Starfield

[SirAndrewD]

You'll have to explain this one because there aren't loading screens in Star Citizen as far as I know. Certainly nothing like Starfield.

Every time you go into a warp or get on a train in Star Citizen you're in a loading screen, it's just happening where you can't necessarily see it.

No Mans Sky's devs talked about that, and how their game has a lot of them too just done in such a way you don't know it.  It's absolutely a more immersive experience and it's technically impressive, but even they admitted that it took a huge amount of time, resources and effort to pull off that could've been spent on other more content related endeavors. 

Starfield just decided to go the other way with it.  It's not a detriment to my experience so far.  Everything's a trade off.

[CaptainKoloth]

Flying from DC to Fairbanks (!) today so had a long session with Starfield on my Ally. Actually really impressed.
Whenever the great unwashed internet masses (present company excluded of course) hype anything up this much  I'm always extremely skeptical.

But I'm actually quite pleased to say that I'm... quite pleased! A couple of positives that stuck out to me:

1) They talked up a lot before launch the "NASA punk" aesthetic. This is actually a real thing and I like it a lot. The level of detail, texturing, on the ships and suits (for example) is insane. It reminds me very much of being at a Disney World ride where the pre-ride areas (think Star Tours if you've been on it) are often dripping in so much detail and atmosphere that they rival the experience of the ride itself. Of course this is the advantage of being a Bethesda vs. say a one-man show like a Spacebourne II (also a great game BTW). But it really shows.

2) The quality of the gunplay really surpassed my expectations. In FPS mode it's very much what you'd expect from a high quality AAA shooter, and there's an equally functional third person mode (which I actually prefer in games as a rule) which really adds a lot for me. Similarly to 1) you can examine the guns and zoom in on them and see tiny little text about the imaginary companies where the futuristic gun technology was patented. It's just dripping with polish.

3) I was most skeptical about the ships. My main worry was that the flight mechanics would be too arcadey. They absolutely are arcadey, to be sure, but it's Ace Combat rather than Afterburner, if that makes sense. It may not be TIE Fighter or anything close to it, but it does have power balancing, enemy target readouts, multiple weapons systems, cockpit view, etc. Given everything else in the game I can live with it not being DCS-level in the space combat (not that I'd mind that one freaking iota of course if someone were to offer it to me!).

4) This may be the most controversial statement. There's a lot of hubbub over the fact that the game is not seamless. Now, for all its flaws, I like Elite Dangerous a lot. It's pretty much entirely seamless. You can fly in space for days between planets. You can set down on planets and run in one direction for hours. It's.... boring (in my opinion). I like that the option exists. I wish it were optional in Starfield, but I must admit that even if it were, I would use fast travel nearly all the time. Seamless, endless travel is technically impressive, but it is not in my opinion a great game mechanic. Heck, DCS is basically my favorite game and I play it more than everything else combined. I always time accelerate during non-combat waypoint navigation. Your mileage may vary.

But yeah, going in with fairly low expectations and admittedly never having played a Bethesda game previously, I'm somewhere between pleasantly surprised and blown away. I think that as long as you're not expecting it be, well, the game Star Citizen fans have been imagining since day 1 (basically a perfect 1:1 recreation of living in a future space reality with every detail from making a sandwich to flying capital ships and everywhere in between- and I'm not making fun of that desire, I'd love that too), you'll be pretty pleased I think.

[Jarhead0331]

You'll have to explain this one because there aren't loading screens in Star Citizen as far as I know. Certainly nothing like Starfield.

Every time you go into a warp or get on a train in Star Citizen you're in a loading screen, it's just happening where you can't necessarily see it.

No Mans Sky's devs talked about that, and how their game has a lot of them too just done in such a way you don't know it.  It's absolutely a more immersive experience and it's technically impressive, but even they admitted that it took a huge amount of time, resources and effort to pull off that could've been spent on other more content related endeavors. 

Starfield just decided to go the other way with it.  It's not a detriment to my experience so far.  Everything's a trade off.

I don't think that is true. When you're on a train, you can move around, access your inventory, maps and contracts, etc. and when you're in warp, you can drop out at any time, change views, be interdicted, etc. So, it being a loading screen doesn't make any sense.

