I haven’t played Starfield yet. That being said, I think I will enjoy most planets being rather dull (as long as you still occasionally have reason to go there). I very much love the stance of “When everything/everyone is remarkable, nothing/noone is.” One of the bigger reasons (aside the gameplay usually not being quite to my liking) why I don’t play MMOs anymore is, because about every MMO culminates in 80% of the people wearing “the armor of fabled legends” and being “Slayer of Demonlord and Demigod Sckholzhlak”.
I very much love the stance of “When everything/everyone is remarkable, nothing/noone is.”
Counterpoint: it doesn’t make everything/everyone unremarkable, it just raises the standard and the bar for what remarkable is. Imagine using that argument for modern graphics, game design, etc, and that you want things to be lackluster because it really highlights the occasional times that they aren’t.
I kind of think it does apply to modern graphics and game design in the same way. A fast paced action shooter still needs moments where you catch your breath, it’s never just an endless constant flood of enemies. A visually beautiful game still has bits that aren’t particularly interesting or you’d get an overdose of visual information and wouldn’t be able to identify what was important.
Similarly, starfield has a lot of small barren moons that don’t have a lot of resources. They are boring compared to the green worlds (there are tons of these too though, which every repeat of this thread has glossed over), but they still have stuff going for them. I spent my evening last night exploring a smuggler base that I randomly fell into while looking for a place to put an aluminum mine on a barren moon. The night before it was a (very cool) mission on an abandoned mining platform.
However, in the process of going to and from these sites, I definitely felt like I was travelling across a barren, dusty moon. That helped the feel. Both those quests had storylines that were inherently tied to the fact that the setting was a barren, dusty moon, rather than a teeming, thriving planet.
Bottom line, I think this one over-shared article says nothing of importance. If you go to one of these ‘boring’ moons there’s lots to do, just not ‘explore and identify the planetary life’ kind of stuff. you can tell at a glance which planets are more likely to have settlements and things from space, and there’s more of them than any one person can explore, so it really doesn’t matter that there are also a bunch that aren’t like that.
Fair point. I would agree to say there should be a healthy middle ground. I think coming across theme park-like spectacle around every corner would remove a lot of immersion and most authenticity (specifically trying not to default to “realism” because then we’d specifically want 99,999% of areas to be lifeless rock) not only from Starfield but many many games. Fallout, Elder Scrolls, Red Dead Redemption and the Metal Gear series would be incredibly different games, if it was just from one action sequence to another and then a beautiful story cutscene immediately and with only loading screens separating them from each other.
I guess I’m trying to say that immersion into and attachment to a game is increased if you give opportunity for (or sometimes force) the player to calm down. Red Dead 2, for example, does this masterfully by its generally slow and deliberate pace for most actions (cooking steak by actually making you hold the meat over fire for a couple seconds, making you walk/ride for long passages to get somewhere even during missions, etc.) and by sprinkling in quite a number of relaxing quests, like watching a movie with your girlfriend, in a game that’s mainly known for shooty tooty cowboy action.
To wrap up that wall of text, I guess I’ll see if the ratio of interesting tidbit for every dull landscape is too low for me in Starfield once I get my hands on it c:
Update: Game’s good, if your expectation was “Space game made by Bethesda”. I like it and am very happy with the amount of barren planets for every lush world. Sure, they lack the “discover flora and fauna” activities but there’s still plenty fun stuff to do.
there are definitely dull planets, but there are also planets i have explored just for the hell of it and found a lot of cool stuff, like a facility run entirely by robots and the robots tell me not to interfere with their work or i will die
OK, then why fucking make them? Aren’t games supposed to be fun?
This whole genre really bugs me, and I’m someone who LOVES space games. The best game in the genre IMO is elite dangerous, because their ship to ship combat is so damn fun to play that I can hop in for a bit and have a blast without having to engage with the other systems that are often painfully boring.
