Digital Foundry - Starfield Tech Review

[Remij 4,679]

 

 

Visuals

-Best looking Bethesda game by far

-Lots of intricate details inside the ship and the various installations throughout the game

-Character animations "work well enough" but aren't great.

-Impressive detail in character outfits and space suits

-NPCs are significantly less impressive (lack of subsurface scattering really holds them back)

-Character creation is more robust than FO4

-Character looks good overall

-Planets are relatively sparse, decent variety of locales

-Mild pop-in for objects such as grass

-View distance is great compared to past Bethesda games

-Decent non-RT GI implementation

-Texture work is largely well done, but quality varies per environment, some ugly textures remain

-Bokeh depth of field during character dialog and ADS looks great

-Motion blur is good and contributes well to the presentation at 30fps

-Some spots near major cities feel "undercooked" and lacking detail

-No Swimming, no diving in water

-Across the game as a whole, feels they've done a good job.  Say it looks beautiful most of the time.

 

Design

-Lots of loading screens, essentially fast travelling

-More loading screens as you transfer around from ship to area

-Game essentially loads a zone around the player, planets are an illusion

-No sense of actual space exploration "About the destination, not the journey"

-Wishes they would have found a middle-ground between fully explorable and just quick travelling

-No real feeling of great distance between galaxies

-Item persistence across the entire game

-Limitations on exploring planets, can't walk around the entire world, Jarring to run into a invisible wall.. but not really something you'd do anyway.

-Frequency of loading screens becomes annoying over time

 

Performance

-Largely stable at 30fps

-Engaging in combat in large cities can cause drops

-Far beyond what Bethesda has done on consoles in the past

-Thinks performance mode could be feasible on VRR displays

-Loading times between planets slightly increased over time, clean saves load faster

-Loading times are quite long

-Game natively supports HDR, but Black levels are raised, leading to a washed out looking image

-Missing FOV slider option

-Generally surprised and impressed by the stability of the games' performance

 

Miscellaneous

-Enjoys the games OST

-Sound effects-work is equally impressive, 

-Game feels like a blend of Skyrim and Fallout

-Starfields segmentation means you spend more time actually doing things instead of just moving forward travelling to the next thing to do

-Combat is good with satisfying gunplay

-Despite the flaws he greatly enjoyed his time with Starfield and will continue to play

 

 

[Quad Damage 1,730]

[jehurey 3,230]

Quote

-No sense of actual space exploration "About the destination, not the journey"

If there is no exploration, and there is no distance to get there............then there is no "destination" to begin with.

 

That 2019 4chan rumor was 100% on the money.

 

Its the same fucking engine, and they could never get space travel to work, because there's NO VEHICLE mechanics or traversal mechanics in this game.

[Sabo 442]

"About the destination, not the journey".

 

LOL that's a nice way of saying it's shallow as fuck.

[Ike★ 2,908]

FLOP

[bhytre 2,753]

1 minute ago, Ike said:

FLOP

say that again

[-GD-X★ 7,738]

7 hours ago, bhytre said:

say that again

[Ike★ 2,908]

1 hour ago, -GD-X said:

New smiley :starflop: