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!
It’s better than I thought it would be but not a great primary experience. In space and exploring planets you can enjoy 30+ FPS, but in the main cities, your framerate will be in the 20s. I haven’t encountered combat there so it’s less of an issue, but still not great
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.
What I’m learning is that I’m really glad that I told myself I wouldn’t be buying it until it was on sale post-launch to see if it was even worth the sale price
I waited until I could see video of people actually playing the game. I like how it looks. I decided to just purchase the base game, so I haven’t played it yet but I’m okay with waiting va few days. Also I got my Steam key $5 off on Newegg so paid $65. I’ll wait to buy all of the DLC in a bundle sometime down the road and it will give the game new life for another playthrough.
I feel like I was completely ripped off. This game is nothing like promised, and I can’t believe how many people seem to be okay with that.
There are more issues than I have the patience to type, so here are just a few of the most egregious.
Graphics. The graphics are nowhere near modern. They are basic colors and sometimes pretty blocky. It almost looks like graphics from a game over 30 years old. This is unacceptable.
Spaceship flight mechanics. There are none. In fact, I have yet to see ANY spaceships in this game. So far, it’s 100% on foot.
First-person gameplay. Not very realistic, but kind of satisfying. There’s a lot of jumping and numerous enemies to avoid. They get a little repetitive, but are enough to hold interest. Some have loot that can give your character special abilities like flying with a raccoon tail, breathing underwater like a frog, or even throwing fireballs.
Character creation. This is virtually non-existent. In fact, I don’t think I was ever asked to review my character. I tried restarting a few times and every time I’m automatically set as some guy in red with a moustache. I did find a multiplayer option, but that just gives a green variant.
I’m thinking of refunding this game as it is nothing like what Todd Howard promised.
I see exactly what I expected. I didn’t bought the hysteria on Youtube/insta/TK.
And I didn’t preorder the game because of that hysteria. The Hysteria looked a lot like the Cyberpunk Fiasco. Realistic expectations, we seem to have lost that capability with upcoming video games. When something sounds too good, It is.
I don’t know what you saw Todd say where but I just read some interviews like this one: ign.com/…/todd-howard-interview-starfield-sgf-202…And in nothing i’ve red from him even slightly resembles the hype around this game.
TH: “We do lock it at 30 [FPS], because we want that fidelity, we want all that stuff.”
That means 1 thing: not a real action game, more in line of FO4, maybe NMS like but more like RDR. A dogfight @30FPS is over before it starts. Beauty is more important then speed for this game.
Speaking about RDR, TH: “So I think it also as a flow, probably has more of a feeling of a [Red Dead Redemption 2]”
Here you have it literally: a game like RDR. Not NMS. Not Elite. Not StarCitizen. But like RDR. That means that the ships are more of a means of transport then a real gameplay mechanic. And space is just the theme.
TH: “this is like five or six games in one, right? It’s the spaceship game, it’s the on the ground game, it’s just a dialogue game, it’s an outpost game, it’s a crafted game. It does all of these things, and so… And it always is tricky for us to get a good game flow where those things don’t feel like they’re separate game”
That means the spaceship part is not front and center. All these things he states are just pieces for a standard RPG:
Ground game: Loot and shoot.
Dialogue game: standard RPG.
Outpost game: base building.
Crafting? Standard part of every RPG in the last decade.
Add to that it’s build with the Bethesda engine. We know it’s capabilities for what… 2 decades? We flew in FO4. But we didn’t steer… It was on rails
This all meant in my mind that the spaceship part had to be a transportation mini game.
So reading the official stuff, I always expected a mix between FO4 and Mass Effect. With a mobile “base” (your ship) with maybe some light spaceship combat. Sprinkled with some exploration.
Not a game which morphed all those separate game types. Just an FP/3rd p ARPG set in a cool science fiction universe.
God I was about to downvote you because of the spaceship comment. Like “Damn, some guy literally gives you his spaceship and puts you into the combat tutorial in the first 30 minutes.”
I love the comments that arent getting the joke, though.
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.
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.
Same. I almost always hold on games until just after release, when the preorder is still up, so I can read user reactions and gameplay videos before buying but still get the crappy preorder rewards.
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.
Lots of people who play games are so used to terrible writing and storytelling that Larian’s mediocre pulp fantasy plot with tired cliches of characters must be a gift from the heavens themselves.
