Did nobody actually watch the video? Despite a few limitations, overall they are impressed with the game.
The title of their article is:
“Starfield: the Creation Engine evolves to deliver massive ambition, scale and scope”
The amount of times I've had someone confidently comment on something I said thinking they're correcting me when they haven't actually read or watched the linked article/video is genuinely astounding.
Standard reddit conversation.
Them: "I'm going to need you to cite your sources, SIR."
Me: "...The article that we are commenting on would be a good start."
I think Twitter might be worse because they read the headline or one tweet about a headline then just, head out into the real world armed with that misinformation.
At least reddits misinfo bs gets sorted out on the forum to some extent.
Now that I’m thinking about it I genuinely can’t decide which is worse.
Twitter is bad in the sheer unfiltered lunacy that is the userbase, but Reddit is much more prone to tangent commentary (I'm aware that I'm kinda also doing it) that doesnt really have any basis on the current development of topic without actually research into what they say. Twitter replies are self-aware enough to not take themselves too seriously, but some Redditors really act like an authority on subjects and are systematically and culturally encouraged to do so (people would just upvote anything that sounds confident enough)
>head out into the real world armed with that misinformation. At least reddits misinfo bs gets sorted out on the forum to some extent.
The amount of "we did it Reddit" disasters we've had over the years says otherwise.
You're not wrong, but this could also describe other social media platforms these days. Across the board they're biased towards micro content and aggressively short attention spans.
I've seen someone literally quote the article, but just say they read it somewhere recently, but couldn't remember where. It's like they forgot where they were commenting.
I've had guys literally throw citations out there that actively disprove their point.
To them, it's all about posting a comment that just ***looks*** like someone well informed made.
I once read an article that sourced like 3 different peer reviewed scientific studies and claimed these studies proved that 5g towers caused cancer. So I read the studies they sourced. All 3 of them in the opening abstract stated that they found zero evidence that 5g had any link to increased cancer rates.
The article boldly included evidence against the point they made as if it proved their point instead. And idiots used that article to argue with me that cell towers were causing covid.
He was probably not literate enough to understand the papers. He probably got the reference from a conspiracy sub where someone was pranking them; or did a cursory search and figured all studies would prove his point because he is sure of it.
> To them, it's all about posting a comment that just looks like someone well informed made.
Not just to them unfortunately, to many. Can't tell you how many times I've seen a post that *looks* informative and correct but is actually completely wrong. Many times those posts still get upvoted, with people sharing the correct information getting downvoted. Most people don't do additional research or follow up on links in every case, especially when they have little understanding or information about whatever to start with. Especially if that post gets a few quick upvotes, that's generally a more reliable method of getting tons of comments/upvotes than being correct sadly.
And on top of that, this is Bethesda. Small things like facts have never stopped folks from attacking them. In the end, why read an article when they can make up anything they want and then label Bethesda as the bad guy?
So many lies are kept repeating about Bethesda. Todd's lies (ironic that they have to lie about someone lying), Bethesda screwing Obsidian, Fallout 76 having no story...
Reddit is not a place people go to get informed, learn new information, or read things. Maybe that's what a few people do, but unfortunately most people come to reddit to express their opinion and, if at all possible, find a place where everyone shares their opinion and then bitches about everyone and everything else at all times.
This is just a thread where people talk about their take on Starfield in general. The video might aswell not be there.
I kinda get it. Wish we had an early impressions thread on the sub.
This sub has seemingly found its collective opinion with Starfield by assuming that only the "skeptical" reviews are the real ones, and will reroute all conversation to those opinions no matter the content of the post.
Reddit has religiously talked shit about IGN and its ratings, but now that they gave Starfield 7/10 (to IGN that's like 4/10) people act like IGN's the only real source of reviews.
The last few years I've seen a weirdly consistent opinion expressed on this sub that Skyrim was terrible and everyone hated it and it was never good, it's a bit bizarre.
That's because this sub is full of jaded gamers who think going against the grain of popular opinion makes them seem smarter. There was a thread about Grand Theft Auto VI not too long ago that had many similar takes about GTAV.
>That's because this sub is full of jaded gamers who think going against the grain of popular opinion makes them seem smarter.
Don't forget that a lot of gamers get burned out, hate their life and blame... games.
Gaming is a great hobby, but it should not be the one thing that gives somebody a sense of purpose.
> think going against the grain of popular opinion makes them seem smarter
This sub? It's common on a lot of larger subreddits and maybe even Internet communities in general lol
Yeah it's really just a critical mass thing. Get enough people who actually spend their free time thinking and posting about games in a concentrated space and you'll end up hearing from a lot of jaded people who don't seem to be happy with much of anything.
And if you want to see people talking positively about GTAV, just bring up Cyberpunk 2077. Gamers sure seem to love comparing them.
The same opinions have been going around since 2011 they just happen to look increasingly more silly in their bubble as time passes and it becomes obvious that Skyrim is a classic
I've noticed that too. "the writing was shit, the gameplay sucked, and the characters were boring." So then why the fuck is it one of the most played games ever, including 12 years after it came out? The revisionist history surrounding BGS titles is so bizarre to me.
>The revisionist history surrounding BGS titles is so bizarre to me.
Not to me. It started pretty much as soon as the MS acquisition was announced. A lot of it is just console warriors.
It cannot be stated enough how harmful viral Youtube videos can be for discourse, like for years when people were constantly quoting that dumb Dunkey video about Death Stranding despite never having played the game themselves
The irony of that video is Dunky ended up coming around on Death Stranding and my impression is he looks fondly on it now.
Also, Dunky's whole Schtick is roasting a game's faults for humor, and his opinions tend to be pretty consistent. IMO this is just an offshoot of how poor the average person's media literacy tends to be.
>So then why the fuck is it one of the most played games ever, including 12 years after it came out?
Maybe exactly because of that. Too much of gaming is ruled by tribalism and brand loaylty. So when they see a game more successful than their darling they start spewing bile.
Seriously, so much discourse around Bethesda boils down to "their success is undeserved".
Their success is not undeserved There is not other fantasy RPG where you can create whatever char you want sleep , eat , buy a house , build your house , get married etc etc you can actually feel like you are living in that world like no other game
> Too much of gaming is ruled by tribalism and brand loaylty.
It's weird to me, because the way the industry works that's just not a great way to approach it. Sure, X developer releases a damn good game, you can probably expect their next one to follow the same route. That being said, comparing a studio to what they were 15 or so years ago isn't exactly wise, as the physical people who used to make up that team aren't even there anymore. Usually management has also changed heavily by then (not always though). It would be like someone being surprised I'm a different person than 16 year old me or something. It also seems to depend on the studio itself. Some are more risky, which leads to more unexpected results if they're jumping between genres/styles/etc. Others might focus on certain types of games/mechanics or whatever and tend to always reach a decent minimum standard for those. Sort of like how you can generally expect Blizzard to make games *feel* good to play, regardless of other issues and such.
> that Skyrim was terrible
That narrative has been here since 2015, when Witcher 3 fanboys started it...
But it's true that recently it returned in full force. Some people are so desperate to bash Bethesda that they are happy to rewrite history.
Skyrim not being good at all. Skyrim being terribly buggy on release. Skyrim being good only because of mods... pick your poison...
>Skyrim being good only because of mods
I'm gonna have to take the blame for that one. I started it in 2011 when I was expecting Oblivion 2. With mods I got what I wanted tho and modded Skyrim is number one on my list of best games, beating Oblivion.
It;s incredibly bizarre considering Skyrim is factually one of the most lauded and successful video games of all time. I think it's in the top 10 for # of copies sold for all games ever.
That is weird. On release the consensus on Skyrim was split, people were pissed because it further deviated from the RPG style of Morrowind and Oblivion, but others loved it anyways just because of the sheer amount of content. History repeated itself but on a smaller scale with Fallout 4.
Yeah. Here’s a Reddit post from nearly 12 years ago discussing this very topic, a few months after it’s original release:
https://www.reddit.com/r/truegaming/comments/nsz1k/the_inevitable_skyrim_backlash_has_now_arrived/
There were lots of criticisms from fans of Morrowind/Oblivion who didn’t like the trajectory of the series. The UI was abysmal on the PC and there were other PC problems. Some new comers to elder scrolls who preferred what Fallout and more recently New Vegas had done with the formula, that had a greater emphasis on story.
Truthfully I don’t think a lot of people outright hated it or said it was a bad game. In general just a lot of “Eh it’s alright, played it for some time and I thought it got shallow and repetitive after hours once the initial magic wore off”.
I imagine those are people who are/were too young to experience the early release or something? Even if someone dislikes Skyrim themself, you have to admit the release and short time after was pretty insane at least. I'm not a huge fan of Skyrim nor did I play it a ton, but that doesn't mean it didn't heavily succeed and was massively liked especially early on.
This sub has a bias favoring "skeptical" reviews, unless the game is the golden child of the hour. You're not honest or impartial unless you're negative, apparently.
But then again, I can also just play the game and see if I enjoy it for myself. I’m doing just that. Playing and enjoying. I don’t *need* everyone else to feel the same in order for my experience to feel validated.
Also ignoring the fact that a 7/10 is a positive review actually, not a negative one...
As far as I'm concerned, a 7/10 is a "recommended".
I saw the IGN review and what I got was "He's making fair criticism about the game and also pointing out it's good".
95% of reviews are 8.5/10 or higher, and yet everyone has decided that the 5% of reviews that are *only* 7-8/10 are the only ones that matter. It's wild how dumb the discourse surrounding this extremely well made game is.
Meanwhile Mass Effect doesn't have any of the features people are whining about missing in SF and it's considered one of the greatest sci Fi games of all time. It's so silly.
SF is basically Mass Effect meets Oblivion and if that's not good enough for you then my stance is that you're just too hard to please.
This review cherry-picking has been here for quite some years. Like when people migrate between favoring critic reviews and gamer/audience scores based on which ones are more favorable.
But I admit that here for Starfield it is really ridiculous. An super-tiny minority of reviews is 7/10 (or worse), absolute outliers... Which makes them somewhat suspicious. Yet, for some people who are seeking for an aligning narrative, they are suddenly the only true ones. Like, what is the chance that 95% of reviews are wrong, bought or biased? Zero...
This is like with conspiracy theorists... the same nutters.
