Starfield Thread - now with Shattered Space horror expansion

[Readher]

You a journalist looking for clicks from clickbait articles, or something? At least wait for 9 p.m. CEST, that's when every game peaks.

 

[Cryomancer]

Japs get extremely preferential treatment from them

Disagreed. If Baizuo's GAte 3 was made in anime style or of any japanese studio, it would be a Adults Only game instantly, all game journalists would criticize and call the halflings "pedophilia".

I hope that the success of Baizuo's Gate 3 makes Bugthesda stops with its police of cutting most of good stuff from previous games, since Morrowind, they only cut off cool stuff.

Pathfinder: Kingmaker gets a negative point for offering "nothing new" (somehow didn't apply to PoE which was shilled by the press left and right

They see Pillars as "reviving a dead genre" and not PF:KM. I don't agree with them. PF:KM is great exactly cuz is the closest thing to a modern Baldur's Gate 1/2 that we will ever get.

 

[Reinhardt]

is it fixed gud already?

 

[Modron]

since Morrowind Daggerfall, they only cut off cool stuff.

 

[RobotSquirrel]

It is possible though i think if the rendering side is the CPU hog, a more likely culprit is their new approach to modular meshes - something their own graphics programmers apparently warned them against (according to a GDC presentation about it in Fallout 4, though those who came up with the idea softened it by saying that the graphics programmers weren't happy when someone from the audience asked them if this didn't had performance implications :-P).

I just watched some of the video... No wall meshes are batched. (part where they're like the old method was 6 objects the new method is 126 its clearly better DERP - what the hell are they thinking)
What the fuck! lol You should be combining meshes - they don't have to be dynamic, MERGE THAT SHIT DAMN IT lol.

 

[janior]

is it fixed gud already?

morrowind and daggerfall were only fixed when they were fully recreated from scratch(daggerfall unity/openmw), so maybe 20 years from now Starfield will be fixed and playable.

 

[perfectslumbers]

Apparently the crashing is related to framerate cap so I'm gonna use control panel to set it to 30 and see if console gaming fixes it

I'm on a 4790k / 1080ti and I'm heavily CPU bound, I suspect I can't load the GPU properly.

The first thing to reduce is the overall resolution, but I guess you've done that. Graphics options shouldn't matter much if you are CPU bound but just in case, don't go over medium in anything. Upscaling at 67% of your display resolution should give you the next lower resolution. In my case - 67% of 3840x2160 is 2560x1440. You'll see internet advice "set your scaling to 50%, that's half your resolution", it's sad how many people can't do basic maths.

I started having silent CTDs recently, around my 16-17th hour of playing, and I assume it has to do with savegame data corruption, because I am not overloading my hardware in any way, and I haven't experienced issues in other games. So be prepared for the occasional crash.

If it's not crashing but freezing for you... who knows. Might be related to the GPU rather than CPU. Start with setting everything to default values in your GPU's control panel, and disabling any overlays-creating software like Steam's and geforce experience if you have that.

Thanks for the advice. I managed to fix it by turning off FSR and limiting fps to 30. My monitor is 1080 so I just play it at that. No more crashes, still freezing but it's playable and as much as I can expect on my hardware so I'm satisfied, real test will be the city. Hearing about save corruption worries me though, one of my friends lost his save to something similar. Apparently enabling fullscreen in the .ini helps too so I'll try that.

So far, I can understand why people don't like this game, especially if you expected a serious deep RPG (obviously never happening from Bethesda), or No Man's Sky RPG edition, but my first impressions of it are strong. Maybe it's the "Just sat through BG3," effect but I found the dialogue and introduction strong, the gun-play fun, the OST is amazing, and the game's atmosphere is great. Hopefully the game doesn't get too repetitive too fast and hopefully it has some good quests, I think I'll end up enjoying it if both of those are the case.

 

[Irxy]

A few questions:
1) Are you constantly being reminded you are the dragonborn/asking everything about your lost child? Or does the game leave you alone for a change?

1. No, the main quest never comes up outside the main quest itself.

Well, the Constellation affilation does come up id dialogs from time to time, haven't yet seen random npcs commenting on it, but I'm not far into the game yet.
You can also sell stories about yourself to a reporter, maybe that influences your renown somehow.

 

[Dodo1610]

A turn-based CRPG is outselling an open-world action RPG. Crap they are going to close down BGS for this, aren't they.

 

[Moink]

Has there been a day 1 patch?

