Starfield

[Phil_SS]

https://bethesda.net/en/game/starfield/article/7J0WvpeJkw4a6254xgChL1/full-starfield-direct

This just looks amazeballs. I could spend days just on the ship builder.......

[Dicknose]

Ok this is getting closer and Im excited. September!
Loved Fallout+Skyrim, the size and scope and feel. That lovely feel of a large and dangerous world - dont go that direction till you are levelled up!
And Im saying "large world" because "open" did take on a new meaning with No Man's Sky...

Seems Starfield will be a huge mixed world - some hand built elements (cities, some planets?) and lots of procedurally generated stuff to bulk it out.
For me it looks like a great blend of stuff I love.
Only down side is its Microsoft exclusive.
Now I just need to hope for some bad weather (windy, snowy) come Sept so I have an excuse to sit inside playing during the day.

[drew]

This is a no-brainer for me.

...and snow, in AUS?

[Yw-slayer]

This is a no-brainer for me.

...and snow, in AUS?

Dude, their Snowy Mountains are far more accurately named than your World Series. :finger:

[Dicknose]

This is a no-brainer for me.

...and snow, in AUS?

Yeah there isn't a lot of places its snows, but I live a few kms from a ski resort.
So Australia is generally warm and low altitude and most people live near the coast. Im in a spot that's cold and at altitude and 200km from the coast (and that far to my nearest traffic light)

Back to Starfield... damn its only for the newer Series X. Thats not to be confused with the One X/S!?! Silly naming scheme.
And I dont own a PC, so hmmm, what to do?

[Yw-slayer]

Buy a PC.

[Rare White Ape]

Stop-gap measure: subscribe to Xbox Game Pass and play it via the clooooouuud (if it is available on Cloud Gaming via that service, which it most likely will be)

[Dicknose]

So ready to go... xbox X and game pass.
Actually played some Fallout 3, missed it on playstation and their lack of backwards compatibility. But can play it with game pass on xbox. Fun if a bit dated on graphics.

[Blerpa]

I've predownloaded the game by PC Gamepass... and I've bought it - with a key from Instant Gaming - for Steam, too.
Just to be safe hahahaha
Standard Edition... after Forza Horizon 5 no way I'm going to pay tons for an unknown DLC, some aestethic stuff and just for playing few days before.

I'm quite hyped, I truly love the Nasapunk vibe, the idea of exploring and going to adventure.
Hopefully it will live up to some expectations!

[Alan P]

And I just shelled out for the premium version from cdkeys.com. Never played Skyrim for more than a few hours. Fallout 3 I tried to get into about three times but I just got bored every time I got to Megaton and everywhere was 'you cannot do this yet' to 'You don't have the required Skill level to do this yet' or whatever the message was. Then I'd leave town and get jumped by some monster 30 levels above me.

[Dicknose]

Either of you played No Mans Sky?
Thats not a RPG, but it does have the procedurally generated universe - big enough that its effectively infinite.

Ive logged a few hours in Skyrim and Fallout 4. Ok a few thousand. Each. On different consoles.

[Rare White Ape]

I’m pre-downloading this via Game Pass. That’s the highest level of excitement for the game that you’ll get out of me.

I expect to play it for a few hours to sate my curiosity, then log off to do something else like vacuum the house or make lunch, then never log on again.

We will see. I’m happy to be wrong and end up addicted to it though.

[Kchrpm]

I'm fascinated by the possibility of building my custom character and a fancy ship and exploring the universe, but I don't know how engaged I'll be by it.

[Dicknose]

Oh minutes to go...
Luckily the weather here is crap - just snowed, which is weird as we didn't get any snow all winter, not first day of Spring and it snows.
So Ill skip work today (which is doing maintenance on the property) and I think it will be an Xbox day!

[Rare White Ape]

Do you get early access? For me it’s out on the 6th.

