I'm finding ways to enjoy Starfield but
this is gonna get torn apart hahahahahah
Outer Worlds was um, better. It looked better too. This is higher polish, but looks, worse? It's so odd.
Try turning upscaling off for a trip. The game looks WORSE at full res. The FSR2 blurry mess makes their assets look more cohesive than they are, your brain takes it as ground/contact shadow.
Had a think, and the stuff in Starfield I'm reacting negatively to is almost entirely stuff that mods fixed in previous games. It's just been ages since I played one of these de-modded.
"Huh, these environments look like someone just kitbashed random plants down, and they don't even change when you harvest": mod-fixed
"Huh, the way they did fast travel completely undercuts any sense of adventure": mod-fixed
"Huh, this UI is catastrophically poorly put together": mod-fixed
"Huh, the way they've chosen to further limit armor/gear options really undercuts what choices you can actually make": mod-fixed
"Huh, this is all just random loot that doesn't seem well thought out, which gives everything this vague sense of being proc-gen": mod-fixed
Never play a naked Bethesda game. This is no exception. Heh. Whatever, I'm still having fun, and good news, this feels EXACTLY like their Skyrim engine++, meaning all the mod tools should still work and be as powerful as they were before.
Also, if anyone was worried about the Starfield planets being huge infinite expanses of open-world proc-gen?
Well, no. What actually happens is you land on one, and you get this big stretch of (procedural? semi-procedural?) planet, and it populates it with Radiant-ish quests and locations, and if you keep walking, you hit a wall.
They're zones. They're semi-procgen zones. It feels VERY much like Skyrim, even here. I doubt mods will be able to populate entire planets because (the planets don't exist, they're just piles of potential random encounters that the engine picks from when populating your little semi-random square).
Which is actually very good! This does NOT feel like No Man's Sky, once you hit the limit and realize what they're doing.
What they've done is looked at NMS gameplay, and realized most players land in one random spot, look around, and then leave. They've optimized for that behavior. There's always Cool Shit happening where you land, because they just throw up a wall past that. It reduces the oatmeal feel, somewhat.
I'd have to play more to see, but I'm 50/50 on whether these planet chunks are even truly random.
I'd lay odds that what's actually happening here is that any given planet has a handful of potential maps it loads, and then it peppers procedural stuff over top. It'd fit their toolset a lot better.
Oh and there's also no atmospheric flight, or transitions from atmosphere to space, or ANY of that. It's all obviously, nakedly just loading between spaces. But that REALLY helps avoid a ton of NMS oatmeal-vibe problems too.
@glassbottommeg Yeah, I've been reading a lot about reactions to #starfield and I think having played NMS (I actually never got super far into the game as its meandering nature always got the best of me - and when I see all these expansions, I have no idea how to have the kind of fun these trailers advertise), I am totally okay not wandering a contiguous proc gen planet.
Are you having fun with the game? I'll play when it hits games pass. Still too engrossed by BG3, so thankfully no FOMO. :P
@fuzzybinary It's intensely confusing, my best guess is that they're such a Designer (like game not UX) heavy studio that their power structure doesn't allow for the designers being told No, on the UX stuff.
Because there are so many outright accessibility failures that I want to scream.
@glassbottommeg My knowledge is approx 15 years old now, but when I was there they had 1 artist dedicated to UI, who was hamstrung by a really bad UI framework, and 1 programmer only semi-dedicated to it, with no tools and no tools programmers to assist making it any better.
My guess is that it is likely still that way.
@fuzzybinary That matches exactly what the game feels like, yep.
So it's designers telling the artist what to do, and there's too much for that artist to really keep up or be empowered to make it cohesive, so each designer (who is often fucking terrible at UX design) just dictates their own little shit sandwich UI for their own little principality
@glassbottommeg It's still creation engine, just a new version of it, it literally is an improved skyrim engine.
Honestly though I haven't enjoyed any of their games past Morrowind, I found Oblivion and Skyrim to be EXTREMELY boring (I've honestly never gotten far into Skyrim before losing interest). Their worlds just all feel so lifeless and copy/paste of large open areas with one wolf, a bandit, and a cave. Even Daggerfall which was entirely generated procedurally is somehow more alive...
@Fangh @leonardbertos I did try stripping everyone and when I saw that ugly grey grandma underwear it was like
oh riiiiiight
@velinion Yep. That's what had me shocked. So much about it is actively uncomfortable to look at, the text is uncomfortable to read, and
I don't even need glasses? I have the weakest possible prescription that I only use for working at the computer, don't even wear 'em outside / at the TV / anywhere else?
It's like, WOOF.
I remember thinking the software rendered I-War 1 actually looked better than hardware accelerated.
@glassbottommeg my twin brother worked on those games. I do remember him saying that the 3dfx cards had trouble doing the cool motion-blurred stars quick enough.
@TomF @glassbottommeg So it turns out that the versions of Edge of Chaos available on Steam and GoG will literally not play unless you have the actual CD in your CD drive.
The most active but very acerbic member of the Steam Forum for the game insults anybody who post about this and tells them they should just download the .iso from somewhere and mount it.
I just got a refund. It's not like any of the original devs get any money for it any more.
@glassbottommeg Damn that is rough 😆
I think I’ve made a good choice by avoiding everything about it so I don’t feel compelled to play until I’ve finished other things..
@glassbottommeg I was actually surprised at how much better it looks in person than from what I've seen on YouTube.
I'm running it with maxed settings at 2560x1440, no upscaling. It doesn't *look* like it's quite matching my monitor's refresh rate with vsync (144hz) but it runs smooth nonetheless.
I didn't play Outer Worlds on PC so I can't compare, but... it looks objectively fine to me. 🤷🏻
Interesting ! Can't wait to have a look at it myself. In general I think they have some engine limitations, the visual presentation does seem somewhat uneven
Was it? I bounced off the game at the first planet in Outer Worlds because I was so bored
Megan Fox
SKUNK 🏳️⚧️
Vivi, The Heinous Witch
che chou 
Darius Kazemi
Jeff Ward
Raptor 
Léonard Bertos 🫏
Fangh
Velinion
Tom Forsyth
Tim Aidley
Metalingus
Marty
Béla Bartha
chrisradsby
Sam Grubb
Psittacus cafeina