I’m not familiar with NUCs, So I dont know if that affects anything… but I’ve been playing Starfield since it unlocked on Linux, so theres no issue with at least the linux part if that helps you with anything.
That’s good to know. I mentioned the nuc because its not a gaming machine. I am able to play some stuff on it but its not a powerhouse. It is utilitarian for me. Budgets, bills, banking, videos, programming, etc.
PSA you can still get Gamepass Ultimate for cheap. This is your last opportunity to stock up (I think September 14th is the cutoff).
Find some cheap Xbox Gold cards (sites like cdkeys or eneba). It’s a little trickier but cdkeys usually sells the cards from the Turkey region super cheap but you have to redeem over VPN.
3 months of gold converts into 50 days of Gamepass Ultimate. Depending on the price you should be able to get 3 years for $200 or less. Careful to not go over, you can’t redeem past 3 years.
Edit
PSA #2
If you already have Gamepass take part in rewards. You can earn enough points throughout the month to self fund your gamepass subscription or other purchases for free (I cashed in my rewards points recently to get that dope Starfield controller and the Starfield early access upgrade).
Here’s my 4 main avenues for points:
Xbox mobile app: go to your profile icon and do everything in the rewards tab. I usually leave Vampire Survivors idling on my PC for the PC game task.
Edge mobile app: click the search icon on the home screen and scroll down to the news stories, click through them. Till you get your mobile & edge searches (think it’s about 20). Then go up to the top right menu and open rewards. Do everything in here. The top 3 items you usually have to actually do (quizzes and polls). The rest you can just click into and back out of.
**Bing mobile app: ** click rewards and collect the daily check-in points then click earn to read. Open a news article and scroll to the bottom, it’ll open the next article (you need 10 of these).
Xbox. Get the rewards app. Do everything in here. Mostly just clicking boxes. Go to the Xbox activities box in the bottom right, you’ll find some rewards to earn in games. There’s also a daily 50 for earning an achievement. Rare Replay gives you an achievement for every game you open and Killer Instinct has several quick achievements for every single fighter.
It sounds like a lot but the mobile app stuff only takes about 10 mins. I usually do it while I’m waking up in bed and the Xbox stuff takes another 10 minutes usually do this before work.
If you max out your points you can easily get $15-20 a month.
They’re stopping the gold conversion program all together on that date. Top yourself up to 3 years right now. I don’t know about buying through Microsoft over VPN though.
Do the people who choose the deadlines (especially if they’re the publisher) really have that much influence on the programming and development side of things?
Strange, I’m about 12 hours in and apart from minor glitches like odd character movement every now and then it’s been pretty smooth sailing. What are you guys running into?
I walk by a shelf and it randomly explodes from some physics glitch.
Things forever rolling that should not be rolling, like books.
NPCs just keep sprinting into a wall.
NPCs stuck halfway through the floor, both alive and dead.
Enemies teleporting into mountain, and can shoot me from there.
Creatures not attacking when they should.
Ships clipping into stations.
My character stuck in a pose.
Guns floating.
Nothing game breaking though!
Just immersion-breaking.
Im more concerned about other stuff. Performance. Design choices.
I get 37fps in towns with an “UFO rated” computer on userbenchmark.
The menus are horrible.
And what good does the spaceship do? I just fast travel everywhere. I think I’ve seen the inside of my ship twice i 10hrs.
Story is the most lazily written, generic scifi tropey stuff I’ve seen.
No maps. No clue where shops are.
The game is marketed as huge and open, but in reality it’s all just setpieces with empty planet surfaces. You cannot get into your ship and fly 500m east to your mission marker. If you do that, a new map is loaded and none of your missions are there.
I concur with pretty much everything you said, though I will say my FPS has been significantly better than yours. You got an nvidia card? I heard they are bugged with bad performance and waiting for a driver update.
Game, while less critically fucky than previous Betehsda efforts (No doubt thanks to Microsoft dragging Bethesda into QA kicking and screaming), still carry the heavy stink of gamebryo, with classic bugs that have been there for decades… Like items/NPCs falling through floors for no reason.
