Sure Todd, lol
That maybe so, but if Earth had 1000 moons, we’d have likely gone to one with something interesting on it.
You people want to hate this game so bad 🤣
This is a nice sentiment, but it falls apart when you realize that a lot of the exploration is procedurally generated POI that eventually copies not just assets, but layouts and granular details. That tends to detract from a sense of wonder and mystery.
Which is fine, if they would just embrace that instead of trying to change how people perceive their work.
That’s exactly it-- The game is what it is and will be alot of fun for many people. They’ll have nailed some stuff and missed the mark elsewhere…
But all the spinning shortcomings as design decisions is off-putting. Like if a restaurant is taking a long time to make my food, just say “it’ll be a few extra minutes…” Not “Actually the anticipation of waiting a little longer will enhance your enjoyment, so you’re welcome.”
It didn’t take me long to find two resesrch facilities that were identical down to enemy and loot placements less than 1km from each other.
Cool, so you put in intricate research discoveries and generations of inventions and innovation and matched the sense of wonder being the handful of people that stepped foot on a non-teristrial surface?
Did you mean to post a YouTube video about a bicycle car?
Haha no :D
<Press X to land on the moon>
ROFL…
I still haven’t found a completely empty planet, there is always outposts, abandoned mines or caves with space pirates or other factions. Every time I walk to a point there is like 3 more points you can just explore endlessly
That’s false as moving away from your ship a certain distance (I think 6 or 7 km), it’ll literally tell you you’ve reached the boundary of the area and you need to land somewhere else to get a new stretch of land.
Yeah but that’s a long walk, I usually do about three or four locations and I’m over encumbered, maybe once my ship is upgraded and can store more junk I can stay on planet longer
This particular point really annoys me, I’d love to have somewhere that actually feels remote, where I don’t have four more copies of the same mining and science outposts in visual range. No matter how large humanity has become it just doesn’t make any sense that you can’t find a single ~15km square without anything man made on it.
The best remote places I’ve found so far has been in some quest-specific areas, but even then there’s usually a facility somewhere within a kilometer of the quest location.
I totally agree, I wish there were actually some barren planets without POIs.
Yeah I had the same thought, the caves and stuff are cool but finding so many abandoned outposts full of people is kind of weird
Especially on planets supposedly never surveyed by anyone ever.
We came here and set up a secret medical research laboratory, and have since abandoned it, and not once did we have the area surveyed
No! That’s impossible! I was told by people who played less than an hour if at all that you simply can’t walk or fly anywhere and MUST fast travel everywhere.
The thing about video games is that they’re a multivariate equation. Fun is a variable, and so is realism. Depending on how much realism there already is, and the nature of it, adding more can also increase the fun but it can also take away from the fun. There’s a reason that even the hardcore simmers who do things like drive pretend trucks across Europe in real time or run pretend air traffic control at pretend airports pay to pretend to do those things instead of getting paid to do them for real.
Yeah, fun should always come before realism. If you can do fun and realism then do both otherwise do fun. Unfortunately realismcucks are a very loud minority.
I’ve been enjoying Starfield - but the empty planets suck, especially without vehicles. The scanning thing is boring and dumb, worse than trying to get 100% on a NMS world. It’s a shame that fast travel disconnects you from the space feel of the game, but it makes the rest of the game playable. I like the game overall, but they have definitely dropped the ball on space travel. In theory it’d be cool to come across different “dungeons” etc, as in Skyrim when wandering around, but doesn’t happen in Starfield because you’re generally not going to happen upon them. It’s not interesting to drop down to random planets.
I’ve found all kinds of shit on planets… spacer hideouts, caves, artifacts… look harder
Yeah started finding some neat stuff as I go further out. It’s not that it’s not there, it’s just that you don’t tend to stumble upon it. Like I’ll go to a planet do a mission open up and scan and see some POI like 1200m away. Now do I really want to tedious run over empty nothingness to see if it’s like a space hut or another pirate base etc? I definitely check out nearby POI especially if they are on the way to where i need to go. (Still having fun in the game though and I guess later having options to at least poke around in new places will be fun and i’m curious if the critters are fixed or procedural, like will there be variants all over or just the same few species)
Did this game focus on anything in particular and do that well? Exploring isn’t it.I’m tired of being negative gamer. This game looks fun even if it isn’t mind blowing, but seeing as I’ve never played a Bethesda game I think I’m just as likely to play one of the older games because they look about as good.
Having tried a bit of it, this game is fun. It plays a bit like outer world but bigger and with a more mature tone.
