Since negative opinions travel fast, I’m just gonna say my GPU is actually below the minimum requirements, though admittedly I upgraded CPU last year. The game’s minimum is a GTX 1070 TI, I just have a regular GTX 1070.
In my case, it’s doing a LOT of dynamic resolution and object blurring nonsense to get the game to run smoothly, but it does run smoothly. I get to see the character faces during conversations, I can see what I’m doing, there’s no hitching, etc. New Atlantis looks ugly, but that might change if I get a new GPU.
Bethesda’s RPGs have always been shallow in the choice you have with dialogue and altering the story, but deep with the detail, world-building, and mechanics of gameplay. Arena is almost no different in the gameplay loop as Starfield. They went through various phases of how to use rules and complexity of certain systems, but have since settled in a formula established first by Morrowind and refined with Oblivion and further with Skyrim.
They are not about the story. The story is just kinda there to drive some motivation and give context to your own thing. They excel at immersing you in the world and allowing you to just play however you want without restrictions (such as being a god in everything without having to start over and build specific characters to do specific things). They have a pretty good track record of doing good environmental story telling and adding in all those little stories in notes and terminals that aren’t even tied to quests.
But when it comes to stories and dialogue? They had ONE game that was a masterpiece, Morrowind, and the rest have ranged from absolute shit to pretty good. And not one of them, not even Morrowind, actually have the same kind of choice and sweeping changes affected through dialogue get in a story-focused RPG like Baldur’s Gate. Bethesda will likely never have a game as well written as Morrowind again, because that isn’t what they are about.
They are very much about the action over the words. Despite the jank as fuck AI, the combat is still fun somehow (and imagine how much more fun it could be if the AI didn’t suck!), it’s incredibly easy to lose yourself in the world because of how detailed it is, and there are plenty of shenanigans to pull once you begin to dive in and see how everything works. Like, I can’t wait to completely fill one of the huge craters near my base with watermelons and then dive in.
This is it. Forget all the tracked on nonsense. The base building, the character management, production chains all that nonsense…
If you focus on the combat/looter aspect of the game, that part is actually pretty good. A world apart from the janky combat of Fallout, it actually feels pretty visceral.
They may not explode like in Fallout, but there is a new fun spectacle in town: Shooting out backpacks on low gravity environments and launching your enemies off world.
And this is why I didn’t buy Starfield. I loved Morrowind and was disappointed with Skyrim, and I think it’s because I prefer a tighter, more linear story and don’t like “messing around” as much. I watched a gameplay video, and the things that player got excited about (all the side content) really didn’t grab my attention, and the story itself seemed a bit flat.
I probably would’ve loved it as a kid, but that’s not what I’m looking for these days.
So for me, BG3 is the better game. But younger me would’ve preferred Starfield. They’re both great games, just for very different audiences. And I could totally see someone having exactly the opposite opinion as me, which just shows how great both are.
With my experiences playing the game with an unsupported GPU and getting a solid 60 fps still as long as no NPCs are in the vicinity, I don’t think it’s the GPU side of things that needs optimization. It’s whatever uses the CPU.
It could be optimized better for intel. They have had that issue in the past.
Though… I limit my voltage to keep it from shooting up to 95c from their latest firmware updates (AMD cpus push themselves to the thermal limit intentionally), I kinda wonder if that is having an effect. It’s never been a problem before, however.
Damn this is a pathetic response. He could’ve said “We’ve tried our best to make it as polished as possible before launch, and are working towards further optimising it to give you the best experience, wherever you play”. Even if they did jackshit, it would not come out as condescending and snarky. Maybe he wasn’t prepared for a tough question on the spot right at the beginning of the interview, but it does show how he thinks about his games. In his mind, the game running at all on PC is optimised enough.
I am not saying he’s bad for not making Creation Engine super optimised engine on this planet, I’m saying he’s bad for not acknowledging it is currently most demanding engine despite looking merely half as good as Cyberpunk 2077 or idk Arkham Knight.
They’re clearly building their games in an extremely inefficient way. Starfield does not have anything going on in it that other games with much lower requirements also have done.
You see evidence of this in their previous games. One of the major performance issues with Fallout 4 for example, was that instead of building their cities in performant ways, they literally plonked every building as an individual asset into the world which thrashed the CPU for no reason. Modders just had to merge them all into one model to significantly improve performance. Their games are full of things like this and Starfield will be no different.
