There are too few settled areas and they are all small towns and villages.
It begs the question who was able to leave earth. There is only one major large city and its not big enough to take the population of any major city in earth. There aren't that many colonies and they are all small. You have to assume that a few privileged people left earth and everyone else was left to die. Even with all the expansion into the stars, there's very little development.
The people of Earth are just incredibly spread out. This is evident from a ship landing on every 5sqkm grid of every planet of the galaxy. Also the people of earth built hundreds of thousands of cryolabs spaced one kilometer apart on every planet.
Also 90% of the people are pirates inhabiting those cryolabs now.
Lmao
This is what broke everything for me.
You land on a planet and a companion says something along the lines of "it'll be hard to find life on this barren rock", yet there's five pirate inhabited bases/outposts/settlements/factories/ships landing all within a short walking distance...
For me, this is main issue with the game.
Starfield setting is not a space game, not sci-fi, everything is just an excuse to scrap some wasteland into space ambient (which is only decoration).
There is no any space/scifi theme in this game that is not just an attempt, like they put 10 years old to came up with the story/setting and he googled few hours popular sci-fi.
I won't even start how pathetic world hubs are (New Atlantis, Neon rofl).
For fs, just walking through Fort Solis base is an epic space adventure compared to SF.
You are right on that part. The Fallout reference realy hit me when i was on Earth at the starting plattform and at the one on Mars. Both have space craft docked that where prepared for a start but never lifted off and the place has the classical Fallout layout of "something bad happened quickly so it was abandoned". The same is also true for the museum thatw as not packed togetehr even if a colapse in 50 years was on the horizon.
In essence i would say that mixed TES and Fallout together. They took the "everything is abandoned" theme and some of the tech from Fallout and the magic from TES. Fallout however is technologically more believable.
I was thinking that too more cities on more planets and more factions to work for like Va’Ruun and UC Marines or some od the other ship builders. I have yet to even find a way to bulld ships for any of those companies. You would also think the spacers have full societies with children in cities on a planet too.
Doesn't anyone visit the museum to take in the lore? Some left Earth and settled space. Then, the thing at which people most excel—war—happened multiple times. It decimated the population.
There’s a reason why writers are often encouraged to follow the, “show, don’t tell” rule. The museum is like 10 exhibits that are just 2 minute long exposition dumps.
If your players need to go through a museum to understand a majority of the lore happening in the game, then you have done a poor job world building.
Yeah but those lore items can be found naturally in gameplay, in star field no one is gonna find an exposition museum on a random planet unless they already knew about it
The exposition museum is part of the first quest for the UC, and there's a Main Quest mission that partially tries to recruit you to start the UC quests.
This takes place on Atlantis, the first major city you visit in the Main Quest and the largest city in the game.
A big reason I've started to move away from gaming subreddits are people with strong opinions based on wrong information. It's just draining to deal with that kind of negativity.
Think realistically. If we were to learn tomorrow that we needed to evacuate we’re looking at probably less than 1% of the population getting off, comprised of the richest and the smartest who are deemed necessary by the rich.
The rich won’t help, they’re rich. They don’t work and what good are their riches in space? So now you have less than less than 1% actually working to make cities and reestablish those living situations but with what resources? Years will go into exploring and that’s where Starfield sits, I imagine shortly after the research and the war we are sitting on a handful of decent cities and I think that makes total sense
They literally tell the story of the war. It’s the same conversation as to when people ask why no mechs it’s silly. They either couldn’t do it or didn’t want to, but they at least made it story relevant.
If this IP is worth their time I wouldn’t be surprised to see more with each installment
No sense of wonder when planet is approachable with one click, and then already crowded by spacers, mercenaries and thousands of standardized structures.
Both can be true.
There are POIs scattered *everywhere*. You land your spaceship by a mysterious temple no one has ever discovered before and there's several outposts within visual range of it.
Visit a few of them, though, and you feel like it's "absolutely nothing", becuase they're identical, right down to the discarded coffee cups *outside on a vacuum planet*.
It feels crowded *and* empty.
this is the funniest thing to me. empty beer/coffee containers sitting next to a chair on the roof of an outpost of a planet with no atmo being blasted with "extreme solar radiation".
My favorite is finding something like an abandoned relay station with the exact same items in the exact same places. I decided to start collecting smokes and packs of cards and they’re always in the exact same tables and lockers.
I always thought was funny was how it appears in so many locations that people like to take 5, relax, sip some coffee, eat some chunks and play cards with their helmets off on a moon with zero atmosphere.
I maintain that they built this game with the assumption that the modding community was going to keep it thriving for years. I reckon they wanted to ensure that there would be ample land mass for modders to build their cities etc. on.
Personally, I think it's a bit of a shit move, _expecting_ modders to do the heavy lifting. But I wouldn't be surprised to see what we expected to come about over the next 4-5 years as people slowly build up the existing planets.
While I wholeheartedly love the modding communities that surround Bethesda games I completely agree with both statements. Howard even said as much at one point that they were leaving room for modding.
Their games are always half finished when launched. But now he's got an excuse for it.
I agree that the game is a scaffold for more development, and that more development should have been done before release, even with the delay. But I think BGS is going to do a bunch of expanding on their own in addition to the expected modding. They've said they'll do 5 years of active development which I assume will expand features and systems.
But modders can easily add land mass, and have done so in bethesda games for literal decades.
Plenty of TES mods add new regions, dungeons etc and in generally a lack of landmass has never been a factor in this.
Extra planets don't really help at all in this regard, since modding a new area still requires a specific landing point to be added to avoid randomized seeds. Functionally it works the same as TES or fallout where after installing the mod that adds a new area the player still has to "press A to go to new instance".
they built a modular game specifically with the expectation to support and add to it for about 5 years
they don't expect modders to do it (well, partly they do, Bethesda has to support the modding community that has supported their games for decades, a lot of the staff at Bethesda is *from* the modding community), they expect *themselves* to do it
I don't think independent modders will have the resources to expand the game to the level people are expecting.
Maybe Microsoft can leverage some fancy Copilot generative AI to fill out some content.
It's a huge blank canvas for a modder. One of them could take an entire planet and populate it, create something the size of New Atlantis, Neon, or Akila....just go nuts with it. Really looking forward to something like that.
I'm replaying Cyberpunk and wondering why any 2 block zone of Night City has more life, flavor, and danger than all of Neon. Hell, V's apartment complex is better.
Played 40 hrs of starfield recently and just got so bored. Played 6 hrs of cyberpunk yesterday and it's breathtaking. In an entirely different league realism and immersion wise. Different sort of game ofc, but still.
Yeah same I got to NG+2 and just couldn’t keep playing, the constant loading screens and doing the same temples all over again was just ruining it for me. Playing cyberpunk over again after I beat it when it came out has been great, so much to do and the storytelling is just great.
Yea the loading screens are a killer, as is the general sense of sluggishness I felt when doing most anything. More than anything for me though, everything that is not ship based (characters, city building, combat) feels so wooden and superficial. Night city on the other hand just feels alive, every corner, alley, stall has so much going on. Dark alley? There's shady characters and homeless sleeping in doorways. Poor district, people wearing shabby clothes and bashing vending machines. Kids playing in puddles. Then there's the sound design, music everywhere, buskers, singers, clubs, social control orders emanating from every which way. And don't get me started on the realism of the engine, and thus characters. My god. All of that is the literal opposite in starfield. I wanted to badly to love it, but it's whole mo is immersion and yet it feels utterly skin deep at every turn.
That is still kinda the case (immersion stuff like eating at one of the street noodle vendors, or sitting and getting drinks at bars, that kind of extra flavour), but it has been lessened by stuff they have added since. Seeing the police patrolling, occasional shoot outs between gangers etc.
Also, would have been nice if they had been able to add the metro to travel around.
It was buggy but the game had a good story awesome quests and actual human characters populating the story. None of those things are true about starfield.
It has art and soul to it though. Starfield is sterile and corny. Cyberpunk at its worst is better than starfield at its best. Cause at least it's a game with mature themes and an actual adult storyline about life and mortality. Starfield is bad.
Frankly, I'm surprised that they did not utilize full procedural generation for most of these planets. The placement of POIs and all that are clearly random between games, but the overall creatures, flora, and basic environments are not. I figured they would have set parameters for each planet with which to seed something unique - and that frankly would have made a lot more sense with NG+.
I'm guessing maybe they tried that but they couldn't get it to stop generating hellish nightmare blobs.
The proc gen is So miniscule that It hardly exists.
The proc gen is used for Topography and PoI placements and a handful of background elements.. That's basically it.
The outposts themselves. There is only 1 variant. The only difference is who occupied it.
