Multi Starfield [Sep 6th 2023]

Oh, mine was cranked to ultra on everything

 

I've got it on ultra everything, running at 4k (DLDSR on a 1440p monitor) at 70% DLSS,. Drops to about 45fps in the big cities (Akila, new Atlantis), solid 60fps everywhere else. My monitor's only 60fps, so I set a limit at that.

 

Just started and it seems FSR doesn't do much for performance, but CAS does.

Are people here using the DLSS mod? People are saying it massively increases FPS, then other say it improves the image not FPS. It's on and working but hasn't increased my FPS by a single frame.

 

By the time I come back to it, Bethesda will have hopefully added official DLSS support, so I’m happy to wait until then.

But that was my understanding… DLSS upscaling (not framegen) isn’t necessarily more performant than FSR upscaling, but the image quality is far better.

 

It's annoying when crew get in the way in your ship, especially the dinosaurs.

I would fire her but she's got good Astrodynamics and Stealth skills

 

Anyone got any ideas on a few issues I'm having.

Video lags for about 2-3 seconds but audio doesn't, usually in dialog cutscenes but it did do it while walking through the mine at the start a couple of times. Fps seems fine, but I do hear my gfx card fans spin up when the game freezes.

Also, the windows mouse cursor keeps appearing where the crosshair is which is very annoying.
Seem to have sorted this with DPI options on the exe. Nope, seemed to fix it for a about 10 minutes, then the blue circle cursor appeared.

Why can't games be released in a working state nowadays, downloaded Forza Motorsport with game pass too and that's appalling, load times take forever and then the track and other objects just start disappearing while racing.

 

Bethesda.

 

I find this puzzling as well. Read a review yesterday for Rogue Trader that stated it was amazing, but had some bugs and if Owlcat could iron those out it might be a late contender for game of the year.

So immediately the thoughts that come up are a) how did these not get noticed before release? b) how did they/would they still release anyway if they had been noticed? and c) why do we accept this as the normal state of things now?

It might be the rose-tinted rearview, but back in the days of disc games, I swear I didn't experience this as often (at least on the X360).

There might have been the odd "Huh. That's weird - I can see through this wall and my guy's leg won't stop jerking" moment, but nothing that meant things were unplayable and a patch had to be awaited.

But then, I'm not the first to say this and it's been going on for some time now, so I don't have any hope of it changing. Seems to be the current model and "release date" actually means "release of final beta".

 

Yeah I can't remember having as many issues back then either, I seem to think my first game ruining bug was in the first Gears of War on PC, and NFS undercover, I couldn't progress past a certain point in both of those due to some bug, everything else just worked, sure there might have been the odd BSOD but that usually got put down to pushing an OC too far,

I suppose everything has gotten more complicated as tech evolves and changes what's possible; especially on the PC side; but that's no excuse for massive bugs like the track disappearing in a racing game, , although I think I read that Forza on the Xbox doesn't have these issues, it's only the PC version. In Starfield even the Bethesda logo video when you start the game is freezing now, I mean if they can't even get their own logo to play smoothly what chance does the rest of the game have, Must be some sort of caching issue, but I'm not exactly lacking in RAM or SSD speed so must be game related rather than hardware, I hope, .

Overall I think I've been quite lucky over the years and haven't really had any major game breaking issues, just annoying that I bought three months of Game Pass specifically to try these out and I can't see them being patched in that time, downloaded Cities Skylines 2 too but that sounds like I'll be playing in single figure FPS,

 

Afraid I can’t speak for the issues you’re having, but I can answer this.

Crunch. It’s almost always crunch, even when publishers tell you they “don’t do crunch”.

There’s a huge pressure to get things out by a release date, whether that’s pressure from “fans” and the media or pressure from investors/execs. Whether the product is actually ready by that point or not, come hell or high water it will ship by that point.

Plenty of games do release in a working state and don’t need gargantuan day 1 patches. Or even gargantuan patches on day 365. Sure there may be bugs and issues that weren’t spotted, but the game won’t be a horribly broken mess with obvious glitches or serious performance issues. But those games don’t tend to be the high-profile big budget games with dozens or hundreds of staff and costs into the tens or hundreds of millions.

Of all the “big” games I’ve played lately, only one didn’t have major or frequent game-breaking issues at launch (that I experienced):

• Cyberpunk 2077: Yeah I think we all remember how “well” that launch went, even with a high-spec PC you’d get jank worthy of Bethesda’s finest. Even now with their “final patch” I still see weird glitches. Last night I had NPC vehicles randomly exploding and at one point I spotted two smiling NPCs happily sat in a burnt-out wreck that was still engulfed in fire.
• Starfield: First time in many long years that I’ve hit a game breaking bug that got written into my save file. The less said about the performance the better.
• Baldur’s Gate 3: I personally didn’t encounter any major bugs or glitches, although there were plenty of reports of rare/infrequent game-breaking issues at launch.

 

I don't follow trailers and hype and tbh haven't been disappointed yet. No Man's Sky, Cyberpunk, Arkham Knight, all really good games.

Still playing Starfield though I feel once the missions are over, the exploring won't last as long once I've been through every base / building copy + paste template.

