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!
I’ll let you know in 2 years when it is on sale for at least 50% off.
and has quite a few decent mods that fix the annoying things like inventory
Boy oh boy everyone hates inventory limits and tedious management but devs still feel the need to make sure we have a reason to return towns and what not as the excuse.
Like fuck you, give me a better reason than inconveniencing the fuck out of me while I was out in your world having fun.
cough Baldur’s Gate 3 cough. Why impose an inventory limit if I can just send all the loot I’m gunna sell back to camp? And why no quick “send to camp” hotkey?! Right clickin n shiiittt
Inventory limits are a direct nerf to barrelmancy
Man, preach
Mods are the very first thing that turns me off in a game. I want to play a game, not go stack mods on top of mods just to fix the shit the studio didn’t feel like working on.
They are optional you know?
But Cities Skylines 1 is borderline unplayable outside of Steam because the non-steam players can’t use that one third-party traffic mod on the Steam Workshop that fixes the annoying only-one-lane traffic jams the devs did jack shit about until their recently-released sequel
Sure, just like SkyUI is “optional” for Skyrim.
Sure, you can. But you will gouge your eyes out.
Personally I don’t like SkyUI, I prefer the base game UI. But I have to use it because so many mods require it :(
Yeah I’ll be patiently waiting for SFSE and StarUI before getting the game lol
Both of those are out now if you haven’t noticed yet.
Oh no kidding that’s awesome! I knew SFSE was in the works but hadn’t heard anything about a SkyUI equivalent
100% true - but if people feel the need to create so many mods, then there are probably lots of things people feel aren’t good enough about the game. I’ll admit my gaming time is limited, so just researching and adding mods could easily take all my time. I mean, fuck, I sold my Warthog HOTAS and went back to a cheap thrusmaster not because I liked the thrustmaster better, but because I was spending more time writing and fixing scripts and updating my bindings than actually playing the game. And every time an update would come out that would break a script I would spend pretty much my entire gaming time budget for a couple weeks just getting it running again. It got to the point where I just didn’t play those games because every patch would change something and something (even something small) would break or be incompatible. I’m kind of over that.
Every game gets modded, the number of mods reflects how easy it is to do, not the need for them.
DayZ has entered the chat.
It’s $120 in Australia, even at 50% off it’s still more than I’d ever spend on a game. Just gonna keep waiting
Yo HO!
Yeah we pay an 80% markup just for existing and I hate it, but the gaming industry has been dropping quality while simultaneously increasing prices for some time now.
The only games in the last couple years I’ve paid full price for are CP2077, BG3 and Battlebit. Everything else is bought during the sales, usually at a steep discount, where many of these games should be priced by default.
Fuckin corpo dogs, they’ll ruin anything and everything they can to make a buck.
Just get Game pass for a month, it launches on there in a couple of days time.
Hello, fellow patient gamer!
Enjoy waiting!
Thanks. I might look into the endless things from 2+ years ago that are on sale now. Probably not though. Too many books to read. 😵💫
Throw some good books my way! I’m always on the lookout
Hyperion+Endymion by Dan Simmons. Such a wonderfully written book that evokes so many sad feelings.
It’s veeeery slow (basically the entire first book is build up for the second one), but it’s so rewarding watching all the threads come together by the end.
I mean, we were clearly all so patiently holding our respective breath for this absolute genius comment of yours to grace our screens, O’ wisest of asses. What’s a little longer, really?
Oh wisest spender of 60 dollars, you are the light. How will I ever decide to expend that amount over the next 24+ months. Lmao. Get your goofy ass on
You spend less than $60 in two years’ time? Your Internet bill must be the cheapest on the planet. Your grocery expenses must also be next to nothing if you’re surviving on the warmth of your hot air whinging alone . Fascinating.
#nopoors
Being a patient gamer isn’t strictly about money. It’s about not getting caught up in hype and making more calculated decisions. Even so, wanting to pay what you think something is worth is just good practice.
I’m not going to wait two years – though I’m opposed to preordering – but there are other benefits too. Two years down the line:
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A bunch of bugs are patched. Even if Starfield is relatively free of bugs, there will be some.
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The wikis for the game have been written up. Some obsessive person will have sat down and figured out the quirks of game mechanics and documented them. Understanding stuff like the relative merits of armor-piercing, bleeding, and so forth in Fallout 4 was complicated.
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Starfield’s expansion packs will be out.
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Mods will be out, and there will probably be some pretty “must have” ones.
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You’ll have more hardware oomph to throw at the game, make it smoother/higher res.
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What if I told you it’s possible to have money and not want to waste it on dumb shit?
Maybe that’s one of the reasons you have said money?
Holy crap you know I think you might be onto something
Lmao I only buy games when they’re discounted too and suddenly I have 186 games in my steam library, most of them are still unplayed . I’m not in a hurry to buy more games with such a long backlog.
Fuck preordering
Just played 4 hours. Not saying whether the game is good or bad, but I’m not seeing the point of the spaceship yet.
It’s looks like merely a medium for the fast traveling mechanic. You can’t really “move” in space (as far as ive tried), and can’t use it to fly within a planet.