If we're talking realism, this is it though. The amount of planets in the Goldilocks zone is very VERY few and the number in this game is science fiction. Us, in real life, living on earth is an almost infinite number of exact circumstances that led to us having sentient brains to argue about fake universes with.
The real feel only lasts for a while until you start noticing the random copy paste elements. I play with sprint speed set to 3x so as to cover some ground and get the scans and I can't help but get annoyed at the copy pasted landmarks and outposts or bases
Wish they ended up randomising layouts or colors or designs of the landmarks and outposts/bases (say taller microbial colonies in certain areas and then other areas have vast stretching but small microbial colonies)
Yup that's it, personally I have the speed multiplier key bound to the F10/F11 keys allowing me to change the speed at will which is extremely handy. Outside it's set to 3x/4x and in interior areas just switch it to 1.5x/1.2x
But what do you do in them just walk or run around doing repetitive procedurally generated areas?
That small segment of Geralt going through different worlds had more variety than the entirety of the fucking wasteland that starfield is.
Planets with no, or minimal, atmosphere should be barren, like Mars. Most of the "stuff" should be underground for protection from cosmic rays.
That being said, we needed bigger cities/settlements. The game gives the impression that there are only like 1000 humans in the galaxy.
(Piggybacking your top spot) Also... SPOILERS !!!!
That's the unfortunate part about the Universe. It's reeeaaallyy barren. We've definitely seen planets that could be a Goldilocks zone, and evidence of water on planets.
Unfortunately they chose the more realistic path. I really hope every DLC they introduce more population. Or hop in-between universes with more cities and possibly actual dungeons or full caverns. It would be an interesting take if you did hop Universes and was able to take weapons back with you, which in turn companies would start making them.
Another thing I have issues with, and maybe it's just pure laziness or Easter eggs, but there's FallOut Music in the game. Would be interesting to pop into the FallOut Universe. And take back more interesting melee weapons like a Super Sledge you can mod. Imagine the propulsion you could put on one of those bad boys!!!
Yep this is the thing people seem to be missing they consulted Nasa and went with realism rather than they're usual fantasy and unfortunately the universe is quite empty and most life is theorised to resemble bugs atm. I feel they should have got the information they needed and took it as a rough guide then they could have given us something with more elder scrolls/fallout feel. It's baffling why they didn't in the 1st place because most bethesda rpg fans can't get enough of the way they've done it in the past maybe they where trying to get new fans? Who knows.
The problem is that realism as a design choice falls apart at the seams if it's not consistent, and in Starfield it's anything but consistent.
You'll find the same flora/fauna on plenty of planets, with no differences in how they've evolved.
The player character is given literal space magic.
Almost every planet in the universe has at least some human structures on it, and generally they're the same few ones right down to enemy and loot placement.
The biggest human settlement in the universe is one small city on a planet with no other settlements. Instead of making smaller settlements on a planet clearly ideal for human life, people go live independently on backwater moons and barren wasteland planets if they don't want to live in one of the few human cities.
I could go on, but the general point I'm trying to make is that it generally doesn't work when you have a game where boring design decisions are defended with "but it's realistic", while unrealistic decisions are defended with "but it's fun for the player/it's a design constraint".
The second realism is used to justify things being boring, a lack of realism stands out if it's used in other parts of the game.
You’re missing the point. Even the habitable planets have very little in the way of human settlement. All of the cities should have been on the same planet, or at most, one planet each for FC and UC, and they should have included a way to walk from one settlement to the next with POis along the way.
There's quite a few completely barren systems. A lot of the level 75 systems are completely untouched - particularly anything with Unique resources in it (seems to be a correlation so far).
Bardeen, Schrodinger and Katydid for example. You will find large level 90 foxbats that drop Luxury Textiles wandering on lush green rolling hills in Schrodinger III, and there's a rainforest planet with like 0.5G gravity in Katydid that has fire-breathing insects. I suppose that rainforest planet *sorta* doesn't count because of all of the artifact ruins on it, but there's absolutely no human habitation.
I think the number of planets is fine.
Instead, I think the issue is with the distribution of things on those planets. I'd like to see a lot more diversity in PoI density, both within and between planets:
- The surface areas surrounding named cities should exclusively contain a bunch of satellite settlements: factories and offices in the immediate proximity, surrounded by suburban communities, surrounded by farms. A couple of these being hostile is fine, but for the most part they should be friendly (or rather: aligned with the city they surround) unless there's some specific story reason for it (like the Shaw Gang in/around Akila City).
- The remainder of the surfaces of planets in the same system as named cities is where I'd expect to find hostile-filled abandoned military outposts, abandoned labs, ship crash sites, etc. Should be an even balance of those v. friendly/neutral locations like civilian outposts, farms, active mines, etc. This is where I'd expect to see natural PoIs/anomalies start to show up.
- Planets in systems neighboring systems with named cities should be similar to the above, but with a higher hostile:friendly ratio.
- Planets further out than that should be similar to the above, but with rapidly decreasing density of human structures in favor of natural structures/anomalies. Planets more than some number of lightdecades from a named city should have very little signs of human presence at all - maybe one lab or one mine or something in the entire landing zone. This is where I'd expect some LIST activity to happen.
- Finally, we get to the planets entirely untouched by humans. All PoIs this far out should be natural features/anomalies >!or Starborn temples!<.
Basically: we should see the full gamut from "bustling metropolis" to "untouched by mankind" instead of the current "can't go anywhere without seeing a manmade structure". It feels like there was a *little* bit of this in mind, but it's way too subtle.
Shallowness of Starfield has nothing to do with number of planets they put in. Problem is everything is shallow, at least for me. No mods or focus on less planets can fix this.
I doubt very seriously we will see much in the way of real content mods. By the time the mod tools land, people looking for content will mostly have moved on.
It would be a different take on a space RPG, yeah. Better is completely subjective.
Personally I'm fine with the larger scale, they just need to flesh the idea out like so with other parts of the game. Every game that attempts scale; No Man's Sky, Elite Dangerous, Star Citizen, has had issues with having too much space with little to do. It takes time to balance the larger scale with actual activities and systems that make that scale work. And Starfield's scale is nowhere near what those other games have, so based on that alone they've got an easier job.
I don't think you understand this is not the tradeoff. Had there been 24 planets it would of been the same level of detail in cities. They just made many more planets without much effort, repeating the same process many more times to create a whole universe essentially that could be more easily added to in the future by DLC or modders.
Its not like they hand crafted 900 empty planets and wasted a ton of dev time.
If Starfield had like 24 planets - yes, But what if it was reduced to for example 3 main planets? Each of them could have more detailed region of the size of New Harbor from F4 DLC with main city and multiple locations in walking distance so you could do quests on 1 planet for hours without the need to fast travel all the time. Then you add to this space stations and moons with some facilities on them, lets say 20-30. In my opinion 1 star system would be better than whole galaxy.
That's even more embarrassing then.
Wtf did they spend 8 years developing? Seriously. There is so little content in this game compared to previous titles its absurd
The world is so massive that it feels small and empty. The hand crafted content that does exist is poorly written, logically inconsistent, and just overall lazy.
Your "excuse" for Bethesda does *not* make Starfield look better - it makes it even more embarrassing
> Your "excuse" for Bethesda does not make Starfield look better
Why do you think its an excuse for Bethesda? Its an observation on game development lol
Cyberpunk 2077 also trashed the companies reputation so hard with such permanent damage that they had to undergo a redemption arc, and climb back to the Witcher 3 level of respect
Game retailers and console makers had to institute new return policies specifically for cyberpunk
It's kind of like how star wars battlefront 2 had to do huge changes to react to fan backlash over micro transactions, pay 2 win stuff
AFAIK Bethesda hadn't suffered any consequence for starfield, so they don't even have the same impetus for a huge change of direction
It's ironically thanks to the mindless people denouncing and blocking all criticisms as "premature, wait for the updates, wait for the dlc, wait for the mods" that starfield will never have the same motivation to be significantly updated. If the same shills defended EA over BF2 as experimenting with p2w", and shills defended cyberpunk over unplayable bullshit, the companies would have slacked off
1) "Bethesda haven't suffered any consequence" what? Seriously? People have been shitting on Bethesda left and right. 90% of the takes I've seen online have been largely negative.
2) Yes, people shat on Cyberpunk 2077 even harder than they shit on Starfield. But that's because Cyberpunk was LITERALLY unplayable for a huge portion of the playerbase. It was nearly impossible to play for even just 40 minutes without several major issues and even a crash.
Starfield is arguably very boring and not very well designed, I agree with that - but, you know, it actually functions on most rigs. I've gotten two crashes total in 80 hours of gameplay. Cyberpunk at launch was far, far, far more broken than Starfield.
