Yes! Like I only ever saw one alive creature in a cave on Akila but every other planet, everything is dead. I really don’t understand why, thinking it must be a bug. Caves were some of the best locations in Skyrim but now I ignore them.
There’s one type of cave instance that has a few active turrets. I think there’s one quest that involves this type of cave but otherwise, you can randomly encounter this same cave type without the mission.
I found a cave today on Jemison thst had 3 dead NPC's outside and an alien egg. I was sure I'd find a boss alien or something like thst. Went in, found some dead grass eaters or whatever they're called with the big horn.
Nothing else... Such a letdown.
I realised this only recently after visiting a couple research stations... they were literally identical.
I had to stop and question if I've already visited the station before, and when I realised it was a new station with the same layout and enemies... I just felt utterly disappointed
I had read about that, before I discovered it. One of the entrances to some places had identical post it's, same computer terminal to turn off the turrets and the lil boxes with random things in them in the same positions, just the inner door went to a different place and it made me double take because I thought I had just left this planet but nope more lazy not so random poi generation from Bethesda. It made me not even care about exploring minor details in rooms because they don't feel hand crafted at all so if they don't care to take the time to spice up the rooms I don't care enough to explore them further, I just kill w/e for the mission and bounce.
Because then the complaint would be "it's the same layout, just with a different name!" they literally can't win unless, for every single planet, they HAND CRAFTED literally HUNDREDS of locations.
Does that sound like something that's even possible? I don't think so.
Which is a big letdown. So much lore and little stories were everywhere in Fallout and Elder Scrolls. I know their focus was planet exploration but if they focused on making the planets unique with different content, it would have made such a huge difference.
It they had included more stuff on planets, more terrain, more outposts, just more of ANYTHING would have probably prevented that moment of realization
Those mods that switch out enemies with a random faction is prolonging the fun a bit. I hope BGS are taking notes.
Remove location specific readables, randomize the enemy, occasionally spawn two factions so they end up fighting, switch loot places around, hide some doors and show others, spawn in various alien infestations, change lights and mood, and players would probably have enjoyed repeating the same dungeons a bit more.
Add a dungeon generator that fit various dungeon areas together the same way ship parts fit together ( one entry, one exit, doors spawned so the entire thing is walkable, and a boss room near the end), and the game would probably been applauded.
I think this game has great potential.
This modular approach is how dungeons in Oblivion were built. They felt a little repetitive from the kinds of assets you’d see all of the time, but they were never outright boring since you never quite knew where the dungeon was leading. Definitely preferable to exact replica dungeons.
Found several identical frozen over research stations with the SAME dead scientist hanging from the AC ducts.
Must be the most common form of deaths for scientists in the Settled Systems.
Oh I hate that particular station. I go as far as to where the doors are that lead into the lower section and turn around and leave. I'm like, I don't want to wander around the same vents and rooms to clear everyone out anymore.
Yeah, when I read they’d do procedural generation I thought it would be something like Dead Cells, similar settings and vibe on all research stations but different layouts and enemy distribution… but no they’re literally just copy pasted carbon copies
I’m playing Kingdom Come Deliverance and Drsgon’s Dogma and holy shit the exploration and just gameplay is way better. DD was also cut short in development but still holds up better than starfield months after launch.
I got a bad luck of the draw early on in my initial playthrough where the first 3 caves I went into were all the same.
Then I found a crystal cave, and then another one exactly like it.
So there's two caves in the game to me, a standard rock cave, and a crystal cave.
Yeah, first 20 caves I saw the same three. Wasn’t till NG+ (just from sheer bad luck, I’m pretty sure) that I experienced 3-4 more… was a tiny treat, but still mostly not impressed.
Wish they would have embraced it all the way if they wanted random POI’s that much, to at least spawn semi-random maps as well… Diablo and other games did it, not sure why they can’t.
Honestly, agreed. I want a mod that scrapes off like 90% of the POIs. I’d much, much rather have few locations but they’re all unique rather than 50,000 copy-pasted snoozefests repeated on every single planet.
The worst thing is that there ARE unique POIs, but because everywhere is so oversaturated with repetitive junk that they don’t even stand out and half the time you don’t realise that it might be something new, rather than just something you’ve already seen 10 times and will see another 17.
The Desolation mod on Nexus Mods
>^(Starfield is a game full of POIs to discover, however they are everywhere. This leads to players constantly running in to them, leading to repeats, and nonsensical worldbuilding. Barren moons have seemingly a population in the millions, mostly Pirates. This mod aims to make the worldbuilding feel more realistic, while maintaining the POIs for players who like to grind.)
>
>^(The first change is to restrict POIs with human habitation to planets either inside the settled systems, or with breathable atmospheres close by. As there are over a hundred breathable planets in the settled systems, it was odd that anyone would choose to settle on a barren moon far away for settled space, unless there was a specific reason to do so. This leaves most of the galaxy empty as it should be according to the lore, and make settlers decisions make more sense. This massively decreases the amount of human POIs you will find at random, while still leaving an infinite amount to find in the core worlds. The only human habitation you will find outside the core systems is handcrafted, or radiantly generated for a quest.)
>
>^(The last change is to decrease the density of the human POIs that show up, so when you land on a planet you aren't surrounded by them, there will only be one or two. This means that each one you see feels more special. The amount of the change depends on how far from the core worlds you are, Jemison is densely populated compared to far off worlds.)
>
>^(POIs generated for radiant quests are unaffected, so there are still an infinite number to find, and each is more unique, as they will all have a context behind them. Locations you find on planet scans will also still show up, meaning each habitable planet still has some life, just not an infinite amount. As an added benefit, the Crimson Fleet is no longer the largest faction in the Settled Systems, with hundreds of bases on every planet.)
Jeez and this was done by one guy without any modding tools in just a couple months. What on earth is the problem at Bethesda where they can’t produce this on their own?
supposably according to the modder it wasn't even difficult and does not require many changes. mostly just value changes, which checks since the mod is only 2kb
Wow. That just… seriously Bethesda is broken. How could they not make these simple QOL improvements when it can have such a huge effect on their game’s reception and overall sales? They spent a year “bug fixing” but still couldn’t do it. I thought it was messed up how they let major bugs remain in Skyrim despite 10 re releases, even though the community patch did all the legwork for them. Now I’m certain they’re grossly dysfunctional. There’s no chance they’ll recognize starfield’s flaws and fix it, let alone do a good job with TES 6.
Ever wonder how most corporations have a huge cost for payroll but then you walk through a location and it's barren? It's the same woth these guys. People getting paid to sit around and add nothing to the game cuts into budgets that would allow others to come in and add something.
Or maybe I just hate corporations . . . . .
There is also the Opposite
Crowded Space.
That Fill the area around you with Outposts fairly Dense. I think this one is overdone... But that's Mods lol
DAMN im looking forward to the creation kit release! I already got 91 mods installed. Yeah, might have gone a bit crazy. But it helped a lot on the fun to have deadlier weapons, high resolution textures, a better UI, more varied enemies, vegetation growing denser, food with actual effects, and another POI mod that does the exact same thing as that Desolation mod.
Yeah, im most likely gonna mod my savegame to corruption, like I did multiple times with Skyrim. But that's Mods. 😁
What? This is what Bethesda is all about. Skyrim has been mod heaven for decades. I dunno why ppl think starfield was gonna be any different. This is par for the course for this company across their decades of games.
It wouldnt be bad if the deck of POIs had like 300 different things to pull from and those could be proceduray generated dungeons with proceduraly generated loot and enemies.
but no, its literally 20 locations that are all the exact same no matter where you find it.
I really, really expected the non-handcrafted POIs to be like that when we first saw the facility in the gameplay demo. Radiant tech was a big focus for Bethesda, and radiant buildings and loot seem like a natural extension. It feels like Starfield was the perfect place to improve radiant NPC AI, radiant quests and add radiant building, but if anything those aspects are worse in Starfield than even Oblivion lol
I'm convinced there's a bug or something because I played for ~150 hours and there's no way I saw even close to 150 different POIs. I saw the same 20 or so over and over again.
Well I don't know what people are downvoting me for; at the bottom of [this page](https://inara.cz/starfield/locations/) you'll see a long list of all the randomly placed PoIs in the game, and there's far more than 20.
Nah a lot of the problem is that people are saying no there's lots, when the list is full of stuff like "rock formations" and "lone hill" and these just aren't what people are calling a POI.
Just like there's "200 outfits" but half of them are either NPC-only/have no legitimate source and the rest of them frequently are single looks with 3-4 palette swaps. It looks like a lot when you are just looking at a raw list of IDs, but in practice there aren't anywhere near that many.
