doggle,

Yeah. It’s a good game. That’s all. Pretty formulaic and not Bethesda’s finest work. Good, but nothing award worthy.

h3rm17,

Both spider man 2, re4, and tears of the kingdom are just as formulaic if not more, yet there they are. And SM Wonders is somehow super innovative, just because it is not the exact same formula of all marios but the exact same formula “a little bit harder”

RizzRustbolt,

When a game like Hardspace has better writing than your game, you fucked up.

Which is not a knock on Hardspace by-the-by. It’s just that writing isn’t the focus of that game, and even Blackbird said, “let’s take a big swing at this anyways”.

delitomatoes,

And the early access people hated the plot too.

doggle,

Yeah, I played it back to back with cyberpunk TPL and it felt pretty sterile and soulless by comparison.

WarmSoda,

I wish Hardspace would work again. It had lots of potential before they crippled it.

angelsomething,

I played it for 30 min and did not enjoy it past the first 10.

fckreddit,

Same with me. As soon as I realized that there is no sane way to travel from planet to planet even within the same system without fast travel, I stopped playing the game. Starfield literally made space boring.

DarkMetatron,

Fast travel is the only sane way, without changing the lore and setting of the world, to travel from planet to planet inside of a system. Space is gigantic and even the distance between planets in a system are huge. Travel between planets, without having to wait real time hours or days to arrive, would need some kind of faster than light propulsion, but the only way to travel faster then light in the lore and world setting is with gravjumps.

The only thing I would change with the current space travel is using micro gravjumps animation between planets instead of the normal fly sequence shown when travelling inside of a system.

fckreddit,

I am just bummed about it that’s all. I feel like it would have served the game better if it had mass effect style fast travel menu because realistic space travel doesn’t add a lot to the game if you can only fight in space but not travel from place to place.

SquirtleHermit,

Kinda seems like they used the lore to justify the load screens, and not the other way around to me. But that’s just a theory… A Game Theory!

Zoboomafoo,
@Zoboomafoo@lemmy.world avatar

So? The writers weren’t forced to make there only be grav drives

DarkMetatron,

And Tolkien was not forced to hinder the Hobbits from inventing full automatic guns, but the Lord of the Rings would be completely different if he hadn’t.

And the same is true for Starfield and other options of FTL. It would be a completely different game, with a completely different story.

Starfield is hard sci-fi at it’s core, with the exception of the grav drive and the powers/unity, a near future setting that is in most parts plausible and possible, a realistic game set in a realistic universe.

wizardbeard,
@wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

The designers chose this setting and lore, and could have chosen otherwise for the sake of game experience.

Additionally, there’s no reason for the fast travel to have to be distinct, separate from gameplay, as loading screens.

Elite Dangerous keeps you in your cockpit, replaces the outside view with an animation while it loads the system you’re jumping to. When landing on a planet, there are various “entering the atmosphere” effects on suitable planets to mask swapping from space to the landable planet.

For ED, in-system FTL is time consuming and you can shave off around 25% of the travel time by doing it manually (risking overshooting and having to loop back around), or you can have the ship’s computer do it. ED is multiplayer and you can be yanked from this “supercruise” by players and NPC pirates, so it works mechanically to make the player waste time with it. In Starfield they could show you the ETA and give you the option to skip it or to wander around your ship during it while the ship does its thing.

If you’re in a menu on your ship when FTL would end with autopilot, stop the clock before leaving FTL, pop up a message in the corner saying the ship is ready to drop from FTL, and let the player exit it manually from the cockpit so you can’t get ambushed while you’re on the other side of your ship.

No changes to setting or lore needed, except that there’s a basic autopilot now.


As far as programming that goes, the engine already uses loading during gameplay when you’re on the overworld, and they have done that since Oblivion. Overworld is set up in chunks, they keep a certain number in each direction around you loaded, and load/unload while you move around.

I won’t say it would be easy to expand that background loading functionality, but I will say that they’ve had many many years to attempt it.

MarcomachtKuchen,

Thats sounds amazing, too bad i dont enjoy Sci-Fi

smackjack,

They could implement a timewarp mechanic like Kerbal Space program does and just speed up time.