As someone who found NMS boring very fast, will I like this game? I just want a game I can sink a ton of time in with moderately fun combat and progression.
I still have to play Starfield, but the most boring aspect for me of NMS was the writing. I’ve found it incredibly bad, so i guess starfield is better in that regard
The lack of real stories was a disappointment but I like the whole empty world find your own fun kinda thing in NMS, we started playing after MP was fixed and within 10 mins I had a carrier 😂
They're completely different games. If you like other BGS games (Elder Scrolls, Fallout 3/4) you'll probably like this. If you didn't, you absolutely won't like this.
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.
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.
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.
I’ll start by saying I haven’t played this, I just watched reviews online. But I see everybody agreeing in that the exploration is not actual exploration but a lot of clicking menus. And when someone complains about it, there’s always a bunch of people defending it because “it’s a bethesda game” or “the game is what it is and not what you expected it to be”. I don’t get this.
The game was overhyped, and the specific part about space exploration is (so far) a lie. Period.
Yeah I got it for free with a purchase and have played a couple hours and it runs terribly, looks middling, and the gameplay is the most base aspects of previous Bethesda games except lacking even the exploration or cohesion.
Hadn’t updated since around 2018 and everything worked fine, but OK, fine, let’s try it.
Can’t figure out how to reenable Windows update (it kept trying to come back, like a dog swallowing and revomiting its own puke, so at some point I’d disabled it with extreme prejudice, and it seems it stuck).
Manage to find a Microsoft tool that’ll update Windows 10 to the latest version without going through Windows update.
Upgrade assistant does its thing and at seventy-something percent complains VirtualBox isn’t compatible and must be uninstalled. Yeah, not doing that, got my family’s mail server in there. I was only 2 major versions behind, shouldn’t’ve been a problem, but all right, have it your way.
Update VirtualBox, looks like Upgrade assistant is finally happy, after a couple aeons Windows is updated.
“Graphics card not supported.”Fuck. You.
Update graphics drivers (couple more aeons; in for a penny, in for a pounding).
While Nvidia does its thing, try to start the VMs in the new version of VirtualBox. “Can’t start operating system”. Well, fuck.
Eventually figure out that at some point around version 6 VHD support got fubared and Oracle never fixed it. This is why I don’t update.
Start converting VHD disks to VDIs, which should fix it. What’s a few more aeons between friends.
While I’m at it the drivers finish updating. Try to start the game again, third time’s the charm.
Fans reach take off speed! Main screen goes black! Logos start showing! It lives!
“Compiling 1 of 7000 shaders”
(╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻
System grinds to a halt. Finally manage to open program manager and kill the game. Probably shouldn’t have started it while I was migrating the virtual disks. (The fact that it’s a 980ti probably doesn’t help either, but hey, it’s worked perfectly till now, including with Cyberpunk 2077 and Baldur’s Gate 3, and by jingo it’ll work with Starfield).
“It just works.”
Anyway, meanwhile the disks finish migrating, and at least now the VMs work. Update the VirtualBox extensions just to be sure, reboot the VM…
Black screen.
(╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻
Find out at some point the display drivers got fubared for Windows 2003 / XP and Oracle never fixed it. Manage to start the VM in safe mode and uninstall the VirtualBox extensions; after fixing the display settings, it sort of works again. Yay. Second VM is staying with v5.x extensions, thank you very much.
Say what you want about Bethesda (they almost certainly deserve it), but at least they ain’t Oracle.
Sigh.
Gonna eat something, relax a bit, and leave the game to compile shaders while I sleep.
With luck, tomorrow it’ll be done, and it’ll just work.
Yeah, probably, though computers take space, and electricity… though, admittedly, these days you can probably run a mail server on a raspberry pi (if you can get your hands on one) powered by a potato… 🤔
The plan sort of was to eventually (once I can afford a new machine) move everything to VMs, with GPU pass through for the gaming one (I can’t afford a dedicated gaming machine — nor have the space for it — and I want something I can easily reset to a clean installation in case of Denuvo and similar malware without messing with my work software), but moving the servers and firewall to a small dedicated machine might indeed be a more realistic (and maybe even cheaper) approach…
I’d disown you if you were family and I found out you were hosting my email on a VM in a 5 years-out-of-date windows PC. Some things are simply unforgivable.
