Anyone Else Having a Blast?

https://lemmy.world/post/4554683

Anyone Else Having a Blast? - Lemmy.world

Seriously this is a lot of fun. It is absolutely a Bethesda game through and through. Not sure what people were expecting. I’m glad it’s not like No Man’s Sky because that game bored the shit out of me almost immediately. Thoughts?

Also has anyone else been having a flickering screen issue on PC? I turned off film grain but that didn’t seem to help.
Like the whole screen going black type of flickering?
No it’s like there is a strobe light on. Constant flashing. I can’t figure it out.

I love No Mans Sky, and still play it regularly today.

I am also really enjoying Starfield - I am glad they are different games as I wouldn’t want what would amount to playing the same game, slightly differently skinned.

Overall, really enjoying it. I have seen complaints that basically amount to “its another bethesda experience” which isn’t necessarily wrong, but I do enjoy their games in general.

I am approximately 15 hours into the game

I wish I could get into NMS. Yeah the seamless planet to space transition is cool, but I found the game pointless. I haven’t played in awhile maybe it’s better now.
There have been a lot of updates over the years to add content, all free
I just wish they would put out an update to the core gameplay loop. There’s all these interesting things to do but I can’t get to that point because collecting resources seems never ending and its incredibly boring. The gunplay is absolutely atrocious as well.

Yeah I always find that comment weird. I love Bethesda games so it’s not terrible that they still follow the same format and in this case the polish was nicer than normal.

It’s like saying hey look at this new Tarantino or Wes Anderson movie coming out, ugh I am so tired of them doing the same thing every movie.

I’m about 2 hours in and it’s ok. I’m not loving the combat or the constant use of the menus. Obvious I’ll give it more time yet.
Yeah it’s disappointing you need to fast travel to get everywhere, even to the other parts of the planet. It’s a little better using the scanner to fast travel instead of the map but it still feels lame. I’m still having a ton of fun though, about 20 hours in now.
I’m hoping I’ll get used to using the menus all the time. As for the combat the space combat is kind of awesome but the enemies are so spongy even with headshots.
I totally agree about the bullet spongyness. I was planning on doing my first playthrough vanilla but I might have to make an exception and use a mod for this.
The enemies being spongy is kind of expected, and even a good thing, in a game like this, I think. For your weapon upgrades and damage perks to feel impactful, you can't be killing enemies too quickly at the start. And it also incentivises you to find ways to avoid combat if you're not planning on building into weapon/damage upgrades. I get that it can feel immersion-breaking for some people (though not for me, thankfully), but I think it's pretty important on a mechanical level in RPGs.

The game’s menus are nowhere near good enough for how much we are forced to use them. Theyre really disruptive and clunky to the normal flow of the game. In context, interfaces have been a weak point for BGS, I was hoping they would have gotten it right this time.

Like, overall, the gameplay is fun to me but I dread when it switches to ‘Fallout 4 UI Simulator’.

The fact that the game is unplayable on an HDD is really upsetting. That’s it, I can’t form an opinion on the rest because the stuttering is so bad that I cannot play it.
Well that’s on you. In the MINIMUM requirements it does say “Additional Notes: SSD Required(Solid-state Drive)
Still using an HDD in 2023 is like trying to use a horse and cart and complaining the motorway traffic is too fast
Dude, SSDs are not expensive anymore like they were ten years ago. If there is any upgrade you need to make, replacing the hdd with an ssd is absolutely the first thing you should do.

Yeah physical spinning disks haven’t been relevant on mondern systems outside of cold data storage since roughly 2016. Price difference between SSD and HDD are pretty much the same up to the 1-2tb range. Its also listed in the minium requirements for the game.

Think its time for a modern storage medium my dude.

That is simply not true. If hdds were outdated 7 years ago I would have had problems 7 years ago. This is the only game out of the hundreds I have that doesn’t work on an HDD. Elden Ring, EFT, Baldurs Gate, Call of Duty, Hogwarts Legacy, hell even Star Citizen works fine on an HDD and that game is massively unoptimized. Having it on its minimum specs isn’t an excuse. If it was just a case of load times being bad and assets loading in slowly then yeah sure, they did their best and it’s a better experience on an ssd. That’s not the case though, talking to anyone, fighting, opening an inventory, just walking, all of these cause a 5 to 30 seconds freeze and the audio is constantly cutting out. There’s no excuse for that and this is unique to starfield. I am making room on my SSD to play it because I still want to try the game but claiming I’m the unreasonable one for voicing a problem is absurd.

I could also say that a 1-2 tb hard drive isn’t relevant on modern systems anymore. The price difference between a 4tb SSD and HDD is 2-3x the price.

That they are still viable for some applications doesn't mean they aren't outdated. There will always be the thing that "starts" your issues, and pointing at it and saying that it isn't hardwares fault doesn't make it less true. Pointing at past years of non-problematic use doesn't make future incompatibility unacceptable.

This is literally the Simpsons meme of the principal standing outside the broken window, saying

"Is it my old HDDs fault I can't play a brand-new modern game?"