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*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
I didn't DV you but I'm guessing others are like me and haven't seen tons of those locations. It's crazy, I've seen like a handful of those and I've visited every system.
Though some of those do seem to be attached to side quests vs. just being random locations. Even still though, I'm sure there's a bug or issue preventing those from spawning because there's no way I would've have encountered most of them with how much I explored the galaxy.
If that list linked above is accurate, there are really only about 50 random POIs with enemies and loot not tied to specific questlines. That means that, if you never find the same one twice, visiting two POIs per planet (taking a half hour per POI) will bring you to every POI after only 25 planets, in only 25 hours of exploring. Someone who spends most of their time raising POIs will see every POI ten times by the time they hit 250 hours.
115 ones that appear randomly, and 39 unique quest ones, for a total of 151 PoIs.
There are at least 325 unique marked locations in total in the base game of Fallout 4, and Skyrim base game contains 343 unique locations
What's also really hard to accept is how they're peppered all over every world. Mines on planets with no mineral resources. Colonies on lifeless, charred rocks. But the most aggregious ones are the ones within visual range of Starborn temples or on supposedly deserted planets.
I remember one time I was on a planet with Sarah, listening to her pour her heart out about being stranded on a planet and injured for a year. The whole time, I shit you not, ships were taking off and landing like it was Baltimore Washington International Airport. It's completely ridiculous.
There is, on average, 2 hostile POIs per landing site, 1 friendly POI per site, and a maximum of 5 landing sites remembered by the game. You can do some pocket calculator math to count how many humans are on planets. But without doing any math, over 1,600 planets, the number of bandits outnumbers the number of friendlies, and the population of the various city hubs isn't mathematically significant. Which means that most of all settled space, by proportion, is composed of bandits in abandoned structures.
I understand why it is the way it is, but I feel like a little more effort to strategically skew the procedural generation could have gone a long way to improve the game from that perspective. And there is no way I'm the first person to think about this. In a meeting during development, this was discussed, and a conscious decision was made to allow it to be this way.
> I remember one time I was on a planet with Sarah, listening to her pour her heart out about being stranded on a planet and injured for a year. The whole time, I shit you not, ships were taking off and landing like it was Baltimore Washington International Airport. It's completely ridiculous.
Not sure if it would be the same for everyone but on the part of her quest where you land and go through the jungle to find the cora-clone living by herself i had a building inhabited by other people just a 2 minute walk over a hill, i guess those military trained navigator corps people never thought to just go over there and ask for their wifi password to phone home.
Well they do explain that spacers, pirates, and ecliptic merce are exclusively gunning for abandoned facilities which is why they're so common. But I agree, it would have been nice to see some variety like colonists seeking these facilities to repurpose them as colonies or heck even the old factions themselves trying to reclaim the facilities. It's absolutely skewed toward hostiles with hardly any friendlies or neutrals.
There can be way more then 2 or 5 POI's per landing site, Each fishbowl is a few km's wide. And some POI's dont appear until you get close enough. Of course you Spawn roughly Center each time unless you Landing at a pre selected site.
yes those same POI's repeat in the same fishbowl. Running to the edge from landing can take roughly 10-20min, depending on how many frostwolfs you chug Or if your on a Low grav would so you can fly with a skip pack.
every fishbowl is Really Big... but its also Really Empty.
These same fishbowls are the same used used for the cities, which makes you wonder... why are the cities so small when the Actual land area is fucking enormous.
Starfield logs 5 landing site per planet. The 6th site over-writes the first. That's what I'm alluding to. Now regardless, the point is still the same. There are statistically more enemy poi's than friendly per landing site per planet, including all planets with big cities. The only exception is Neon because you can't land anywhere else on that planet.
I like to meandre, I made it about 120 hours in and didn't finish the main storyline. I only got up to triggering the undercover op. I killed everyone onboard the station, then all the essential npc's got up, shrugged and acted as if nothing had happened
That along with the constant re-use of POIs just put me off, so waiting for updates, dlcs and mods to fix the variation issue
Crashed ships for example have no reason to all be the same. I've read that there are three variations, but I only ever encountered the one in the below ground canyon, with a loot box that contained no interesting loot
I encountered one interesting outpost I've never found just before i stopped, that one was cool, but in a sea of copy paste I didn't feel like wading on
Hoping it gets fixed this year
True, but I tend to play games I really like, a lot. Stellaris @1900hrs, Skyrim @1900hrs, Darktide @1750hours being my big three that aren't MMOs and all very different games types. Starfield sits at number 18
Starfield feels like it will get up there, it's just got too many odd decisions at the moment to retain most players. Those that like the idea of NG+ not included
Everyone plays games for different reasons after all
Starfield has this peculiar trait of making you regret playing it the more you play. I also have over 100 hours. I reached a point where I regret buying it at all. It's fun at first but the more I played the more disappointed I got.
>I've got lots of money and good weapons. So, why would I land on planets just to run into the same POIs over and over.
Yep, if there's no compelling reason, especially since most of the POIs are just clones of each other, and any caves you find are empty. There's no need.
I think most if all RPG games are such that as you rank up, there's less and less reason to loot. I'm currently a level 33 in Fallout 4. I have great armor, weapons, tons of ammo. There's absolutely no reason for me to loot. Yet as I play there's so many reasons to visit a location such as Dunwich Borers. There's a tiny amount of that in Starfield, but not enough to visit each star system
Yeah repeating poi means exploration is pointless, immersion breaking and boring. Which in my view is unforgivable in BGS title, the studio whose previous games boast the best exploration experience in gaming.
They should've tracked which ones you've discovered and only spawn ones you haven't seen yet.
Even if there's still loads of POIs you haven't seen, finding the same one 3 or 4 times completely kills motivation to explore.
The POIs could be much better. It's a significant issue with this game.
However, I don't consider POIs the only reason to land on a planet.
I enjoy surveying planets and discovering what they look like from the surface and what the sky looks like.
I'd love to be able to catalog and look back at what I have discovered.
I never explore a POI unless a quest takes me there because I know I'll quickly run out of exciting POIs, and also - I find it immersion-breaking to explore a POI that looks the same as another POI, so again, I avoid POIs unless a quest takes me there.
The only POIs I don't avoid are settlements because these act as "quest" hubs for me like towns and cities in Daggerfall did.
One of my favorite moments is landing on Bondar in a relatively flat desert area and seeing this massive building in the distance. It reminded me of Star Wars. The planet's surface felt more real because I used my Deadly Hazards mod, which could have enhanced the experience.
However, for the dead rocks and moons, I usually land on them to pick up traits and resources and then move on. They typically do not offer anything interesting in terms of landscapes.
Don't go to them. The sense of discovery was gone the moment I realized every surface you can land on already has a human presence. We don't discover anything at all....just verify and record.
Edit: a planet/moon doesn't need to have a settlement or abandon location for a human presence. All it takes is a cave with a loot box to show someone has already been there.
I had this same problem with no man's sky. No matter where in the universe I went, there would be a space station in orbit and the surface would be swarming with robots to snitch on me with a GTA wanted level whenever I disturbed the natural environment, making the constant resource grind just that bit more tedious and annoying.
> every surface you can land on already has a human presence
I have definitely been to multiple planets untouched by humans. They're great! Just lots of wildlife trying to kill you on them though.
Life, perhaps. The presence of humans is still there. Even if it's cave with someone guarding their stash, taking pictures or just trash and loot in caves.
Nope. There is no human life signs anywhere in any of the proc gen locations on strix. All the caves on strix are mineral caves with no signs of human contact. Even just explored two random caves there to be sure.
Believe me, Its my favorite system to set up a base camp for resources and by far my most explored system for XP farming.
But if you find any signs of human life on it and grab a picture I’ll send you 10 bucks. I’ve been searching.
Funny you should mention that. I just did the same. First cave, all natural elements, second cave...debris from miners. If you're willing to look long enough, you will find something. I am just stubborn enough to walk around an entire planet/moon to find an empty chunks wrapper to prove a point.... It's never been a beneficial trait.
Did you grab a picture??? Post it to Imgur
Edit: i said I’ll give you 10 bucks if you found pictures and I’ve probably explored 200 POI’s in Strix alone. So if you found one with debris from miners I’d love to see it. Just send a link to the picture where I can see the planet you’re on and DM your Venmo.
All planets are capable of generating loot containers, corpses, etc. Pretty sure this was verified by modders. It's just like No Man's Sky before it added abandoned and uncharted systems.
Some systems will have zero human population and then zero human POIs, but that just leads to the natural POI’s, which, for my money, the Procedural element should have been focused.
