Currently there is a lot of hype for the upcoming bethesda game "starfield" and people who are critical of the game are often discarded as "sony fanboys".
But often when cames are overhyped prior to launch the actual launch of the game is disastrous with many people feeling disappointed. People who buy xbox series x just to play starfield will definitely feel scammed once reality hits home (or they just remain in denial about being fucked by microsoft).
There are already many red flags and this is despite bethesda/microsoft hiding a lot of problems from us.
Locked to 30fps (or worse) on xbox
The bugtesta ceo claimed that they locked it to 30fps on xbox series S/X for "consistency" while also claiming that the xbox consoles sometimes could go far higher than that.
But they are not actually giving the xbox players any choice on the matters, they think they know better than the ones actually playing the game (they don't) and therefore decided to force millions of people to play it at an consistently awful framerate. There is basically no benefit with capping the framerate below the refreshrate of your monitor when you have VRR/similar.
Of course having it locked to 60 would also be really bad and there is a real risk that is going to be the case on PC, at least at launch.
It could be the case that the xbox series x has too weak of a CPU to hit 60fps but why then is the recommended cpu just an r5 3600x ?
But if the game is GPU limited (as indicated by the recommended specs) why are they refusing to provide a performance mode for the xbox series X? the only explanation i can see is them not wanting to have the xbox series S look bad (by only providing a performance mode for the series X) but the series S should also be able to go much higher than 30 for the most part.
Adding a performance options with lower graphics settings does not sacrifice anything since people who prefer the better graphics will still have that option. This is yet enather example of microsofts despictable treatment of the people who bought their console, not only do they get services (gamepass, xbox live) shoved down their throats but they don't even get basic choices for graphics options in their first party games.
AMD partnership
Usually with AMD sponsored titles there is no DLSS support, this is because AMD outright pays game developers not to support the objectively superior nvidia DLSS technology.
Note that nvidia doesn't actually pay game developers not to support FSR.
And you will probably need DLSS to have the game look and play decent even on a 3090 given that it's made by bethesda and doesn't even have a performance mode planned for the xbox series X.
The 4090 might be able to brute force it though but that card costs 1599$+
We simply have to hope some modder is able to hack the game to somehow add support for DLSS.
DLSS 3 could actually be useful if the game is CPU limited but then you need to have a 40 series GPU and most gamers are skipping those.
Bad space travel mechanics
Unlike much older games such as elite dangerous and no mans sky starfield will not actually support proper space-travel.
Starfield won't let players fly seamlessly from the surface of planets to space.
Todd Howard, the game's director, spoke to IGN and offered further details on the game - including the length of its main quest.
However, when asked whether players can fly seamlessly to space, Howard said the feature is "really just not that important to the player" to justify the extra engineering work required.
bethesda/microsoft has a history of failure
Bethesda games tend to be launched with a lot of bugs and bad performance due to shitty coding.
Games develop by microsoft studies tend to launch poorly and never really get fixed if they get launched at all. Just take a look at halo infinite, the game never really got good despite years of development and hundreds of millions of dollars in funding.
Bad and limited exploration
Almost all areas you can visit in the game will be procedurally generated when you visit that place and when you go there again it will be generated again in a different way. Thus the game does not actually have proper exploration since if you actually discover some amazing area in the game it will probably be lost after you leave it.
When traversing planets you are limited to walking which is very slow, you cannot use vehicles, no flying across planets with plants/ships or racing on the surface of some planet.
There is also reports of people running into invisable walls when walking too far in one direction, it remains to be seen how bad that problem is.
Broken graphics?
Playstation fanboys have analyzed the game and found some pretty bad graphical glitches.
Of course this could have all been avoided by fully using raytracing but they probably opted not to have any raytracing due to AMD hardware being awful at is (they partnered with AMD on PC too).
So even on high end PC the experience will probably not be super-great since the best hardware (4090, etc) isn't going to be utilized properly.
Professional reviews are now out
Currently the average metacritic score is at 87 which isn't bad but not nearly what a lot of microsoft fanboys were hoping for.
The gameranx review was the first decent review i came across
They confirmed that the exploration aspect wasn't very good due to loading screens and procedural generation.
Review by Junglebunny
She was exceted for the game but got really disappointed when she saw the review above. She is not just some random person, only 3 people of 1000 has higher rank than here in the transmaxxing discord where she posted her impressions:
Just gave starfield an hour
The space exploration and combat is literally awful
Like excruciatingly painful
It's like bootleg no man's sky but with a shit ton of load screens
the only good thing has been the gunplay and strong rpg elements and strong story
I'm already extremely attached to alot of the characters they seem very human
I just know whenever I have to travel from planet to planet I have cross my damn fingers I dont attacked
The controls are awful and clunky.
Its almost like they didnt even try
It's sad because it true literally have to go through 5 load screens to travel to other planets and locations
I've been so fucking annoyed you can't manually change quests. There is no mini map whatsoever so like when you have to do quests I frequently find myself completely lost with no direction
not to mention it's very easy to progress too far in other side storylines to the point it's impossible to complete at your current level even on very easy mode. So you just end up with quest markers for quests you literally can't currently complete
So when you are doing stuff you actually can do it's like running around as a chicken with no head
Because you can't manually select what quest you are working on
DLSS mod already available?
I was informed that a mod has already been made supposedely adding support for DLSS and XeSS which is very good news if it actually works properly.
Who here got filtered by the shit performance? And that less than exciting story hook? I can't believe Tyrone fucking died for this.
Put in my refund request after failing to get north of 45 FPS in New Atlantis on an RTX 4070 at 1440p. I will now proceed to doomerpost about TES6 for the next 6 years.
Despite playing for 3 hours the game was like 50% menu navigation. And the menus suck. Remember how shitty Oblivion's inventory system was? Lol. It looks great in comparison. And yeah, flying around feels like an afterthought, not a core component of the gameplay.
