Blake

i dont think its better than New Vegas

To be fair, that’s quite a high bar, games that are as good as New Vegas are very rare indeed

I’ve played Starfield (PC) a good bit by now and I’d say that mid 80s is probably fair.

The gameplay is great fun - the combat, gear, etc. is really quite similar to Fallout 4 (though without the VATS), with a Skyrim style talent tree.

The base building and ship building is quite like Fallout 4, though much improved (thankfully!) but still a bit janky.

The worldbuilding is immersive but the world itself is just okay - it’s really predictable, they play it a bit too safe, every faction is nothing we haven’t seen a dozen times before, and society hasn’t advanced at all ~400 years in the future apparently.

Characters are exactly what you expect from a Bethesda game - a bit two dimensional, but nice enough.

Graphics are good, sound design is good, music is nice but a bit too similar to Skyrim IMO.

The story is also really quite safe and derivative, reminds me simultaneously of Mass Effect and Skyrim.

The exploration is cool, but does get a bit repetitive after a while. I think more interesting “random” locations would be really good - after a few abandoned, flavourless civilian bases, you’ve seen them all.

I’m a sucker for customisable bases/houses/etc. especially for space ships, giving me all those building blocks and letting me loose in the sandbox (starbox?) is honestly hours of entertainment.

Space combat is fun, but IMO the space part of the game would be way more immersive if I did all of the ship piloting stuff in-character rather than in the UI menues, seems like a big oversight - why not have something like the galaxy map from mass effect, or have everything on displays in the cockpit? It would be much more immersive, but I guess it would have delayed the game quite a bit.

A lot of the game is juggling menues and interfaces which aren’t the best designed. very similar to Skyrim - I imagine UI redesign mods will really shine once they start coming out. It’s pretty tricky trying to figure out what stuff in your inventory is junk you accidentally picked up (looking at you, Fire Extinguisher!) and which items have a surprisingly good value-to-weight ratio (like some - but not all - of the books, or the deck of cards, surprisingly)

There are occasionally little bugs and glitches, but it’s not too bad for 2023 - nothing that makes the game unplayable or breaks major things, it’s just been stuff like glitchy animations, containers placed in the wrong place/orientation, weird physics behaviour, and I’ve noticed a couple missing textures here and there.

If you’re looking for more of a story/RPG game, I’d suggest something more like Mass Effect or Knights of the Old Republic.

For exploration and space combat, I think No Man’s Sky is better, but with much less customisation.

For more customisation and sandbox style gameplay - but less action-oriented - Space Engineers is probably a better choice.

All in all, Starfield is a fun game - Skyrim in space is a good starting point for describing it, but it’s a lot closer to “Fallout 4, but the bombs didn’t drop”, though the game has a lot of cool extra systems beyond that. I’d be happy to recommend it to someone who would enjoy a single player sci-fi themed looter-shooter sandbox game with some mild RPG elements and player-constructed ships and bases, and I’m sure there are hundreds of hours of enjoyment there, and, as with the Elder Scrolls or Fallout games, it’s likely a game that I will return to for many, many years to come

Thanks for sharing, and for putting me right, I appreciate it! I’m very glad that they’ve backtracked on that. While it’s not a huge amount of processing in most situations, I work as a programmer and I don’t love it when I compile code and my music sounds horrible for a few seconds as the CPU gets absolutely massacred by MSBuild.

I have a DAC which is currently connected by USB - it does have SPDIF inputs as well, though. Do you happen to know if they make sound cards with USB output? Or would I need to use the SPDIF output on the card?

I might still have an old sound card kicking around (Creative X-Fi Fatality or something) but I’m not sure it’ll have Windows 8+ compatible drivers, so I might have to get a new one.

I’m interested in learning more! What benchmarking software are you using and how are you testing that?

Edit: I looked into it and my information was outdated - support for hardware audio offloading was added back in Windows 8! I still have no idea why they removed it between XP and Windows 8, but I’m glad it’s back.

Edit: Turns out that my information is outdated - hardware audio offloading support was added back in Windows 8, apparently!

Original comment: Sound processing hasn’t been offloaded to the sound card since Windows XP - you’ll get no performance improvement from having a sound card.

I think someone can gift you the game, but I’m not 100% certain.

Yeah, the level of state investment and subsidy in fossil fuel is absolutely ludicrous. If all of the money spent on subsidising fossil fuels was instead put into investment of renewables, that would DOUBLE the investments on renewables. It wouldn’t double the subsidy, it would double TOTAL SPENDING.

That is absolutely eye-watering to me.

If they want to keep fuel prices low, the best thing to do would be to nationalise all corporations in the fossilfuel industry - with a symbolic payment of $0.01 per share or something like that - and run them to completely forego profit and to put those companies intentionally into decline.

This is new to me, but absolutely aligns with something I have struggled with all of my life. People have always thought it was strange how I always seemed so… neutral. It’s not that I didn’t feel anything, I felt emotions very strongly in fact, I just usually couldn’t interpret or express them clearly. The best way I’ve found of explaining it, is this: imagine that emotions are colours, like red is anger, yellow is happiness, blue is sadness, etc. what I feel inside looks like one of those balls of elastic bands with every colour just all twisted around eachother so it’s really hard to tell where one strand begins and ends.

It’s only during moments of more intense emotion that I can notice one of the emotions more prominently. And because I don’t feel it often, it’s harder for me to deal with due to lack of practice.

Oh man, you just unlocked a memory of me explaining a weird spectrum I had subconsciously developed for emotions - there’s past, present, future - and a negative/positive axis. Past negative is regret, future negative is anxiety or dread. Future positive is anticipation, past positive is nostalgia, and so on. I got into this whole explanation until the person I was talking to interrupted me and explained that most people don’t need a matrix to explain their feelings.

At what point do we say, “enough is enough, a collective of employees and customers is taking control of the company, you are relieved of command”?

I am so sick of things getting worse and worse because people want to unfairly profit from selling us the solution to a problem that they caused.

I think the other direction you could go is to aim for a younger demographic than you’re likely thinking of. Maybe something like 12-15 years old. It’s very important to note that I’m not suggesting you make the story/aesthetic “kid friendly”, if anything I’d suggest more the opposite, kids love things that seem really adult - but the actual challenges and content itself, keep it tuned to a younger audience. I think that age group would get the most out of a general-purpose “learning to code” educational game