Starfield

Anyone started yet? I'm about an hour in, so very early days, but so far so Bethesda. Not a negative necessarily, but it feels exactly like Fallout 4 in space. Same buttons, same shortcuts, same talking heads, same feel to the character movement etc.

Lordy the 30fps is rough, though. Especially in the firefights - we haven't really seen a AAA shooter (I know, RPG) run this badly for three years or so, and it's taking a long time to adjust. I would have taken any graphical sacrifice over this, there must be some way to get it running at 60.

I'm maybe a dozen hours in, and have been enjoying it enough once it starts to broaden out a bit. I'm somewhat relived at how little combat I've had to do so far, though one ludicrous firefight against what felt like a hundred space bandits at an abandoned mining facility I found while wandering around the mountains on Jemison.

Currently involved in some corporate espionage-type subquests in a legalized-narcotic cyberpunk city called Neon, which I feel highlights the general level of creative writing in the worldbuilding.

a hundred space bandits at an abandoned mining facility

That's stretching the definition of "abandoned", surely?

I think I'm getting into the rhythm of it now.

Spent a few hours this evening mopping up side quests in Neon, then explored some mountains and scanned some plants, stole a space suit from my friends' basement, and flew a couple of passengers to another planet. (I think? Never actually saw them.)

And I finally figured out the crafting and research stuff.

The game design is showing its age (the structure of the core loop fundamentally hasn't changed in at least 15 years) and there are way too many loading screens for it to really sell the sense of scale and exploration promised by the pre-release marketing, but with my expectations adjusted I'm finding it a quite pleasant experience.

I'm only an hour in, I've done the initial mining intro, the space combat tutorial and the first pirate base. It's still leading me by the nose teaching me stuff so I don't feel I have a handle on the game at all yet really. I'm having to stop myself hoovering up a million pointless plates, cups and styrofoam boxes everywhere I go though.

The 30fps thing is weird, I've just played through TLOU2 on the PS4 where I barely noticed it at all but I agree it is a bit jarring here. Maybe the motion blur isn't as good, or (more likely) your movement and turning speed is so much greater here that the lower frame rate is more apparent. I'm sure I'll adjust though - I made the effort for Jedi Survivor and it was totally worth the effort.

First or third person, people? First-person is traditional Bethesda but third-person gives the whole thing a Mass Effect vibe and I swear it makes the game look smoother too.

Third person definitely makes it feel smoother, but I think it's quite poorly thought out. Especially indoors, the camera just doesn't know what to do.

I've accepted the main quest and got into the game proper now. Weirdly, despite there being over a thousand planets, the very first building on the very first planet I decided to explore was the location of a key item further down the main quest chain. So I've skipped over a chunk of content completely by accident and insane chance. The game didn't seem to know how to handle this - it just pretended I had the context for whatever doohickie I picked up. I'll watch a YouTube playthrough to catch up on the story.

Despite this clearly being the same engine as Oblivion (new look and feel for Elder Scrolls 6, pretty please..?), I appreciate the new facial expressions, and all of the tiny details in the ships. Every button seems to have a purpose, and can be read if you get close enough. And the wrinkle lines when people talk, or expressively scrunch up their forehead, adds to the immersion no end.

The atmosphere is brilliant too. A storm kicked off after I'd landed in the UC capital, and it just felt right. I've been in the middle of surprisingly few storms at spaceports, but that's exactly what I think one would feel like.

Anyone managed to get the game calling you by name? There’s a list of names it recognises and will use. Unsurprisingly it doesn’t recognise “Garwoofoo”, but apparently if you call yourself “Fuckface” it is happy to oblige.

I tried out Starfield this morning, and it crashed after about ten minutes. Bethesda gonna Bethesda.

Anyone managed to get the game calling you by name?

I suspect that if I'd used my own name it would have, but forgot that was even a thing when building my character.

I think so far someone's description of it on rllmuk as "the best game released in 2013" is pretty close to the nose.

I'd say it has to be patched for performance pretty quickly. I can just about get 60fps on my main PC and that'll run anything. My 3070 equipped laptop struggles to get above 50fps reliably, which is crazy considering how it looks. It utilises no CPU at all and absolutely hammers the GPU for some reason - I'd say it needs an optimisation pass pretty quickly. And surely once that's done it'll hit 60fps on 1X.

There's a lot to like about it, but the quality of nearly everything is so wayward and variable it's often hard to get truly swept up in it. We have all praised Last of Us 2 on the Soc. That game just hangs together perfectly. It knows what it's doing. From the look, to the story, to the gameplay, it's finely tuned. Starfield is a bit more of a pot pourri of ideas thrown in an Elder Scrolls shaped bag, shook for 30 seconds then poured out on a table. It feels like all the bits were developed by different teams who didn't really talk to one another much. Interestingly, I wonder if Microsoft's focus on QA and reducing the torrent of bugs in Bethesda products actually stripped away some of the free form jazz element of their games. It feels like all the bits of this were ruthlessly quality controlled in silo'ed lanes, which bled into the product.