 

[likash]

A turn-based CRPG is outselling an open-world action RPG. Crap they are going to close down BGS for this, aren't they.

 

[Infinitron]

So apparently this game officially released on Steam ten hours ago. No launch trailer?

 

[Azdul]

is it fixed gud already?

morrowind and daggerfall were only fixed when they were fully recreated from scratch(daggerfall unity/openmw), so maybe 20 years from now Starfield will be fixed and playable.

It is not so simple.

New engine won't fix scripting bugs or broken models. Some mods work on original engine - and not on OpenMW - because mods themselves contain references to non-existing files, objects or broken meshes - and original engine is more forgiving. Some mods have 10+ scripts of spaghetti code running in parallel. Let's not even mention different mods interacting in a weird way.

New engine can solve issues with 32-bit memory limitations and renderer targetting old APIs and race conditions that became more prevalent once hardware got faster. Most of engine fixes can be accomplished through code injection (script extenders) and DirectX wrappers.

 

[InD_ImaginE]

Considering no modding yet, probably most people looking to try this officially will buy it from gamepass

At current state of the game there is 0 reason to actually buy the game considering gamepass exist. In 2 - 3 years after modding is half bit mature there might be reason to buy the Steam version

 

[Cat Headed Eagle]

More like Starflop, am I rite?

 

[NecroLord]

It's a MASTERPIECE!!

 

[Mebrilia the Viera Queen]

It's a MASTERPIECE!!

No the game is fun but is hardly a masterpiece. Bg3 is a masterpiece.

 

[Infinitron]

More like Starflop, am I rite?

Considering no modding yet, probably most people looking to try this officially will buy it from gamepass

At current state of the game there is 0 reason to actually buy the game considering gamepass exist. In 2 - 3 years after modding is half bit mature there might be reason to buy the Steam version

I'm sure Game Pass subscription stats are through the roof this week, but we can't see that.

 

[NecroLord]

It's a MASTERPIECE!!

No the game is fun but is hardly a masterpiece. Bg3 is a masterpiece.

You don't get it, do you?

 

[Mebrilia the Viera Queen]

It's a MASTERPIECE!!

No the game is fun but is hardly a masterpiece. Bg3 is a masterpiece.

You don't get it, do you?

There is really little to get.

 

[MorsInvicta]

Right, here is my rather long review on Shitfield:


Bethesda Game Studios is a company that broke ground on some truly revolutionary games like The Elders Scrolls: Arena, and its sequel Daggerfall. However a long line of commercial failures afterwards pushed the company to the brink of bankruptcy. Its next game had to be a success to save the company, and the result was TES: Morrowind, a truly fantastic game of incredible creativity, set in a world unlike any seen before. It captured my attention like few other games have when it released in 2002.

Then they released the next game, TES: Oblivion. And they played it safe. Utterly safe. Gone was the fantastic creativity of Morrowind, replaced instead by the most bog standard fantasy world you could possibly create. All elements that could offend anyone were removed or heavily toned down. But it still worked, the joy of freely exploring such a vast fantasy world still held up even if the world was comparatively shallow. And with their next series of games, Fallout 3, TES: Skyrim, and Fallout 4, the formula held up. Successful, but increasingly safe, shallow games plagued by weak writing and increasingly inconsistent lore, held up primarily by the freedom of their open world and the endless modders supporting the games for decades after release.

That brings us to Starfield, the latest game from Bethesda, their first new IP in ages, and the final destination of their increasingly lazy, uninspired and utterly "safe" game design. Though I fail to understand why they were so hell bent on creating a "new" IP when they did absolutely nothing original with it. Starfield does absolutely nothing new, it's just a long series of sci-fi tropes done better by others without adding anything, or putting an interesting new spin on anything. With the recent Elder Scrolls and Fallout games they had the luxury of copying the homework of the great talents that created those franchises, but with Starfield they had to learn to walk on their own, and they faceplant right out of the gate.

The main story is the most tedious, derivative and repetitive slog I've ever experienced in a Bethesda game. Most quests are simple fetch quests, the EXACT SAME fetch quest, repeated for hours on end. The story takes forever to build any kind of momentum, and it barely reaches the pace of a gentle jog before it reaches its final unsatisfying end. It opens to a far inferior version of Mass Effect's inciting event, before going into some pseudo-religious claptrap and ultimately devolving into the most overdone sci-fi trope that has been plaguing popular culture in recent years. You'll know it when to get there, trust me. I can barely describe how much I hated the main story, and it certainly didn't help that I predicted most of the big story reveals along the way.

