Gaming @beehaw.org stopthatgirl7 @kbin.social 10mo ago

Starfield's Numbers Surge in Early Access - Insider Gaming

insider-gaming.com Starfield's Numbers Surge in Early Access - Insider Gaming

Starfield's numbers have swollen in early access on streaming and gaming platforms - and the global release is yet to take place.

55 comments

Shame. If people keep paying for “head start”, companies will keep selling them and making bank off FOMO.

On the plus side, plenty of guides getting created so I can start tomorrow without fear of fucking up my first character too badly.
- I worry that this also has a rose tinted glasses effect on early user reviews. The only people leaving reviews for the first few days are going to be the people already invested enough to pay extra for early access, and they may be more willing to overlook issues with the game.
  
  That's precisely what I'm seeing with streams of the game. There's so many bugs and just bizarre design decisions, especially with the opening hour or so, but the streamers then claim it's a perfect game with no problems.
  
  I wonder how long it takes for some of those people to transfer to a more embittered relationship with Bethesda over it? Assuming any of them have that "I'm staring at a title screen realizing I haven't actually had fun playing the game in weeks but the dopamine loop of the 'loot, kill, craft' system had me deluded into thinking I was enjoying myself. Like a social media doom-scroller or something" moment.
- As someone that doesn't mind waiting, I appreciate all the people paying to beta test the games before I play them.
- I too like to wait until people can tell me how i have to play the game.
  
  You used to be able to literally brick your build (get to a point where it's impossible to progress any further) in Bethesda games. I'm sure that's changed now, but that paranoia lingers.
  
  RPGs almost always need a little hint on what's actually useful, this game doesn't have respecting AFAIK and is obviously quite long.
- I haven't bought a triple a game on release in ten or fifteen years. For this one enough of my friends were already playing it for several days by the time I got it that it's hard to see it as "early" (certainly not patient, either, but it's fun to cheat on a diet now and then). And I'm really not finding it buggy particularly, no more than any non-aaa title would be shortly after launch. I hate to be overly kind to Bethesda but it's really not worth the hate the net is leveling at it
I'm watching a streamer play the game, and what I see looks like I'd have some fun, and others probably feel the same way.

I'm just not interested in playing at like 30fps on a 3080. Maybe some patches or driver updates can improve things and I'll check it out in the Steam Winter Sale or something.
- Being a patient gamer is best. We need to give it at least 6 months for Bathesda to optimize the game and fix the major bugs.
  
  They haven't even fixed Skyrim yet.
  
  One can hope, but I kinda doubt that they can pull out like a 50% performance uplift, unless there's just some weird bugs that tank performance.
  
  Modders already on top of optimization. DLCC 2.0 mod already out there. Runs 40-50 fps 4K/ultra on my system unmodded. 3080ti, 12900k, 128GB DDR5, m2.
- Here are some numbers. I’m at 42 hours played. Resolution 2k, settings are on High. Ryzen 5800x and a Radeon RX 6800xt. The last session of ~5 hours had an average FPS of 108, Starfield is more optimized than BG:3 and Remnant 2.. at least for AMD. I had to lower a lot of Remnant 2 settings and it still averages around 55.
  
  Ony 3080 with a 5900x I'm constantly getting 60fps at 1080p (unfortunately for now that's the only screen I have), meanwhile BG3 would dip to low 10s after a few minutes of playing every time
  
  EDIT: I would also like to add that I didn't use DLSS or FSR in both games, since my hardware is more than capable of running both on maximum quality at 60fps 1080p.
- I heard this is because NVIDIA didn’t fund optimizations. AMD did so it’s running a lot better for them. I said fuck it and bought an Xbox with 2 year payment plan and game pass included. Cause no way my 1080ti is ever gonna play this game that good I don’t think. End of an era.
  
  It's all over the place. Some AMD GPUs are far better than the equivalent Nvidia GPUs, but then AMD CPUs are seemingly much worse than Intel.
  
  Then there's reports of Nvidia cards sometimes being stuck at like 60% power, which of course doesn't help either.
  
  It's technically sponsored by AMD, which is why you ~~could~~ can get it free with a processor or GPU upgrade.
  
