Starfield Pre-Release Thread [GAME RELEASED, GO TO NEW THREAD]

[Crispy]

Dear Lord.

I just entered New Atlantis. It's almost unbelievably bad. I was thinking I should make a video because it would get lots of laughs, but I just felt like seeing how ridiculous the engine still is and so forth by running around in this pool of water, jumping up and down in it and instantly changing direction mid-air, etc. You can sprint full-speed against the smallest barrier and go nowhere but run out of o2 (bro I'm in breathable air right now).

I also walked up to a random group of black citizens talking to one another and the sclera show thing is real. It's fucking creepy. And everyone in the group was taller than my character for some reason, like significantly taller. But the guards in the city are all my height. What the fuck.

And the performance, ffs. My 40-fucking-90 is struggling to maintain 70fps in an area that isn't graphically impressive in any way. Even cheating in DLSS with a mod isn't helping, it actually loses performance that way.

This game is an absolute trainwreck. It may get marginally better after I leave New Atlantis but it almost doesn't seem like it matters. If you can't blow your best wad on the first city the player reaches then I just can't see it ever being worth a full playthrough.

Utter disaster. It's clear that Todd is ready to be wheeled out onto the scrap heap. His time is done.

P.S. Say what you will about Cyberpunk 2077 but Starfield can't even dream of pulling off a believable city like CDPR did.

 

[Alienman]

So, what do you guys think? Are the performance issues thanks to talentless diversity hires? Or are the old-guard devs just phoning it in/aka not giving a shit? Or maybe it's a combination of both?

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

Dear Lord.

I just entered New Atlantis. It's almost unbelievably bad. I was thinking I should make a video because it would get lots of laughs, but I just felt like seeing how ridiculous the engine still is and so forth by running around in this pool of water, jumping up and down in it and instantly changing direction mid-air, etc. You can sprint full-speed against the smallest barrier and go nowhere but run out of o2 (bro I'm in breathable air right now).

I also walked up to a random group of black citizens talking to one another and the sclera show thing is real. It's fucking creepy. And everyone in the group was taller than my character for some reason, like significantly taller. But the guards in the city are all my height. What the fuck.

And the performance, ffs. My 40-fucking-90 is struggling to maintain 70fps in an area that isn't graphically impressive in any way. Even cheating in DLSS with a mod isn't helping, it actually loses performance that way.

This game is an absolute trainwreck. It may get marginally better after I leave New Atlantis but it almost doesn't seem like it matters. If you can't blow your best wad on the first city the player reaches then I just can't see it ever being worth a full playthrough.

Utter disaster. It's clear that Todd is ready to be wheeled out onto the scrap heap. His time is done.

P.S. Say what you will about Cyberpunk 2077 but Starfield can't even dream of pulling off a believable city like CDPR did.

Mad Respek, Crispmon... I know you've been looking forward to this one, having put in 10,000 hours into Skyrim, but mad props for admitting it's shit.

 

[Crispy]

It doesn't make any real sense. There's nothing going on in this game that Oblivion didn't do. I mean they've got the usual graphical bells and whistles but the geometry is relatively simple, the NPCs aren't particularly detailed (some are laughably devoid of detail), and the textures are still the same old muddy shit Bethesda comes up with. This game should easily be able to maintain 100fps even on a 3070 imo.

Oh well, this happens every time. Skyrim ran like pure dogshit until some guy came along and asked, "Hey, why is your engine rendering all this unnecessary stuff, here's a fix for it, enjoy massive improvements with zero quality loss," which eventually Bethesda just implemented into their own patch.

I shouldn't be surprised at all.

 

[Akachi]

I'm not sure what you're going off the rails about but in BG3 you can have both. There are touching dialogue options in that game as well as more lustful ones. It's called having a choice.

My characterisation of BG3 was somewhat hyperbole. Of course I know BG3 has touching romances and lots of choice, you don't have to rush to defend your favourite game in another thread to the slightest disparaging comment. I experienced its romantic charms myself and had a beautiful romance with a mind flayer (I was lucky I had investigation proficiency to find its mouth to kiss) that all my companions got to psionically watch and said nothing about after. Sadly there was no full mocapped sex scene complete with illithid moaning, so not so much touching as there could have been.