I expected being able to manually travel from planet A to planet B and finding cool stuff along the way. If you wanna actually move you need to fast travel.
I also expected to be able to get in my ship and go from place A to place B within the same planet (also finding cool stuff along the way). It seems that also is just done by fast traveling only.
This is one of the more biting criticisms I’ve heard of the game. It results in a lack of feeling of scale and scope. The universe just feels like connected places, instead of worlds within a galaxy. No Mans Sky got this right, and it’s surprising that Bethesda would fumble such a core mechanic. It looks like they tried to cover up this wart by… removing city maps.
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Oblivion has towns behind loading screens too. Even Kvatch. There are mods that break them out into the world but they’re instanced by default.
Particularly annoying with the Imperial City.
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Any town with a wall around it in Oblivion is instanced.
Also, you have correctly recognized Morrowind’s superiority. I highly recommend the Tamriel Rebuilt mod that adds a lot of the land mass of the rest of the province outside of the island of Vvardenfell!
A lot of the towns are still a part of the open world, but some of them are separated by loading screens.
Look at Ratchet and Clank Rift Apart. They have completely seamless transitions between entire dimensions. They use Direct Storage, which is a Microsoft API. It’s not a good look when a Sony studio is able to achieve seamless transitions on a Windows game but a Microsoft game can’t.
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TF2 and Dishonored accomplished this by having all the other level data loaded in memory simultaneously all as part of the same map. The instant transitions are accomplished by teleporting the player to another part of the map that is already in memory.
This is not the same trick R&C pulled, and it has far more limitations. For example, TF2’s Effect and Cause necessitates a smaller overall map than the other missions because they had to fit two different versions of the same map in memory all at once. If they wanted to let you transition between three different time periods, they would have had to make it even smaller to fit in the same memory budget.
Ratchet & Clank’s approach has no such limitations. They could let you switch between 8 different time periods and not worry about having to fit all of them in memory at once.
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How Morrowind and other open world games work has very little in common with the approaches used in R&C or Titanfall 2.
This approach has its own unique limitations. In Morrowind, you cannot instantly teleport from one side of the map to the other, in theory that would only be possible between adjacent cells. Otherwise, fast traveling would be instantaneous.
The beauty of what R&C does is that there are no limitations at all. You can almost instantly teleport between any maps the game has. No hacks or trickery beyond the brief animation concealing the 1-2 seconds it takes to shuttle the data from the SSD to VRAM. This is unique, and simply wasn’t possible on spinning rust without radically simplifying your level design and visual package to fit within the limited bandwith.
Even on systems with significant memory, a slow drive will create lag in RC. Moreover, RC is doing this while also having very high graphical fidelity overall, including ray tracing, which is quite memory intensive. It’s not possible without Direct storage and reasonably fast SSDs.
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I’m not insulting the devs who did similar with much less. I’m insulting the devs who can’t do similar with the same hardware.
If you ignore the server performance issues and bugs, star citizen is completely playable on my system and I have below reccomended specs (for starfield & star citizen). If star citizen can have no loading screens with most planets as populated (or more populated) then starfield’s planets while also having to manage server resources, then starfield has almost no excuse to have loading screens.
Elite dangerous did it better. A mix of both maybe.
So the space exploration is more like Mass Effect Andromeda instead of No Man’s Sky?
To me Mass Effect 1-3 felt more cohesive in space, because it was always clear how much you could do, whereas in SF it looks exactly like you’re in NMS, but you can’t do NMS things.
It’s not game breaking or ruining though. Just know going in that it isn’t No Mans Sky.
I haven’t played it, but that seems to be the general consensus I’ve seen.
Yes, it’s much more like Andromeda than NMS. You can also land at other points on planets and get a procedurally generated area instead of just the pre-made ones like in andromeda though.
Sounds disappointing. I’m definitely unnaturally excited with the idea of “Large vehicles” - being able to walk inside with your character, take casual actions like crafting/talking while it transports, then stepping out. It’s why I enjoyed Sea of Thieves and Subnautica, and it’s what I mainly want out of trains in games.
Reducing them to interaction prompts and cutscenes sort of undersells them to me.
Damn, I guess we’ve been spoiled by No Man’s Sky. I was expecting it to be a completely open, manual traversal universe.
Why were people expecting this? I agree it would be awesome, but I thought they were pretty clear this wasn’t going to be like no man’s sky
I did read that landing on planets is just a cutscene rather than a seamless transition, but I thought for sure you can actually fly it in space - isn’t there even combat with other spaceships or random locations to check for resources?
Is there anything else to do on the spaceship, does it feel like a home base where you keep your gear, crafting benches, companions to talk to, etc? I really want that cozy starbound/kotor ebon hawk vibes if possible 🥺
So you can fly in space, and fight space battles there, but you can’t really fly fast enough to fly from one planet to another in real time. To move to a different point of interest in the system, you need to fast travel to it. So the meaningfully interactable part of space is just the immediate area around each fast travel point.
I’m not far enough yet to know if the interior gets more interesting after you add more modules to the ship; the starter ship is basically an RV: bed, galley, cockpit.
