nanoUFOStarfield's been left out to dry at The Game Awards—and even dedicated fans are 'not terribly surprised'
FiveMacsPlayed my full version demo before purchasing. Was bored on day one. None of this surprises me.
SSTFI have not played it. I love scifi and open world games, but the trailers never spoke to me.
The universe looked so generic. I know Bethesda tried to force the label of “NASApunk” (whatever that means) but it just ended up with the same aesthetic of all those DeviantArt pages where people draw angular, scalloped metal, scifi greeble over modern modern pictures. I didn’t feel any kind of vision coming out and grabbing me.
That’s aside from all the optimization and technical issues that I hear are bad even by Bethesda standards.
I watched part one of a play through. The moment I heard United colonies and Freestar Collective. I knew it was going to be the most generic space setting possible.
I’m a huge Bethesda fan and I absolutely love everything bethesda.
I can unfortunately say that many people will not be impressed with this showing. Outside of a few key characters, most NPCs are forgettable. Most quest designs are basic, and some are outright stupid - like some stranger just giving you the keys to unlock everything.
Skyrim has so much storytelling and “oh wow” moments.
You might find 5-6 of them in the 100+ hours you play. Not to say that won’t change in the future.
smoothbrain coldtakesSkyrim also had immediate recognition, spun off memes, and people were riffing on it from day 1.
Who is Starfield’s best girl? Everybody basically crushed on Aella and Lydia.
What’s the most gimmicky saying? Arrow to the knee, you’re finally awake, etc
Starfield just has no life, no joie de vivre - wide as a lake but shallow as a puddle.
I read a reviewer that said “It’s a beautiful game about space exploration that has no space exploration” and they were completely right. It’s just fallout in space. Who thought Quick Travel the game would be compelling space exploration
But it’s not Fallout in Space. I can travel from one edge of the map to the other in Fallout or Skyrim and stumble upon a pitched battle or a cultist ritual or a lost dog or a juicy plot hook. In Starfield I can travel from one interstitial area to the next interstitial area to listen to a bland NPC tell me to go to the next interstitial area.
It’s okay. I look forward to mods. Right now it’s like somebody reskinned Super Mario Bros from the NES with a generative image AI trained on NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day and Mass Effect 1 stills.
That's what I found really interesting about Cyberpunk 2077.
It took me a long time before I even started using fast travel in that game. I actually enjoyed walking through the city. Even on later replays and when I'd finished almost all the side quests.
Far from perfect game even after all the bug fixes, and kinda empty after the end game, but I can't help thinking it illustrates how Bethesda's been left behind in many ways. It'll be interesting to see what the next GTA's like. If they manage to make a more immersive world to explore.
I gave up on Starfield to try Cyberpunk again with the new fixes and I’m now probably 150 hours in and I think I’ve only fast travelled once? Maybe three or four times if you count the mid mission moments where you’re riding in a car with someone.
It’s kind of wild the Neon had to be split in half by a loading screen, but you can go from one end of Night City to the other with none, and Night City is way more detailed, and quite frankly probably has more unique geometry to load and render than Neon + entire surrounding planet.
The reason for that is because, yet again, for the three hundred thousandth fucking time, Bethesda is using, still, a modified creation engine.
There is an argument to be made that Half-Life: Alyx runs on a “modified Quake engine”. At no point was the engine completely rewritten, though it went through several major evolutions and presumably none of Carmack’s original Quake code still survives… probably.
What matters is that Valve made several major overhauls over the years and is well aware of both the strengths and weaknesses of its engine and taylors its games to them. I mean, you couldn’t run Elite Dangerous on Source 2, but nobody asked. Seemingly, nobody at Bethesda corporate asked if CE was capable of multiplayer (hence Fallout 76), and nobody at Bethesda corporate asked if CE was capable of half the shit that Starfield would have to provide for exploration to be compelling in the way that it is in Skyrim.
I just wish CP2077’s driving was better, I find it impossible to drive the good cars.
Much better after the bug fixes, but still far from perfect. Agreed.
I stuck to bikes which were fun to drive around.
Absolutely. I stopped playing it because it just wasn’t fun, 2.0 is much better. Bikes are way more usable, but I’d love to be able to hoon the cars like a GTA game.
