Bethesda's Starfield is a disgrace to game development and a slap in the face t | Hacker News Reader

Bethesda's Starfield is a disgrace to game development and a slap in the face t

unixsheikh.com

15 pointstodsacerdoti45 comments

> No, you shouldn't have to install this game on an SSD in order to avoid video or audio stuttering. No, you should most definitely NOT upgrade your NVIDIA 1080, 20xx or 30xx something card in order to play this crap.

Oh please. An SSD and a modern video card are the price of entry for AAA games.

That’s just PC gaming with AAA titles. They’re made to have the best graphics possible, not cater to old hardware. If someone doesn’t like it, consoles are a great value. They can also play any number of older games released over past years that are now heavily discounted.

Complaining that a blockbuster AAA title doesn’t work well on mechanical HDDs in 2023 is one of the weirder critiques I’ve heard. This person is just out to complain and/or would be better off on consoles.

> Take a look at the remastered PC versions of Crysis, they all look fantastic and they all run really well even on an old NVIDIA 1050 Ti GPU.

Crysis was released in 2007. The NVIDIA 1000 series came out a decade later. Of course it runs well. What point is the author trying to make? This whole article is strange.

Yeah, the console this game was optimized for (Xbox Series X) has SSD storage and was released concurrent with the Nvidia 30XX series. 2020 console specs seem like a reasonable target.

My son plays Starfield on a nvidia 1060GT 6GB and the game runs easily at 30-40 fps on medium settings. Everything else on the computer is very modern though.

I've not played it yet, but if I am not mistaken the 1080 was released in early 2017, that's basically 6.5 years.

But yes, I'd be pissed if it didn't work on my 3070 with my 2019 CPU.

Disclaimer: have not played Starfield yet, still on Baldur's Gate 3.

>The game suffers an endless amount of video and audio stuttering issues unless you run it from an SSD or an NVMe

The recommended MINIMUM requirement for storage is to use an SSD, per https://store.steampowered.com/app/1716740/Starfield/ :

System Requirements

    Minimum:
        OS: Windows 10 version 21H1 (10.0.19043)
        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
        Storage: 125 GB available space
        Additional Notes: SSD Required

My previous PC had an SSD, I would rather not go back to running my OS/applications from a HDD.

That said, ensuring your games run on minimal hardware goes a long way, Blizzard does/did this for their games.

Starfield is fine. It actually runs pretty smoothly, just not at 4k 120fps. A lot of AAA games these days require a DLSS-like solution to run well, which is kind of frustrating but we are already a few years into the roll out and its only a matter of time before it is ubiquitous. There is also a problem with tech IP lockout: Bethesda made a deal with AMD where they would support AMDs Super Resolution tech, the terms of which required them to not officially support NVidia DLSS. There are however Mods you can install to support DLSS.

An interesting sidebar there is that allegedly, a popular community modder was given advanced access to the game, allegedly so that DLSS support would be available near launch.

Anyway idk man, all these issues are manageable. Its janky but its fun jank.

Negative articles get views.

I'm really enjoying Starfield, it's great.

End of story.

(Proof that positive stories don't get views)

I'm playing it because I got it for free(read: Game Pass). The glitches are bad, the writing is pretty bad despite having good moments, the progression is pretty shoddy.

End of story. Right?

While I agree with the general sentiment, and think some egregious cases should even be handled as false advertisement / fraud, picking out Starfield as an example of what changed for the worse is odd, since Bethesda games have been riddled with bugs for at least two decades now.

I RTFA, and this is not my experience. I just built a new gaming PC for about $900 with an AMD Radeon 6700 XT and the game runs smooth at 4K on the default high setting, about 50 fps normally. An SSD has been expected for AAA gaming for years. The game, as a game, is fine. I'm not saying you should like it, but if you don't like it then it's probably because you don't like the genre. As the article mentions, it's pretty derivative material within its genre, not exactly breaking a lot of new ground. This is fine. I have experienced no bugs whatsoever. I like the way it looks.

Oh brother...

>The game suffers an endless amount of video and audio stuttering issues unless you run it from an SSD or an NVMe (even then some people still experience stuttering problems).

This has been an issue with many games for a while. Diablo 3 ran like dog shit and had audio issues on HDDs. TF2 runs like shit on HDDs.

This entire article is "Waaaahhhh I should be able to play modern Triple A games on shitty hardware"

I don't think so. I can understand SSD/HDD difference and SSD requirement, which is probably due to tons of random, small reads.

Yet, Valve has shown us it's possible to have great graphics, atmosphere and playability with modest hardware with HL2 series.

They tuned it so hard, so it crashed on AMD systems like crazy in the beginning. They called gamers to their labs and debugged on real hardware when this happened. I remember installing 3+ hotfixes a day.

They did HDR on a card (Radeon 9600XT) which supposedly can't do these things and ran with almost no performance penalty.

I believe so many things can be optimized further, yet it's not seen worthy of the effort. When games are made for passion, but not for money primarily, everybody wins. When you want to milk something as quickly as possible, this happens.

I have SDDs but my Steam library is on HDDs for cost efficiency. It's not "shitty" hardware, it's actually a reasonable choice. I'm sure has hell not going to futz around with copying the current game I want to play from HDD to SSD each time my mood changes.