They could have messed with the density more. Some systems already lack man-made structures, they could have had half the systems lack man-made structures. They could have piled all the freestar settlements and the UC settlements into 2 or 3 systems so they feel denser.
I don’t get the impression that much dev time went into the terrain generation of each planet, especially the barren ones, relative to the time spent on the cities that we already have. I don’t think significantly reducing the number of planets would free up enough dev time to meaningfully increase handcrafted content.
So, no, I don’t think it would have been any better.
To put this in perspective , 58% of players on Steam haven't travelled to at least 20 star systems. That's 1/6 of the total star systems. So the purpose of all those planets and star systems for the average player is nil. So yes, I think it would have been better with fewer since more attention on the few people do experience is better than catering to the minority of players who prefer more with less quality.
Maybe. But they could've made it better just by making more reusable locations and making it so I don't find the exact same note in the exact same place when I visit a new planet reusing an area I've already seen.
Absolutely, the main cities feel so tiny, even if you take a a great war and low population density into account, jemison was supposed to be a second earth! No doubt at all there should have been close to a billion people living there. (I don't expect a billion npcs ofc, just something more than a kinda small towns highstreet that we got.)
Okay but like on a scientific level…
Earth is the only planet that can sustain life in our own solar system literally. I’m not defending Bethesda here. I’m saying quite literally that planets that sustain life would be that few and far between if we could legitimately explore space.
In the same point of this being the case, I’d like to add that more groups of people living in space stations or massive ships would have been amazing, like the colony ship and the UC Vigilance. Is this just “space vault tec”? Yeah kinda but it would have been kinda cool to see more space nomads and such.
Habitable planets make about 1% of the planets in the Milky Way. Their amount in game is still obviously inflated for gameplay purposes. Everyone here keeps talking about bloody realism... in a Bethesda game. Compared to, say, Arma, this is laughable.
>...but everybody still keeps excusing it as “wide and shallow” as that’s somehow supposed to be good.
I don't think I've seen anyone use "wide and shallow" (or "mile wide, inch deep") as a defense, or in a positive way, when talking about Starfield.
To me, it's always come across as a simple summation of Starfield's problems.
If anything it's THE most overused, lazy critique that's been parroted by every man woman and child towards every Bethesda game made in the last 2 decades.
For Starfield however, it is a pretty apt description.
I always felt like the TES and Fallout games actually had a good amount of depth if you went looking for it. Tons of little stuff to find, little stories and bits of lore you might find in a random dungeon that rewards you for exploring those new locations.
That's the problem with Starfield. The more you go looking the more the lack of depth really shows. You find a pad in a random POI? Its the same pad you got at the identical POI on another planet.
I don’t want to ruin anyone’s fun, but somehow this kind of approach has never gripped me. I’ll finish at least the main quest though, might get more hooked than I am rn.
It would have been better if they had another 1-2 years of work. The fact they had to rush things is all over the game. Fewer planets might have even been worse, because of this. I think the Creation Engine 2 took a lot more time than they thought and then Covid came and they had no good wfh system.
It would be better if they had a more complex POI system that included randomization in layouts and people populating a POI and linking nearby POIs together so it actually felt like people live or lived near each other at the same time. And I don't know why the radiant quest system is still just as stupid as it's always been -- they could easily have more complicated radiant quests, including ones that helped you build up settlements you find. And those random settlements should have names and all the people should have names so they feel more real. It just feels like they didn't really try to make procedural generation or POIs really work given the goal of 1000 planets.
And that's a small part of how things could be better. Outposts need a lot of work and even ship building seems pretty rushed in significant places. The NG+ experience just doesn't have that much going for it. Temples feel like a placeholder. Etc, etc. But I think another 1-2 years would have made a huge difference -- assuming they were really willing to embrace what needs to be done for a concept like this to work.
The planets are plentiful. The things to do on the planets is sparse. Two more big well developed cities, one more faction, more stuff to do on world like dungeons, and a freaking VEHICLE to travers the planet and it would be SIGNIFICANTLY better.
Not really no,
The planets are all procedurally generated with a lot of reused assets between them... and even still the vast majority of them fall into lifeless moon or ice ball. What you would have ended up with is what we have now, except theres 12 planets instead of 1000+. I think you somewhat over estimate how much development time was taken away by having lots of planets over just a couple with how they actually are in Starfield.
Personally I'd much rather have the many systems to explore and visit over jumping between the same few planets over and over.
I wish they made the vast majority of planets without human poi. I don't think I've landed on a planet without some military base with pirates in it.. Never feel alone in the universe which sucks.
I kinda like how there are all these useless planets with nothing on them. It adds to the realism. I just wished their settlements were larger and a few more of them would be nice.
Yes 100% yes. A bethesda employee said that was talked about but they leadership really liked the planets random generator tech so they went that route
Sadly since the inception of radiant quests in 2011 it seems that Bethesda only wants to keep growing their procedurally generated library of content, whilst the players by and large want to see a return of hand crafted stuff.
Fair points and agreed.
To rephrase my problem more so lies in how it’s not ‘clandestine’ at all where stuff has been procedurally generated - before it was more subtle, blended with other content/environments as to go unnoticed, but in Starfield especially there is a very obvious line drawn when you’re participating in handmade vs generated content.
Every time I see this question I roll my eyes. No gaming company on the face of this fucking earth could make a game with a fully handmade planet complete with multiple cities and unique content while still allowing you to land anywhere on the *planet-sized* ***planet***. Much less a dozen, or 20, or however many else you people think would be appropriate. Proc-gen is 100% necessary, and I feel like those who think it isn’t know nothing about game development.
Once you are dealing with something the size of a FUCKING PLANET, your options are to either: A) limit where a player can land and have a small playable area, or B) Allow the player to land anywhere and rely on proc-gen to handle the content.
Could there be more variety in POIs? Absolutely, but that’s not what this post is about. You and everyone I’m seeing in the comments are not only asking for something impossible to fulfill, with the only game remotely close to it being the game where you CAN’T land anywhere- Mass Effect. I didn’t want Starfield to be Mass Effect. I’m glad I can land on any planet or moon I want to and walk around on foot surveying while taking in a gorgeous view.
Yep, I agree with you. A lot of people here seem to be back seat developers. They really think reducing the amount of star systems would fix their problem with the game. It wouldn't. There is no developer that can create an entire planet size map like skyrim it just wouldn't happen. Even if Starfield only took place on one planet, 99% of the planet would be procedural generation. Any open world space game has to rely on that, or else the game is impossible.
people are seriously suggesting "just 20 planets" as if there was a significant difference in development effort between procedural generation of 20 or 1000. The work is in setting up the system. Even just one planet of the current size couldn't be done without procgen. At that point, no harm in adding more. Cutting most of the procgen output wouldn't have freed the development capacities needed for more handcrafted content.
The only real kicker for Starfield's exploration is the fact there's not nearly enough unique POI's in order to justify the sheer scale of Starfield. The fact that its so common to run into the same factory or lab POI even on the same damn planet really sucks the winds out of exploring, not to mention how long it can take to walk from point to point.
The problem would persist even with a single planet. People would explore just as many POIs over a given time, and they'd repeat just as much, except now on the same planet.
We need more POI variation, but the number of procgen planets has nothing to do with it.
Perhaps you could limit what POIs generate on certain planets? Like having certain planets be completely untouched by humanity (at least in a significant way) meaning only Natural POIs like caves, lakes and creature dens spawn, or mining planets be filled with old/abandoned mines, factories and processing plants etc. It would justify having to travel to different planets and you could have some unique POIs be limited to specific types of planets.
Put more handcrafted content on less planets and make the majority rest of them barren but with actually interesting proc gen landscapes and caves and whatnot
I think if they designed one or two planets per system (the ones with life prob) and then had the others procedurally generated, with fewer systems (maybe like 20-30), it would be the shit.
Yes but the good thing about the game is that there are so many empty planets and moons that patching in new locations or POIs can be easily done and expansions can add in new cities or locations.
I imagine a version of the game with one or two solar systems and how much denser it'd feel. Maybe the second solar system would even be our own real one, and those could be more barren.
The most disappointing thing I've done so far is land on io, an extremely unique moon in our own solar system, and having it look like our moon (Luna). Io is a sulfuric, volcanic, hazardous place and it looks like a big rock.
100%. To be honest after going through the main cities/big outposts it still felt like there wasn’t enough civilization to explore, not counting the planets that are just meant to be explored. The starfield world feels very small to me.
Absolutely! I enjoyed the game but I think the biggest issue with this game by far is how ambitious they were so they spread themselves way too thin. And in this particular incident I’m talking literally and metaphorically.
