2y ago

Starfield on PC is the best way to play - but the game still requires a lot of work

www.eurogamer.net

85 comments

I'm looking forward to playing it. I'm going to wait for 6 months for the game to stabilize. Because that's my Bethesda tradition
- The tech issues are blown way out of proportion, especially with scaling dialed in at 80%. Runs like a dream on my system.
  On steamdeck it chugs in the cities but it's still playable at medium settings.
  
  The waiting 6 months isn't just for tech issues, it's for story patches, or inconsistency updates, or all the little modifications that make life easier.
  
  Playable at medium? With the lowest settings I get 20 fps...
  
  what system? I have everything on high, 100% and FSR2 on. Never dipped below 70 on a 6900XT and a 5800x 3D.
- Yeah, I'm playing 'free' now in (PC) Gamepass. I'll buy it for steam on sale and go full hog later
Really? I've seen lots of people complaining about loading screens. I'm playing on Xbox and haven't had an issue with it. I'm 82 hours in and only really noticed there's a few 2 second loading screens going from orbit to walking off the ship.
- I've had at times 4 loading screens consecutively in the space of seconds. They are quick but they do take me out of the experience. I think the engine is just showing its age in a way that a nice new coat of paint can't really hide for a game like this.
  Fortunately I saw reviews before buying so I knew what to expect and it's not a huge deal for me after lowered my expectations for the game but I can understand people's disappointment.
  
  It's not really an engine issue. It's a design issue. Things have to load when there's no way to predict what will be needed soon. There are lots of ways to hide loading zones when you're walking in connected spaces. Assets can be streamed in when and where they're needed. When you're fast traveling between totally disconnected spaces, there's really no way to avoid some kind of loading screen.
  The best way to handle this for a space game is to hide loading the planet surface behind your ship coming down from space. You can stream them in while keeping the player and ship loaded in so it's seemless. There's no way to do it when you're just teleporting to a location though. However, it could be done better in a lot of places. For example, why does it teleport you right outside the door of the lodge. Just teleport inside and save an extra loading transition after we just had at least one to get there.
  All the ways to handle making transitions better can be done in the CE I'm pretty confident. It's constantly streaming in chunks of landscape as you travel around. They have full control over the engine source anyway, so if it can't handle it they could spend some resources to build that functionality. There's no reason landing on a planet should require a loading screen. Entering structures also are usually through an airlock style door. There's no reason that couldn't be used to mask a loading transition.
- Its not bugs but QoL issues. Stuff like inventor management, map interface, triple loading screens, basic HDR support, absent FoV sliders, no DLSS support etc.
  It is a great game, but has a lot of baffling QoL problems
- "It’s just as polished as Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom."
  Sorry, I can only laugh so much at such a pathetic claim.
  
  You can disagree with someone without saying that their opinion is pathetic.
- I guess the Zelda franchise isn't what it used to be then?
  Suit protection is apparently always depleted, even when it isn't.
  The game randomly freezes my entire system at least once per day, if not more, requiring me to hard reset it.
  Followers & player character often are missing various body parts.
  The game crashes every now and then, sometimes even during saves.
  Sometimes assets don't load properly, which bugged out a faction quest and boarding activity for me until I restarted the game and loaded an old save (which I luckily still had).
  Every time you close a menu (including the container transfer menu) there's a whole bunch of graphical glitches coming from your character loading its assets back in.
  Player spacesuit isn't taken off in spaceships even though I toggled the option in the inventory.
  Outpost containers chain link breaks if you manually add or remove items from them, sort of defeating their point as storage units.
  I somehow managed to break the rendering engine when I triggered the red mile airlock while tabbing out of the game, causing everything to be black. At first I thought I felt through the ground but I actually had to restart the game as reloading did not help and eventually also crashed the game.
  During a quest in New Atlantis I got stuck when I had to use the EM rifle.
  Lots and lots of possible sequence breaking that can bug out quests or other parts of the game.
  The armory module just deletes all stored items when you edit your ship, instead of throwing it into the cargo. (Might also goes for other containers in other modules, not sure.)
  FSR just lowers my performance instead of giving me more FPS.
  Lots of other random graphical glitches, especially related to stacking transparency effects from like smoke for example (missiles, smoking docker in one mission, waterfalls, etc.).
  And that's just the stuff from the top of my head after about 100 hours. I definitely had not that much and not that severe issues with Skyrim, Oblivion, Morrowind, or Fallout 3. Kinda hoped there would be a patch for some of this stuff already.
  
  Player spacesuit isn't taken off in spaceships even though I toggled the option in the inventory
  It only takes it off in settlements. The toggle specifically says so. That's not a bug.
  During a quest in New Atlantis I got stuck when I had to use the EM rifle.
  Not sure what you mean by "stuck," but if it's the quest I think you're talking about you have to shoot them until they ragdoll. I thought downing them was enough, but apparently the game wants you to fully incapacitate them.
  
