Game Discussions Bethesda Softworks Starfield Space RPG

I can also confirm rain. I was in New Atlantis today. At the start of doing my errands, it was a typically sunny day. A few hours later, the weather changed to rain (as with Cyberpunk 2077, there seems to be a behind-the-scenes dice roll to determine the weather every time a new instance loads). I was happy to see this because I thought New Atlantis was only going to be a perfectly sunny place. The only thing I didn't care for is how SF produces a rainy day in the same way as NMS: you might see a gray sky and raindrops, but the lighting remains sunny. You can see that here:

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That's a strong shadow for such a cloudy day. Stuff like that annoys me.

I stole my first ship from raiders. While doing a planetside survey, I came across this landed ship and shot my way aboard. Now it's mine! Here it is landing at a LIST homestead.

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This game can be gorgeous!
There is a number of environmental effect that occur weather-like. Depends on the planet features. You can get toxic storms, fogs, seismic events etc.
 
I have played a few games where night lasted a long time (relatively) and the darkness was so extreme in some areas you just had to sit down and wait for the dawn, or indeed log off and return to playing later, there are two extremes, proper night and pretend night, I would take short nights over proper nights any day in RPG's, I mean it's not a simulation, you are there to have fun, and that's hard to do when you walk right past a huge great castle in the middle of the night because you can't see a thing!
Starfield isn't a simulator... but many mods in the coming months will try to turn it into one: dark nights, needs to eat/sleep, realistic inventory weight, no boundaries, non-fast space travel, etc.

As in previous Bethesda games (Skyrim for example); it's not a pure RPG, it's not a pure simulator, but the mods will try to turn it into something it will never end up being. In a few months we will have a hybrid that will have lost its essence (because its essence does not convince many) to try to be what it will never be... with corrupted savegames and endless conflicts between mods.

I love mods... and I hate mods....
 
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Starfield isn't a simulator... but many mods in the coming months will try to turn it into one: dark nights, needs to eat/sleep, realistic inventory weight, no boundaries, non-fast space travel, etc.

Oh yeah for sure, and I have no problem with that because mods are optional, and some mods become very popular and some don't, but in the end it's the mod maker putting the effort in to make something they enjoy and hope others may also enjoy. Mods often extend the lifetime of a game far beyond it's expected period as well, I mean I played Desert Combat (mod for Battlefield 1942) for many years. In the end it depends how flexible the actual game engine is, I suspect mods like no boundaries may actually be impossible for the game engine from the little I have seen online about it, you have to remember the Creation Engine 2 is an update of the original Gamebryo engine used for Morrowind. It should be interesting to see exactly what can and can't be done by the modders, indeed it may extend the game into areas where I might find myself interested in playing it, if it's more space sim like than RPG that would be a plus for me.
 
Starfield isn't a simulator... but many mods in the coming months will try to turn it into one: dark nights, needs to eat/sleep, realistic inventory weight, no boundaries, non-fast space travel, etc.

As in previous Bethesda games (Skyrim for example); it's not a pure RPG, it's not a pure simulator, but the mods will try to turn it into something it will never end up being. In a few months we will have a hybrid that will have lost its essence (because its essence does not convince many) to try to be what it will never be... with corrupted savegames and endless conflicts between mods.

I love mods... and I hate mods....

Well, to be fair, Mods will only turn the game into whatever the player wants. They won't take away anything from the game or add anything to it that the player doesn't want. There will probably be the usual tools from the other Bethesda games to install and manage mods. Other than that, it's always in the player's own responsibility to check the mod description for (known) compatibility issues. A Star Trek themed full conversion mod is likely to conflict with a Star Wars themed full conversion mod so they shouldn't be installed at the same time.
 
Does the mod affect random encounters? With the fast travel the pirates are right in your face as you load in whilst with supercuise we can see them coming and prepare.

I think the random encounters are only in normal space flight. So when you switch to normal mode it'll be as usual.
 
Night is really dark as are caves.
I have played a few games where night lasted a long time (relatively) and the darkness was so extreme in some areas you just had to sit down and wait for the dawn, or indeed log off and return to playing later, there are two extremes, proper night and pretend night, I would take short nights over proper nights any day in RPG's, I mean it's not a simulation, you are there to have fun, and that's hard to do when you walk right past a huge great castle in the middle of the night because you can't see a thing!

I don't have a big problem with abstracting time so that more variety can be seen, but the nights in Starfield are incredibly bright. The skybox illuminates the scene and even at midnight, with no moon, an overcast sky, and mods that bring the black levels down to actual black (while carefully avoiding crushing anything), visibility is to the edge of the planetary tile. Plausibility aside, it's aesthetically weird. It's like permanent, high-end nightvision, or what I see in documentaries like Earth at Night in Color.

