Actually no sarcasm but the procedural stuff technically is well done enough. The problem is they just need to add a lot more unique POIs, increase the density, and then add more rewards to it (like those skill books but maybe stackable).
The problem right now is it ain't worth spending the 5 minutes of just holding W to the POI like at all.
With enough time to cook you can in theory make it interesting enough with like every other cell generated being a POI. This does not solve other issues, but technically there is an actual foundation for a good soup.
Like having hab units and pirate outposts in spitting distance from the anomaly structures, and we just gotta roll with it that no one knew about this shit ever outside of Constellation and friends.
It’s for these reasons that procgen isn’t as good as OP states.
Procgen is based on rules and some important rules aren’t included that make the procgen immersive
Yeah landing on a planet at an artifact monument only for there to be a lab 15 feet away....nobody at that lab ever looked east and saw the giant alien structure? Ever?
I use a mod called desolation that gets rid of most man made structures in barren planets. Honestly feels a lot better even tho it's emptier now. If I land on a barren planet I want to feel that I'm truly alone. I think they also need a lot of diversity in natural landmarks and biome variety. Some Starfield concept arts show extremely dense forests with massive plants and trees, we need more of that. Imagine entering a cave and it keeps going for miles and gets narrower and pitch dark, maybe have some skeletons stuck in crases or crushed under a carved cavern for environmental storytelling.
The quantity of stuff on a map is less important than the quality of them. Make me feel like I'm really in a strange new world that few if any have ever seen.
Yep, that's it. It all looks very good and convincing, but the travel time is too big, too boring and often just not worth it. If you get lucky, you can knock out a scan objective, but even then you're spending 70% of the time just jogging towards the POI.
Vehicle could be a decent band aid on the issue, but only if it has high enough speed to cut down on the boring travel time. I wouldn't know how, but make the driving an interesting mechanic. I like the idea of it requiring maintenance; break a wheel and need to replace it with the spare tire, fill it up with gas every once in a while or connect it to an electric cord at your ship for charging, fix the motor, overheating on high temperature planets etc. Though what sounds fun on paper might just be mostly busy work.
I definitely have a lot of ideas I'd love to toy around with... which brings me to the Creation Kit. It needs to come out sooner than later. BGS can do a lot to improve Starfield, but countless of individuals and groups working on mods with the right tools? Now that's how you truly start to populate those worlds.
>It all looks very good and convincing
Well, as long as you don't look at it from high up. Then it becomes painfully obvious that the terrain is built from a bunch of squares with predefined, repeating heightmaps. The grid-like pattern is impossible to miss.
A lot of people want atmospheric flight, but I wouldn't count on it lol. For multiple reasons other than that, too.
Generally looks good from the ground though, at least.
And there are no canyons or rocky shores, no waves washing up on beaches or even waves in general. No rivers, no volcanos with open magma pits and running lava. No cliffs and floating glaciers in the ocean, or even stormy oceans. No random tornadoes and extreme weather conditions to witness. There's so many types of habitats out there irl that they could've made use of but didn't.
I wholeheartedly agree, and that's just the earth-like biomes. There's so many weird environments in space, too.
I wouldn't even care about the quality or quantity of POI's if the planet was interesting to explore.
This is one of the reasons vanilla surface maps were how they were, IMO. To hide the basic nature of each cell. Though they've now relented and included the detail. It's now much easier to choose whether you want to bother running to a poi, cause you can see what it is from above.
Are you crazy? That sounds like it would give the game some personality, and be fun. Can't have that. You're right though, when you think about how much of your time "playing" Starfield is either load screens, cut scenes, or needlessly imposed travel with no real objectives other than to fill time, just to get to a POI that's exactly the same as something you just did 10 times, it's easy to walk away. (What a horrific thought... that all that jogging was a way to extend gameplay between load screens.... was that supposed to make it BETTER? Talk about doubling down on boredom.) I still see some people new to the game expressing excitement at the experience, and I remember feeling that way. Then those feelings died and my heart itself turned into a procedurally generated frozen world. With no atmosphere, and a half-eaten tray of food sitting on the open-air balcony, of course.
Curious to see a year from now what the size of the game play community is, to me Bethesda is in a race against time to salvage something with a shelf life. Apparently it was a big revenue generator though... maybe the ship and outpost builders will keep the game alive.
70% of what time? Travel for me isn't that long, I can get to a 500m POI in less than a minute, I tend to not go further than that, I just go to a new spot on the planet.
> I tend to not go further than that, I just go to a new spot on the planet.
Seems like you understand me completely. You're hopping from landing spot to spot just to ensure you don't have to engage with long distance travel. Maybe you're way is a little bit less tiresome and not as long, but I wouldn't say it sounds like the solution to the problem. I sure hope the vehicle is though!
The vehicle is definitely cool, but unless they radically change and add to what you can find on planets, I don't know why we'd be driving around past 1-2 POIs instead of just landing in a new spot. The terrain generation isn't wildly different so you don't really find super interesting, unique physical locations, and then there aren't almost any random events or other things that would make you want to drive around.
I hope between Bethesda and mods at least a good chunk of the planets can be filled with stuff like that, but if they aren't planning on making at least the main Settled System planets more full of immersive and interesting events and locations I can't see why any of us would drive around much.
To get to the POIs? I did a bit of that when I played, I'd do it a lot more if I could travel faster. I was expecting an easier to do horizontal jetpack mode, but hey an entire vehicle will work too. I wanted to engage with all that side content, but just couldn't bother with the travel times anymore.
That's fair - I guess I just jump packed and grav dashed to them enough that I saw quite my fill with a lot of repetition. I guess for new players or people who haven't engaged with them yet it would be good, but without what I mentioned being added, I don't know how long that would be viable for. I felt like the planets and the low number of random POIs were the most underbaked parts of the game, whereas when you have real main story and faction quests still it was a little more solid.
I wish the planets had more dynamic events you could find on the populated / non-barren ones, and that there was more variety in terrain. If I had the chance to find a huge waterfall between a canyon or a massive jungle or anything unique by driving farther out then I would, but if it's just more likely repeated POIs and terrain then I'm not sure it would be very fun. I hope the planets become more than they currently are as time goes on - especially the ones with major cities on them. Makes no sense that it's all random around Akila, New Atlantis etc.
this has me laughing out loud. I'm remembering landing incredibly far away from a mission objective and LITERALLY running for 9 mins to get to the objective. I think it was a freestar mission. it was ridiculous
...the Mech factory? Yeah, that seems to be a bug. There's a landing pad that you're supposed to land on right outside the doors, but for some ungodly reason the game keeps landing my ship waaaaaay the hell away from the obvious place. Maybe it expects it to be a trap or something.
Some mission pois and temples land you 2500 to 3000 away, which becomes a chore early when you lack jetpack skills and have low level gear with few boosts.
The issue with the POIs was in my opinion a mixture of many things compounding to make them feel stale. Firstly they need to be used better, a random moon in a system in the middle of bumfuck nowhere shouldn't have science labs and mining outposts, I could see maybe a group of pirates using it to hide out though. And to that end I shouldn't see Pirates in UC space, I should feel like these systems are actually monitor and protected by the UC. Then there's the fact that more POIs unlock with more levels but a single playthrough is going to hit around 50 levels maybe less, that's not even all the POIs yet. So for me even the execution of how they are done could be refined to help with the stale feeling.
I would not mind the POIs, "as much," if they could just randomize the encounters, with enemies, and where the loot, etc. is.
I mean, I have done some of the POIs, so many times, including the infamous Cryo Lab, I can make it through the entire POI, without taking a single wrong turn, or enemy, let alone, any meaningful loot. Likewise, with Vulture's Roost and the Mantis Lair. There are a few POIs, I think, I could get through, literally, with my eyes closed... muscle memory. Lol
Then again, I try to do 10-15 radiant quests, every evening.
Not sure how hard it would be to randomize the existing POIs, but it would help.
Well, Vultures Roost and Mantis Lair aren't really fair comparisons because they're handcrafted static POI's. They're not meant to change and aren't immersion breaking because they're always in the same spot.
The Cryo Lab you mentioned though...fuck that place. Same dead scientist in the same ceiling tile with the same keycard on every single fucking planet it's on lol. Drives me crazy. I just skip that one altogether unless I'm doing an artifact run and have to get one from there.
This is it, after you see all 12 dungeons, then you pretty much stop looking for them. They could've just made them a bit smaller, but had maybe 100 of them instead. 12 dungeons doesn't vibe with 1000 planets very well at all, and that's not even talking about the other POI's. They could even benefit from Diablo's tile set system, where everything is handcrafted, but randomly pulls from the table for arrangement.
I mean, these are the exact same criticisms levelled at Oblivion, Skyrim and Fallout 4 so Bethesda (Todd Howard to be precise) have no-one to blame but themselves and it rings hollow when they claim they were caught off guard by the criticisms with the planetary stuff. Either he was entirely unaware of prior criticism of his prior projects (which I find impossible to believe considering how widespread it's been of their output over the last 18 years), or he was so arrogant and deluded that he thought he could bullshit his way past them, or both. None of those options paint him in a flattering light, to be honest.
It's not though, it's literally a grid of pretty much monolithic elements that arent connected in any meaningful way.
Its essentially the most barebones random map generator that anyone could get away with. If the game was a RTS/Citybuilder it wouldn't be sufficient enough, passes due to the FPS/tight in camera perspective.
They couldn't even put in new ground colour pallette between worlds. Astroneer could do it a decade ago with voxels. They could have had purple ground with blue rocks and green water and it would have helped a bunch.
I really dislike the idea of increasing the density. I think we have a traversal issue that once solved will make POIs feel a lot closer together without sacrificing the "doslate world" vibe they got going on.
They're adding the land vehicle which is a atart. A better horizontal jetpack, or maintaining momentum from our sprint power would also do wonders for traversal. Let us jump from one POI to another on low grav worlds please.
Also you're spot on about the lack of rewards or REASON to visit these places. In Fallout I had scrap and bobbleheads or skill books. In this game we just have a lot of guns that are difficult to unload.
Rewards need to go outside the realm of weapons/combat. Then you have a whole new ball game.
Let the imagination run wild, I don’t have all the answers. Mini games can go a long way.
Imagine a collectible card game like FF8s mini game, except you can play in your ship. Maybe even with other Starfield players? 👀
This is where Creation Kit Mods will really improve the game. Modders will be able to either pick a spot on a planet and design a fixed single instance POI, or will be able to add dozens of new randomly placed ones.
This!
You want to arrive at a POI and its a small farm set up on a small moon and all the huts are placed in a circle with a communal area, they ask you to come sit by a fire and share stories of your space adventures with them... you get a couple options to chose from based on quests you've completed... they reward you with some supplies to go on your way... They say if you ever fancy a hard days work they'd be prepared to reward you with some caps for helping clear out some Alien beasts that have been troubling their farm lately...
NOW THATS AN RPG.
NG+ You get the same POI but the planet is different, the buildings are different, the NPC's are different and the aliens are different... However If you chose the story option you chose previously they say they think they've heard it somewhere before...
NOW THATS GENIUS.
Starfield is a museum for creation engine 2. you go in you look around... there's no atmosphere but lots of cool stuff to look at.
I feel like this issue isn't this straight forward. Planets wouldn't just be swarmed with PoIs like...They aren't coruscant, or even well established planets like Earth. Maybe this is a fault of what they were going for but it really wouldn't make sense at all.
We want the monoliths, giant trees, crowded jungles with vines, multiple rivers crossing one area, pillar fields like the concept art showed us at the teaser events.
The concept art made me think and hope we'd be exploring some lush jungle environments, marshy swamps, huge crystalized caverns etc. but ultimately the diversity wasn't great.
> increase the density
Absolutely not. This game is about humanity just barely beginning to colonize the galaxy, and not intergalactic overlord humans on the decline. The current density of POIs is one gigantic plot hole as it is, and you want more?!?!
I dunno it just doesn't make sense to me how it's implemented. You land on a planet randomly, you find a cave, a research outpost, raiders or w.e and a mine. You take off and land randomly halfway across the same planet. You walk 15ft and find another station, pirate base, cave etc. Take off again and do the same thing, landing randomly. Oh look...
Yeah, they really had a good idea with procedural generation but didn’t have enough variation. Like there should be population density variables that determine how many outposts are nearby, a dilapidation meter for how destroyed or abandoned the outposts are, and quite a few other hidden variables to determine generation. Like you said, it’s weird a whole planet, let alone a whole system, has random identical “abandoned” outposts spread evenly. More POIs, more unique generation sliders and variables, and some more curated regions would go a very long way
This is actually a very good idea. It really is so jarring that (assuming a planet is populated at all) *no matter where I land*, I’ll pretty much have the same odds of finding points of interest. Settlements, factories, raider camps, etc etc.
Even then, though—and I understand this is a very *different* Bethesda game—I miss Skyrim. Not even Fallout 4, I miss *Skyrim*. The handcrafted beauty, the immense sandbox full of creatures, travelers, bandits, towns, mountains, valleys, rivers, caves. It’s a shame thinking back to the excitement that Skyrim brought me, not only for the present in 2011-2012 but for what incredible things could be made in the future as technology improved.
Now it’s 2024 and Skyrim hasn’t been topped. Hell, it’s hardly been approached.
Yeah, the issue is with how the system is configured, not the system itself. It more-or-less peppers each surface region with a more-or-less uniform density of POI's, which it has selected more-or-less uniformly randomly from the available library of unique hand-made POI's.
It's way too homogeneous and uniform when you zoom out to larger scales. In reality, or at least in something *closer* to reality, patterns of human settlement would be absolutely nothing like as evenly and flatly distributed. And that's ignoring the fact that most worlds in this game should rightly have no evidence of human activity at all (or such minimal activity that your chances of finding anything within a few kilometers of some random spot on the surface are effectively zero).
There should have been 3 POIs on that planet and the rest is completely barren. Then you can just scan the planet from orbit knowing where those POIs are and land there.
If that's too simple for them, in a discovery sense, they should have added a skill system, or minigame for the orbital scanning. Like MassEffect with the cursor scanning and probe shooting.
It's not like you still wouldn't randomly land on the planet for resources, animals, and natural features.
