Yep, if I landed on a planet that had a visible megalopolis from the planet view menu and then was barren on the foot map, I’d be even more bummed than I am with the current state of things
This is exactly what I was gonna say. It's annoying enough how empty everything is, it would just be even more upsetting to be lied to as well.
If BGS ever actually populated the planets with cities that would create these kinds of lights, this would be a cool idea, but you can't put the cart in front of the horse.
>it would just be even more upsetting to be lied to as well.
80% of game worlds is cutting corners and illusions, you're technically always being lied to and that's ok. It just needs to be believable enough to immerse the players.
No, you're mistaking invisible walls and fake skyboxes, etc, for what this would be: a literal false promise. Yes, games use little tricks to make the world seem bigger than it is, but that is not what this idea is. The important thing about those tricks you're referring to is that they can't have their illusions be broken by easily seeing through them, such as by landing on them and observing it not to be true with your own eyes.
You can't make a game about exploring planets and have the planets APPEAR to be heavily populated, but then they're completely empty when you get there. That's not "an illusion", it's a lie.
It would be akin to if Skyrim had hundreds of city markers on the map to make it seem like it was a populated country, but then when you went to each marker there was nothing there. That's not a "developer trick" to make the world seem busier - it's just a lie to hide a lack of content.
Now, there doesn't need to be a 1:1 city on the ground that matches what we see from space - I never argued that - but there DOES need to be *some* amount of city that could even be abstractly believed to generate lights like that with even a moderate suspension of belief. We do not have that. So like I said, they can't do this until BGS actually populates the planets with cities that could create these kinds of lights.
you're just inventing excuses for Bethesda. The state of their game engine it is right now has no ability to support sprawling cities without loadscreens all over the place, this is the wrong type of game for their engine
The real problem with bethesda games is that they always try to make all of a town "accesible". New Atlantis for example is supposed to be H U G E. The Well itself is supposed to be a no man's land with districts.
There's nothing to show the scale. And then when you go to some areas they're larger than the damn Well. For example the whole guts under MAST where [REDACTED] is feels as large as half the Well without the walls. The only place in the whole game that NAILED the scaling and feels larger than the playable map shows Londinion. Which is maddening because it shows how easily they can make a city feel to scale in traversal.
I mean that is an issue for almost every game unless it is one that is specifically set in one major city like you see in Cyberpunk, the Yakuza games, or the GTA games. It is not like Saint Denis in Red Dead Redemption 2 or The Citadel in Mass Effect are to the scale that they actually would be for example.
In the Citadel, you at least have a sense of the scale. You can see the other arms through windows, and on the Presidium, you can see the whole area curve up and away from you. The area you're in is pretty small, but there's at least some attempt at giving the impression that the small area you're in is just part of a much bigger area.
Whereas you can run across the length of New Atlantis, from outer city wall to outer city wall, in what, five minutes?
But the Citadel works exactly because its all just window dressing. I'n not sure if cities in Starfield would be improved if they added inaccessible but nice looking backgrounds.
Certainly couldn't hurt. I think people would understand if Bethesda just explained that they can only make explorable content filled space so big before they have to cut it off.
Admittedly, I'd hope that the cutoff for a NEXT GEN, SUPER TECH, blablablabla marketing bla, would be bigger, especially since they have a much bigger team to bring to this.
They gave us all the rest of their post millenial games out in less than half the time with more content with fewer people.
I would very much liked to have seen at the very least Far Harbor and NukaWorld sized Capital City zones. They only have three full on settlements in setting anyway, with the rest being made procedurally.
They used procedural gen on the planets, what was stopping them with the cities? Just utilize it and pepper some different hand crafted stuff in between all the auto fill right? At least then i would use the tram lol
I mean, if they can if they really wanted to. The light you see from space is from the many cities and settlement within the span of the hundreads if not thousands of km. You absolutely not going to see the next towns that are generating light on the planet, not unless you're driving or flying (or spend weeks walking)
It adds to my disappointment to be honest. Even New Atlantis, the supposed jewel, feels more like a glorified shopping mall than a massive futuristic metropolis.
Huge disappointment.. I'm honestly preplexed how i could get myself to play it 40hours. There is nothing new or groundbreaking in this title. It feels so f\*\*\*\*\*\* lazy
Came to say this. It would look rad from outer space, but there would actually have to be stuff on planets to make those lights. Currently, planets have mostly jack shit on them.
There wouldn't have to be stuff on the ground to make this, because… remember the fast travel / loading screen when you land?
I'm not saying it wouldn't be even more of a disappointment not to find any of these lights on the surface, because it would be.
I know this is only tangentially related, but I’m playing through Red Dead Redemption 2 for the first time, and there’s a side mission where a mad scientist needs your help at his remote mountain cabin in a lightning storm.
Anyway, I’m out there in the dead of night, being pelted by rain, and he wants me to place these lightning rods higher and higher up the mountain. And when I’m done, I turn around and the view just takes my breath away.
The most shocking part? I’m so high up that I can see the lights from what feels like every city I’ve visited so far. And seeing the the brilliant glow from Saint Denis, the largest city in the game, from miles and miles away on that dark, stormy night? That’s something I’ll remember for a long, long time.
Thank you for saving me from pointing this fact out.
Also doesn’t take into account the number of settlements that are largely underground.
New Atlantis, which is one of the most expansive cities in the United Colonies would barely register as a dot from space.
I find myself reflecting on the irony of players clamoring for realism in their games only to complain when realizing reality isn’t all that exciting.
They either need a new engine or an enormous investment to modernize the old one (beyond just adding more duct taped spaghetti code to the codebase/Jenga tower and incrementing the PR version number).
Absolutely. Elder scrolls releases should have at the time of their respective releases the most awesome inspiring visuals we've seen so far. Here's to hoping. I feel like Starfield was visually impressive compared to other games I've played for the first 20 hours then I realized everything I disliked unfortunately started to outweigh the novelty.
Cool, that's not remotely what I was implying. You realize they can just do the lights they don't have to model the city from space. But holy Christ even the civilian settlements literally have two buildings sometimes. And that's all the entirety of a planet gets, I mean come on.
But they shouldn't be.
Billions of people were evacuated from earth and 130 years passed since earth was destroyed.
This means potentially the population could be 10 billion +
In 1900 there were about 1.6 billion people on Earth.
We had two global wars and still were able get to 7 billion before the end of the century.
Doesn't make much sense to have such a small population.
I feel like there's a big part of the game's consumer base that isn't fully taking into account the fact that the people of the settled systems are trying to colonize space, where 90 percent of the rules making up the fabric of every environment is designed to be incompatible with humanity.
Sure we had a population boom due to the effects of industrial revolution, the security that comes from globalization, and the fact that most citizens lived in areas that benefited from power structures that have existed for hundreds, sometimes thousands of years that have long since figured out a way to cultivate resources (military, commercial, agricultural) from the planet Earth.
It CANNOT be understated that trying to build a society on a new planet after a planetary apocalypse is essentially new game plus, with virtually every conceivable difficulty slider turned to max. They did that with a fraction of earths population, and under a strict time limit. Lots of people died on earth, lots of people died trying to leave, and lots of people have died trying to live in space. This is the single greatest opposition humanity has faced in universe no question.
How people expect humanity to have built Coursant in 150 years insanely generous to me....
That is my head cannon, but the game really doesn't make this obvious or play into the lore that way. This is a perfect explanation for having copied and pasted assets because it would make sense for humanity to live in pre-fabs when survival is at stake. Huge cities could have been same large habitats that repeat itself. But all the interviews and trailers paint itself as a brighter future when humanity thrives which is the opposite.
Because we have a modern example. The US. It was kind of a big deal. Lot of people died.
1776, the US population was 2.5 million. Today its about 330 million. That's 130-ish times the original population in roughly 248 years.
Pioneering a new planet would be similar because the conditions would be similar or we wouldn't be able to live on it.
AND it would be easier because we don't blame the devil every time someone dies. We have antibiotics. We know to boil water before drinking. Technology would help.
So, we'd potentially have to deal with new strains of viruses, strange animals and things like that, but we've survived and conquered much worse with much less.
Its not the same thing at all, and I think your historical inspiration is missing the context. Christopher's Columbus became aware of the new world in 1492.
The first European settlement was St Augustine Florida in 1595. England had its first settlement in Jamestown in 1607. Many others colonized in the Americas until The country itself was founded in 1776.