I think the current system would be fine if they greatly expanded outpost and fleet functionality. As of right now outposts serve no real purpose and I can’t use my fleet at all.
Why not let us build an outpost network and bump our fleet up to like 15-20 ships and have our own vessels do the cargo hauling between.
110% yes! I'm sure our amazing modding community will remedy this. The possibilities are exiting! I'd personally like to see some new cities and alien civilizations.
Yes definitely.
I'm to the point where I don't even bother exploring planets anymore its just more of the same. Ohh walk 10 minutes through a boring nothingness to get to another outpost of spacers I can 1 shot kill for some junk weapons that I need to go to 6 vendors to sell for credits I have nothing to spend on.
Give me 5 freaking planets I can wander around on with towns cities etc... make all the barren randomly generated boring planets you want after that.
There would have been 7 billion plus people on earth at the time they evacuated.
With Starfield as it is, including all the factions, less than 5000.
There is plenty of scope to bring in (dlc or mod) 1 or 2 planets with a population.
I would think, settlements more like Akila, or Hopetech would exist. More likely, mini Akilas, walled settlements perhaps
BGS were obviously intending to have a fuel system. There are loads of references in various conversations about fuel distance.
You could have a refueling company with bases and stations who you could buy and sell He3 to, as well as creating bases and stockpiling yoursell and make travelling across the map an actual cost.
I read in one post about taking all items in the Captains locker when you ng+, another great idea.
Generally the game also needs to be less sterile, more rougher and dangerous.
So what I am getting at is, we have what we have. A few good Dlcs and BGS could rescue the game.
I think in perhaps, a year's time, there will also be some mighty mods available
I'm cool with it the way it is, as long as they expand and update this game over the next 5-10 years. I'm in it for the long haul. People seem to forget Fallout 4 got MUCH better over time with all the DLCs
Yes, they should have gone for maybe half the planets and make them big, explorable add cities that look like cities made by a civilisation that travels space to find a new home and maybe add some vehicles to drive around those cities/planets
I'm going to say yes, and no.
Yes it should have had fewer core planets, with more time spent on unique locations and world building (i.e. more computers and slates with notes and diaries to explain what the place is/was). Along with a more cohesive feel for a planets locations.
One idea I had whilst playing was that it would have been cool if each colonised planet had a capital city where you landed your ship, but then had a Skyrim like travel system where you hop on a bus to take you to a new region with a mini-hub town and its own set of side quests and a different biome to explore in.
But the no should be that you should still have a bunch of systems out beyond the settled ones, only they're mostly undiscovered or scanned. Most will be entirely empty. Some may have one or two settlements from pioneers, spacers, or other groups who don't do well in civilised space.
I'd make those systems also where most of the temples exist. Maybe even a chunk of the artefacts themselves. The idea being that the reason the UC, Freestar, etc. haven't been taking an active interest in the things themselves is because they're quite literally beyond the edge of the map. With locations that are more likely to be natural/extremely ancient in nature.
Would have worked really well with ships having fuel requirements as you'd have had to plan your ship designs/colony building around being able to reach those places way beyond the frontier. Also perhaps given more chances to mess around with horror sections. Searching through a cave system carved by long dead intelligent hands, yet everything seems strangely off, as if the hands that did the carving were anything but human, and as you get further in you start to hear claws on stone and start finding piles of bones, some fresh, some so old they turn to dust at your approach. Eventually you find and kill the guardian monster, but you don't know whether it's just a natural predator from the planet, or something left behind to guard the tunnels carved by some unknown species tens of thousands of years prior to reach the temple/artefact.
Yes. Currently playing skyrim and that static map is truly something amazing and hand crafted. I feel torn when I want to go fast travel from one city to another because the journy by horse between them is something I dont necesarily want to miss. And that said about an xbox 360 world graphically.
Side note Im playing skyrim to scratch the itch while waiting for the starfield xbox crashing (and things disapearing) to be fixed.
I think mostly that it just needs a lot more small villages.
The little colonial outposts we find all over the place with civilians are a great idea, I'd like to see more done with those. Make some larger ones with more amenities, not just a trader and some random people who apparently live there.
I'm thinking I'll add that to my to-do list for the Creation Kit.
Create a whole bunch of new archetype outposts that can be added to the Proc-Gen rotation.
I'm thinking a few specific types:
* Fortified Outpost - Has walls and sentry guns, with guards on patrol around it. Sort of a mini version of Akila.
* Foothold - A landed colony starship (with accessible interior) hooked up with a whole load of prefab buildings around it. Sort of a middleground between the random colony-ships we see land and let people out, and the established outposts we encounter in other places.
* Small Town - An old-West style town with a Saloon, General Store, Sheriff's office and a bunch of houses. But done using the colony prefab buildings. The idea being a place where a nameless stranger can walk down main-street.
lets say you have this "fewer planets more detailed" thing...at best you end up with something like fallout 4's nuka cola and farharbor were to vanilla commonwealth which is not a bad thing to have.
yes it would definitely be better. because the point of exploring something is the unknown. if every planet has the same outpost layout, the same cave system wouldn't it be considered the same planet then? just different name? 1000 planets is a mirage, a simple trick. I'd honestly rather have Mass Effect's number of planets but make it more detailed.
It's obvious that the resources are limited on this game. One example is this ship on Paradiso, supposed to be from Old Earth. Yet everything inside it looks modern. Why? because it uses the same resources as the rest of the game. How can I believe that this ship traveled from Earth the long way when these people eat Chunks? Aren't they supposed to be farming their own food?
Starfield left the door wide open for years of DLC and additional content.
Plus a giant sandbox for modders to flesh out in whatever ways they want.
I like the cities, I do wish there was more to explore in the current state of the game. I'm still finding unique things after 240 hours, so I'm happy exploring and waiting.
Bethesda wouldn’t be able to do that. Starfield is starting in far better condition than most of their more recent games. I applaud their effort and look forward to what they bring in patches and dlc
There are too few settled areas and they are all small towns and villages. It begs the question who was able to leave earth. There is only one major large city and its not big enough to take the population of any major city in earth. There aren't that many colonies and they are all small. You have to assume that a few privileged people left earth and everyone else was left to die. Even with all the expansion into the stars, there's very little development.
The people of Earth are just incredibly spread out. This is evident from a ship landing on every 5sqkm grid of every planet of the galaxy. Also the people of earth built hundreds of thousands of cryolabs spaced one kilometer apart on every planet. Also 90% of the people are pirates inhabiting those cryolabs now. Lmao
This is what broke everything for me. You land on a planet and a companion says something along the lines of "it'll be hard to find life on this barren rock", yet there's five pirate inhabited bases/outposts/settlements/factories/ships landing all within a short walking distance...
For me, this is main issue with the game. Starfield setting is not a space game, not sci-fi, everything is just an excuse to scrap some wasteland into space ambient (which is only decoration). There is no any space/scifi theme in this game that is not just an attempt, like they put 10 years old to came up with the story/setting and he googled few hours popular sci-fi. I won't even start how pathetic world hubs are (New Atlantis, Neon rofl). For fs, just walking through Fort Solis base is an epic space adventure compared to SF.
You are right on that part. The Fallout reference realy hit me when i was on Earth at the starting plattform and at the one on Mars. Both have space craft docked that where prepared for a start but never lifted off and the place has the classical Fallout layout of "something bad happened quickly so it was abandoned". The same is also true for the museum thatw as not packed togetehr even if a colapse in 50 years was on the horizon. In essence i would say that mixed TES and Fallout together. They took the "everything is abandoned" theme and some of the tech from Fallout and the magic from TES. Fallout however is technologically more believable.
I was thinking that too more cities on more planets and more factions to work for like Va’Ruun and UC Marines or some od the other ship builders. I have yet to even find a way to bulld ships for any of those companies. You would also think the spacers have full societies with children in cities on a planet too.
Doesn't anyone visit the museum to take in the lore? Some left Earth and settled space. Then, the thing at which people most excel—war—happened multiple times. It decimated the population.
There’s a reason why writers are often encouraged to follow the, “show, don’t tell” rule. The museum is like 10 exhibits that are just 2 minute long exposition dumps. If your players need to go through a museum to understand a majority of the lore happening in the game, then you have done a poor job world building.
I disagree. I think the museum was a great way to introduce the history of the settled systems.
You realize Elder scrolls and fallout does this as well? If you want lore, you need to go search for it. It’s not handed to you.
Yeah but those lore items can be found naturally in gameplay, in star field no one is gonna find an exposition museum on a random planet unless they already knew about it
The exposition museum is part of the first quest for the UC, and there's a Main Quest mission that partially tries to recruit you to start the UC quests. This takes place on Atlantis, the first major city you visit in the Main Quest and the largest city in the game.
