Starfield from Bethesda - coming 11/11/22

[Tamas]

Expanded/rebuilt the starting ship "slightly". It's a hoot that you can then walk inside it.

[Solmyr]

I am: enjoying this game and played for many hours yesterday. That's the main criteria for it being good.

[Tamas]

Ok so pro tip do not run too recklessly ahead in the main storyline, without spoilers I am in a situation at level 10 where level 30-ish nemesis people can randomly find me on ground or in space and make short work of me.

Otherwise I am enjoying it the more I play it. The ship upgrade above took all my savings so I have started making a living according to my character's background: exploring. Doing a random mission of surveying Tau Ceti II for decent credits.

[Tamas]

It's one of those games where you can walk (or fast travel) right past a lot of the content. Like in the first capital city you visit, I saw "The Well" referenced, I thought it was referring to this kind of public square with a pond with like a couple of shops. Turns out no it's the subterranean level of the city with a whole bunch of locations. Neat.

[Tamas]

So I was Googling a quest I think it might be bugged and two Youtube reviews came up on the results right on top of each other.

One was titled: "Starfield's Bethesda's BEST game"
The other: "This game is a DISASTER"

 

I am leaning much much more toward the first one, however it cannot be the best Bethesda game because it's not as revolutionary as some previous titles.

[FunkMonk]

The thing I really like about Bethesda games is the sense of wonder and discovery you get from just walking around. What could be over the next hill? But from what I'm seeing in reviews and videos, that isn't really here in Starfield? Space travel is basically loading screens and planetary exploration is severely constrained by procedural generation of a 1000 planets.

[Tamas]

The thing I really like about Bethesda games is the sense of wonder and discovery you get from just walking around. What could be over the next hill? But from what I'm seeing in reviews and videos, that isn't really here in Starfield? Space travel is basically loading screens and planetary exploration is severely constrained by procedural generation of a 1000 planets.

To some degree it is a problem yes, but I think most of it comes from the setting. The cities of the game seem massive, wherever you go in space you see stuff you could check out, planets have different biomes etc. But of course you cannot just look up to the sky on Planet 1 and see an interesting landmark on Planet 2, 3, 4, 5 and 12, the way you could see landmarks in the background in Skyrim.

Between quests I am making money surveying planets, which to me is fun (but I enjoyed that in Elite as well where planets are considerably more dull). These survey missions have kept me close to the starting systems and wherever I land (you click anywhere on a planet it tells you the biome and if you land it generates a pretty large area (I don't think I've gotten close to the edge of any of them) there is almost always some mob-populated landmark like an abandoned factory and such. I do wonder if these go away when I land on a planet further away from settled space. By the way they did try to explain these lore-wise, the galaxy is just after a long war that ended in a draw and devastated both sides.

Once you accept/get used to the fact that the game is not hiding its loading screens from you, it's fine. As I said I am enjoying both the random-generated content and the prepared one as well - just finished a questline where I was a double agent between the UC navy and the pirate faction. Fun.

One bigger problem I think is that the start of the game really doesn't try to walk you through the game in a way to help realise the size of it and the options available. Instead the starting couple of missions of the main quest line involve you zipping across systems so the first impression you are getting is fast-travel loading screens every 3 minutes. Quite a misrepresentation of how the rest of the game looks. I think what they wanted you to do is focus on these Activities that keep popping up, sort of side-missions about mundane stuff like craft an item etc but these are easy to ignore.

As I mentioned I was very lukewarm on it for the first few hours and it was because of the above I think. Once the scope (size of and options available in the sandbox, really) became apparent it really clicked.

BTW after having a better understanding of what I want in my ship and which modules have those, I have managed to streamline a whole deck off of the 3-deck setup of the Frontier B. Behold, the Frontier C:

[Tamas]

Pretty good guide on ships which will save you fron having to figure out a whole bunch of stuff on your own that I had to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkwN3PtOTiE

[Tamas]

Trying a "no filters" mod, the graphics are more colourful but also somehow looking more, I don't know, dated? Will see if I keep it.

Here are a couple of examples, I am surveying Eta Cassiopeia I at the moment, quite a lush planet with much more aggressive animals than in the more harsh planets I visited before. I wonder if that comes just from the fact there are more species here.

The pics are from the Plateau biome of the planet, have already been to a rainforest and a corni.. regular forest/savannah area, need to travel around a bit to catch all them species. You won't be able to see but there's a couple of weird ones hiding among the rocks (helped by being rock-coloured) on the left edge of the first picture.

The second picture shows a random landmark plucked down by the game for me to go and loot / kill baddies at if I am so inclined.

[Tamas]

Sorry for the screenshot spam but I am quite taken by this random planet sent to by a randomly generated mission-board mission.

Here I left the scan-UI on to show that's not just an inaccessible background, there's a point of interest at the far edge of my view distance (and the icon shows it to be 3rd planet unique POI type that I must scan). Ocean is slightly visible on the left:



And that was already taken about 500ms from the ship, from where the view was like this:



It really has a Death Planet thing going on though with big predators with a lot of armour soaking up my bullets. Previous planets were definitely much more laid back.

EDIT: same planet, different zone:

[celedhring]

Tamas talking so much about his ship makes the game look like The Sims for geeks 

[Crazy_Ivan80]

Tamas talking so much about his ship makes the game look like The Sims for geeks 

Well, people have been building ships from other franchises already...

[Syt]

How's performance for you, Tamas? Hearing some mixed stuff in that regard on PC.

[Tamas]

How's performance for you, Tamas? Hearing some mixed stuff in that regard on PC.

Graphics-wise its acceptable.

I have a 10600K CPU with Geforce 1660 Super (or something) and 24GB RAM, with the game installed on my m.2 SSD. Using 1080p resolution (I think, that's my screen's resolution and the game I think uses the screen's resolution, it doesn't really tell you), I switched down from Ultra to High as it was sometimes slowing down. BUT I did deactivate dynamic resolution changes to avoid it dumbing down graphics. It is working perfectly fine now, except there was one quite big space battle in some sort of a nebula which slowed down the frame rate.

Overall I am content with the performance but my rig can definitely run prettier things without issues, so I am hoping for some optimisation down the line.

In terms of loading times and such, -thanks to the SSD I suspect- it's pretty great. New zones load very fast.

[FunkMonk]

Thanks Tamas. That looks pretty cool, actually. Keep posting screenshots