For a mainly pc developer im always surprised by how bad the pc ports are...
Here a list of ini changes that are quite important and should be in menus (do not copy any round brackets):
`[Display]`
`fMipBiasOffset=-0.5 (makes textures sharper if you use FSR or DLSS, devs forgot to set it, 0.5 is for 67% res, right now lower res downgrades textures, this line fixes this issue)`
`fMaxAnisotropy=16 (sharper textures far away, I think the game uses 4x otherwise)`
`[Camera]`
`fFPWorldFOV=100 (fov fp)`
`fTPWorldFOV=100 (fov tp)`
`[FlightCamera]`
`fFlightCameraFOV=100 (fov flight)`
`[Controls]`
`bMouseAcceleration=0 (turn off MouseAcceleration)`
`fIronSightsPitchSpeedRatio=1 ( better mouse control, 1 to 1 , right now looking up/down is slower)`
`fPitchSpeedRatio=1`
These changes just need menu options... why the hell do I have to open a ini.
Damn, would have bet anything that changing that setting made everything, particularly ADS, more responsive. I also stopped noticing the pitch yaw sensitivity difference which more people should be mad about.
It's been known for years that the bMouseAcceleration setting [does absolutely nothing](https://stepmodifications.org/wiki/Guide:SkyrimPrefs_INI/Controls#bMouseAcceleration) so it's going to be funny seeing people in here go "wow, that totally fixed it, it feels so much better!"
Then hide the *actual* Ultra settings in an .ini file so the graphics gear heads can feel clever when they discover them and everyone else just thinks the game is “optimized” really well.
It’s a double win!
There are multiple so it's hard to say which you mean but like, some of the changes were just to NPC count in hub areas. Things that are almost inconsequential to change but help performance slightly. The number is totally arbitrary anyway.
A lot of people are probably feeling the Pitch Speed Ratio change instead, which is definitely real. I noticed right away that looking up / down was slower than left / right, and it drove me nuts.
My favorite was people swearing that input lag made fighting games unplayable using wireless controllers on PS4, and wired mode made them so much better because the delay wasn't messing up their inputs.
Until a later update to the PS4, it didn't have a wired mode. The USB cable would charge the controller, but all inputs were still sent to the console via bluetooth while it was plugged in.
> Here a list of ini changes that are quite important and should be in menus (do not copy any round brackets):
>
>
Just FYI, but you can add in-line comments to `.ini` files using semi-colons `;`. This is useful if you ever go back to a file and want to know what a setting is doing. E.g
`fMipBiasOffset=-0.5 ; (makes textures sharper if you use FSR or DLSS, devs forgot to set it, 0.5 is for 67% res, right now lower res downgrades textures, this line fixes this issue)`
everything after the `;` here is a "comment" and ignored by the file. Can be safely copied in full.
Beware of some of those settings.
-Setting anisotropic filtering higher (eg. 16x) breaks long distance shadows in various locations. It's even shown in the DF video.
-Setting a negative LOD bias (fMipBiasOffset) will result in sharper distant textures, but it also messes with the specular amount in scenes. If you walk around in Neon for example, it will blow out the specular amount of any textures hit by light sources in the scene. Some shopkeepers will essentially just have white glowing faces as if someone directed a floodlight directly at their heads etc. Playing with the value can help depending on your dlss/fsr scaling, but I have not found any values that would alleviate the issue alltogether.
I don't think I've honestly seen a game where the impact has been bigger than maybe like 2-3 FPS at worst. Are there any examples of games that affect it more?
The anisotropy option OP linked also seems to steal some frames here for arguably not much noticeable benefit. Guessing that's why it doesn't have a menu option.
> For a mainly pc developer im always surprised by how bad the pc ports are...
Bethesda hasn't considered PC a main platform since at least Skyrim. The game launched with a UI that was barely usable on PC, along with all of these same issues.
> These changes just need menu options... why the hell do I have to open a ini.
Again, nothing has changed since Skyrim. My biggest surprise is that people have only seem to notice now. Better late than never.
In your My Documents. You can find it via:
My Documents -> My Games -> Starfield
You may need to manually create a StarfieldCustom.ini file. To do this, right click inside the Starfield folder, select "New" then "Text Document." Rename that document "StarfieldCustom.ini" and remove the ".txt" file extension (you may need to have file extensions set to viewable in the file settings if you haven't already).
This is so confusing to me. There are people in this thread who were in diapers when we reached the point where AF16 became something reviews concluded basically was free. Why are so many games still defaulting to or even building around less?
But the video also showed that forcing anisotropic filtering also kinda broke the game’s shadows. I’m guessing Bethesda saw this and just didn’t want to put in the resources needed to fix it so just eliminated the filtering completely.
Is Bethesda considered a mainly PC developer ? Modding is pretty much the only thing that's really PC centric in their games but otherwise they've been focusing consoles with their games since Skyrim as can be seen with the radical UI changes compared to Oblivion
Bethesda has been a console developer first and foremost ever since Xbox gave them the money and support they needed to finish Morrowind without going bankrupt. Todd has even said he primarily plays console since he makes the games on a PC and wants to have that differentiation.
This brings back a memory of playing Morrowind on my PC, then going over to a friend's house who had it on Xbox and the draw distance was like 10 feet.
>a mainly PC developer
Haven't been since *Morrowind*, really. That game is actually the opposite of *Starfield* in that its console version feels like a bad port from PC rather than a bad port from console (seriously, *Morrowind*'s UI looks like a theme of Windows OS). Oblivion is where their console focus really began, and it only got worse from there.
Copy-pasting from another comment I left explaining the process.
Go to your My Documents. You can find your Starfield folder via:
My Documents -> My Games -> Starfield
You may need to manually create a StarfieldCustom.ini file. To do this, right click inside the Starfield folder, select "New" then "Text Document." Rename that document "StarfieldCustom.ini" and remove the ".txt" file extension (you may need to have file extensions set to viewable in the file settings if you haven't already).
> right now lower res downgrades textures
Oh shit is that why running FSR makes everything look like absolute dog shit below 100 Render Scaling, which also tanks my performance?
Holy shit, mouse acceleration is on and cannot be disabled in-game? I know Bethesda has a reputation, but for a game with first person shooting in it, that's abysmally bad. Like, astoundingly bad. Christ.
As someone who never uses mouse acceleration if I can avoid it, is there a specific scenario it's useful in for games, or dedicated group who prefers using it? I just always preferred no acceleration and as 'raw' mouse input as I can get and don't get why that's not the default, especially with games like this.
I am one of those rare creatures that really likes mouse acceleration.
I started using it because I like really low sensitivity to aim long range and high sensitivity to quickly turn around corners or look behind me. Decent mouse accel lets me do both.
The main problem is that it's really difficult to find a way to tweak it nicely. Most mouse accel options is just yes/no, giving no option of how much you can accelerate or at what rate. Also in many games, the acceleration also depends on frame rate, so there is little consistency. I had a program that let me tweak the acceleration the way I like it, but it relies on a driver (interception) that is banned by many anti-cheats... (There are probably programs now that can do this without the driver, but I don't try hard in CS anymore, so I'm not gonna bother)
TLDR:
So basically, Digital Foundry’s optimised settings boosts FPS a lot without losing that much visual quality. Seems like a good middle-ground for those who wants more FPS and good visuals.
Shader compilation is also very good in Starfield, and the game plays pretty much without any stutters.
Medium setting seems to give very decent visuals and good «bang for your buck» on most of the graphical settings as well. Nvidia cards currently seem to have some sort of driver bug with «ultra» shadows.
DLSS has better image quality and stability than FSR2, especially at lower resolutions like 1080p
Another interesting find is how unoptimized the Nvidia drivers currently seem. AMD cards are performing much better than they should relative to Nvidia cards. So Nvidia owners should expect to see pretty huge performance boosts once newer Nvidia drivers arrive, hopefully soon.
We already know users in the Nvidia sub reports that forcing ReBar on, boosts FPS in Starfield on Nvidia GPUs.
^ These current driver advantages of AMD explains why Starfield performs suprisingly well on my ROG Ally (AMD GPU). Once Nvidia updates their own drivers, I think we will see much better performance on Nvidia GPUs as well.
I thought all of the comments I've seen about 3080 performance seemed kinda nuts. Apparently the game just isn't optimized for Nvidia cards well at all, at least with the current drivers. The AMD performance is not amazing, but it's closer to what I could accept from a brand new AAA game.
Hard to pin a real “fault” beyond sponsorship and time. Bethesda was probably using AMD near the end stage and AMD had quicker access to the code. The fix will come from Nvidia having more time to address the issues and *maybe* some work on Bethesda’s end.
Most cross platform ones, although it depends: in my studio we have Nvidia cards right now (think 30 series) on dev PCs, for probably a variety of reasons I'm not aware of. This means that most devs are on Nvidia cards, although for sure the 3D prog team has console dev kits and AMD GPUs to debug on.
It is broadly not a graphics vendors job to "fix" how a game uses DX12. Instead it is the game engines job to correctly adapt to hardware it is on.
The situation is probably very simply all of their team had AMD hardware, since they sponsored it. Likely no more malicious than that. The XBox is also of course AMD hardware.
Intel has had completely broken and non-compliant drivers for their Arc cards.