So, that's the next step--now that I have frame generation, LUTs, and HDR mostly sorted out--modding the nighttime skybox to be less overwhelming.
 
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The player who experimented with removing landing zone boundaries and found out that planet tiles are actually contiguous has found out the probable cause for the eventual crash - once you get far enough away from your ship it gets culled and the game doesn’t like that.

The explanation from their latest testing video:
I positioned an Outpost beacon to see if what happened with the New Atlantis' map markers would also happen in reverse, and I can say with a non-zero amount of confidence that this confirms all my previous findings. The game is perfectly able to load the Outpost in the distance when coming near it from the New Atlantis Tile. It positions the Map Marker just as expected, on top of the Outpost Beacon.

You can target it with the scanner, and fast travel to it. This causes the game to move you there, but without moving the Home Ship with you, which then unloads, causing the game to crash. You can see that judging from the position of the quest and Frontier markers. This potentially confirms the findings from all previous experiments.

Respectively:

1. Tiles are connected;
2. The connection isn't just visual, that worldspace exists. You can try to reach across, and the game will load its contents as it used to in past games.
3. This isn't only valid for major locations like New Atlantis, and it also works the other way around. Another user on Twitter and Reddit proved the same for non-major tiles. From that same user's screenshot of New Atlantis in the distance, the shape of a nearby lake appears to confirm that all tiles in the game are the same for everyone, and are not randomly generated at runtime.
4. The actual cause for the crash isn't overload from having two tiles loaded, I recognize that's my fault for putting this hypothesis out into the world. The reason is more likely to be that the Home Ship in this game factors into what BGS previously described as "Atlas". Moving away from the Home Ship to the point that the area it's in completely unloads is what actually breaks the game.

Regarding performance: Yes, I get low fps and loading screens. I am forcing the game to run on Ultra on a below-specs card, and am further stressing the game by moving quickly and forcing it to quickly load and unload an enormous quantity of data. This is not regular gameplay, so concentrate on the important aspects of the video.
 
Time moving approximately ten fold real speed is typical for Bethesda games. Combined with the shorter day/night cycles on some worlds, this can get pretty extreme.
I recall that in all three elder scrolls games that I played (Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim) there was a console command that could be used to set the time scale of one to one. Is that available here for PC users?
 
It seems like the honeymoon period is finally over for Starfield. This morning, I successfully resisted the temptation to skip the health club in favor of playing the game some more.

But it was a close thing, since I burned what little time I had to play last night on my little experiment. ;)

On a completely different note, it’s now meteorological fall/autumn here in Minnesota. It was 42F (5C) this morning. You can always tell who the native/long term Minnesotans are. We’re the ones still wearing shorts and T-shirts, :)
 
It seems like the honeymoon period is finally over for Starfield. This morning, I successfully resisted the temptation to skip the health club in favor of playing the game some more.

But it was a close thing, since I burned what little time I had to play last night on my little experiment. ;)

On a completely different note, it’s now meteorological fall/autumn here in Minnesota. It was 42F (5C) this morning. You can always tell who the native/long term Minnesotans are. We’re the ones still wearing shorts and T-shirts, :)
Sounds like Scotland we wear string vests and flip flops whilst trekking through the Snow . ( unlike our southern neighbours who have a melt down when they see a snow flake 🤣)
 
Well, to be fair, Mods will only turn the game into whatever the player wants. They won't take away anything from the game or add anything to it that the player doesn't want. There will probably be the usual tools from the other Bethesda games to install and manage mods. Other than that, it's always in the player's own responsibility to check the mod description for (known) compatibility issues.
And this is what I like about games like X4 and Starfield: The ability to browse/check out various mods and only install those I like. With Elite, stuff like engineers (for example) got installed regardless of if I wanted it or not. Hated that.
 
A small ~730mb Patch just dropped. Nothing too exciting just yet

Update Version 1.7.29 - Fixes and Improvements
Performance and Stability
  • Xbox Series X|S Improved stability related to installations.
  • Various stability and performance improvements to reduce crashes and improve framerate.
Quests
  • All That Money Can Buy: Fixed an issue where player activity could result in a quest blocker.
  • Into the Unknown: Fixed an issue that could prevent the quest from appearing after the game is completed.
  • Shadows in Neon: Fixed an issue where player activity could result in a quest blocker.
[/spoiler]

 
Real Grav Drive Supercruise and EVA Spacewalk with Hotkeys


This mod disables achievements, but Achievement Enabler should fix it.



There are day/night cycles. I saw a sun rise and sunset on New Atlantis. The weather changes too (sunny, cloudy, rainy).
The player struggling to get to that final moon reminds me too much of Frontier Elite 2 when flying without an autopilot and being a bit slow on the StarDreamer controls 😁

Those loading screens were a bit thirsty though 😂
 
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