I gave Starfield a fair chance, I played it for 20 hours, patiently waiting on why it deserved an “8.4” rating from critics. But it never delivered. The gameplay is a copy of Fallout 4, the user interface is a mess (they’ve gone backwards somehow) and the world is just so generic and uninspiring that I couldn’t bear one more minute of it.
I can see why it’s got a 5.5 from real players.
On a side note, the gaming reviews now mirror Rotten tomatoes. What the professional paid “critics” love, doesn’t necessarily mean the players do, and vice versa. The real players always give a more fair rating.
Imagine it in five years when the modding scene has popped off though. It could truly be something spectacular. Which is frankly the only saving grace of Bethesda games. They’re a solid sandbox/framework for others to fill in.
Ray tracing sounds like a stretch, but with frame generation nothing seams to be impossible anymore. Though I’d rather see them target consistent 60fps now.
Todd forgets this is a game and not real life where you have to train and study for 30 years to go to the moon. He forgot that the main intricacy is the stories you can make for the player.
Like assassins creed has big cities. Which feel dead, not enjoyable.
Some do, but they make it their main draw. The reason Kerbal Space Program is fun, is fun because you can fuck up and die in a million different ways, and not doing so is chalenging and succes is rewarding while failure is hilarious(ly frustrating).
Not fucking up and dying in Starfield means pressing the Use Healthpack frequently enough.
…yes, they do. Soooo many fucking games have that. There’s a whole genre of games built around it. They’re called survival games. A relevant example would be No Man’s Sky.
I am kinda certain no game has dying. I haven’t died in any yet. Although I remember a piece of The Onion of a suicide feature of a car seat. Maybe someone should build a gaming chair with this feature to improve the immersion.
Yes, they do, just not for real. Why would you expect it to kill you for real? What an absurd standard. You’re supposed to be scared for your character’s life, not your own. They’re the one in space, not you…
You do know this threat is about some dev saying the first guys on the moon weren’t bored although there’s basically just sand and rocks to be found? And that because of this it’s fine most planets in a game are baren and uninteresting?
The Bethesda guy compared the game to RL. I am just pointing out why this makes no sense.
In RL most of the “excitement” in space comes from not wanting to fuck up and die. Games don’t have that, Todd.
So many games are all about the struggle to not fuck up and die, and they are plenty tense even though they don’t affect your real body. Ever played Subnautica? I’m not actually underwater but I’m scared of drowning.
I don’t know why the fact that a game can’t actually kill you doesn’t mean it can’t try to introduce tension.
Yeah, planets being barren is shit and realism is a shit excuse for it, but it’s kinda irrelevant to your “games don’t have dying” point, which would apply even if planets were designed better
Dude… You’re even agreeing with me without realizing it. My point is, because a game can’t create tension by threatening you with real death, it needs to be interesting in some way.
It’s a reason why the astronauts weren’t bored on the moon. The fear of death. Games don’t have that and that is one of the reasons games need to be interesting and can’t be dull like the moon. I’ll just rephrase the same thing over and over for you. I do see some things may appear challenging to understand for some.
Read the title of the article and you may be able to piece things together: Bethesda says most of Starfield’s 1000+ planets are dull on purpose because ‘when the astronauts went to the moon, there was nothing there’ but ‘they certainly weren’t bored’
Exactly! Now go tell Todd that his game isn’t real and therefor his example “astronauts on the moon weren’t bored although the moon is dull” doesn’t make any sense.
It’s like you’re getting there without actually ever getting there.
Of course it makes sense. That’s just how games work. You’re pretending you’re in space, and even though you aren’t actually running our of oxygen, your character is. You feel tension for your character.
Y’know playing COD doesn’t mean you’re actually at war, right?
I think you missed the point, lol. Obviously COD isn’t a remotely realistic portrayal of war. You haven’t understood a thing if you seriously thought I was saying that.
But we weren’t discussing realism of mechanics, rather, realism of environment. And the environments are pretty true to life.
It’s the mechanics that make a game fun. Not necessarily the environments. Though they of course help. Fun mechanics are what a game is about.
You mean like a game needs to offer more than dull enviroments to be not boring although the astronauts on the moon didn’t seem to be bored on the dull moon?