"No, it's the devs fault for not supporting my old hardware"

That’s good that Baldur’s Gate ran well for you on a HDD, but the minimum specs list a SSD as required.

Brother, im not claiming you complaining about a point of contention is an issue at all. Get off your high horse. We all know the game has performance issues

Also those games you listed are bing impacted by slow access times of your HDD. They just are not impacted as much as the one you are currently complaining about.

Starfield has a SSD listed as a min req for the game. You not meeting the min req WIIL cause issues.

Intel 670p nvme drve is $0.035/gb a WD blue 7200rpm HDD is $0.030/gb. Its a roughly $3-5 difference per TB.

If you really need that $3-5 bro, i can send you it lol.

What about the rest of your specs? You got a pentium 2 in that thing and 512Mb of ram or somthing sheesh? The futures now old man.

Honestly, I would go as low as 2013. As someone who works in IT, that was about the year all the regular desktop stations basically came with an SSD standard or didn’t really cost much to swap so it was a must. 2016 was more of the move to NVME with M.2 drives.

For myself I believe I made the switch in 2010, once you get a taste of that speed boost it was hard not to justify the extra cost! Wasn’t to bad either if you got small storage to cut cost. I just wanted my OS to load quick.

Yeah thats true, i was mainly giving the poster some leway at a consumer level. I made the swap in my personal systems in 2014 and havent looked back.

I understand and agree to an extent that games should still be able to be stored on an HDD and played. But Starfield is an exception because of how massive it is. An SSD helps with the loading and transitioning when traveling between planets and new zones. An HDD is just too slow for this.

But SSDs are much cheaper now and keep getting cheaper. I spent $300 for a 1TB SATA 2.5 inch SSD only about 8 years ago and I saw on Amazon that there is a 1TB NVMe SSD for only $49. If you’re willing to spend $70 on a game, you should be willing to invest $49 for a SSD.

It’s 2023 - SSDs have been affordable for years.
An ssd is the best bang for the buck upgrade to a slow machine in my experience. Putting even a cheap $40 Kingston one in my grandmas old ass computer took it from unusable to decent speeds for web browsing/office applications/etc. I highly recommend you get one.
I have an SSD and an HDD. There’s not room on my SSD for games.

I’m having a blast as well. I’m getting sidetracked by all the random side missions and activities that I’m 16 hours in and still haven’t really completed the first main storyline mission. I had to figure things out that would have been taught to me during that mission apparently.

My only issue is resources and modding. Carrying all that crap around on the off chance I need it is killing my carry capacity.

Otherwise I’m just blasting through space and enjoying the dialog and pickpocketing everything I see. Good times.

Same here. I spent four hours exploring the moon Kreen and haven’t even fought the crimson fleet mission. It’s amazing how sidetracked you can get.
For the first time ever in a Bethesda RPG I’ve decided I won’t go stealth and I won’t pick up every crappy item to be permanently overloaded. FREEDOM! Only 3 hours in but it feels great.
Wait so you AREN’T picking up every styrofoam coffee cup you find?

Yeah, its weird

Like you can start gathering and collecting resources from the very beginning of the game, but 30 hours in and i still cant use any significant amount of it?

I’m having a blast once I figured out how I want to play it. At first I struggled with the time I spent in menus and fast travel.

Now it’s fun and I’m hooked!

I’m 17 hours in so far and really enjoying the game. For a short moment at the beginning I was a bit annoyed because I couldn’t find the last resource to scan on a planet to get 100%. But the next day I said screw that and continued the main quest and I’m having a blast since then.
I can’t find the last resource on the Moon. Guess I need better scan equipment or something.
There may be a cave or something where it generates, if it's a rare material.
This is me on Neon’s planet. Apparently there is fauna to scan?? I just found the sea creatures and started scanning them.
Try looking in caves. Sometimes the necessary resource is only found in a cave. Or at least that’s what it seems like.

I'm like 30+ hours in and it's all in thinking about at work rn. That doesn't always happen, few games hook me like that. Halo 2/3 from MS/HS, probably Skyrim to an extent, ESO (forever and always apparently, cause I'm still playing that amongst Starfield), and now this. And it's all aspects. I want to build my ship, I want to do my outposts and crafting, I want to explore planets to find needed resources, gear, and weapons, I want to finish the main story, and the side quests (and I'm actually agonizing over which side I want to go with).

I'm debating bringing my Xbox with me to a friend's house for a weekend trip so we can play there.

I'm definitely bringing it, who am I kidding?

Im having a lot of fun, running around the planets trying to find new locations, I want to start building bases because I have so many followers I cant assign to stuff
I’m nearly 50 hours in already (and haven’t played at all today, yet 😎) and having so much fun with the game, barely even touched the main story because I’m so fixated on rebuilding my ship constantly
I opened the ship edit screen and just backed out haha, Im not ready!! although I did end up going back in to make the starter ship all black. Also do you know if you hijack and steal another ship does it just sort of stay in inventory? or can you like assign crew to live in it or something
You need to dock with the ship and pilot it somewhere that lets you modify your ships. Then just go into “view and modify ships” to change your home ship if you want to use something else.
Question to those who may know: I swapped my crew habitat for one of the 3x1 habitats last night, and noticed afterwards that the new habitat did not have a research station. I tried switching it to the engineering version of the hab, but no luck. Anyone know how I can get it back?

