For those who have pre-ordered it is already here, the rest have to wait a little longer. Starfield is finally here! Have you bought it, why or why not? If you’ve already played it, what do you think of it? We are very curious!
Discuss all things Starfield below!
I did not bite and will avoid it until 75% off GOTY edition all DLC in etc. Patient gamer through and through, burnt way too many times. So far what I read about it, it not optimized, it’s shallow, lacks polish, etc etc. Basically, a standard AAA fare, something we sadly grew to expect from major studios. Will be watching it for a while to see what I’m missing.
There’s no reason for studios to behave better when they get a bazillion pre-orders and games make a profit before they’re even released. When that dynamic is in play there will always be an army of MBAs who point out that the purpose of the company is hyped releases and everything else is strictly secondary.
So to sum up, I agree. I won’t be touching this until it’s mature, stable, and on sale.
I’ve got Game Pass and it comes with it. So no waiting for me!
I have no arguments against it. Do your part and let us know if we’re missing out on anything. How does it stack against No man’s sky?
I hated NMS so I think starfield is kind of better but not at all in any sense of a space sim / 4x aspect. Space is mostly just a minigame with arcadey feel in a not great way imo.
It’s a bethesda RPG first and foremost and honestly it plays mostly like a fallout 4 total conversion mod. Instead of a map (there are none) you just get a bunch of fast travel points. Planets have 1-3ish “biomes” which are individual rng maps with POIs which are very far apart and often meaningless.
I really loathe the equipment system in Starfield. Attachments require very specific resources and if you have two identical guns side by side, one with an extended magazine and one with a reflex scope there is absolutely NO way to combine those attachments or weapons in any way. They are always unique. Plus as you level up the same weapons get new prefixes that are simply higher damage versions of the same thing, same ammo and everything.
Oh and for fun when you mod a weapon to be full auto it loses ~60% of it’s per hit damage because DPS is the only stat they balanced on. Semi-automatic weapons and weapon mods are the only way to reasonably play. There isn’t much in the way of fully automatic skill tree items that make up for the huge ammo costs of fully automatic weapons and frequent reload times either- after all that 80 round mag simply does 3 times the damage when your weapon is semi auto instead of fully auto.
Just too much carbon copy crap for me. I wanted innovation and I got a fallout mod.
I’m even planning to wait until the game is out on GOG, which could be several years from now.
This is how I roll.
I’ve never been unhappy either.
Y’all I thought we agreed as a society to not preorder anymore?
I didn’t pre order. I waited for review embargo to lift, then I bought it today.
This isn’t “early access”, this is Bethsda squeezing money out of game pass subscribers
I actually have no problem with this, I even almost like this.
If you want, you can spend extra cash to play it a few days earlier, otherwise you can wait and get it for “free”. This drives sales, “forces” the most hardcore players to purchase the title, and ensures that gamepass players can enjoy first party titles on day one even in the future.
You didn’t have to pre-order it for early access.
I didn’t preorder, it’s free with Game Pass. Just not the early play.
I got the premium edition when I bought a new CPU and it came bundled, so I still have my Hardcore Gamer Badge.
…I also got Overwatch 2, but I’m not even going to bother redeeming that one.
Isn’t OW2 free?
You’re right, just checked my emails and saw that the code is for “Overwatch 2 Invasion Ultimate Bundle”, which I guess is DLC or something. It was bundled with a Zotac 4090 on Amazon.
Just played 4 hours. Not saying whether the game is good or bad, but I’m not seeing the point of the spaceship yet.
It’s looks like merely a medium for the fast traveling mechanic. You can’t really “move” in space (as far as ive tried), and can’t use it to fly within a planet.
I expected being able to manually travel from planet A to planet B and finding cool stuff along the way. If you wanna actually move you need to fast travel.
I also expected to be able to get in my ship and go from place A to place B within the same planet (also finding cool stuff along the way). It seems that also is just done by fast traveling only.