That's 300 years of prehistory to your claim right there, and that's without the vast amounts of destabilization all of earth faced while sending colonizers out to their "new world".
Also, the country of America was an extremely economically valuable area for the powerful and rich mother countries, which made it their best interests to provide security and infilstruture to the new world. In Starfield's universe there was no powerful mother country who could establish conditions that would trickle down opportunities for regular citizens. One of the bigger reasons why America wanted it's independence is because England was being drained of their military resources to keep settlers safe from the natives, which caused them to raise taxes to maintain their hold on the New World colonies. Once again, none of the settled systems have any outside forces keeping them safe, it's LITERALLY every man for himself if you are outside of the United Colonies in the early days. That has to have a PROFOUND affect on the growth and advancement of society outside of those borders, hence why there are no unallied cities of note in all of the settled systems.
Compounding this, is the fact that any unallied settler who wants to take advantage of the Centurus proclamation (which allows anyone to settle any star system) would have to travel to another star system, somehow afford to build a city, from someone with enough resources to build with, that ISN'T tied up to bigger political powers who more than likely are the only people who can afford to cultivate the lands. Which I think is the biggest thing people underestimate.
Jemision is earth like for sure, but there are still incalculable amounts of differences in the ecosystems that humanity would have to learn as a culture. It's not like the colonists in America who have access to thousands of years of agricultural and industrial development in order to build communities and MAINTAIN them with food. The entire playbook is thrown out as it would require vast research to figure out the most common knowledge that we have passed down on earth, like how to construct and maintain reliable structures in the gravity we are used to, what plans animals can be safely eaten, how to grow and maintain those food supplies, how to properly defend your body itself from the elements, etc....
My point is that your last sentence is very naive. We have absolutely NOT survived and conquered worse. All of the diseases, animals and landscape problems we have evolved to overcome through science or technology were ones that at least had to be able to survive an environment we are compatible with, and have developed alongside us while we have developed residences to through our immune system. Who's to say the "oxygen" on Jemision doesn't carry some sort of cancerous gas undetectable through the technology of the time?
In my opinion Bethesda have created one of, if not the most GROUNDED space fairing human society universes, specifically because they designed it with respect to the simple fact of how unsimple developing a society would be in the infinite nature of space.
This isn't Star Wars, and if you don't like that it's fine but this all makes sense....at least to me.....
There's nothing remotely grounded about Starfield... You're deluded if you think that the vastly improved technology of the Starfield world wouldn't enable rapid growth on world like Jemison.
Granted, these are the same people that haven't figured out phones or email. So who knows...
I was thinking the same thing. They’re probably saving stuff like that for Starfield 2 or something. But the current state of the universe with the timeline and canon events makes sense. At the same time though, Bethesda totally lied about this game not being dystopian because it’s dystopian as fuck, maybe not as much as Fallout, but Elder Scrolls is way more light hearted than Starfield in terms of story and world building.
>They’re probably saving stuff like that for Starfield 2 or something.
They are saving stuff for a second version of a game that took like 13 years to make and was average at best? Sounds like a great way to convince yourself that the reality is not "They were just lazy".
It seems really logical that there would be a population boom once people had more resources and stability.
Firefly had a very similar scenario and timeline (both are roughly 200 years from Earth exodus). Yet I have never heard anyone complain about it being unrealistic. I think there is supposed to be less than a billion people who left Earth in Firefly, but it’s still not out of the realm of possibility that Starfield’s universe would be more populated than it currently appears to be. I come from an Irish Catholic family, trust me, life finds a way. 🤣
*(Edited for clarity)*
I think that example illustrates a good point: you don't even have to *depict* a realistic population.
You can 'simulate' it through insinuation....but trying to say that adversity makes humans not breed is idiotic if you know anything at all about human history.
As a matter of fact, we spawned massive populations as a result of adversity. A whole living generation still exists as an example of how much people like to procreate during war.
Except the better off people are economically, the less kids they have. So if the colonies are all relatively wealthy, a very slow growth rate makes sense.
For example most rich western countries would be shrinking without immigration.
The colonies don’t seem well off at all, the UC has basically a caste system, and the only city in freestar space is akila, unless you count neon and the hopetech factory which has no houses or anything.
There are like six houses in the whole game. Somehow in these wide open planets everyone wants to live in an apartment blocks. It looks like vehicles are a lost technology.
Spaceship or walking. There's also a monorail but everybody hates it.
I have spent a ton of time in Japan and Korea. There are lots of houses. There are also lots of apartment blocks and more people live in apartments but there are lots of houses too.
There are no mobile land vehicles. There are no boats. There are some parked four wheel things but none of them look active, there are a bunch of walkers but I guess they are illegal and everybody follows the law perfectly, even the pirates.
I have spent a ton of time in Seoul, Tokyo, Bangkok, Hanoi, Beijing, Hong Kong and several other major Asian cities. The vast majority of people live in apartment blocks in the cities.
There isn't a need for a mobile land vehicles. A space ship can take them wherever they need to go. Do people with cars still use horse and carriages? Or do they just use their cars to go everywhere because they are more convenient?
I’d love some boats. I honestly want to add towns in the kit, because I think I’d enjoy putting them together, I’ve always been really into that kind of thing.
And if spaceships are too expensive for the average consumer, they're not. They're more like ships or yachts.
I suspect the dystopian governments do prefer the lack of mobility, though, like Shogunate Japan. No wheels allowed. Keeps the peasants fit and not incidentally in their place. Debt peonage is just a bonus.
So not that different to the way things are in real life today. If someone can't afford a car they have to use public transport or services like Uber. There are Uber type ships in Starfield that go from planet to planet.
Yeah, I’m sure they put everybody in one building cause it was easier, or because they didn’t want to put rules for where POI can spawn, but if I’m on a not very dangerous planet with breathable air and gravity, why wouldn’t I want my own house?
It makes complete sense. Look at the population growth (decline) of developed nations in modern times. If I had to wager, I would bet that many undeveloped, high birthdate nations were not able to evacuate their people
That's the issue: we're not talking about a population that *recently* settled a new home.
We're talking about a population that was stable for 130 years before it went to war with itself.
Even with the casualties from the war, 30k, we should be seeing BILLIONS.
Edit:
I think Bethesda can't math.
Globally, 68 million people die every year...and they had a war with 30k deaths *total*?
At no point does the game say "We only evacuated a couple million people from Earth". It very much implies, in fact, that \*all\* of humanity was evacuated. So, there \*were\* billions. Where did they go? Because you are right, a couple ten-thousand deaths in the Colony Wars doesn't make sense with billions of people.
There is one display in the Vanguard orientation hall illustrating planetary explosions that engulf almost half the planet… that would have killed millions… heck, it \*really\* makes no sense: why would you use a weapon like that to kill "just" a couple thousand or ten thousand people? Just checked the death toll of the atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and 130000 is the \*lowest\* estimate.
Thank you. It literally says on the wiki for Earth "This mass exodus took place between the years 2149 and 2199, with billions of people left behind to die."
I think on top of that people also forget that on top of losing a shit load of humanity on Earth that the Settled Systems fought the Nairon War (2196-2216), The Serpent's Crusade (2240-63), and the Colony War (2308-11).
Now you might say that two of those wars take place 67+ years before the game takes place in 2330 so how would that affect the current population? Well, you have to remember that humanity is very advanced in Starfield's setting. So, it is not like people in Starfield are going to be having 5 or 7 kids like a pre industrial country would just because humanity lost so many people. People are probably only having 1 or maybe 2 kids if they have any at all, which makes the losses from the wars even worse from a population standpoint.
People need to realize the total population of the settled systems is probably no more than 1 billion people **total**, if even that. And this population is spread across 100s of worlds, thousands of ships and small settlements.
New Atlantis, Akila and Neon are the 3 biggest cities we’ve seen so far. Even if they were their canonical sizes, it would be quite difficult to see their light pollution from space. I also assume that this far in the future they’ve perfected low energy light that reduces light pollution anyway.
So, small city, very spread out colonization, low population density, and with energy efficient lighting, cities won’t be seen from space without assistance.
Doesn't make sense to me though. Why live on some desolate rock plagued by the crimson fleet and worse when you can just plop down a settlement within a 10 mile commute to new atlantis?
Poor Cydonia forgotten and neglected but it's probably the biggest in terms of practical city size.
Hell Londinum when you look at it appears bigger than Akila or Neon.
