Starfield Pre-Release Thread [GAME RELEASED, GO TO NEW THREAD]

[EvilWolf]

They won't proc-gen terrain, see my earlier post.

So you want to say they hand crafted heightmaps for the hundreds of celestial bodies instead of using a noise function? I seriously doubt that (although it is 25 years in the making so who knows, maybe that's what they were doing all the time ), unless each planet has a total surface of 1 square kilometer or something before it starts wrapping around. Furthermore at "kind of" planetary scale that's a fucking lot of data even if you store just the vertex coordinates plus the usual UV, normals and whatever else they need to render the terrain (but still the installation size is fucking huge). Finally, do you truly believe bethesda would pick the hard route requiring a lot of effort rather than take shortcuts?

If the game truly lets you land anywhere and keeps reasonable (but not necessarily 100% realistic) scale for the surface then there is no other option than to use a noise function at least as a basis, with some "manual" modification layer for unique planetary features like say "cool crater visible from space so that we can put it in a trailer" (this is what both Kerbal Space Program games do for example, and those have just 16 celestial bodies at the moment). This is what everyone does with planetary scale terrain because it's borderline impossible to create handcrafted terrain at planetary scale that wouldn't on average look worse than a half-decent perlin or simplex noise-based output.

My wild guesses on the planetary "see that moon, you can land there" exploration based on Toddster's obvious lies are:

If you could drive around the fucking planet or fly around it then the Toddster would hype it, so obviously their implementation can't do that.

So I guess if you pick to land at a set of coordinate on a given celestial body the game runs the noise function for something for a preset size of a square chunk of the surface and generates the terrain. Then it rolls some points of interest from prefabs, places them "randomly" using another noise function. You get a visible or invisible barrier if you try to walk outside of the generated chunk of the planet, because of course Bethesda wouldn't be able to do a proper chunking system that would allow for driving a rover around a whole moon or flying above the planet No Man's Sky style without crashing your PC due to bad optimization or at least enormous stutter. Also this hides the monotony/repetitiveness of the terrain generation algorithm and any other flaws (such as seams) that larger maps might have shown easily.

During an interview after the direct Todd relayed a story about an encounter where an enemy ship landed in front of him, he got into a firefight with them, boarded the ship, and mid fight they took off with him in the ship. Therefore, one would assume, if there are loading screens when entering space that they're relatively seamless. In the direct they also showed manual selection of a landing spot on a planet with multiple points of interest that seemed a great distance apart, so I would imagine there is some form of overland travel.

 

[soulburner]

Consoles are fixed hardware. The Xbox Series X is a downclocked Ryzen 3700 paired with a GPU roughly the performance of an RX 6600, maybe RX 6600XT. The only advantage it has is its unified memory architecture, so there's no moving data back and forth between system RAM and video RAM, but I haven't seen any data which would show actual numbers comparing memory performance to the PC.

Anyway, think about this for a second.

Ryzen 3700.
RX 6600(XT).

As PC players, what do we know about this kind of configuration? 1080p gaming at 60 fps is likely in many games with slightly reduced detail settings, most new ones will drop to something like 50-ish, with some AAA titles nearing 30. 1440p gaming makes 60 fps much harder to achieve in recent games and can often result in ~40 and less, often requiring the usage of DLSS/FSR2 if available. The Zen 2 CPUs are known to be bottlenecks in many games even when paired with a middle-end GPU like the 6600 or RTX 3060 - and the Xbox uses a downclocked version of Ryzen 3xxx, which never clocked high on PC. A Ryzen 5600 on the Zen 3 architecture murders the 3700X in most tasks - even though it contains 2 cores less it often wins even in properly multithreaded programs.

Starfield is a "modern" game, meaning it has graphical features expected in 2023 - high resolution textures, high amount of clutter (draw calls!), high draw distance, real time global illumination, possibly some advanced form of ambient occlusion (something better than SSAO at least) and other crap we are not aware of but was unheard of in games like Skyrim or Fallout 4.

