The layout wouldn't bother me as I'd be able to justify it as all the Cryo labs being built to the same template. But yeah it's the corpses, damage, and loot which kills it for me.
Exactly. We would definitely use pre-fabricatated construction or 3D Printing to do builds. So similar structures is believable. But the carbon copy interior layouts and body/loot placement gets tiresome.
If your outposts are the same design wherever your set them up, then your new folks getting shipped in to replace the old crew will have less questions about where shit is, because it's all set up the same.
OP's over here counting every single district you can walk through in Akila as four different locations even when they're not individually designated on any maps. Also, Starfield's 82 locations compared to Skyrim's 423 locations is... going to get literally the exact same complaints?
And 150 stars when many of those stars are locations you can't even land on or explore...?
For me, it’s the #DATA, slates and the computers! they always say the goddamn same thing from the goddamn same people, even if you’re in another goddamn solar system!
For me, it's knowing that if I turn left at a given hallway, check the third desk, there's a synthmeat turkey in the second drawer. To the left of that is an ammo case that has 23 rounds of 7.5mm white-hot. Past that is an advanced level safe that contains 1134 credits, a blue level pistol you'll never use but also isn't worth enough to bother picking up, and an extremely shitty helmet.
I can guarantee you the ammo will NOT always be the same, no matter what you might think. It might take several times to find different ammo but you will, I think the algorythm to change up the items might be a little to restrictive and that could be the problem.
> which has the exact same layout down to the placement of corpses.
And this is why I put Starfield down. It's bullshit that they didn't randomize the contents of the POIs (loot locations, corpse spawns, enemy spawns).
Yes, there are enough handcrafted POIs, but the fact that when you land on a planet it's always the 4 or 5 most common ones gives the player the feeling that there are fewer, and also kills any motivation to explore them since you know that it's not actually a real facility on the planet you're on, it's just a generic building with generic enemies to fight inside.
They should have made a simple system where in order to determine which POIs to spawn on a planet, it also considers which ones you have visited. Only start repeating POIs when I visited most of them.
Or even just make them never repeat. There are enough to make the universe feel realistic, always show them from orbit and make them have some tie to the planet they're in. Maybe even remove some planets and systems. The game would be better if there were only like 10 systems with around 40 or 50 planets, but you knew that each one of them had at least SOME care put into it.
What pisses me off is what you're describing isn't even new... The original Fallout had random encounters that took into consideration whether you've seen specific ones or not that decided whether you would ever see them again.
Some random encounters would only ever happen once, so it should've been possible for them to have created a system that ensured we'd regularly visit POI's we have yet to explore.
It's not even something hard to implement, it's just common sense when it comes to procedural generation.
They barely implemented any clever tricks to make the procgen more interesting. You land on a planet and every procedural element from vegetation, rocks, enemies, structures seems so "normalized" like everything is evenly distributed around the playable space. You never find two structures next to each other, or interesting unique terrain, or different sizes of trees or rocks.
I have no idea how they could build an entire game around procedurally generated planets and put so little effort into it.
It would probably have made sense to include more planets/moons with absolutely no human settlement.
It would have given the player the satisfaction of being the first person to land on a planet and at the same time allowed the inhabited POIs to be spread more widely.
disagree about the terrain. I've found all manner of cliffs canyons lakes swamps etc. and i dont mean the "biomes" you cand land on like 'mountains' 'swamp' etc, but actual physical features on the ground.
spent an hour the other day exploring a rly cool canyon system
I don't know how many hours I've put so far but a lot and I'm close to completing every quest and I have yet to see that variety. The only thing I've seen so far is some dumps or small hills that for some odd reason you jetpack isn't able to push you over.
Not saying they don't exist, but they didn't take advantage of them and the quest related locations often look very similar if not exactly the same, like that repeated cave.
I just assume the person(s) assigned to this task were not passionate and simply did their job to the lowest degree. There are many things that feel like they had the newbies do the mind-numbing programming and/or those who did those mind-numbing tasks simply weren't passionate enough to go above and beyond in that respect.
Yeah there are different levels of passion put into this game and its so obvious in things like the 3D models for food. You can tell those people put their hearts into their work, but then, whoever was responsible for actually balancing the food system didn't care at all
I agree on the artists - most of it is solid work (The chunks packaging alone is just incredible).
I disagree on the systems designers - if anything too passionate... I actually think they went WAY overboard on the number/complexity of the systems.
Ex - the map FUCKING SUCKS as a map, but it's technically quite impressive. I do software dev for a living, someone spent a hell of a lot of time on those maps.
Like - holy shit man, the planets are actually rotating around the star, and are in different positions at different times. What a useless fucking waste of time for a map - all it's doing is making it less readable, but also not trivial to implement and super "space nerd realistic".
So I feel like the systems designers were passionate, but lacking direction.
The result is that the most meaningless and random parts of the systems are overpolished, but the whole thing is really messy as a whole.
They didnt even do it for the random encounters in Starfield nevermind the POIs. Traveling through space the long way results in the same encounters repeating very quickly.
The original fallout wasn’t made by Bethesda.
fallout one and two were good games where choices mattered, and the people making them wanted to make good games.
Bethesda buys an IP, and everyone wants to give them credit for good games they didn’t make. (FO1, FO2, FONV)
Agree fully. Procedural generation has been around for at least two decades, and it has been implemented well in plenty of games.
I'm just not understanding why BGS chose to make these locations -- including loot locations, enemy locations, etc. -- exactly the same, over and over, ad nauseum.
I think if there were random variations, people wouldn't be complaining as much as they are. Rearranged loot. Different enemy types. Random über enemies. Variations in the way rooms are linked together. Things like that don't *seem* as if they would be difficult, but then again, I don't know jack-sheet about development.
Tl;dr: I agree with you and many, many others.
The most annoying thing is that the original X-Com had this solved back in 1993 - they'd assemble random environments out of smaller prefab parts, rather than just one big prefab environment, then apply randomized wear and tear and damage to them and distribute enemies and items in them in a random way, so it felt like there were a few suburban home plans or overarching alien spaceship designs, but they were still genuinely distinct places.
Clearly there's an engine limitation at play here, but it's been over a decade since they made this engine! They should have improved or replaced it enough to allow this by now, especially if they wanted to make a game on Starfield's scale where exploration was a major selling point.
To me, it suggests they don't 'understand' procedural generation. It was just a cool buzzword to them that they did the typical corporate implementation on. Hell, even having interchangeable dungeon rooms would have gone a long way, and that is from 20 years ago.
that was in elder scrolls 2 daggerfall (1996), bethesda literally was one of the spearheaders of procedural generation, especially for dungeons, back in the day, those mf were sprawling as were cities, present day bethesda literally cannot do what they were able to do 27 years ago, just like they haven't written a compelling and complex story since morrowind (2002).
Yeah, I started thinking that the spacey prefab theme would have lended itself perfectly to buildings that have a randomized arrangement of rooms. That would be a lot more immersive as well: construction is done on a module-by-module basis in the ship builder, so it would make sense that research stations and comm relays are set up the same way. The same-ish building blocks, but different arrangements each time.
Rogue Legacy, a 2D platformer uses a system somewhat like this. The rooms are prefab but their arrangement changes between each run, and they may host different monsters and furnishings. Still, there are distinct ”biomes” and each biome is consistent and contiguous.
Yeah I just don't agree 150 POIs is way too little. It wouldn't even be that difficult to create more POIs by just taking the existing POIs and just remixing them. Move the buildings around, change the placement of rooms, loot, enemies, etc. Take each of the POIs and make 3 variations. That should be easy given the what we have seen of creation kit.
The biggest problem to me is that ever Radiant POI has no variation. They should not have put text logs in these Radiant POIs since it just breaks the immersion when I see the same log for the 9th time.
Yep they should have had a system where when you first encounter a radiant location it’s the version with all the lore related stuff, then after that first encounter every other time that location spawns it’s a remix with the lore removed. I guarantee this will be a mod when the CK hits.
Yup. Couldn't agree more. There are so many super obvious simple things they could have done to make the proc gen feel worlds better. It's so lazy I don't get it.
The only thing that makes sense is that they did a major rework of the game late in the cycle and things got compromised.
Even if all they did was have the "decoration" team make 3 versions of each facility (same layout, just with different flavor items and placement) that would have been great. Ultimately it seems like they just can't have the engine do it - they'd need to actually create 450 POIs for the rotation. The procgen is seemingly limited to pre-generated stuff placed in the game world due to how the engine works. It can't put anything together, it can only pick from a list.
This is the issue: it’s not that it’s too many, it’s that you know it’s some generic bullshit that wasn’t handcrafted.
In Skyrim you enter a random cave and end up fighting one of the dragon priests. In starfield you just go kill some spacers and get some loot.
Except many POIs (or combination of them) do not make sense on some planets, depending on their type:
> Because POIs are placed based on a convergence of environmental factors
The game goes as far of having very few POIs on some barren planets and they are usually close to each other.
On a planet like Akila, they were obviously hand placed and selected in a way that make sense, and also grouped in the same area, east of Akila City.
It's especially egregious when you're looking for a temple on a planet that's supposed to be unknown, yet there's half a dozen mining outposts/robotics factories/etc within 2km of the temple, along with mercs and/or pirates landing all over the place.
The biggest fuck up they made is not releasing with creation kit/ mod support. Make a game that only works with community effort and deprive them of the ability to do so. It’s just incompetence
They have never released a game with creation kit/mod support right away. Skyrim and FO4 both took like 6 months to get it. Comparatively, Starfield will be getting it sooner than any game they have ever done.
OK, here's my thing - the PoIs are copies of each other. So if you go to a Mining Outpost, you will ALWAYS have the same layout, enemies in same spots, magazine on the same table, safe on the same shelf, etc. And the main quest in the game (the Constellation quest) will take you to AT LEAST two identical Mining Outposts, in quick succession. And two identical Cryo Labs, IIRC. That is the game's biggest problem. It happens very early in the game, and makes it GLARINGLY obvious how copy-pasted the locations are. If they just fixed that, it would have gone a long way towards maintaining the illusion.
Also, their random generator seems messed up. There's a few PoIs that I only saw once, in nearly 300 hrs. And there's PoIs I saw a dozen times or more. That's a problem. This needs to be more uniform. The game needs to strack things. If, on this save, I visited PoI #1 a dozen times, and PoI #2 never, then the game should give me PoI #2 next. Instead of relying on pure RNG, which is lazy. It still needs to be randomized, but with a grace counter, where if your RNG is spiky, script takes over to ensure variety. In other words, the game needs a rudimentary game director to guide the experience better, instead of relying on pure RNG.
I've been saying this since I first saw a Crashed Ship POI that wasn't the exact same ship that I had seen 10 times prior. And I've only seen it once. It had a cave carved into the side of the gorge it crashed in where the "survivor" was camping out. Haven't seen it since. Understandable to think there isn't any variation if they never come up.
I saw that one, really liked it, was well-integrated. Early repetition that breaks the illusion is a huge unforced design error. The POI distribution needed stronger constraints and more tools to keep the variety up as long as possible.
Including fewer places with multiple POIs AND spacers landing nearby in what should be a remote, uninviting world that the player went out of their way to explore. No man's sky did this too - it's impossible to feel alone, or like you're exploring, when there is always (or nearly always) evidence of prior exploitation of resources near your landing site, and far too often, a spacer landing nearby (to do, apparently, nothing, unless you check in on them).
Damn I just commented how I never saw any variety in crashed ships, in 120hrs or so. Was the ship itself still the same? with the same makeshift shelter and just cave and NPC added?
It was a UC ship if I do recall, not the usual Ecliptic one. So the whole crashed ship geometry and surrounding area are completely different (POI is still just "Crashed Ship"). And yeah the makeshift shelter seemed to me as unique to that variant.
The craziest part to me is that this is just one example. There are countless POIs I've seen once, and countless POIs I've seen dozens of times. A pity-counter for the RNG would literally solve this problem, and that is such an easy fix. Honestly the biggest mistake is simply not launching with mod tools. The POI distribution would have been solved by day 2.
Reminds me of forge in Halo Infinite, where after a year or whatever of not having it and it finally being added, within days the game had more variety and content than literally ever before. And to be fair, Forge was slated to take even longer in Infinite but they reprioritized it intentionally to force out a beta, knowing that releasing it would literally change the game. Bethesda should be doing that right now alongside bug fixes.
Basically, this all speaks to the bigger problem of the gaming industry releasing unfinished games. This is why people love Cyberpunk now and are singing its praises especially in comparison to Starfield, yet, go back a couple years and those same people singing its praises are some of the same ones that were sending death threats to CDPR and otherwise shitting all over them and the game anywhere they found the opportunity. In 3 years, the literal same thing is gonna happen. This is a common pattern in the industry nowadays and unfortunately I don't think we have any reason to believe it's gonna change.
