For those who have pre-ordered it is already here, the rest have to wait a little longer. Starfield is finally here! Have you bought it, why or why not? If you’ve already played it, what do you think of it? We are very curious!
Discuss all things Starfield below!
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The Lemmy community desperately needs a mix of more people lol, how are most of these comments “I haven’t played but it sucks” 😂
Lemmy overall has somehow managed to become an even more negative place to post than Reddit
I agree and it sucks. At least on Reddit you could generally avoid pointlessly negative people, whereas here it feels like that’s the majority of comments. I hope it changes into actual conversations at some point
“I hate negativity” he said while being negative.
Ya, that’s not the argument you think it is, lol
Reddit has toxic positivity with regards to Starfield. I find the comments I’ve read here so far to be a much more measured take. Basically that it’s a good game but it has a few minor issues that make it not live up to what was advertised.
Or at least the expectations people had made for themselves.
More so this. The things I saw people saying they were gonna do once they got the game despite nothing of the sort being implied to be in the game were out of control. I’ve played the dog shit out of Skyrim and Fallout 4 and have yet to be let down by Starfield because I knew what to expect. And yes, I watched all of the ads and read the interviews, same as most, and never once felt lied to.
Uh, so you shouldn’t criticize games here…?
I prefer people giving their honest opinions to whatever they think the collective deems acceptable.
so if I don’t like the game I should just avoid commenting because it isn’t positive? I prefer to see everyone’s take thanks
You’ll die someday and the sun will explode in a few billion years
Not soon enough, that glowing bastard has it coming!
Agreed, there’s a couple comments of actually thoughtful replies but the vast majority is booo Bethesda bad because Bethesda.
you don’t have to play a game to comment on it, especially when there’s so much material about it online because it is such a relevant title.
I would never comment on an indie game because of a tweet I read. But this is not that and there’s a lot of info about it.
it’s because a lot of us didn’t pay for early access. so we have to wait.
Or we brought the wrong version 😿
I can spend what I saved for the game. I can’t spend 100 bucks for the version that let’s you play 5 days early. 😢
Cause this isn’t Reddit lmfao
I was hoping that would be a good thing, but yeah… feels like a site-wide echo chamber almost lol
I can attest that my comment was made in isolation. I intentionally didn’t look at conversations or reviews and wanted a fresh experience all to myself. So I’m not parroting or trying to push some negative narrative.
Now that I’ve slept on it, I’m going to dive back in with my expectations reduced, and I’m hoping I’ll have lots of fun with it.
I think your comment is totally fair, you actually tried the game and came to the opinion. I’m more so confused on the zero gameplay but I know it sucks comments.
No VR.
Not gonna buy until the VR modding community catches up to it and the game is on sale.
So far I’m a few hours in and I’ve been having a great time. My hardware is closer to the minimum requirements, so I’ve had some issues with my resolution throttling back to keep framerate up in the busiest areas. So far, no significant bugs experienced, assuming the aforementioned texture resolution fuzzing was intentional.
I will say I’ve found all the complaints about loading screens to be a little silly. Again, I’m closer to the minimum hardware level on PC but most loading screens I encounter have been around 3-5 seconds, and they’re generally made up for with other conveniences like the ability, when planetside, to fast travel not just directly to your ship, but Into the pilot’s seat, so I’m spending a lot less time loading than I would have just walking through doors.
All in all so far it feels like exactly what I was expecting.
specifically to the loading screens point, I guess it’s about expectations. Since this is such a huge game advertised as exploration-based people might find too many loading screens immersion-breaking.
I know I’m spoiled about this since Red Dead 2
Spent a few hours trying to fix the broken ultrawide support. Eventually, the good old hex edit fix for aspect ratios on the EXE did the trick. After that, the FOV was messed up, but the game doesn’t have an FOV slider (or HDR, or DLSS)… so eventually I managed to fix that with a custom ini.
The next few hours was spent shooting pirates like I was playing Far Cry in Space, and struggling with the game’s horrifically designed UI, menus, and inventory. So far, I am feeling very angry about the game. Like we were flat-out lied to about what the game was. There is no exploration. There’s barely even “space”. You just teleport from map to map shooting pirates… with a little scanning creatures and mining rocks mixed in. I don’t understand how anyone is okay with this.
I feel like I’ve burned myself out a little bit on story heavy games after Baldurs Gate 3, so I cannot concentrate on the story lol
But otherwise…
Fps jumps between 30 and 90 and I feel the slowdowns (rtx3080, Ryzen 3900x here).
The graphics and animations are kind of shit. Standard Bethesda.
The menus are super fiddly.
The aesthetic is cool. I love the retro futuristic bulky style.
Music is great!