Then you have games that do space travel so well that I’m beyond scared shitless in them, like Outer Wilds. So many games have already managed to convey some of these feelings.
Perfect example. Handful of planets, each rich with hand-crafted purpose, space travel is big enough to feel epic, but small enough to not want to skip.
It nails the feeling of exploring a vast area of space, not by being realistic (it is not, by a long shot), but by just making certain experiences feel right.
Yup, classic case of realism not always making the game better.
I went to earth to check it out, I know the lore of why it is a giant sand ball but that also disappoints me. I walked around the approximate area of where I am from and found a small cave. But there was nothing in the cave except some abandoned drugs. I couldn’t interact with the glowing mushrooms, mine any minerals, etc. I was hoping for a sprawling cavern or something and just… nope. I might go back to earth to explore it some more but it’s so bland.
Absolutely makes sense for most planets to be rather barren. What I found a bit disappointing so far - keeping in mind I started yesterday and I’m only a few hours in - is how mostly when you land on a planet there is a key point of interest (an outpost, a mining facility, a city etc) at a landing site and then immediately a whole lot of randomly generated nothing around it. No roads or paths, NPCs, houses etc. I haven’t really been to a place where I got that Skyrim feeling of going out into the wilderness and finding interesting things. I hope that later on there are at least a few areas with more substantial exploration. Still enjoying the game though.
It could really benefit from some sort of vehicle as well.
I land on a planet, sprint 300m to the first point of interest, 900m to the next, 700m to the next etc. and most of it is just sprinting through nothing…
Feels like it’s just wasting my time, as there is literally nothing in between. I think a little hover bike would be a great addition to the game.
I haven’t played Starfield, but that sounds like No Man’s Sky when it first released. A few points of interest per planet, nothing else of note to do there, and the entire planet just became a rather boring trip from point A to point B to point C and nothing more.
You’re saying that doesn’t describe the current state of No Man’s Sky? The only notable buildings I’ve found are the same 3 tiny cookie-cutter outposts dotted randomly all across most planets. Oh sorry, 4 now if you count the camps from the Interceptor update and happen to be on a dissonant planet.
I feel like it wouldn’t take much effort to do better so that’s sad if Starfield hasn’t.
The difference being that was NMS whole loop at launch. Exploring barren and mostly empty planets is just side content to a lot of directed story and side missions here.
that would be perfect, maybe a vehicle with scanner and some mining tool so you could analyse and collect few minerals along the way. would be great QOL improvement.
I will say, finding a vehicle and not being able to drive it was a bit disappointing. But otherwise, I just wish there were more resources on the barren worlds.
Absolutely makes sense for most planets to be rather barren.
This idea is something I’ve heard a lot about Starfield and is why I don’t think I’ll pick it up, at least until a big sale. To me, it seems like they made a fair number of design decisions around what “makes sense” rather than what’s fun.
When it comes to the barren planets, it just adds a bit of immersion IMO. Nobody is forcing you to visit those rocks, and you probably won’t ever land on most of them, but it’s cool that you can. So to me, it’s not something that has a negative effect on my enjoyment of the game.
Makes sense to wait for a sale though. Mods and updates will no doubt vastly improve the game. Personally, I just play it on gamepass.
I'm the same way. Even just going from the "lore" most planets aren't going to have colorful interesting cities in it with unique locations and things to do. A lot of the rocks are going to be desolate with nothing on it, because they should be. When you find something of interest in the desolate void of space, it's gonna be interesting. Every planet having the same formulaic procedurally shaped bar, merchant, and a fetch quest would have people foaming at the mouth about how Bethesda replaced their specific crafted environments with shitty generated ones with no soul.
I haven’t played it yet (A second play through of BG3 sounds more appealing right now), but in general for an singleplayer RPG I would prefer a small full setting to an empty large one. If the environment has almost nothing of interest in it, then I’m going to just be glued to the objective marker, which while not a deal breaker, definitely hurts the experience. In a more curated environment I would ignore the objective marker and go off in a random direction. This means my experience is more unique and gives a proper sense of exploration which can make the game feel bigger even though it is technically smaller.
