Your Starfield experiences

[linuxgurugamer]

This thread is to discuss your experiences with the new game Starfield.

Bug discussions are fine, but let's not focus on that.

 

Linuxgurugamer

Edited September 1, 2023 by linuxgurugamer

[linuxgurugamer]

So, after playing a few hours last night, my initial impressions are as follows.  First, my system specs:

• CPU:  Intel i9-13900K
• Memory:  64 g
• Motherboard:  ASUS ROG Strix Z690-A Gaming WiFi D4
• Graphics:  XFX 7900XT, with 20 g onboard memory (AMD chipset)

According to Steam, I played for about 2.8 hours, but that's not fully accurate due to the crashes

1.  I experienced numerous CTD, apparently related to graphics. I'm playing on an ultra-wide screen, 3440x1440 at Ultra quality, and it kept crashing in the initial into screen.  I fixed that by dropping the resolution to 2440x1440 and dropping the quality to Medium.  I did get a few later on, but then I figured out the next fix, which was to tell my antivirus (Kaspersky) to trust and ignore the Starfield executable and it's files.  I had updated my graphics driver in the morning, but saw that there was an update late in the evening which might have helped after I installed it.

2.  I suppose I'll get used to it, but flying the spaceship was wierd, kind of reminded me of Elite Dangerous, which I had played a bit many years ago.  The flight controls are not like any other flight-sim I've played in recent memory.  For example, the QWEASD keys are NOT pitch, roll and yaw, they are:

• W & S are the throttle
• A & D are roll
• pitch and yaw are similar to the mod Mouse, Aim, Flight, where you position the mouse and the ship moves in that direction

3.  The gameplay was very smooth.  I need to run through the tutorial again, which is really just the first few scenes

4.  The two planets I've been on so far are quite detailed (in the area you are in), with some interesting critters to deal with.  

5.  There are many unexpected twists

 

I'm sure the CTDs will be fixed, it was the first day, after all.  Beyond that, I don't know how to compare this to FO4.  It's so different than FO4.  Travel between planets/stars is somewhat boring, but frankly, that's what I expect space travel to end  up being

I am looking forward to many hours of play, it's obvious that I haven't even scratched the surface yet

Edited September 12, 2023 by linuxgurugamer

[kerbiloid]

https://m.twitch.tv/charalanahzard/clip/CoySecretivePastaPeoplesChamp-GoHm_jWVrAppAYzU

[DeadJohn]

On 9/1/2023 at 7:06 AM, linuxgurugamer said:

• W & D are the throttle
• A & D are roll

That's probably a typo, but if exact would certainly add to the challenge of flight

I wasn't sure whether to get sucked into Starfield now, or make the Cyberpunk 2077 Liberty City expansion my next lost weekend. Rainy forecast might cancel this weekend's outdoor plans in which case it will be Starfield since Cyberpunk isn't released quite yet.

[Casellina X]

Specs:

• CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 5950X
• GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX3090
• RAM: 64GB

I've got 2 days and 6 hours of play time since the 1st according to Xbox, although a couple of those hours were on Xbox, and I've had probably a handful of hours idle in the menus. No gamebreaking bugs thus far, and the only "pucker" situation I was in was entering a system with a handful of hostiles and the game slowing considerably during the autosave. I wasn't sure if things would recover but after a good 30-45 seconds the autosave finished and things resumed.

While I have a dual screen setup, I only use a single screen at 2560x1440. A mix of Ultra, High, and Medium settings has me generally above 60FPS. In the major cities that drops, on vegetation rich planets that drops even further. I'm in no hurry to seek out a performance improvement mod or anything like that. I'll hold out hope that Bethesda uses the coming weeks and months for further optimization targeting the consoles, which will trickle down to PC. Other than some sync issue between PC and Xbox, it has been smooth sailing.

I don't want to comment on the story as I feel any reaction can spoil the experience - I just started to watch Starfield content in hopes of being out in front of any "spoiler-free content" that winds up having minor spoilers. Gameplaywise, it's Bethesda from top to bottom with a space setting. If you like Bethesda games, you'll like this. If you're interested in space, you should like this. It builds upon systems that Bethesda has been using for a while - base building, companions, factions, stealth, clutter, etc. Now they're attempting to add depth via exploring the cosmos.

