Sure Todd, lol
Most of the planets are dull on purpose because my graphics card catches fire if there’s too much excitement on screen. Thanks for looking out for me, Todd!
Didn’t know anyone was still using Fermis.
“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.
Chris Roberts : Hold my beer, for another 50 years.
Yeah, it’s already stale and expired by now
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.
While I agree, I’ve been saying that about NMS for years. Not that we want to be comparing Starfield to NMS, of course.
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.
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.
Todd forgets this is a game and not real life where you have to train and study for 30 years to go to the moon. He forgot that the main intricacy is the stories you can make for the player.
Like assassins creed has big cities. Which feel dead, not enjoyable.
In RL most of the “excitement” in space comes from not wanting to fuck up and die. Games don’t have that, Todd.
Some do, but they make it their main draw. The reason Kerbal Space Program is fun, is fun because you can fuck up and die in a million different ways, and not doing so is chalenging and succes is rewarding while failure is hilarious(ly frustrating).
Not fucking up and dying in Starfield means pressing the Use Healthpack frequently enough.
for now, the gameplay-enrichment mods are well on their way
Imagine a realistic KSP with AAA graphics, like replicating historic missions and planned ones, etc.
You just described the KSP RP-1 modpack with high graphics and volumetric clouds mod
Then you have games that do space travel so well that I’m beyond scared shitless in them, like Outer Wilds. So many games have already managed to convey some of these feelings.
Perfect example. Handful of planets, each rich with hand-crafted purpose, space travel is big enough to feel epic, but small enough to not want to skip.
It nails the feeling of exploring a vast area of space, not by being realistic (it is not, by a long shot), but by just making certain experiences feel right.
…yes, they do. Soooo many fucking games have that. There’s a whole genre of games built around it. They’re called survival games. A relevant example would be No Man’s Sky.
I am kinda certain no game has dying. I haven’t died in any yet. Although I remember a piece of The Onion of a suicide feature of a car seat. Maybe someone should build a gaming chair with this feature to improve the immersion.
…what? I can’t tell if you’re trolling. Death is basically the most common failure state of any game.
IRL the stakes are a little higher, don’t you think?
Games aren’t real life??!
No shit? That was the point
Astronauts aren’t bored in space because they’re busy trying not to die. games don’t kill you when you fuck up or something goes wrong
Yup, classic case of realism not always making the game better.
I went to earth to check it out, I know the lore of why it is a giant sand ball but that also disappoints me. I walked around the approximate area of where I am from and found a small cave. But there was nothing in the cave except some abandoned drugs. I couldn’t interact with the glowing mushrooms, mine any minerals, etc. I was hoping for a sprawling cavern or something and just… nope. I might go back to earth to explore it some more but it’s so bland.
What do you think is behind that rock?
Another rock.
I was hoping for at least some scattered ruins on earth. Like there are random generated gas tanks and buildings on most planets.
Just something a little unique.
Maybe I should try and learn to mod it and do that.
Ah yes “…Bethesda’s managing director, and Todd Howard, who is Todd Howard.”
Thanks for clearing that up AI writer.
Also how is it thrilling to “blast off” and “set foot on a new planet” when the game is more clicking through menus and fast traveling.
In No man’s sky you actually land. In star field you fast travel.
It was not ai but a joke how he is famous to the wider audience.
In No Mans Sky, you’ve seen five planets, you’ve seen them all.
Not necessarily but yea it trades the bespoke environments for generated ones that aren’t so dissimilar.
I think it makes for interesting comparison. Both space traveling games, one comprised of specially designed levels navigated by menus, the other less variety but you actually journey to them and given the sheer number you can actually discover and name a planet no one’s ever been to.
Both valid but I think starfield shouldn’t really advertise in exploration. Unlike NMS it’s far more narrative based.
Both valid but I think starfield shouldn’t advertise really advertise in exploration. Unlike NMS it’s far more narrative based.