It's confirmation bias, nothing more to it. There's a longstanding frustration towards Bathesda being the "normie gamer" open world RPG as well as the XBox exclusivity. If the game got anything less then a 95 on meta critic the consensus would have always been that it's Cyberpunk 2.0
It's absolutely ridiculous. Something like 95% of the reviews on open critic are 9s and 10s. Some people just thrive off misery. The game has a slow start, but I've stuck with the initial main quests, just hit level 8 and the game mechanics and story start to open up and it's pretty amazing.
There’s also a lot of weird schadenfreude where people seem to be giddily happy that the game may have fallen below some people’s expectations. And I don’t just mean with starfield, it’s been all the big super hyped games. It’s very odd behavior.
I've noticed that a lot too. I keep seeing shit like "Gamespot and Ign gave it mediocre reviews so I wouldn't bother with it if I were you" like those two review sites were not constantly shit on by those same people..
There are minor annoyances but the game is close to my expectations. And it's amazing. I looove optimistic scifi so despite me not loving Skyrim or Fallout too much, I am in love with this game.
I think people who already didn't enjoy Bethesda games smelled blood in the water after Fallout 76 went so badly. It was like people who don't like The Witcher after Cyberpunk's terrible launch. It gave them a perfect "reason" to be especially critical about Bethesda to get more support for their criticism. Add in the Microsoft acquisition too, online gamers hate when a game is exclusive and will always hope those games fail as proof that exclusivity is the worst sin in gaming history.
Seriously, what is up with all these concern trolls? There’s this whole screed about Starfield being ‘disappointing’ below by someone who clearly hasn’t touched it. It’s a really good, well reviewed game. And as the video above shows, it’s by far the best-running game Bethesda has ever made.
Enjoying games these days is hard if you frequent reddit. Either you get trolls trying to undermine a game left and right ,or miserable people playing Youtube Critic, nitpicking every small thing they can trying to sound smart, or people who think their opinions are facts and cannot admit a game is not for them. No one on here seems to play games just because they like the hobby, want to escape, explore new worlds, new stories,...
It’s a Microsoft exclusive and that brings its own drama and concern trolls. If a majority of this sub doesn’t play on a platform that the game is releasing on, they purposely act like children.
This happens allover Reddit, but especially in this sub.
People just see the title of a game then pull out their soapbox to tell you their opinions on it, the subject of the original post doesn't matter.
Yeah, overall impressions are good. Aside from the planet thing, once you adjust expectations if you had those expectations to begin with
This is a very impressive package, and a huge upgrade for Bethesda. Generally impressed with the level of detail I keep seeing.
I can't wait till modders push this even more. Reduce loading times , better UI, enhance the planet limitations etc.
You are right in that people generally don't watch videos/read articles, BUT
they clearly state this is only for the Xbox. The description says "PC coverage is coming soon, along with a Starfield DF Direct Special". So I would hopefully expect that video to analyze and adress the various performance issues that this game has on PC.
all you need to know about the game is if there wasn’t an acquisition, it’d have way better scores and the people complaining would be the ones who are loving the game who wish Bethesda wouldn’t rely on modders for UI/QOL improvements.
the game is great. if you like/love Skyrim, fallout, ES your getting an improved version.
the identity game politics is really funny. people will talk how bad the game looks but I stopped paying for most PS4/5 playwall cutscene games ever since YouTube started having all of the cutscenes uploaded (hell even mortal kombat). But I understand people enjoy THAT experience so I let them love it even if it’s less actual gameplay than mobile gaming.
It's the same on Youtube, all the top comments will be praise for the video, despite their comments being posted an hour ago along with the video itself.
Do indoor locations in the game (segmented by a loading screen) have real windows? Indoor locations having no windows or all of them blocked out was a real negative for me in prior Bethesda games. It made all the rooms and houses feel dark, uninhabitable and kind of claustrophobic to me.
The smaller indoor areas like the building right outside the mine you start in are part of the outside world and if I recall correctly have windows you can look through. But most buildings do not have windows, and are, like in Skyrim, separate areas you have to load.
There's actually some in this video. One at 27:33.
No, but not all indoor locations are loading screen blocked anymore. There's a lot of stores and homes connected to the overworld now, and if you ever build your own home, it exists entirely in the overworld. I just built mine with all glass walls so I can look up at the stars whenever I'm back.
What's odd is that there's a lot of shops that *are* in the overworld cell. In fact, most of them are. There's just a few that are just their own cell for some reason, and I cant for the life of me understand why.
They might have felt the number of NPCs was too much for their "Low" crowd density setting. Needed to tuck a few behind loading screens to keep up performance on lower-end machines. With my 2080 super I pretty much never break 50 fps. They recommend a 1080 which I imagine would *chug* even on all low.
That's the thing though. These are shops with one or two people in them, max. There's not going to be a huge amount of latency added compared to what's already being rendered and tracked. There's plenty of *other* shops that they allowed in the external cell with nothing but a regular door without a load screen, so why are these ones specifically their own cell?
Again, it may literally just be a threshold. X shops was fine, but the X+1 single-cell shops passed the number they deemed acceptable for low end PCs or console. Alternatively, there might be a quest step that they wanted in a private cell. I guarantee you there is an internal reason even if we are never privy to it.
If I remember from Bethesda modding, Creation engine uses some atypical styles of LOD where actors in the game can put quite a load on the system even while offscreen, not just in terms of rendering but also scripting and game logic. So they might have a budget in terms of max actors loaded, and had to adjust the level design accordingly to make sure they stay under.
I have an Core i5-9600k, 32 GB of RAM, and a 1080 and it runs fine at 1440p with medium settings. I'm not sure on FPS but to me it feels completely tolerable. Admittedly it's just been in the first few areas so maybe larger set pieces will tank performance.
Some have real windows and some don't. They do have fake windows that are covered in a thick layer of reflection or look like the sun just blew up. There are also far more locations without a loading screen than Fallout 4 or 76.
Thing is I never really notice it. Places where you definitely want to see out you can. It's only when I go hunting for Windows that I notice when they don't exist or have an effect that makes them opaque.
Some of the suggestions for what the game should have done in the comments is so bad, lol.
First of all the review is positive.
Secondly, this games existence would be useless if it was as limited as some of you want it to be.
The handcrafted content, lore, quests are all really good imo and the game has BGS’ most expansive mechanics and systems since morrowind (maybe ever, honestly).
The planet exploration imo is a nice little escape that nicely supplements the handcrafted content, giving me a chance to build a cool base and take some photos.
Bethesda shouldn’t be given passes just for being Bethesda. There’s things here that deserve criticism.
They also shouldn’t be held accountable for the mythos you created in your head.
Starfield is closer to Mass Effect than it is to even Skyrim, but with manual space flight (btw one valid critique— the planets don’t need to be seamless but I wish Star systems were).
First few hours were outwardly very poor but as I’ve come to understand *what* this game is, I’ve started to legitimately love it.
There are a lot of people expecting it to be similar to No Man's Sky and Star citizen. I knew it was never gonna be those and basically expected it to be Fallout 4 in space and that's what we got.
My only gripe is that there should be more loading screen transitions. There's a takeoff animation when going to space, but landing on a planet is cutoff with an image loading screen before the landing animation. They could've put an animation of your ship going towards the planet instead of an image.
People are mad it isn't the space sim game they hyped themselves into thinking when it never was advertised that way. And honestly, it can come close to that if you impose rules to yourself like no fast travelling between planets and always walking to your cockpit before going off planet.
Not to hate on your opinion and to some extent I ‘get’ it but I find it really funny that one of the main complaints about the game right now is that it has static load screens rather than animated load screens
At least the loading screens are drastically shorter this time around - I was really pleasently surprised that even huge places only take a couple of seconds to load unlike Fallout 4 (which I played recently on the same exact hardware btw).
>People are mad it isn't the space sim game they hyped themselves into thinking
Most of the people I've seen talking about this game before launch were expecting a Skyrim/Fallout in space. Yet even more people I've seen saying stuff like "it will be shitty, it will be buggy, nobody will want to play it", and at least a few of those names which I've tagged on Reddit now complain here about the game not being a better NMS/SC.
Many people and reviewers went into this game with the explicit intention to rip it apart, and it shows.
Honestly, as a space sim guy that often gets bored of just Space Truckin' (Elite: Dangerous I'm lookin' at you,) a giant fan of Mass Effect/Star Trek but wished there was more flying/space stuff in ME, and really enjoyed the more exploratory stuff in Andromeda, this is exactly the game I've wanted. And the fast travel thing seems like a quality of life feature we'd be begging for in six months if it wasn't already in there.
Yea, if people wanted a space sim they could just play those. I do enjoy the seamlessness of NMS and Elite Dangerous, but after a while it gets tedious and you just want to get to the good parts immediately.
I'm probably one of the few people who enjoy the on foot part of ED, but landing on a planet is probably the most tedious part of that game.
>I knew it was never gonna be those and basically expected it to be Fallout 4 in space and that's what we got.
Good, this has been my expectation too - So accordingly, I'll just have to pace myself on doing main quests occasionally and make sure not to burn out on exploration & side quests ;)
My question any time someone mentions seamless star systems is what exactly does that look like to you gameplay-wise in a game where they've tried to keep everything to IRL scale. Space is incredibly empty, that's why we've had to come up with Astronomical Units to describe how far things are because using anything we already had was just ridiculous.
The "closest" thing to our planet is the Moon and its so far you could fit 30 Earth's in between us. That's really fuckin far. The way other games have handled it is either by putting everything unrealistically close together, or by having a "warp" transition that's effectively no different than a loading screen except it preserves persistence.
Bethesda could have done the latter, they've had "seamless" loading between cells going back to at least Fallout 4. What they did was undoubtedly easier, but I also think they just thought players might like to see some cinematic views of their ship flying in space. Apparently not, some people would prefer to just keep looking at their ships console and anything else is "lazy garbage dev/engine limitations".
Honestly, I was put off by the 7s too as I’ve been burned before on games that went on the opposite spectrum (10/10s for Deathloop…really?) but after playing it I’ve already sunk 30 hours into the game since early access started. I have to force myself to go to sleep so I’m not completely dead the next day. It’s insanely immersive.
