Holy shit that article reaks of AI generated content. If it was written by a someone that claims to be human, then that human needs a Voight-Kampff test ASAP.
This is one case where I almost posted a summary from another source that linked to it, but there seems to be a (loose?) norm here around posting the original sources.
You are all saying that both games have boring, procedurally generated planets. Sounds like both games were designed with boring elements people don't want. Just because ED is more boring, doesn't mean Starfield is good.
The point isn’t that ED being boring makes Starfield good. The point is that space exploration is mostly boring, and ED exemplifies that well. If I wanted unrealistic space exploration, I’d just play No Man’s Sky.
I agree it's particularly dumb thing to complain about. You can land on Pluto. Well for posterity, I'm assuming they mean going to the planet and landing directly, which you can't do to any planet. You can land on Pluto, just not by flying directly to it. You can't really fly to any planet and land on it like that because when you're at the planet, selecting it has you bring up the planetary map to initiate landing/destinations.
Basically, if I'm anywhere in the galaxy I can select Pluto, plot a course, and land in it's orbit. Or, if I've landed on it before and visited a settlement, or made my own outpost, then I can select either of those.
You cannot fly from earth to Mars and then directly land on Mars. You can select a location near mars and then press a button to travel to it, likewise for any waypoints you can see.
At no point does the game or the marketing say that you can fly to planets without menus and land on the planet with a seamless transition, so I don't really understand what everyone is up in arms about. They told us long ago that cutscenes would be the transitions so frankly I'm just seeing people complain for making assumptions they were never promised. (unlike 2077 which actually did have some missed promises).
So yeah, "can't land" on Pluto without using the map menu... Just like literally everything else except waypoints in the game
Wouldn't it be relatively simple to have the ship be automatically stopped as soon as it gets at a certain distance from a land-able object and open some dialog asking whether you want to land / enter atmosphere or something like that to initiate a cutscene / loadscreen?
And if you say no, the ship's computer could make up some in-game excuse, such as needing to avoid the gravity well of the planet, for it to automatically turn around and move away from it.
I mean, I get that they probably didn't expect someone to spend the time to actually go and attempt physically reaching the planet, but after all the attention this thing is getting it could be an appropriate approach to take for when they do the full release, if only to shut people's mouths. It's just one small detail.
Honestly, avoid Lemmy and Reddit for reviews on this game. The absolute vitriol it’s gotten here has just pushed me beyond trusting any of them. (and yes, they all end with “I mean I haven’t played it.”)
I have played it. 8 hours in so far, it’s fun. I won’t say it’s “redefining RPGs” for me or anything, but I’m having a good time playing around. To others here on Lemmy I am now the worst person on the planet.
It’s the same people that have been bashing Bethesda for years now, they don’t care whether the game is actually good or not, they just want to bash the people behind it.
I’ll play it for myself on gamepass and see what I think, discussion around it has been worthless here.
Yeah, as if Mars and Pluto is interesting. People want this game to fail because it isn’t a better game than the darling Baldur’s Gate 3. And gamer has been like this for a while: either the game is 10/10 or it’s shit/10, there’s no between.
I remember the time when zelda botw came out and jim sterling gave it a 7/10,people went banana over that lol. Starfield and Witcher 3 may very well be a 6 or 7/10 game, and that’s okay.
I think the big issue with a personal preference of realism vs. Fantasy is that Starfield has no commitment to realism in its execution (I say this with 12 hours played before I gave up). It is very much made to cater to lowest common denominator in other space travel things. The ship movement is very primitive and simplified. Travelling to new solar systems, landing on a planet, etc. Is done through fast travelling on the map to connect the different cells. It does not feel immersive in the slightest to me, and I have really enjoyed the “realism” of games like Elite Dangerous in the past.
Most damning is the lack of environmental planet differences. The only affect of a planets negative traits is suit protection reduction. There is no life support, your oxygen is just a stamina system. There is no vehicles. You are just running across barren, boring, procedural planets with none of the pomp and circumstance of games that have done effective space exploration.
Maybe in 2 years of mods you might have a more realistic experience out of starfield.
Any Bethesda game is essentially a mod vehicle with an RPG tacked on anyway. I think it’s entirely on brand that they didn’t go all in on hard sci fi for vanilla. I don’t think that’s incompatible with having a lot of planets that are mostly barren filler; I’m never going to explore 1000 detailed planets, and rescuing someone from a crash on a barren moon or finding a smuggler base on a frozen rock helps to keep the more interesting places feeling cool. There are still more interesting planets than I’m likely to ever get through.
I can’t remember much of how Starfield was marketed but I remember the “1000 planets” thing being parroted a lot. Was the fact that these planets were going to be realistically portrayed and mostly empty wastelands something that was made clear during marketing?
They said that about 10% of planets would have life, and that one of the things they wanted to portray was an IRL astronaut’s quote of being in space as “magnificent desolation.”
The point of a game is to be fun in some sense of the word, not to depict Mars as scientificly accurate as possible, unless it’s Scientificly Accurate Mars Simulator.
If the planneta are boring, then the game about exploring those planets are probably failed at being fun, and that’s kind of irregardless of what people want.
Personally I would like all the games to be good, for example.
I dunno, I don’t think the point of all art is to be “fun”. There’s plenty of examples of games that aren’t necessarily fun but do something interesting in some sense or inspire other emotions. Exploring a bunch of dead and boring planets may not be fun and maybe it’s not compelling or worth doing in Starfield, but I think it can be interesting to have something more “boring” most of the time to have other moments stand out… and sometimes something being boring or painful is part of the experience and it wouldn’t be as worthwhile without, like for example particularly difficult games can be pretty painful to play through, but sometimes having gone through the painful thing is a huge part of why you care about the experience.
