The other guy said something similar elsewhere, but again I just... don’t know what y’all are talking about? Starfield absolutely wants everyone to be an everything machine, like most Bethesda games before it (especially the shooty ones). In the end you can invest in everything, and even if you wanted to specialize,…

There are quite literally 100 things more interesting in Valhalla character development than you cherrypicking the most interesting (and still mostly fucking dull!) capstone abilities you get after a billion points of investment and “challenge” grinding. The fact that shit like “health regen out of combat” and “you…

I’m ungreying this dunk on myself because it made me chuckle lol

This is a bonkers take. After character creation, almost every single upgrade in Starfield is “+10% pistol damage” “+10kg carry weight” “-5% O2 consumption” “+10% persuasion chance”. Comparatively, the skill tree in AC: Valhalla was a fucking design masterclass.

I’m talking about the reaction tests you were talking about. Pay attention. Which, incidentally, is mostly measuring system latency. If you took out peoples setups introducing a metric ton of latency on both sides, actual scientific testing puts roundtrip reaction speed at closer to 150ms, but the reaction to just…

Yeah, I feel all of that. I also came to realize, after putting it down for a bit, that getting the most out of Starfield requires you to really minimize as much extraneous friction as possible. Because just playing the game as designed at all has such a high base level of it that it can’t bear any more.

Installing the…

I’m one of the people who has been pretty harsh on the game, but I think you’ve nailed the whole deal here as well as I’ve heard anyone do thus far.

Again, you’re taking a very surface level understanding of things and stretching it to the point of being woefully wrong.

That’s roundtrip latency. The thing that is most important in game perception is not light-action-light, its action-light. Your ability to perceive that gap is roughly an order of magnitude higher.…

When you say “At 4K” I’m assuming you mean output resolution, and not actual resolution. Because native 4K ultra chugs in lots of places.

Our superior systems can play it, just not as well as they should (but still significantly better than consoles). Console gamers just have standards in the fucking dirt, so they mistake PC gamers saying “this game runs like shit on PC” for it running any better on console. It doesn’t, they just think a wobbly 30 FPS…

This is objectively false. You sound like the person who hasn’t played much. Only the smallest outpost aren’t instanced. The rest are absolutely load separated dungeons, often with several load separations within a single dungeon.

You see no reason why because you haven’t thought about this very hard. Video games operate on perception-action loops. The latency of that loop is directly tied to the framerate of the game. A higher latency results in a larger disconnect, which reduces the sense of agency, dulls reactions, can cause disorientation…

I mean that broadly matches my understanding as well, but I also know he got caught with his hand in the cookie jar more than once. It wasn’t just one wave of unlicensed content and then it was fixed, the game got patched several times to change/remove shit he didn’t have permission to use.

(Admittedly, somewhat cynical) translation: I got my bag, and the longer this remains available for purchase, the more liable I am for the obvious and blatant copyright infringement the game made its fortune on.

Which, to be clear, I don’t really begrudge. I doubt this dude thought this game would ever have the…

Including referral code links in an article about a game is not “shilling”, for fucks sakes get ahold of yourselves. I’m sure you’re browsing this site with an ad blocker enabled, you’d scoff at the notion of paying a subscription to be here, and including unobtrusive referral links that are not pressed in the actual…

“or you have to just pick a location from a menu and hope there might be something interesting once you load in there”

I said that’s a thing you could do, though I would personally be reticent to call a Radiant AI style random event something of actual interest, but that’s a matter of personal taste.

What I mean by a…

You can also land directly on planets by opening the scanner and looking at the location on the planet of the landing site, as long as theres not multiple fast travel points at that site, which redirects you to the planet map again. Which is frustrating, because half the buttons in the planet map break if youve done…

I’m happy you had an experience that was cool for you, and I have no doubt many, many people are going to find the fun in it, but that really doesn’t run counter to what I was saying at all. The game is plenty good at throwing random scripted events at you. It has to be, because they entirely take the place of organic…

This was a really great piece, that I almost wish was packaged as a standalone essay using Fae Farm as a lens rather than as a review, because I think a lot of people will miss it by not really giving a shit about Fae Farm.

“or you have to just pick a location from a menu and hope there might be something interesting once you load in there”