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

[Mega Black]

-It has started to crash every 20 minutes.

Nice to see this issue persists through Skyrim still. Didn't this happen in Skyrim and F4 where after a save game became too 'big' the game would begin to crash constantly?

 

[CHARizard]

Nice to see this issue persists through Skyrim still. Didn't this happen in Skyrim and F4 where after a save game became too 'big' the game would begin to crash constantly?

It seemed to happen faster here. It started at around 40 hours playtime in NG+. I have never had it happen so severely in something like Skyrim where I have definitely had savegames that are above 10 hours. Theres a noticeable pause for about 20 seconds every quick save, and if it goes over 30 its a coinflip if the game crashes. This is on Series X installed onto the internal storage.

 

[xXx: State of the Union]

Thanks to Bethesda's 'the player can do anything' design style and the coat of diversity they threw on, a good deal of side quests are me fixing problems and saving the day for minorities, w*men and fags by virtue of my MC power (being a competent white man). Even in zero G, the White Man's Burden hangs heavy.

So they pulled a Far Cry?

 

[Molly White's Breast Milk]

Nice to see this issue persists through Skyrim still. Didn't this happen in Skyrim and F4 where after a save game became too 'big' the game would begin to crash constantly?

Save game bloat in Skyrim is usually caused by endlessly firing scripts that build up over time. If this is happening in a vanilla release then the devs still haven't learned to do scripting in papyrus. If they don't release the Creation Kit for Starfield soon this game will die on PC and XBox without modders fixing Bethesda's pajeet and zipperhead outsourced game devs fuck ups.

 

[Begemot]

Not even simping dipshit. But anything that isn't faggoty doom posting is seen as blind fanboyism. You'd have to be actually mentally deficient to think this pile wouldn't be hailed as some massive achievement if a small indie dev made it. Especially when the vast majority of indie games people coom for are simple fuckin sprite games like undertale or deadcells.

Todd, please stop. We'll never support your mediocre game.

 

[Moths]

Has the list of names the robots will say been data mined yet? I'm curious because I assumed it was generated, but some people claim they won't say their character name.

I can tell ya it certainly won't say nigger

Indieshit dev finds video games icky and gross:

View attachment 5328053
Twitter thread (can't get archive.md/is/whatever to work)

I agree with this dev, we should make NPCs majority white and male again :^)

He's still upset over no one giving two shits about The Witness.

Yeah that does sound like the quintessential indie game title. Was it some kind of shitty walking simulator?

 

[Epoch]

Yeah that does sound like the quintessential indie game title. Was it some kind of shitty walking simulator?

Its a walking simulator with bad puzzles tacked on and filled with extremely pretentious audio logs. It sucks, but someone made a parody game called The Looker that does everything better and is funny, for free: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1985690/The_Looker/

 

[xXx: State of the Union]

If they don't release the Creation Kit for Starfield soon this game will die on PC

I think Todd said they won't release it until next year. lol

 

[Judge Dredd]

Was it some kind of shitty walking simulator?

Worse. It was a myst style island full of screens with line puzzles where you had to draw a line from one node to another. With the answer hidden in the environment. The game had one cool twist before going up it's own arse.

You find one puzzle that doesn't do anything when clicked on, instead, you click on the world and the world itself is the line puzzle. Admittedly a cool effect, now you're connecting nodes on everything from videos to rivers. The "true" ending is a video where it all but stats the game has changed your perception of reality by making you see line puzzles in real life.

I recommend Joseph Andersons video on the game.

Edit: Here's the video, timestamped so that you can jump straight to the big twist I hid in the spoiler and how it's a good twist.

Edit 2: 39:09 shows the true ending, and how it comes across as pretentious.

 

[CHARizard]

I wonder if Microsoft will ever reveal xcloud numbers. Trying to play some Fallout 4 on my work computer and this is popping up, I have never seen xcloud with a queue before the Starfield launch.

On xcloud Starfield lags a whole lot for some reason. I have been playing FO4 and its smooth as it can be, no idea why theres a difference. Starfield is the first game I have played on xcloud that has this lag, but it may be because the servers are overwhelmed.