Everything is way better and more detailed in Cyberpunk.
It feels like everybody is so generic in Starfield. They don’t feel like they have personalities.
You travel 10KM in any direction in Cyberpunk and you’ll be dealing with an entirely new set of gangs with their own slang and their own backgrounds and their own heritage.
You travel 10KM in any direction in Starfield and you’ll either find nothing or an entrance to another procgen cave with the same spacers as everywhere else.
samus12345No way, Super Mario Bros. has much better gameplay.
Empyrion is a way better game about space exploration and i’d never consider it for a GOTY award.
A lot of those physics-y space games like Empyrion and Space Engineers are a way more fun way of interacting with custom ships and space than Starfield is, for sure.
HolyDuckTurtleFor me it's not so much the travel; the main story tries to sell this idea of exploring the unknown, but literally everything you find is a known quantity in some form or another.
Every planet has at least 10 bases filled with pirates or mercenaries.
… within eyesight of a mysterious temple that only Constellation is aware of for some reason.
I didn’t think the lack of space exploration would bother me so much.
But after playing the Pirate quest and just fast traveling over and over, my immersion broke and realized how little I’m really traveling.
Metal ZealotWhat’s the point in making a game “as stable as possible”,
when it’s not even fun?
Aren’t you just polishing shit at that point?
when it’s not even fun?
Aren’t you just polishing shit at that point?
wizardbeardIt is more stable than their other releases, but that’s a very low bar.
I’d never call it stable without that very important context.
Plus, it doesn’t pass that bar by more than a few inches.
I played it for 30 min and did not enjoy it past the first 10.
Same with me. As soon as I realized that there is no sane way to travel from planet to planet even within the same system without fast travel, I stopped playing the game. Starfield literally made space boring.
Fast travel is the only sane way, without changing the lore and setting of the world, to travel from planet to planet inside of a system. Space is gigantic and even the distance between planets in a system are huge. Travel between planets, without having to wait real time hours or days to arrive, would need some kind of faster than light propulsion, but the only way to travel faster then light in the lore and world setting is with gravjumps.
The only thing I would change with the current space travel is using micro gravjumps animation between planets instead of the normal fly sequence shown when travelling inside of a system.
I am just bummed about it that’s all. I feel like it would have served the game better if it had mass effect style fast travel menu because realistic space travel doesn’t add a lot to the game if you can only fight in space but not travel from place to place.
Kinda seems like they used the lore to justify the load screens, and not the other way around to me. But that’s just a theory… A Game Theory!
ZoboomafooSo? The writers weren’t forced to make there only be grav drives
And Tolkien was not forced to hinder the Hobbits from inventing full automatic guns, but the Lord of the Rings would be completely different if he hadn’t.
And the same is true for Starfield and other options of FTL. It would be a completely different game, with a completely different story.
Starfield is hard sci-fi at it’s core, with the exception of the grav drive and the powers/unity, a near future setting that is in most parts plausible and possible, a realistic game set in a realistic universe.
The designers choose this setting and lore, and could have chosen otherwise for the sake of game experience.
Additionally, there’s no reason for the fast travel to have to be distinct, separate from gameplay, as loading screens.
Elite Dangerous keeps you in your cockpit, replaces the outside view with an animation while it loads the system you’re jumping to. When landing on a planet, there are various “entering the atmosphere” effects on suitable planets to mask swapping from space to the landable planet.
For ED, in-system FTL is time consuming and you can shave off around 25% of the travel time by doing it manually (risking overshooting and having to loop back around), or you can have the ship’s computer do it. ED is multiplayer and you can be yanked from this “supercruise” by players and NPC pirates, so it works mechanically to make the player waste time with it. In Starfield they could show you the ETA and give you the option to skip it or to wander around your ship during it while the ship does its thing.
If you’re in a menu on your ship when FTL would end with autopilot, stop the clock before leaving FTL, pop up a message in the corner saying the ship is ready to drop from FTL, and let the player exit it manually from the cockpit so you can’t get ambushed while you’re on the other side of your ship.
No changes to setting or lore needed, except that there’s a basic autopilot now.
