KickAssCop
[H]F Junkie
- Joined
- Mar 19, 2003
- Messages
- 8,336
I don't hold it against him to charge for his work. Nothing in life is free.
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I don't hold it against him to charge for his work. Nothing in life is free.
Has anyone tried the new Halk Hogan Starfield HD Reworked mod?
https://www.thefpsreview.com/2023/0...1-0-improving-environmental-and-npc-textures/
Looks promising. I might try it tonight.
What people usually fail to understand is that the lower resolution textures are not used because a developer wanted to. It is normally about hitting certain performance targets. So the dev chooses where to make sacrifices to hit those frame rate numbers on their target hardware. Back in the day, Mass Effect 3 had worse textures than Mass Effect 2. The reason? So it could fit on two DVD's. Rather than give the PC and Playstation versions different textures, they used the same ones for all three versions of the game. In the digital distribution age we don't see it for those reasons but there are plenty of others.I tested this.
Improvements are subtle, and you'll probably miss them unless comparing screenshots side by side.
It did - however - introduce some stuttering as game assets are loaded, which weren't there before, and that's running this off of two 2TB Samsung 990 Pro's in parallel (main game data in my Steam folder on one, and mod data in my user folder on another) so we should be talking ridiculous levels of available drive bandwidth.
I think I'm going to remove it.
What people usually fail to understand is that the lower resolution textures are not used because a developer wanted to. It is normally about hitting certain performance targets. So the dev chooses where to make sacrifices to hit those frame rate numbers on their target hardware. Back in the day, Mass Effect 3 had worse textures than Mass Effect 2. The reason? So it could fit on two DVD's. Rather than give the PC and Playstation versions different textures, they used the same ones for all three versions of the game. In the digital distribution age we don't see it for those reasons but there are plenty of others.
Starfield also limits how many modules your ship can be made out of or how long, tall and wide it can be for similar reasons. Though on a high end rig you can get away with increasing these values same as you can for some of the textures. At some point, you will hurt performance with mods like this one.
Contrary to popular belief, you can't just throw more RAM at a problem. Some processes just don't need that much. However, games are designed for console I/O systems which took a huge leap forward with this generation. I/O is often overlooked in many applications.In total agreement. I was hoping my system specs were sufficient to get away with it. Apparently not.
Modder claims performance is unaffected by his tweaks, and from a framerate perspective after everything is loaded, he is completely right, but at least on my system, the asset loads from the drive kill it.
Might be better if coupled with the drive cache mod. I may have to try that.
it seems absolutely insane that this game is hammering my drives like crazy nonstop, and then not keeping assets cached, using only 12GB of RAM when I have 64.
Contrary to popular belief, you can't just throw more RAM at a problem. Some processes just don't need that much. However, games are designed for console I/O systems which took a huge leap forward with this generation. I/O is often overlooked in many applications.
I just completed my first faction questline after 50 hours according to steam. Makes me question that the game can be completed in 120 hours with all faction missions.Faction quest ranks, CF > UC > Ryujin > Rangers
Companion quest ranks, Sarah > Andreja > Sam > Barrett
Not yet, but I will! I'm hvaing one of those "major work deadline" weekends where I am catching up. Not a lot of games this weekend.
Sam and Sarah are assigned to my ship so when the activity to talk to them pops up I do that, but no mission so far. But I never went out of my way to say the right thing every time to them, especially when they start moaning about something. I learned early on that followers tend to get in the way more than be of actual help so I'm not taking anyone with me on missions except when it is forced. I couldn't care less about achievements, just don't want to miss interesting quests.Companion quests trigger when they reach a certain affinity level, they also stop and talk to you periodically leading up to the quest. I assume you gotta do all of those too.
I took each one as a follower until I completed their quest and rotated them out. It took me the entire playthrough to finish it, I literally finished up Sam's quest a few hours before the ending of the game. Also to get the achievement you have to marry someone.
I used an affinity cheat in the 2nd half of the game because they are all very picky people who get angry easily. In my experience it would be really hard to do all 4 in one playthrough.
In your case the only choice is NG+.
Load times are less than 3 seconds for the most part, only quick loading takes a bit longer, but it's still sub 10 seconds. If I had to fly seamlessly from orbit to a landing pad every time that would really be repetitive and boring.I'm level what . 29. Games starting ri get boring. I'm just figuring things out and it's getting repetitious and lacking in excitement.
And I'm getting tired of loading. Why can't it be like star citizen. No loading seamless game play.
Bethesda missed the opportunity to truly make this a spiritual successor to Skyrim, "Skyrim in space".Load times are less than 3 seconds for the most part, only quick loading takes a bit longer, but it's still sub 10 seconds. If I had to fly seamlessly from orbit to a landing pad every time that would really be repetitive and boring.
