Bethesda's Starfield is a disgrace to game development and a slap in the face to gamers
Published on 2023-09-12. Modified on 2023-10-19.
Nowadays PC gamers are used as guinea pigs when big gaming titles are released with major bugs, major performance issues, and other similar problems. Even though PC gamers are used as guinea pigs, they still often have to pay full price for the games as well. Game development has turned into a circus and Bertheda's latest title Starfield is a disgrace, not only to game development itself, but also to the gaming community.
I have played computer games since I acquired my first personal computer, the Sharp MZ-800. Then later on the Commodore 64, the Amiga 500, and finally on PC. I therefore remember when game development was all about squeezing every drop of performance out of the game and when the industry actually cared about performance.
Bethesda's latest PC release Starfield is an example of just how bad it has become.
When Starfield director Todd Howard was asked why Bethesda didn't optimized the game for PCs (during a Bloomberg Technology interview with questions from users) he answered:
We did, it’s running great!
Followed up by saying:
It is a next-gen PC game, we really do push the technologies. So you may need to upgrade your PC for this game.
I am sorry, but WHAT AN ABSOLUTE LOAD OF CRAP!
Compared to titles such as Cyberpunk 2077, Mass Effect: Andromeda, and many other - even much older titles - Starfield not only looks bad, but it performs absolutely horrible in comparison, without any added benefits what so ever.
While Starfield's universe is "big" it is mostly put together by an endless amount of recycled resources. Nothing has changed creatively or gameplay wise since the release of Mass Effect.
Not only did I run into the ridicules hard-coded GPU check, that continuously fail for thousands of users that DO fulfill the minimum GPU requirements, with the message "Graphics card does not meet the minimal specifications requirements", but the game is more or less unplayable even with the lowest settings on an NVIDIA RTX 3060 Ti or an AMD RX7600.
- The game suffers an endless amount of video and audio stuttering issues unless you run it from an SSD or an NVMe (even then some people still experience stuttering problems).
- The so-called A.I. technology in the game is pathetic. It looks like classical old-school animations. I will even go so far as to state that I find the old A.I. simulated behavior of the NPCs in Halo better!
- It's the same old narrative and cliches, nothing what so ever has changed creatively that justify neither the price nor the hardware requirements of this game.
- The game suffers from so many in-game bugs that it looks like something released as BETA. You continuously get stuck on dialog screens and in conversations. You become stuck/trapped in all kinds of situations (such as in the cockpit of your ship). Characters suddenly vanish. Enemy NPCs spawn inside walls, making it very difficult to progress. And then there's all the crashes.
- The overall performance of the game is really REALLY bad!
Companies like Bethesda slap gamers in the face when they release crap like this and respond to problems by saying that gamers need to upgrade their PCs.
Take a look at the remastered PC versions of Crysis, they all look fantastic and they all run extremely well even on an old NVIDIA 1050 Ti GPU.
Starfield is a big game, yes, but what exactly is it about it that makes it so much better that it require so much more hardware power?
The issue is that you can still make amazingly looking and performing games that runs well on older hardware, but then there is no reason to upgrade the hardware and the hardware industry isn't making enough money then. Prices on modern GPUs have already skyrocketed and you have to pay absolute ridicules amounts of money for graphics cards that doesn't provide that much improvement over previous generation cards. So, in order to make people buy new cards, GPU producers turn to the gaming industry where they partner up on different gaming releases. That is why most games are released as a game either for "NVIDIA" or "AMD". The game still works on the competitors GPU, albeit often with reduced performance, but that's not the point, the point is that the game is released, by design, to not work on older generations of GPUs.
No, you shouldn't have to install Starfield on an SSD in order to avoid video or audio stuttering. No, you should most definitely NOT upgrade your NVIDIA 1080, 20xx or 30xx card in order to play this game. There is absolutely no excuse for a company like Bertheda to release Starfield as the piece of junk they have done.