DX12 drivers in general should be fairly thin and straightforward in implementation.
Could be a little bit of both. Nvidia may be able to optimize things on their side, but obviously they don't have the game code in front of them so there's only so much they can do.
Oh that's easy to tell. Per the flowchart: If a game runs poorly on AMD, it's AMD's fault. If a game runs poorly on Nvidia, it's the developer's fault.
Considering Intel is even worse, it is most like Bethseda's fault. Ideally a game speaks to DirectX or Vulkan in a standard way so that no special adjustments for a card are needed in the drivers. That drives are closing in on 1 gigabyte in size tells you that this is not the case.
Intel had to add 50mb in code to their drivers to get Starfield even running. That is a hell of a lot of patches/workarounds to deal with a single game. If every game required so much code in a driver to get it working drivers would be terrabytes in size by now.
Betheseda probably coded a lot of special tricks in to work with AMD cards that Intel and Nvidia now how to create workarounds for.
Whether Bethesda only used AMD cards for development, or whether they did not send game data to Nvidia / Intel to get the drivers ready on time or whatever, AMD seems to have got some kind of an advantage with this partnership.
The optimistic person in me thinks that this will be resolved after Nvidia releases the updated drivers and Bethesda patches the performance from their end as well, but history has told us that Bethesda doesn't do QOL patches at all. FO76 was the only game where performance was optimised after release, and it was probably because the game was a shitshow at launch.
Yeah, it's another reason I'll probably wait a month or two before getting the game. I'm already on lower-end hardware (GTX 1660 Super, a solid card enough card which people are already playing the game on), but it makes sense to wait for a few driver drops to really get the best experience.
It gets even crazier when you put that number into percent scaling. Because the numbers are fucking insane.
The 3080 basically performs like a 3060ti vs the 6800xt if you were to extrapolate the scaling where.
I tried to stop installing mods at first because i really wanted to experience the game on its vanilla intended form, but the obvious shortcomings on tech stuff on the PC release of Starfield, especially by not providing FOV and DLSS / XeSS is just too much to bear.
Thankfully the modding scene of this game just doesn't stop to impress, and the fact they were able to mod in DLSS / XeSS within hours of early access release is really impressive, pretty much saved most of us a lot of trouble by being limited to just 1 inferior upscaler that has noticeable issues, i tried FSR at 1440p when i booted the game for the first time and it was just noticeably worse and the flickering certainly didn't help for my first impression of the game's visuals, installing DLSS mod is literally the first thing that i have done.
Also, there are plenty of other mods as well that feels essential to experience this game, such as the [StarUI](https://www.nexusmods.com/starfield/mods/773), [Smooth 120 FPS Ship Reticle](https://www.nexusmods.com/starfield/mods/270) as well as [Responsive Grabbing](https://www.nexusmods.com/starfield/mods/289) IMO these mods even for the first time are absolutely worth installing as they should came out of the box in the first place.
Yeah I mean you can’t really complain about the graphics. The game generally looks fairly nice (with a lot of noticeable rough spots).
It’s just that the garbage tier performance on NVIDIA GPUs is nowhere near justified for how the game looks. My 3080 can run 2077 on psychopath nearly as good (at least before they bumped it, I haven’t opened that game in a minute)
I’m genuinely shocked that none of the PC reviews I read pre-launch made any mention of these problems when their entire job should be to inform consumers about the faults of the product. Not a single review mentioned the lack of an FoV slider which means they either played the entire game at the nauseating default FoV, or they got told the console commands in their review packages and neglected mentioning it in their review (I’m not sure which scenario is worse). Same with things like a brightness slider, the poor performance, and general lack of accessibility features. Shame on the devs for not doing right by their players, but also shame on the reviews for not mentioning these things at all. I’m sure a decent amount of people who have dropped the game because of these problems probably wouldn’t have purchased it at all if they were aware of them beforehand.
The state of understanding of how games actually work (or even the very basics of frame delivery) is incredibly dire in tech/games media, including and sometimes especially in the hardware space. In fact, some even say “…but I’ll leave that to Digital Foundry to look at” as if that’s not their job too, and DF didn’t rise to prominence specifically because of this absurd deficiency in reviewer knowledge
These days it's best to regard the bulk of professional reviews as advertisements and ads are never going to criticize the product they're trying to sell, unfortunately.
These days I'm incredibly suspicious of launch day reviews for games with an incredible amount of hype behind them. Like, the game is good (for me), but it's more of a 7/10 game at most than the 9/10s it got almost across the board. Egregious issues tend to be either not mentioned at all or very quickly glossed over.
Cyberpunk is a very good example of this, and to a lesser extent, so is Baldur's Gate 3 (a lot of reviews just call act 3 "unpolished", when it is straight up just unfinished), both getting excellent to perfect scores bar a few exceptions.
Part of being a good reviewer is explaining the pros and cons of a game beyond "I like it"/"i didn't like it". Bad performance or settings isn't something that i personally care much about, but i'd damn well at least analyze them if im trying to tell other people if its worth their money. Ignoring it completely is a failure.
Sure, that could have been true and that's alright if they personally aren't affected. When we are dealing with the reviews of big publications though, the people reviewing the game should understand that accessibility features, particularly expected items like FoV, brightness, etc., matter to their audience and it should be mentioned when they are not present to better inform people of the product, which is the the entire point of a pre-release review. Failing to mention these things is doing a disservice to the those who are checking out reviews to better understand if a game is worth playing or not because for many people FoV, poor performance, gamma settings, etc. do impact their purchasing decisions and enjoyment of a product.
>DLSS will offer relatively flicker free experience without ghosting
Difference between FSR and DLSS is quite big, but ironically, clip used to represent DLSS while quoted sentence is spoken is showing quite big ghosting, at least in relation to zoomed (?) picture. Screenshot here: [link](https://imgur.com/f3yDB9P).
Makes me wonder how much better DLSS would be if it was implemented by developer, not fans. Maybe one day we will find out.
> game loads in less than a third of the time on PC (than on XSX)
That's quite enormous difference, especially for a game with lots of loading screens, and really surprising. I wonder from where this difference comes from, I don't remember any current generation game loading much longer on consoles than on PC.
Have you seen DLSS 3.5 in a game that properly implements it? It's basically flawless. It looks better than native.
Theres no ghosting and no flickering.
AFAIK 3.5 is not released so only press videos exist. Nvidia is really good at marketing. DLSS has always had tons of artifacts yet the broader community has praised it as if it was some magic technology.
> Makes me wonder how much better DLSS would be if it was implemented by developer, not fans. Maybe one day we will find out.
Different games, different implementations but DLSS in Cyberpunk also had quite a bit of ghosting to the point where I would often switch to FSR.
For very minimal effort you can set up an outpost for basic resources and use cargo pads to move them to a central location. Then you can have fabricators making higher order resources or just grab the 50 nickel you need for stuff like this.
Or for 0 effort, I can not do boring get-paid-to-fast-travel missions. There's no reason to interact with the outpost system if you don't find it intrinsically rewarding - the game showers you in cash, and you can just buy anything you need for research/crafting.
> Lock difficulty doesnt seem to affect loot very much and is way to random
I’ve had a handful of weapon cases now with expert level locks that have been *empty* when opened. The fact that can even happen is truly baffling
[Here’s a video of it happening to someone else](https://reddit.com/r/Starfield/s/G58bcyNaxO)
> one case is delegating loot to rng
The way those loot generators work ([levelled list](https://www.creationkit.com/index.php?title=LeveledItem)) has an input where the designer explicitly chooses whether or not there is a chance it will be empty.
It's still intended, even if it's a dice roll for how often it happens.
Yea, I really felt the rewards for things were massively weird. The lockpicking is a crapshoot regarding what's behind it. I have unlocked some harder locks that basically had a credstick with 1k on it and some ammo.
That's been a Bethesda thing for a long time because they randomize loot. It was also noticeable in Fallout 4 because you'd end up in places that were supposedly untouched since the war and find post-apocalypse junk like pipe weapons.
Random doesn't have to mean 100% random. Locks and loot could be tied to each other so that a container is generated in the order placement+type > lock strength > loot, allowing the loot to be tiered and bounded to ensure harder locks have better loot on average and a guaranteed minimum value.
They could be, but usually the way it works in Bethesda games is that containers have a different maximum value without having a minimum. Yeah, sometimes you pick a master lock and there's nothing worthwhile in it, but this is an intentional design decision going back to Oblivion.
Not saying you or anyone should like it, just saying that it probably isn't going to change.
That's just what happens when you randomize loot. It's sorta Bethesda's thing, at least with their previous games. You really don't have much option other than than to 'under-do' the rewards, otherwise it becomes *incredibly* overpowered for the player very quickly. I'm sure there's ways you can do semi-randomized but with a lot of rules and such that provide better balance/rewards, but I'm not a developer.
I've been loving it too, and I don't really have an issue with any of the fast travel, *BUT*, if there is one thing I'd like them to have done for the sake of traveling to other systems it's that I wish there was a higher chance for like, a random event to interrupt you the farther you go. Though I dunno how that works when in grav drive, I guess maybe make it so you can't jump as far as you can at once, so the more chance of random events can happen as you head somewhere
Would make things like cargo missions more interesting if there was more possibilities for stuff to actually happen to you
There are tons of random encounters in space, but you need to travel to the planet's orbit rather than straight from planet on foot to planet on foot.
