>>, and no pariah of optimization.

Cyberpunk runs perfectly well on the Steam Deck, while Starfield struggles to stay above 20fps(this is me agreeing with you btw)

>> Starfield seems kinda dull? I don't really get what all the fuss is about.

Because it is. Eurogamer put it into words right - Bethesda games were always about exploration, in Morrowind/Oblivion/Skyrim/Fallout it was always core part of the experience to point your character in any direction then keep walking and see what comes up. Some of my best memories of those games were of doing exactly that. In Starfield this isn't entirely absent, but it feels....pointless. You are either coming across randomly generated events which makes it feel like playing an MMO, or just warping between locations which don't really matter. Like some people said - even after not playing Oblivion for 10 years I can find my way to Kvatch without even thinking about it, the locations were super memorable. In Starfield there's no point in even learning their names, it's all just there as set decoration(outside of the few main cities).

I think digital foundry mentioned each planet has one main attraction/city and not much else outside of that. I could see how that would put a damper on exploration.

There are mods to increase the amount of 'random instances' that are created on a planet when you land, which takes the game from 'isolated-feeling space exploration game with not much to do' to 'everyone else has already built hundreds or thousands of facilities on every single planet or moon in the galaxy.

What's the name of the mod (or mods)?

and the multiple load screens between you and your destination really hurts my time in starfield.

Calling it horrid is honestly too kind.

Granted I’ve been spoiled with my Strix 3090OC/12900K which was consistently able to crank out high amount of frames at 4K and ultra settings out of the box for any title I threw at it but I knew that couldn’t last forever.

Starfield seems exceptionally poorly optimized however and runs like dogshit even after abandoning ultra or even high settings. I’m looking at an average fps of around 40 in mundane indoor settings.

This would be less egregious if the game at least looked amazing and had all the bells and whistles like ray tracing etc. But it looks awful even on ultra, some of the textures look like they’re meant to be an easter egg as a throwback to the original Doom.

Scaling the resolution barely makes a dent and it also doesn't help that I can't access the most useful mods because MS fuckery with the Gamepass edition.

On the XBSX it’s even worse, it would be funny if it weren’t for the fact that it’s so sad that MS still isn’t able to produce an XB exclusive that can hold a candle to Sony’s exclusives.

And don’t get me started on the actual gameplay/story experience.

I too am a big BGS fan, since back in the Morrowind days and I too am one of the few Andromeda fans (there’s dozens of us, dozens!), but this one feels underbaked even for BGS’ standards. In particular the opening of the game, as if they forgot to replace the placeholder storyline and gameplay with the actual story.

After my first 4 hours or so I was still waiting for the game to really start to the point that I was convinced the game had glitched on me and skipped the beginning or something so I looked up a let’s play only to be dumbfounded that my game was working as intended.

All in all it’s such a weird game to me, like it’s a beta or something.

I play an hour here and there every once in a while, hoping to be hooked and see what others seem to be seeing, but if anything it makes me want to repurchase No Man’s Sky on Steam (had a copy way back when for the PS4 but lost it during a move).

> one of the few Andromeda fans (there’s dozens of us, dozens!)

Maybe even many dozens!

But yeah. I know my nostalgia glasses are strong, and that every game from Oblivion to 4 has a dull main quest and some dully written side quests among the gems, but I thoroughly enjoyed digging for those gems and all the little worldbuilding in between. Andromeda was kinda like that too, but with (IMO) much more solid combat, but the expectations from the public were totally different.

But... I am not running into the gems in my short time in Starfield so far.

another Andromeda fan checking in :)

That series certainly had its problems, but the ideas in it were sound.

For a supposedly next-gen game, it sure didn't take long for Starfield to get an HD texture pack mod from the community.

I was really really hyped for a new Bethesda game. After a few weeks playing Baldur’s Gate 3, though, Starfield just landed completely flat with me. Characters just feel completely lifeless, both in terms of voice acting and in how they move.

i'm still playing the latest zelda.

I'm only really excited in Starfield as an updated RPG modding sandbox. So the real release, for me, is next year.

This is what I have decided. I am leaving it in the oven and will see what happening on the Nexus in a year.

But what if you compare Starfield performance with Cyberpunk's at the release time? Will it be still as different as now? I obviously don't know what happens in the future, but maybe some optimizations will come to Starfield as well?