But BG3 was not the point, rather (as I thought would be obvious) how pathetic it is the way porn has hijacked most people's sexualities without them even being aware of it to where that dialogue in Starfield seems suspect or detached from reality to some rather than perfectly normal. Surprisingly refreshing from Beth, even if it looks like the only thing that is about this game.

Just did a really awesome quest with the Crimson Fleet. Easily the most engaging "RPG" quest I've done so far.

Finally got a new ship and it came with a white person who has a tremendous work ethic. Real go getter that guy.

What level of settings is this? It looks worse than Mass Effect 1. Where is all the processing power this game requires going? I don't know what the point of all the advancements in CPUs, GPUs, and other architecture has been.

 

[Alienman]

Oh well, this happens every time. Skyrim ran like pure dogshit until some guy came along and asked, "Hey, why is your engine rendering all this unnecessary stuff, here's a fix for it, enjoy massive improvements with zero quality loss," which eventually Bethesda just implemented into their own patch.

You have to wonder why that thing isn't used now. I mean, I would assume they had better knowledge of the engine by now.

 

[Moink]

So, what do you guys think? Are the performance issues thanks to talentless diversity hires? Or are the old-guard devs just phoning it in/aka not giving a shit? Or maybe it's a combination of both?

Bethesda used a 3rd party porting studio which also happens to be the same company responsible for the awful port of The Last of Us Part 1.

Hold on a second, the video doesn't match the statement, what the fuck is going on here? The clip shows her flying through the planet, sounds like someone should've set up collision bounds in orbit, but you can fly around a star system from one planet to another? 'Cause there's a big difference between "you can only freefly in orbit" and "you can freefly between planets, it'd just take you extremely long to do it." Or does it mean you can fly from the fast travel point to that planet?

Feels a bit "you can get to Morrowind in Oblivion".

 

[Crispy]

Taking off from planets and landing on them is just irritating. The cutscene that plays every time is far too loud, so I'm assuming it isn't going to be long before a mod that just deletes that from playing will be quite popular.

Think about that. A game called Starfield that actually manages to *irritate* the player by showing his ship take off from the planet.

 

[Crispy]

By the way, fair warning: I'm going to be dropping in short little shit nuggets about this game from time-to-time, as I think of something else about it that either irks me or makes me shake my head in disbelief. Most if not all of them will probably have already been talked about ITT but I don't really care. I like to vent.

Did you know that if you take your "space suit" off, but keep all of your weapons in your inventory, if you keep your weapon of choice holstered, it no longer shows up anywhere on your body?

 

[Drakortha]

Mad Respek, Crispmon... I know you've been looking forward to this one, having put in 10,000 hours into Skyrim, but mad props for admitting it's shit.

Crispy is on the Larian payroll just like the rest of the Youtuber shills that are giving 9's and 10's left and right to whichever title brings in the most bang for buck. Take his opinion with a grain of salt because the more that the media cans Starfield, the more they'll feel justified giving DOS3 the GOTY award. Its always the same thing with these loser shills who pick their favorite golden child. It used to be Witcher 3 and that game was always hot garbage.

They now criticize Starfield while at the same time praise CDPRs Cyberpunk, a game that was total fucking trash on release but with 3 years of updates later the entire games media is doing the usual bait and switch redemption arc routine. Now watch while everyone lines up to consume Cyberpunk once again with this Phantom Liberty dogshit. Ive said it before; Consumers are not learning creatures. They consume what they are told to consume.

Pete Hines already said that Starfield has a 10 year roadmap ahead of it. I'm not praising Starfield. I think all of these games are TRASH and Im yet to even play any of them. But if you want to compare Starfield to Cyberpunk 3 years on, you are doing nothing but towing the line at this point.

 

[Rhobar121]

Pete Hines already said that Starfield has a 10 year roadmap ahead of it. I'm not praising Starfield. I think all of these games are TRASH. But if you want to compare Starfield to Cyberpunk 3 years on, you are doing nothing but towing the line at this point.

Isn't this the guy who brazenly lies even more than Todd?

 

[Crispy]

Did you know that, afaict, it's impossible to get rid of that stupid robot until I'm assuming you meet other "companions" with which I suppose you can replace him with?

How stupid. What should prevent me from telling this stupid STOMP STOMP STOMP robot from just staying with the ship? Wouldn't that make more sense? Stay with the ship to make sure no one messes with it.

