if BG3 would still fit on that drive.
I had thought that at least Microsoft’s plan was to for allow their cloud infrastructure to handle background loading processes so that there didn’t need to be such giant file sizes and so developers could have more computing power to work with.
I want Valve to encourage developers to use their branch tool like Witcher 3 did with the next gen upgrade to make high resolution assets optional.
There's no reason to have 100-something GB of assets on an 800p device. Same with languages. Support is awesome. Disrespecting my storage to pack them all without any way to cut out the waste isn't.
That's before the heavy duplication of assets for sequential HDD loads that I'm guessing hasn't disappeared yet.
That's why I mentioned languages, too. I'm not saying that it's bad that more people can access it in their native language, just that a lot of games include it by default when they're not going to be used.
It's possible BG3 is an exception, but a lot of publishers pretty clearly just don't care how much space they take up (and I kind of think a few of the GAAS nonsense see more space as a positive so they can monopolize users's time even more by limiting the number of other games they have). I really wish that Valve had pushed for an alternative "trim the fat" branch that defaulted to less, less heavy assets and let you choose what else you needed for Steam Deck verification (over, say 10 GB, so you only really needed to do it for modernish AAA type games). I think it could have made a difference because the cost isn't high to do.
I think most people have 1tb of storage space and not much else. Most games these days are well under 100gb. In that respect, it’s kind of ridiculous to have one game take up 1/10th of your storage. I doubt most gamers are going to see those high res textures anyway.
Your point is valid though, too. Games are only increasing in size. I already have 5tb total in my PC but would need more space to install this particular game (I have a lot of games lol). I don’t have a problem upgrading but I don’t think a lot of people the money to buy a $70 plus a good HDD/SSD. Just my thoughts on this.
Fallout 3 released two hardware generations ago at around 8GB. Fallout 4 released last gen and sits at around 25GB. One generation later, Starfield is launching at ~140GB - almost 6x the file size of the previous generation.
I can't speak for everybody, but my PC storage didn't jump to 6x capacity in that amount of time, and my download speeds didn't get 6x faster. But I imagine that's why it's concerning to some people.
Even just going by console standards, we're looking at only a jump of 2x capacity between the Xbox One and Xbox Series X - or exactly the same if you have a Series S. It takes up over 20% of the storage Series S in just one game - with a mandatory install, unspecified patch sizes, impending DLC, etc.
Obviously there's a discussion to be had of WHY the games are increasing exponentially like that, but on the surface that's likely where the bulk of the frustration comes from.
Isn’t the size of your PC storage entirely user controlable? If you want 6x the memory you had in 2008 when F3 came out you could have it. The Xbox model at the time came with a 20gb hard drive on the standard model and 120gb for an Elite. So they’ve definitely exponentially grown to 512gb/1tb this gen.
Here’s the thing: I don’t want games to keep improving, at least, not in that way. It doesn’t mean anything to me that the game includes ultraHD textures and looks stunning on an 8K monitor because I’m still rocking a 3070 with a 1080 120 Hz. The fact that it takes them three years to make a game look this good, which is meaningless to a majority of gamers who can’t afford that kind of hardware, is especially frustrating. And now they’re telling us for the pleasure of waiting so long for them to put the finishing touches on what is effectively marketing material, I have to reserve not just 100+ GB, but all that space on an SSD because the game loads too damn slow otherwise? That’s like an eighth of the available space on your average m.2 drive, for one game, for something most people won’t even be able to enjoy because their hardware just isn’t made for that kind of output.
I don’t want sixteen times the detail, I want an optimized game with serviceable assets and a gameplay loop that doesn’t feel like a second job. And granted, this is getting beyond the graphics argument, but I like games that aren’t afraid of not appealing to the broadest audience. I want my Fallout in Space to have more than four dialog options that all point the same direction. I want to make meaningful choices and play a character that has real opinions and can act accordingly, instead of endless modifiers on the gear of a voice-acted talking doll that exists to service a mostly linear plot. I don’t want F4, I want FNV. I’ll be pleasantly surprised if the reviews come out and it ends up being as meaningful as I want it to be, but I’m not holding my breath, and in all likelihood I’m not jumping through the hardware hoops to play a game I probably won’t like.
Do we have any sort of information on how big the Shattered Space Story Expansion is supposedly going to be? Because 30 bucks extra seems excessive, especially when the game is already 70 bucks. Kinda feels like they just want to lure you with the early access, which will likely be a hot mess anyway.
yup. I am really excited for this game, but I’ll be giving it a few months at least. It’s not just 76, FO4 was… fine. Still replay it. But if starfield has to much in common with that gameplay loop I’ll probably skip it.
I don’t have a lot of patience for AAA releases with a repetitive loop and nothing but better polish to distinguish them from all of the innovative indie games that are out these days.
That sounds like an overly negative take, and it kind of is, but I am definitely rooting for this thing.
I think it’s a reasonable take. Skyrim was the last good game they put out, but I even preferred Oblivion to Skyrim - it captured my imagination more and there was more depth to the role playing - so I think it’s a fair view to be cautious.
I’m hoping it’s great, but with the size and scale of the procedurally generated content I’m kind of expecting it to be mostly soulless cookie cutter shooty shooty content with four times the detail but little actual role playing. It’s Bethesda so we know it’s going to be buggy, that’s nothing new.
Setting down the reasonable take: it does look realllllllly good. Meant what I said I’m rooting for it. I’ve just been hurt before lol.
They’ve been saying all the right words, it’ll come down to feel. Bugs don’t, well, bug me, when there’s soul. And I shouldn’t be overly negative on FO4, there’s some excellent characters there. Nick Valentine in particular will always be a favorite, and while the main plot could be a bit better there’s a lot of heartfelt content along the way and in the side missions.
I do think this is the lesson a lot of AAAs are learning the hard way though. When you do what blizz did to overwatch, what bethesda did with 76, the damage is lasting. I would have been a day 0 person for starfield if not for that. Hell, I still haven’t gotten around to cyber punk, even though it seems pretty OK now.
Fair enough. F76 was a shit show. But I have high hopes both because Starfield is a single player game and because a multiplayer Fallout was always a terrible idea anyway
I’m just concerned and will wait for reviews before buying (like everyone should). Bethesda has a reputation for being slow to fix games and having lots of bugs and crashes at release. And even then, they patch them up to being playable and leave the rest for modders to fix.
What makes you think they stick with their games? They fix bugs for about a year or so after release and move on, just like any other studio. They fix stuff in re-releases but you have to pay for that.
I was reserving judgement. Just giving reasons to be cautious going into this. Everyone should still be excited, I’m just saying “expect a Bethesda game” so look at their recent games and that’s what you’re getting into probably. With those expectations, you’re less likely to be disappointed
Me too. If the sales aren't high enough, Microsoft may reconsider and decide to sell it on the PS5 (probably with some DLC included) a year later or so. It cost them a whole lot of money to buy all those companies, including Bethesda, and they're going to eventually have to recoup a profit from those purchases.
If that means releasing on Playstation again, I think they'll do it rather than risk losing money. Even Disney has learned with Disney+ that having your own exclusive platform and not sharing isn't great business sense. It costs them a lot of money every month to host everything and produce content, and if they don't license out that content to competitors, they can't make their money back.
I can see Microsoft learning the same lesson. Especially given that Disney+ hasn't been profitable ever, and now the red ink is starting to catch up with Disney. If keeping big games from big studios starts losing Microsoft a lot of money, I think they'll fold, at least partially.
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