Exploration is largely... well, Bethesdaeqsue.  A handful of activities dot the area. You should see a couple from your vantage point, and you're encouraged through intrigue to go to the places you see. Of course with moon and planet sized locales, they have to rely heavily on procedural generation. You will see the same abandoned mine, farm, settlement, what have you, as you jump from place to place. If the potential for repetition turns you off, you might as well not even bother. But always bear in mind that just because it's out there, doesn't mean you have to go to it. I've landed in many a location just to turn back around and get on my ship because I didn't feel like visiting any of the nearby points of interest, or it was just far enough of a trek to make it a task. 

One thing that got the internet in a tizzy was invisible walls on the planets. At first I was straying into that camp, however when you get hands on with it, it's not a big deal. The instance size they generate is quite large - double digit KM^2. Distance between POIs can be from 300m to 1200m, potentially even greater. Do folks really want to traipse across an entire planetary body on foot? I'm not sure they do.

On a similar note people were up in arms about the transition from space to planet not being seamless. I was slightly disappointed about that, however we all know that Bethesda's game engine isn't built for such a task. Now, when they said that you can land anywhere on the planet, they're actually almost right. Due to the size of each body being rather large I haven't had the motivation to attempt this, but you could theoretically land just about everywhere on the planet. The only limit seems to be how many instances the game is able to track - and given how many there can be (ship interiors, caves, buildings, you name it), this is really impressive. I've chased ships from surface to orbit, boarded the ship, then went back down to the surface into the same instance state (sans enemy ship).

Space combat is wildly difficult at the start. If you're outnumbered, which oftentimes you are, pray you had a recent save point.  The default ship is woefully inadequate and you should expect to be chewed to bits and limping along IF you survive. And that's a big if, because there were times where I couldn't even drain the shields on a comparable strength ship before exploding. If you plan to do any fighting in space (it's unavoidable) save up your credits for weapons with higher range and better damage. After I got those upgrades then I was able to at least survive. Of course with as much time in as I have, I was able to put together a ship that's a big bully.

Ship Building is lego style, not that dissimilar to KSP. Thankfully no things like dV, TWR, staging to worry about. You do need to keep an eye on mass and maneuverability, weapon power, overall ship power, cargo capacity, fuel capacity... Ok it's kind of a lot at the start, but they have a tool that checks to make sure your ship fits what the game will allow. It's an expensive venture, my first ship costing me every bit of my 160k credits at the time, but satisfying. Understanding how the modules fit together and will look once inside is is a different beast entirely. My first few attempts, and even now, the game constructed a convoluted maze to navigate through to get from the entrance to the cockpit. Fortunately reconfiguring is free so I'll be playing with the layout a ton more.

Gun play is pretty solid although I wish there were ways to peek around corners or properly utilize cover. I've often taken damage behind what I thought was solid cover. As you might expect, stealth is the easiest way to play, but you can easily overpower the enemy as if you were playing as the commandos in General Chaos (throw back for those a certain age).

Crafting is... a chore. Sometimes complex recipes coupled with the ever present carry weight means, at least for me, crafting goes undone. This can be extended to base building. Building some of the modules is annoyingly difficult in terms of materials. It's a hard mechanic to want to engage in. I hoped to be able to extract resources and sell them, but they don't seem to fetch a high price, so I'm confused. But at least base building appears to be entirely optional.

I'm pleased with what Starfield is and attempts to be. It's certainly a game I'll get a couple hundred hours out of without noticing. It doesn't change the Bethesda formula, but doubles down on it, for better or for worse. It will be interesting to see how the game evolves from here on out.

[linuxgurugamer]

On 9/8/2023 at 3:19 PM, DeadJohn said:

That's probably a typo, but if exact would certainly add to the challenge of flight

Not a typo.  Don't forget, this is essentially a console game ported to the pc.  The controls were not well ported.

