Not polished as it’s still in early access, not amazing graphics, but turning out to be a damn good game that most “AAA” developers wouldn’t even try to make, that was made by one guy (and now a small team of volunteers/contractors lol)
The most aggravating thing for me personally as a PC gamer with an obsession with fidelity/graphics, is any Microsoft acquisition becomes focused on console first (to sell Xbox) which leaves every game as a neutered PC port that had to be made shitty enough to run on consoles… It’s very irritating.
The worst thing for elite was being made by frontier as they are now. Frontier now is just a tycoon simulator game generator, that’s all they care about. It’s like the FIFA of the tycoon games… spit out another one every year or two and who gives a rats ass about the stuff we already made or haven’t completed.
I loved what elite wanted to be, I hate what the bean counters did to it…
People shit on star citizen for their dev cycle, but elite took the worse route in my opinion: they released a minimally viable product and then intended on building it into something bigger, but got cheap/lazy and just accepted that what they have out is “good enough” so they dumped all the internal ship plans (braben spoke about boarding ships and piracy on foot in a ship, that kind of thing.) They dumped so much of the simulation stuff and just stuck with the BGS… it’s frustrating to see what could have been.
You can land on moons in elite dangerous and if you have the expansion you can land on planets and moons with a light atmosphere and walk on foot.
If anyone complained about barren moons everywhere in starfield, just be warned elite has exactly zero interesting planets/moons in the literal billions of star systems it has. Everything is identical minus terrain colors and planetary rings. I loved elite for a while, but as far as exploration goes you really need to like scanning for the sake of scanning.
Starfield has a lot of stuff to explore, even if some of it is repetitive, but elite has maybe 10-15 interesting locations in the entire galaxy…
There are plenty of moons/planets with life and interesting things to see, but yes there are a lot of “barren” moons and whatnot. The game tells you what to expect when you click on a given object. It will tell you if there are flora and fauna, what the temperature is, what minerals to expect, that kind of thing. From what I can tell there is almost always some sort of structures/bases on the planets as well.
I really don’t get it to be honest, I’m left saying “damn I can’t wait for the weekend to play starfield longer because there’s so much to do” I don’t have enough time to do what I want in any given weeknight. I’ve been absolutely obsessed with starfield…
I got the early release and had a 4 day weekend, my play time was measured in days by Tuesday…
It looks like they’re doing what star citizen does with terrain generation where they hand-make tiles of landforms like mountains/cliffs, hills, etc, then the procedural generation takes over and stitches them all together in ways that “make sense.” So it’s not 100% hand crafted, but it’s also not “strange landform” NMS type nonsense that is entirely made from maths so you only seem to get rounded features. From what I’ve seen the environments look absolutely stunning! As someone who plays NMS too I can say they look 100x better than NMS.
That’s a valid point. As long as there’s a publisher and investors we’re more than likely never going to see what I suggested, I kinda forgot star citizen is what it is because it’s funded by us.
It’s always the same crunch time for employees and rushed buggy products to feed the investors from “AAA” corps. Hope we can push for some positive change :/
I mean we can have large games with detailed graphics and have employees treated well. We just need to accept 10+ year timelines for releases on big games which I’m ok with as long as we get quality results and the team is treated well.
I follow star citizen though so I could be the weird one here lol