Only thing I disagree with Lord Ryuu on is the performance. Might just be me.. but the more I play the worse certain things get. Akila city runs kind of poorly on my end. Everytime I scan with LB and get out of it, I get a decent amount of stuttering. I've had a few hard crashes and like five lock ups that made me quit manually.

I'd say it runs great at times, but maybe it's playing over 12 hour sessions...

Playing on series x as well.

Overall, buttery in some places, but not the best in others. 85-90% super smooth. Turned off film grain and motion blur as well.

Series X user here, also gotta say the performance isn’t perfect, 10+ crashes so far and my frame rate starts to tank in certain areas like ship building. I think a lot it comes from quick resume. 

The performance isn't perfect, I've had a number of crashes but I have played for over 60 hours now and the vast majority of my time has been very smooth. I've not noticed any performance issues with Akila or the scanner thus far. What I've noticed is that the crashes happen typically at the end of the day, after playing for like 6+ hours straight, I don't believe I've ever had a crash at the start of my play session. I also don't use quick resume.

So maybe it's a memory leak (is that the term?) where it's more likely to crash the longer you play and then you have to do a hard reset of the game. I've been forgiving of that though because it's been so few in comparison to my total playtime and because they happen typically at the end of my day, Lol. I'm about to quit my session and the game frigging crashes anyway, so I quit, load it up, make sure the save is good and then turn it off, haha.

It unfortunately does not appear to run well on a lot of PCs though, the majority of Steam complaints seem to be about the performance and not running on their hardware. I bet Xbox's ATG group only focused on getting Xbox up to speed and kind of neglected the PC side of things. Yet another in the long line of PC releases that performs worse on PC than consoles (and please, user who constantly wants to compare the two, don't pretend like BG3 didn't have a bunch of issues too, in performance, crashing and save file corruptions, if it's unacceptable for Starfield to have some then it is for BG3 too).

Also I am being cognizant with deleting saves when they get too many, Never have more than 50.

And once I realized at the start of the gen that quick resume fs up cheevos I never use it, plus it inflates my play time. 

What I love about this game is you can get yourself out of so many situations just by talking. lol.

REminds me of the outer worlds where I didn't even have a final boss, I just talked my way out of it.

Also who TF said Starfield was gonna change the industry XD

Chose persuasion as a starting skill (diplomat) and 100% agree, one of my favourite skills by far. 

Well, you're certainly welcome to your opinion, but I can't say I agree with that:

-Bethesda always did have a group of haters, mainly due to the buggy state they were known for releasing their games in and their usage of outdated engines, but that group was never huge, it was a fairly niche group before Fallout 76, which is why Skyrim has user reviews of 94% on Steam and Fallout 4 managed a lower but still respectable 83%. Fallout 76 grew that group of Bethesda haters by quite alot, which is why we started to see their youtube videos getting more dislikes after that, including the Starfield reveal trailer before Xbox had even bought them.

-Fallout 4 most certainly wasn't hated by a large group of people. It managed a respectable 83% user score on Steam as I mentioned before, which was honestly impressive considering how rushed Fallout 4 was, Bethesda released it with just 2.5 years of full development, the full dev team wasn't on it until after Skyrim's last DLC released in mid 2013, with the game releasing 2.5 years later in late 2015. 

-Nearly every lower review that I have seen for Starfield has been tainted by nonsense, from IGN's Dan Stapleton expecting the game to be a full on space sim instead of a more arcadey space RPG like he should have known Bethesda was aiming for, to Jim Sterling claiming that Bethesda's game making hasn't improved at all since Fallout 3 (even though he gave both Skyrim and Fallout 4 good reviews and they both released after Fallout 3 and would have also suffered from a lack of evolution if his claim was true, and yet he gave them both good reviews regardless). It's clear to see that the infamous Xbox Tax is in full effect with these reviews, if this game had been a Sony or Nintendo exclusive I guarantee you that the reviews would be over 90 average, instead of 85 on Metacritic and 88 on Opencritic.

-Starfield is a huge game and will have an impact on the industry, just like Skyrim did before it (though likely a smaller impact than Skyrim had). Skyrim inspired many devs to make open world games who had never done so before, and I fully expect Starfield will inspire more devs to use randomization systems like Bethesda used for NPC's, world terrain, repeatable missions, and creatures/aliens in Starfield. 

-Starfield is most certainly massive in areas other than player count. It has 3 large hub cities, the largest of which, New Atlantis, is the biggest city that Bethesda has ever built. It has 1000+ planets and moons, and between those quite a few smaller named settlements (such as Gagarin, New Homestead, Dydonia, Hopetown, and Red Mile) which each have quests that take you to them and side quests to discover inside of them. Based on the fact that I'm at 54 hours playtime and still have barely touched the main story or the 4 faction storylines, it is a safe bet that Starfield is the largest game that Bethesda has ever made in terms of hours of content on release.

-They worked a long time on Starfield because a. they remade Creation Engine as Creation Engine 2, b. it was a new IP and new IP's always take longer, and c. it was the largest game they have ever made in virtually every metric, as I mentioned above. 

-The extra year was for optimization and bug fixes and the game was certainly better for it.