That said, I have 64 GB of RAM and use Primo Cache to cache my Steam drive, so I don't generally notice any stuttering after maybe the first minute of the game.

I tried playing on my gaming PC with a 3080 and an NVMe. It gives me major nausea, something that has never happened to me before (and I had a VR startup where I spent all day in a headset!).

I really wanted to dive into this game but I guess I’ll wait to see if something improves. From what I heard performance isn’t great on intel and NVIDIA machines.

I am surprised there are that many non-SSD drives left out there among gamers.

I still have a few hard drives in my computer for things I don't really care about. Hard drives last for ages and a computer used for most professional work doesn't need much more than 250GB of SSD storage. Using an old hard drive for games has worked well for me for ages, even Cyberpunk ran fine from a hard drive for me.

Having to upgrade your system because one game doesn't handle hard drives well sucks. Previously, many games were huge because they repeated assets on disk so that hard drives could load them up faster. With the SSD requirement, this is no longer the case. Logically, the game should be much smaller because of that, but it's still huge.

There's an easy solution for all of this, though: just don't buy the game. If the game wasn't built to your liking or your computer can't handle it, you can simply not spend money on it and play something else.

Well, 10TB 2DWPD SSD drives are not easy to find...

I didnt realize the game was that big

It’s not that I store only games on my computer, but backups, photography and legacy stuff takes space. Especially, if you’re into computers for ~30 years.

> Nowadays PC gamers are used as guinea pigs when big gaming titles are released with major bugs, major performance issues, and other similar problems.

Gamers are also very vocal when games are delayed as well.

The developers cant really win!

PCs have such variation in configurations and quality that games are bound to suffer, the price you pay for hardware freedom is that games sometimes aren’t optimised for your environment.

(Games are also getting bigger and bigger with no guarantee that it will sell so decisions need to be made)

There are so many great games out there which can run on anything 64bit, that I'm still letting my old desktop PC chug along with its 740 and whichever harddisks I've had thrown at me over the years.

Might upgrade at some point to try some of these high profile releases, but I have to say I don't find it appealing enough to go through the hassle atm.

Its ironic that an article which talks about Quality Control, misses the spelling of Bethesda quite a few times :D

He misses the spelling of a lot of words

English isn't his first language. He did alright (though yes, a spell checker would have helped)

(The "though" and "would" thing reminds me of those old jokes about English spelling not being phonetic)

I'm playing on a 1080ti with a 10 year old CPU. My partner plays on a 980ti with a more recent CPU.

Totally agree with the comments that it’s weird to expect an AAA game to work ok on HDD in 2023. If you don’t want to pay for an expensive video card, just buy an XBox for $300 and be happy:).

I still remember my intel 1st gen 80gb ssd. Who doesn't run ssds?

>Not only did I run into the ridicules hard-coded GPU check, that continuously fail for thousands of users that DO fulfill the minimum GPU requirements,

From what I read this was a common linux problem, though not for myself. For me nvidia gpu + linux = no starfield. So I went and bought a new amd gpu.

I had a few troubles but once the game would actually launch it has been running quite smoothly. I have found some bugs which seem not-linux-related. Expected Im guessing.

>Relevant reading

terrible, horrible, bad, worse

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Negative+Nan...

Stop being so negative.

SSDs aren't new technologies and nvme drives can be found at similar or lower prices than ssd. so in this case, Todd Howard is correct, upgrade your PC. cyberpunk's new update is also dropping support for HDD

> Starfield is a big game, yes, but what exactly is it about it that makes so much better that it require so much more hardware power?

no other game allows you to do crazy stuff like this https://proxitok.pabloferreiro.es/@placeholder/video/ZPRWoBA... and have the items persist.

There's a lot of rage about this game considering that most people didn't even pay full price and are playing via Game Pass.

A 1tb nvme costs less than the game. Not to apologize for underachieving too much, but honey, if you think Starfield was bad..

I was really annoyed that the Nexus mods banned Starfield mods for removing pronouns. It seemed so..petty but.. that's Bethesda for you.

The mod sounds a lot more petty than the removal of said mod.

Is a single drop down menu that only shows up once during character creation really triggering the author of that mod that much?

Thats not Bethesda, Nexus bans mods like that for any game

I'm not sure what made anyone think running Starfield from an SSD makes a difference. Perhaps there is a performance floor that describes Runs-Like-Ass, but having an SSD drive on my gaming PC (ryzen even) did not provide any sort of performance benefit.

I made the mistake of, admittedly accidently, throwing Starfield onto a spinning disk drive.

Load times were approximately 5-10 minutes from button click to start, any conversation that was initiated either ran through all of the audio dialogue and then ran the animations for said dialogue or did the reverse. Any time combat started the game would freeze completely and then start again.

I realized my mistake and moved Starfield over to my nvme and load times dropped to about 1 minute, and I never saw any of the other issues again. It was like I spent my whole life living in a cave staring at shadows and then found my self on the surface seeing the sun for the first time.

I read elsewhere that there's an issue with audio being loaded on demand causing performance hiccups, that might be improved with an SSD?

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