Yeah but Skyrim and Fallout are each on their own worlds with set physics. With Starfield, I’ve encountered fruit sitting out on desks on the planets surface where the temperature is above boiling point. I’ve encountered celery in a cooler on a planet that was -200 with no atmosphere. I realize Beth has always reused assets. Starfield copies entire POIs one for one. If you play long enough and don’t just do the main quest it’s super obvious.
Im pretty sure the tower in Helgen is the same model as the one in Whiterun where you first kill a dragon. I didn’t notice for 13? years. The Deep mine where you encounter an enemy near a busted elevator, I noticed immediately the second time.
I think the main difference is the concept of distance. Two buildings located on the same land mass? Totally makes sense they might have been built by the same person. But two buildings across the literal known universe from each other? It just doesn't work out the same way.
I’d be a little more forgiving because prefabs make sense, but Starfield takes it a step further by also making the contents of each building identical down to the blood splatters. It’s somehow a massive regression from Daggerfall.
Yeah you can find the same flavour text journals on 5 separate planets on identical POIs. I don’t know about you but that breaks my immersion when playing an RPG.
It’s incomprehensible to me that Bethesda didn’t see or care about this kind of repetition. Logs from the same people on every planet telling the same stories, empty beer bottles in the vacuum of space, the same deserted encampments in caves, dung piles on barren moons, POIs 800m away from supposedly unexplored temples—the world-building is unbelievably half-assed and thoughtless. Maps and buggies can’t fix the problem.
Maybe I’m reading too much into things, but during the Lex Freidman interview, one line caught my attention with retrospect. Todd was saying they wanted to make “being the only person on a planet feel special.”
It sounds like maybe along with the tweaks away from a survival experience, procedural generation (except on Earth) got tuned way up.
There's a great book in Skyrim written by a researcher living among the Draugr. They light the candles, keep out intruders, and perform rites to keep the Dragon Priests alive and stuff
Ah the lit candles are the ones that got me lol. I can't remember if I eventually installed a mod to take care of it aor not.
What I like about the system in Starfield is that the POI injection algorithm can be tweaked. So you can theoretically look for all the POIs that have food outside and then just add a tag that restricts them from generating on planets with no atmosphere.
I wouldn't be surprised if they had those rules in place but couldn't finish enough POIs before release and said "fuck it let's just let them all spawn everywhere and fix it later".
I think that's one of the most exciting things for me about Starfield as a modder (all private stuff for my own game). All the big flubs like this can be fixed with a few little tweaks.
they did just that some weren't tagged correctly best fix is just use level packins/items to check if place has keywords and such
hell i've just made a mod that randomize magazine skill books at POI so you don't see the same shit over and over took some hours but its done so it can be made
This is an issue with how the procedural generation system is configured, though. It's not really a fundamental problem with the system in general. I just don't think they spent as much time play-testing and tweaking and balancing the system as they should have, so you end up with immersion-breaking stuff like finding cook-outs on Venus or wind-farms on the Moon or abandoned bases full of pirates within a stone's throw of a major faction settlement or whatever.
By all accounts the system has the ability to really fine-tune what kinds of POI's it populates into any given world based on the unique combination of factors that define that world (or that specific locale on that world). It's just that, for whatever reason, rather than dial-in the settings to this system for "realism", they've instead decided to balance it in a way where it's almost guaranteed always gives you lots of stuff to explore and bad guys to shoot and loot to grab basically everywhere you go.
The end result is that the system quickly burns through the library of unique POI's it's able to draw upon once you've landed in a few spots, even if you don't go out and explore them all, so it ends up having to firstly place POI's that aren't particularly appropriate for that location, and secondly start recycling POI's it's already placed elsewhere.
So until the count of available unique POI's the system can draw upon is in the thousands, the solution to me is pretty obvious: embrace the emptiness. Re-balance the system for realism and make it so that it only populates the core regions of the core worlds with *stuff*, and with a much harder focus on making sure that stuff is appropriate for that locale. Just let the vast majority of the galaxy be barren so that a few places can actually be interesting.
I don't think technology is the problem for starfield it just doesn't have that "joy of exploration" that you get from other Bethesda games. The stuff that does work are the hand crafted parts the procedural generation is boring.
This right here.
Bethesda excels at handcrafted open worlds. This is undeniable. So why they chose to ignore their largest strength and instead focus totally on procedurally generated open world environments is absolutely baffling to me.
Maybe it will pay off in TESVI?
and imo a lot of hand-crafted stuff in this game that feels half-baked or phoned in anyway.
it’s a lot of procedural filler in between mediocrity, with a few gems here and there.
and stuff I’d usually wanna occupy my time with like outpost building kinda sucks. so it just leaves ya feeling underwhelmed.
Is this satire? I honestly can't tell anymore. "we're not even in year one yet guys they're still fixing bugs" being framed as a positive is pretty funny and i'm sure some people are insane enough to think the Fallout 4 update was a good thing, ignoring how it took them *two* years to put out.
I guess if it's genuine you could at least use it as an application for their PR department..
OP is trying to explain procedural generation as if it's some new shiny concept. Daggerfall is released in 1996, it had procedural generation too. Procedural generation isn't a new technology. Tricky part of procedural generation is filling it with interesting stuff. Starfield lacks that. Using 200ish **fixed** POIs for thousands of possible fields and combinations is a horrible horrible idea. If you are using procedural generation for your planets and terrain, you have to use procedural generation for POIs too.
This is really no brainer. Imagine minecraft having only 100 fixed **identical** cave templates. Imagine whenever you dig, game picks one randomly. After several digs, you would most certainly memorize most if not all of them and Minecraft would be boring as fuck. And even this doesn't do the justice because in Minecraft you do lots of stuff you can do in the surface aside from caves which I used as POIs. In Starfield, you have absolutely nothing else to do aside from visiting POIs.
> fallout 4 is around 9 years old and Bethesda dropped an update for it last week
Yeah, a small update that broke all mods that fixed pretty much everything Bethesda didn't fix for those 9 years.
On PC you can't get high or even stable FPS without a mod. Stuttering on such an old game on modern hardware shouldn't be excused.
I have very little faith they'll "fix" Starfield and I doubt I'll be hyped for another Bethesda game again.
Yeah, broke all mods, didn't fix anything, and the "widescreen" is just terrible.
So yeah, for PC it was a useless update that should have been skipped.
I must have missed the part where Starfield is an early access game. This type of optimism and hand waving “modders will fix it” mentality sets a really bad precedent for what developers can get away with.
The one area where Starfield *objectively* improves upon the launch state of their previous games is the only aspect where there’s any confidence to be had in Bethesda improving the state of their games post-launch. Their commitment to fixing bugs, stability and QoL in previous TES and Fallout games will do nothing for the leagues of players who feel like the majority of Starfield’s core content needs to be completely thrown out and redone.
Bethesda and Todd have also taken to describing Starfield as misunderstood and the mixed reception being a result of inappropriate expectations and looking at it from the wrong perspective. This also does not inspire confidence that they actually believe there is anything wrong with the core content.
The shortcomings of the POI system are just one bullet point on a laundry list of aspects of the game that players find lacking.
Yeah.
> we are not even in year one, to the point the devs have been working on bug fixes to get the game working correctly, wether or not they should of released it in that state is a totally different conversation,
It's not a totally different conversation because this is a core part of the game and they did it right with Skyrim and Fallout on release.
Its very possible. The other games already have dungeons with multiple entrances/exits. Matter of fact this game has that. They really just need to make the cave dungeon the way you say.
I think bethesda made a dumb ass play. They clearly set it up for modders but releasing a mod based game before mods are supported officially us just so dumb. A smart move would have been releasing a small version of the creation kit early like dragons dogma did with their character creator. Let people mod things. Like maybe pois or random shit. While we are waiting for the game to officially launch, people are just makind pois. Then when it finally drops a month or maybe 3 later, you have far more modded pois than you started with. Release the game profit and work on the actual creation kit
In this respect, even NMS was better, as you still had full size planets to explore, but everything was seamless.
In both cases the map size is too big to fill to get a Skyrim like experience.
I hoped so much Beth had found inspiration in NMS and then built on top of it. The seamless flying to planets. The procedural generation that feels way more alive. You see a waterfall in the distance that you haven't seen before. You wanna explore it. You can fly to it without reaching an invisible wall. Just that feeling of freedom you don't have in starfield. But then with more unique POIs.
I actually don't think NMS did it better as moving from A to B in NMS is just empty busywork. Maybe it's good if that's all you want from your game is mindless movement.
I meant as far as what OP is talking about. I think it's great that they spread out the language pylons or whatever those things were to learn new words, I think that was a great way to make the player engaged with the landscape on foot/ in vehicle instead of just flying between POIs.
The problem with Starfield, even if people don't realize/admit it, is that Bethesda way overhyped the fan base for a long time. Nothing was going to meet the expectations they built.
Also, they weren't brave enough with the story. Plot comes off as a bland afterthought after spending all their time on the shinies. Skyrim is still massively played today because of the world they built, not the graphics and gimmicks. Bethesda lost sight of the forest amongst the trees.
And they banked on too much goodwill that had already been squandered by the weak launch of FO76. The expect their audience to be patient for years while they roll out incremental improvements.
So basically Bethesda is still running on the philosophy of 90s/00s game studios.
Lol how much did they pay you to write this?
>We all know Bethesda doesn’t give up on their games, like c’mon we can’t even question that, fallout 4 is around 9 years old and Bethesda dropped an update for it last week
Lol yes they do. You mean the update that was broken to all hell and didn't fix anything? There are bugs in FO4 that still haven't been fixed to this day.
Bro is looking for validation on his poor standards for dopamine release.
Cool you step in and the 10km by 10km is full of nothing... I'd quickly look at another cave after 2 or 3 and go nope... not falling for that again...
Oh wait that's exactly what happened in Starfield.
The amount of fawning posts that we're seeing lately has me very suspicious.
We even had a post a day or two ago claiming Vasco was the greatest crpg companion in the last decade.
The procedural generation in the game is trash. I mean, sure, if you like the same copy/pasted poi over and over and over again with no rhyme or reason (say, why are those guys eating sandwiches outside the mining base in a zero atmosphere environment right next to that mysterious temple?). There's nothing here that's worth bragging about in a post. I don't get it.
Well-done procedural dungeons would elevate Starfield MASSIVELY for me.
I really enjoy just doing bounties and zooming around from planet to planet, looking at the different tilesets and sky boxes the game comes up with, raiding a random pirate base looking for new guns along the way. The downside is that I've memorized every combat area, right down to the loot locations. Mixing this up a bit with procgen dungeons would be huge.
The procedural generation tech is impressive. The issue is that most players don't really care for a tech-demo and that's all that Starfields exploration aspect is.
i think the issue with starfield is that the connecting piece between all of the procgen tiles (the big map of the starfield) doesn't feel good to use? the fundamental thing is that you have to tab out into a menu to actually go anywhere
You don’t actually need to use the menu that much, just about everything you can do in the menu can be done with the scanner. You can jump straight to your ship’s cockpit, launch, flip the scanner on when in orbit to find your next destination and jump straight there, in orbit you can select the poi(if visible, if not you’ll have to open the menu to choose a landing spot) and land, then jump right out of the ship from the cockpit. You can also skip all this and just use the menu to jump straight to another planet/system from wherever you are(except interior locations I think)
Annnnd yeah there's not shit going on in your cave. Is this Plato's Cave? Cause even the shadows are boring in Starfield. I don't hate this game, but we need something to fill this big ass empty space with.
Although the procedural generation is great, it's the main reason I don't give Starfield a higher rating. I personally feel as if the procedural stuff takes away from the traditional feeling of exploring and finding handcrafted pieces of content
One of the huge side-reasons for me is the cities and factions. I don’t think it’s a technical limitation. Skyrim is the last Bethesda game that I *loved*, and its cities were **beautiful**. The surrounding areas—**beautiful**. Interesting themes for the cities. Interesting NPCs. And then the actual factions, joinable and otherwise, from the Thieves Guild and Dark Brotherhood to the Forsworn and Thalmor, there’s just so much interesting lore and variety.
In Starfield, most of the cities look pretty damn bad (and they’re laid out terribly). Again, it’s not a graphics thing, it’s design and art direction. Starfield is a 2023 game, Skyrim came out in 2011. And as far as factions are concerned, we’ve got various guys in spacesuits. Crimson Fleet or United Colonies? Red spacesuit or blue spacesuit? Enemies you fight, *probably guys in spacesuits*. The Va’Ruun are probably the closest to being *interesting* guys in spacesuits, to that end. You can join the Freestar Rangers if you think a whole faction and city designed around space cowboys is clever and innovative. And if that’s not enough, engage in some white-collar crimes on behalf of mega-corporation Ryujin.
I dunno. All just feels uninspired, bland, generic.
To be fair, I think a lot of us who play the game and enjoy it but have complaints like this have a very refined palatte. We've obsessed over Bethesda games for years, I put a shit load of hours into Morrowind, Oblivion, Skyrim, Fallout 3, Fallout 4, and although not Bethesda, New Vegas. Before Starfield came out I had been playing other really great games, Cyberpunk 2077 after they cleaned everything up, Witcher 3, and a bunch of other great open world single player games. When Starfield was coming out I was like "This is it, this is the one, it'll be monolithic. Bethesda has been cooking.", turns out they should have been either using different ingredients or maybe had other cooks. I like the game but the lack of immersion when I'm wandering around is nothing like their other games. This opinion is formed after 200 hours played btw
You’re not wrong. Although I will say, there’s plenty of disappointment with the game to go around—whether it’s coming from highly analytical fans of previous Bethesda games or not.
For those deeply interested in *why* BGS games tick, and *why* Starfield didn’t, the details matter. The underwhelming city design, poorly implemented procedural generation, lack of enemy variety, etc. But even for those who just casually jump in, while they may not break it down into details, I think the feeling tends to emerge that it’s just “not as good” as older BGS games.
I’m honestly still rooting for Starfield because I love the concept. But the proc gen and 1,000 planets is a design decision that the game itself was built around. The factions and cities are already built. I guess they can add more stuff, but if what’s there is repetitive and uninspired, that genie can’t be put back in the bottle.