The problem here is that people what the feeling of being explorers and finding new things, but video games inherently can’t provide that. There aren’t computers strong enough to produce thousands or millions of planets that all have genuinely interesting features on them that are worth exploring for. “Exploration” in current space Sims is basically “stick your name on something someone else hasn’t already stuck their name on, maybe grab some resources from it, and leave.” That gets dull very fast.
Developers COULD choose instead to make a couple of good, big planets that are interesting and full of actually good content. They could give you a reason to explore beyond “look other planets cool.”
If you made 1000 planets and only 10 of them are at all interesting, and your game is centered on exploring other planets and not really focussed on much else, you’ve made a boring game.
Elite dangerous space combat is literally the most lackluster and boring space combat I have ever engaged in. It’s such a slog.
I find combat where you have less control (weak strafing) and more maneuvering to be more interesting. That said, I think Microsoft allegiance probably did 6dof in space combat the best.
There aren’t computers strong enough to produce thousands or millions of planets that all have genuinely interesting features on them that are worth exploring for.
I don't think there is an infinite amount of "genuinely interesting features" so it's hard to imagine we'll ever get a game with this.
I have MSFS2020 and enjoy completing long haul flights. literally a whole workday spent where I see nothing but cockpit controls and the sky through the window, with no interaction needed due to autopilot. then I bring her in to land 10 hours later.
Very different games and very different expectations of effort spent. I’ve space trucked a lot in Elite, spending hours going back and fort. But it was never dull, more of a relaxing experience.
That comment stems from games failure to live up to its promises.
This game was marketed as an explorers game with 1000 planets to see, for example.
None of those planets have even the half of the content Skyrim/Fallout has. None of those planets are barren as Elite’s planets, either. You can’t traverse them more than 30 minutes, so it doesn’t even scratch NMS itch. People that liked the exploration of any of those four games would dislike this games exploration very much.
The person above was probably expecting a more lively game, like any other Bethesda game and got whatever this is instead. It’s completely justified to be disappointed.
Granted, I’m only like five of the twelve hours in I’m supposed to be before the game starts getting good, but my god they made some baffling design choices here. Possibly the most egregious is the fact that every skill comes with leveling requirements - for example, the worst offender I’ve seen is the oxygen (stamina) skill requiring you to completely exhaust your meter 20 times before you can put a second point in. (Worth noting, ‘completely exhaust’ in this context means deplete both the regular O2 meter and max out the CO2 meter, which depletes more slowly than the O2 refills) The only way to reliably and safely do this, considering you only really need stamina in short bursts when playing normally, is to literally just run fucking laps. Bad and boring, to the point that I will say, without a hint of sarcasm, that the person responsible for making it this way should be moved off the team. I cannot fathom how that person arrived at the conclusion that doing chores was somehow the most exciting and innovative way to spice up FO4’s perk system, because that’s all it is underneath, and it is an aggressive waste of time.
The ship builder is just tons of fun. I wish the controls were a little bit more obvious but once you get the hang of it, I think it’s my favourite in genre. I love building something neat and then going to check out the interior walkthrough, particularly. I think I need a save where I just cheat in millions of credits so i can experiment for a while
Is it? I find it pretty fun, sure games like everspace did it better, but that is literally a space dogfighting game lol.
NMS space combat is noticably worse in comparison, and some of the upgrade paths and the ability to adjust your reactor usage (very reminiscent of FTL) make it interesting enough for me.
Your ship is kinda like a player home you bring around with you. Having one that uniquely suits your needs and preferences is cool, and also I want a damn weapon workbench.
To give an impression of what it’s been like for me:
I had a quest where I needed Iron. I found a random planet that had it, and picked a spot in the middle of the scan readouts. Arrive, looks like a barren rock - but that’s fine because I only wanted rocks. However, I see something in the distance, and check it out. On the way, I find a wandering trader taking her alien dog for a walk, and sell some stuff weighing me down. I find a cave, where a colonist is hiding out with a respiratory infection - and am able to help them get out as a little mini-quest, though the infection spreads to me.