Why should it be a spiritual successor to Skyrim? That's an arbitrary expectation you attach to the game.Bethesda missed the opportunity to truly make this a spiritual successor to Skyrim, "Skyrim in space".
While it's true I fast travel between NA, Akila, and Neon the same way I fast travel between Solitude, White Run, and Riften.
You just have to come to terms with the fact that this is not skyrim in space, but more of a modern large scope Mass Effect clone. It didn't bother anyone in Mass Effect that you can't travel seamlessly between locations. So why is it a huge issue now?But in past games you also wander around the open world sometimes, to discover new places, and you don't really do that in Starfield.
The game is not flawed, it's just not what you want it to be. The emptiness of space is kind of a given. I'd say the game would be flawed if you bumped into something every 2 minutes while flying around in the void. It would certainly break my immersion much more so than a 2 second pause during loading. There is not even a loading screen per se once you start the game. What I find kind of ironic is that almost everyone bashes the game for the walking part between pois planetside while complaining that space is not seamless. For crying out loud if it was seamless space would exactly be the same as the walking part to reach planets and space stations. This is when the saying is very true in my opinion, that players don't always know what they want.You just grav jump directly to your location. This is where people make a huge mistake. "Space is big and empty, what else was Bethesda supposed to do?" Duh, space isn't the problem, the problem is the way Bethesda designed it. The entire game is flawed.
Even if flying would take two minutes I'd still opt for fast traveling every single time when I'm on a mission. And if fast travel was somehow restricted that would make the game flawed to me. Because it would increase the grind by having to deal with random encounters that don't advance the story, don't count as exploration, but takes time, when I just want to be at my destination to complete the mission I'm actually interested in.To be clear, the solar systems in Starfield are already rendered in full 3D space. You can fly from one plant to another using speed mods -- it's all there already. All they had to do was give the ship a super speed where it takes 1-2 minutes to fly between each planet, then spawn space POI's on the way. They already have a lot of that stuff in the game, it just spawns on the star map and dynamically after you grave jump... Pirate battles, derelict ships, grandma, space stations. Instead of using the star map, they just had to spawn those places in space as you fly.
That would be absolutely insane, and not in a good way, hundreds of POIs on uninhabited planets? My immersion is not just out the door, but already on the bus halfway to Rome. The barrenness of the random landing sites gives me a feeling of awe at the emptiness and inhospitably of the universe. The fact that there are nothing much of interest at every random location I choose to land makes me feel like a real explorer, especially when I actually bump into something cool, as it becomes a reward in of itself. As opposed to being in a "dumb" videogame that showers me with participation trophies every step of the way.Then, on planets, a pool of 100-200 POIs like Skyrim and FO4 are spawned procedurally, depending on the planet type and biome.
Because they wanted to make Mass Effect with a bethesda flavor, and that's fine. I think Starfield is almost perfect as is, I'd add or change very little about it, and the things you listed as wants would either make the game worse for me, or at best not add anything of value to the experience.Could've been the perfect game. But again I find myself constantly wondering how Bethesda fucked it up this bad. All they had to do was make Skyrim in Space. Or Fallout 3 In Space. Or Fallout 4 in Space. Or Oblivion in Space.
Instead they made Mass Effect Andromeda 2.
If they tried to make star citizen, they'd be in the same boat of feature and scope creep and we'd never have seen a finished product. It would've ended up in development hell or microsoft would've swooped in and made executive decisions, and we all know how well it works out when the publisher starts meddling with the product.I'm enjoying the game but it makes me mad thinking about it. I feel like I've been swindled by Bethesda, they have a 20 year history of making the same type of game. Except this time, the one time when they really needed to do it right. They went in the complete wrong direction. Todd Howard was determined to make his "dream game" and all they had was this shitty engine, so this is what we get.
Will starfield suffer the same fate? Everyone smashes out a few hundred levels, does all there is to do, and the game offers nothing else? I'm only speculative. No one can answer yet, just as D4 had to organically prove its a pure garbage game and it took a couple months, I think starfield is this way but we'll see.
Of course it is not exactly mass effect, but the way space travel is implemented is the same in it. I'd not mind if seamless travel was possible, but just as in skyrim or any other bethesda game thus far I'd skip it and just travel to the nearest fast travel point whenever possible anyway. So I don't miss it at all.Why not have a seamless experience with a choice to fast travel? And this game ain't no mass effect.
Starfield might not be a masterpiece in storytelling, but I'm not exactly enjoying it for the riveting main quest either. To be fair it seems like a small step up in voice acting.Mass effect was a masterpiece in story, delivery of story, and A list voice acting.