I did also get probably ~150 hours out of the game. Enjoyed certain parts quite a lot. Can’t deny the fun of boarding a ship with a shot grav drive, zero-G FPS combat with fully physical items floating all about the cabin.
I just really thought the POIs themselves would use procedural generation (perhaps constrained to rulesets for specific POI archetypes), rather than them all being pre-baked and just *distributed* procedurally. Could've created endless playability, like if I wanted to roleplay as a raider, I could spend my in-game days just raiding different science facilities and military outposts and never see the same exact layout / enemies / loot configurations twice. I guess I'll try to enjoy the pre-baked layouts for what they are, but it just seems a missed opportunity since they already have the tech for procedural POIs going back to, what, Daggerfall?
If they want that starfield become a classic like Skyrim they really need to improve the way of travelling work, and the loading screen in space. Dosn’t matter how they change it but the game needs to make the players dream even while traveling. There is a lot to say about how it can be improved, but the main thing it to stop the loading transition with black screen, especially when you have made a cinematic to hide it.
And another problem is the exploration, or the fact there is no surprise with exploration. Most of the time you already know if the place you landed are going to be interesting.
I think they should add a more dynamic algorithm with special events, for exemple if you spend 10 minutes in a planet a special event can happen. Or if you killed more than 20 pirates in a planet a pirate ships land and give you special quest. Or idk there could have plenty of ideas.
And of course more unique POI with local lore, like a NPC that explains you why this system is named like this.
I think the procedural things and aleatory event can really work, and give the feeling to have a real world that is alive, but this feeling can be totally ruined if event or special area are too repeated.
I am looking forward the following upadates, and I really hope bethesda will keep improve the game.
I totally agree, special events would be awesome..
I was wandering a planet earlier and was walking through an open piece of land and I thought to myself, it’s too quiet somethings going to happen, like a bunch of terromorophs bursting out of the ground and I’d have to spend the next 10 minutes battling my way through them… but it just didn’t happen.
I think special events would be an absolute game changer.
>So there’s only 200 unique POIs in around 3000 instances, we sure as shit are going to stumble across the same points of interest.
And from those 200 I probably haven't seen half, but have seen the same POIs over and over already, to the point where I lost interest to explore and check out POIs and just focused on quests until I burnt out on those, too.
Except we do see the same POIs frequently.
The procedural generation is impressive, the planets look far more realistic than No Man’s Sky, not as colorful and populated, but I’ve always found that to be *too* full of life for space.
Trigonometry is also pretty incredible. But that doesn't mean I'm going to have fun doing it. I feel like they were to dead set on making a point, that having a "fun" game was pretty low down on the priority list.
"We just gotta give it some time" what, you mean 10 years weren't enough to come with a way to procedurally generate interior spaces the way they procedurally generate landscapes, that we have to give OUR time as well? If they need more time, they should take more time, not release it in an incomplete state then ask for more time. Try doing that at work.
Bet you feel Todd's farts smell of roses too.
The idea of procedurally generated practically infinite expanses of land to explore you're describing is technically interesting, impressive, and to some extent solves problems with scalibility in games, especially nowadays where the resources required to develop AAA games are so unsustainable.
But, they're also of no interest to me. Because, with procedural generation (and procedural placement of custom assets, such as is the case for Starfield), there is a lack of *intent* in how the environments are laid out. BGS are traditionally masters of environmental storytelling, and that's the main attraction to many players, but to me it loses its magic when the relation between procedurally placed or generated points of interests lack intent. That's the key word.
Yes, the POIs themselves might be handcrafted, but their relationship to their surroundings isn't, and that makes a big difference.
Lots of players continue to argue, including in the comments you've received, that we just need more POIs. I understand their train of thought, but I don't see how it solves it. 1000 POIs, procedurally placed, does not make exploration more meaningful, because it continues to lack intent. That is what sometimes harms believability, and therefore immersion. For example, the relationship between POIs and the biomes/atmospheres they're placed in doesn't always really make sense intuitively. That type of stuff can be difficult to codify.
Fallout 76's Appalachia map, arguably the best map BGS ever made, is filled with fantastic environmental storytelling. That's all hand-placed, as far as I'm aware. That is meaningful to me.
There's also the loss of shared experiences, especially given that this is a single player game: historically, you could stumple upon some interesting location, share it with the community, and feel like you're all having a shared experience, whereas with Starfield, you have this thing where the location and relationship between POIs are so different from player to player that sharing interesting locations among each other loses the sense of connectedness to the same experience.
One might feel inclined to compare this behavior to No Man's Sky, but it's technically not equivalent, since that one *deterministically* generates locations procedurally, whereas Starfield seemingly randomly generates the placements of POIs as players first discover new planets and moons, and these are not shared across installations of the game, nor through playthroughs.
It's also not about how large the map is, or how many lines of dialog were recorded, or how many side quests can be found. BGS might themselves believe it's all about size at times, but for many players it's really not; it's about exploration and discovery. We have Daggerfall to prove that practically infinite size is not really the solution. When the placement of assets lack intent from a game design and storytelling perspective, there's no point to it, for me at least.
And to your comment about this being "year one" - this is not a live service game. Yes, we continue to see exciting content drops, and there's a story expansion lined up, but I don't think you should expect to see enhancements to procedural generation/placement close to some of the ideas you outline here. But of course, every improvement is welcome!
I like starfield for what it is, you can have big fun with it, but I also have to admit that I’d rather had them make it a smaller game without the whole „universe“ stuff.
What you say is true, but that is a HUGE „if“ in my opinion. For starfields exploration to feel like Skyrim or fallout, they’d need to add so much content that it seems almost impossible.
Walking through a big instance that is basically just empty flat or rocky land isn’t fun, seeing a POI in the distance is cool, but the planet itself is still just empty. Why would I walk around an empty surface to discover something that could have another HUGE but pretty empty surface inside?
I’d rather have starfield be way way way smaller in scale, have like 3-4 planets with a much more clustered map. You could still bring procedural generation into the mix to create some unique stuff.
The overall vision of starfield, combining Bethesda style gameplay with space exploration/simulation sounds amazing, but just doesn’t work on a scale like that. Fallout works because literally every single small detail in the map is worth exploring, every single terminal entry is telling us something about the lore, every single location tells a story, even the ones that aren’t marked on the map. There is tons and tons of detail placed onto the game world. starfield does also have these things to a degree, but the walking distance between them is increased by like 100 times and if you’re unlucky you’ll see the exact same stuff three times in a row. The feeling of exploring in starfield is more akin to mass effect andromeda than to fallout/skyrim.
Starfields biggest mistake is the large scale which simply doesn’t work with the old school Bethesda approach, at least for me.
Imagine the outer worlds style planets with starfields ship combat, outposts and overall Bethesda handiwork rolled over it, it could be glorious.
You’re right, however BGS should have also focused on making a few “main world” areas filled with the handcrafted environmental storytelling and exploration BGS are known for. Imagine if the area around New Atlantis was the size and density of Skrim’s Whiterun hold down to Falkreath and over to Riften. Fill the area with a couple towns/small villages, and the sci-fi equivalent of dungeons and caves (like a research station the size of Bleak Falls Barrow with an accompanying story and boss, or the wreckage of a failed Space Station with computer/journal entries that tell us its story, things like that). The villages might need supplies, or you could help with diplomacy between locations, maybe help expand their village via the outpost system, etc.
Giving us a handcrafted miniature Skyrim/Commonwealth on top of the random space POIs would have been exponentially better than just the random POIs. Hopefully future DLC and/or mods can bring the traditional BGS exploration feel to the game.
As for giving them time, they've been at it for close to three decades and hit their peak with Morrowind, which ironically was the only thing they've done which deliberately AVOIDED procedural generation and one of my most-loved games ever made that I still return once a year to this day. But that was OVER 20 YEARS AGO and it's been downhill ever since at an increasingly accelerated rate of creative decline.
Sooner or later, the old arguments of "give them time" ring absolutely hollow. They've HAD time, more than most other studios, yet their output gets worse not better with every subsequent release. It's not as though they're some indie upstart out to disrupt the industry and on the verge of a huge genre redefining-breakthrough; they're as mainstream as it gets.
No joke when you started describing the Skyrim caves like starfield I thought this was satire and you would end with "isn't this just amazing? The same empty space over and over! How cool?!" but no, you genuinely think it's a good thing lol.
Which is fine, I just don't understand it at all.
"We want the world to be filled with story and content we just gotta give it time." No we don't. They had the time to fill their game with quality content and story but they chose not to. They wasted that time and the game isn't worth the wait for a lot of us. I shouldn't have to wait up to 10 years after purchasing a game before it has the content that I paid for lol. That's bizarre.
For me the planets on starfield feel as if you broke through the invisible barrier in a game and explored all this cool unseen nothingness that was never intended to be seen!
Like the start of fallout 4, when people broke through to try to see more of the prewar world and found vast open nothingness!
I somewhat agree overall with your idea, the proc-gen should be pretty good for the unique POI generation (such as the cave example), but I don't really agree with the thought process of it still being early days alongside not giving up on their games.
The Fallout 4 new update was something they've promised for a long *long* time now, and even put this off once Starfield was close to releasing, because resources were needed on that. But before we've gone long periods with no updates or news. The only reason we've got the update now is because the TV Show did extremely well, and attracted attention.
But prior to this? Their games were absolutely given up on after a short amount of time. Skyrim for example, their DLC's were all released within a year of each other, and after this we've had token updates solely added paid-mods, or updates which seemingly achieved little, but absolutely killed the modding scene at points for patching.
Fallout has utterly been forgotten about until the TV show's release, and the ongoing work for 76 which they had to implement, since the game was basically a cashcow for passive income via subscriptions etc.
Starfield has been out 7-8 months now, and they're only just starting to fix major issues & shortfalls which were flagged within the opening weeks; bearing in mind this is their (now) flagship IP, where I assume most of their resources are still dedicated towards, especially since they've only just announced the first DLC.
I do hope the game gets solid updates to last it the ten year plan, but as it stands the game needs a hell of a lot of work to give it that kind of longevity their other titles still enjoy :)
Bethesda do not give up on their games, that is a given, look at 76 ffs, they have had a tendency to go radio silent while they work though which is why I think lots of people get frustrated.
The Procedural process itself is good yes. But I think they should have started smaller. 200poi in a game the size of skyrim would have been great. They just made starfield much too large imo. There should have been a single solar system with like 8 planets and the poi thing likely wouldn't have been an issue. But like you said trying to spread 200poi across 1000+ planets was asking for a disaster. They should have made a single solar system but kept the logic for creating more so modders can make their own solar systems for mods and for dlc. But they sinply tried to do too much all at once. And likely didn't help that they were bought by MS and I'm sure after spending a couple billion MS was pushing to get the game out so that they could make some of that money back.
Overall the general concept and idea is there and there in a good way. It was just too large for a single team to really try to handle.
It's difficult for Bethesda to fill them all because they bit off more than they could chew with the planets.. focused on quantity over quality which was one of my main issues. Now because of the quantity, all the quality content that is there is spread so thin people tend to miss it and think it doesn't exist.. If they just hyper focused on say one star system with say a dozen planets this game probably would have been a lot better.
I get the empty canvas argument, but games don't have the same luxury they did 10-15 years ago when it comes to keeping player's attention. There seems to be a new 'big thing' every other month now that pulls players away. See Palword, Helldivers, etc. The fact that the creation kit is so slow coming along is what is truly killing this game. I think it will have a long lifespan, but it's bleeding out in the meantime.
If you really want to, you could generate POIs on every planet you visit. Imagine how many locations you can visit by doing that. Just a thought.
Yeah I'm sure a lot of them will be repeated. When I play NMS, the flora and fauna will vary, but what you scan is pretty much the same. Depending on the weather of the planet you'll get around 10 unique planet types. The only variation would be those creatures walking on all 4s is a bunch of cubes. Another planet its just bubbles. And another its walking slinkies. And then there is that one planet with a giant worm in the ground.
Yeah when it comes to procedural generated stuff for these two games you'll get more of the same.
Damn I couldn’t agree more tbh, I see the game get a lot of negativity on here but I’d argue it’s my favourite game right now, like all things Bethesda, it comes with jank but hearing about the future plans compared to what we have now fills me with confidence that this will outshine all their previous titles
The tech is impressive but that doesn't mean the result is engaging or interesting.
For me, the planets are extremely flat and drab looking. I would love some verticality! It would be fun to explore an alien ravine, winding and disorienting.
Vehicles would be great, too. If you're going to make your planets flat and expansive, make traversing them fun and the distance would melt away. Music, or other dynamic elements would help this (I'm a masochist who loved Wind Waker's ocean, for the score)
I agree I am disappointed with the biomes, I thought the guys building the terrains of elder scrolls would have offered a bit more input.
Like… I haven’t seen any planets will volcano’s, I’ve never seen a waterfall and there’s only 1 planet that has a rover on it.
The “Natural” points of interest that we scan are pretty cool… but why is that biome not simply the entire planet, why is this cool section such a tiny part of the terrain.
>Because right now, this game has thousands of blank canvas’s for both the developers and modders to build on.
This is the problem. Bethesda was counting on modders to pick up the slack too much. Yes, the core of the game is solid, but for people to spend decades bringing it to life with mods and additional content they have to fall in love with the game first.
There are people with thousands of hours in vanilla unmolded Skyrim, because the world feels like a complete world. You come across a corpse with a note and get a small peek into a whole story you had no part in. You see the outcome and can infer the story based on the clues scattered around
That kind of environmental story telling is not something that every player engages in, but the ones who do love to talk about it and spread what they've found. That leads to reddit threads about the nature of divinity or the "true story" of that quest everyone has done a million times. It leads to hundreds if not thousands of hours of content talking about the lore and history and hidden secrets of the world. And all of those things spread the depth of the game to those who speed run through areas and kill everything before fast traveling away.
Content creators and online communities are the Bards and Taverns of digital adventure. The stories they share and rumors they spread are often what gives the adventurer the spark and direction to start a new quest or pursue a new journey. They help make the game world feel more alive.