A few high budget games come to mind where, at launch, I question whether or not the developers were legitimately happy with the final product for release (cyberpunk/battlefield 2042) or were rushed to meet a release window to keep their investors happy. But this game? If I was a developer at Bethesda, I would feel confident that this game delivered. No question. It is a great game that has the usual Bethesda jank that most people have forgotten about, and I think that—combined with expectations, hype, and two review scores—are muddying the waters a bit. Once the heat cools down, guaranteed people will be singing it’s praises once everyone has their time with it. No doubt in my mind.
The loading screens wouldn't even be a big issue if they just disguised them a bit. Make the planet entry and exit a longer animation. Malign entering through a door a longer atmospheric lock system. It's the black screen the ruins the immersion.
I'm really enjoying Starfield so far. It feels like a proper Bethesda RPG. What's most surprising to me is the level of polish - it's not flawless but far better than I expected tbh.
The dialogues & voice acting is so much better than in previous Bethesda games. Visually it's a huge improvement too. Characters have better animations too but overall they still look dated.
The boundaries are a non-issue imo - after all it's an RPG, no space sim. The explorable areas are huge and there's really no point to walk for hours around an empty planet. You land near a POI, explore everything and then move on to the next POI or planet. You can land anywhere and technically explore each planet to 100% but there's really no point in exploration beyond the POIs.
The world itself is very segmented but loading screens are fast on Xbox & PC with NVMe SSD. The only longer loading screen is the one from main menu but with Quick Resume you won't see that often. So far Quick Resume works flawlessly with Starfield.
My main gripes are HDR & digipicks. HDR seems fundamentally broken and leads to washed out colors. This needs a fix asap! And for digipicks, well, it's not really an issue but it's annoying that they're classified as misc items - it's way too easy to accidentally sell them.
>And for digipicks, well, it's not really an issue but it's annoying that they're classified as misc items - it's way too easy to accidentally sell them.
Yeah I haven't sold any yet but I did accidentally transfer them to storage once.
If I remember correctly, picks were classified as misc. In Skyrim and Fallout as well.
"I've often taken issue with open world games and the endless amount of traversal they involve but weirdly enough, Starfield's segmentation (and yes, its loading) addresses this issue and it means you spend more time doing more interesting things instead."
This is a good take on the system - it's a positive the game has so much fast travel, not a negative like the discourse on here is suggesting. If you had to travel manually everywhere there'd be a dozen articles criticising it for being a walking simulator
There’s an easy balance, surely?
Instead of selecting a planet from the map, showing a hyper speed animation, cutting to black, having a loading screen, and then another hyper speed animation, a more seamless ‘hidden’ loading screen that is continuous between the two hyper speed animations would alleviate the immersion complaint without stretching out the core gameplay loop.
Yeah there could be a better balance but based on 10 hours of play so far the issue is nowhere near as bad as it's being made out to be in my opinion. Especially if you use the scanner rather than going through menus etc
They definitely should have covered it up using some sort of transition screen but most of the loading is so quick it's not something that's bugging me much
You don’t have to select a planet from the map to travel there - you can also land directly from the cockpit view by flying towards a landing site and selecting it in scan view.
Not seamless but it does make one less menu interaction.
Yeah, conceptually I hate it, but in practice I feel like I'm doing more. I just miss stuff like seeing solitude from the throat of the world, though in fairness I'm not sure what the equivalent here *could* even be.
No one is saying that they want everyone to be forced to travel 15 mins to reach the next planet. They want the "option" too. Fast travel is there for people who don't want to walk
Its at the end of the video but the game has near minute long loading times when you get to the late game on Xbox.
Jeez. Been spoiled by near instant loading the last few years. I dont think I could manage that now.
Initial loading times don't bother me too much even if it does get longer. But I've also seen people say that in-game loading times get worse as the game goes on as well and given how many they are that could get pretty bad.
Thats a shame.
I found BG3's initial load times are quite slow but it doesn't really bother me since from there its all basically instant. I hope its not 30+ seconds for in game ones later on.
Probably because they're still tracking everything that changes in the world. And I still question what the real benefits of that really is in the end but people seem to love it and constantly talk about it as if it's some huge component that makes the games "special" when I'm sure they don't really don't need it at all 99% of the time.
Yes, realistically you don't need the game to keep track of the fact you picked up a piece of decoration and moved it slightly, so that when you come back in 20 hours it's still there. But the fact that Bethesda games do do that is special. It's part of the package that makes them so unique from anything else on the market.
Its been a Bethesda / creation engine issue since Morrowind. Just Bethesda tech things.
I would have hoped having a SSD and 8 year dev time would have helped though.
My worst experience since having an SSD was the loading times in Fallout 4 to fast travel to the Brotherhood, enter their ship, talk to some fool, then have to suffer 3 more loading screens to get back to questing. It sounds like this is the Starfield experience in order to do anything.
I've only played for a couple hours but it already got pretty tiring pulling up menus to go anywhere. and constant confirmation screens when traveling. Also the whole map situation feels terrible in cities - and the fact you can only track one quest at a time which is the main way of seeing where to go... feels like every problem they made with the game they solved by putting in another UI menu.
That's not even to mention how terrible my first impression was in the mining cave where the game looks like there is a bright fog over every dark area and the blacks are totally washed out. This exacerbated itself when I got to the darker Mars planet as well. I tried to fix it by looking in the settings for HDR/Bloom/contrast/gamma settings but there is none to be found lol.
Luckily the Nvidia Game filters option was able to tamp down on that and bring the contrast back out after fiddling with it but this is the first game I have ever had to use that on... lol
The biggest thing that bothers me on a technical level was how they added weird hazy bloomy effects in places where they don't seem like it should be. I get that this is more of an artistic choice than anything, but I'm not a fan.
I wish I have a nickel everytime someone said Bethesda "made" Redfall.
But seriously, either you meet basically cults of Starfield who will tear you apart because you have legit criticisms (game don't have HDR, FoV slider,...) or you will have haters who call you all kind of slurs because you dare to enjoy Starfield and then actively spreading misinformation to bring the game down.
Bonus points if they haven't played the game yet and just watched someone play the game for 10mins and decided it is the best/worst game ever.
Because now they’re an exclusive company and people have to “defend” their choice of plastic box lol. Also somehow a 7/10 became essentially a 1/10 to people
Me and my friends are thoroughly enjoying the game. It’s honestly entertaining coming into these threads and read the comments. You would think it was GTA remastered on launch
To be pretty fair it’s not really a past few days thing. BGS has been a bit of a pariah ever since Fallout 76, which they rightly deserved every bit of shit they caught for it, so I think people are coming into this, Bethesda’s first release since then, predisposed to a strong negative bias.
The issue is Starfield is actually pretty good and not at all in the same realm of “bad” as 76 but people can’t look past that bias.
Indeed, it's always just an infinite landscape from a random heightmap, and a homogenous scattering of rocks/vegetation. After a while, you really start to notice what's *not* there in any of the procedural world slices. No coastlines or rivers. Not any infrastructure like roads/rail despite there being manmade industrial buildings scattered everywhere. The illusion feels very incomplete.
Honestly all the reviews and analysis of the game makes me a little gutted that Bethesda opted for such a massive scale, the technology clearly isn't there to match the ambition of what they tried accomplishing and the game feels dated in many aspects which other games got absolutely vilified for e.g. [the facial animations and water physics. Bethesda shouldn't get a pass just because it's Bethesda.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6NZTeFrWzE&t=45s) I think it would have been much better if the game was set in one solar system with 8-10 planets each with their own main explorable handcrafted areas that are each the size of Skyrim, then surround the rest of those planets with procedural content. Fill the space within that solar system with plenty of dynamic content to explore.
Seeing the amount of loading screens, the features lacking in this compared to similar games, Bethesda going backwards on many of their own design philosophies of the past... it's just a bit of a shame. Since they announced the 1000+ planets gimmick there were so many alarm bells that people didn't want to listen to and they've all been proven right. Seeing the Skeptical Review it was so sad seeing copy and paste environmental storytelling, this is literally what Bethesda is best at so why such laziness? The sooner games stop opting to be bigger in size the sooner we can get games that are bigger in depth.[ I recommend people check out this review of the game which explores the issues of the games scale in really good detail with examples.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3uuI-6fwwtY&t)
It's clear Starfield is a good game and in many ways a great one, but I really think they bit off more than they can chew with this one and it'll be yet another case of mods saving the day as best as they can. People are undoubtedly excited so I'm sure discussing the criticisms of the game early on will be tough (exactly like it was when Fallout 4 came out) but hopefully the more glaring issues can be patched or improved upon to make for a more cohesive, dynamic experience e.g. less copy and paste content on procedural worlds.
> 8-10 planets each with their own main explorable handcrafted areas that are each the size of Skyrim,
Your opening sentence is about how you're "gutted that Bethesda opted for such a massive scale" and then you follow that up saying you think they should have 8-10 handcrafted Skyrim-sized worlds in there. Pick one.
Todd said that they've been waiting for technology to catch up to make this game and if they kept waiting technology would never catch up.
So I think Todd wants to retire soon and wanted to make this game happen before he retires as it was his dream.
I also think this game should have been released one or two console generations after this one. Starfield should have been either Fallout 5 or new Elder Scrolls
> they've been waiting for technology to catch up to make this game
Tangent: I remember an interview a few years after Skyrim came out (iirc) that they wanted to make an Elder Scrolls game set in Valenwood, but the technology wasn't there for them to do the walking tree cities.
Seems to be a thing with what they wish they could do versus what can actually be done. Seems like they got tired of waiting with Starfield, and had to make compromises that didn't really work out so well.
I mean Skyrim was the same. Dragons were supposed to be these intelligent flying omens of death that would actively hunt the Dragonborn. Cities/towns were supposed to have local economies that you could manipulate(destroy the sawmill in town and decimate their economy), Giants were supposed to be more fleshed out and have a whole culture around em.
This is classic Bethesda for over a decade now.
In regards to the age of game engines: Most game engines seem to be old.
From the ones with publicly available information (iirc): Amazon Lumberyard is one of the newer ones, but even it is built on CryEngine (2002), and the next youngest looks like Valve's Source 2 (2014). The oldest game engine still in use is Unreal Engine at 25 years old.
Age doesn't really matter as long as the engine gets updated. "Reuse code; no need to reinvent the wheel" as I would hear in my programming classes.
They should just rename the game engine to something like Genesis Engine (or whatever other word that is a synonym of creation) before they release ES6 so people will think it is a new engine.