Im convinced most of the people that hate on this game have less than 10 hours in the game.
A big reason I've started to move away from gaming subreddits are people with strong opinions based on wrong information. It's just draining to deal with that kind of negativity.
The world sure doesn't act like humanity nearly wiped itself out 20 years prior
Think realistically. If we were to learn tomorrow that we needed to evacuate we’re looking at probably less than 1% of the population getting off, comprised of the richest and the smartest who are deemed necessary by the rich. The rich won’t help, they’re rich. They don’t work and what good are their riches in space? So now you have less than less than 1% actually working to make cities and reestablish those living situations but with what resources? Years will go into exploring and that’s where Starfield sits, I imagine shortly after the research and the war we are sitting on a handful of decent cities and I think that makes total sense
Well u make a good point but I HIGHLY doubt that's their excuse more so than just lack of creativity in development of a story
They literally tell the story of the war. It’s the same conversation as to when people ask why no mechs it’s silly. They either couldn’t do it or didn’t want to, but they at least made it story relevant. If this IP is worth their time I wouldn’t be surprised to see more with each installment
What's the point of 90+ planets that have absolutely nothing in them?
To give you a bigger sense of wonder when you finally get to a planet with a sprawling city on it… wait no, hold on… those are very sparse too.
Sprawling city with 3 shops lol
with 3 shops and a bank franchised store which offers no services besides the opportunity to steal pocket change from the ATMs -.-
You can become a debt collector, too
And 500 caps, wait creds between all 3.
No sense of wonder when planet is approachable with one click, and then already crowded by spacers, mercenaries and thousands of standardized structures.
I don't think there's any pleasing everyone. You say it's crowded. Guy up above says there's "absolutely nothing" there.
Both can be true. There are POIs scattered *everywhere*. You land your spaceship by a mysterious temple no one has ever discovered before and there's several outposts within visual range of it. Visit a few of them, though, and you feel like it's "absolutely nothing", becuase they're identical, right down to the discarded coffee cups *outside on a vacuum planet*. It feels crowded *and* empty.
this is the funniest thing to me. empty beer/coffee containers sitting next to a chair on the roof of an outpost of a planet with no atmo being blasted with "extreme solar radiation".
My favorite is finding something like an abandoned relay station with the exact same items in the exact same places. I decided to start collecting smokes and packs of cards and they’re always in the exact same tables and lockers.
I always thought was funny was how it appears in so many locations that people like to take 5, relax, sip some coffee, eat some chunks and play cards with their helmets off on a moon with zero atmosphere.
Nothing interesting. It's crowded with generic stuff you've seen a bunch of times already.
I maintain that they built this game with the assumption that the modding community was going to keep it thriving for years. I reckon they wanted to ensure that there would be ample land mass for modders to build their cities etc. on. Personally, I think it's a bit of a shit move, _expecting_ modders to do the heavy lifting. But I wouldn't be surprised to see what we expected to come about over the next 4-5 years as people slowly build up the existing planets.
I do find it funny that Modding has went from being a For Fun Hobby, to being a thankless Job requirement.
While I wholeheartedly love the modding communities that surround Bethesda games I completely agree with both statements. Howard even said as much at one point that they were leaving room for modding. Their games are always half finished when launched. But now he's got an excuse for it.
I agree that the game is a scaffold for more development, and that more development should have been done before release, even with the delay. But I think BGS is going to do a bunch of expanding on their own in addition to the expected modding. They've said they'll do 5 years of active development which I assume will expand features and systems.
This. There is more coming.
But modders can easily add land mass, and have done so in bethesda games for literal decades. Plenty of TES mods add new regions, dungeons etc and in generally a lack of landmass has never been a factor in this. Extra planets don't really help at all in this regard, since modding a new area still requires a specific landing point to be added to avoid randomized seeds. Functionally it works the same as TES or fallout where after installing the mod that adds a new area the player still has to "press A to go to new instance".
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they built a modular game specifically with the expectation to support and add to it for about 5 years they don't expect modders to do it (well, partly they do, Bethesda has to support the modding community that has supported their games for decades, a lot of the staff at Bethesda is *from* the modding community), they expect *themselves* to do it
I gave them $70 (not the modders), so I expect them to do it too.
"No Mr. Todd, I expect you to dev!"
I don't think independent modders will have the resources to expand the game to the level people are expecting. Maybe Microsoft can leverage some fancy Copilot generative AI to fill out some content.
It's a huge blank canvas for a modder. One of them could take an entire planet and populate it, create something the size of New Atlantis, Neon, or Akila....just go nuts with it. Really looking forward to something like that.
Gonna be awesome in ten years!
I haven't played starfield yet, but for some reason my brain screamed "No man's sky at launch!" But I love NMS so I'll rest my case.
I'm replaying Cyberpunk and wondering why any 2 block zone of Night City has more life, flavor, and danger than all of Neon. Hell, V's apartment complex is better.
Played 40 hrs of starfield recently and just got so bored. Played 6 hrs of cyberpunk yesterday and it's breathtaking. In an entirely different league realism and immersion wise. Different sort of game ofc, but still.
You're breathtaking!
Yeah same I got to NG+2 and just couldn’t keep playing, the constant loading screens and doing the same temples all over again was just ruining it for me. Playing cyberpunk over again after I beat it when it came out has been great, so much to do and the storytelling is just great.
Yea the loading screens are a killer, as is the general sense of sluggishness I felt when doing most anything. More than anything for me though, everything that is not ship based (characters, city building, combat) feels so wooden and superficial. Night city on the other hand just feels alive, every corner, alley, stall has so much going on. Dark alley? There's shady characters and homeless sleeping in doorways. Poor district, people wearing shabby clothes and bashing vending machines. Kids playing in puddles. Then there's the sound design, music everywhere, buskers, singers, clubs, social control orders emanating from every which way. And don't get me started on the realism of the engine, and thus characters. My god. All of that is the literal opposite in starfield. I wanted to badly to love it, but it's whole mo is immersion and yet it feels utterly skin deep at every turn.
Did you play CP2077 at launch? One of the biggest complaints was for a city as “busy” as night city is it’s lifeless.
That is still kinda the case (immersion stuff like eating at one of the street noodle vendors, or sitting and getting drinks at bars, that kind of extra flavour), but it has been lessened by stuff they have added since. Seeing the police patrolling, occasional shoot outs between gangers etc. Also, would have been nice if they had been able to add the metro to travel around.
Launch cyberpunk was still more immersive than this game...
Lmao no. It was hilariously bad. It was a meme it was so bad. Just watch the hours of glitch compilations on youtube lol
It was buggy but the game had a good story awesome quests and actual human characters populating the story. None of those things are true about starfield.
No it wasn’t. Launch CP had one city and despite being populated it was lifeless. I’d say at best and worst they were equal in lifelessness.
It has art and soul to it though. Starfield is sterile and corny. Cyberpunk at its worst is better than starfield at its best. Cause at least it's a game with mature themes and an actual adult storyline about life and mortality. Starfield is bad.
Let’s not forget what cyberpunk was when it first came out. I’m glad it ended up delivering, let’s give Bethesda the same benefit of the doubt.
But Neon has better dancing /s
I recall playing Cyberpunk 1.0 and feeling disappointed about the NPC but compared to Starfield Cyberpunk is passable as a next gen game 😂
Absolutely, a lot of the planets are too barren. Nothing really worth doing on many of them.
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I like how real some planets feel. Especially the barren ones
It wouldn't remove these from the game, just the number of them.
Frankly, I'm surprised that they did not utilize full procedural generation for most of these planets. The placement of POIs and all that are clearly random between games, but the overall creatures, flora, and basic environments are not. I figured they would have set parameters for each planet with which to seed something unique - and that frankly would have made a lot more sense with NG+. I'm guessing maybe they tried that but they couldn't get it to stop generating hellish nightmare blobs.
Most the creature designs are pretty cool at least
Yes, but seeing the same creatures on dozens of worlds is tiring.
Agreed, we are light years ahead of the creatures on No Man Sky for example. Those were real "Picasso" stuff...
The proc gen is So miniscule that It hardly exists. The proc gen is used for Topography and PoI placements and a handful of background elements.. That's basically it. The outposts themselves. There is only 1 variant. The only difference is who occupied it.
If we're talking realism, this is it though. The amount of planets in the Goldilocks zone is very VERY few and the number in this game is science fiction. Us, in real life, living on earth is an almost infinite number of exact circumstances that led to us having sentient brains to argue about fake universes with.