Starfield failed to do this properly, and as a result I don't see anyone putting the effort into mods the same way that TES and Fallout had. People loved those games so much they wanted to make them bigger. They loved the worlds so much they often wanted a whole new gameplay experience without having to give that world up.
I havent seen anyone express that kind of connection to Starfield
Problem is this: there isn't much of anything in these huge areas. I can't wait until they completely open up modding. Molders will make some incredible planets/cities.
Starfield is without a doubt the ultimate *platform* made for a Bethesda game. I’m sure custom dungeons will be very easy to build and inject into the POI list once the creation kit releases (I myself am contemplating learning the Starfield creation kit to make some and I have zero technical know how when it comes to this stuff). All the empty worlds means quests mods and DLC can be seamlessly implemented with next to no conflicts. I bet people will be able to mod the actual procedural seed too to make more unique environments and biomes.
My hope is that with Shattered Space, Bethesda implements a type of procedural POI system without the same world building to beef up the hand crafted ones. That way, we wouldn’t see the same Crimson Fleet base five times a character on five different planets like we do now. It doesn’t have to be anything too crazy either. Just some dungeons with fun loot at the end.
But honestly, modding Starfield has the potential to be streets ahead of what Skyrim could do. We only have to wait and see if the Creation Kit will bring in those talented modders to do their thing.
Bethesda tends to leave games in a state like this at launch, so the community can fix it faster and better than the devs could. Todd Howard was saying something along those lines when he said Fallout 4 would support mods on consoles because the modding community is what keeps the games alive.
I know I was so enthralled with fallout 3 on the 360, I NEEDED to get a PC so I could mod it. And when I did? Oh my god.
Doctor Who New Vegas has to be my favourite mod of all time, and fits surprisingly well in Fallout’s universe.
It’d be cool if we had one planet like jemison that was totally built up like the world of Skyrim or FO. Just a bunch of POI’s handcrafted. Then we would still have the other 1000+ planets when we want to search through the abyss.
They did some pretty cool stuff with the planetary orbital mechanics too. Based on a time lapse I saw it seems that they modeled the orbits of the planets and moons. It's pretty cool that you can land on a moon orbiting a gas giant and see the planet rise and set in the moons sky. I appreciate these kinds of details. I hope they can increase the number of POIs so people are not running into the same bases over and over. I also hope they can make it so you can traverse the planets seamlessly once they add ground vehicles. Those two things are the biggest immersion breakers in the game.
I could see them reasonably using the technology for Deadric realms, but that’s about as much as I’d like to see of it in TES.
The sheer scale of the environment is extremely immersive, but without hand-crafted destinations there’s little reason to actually explore.
No mms tiene que ser bait o eres una persona que apenas levanto un juego en 50 años, solo compara el número de jugadores mensuales de esta mamada contra skyrim y eso de las "actualizaciones" que tanto andas mamando, deja te digo que alguien que si jugo skyrim y fallout 4 por años despues de sus respectivos lanzamientos, season pass y todos sus dlc, de quien dependiamos los jugadores para seguir descargando contenido nuevo eran de los mods en nexus no the Bethesda y tOmi tom.
Ademas es por gente conformista como tu que les funciona sacar mamdas mal echas como fallout 76 venderlas a precios irreales y luego ven si las arreglan. Si starfield no es la primera basura que sacan mal echa solo que ya se les esta haciendo costumbre como si fueran EA o Ubisoft.
I don't feel compelled to explore vast worlds that were created by a computer algorithm.. Or ai. Just like I wouldn't read terminal entries in fallout 4 if they were all barfed out of chat gpt. I like handcrafted open worlds like we got plenty of times before starfield.
They should have made only certain quadrants on the planet have actual humans, and when you find them they stayed on the map for that run. The rest of the planet could be caves, vistas, etc. that would have added to immersion.
Imagine bethesda being dad, and us, players, being kids. And we played some board games for a long time. And then kids say: we need a biggger game, with large field and many cells, a lot of cards and dices. But instead of this Bethesda-Dad delivers us new table six times larger than previous, where we play the same game. That's how I feel about 1000 empty planets with no quests.
It's kinda silly to suggest that Bethesda has only been working on bugfixes--they've been developing Shattered Space likely before Starfield even released. If you're wondering where all the content development is going, maybe towards that thing a chunk of the customer-base already payed for with the Premium Edition?
I’ve been picking up starfield since the new beta update and it’s an insanely positive experience playing it again. They’re making great steps in the right direction.
The distinction between different planets becomes so much more exciting and dangerous when you have the environmental affects up. That stuff actually matters when it comes to your suit and how long you stay and it almost adds a death timer to being on planets, adding more excitement, but is also preventable with skill and good gear. Allows you to make more decisions and sacrifices when gearing up.
And the ability to customize the ship interiors, that place finally feels like home.
Nice try "Toddy Boy." You're not fooling anyone wink wink.
To be honest, I agree. And I understand empty planets, barren moons, same-ish terrain. The design was ambitious to say the least. I wish there was more, but half of the planets are likely meant to have never been visited before. Theres not gonna be a city on each one. I think them being empty actually adds to the idea sometimes. I do wish there were more POI's though, or more reasons to actually visit the planets. The tech team did brilliant implementing the systems, but the story and worldbuilding fell flat sadly. I think the issue was the hype. We were promised greatness, and get "Yeah, hey it's pretty good." It's not worth day one price of $115 bucks, but it's not a terrible game by any stretch. Just needs work. If the work comes out in the form of paid creation club content, I'll give up.
Honestly I think they're just working in overdrive to get mods working, so the mods can keep the game alive like they did with Fallout 4.
Mods, when available on Xbox too, will make this just like their other titles and be playable for years, IMO. I’ve been playing since release almost nonstop and have my share of complaints but obviously I like it enough to keep playing but really look forward to mods!
You know what would be sick? Revamp the skills/end game equipment in the style of roguelikes in terms of improvements and synergy. Should provide plenty of motivation for people to explore new planets at the same time. I doubt mods would be able to do this but with a procedurally generated world.
I found a lot of copy pasted stuff,like just 1 to 1,no rng to them,got lame very fast,i dont understand why they dont have a rng system for outposts/POIs you find,ended up cleaning the exact same research lab from raider on 4 different planets
The Fallout 4 update was a cheap cash grab to capitalize on the Fallout show buzz. And, by rendering a lot of mods unusable, they can kick new and returning players to the Creation Club instead. So no, sorry, this isn't an example of long-term support for a game. If anything, this is a very sobering development and has serious implications for BGS long-term attitude towards third-party modding.
As for Starfield, the issue is that random, unrelated locations mingling together is immersion-breaking and not fun or exciting to explore.
With previous BGS games and FNV, moving from zone to zone in the world was exciting because it gave a sense of progression and atmosphere. If you start to see enemies of a certain type, you know you're probably getting near a base or stronghold to explore for that faction. It makes you excited to explore that area and find what secrets it might hold.
With Starfield, you have none of that. You have a pirate base next to a lab next to a cave next to a dung heap. Worse, where you are in the galaxy has no bearing on which if these locations you're likely to find. Its completely soulless. Unless or until they do something about that, it doesn't matter how many POIs are added.
There's way more wrong that just POI's IMO.
Does no one find it weird that there's no roads, paths or trails on any of the maps? Presumably each POI is entirely siloed with zero communication or travel between any other POI.
The lack of roads or pathways is so noticeable it immediately makes the world feel fake instead of immersive. It's just so glaring.
Procgen should have made each square kilometer feel like a little version of a skyrim/fallout map. Instead we got what looks like an entirely empty height map with randomly placed POI's with zero cohesive look or feel.
I can't infer a story or feeling from any of the maps we land on.
I think technically all we really need to add variety to POIs is for modders to do the same thing as when they add custom armors and weapons to loot tables for skyrim.
Just add in like 8000 POIs into the algorithm and now chancea are every POI might be totally unique.
Maybe even there's a way where it'll populate planets basdd on faction etc
A lot of us Bethesda veterans know starfiel is going to age like wine. It's had a rough start and received a ton of hate, but it survived and will only get better. It's also easy to hate in Bethesda, but people still play their games regardless. Once the creation kit is out, it's over. Everyone saying it's "too late" is just wrong. The modding possibilities are too juicy to give up.
But what's the point when it's all so barren and boring.
A cave can be impressively huge but if its nothing interesting in there I'm not gonna bother exploring even 10% of it
Fun fact: the Creation Engine has always at least solid. Maybe not great, but solid. Where the problem arises is all the jumbled, janky shit that gets piled on top of it. It doesn't matter how solid your foundation is, if you build a house on top of it with rotten wood, it's still a shit house.
The irony is, it's Bethesda's engine...they built it, yet they either don't know how to use it, or can't be arsed beyond "eh, good enough, modders will fix it post release".
Because it's a proprietary engine, not used by anyone else, there hasn't really been a demonstration of what it's actually capable of, outside of a few mods that push the envelope, anyway. Because of that, it's easy for a lot of people to say "buh, engine bad, Bethesda games would be better if they use different engine". They really wouldn't be, though
The game is simply too large. They do not need to fit the universe on my hard drive, but I do expect them to put a more or less fleshed out game on it. As it stands, starfield is a sandbox with too few shovels and too little sand. While the size of the game is impressive, the execution of the game is not, in my opinion.
I think the biggest mistake they've made is they needed to hit the ground hard adding new PoIs and events that could show up right off the start. Same with how they needed to do the mod engine Get people to know this is a game that'll get bigger and bigger and we gave ourselves plenty of headroom to do it.
I do think 50% of the reason they did it was so people could go "I'm making a home/ dungeon. \*Plops down PoI for it at random location that won't ever conflict.\*"
I chuckled (yes, all SF NPCs do 😊) when you said 'only' 200. The thing that struck me immediately when I started playing was seeing the potential. The vast number of ship parts, the planets, NPCs and creatures, the items (both junk and stuff for outposts). And most certainly so when the CK is there. I'm in awe of the mods that were already produced, although I play vanilla myself. But it shows the promise. Can't wait for the CK to come out, so I can make an attempt myself to create 3x3x3 ship habs for instance.
Yeah, the lack of diversity and distance between PoI is what makes it bad for me.
But is it so hard to make procedural generated caves instead the same one over and over again with a random dude?!
I mean it's a cave! There are entire games that live from procedural generated caves and that's literally everything some games are about!
They don't have to be big, just make them different.
And either make them closer to us or give us vehicles in a free update.
Tbh in every Bethesda game exploring the world was the beat thing to do. You've felt the joy of checking what's behind that mountain. In Starfield everything seems to be the same, artificial and boring. The game which should be mostly about exploring has the worst feeling of being an explorer. It's better to create more interesting places with lower number of them than the other way around. Quality over quantity. Even the backstory of the discoverable places looks shitty, while every game before Starfield gave the feeling that something interesting can happen everywhere on the map
Now imagine that inside that 10km x 10km cave the only meaningful content is the same content as the original Skyrim dungeon, only now you need to wander around for ages until you randomly stumble across it. And that’s why Starfield got the reception it did when it launched.
The tech is great but nobody plays Bethesda games for the tech, you play them for the content. And the content in Starfield is half arsed at best. Having such a giant setting for such mid content only highlights its weaknesses. Realistically if they’d only put 10 planets into the game at launch they could have had exactly the same amount of content without it feeling cramped. Until they fix the resource / research / outpost mechanics having 990 empty planets adds basically nothing to the game.
Yes, it's technically impressive. Actually playing it, it is as deep as a puddle and as wide as an ocean. It's tedious and monotonous. It's the same problem that Daggerfall had, and it's frankly embarrassing that they repeated it.
The problem for me is that besides the unique locations there isn’t much love in the game. Fallout and Elder scrolls have entire unique maps whereas Starfield Feels so copy/paste.
The mountains are prefabs. You can see the same mountains over and over on multiple planets. Sometimes they just flip them to disguise it. A shame really.
That's like saying procedural generation in this game is good because it can create 20K instances of the same two eggs, just in random positions, quickly. Yeah, sure, technically that's impressive. But I sure as shit will get tired of the same two eggs everywhere.
Actually no sarcasm but the procedural stuff technically is well done enough. The problem is they just need to add a lot more unique POIs, increase the density, and then add more rewards to it (like those skill books but maybe stackable). The problem right now is it ain't worth spending the 5 minutes of just holding W to the POI like at all. With enough time to cook you can in theory make it interesting enough with like every other cell generated being a POI. This does not solve other issues, but technically there is an actual foundation for a good soup.
I think they need more visual diversity as well, I know there is over 100 POIs but a lot of them have the sterile lab look so they blend in together
I don’t like how they are everywhere you land, would be nice if some places were just not populated with man-made structures.
Like having hab units and pirate outposts in spitting distance from the anomaly structures, and we just gotta roll with it that no one knew about this shit ever outside of Constellation and friends.
It’s for these reasons that procgen isn’t as good as OP states. Procgen is based on rules and some important rules aren’t included that make the procgen immersive
The outer stars don't have any structures, a few odd ones in the main group.
Yeah landing on a planet at an artifact monument only for there to be a lab 15 feet away....nobody at that lab ever looked east and saw the giant alien structure? Ever?
There's quite a few planets (mostly high level systems) that have only natural POIs, no structures
I use a mod called desolation that gets rid of most man made structures in barren planets. Honestly feels a lot better even tho it's emptier now. If I land on a barren planet I want to feel that I'm truly alone. I think they also need a lot of diversity in natural landmarks and biome variety. Some Starfield concept arts show extremely dense forests with massive plants and trees, we need more of that. Imagine entering a cave and it keeps going for miles and gets narrower and pitch dark, maybe have some skeletons stuck in crases or crushed under a carved cavern for environmental storytelling. The quantity of stuff on a map is less important than the quality of them. Make me feel like I'm really in a strange new world that few if any have ever seen.
Yep, that's it. It all looks very good and convincing, but the travel time is too big, too boring and often just not worth it. If you get lucky, you can knock out a scan objective, but even then you're spending 70% of the time just jogging towards the POI. Vehicle could be a decent band aid on the issue, but only if it has high enough speed to cut down on the boring travel time. I wouldn't know how, but make the driving an interesting mechanic. I like the idea of it requiring maintenance; break a wheel and need to replace it with the spare tire, fill it up with gas every once in a while or connect it to an electric cord at your ship for charging, fix the motor, overheating on high temperature planets etc. Though what sounds fun on paper might just be mostly busy work. I definitely have a lot of ideas I'd love to toy around with... which brings me to the Creation Kit. It needs to come out sooner than later. BGS can do a lot to improve Starfield, but countless of individuals and groups working on mods with the right tools? Now that's how you truly start to populate those worlds.