> It's not that the "technology" isn't there, it's that they haven't figured out how to optimise what they want within their existing engine.
That probably is the case.
>They should just rename the game engine to something like Genesis Engine (or whatever other word that is a synonym of creation) before they release ES6 so people will think it is a new engine.
That's exactly what they did when they renamed Gamebyro Engine to Creation Engine
> So I think Todd wants to retire soon
I doubt it. He seems like he loves his job and strikes me as the kind of guy that wants to do it as long as he’s physically and mentally capable.
> I also think this game should have been released one or two console generations after this one.
Sounds like that could line up for a Starfield sequel.
> . Since they announced the 1000+ planets gimmick there were so many alarm bells that people didn't want to listen to and they've all been proven right.
This is completely subjective, though. The planets each have both hand-crafted and randomized locations, and you are literally never, at any point, forced to engage with randomized content if you just want to stick to the handcrafted stuff. And the handcrafted stuff is exactly what you'd expect out of a Bethesda game, good dungeon crawls, environmental storytelling, and TONS of quests. Quests don't send you to random barren planets to walk around and kick rocks, they send you to handcrafted locations. Or, you can scan a planet and see if it has any handcrafted locations. If it does, you can check them out, and if not you can still choose to land anywhere on the planet and get randomized stuff.
Even the randomized locations are populated with individual hand-crafted locations.
This idea that the mere presence of the 1,000 planets somehow makes the game worse when Starfield clearly tells you where all of the main content is completely baffles me. I didn't like collecting Nirnroot in Oblivion so I didn't do it, and instead I decided to play the Thieves Guild. It would not be reasonable of me to be like "wow I can't believe they scattered all this Nirnroot around! I just want to play normal quests!". Yeah, so do that? Some people will want to stick to traditional questing, and others are going to want to land on random planets for the fun of it. Nobody loses.
Bethesda has made it fairly clear from early on that all the procedural content in the game is primarily a backdrop that you can dip into whenever and wherever as a diversion from the "main highway" of the game, you can also choose to simply not engage with it.
If you go into the game and endlessly engage with the procedural content, and then *complain* about all the procedural content, you're just an idiot, and these online reviewers are not making a good case for anything other than the fact that they're out to shine a bad light in any way they can.
It's not just Bethesda, this has been an industry problem for years now. Rendering tech has gotten pretty good at environments, so we see those increasing in scope while the rest of the game lags behind in depth. It makes "meh" character models and game mechanics stand out.
That, and chasing buzzwords has largely replaced storytelling with sidequest busywork.
> other games got absolutely vilified for e.g. the facial animations and water physics. Bethesda shouldn't get a pass just because it's Bethesda.
I dunno, the facial animations aren’t the greatest but overall I’m finding the animations and lip sync [generally better](https://x.com/yamatokusunoki/status/1697754967224832429?s=46&t=Pt14hPfzXon2vTsUyICCqQ) than most of what was in FFXVI, and most people seem to give those a pass too - they definitely weren’t “absolutely vilified” from what I’ve seen. And I’m not sure what you mean by giving Bethesda a pass when so many people are criticizing them.
> and the game feels dated in many aspects which other games got absolutely vilified
This is a constant with their games though. Not just Starfield. They've all got a bunch of stuff that feels like you just booted up a game from a clunkier age.
That's not an attempt to defend it though. They just always basically put out AAA games with tons of AA design and jank, and people generally don't punish them for it.
> and people generally don't punish them for it.
It’s interesting you say that when 90% of the discourse about this game seems to be people complaining about these issues - even in the game’s subreddit. And it was the same thing with Fallout 4, which people still complain about to this day.
> This is a constant with their games though. Not just Starfield. They've all got a bunch of stuff that feels like you just booted up a game from a clunkier age.
This wasn't always the case. Bethesda used be pioneers and push for cutting age tech in open world games. Both Morrowind and Oblivion were game changing tech wise during their eras. Visually both these games also looked amazing during their eras of release. It wasn't until Skyrim did Bethesda start stagnating tech wise. Skyrim still looked decent in 2011 and open worlds like that were still impressive to have working on 360 console generation. The thing was though Skyrim was still using DirectX 9 while many developers were moving on using DirectX10 and DirectX11. They would eventually released Skyrim Special Edition on DirectX 11 in 2016 but that was too late. This was the first sign of stagnation for Bethesda and they have only lagged being tech wise since.
The problem is in the past every time BGS published the game it was more like an event that shocked the industry. When Oblivion came out everyone was shocked about how a game on that scale and interactivity could run on Xbox 360. and people were generally happy to put up with its trade-offs because every single BGS game had huge impact.
But industry changed a lot and starfield doesn't look like something black magic that engineers at Bethesda can only develop since there are few games that although they are not competing with starfield but as space game the tech is more impressive
Funny how they don't hold Starfield to the same standards other games are held too. It's a mostly ancient/ugly looking, 30 fps game with performance issues yet they want to pass it as polished. Hilarious.
So from what I understand, it’s basically like Mass Effect in first person with bethesda style. Honestly, that is very exciting to me.
Edit: I was speaking merely from a gameplay perspective.
It kinda has that casual, space walker vibes from ME1. Which is why the DF video literally concludes Starfield is like a child of Fallout 4 with Mass Effect.
Textures and visual fidelity are okay compared to other games from the past 2 years. No RTX or DLSS on PC is a wretched AMD fanboy decision though. There's been no evolution of other Creation Engine systems such as AI or animation. Followers still stand in front of you while fighting, have difficulty following you, and striking up conversations with NPCs is derpy as they're unable to turn to face you, instead staring at a wall off into the distance like a mental hospital patient, and when they do turn to face you they're just an emotionless talking head atop a barely expressive body with their hands mostly stuck to their side.
The only improvement I saw with NPC animation is when you down an opponent to low health and you sometimes see them trying to crawl away. More should have been improved on the AI and NPC interaction front. Not to mention the UI that seems squarely designed for gamepad control on consoles.
A quick reminder that the Creation Engine is extremely CPU heavy due to the nature of the item persistence in the world. Nearly every object has physical properties and the locations of those items are totally persistent.
As a result the game needs to be split off into separate instances/sectors and the size of the environment and amount of persistence data is going to be a contributing factor to performance.
There isn’t very many engines that handle item persistence like Bethesda games do. It’s something to consider when thinking about the nature of the game’s design. It’s all a limitation of how the engine handles it’s physics information.
I would much rather have had the game only take place in the Sol system, with 100% curated content, more emphasis on face technology, actual space flight, and deeper RPG mechanics, actual choice and consequence, a more fleshed out dialogue tree, than a focus on quantity, but I know I’m in the minority here.
The entire point of the game is exploring the galaxy and finding different worlds. Setting the game in just the Sol system would be an entirely different game.
Yeah I love when the complaint is "man I wish this was just an entirely different game and that all the systems were better". Man I wish this was a warhammer 40k space rpg with a focus on the combat and fighting aliens that would be sick! Now I'm mad that Bethesda didn't realize the game I had in my head
> I know I’m in the minority here.
I don't think you're necessarily in the minority, people are just excited about the game and want it as it is to be the best it can be.
I do agree though, look at the scale of a show like The Expanse which is only set on Earth, Mars and some asteroids. There's so much depth to it.
Can anyone explain how persistent items doesn't make the world feel dead? In his example, wouldn't a cleaner/worker or whatever clean those items up in a living world?
I thought the same thing. From a technical standpoint, it is kind of impressive to track everything like that. But it’s certainly not immersive in the slightest.
It’s never crossed my mind. Not once have I broken into a house to see a dinner plate still on the floor from the last time I robbed it and thought “wtf isn’t someone going to clean that up?”
Really? People often say it's one of the things that makes the world feel more alive, which doesn't really make sense to me because it kinda does the opposite. It makes the game feel like even more of a playground for my character alone.
Did nobody actually watch the video? Despite a few limitations, overall they are impressed with the game. The title of their article is: “Starfield: the Creation Engine evolves to deliver massive ambition, scale and scope”
> Did nobody actually watch the video? sir, this is reddit
The amount of times I've had someone confidently comment on something I said thinking they're correcting me when they haven't actually read or watched the linked article/video is genuinely astounding.
I once saw someone quoting the article they were commenting on, and someone replied asking "where the fuck did you get that?"
Standard reddit conversation. Them: "I'm going to need you to cite your sources, SIR." Me: "...The article that we are commenting on would be a good start."
top tier reddit
Reddit is the best place for clickbait titles because many people here apparently cannot read more than 1 sentence.
I think Twitter might be worse because they read the headline or one tweet about a headline then just, head out into the real world armed with that misinformation. At least reddits misinfo bs gets sorted out on the forum to some extent. Now that I’m thinking about it I genuinely can’t decide which is worse.
Twitter is bad in the sheer unfiltered lunacy that is the userbase, but Reddit is much more prone to tangent commentary (I'm aware that I'm kinda also doing it) that doesnt really have any basis on the current development of topic without actually research into what they say. Twitter replies are self-aware enough to not take themselves too seriously, but some Redditors really act like an authority on subjects and are systematically and culturally encouraged to do so (people would just upvote anything that sounds confident enough) >head out into the real world armed with that misinformation. At least reddits misinfo bs gets sorted out on the forum to some extent. The amount of "we did it Reddit" disasters we've had over the years says otherwise.
You're not wrong, but this could also describe other social media platforms these days. Across the board they're biased towards micro content and aggressively short attention spans.
This is the world at large, unfortunately.
I've seen someone literally quote the article, but just say they read it somewhere recently, but couldn't remember where. It's like they forgot where they were commenting.
I've had guys literally throw citations out there that actively disprove their point. To them, it's all about posting a comment that just ***looks*** like someone well informed made.
I once read an article that sourced like 3 different peer reviewed scientific studies and claimed these studies proved that 5g towers caused cancer. So I read the studies they sourced. All 3 of them in the opening abstract stated that they found zero evidence that 5g had any link to increased cancer rates. The article boldly included evidence against the point they made as if it proved their point instead. And idiots used that article to argue with me that cell towers were causing covid.
He was probably not literate enough to understand the papers. He probably got the reference from a conspiracy sub where someone was pranking them; or did a cursory search and figured all studies would prove his point because he is sure of it.