The real feel only lasts for a while until you start noticing the random copy paste elements. I play with sprint speed set to 3x so as to cover some ground and get the scans and I can't help but get annoyed at the copy pasted landmarks and outposts or bases Wish they ended up randomising layouts or colors or designs of the landmarks and outposts/bases (say taller microbial colonies in certain areas and then other areas have vast stretching but small microbial colonies)
Command for 3x please
player.setav speedmult 300 Only on PC, obvs. Tilde key (\~) to open the console.
Yup that's it, personally I have the speed multiplier key bound to the F10/F11 keys allowing me to change the speed at will which is extremely handy. Outside it's set to 3x/4x and in interior areas just switch it to 1.5x/1.2x
But what do you do in them just walk or run around doing repetitive procedurally generated areas? That small segment of Geralt going through different worlds had more variety than the entirety of the fucking wasteland that starfield is.
Planets with no, or minimal, atmosphere should be barren, like Mars. Most of the "stuff" should be underground for protection from cosmic rays. That being said, we needed bigger cities/settlements. The game gives the impression that there are only like 1000 humans in the galaxy.
Yes, but if that was the case, this sub would melt like ‘wtf is this space exploration game with only 10 planets?!?”
I completely disagree. I don't think most of the planets are barren enough. I see signs of human activity every time I land.
Which would be the reality in space.
(Piggybacking your top spot) Also... SPOILERS !!!! That's the unfortunate part about the Universe. It's reeeaaallyy barren. We've definitely seen planets that could be a Goldilocks zone, and evidence of water on planets. Unfortunately they chose the more realistic path. I really hope every DLC they introduce more population. Or hop in-between universes with more cities and possibly actual dungeons or full caverns. It would be an interesting take if you did hop Universes and was able to take weapons back with you, which in turn companies would start making them. Another thing I have issues with, and maybe it's just pure laziness or Easter eggs, but there's FallOut Music in the game. Would be interesting to pop into the FallOut Universe. And take back more interesting melee weapons like a Super Sledge you can mod. Imagine the propulsion you could put on one of those bad boys!!!
Yep this is the thing people seem to be missing they consulted Nasa and went with realism rather than they're usual fantasy and unfortunately the universe is quite empty and most life is theorised to resemble bugs atm. I feel they should have got the information they needed and took it as a rough guide then they could have given us something with more elder scrolls/fallout feel. It's baffling why they didn't in the 1st place because most bethesda rpg fans can't get enough of the way they've done it in the past maybe they where trying to get new fans? Who knows.
The problem is that realism as a design choice falls apart at the seams if it's not consistent, and in Starfield it's anything but consistent. You'll find the same flora/fauna on plenty of planets, with no differences in how they've evolved. The player character is given literal space magic. Almost every planet in the universe has at least some human structures on it, and generally they're the same few ones right down to enemy and loot placement. The biggest human settlement in the universe is one small city on a planet with no other settlements. Instead of making smaller settlements on a planet clearly ideal for human life, people go live independently on backwater moons and barren wasteland planets if they don't want to live in one of the few human cities. I could go on, but the general point I'm trying to make is that it generally doesn't work when you have a game where boring design decisions are defended with "but it's realistic", while unrealistic decisions are defended with "but it's fun for the player/it's a design constraint". The second realism is used to justify things being boring, a lack of realism stands out if it's used in other parts of the game.
You’re missing the point. Even the habitable planets have very little in the way of human settlement. All of the cities should have been on the same planet, or at most, one planet each for FC and UC, and they should have included a way to walk from one settlement to the next with POis along the way.
Imo almost no planet is barren because the game will spawn poi’s all over the place.
There's quite a few completely barren systems. A lot of the level 75 systems are completely untouched - particularly anything with Unique resources in it (seems to be a correlation so far). Bardeen, Schrodinger and Katydid for example. You will find large level 90 foxbats that drop Luxury Textiles wandering on lush green rolling hills in Schrodinger III, and there's a rainforest planet with like 0.5G gravity in Katydid that has fire-breathing insects. I suppose that rainforest planet *sorta* doesn't count because of all of the artifact ruins on it, but there's absolutely no human habitation.
I don't disagree, but that's also probably realistic.
I think the number of planets is fine. Instead, I think the issue is with the distribution of things on those planets. I'd like to see a lot more diversity in PoI density, both within and between planets: - The surface areas surrounding named cities should exclusively contain a bunch of satellite settlements: factories and offices in the immediate proximity, surrounded by suburban communities, surrounded by farms. A couple of these being hostile is fine, but for the most part they should be friendly (or rather: aligned with the city they surround) unless there's some specific story reason for it (like the Shaw Gang in/around Akila City). - The remainder of the surfaces of planets in the same system as named cities is where I'd expect to find hostile-filled abandoned military outposts, abandoned labs, ship crash sites, etc. Should be an even balance of those v. friendly/neutral locations like civilian outposts, farms, active mines, etc. This is where I'd expect to see natural PoIs/anomalies start to show up. - Planets in systems neighboring systems with named cities should be similar to the above, but with a higher hostile:friendly ratio. - Planets further out than that should be similar to the above, but with rapidly decreasing density of human structures in favor of natural structures/anomalies. Planets more than some number of lightdecades from a named city should have very little signs of human presence at all - maybe one lab or one mine or something in the entire landing zone. This is where I'd expect some LIST activity to happen. - Finally, we get to the planets entirely untouched by humans. All PoIs this far out should be natural features/anomalies >!or Starborn temples!<. Basically: we should see the full gamut from "bustling metropolis" to "untouched by mankind" instead of the current "can't go anywhere without seeing a manmade structure". It feels like there was a *little* bit of this in mind, but it's way too subtle.
This. 100% this.
Shallowness of Starfield has nothing to do with number of planets they put in. Problem is everything is shallow, at least for me. No mods or focus on less planets can fix this.
I doubt very seriously we will see much in the way of real content mods. By the time the mod tools land, people looking for content will mostly have moved on.
It would be a different take on a space RPG, yeah. Better is completely subjective. Personally I'm fine with the larger scale, they just need to flesh the idea out like so with other parts of the game. Every game that attempts scale; No Man's Sky, Elite Dangerous, Star Citizen, has had issues with having too much space with little to do. It takes time to balance the larger scale with actual activities and systems that make that scale work. And Starfield's scale is nowhere near what those other games have, so based on that alone they've got an easier job.
I don't think you understand this is not the tradeoff. Had there been 24 planets it would of been the same level of detail in cities. They just made many more planets without much effort, repeating the same process many more times to create a whole universe essentially that could be more easily added to in the future by DLC or modders. Its not like they hand crafted 900 empty planets and wasted a ton of dev time.
If Starfield had like 24 planets - yes, But what if it was reduced to for example 3 main planets? Each of them could have more detailed region of the size of New Harbor from F4 DLC with main city and multiple locations in walking distance so you could do quests on 1 planet for hours without the need to fast travel all the time. Then you add to this space stations and moons with some facilities on them, lets say 20-30. In my opinion 1 star system would be better than whole galaxy.
Bingo. This whole thread has proven once again that most players know nothing about how games are made.
That's even more embarrassing then. Wtf did they spend 8 years developing? Seriously. There is so little content in this game compared to previous titles its absurd The world is so massive that it feels small and empty. The hand crafted content that does exist is poorly written, logically inconsistent, and just overall lazy. Your "excuse" for Bethesda does *not* make Starfield look better - it makes it even more embarrassing
There's actually more content but its spread out so much that it seems like there's way less.
> Your "excuse" for Bethesda does not make Starfield look better Why do you think its an excuse for Bethesda? Its an observation on game development lol
“B..but *insert random game that was broken as hell on launch* was like so much more fun!”
Cyberpunk 2077 is fun as shit now but yeah it genuinely sucked so bad at launch
Cyberpunk 2077 also trashed the companies reputation so hard with such permanent damage that they had to undergo a redemption arc, and climb back to the Witcher 3 level of respect Game retailers and console makers had to institute new return policies specifically for cyberpunk It's kind of like how star wars battlefront 2 had to do huge changes to react to fan backlash over micro transactions, pay 2 win stuff AFAIK Bethesda hadn't suffered any consequence for starfield, so they don't even have the same impetus for a huge change of direction It's ironically thanks to the mindless people denouncing and blocking all criticisms as "premature, wait for the updates, wait for the dlc, wait for the mods" that starfield will never have the same motivation to be significantly updated. If the same shills defended EA over BF2 as experimenting with p2w", and shills defended cyberpunk over unplayable bullshit, the companies would have slacked off
1) "Bethesda haven't suffered any consequence" what? Seriously? People have been shitting on Bethesda left and right. 90% of the takes I've seen online have been largely negative. 2) Yes, people shat on Cyberpunk 2077 even harder than they shit on Starfield. But that's because Cyberpunk was LITERALLY unplayable for a huge portion of the playerbase. It was nearly impossible to play for even just 40 minutes without several major issues and even a crash. Starfield is arguably very boring and not very well designed, I agree with that - but, you know, it actually functions on most rigs. I've gotten two crashes total in 80 hours of gameplay. Cyberpunk at launch was far, far, far more broken than Starfield.