For flight, I switched to using an XBox-1 Gamepad (made for pc), and it became a whole lot easier

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

2 hours ago, linuxgurugamer said:

Not a typo.  Don't forget, this is essentially a console game ported to the pc.  The controls were not well ported.

... 

This is the horror of modern gaming. 

I know there is more money in Console, but if developers would just craft a good game for PC from the start, I would think it easier to dumb down to console than to try and port Console compromises to PC. 

[DeadJohn]

On 9/10/2023 at 10:03 AM, linuxgurugamer said:

Not a typo.

Your original post has the D-key doing 2 things as the same time. W & *S* are throttle for my copy. It would be horrible if throttle and roll were coupled to the same key.

I bought it during a rainy weekend. Storylines seem ok, but dialog options with NPCs all tend to end up in the same place so it feels like choices have no consequences.

They did a good job with gravity. Zero G combat works well. Jetpacks fly differently depending on the planet. Sprinting seems to cause fatigue relative to gravity or oxygen levels although I'm less sure about that.

Combat is repetitive. Most "abandoned" outposts are swarming with dozens of mercenaries. Stealth isn't much of an option. Sniping isn't good, either, because it often takes multiple bullets to the face to kill.

The overall UI feels dated. The inventory UI sucks. Mods will fix it.

I'll add that performance and stability have been excellent for me. Zero crashes no stuttering on a midrange PC (Intel 12400, AMD 6700XT, 2560x1440).

[linuxgurugamer]

5 hours ago, DeadJohn said:

Your original post has the D-key doing 2 things as the same time. W & *S* are throttle for my copy. It would be horrible if throttle and roll were coupled to the same key.

Updated, thx

[Vl3d]

On 9/8/2023 at 10:19 PM, DeadJohn said:

I wasn't sure whether to get sucked into Starfield now, or make the Cyberpunk 2077 Liberty City expansion my next lost weekend.

CP2077 UP!

[Just Jim]

CPU: Intel(R) Xeon(R) W-2133 CPU @ 3.60GHz
RAM: 32 G
GPU: NVidia GeForce RTX 2080 Super

I've been playing about 70 hours now according to Steam, and I'm having fun.

No game breaking bugs to report.

But I'm not sure how compare it to Fallout 4. Yes, the gameplay mechanics are very similar, so I was doing ground combat at very hard difficulty right from the start with no problem. Outer space combat reminds me a lot of a game called Freespace that I played before finding KSP. So that was pretty easy to get the hang of.

But the tone, the atmosphere... the writing. The entire universe is so vastly different from Fallout 4 that I don't know how to really say which I like best at this point.  Starfield is a lot more laid back than FO4. There is some combat, yes. But the overall feel of the game is a lot different, so I can easily see myself switching back and forth between the two depending on what mood I am in.  But I don't know which one I like better yet.

Would I recommend it? Probably. Depends on the person I suppose.  

[linuxgurugamer]

On 9/13/2023 at 11:53 AM, Just Jim said:

I've been playing about 70 hours now according to Steam, and I'm having fun.

I am limited to only a few hours a week, so as of now, I'm about 8 hours into the game.   I do like it, as you said, it's different, so I would not call it FO4 in space.  But definitely a Bethesda game.

Mod support is also interesting, I'm using Nexusmods.com and Vortex to install mods.  Not quite as clean as CKAN, but works.

[Casellina X]

Vendors not having enough credits is a steady annoyance.  Once you can get full price for items, 5000 credits at most merchants only goes so far with ~35-40 level gear. It appears worse with ship vendors, I'm not sure that their credits even replenish. It makes an already low paying ship salvaging prospect even worse. The first time I scored a high value ship I expected to rake in  5 figures of profit. Well, you can't just sell, the ship has to be registered first. No problem takes money to make money. Well when the registration price is (not exact numbers but you'll get the picture) 13k and sale price is maybe 15k, you quickly learn that trying to hijack ships is a mostly fruitless effort. You'll likely make more money from selling the loot from the enemies you kill on the ship. I'll further mention that the money you spend on registering the ship does not go to the vendor funds, so one or two ship sales could deplete the vendor in short order. So eventually you learn to hijack ships primarily to have a slot to build a custom ships. Ex: You have 3 ships currently, you cannot go to the vendor and say let me build number 4, you have to build on one of the existing 3. 