Yeah I meant fly as in between locations without a loading screen, kinda like in X3/X4/NMS or even Freelancer/Rebel Galaxy and older spaceship games. I get it might be harder between solar systems the way E:D does it but kinda sad it’s not real travel within one. Maybe they patch it in one day in the future? Who knows
Yeah I meant fly as in between locations without a loading screen, kinda like in X3/X4/NMS or even Freelancer/Rebel Galaxy and older spaceship games.
Ehhhh.
I dunno about No Man’s Sky.
But in X3 (and X2, for that matter), you don’t really seamlessly enter stations. In X4, you do, but it felt like a gimmick to me – there’s not much interesting gameplay on a station.
And there are loading screens between sectors in those games. Short ones, but they’re there. Freelancer too.
Well I never said “enter” stations, I said travel between them. In X3 you used SETA to travel between stations and in X:R and X:4 you had (super)highways. Freelancer also had those rings that speed you up and you could leave them at any point - in fact, the way piracy worked was you destroy one of the rings which would interrupt the travel and drop any ships out of the hightway lane so you could attack them.
Basically, all of these games didn’t just have a loading screen when going from one station to another, there was an actual feeling of distance and travel. From what I’ve heard starfield doesn’t have it at all.
Your ship is basically a TARDIS. You pick a destination from your star map and then your ship magically disappears from one place and appears at another. There is “space” but it feels completely fake, like they tacked it on at the end. Really, so many of the games mechanics feel fake and the effort it takes to suspend disbelief is really high.
There is spaceship battles, not sure about random locations, but I’m guessing you’d also need to fast travel to those.
Also the spaceship is VERY customizable, so much in fact that I found it overwhelming lmao. Not saying that’s bad thing, but you’d definitely need to come up with a lot of credits /loot first.
Again I only have 4 hours in game, so I don’t really know much yet.
Well. Fuck.
I had this complaint early on. It was very disheartening.
20 hours in, I love that I can fast travel from one planet to another in an entirely different solar system, to the building I need to get to.
Tbh I have had a lot of fun with this game (35h in). It’s an RPG first and space explorer second, nothing necessarily wrong with that.
I also learned that if you’re tracking a quest you can use the grav drive right from the ship’s HUD by selecting the locstion marker. It does help immersion a tiny bit more.
Overall it’s what they promised, modders can anyways “fix” the shortcomings.
This is the exact thing that I expected them to implement, and the dealbreaker for me.
I feel like I was completely ripped off. This game is nothing like promised, and I can’t believe how many people seem to be okay with that.
There are more issues than I have the patience to type, so here are just a few of the most egregious.
Graphics. The graphics are nowhere near modern. They are basic colors and sometimes pretty blocky. It almost looks like graphics from a game over 30 years old. This is unacceptable.
Spaceship flight mechanics. There are none. In fact, I have yet to see ANY spaceships in this game. So far, it’s 100% on foot.
First-person gameplay. Not very realistic, but kind of satisfying. There’s a lot of jumping and numerous enemies to avoid. They get a little repetitive, but are enough to hold interest. Some have loot that can give your character special abilities like flying with a raccoon tail, breathing underwater like a frog, or even throwing fireballs.
Character creation. This is virtually non-existent. In fact, I don’t think I was ever asked to review my character. I tried restarting a few times and every time I’m automatically set as some guy in red with a moustache. I did find a multiplayer option, but that just gives a green variant.
I’m thinking of refunding this game as it is nothing like what Todd Howard promised.
Y’all I thought we agreed as a society to not preorder anymore?
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.
Watched a streamer play for quite a while and my primary takeaway is that I wish Bethesda would just scrap their engine and start fresh.
It’s got the same stiffness, gliding movement, butt-ugly NPC’s, and just the general feel of 15 year old Bethesda RPGs. I expect I wouldn’t be able to enjoy it for the same reason I struggled with fallout 4.
Something about how luminescent their eyes are bothers me. But their engine is starting to show it’s age, that’s for sure.
This is their first game on this new engine, so that’s probably not it.
Calling Creation 2 a “new engine” is a little too generous.
It’s an upgrade of their previous engine, which was an upgrade to gamebryo.
Taking a Model T, and dropping the engine into a Porsche doesn’t mean you have a Porsche.
valves new games are still running off code from gold source
‘engine old’ means extremely little and i wish people would stop parroting it
Bethesda really needs to tweak their subsurface scattering for the skin and eyeballs (maybe have a separate render method of eye scatter)
New engine? Do you mean the “Creation Engine 2”, which is still gamebryo at its core? I’m not complaining though because the engine is very mod friendly, it’s just realism is not its strong suit.
RDR2 was built on RAGE, an engine originally used for a table tennis game. Things get upgraded and evolve.
From ping-pong balls to dynamically-resizing horse balls.
It’s interesting how little evolving and upgrading Bethesda does with their stuff. You can’t say that RDR2 and that table tennis game feels the same, but Oblivion and Fallout 4 feel very similar.
It’s a Bethesda problem, because other Gamebryo games don’t feel the same. Even CAVE did a better job with it.
Yep, people love to blame the engine but that’s not why their games have the same feel.