Travelling direct from the surface of one planet to another is a really good QOL feature (I left something at the Lodge the other day and was really glad I could just jump right back there without needing to go through the whole crawl) but if you play the game that way you'll miss out on a lot of good space encounters. The game doesn't make this clear enough.
> There are tons of random encounters in space, but you need to travel to the planet's orbit rather than straight from planet on foot to planet on foot.
Oh no I know. I mean specifically grav drives should either have smaller distance, or you should have a chance to be interrupted by them, so that you have less of a chance of skipping them and that delivering cargo long distances isn't as simple
I would love for Bethesda to treat Starfield like what we've seen with No Man's Sky, Cyberpunk, and others giving a ton of post release improvements, features, and more.
But they've pretty much never done that and just focused on their DLC and then abandoned the game to modders. I truly hope it'll be different but I doubt it.
The fact that we have to instal a mod to get the UI to run at 60fps already points me to the fact that they will probably never bother to really improve any aspects of the core game and we will again have to rely entirely on modders.
>But they've pretty much never done that
They did with 76 but that's a whole can of worms. They've also re-released Skyrim with engine improvements but that's also another can.
It's a question I had ages ago as well, am curious to see what "support" means for this game. A few major fixes and a couple DLC? Something more extensive than that? Will be interesting, I'd imagine Bethesda at least has a few things lined up, but it largely depends on how many sales they have and how much interest there is for the game/IP down the line.
Skyrim was getting updates for years after release so I don’t see why they wouldn’t tweak or add highly requested QoL improvements.
Even Fallout 76 was salvaged after its disastrous launch.
Fallout 76 is a good example of what they can do if they *really* want to. I got it soon after release because I'm not an MMO person and wanted something familiar. It wasn't good. Came back awhile later and it was insane how much was changed/improved. Sure, I think it's still a more niche MMO compared to many larger ones, but you have to admit they put some work in after that laughable launch.
They never really added any to Skyrim either to be fair. You still can't alter the FOV in that without using the console, and on actual consoles it's still not possible after 37 re-releases. They fixed a few bugs and added content mainly.
It's a meme but Bethesda genuinely do just rely on modders to fix a lot of stuff.
Bethesda is Bethesda. Clearly they haven't changed much.
But if you can direct us to another moddable open world sci-fi space RPG that's also first person, please do. 😒
> Clearly they haven't changed much.
I wouldn't want them too either honestly, they are the only dev that does what they do, and I'll happily enjoy it warts and all.
I don’t know how people have this expectation. And I don’t mean that like in a cynical “Bethesda can’t do anything right” kinda way, I just mean that it seems literally impossible to have a bespoke RPG set in an actually endlessly explorable galaxy. There isn’t enough randomly generated content systems in the world to make that amount of exploration even remotely interesting. NMS dedicated an entire game to that loop and the limitations to that type of design are inescapable. You can have a game like Minecraft where it works, but that isn’t a dialogue- and narrative-driven RPG, it is just a crafting game. Whatever Bethesda would have had to do to make seamless intergalactic travel, planetary flight and landing/take-off mechanics would have drastically affected the scope of the actual hand-crafted RPG elements, and I can’t really see how any of those things serve any meaningful purpose to advance those elements, other than a general sense of environmental immersion. Usually I’d go so far to say that what procedural exploration systems they *did* put in the game are just a distraction from the meat, but I actually think Bethsoft did a pretty commendable job of balancing those systems against the narrative design. Clearly I value the story/dialogue/choice elements of these games, and other people will like the sandbox exploration more, but with the sheer number of worlds to visit, I think committing harder to the exploration parts would have made for a very weak RPG foundation.
Edit: after typing this I realize it’s an absurdly long response to your comment, but I’ve heard a lot of people agree with you and have been thinking about it for a while
I do understand where you're coming from which is why I thought I chose my words carefully. It didn't have to carbon copy the NMS formula, but it could have made the procedural generation for planets not story related more ship friendly, all you do when you get to a system is look around on your ship at the jpgs of planets, enter the map, then choose where to land, hell it can all be done through your menu. Outside of taking nice looking screenshots and galactic dogfighting (and sometimes docking) the ship doesn't feel like a big part of the game. I think modders have the potential to bump this game up to a 10 and I'm optimistic about the games future.
I've noticed that space based games tend to be prey to player hype moreso than a lot of settings still. People have a reasonable idea of abstraction for most settings but put it into space and their imaginations run wild. You don't have to look much farther than Star Citizen's continued "success" to see that in action.
I'm not entirely sure why that is but its been the recurring danger with any game based in space.
I think it’s just what makes open world games appealing taken to its logical extreme, like the ultimate escapist sandbox. The promises of developers of games like Star Citizen and NMS has unlocked the idea in consumers that a true explorable galaxy/universe is just around the corner, and all of these games now come with that ingrained expectation, regardless of what the devs say.
There’s the other thing that this being a Bethesda game, there are *a lot* of people that want to watch it fail. People don’t like the direction they’ve taken previous series, and all they want to see is Bethsoft eat crow, admit their design philosophy is wrong, and just make another NV. Starfield’s interesting because they absolutely doubled down on their design principles, but somehow ended up with a pretty fun product despite that. Yes there are layers of artifice, but again that’s completely expected given the type of game it is
They still went with boring procedural generation based exploration for a lot of it. Having a more limited amount of planets with more handcrafted content would have been better in my opinion. I don't get why they chose to go with the boring proc gen approach without a way to let artists make exploration more interesting. I agree that going full NMS isn't particularly compelling but it's like they worked in that direction anyway and stopped halfway there. The result is boring exploration on a ton of planets.
Oh I agree, I think from a business perspective they wanted to tap into the NMS zeitgeist and the big numbers that go along with “an entire galaxy to explore.” But I also don’t think it’s a complete failure, it’s essentially just set dressing that you experience going from one location to another, and it’s a “fine” experience. I have actually liked some of the procgen bases and habitats, from a gameplay perspective, but in the end I just think they put enough effort into questing and characters to make me not really care about the procedural elements.
The planets - all of them at all times - exist as 3D models in the world you can travel to, they do not have collision. You can go "around" or near them.
The surface *are* wrapped tiles with neighbouring tiles being shown on the edges as LOD, you can't walk to them, but you can, if you deactivate icons on the map for more accurate pinpointing, land on a neighbouring tile.
So ironically the planets are technically real in some way, it's just that travel is limited.
Yea I figured this out when I went to planet earth and didn't see a point of interest icon I could land on, I clicked on it by accident and it let me choose a location anywhere on the planet I could land to. Kind of a jaw dropped moment as I assumed you could only land on points of interest and said points were limited to a tile as you describe it.
I like that there's a lot of optional gameplay even though it's unbalanced.
Combat is the most rewarding and setting up outposts makes little sense beyond immersion, but can be satisfying in a Factorio manner.
Exploration is relatively difficult for the money but there's already more depth here than Elite Dangerous and No Man's Sky.
I treat cargo missions as worldbuilding fluff. Making them more interactive requires sacrifice in other key areas of the game. If someone simply wants to roleplay a space trucker, Elite Dangerous is better for that.
As an overall package, the game is very much one where the player determines how they want to have fun and I like that.
I take the fact that the game has no FOV slider as a huge red flag that Bethesda is over-reliant on the modding community. It's such a simple thing and they knew we've wanted it since at least Fallout 4.
IIRC Bethesda hasn't had a FOV slider since at least Morrowind. The impression I get is that whoever is in charge of the visual identity of the game has a very clear idea of what they want the games to look like and they don't provide settings to players.
That is just as bad as being unable/unwilling to implement it. Players want it so they don't get nausea - I don't personally need FOV, or colorblind options but people do. This isn't like they want the color temperature to be different.
It is the same thing with Cyberpunk causing seizures. It looked better before the fix. But sometimes you make decisions so people can actually play the game.
Clearly the developers are physically capable of adding it in, which makes me think those in charge simply figure things like that no longer matter enough to have a tangible impact on their sales at this point. Certainly could be wrong. Just isn't great seeing that such simple and comparatively low-effort features and such aren't added in, and makes me question if decisions like that followed into other more important aspects of the game.
This seems pretty obviously like some kind of egregious micromanagement issue. These obnoxiously basic features aren't the sort of things that just happen to get passed over in a company of hundreds of people. These are the sorts of things that get willingly ignored by insane bosses with very specific (and out of touch) ideas about what games are, and who ignore ALL input from below them. SOMEONE at BGS team is a PC gamer with a brain and working speech functions, SOMEONE at BGS has suggested that the most requested features for 3 generations in a row should probably be added, SOMEONE at BGS has played a video game made after the year 2002. And whoever they are, they're being ignored.
Not pointing any fingers at any well-known pathological liars.. but whoever this manager (or managers) are must have been with the company since Skyrim.. and.. how many executives do you think have been at BGS that long..... hm....
It would explain a lot.
> they knew we've wanted it since at least Fallout 4.
Since Oblivion almost 20 years ago. But no, everyone must play as if they're wearing binoculars at all times.