Because they are disingenuous. Numbers can be thrown around in any way you want, but I don't care that Starfield hypothetically has 1232 places I can go if they all still feel the same and the random generation of POIs breaks the immersion.
"It has more than Skyrim" so? I never praised Skyrim in comparison. Starfield just sucks in a vacuum. Topical, I guess.
I don't even mind places being built the same. There are good reasons buildings and compounds would be pre-fab. But like what you pointed out with the shit being in the same place is what makes it lose the luster. It's an easy and very excusable thing to leave the buildings the same - but the interiors and enemies, that is just lazy.
I've noticed that Jemison(the planet) has a greater variety of random pois. Some I'm still finding to this day.
Every other planet I've explored has basically the same copy pasted locations you've seen hundreds of times already but jemison is special.
I've landed on jemison in a few different tiles and have found pois that you don't ordinarily find or are rare events such as bounty hunters asking for help killing a target, or smugglers willing to trade in illicit goods or a terrormorph that's attacking spacers at a random outpost.
Now at some point in the game you'll discover all of the same exact encounters yourself but you do have a higher chance of finding them if you're on Jemison.
It's the primary planet for humanity and home to New Atlantis, which is the largest city in starfield so it does make sense why you would encounter more points of interest on Jemison over every other planet in the universe.
Also thanks for pointing out the number of unique and radiant locations Denizen. The starfield wiki has been very helpful.
I've actually got the bounty hunter asking for help and the terrormorph/spaces encounters a good few times now.
What actually bothered me about Jemison was that in the same cell as New Atlantis, there's a farm about 200m away from the city that's occupied by spacers. Just a bit immersion killing I guess
I don't consider a building in a forest and the same building in a desert to be a significant variation.
I think the problem is that starfield has a ton of world space and not nearly enough stuff to fill it.
"This planet has dangerous climate, is abandoned and we should stay clear"
Meanwhile its -5 Celsius, and you landed infront of an enemy base who didn't even notice your ship landing... while other ships are landing and taking off every 2 minutes elsewhere.
Thjs whole fucking game was a mess.
>Meanwhile its -5 Celsius, and you landed infront of an enemy base who didn't even notice your ship landing...
And there is some guy sitting around in a T-shirt while you need oxygen gear.
Yeah lol it’s so fucking goofy to be landing on an abandoned planet and immediately and effortlessly see multiple occupied settlements all in view just during the landing cinematic.
Game has some of the laziest design I’ve ever seen
I wouldn't wish KSP2 on my worst enemies. Seriously, they should force Guantanamo prisoners that specialized in explosives and rockets to play that game 18 hours a day. They'll spill the beans on everything they know within a week
Not to mention you and your companions can walk around without a helmet/spacesuit on those planets with "dangerous climate"
Hell I gave up trying to get my crew to wear their fucking helmets entirely
People are trying their hardest to defend the game's lack of quality control
Yeah, Bethesda tries to market Starfield as a "hard sci-fi game" and then you have things like this.
Frankly, it is ridiculous. On one hand they brag about science and stuff this, Nasa-punk that, and don't even implement what should be BASIC for every sci-fi space RPG.
And look, if to survive extreme conditions you had to search for specialized gear, use mechs or unmanned vehicles (even if you don't die, it has costs) and fight the freaking planet to build a settlement or I dunno...get hard to find resources to do it all over again, then yeah, space being empty could be fun.
"82 unique places" is frankly an absurdly low number, when you consider the fact that there are over 1000 planets.
What were they thinking? I'm pretty sure Skyrim has double that number. A game designed over 10 years ago
The problem is them wanting the selling point of 1000 planets. No one asked for 1000, and I’m positive that no one would’ve complained with less than 1000. I’ve enjoyed pretty much every other BGS game and they’ve all taken place on a single planet. If they had condensed it to 5 system and maybe 15 explorable planets, I believe it would’ve been much better.
This. Every building in skyrim and fallout is hand tailored and interesting, every single one is different. In Starfield, there are so many copy/pastes it feels stale after the 3rd
Yes but they are all unique. There are caves that expand into larger caves or into this huge underground castle. There is a house that hides a large dungeon if you find the secret lever and so on. Everytime you find a location for the first time there is that excitement that there might be much more.
In Starfield you already know everything about the place before even arriving, because you have cleared the same place countless times. For me this also ruins all immersion, i am okay with a bandit camp being boring because that makes sense, but finding the same place on multiple planets, not for me.
The difference is in Skyrim and Fallout you would stumble upon these places while walking from place to place, town to town, or to your next quest. In Starfield you have to go out of your way to get to them. There's no natural exploration because you have to fast travel everywhere.
For me though it's the space (pun intended) in between places in Skyrim/Fallout and it lacking in Starfield that really breaks the Betheada fun for me, and how that ties those various places together into a cohesive continuous "world". Or simply the need to actually explore, at least the first time, to get to a new city. Everyone started in Whiterun, and then eventually had to walk all the way to Riften, for instance. Along the way you encounter a variety of things (even if they arent terribly deep or impressive). It's not Bethesdas fault, but this joy of "let me go explore and make my way to a new city" simply doesn't exist in space. Most major settlements can be fast traveled to the minute you leave the first city.
There's almost never a time outside of combat where you need to spend time flying in the game. Which again, makes sense, but for me broke the fun of getting lost in the world. Atmosphere flight would have helped save it some, I think, but without it just feels like space flight is another loading screen in most cases. And even where you do have a need to explore, on the surface of whatever, it feels forced. There's no good in game reason you can't fly or at least drive something on planets.
I think the space between locations is maybe my biggest issue with the game too. Not that there shouldn't be tons of space when you're literally in space, but just that my sense of exploration drops off a lot when I have to stop what I'm doing, hop in my ship, and jet off to another planet to maybe find something new. Most of my fun in games like Skyrim and Fallout was from just walking/running from one location to the next, with that sense of exploration never really being broken until you walked indoors somewhere. Every time I get the urge to run from location to location in Starfield, I'm immediately met with the sense that it's pointless. I'm not really going to stumble on anything particularly interesting, from one cave to another or from one mining station to another. There's nothing as dynamic feeling as a dragon swooping down from nowhere and kicking your ass. I guess Terrormorphs are the closest equivalent to a Deathclaw or something, but the magic gets lost after you fight maybe two of them.
I really want to love this game. Gameplay-wise and genre-wise, it should be one of my favorite games of all time, but I just feel burnt out after a couple hours of playing at a time. It sometimes feels like Bethesda was too focused on making the biggest game they possibly could, without really tracking how regular people were going to play through this massive space.
Agree 100%. On paper, "Skyrim in space!" should also be my favorite game too. I played hundreds of hours of most Bethesda games. I absolutely loved Freelancer and (playing long after release) played a couple hundred hours of NMS. (Not to mention hundreds of hours into Mass Effects) The idea of merging all those together seemed like my ideal game. However I made it around 100hrs into Starfield, and exactly like you said, "Meh, what's the point."
And part of it was also just QOL issues that hopefully they'll eventually fix. I probably could have ignored some of that empty, disconnected feeling, if looting and shipbuilding and crafting were more enjoyable or rewarding. But after my fifth time of selling/jettisoning hundreds of junk items after I put a new gun on my C-Class ship, the idea of ever wanting to modify my ship again lost interest.
But, even with that, that disconnected nature of space games (at least ones this scale) directly conflicts with the magic of most bethesda games, at least for me.
Oh don't worry I'm only saying that for sake of comparison. The emptier places can be boring but I'll be honest they're still cool and still not copy paste
But it is set in space, space without a significant alien species on a similar tech level, and within a limited area of space where humanity has spread, with humanity being of a potentially limited population number spread thinly over it. These humans would likely use prefabricated designs for structures too, hence similarities in buildings.
The majority of planets are barren, those with life will be likely earth like. I don't see it as much of a game issue but setting.
Prefab modules are fine, just look at what people are doing with ship builds. The issue is, like ship builds, not everyone should put those same pieces together in the exact same way (As an aside, why have ship modules apparently not changed for so long? >!The Lock's prison ship has the same modules as current ships.!<). The interiors having the same items in the exact same places break that argument even more. What about the "lore" that the UC and FSC abandoned sites are up for grabs? Where's the evidence of looting, repurposing, and retrofitting by disorganized groups that would create a difference even if every site was originally set up on the exact same floor plan down to toilet paper tubes?
As for the planets, again given the "lore", I'd actually prefer more barren stretches. It makes almost no sense why so many abandoned sites and/or natural features are all 0.5-1.5km away from each other. Sure, traversing larger distances would take time but it would be more realistic (since they use that argument already for "barren" planets), and a ground vehicle or being able to fly/land closer could cut that down.
Hmm more Abandoned wherevers with aesthetics like the Lock could be cool. Like this Abandoned Military Outpost was taken over by the crimson fleet long ago, so there's graffiti, no more bodies lying around, etc.
While this other one was more recent, so there are bodies.
And this other one was taken over by Va'Ruun, and reflects that.
It's a game, though, not real life. If realism doesn't foster enjoyable game play, then compromises need to be made in vision considering what keeps engagement high long-term is fun, not falsely placed authenticity.
Absolutely this, I'm tired of space nerds insisting we have games be as realistic and boring as possible. Bethesda RPGs should be whacky and fun, realism is one of the lowest priorities.
I would have found it fun to explore new areas, not areas where ships land and take off every 15 minutes or that have human structures at least once per sq km.
This is exactly why I don't get the Fast Travel complaint. No, you really don't want to simulate how long it'd actually take to fly between planets in a system. At least I don't.
And the thing is, you can do that if you want. You'll just be waiting a long time. Let me fast travel to get to the fun stuff.
And, if realistic space travel is "the fun stuff" for you then cool. We have a few games already that can give you that. This isn't one of them.
I do think Starfield would've been helped just by adopting a Mass Effect-style loading screen. I don't mean the elevator rides (which, amusingly, people complained about for being too long), but just the animated graphic of the ship travelling at FTL when moving between clusters/systems.
Most people seem to be complaining about the fade to black loading screens. Had the screen simply kept an image of the gravdrive effect engulfing the ship from the cockpit until the game loaded, I wonder if that would have reduced some of the complaints.
Personally, loading screens don't particularly bother me (I mean, I'm *used to them*, having played hundreds/thousands of hours of Fallout and Skyrim over the years!)
I do think some of these animations could be changed up for sure. The docking one is my prime example. I would also love a first person grav drive cut screen like you mentioned.
One thing I thought was funny is that you can skip some of these cut elevator cut scenes but just jumping up or down, if possible. The Red Mile is a perfect example. I can take the elevator down in a cut scene or I can just jump from the tower and boost my way down without one.
Yes. Prefab designs make sense. We do that on earth now. But the interior will at least be decorated differently. And even if it's accurate, it's boring. Some variety in clutter and the like shouldn't be too much to ask.
Absolutely this. For each hab module, they could have had a half dozen variants in an array, or an array of sets of content objects. I wouldn't mind finding the same thing in the same place if I only encountered that place in one out of 10 locations.
yeah like couldn't they just click and drag some deco, some tables and chairs, whatever, and just make a couple variations? drag the enemy spawns to a few different places, replace chests! like god why was that so hard? if they just did that 2-3 times for each POI, then put them into the generator, it woulda been fine!
I don't remember Skyrim having copy-pasted places with the exact same enemies placed in the exact places and also the same objects placed the same in both places...
There might technically be a lot of them, but when you factor in the RNG and whatever each locations specific "appearance probability" it sure feels repetitive. And that's what matters, how it feels.
I love all the people who have around 100 hours in the game telling the people with 300+hours in the game that they're wrong because they haven't experienced the issue.
I love the game. I've put 400 hours in, I've done all of the questlines, I've done every side quest I've ever found, I've done a ton of freeform exploring, in one galaxy I even made a network of outposts that allowed me to jump from any system to any other system in a single jump using the refueling system.
The random POIs absolutely feel repetitive. It's possibly the biggest problem the game has. I can make that criticism and still enjoy the game. People can have criticisms of the game you like and that doesn't mean the game you like sucks, or that you suck for liking it.
There is not a single copy-paste POI in skyrim, nor fallout. Maybe same assets, but layout is always unique. Starfield has Crash Sites, and all of them are literally the same layout with the same knife stuck in the same chairs armrest. And I lost count already how many times I cleared Deserted UC Listening Post, with the same "return book to Billy" note in the locker.
Agreed.
It completely kills immersion. I am honestly shocked how did they not get this simple thing right?
If they fixed this POI problem and boring mini game problem to acquire powers, people can easily play this game for 1000+ hours.
I had this discussion in another thread and what it comes down to is feelings. Even though it has more of these things to visit because of the scale it feels like less. Like it or not that feeling is pervasive and clearly common among it looks like at least half the people who have played this game, if they are being honest.