But i am really glad that after getting hyped in spring i actually forgot it was coming out. My gpu was not prepared.
Personally it feels like a lot of the promise of Mass Effect: Andromeda was channeled into Starfield and they took the launch version of the story in No Man’s Sky and ran with it. It definitely stands on the shoulders of other games but it is a reasonably solid iteration.
The game is good, I have fun with it more than Oblivion and Skyrim, as well as Fallout 3 and Fallout 4.
People are just complaining to complain.
The only Bethesda game I like more than Starfield is Morrowind.
It’s a pretty entertaining crafting-shooter, but it’s not an AMAZING one.
counterpoint: there’s not a single “amazing” game of this genre. Elite Dangerous does the space sim perfectly, but it’s boring apart from that. No Man’s Sky has the wonder and exploration, but every planet is functionally the same. Starfield expands on No Man’s Sky with a comprehensible story and actual gameplay. Star Citizen will never come out. Did i miss anything?
There does seem to be some people out there who are just radiating negativity about this game even more so than most.
I played a good few hours last night and it’s Skyrim in Space which is what I wanted.
I don’t know if it’s the Xbox console exclusivity that’s bringing fanboys out the woodwork or just that people like to attack a big, hyped up release like they did with Cyberpunk, but it’s brought out the worst in people.
Wasn’t Cyberpunk actually catastrophically bad at release, and then got fixed later?
Depends on your platform, PC and Current Gen machines were pretty good from day one, bar a few little bugs.
Only the bugs are gone. Weird design decisions and some horrendous mechanics are still here. It’s still isn’t an incredible game, but not a bad game either.
They thought they had a brilliant idea, but it’s not. It’s a classic. The space is beautiful, of course, but it’s the interactions that make a game unique. No interaction, no party.
Bethesda, are you high?
“1000+ planets are dull on purpose”
No, they’re dull because no human team could make 1000 planets worth of interesting content in a single game development cycle.
They could at least make the random PoI’s interesting if there was some…randomness to them.
Like, I walk into a PoI, I already know where the chests are, the locked doors, are, where the stupid fucking corpse in the shower is, etc etc. cause I’ve ran through this PoI 20 times.
I dont know why at least the locations of chests and locked doors cant be randomized. Make things at least marginally interesting, instead of cookie cuttered to extreme.
You can, but randomizing chests+locked doors is kinda complicated, and the more “interesting” your generations the harder it is to code and the more dev time it takes. And for a AAA game release you can’t really do that.
Key+Lock randomization is something that has been solved, and has been used most notably in procedurally generated zeldalikes. But that’s still niche indie territory, and not used for major game releases.
Hasn’t this game been in development for like 5 years? And they built it on an existing engine that they have tons of experience with. You could have said “they were limited on how much they could randomize POIs because of the old engine” and I would have believed you because that sounds way more plausible than “it’s hard to code, so AAA games can’t do it”. Like what?
The issue with procedural generation is the game has to be built for it from the ground up and in a modular way. AAAs try to make themselves appealing by using novel new high quality assets that aren’t modular.
I haven’t played starfield so idk what they ended up doing, but from the sound of it they have pre-made assets/areas that they then place onto pre-generated worlds in a randomized way.
To make one of these “areas” procedural in itself, they’d then have to code a whole system for that. With AAA/3D the hard part is making modular environments without it looking repetitive or ugly.
My point isn’t so much that it can’t be done in a AAA game. But rather that it’s risky to do (not all players like it), and you have to structure your development around it. Lots can go wrong, there’s stuff you gotta sacrifice to make it work, etc.
If starfield is on the old bethesda engine then that’s even more of a reason. You can’t just plug and play an entire procedural generation thing in there without some fairly large overhauls or just gluing on an unrelated system.
In practice, bethesda probably took the lazy route: using their existing engine without major changes, then just making new assets for it, throwing stuff about a bit randomly, and calling it a day.
That’s the thing about procedural generation is: it’s a lot of effort and sucks up a huge part of the game’s development and comes at some pretty strict costs (repetitive looking environments/gameplay, reduced novelty, larger programming dev time to make it work). It can be done, but for a cost-cutting AAA studio they’re not gonna bother.
They already have once though. Many of Morrowind’s dungeons were procedurally generated in development then edited a bit after, that was the same engine. Same with Daggerfall altho that was a diff engine.
Very different game but Amnesia: the Bunker has plenty of procedural generation as well.