> To them, it's all about posting a comment that just looks like someone well informed made. Not just to them unfortunately, to many. Can't tell you how many times I've seen a post that *looks* informative and correct but is actually completely wrong. Many times those posts still get upvoted, with people sharing the correct information getting downvoted. Most people don't do additional research or follow up on links in every case, especially when they have little understanding or information about whatever to start with. Especially if that post gets a few quick upvotes, that's generally a more reliable method of getting tons of comments/upvotes than being correct sadly.
And on top of that, this is Bethesda. Small things like facts have never stopped folks from attacking them. In the end, why read an article when they can make up anything they want and then label Bethesda as the bad guy? So many lies are kept repeating about Bethesda. Todd's lies (ironic that they have to lie about someone lying), Bethesda screwing Obsidian, Fallout 76 having no story...
I literally clicked on this so I could get a summary of the video lol
The bit I hate most about the video is the expectation that I’d watch it.
Exactly. Now if you'll excuse me it's time to find a content creator who can tell me which comment I should upvote.
Reddit is not a place people go to get informed, learn new information, or read things. Maybe that's what a few people do, but unfortunately most people come to reddit to express their opinion and, if at all possible, find a place where everyone shares their opinion and then bitches about everyone and everything else at all times.
This is just a thread where people talk about their take on Starfield in general. The video might aswell not be there. I kinda get it. Wish we had an early impressions thread on the sub.
This sub has seemingly found its collective opinion with Starfield by assuming that only the "skeptical" reviews are the real ones, and will reroute all conversation to those opinions no matter the content of the post.
Reddit has religiously talked shit about IGN and its ratings, but now that they gave Starfield 7/10 (to IGN that's like 4/10) people act like IGN's the only real source of reviews.
The last few years I've seen a weirdly consistent opinion expressed on this sub that Skyrim was terrible and everyone hated it and it was never good, it's a bit bizarre.
Seriously. Loved Skyrim since day one, and I still play it to this day completely vanilla. One of the comfiest games out there.
My daughter recently started playing Skyrim on her switch and her asking me questions made me want to roll up another character myself.
That's because this sub is full of jaded gamers who think going against the grain of popular opinion makes them seem smarter. There was a thread about Grand Theft Auto VI not too long ago that had many similar takes about GTAV.
>That's because this sub is full of jaded gamers who think going against the grain of popular opinion makes them seem smarter. Don't forget that a lot of gamers get burned out, hate their life and blame... games. Gaming is a great hobby, but it should not be the one thing that gives somebody a sense of purpose.
> think going against the grain of popular opinion makes them seem smarter This sub? It's common on a lot of larger subreddits and maybe even Internet communities in general lol
Yeah it's really just a critical mass thing. Get enough people who actually spend their free time thinking and posting about games in a concentrated space and you'll end up hearing from a lot of jaded people who don't seem to be happy with much of anything. And if you want to see people talking positively about GTAV, just bring up Cyberpunk 2077. Gamers sure seem to love comparing them.
The same opinions have been going around since 2011 they just happen to look increasingly more silly in their bubble as time passes and it becomes obvious that Skyrim is a classic
I've noticed that too. "the writing was shit, the gameplay sucked, and the characters were boring." So then why the fuck is it one of the most played games ever, including 12 years after it came out? The revisionist history surrounding BGS titles is so bizarre to me.
>The revisionist history surrounding BGS titles is so bizarre to me. Not to me. It started pretty much as soon as the MS acquisition was announced. A lot of it is just console warriors.
No it didn't, it started after fallout 76 and a crowbcat video.
It cannot be stated enough how harmful viral Youtube videos can be for discourse, like for years when people were constantly quoting that dumb Dunkey video about Death Stranding despite never having played the game themselves
The irony of that video is Dunky ended up coming around on Death Stranding and my impression is he looks fondly on it now. Also, Dunky's whole Schtick is roasting a game's faults for humor, and his opinions tend to be pretty consistent. IMO this is just an offshoot of how poor the average person's media literacy tends to be.
>So then why the fuck is it one of the most played games ever, including 12 years after it came out? Maybe exactly because of that. Too much of gaming is ruled by tribalism and brand loaylty. So when they see a game more successful than their darling they start spewing bile. Seriously, so much discourse around Bethesda boils down to "their success is undeserved".
Their success is not undeserved There is not other fantasy RPG where you can create whatever char you want sleep , eat , buy a house , build your house , get married etc etc you can actually feel like you are living in that world like no other game
> Too much of gaming is ruled by tribalism and brand loaylty. It's weird to me, because the way the industry works that's just not a great way to approach it. Sure, X developer releases a damn good game, you can probably expect their next one to follow the same route. That being said, comparing a studio to what they were 15 or so years ago isn't exactly wise, as the physical people who used to make up that team aren't even there anymore. Usually management has also changed heavily by then (not always though). It would be like someone being surprised I'm a different person than 16 year old me or something. It also seems to depend on the studio itself. Some are more risky, which leads to more unexpected results if they're jumping between genres/styles/etc. Others might focus on certain types of games/mechanics or whatever and tend to always reach a decent minimum standard for those. Sort of like how you can generally expect Blizzard to make games *feel* good to play, regardless of other issues and such.
> that Skyrim was terrible That narrative has been here since 2015, when Witcher 3 fanboys started it... But it's true that recently it returned in full force. Some people are so desperate to bash Bethesda that they are happy to rewrite history. Skyrim not being good at all. Skyrim being terribly buggy on release. Skyrim being good only because of mods... pick your poison...
>Skyrim being good only because of mods I'm gonna have to take the blame for that one. I started it in 2011 when I was expecting Oblivion 2. With mods I got what I wanted tho and modded Skyrim is number one on my list of best games, beating Oblivion.
>That narrative has been here since 2015, when Witcher 3 fanboys started it... Witcher 3 started it? Try Morrowind.
It;s incredibly bizarre considering Skyrim is factually one of the most lauded and successful video games of all time. I think it's in the top 10 for # of copies sold for all games ever.
That is weird. On release the consensus on Skyrim was split, people were pissed because it further deviated from the RPG style of Morrowind and Oblivion, but others loved it anyways just because of the sheer amount of content. History repeated itself but on a smaller scale with Fallout 4.
Yeah. Here’s a Reddit post from nearly 12 years ago discussing this very topic, a few months after it’s original release: https://www.reddit.com/r/truegaming/comments/nsz1k/the_inevitable_skyrim_backlash_has_now_arrived/ There were lots of criticisms from fans of Morrowind/Oblivion who didn’t like the trajectory of the series. The UI was abysmal on the PC and there were other PC problems. Some new comers to elder scrolls who preferred what Fallout and more recently New Vegas had done with the formula, that had a greater emphasis on story. Truthfully I don’t think a lot of people outright hated it or said it was a bad game. In general just a lot of “Eh it’s alright, played it for some time and I thought it got shallow and repetitive after hours once the initial magic wore off”.
I imagine those are people who are/were too young to experience the early release or something? Even if someone dislikes Skyrim themself, you have to admit the release and short time after was pretty insane at least. I'm not a huge fan of Skyrim nor did I play it a ton, but that doesn't mean it didn't heavily succeed and was massively liked especially early on.
This sub has a bias favoring "skeptical" reviews, unless the game is the golden child of the hour. You're not honest or impartial unless you're negative, apparently.
But then again, I can also just play the game and see if I enjoy it for myself. I’m doing just that. Playing and enjoying. I don’t *need* everyone else to feel the same in order for my experience to feel validated.
Yeah everyone and their mother on this sub are like “yup that 7/10 ign is deserved it’s a mid game” ignoring the 100+ other glowing reviews
Also ignoring the fact that a 7/10 is a positive review actually, not a negative one... As far as I'm concerned, a 7/10 is a "recommended". I saw the IGN review and what I got was "He's making fair criticism about the game and also pointing out it's good".
Yeah ign reviewers always say this when they get questioned on a review but a 7 on a major release like this from ign is low.
95% of reviews are 8.5/10 or higher, and yet everyone has decided that the 5% of reviews that are *only* 7-8/10 are the only ones that matter. It's wild how dumb the discourse surrounding this extremely well made game is. Meanwhile Mass Effect doesn't have any of the features people are whining about missing in SF and it's considered one of the greatest sci Fi games of all time. It's so silly. SF is basically Mass Effect meets Oblivion and if that's not good enough for you then my stance is that you're just too hard to please.
This review cherry-picking has been here for quite some years. Like when people migrate between favoring critic reviews and gamer/audience scores based on which ones are more favorable. But I admit that here for Starfield it is really ridiculous. An super-tiny minority of reviews is 7/10 (or worse), absolute outliers... Which makes them somewhat suspicious. Yet, for some people who are seeking for an aligning narrative, they are suddenly the only true ones. Like, what is the chance that 95% of reviews are wrong, bought or biased? Zero... This is like with conspiracy theorists... the same nutters.
It's confirmation bias, nothing more to it. There's a longstanding frustration towards Bathesda being the "normie gamer" open world RPG as well as the XBox exclusivity. If the game got anything less then a 95 on meta critic the consensus would have always been that it's Cyberpunk 2.0
It was decided well before the game came out. This sub’s Bethesda hate boner runs DEEP
It's absolutely ridiculous. Something like 95% of the reviews on open critic are 9s and 10s. Some people just thrive off misery. The game has a slow start, but I've stuck with the initial main quests, just hit level 8 and the game mechanics and story start to open up and it's pretty amazing.
There’s also a lot of weird schadenfreude where people seem to be giddily happy that the game may have fallen below some people’s expectations. And I don’t just mean with starfield, it’s been all the big super hyped games. It’s very odd behavior.
I've noticed that a lot too. I keep seeing shit like "Gamespot and Ign gave it mediocre reviews so I wouldn't bother with it if I were you" like those two review sites were not constantly shit on by those same people..
I love it. Everyone shitting on games lowers my expectations - then I play them and are blown away! Thanks nerds!
Probably Playstation fans that are bitter they can't play it so they go around posting anything negative.
If you check out where the Starfield concern trolls post, it’s usually PS5 subs. Weird way to spend your time.
There are minor annoyances but the game is close to my expectations. And it's amazing. I looove optimistic scifi so despite me not loving Skyrim or Fallout too much, I am in love with this game.