It absolutely is the fault of the engine, but that’s not because Bethesda is incompetent or anything. It’s actually a pretty complicated issue, but yes, it is due to the engine. I wrote a whole explanation for someone else who was parroting the “it’s not the engine’s fault” bs that Pete Hines & Todd Howard started perpetuating a few years ago, so I’ll put it here for you and anyone else:
The problem isn’t the engine itself, it’s that Bethesda hasn’t given it the attention it needs.
Unreal Engine 5, for example, is built from the original Unreal Engine. But there has been so much work put into it that it’s nearly impossible to tell. Meanwhile, the creation engine literally has some of the same issues that the Gambryo engine had back during Morrowind.
To Bethesda’s credit, this isn’t entirely their fault. There’s a reason that proprietary engines have been dying out in favor of engines like Unreal, and that’s because maintaining and improving game engines is incredibly time consuming and expensive. And unless you’re directly profiting off of your engine, like Epic does, you don’t have a massive incentive to endlessly polish it. Doing so is time you could be spending working on your next game, which you do directly profit off of.
Personally, I want Bethesda to keep using the Creation Engine, or whatever they turn it into next, because of its incredible mod support. However, it’s nowhere near as polished or advanced as other engines, and understandably probably never will be. There’s really no easy solution imo.
Careful. The last time I spoke ill of Gamebryo+++++++ I was the subject of a short-lived harassment campaign. Bethesda fans are bizarrely protective of this Frankenstein engine. Get this: you still can’t climb ladders! It’s fucking 2023.
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Their engines have been showing it’s age since Skyrim came out. The fact that they got this far is a testament to their willpower, but man, if they’d change it up it might work out really well for them.
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You mistook me for someone else.
I’ve been playing their games since oblivion, I haven’t played this one yet, but if people are complaining about the engine already then I know there’s a decent chance I’ll air the same grievances.
Though, you’re quick to pull out the grass touching, I must ask, why are you so staunch of a defender of Bethesda? Maybe we both should be touching grass.
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The engine sucks shit. It is functional and useful and bad.
I’m also not convinced that ladder-climbing, whether one wants it or not, is a fundamental engine limitation. It might not be in the game, but that doesn’t imply that it’s an engine limitation.
googles
This guy modded climbable ladders into Fallout 4, which seems like a pretty good argument that it’s not an engine limitation.
https://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/62738
And not that I object per se to ladders, but when was the last time you climbed a ladder in real life? I haven’t in quite some years. I mean, sure, it’s one more interaction, and IIRC there are some fire escapes that had ladders somewhere in Fallout 4 in Boston. But you could make the same argument about interacting with all kinds of things, and it just seems odd for so many people here to mention specifically climbing ladders. I mean, you could fall and catch yourself, drive vehicles, rappel on a rope, skateboard, ice skate, grapple with enemies, zipline, sail a sailing boat, or God knows, any number of other player-object interaction functionality things that might be added. I suppose that any of them could theoretically add gameplay, but I don’t see why the criticality of ladders.
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They’ve never been able to get player models and expression right. I can totally forgive it if you get the same level of open world exploration and interaction we got in New Vegas. I personally can trade quality for depth and interesting gameplay (rimworld and dwarf fortress come to mind in the extremes of this). But it does seem like they struggle to achieve standards that were set even 5 years ago.
Bethesda is a funny company. When they are on it and get it right you end up with some of the best games ever made (Skyrim) but when they’re off it just becomes this jumbled mess that got duct taped together and released at full price (fo76).
I’m hoping this is more of the former but we will see. I suspect the modding community is going to take starfield and turn it into something magical. That ship building engine plus copyrighted space ships from pop culture, sign me up.
I think the hardest thing to do is having complex facial expressions overlapping when characters talk. You could do face capture for every dialog option but that would be a massive task.
In alot of engines characters mouths are controlled by a lip sync system that uses, pitch, tone or text fed dialog to ‘mimic’ words being formed in the mouth. It’s far easier to have that and then having facial expressions as a separate animation layer that’s blended together and triggered based on a enum that’s selected by a script (say a players dialog option says “Your a mean man” and the player selects it, the NPC knows what you selected and in that dialogue option theirs a little enum (it makes more sense if you treat a dialogue option as an object) that contains the facial expression or expressions that are appropriate to use in response).
Full facial animations are used mostly for cutscenes because actors cost money while in game is just the engine trying to move the mouth using code (I know Farcry 5 had this where only the important characters had full facial animations and the rest just flapped their mouths up and down).
Would anyone else be interested in a game that aborts a dedicated “conversation mode” to just have players respond in their normal first person view? Games like Titanfall 2 did that - even though your banter with BT is inconsequential.
It could even lead to some fun “actions not words” moments. Like, a gangster explaining to you “I have the council in my pocket and every gun in the city knows your face. What’re you gonna do about it?” shoots him in the head instead of responding
I’ve never understood this argument, most game engines are based on 20+ year old technology and have been updated throughout the years. Can the creation engine be improved upon? Definitely yes, but the engine’s age has almost nothing to do with it.
Their point is that the engine doesn’t show signs of being improved upon during that time and is still stuck feeling like a 20 year old engine.
