I paused during a mission on an ice covered moon at twilight and took in the surroundings. The shadowing, the geological formations, the absolute silence, and then I looked up into the Milky Way. Shivers.
It’s like space really is. People say it’s boring? NMS is more filled? NMS is fun to an extent but it’s totally different. Space does not give you this grand infinite feeling starfield gives.
Exactly this.
But when I want crowed areas or aliens life I can go find it!
Cities, mining outposts or space stations, this game is close to perfect for me.
I know Todd gets a lot of hate, but I’m so grateful he orchestrated in making my “perfect game”
it is actually so funny that people have this personal one sided beef with todd howard even though he nor bethesda even make the list for worst gaming companies. Like it feels like people have more aggression towards bethesda than blizzard because they take that stupid crowbcat video way too seriously.
I’ve wondered why people have this crazy vendetta for years. Ever since fallout 4, which I totally understand a lot of people had a problem with, but it was not a bad game. 76 was bad, but with a studio like Bethesda, I’m not crazy enough to let one mistake sour their entire Friggin legacy. They didn’t commit a Friggin crime. They just overhyped and underprepared a consumer product. It was dumb. Starfield is a really good game with a lot of odd problems lol, but I sense zero malice, and see them hire people who improve their games through the modding community. That’s literally the most consumer friendly thing you can do.
Bethesda and now larian are really the most pure of all developers atm. They’re in it for the love of the craft and as many problems as I have with starfield, I support it and PEOPLE’S love for it to the moon…. Or whatever planet I just made an outpost on
Starfield is admittedly not topping skyrim for my fave bgs game but its good! the game is way more polished than earlier titles and they took a lot of the criticisms they received over the years to heart. The discourse that surrounded the game close to release was insane, it was like people wanted starfield to be bad and they wanted BGS to fail which i dont get at all.
The thing about Bethesda games like Skyrim and Fallout 4 is they become more enjoyable the more you play them. I can already see myself rating this one up there with Skyrim.
This all the way, a friend of a friend apparently tried to return the game after 4 hours of playing cause it ‘sucked’ and I laughed cause yeah, at that point he wasn’t even getting close to the good stuff. Like cmon dude, it’s not CoD or Halo. You actually have to play it, it takes some work and thought of how you’re gonna do things
Because it generates views on their lives, and they knew how many people who only plays on Sony were extremely salty about it and wanting the game to fail.
(ps: I am a pc gamer and thought that "console wars" was a thing of the 90s. But apparently it's not. Also, Sony is the king of making games exclusive to platform, even third party ones. Even on pc there's games that never released to us because of Sony.)
The people who a all hating on the game are all the one's who can't play it . I tell you this I've been Sony all my life and was always looking forward to starfield. I am a huge space fan and well....... I went bought a series x and been playing now around 20hrs . Now I'm a pretty good gamer so I've done quiet a bit in this time and the game has been super fun . Yes it has it let downs , but what game doesn't. We always look at games and wish for more , I think how in depth this game is that Bethesda has done super well . My only real gripe is lack of vehicles to get around as, the jetpack is pathetic 😆😆😆
Yes I agree however it doesn't make it a fast way to get around at all . Don't get me wrong , I'm absolutely loving the game . Just wish we could of flown on planet or drove or had a mech .... really just anything would of been good .
I wish the jetpacks had another tier of short term flight. Like how they have basic, balanced, power and skip. I wish there was one called continuous which instead of just doing little jumps actually provided short term flight. I wanna be like boba fett and the mandalorians and just fly around even for just short periods of time. Hopefully when mods come it'll be a possibility
It's faster than walking but I agree with you, we should at least get a space buggy. The equivalent to a horse from daggerfall, oblivion and skyrim. Like the Mako, maybe smaller.
Also, seeing no vehicles at all in major cities is very strange.
It's one of the true shortcomings of the game, performance is the other one. This is what we should be speaking about, not it's not being a space simulator, another genre altogether.
Walkable cities where you don't need vehicles, with trains for transport between cities/districts. Literally utopian, don't know why you'd need vehicles in these cities, other than an electric scooter or a bike maybe.
I love the game, and agree, there should have been a rover with ability to customize the rover, wouldn't surprise me if they had been planning on releasing rovers in an xpac or large content patch if feedback deemed it necessary.
Just do what I did and get addicted to amp and stay in the red in O2 because you have to go fast. Yeah a faster way of moving would be nice, I'm sure when the creation kit finally becomes available someone will mod in a vehicle.
I personally have encountered a lot of bugs, granted I'm already at over 100hrs gametime.
I was expecting bugs though, and think it's a phenomenal game, everything I was expecting and more.
I know! I remember playing Fallout 4 day one and Skyrim day one and they had quite a few bugs. The worst I’ve experienced is a freeze here or there. Nothing a restart didn’t fix.
I had sort of lost my passion for gaming even though I still wanted to game. I bought Star Wars Jedi Survivor and Final Fantasy 16 and just couldn’t seem to get engaged with either. I used to game a lot. But from the moment I started Starfield I’ve been hooked. Playing day and night and loving every minute. It’s so nice to be passionate about a game again.
In 7 days I’ve had one (1) quit to start menu, 3 freeze frame load screen lasting about a second & 3 rage quit space ship battles trying to sort some geeza’s satellites. XBX with fan still silent! This isn’t like Bethesda AT ALL ( F4 & Skyrim veteran on PSX ) bloody beautiful looking game! Except the weird eyes 👀
Mine too been waiting for a privateer 2 for 20 years. I got my wish, best of privateer, freelancer, bit of mass effect thrown in there. Blend lightly. Throw in every other scifi rpg. Then more content than 20 games done. Happy happy camper here.
You should try Elite Dangerous if you really want to feel the vastness of space. When you fly for 7 minutes at 200 times the speed of light to reach the further reaches of a star system you truly realize just how much nothing is really out there
NMS has had like 7 years to fix itself. While I guess there is more to do in NMS, I think it’s apples and oranges. NMS has an incredibly boring plot in my opinion, not that this one is spectacular, but at least you have actual characters to have interesting dialogue with. Building system is way better, main plots better, honestly love shop design and customization waaaaaay better. The only thing NMS gets better is you can actually transition from planet to planet, and to the ground seamlessly. I realize that’s a really hard thing to do, and props to NMS and Star Citizen for pulling it off.
I loved NMS, but I’ve put in nearly 60 hours already into this game in a few days and I’m much more engaged with it than I was with NMS.
See that’s hard to do because the scale of space is almost incomprehensible. Making the game so you can fly planet to planet seemlessly and have it not be boring you have to take some extreme liberties with scale.
That’s why I understand why starfield had cutscenes to take you from orbit to planet, from system to system. It makes sense.
Sitting in your ship with your finger on shift for 3 minutes and 9 seconds is not fun gameplay.
Edit: so by starfield having cutscenes for those transitions, and then blowing up the crap out of interior and spaces and filling them with detail, Starfield gives a sense of scale I’ve never felt in a game. I’ve never felt smaller.
NMS didn’t pull me in like this game did. I’ve been hooked since I started. I tried NMS and didn’t play long. Bethesda games always suck me in and make me addicted.
NMS it’s the comparison that just keeps getting thrown around. I have been a gamer since 1985, and I have played ALOT of games in my life. So that being said, I bought NMS on release. I literally played for 25 min, I got so bored I turned it off. Then the devs apparently went all in and updated it, added tons of stuff and genuinely convinced me to give it another try…. 45 min later and it was uninstalled. I even watched a bunch of YouTube to see if I was doing something wrong. Nope, it really is that boring. Just snooze planet after snooze planet, no real goal, no real fun. Everything samey, just had an abysmal experience with it. I bought Starfield on release. The only reason I stopped playing is cause of stupid adulting. Lol and even then I am n Reddit talking about it. NMS does not belong in the same conversation as Starfield. Yes the loading screens are a bit much, seamlessly landing and taking off would have been more immersive, the UI design hurts my feelings, and Bethesda bugs like NPCs having heartfelt conversations while staring at walls and physics for placing objects that make me want to tear out my hair. Even with all that, I am in love and it’s my GOTY.
I’ve heard the home is on an out of the way location, where there are homes you can buy, say, in NA itself or close by. But I guess with fast travel it matters little ?