But what about the open world? It's always carried Bethesda games before. 1000 planets of adventure must be something, right? No. Bethesda dropped the ball here monumentally. The open world is basically a lie, an illusion of content. In truth the worlds you visit are little more than vast empty expanses of open terrain with the occasional copy/pasted structure dotted around. And it's extremely obvious how lazy it is, every "random" structure is identical down to the placement of every last item, enemy, and decoration. Worse yet is the fact that you can't fly directly to the structures, nor are there any kinds of mounts or vehicles available so you'll spend vast amounts of time walking to things. At least you can fast travel back, and good god you have to fast travel a lot in this game. Enjoy the loading screens.

The worldbuilding is some of the worst I've ever seen. There's no depth to anything. In playing it safe, every faction is just a generic stock entity, "space law enforcement", "space bank", "space bandits", "space pirates". Every character is a basic cardboard cutout, with terrible facial animations and wooden acting to boot. All animal and plant life across the galaxy is basically the same models, just with different names. It's all so bland and repetitive I can barely remember the names of any of the characters I encountered. There's nothing to distinguish one person or place from any other. Every area is equally diverse, with no distinguishing features to set them apart from any other. The worst example of this I experienced is when I found a 200 year old generation ship, launched at sublight speed from Earth to colonize another planet, and I discovered the people born and raised on said ship all spoke with clearly distinct Earth accents like Russian, African, English etc. Are you joking? Did the Africans isolate themselves in a ghetto in Cargo Bay 3 for two centuries? Did the Russians conquer and establish a fiefdom on deck 9? Bethesda's writers have clearly never experienced a truly multicultural society, because it doesn't work like this. After growing up together in a community sealed inside a spaceship they should speak the same English accent, and probably a strange form of English that distinctly diverged from what everyone else speaks after two centuries in isolation. But that idea was just too clever for Bethesda.

Then there are the bugs, of which there are many. This is pretty much part and parcel of any Bethesda game, but needs to be addressed. I've personally experienced a plethora of minor irritants such as t-posing corpses, wild physics and poorly scripted quests and triggers. This on top of many, many crashes and freezes. Save often is my advice. Hard saves, so that you can revert if necessary.

Beyond bugs there are also endless little irritating quirks that makes the game a pain to play. There are no local or interior maps, so finding your way around cities or buildings becomes irritating. Particularly in cities which have been built around long detours to get to anything, most likely to hide how small they really are.
The "skill challenges" you have to complete to progress character skills. It's just another system meant to slow the game down, to pad out the time it takes to get anything done. And the challenges are never anything interesting like, breaking into the secure vault of a band of religious zealots, or hunt a lethal predator loose on a space station that's falling into a black hole. No, it's just a grind. Do X thing Y number of times. I particularly hated having to grind space combat to pump up my Piloting skill so that I could use a ship with longer jump range.
Then there are escort quests, thankfully I haven't found many, but trying to keep a character with the survival skills of a clinically depressed lemming alive is never fun, especially with the sheer number of bloodthirsty aliens the game throws at you.

Ultimately a lot of the game's issues beside the stale writing and uninspired worldbuilding, boil down to engine limitations. The game is built on the back of the aging Creation Engine, which itself is an evolution of the Gamebryo Engine Bethesda has been using since Morrowind, over 20 years ago. Please Bethesda, let it rest. It can go no further.

To conclude, Starfield is all the bad connotations of the word "Bethesda" distilled into one game. This is the final destination for all of the lazy choices, overhyped features, stale writing, and "vast but shallow" design philosophy that Bethesda is known for. What else can I say but this? Bethesda. This isn't good enough any more! Your lazy, half-assed efforts aren't good enough. You had the unmitigated gall to ask 100$ for early access to this uninspired piece of ♥♥♥♥, the worst product you have ever cobbled together. If we are to have any hope of a decent Fallout or Elder Scrolls game in the future, there has to be a serious shakeup at Bethesda. And I doubt Todd Howard is the only problem as some have suggested. For a game to so utterly fail in so many aspects takes a considerable team effort. I can only hope that this game's failure is a wake up call and that the future will see some positive changes.

Final score: Bethesda / 10

 

[sebas]

Thoughts after a few hours:

Starfield is not about Space itself, Space is just there to help the narrative. To compare it to sci-fi books it would definitely be most like The Expanse. It's rooted in current tech, current society, it's very Americana and any physics is thrown out the window. As such it doesn't even matter that you can only fly ships in orbit, it's not like full space piloting would have anything to offer. The gaming loop is pretty clear: land on planets, survey and mine to build/sell/research and do missions for various corporations/cartels/whatever. All very "humanlike".