If you mean just the Creation Engine, that was 2011.
If you trace it back to Gamebryo, then Morrowind was 20 years ago, but I don’t think that one can say that even Skyrim looks much like Morrowind.
Skyrim literally had some of the same exact problems that Morrowind had.
Personally I want them to keep the creation engine, if only for the stellar mod support. But let’s not kid ourselves, it desperately needs an overhaul.
What specific functionality is it that you want?
I listed one feature that I’d like to have (dynamic generation of polygons in curved surfaces), which I do not consider to be a very important limitation in another comment.
But if you strongly feel that the engine imposes constraints, then I’m curious what particular functionality it is that you’re after.
EDIT: Another: I don’t think that the game can generate billboards for player-built structures (so you can see the structures you’ve built in Fallout 4 and Fallout 76 many cells away). I don’t think that that’s actually a fundamental engine limitation – you could probably do it with the existing engine, just that the game doesn’t do it today. Instead, stuff like that is generated via offline map-generation tools. But again, it’s not really a huge deal in either of the above Fallout games.
There’s no specific functionality (except maybe ladders lol) it’s more just the engine as a whole. The fact that certain bugs can be found in all of their games from Morrowind to Fallout 4 is unacceptable imo.
And the fact that someone managed to literally put the world of Fallout 4 into Skyrim, and have it just work seamlessly, really speaks volumes.
I actually wrote an explanation for someone else a while ago, so I’ll put it here if you’re curious:
The problem isn’t the engine itself, it’s that Bethesda hasn’t given it the attention it needs.
Unreal Engine 5, for example, is built from the original Unreal Engine. But there has been so much work put into it that it’s nearly impossible to tell. Meanwhile, the creation engine literally has some of the same issues that the Gambryo engine had back during Morrowind.
To Bethesda’s credit, this isn’t entirely their fault. There’s a reason that proprietary engines have been dying out in favor of engines like Unreal, and that’s because maintaining and improving game engines is incredibly time consuming and expensive. And unless you’re directly profiting off of your engine, like Epic does, you don’t have a massive incentive to endlessly polish it. Doing so is time you could be spending working on your next game, which you do directly profit off of.
Personally, I want Bethesda to keep using the Creation Engine, or whatever they turn it into next, because of its incredible mod support. However, it’s nowhere near as polished or advanced as other engines, and understandably probably never will be. There’s really no easy solution imo.
Old or not it’s clear it needs a fundamental reworking if the same complaints persist across literal decades.
Yeah, they can just append a number to it like unreal does and call it a new engine but that’s not what you actually want. It’s not a matter of a “new engine”, it’s them not investing enough into the existing one to make it feel more modern. I know some things like physics and animations are part of the “bethesda charm” but it stopped being charming after skyrim :P
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UE5 doesn’t still have UE2 limitations. Gamebryo still won’t let me climb ladders. It’s clear that UE has been upgraded extensively, while Gamebryo has not.
The one thing Unreal still has bug wise is the fact I can’t place hundreds of actors in a blueprints viewport because it lags like Satan but if I run code that spawns the same amount attached to said actor or drag the same quantity into the level itself it works without issue.
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One thing I did want in Fallout 4 that I don’t believe it presently does is dynamic generation of polygons in curves.
The game has environments with kinda curvy surfaces, but aside from the dynamic level of detail models, the engine can’t go throw spare horsepower at generating more polygons to make smoother curves. I think that that’s a good match with long-lived PC games, because people playing it years later on more-powerful hardware can burn their extra cycles on making things pretty.
It’s not vital or anything, just think that if there’s one game where it’d be neat, it’d be Bethesda-type games.
I respect the sentiment, so no disrespect to it; but in software, there’s often a lot of caution against throwing out too much code.
You often find certain modules and sections of code that really should be thrown out or overhauled. If you can convince the corporation to dedicate time to doing that, it can often, but not always, show its benefits.
Probably a lot of the popular games we still play use some old bases, but replace parts that don’t work well. I think Apex Legends is still technically using Source (HL2), they’ve just done a lot to it so it no longer looks anything like Half Life 2.
Okay but Bethesdas engine kinda sucks and source engine is still pretty good… Why keep something if it’s not very good, other than to save money of course.
I’m done paying anything above half off a Bethesda games since fallout 4/76 anyway, they were bad and awful.
we’ve never seen a source game at the scale of oblivion and have object permanence so you can’t really compare the two.
Modern game engines are extremely complex machines, starting from scratch would take decades because it’s fundermental things like drawing geometry in a 3D space, getting input, memory handling, garbage collection and all that low level stuff that needs to be re-done. Physics requires lots of work, so much infact for a time HAVOK was the go to plugin for most engines (still kinda is) just because of how God damn hard it is to have nice physics and high frame rates (tried to build a physics engine from scratch in C++ and I couldn’t get past the floating point position problem so anything too far away from 0,0,0 would spaz and handling multiple collisions on an object simultaneously caused all sorts of freaky things to happen).
Then when that’s done you still need to write additional tools and plugins so developers can import assets and scripts into the engine plus a level editor for designers to place objects, triggers and all that fun stuff.
After that you can now start making the game.