In any case, Digital Foundry has an early tech review of the Xbox versions and they say performance is solid with very few bugs.

https://youtu.be/LlStOHRI56o?si=d85qZ2T3MOiFm0_B

[Dicknose]

Yeah early access - so that was 10am today.
Got a few hours in, still coming to grips with controls/interfaces. Being more complex that Fallout/Skyrim its got a bit more depth to the interfaces, so still finding my way around.
The level of graphics and details is amazing. The gunfights so far have been ok, but that's not been the strength of their series. Only really just started to get into the main quest. Have done a couple of easy side quests - the "go to X and come back" style.
They have automated ship landing/takeoff, so its a button click and animation.

[Dicknose]

Oh and it has a few things that feel like they were copied from No Mans Sky...
scanning flora/fauna/resources
and resource mining
haven't built an outpost yet but the features also seem like NMS

[Yw-slayer]

I bought NMS quite early. Enjoyed it, but haven’t played it since the very early days as, heh, no time. My daughter and I used to spend most of our time naming the animals.

[Dicknose]

Enjoying it - it does have depth to it.
But the moving from place to place is a bit clunky.
What I miss is the feeling from Skyrim of you actually moving thru a landscape - the suspense as you know its getting into dangerous areas and then the awe when you come across something spectacular - a waterfall or a view from a high spot.
This feels big, but its also sort of feels flat, planets dont have any great feel to them.

[Rare White Ape]

My, uhhh... first impression of playing Starfield. Note how the screenshot is 32:9. It's 2023 FFS, I can't believe I have to hit up the Wide Screen Gaming Forum right away for a new PC game smh

https://i.imgur.com/B1pSPDe.png

[Rare White Ape]

OK so no 32:9 fix available yet. There's one for the Steam version but I am on Game Pass.

However... this game can buttfuck your CPU in busy areas, which leads to lower frame rates. To fix this, some legend has made a DLSS 3 mod which gives you frame generation on 40-series RTX GPUs. And guess what GPU I bought a few weeks ago? Yep, a 40-series.

In New Atlantis I went from a choppy 30-35 fps and instantly got 60-70 just because of this mod: https://www.nexusmods.com/starfield/mods/761?tab=description

One big caveat though. The game still feels laggy because it's taking a laggy realtime render and adding more frames into it. But this is fine because New Atlantis is a hub area. In low-spec areas where combat happens, the game runs natively at over 60 anyway (this is with render scaling at 100%) so an upscaled 100 fps looks and feels fantastic.

The advantage of this mod in busy areas is that you won't get a headache just walking around. It looks really smooth, if a little unresponsive. I'll take it.

[Dicknose]

No great bugs for xbox. Had a undressed security guard saying "I hate dealing with drunks" while looking like a drunk who forgot their clothes.
Had the audio go buzzsaw a couple of times, but that's easy to fix.
Still settling in, getting the feel of stuff like building outposts. Haven't gotten a 2nd ship yet or played with modding the one I have.

[Freude am Fahren]

RWA, how's the look of space / HDR? I saw on pre-release day really bad gray looking space. I'm hoping for true blacks, especially with an OLED monitor. I think I saw some posts saying it was only on PC too.

[Rare White Ape]

No HDR on PC as far as I’m aware. Big shortcoming.

And space doesn’t have bad greys, it’s more like a hazy atmospheric effect. Space should have near zero atmosphere. You could imagine how much this annoys me, a space nerd.

I’m fine with the sound of blasters and engines in space tho…

[drew]

I installed it last night, played about 8 minutes. I'll give it a proper go tomorrow. Those 8 minutes looked good.

[Kchrpm]

I started to play it and got to the main city, and then...I don't care. I have very little interest in fast travelling to a new place to find new side missions to do with janky combat and collecting.