  Edit: could to can, the offer is open until October apparently
  
  1080ti could’ve been a solid 30fps experience…
- I've also watched some streams, and the performance hasn't even been my biggest concern. I'm just... not interested? It hasn't been gripping me. Even though there are these shiny new things and bells and whistles, it still just looks like another Bethesda game to me, but with a blander setting this time. Though maybe it's more fun to play than watch. I just haven't really seen anything that makes me go "goddamn I gotta get a piece of that".
  
  Replied to wrong level, moving to parent comment.
- AMD folks are having a good time, but nvidia folks will need to wait. The game is purposefully not optimized for nvidia at the moment due to AMD sponsorship. (Also potentially to point out that many AAA titles tend to be optimized for nvidia but not AMD at launch)
  
  That doesn't explain the CPUs though, since with those, AMD is much worse than Intel, so it's not just a simple "game is optimized for AMD."
I can see a lot of bad new standards develop from this, but i also recognise it gets more than just early review copies out rhe door before the majority buys the game making it a tactic bad games cant do and will reward good games to cash in. Still. Lots of potential bad stuff is intertwined with these same points
- My concern is when I'm seeing streamers play games like Starfield and run into a ton of bugs, often game-breaking ones, but then go and praise the game to high heaven.
  
  I just want a basement level of proper standards, that's all I'm asking for.
  
  have you seen what happens if you say you didn't like it? you're told you're a troll, you're negative, you "just don't get it", or they take your criticism and then act like the only alternative is the complete and total opposite of that and try and pull a 'gotcha'
  
  on one hand I would obviously LOVE for reviews (across the board, not just in gaming) to be realistic and not all be 7+/10 but I also understand why they don't to an extent
I played 10hrs and refunded. (Thank god for Steam)
I feel like im in Truman Show. I see how shallow the game is. Everything is a facade. They try to mask the issues of their old game engine and people (streamers and reviewers) just eat it up. Im watching streams where they run into game breaking bugs several times but still praise the game like they have a script to follow.
- This has kind of been my biggest concern about the game from the earliest days, I don't want it to fail or anything but the idea that Bethesda, with their characteristic mechanical jank and traditionally buggy releases, could undertake such an ambitious concept has always found me skeptical.
  
  Procedurally generating planets and stuff is not really the most difficult part of this kind of game, it's having a way to scale your designer-touched content to match that scale and make that procedural content not feel procedural.
  
  If they made a game that took place in one or two systems, or even just a handful, that would've been enough. But I have a hard time believing the 1,000 planets will be filled with content that's any more worth exploring than what they could've put on a handful of more hand-crafted systems. The quantity is not a selling point without some guarantee of quality.
  
  But, I haven't played it, so I could be wrong. Time will tell once the hype has cleared. Maybe modding will add a dimension that a single studio can't accomplish on their own.
  
  I mean, they straight up said that 90% of planets will be empty.
  
  As far as spreading out the handcrafted content goes, in my 60 hours it's been pretty good, but I also deliberately stick primarily to actual quests, only dipping into random exploration and proc-gen mission board quests like bounties and cargo delivery on occasion. I was initally worried that the handcrafted stuff would be limited to the three major cities, but there's plenty of other towns and locations out there. I think there's like three small towns just in the Sol system. It feels like every other system has one or two big handcrafted locations or questlines. I came across stuff like a resort town, a small assortment of settlers I had to negotiate a mutual defense pact for, an abandoned zero-g casino space station, a mercenary bar/motel with the absolute motherload of contraband (and a free ship), just to name a few.
  
  The side and faction quests also are almost entirely handcrafted locations and not just clearing out enemies in generic locations like half the stuff in FO4 was. All the proc-gen quests have been relegated to Mission Boards, so every quest you get from an NPC will be an actual quest, although I had to do one single proc-gen mission to join one of the factions.
  
  Also I'm surprised you saw that many game breaking bugs on streams, because it's actually a very stable release. There's some of the usual Creation Engine physics stuff, or an NPC might stand on a table or something, but I haven't really encountered all that many bugs.
  
  The last drop was when I realized that it's not as open and "huge scale" as people seem to think it is. It's kind of "fake open" if that makes sense. You cannot get into your ship and fly 800m east to your mission. If you click on your mission marker and click travel, a new instance is loaded and your mission is not there. You have to go back and run those 800m.
  You really don't even need a ship honestly, you just fast travel everywhere.
  
  I'll probably get it once the price goes down to 30-40 bucks or so.
  100 was waaaay too much for this shallow game.

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