Unless I’m completely mistaken here, modders didn’t combine the buildings together, that’s how they are by default. Mods, however, sometimes needed to break said system which resulted in massively degraded performance.
Nah the Boston performance was terrible in vanilla. The precombination fixes made huge performance improvements. There were issues with mods breaking precombined meshes but that was a separate issue.
Why would he? Todd hates everyone who plays his games and cares only about separating money from pockets. Fallout 76 made that quite clear to everyone.
If he gave a standard appeasing PR statement without following it up at all, that would somehow be preferable? This may be snarky, but at least you know what to expect.
In comparison to BG3, the dialogue and stories are incredibly bland in Starfield.
If you don’t compare it to BG3 though, then the dialogue and stories are still incredibly bland.
I swear every Bethesda game does this. For example, when you get three dialogue options, they all say basically the same thing, and they all set up the player to be dunked on by the NPCs response…
Or the only options are:
“wow! Incredible! I love kittens, good on ya kid!”
At least the stories were pretty good for the most part. Starfield’s story and lore are just so generic and boring, and the dialogue ranges from corny to just flatout awful. Even compared to previous Bethesda games, the story elements in Starfield are a yawn fest that feel like they were written by history majors and not people who love science fiction.
The thing about video games is that they’re a multivariate equation. Fun is a variable, and so is realism. Depending on how much realism there already is, and the nature of it, adding more can also increase the fun but it can also take away from the fun. There’s a reason that even the hardcore simmers who do things like drive pretend trucks across Europe in real time or run pretend air traffic control at pretend airports pay to pretend to do those things instead of getting paid to do them for real.
Yeah, fun should always come before realism. If you can do fun and realism then do both otherwise do fun. Unfortunately realismcucks are a very loud minority.
If your enjoying it then don’t worry about the negative comments. Unlike some other space games you dont do much travel yourself, you fast travel everywhere which means seeing the same non-skippable cutscenes again and again, i fast travel to the system, then fast travel to the planet, then fast travel to the surface; then if i want to go elsewhere on the planet i have to fast travel back to orbit then back down to the planet. Its “fast travel:the video game” Given that similar games have managed to let you fly your ship from space down and around the planet for years now I dont why you cant in this, im constantly pulled out of playing for a loading screen
You can’t because the engine is bad, and they need a lot of loading screens to connect the small-sized playable areas. Other Bethesda titles pull the same trick, but you don’t realize it, because there’s no loading screen. Instead it’s doors that handle that (which is quick because rooms are small) and pre-loading of neighbouring grids when you are outdoors (which is why sometimes you’ll see creatures popping out of thin air, or walking out from behind walls/trees/rocks to hide the popping.
Bethesda always advertises their “new engine”, but really it’s exactly the same engine they’ve been using since Morrowind, with minor logic improvements and updates to the graphical assets. It’s to the point where a lot of bugs have ancestry trees.
Oh yeah things were that simple, just change it ! Man who would have thought ! Hey we need your help on other issue what can we do about the economic crisis, world hunger or civils wars ?
Bethesda always advertises their “new engine”, but really it’s exactly the same engine they’ve been using since Morrowind, with minor logic improvements and updates to the graphical assets. It’s to the point where a lot of bugs have ancestry trees.
Yep. Call it Gamebryo, Call it Creation Engine, Call it what the fuck ever.
Its still NetImmerse.
They can keep slapping fresh makeup on it, and keep wraping new ducttape around it when the old stuff wears out and fails, but it’ll always be the same engine, regardless of the name changes.
They dont want to invest in making a whole new engine (which, given Bethesda, would be just as bad or worse than what they use now), and they don’t seem to want to license anyone elses engine. Which is weird, cause subsidiary studios don’t seem to have the same issue… Like, Ghostwire Tokyo is built on Unreal Engine 4.
Not arguing with the crux of your argument here, but most fast traveling I’ve done is way more direct than that. New planet, sure there’s a few stages, but anywhere you’ve been before you can pretty much fast travel to directly from anywhere.
How often are you just hopping between places you’ve already been?
As to the people saying you can fast travel back to cities, last time (which was about 5 mins ago) i went to go back to New Atlantis i had to faat travel to the system first before i could even select the city, but other times ive been able to directly select the landing spot and fast travel there from another system so I dunno.