Yout have to factor in the life sim-element of Bethesda RPGs too. You can theoretically become a mining magnate in Starfield using those planets and resource extraction outposts. That content is there for those kind of players. If you just want to do the directed side content, then as you say, you’d just follow the markets and not need to interact with it. Your exploration will be in the “dungeons” looking about for lore and loot.
Yeah, it’s all part of the freedom the game offers for what you want to do. If you want to be a cargo hauler you’ll rarely see a barren planet as you’re delivering to settlements. If you want to be a bounty hunter, you may see them once or twice when a bounty has holed up there, but if you want to be a space prospector, you will need to spend more time exploring and locating resources to set up extraction plants for.all valid methods of interacting with the universe with different needs for the barren planets.
A place can have a barren atmosphere and aesthtic while also having content to find, even if that content is more sparse or minimal, suited to that lonely environment
That's exactly what they've done.
A "barren" planet still has stuff. In the 5 minutes or so that I did random exploration I found a colonist hut that was razed by pirates with a hidden chest with like 3k credits, and a random vendor who was going a little nuts for being alone so long. Nothing incredible, but enough to make the place not feel dead on a random frozen moon.
I wouldn’t shape any of your decision to playor not play on this particular detail. It really has little to no impact on the game whatsoever. There are a lot of really interesting worlds to explore, it’s really not worth the amount of discussion lately.
Not saying this means “this is the game for you”. Just that this one facet shouldn’t enter into your assessment at all, in my opinion.
Well, one is a linear, turn-based, 3rd person party cRPG.
The other is open world, real-time, 1st person with optional followers, sandbox action-RPG with space shooter elements.
Utterly different animals and any comparison is as invalid as comparing BG3 to Elite, DCS or RaceRoom. I've no interest at all in BG3 because turn-based party RPG-s are not really my jam. And I've never cared much about story-telling, either. I like good worldbuilding, sandboxing, looting, crafting, trying different builds, doing whatever the hell I like at any moment while completely forgetting that something called "main quest" exists, getting technical and modding the crap out of a game and this is where Bethesda shines.
Generally the term cRPG is used for specifically tabletop RPG-s adapted to digital realm. Action RPG-s take those classical RPG concepts and adapt them to a first- or third-person action game—basically Doom with leveling systems.
OK, then why fucking make them? Aren’t games supposed to be fun?
This whole genre really bugs me, and I’m someone who LOVES space games. The best game in the genre IMO is elite dangerous, because their ship to ship combat is so damn fun to play that I can hop in for a bit and have a blast without having to engage with the other systems that are often painfully boring.
The problem here is that people what the feeling of being explorers and finding new things, but video games inherently can’t provide that. There aren’t computers strong enough to produce thousands or millions of planets that all have genuinely interesting features on them that are worth exploring for. “Exploration” in current space Sims is basically “stick your name on something someone else hasn’t already stuck their name on, maybe grab some resources from it, and leave.” That gets dull very fast.
Developers COULD choose instead to make a couple of good, big planets that are interesting and full of actually good content. They could give you a reason to explore beyond “look other planets cool.”
If you made 1000 planets and only 10 of them are at all interesting, and your game is centered on exploring other planets and not really focussed on much else, you’ve made a boring game.
Elite dangerous space combat is literally the most lackluster and boring space combat I have ever engaged in. It’s such a slog.
I find combat where you have less control (weak strafing) and more maneuvering to be more interesting. That said, I think Microsoft allegiance probably did 6dof in space combat the best.
There aren’t computers strong enough to produce thousands or millions of planets that all have genuinely interesting features on them that are worth exploring for.
I don't think there is an infinite amount of "genuinely interesting features" so it's hard to imagine we'll ever get a game with this.
Remember when Sean Murray said prior to NMS launch that it was part of their vision for you to be alone in a vast uncharted universe with nowhere to call a home? That was code for, “we don’t have multiplayer or basebuilding, and there’s not really anything interesting enough for you to stay there long term”.
Give Starfield a few years, they’ll figure out what to do with those planets.
people really need to put the nostalgia googles down…back in the days nobody played Crysis with full details and a steady framerate.
You were in 1024x768 and turned everything down just to play the game with barely 30fps and you know what, it was still dope as fuck. So yeah guys get used to lower your settings or to upgrade your rig and if you don’t want to do that get a xbox
Crysis was built by a company specialising in building a high fidelity engine. It was, by all accounts, meant primarily as a tech demo. This is absolutely not the case with Starfield - first, the game doesn’t look nearly good enough for that compared to Crysis, and second it’s built on an engine that simply can’t do a lot of the advanced stuff.
