Originally published at: A "deep dive" preview of Bethesda space RPG Starfield | Boing Boing
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I don’t have time for the full video, but it looks like No Man’s Sky with a budget.
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A game could do a lot worse to get my attention than Skyrim but in space. And while I may be in the minority, I had a blast with Fallout 4’s community/base building, glitches and all.
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I’m astounded by the amount of vitriol the gamerboys are aiming at this for being ‘Limited to 30fps’.
Guys, this is a Bethesda RPG, be thankful at launch if characters have heads.
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The real difference here is that in addition to all the galactic roaming there’s also an actual story to enjoy.
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There’s been the skeleton of a story in NMS for a while
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Yeah… just like there’s a skeleton of a story in Minecraft. Bethesda aren’t the greatest storytellers, but they’re offering a lot more than you’ll find elsewhere.
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No Man’s Skyrim
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I’ve tried to like No Man’s Sky since early release; and despite all the updates, it still seems too unfocused for me to enjoy. This looks promising; especially in a few years, when the bugs are fixed and price drops. 
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If you have game pass no need to wait for a drop.
The bugs 
MS says that it’s the least of any Bethesda game on release, but that’s a pretty low bar.
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I think folks are right to say this is NMS but with a story (and a higher dash of “realism”, aka Nasa-punk aesthetic). I happen to love NMS and have been playing it off and on since it launched, and this strikes many of the same chords. It’s just clearly ALSO going to toss in “bandits in space mines” which I’m all here for. 
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I can be hesitant, but barring a heart attack there is about a 0% chance I won’t be buying and playing this game.
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I’d rather a steady 30 fps than a fluctuating 60.
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“I used to be an explorer like yourself, but then I took a blaster to the knee…”
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Annoying fan is in it, so I don’t think your line is all that implausible.
Watch out for your sweet roll.
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I worked on a few games that did this. It was more common in the aughts and it’s still not unheard of on open world games now.
People assume it’s related to graphics and thus why the fanbois get all angry because they think their $3000 graphics card can handle it. It’s not about graphics though, it’s about end frame time. On modern multi-core systems, the most precious time is the end of the frame, which is your only chance to pass data between cores, move data to and from vector units, etc. It’s your chance to synchronize game state. The shorter that time is, the less sophisticated things you can multi thread, basically. Doing work like pathfinding in AI is very difficult to spread across cores if you can’t sync at the end of the frame. Overall game frame rate dictates how long this precious period is. At 60fps it’s very difficult to get anything done in that period, which limits how complex the game state can be.
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This is the most appealing a game pass ever looked to me.
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It’s why I always roll my eyes at specs that Intel or AMD throw out there despite not really giving good tools to leverage the hardware’s supposed performance capabilities. It’s why I wish chip makers would focus on giving us larger CPU caches and the ability to load VMs into the processors themselves to make programming much easier overall. It’s nice to have those fancy instructions per clock cycle but it would be better to just be able to run them in the processors themselves and not demand programmers to constantly swap things in and out of registers all the time. Even abstracted languages like C# still have a tough time doing this well even if you use optimization tricks. Sorry for the digression but it’s just one of my little beefs with the chip makers.
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OMG, all of this. CPU designers still build chips like it’s 1995. More clock speed and deeper pre-fetch will solve everything, right guys? Guys? crickets
When the Moore curve flattened out, they went parallel and started heaping in cores. But then they gave developers virtually no help in leveraging those cores. So we have systems with 32 cores in them, 31 of which are doing the occasional ray cast or physics manifold but mostly twiddling their thumbs.
The sad thing is, this is all lost progress. Cray had solved a lot of these issues in the ‘80s with their optical backbones, shared backside caches, inter-core cache DMA, and other things. They were figuring out how to do multi-core computing. Then they went out of business and desktop chip makers ignore everything they did.
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I just need something to keep me busy until Outer Worlds 2 comes out. This will do.
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