Starfield

[hogso]

11 hours ago, villarule123 said:

I am AMD, 5700 xt. I've read that because of the deal they made with AMD they've not added a lot of NVIDIA card features.. yuck

I think waiting a month or two would be best for a game like this and there will be loads of mods available. 

Oh man, waiting may well be for the best then. 

Despite the decidedly mixed reception to this, the more I see of it, the more I actually thing I'd enjoy it. 

[Daweii]

12 hours ago, villarule123 said:

I am AMD, 5700 xt. I've read that because of the deal they made with AMD they've not added a lot of NVIDIA card features.. yuck

I think waiting a month or two would be best for a game like this and there will be loads of mods available. 

The game is massively CPU dependent. Starfield is doing things with physics, world detail and world persistence that no game has ever attempted. This means that the target frame rate for every platform is 30FPS, even on PC. There are people getting higher than 30FPS on PC. Those with a cutting edge Ryzen 7800X3D or a i9 13900K. Those CPUs eat Starfield for breakfast, but most CPUs especially in the major cities are not good enough for Starfield. Now, those with better GPU's like the 7000 series AMD GPUs or the 40-series Nvidia GPUs can raise their graphics or resolution enough to make the game slightly more GPU bound and free up some CPU, but when Todd Howard, the games director stated in a Bloomberg interview that, "the game isn't unoptimised, you might just need to upgrade your PC", he was mostly telling the truth. There are CPU benchmarks from reputable tech outlets that show over 90% of CPUs from the last 5-6 years all struggling to run the deep simulations in Starfield.

We're entering into a time where current-gen games are now hitting PC. We're long gone from PC games that are ports of games made for a terrible AMD Jaguar netbook CPU in the PS4/Xbox One. We have been eating good for so long on PC because the consoles were terrible from a raw performance standpoint. Now, of course it didn't stop developers making truly gorgeous experiences with that terrible hardware, but it meant that the recommended CPU was a i5 2500K and the GPU was a GTX 970 for what felt like almost a decade. That said, we're entering into a time where games are now targeting consoles with an AMD 6700XT GPU and a 3700X (8 core 16 thread) CPU. It sucks when games like Immortals of Aveum come out that are Unreal Engine 5, and require a Ryzen 7 3700X and a RTX 2080 Super for 1080p low settings. The 2080 Super is a card that is 33% better than the 5700XT, that's a card that is 6% better than my aging 1080Ti. Everyone is getting caught out by the hardware that current-gen games are requiring, and Starfield is just yet another current-gen only game that is hitting peoples hardware hard. 

[villarule123]

1 hour ago, Daweii said:

The game is massively CPU dependent. Starfield is doing things with physics, world detail and world persistence that no game has ever attempted. This means that the target frame rate for every platform is 30FPS, even on PC. There are people getting higher than 30FPS on PC. Those with a cutting edge Ryzen 7800X3D or a i9 13900K. Those CPUs eat Starfield for breakfast, but most CPUs especially in the major cities are not good enough for Starfield. Now, those with better GPU's like the 7000 series AMD GPUs or the 40-series Nvidia GPUs can raise their graphics or resolution enough to make the game slightly more GPU bound and free up some CPU, but when Todd Howard, the games director stated in a Bloomberg interview that, "the game isn't unoptimised, you might just need to upgrade your PC", he was mostly telling the truth. There are CPU benchmarks from reputable tech outlets that show over 90% of CPUs from the last 5-6 years all struggling to run the deep simulations in Starfield.