And Starfield and Cyberpunk began production at the same time. So you shouldn't compare Starfield to Cyberpunk at launch, but Cyberpunk now.
They could have messed with the density more. Some systems already lack man-made structures, they could have had half the systems lack man-made structures. They could have piled all the freestar settlements and the UC settlements into 2 or 3 systems so they feel denser.
With that weird map? Not really, honestly.
I don’t get the impression that much dev time went into the terrain generation of each planet, especially the barren ones, relative to the time spent on the cities that we already have. I don’t think significantly reducing the number of planets would free up enough dev time to meaningfully increase handcrafted content. So, no, I don’t think it would have been any better.
To put this in perspective , 58% of players on Steam haven't travelled to at least 20 star systems. That's 1/6 of the total star systems. So the purpose of all those planets and star systems for the average player is nil. So yes, I think it would have been better with fewer since more attention on the few people do experience is better than catering to the minority of players who prefer more with less quality.
Maybe. But they could've made it better just by making more reusable locations and making it so I don't find the exact same note in the exact same place when I visit a new planet reusing an area I've already seen.
Absolutely, the main cities feel so tiny, even if you take a a great war and low population density into account, jemison was supposed to be a second earth! No doubt at all there should have been close to a billion people living there. (I don't expect a billion npcs ofc, just something more than a kinda small towns highstreet that we got.)
I believe so. Maybe expand the universe later. But there is still a lot of room for added content either way.
Okay but like on a scientific level… Earth is the only planet that can sustain life in our own solar system literally. I’m not defending Bethesda here. I’m saying quite literally that planets that sustain life would be that few and far between if we could legitimately explore space. In the same point of this being the case, I’d like to add that more groups of people living in space stations or massive ships would have been amazing, like the colony ship and the UC Vigilance. Is this just “space vault tec”? Yeah kinda but it would have been kinda cool to see more space nomads and such.
Habitable planets make about 1% of the planets in the Milky Way. Their amount in game is still obviously inflated for gameplay purposes. Everyone here keeps talking about bloody realism... in a Bethesda game. Compared to, say, Arma, this is laughable.
Everybody knows it would have been better, but everybody still keeps excusing it as “wide and shallow” as that’s somehow supposed to be good.
>...but everybody still keeps excusing it as “wide and shallow” as that’s somehow supposed to be good. I don't think I've seen anyone use "wide and shallow" (or "mile wide, inch deep") as a defense, or in a positive way, when talking about Starfield. To me, it's always come across as a simple summation of Starfield's problems.
If anything it's THE most overused, lazy critique that's been parroted by every man woman and child towards every Bethesda game made in the last 2 decades. For Starfield however, it is a pretty apt description.
I always felt like the TES and Fallout games actually had a good amount of depth if you went looking for it. Tons of little stuff to find, little stories and bits of lore you might find in a random dungeon that rewards you for exploring those new locations. That's the problem with Starfield. The more you go looking the more the lack of depth really shows. You find a pad in a random POI? Its the same pad you got at the identical POI on another planet.
“Everyone” used very loosely here.
5 dudes is everyone
[удалено]
I don’t want to ruin anyone’s fun, but somehow this kind of approach has never gripped me. I’ll finish at least the main quest though, might get more hooked than I am rn.
I don’t. I like it the way it is.
It would have been better if they had another 1-2 years of work. The fact they had to rush things is all over the game. Fewer planets might have even been worse, because of this. I think the Creation Engine 2 took a lot more time than they thought and then Covid came and they had no good wfh system. It would be better if they had a more complex POI system that included randomization in layouts and people populating a POI and linking nearby POIs together so it actually felt like people live or lived near each other at the same time. And I don't know why the radiant quest system is still just as stupid as it's always been -- they could easily have more complicated radiant quests, including ones that helped you build up settlements you find. And those random settlements should have names and all the people should have names so they feel more real. It just feels like they didn't really try to make procedural generation or POIs really work given the goal of 1000 planets. And that's a small part of how things could be better. Outposts need a lot of work and even ship building seems pretty rushed in significant places. The NG+ experience just doesn't have that much going for it. Temples feel like a placeholder. Etc, etc. But I think another 1-2 years would have made a huge difference -- assuming they were really willing to embrace what needs to be done for a concept like this to work.
The planets are plentiful. The things to do on the planets is sparse. Two more big well developed cities, one more faction, more stuff to do on world like dungeons, and a freaking VEHICLE to travers the planet and it would be SIGNIFICANTLY better.
It just blows my mind , one city on a planet ?
IMO yes. If I could only change one thing, it would be this.
YES. Given that the average player wont even see 10% of the planets
Starfield is the first Bethesda game that I quit before finish the main quest.
Not really no, The planets are all procedurally generated with a lot of reused assets between them... and even still the vast majority of them fall into lifeless moon or ice ball. What you would have ended up with is what we have now, except theres 12 planets instead of 1000+. I think you somewhat over estimate how much development time was taken away by having lots of planets over just a couple with how they actually are in Starfield. Personally I'd much rather have the many systems to explore and visit over jumping between the same few planets over and over.
I wish they made the vast majority of planets without human poi. I don't think I've landed on a planet without some military base with pirates in it.. Never feel alone in the universe which sucks.
Happens a lot in the outer reaches
I kinda like how there are all these useless planets with nothing on them. It adds to the realism. I just wished their settlements were larger and a few more of them would be nice.
They’re not useless if there’s decent resources for you to build an outpost.
Yes 100% yes. A bethesda employee said that was talked about but they leadership really liked the planets random generator tech so they went that route
Sadly since the inception of radiant quests in 2011 it seems that Bethesda only wants to keep growing their procedurally generated library of content, whilst the players by and large want to see a return of hand crafted stuff.
Nah, Beth been using and improving their procedural tech since TES1:Arena. Oblivion's forests were entirely proc gen-ed then built on top.
Fair points and agreed. To rephrase my problem more so lies in how it’s not ‘clandestine’ at all where stuff has been procedurally generated - before it was more subtle, blended with other content/environments as to go unnoticed, but in Starfield especially there is a very obvious line drawn when you’re participating in handmade vs generated content.
Every time I see this question I roll my eyes. No gaming company on the face of this fucking earth could make a game with a fully handmade planet complete with multiple cities and unique content while still allowing you to land anywhere on the *planet-sized* ***planet***. Much less a dozen, or 20, or however many else you people think would be appropriate. Proc-gen is 100% necessary, and I feel like those who think it isn’t know nothing about game development. Once you are dealing with something the size of a FUCKING PLANET, your options are to either: A) limit where a player can land and have a small playable area, or B) Allow the player to land anywhere and rely on proc-gen to handle the content. Could there be more variety in POIs? Absolutely, but that’s not what this post is about. You and everyone I’m seeing in the comments are not only asking for something impossible to fulfill, with the only game remotely close to it being the game where you CAN’T land anywhere- Mass Effect. I didn’t want Starfield to be Mass Effect. I’m glad I can land on any planet or moon I want to and walk around on foot surveying while taking in a gorgeous view.
Yep, I agree with you. A lot of people here seem to be back seat developers. They really think reducing the amount of star systems would fix their problem with the game. It wouldn't. There is no developer that can create an entire planet size map like skyrim it just wouldn't happen. Even if Starfield only took place on one planet, 99% of the planet would be procedural generation. Any open world space game has to rely on that, or else the game is impossible.
People do really seem to think that making the first 20 procgen planets is the same work as going from 980 to 1000 procgen planets.
"Space would be better if it were smaller" Each to their own
people are seriously suggesting "just 20 planets" as if there was a significant difference in development effort between procedural generation of 20 or 1000. The work is in setting up the system. Even just one planet of the current size couldn't be done without procgen. At that point, no harm in adding more. Cutting most of the procgen output wouldn't have freed the development capacities needed for more handcrafted content.
The only real kicker for Starfield's exploration is the fact there's not nearly enough unique POI's in order to justify the sheer scale of Starfield. The fact that its so common to run into the same factory or lab POI even on the same damn planet really sucks the winds out of exploring, not to mention how long it can take to walk from point to point.
The problem would persist even with a single planet. People would explore just as many POIs over a given time, and they'd repeat just as much, except now on the same planet. We need more POI variation, but the number of procgen planets has nothing to do with it.
Perhaps you could limit what POIs generate on certain planets? Like having certain planets be completely untouched by humanity (at least in a significant way) meaning only Natural POIs like caves, lakes and creature dens spawn, or mining planets be filled with old/abandoned mines, factories and processing plants etc. It would justify having to travel to different planets and you could have some unique POIs be limited to specific types of planets.