As a PC gamer I'd never expect Starfield to run well on a Zen 2 CPU paired with an RX 6600/RTX 3600 GPU. And yet, console players are outraged the game doesn't run at 60 fps on their seriously obsolete hardware.

So, there. That's my take on the "30 fps, lololol" debate.

 

[Van-d-all]

While this might be the most intriguing title from Bethesda, I'm pretty sure it's going to fall short on the very same issues that made NMS, Outer Worlds and Mass Effect Andromeda (yeah, yeah) suck so hard.

Firstly given the scale and scope of open world exploration, it's just bound to (over)rely on procedurally generated content, that with expected modern graphical fidelity will result in lots of sameish, barren landscapes plastered with repetitive, rescaled assets (flora, fauna, architecture) lacking any meaningful differences to actually make exploration worthwhile and fun.

Secondly with current creative bankruptcy, the plausibility of anything otherworldly (ie. not currently known to man) will fall well below any acceptable sci-fi standard (which I consider to be somewhat higher than for most fantasy). Sapient aliens non-existent, anthropomorphic or hivemind. Non-sapient aliens just a rehash of generic monsters you'd whip in Spore creator.

Thirdly, with current "fuck logic" attitude any semblance of reasonably functional societies, world order or even character motivations is going to be rare, which of course will take a heavy toll on dialogues, let alone quests and worldbuilding. Not to even mention the abyssal "radiant" fetch quests they'll most likely supplement it with.

Lastly, technical issues. Seeing in what state the games are released nowadays, Bethesda game premieres and the pitifully arcade combat they've shown in videos, Starfall will most likely release with plethora of weird animations, glitches and bugs, and that's on top of performance limitations like invisible walls, non enterable buildings and what not.

 

[Yosharian]

You're assuming that better hardware = better performance, we've seen how that went with Jedi Survivor

 

[Yosharian]

I'm pretty sure it's going to fall short on the very same issues that made NMS, Outer Worlds and Mass Effect Andromeda (yeah, yeah) suck so hard.

At the end of the day we know what Beth's weaknesses are, they have been shown clearly in their last few releases. They need to up their game significantly with respect to their storytelling and making deeper game mechanics.

If they can do that there's no reason Starfield can't be a good game, but it remains to be seen whether they actually have the talent to do it

 

[soulburner]

You're assuming that better hardware = better performance, we've seen how that went with Jedi Survivor

Of course, we have many examples of very well optimized games (like, I don't know, Doom Eternal, which runs on pretty much anything at 60 fps at least while looking exceptionally good) and complete fuck ups like Jedi Survivor and most of the other "AAA" releases this year. I do not believe Starfield's iteration of the Gamebryo Creation Engine is going to be an example of great optimization, but I do not believe it's an example of a fuckup, either (should be better than Elex 2 ). I guess we will have to find out within mere few months - expecting a performance analysis by Digital Foundry before deciding on whether to purchase or to pirate this thing

 

[Drakortha]

I'm pretty sure it's going to fall short on the very same issues that made NMS, Outer Worlds and Mass Effect Andromeda (yeah, yeah) suck so hard.

At the end of the day we know what Beth's weaknesses are, they have been shown clearly in their last few releases. They need to up their game significantly with respect to their storytelling and making deeper game mechanics.

If they can do that there's no reason Starfield can't be a good game, but it remains to be seen whether they actually have the talent to do it

From what little we've seen of the story it looks phenomenally bad. Like, Fallout 4 institute bad. I don't think they've upped their game at all.

The only thing they've upped is their marketing budget.

 

[Van-d-all]

I'm pretty sure it's going to fall short on the very same issues that made NMS, Outer Worlds and Mass Effect Andromeda (yeah, yeah) suck so hard.

At the end of the day we know what Beth's weaknesses are, they have been shown clearly in their last few releases. They need to up their game significantly with respect to their storytelling and making deeper game mechanics.

If they can do that there's no reason Starfield can't be a good game, but it remains to be seen whether they actually have the talent to do it

From what little we've seen of the story it looks phenomenally bad. Like, Fallout 4 institute bad. I don't think they've upped their game at all.