Try going to different shipyards as each have different habs to choose from, this also includes different planet cities’ landing zones where you can talk to a technician.

There are habs, for example on Mars’ moon Demios’ shipyard, that are specifically for research.

Awesome! I was wondering what I was missing. So you buy your different stations and whatnot at vendors, and that’s not in the build screen, right? I assume there’s some kind of fabricator that I can also buy and add to my ship, but they don’t really do a great job of explaining any of that haha.

Sort of. So like when you land at New Atlantis, there is a terminal to your right when you are walking away from your ship and into the city. There is usually a guy standing here with a hard hat and a vest on. He’s a ship technician or something like that title. If you speak to him, you can select the option to view/edit your ship and in that menu, you can make edits to your ship and that’s where you will find the different fabs to choose from.

When you are on the habs, do take note that on some of them, you can cycle to the left and right to access more options. So like a 1x3 hab has the option for an All in One access, the next is a Research hab, the next is a science hab, the next is armory, and so on and so forth.

Each city will have a technician like this you can speak to and make these changes. But you can also go to shipyards like the one on Mars’ moon Deimos where a space station is in orbit and talk to the guy to either buy new ships or make changes to your ship just like the technician from earlier.

Keep in mind that every city and space station shipyard have different options to choose from. So you may like the habs from Deimos but you like the landing gear selection in Neon.

I had this all down pat yesterday because I looked up a guide just on what all the pieces look like on the inside and what extra shit they have that the game doesn’t tell you on the build screen, and now I can’t remember which one it said had all of the things in it… 😩

One of the 2x1 hab modules has basically everything in it, while the rest have nothing, and it’s not available to buy at every port.

I’ll have to try some other ports out! I’m still pretty early in the game, just thought I had missed something somewhere lol. I’ll add glad hab back onto my ship!
There’s one that’s literally called “all in one” IIRC.
Yeah; but that’s not the one that has everything. 😮‍💨 It has a nav table, a bed and some crew seats. The “workshop” hab has the weapon, suit and fabrication table, while the “science” has the pharma lab, research lab and a galley. With those two, you should have everything as far as extras go that do anything super useful.

Super fun, I wish I could fly around in atmosphere.

I realize now that is asking a lot since the game is almost completely instanced instead of free roam.

But the naysayers from early access have been proven wrong. The game actually runs fantastic on my 3080 (despite my processor necking the system), at 60-70 fps with everything on ultra and scaling down to 80%.

I’m having too much choice paralysis. 😵‍💫

I will spend hours just wandering aimlessly looking for things to do end up with 20 missions and not want to do any of them because along the way I learn something new that’s possible and seek to check that out. I’ve just been bouncing around 3 or 4 star systems going between Mars, New Atlantis, Neon and Akila and feel like I’ve barely scraped the surface.

It’s fun to notice the tropes, though. Its like they just took everything from sci-fi they thought was cool and shoved it into one game. You’ve got the Star Trek planet, the Cyberpunk planet, the Firefly planet, a faction that’s basically Starship Troopers, the NCR Rangers from Fallout (everyone thought they were so cool), evil corporations filled with snappy dressers… I’m sure there’s gotta be a derelict ship or station that has a terramorph infestation that is going to be basically Alien/Aliens (and I can’t wait to find it). As a huge sci-fi fan, I appreciate the hell outta this game for the nerdgasm it gives me.

I mean, once I got past the whole “Here, take my starship and utility bot. It’s cool. I’ll just stay here with these miners who’re now hunted by a notoriously bloodthirsty merc group. Have fun!”… Sure. 🤦🏼‍♂️

That sorry excuse for writing is how you begin your groundbreaking game, Bethesda? Truly? 🙄

Eh, I really didn’t think about it too much, but not to spoil anything, but that decision does come back up later with consequences so it makes sense.

But also, when has Bethesda had great writing? This has def been the biggest gripe with them for a long time now, and it’s def not the strongest point of the game lmao

Yes, but I’m glad my expectations were lowered before I played it since it was hyped up to be more than just another open world Bethesda game. It’s fun for what it is and I really appreciate that being encumbered doesn’t reduce your run speed, it just makes your stamina (oxygen) lower as if you were sprinting. I’ve been able to realize my dream of looting absolutely every piece of garbage (that isn’t marked as stealing) and selling it when I get back to a city, whereas in previous Bethesda games I had to actually be selective in what I took.

It’s a great feature. Works incredibly well on low g planets when you’re far from your ship.

I’ve stopped hoarding resources though, it has got out of hand. Haven’t figured out where to store it all off ship. All the outpost storage at my current level seems pretty low.