I dont mind the very plane world map on random gen planets and shit, but how the fuck am i supposed to navigate New Atlantis or Neon on a field of useless floating dots and a collapsing fast travel icon stack?
edit I want to add that the autosaving fucking sucks, too. Especially since i got set back by a significant margin due to the crash i just had.
The issue with Nvidia cards is that Bethesda had an agreement with AMD for the game dev, so NVIDIA DSLL isn’t included. This means NVIDIA cards can’t by default take advantage of their full resolution upscaling ability.
I say “by default” because there’s already mods that replace AMD FSR with NVIDIA DSLL. I installed DSLL 3.5 and have been running it essentially without issues (very rarely the screen goes black for a second or two). Getting smooth frame rates on my 2070 super, 3440x1440, High settings other than resolution scaling (which I set around 58%, essentially DSLL “balanced”).
Yeah. People have vastly different combinations of hardware and software. Different manufacturers and drivers. So it can be really different.
If they play on pc, I mean.
I seem to unknowingly have built myself a real shit-magnet of a computer. Basically no new game has worked well for me since I built that one.
I had like 20 bad bugs per hour with Cyberpunk on release while my buddy had like one mildly annoying per 5h.
Darktide just didn’t work at all. Kept crashing six months after release, then I gave up.
Etc etc…
yeah, the game stinks of gamebryo, but… I’ve only had one crash so far… Who would have that that all it would take to make a less buggy bethesda game was the entire QA department of one of the biggest companies on the planet.
Shit, I would like a hint at least! As far as I know this is just random tinfoil hattery. At least the earth LOOKS flat from most angles accessable by humans
No but I think it’s naive to think otherwise. I’m not saying they’re stealing your banking info but I absolutely believe they’re collecting data on the actions you take ingame.
I’ve been in the SpecialK discord all of yesterday messing with stuff and went to bed.
Now I wake up and find that not only did they (SpecialK devs) fix the 8bit pipeline problem, but it paves the way for real HDR in all Direct3D12 games.
You have until launch day to return pre-orders and I was considering it, but we might have fixed HDR/black levels now.
Hey, I work in QA (not in the video game field though.) However, I can tell you there is a difference between “QA missed” and “deadlines required prioritizing other fixes.”
One implies that the employees are bad at their job. Which is almost certainly not the case. I haven’t played Starfield (or even clicked through to your link lol) but presumably this is something blatantly obvious. And I’m sure the QA team was frustrated letting a glaring known issue through.
QA finds issues but it’s up to development teams to fix them, and strict deadlines will always hamper delivering a flawless product. But deadlines are driven by management and until the industry changes (i.e. don’t preorder games) we’re going to keep seeing these problems.
But as a QA professional, please don’t blame us ✌️
Yeah I don’t buy it. This is not a new engine they just developed, or some obscure complicated feature. This is one of the core functionalities of the game engine: render the game world onto the screen. And it’s an engine they developed in-house. They have been working on this game for years and years, and all that time no one noticed that output of the rendering engine is incorrect and everything looks washed out?
In the current state, the game should not have been released at all. If this is something that was fundamentally unfixable they should have pulled the plug and cancelled the game.
Yes I did. I’m not saying they should have pushed the release date but cancelled the release entirely. As in: never release it and refund everyone who preordered it.
This. You don’t know what’s sitting on a jira somewhere with “won’t fix” tagged to it. As an ex-QA who’s now a dev, we want to fix everything and we get told what we will and will not be fixing. When you see bugs in the final product that are relatively easy to reproduce, the story there is almost certainly that we found it and then the money told us not to bother with it because they think you’ll buy the product anyway.
me: Our integration testing environment is constantly broken due to bad practices among all the teams that share it. They need to be aware of the contract they expose and how they’re changing it before they deploy their code to any shared space.
management: Given the recent complaints about the instability of the QA environment, we’ve decided to shut it down and eliminate all QA positions.
Our managers did that shit, too, back when I was in the durable medical equipment industry. They said some shit like “QA as an org is dysfunctional, as evidence by all the complaints. We’re gonna streamline the process by eliminating them and having dev teams do their own QA according to this checklist we’ve developed. We think that we can get the same quality for less money and less bureaucratic overhead communicating between the dev teams and the QA team.” They cut about $2 million in annual salary right then and there. A lot of our QA engineers and even a couple of their managers found out about the restructuring at the all-hands where they announced this.