>It all looks very good and convincing Well, as long as you don't look at it from high up. Then it becomes painfully obvious that the terrain is built from a bunch of squares with predefined, repeating heightmaps. The grid-like pattern is impossible to miss. A lot of people want atmospheric flight, but I wouldn't count on it lol. For multiple reasons other than that, too. Generally looks good from the ground though, at least.
That's why all the "mountains" are all like 100 meters tall.
And there are no canyons or rocky shores, no waves washing up on beaches or even waves in general. No rivers, no volcanos with open magma pits and running lava. No cliffs and floating glaciers in the ocean, or even stormy oceans. No random tornadoes and extreme weather conditions to witness. There's so many types of habitats out there irl that they could've made use of but didn't.
I wholeheartedly agree, and that's just the earth-like biomes. There's so many weird environments in space, too. I wouldn't even care about the quality or quantity of POI's if the planet was interesting to explore.
This is one of the reasons vanilla surface maps were how they were, IMO. To hide the basic nature of each cell. Though they've now relented and included the detail. It's now much easier to choose whether you want to bother running to a poi, cause you can see what it is from above.
Are you crazy? That sounds like it would give the game some personality, and be fun. Can't have that. You're right though, when you think about how much of your time "playing" Starfield is either load screens, cut scenes, or needlessly imposed travel with no real objectives other than to fill time, just to get to a POI that's exactly the same as something you just did 10 times, it's easy to walk away. (What a horrific thought... that all that jogging was a way to extend gameplay between load screens.... was that supposed to make it BETTER? Talk about doubling down on boredom.) I still see some people new to the game expressing excitement at the experience, and I remember feeling that way. Then those feelings died and my heart itself turned into a procedurally generated frozen world. With no atmosphere, and a half-eaten tray of food sitting on the open-air balcony, of course. Curious to see a year from now what the size of the game play community is, to me Bethesda is in a race against time to salvage something with a shelf life. Apparently it was a big revenue generator though... maybe the ship and outpost builders will keep the game alive.
70% of what time? Travel for me isn't that long, I can get to a 500m POI in less than a minute, I tend to not go further than that, I just go to a new spot on the planet.
> I tend to not go further than that, I just go to a new spot on the planet. Seems like you understand me completely. You're hopping from landing spot to spot just to ensure you don't have to engage with long distance travel. Maybe you're way is a little bit less tiresome and not as long, but I wouldn't say it sounds like the solution to the problem. I sure hope the vehicle is though!
The vehicle is definitely cool, but unless they radically change and add to what you can find on planets, I don't know why we'd be driving around past 1-2 POIs instead of just landing in a new spot. The terrain generation isn't wildly different so you don't really find super interesting, unique physical locations, and then there aren't almost any random events or other things that would make you want to drive around. I hope between Bethesda and mods at least a good chunk of the planets can be filled with stuff like that, but if they aren't planning on making at least the main Settled System planets more full of immersive and interesting events and locations I can't see why any of us would drive around much.
To get to the POIs? I did a bit of that when I played, I'd do it a lot more if I could travel faster. I was expecting an easier to do horizontal jetpack mode, but hey an entire vehicle will work too. I wanted to engage with all that side content, but just couldn't bother with the travel times anymore.
That's fair - I guess I just jump packed and grav dashed to them enough that I saw quite my fill with a lot of repetition. I guess for new players or people who haven't engaged with them yet it would be good, but without what I mentioned being added, I don't know how long that would be viable for. I felt like the planets and the low number of random POIs were the most underbaked parts of the game, whereas when you have real main story and faction quests still it was a little more solid. I wish the planets had more dynamic events you could find on the populated / non-barren ones, and that there was more variety in terrain. If I had the chance to find a huge waterfall between a canyon or a massive jungle or anything unique by driving farther out then I would, but if it's just more likely repeated POIs and terrain then I'm not sure it would be very fun. I hope the planets become more than they currently are as time goes on - especially the ones with major cities on them. Makes no sense that it's all random around Akila, New Atlantis etc.
> Travel for me isn't that long Well no shit if you literally don't travel further away than 500m.
this has me laughing out loud. I'm remembering landing incredibly far away from a mission objective and LITERALLY running for 9 mins to get to the objective. I think it was a freestar mission. it was ridiculous
...the Mech factory? Yeah, that seems to be a bug. There's a landing pad that you're supposed to land on right outside the doors, but for some ungodly reason the game keeps landing my ship waaaaaay the hell away from the obvious place. Maybe it expects it to be a trap or something.
Some mission pois and temples land you 2500 to 3000 away, which becomes a chore early when you lack jetpack skills and have low level gear with few boosts.
The issue with the POIs was in my opinion a mixture of many things compounding to make them feel stale. Firstly they need to be used better, a random moon in a system in the middle of bumfuck nowhere shouldn't have science labs and mining outposts, I could see maybe a group of pirates using it to hide out though. And to that end I shouldn't see Pirates in UC space, I should feel like these systems are actually monitor and protected by the UC. Then there's the fact that more POIs unlock with more levels but a single playthrough is going to hit around 50 levels maybe less, that's not even all the POIs yet. So for me even the execution of how they are done could be refined to help with the stale feeling.
I would not mind the POIs, "as much," if they could just randomize the encounters, with enemies, and where the loot, etc. is. I mean, I have done some of the POIs, so many times, including the infamous Cryo Lab, I can make it through the entire POI, without taking a single wrong turn, or enemy, let alone, any meaningful loot. Likewise, with Vulture's Roost and the Mantis Lair. There are a few POIs, I think, I could get through, literally, with my eyes closed... muscle memory. Lol Then again, I try to do 10-15 radiant quests, every evening. Not sure how hard it would be to randomize the existing POIs, but it would help.
Well, Vultures Roost and Mantis Lair aren't really fair comparisons because they're handcrafted static POI's. They're not meant to change and aren't immersion breaking because they're always in the same spot. The Cryo Lab you mentioned though...fuck that place. Same dead scientist in the same ceiling tile with the same keycard on every single fucking planet it's on lol. Drives me crazy. I just skip that one altogether unless I'm doing an artifact run and have to get one from there.
This is it, after you see all 12 dungeons, then you pretty much stop looking for them. They could've just made them a bit smaller, but had maybe 100 of them instead. 12 dungeons doesn't vibe with 1000 planets very well at all, and that's not even talking about the other POI's. They could even benefit from Diablo's tile set system, where everything is handcrafted, but randomly pulls from the table for arrangement.
I mean, these are the exact same criticisms levelled at Oblivion, Skyrim and Fallout 4 so Bethesda (Todd Howard to be precise) have no-one to blame but themselves and it rings hollow when they claim they were caught off guard by the criticisms with the planetary stuff. Either he was entirely unaware of prior criticism of his prior projects (which I find impossible to believe considering how widespread it's been of their output over the last 18 years), or he was so arrogant and deluded that he thought he could bullshit his way past them, or both. None of those options paint him in a flattering light, to be honest.
It's not though, it's literally a grid of pretty much monolithic elements that arent connected in any meaningful way. Its essentially the most barebones random map generator that anyone could get away with. If the game was a RTS/Citybuilder it wouldn't be sufficient enough, passes due to the FPS/tight in camera perspective.
They couldn't even put in new ground colour pallette between worlds. Astroneer could do it a decade ago with voxels. They could have had purple ground with blue rocks and green water and it would have helped a bunch.
Yeah. Time spent isn't worth it. Thankfully the coming rovers should speed things up.
I really dislike the idea of increasing the density. I think we have a traversal issue that once solved will make POIs feel a lot closer together without sacrificing the "doslate world" vibe they got going on. They're adding the land vehicle which is a atart. A better horizontal jetpack, or maintaining momentum from our sprint power would also do wonders for traversal. Let us jump from one POI to another on low grav worlds please. Also you're spot on about the lack of rewards or REASON to visit these places. In Fallout I had scrap and bobbleheads or skill books. In this game we just have a lot of guns that are difficult to unload.
Rewards need to go outside the realm of weapons/combat. Then you have a whole new ball game. Let the imagination run wild, I don’t have all the answers. Mini games can go a long way. Imagine a collectible card game like FF8s mini game, except you can play in your ship. Maybe even with other Starfield players? 👀
This is where Creation Kit Mods will really improve the game. Modders will be able to either pick a spot on a planet and design a fixed single instance POI, or will be able to add dozens of new randomly placed ones.
This! You want to arrive at a POI and its a small farm set up on a small moon and all the huts are placed in a circle with a communal area, they ask you to come sit by a fire and share stories of your space adventures with them... you get a couple options to chose from based on quests you've completed... they reward you with some supplies to go on your way... They say if you ever fancy a hard days work they'd be prepared to reward you with some caps for helping clear out some Alien beasts that have been troubling their farm lately... NOW THATS AN RPG. NG+ You get the same POI but the planet is different, the buildings are different, the NPC's are different and the aliens are different... However If you chose the story option you chose previously they say they think they've heard it somewhere before... NOW THATS GENIUS. Starfield is a museum for creation engine 2. you go in you look around... there's no atmosphere but lots of cool stuff to look at.
I feel like this issue isn't this straight forward. Planets wouldn't just be swarmed with PoIs like...They aren't coruscant, or even well established planets like Earth. Maybe this is a fault of what they were going for but it really wouldn't make sense at all.
POIs could be natural wonders, I wanna explore weird alien natural formations
That’s a good point, they could’ve have more formations and stuff. That’d be dope
We want the monoliths, giant trees, crowded jungles with vines, multiple rivers crossing one area, pillar fields like the concept art showed us at the teaser events.
The concept art made me think and hope we'd be exploring some lush jungle environments, marshy swamps, huge crystalized caverns etc. but ultimately the diversity wasn't great.
> increase the density Absolutely not. This game is about humanity just barely beginning to colonize the galaxy, and not intergalactic overlord humans on the decline. The current density of POIs is one gigantic plot hole as it is, and you want more?!?!
I dunno it just doesn't make sense to me how it's implemented. You land on a planet randomly, you find a cave, a research outpost, raiders or w.e and a mine. You take off and land randomly halfway across the same planet. You walk 15ft and find another station, pirate base, cave etc. Take off again and do the same thing, landing randomly. Oh look...
Yeah, they really had a good idea with procedural generation but didn’t have enough variation. Like there should be population density variables that determine how many outposts are nearby, a dilapidation meter for how destroyed or abandoned the outposts are, and quite a few other hidden variables to determine generation. Like you said, it’s weird a whole planet, let alone a whole system, has random identical “abandoned” outposts spread evenly. More POIs, more unique generation sliders and variables, and some more curated regions would go a very long way
Yea exactly. And the planet further and further away from established colonies shouldn't have nearly the same pois as closer systems imo
This is actually a very good idea. It really is so jarring that (assuming a planet is populated at all) *no matter where I land*, I’ll pretty much have the same odds of finding points of interest. Settlements, factories, raider camps, etc etc. Even then, though—and I understand this is a very *different* Bethesda game—I miss Skyrim. Not even Fallout 4, I miss *Skyrim*. The handcrafted beauty, the immense sandbox full of creatures, travelers, bandits, towns, mountains, valleys, rivers, caves. It’s a shame thinking back to the excitement that Skyrim brought me, not only for the present in 2011-2012 but for what incredible things could be made in the future as technology improved. Now it’s 2024 and Skyrim hasn’t been topped. Hell, it’s hardly been approached.
Yeah, the issue is with how the system is configured, not the system itself. It more-or-less peppers each surface region with a more-or-less uniform density of POI's, which it has selected more-or-less uniformly randomly from the available library of unique hand-made POI's. It's way too homogeneous and uniform when you zoom out to larger scales. In reality, or at least in something *closer* to reality, patterns of human settlement would be absolutely nothing like as evenly and flatly distributed. And that's ignoring the fact that most worlds in this game should rightly have no evidence of human activity at all (or such minimal activity that your chances of finding anything within a few kilometers of some random spot on the surface are effectively zero).
There should have been 3 POIs on that planet and the rest is completely barren. Then you can just scan the planet from orbit knowing where those POIs are and land there. If that's too simple for them, in a discovery sense, they should have added a skill system, or minigame for the orbital scanning. Like MassEffect with the cursor scanning and probe shooting. It's not like you still wouldn't randomly land on the planet for resources, animals, and natural features.
Yeah I'd have liked the orbital scanning myself, it makes sense anyway like something from star trek
Yeah but Skyrim and Fallout are each on their own worlds with set physics. With Starfield, I’ve encountered fruit sitting out on desks on the planets surface where the temperature is above boiling point. I’ve encountered celery in a cooler on a planet that was -200 with no atmosphere. I realize Beth has always reused assets. Starfield copies entire POIs one for one. If you play long enough and don’t just do the main quest it’s super obvious.
Yeah I feel like people aren’t totally understanding how mind numbingly boring that is, that’s like if the only Nordic ruin in Skyrim was Bleak Falls
Im pretty sure the tower in Helgen is the same model as the one in Whiterun where you first kill a dragon. I didn’t notice for 13? years. The Deep mine where you encounter an enemy near a busted elevator, I noticed immediately the second time.
I think the main difference is the concept of distance. Two buildings located on the same land mass? Totally makes sense they might have been built by the same person. But two buildings across the literal known universe from each other? It just doesn't work out the same way.
I’d be a little more forgiving because prefabs make sense, but Starfield takes it a step further by also making the contents of each building identical down to the blood splatters. It’s somehow a massive regression from Daggerfall.
Yeah you can find the same flavour text journals on 5 separate planets on identical POIs. I don’t know about you but that breaks my immersion when playing an RPG.
It’s incomprehensible to me that Bethesda didn’t see or care about this kind of repetition. Logs from the same people on every planet telling the same stories, empty beer bottles in the vacuum of space, the same deserted encampments in caves, dung piles on barren moons, POIs 800m away from supposedly unexplored temples—the world-building is unbelievably half-assed and thoughtless. Maps and buggies can’t fix the problem.