I played about half of Cyberpunk on release at 1440p on low with fsr (render resolution about 1080p) at about 30fps. It ran and looked good. On same system with starfield I get about 10-20 fps (render resolution about 480p) and that is just the intro before going to any city. It looks like crap. Runs like crap. And crashes every couple minutes.

On top of this, Fallout 4 didn't get much faster with time. Neither did Oblivon/Fallout 3.

Skyrim kinda did with SSE? But that took a looong time.

Cyberpunk visuals knocked my socks off. They still do (even more now). Once CP77 expansion comes out at the end of the month with dlss3.5, starfield will look like even more trash. Trying to play starfield after bg3 has led me to a disappointing experience due to the face textures alone.

I have a 5800x and an RX 6800 XT - definitely not a low-end system - and this is the worst performance I've had in a game. I have a 4K display and use FSR2 with 50% (!!) render scale in order to maintain as close to 60 FPS as possible.

All that for a game that looks pretty okay, with uncanny valley NPCs, awkward (awful?) animations, and fine I guess graphics overall. It doesn't look like 'Creation Engine 2' levels of quality, it looks like a well-done Skyrim mod. It looks as impressive as the HD mod packs I've tried for Fallout New Vegas or Skyrim, but it runs far worse.

It's not an apples to apples comparison, but Baldur's Gate 3's level of detail in texturing, character design, and animations was mind-blowing; Starfield has a mid-range level of detail and very clearly didn't bother with any sort of motion capture (and the voice acting for a lot of NPCs is mediocre as well).

> for what you get, the performance is horrid.

Well Starfield is the n-th iteration of Bethesda hacking on their Gamebryo fork, and this has always been true (Fallout 4 - Skyrim - Oblivion). Not that these were bad looking games in their day, but they always kinda ran like dog.

They weren't bad looking, but neither of those games were celebrated as graphical masterpieces either. As far back as I can remember, Bethesda has always made games with behind-the-curve but acceptable graphics, with bad performance and lots of bugs. It's the incredible moddability that justified all of this, with mods elevating those games to great graphics, as well as eventually fixing any other shortcomings.

Oblivion was more cutting edge at the time, and it sheer scale (along with Morrowind's) was quite unique.

> , for what you get, the performance is horrid.

I have a 5 year old Alienware laptop that I use for the occasional PC gaming.

The graphics were horrendous. I found the problem was related to how Starfield generates the settings. It didn't correctly determine the performance of the machine.

I set everything to Medium, switched off film grain/motion blur, then played with draw distance until I got quality screen and good performance.

> Starfield seems kinda dull?

Not going to lie, the first 3 hours were painful for me. So much so I was planning to give up on it. The game does open up, and when it does... wow.

I think I have around 50 hours of gameplay and I've barely scratched it.

I have ~25 hours and I'm bored to tears. I've unlocked the first couple of powers, finished a few corp quest chains, but nothing about the game has grabbed me, and I have similar complaints as the GP: it's dull, the universe feels huge but flat, empty, and pointless.

I'm full of regret both that this is the most expensive game I've ever bought, plus that I upgraded my GPU just to play it.

I really want to love Starfield, and based on comments like yours I keep feeling like somehow I'm missing something. Should I keep playing? Does it get better, or do we just have vastly different tastes?

That sucks. I'm about 20 hours in (almost completely sidequests, I think I'm still in the second main storyline quest) and loving it, but that's how I've always played Bethesda games. I go and make my own fun as soon as possible.

Not every game's for everyone though, and a good rule is to wait a month or so on single player games so you can see what reviewers who align with your taste think.

The fuss is apparently many people love the Bethesda RPG formula.

I personally don't, it bored me already by Morrowind and have given Skyrim and Fallout 3 few chances, but I know there's many millions that love it, and I guess Starfield is for them.

knew I recognized this comment. Starfield looks perfectly fine, with some pretty impressive vistas to admire, and that with a RTX 3070 at 5760x1200

I remember when I first saw No Man's Sky I just wanted it as a screensaver. I don't have the time to invest in a second job as a space explorer, but I sure can enjoy looking through a window of a spaceship going to exotic places.

Yeah, the style and worldbuilding seems fine, which is no surprise from a BGS game.

Neither is the janky feeling of the engine.

Yet some of the magic is not there...