DarkMetatron,

But that’s more or less what they have done with the flyby animation shown when travelling inside of a system. You could interpret that as watching a rapidly speed up version of the, boring because space is a huge and empty void, travel.

Honytawk,

Can’t really form an opinion about an RPG in 30 minutes playtime. Hell, I doubt you even know Starfield has magic powers.

It was influenced by the internet calling it bad, you are allowed to admit it.

Just don’t call it your opinion.

rip_art_bell,
@rip_art_bell@lemmy.world avatar

Starfield bad

rip_art_bell,
@rip_art_bell@lemmy.world avatar

Okay, who downvoted this? Come clean, buster. My opinion about a video game is objective fact and you must agree with it.

KingThrillgore,
@KingThrillgore@lemmy.ml avatar

Jankfield’s poor technical and creative debt have come full circle.

kadu,
@kadu@lemmy.world avatar

I don’t care about the Bethesda bad circlejerk, once Elder Scrolls VI comes out I’ll buy two copies, shove one up my ass, and play for an entire week non stop eating nothing but frozen pizza with a few stops to praise the game online

vsh,

Bethesda games starting from fallout 3 felt empty as fuck.

Copatus,

I’ve lost a bit of respect for Bethesda. It’s become clear to me that with Starfield they made many very shallow systems in hopes that modders step in and expand on those systems.

I’m hoping this is because the engine is in its last legs and they’ll do a better job once Elder Scrolls VI comes around. (Won’t be buying that on launch tho)

NoSpiritAnimal,
@NoSpiritAnimal@lemmy.world avatar

I like it 🤷‍♂️

corrupts_absolutely,

congratz

NoSpiritAnimal,
@NoSpiritAnimal@lemmy.world avatar

Thanks!

disheveledWallaby,

Bought Starfield, still can’t play it. Linux, nvidia no MUX switch. Starfield won’t use the discrete GPU. Doesn’t even know its there. Thrown every launch option I could find at it. Uninstalled and hidden now. Worst purchases I ever made on a game.

Oldrim and Starfield are the only bethesda games I didn’t buy on super sale. I’ll never make that mistake again. I even purposefully bought it without waiting for sales to throw some support to the devs for building the majority of my favorite games I’ve ever played.

The up side is that after about two weeks of tinkering I bought Baldurs Gate 3 on a whim. Been playing it non stop ever since. I might not have bought BG3 if bethesdas didn’t have such a shity unpayable game at launch, so in a way I thank them. BG3 has far exceeded my every expectation. What I thought would be a mediocre time waster turned out to be the best game I’ve ever played.

DarkMetatron,

That sounds more like a issue with your proton configuration then a fault of the game.

Have you tried to change the proton configuration, to force it to use the discrete GPU?

Nvidia GPUs are known to be problematic in Linux, not only with Wine/Proton

disheveledWallaby, (edited )

Yes I’ve done so much tinkering to everything I can possibly do. Like 5 hours of 2 minute game time testing. Enough to negate a steam refund!

Telling proton to use prime-run. Custom protons, every launch option that matched my specs on protondb.

__NV_PRIME_RENDER_OFFLOAD=1 __GLX_VENDOR_LIBRARY_NAME=nvidia %command% doesn’t work at all.

It’s not just a Linux issue. I read on steam, a guy only got Starfield to launch in windows after disabling his primary GPU in bios via MUX which sadly isn’t an option for me.

I’ve tried everything but Wayland. If you’ve got some magic to try I’m all ears.

canis_majoris,
@canis_majoris@lemmy.ca avatar

If you have a newer Nvidia card, Wayland works just fine, and more optimally than X in multi-monitor scenarios, as X locks the refresh rate to the lowest monitor’s setting across the board.

I have a 3090 and Wayland lets me use all three of my monitors at their native refresh rates.