This is one of the more biting criticisms I’ve heard of the game. It results in a lack of feeling of scale and scope. The universe just feels like connected places, instead of worlds within a galaxy. No Mans Sky got this right, and it’s surprising that Bethesda would fumble such a core mechanic. It looks like they tried to cover up this wart by… removing city maps.
Elite dangerous did it better. A mix of both maybe.
I had this complaint early on. It was very disheartening.
20 hours in, I love that I can fast travel from one planet to another in an entirely different solar system, to the building I need to get to.
Tbh I have had a lot of fun with this game (35h in). It’s an RPG first and space explorer second, nothing necessarily wrong with that.
I also learned that if you’re tracking a quest you can use the grav drive right from the ship’s HUD by selecting the locstion marker. It does help immersion a tiny bit more.
Overall it’s what they promised, modders can anyways “fix” the shortcomings.
This is the exact thing that I expected them to implement, and the dealbreaker for me.
I did read that landing on planets is just a cutscene rather than a seamless transition, but I thought for sure you can actually fly it in space - isn’t there even combat with other spaceships or random locations to check for resources?
Is there anything else to do on the spaceship, does it feel like a home base where you keep your gear, crafting benches, companions to talk to, etc? I really want that cozy starbound/kotor ebon hawk vibes if possible 🥺
So you can fly in space, and fight space battles there, but you can’t really fly fast enough to fly from one planet to another in real time. To move to a different point of interest in the system, you need to fast travel to it. So the meaningfully interactable part of space is just the immediate area around each fast travel point.
I’m not far enough yet to know if the interior gets more interesting after you add more modules to the ship; the starter ship is basically an RV: bed, galley, cockpit.
Yeah I meant fly as in between locations without a loading screen, kinda like in X3/X4/NMS or even Freelancer/Rebel Galaxy and older spaceship games. I get it might be harder between solar systems the way E:D does it but kinda sad it’s not real travel within one. Maybe they patch it in one day in the future? Who knows
Yeah I meant fly as in between locations without a loading screen, kinda like in X3/X4/NMS or even Freelancer/Rebel Galaxy and older spaceship games.
Ehhhh.
I dunno about No Man’s Sky.
But in X3 (and X2, for that matter), you don’t really seamlessly enter stations. In X4, you do, but it felt like a gimmick to me – there’s not much interesting gameplay on a station.
And there are loading screens between sectors in those games. Short ones, but they’re there. Freelancer too.
Well I never said “enter” stations, I said travel between them. In X3 you used SETA to travel between stations and in X:R and X:4 you had (super)highways. Freelancer also had those rings that speed you up and you could leave them at any point - in fact, the way piracy worked was you destroy one of the rings which would interrupt the travel and drop any ships out of the hightway lane so you could attack them.
Basically, all of these games didn’t just have a loading screen when going from one station to another, there was an actual feeling of distance and travel. From what I’ve heard starfield doesn’t have it at all.
Your ship is basically a TARDIS. You pick a destination from your star map and then your ship magically disappears from one place and appears at another. There is “space” but it feels completely fake, like they tacked it on at the end. Really, so many of the games mechanics feel fake and the effort it takes to suspend disbelief is really high.
There is spaceship battles, not sure about random locations, but I’m guessing you’d also need to fast travel to those.
Also the spaceship is VERY customizable, so much in fact that I found it overwhelming lmao. Not saying that’s bad thing, but you’d definitely need to come up with a lot of credits /loot first.
Again I only have 4 hours in game, so I don’t really know much yet.
So the space exploration is more like Mass Effect Andromeda instead of No Man’s Sky?
Coming fresh off BG3, the quality of the writing and the amount of character expression in dialog is like night and day. Honestly there was even one moment fairly early on when I said to myself “Fallout 4 would have let me extort this guy” and then I realized how egregious it was that I felt I had less agency in this quest than in FO4.
Dang, that different huh? I’m on Act III in Baldur’s Gate 3 right now and was thinking about taking a break for Starfield lol
I think current wisdom is to take a break from BG3 with Armored Core 6.
the side quest lines are giving me a few interesting options. try the corpo one
Watched a streamer play for quite a while and my primary takeaway is that I wish Bethesda would just scrap their engine and start fresh.