I just went and did stuff in Sol, i fast travelled to the system, fast travelled to the city, ran to the bar close to the landing pad, ran back to the ship, fast travelled to orbit, fast travelled to Venus, killed 3 ships, interacted with satellite, fast travelled to staryard, fought a decent amount of people which was good, fast travelled to Neptune, short fight, board, kill 3 or 4 peeps, fast travel to lodge. Then fast travel to mining planet system, fast travel to planet, talk, fast travel to different system, fast travel to planet run to ship, no bad guys just a quick convo, then fast travel back to ship, fast travel to orbit, and now fast travel to different planet.
Also fuel auto refills after every jump just seems to mean more fast travelling if you need to go further
If your enjoying it then im happy for you not trying to detract, just sharing my experience, i just wish they pushed what could be done more
I think if there’s a patrol scanning your cargo you have to hit the system before landing, otherwise you’d fast travel your way past contraband scans. I’m having a lot of fun in the game, I agree there’s too much fast traveling though.
taking the other side of the argument, planetary landings in E:D are just loading screens at 10x the length. Travelling to a planet at .3 C is neat the first time but then you look at trade routes as “how long do I sit paying attention in case of an interdiction?” StarCitizen falls into the same trap. QD is neat but then it takes you 5 minutes and a fuel stop to go from one side of a system to another. Its mundane trudging for reality rather than getting the boring monotony out of the way of the player.
Just because the tech exists doesn’t mean it makes for compelling gameplay.
I can agree with this but I do wish it involved fewer loading screens and clicking through each time. If you’re gonna skip the “realism” to make it more convenient then make it actually convenient.
With that said despite that and the fact I’d love to fly the ship over the planets manually, I’m really liking it so far (2h in).
Yeah I can’t really disagree with people’s assessment of how much travel-by-loading-screen there can be, but like… while it’s there, I just mostly haven’t noticed it. Thirty hours in now and I find I’m mixing up fast travelling wide distances with “manually” travelling by launching into orbit and jumping place to place fairly regularly, I don’t think I’d even have thought to criticize it without coming here.
I like how immersive travel can be in a game like NMS, but it’s not like it’s all that exciting or fun to pull into the atmosphere for the 500th time and maneuver to your landing pad, or spend longer than a loading screen amount of time to boost out of atmosphere to hit the jump button. We’re exchanging one form of slightly tedious load for a different one.
The best answer I have to minimizing the interaction is setting routes from your mission list. On PC this cuts down to L > click mission > R > hold X.
It is still 4 discrete inputs, which sucks, but it is substantially better than navigating by the star map which is how my brain defaulted to fast travel for most of my first play through.
There are all kinds of possibilities, and for one example of a video game system for travelling among the stars that gives you a sense of actually going somewhere without getting too dull I’d point to EVE. You can go anywhere, but there are distant and dangerous places that take actual effort to get to. It lets you get some kind of sense of the distances involved. Having made that comparison it’s hard to avoid noticing that the space combat (even against NPCs) and ship outfitting are quite good too compared to how it looks in Starfield. Planetary interaction was pretty tedious when I played it, but EVE is mostly really good at the space stuff.
Another example would be good old Star Control II, another of my favourite space games. Another one that managed to make space feel big. You had to carefully manage fuel and resources, and if you wanted to go all the way across the map you’d have a long and interesting journey during which many things would happen. Combat and navigation were primitive compared to what people expect today, but still it made it feel like you were exploring a vast space, not just a big catalogue of planets.
As for Starfield, I don’t know whether it does that or not since I haven’t played it yet; I’d sort of like to find out before I spend $ on it.
you cant really compare gate-to-gate traversal to the other primary space games though. unless you are in a capital ship, generally you have a warp around 3-5 so even Niarja (minus dock workers) only takes a few seconds to cross. If we just focus on hub routes, I don’t recall the exact number, but Amarr to Jita/Dodi is between 25-60 jumps depending on your risk tolerance. That is 25 discrete load screens, with a Leopard and no 0 tick gate camps thats still around 10-20 minutes of just loading. EVE is an exceptionally bad example to pull and why I excluded it.
If you want something like Star Control then running the bubble in E:D is your best option, just never install a fuel scoop.