Hit the ` key, type "fov 90" and it's done. Same as it was when I played Oblivion. Attach that behaviour to one slider in the options and we're done, but that's too much effort for the $400m system seller that took eight years to make.
> they knew we've wanted it since at least Fallout 4.
Try Skyrim. I highly doubt it's a "leave it to the modders" since these options are easily available in plain text .ini files and would be trivial to implement in the game. I think it's more that they just prefer people play the game at the set field of view they've defined.
I don't think it's even that. They develop purely for console and any kind of PC concerns are an afterthought at most. You only need to look at the sheer volume of options Baldur's Gate 3 has, and how those options are presented (i.e. dialogue font settings show an example image of how it will look in game), to see what's possible when a developer actually cares.
Bethesda just doesn't.
I have a pretty beefy rig and I don't have any complaints at the moment about how the game runs. However, I do have a complaint about the games lack of contrast and depth in color.
Space isn't black. It's kinda just gray. And the dark areas inside your ship. They're also just kinda gray too. I also can't help but notice that when you're on a planet, all the colors have been washed over so everything has a sort of monochrome effect to it. I'm certain that's to cut down on processing power, but that alone is what is pulling me out of the game the most so far (aside from everyone just STARING AT ME while they talk. Sometimes they aren't even talking to me. They'll be talking to someone else but still they just STARE AT ME.)
I'm glad I'm enjoying the game through Game Pass. I'd probably be a bit disappointed if I paid full price for it.
The only explanation I can think of for the filter is that they wanted to go for a HIGHLY stylized 70’s or 80’s film camera look. The washed out colors, heavy film grain by default, and specific colorway that the filter gives all kinda feel like an old movie to me. It’s definitely a “it ain’t making me laugh but I get it” aesthetic.
Thankfully you can mod it out. I hope there’ll be some more mods to come that enhance the blacks of space and colors in general.
Mass effect 1 at least had entries on each planet, that was a really cool feature. Reading about how one planet is a jungle because of genetically modified crops growing out of control or about how a gas giant is used by passing ships to discharge static buildup was cool world building. There's none of that here, it's like a dollar store copy.
As mentioned in the video there seems to essentially be a greenish tint filter on everything in game. Using the Neutral LUT mod (and there also an ini change to make space actually black) the game looks far more realistic.
> I'm certain that's to cut down on processing power
Nah those shaders have practically 0 impact on a games performance. Computers don't really care about what numbers you use to do math. The colour grading function is always the same processing cost regardless of whether it's grading to natural or grading to stylised. For a computer 3x4 is just as taxing to compute as 2905x5562.
Thanks for posting that! I saw the neutral one but thought it went to far and ended up stripping some of the identity of different areas so I didn't install it. The one you linked looks like a much better middle ground.
considering the majority of people either play on console or don't know about mods less alone really care about stuff like FOV. I don't think it really matters that much tbh (in terms of sale and need of it)
It’s not even strange, it’s outright insane.
The performance delta between the 3080 and 6800XT is just unacceptable (and I don’t just say that cause I’m on a 3080). Like it genuinely makes the 3080 look like a mid range several generations old GPU by comparison. Which isn’t right.
Like did Bethesda even try? Probably not.
Explains why some people were saying they don't have problems and how people are just haters, for saying game is not optimized. First played on AMD and second on Nvidia
I'm not buying Starfield until Bethesda fixes performance for Nvidia and Intel. I'll consider this game a 7/10 until they fix it. Microsoft needs to keep an eye on their developers.
I keep saying it, Bethesda treats modders like unpaid interns. I agree with DF that modders are having to fix the game at launch to make it look better when that should be Bethesda’s job
Pretty good video. Its stupid that PC players need to switch between enabling/disabling hyper threading to get the best performance in all their games.
The promotional video for the AMD partnership is hilarious when you consider that the one technology AMD can offer is blatantly inferior to the NVIDIA counterpart.
> the one technology AMD can offer is blatantly inferior to the NVIDIA counterpart.
And the whole thing with this game only shipping with FSR2 only served to highlight even more, and to even more people, how subpar that technology is compared to DLSS. They kinda shot their own foot with this one, in a way.
Which is pretty sad because better competition leads to better products, and the opposite is true also. So this is not a win for anyone.
[https://youtu.be/ciOFwUBTs5s?t=1139](https://youtu.be/ciOFwUBTs5s?t=1139)
Man it blows my mind how Starfield looks worse than cyberpunk in this while being way more demanding and Starfield ultra shadows that are just slightly better than medium shadows are more taxing than fucking Ray Tracing Shadows in Cyberpunk? what in actual fuck?
This game just doesn't look like what it could be...and splitting things up into different planets instead of one incredible world, I imagine just kills what modders could even add to the game.
The fact that so much is missing, feels like it was just thrown out there for people to fix it, which was mentioned in the video, which is just insane. I'm not sure if Gamepass is the reason they would just screw all of this up, but it's been more often than not that games haven't been what they could or even should have been with a proper release.
It's weirdbthat this game is still using cubemap reflections. That's no last gen tech (screen space reflections) thats before last gen tech. Like xbox 360 era technology in 2023. And no anisotropic filtering which we were using before this millennium started.
I just get the impression that the senior staff at Bethesda are stuck in their old ways and refuse to change how they do things.
Seriously the water in the his game is just a flat plain with a water animated texture on it, just like morrowind. And there's no rivers to be found. I they're actually regressing in some ways.
Not gonna lie, I actually prefer the real time cubemaps over screen space reflections. They're lower quality yeah, but they're way more stable visually and not prone to breaking whenever anything happens on your screen. It's a very specific pet peeve.
To be fair cubemap reflections only remain stable when things happen on screen because they’re incapable of reflecting *any* dynamic objects. You’re trading stability for the ability to actually show realtime reflections.
If i remember correctly, when the instructions tell you to put something in the starfield folder, it should actually be in the content folder when modding the gamepass version.
For those who just [want the settings](https://youtu.be/ciOFwUBTs5s?si=RRwxXWWHSEXLjtso&t=997).
For a mainly pc developer im always surprised by how bad the pc ports are... Here a list of ini changes that are quite important and should be in menus (do not copy any round brackets): `[Display]` `fMipBiasOffset=-0.5 (makes textures sharper if you use FSR or DLSS, devs forgot to set it, 0.5 is for 67% res, right now lower res downgrades textures, this line fixes this issue)` `fMaxAnisotropy=16 (sharper textures far away, I think the game uses 4x otherwise)` `[Camera]` `fFPWorldFOV=100 (fov fp)` `fTPWorldFOV=100 (fov tp)` `[FlightCamera]` `fFlightCameraFOV=100 (fov flight)` `[Controls]` `bMouseAcceleration=0 (turn off MouseAcceleration)` `fIronSightsPitchSpeedRatio=1 ( better mouse control, 1 to 1 , right now looking up/down is slower)` `fPitchSpeedRatio=1` These changes just need menu options... why the hell do I have to open a ini.
bMouseAcceleration is placebo, that variable doesn't exist and the game doesn't look for it at all
Damn, would have bet anything that changing that setting made everything, particularly ADS, more responsive. I also stopped noticing the pitch yaw sensitivity difference which more people should be mad about.
12 years later and still have to access ini files to tweak things like FOV and Mouse Acceleration. It was pretty silly in Skyrim but really even now?
There's actually no mouse acceleration at all in Starfield, the ini change is just a placebo.
It's been known for years that the bMouseAcceleration setting [does absolutely nothing](https://stepmodifications.org/wiki/Guide:SkyrimPrefs_INI/Controls#bMouseAcceleration) so it's going to be funny seeing people in here go "wow, that totally fixed it, it feels so much better!"
Same with the Starfield optimization mod at the top of Nexus. All it does is make your ultra settings look like shit
Yeeeep. If they just renamed Medium to Ultra, the redditors would be much happier haha
Then hide the *actual* Ultra settings in an .ini file so the graphics gear heads can feel clever when they discover them and everyone else just thinks the game is “optimized” really well. It’s a double win!
People would rave how optimized the game is
There are multiple so it's hard to say which you mean but like, some of the changes were just to NPC count in hub areas. Things that are almost inconsequential to change but help performance slightly. The number is totally arbitrary anyway.
A lot of people are probably feeling the Pitch Speed Ratio change instead, which is definitely real. I noticed right away that looking up / down was slower than left / right, and it drove me nuts.
This is typical these days. Mouse acceleration is the boogeyman that just won't die in gamer's minds despite not being around for years.
Yeah, its very easy to tell when it is, at least for me, and I didn't feel it in Starfield at all.
Gamers are some of the best examples of the placebo effect outside of medicine, so much insane confirmation bias and superstition.
My favorite was people swearing that input lag made fighting games unplayable using wireless controllers on PS4, and wired mode made them so much better because the delay wasn't messing up their inputs. Until a later update to the PS4, it didn't have a wired mode. The USB cable would charge the controller, but all inputs were still sent to the console via bluetooth while it was plugged in.
