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“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
You know someone is gonna make a mod that generates random and unique bases from hab complex assets.
And thats exactly why Bethesda doesnt put the effort in. cause they make the game, then the modders make it good for free… Or it used to be that, now they want to charge for mods and take a cut of the profits for shit they didnt make.
At a scale of 1k planets you’re going to have to rely on reused assets and procedural generation. At which point people not into procedural generation say that it’s “repetitive”. Especially if you only gen once for everyone and not each run lol.
AI generation of assets and code will theoretically eventually resolve this, but that’s quite a ways off. They’re not even usable for such with human assistance yet. And if you have ai generating the content, it’s not really a human team making that stuff lol.
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.
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.
yes. I haven’t played the game so idk the details of what’s up. but at 1k+ planet-sized spaces it’s hard to have a team go over that by hand. Planets are large. But I have no doubt that bethesda team was probably super lazy as well.
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.
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
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!
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.
There’s one part in the story that you need to build a thing in a shop or an outpost, but it doesn’t require you to really build an outpost. I did it so I can have any supplies for upgrading things without too much effort. I think that was a mistake, but now I’m too invested. Lol.
I gotta be honest this looks like Minecraft construction but even in Minecraft there are ways to sort out and destroy unwanted items
[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.
If you want the astronaut experience, play Kerbal Space Program 🚀
nice argument lol
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)
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.
I really like the game so far but it really needs some kind of vehicle for travelling around planets. Like the exocraft from No Man’s Sky.
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.
Depends on your platform, PC and Current Gen machines were pretty good from day one, bar a few little bugs.
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.
Yeah. I failed math on purpose too.
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
Beaten it twice? like the main story? Honestly I forgot Skyrim had a story too. I always wandered for so long I forgot what I was doing.
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.
We have a culture of edgy hot takes so I think that’s where a lot of this is coming from. Space is huge and it’s expected that a lot of it is empty and boring. Filling things out with randomly generated planets is awesome as long as the main story ones get some TLC. They did that.
The game has some rough edges like terrible inventory management and clunky menus, but there are so many good parts that I think it won’t be much of an issue. I expect they will smooth some of it out with patches.
Overall, the game reminds me of Mass Effect. That first game was janky as hell, but the world building and characters were so good that it didn’t matter. I’m impressed with Starfield so far. It looks like they nailed the most important parts.
*Fast travel around to any point.
If there’s more going on outside my window than in the $90 game I just bought, there’s a problem.
Bethesda, are you high?
I’ve been enjoying Starfield - but the empty planets suck, especially without vehicles. The scanning thing is boring and dumb, worse than trying to get 100% on a NMS world. It’s a shame that fast travel disconnects you from the space feel of the game, but it makes the rest of the game playable. I like the game overall, but they have definitely dropped the ball on space travel. In theory it’d be cool to come across different “dungeons” etc, as in Skyrim when wandering around, but doesn’t happen in Starfield because you’re generally not going to happen upon them. It’s not interesting to drop down to random planets.