I come past a little mining installation, where I find a bounty hunter that tells me of a bounty nearby she’s offering to split with me. We do so, fighting a base full of raiders to get to their captain, and I finally decide to leave.
The key here is, I don’t think any of those quests are amazing - they’re likely very dynamically generated. But they’re also not fun to “seek them out” - just to come across them in some other mission, like trying to make an outpost or mining for stuff.
I mean, I can’t even argue against that. Some people find some forms of work fulfilling, and even switch to games because their own jobs don’t actually give them that feeling of fulfillment.
Monster Hunter is a prime example of a game that sets such elongated goals that it’s regarded as a “grind-heavy” game - but its players like the grind. Heck, the entire space simulator genre often involves quite a lot of “Space Truck Simulator” gameplay, where you’re just engineering good ways to ferry cargo around.
Which is not to say that’s what Starfield aims for. From what I’ve played, it’s closer to Sea of Thieves, having adventurous interruptions - where you start a boring, routine mission to bring Sugar from one merchant post to another, but then get ambushed by a skeleton ship, then a giant shark, then find a map to a buried treasure nearby.
Half the reason I play Elite is space trucking. I’m only raising my empire rank to get the largest ship… in order to space truck better. The Fed Corvette I plan to make a combat vessel, but the Cutter will be my space truck.
I found that flow of the game works a little bit better if you just don’t fast travel at all. I played a lot of Elite and it gave me a little bit of Elite vibes when I just walk to my ship, go thru inside it and sit down. Then I take off “manually” using the button and jump to the target system by manually targeting it and press the jump button.
What Bethesda can do better is to just mask the loading with a flight animation, for example when you’re taking off from a planet the loading should be replaced by an animation where you’re going out of the atmosphere. And when you’re jumping between star systems, the loading should be replaced by something similar to Elite when we’re jumping through the witch space.
All in all, my experience with Starfield has been fine. I loved the weird stuff happening when you’re just fucking around. Although the main quest has taken a step back with their sense of urgency, compare it to previous Bethesda games, where there’s a big stake going on that pushes you to at least complete the main quest once. In Starfield there’s no such sense of urgency.
It seems like Bethesda is leaning heavy on their sandbox side, just letting people go around and do stuff.
With optimized settings from the HUB YouTube channel, my FPS never went below 60.
Starfield sounds like an okay game but all the PR responding to complaints sounds like an absolute disaster. Stop letting Todd answer these things directly
So far, Starfield is exactly like Skyrim in space to me. There’s as many carefully crafted cities, and quite a few carefully crafted locales. There’s just a lot more space in Starfield (estimated about 500x more. Skyrim is 15sq miles, and those 1000 planets are each a couple square miles ingame). Sounds like there may be less hand-crafted content in Starfield than Skyrim, but that’s hard to tell.
I’m definitely not finding Starfield to be claustrophic. On the contrary, a bit agoraphobic.
I had agoraphobia growing up. I know exactly what it is. And I had moments of it exploring the planets. I found myself hugging to keep buildings in range and not wanting to stray out into the great wide open. For some odd reason, I got more of that in Starfield than in NMS.
I’m also still fairly early into the game, so perhaps I’ll spend more time indoors than I have so far.
EDIT, also, it kinda is the opposite of claustrophobia in some ways. There are some overlaps and nuances (both fears sometimes include fear of crowds). I had a grandparent with really bad claustrophobia who never used an elevator in her life. Ironically, we could relate on a lot. But they were still opposite issues.
I don’t know, been agoraphobic for quite some time. Never had problems in elevators (alone), but trains or tunnels are the worst. Guess that’s why it’s hard for me to imagine how a game could ever transport that.
I’m approaching that, but I have to admit I take my time and revisit towns a lot.
I’ve only gone to a dozen dungeons so far that were hand-crafted. There were literally hundreds of them in Skyrim. I’d love to get real numbers.