As far as programming that goes, the engine already uses loading during gameplay when you’re on the overworld, and they have done that since Oblivion. Overworld is set up in chunks, they keep a certain number in each direction around you loaded, and load/unload while you move around.
I won’t say it would be easy to expand that background loading functionality, but I will say that they’ve had many many years to attempt it.
Thats sounds amazing, too bad i dont enjoy Sci-Fi
They could implement a timewarp mechanic like Kerbal Space program does and just speed up time.
But that’s more or less what they have done with the flyby animation shown when travelling inside of a system. You could interpret that as watching a rapidly speed up version of the, boring because space is a huge and empty void, travel.
Can’t really form an opinion about an RPG in 30 minutes playtime. Hell, I doubt you even know Starfield has magic powers.
It was influenced by the internet calling it bad, you are allowed to admit it.
Just don’t call it your opinion.
Bri Guy The fact that this game was actually nominated as “best RPG” with the likes of baldurs gate 3 and final fantasy XVI is ludicrous enough.
to be fair, ffxvi is not really an rpg either.
Feel like this games gonna get the NMS treatment and be relatively playable maybe 3 years down the line…
As it stands the game has some merits (tons of planets, dungeons are compelling enough while you’re still seeing new ones) but it feels like the size of the world really caused the world design overall to suffer.
I honestly don’t think so. NMS sky started from a rock solid space exploration engine, but that was basically it, and has then layered on most of the other parts of a space sim on top since then, but most of Starfield’s biggest issues seem to be because their game engine can’t handle the scales needed for seem less space exploration.
So at this point Starfield devs have spent a ton of time and effort building a space sim game on an engine not suited for it, and that means that every cut scene and animation and scripted event is built around this engine, making it really time consuming just to bug test, let alone fix any problems that arise from changing or upgrading that engine, let alone designing the old missions and stuff to work with more continuous travel.
I have more faith that 5 years from now NMS will be fleshed out into a really rich and full story driven game, then that Starfield will have fixed it’s fundamental exploration / loading screen problems.
NMS was purpose-built to be a space game.
Starfield was built on an ancient engine that’s always been for ground-based games.
It’s such a huge sunk cost fallacy that keeps Bethesda using the same dogshit engine. “We’ve used it for years!” Yeah but it’s been fucking garbage for years too.
stuff to work with more continuous travel.
I bet you would be surprised if you were to find out that it is possible already. In space one can already move from one planet to another, only thing that is missing is the loading of new space "map" on demand. And more importantly move from one planet to another and then dock with spacestation. As shown by https://www.nexusmods.com/starfield/mods/3541.
And on planets the landing zones aren't placed in a vacuum, topological details like mountains are visible from adjacent zones. As shown by https://youtu.be/Fy0eG7MFSTM?si=ZwaE3OzmEf9IxbwZ&t=841 by 2kliksphilip.
Now you might ask the very obvious question: why isn't this correctly implemented to allow seamless travel in both space and on planets in vanilla Starfield? We may know only after someone does full introspection what happened during development but my speculative guess is that Xbox Series S which is much weaker than X is the primary reason for all this segmentation in all aspects of Starfield.
Bruh blaming the S with no information is asinine when not a single other game struggles with traversal on it, including other space sims like NMS.
Given that this game also chose to procedurally spawn the same bases over and over again, I think their issues are firmly routed in their development process, not hardware limitations.
Traversal is technically possible yes, but it’s not possible to traverse at a speed which would be feasible or fun, indicating that their engine isn’t capable of unloading and loading new assets in fast enough as you move around. Probably the same reason that even Neon needs to be hard split in half instead of just unloading the assets from the part of the city you’re not at at the moment.
Speeds that the above mentioned mod adds. Until CK is added the debate of switching of one space map to another seamlessly is useless, since the current implementation is missing the hook to load the next map whilst the same hook is implemented between ship take off and space (even when player is not at the helm). Yeah, but New Atlantis is much bigger and allows the player to boost pack from the MAST top floor to another skyscrapers roof and then get down to commercial level and trade stuff without any load screens, at least on PC.
And bruh blaming the S with no information is asinine when not a single other game struggles with traversal on it, including massive open world’s like GTAV, Cyberpunk, Flight Simulator and even other space sims like NMS.