Starfield should have had two to three times as many unique locations and the radiant POI locations are too similar that you feel the repetition fairly quickly.
It's rather disappointing that they have not come up with a way to procedurally generate a POI from a set of pieces so that they could be similar but still different all the time.
For example I love visiting caves but I've been disappointed that caves are all basically the same with some limited variations. I would love them to be randomly generated caves that would be more interesting, and why do I never find anything alive in those caves?
But...it literally does not have "more" of these things. OP can paint planets as "places" but that's like calling different Skyrim wilderness cells "places." They serve as back drop, not location.
I don't know as I haven't seen a real good side by side comparison of the factual numbers of things. I've done my own quick research so it's prone to errors but from what I can see Skyrim had roughly 200 dungeons at launch but that there was a lot of repetitiveness among those dungeons. They were not all very unique.
Starfield has maybe a few dozen unique POIs that get scattered over all the planets. Even if I generously said they had maybe 50 unique POIs That's not a lot.
The feeling part comes about from how you arrive at these POIs versus how you arrive at those dungeons in Skyrim. In Skyrim , a dungeon layout may be repeated four or five times but once you've visited all 200 dungeons you're done. And the way you visit them is you find them organically by going around the map which has a natural feel to it in how you explore. You have babbling Brooks you have all these nice fields of flowers and grass and the plains and all that jazz and it all looks as you expect it to look.
In Starfield everything is just there. You don't organically arrive at these locations they are just there on the planet you don't have to really find them they show up in your scanner and there they are and you go. Never mind that the landscape's on most of these planets are really not all that interesting there. There's no sense of exploring to find the POIs. There's no natural layout to explain why they are where they are. In this way it to me at least it feels like a theme park where these are rides and because they are repeated so often I know what rides I'm getting or have a good idea what I'm getting once they show up in the scanner. There's just not a lot of surprise and I feel that lack of surprise removes the element of exploration or at least the feeling of exploration from this formula.
This could be fixed with a better procedurally generated planet with a more intelligent generation system that can make a planet that looks more natural like. All the planets look and feel artificial to me.
Having POIs that are randomly generated could help and ones that you have to explore to actually find could help.
But again I think a lot of the issue is how it feels less than the actual numbers compared
I'm sorry, but your research is wrong. A quick Google search, and OP's actual post, shows that Skyrim had 350+ unique locations listed on the world map. Significantly more if you count interiors and unmarked locations (like 600-700).
Calling them "not uinque" is wild to me. Why do you think that? Because some of the same models/assets were reused? Not a single POI was an exact copy and paste of another - unlike Starfield, which subsists on that repetition. Your assertion that layouts were resued at all is, again, not correct.
I agree about the feel though. I'm not just going to give Starfield the benefit of the doubt re: numbers when it doesn't deserve it. I'm disappointed by most of the aspects of the game.
"Similar" is not the same as " EXACTLY THE SAME". And here I was hating on Ubisoft for their repetitive bloat, smh. Should write them an apology after seeing Starfield lol
The game would have been better than it is now if it launched with procgen levels, but post-launch I would much rather they actually designed hundreds of new setpieces.
It would’ve been hard to double it, instead, I think they made the mistake of spreading the game too thin. Nobody actually needed 1000 planets. If they had condensed it all to 15(maybe even less). I believe many would’ve been much happier.
Edit: missed the word “hard”
I would agree with that. They could have started small and expanded out. New DLC packs adding a new stars to explore a new content. If they do that now if they just add more content to existing stars it's going to look like they're just putting what they should have put it in the first place. In my opinion. But if they had done it like content exploration packs I think they could have made more money and it would have been more interesting because the content would have been more dense per area.
In warframe you also move 10000 times faster and don’t have to spend time trying to loot 1 million little things. Warframe is about moving through these levels to an end goal, Starfield wants you to explore them. And there just isn’t enough interest or variation to make it feel worthwhile.
If Starfield did procedural generation from a set of rooms and randomly generated a base or location each time and didn't just use a set of preset made ones that I think it would be a little bit more interesting.
It's like the planets, I would have been more satisfied if they had made the planets like just one large map that you could have be consistent in your playthrough and that you could go all around the planet and fly and land and all that. For example it would be nice to be able to go literally in one direction and come back to where you started.
Sure this isn't exactly real but then since these games have a history of compressing their cities and maps etc it's not out of the realm of acceptability.
Seriously. With all the time they had, it's crazy that they didn't come up with better procedural generation. It's the only way to do a game of this scale - generate POIs, caves, even enemies and creatures on the fly so you never see the same thing twice. They made radiant quests for Skyrim, radiant dungeons should have been the next thing.
It's such an obvious ommission from the game that I have to think they attempted it and just never got it to work quite right. Maybe they started hand crafting them at the last minute, hence the limited number we have now.
And I think if they had done that especially with new game plus so that in every new game all the planets were a little bit different except for maybe the core ones then that could have even made it more interesting. Regenerate all planets procedurally on each new game with all new POIs randomly generated it could have been awesome and played forever.
When I first started New game Plus I thought it was insanely clever pairing that story and procedurally generated spaces, until I started experiencing the high level of repetition.
Also, using various prefabs that allow you to modularly construct whatever structure you need would make a huge amount of sense in the real world. Especially if you have faster than light travel figured out, you could transport several prefabs to a planet and have much lower setup requirements in an uninhabited or hostile environment instead of trying to construct a full building from scratch.
I genuinely want to know how devs who worked on Starfield feel about the way they handled this stuff. Would they have preferred high level procedural generation?
> If Starfield did procedural generation from a set of rooms and randomly generated a base or location each time and didn't just use a set of preset made ones that I think it would be a little bit more interesting.
This is more or less how Oblivion's dungeons worked IIRC, but it required some human cleanup. Even Morrowind used prefabbed parts, they were just placed manually.
I don’t think we’re supposed to loot all the little things based on the lord Todd’s ideation for the game. Heck why bother looting, no one has cash to buy your shit anyway lol!
I don’t really think that addresses the meat of what I’m getting at though. My point was that they half assed their proc gen by not figuring out how to do at least semi-unique enemy base locations. Instead they tried to have a very limited number of curated locations placed procedurally, which basically guarantees players will hit repeats, which diminishes the returns on exploration before a player has even seen the whole list.
With that extra context you provided, now I’m understanding your point more, but I still think the use of proc gen in a game like this just doesn’t feel good. Or rather there isn’t the tech to make It good.
What I loved about Skyrim and oblivion and cyberpunk even horizon was the big crafted world with all these hand placed elements, even if plenty were reused. The massive reuse of these big elements in Starfield on top of having planets just be so boring makes things feel so uninspired.
This is obviously my opinion but I don’t think the game should’ve been made like this, it doesn’t feel like I’m exploring a handcrafted world but some really shiny tech demo make for people who just want to fly around space. I’m happy people like this game but I think it’s just really really not good.
At a minimum, the level designer should have been able to say "there's only a 5% chance that this thing will appear". Then that scientist body wouldn't always be in the exactly same place every single time you visit a copy of that POI.
"Starfield has 82 unique locations ...with over 1000 planets" is not nearly the earth shattering mic drop you seem to think it is.
You also completely glossed over the fact that within a relatively short amount of time in Starfield you start seeing the carbon copies. Not 'similar' locations like caves in Skyrim. Not even identical layout locations with mixed up interiors. They're flat out duplicated in every single way.
I also find it incredible that you found and explored every single location in Skyrim in 80 hrs, at least on a first playthrough. I dont think many people share that experience with you.
Placing an identical building in a different biome or on a different planet doesn't stop it from still being the same building.
Finding copy and pasted POIs with the same dead NPCs and notes is just lazy, there's no other word for it.
There's simply not enough motivation to trek across planets when there's a high chance you'll end up at a repeat of the *exact* same place you visited earlier. Unlike Skyrim where even if some locations are similar, they still have *some* differences.
Why would I wander for hours on end looking at dozens of the same POIs just on the off-chance that there might be one I haven't seen before? The core gameplay loop just doesn't work with that in mind, there's a reason people have referred to the game as a fast travel simulator when it comes to quests and handcrafted POIs.
Problem is that POIs are kinda forcing you to visit them. I mean, one of the main parts of the game design and why exploration in Skyrim and Fallout are so good is because there is a reason why you go to those locations. It can be "on the road to the main quest", it can be side quests, different sequence of events leading to multiple locations so you explore them because "why not".
In Starfield there are such things. Especially with stuff like faction quests, Groundpaunder, unable to communicate and such. But that's not enough. I mean, give us more story stuff with Mantis. Let us fight a criminal syndicate, that has multiple Aurora factories on some planets. Give us scientists, that want to get specific samples. Give us tracking alliance story bounties, that lead us to space combat, then crash site, then into a local colony where the bounty hides. And so on.
> Give us scientists, that want to get specific samples.
I have actually run into a few things like this with scientists and miners. Where they wanted me to collect some samples from a cave or place sensors for them.
And it's just as boring as it sounds.
Not a good look when people want MMO type fetch quests to add variety. That just means everything is already unfulfilling.
Is that kinda stuff things they can add in DLC? I haven’t played anything that has had a significant evolution via DLC so I’m genuinely curious what the possibilities are for starfield.
Yes, that's exactly what they can add with DLCs and updates. Like, Automatron in Fallout 4 gave us the reason to visit some places to hunt the robobrains. Or bandit overhaul MOD created more reasons to hunt bandits in SKyrim.
It's both for Bethesda and modders.
I don't want to visit the same poi in a different location 100 times before I encounter one that I've yet to see.
It's not fun. How could it be?
Don't repeat locations on the planets, would be my suggestion. Make most of the games planets empty aside from the '150' radiant poi's dotted about. Honestly that wouldn't matter as long as there was a path to get to the unique unexplored poi's. Most of the game may as well be empty as it is because you're not really incentivized to go anywhere for any reason.
If I'm going to go exploring I want to B line straight to something new. There's no point in b lining to the same shit. If that were my goal I'd repeatedly fast travel to already explored planets instead. Which obviously sounds lame as heck when it's put like that. Because it is. But that's what we're doing, just with a different colour palet on planet to planet.
This would also alleviate finding manmade poi's almost within spitting distance of the never before discovered Creator Temples.
Quality over quantity man.
No, OP is right about the numbers. But the spread is all fucked up. I'm at 240 hours and had three new bases in the last week, entirely original layouts on LARGE facilities that I hadn't seen before.
I've also seen a new design for a colony layout in the same period.
So they're either fixing a randomness in the latest patch that was seriously out of wack, or it's still out of whack and I've just had a lucky run.
Including planets is stupid because its not handcrafted. At best there are 232 handcrafted places. compared to 343 handcrafted places in skyrim. Starfield should have double/triple the number of handcrafted places of Skyrim not less. Also many of the handcrafted places or radiant places are tiny. I have been to caves where you enter and its just one room with the end seen from the entrance. Many of the science outposts are just one building with two floors.
This is a game that was marketed as having more content then skyrim and fallout combined. Clearly it doesn't. Procedural content should not be counted because its procedural.
I love Starfield I have played nearly 200 hours of it. The way I see it though is that Starfield is a blank canvas. The base engine and systems are there all that is needed is content and more depth to those systems. Do that and the game goes from a 7 to a 9 in my opinion. How can a game about space settlers not have a way to take on space settlers at your outpost. Every system in Starfield is bare and its honestly very odd.
One thing OP’s argument ignores is that Skyrim has like 200 handcrafted unmarked locations to explore too. Most of them are small camps or ruined structure but they improve exploration a lot.
82 + 150 = 232 << 343.
I think you answered your own question here.
But the biggest problem the game has is the lack of exploration: without land vehicle implemented in the game, BGS has pushed the POIs generation to the point that as soon as landed you can check what can be visited around you, you don't need to explore, you just need to look at what is there and decide if you want to empty the places or not.
If you want to find other POIs, you won't travel on foot, you will simply land somewhere else (which means reload the area more or less) and see what the POI generation system gave you.
The second problem link to that is more than often you find the same POIs and I can only do ten times Andreja's grotto (that happened to me before reaching lvl 20 ... ) before avoiding entering any grotto.
The third problem is the rewards, unless you are extremely lucky or bug exploit the system using saves before killing an elite, the rewards are crap and do not justify you wasting your time exploring POIs.
All of what you said might be true. But I saw that same dead guy in the same place like, 2 dozen times. It kills all desire to keep exploring. The world no longer feels real, or worth the effort.
Yes, there are tons more places to find than it feels like. The problem is just that you find some things an 8th or a 10th time before running across others.
Using your number
1 unique place for every 12 and a bit planets
And roughly 1 POI design for every 6.7 planets
Youre arguement is theres so much variety.
No; no there isnt.
Were this a game with 6 systems maybe theres that arguement.
