Game Discussions Bethesda Softworks Starfield Space RPG

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 think it's something to do with new drivers, gfx card - old games were never as dark I found RDR2 nigh unplayable at night and SF is significantly less fun at nighttime as well. And there isnt even a gamma option.
 
I think it's something to do with new drivers, gfx card - old games were never as dark I found RDR2 nigh unplayable at night and SF is significantly less fun at nighttime as well. And there isnt even a gamma option.
I think there's been a move towards "hyper-realism" in visual media lately: not only in video games, but movies and television as well. Once upon a time, they'd drop a blue filter over the lens, and everyone would understand that it's night time. These days, they go for night's so black, you'd think you're visiting a dark site during the new moon. Being able to see the action on screen? The audience doesn't want that. They want realism in their fictional media.
 
Originally I wanted to hold off buying this because I thought I might not like it (at least not $60 worth of like). Now I may hold off buying this because I fear I might like it TOO MUCH. I worry it might interfere with real-life obligations (I am weak - I'll choose to play a very fun game over doing important chores and projects if the game is addictive enough). Maybe I can make this my own personal carrot / reward for checking off all these obligations from my list. "When you finish XYZ, then you can buy and play Starfield!"

As I tell my family, when it comes to dieting, I win that war at the grocery store, not in the kitchen. If something yummy makes it into my cupboard, then the battle is already lost!
 
Originally I wanted to hold off buying this because I thought I might not like it (at least not $60 worth of like). Now I may hold off buying this because I fear I might like it TOO MUCH. I worry it might interfere with real-life obligations (I am weak - I'll choose to play a very fun game over doing important chores and projects if the game is addictive enough). Maybe I can make this my own personal carrot / reward for checking off all these obligations from my list. "When you finish XYZ, then you can buy and play Starfield!"

As I tell my family, when it comes to dieting, I win that war at the grocery store, not in the kitchen. If something yummy makes it into my cupboard, then the battle is already lost!
When it comes to Starfield, the only term that comes to mind is bewitching. It's an odd feeling. It sort of reminds me of Elite Dangerous during its first year: the game annoys with its various shortfalls, but there is already enough there to keep you coming back for more, sort of like a sexy witch with a wart on her nose. For example, when I play it, I often find myself wanting to go back to X4 because SF lacks that large-scale enterprise feeling. So, I close the game with the intention of returning to X4 later, but when I do come back to my PC, it's right back to Starfield! I keep asking myself why I am so hooked on this game, and I still don't have an answer. :D But it has sunk its claws deep into me. Again, I think it is because I see the vast potential that it has, not just with mods but with updates and DLC from Bethesda. As with Elite, Bethesda has built a rock-solid foundation that has the potential to expand in all sorts of interesting ways. And Bethesda's commitment to the long-term development of the game just makes me all the more excited for its future.

I know you said you weren't interested in Game Pass, but I would say for $10, it is worth a spin just to see if you will be entranced by it as much as we poor Spacelord Randalls have been.

Update on my adventure. I decided to try a mission board-generated survey mission. It was to Tau Ceti III. When I arrived in orbit, my scan found a science outpost. I approached the place with caution but was pleased to discover that it was just a bunch of scientists conducting research to see if the world could be terraformed. With the exception of a brief quest to place some sensors around some gas fumaroles, there was no other drama to be had, which was a nice break from the action. Even the mission board outside the station was empty. (Was this a bug? Or are missions generated according to need, as in X4? If the latter, that would be really cool! I need to know the answer to this!)

