Starfield - Bethesda's new space IP: will probably be full of fun and easily trackable bugs

[Sand Mega]

https://www.pcgamer.com/bethesda-says-most-of-starfields-1000-planets-are-dull-on-purpose-because-when-the-astronauts-went-to-the-moon-there-was-nothing-there-but-they-certainly-werent-bored/

This is a real article.

Amazing job bethesda

 

[PHILLIP BANKS]

This might answer your question

Man I don't like asmongold

 

[Abbadon's Gate]

Another thing that got me, and it's probably the result of me coming fresh of Baldur's gate 3, is just how bad the dialogue is. I don't mean in delivery but just how it feels. It might be the complete lack of swearing or just how every NPC handles the player character.

Nothing makes me go insane like every single merchant wanting to give me their life story the first time I talk to them. Its like no one at BGS goes out to eat or anything ever and thus thinks that participating in a community means everyone is just constantly expositioning to everyone else.

 

[hawkisnight]

I managed to launch it on my piece of shit 10 year old cpu OCed to near death and 1660s. On lowest I had ~30fps but I had to do some settings tweaking to stop the random 1 second freezes. I played few hours before deleting it.
If I had to describe the game with one word it would be: generic. The story especially. They didn't even try. Maybe it gets better but I didn't care enough to find out the starborn(cue the eyeroll) story. Nothing really in the game made me want to stay. I didn't explore the crafting which I hate in games or base building which seems pointless. I admit I liked the space segments a bit. I am a sucker for space games. The cockpit view and character doing things when you warp was really cool but just like people say the black loading screens really do pull you out of experience. The game to its own detriment even teaches you to travel in the least immersive way: through menus. Todd must have ignored all the space games that came out in recent years and just thought it's not important.
In a few years once I finally decide to upgrade my pc maybe I will buy it on steam for $20 for the ease of modding. I do wonder what will people try to improve and how.

 

[Abbadon's Gate]

The game to its own detriment even teaches you to travel in the least immersive way: through menus. Todd must have ignored all the space games that came out in recent years and just thought it's not important.

I also had this opinion.

Why would I play Starfield for space when X4 is cheaper and the universe there actually works.

Why would I play Starfield for ground gameplay when Cyberpunk 2077 has more melee weapons, fire arms, vehicles, enemy types, a better setting, more useful skills, etc and that's before 2.0 for Cyberpunk launches in like 18 days.

And if I use G2A or another non-steam platform I can probably get both games for as much or less than Starfield.

 

[Kharash]

ROFLMAO
WTF?

Here's your M rating bro.

 

[Anon88]

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Amazing job bethesda

Yes the game sucks but we designed the game to suck so it's ok that it's a bad game.

 

[Hiphopopotamus]

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Just don't have the planet be explored then.
It's the fundamental issue with "open world" bullshit, oh wow 2000 square miles?! But there's less than 1 square mile of content to experience.
Also they would've been bored if they went to 25 different planets that all looked the same and had the same reskinned enemies with a slightly different name and no incentive to kill/scan them.

 

[Mr.Miyagi]

This is a real article.

Real life space is exciting because it's an unconquered frontier where even the act of getting there involves skirting death, let alone spending any amount of time there. If your sci-fi setting has space travel become so commonplace for interstellar trade and logistics that anyone can get a Space License and become Space Asshole riding in his truck, then it risks losing that appeal. I liked exploring in Bethesda's previous games, because there was always some new place to discover and see what/who was there. But from what others have said here, it seems like Starfield's exploration is landing at a specific spot, and then walking 500 meters through brown, barren rocks to a single randgen PoI with nothing particularly interesting in it.

 

[NPZCC]

With all the talk of loading screens, I remembered that there's a point in Fallout 4's MQ where you first teleport into the Institute that has no loading screens, even though you're loading from an exterior into an interior. There are functions they use for this and for elevators that result in no loading screens.

You can see them here: PreloadTargetArea & PreloadExteriorCell

Why aren't they doing something like this during the hyperspace jump startup sequence so there's no black loading screen in between cutscenes?

Seems like in FO4 they were dipping their toes in reducing loading screens, but they just decided to give up on it entirely.

Also, to this day, FO4 has a "bug?" where loading screens are tied to framerate. You have to download a mod that unlocks your framerate during loading screens, because if you don't, loading will take way longer than it has to.

 

[Epoch]

With all the talk of loading screens, I remembered that there's a point in Fallout 4's MQ where you first teleport into the Institute that has no loading screens, even though you're loading from an exterior into an interior. There are functions they use for this and for elevators that result in no loading screens.

You can see them here: PreloadTargetArea & PreloadExteriorCell

I believe OpenMW does this for its interior cells, it has some smart preloader that loads around the player and deloads based on certain criteria, its why cell transitions are essentially instant in OpenMW.