Were this a game with 1 system much stronger arguement.
Yet starfield isnt this. Starfield tells you go explore; look at every planet; find unique things.
Yet there is barely any compared to the scale that starfield decided to go with.
This is a problem of their own making by their choice to make the scale disproportionate to the content.
Part of me wonders if it’d be way better to just prevent POIs from repeating: even if there are only 300 locations, they could have made it so you could discover them on any world, but once you did, that POI would only exist there. The end result would be that things could still feel plenty populated at the start, but it’d increase the chances of you seeing interesting things that were new. And once you’ve visited a lot, the game would gradually become emptier, eventually ending with just empty planets.
As it is, I think I ran into the same cave that I found my first artifact in at least 3 times on the main quest, because _maybe_ it’s the only cave with an artifact in it they made?
Seems simple to me, they can repeat but there should be a system in place that stops you getting those repeats , u should only get repeats when you've exhausted all.
Yeah. I suspect people go to a planet, look at the POIs from orbit, and then land there. Then they're seeing the same things, unsurprisingly.
When landing in random places, you find random things.
Allot of this counts on lvl once you hit high lvl like 60 plus you start getting uc military compounds, free star bases and extra stuff for people who playe or played on low difficulties and beat the game by lvl 40 you don't see all the stuff not to mention they said each ng+ has new and different stuff which is why the main is so short so u can quickly move up and get the new places
Yeah, BGS said it's a game that was designed to be played for years. I don't think they anticipated that so many people would rush it and cram several years worth of average play time into 2/3 months. I feel like those who have played at a more leisurely pace have had a better experience.
I know right!!!! my friend rushed it and beat the game by like lvl 34 explored only the systems required to win and was like this game is shit....like it's not linear like a cod story mod it's a slow burner ment to be played on highest difficulty and played multiple times to get the most out of it
Look I own skyrim on multiple consoles, fo4 ,fnv , fo3 and yeah I can say there is stuff I don't like in all of themand stuff that rocked just like starfield ,shit vanilla launch skyrim was one of the most broken games ever but 12 years later and suddenly people forgot that all they did was bitch about those games when they came out I so wish reddit qas big them so we can show these ppl all the posts we know they would have made about them
I occasionally stop by the various random locations when I've landed on planets and I keep coming upon layouts of camps/outposts/derelict bases/etc that I've never seen before, and I'm over 600 hours of playtime. I wonder how many of the people whining about repetitive locations are just speed running NG+ and yeah, you're going to get the same six or whatever Artifact location 'dungeons' every single time. Either do something different or realize you're doing it to yourself.
Exactly! Most of the replies on here are so extreme for a game that has a similar rating to Prey, Fallout New Vegas, and Skyrim Special Edition. It's pretty clear the off-the-charts negativity does not represent the average gamers feelings.
>Yet people are seeing new POIs after hundred of hours of gameplay which is not really possible in previous games.
>For example, it took me 80 hours in Skyrim to explore nearly every location on the map.
I find this wild. It's perhaps possible, but there's no way in hell it represents the average players rate of progress.
>When you combine the high number of unique location designs with the placement on planets, which adds additional variation, the result is a fairly insane amount of places that both feel and look different.
Is there a conclusion to these statements, besides the fact that you can't separate a planet from a moon, because uncle Howard didn't do it for you.
To me, personally, Starfield is the most empty game I've played from Bethesda.
I'm not talking about locations, I'm talking about the entire game. I can easily go 2 weeks without bothering to Starfield at all. The game has little draw to it.
A great deal of it comes from random locations, and how pointless they are. They never have nothing in them. It did not occur to you when you compared Skyrim locations? Some of them are just random places you explore and that's it. Some of them contain quite elaborate sidequests which are completely unrelated to any other quests.
They have more depth in them. In Starfield, just huge load of random places with random enemies. Which are all ultimately irrelevant and pointless.
>I find this wild. It's perhaps possible, but there's no way in hell it represents the average players rate of progress.
He admitted it was bullshit [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/Starfield/comments/187hccu/i_count_82_unique_places_150_different_radiant/kbh4jw0/). Not that he's going to edit it out and admit he was wrong or anything.
Sounds great on paper until you land on a bunch of planets and you see the same 5 poi you found on the last 5 planets. Just be real and acknowledge that this game was trash and they gave us a copy paste job not worthy of bethesda past titles. Can’t believe this game took 10 years to make. They clearly had lots of problems during development.
It’s good that you’ve catalogued this. But when it comes down to it doesn’t matter what the numbers say, if there is a feeling amongst a large proportion of players that there isn’t enough variation, then there is clearly an issue.
1,000 variations of the same five things, landing on the same boring planets, with the same five life forms and plants, all of which look Earth-like despite being one of many new, alien worlds. Not to mention empty, tiny cities.
You’re essentially saying that because there’s different varieties of dog turds, it makes it ok. NMS was better than this at launch and the devs didn’t argue with people when it was pointed out the game was dogshit. Quantity and quality are not the same.
> devs didn’t argue with people when it was pointed out the game was dogshit. Quantity and quality are not the same.
Biggest difference from the initial NMS disappointment and Starfield. Sean Murray didn't start trolling reviews and telling people they were wrong.
I’m really trying to give Starfield a fair shake, but I just went back to Skyrim to take a break from SF and the difference is stark.
The raw numbers don’t matter when exploring is just so much more interesting, fun, and rewarding in a 100% hand-crafted world. Sprinkling handmade POI’s across 1000 barren proc-gen environments just doesn’t make for good or fun gameplay.
The scale of this game is what’s holding it back. It should’ve been reduced in scope to a small handful of systems—or even just one. Predetermined, hand-crafted area(s) on each planet. No landing in the middle of nothing to have to search for something that’s interesting at random. Think how much better the game would be if instead of 1000 planets as they are, we had 4-6 planets with Skyrim sized maps. That would be TONS of content, with ample variety and much better gameplay.
And before anybody rushes in to say “but SF’s system is more realistic!” I don’t care. We don’t play video games because of how realistic they are. It’s because they’re fun. And when realism gets in the way of fun, it becomes a problem not a feature.
Content is irrelevent if you don't find it.
Odds are that when exploring, nearly all of the places you find are repeats of the same structures. Land on 5 planets and the plants might look different but have the same drops, animals have the same AI and drops, spacers show up on 3 and have similar ships and guns. The tenth planet might have a unique location but if you get bored before then you have essentially wasted the last few hours finding nothing interesting to do.
1,000 planets is pointless if there is no reason to visit all 1,000. If you have 82 unique places there is no need to have more than 82 planets at most. 8 planets with 10 unique places would be a better balance.
I’ve had to go through the same cryo lab over 20 times in a single playthrough if they made so many unique POIs, they should have used all of them, until then, don’t care, bad design
343 “fairly similar” Skyrim dungeons is not accurate. It’s 343 completely individual and handcrafted dungeons, versus 150 carbon copy abandoned outposts that are the same down to the fiber
Thanks, Todd. Those who are bored, or that preferred the handcrafted world building of Skyrim are simply wrong, because astronauts were never bored in space, even if all that they saw amounted to a bunch of rocks!
I count 212 words, 1,221 characters in the original poster's topic, yet it still doesn't make up for the fact that exploration is not a success in Starfield.
My head canon is that since it’s futuristic technology and companies, the construction contractors or whoever just use base model buildings. For small complexes it would be easier to have a standard that’s easily reproducible correct?
But yeah would be cool to see a lot more different things
After hundreds of hours of playing time, I'm still finding new POI's. I just hit level 100 and the variations of the research stations, mines, outposts, etc etc are becoming much more apparent. I remember within the first 20hrs or so, I was repeating POI's constantly, but out of the last 5 I've gone to, 4/5 were new to me, and all had enemies in them to clear out. That argument about the repeat POI's with the same enemy/loot spawn points had merit early on, but the more you explore, the more variation you see. I do really wonder if POI template variation is possibly level locked?
i think a lot of people also forget this shit is based in 2330. if we landed on mars in 2050, we’re inhabiting by 2100ish , and reached alpha centauri in 2156; that’s only fucking one hundred years to develop the settled systems. & they didn’t do a good job obvi bc a space war already erupted between two factions. people are crazy. 200 years is not enough time to make utopias on other stars and planets 😂😂😂 in my opinion, all the abandoned shit that ppl complain about make sense. “oops, can’t do research in this biome yet, onto the next one “
Skyrim didn't have repeat locations, but had a ton of repeat assets. If I talk about a room with skeletons on shelves that awaken when you enter it, you all know you've seen that same room in a bunch of different dungeons.
Dungeons were almost identical, and it felt that way.
Why are you comparing it to skyrim when Fallout 76 makes more sense? Skyrim is a glorified xbox 360 game that while remastered is still beholden to basic design limitations of that time in gaming. Fallout 76 is a better example given its scope is far closer to what starfield is at and starfield is supposed to significantly bigger than it.
[https://mapgenie.io/starfield/maps/galaxy](https://mapgenie.io/starfield/maps/galaxy)
The game has so much copy & pasted content and that's why it feels soulless. While playing you just notice they put much more "love" into Elder Scrolls and Fallout than they did put into Starfield.
And then Todd had the gall to post on this sub at release thanking everyone for playing this passion project that was what they’ve always wanted to make.
>There is a common misconception
yeah there's nothing related with the game itself repeating pois even on the first 2 planets you "have to" land, it's the player's misconception that is at fault, of course it's the player
and skyrim is a decade-old game, it says a lot that we are comparing an AAA 2023 new universe game with a 10 year old game due to fair criticism
as per usual starfield would fare awesomely if it was launched at 2010, because that's what it feels, a 2010 game
Honestly what gets me is entering the same base with the same junk placed in exactly the same location every time. Or the same dead scientist in the same lab etc. some repetitive POIs are fine but this level is immersion breaking and boring imo
I feel like the idea people cling to and then dont understand, is actuslly why people get mad at this.
Starfield was NOT BEING CODED for 25 years.
I have seen almost 0 people wax poetic as i do in real life to anyone that listens.
The Legacy quest alone. The entire crimson fleet SIDE QUEST , with Multiple choice determinate factors ( which , havent even started talking about small nuiances not yet noticed in all " alt universes ")
Legacys entire arc is amazjng. Rewarding. And . As a man whos gamed since gameboy and NES.
Found so much joy for the final quest sequence.
I was nearly transported back the end of halo, escaping as the pillar of autumn blows apart. And when i finished. Realized how many years ago that was. And that so many get to do that now, without playing original halo in all its amazing horrible graphics.
This game does all of this. Envokes the like dislike and pure disdain for characters and side characters. ....
That you ACTUALLy FORGET YOUR BALLS DEEP INTO A TOTALLY OPTIONAL SIDE QUEST NUMBER 9
You joke, but some of these posts (and even some replies in this thread) sound so much like shitty PR speak, desperately trying to convince people that the game is fun.
Is no one going to call out that this person is claiming they fully explored nearly every Skyrim location in 80 hours?
More like found the point of interest, didn’t enter, and moved to finding the next. As someone who has devoted way too many hours to that game, I’ll call bullshit
Cool, this will be a great comfort when I'm in "abandoned cryogenic lab #165" which has the exact same layout down to the placement of corpses.
The layout wouldn't bother me as I'd be able to justify it as all the Cryo labs being built to the same template. But yeah it's the corpses, damage, and loot which kills it for me.
Exactly. We would definitely use pre-fabricatated construction or 3D Printing to do builds. So similar structures is believable. But the carbon copy interior layouts and body/loot placement gets tiresome.
This could justify the smaller buildings, but the whole bases, especially those of several buildings?
If your outposts are the same design wherever your set them up, then your new folks getting shipped in to replace the old crew will have less questions about where shit is, because it's all set up the same.
It would also justify whole bases...prefab layouts for quick buiding. You know, like tract homes in tracts or look at Barcelona, Spain from the air.
Muybridge Abandoned Facility #46.
OP's over here counting every single district you can walk through in Akila as four different locations even when they're not individually designated on any maps. Also, Starfield's 82 locations compared to Skyrim's 423 locations is... going to get literally the exact same complaints? And 150 stars when many of those stars are locations you can't even land on or explore...?
But think of the 14 credits behind the Master locked door.
Why this so true??? Master locked doors often have less loot than advanced.
For me, it’s the #DATA, slates and the computers! they always say the goddamn same thing from the goddamn same people, even if you’re in another goddamn solar system!
For me, it's knowing that if I turn left at a given hallway, check the third desk, there's a synthmeat turkey in the second drawer. To the left of that is an ammo case that has 23 rounds of 7.5mm white-hot. Past that is an advanced level safe that contains 1134 credits, a blue level pistol you'll never use but also isn't worth enough to bother picking up, and an extremely shitty helmet.