I really don't know what do you mean by that.And the game felt perfectly designed to be loaded in the way things were loaded.
And I criticized the skill point challenge mechanic, I think it is by far the biggest mistake in the game. If I wasn't so OCD about playing games vanilla for the first playthrough I'd already have modded that shit out.Whereas Starfield just feels too much like fallout and gets terribly boring and with like 500 cheat codes baked in, the temptation to use cheats far surpasses the ridiculous skill point grinding that it has.
That sounds more like a criticism of how you play the game, not the game itself. The game does not require you to grind for money, so if you choose to do it that's entirely on you. I'm just going with the flow, whatever I feel like doing I do. And this is the great freedom given by the game, that you can just get lost in the world in the seemingly endless side quests, just ignoring the main story for dozens of hours. Try that in Mass Effect, the entire game takes 25-30 hours to complete with all optional missions and exploration included.And your base building mechanic means nothing more in the game than doing a quest and the most expensive ship cab be purchased by level 20 with little effort if your willing to do another grind for money.
To be honest 99.9% of games are like that to me anyway, even the ones I find absolutely brilliant. I finish it once then loose interest. The last RPG I finished twice was Cyberpunk 2077. I never even did a second run at Fallout 4 or Skyrim despite enjoying them for the first attempt.I'm getting the vibe I get from Diablo 4. Which by the way 99.3% of gamers quit D4. It's being touted as an abysmal failure all over the internet.
Will starfield suffer the same fate? Everyone smashes out a few hundred levels, does all there is to do, and the game offers nothing else? I'm only speculative. No one can answer yet, just as D4 had to organically prove its a pure garbage game and it took a couple months, I think starfield is this way but we'll see.
That again speaks of how you choose to play the game, not the game itself. There was no sidestepping in Tie Fighter either which is considered a legendary game. Starfield uses the exact same mechanics, yet somehow that stinks now?Don't get me started on how completely rubbish space ship battles are in starfield. It's littlerally straight line shooting with no dynamics, no piloting skills, the ships can't translate from side to side, no "sidestep". Just fly straight and hope your guns hit harder than the cpus guns.
And thank god for that. A single player game should be a single player game through and through and not waste time on tacking on multiplayer.No multi-player, no pvp, no cooperative planetary governance, and the list goes on.
I play around with building stuff because I enjoy it, not because I seek validation from total strangers. In fact sharing a game world with total strangers would put me off from experimenting with the game and doing things just for fun.It's a single player campaign that let's you remain in game and build a mundane lonely procedurally generated empire of time waste. There is no incentive to build an amazing and functionally dependable outpost because no real player is ever going to discover it and try to join or exploit you. There is no sense of importance at all, there is not even a proper disposal method for excess production. You just drop it on the ground or ship shit it into space.
That's a very strange attitude to have. How did you waste 80 hours on Diablo IV? Are you saying you didn't enjoy a single minute of it? Then why didn't you quit playing after the first 2 hours if it is really that bad?Glad I got an unopened copy of the new Zelda for switch. That game doesn't suck. Time to play it soon. Also glad Starfield is basically pennies for me since it's part of gamepass sub. I wasted 80 on D4, glad not wasted on starfield as well.
That's a very strange attitude to have. How did you waste 80 hours on Diablo IV? Are you saying you didn't enjoy a single minute of it? Then why didn't you quit playing after the first 2 hours if it is really that bad?
(1) Choose one and ask them to join you.I didn't even realize there are companion quests, how do you trigger those?
80 bucks not hours. Diablo IV was a money rip off.
You replied with your opinion to my opinion and thats all this disucssion is - opinion. Never said anything different. I typed all that stuff above on my phone, hence the typos.
In the meantime for all those that care: This video perfectly sums up Bethesda:
View: https://youtu.be/a_lu152g5aM?si=zNxM24OHeuS7IJDw
There is literally NOTHING next gen about this game. Its cheap, poorly designed, and pure trash at this point. Prove me wrong.
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeIfFSH_pWg
There is literally NOTHING next gen about this game. Its cheap, poorly designed, and pure trash at this point. Prove me wrong.
NG+ spoilersWhile I quite enjoyed my initial playthrough, I can definitely say that I was majorly disappointed with the lack of exploration. My favorite thing to do in previous Bethesda titles was just to get out there and see what I might come across, you could ignore quests entirely in those and still have a great time, definitely not in Starfield. Here the POI's on whatever planet you might land on generally have very little to offer, are always ~500-1200m away, and while getting there you get to fight the ridiculous o2 system the entire time, once you do, might just find a couple things to scan or an empty outpost or whatever. NG+ to me seems entirely worthless as well, lose EVERYTHING except your experience? Leveling up passed 40 or so is such a massive slog, might as well just start from scratch.