What I want is just something where travel takes enough time and effort that interesting problems can arise during the course of it that aren’t just generic random encounters. Something where different parts of space have local character, something like geography rather than a flat isotropic void where distance is meaningless. In each case the technology used for moving about is entirely fictional, so I don’t see a reason not to make it interesting. I was just pointing out examples of that being done, not advocating for either of them being the one true way to do it.
transit in EVE isn’t really anything to write home about though. Target, align, warp, jump, target, align, warp, jump.
Gate camps are player based RNG with a difficulty slider. Do you take the shorter run thru Niarja or do you add an extra 30 jumps for relative safety barring CODE affiliates.
if what you want is a completely bespoke experience where a system has only explicit experiences then you immediately lose out on the design intent behind Starfield and the storyline within is immediately hollowed out and meaningless.
besides, its a video game. everything is a generic random encounter rolled on a table hidden from the player. if you want a better experience, Starfinder is there.
I used to make a living hauling valuable stuff from the outer edge of low-sec in to Jita and such places. Sure it got to be pretty much routine after a while. Well, most of the time. But then it’s always possible in that game to go off and do something else instead. The experience of exploring it all for the first time though, having not yet gathered the knowledge and resources to do it in anything like safety or comfort, was fantastic. If you could just teleport instantly from one place to anywhere without significant cost it wouldn’t even be a game. I’m not saying that the mechanics of transportation should dominate every game like they do EVE, but having at least some of that sort of thing seems like a good idea in a game that’s supposed to be about exploring a space of any kind. I disable fast travel in Skyrim too. It makes things too quick and convenient.
Well, guess what? You can walk to the starport, open the door to your ship, walk into the cockpit, sit down, launch into space, target your next system navpoint, power up your grav driv, and jump to the next system. You won’t be on a planet, you will be in space. Will you find a trader? System security fighting pirates? A bounty hunter wanting to cash in on you? An old lady that wants you to come over for tea? Dunno. But you aren’t fast traveling. Genuinely the crux of your complaint has been “i dont know how it works but its bad and I dont like it”
I haven’t had a chance to play it yet. Moving and still have to get through BG3. But I’m actually excited for it. Like I see posts over and over and over and over and over and over about the the fact that it’s not NMS. Sure, kind of disappointing. And I will agree that if you keep running into the same exact structures over and over, maybe they could have done something different. Have some sort of procedurally generated structures.
But that seems to mostly be it. Every review I’ve watched talks pretty positively about the other aspects. It’s got some bugs, which is to he expected, and apperantly the melee combat isn’t clunky and awkward. But those seem to be the biggest complaints outside of not being able to land.
So I’m gonna do what I’ve seen a lot of people said to do. I’m gonna go into the Bethesda game and play it largely like it’s a Bethesda game. Gonna go through the main story, the different factions, do some side quests, etc.
It’s not No Man’s Sky. Cool. Call of Duty isn’t Escape From Tarkov. I have played both of those and loved them both for completely different reasons, and I don’t expect them both to be the same. If anything I got bored of No Man’s Sky after a bit. Partially because I’m just not into the base building, and itnfelt like that was the main thing to do outside of explore. Little to no stories. Last I heard we still don’t have the faction system they talked about when the game was first launching. Starfield has things going for it over NMS.
I think people had their expectations too high. People are expecting it to be as good as skyrim was for 2011 but in 2023, but I went in expecting it to be as good as (vanilla) skyrim is now and so far that’s what I feel like I got.
It’s perfectly optimized. I’m getting a rock solid 30fps. /s
Seriously though, I think it’s fine. Especially indoors and in space, it performs well and looks incredible. New Atlantis is kinda ugly and janky though.
BG3 is critically acclaimed and on path to win every GOTY award this year. Taking this into consideration any game compared against BG3 may look lackluster, not just Starfield.
I didn’t play these games yet but I did play The Outer Worlds and it was acceptable to me. If Starfield is a game along the same lines then I am OK with that.
Hogwarts Legacy was a very solid title with very memorable characters, story and wow what a detailed fun world. Have not played BG3 yet so cannot compare, but Hogwarts is my GOTY so far.
Just finished Hogwarts yesterday for the first time. I absolutely love the world building, but I found the story a bit lacking. In my mind I ended up siding with Ranrok, in his quest to free the goblins, Sebastian (Solomon was an asshole thorough and through), and the ending was pretty vanilla. Also the whole idea in the ending of keeping the ancient power secret makes no sense: the same implications could be made100% for normal magic
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