So sad this thing can’t even clear the low bar that is fucking fallout 4 of all things. I don’t know how anyone in development or QA played the first 5 hours of this and didn’t immediately dump it and start over. It is fundamentally fucked and uninteresting from story, to new mechanics, to exploration, to visuals. It’s just all fucked. I’m glad I’m stingy and waited until it’s cheap at first. I don’t think I’ll ever spend a dime on this game now
They just bit off way more than they could chew, they should have never touched the genre in the first place. There are no driveable vehicles in the game because theres no reason to have them, the scale is small enough on these segmented instances that you can walk everywhere. I understand now why so much of this game was kept under wraps.
half the reviews are like "the game gets good after you beat it", which puts it in the echelon of widely adored classics like final fantasy 13. if you have to give yourself stockholm syndrome to enjoy it, it's bad!
My expectations were low with space travel. I thought it would be low poly giant rocks where if you fly too close the "auto landing" feature would enable and force you to choose where you want to land.
I did not expect every planet and moon to be a skybox png
I expected nu fallout in space and it looks like this is exactly that. If they're putting loading screens everywhere and won't even let you actually go open world or pilot your ship they could have fucking used the id tech engine at least it wouldn't look so bad and run so bad too.
>And that less than exciting story hook?
That's the perfect way of putting it. It's not BAD exactly, but it's as far from inspired as you could get. Science fiction stories need a good basis. You need to spend much of the game getting acquainted with the setting, the conflicts, the things the characters in the universe take for granted that seem strange to you, and so on. But this is about as generic space setting as it gets. It's a real let-down.
I was going to say I'll stick with it for mods but the fact that they aren't releasing a creation kit to the public outside of their "creation club" (i.e. no free mods for Starfield) makes me think it's just going to be something I play once and set aside. Which is less than I can say about a lot of other games, in fairness.
No way they have fucked up 5 times in a row now and have always dumbed things down more and more and gotten progressively more lazy. These faggots don’t work don’t have have ambition to do anything they don’t even get a new engine they probably all sit around and shit post here all day and get drunk and high in the office. There is no way in hell Bethesda is a real studio it’s a massive scam where the biggest cheaters liars and thieves app get rewarded with a cushy “job” that they managed to scam their way into. I’m done thinking the game for just incompetent they are malicious
Just finished playing ~6 hours and bros... I was so hyped for this game but it has been massively disappointing.
>performance is godawful, had an easier time getting fucking Jedi Survivor to run at a playable framerate
>FSR2 looks like shit, DLSS is mandatory
>first 2 hours are the worst opening of any Bethesda game in modern history
>graphically dated
>ships are completely useless, faster to just travel from the map
>multiple load screens and cutscenes to go between planets
>terrible writing already and my background has come up one time
>gunplay is BAD, whoever said this was an improvement on FO4 was blinded by hype, the maelstrom is one of the worst feeling ARs ive ever used in a game
>side quests have all been boring so far like "recover the datadisk" or shit like that
>planets are NMS tier with repeating foliage and rocks, mining takes too long
>ship combat feels like ass, but small issue since u never have to be in the ship anyways
>inventory mgmt worse than oblivion
I can't believe how big of a fumble this is. IGN and Gamespot were being fucking generous
I said it before and I'll say it again, preordering is terrible and a bad idea. That goes double for any Bethesda game. Enjoy your steamy bowl of technical difficulty soup braindead preorder people. Todd does it again.
Lmao snoygers are gonna have a field day once it fully releases on xbox. Every consolewarfaggotry thread you’d have xbottoms talking about “starkino”. Guess it wasn’t just cope and those grapes really were sour,
it was obvious desu, I was hoping I’d be wrong but it being mediocre isn’t surprising
Locking to 30 in this game is kinda retarded though because all of the interior parts run at 60+ but as soon as you get to a city or anywhere with a lot of NPCs/ships it tanks badly. So you're giving up a lot of frames for like half the game to make the other half slightly better
was so close to upgrading my PC or getting a Series S because the hype was starting to get to me…thank fuck I didn’t, all these streams have me seriously questioning anyone who gave this a 9 or more, this is the safest route Bethesda could have taken and it is just so fucking boring, and I say that as someone who likes spreadsheet simulations
First thing I did was look down. No legs. Seems like you can date the game just by that. Feels very pre 2016 vibes.
This game isn’t even meme level crowbcat fun bad. It’s boring and that’s it, I don’t think it’s possible to make a fun video shitting on it.
Games that look worse than Skyrim shouldn't be this performance intensive
>People actually paid 100 dollars for early access slop
not only that, but yet again people literally and unironically paid thousands of dollars to upgrade just to play this, on top of that $100 tip for Todd
IGN and Gamespot were right all along. and people gave this 10/10 kek
At least the hardware can be used for other things but that $100 is ouch
5800x + 3080 i get like 70 fps at max low 50s minimum
Fucking horrendous for how bad the game looks in comparison
Why did I believe him again?
It’s boring bad, if it feels like the game was AI generated. I seriously can’t imagine a human creating something like this
Thats because most of the content literally is algorithmically generated lmao. People (like me) have been saying it was gonna feel like boring soulless slop similar to NMS since the first reveal for that reason.
No it’s not even the content, it’s everything. The UI, the overall game design, the story, the characters, the cities, the mechanics, the visuals, the human models, everything in this game is so wildly inconsistent with eachother, underbaked, and poorly thought out.
That's because this was Todd projects and he once again put his friend Emil in charge of the writing and directing.
They're both 105 IQ midwits
The 1000 planet thing is irrelevant since its procedurally generated garbage.
They didn't really lose any development time since people have pointed out that these "HANDCRAFTED" locations that are supposed to show up on the random planets to give you something interesting to find are literally just copypasted locations that are just part of the main quest.
Down to the same loot, enemy placement, landing spot, everything.
The 1000 planets thing is even worse that you would have thought. Going back to what Todd promised with all these procedural planets is even more insultin now that people have realized how they actually work, its fucking hilarious.
Fucking Todd just can't fucking keep himself from lying and overpromising his shit when he is fully aware people will call him out on it.
The funniest part is
During the last couple of gameshows everyone was like "SPACE SPACE SPACE MUH SPACE ENOUGH OF SPACE WHY IS EVERYONE DOING SPAAAACE"
Except every single one of these games is shit, and us spacechads have nothing to play. And we won't have anything because game devs will be like "well, this niche is over-saturated anyway".
Fuck you
>4070
Told you fuckers it wasnt worth upgrading to anything less than a 4070ti/7900xt unless you're running a 10 series card. If you had that you would have been fine.
