Starfield has a release date

[Sly Boots]

It looks and sounds incredible. I just worry that it feels too good to be true, and what the catch will be.

I guess I'm a bit burned by other hyped games this year, like Last Of Us and everything else that's come out in a godawful state. Starfield just feels too ambitious for the studio that crapped out Fallout 76 to pull off.

But we'll see. If it delivers on the promises it's making it could end up as the best RPG since Witcher 3.

[Wrathbone]

I think Fallout 76 was something of an anomaly. I got the impression Tod Howard never wanted to do it and that he was likely told by Zenimax that they needed a multiplayer Fallout. And of course trying to heft the Creation engine online was a spectacularly bad idea, so the game had little hope from the get go.

Starfield on the other hand is a game that Howard has wanted to make since the 90s, that’s had extensive time to improve and modernise the engine and is in Bethesda’s wheelhouse of single player RPGs. It’s ambitious in scale, yes, and there will undoubtedly be some howlers when it comes to bugs, but I’m reasonably confident that this will be a statement game from them.

[DjchunKfunK]

As I think I discussed months ago, the thousand planets thing doesn't really mean anything other than if you WANT to land on that barren rock over there then the game's not going to stop you. It's obviously just a number for marketing to throw around, but I expect the reality is going to be more like 10 fleshed out planets, numerous other planets with handcrafted encounters and hundreds of planets with procedural stuff in the event that you decide to land on one without a specific reason to do so. I don't see that as a problem at all, because inevitably the first thing people would complain about if you could only land on planets with a bunch of stuff to do is that you can't land on every planet. Bethesda probably expect most people to just ignore those sorts of planets, but want to offer something pretty to look at or some loot to get if players do wander there.

Yeah I agree, I also think the size gives you the emptiness that I want from a space game. I want there to be planets that don't really have very much on them as that is what I imagine space to be like. If it was just a galaxy of ten planets which had all been handcrafted I don't think it would feel the same as what Starfield sounds like it will be.

On performance it is locked to 30fps on consoles, which isn't a surprise. These are the PC specs.

MINIMUM:
OS: Windows 10 version 22H2 (10.0.19045)
Processor: AMD Ryzen 5 2600X, Intel Core i7-6800K
Memory: 16 GB RAM
Graphics: AMD Radeon RX 5700, NVIDIA GeForce 1070 Ti
DirectX: Version 12
Network: Broadband Internet connection
Storage: 125 GB available space
Additional Notes: SSD Required

RECOMMENDED:
OS: Windows 10/11 with updates
Processor: AMD Ryzen 5 3600X, Intel i5-10600K
Memory: 16 GB RAM
Graphics: AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080
DirectX: Version 12
Network: Broadband Internet connection
Storage: 125 GB available space
Additional Notes: SSD Required

[Sly Boots]

Pretty reasonable!

[Wrathbone]

On performance it is locked to 30fps on consoles, which isn't a surprise.

Yeah, it was expected but it's still a shame that they couldn't find a way to have a 60fps performance mode. I'll be playing it on PC, but I probably would have played it on Series X if 60fps was an option.

Also weird that an internet connection is required. Is there an online element or is it just for DRM or the online store?

[Animalmother]

30fps on console is disappointing to say the least. No doubt someone will mod that in time.

Combat presentation video..

Looks much better than in the launch videos. Gravity (or lack there of) effects recoil and movement. They also seem to have put some effort into the weapon design, the guns in FO4 are some of the most mediocre and clunky looking ever.

[Wrathbone]

New interview with Todd Howard with some interesting details near the end:

- General planet terrain is generated in areas about 1km in diameter that are then wrapped around the whole planet. So the speculation that each planet will have one homogenous biome seems accurate.

- They've done more handcrafted material than in any of their previous games, including more dialogue than Skyrim and Fallout 4 combined.

[Maturin]

This looks bloody amazing. They finally got a decent engine it seems. Actual real time lighting!

I still have an i5 4570 though, although my GPU meets the requirements. I hardly play games any more but I'd be willing to dive into this I think, if my PC could handle low settings.

[Raid]

Yeah I agree, I also think the size gives you the emptiness that I want from a space game. I want there to be planets that don't really have very much on them as that is what I imagine space to be like. If it was just a galaxy of ten planets which had all been handcrafted I don't think it would feel the same as what Starfield sounds like it will be.

Fair enough I suppose. I'll probably visit a few planets just to see what the procedural generation is like, but other than that I can't see me going to planets that I'm not directed to.

I'll watch that combat video later, but the bits they showed off last night looked pretty good, certainly better than in the Fallouts. The weapons look like they're pretty meaty, and the physics and reduced gravity lend themselves to entertaining moments. And I'm never going to say no to a jetpack.

I think the fact that this doesn't appear to have been in active development for even half the length of time that Star Citizen has, yet it feels like it's hitting a lot of the same buttons is pretty funny. It's not as if SC hasn't had the funding (although I do expect Starfield will have been enormously expensive to create judging from what we've seen so far) either.

I don't believe those recommended specs for the PC version. Recommended to get a playable frame rate at minimum settings, sure, but I always thought recommended settings were for most of the bells and whistles turned on.

[Wrathbone]

I'm dubious on the specs too. I would guess the recommended specs are supposed to give you an equivalent experience to Series X, so 4k 30fps, but it could be that the Series X quality is equivalent to PC medium settings. To get it running at 2k or 4k at 60fps with everything on ultra, I suspect you're going to need something beefier than a 2080. I've also seen some discussion suggesting that the Series X limitation for Starfield is the CPU rather than the GPU, so a decent CPU will probably make a difference with performance consistency.

[Mantis]

I can't believe the level of hype that this game is generating. I personally think it looks incredibly bland and uninspiring.

[Alan]

I concur. Especially any of the dead eye character interactions. I’ve not really liked a Todd Howard joint in two decades so it’s probably not for me.

[Raid]

I don't think it looks any more lifeless than Skyrim or Fallout 4 did. Bethesda's RPGs have always had incredibly wooden NPCs, and they still haven't fixed their bloody awful facial animations which I find genuinely off-putting.

I suppose the setting does lend itself to a more... distant experience, as others have said the remoteness of space travel is part of the appeal for some. The whole "NASA-punk" aesthetic kinda adds to that, because we're used to seeing that style of technology in stories of early space exploration. Everything is purely functional with zero effort given to making things look good at the expense of practicality, and I guess that might feel a bit soulless.

I also think they haven't really shown off much of the usual Bethesda sense of fun. We got the Adoring Space Fan, sure, but other than that did we see anything quirky other than what the staff have built? I love that they showed off a ridiculous spaceship mech that could have been built with Duplo, but we've not seen much in the way of strange conversations that Bethesda games tend to have. It could just be for marketing reasons, perhaps they thought it might detract from the grand space opera that they're trying to portray, or maybe it's just not in there at all.

[Wrathbone]

I get the impression from interviews that Todd Howard is reluctant to show anything that could detract from a player's discovery of that thing, so it could just be that they're holding back on showing too many oddball things for that reason. In the past I've heard him say that if it was up to him, he wouldn't show anything of his games until a week before release.

[Sly Boots]

This was quite amusing:

https://www.pcgamer.com/no-bethesda-i-d ... ompanions/