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

[General Disarray]

It seems that even Death Stranding shits on this game's exploration and hiking. It actually has land vehicles. One more point to the beloved gaming master Hideo Kojima! Suck it Todd! You will never be gaming's top auteur.

 

[Vic]

It seems that even Death Stranding shits on this game's exploration and hiking. It actually has land vehicles. One more point to the beloved gaming master Hideo Kojima! Suck it Todd! You will never be gaming's top auteur.

I think that's because he doesn't want players to see how empty the planets are. For exploration I stick to the spaceship, only land on locations that are revealed from orbit. But I guess it makes sense that uncolonized planets would be mostly empty space.

 

[Non-Edgy Gamer]

if you look in the games files they have like 12gb for facial animations alone afaik, while the rando NPCs can look weird, facial animations are very fluid in starfield

They're very fluid, yes. But the engine sabotages them, jerking the head to look at the player abruptly or at a weird angle. It's the preprogramed animation stuff that's terrible. The lip-synch is usually ok.

Witcher 3 looks a million times better than this.

 

[Konjad]

Is it me or the NPCs faces in starfield look worse than in Skyrim?

They look worse than Oblivion's.

It's a technological achievement for sure.

 

[Vic]

But the engine sabotages them

I think the engine sabotages a lot of things for the game

 

[Vic]

good show of facial animations in the game:

 

[AwesomeButton]

I had one random event today - a Trade Authority station was radided by spacers, only one guard had survived, wounded. Offered me a top weapon held in a locked storage box if I clear the spacers out of the station. My first 0G combat. It was fun, although a linear sequence. Not much space for maenuvering. Maybe this is more realistic strictly speaking, but not very fun gameplay. I think people will widely overestimate how spacious "Space" actually is, both for space combat and travel and for interiors. There was this film some years ago, called "Gravity" with Sandra Bullock, I really liked it, and was somewhat realistic too.

Also, fuck, how could they fail to add the boot tracks you leave behind when walking on a respective planet surface? It's an iconic thing about walking on a different planet's surface.

 

[mediocrepoet]

There is a point in playing, you wanna make your character stronger. In Starfield there is no point

Numbers. Go. Up.

 

[Non-Edgy Gamer]

I think the engine sabotages a lot of things for the game

It's amazing to me that Bethesda still has issues like stiff, awkward NPC movements, which have been an issue for them since Morrowind. Yet they refuse to change engines, or fix their current one.

Every game just gets a few bells and whistles added to the engine. Shadows, lighting, shaders etc. The core is always the same, and has many of the same problems.

 

[Vic]

I think the engine sabotages a lot of things for the game

It's amazing to me that Bethesda still has issues like stiff, awkward NPC movements, which have been an issue for them since Morrowind. Yet they refuse to change engines, or fix their current one.

Every game just gets a few bells and whistles added to the engine. Shadows, lighting, shaders etc. The core is always the same, and has many of the same problems.

they're afraid to lose their lifeblood, the modders

 

[Old Hans]

Just a quick example from a NPC I just found from wandering around in TW3:

I think the reason the witcher 3 background npcs still look better than cyberpunk and starfield is 'cause they are not really randomly generated faces. they are hand crafted, but there are a only a handful of them, used over and over, but even with just a handful of faces, I still think it comes out on top

 

[Non-Edgy Gamer]

they're afraid to lose their lifeblood, the modders

I think someone did a breakdown of how many people actually used mods in Skyrim etc. and it wasn't as many as you think.

It's certainly responsible for a lot of PC sales, but I doubt most console users bother with them.

No, I think what they're addicted to is the workflow of the toolset. They've trained their teams to make games a certain way and don't want to alter that for a whole new engine. Not to mention the cost of creating or licensing a new engine.

 

[Grauken]

I think people will widely overestimate how spacious "Space" actually is, both for space combat and travel and for interiors.

You mean in the game, or in reality? Because people usually widely underestimate the second

 

[Non-Edgy Gamer]

I think the reason the witcher 3 background npcs still look better than cyberpunk and starfield is 'cause they are not really randomly generated faces.

It's not just the faces though. It's the animations. They were more natural, even in throwaway conversations with unimportant NPCs.

I think this was a result of the animators having a good database of natural-looking reactions, as well as having a better sense of the art of putting together a scene.

 

[La vie sexuelle]

We need to change the slogan "mods will fix it" to "mods will make it bearable".

 

[Vic]

we're hitting a new playercount peak less than a day before release

 

[Old Hans]

We need to change the slogan "mods will fix it" to "mods will make it bearable".

everyone knows the good stuff is years away. the first couple years of bethesda games are full of mods like "Steve's 8k texture wearable cowboy hats"

 

[Vic]

We need to change the slogan "mods will fix it" to "mods will make it bearable".

everyone knows the good stuff is years away. the first couple years of bethesda games are full of mods like "Steve's 8k texture wearable cowboy hats"

on loverslab, right?

 

[Jarmaro]

Is there a good variety of melee weapons in the game? So far I've only seen axes on videos, I'd like to try a melee build.
Persoanlly, I haven't played the game yet, still considering whether I should (on xCloud of course, way cheaper but greedy Microsoft doesn't allow for Ultimate Pass to be played without controller on PC lmao).