 

[Drakortha]

Pete Hines already said that Starfield has a 10 year roadmap ahead of it. I'm not praising Starfield. I think all of these games are TRASH. But if you want to compare Starfield to Cyberpunk 3 years on, you are doing nothing but towing the line at this point.

Isn't this the guy who brazenly lies even more than Todd?

Starfield is on GAMEPASS. You dont even need Pete to tell you that they plan on milking this game with updates as a way to get people to subscribe to the service.

 

[mediocrepoet]

Pete Hines already said that Starfield has a 10 year roadmap ahead of it. I'm not praising Starfield. I think all of these games are TRASH. But if you want to compare Starfield to Cyberpunk 3 years on, you are doing nothing but towing the line at this point.

Isn't this the guy who brazenly lies even more than Todd?

He was telling the truth here though. He was talking about the Unofficial Starfield patch project.

 

[Crispy]

They now criticize Starfield while at the same time praise CDPRs Cyberpunk, a game that was total fucking trash on release but with 3 years of updates later the entire games media is doing the usual bait and switch redemption arc routine.

I don't think CP2077 was "total fucking trash" on release. It was p. damned solid, actually. It got neutered for quite a long time with patches to bring its performance to its knees to help out all the retarded PS5 owners out there, and the game still isn't as impressive as it was at release.

But at least CP2077 is fun to play. It's a superior walking sim, it has cool albeit simplistic vehicles, its NPCs are all fairly impressive, it has combat that almost dares to be engaging. It's a solid game.

Starfield, at least so far, has... nothing going for it. Nothing. It's ugly, it runs like shit, it plays poorly, it has a truly laughably ridiculous "spaceship sim" component to it. You can't even land on planets. You just hit 'X' to make something awesome happen.

Oh, btw, BG3 is actually fun to play as well, unlike Starfield, thanks to its superior combat design. Even with all the gay vampires running around in it it's worthy of my time.

 

[Wasteland]

Dear Lord.

I just entered New Atlantis. It's almost unbelievably bad. I was thinking I should make a video because it would get lots of laughs, but I just felt like seeing how ridiculous the engine still is and so forth by running around in this pool of water, jumping up and down in it and instantly changing direction mid-air, etc. You can sprint full-speed against the smallest barrier and go nowhere but run out of o2 (bro I'm in breathable air right now).

I also walked up to a random group of black citizens talking to one another and the sclera show thing is real. It's fucking creepy. And everyone in the group was taller than my character for some reason, like significantly taller. But the guards in the city are all my height. What the fuck.

And the performance, ffs. My 40-fucking-90 is struggling to maintain 70fps in an area that isn't graphically impressive in any way. Even cheating in DLSS with a mod isn't helping, it actually loses performance that way.

This game is an absolute trainwreck. It may get marginally better after I leave New Atlantis but it almost doesn't seem like it matters. If you can't blow your best wad on the first city the player reaches then I just can't see it ever being worth a full playthrough.

Utter disaster. It's clear that Todd is ready to be wheeled out onto the scrap heap. His time is done.

P.S. Say what you will about Cyberpunk 2077 but Starfield can't even dream of pulling off a believable city like CDPR did.

Some interesting performance numbers here:



There's also a companion breakdown on good bang-for-buck graphics settings:



The TL;DR on the latter video is contained in this screencap of "recommended" settings for minimal quality loss:

And I guess the TL;DR on the former video is that the game's poor performance is exacerbated by the poor GPU market, which hasn't delivered a genuine gen-on-gen price-to-performance uplift since Ampere/RDNA2. Of course, Crispy's 4090 is the shining exception for Ada Lovelace, but unfortunately Nvidia cards lose pretty badly in this particular game, with the current drivers. I'm sure that will change eventually. Certainly I wouldn't expect the 4090 to continue losing to AMD's 7900 XTX. Oh, and worth emphasizing that FSR's performance scaling in Starfield is all over the place. Depending on your card, on your quality settings, and on the output resolution, FSR might improve your FPS by almost nothing, or by 50% or more. Nvidia seems to lose here too, in the general case, though IIRC Nvidia cards benefit more at high resolution.