This is going to be a pattern from now on. Games are going to continue to run like complete ass for a long while.
>>first 2 hours are the worst opening of any Bethesda game in modern history
only thing i disagree on
this was the first time i started a bethesda game that actually felt like a modern AAA game
it was solely because of the dim atmosphere in the mines and the fact that everyone had the helmets on with the light shining on the face which hid some of the graphical weaknesses
it actually felt like a modern aaa studio for once
then you go outside and the pirates attack and that illusion gets swatted away like every other lie the game is built on
Skyrim grandma died before getting to play Skyrim 2 because of this game kek
Yeah thats it for Bethesda. Hows its acceptable they keeping using that crusty old engine that was never even good to begin with?
Every explanation for this is an insult. "Oh, its because the mod community knows this engine and we want to nurture them" WTF?? So you release a buggy, shitty, gimped game, thats inferior to similar games 5 years older on purpose in the hopes that your own costumer base fix it and makes the game playable? What business model is that? No other industry allows this.
Bethesda should go fuck itself and everyone defending it.
Fallout 76 in space.
> is the writing at least good? or the rpg elements? I'm thinking long tern playability here
No, not at all. I think the skill system is a mild improvement. You now have to do little quests for each skill, like "shoot 50 people with pistols" to be able to put another skill point into pistols. It's a far cry from something like Skyrim, let alone Oblivion or Morrowind, but it's better than Fallout 4.
The writing is atrocious and grating. The only character I can tolerate is the autistic mole face woman, and that's just because every other companion is awful. Your companions come up every 5 minutes to ask about how you're feeling about things so far, it's a joke.
>Who here got filtered by the shit performance?
Me, gave up and refunded after I couldn't get 20 FPS even on lowest settings
My hardware's not new but this is by far the worst performance I've seen in any game yet and it doesn't look any better for it either
It's basically a good foundation for mods. They're banking on modders to bail them out again and actually make the game good.
now go back and think hard on phil's words a few months ago:
>starfield won't be a system seller
the signs are right there, ni**er was trying to warn us even as a company head lmao.
I feel like the mod meme is the greatest trick ever pulled.
Have there been mods which overhauled Skyrim and F4 by cutting all voice dialogue and adding RPG systems, or are these mods just sexy meshes and gimmick weapons which fire nyan cats when you strike
Calling it now, Todd is going to retire after this mess.
He is going to grab all the stock money from the Zenimax buyout and fly away to New Zealand
> I'm incredibly confused on how this is Todd's magnum opus that he's been wanting to make for 20 years
Todd is a fuckin midwit that runs a literal clowncar of a studio filled with his retarded yes-man friends like Emil and Pete Hines, developers that can't program and an engine that can't handle pretty much anything anymore.
Why are people surprised?????
all that tech
all that computing power
all those years of work
to generate a world so ugly.... do they not understand we're supposed to want to spend time in this world?
What even was his idea cause obviously he didn’t write the game, it was his brainlet friends. Was his space game idea literally just no man’s sky cause it feels like he wanted to do that and couldn’t cause it would mean pretty much getting a new engine. It also feels like after the critical response to NMS he was already too far deep and desperately switched to just making a Bethesda game again which would explain why it does neither of those things well.
The games take too fucking long to make to be such shitty products. It's not worth waiting 8 years for some garbage.
you essentially spend your time doing whatever and whenever you land, you can run around and explore the immediate area in your vicinity. some are hand-made, most are gonna be procedurally generated
space combat and spaceflight is shit and should've just been removed from the game. if you want a space combat/exploration game, play Everspace 2, where you can move throughout a solar system and do space stuff - if they could combine the space mechanics of Everspace 2 with starfield, then maybe it would be passable. but the engine fundamentally can't handle that
I can't believe I actually fell for that next-gen video meme they put out.
This looks like an Xbox-360 game.
> Did everyone forget that Fallout 4 ran like complete shit too?
Apparently they also forgot that Bethesda hasn't made a good game since Oblivion and even that had major design flaws and reeked of laziness.
>nms 2
Giving them too much credit here.
They don't even manage to be better than nms1.
actually laughed out loud in new atlantis when i walked into the outland store and it was a single room with one npc at a table and no visible merchandise
Why can't this game be fun? I love space games and I just wanted a game where I could have fun shooting shit and travel in space. This is so boring, combat feels unresponsive, and space travel is a fucking joke.
I can't take this 40 fps bullshit anymore... I'm setting it to low. It's called nasapunk because you need a NASA supercomputer run it.
Yeah my 4070Ti shits the bed on 1440p too, doesn't help that the framepacing is awful even when above 60fps
>4070
Poorfag lmao you're not worthy of Todd's magnum opus
Its a bethesda game. You're supposed to immediately fuckoff and ignore the main story so you can larp as a space explorer. You want good story stop playing fucking video games and read a book or watch a movie. There has never been a video game with good story. At least not made after 2002.
how many games have you played that you honestly can't think of any with a story that's good and engaging
Its a video game. The entire point is to engage with it. I don't think 'engaging' is the right word to describe a good story in the context of video games. I honestly can't think of a single one that stuck out at me as anything more than just memorable for its ideas and the occasionally really well done character.
Why would i want to spend hours in a world that look the same as outside
I'm watching a streamer play this and it looks so fucking bland and boring. It also looks graphically really bad, especially when you are on a planet. What a fucking joke
>companion ai not working
>use instigation make enemy using companion ai
classic todd jank
even worse than fallout 4
Most mods are largely surface-level changes. Look at the top 50 mods of both Skyrim and FO4 and they don't change the core gameplay very much.
SF isn't going to become Skyrim 2 with elves, orcs and swords. It's going to be SF with more guns, titties, and intercourse.
The worst part of combat is if anyone gets close to you and uses melee, literally just stunlocked for 3 seconds. Awful design.
starfield
star - space theme
field - like rural fields and horse troughs.
they didn't hide that it's same again
I refunded it and am now torrenting it. You did not deserve my money Todd-sama
I'm still hoping the initial negativity isn't all completely true, but I can't say I didn't expect it.
I completely thought the game would be shit based on everything I saw and expected, but at the same time, I thought the game must have been a product of extensive focus group testing and such, so it had to have something really fucking catchy and interesting to it.