Bethesda probably rewrote huge chunks of their engine to support larger texture sizes and improve performance across the board for Starfield.
If they do decide to dump it then they’re most likely to use an existing engine like Unreal or Cry rather than build one from scratch.
Personally I believe the reason why they didn’t re-write the character movement is because it would also mean altering way to much stuff on the front end.
A good example would be if I use FunctionGetVelocity in my script to determine if a player is moving and it use to return an int but now it returns a float because of the rewrite, without conversion would mean you’d probably get a crash.
Another example would be AI related. If I use a variable to get a rot data type but now that’s been replaced with a struct that needs to be split to get rot now suddenly you have to touch the code to make it compliant.
Which is why I’m sad that cdpr decided to ditch their red engine. So much work turning a buggy mess engine from Witcher 2 into a beautiful (still buggy) engine in cyberpunk. If only they would at least open source it, or sell it to another studio.
I agree. I really admired their persistence with it and it would be nice to have some actual competition to Unreal.
With nanite, live coding and lumen Unreal is unbeatable at the moment and lots of studios are hiring like crazy for Unreal Engine specialists to try and beat the competition.
If CDPR wants to compete they’ll have to do a ton of work making those tools for designers and artists easy to use (alot more in-house engines still have source 2 hammer editor style toolkits and command line conversion tools which are shit compared to Unreals drag and drop advantage).
Plus Unreal 4/5 was built to be as modular as possible so you can build whatever you want while CDPR engine was built specifically for this genre of games Cyberpunk is in. They definitely could and I see the engine having potential but afraid that’s it’s not flexible enough without serious work.
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They’ve been saying a new engine for a long time. It’s just not. they change subsystems, but people are saying they can feel the morrowind in their latest titles.
I can’t feel the unreal 1 in UE5 games.
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Yeah it’s really weird to feel it again in a game. Especially coming from baldurs gate 3 where the npc interactions and realness of characters is so good
To be thrown into npc dialogue straight at you with no natural movement.
Otherwise the game is really cool so far. Flight is a little complex but I guess I’ll get used to it. The robot even says it’ll be like second nature soon. Assume he was talking directly to the player
scrapping their engine is a terrible idea, and folks need to stop repeating it
just shows that you dont know what engines are, do or how they evolve
Coming fresh off BG3, the quality of the writing and the amount of character expression in dialog is like night and day. Honestly there was even one moment fairly early on when I said to myself “Fallout 4 would have let me extort this guy” and then I realized how egregious it was that I felt I had less agency in this quest than in FO4.
One thing I can say so far after a few hours is that their advertising department and Inon Zur did a masterful job capturing a whimsical aesthetic that nostalgically reminds me of some educational TV space shows like Cosmos.
Now that I’m playing the game, it feels significantly more clunky than that, and I haven’t gotten as immersed into that aesthetic as I had hoped. Really just FEELS like Fallout in space so far, which is a bit disappointing.
There’s also significantly more load screens than I had hoped. I’ve been spoiled by No Man’s Sky, thought we’d be getting some seamless transitions to planets and cities. Seems bizarre that we just fast travel through the starmap.
I think the load screens is what will kill it for me. I’d like to be immersed in a new universe. Not just select places from a menu and then load that place in.
What a time to be alive when NMS is the standard that a Bethesda game is being held up to. Hello Games have made the comeback of the century I guess.
I mean I thought fallout 4 was kinda mediocre to bad, and fallout 76 was awful, so I don’t really expect much from Bethesda any more. TES 6 is gonna come out and feel like a 20 year old game, not in a good way.
Unfortunately it isn’t what I wanted out of this game.
Loading screen to land on a planet, loading screen to leave my spaceship, no seamless entry into caves or buildings. Planets and space having boundaries. Can’t use my spaceship to traverse.
Glad people enjoy it, but I was looking for something more akin to NMS or Star Citizen.
This is exactly why I didn’t pre order or buy this game, I knew it was going to fall severely short of the expectation.
A bunch of non connected areas and gameplay loops.
They specifically said there were going to be loading screens and no user driven landings. I agree with not preordering games, but I also think you need to actually look at what the dev is saying before you set your expectations.
My expectations are set by the gaming landscape as a whole. For example, virtually all games releasing nowadays have a manual save feature. I expect that. A dev coming out during development to say their game doesn’t have manual saving doesn’t suddenly make that okay.
It’s an extreme example, but my point is that a dev disclosing something before release shouldn’t magically negate all criticism of it. People are allowed to be frustrated by things this game does poorly that other games excel at, even if the devs were transparent about those shortcomings.
It’s not even that, I never talked about the space to planet transition because I expected that to be a loading screen.
I’m talking about how the game itself is structured, I thought the space travel and jumping from system to system was going to be more like elite, but it’s just small instances with loading screens. Was that my fault for assuming that? I mean, they focused so hard on ship customization I assumed space travel was a big part of the game. At least the space gameplay, if not the planetary gameplay.
Bethesda was super closed off about how exactly the gameplay loop was structured because they knew the truth was going to reduce sales. So they let the reality of it just go unsaid while they kept you focused on the pretty screenshots.