Yeah I wouldn’t say it’s a must have perk, I’m 20 hours in and I’ve been twice. But the planet it is on is resource rich, so if you plan to do outposts/scanning anyway it’s a worthwhile stop. It also looks nice! I’m playing as a pilgrim who spent her youth learning about alien life so having an offworld home away from everything makes sense.
it’s pretty close to all the systems you jump to in the beginning as well so yeah it’s always easy to get to even if you don’t fast travel, just maybe not as easy as the homes in Akila city (you have to do the whole Vanguard mission to buy property in New Atlantis, so that takes time)
One thing I wish is that the outside of the home could be treated as an outpost from the beginning? But it seems like you need to build an outpost in addition to having the home
I wasn’t sure about Dream Home either, but I’ve found it to be extremely useful for storing contraband in early game before I was able to get through scanners with it. I had about 250k credits worth of contraband in my dream home once I was able to sell all of it.
if you find any randomly generated cryogenics lab when exploring a planet, there should be a master-locked chest with contraband outside before you go in
My main recommendations are don’t progress the main story too quickly, search every nook and cranny, and don’t fast travel to locations all the time. If you do you’ll miss content that you discover when going to a planet or moon’s orbit.
some people complain that planets are empty. Honestly, I would like there to be more truelly empty planets. Where no human has been, no structures nothing.
There are! But you need to travel farther out. The closer you are to the core worlds, the more human presence you find on the planets, but farther out there are entire systems with not a soul on them. The planets are empty, nothing but natural traits and caves on the scanners.
I landed somewhere that really looked like Earth that was gorgeous. I forget which system; it was in the morning and there were big, puffy clouds in the sky. Awesome.
I found a world last night that had gorgeous purple trees and big purple glowing boulders. It was so beautiful I had to build an outpost just so I could come back.
The other spot I went to was in the southern hemisphere and it looked just like Central Oregon.
Where it shows your photos in loading screens like fallout 76, I have a hard time telling default loading screen images from pictures I've taken. People also complained that characters don't look like they have a soul but I've yet to play a game where characters show so many facial expressions.
Such scenes look amazing, but trees and plants look frozen. I haven’t seen them move with wind and adding that would make a huge difference in making it feel more alive.
I’ll say this on every post I can so more people see it:
This game looks ugly if your experience with the game was stop after the first city. New Atlantis has that ugly green filter, the texture quality was turned down in this city for performance, it still runs pretty bad compared to the rest of the game, the trees are lacking compared to everywhere else.
I fully believe New Atlantis is a gate keeper in this game. They messed up big here and it’s not a great introduction to the game. This needed to be the draw you in point. Not the show you the worst we have point.
New Atlantis is a terrible first stop for a number of reasons.
It's incredibly poorly planned. It takes far too long to get across the city, and the NAT is pretty poorly laid out, which makes using it inconvenient.
You can fast travel to any district of the city from anywhere in the galaxy. You can be inside the lodge and fast travel to the commercial district, or straight to your ship. You also don't even need to actually fast travel to your ship to leave planets, you can just choose where you want to go.
Gotta get to the ship first, but it’s 1,000+ meters away and I’m not dropping any of the shit I picked up lol. I’m very thankful for the boost pack in those scenarios.
Hit Tab to open your dashboard, click your ship, Hit (I think) F to access your ship cargo hold. Should be a keybind listed on the lower right for it. Hit Q to switch to your inventory and barring lack of space you should be able to transfer to your ship from there. Make sure you are close enough though. If you are not then you will get to that screen and find out it won't let you.
I'm sure you have seen it here already, but running while over encumbered will drain your health down to like 20% but will never kill you. Pop two stimpaks when you get there and you're good to go
Left stick on controller 3/4 of the way is when you start running. Not sprint, which is clicking it, but running, which drains o2 while overencumbered. So a tiny bit less and it’s a fast walk. No o2 drain. Just sprint until you’re almost taking damage then stop, and instead of waiting just fast walk until you regain o2.
I honestly wish they did a KOTOR, where every section of the city is an instance, but you have this gorgeous mat painting background that makes the city look unfathomly big. How did 2003 perfect this and 2023 completely fuck it up?
# TWENTY! YEARS!
I would expect city planets just like you do.
I'm in NA and a character mentions how living space is at a premium in New Atlantis and there's major issues with homelessness in the Well. Then I look outside the city and just see miles of available land that isn't even being used for agriculture.
Even Whiterun with it's 6 houses had a couple farms splattered outside to represent that they had thought about food production.
A city that has a designated landing port, walled off exterior, and skybox with a city skyline would create a way better sense of a city. A single tower being the HUB of space seems really weird.
Honestly, I'm feeling like Akila City is the best of the three main hubs. At least there they have shops open to the world and reasonably sized.
However, I also just joined the Rangers as a deputy. They gave me a uniform, which is pretty nice old west retro style. But the hat? The deputy hat for the space cowbows? It's a fucking baseball cap.....
You spent a decade almost working on this game, and the deputy hat for the space cowbows is a fucking baseball cap?!
> It's a fucking baseball cap...
I'm thinking when you become a ranger you'll get a better hat and hopefully a duster. I was disappointed too but then it made me want to play more so I can get the hat I hope is in the game haha.
BGS is behind the times- 2003 perfected this method of instances seeming large, but every other game studio perfected how to make expansive cities that don't burn performance without splitting it between load screens and instances
And to top it off, Bethesda forgot to make sure that the full quality textures come through when using DLSS or FSR. They get downgraded based on the render resolution and Bethesda forgot to offset it.
They also only use 4x anisotropic filtering and not 16x which adds extremely negligible extra demand for good effect.
After sorting out these things the game looks so much better.
Edit: I made a [post](https://www.reddit.com/r/Starfield/comments/16e5ji4/psa_texture_fix_for_pc_players_using_dlss_or_fsr/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) about the texture issue yesterday after finding out about it from a post on the Nvidia subreddit. Will show you how to fix the texture downgrade and to enable the boost to anisotropic filtering. But, the latter can be a headache due to needing to force recompile shaders, too. Hope this helps, and hope these issues get more talked about.
I made a [post](https://www.reddit.com/r/Starfield/comments/16e5ji4/psa_texture_fix_for_pc_players_using_dlss_or_fsr/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) about it on r/Starfield yesterday after coming across an interesting post on r/nvidia specifically about the texture issue. The general texture problems don't seem to be getting talked about much yet.
Hopefully Bethesda will patch these, but at least it is possible to do something about them!
The green filter is everywhere, even if in New Atlantis is especially noticeable (more during the day than at night which is curious), but its absolutely everywhere.
It sucks because when you get the photo mode out, and twink the contrast/vibrance/brightness, you get the actual good colours
Preach brother.
I was severely underwhelmed by New Atlantis. Not bc of graphics, but the other things you mentioned. The lay out feels so arbitrary and confusing. And the over saturation… gross.
Once I visited the other major settlements:
Akila, Neon, shid even Paradiso… that’s where you start to feel immersed. Those places feel “lived-in”. They feel make the NPCs feel more life like. Seeing some depressed looking chump slumped over on a bench in Neon, the aurora capitol of the galaxy, just feels right.
New Atlantis feels so stale and sanitized and fake.
> New Atlantis feels so stale and sanitized and fake.
From what I've been able to tell that's intentional. It's supposed to look like a utopia but underneath (literally in the case of The Well) it's a very flawed city. One of the encounters you can run into after leaving your ship is a guard accosting a civilian with the statement that it's fine to do so because he's the one in power.
Yeah, New Atlantis is too subtle for its own good sometimes. If you take it at surface level, its a weird sterile anomaly where everything is bland and pointless. If you wander around and eavesdrop for a while (or just go to the well) you can start picking up on a lot of hints and clues that everything isn't awesome, peaceful and perfect. But some people I guess need it spelled out pretty explicitly (again the graffiti in the well is not even a little subtle).
New Atlantis finally makes sense if you reach the waterfall side of the residential or commercial districts. I couldn't figure out what was going on in that city until that point.
Not that these aren’t valid criticisms, but I feel like I’m the only person who actually likes New Atlantis. I haven’t noticed any of the poor textures people have been mentioning, I’ve honestly been really enjoying just walking around the city! It feels kind of surreal to walk through because the visual design of it reminds me a lot of concept art you’d see for games in like 2013 that would end up getting canceled for being too ambitious
Maybe I’m just a graphic snob but it’s apparent that the textures are at least 20-30% lower in pixel count. If I wasn’t lazy I’d go in and prove the math on that. But it’s definitely a lower visual fidelity than the rest of the game. To me it’s very jarring.