Of course not everything is for everybody, and more “boring” experiences in general are probably not what the average person playing video games is into… but there’s plenty of us who like a good boring or tedious or painful slog every once in a while :). Maybe it’s rewarding, maybe it sets the atmosphere, maybe it’s meaningful in some other way… I get it, but I think it’s a little sad to reduce games to “just supposed to be fun!” It’s an awesome art form and I love seeing other creative things done with it.
It’s a space exploration game with thousands of planet, they can depict planet being a barren rock and can be fun.
Personally i don’t think all games are good, arguing with people parroting that is a waste of time. Personally Witcher 3 is mediocre, but i’m allowing people to love it and see it as 10/10. Game is personal taste, if you don’t like that sort of thing then it isn’t for you, no such thing as “all game is good”.
can depict planet being a barren rock and can be fun.
And that will be good then. My point was, that games should sacrifice realism in favour of fun and criticism of “yeah it’s boring, but it’s realistic” is fundamentally wrong.
I think in Starfield case it’s less of sacrifice fun for realism and more of having these realism for a reason. From the review alone, the location is boring, and that’s by design, because you can either ignore it or interact with it, like gather resource or build a base. There’s thousands of planet, it’s not realistic to all be handcrafted and interesting, because what’s interesting for the first 10 times will get boring when you do it 50 times.
There’s a reason why they design it that way, and i think it’s rather fair for this sort of game.
That depends what you’re going in expecting. Bethesda have been very clear that this isn’t a Space Opera but more hard-sci-fi. I don’t expect cities on every planet and alien political intrigue. I expect a cold, barren and uncaring universe that humans are trying to tame.
Not surprising to see them get complaints about this tbh. They went for “borderline horror game” with how much of a miserable wasteland Fallout 3 was and got blasted for it.
And the only metrics here would be “is the game fun” in the end. Is exploring barren planets fun? Good. Is it not? Then it doesn’t matter that real life Mars is even more boring
I mean, isn’t it still only available to those who paid extra? That’s probably why you see so many people wanting to discuss it without having played it yet…
Personally, I try to see it positive. They want to protect others from being disappointed from yet another Bethesda game. I got burned by Skyrim in my youth, so when I see Todd Howard spitting straight lies again, I’ll try to save others the disappointment.
Now that Starfield is public, I feel like people can at least try to form an own opinion, but if only the people who are willing to pay extra talk about it, then you’ve only got Bethesda fans talking.
To chime in, I think a lot of this kind of discourse is just based on what you’re looking for in a game.
In American Truck Simulator, one of the DLC’s is the state of Wyoming, which is remarkably barren. It’s the least populous state in the whole country, and many of it’s “biggest cities” don’t even top out over 100,000 people. If you look at the reviews for it, it’s actually somewhat divisive. A lot of people criticize it for being “boring,” but that’s also how Wyoming is in real life, having driven across the state partially myself. I think a lot of this has to do what people come into the game expecting. Some want to enjoy the game as a truck simulator and Wyoming offers plenty of space for that. Some also want to enjoy the game via other formats, such as the scenery, and Wyoming doesn’t excel that much in those areas.
My point being, I think it’s just hard to make claims about this thing because it’s all just subjectivity. I think if you make a black-and-white claim about this then you just aren’t thinking very rationally. Some people will like it and some people won’t. Such is life.
As a very committed SC backer, I do not think that quote was directed at SC, I think that was just an honest assessment of the amount of work that handcrafted planets would have taken.
Space Engineers has a planet, where you can burn fuel and fly for hours from Earth and land to. However, there is no story there. Choose the game that is more interesting to you.
I haven’t played the game, only been watching a streamer play it, but I think arguments like “it’s boring on purpose” are dumb.
Trying to convey the vastness of space and how small you are seems also somewhat undermined, if you’re just constantly fast traveling everywhere, and it seems like you’re made out to be the most important person in the universe, since everyone is screwed without you, but that’s just most games.
It’s dumb because that’s a fringe argument that I hear people reference as absurd more than I’ve ever encountered it. In fact, I have yet to see one person make that justification. I’m just assuming that argument exist somewhere because so many people have complained about it.
Starfield is yet another example of gamers getting outraged over a perceived reception, no matter how large or small that group actually is. I’m sure there are people out there making really bad defenses of the game, but the people who are angry at those people are much louder and far more numerous. 
Most people who are playing and enjoying the game are probably perfectly capable of seeing and articulating some of the issues, but just because a game has issues doesn’t mean it’s “literally unplayable“ or whatever people like to say now. 
I don’t know I just find these back-and-forth so repetitive. Every single game release you see this. The answer is Starfield is a perfectly fine, flawed game, that different people will react to differently. Just like any piece of media.
I spent all morning dunking on the game’s issues and Bethesda’s design philosophy with some friends… But ultimately I’m having a ton of fun with the game, glad I broke my rules and purchased it early, and finding it basically fulfills the things I wish both outer worlds and no man’s sky had delivered on. It’s a good game, and it is exactly what it says it is (as far as I know. I haven’t paid a lick of attention to the ad hype): a Bethesda style open world rpg.
I don’t really want to like it over the small studio titles that it clearly builds on, but them’s the breaks. If you’re looking for a Bethesda style open world RPG set in a sci fi world, then this game will probably be fun for you, and if you think all Bethesda style games are garbage and can’t get past their very odd design choices, then why are you ranting about starfield since obviously it’s going to be that.
Lotta people just love to hate Bethesda. Including me really… but this ain’t it.
vg247.com
Aktywne