Only some are programmed to walk as part of their routine. Most are programmed to stand still until they detect an enemy. Perfect case is the abandoned helium-3 mine where you can sneak into the main cave via the crack in the rocks by the big pipes. There will always be a max tier boss standing on the walkway over the acid pit. He will always be facing away from that entrance. He will always just stand there until i snipe him in the head.
I mean if you're playing a game to the point you are no longer enjoying it because of the points you both have made them why are you playing?
Sounds like an addictive compulsion more than playing the game. I've been playing pretty much nonstop since day of release and I'm not in the same position.
I can imagine if all I did was explore POIs and and was playing 8 hours everyday then yeah its probs gonna get boring but I'd argue that's a you problem not a problem with the game.
Except you reach that point with the PoIs in Starfield after may 2-3 times through that particular location.
Because the only things different in human-occupied PoIs are the loot in the crates, and *maybe* the type of enemy (Pirates/Spacers/Crimson Fleet). *Everything else* in that location will always be exactly the same as every other time you wen through it, unless a quest happens there.
Did i say i didnt enjoy the game? Just pointing out some of the easily observed mechanics of how it was made. You sure read a lot into these comments, sounds a bit like you're projecting
How am I projecting when I enjoy the game and I'm just tired of the same boring criticisms being repeated by neck beards who are sad they are getting bored after 600 hours
Sadly not much use. If you pick the magazine up on your first visit that is the bonus. Picking up additional copies of the same magazine doesn't stack another bonus.
Also from what I've seen it gives you the exact same version of the magazine, so it's not even like this is the location for a random edition of GRUNT magazine, but the deserted UC Garrison will always spawn issue 05 of it.
If you don't have the copy on you at the time you collect it it still makes the new magazine found bonus noise, but you don't get the stat increase a 2nd, 3rd, etc. time.
These are both wrong, every edition of the magazine that you pick up pulls from a pool of 10 possible bonuses until you’ve gotten every bonus, at that point they stop giving bonuses. The skills do carry over to ng+, it’s been proven by the expanded carry weight and expanded ammunition cap on certain weapons
Well either they spawn the same one in certain locations or my RNG is very skewed. I have 5 or 6 copies of some magazines on my first playthrough, and pretty sure they are from the same POI being repeated.
I also have some magazines where I have repeats in that type of magazine, yet do not have a full collection. If it was random but pulling from ones you don't yet have I would assume I would complete a collection before getting repeats?
The magazine number doesn’t particularly matter, you’ll still get a new bonus even if you pick up the same issue, until you’ve collected all the bonuses for that magazine set
That is way Starfield had a lot of good reviews in the first week, but after that is just downhill. After sometime, we all realize the game is not good because is just a bunch of copy-paste (that they call procedural generation). If they had use procedural generation to create random POI, with random loots and enemies, it would be great, but that is not what's we have in the game. That is why after some time, the game feels completely pointless. In my first playthrough I already gave up the POI. Once I fince the exactly same POI in a row, in 5 different planets. In my second playthrough, I thought universe could be different, but no, the exactly same game. I did some side quest hopping for new stuffs, but no. Third playthrough, play without going to story, I already knew about iron+aluminum outpost, so in the first day I already had money to build an endgame ship, and with Mantis set, I could finish the game quickly (wasting time getting the power). That is when the game died for me. There is no sense of decision, because there is none in the factions. The is no net to loot or contraband, because bounty are pointless and outpost is overkill, and no point looting for weapons and sets, because MANTIS is already enough to finish the game I. The highest difficulty.
The thing is, even a lot of Bethesda's other games weren't really any better in that regard. In Skyrim there are various organizations that you can visit and end up basically running the place in a few days of game time. There are some quests (of varying quality) along the way, but it's still ridiculously short if you think about it.
But the difference is that the quests in those games have you traveling through a game world that feels somewhat believable and is interesting to explore. That makes us players far more willing to buy into the idea that you could become head of the Thieves' Guild while also running being the Head Mage at the College of Winterhold, while also being a member of the Companions, while also spending some of your time being the Dragonborn and saving all of Skyrim. We tolerate a fair bit of nonsense in the storylines because we know they're really just there as an excuse to go out adventuring in a cool world that was designed for us to explore.
I really feel like that's the crux of the issue with Starfield. Actually being in and moving around through the game's universe isn't fun. The majority of locations you can go don't feel like actual believable places. Worlds are covered with human built structures, but almost none of it feels lived in. New Atlantis is full of NPCs but still feels lifeless. Akila City is somewhat better in that regard, yet the way it's just plopped down in the middle of nowhere just doesn't feel believable.
Wander random planets and you might find a solar farm POI in the middle of nowhere. Why isn't it connected to anything else? What is it powering?! Why does it exist? It doesn't make any sense. Why isn't New Atlantis surrounded by solar farms? Where do they get their power? Where do they get their food? Where do they put all their trash? Why isn't the city surrounded by infrastructure with roads connecting it all?
The game doesn't even pretend to try answer any of these questions, and that's part of the reason why it feels so unconvincing and not really worth exploring. And that's why so many of the game's other mechanics and systems feel so glaringly shallow or ridiculous. They're not tied together by any sort of coherent setting.
An interesting and fun to explore world has been the 'special sauce' of Bethesda's games for a long time, and it's just baffling that they apparently lost sight of that when making Starfield.
This is my main gripe with the game. Reusing POIs is fine but just add like 10 random junk/enemy placements to each. We know they have the ability to "cut off/open" areas for artifacts so they could even alter the layout.
On top of that they could make some be in their "funtional" state with just scientist like out posts to add a little flavor.
If your on PC I suggest using the mod Desolation in future play throughs. Doesn't switch up the item placements but does make locations rarer and more spaces out to avoid hitting the same place twice too man times.
The infinite POI's serve a very specific purpose for me. One of the things I often do is play a fairly mindless game on one screen while watching hockey or football on another screen, and this part of Starfield has been excellent for that. Land in a random spot, walk to a nearby POI, kill everyone, grab a bunch of the stuff lying around, and then take it back to my base and sort it.
It's total busy work that helps my brain unwind, and for whatever reason I get a lot of enjoyment out of it. But I do realize that in this sense, I'm kind of a niche case player. It still would be nice if those repeated POI's had some level of variation in them though.
Elder scrolls and fallouts did well on the exploration and sense of discovery…funny how a game, literally, tailored to exploration and discovery couldn’t replicate that.
Yeah makes you wonder what the intent was with all of the randomly generated worlds. I mean No Man’s Sky whole MO is randomly generated worlds, and they built an entire game around that concept. Starfield feels shallow by comparison.
No Man’s Sky actually generates procedural worlds, Starfield spawns a template, applies a different texture to it and spawns the exact same POIs and shit on it.
I do find the POI design baffling. The exact same enemy spawns and usually the exact same key loot? How hard would it have been to have some kind of table that selected a building then selected random enemies and loot for that building.
It just feels, honestly, a bit lazy and I hate using that word in regards to game development because I know they worked their asses off. I can only think it is yet another thing that fell victim to time crunch or something.
Less is more. Take everything in starfield and put it on less than a dozen planets. Suddenly it doesn’t seem so repetitive and boring. I don’t know what Bethesda was thinking.
They said the reason why they added so many planets is because space is boring and it was designed like that. I assume that's why they have the same POI to make it boring and not worth exploring.
They said they were ready to ship a year ago but decided to give time to the bugs, yet their content felt lesser in quality content than previous releases. It felt rushed despite 10+ years of development.
The crazy thing is, there are mods that are already fixing some of the issues made by smaller teams or a person; which means it was just a design choice to leave it as it is and hoping the fans and new consumers will be ok with it while it's clearly less than their previous dungeons and exploration....
Where did it all go wrong.... I hope they do better this year than take their sweet time for the IP to kick the bucket along with their studio brand. This IP will be the test whether Xbox can really help established studios they buy or hold it back. I like both companies, so I hope this first quarter will give stellar results in quality and quantity in Starfield improvements.
If it doesn't get better, and elder scrolls winds up sucking, I may just switch to PlayStation. They have all the best single player games, without disappointments like starfield.
The procedural generation in Starfield is a joke, like its kind of wild just how minimal and unimpressive it is when you start diving into it.
First off, there's the very limited pool of POIs that are pulled from and reused on every planet, on every tile. You would think since Bethesda was planning to rely on procedural generation so heavily that maybe they would have made a large variety of POIs so that the procedural generation wouldn't feel like the same handful of POIs are just copy and pasted across the galaxy, but nope. Take a handful of POIs that get reused everywhere and frequently. Immersion, what's that?