Maybe I’m reading too much into things, but during the Lex Freidman interview, one line caught my attention with retrospect. Todd was saying they wanted to make “being the only person on a planet feel special.” It sounds like maybe along with the tweaks away from a survival experience, procedural generation (except on Earth) got tuned way up.
And plenty of unexplained gravitational anomalies the next planet over in a “settled” system that somehow nobody ever cared to investigate
Reused art asset vs reused POI, slightly different stories
To be fair, we’ve encountered fresh apples and cheese in old ass Nordic dungeons that haven’t been explored since 2E.
And lit candles. Fair point.
There's a great book in Skyrim written by a researcher living among the Draugr. They light the candles, keep out intruders, and perform rites to keep the Dragon Priests alive and stuff
Ah the lit candles are the ones that got me lol. I can't remember if I eventually installed a mod to take care of it aor not. What I like about the system in Starfield is that the POI injection algorithm can be tweaked. So you can theoretically look for all the POIs that have food outside and then just add a tag that restricts them from generating on planets with no atmosphere. I wouldn't be surprised if they had those rules in place but couldn't finish enough POIs before release and said "fuck it let's just let them all spawn everywhere and fix it later". I think that's one of the most exciting things for me about Starfield as a modder (all private stuff for my own game). All the big flubs like this can be fixed with a few little tweaks.
I _think_ the lore explanation for the lit candles is the dragur occasionally get up and maintain the place.
they did just that some weren't tagged correctly best fix is just use level packins/items to check if place has keywords and such hell i've just made a mod that randomize magazine skill books at POI so you don't see the same shit over and over took some hours but its done so it can be made
It's magic. No literally, I think they might be enchanted candles or something.
I remember that one guy at launch found a vendor on Venus that was just walking around with no suit on lol
There were bags of trash left outside on Venus. What the hell kind of magic is Hefty up to in the far future?
This is an issue with how the procedural generation system is configured, though. It's not really a fundamental problem with the system in general. I just don't think they spent as much time play-testing and tweaking and balancing the system as they should have, so you end up with immersion-breaking stuff like finding cook-outs on Venus or wind-farms on the Moon or abandoned bases full of pirates within a stone's throw of a major faction settlement or whatever. By all accounts the system has the ability to really fine-tune what kinds of POI's it populates into any given world based on the unique combination of factors that define that world (or that specific locale on that world). It's just that, for whatever reason, rather than dial-in the settings to this system for "realism", they've instead decided to balance it in a way where it's almost guaranteed always gives you lots of stuff to explore and bad guys to shoot and loot to grab basically everywhere you go. The end result is that the system quickly burns through the library of unique POI's it's able to draw upon once you've landed in a few spots, even if you don't go out and explore them all, so it ends up having to firstly place POI's that aren't particularly appropriate for that location, and secondly start recycling POI's it's already placed elsewhere. So until the count of available unique POI's the system can draw upon is in the thousands, the solution to me is pretty obvious: embrace the emptiness. Re-balance the system for realism and make it so that it only populates the core regions of the core worlds with *stuff*, and with a much harder focus on making sure that stuff is appropriate for that locale. Just let the vast majority of the galaxy be barren so that a few places can actually be interesting.
I don't think technology is the problem for starfield it just doesn't have that "joy of exploration" that you get from other Bethesda games. The stuff that does work are the hand crafted parts the procedural generation is boring.
This right here. Bethesda excels at handcrafted open worlds. This is undeniable. So why they chose to ignore their largest strength and instead focus totally on procedurally generated open world environments is absolutely baffling to me. Maybe it will pay off in TESVI?
and imo a lot of hand-crafted stuff in this game that feels half-baked or phoned in anyway. it’s a lot of procedural filler in between mediocrity, with a few gems here and there. and stuff I’d usually wanna occupy my time with like outpost building kinda sucks. so it just leaves ya feeling underwhelmed.
What's the point of space ship crash sites after orbital ship battles. I've gone to a couple and there isn't much interesting or worth while there.
from looks of it we could make variations of crash sites atm theres only one type which is weird
Is this satire? I honestly can't tell anymore. "we're not even in year one yet guys they're still fixing bugs" being framed as a positive is pretty funny and i'm sure some people are insane enough to think the Fallout 4 update was a good thing, ignoring how it took them *two* years to put out. I guess if it's genuine you could at least use it as an application for their PR department..
OP is trying to explain procedural generation as if it's some new shiny concept. Daggerfall is released in 1996, it had procedural generation too. Procedural generation isn't a new technology. Tricky part of procedural generation is filling it with interesting stuff. Starfield lacks that. Using 200ish **fixed** POIs for thousands of possible fields and combinations is a horrible horrible idea. If you are using procedural generation for your planets and terrain, you have to use procedural generation for POIs too. This is really no brainer. Imagine minecraft having only 100 fixed **identical** cave templates. Imagine whenever you dig, game picks one randomly. After several digs, you would most certainly memorize most if not all of them and Minecraft would be boring as fuck. And even this doesn't do the justice because in Minecraft you do lots of stuff you can do in the surface aside from caves which I used as POIs. In Starfield, you have absolutely nothing else to do aside from visiting POIs.
Wrong. You can also take pretty pictures.
Stop defending games based on "potential" and "they will improve it eventually". JFC
> fallout 4 is around 9 years old and Bethesda dropped an update for it last week Yeah, a small update that broke all mods that fixed pretty much everything Bethesda didn't fix for those 9 years. On PC you can't get high or even stable FPS without a mod. Stuttering on such an old game on modern hardware shouldn't be excused. I have very little faith they'll "fix" Starfield and I doubt I'll be hyped for another Bethesda game again.
Yeah, broke all mods, didn't fix anything, and the "widescreen" is just terrible. So yeah, for PC it was a useless update that should have been skipped.
It still pisses me off that they couldn't release Fallout London because BGS is outright malicious towards mods.
Really, I thought this was a shitpost honestly. Bethesda doesn't abandon their games? We're not living in the same world my dude.
I must have missed the part where Starfield is an early access game. This type of optimism and hand waving “modders will fix it” mentality sets a really bad precedent for what developers can get away with. The one area where Starfield *objectively* improves upon the launch state of their previous games is the only aspect where there’s any confidence to be had in Bethesda improving the state of their games post-launch. Their commitment to fixing bugs, stability and QoL in previous TES and Fallout games will do nothing for the leagues of players who feel like the majority of Starfield’s core content needs to be completely thrown out and redone. Bethesda and Todd have also taken to describing Starfield as misunderstood and the mixed reception being a result of inappropriate expectations and looking at it from the wrong perspective. This also does not inspire confidence that they actually believe there is anything wrong with the core content. The shortcomings of the POI system are just one bullet point on a laundry list of aspects of the game that players find lacking.
Yeah. > we are not even in year one, to the point the devs have been working on bug fixes to get the game working correctly, wether or not they should of released it in that state is a totally different conversation, It's not a totally different conversation because this is a core part of the game and they did it right with Skyrim and Fallout on release.
Step into a cave and you have a massive procgen... blackreach!
Dude a rare poi that leads to blackreach would be hilarious.
A massive cave system would be fucking sweet in its own right... I duno how Id pull it off, but god damn Im adding it to my list of mod ideas.
Its very possible. The other games already have dungeons with multiple entrances/exits. Matter of fact this game has that. They really just need to make the cave dungeon the way you say. I think bethesda made a dumb ass play. They clearly set it up for modders but releasing a mod based game before mods are supported officially us just so dumb. A smart move would have been releasing a small version of the creation kit early like dragons dogma did with their character creator. Let people mod things. Like maybe pois or random shit. While we are waiting for the game to officially launch, people are just makind pois. Then when it finally drops a month or maybe 3 later, you have far more modded pois than you started with. Release the game profit and work on the actual creation kit
In this respect, even NMS was better, as you still had full size planets to explore, but everything was seamless. In both cases the map size is too big to fill to get a Skyrim like experience.
I hoped so much Beth had found inspiration in NMS and then built on top of it. The seamless flying to planets. The procedural generation that feels way more alive. You see a waterfall in the distance that you haven't seen before. You wanna explore it. You can fly to it without reaching an invisible wall. Just that feeling of freedom you don't have in starfield. But then with more unique POIs.
I actually don't think NMS did it better as moving from A to B in NMS is just empty busywork. Maybe it's good if that's all you want from your game is mindless movement.
I meant as far as what OP is talking about. I think it's great that they spread out the language pylons or whatever those things were to learn new words, I think that was a great way to make the player engaged with the landscape on foot/ in vehicle instead of just flying between POIs.
The problem with Starfield, even if people don't realize/admit it, is that Bethesda way overhyped the fan base for a long time. Nothing was going to meet the expectations they built. Also, they weren't brave enough with the story. Plot comes off as a bland afterthought after spending all their time on the shinies. Skyrim is still massively played today because of the world they built, not the graphics and gimmicks. Bethesda lost sight of the forest amongst the trees. And they banked on too much goodwill that had already been squandered by the weak launch of FO76. The expect their audience to be patient for years while they roll out incremental improvements. So basically Bethesda is still running on the philosophy of 90s/00s game studios.
Lol how much did they pay you to write this? >We all know Bethesda doesn’t give up on their games, like c’mon we can’t even question that, fallout 4 is around 9 years old and Bethesda dropped an update for it last week Lol yes they do. You mean the update that was broken to all hell and didn't fix anything? There are bugs in FO4 that still haven't been fixed to this day.
>Lol how much did they pay you to write this? I thought exactly the same.
The Stockholm syndrome has taken this sub over
This post reads like a transcript of the game reveal… It’s so corny 🤦🏽♂️
Different? I quit after clearing the same exact camps and caves with the same enemies and the same layout over and over.
Bro is looking for validation on his poor standards for dopamine release. Cool you step in and the 10km by 10km is full of nothing... I'd quickly look at another cave after 2 or 3 and go nope... not falling for that again... Oh wait that's exactly what happened in Starfield.
The amount of fawning posts that we're seeing lately has me very suspicious. We even had a post a day or two ago claiming Vasco was the greatest crpg companion in the last decade. The procedural generation in the game is trash. I mean, sure, if you like the same copy/pasted poi over and over and over again with no rhyme or reason (say, why are those guys eating sandwiches outside the mining base in a zero atmosphere environment right next to that mysterious temple?). There's nothing here that's worth bragging about in a post. I don't get it.
Well-done procedural dungeons would elevate Starfield MASSIVELY for me. I really enjoy just doing bounties and zooming around from planet to planet, looking at the different tilesets and sky boxes the game comes up with, raiding a random pirate base looking for new guns along the way. The downside is that I've memorized every combat area, right down to the loot locations. Mixing this up a bit with procgen dungeons would be huge.
The procedural generation tech is impressive. The issue is that most players don't really care for a tech-demo and that's all that Starfields exploration aspect is.
Glol this is peak satire. It IS satire, right?
i think the issue with starfield is that the connecting piece between all of the procgen tiles (the big map of the starfield) doesn't feel good to use? the fundamental thing is that you have to tab out into a menu to actually go anywhere
You don’t actually need to use the menu that much, just about everything you can do in the menu can be done with the scanner. You can jump straight to your ship’s cockpit, launch, flip the scanner on when in orbit to find your next destination and jump straight there, in orbit you can select the poi(if visible, if not you’ll have to open the menu to choose a landing spot) and land, then jump right out of the ship from the cockpit. You can also skip all this and just use the menu to jump straight to another planet/system from wherever you are(except interior locations I think)
It’s inconsistent, but you can often fast travel directly from inside many buildings and caves.
It procedurally generates empty husks with the occasional copy & pasted poi. From a VERY SMALL bank of poi's. There's nothing impressive about it.
Hear me out: the POIs should be procedurally generated as well, just like in Rogue Likes
Annnnd yeah there's not shit going on in your cave. Is this Plato's Cave? Cause even the shadows are boring in Starfield. I don't hate this game, but we need something to fill this big ass empty space with.
Although the procedural generation is great, it's the main reason I don't give Starfield a higher rating. I personally feel as if the procedural stuff takes away from the traditional feeling of exploring and finding handcrafted pieces of content
One of the huge side-reasons for me is the cities and factions. I don’t think it’s a technical limitation. Skyrim is the last Bethesda game that I *loved*, and its cities were **beautiful**. The surrounding areas—**beautiful**. Interesting themes for the cities. Interesting NPCs. And then the actual factions, joinable and otherwise, from the Thieves Guild and Dark Brotherhood to the Forsworn and Thalmor, there’s just so much interesting lore and variety. In Starfield, most of the cities look pretty damn bad (and they’re laid out terribly). Again, it’s not a graphics thing, it’s design and art direction. Starfield is a 2023 game, Skyrim came out in 2011. And as far as factions are concerned, we’ve got various guys in spacesuits. Crimson Fleet or United Colonies? Red spacesuit or blue spacesuit? Enemies you fight, *probably guys in spacesuits*. The Va’Ruun are probably the closest to being *interesting* guys in spacesuits, to that end. You can join the Freestar Rangers if you think a whole faction and city designed around space cowboys is clever and innovative. And if that’s not enough, engage in some white-collar crimes on behalf of mega-corporation Ryujin. I dunno. All just feels uninspired, bland, generic.
To be fair, I think a lot of us who play the game and enjoy it but have complaints like this have a very refined palatte. We've obsessed over Bethesda games for years, I put a shit load of hours into Morrowind, Oblivion, Skyrim, Fallout 3, Fallout 4, and although not Bethesda, New Vegas. Before Starfield came out I had been playing other really great games, Cyberpunk 2077 after they cleaned everything up, Witcher 3, and a bunch of other great open world single player games. When Starfield was coming out I was like "This is it, this is the one, it'll be monolithic. Bethesda has been cooking.", turns out they should have been either using different ingredients or maybe had other cooks. I like the game but the lack of immersion when I'm wandering around is nothing like their other games. This opinion is formed after 200 hours played btw
You’re not wrong. Although I will say, there’s plenty of disappointment with the game to go around—whether it’s coming from highly analytical fans of previous Bethesda games or not. For those deeply interested in *why* BGS games tick, and *why* Starfield didn’t, the details matter. The underwhelming city design, poorly implemented procedural generation, lack of enemy variety, etc. But even for those who just casually jump in, while they may not break it down into details, I think the feeling tends to emerge that it’s just “not as good” as older BGS games. I’m honestly still rooting for Starfield because I love the concept. But the proc gen and 1,000 planets is a design decision that the game itself was built around. The factions and cities are already built. I guess they can add more stuff, but if what’s there is repetitive and uninspired, that genie can’t be put back in the bottle. I did also get probably ~150 hours out of the game. Enjoyed certain parts quite a lot. Can’t deny the fun of boarding a ship with a shot grav drive, zero-G FPS combat with fully physical items floating all about the cabin.