It's sad to hear people aren't into it. I guess it was worth waiting for reviews before buying, as always.
Still optimistic that the game has something special in it that people just haven't found yet though.
>Wide as the ocean
>Deep as a puddle
It's just a saying, Todd, you didn't need to apply it to everything...
>believing Todd's sweet little lies
this is from someone who has owned at least one of each console company's product in the past 16 years and I own a PC.
grow older and you can spot the false promises a mile away
>I'm still hoping the initial negativity isn't all completely true
Some of it is moaning from people that have proformance issues (like myself) and some of it is people who bought into it completely.
There is something there and it'll be good when people get to play it properly but right now its just not what people were dreaming of.
The way some people are reacting its like they wanted the love child of Fallout 4 and Eliete Dangerous in terms of exploration and gunplay.
The gunplay (and swordplay) is there but the exploration is mundane despite being in fucking space and planet hopping.
Personal gripe is the lack of an aesthetic, NASApunk is apparently a thing but its all this sterile brutalist shiny crap and lacks a real identity of its own.
But I suppose New Atlastis being some new-age space society would be exactly that.
What happened to the Bethesda team that made Skyrim? Did all the talent get poached?
>skyrim
>talent
All of the current Starfield threads currently on /v/ are the same fa***ts recycling the same complaints about the game. Some of the complaints are valid, but they are acting surprised that a Bethesda game is a Bethesda game. Bethesda games only really shine once a modding community starts to support them, and there seems like there is a lot of potential in Starfield.
I don't think any of them even played it. I spent six hours on some bumfuck moon out in the boonies because there was so much shit in the landing area I picked like a massive oil rig looking thing infested with zerg and NPCs giving quests in the other locations.
It works like old school procedural games or 'roguelikes' I guess zoomies call it for whatever fucking reason. 'No content' is the most absurd complaint I've heard so far. Is supposed to have some onions guzzling epic marvel plot to save the planet in every space outhouse you bungle into like a murderhobo to count as 'content?'
you paid 70-100 bucks to play the equivalent of an old school procedurally generated game?
OP HERE!
WE ARE SO BACK!!
FUCK YOU TODD AND YOUR STUPID BULLSHIT
(I refunded after 3+ hours, the rules aren't super strict about the 2 hour thing you'll be fine if you barely played and you'll never know if you don't ask)
they didn't learn from fallout 76. They could have loaded the first 4 hours of the game with good things (padded with lenghty cutscenes and character creation) and then make the refunding policy ultra strict
watched a bit of someone else stream this game
why is everything so blurry and washed out? its really depressing to look at the visuals most of the time
i cant believe i paid for this shit. last time i get fooled by Todd
upscaling tends to make things blurry like that, and dynamic resolution is on by default so stuff will occasionally look even blurrier.
Will the modders be autistic enough to make this game good?
> atomsk, what didn't you like about my game?
IT RAN LIKE SHIT AND WAS STILL UGLY AS SIN
THE STORY WAS NOT AT ALL INTERESTING IN THE FIRST FEW HOURS (THE STORY HOOK SUCKED)
NEW ATLANTIS IS FULL OF NIGGERS. FAT ONES.
FLOATING TREES IN THE DISTANCE
TOO MUCH MENU NAVIGATION
That's the only hope I have for the
>1000+ planets meme
Madders could make some wild shit in these
bethesda games were shit since morrowind, poorly optimized messes
the only truthful statement that has come out of that f**got Todd’s mouth is his iconic phrase “it just works” it represents their products very well since they dont even know how or why does X works with that awful spaghetti code
I don't even know why I bought it. Never even took off from the tutorial planet. Fucked around looking for fixes to the mouse aim and FOV being shit, got frustrated the slow moving NPC in the intro stopped moving when I got too far ahead, shot the pirates, went into the ship and saw a crafting menu with a dozen different resource types and immediately quit and refunded it. I'm not doing chores just to get to the next middling shooting match.
>try climbing a ladder
>loading screen
ALT + F4'd and uninstalled this shit so fucking quick
Honestly the core structure is flawed which is the utterly disjointed traveling and exploration. It would be a massive undertaking to fix that and I don’t think the base game has enough intrigue and entertainment to facilitate putting that much effort into it. You would have to remove barriers and add infinite procedural generation, remove the loading to enter ships, remove the taking off loading, and allow realistic traveling from one planet to another. You would basically have to remake the whole game. Only one capable for that was Bethesda who should have worked hard to get those systems in place
>"And the most disappointing thing so far for a game called Starfield... Where's the space gameplay?"
lmao
I remember that one shill here who kept screeching "IT'S NOT A SPACESIM!§§!", yet there is not enough space exploring (close to none) even for normies
I expected skyrim-level junk food, not daggerfall with worse performance, can I get rutracker to refund my $0?
Abysmal PC performance
Even GPUs like the 4070ti cannot run the game well at high settings. It runs especially bad on nvidia cards for some reason while also being sponsored by AMD, no official DLSS support, etc.
But even if you get a 4090 you still will not get a good framerate due to becoming badly CPU bottleneck if you try to reach consistently above 100fps, especially if you do not have a raptor lake CPU (like 13900K)
Orange = average
yellow = 1 % low
green = 0.2% low
I tried the game
It seems like i got badly CPU bottlenecked with my 13900KF, unclear if this can even be fixed.
It was confusing to install the DLSS mod, i ended up following this video but i am not sure if i did it correctly.
I couldn't play for long due feeling discomfort in my eyes from such awful performance, for me it was unplayable.
Even when i got to over 100fps on average it was still bad due to the framerate being unstable, then it got worse. There are some things i could try for better performance (such as enabling resizeable bar) but i doubt anything would be particularly effective, other people have also had really bad performance problems.
The game also crashed multiple times when i tried to play it.
I tried making a female character that wasn't downright unappealing but that failed really badly, none of the option made her look even remotely appealing to me. What's up with game companies forcing masculine facial features upon female characters?
I am not sure what to feel about the first short section i played, you did some mining with a laser but that was very quick so it didn't get boring, i could however imagine it getting booring if you have to keep doing it.
Next i will try having e-cores disabled in bios and resizeable bar turned on, it might help with getting a bit better performance (i played on windows 10).
