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
Thanks for sharing, and for putting me right, I appreciate it! I’m very glad that they’ve backtracked on that. While it’s not a huge amount of processing in most situations, I work as a programmer and I don’t love it when I compile code and my music sounds horrible for a few seconds as the CPU gets absolutely massacred by MSBuild.
I have a DAC which is currently connected by USB - it does have SPDIF inputs as well, though. Do you happen to know if they make sound cards with USB output? Or would I need to use the SPDIF output on the card?
I might still have an old sound card kicking around (Creative X-Fi Fatality or something) but I’m not sure it’ll have Windows 8+ compatible drivers, so I might have to get a new one.
I’m interested in learning more! What benchmarking software are you using and how are you testing that?
Edit: I looked into it and my information was outdated - support for hardware audio offloading was added back in Windows 8! I still have no idea why they removed it between XP and Windows 8, but I’m glad it’s back.
Edit: Turns out that my information is outdated - hardware audio offloading support was added back in Windows 8, apparently!
Original comment: Sound processing hasn’t been offloaded to the sound card since Windows XP - you’ll get no performance improvement from having a sound card.
I think the other direction you could go is to aim for a younger demographic than you’re likely thinking of. Maybe something like 12-15 years old. It’s very important to note that I’m not suggesting you make the story/aesthetic “kid friendly”, if anything I’d suggest more the opposite, kids love things that seem really adult - but the actual challenges and content itself, keep it tuned to a younger audience. I think that age group would get the most out of a general-purpose “learning to code” educational game
Releasing what is essentially two different consoles at the same time was such a bad idea. I can’t imagine that anyone in the engineering team thought it was a good idea. It seems like the kind of decision that is made in a board meeting that gets handed to the engineers with the caveat, “you don’t have to agree with the idea; just make it work!”
For context: I’m currently employed as a software engineer, I do consultancy on the side and I previously was a technical lead. Around 15 years of professional experience which includes a lot of mentoring/training.
It’s a cool idea - there are quite a few little things kicking around with some similarities - “advent of code” is the closest thing I can think of. I’m sure it could be very fun and educational.
Personally, and I’m going to be completely honest and frank with you, I don’t think I would play it, (though I’m definitely not the target market), but also, it’s not likely that I would recommend it to someone who wants to learn to code either.
Usually when people want to learn to code, it’s because they have some end goal in mind - they want to make an app, game, website, they want to get a job as a developer, data analyst, QA, etc. or they have something in particular which interests them - such as machine learning, embedded design, blockchain (yes, I know it’s a scam), digital music/art, etc. - and based on what they want to do, I’d recommend them some very different pathways, and it’s very unlikely that your game would be the best use of their time, to be honest.
I think, personally, this kind of learning device is only really good as a starting point for people who want to learn for the sake of learning, people who want to learn programming but have no real idea about what they want to program - this tends to be quite rare, though, because we all interact with technology from such a young age, by the time people are capable of learning programming, there would be something that gets them excited and that they would enjoy working towards.
I think what I would like to suggest to you instead, is something that I think would be - in my opinion - really cool, genuinely helpful as an educational tool, and with a lot more potential for monetisation:
The exact game you described, but rather than the game being the end goal, instead, you focus on the foundations that the game is built upon, and have the game be a tech demo for an educational, learn-to-code driven game engine.
Prioritise all of the game design tools for building the game such as the world/quest editors and make sure you have some way of supporting different languages, allowing custom assets to be easily imported, etc.
Make it nice and easy for people to build on top of - in an ideal world, it should be possible for someone to decide to make a module for an esoteric conlang and whip up a simple proof of concept adventure with your framework in an evening or two.
Then you can provide it as a subscription based online platform with some sort of limited free trial, a selection of pre-made official modules for individuals and organisations who pay, a “module marketplace” where people can design, share, and sell new adventures (where you take a cut, of course) and self-hosted (or separate) instances for schools, colleges, boot camps, and so on. who want to provide a series of adventures as supplementary learning material for classes.
I think if you put some effort into this you could make something really cool and successful. But it’s definitely a huge undertaking. If you want to take on the challenge, let me know, maybe it’s something we can work on together if you’re interested.
I would respect your opinion about my opinion if you presented it as an opinion about my opinion…
Of course it’s just my opinion. I respect people who enjoy those games absolutely, 100%. No disrespect at all. I didn’t even say anything negative about MOBAs except the fact that I didn’t personally enjoy them. You’re taking this way too personally.
Yeah, I understand that, and I guess they’re not for everyone. I’ve got pretty severe ADHD and I love the “everything happening everywhere all at once” feeling that RTS has
Oh yeah, for sure, 100%. I know that this is incredibly opinions based. Every time I play a MOBA, I just think how much more fun I’d have playing an RTS!
Lots of games had duel modes without downtime, when your duel ends, you get paired up with another player whose duel ended recently. It’s a few seconds at most usually.
I never felt particularly stressed during the collection segment, just bored, and from the other guy who wrote that he likes that time to mess around with his friends, I don’t know that your experience is universal.
That feeling of tension that you describe was absolutely present for me playing traditional deathmatch. The drive to want to win was strong enough to make me give a shit about the game. Especially if it was like, a clan match or something.