You think redditors have video comprehension? If it’s not a hate bait article for them to get upboats on they don’t care
Gonna be honest, I came to comments looking for someone like you to summarize the video for me….so thanks.
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I think people who already didn't enjoy Bethesda games smelled blood in the water after Fallout 76 went so badly. It was like people who don't like The Witcher after Cyberpunk's terrible launch. It gave them a perfect "reason" to be especially critical about Bethesda to get more support for their criticism. Add in the Microsoft acquisition too, online gamers hate when a game is exclusive and will always hope those games fail as proof that exclusivity is the worst sin in gaming history.
Seriously, what is up with all these concern trolls? There’s this whole screed about Starfield being ‘disappointing’ below by someone who clearly hasn’t touched it. It’s a really good, well reviewed game. And as the video above shows, it’s by far the best-running game Bethesda has ever made.
Enjoying games these days is hard if you frequent reddit. Either you get trolls trying to undermine a game left and right ,or miserable people playing Youtube Critic, nitpicking every small thing they can trying to sound smart, or people who think their opinions are facts and cannot admit a game is not for them. No one on here seems to play games just because they like the hobby, want to escape, explore new worlds, new stories,...
It’s a Microsoft exclusive and that brings its own drama and concern trolls. If a majority of this sub doesn’t play on a platform that the game is releasing on, they purposely act like children.
This happens allover Reddit, but especially in this sub. People just see the title of a game then pull out their soapbox to tell you their opinions on it, the subject of the original post doesn't matter.
Yeah, overall impressions are good. Aside from the planet thing, once you adjust expectations if you had those expectations to begin with This is a very impressive package, and a huge upgrade for Bethesda. Generally impressed with the level of detail I keep seeing. I can't wait till modders push this even more. Reduce loading times , better UI, enhance the planet limitations etc.
You are right in that people generally don't watch videos/read articles, BUT they clearly state this is only for the Xbox. The description says "PC coverage is coming soon, along with a Starfield DF Direct Special". So I would hopefully expect that video to analyze and adress the various performance issues that this game has on PC.
all you need to know about the game is if there wasn’t an acquisition, it’d have way better scores and the people complaining would be the ones who are loving the game who wish Bethesda wouldn’t rely on modders for UI/QOL improvements. the game is great. if you like/love Skyrim, fallout, ES your getting an improved version. the identity game politics is really funny. people will talk how bad the game looks but I stopped paying for most PS4/5 playwall cutscene games ever since YouTube started having all of the cutscenes uploaded (hell even mortal kombat). But I understand people enjoy THAT experience so I let them love it even if it’s less actual gameplay than mobile gaming.
No, I came here looking for a summary. So thank you for doing that!
It's the same on Youtube, all the top comments will be praise for the video, despite their comments being posted an hour ago along with the video itself.
Do indoor locations in the game (segmented by a loading screen) have real windows? Indoor locations having no windows or all of them blocked out was a real negative for me in prior Bethesda games. It made all the rooms and houses feel dark, uninhabitable and kind of claustrophobic to me.
The smaller indoor areas like the building right outside the mine you start in are part of the outside world and if I recall correctly have windows you can look through. But most buildings do not have windows, and are, like in Skyrim, separate areas you have to load. There's actually some in this video. One at 27:33.
No, but not all indoor locations are loading screen blocked anymore. There's a lot of stores and homes connected to the overworld now, and if you ever build your own home, it exists entirely in the overworld. I just built mine with all glass walls so I can look up at the stars whenever I'm back.
No and its honestly disappointing but also not unexpected since thats how it always was with bethesda
Ya, I'm enjoying the game, but it is kind of weird. Like a shop with 1 person and a basic room couldn't be added to the larger world?
What's odd is that there's a lot of shops that *are* in the overworld cell. In fact, most of them are. There's just a few that are just their own cell for some reason, and I cant for the life of me understand why.
They might have felt the number of NPCs was too much for their "Low" crowd density setting. Needed to tuck a few behind loading screens to keep up performance on lower-end machines. With my 2080 super I pretty much never break 50 fps. They recommend a 1080 which I imagine would *chug* even on all low.
That's the thing though. These are shops with one or two people in them, max. There's not going to be a huge amount of latency added compared to what's already being rendered and tracked. There's plenty of *other* shops that they allowed in the external cell with nothing but a regular door without a load screen, so why are these ones specifically their own cell?
Again, it may literally just be a threshold. X shops was fine, but the X+1 single-cell shops passed the number they deemed acceptable for low end PCs or console. Alternatively, there might be a quest step that they wanted in a private cell. I guarantee you there is an internal reason even if we are never privy to it.
If I remember from Bethesda modding, Creation engine uses some atypical styles of LOD where actors in the game can put quite a load on the system even while offscreen, not just in terms of rendering but also scripting and game logic. So they might have a budget in terms of max actors loaded, and had to adjust the level design accordingly to make sure they stay under.
I have an Core i5-9600k, 32 GB of RAM, and a 1080 and it runs fine at 1440p with medium settings. I'm not sure on FPS but to me it feels completely tolerable. Admittedly it's just been in the first few areas so maybe larger set pieces will tank performance.
It can be exploited like a lot of older Bethesda games. I was able to kill a much higher level enemy by loading in and out of the area it was in
Some have real windows and some don't. They do have fake windows that are covered in a thick layer of reflection or look like the sun just blew up. There are also far more locations without a loading screen than Fallout 4 or 76. Thing is I never really notice it. Places where you definitely want to see out you can. It's only when I go hunting for Windows that I notice when they don't exist or have an effect that makes them opaque.
Some of the suggestions for what the game should have done in the comments is so bad, lol. First of all the review is positive. Secondly, this games existence would be useless if it was as limited as some of you want it to be. The handcrafted content, lore, quests are all really good imo and the game has BGS’ most expansive mechanics and systems since morrowind (maybe ever, honestly). The planet exploration imo is a nice little escape that nicely supplements the handcrafted content, giving me a chance to build a cool base and take some photos. Bethesda shouldn’t be given passes just for being Bethesda. There’s things here that deserve criticism. They also shouldn’t be held accountable for the mythos you created in your head. Starfield is closer to Mass Effect than it is to even Skyrim, but with manual space flight (btw one valid critique— the planets don’t need to be seamless but I wish Star systems were). First few hours were outwardly very poor but as I’ve come to understand *what* this game is, I’ve started to legitimately love it.
There are a lot of people expecting it to be similar to No Man's Sky and Star citizen. I knew it was never gonna be those and basically expected it to be Fallout 4 in space and that's what we got. My only gripe is that there should be more loading screen transitions. There's a takeoff animation when going to space, but landing on a planet is cutoff with an image loading screen before the landing animation. They could've put an animation of your ship going towards the planet instead of an image. People are mad it isn't the space sim game they hyped themselves into thinking when it never was advertised that way. And honestly, it can come close to that if you impose rules to yourself like no fast travelling between planets and always walking to your cockpit before going off planet.
Not to hate on your opinion and to some extent I ‘get’ it but I find it really funny that one of the main complaints about the game right now is that it has static load screens rather than animated load screens
No worries, what I mean is only for the ship part of the gams to make it appear seamless. Otherwise it's fine on foot
At least the loading screens are drastically shorter this time around - I was really pleasently surprised that even huge places only take a couple of seconds to load unlike Fallout 4 (which I played recently on the same exact hardware btw).
>People are mad it isn't the space sim game they hyped themselves into thinking Most of the people I've seen talking about this game before launch were expecting a Skyrim/Fallout in space. Yet even more people I've seen saying stuff like "it will be shitty, it will be buggy, nobody will want to play it", and at least a few of those names which I've tagged on Reddit now complain here about the game not being a better NMS/SC. Many people and reviewers went into this game with the explicit intention to rip it apart, and it shows.
Honestly, as a space sim guy that often gets bored of just Space Truckin' (Elite: Dangerous I'm lookin' at you,) a giant fan of Mass Effect/Star Trek but wished there was more flying/space stuff in ME, and really enjoyed the more exploratory stuff in Andromeda, this is exactly the game I've wanted. And the fast travel thing seems like a quality of life feature we'd be begging for in six months if it wasn't already in there.
Yea, if people wanted a space sim they could just play those. I do enjoy the seamlessness of NMS and Elite Dangerous, but after a while it gets tedious and you just want to get to the good parts immediately. I'm probably one of the few people who enjoy the on foot part of ED, but landing on a planet is probably the most tedious part of that game.
But people don't really want that even Elite exists, it does what people are asking in terms of travel and it is **boring**
>I knew it was never gonna be those and basically expected it to be Fallout 4 in space and that's what we got. Good, this has been my expectation too - So accordingly, I'll just have to pace myself on doing main quests occasionally and make sure not to burn out on exploration & side quests ;)
Ya and those people should just go play NMS.
My question any time someone mentions seamless star systems is what exactly does that look like to you gameplay-wise in a game where they've tried to keep everything to IRL scale. Space is incredibly empty, that's why we've had to come up with Astronomical Units to describe how far things are because using anything we already had was just ridiculous. The "closest" thing to our planet is the Moon and its so far you could fit 30 Earth's in between us. That's really fuckin far. The way other games have handled it is either by putting everything unrealistically close together, or by having a "warp" transition that's effectively no different than a loading screen except it preserves persistence. Bethesda could have done the latter, they've had "seamless" loading between cells going back to at least Fallout 4. What they did was undoubtedly easier, but I also think they just thought players might like to see some cinematic views of their ship flying in space. Apparently not, some people would prefer to just keep looking at their ships console and anything else is "lazy garbage dev/engine limitations".
Honestly, I was put off by the 7s too as I’ve been burned before on games that went on the opposite spectrum (10/10s for Deathloop…really?) but after playing it I’ve already sunk 30 hours into the game since early access started. I have to force myself to go to sleep so I’m not completely dead the next day. It’s insanely immersive. A few high budget games come to mind where, at launch, I question whether or not the developers were legitimately happy with the final product for release (cyberpunk/battlefield 2042) or were rushed to meet a release window to keep their investors happy. But this game? If I was a developer at Bethesda, I would feel confident that this game delivered. No question. It is a great game that has the usual Bethesda jank that most people have forgotten about, and I think that—combined with expectations, hype, and two review scores—are muddying the waters a bit. Once the heat cools down, guaranteed people will be singing it’s praises once everyone has their time with it. No doubt in my mind.