Star-citizen fanboys are gloating now
Not that there was ever any hope for starfield being a viable alternative in the first place, it never was. Star-citizen is a highly restricted single-player game that doesn't offer anything close to proper exploration.
Most of the community do however recognize that starfield failing doesn't make star-citizen any better.
Hardware unboxed confirms: you cannot get FPS stable above 100
Their results are similar to the earlier review showing that i9-13900K is faster than anything from AMD in this game, not that it matters much since the game is garbage anyway.
It does not seem like heavy overclocking would be enough to get acceptable CPU performance in the game.
Dropping steam score
Right after the official launch 89% liked the game, first time i looked at the steam scores it had already fallen to 85%. now that figure is down to 82% just a few days after launch.
While 82% isn't super-bad it's not exactly great either, not what microsoft needed.
Baldurs gate 3: 96% liked the game.
Flight of Nova: 95% liked the game.
No mans sky: 76% liked the game (91% of recent),
Spacebourne 2: 83% liked the game (65% of recent).
It is worth noting that No mans sky was poorly recieved at launch but the developers put a lot of effort into improving the sentiment about the game is a lot better, this is why the recent reviews are so much better.
My metacritic reviews
I ended up submitting 3 reviews in total (the first PC review got deleted) i ended up giving the PC version 1/10 and the xbox version 0/10.
xbox review
You don't need an xbox to know that 30fps is awful and worthy of no higher than 0/10.
Even console peasants deserve better than this.
Stop defending awful corporations and incompetent game developers.
PC review
Starfield was never a game that i really look forward to playing. The reason i wasted my SSD space and internet bandwidth on it in the first place was because of the controversy, i wanted to see for myself how bad it was.
Unfortunately even with 13900KF and 3090 i still couldn't get acceptable performance and changing graphics settings didn't really work, sometimes i would get over 100fps on average but more often than not my framerate was so bad my eyes started hurting, sometimes dropping down under 30fps.
Looking at what performance other people are getting i see that you cannot get over 100fps stable without DLSS 3 but i do not have a 40-series GPU so i cannot actually get to a framerate that would be tolerable for me long-term.
There also isn't anything particularly exciting about the game in the first place. You cannot freely fly your ship or even use vehicles. The game is simply bad. Not really worth playing for free unless you are into reviewing games or just happens to be a very curious person.
I gave it 1/10 since that was my experience with this game, of course for other people it can be anything from a 0 to 10 depending on their tolerance for low framerate and whether or not they are can use and are ok with the extra lag (and other issues) brought by DLSS 3 frame generation.
I rated the xbox version 0/10 since it is locked to 30 which is even worse than what i got on high end PC (in addition to other way xbox is awful).
Deleted review:
I tried this awful game mostly out of curiosity, obviously i didn't pay for it.
Despite having a 13900KF and a 3090 i was never able to get acceptable performance, because of that i was able to stop testing fairly quickly due to pain in my eyes, it was that bad.
There isn't really much of a reason to play this game besides seeing for yourself how bad it is but if you like me cannot stand bad framerate (1% low under 100) you should probably play something else.
If you actually want to play a spaceship for real (rather than just watching cut-scenes of it) i suggest Flight of Nova, it was actually fine to play and my 3090 was overkill for it (1440p165).
But if you just want a shooters there are thousands of better options out there.
For me it was a 0/10 since it was unpleasant for my eyes to play it, maybe if you have access to the DLSS3 mod and a 40-series GPU or can stand awful framerate it's like a 6 out of 10 but since this was a user review i should go with my experience (awful).
Metacritic ended up banning my account
They never really explained why besides "You may no longer submit a review due to the content of your previous comments or reviews."
So i can only guess why they ended up deleting my reviews and banning my account,
Wide as an ocean - shallow as a puddle.
This is a critical and very brutal review from someone who actually bought the game (which i obviously never did)
If you design your game to consist of cells within cells and on top of that, divide everything within with loading screens, it kills the flow of the gameplay and immersion pretty effectively. Towns and procedural sandboxes created upon landing on planets, should be at very least dynamic and seamless for the player to explore. It's tedious, that you have somewhat limited sandbox to play in any given time and yet, you still need loading screen for every single shop, office, hatch, alley, cave, ship and whatever there is.
This kind of game design is not a standard anymore, maybe it was 15 years ago when Fallout 3 came out, but not anymore. There's a lot of games, that do this pretty seamlessly or unnoticeably and let player just walk into places, without loading into a new instance every couple of minutes.
Let's say you wanna do a simple task, go sell your junk after a simple fetch quest and go talk to NPC on another planet, you have 15 loading screens coming.
"
Exit planet loading screen
Enter orbit loading screen
Land planet loading screen
Exit ship loading screen
Enter shop loading screen
Exit shop loading screen
Enter ship loading screen
Exit planet loading screen
Enter orbit loading screen
Land planet loading screen
Exit ship loading screen
Enter building loading screen
Talk to NPC!
Exit building loading screen
Enter ship loading screen
Exit planet loading screen
Enter orbit loading screen
Land planet loading screen
"
It's atrocious design.
All this is managed via relatively unintuitive and slow UI. By slow I mean that you need multiple key inputs to do anything and almost all inputs require HOLD instead of TAP. This combined with transition-animations makes UI feels sluggish. If I hit my map open while fighting, I need 3 inputs or one long hold to get back to shooting. If I open my inventory, I can't use hotkey to immediately open my quest log, first I have to close inventory, then open quest log.
Here's the biggest cons with short examples included:
-Terrible story. This is subjective, but it's nothing but a series of fetch-quests. Go to planet X and pick up Y. Ending is the ultimate sci-fi cliche, just so you have a "story-related" reason to keep on grinding the game over and over again. Bland and forgettable characters, choices have no consequences.
-Engine, graphics and animations feels outdated. Ugly dull NPC's, mediocre graphics, old mechanics, gunplay has no punch to it and melee is awful. Game just feels in general it's decade old, tasteless, odorless, without any grit or attitude. Quests are mostly just generic fetching.
-Bad, overcomplicated sluggish UI. Unresponsive, transition animations, requires unneccessary inputs. Lack of color-coding, no icons. At glance, you can't tell if item restores health or give you a temporary buff. It's minimalistic to the point where it becomes a burden.
