Speaking of mods, somebody HAS to create a Mandalorian Armor Pack!! I'll also take a baby Yoda companion while you're at it.
Game Discussions Bethesda Softworks Starfield Space RPG
- Thread starter Lngjohnsilver1
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I keep forgetting that DLC will be coming! Some of my favorite Skyrim content was added as DLC. With such a huge game world, there's a whole ecosystem for new quests and stories and content to be added!
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I will not spend $70 on a video game.
I will not spend $70 on a video game.
I will not spend $70 on a video game.
I will not spend $70 on a video game.
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(And no, I'm not signing up for gamepass. I just have to wait for a Steam sale, hopefully Black Friday.)
Wow. AMD are really shooting for the stars with their RX 7900 XTX Bethesda/Starfield collaboration. Even beating the mighty RTX 4090 at particular settings (despite the price difference):
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTNiZhEqaKk&t=342s
It’s well worth the cost in terms of entertainment/$. If you don’t have anything you’re really playing at the moment and are looking for a game there’s no sense in waiting for a sale.
That said, If you do have something else you’re enjoying at the moment then there’s also no harm in waiting for a sale. You’re not getting anything extra in buying it right now if you’re not looking for a game.
Some of the pirates I'm meeting are already wearing polished Mando-ish armor suits with matching helmets. I grabbed a few, but have yet to try them on.
I probably should, now that I think of it. Wear those armored suits when facing combat.
Back in 1993 or so, I paid $75 for Street Fighter 2 on the Super Nintendo. But this $75 on Starfield has been some of the best gaming dollars I've spent.
Not quite - Skyrim has an area of approx 37km² and videos of players running across Starfield landing zones (which takes around 21 minutes of running/sprinting) gives an approximate area of 64km² - though Skyrim has several hundred locations in that space and is designed to fool the player into thinking it’s much bigger, while SF has less than a dozen POIs per map and is much flatter and open in general.
The maps are big enough that I’d be happy if a speeder bike gets released/modded in.
@Old Duck - as far as I’m aware the only mention of Creation Kit release so far has been in a recent Japanese interview with Todd Howard in which he just says it’s coming in 2024, but nothing more specific.
What gave that idea? Each tile is almost twice the size of Skyrim.
70 hours into the game (I know, I know 
) and I still have to run into this invisible, immersion breaking wall at the end of the map. But maybe I'm just playing the game wrong
In other news: Apparently I sold all my Digipicks at a vendor when tidying up my inventory. Why, just why, are they under "misc" instead of "aid"?
) and I still have to run into this invisible, immersion breaking wall at the end of the map. But maybe I'm just playing the game wrong In other news: Apparently I sold all my Digipicks at a vendor when tidying up my inventory. Why, just why, are they under "misc" instead of "aid"?
Thing's I've accomplished in Starfield since I got home from work yesterday:
After I'd finished with the outpost (for now), I visited one of the space stations in the station I'm in, and found improved class A reactor, shields, and weapons. Finally, I decided to explore the rest of the worlds in this system.
Nearby was another abandoned facility that had been taken over by "bad guys." Decided to clear it out as well... and then realized that I'd seen this exact same subterranean layout before, even if I didn't recognize the exterior. Not sure if it's just bad luck, a coincidence from exploring two very similar moons, or the asset set is simply that small. I haven't heard anyone else mentioning this (yet), so maybe it's just bad luck on my part.
- Cleaned out the pirates from the abandoned facility
- Figured out how outpost links are supposed to work, since they don't work like in Fallout 4.
- I also got a bit of a surprise the first time I'd built one...
- I also got a bit of a surprise the first time I'd built one...
- Finally transferred all my materials to my "main" base.I'm out of titanium, and I haven't found a source yet, so I can't expand things further. Here's what it currently looks like:
After I'd finished with the outpost (for now), I visited one of the space stations in the station I'm in, and found improved class A reactor, shields, and weapons. Finally, I decided to explore the rest of the worlds in this system.