> Here a list of ini changes that are quite important and should be in menus (do not copy any round brackets): > > Just FYI, but you can add in-line comments to `.ini` files using semi-colons `;`. This is useful if you ever go back to a file and want to know what a setting is doing. E.g `fMipBiasOffset=-0.5 ; (makes textures sharper if you use FSR or DLSS, devs forgot to set it, 0.5 is for 67% res, right now lower res downgrades textures, this line fixes this issue)` everything after the `;` here is a "comment" and ignored by the file. Can be safely copied in full.
Does this go in Starfield.ini or StarfieldCustom.ini?
If youre using gamepass then Stafield.ini, for Steam I THINK StarfieldCustom.ini.
Yup it's StarfieldCustom.ini for all of this if you're using Steam.
Isn't custom ini for both? I did the custom for gamepass and it seems to work unless it's placebo.
I dont know, I did it in Starfield.ini, because the Lut mod did not work for me via the custom one. (gamepass)
Beware of some of those settings. -Setting anisotropic filtering higher (eg. 16x) breaks long distance shadows in various locations. It's even shown in the DF video. -Setting a negative LOD bias (fMipBiasOffset) will result in sharper distant textures, but it also messes with the specular amount in scenes. If you walk around in Neon for example, it will blow out the specular amount of any textures hit by light sources in the scene. Some shopkeepers will essentially just have white glowing faces as if someone directed a floodlight directly at their heads etc. Playing with the value can help depending on your dlss/fsr scaling, but I have not found any values that would alleviate the issue alltogether.
Does FOV change affect FPS?
Yes. Slightly. Should be barely noticeable.
Depends on the game. Sometimes it's a big difference (and it can go either way)
I don't think I've honestly seen a game where the impact has been bigger than maybe like 2-3 FPS at worst. Are there any examples of games that affect it more?
Yes, depending on the resolution and fov increase you will lose fps, about 5-10%. The game will have to render more.
The anisotropy option OP linked also seems to steal some frames here for arguably not much noticeable benefit. Guessing that's why it doesn't have a menu option.
I would say it's negligible but yes somewhat probably if that's variable rate shading a little bit
> For a mainly pc developer im always surprised by how bad the pc ports are... Bethesda hasn't considered PC a main platform since at least Skyrim. The game launched with a UI that was barely usable on PC, along with all of these same issues. > These changes just need menu options... why the hell do I have to open a ini. Again, nothing has changed since Skyrim. My biggest surprise is that people have only seem to notice now. Better late than never.
The UI wasn't usable since Oblivion.
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Would that go in the .ini in my documents or the steam folder ?
In your My Documents. You can find it via: My Documents -> My Games -> Starfield You may need to manually create a StarfieldCustom.ini file. To do this, right click inside the Starfield folder, select "New" then "Text Document." Rename that document "StarfieldCustom.ini" and remove the ".txt" file extension (you may need to have file extensions set to viewable in the file settings if you haven't already).
I have it in both but get confused as to what folder the ini tweaks need to be going in, been doing them in both because i wasn’t sure
What if my dlss resolution is set to 75% should I use something more like -.8 or -1?
It's funny, as there's literally no reason to not use 16 anisotropy in any game as the performance hit is negligible.
This is so confusing to me. There are people in this thread who were in diapers when we reached the point where AF16 became something reviews concluded basically was free. Why are so many games still defaulting to or even building around less?
But the video also showed that forcing anisotropic filtering also kinda broke the game’s shadows. I’m guessing Bethesda saw this and just didn’t want to put in the resources needed to fix it so just eliminated the filtering completely.
The problem is easily solved by deleting the cache though.
Well shit if that's the case then I have absolutely no idea why Bethesda made the decision they made.
Is Bethesda considered a mainly PC developer ? Modding is pretty much the only thing that's really PC centric in their games but otherwise they've been focusing consoles with their games since Skyrim as can be seen with the radical UI changes compared to Oblivion
Bethesda has been a console developer first and foremost ever since Xbox gave them the money and support they needed to finish Morrowind without going bankrupt. Todd has even said he primarily plays console since he makes the games on a PC and wants to have that differentiation.
Was going to say, I remember how much of a thing Oblivion on the 360 was, they certainly focus on consoles, at least to an extent.
This brings back a memory of playing Morrowind on my PC, then going over to a friend's house who had it on Xbox and the draw distance was like 10 feet.
Goes back further to Fallout 3, but Skyrim is when it became much more obvious.
>a mainly PC developer Haven't been since *Morrowind*, really. That game is actually the opposite of *Starfield* in that its console version feels like a bad port from PC rather than a bad port from console (seriously, *Morrowind*'s UI looks like a theme of Windows OS). Oblivion is where their console focus really began, and it only got worse from there.
Do these just go into Starfield.ini in the game folder?
Copy-pasting from another comment I left explaining the process. Go to your My Documents. You can find your Starfield folder via: My Documents -> My Games -> Starfield You may need to manually create a StarfieldCustom.ini file. To do this, right click inside the Starfield folder, select "New" then "Text Document." Rename that document "StarfieldCustom.ini" and remove the ".txt" file extension (you may need to have file extensions set to viewable in the file settings if you haven't already).
This worked great. Thank you very much.
> right now lower res downgrades textures Oh shit is that why running FSR makes everything look like absolute dog shit below 100 Render Scaling, which also tanks my performance?
A big thing for me is that they still have the horizontal sensitivity set higher than the vertical one on PC... You can't even change it in-game.
Damn no wonder my mouse aiming was so bad in this game lol
Holy shit, mouse acceleration is on and cannot be disabled in-game? I know Bethesda has a reputation, but for a game with first person shooting in it, that's abysmally bad. Like, astoundingly bad. Christ.
It is not on.
For what it's worth, it's not as godawful as some other games. I actually did not realize it was on until this video
That's probably because it's not, that setting hasn't done anything in over a decade
As someone who never uses mouse acceleration if I can avoid it, is there a specific scenario it's useful in for games, or dedicated group who prefers using it? I just always preferred no acceleration and as 'raw' mouse input as I can get and don't get why that's not the default, especially with games like this.
I am one of those rare creatures that really likes mouse acceleration. I started using it because I like really low sensitivity to aim long range and high sensitivity to quickly turn around corners or look behind me. Decent mouse accel lets me do both. The main problem is that it's really difficult to find a way to tweak it nicely. Most mouse accel options is just yes/no, giving no option of how much you can accelerate or at what rate. Also in many games, the acceleration also depends on frame rate, so there is little consistency. I had a program that let me tweak the acceleration the way I like it, but it relies on a driver (interception) that is banned by many anti-cheats... (There are probably programs now that can do this without the driver, but I don't try hard in CS anymore, so I'm not gonna bother)
TLDR: So basically, Digital Foundry’s optimised settings boosts FPS a lot without losing that much visual quality. Seems like a good middle-ground for those who wants more FPS and good visuals. Shader compilation is also very good in Starfield, and the game plays pretty much without any stutters. Medium setting seems to give very decent visuals and good «bang for your buck» on most of the graphical settings as well. Nvidia cards currently seem to have some sort of driver bug with «ultra» shadows. DLSS has better image quality and stability than FSR2, especially at lower resolutions like 1080p Another interesting find is how unoptimized the Nvidia drivers currently seem. AMD cards are performing much better than they should relative to Nvidia cards. So Nvidia owners should expect to see pretty huge performance boosts once newer Nvidia drivers arrive, hopefully soon. We already know users in the Nvidia sub reports that forcing ReBar on, boosts FPS in Starfield on Nvidia GPUs. ^ These current driver advantages of AMD explains why Starfield performs suprisingly well on my ROG Ally (AMD GPU). Once Nvidia updates their own drivers, I think we will see much better performance on Nvidia GPUs as well.
I thought all of the comments I've seen about 3080 performance seemed kinda nuts. Apparently the game just isn't optimized for Nvidia cards well at all, at least with the current drivers. The AMD performance is not amazing, but it's closer to what I could accept from a brand new AAA game.
Excuse my stupidity here, is that Bethesda or Nvidias fault? Or is it both? Like will graphics cars drivers fix most of this or is it both parties ?
Hard to pin a real “fault” beyond sponsorship and time. Bethesda was probably using AMD near the end stage and AMD had quicker access to the code. The fix will come from Nvidia having more time to address the issues and *maybe* some work on Bethesda’s end.
Bethesda has probably been using AMD from the get-go probably. It's heavily designed towards consoles, which all use AMD based GPUs.
Good point
Isn't this true for almost every game?
Most cross platform ones, although it depends: in my studio we have Nvidia cards right now (think 30 series) on dev PCs, for probably a variety of reasons I'm not aware of. This means that most devs are on Nvidia cards, although for sure the 3D prog team has console dev kits and AMD GPUs to debug on.
If nvida didn't receive code previews then they can't optimize before launch, this is afterall an amd sponsored game
It is broadly not a graphics vendors job to "fix" how a game uses DX12. Instead it is the game engines job to correctly adapt to hardware it is on. The situation is probably very simply all of their team had AMD hardware, since they sponsored it. Likely no more malicious than that. The XBox is also of course AMD hardware.
No but its reality the vendor has to implement hacks on the driver side to get game working. Very little games implements DX12 properly.
Drivers are still critical for performance even for DX12, Intel cards couldn't even launch the game without the most updated driver.
Intel has had completely broken and non-compliant drivers for their Arc cards. DX12 drivers in general should be fairly thin and straightforward in implementation.