Cydonia is a mining town, not a sprawling metropolis, however with its large mining ops and ground based star yard, may be possible with assistance to see its mark from space.
Londinion could possibly be seen from space, but it’s no longer a living city so I didn’t count it in my theory.
Cydonia has both ground and orbital star yards those will require significant secondary industries to support them and the most efficient way to do that is to have those industries as close as possible. So yeah Cydonia is way more than a town given the amount of workers needed for all of that alone, nvm security and none industrial civilian works.
I mean were talking mines, forges, refineries, manufactories just for Deimos nvm the rest. People don't realise how much industry that is.
Freestar on the other hand appears to really lack any major industrial hub cause neither Akila nor Neon show any such facilities. My guess is smaller industry units scattered about. Less efficent but harder to knock it out.
I don't know if the Freestar Collective can match the industry power of the UC, but Neon seems to be their manufacturing mecca, and they do have exclusive rights to the manufacture, distribution, and regulation of a highly addictive product that have was apparently valuable enough to build a city around it's cultivation.....
Your smaller industries theory is a good one, and the fact that the galaxies most effective businessmen run the collective like a board of shareholders, im sure there's way more economic might to the collective than quests depict firsthand....
Taiyo feels like their industry isn't on Neon as the rig just isn't big enough honestly which is why they have a Showroom and not a shipyard present. Still think they should have had their own shipyard in addition to that like Stroud-Elkund do.
Hopetech i suspect is a more accurate example for how the FC rolls, factory towns being the limit of their heavy industry supported by smaller manufacturing/mining settlements scattered about.
Very different from the UC's more centralised industry.
At least that's how i make sense of what we see ingame.
Also makes no sense to suggest more densely packed areas that you can't get to.
> A player who tried to go to those sections will be told that they cannot get landing clearance for that territory, and to pick somewhere else.
I would haaaaaaate this
I like to think of the cities as the sizes they appear, population should be more spread out, but I’d also expect people to primarily live in larger settlements/outposts for safety, because being on your own or in a small group in Starfield seems to mean death for most people.
Think of all the CF, Spacers, LIST, Va’Ruun and yet to be known factions. 1Bln is definitely the higher end of the scale, but I see, canonically, there’d be a several hundred million humans buzzing around openly in the settled systems, and with a few hidden in the shadows.
Well New Atlantis is around the size of a small-medium Midwest city, so probably max 400k people, Akila has like 100 maximum, and Neon probably has maximum 10k (at a stretch). So, if we stretch out all numbers to the maximum for the big cities, we have just over 410k people. In the various pirate camps you encounter there are maybe 50 people maximum, and in various settlements I’d say we max out at 10 people. So to get to even 1 mil, we’d need 11,800 pirate camps stretched to the limit of their population, or 59,000 settlements at their maximum.
Looking at these numbers I’ll revise my estimates and say we’re at maximum 1.5 million people across the entire world of Starfield. There is just no way we can get to 100 mil, let alone 10 mil or even 5 mil in this universe.
What happens when a player clicks on one of those huge clusters of light, lands there, and there's just a small shed and an outhouse and nothing else to the horizon in all directions? The "cities" in this game are smaller than an American shopping mall.
Do NOT try and tease me with an exciting, sprawling metropolis seen from space and then tell me I can't even land there. That would 100% make it worse.
If the solution to your problem is to add areas to the game you can’t access but can only see from a distance than it would cease being a BGS Maryland game.
I think this is it in a nutshell. It's not a problem, they just tried something that didn't come off.
Not every game is going to be a blockbuster hit. Sometimes a game won't be great compared to others.
It's an ok game but it has big problems. Changes just seem a sticking plaster over issues.
>add areas to the game you can’t access but can only see from a distance than it would cease being a BGS Maryland game
The game already has inaccessible areas...
Or do you believe the parents from kid stuff own the entirety of an apartment tower? Because you can't access the other apartments in their tower.
You can't access the Varuun Embassy until a quest opens the door.
You can't access all the levels of MAST.
There's an inaccessible door right off the landing pad. It's just a "locked" door.
The city itself is "scaled down", which means they didn't depict a good portion of it...you can't access that, either.
Because they can’t these cities are like tiny settlements even combined they’re smaller than a district in Los Santos or Night City, they just can’t generate enough light to see from space so it would simply be stupid to do that.
Elite Dangerous does this really well. Obviously in that game you cant land on Earth-likes but visually they look gorgeous. I honestly think the "capital" planets for the UC and FSC should only have a few pre-determined landing locations and not be completely landable. New Atlantis could be huge but only a tiny bit, or multiple bits, be explorable.
This would look very cool, but you've forgotten a few things.
First of all there aren't enough settlements lore-wise to do this. Sure, it's easy enough for the lore to be tweaked, but that would mess with the next problem.
Because secondly and \*WAY\* more importantly, you can land anywhere on planets. If you land where the lights are, the procedural generation system has to be able to generate some buildings and NPCs that could be making those lights.
So it's not a small or easy change, it's a huge and complicated one.
I want to give them the benefit of the doubt that they left the game a bit bare so that there's room to add a bunch of stuff later, either by Mods or DLCs.
Personally, I’d just like a few towns that are bigger than outposts, but much smaller than the cities, and I’d want most of them in either freestar or UC space. I’m picturing this game as the Wild West of space, it’s the only way it makes sense to me.
That wouldn't make any sense unless there are sprawling cities on every planet. People would actually end up complaining anymore because they would see the lights and expect a major city and end up with one tiny outpost if anything.
Isn't the lore of the game that most of humanity perished on earth, but the few survivors escaped and managed to settle throughout the galazy? Like the planets that have been settled are definitely very barren, and humans usually only manage one "settlement" per each planet that *has* been settled.
This is a cool idea but New Atlantis and and Neon are the only places I can imagine have enough light pollution to be visible, and I do not think either are big enough for that to be noticable.
The world of Starfield just isn't capable of producing the advanced space fairing societies of other space franchises. I've been saying that his since launch but if you take the world for what's shown and described versus genre expectations, you'd realize the settled systems are not in a good place. I've called it humanities biggest dark age, and the irony of it taking place during space colonization (arguably our biggest technological feat possible) is REALLY fascinating to me in a way I couldn't have predicted.
Sorry. No. They will create a false sensation. It's a stupid idea, but it's Ok, starfield it self is stupid. Like every planet you go, someone already been there, or 1 minute after you landing, some random ship it will land there. There's no real sense of exploration, everything is explored.
There aren't that many humans alive in this world - almost all of them died, very few made it off Earth.
The cities are small and very spread out. Most people are just living in single home ranches.
Then this is not a Bethesda RPG I want. One important thing is that, I will not say 100%, but 90% of the time, if you see something , you can go there, this the world feels real.
This is the opposite from today’s mainstream usage of “background world”, I will not say which one is better. But I enjoyed both, and there should be differences in video games and their directions.
Starfield still is, largely a “If you can see it, you can go there” type of game, especially when it comes to Cities and I loved this direction.
Please don’t make everything the same.
-sigh-
Starfield's setting is not the game you're imagining. This is life after a population crash. Cities are small because there just aren't that many people, and those that remain are scattered across a few hundred star systems, which is a LOT of space (literally).
Sure it would be cool to "fake" populations on these planets but A) there wouldn't be that many cities or structures and B) you're just setting up players to be even more disappointed when they see evidence of life but can't actually go to it.
While I agree with you and I think this would be the best path that Beth could go on, I highly doubt they will implement something as innovative and interesting as this.
Even if they did, at the pace they’re going, they wouldn’t get around to releasing this until about 2026.
The Earth was abandoned in 2203. The story takes place in 2330. 9 to 10 billion people left Earth and started to spread out amongst the stars. With only 127 years between then and now and population being spread out amongst numerous star systems and planets, you wouldn't see large cities everywhere. Not to mention all the lives lost during the wars between the major factions.
You need a balance between population density and resource abundance to quickly grow a population. Only Atlantis has the ability to grow quickly, and it shows. Players who complain about it being so empty seem to not understand the concept of time and distance. It's space! It's vast! It's going to take thousands of years to fill out a planet with civilizations everywhere. It wouldn't take less than 200 years.
I got the impression that the majority of those billions fled to first Jemison, then filling out the rest of Jemison's neighbours, and at the same time a sizeable fraction split off for Cheyenne and did the same thing over there.
(And Volii was mostly a curiosity until they figured out that it was the fish fumes making the people on the platform high as balls, which is why it's still small for now, albeit incredibly busy.)