Nearby was another abandoned facility that had been taken over by "bad guys." Decided to clear it out as well... and then realized that I'd seen this exact same subterranean layout before, even if I didn't recognize the exterior. Not sure if it's just bad luck, a coincidence from exploring two very similar moons, or the asset set is simply that small. I haven't heard anyone else mentioning this (yet), so maybe it's just bad luck on my part.
I watched a vid of his initial thoughts on the game, and he seemed to be trying to have his cake and eat it, too (i.e., knock the game but also like it). In general, I have found the reviews of Stafield to be almost as entertaining as the game itself. They reflect the polarization that we are seeing elsewhere in the world. You have:Are there any games he doesn't rip?
1) The Cultists: these are the ones who often mistake a game for a religious experience and convince themselves the game is going to be a 10/10 before ever playing it. This group shows up around every hyped game, so nothing new here.
2) The Monetization Fanbois: These were going to give the game a 10/10 (or 1/10 if it had a bad launch) no matter what because they have built a Youtube channel designed to capitalize on the hype surrounding the game. Their fandom is determined by profitssss (X4 reference
).3) The too-cool-for-school crowd: These are the fellas who would never demean themselves by liking something that is very popular, or it is the armchair developers who are experts when it comes to AAA game design and see nothing but technical flaws in the game, flaws that they would have easily avoided with all their deep insight into game design (I would put Yamiks here). I had to laugh at the number of videos from different folks who criticized BGS using the Creation Engine because it was just "too old" (of course, paying no attention to the fact that SF uses CE 2.0, something custom-tailored for Starfield development—"a new tech base" according to Howard). [It's certainly okay to criticize a game's technical aspects (see Redfall), but I lose patience when critics strut around like they know the intricacies of a game engine better than the devs do.]
4) The rose-colored-glass crowd: These are the folks who have built their reputations around raging at modern games, particularly from the big studios, and peddle the idea that PC gaming peaked pre-2008. I think "Mac" over at Worth a Buy is a good example of this mentality. His review of SF was just atrocious; little more than a rant in search of a reason to be angry. I laughed particularly hard when he held up NMS as a superior game to SF, not because there is anything wrong with NMS, but because he was the guy who trashed NMS in his review as being an example of...wait for it...everything wrong with modern game design. I guess now that a few years have passed, it is safe to like that game and not consider it part of the modern scene.
In general, I found most of the reviews of SF to be mediocre, at best. Some tried to be fair, but most fell short because too many of them powered through the game, particularly the main quest, so they could do a traditional review. SF is such a hugely intricate game, that the traditional style of reviewing doesn't really work, in my opinion. I think Obsidian Ant has been much smarter in his approach: releasing a series of videos covering discrete aspects of the game, rather than trying to summarize the entirety of the game in a single video. Well done. o7
Anyhow, I just had to get that off my chest. The reviews for this game have been worse than normal. If it isn't the various cliques jockeying for position (see above), it's the review bombing that's going on because of hurt feelings on the part of Playstation fans, or the Star Citizen crowd circling the wagons.
In other news, I landed on Mars to visit a shipyard for a mission. I love how spooky Mars is! And how large some of these surface installations can be!
All that was missing was the Halloween sound FX.
I take that back: there was a whistling wind! Spooky!
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Thankfully this is not stopping modders from putting out some pretty impressive mods even this early in the game's release.
Next question, which is kinda sort maybe stretching it related to mods - how's the replayability of this game? More specifically, how many unique playstyles are there? In Skyrim, I was able to play the same game half-a-dozen times easily, because playing as Hawkeye (archer) is radically different than playing as Conan or Doctor Strange. I also purposefully did not become "Jack of all trades" when I played a specific character in Skyrim - my mage did not join the Companions, and my sword and board fighter did not join the Mages Guild, which means each play-through felt unique and different enough to be enjoyable.