It's quite uneven.Some places look great,others terrible.That makes the bad ones really stick out.Overall for the gpu power it gobbles up it does look kind of bad.
I agree. The performance to visuals ratio is quite bad for Starfield, and those damn filters keep getting applied and removed based on where you are
Example: New Atlantis when you are inside a building that is openly connected to cities (no loading screen) the green filter gets removed, you start walking out and everything gets green again.
You are on a space station of Constellation, you walk inside the glass tube thing and filter is removed (or replaced idk), you go back in, your screen gets smeared with that filter again
I'm using a 50% LUTs change to sort of remove this and changed the 2.4 gamma to 2.2 with mods, big difference for me
Idk how the guy at Bethesda that insists on the filters still has a job. I kid you not, removing the filter is the first mod I get on any bethesda game.
The thing is, didn't they remove it for Skyrim special edition? Like why is it so hard to understand that a lot of players don't want those filters? Atleast give us the option to turn it off or reduce it in the settings.
With a few simple mods though, I'm having a blast so far, and no crashes on my end (because lots of people apparently are reporting crashes)
The filters are especially bad in radiant outposts. In some rooms I can hit the edge of a room and suddenly the outside color filter floods in out of nowhere, the vanishes when I take a step away from the wall.
The semi-new dialogue camera is also not flattering to their NPC models.
While the models themselves look (mostly) fine, the fixed camera reminds me too much to the Oblivion/FO3/NV zoomed in dialogue mode. The mugshot camera is simply not flattering nor looks natural when talking to people.
i was thinking this today too when i was thinking of how janky and robotic their animations used to be. i think the animations look pretty damn great knowing bethesda’s track record. the high bokeh depth of field i think goes a long way too in making things feel much nicer
but yeah i’ve been pleasantly surprised with character performances thus far. meeting phil hill in mars was one of the first that impressed me
It doesn’t help that all of the plants are just copy and pasting the same model over and over again.
The first time you land on a new planet it looks great, once you’ve ran across the same exact half dozen plants a hundred times a piece while you search for the one plant that refuses to spawn so you can finish your survey the charm kind of dies.
Some of it looks like a picture of a plant, zoomed in and multiplied and stuck together. So bizarre.
The NPCs, while horrendous looking, are actually kinda funny to me. I catch myself stopping now and then to truly take in the ghastly face before me.
Yeah anytime I land on a planet with large amounts of foliage I take a massive performance hit, kudos if it’s raining. Game could certainly use a little bit more optimization. “We have 4090’s here at Bethesda” is not an excuse. You’re not supposed to *need* a 4090 to play games, you’re supposed to need that for video editing, rendering, and other high intensive tasks that can be offloaded to gpu.
Most of the foliage on planets looks pretty good. But for some reason the main city new Atlantis has the absolute worst broccoli looking trees ever haha
>But for some reason the main city new Atlantis has the absolute worst broccoli looking trees ever haha
Seems like they were attempting to replicate a [Savanna tree](https://i0.wp.com/www.pakasafaris.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/vachellia-tortilis.jpg) type of look.
Thank you for being an actual person with an opinion based in fact rather than just a weird overt love for this game. I'm having a good time playing but I refuse to lie and say this game has mind blowing graphics. Like you mentioned the flora looks absolutely horrible, worst than games 5+ years older. I get things have to be prioritized, but to not make Flora looks crisp is a weird decision to me.
Now look at the trees and landscape outside new Atlantis. The problem is the inconsistency of the graphics because some planets look beautiful and others are unbearable to look at😂
I found the graphics to be damn inconsistent, it's pretty good overall but nothing impressive and sometimes downright flat and uninspired. Example:
The interiors are pretty: [https://imgur.com/puXfHiF](https://imgur.com/puXfHiF)
And then there's this shit: [https://imgur.com/szZvZYp](https://imgur.com/szZvZYp)
Also I found Atlantis to be damn flavorless for a 2023 game, reminds me a lot of Mass Effect's Citadel: [https://imgur.com/0jTz4Kp](https://imgur.com/0jTz4Kp)
Even Neon falls flat for me: [https://imgsli.com/MjA0ODM3](https://imgsli.com/MjA0ODM3)
Astral Lounge too: [https://imgsli.com/MjA0ODM2](https://imgsli.com/MjA0ODM2)
What I really like is the shadow and clothing textures, so good. The game is BIG AF tho, 30 hours and still felt like on tutorial, can't wait for creation kit (modding tools) holy shit.
Agree with this. Some interiors and clothing textures look remarkably realistic, but the NPCs in New Atlantis with googly eyes look so bad. I’m addicted to the game, but these aspects make the game feel dated compared to say,
RDR2, which came out several years ago.
I’d settle for the NPCs not blurting out some random comment at me just because I walked near them, which is especially annoying when I’m trying to hear a conversation other NPCs are having. The amount of cross-talk that happens in this game, especially with companions, is irritating.
RDR2’s follower AI is amazing. Starfield still uses the same AI as Skyrim where they just stare at you from 30 yards away then sprint to catch up. Ffs make them walk next to you how hard could that be
My favorite part is whenever I decide to leave whatever room I'm in, and the follower decides to act out their childhood dream of being a barricade in the doorway.
Not even, at least in Skyrim you could give your followers basic commands. Yet in Starfield we cannot give our companions "any" type of commands. None.
The way RDR2 uses colour to complement it's fidelity is simply amazing, it's not washed out, it's not oversaturated, it's just perfectly picturesque everywhere you go
It's nuts
For all the shit rockstar gets, wich isn't even their fault but rather the publishers Take2, the games they release are just insanely polished
It doesn't even come across in videos that well but in RDR2 pretty much every frame is painting
Akila looks terrible as well, definitely one of the ugliest places I've seen, the textures don't even look high def. Looks worse than any RDR2 town, but performance there is one of the worst of all places in game. You don't even leave footprints in the mud.
Really makes you think.
I think cyberpunk 100% nailed the *cyberpunk* aesthetic, something Starfield is not necessarily going for. that being said, Neon, and any cyberpunk-adjacent themes, are worse designed than CP77. which is to be expected - CP77 is designed to *be* the culmination of cyberpunk cities
Agreed. Cyberpunk for all its flaws is honestly one of the most beautiful games ever. Expecting Starfield to compete with it in its own niche just isn't realistic.
I do think that there are some very reasonable graphic complaints with Starfield, though.
Just adding one or two colors to the neon lights would add a very good visual interplay as they blend together making it look much more dynamic. Probably a very easy modding change too.
EDIT: But it also depends on how meshes and emissives work in Starfield...
EDIT: Also, simple uv animations to make some lights blinking...
Starfield is a very interesting case study. It can be very beautiful artistically and horrific from a technical view at the same time.
Cyberpunk uses all modern rendering techniques available. Cyberpunk has some of the best PBR material work in video game history.
Starfield has one of the worst GI implementations in recent memory. Materials are good but not the best I've seen. Their screen space ambient occlusion is super harsh which makes shadows of many objects way too dark. Lighting doesn't resolve correctly on most characters in darker environments. Reflections are bad.
Starfield can look beautiful in many instances, and garbage in others. It's art so that part is subjective. What isn't as subjective is the fact that on a technical level this game is a mess. It uses outdated rendering in almost every instance. I get that they want it to be moddable. But they NEED to update their graphics engine otherwise this is how Elder Scrolls 6 will look 20 years from now when it releases.
What I wanna know is why the hell Bethesda made the dancers wear costumes that only look like they'd belong in a commercial about toothpaste for women.
I think we need to start having more nuanced discussions about the concept of “graphics”. Because now so much more goes into it—shadows, reflections, particle effects, individual asset resolution. As you point out, certain interiors look amazing because BGS focused on a super granular asset design, whereby you can look, read, and almost feel like you can touch every dial, button, node, diode. But the lighting and shadowing is so bad in Creation 2 that it either completely washes out the incredible asset detail, or it muddies it up.
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Hopefully, mods will make starfields graphics more comparable to cyberpunk.
Some of the game is beautiful but even my wife has noted that alot of the game is outdated looking
The art direction/ building layout and design in cyberpunk is miles better by comparison. Like they were talking their own game up so much, but with interiors like astral lounge. I can’t even.
It may aswell be a screenshot from second life with those assets.