It's a shame that after so many years of development, this is all they have to show for. Especially when there are many great sci-fi books out there. And I'm not talking about mind benders rooted in physics like what Cixin or Weir write. There are honest work sci-fi page turners that have just enough creativity to make it worthwhile: mix up the society maybe add some aliens that aren't built on mitochondria, give genetical alteration a proper go, etc. I guess the good part is that adding some creativity into the basic loop is definitely moddable, somethingsomethingstartrek.

I'm not gonna talk about the wokeness, it's Americana like I said. So I guess trying to portray whatever te fuck is happening in the States right now makes sense.

There are significant improvements to the Creation Engine across the board. I especially liked the way beards are rendered while facial animations are decent enough.

The one thing that really surprised me was how insipid the first hour was. Every BGS game I've ever played had really awesome introductions. Not this one though, not at all.


And that's about it from me, I don't see any point in playing it further. I'm a bit shellshocked really at how poor it is.

 

[Be Kind Rewind]

So apparently this game officially released on Steam ten hours ago. No launch trailer?

I thought you didn't care about shilling the game that much but the issue is really that the Bethesda marketing team has given up after they got bought by Microshaft? Gave you a participation award since I really don't think you should be spamming about non-RPGs on the Codex's front page. If you're going to cover Cyberpunk 2077 and Beth games you might as well post about Assassin's Creed and the other AAA slop that have a couple of token progression mechanics.

 

[Irxy]

It's a feature.

https://www.pcgamer.com/bethesda-sa...othing-there-but-they-certainly-werent-bored/

Here again, this is just their ambition falling short due to laziness. He talks about the majesty of feeling like an explorer as if he never played Elite which, while not a perfect game, nailed this feeling absolutely. Especially after they added the ability to land on planets and mine space rocks to trade in for space doubloons to buy better space lasers for your space ship.

There are half a dozen things they could've just copied, let alone imagined for themselves, to make Starfield feel like an actual exploration game.

Didn't they see this coming?

I personally think most planets are not empty enough, I don't want to fly to some god forgotten rock at the endge of the galaxy, land on a random spot and find abandoned bases and pirate outposts every 500m.
Sorry, but anyone who wants more content on these planets is a retard.
Well, at least those POIs are not every 50m, like in their previous games.

 

[NecroLord]

Right, here is my rather long review on Shitfield:


Bethesda Game Studios is a company that broke ground on some truly revolutionary games like The Elders Scrolls: Arena, and its sequel Daggerfall. However a long line of commercial failures afterwards pushed the company to the brink of bankruptcy. Its next game had to be a success to save the company, and the result was TES: Morrowind, a truly fantastic game of incredible creativity, set in a world unlike any seen before. It captured my attention like few other games have when it released in 2002.

Then they released the next game, TES: Oblivion. And they played it safe. Utterly safe. Gone was the fantastic creativity of Morrowind, replaced instead by the most bog standard fantasy world you could possibly create. All elements that could offend anyone were removed or heavily toned down. But it still worked, the joy of freely exploring such a vast fantasy world still held up even if the world was comparatively shallow. And with their next series of games, Fallout 3, TES: Skyrim, and Fallout 4, the formula held up. Successful, but increasingly safe, shallow games plagued by weak writing and increasingly inconsistent lore, held up primarily by the freedom of their open world and the endless modders supporting the games for decades after release.

That brings us to Starfield, the latest game from Bethesda, their first new IP in ages, and the final destination of their increasingly lazy, uninspired and utterly "safe" game design. Though I fail to understand why they were so hell bent on creating a "new" IP when they did absolutely nothing original with it. Starfield does absolutely nothing new, it's just a long series of sci-fi tropes done better by others without adding anything, or putting an interesting new spin on anything. With the recent Elder Scrolls and Fallout games they had the luxury of copying the homework of the great talents that created those franchises, but with Starfield they had to learn to walk on their own, and they faceplant right out of the gate.

The main story is the most tedious, derivative and repetitive slog I've ever experienced in a Bethesda game. Most quests are simple fetch quests, the EXACT SAME fetch quest, repeated for hours on end. The story takes forever to build any kind of momentum, and it barely reaches the pace of a gentle jog before it reaches its final unsatisfying end. It opens to a far inferior version of Mass Effect's inciting event, before going into some pseudo-religious claptrap and ultimately devolving into the most overdone sci-fi trope that has been plaguing popular culture in recent years. You'll know it when to get there, trust me. I can barely describe how much I hated the main story, and it certainly didn't help that I predicted most of the big story reveals along the way.