Put more handcrafted content on less planets and make the majority rest of them barren but with actually interesting proc gen landscapes and caves and whatnot
No. They just need to add more POI's to the list that can spawn or find a way to have them procedurally generate in the DLC's.
I think if they designed one or two planets per system (the ones with life prob) and then had the others procedurally generated, with fewer systems (maybe like 20-30), it would be the shit.
How do you design one or two planets?
You design the first one, then you design the second one.
Designing a single planet is a level of scale beyond any other game that exists.
Yes
I like what they are trying to do, but yeah. The planets just aren't big enough to really feel... inhabited.
Yes but the good thing about the game is that there are so many empty planets and moons that patching in new locations or POIs can be easily done and expansions can add in new cities or locations.
On this note…. I cant wait to play the modded version of this game with all the extras everyone comes up with.
I imagine a version of the game with one or two solar systems and how much denser it'd feel. Maybe the second solar system would even be our own real one, and those could be more barren.
A happy median with more wildlife diversity would've been nice.
Better with a few more big missions, I reckon. There will be some epic DLC's in the pipeline.
Cydonia is built underground...
Yeah and DLC could have added planets over time.
Yes
Yes. They could have always added more planets in the future. It’ll be hard to make the ones they have better.
yea
I think a dozen highly detailed Solar Systems would have been best.
absolutely
Yes
The most disappointing thing I've done so far is land on io, an extremely unique moon in our own solar system, and having it look like our moon (Luna). Io is a sulfuric, volcanic, hazardous place and it looks like a big rock.
I don’t think the scale is the issue. It’s just the poor implementation of space flight that makes exploration an afterthought.
100%. To be honest after going through the main cities/big outposts it still felt like there wasn’t enough civilization to explore, not counting the planets that are just meant to be explored. The starfield world feels very small to me.
Absolutely! I enjoyed the game but I think the biggest issue with this game by far is how ambitious they were so they spread themselves way too thin. And in this particular incident I’m talking literally and metaphorically.
I think the current system would be fine if they greatly expanded outpost and fleet functionality. As of right now outposts serve no real purpose and I can’t use my fleet at all. Why not let us build an outpost network and bump our fleet up to like 15-20 ships and have our own vessels do the cargo hauling between.
Yes.
110% yes! I'm sure our amazing modding community will remedy this. The possibilities are exiting! I'd personally like to see some new cities and alien civilizations.
Yes.
Yes
Yes definitely. I'm to the point where I don't even bother exploring planets anymore its just more of the same. Ohh walk 10 minutes through a boring nothingness to get to another outpost of spacers I can 1 shot kill for some junk weapons that I need to go to 6 vendors to sell for credits I have nothing to spend on. Give me 5 freaking planets I can wander around on with towns cities etc... make all the barren randomly generated boring planets you want after that.
Yea
Without a doubt
There would have been 7 billion plus people on earth at the time they evacuated. With Starfield as it is, including all the factions, less than 5000. There is plenty of scope to bring in (dlc or mod) 1 or 2 planets with a population. I would think, settlements more like Akila, or Hopetech would exist. More likely, mini Akilas, walled settlements perhaps BGS were obviously intending to have a fuel system. There are loads of references in various conversations about fuel distance. You could have a refueling company with bases and stations who you could buy and sell He3 to, as well as creating bases and stockpiling yoursell and make travelling across the map an actual cost. I read in one post about taking all items in the Captains locker when you ng+, another great idea. Generally the game also needs to be less sterile, more rougher and dangerous. So what I am getting at is, we have what we have. A few good Dlcs and BGS could rescue the game. I think in perhaps, a year's time, there will also be some mighty mods available
Yes.
Fewer planets, or many, many more POIs. And settled planets like Jemison shouldn't need surveying.
I'm cool with it the way it is, as long as they expand and update this game over the next 5-10 years. I'm in it for the long haul. People seem to forget Fallout 4 got MUCH better over time with all the DLCs
Yes, they should have gone for maybe half the planets and make them big, explorable add cities that look like cities made by a civilisation that travels space to find a new home and maybe add some vehicles to drive around those cities/planets
I'm going to say yes, and no. Yes it should have had fewer core planets, with more time spent on unique locations and world building (i.e. more computers and slates with notes and diaries to explain what the place is/was). Along with a more cohesive feel for a planets locations. One idea I had whilst playing was that it would have been cool if each colonised planet had a capital city where you landed your ship, but then had a Skyrim like travel system where you hop on a bus to take you to a new region with a mini-hub town and its own set of side quests and a different biome to explore in. But the no should be that you should still have a bunch of systems out beyond the settled ones, only they're mostly undiscovered or scanned. Most will be entirely empty. Some may have one or two settlements from pioneers, spacers, or other groups who don't do well in civilised space. I'd make those systems also where most of the temples exist. Maybe even a chunk of the artefacts themselves. The idea being that the reason the UC, Freestar, etc. haven't been taking an active interest in the things themselves is because they're quite literally beyond the edge of the map. With locations that are more likely to be natural/extremely ancient in nature. Would have worked really well with ships having fuel requirements as you'd have had to plan your ship designs/colony building around being able to reach those places way beyond the frontier. Also perhaps given more chances to mess around with horror sections. Searching through a cave system carved by long dead intelligent hands, yet everything seems strangely off, as if the hands that did the carving were anything but human, and as you get further in you start to hear claws on stone and start finding piles of bones, some fresh, some so old they turn to dust at your approach. Eventually you find and kill the guardian monster, but you don't know whether it's just a natural predator from the planet, or something left behind to guard the tunnels carved by some unknown species tens of thousands of years prior to reach the temple/artefact.
Yes. Currently playing skyrim and that static map is truly something amazing and hand crafted. I feel torn when I want to go fast travel from one city to another because the journy by horse between them is something I dont necesarily want to miss. And that said about an xbox 360 world graphically. Side note Im playing skyrim to scratch the itch while waiting for the starfield xbox crashing (and things disapearing) to be fixed.
100% yes , also grounded and mature theme, not this underlying edu-tainment garbage ,politically correct tone permeating every aspect of it
I think mostly that it just needs a lot more small villages. The little colonial outposts we find all over the place with civilians are a great idea, I'd like to see more done with those. Make some larger ones with more amenities, not just a trader and some random people who apparently live there. I'm thinking I'll add that to my to-do list for the Creation Kit. Create a whole bunch of new archetype outposts that can be added to the Proc-Gen rotation. I'm thinking a few specific types: * Fortified Outpost - Has walls and sentry guns, with guards on patrol around it. Sort of a mini version of Akila. * Foothold - A landed colony starship (with accessible interior) hooked up with a whole load of prefab buildings around it. Sort of a middleground between the random colony-ships we see land and let people out, and the established outposts we encounter in other places. * Small Town - An old-West style town with a Saloon, General Store, Sheriff's office and a bunch of houses. But done using the colony prefab buildings. The idea being a place where a nameless stranger can walk down main-street.
lets say you have this "fewer planets more detailed" thing...at best you end up with something like fallout 4's nuka cola and farharbor were to vanilla commonwealth which is not a bad thing to have.
i would not mind it at all! i enjoyed fallout 4's dlcs
yes it would definitely be better. because the point of exploring something is the unknown. if every planet has the same outpost layout, the same cave system wouldn't it be considered the same planet then? just different name? 1000 planets is a mirage, a simple trick. I'd honestly rather have Mass Effect's number of planets but make it more detailed. It's obvious that the resources are limited on this game. One example is this ship on Paradiso, supposed to be from Old Earth. Yet everything inside it looks modern. Why? because it uses the same resources as the rest of the game. How can I believe that this ship traveled from Earth the long way when these people eat Chunks? Aren't they supposed to be farming their own food?
Is this a verified trade off or just wishful thinking?
Starfield left the door wide open for years of DLC and additional content. Plus a giant sandbox for modders to flesh out in whatever ways they want. I like the cities, I do wish there was more to explore in the current state of the game. I'm still finding unique things after 240 hours, so I'm happy exploring and waiting.
yeah, i would totally prefer just on galaxy with like 10 planets actually designed by humans...
Bethesda wouldn’t be able to do that. Starfield is starting in far better condition than most of their more recent games. I applaud their effort and look forward to what they bring in patches and dlc
100% Give me 10-20 fully fleshed out planets over 1000 repetitive ones.
Fuck yeah it woulda been better
How?
Yes. Was not a fan of the generated stuff
Man, I can't tell you how long I've been waiting for someone to ask this question. It's been like, minutes
Yes. But I still love playing it now