It's finally happened ... my 1070 is finally below minimum requirements for a game I want to play. Guess this will be an Xbox only game for me because I am not paying the insane prices for GPUs.
Same, for the GPU that is. I don't have or want an Xbox so I guess I won't be playing it for a long time. Not that I ever play Bethesda games at launch anyway.
Don’t own an Xbox or PC, I’m going to wait until they decide milking money out of an old game > exclusivity and play with the future GOTY edition on a smart refrigerator or a Playdate or whatever other weird platform they repackage it for.
It's not going to get better unless companies start making consoles with 1-2 year life cycles (which won't sell, because at that point, you may as well be swapping parts out of your PC of Theseus).
I also love space RPGs. SWTOR was pretty great. It's an MMO, but it has good single player. The Knights of the Fallen Empire/Eternal Throne DLCs are basically single player games and they're really good quality. The KOTOR games are also really great, if a bit older and KOTOR2 was basically unfinished and requires mods to make it even feel 80% finished.
Outer Worlds was okay. It certainly does in some ways feel similar to Fallout in space. But not quite as good and I don't recall being aware of any serious modding scene.
But huh, I thought there'd be more, but I'm struggling to think of space RPGs with a feel like Mass Effect or Elder Scrolls. I'm really looking forward to this, too, cause despite being a buggy mess, I love Bethesda games and I also love sci fi (especially in space).
Not an RPG, but I also love Stellaris. It's a strategy game, but really scratched that hyper advanced sci fi and space exploration itch.
I really liked the Mass Effect Series, it's no Freelancer or Freespace but if Starfield even feels a little bit like what No Man Sky was doing it should be good. Fallout series and TES proves it will be buggy but fun.
Yes. Now that all the consoles have ssds, devs are going to design their games around them. That means asset streaming is the norm. And that means hdds will cause massive pop-in and stutters.
Honestly if you don’t have an SSD save 50$ and get one. Especially for crappier pcs it’s the most significant upgrade you can do and not even for gaming. 10 years ago SSDs were somewhat niche. They were expensive as well. Now I won’t even touch a computer without one basically.
It's probably not 100% necessary; even Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart (which was designed to use the PS5's fast loading speeds to switch between worlds on the fly, and supports the latest DirectStorage implementation on PC) can be played off a hard drive, tests have shown. But any PC recent enough to play Starfield on really should have an SSD.
"Playable" and "good experience" don't necessarily mean the same thing though. Those rift transitions in R&C are rough on anything less than a decent NVMe SSD. Though there may be some room for improvement, as even high end NVMe drives struggle to handle these transitions as gracefully as the PS5.
Whether or not playing off an HDD is truly a dealbreaker though depends on where in gameplay the storage speed bottleneck causes problems. For Rift Apart, it's mostly just an issue with these rift transitions, and the gameplay effectively pauses while it waits for them. For an open world game it could be more problematic (i.e. pervasive traversal stutter during combat.)