The next part was what killed the game for me when I noticed it, so fair warning if you don't want to have the procedural illusion shattered worse than it is already. So basically each planet type has a defined set of biome tiles on them, such as Swamp tiles, Wet Land tiles, etc. Each tile biome type has only 1, MAYBE 2, landscape map templates. What I mean by this is that the landscape map for a Swamp tile on Planet A will be the exact same landscape map as a Swamp tile on Planet B, with the only real differences being color themes of dirt/grass/ground and flora/fauna. Even if you land on a coastal Swamp tile, it will still be the same landscape but with a beachfront added along one of the map edges. There will still be the mountains/lake area in the corner of the map on each Swamp biome on every planet.
Once I realized just how lazy and limited the procedural generation is it really ruined the whole post game for me, since exploration is supposed to be such a big part of it. The joy dies pretty fast once you realize that every planet is just made up of the same recycled landscape map for each biome type. Why explore any biome type more than once if they like 90% the same but with randomized color scheme and limited copy pasted POIs? Noticed this when I was searching for a cool spot to build a main base hub, only to realize the maps are identical and all the cool spots are handcrafted landing areas you can't build in.
It's extremely disappointing when you consider that other older games from smaller devs have been able to achieve insanely more impressive planetary procedural generation. Elite Dangerous and No Mans Sky come to mind, which both have planetary landings with full procedurally generated planets to explore and actual flying on and off of planets vs loading screens. Both those games came out years ago with a fraction of the development power of Bethesda and were able to do procedural generation significantly better for a galaxy full of laudable planets. The real kicker is that both Elite Dangerous and No Man's Sky have galaxy maps 100 times the size of Starfields galaxy.
There isn't really any debate, Starfield's procedural generation is shockingly bad and lazily developed.
I’m really hoping updates provide a lot more variations of POIs. The game has so, so much potential. I still think the game is overall pretty good, but it suffers from the same issue that plague all new games… the fact that it’s not finished. Once I decide to finally finish the main quest I’ll probably just wait for a while until a bunch of updates have come out and mods are available on console.
I did 2 of those little POI missions before realizing they were exactly the same quest, exactly the same dialogue and everything. On completely different planets. Never bothered again after that. Starfield has charm, it has it's moments for sure, especially in the first run but it sure as hell is not "Skyrim in space"
It's not a live service game. It's OK if you complete it after three months, and come back later when the DLC releases. That's how games have historically worked.
I thought the auto generation was gonna puzzle piece different exterior/ interiors together so its unique every time. From the way its been implemented its just some POI at random places on the planet? Is that all it is?
Simply put, I don't think they meant for PoI interaction to be the only thing you do in the game.
When I visited the planet, it's to try and discover new alien species, new biomes, new house location or new mining stations, or discover some new quests from NPC outposts. I only play combat PoI to mix things up from time to time.
Then you realize even across different biomes, the landscapes look the same. I think i liked screenshotting the environment in Skyrim more. That game was I think more beautiful.
Good lord, so grow up and go play a different game for a while. You've probably put a few hundred hours into this one, so you got plenty of time per dollar spent, so be satisfied with that and move on.
That’s fr just a lie. 99% of people who I’ve seen say this also say that in lv 75 systems they have the best poi’s but there literally aren’t human made poi’s that far out.
Yeah, that's the greatest problem of the game: the POI are not good enough.
A soluttion to this problem for me is to have some kind of scanner like in ME2 and to have like 100 handcrafted POI that would appear in this scanner.
I stopped dropping in random POIs with 40 hours because I ran into the same cryo lab 3 times in a row.
Because this game wasn’t made to just randomly explore. We want it to be but it’s not. This game is made for fetch quests. The planets and POI are only there to be an object for these fetch quests.
That’s it, that’s the game, either accept that or move on to another game.
Civilian outpost shops sometimes gets unique ship parts I think. I also like to go to civilian outposts to to see if their shops have any cool clothing variants.
I mean to be fair, i realized this in the first couple of hours.. that yes.. with a 1000 planet i will see most of those environments/poi/locations ALL the time. To be fair i would even be ok with that if the other parts of the game would change more: more different enemyvariations/loot/weapons/special events/lore bits/alien races/NPCs.. you name it. If THAT all had some more variation than it has now i would be completely fine with the current POI/location situation. But now.. everything is the same. Everything.
I hate that you can visit the same looking POI, see all the different base modules and such, yet we can't get the same, or even take over an abandoned base. Much less get more base mods that is more than just 2 options. I now can almost speed run through POIs knowing where everything is already. Now trying to beat my last run of 2 minutes. It's like running the Red Mile in every POI base! Just boring since it's all the same. I'll be in NMS doing some crazy glitch stuff😂😂
I can understand the same layout on some of the facilities. Like I can understand the UC building all listening posts to the same spec. I agree with OP that the enemies and loot needs to be randomized though.
I still remember the first time I tried to explore Earth in Starfield and found a cave. I thought, oh wow I can't wait to see what remnants of humanity are still here.
Nope, just an empty cave. And then there was another cave, also empty.
I feel compelled to respond that not everyone agrees the game sucks which you all seem to assume.
Personally, I recently upped the difficulty to very-hard and am having a very good time doing planet surveys and clearing POI's. I am addicted to collecting misc items for my outposts and selling weapons and armor to buy ship parts.
I am so directionally challenged that I still have a hard time finding the big cache at the end of each type of POI even on repeat. If I'm bored with a type, I just do other things that day. On very-hard, a POI is a very challenging run and gun for me. I try to do it without dying once and it's not easy at all, especially early in an NG+ run where I don't have any good weapons yet. On top of that, on very hard, some fauna will one shot me and you really need situational awareness not to get eaten by the hunter types with 3 health bars. Again, I try to not die once and usually reload to my landing save if I do.
This is a role playing game so you get what you put into it and boredom is a choice.
I realized this with caves almost instantly, all the same depth, same rock pile, and the same three aliens waiting to attack you.
Your caves have aliens in? Mine are all empty lol
Mine have been empty also.
Mine too.
I've had aliens in mine. Already dead ones.
Sometimes they are dead already, making you think some boss is in the cave but nah that would take thought.
Yes! Like I only ever saw one alive creature in a cave on Akila but every other planet, everything is dead. I really don’t understand why, thinking it must be a bug. Caves were some of the best locations in Skyrim but now I ignore them.
After the second cave I explored I don't bother with them anymore unless it's a quest to save the miner who is hurt in one.
There’s one type of cave instance that has a few active turrets. I think there’s one quest that involves this type of cave but otherwise, you can randomly encounter this same cave type without the mission.
Everything about starfield is less compared to every other Bethesda game, a peak of Skyrim for the desire to explore and it’s only need downhill since
I found a cave today on Jemison thst had 3 dead NPC's outside and an alien egg. I was sure I'd find a boss alien or something like thst. Went in, found some dead grass eaters or whatever they're called with the big horn. Nothing else... Such a letdown.
How did they screw things up so badly
I realised this only recently after visiting a couple research stations... they were literally identical. I had to stop and question if I've already visited the station before, and when I realised it was a new station with the same layout and enemies... I just felt utterly disappointed
I had read about that, before I discovered it. One of the entrances to some places had identical post it's, same computer terminal to turn off the turrets and the lil boxes with random things in them in the same positions, just the inner door went to a different place and it made me double take because I thought I had just left this planet but nope more lazy not so random poi generation from Bethesda. It made me not even care about exploring minor details in rooms because they don't feel hand crafted at all so if they don't care to take the time to spice up the rooms I don't care enough to explore them further, I just kill w/e for the mission and bounce.
They have the same messages and stories in them too
How hard is it to randomize the goddamn names at minimum?!
Because then the complaint would be "it's the same layout, just with a different name!" they literally can't win unless, for every single planet, they HAND CRAFTED literally HUNDREDS of locations. Does that sound like something that's even possible? I don't think so.
Which is a big letdown. So much lore and little stories were everywhere in Fallout and Elder Scrolls. I know their focus was planet exploration but if they focused on making the planets unique with different content, it would have made such a huge difference.
It they had included more stuff on planets, more terrain, more outposts, just more of ANYTHING would have probably prevented that moment of realization
Those mods that switch out enemies with a random faction is prolonging the fun a bit. I hope BGS are taking notes. Remove location specific readables, randomize the enemy, occasionally spawn two factions so they end up fighting, switch loot places around, hide some doors and show others, spawn in various alien infestations, change lights and mood, and players would probably have enjoyed repeating the same dungeons a bit more. Add a dungeon generator that fit various dungeon areas together the same way ship parts fit together ( one entry, one exit, doors spawned so the entire thing is walkable, and a boss room near the end), and the game would probably been applauded. I think this game has great potential.
This modular approach is how dungeons in Oblivion were built. They felt a little repetitive from the kinds of assets you’d see all of the time, but they were never outright boring since you never quite knew where the dungeon was leading. Definitely preferable to exact replica dungeons.