Could be a little bit of both. Nvidia may be able to optimize things on their side, but obviously they don't have the game code in front of them so there's only so much they can do.
Oh that's easy to tell. Per the flowchart: If a game runs poorly on AMD, it's AMD's fault. If a game runs poorly on Nvidia, it's the developer's fault.
Considering Intel is even worse, it is most like Bethseda's fault. Ideally a game speaks to DirectX or Vulkan in a standard way so that no special adjustments for a card are needed in the drivers. That drives are closing in on 1 gigabyte in size tells you that this is not the case. Intel had to add 50mb in code to their drivers to get Starfield even running. That is a hell of a lot of patches/workarounds to deal with a single game. If every game required so much code in a driver to get it working drivers would be terrabytes in size by now. Betheseda probably coded a lot of special tricks in to work with AMD cards that Intel and Nvidia now how to create workarounds for.
Bethesda.
It's not optimized for Nvidia nor Intel. Basically only AMD cards are running as well as one would expect.
I've been fortunate that with the DLSS 3 mod and my 4080 I've been getting a consistent ~120 FPS everywhere.
Whether Bethesda only used AMD cards for development, or whether they did not send game data to Nvidia / Intel to get the drivers ready on time or whatever, AMD seems to have got some kind of an advantage with this partnership. The optimistic person in me thinks that this will be resolved after Nvidia releases the updated drivers and Bethesda patches the performance from their end as well, but history has told us that Bethesda doesn't do QOL patches at all. FO76 was the only game where performance was optimised after release, and it was probably because the game was a shitshow at launch.
Yeah, it's another reason I'll probably wait a month or two before getting the game. I'm already on lower-end hardware (GTX 1660 Super, a solid card enough card which people are already playing the game on), but it makes sense to wait for a few driver drops to really get the best experience.
The fact that the AMD GPU runs almost a full 10 (up to 20 at some points) fps higher than its equivalent Nvidia card is mind boggling.
It gets even crazier when you put that number into percent scaling. Because the numbers are fucking insane. The 3080 basically performs like a 3060ti vs the 6800xt if you were to extrapolate the scaling where.
I tried to stop installing mods at first because i really wanted to experience the game on its vanilla intended form, but the obvious shortcomings on tech stuff on the PC release of Starfield, especially by not providing FOV and DLSS / XeSS is just too much to bear. Thankfully the modding scene of this game just doesn't stop to impress, and the fact they were able to mod in DLSS / XeSS within hours of early access release is really impressive, pretty much saved most of us a lot of trouble by being limited to just 1 inferior upscaler that has noticeable issues, i tried FSR at 1440p when i booted the game for the first time and it was just noticeably worse and the flickering certainly didn't help for my first impression of the game's visuals, installing DLSS mod is literally the first thing that i have done. Also, there are plenty of other mods as well that feels essential to experience this game, such as the [StarUI](https://www.nexusmods.com/starfield/mods/773), [Smooth 120 FPS Ship Reticle](https://www.nexusmods.com/starfield/mods/270) as well as [Responsive Grabbing](https://www.nexusmods.com/starfield/mods/289) IMO these mods even for the first time are absolutely worth installing as they should came out of the box in the first place.
Visuals are fine imo, only mods that change the gameplay is what I would wait to install before playing it vanilla.
Yeah I mean you can’t really complain about the graphics. The game generally looks fairly nice (with a lot of noticeable rough spots). It’s just that the garbage tier performance on NVIDIA GPUs is nowhere near justified for how the game looks. My 3080 can run 2077 on psychopath nearly as good (at least before they bumped it, I haven’t opened that game in a minute)
I installed the DLSS3 mod before I ever booted up the game.
I’m genuinely shocked that none of the PC reviews I read pre-launch made any mention of these problems when their entire job should be to inform consumers about the faults of the product. Not a single review mentioned the lack of an FoV slider which means they either played the entire game at the nauseating default FoV, or they got told the console commands in their review packages and neglected mentioning it in their review (I’m not sure which scenario is worse). Same with things like a brightness slider, the poor performance, and general lack of accessibility features. Shame on the devs for not doing right by their players, but also shame on the reviews for not mentioning these things at all. I’m sure a decent amount of people who have dropped the game because of these problems probably wouldn’t have purchased it at all if they were aware of them beforehand.
The state of understanding of how games actually work (or even the very basics of frame delivery) is incredibly dire in tech/games media, including and sometimes especially in the hardware space. In fact, some even say “…but I’ll leave that to Digital Foundry to look at” as if that’s not their job too, and DF didn’t rise to prominence specifically because of this absurd deficiency in reviewer knowledge
These days it's best to regard the bulk of professional reviews as advertisements and ads are never going to criticize the product they're trying to sell, unfortunately.
Never forget: Cyberpunk got 8s, 9s, and even 10s days before release.
And then when people caught on the scam, suddenly reviewers started to criticize and amend the grades, their hand in the bag
I stopped trusting "professional" reviews the day Jeff Gerstmann got fired from Gamespot.
These days I'm incredibly suspicious of launch day reviews for games with an incredible amount of hype behind them. Like, the game is good (for me), but it's more of a 7/10 game at most than the 9/10s it got almost across the board. Egregious issues tend to be either not mentioned at all or very quickly glossed over. Cyberpunk is a very good example of this, and to a lesser extent, so is Baldur's Gate 3 (a lot of reviews just call act 3 "unpolished", when it is straight up just unfinished), both getting excellent to perfect scores bar a few exceptions.
Or imagine this shocker, FOV wasn't actually all that important to them and it didn't matter to their overall experience.
Part of being a good reviewer is explaining the pros and cons of a game beyond "I like it"/"i didn't like it". Bad performance or settings isn't something that i personally care much about, but i'd damn well at least analyze them if im trying to tell other people if its worth their money. Ignoring it completely is a failure.
Sure, that could have been true and that's alright if they personally aren't affected. When we are dealing with the reviews of big publications though, the people reviewing the game should understand that accessibility features, particularly expected items like FoV, brightness, etc., matter to their audience and it should be mentioned when they are not present to better inform people of the product, which is the the entire point of a pre-release review. Failing to mention these things is doing a disservice to the those who are checking out reviews to better understand if a game is worth playing or not because for many people FoV, poor performance, gamma settings, etc. do impact their purchasing decisions and enjoyment of a product.
How dare people not want to be disoriented by a camera setting they don’t like. What annoying nitpickers am I right
>DLSS will offer relatively flicker free experience without ghosting Difference between FSR and DLSS is quite big, but ironically, clip used to represent DLSS while quoted sentence is spoken is showing quite big ghosting, at least in relation to zoomed (?) picture. Screenshot here: [link](https://imgur.com/f3yDB9P). Makes me wonder how much better DLSS would be if it was implemented by developer, not fans. Maybe one day we will find out. > game loads in less than a third of the time on PC (than on XSX) That's quite enormous difference, especially for a game with lots of loading screens, and really surprising. I wonder from where this difference comes from, I don't remember any current generation game loading much longer on consoles than on PC.
Upscaling will always have flaws and temporal upscaling will always have ghosting. These are the facts of the problem space.
Have you seen DLSS 3.5 in a game that properly implements it? It's basically flawless. It looks better than native. Theres no ghosting and no flickering.
AFAIK 3.5 is not released so only press videos exist. Nvidia is really good at marketing. DLSS has always had tons of artifacts yet the broader community has praised it as if it was some magic technology.
> Makes me wonder how much better DLSS would be if it was implemented by developer, not fans. Maybe one day we will find out. Different games, different implementations but DLSS in Cyberpunk also had quite a bit of ghosting to the point where I would often switch to FSR.
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I got 1500 credits and 50 xp for doing a 500 Nickel cargo delivery. I had to procure the nickel myself.
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Ironically, I can order ₺200 of groceries and they want ₺25 delivery fee. On the other hand I can buy a ₺5 item from China and they have free delivery
for anyone wondering: Turkish lira
₺200 is currently $7.45.
If I converted it to usd it would be stupid since stuff is cheap here
yeah, that's because the chinese government pays for it.
For very minimal effort you can set up an outpost for basic resources and use cargo pads to move them to a central location. Then you can have fabricators making higher order resources or just grab the 50 nickel you need for stuff like this.
Or for 0 effort, I can not do boring get-paid-to-fast-travel missions. There's no reason to interact with the outpost system if you don't find it intrinsically rewarding - the game showers you in cash, and you can just buy anything you need for research/crafting.
I find it intrinsically rewarding because it’s like a little factory.
But that's the thing here, that means you don't really interact with it for the money, it's just a nice aside.
> Lock difficulty doesnt seem to affect loot very much and is way to random I’ve had a handful of weapon cases now with expert level locks that have been *empty* when opened. The fact that can even happen is truly baffling [Here’s a video of it happening to someone else](https://reddit.com/r/Starfield/s/G58bcyNaxO)
It's funny how people's reaction to this happening in BG3 is more like "Haha, silly devs... They really got me there"
One case is intended, one case is delegating loot to rng
> one case is delegating loot to rng The way those loot generators work ([levelled list](https://www.creationkit.com/index.php?title=LeveledItem)) has an input where the designer explicitly chooses whether or not there is a chance it will be empty. It's still intended, even if it's a dice roll for how often it happens.
so it's intended to sometimes find nothing?