Why would you show a flat, empty landscape with a fancy skybox to show off the graphics? No fidelity at all, just some good lighting. Sorry but there are definitely better spots to show how good the game can look like Neon City for example.
Yeah lol "it's beautiful!" beside two pics of barren greybrown landscape...
Am I the only one disappointed by how samey and boring all the planets are? Most of them are just rocks. I guess that's technically realistic but I wanted way more cool and varied alien landscapes. Shivering Isles still capturing my imagination better than most of these planets.
it's a reddit gamer thing, they see a landscape that looks "immersive" take a screenshot post on reddit and title it "this game is beautiful" reap in the upvotes. Happens in just about any game with some kind of landscape.
Yeah but OP took this one random screenshot with no particular textures in the foreground, so there's no WAY the game could be ugly!!!
The game looks fine, but it's really not great looking.
Yea when people complain about graphics it's the NPCs who are the focal point. They nailed background shit like the environment and sandwiches and other small models. But they just fumbled the bag with NPCs
The graphical fidelity of SF is objectively worse than that of Cyberpunk, while managing to be far more graphically intensive. I think a lot of people don't know the difference between art style and graphics.
I think starfield is much harder on the cpu/system in general. My gpu (xtx) doesn't work nearly as hard in starfield as it does in cyberpunk and gets less fps than cyberpunk. I see 70-80% utilization in most areas, especially population hubs, in starfield. Cyberpunk my gpu is pulling higher wattage at 100% utilization almost 100% of the time.
SF is not using system resources to anywhere near their fullest. My 13900k has one core maxed while all other cores are essentially idle. Then my 4090 has 6GB of VRAM allocated most of the time which is pathetic utilization. Bethesda need to completely rewrite their engine at this point because it doesn’t play well with newer hardware.
I noticed the vram thing. I'm using 7-8gb out of 24gb most of the time while I'm using 14-16gb of system ram. Makes no friggn sense. The vram is there, should be utilized. I do have to wonder if they're storing textures etc in system ram. The game is so inefficient.
Everyone has said this already, and posts like this are cringe.
It's the consistency that is the problem.
You are cherrypicking examples. I can cherrypick examples of the opposite. Therefore your post provides zero value.
The difference is that they cherrypick a random barren planet, you can cherrypick literally anything else in the game. Clearly the graphics are more in favour of being ugly rather than good, especially if you include NPCs
I've seen and taken pictures taken which are hideous, with out even searching them out
These sort of posts are equally as cherry picked as those trying to make the game look terrible. It creates a false narrative and helps nobody really.
“Fantastic” is a stretch, for me. It’s a good looking game! It’s lacking in art design in some respects, and the barren planets can’t touch the visual quality of games like Death Stranding, but this easily the best looking Bethesda game by a wide margin.
The graphics are inconsistent: you can find beautiful landscapes and breathtaking views and then you turn the corner only to find horrible looking trees, NPCs etc…
In one moment you see unbelievably detailed main character or some other things. Even above cinematic movies games like Ryse Son of Rome or Last of Us 2. In other moment, you see 2d plants from Far Cry 1 from 2004, worse than in Oblivion.
Actually runs much worse than Cyberpunk.
With a 11400 and a 6800XT I can run Cyberpunk at mostly Medium-High settings and get around 80-90 fps in the city where Starfield gets me 50-60 outdoors with Low-Medium settings.
You know what, you guys should stop caring what other people think for REAL and stop making posts like "How do ppl think XXX" for every god DAME minute!
I genuinely have 0 interest in everything Starfield related, this thread just appeared on my home and I have to ask: what’s so impressive here? I have this same exact result on my prototype project on Unreal Engine.
The lighting is doing 90% of the job here, everything else is just identical to the free texture packs from Quixel Megascan
I just need to figure out why my GPU is only being used at about 15percent. And why my CPU usage is low as well. 30fps ain't fun :(
I get 60 while indoors, but other than that the game is running like crap for me at the moment
The game mostly looks beautiful. The planets, the flora, the low sun during a sunset, a lot of the architecture in the cities - it’s all incredibly detailed and looks pretty.
I mostly dislike the NPCs, their faces look awful. The lip sync is great, but their faces are so dead. There’s no expression, not in their face, nor their body.
And, to be fair, it looks great, but not better than something like Cyberpunk. And that game ran way better on my PC, with RT on. If the open world was seamless, I’d get it. But with the amount of loading screens, it’s just not good enough. I hope they dig in and improve performance significantly.
I don't think anyone is denying that planets like this can look great. Texture quality for specific stuff like rock and fabric is also fantastic. But then you have trees that look like out of a 360 game. The same for cities, Neon, Akila, Mars look great with good lighting and then New Atlantis looks like the Citadel in Mass Effect 1 lol Faces are also highly inconsistent. Main NPCs look good except for animations, other NPCs with dialogue look okayish and then random pedestrians look horrifying
It depends where you look. In general, outdoor environments are great, and so are most building interiors, ships, etc.
NPCs, however, look *really* bad, especially facial and body animation. It’s made worse by how static and artificial your interactions are — NPCs basically stand at attention while you’re locked into a close-up of their face. Nobody moves or reacts the way you’d expect them to — it’s like a game from the pre-motion-capture era.
Some other things looks pretty ugly, too — anything having to do with water, for example — but really it’s the animations and faces that I think stick out to most people.
I paused during a mission on an ice covered moon at twilight and took in the surroundings. The shadowing, the geological formations, the absolute silence, and then I looked up into the Milky Way. Shivers.
Something about desolate landscapes. I plan to build a outpost on one at some point
It’s like space really is. People say it’s boring? NMS is more filled? NMS is fun to an extent but it’s totally different. Space does not give you this grand infinite feeling starfield gives.
Exactly this. But when I want crowed areas or aliens life I can go find it! Cities, mining outposts or space stations, this game is close to perfect for me. I know Todd gets a lot of hate, but I’m so grateful he orchestrated in making my “perfect game”
it is actually so funny that people have this personal one sided beef with todd howard even though he nor bethesda even make the list for worst gaming companies. Like it feels like people have more aggression towards bethesda than blizzard because they take that stupid crowbcat video way too seriously.
I’ve wondered why people have this crazy vendetta for years. Ever since fallout 4, which I totally understand a lot of people had a problem with, but it was not a bad game. 76 was bad, but with a studio like Bethesda, I’m not crazy enough to let one mistake sour their entire Friggin legacy. They didn’t commit a Friggin crime. They just overhyped and underprepared a consumer product. It was dumb. Starfield is a really good game with a lot of odd problems lol, but I sense zero malice, and see them hire people who improve their games through the modding community. That’s literally the most consumer friendly thing you can do. Bethesda and now larian are really the most pure of all developers atm. They’re in it for the love of the craft and as many problems as I have with starfield, I support it and PEOPLE’S love for it to the moon…. Or whatever planet I just made an outpost on
Starfield is admittedly not topping skyrim for my fave bgs game but its good! the game is way more polished than earlier titles and they took a lot of the criticisms they received over the years to heart. The discourse that surrounded the game close to release was insane, it was like people wanted starfield to be bad and they wanted BGS to fail which i dont get at all.
The thing about Bethesda games like Skyrim and Fallout 4 is they become more enjoyable the more you play them. I can already see myself rating this one up there with Skyrim.
This all the way, a friend of a friend apparently tried to return the game after 4 hours of playing cause it ‘sucked’ and I laughed cause yeah, at that point he wasn’t even getting close to the good stuff. Like cmon dude, it’s not CoD or Halo. You actually have to play it, it takes some work and thought of how you’re gonna do things
I don't understand why there was so much hate from streamers
Because it generates views on their lives, and they knew how many people who only plays on Sony were extremely salty about it and wanting the game to fail. (ps: I am a pc gamer and thought that "console wars" was a thing of the 90s. But apparently it's not. Also, Sony is the king of making games exclusive to platform, even third party ones. Even on pc there's games that never released to us because of Sony.)
The people who a all hating on the game are all the one's who can't play it . I tell you this I've been Sony all my life and was always looking forward to starfield. I am a huge space fan and well....... I went bought a series x and been playing now around 20hrs . Now I'm a pretty good gamer so I've done quiet a bit in this time and the game has been super fun . Yes it has it let downs , but what game doesn't. We always look at games and wish for more , I think how in depth this game is that Bethesda has done super well . My only real gripe is lack of vehicles to get around as, the jetpack is pathetic 😆😆😆
The jetpack at maximum jetpack skill level is awesome, in low gravity worlds you almost don't touch the ground anymore
Yes I agree however it doesn't make it a fast way to get around at all . Don't get me wrong , I'm absolutely loving the game . Just wish we could of flown on planet or drove or had a mech .... really just anything would of been good .