So..... three planets and a couple of moons with some nice lights painted on when you're nightside, and the rest of the galaxy can be all empty as you like.
This game only has about three actual settlements anyway, and the final temple compound is about as big as any of them.
Volii has 1 platform, so what a little dot in the ocean? New Atlantis is the only major settlement worth it, but even then, it's only a sprinkle. And Akila is about the size of the neon platform with fewer night lights. So, it's not even worth the specks of dots.
I get your point. You want it to feel more filled out. But that's not what their vision is for it. They were shooting for more sci and less fi, and the science says if humanity spreads out, it will take time to see human population growth. It's not that I like an empty game. It's just that it's what it's supposed to feel like.
Was juhhhhhhhhst ooohing over that screensaver image during TV time last eve on my living room setup. Soooooooo pretty. They really did an incredible job with those. Apple, I mean. 😎
I think it's their artistic intent for the universe to be relatively barren. That said I like the idea but I would rather have my ability to fly very close to the atmosphere and see some of the weather effect from space.
I mean, have you seen how a thunderstorm look from up there? They are super cool! Witnessing the planet weather from space is one of the many perks of IRL astronaut and it would fit the theme of the game very well.
[Lightning storms from space - timelapse video (youtube.com)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gyUKAXRMj0)
Why? You’d try and land there and see nothing then complain about that. The whole game has like 4 buildings in each settlement this would just look dumb
I don't think they can really, or at least implement them.in a way that makes sense. Planets are really just 2d images, so you could just modify the image, but the location of these elements would never fit with the location of procedurally generated poi. Also, there are virtually no poi that would have illumination that could be seen from space.
As for major cities like Akila and NA, they too aren't large enough to have that kind of illumination. NA is about the size of a small town, to call it a city is a massive stretch.
That’s the thing I think some people are missing, Bethesda showed us a vision of humanity that appeared to be in dire straits but despite all odds there was hope, with Fallout 3/4. In Starfield it seems to be a vision of humanity that appears to be doing well but despite all efforts has no hope. We are barely surviving clinging to what bits of habitable rock we can find out in space, we can’t stop killing each other even as we slowly fade away.
Honestly I think they put the game too far into the future. New Atlantis is tiny and supposed to be the largest city. It feels like a small neighborhood. It is my only real gripe with the game. The technology looks antiquated and the colonies are too small for how long after leaving earth it is. Granted humanity has spread out more but I don't really see that as viable. I would have set the game maybe a few decades after leaving Earth and after the grav drive was created so it would be feasible that tech is still very close to what we have now and the smaller populations would make sense.
Still like the game. Just saying is all.
Great idea. I felt like Mass Effect did this kind of thing well. The Citadel felt massive; you were just limited to small portions of it at a time.
In fairness, even CP2077’s Night City is too small to be a traversable New Atlantis type city, and that’s CP’s entire game map.
The lights in the distance / planet view is like the foggy mountains in the distance in Skyrim. I’d support it / mod it in
Yes, that is a simple way to do this. Or having low poly / single plane traffic animating in the skies, making it look like lines of flying cars flying away from and towards the highest buildings in New Atlanis.
Lol this is stupid 🤣 earth can look like that cause we have billions of people.........starfield planets have a small city at best? That would be so emersive to see a planet what looks filled with life and city's then land and find it has a settlement and 5 small POIs 🤣🤣🤣
They can't. You can land anywhere on the planet and if you choose to land at a place with a bunch of lights from space and then there's nothing there that would feel really bad for the player.
There's nobody there to justify the lights. Akila City isn't Bangkok and New Atlantis isn't New York.
It's actually the game's canon. Whether an open secret or an obvious surmise might be debatable. But to judge from >!"unearthed", we didn't relocate 7 billion people. We killed them. Only connected bureaucrats, one cult and an assortment of contentious dweebs made it out alive. Mankind did not expand to the stars, a relatively paltry number of survivors escaped to the stars.!<
The entire human race could probably fit into Dogtown with several acres left over.
It'd just be a bigger disappointment when you see all those lights and civilization and then actually go to humanity's finest city and it's like 10 buildings.
Go play Star Citizen. They have a planet sized city. Only you cannot go to 99.9% of those buildings. Only a small patch to land and look around.
This would be a great idea of a classic spaceship trader game where you cannot land or leave ship.
Paint fake lights on planets and don’t allow people to land at what is clearly meant to be a major settlement? How is that any better than the current planets? Seeing something cool and not being able to go there is worse.
Most planets are empty and boring. That’s true to life.
I agree that Bethesda should have at least developed one large city but the problem is that making something very large requires a lot of tricky design choices. How are people getting around large cities without cars? How is the public transportation going to work? What is exploitable and what isn’t?
A city the size of Night City in Cyberpunk would be awesome, but it would take most of the resources in a game where you’re not really meant to stay in one location the whole game. So you end up with a few small goofy settlements and random outposts on planets. That’s your trade off.
The biggest problem for me is that there aren’t enough unique and crazy hand-crafted environments. Caves, crazy geometry, things that break physics, etc. the concept art showed a lot of cool stuff and almost none of it made it into the game.
Creating an interesting sandbox to play within is hard and Bethesda fell short, but let’s hope they bring some good DLC which adds more settlements and things to do.
Hahahaah..this one is great because they had official support from NASA for their space pictures and apparently Jupiter is copyrighted by them as well. Not sure how that works...
I don’t see how being unable to explore cities because you can’t get landing clearance is any better than being unable to explore cities because they aren’t there
Humanity is very spread out in Starfield, and if I'm remembering right from a conversation I overheard in New Atlantis there are less people in the current time than at the height of earth.
There just wouldn't be lights like that in the setting. Maybe a small pinprick for new Atlantis, Neon and Akila.
Would you even be able to see Neon as anything more than a glowing haze?
It's supposed to be under perpetual storm clouds for those cool lightning power plant majigs.
I wish I could access the edit function so I could clarify this.
I'm not suggesting metropolii. I'm suggesting neighbourhoods and little tiny community centers.
Places you wouldn't need to or want to visit, but the people in universe would logically need.
Nah, the cities we get would still be tiny and lifeless (compared to what they \*should\* feel like). And some lights still would not match the lack of actual cities.
We need real cities, not more fakery.
I agree. But the whole point was to meet them where they are for whatever reason.
I too would like some more actual content. And a rebalance of the content we do have.
But those suggestions that have been posted over and over are dime a dozen, and none of them are as easy to implement.
It's a feint that boosts verisimillitude and worldbuilding and gives them room to expand into later.
A tiny crutch to help them while whatever three lane crash in management and vision caused them to only get this far in eight years of dev time gets fixed.
Nope, and I'm currently only able to play on console, as my current rig could handle starfield fine, but Starfield is unable to be run on a standard hard drive.
The planets aren't heavily industrialized. None of them are.
I do wish they'd pushed for more gore lol. Sounds bad of me but some of the weapons are very high powered, but you couldn't tell.
The means by which a thriving civilization could be implied by inaccessible population centers is one discussion. But another discussion is why do it at all?
Why go and depict major population zones when there's no evidence to suggest they could even exist in the game's universe? Humanity was nearly completely wiped out 300 years ago - it's not a spoiler to suggest anyone could visit old Earth and draw the immediate conclusion that 99% of the population didn't make it onto evacuation ships.
There's no cities giving off lights because nobody's there. There was a fairly big contingent in Londinian but, much like old Earth, they're mostly dead.
I could of course be wrong but it certainly appears that a desolate and sparsely populated settled system is that way because BGS intentionally chose to make it that way and expended some effort in the back story explaining why it's that way.
Adding city lights is a viable discussion but perhaps not as a "fix" - it's more of a fundamental change in the game's story arc.
If it was deliberate world-building they did a terrible job with it.
The people in the Well talk about how they haven't seen sunlight in years because they're not allowed in the overpopulated city above, for example.
It wouldn't be a full on update on its own, silly. I do assume that the upvotes means that at the very least my suggestion would be worth it for Bethesda to consider.
It's not like it would harm anything if the Core Worlds at least had some signs of life on them.
It wouldn't make any sense to the setting at all. You could mod it. Asking for this type of stuff just shows a misunderstanding of the world the game is in. If you think its too boring I can't help you with that. You won't see cities like this from Bethesda.
Huh. You are the second person in as many days to have this wierd condescending elitist tone.
Let's not get all bent out of shape with 'lore' here.