It’s got the same stiffness, gliding movement, butt-ugly NPC’s, and just the general feel of 15 year old Bethesda RPGs. I expect I wouldn’t be able to enjoy it for the same reason I struggled with fallout 4.
Something about how luminescent their eyes are bothers me. But their engine is starting to show it’s age, that’s for sure.
Careful. The last time I spoke ill of Gamebryo+++++++ I was the subject of a short-lived harassment campaign. Bethesda fans are bizarrely protective of this Frankenstein engine. Get this: you still can’t climb ladders! It’s fucking 2023.
I’ve never understood this argument, most game engines are based on 20+ year old technology and have been updated throughout the years. Can the creation engine be improved upon? Definitely yes, but the engine’s age has almost nothing to do with it.
Their point is that the engine doesn’t show signs of being improved upon during that time and is still stuck feeling like a 20 year old engine.
If you mean just the Creation Engine, that was 2011.
If you trace it back to Gamebryo, then Morrowind was 20 years ago, but I don’t think that one can say that even Skyrim looks much like Morrowind.
Skyrim literally had some of the same exact problems that Morrowind had.
Personally I want them to keep the creation engine, if only for the stellar mod support. But let’s not kid ourselves, it desperately needs an overhaul.
What specific functionality is it that you want?
I listed one feature that I’d like to have (dynamic generation of polygons in curved surfaces), which I do not consider to be a very important limitation in another comment.
But if you strongly feel that the engine imposes constraints, then I’m curious what particular functionality it is that you’re after.
EDIT: Another: I don’t think that the game can generate billboards for player-built structures (so you can see the structures you’ve built in Fallout 4 and Fallout 76 many cells away). I don’t think that that’s actually a fundamental engine limitation – you could probably do it with the existing engine, just that the game doesn’t do it today. Instead, stuff like that is generated via offline map-generation tools. But again, it’s not really a huge deal in either of the above Fallout games.
There’s no specific functionality (except maybe ladders lol) it’s more just the engine as a whole. The fact that certain bugs can be found in all of their games from Morrowind to Fallout 4 is unacceptable imo.
And the fact that someone managed to literally put the world of Fallout 4 into Skyrim, and have it just work seamlessly, really speaks volumes.
I actually wrote an explanation for someone else a while ago, so I’ll put it here if you’re curious:
The problem isn’t the engine itself, it’s that Bethesda hasn’t given it the attention it needs.
Unreal Engine 5, for example, is built from the original Unreal Engine. But there has been so much work put into it that it’s nearly impossible to tell. Meanwhile, the creation engine literally has some of the same issues that the Gambryo engine had back during Morrowind.
To Bethesda’s credit, this isn’t entirely their fault. There’s a reason that proprietary engines have been dying out in favor of engines like Unreal, and that’s because maintaining and improving game engines is incredibly time consuming and expensive. And unless you’re directly profiting off of your engine, like Epic does, you don’t have a massive incentive to endlessly polish it. Doing so is time you could be spending working on your next game, which you do directly profit off of.
Personally, I want Bethesda to keep using the Creation Engine, or whatever they turn it into next, because of its incredible mod support. However, it’s nowhere near as polished or advanced as other engines, and understandably probably never will be. There’s really no easy solution imo.
Old or not it’s clear it needs a fundamental reworking if the same complaints persist across literal decades.
Yeah, they can just append a number to it like unreal does and call it a new engine but that’s not what you actually want. It’s not a matter of a “new engine”, it’s them not investing enough into the existing one to make it feel more modern. I know some things like physics and animations are part of the “bethesda charm” but it stopped being charming after skyrim :P
They’ve never been able to get player models and expression right. I can totally forgive it if you get the same level of open world exploration and interaction we got in New Vegas. I personally can trade quality for depth and interesting gameplay (rimworld and dwarf fortress come to mind in the extremes of this). But it does seem like they struggle to achieve standards that were set even 5 years ago.