Good strawman, notice how I never specified planetary landings? Cause I already knew that it was going to be a loading screen.
I’m talking about the fractured nature of the surface and the inability to fly from place to place in space. Or transition from locations in atmosphere. Everything is its own tiny location and fast traveling the rule of thumb. It seems like they kept as little information on this specific aspect as possible until the preorders were in. Probably so that the nature of the game wouldn’t drive away people looking for something with more of an interconnected holistic model of travel. They knew the truth would severely reduce their consumer base so they pretended it was “Star Citizen (with severe limitations)” instead of “Mass Effect: Andromeda (but you can customize and fly the tempest yourself)”
Someone in here said it best, “I have no idea what the purpose of including space ships and space travel even was.” If that’s a legitimate question in your space game, you failed.
At this point, what is functionally the difference between this and The Outer Worlds?
Oh no I was afraid of reading something like this. I love the concept of Star Citizen and got used to never seeing a loading screen and love the flight mechanics and ships (when it’s stable). I was hoping that Star Field could give me a similar experience. Didn’t have to be exactly like SC. I just wanted a stable, beautiful space game with game loops lol.
Guess I’ll wait on this one till there are more mods.
Could give space engineers a go
So called seamless experiences just add time and tedium, because they’re hidden loading screens. Take me to the content please.
loading-screen-lover gamer, this is definitely a first.
Give me RDR2 seamless experience every day of the week
Sorry, if you want to get to Valentine, you have to get on your horse and fast travel.
I did not bite and will avoid it until 75% off GOTY edition all DLC in etc. Patient gamer through and through, burnt way too many times. So far what I read about it, it not optimized, it’s shallow, lacks polish, etc etc. Basically, a standard AAA fare, something we sadly grew to expect from major studios. Will be watching it for a while to see what I’m missing.
There’s no reason for studios to behave better when they get a bazillion pre-orders and games make a profit before they’re even released. When that dynamic is in play there will always be an army of MBAs who point out that the purpose of the company is hyped releases and everything else is strictly secondary.
So to sum up, I agree. I won’t be touching this until it’s mature, stable, and on sale.
I’ve got Game Pass and it comes with it. So no waiting for me!
I have no arguments against it. Do your part and let us know if we’re missing out on anything. How does it stack against No man’s sky?
I hated NMS so I think starfield is kind of better but not at all in any sense of a space sim / 4x aspect. Space is mostly just a minigame with arcadey feel in a not great way imo.
It’s a bethesda RPG first and foremost and honestly it plays mostly like a fallout 4 total conversion mod. Instead of a map (there are none) you just get a bunch of fast travel points. Planets have 1-3ish “biomes” which are individual rng maps with POIs which are very far apart and often meaningless.
I really loathe the equipment system in Starfield. Attachments require very specific resources and if you have two identical guns side by side, one with an extended magazine and one with a reflex scope there is absolutely NO way to combine those attachments or weapons in any way. They are always unique. Plus as you level up the same weapons get new prefixes that are simply higher damage versions of the same thing, same ammo and everything.
Oh and for fun when you mod a weapon to be full auto it loses ~60% of it’s per hit damage because DPS is the only stat they balanced on. Semi-automatic weapons and weapon mods are the only way to reasonably play. There isn’t much in the way of fully automatic skill tree items that make up for the huge ammo costs of fully automatic weapons and frequent reload times either- after all that 80 round mag simply does 3 times the damage when your weapon is semi auto instead of fully auto.
Just too much carbon copy crap for me. I wanted innovation and I got a fallout mod.
I’m even planning to wait until the game is out on GOG, which could be several years from now.
This is how I roll.
I’ve never been unhappy either.
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.
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 only played a few hours on my Steam Deck (because it would freeze on my PC), but what I saw was slightly disappointing. The game looks great, even on the Steam Deck with FSR blurring everything, the gun mechanics are fun, the character animations are the best I’ve ever seen from this studio. The performance is also very good on the Deck, with stable
60FPS30FPS (edit: when I wrote this initially I was just eyeballing it, but didn’t bother to check that Steam capped the frame rate to 30 by default lol, so it was actually 30 and not 60…my bad) in indoor scenes and playable sub-30 in large outdoor areas.…but the exploration. Man, Bethesda is known for their exploration, yet the spaceship is a gimmick at best. To be fair, I haven’t played enough to get familiar with everything yet, but I don’t expect that part to get much better. The game feels like Fallout, except instead of having a giant seamless open world to explore, you have a giant open world with tedious transitions between different areas. Maybe it’ll grow on me, but it’s not at all what I was expecting.
EDIT: update after playing some more.
The game definitely grew on me! The exploration is still shitty, but everything else makes up for it. I’m at ~9 hours on my Steam Deck, and even with all the FSR blurring I’m enjoying it a lot. I started doing a side quest collecting on bad debts for a bank, and during one of them I found a mission terminal on Mars offering a reward to anyone who surveys a distant planet, and on my way to the planet I picked up a distress call from a settler asking for help to fight off a bunch of pirates, and stumbled upon a drama between 3 settler families, then hijacked a pirate ship and found some “sentient AI” contraband inside and then… I went to sleep because it was late.