 

This was me (although I find NMS super boring), and I really enjoyed it, but you're right asiding from the cities, its all a bit cookie cutter!

 

My point was that a lot of these games shouldn’t have gone out when they did. Not because they didn’t live up to the hype or the trailers, but because of the conditions people had to go through to meet an arbitrary and unrealistic deadline.

I had more here, but honestly crunch and what it does to people is a little too close to home for casual discussion.

 

AAA games back then where certainly more polished at launch, for example take Halo 3 and Halo Infinite... one was a complete game while the other was an empty husk of a tech demo with a promise of potential future content.
Even when AAA games where bad back then the worst was usually some jank or boredom.
Take the infamously bad Aliens: Colonial Marines as an example, even that game despite getting universally panned by both critics and gamers launched feature complete and functioned as a game, I'm not saying it was good... but even a game that bad still met certain minimum criteria.

These days however the gap between the good and bad AAA games has widened from a valley to a grand canyon.

On one hand you got games like Baldurs Gate 3, Spider-Man 2, Tears of the Kingdom, Lies of P etc, but at the same time we had several AAA games fail on such a colossal scale that they should have never even left the drawing board like Forspoken, Redfall, Saints Row Reboot and so on.

 

Absolutely. It's nothing to do with so-called "crunch" or any other similar symptom - which is what that is - a symptom. Of either poor planning (aiming for too much in too short a space of time) or overreach (aiming for too much full stop, or feature creep), to name two possibles. Throw in lack of ambition ("this is good enough" - although arguably, this is possibly more a case of personal opinion than a measure of standard); laziness (since the market/investors will (however begrudgingly) accept a product launch regardless of final state); or poor quality control ("we overlooked this but released anyway because due date" or "we had no robust QC in place") and the reasons for heavily-criticised releases become a bit more understandable.

You'd think that by now the bigger houses have a rough idea of how long/how much it takes to release a title to a certain standard. Plus with all the lessons (supposedly) learnt since the apparent shift to this new release model, maybe also some better insight into potential pitfalls. And that said, I'm admittedly not fully clear on what real-world impact delayed release has, beyond the regurgitated "impact to share price because investors get sad and sell" headlines (which is the short-sighted "indigestion" investment view anyway), because as an end-purchaser, especially one who might have to wait for patches, I couldn't give several shiits if you release tomorrow or next month as long as it works and I enjoy it when it lands.

But you're absolutely right - a crap story and unengaging, derivative gameplay (Starfield - I'll just throw that grenade out there) is not the same as systemically unplayable (Payday 3 - apparently, but not from personal experience as I swerved it once I heard the stories) and one is, as mentioned above, more of a personal judgement than an objective one, where only the latter should preclude release.

And a missing racetrack from a game about racing on a track would come under the latter. Incidentally, @Cerberus90 - I think you're correct; I'm running Forza on the Xbox and haven't seen any bugs yet, so must be an issue with the PC version.

Is tech evolving and changing what's possible though, or does the new standard become just that (after a bit of bedding in, of course) and excuses for ray tracing not working in three years' time become unacceptable? I remember people queuing round the block for Halo 2. Can't see them doing that these days (although digital storefronts don't help with this analogy, I'm sure there are some equivalent numbers).

And maybe this is another aspect to the problem - acceptance from both sides of DLC/updates/games as a service nowadays. Which does feed back indirectly to laziness in a way.

Sorry - wall of text and no idea where that came from! Just thinking though, Game Pass can't be good for this situation (1500 words - discuss) as the cost/risk is shared amongst titles, giving no incentive to developers to release properly finished products. Halo Infinite was always going on GP. As a purchaser paying a sub anyway, it costs me ~£17 divided by all the games I play that month, so if it's crap, I'll just not play it and I've lost a couple of quid rather than fifty (or the numerous other titles just got less than a quid more expensive). As a developer, I've released on date and if no-one plays it I'm getting paid by Microsoft anyway and can patch it afterwards.

In summary, you can't send the chicken Kiev out to the diner at the table before it's cooked through properly, then bring the microwave out whilst they sit and wait. And then watch them push the chicken around a bit in isolation on the plate before bringing some chips and veg out a month later.

So why is it acceptable with games that sometimes cost more than dinner?

 

If you want to put it more succinctly then you can sum it up in two words: because money.

The people who really make the money in the games industry don’t give one wet turd about anything but money.

To those people it was perfectly fine to release Aliens: Colonial Marines - whether it was utter garbage or the most perfect game ever made, it was still going to sell. And sell it most certainly did: it sold 1.3 million copies in the first ~6 weeks. When a “big” game does make a loss, dev studios get shut down, sold, or a ton of people get fired. (Although people often get fired (or have their contracts terminated, which is effectively the same thing) when games are successful because that makes the earnings report look better.)

 

The enemy AI was just at the same lvl as in regular games rather than at the lvl they hyped it up to be.

And talking of which, enemy AI is one of the things that have advanced the least in the last 2 or so decades of gaming... other than F.E.A.R there has been basically nothing that advanced the idea of enemy AI in games.
Instead of improving enemy AI modern gaming has just given us ridiculously padded enemy health bars.

 

I remember when Half Life 2 came out.
Went to Game, bought it, went home, installed it.
Played it from start to end, zero bugs.