Bethesda is a funny company. When they are on it and get it right you end up with some of the best games ever made (Skyrim) but when they’re off it just becomes this jumbled mess that got duct taped together and released at full price (fo76).
I’m hoping this is more of the former but we will see. I suspect the modding community is going to take starfield and turn it into something magical. That ship building engine plus copyrighted space ships from pop culture, sign me up.
scrapping their engine is a terrible idea, and folks need to stop repeating it
just shows that you dont know what engines are, do or how they evolve
Spent a few hours trying to fix the broken ultrawide support. Eventually, the good old hex edit fix for aspect ratios on the EXE did the trick. After that, the FOV was messed up, but the game doesn’t have an FOV slider (or HDR, or DLSS)… so eventually I managed to fix that with a custom ini.
The next few hours was spent shooting pirates like I was playing Far Cry in Space, and struggling with the game’s horrifically designed UI, menus, and inventory. So far, I am feeling very angry about the game. Like we were flat-out lied to about what the game was. There is no exploration. There’s barely even “space”. You just teleport from map to map shooting pirates… with a little scanning creatures and mining rocks mixed in. I don’t understand how anyone is okay with this.
Upsides:
- side quests other than the radiant ones are mostly cool so far
- stealth archer isn’t so good that you can just play that way straight out, but the tree makes it looks eventually strong
- zero g combat in a derelict space station was cool. I hope there’s more of that
- base building seems fine, I’m not sure what it’s for, but it seems fine
Downsides:
- ship stuff feels bad. I don’t care about fast travel, but it’s just about the weakest ship-to-ship combat that I’ve played. Its early yet, though. Boarding a ship was cool at least.
- combat AI is not good. Enemies never seem to take any initiative, they mostly just crouch behind wherever you found them
- the setting has no… flavor? The factions feel like fallout analogues but without fun or verve. Maybe I just haven’t found the weird shit yet, but I’m not optimistic.
Unfortunately it isn’t what I wanted out of this game.
Loading screen to land on a planet, loading screen to leave my spaceship, no seamless entry into caves or buildings. Planets and space having boundaries. Can’t use my spaceship to traverse.
Glad people enjoy it, but I was looking for something more akin to NMS or Star Citizen.
So called seamless experiences just add time and tedium, because they’re hidden loading screens. Take me to the content please.
Bought it on steam. i7 3770K. GTX 1080. Pop_os. “Whatever, it will work!”
… anybody want to donate an Xbox series X?
That CPU is a little long in the tooth
I saw some comment in this thread that on the Deck, someone had to set their Proton version for Starfield to Proton Experimental – newer than the current stable release version – and then it worked. Might try that on other Linux distros too.
IIRC it’s in the Properties->Compatibility dialog for a given game.
checks ProtonDB
https://www.protondb.com/app/1716740
Many entries on ProtonDB saying “switch to Experimental”. Looks like the current GloriousEggroll Proton build also works, but if you’ve never set that up, easier to just do Proton Experimental.
Works fine and selected Experimental as the default.
However vrr isn’t working on the latest Experimental so the monitor doesn’t slow down with the game.
Damn dude I thought my 4770 was old. Until a few months ago I had a grx770 until I cracked and found a deal on a 6800XT. So now I know what it’s like to be heavily CPU-bottlenecked .
It has somehow been fine for everything I’ve thrown at it until now. But after a decade, “it’s time to go”
A new rig with an i5 13600K and 7900XT is on the way. I’m trying to remember what game finally forced my hand at a big time upgrade last time around.
I’m guessing it won’t work on the steam deck then
haha!
just visited my parents and could negotiate with my little brother that the drives us home so we don’t have to take the train.
poor fellow thought starfield would also release on playstation 5 so I offered him my xbox series x as a reward for the drive 😅
I’m on an i7-1165g7 and 1070 on windows. 25-30 fps at 1080p.
It’s completely GPU bound. I have a 4060 ti 16 gb in the mail. We’ll see how it plays.