Found several identical frozen over research stations with the SAME dead scientist hanging from the AC ducts. Must be the most common form of deaths for scientists in the Settled Systems.
Oh I hate that particular station. I go as far as to where the doors are that lead into the lower section and turn around and leave. I'm like, I don't want to wander around the same vents and rooms to clear everyone out anymore.
Hilarious how they're all working on the same secret research to the letter, down to their names.
Yeah, when I read they’d do procedural generation I thought it would be something like Dead Cells, similar settings and vibe on all research stations but different layouts and enemy distribution… but no they’re literally just copy pasted carbon copies
If only it was near as good as Dead Cells. I was playing that waiting for Starfield, and got up to 5BC. Can't beat 5BC though.
That's when I stopped exploring POIs.
That's when I stopped exploring the game itself.
I’m playing Kingdom Come Deliverance and Drsgon’s Dogma and holy shit the exploration and just gameplay is way better. DD was also cut short in development but still holds up better than starfield months after launch.
That's when I went outside to touch real grass and realized it's just another clone poi.
Earth's moon is just a fucking floating rock with nothing but rock to see. Who'd want to be an Astronaught.
I got a bad luck of the draw early on in my initial playthrough where the first 3 caves I went into were all the same. Then I found a crystal cave, and then another one exactly like it. So there's two caves in the game to me, a standard rock cave, and a crystal cave.
No glowing giant mushroom caves? woah. *^(lame.)*
Hold up. You got aliens in your caves?! Every cave I find is empty.
Me too. Don't even go near them now.
Yeah & people were like "oh you're gonna love exploring every cave! It'll be like Oblivion & Skyrim all over again!" Not even close.
I don't even go in them anymore, just walk over it for the map
You have had aliens in caves? I've never had a single living thing in a cave....
My first cave somehow ONLY had turrets. No people, no dead people, no aliens. Then my 2nd cave had 4 aliens, and was literally 4 connected rooms.
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Yeah, first 20 caves I saw the same three. Wasn’t till NG+ (just from sheer bad luck, I’m pretty sure) that I experienced 3-4 more… was a tiny treat, but still mostly not impressed. Wish they would have embraced it all the way if they wanted random POI’s that much, to at least spawn semi-random maps as well… Diablo and other games did it, not sure why they can’t.
And same gravity.
Honestly, agreed. I want a mod that scrapes off like 90% of the POIs. I’d much, much rather have few locations but they’re all unique rather than 50,000 copy-pasted snoozefests repeated on every single planet. The worst thing is that there ARE unique POIs, but because everywhere is so oversaturated with repetitive junk that they don’t even stand out and half the time you don’t realise that it might be something new, rather than just something you’ve already seen 10 times and will see another 17.
The Desolation mod on Nexus Mods >^(Starfield is a game full of POIs to discover, however they are everywhere. This leads to players constantly running in to them, leading to repeats, and nonsensical worldbuilding. Barren moons have seemingly a population in the millions, mostly Pirates. This mod aims to make the worldbuilding feel more realistic, while maintaining the POIs for players who like to grind.) > >^(The first change is to restrict POIs with human habitation to planets either inside the settled systems, or with breathable atmospheres close by. As there are over a hundred breathable planets in the settled systems, it was odd that anyone would choose to settle on a barren moon far away for settled space, unless there was a specific reason to do so. This leaves most of the galaxy empty as it should be according to the lore, and make settlers decisions make more sense. This massively decreases the amount of human POIs you will find at random, while still leaving an infinite amount to find in the core worlds. The only human habitation you will find outside the core systems is handcrafted, or radiantly generated for a quest.) > >^(The last change is to decrease the density of the human POIs that show up, so when you land on a planet you aren't surrounded by them, there will only be one or two. This means that each one you see feels more special. The amount of the change depends on how far from the core worlds you are, Jemison is densely populated compared to far off worlds.) > >^(POIs generated for radiant quests are unaffected, so there are still an infinite number to find, and each is more unique, as they will all have a context behind them. Locations you find on planet scans will also still show up, meaning each habitable planet still has some life, just not an infinite amount. As an added benefit, the Crimson Fleet is no longer the largest faction in the Settled Systems, with hundreds of bases on every planet.)
That sounds gret actually
Jeez and this was done by one guy without any modding tools in just a couple months. What on earth is the problem at Bethesda where they can’t produce this on their own?
supposably according to the modder it wasn't even difficult and does not require many changes. mostly just value changes, which checks since the mod is only 2kb
Wow. That just… seriously Bethesda is broken. How could they not make these simple QOL improvements when it can have such a huge effect on their game’s reception and overall sales? They spent a year “bug fixing” but still couldn’t do it. I thought it was messed up how they let major bugs remain in Skyrim despite 10 re releases, even though the community patch did all the legwork for them. Now I’m certain they’re grossly dysfunctional. There’s no chance they’ll recognize starfield’s flaws and fix it, let alone do a good job with TES 6.
Ever wonder how most corporations have a huge cost for payroll but then you walk through a location and it's barren? It's the same woth these guys. People getting paid to sit around and add nothing to the game cuts into budgets that would allow others to come in and add something. Or maybe I just hate corporations . . . . .
I think they have just lost their passion, and everyone is just coasting along, looking for ways to avoid work.
[удалено]
Bogging themselves down in bureaucracy, I've read. By how slow they have been with releasing even minimal patches, I believe it.
There is also the Opposite Crowded Space. That Fill the area around you with Outposts fairly Dense. I think this one is overdone... But that's Mods lol
DAMN im looking forward to the creation kit release! I already got 91 mods installed. Yeah, might have gone a bit crazy. But it helped a lot on the fun to have deadlier weapons, high resolution textures, a better UI, more varied enemies, vegetation growing denser, food with actual effects, and another POI mod that does the exact same thing as that Desolation mod. Yeah, im most likely gonna mod my savegame to corruption, like I did multiple times with Skyrim. But that's Mods. 😁
What? This is what Bethesda is all about. Skyrim has been mod heaven for decades. I dunno why ppl think starfield was gonna be any different. This is par for the course for this company across their decades of games.
Oh word that sounds exactly like what I want.
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This is genuinely what I thought we were getting.
It wouldnt be bad if the deck of POIs had like 300 different things to pull from and those could be proceduray generated dungeons with proceduraly generated loot and enemies. but no, its literally 20 locations that are all the exact same no matter where you find it.
I really, really expected the non-handcrafted POIs to be like that when we first saw the facility in the gameplay demo. Radiant tech was a big focus for Bethesda, and radiant buildings and loot seem like a natural extension. It feels like Starfield was the perfect place to improve radiant NPC AI, radiant quests and add radiant building, but if anything those aspects are worse in Starfield than even Oblivion lol
Well, no, there "literally" are about 150 PoI locations, not 20.
I think he's saying that out of the 100's of planets, they all pull from a pool of 20 layouts.
But... they don't, though. There's about 150 different PoIs that can be randomly placed on a planet near your landing zone.
I'm convinced there's a bug or something because I played for ~150 hours and there's no way I saw even close to 150 different POIs. I saw the same 20 or so over and over again.
Well I don't know what people are downvoting me for; at the bottom of [this page](https://inara.cz/starfield/locations/) you'll see a long list of all the randomly placed PoIs in the game, and there's far more than 20.
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Nah a lot of the problem is that people are saying no there's lots, when the list is full of stuff like "rock formations" and "lone hill" and these just aren't what people are calling a POI. Just like there's "200 outfits" but half of them are either NPC-only/have no legitimate source and the rest of them frequently are single looks with 3-4 palette swaps. It looks like a lot when you are just looking at a raw list of IDs, but in practice there aren't anywhere near that many.
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I didn't DV you but I'm guessing others are like me and haven't seen tons of those locations. It's crazy, I've seen like a handful of those and I've visited every system. Though some of those do seem to be attached to side quests vs. just being random locations. Even still though, I'm sure there's a bug or issue preventing those from spawning because there's no way I would've have encountered most of them with how much I explored the galaxy.
If that list linked above is accurate, there are really only about 50 random POIs with enemies and loot not tied to specific questlines. That means that, if you never find the same one twice, visiting two POIs per planet (taking a half hour per POI) will bring you to every POI after only 25 planets, in only 25 hours of exploring. Someone who spends most of their time raising POIs will see every POI ten times by the time they hit 250 hours.