Buildzoid also had some interesting insights with respect to Starfield's memory scaling, in CPU-bound scenarios:



(TL;DR: Starfield may scale to a ridiculous degree with memory bandwidth.)

It seems one of the reasons so many people say that the game looks like shit--apart from the fact that the game intrinsically looks like shit, of course--is that Bethesda chose to make heavy use of resolution scaling in its default quality settings. Disabling that setting is probably the best thing anyone can do, if your hardware can at all swing it. The scaling looks especially bad at lower output resolutions, which of course compounds the problem for people running the game on lower spec hardware.

EDIT: Also I agree about Cyberpunk. The more I look at Starfield, the more I think that's the most obvious comparison to make--in terms of performance, in terms of game play, and in terms of overall presentation. Starfield seems to be a somewhat inferior version of Cyberpunk with a space motif. And more loading screens. It really is a shame.

 

[Drakortha]

I don't think CP2077 was "total fucking trash" on release. It was p. damned solid, actually.

That wasn't the consensus across the entire medium at launch.

Why is everyone flipping now with Phantom Liberty around the corner? Did a late shipment of CDPR Jackets finally arrive in your mailbox?

 

[Crispy]

Why is everyone flip-flipping now with Phantom Liberty around the corner?

I challenge you to find even a single post of mine in my entire history "flip-flopping" about CP2077. I was angry with CDPR for its patches, fucking the game up, but I've never wavered in my admiration for the game.

You, typically, have some sort of bizarre agenda you're trying to push that suggests I'm a member of some shady cabal that monetarily benefits from "shilling" certain games and certain companies.

You're insane.

 

[Drakortha]

I challenge you to find even a single post of mine in my entire history "flip-flopping" about CP2077. I was angry with CDPR for its patches, fucking the game up, but I've never wavered in my admiration for the game.

You, typically, have some sort of bizarre agenda you're trying to push that suggests I'm a member of some shady cabal that monetarily benefits from "shilling" certain games and certain companies.

You're insane.

Yes my bizarre agenda of calling these games out for what they actually are, at the detest of everyone who loves to SHILL and CONSUME on a daily basis.

I never bought any of these trash games or downloaded them. I only called them out for what they are - total regressive TRASH. And I've been right every single time.

The difference between you and me is you seem to enjoy eating shit. It's not my problem, to each their own.

 

[Mojobeard]

So, what do you guys think? Are the performance issues thanks to talentless diversity hires? Or are the old-guard devs just phoning it in/aka not giving a shit? Or maybe it's a combination of both?

I have a hunch it's younger/newer dev teams with bad management.
You have competent people doing the "critical path", which seems to work at least fine. You have the rest doing a minimum viable product. You don't put enough time into checking if they did everything/anything right, nor into performance optimization, and push the game out the door.

 

[Crispy]

The difference between you and me is you seem to enjoy eating shit. It's not my problem, to each their own.

Gee, I could have sworn the last several posts of mine in this very thread have basically been shitting all over Starfield. This is the Starfield thread, isn't it? Have I gone senile?

 

[Drakortha]

Gee, I could have sworn the last several posts of mine in this very thread have basically been shitting all over Starfield. This is the Starfield thread, isn't it? Have I gone senile?

You missed the point where I pointed out that everyone is getting ready to shill for Phantom Liberty and part of that shilling is putting down the nearest competition. You've already started to put down Starfield while praising that CDPR garbage and I was only pointing that out. I'm sorry this is difficult for you to comprehend but it's the stark truth. Cyberpunk is SHIT and will always be SHIT!

 

[AlwaysBrotoMen]

For any of you whine babies complaining about black people in Atlantis , just imagine you have arrived in Black Atlantis and get the fuck out of there asap. Anyone completed Starfield and can provide any detailed review of the game? The game seemed stable for me using the dlss mod But i hope nvidia solves it asap. The menus remind me of Underrail. But i do acknowledge that there is no sense of gravity in the game and space combat is too slow.

 

[Crispy]

Look at this! I... how is this...

Isn't this 2023? This screenshot is untouched. This is basically running the game in 1440 at maxed out details. This is the FIRST CITY YOU VISIT.

I have no words.

 

[Drakortha]

For any of you whine babies complaining about black people in Atlantis

The same posters who are whining about black people in Starfield loved being surrounded by FAGGOTS in BG3 for 100+ hours straight.