 

[Inafune Fanfiction]

From what I've seen from gameplay videos, they took the wrong lessons from KOTOR 2 and plastered that situational dialogue into literally everything in the most autistic way possible.

Instead of a conversation at home/the ebon hawk with a small handful of friends you've survived the war with, everywhere you go, complete strangers on the street are approaching you for a heart to heart or to discuss life lessons. That's the impression I got from the ridiculously autistic and creepy NPC dialogue.

 

[scathefire]

Yes

It's so close to Fallout 4's that I'm willing to say they didn't add any.

Edit: Didn't Blows whole career pop up from him making a game about stalking a woman who turned out to be an atomic bomb or something? How "icky".

Thanks Todd, I really needed the option to name my character "Fuckface".

 

[Johan Schmidt]

From what I've seen from gameplay videos, they took the wrong lessons from KOTOR 2 and plastered that situational dialogue into literally everything in the most autistic way possible.

Instead of a conversation at home/the ebon hawk with a small handful of friends you've survived the war with, everywhere you go, complete strangers on the street are approaching you for a heart to heart or to discuss life lessons. That's the impression I got from the ridiculously autistic and creepy NPC dialogue.

It's a simulation of walking through downtown San Fran, and having crackheads word vomit their life story at you.

 

[Moths]

From what I've seen from gameplay videos, they took the wrong lessons from KOTOR 2 and plastered that situational dialogue into literally everything in the most autistic way possible.

Instead of a conversation at home/the ebon hawk with a small handful of friends you've survived the war with, everywhere you go, complete strangers on the street are approaching you for a heart to heart or to discuss life lessons. That's the impression I got from the ridiculously autistic and creepy NPC dialogue.

"Hello random passerby let me tell you all of my life problems so as to clearly outline the context of questid::GEN001"

 

[Molly White's Breast Milk]

"Hello random passerby let me tell you all of my life problems so as to clearly outline the context of questid::GEN001"

After a little research I've found that the guy who did the Interesting NPC mod for Skyrim was hired by Bethesda to consult on dialogue and it fucking tells. That mod is full of over-sharing NPCs that take 20 minutes to run out of dialogue options or to give you a stupid quest. Watch a playthrough of the mod on youtube and compare it to Starfield and you'll see it's the same writing style.

 

[Drain Todger]

From what I've seen from gameplay videos, they took the wrong lessons from KOTOR 2 and plastered that situational dialogue into literally everything in the most autistic way possible.

Instead of a conversation at home/the ebon hawk with a small handful of friends you've survived the war with, everywhere you go, complete strangers on the street are approaching you for a heart to heart or to discuss life lessons. That's the impression I got from the ridiculously autistic and creepy NPC dialogue.

Yes, that is exactly how it's written.

This is my current ship, the Chuckwagon, which is very sluggish to turn with its nearly 10k cargo capacity, but can still just barely dogfight:






Starfield is a bit of a mixed bag for me.

Pros:

• Amazing sound effect design. I love the ship engine noises and the gun sound effects, and the way firearms have Battlefield-like short reverb indoors.
• Inon Zur's kickass soundtrack.
• Some of the companion questlines are kind of touching.
• Nice ship/building art and hard surface modeling, but the heightmapped terrain can be a bit muddied and flat at times, and foliage doesn't really stick out. There are times where you will zoom into a console and all the little screws and buttons and be like "What poor 3D contractor in war-torn Ukraine slaved over this for hours?"
• I do like the ship-building and habitat construction, but I honestly wish there were a lot more parts. This is very simplistic compared to what I'm used to, and the colony management shares the same horrible inventory problems as the player character and their ship.
• The gunfights are pretty fun and Fallout 4-esque. Boarding always makes you feel like an unstoppable badass, especially if you've got a Magstorm and are just Metal Storming everyone into Swiss cheese.
• The ship combat is decent, kind of Freelancer-esque, but with a power redistribution mechanic (I've honestly never been a fan of those). All the ships are very sluggish to turn, however. They turn like boats; there's a sweet spot mid-throttle where they turn faster, but at full or zero throttle, they turn slowest. There are no "light fighters" in this game. The smallest ship you can fly is still basically an interstellar-capable gunship with a turning radius like a school bus.