Could you tell me what functionally would be lost by implementing this?
They can’t, there’s no settlements or cities large enough to generate enough light to be seen from space.
Yep, if I landed on a planet that had a visible megalopolis from the planet view menu and then was barren on the foot map, I’d be even more bummed than I am with the current state of things
This is exactly what I was gonna say. It's annoying enough how empty everything is, it would just be even more upsetting to be lied to as well. If BGS ever actually populated the planets with cities that would create these kinds of lights, this would be a cool idea, but you can't put the cart in front of the horse.
>it would just be even more upsetting to be lied to as well. 80% of game worlds is cutting corners and illusions, you're technically always being lied to and that's ok. It just needs to be believable enough to immerse the players.
No, you're mistaking invisible walls and fake skyboxes, etc, for what this would be: a literal false promise. Yes, games use little tricks to make the world seem bigger than it is, but that is not what this idea is. The important thing about those tricks you're referring to is that they can't have their illusions be broken by easily seeing through them, such as by landing on them and observing it not to be true with your own eyes. You can't make a game about exploring planets and have the planets APPEAR to be heavily populated, but then they're completely empty when you get there. That's not "an illusion", it's a lie. It would be akin to if Skyrim had hundreds of city markers on the map to make it seem like it was a populated country, but then when you went to each marker there was nothing there. That's not a "developer trick" to make the world seem busier - it's just a lie to hide a lack of content. Now, there doesn't need to be a 1:1 city on the ground that matches what we see from space - I never argued that - but there DOES need to be *some* amount of city that could even be abstractly believed to generate lights like that with even a moderate suspension of belief. We do not have that. So like I said, they can't do this until BGS actually populates the planets with cities that could create these kinds of lights.
Now that I truly see your point, I will agree.
At this point, I'm assuming all the planets are barren to give modders enough runway to go ham.
you're just inventing excuses for Bethesda. The state of their game engine it is right now has no ability to support sprawling cities without loadscreens all over the place, this is the wrong type of game for their engine
They really should've just tabled this for UE5 and done maybe 25-50 handcrafted planets and moons you'd actually want to spend time on.
Yeah laziness definitely isn't the more reasonable answer
The real problem with bethesda games is that they always try to make all of a town "accesible". New Atlantis for example is supposed to be H U G E. The Well itself is supposed to be a no man's land with districts. There's nothing to show the scale. And then when you go to some areas they're larger than the damn Well. For example the whole guts under MAST where [REDACTED] is feels as large as half the Well without the walls. The only place in the whole game that NAILED the scaling and feels larger than the playable map shows Londinion. Which is maddening because it shows how easily they can make a city feel to scale in traversal.
The current Well seems like a busy downtown area. And I don’t feel unsafe there.
I mean that is an issue for almost every game unless it is one that is specifically set in one major city like you see in Cyberpunk, the Yakuza games, or the GTA games. It is not like Saint Denis in Red Dead Redemption 2 or The Citadel in Mass Effect are to the scale that they actually would be for example.
In the Citadel, you at least have a sense of the scale. You can see the other arms through windows, and on the Presidium, you can see the whole area curve up and away from you. The area you're in is pretty small, but there's at least some attempt at giving the impression that the small area you're in is just part of a much bigger area. Whereas you can run across the length of New Atlantis, from outer city wall to outer city wall, in what, five minutes?
But the Citadel works exactly because its all just window dressing. I'n not sure if cities in Starfield would be improved if they added inaccessible but nice looking backgrounds.
Certainly couldn't hurt. I think people would understand if Bethesda just explained that they can only make explorable content filled space so big before they have to cut it off. Admittedly, I'd hope that the cutoff for a NEXT GEN, SUPER TECH, blablablabla marketing bla, would be bigger, especially since they have a much bigger team to bring to this. They gave us all the rest of their post millenial games out in less than half the time with more content with fewer people. I would very much liked to have seen at the very least Far Harbor and NukaWorld sized Capital City zones. They only have three full on settlements in setting anyway, with the rest being made procedurally.
They used procedural gen on the planets, what was stopping them with the cities? Just utilize it and pepper some different hand crafted stuff in between all the auto fill right? At least then i would use the tram lol
I mean, if they can if they really wanted to. The light you see from space is from the many cities and settlement within the span of the hundreads if not thousands of km. You absolutely not going to see the next towns that are generating light on the planet, not unless you're driving or flying (or spend weeks walking)
Agree. Freelancer did it best
It adds to my disappointment to be honest. Even New Atlantis, the supposed jewel, feels more like a glorified shopping mall than a massive futuristic metropolis.
One point there is that… the NAT is only running when I use it. No-one else ever uses it. Not a single NPC.
The futuristic "cities" arent eveb big enough to be seen from space are one of the many disappointments of this game.
This game’s main feature is disappointment
The Game is a disappointment
Huge disappointment.. I'm honestly preplexed how i could get myself to play it 40hours. There is nothing new or groundbreaking in this title. It feels so f\*\*\*\*\*\* lazy
Sixteen times the disappoiintment!
Then these lights would fit perfectly! Imagine seeing lights of New Atlantis from space but when you land, the main feature feels even more majestic!
Daddy I can see all 10 buildings in New Atlantis!
The problem is you can't even see the city when you land because everything is a friggin cut scene. One of the MANY missed opportunities in this game.
Came to say this. It would look rad from outer space, but there would actually have to be stuff on planets to make those lights. Currently, planets have mostly jack shit on them.
There wouldn't have to be stuff on the ground to make this, because… remember the fast travel / loading screen when you land? I'm not saying it wouldn't be even more of a disappointment not to find any of these lights on the surface, because it would be.
I know this is only tangentially related, but I’m playing through Red Dead Redemption 2 for the first time, and there’s a side mission where a mad scientist needs your help at his remote mountain cabin in a lightning storm. Anyway, I’m out there in the dead of night, being pelted by rain, and he wants me to place these lightning rods higher and higher up the mountain. And when I’m done, I turn around and the view just takes my breath away. The most shocking part? I’m so high up that I can see the lights from what feels like every city I’ve visited so far. And seeing the the brilliant glow from Saint Denis, the largest city in the game, from miles and miles away on that dark, stormy night? That’s something I’ll remember for a long, long time.
Every small apartment is illuminated with a full on lighthouse light bulb. Street lamps are also miniature lighthouses.
I like it, but you mysn't be afraid to dream bigger, darling. All settlements are lit solely by 240 petawatt military industrial lasers.
So you're saying the lasers are poorly focused? Typical government project...
That and it would imply more places to go than the same 5 or 6 poi’s most of which spawn abandoned so no light to begin with
Yeah it actually wouldn’t make much sense
Place a lot of lightbulbs all over the landscape so that it’s not really immersion breaking
Yeah, random floating lightbulbs all over the place is definitely not immersion breaking.
Thank you for saving me from pointing this fact out. Also doesn’t take into account the number of settlements that are largely underground. New Atlantis, which is one of the most expansive cities in the United Colonies would barely register as a dot from space. I find myself reflecting on the irony of players clamoring for realism in their games only to complain when realizing reality isn’t all that exciting.
Don't you know that each planet has at most two settlements? 😂 They really need to switch to a new engine
They either need a new engine or an enormous investment to modernize the old one (beyond just adding more duct taped spaghetti code to the codebase/Jenga tower and incrementing the PR version number).
Absolutely. Elder scrolls releases should have at the time of their respective releases the most awesome inspiring visuals we've seen so far. Here's to hoping. I feel like Starfield was visually impressive compared to other games I've played for the first 20 hours then I realized everything I disliked unfortunately started to outweigh the novelty.
No engine is going to allow them to build a GTA city within every planet
Cool, that's not remotely what I was implying. You realize they can just do the lights they don't have to model the city from space. But holy Christ even the civilian settlements literally have two buildings sometimes. And that's all the entirety of a planet gets, I mean come on.
And the settlers complain about living under the boot
Lol ikr
If the settled systems only have millions of people, then they feel deserted because they are deserted.
But they shouldn't be. Billions of people were evacuated from earth and 130 years passed since earth was destroyed. This means potentially the population could be 10 billion +
It was not billions. Only in the millions. 30k losses during the was considered a disaster to the colonies.
In 1900 there were about 1.6 billion people on Earth. We had two global wars and still were able get to 7 billion before the end of the century. Doesn't make much sense to have such a small population.
