Unfortunately, I'm going to have to wait. It turns out the AMD RX 580 graphics card has texture issues with the game. Missing faces, missing bodies, missing walls, floors, missing ships, etc., so they will have to patch it before I can play. :/
I was having similar issues with newer games with my RX 570. Updating the driver five or six times as new ones were released didn't fix it. Then, I upgraded to an RX 6700 XT like two months ago. Hopefully a patch or driver update will fix it soon; the 580 is still a decent card and should have some life left in it.
Yeah, it's getting old for modern games, sadly. I've got a nice RX 6600 bookmarked, but at the price it will be a few months at least. Cards are still really pricey.
Yeah, there was a brief window after the collapse of crypto where video cards started dropping in price, and now some assgasket has figured out how to run AI programs on them, so they're starting to go back up. Fuckers.
So, I'm scanning shit on some moon, and an argon vent gave me lung damage. How the fuck do I get lung damage from an argon vent when said vent and my lungs are separated by a FUCKING SPACESUIT??!!
Me: "Well, I've been playing for a few hours. I think I'm ready to call it a night." Clock: "It's 6am." Me: "Hmm. Yeah, that sounds about right."
Apparently. As for it being "just Skyrim in Space," it is in the same sense that Star Wars is "just Samarui in space," Star Trek is "just cowboys in space" and season 3 of The Orville is "just a big, smelly, steaming pile of fermenting shit in space." On foot gameplay is definitely based on The Elder Scrolls and Fallout gameplay, but isn't the same as. Spaceflight gameplay feels a little off to me, but I don't know if that's because it is a little off or if I'm just not used to it yet. Ah well, I can change the controls around if I need to. Anyway, Starfield is what The Outer Worlds should have been (not that The Outer Worlds is a bad game, it just could have been more than it is.) It looks as though there isn't a commodity system, which has been a staple of freelance space pilot games since forever. Interesting choice, but in those games every time I buy a freighter and decide to be a trader, I get my ass handed to me by pirates, then decide "fuck it," sell the freighter, and go back to being a mercenary. So, I'm probably not missing out on much. Also, I'm sure there will be mods... there are always mods.
Honestly, I think I bought Outer Worlds, just never played it. Or maybe I just put it on my wish list and never actually bought it.
I finished the UC Vanguard questline, and as part of it, they gave me a penthouse. It's empty, and if I want furniture, I have to build it using a system like the C.A.M.P. uses Fallout 76 (similar to settlement building in Fallout 4.) In the Fallout games, it made sense that things need to be built from raw materials. If I set up an outpost on some obscure moon, it makes sense that I need to build things from raw materials. However, I'm in a penthouse apartment in a city that's pretty much the capital of the fucking galaxy. Can I just buy some furniture please? With money?
The worst I've seen is that it doesn't really matter what you do, there's always a way to do everything - i.e no real consequences. But Bethesda games have always suffered from that - you could be Archmage of the College of Magic, head of the Fighter's Guild, chief assassin of the Morag Tong (and not even a Dunmer!) and Grand High Poohbah of the Dickmeisters and no-one would bat an eyelid about the fact that some of those factions SHOULD be at each others' throats. The closest they ever got was the Civil War choice in Skyrim, but you could stay neutral till the end.
I kind of liked that there was a way to unite everyone against the Institute (or at least being non-belligerant to each other) in Fallout 4. I am diplomacy.
really, please tell me more about the ways you can "do" everything in the game. you said dew. heh heh.
It seems like Bethesda is moving away from the "leader of all the factions" model. Although, that really only applied to The Elder Scrolls anyway. Fallout was never like that, and Starfield isn't. I guess we'll see what TES VI does. Leading all the factions doesn't make sense from a story perspective. I've also noticed that if one becomes the leader of all factions, no one actually acknowledges it. It's more like one can play several roles and switch between them than one person actually fills all those roles at the same time. I think the best way to do it would be to have varying or ambiguous commitment to factions, and allow options to take sides in conflicts or try to resolve them. Fallout 4's factions could have become this versatile with a few tweaks: The Minutemen: They follow the player's lead (except then it comes to the Nuka World raiders), works as-is. The Railroad: Should have been a larger anti-slavery organization where the Commonwealth cell specializes in helping synths instead of being all about synths. Tone down their Institute hate from "zealots with a a sole purpose" to at least "this is our biggest enemy yet" if not "very serious conflict." Brotherhood of Steel: Chapters come in two flavors: Hardcore and reasonable. Maxon is the former. Many others are the latter. Include a way to oust Maxon (either directly by murder/accident or a "chain that binds" loophole) to be replaced by someone more reasonable. The Institute: Change Shaun's motivation for seeking out the player. He has some serious problems with how the institute does things, and after a lifetime of trying to change things from the inside and not quite getting there, hopes the player can bring a fresh perspective and succeed, and give the player more control over if and how the Institute changes. Nuka World Raiders: Probably fine the way they are, but it would have been hilarious if there was a "make them go straight" option, and maybe turn Nuka World into an actual theme park again. Reform Minutemen, take over Institute. Sit down with Railroad, agree to free all synths who want to leave, stop or seriously scale back and repurpose synth production. Sit down with Brotherhood, agree to some level of Brotherhood oversight to prevent abuses of technology. It could work. There'd still be a lot of tension and mistrust, but it could work.