It’s funny that you’re bitching about the game being bad because it doesn’t run on an OS it wasn’t designed to run on. That’s kind of a silly thing to get up in arms about. Linux gamers are lucky that Proton works as well as it does the majority of the time, and I think you’ve taken that aspect for granted.

disheveledWallaby,

It’s funny that you’re removed about the game being bad because it doesn’t run on an OS it wasn’t designed to run on. That’s kind of a silly thing to get up in arms about. Linux gamers are lucky that Proton works as well as it does the majority of the time, and I think you’ve taken that aspect for granted.

Maybe so. Seems like there is a bunch of removed about the game to go around even on windows using nvidia though. And if Larian can get it right you’d think bethesda could. Even on windows.

Also I have no idea if the game is bad. I cant even play it so I cant say if the game sucks or not. Here in a few years when it’s playable if it’s playable I’ll make that decision. By then the modding community will have had a chance to do their thing and hopefully make the game an even better game.

canis_majoris,
@canis_majoris@lemmy.ca avatar

Nobody has ever respected Bethesda for their quality work on engines.

Larian also has not been famously known for the last three decades as the studio with the most bugs on AAA titles.

Modding will kick off more next year when they release the official kits and tools. Surprised that wasn’t priority number 2 after ironing out the bugs.

Also, what distro are you running? I didn’t have problems getting it to work on Endeavour, once I got a Steam copy. You can’t run the Xbox launcher games properly AFAIK and they’re markedly worse for modding anyways.

disheveledWallaby,

I’m using Garuda.

You have it running on a muxless optimus laptop? What launch options are you using and what proton?

Bought SF through steam as well.

Tried EOS before Garuda. Following the asus-linux instructions they recommended manually installing nvidia drivers. Following the arch wiki I bricked my install a few times before moving on. Like I said in another post I give no shade to EOS as it was defiantly operator error. I think I was trying to use mkinitcpio to rebuild initramfs and if I remember correctly EOS uses dracut. At least thats what I think I remember causing my issue, been around a year ago.

canis_majoris,
@canis_majoris@lemmy.ca avatar

Yeah EOS uses Dracut, that’s probably the issue there.

I’ve had success using the Nvidia-DKMS package on both a laptop (with a 1650) and the aforementioned 3090 machine.

I’ve never had to manually rebuild initramfs, whenever a major enough system upgrade happens the package manager is designed to automatically rebuild the file, which typically happens every time you update the Nvidia drivers.

Does Garuda have the option to use the DKMS package? I think that’s what made the difference for me.

disheveledWallaby,

Yeah I have the dkms installed.

So you are running the 3090 on a optimus laptop?

What about your proton version. I’ve tried all but the latest GE version.

What about your launch options? Are you using Prime render offload?

canis_majoris,
@canis_majoris@lemmy.ca avatar

Sorry, I am running the 3090 on a rig running an Intel 12-7000KF. I haven’t had much experience with Optimus configuration, since I don’t think the 1650 has Optimus either.

I haven’t gotten Starfield to run on the 1650, but that was a spec issue. What kind of card are you trying to run it with? Might just be that Starfield is too intensive to run, which was the case for me.

disheveledWallaby, (edited )

I pretty sure its a optimus issue as there are 2 GPUs, integrated AMD and discrete NV 3080.

I run rdr2 at 90 fps max everything, cp2077 at 60 fps ray tracing and all with only a few settings toned down. Last time I checked 130 fps in borderlands3, 70-80 fo4 moded to hell, 60 in Skyrim AE utra moded to hell. 130 in tomb rader shadows. BG3 at 70+ when im not in the gate city. Max 12 fps in SF with nvtop showing no usage in the 3080 and max usage for the AMD GPU.

Its not a configuration issue. Its either a SF issue or nvidia driver issue. Being as how SF doesn’t even recognize that I have a nvidia card I’m betting money on SF being the issue. That and my research points me to others on windows having issues with discrete GPUs not being recognized either in SF and being solved by disabling MUX in bios forcing the use of discrete GPU.

Thanks for trying though. It is appreciated.

canis_majoris,
@canis_majoris@lemmy.ca avatar

Rock on my friend.