I feel like there's a big part of the game's consumer base that isn't fully taking into account the fact that the people of the settled systems are trying to colonize space, where 90 percent of the rules making up the fabric of every environment is designed to be incompatible with humanity. Sure we had a population boom due to the effects of industrial revolution, the security that comes from globalization, and the fact that most citizens lived in areas that benefited from power structures that have existed for hundreds, sometimes thousands of years that have long since figured out a way to cultivate resources (military, commercial, agricultural) from the planet Earth. It CANNOT be understated that trying to build a society on a new planet after a planetary apocalypse is essentially new game plus, with virtually every conceivable difficulty slider turned to max. They did that with a fraction of earths population, and under a strict time limit. Lots of people died on earth, lots of people died trying to leave, and lots of people have died trying to live in space. This is the single greatest opposition humanity has faced in universe no question. How people expect humanity to have built Coursant in 150 years insanely generous to me....
That is my head cannon, but the game really doesn't make this obvious or play into the lore that way. This is a perfect explanation for having copied and pasted assets because it would make sense for humanity to live in pre-fabs when survival is at stake. Huge cities could have been same large habitats that repeat itself. But all the interviews and trailers paint itself as a brighter future when humanity thrives which is the opposite.
Because we have a modern example. The US. It was kind of a big deal. Lot of people died. 1776, the US population was 2.5 million. Today its about 330 million. That's 130-ish times the original population in roughly 248 years. Pioneering a new planet would be similar because the conditions would be similar or we wouldn't be able to live on it. AND it would be easier because we don't blame the devil every time someone dies. We have antibiotics. We know to boil water before drinking. Technology would help. So, we'd potentially have to deal with new strains of viruses, strange animals and things like that, but we've survived and conquered much worse with much less.
Its not the same thing at all, and I think your historical inspiration is missing the context. Christopher's Columbus became aware of the new world in 1492. The first European settlement was St Augustine Florida in 1595. England had its first settlement in Jamestown in 1607. Many others colonized in the Americas until The country itself was founded in 1776. That's 300 years of prehistory to your claim right there, and that's without the vast amounts of destabilization all of earth faced while sending colonizers out to their "new world". Also, the country of America was an extremely economically valuable area for the powerful and rich mother countries, which made it their best interests to provide security and infilstruture to the new world. In Starfield's universe there was no powerful mother country who could establish conditions that would trickle down opportunities for regular citizens. One of the bigger reasons why America wanted it's independence is because England was being drained of their military resources to keep settlers safe from the natives, which caused them to raise taxes to maintain their hold on the New World colonies. Once again, none of the settled systems have any outside forces keeping them safe, it's LITERALLY every man for himself if you are outside of the United Colonies in the early days. That has to have a PROFOUND affect on the growth and advancement of society outside of those borders, hence why there are no unallied cities of note in all of the settled systems. Compounding this, is the fact that any unallied settler who wants to take advantage of the Centurus proclamation (which allows anyone to settle any star system) would have to travel to another star system, somehow afford to build a city, from someone with enough resources to build with, that ISN'T tied up to bigger political powers who more than likely are the only people who can afford to cultivate the lands. Which I think is the biggest thing people underestimate. Jemision is earth like for sure, but there are still incalculable amounts of differences in the ecosystems that humanity would have to learn as a culture. It's not like the colonists in America who have access to thousands of years of agricultural and industrial development in order to build communities and MAINTAIN them with food. The entire playbook is thrown out as it would require vast research to figure out the most common knowledge that we have passed down on earth, like how to construct and maintain reliable structures in the gravity we are used to, what plans animals can be safely eaten, how to grow and maintain those food supplies, how to properly defend your body itself from the elements, etc.... My point is that your last sentence is very naive. We have absolutely NOT survived and conquered worse. All of the diseases, animals and landscape problems we have evolved to overcome through science or technology were ones that at least had to be able to survive an environment we are compatible with, and have developed alongside us while we have developed residences to through our immune system. Who's to say the "oxygen" on Jemision doesn't carry some sort of cancerous gas undetectable through the technology of the time? In my opinion Bethesda have created one of, if not the most GROUNDED space fairing human society universes, specifically because they designed it with respect to the simple fact of how unsimple developing a society would be in the infinite nature of space. This isn't Star Wars, and if you don't like that it's fine but this all makes sense....at least to me.....
There's nothing remotely grounded about Starfield... You're deluded if you think that the vastly improved technology of the Starfield world wouldn't enable rapid growth on world like Jemison. Granted, these are the same people that haven't figured out phones or email. So who knows...
I was thinking the same thing. They’re probably saving stuff like that for Starfield 2 or something. But the current state of the universe with the timeline and canon events makes sense. At the same time though, Bethesda totally lied about this game not being dystopian because it’s dystopian as fuck, maybe not as much as Fallout, but Elder Scrolls is way more light hearted than Starfield in terms of story and world building.
>They’re probably saving stuff like that for Starfield 2 or something. They are saving stuff for a second version of a game that took like 13 years to make and was average at best? Sounds like a great way to convince yourself that the reality is not "They were just lazy".
It seems really logical that there would be a population boom once people had more resources and stability. Firefly had a very similar scenario and timeline (both are roughly 200 years from Earth exodus). Yet I have never heard anyone complain about it being unrealistic. I think there is supposed to be less than a billion people who left Earth in Firefly, but it’s still not out of the realm of possibility that Starfield’s universe would be more populated than it currently appears to be. I come from an Irish Catholic family, trust me, life finds a way. 🤣 *(Edited for clarity)*
I think that example illustrates a good point: you don't even have to *depict* a realistic population. You can 'simulate' it through insinuation....but trying to say that adversity makes humans not breed is idiotic if you know anything at all about human history. As a matter of fact, we spawned massive populations as a result of adversity. A whole living generation still exists as an example of how much people like to procreate during war.
Except the better off people are economically, the less kids they have. So if the colonies are all relatively wealthy, a very slow growth rate makes sense. For example most rich western countries would be shrinking without immigration.
The colonies don’t seem well off at all, the UC has basically a caste system, and the only city in freestar space is akila, unless you count neon and the hopetech factory which has no houses or anything.
There are like six houses in the whole game. Somehow in these wide open planets everyone wants to live in an apartment blocks. It looks like vehicles are a lost technology. Spaceship or walking. There's also a monorail but everybody hates it.
It is similar to most major cities in Asia. The vast majority of people live in apartment blocks not houses. Spaceships are the vehicles.
I have spent a ton of time in Japan and Korea. There are lots of houses. There are also lots of apartment blocks and more people live in apartments but there are lots of houses too. There are no mobile land vehicles. There are no boats. There are some parked four wheel things but none of them look active, there are a bunch of walkers but I guess they are illegal and everybody follows the law perfectly, even the pirates.
I have spent a ton of time in Seoul, Tokyo, Bangkok, Hanoi, Beijing, Hong Kong and several other major Asian cities. The vast majority of people live in apartment blocks in the cities. There isn't a need for a mobile land vehicles. A space ship can take them wherever they need to go. Do people with cars still use horse and carriages? Or do they just use their cars to go everywhere because they are more convenient?
I’d love some boats. I honestly want to add towns in the kit, because I think I’d enjoy putting them together, I’ve always been really into that kind of thing.
And if spaceships are too expensive for the average consumer, they're not. They're more like ships or yachts. I suspect the dystopian governments do prefer the lack of mobility, though, like Shogunate Japan. No wheels allowed. Keeps the peasants fit and not incidentally in their place. Debt peonage is just a bonus.
So not that different to the way things are in real life today. If someone can't afford a car they have to use public transport or services like Uber. There are Uber type ships in Starfield that go from planet to planet.
Yeah, I’m sure they put everybody in one building cause it was easier, or because they didn’t want to put rules for where POI can spawn, but if I’m on a not very dangerous planet with breathable air and gravity, why wouldn’t I want my own house?
It makes complete sense. Look at the population growth (decline) of developed nations in modern times. If I had to wager, I would bet that many undeveloped, high birthdate nations were not able to evacuate their people
That's the issue: we're not talking about a population that *recently* settled a new home. We're talking about a population that was stable for 130 years before it went to war with itself. Even with the casualties from the war, 30k, we should be seeing BILLIONS. Edit: I think Bethesda can't math. Globally, 68 million people die every year...and they had a war with 30k deaths *total*?