-Bad AI. At harder difficulties, enemies are nothing but a bullet sponges.
-Bugs. Perk progress gets bugged, stealth is bugged, NPC's floating through the world, worst case breaking quest lines, input prompts go missing, ragdolls and items are flying in the air, enemies see and shoot through walls, game says you're in combat when you're kilometres away disabling fast travel.
-Loading screens everywhere non-stop.
-Encumbered. Even with maxed carry capacity perk, you're encumbered in an instant. Selling stuff is also a pain, since no vendor has that amount of money you can dump your junk at one go. Just a tedious procedure to be constantly "24h-resting", which actually takes some time, in front of a vendor or Trade-A-post.
-Anything generated is repetitive copypaste resource grind. Caves, Outposts, Mines, Labs etc. Layout is the exact same, loot is the same, enemies are the same, even at the same places doing the exact same thing. Once you've done one Cryolab, you've done them all. Random planets devoid of content except for rocks, few plants, few animals and couple POI-buildings each; all have same structure, nothing to them but grind resources.
-Inventory management is a pain. Nothing is well-organized. No icons, no color-coding. For example; food items, heal items, buff items even ship parts all get mixed up in "AID" category and it's a pain to manage since there's no visible indicators of any kind to tell what items do other than plain text. "Tikka Masala" and "Premium Alien Cuisine" doesn't tell you much. At glance I have no way to tell, if item restores health or gives me a persuasion buff.
-Navigating through UI requires way too many unnecessary inputs and almost all inputs are HOLD instead of TAP.
-Basic game mechanics are behind perk-grind. You have to put in dozens if not hundreds of hours your time to unlock all features and mechanics in the game. Ship building, armor and weapon modding, base building, stealth, picklocking, crafting, weapon specialization, carry capacity, HP, Stamina, they are all locked behind perk-specific grind that takes too much time.
-Leveling up is way too slow. After 40 hours, I was at level 29 and barely even get to touch Tier 2 perks. We're talking hundreds of hours playtime until you've leveled up enough and grinded out actual good perks like Planetary Habitation, Outpost Engineering, Weapon Engineering, Starship Design or Spacesuit Design.
-Poor performance relative to what game actually looks like.
-"Travelling in space" is mainly just loading menus, fast traveling and landing/takeoff animations. You don't really feel like you are going anywhere, since you're just constantly loading from one instance to another. For clarification, I don't mean or expect that travelling between star systems or planets should be seamless, but exploring a town or a planet definitely should be for the most part.
-Ship building system is janky and you are unable view all parts available at one place.
-Lots of other minor but necessary QOL-stuff completely ignored like DLSS, FOV, lacking hotkey customization and lack of further explanations on multiple different occassions, like in a ship builder.
Gameplay itself, shooting and looting, is somewhat enjoyable and locations are detailed, but dealing with terrible sluggish UI, endless amount of loading screens, unresponsive menus and animations nonstop just makes the game so heavy and tedious to play that it is almost not worth even playing. You probably spend half of your playtime navigating through menus, loading screens and transition animations.
Bad UI and nonstop-loading screens are easily the most annoying part of the game and the biggest thing that bothered me to the point I was unable to enjoy the game itself. It just silly that you load 3 seconds in to a single room.
Overall it's a weird abomination of a game from last decade which feels more like beta, early access or a barebone for the modders. It's completely designed around player putting in hundreds of hours in order to unlock and experience all the mechanics which is a lot to ask, considering how tedious it is to play, how outdated game feels and how uninspired the content is. Intentional game design choice where you're supposed to keep playing the game over and over again is just plain terrible because of this. You're not getting content that is worth the time invested when farming NG+. If you focus only a main story once and maybe one or two faction questlines, you won't be able to fully experience 90% of the mechanics. You need to grind quite a lot to fully unlock everything.
Simply put, game is just not fun, it looks mediocre and feels terrible to play. It's a barebone for modders, beta, EA, whatever you wanna call it, but it's definitely not a polished next-gen AAA-title worth of 70$.
Outdated game, outdated engine, outdated dev team, outdated CEO.
The following very brutal metacritic review hits home, you can tell that this is someone who has actually spent a lot of time playing the game.
Let me start: I am owner of premium edition so I have been familiar with this production for a few days. First at all I will honestly state that I feel cheated out of $100. And just to be clear, I based my decision to buy not on hype or rumors, but on carefully following official information from the developer, publisher, including their CEOs. So I don't feel like a dumb sucker, but like a person who was deliberately lied to. I want nothing to do with future products with the Microsoft and Bethesda logos. But about that in the summary at the end.
I begin with technical aspects, because it is easer. In a nutshell: primitive port from consoles. Therefore, VRAM does not exceed 6 GB, and RAM oscillates around 6-8 GB (although on PC 24-32 GB today is not surprising). Hence the constant loading screens, even though the whole thing should sit in memory even though everything works in small instances. And I'm not even mentioning such technical nightmares as the lack of support for proper anti-aliasing in 2023, no DLSS, no Intel ARC GPU support or problems with textures not fully loading, exactly the same as in Forspoken. And that embarrassing performance even on extremely strong configurations with graphics dating back 7 years! How about AI of NPCs and enemies? What AI? What faces animations? What is it? A joke? The whole thing done as off-putting as possible. 3D engine is terrible, I mean terrible outdated and you feel it literally everywhere. Fatal engine, fatal port. And yet, these are only core technical issues, on top of that there is the content, and this content is as if from 2010-2013. It is unacceptable. This way of giving gameplay even comes from the 90's and has nothing to do with current standards. And this applies to the content as well as the form of its delivery, i.e. UI/UX. And it's hard to believe that this is a product released in the year 2023, there are such is the coarseness of everything, feel so cheap, so... lame. Use of Creation Engine while owning the rights to use the id Tech engine. This is lunacy!
Now we move deeper, and you know what? No alien races, whole Galaxy is open, but there are NOT any other vivid civilizations. The narrative in this game is reminiscent of the work of a 15-year-old for a contest entitled "The story of the world. How I imagine life in 100 years". But, on the other hand, the entire Galaxy we've come to know is purely American: from the architecture, to the disgusting mass culture, to the customs. Where are the cultural differences between the different worlds? Hey, you creators of this carcass without imagination, do you really think that in the future everyone will live in the same cesspool as you today? This is not the 1980s! What is it I ask? WHAT IS IT?! It insults intelligence. Where is the plot? Where do choices matter? It is unbelievable how infantile everything is conveyed and would require an looong and deeep elaboration, but I just don't want to rummage through this rubbish, simply: this is total mess.
