20 year old graphics :(

[RyanLightning]

It appears that Bethesda reused a lot of assets from previous games in making Starfield. The color maps in Starfield are very similar to the color maps in Oldrim. The difference being that Oldrim's texture files were something like 512x512 and Starfield's texture files are 2048x2048.

[zanity]

The game looks anything but great- sometimes it looks kinda OK, sometimes (when faces are inexplicably lit from beneath, revealing the sunken cheeks every face model has for some reason), it looks like utter and total ass. The skies are low rez rubbish, the weather effects dismal, the inability to put massive moons and suns into the skybox because the game still cannot use polar co-ordinates is an humiliating joke (sky sprites incorrectly rotate with the player's linear POV).

 

The outdoor global lighting system is the worst I've seen in a modern game- though the 'artistic' choices are partially to blame. Interior lighting has zero atmosphere. 99% of the computer displays have a fixed bitmap with a red blotch bitmap randomly splatted on the screen to give the 'impression' of function. A million years back John Carmack created an entire vector render system for the monitors in Doom 3, so they could all have sophisticated scripted realtime content.

 

Starfield is a joke of a joke of a joke technically. Fallout 3 was a massive hit at the time, because at the time it was state of the art in so many ways. Not one thing in Starfield would have been state of the art 10 years ago. But as the loot box laden sports games horrors from EA prove, the great unwashed will gobble up any old rubbish and declare it "divine". Hence all those people calling Starfield "magnificent", when in reality it is another good Beth open world game, and only good because only Beth, for some reason even chooses to make such games.

 

Visually, Starfield is good enough, just. Sane people focus on the game experience, and can accept non-essential features being less than great. But that doesn't excuse Bethesda, that spent many hundreds of millions of dollars across many many years making this, with seemingly so little to show for the time and money invested.

 

The biggest laugh is when people who have spent literally fortunes on their Intel CPU and Nvidia GPU have to see every poor new AAA game thru rose-tinted glasses in a desperate attempt to justify their hobby. I can tolerate this game at 1440P on my reasonable cost AMD 5700XT, but I'd be pig sick at all of its mediocrities writ large at 4K, running on a 4090 and a 600 dollar, 350 Watt Intel CPU.