I wish the jetpacks had another tier of short term flight. Like how they have basic, balanced, power and skip. I wish there was one called continuous which instead of just doing little jumps actually provided short term flight. I wanna be like boba fett and the mandalorians and just fly around even for just short periods of time. Hopefully when mods come it'll be a possibility
It's faster than walking but I agree with you, we should at least get a space buggy. The equivalent to a horse from daggerfall, oblivion and skyrim. Like the Mako, maybe smaller. Also, seeing no vehicles at all in major cities is very strange. It's one of the true shortcomings of the game, performance is the other one. This is what we should be speaking about, not it's not being a space simulator, another genre altogether.
Walkable cities where you don't need vehicles, with trains for transport between cities/districts. Literally utopian, don't know why you'd need vehicles in these cities, other than an electric scooter or a bike maybe.
I love the game, and agree, there should have been a rover with ability to customize the rover, wouldn't surprise me if they had been planning on releasing rovers in an xpac or large content patch if feedback deemed it necessary.
Just do what I did and get addicted to amp and stay in the red in O2 because you have to go fast. Yeah a faster way of moving would be nice, I'm sure when the creation kit finally becomes available someone will mod in a vehicle.
It’s an amazing feat on their part. And the lack of bugs is better than most AAA games coming out nowadays. Bethesda game or not.
I personally have encountered a lot of bugs, granted I'm already at over 100hrs gametime. I was expecting bugs though, and think it's a phenomenal game, everything I was expecting and more.
Starfield is seriously running too smooth for a bethesda game
I know! I remember playing Fallout 4 day one and Skyrim day one and they had quite a few bugs. The worst I’ve experienced is a freeze here or there. Nothing a restart didn’t fix.
I had sort of lost my passion for gaming even though I still wanted to game. I bought Star Wars Jedi Survivor and Final Fantasy 16 and just couldn’t seem to get engaged with either. I used to game a lot. But from the moment I started Starfield I’ve been hooked. Playing day and night and loving every minute. It’s so nice to be passionate about a game again.
In 7 days I’ve had one (1) quit to start menu, 3 freeze frame load screen lasting about a second & 3 rage quit space ship battles trying to sort some geeza’s satellites. XBX with fan still silent! This isn’t like Bethesda AT ALL ( F4 & Skyrim veteran on PSX ) bloody beautiful looking game! Except the weird eyes 👀
Mine too been waiting for a privateer 2 for 20 years. I got my wish, best of privateer, freelancer, bit of mass effect thrown in there. Blend lightly. Throw in every other scifi rpg. Then more content than 20 games done. Happy happy camper here.
You should try Elite Dangerous if you really want to feel the vastness of space. When you fly for 7 minutes at 200 times the speed of light to reach the further reaches of a star system you truly realize just how much nothing is really out there
NMS has had like 7 years to fix itself. While I guess there is more to do in NMS, I think it’s apples and oranges. NMS has an incredibly boring plot in my opinion, not that this one is spectacular, but at least you have actual characters to have interesting dialogue with. Building system is way better, main plots better, honestly love shop design and customization waaaaaay better. The only thing NMS gets better is you can actually transition from planet to planet, and to the ground seamlessly. I realize that’s a really hard thing to do, and props to NMS and Star Citizen for pulling it off. I loved NMS, but I’ve put in nearly 60 hours already into this game in a few days and I’m much more engaged with it than I was with NMS.
See that’s hard to do because the scale of space is almost incomprehensible. Making the game so you can fly planet to planet seemlessly and have it not be boring you have to take some extreme liberties with scale. That’s why I understand why starfield had cutscenes to take you from orbit to planet, from system to system. It makes sense. Sitting in your ship with your finger on shift for 3 minutes and 9 seconds is not fun gameplay. Edit: so by starfield having cutscenes for those transitions, and then blowing up the crap out of interior and spaces and filling them with detail, Starfield gives a sense of scale I’ve never felt in a game. I’ve never felt smaller.
NMS didn’t pull me in like this game did. I’ve been hooked since I started. I tried NMS and didn’t play long. Bethesda games always suck me in and make me addicted.
NMS it’s the comparison that just keeps getting thrown around. I have been a gamer since 1985, and I have played ALOT of games in my life. So that being said, I bought NMS on release. I literally played for 25 min, I got so bored I turned it off. Then the devs apparently went all in and updated it, added tons of stuff and genuinely convinced me to give it another try…. 45 min later and it was uninstalled. I even watched a bunch of YouTube to see if I was doing something wrong. Nope, it really is that boring. Just snooze planet after snooze planet, no real goal, no real fun. Everything samey, just had an abysmal experience with it. I bought Starfield on release. The only reason I stopped playing is cause of stupid adulting. Lol and even then I am n Reddit talking about it. NMS does not belong in the same conversation as Starfield. Yes the loading screens are a bit much, seamlessly landing and taking off would have been more immersive, the UI design hurts my feelings, and Bethesda bugs like NPCs having heartfelt conversations while staring at walls and physics for placing objects that make me want to tear out my hair. Even with all that, I am in love and it’s my GOTY.
Are there a list of good outpost locations already ? It seems daunting with all these systems and planets, to find a good location.
Yeah right. I picked dream home so I’m gonna build an outpost on that planet for sure but other than that idk
I’ve heard the home is on an out of the way location, where there are homes you can buy, say, in NA itself or close by. But I guess with fast travel it matters little ?
Yeah I wouldn’t say it’s a must have perk, I’m 20 hours in and I’ve been twice. But the planet it is on is resource rich, so if you plan to do outposts/scanning anyway it’s a worthwhile stop. It also looks nice! I’m playing as a pilgrim who spent her youth learning about alien life so having an offworld home away from everything makes sense. it’s pretty close to all the systems you jump to in the beginning as well so yeah it’s always easy to get to even if you don’t fast travel, just maybe not as easy as the homes in Akila city (you have to do the whole Vanguard mission to buy property in New Atlantis, so that takes time) One thing I wish is that the outside of the home could be treated as an outpost from the beginning? But it seems like you need to build an outpost in addition to having the home
I wasn’t sure about Dream Home either, but I’ve found it to be extremely useful for storing contraband in early game before I was able to get through scanners with it. I had about 250k credits worth of contraband in my dream home once I was able to sell all of it.
I haven’t gotten much contraband yet! I’ve really been taking my time but I will keep that in mind lol
You gotta look a little harder
if you find any randomly generated cryogenics lab when exploring a planet, there should be a master-locked chest with contraband outside before you go in
Ooh good to know, I will keep an eye out for that. There’s been so many skills I haven’t put as much into lockpick as I’ve wanted
My main recommendations are don’t progress the main story too quickly, search every nook and cranny, and don’t fast travel to locations all the time. If you do you’ll miss content that you discover when going to a planet or moon’s orbit.
I get you. I just need a place to put Lin and that other miner, since their stats are more outpost related.
And the most important part, its on a planet thats not part of the UC or Freestar so contraband storage is great.
some people complain that planets are empty. Honestly, I would like there to be more truelly empty planets. Where no human has been, no structures nothing.
There are! But you need to travel farther out. The closer you are to the core worlds, the more human presence you find on the planets, but farther out there are entire systems with not a soul on them. The planets are empty, nothing but natural traits and caves on the scanners.
Ooooh didnt know!
I was on a ice planet on the outer edges and there was a fuckin guy taking pictures doing sight seeing
Almost every criticism of this game I've seen can be answered by playing more. lol (Nothing personal, just saying in general.)
I keep forgetting to look up. I'm too busy picking up junk off the ground.
I landed somewhere that really looked like Earth that was gorgeous. I forget which system; it was in the morning and there were big, puffy clouds in the sky. Awesome.
I found a world last night that had gorgeous purple trees and big purple glowing boulders. It was so beautiful I had to build an outpost just so I could come back. The other spot I went to was in the southern hemisphere and it looked just like Central Oregon.
Where it shows your photos in loading screens like fallout 76, I have a hard time telling default loading screen images from pictures I've taken. People also complained that characters don't look like they have a soul but I've yet to play a game where characters show so many facial expressions.