Voice acting thus far, is good.
Starship is cool but basically unnecessary. You just fast travel anyway.
Combat is pretty cool but stiff.I haven’t played super far yet so im hoping it gets a bit better soon.
I feel bad about supporting the preorder system, but fuck me this game has been fantastic so far. Long weekend babyyyyyyy
What I’m learning is that I’m really glad that I told myself I wouldn’t be buying it until it was on sale post-launch to see if it was even worth the sale price
Anybody able to talk about the steam deck experience?
Upsides:
- side quests other than the radiant ones are mostly cool so far
- stealth archer isn’t so good that you can just play that way straight out, but the tree makes it looks eventually strong
- zero g combat in a derelict space station was cool. I hope there’s more of that
- base building seems fine, I’m not sure what it’s for, but it seems fine
Downsides:
- ship stuff feels bad. I don’t care about fast travel, but it’s just about the weakest ship-to-ship combat that I’ve played. Its early yet, though. Boarding a ship was cool at least.
- combat AI is not good. Enemies never seem to take any initiative, they mostly just crouch behind wherever you found them
- the setting has no… flavor? The factions feel like fallout analogues but without fun or verve. Maybe I just haven’t found the weird shit yet, but I’m not optimistic.
Played for 3 hours yesterday on a 3070, 10700k, 32GB ram. Game runs and looks incredible on high/ultra settings. I haven’t gotten far into the story, but the beginning gets into the action very fast like Skyrim.
The animations and textures make npcs feel more alive than fallout. I made it to the first city area and it looks amazing. It looks like mirrors edge type city in space
textures
What about the textures? Like, higher texture resolution?
Higher res and more details in the textures. Faces don’t look like they’re one flat texture with the npcs skin tone, for example.
The look of npcs, items, roads, rocks, hills, etc. is way better than even F4/F76.
What resolution? I’m just a tier below with a 3060Ti + 10600k and a tech review has me worried my 1440p monitor is gonna be a problem.
I don’t want another situation like downtown in Fallout 4 on my last rig where I’m trying to play a FPS with framerate dips all over the place.
1080p, I’ve been too scared to upgrade to a 1440p monitor on the current rig ):
I had those downtown F4 dips too, even at 1080. This game is far from that, it feels much more polished.
I can’t even play F76 to this day without super annoying frame dips
Definitely get a decent 1440p monitor with high refresh rate and GSync and then you are set. If you get it used it probably won’t even be that expensive (that’s how I got mine around 2 years ago).
Monitors last a long time so it’s not something that you will just toss, and a 3070 with 1080p is such a waste imo
Yeahhh, I found a great deal on this monitor but I was a dumbass and didn’t know how bad the down-rez is when running 1080p on a 1440p monitor😅
Other than not being able to use raytracing in CP2077 it hasn’t been a problem, but I’m think I’m going to start running into trouble from this point on. Oh well, I was thinking of getting another monitor for my workflow anyway…
“Graphics card not supported.”
Find out I have to update Windows.
Hadn’t updated since around 2018 and everything worked fine, but OK, fine, let’s try it.
Can’t figure out how to reenable Windows update (it kept trying to come back, like a dog swallowing and revomiting its own puke, so at some point I’d disabled it with extreme prejudice, and it seems it stuck).
Manage to find a Microsoft tool that’ll update Windows 10 to the latest version without going through Windows update.
Upgrade assistant does its thing and at seventy-something percent complains VirtualBox isn’t compatible and must be uninstalled. Yeah, not doing that, got my family’s mail server in there. I was only 2 major versions behind, shouldn’t’ve been a problem, but all right, have it your way.
Update VirtualBox, looks like Upgrade assistant is finally happy, after a couple aeons Windows is updated.
“Graphics card not supported.” Fuck. You.
Update graphics drivers (couple more aeons; in for a penny, in for a pounding).
While Nvidia does its thing, try to start the VMs in the new version of VirtualBox. “Can’t start operating system”. Well, fuck.
Eventually figure out that at some point around version 6 VHD support got fubared and Oracle never fixed it. This is why I don’t update.
Start converting VHD disks to VDIs, which should fix it. What’s a few more aeons between friends.
While I’m at it the drivers finish updating. Try to start the game again, third time’s the charm.
Fans reach take off speed! Main screen goes black! Logos start showing! It lives!
“Compiling 1 of 7000 shaders”
(╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻
System grinds to a halt. Finally manage to open program manager and kill the game. Probably shouldn’t have started it while I was migrating the virtual disks. (The fact that it’s a 980ti probably doesn’t help either, but hey, it’s worked perfectly till now, including with Cyberpunk 2077 and Baldur’s Gate 3, and by jingo it’ll work with Starfield).