I'm not sure it also has as much room to wiggle and grow like No Man's Sky did. Modders will no doubt turn it into a vastly superior product on PC and we'll get GOTY editions for the next 15 years that'll slowly sand the edges off, but it's hard to see a big reinvention like NMS. But I do like it, it's fine. I think it has little flickers of magic to it, like a lot of Bethesda stuff. My issue is that there were a lot more flickers of brilliance and a lot more bugs in Morrowind, Oblivion and Fallout, I'm not sure if the cost of reducing the bugs is this, if it's the right choice. Bit like the manic barking dog finally catching the bus and not knowing what to do with it.

I've put a few more hours into it now so I feel a bit more qualified to give an opinion.

It feels like a relic. It's kind of hilarious that Xbox's big hope, the enormous first-party game that will justify the company's strategy and turn the tables on Sony, is… this. The last Bethesda game I played was Skyrim in 2011 and this is functionally identical, if not a step back in some areas. Instead of a huge world map, you now get a disjointed series of small areas separated by loading screens. You spend a lot of time in menus. When you are not in menus, you are generally talking to weirdly intense potato people. Jank is everywhere. And while it mostly looks good, I'm not seeing anything at all that justifies its exceptionally poor performance on console.

And yet… it's pretty compulsive despite all that. I spent ages playing it today, following some random quest chain on Mars that mostly involved running up and down the same flight of stairs over and over, but it was weirdly entertaining all the same. I have a log that is rapidly filling up with interesting diversions. I almost understand the star map. I've had a couple of instances where it felt like I had genuine choices to make, which mattered. This is all good stuff.

So I'm definitely sticking with it. My fear is that at some point the interesting character-based stuff will get sidelined for endless crafting menus and resource gathering, which it keeps hinting at but which I could not have less interest in. And my guess is that 950 out of those 1000 planets are going to be uninteresting, procedurally-generated rocks, and it's front-loading the good stuff. But, for now, I'm in.

Played a bit this morning, had to attack a base that was overrun with pirates. My companion immediately ran to the corner of the room and wedged herself behind a barrel. She spent the rest of the firefight screaming "I am going to end you!" at the wall.

Genuine whinge though:

Spoiler - click to showTutorialising is poor in this game. The amount of times I've had to look up basic controls and concepts is getting kind of silly. Even for things like "how do I put my weapon away" so I wasn't wandering through New Atlantis waving a fire axe around like some kind of psychopath. Had a really irritating mission thing today too where I had to attack a ship but the game made it very clear I needed to disable the engines rather than destroying it - I didn't have the perk that allowed you to target individual ship parts so I did a whole load of menial running around in order to level up and get that perk, came back to the firefight and it turns out that for that battle only, because it's a main mission and the script demands it, that knocking the ship health down to zero disables the engines rather than destroying it anyway. Bullshit.

A few spoiler-free tips I've found to make this stupid, archaic, brilliant game more user friendly:

• On the mission list, press Select (or whatever it's called now) to have every mission show up on your in-game HUD. They'll display as blank blue icons, but if you tap LB to go into scanner and hover over one, it'll tell you the name of the mission. A much easier way to see if you have any missions nearby. (But still stupid.)
• There's an unlimited storage box in the Lodge basement, behind the research station. You'll also find every other crafting station down here. Select transfer, go to your inventory, go to Resources and dump your resources in here (RB button). Then when you need to craft anything, go back to the storage box, take out every resource, craft, and re-store when you're done. Stupid, but more convenient than the default.
• When you're browsing your mission list, press X to set a course directly to the objective. I still have no idea how this is different to pressing A, and sometimes you end up floating in space, other times you end up on the planet. But it's always faster than pressing A.

I'd forgotten how daft Bethesda games are before the modders get access.

I have only played about 6 hours but I utterly love it. It's easily my favourite new game of recent years as I am annoyed when not playing it and wished it had come out during the summer Hols.

I did play and love Fallout 76 though.

I've played another couple of hours, and it's all getting a bit 'follow the marker'. The best bits of Skyrim, Fallout etc are going off on your own, discovering a cave and finding a gem of a self-contained story. Does Starfield have none of that, or have I not found it yet?

The planets all seem to be empty maps with procedurally generated buildings.

I've found a couple of interesting things on planets, but they do feel a bit scattershot. Wandering around scanning stuff is, for me, when the game is at its best, but I'm not expecting to stumble into any sidequests in a cave or anything.

I still haven't encountered anything to do with ship building or outposts, I'm assuming they "unlock" at some point or at least I get reasons why I need to engage with them because so far I haven't really even seen any indication they are in the game.