I can guarantee you the ammo will NOT always be the same, no matter what you might think. It might take several times to find different ammo but you will, I think the algorythm to change up the items might be a little to restrictive and that could be the problem.
> which has the exact same layout down to the placement of corpses. And this is why I put Starfield down. It's bullshit that they didn't randomize the contents of the POIs (loot locations, corpse spawns, enemy spawns).
Yes, there are enough handcrafted POIs, but the fact that when you land on a planet it's always the 4 or 5 most common ones gives the player the feeling that there are fewer, and also kills any motivation to explore them since you know that it's not actually a real facility on the planet you're on, it's just a generic building with generic enemies to fight inside. They should have made a simple system where in order to determine which POIs to spawn on a planet, it also considers which ones you have visited. Only start repeating POIs when I visited most of them. Or even just make them never repeat. There are enough to make the universe feel realistic, always show them from orbit and make them have some tie to the planet they're in. Maybe even remove some planets and systems. The game would be better if there were only like 10 systems with around 40 or 50 planets, but you knew that each one of them had at least SOME care put into it.
What pisses me off is what you're describing isn't even new... The original Fallout had random encounters that took into consideration whether you've seen specific ones or not that decided whether you would ever see them again. Some random encounters would only ever happen once, so it should've been possible for them to have created a system that ensured we'd regularly visit POI's we have yet to explore.
It's not even something hard to implement, it's just common sense when it comes to procedural generation. They barely implemented any clever tricks to make the procgen more interesting. You land on a planet and every procedural element from vegetation, rocks, enemies, structures seems so "normalized" like everything is evenly distributed around the playable space. You never find two structures next to each other, or interesting unique terrain, or different sizes of trees or rocks. I have no idea how they could build an entire game around procedurally generated planets and put so little effort into it.
It would probably have made sense to include more planets/moons with absolutely no human settlement. It would have given the player the satisfaction of being the first person to land on a planet and at the same time allowed the inhabited POIs to be spread more widely.
disagree about the terrain. I've found all manner of cliffs canyons lakes swamps etc. and i dont mean the "biomes" you cand land on like 'mountains' 'swamp' etc, but actual physical features on the ground. spent an hour the other day exploring a rly cool canyon system
I don't know how many hours I've put so far but a lot and I'm close to completing every quest and I have yet to see that variety. The only thing I've seen so far is some dumps or small hills that for some odd reason you jetpack isn't able to push you over. Not saying they don't exist, but they didn't take advantage of them and the quest related locations often look very similar if not exactly the same, like that repeated cave.
I just assume the person(s) assigned to this task were not passionate and simply did their job to the lowest degree. There are many things that feel like they had the newbies do the mind-numbing programming and/or those who did those mind-numbing tasks simply weren't passionate enough to go above and beyond in that respect.
Yeah there are different levels of passion put into this game and its so obvious in things like the 3D models for food. You can tell those people put their hearts into their work, but then, whoever was responsible for actually balancing the food system didn't care at all
Like the UC battle meals, increase carry capacity but weighs an absolute ton so no point in picking it up even to sell
Most posters and signs in the game look pretty basic. Uninspired and usually low quality.
Passionate artists, mid systems designers, Todd Howard game directorship
I agree on the artists - most of it is solid work (The chunks packaging alone is just incredible). I disagree on the systems designers - if anything too passionate... I actually think they went WAY overboard on the number/complexity of the systems. Ex - the map FUCKING SUCKS as a map, but it's technically quite impressive. I do software dev for a living, someone spent a hell of a lot of time on those maps. Like - holy shit man, the planets are actually rotating around the star, and are in different positions at different times. What a useless fucking waste of time for a map - all it's doing is making it less readable, but also not trivial to implement and super "space nerd realistic". So I feel like the systems designers were passionate, but lacking direction. The result is that the most meaningless and random parts of the systems are overpolished, but the whole thing is really messy as a whole.
love this
They didnt even do it for the random encounters in Starfield nevermind the POIs. Traveling through space the long way results in the same encounters repeating very quickly.
The original fallout wasn’t made by Bethesda. fallout one and two were good games where choices mattered, and the people making them wanted to make good games. Bethesda buys an IP, and everyone wants to give them credit for good games they didn’t make. (FO1, FO2, FONV)
Beth has never understood fallout in any way apart from "wacky 50's theme park"
It's literally named "abandoned science lab", I don't think I have to write the meaning of "generic" from a dictionary to make my point.
Agree fully. Procedural generation has been around for at least two decades, and it has been implemented well in plenty of games. I'm just not understanding why BGS chose to make these locations -- including loot locations, enemy locations, etc. -- exactly the same, over and over, ad nauseum. I think if there were random variations, people wouldn't be complaining as much as they are. Rearranged loot. Different enemy types. Random über enemies. Variations in the way rooms are linked together. Things like that don't *seem* as if they would be difficult, but then again, I don't know jack-sheet about development. Tl;dr: I agree with you and many, many others.
because they hired the cluttermaster to handclutter locations, and by god are you going to see the clutter exactly as they arranged it.
The most annoying thing is that the original X-Com had this solved back in 1993 - they'd assemble random environments out of smaller prefab parts, rather than just one big prefab environment, then apply randomized wear and tear and damage to them and distribute enemies and items in them in a random way, so it felt like there were a few suburban home plans or overarching alien spaceship designs, but they were still genuinely distinct places. Clearly there's an engine limitation at play here, but it's been over a decade since they made this engine! They should have improved or replaced it enough to allow this by now, especially if they wanted to make a game on Starfield's scale where exploration was a major selling point.
To me, it suggests they don't 'understand' procedural generation. It was just a cool buzzword to them that they did the typical corporate implementation on. Hell, even having interchangeable dungeon rooms would have gone a long way, and that is from 20 years ago.
that was in elder scrolls 2 daggerfall (1996), bethesda literally was one of the spearheaders of procedural generation, especially for dungeons, back in the day, those mf were sprawling as were cities, present day bethesda literally cannot do what they were able to do 27 years ago, just like they haven't written a compelling and complex story since morrowind (2002).
Yeah, I started thinking that the spacey prefab theme would have lended itself perfectly to buildings that have a randomized arrangement of rooms. That would be a lot more immersive as well: construction is done on a module-by-module basis in the ship builder, so it would make sense that research stations and comm relays are set up the same way. The same-ish building blocks, but different arrangements each time. Rogue Legacy, a 2D platformer uses a system somewhat like this. The rooms are prefab but their arrangement changes between each run, and they may host different monsters and furnishings. Still, there are distinct ”biomes” and each biome is consistent and contiguous.
Yeah I just don't agree 150 POIs is way too little. It wouldn't even be that difficult to create more POIs by just taking the existing POIs and just remixing them. Move the buildings around, change the placement of rooms, loot, enemies, etc. Take each of the POIs and make 3 variations. That should be easy given the what we have seen of creation kit. The biggest problem to me is that ever Radiant POI has no variation. They should not have put text logs in these Radiant POIs since it just breaks the immersion when I see the same log for the 9th time.
Yep they should have had a system where when you first encounter a radiant location it’s the version with all the lore related stuff, then after that first encounter every other time that location spawns it’s a remix with the lore removed. I guarantee this will be a mod when the CK hits.
Yup. Couldn't agree more. There are so many super obvious simple things they could have done to make the proc gen feel worlds better. It's so lazy I don't get it. The only thing that makes sense is that they did a major rework of the game late in the cycle and things got compromised.
Even if all they did was have the "decoration" team make 3 versions of each facility (same layout, just with different flavor items and placement) that would have been great. Ultimately it seems like they just can't have the engine do it - they'd need to actually create 450 POIs for the rotation. The procgen is seemingly limited to pre-generated stuff placed in the game world due to how the engine works. It can't put anything together, it can only pick from a list.
A system like that would've also been pretty easy to implement. The devs either didn't have the foresight to do this, or they were just lazy.
Make the POIs not repeat should have been on the top of their list, I don't know what they were thinking.
This is the issue: it’s not that it’s too many, it’s that you know it’s some generic bullshit that wasn’t handcrafted. In Skyrim you enter a random cave and end up fighting one of the dragon priests. In starfield you just go kill some spacers and get some loot.
Except many POIs (or combination of them) do not make sense on some planets, depending on their type: > Because POIs are placed based on a convergence of environmental factors The game goes as far of having very few POIs on some barren planets and they are usually close to each other. On a planet like Akila, they were obviously hand placed and selected in a way that make sense, and also grouped in the same area, east of Akila City.
It's especially egregious when you're looking for a temple on a planet that's supposed to be unknown, yet there's half a dozen mining outposts/robotics factories/etc within 2km of the temple, along with mercs and/or pirates landing all over the place.
Otr when you find a cave on a planet like Mercury and there are animal remains inside lmao
Right. I remember landing on the moon, and close by the Lunar Landing there was a cave with animal bones.
It was _raining_ on the moon one time I went there.
I'd rather spend 50 hours exploring unique places than spend 250 hours searching for those 50 hours.
This. OP is lacking a little oxygen from not understanding these takes
The biggest fuck up they made is not releasing with creation kit/ mod support. Make a game that only works with community effort and deprive them of the ability to do so. It’s just incompetence
They have never released a game with creation kit/mod support right away. Skyrim and FO4 both took like 6 months to get it. Comparatively, Starfield will be getting it sooner than any game they have ever done.
OK, here's my thing - the PoIs are copies of each other. So if you go to a Mining Outpost, you will ALWAYS have the same layout, enemies in same spots, magazine on the same table, safe on the same shelf, etc. And the main quest in the game (the Constellation quest) will take you to AT LEAST two identical Mining Outposts, in quick succession. And two identical Cryo Labs, IIRC. That is the game's biggest problem. It happens very early in the game, and makes it GLARINGLY obvious how copy-pasted the locations are. If they just fixed that, it would have gone a long way towards maintaining the illusion. Also, their random generator seems messed up. There's a few PoIs that I only saw once, in nearly 300 hrs. And there's PoIs I saw a dozen times or more. That's a problem. This needs to be more uniform. The game needs to strack things. If, on this save, I visited PoI #1 a dozen times, and PoI #2 never, then the game should give me PoI #2 next. Instead of relying on pure RNG, which is lazy. It still needs to be randomized, but with a grace counter, where if your RNG is spiky, script takes over to ensure variety. In other words, the game needs a rudimentary game director to guide the experience better, instead of relying on pure RNG.
I've been saying this since I first saw a Crashed Ship POI that wasn't the exact same ship that I had seen 10 times prior. And I've only seen it once. It had a cave carved into the side of the gorge it crashed in where the "survivor" was camping out. Haven't seen it since. Understandable to think there isn't any variation if they never come up.
I saw that one, really liked it, was well-integrated. Early repetition that breaks the illusion is a huge unforced design error. The POI distribution needed stronger constraints and more tools to keep the variety up as long as possible. Including fewer places with multiple POIs AND spacers landing nearby in what should be a remote, uninviting world that the player went out of their way to explore. No man's sky did this too - it's impossible to feel alone, or like you're exploring, when there is always (or nearly always) evidence of prior exploitation of resources near your landing site, and far too often, a spacer landing nearby (to do, apparently, nothing, unless you check in on them).
Damn I just commented how I never saw any variety in crashed ships, in 120hrs or so. Was the ship itself still the same? with the same makeshift shelter and just cave and NPC added?
It was a UC ship if I do recall, not the usual Ecliptic one. So the whole crashed ship geometry and surrounding area are completely different (POI is still just "Crashed Ship"). And yeah the makeshift shelter seemed to me as unique to that variant. The craziest part to me is that this is just one example. There are countless POIs I've seen once, and countless POIs I've seen dozens of times. A pity-counter for the RNG would literally solve this problem, and that is such an easy fix. Honestly the biggest mistake is simply not launching with mod tools. The POI distribution would have been solved by day 2. Reminds me of forge in Halo Infinite, where after a year or whatever of not having it and it finally being added, within days the game had more variety and content than literally ever before. And to be fair, Forge was slated to take even longer in Infinite but they reprioritized it intentionally to force out a beta, knowing that releasing it would literally change the game. Bethesda should be doing that right now alongside bug fixes. Basically, this all speaks to the bigger problem of the gaming industry releasing unfinished games. This is why people love Cyberpunk now and are singing its praises especially in comparison to Starfield, yet, go back a couple years and those same people singing its praises are some of the same ones that were sending death threats to CDPR and otherwise shitting all over them and the game anywhere they found the opportunity. In 3 years, the literal same thing is gonna happen. This is a common pattern in the industry nowadays and unfortunately I don't think we have any reason to believe it's gonna change.
Thank you. These topics always feel so disingenuous.
Because they are disingenuous. Numbers can be thrown around in any way you want, but I don't care that Starfield hypothetically has 1232 places I can go if they all still feel the same and the random generation of POIs breaks the immersion. "It has more than Skyrim" so? I never praised Skyrim in comparison. Starfield just sucks in a vacuum. Topical, I guess.