I like how they made use of procedural generation for most of the areas in the game. It makes the scope of the game seems much, much more massive than it really is. "Finished" the main quest line. Unspoilered commentary: The premise of the main quest is absolutely stupid. Hunt MacGuffins to unlock the opportunity to hunt even more MacGuffins, then combine the MacGuffins to form the Mega MacGuffin, which opens a portal to the Ultimate MacGuffin Hunting Experience™. Despite all that, it was well-executed and fun, and I suspect at least somewhat intentionally satirical. Spoiler- Main/ UC Vanguard:
Replicants are like any other machine - they’re either a benefit or a hazard. If they’re a benefit, it’s not my problem.
I managed to get an RX 6600! Turns out, Newegg has an option where you can pay with Zip, a very short term payment plan service. You pay 25% of the cost at point of sale, and then you pay 25% every two weeks until it's paid off. Normally, I'd reject that as an option because a lot of these short term payment managers are just gougers, but Zip only takes a modest fee: $5 ($6 if you're buying something that's more than $300). So if you buy a $200 graphics card, Zip makes $5 on the whole deal, which seems pretty reasonable to me. So I made the first payment, and I'm selling my RX 580 to make up some of the other payments. I got my card today. It is a lovely MSI Radeon RX 6600 MECH series. I bought it refurbished and saved a fuckton of money. I know refurb is generally good, I've advocated people buy refurb in the past (from reputable sellers, of course). So, I installed the card. Aside from some mild swearing, and hitting the back of my head against the desk several times, there were no issues getting it installed. It's actually shorter than my old RX 580, but it's also much chunkier. It's a good thing I don't have any other expansion cards I use. Anyway, installed. Started up the system, Linux has no trouble seeing the new card, drivers are automatically installed. Now, here comes the big banana: I startup Steam, and run Starfield. Glorious textures! Everything looks terrific! Gameplay is smooth as silk. 5 minutes later, game crashes. I try again. Game crashes. Uninstalled. Reinstalled. Fired it up and started a *new* game. Game crashes. For the LOVE of MIKE AND IKES WHY CAN'T I JUST PLAY STARFIELD?!
Got it fixed! I had to update my Mesa drivers to 23.7.1, and update the kernel to 6.5. I also used an optimization tutorial for my new RX 6600 to give maximum visual quality while reducing the strain on it when rendering complex scenes like cities. I just finished my first mission, blew up some space pirates, and I'm loving it!
Probably a good move. I looked at the system requirements, and it turns out the minimum is RX 5700/1070 Ti. While I wouldn't say it's impossible to get a 580 to run it, a driver update wouldn't have done it. You'd have to take apart the card and solder some more VRAM in there or something. That's how VRAM works, right? Soldering? Probably. Soldering fixes everything. Also, System Requirements Lab has some of their settings for the 6700 XT confused with the 6700M, so I have to actually look at the minimum/recommended cards and can't just look for green checkmarks.
Oh, the RX 580 ran the game. It just couldn't run some of the specialized code in the game because it was never designed to process those instructions. As for VRAM, the RX 6600 has the same amount of VRAM as the RX 580. That little card was a beast for many years, and played everything you threw at it like it was nothing. I loved it, but it was time to upgrade.
I visited the great pyramids. They were better when Earth had a magnetosphere, but at least there's no one around to tell me I can't climb on them. I'm kind of disappointed with Earth in this game. It's just tan desert unless you unlock ruins. They could have easily littered the landscape with ruined buildings, concrete, and sheet metal or something.
The bathroom on my ship: It's like one of those fancy Port-a-Pottys with a sink, but also the whole thing is a shower. Do... do they make these? Like, can I buy one from Home Depot and install it in my house? If so, I guess I'm going to Home Depot.
Home Depot doesn't carry them, but I have seen such things on design websites. It's like a 21st Century version of Bucky Fuller's Dymaxion Bathroom.
Yeah, I found some after I made the post. Although, they look like the stuff one would find on a design website. I want one that looks utilitarian. Maybe if I get a prefab shower stall and put one of those prison toilet/sink combos in there... Prison toilets cost $2000? Never mind.