You’re throwing back “It just works.” at them because you failed to maintain a Windows VM that you haven’t updated in FIVE YEARS? Not to mention that you really expect game dev studios test and support running a game in virtual box??
If you want to do something tech savvy, that’s on you to do the tech part.
This has to be one of the most wild “gamer” complaints I’ve ever seen.
And yet, every other game I’ve tried so far (including several with better graphics) actually worked out of the box without requiring Windows or even driver updates, or having to spend ages compiling shaders. 🤷♂️
You could also drive an old hooptie with 300,000 miles on it and it might work for a period of time but don’t bitch at your mechanic when the engine finally gives out.
I’ve been having a ton of fun with it. I’ve only played 4 hours so far, but it’s definitely the smoothest Bethesda game in terms of performance and animations, also in my experience not many bugs. Playing on a 1440p monitor with a 7900XT and I get pretty consistent 100fps (my monitor freaks out if I raise the hz higher than 100 so can’t tell how high it’ll go).
In terms of gameplay, space combat is reasonably entertaining and flying the ship is fairly well thought out. Whilst you can’t fly directly between planets like in Elite Dangerous, the primary purpose of ship control is combat and it does fairly well. On my computer, loading screens are pretty much instant, so travelling between planets isn’t a problem. Combat is fairly fun, and the AI behaviour has been much improved from previous Bethesda games. Still not always perfect but they do behave more naturally. Environmental storytelling also has a much larger presence again, with a lot of interactions and things to read. Also, this really fulfils my fantasy of being just a citizen in a sci-fi world. Walking around my ship, seeing the little bathroom and crew chambers, it’s really cool, it feels very lived in and really makes it feel like you’re an explorer on the fringes of space, living out of a ship.
There are a lot of comparisons with No Man’s Sky, but honestly I feel they’re completely different games, by design. Starfield is more Bethesda’s take on a Mass Effect style game.
Anyway, people have a lot of mixed opinions, but I’ve been loving it!
Might also need to check what the ports on your monitor support. A high quality DisplayPort cable will probably solve the issue, but make check the spec on the HDMI and DisplayPorts on your monitor to make sure they can support higher the higher bandwidth needed for high refresh rate/high resolution monitors. If your HDMI is only v1.4, but DP is 1.2 or 1.4, definitely use DisplayPort instead.
If you just used an old cable that came with something for free, I would buy a proper cable that supports the newer DP or HDMI specs from someone like KableDirekt.
Unfortunately I’ve tried a number of very expensive cables, as well as multiple graphics cards. The monitors used to be fine, but over time they started getting all these horizontal lines across the screen if I go above 100hz. I’ve also tried Mac and Windows and same problem with both.
I’ve looked it up though and seems to be a common problem for AOC Agon monitors, so my fault for cheaping out, even though they still cost me $550aud per monitor :(
Thank you! Unfortunately I’ve tried multiple cables with different lengths, as well as DP and HDMI, different GPU’s and different OS’s, iGPU vs discrete, the only common failure is the monitor. Unfortunately it’s happening on both of them, same model of monitor and seems to be a common flaw. They are about 6 years old now though
For old monitors breaking or acting weird a lot of times it’s capacitors going bad & popping. I love looking around at the insides of tech things that stopped working right to try seeing why & maybe fixing them so just curious what could be causing it :)
if I may ask, I see you say that the loading screens are fast for you so the way to travel is not bad in your opinion. Would you say you are OK with the exploration being menu based? (which seems to be the biggest complain so far)
Yeah for me personally it’s not a subtractor to the experience. For one, they make those menus super convenient.
But then, as somebody who’s played quite a lot of Elite Dangerous, I don’t really feel there’s that much missing. I know lots of people will disagree with me here, but whilst I agree it’d be awesome to be able to fly from planet to planet, most of the other games that do this it’s just flying at a dot in space, waiting until the number next to it gets smaller. Space is big, and really really empty. And while I would still enjoy having that aspect in the game too, I think it’s not a bad tradeoff for having much more immersive planets, cities and gameplay. Also most of Elite Dangerous is sitting in a ship traversing menus, selecting a planet and then jumping there. While you can’t directly fly between, Starfield has that same game loop. You can just select a planet, mark it as your destination, then jump into the cockpit, line it up and turn on the grab drive to jump to that place. So I feel that it lives up to my personal expectations.