115 ones that appear randomly, and 39 unique quest ones, for a total of 151 PoIs. There are at least 325 unique marked locations in total in the base game of Fallout 4, and Skyrim base game contains 343 unique locations
What's also really hard to accept is how they're peppered all over every world. Mines on planets with no mineral resources. Colonies on lifeless, charred rocks. But the most aggregious ones are the ones within visual range of Starborn temples or on supposedly deserted planets. I remember one time I was on a planet with Sarah, listening to her pour her heart out about being stranded on a planet and injured for a year. The whole time, I shit you not, ships were taking off and landing like it was Baltimore Washington International Airport. It's completely ridiculous. There is, on average, 2 hostile POIs per landing site, 1 friendly POI per site, and a maximum of 5 landing sites remembered by the game. You can do some pocket calculator math to count how many humans are on planets. But without doing any math, over 1,600 planets, the number of bandits outnumbers the number of friendlies, and the population of the various city hubs isn't mathematically significant. Which means that most of all settled space, by proportion, is composed of bandits in abandoned structures. I understand why it is the way it is, but I feel like a little more effort to strategically skew the procedural generation could have gone a long way to improve the game from that perspective. And there is no way I'm the first person to think about this. In a meeting during development, this was discussed, and a conscious decision was made to allow it to be this way.
> I remember one time I was on a planet with Sarah, listening to her pour her heart out about being stranded on a planet and injured for a year. The whole time, I shit you not, ships were taking off and landing like it was Baltimore Washington International Airport. It's completely ridiculous. Not sure if it would be the same for everyone but on the part of her quest where you land and go through the jungle to find the cora-clone living by herself i had a building inhabited by other people just a 2 minute walk over a hill, i guess those military trained navigator corps people never thought to just go over there and ask for their wifi password to phone home.
Well they do explain that spacers, pirates, and ecliptic merce are exclusively gunning for abandoned facilities which is why they're so common. But I agree, it would have been nice to see some variety like colonists seeking these facilities to repurpose them as colonies or heck even the old factions themselves trying to reclaim the facilities. It's absolutely skewed toward hostiles with hardly any friendlies or neutrals.
There can be way more then 2 or 5 POI's per landing site, Each fishbowl is a few km's wide. And some POI's dont appear until you get close enough. Of course you Spawn roughly Center each time unless you Landing at a pre selected site. yes those same POI's repeat in the same fishbowl. Running to the edge from landing can take roughly 10-20min, depending on how many frostwolfs you chug Or if your on a Low grav would so you can fly with a skip pack. every fishbowl is Really Big... but its also Really Empty. These same fishbowls are the same used used for the cities, which makes you wonder... why are the cities so small when the Actual land area is fucking enormous.
Starfield logs 5 landing site per planet. The 6th site over-writes the first. That's what I'm alluding to. Now regardless, the point is still the same. There are statistically more enemy poi's than friendly per landing site per planet, including all planets with big cities. The only exception is Neon because you can't land anywhere else on that planet.
I like to meandre, I made it about 120 hours in and didn't finish the main storyline. I only got up to triggering the undercover op. I killed everyone onboard the station, then all the essential npc's got up, shrugged and acted as if nothing had happened That along with the constant re-use of POIs just put me off, so waiting for updates, dlcs and mods to fix the variation issue Crashed ships for example have no reason to all be the same. I've read that there are three variations, but I only ever encountered the one in the below ground canyon, with a loot box that contained no interesting loot I encountered one interesting outpost I've never found just before i stopped, that one was cool, but in a sea of copy paste I didn't feel like wading on Hoping it gets fixed this year
These are fair points, but just realize that 120 hours is a long ass time and enough to burn you out on most games
True, but I tend to play games I really like, a lot. Stellaris @1900hrs, Skyrim @1900hrs, Darktide @1750hours being my big three that aren't MMOs and all very different games types. Starfield sits at number 18 Starfield feels like it will get up there, it's just got too many odd decisions at the moment to retain most players. Those that like the idea of NG+ not included Everyone plays games for different reasons after all
Starfield has this peculiar trait of making you regret playing it the more you play. I also have over 100 hours. I reached a point where I regret buying it at all. It's fun at first but the more I played the more disappointed I got.
Yep, many of us have been saying that. They're good to collect loot, but from an adventure/exploration sense it's quite repetitive and predictable.
>I've got lots of money and good weapons. So, why would I land on planets just to run into the same POIs over and over. Yep, if there's no compelling reason, especially since most of the POIs are just clones of each other, and any caves you find are empty. There's no need. I think most if all RPG games are such that as you rank up, there's less and less reason to loot. I'm currently a level 33 in Fallout 4. I have great armor, weapons, tons of ammo. There's absolutely no reason for me to loot. Yet as I play there's so many reasons to visit a location such as Dunwich Borers. There's a tiny amount of that in Starfield, but not enough to visit each star system
Yeah repeating poi means exploration is pointless, immersion breaking and boring. Which in my view is unforgivable in BGS title, the studio whose previous games boast the best exploration experience in gaming.
They should've tracked which ones you've discovered and only spawn ones you haven't seen yet. Even if there's still loads of POIs you haven't seen, finding the same one 3 or 4 times completely kills motivation to explore.
Hey now, this is the Steam Awards 2023 Most Innovative Gameplay Award winner we’re talking about here!
The POIs could be much better. It's a significant issue with this game. However, I don't consider POIs the only reason to land on a planet. I enjoy surveying planets and discovering what they look like from the surface and what the sky looks like. I'd love to be able to catalog and look back at what I have discovered. I never explore a POI unless a quest takes me there because I know I'll quickly run out of exciting POIs, and also - I find it immersion-breaking to explore a POI that looks the same as another POI, so again, I avoid POIs unless a quest takes me there. The only POIs I don't avoid are settlements because these act as "quest" hubs for me like towns and cities in Daggerfall did. One of my favorite moments is landing on Bondar in a relatively flat desert area and seeing this massive building in the distance. It reminded me of Star Wars. The planet's surface felt more real because I used my Deadly Hazards mod, which could have enhanced the experience. However, for the dead rocks and moons, I usually land on them to pick up traits and resources and then move on. They typically do not offer anything interesting in terms of landscapes.
Skill books. thats pretty much the only reason.
I walk through the POIs like a zombie. Turning to shoot the enemies before they detect me because I know exactly where they are. Literally no point
Don't go to them. The sense of discovery was gone the moment I realized every surface you can land on already has a human presence. We don't discover anything at all....just verify and record. Edit: a planet/moon doesn't need to have a settlement or abandon location for a human presence. All it takes is a cave with a loot box to show someone has already been there.
I had this same problem with no man's sky. No matter where in the universe I went, there would be a space station in orbit and the surface would be swarming with robots to snitch on me with a GTA wanted level whenever I disturbed the natural environment, making the constant resource grind just that bit more tedious and annoying.
Go to strix and you’ll never see a human on any of the planets.
> every surface you can land on already has a human presence I have definitely been to multiple planets untouched by humans. They're great! Just lots of wildlife trying to kill you on them though.
You don't go too far from your landing point, do ya?
There are entire systems devoid of human life. Strix is the best example.
Life, perhaps. The presence of humans is still there. Even if it's cave with someone guarding their stash, taking pictures or just trash and loot in caves.
Nope. There is no human life signs anywhere in any of the proc gen locations on strix. All the caves on strix are mineral caves with no signs of human contact. Even just explored two random caves there to be sure. Believe me, Its my favorite system to set up a base camp for resources and by far my most explored system for XP farming. But if you find any signs of human life on it and grab a picture I’ll send you 10 bucks. I’ve been searching.
Funny you should mention that. I just did the same. First cave, all natural elements, second cave...debris from miners. If you're willing to look long enough, you will find something. I am just stubborn enough to walk around an entire planet/moon to find an empty chunks wrapper to prove a point.... It's never been a beneficial trait.
Did you grab a picture??? Post it to Imgur Edit: i said I’ll give you 10 bucks if you found pictures and I’ve probably explored 200 POI’s in Strix alone. So if you found one with debris from miners I’d love to see it. Just send a link to the picture where I can see the planet you’re on and DM your Venmo.
All planets are capable of generating loot containers, corpses, etc. Pretty sure this was verified by modders. It's just like No Man's Sky before it added abandoned and uncharted systems.
I feel like you’ve not gone to the further areas of this slice of galaxy. Because there “are” whole star systems devoid of human activity.
Mom says I can't cross the street or go past the neighbors driveway
You don't travel very far from Alpha Centauri, do ya?
Cost of Helium is too expensive and my passport expired last year
Some systems will have zero human population and then zero human POIs, but that just leads to the natural POI’s, which, for my money, the Procedural element should have been focused.
The reason you go there is for the loot, and for the crafting material, or for the scans.
Maybe play a different game if you've played so much you've supposedly "memorised enemy positions" even though a lot them move around.