I like it. Still has some classic glitches, enemies jumping high into the air after you kill them, grabbing weapons out of a locked container because part of the gun was sticking was sticking out, you know, Bethesda things.
I found that it looks really blurry if I don’t have it on Ultra settings, that’s my only real complaint.
Turn on FSR but keep the resolution scale at 100% if you don’t want it doing any upscaling. This looks a lot sharper to me than native resolution with no FSR.
I wonder if this is because the TAA implementation lacks a sharpening pass.
You might want to check the FSR scaling if the screen looks blurry below ultra. Basically the graphics preset also changes the resolution scaling IIRC with Ultra with the highest percentage.
It took me a hot minute to figure this out.
Also even on low, with fsr up, I’m pulling a whopping 30 fps max with my 1070. My 3060 is dead and I just went ahead and upgraded ahead of the warranty check.
But I had to turn motion blur and film grain back on to make the game even marginally playable. It’s like a new record for how unoptimized it is. Seems specific to nvidia cards.
I played 4 hours last night and I really am enjoying the game. There are a few issues but I think they things that could be improved via patches. For the most part it’s QOL things. I fixed the no ultra wide support with a hex editor but by far my biggest gripe is movement speeds. Walking is way too slow. Jogging is a little slow but not available if using kb&m. Run and sprint feel OK (sprint is maybe too fast). Using kb&m feels really bad. You go from very slow walking to a full run which ruins the immersion for me. Using controller is better but I prefer kb&m for combat. Even with controller though, the difference between walk, jog, run and sprint feels weird as they don’t blend together. I would switch between kb&m and controller but there’s not a separate setting for inverting Y for controller vs. Kb&m, which for me is a problem as I invert y on controller so switching between the two requires a change of that setting as well. For now I’m sticking with kb&m and just putting up with the fact that I feel like I’m running around like a crazy person all the time. Oh, and the fact that walk is slower for your character than it is for NPC’s is so annoying. Allowing that to happen should exclude you being able to make video games! Whoever is responsible for that needs to do better.
I’m having a great time, but I also love FO4 and No Man’s Sky. The toe-dip I’ve done into colony building shows that they put real thought into Astroneer-like automated manufacturing stuff, which is my crack, and something I missed in NMS and FO4. It’s also clear from the first city that they know how depressing FO4 is, and wanted to add more variety.
Story and characters are a cut above any other Bethesda game so far, but that’s not saying much. My wife is replaying BG3 next to me, and it makes Starfield’s writing look amateurish by comparison. It’s not the core of the game though, so eh.
Downsides so far have been that the minor planets/moons don’t have much to do, and that inventory management is annoying with how much crafting components weigh.
Ship combat is… Fine. It’s not as intricate as Elite: Dangerous or SW:Squadrons (for sim gamers, weapons are all on REALLY forgiving gimbals, which makes precision unnecessary), but not actively bad like NMS VR. I think it’s a good compromise, because not everyone wants to deal with a realistic sim in what is essentially a minigame.
It’s also complex, which is good, but adds some awkwardness to the beginning.
if ship combat was like those space combat games i would be avoiding any space fight like the plague. i barely survived the tutorial enemies 😂
I think they made the right call too. It’s better for almost everyone. A lot of flight sim types are also techies, so I bet the mods will bias that way.
that’s what I’m hoping is a big flight Sim guy
I7-11/3070/32GB and I have been having a lot of fun. I play all games on very hard and this one I was thinking maybe I should tone it down. I didn’t and I didn’t regret it.
30+ hours in and after reading this thread I feel like some people just got unlucky or were expecting something like SC or SpaceBourne 2. This isn’t those games and weren’t promised to be. I play both of those games and SC is a mess 12 years and $600k later and SB2 is awesome and only made by one guy! But this game is way polished and ready by comparison. By far imo.
I was maybe 4 hours in and got sidetracked in a solar system surveying everything. I forgot about the original quest to scan a moon and just traveled to every planet and not only had a great time scanning and scouting across different moons and planets but was also helping randoms with distress calls and 3 on 1 battles against Spacers in spaceships. By the time I was done with that solar system I was 18 hours in.