Cons:

• Retarded Woke ESG bullshit and sneering, clay-faced, hormonally imbalanced, uncanny valley NPCs with giant chins speaking horrible, flat, phoned-in, Netflix-level snarky dialogue written by utterly incompetent shit-hack non-writers. Every character overshares and spills their guts and tells you their life story at the drop of a hat with hundreds of hours of boring-ass expository dialogue just like the retards in Mass Effect: Andromeda.
• The writing of the intro sequence is the most boring shit I have ever seen. This is from the company that gave us the iconic cart ride and dragon attack of Helgen. What the fuck is this Mass Effect ripoff shit? It's like touching the Prothean Beacon, but without the intrigue of Saren shooting his friend Nihlus. It's fucking STUPID. Why should I care about these artifacts? There's no practical matter here of any concern to the audience. It's forced plot coupons just because. Fetch another artifact, receive more plot. Fuck you! Go die in a ditch!
• A few glaring bugs remain (sometimes, the sounds from in-flight 40mm grenades will play in a loop, for instance), but I only had one CTD so far. I've encountered floating NPCs, enemies clipped outside ship hulls (especially in the hostage rescue missions; there's one ship hab where, if enemies spawn in it, they will spawn outside the geometry), floating objects, asteroids stuck to my ship and following it around across multiple jumps (I used the console to disable them), and, in some cases, entirely missing geometry upon cell load (like the desk missing from the ship technician's shop in Akila, or the HVAC housings missing from the vent fans in an alley in Neon).
• Dialogue that still has the old in-production names for certain locations in it, and subtitles that often don't match because they re-scripted so many parts. Fucking sloppy.
• The UI is atrocious radial menu console garbage and has too much tabbing back and forth.
• The inventory management is a chore. Between the stupid vendors having such limited currency and the sheer lack of Skyrim-like infinite chests, loot is hard to get rid of without just plain dropping it somewhere. Storage boxes at outposts have a teeny tiny capacity and you have to build dozens of them just to be able to gather a respectable quantity of material, especially for the shipyard material dropoff mini-quests and stuff.
• Lots of missed opportunities here and there.
• As usual, the lockpick minigame is just padding the playtime.
• Badly unoptimized, but it runs fine on my system (I have a supercomputer with a 4090, all-SSD storage and 192 gigs of RAM, it doesn't count).
• No super ultrawide support (32:9 aspect ratio) without hex editing that leaves nasty letterboxing here and there and scope overlays with the edges of the texture cut off and the world still visible.
• STARBORN!?! Bethesda, you lazy motherfuckers.

The plot in this game is often completely pants-on-head retarded.

So, I'm going to put this behind spoilers, but I just have to say it, because of how stupid it is.

Spoiler: Retardation

I just beat the Freestar quest line, and there's an entire plot line where we find out that Ron Hope, the head of HopeTech, one of the ship manufacturers in the game, was involved with a conspiracy to poison farmland with a compound that transmutes soil into valuable minerals at the cost of making it barren, and then hiring mercenaries to force people off their farms and then mine these minerals. The whole thing is dripping with Outer Worlds-style full-blown smug Marxism and environmentalism, where the player is invited to beat up on a rich, elitist, exploitative entrepreneur (voiced by Wes fucking Johnson) just because they can, and then, when the inevitable happens and you refuse his attempted bribery and try and arrest him, he goes down in a gunfight like a chump, and there are no repercussions for the player at all.

This is stupid. It's beyond moronical. The writers have contrived a conflict while ignoring the facts of their own setting. Three things immediately come to mind.

• A substance that turns soil into industrial quantities of metals is scientifically implausible. This is Tiberium-level handwavium. Either the elements are there, or they aren't. In fact, the setting has abundant fusion reactors, so industrial transmutation and recycling of materials should be entirely feasible and cheap... in fixed locations, in a factory setting. Look up Bernard Eastlund's fifty-year-old paper on the Fusion Torch.
• If you do have such a magical substance, why in the maximum fuck would you distribute it on farmland, instead of one of the many uninhabited (and, indeed, uninhabitable) planets all over the goddamn place?
• THERE ARE METALS EVERYWHERE. Blow up an asteroid. It's full of iron. Hell, do a few jumps, and you'll encounter enough recyclable station debris from the Colony War to build hundreds of ships. It's free fucking metal! HOLY FUCK! Ron Retard would have been money ahead if he'd just hired the garbage scow guys from Planetes to scoop up all the FREE METAL.