Thing is they did. While technical issues might stem from inabilities of their devs, storytelling and overall plot are high level elaborate decision, made exactly to be so, simply because this zany, clownish attitude attracts modern audiences. Take a look at Critical Role, F76 trailer and how PDX games became meme sandboxes with little history attached. It sells on a promise, because it looks like "funni tiem wit frens (tm)" and people conflate emergent social enjoyment with silly gameplay.

 

[Drakortha]

Thing is they did. While technical issues might stem from inabilities of their devs, storytelling and overall plot are high level elaborate decision, made exactly to be so, simply because this zany, clownish attitude attracts modern audiences. Take a look at Critical Role, F76 trailer and how PDX games became meme sandboxes with little history attached. It sells on a promise, because it looks like "funni tiem wit frens (tm)".

That is not a good thing. It just means they've doubled downed on making their games appeal to the lowest common denominator. I'm not sure why, but somehow I thought they could turn things around. But I think it's clear now they are consciously doing this, and it's not mere incompetence on their part (like I thought it was with F4/76 for example)

 

[Van-d-all]

making their games appeal to the lowest common denominator

I was always of firm belief, that's the major cause of decline. That's why Obsidian made Outer Worlds to be such a lukewarm enema to go down fairly easily with everyone, and it did. Bethesda upping their game, is pretty much wanting to achieve the same. Copies sold.

 

[Hag]

Since they introduced a nod to Oblivion, I hope they'll do the same for Morrowind and make a planet with giant mushrooms.
And netches.

 

[Yosharian]

You're assuming that better hardware = better performance, we've seen how that went with Jedi Survivor

Of course, we have many examples of very well optimized games (like, I don't know, Doom Eternal, which runs on pretty much anything at 60 fps at least while looking exceptionally good) and complete fuck ups like Jedi Survivor and most of the other "AAA" releases this year. I do not believe Starfield's iteration of the Gamebryo Creation Engine is going to be an example of great optimization, but I do not believe it's an example of a fuckup, either (should be better than Elex 2 ). I guess we will have to find out within mere few months - expecting a performance analysis by Digital Foundry before deciding on whether to purchase or to pirate this thing

Fair enough, for what it's worth I'm really hoping Beth pull it out of the bag too. I'm just very sceptical

 

[Mortmal]

While this might be the most intriguing title from Bethesda, I'm pretty sure it's going to fall short on the very same issues that made NMS, Outer Worlds and Mass Effect Andromeda (yeah, yeah) suck so hard.

Firstly given the scale and scope of open world exploration, it's just bound to (over)rely on procedurally generated content, that with expected modern graphical fidelity will result in lots of sameish, barren landscapes plastered with repetitive, rescaled assets (flora, fauna, architecture) lacking any meaningful differences to actually make exploration worthwhile and fun.

Secondly with current creative bankruptcy, the plausibility of anything otherworldly (ie. not currently known to man) will fall well below any acceptable sci-fi standard (which I consider to be somewhat higher than for most fantasy). Sapient aliens non-existent, anthropomorphic or hivemind. Non-sapient aliens just a rehash of generic monsters you'd whip in Spore creator.

Thirdly, with current "fuck logic" attitude any semblance of reasonably functional societies, world order or even character motivations is going to be rare, which of course will take a heavy toll on dialogues, let alone quests and worldbuilding. Not to even mention the abyssal "radiant" fetch quests they'll most likely supplement it with.

Lastly, technical issues. Seeing in what state the games are released nowadays, Bethesda game premieres and the pitifully arcade combat they've shown in videos, Starfall will most likely release with plethora of weird animations, glitches and bugs, and that's on top of performance limitations like invisible walls, non enterable buildings and what not.