So in short, it definitely feels like a typical Bethesda game, but in a good way. Just side quests on top of side quests, but with less bugs.
The ship combat is still bland. I found it very easy. Idk if it’s because it’s early in the game, but no enemy has even gotten close to killing me, even when it’s 3 on 1 and we’re using the exact same unmodified ship. On the one hand, that’s boring, but on the other hand I appreciate not having to spend a lot of time in ship combat. However, now that I discovered how to board and hijack a ship, the combat is slightly more interesting.
And again, I did all of this on Steam Deck, with the only performance issue being on Mars and New Atlantis, which are both big cities/hub areas. It was still playable, but a blurry FSR mess. I disabled FSR because I hate the blurring, and it dropped the FPS pretty hard. Luckily, I didn’t have to spend a lot of time in those locations.
I think people were expecting fallout no man’s sky…and I don’t know why.
I’d rather play nms for exploration/sandbox
And then a Bethesda space game for goofyish gunplay with a decent story.
Bethesda’s not exactly known for decent stories though. I mean yeah maybe back in the day, but nothing they’ve released in the past 10-15 years or so.
I liked Fallout 4. I mean, the dialog was annoying compared to New Vegas, but the story was fine. That was 2016 for the initial game, and the DLC later.
EDIT: 2015. 2016 for the DLC.
I liked the DLC with the creepy island and the robot man detective, that one was good! The main story was poppycock though. Like, a partner I didn’t care for died within the first few minutes, then a baby I didn’t care for got kidnapped and that was supposed to be my main motivator to get through the game?
Bethesda also kind of flops in the roleplaying department. Looking at BGIII, there’s plenty of moments where you can make decisions and not know what impact it might have, there’s lots of little interwoven story threads, and that’s what I’d expect from an RPG. Bethesda doesn’t really let you make choices.
Even No Man’s Sky has deeper thoughts hidden in that sparkly, colourful, arcade sandbox. The game touches on ideas of existence, life, and self. What themes did Skyrim touch on? Racism I guess? It feels to me like they wanted to do more with Skyrim, but blew all their budget on making a big world and didn’t have enough to put in it. The civil war storyline could in theory be a fantastic exploration on morals, but in reality it was just a slog.
Oblivion had some good quests. The expansion was really nice, but the quest that stands out most in my mind is the one where you set out to help a woman find her husband, and sleuth out that he actually managed to get trapped in the painting he was working on, after being attacked by a burglar.
Skyrim doesn’t really have anything remotely like it. Just endless copy-pasted dungeons with the same condescending puzzles and boring enemies. Sure they included Sheogorath, but somehow they managed to make even him drab and grey.
I was kind of hoping for fallout and elite; real space flight and exploration, but with an actual story and story line to follow. I’m mostly over real-life gaming that looks like a cartoon, so I’m glad it’s not nms.
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Well, Outer Worlds is already almost literally “Fallout 3, in space”.
Outer Worlds really did not scratch my Fallout itch.
Yeah, superficially it’s similar in a number of ways, but:
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For all practical purposes, the game is fairly linear. The world is open, but you have little reason to go back.
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The Fallout perk system introduces a lot of interesting mechanics, is an important part of the game. The Outer Worlds perk system was almost entirely flat bonuses to one thing or another. Didn’t change much how one would play the game.
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I rarely found myself stumbling into new and interesting situations just walking around the world.
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The weapons weren’t all that interesting or customizable. That includes the uniques, other than the science weapons.
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Skyrim and Oblivion definitely hooked me with exploration. It was a significant reason for playing and completing those games for me. If I want story there are a thousand better games out there. One without the other feels like a loss for me.
The performance is also very good on the Deck, with stable 60FPS in indoor scenes and playable sub-60 in large outdoor areas.
Wow, really? The game has a 1070 Ti minimum requirement, I barely expected this to work on Deck
Minimum requirements are always useless.
The Steam Deck is an extremely low resolution which is why anything works.
I played a few more hours today in handheld (yesterday was on power and connected to an HDMI display).
I did notice worse performance, but that could also be because the content was different. The game is still fully playable, and I had fun murdering a bunch of pirates in an abandoned fracking station. New Atlantis (the first big hub city) ran like dogshit though. It struggled to maintain 30 and was blurry as hell, but yesterday it ran better. Idk, this isn’t scientific at all.
Just adding this extra info in case someone sees my first comment and thinks the game will run perfectly. Playable? Very much so. Recommended? Only if you can’t play on something more powerful.
Some people in this thread are apparently streaming it to their Deck from their PC. If you’re set on playing it on a Deck, that might be an option.
I wouldn’t take their word. Everything I’ve seen about Deck performance is it runs at a fluctuating 30fps in basic scenes but drops massively in cities etc, on lowest settings with FSR on.
That’s amazing. I hope I have the same luck on the deck. Got a long weekend away from home and I’m itching to playing more.
How did you get it working on the Deck? I can load into the menus, but when I try to start a game it crashes.
I was having the same problem until I switched to the preview branch and installed the latest system update, and I also switched it proton experimental. My current Steam OS version is 3.4.9, although I see there’s another update available.
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!
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