Yep. There are three space games on the market that are not too far apart: NMS, Elite: Dangerous, and Starfield. They have similarities, they have differences, and they have different target audiences.
I told my buddy the other day that it was Bethesda Menu Simulator 2023, and I wasn’t wrong. I was working on my outpost, so I’d place some stuff, go to star map, select the planet with the material, pick a landing spot, land, get up, mine ore for 5 minutes, fast travel to ship, repeat 2-3 more planets, choose the outpost, land, place some more stuff. Then repeat.
i find it less headache to just sit in UC distrobution and fast forward 24 hours to keep reseting inventory to get all the mats I need to build, at least my starter shit.
You could skip fast traveling to your ship, or do any of the plethera of quests instead of what you’re doing
coming from elite dangerous, flying in NMS feels incredibly simplified. landing is literally “push a button to land”. either way, they both beat starfield in that department
Totally it is but that’s the style. The game isn’t trying to simulate complexity, it’s more a kick back and relax game masquerading as a prog-rock album cover. Pressing X to let your ship land itself gives you just enough time to hit a joint and make a plan.
weird in starfield i also have to press x to land, so whats everybody’s big deal?
Landing or taking off isn’t interrupted with a loading screen in either game. You also have freedom of pointing ship to a direction and go there.
Those two things combine to make you feel like you are moving around the game world as opposed to game world moving around you.
that may be true, but starfield has some fun quests and interesting characters, which makes the world feel real and not like im the last human being in the universe
“Press X to Pay Respects”
RockPaperShotgun’s review is out now, and I could not agree more. The game is so meaningless.
It’s crazy impressive. Especially on a technical level. But it feels like a tech demo more than a game almost. It’s still fun to idle time away in, but it’s not engaging. At all. It’s brain idle time. In a positive way, but also no more than that.
In this case I’d call that a positive statement. That’s what I was looking for when I decided to get the game… I’m not going to shell out my dimes to Bethesda hoping for disco elysium, I basically want something that makes demands of my brain just a little more than solitaire or minesweeper.
I don’t really agree with it not being ‘engaging’ though, I guess depending on what you mean. I’m not staying up at night wondering what’s gonna happen next, but I’m staying up past my bedtime designing space ships and then running out of cash and going and doing a fun loot-and-shoot mission to get more money to build more space ships. That ain’t bad.
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.
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
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.
You can’t because the engine is bad, and they need a lot of loading screens to connect the small-sized playable areas. Other Bethesda titles pull the same trick, but you don’t realize it, because there’s no loading screen. Instead it’s doors that handle that (which is quick because rooms are small) and pre-loading of neighbouring grids when you are outdoors (which is why sometimes you’ll see creatures popping out of thin air, or walking out from behind walls/trees/rocks to hide the popping.
Bethesda always advertises their “new engine”, but really it’s exactly the same engine they’ve been using since Morrowind, with minor logic improvements and updates to the graphical assets. It’s to the point where a lot of bugs have ancestry trees.
Bethesda always advertises their “new engine”, but really it’s exactly the same engine they’ve been using since Morrowind, with minor logic improvements and updates to the graphical assets. It’s to the point where a lot of bugs have ancestry trees.
Yep. Call it Gamebryo, Call it Creation Engine, Call it what the fuck ever.
Its still NetImmerse.
They can keep slapping fresh makeup on it, and keep wraping new ducttape around it when the old stuff wears out and fails, but it’ll always be the same engine, regardless of the name changes.
They dont want to invest in making a whole new engine (which, given Bethesda, would be just as bad or worse than what they use now), and they don’t seem to want to license anyone elses engine. Which is weird, cause subsidiary studios don’t seem to have the same issue… Like, Ghostwire Tokyo is built on Unreal Engine 4.
im sick of this excuse. since its not one. nobody is forcing them to use that engine
The will of the dev is not the will of the producer.
then change it? or just cope hearing your game is not very good
You can actually fast travel directly to cities, even when you’re in a different system.