Not so long ago i had to use the console to debug a faction quest in skyrim for my nephew , said nephew being younger than the game and not believing elderscrolls 6 still not out...So a plethora of bugs will be an understatment and they will be in for a long long time. Creatively bankrupt too for sure, everyone certainly remember fallout 4 great plot, any reasons to believe it will get any better?
They are showing us a nice firefly like town , but thats the good bit for gaming journos and youtubers, it's 100% guaranteed you will only get a few POI like that and barren landscapes elsewhere with generic space bandit camp and wrecks.There's no miracle, same in no man sky, or empyrion.
"There is no world where Starfield is an 11 out of 10 and people are selling their PS5. That’s just not going to happen." said some Microsoft exec, so with such enthusiasm and strong belief in this product, i would wait before getting that 4090 ti and show meb who's the peasant.

 

[random_name]

Should be really easy for modders to add sex planets of all kind without ruining the world too much. Solid torrent for me.

 

[Silverfish]

Fast travel is poison anyway unless its done in a controlled, restricted way which gives value to it.

Never understood the hate for fast travel, especially in Bethesda games. What's the appeal of taking an eventless 15 minute trek back to the Imperial City / Megaton after killing all of the trolls / super mutants in the cave / cave but radioactive?

 

[tritosine2k]

Consoles are fixed hardware. The Xbox Series X is a downclocked Ryzen 3700 paired with a GPU roughly the performance of an RX 6600, maybe RX 6600XT. The only advantage it has is its unified memory architecture, so there's no moving data back and forth between system RAM and video RAM, but I haven't seen any data which would show actual numbers comparing memory performance to the PC.

Anyway, think about this for a second.

Ryzen 3700.
RX 6600(XT).

As PC players, what do we know about this kind of configuration? 1080p gaming at 60 fps is likely in many games with slightly reduced detail settings, most new ones will drop to something like 50-ish, with some AAA titles nearing 30. 1440p gaming makes 60 fps much harder to achieve in recent games and can often result in ~40 and less, often requiring the usage of DLSS/FSR2 if available. The Zen 2 CPUs are known to be bottlenecks in many games even when paired with a middle-end GPU like the 6600 or RTX 3060 - and the Xbox uses a downclocked version of Ryzen 3xxx, which never clocked high on PC. A Ryzen 5600 on the Zen 3 architecture murders the 3700X in most tasks - even though it contains 2 cores less it often wins even in properly multithreaded programs.

Starfield is a "modern" game, meaning it has graphical features expected in 2023 - high resolution textures, high amount of clutter (draw calls!), high draw distance, real time global illumination, possibly some advanced form of ambient occlusion (something better than SSAO at least) and other crap we are not aware of but was unheard of in games like Skyrim or Fallout 4.

As a PC gamer I'd never expect Starfield to run well on a Zen 2 CPU paired with an RX 6600/RTX 3600 GPU. And yet, console players are outraged the game doesn't run at 60 fps on their seriously obsolete hardware.

So, there. That's my take on the "30 fps, lololol" debate.

This maybe made some sense before "gpu driven rendering" https://vkguide.dev/docs/gpudriven/gpu_driven_engines/
It's just you can't compare like this anymore cause it's a thing now and ue5 adopted it. That simply takes cpu out of the equation and there isn't any equation anyway but 33.3ms rendertime with async compute eating up leftover stuff so there isn't even variable refresh rate. So wearable displays can't come soon enough because they can't get away with 30 or even TAA there. And it doesn't need to be VR to support 90° head turns because even simple head-bob/ motion parallax is cool and adds a lot.

 

[Falksi]

Fast travel is poison anyway unless its done in a controlled, restricted way which gives value to it.

Never understood the hate for fast travel, especially in Bethesda games. What's the appeal of taking an eventless 15 minute trek back to the Imperial City / Megaton after killing all of the trolls / super mutants in the cave / cave but radioactive?

It just totally takes away the sense of realism. It's got a place, but that place is to cut back on previous journeys as the player discovers more places. However, like the Silt Strider, it's needs to be implemented in a way which feels realistic too. Hopping from one place to another at will isn't.

 

[Naraya]

Finished watching the deep dive video. My god, either I'm getting REALLY old or this looks generic af (whynotboth.gif). I think modern gayming is just not for me anymore.

Is it me or Todd looks younger with each Bethesda game?

