I’ve played Starfield (PC) a good bit by now and I’d say that mid 80s is probably fair.
The gameplay is great fun - the combat, gear, etc. is really quite similar to Fallout 4 (though without the VATS), with a Skyrim style talent tree.
The base building and ship building is quite like Fallout 4, though much improved (thankfully!) but still a bit janky.
The worldbuilding is immersive but the world itself is just okay - it’s really predictable, they play it a bit too safe, every faction is nothing we haven’t seen a dozen times before, and society hasn’t advanced at all ~400 years in the future apparently.
Characters are exactly what you expect from a Bethesda game - a bit two dimensional, but nice enough.
Graphics are good, sound design is good, music is nice but a bit too similar to Skyrim IMO.
The story is also really quite safe and derivative, reminds me simultaneously of Mass Effect and Skyrim.
The exploration is cool, but does get a bit repetitive after a while. I think more interesting “random” locations would be really good - after a few abandoned, flavourless civilian bases, you’ve seen them all.
I’m a sucker for customisable bases/houses/etc. especially for space ships, giving me all those building blocks and letting me loose in the sandbox (starbox?) is honestly hours of entertainment.
Space combat is fun, but IMO the space part of the game would be way more immersive if I did all of the ship piloting stuff in-character rather than in the UI menues, seems like a big oversight - why not have something like the galaxy map from mass effect, or have everything on displays in the cockpit? It would be much more immersive, but I guess it would have delayed the game quite a bit.
A lot of the game is juggling menues and interfaces which aren’t the best designed. very similar to Skyrim - I imagine UI redesign mods will really shine once they start coming out. It’s pretty tricky trying to figure out what stuff in your inventory is junk you accidentally picked up (looking at you, Fire Extinguisher!) and which items have a surprisingly good value-to-weight ratio (like some - but not all - of the books, or the deck of cards, surprisingly)
There are occasionally little bugs and glitches, but it’s not too bad for 2023 - nothing that makes the game unplayable or breaks major things, it’s just been stuff like glitchy animations, containers placed in the wrong place/orientation, weird physics behaviour, and I’ve noticed a couple missing textures here and there.
If you’re looking for more of a story/RPG game, I’d suggest something more like Mass Effect or Knights of the Old Republic.
For exploration and space combat, I think No Man’s Sky is better, but with much less customisation.
For more customisation and sandbox style gameplay - but less action-oriented - Space Engineers is probably a better choice.
All in all, Starfield is a fun game - Skyrim in space is a good starting point for describing it, but it’s a lot closer to “Fallout 4, but the bombs didn’t drop”, though the game has a lot of cool extra systems beyond that. I’d be happy to recommend it to someone who would enjoy a single player sci-fi themed looter-shooter sandbox game with some mild RPG elements and player-constructed ships and bases, and I’m sure there are hundreds of hours of enjoyment there, and, as with the Elder Scrolls or Fallout games, it’s likely a game that I will return to for many, many years to come
One of the hidden elements of travel is the scanner; if you travel within a system and can "target" the location via quest marker or the like, you can just travel to it from the pilot seat and land at the location, no menu needed.
I think there are other caveats, but the number of "different" ways travel can occur makes it hard for me to keep the details straight. It may just be within system, you may be able to grav jump. You may need to have a quest marker there so it "displays" the planet surface location, or you may be able to select from a few "local" options. I just can't remember what the restrictions are to that method off the top of my head lol
I thought so! There are a lot of little quirks with travel. Usually I get scanned by the Feds landing at New Atlantis, other times I don't. Sometimes I can jump straight to surface other times I need to go from orbit. Just little things I haven't paid attention to so I can't say definitively what the criteria is. But, jumping from the scanner is a way nicer way to do it. I just got in the ha it of traveling from the quest menu because I can go from planet surface -> new system -> planet surface with one action (usually).
How i see it is al alternative falllout timeline aet in the future. A lot of the basic game mechanics are straight upgrades from Fallout 4, with slightly better faction writing than 4, and slightly more rpg checks to make an experience feels better than 4. IMO i dont think its better than New Vegas, but its a direct upgrade from FO4
I’m loving starfield and I’ll agree with this. It’s a mid eighties score kind of game. If it’s what you want it’s amazing, but the people calling it game of the century and whatnot are buying their own hype.
On the other hand, it’s likely to have serious staying power as an all time classic game, Bethesda is great at that and there’s a ton of room for people to use it as an incredible mod canvas. I don’t think that should affect launch reviews though.
This battle system was in use by final fantasy before pokémon though, wasn’t it? Also summoning was used in at least the 4 ff games that I have actually played.