I don’t want to invalidate anyone else’s feelings or expiriencds though. I’m having a ton of fun playing and seeing the Starfield universe. However I’ll leave an update if that changes.
Personally having put in several hundred hours with Elite Dangerous (pre-landings, even), I’m glad to read this comment of yours. I don’t disagree about the game loop comparison, and yet I was hoping that Starfield would succeed where ED stayed limp all these years: quadrant-spanning politics, faction progress, living economies and similar. Hell, after knocking out my Merchant elite rank, I just focused on baggin’ griefers until Combat ranked up as well, but… menu scrolling for hours to tick that last box? I just couldn’t find the time. Especially when planets had no atmosphere, outposts were a joke, and even artifact sites were a half-baked afterthought by an obviously overdrawn team. 😅🥹🤷🏼♂️
Not only preordering, spending almost 50% more on the game just to play it 5 days early. The fuck is wrong with people, no wonder the industry got like it is.
It’s pretty good. I’m not super into fantasy so I think I prefer the story so far over TES. I do like a sideish plot I’m in to join a faction and potentially betray another faction.
I am running on a 3080 with no real hiccups. I get 40-80fps. It’s higher indoors and on the blower side in cities. This is on Ultra with resolution scaling at 77% at 4K, which is slightly above the Ultra preset.
There are loading screens when you take off and land or enter certain areas. They’re annoying, but usually just 1-2 seconds. I do wish they optimized this more.
Combat is decent. It’s not the best shooter in history but it generally works okay. Space combat is again just okay. Kind of simplistic relative to something like Elite Dangerous or Star Citizen. Actually, after admittedly only a couple space battles, I actually think even No Mans Sky has better space combat. Don’t take this as gospel though.
To be fair, the realistic space combat video game genre really doesn't exist, that I've seen.
You can get pretty hard-realistic combat aircraft sims. Not many, but they exist.
But in space combat games, you're always playing something roughly like Star Wars. Which is cool and all, but just not what actual space combat would likely look like.
googles for one of the pages talking about the issues
Real life naval warfare is generally slow and boring, but by using a variety of tricks, like time compression and only having the player involved in actual combat, many games have made that palatable.
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.
They specifically said there were going to be loading screens and no user driven landings. I agree with not preordering games, but I also think you need to actually look at what the dev is saying before you set your expectations.
My expectations are set by the gaming landscape as a whole. For example, virtually all games releasing nowadays have a manual save feature. I expect that. A dev coming out during development to say their game doesn’t have manual saving doesn’t suddenly make that okay.
It’s an extreme example, but my point is that a dev disclosing something before release shouldn’t magically negate all criticism of it. People are allowed to be frustrated by things this game does poorly that other games excel at, even if the devs were transparent about those shortcomings.
It’s not even that, I never talked about the space to planet transition because I expected that to be a loading screen.
I’m talking about how the game itself is structured, I thought the space travel and jumping from system to system was going to be more like elite, but it’s just small instances with loading screens. Was that my fault for assuming that? I mean, they focused so hard on ship customization I assumed space travel was a big part of the game. At least the space gameplay, if not the planetary gameplay.
Bethesda was super closed off about how exactly the gameplay loop was structured because they knew the truth was going to reduce sales. So they let the reality of it just go unsaid while they kept you focused on the pretty screenshots.
Good strawman, notice how I never specified planetary landings? Cause I already knew that it was going to be a loading screen.
I’m talking about the fractured nature of the surface and the inability to fly from place to place in space. Or transition from locations in atmosphere. Everything is its own tiny location and fast traveling the rule of thumb. It seems like they kept as little information on this specific aspect as possible until the preorders were in. Probably so that the nature of the game wouldn’t drive away people looking for something with more of an interconnected holistic model of travel. They knew the truth would severely reduce their consumer base so they pretended it was “Star Citizen (with severe limitations)” instead of “Mass Effect: Andromeda (but you can customize and fly the tempest yourself)”
Someone in here said it best, “I have no idea what the purpose of including space ships and space travel even was.” If that’s a legitimate question in your space game, you failed.
Oh no I was afraid of reading something like this. I love the concept of Star Citizen and got used to never seeing a loading screen and love the flight mechanics and ships (when it’s stable). I was hoping that Star Field could give me a similar experience. Didn’t have to be exactly like SC. I just wanted a stable, beautiful space game with game loops lol.
Guess I’ll wait on this one till there are more mods.
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