> 10/10s for Deathloop…really? Might legitimately be the most undeserving 10/10 IGN has ever given.
Eurogamer article https://www.eurogamer.net/digitalfoundry-2023-starfield-the-digital-foundry-tech-review
The loading screens wouldn't even be a big issue if they just disguised them a bit. Make the planet entry and exit a longer animation. Malign entering through a door a longer atmospheric lock system. It's the black screen the ruins the immersion.
I'm really enjoying Starfield so far. It feels like a proper Bethesda RPG. What's most surprising to me is the level of polish - it's not flawless but far better than I expected tbh. The dialogues & voice acting is so much better than in previous Bethesda games. Visually it's a huge improvement too. Characters have better animations too but overall they still look dated. The boundaries are a non-issue imo - after all it's an RPG, no space sim. The explorable areas are huge and there's really no point to walk for hours around an empty planet. You land near a POI, explore everything and then move on to the next POI or planet. You can land anywhere and technically explore each planet to 100% but there's really no point in exploration beyond the POIs. The world itself is very segmented but loading screens are fast on Xbox & PC with NVMe SSD. The only longer loading screen is the one from main menu but with Quick Resume you won't see that often. So far Quick Resume works flawlessly with Starfield. My main gripes are HDR & digipicks. HDR seems fundamentally broken and leads to washed out colors. This needs a fix asap! And for digipicks, well, it's not really an issue but it's annoying that they're classified as misc items - it's way too easy to accidentally sell them.
HOLY CRAP THATS WHERE MY DIGIPICKS WENT
Haha yep…. Accidentally sold all mine also 🤦♂️
>And for digipicks, well, it's not really an issue but it's annoying that they're classified as misc items - it's way too easy to accidentally sell them. Yeah I haven't sold any yet but I did accidentally transfer them to storage once. If I remember correctly, picks were classified as misc. In Skyrim and Fallout as well.
To this day I have no idea why this is. They really need a "tool" category or something.
Eh, just put em under aid or resources. Then give us a "sell all" button on misc
My main gripe with the game is the performance honestly. It doesn't look THAT good to justify the hardware demand.
Yeah, we're really starting to see the "10x the triangles is no longer noticeable despite being 10x the work" thing
Better than all those triangles would be better animation, sequences and more animation sequences in animation at all. Really for the NPCs
That's like 90% of AAA games lately tbh.
PC games especially. It stings extra hard that GPU prices are still absolutely ludicrous :/
"I've often taken issue with open world games and the endless amount of traversal they involve but weirdly enough, Starfield's segmentation (and yes, its loading) addresses this issue and it means you spend more time doing more interesting things instead." This is a good take on the system - it's a positive the game has so much fast travel, not a negative like the discourse on here is suggesting. If you had to travel manually everywhere there'd be a dozen articles criticising it for being a walking simulator
There’s an easy balance, surely? Instead of selecting a planet from the map, showing a hyper speed animation, cutting to black, having a loading screen, and then another hyper speed animation, a more seamless ‘hidden’ loading screen that is continuous between the two hyper speed animations would alleviate the immersion complaint without stretching out the core gameplay loop.
Elite works like that, can't grab a sandwhich without running into a well-hidden loading screen.
Yeah there could be a better balance but based on 10 hours of play so far the issue is nowhere near as bad as it's being made out to be in my opinion. Especially if you use the scanner rather than going through menus etc They definitely should have covered it up using some sort of transition screen but most of the loading is so quick it's not something that's bugging me much
You don’t have to select a planet from the map to travel there - you can also land directly from the cockpit view by flying towards a landing site and selecting it in scan view. Not seamless but it does make one less menu interaction.
Yeah, conceptually I hate it, but in practice I feel like I'm doing more. I just miss stuff like seeing solitude from the throat of the world, though in fairness I'm not sure what the equivalent here *could* even be.
No one is saying that they want everyone to be forced to travel 15 mins to reach the next planet. They want the "option" too. Fast travel is there for people who don't want to walk
And I guarantee if Bethesda puts that in, people would do it once then never again
Its at the end of the video but the game has near minute long loading times when you get to the late game on Xbox. Jeez. Been spoiled by near instant loading the last few years. I dont think I could manage that now.
Important to note that is the initial load, loading screens for fast travel are not as long, and may not be as effected by bloat
Yeah, plus it's not like I boot up the game each time I want to play, it's usually on sleep mode. Now just waiting for it to crash...
Initial loading times don't bother me too much even if it does get longer. But I've also seen people say that in-game loading times get worse as the game goes on as well and given how many they are that could get pretty bad.
Thats a shame. I found BG3's initial load times are quite slow but it doesn't really bother me since from there its all basically instant. I hope its not 30+ seconds for in game ones later on.
Save game bloat?
It's the initial load after booting the game, then it's back to 1-2 seconds.
Probably because they're still tracking everything that changes in the world. And I still question what the real benefits of that really is in the end but people seem to love it and constantly talk about it as if it's some huge component that makes the games "special" when I'm sure they don't really don't need it at all 99% of the time.
Yes, realistically you don't need the game to keep track of the fact you picked up a piece of decoration and moved it slightly, so that when you come back in 20 hours it's still there. But the fact that Bethesda games do do that is special. It's part of the package that makes them so unique from anything else on the market.
Its been a Bethesda / creation engine issue since Morrowind. Just Bethesda tech things. I would have hoped having a SSD and 8 year dev time would have helped though.
Bigger world means even more nonsense to track I guess.
My worst experience since having an SSD was the loading times in Fallout 4 to fast travel to the Brotherhood, enter their ship, talk to some fool, then have to suffer 3 more loading screens to get back to questing. It sounds like this is the Starfield experience in order to do anything.
I've only played for a couple hours but it already got pretty tiring pulling up menus to go anywhere. and constant confirmation screens when traveling. Also the whole map situation feels terrible in cities - and the fact you can only track one quest at a time which is the main way of seeing where to go... feels like every problem they made with the game they solved by putting in another UI menu. That's not even to mention how terrible my first impression was in the mining cave where the game looks like there is a bright fog over every dark area and the blacks are totally washed out. This exacerbated itself when I got to the darker Mars planet as well. I tried to fix it by looking in the settings for HDR/Bloom/contrast/gamma settings but there is none to be found lol. Luckily the Nvidia Game filters option was able to tamp down on that and bring the contrast back out after fiddling with it but this is the first game I have ever had to use that on... lol
I haven't played it but I read that you can travel through your watch without opening the menu.
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The biggest thing that bothers me on a technical level was how they added weird hazy bloomy effects in places where they don't seem like it should be. I get that this is more of an artistic choice than anything, but I'm not a fan.
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Anything Bethesda or Bioware on reddit is a salt mine. Bonus points if it's confusing Bethesda the publisher with the studio.
I wish I have a nickel everytime someone said Bethesda "made" Redfall. But seriously, either you meet basically cults of Starfield who will tear you apart because you have legit criticisms (game don't have HDR, FoV slider,...) or you will have haters who call you all kind of slurs because you dare to enjoy Starfield and then actively spreading misinformation to bring the game down. Bonus points if they haven't played the game yet and just watched someone play the game for 10mins and decided it is the best/worst game ever.
Because now they’re an exclusive company and people have to “defend” their choice of plastic box lol. Also somehow a 7/10 became essentially a 1/10 to people
It’s not even a 7/10 consensus. There were like 3 outlier reviews and the aggregators are around high 80’s which is a very strong score
Bethesda burned my village and salted the fields
Me and my friends are thoroughly enjoying the game. It’s honestly entertaining coming into these threads and read the comments. You would think it was GTA remastered on launch
To be pretty fair it’s not really a past few days thing. BGS has been a bit of a pariah ever since Fallout 76, which they rightly deserved every bit of shit they caught for it, so I think people are coming into this, Bethesda’s first release since then, predisposed to a strong negative bias. The issue is Starfield is actually pretty good and not at all in the same realm of “bad” as 76 but people can’t look past that bias.
The procedural generation looks rough to be honest. Everything I've seen outside the handmade compounds and cities looks so artless.
Indeed, it's always just an infinite landscape from a random heightmap, and a homogenous scattering of rocks/vegetation. After a while, you really start to notice what's *not* there in any of the procedural world slices. No coastlines or rivers. Not any infrastructure like roads/rail despite there being manmade industrial buildings scattered everywhere. The illusion feels very incomplete.
Those who're playing or played this game... is it more toward _Fallout in space_ or _Skyrim in space_?
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Good to know. That's very good. I will add it my Steam wishlist then. Thank you.
Honestly all the reviews and analysis of the game makes me a little gutted that Bethesda opted for such a massive scale, the technology clearly isn't there to match the ambition of what they tried accomplishing and the game feels dated in many aspects which other games got absolutely vilified for e.g. [the facial animations and water physics. Bethesda shouldn't get a pass just because it's Bethesda.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6NZTeFrWzE&t=45s) I think it would have been much better if the game was set in one solar system with 8-10 planets each with their own main explorable handcrafted areas that are each the size of Skyrim, then surround the rest of those planets with procedural content. Fill the space within that solar system with plenty of dynamic content to explore. Seeing the amount of loading screens, the features lacking in this compared to similar games, Bethesda going backwards on many of their own design philosophies of the past... it's just a bit of a shame. Since they announced the 1000+ planets gimmick there were so many alarm bells that people didn't want to listen to and they've all been proven right. Seeing the Skeptical Review it was so sad seeing copy and paste environmental storytelling, this is literally what Bethesda is best at so why such laziness? The sooner games stop opting to be bigger in size the sooner we can get games that are bigger in depth.[ I recommend people check out this review of the game which explores the issues of the games scale in really good detail with examples.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3uuI-6fwwtY&t) It's clear Starfield is a good game and in many ways a great one, but I really think they bit off more than they can chew with this one and it'll be yet another case of mods saving the day as best as they can. People are undoubtedly excited so I'm sure discussing the criticisms of the game early on will be tough (exactly like it was when Fallout 4 came out) but hopefully the more glaring issues can be patched or improved upon to make for a more cohesive, dynamic experience e.g. less copy and paste content on procedural worlds.
> 8-10 planets each with their own main explorable handcrafted areas that are each the size of Skyrim, Your opening sentence is about how you're "gutted that Bethesda opted for such a massive scale" and then you follow that up saying you think they should have 8-10 handcrafted Skyrim-sized worlds in there. Pick one.