Aside from the analog sticks, the console itself seems like a fine upgrade from the original making it a tempting for anyone looking for “Switch Pro”. But it’ll be intersting to see how the price of games and the digital key aspect will affect the game sales down the line.
Steam Deck and other portable pc:s seem to be also getting a lot of momentum so there’s increasing amount of competition for handheld devices which was not really the chase with Switch 1.
There’s no competition for handhelds dude l. This the switch 2… there was one before it. And it’s a console. Mthe steam deck came out after the switch, you could emulate like 95% of the switch library on the steamd deck plus steam games plus wharever you wanted. I’d imagine in 2-3 years the steam deck 2 will come out. But all this is is just a console vs a PC… Still… Just like before. Nintendo kant shaking anything up except that every company will now sell games at $80. Nintendo fucked everyone
Not yet, but availability of steam decks and other pc handhelds is improving rapidly. Valve also just recently allowed other manufacturers like Lenovo to produce their own devices.
PC gaming is currently overshadowing console gaming and these pc handhelds are just extension of that.
NICE, which Windows are you using bro? I’m running 10 with a stock kernel and GUI, as well as a bunch of custom modifications, including a custom desktop*.
Not the guy toy responded but I can give my experience.
The first annoyance was downgrading Fallout 4. Now I know there’s a mod that can do it for you but I’m not going to stick my Steam credentials in some random piece of code. So I did it manually which wasn’t hard but it was annoying.
The second burden was getting F4se to run because for whatever reason I couldn’t launch FO4 without downgrading to wine 8.0.x. Luckily I found out glorious eggroll version of wine works with FO4 and actually starts F4se automatically.
But by far the biggest hurdle was the actual installation of Folon. I couldn’t get the installer to install the mod. I ended up unpacking the installer and manually copying the files into the FO4 folder.
Then I got the train bug and manually installed buffout. Then I got an XDI error so I had to manually reinstall XDI as well.
Well, you can check the scripts of the tool yourself. They’re all in the zip file you download from nexus. It just sends the credentials to the Steam API and uses the auth token for the rest. That’s exactly what the Steam app on Android does. And it’s also not some tool from a random dude, it’s the official downgrader tool from the FOLON team. They even link it on their homepage. I get being paranoid with credentials, but in this case i saw no problem. Sorry for my rambling, but this “issue” is blown way out of proportion imo.
It’s deck specific, but the deck just runs arch. The only difference from the guide was that i didn’t used the gui .exe and just ran the .sh script in Konsole.
That’s actually something i still have trouble with and i’m hit withe the “No Female” bug. Gonna try your suggestion for F4SE bug. I’m currently installing the recommended mods which are suggested in the downgrader tool.
Edit// installed GE-Proton 9-11 and it runs with F4SE, so thank you :)
Well, you can check the scripts of the tool yourself. They’re all in the zip file you download from nexus. It just sends the credentials to the Steam API and uses the auth token for the rest. That’s exactly what the Steam app on Android does. And it’s also not some tool from a random dude, it’s the official downgrader tool from the FOLON team. They even link it on their homepage. I get being paranoid with credentials, but in this case i saw no problem. Sorry for my rambling, but this “issue” is blown way out of proportion imo.
Ah, I didn’t think about who made it. I just saw two options, either I go through the code to make sure it’s nothing sus or I do it manually and because I didn’t feel like going through code I did it manually. Should’ve paid more attention I guess.
As for the guide, I haven’t tried the Heroic launcher. I generally use Lutris but I will try that when the big patch comes out. Hopefully they also upgrade to a newer version of Fo4 because the ultrawidescreen mod is having some issues.
Yeah, a lot of people are missing who made the tool.
I can just speak as a deck owner because i’m not at home till october, but heroic saves a lot of headache. Combined with SteamTinkerTools is was really easy to set up everything.
Do you use the UWS-Mod they mention on the downgrader tool Nexuspage?
First issue was the downgrade failing to run because it claimed I was missing an ssh library. Then I found a work around that involved grabbing the uncompiled source and running the script from there, but that failed to connect to steam. I finally downgraded using a manual method that took forever, but it worked. Once I finally got it all running, I hit the infamous crash after the train ride bug.
I haven’t even been able to get it work using Nexus mods with my Steam version. I’m getting the intro screen/menu, but it never actually loads a new game after that. I’ll just wait a few months/years til I remember about it and try again.
I agree that dev to user is best, and I agree that the current greenlight processes for game publishers are pretty busted, no arguments there. I also have bigger issues with the sub model he's not even mentioning.
In fairness, though, I think for majors with that busted greenlight process the sub model does enable some games to get made that wouldn't otherwise. Some games just don't work at full price and just can't stack up to the major productions but they do get checked out in a sub. For smaller games and devs the sub money can guarantee survival.