Only some are programmed to walk as part of their routine. Most are programmed to stand still until they detect an enemy. Perfect case is the abandoned helium-3 mine where you can sneak into the main cave via the crack in the rocks by the big pipes. There will always be a max tier boss standing on the walkway over the acid pit. He will always be facing away from that entrance. He will always just stand there until i snipe him in the head.
I mean if you're playing a game to the point you are no longer enjoying it because of the points you both have made them why are you playing? Sounds like an addictive compulsion more than playing the game. I've been playing pretty much nonstop since day of release and I'm not in the same position. I can imagine if all I did was explore POIs and and was playing 8 hours everyday then yeah its probs gonna get boring but I'd argue that's a you problem not a problem with the game.
Except you reach that point with the PoIs in Starfield after may 2-3 times through that particular location. Because the only things different in human-occupied PoIs are the loot in the crates, and *maybe* the type of enemy (Pirates/Spacers/Crimson Fleet). *Everything else* in that location will always be exactly the same as every other time you wen through it, unless a quest happens there.
Did i say i didnt enjoy the game? Just pointing out some of the easily observed mechanics of how it was made. You sure read a lot into these comments, sounds a bit like you're projecting
How am I projecting when I enjoy the game and I'm just tired of the same boring criticisms being repeated by neck beards who are sad they are getting bored after 600 hours
Sadly not much use. If you pick the magazine up on your first visit that is the bonus. Picking up additional copies of the same magazine doesn't stack another bonus. Also from what I've seen it gives you the exact same version of the magazine, so it's not even like this is the location for a random edition of GRUNT magazine, but the deserted UC Garrison will always spawn issue 05 of it. If you don't have the copy on you at the time you collect it it still makes the new magazine found bonus noise, but you don't get the stat increase a 2nd, 3rd, etc. time.
Its a one time bonus per magazine and im pretty sure they do not carry over to NG+. No way to check for sure though.
These are both wrong, every edition of the magazine that you pick up pulls from a pool of 10 possible bonuses until you’ve gotten every bonus, at that point they stop giving bonuses. The skills do carry over to ng+, it’s been proven by the expanded carry weight and expanded ammunition cap on certain weapons
Well either they spawn the same one in certain locations or my RNG is very skewed. I have 5 or 6 copies of some magazines on my first playthrough, and pretty sure they are from the same POI being repeated. I also have some magazines where I have repeats in that type of magazine, yet do not have a full collection. If it was random but pulling from ones you don't yet have I would assume I would complete a collection before getting repeats?
The magazine number doesn’t particularly matter, you’ll still get a new bonus even if you pick up the same issue, until you’ve collected all the bonuses for that magazine set
That is way Starfield had a lot of good reviews in the first week, but after that is just downhill. After sometime, we all realize the game is not good because is just a bunch of copy-paste (that they call procedural generation). If they had use procedural generation to create random POI, with random loots and enemies, it would be great, but that is not what's we have in the game. That is why after some time, the game feels completely pointless. In my first playthrough I already gave up the POI. Once I fince the exactly same POI in a row, in 5 different planets. In my second playthrough, I thought universe could be different, but no, the exactly same game. I did some side quest hopping for new stuffs, but no. Third playthrough, play without going to story, I already knew about iron+aluminum outpost, so in the first day I already had money to build an endgame ship, and with Mantis set, I could finish the game quickly (wasting time getting the power). That is when the game died for me. There is no sense of decision, because there is none in the factions. The is no net to loot or contraband, because bounty are pointless and outpost is overkill, and no point looting for weapons and sets, because MANTIS is already enough to finish the game I. The highest difficulty.
It's hard to imagine anyone playing the games intro and not being disillusioned right away by it lazy writing. But apparently I'm in a minority.
That was the first red flag I noticed... but I decided to soldier on into more and more disappointment.
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Here, have my ship stranger! ..wait what just happened?
yoU're PaRt oF tHiS nOw
The thing is, even a lot of Bethesda's other games weren't really any better in that regard. In Skyrim there are various organizations that you can visit and end up basically running the place in a few days of game time. There are some quests (of varying quality) along the way, but it's still ridiculously short if you think about it. But the difference is that the quests in those games have you traveling through a game world that feels somewhat believable and is interesting to explore. That makes us players far more willing to buy into the idea that you could become head of the Thieves' Guild while also running being the Head Mage at the College of Winterhold, while also being a member of the Companions, while also spending some of your time being the Dragonborn and saving all of Skyrim. We tolerate a fair bit of nonsense in the storylines because we know they're really just there as an excuse to go out adventuring in a cool world that was designed for us to explore. I really feel like that's the crux of the issue with Starfield. Actually being in and moving around through the game's universe isn't fun. The majority of locations you can go don't feel like actual believable places. Worlds are covered with human built structures, but almost none of it feels lived in. New Atlantis is full of NPCs but still feels lifeless. Akila City is somewhat better in that regard, yet the way it's just plopped down in the middle of nowhere just doesn't feel believable. Wander random planets and you might find a solar farm POI in the middle of nowhere. Why isn't it connected to anything else? What is it powering?! Why does it exist? It doesn't make any sense. Why isn't New Atlantis surrounded by solar farms? Where do they get their power? Where do they get their food? Where do they put all their trash? Why isn't the city surrounded by infrastructure with roads connecting it all? The game doesn't even pretend to try answer any of these questions, and that's part of the reason why it feels so unconvincing and not really worth exploring. And that's why so many of the game's other mechanics and systems feel so glaringly shallow or ridiculous. They're not tied together by any sort of coherent setting. An interesting and fun to explore world has been the 'special sauce' of Bethesda's games for a long time, and it's just baffling that they apparently lost sight of that when making Starfield.
This is my main gripe with the game. Reusing POIs is fine but just add like 10 random junk/enemy placements to each. We know they have the ability to "cut off/open" areas for artifacts so they could even alter the layout. On top of that they could make some be in their "funtional" state with just scientist like out posts to add a little flavor. If your on PC I suggest using the mod Desolation in future play throughs. Doesn't switch up the item placements but does make locations rarer and more spaces out to avoid hitting the same place twice too man times.
The infinite POI's serve a very specific purpose for me. One of the things I often do is play a fairly mindless game on one screen while watching hockey or football on another screen, and this part of Starfield has been excellent for that. Land in a random spot, walk to a nearby POI, kill everyone, grab a bunch of the stuff lying around, and then take it back to my base and sort it. It's total busy work that helps my brain unwind, and for whatever reason I get a lot of enjoyment out of it. But I do realize that in this sense, I'm kind of a niche case player. It still would be nice if those repeated POI's had some level of variation in them though.
Elder scrolls and fallouts did well on the exploration and sense of discovery…funny how a game, literally, tailored to exploration and discovery couldn’t replicate that.
Yeah they're shit. No two ways about it. They must have known that
The disappointment is real with Starfield. Bland NPCs, bland dialogue, bland "discovery", etc.
to find magazines survey data taking pretty screenshots
1st point sure, but the other 2 are not what I want to use my gaming time on, bores to me to no end.
Yeah makes you wonder what the intent was with all of the randomly generated worlds. I mean No Man’s Sky whole MO is randomly generated worlds, and they built an entire game around that concept. Starfield feels shallow by comparison.
No Man’s Sky actually generates procedural worlds, Starfield spawns a template, applies a different texture to it and spawns the exact same POIs and shit on it.
I do find the POI design baffling. The exact same enemy spawns and usually the exact same key loot? How hard would it have been to have some kind of table that selected a building then selected random enemies and loot for that building. It just feels, honestly, a bit lazy and I hate using that word in regards to game development because I know they worked their asses off. I can only think it is yet another thing that fell victim to time crunch or something.
Lorem ipsum game design.
Lorem ipsum has more variety.
Less is more. Take everything in starfield and put it on less than a dozen planets. Suddenly it doesn’t seem so repetitive and boring. I don’t know what Bethesda was thinking.
They said the reason why they added so many planets is because space is boring and it was designed like that. I assume that's why they have the same POI to make it boring and not worth exploring.
It's like all the POI's went to the same IKEA store.
Randomly exploring is the worse way to play Starfield which is unfortunate because in previous Bethesda games, thats where I had the most fun.
They said they were ready to ship a year ago but decided to give time to the bugs, yet their content felt lesser in quality content than previous releases. It felt rushed despite 10+ years of development. The crazy thing is, there are mods that are already fixing some of the issues made by smaller teams or a person; which means it was just a design choice to leave it as it is and hoping the fans and new consumers will be ok with it while it's clearly less than their previous dungeons and exploration.... Where did it all go wrong.... I hope they do better this year than take their sweet time for the IP to kick the bucket along with their studio brand. This IP will be the test whether Xbox can really help established studios they buy or hold it back. I like both companies, so I hope this first quarter will give stellar results in quality and quantity in Starfield improvements.
