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

[TheDarkUrge]

How fast will this game be cracked? Not gonna get tricked into buying two unfinished RPGs in a year

 

[Non-Edgy Gamer]

$70 for Skyrim in Space.

Be honest, how many of you have already preordered?

 

[soutaiseiriron]

The physiognomy of start screens. The start screen of a game can reveal a lot about how rushed the team was and how much pride they took in their work. Half Life 2's start screen either shows hasty shipping deadlines by a passionate team overworked, or a team that didn't care.

what a braindead 80iq comment by people looking to overanalyze or critique something when there's nothing to critique. bethesda has made one (1) title screen that wasn't completely bland text-on-background, and that was oblivion. twitter blue checkmark cavedwellers need to be banned from the internet

 

[Inhabitants of Khorinis]

Bland but still better than KotC menu screen.

 

[Be Kind Rewind]

Half Life 2's start screen either shows hasty shipping deadlines by a passionate team overworked, or a team that didn't care.

Half-Life 2's main menu is indicative of a game that has spent too long in development because they have a different one for each chapter, it also focuses on the levels just as the game does, less on the characters, enemies and shooting.

bethesda has made one (1) title screen that wasn't completely bland text-on-background

 

[Be Kind Rewind]

Planet (or space station) silhouettes are a staple of scifi. Space is vast and empty and these shots impress that upon you.

That's why I said Mass Effect's start screen showed how it was trying to bring back classic science fiction.

I'm going to say this comes down to diverging tastes. Personally, I dislike the busy renaissance scenes depicted in most fantasy cover/menu art. I prefer things kept simple and clean, conveying the tone without depicting much at all. Brevity is the soul of wit and all that.

I didn't post those main menu screenshots because fantasy > science fiction, but because I had them installed and I could point out how for example Dungeon Lords, a game about going into dungeons, killing monsters and getting loot has all that baked into the menu. It has nothing to do with taste, unless you mean that if the main menu doesn't appeal to you then the rest of the game probably won't either.

Obviously Starfield is going for a stock science fiction vibe with the main menu, but we can do better than that when analyzing it. But before we do we should look at one of your examples of this common motif, Alien Isolation.



Again the main menu screen sums up the entire game, it's a game with exceptional production values and highly cinematic qualities. The great flaw of the game is present too, that we have already seen it in the film the game was based on and that it will be a repeat. Within the game itself there are repetitious segments, such as a crafting system, slow but high fidelity animations that play when you interact with things, and it's a stretched out recap of what happened in the film. The UI is minimal and the focus is on the expensive art assets the developers have labored on, just like the focus in the game. All this can be seen in the main menu.

Now let's take a look at Starfield for a comparative analysis.

Spoiler

What immediately hits the viewer is the ugly but now common DLC shill square where you'll get pestered with ads in a game you paid full price for. It shows where Bethesda have their priorities, which are to squeeze every penny out of the players. The actual menu to the left is highly reminicent of Fallout 4's UI, showing us that it's still a NetImmerse title underneath the not so great rendering update the game got, and that you can expect Fallout 4 with a thin layer of paint. The actual background art is a dark featureless planetoid, reminding us of the swarthy cast and the desolate contentless planets with nothing on them that players will be "exploring" during the game. One can think of it as the empty black void that delusional people think can ever be filled with mods, just like how others think their lack of a sex life can be filled with BG3 tier loverslab mods.

The background art is also reminding the viewer of 2001, the pretentious film written by a hack writer and that aimed for topics so big it couldn't but underdeliver. 2001 with Bethesda writing, the mysteries of the cosmos answered by a mouth breathing retard without even the pizazz of Kubrick's rainbow ride.

From an artistic standpoint it's also very ugly, it doesn't have the utopian futuristic factor that Mass Effect had, where you could assume there were locations looking like Syd Mead had drawn them to explore, with the vibrant greens and blues of its opening screen. Nor does it have the aesthetic sense that Alien Isolation has. None of the charm of Sundog, nor the focus on space travel which was indicated by the starship coming from the planet in that splash screen.

Finally the photo gallery button shows us that it's not really much of a game at all, it's a platform for coomer modders to take tasteless screenshots with and share online.

 

[Child of Malkav]

How fast will this game be cracked? Not gonna get tricked into buying two unfinished RPGs in a year

Well apparently since it won't have Denuvo and just the steam protection that means day 1 (or day 0 whatever the naming convention is these days).

 

[ArchAngel]

$70 for Skyrim in Space.

Be honest, how many of you have already preordered?

I have preordered 1.5 years ago when I signed up for Gamepass.

 

[Zed]

I predict the game will review around 6-8, with 7-7.5 being the average (mostly due to reviewer fanboy fear), undersell immensely on console due to gamepass and xbox exclusivity, and not flop but still underperform on PC. It might win GOTY over BG3 and Zelda from smaller websites like Afghan xbox fanzine.

 

[RobotSquirrel]

Sidebar, Jagged Alliance 3 does the same thing. Even better it shows your most recently active squad overlooking the sector they were last in. Just such a nice connection with my team starting right when I boot up the game. Love this trend (and yes, that means thank you XCOM).

that's genuinely cool. I love it when they have your previous played session on the title screen so you know your save file is intact still. I like also seeing mod-manager in game, I hate having to go out of game to mess around with that stuff. Similarly I like UIs like WoW and Xcom where they show your characters on the title screen. One of the biggest advantages though doing a UI like this does for you is that you can basically see what your in-game visual quality is representative of, you can see how fast the popin/LOD is and its extremely useful for troubleshooting without having to load into the game. The only reason not to do it is that your game itself is too weighty so you need a static menu to prevent it either 1. running like a POS thus causing a bad first impression or 2. Prevent having to load everything in the logos - which btw is why so many AAA games have so many damn logo intros because sometimes they're hiding load times (or in the case of Mass Effect 2 the developers are idiots and have the load times tied to the video length!).