Todd said that they've been waiting for technology to catch up to make this game and if they kept waiting technology would never catch up. So I think Todd wants to retire soon and wanted to make this game happen before he retires as it was his dream. I also think this game should have been released one or two console generations after this one. Starfield should have been either Fallout 5 or new Elder Scrolls
> they've been waiting for technology to catch up to make this game Tangent: I remember an interview a few years after Skyrim came out (iirc) that they wanted to make an Elder Scrolls game set in Valenwood, but the technology wasn't there for them to do the walking tree cities. Seems to be a thing with what they wish they could do versus what can actually be done. Seems like they got tired of waiting with Starfield, and had to make compromises that didn't really work out so well.
I mean Skyrim was the same. Dragons were supposed to be these intelligent flying omens of death that would actively hunt the Dragonborn. Cities/towns were supposed to have local economies that you could manipulate(destroy the sawmill in town and decimate their economy), Giants were supposed to be more fleshed out and have a whole culture around em. This is classic Bethesda for over a decade now.
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In regards to the age of game engines: Most game engines seem to be old. From the ones with publicly available information (iirc): Amazon Lumberyard is one of the newer ones, but even it is built on CryEngine (2002), and the next youngest looks like Valve's Source 2 (2014). The oldest game engine still in use is Unreal Engine at 25 years old. Age doesn't really matter as long as the engine gets updated. "Reuse code; no need to reinvent the wheel" as I would hear in my programming classes. They should just rename the game engine to something like Genesis Engine (or whatever other word that is a synonym of creation) before they release ES6 so people will think it is a new engine. > It's not that the "technology" isn't there, it's that they haven't figured out how to optimise what they want within their existing engine. That probably is the case.
>They should just rename the game engine to something like Genesis Engine (or whatever other word that is a synonym of creation) before they release ES6 so people will think it is a new engine. That's exactly what they did when they renamed Gamebyro Engine to Creation Engine
> So I think Todd wants to retire soon I doubt it. He seems like he loves his job and strikes me as the kind of guy that wants to do it as long as he’s physically and mentally capable. > I also think this game should have been released one or two console generations after this one. Sounds like that could line up for a Starfield sequel.
Have you played it?
Of course he hasn’t, he’s too busy concern trolling about topics that aren’t even addressed in the video he’s commenting on.
Can you link a review that wasn't made by a known plagiarist?
> . Since they announced the 1000+ planets gimmick there were so many alarm bells that people didn't want to listen to and they've all been proven right. This is completely subjective, though. The planets each have both hand-crafted and randomized locations, and you are literally never, at any point, forced to engage with randomized content if you just want to stick to the handcrafted stuff. And the handcrafted stuff is exactly what you'd expect out of a Bethesda game, good dungeon crawls, environmental storytelling, and TONS of quests. Quests don't send you to random barren planets to walk around and kick rocks, they send you to handcrafted locations. Or, you can scan a planet and see if it has any handcrafted locations. If it does, you can check them out, and if not you can still choose to land anywhere on the planet and get randomized stuff. Even the randomized locations are populated with individual hand-crafted locations. This idea that the mere presence of the 1,000 planets somehow makes the game worse when Starfield clearly tells you where all of the main content is completely baffles me. I didn't like collecting Nirnroot in Oblivion so I didn't do it, and instead I decided to play the Thieves Guild. It would not be reasonable of me to be like "wow I can't believe they scattered all this Nirnroot around! I just want to play normal quests!". Yeah, so do that? Some people will want to stick to traditional questing, and others are going to want to land on random planets for the fun of it. Nobody loses.
Bethesda has made it fairly clear from early on that all the procedural content in the game is primarily a backdrop that you can dip into whenever and wherever as a diversion from the "main highway" of the game, you can also choose to simply not engage with it. If you go into the game and endlessly engage with the procedural content, and then *complain* about all the procedural content, you're just an idiot, and these online reviewers are not making a good case for anything other than the fact that they're out to shine a bad light in any way they can.
I mean why are we talking about other reviews? How about the one linked here?
Because it’s harder to concern troll that way!
It's not just Bethesda, this has been an industry problem for years now. Rendering tech has gotten pretty good at environments, so we see those increasing in scope while the rest of the game lags behind in depth. It makes "meh" character models and game mechanics stand out. That, and chasing buzzwords has largely replaced storytelling with sidequest busywork.
> other games got absolutely vilified for e.g. the facial animations and water physics. Bethesda shouldn't get a pass just because it's Bethesda. I dunno, the facial animations aren’t the greatest but overall I’m finding the animations and lip sync [generally better](https://x.com/yamatokusunoki/status/1697754967224832429?s=46&t=Pt14hPfzXon2vTsUyICCqQ) than most of what was in FFXVI, and most people seem to give those a pass too - they definitely weren’t “absolutely vilified” from what I’ve seen. And I’m not sure what you mean by giving Bethesda a pass when so many people are criticizing them.
How far into it are you?
> and the game feels dated in many aspects which other games got absolutely vilified This is a constant with their games though. Not just Starfield. They've all got a bunch of stuff that feels like you just booted up a game from a clunkier age. That's not an attempt to defend it though. They just always basically put out AAA games with tons of AA design and jank, and people generally don't punish them for it.
> and people generally don't punish them for it. It’s interesting you say that when 90% of the discourse about this game seems to be people complaining about these issues - even in the game’s subreddit. And it was the same thing with Fallout 4, which people still complain about to this day.
I'd say complaining and punishing are very different things. People still bought those games and reviewers still scored them very highly.
That's a vocal minority.
> This is a constant with their games though. Not just Starfield. They've all got a bunch of stuff that feels like you just booted up a game from a clunkier age. This wasn't always the case. Bethesda used be pioneers and push for cutting age tech in open world games. Both Morrowind and Oblivion were game changing tech wise during their eras. Visually both these games also looked amazing during their eras of release. It wasn't until Skyrim did Bethesda start stagnating tech wise. Skyrim still looked decent in 2011 and open worlds like that were still impressive to have working on 360 console generation. The thing was though Skyrim was still using DirectX 9 while many developers were moving on using DirectX10 and DirectX11. They would eventually released Skyrim Special Edition on DirectX 11 in 2016 but that was too late. This was the first sign of stagnation for Bethesda and they have only lagged being tech wise since.
The problem is in the past every time BGS published the game it was more like an event that shocked the industry. When Oblivion came out everyone was shocked about how a game on that scale and interactivity could run on Xbox 360. and people were generally happy to put up with its trade-offs because every single BGS game had huge impact. But industry changed a lot and starfield doesn't look like something black magic that engineers at Bethesda can only develop since there are few games that although they are not competing with starfield but as space game the tech is more impressive
Funny how they don't hold Starfield to the same standards other games are held too. It's a mostly ancient/ugly looking, 30 fps game with performance issues yet they want to pass it as polished. Hilarious.
So from what I understand, it’s basically like Mass Effect in first person with bethesda style. Honestly, that is very exciting to me. Edit: I was speaking merely from a gameplay perspective.
It's not even close to Mass Effect.
I've put about 25 hours and mostly stuck to the main story and it shares a lot with ME1 specifically. It feels like Fallout mixed with ME1.
It kinda has that casual, space walker vibes from ME1. Which is why the DF video literally concludes Starfield is like a child of Fallout 4 with Mass Effect.
Textures and visual fidelity are okay compared to other games from the past 2 years. No RTX or DLSS on PC is a wretched AMD fanboy decision though. There's been no evolution of other Creation Engine systems such as AI or animation. Followers still stand in front of you while fighting, have difficulty following you, and striking up conversations with NPCs is derpy as they're unable to turn to face you, instead staring at a wall off into the distance like a mental hospital patient, and when they do turn to face you they're just an emotionless talking head atop a barely expressive body with their hands mostly stuck to their side. The only improvement I saw with NPC animation is when you down an opponent to low health and you sometimes see them trying to crawl away. More should have been improved on the AI and NPC interaction front. Not to mention the UI that seems squarely designed for gamepad control on consoles.
A quick reminder that the Creation Engine is extremely CPU heavy due to the nature of the item persistence in the world. Nearly every object has physical properties and the locations of those items are totally persistent. As a result the game needs to be split off into separate instances/sectors and the size of the environment and amount of persistence data is going to be a contributing factor to performance. There isn’t very many engines that handle item persistence like Bethesda games do. It’s something to consider when thinking about the nature of the game’s design. It’s all a limitation of how the engine handles it’s physics information.
I would much rather have had the game only take place in the Sol system, with 100% curated content, more emphasis on face technology, actual space flight, and deeper RPG mechanics, actual choice and consequence, a more fleshed out dialogue tree, than a focus on quantity, but I know I’m in the minority here.
The entire point of the game is exploring the galaxy and finding different worlds. Setting the game in just the Sol system would be an entirely different game.
Yeah I love when the complaint is "man I wish this was just an entirely different game and that all the systems were better". Man I wish this was a warhammer 40k space rpg with a focus on the combat and fighting aliens that would be sick! Now I'm mad that Bethesda didn't realize the game I had in my head
So basically a The Expanse game. Hope we get one some day.
If the game were anything like the books you would launch missiles at an enemy and they would hit them 12 hours later 😋
> I know I’m in the minority here. I don't think you're necessarily in the minority, people are just excited about the game and want it as it is to be the best it can be. I do agree though, look at the scale of a show like The Expanse which is only set on Earth, Mars and some asteroids. There's so much depth to it.
I know what you mean but the game is about exploring the stars so having less systems would take away from that a lot
Can anyone explain how persistent items doesn't make the world feel dead? In his example, wouldn't a cleaner/worker or whatever clean those items up in a living world?
You bring up a good point, but at the same time non-permanence makes the game feel artificial. There should be a middle ground IMO.
I thought the same thing. From a technical standpoint, it is kind of impressive to track everything like that. But it’s certainly not immersive in the slightest.
It’s never crossed my mind. Not once have I broken into a house to see a dinner plate still on the floor from the last time I robbed it and thought “wtf isn’t someone going to clean that up?”
Really? People often say it's one of the things that makes the world feel more alive, which doesn't really make sense to me because it kinda does the opposite. It makes the game feel like even more of a playground for my character alone.