[SirAndrewD]

I don't think that is true. When you're on a train, you can move around, access your inventory, maps and contracts, etc. and when you're in warp, you can drop out at any time, change views, be interdicted, etc. So, it being a loading screen doesn't make any sense.

More like the loading is happening while you are doing that. 

I'm misspeaking in calling it a "loading screen" it's just a different approach to loading assets by putting them behind less intensive segments where it scales and streams new areas and data.  This is how No Mans Sky also does it.

Elite does it on a more limited basis with planets in system, but it uses the witchspace to hide a more conventional load.  If you try to fly in FSD to another distant system it does actually have pauses.

The point is that no matter how you do it there has to be a solution to loading assets as they can't fully render everything all the time everywhere.  Starfield's content for me has been worth the trade off.  And honestly I've already put in my time space Trucking for hours on a long haul in Elite.

The only thing I do miss is the chance for being intercepted on a trip.  If that's in Starfield somehow I haven't seen it yet.

[CaptainKoloth]

I don't think that is true. When you're on a train, you can move around, access your inventory, maps and contracts, etc. and when you're in warp, you can drop out at any time, change views, be interdicted, etc. So, it being a loading screen doesn't make any sense.

More like the loading is happening while you are doing that. 

I'm misspeaking in calling it a "loading screen" it's just a different approach to loading assets by putting them behind less intensive segments where it scales and streams new areas and data.  This is how No Mans Sky also does it.

Elite does it on a more limited basis with planets in system, but it uses the witchspace to hide a more conventional load.  If you try to fly in FSD to another distant system it does actually have pauses.

The point is that no matter how you do it there has to be a solution to loading assets as they can't fully render everything all the time everywhere.  Starfield's content for me has been worth the trade off.  And honestly I've already put in my time space Trucking for hours on a long haul in Elite.

The only thing I do miss is the chance for being intercepted on a trip.  If that's in Starfield somehow I haven't seen it yet.

A good example of this is the original trilogy for Gears of War, if you've ever played that. There are sections where Marcus walks around very slowly- in-game- talking to command and getting further orders and story. These are actually cleverly disguised loads. You don't have to show a static screen saying "loading", but you do have to, as Andrew is saying, load the assets somewhere. When it's done we'll you never even notice it, but it is happening. You wouldn't be able to, for example, instantaneously transport between NMS or Elite planets without SOMETHING in between allowing the game time to put the assets in memory. That something can, if designed cleverly, be interactive, but it's still always going to be there.

[endfire79]

I'm checking the offerings on Newgg and I'm tempted to upgrade to more recent AMD graphics card (67xx xt) coming with Starfield promo.  Prices really came down and more reasonable than some of the current Nvidia offerings for gaming at 1440p. 

[Skoop]

With space combat, is it mouse and keyboard or can you map hotas and track ir to the game ?  Just wondering if it would be worth while.  Also does track ir work with starfield ?  I'm guessing the game's probably designed for mouse and keyboard only but I thought I'd ask, curious.

[CaptainKoloth]

With space combat, is it mouse and keyboard or can you map hotas and track ir to the game ?  Just wondering if it would be worth while.  Also does track ir work with starfield ?  I'm guessing the game's probably designed for mouse and keyboard only but I thought I'd ask, curious.

Definitely not TrackIR. You can map just about anything in terms of key bindings I think, though it's clearly designed with controller or mouse + KB controls in mind. It is obviously (to me) a console game ported to PC. I have an elaborate HOTAS setup for DCS but I've been playing Starfield with an Xbox controller.

[undercovergeek]

With space combat, is it mouse and keyboard or can you map hotas and track ir to the game ?  Just wondering if it would be worth while.  Also does track ir work with starfield ?  I'm guessing the game's probably designed for mouse and keyboard only but I thought I'd ask, curious.

At least 3 YT videos I've watched say there's no function to map a joystick

[Jarhead0331]

Interesting take from a different perspective.

...and mapping a HOTAS would be a waste of time. Space flight and combat is extremely simple. Its one of the areas that they really missed the mark on. Could have added a lot of immersion and fun here. There is very little point or incentive to flying around in this game and so far, space combat is really just a matter of lining ships up in the sights and wearing shields and hull down as quickly as possible. Yes, eventually you can target systems and disable ships for boarding, but as far as more complex concepts like newtonian physics, etc. It's not here at all.