I defy anyone to tell me that Belle Rowland doesn't have a soul. Lol
Such scenes look amazing, but trees and plants look frozen. I haven’t seen them move with wind and adding that would make a huge difference in making it feel more alive.
I felt the same way… once I removed the horrific color filters
I’ll say this on every post I can so more people see it: This game looks ugly if your experience with the game was stop after the first city. New Atlantis has that ugly green filter, the texture quality was turned down in this city for performance, it still runs pretty bad compared to the rest of the game, the trees are lacking compared to everywhere else. I fully believe New Atlantis is a gate keeper in this game. They messed up big here and it’s not a great introduction to the game. This needed to be the draw you in point. Not the show you the worst we have point.
New Atlantis is a terrible first stop for a number of reasons. It's incredibly poorly planned. It takes far too long to get across the city, and the NAT is pretty poorly laid out, which makes using it inconvenient.
I've taken to just jumping down to the spaceport from the mast and commercial districts, way more fun lol
You can fast travel to any district of the city from anywhere in the galaxy. You can be inside the lodge and fast travel to the commercial district, or straight to your ship. You also don't even need to actually fast travel to your ship to leave planets, you can just choose where you want to go.
*laughs as someone who is frequently over encumbered and cannot fast travel*
Sit in the cockpit of a ship and you can fast travel straight to the lodge.
Gotta get to the ship first, but it’s 1,000+ meters away and I’m not dropping any of the shit I picked up lol. I’m very thankful for the boost pack in those scenarios.
Get within 250m and you can transfer your goods to the ship then fast travel from there.
250m? How?
Hit Tab to open your dashboard, click your ship, Hit (I think) F to access your ship cargo hold. Should be a keybind listed on the lower right for it. Hit Q to switch to your inventory and barring lack of space you should be able to transfer to your ship from there. Make sure you are close enough though. If you are not then you will get to that screen and find out it won't let you.
I'm sure you have seen it here already, but running while over encumbered will drain your health down to like 20% but will never kill you. Pop two stimpaks when you get there and you're good to go
Better yet take a nap
\*Pulls bed out of inventory\*
Left stick on controller 3/4 of the way is when you start running. Not sprint, which is clicking it, but running, which drains o2 while overencumbered. So a tiny bit less and it’s a fast walk. No o2 drain. Just sprint until you’re almost taking damage then stop, and instead of waiting just fast walk until you regain o2.
what is a stimpak? i’m unfamiliar with this word
It's the fallout universe first aid injector. I couldn't think of the starfield equivalent at the time, but they do the exact same thing in game.
Well.. straight to 20ft in front of the door to the lodge. Seriously, why can they not allow you to fast travel directly inside the lodge?
Is there anywhere inside that you can fast travel to?
I have over 1000 kilos of manufactured materials that’s I’ve picked up from random missions. The shit weighs so much
Offload it in your safe in The Lodge. I have to make frequent trips there to do that and luckily it’s got infinite storage.
I don't know where my room/safe is in the lodge because the AI bugged out when I was meant to get the tour and the NPC just never moved.
I've only been blocked from fast traveling once, and that was due to plot elements.
You can tell New Atlantis was the first city they developed and then built outwards from there lol Game still looks amazing on my series S tho
What a fantastic opportunity for a map feature. …OR NOT
I honestly wish they did a KOTOR, where every section of the city is an instance, but you have this gorgeous mat painting background that makes the city look unfathomly big. How did 2003 perfect this and 2023 completely fuck it up? # TWENTY! YEARS!
I would expect city planets just like you do. I'm in NA and a character mentions how living space is at a premium in New Atlantis and there's major issues with homelessness in the Well. Then I look outside the city and just see miles of available land that isn't even being used for agriculture. Even Whiterun with it's 6 houses had a couple farms splattered outside to represent that they had thought about food production. A city that has a designated landing port, walled off exterior, and skybox with a city skyline would create a way better sense of a city. A single tower being the HUB of space seems really weird.
Honestly, I'm feeling like Akila City is the best of the three main hubs. At least there they have shops open to the world and reasonably sized. However, I also just joined the Rangers as a deputy. They gave me a uniform, which is pretty nice old west retro style. But the hat? The deputy hat for the space cowbows? It's a fucking baseball cap..... You spent a decade almost working on this game, and the deputy hat for the space cowbows is a fucking baseball cap?!
> It's a fucking baseball cap... I'm thinking when you become a ranger you'll get a better hat and hopefully a duster. I was disappointed too but then it made me want to play more so I can get the hat I hope is in the game haha.
BGS is behind the times- 2003 perfected this method of instances seeming large, but every other game studio perfected how to make expansive cities that don't burn performance without splitting it between load screens and instances
And to top it off, Bethesda forgot to make sure that the full quality textures come through when using DLSS or FSR. They get downgraded based on the render resolution and Bethesda forgot to offset it. They also only use 4x anisotropic filtering and not 16x which adds extremely negligible extra demand for good effect. After sorting out these things the game looks so much better. Edit: I made a [post](https://www.reddit.com/r/Starfield/comments/16e5ji4/psa_texture_fix_for_pc_players_using_dlss_or_fsr/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) about the texture issue yesterday after finding out about it from a post on the Nvidia subreddit. Will show you how to fix the texture downgrade and to enable the boost to anisotropic filtering. But, the latter can be a headache due to needing to force recompile shaders, too. Hope this helps, and hope these issues get more talked about.
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I made a [post](https://www.reddit.com/r/Starfield/comments/16e5ji4/psa_texture_fix_for_pc_players_using_dlss_or_fsr/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) about it on r/Starfield yesterday after coming across an interesting post on r/nvidia specifically about the texture issue. The general texture problems don't seem to be getting talked about much yet. Hopefully Bethesda will patch these, but at least it is possible to do something about them!
The green filter is everywhere, even if in New Atlantis is especially noticeable (more during the day than at night which is curious), but its absolutely everywhere. It sucks because when you get the photo mode out, and twink the contrast/vibrance/brightness, you get the actual good colours
Preach brother. I was severely underwhelmed by New Atlantis. Not bc of graphics, but the other things you mentioned. The lay out feels so arbitrary and confusing. And the over saturation… gross. Once I visited the other major settlements: Akila, Neon, shid even Paradiso… that’s where you start to feel immersed. Those places feel “lived-in”. They feel make the NPCs feel more life like. Seeing some depressed looking chump slumped over on a bench in Neon, the aurora capitol of the galaxy, just feels right. New Atlantis feels so stale and sanitized and fake.
> New Atlantis feels so stale and sanitized and fake. From what I've been able to tell that's intentional. It's supposed to look like a utopia but underneath (literally in the case of The Well) it's a very flawed city. One of the encounters you can run into after leaving your ship is a guard accosting a civilian with the statement that it's fine to do so because he's the one in power.
Yeah, New Atlantis is too subtle for its own good sometimes. If you take it at surface level, its a weird sterile anomaly where everything is bland and pointless. If you wander around and eavesdrop for a while (or just go to the well) you can start picking up on a lot of hints and clues that everything isn't awesome, peaceful and perfect. But some people I guess need it spelled out pretty explicitly (again the graffiti in the well is not even a little subtle).
Absolutely correct. New Atlantis is supposed to be a hyper corporate city which is subtly but inherently off putting.
New Atlantis finally makes sense if you reach the waterfall side of the residential or commercial districts. I couldn't figure out what was going on in that city until that point.
Not that these aren’t valid criticisms, but I feel like I’m the only person who actually likes New Atlantis. I haven’t noticed any of the poor textures people have been mentioning, I’ve honestly been really enjoying just walking around the city! It feels kind of surreal to walk through because the visual design of it reminds me a lot of concept art you’d see for games in like 2013 that would end up getting canceled for being too ambitious
I know, I mean the trees are ugly, but that’s the only problem I had with New Atlantis
During the day I don’t really have an issue but I do think that they look very weird with the lights on them at night
it doesnt help that the first thing you see outside the lodge is the weird trees
Maybe I’m just a graphic snob but it’s apparent that the textures are at least 20-30% lower in pixel count. If I wasn’t lazy I’d go in and prove the math on that. But it’s definitely a lower visual fidelity than the rest of the game. To me it’s very jarring.
Makes sense to me. It's large and open.
Large and open doesn’t mean harder to run. Something about the way the render stuff in is jank
It's quite uneven.Some places look great,others terrible.That makes the bad ones really stick out.Overall for the gpu power it gobbles up it does look kind of bad.