Of course that hasn't stopped me from closing in on 4 days of play with no end in sight. I do have to start pulling my own leash soon, be a somewhat responsible adult.

[Joker58th]

CPU: Intel i7-12700K
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX2080
RAM: 32GB

This is my first Bethesda game in which I have about 11 hrs so far.  I have not experienced any bugs or crashes at this point.  Running default High graphics settings at 3440 x 1440 where I'm getting >30fps so far which is very livable.  I am enjoying the game.  It's kind of weird being on the ground and being able to jump to another planet but I understand the dilemma of spending time being realistic vs playing the content of the game.  I am intrigued with Star Citizen for the realism side of things in that regard.  The scanning makes me think of No Man's Sky but I'm not sure of the point as yet.  Still a lot to learn and experience.

One of the things I heard about and am looking forward to is ship building/customizations.

Edited September 15, 2023 by Joker58th

[magnemoe]

57 minutes ago, Casellina X said:

Vendors not having enough credits is a steady annoyance.  Once you can get full price for items, 5000 credits at most merchants only goes so far with ~35-40 level gear. It appears worse with ship vendors, I'm not sure that their credits even replenish. It makes an already low paying ship salvaging prospect even worse. The first time I scored a high value ship I expected to rake in  5 figures of profit. Well, you can't just sell, the ship has to be registered first. No problem takes money to make money. Well when the registration price is (not exact numbers but you'll get the picture) 13k and sale price is maybe 15k, you quickly learn that trying to hijack ships is a mostly fruitless effort. You'll likely make more money from selling the loot from the enemies you kill on the ship. I'll further mention that the money you spend on registering the ship does not go to the vendor funds, so one or two ship sales could deplete the vendor in short order. So eventually you learn to hijack ships primarily to have a slot to build a custom ships. Ex: You have 3 ships currently, you cannot go to the vendor and say let me build number 4, you have to build on one of the existing 3. 

Of course that hasn't stopped me from closing in on 4 days of play with no end in sight. I do have to start pulling my own leash soon, be a somewhat responsible adult.

Poor vendors was also true in Morowind, Oblivion, Fallout 3, Skyrim and Fallout 4, in all these games  vendor money restock after a in game day. 
I believe this is to stop players to get idiotic rich fast. But this was trivial at least in Skyrim. You start bartering, say I want to buy an expensive item at an shop, I buy it then sell loot or crafted items worth the current cash the show have. Repeat until more gold than you can spend and 10 time more in stuff to sell in storage chests you put around. 

[Casellina X]

4 hours ago, magnemoe said:

Poor vendors was also true in Morowind, Oblivion, Fallout 3, Skyrim and Fallout 4, in all these games  vendor money restock after a in game day. 
I believe this is to stop players to get idiotic rich fast. But this was trivial at least in Skyrim. You start bartering, say I want to buy an expensive item at an shop, I buy it then sell loot or crafted items worth the current cash the show have. Repeat until more gold than you can spend and 10 time more in stuff to sell in storage chests you put around. 

Correct, and it's not something I'm not used to, it's just a frustration. I've come across about a dozen weapons that will sell for more than 5000 credits, so I'm forced to sell at a loss or hang onto them until I can get to one of the few vendors with a larger pool. I think I'm in the mid 40's as far as level, so it's going to become a compounding problem as  keep picking up higher tiered gear. At this point I'm just shy of 700k credits, so money isn't an issue. I'm just greedy and want more. Well, that and building a ship from a clean sheet can clean you out if you aren't careful.

[Chilkoot]

On 9/10/2023 at 10:03 AM, linuxgurugamer said:

The controls were not well ported.

The flight controls were poorly implemented on PC, no question.  Thinking of dusting off the old Sidewinder FF to see how it feels.