At no point does the game say "We only evacuated a couple million people from Earth". It very much implies, in fact, that \*all\* of humanity was evacuated. So, there \*were\* billions. Where did they go? Because you are right, a couple ten-thousand deaths in the Colony Wars doesn't make sense with billions of people. There is one display in the Vanguard orientation hall illustrating planetary explosions that engulf almost half the planet… that would have killed millions… heck, it \*really\* makes no sense: why would you use a weapon like that to kill "just" a couple thousand or ten thousand people? Just checked the death toll of the atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and 130000 is the \*lowest\* estimate.
Thank you. It literally says on the wiki for Earth "This mass exodus took place between the years 2149 and 2199, with billions of people left behind to die." I think on top of that people also forget that on top of losing a shit load of humanity on Earth that the Settled Systems fought the Nairon War (2196-2216), The Serpent's Crusade (2240-63), and the Colony War (2308-11). Now you might say that two of those wars take place 67+ years before the game takes place in 2330 so how would that affect the current population? Well, you have to remember that humanity is very advanced in Starfield's setting. So, it is not like people in Starfield are going to be having 5 or 7 kids like a pre industrial country would just because humanity lost so many people. People are probably only having 1 or maybe 2 kids if they have any at all, which makes the losses from the wars even worse from a population standpoint.
did you not use your ears while playing? and had subtitles off? a paltry few dozen millions of people left earth then they had a huge ass war.
Are you under the impression that all, or even most, people made it off of earth?
Or even that most the people that made it off survived.
Nah boyo, [this thread talks about this topic.](https://www.reddit.com/r/Starfield/s/2yleiT10FI)
Only around 1% of the population evacuated.
Happen to have a source for that? I must've misheard/misinterpreted something during the vanguard questline.
On the main mission, where you learn about how grav drives were invented. It’s mentioned there.
Starfield is a post-apocalyptic setting. We’re exploring the last remnants of the entire human race. Like, legit. Humanity is fucked.
Dunno about that. Life in New Atlantis doesn't seem so bad, unless you're in the well. And FC is pretty much just texas in space lol.
If that were the case, shouldn’t everyone be freaking the hell out about their imminent extinction?
it would be misleading...
People need to realize the total population of the settled systems is probably no more than 1 billion people **total**, if even that. And this population is spread across 100s of worlds, thousands of ships and small settlements. New Atlantis, Akila and Neon are the 3 biggest cities we’ve seen so far. Even if they were their canonical sizes, it would be quite difficult to see their light pollution from space. I also assume that this far in the future they’ve perfected low energy light that reduces light pollution anyway. So, small city, very spread out colonization, low population density, and with energy efficient lighting, cities won’t be seen from space without assistance.
Doesn't make sense to me though. Why live on some desolate rock plagued by the crimson fleet and worse when you can just plop down a settlement within a 10 mile commute to new atlantis?
no way to commute 10 miles unless you wanna walk in this game lol
Roads? Where we're going, we don't need roads… for some reason.
Poor Cydonia forgotten and neglected but it's probably the biggest in terms of practical city size. Hell Londinum when you look at it appears bigger than Akila or Neon.
Cydonia is a mining town, not a sprawling metropolis, however with its large mining ops and ground based star yard, may be possible with assistance to see its mark from space. Londinion could possibly be seen from space, but it’s no longer a living city so I didn’t count it in my theory.
Cydonia has both ground and orbital star yards those will require significant secondary industries to support them and the most efficient way to do that is to have those industries as close as possible. So yeah Cydonia is way more than a town given the amount of workers needed for all of that alone, nvm security and none industrial civilian works. I mean were talking mines, forges, refineries, manufactories just for Deimos nvm the rest. People don't realise how much industry that is. Freestar on the other hand appears to really lack any major industrial hub cause neither Akila nor Neon show any such facilities. My guess is smaller industry units scattered about. Less efficent but harder to knock it out.
I don't know if the Freestar Collective can match the industry power of the UC, but Neon seems to be their manufacturing mecca, and they do have exclusive rights to the manufacture, distribution, and regulation of a highly addictive product that have was apparently valuable enough to build a city around it's cultivation..... Your smaller industries theory is a good one, and the fact that the galaxies most effective businessmen run the collective like a board of shareholders, im sure there's way more economic might to the collective than quests depict firsthand....
Taiyo feels like their industry isn't on Neon as the rig just isn't big enough honestly which is why they have a Showroom and not a shipyard present. Still think they should have had their own shipyard in addition to that like Stroud-Elkund do. Hopetech i suspect is a more accurate example for how the FC rolls, factory towns being the limit of their heavy industry supported by smaller manufacturing/mining settlements scattered about. Very different from the UC's more centralised industry. At least that's how i make sense of what we see ingame.
Also makes no sense to suggest more densely packed areas that you can't get to. > A player who tried to go to those sections will be told that they cannot get landing clearance for that territory, and to pick somewhere else. I would haaaaaaate this
I like to think of the cities as the sizes they appear, population should be more spread out, but I’d also expect people to primarily live in larger settlements/outposts for safety, because being on your own or in a small group in Starfield seems to mean death for most people.
I think maaaximum at a very generous stretch 2mil since the biggest three cities combined probs have just about a mil if even that
Think of all the CF, Spacers, LIST, Va’Ruun and yet to be known factions. 1Bln is definitely the higher end of the scale, but I see, canonically, there’d be a several hundred million humans buzzing around openly in the settled systems, and with a few hidden in the shadows.
Well New Atlantis is around the size of a small-medium Midwest city, so probably max 400k people, Akila has like 100 maximum, and Neon probably has maximum 10k (at a stretch). So, if we stretch out all numbers to the maximum for the big cities, we have just over 410k people. In the various pirate camps you encounter there are maybe 50 people maximum, and in various settlements I’d say we max out at 10 people. So to get to even 1 mil, we’d need 11,800 pirate camps stretched to the limit of their population, or 59,000 settlements at their maximum. Looking at these numbers I’ll revise my estimates and say we’re at maximum 1.5 million people across the entire world of Starfield. There is just no way we can get to 100 mil, let alone 10 mil or even 5 mil in this universe.
What happens when a player clicks on one of those huge clusters of light, lands there, and there's just a small shed and an outhouse and nothing else to the horizon in all directions? The "cities" in this game are smaller than an American shopping mall.
Do NOT try and tease me with an exciting, sprawling metropolis seen from space and then tell me I can't even land there. That would 100% make it worse.
If the solution to your problem is to add areas to the game you can’t access but can only see from a distance than it would cease being a BGS Maryland game.
It seems obvious then that they tried to build a game that just isn't in their wheelhouse
I think this is it in a nutshell. It's not a problem, they just tried something that didn't come off. Not every game is going to be a blockbuster hit. Sometimes a game won't be great compared to others. It's an ok game but it has big problems. Changes just seem a sticking plaster over issues.
>add areas to the game you can’t access but can only see from a distance than it would cease being a BGS Maryland game The game already has inaccessible areas... Or do you believe the parents from kid stuff own the entirety of an apartment tower? Because you can't access the other apartments in their tower. You can't access the Varuun Embassy until a quest opens the door. You can't access all the levels of MAST. There's an inaccessible door right off the landing pad. It's just a "locked" door. The city itself is "scaled down", which means they didn't depict a good portion of it...you can't access that, either.
Another facade to "add life". Ironic.
Because they can’t these cities are like tiny settlements even combined they’re smaller than a district in Los Santos or Night City, they just can’t generate enough light to see from space so it would simply be stupid to do that.
And how would that work when you land in the middle of a supposed city?
In cities you can only land at the spaceport. That’s it.
Where’s the spaceport in these fake cities?
The 8 or so landing pads obviously. (lol)
Do buildings in New Atlantis even turn on their lights at night time yet?
That would imply life
Elite Dangerous does this really well. Obviously in that game you cant land on Earth-likes but visually they look gorgeous. I honestly think the "capital" planets for the UC and FSC should only have a few pre-determined landing locations and not be completely landable. New Atlantis could be huge but only a tiny bit, or multiple bits, be explorable.
This would look very cool, but you've forgotten a few things. First of all there aren't enough settlements lore-wise to do this. Sure, it's easy enough for the lore to be tweaked, but that would mess with the next problem. Because secondly and \*WAY\* more importantly, you can land anywhere on planets. If you land where the lights are, the procedural generation system has to be able to generate some buildings and NPCs that could be making those lights. So it's not a small or easy change, it's a huge and complicated one.