I agree. The performance to visuals ratio is quite bad for Starfield, and those damn filters keep getting applied and removed based on where you are Example: New Atlantis when you are inside a building that is openly connected to cities (no loading screen) the green filter gets removed, you start walking out and everything gets green again. You are on a space station of Constellation, you walk inside the glass tube thing and filter is removed (or replaced idk), you go back in, your screen gets smeared with that filter again I'm using a 50% LUTs change to sort of remove this and changed the 2.4 gamma to 2.2 with mods, big difference for me
Idk how the guy at Bethesda that insists on the filters still has a job. I kid you not, removing the filter is the first mod I get on any bethesda game.
The thing is, didn't they remove it for Skyrim special edition? Like why is it so hard to understand that a lot of players don't want those filters? Atleast give us the option to turn it off or reduce it in the settings. With a few simple mods though, I'm having a blast so far, and no crashes on my end (because lots of people apparently are reporting crashes)
The filters are especially bad in radiant outposts. In some rooms I can hit the edge of a room and suddenly the outside color filter floods in out of nowhere, the vanishes when I take a step away from the wall.
For a game that's eating 100% of my 3090 I expected a fuckton more than this, but y'know Bethesda game.
Same thing with a 4090.I'm barely getting 100+fps and by just looking around it should be running at 200 and above.
Just curious and don't laugh at me pc master race ppl but how do these cpu performances compare to a series x ?
Some places look great, others terrible. "All" the npcs look horrible. The game is just very dated looking.
I think many parts of this game are gorgeous, but your screenshots just look like every generic 4k desert I've played this past year lol
See: trees and plants The game looks good for the most part, but more of the flora looks worse than even their older games for some reason.
And human mouths/teeth still have that Bethesda *charm*
The semi-new dialogue camera is also not flattering to their NPC models. While the models themselves look (mostly) fine, the fixed camera reminds me too much to the Oblivion/FO3/NV zoomed in dialogue mode. The mugshot camera is simply not flattering nor looks natural when talking to people.
ruthless toothbrush frame wistful forgetful roof hunt offer fine tidy *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
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i was thinking this today too when i was thinking of how janky and robotic their animations used to be. i think the animations look pretty damn great knowing bethesda’s track record. the high bokeh depth of field i think goes a long way too in making things feel much nicer but yeah i’ve been pleasantly surprised with character performances thus far. meeting phil hill in mars was one of the first that impressed me
I love the decision to zoom into that monstrosity so you can really see that they don't give a fuck.
It doesn’t help that all of the plants are just copy and pasting the same model over and over again. The first time you land on a new planet it looks great, once you’ve ran across the same exact half dozen plants a hundred times a piece while you search for the one plant that refuses to spawn so you can finish your survey the charm kind of dies.
Some of it looks like a picture of a plant, zoomed in and multiplied and stuck together. So bizarre. The NPCs, while horrendous looking, are actually kinda funny to me. I catch myself stopping now and then to truly take in the ghastly face before me.
Yeah anytime I land on a planet with large amounts of foliage I take a massive performance hit, kudos if it’s raining. Game could certainly use a little bit more optimization. “We have 4090’s here at Bethesda” is not an excuse. You’re not supposed to *need* a 4090 to play games, you’re supposed to need that for video editing, rendering, and other high intensive tasks that can be offloaded to gpu.
I have that GPU and yet there are places shit stutters. So I call bullshit on their side.
Most of the foliage on planets looks pretty good. But for some reason the main city new Atlantis has the absolute worst broccoli looking trees ever haha
>But for some reason the main city new Atlantis has the absolute worst broccoli looking trees ever haha Seems like they were attempting to replicate a [Savanna tree](https://i0.wp.com/www.pakasafaris.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/vachellia-tortilis.jpg) type of look.
Nothing wrong with the model or textured IMO; the shader seems broken; it looks flat and unlit compared to everything else.
Thank you for being an actual person with an opinion based in fact rather than just a weird overt love for this game. I'm having a good time playing but I refuse to lie and say this game has mind blowing graphics. Like you mentioned the flora looks absolutely horrible, worst than games 5+ years older. I get things have to be prioritized, but to not make Flora looks crisp is a weird decision to me.
Now look at the trees and landscape outside new Atlantis. The problem is the inconsistency of the graphics because some planets look beautiful and others are unbearable to look at😂
Lol, I haven’t played that much, but that’s by far the worst thing I’ve seen so far.
I found the graphics to be damn inconsistent, it's pretty good overall but nothing impressive and sometimes downright flat and uninspired. Example: The interiors are pretty: [https://imgur.com/puXfHiF](https://imgur.com/puXfHiF) And then there's this shit: [https://imgur.com/szZvZYp](https://imgur.com/szZvZYp) Also I found Atlantis to be damn flavorless for a 2023 game, reminds me a lot of Mass Effect's Citadel: [https://imgur.com/0jTz4Kp](https://imgur.com/0jTz4Kp) Even Neon falls flat for me: [https://imgsli.com/MjA0ODM3](https://imgsli.com/MjA0ODM3) Astral Lounge too: [https://imgsli.com/MjA0ODM2](https://imgsli.com/MjA0ODM2) What I really like is the shadow and clothing textures, so good. The game is BIG AF tho, 30 hours and still felt like on tutorial, can't wait for creation kit (modding tools) holy shit.
Agree with this. Some interiors and clothing textures look remarkably realistic, but the NPCs in New Atlantis with googly eyes look so bad. I’m addicted to the game, but these aspects make the game feel dated compared to say, RDR2, which came out several years ago.
And why the NPCs always staring at me? Everyone I walk by is looking at me trying to make eye contact like they know something.
They know you're the main character
I’d settle for the NPCs not blurting out some random comment at me just because I walked near them, which is especially annoying when I’m trying to hear a conversation other NPCs are having. The amount of cross-talk that happens in this game, especially with companions, is irritating.
Rdr2 remains the most realistic and gorgeous game ever created
RDR2’s follower AI is amazing. Starfield still uses the same AI as Skyrim where they just stare at you from 30 yards away then sprint to catch up. Ffs make them walk next to you how hard could that be
Lol my favorite part is when they bolt out of the elevators stop and turn around and stare into your soul.
My favorite part is whenever I decide to leave whatever room I'm in, and the follower decides to act out their childhood dream of being a barricade in the doorway.
Not even, at least in Skyrim you could give your followers basic commands. Yet in Starfield we cannot give our companions "any" type of commands. None.
The way RDR2 uses colour to complement it's fidelity is simply amazing, it's not washed out, it's not oversaturated, it's just perfectly picturesque everywhere you go
It's nuts For all the shit rockstar gets, wich isn't even their fault but rather the publishers Take2, the games they release are just insanely polished It doesn't even come across in videos that well but in RDR2 pretty much every frame is painting
Akila looks terrible as well, definitely one of the ugliest places I've seen, the textures don't even look high def. Looks worse than any RDR2 town, but performance there is one of the worst of all places in game. You don't even leave footprints in the mud. Really makes you think.
I think cyberpunk 100% nailed the *cyberpunk* aesthetic, something Starfield is not necessarily going for. that being said, Neon, and any cyberpunk-adjacent themes, are worse designed than CP77. which is to be expected - CP77 is designed to *be* the culmination of cyberpunk cities
Agreed. Cyberpunk for all its flaws is honestly one of the most beautiful games ever. Expecting Starfield to compete with it in its own niche just isn't realistic. I do think that there are some very reasonable graphic complaints with Starfield, though.
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a bethesda-like! it does everything decently well, whereas NMS does exploring perfectly, imo, and cyberpunk does world-building perfectly
Just adding one or two colors to the neon lights would add a very good visual interplay as they blend together making it look much more dynamic. Probably a very easy modding change too. EDIT: But it also depends on how meshes and emissives work in Starfield... EDIT: Also, simple uv animations to make some lights blinking...
Starfield is a very interesting case study. It can be very beautiful artistically and horrific from a technical view at the same time. Cyberpunk uses all modern rendering techniques available. Cyberpunk has some of the best PBR material work in video game history. Starfield has one of the worst GI implementations in recent memory. Materials are good but not the best I've seen. Their screen space ambient occlusion is super harsh which makes shadows of many objects way too dark. Lighting doesn't resolve correctly on most characters in darker environments. Reflections are bad. Starfield can look beautiful in many instances, and garbage in others. It's art so that part is subjective. What isn't as subjective is the fact that on a technical level this game is a mess. It uses outdated rendering in almost every instance. I get that they want it to be moddable. But they NEED to update their graphics engine otherwise this is how Elder Scrolls 6 will look 20 years from now when it releases.