We're entering into a time where current-gen games are now hitting PC. We're long gone from PC games that are ports of games made for a terrible AMD Jaguar netbook CPU in the PS4/Xbox One. We have been eating good for so long on PC because the consoles were terrible from a raw performance standpoint. Now, of course it didn't stop developers making truly gorgeous experiences with that terrible hardware, but it meant that the recommended CPU was a i5 2500K and the GPU was a GTX 970 for what felt like almost a decade. That said, we're entering into a time where games are now targeting consoles with an AMD 6700XT GPU and a 3700X (8 core 16 thread) CPU. It sucks when games like Immortals of Aveum come out that are Unreal Engine 5, and require a Ryzen 7 3700X and a RTX 2080 Super for 1080p low settings. The 2080 Super is a card that is 33% better than the 5700XT, that's a card that is 6% better than my aging 1080Ti. Everyone is getting caught out by the hardware that current-gen games are requiring, and Starfield is just yet another current-gen only game that is hitting peoples hardware hard. 

I'm probably not as knowledgeable as you, but my CPU (3700x) is at 3% usage when I'm playing Starfield. It might be my GPU bottle-necking the CPU but I'm not sure. I can get 60fps at 1080p on medium settings but I don't mind waiting until I upgrade so I can play the game with all bells and whistles. 

I'm looking at getting a 5800x3D and a 7900 XTX in the next month or so. 

[Davkaus]

I'm very underwhelmed after 3 or 4 hours. It doesn't feel like a step forward in any way from Skyrim or FO4. I loved exploring those big open worlds, full of surprises. This is very much a thousand small separate zones rather than one big living, breathing universe. The Al is dumb as rocks, and no game that looks this average should run this poorly.

I'll probably give it another go when I finish BG3, but it's a 6 out of 10 for me on first impressions. I'm just glad I got it free.

First game I've played in bloody years that doesn't even have a **** brightness or contrast setting.

Edited September 10, 2023 by Davkaus

[villarule123]

I don't think you can even change the resolution of the game without doing it in an ini file outside of the game or changing the resolution through windows.

I don't think I've seen that in a game before.

 

[Daweii]

53 minutes ago, villarule123 said:

I'm probably not as knowledgeable as you, but my CPU (3700x) is at 3% usage when I'm playing Starfield. It might be my GPU bottle-necking the CPU but I'm not sure. I can get 60fps at 1080p on medium settings but I don't mind waiting until I upgrade so I can play the game with all bells and whistles. 

I'm looking at getting a 5800x3D and a 7900 XTX in the next month or so. 

3% sounds too low, so there might be a bottleneck elsewhere. I just pulled up a benchmark from someone with a 3700X and a 6700XT and their CPU usage was 67% at 1080p medium settings in the main city. That said, their GPU usage was around 75-80% which does indicate that they're being bottlenecked by the CPU slightly even if it's not using 100% CPU. 

Upgrading to a 5800X3D and 7900 XTX will certainly help a lot though. 

Edited September 10, 2023 by Daweii

[Talldarkandransome]

It looks OK on a series x with 55" OLED on HDR game settings, no idea what the FPS might be. I think it's gonna take some work on my part to get me off COD

[GarethRDR]

Soooooooo... it's not good, is it?  At least not as it is now, and possibly this is is just me still being early doors in the game, hoping things pick up considerably once I can get to the ship/colony building stuff.  By god the UI is horrible (pathfinding and inventory stuff in particular).

[Chindie]

I put 5 hours into it, find nothing I liked, and I've ditched it.

An outright and crushing disappointment.

[HongKongVillan]

15 hours (somehow I made it) into it. Actually if you don't get sidetracked and get into the few main stories it gets better. Then a few random side quests are quite interesting too.

 

Still lots to learn though I'm still not quite there with the crafting and building.

[GarethRDR]

I'm persevering but it's skin of my teeth at this point. I think one of the problems might the glacial pace and cumbersome feel of everything, when I'm coming right off the back of Armored Core 6 which is a textbook exercise in immediacy and handles like a dream. An unfair comparison perhaps, but it's definitely not helping my judgement here.

It feels like nothing's really moved on from Skyrim at all (and I get that there is a certain Bethesda formula to these things, but Skyrim was how long ago now?) with the sole exception being some parts borrowed from No Man's Sky that it doesn't do as well as No Man's Sky does.