The game could be playable on max settings on many modern computers if it was optimised properly. It isn’t.
sure mister gamedev, please continue to tell more on how an engine you clearly worked on, should run…
I dont say that Starfield is a well optimised game and performance will get better with upcoming patches. But I also don’t think it’s an unoptimized mess, I think it is running reasonable and people really should start review their rig, because modern games will need modern components
Oh and also other games did not run that well like you maybe remember ;)
sure mister gamedev, please continue to tell more on how an engine you clearly worked on, should run…
I can easily compare between what different game companies do. Why are you acting like I need to be a developer on a game to criticise that game?
I dont say that Starfield is a well optimised game and performance will get better with upcoming patches.
Todd could have said so. He didn’t. Why?
But I also don’t think it’s an unoptimized mess, I think it is running reasonable and people really should start review their rig, because modern games will need modern components
I never stated this. I simply said: comparing Starfield and Crysis is deliberately disingenuous, because Crysis was fundamentally meant to break boundaries, which Starfield doesn’t do.
Oh and also other games did not run that well like you maybe remember ;)
Okay, what’s the argument here? Do you think I say for those games “well, you’re not Bethesda, so I’m fine with you not running well”?
does it look it look good compared to other AAA games? no
well I beg to differ on that, but it’s quiete a subjective topic right ;)
does it run fast? no ergo. the engine is crap.
Again very subjective, very dependend on your hardware and also a pretty dumb conclusion, since an engine has more qualities then to run “fast”.
I already mentioned in this thread, the games runs quite well for me and I would call fps in the range from 80 to 124 quite fast for a Bethesda Open World Game. So what do we do now with our subjective oppinions 🤔
well you can put your “not in my computer” opinion in your ass. widespread benchmarks by established gaming journalists show good computers struggling.
I don’t know why they keep using that piece of shit engine, Microsoft should order them to format every PC and start again with UE5, the engine that it’s actually next gen
You don’t have to be a game dev to see that games that came out before Starfield look and perform better. If you bought the game and you enjoy it, that’s all fine and I won’t make fun of you for it, but let’s not defend what is an obvious point of incompetence on Bethesda’s side.
And buddy, I’ve been playing Bethesda Games since Daggerfall and believe me, Starfield is a fucking polished diamond compared to their old good games and compared to their latest shitshows like fallout 4 and fallout 76…
You’re comparing Bethesda games to Bethesda games, which we all know are buggy messes. Starfield falls short of my expectations for what a polished diamond looks like.
okay not-buddy 😂 I think we are also pretty much done here, since I dont see any point in discussing this any further with you. So byeeee and have a pleasent day not playing Starfield I guess.
There will always be that game that pushes the boundaries between current gen and next gen. Sometimes even more. Crysis is the perfect example of the past. Starfiels seems to do a decent job right now even if it’s probably not even close to what Crysis did. When people spend a lot of money we feel entitlement, thats only natural. No one did anything wrong. So no need to point a finger anywhere.
You seem to have missed the part where I wrote that Starfield is probably not even close to pushing the boundaries in the same way that Crysis did. So I can’t do much explaining in detail about that it is.
But it didnt tho, it looks shit and hogs more resources compared to other games like cyberpunk which is probably a better example for next gen graphics
It’s system by system, I have the same cpu and do fairly well, admittedly with it boosting to 4.5ghz. My wife has the same cpu and it struggles on her machine. It feels like the game just wasn’t tested well.
After all this time I don’t think I ever heard anything about how Crysis plays or what’s the story and such. People only talk about how hard it was to run and how fancy these graphics were. Doesn’t make it sound all that great.
Story is meh but lots of people will say how the open ended nature of Crysis was fun and a pity that it was removed for a more linear CoD style in Crysis 2
While there’s a current DLSS thread, am I the only one who actually likes the aesthetics of DLSS, regardless of FPS? It adds a softness to the whole image that reduces eye strain for me and make the game more cinematic almost.