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.
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).
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!
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.
Why don’t they just have Skyrim level of detail on all 1000 planets, smh!
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?
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.
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?
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.
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?
Just wait then DLCs start to populate the void…
Apart from that, what I’ve seen on some YT videos is impressive - When they populate a planet, they really mean it.
Exploring is supposed to be a reward in itself
Oh yes, exploring 6 levels of nested menus is incredibly rewarding
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Disclaimer: My comment is a reaction to the stuff Todd and his minions said in the article, not necessarily about the game itself. I haven’t played Starfield yet. I just find the statements really weak and want to express why I see it that way.
Yeaaahh that’s nice for maybe a couple of hours, but then it starts to get boring. That’s not how you keep players engaged, although there are of course those who don’t find that boring at all.
We’re not astronauts, we’re not there. Astronauts had the thrill of the voyage through space, stepping on the moon and feeling with ones own body how it is to walk on the moon’s dust in low gravity. Also astronauts had and have a shitload of scientific equipment and experiments to carry out, i.e., a purpose beyond the mere jolly walking.
If they were just there for walking and that for days, weeks, months, they would get bored pretty fast as well.
Take a look at No Man’s Sky. Similar problem. The procedural generation algorithm made planets look familiar after you’ve seen a couple. There is nothing new. Exploration became unrewarded. But Hello Games has massively improved on that over the years and produced a game where you can sink dozens of hours without getting bored so easily.
I have played Starfield.
The planets being mostly empty is fine. In fact, I think they’re too full if anything. You’re not meant to travel on the planet’s surface for long. You explore a bit if you think you want to build an outpost there, but otherwise you just move on. Most of the “content” is in pre-built areas. Enemy encounters almost always take place in hand crafted facilities, and usually it’ll be for some kind of quest so you land right near it.
The outpost system is where the procedural planets come in. You need to explore some to find the right spot to build with the resources you want. The content there is the building, not the planet. The landscape will effect it some, but mostly it’s whatever you make of it.
That said, the outpost system fucking sucks right now. You have to send resources between outposts with “links”, which take goods into a container and store them in linked containers. All solid goods go in one type, and the same for liquid, gas, and manufactured. I have all of my resources trickling into a main base, so I have all resources available there. This has caused my storage to back up and there’s no way to filter out items you don’t want. Then no resources can come in so you have to go to your storage and clear whatever is clogging it. There’s also no way to delete items as far as I’m aware, so you just dump the excess resources on the ground where they’ll remain forever. It’s really stupid. This is my storage solution for now.
All the crates flow into the next one, so it’s functionally one massive storage container, but with 15 seperate inventories I have to go through to get anything out. There’s also no stairs object you can build, or anything like it, so I stacked cabinets into a sort of access staircase. It’s really bad, but it’s what works for now.
Just a tip if you start playing and build a main base, build it on a low gravity planet so you don’t have as much of a problem if you stack stuff like this.
Does it eventually give you a purpose or guide you to making an outpost, I haven’t felt much of a need yet.
I hope not, i came for the RPG, if i wanted to play worse version of minecraft i would just go play minecraft.
[accidentally attracting Satisfactory fans intensifies]
That reminds me of how annoyed I get with Satisfactory as well…
As a Factorio player, this could all be handled so much better in both games, but Starfield is particularly bad. It’s like they never even tried building outposts before launch. So many basic functions are missing.
This sounds like factorio without the biters
Yeah, and without any way to actually manage the resources. I want to like it, but I see so many issues that should be easy to solve that they just didn’t. Sure, it’ll be fixed with mods and maybe DLC, but that shouldn’t be required for basic UX.
Another one of my big gripes with outposts is that there is no way to view your existing outposts. There’s not a list, and definitely no way to view what an outpost is producing. Hell, you can’t even view what an outpost is producing when you’re there. It’ll tell you the total quantity produced of everything combined, but not of what. It’s bad.
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)