It’s not at all impossible for one of the largest game development studios to have some procedurally generated, essentially dungeon content. Doing a bit more than the exact same place copied and pasted would be a huge undertaking yes, but if they wanted to they could have. There are plenty of 3D rogue-likes out now as well. Returnal is AAA and haa procedurally generated levels, far more complicated than neccesary for Bethesda to do in order to populate planets in their game about planet exploration.
I didn’t say it’s impossible. Just that it’s harder, takes deliberate effort, etc. For AAA games they don’t bother with that kind of thing because it’s larger expense and larger risk.
Just to wheel things back onto the road.
I was never asking for fully procedurally generated dungeons.
I just said randomize chest locations and door locks. It cant be that hard for a company that has been using the same game engine for almost 22 years to implement a node system to roll a spawn chance for a chest, or a door to be locked or not (with a higher chance of node spawns behind locked doors).
Hell, they could have even gone the lazy way and just copy and pasted the PoI a few times and manually changed the cosmetics/appearances.
With space and prefab buildings, they have the ultimate excuse for why every dungeon is identical (at least until you get into the underground caves…), but not every one of them should have the same dead body inthe same location in the same shower, the same succulent on the same shelf. move the body to a different location! Have a chance for a cluster of books to spawn instead of the succulent! Its a prefabricated hab structure, but that doesnt mean they come with such strict instructions as “Only succulent A on this shelf”
Couldn’t they just have copied the locations a few times and changed up the doors and chests by hand? Seems like an easy fix.
yes. I haven’t played the game so idk the details of what’s up. but at 1k+ planet-sized spaces it’s hard to have a team go over that by hand. Planets are large. But I have no doubt that bethesda team was probably super lazy as well.
While I agree, I’ve been saying that about NMS for years. Not that we want to be comparing Starfield to NMS, of course.
Chris Roberts : Hold my beer, for another 50 years.
Yeah, it’s already stale and expired by now
You know someone is gonna make a mod that generates random and unique bases from hab complex assets.
And thats exactly why Bethesda doesnt put the effort in. cause they make the game, then the modders make it good for free… Or it used to be that, now they want to charge for mods and take a cut of the profits for shit they didnt make.
At a scale of 1k planets you’re going to have to rely on reused assets and procedural generation. At which point people not into procedural generation say that it’s “repetitive”. Especially if you only gen once for everyone and not each run lol.
AI generation of assets and code will theoretically eventually resolve this, but that’s quite a ways off. They’re not even usable for such with human assistance yet. And if you have ai generating the content, it’s not really a human team making that stuff lol.
I knew one of the planet designers. His favourite part was coastlines.
He was particularly fond of some fjords he made on the coast of Norway, I think he won an award for them.
Slartibartfast?
Gesundheit.
The moon is boring, so every planet in the universe must be boring. Earth is mostly capitalist right now, so every planet with humans must be one form or another of late capitalist dystopia. A whole galaxy made of inert rocks, fast travel, and people eager to exchange gunfire with you.
I haven’t played it yet, but from what I’ve seen the setting looks even more bleak and depressing than Bethesda Fallout.
For all the problems the game has, the major thing they get right is the environment.
Almost every area looks more than great, some are industrial, luxurious, barren, creepy, outright hostile, or cozy, but they are usually always gorgeous.
The environments are what pushed me to keep giving the game a chance after the initial shock of not having a cohesive overworld.
The setting is actually really cool. New Atlantis is actually quite utopian looking. I haven’t gotten too deep into the game yet, only about 3 hours so far.
New Atlantis does look pretty cool, but I worry that it seems a bit empty. From what info I can find it seems to have maybe half as many named NPCs as the average Skyrim city even if it is three times the size. But maybe there are many more and they just haven’t all made it to the wiki yet? I don’t know, it’s little things that annoy me. Like it’s the glorious spacefaring future and every city is still full of fast food franchises selling coffee in what look like exactly the same kind of disposable cups with plastic lids we use today? Maybe that’s a failure of imagination too small to complain about in itself, but it seems representative of how everything is when you look closely. Is it meant to be allegorically examining the social problems of our current world rather than presenting future humanity as doing something genuinely new? If so what’s it trying to say about that, exactly? Where’s the deep lore? Where are the characters you’d actually care about as people rather than video game NPCs that help you advance a quest? I was hoping for Skyrim in space, but to me it looks more like Fallout 4 in space. Never mind the reviewers who compared it to Oblivion and got my hopes up. The only thing it has in common with Oblivion is the Annoying Fan who I must admit is genuinely annoying.