The recent versions are much better. But it also depends on the engine. I haven’t played Cyberpunk2077 since release, but there the trailing shadows of moving people and cars were very visible. Hopefully these issues are a thing of the past.
Is anyone else done with Nintendo? I bought the switch when it first came out after buying every other dang console for years and it just snapped in me finally that many of their flagship games are the same lifeless thing every time and not even as close to fun as their predecessors that I can still play today. Mario party was such a fucking let down for me. The only game I was able to get into so far was smash bros and it didn’t last too long. Tried that animal crossing game during pandemic but it was so bad you were just a manipulated slave to animals getting you to put chairs in your house…it was Soo boring. I tried Zelda too but man I didn’t enjoy weapons constantly breaking. I think the last straw for me was the new Pokemon games and how bad they ran. I came to the conclusion what’s the point of buying this thing when I just have way more fun on PC for way cheaper price for games overall? Can’t even play with anyone on Nintendo anyways without paying for access to their servers while also having to have Internet. Even if you get a ballin PC overtime the game library is way more extensive and less expensive for the most part with sales and steam key sites. Nintendo never budges on pricing for anything.
Mario Odyssey was the best Mario game I’ve every played, so not all bad. I just borrowed a Switch to play it though. Nobody is forcing you to pay the Nintendo tax!
I’ve played the switch more hours than I think any previous console. For all its flaws the switch is home to so many quality Nintendo experiences at this point that if someone finds that this is the generation that they’ve tired of Nintendo then it’s possible they simply don’t like Nintendo style games anymore.
Mario Party indeed was a pile of shit. But there are so many incredible games.
To give an impression of what it’s been like for me:
I had a quest where I needed Iron. I found a random planet that had it, and picked a spot in the middle of the scan readouts. Arrive, looks like a barren rock - but that’s fine because I only wanted rocks. However, I see something in the distance, and check it out. On the way, I find a wandering trader taking her alien dog for a walk, and sell some stuff weighing me down. I find a cave, where a colonist is hiding out with a respiratory infection - and am able to help them get out as a little mini-quest, though the infection spreads to me.
I come past a little mining installation, where I find a bounty hunter that tells me of a bounty nearby she’s offering to split with me. We do so, fighting a base full of raiders to get to their captain, and I finally decide to leave.
The key here is, I don’t think any of those quests are amazing - they’re likely very dynamically generated. But they’re also not fun to “seek them out” - just to come across them in some other mission, like trying to make an outpost or mining for stuff.
I mean, I can’t even argue against that. Some people find some forms of work fulfilling, and even switch to games because their own jobs don’t actually give them that feeling of fulfillment.
Monster Hunter is a prime example of a game that sets such elongated goals that it’s regarded as a “grind-heavy” game - but its players like the grind. Heck, the entire space simulator genre often involves quite a lot of “Space Truck Simulator” gameplay, where you’re just engineering good ways to ferry cargo around.
Which is not to say that’s what Starfield aims for. From what I’ve played, it’s closer to Sea of Thieves, having adventurous interruptions - where you start a boring, routine mission to bring Sugar from one merchant post to another, but then get ambushed by a skeleton ship, then a giant shark, then find a map to a buried treasure nearby.
Half the reason I play Elite is space trucking. I’m only raising my empire rank to get the largest ship… in order to space truck better. The Fed Corvette I plan to make a combat vessel, but the Cutter will be my space truck.
I found that flow of the game works a little bit better if you just don’t fast travel at all. I played a lot of Elite and it gave me a little bit of Elite vibes when I just walk to my ship, go thru inside it and sit down. Then I take off “manually” using the button and jump to the target system by manually targeting it and press the jump button.
What Bethesda can do better is to just mask the loading with a flight animation, for example when you’re taking off from a planet the loading should be replaced by an animation where you’re going out of the atmosphere. And when you’re jumping between star systems, the loading should be replaced by something similar to Elite when we’re jumping through the witch space.
All in all, my experience with Starfield has been fine. I loved the weird stuff happening when you’re just fucking around. Although the main quest has taken a step back with their sense of urgency, compare it to previous Bethesda games, where there’s a big stake going on that pushes you to at least complete the main quest once. In Starfield there’s no such sense of urgency.
It seems like Bethesda is leaning heavy on their sandbox side, just letting people go around and do stuff.