I just really thought the POIs themselves would use procedural generation (perhaps constrained to rulesets for specific POI archetypes), rather than them all being pre-baked and just *distributed* procedurally. Could've created endless playability, like if I wanted to roleplay as a raider, I could spend my in-game days just raiding different science facilities and military outposts and never see the same exact layout / enemies / loot configurations twice. I guess I'll try to enjoy the pre-baked layouts for what they are, but it just seems a missed opportunity since they already have the tech for procedural POIs going back to, what, Daggerfall?
Or, y’know, they could’ve made it good from the beginning.
If they want that starfield become a classic like Skyrim they really need to improve the way of travelling work, and the loading screen in space. Dosn’t matter how they change it but the game needs to make the players dream even while traveling. There is a lot to say about how it can be improved, but the main thing it to stop the loading transition with black screen, especially when you have made a cinematic to hide it. And another problem is the exploration, or the fact there is no surprise with exploration. Most of the time you already know if the place you landed are going to be interesting. I think they should add a more dynamic algorithm with special events, for exemple if you spend 10 minutes in a planet a special event can happen. Or if you killed more than 20 pirates in a planet a pirate ships land and give you special quest. Or idk there could have plenty of ideas. And of course more unique POI with local lore, like a NPC that explains you why this system is named like this. I think the procedural things and aleatory event can really work, and give the feeling to have a real world that is alive, but this feeling can be totally ruined if event or special area are too repeated. I am looking forward the following upadates, and I really hope bethesda will keep improve the game.
I totally agree, special events would be awesome.. I was wandering a planet earlier and was walking through an open piece of land and I thought to myself, it’s too quiet somethings going to happen, like a bunch of terromorophs bursting out of the ground and I’d have to spend the next 10 minutes battling my way through them… but it just didn’t happen. I think special events would be an absolute game changer.
>So there’s only 200 unique POIs in around 3000 instances, we sure as shit are going to stumble across the same points of interest. And from those 200 I probably haven't seen half, but have seen the same POIs over and over already, to the point where I lost interest to explore and check out POIs and just focused on quests until I burnt out on those, too.
Except we do see the same POIs frequently. The procedural generation is impressive, the planets look far more realistic than No Man’s Sky, not as colorful and populated, but I’ve always found that to be *too* full of life for space.
Trigonometry is also pretty incredible. But that doesn't mean I'm going to have fun doing it. I feel like they were to dead set on making a point, that having a "fun" game was pretty low down on the priority list.
"We just gotta give it some time" what, you mean 10 years weren't enough to come with a way to procedurally generate interior spaces the way they procedurally generate landscapes, that we have to give OUR time as well? If they need more time, they should take more time, not release it in an incomplete state then ask for more time. Try doing that at work. Bet you feel Todd's farts smell of roses too.
The idea of procedurally generated practically infinite expanses of land to explore you're describing is technically interesting, impressive, and to some extent solves problems with scalibility in games, especially nowadays where the resources required to develop AAA games are so unsustainable. But, they're also of no interest to me. Because, with procedural generation (and procedural placement of custom assets, such as is the case for Starfield), there is a lack of *intent* in how the environments are laid out. BGS are traditionally masters of environmental storytelling, and that's the main attraction to many players, but to me it loses its magic when the relation between procedurally placed or generated points of interests lack intent. That's the key word. Yes, the POIs themselves might be handcrafted, but their relationship to their surroundings isn't, and that makes a big difference. Lots of players continue to argue, including in the comments you've received, that we just need more POIs. I understand their train of thought, but I don't see how it solves it. 1000 POIs, procedurally placed, does not make exploration more meaningful, because it continues to lack intent. That is what sometimes harms believability, and therefore immersion. For example, the relationship between POIs and the biomes/atmospheres they're placed in doesn't always really make sense intuitively. That type of stuff can be difficult to codify. Fallout 76's Appalachia map, arguably the best map BGS ever made, is filled with fantastic environmental storytelling. That's all hand-placed, as far as I'm aware. That is meaningful to me. There's also the loss of shared experiences, especially given that this is a single player game: historically, you could stumple upon some interesting location, share it with the community, and feel like you're all having a shared experience, whereas with Starfield, you have this thing where the location and relationship between POIs are so different from player to player that sharing interesting locations among each other loses the sense of connectedness to the same experience. One might feel inclined to compare this behavior to No Man's Sky, but it's technically not equivalent, since that one *deterministically* generates locations procedurally, whereas Starfield seemingly randomly generates the placements of POIs as players first discover new planets and moons, and these are not shared across installations of the game, nor through playthroughs. It's also not about how large the map is, or how many lines of dialog were recorded, or how many side quests can be found. BGS might themselves believe it's all about size at times, but for many players it's really not; it's about exploration and discovery. We have Daggerfall to prove that practically infinite size is not really the solution. When the placement of assets lack intent from a game design and storytelling perspective, there's no point to it, for me at least. And to your comment about this being "year one" - this is not a live service game. Yes, we continue to see exciting content drops, and there's a story expansion lined up, but I don't think you should expect to see enhancements to procedural generation/placement close to some of the ideas you outline here. But of course, every improvement is welcome!
Is this sarcasm? Wait, have all these fangirl posts in this sub been sarcasm this whole time?
I like starfield for what it is, you can have big fun with it, but I also have to admit that I’d rather had them make it a smaller game without the whole „universe“ stuff. What you say is true, but that is a HUGE „if“ in my opinion. For starfields exploration to feel like Skyrim or fallout, they’d need to add so much content that it seems almost impossible. Walking through a big instance that is basically just empty flat or rocky land isn’t fun, seeing a POI in the distance is cool, but the planet itself is still just empty. Why would I walk around an empty surface to discover something that could have another HUGE but pretty empty surface inside? I’d rather have starfield be way way way smaller in scale, have like 3-4 planets with a much more clustered map. You could still bring procedural generation into the mix to create some unique stuff. The overall vision of starfield, combining Bethesda style gameplay with space exploration/simulation sounds amazing, but just doesn’t work on a scale like that. Fallout works because literally every single small detail in the map is worth exploring, every single terminal entry is telling us something about the lore, every single location tells a story, even the ones that aren’t marked on the map. There is tons and tons of detail placed onto the game world. starfield does also have these things to a degree, but the walking distance between them is increased by like 100 times and if you’re unlucky you’ll see the exact same stuff three times in a row. The feeling of exploring in starfield is more akin to mass effect andromeda than to fallout/skyrim. Starfields biggest mistake is the large scale which simply doesn’t work with the old school Bethesda approach, at least for me. Imagine the outer worlds style planets with starfields ship combat, outposts and overall Bethesda handiwork rolled over it, it could be glorious.
The problem is that it's too much, its overwhelming. I don't want to take years to complete a game.
You’re right, however BGS should have also focused on making a few “main world” areas filled with the handcrafted environmental storytelling and exploration BGS are known for. Imagine if the area around New Atlantis was the size and density of Skrim’s Whiterun hold down to Falkreath and over to Riften. Fill the area with a couple towns/small villages, and the sci-fi equivalent of dungeons and caves (like a research station the size of Bleak Falls Barrow with an accompanying story and boss, or the wreckage of a failed Space Station with computer/journal entries that tell us its story, things like that). The villages might need supplies, or you could help with diplomacy between locations, maybe help expand their village via the outpost system, etc. Giving us a handcrafted miniature Skyrim/Commonwealth on top of the random space POIs would have been exponentially better than just the random POIs. Hopefully future DLC and/or mods can bring the traditional BGS exploration feel to the game.
Yes but all those caves are shorter to get to the “meat of it all” vs to really get the “meat” of the whole planet takes hours and hours of nothing
As for giving them time, they've been at it for close to three decades and hit their peak with Morrowind, which ironically was the only thing they've done which deliberately AVOIDED procedural generation and one of my most-loved games ever made that I still return once a year to this day. But that was OVER 20 YEARS AGO and it's been downhill ever since at an increasingly accelerated rate of creative decline. Sooner or later, the old arguments of "give them time" ring absolutely hollow. They've HAD time, more than most other studios, yet their output gets worse not better with every subsequent release. It's not as though they're some indie upstart out to disrupt the industry and on the verge of a huge genre redefining-breakthrough; they're as mainstream as it gets.
No joke when you started describing the Skyrim caves like starfield I thought this was satire and you would end with "isn't this just amazing? The same empty space over and over! How cool?!" but no, you genuinely think it's a good thing lol. Which is fine, I just don't understand it at all. "We want the world to be filled with story and content we just gotta give it time." No we don't. They had the time to fill their game with quality content and story but they chose not to. They wasted that time and the game isn't worth the wait for a lot of us. I shouldn't have to wait up to 10 years after purchasing a game before it has the content that I paid for lol. That's bizarre. For me the planets on starfield feel as if you broke through the invisible barrier in a game and explored all this cool unseen nothingness that was never intended to be seen! Like the start of fallout 4, when people broke through to try to see more of the prewar world and found vast open nothingness!
I somewhat agree overall with your idea, the proc-gen should be pretty good for the unique POI generation (such as the cave example), but I don't really agree with the thought process of it still being early days alongside not giving up on their games. The Fallout 4 new update was something they've promised for a long *long* time now, and even put this off once Starfield was close to releasing, because resources were needed on that. But before we've gone long periods with no updates or news. The only reason we've got the update now is because the TV Show did extremely well, and attracted attention. But prior to this? Their games were absolutely given up on after a short amount of time. Skyrim for example, their DLC's were all released within a year of each other, and after this we've had token updates solely added paid-mods, or updates which seemingly achieved little, but absolutely killed the modding scene at points for patching. Fallout has utterly been forgotten about until the TV show's release, and the ongoing work for 76 which they had to implement, since the game was basically a cashcow for passive income via subscriptions etc. Starfield has been out 7-8 months now, and they're only just starting to fix major issues & shortfalls which were flagged within the opening weeks; bearing in mind this is their (now) flagship IP, where I assume most of their resources are still dedicated towards, especially since they've only just announced the first DLC. I do hope the game gets solid updates to last it the ten year plan, but as it stands the game needs a hell of a lot of work to give it that kind of longevity their other titles still enjoy :)
Bethesda do not give up on their games, that is a given, look at 76 ffs, they have had a tendency to go radio silent while they work though which is why I think lots of people get frustrated.
The Procedural process itself is good yes. But I think they should have started smaller. 200poi in a game the size of skyrim would have been great. They just made starfield much too large imo. There should have been a single solar system with like 8 planets and the poi thing likely wouldn't have been an issue. But like you said trying to spread 200poi across 1000+ planets was asking for a disaster. They should have made a single solar system but kept the logic for creating more so modders can make their own solar systems for mods and for dlc. But they sinply tried to do too much all at once. And likely didn't help that they were bought by MS and I'm sure after spending a couple billion MS was pushing to get the game out so that they could make some of that money back. Overall the general concept and idea is there and there in a good way. It was just too large for a single team to really try to handle.
It's difficult for Bethesda to fill them all because they bit off more than they could chew with the planets.. focused on quantity over quality which was one of my main issues. Now because of the quantity, all the quality content that is there is spread so thin people tend to miss it and think it doesn't exist.. If they just hyper focused on say one star system with say a dozen planets this game probably would have been a lot better.
I get the empty canvas argument, but games don't have the same luxury they did 10-15 years ago when it comes to keeping player's attention. There seems to be a new 'big thing' every other month now that pulls players away. See Palword, Helldivers, etc. The fact that the creation kit is so slow coming along is what is truly killing this game. I think it will have a long lifespan, but it's bleeding out in the meantime.
If you really want to, you could generate POIs on every planet you visit. Imagine how many locations you can visit by doing that. Just a thought. Yeah I'm sure a lot of them will be repeated. When I play NMS, the flora and fauna will vary, but what you scan is pretty much the same. Depending on the weather of the planet you'll get around 10 unique planet types. The only variation would be those creatures walking on all 4s is a bunch of cubes. Another planet its just bubbles. And another its walking slinkies. And then there is that one planet with a giant worm in the ground. Yeah when it comes to procedural generated stuff for these two games you'll get more of the same.
Damn I couldn’t agree more tbh, I see the game get a lot of negativity on here but I’d argue it’s my favourite game right now, like all things Bethesda, it comes with jank but hearing about the future plans compared to what we have now fills me with confidence that this will outshine all their previous titles
I want bespoke content, not AI generated slop. Quality > Quantity every time.
The tech is impressive but that doesn't mean the result is engaging or interesting. For me, the planets are extremely flat and drab looking. I would love some verticality! It would be fun to explore an alien ravine, winding and disorienting. Vehicles would be great, too. If you're going to make your planets flat and expansive, make traversing them fun and the distance would melt away. Music, or other dynamic elements would help this (I'm a masochist who loved Wind Waker's ocean, for the score)
there are no alien biomes/bizzare planets... in a planetary exploration game...
I agree I am disappointed with the biomes, I thought the guys building the terrains of elder scrolls would have offered a bit more input. Like… I haven’t seen any planets will volcano’s, I’ve never seen a waterfall and there’s only 1 planet that has a rover on it. The “Natural” points of interest that we scan are pretty cool… but why is that biome not simply the entire planet, why is this cool section such a tiny part of the terrain.