-I think the environment graphics are excellent, I can run through a city like Neon and it looks as good as Cyberpunk 2077's Night City to my eyes. Likewise, there are some truly gorgeous randomized planets with both good landscapes and gorgeous skyboxes. Character model graphics are less good, they do look a bit outdated due to things like a lack of subsurface scattering on skin and the fact that they used a facial animation AI system instead of mo-cap, and the randomization of the character creator they used for non-named "Citizen" type NPC's occasionally produces less than flattering results. But overall, this is the best looking game Bethesda has ever released, and Digital Foundry agreed with that in their analysis.

-Performance could be better, I agree there, but the game seems to be heavily CPU intensive due to things that Bethesda does with their Creation Engine that few other developers do, like hundreds of interactable objects which each have real-time position tracking and the ability to save their location when you exit an instance and have them there again when you re-enter; a large number of NPC's walking around the cities, including named NPC's each having daily schedules of things they do and places they will be (from work to eating to sleeping). The fact of the matter is that many other games are seeing performance issues in cities these days, including Larian's Baldur's Gate 3, which is currently suffering from major frame drops in a large city in Act 3. CPU improvements have gotten stagnant over the years due to Intel getting lazy and AMD failing to keep Intel on their toes (particularly during the FX years from 2011 to 2017), so GPU improvements have outpaced CPU improvements, so these days whenever a developer tries to do anything that is even remotely CPU intensive in their games, we end up with CPU related frame drops. While Xbox Series and PS5 are certainly more balanced systems than Xbox One and PS4 were (which were almost all GPU and next to nothing on CPU), the fact that we have seen many CPU intensive games even on PC recently just goes to show how much the stagnant period for CPU development has hurt gaming, though AMD and Intel are both trying harder on the CPU front these days, we will be feeling the effects of the stagnant period of CPU improvements from the last decade for years to come still.

-Starfield has the best gameplay of any Bethesda game ever. Shooting actually feels good now, so you no longer need a handholding device like VATS to do well at the shooting. The space combat is fantastic, some of the best space combat of any game I have ever played. 

-All I can say is have encountered far fewer bugs than any past Bethesda game, and the few I have encountered have mostly been minor visual or physics glitches, the biggest issue I have ran into was the vanishing ship issue I had yesterday, which thankfully has a workaround until the devs patch it. 

-Just because Bethesda haven't announced any sort of roadmap doesn't mean that they aren't working on bug fixes right now as we speak, lol. I can guarantee you that many of the hundreds of devs at Bethesda right now, as people at the Zenimax multi-studio QA team and the Xbox multi-studio QA team, are pounding out bug fixes right now as we speak. There are far fewer bugs for them to fix in Starfield post-release than in their past games, so they may just be able to fix just about everything over the next 1 and a half years or so of DLC support for Starfield, so it won't be like Skyrim and Fallout 4 which were left unfinished in terms of bug fixes when they moved on to fully developing their next game, where you pretty much needed to download an unofficial modder developed patch in order to play free of issues for years to come.

Sometimes, I think to myself, I enjoyed gaming a lot more when I was disconnected from all this console war bullshit.

Fondly remember back in my teenage years, nobody in my school gave an absolute fuck about Metacritic, nobody knew what these games scored, nobody knew the total sales of the consoles. We just played games and spoke about what we enjoyed about them. Instead of obsessing over what random dudes are screaming about over the internet. It was all about the games.

This is why I have my Twitter very carefully curated to avoid following console war morons (on both sides) so I don't see that shit on my timeline or RT'd. My Twitter is as strictly news focused as it can be, but even that doesn't stop some news sites lately dropping console war bait and then later complaining about the console wars after feeding them!

It's why I avoid YouTube as much as I can, 80% of Youtubers today are just rage-baiters. Half of them are angry and the other half are pretending to be angry to get angry people and trolls clicking their videos. There's such a focus on desperately finding faults in anything and blowing it up to a ridiculous proportion to get those angry clicks. There is so little positivity on YouTube. (Talking about beyond gaming too).

I also think Meta/Open do more harm than good for the industry, I don't mind the fun bets or prediction leagues, not taking them too seriously there, but I do believe the vast majority of the general public couldn't give a shit about Meta/Open, only internet users do, and the vast majority of those internet users just use these sites to feed the console wars rather than actually use them to make an informed decision on their purchases.

This hobby is just so incredibly toxic sometimes and just full of whine whine whine whine, Lol.

Ah, I love this thread at least. I'm loving Starfield but I'm not loving the drama and it isn't making me like Starfield any less, it's making me like this hobby overall less, Lol. After Starfield I'm going to detox with a bunch of TV Shows though, largely because Starfield is such a massive game that I'm going to put over 100 hours in so I'll want a bit of a break from gaming.

But also cause the sheer toxicity and fanboy drama surrounding this game, that when I'm done with it, I'm likely going to notice it more, fuck that, I'll just wait for the news and binge TV Shows until the fanboy nonsense surrounding this game blows over, although ABK is next, Lmfao. But I don't think ABK will be surrounded by such fanboy nonsense because most their titles will remain multiplatform for years to come.

Yeah, performance is definitely Starfield's weakest area imo. While it is a smooth 30 fps most of the time (with the best motion blur system I have ever seen helping it look higher than 30 fps), I do get 0 fps hitches sometimes while just walking around (this is a Creation Engine issue as the same thing happened in Fallout 4, I remember Digital Foundry talking about it years ago). At 54 hours playtime I've had I think 3 hard crashes back to the Xbox Home screen, and I think 6 lock-ups that forced me to reboot the game (these usually happen either when I am waiting in a chair to advance time in game, or during a quicksave or autosave).