With optimized settings from the HUB YouTube channel, my FPS never went below 60.
Exactly this. It was only two generations ago when idTech was an open world engine, id can and have made it to do whatever they want and to suggest that despite Bethesda money (let alone MICROSOFT money) id couldn’t make a better engine with similar development workflows as Creation is just dishonest to suggest.
It’s a shame idTech is no longer released publicly. It would’ve been amazing to see what people could do with the beast of an engine that powered DOOM Eternal, especially modders.
I assume you’re talking about Rage, which had an open world map, but no where near the level of simulation systems as a Bethesda game. In fact I remember back at the time most of us saying the map was pointless as it was just a way to travel between levels with nothing to do in it.
There are no “levels of simulation systems” in Starfield. NPCs don’t even have schedules in this game, they literally just stand around in the same spot 24/7.
“keeping track of lots of variables” doesn’t cost CPU time though, since nothing that isn’t on the same map as you is ever relevant for anything. Their engine just fucking sucks.
Keeping track of variables doesn’t use CPU time? Ok man. I’m all for hating on Bethesda’s shitty engine but that’s just not true. At the very least it does track what NPCs are doing off screen which is how they end up at your ship when you tell them to go there. They will actually walk to your ship if you don’t get there first.
On the other hand it’s basically guaranteed that Bethesda spent zero effort optimizing that. I bet it’s the same code they ran for Skyrim.
ID tech is nowhere near flexible enough for something like Starfield or even Skyrim. It’s partially the reason why it’s so efficient. It simply isn’t fit for the task.
And the Bethesda developers are intimately familiar with Creation Engine, achieving the same level of productivity with something new will take a long time. Switching the engine is not an easy thing.
Not to say that Creation Engine isn’t a cumbersome mess. It has pretty awful performance, stability and is full of bugs, but on the other hand it’s extremely flexible which has allowed its games to have massive mod communities.
If Bethesda can’t take the time to do it then who can? People act like they’re some small time developer but they’re not. They simply refuse to expand their dev team to do things like a redesign.
Creation engine is not going to hold up well for another 6 years, there’s no way their cell loading system will be considered acceptable by the time ES6 comes out. The amount of loading screens in Starfield is insane for a modern game. This company needs new talent badly.
You realise custom engines are built for specific game types right? iD Tech is great for creating high fedelity FPS games with linear levels and little environment interactivity. That’s not what Bethesda make though.
They could do everything they usually do but better if they used Unreal. They don’t need a custom engine. They just need an engine that isn’t over 2 decades old with a bunch of shit taped to it to make it look modern. Not to mention, ID already did make a custom built engine that handles much of what Bethesda RPGs do when they made RAGE. They could have used that, with the only issue being learning it. Not sure what their turnover rate is like… maybe they’re just too used to GameBryo/Creation to be able to switch now. It might take too long to learn anything new. Plus it would have to be able to have a toolset. If they didn’t release those easy to use modding tools, there could be rioting in the streets.
As far as I know, Bethesda are unusual in modern Devs in that they have a small team for the size of game they make, but they have strong retention of staff so have huge amounts of institutional knowledge about how they do things. Shifting to a new engine would basically mean starting from scratch on a company level. Unlike Ubisoft or Activison, they can’t just throw several thousend Devs at a game to brute force the development either.
But that’s their biggest problem. There’s no reason for them to have a small unchanging team. It’s very very obvious that they never get an influx of new ideas. Starfield feels like it was made in 2016 and the optimization effort is comically bad. The writing is still mostly boring, campy and naive like it was written by a 15 year old Mormon. The facial animations are incrementally better than fallout but still noticeably worse than much older games like Witcher 3. I could go on.
It’s not a bad game at all but it could’ve been so much better if Bethesda execs weren’t greedy cheapasses and the dev team was open to changing their process.
This why Bethesda needs to be criticized instead of constantly getting fellated by fanboys. ES6 will be an outdated mess because Bethesda never sees any feedback except over the top praise for half-assing their games.
Fanboys downvote you but you are right, even if I love the fallout franchise, the same gameplay loop, the same engines, potato faces in 2023, outdated animations… etc, right now I would prefer Microsoft to force obsidian to take care of the next fallout, and ban Todd Howard for ever putting one foot in the dev took, even in the building. He can go fuck himself and his shit engine.