“It just works.”
Anyway, meanwhile the disks finish migrating, and at least now the VMs work. Update the VirtualBox extensions just to be sure, reboot the VM…
Black screen.
(╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻
Find out at some point the display drivers got fubared for Windows 2003 / XP and Oracle never fixed it. Manage to start the VM in safe mode and uninstall the VirtualBox extensions; after fixing the display settings, it sort of works again. Yay. Second VM is staying with v5.x extensions, thank you very much.
Say what you want about Bethesda (they almost certainly deserve it), but at least they ain’t Oracle.
Sigh.
Gonna eat something, relax a bit, and leave the game to compile shaders while I sleep.
With luck, tomorrow it’ll be done, and it’ll just work.
You have done that yourself
True, I should’ve probably waited for the community patch that’ll fix these issues.
“fix these issues” - You’re the issue lmao
VirtualBox isn’t compatible and must be uninstalled. Yeah, not doing that, got my family’s mail server in there
In all seriousness, might be worth just setting up a physical server separate from your gaming system.
I mean, I’ve thrown out many computers that would be entirely capable of running a mail server and the like.
I’d disown you if you were family and I found out you were hosting my email on a VM in a 5 years-out-of-date windows PC. Some things are simply unforgivable.
Yeah, probably, though computers take space, and electricity… though, admittedly, these days you can probably run a mail server on a raspberry pi (if you can get your hands on one) powered by a potato… 🤔
The plan sort of was to eventually (once I can afford a new machine) move everything to VMs, with GPU pass through for the gaming one (I can’t afford a dedicated gaming machine — nor have the space for it — and I want something I can easily reset to a clean installation in case of Denuvo and similar malware without messing with my work software), but moving the servers and firewall to a small dedicated machine might indeed be a more realistic (and maybe even cheaper) approach…
Just get a secondhand thin client like hp t620 for like $30, which is perfectly capable of running 64bit Linux/Windows with 7 watt of power.
You’re throwing back “It just works.” at them because you failed to maintain a Windows VM that you haven’t updated in FIVE YEARS? Not to mention that you really expect game dev studios test and support running a game in virtual box??
If you want to do something tech savvy, that’s on you to do the tech part.
This has to be one of the most wild “gamer” complaints I’ve ever seen.
And yet, every other game I’ve tried so far (including several with better graphics) actually worked out of the box without requiring Windows or even driver updates, or having to spend ages compiling shaders. 🤷♂️
You could also drive an old hooptie with 300,000 miles on it and it might work for a period of time but don’t bitch at your mechanic when the engine finally gives out.
Well… Confirmed what I had feared. They heavily rely on dynamic resolution and DLSS/FSR instead of real optimization. Meet most of the recommended specs, except the GPU. I’ve got a 1660 Super and even on low settings @1080p, the game runs anywhere between 25 and 60 fps. And it’s like… Backwards from what I would expect. Indoor areas are the slower areas, while outdoors is nice and snappy. But it looks blurry as fuck with the resolution scale at anything other than 100%, and even ultra settings do not put it that high.
That said, it is still playable without having to mod in lower textures and reducing clutter. Which is more than I can say about Fallout 4 at release, and I had the exact recommended specs for that one back then.
First game since I built this machine to run this poorly with settings this low. Even Baldur’s Gate 3, which looks way better, runs so much better at Ultra settings than Starfield does at the minimum.
Other than that, the setting feels pretty bland, which is not what I expected considering the passionate way they talked at lengths about it. It’s all very generic and very obviously just trying to make every fun sci-fi trope they like stick. I am not playing for the story or the writing, but the world building is usually one of their best features… This one is pretty lackluster with the world building, and so far has not really drawn me in.
I’ve been having a ton of fun with it. I’ve only played 4 hours so far, but it’s definitely the smoothest Bethesda game in terms of performance and animations, also in my experience not many bugs. Playing on a 1440p monitor with a 7900XT and I get pretty consistent 100fps (my monitor freaks out if I raise the hz higher than 100 so can’t tell how high it’ll go).
In terms of gameplay, space combat is reasonably entertaining and flying the ship is fairly well thought out. Whilst you can’t fly directly between planets like in Elite Dangerous, the primary purpose of ship control is combat and it does fairly well. On my computer, loading screens are pretty much instant, so travelling between planets isn’t a problem. Combat is fairly fun, and the AI behaviour has been much improved from previous Bethesda games. Still not always perfect but they do behave more naturally. Environmental storytelling also has a much larger presence again, with a lot of interactions and things to read. Also, this really fulfils my fantasy of being just a citizen in a sci-fi world. Walking around my ship, seeing the little bathroom and crew chambers, it’s really cool, it feels very lived in and really makes it feel like you’re an explorer on the fringes of space, living out of a ship.