This should be groundbreaking Crysis for the year 2023, not a horribly optimized, archaic product in form and content. This game is in much worse state them Cyberpunk on release because Cyberpunk at least had a good, modern 3D engine and a contemporary gameplay concept.
This game should never have been released in this state - this is not an indie developer, but the largest software publisher in the world. You can see right through, Microsoft and Bethesda have real problem with internal management, because it is not first blunder this year. Maybe next year something will come of it, if MS does not abandon the project and rebuild this game from the ground up - and I write this completely seriously. For now it is unplayable. This product is a complete mess at this point, it's a beta version, and situations like this gives Microsoft a terrible reputation - again. Something really bad is going on there. Their recent actions resemble management at a market stall, not a multinational corporation. If Microsoft wants to stay in this market as a major player, needs to change something, because the Activision-Blizzard purchase won't help anything if you don't release good products. Of course, in the short term you can count on profits from an uninformed or undemanding customer, but this is a marathon, not a sprint. I am sure, that Starfield discredit will only confirms this.
And looking at the above I would give a summary rating of 4/10, but in this case I in good conscience give 1/10. Why? Because, let me repeat myself, for months the developer and publisher in their official information simply gave outright lied about whether this product will be. So as owner of premium edition of this game let me summarize: I feel SCAMmed in very bad way which I write utterly honest. Almost everything from the official announcements and official statements turned out to be a lie. Enough is enough.
What game publishers will learn from this
Game publishers will learn that you do not actually have to deliver quality games, instead you can simply lie about the game in advance and then cherrypick rewiers to still get a decent score.
Some game companies will only select full shills who will all give the game 10/10 regardless of quality while others will include a few famous outlets like IGN but still have mostly shill reviewers to keep the average score decently high. It wouldn't surprise me if microsoft opted to skip IGN as a reviewers next launch after their 7/10 starfield review.
Sure the reviews of the actual users will still be bad but those can be discarded as fanboys for other companies/products such as sony/PS5, nvidia, etc. Maybe partner with some really nieche hardware company, sabotage the performance on all other platforms and then everyone who did not buy from said nieche hardware company can be discarded as salty fanboys.
People who refunded starfield during early access couldn't review it
This is why the percentage that recommends it is falling. Early on a lot of people couldn't recommend against it since they refunded it.
It is a bit strange how we constantly run into issues with people being unable to leave negative reviews. Meta-critic deleted my negative reviews and i cannot review it on steam since i didn't pay for it in the first place.
Despite all this the game isn't going great based on user reviews
Alternatives
Let's give examples of alternatives ranked by recent steam reviews (all reviews if only available) that actually has decent spaceflight:
Dyson Sphere Program (97%)
Outer Wilds (96%)
Flight of Nova (95%)
Kerbal space program (94%)
Rebel galaxy (92%)
No mans sky (91%)
house of the dying sun (90%)
Space engineers (89%)
Avorion (86%)
Everspace 2 (84%)
Space Bourne 2 (78%)
Empyrion (75%)
X4 foundations (72%)
Elite Dangerous (72%)
Elite Dangerous Odyssey (64%)
Star-citizen (not on steam, predatory mactrotransactions, pay to win).
Note that the percentage that recommends the game is far from perfect in terms of evaluating how good the game is, it's just that it's hard to find better methods that doesn't involve you trying the games yourself.
It's also unclear if just looking at recent reviews is fair since a game might get reviewbombed from upset fans despite being overall good, that seems to have happened to spacebourne 2 recently (was 68% earlier for recent reviews, now 78%).
No decent space flight:
Metroid prime trilogy (not on steam)
Baldurs Gate 3 (96%)
Alien isolation (93%)
Dead Space (90%)
Cyberpunk 2077 (90%)
HELLDIVERS (88%)
Journey top the save Planet (85%)
Mass Effect Legendary Edition (82%)
Star-wars Jedi: fallen order (81%)
Lifeless planet (77%)
Starfield (76%)
Star wars jedi: survivor (68%)
Destiny 2 (62%)
2D games:
Endless Sky (92%)
Starbound (91%)
Starsector (not on steam)
"you cannot walk on a gas-giant"
I have seen many fanboys defend not being able to explore gas-giants with "you cannot walk on the surface" but that's not excuse just doesn't cut it.
Todd Howard did lie claiming that you would be able to explore all planets.
You can land and explore anywhere on the planet. Not just this planet but all planet of the system. Not just this system but over a hundred systems.
A gas giant with rings was shown when he said that all planets in the system could be explored.
If the game actually had decent spaceflight you would be able to fly over a gas-giant with your ship to explore it. Even with the dogshit engine starfield has it should have been possible to implement something like that.
The atmosphere on gas giants are so dense that you will get crushed as soon as you fly into one.
The pressure is altitude dependent so it wouldn't get crushed right away, you would just have to abstain from flying to low (depending on your space ship) You could have a pressure warning for when you are flying to low.
Star-citizen sure has it's problems but at least they already did what starfield fanboys claimed wasn't possible.
In case you wanted to know a few reasons on why Starfield is so unoptimized.
People much smarter than everyone working for bethesda have discovered severe coding errors in starfield thanking the PC (and probably also xbox) performance.
Starfield allocates its memory incorrectly where it doesn't align to the CPU page size. If your GPU drivers are not robust against this, your game is going to crash at random times.
Starfield abuses a dx12 feature called ExecuteIndirect. One of the things that this wants is some hints from the game so that the graphics driver knows what to expect. Since Starfield sends in bogus hints, the graphics drivers get caught off gaurd trying to process the data and end up making bubbles in the command queue. These bubbles mean the GPU has to stop what it's doing, double check the assumptions it made about the indirect execute and start over again.
Starfield creates multiple `ExecuteIndirect` calls back to back instead of batching them meaning the problem above is compounded multiple times.