Expect of course if there were dev stories related to it sprinkling out periodically, latest being from Baldurs Gate 3 devs: https://www.pcgamer.com/baldurs-gate-3-dev-shows-off-the-level-of-optimization-achieved-for-the-xbox-series-s-port-which-bodes-well-for-future-pc-updates/
It's worth noting that out of all the platforms that Larian has developed its masterpiece for, the Xbox Series S is probably the most restrictive. This is because it only has 8GB of high-bandwidth memory, to store the game while running and use as VRAM (the remaining 2GB gets used for system functions).
The graphs start at the beginning of September, with the game using just over 5.2GB for general game RAM and around 3.5GB for VRAM. By November, though, Larian had shaved this down to 4.7GB and 2.3GB respectively. The RAM reduction is a pretty decent 10% drop but the reduction in VRAM usage is a massive 34%.
Other devs have stated these: https://www.gamesradar.com/xbox-series-s-could-bottleneck-some-next-gen-games-developers-suggest/
Gneitling pointed to the "almost non-existent" RAM increase from current-gen systems to Xbox Series S as a major pain point. Also "it always scaled on PC" is nonsense. Every AAA game in the past decade or so has their assets made once so they run on min spec. Increasing sample counts a bit here and there for high settings isn't what you could truly have done with more power. Min spec matters.
The article has many such remarks from other devs as well. So why couldn't the segmentation of Starfield be because of Xbox Series S? Keep in mind the latter article is now roughly three years old.
Because Larian specifically struggles with local co-op, not with loading new sections of the map.
As I’ve said, Cyberpunk runs perfectly fine on the S while loading in more geometry faster on the fly, and it’s far from alone in that. Starfield’s limitations are clearly a result of Bethesda’s ancient engine and not hardware limitations since other devs using different engines can accomplish what they failed at on the same hardware.
I’m sorry but Bethesda doesn’t deserve three years to make a game work. They should make it work on launch and delay it until it’s worth launching.
Games are never finished now with the internet. The whole industry has agreed to say “fuck it, we’ll fix it in post” for basically every single project.
AltoYeah Bethesda doesn't get the same amount of leeway that a small dev that was clearly way in over their heads gets
They’d have to rip out and replace the entire plot, which I don’t think they would do
The sad part is that Microsoft pulled the original 2022 release to fix a lot of the bugs.
So really the updates have to be pretty impactful.
I’m still optimistic, because fallout 76 did finally get there!
It really got nowhere, and then started charging premium subscriptions to cover most of the mechanics that have sucked since day 1. Repair kits? You got em. You’re not constantly locked in the treadmill of deciding to do something and giving up halfway to go farm screws from office fans because your weapons have degraded to useless conditions. You pay to avoid bullshit like that.
Doesn’t sound like it got there, sounds like they might have improved their netcode, which was spaghetti to be perfectly honest so easy to have improved upon, and maybe the engine use for things not T-posing and floating around. I’m sure those bat fuckers are technically internally still dragons though.
I’m still optimistic, because fallout 76 did finally get there!
This is sarcasm, right?
I love Starfield, not as much as I love Skyrim or even Morrowind, but I really love it.
I am at 160ish hours and have seen only a small amount of the quests and barely touched the base or ship building part. There is so much in the game and with the innovative spin on new game plus I am able to build my own narrative again and again. I can play the perfect angle in one NG+ and a devil in another, I can be the freedom loving Ranger in the next, a mad loner who only interacts with others as much as needed to finish his perfect planetary base, or a starship fanatic who wants to collect and/or build the best ships.
You don’t have those kinds of freedom with Baldurs Gate 3 or other RPGs, you can’t really leave or mostly ignore the narratives of those games to create your own, not on the scale as it is possible with Starfield.
Starfields quests are fun, yes they are all separate from each other but that is in my eyes a good thing in this case as it allows to play the game as you like.
All the quests are like basic Lego blocks, you can connect them together in any way you want but they don’t change each other but that’s not needed as I have my own narrative and stories in my mind for this run or character.
Sure, games like Baldurs Gate 3 or Cyberpunk 2.0 have better storytelling, better NPCs, but they are at the same time extremely limited and narrow experiences, sure you have side quests and all but once played the game that’s mostly it.