After that brief encounter, I set about surveying the planet. It was a very bleak world—cold, windy, and with a dusty atmosphere. It took some doing, including exploring a cave to find all the elements I needed to scan, but I got it done. The last thing I found was the planet's unique feature: pools of liquid metal with crystals growing out of them:

Photo_2023-09-13-021846.jpg


I then decided to do some poking around and came across another settlement, this time of would-be colonists making a hardscrabble existence from the tough terrain. Again, no drama or gunfights, which was nice. Just people doing their thing. I took a moment to sit with them in their prefab while the wind howled outside (there is some GREAT sound design in this game!):

Photo_2023-09-13-020804.jpg


After resting a bit, I headed back to my ship and decided, just for the heck of it, to land on the other side of the planet and do some further exploring. Upon setting down, I saw this tower in the far distance (also great draw distances in this game!):

Photo_2023-09-13-025838.jpg


It really intrigued me, so I decided to see if I could walk all that way without hitting a wall. VASCO and I set out, crossing the rocky terrain (more praise: you can tell the artists over at BGS examined the photos from Mars and Titan to get the rocky landscapes looking realistic. SF beats Elite's terrain gen by a mile!).

After covering about 1.5 KM or so, I could see the tower getting closer and larger:

Photo_2023-09-13-030147.jpg


It seemed to be on a hill. March on! (Yes, it was here I wished we had an SRV. I fully expect one to arrive with a future DLC.)

Photo_2023-09-13-030445.jpg


Another 1 KM or so, and we made it! It turns out it was a radio transmitter station. It was guarded by some rogue robots. When I finally made it inside the station, the computer logs indicated that there was some sort of malfunction or user error on the part of the staff that set the bots to "eliminate the useless humans" mode.

And that was my adventure last night! I did a survey mission and did some random exploring for about 90-minutes of gameplay. WARNING: This game is a huge time sink, but in the best way possible. Not a grind but just too much to do and see! I think I've only done three mainline quest missions so far and haven't even moved beyond the starting city of New Atlantis!
 
Last edited:
Originally I wanted to hold off buying this because I thought I might not like it (at least not $60 worth of like). Now I may hold off buying this because I fear I might like it TOO MUCH. I worry it might interfere with real-life obligations (I am weak - I'll choose to play a very fun game over doing important chores and projects if the game is addictive enough). Maybe I can make this my own personal carrot / reward for checking off all these obligations from my list. "When you finish XYZ, then you can buy and play Starfield!"

As I tell my family, when it comes to dieting, I win that war at the grocery store, not in the kitchen. If something yummy makes it into my cupboard, then the battle is already lost!

At this point I just think you’re trying to get someone to buy it for you.. 😆
 
Huzzah!

(I just love GFN to death!)

Screenshot 2023-09-13 204959.png


I am very glad I didn't upgrade my Game Pass membership for XCloud. Now I can play it with KB&M on GFN!

I figured they would give XCloud a bit more exclusivity. But, then again, I have heard that XCloud has been groaning under the weight of Starfield. It makes sense to distribute the server load to Microsoft's cloud-gaming partner.
 
Update on my adventure. I decided to try a mission board-generated survey mission. It was to Tau Ceti III. When I arrived in orbit, my scan found a science outpost. I approached the place with caution but was pleased to discover that it was just a bunch of scientists conducting research to see if the world could be terraformed. With the exception of a brief quest to place some sensors around some gas fumaroles, there was no other drama to be had, which was a nice break from the action. Even the mission board outside the station was empty. (Was this a bug? Or are missions generated according to need, as in X4? If the latter, that would be really cool! I need to know the answer to this!)

You see this almost drags me in to buying it, these are the sort of exploration missions needed in Elite, not just, map as many ammonia worlds as you can find, something meaty for explorers, something meaningful for exploration. Exploration in ED certainly need some sort of upgrade like this to appeal to more players......maybe one day.
 
I updated to the newest Nvidia driver today and got stutters and non stop crashes for first time in my 40 or so hours. I reverted to the August one and everything was fine again. 1660ti. May be an older card thing, saw some people mentioning it auto enables something called rebar which may be the cause for the problems.
 