[Blerpa]

So, a long list of gripes on this title (bought on Steam):

. No FOV slider.
. No Brightness slider.
. No Gamma slider.
. No support for 32:9 monitors.
. No mousewheel to quick change weapons.
. No maps: truly local maps are something hideous and inexistant - what were they thinking, and doing, in all these years of coding?
. Speaking of locations New Atlantis looks like a terrible place to live, like an Epcot Center cheap clone... it does not have at all the grandeur of a Night City or the vividness of a Novigrad.
. Encumbrance: game gives you billions of objects to grab and fetch, and resources to amass to be able to craft about everything... all of this to penalise you with a draconian encumberance system that can be barely and very slowly improved. We got it, Bethesda, you hate fun.
. Oh, I get it, it is a space game, so there's oxygen consumption. Ok. But... why on earth do I have to min manage it also in normal atmosphere in cities, where oxygen is totally present? Same for before, Bethesda hates you having fun.
. A mediocre redundant UI. I love the minimal aesthetic, but make it functional.
. Inventary is terrible and no user-friendly.
. Some key bindings have no sense and you cannot change them: WHY ON EARTH the Scanner has to be forcifully on the same button as the Torch? short press ON or OFF Scanner; long press ON or OFF Torch. Ask me how many million times I mistakenly clicked on the button.
. Also too many, way too many, controls... and for things you will use way less than in other games more focused on spaceship combat or space navigation.
. A non skippable intro as usual.
. You pass near a NPC and he/she automatically starts blathering, and if others pass by, they add to the chore... to the point you want to go full Columbine on all of them while voices overlap one on the other in a confusing cacophony of sorts.
. You pass near a NPC and he/she automatically starts giving a secondary quest. Why? Who asked you?
. Quest cannot be deleted by the quest list.
. Usual silent main characther. A bit meh.
. This is a personal grip: no italian voice localization. We get italian subtitles but no italian dubbing.
. The prologue is bland and as cinematic as a Commodore 64 game.
. Graphic wise is not bad, actually I like the textures and the realtime illumination system, but I cannot fathom how this can weight on my PC (5800X3D, 3080 Ti, 32GB DDR4, game installed on fast NVMe pci-e 4.0) and barely do 48-65 fps in 1440p 21:9. It's a embellished 2018 game, should do rock solid 70-80 fps on ULTRA on my system - I really should not have to put the game at HIGH and reduce some other things to run at 60 fps.
Badly optimized, basically.
. No DLSS nor XeSS - shame on you Bethesda. FSR2 is terrible by the way.

Only 13 hours in the game.
So far, only 1 bug encountered; what is piss poor here is the work done by Bethesda.

Yes, on PC there will be mods.
Yet, some things should be present by day one in the game and should not be done by modders... cannot fathom how they (Todd Howards and his minions) thought they could get rid entirely of local maps, for example.
2023, we have Google Maps. 2330? We are monkeys and cannot anymore use digital maps - while traveling faster than light and using laser weapons. Got it.
Retarded.
That's the best word I can think about this game and its whole structure.

[Rare White Ape]

On top of all this, the game is published by Microsoft, who is absolutely leading the way with gaming accessibility for people with disabilities, meanwhile the accessibility options are thinner than what Nintendo puts into their games.

[Dicknose]

The encumbrance - they have also added limits to containers!
I dont mind that it has a system, but it should be more generous. Or maybe have it tweakable in settings eg difficulty could have more settings including things like this, even if its just hard/normal/easy/off.

A game that is sold as "play how you want to play" should let you do that. Maybe I just want to explore, or build ships, let me set options that make this as hard/easy as I like and let me enjoy it rather than endure it.

Yeah the no local maps, especially in the cities, is a real pain. Yeah its hard with different levels of terrain, but give us something.

[drew]

I got to the first part where you first go into space. After 20 minutes of fighting the "control" of the ship, the objective was met, and I quit. That was 3 days ago.

[JSGeneral]

The AI ships target the center of your ship. The solution... build a ship without a center.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Reo0S-4NGA

[Rare White Ape]

I played an hour on release day, then hopped on for another half-hour last night. I went to the Lodge and got my boost pack. Went to talk to the woman again and the game froze.

So that's 1.5 hours in total.

After this I played Tears of the Kingdom for another four hours.

[drew]

Yep, not sure I've broke an hour. At this point, I'm waiting for mods. Going to find something else to fuck around with for a while.