LiveLM,

…why didn’t you just refund it?
Even if you passed the 2h window because of troubleshooting, Steam Support would probably still allow it if you explained you couldn’t get it to work at all

disheveledWallaby,

I tried, steam said NO!

pastaPersona,

Feel like this games gonna get the NMS treatment and be relatively playable maybe 3 years down the line…

As it stands the game has some merits (tons of planets, dungeons are compelling enough while you’re still seeing new ones) but it feels like the size of the world really caused the world design overall to suffer.

masterspace, (edited )

I honestly don’t think so. NMS sky started from a rock solid space exploration engine, but that was basically it, and has then layered on most of the other parts of a space sim on top since then, but most of Starfield’s biggest issues seem to be because their game engine can’t handle the scales needed for seamless space exploration.

So at this point Starfield devs have spent a ton of time and effort building a space sim game on an engine not suited for it, and that means that every cut scene and animation and scripted event is built around this engine, making it really time consuming just to bug test, let alone fix any problems that arise from changing or upgrading that engine, let alone designing the old missions and stuff to work with more continuous travel.

I have more faith that 5 years from now NMS will be fleshed out into a really rich and full story driven game, then that Starfield will have fixed it’s fundamental exploration / loading screen problems.

canis_majoris,
@canis_majoris@lemmy.ca avatar

NMS was purpose-built to be a space game.

Starfield was built on an ancient engine that’s always been for ground-based games.

It’s such a huge sunk cost fallacy that keeps Bethesda using the same dogshit engine. “We’ve used it for years!” Yeah but it’s been fucking garbage for years too.

Baggins,

stuff to work with more continuous travel.

I bet you would be surprised if you were to find out that it is possible already. In space one can already move from one planet to another, only thing that is missing is the loading of new space "map" on demand. And more importantly move from one planet to another and then dock with spacestation. As shown by https://www.nexusmods.com/starfield/mods/3541.

And on planets the landing zones aren't placed in a vacuum, topological details like mountains are visible from adjacent zones. As shown by https://youtu.be/Fy0eG7MFSTM?si=ZwaE3OzmEf9IxbwZ&t=841 by 2kliksphilip.

Now you might ask the very obvious question: why isn't this correctly implemented to allow seamless travel in both space and on planets in vanilla Starfield? We may know only after someone does full introspection what happened during development but my speculative guess is that Xbox Series S which is much weaker than X is the primary reason for all this segmentation in all aspects of Starfield.

masterspace,

Traversal is technically possible yes, but it’s not possible to traverse at a speed which would be feasible or fun, indicating that their engine isn’t capable of unloading and loading new assets in fast enough as you move around. Probably the same reason that even Neon needs to be hard split in half instead of just unloading the assets from the part of the city you’re not at at the moment.

And bruh blaming the S with no information is asinine when not a single other game struggles with traversal on it, including massive open world’s like GTAV, Cyberpunk, Flight Simulator and even other space sims like NMS.

Given that this game also chose to procedurally spawn the same bases over and over again, I think their issues are firmly routed in their development process, not hardware limitations.

Baggins,

Traversal is technically possible yes, but it’s not possible to traverse at a speed which would be feasible or fun, indicating that their engine isn’t capable of unloading and loading new assets in fast enough as you move around. Probably the same reason that even Neon needs to be hard split in half instead of just unloading the assets from the part of the city you’re not at at the moment.

Speeds that the above mentioned mod adds. Until CK is added the debate of switching of one space map to another seamlessly is useless, since the current implementation is missing the hook to load the next map whilst the same hook is implemented between ship take off and space (even when player is not at the helm). Yeah, but New Atlantis is much bigger and allows the player to boost pack from the MAST top floor to another skyscrapers roof and then get down to commercial level and trade stuff without any load screens, at least on PC.

And bruh blaming the S with no information is asinine when not a single other game struggles with traversal on it, including massive open world’s like GTAV, Cyberpunk, Flight Simulator and even other space sims like NMS.