Eh well, it’s a Bethesda game. I’ll probably give in and play it eventually.
this game is a lot more like KOTOR than any of the bethesda games. if you loved KOTOR you will probably love starfield
and people will always bitch about the NPC amount, whiterun is too little (but everyone is unique). well okay, we’ll add an actual city population but now everyone is just a random citizen (but it looks like a city size population)
I really don’t understand all the negative comments. It feels like a very fun game and I can’t wait to play it again.
For me, the criticism is more directed toward the PR and hype. There’s still lots to like about the game, it’s just frustrating how they spin it.
I’m glad you’re enjoying it!
If your enjoying it then don’t worry about the negative comments. Unlike some other space games you dont do much travel yourself, you fast travel everywhere which means seeing the same non-skippable cutscenes again and again, i fast travel to the system, then fast travel to the planet, then fast travel to the surface; then if i want to go elsewhere on the planet i have to fast travel back to orbit then back down to the planet. Its “fast travel:the video game” Given that similar games have managed to let you fly your ship from space down and around the planet for years now I dont why you cant in this, im constantly pulled out of playing for a loading screen
You can actually fast travel directly to cities, even when you’re in a different system.
Yes, you can. There are several levels of fast travel and you can use it how you prefer.
Not arguing with the crux of your argument here, but most fast traveling I’ve done is way more direct than that. New planet, sure there’s a few stages, but anywhere you’ve been before you can pretty much fast travel to directly from anywhere.
How often are you just hopping between places you’ve already been?
As to the people saying you can fast travel back to cities, last time (which was about 5 mins ago) i went to go back to New Atlantis i had to faat travel to the system first before i could even select the city, but other times ive been able to directly select the landing spot and fast travel there from another system so I dunno.
I just went and did stuff in Sol, i fast travelled to the system, fast travelled to the city, ran to the bar close to the landing pad, ran back to the ship, fast travelled to orbit, fast travelled to Venus, killed 3 ships, interacted with satellite, fast travelled to staryard, fought a decent amount of people which was good, fast travelled to Neptune, short fight, board, kill 3 or 4 peeps, fast travel to lodge. Then fast travel to mining planet system, fast travel to planet, talk, fast travel to different system, fast travel to planet run to ship, no bad guys just a quick convo, then fast travel back to ship, fast travel to orbit, and now fast travel to different planet.
Also fuel auto refills after every jump just seems to mean more fast travelling if you need to go further
If your enjoying it then im happy for you not trying to detract, just sharing my experience, i just wish they pushed what could be done more
I think if there’s a patrol scanning your cargo you have to hit the system before landing, otherwise you’d fast travel your way past contraband scans. I’m having a lot of fun in the game, I agree there’s too much fast traveling though.
taking the other side of the argument, planetary landings in E:D are just loading screens at 10x the length. Travelling to a planet at .3 C is neat the first time but then you look at trade routes as “how long do I sit paying attention in case of an interdiction?” StarCitizen falls into the same trap. QD is neat but then it takes you 5 minutes and a fuel stop to go from one side of a system to another. Its mundane trudging for reality rather than getting the boring monotony out of the way of the player.
Just because the tech exists doesn’t mean it makes for compelling gameplay.
There are all kinds of possibilities, and for one example of a video game system for travelling among the stars that gives you a sense of actually going somewhere without getting too dull I’d point to EVE. You can go anywhere, but there are distant and dangerous places that take actual effort to get to. It lets you get some kind of sense of the distances involved. Having made that comparison it’s hard to avoid noticing that the space combat (even against NPCs) and ship outfitting are quite good too compared to how it looks in Starfield. Planetary interaction was pretty tedious when I played it, but EVE is mostly really good at the space stuff.
Another example would be good old Star Control II, another of my favourite space games. Another one that managed to make space feel big. You had to carefully manage fuel and resources, and if you wanted to go all the way across the map you’d have a long and interesting journey during which many things would happen. Combat and navigation were primitive compared to what people expect today, but still it made it feel like you were exploring a vast space, not just a big catalogue of planets.
As for Starfield, I don’t know whether it does that or not since I haven’t played it yet; I’d sort of like to find out before I spend $ on it.
you cant really compare gate-to-gate traversal to the other primary space games though. unless you are in a capital ship, generally you have a warp around 3-5 so even Niarja (minus dock workers) only takes a few seconds to cross. If we just focus on hub routes, I don’t recall the exact number, but Amarr to Jita/Dodi is between 25-60 jumps depending on your risk tolerance. That is 25 discrete load screens, with a Leopard and no 0 tick gate camps thats still around 10-20 minutes of just loading. EVE is an exceptionally bad example to pull and why I excluded it.