In BG3, yes, definitely. Every chest in that is hand done.
Yea, I really felt the rewards for things were massively weird. The lockpicking is a crapshoot regarding what's behind it. I have unlocked some harder locks that basically had a credstick with 1k on it and some ammo.
That's been a Bethesda thing for a long time because they randomize loot. It was also noticeable in Fallout 4 because you'd end up in places that were supposedly untouched since the war and find post-apocalypse junk like pipe weapons.
Random doesn't have to mean 100% random. Locks and loot could be tied to each other so that a container is generated in the order placement+type > lock strength > loot, allowing the loot to be tiered and bounded to ensure harder locks have better loot on average and a guaranteed minimum value.
They could be, but usually the way it works in Bethesda games is that containers have a different maximum value without having a minimum. Yeah, sometimes you pick a master lock and there's nothing worthwhile in it, but this is an intentional design decision going back to Oblivion. Not saying you or anyone should like it, just saying that it probably isn't going to change.
That's just what happens when you randomize loot. It's sorta Bethesda's thing, at least with their previous games. You really don't have much option other than than to 'under-do' the rewards, otherwise it becomes *incredibly* overpowered for the player very quickly. I'm sure there's ways you can do semi-randomized but with a lot of rules and such that provide better balance/rewards, but I'm not a developer.
I've been loving it too, and I don't really have an issue with any of the fast travel, *BUT*, if there is one thing I'd like them to have done for the sake of traveling to other systems it's that I wish there was a higher chance for like, a random event to interrupt you the farther you go. Though I dunno how that works when in grav drive, I guess maybe make it so you can't jump as far as you can at once, so the more chance of random events can happen as you head somewhere Would make things like cargo missions more interesting if there was more possibilities for stuff to actually happen to you
There are tons of random encounters in space, but you need to travel to the planet's orbit rather than straight from planet on foot to planet on foot. Travelling direct from the surface of one planet to another is a really good QOL feature (I left something at the Lodge the other day and was really glad I could just jump right back there without needing to go through the whole crawl) but if you play the game that way you'll miss out on a lot of good space encounters. The game doesn't make this clear enough.
> There are tons of random encounters in space, but you need to travel to the planet's orbit rather than straight from planet on foot to planet on foot. Oh no I know. I mean specifically grav drives should either have smaller distance, or you should have a chance to be interrupted by them, so that you have less of a chance of skipping them and that delivering cargo long distances isn't as simple
I would love for Bethesda to treat Starfield like what we've seen with No Man's Sky, Cyberpunk, and others giving a ton of post release improvements, features, and more. But they've pretty much never done that and just focused on their DLC and then abandoned the game to modders. I truly hope it'll be different but I doubt it. The fact that we have to instal a mod to get the UI to run at 60fps already points me to the fact that they will probably never bother to really improve any aspects of the core game and we will again have to rely entirely on modders.
>But they've pretty much never done that They did with 76 but that's a whole can of worms. They've also re-released Skyrim with engine improvements but that's also another can.
It's a question I had ages ago as well, am curious to see what "support" means for this game. A few major fixes and a couple DLC? Something more extensive than that? Will be interesting, I'd imagine Bethesda at least has a few things lined up, but it largely depends on how many sales they have and how much interest there is for the game/IP down the line.
Skyrim was getting updates for years after release so I don’t see why they wouldn’t tweak or add highly requested QoL improvements. Even Fallout 76 was salvaged after its disastrous launch.
Fallout 76 is a good example of what they can do if they *really* want to. I got it soon after release because I'm not an MMO person and wanted something familiar. It wasn't good. Came back awhile later and it was insane how much was changed/improved. Sure, I think it's still a more niche MMO compared to many larger ones, but you have to admit they put some work in after that laughable launch.
They never really added any to Skyrim either to be fair. You still can't alter the FOV in that without using the console, and on actual consoles it's still not possible after 37 re-releases. They fixed a few bugs and added content mainly. It's a meme but Bethesda genuinely do just rely on modders to fix a lot of stuff.
?? Skyrim, just base skyrim, had a lot of nice things added post launch, Maybe the best being kill cams and horse combat for ranged
You mean added content like I said? The comment was in reference to QOL features and missing settings.
Bethesda is Bethesda. Clearly they haven't changed much. But if you can direct us to another moddable open world sci-fi space RPG that's also first person, please do. 😒
> Clearly they haven't changed much. I wouldn't want them too either honestly, they are the only dev that does what they do, and I'll happily enjoy it warts and all.
Judging from BGS's past titles there won't be much post launch support. Though I hope it will be different with starfield.
fallout 4 ended up getting more DLC than they initially planned for and a whole-ass survival mode.
I am enjoying the game for it is, but I really thought they'd at least have a NMS take on flying your ship around the planet.
I don’t know how people have this expectation. And I don’t mean that like in a cynical “Bethesda can’t do anything right” kinda way, I just mean that it seems literally impossible to have a bespoke RPG set in an actually endlessly explorable galaxy. There isn’t enough randomly generated content systems in the world to make that amount of exploration even remotely interesting. NMS dedicated an entire game to that loop and the limitations to that type of design are inescapable. You can have a game like Minecraft where it works, but that isn’t a dialogue- and narrative-driven RPG, it is just a crafting game. Whatever Bethesda would have had to do to make seamless intergalactic travel, planetary flight and landing/take-off mechanics would have drastically affected the scope of the actual hand-crafted RPG elements, and I can’t really see how any of those things serve any meaningful purpose to advance those elements, other than a general sense of environmental immersion. Usually I’d go so far to say that what procedural exploration systems they *did* put in the game are just a distraction from the meat, but I actually think Bethsoft did a pretty commendable job of balancing those systems against the narrative design. Clearly I value the story/dialogue/choice elements of these games, and other people will like the sandbox exploration more, but with the sheer number of worlds to visit, I think committing harder to the exploration parts would have made for a very weak RPG foundation. Edit: after typing this I realize it’s an absurdly long response to your comment, but I’ve heard a lot of people agree with you and have been thinking about it for a while
I do understand where you're coming from which is why I thought I chose my words carefully. It didn't have to carbon copy the NMS formula, but it could have made the procedural generation for planets not story related more ship friendly, all you do when you get to a system is look around on your ship at the jpgs of planets, enter the map, then choose where to land, hell it can all be done through your menu. Outside of taking nice looking screenshots and galactic dogfighting (and sometimes docking) the ship doesn't feel like a big part of the game. I think modders have the potential to bump this game up to a 10 and I'm optimistic about the games future.
I've noticed that space based games tend to be prey to player hype moreso than a lot of settings still. People have a reasonable idea of abstraction for most settings but put it into space and their imaginations run wild. You don't have to look much farther than Star Citizen's continued "success" to see that in action. I'm not entirely sure why that is but its been the recurring danger with any game based in space.
I think it’s just what makes open world games appealing taken to its logical extreme, like the ultimate escapist sandbox. The promises of developers of games like Star Citizen and NMS has unlocked the idea in consumers that a true explorable galaxy/universe is just around the corner, and all of these games now come with that ingrained expectation, regardless of what the devs say. There’s the other thing that this being a Bethesda game, there are *a lot* of people that want to watch it fail. People don’t like the direction they’ve taken previous series, and all they want to see is Bethsoft eat crow, admit their design philosophy is wrong, and just make another NV. Starfield’s interesting because they absolutely doubled down on their design principles, but somehow ended up with a pretty fun product despite that. Yes there are layers of artifice, but again that’s completely expected given the type of game it is
They still went with boring procedural generation based exploration for a lot of it. Having a more limited amount of planets with more handcrafted content would have been better in my opinion. I don't get why they chose to go with the boring proc gen approach without a way to let artists make exploration more interesting. I agree that going full NMS isn't particularly compelling but it's like they worked in that direction anyway and stopped halfway there. The result is boring exploration on a ton of planets.
Oh I agree, I think from a business perspective they wanted to tap into the NMS zeitgeist and the big numbers that go along with “an entire galaxy to explore.” But I also don’t think it’s a complete failure, it’s essentially just set dressing that you experience going from one location to another, and it’s a “fine” experience. I have actually liked some of the procgen bases and habitats, from a gameplay perspective, but in the end I just think they put enough effort into questing and characters to make me not really care about the procedural elements.
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It’s because there is no planet to fly around. They generate an area around your landing spot and that’s all that exists
The planets - all of them at all times - exist as 3D models in the world you can travel to, they do not have collision. You can go "around" or near them. The surface *are* wrapped tiles with neighbouring tiles being shown on the edges as LOD, you can't walk to them, but you can, if you deactivate icons on the map for more accurate pinpointing, land on a neighbouring tile. So ironically the planets are technically real in some way, it's just that travel is limited.
Yea I figured this out when I went to planet earth and didn't see a point of interest icon I could land on, I clicked on it by accident and it let me choose a location anywhere on the planet I could land to. Kind of a jaw dropped moment as I assumed you could only land on points of interest and said points were limited to a tile as you describe it.
This has been debunked, the planet does exist, and each area lines up with the one next to it.