I updated to the newest Nvidia driver today and got stutters and non stop crashes for first time in my 40 or so hours. I reverted to the August one and everything was fine again. 1660ti. May be an older card thing, saw some people mentioning it auto enables something called rebar which may be the cause for the problems.
I think there might be an issue with the new driver, too. After updating my driver, I experienced the first crash in my 20+ hours of gameplay. Nothing that kept happening, but it did happen once soon after updating. It probably is the ReBAR. I would have to imagine all that steel makes the driver very heavy.
 
I think there might be an issue with the new driver, too. After updating my driver, I experienced the first crash in my 20+ hours of gameplay. Nothing that kept happening, but it did happen once soon after updating.
I got 7 or 8 in an hour and constant stuttering. Whatever it did for me was bad news. After I reverted I played about 4-5 more hours with zero problems.
 
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's like over here...we know summer has arrived in the frozen north when the permanent residents can be seen in the local shop with the top toggle of their duffel coats undone :)

After a brief and mostly intermittent summer where temps rarely reached above 17°c, we're back to the autumnal norms of 5°c and brisk 30mph winds at present...
 
Last edited:
I updated to the newest Nvidia driver today and got stutters and non stop crashes for first time in my 40 or so hours. I reverted to the August one and everything was fine again. 1660ti. May be an older card thing, saw some people mentioning it auto enables something called rebar which may be the cause for the problems.
Rebar (resizable bar) is a hardware feature only available on 30xx series Nvidia cards and later...if your card isn't one of them, any driver enabling it it won't make any difference 🤷‍♂️
 
Rebar (resizable bar) is a hardware feature only available on 30xx series Nvidia cards and later...if your card isn't one of them, any driver enabling it it won't make any difference 🤷‍♂️
I was just kind of reading through the thread about the problems and it did seem to be mostly guys with newer cards and laptops for whatever reason. I just know the new driver definitely didn't play nice with me.
 
I was just kind of reading through the thread about the problems and it did seem to be mostly guys with newer cards and laptops for whatever reason. I just know the new driver definitely didn't play nice with me.
Rebar...although I don't have a clue what it actually does except for slightly improve game performance if you have it enabled... is more of a firmware enabled hardware function. AMD 6000 series cards and later have the same feature, which they named SAM or smart access memory. I'm sure a tech guru will appear soon enough to enlighten me what rebar and sam actually is and how it works :)

You also need the firmware enabled in your PC's motherboard bios for it to work so even enabling the feature directly through a driver release would do nothing...or technically, shouldn't do anything.

The issues are probably just a poorly optimised driver is all, they crop up with great regularity :)
 
Last edited:
Rebar...although I don't have a clue what it actually does is more of a firmware enabled hardware function. AMD cards have the same feature, SAM or smart access memory.

You also need the firmware enabled in your PC's motherboard bios for it to work so even enabling the feature directly through a driver release would do nothing...or technically, shouldn't do anything.

The issues are probably just a poorly optimised driver is all, they crop up with great regularity :)
I was reading about all the mods you are using in the SC thread. How are things on the stability front mod wise?
 
I was reading about all the mods you are using in the SC thread. How are things on the stability front mod wise?
Since practically all of the mods I'm using are either just graphics/texture/UI based or mere custom.ini enabled tweaks or bends, I've had absolutely no issues whatsoever, even the latest game update had no effect on any of the mods I'm using. Once the creation kit appears and we then have to use a script extender and mod managers for the more complicated mods...that's when the fun times spent balancing and mucking about with mod loading orders will appear.

Since Starfield, like all Bethesda games before it, is purposely designed to let us as users play with via modding, it's more user friendly than 99% of other games out there when it comes to making the mods work together. The trick is to not have 2 or more incompatible mods mess with the same part of the game engine...within reason.

From experience of Fallout 4 and spending far more time trying to get all the mods I wanted working at the same time than I spent actually playing the game...I'm already dreading the plethora of script extended nightmares to come :eek:
 
Last edited:
Back
Top Bottom