The reason this relates to mods is that I don't want to become bored with the game by playing it early on and then have all the cool mods release after I've exhausted the game. This really wasn't a problem in Skyrim, because there were so many varied possibilities in gameplay (not just classes, but who you married, what house you bought, how you made money, which side of the civil war you sided with, etc). I'm hoping Starfield is like Skyrim in this regard, where in theory I could literally get years of enjoyable gameplay from it, which should be plenty of time for modders to release some really "bijin" content!
This post is for anyone who thought cause of low specs they'd have to sit this out. After looking at minimum specs I figured it just wouldn't run so I would have to simply live vicariously through you guys but since I have gamepass I figured why not try it out anyway.
Set all the settings to low, 1080p. Windows 10, i7-6700k, Geforce 1660Ti, 32 gigs of 3200 (Running at 2800 or 3000 cant remember) Gskill DDR4. Samsung 870 EVO SSD. Game ran amazing, and its the best looking game I've played on pc with my hardware since Elite. 60 fps almost all the time except for, massive firefights on open planets / space which fps tends to drop to 45-60. Massive hub citys where it drops to 30-60. Anything taking place on spaceships or in buildings or on non busy planets outddoors it seems locked to 60. Space always seem to hover around 45-60 fluctuating like it does in the hub citys but not as bad, seemed more stable.
In addition to how well it ran, having finally had a weekend to myself, I probably played for over 30 hours.... I haven't been gaming really for the past year, Red Dead 2 kind of ruined games for me after. But Starfield really hooked me hard and I couldn't stop and time seemed to disappear. Wow...
Edit. It was running so good and seemed to even have head room at times I turned a couple of the options to medium. I think lighting quality and particles. No crashes at all and just a couple casual bugs where killing enemies near equipment would make them stand up and orient towards it.
My biggest complaint is the standard walk speed being faster than npc and the slow walk speed with capslock being too slow. Kind of ruins the moment when keeping immersion during group quests and events to keep dashing and shopping short. This is one thing that ruined fps mode in RDR2 for me.
Not going to give any spoilers but there's a really nice nod to Frontier in a side mission involving a ship named The Constant. Its kind of passive and you have to be paying attention to catch it. (I'm sure there's many more).
Set all the settings to low, 1080p. Windows 10, i7-6700k, Geforce 1660Ti, 32 gigs of 3200 (Running at 2800 or 3000 cant remember) Gskill DDR4. Samsung 870 EVO SSD. Game ran amazing, and its the best looking game I've played on pc with my hardware since Elite. 60 fps almost all the time except for, massive firefights on open planets / space which fps tends to drop to 45-60. Massive hub citys where it drops to 30-60. Anything taking place on spaceships or in buildings or on non busy planets outddoors it seems locked to 60. Space always seem to hover around 45-60 fluctuating like it does in the hub citys but not as bad, seemed more stable.
In addition to how well it ran, having finally had a weekend to myself, I probably played for over 30 hours.... I haven't been gaming really for the past year, Red Dead 2 kind of ruined games for me after. But Starfield really hooked me hard and I couldn't stop and time seemed to disappear. Wow...
Edit. It was running so good and seemed to even have head room at times I turned a couple of the options to medium. I think lighting quality and particles. No crashes at all and just a couple casual bugs where killing enemies near equipment would make them stand up and orient towards it.
My biggest complaint is the standard walk speed being faster than npc and the slow walk speed with capslock being too slow. Kind of ruins the moment when keeping immersion during group quests and events to keep dashing and shopping short. This is one thing that ruined fps mode in RDR2 for me.
Not going to give any spoilers but there's a really nice nod to Frontier in a side mission involving a ship named The Constant. Its kind of passive and you have to be paying attention to catch it. (I'm sure there's many more).
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Steam Numbers Do Not Count! (when they go against Frontier).
Gamepass is awesome. As most humans, i've been a complete stranger to the xbox ecosystem (when halo 1 came out, i concluded "i've been playing unreal on pc for the last 2 years, and sure, console p's have firsts times too).