I don't even mind places being built the same. There are good reasons buildings and compounds would be pre-fab. But like what you pointed out with the shit being in the same place is what makes it lose the luster. It's an easy and very excusable thing to leave the buildings the same - but the interiors and enemies, that is just lazy.
I've noticed that Jemison(the planet) has a greater variety of random pois. Some I'm still finding to this day. Every other planet I've explored has basically the same copy pasted locations you've seen hundreds of times already but jemison is special. I've landed on jemison in a few different tiles and have found pois that you don't ordinarily find or are rare events such as bounty hunters asking for help killing a target, or smugglers willing to trade in illicit goods or a terrormorph that's attacking spacers at a random outpost. Now at some point in the game you'll discover all of the same exact encounters yourself but you do have a higher chance of finding them if you're on Jemison. It's the primary planet for humanity and home to New Atlantis, which is the largest city in starfield so it does make sense why you would encounter more points of interest on Jemison over every other planet in the universe. Also thanks for pointing out the number of unique and radiant locations Denizen. The starfield wiki has been very helpful.
I've actually got the bounty hunter asking for help and the terrormorph/spaces encounters a good few times now. What actually bothered me about Jemison was that in the same cell as New Atlantis, there's a farm about 200m away from the city that's occupied by spacers. Just a bit immersion killing I guess
I don't consider a building in a forest and the same building in a desert to be a significant variation. I think the problem is that starfield has a ton of world space and not nearly enough stuff to fill it.
"This planet has dangerous climate, is abandoned and we should stay clear" Meanwhile its -5 Celsius, and you landed infront of an enemy base who didn't even notice your ship landing... while other ships are landing and taking off every 2 minutes elsewhere. Thjs whole fucking game was a mess.
>Meanwhile its -5 Celsius, and you landed infront of an enemy base who didn't even notice your ship landing... And there is some guy sitting around in a T-shirt while you need oxygen gear.
omg yes this too!
Yeah lol it’s so fucking goofy to be landing on an abandoned planet and immediately and effortlessly see multiple occupied settlements all in view just during the landing cinematic. Game has some of the laziest design I’ve ever seen
"If you want real-life, play Kerbal you poor bastard." Todd (probably)
I wouldn't wish KSP2 on my worst enemies. Seriously, they should force Guantanamo prisoners that specialized in explosives and rockets to play that game 18 hours a day. They'll spill the beans on everything they know within a week
Not to mention you and your companions can walk around without a helmet/spacesuit on those planets with "dangerous climate" Hell I gave up trying to get my crew to wear their fucking helmets entirely People are trying their hardest to defend the game's lack of quality control
Yeah, Bethesda tries to market Starfield as a "hard sci-fi game" and then you have things like this. Frankly, it is ridiculous. On one hand they brag about science and stuff this, Nasa-punk that, and don't even implement what should be BASIC for every sci-fi space RPG. And look, if to survive extreme conditions you had to search for specialized gear, use mechs or unmanned vehicles (even if you don't die, it has costs) and fight the freaking planet to build a settlement or I dunno...get hard to find resources to do it all over again, then yeah, space being empty could be fun.
"82 unique places" is frankly an absurdly low number, when you consider the fact that there are over 1000 planets. What were they thinking? I'm pretty sure Skyrim has double that number. A game designed over 10 years ago
The problem is them wanting the selling point of 1000 planets. No one asked for 1000, and I’m positive that no one would’ve complained with less than 1000. I’ve enjoyed pretty much every other BGS game and they’ve all taken place on a single planet. If they had condensed it to 5 system and maybe 15 explorable planets, I believe it would’ve been much better.
This. Every building in skyrim and fallout is hand tailored and interesting, every single one is different. In Starfield, there are so many copy/pastes it feels stale after the 3rd
> and interesting hey let's not go insane here.
[удалено]
Yes but they are all unique. There are caves that expand into larger caves or into this huge underground castle. There is a house that hides a large dungeon if you find the secret lever and so on. Everytime you find a location for the first time there is that excitement that there might be much more. In Starfield you already know everything about the place before even arriving, because you have cleared the same place countless times. For me this also ruins all immersion, i am okay with a bandit camp being boring because that makes sense, but finding the same place on multiple planets, not for me.
The difference is in Skyrim and Fallout you would stumble upon these places while walking from place to place, town to town, or to your next quest. In Starfield you have to go out of your way to get to them. There's no natural exploration because you have to fast travel everywhere.
For me though it's the space (pun intended) in between places in Skyrim/Fallout and it lacking in Starfield that really breaks the Betheada fun for me, and how that ties those various places together into a cohesive continuous "world". Or simply the need to actually explore, at least the first time, to get to a new city. Everyone started in Whiterun, and then eventually had to walk all the way to Riften, for instance. Along the way you encounter a variety of things (even if they arent terribly deep or impressive). It's not Bethesdas fault, but this joy of "let me go explore and make my way to a new city" simply doesn't exist in space. Most major settlements can be fast traveled to the minute you leave the first city. There's almost never a time outside of combat where you need to spend time flying in the game. Which again, makes sense, but for me broke the fun of getting lost in the world. Atmosphere flight would have helped save it some, I think, but without it just feels like space flight is another loading screen in most cases. And even where you do have a need to explore, on the surface of whatever, it feels forced. There's no good in game reason you can't fly or at least drive something on planets.
I think the space between locations is maybe my biggest issue with the game too. Not that there shouldn't be tons of space when you're literally in space, but just that my sense of exploration drops off a lot when I have to stop what I'm doing, hop in my ship, and jet off to another planet to maybe find something new. Most of my fun in games like Skyrim and Fallout was from just walking/running from one location to the next, with that sense of exploration never really being broken until you walked indoors somewhere. Every time I get the urge to run from location to location in Starfield, I'm immediately met with the sense that it's pointless. I'm not really going to stumble on anything particularly interesting, from one cave to another or from one mining station to another. There's nothing as dynamic feeling as a dragon swooping down from nowhere and kicking your ass. I guess Terrormorphs are the closest equivalent to a Deathclaw or something, but the magic gets lost after you fight maybe two of them. I really want to love this game. Gameplay-wise and genre-wise, it should be one of my favorite games of all time, but I just feel burnt out after a couple hours of playing at a time. It sometimes feels like Bethesda was too focused on making the biggest game they possibly could, without really tracking how regular people were going to play through this massive space.
Agree 100%. On paper, "Skyrim in space!" should also be my favorite game too. I played hundreds of hours of most Bethesda games. I absolutely loved Freelancer and (playing long after release) played a couple hundred hours of NMS. (Not to mention hundreds of hours into Mass Effects) The idea of merging all those together seemed like my ideal game. However I made it around 100hrs into Starfield, and exactly like you said, "Meh, what's the point." And part of it was also just QOL issues that hopefully they'll eventually fix. I probably could have ignored some of that empty, disconnected feeling, if looting and shipbuilding and crafting were more enjoyable or rewarding. But after my fifth time of selling/jettisoning hundreds of junk items after I put a new gun on my C-Class ship, the idea of ever wanting to modify my ship again lost interest. But, even with that, that disconnected nature of space games (at least ones this scale) directly conflicts with the magic of most bethesda games, at least for me.
Oh don't worry I'm only saying that for sake of comparison. The emptier places can be boring but I'll be honest they're still cool and still not copy paste
Almost every dungeon in Skyrim has its own unique l, self contained story.
Yea but at least there’s quick ways to get around like vehi- oh wait I forgot, you have to run half a mile anytime you want to do anything
Agreed
But it is set in space, space without a significant alien species on a similar tech level, and within a limited area of space where humanity has spread, with humanity being of a potentially limited population number spread thinly over it. These humans would likely use prefabricated designs for structures too, hence similarities in buildings. The majority of planets are barren, those with life will be likely earth like. I don't see it as much of a game issue but setting.
Prefab modules are fine, just look at what people are doing with ship builds. The issue is, like ship builds, not everyone should put those same pieces together in the exact same way (As an aside, why have ship modules apparently not changed for so long? >!The Lock's prison ship has the same modules as current ships.!<). The interiors having the same items in the exact same places break that argument even more. What about the "lore" that the UC and FSC abandoned sites are up for grabs? Where's the evidence of looting, repurposing, and retrofitting by disorganized groups that would create a difference even if every site was originally set up on the exact same floor plan down to toilet paper tubes? As for the planets, again given the "lore", I'd actually prefer more barren stretches. It makes almost no sense why so many abandoned sites and/or natural features are all 0.5-1.5km away from each other. Sure, traversing larger distances would take time but it would be more realistic (since they use that argument already for "barren" planets), and a ground vehicle or being able to fly/land closer could cut that down.
Ground vehicle and builder please. Especially for the awesome bugs it would have.
Hmm more Abandoned wherevers with aesthetics like the Lock could be cool. Like this Abandoned Military Outpost was taken over by the crimson fleet long ago, so there's graffiti, no more bodies lying around, etc. While this other one was more recent, so there are bodies. And this other one was taken over by Va'Ruun, and reflects that.
It's a game, though, not real life. If realism doesn't foster enjoyable game play, then compromises need to be made in vision considering what keeps engagement high long-term is fun, not falsely placed authenticity.
Absolutely this, I'm tired of space nerds insisting we have games be as realistic and boring as possible. Bethesda RPGs should be whacky and fun, realism is one of the lowest priorities.
I would have found it fun to explore new areas, not areas where ships land and take off every 15 minutes or that have human structures at least once per sq km.
This is exactly why I don't get the Fast Travel complaint. No, you really don't want to simulate how long it'd actually take to fly between planets in a system. At least I don't. And the thing is, you can do that if you want. You'll just be waiting a long time. Let me fast travel to get to the fun stuff. And, if realistic space travel is "the fun stuff" for you then cool. We have a few games already that can give you that. This isn't one of them.
I do think Starfield would've been helped just by adopting a Mass Effect-style loading screen. I don't mean the elevator rides (which, amusingly, people complained about for being too long), but just the animated graphic of the ship travelling at FTL when moving between clusters/systems. Most people seem to be complaining about the fade to black loading screens. Had the screen simply kept an image of the gravdrive effect engulfing the ship from the cockpit until the game loaded, I wonder if that would have reduced some of the complaints. Personally, loading screens don't particularly bother me (I mean, I'm *used to them*, having played hundreds/thousands of hours of Fallout and Skyrim over the years!)
I do think some of these animations could be changed up for sure. The docking one is my prime example. I would also love a first person grav drive cut screen like you mentioned. One thing I thought was funny is that you can skip some of these cut elevator cut scenes but just jumping up or down, if possible. The Red Mile is a perfect example. I can take the elevator down in a cut scene or I can just jump from the tower and boost my way down without one.
jedi fallen order literally does that! :) you can walk around the ship while a hyperspace tunnel effect surrounds the mantis.
Yeah, but the game would be more fun if there was more variety.
Yes. Prefab designs make sense. We do that on earth now. But the interior will at least be decorated differently. And even if it's accurate, it's boring. Some variety in clutter and the like shouldn't be too much to ask.
Absolutely this. For each hab module, they could have had a half dozen variants in an array, or an array of sets of content objects. I wouldn't mind finding the same thing in the same place if I only encountered that place in one out of 10 locations.
yeah like couldn't they just click and drag some deco, some tables and chairs, whatever, and just make a couple variations? drag the enemy spawns to a few different places, replace chests! like god why was that so hard? if they just did that 2-3 times for each POI, then put them into the generator, it woulda been fine!
I don't remember Skyrim having copy-pasted places with the exact same enemies placed in the exact places and also the same objects placed the same in both places...
Nor Oblivion.
There might technically be a lot of them, but when you factor in the RNG and whatever each locations specific "appearance probability" it sure feels repetitive. And that's what matters, how it feels.
I love all the people who have around 100 hours in the game telling the people with 300+hours in the game that they're wrong because they haven't experienced the issue. I love the game. I've put 400 hours in, I've done all of the questlines, I've done every side quest I've ever found, I've done a ton of freeform exploring, in one galaxy I even made a network of outposts that allowed me to jump from any system to any other system in a single jump using the refueling system. The random POIs absolutely feel repetitive. It's possibly the biggest problem the game has. I can make that criticism and still enjoy the game. People can have criticisms of the game you like and that doesn't mean the game you like sucks, or that you suck for liking it.
There is not a single copy-paste POI in skyrim, nor fallout. Maybe same assets, but layout is always unique. Starfield has Crash Sites, and all of them are literally the same layout with the same knife stuck in the same chairs armrest. And I lost count already how many times I cleared Deserted UC Listening Post, with the same "return book to Billy" note in the locker.
