I already liked the game since I’m not the typical bethesda fan, “their” only game I finished was New Vegas, liked the characters and story and didn’t care that planets were empty since I played Daggerfal Unity. But I don’t think they can grab that explorer fanbase again, they are just against procedural generation in general, they probably wanted Outer Worlds but bigger.
But I don’t think they can grab that explorer fanbase again, they are just against procedural generation in general, they probably wanted Outer Worlds but bigger.
I don’t think that’s true. Elite Dangerous is one of my favorite games and it’s procedurally generated. I think the issue is that that’s not exactly what Starfield is.
When you “land” in Starfield (outside a handcrafted city or similar), you land in a procedurally generated box made just for you. It isn’t repeatable by anybody but you. Other people who “land” in the same spot will not see what you saw, they get their own procedurally generated box. The contents of the box are similar (the terrain is the right color, the flora and fauna are the same). If you were to see something particularly cool in your box (although I never did when I was playing the game) - ie: “unusually tall mountain range” or “unusually deep valley” - you can’t tell someone “hey go to coordinates x,y and check this out!” You CAN do this in Elite Dangerous. All worlds, all settlements - everything is the same for everyone, and if you explore through it all and you find something interesting, you can share it with people.
In Starfield, your box always contains an uninteresting/unremarkable patch of terrain and magically, literally everywhere you land, there are structures and ships within walking distance - none of which anyone can get to but you.
There is literally no WAY to explore. Everywhere you land, it’s just another box and it will always contain the same variation on the same things. That isn’t exploration. Exploration implies things that exist whether you are there or not and which can be found by someone if they look long enough.
I think you’ve excellently captured the difference here. I didn’t get heavily into Elite Dangerous, but on one of my longest journeys, I scanned a few things that no-one had ever scanned before. I didn’t discover any awesome looking space phenomena that would be worth sharing (at least, none that hadn’t been discovered before), but the prospect that I could was exciting.
Even just the idea that my name would be on other people’s screens if they came and scanned the same things I did, because we were all sharing the same world.
This is the most precise presentation about what I hated about Starfield. I gave up about 5ish hours in when the 3rd planet I landed on to explore was literally the same as the first two. Maybe it was just me, maybe it was unlucky lottery, but the fast travel to multiple boxes with the same ingredients shaken up slightly was enough to make me walk away.
If people liked it, I’m very happy for them, it just didn’t do it for me and I feel like it’s starting to be diminishing returns with Bethesda after Fallout 3/Skyrim (though I’m sure someone will correct me with an older drop off point).
If I remember it correctly, everything in E:D is procedurally generated, but every player has the same seed so it generates everything identically. That’s how they keep the installation a manageable size.
Yes and this is what Starfield doesn’t do. Starfield doesn’t actually have whole planets generated by a shared seed. Planets in Starfield are just unlimited sources of randomly generated playboxes. Since the planets don’t actually exist, they can’t properly be said to be explorable.
For anyone interested in this topic, there is a super great video that explains the difference between procedural generation and random generation and how a tiny amount of data can be used to generate extremely complex things.
I mean, the only thing that’s really needed is the standard access to the creation kit. After that, I think modders can polish it up to competency, although flying to planets might be outside the abilities of the engine. I think anyone still hoping Starfield is going to be a good space game need to stop dreaming and go back to Elite/No Mans Sky/Waiting for Star Citizen, but there were some really elaborate mods for New Vegas and Skyrim back in the day. Maybe someone dedicated and talented enough could even fix that.
The trick is that they want paid mods so they can do nothing and get a decade of profit. Consider that many of the mods on Nexus have millions of unique downloads.
Even if they charge 3 bucks a mod and get a third of it, that's tens of millions of dollars with zero effort on their part.
But the primary issue is that the current modding framework they're pushing onto Skyrim doesn't support framework mods, so none of the big mods Skyrim is known for, and have kept it alive so long, could happen.
And that people will hopefully riot about paid mods again. The Skyrim framework flew under the radar because of clever timing. There’s no way it goes un-noticed on their newest flagship game.
Honestly I let my Gamepass lapse and was considering re-upping it to play Starfield. And now I am for sure not going to re-up it for Starfield. Maybe I’ll visit it in a few years, but it sounds like not a great time from Nakey Jakey’s review on it.
I should probably pick this up when it’s on sale. I bought it on release after playing CyberPunk with ray tracing and asked for a refund after playing for 20 minutes because it just looked like garbage in comparison.
Part of the reason why Bethesda games visually looks bad is because their tied to the hip with creation engine for modders to use. Part of the reason why bethesda games have soo many mods is because of how much of the games engine is open to modders to modify.
I agree. I was fine with it for Skyrim and Fallout 4 but after getting used to how gorgeous CP2077 was, the difference was jarring for a AAA title in 2023.
The thing is, cyberpunk also has mod support, and it’s pretty good, I use a climbing mod, a drone mancer class mod, and before the 2.1 update it already had a metro system via mod.
I'd say "i will pick it up on a sale in a year or two" but they're just going to release the enhanced / special / anniversary / superspace edition down the line too, so why bother
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