I would scan a planet, find a spot to land and drop in. Scout every place that popped up and then set another course on the same planet and repeat. Never did I feel bored or that I was going to see the same assets. Every spot felt unique and well designed. One planet felt like the American Southwest, it was so beautiful.
I highjacked a landed vessel during my surveying mission and upgraded and redesigned it for more maneuverability and storage and I have to say that the ship editor is so well done. I have 1000+ hours in FO76 and the camp building in that was really great and Bethesda has made the industry standard camp building format in SC. It is really an improvement from FO4 to current. I cannot wait until the mods really open this masterpiece up.
I haven’t even touched the base building yet btw.
The space combat is solid. From what I gather people don’t really know how to do space combat. Especially when in bulk freight ships or similar. You have to boost right at them guns blazing and then hard turn when you pass them so you can get behind them. Watch your throttle as you will only turn fast when it’s at halfway (within the white lines). I can take on 3 Spacer attackers on very hard difficulty with this method. If you can track the enemy (perk i think?) do it and just kill their shields and weapons. If you just kill their engines they love to just tumble in space and shoot at you. I usually kill two and then disable the third and board. It’s hard af and fun af.
I would like to be able to spacewalk but also see why it’s not included in Starfield. It’s fun but as I have experienced it in SC all of that extra functionality doesn’t really add to the game. It’s a pain to get out of your ship and fly over to the enemy ship and then try to gain access. I like the way Bethesda did it. Super easy.
Also the space travel is super easy. Fast traveling is great and keeps the game going without having problems finding where you want to go. SC has this problem. Their map of one solar system is terrible and doesn’t work half of the time. It’s only 1 solar system and barely works. Not to mention the navigation in SC and SB2 typically bug out and don’t work which calls for a reboot. Bethesda said fuck that and did better. Sure it’s not as immersive but immersion really has potential to take away from the game and progress.
The overall look and feel is what I was hoping in FO76. Vast improvement. The gunplay is on par with what I want and expect. Fighting on moon bases is fucking awesome. On very hard the enemies are harder, their tactics are okay, not great, but challenging enough to keep you guessing. Abandoned bases are always fun to attack. Loot is everywhere.
Some NPCs are bugged. It’s annoying but infrequent enough to not be a game breaker. The NPCs just talking to you randomly is weird, especially when you are walking through a city and your companion is already talking to you. Needs work.
I caught Shrouds stream and it looks like this game just gets better. I can’t wait to jump back in.
Thanks for the actual good comment and not the circlejerk hate comments that are surrounding this game
“Bethesda, FFS can you finish a functional, polished game for once? Bugs and performance issues are not cute anymore!”
Bethesda: “No Uwu”
It’s got some rough edges but it seems fine so far for me?
I feel like I’ve burned myself out a little bit on story heavy games after Baldurs Gate 3, so I cannot concentrate on the story lol
But otherwise…
Fps jumps between 30 and 90 and I feel the slowdowns (rtx3080, Ryzen 3900x here).
The graphics and animations are kind of shit. Standard Bethesda.
The menus are super fiddly.
The aesthetic is cool. I love the retro futuristic bulky style.
Music is great!
Voice acting thus far, is good.
Starship is cool but basically unnecessary. You just fast travel anyway.
Combat is pretty cool but stiff.I haven’t played super far yet so im hoping it gets a bit better soon.
Music is great!
Thanks. I specifically meant to ask about this in this thread and forgot.
I liked the music in New Vegas a lot, liked Fallout 4. Fallout 76 was a disappointment music-wise – I’m not a fan of country, and didn’t think that the DJing was good, left the radio off. Was really hoping that the Starfield music would be good.
That’s because Obsidian did new Vegas. Bethesda is good at making promises not games.
I was fine with the music in Fallout 4, and Bethesda did that.
Fallout 76 was a disappointment
ehehe
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