I know they don’t want to switch, but it would be worth it to make the swap to something like unreal, even if it takes a few years of customization to get the open world stuff right. Creation Engine just feels so old.
Wait, what? I have to buy a PC about every 10 to 15 years and it does’t cost me “thousands”. Last year, I bought one for about $700 and I can run every game at maximum settings with no issues.
Just wait for components to be on sale (it happens often) and you’ll have a good pc for a very good price.
Actually its quite the opposite usualy and games on conosles run well while on pc they can be a buggy mess. Granted on pc they will/can look better but the optimization is mostly done for console players.
Just stop chasing trends and play everything on a 5-10 year delay. Or better yet, just play indie. I save so much
money and my backlog is so long I don't even have time to play all of it.
I've just installed STALKER: Anomaly, a total conversion mod for STALKER: Call of Chernobyl. If you've never played the STALKER series before it is one of my favourite games of all time.
Operation Harsh Doorstop and Ravenfield are fun fps to casually dick around. I like them for their growing Steamworkshop mod scene, especially with Ravenfield.
Return of the Obra Dinn and Disco Elysium are two games on my backlog that saddens me every time I see it because I'd love to finish them but I just couldn't find the time.
Project Zomboid and Deep Rock Galayctic are fun times with people.
I was gifted Frostpunk and Outer Wilds. I haven't got around to playing it yet but my brother loved it.
It’s funny, Steam Deck is so much weaker than the typical gaming PC and will definitely not outperform an ~RX 6700XT at the same quality level but Steam Deck resolution vs at 1440p. Worse, Steam Deck shares 16 GB of RAM between CPU and GPU, so this guy is gonna have an even smaller list of games they can play on a docked Steam Deck vs a PC.
Also, Steam Deck can’t be (read: processing power) upgraded, and doesn’t have 3D-VCache, that’s not good for CPU bound games. And then you might also be defaulting to Steam OS, which doesn’t have full compatibility with Windows games, and have a complicated compatability file structure, which could complicate modding and 3rd party utilities.
So yeah, Steam Deck as a complete desktop replacement has more issues than you might expect. And the worst part is, absent docking portable HDDs, everything is an SSD, so welcome to the SSD $/GB world. TF cards have even worse $/GB.
It’s comfortable - play on your couch, bed sofa or wherever.
Portable - battery-powered handheld gaming device. Play anywhere.
Powerful - it’s not Android-based device, it’s fully featured computer that is capable of running even the latest games at 30fps (but as you said - it’s not always the case).
It’s cheap - you can have a gaming “PC” for 500$/€
Linux feature - instant sleep & resume mid-game. Perfect if “free time” isn’t your second name.
Device feature - no closed OS. Which means mods and no jailbreaking or any other unnecesarry workarounds required to fully use the hardware.
As someone who has gaming PC (nvidia 2080Ti, ryzen 9 3900x, 32gb ram, FHD 280Hz monitor) as well as gaming laptop (nvidia 3080m, intel i7 something, 32gb of ram, 2K 240Hz display) and Xbox series X with LG C1 TV - I am still spending most of my time on Steam Deck. Why? Convenience.
#1 you’re also restricted to whatever plays nice with the steam input system, and custom inputs are generally more tedious to use than a mouse and keyboard.
#2 that’s the entire point of the Steam Deck.
#3 isn’t the hallmarks of something “powerful”, I’m surprised that you would consider 30 fps acceptable given that you know what 240 fps is like.
#4 it’s not cheap. It’s just at the right proce for the hardware. The only reason why it doesn’t feel worse is because it’s running at 1280x800p. The display is literally from the discard pile with its terrible colours.
#5 Windows could do the same if Valve tried hard enough. Suspend/Resume isn’t that special and I’ve manually invoked it on desktop for all kinds of things before. >Task Manager.
#6 that’s because Steam is doing the legwork to make things work for you. See what they did with Elden Ring’s stuttering problem. I challenge you otherwise to access the game directories of any game running through proton. There’s a whole emulated filestructure that you have to understand before modding the game on Steam Deck.
Power user stuff is outside the scope of gaming for most people.
pcgamer.com
Aktywne