  Yeah not my experience either. One point you made about the armory items not moving to cargo is not accurate. I have done that twice actually and each time my mantis gear and Livingstone pistol remained in cargo. Possible big with a particular armory piece or maybe you had a full cargo hold? I just know there is more to it than that
  
  90% of what you are experiencing is due to a slow HD not loading assets fast enough. I have it installed on a NVMe and have had no issues like this.
- I’m loving the game, but I’ve had characters pop in and out of spaces, through walls/doors, models that shake uncontrollably. There’s a bunch of issues with some planets having no breathable air and companions aren’t wearing a suit. Buildings with no air locks on one side that have airlocks on the other. I picked up an item that inexplicably was on the door, to move it back to where it was supposed to be, and got instantly arrested….There is a ton of things to patch.
  
  Agreed, I've had a lot of NPC jank, sometimes items in the environment fall out of place randomly. I had a bug where I couldn't land on Porrima III for a quest, I had to go to some other planets in the system, try to save, quit the game, come back, and it let me.
  I sometimes wonder that people are so lax on the definition of a bug that they might say Starfield isn't buggy. It has not been like game breakingly buggy, aside from my quest bug if that had kept up, but it's certainly got a lot of low level bugs that amount to a reasonable bit of jank.
  
  The floor at one of the spaceports just fully disappeared permanently for me, and bounties seem bugged in that they are not removed even after killing all witnesses. One of the transport pods in the main city is also just permanently gone. This is on top of all the issues you pointed out!
- I had to save scum the groundpounder mission because I got soft locked multiple times because an enemy ran off and unloaded before I could kill them to proceed with the mission.
  Also, depending on the location, I've had multiple CTDs that required constant quick saving otherwise I'd have to do the same conversation repeatedly (Looking at you, GalBank in Akila City).
- It's just as polished as Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom.
  LMAO
  You need to learn what the term "polished" means.
- Yes, it is the most polished Bethesda game, but no, it is not "just as polished as TotK". I'm sorry but that's blatantly untrue.
- I've experienced 3 major bugs.
  The boss battle on the Lock for the pirates quest line. The boss bugs out and disappears somewhere, and you either have to reload an old save, or use console commands.
  The adoring fan just deleted themselves, and can't get them back. Even with console commands.
  My ship disappears nearly every time I load up.
  I'm fine with it tbh. No where near what I experienced with Cyberpunk. I'm thoroughly enjoying Starfield.
Star UI and no menu animation mods make this way more playable.
The console-ified UI is terrible, just as it was for Skyrim and Fallout 4.
- Bethesda has never real done UI well. Even Morrowind and Oblivion had pretty bad UI and those were built for PC.
  At least this one recognizes where the mouse is clicking, though.
Very tired of the number of people actively trying to police people playing this. It's fun. It's no Mass Effect or Baldur's Gate, and it's certainly not a GOTY, but it's good.
Let people enjoy things.
The best way to play is to shut it off and just imagine exploring other planets. Seriously, this game fails to be entertaining even when it's buggy as fuck. It's just so goddamn boring.
You know what's fun? Going through three loading screens to watch the same animation of a ship touching down on a planet for the zillionth time, to then get out and start sprinting/bunny hopping to a quest marker, do the thing, get back on the ship, fast travel to hub world, sell your shit, and lather rinse repeat. Or how about pointing your radar gun at the same alien rhinoceros eight times, and repeat that process five times to fill a different fucking checklist? You like campground management? How many campgrounds do you want to manage? 8? 16? up to 24? With another three loading screens between each one? Pick up the resources! What are they good for? Building more bases, of course! And mods, but only after you've dumped precious perk points into those skills. Speaking of - I sure hope you like doing chores, because you get slapped with a "Do this 50 times" task before you can put another point in. Oh joy!
Bethesda games always had a reputation for being boring, buggy clutter looters, but up until now there was still satisfaction in exploring and finding bespoke setpieces - one example that sticks out in my mind to this day, in FO4, the office in that first town that you can unlock to see a skeleton strangling another. It tells a story that you don't get on the 990 procgen planets, and it's shockingly scarce in the other 10 handcrafted ones that also suffer the issue of everything being cookie-cutter and too damn far apart. When I play this game, I don't feel the love and care that other Bethesda games have. It feels empty and soulless, and it wastes so much of your fucking time to deliver that soullessness. I look at it and all I can think is "They spent eight years on this?"
- Im having fun, but i enjoyed FO4 and TESV. Vanguard quest was quite good, main quest a bit meh, but im getting what i wanted.

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