So far, I am enjoying the hell out of the game, if my lack of twitch reflexes is hurting that a lot. I keep having to juggle between ship upgrades (my Mantis keeps dying to small fleets more than 10 levels lower than me) and face-to-face. Usually by now in other Bethesda games, dying is rare. I’m too stubborn to drop the difficulty, though, so I suppose that’s on me.
There’s a pirate fleet in orbit around the planet I want to build my first output. Last 5 times I tried to go there, fleet keeps showing up and killing me. That’s somewhat annoying.
Save in space often. There’s a semi common bug I’ve just run into that will cause your ship to vanish and it somehow retroactively removes it from all previous saves. No recreateable way to get it back. The only thing that saved me was a previous save where I was in orbit, still lost a few hours of progress.
When the astronauts went to the moon, there was nothing there. They certainly weren’t bored.
Because it wasn’t just a rock, but the first time entering another natural body of mass in the universe, apart from our earth. Something that never happened before. In contrast, over a million players have discovered planets in Starfield by now, including all customly made content by Bethesda for the planets.
The astronauts where excited and happy as they achieved a huge step for humanity - somewhere I heard that before - while one could literally only achieve one small step for a human in Starfield.
Yeah, and it’s not like the astronauts just put up a flag and left. They took soil samples, set up sensors to measure tectonic activity, etc. Rocks are interesting when you can interact with them.
What’s that quote from originally? I’ve always assumed it was Todd but now that I think about it I’ve never seen anything that would prove it, I supposed I’ve always just associated it with bethesda games lol.
It’s just a general software development joke. Eventually your customers will rely on that bug, because thats how it works right? So you can´t fix it later as it would break workflows thus that bug becomes a feature.
I have no clue what people are talking about? I have beaten it twice and surveyed an entire solar system and there was plenty. You can fly around to any point in most planets and moons and have stuff generate at each landing, within hiking distance.
I feel like the game is so big and good, the haters are just hating and being stupidly immature about it.
I think here we are reacting to the colossally dumb reasoning in the quote from the article. Astronauts had a few things to be excited about that gamers… won’t
Everything in the game is “within hiking distance” because that’s how the game generates planets. You don’t just “land on a planet”. You go through several hidden loading screens and arrive in a 1km x 1km square of planet.
I’m an Elite Dangerous veteran and have no problem with that. I think it’s more realistic.
I’m about 18 hours in and the illusion of variety hasn’t worn off yet. Plenty of things to find, with some travel time though. Unlock/upgrade your backpack boosters and it’s almost like Tribes though, as you go flying across the landscape in short bursts to keep moving forward in the air.
Yeah, I’m right here with you. I’ve explored hundreds of systems in Elite. I get excited when I find an interesting planet. It would be really weird and immersion breaking for me if every planet was interesting.
Oddly enough, it's misleading. Planets are covered with procedural generated POIs what he meant is that the environment of most planets is barren. I wish there were actually unexplored planets that weren't covered in POIs too.
(I really do want to play this game, I like Bethesda games. But there are always inevitable shortcomings, which modders will fix.) Also by then perhaps it will be cheaper.
I want to like Bethesda games. I liked fallout 3 a lot and their doom games, which is different i guess. But man, i'm not a trash collector that collects trinkets. It's not enjoyable to me. It doesn't matter where the setting is. And the fact that the characters still look like the game is made in 2010, with the same shitty zoomed in dialogue and awkward ass eye contact is just driving me away. This isn't some indie company that want to make thir dream game, this is Bethesda that wants to make a 80 dollar game with as little effort as humanly possible.
Yeah, I'm rather bored with the wide-but-shallow approach Bethesda games take. Tons of geography with maybe 20% filled with things of consequence. I am uninterested in collecting 42,000 wheels of cheese or finding some random space hobo on a planet.
It really just feels like Bethesda needs to just build world so we can populate them however we choose. They know the public and modders like their framework so they create settings. Fantasy, Nuclear Wasteland, Space. They know modders keep games alive.
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