It was only the random passing data that wireless xbox controllers support double a batteries, combined with horizon ps5 in fact being an activist feminist hit piece, that my view on the green offer softened. So my first experience with gamepass was a few weeks ago for starfield. I can't say anything bad about it at all. The free back catalog is quality, and out of what i've tried, 2 games have convinced me enough to buy the full game, and a few have turned average or below experiences into positive because they're not worth more than say, 7.99, like local hero JWE2, and $0 was just the right price for a thumbs up review. It seems to add an identical amount of overhead to any other game store. There's a separate xbox app for games, so you don't need to open the windows 10 store. If you don't sign in with a microsoft account for windows, i'm not sure if you can use a local account with an xbox account, it might swallow your whole machine or not. I used to use local accounts, but since my email and cloud backup is with outlook, i'm sort of plugged in with them anyway (they have amazing security, you can make an email alias to log in with that you don't use for communication).
... Sadly, they only made the smallest of errors that completely cancelled it for me. Everything was fine in gamepass happyland. But game pass isn't free. Even with the strong discounts available from the saudi arabian legitimate looking key site, it does cost money, which made the smallest butterfly wings of decisions start considering, which quickly concluded that the savegames are not compatible with steam, i don't want to run some dodgy tool, i have enough steam credits so that i could buy it outright for 3 months of gamepass.. Opps. So the best i can do is leave gamepass glowing reviews as they were so close to having me indefinitely.
If you have good internet, you could use it as a cheaper trial to see if it will run... its a fierce download to have to do twice if you switch.
Speaking of getting it to run, the digital foundry tweaking video has been the most valuable yet:
Shadows is overkill and needs an ini edit, but for everything else, you can do high to mid settings with very little iq downgrades, which apparently is what has been set for consoles.
Another thing I want to add about Starfield is just how organic the journey has been. It just flowed. I never felt forced to continue anything and have dipped in and explored all the different mechanics at my own pace. It just flows.
I'm only level ten and over thirty hours, Still havnt messed with outposts or ship building all though I messed around in the builder a bit to get the gist of it. Really reminds me of a Space Engineers light and reorienting the interior of your ships based on modules and really making them your own. But they still seem to have Elite levels of fidelity outside and reminds me of some screen shots I've seen of Star Citizen on the inside.
Being able to roleplay and not fast travel or quick travel when I have errands to run just works marvelously like Root mentioned earlier.
I spent 12 hours on Akila, just wandering around town and taking it in. I spent hours exploring the world around the main city and trying to max out exploration scans to 100% the planet and I just can't stop. Big game hunting, survival, caving man this really has it all. Can't stop with the photo mode and a huge bonus that your loading screens feature your own in game photos. I've also never hit a "boundry" and went so far away from the city I got nervous as ammo and supplies were low and other dangerous but no spoilers. I've even hard Jurassic park vibe moments...!
The vibe between different cities from the people to the cities themselves is just amazing. This ain't no cut and paste. One place has the borderland cowboy rural rough neck vibe other will have the capital city filled with pampered rich folk with the subterranean poors living a much more hagard existance. Every area feels so authentic lived in and oozes vibe.
I landed on a winter wonderland planet and I was just walking around for like two hours with my mouth open with a giant ringed gas giant in the distance and when the sunrise hit I just had a giant grin like a silly kid. I'm going to build a chateau here on the mountains over looking the snowy forest that stretches to the horizon where it seems to meet the rising gas giant. I don't care if there's nothing useful here. It's one of those moments I will remember forever.
I'm only level ten and over thirty hours, Still havnt messed with outposts or ship building all though I messed around in the builder a bit to get the gist of it. Really reminds me of a Space Engineers light and reorienting the interior of your ships based on modules and really making them your own. But they still seem to have Elite levels of fidelity outside and reminds me of some screen shots I've seen of Star Citizen on the inside.
Being able to roleplay and not fast travel or quick travel when I have errands to run just works marvelously like Root mentioned earlier.