Same goes with all the various types of crafting really, I haven't needed to even think about that stuff at all. I'm picking up enough new weapons and spacesuits just from completing various missions.

It's such a weird game. Every part of it is aggressively mediocre or actively fighting against itself but the overall experience is weirdly captivating. Despite myself, I am really have a good time.

The ship building is available at space ports, you have to talk to a guy at the landing platform. Dunno if there's a quest that leads you here, I just found it accidentally. It's a bit overwhelming though so I just ignored it.

It's such a weird game. Every part of it is aggressively mediocre or actively fighting against itself but the overall experience is weirdly captivating. Despite myself, I am really have a good time.

Same, and I think what's happening is, no-one else makes RPGs like Bethesda. This is objectively worse than Skyrim and Fallout 4. They've somehow made space feel narrow; the joy of exploration has been replaced with self contained boxes of content that you fast travel between. It's more Outer Worlds than Skyrim.

But because no-one else makes RPGs like Bethesda - and it clearly does take an incredible amount of skill, otherwise others would - it's still nice to play something like this after all these years.

Isn't Outer Worlds something of the elephant in the room though. I've played quite a lot of that and I'd be hard pushed to say one is significantly better than the other and they're both very similar.

People do make RPGs like Bethesda now, that being a prime example.

I haven’t played a Bethesda game since Skyrim (passed on Fallout 4, as well as Fallout 76 and Outer Worlds if they count, and never even played New Vegas) so it does at least have some novelty value.

I’m currently enjoying the notion that, given the opportunity to expand into the unknown reaches of space, at least a third of the human race would opt to spend their whole time engaging in elaborate cowboy cosplay.

You should give Fallout 4 a look. It's 4K60 on Series X, has mod support, and is a better game than Starfield.

By the time you're finished with Fallout they might even have patched Starfield.

I have found an abandoned floating Casino, a ghost ship where the crew had turned on itself, and then this evening a random planet based processing plant full of pirates. All just random things I discovered spacing about.

Genuinely enjoying this now. The main story is starting to go to some unexpected places and the various sub-factions are fun too. I'm having fun just picking up side missions in general and seeing where they take me.

Is it me or does it feel like the crafting, outpost building and resource gathering belong to a different game entirely? They're eminently ignorable and in many ways it feels like they come from an earlier draft of the game that was intended to be more like No Man's Sky before they just went fuck it and did Oblivion again. There are weird little things like your grav drive just automatically refuelling itself that makes me think that originally just getting around was supposed to be harder. Also stuff like all the take-off and landing animations that 99% of the time you won't even see because you just fast travel absolutely everywhere, and all the different status afflictions that you can either just ignore or cure with one item from your inventory.

I still don't get why this runs at 30fps. It's got the smalliest, boxiest environments I've seen in any game since Deus Ex.

Off with covid today and played this from like 9am till 4pm. Very entranced. The outpost building and crafting is completely out of fallout 76. Its literally just a reskin with some tweaks.

Finally got my head around some of the ship building. The control interface for that isnt great, but i had previously liberated some pirates of a much bigger ship -(a stiletto)- but now rigged massive amounts of extra storage onto it. Its effectively just a space barge now.

I tried playing Outer Worlds for a bit to remind myself how they compared. I'm fairly sure Starfield is objectively worse than it by any metric.

I'm in the same mindset. It's been a while since I played Outer Worlds, but I recommend Outer Worlds over starfield any day. I'll get into my massively disappointment of Starfield soon but if anyone feels the same about starfield, the Outer Worlds is what I would call the "Bethesda like RPG in space" the way to go. Also, you don't have to put 100s of hours to get the most out of it.

You clearly didn't read the forum rules section where it said never to agree with me about anything.

I had a chance to finally give this a go. The opening is really unimpressive by Bethesda's standards. Think of the openings to Fallout 3, Oblivion, and Skyrim. This is a cave and a predictable weirding out. It's a bit weak. I could actually do without the amazing graphics. I'd rather have something that doesn't make me worry that it's going to cause my PC to burst into flames.

I picked the most generically sci-fi hero character model and named him Dan Yolo.

The best bit of the game so far has been Neon. It’s even got me wondering if it’s finally time for me to play Cyberpunk. It’ll probably look like a model of stability and innovative game design compared to Starfield.

Cyberpunk is properly brilliant, to be fair. If it had released in its current state it would have been considered an all-time classic alongside Witcher 3.

Very excited to play the expansion, and today's (free) patch 2.0 is supposed to transform the game even further.

I've been playing it a bit, the 2.0 patch is excellent (I've had a performance increase, not decrease and it looks lovely). The QOL enhancements are all well thought out and vastly (ironically) reduce menu clutter and busywork. It does embarrass Starfield somewhat, technically.