A prominent open-source dev publishes their findings as to what's going on with Starfield's performance, and it's pretty darn strange.
According to Hans-Kristian Arntzen, a prominent open-source developer working on Vkd3d, a DirectX 12 to Vulkan translation layer, Starfield is not interacting properly with graphics card drivers.
Builds out thousands of hours well written, acted, and intricately laid out rpg content that people are immediately sinking hundreds of hours into, has minor technical issues
There's a lot of interesting world building and history to draw upon, it's just a shame Bethesda doesn't do that.
You're never really presented with moral choices. The story never really has you think about things. There's a tonne of lore books and tapes and what have yous that spill a rich tapestry of stories at you, but you're never really shown any of it. I've had fun with Oblivion, Fallout 3, and Skyrim, and to a lesser extent Fallout 4, but at this point I'm kind of tired of it. They're all the same game. They have the same floaty combat. The same lacklustre storytelling. The same awkward "talk at you" conversations.
Morrowind's entire map was hand made. All of its quests were hand made.
Starting with Oblivion, they moved to make most of the map and quests automatically with minimal human intervention.
To the point that they admitted it was too much for the tech at the time and actually hurt the gameplay, and pulled back for Skyrim, using a mix of computer made and human made content, adding in the radiant quest system in an attempt.to make the gameplay "endless".
The modern thing we call AI is just the chatbots from a decade prior with improved processing power and vastly larger data sets to work with. The tech in those chatbots had been working in various pieces for a decade before that.
It's best gameplay is when your ignore the plot entirely and create your own story.
Same with Skyrim, Fallout 3 and Oblivion.
The actual main plots are simplistic, boring and oddly quick. Weirdly, each of the games has an expansion that has a well done quest line, so its not that they can't do it, they choose to not do it.
Fast food can be delicious and filling, but it's not good food.
Bethesda makes the game equivalent to fast food. Specifically instant ramen. You can tweak instant ramen, add veggies, eggs, meat, seasonings, etc. and transform it into something new. It's still instant ramen, but it's different.
Fast food can be delicious and filling, but it's not good food.
this is a completely different argument. Fast food is "good by any measure" because it's good by the measure of delicious and of filling. It doesn't make sense to complement something and then say it's not good in any aspect.
I would like to add Hook to this list. I was flabbergasted when, as an adult, found out it was poorly received. Then I rewatched it as an adult and was forced to agree. Still one of my favorites.
I'm not sure what this means. Is the game not on PS5?
You're absolutely free to enjoy the game. Like I mentioned in the comments, Bethesda's game is like instant ramen. It can definitely be delicious and enjoyable, but it's not good/healthy food.
It does not matter how extensive the lore, character design and world building is if the fucking game runs like shit and crashes. The game being in a playable state is the bare minimum.
Its like a chef spending hours decorating a dish made with spoiled raw chicken.
The fact that it literally can't run on a normal HDD is baffling to me. The game is so poorly optimized that not only does it require an SSD just to run both the graphics and audio smoothly and in sync, but the recommended settings for my 2060 are everything as low as it can possibly go. I got roughly a decade out of my 970 before it truly started to show its age, but my 2 generations old card is barely good enough to run this game?
And don't even get me started on how I keep feeling like I'm playing Fallout 4 because so much of the music uses the same underlying score of the music from the reveal trailer. The number of times I've heard those rising notes from the leaving the Vault scene in Fallout 4 in my 3 hours in Starfield...
This is what happens when a new console generation comes around. Just because you are on PC does not mean you are exempt from industry norms which are largely pushed by consoles. Your 970 was significantly stronger than the xbox one and the ps4, so you could use it for that entire generation if you wanted. Your 2060 is weaker than the xbox series x and the ps5, so should be no surprise that you use lower settings than those consoles.
Same with ssds. They werent required for so long because the consoles didnt have them. Now they do, and fast ones at that. So devs use them, and sometimes require them.
Now obviously starfield in particular is not a shining beacon of next gen technology and optimization. But those reasons you chose to pick on are not really examples of its failings.
It's worth noting that though those are the "recommended" settings, my 2060 runs high settings without any issues, and runs high settings on every other game I've played, including other AAA releases from this year. It's my fault for not making it clear that those are NVIDIA's recommended settings and not what I actually have it running at. But Starfield is the first game I've ever seen that has simply not been able to run on a standard HDD at all. Even Baldur's Gate 3, which requires an SSD as well, runs competently on an HDD, just with slower load times on models/textures.
I totally understand that tech becomes outdated, especially with the jump from one console generation to the next. And especially that the recent generations of NVIDIA cards have been nowhere near as long-lasting as the 900 and 1000 series were. But Starfield is an outlier even by those standards. It has never put any real pressure on my CPU or GPU, it's all been entirely on the speed of the harddrive.
Running it on an HDD was such a bizarre experience. The game would freeze for about 5 seconds every minute or so, and on initiating any dialogue with NPCs it would stutter for just a moment. NPC dialogue would also be out of sync with their animations, which is to be expected with the stutter. The weirdest part was how the music would stop playing suddenly and the game would go completely silent for about 10 seconds while it was still running smoothly, before all the sounds that had happened in that timespan played out suddenly, like they had been queueing up while the game figured out whether or not it wanted to play them. For this one particular game to have these kinds of issues - especially considering how partitioned the game world is by loading screens - says that the issue lies in the optimization of Starfield and not the specs of my PC. Especially since they all stopped when I migrated the game to an SSD I have plugged into an external SATA dock hooked up over USB C.
Bethesda is sub-par in just about every aspect of game development. Shallow combat. Basic dialogue trees. Skill/feats haven't evolved in several games. Engine so old it has to have loading screens for every type of transition.
But you picked the story and acting to tout as good? Bethesda is well-known to have pathetically bad main-story arcs. Only a handful of side quests end up being engaging to most people. The face animations are...better now but still deeply in the uncanny valley. Their acting is usually deadpan with only the merest speck of emotion and shown as if the actor is reading their script for the first time during recording.
Honestly the main thing that Bethesda games have going for them are a detailed, hand-crafted world that is fun to explore and experiment in. Which...Bethesda handily disposed of to have the majority of its world and worlds be procedurally generated.
Wow, so informed you are, you are talking of Starfield right?
You wouldn't happen to just be talking out of your ass trying to make broad generalizations about games made 20 years apart to try and cast shade on a game you've never played would you?
This comment doesn't actually say anything. It's just casting aspirations against me because you didn't like what I said. It doesn't rebut anything or offer differing opinions on anything I proposed.