But that doesn't take away that a subscription-dominated market is poorer, the preservation issues or any of the other problems with that being the primary thrust. Tech guys tend to be all-in on things and think they should be THE way because more money is more optimal and if they dominate then that's more money. In reality for a content ecosystem to thrive a multi-window ecosystem is probably best. Also, I want to buy games I can own, and the less they let me do that the more I want it, so... there's that.
I have no problem with subscriptions as they are right now, my issue is a potential future where I am not given the opportunity outright buy the games I want to play.
Game subscriptions will never stay as they are right now. Microsoft is basically burning money with GamePass they aren’t making a penny. Currently they are wining and dining the devs with big checks, but once MS has cornered the market they won’t be handing out these big bags of cash anymore. And they will definitely raise their prices. It’s big tech disruption tactics 101. Undercut the competition and go into the red until the competition throws in the towel then lower cost and increase the prices.
I always tell people concerned about this sort of thing to look at how cable TV still exists long after obsolescence. The content delivery system won’t dry up before the content you want does (at least not in your lifetime).
Yeah, but much of the cable content is lost to time. That’s why we have stories like that of Marion Stokes, who collected tapes at her home and preserved hundreds of thousands of hours of news footage.
Sure, and the amount of lost PBS footage alone due to draconian copyright restrictions borders on criminal.
The point isn’t on the quality of the distribution method. Even if it was, preservation efforts for games that qualify for the concept of game ownership are far more advanced. The point is that when an entertainment industry gets this big, it takes the deaths of multiple generations for the market to dry up.
Are there examples for a games that wouldn’t exist without subscription services?
Small games can sell for smaller money and get successful without subscriptions, too (like Vampire Survivors, Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice and many more).
I don’t think subscription services will pay good money to small productions. I mean look at Spotify’s or Twitch’ payouts. Only the big dogs get fed and the smaller ones have no choice.
Not even going to joke about this, but I am really hoping nobody there gets the bright idea to make a Barbie blockchain or NFT or anything like that.
Speaking of “Ready Player One”, the author Ernest Cline also wrote literally the absolute worst, grossest, most misogynistic poem I’ve ever had the displeasure of reading in my life. Now you’ll have to read it too to make sure the “Reqdyverse” never succeed and thus, zero possibility of Barbie blockchain.
I still don’t really understand this. Local splitscreen on a game the size of baldurs gate does make sense to me as being a technical hurdle, obviously rendering the game world twice is extremely taxing.
I keep seeing complaints about other games also, lots off people seem to be blaming the Series S for Remnant 2s slow xbox patches.
The Series S is basically an X with a weaker GPU, how are games (that also release on PC) not scalable enough to run on the S at 1080p when they can run at 4k on the X? I’d love a technical answer, if I replace my 3080 with a 1060 I could run the game on my PC and a lower resolution/graphic settings. How is this different from the Series X/S? I’m not a programmer/developer and I’d really like if someone could explain too me why the Series S is a problem because from my view point it’s lazy developers with unoptimised games
did you think of the possibility that even Larian’s low settings still can’t run on series S? Given the amount of assets I saw it’s actually quite possible that vram requirement are pretty high and that’s why PS5 have delay as well so they can figure out ways to consolidate textures used etc. Like they can’t even manage to let me stack rope or water bottle properly in inventory(maybe some asset id not cleaned up during development), so having excessive vram usage is fairly easy/common for content heavy games.
To be clear, I’m not trying to attack Larian here. I think splitscreen is a much bigger technical hurdle than other games have to deal with and delaying it on the Xbox was the right idea. But, the PC versions minimum requirements is 4GB vram and recommended 8GB vram. The Series S has 10GB vram. I’m more annoyed by the anti Series S rhetoric going around about it holding all games back, because most games with a PC release scale no problem
What you forgot to consider is that the Xbox has to share the RAM with the VRAM. The game on PC has 8GB RAM and 4GB VRAM as minimum. That is 12GB of RAM. The Series S only has 10GB. Which is 2GB less than minimum.
And with PC, there is only one view point at one time. You can have characters all over the map, but it only needs to render one at a time. Worst case it loads and unloads assets as you switch back and forth. With split screen console, gotta have both loaded at the same time.
The Xbox Seried S does not have 10GB VRAM it has 10GB VRAM/RAM that can be dynamically allocated to whatever the game needs.
Baldur’s Gate 3 needs 12GB combined VRAM/RAM at minimum. While the Xbox OS peobably doesn’t eat as much RAM as Windows does the difference is apparently not 2GB which leaves the Series S with not eniugh RAM to power the game.