I spent 12 hours on Akila, just wandering around town and taking it in. I spent hours exploring the world around the main city and trying to max out exploration scans to 100% the planet and I just can't stop. Big game hunting, survival, caving man this really has it all. Can't stop with the photo mode and a huge bonus that your loading screens feature your own in game photos. I've also never hit a "boundry" and went so far away from the city I got nervous as ammo and supplies were low and other dangerous but no spoilers. I've even hard Jurassic park vibe moments...!
The vibe between different cities from the people to the cities themselves is just amazing. This ain't no cut and paste. One place has the borderland cowboy rural rough neck vibe other will have the capital city filled with pampered rich folk with the subterranean poors living a much more hagard existance. Every area feels so authentic lived in and oozes vibe.
I landed on a winter wonderland planet and I was just walking around for like two hours with my mouth open with a giant ringed gas giant in the distance and when the sunrise hit I just had a giant grin like a silly kid. I'm going to build a chateau here on the mountains over looking the snowy forest that stretches to the horizon where it seems to meet the rising gas giant. I don't care if there's nothing useful here. It's one of those moments I will remember forever.
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No Microsoft account here.
The controls are fairly customizable, but the underlying system is quite limited. Space flight is really a relatively minor part of the game though.
I typically modify the install media with Rufus, as it's faster, especially if you need to do it more than once.
It does heavily favor AMD GPUs at any given price point and AMD's drivers have somewhat lower CPU overhead. However, I've generally found the performance relatively unsatisfactory, given how the game looks...not that it looks bad, just not good enough to justify getting sub-60 fps on a top GPU in some areas at 4k native. It's also incredibly CPU bound in some areas and needs something on the order of a 7800X3D or 13th generation i7/i9 to really stretch it's legs.
Fortunately, the DLSSG injector is maturing quite nicely and finally has no stability penalty (I just played a four hour uninterrupted session with the new version while making heavy use of scopes and doing a lot of travel that would cause transitions the old version had trouble with, no crashes). Using frame generation, I'm able to hold around 100 fps in the more demanding areas at 4k ultra, with 100% render scale, on my 5800X3D + RTX 4090 system. Only visual problem is that frame gen seems to think the stars int he skybox are noise to be filtered out during movement, but I should be able to fix that, hopefully without other downsides, by tuning the DLSS presets.
The default LUTs are pretty bad. It looks like the whole universe is permeated with a glow-in-the-dark smog that might be the result for tuning for limited (16-235) rather than full (0-255) luminance ranges. Currently, I've found these LUTs to be the best compromise between retaining the intended artistic direction, as the author uses the default LUTs as a baseline, then mixes them down to extend the dynamic range and contrast, while being an all-round improvement, without crushing dark tones out of existence. Some of the modded LUTs are too dark, while others are too arbitrary and reflect too much of the personal taste of the modder, but these ones actually seem to follow a coherent formula for their extrapolations.
Most people looking for HDR will just install SpecialK and be done with it, but SpecialK doesn't like being run with Administrator privileges, and getting it to run without them on my preferred setup needs annoying workarounds. More problematic is that there doesn't seem to be a way to get SpecialK's HDR to limit itself to HDR10 with a 10-bit display chain rather than scRGB which has 16-bit per channel for it's frame buffer and DLSS frame generation cannot use scRGB. So, I'm slowly cobbling together a DLSSG compatible HDR solution out a few different mods.
I've run into a few side-plots where the path I was aiming for/anticipating wasn't even close to being an option. For example, when I stumbled upon the ECS Constant I found both parties involved rather unsympathetic, but the Paradiso board outright offensive. I was expecting to be offered an option to lead an assault on Paradiso and force them to capitulate to favorable terms for the Constant's crew, or violently depose them, fend off a counterattack or two, and have the colonists take over wholesale. Instead, I can either fork over a lot of money to have the Constant leave the destination that has been their goal for generations; essentially sell them into servitude and have to collect a bunch of resources to do it; or blow up the colony ship, which requires pickpocketing to even be an option by default. I ended up with an unappealing compromise...I disabled the flag protecting supposedly critical NPCs, destroyed the colony ship after taking some keys I needed from some corpses, then murdered the Paradiso board of directors and their security forces for railroading me.