Starfields freedoms come with limits like the loading screens sure, but that is a price I am willing to pay for having a sandbox like universe to explore and roleplay in.
As a pure entertainment product, that can be consumed without any own creativity, is Baldurs Gate better, without doubt. But as a expansion tool for your imagination, that’s where Starfield (or any other Bethesda RPG) shines.
But as a end note: What have the Starfield developers consumed when they created the utterly bad and boring temple “puzzles”. In Todd’s name WHY???
The problem is how disjointed everything is. Skyrim and Fallout, I can literally walk across the entire map. I can run into a random plot, some fun environmental storytelling, anything really - there’s no sense of discovery for a game so vast as Starfield. Everything is a known quantity which is why you can fast travel to and from basically every area.
All these other functions built into the game are superficial and/or incomplete at best. Ship building is basically pointless, as you can carry a massive crew in a tiny freighter, regardless of crew capacity or passenger capacity of your vessel. Modding weapons is more or less the same as it was in Fallout 4. The environments that are available to explore are all dead with fuck all, and all the tunnels and mines are filled with the same bullet-sponge spacer enemies. You would think with smaller, chunked zones we’d have some very detailed environments that make use of the fact that they are relatively small spaces, but instead everything is truncated with a loading screen and entirely lacking in depth.
Your love for the game is valid but criticisms of the game are also valid. The biggest flaw starfield has is the massive amount of gameworld it provides. In skyrim, CP2077, BG3, Morrowind, Zelda, and whatever else you want to think of, you can pick a direction and go.
In nearly every case, the game is designed to take you somewhere, give you something, reward you for straying off the main path. In Starfield, both space and planet side, youre likely to run into a whole lot of nothing. Which is realistically fine, the universe is already a vast amount of nothing, but in game design that makes for a boring and lackluster RPG and that is the biggest problem SF has. That doesnt take away from the players like you who want this experience though, but thats kind of why Space Sim games are a niche experience.
You clearly haven’t played baldur’s gate and shouldn’t make comparisons based on your limited experience with it.
I have played and completed it, very recently, and I stand to my words. BG3 has a great story and it was fun to play once. But it is not a game I will play again, at least not for years. BG3 is like a good movie, impressive and great story telling but after I seen it once it is done and will go on the shelf.
That’s where Starfield differs, in BG3 I command great written characters through adventures, in Starfield I play more or less an avatar of myself but on a Spaceship. And that is something I come back to again and again, just like I go back to Skyrim, Morrowind or Fallout for years now.
Maybe you have Not realized just how much your choices affect the “linear Story” and how much permutation there is in follow up quests or alternate pathways through the same quest. I guess thats the beauty of it. Most of the quests an Narrative fit into each other so neat One might suspect this way was the only possible way, just because of how good it is presented.
Yes, but that still is like reading the same book but with a few pages changed. I am still only moving characters through a stage play, not roleplaying.
I can’t have a completely changed or different way to play the game or be myself/anything in the world of the game.
Both games are great but they can’t really be compared, not much more as you could compare a high budget musical with a high budget improv theatre play. Sure both are plays on a theatre stage (or RPG in case of the games) but beside that they don’t have really much in common.
But maybe it is just to complicated for me to fully express or explain what I mean as I am not a native speaker and I am therefore limited in my words and formulations.
TSG_Asmodeus (he, him)As a pure entertainment product, that can be consumed without any own creativity, is Baldurs Gate better, without doubt. But as a expansion tool for your imagination, that’s where Starfield (or any other Bethesda RPG) shines.
You should seriously, seriously go play BG3.
I have played it and I liked it. But after completing it with one character I have no intention of doing another play through anytime soon.
Yes you have different character choices but in the end it is always the same linear story. Yes, you could say the same about Starfield but it is not. In Starfield if I want I can ignore the main quest more or less completely and play a bounty hunter who only builds his base to have a place for his collection of coffee cups he takes from every place he goes.
In BG3 they give you predefined experience (now in Dark Urge flavour) which is great for telling a story but not so great for creating a world to really roleplay in.
Both games are fun for what they are, they are just not fun in the same way for everyone.