As others mentioned for the Steamdeck Splitscreen was disabled, however that was likely done to save GPU performance, unlike the Series S the Steamdeck has enough RAM (16GB) to meet the minimum requirements.
Today’s Digital Foundry video suggests that this is far from the issue. Even the highest texture settings fit comfortably in 6 GB. IIRC it was around 4,5 - and consoles typically go for high rather than ultra settings.
Xbox series S have 8GB for game, so while BG3 might consume around 4-5GB on PC, console with unified memory couldn’t afford this. All the other assets(model/animation/audio clips/massive amount of icons) needs to be loaded as well. With split screen, you can have one person tries to go into conversation (that streaming in high res texture/face models, etc) while the other one stay and still render the world with all the things their camera can move around with.
I don’t know what to say other than maybe you should send Larian your resume and type “I am sure series S can be ported no issue, here is my numbers.” I am sure Larian would love to have simultaneous launch like PS5 and you can cut a really good deal if you can manage to pull that. BUT, you would have to pass the [Persuasion] check though, hope you have high cha to back it up. :)
It wasn’t delayed on the PS5; that was the original release plan. They moved the release UP for PC because they didn’t want to have to compete with Starfield’s release. Since that’s not coming out on PS5, they left the release date as is.
Split screen might be difficult for Series S due to memory constraints. Keep in mind that all assets both players are seeing must be loaded in memory simultaneously. This includes textures, models and animations. These assets are normally not loaded into the memory unless they’re visible by the camera. This becomes problematic if there are two cameras facing different parts of the map at the same time. Then you potentially need to double the memory requirements, which the Series S might not have.
If it was just a GPU difference, you’d be right it should be easy to just run it less pretty. But the memory limitations are the real issue. The X has 16 GB of memory and the S has 10 GB. And worse, the memory performance is drastically different. The X has 10 GB that runs at 560 GB/s and 6 that runs at 336 GB/s, where as the S has 8 GB at 224 GB/s and 2 GB at 56GB/s. (I did not miss a zero on the last value)
Xbox owners who are not following video game news every second of the day might find themselves buying a Series S version thinking they can play co-op with their friend who owns a Series X and they…can’t.
The problem here is implied to be local co-op between X and S players?
The main difficulty with split screen is that you need to be able to fit everything you need to render the scene into RAM, twice. Let’s go through some cases:
Just rendering to a higher resolution still lets you get away with the same amount of RAM if you use low-res textures, or a moderate increase because you’re using high-res textures, but only in the foreground – all you need is enough GPU compute power to push the pixels.
If you’re rendering VR both camera perspectives are going to be nearly identical, looking at the same objects, so RAM use is nearly identical to a single camera. Your frame time targets are much stricter in VR, you have to have high and very regular fps or people are going to puke, but again that’s compute pressure, not memory pressure.
In the split-screen case all bets are off: When players are at opposite sides of the map there may be literally zero meshes and textures in common between those two areas and you need twice the RAM for twice the amount of camera views. Nothing in common is the worst case, yes, but it’s bound to happen, and not leave PR in a situation where they have to say “We degraded performance when players are far apart to promote an atmosphere of closeness and cooperation”.
Damn reading the impact this has is some combination of hilarious and horrifying to see people bought into a service like this. If it was free or simply a monthly sub like Netflix I could kinda understand. But a sub to use things you also had to buy? Fuck that.
Yep, all my GoG games would be installable without internet if I have the installer downloaded, games without DRM bought from the devs directly like Factorio would also work just fine. Loads of games are available outside of steam, some are even on github for free.
Not sure if this is still the case, but with Steam it used to be that if you didn’t put the client into “offline mode” ahead of time the client wouldn’t open, let alone allow you to launch a game once the connection was lost.
At least in 2013 when I started using Steam more seriously if your connection dropped it would prompt you asking if you wanted to switch to offline mode. And I know this because I had Steam on a laptop that I carried in my bag hibernating and I didn’t had internet in some places I went to. So that has been fixed for over a decade.
they fixed that, but if you are connected to WiFi that blocks steam it will refuse to launch your games even after you disconnect from the WiFi. I think this is to prevent piracy I guess??
I needed a software that I bought on steam for schoolwork and I couldn’t use it because steam was having a panic attack over my schools wifi. Inst of preventing piracy I went and pirated the software to not have that issue LOL
Oh, go figure. I thought a Steam Deck was a handheld device running off of a battery. Yeah, if you’ve got a desktop computer with a high-wattage GPU you’d expect better performance on the latest AAA graphics, huh? Weird. Cannot possibly be worthwhile to own, I guess.
Sort of a nothingburger article. He says that they didn’t get nominated, then says they probably didn’t deserve to get nominated. Even people that liked the games agree neither should’ve been nominated.
forbes.com
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