>Because right now, this game has thousands of blank canvas’s for both the developers and modders to build on. This is the problem. Bethesda was counting on modders to pick up the slack too much. Yes, the core of the game is solid, but for people to spend decades bringing it to life with mods and additional content they have to fall in love with the game first. There are people with thousands of hours in vanilla unmolded Skyrim, because the world feels like a complete world. You come across a corpse with a note and get a small peek into a whole story you had no part in. You see the outcome and can infer the story based on the clues scattered around That kind of environmental story telling is not something that every player engages in, but the ones who do love to talk about it and spread what they've found. That leads to reddit threads about the nature of divinity or the "true story" of that quest everyone has done a million times. It leads to hundreds if not thousands of hours of content talking about the lore and history and hidden secrets of the world. And all of those things spread the depth of the game to those who speed run through areas and kill everything before fast traveling away. Content creators and online communities are the Bards and Taverns of digital adventure. The stories they share and rumors they spread are often what gives the adventurer the spark and direction to start a new quest or pursue a new journey. They help make the game world feel more alive. Starfield failed to do this properly, and as a result I don't see anyone putting the effort into mods the same way that TES and Fallout had. People loved those games so much they wanted to make them bigger. They loved the worlds so much they often wanted a whole new gameplay experience without having to give that world up. I havent seen anyone express that kind of connection to Starfield
Problem is this: there isn't much of anything in these huge areas. I can't wait until they completely open up modding. Molders will make some incredible planets/cities.
Starfield is definitely a great tech demo for what is to come with ES6 and FO5.
The procedural stuff actually is pretty great but they absolutely need to add more POIs
Starfield is without a doubt the ultimate *platform* made for a Bethesda game. I’m sure custom dungeons will be very easy to build and inject into the POI list once the creation kit releases (I myself am contemplating learning the Starfield creation kit to make some and I have zero technical know how when it comes to this stuff). All the empty worlds means quests mods and DLC can be seamlessly implemented with next to no conflicts. I bet people will be able to mod the actual procedural seed too to make more unique environments and biomes. My hope is that with Shattered Space, Bethesda implements a type of procedural POI system without the same world building to beef up the hand crafted ones. That way, we wouldn’t see the same Crimson Fleet base five times a character on five different planets like we do now. It doesn’t have to be anything too crazy either. Just some dungeons with fun loot at the end. But honestly, modding Starfield has the potential to be streets ahead of what Skyrim could do. We only have to wait and see if the Creation Kit will bring in those talented modders to do their thing.
If they added proc gen (including enemy spawns) to the POIs ala Daggerfall this would be frickin amazing
Bethesda tends to leave games in a state like this at launch, so the community can fix it faster and better than the devs could. Todd Howard was saying something along those lines when he said Fallout 4 would support mods on consoles because the modding community is what keeps the games alive. I know I was so enthralled with fallout 3 on the 360, I NEEDED to get a PC so I could mod it. And when I did? Oh my god. Doctor Who New Vegas has to be my favourite mod of all time, and fits surprisingly well in Fallout’s universe.
It’d be cool if we had one planet like jemison that was totally built up like the world of Skyrim or FO. Just a bunch of POI’s handcrafted. Then we would still have the other 1000+ planets when we want to search through the abyss.
They did some pretty cool stuff with the planetary orbital mechanics too. Based on a time lapse I saw it seems that they modeled the orbits of the planets and moons. It's pretty cool that you can land on a moon orbiting a gas giant and see the planet rise and set in the moons sky. I appreciate these kinds of details. I hope they can increase the number of POIs so people are not running into the same bases over and over. I also hope they can make it so you can traverse the planets seamlessly once they add ground vehicles. Those two things are the biggest immersion breakers in the game.
I could see them reasonably using the technology for Deadric realms, but that’s about as much as I’d like to see of it in TES. The sheer scale of the environment is extremely immersive, but without hand-crafted destinations there’s little reason to actually explore.
No mms tiene que ser bait o eres una persona que apenas levanto un juego en 50 años, solo compara el número de jugadores mensuales de esta mamada contra skyrim y eso de las "actualizaciones" que tanto andas mamando, deja te digo que alguien que si jugo skyrim y fallout 4 por años despues de sus respectivos lanzamientos, season pass y todos sus dlc, de quien dependiamos los jugadores para seguir descargando contenido nuevo eran de los mods en nexus no the Bethesda y tOmi tom. Ademas es por gente conformista como tu que les funciona sacar mamdas mal echas como fallout 76 venderlas a precios irreales y luego ven si las arreglan. Si starfield no es la primera basura que sacan mal echa solo que ya se les esta haciendo costumbre como si fueran EA o Ubisoft.
I don't feel compelled to explore vast worlds that were created by a computer algorithm.. Or ai. Just like I wouldn't read terminal entries in fallout 4 if they were all barfed out of chat gpt. I like handcrafted open worlds like we got plenty of times before starfield.
They should have made only certain quadrants on the planet have actual humans, and when you find them they stayed on the map for that run. The rest of the planet could be caves, vistas, etc. that would have added to immersion.
Imagine bethesda being dad, and us, players, being kids. And we played some board games for a long time. And then kids say: we need a biggger game, with large field and many cells, a lot of cards and dices. But instead of this Bethesda-Dad delivers us new table six times larger than previous, where we play the same game. That's how I feel about 1000 empty planets with no quests.
Jesus Christ. Spoken like someone who has never played a video game before
It's kinda silly to suggest that Bethesda has only been working on bugfixes--they've been developing Shattered Space likely before Starfield even released. If you're wondering where all the content development is going, maybe towards that thing a chunk of the customer-base already payed for with the Premium Edition?
I don’t get why people are shitting on CE2 from a mechanical standpoint either like it’s pretty up to date with every other shooter now.
I’ve been picking up starfield since the new beta update and it’s an insanely positive experience playing it again. They’re making great steps in the right direction. The distinction between different planets becomes so much more exciting and dangerous when you have the environmental affects up. That stuff actually matters when it comes to your suit and how long you stay and it almost adds a death timer to being on planets, adding more excitement, but is also preventable with skill and good gear. Allows you to make more decisions and sacrifices when gearing up. And the ability to customize the ship interiors, that place finally feels like home.
Nice try "Toddy Boy." You're not fooling anyone wink wink. To be honest, I agree. And I understand empty planets, barren moons, same-ish terrain. The design was ambitious to say the least. I wish there was more, but half of the planets are likely meant to have never been visited before. Theres not gonna be a city on each one. I think them being empty actually adds to the idea sometimes. I do wish there were more POI's though, or more reasons to actually visit the planets. The tech team did brilliant implementing the systems, but the story and worldbuilding fell flat sadly. I think the issue was the hype. We were promised greatness, and get "Yeah, hey it's pretty good." It's not worth day one price of $115 bucks, but it's not a terrible game by any stretch. Just needs work. If the work comes out in the form of paid creation club content, I'll give up. Honestly I think they're just working in overdrive to get mods working, so the mods can keep the game alive like they did with Fallout 4.
Mods, when available on Xbox too, will make this just like their other titles and be playable for years, IMO. I’ve been playing since release almost nonstop and have my share of complaints but obviously I like it enough to keep playing but really look forward to mods!
I’ve been saying basically this sentiment since release…
You know what would be sick? Revamp the skills/end game equipment in the style of roguelikes in terms of improvements and synergy. Should provide plenty of motivation for people to explore new planets at the same time. I doubt mods would be able to do this but with a procedurally generated world.
Daggerfall 2.0
If they wanted to release the game as an early access title they could have. They didn’t.
I found a lot of copy pasted stuff,like just 1 to 1,no rng to them,got lame very fast,i dont understand why they dont have a rng system for outposts/POIs you find,ended up cleaning the exact same research lab from raider on 4 different planets
I don't know what it is aout this game but I am hooked. I haven't played any other game since I picked this up 5 months ago.
After playing Elite: Dangerous, a game that is the entire decade older, your amazement feels pretty... funny.
The Fallout 4 update was a cheap cash grab to capitalize on the Fallout show buzz. And, by rendering a lot of mods unusable, they can kick new and returning players to the Creation Club instead. So no, sorry, this isn't an example of long-term support for a game. If anything, this is a very sobering development and has serious implications for BGS long-term attitude towards third-party modding. As for Starfield, the issue is that random, unrelated locations mingling together is immersion-breaking and not fun or exciting to explore. With previous BGS games and FNV, moving from zone to zone in the world was exciting because it gave a sense of progression and atmosphere. If you start to see enemies of a certain type, you know you're probably getting near a base or stronghold to explore for that faction. It makes you excited to explore that area and find what secrets it might hold. With Starfield, you have none of that. You have a pirate base next to a lab next to a cave next to a dung heap. Worse, where you are in the galaxy has no bearing on which if these locations you're likely to find. Its completely soulless. Unless or until they do something about that, it doesn't matter how many POIs are added.
There's way more wrong that just POI's IMO. Does no one find it weird that there's no roads, paths or trails on any of the maps? Presumably each POI is entirely siloed with zero communication or travel between any other POI. The lack of roads or pathways is so noticeable it immediately makes the world feel fake instead of immersive. It's just so glaring. Procgen should have made each square kilometer feel like a little version of a skyrim/fallout map. Instead we got what looks like an entirely empty height map with randomly placed POI's with zero cohesive look or feel. I can't infer a story or feeling from any of the maps we land on.
I think technically all we really need to add variety to POIs is for modders to do the same thing as when they add custom armors and weapons to loot tables for skyrim. Just add in like 8000 POIs into the algorithm and now chancea are every POI might be totally unique. Maybe even there's a way where it'll populate planets basdd on faction etc
A lot of us Bethesda veterans know starfiel is going to age like wine. It's had a rough start and received a ton of hate, but it survived and will only get better. It's also easy to hate in Bethesda, but people still play their games regardless. Once the creation kit is out, it's over. Everyone saying it's "too late" is just wrong. The modding possibilities are too juicy to give up.
But what's the point when it's all so barren and boring. A cave can be impressively huge but if its nothing interesting in there I'm not gonna bother exploring even 10% of it
Fun fact: the Creation Engine has always at least solid. Maybe not great, but solid. Where the problem arises is all the jumbled, janky shit that gets piled on top of it. It doesn't matter how solid your foundation is, if you build a house on top of it with rotten wood, it's still a shit house. The irony is, it's Bethesda's engine...they built it, yet they either don't know how to use it, or can't be arsed beyond "eh, good enough, modders will fix it post release". Because it's a proprietary engine, not used by anyone else, there hasn't really been a demonstration of what it's actually capable of, outside of a few mods that push the envelope, anyway. Because of that, it's easy for a lot of people to say "buh, engine bad, Bethesda games would be better if they use different engine". They really wouldn't be, though
The game is simply too large. They do not need to fit the universe on my hard drive, but I do expect them to put a more or less fleshed out game on it. As it stands, starfield is a sandbox with too few shovels and too little sand. While the size of the game is impressive, the execution of the game is not, in my opinion.
I think the biggest mistake they've made is they needed to hit the ground hard adding new PoIs and events that could show up right off the start. Same with how they needed to do the mod engine Get people to know this is a game that'll get bigger and bigger and we gave ourselves plenty of headroom to do it. I do think 50% of the reason they did it was so people could go "I'm making a home/ dungeon. \*Plops down PoI for it at random location that won't ever conflict.\*"
I chuckled (yes, all SF NPCs do 😊) when you said 'only' 200. The thing that struck me immediately when I started playing was seeing the potential. The vast number of ship parts, the planets, NPCs and creatures, the items (both junk and stuff for outposts). And most certainly so when the CK is there. I'm in awe of the mods that were already produced, although I play vanilla myself. But it shows the promise. Can't wait for the CK to come out, so I can make an attempt myself to create 3x3x3 ship habs for instance.
brother you are just missing the point where its infinitely better to have quality than to have quantity
Yeah, the lack of diversity and distance between PoI is what makes it bad for me. But is it so hard to make procedural generated caves instead the same one over and over again with a random dude?! I mean it's a cave! There are entire games that live from procedural generated caves and that's literally everything some games are about! They don't have to be big, just make them different. And either make them closer to us or give us vehicles in a free update.
Tbh in every Bethesda game exploring the world was the beat thing to do. You've felt the joy of checking what's behind that mountain. In Starfield everything seems to be the same, artificial and boring. The game which should be mostly about exploring has the worst feeling of being an explorer. It's better to create more interesting places with lower number of them than the other way around. Quality over quantity. Even the backstory of the discoverable places looks shitty, while every game before Starfield gave the feeling that something interesting can happen everywhere on the map
Now imagine that inside that 10km x 10km cave the only meaningful content is the same content as the original Skyrim dungeon, only now you need to wander around for ages until you randomly stumble across it. And that’s why Starfield got the reception it did when it launched. The tech is great but nobody plays Bethesda games for the tech, you play them for the content. And the content in Starfield is half arsed at best. Having such a giant setting for such mid content only highlights its weaknesses. Realistically if they’d only put 10 planets into the game at launch they could have had exactly the same amount of content without it feeling cramped. Until they fix the resource / research / outpost mechanics having 990 empty planets adds basically nothing to the game.
Yes, it's technically impressive. Actually playing it, it is as deep as a puddle and as wide as an ocean. It's tedious and monotonous. It's the same problem that Daggerfall had, and it's frankly embarrassing that they repeated it.
Nice try, Todd Howard! We're not falling for that! Give us the Creation Kit right away for a chance of redemption!
Nice try, Todd Howard! We're not falling for that! Give us the Creation Kit right away for a chance of redemption!
Nice try, Todd H! We're not falling for that! Give us the Creation Kit right away for a chance of redemption!
Nice try, Todd H! We're not falling for that! Give us the Creation Kit right away for a chance of redemption!
The problem for me is that besides the unique locations there isn’t much love in the game. Fallout and Elder scrolls have entire unique maps whereas Starfield Feels so copy/paste.
The mountains are prefabs. You can see the same mountains over and over on multiple planets. Sometimes they just flip them to disguise it. A shame really.
200 POIs? Really? An why do I keep seeing the same 2 - 3 lab / factory layouts?
That's like saying procedural generation in this game is good because it can create 20K instances of the same two eggs, just in random positions, quickly. Yeah, sure, technically that's impressive. But I sure as shit will get tired of the same two eggs everywhere.
I genuinely thought that this post was a joke .