It's a 5/10 to Outer World's 7/10 at the mo, that's my hot take.

[Chindie]

If it was more like Skyrim, it would be a better game.

Instead it's just Menus - the game. Has none of the awe and wonder you got with these games at their best. It's completely flowless.

[villa4europe]

To me reading here and listening to some podcasts it still sounds like MS have single player story-phobia

They just can't get a game with a great narrative, not that Bethesda should be the expectation to change that

[Wainy316]

So is this not just Fallout in space?  That alone should make it at least playable and engrossing.

[villa4europe]

1 hour ago, Wainy316 said:

So is this not just Fallout in space?  That alone should make it at least playable and engrossing.

i've not played it and by the sounds of it i wont be playing it...TCGS said yes but that's what makes it boring, because it uses a mapping and fast travel system to jump around rather than a proper exploration game, fallout you get out of the vault and then head off in the direction that looks the most interesting, the tower on the horizon for example, the way starfield works takes all of that away

[Chindie]

1 hour ago, Wainy316 said:

So is this not just Fallout in space?  That alone should make it at least playable and engrossing.

Not really.

Imagine Fallout, but instead of a huge world, you have lots of smaller world that are mostly empty with occasional works with big settlements on them, and you travel between the small worlds through a series of menu choices, except when you get to the new world where you briefly are piloting your ship above the planet which mostly is pointless because you just go into another menu and pick land.

It's rubbish.

[Wainy316]

48 minutes ago, Chindie said:

Not really.

Imagine Fallout, but instead of a huge world, you have lots of smaller world that are mostly empty with occasional works with big settlements on them, and you travel between the small worlds through a series of menu choices, except when you get to the new world where you briefly are piloting your ship above the planet which mostly is pointless because you just go into another menu and pick land.

It's rubbish.

So basically Outer Worlds?

[Chindie]

5 minutes ago, Wainy316 said:

So basically Outer Worlds?

From what I understand, yes. I never actually put any serious time into Outer Worlds to know it's structure etc. But maybe with a bit more ambition - it does have space flight stuff and dog fighting in orbit etc.

[Daweii]

5 minutes ago, Wainy316 said:

So basically Outer Worlds?

Not really.

I mean, yes if you take both games as being Bethesda style RPGs, but Outer Worlds deliberately limited its scope to maintain a more traditional flow. You land on a planet and then you play that planet like its Oblivion. Starfield lets its grand scope get in the way of that more traditional flow. The reason for this is because everything is a loading screen. Land on a planet is a loading screen. Leave a planet is a loading screen. Entering a section of space around a planet is a loading screen. Warping is a loading screen. Now, some of these loading screens give a nice little cutscene, but the game essentially boils down to clicking on the map, selecting a destination, and then fast travelling to it. There is no real space travel in this game. You load into a section of space around a planet and if there is something there to do then you can fly towards it, but on many occasions you'll load into a section of space and the only thing there is the planet and nothing else to do. 

Starfield would be 100x better if it was like Outer Worlds which is why I don't see them as comparable. Starfield wanted 1000 planets, space combat, ship building, outpost building, crew recruitment, and whatever else they managed to get into that game. It's the scope of Starfield that hurts the game. Also, the pace of the game hurts it quite a bit. This is a game where it takes 15-20 hours to get going, and some even say it doesn't truly get going until completing the main story and starting new game plus. There is definitely fun to be had in Starfield for sure, but you have to play it to know if you'll find it. I'm a huge Bethesda fan and I thought Starfield was shit, but there are 6+ million people that love it, so it seems to be a game you have to play to know if you'll like it as while this is "Fallout in space", "Skyrim in space", "Oblivion in space", it's also it's own thing with its own pace and flow. 

[The_Rev]

I’ve tried, but damn this game is boring. How could it be so incredibly boring?