[MEGATHREAD] Starfield - Your experiences!
For those who have pre-ordered it is already here, the rest have to wait a little longer. Starfield is finally here! Have you bought it, why or why not? If you've already played it, what do you think of it? We are very curious!
Discuss all things Starfield below!
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I've been having a ton of fun with it. I've only played 4 hours so far, but it's definitely the smoothest Bethesda game in terms of performance and animations, also in my experience not many bugs. Playing on a 1440p monitor with a 7900XT and I get pretty consistent 100fps (my monitor freaks out if I raise the hz higher than 100 so can't tell how high it'll go).
In terms of gameplay, space combat is reasonably entertaining and flying the ship is fairly well thought out. Whilst you can't fly directly between planets like in Elite Dangerous, the primary purpose of ship control is combat and it does fairly well. On my computer, loading screens are pretty much instant, so travelling between planets isn't a problem. Combat is fairly fun, and the AI behaviour has been much improved from previous Bethesda games. Still not always perfect but they do behave more naturally. Environmental storytelling also has a much larger presence again, with a lot of interactions and things to read. Also, this really fulfils my fantasy of being just a citizen in a sci-fi world. Walking around my ship, seeing the little bathroom and crew chambers, it's really cool, it feels very lived in and really makes it feel like you're an explorer on the fringes of space, living out of a ship.
There are a lot of comparisons with No Man's Sky, but honestly I feel they're completely different games, by design. Starfield is more Bethesda's take on a Mass Effect style game.
Anyway, people have a lot of mixed opinions, but I've been loving it!
Try a shorter monitor cable? I had a really long cable that did not deal well with high refresh rates.
Might also need to check what the ports on your monitor support. A high quality DisplayPort cable will probably solve the issue, but make check the spec on the HDMI and DisplayPorts on your monitor to make sure they can support higher the higher bandwidth needed for high refresh rate/high resolution monitors. If your HDMI is only v1.4, but DP is 1.2 or 1.4, definitely use DisplayPort instead.
If you just used an old cable that came with something for free, I would buy a proper cable that supports the newer DP or HDMI specs from someone like KableDirekt.
Thank you for the advice!
Unfortunately I've tried a number of very expensive cables, as well as multiple graphics cards. The monitors used to be fine, but over time they started getting all these horizontal lines across the screen if I go above 100hz. I've also tried Mac and Windows and same problem with both.
I've looked it up though and seems to be a common problem for AOC Agon monitors, so my fault for cheaping out, even though they still cost me $550aud per monitor :(
Thank you! Unfortunately I've tried multiple cables with different lengths, as well as DP and HDMI, different GPU's and different OS's, iGPU vs discrete, the only common failure is the monitor. Unfortunately it's happening on both of them, same model of monitor and seems to be a common flaw. They are about 6 years old now though
For old monitors breaking or acting weird a lot of times it's capacitors going bad & popping. I love looking around at the insides of tech things that stopped working right to try seeing why & maybe fixing them so just curious what could be causing it :)
if I may ask, I see you say that the loading screens are fast for you so the way to travel is not bad in your opinion. Would you say you are OK with the exploration being menu based? (which seems to be the biggest complain so far)
Yeah for me personally it's not a subtractor to the experience. For one, they make those menus super convenient.
But then, as somebody who's played quite a lot of Elite Dangerous, I don't really feel there's that much missing. I know lots of people will disagree with me here, but whilst I agree it'd be awesome to be able to fly from planet to planet, most of the other games that do this it's just flying at a dot in space, waiting until the number next to it gets smaller. Space is big, and really really empty. And while I would still enjoy having that aspect in the game too, I think it's not a bad tradeoff for having much more immersive planets, cities and gameplay. Also most of Elite Dangerous is sitting in a ship traversing menus, selecting a planet and then jumping there. While you can't directly fly between, Starfield has that same game loop. You can just select a planet, mark it as your destination, then jump into the cockpit, line it up and turn on the grab drive to jump to that place. So I feel that it lives up to my personal expectations.
I don't want to invalidate anyone else's feelings or expiriencds though. I'm having a ton of fun playing and seeing the Starfield universe. However I'll leave an update if that changes.
Personally having put in several hundred hours with Elite Dangerous (pre-landings, even), I'm glad to read this comment of yours. I don't disagree about the game loop comparison, and yet I was hoping that Starfield would succeed where ED stayed limp all these years: quadrant-spanning politics, faction progress, living economies and similar. Hell, after knocking out my Merchant elite rank, I just focused on baggin' griefers until Combat ranked up as well, but... menu scrolling for hours to tick that last box? I just couldn't find the time. Especially when planets had no atmosphere, outposts were a joke, and even artifact sites were a half-baked afterthought by an obviously overdrawn team. 😅🥹🤷🏼♂️
Just... Dammit. Why.
Thanks for the insight!