I mean sure Preloading is always going to beat streaming the data in from a performance perspective - but its also inconvenient. Working out a system that employs both is ideal as long as stream loads aren't too heavy. I mean you can segment your loading based on priority and then load things in on a need to need basis. I mean ultimately just have good optimized work from the start and you'll have a much better time.

But yeah I'm glad this discussion is being had because I think its one thing that needs to be done better. Similarly as well I Think the launcher stuff needs to either be removed entirely or improved to the point where its actually useful because most launchers aren't (Bannerlord I'm looking at you! Your launcher is GARBAGE). Its just QoL stuff that I think really needs to be improved so there's a lot less opposition to getting into the game, I'd love a quick launch feature even - so basically skip all the menus and just immediately load the last save state more games need that.

 

[RobotSquirrel]

You see that mech? You can't pilot it.

This is hilarious, why couldn't they just make Power Armor but tall? you already have the tech to do it why is it so fucking difficult Todd?!
It took me a week in Unity to make a Mech and have it walk and shoot. Mechs are easy.

 

[Yoomazir]

What do you think, they can't even make drivable cars...

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

naming convention is

"0-day". has always been.

 

[sosmoflux]

The actual background art is a dark featureless planetoid, reminding us of the swarthy cast

 

[deama]

You've got it backwards. BG3 released a month early because Larian was shitting bricks that they wouldn't get their release uptick sales numbers.

Yeah but that already happened and the game sold way more than anyone expected, including Larian.

Yes but that happened AFTER they pushed the release date back almost a month.

 

[Grampy_Bone]

What kind of bs always online "live service" crap is it gonna have?

 

[sosmoflux]

All of it and then some
Reminder this is the same outfit that gave us horse armour

 

[Zlaja]

I think HL2 also only showed scenes from places you'd explored recently? Like you didn't see some of the big set pieces until after you'd played through them. Been a while though so I may be dreaming this.

Different start screens depending on which chapter your last save was on, Portal 2 also did this.

Alan Wake Remastered had this as well. Different one for each chapter:

 

[Robotigan]

It has nothing to do with taste, unless you mean that if the main menu doesn't appeal to you then the rest of the game probably won't either.

The background art is also reminding the viewer of 2001, the pretentious film written by a hack writer and that aimed for topics so big it couldn't but underdeliver.

I think when you get to the point where you're offhandedly calling Arthur Clarke a hack, you should reconsider whether your critique stands up to scrutiny or if might be tinged with a bit too much of the tism.

 

[Elthosian]

You've got it backwards. BG3 released a month early because Larian was shitting bricks that they wouldn't get their release uptick sales numbers.

Yeah but that already happened and the game sold way more than anyone expected, including Larian.

Yes but that happened AFTER they pushed the release date back almost a month.

Microsoft wants to sell consoles, that’s their most important metric by far, and it’s not crazy to think many PS5 gamers that would otherwise have bought an Xbox for Starfield will now get BG3, spend a few weeks with it, and then move on to the next big thing (CP2077 DLC, Spiderman). And you’ll definitely see the game mentioned in more than a few reviews to knock a couple points off.

I guess they wanted to take over the early September holiday by overshadowing other nearby releases but I’d say it didn’t play as well as they had expected even though Larian did end moving their release date. Early August would have played out much better for them but of course it would have required some crazy hindsight to predict so.

I can also imagine them praying for AC6 not to be a huge hit. Having a second BG3 hype storm just a week before could hurt their PC numbers

 

[Inhabitants of Khorinis]

Beat this straggots:


The camera even moves and changes depending on what you hoer over in the menu list.

 

[Grampy_Bone]

horse armour

So quaint to think back to those halcyon days. We had no idea what was in store.

 

[Grampy_Bone]

It's likely starfield will sell consoles but it's no elder scrolls or fallout game. FYI fallout 76 was outsold by GTA 5 in its launch month. Hype feels very tepid. People have been wanting the 'ultimate space game' since forever but with elite, no man's sky, star citizen, etc all disappointing it would be amazing for Bethesda to sleepwalk over the finish line.

Releasing on gamepass doesn't engender confidence either. The hope is that people will be too lazy to cancel after signing up but that didn't work for Disney+. There's a reason why big movies are avoiding streaming, and no good books come out on Kindle unlimited; it's a race to the bottom. Gamepass was always a Trojan horse to try to buy your back library, as game publishers have always hated old games and used sales. Once they hit critical market share they'd have to raise prices, there'd be no other choice. Reportedly the dead zenimax guy was always mega butthurt at how many people played skyrim for years at no additional cost, so its highly unlikely you'll see that kind of product from Bethesda ever again.

I don't have the time these days but as a kid I could totally see myself paying a dollar, binging this over a week or two, and then being finished with it.

 

[Wirdschowerdn]

Schmalzy like fuck.

 

[GamingConnoisseur]

Half Life 2's start screen either shows hasty shipping deadlines by a passionate team overworked, or a team that didn't care.

Half-Life 2's main menu is indicative of a game that has spent too long in development because they have a different one for each chapter, it also focuses on the levels just as the game does, less on the characters, enemies and shooting.

bethesda has made one (1) title screen that wasn't completely bland text-on-background

that's the armor from Fallout 1. Lol. Old games used to rip off everything