 

[NPZCC]

I believe OpenMW does this for its interior cells, it has some smart preloader that loads around the player and deloads based on certain criteria, its why cell transitions are essentially instant in OpenMW.

Sounds like the kind of progress that a AAA game developer should be making on their own engine after 8 years.

 

[Abbadon's Gate]

Real life space is exciting because it's an unconquered frontier where even the act of getting there involves skirting death, let alone spending any amount of time there.

True. The other thing that makes space travel cool is how different it is than Terrestrial Travel.

In space I can, with enough force go any direction indefinitely. I should be able to fire my engines, get up to speed and rotate my ship around as much as I want while staying on that same linear path until I fire my engines again to counter balance or change the force acting on my ship itself.

In starfield, I fly like a really, really, really slow airplane. In Starfield I think I fly an average of around 35 m/s or 68 knots. In DCS world, if I load up an F-18, without pushing the airframe too much I can maintain easily 350 Knots. If I really want to haul ass and potentially bend the air frame I can get up to 500 Knots. This is a space game where a good amount of my flight time is in a vacuum, I should be able to go way, way faster.

 

[crowabunga]

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Here's your M rating bro.

The M rating is justified. If some big boob anthro rabbits can spur the development of furries, what fetishes would this spawn among the susceptible?

 

[Jet Fuel Johnny]

Usually I play a Bethesda game all the way through at least once before adding mods.

I've already got mods, including one to replace those retarded dancers at Neon with naked chicks.

Say what you want about nude mods, but this game fucking needs them. That and a better body.

holy shit, apparently in the grim future of Starfield everyone is a A+ cup and breasts are outlawed by the merciless state.

I'm so sick of this trend in games. If I wanted to see ugly people I'd go to WalMart or Target.

 

[I (Don't) Have A Gun]

Sounds like the kind of progress that a AAA game developer should be making on their own engine after 8 years.

I think you need some programming skills for that and any decent programmer is probably not working in gaming with it's long hours and low pay.

 

[shekelshoah666]

Even just the illusion of space travel by changing loading screens to lightspeed flying + landing and taking off would've been a huge improvement for the game. You can find more compelling space travel in Elite for the Spectrum ZX. I don't really care for NMS but its miles ahead of this.

Releasing right after BG3 was good in that people see right through a lot of Starfield's bullshit right away. In BG3 I wasn't reminded about the 6 million and every random NPC wasn't an ugly ass abbo with vitiligo or dirty chink and even if they were in BG3 I could just kill them same with anyone else who I didn't want to fuck with. Outsourcing to like 30+ studios including that group of 3rd world slavery tier ones was a mistake.

Such an easy genre to succeed in but they couldn't even pretend to care about the basics here. I have my issues with every Bethesda game but when I came out of Vault 101 or the prison in Oblivion I felt that sense of adventure and couldn't wait to just go look everywhere and Starfield feels like a worse version of their worst games with way more loading screens.

 

[Dixieland Buckaroo]

Steve at GN looked at the game's efficiency with some newer tools they have recently talked about:

It's mostly looking at CPU usage (vs GPU usage with basically a 4090). It's early days for them and this kind of testing, and we'll see what happens if there is a day 1 patch.

While interesting, a comment caught my eye:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=raf_Qo60Gi4&lc=UgwOGMJdK_v18QKfhLx4AaABAg

[a]



Summary by a non-programmer: someone in Bethesda / BGS / Zeni / MS compiled the code with calls that are making everything super inefficient. Modders (presumably the Script Extender crew) have identified this and saw something similar with Skyrim. Fixing it in Skyrim improved things up to 30% in performance, although this approach seems to be perhaps the inverse.

 

[Whoopsie Daisy]

After Halo, Starfield was hyped up as the xbox saver, the big game people will sub to gamepass for.

How have the expectations hit compared to the reality? What's next for Microsoft and Xbox?

 

[Problematic User Forever]

So wait...

Spoiler: Major End Game/New Game+ Spoilers

In my game, when The Hunter attacked The Eye, they made it very clear that I either had to stay at the Lodge to defend the artifacts with Sam and others or go to the Eye to save Sarah. I ended up staying with Sam because I was already at the lodge and I figured he'd be the one to die if I left since they're both relationship characters and I didn't like the idea of his daughter losing her father.

I'm now reading that it can literally be any of the companion characters and it all depends on who you are closest to? So like some people had Barret die and others had Andreja?

People are also saying that New Game+ alters a shit ton of stuff every time you go through the Unity and it's kind of random. Some people say they go through and return only to find that certain people are already dead at Constellation, some find their alternate and he joins you as a companion. Some people are even saying shit changes within the factions and that on one persons second playthrough the mexican leader of the Crimson Fleet turned into a black woman who was a scientist in his first one?

Can anyone else confirm any variations like this? Just the fact that all of the companions are possible to die is surprising me from Bethesda, let alone having 10+ variations to the campaign and factions.