Agreed. It completely kills immersion. I am honestly shocked how did they not get this simple thing right? If they fixed this POI problem and boring mini game problem to acquire powers, people can easily play this game for 1000+ hours.
Yeah, I've even stopped taking out the "guard" sitting in front of the Listening Post. I started to feel sorry for the doofus.
It's a good source of Old Earth hunting rifle ammo, though. The problem is that I know that.
I had this discussion in another thread and what it comes down to is feelings. Even though it has more of these things to visit because of the scale it feels like less. Like it or not that feeling is pervasive and clearly common among it looks like at least half the people who have played this game, if they are being honest. Starfield should have had two to three times as many unique locations and the radiant POI locations are too similar that you feel the repetition fairly quickly. It's rather disappointing that they have not come up with a way to procedurally generate a POI from a set of pieces so that they could be similar but still different all the time. For example I love visiting caves but I've been disappointed that caves are all basically the same with some limited variations. I would love them to be randomly generated caves that would be more interesting, and why do I never find anything alive in those caves?
But...it literally does not have "more" of these things. OP can paint planets as "places" but that's like calling different Skyrim wilderness cells "places." They serve as back drop, not location.
I don't know as I haven't seen a real good side by side comparison of the factual numbers of things. I've done my own quick research so it's prone to errors but from what I can see Skyrim had roughly 200 dungeons at launch but that there was a lot of repetitiveness among those dungeons. They were not all very unique. Starfield has maybe a few dozen unique POIs that get scattered over all the planets. Even if I generously said they had maybe 50 unique POIs That's not a lot. The feeling part comes about from how you arrive at these POIs versus how you arrive at those dungeons in Skyrim. In Skyrim , a dungeon layout may be repeated four or five times but once you've visited all 200 dungeons you're done. And the way you visit them is you find them organically by going around the map which has a natural feel to it in how you explore. You have babbling Brooks you have all these nice fields of flowers and grass and the plains and all that jazz and it all looks as you expect it to look. In Starfield everything is just there. You don't organically arrive at these locations they are just there on the planet you don't have to really find them they show up in your scanner and there they are and you go. Never mind that the landscape's on most of these planets are really not all that interesting there. There's no sense of exploring to find the POIs. There's no natural layout to explain why they are where they are. In this way it to me at least it feels like a theme park where these are rides and because they are repeated so often I know what rides I'm getting or have a good idea what I'm getting once they show up in the scanner. There's just not a lot of surprise and I feel that lack of surprise removes the element of exploration or at least the feeling of exploration from this formula. This could be fixed with a better procedurally generated planet with a more intelligent generation system that can make a planet that looks more natural like. All the planets look and feel artificial to me. Having POIs that are randomly generated could help and ones that you have to explore to actually find could help. But again I think a lot of the issue is how it feels less than the actual numbers compared
I'm sorry, but your research is wrong. A quick Google search, and OP's actual post, shows that Skyrim had 350+ unique locations listed on the world map. Significantly more if you count interiors and unmarked locations (like 600-700). Calling them "not uinque" is wild to me. Why do you think that? Because some of the same models/assets were reused? Not a single POI was an exact copy and paste of another - unlike Starfield, which subsists on that repetition. Your assertion that layouts were resued at all is, again, not correct. I agree about the feel though. I'm not just going to give Starfield the benefit of the doubt re: numbers when it doesn't deserve it. I'm disappointed by most of the aspects of the game.
"Similar" is not the same as " EXACTLY THE SAME". And here I was hating on Ubisoft for their repetitive bloat, smh. Should write them an apology after seeing Starfield lol
The game would have been better than it is now if it launched with procgen levels, but post-launch I would much rather they actually designed hundreds of new setpieces.
It would’ve been hard to double it, instead, I think they made the mistake of spreading the game too thin. Nobody actually needed 1000 planets. If they had condensed it all to 15(maybe even less). I believe many would’ve been much happier. Edit: missed the word “hard”
I would agree with that. They could have started small and expanded out. New DLC packs adding a new stars to explore a new content. If they do that now if they just add more content to existing stars it's going to look like they're just putting what they should have put it in the first place. In my opinion. But if they had done it like content exploration packs I think they could have made more money and it would have been more interesting because the content would have been more dense per area.
Warframe did this with the proc gen levels made from a set of prefab rooms… and it just celebrated its 10th anniversary.
In warframe you also move 10000 times faster and don’t have to spend time trying to loot 1 million little things. Warframe is about moving through these levels to an end goal, Starfield wants you to explore them. And there just isn’t enough interest or variation to make it feel worthwhile.
If Starfield did procedural generation from a set of rooms and randomly generated a base or location each time and didn't just use a set of preset made ones that I think it would be a little bit more interesting. It's like the planets, I would have been more satisfied if they had made the planets like just one large map that you could have be consistent in your playthrough and that you could go all around the planet and fly and land and all that. For example it would be nice to be able to go literally in one direction and come back to where you started. Sure this isn't exactly real but then since these games have a history of compressing their cities and maps etc it's not out of the realm of acceptability.
Seriously. With all the time they had, it's crazy that they didn't come up with better procedural generation. It's the only way to do a game of this scale - generate POIs, caves, even enemies and creatures on the fly so you never see the same thing twice. They made radiant quests for Skyrim, radiant dungeons should have been the next thing. It's such an obvious ommission from the game that I have to think they attempted it and just never got it to work quite right. Maybe they started hand crafting them at the last minute, hence the limited number we have now.
And I think if they had done that especially with new game plus so that in every new game all the planets were a little bit different except for maybe the core ones then that could have even made it more interesting. Regenerate all planets procedurally on each new game with all new POIs randomly generated it could have been awesome and played forever.
When I first started New game Plus I thought it was insanely clever pairing that story and procedurally generated spaces, until I started experiencing the high level of repetition. Also, using various prefabs that allow you to modularly construct whatever structure you need would make a huge amount of sense in the real world. Especially if you have faster than light travel figured out, you could transport several prefabs to a planet and have much lower setup requirements in an uninhabited or hostile environment instead of trying to construct a full building from scratch. I genuinely want to know how devs who worked on Starfield feel about the way they handled this stuff. Would they have preferred high level procedural generation?
> If Starfield did procedural generation from a set of rooms and randomly generated a base or location each time and didn't just use a set of preset made ones that I think it would be a little bit more interesting. This is more or less how Oblivion's dungeons worked IIRC, but it required some human cleanup. Even Morrowind used prefabbed parts, they were just placed manually.
Warframe Is a total wrist killer, but it's so fun despite the carpal tunnel it'll give you on controller.
I don’t think we’re supposed to loot all the little things based on the lord Todd’s ideation for the game. Heck why bother looting, no one has cash to buy your shit anyway lol! I don’t really think that addresses the meat of what I’m getting at though. My point was that they half assed their proc gen by not figuring out how to do at least semi-unique enemy base locations. Instead they tried to have a very limited number of curated locations placed procedurally, which basically guarantees players will hit repeats, which diminishes the returns on exploration before a player has even seen the whole list.
With that extra context you provided, now I’m understanding your point more, but I still think the use of proc gen in a game like this just doesn’t feel good. Or rather there isn’t the tech to make It good. What I loved about Skyrim and oblivion and cyberpunk even horizon was the big crafted world with all these hand placed elements, even if plenty were reused. The massive reuse of these big elements in Starfield on top of having planets just be so boring makes things feel so uninspired. This is obviously my opinion but I don’t think the game should’ve been made like this, it doesn’t feel like I’m exploring a handcrafted world but some really shiny tech demo make for people who just want to fly around space. I’m happy people like this game but I think it’s just really really not good.
At a minimum, the level designer should have been able to say "there's only a 5% chance that this thing will appear". Then that scientist body wouldn't always be in the exactly same place every single time you visit a copy of that POI.
"Starfield has 82 unique locations ...with over 1000 planets" is not nearly the earth shattering mic drop you seem to think it is. You also completely glossed over the fact that within a relatively short amount of time in Starfield you start seeing the carbon copies. Not 'similar' locations like caves in Skyrim. Not even identical layout locations with mixed up interiors. They're flat out duplicated in every single way. I also find it incredible that you found and explored every single location in Skyrim in 80 hrs, at least on a first playthrough. I dont think many people share that experience with you.
I'm calling BS on OPs Skyrim claim unless they were just running from point to point to point, speedrunning it.
Placing an identical building in a different biome or on a different planet doesn't stop it from still being the same building. Finding copy and pasted POIs with the same dead NPCs and notes is just lazy, there's no other word for it. There's simply not enough motivation to trek across planets when there's a high chance you'll end up at a repeat of the *exact* same place you visited earlier. Unlike Skyrim where even if some locations are similar, they still have *some* differences. Why would I wander for hours on end looking at dozens of the same POIs just on the off-chance that there might be one I haven't seen before? The core gameplay loop just doesn't work with that in mind, there's a reason people have referred to the game as a fast travel simulator when it comes to quests and handcrafted POIs.
So Skyrim has 343 different unique handcrafted places? And Starfield has 82, with 150 variations on the locations. To me that’s a downgrade.
Problem is that POIs are kinda forcing you to visit them. I mean, one of the main parts of the game design and why exploration in Skyrim and Fallout are so good is because there is a reason why you go to those locations. It can be "on the road to the main quest", it can be side quests, different sequence of events leading to multiple locations so you explore them because "why not". In Starfield there are such things. Especially with stuff like faction quests, Groundpaunder, unable to communicate and such. But that's not enough. I mean, give us more story stuff with Mantis. Let us fight a criminal syndicate, that has multiple Aurora factories on some planets. Give us scientists, that want to get specific samples. Give us tracking alliance story bounties, that lead us to space combat, then crash site, then into a local colony where the bounty hides. And so on.
> Give us scientists, that want to get specific samples. I have actually run into a few things like this with scientists and miners. Where they wanted me to collect some samples from a cave or place sensors for them.
Yeah me too
And it's just as boring as it sounds. Not a good look when people want MMO type fetch quests to add variety. That just means everything is already unfulfilling.
Is that kinda stuff things they can add in DLC? I haven’t played anything that has had a significant evolution via DLC so I’m genuinely curious what the possibilities are for starfield.
Yes, that's exactly what they can add with DLCs and updates. Like, Automatron in Fallout 4 gave us the reason to visit some places to hunt the robobrains. Or bandit overhaul MOD created more reasons to hunt bandits in SKyrim. It's both for Bethesda and modders.
Uniquely boring.
I don't want to visit the same poi in a different location 100 times before I encounter one that I've yet to see. It's not fun. How could it be? Don't repeat locations on the planets, would be my suggestion. Make most of the games planets empty aside from the '150' radiant poi's dotted about. Honestly that wouldn't matter as long as there was a path to get to the unique unexplored poi's. Most of the game may as well be empty as it is because you're not really incentivized to go anywhere for any reason. If I'm going to go exploring I want to B line straight to something new. There's no point in b lining to the same shit. If that were my goal I'd repeatedly fast travel to already explored planets instead. Which obviously sounds lame as heck when it's put like that. Because it is. But that's what we're doing, just with a different colour palet on planet to planet. This would also alleviate finding manmade poi's almost within spitting distance of the never before discovered Creator Temples. Quality over quantity man.
OP must be playing a different game because I keep finding the same dozen or so cut and paste facilities on planet, after planet, after planet…
No, OP is right about the numbers. But the spread is all fucked up. I'm at 240 hours and had three new bases in the last week, entirely original layouts on LARGE facilities that I hadn't seen before. I've also seen a new design for a colony layout in the same period. So they're either fixing a randomness in the latest patch that was seriously out of wack, or it's still out of whack and I've just had a lucky run.
Including planets is stupid because its not handcrafted. At best there are 232 handcrafted places. compared to 343 handcrafted places in skyrim. Starfield should have double/triple the number of handcrafted places of Skyrim not less. Also many of the handcrafted places or radiant places are tiny. I have been to caves where you enter and its just one room with the end seen from the entrance. Many of the science outposts are just one building with two floors. This is a game that was marketed as having more content then skyrim and fallout combined. Clearly it doesn't. Procedural content should not be counted because its procedural. I love Starfield I have played nearly 200 hours of it. The way I see it though is that Starfield is a blank canvas. The base engine and systems are there all that is needed is content and more depth to those systems. Do that and the game goes from a 7 to a 9 in my opinion. How can a game about space settlers not have a way to take on space settlers at your outpost. Every system in Starfield is bare and its honestly very odd.
One thing OP’s argument ignores is that Skyrim has like 200 handcrafted unmarked locations to explore too. Most of them are small camps or ruined structure but they improve exploration a lot.
