Always one to make good bugs out of bad bugs, the team added some dialogue to Mass Effect 2 in which returning squadmates comment about all the lovely conversations they used to have while waiting for the elevators to get there. They also added an elevator to the Normandy itself.
Well, Starfield manages to get the worst of both worlds. It has extremely long door-opening animations, and ship-launch animations, and all sorts of other fill-the-time animations...but still has to stop on a blank screen to actually load the cell. No, worse than that; it stops on the still picture and spinning disk to load the transition scene. Then once the transition is done, it goes to a loading screen again.
This pretty much sums up the game, technically-wise. It obviously has a more hungry engine in it. The first advice in all the materials for lags and crashes is to turn down graphics quality. The requirements for storage, RAM, VRAM and GPU are huge.
And it looks like crap. I mean, it looks vastly worse than Andromeda, and that was an earlier game with less intensive graphical needs. It is barely better than Fallout 4 aside from some fancier lighting. But what really kills it is that all this horsepower is being used badly. All those CPU cycles are going to waste. Skyrim provides landscapes that feel more real and NPCs that are easier on the eye even though they are clearly a few generations back.
It has reached a sort of Uncanny Valley of graphics; the graphics are so "real" that they make the computer cry, but the result is less pleasing to the eye than what other teams achieved with, well, much less.
This is the most poorly optimized piece of garbage I have ever watched spin, and lag, and bug out, and even lock up. And, no; turning down graphics doesn't fix the bugginess or the lag (it does, oddly, make the game look a bit better!)
Not just graphics. The cells load agonizingly slow and have all sort of problems. But as bad as the optimization for running on a computer is, the optimization for the human experience is just as bad or worse.
The menu system is a nightmare. The space combat control schema is a cludge. Nothing is properly tutorialized. They've even managed to screw up maps. I am playing a couple of very large patches down the road, and I have to suspect that they patched around some of the loading-screen nightmare by giving you the option to launch into space without going through your cockpit at all. I suspect this largely because the design of when you can skip the various planet screens feels like a mish-mosh.
But then, so do the other menus. There's no feeling of a single design vision, as there was with the Mass Effect games (not that Mass Effect 1 was a winner for inventory screens, either).
And, ouch, the planets. For procedurally-generated planetscapes, they don't look bad. But there's little variation, little fractal scale. It is just rocks and trees, rocks and trees, out to the horizon. You don't get a sense of having gone anywhere, or having been anywhere, because no part of the map sticks out. There's no "follow the river into the ravine, then climb the hillside and on the other side of the glade..." There's just...more rocks and trees.
Which wouldn't be so bad...again, that's what Mass Effect 1 had to offer. But it also had the Mako (and smaller maps anyhow). The preset landing locations and quest locations are twenty minutes apart on the damned Starfield maps. Twenty minutes of walking. Through rocks and trees.
I am still playing. It is mildly diverting. But oh, boy, what a botch job of a game.
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