But what about the open world? It's always carried Bethesda games before. 1000 planets of adventure must be something, right? No. Bethesda dropped the ball here monumentally. The open world is basically a lie, an illusion of content. In truth the worlds you visit are little more than vast empty expanses of open terrain with the occasional copy/pasted structure dotted around. And it's extremely obvious how lazy it is, every "random" structure is identical down to the placement of every last item, enemy, and decoration. Worse yet is the fact that you can't fly directly to the structures, nor are there any kinds of mounts or vehicles available so you'll spend vast amounts of time walking to things. At least you can fast travel back, and good god you have to fast travel a lot in this game. Enjoy the loading screens.

The worldbuilding is some of the worst I've ever seen. There's no depth to anything. In playing it safe, every faction is just a generic stock entity, "space law enforcement", "space bank", "space bandits", "space pirates". Every character is a basic cardboard cutout, with terrible facial animations and wooden acting to boot. All animal and plant life across the galaxy is basically the same models, just with different names. It's all so bland and repetitive I can barely remember the names of any of the characters I encountered. There's nothing to distinguish one person or place from any other. Every area is equally diverse, with no distinguishing features to set them apart from any other. The worst example of this I experienced is when I found a 200 year old generation ship, launched at sublight speed from Earth to colonize another planet, and I discovered the people born and raised on said ship all spoke with clearly distinct Earth accents like Russian, African, English etc. Are you joking? Did the Africans isolate themselves in a ghetto in Cargo Bay 3 for two centuries? Did the Russians conquer and establish a fiefdom on deck 9? Bethesda's writers have clearly never experienced a truly multicultural society, because it doesn't work like this. After growing up together in a community sealed inside a spaceship they should speak the same English accent, and probably a strange form of English that distinctly diverged from what everyone else speaks after two centuries in isolation. But that idea was just too clever for Bethesda.

Then there are the bugs, of which there are many. This is pretty much part and parcel of any Bethesda game, but needs to be addressed. I've personally experienced a plethora of minor irritants such as t-posing corpses, wild physics and poorly scripted quests and triggers. This on top of many, many crashes and freezes. Save often is my advice. Hard saves, so that you can revert if necessary.

Beyond bugs there are also endless little irritating quirks that makes the game a pain to play. There are no local or interior maps, so finding your way around cities or buildings becomes irritating. Particularly in cities which have been built around long detours to get to anything, most likely to hide how small they really are.
The "skill challenges" you have to complete to progress character skills. It's just another system meant to slow the game down, to pad out the time it takes to get anything done. And the challenges are never anything interesting like, breaking into the secure vault of a band of religious zealots, or hunt a lethal predator loose on a space station that's falling into a black hole. No, it's just a grind. Do X thing Y number of times. I particularly hated having to grind space combat to pump up my Piloting skill so that I could use a ship with longer jump range.
Then there are escort quests, thankfully I haven't found many, but trying to keep a character with the survival skills of a clinically depressed lemming alive is never fun, especially with the sheer number of bloodthirsty aliens the game throws at you.

Ultimately a lot of the game's issues beside the stale writing and uninspired worldbuilding, boil down to engine limitations. The game is built on the back of the aging Creation Engine, which itself is an evolution of the Gamebryo Engine Bethesda has been using since Morrowind, over 20 years ago. Please Bethesda, let it rest. It can go no further.

To conclude, Starfield is all the bad connotations of the word "Bethesda" distilled into one game. This is the final destination for all of the lazy choices, overhyped features, stale writing, and "vast but shallow" design philosophy that Bethesda is known for. What else can I say but this? Bethesda. This isn't good enough any more! Your lazy, half-assed efforts aren't good enough. You had the unmitigated gall to ask 100$ for early access to this uninspired piece of ♥♥♥♥, the worst product you have ever cobbled together. If we are to have any hope of a decent Fallout or Elder Scrolls game in the future, there has to be a serious shakeup at Bethesda. And I doubt Todd Howard is the only problem as some have suggested. For a game to so utterly fail in so many aspects takes a considerable team effort. I can only hope that this game's failure is a wake up call and that the future will see some positive changes.

Final score: Bethesda / 10

Should've a made thread, brother!
So we can all have fun!