What really grinds my gears is the fact that the open source community has figured out and came up with workarounds to try to make this game run better. These workarounds are available to view by the public eye but Bethesda will most likely not care about fixing their broken engine. Instead they double down and claim their game is "optimized" if your hardware is new enough.
I tried the game again with the new nvidia driver
Today nvidia finally updated their drivers to i installed it to see what performance i would get.
First i got 1% low at 80 which definitely didn't provide me a great experience. The game felt laggy.
All settings at low with 864p render resolution.
Main good thing about the game was the low gravity gameplay. It would have drawn me in if it wasn't for all issues with the game and lag.
In space 1% low dropped below 60 which was awful.
The max wattage for the GPU was 375 so it wasn't close to fully utilized. It was probably CPU bottlenecked
30% more performance needed to reach the 1% low target of 100.
There is room for CPU overclocking but not +30% in a sustainable manner.
Besides the awful framerate the actual spaceflight gameplay was awful, me having played flight of Nova earlier definitely made the whole thing a lot of worse. From wonderful newtonian physics to this laggy mess.
Why are so many people still enjoying the game?
Something that does perplex me a bit is why so many people are still enjoying starfield and insisting (countrary to massive evidence) that it's a top tier gameplay. A lot of people have a hard time accepting that other people simply do not like the game after having tried it.
One obvious appeal with the game is how some planets look visually. It actually looks good at some locations.
The game does not however feature raytracing so it's not actually a visual masterpiece. For the no wow moment actually came.
For me i have found that framerate (as in 1% low) below 100 is so detrimental that the extra graphical fidelity provided in return just isn't worth it. With starfield i couldn't get close to that performance target even with a 3090 and 13900KF.
Still despite having performance target viewed as unreasonable by a lot of PC peasants i could enable raytracing in pretty much every game that supported it and still easely meet my performance target, i just had to enable DLSS usually but that was about it. The only other games i couldn't get decent performance in so far was starcitizen and nioh 2 in addition to games hardlocked to 60 where i couldn't unlock it via modding.
The other redeeming quality with starfield that i found was the low gravity gaemplay in terms of how you could move, it actually felt nice to jump around in low gravity. This is something starcitizen should learn from.
The combat don't seem very challanging
First of you have to go through loads of filler content to actually get to the combat and when you actually get there you easely win at your first attempt.
This is a general theme with this game. There isn't any challange anywhere.
When you enter your ship you just have to press a button to take off and then you will be in space.
Comparison:
Having manual flight with full physics would likely alienate a lot of people (Flight of Nova isn't particularly popular atm) so for games targeting a larger audience it's probably best al also allow for automatic flight to to select locations but requirering manual flight to land elsewhere (thus rewarding skilled players).
Allowing the ship to automatically land at certain locations could be used to allow the player to wander way or course, then you just call your ship and it will automatically land in the location you selected.
The reviewer microsoft didn't want to send a code to gave it 60/100
This is in line with the pattern we have seen. As the non-cherrypicked rewievers grade it the metacritic score falls lower.
Starfield pairs near-impossible breadth with a classic Bethesda aptitude for systemic physics, magnetic sidequests, and weird vignettes. But in sacrificing direct exploration for the sake of sheer scale, there's nothing to bind it together.
Fake planetary exploration?
I have seen some shills try to defend starfield with "you can still explore the entire planet, just in small chunks" well no. You can not land anywhere you want, you can only land on select locations.
Area of a sphere = 4*pi*radios²
Area of a circle = pi*radios²
To get the fraction of how much of a planet that can be explored for each landing spot we take (distance that can be traveled)² / (diameter of the planet)²
The diameter of earch is 12742 km
In starfield you can walk 4km before you hit hit an invisible wall.
4² / 12742² = 1 / 10147410.25 = 0.000009855%
But of course bethesda would never bother do add water exploration and starfield fanboys would defend that with "you cannot walk on water" (ignoring that boats and submarines exist).
Real exploration would also require things to be permanent, not having a new environment be generated when you return back to the new spot, i have heard conflicting statements regarding if the terrain is actually permanent.
You can get permanent terrain from procedural generation by using one and the same seed for the entire planet but i am not sure if bethesda actually did that.
I did hear it claimed that "the terrain itself is the same for everyone, but the points of interest are different for everyone." but i have not yet verified that this is actually the case when you select a landing location manually.
Having the same points of interest be randomly repeated over and over is definitely problematic. It would have been better to only have fixed points of interest close to designated landing spots (hand-crafted).
Flight across an entire planet has been done before without procedural generation or bad graphics
Microsoft of all companies somehow managed to pull that off with the microsoft flight simulator.
Did the game get botched because of xbox series S?
At first i assumed that the limitation on how far you could travel were due to the explorable area being very limited (compared to the size of real planets) but then i came across information pointing towards that not being the case.
The game does seem to have connected tiles, it's just that they block you and prevent you from going further in-addition to not providing you with any land vehicles or flight.
Note that the video above is not proof that the terrain will not change if you select a different landing location.
I was also informed that you can actually select landing locations semi-freely (you still cannot land on water for example).
So maybe they could have included things like atmospheric flight all along but cut it out of the game in order to not make the series S look as bad as it actually is (ruining the game for everyone in the process).
Currently though the game crashes if you try to bypass the invisable wall with mods so it might be the engine being dogshit, don't hope for too much from mods.
Fallout76 in space
Going by steam reviews (which excludes early access refunds) it's now the same score as fallout76 and is before we see any of the following:
Things like that is often the cause of a lot of people recommending against the game after buying it (the publisher making it worse for the player to earn more money after the players already paid for it) currently nothing like that has happened but it still has 25% recommending against it.
The recommended specs are misleading
Todd howards told people to upgrade their PC if they had performance issues. There are however 2 big problems with that.
0. Even the best hardware on the market results in poor performance.
1. The recommended specs gave people the impression that it would run well on better hardware.
Starfield recommended system PC specs according to microsoft bethesda
Operating System: Windows 10/11 with updates.
Processor: AMD Ryzen 5 3600X, Intel i5-10600K.
Memory: 2x16 GiB DDR5 @ 6000 MT/s with tightened timings and subtimings.
One big elephant in the room is of course DLSS3 frame generation, not officially supported but can be added via mod. It's restricted to 40-series (which most people do not have) and it does unfortunately add extra latency in addition to the image quality degradation.