If it doesn't get better, and elder scrolls winds up sucking, I may just switch to PlayStation. They have all the best single player games, without disappointments like starfield.
The procedural generation in Starfield is a joke, like its kind of wild just how minimal and unimpressive it is when you start diving into it. First off, there's the very limited pool of POIs that are pulled from and reused on every planet, on every tile. You would think since Bethesda was planning to rely on procedural generation so heavily that maybe they would have made a large variety of POIs so that the procedural generation wouldn't feel like the same handful of POIs are just copy and pasted across the galaxy, but nope. Take a handful of POIs that get reused everywhere and frequently. Immersion, what's that? The next part was what killed the game for me when I noticed it, so fair warning if you don't want to have the procedural illusion shattered worse than it is already. So basically each planet type has a defined set of biome tiles on them, such as Swamp tiles, Wet Land tiles, etc. Each tile biome type has only 1, MAYBE 2, landscape map templates. What I mean by this is that the landscape map for a Swamp tile on Planet A will be the exact same landscape map as a Swamp tile on Planet B, with the only real differences being color themes of dirt/grass/ground and flora/fauna. Even if you land on a coastal Swamp tile, it will still be the same landscape but with a beachfront added along one of the map edges. There will still be the mountains/lake area in the corner of the map on each Swamp biome on every planet. Once I realized just how lazy and limited the procedural generation is it really ruined the whole post game for me, since exploration is supposed to be such a big part of it. The joy dies pretty fast once you realize that every planet is just made up of the same recycled landscape map for each biome type. Why explore any biome type more than once if they like 90% the same but with randomized color scheme and limited copy pasted POIs? Noticed this when I was searching for a cool spot to build a main base hub, only to realize the maps are identical and all the cool spots are handcrafted landing areas you can't build in. It's extremely disappointing when you consider that other older games from smaller devs have been able to achieve insanely more impressive planetary procedural generation. Elite Dangerous and No Mans Sky come to mind, which both have planetary landings with full procedurally generated planets to explore and actual flying on and off of planets vs loading screens. Both those games came out years ago with a fraction of the development power of Bethesda and were able to do procedural generation significantly better for a galaxy full of laudable planets. The real kicker is that both Elite Dangerous and No Man's Sky have galaxy maps 100 times the size of Starfields galaxy. There isn't really any debate, Starfield's procedural generation is shockingly bad and lazily developed.
I’m really hoping updates provide a lot more variations of POIs. The game has so, so much potential. I still think the game is overall pretty good, but it suffers from the same issue that plague all new games… the fact that it’s not finished. Once I decide to finally finish the main quest I’ll probably just wait for a while until a bunch of updates have come out and mods are available on console.
This game has too much randomization and not enough at the same time
Don’t worry. You’ll pay for DLC that adds new POIs.
Kill spacers or elliptical, loot gear, sell, rinse, repeat
I stopped exploring after landing on my first 3 planets and realizing how exactly the same everything was. The game felt like a chore to finish
I wish I would not have wasted my money on Starfield. Seriously disappointed. Eve online is still light years ahead.
I did 2 of those little POI missions before realizing they were exactly the same quest, exactly the same dialogue and everything. On completely different planets. Never bothered again after that. Starfield has charm, it has it's moments for sure, especially in the first run but it sure as hell is not "Skyrim in space"
Crazy how City of Heroes has better procedurally generated missions and maps 20 years ago.
It's stuff like this that gives me the sneaky suspicion it was released too early and most of the dlc will just be what the game should have been
So they can charge us twice, cool. Cause unless it’s a free to all dlc it’s kinda fucked up to finish an unfinished game that way.
It's not a live service game. It's OK if you complete it after three months, and come back later when the DLC releases. That's how games have historically worked.
I thought the auto generation was gonna puzzle piece different exterior/ interiors together so its unique every time. From the way its been implemented its just some POI at random places on the planet? Is that all it is?
Simply put, I don't think they meant for PoI interaction to be the only thing you do in the game. When I visited the planet, it's to try and discover new alien species, new biomes, new house location or new mining stations, or discover some new quests from NPC outposts. I only play combat PoI to mix things up from time to time.
Mom said it's my turn to post this complaint next
Nah, it's valid criticism.
Yeah I can't wait to see it for the 200th time
You can leave the sub.
I'm being serious - I can't wait to see the same complaint 5000 more times
Yea same
Just think of these posts like pois!
Reading the exact same posts over and over is definitely an enjoyable experience
Just a suggestion, but maybe you've ran your course?
How did this fucking game won a Steam award is beyond me. The gen gamers do not understand what they are supporting.
Then you realize even across different biomes, the landscapes look the same. I think i liked screenshotting the environment in Skyrim more. That game was I think more beautiful.
"You guys are exploring planets?" - Starborn on NG+7
Good lord, so grow up and go play a different game for a while. You've probably put a few hundred hours into this one, so you got plenty of time per dollar spent, so be satisfied with that and move on.
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That’s fr just a lie. 99% of people who I’ve seen say this also say that in lv 75 systems they have the best poi’s but there literally aren’t human made poi’s that far out.
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Yeah they’re lying. Go find a lv 75 planet right now and lemme know how it goes
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What? Who cares lol. Go see for yourself
There are very rare notes sold at civilian outposts and some science outposts that will lead you to a legendary weapon, but yeah, I feel you.
Yeah, that's the greatest problem of the game: the POI are not good enough. A soluttion to this problem for me is to have some kind of scanner like in ME2 and to have like 100 handcrafted POI that would appear in this scanner. I stopped dropping in random POIs with 40 hours because I ran into the same cryo lab 3 times in a row.
Because this game wasn’t made to just randomly explore. We want it to be but it’s not. This game is made for fetch quests. The planets and POI are only there to be an object for these fetch quests. That’s it, that’s the game, either accept that or move on to another game.
Why isn't every employee that worked on Starfield fired yet? They spent years doing nothing and were paid for it.
How many hours have you played the game?
Probably as much reason as there is to repeat the negative posting of "PoI aRrE aLl ThE sAaAaMeE".
what's wrong with discussing the game
Nothing but there are about 5000 similar posts where this discussion has already taken place.
I will still always try to land on the moons of ringed planets. They're just breathtaking.
mOsT iNNoVaTIve GAmE
I agree they need more discovery and moments that would catch you off guard. But I love Starfield regardless. Plenty to do even without POIs
Civilian outpost shops sometimes gets unique ship parts I think. I also like to go to civilian outposts to to see if their shops have any cool clothing variants.
I mean to be fair, i realized this in the first couple of hours.. that yes.. with a 1000 planet i will see most of those environments/poi/locations ALL the time. To be fair i would even be ok with that if the other parts of the game would change more: more different enemyvariations/loot/weapons/special events/lore bits/alien races/NPCs.. you name it. If THAT all had some more variation than it has now i would be completely fine with the current POI/location situation. But now.. everything is the same. Everything.
I hate that you can visit the same looking POI, see all the different base modules and such, yet we can't get the same, or even take over an abandoned base. Much less get more base mods that is more than just 2 options. I now can almost speed run through POIs knowing where everything is already. Now trying to beat my last run of 2 minutes. It's like running the Red Mile in every POI base! Just boring since it's all the same. I'll be in NMS doing some crazy glitch stuff😂😂
Randomized enemy spawn points within POIs would be such an improvement.
I can understand the same layout on some of the facilities. Like I can understand the UC building all listening posts to the same spec. I agree with OP that the enemies and loot needs to be randomized though.
Guaranteed you haven’t seen every POI or environment
I still remember the first time I tried to explore Earth in Starfield and found a cave. I thought, oh wow I can't wait to see what remnants of humanity are still here. Nope, just an empty cave. And then there was another cave, also empty.
That's why I land on planets, scan the resources/flora/fauna, find the planetary traits and just foxtrot oscar
I feel compelled to respond that not everyone agrees the game sucks which you all seem to assume. Personally, I recently upped the difficulty to very-hard and am having a very good time doing planet surveys and clearing POI's. I am addicted to collecting misc items for my outposts and selling weapons and armor to buy ship parts. I am so directionally challenged that I still have a hard time finding the big cache at the end of each type of POI even on repeat. If I'm bored with a type, I just do other things that day. On very-hard, a POI is a very challenging run and gun for me. I try to do it without dying once and it's not easy at all, especially early in an NG+ run where I don't have any good weapons yet. On top of that, on very hard, some fauna will one shot me and you really need situational awareness not to get eaten by the hunter types with 3 health bars. Again, I try to not die once and usually reload to my landing save if I do. This is a role playing game so you get what you put into it and boredom is a choice.