[CaptainKoloth]

Interesting take from a different perspective.

...and mapping a HOTAS would be a waste of time. Space flight and combat is extremely simple. Its one of the areas that they really missed the mark on. Could have added a lot of immersion and fun here. There is very little point or incentive to flying around in this game and so far, space combat is really just a matter of lining ships up in the sights and wearing shields and hull down as quickly as possible. Yes, eventually you can target systems and disable ships for boarding, but as far as more complex concepts like newtonian physics, etc. It's not here at all.

That's true, though I think this is an unnecessarily harsh take. It's like saying Sid Meier's Pirates is a bad game because it doesn't have a DCS-level accurate simulation of a sailing ship. And believe me, no one would be happier than me to have a full-blown Newtonian flight sim with complex systems, but it simply isn't what the game sets out to do. What it does set out to do, which is a different thing, it does exceptionally well. In my totally subjective opinion, this is the inevitable climbdown from the hype of this game having been portrayed as all things to all people. Now that it's a real product actually available to play, it of course does finite things and some people are going to be disappointed relative to the insane pre-release hype levels. That doesn't make it a bad game, or a game that was anything other than what it was intended to be in the first place.

It's frankly a lot like Mass Effect. I don't see anyone criticizing Mass Effect or KOTOR because they lack TIE Fighter-complexity space combat. And Elite has that and a lot of people really dislike it for other reasons. There is this weird thing with space games where a lot of people are on this holy grail quest for the one perfect game that does literally everything, which is why people continue to pour money into the Star Citizen dumpster fire a decade after it's become basically an obvious scam in my view. Other genres aren't usually held to that standard and in my view a lot of space games are unreasonably criticized when they fail to meet it.

I can't believe I'm defending this game when a week ago I thought I'd be the only one not falling for the hype..   

[Jarhead0331]

^Ok, but that kind of begs the question. What exactly does Starfield set out to do? My understanding is that this is supposed to be a space-based RPG with unparalleled freedom. I think this is an RPG in only the lightest sense. It is really limited to what boils down to a "perk" based system and as you get deeper into the game, you see how the system isn't really well-balanced. This is one of W-A-B's main points of criticism. Even the character creation aspect is extremely basic, light and limited for something that is described as an RPG. Also, I'm not feeling like there is a whole lot of freedom, or that the freedom that is there is particularly meaningful. There just isn't that much of note to explore out there so there isn't much of a compelling reason to visit locations other than to follow a trail from a mission. Speaking of missions, most of them have not been very engrossing for me and some of them have even been frustrating. I find myself just wanting to get through them so I can move onto the next thing, or reassert some control over where I'm going or what I'm going to do. There doesn't seem to be any consequence to making decisions outside of the outcome of the particular mission.

So, yes, while I am still enjoying the game and I've already sunk many hours into it, I can see my enjoyment wearing thin in the near future. Hopefully this trajectory will change. I think maybe it will once I get into outpost and ship construction.   

[Gusington]

Tom's Guide reporting Starfield available for 31.00 through 'XBox Game Pass Ultimate Deal':

https://www.tomsguide.com/deals/get-starfield-for-just-dollar31-thanks-to-this-epic-xbox-game-pass-ultimate-deal?utm_source=notification

[Grim.Reaper]

Tom's Guide reporting Starfield available for 31.00 through 'XBox Game Pass Ultimate Deal':

https://www.tomsguide.com/deals/get-starfield-for-just-dollar31-thanks-to-this-epic-xbox-game-pass-ultimate-deal?utm_source=notification

That appears like just a 3 month subscription to game pass which you then have access to starfield during that time.  It is cheap cost for 3 months though.

[Sigwolf]

Tom's Guide reporting Starfield available for 31.00 through 'XBox Game Pass Ultimate Deal':

https://www.tomsguide.com/deals/get-starfield-for-just-dollar31-thanks-to-this-epic-xbox-game-pass-ultimate-deal?utm_source=notification

That appears like just a 3 month subscription to game pass which you then have access to starfield during that time.  It is cheap cost for 3 months though.

Yes, that is a very poorly thought out, and written article.  It's a good deal for three months of game pass ultimate.  After 3 months you're still out $31 and own nothing for Starfield unless you continue to pay more for game pass.