So, in the end, I didn't shoot Ron Hope because he was a capitalist. I shot him because he was a moron.

There are so many things that the game flirts with, here and there, in little radiant encounters, that should be full-fledged features. One time, I landed on Toliman II, ignoring the warning in orbit about the Terrormorphs, because I wanted to go hunting Terrormorphs so I could pose for a selfie with their carcasses. You know, the usual. I encountered a Survivalist NPC whose partner was lying dead on the ground next to him who wanted help getting back to his ship while avoiding the Terrormorphs. Cue two-kilometer trek through the deadliest frozen-ass boreal forest in the Settled Systems while escorting an NPC and shooting any wildlife that get near. That one little bit was more immersive than most of the repetitive Travel from Point A to Point B, Kill everyone at Point B, return to Point A murderhobo quests that the actual quest-givers pawn off on you.

After playing Stormworks and seeing the appeal of a Search-and-Rescue gameplay loop, it would actually be cool if Starfield, perhaps as a DLC questline, incorporated an SAR faction that you could join and made it so that ship infirmaries actually had "casualty slots", and you could find people who'd sent distress calls, treat their injuries (literally just use the same minigame as the Persuade mechanic but with your medical skills and different dialogue), and then cart them back to your ship and then back to a hospital, like The Clinic. For a game obviously written by SJWs with a full-blown liberal humanist bent, where every villain has some Freudian excuse for villainy like being abused and abandoned as a child, and every aesop is aimed at teaching the player the intrinsic value of human life, it's ironic that most of your actual interactions with this world involve artfully pasting people's brains all over the ceiling with a rifle with a stock sculpted by a woodworking god. Speaking of which, damn, the guns sure look cool.



Also, in Akila, there is a shopkeeper who inexplicably looks like Terry O'Quinn.



People have been saying the game's "graphics are bad". What the fuck? Are we playing the same game? The cities look amazing! Get a new GPU. Well, admittedly, some of the planet terrain is very drab and fogged-over and covered with an annoying color cast, but the hand-created areas have all sorts of fine details.




This game is not just an ordinary shitpile. It's a glorious Cyberpunk 2077-level shitpile with glimmers of greatness peeking through, right underneath. It will take legions of modders an absolutely herculean effort over many years to unfuck it, but even if they do, it will still be tainted by the abysmal dialogue writing and loading screens galore.

 

[Epoch]

People have been saying the game's "graphics are bad". What the fuck? Are we playing the same game? The cities look amazing! Get a new GPU. Well, admittedly, some of the planet terrain is very drab and fogged-over and covered with an annoying color cast, but the hand-created areas have all sorts of fine details.

Lots of detail doesn't equal good art direction, and this game's art direction is ass blasted colours hidden behind 3 or 4 layers of blur filters with blown out black levels on top from a shitty LUT. The game is detailed, but ugly as sin. Also NPCs don't have subsurface scattering, still, that's why they look like clay golems.

 

[Molly White's Breast Milk]

Also NPCs don't have subsurface scattering, still, that's why they look like clay golems.

Skyrim has had a subsurface scattering mod since 2017. Bethesda takes another L to Chad modders.

 

[Epoch]

Skyrim has had a subsurface scattering mod since 2017. Bethesda takes another L to Chad modders.

ENBSeries has had it for longer, and people used to fake it with textures before that. No excuse from Bethesda.

 

[Male Idiot]

People have been saying the game's "graphics are bad". What the fuck? Are we playing the same game? The cities look amazing! Get a new GPU. Well, admittedly, some of the planet terrain is very drab and fogged-over and covered with an annoying color cast, but the hand-created areas have all sorts of fine details.

The textures are sharp... but it is all brown. The entire game looks like it was put through a shit-piss filter.

It isn't just drab, it is the antithesis of colour. Warhammer and Fallout games set in wastelands look more appealing. Not even real life spacecraft are this drab.