 

[Silverfish]

My time isn't super valuable, but I'll still happily give up realism to avoid having it wasted. I just want to turn my current quest in and then go check out that abandoned skyscraper. I don't need to shoot three molerats before getting to that.

 

[Gargaune]

So you want to say they hand crafted heightmaps for the hundreds of celestial bodies instead of using a noise function? [...]

No, I'm saying that they won't do proc-gen terrain on the user's end, which was what Mebrilia was talking about, it was in the context of CPU load. On the development side, Bethesda's been procedurally generating terrain via heightmap since Oblivion and then having a designer refine it. I very much expect the same here, except with less hands-on designer time.

I'm also not sure about the "land anywhere", I seem to remember Todd suggesting that wouldn't be the case last year, but I might be wrong. I'd expect each planet to be a sort of Far Harbor-style landmass with a bunch of spawnpoints for random encounters and dynamic prefabs, and some of them with a smattering of handcrafted content.

 

[Falksi]

My time isn't super valuable, but I'll still happily give up realism to avoid having it wasted. I just want to turn my current quest in and then go check out that abandoned skyscraper. I don't need to shoot three molerats before getting to that.

But it's not wasted in well designed games. In well designed games backtracking usually yields a surprise or two, and doing so connects you more with that area too. It starts getting boring and old when it gets over-familiar, but before that point you've usually found a method of fast travelling in someway, like said silt striders.

The fact that fast travel is so common from the off now is just pure laziness from studios and devs.

 

[Yosharian]

My time isn't super valuable, but I'll still happily give up realism to avoid having it wasted. I just want to turn my current quest in and then go check out that abandoned skyscraper. I don't need to shoot three molerats before getting to that.

How is it unrealistic to turn in a quest remotely

 

[Mebrilia the Viera Queen]

I have a brand new top gaming rig.

You promised you wouldn't tell Codex that I built that for you!

Edit: lol I posted this before actually seeing your system's specs. Obv I'd never build a crappy PC like that even for a Codexer.

(No offense)

Pffffh.... Contrarian uh? My pc would eat you for breakfast! Also Lol at this console paesantry!

 

[Kiste]

Fast travel is poison anyway unless its done in a controlled, restricted way which gives value to it.

Never understood the hate for fast travel, especially in Bethesda games. What's the appeal of taking an eventless 15 minute trek back to the Imperial City / Megaton after killing all of the trolls / super mutants in the cave / cave but radioactive?

Because when you fast travel you miss out on all that glorious Bethesda enviromental story telling.

 

[v1c70r14]

Apparently when you land on a planet, you have a small map to explore (with invisible walls along the edges?). Can't fly your ship around the surface, can't climb a distant mountain, no speeder bikes or land vehicles to speak of. WTF is this? Land on a planet to kill some baddies in a compound or take some pictures of the plants. That's Todd Howard's big, open world space game (Now @ 20FPS and < 10 CTDs per hour!).

Fk this game.

So it's Precursors but worse?

Top notch Codex quickie mini-review of Starfield, Conjob. You have to wait until at least five shill reviews are published before it's allowed to hit the front page though.

While this might be the most intriguing title from Bethesda, I'm pretty sure it's going to fall short on the very same issues that made NMS, Outer Worlds and Mass Effect Andromeda (yeah, yeah) suck so hard.

If only there was a space game that did exploration right, featuring a small dynamic and totally handcrafted star system with the most satisfying science fiction writing and presentation in a video game since the 1990's. Would be a shame if it came out after being vaporware for several years after being expanded from a student project to a full game and almost everyone dismissed it since it didn't feature skinnerboxes and didn't send dopamine shots to their brain with Diablo styled loot, pointless Minecraft sandboxing and building as well as bandit lairs in space and didn't have hyper-realistic graphics. Haha, imagine if a space game featuring these big what ifs, a decently built setting and an even more impressive unplanned expansion pack that seamlessly integrated into the main game came out and nobody paid any attention to it, only to get hyped for Todd's lies again instead because what gamers really want from their games are these Ubisoft style content deliveries and they can't wait to raid another generated bandit outpost... in space.