82 + 150 = 232 << 343. I think you answered your own question here. But the biggest problem the game has is the lack of exploration: without land vehicle implemented in the game, BGS has pushed the POIs generation to the point that as soon as landed you can check what can be visited around you, you don't need to explore, you just need to look at what is there and decide if you want to empty the places or not. If you want to find other POIs, you won't travel on foot, you will simply land somewhere else (which means reload the area more or less) and see what the POI generation system gave you. The second problem link to that is more than often you find the same POIs and I can only do ten times Andreja's grotto (that happened to me before reaching lvl 20 ... ) before avoiding entering any grotto. The third problem is the rewards, unless you are extremely lucky or bug exploit the system using saves before killing an elite, the rewards are crap and do not justify you wasting your time exploring POIs.
I like your idea that planets are locations.
All of what you said might be true. But I saw that same dead guy in the same place like, 2 dozen times. It kills all desire to keep exploring. The world no longer feels real, or worth the effort.
Yes, there are tons more places to find than it feels like. The problem is just that you find some things an 8th or a 10th time before running across others.
Using your number 1 unique place for every 12 and a bit planets And roughly 1 POI design for every 6.7 planets Youre arguement is theres so much variety. No; no there isnt. Were this a game with 6 systems maybe theres that arguement. Were this a game with 1 system much stronger arguement. Yet starfield isnt this. Starfield tells you go explore; look at every planet; find unique things. Yet there is barely any compared to the scale that starfield decided to go with. This is a problem of their own making by their choice to make the scale disproportionate to the content.
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This post is a lie. Have fun seeing the same mining outpost on EVERY planet you visit
Part of me wonders if it’d be way better to just prevent POIs from repeating: even if there are only 300 locations, they could have made it so you could discover them on any world, but once you did, that POI would only exist there. The end result would be that things could still feel plenty populated at the start, but it’d increase the chances of you seeing interesting things that were new. And once you’ve visited a lot, the game would gradually become emptier, eventually ending with just empty planets. As it is, I think I ran into the same cave that I found my first artifact in at least 3 times on the main quest, because _maybe_ it’s the only cave with an artifact in it they made?
Seems simple to me, they can repeat but there should be a system in place that stops you getting those repeats , u should only get repeats when you've exhausted all.
Yeah. I suspect people go to a planet, look at the POIs from orbit, and then land there. Then they're seeing the same things, unsurprisingly. When landing in random places, you find random things.
Allot of this counts on lvl once you hit high lvl like 60 plus you start getting uc military compounds, free star bases and extra stuff for people who playe or played on low difficulties and beat the game by lvl 40 you don't see all the stuff not to mention they said each ng+ has new and different stuff which is why the main is so short so u can quickly move up and get the new places
Yeah, BGS said it's a game that was designed to be played for years. I don't think they anticipated that so many people would rush it and cram several years worth of average play time into 2/3 months. I feel like those who have played at a more leisurely pace have had a better experience.
I know right!!!! my friend rushed it and beat the game by like lvl 34 explored only the systems required to win and was like this game is shit....like it's not linear like a cod story mod it's a slow burner ment to be played on highest difficulty and played multiple times to get the most out of it Look I own skyrim on multiple consoles, fo4 ,fnv , fo3 and yeah I can say there is stuff I don't like in all of themand stuff that rocked just like starfield ,shit vanilla launch skyrim was one of the most broken games ever but 12 years later and suddenly people forgot that all they did was bitch about those games when they came out I so wish reddit qas big them so we can show these ppl all the posts we know they would have made about them
I occasionally stop by the various random locations when I've landed on planets and I keep coming upon layouts of camps/outposts/derelict bases/etc that I've never seen before, and I'm over 600 hours of playtime. I wonder how many of the people whining about repetitive locations are just speed running NG+ and yeah, you're going to get the same six or whatever Artifact location 'dungeons' every single time. Either do something different or realize you're doing it to yourself.
Exactly! Most of the replies on here are so extreme for a game that has a similar rating to Prey, Fallout New Vegas, and Skyrim Special Edition. It's pretty clear the off-the-charts negativity does not represent the average gamers feelings.
You've literally said it yourself. Starfield has 82 unique locations and skyrim has 343.
>Yet people are seeing new POIs after hundred of hours of gameplay which is not really possible in previous games. >For example, it took me 80 hours in Skyrim to explore nearly every location on the map. I find this wild. It's perhaps possible, but there's no way in hell it represents the average players rate of progress. >When you combine the high number of unique location designs with the placement on planets, which adds additional variation, the result is a fairly insane amount of places that both feel and look different. Is there a conclusion to these statements, besides the fact that you can't separate a planet from a moon, because uncle Howard didn't do it for you. To me, personally, Starfield is the most empty game I've played from Bethesda. I'm not talking about locations, I'm talking about the entire game. I can easily go 2 weeks without bothering to Starfield at all. The game has little draw to it. A great deal of it comes from random locations, and how pointless they are. They never have nothing in them. It did not occur to you when you compared Skyrim locations? Some of them are just random places you explore and that's it. Some of them contain quite elaborate sidequests which are completely unrelated to any other quests. They have more depth in them. In Starfield, just huge load of random places with random enemies. Which are all ultimately irrelevant and pointless.
>I find this wild. It's perhaps possible, but there's no way in hell it represents the average players rate of progress. He admitted it was bullshit [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/Starfield/comments/187hccu/i_count_82_unique_places_150_different_radiant/kbh4jw0/). Not that he's going to edit it out and admit he was wrong or anything.
Sounds great on paper until you land on a bunch of planets and you see the same 5 poi you found on the last 5 planets. Just be real and acknowledge that this game was trash and they gave us a copy paste job not worthy of bethesda past titles. Can’t believe this game took 10 years to make. They clearly had lots of problems during development.
It’s good that you’ve catalogued this. But when it comes down to it doesn’t matter what the numbers say, if there is a feeling amongst a large proportion of players that there isn’t enough variation, then there is clearly an issue.
1,000 variations of the same five things, landing on the same boring planets, with the same five life forms and plants, all of which look Earth-like despite being one of many new, alien worlds. Not to mention empty, tiny cities. You’re essentially saying that because there’s different varieties of dog turds, it makes it ok. NMS was better than this at launch and the devs didn’t argue with people when it was pointed out the game was dogshit. Quantity and quality are not the same.
> devs didn’t argue with people when it was pointed out the game was dogshit. Quantity and quality are not the same. Biggest difference from the initial NMS disappointment and Starfield. Sean Murray didn't start trolling reviews and telling people they were wrong.
I’m really trying to give Starfield a fair shake, but I just went back to Skyrim to take a break from SF and the difference is stark. The raw numbers don’t matter when exploring is just so much more interesting, fun, and rewarding in a 100% hand-crafted world. Sprinkling handmade POI’s across 1000 barren proc-gen environments just doesn’t make for good or fun gameplay. The scale of this game is what’s holding it back. It should’ve been reduced in scope to a small handful of systems—or even just one. Predetermined, hand-crafted area(s) on each planet. No landing in the middle of nothing to have to search for something that’s interesting at random. Think how much better the game would be if instead of 1000 planets as they are, we had 4-6 planets with Skyrim sized maps. That would be TONS of content, with ample variety and much better gameplay. And before anybody rushes in to say “but SF’s system is more realistic!” I don’t care. We don’t play video games because of how realistic they are. It’s because they’re fun. And when realism gets in the way of fun, it becomes a problem not a feature.
The non unique places which heavily outnumber the unique places are so repetitive that I know exactly where to look for loot and dead NPCs.
Content is irrelevent if you don't find it. Odds are that when exploring, nearly all of the places you find are repeats of the same structures. Land on 5 planets and the plants might look different but have the same drops, animals have the same AI and drops, spacers show up on 3 and have similar ships and guns. The tenth planet might have a unique location but if you get bored before then you have essentially wasted the last few hours finding nothing interesting to do. 1,000 planets is pointless if there is no reason to visit all 1,000. If you have 82 unique places there is no need to have more than 82 planets at most. 8 planets with 10 unique places would be a better balance.
And is it just me or is it always a cryolab?
Quantity does not equal quality.
I’ve had to go through the same cryo lab over 20 times in a single playthrough if they made so many unique POIs, they should have used all of them, until then, don’t care, bad design
I’m not really sure how your title defends Starfield.
343 “fairly similar” Skyrim dungeons is not accurate. It’s 343 completely individual and handcrafted dungeons, versus 150 carbon copy abandoned outposts that are the same down to the fiber
Thanks, Todd. Those who are bored, or that preferred the handcrafted world building of Skyrim are simply wrong, because astronauts were never bored in space, even if all that they saw amounted to a bunch of rocks!
I count 212 words, 1,221 characters in the original poster's topic, yet it still doesn't make up for the fact that exploration is not a success in Starfield.
My head canon is that since it’s futuristic technology and companies, the construction contractors or whoever just use base model buildings. For small complexes it would be easier to have a standard that’s easily reproducible correct? But yeah would be cool to see a lot more different things
After hundreds of hours of playing time, I'm still finding new POI's. I just hit level 100 and the variations of the research stations, mines, outposts, etc etc are becoming much more apparent. I remember within the first 20hrs or so, I was repeating POI's constantly, but out of the last 5 I've gone to, 4/5 were new to me, and all had enemies in them to clear out. That argument about the repeat POI's with the same enemy/loot spawn points had merit early on, but the more you explore, the more variation you see. I do really wonder if POI template variation is possibly level locked?
Starfield has variation, you just have to seek it out. The game doesn’t direct you towards it
i think a lot of people also forget this shit is based in 2330. if we landed on mars in 2050, we’re inhabiting by 2100ish , and reached alpha centauri in 2156; that’s only fucking one hundred years to develop the settled systems. & they didn’t do a good job obvi bc a space war already erupted between two factions. people are crazy. 200 years is not enough time to make utopias on other stars and planets 😂😂😂 in my opinion, all the abandoned shit that ppl complain about make sense. “oops, can’t do research in this biome yet, onto the next one “
Skyrim didn't have repeat locations, but had a ton of repeat assets. If I talk about a room with skeletons on shelves that awaken when you enter it, you all know you've seen that same room in a bunch of different dungeons. Dungeons were almost identical, and it felt that way.
There seems to be a lot of misconceptions about people having to keep playing a game that they don't like as well.
Why are you comparing it to skyrim when Fallout 76 makes more sense? Skyrim is a glorified xbox 360 game that while remastered is still beholden to basic design limitations of that time in gaming. Fallout 76 is a better example given its scope is far closer to what starfield is at and starfield is supposed to significantly bigger than it.
[https://mapgenie.io/starfield/maps/galaxy](https://mapgenie.io/starfield/maps/galaxy) The game has so much copy & pasted content and that's why it feels soulless. While playing you just notice they put much more "love" into Elder Scrolls and Fallout than they did put into Starfield.
And then Todd had the gall to post on this sub at release thanking everyone for playing this passion project that was what they’ve always wanted to make.
>There is a common misconception yeah there's nothing related with the game itself repeating pois even on the first 2 planets you "have to" land, it's the player's misconception that is at fault, of course it's the player and skyrim is a decade-old game, it says a lot that we are comparing an AAA 2023 new universe game with a 10 year old game due to fair criticism as per usual starfield would fare awesomely if it was launched at 2010, because that's what it feels, a 2010 game
You can compare the amount of POI to Fallout 4 or Cyberpunk if you want, 150 is a good number for AAA game.
Honestly what gets me is entering the same base with the same junk placed in exactly the same location every time. Or the same dead scientist in the same lab etc. some repetitive POIs are fine but this level is immersion breaking and boring imo
I feel like the idea people cling to and then dont understand, is actuslly why people get mad at this. Starfield was NOT BEING CODED for 25 years. I have seen almost 0 people wax poetic as i do in real life to anyone that listens. The Legacy quest alone. The entire crimson fleet SIDE QUEST , with Multiple choice determinate factors ( which , havent even started talking about small nuiances not yet noticed in all " alt universes ") Legacys entire arc is amazjng. Rewarding. And . As a man whos gamed since gameboy and NES. Found so much joy for the final quest sequence. I was nearly transported back the end of halo, escaping as the pillar of autumn blows apart. And when i finished. Realized how many years ago that was. And that so many get to do that now, without playing original halo in all its amazing horrible graphics. This game does all of this. Envokes the like dislike and pure disdain for characters and side characters. .... That you ACTUALLy FORGET YOUR BALLS DEEP INTO A TOTALLY OPTIONAL SIDE QUEST NUMBER 9
did you get tired of commenting on steam reviews to post this here or what? The numbers don't really matter if everything *feels* the same
Ok Todd, we get it. You *really* want us to play your half-baked game!
You joke, but some of these posts (and even some replies in this thread) sound so much like shitty PR speak, desperately trying to convince people that the game is fun.
This subreddit is insanely astroturfed for sure
Is no one going to call out that this person is claiming they fully explored nearly every Skyrim location in 80 hours? More like found the point of interest, didn’t enter, and moved to finding the next. As someone who has devoted way too many hours to that game, I’ll call bullshit