I like it though. I really like it how it doesn't look like every other standard issue video game (well perhaps like the other handful of games that have also chosen this appearance over time). I thought it was the film grain effect.
So i turned down my shadows.. but at the same time.. i saw something that triggered such a "finally" of joy in starfield.. for the past x years, stupid internet people have been prasing how high resolution they can get shadows at. Maybe it was correlated to hardware ability to have them? But immediately this is junk. Go outside on a sunny day, and put your hand 30 cm above the ground. Now move it up a meter, and look at the shadows. It doesn't look a thing like the status quo ultra shadows that have been prasied by even professionals for years.
To my immense relief.. finally... at least its the first time i've seen it. Sorry morbad for also showing off your haze.
In general, I found most of the reviews of SF to be mediocre, at best. Some tried to be fair, but most fell short because too many of them powered through the game, particularly the main quest, so they could do a traditional review. SF is such a hugely intricate game, that the traditional style of reviewing doesn't really work, in my opinion. I think Obsidian Ant has been much smarter in his approach: releasing a series of videos covering discrete aspects of the game, rather than trying to summarize the entirety of the game in a single video. Well done. o7
Anyhow, I just had to get that off my chest. The reviews for this game have been worse than normal. If it isn't the various cliques jockeying for position (see above), it's the review bombing that's going on because of hurt feelings on the part of Playstation fans, or the Star Citizen crowd circling the wagons.
Because of gamepass, i knew i was already in for at least a month, so have avoided all but the acg review. The game itself is the best review
After all the tweaking, i fired it up again last night with a different question, do i want to play it? And just the novelty of the nasa space theme and the level of detail was enough to make it a yes.The only thing i found distasteful regarding popular opinion was the spite negatives from playstation players. Stereotyped well by dreamcastguy. I get why they're spiteful, but sony has an eternity of similar evil in reverse, so i don't think its very polite. I don't really get oa coverage.. sure hes been branching out from elite for many years, but the starfield coverage has been so purely hype merchant content, it was unexpected anyway.
Xbox hardware is good friends with pcs, and look the headsets and controllers are so nice too, aww.
Though im also in an odd place.. see i'm not going to continue with gamepass, very sadly.. so i want to get out some of the indie gems that probably aren't worth paying for, JWE2, Planet of Lana, ori (which seems good enough to buy actually), hotwheels unleashed, dreamlight valley, the first party microsoft games... 2 weeks.. heh heh... Also strangely i fired up everspace 2.. after the first 10 hours before starfield, i thought it was again a nice try.. but after starfield, its on the buy list, thinking about the physical edition for console. I like it more now.
You can specialize your character in many different ways. You can go for ballistic or laser weapons. Rifles or Pistols. Melee or Heavy Weapons etc.
You can focus more on your on-foot skills or more on your spaceship skills. You can focus on exploration or combat etc.
As far as I know, there is no level cap in Starfield, so in theory you could eventually max out every single skill. But to be honest, that's probably unrealistic for 99.9% of the players, since this will probably take thousands of hours game play. I'm 70 hours in and "only" about Level 37. At each level up I have to carefully consider which skill I only "want" and which I really "need" to improve. Is picking master class locks really that important or do I want to get better modules for my ship? But do I have enough power on my current ship to even run better shields? Should I improve my scanning skills instead, so I don't have to waste time jumping from planet to planet for scanning? But I also could do with some better Outpost skills...and then there's all those Social and Combat skills that...ahhhrrrghh.
Additionally, you can make an other decisions during the various plots and see what happens differently ingame. You could fly a different ship with a different loadout, pick a different crew and run around with a different companion (they like to chime in and comment on your decisions based on their "personality and might like or dislike your decisions)