From everything I've seen and read about the game in the last week...I maintain my opinion from the first trailer - the game's weakest point is the lack of hook. They have good set-up with Nasapunk they were going for, but aside of that it's rather dull. Compare that to grandiosity of Oblivion and its daedric invasion, epicness and dragon fighting in Skyrim, even the satirical climate of 60s in Fallout 4. All of the previous Bethesda games had concrete identity. Starfield doesn't seem to have even half of that.
I guess as Bethesda lacks the world-building made by Morrowind writers and setting bought from Fallout devs they can't cook up anything interesting by themselves.

By the way, the game really does seem to be the best baseline game made by Bethesda in the last 20 years. A lot of content (apparently bogged down by over-use of procedural generation, not that it isn't there, just too much of weak stuff in the way), wealth of systems (even if some of them barebones) and solid gameplay (basically everyone I see praises it).

Some people said that Bethesda has learned nothing from Skyrim and Fallout 4 criticism. Those people are retarded. It's typical Bethesda jank design philosophy, but they made a lot of progress in the character progression, dialogues and immersion.

All of you seem to forget how Oblivion, Skyrim and Fallout 4 played at launch. Hell, even with patches and DLCs all of those games are nearly unplayable on their own most of the time in terms of gameplay. Compared to them Starfield is a big step forward, if not without sacrifices.

Tl;DR
Best Bethesda baseline game to date, would be much better if they had the game take place on just a few hand-crafted big locations instead of immense space filled with repetetive content.

 

[Old Hans]

We need to change the slogan "mods will fix it" to "mods will make it bearable".

everyone knows the good stuff is years away. the first couple years of bethesda games are full of mods like "Steve's 8k texture wearable cowboy hats"

on loverslab, right?

those are the types of modders who make a pair high heel shoes using 9 zillion polygons

 

[orcinator]

I think people will widely overestimate how spacious "Space" actually is, both for space combat and travel and for interiors.

If your space stations don't look like this then your space game is shit.

 

[AwesomeButton]

I think people will widely overestimate how spacious "Space" actually is, both for space combat and travel and for interiors.

You mean in the game, or in reality? Because people usually widely underestimate the second

No, I really mean over-estimate, because they've watched a lot of Star Wars. Given the actual vastness of Space, and your ship's miniscule resource capacity, you are really a very constrained little microbe trying to travel through a moutful of spit, and your travel time in realtime would be multiple lifetimes

So the feeling of "I keep travelling in outer space and not a damn thing is *happening* to me!" is actually on point. You're not travelling through Skyrim, you're travelling through space. As others already compared many times.

I think the reason the witcher 3 background npcs still look better than cyberpunk and starfield is 'cause they are not really randomly generated faces.

It's not just the faces though. It's the animations. They were more natural, even in throwaway conversations with unimportant NPCs.

I think this was a result of the animators having a good database of natural-looking reactions, as well as having a better sense of the art of putting together a scene.

That was the next thing I was going to mention. They cleverly reuse animations both for plot characters and for NPCs. The end result is that they manage to weave a kind of individuality to characters' body language. Even if Geral smirks the same way, or shakes his hand the same way, it ends up turning into a "signature body language trait".

We need to change the slogan "mods will fix it" to "mods will make it bearable".

Times are changing, yes (for the worse).

 

[racofer]

Witcher 3 will forever remain a game where the devs pulled very smart tricks in order to do a lot with a little.

Their NPCs look good because, first - they are not random generated, they are all hand placed and have their own routines. If you load the same savegame 1000 times you will see the same npcs walking around in novigrad and its outskirts. Second, NPCs are reusing faces. Indeed those faces are well designed, but they are often reused. In the case with this woman on the screenshot, CDPR have used the dress and hat to mask the fact that her face isn't unique. Starfield I believe generates its pedestrians on the fly, likely cycling predefined face presets. But in Witcher 3 nothing is modular about the faces, the game simply doesn't have a face generation system as such. If you check out Cyberpunk where there is a face generation system, and where pedestrians are actually generated and streamed by the engine, the face variety and quality is lower.

I didn't remember that. It certainly explains why TW3 NPCs look so good.

Just a quick example from a NPC I just found from wandering around in TW3:

I think the reason the witcher 3 background npcs still look better than cyberpunk and starfield is 'cause they are not really randomly generated faces. they are hand crafted, but there are a only a handful of them, used over and over, but even with just a handful of faces, I still think it comes out on top

Handcrafted NPCs sound like a much better system, but it also takes a lot more work thus it's obvious why developers won't even bother.

Still, my point stands that Cyberpunk can generate better looking NPCs. Although you can come across some disturbing stuff from an aesthetic point of view due to randomization, it's still visually better than what Shartfield does.

Quickly looking around Jig Jig Street:

Imagine the horror of this specimen in Todd's world:

 

[La vie sexuelle]

We need to change the slogan "mods will fix it" to "mods will make it bearable".

everyone knows the good stuff is years away. the first couple years of bethesda games are full of mods like "Steve's 8k texture wearable cowboy hats"

We need to change the slogan "mods will fix it" to "mods will make it bearable".

everyone knows the good stuff is years away. the first couple years of bethesda games are full of mods like "Steve's 8k texture wearable cowboy hats"

on loverslab, right?

They will be the first to make all things related to women and sex (clubs, etc.)

We'll have to wait for the rest.

 

[Hace El Oso]

Just a quick example from a NPC I just found from wandering around in TW3:

I think the reason the witcher 3 background npcs still look better than cyberpunk and starfield is 'cause they are not really randomly generated faces. they are hand crafted, but there are a only a handful of them, used over and over, but even with just a handful of faces, I still think it comes out on top

But randomly generated NPCs aren’t used in order to have a greater variety, they’re used to remove the need for effort and care.