I’ve been having a ton of fun with it. I’ve only played 4 hours so far, but it’s definitely the smoothest Bethesda game in terms of performance and animations, also in my experience not many bugs. Playing on a 1440p monitor with a 7900XT and I get pretty consistent 100fps (my monitor freaks out if I raise the hz higher than 100 so can’t tell how high it’ll go).

In terms of gameplay, space combat is reasonably entertaining and flying the ship is fairly well thought out. Whilst you can’t fly directly between planets like in Elite Dangerous, the primary purpose of ship control is combat and it does fairly well. On my computer, loading screens are pretty much instant, so travelling between planets isn’t a problem. Combat is fairly fun, and the AI behaviour has been much improved from previous Bethesda games. Still not always perfect but they do behave more naturally. Environmental storytelling also has a much larger presence again, with a lot of interactions and things to read. Also, this really fulfils my fantasy of being just a citizen in a sci-fi world. Walking around my ship, seeing the little bathroom and crew chambers, it’s really cool, it feels very lived in and really makes it feel like you’re an explorer on the fringes of space, living out of a ship.

There are a lot of comparisons with No Man’s Sky, but honestly I feel they’re completely different games, by design. Starfield is more Bethesda’s take on a Mass Effect style game.

Anyway, people have a lot of mixed opinions, but I’ve been loving it!

I only played a few hours on my Steam Deck (because it would freeze on my PC), but what I saw was slightly disappointing. The game looks great, even on the Steam Deck with FSR blurring everything, the gun mechanics are fun, the character animations are the best I’ve ever seen from this studio. The performance is also very good on the Deck, with stable 60FPS 30FPS (edit: when I wrote this initially I was just eyeballing it, but didn’t bother to check that Steam capped the frame rate to 30 by default lol, so it was actually 30 and not 60…my bad) in indoor scenes and playable sub-30 in large outdoor areas.

…but the exploration. Man, Bethesda is known for their exploration, yet the spaceship is a gimmick at best. To be fair, I haven’t played enough to get familiar with everything yet, but I don’t expect that part to get much better. The game feels like Fallout, except instead of having a giant seamless open world to explore, you have a giant open world with tedious transitions between different areas. Maybe it’ll grow on me, but it’s not at all what I was expecting.

EDIT: update after playing some more.

The game definitely grew on me! The exploration is still shitty, but everything else makes up for it. I’m at ~9 hours on my Steam Deck, and even with all the FSR blurring I’m enjoying it a lot. I started doing a side quest collecting on bad debts for a bank, and during one of them I found a mission terminal on Mars offering a reward to anyone who surveys a distant planet, and on my way to the planet I picked up a distress call from a settler asking for help to fight off a bunch of pirates, and stumbled upon a drama between 3 settler families, then hijacked a pirate ship and found some “sentient AI” contraband inside and then… I went to sleep because it was late.

So in short, it definitely feels like a typical Bethesda game, but in a good way. Just side quests on top of side quests, but with less bugs.

The ship combat is still bland. I found it very easy. Idk if it’s because it’s early in the game, but no enemy has even gotten close to killing me, even when it’s 3 on 1 and we’re using the exact same unmodified ship. On the one hand, that’s boring, but on the other hand I appreciate not having to spend a lot of time in ship combat. However, now that I discovered how to board and hijack a ship, the combat is slightly more interesting.

And again, I did all of this on Steam Deck, with the only performance issue being on Mars and New Atlantis, which are both big cities/hub areas. It was still playable, but a blurry FSR mess. I disabled FSR because I hate the blurring, and it dropped the FPS pretty hard. Luckily, I didn’t have to spend a lot of time in those locations.

“Graphics card not supported.”

Find out I have to update Windows.

Hadn’t updated since around 2018 and everything worked fine, but OK, fine, let’s try it.

Can’t figure out how to reenable Windows update (it kept trying to come back, like a dog swallowing and revomiting its own puke, so at some point I’d disabled it with extreme prejudice, and it seems it stuck).

Manage to find a Microsoft tool that’ll update Windows 10 to the latest version without going through Windows update.

Upgrade assistant does its thing and at seventy-something percent complains VirtualBox isn’t compatible and must be uninstalled. Yeah, not doing that, got my family’s mail server in there. I was only 2 major versions behind, shouldn’t’ve been a problem, but all right, have it your way.

Update VirtualBox, looks like Upgrade assistant is finally happy, after a couple aeons Windows is updated.

“Graphics card not supported.” Fuck. You.

Update graphics drivers (couple more aeons; in for a penny, in for a pounding).

While Nvidia does its thing, try to start the VMs in the new version of VirtualBox. “Can’t start operating system”. Well, fuck.

Eventually figure out that at some point around version 6 VHD support got fubared and Oracle never fixed it. This is why I don’t update.

Start converting VHD disks to VDIs, which should fix it. What’s a few more aeons between friends.

While I’m at it the drivers finish updating. Try to start the game again, third time’s the charm.

Fans reach take off speed! Main screen goes black! Logos start showing! It lives!

“Compiling 1 of 7000 shaders”

(╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻

System grinds to a halt. Finally manage to open program manager and kill the game. Probably shouldn’t have started it while I was migrating the virtual disks. (The fact that it’s a 980ti probably doesn’t help either, but hey, it’s worked perfectly till now, including with Cyberpunk 2077 and Baldur’s Gate 3, and by jingo it’ll work with Starfield).

“It just works.”

Anyway, meanwhile the disks finish migrating, and at least now the VMs work. Update the VirtualBox extensions just to be sure, reboot the VM…

Black screen.

(╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻

Find out at some point the display drivers got fubared for Windows 2003 / XP and Oracle never fixed it. Manage to start the VM in safe mode and uninstall the VirtualBox extensions; after fixing the display settings, it sort of works again. Yay. Second VM is staying with v5.x extensions, thank you very much.

Say what you want about Bethesda (they almost certainly deserve it), but at least they ain’t Oracle.

Sigh.

Gonna eat something, relax a bit, and leave the game to compile shaders while I sleep.

With luck, tomorrow it’ll be done, and it’ll just work.