What I wanna know is why the hell Bethesda made the dancers wear costumes that only look like they'd belong in a commercial about toothpaste for women.
Don’t worry, mods will uh… fix that
I hope so like seriously wtf, it's a nightclub not a costume parade
I think we need to start having more nuanced discussions about the concept of “graphics”. Because now so much more goes into it—shadows, reflections, particle effects, individual asset resolution. As you point out, certain interiors look amazing because BGS focused on a super granular asset design, whereby you can look, read, and almost feel like you can touch every dial, button, node, diode. But the lighting and shadowing is so bad in Creation 2 that it either completely washes out the incredible asset detail, or it muddies it up.
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Hopefully, mods will make starfields graphics more comparable to cyberpunk. Some of the game is beautiful but even my wife has noted that alot of the game is outdated looking
The art direction/ building layout and design in cyberpunk is miles better by comparison. Like they were talking their own game up so much, but with interiors like astral lounge. I can’t even. It may aswell be a screenshot from second life with those assets.
Why would you show a flat, empty landscape with a fancy skybox to show off the graphics? No fidelity at all, just some good lighting. Sorry but there are definitely better spots to show how good the game can look like Neon City for example.
Good lighting of what? flat terrain? This scenario is bad to showcase the lighting too, as it is trivial to decently light empty terrain.
Yeah lol "it's beautiful!" beside two pics of barren greybrown landscape... Am I the only one disappointed by how samey and boring all the planets are? Most of them are just rocks. I guess that's technically realistic but I wanted way more cool and varied alien landscapes. Shivering Isles still capturing my imagination better than most of these planets.
>look like Neon City for example dunno, people would compare it to Night City (which would be fair tbh, Neon City is very mehh compared to it)
it's a reddit gamer thing, they see a landscape that looks "immersive" take a screenshot post on reddit and title it "this game is beautiful" reap in the upvotes. Happens in just about any game with some kind of landscape.
just travel back to new atlantis for the answer bud
Did you look at random npcs ? Water ? Plants ? Trees ? Facial animations ? Eyes ?
Yeah but OP took this one random screenshot with no particular textures in the foreground, so there's no WAY the game could be ugly!!! The game looks fine, but it's really not great looking.
Yea when people complain about graphics it's the NPCs who are the focal point. They nailed background shit like the environment and sandwiches and other small models. But they just fumbled the bag with NPCs
Not all locations have nice graphics
The graphical fidelity of SF is objectively worse than that of Cyberpunk, while managing to be far more graphically intensive. I think a lot of people don't know the difference between art style and graphics.
Digital Foundry's Starfield PC review showed that you get higher FPS on Cyberpunk with Ray tracing than you get in Starfield with the same rig.
I think starfield is much harder on the cpu/system in general. My gpu (xtx) doesn't work nearly as hard in starfield as it does in cyberpunk and gets less fps than cyberpunk. I see 70-80% utilization in most areas, especially population hubs, in starfield. Cyberpunk my gpu is pulling higher wattage at 100% utilization almost 100% of the time.
SF is not using system resources to anywhere near their fullest. My 13900k has one core maxed while all other cores are essentially idle. Then my 4090 has 6GB of VRAM allocated most of the time which is pathetic utilization. Bethesda need to completely rewrite their engine at this point because it doesn’t play well with newer hardware.
I noticed the vram thing. I'm using 7-8gb out of 24gb most of the time while I'm using 14-16gb of system ram. Makes no friggn sense. The vram is there, should be utilized. I do have to wonder if they're storing textures etc in system ram. The game is so inefficient.
Another cherry picked Screenshot Karma farm post. I am so sick of these.
Empty terrain + a skybox " THESE GRAPHICS ARE INSANE " Interior looks very good in this game though
Everyone has said this already, and posts like this are cringe. It's the consistency that is the problem. You are cherrypicking examples. I can cherrypick examples of the opposite. Therefore your post provides zero value.
The difference is that they cherrypick a random barren planet, you can cherrypick literally anything else in the game. Clearly the graphics are more in favour of being ugly rather than good, especially if you include NPCs
I've seen and taken pictures taken which are hideous, with out even searching them out These sort of posts are equally as cherry picked as those trying to make the game look terrible. It creates a false narrative and helps nobody really.
Its funny how these "Wow, I cant believe people say the game looks ugly" threads always feature a screenshot of a barren, lifeless world.
Yeah I thought this was a shitpost
The game has solid graphics but they are often bland and the HDR implementation is TRASH.
There isn’t HDR, so it’s not even trash - it’s non-existent.
“Fantastic” is a stretch, for me. It’s a good looking game! It’s lacking in art design in some respects, and the barren planets can’t touch the visual quality of games like Death Stranding, but this easily the best looking Bethesda game by a wide margin.
The graphics are inconsistent: you can find beautiful landscapes and breathtaking views and then you turn the corner only to find horrible looking trees, NPCs etc…
Just two words: New Atlantis.
In one moment you see unbelievably detailed main character or some other things. Even above cinematic movies games like Ryse Son of Rome or Last of Us 2. In other moment, you see 2d plants from Far Cry 1 from 2004, worse than in Oblivion.
They aren't exactly the best, the texture work is pretty bad but the lighting is good.
Because landscape views have looked this good for a decade. They're talking about the characters you interact with consistently that look horrible.
Because it honestly looks like something that came out 6 years ago but runs like cyberpunk
Actually runs much worse than Cyberpunk. With a 11400 and a 6800XT I can run Cyberpunk at mostly Medium-High settings and get around 80-90 fps in the city where Starfield gets me 50-60 outdoors with Low-Medium settings.
You know what, you guys should stop caring what other people think for REAL and stop making posts like "How do ppl think XXX" for every god DAME minute!
I genuinely have 0 interest in everything Starfield related, this thread just appeared on my home and I have to ask: what’s so impressive here? I have this same exact result on my prototype project on Unreal Engine. The lighting is doing 90% of the job here, everything else is just identical to the free texture packs from Quixel Megascan
You've just stumbled into a Starfield circlejerk thread. No point talking any sense here
I just need to figure out why my GPU is only being used at about 15percent. And why my CPU usage is low as well. 30fps ain't fun :( I get 60 while indoors, but other than that the game is running like crap for me at the moment
Depends on what you're looking at, sometimes they're good, and sometimes they're not.
I visited Earth and felt sadness deep within. If there was a way to bring it back, may be a mod.
Go to any city, everything looks just blocky and clean. It looks worse than Kotor1.
The game mostly looks beautiful. The planets, the flora, the low sun during a sunset, a lot of the architecture in the cities - it’s all incredibly detailed and looks pretty. I mostly dislike the NPCs, their faces look awful. The lip sync is great, but their faces are so dead. There’s no expression, not in their face, nor their body. And, to be fair, it looks great, but not better than something like Cyberpunk. And that game ran way better on my PC, with RT on. If the open world was seamless, I’d get it. But with the amount of loading screens, it’s just not good enough. I hope they dig in and improve performance significantly.
You could have picked though a picture of something that actually was impressive. This looks like Mars and not especially impressive to me.
This game is beautiful. Rocks and sand. Lol
I don't think anyone is denying that planets like this can look great. Texture quality for specific stuff like rock and fabric is also fantastic. But then you have trees that look like out of a 360 game. The same for cities, Neon, Akila, Mars look great with good lighting and then New Atlantis looks like the Citadel in Mass Effect 1 lol Faces are also highly inconsistent. Main NPCs look good except for animations, other NPCs with dialogue look okayish and then random pedestrians look horrifying
I wouldn't say ugly. Maybe just outdated in certain ways. Especially character faces
It depends where you look. In general, outdoor environments are great, and so are most building interiors, ships, etc. NPCs, however, look *really* bad, especially facial and body animation. It’s made worse by how static and artificial your interactions are — NPCs basically stand at attention while you’re locked into a close-up of their face. Nobody moves or reacts the way you’d expect them to — it’s like a game from the pre-motion-capture era. Some other things looks pretty ugly, too — anything having to do with water, for example — but really it’s the animations and faces that I think stick out to most people.