If you want something like Star Control then running the bubble in E:D is your best option, just never install a fuel scoop.
What I want is just something where travel takes enough time and effort that interesting problems can arise during the course of it that aren’t just generic random encounters. Something where different parts of space have local character, something like geography rather than a flat isotropic void where distance is meaningless. In each case the technology used for moving about is entirely fictional, so I don’t see a reason not to make it interesting. I was just pointing out examples of that being done, not advocating for either of them being the one true way to do it.
transit in EVE isn’t really anything to write home about though. Target, align, warp, jump, target, align, warp, jump.
Gate camps are player based RNG with a difficulty slider. Do you take the shorter run thru Niarja or do you add an extra 30 jumps for relative safety barring CODE affiliates.
if what you want is a completely bespoke experience where a system has only explicit experiences then you immediately lose out on the design intent behind Starfield and the storyline within is immediately hollowed out and meaningless.
besides, its a video game. everything is a generic random encounter rolled on a table hidden from the player. if you want a better experience, Starfinder is there.
I used to make a living hauling valuable stuff from the outer edge of low-sec in to Jita and such places. Sure it got to be pretty much routine after a while. Well, most of the time. But then it’s always possible in that game to go off and do something else instead. The experience of exploring it all for the first time though, having not yet gathered the knowledge and resources to do it in anything like safety or comfort, was fantastic. If you could just teleport instantly from one place to anywhere without significant cost it wouldn’t even be a game. I’m not saying that the mechanics of transportation should dominate every game like they do EVE, but having at least some of that sort of thing seems like a good idea in a game that’s supposed to be about exploring a space of any kind. I disable fast travel in Skyrim too. It makes things too quick and convenient.
I can agree with this but I do wish it involved fewer loading screens and clicking through each time. If you’re gonna skip the “realism” to make it more convenient then make it actually convenient.
With that said despite that and the fact I’d love to fly the ship over the planets manually, I’m really liking it so far (2h in).
Yeah I can’t really disagree with people’s assessment of how much travel-by-loading-screen there can be, but like… while it’s there, I just mostly haven’t noticed it. Thirty hours in now and I find I’m mixing up fast travelling wide distances with “manually” travelling by launching into orbit and jumping place to place fairly regularly, I don’t think I’d even have thought to criticize it without coming here.
I like how immersive travel can be in a game like NMS, but it’s not like it’s all that exciting or fun to pull into the atmosphere for the 500th time and maneuver to your landing pad, or spend longer than a loading screen amount of time to boost out of atmosphere to hit the jump button. We’re exchanging one form of slightly tedious load for a different one.
The best answer I have to minimizing the interaction is setting routes from your mission list. On PC this cuts down to L > click mission > R > hold X.
It is still 4 discrete inputs, which sucks, but it is substantially better than navigating by the star map which is how my brain defaulted to fast travel for most of my first play through.
I think people had their expectations too high. People are expecting it to be as good as skyrim was for 2011 but in 2023, but I went in expecting it to be as good as (vanilla) skyrim is now and so far that’s what I feel like I got.
Yeah, I had no expectations and I like it. I always get disappointed when I have high expectations.
Tbh I’m mainly disappointed in the graphics of the surroundings.
I haven’t had a chance to play it yet. Moving and still have to get through BG3. But I’m actually excited for it. Like I see posts over and over and over and over and over and over about the the fact that it’s not NMS. Sure, kind of disappointing. And I will agree that if you keep running into the same exact structures over and over, maybe they could have done something different. Have some sort of procedurally generated structures.
But that seems to mostly be it. Every review I’ve watched talks pretty positively about the other aspects. It’s got some bugs, which is to he expected, and apperantly the melee combat isn’t clunky and awkward. But those seem to be the biggest complaints outside of not being able to land.
So I’m gonna do what I’ve seen a lot of people said to do. I’m gonna go into the Bethesda game and play it largely like it’s a Bethesda game. Gonna go through the main story, the different factions, do some side quests, etc.
It’s not No Man’s Sky. Cool. Call of Duty isn’t Escape From Tarkov. I have played both of those and loved them both for completely different reasons, and I don’t expect them both to be the same. If anything I got bored of No Man’s Sky after a bit. Partially because I’m just not into the base building, and itnfelt like that was the main thing to do outside of explore. Little to no stories. Last I heard we still don’t have the faction system they talked about when the game was first launching. Starfield has things going for it over NMS.
Straight out of “30 things I hate about your pitch”, which is a great GDC talk. In that talk he has one thing that is “in the real world you can’t double jump”. Don’t make a realistic setting that is realistic just because.