There are a lot of comparisons with No Man’s Sky, but honestly I feel they’re completely different games, by design. Starfield is more Bethesda’s take on a Mass Effect style game.
Anyway, people have a lot of mixed opinions, but I’ve been loving it!
my monitor freaks out if I raise the hz higher than 100 so can’t tell how high it’ll go
Try a shorter monitor cable? I had a really long cable that did not deal well with high refresh rates.
Might also need to check what the ports on your monitor support. A high quality DisplayPort cable will probably solve the issue, but make check the spec on the HDMI and DisplayPorts on your monitor to make sure they can support higher the higher bandwidth needed for high refresh rate/high resolution monitors. If your HDMI is only v1.4, but DP is 1.2 or 1.4, definitely use DisplayPort instead.
If you just used an old cable that came with something for free, I would buy a proper cable that supports the newer DP or HDMI specs from someone like KableDirekt.
Thank you for the advice!
Unfortunately I’ve tried a number of very expensive cables, as well as multiple graphics cards. The monitors used to be fine, but over time they started getting all these horizontal lines across the screen if I go above 100hz. I’ve also tried Mac and Windows and same problem with both.
I’ve looked it up though and seems to be a common problem for AOC Agon monitors, so my fault for cheaping out, even though they still cost me $550aud per monitor :(
Thank you! Unfortunately I’ve tried multiple cables with different lengths, as well as DP and HDMI, different GPU’s and different OS’s, iGPU vs discrete, the only common failure is the monitor. Unfortunately it’s happening on both of them, same model of monitor and seems to be a common flaw. They are about 6 years old now though
For old monitors breaking or acting weird a lot of times it’s capacitors going bad & popping. I love looking around at the insides of tech things that stopped working right to try seeing why & maybe fixing them so just curious what could be causing it :)
if I may ask, I see you say that the loading screens are fast for you so the way to travel is not bad in your opinion. Would you say you are OK with the exploration being menu based? (which seems to be the biggest complain so far)
Yeah for me personally it’s not a subtractor to the experience. For one, they make those menus super convenient.
But then, as somebody who’s played quite a lot of Elite Dangerous, I don’t really feel there’s that much missing. I know lots of people will disagree with me here, but whilst I agree it’d be awesome to be able to fly from planet to planet, most of the other games that do this it’s just flying at a dot in space, waiting until the number next to it gets smaller. Space is big, and really really empty. And while I would still enjoy having that aspect in the game too, I think it’s not a bad tradeoff for having much more immersive planets, cities and gameplay. Also most of Elite Dangerous is sitting in a ship traversing menus, selecting a planet and then jumping there. While you can’t directly fly between, Starfield has that same game loop. You can just select a planet, mark it as your destination, then jump into the cockpit, line it up and turn on the grab drive to jump to that place. So I feel that it lives up to my personal expectations.
I don’t want to invalidate anyone else’s feelings or expiriencds though. I’m having a ton of fun playing and seeing the Starfield universe. However I’ll leave an update if that changes.
Thanks for the insight!
Personally having put in several hundred hours with Elite Dangerous (pre-landings, even), I’m glad to read this comment of yours. I don’t disagree about the game loop comparison, and yet I was hoping that Starfield would succeed where ED stayed limp all these years: quadrant-spanning politics, faction progress, living economies and similar. Hell, after knocking out my Merchant elite rank, I just focused on baggin’ griefers until Combat ranked up as well, but… menu scrolling for hours to tick that last box? I just couldn’t find the time. Especially when planets had no atmosphere, outposts were a joke, and even artifact sites were a half-baked afterthought by an obviously overdrawn team. 😅🥹🤷🏼♂️
Just… Dammit. Why.
Absolutely loving it. 25 hours in and a lot more to come, and I’ve barely scratched the surface of the game. I’ve already got a second play through on the mind.
Fuck preordering
Not only preordering, spending almost 50% more on the game just to play it 5 days early. The fuck is wrong with people, no wonder the industry got like it is.
What does this thread have to do with pre-ordering?
Did you actually read the original post?
The original post is incorrect, you didn’t have to pre-order to play early. I bought my copy after reviews dropped.
Good to know, but irrelevant to the point I was making. I wasn’t saying fuck preordering this game. But rather, fuck preordering as a practice.
All it does is incentivize developers to release incomplete games.
I clapped. I clapped because I agree. I’m still clapping.
THEY BROKE NEW GROUND
![[MEGATHREAD] Starfield - Your experiences!](https://cdn.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/steam/apps/1716740/capsule_616x353.jpg?t=1692798833){kind=link}