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!
I’m certainly enjoying playing. I just wish Bethesda could stop making potato people with weird talking animations and the whole muted, grainy, weird Bethesda art style, but that aside it’s pretty fun. I wasn’t watching a bunch of footage beforehand, so I didn’t build up expectations to get let down. I think paying too much attention to things said during development (which is where lots of changes happen) is pretty dumb.
Same. Loving my time with it. It’s great that they’ve captured the things I loved about their old games (no surprise) but too bad they can’t alleviate the immersion breaking issues of their old games (again no surprise).
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.
Absolutely loving it. 25 hours in and a lot more to come, and I’ve barely scratched the surface of the game. I’ve already got a second play through on the mind.
I beg to differ. It’s the most beautiful of the Bethesda games by far, very immersive without having to have the main character have dialogue (fallout 4). Tons of items, crafting, research, outposts, ships. This game is huge. Absolutely love it.
I’ve played oblivion, skyrim and fallout 3 and 4. While it’s similar engine of game, this game blew it out of the park.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I’ve been playing Bethesda games vanilla for my first playthrough since Oblivion. By the time I finished my first run, usually a healthy modding scene had already developed.
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.
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.
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 .
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.
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.
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 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.
Well… Confirmed what I had feared. They heavily rely on dynamic resolution and DLSS/FSR instead of real optimization. Meet most of the recommended specs, except the GPU. I’ve got a 1660 Super and even on low settings @1080p, the game runs anywhere between 25 and 60 fps. And it’s like… Backwards from what I would expect. Indoor areas are the slower areas, while outdoors is nice and snappy. But it looks blurry as fuck with the resolution scale at anything other than 100%, and even ultra settings do not put it that high.
That said, it is still playable without having to mod in lower textures and reducing clutter. Which is more than I can say about Fallout 4 at release, and I had the exact recommended specs for that one back then.
First game since I built this machine to run this poorly with settings this low. Even Baldur’s Gate 3, which looks way better, runs so much better at Ultra settings than Starfield does at the minimum.
Other than that, the setting feels pretty bland, which is not what I expected considering the passionate way they talked at lengths about it. It’s all very generic and very obviously just trying to make every fun sci-fi trope they like stick. I am not playing for the story or the writing, but the world building is usually one of their best features… This one is pretty lackluster with the world building, and so far has not really drawn me in.
I mean… Yes, but I would have expected it to not run at all. It runs playable. Which is crazy for it not only being an unsupported GPU, but also a BGS game. It wasn’t meant as a bash, other than it probably could have been supported if they didn’t use DLSS/FSR as a crutch. It was praise for the stability actually being fucking solid for once.
Complaints about the looks still stand (don’t need to have high fps to see the world looking nice in a still frame lol). At its best, it looks 5 years old. I’ve seen better recently, so it’s kind of disappointing.
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