Expect of course if there were dev stories related to it sprinkling out periodically, latest being from Baldurs Gate 3 devs: https://www.pcgamer.com/baldurs-gate-3-dev-shows-off-the-level-of-optimization-achieved-for-the-xbox-series-s-port-which-bodes-well-for-future-pc-updates/

It's worth noting that out of all the platforms that Larian has developed its masterpiece for, the Xbox Series S is probably the most restrictive. This is because it only has 8GB of high-bandwidth memory, to store the game while running and use as VRAM (the remaining 2GB gets used for system functions).

The graphs start at the beginning of September, with the game using just over 5.2GB for general game RAM and around 3.5GB for VRAM. By November, though, Larian had shaved this down to 4.7GB and 2.3GB respectively. The RAM reduction is a pretty decent 10% drop but the reduction in VRAM usage is a massive 34%.

Other devs have stated these: https://www.gamesradar.com/xbox-series-s-could-bottleneck-some-next-gen-games-developers-suggest/

Gneitling pointed to the "almost non-existent" RAM increase from current-gen systems to Xbox Series S as a major pain point. Also "it always scaled on PC" is nonsense. Every AAA game in the past decade or so has their assets made once so they run on min spec. Increasing sample counts a bit here and there for high settings isn't what you could truly have done with more power. Min spec matters.

The article has many such remarks from other devs as well. So why couldn't the segmentation of Starfield be because of Xbox Series S? Keep in mind the latter article is now roughly three years old.

masterspace,

Because Larian specifically struggles with local co-op, not with loading new sections of the map.

As I’ve said, Cyberpunk runs perfectly fine on the S while loading in more geometry faster on the fly, and it’s far from alone in that. Starfield’s limitations are clearly a result of Bethesda’s ancient engine and not hardware limitations since other devs using different engines can accomplish what they failed at on the same hardware.

canis_majoris,
@canis_majoris@lemmy.ca avatar

I’m sorry but Bethesda doesn’t deserve three years to make a game work. They should make it work on launch and delay it until it’s worth launching. They have billions of dollars and ownership from a major tech conglomerate. It’s entirely unacceptable for them to release an unfinished product.

Games are never finished now with the internet. The whole industry has agreed to say “fuck it, we’ll fix it in post” for basically every single project.

Alto,
@Alto@kbin.social avatar

Yeah Bethesda doesn't get the same amount of leeway that a small dev that was clearly way in over their heads gets

Zoboomafoo,
@Zoboomafoo@lemmy.world avatar

They’d have to rip out and replace the entire plot, which I don’t think they would do

Potatos_are_not_friends,

The sad part is that Microsoft pulled the original 2022 release to fix a lot of the bugs.

So really the updates have to be pretty impactful.

I’m still optimistic, because fallout 76 did finally get there!

canis_majoris,
@canis_majoris@lemmy.ca avatar

It really got nowhere, and then started charging premium subscriptions to cover most of the mechanics that have sucked since day 1. Repair kits? You got em. You’re not constantly locked in the treadmill of deciding to do something and giving up halfway to go farm screws from office fans because your weapons have degraded to useless conditions. You pay to avoid bullshit like that.

Doesn’t sound like it got there, sounds like they might have improved their netcode, which was spaghetti to be perfectly honest so easy to have improved upon, and maybe the engine use for things not T-posing and floating around. I’m sure those bat fuckers are technically internally still dragons though. The core gameplay loop still sucks. Pick a direction, veer off to fix your shit, and ultimately get annoyed because there’s only so many fucking times I can go to the adhesive shed or the fucking office with all the fans before I’m just done with the worst mechanic ever invented.

Silverseren,

I’m still optimistic, because fallout 76 did finally get there!

This is sarcasm, right?

tacosupreme,

I played it and really liked it. I did everything I could do with my first playthrough. I started ng+ but just couldn’t continue. A bunch of cool systems in theory but just not enough substance. The copy and paste assets gave me fatigue. It scratched that Bethesda game but I am a bit disappointed. I really wonder why it took so long. It sorta feels like a bunch of reused elements from fallout. Like did they scrap a bunch? I’ve seen many more in depth games from smaller studies lately. On a side note I started playing Cyberpunk with new dlc afterwards and damn I really like that game

FilthyHookerSpit,

It’s real nova, choom.

charred,

Everyone loves to hate Bethesda

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