NG+ spoilers
One of your powers gains a rank when you complete a temple in NG+. Also your Starborn armor and ship rank up each NG+.
It takes 10 loops to max everything.
Some people are maxing everything out in NG+ before even playing the rest of the game.
Huh? It's literally the perk for the first level of the Piloting skill, which is one of the first skills you can get in the Tech tree.Don't get me started on how completely rubbish space ship battles are in starfield. It's littlerally straight line shooting with no dynamics, no piloting skills, the ships can't translate from side to side, no "sidestep". Just fly straight and hope your guns hit harder than the cpus guns.
The perk is turn faster, not translation from side to side. Think sidestep like in first person shooters where you hit A and D.Huh? It's literally the perk for the first level of the Piloting skill, which is one of the first skills you can get in the Tech tree.
No it's not, it's thrusters.The perk is turn faster, not translation from side to side. Think sidestep like in first person shooters where you hit A and D. Those are not even bindable functions in the game. Starcitizen has it, Space Engineers has it, Elite Dangerous damn sure has it, but the 25 year in the making space game doesn't have a simple mechanic such as this? Yeah space battles are laughable at best. If you cant tell I am becoming completely disenfranchised with this over hyped and underdelivered typical AAA 2020's kinda game. All about the Benjamins then move on with your hundreds of millions to the next big fluff scheme game.
Ah, got it. I paid $80 for Starfield and I feel it was already worth it even if I stopped playing it right now.80 bucks not hours. Diablo IV was a money rip off.
That's OK, I wasn't trying to prove your opinion wrong, I'm just offering a counter perspective to those willing to listen.You replied with your opinion to my opinion and thats all this disucssion is - opinion. Never said anything different. I typed all that stuff above on my phone, hence the typos.
A meme video can't sum up the game completely, the 1 second blank screens when going through some doors doesn't bother me at all.In the meantime for all those that care: This video perfectly sums up Bethesda:
I have my own experience and you have yours. My goal is not to change your mind. I just hope that others listen to me and give the game a fair shake at least and not dismiss it entirely based on some first world problem like not being "next gen" enough.There is literally NOTHING next gen about this game. Its cheap, poorly designed, and pure trash at this point. Prove me wrong.
His point was that the gameplay and story of Starfield are not as good as Mass Effect, making the constant loading screens of Starfield less excusable than they were in Mass Effect.Of course it is not exactly mass effect, but the way space travel is implemented is the same in it. I'd not mind if seamless travel was possible, but just as in skyrim or any other bethesda game thus far I'd skip it and just travel to the nearest fast travel point whenever possible anyway. So I don't miss it at all.
What possible connection is there between seamless transit between areas and story? I just mentioned that games are not just the sum of their parts. A game can be enjoyable despite having many issues. There is no better example of this than Alpha Protocol. What a broken mess that is for the most part yet I'd be kicking myself if I missed it.His point was that the gameplay and story of Starfield are not as good as Mass Effect, making the constant loading screens of Starfield less excusable than they were in Mass Effect.
The one thing I will say in the defense of Bethesda. 90% of the people expected a buggy game with odd ball choices in the game. To me I do love playing starfield, but I know for a fact it is just fallout 4 in space with a new story and ships thrown in. Starfield imo is not the best game out this year. It isn't even close if you ask me.What I see, and I understand why, is the "Diablo 4 syndrome" at work. Players defended diablo 4 as if it was the most amazing creation in the modern era, even more than electricity itself if there were a way to describe it. However 99% of diablo player base no longer plays and in the end the hardcore defense of the game turned out to be cognitive dissonance all along. I am seeing the same pattern with this game. People know the game sucks deep inside but refuse to acknowledge it for reasons no one can discern but we know the game is trashy, but for some reason it's the new game on the block so let's pretend it's amazing until it finally hits that "hey this thing sucked all along". Same with politics, president X is my guy, even though 100% of what he does is evil and wrong and I know it, I am going to support him regardless because president Y is 95% amazing but I don't like the way he talks so ..... anyways that kinda cognitive dissonance.
Duplicating a ship is very straightforward, but it requires some legwork to make sure it’s worth doing. Ship duplication works both on PC and Xbox consoles, but you need to use a controller to pull it off. It won’t work with a keyboard.
The way you use the glitch to make money requires you to have at least two ships in your inventory, ideally one big high-value ship and a small cheap one that you got for free, as the latter will disappear in the process.