Fast forward a year, they’re getting the shit sued out of them and have to do a multi-billion dollar recall because of…let’s just call it an “emergent use case” among our customers that no one foresaw and therefore no one tested. That emergent use case was sending people to the hospital. I’ll go to my grave confident that someone whose only job was QA would have absolutely been able to catch that.
Lol some of their devices absolutely shipped w privesc bugs, including at least one that could be rooted and I know cuz I was on the team that pentested it but I’m not tryna feed Lemmy some shit that a basic security scan could tell y’all. All I’m gonna say is that if it has wifi or Bluetooth throw scans at it.
sometimes there’s also the dev team prioritizing some reported things over others, within the same class of bugs, that might not result in a better end user experience (either from lack of foresight, or external pressures from sources like the publisher), but they definitely know most of the complaints before they became complaints after release.
Hell yea brother. Lazy Dev / Lazy QA talk is shit that’s gotta stop. Dev here. No one likes to ship buggy code, it’s just gonna come back to bite us. Sometimes all you can do is ship good enough code because there are 20 more Jira tickets coming down the pipe.
The teams behind a single AAA game are often as big or bigger than your average tech startup. It’s competing priorities all the way up and down the ladder and devs and QA often have very little influence over this.
As a developer who works with great QA people. I can guarantee you that the QA team were not the issue here. Where the developer’s time was prioritized and what fixes where even allowed to be patched would have been a direct result of leadership decisions
Yep. A lot of people don’t realize that games are not bad because of the developers but rather because of leadership. They incorrectly attribute the blame to developers and think developers want to build shitty games or something.
I don’t know why everyone is acting surprised, it’s been this way for a while now. Pre-ordering any game is just paying early so you can be a dev-tester. I can’t think of a major release in video games that hasn’t been a buggy mess on release. I was fool with No Man’s Sky, and I won’t be fooled again. My plan is to just wait a few months until the second patch, same thing I do for all new releases and they’re usually discounted a bit by then too.
It’s not even really an rpg with how few skills/abilities there were to select from. And how little the environment changes to allow you to solve problems differently
Not really? I feel like that was a lot closer to new Vegas. That felt like a continuation of obsidian whereas starfield very much feels like a continuation of the trends between Skyrim and FO4 within bethesdas game design. If that makes sense.
Thank you for elaborating. I honestly didn’t notice the “4” in the first comment and thought it just said “Fallout in space”, so that’s where my comment came from.
Basically the space flight mechanic is somewhere between Mass Effect: Andromeda and CoD: Infinite Warfare.
You use your galaxy map fast travel to go anywhere and can only fly the ship around each small “instance.”
Planetary landings are restricted to POI’s or you can land on some random spot, but the planets are broken up into chunks so you can only walk around so much before having to go back to your ship for another fast travel moment.
The NMS like gameplay is like a tiny part of it. It’s a story heavy RPG first and foremost. Sure, you can do a lot of NMS style stuff, like gathering resources and scanning wildlife on a thousand planets, but that’s really not why you should get the game. You should get it if you want a massive space RPG in the style of Bethesda. And yes, this time Bethesda actually made a proper RPG.
In all other Bethesda games I only have minor bugs because of mods to fix a majority of them. I’m not buying star field for another 2 months at least because I’ve played previous Bethesda games and I rather buy it once it works
Yeah! Fuck all the evidence showing this is the one Bethesda game we wouldn’t have to wait for mods to make it enjoyable. I only like learning from my own experience, can’t trust anyone.
If you don't mind the puppet faces, the Bethesda jank and playing from loading screen to loading screen, the game is great. I wouldn't even pirate that crap.
I am average worker who preordered it 2-3 days ago for 100€ with intent that if it’s bad that I will be able to refund it.
So far I have like 6 hours put it and except some stuff sometimes clipping through walls or weird movement and 1 crash I didn’t notice anything else broken. There are some game mechanics I am annoyed about and “open-world” performance is bad but it’s not broken game the bitching make it outs to be.
So far I am experiencing the Bethesda RPG™ I though it would be and I am happy. Can’t wait for modders to put more stuff in.
lemmy.ml
Hot