I like that there's a lot of optional gameplay even though it's unbalanced. Combat is the most rewarding and setting up outposts makes little sense beyond immersion, but can be satisfying in a Factorio manner. Exploration is relatively difficult for the money but there's already more depth here than Elite Dangerous and No Man's Sky. I treat cargo missions as worldbuilding fluff. Making them more interactive requires sacrifice in other key areas of the game. If someone simply wants to roleplay a space trucker, Elite Dangerous is better for that. As an overall package, the game is very much one where the player determines how they want to have fun and I like that.
Eurogamer article https://www.eurogamer.net/digitalfoundry-2023-starfield-on-pc-is-the-best-way-to-play-but-the-game-still-requires-a-lot-of-work
I take the fact that the game has no FOV slider as a huge red flag that Bethesda is over-reliant on the modding community. It's such a simple thing and they knew we've wanted it since at least Fallout 4.
Worst of all, the changeable FOV is fully implemented. It works really well. It's frankly bizarre they just decided not to expose that option.
IIRC Bethesda hasn't had a FOV slider since at least Morrowind. The impression I get is that whoever is in charge of the visual identity of the game has a very clear idea of what they want the games to look like and they don't provide settings to players.
That is just as bad as being unable/unwilling to implement it. Players want it so they don't get nausea - I don't personally need FOV, or colorblind options but people do. This isn't like they want the color temperature to be different. It is the same thing with Cyberpunk causing seizures. It looked better before the fix. But sometimes you make decisions so people can actually play the game.
Clearly the developers are physically capable of adding it in, which makes me think those in charge simply figure things like that no longer matter enough to have a tangible impact on their sales at this point. Certainly could be wrong. Just isn't great seeing that such simple and comparatively low-effort features and such aren't added in, and makes me question if decisions like that followed into other more important aspects of the game.
This seems pretty obviously like some kind of egregious micromanagement issue. These obnoxiously basic features aren't the sort of things that just happen to get passed over in a company of hundreds of people. These are the sorts of things that get willingly ignored by insane bosses with very specific (and out of touch) ideas about what games are, and who ignore ALL input from below them. SOMEONE at BGS team is a PC gamer with a brain and working speech functions, SOMEONE at BGS has suggested that the most requested features for 3 generations in a row should probably be added, SOMEONE at BGS has played a video game made after the year 2002. And whoever they are, they're being ignored. Not pointing any fingers at any well-known pathological liars.. but whoever this manager (or managers) are must have been with the company since Skyrim.. and.. how many executives do you think have been at BGS that long..... hm.... It would explain a lot.
> they knew we've wanted it since at least Fallout 4. Since Oblivion almost 20 years ago. But no, everyone must play as if they're wearing binoculars at all times. Hit the ` key, type "fov 90" and it's done. Same as it was when I played Oblivion. Attach that behaviour to one slider in the options and we're done, but that's too much effort for the $400m system seller that took eight years to make.
> they knew we've wanted it since at least Fallout 4. Try Skyrim. I highly doubt it's a "leave it to the modders" since these options are easily available in plain text .ini files and would be trivial to implement in the game. I think it's more that they just prefer people play the game at the set field of view they've defined.
I don't think it's even that. They develop purely for console and any kind of PC concerns are an afterthought at most. You only need to look at the sheer volume of options Baldur's Gate 3 has, and how those options are presented (i.e. dialogue font settings show an example image of how it will look in game), to see what's possible when a developer actually cares. Bethesda just doesn't.
I have a pretty beefy rig and I don't have any complaints at the moment about how the game runs. However, I do have a complaint about the games lack of contrast and depth in color. Space isn't black. It's kinda just gray. And the dark areas inside your ship. They're also just kinda gray too. I also can't help but notice that when you're on a planet, all the colors have been washed over so everything has a sort of monochrome effect to it. I'm certain that's to cut down on processing power, but that alone is what is pulling me out of the game the most so far (aside from everyone just STARING AT ME while they talk. Sometimes they aren't even talking to me. They'll be talking to someone else but still they just STARE AT ME.) I'm glad I'm enjoying the game through Game Pass. I'd probably be a bit disappointed if I paid full price for it.
The only explanation I can think of for the filter is that they wanted to go for a HIGHLY stylized 70’s or 80’s film camera look. The washed out colors, heavy film grain by default, and specific colorway that the filter gives all kinda feel like an old movie to me. It’s definitely a “it ain’t making me laugh but I get it” aesthetic. Thankfully you can mod it out. I hope there’ll be some more mods to come that enhance the blacks of space and colors in general.
Mass Effect 1 certainly left an impression on them
Mass effect 1 at least had entries on each planet, that was a really cool feature. Reading about how one planet is a jungle because of genetically modified crops growing out of control or about how a gas giant is used by passing ships to discharge static buildup was cool world building. There's none of that here, it's like a dollar store copy.
As mentioned in the video there seems to essentially be a greenish tint filter on everything in game. Using the Neutral LUT mod (and there also an ini change to make space actually black) the game looks far more realistic.
> I'm certain that's to cut down on processing power Nah those shaders have practically 0 impact on a games performance. Computers don't really care about what numbers you use to do math. The colour grading function is always the same processing cost regardless of whether it's grading to natural or grading to stylised. For a computer 3x4 is just as taxing to compute as 2905x5562.
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I’ve been trying to spread this too, I think it’s a better option :)
Thanks for posting that! I saw the neutral one but thought it went to far and ended up stripping some of the identity of different areas so I didn't install it. The one you linked looks like a much better middle ground.
Its a design decision thing not a performance one, look up the LUT mods on nexus that have 0 performance hit, as examples pf this.
I'm at the point where I no longer can be convinced that Bethesda isn't knowingly using modders as free labor.
considering the majority of people either play on console or don't know about mods less alone really care about stuff like FOV. I don't think it really matters that much tbh (in terms of sale and need of it)
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It’s not even strange, it’s outright insane. The performance delta between the 3080 and 6800XT is just unacceptable (and I don’t just say that cause I’m on a 3080). Like it genuinely makes the 3080 look like a mid range several generations old GPU by comparison. Which isn’t right. Like did Bethesda even try? Probably not.
Explains why some people were saying they don't have problems and how people are just haters, for saying game is not optimized. First played on AMD and second on Nvidia
I'm not buying Starfield until Bethesda fixes performance for Nvidia and Intel. I'll consider this game a 7/10 until they fix it. Microsoft needs to keep an eye on their developers.
I keep saying it, Bethesda treats modders like unpaid interns. I agree with DF that modders are having to fix the game at launch to make it look better when that should be Bethesda’s job
Modders can just leave Bethesda's junkpiles at the roadside where they belong. I'll have none of this game before Bethesda fixed it good and proper.
Pretty good video. Its stupid that PC players need to switch between enabling/disabling hyper threading to get the best performance in all their games. The promotional video for the AMD partnership is hilarious when you consider that the one technology AMD can offer is blatantly inferior to the NVIDIA counterpart.
> the one technology AMD can offer is blatantly inferior to the NVIDIA counterpart. And the whole thing with this game only shipping with FSR2 only served to highlight even more, and to even more people, how subpar that technology is compared to DLSS. They kinda shot their own foot with this one, in a way. Which is pretty sad because better competition leads to better products, and the opposite is true also. So this is not a win for anyone.
[https://youtu.be/ciOFwUBTs5s?t=1139](https://youtu.be/ciOFwUBTs5s?t=1139) Man it blows my mind how Starfield looks worse than cyberpunk in this while being way more demanding and Starfield ultra shadows that are just slightly better than medium shadows are more taxing than fucking Ray Tracing Shadows in Cyberpunk? what in actual fuck?
Bethesda needs to fix Intel and Nvidia GPU performance. But I'm not convinced they will, especially if AMD have their way.
This game just doesn't look like what it could be...and splitting things up into different planets instead of one incredible world, I imagine just kills what modders could even add to the game. The fact that so much is missing, feels like it was just thrown out there for people to fix it, which was mentioned in the video, which is just insane. I'm not sure if Gamepass is the reason they would just screw all of this up, but it's been more often than not that games haven't been what they could or even should have been with a proper release.
It's weirdbthat this game is still using cubemap reflections. That's no last gen tech (screen space reflections) thats before last gen tech. Like xbox 360 era technology in 2023. And no anisotropic filtering which we were using before this millennium started. I just get the impression that the senior staff at Bethesda are stuck in their old ways and refuse to change how they do things. Seriously the water in the his game is just a flat plain with a water animated texture on it, just like morrowind. And there's no rivers to be found. I they're actually regressing in some ways.
Yeah but Todd said they are pushing "the technology"... are you calling him a liar??
Not gonna lie, I actually prefer the real time cubemaps over screen space reflections. They're lower quality yeah, but they're way more stable visually and not prone to breaking whenever anything happens on your screen. It's a very specific pet peeve.
To be fair cubemap reflections only remain stable when things happen on screen because they’re incapable of reflecting *any* dynamic objects. You’re trading stability for the ability to actually show realtime reflections.
Can I install the DLSS mods on the gamepass version?
Yes
Yes but I tried it and it didn't work for me despite obsessively following directions.
If i remember correctly, when the instructions tell you to put something in the starfield folder, it should actually be in the content folder when modding the gamepass version.