It's also pretty disconcerting when the UI overlay is updating at 30FPS and the action is moving at 100FPS - makes a bad situation worse on PC, IMO.

Pretty much everything else controls better and and feels more natural on kb/m than a controller.  I've played both PC and XBox versions extensively via GamePass, and with a semi-modern PC, there's really no comparison.

Single game-breaker bug so far:  There is one NPC in the Crimson Fleet campaign that can get stuck above the ceiling where you can't interact with them, preventing you from progressing.  Reloading last auto-save from about 5 minutes earlier fixed this.

5 hours ago, Joker58th said:

One of the things I heard about and am looking forward to is ship building/customizations.

Bring a drink.  You'll start tinkering and suddenly realize it's 3 hours later.  The ship builder isn't as sophisticated as KSP (nor should it be), but it's extremely satisfying.

Edited September 16, 2023 by Chilkoot

[kerbiloid]

There was a mod, adding entire Fallout 3 into New Vegas (merging maps and assets).

There was Skywind, Morrowind on Skyrim engine.

Maybe, they will make a Fallfield or Starlout to ride the captured Mothership Zeta in the Bethesda space.

[Just Jim]

21 hours ago, linuxgurugamer said:

I am limited to only a few hours a week, so as of now, I'm about 8 hours into the game. 

I was on vacation when it released, so I had a few days to do nothing but goof-off and play... lol

 

13 hours ago, Chilkoot said:

Bring a drink.  You'll start tinkering and suddenly realize it's 3 hours later.  The ship builder isn't as sophisticated as KSP (nor should it be), but it's extremely satisfying.

Agreed. It's not KSP. But I've still been having a lot of fun customizing my ship(s), once I got the hang of how the ship builder works.
 
 

[Pat20999]

I’m 10 hours into the game!

[DeadJohn]

On 9/15/2023 at 8:29 PM, Casellina X said:

...I've come across about a dozen weapons that will sell for more than 5000 credits, so I'm forced to sell at a loss or hang onto them until I can get to one of the few vendors with a larger pool....

Trade Authority in The Well New Atlantis is pretty easy to reach. Fast travel to The Mast, take station elevator to The Well. 11k credits, and there are seats so you can keep waiting 24 hours to reset credits. (I hate that slow waiting minigame; it's just  an exchange of wasted player time. Mods will fix it.)

It's unfortunate that one of the most vendor-dense locations becomes permanently unavailable if you don't side with the pirates.

[Casellina X]

11 hours ago, DeadJohn said:

Trade Authority in The Well New Atlantis is pretty easy to reach. Fast travel to The Mast, take station elevator to The Well. 11k credits, and there are seats so you can keep waiting 24 hours to reset credits. (I hate that slow waiting minigame; it's just  an exchange of wasted player time. Mods will fix it.)

I've recently started including The Trade Authority in my rounds. Buying 11mm Caseless helps when I'm trying to clear inventory but still pull a profit, but I'm rapidly approaching "too much" of that, like I am with the 7mm since that's all Ecliptic or Spacers seem to carry.

[kerbiloid]

(Not mine).

https://pikabu.ru/story/starfild_ocherednoy_raz_opozorilsya_a_eshchyo_govoryat_nasapank_10666683

They have external vent fans on the Moon.

Spoiler

 

(After a decade of NASA consulting.)

[Superfluous J]

7 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

They have external vent fans on the Moon.

(After a decade of NASA consulting.)

Now that's funny. I assume you find those kinds of modules everywhere and it was just easier to to have one model for planets with and without air.

Still funny.

[Casellina X]

I'm up against a bug where landed ships aren't opening their landing bays, which hinders my usual method of ship poaching. Not sure what caused this but I wonder if it's related to (prior to the bug) ships almost immediately heading into space even though I boarded stealthily. Could be that one too many locked the mechanic. I've also got a bug with my current ship where renaming it was repeatedly failing, and eventually it erased the name entirely. I may have to swap to a different ship and see if the behavior changes. And if all else fails... scrap what has turned out to be a pretty solid build.