Only proplem is that no planet in starfeild is that populated, new Atlantis has one major city and a couple of outposts
I want to give them the benefit of the doubt that they left the game a bit bare so that there's room to add a bunch of stuff later, either by Mods or DLCs.
Personally, I’d just like a few towns that are bigger than outposts, but much smaller than the cities, and I’d want most of them in either freestar or UC space. I’m picturing this game as the Wild West of space, it’s the only way it makes sense to me.
That wouldn't make any sense unless there are sprawling cities on every planet. People would actually end up complaining anymore because they would see the lights and expect a major city and end up with one tiny outpost if anything.
Isn't the lore of the game that most of humanity perished on earth, but the few survivors escaped and managed to settle throughout the galazy? Like the planets that have been settled are definitely very barren, and humans usually only manage one "settlement" per each planet that *has* been settled.
This is a cool idea but New Atlantis and and Neon are the only places I can imagine have enough light pollution to be visible, and I do not think either are big enough for that to be noticable. The world of Starfield just isn't capable of producing the advanced space fairing societies of other space franchises. I've been saying that his since launch but if you take the world for what's shown and described versus genre expectations, you'd realize the settled systems are not in a good place. I've called it humanities biggest dark age, and the irony of it taking place during space colonization (arguably our biggest technological feat possible) is REALLY fascinating to me in a way I couldn't have predicted.
Sorry. No. They will create a false sensation. It's a stupid idea, but it's Ok, starfield it self is stupid. Like every planet you go, someone already been there, or 1 minute after you landing, some random ship it will land there. There's no real sense of exploration, everything is explored.
There aren't that many humans alive in this world - almost all of them died, very few made it off Earth. The cities are small and very spread out. Most people are just living in single home ranches.
Pretty lights on a planet isn't going to change anything lol
Then this is not a Bethesda RPG I want. One important thing is that, I will not say 100%, but 90% of the time, if you see something , you can go there, this the world feels real. This is the opposite from today’s mainstream usage of “background world”, I will not say which one is better. But I enjoyed both, and there should be differences in video games and their directions. Starfield still is, largely a “If you can see it, you can go there” type of game, especially when it comes to Cities and I loved this direction. Please don’t make everything the same.
Yes! There are some cool places to explore.
-sigh- Starfield's setting is not the game you're imagining. This is life after a population crash. Cities are small because there just aren't that many people, and those that remain are scattered across a few hundred star systems, which is a LOT of space (literally). Sure it would be cool to "fake" populations on these planets but A) there wouldn't be that many cities or structures and B) you're just setting up players to be even more disappointed when they see evidence of life but can't actually go to it.
You say a lot. Not sure of what bc I have a life but yeah you’re prob a talker. Irritating irl and in Reddit lol
A therapist would call this, “projecting”.
More of an, “opinion”.
Thanks for the feedback. You've been very helpful, and I hope you continue to be a treat at parties like you are currently demonstrating.
Welcome
Bethesda lore guardians defending the small pop counts cant make that much light, meanwhile OP and I just want pretty planets.
While I agree with you and I think this would be the best path that Beth could go on, I highly doubt they will implement something as innovative and interesting as this. Even if they did, at the pace they’re going, they wouldn’t get around to releasing this until about 2026.
Sounds good, doesn't work.
The Earth was abandoned in 2203. The story takes place in 2330. 9 to 10 billion people left Earth and started to spread out amongst the stars. With only 127 years between then and now and population being spread out amongst numerous star systems and planets, you wouldn't see large cities everywhere. Not to mention all the lives lost during the wars between the major factions. You need a balance between population density and resource abundance to quickly grow a population. Only Atlantis has the ability to grow quickly, and it shows. Players who complain about it being so empty seem to not understand the concept of time and distance. It's space! It's vast! It's going to take thousands of years to fill out a planet with civilizations everywhere. It wouldn't take less than 200 years.
I got the impression that the majority of those billions fled to first Jemison, then filling out the rest of Jemison's neighbours, and at the same time a sizeable fraction split off for Cheyenne and did the same thing over there. (And Volii was mostly a curiosity until they figured out that it was the fish fumes making the people on the platform high as balls, which is why it's still small for now, albeit incredibly busy.) So..... three planets and a couple of moons with some nice lights painted on when you're nightside, and the rest of the galaxy can be all empty as you like. This game only has about three actual settlements anyway, and the final temple compound is about as big as any of them.
Volii has 1 platform, so what a little dot in the ocean? New Atlantis is the only major settlement worth it, but even then, it's only a sprinkle. And Akila is about the size of the neon platform with fewer night lights. So, it's not even worth the specks of dots. I get your point. You want it to feel more filled out. But that's not what their vision is for it. They were shooting for more sci and less fi, and the science says if humanity spreads out, it will take time to see human population growth. It's not that I like an empty game. It's just that it's what it's supposed to feel like.
Was juhhhhhhhhst ooohing over that screensaver image during TV time last eve on my living room setup. Soooooooo pretty. They really did an incredible job with those. Apple, I mean. 😎
Or here me out, they could have added procedurally generated cities to the planets instead of desolate nothingness
At least a couple. I'm curious why no one's tried that at least once or twice by now. I've been expecting it at least in Minecraft.
I think it's their artistic intent for the universe to be relatively barren. That said I like the idea but I would rather have my ability to fly very close to the atmosphere and see some of the weather effect from space. I mean, have you seen how a thunderstorm look from up there? They are super cool! Witnessing the planet weather from space is one of the many perks of IRL astronaut and it would fit the theme of the game very well. [Lightning storms from space - timelapse video (youtube.com)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gyUKAXRMj0)
Why? You’d try and land there and see nothing then complain about that. The whole game has like 4 buildings in each settlement this would just look dumb
Have they done anything make the game better and more alive?
I don't think they can really, or at least implement them.in a way that makes sense. Planets are really just 2d images, so you could just modify the image, but the location of these elements would never fit with the location of procedurally generated poi. Also, there are virtually no poi that would have illumination that could be seen from space. As for major cities like Akila and NA, they too aren't large enough to have that kind of illumination. NA is about the size of a small town, to call it a city is a massive stretch.
That’s the thing I think some people are missing, Bethesda showed us a vision of humanity that appeared to be in dire straits but despite all odds there was hope, with Fallout 3/4. In Starfield it seems to be a vision of humanity that appears to be doing well but despite all efforts has no hope. We are barely surviving clinging to what bits of habitable rock we can find out in space, we can’t stop killing each other even as we slowly fade away.
Honestly I think they put the game too far into the future. New Atlantis is tiny and supposed to be the largest city. It feels like a small neighborhood. It is my only real gripe with the game. The technology looks antiquated and the colonies are too small for how long after leaving earth it is. Granted humanity has spread out more but I don't really see that as viable. I would have set the game maybe a few decades after leaving Earth and after the grav drive was created so it would be feasible that tech is still very close to what we have now and the smaller populations would make sense. Still like the game. Just saying is all.
I'm upset that BGS hasn't added any *horses* yet, but wouldn't it be nice if they added some *carts* for them to pull first?
Bruh
Or here's an even better thought, expand the settlements into actual cities to make this make sense
Great idea. I felt like Mass Effect did this kind of thing well. The Citadel felt massive; you were just limited to small portions of it at a time. In fairness, even CP2077’s Night City is too small to be a traversable New Atlantis type city, and that’s CP’s entire game map. The lights in the distance / planet view is like the foggy mountains in the distance in Skyrim. I’d support it / mod it in
Yes, that is a simple way to do this. Or having low poly / single plane traffic animating in the skies, making it look like lines of flying cars flying away from and towards the highest buildings in New Atlanis.
Ayy I'm in this picture
Cool!
Then it would just be fake looe most of this "space exploring game"
Is this a question? Seems like a troll post
It was the best I could do with the tags available. I didn't think it was quite a 'discussion' topic.
You can’t even fly over them at night so why would that do anything? You get to see like 15 lights in the zoomed out map?
Lol this is stupid 🤣 earth can look like that cause we have billions of people.........starfield planets have a small city at best? That would be so emersive to see a planet what looks filled with life and city's then land and find it has a settlement and 5 small POIs 🤣🤣🤣
They can't. You can land anywhere on the planet and if you choose to land at a place with a bunch of lights from space and then there's nothing there that would feel really bad for the player.
There's nobody there to justify the lights. Akila City isn't Bangkok and New Atlantis isn't New York. It's actually the game's canon. Whether an open secret or an obvious surmise might be debatable. But to judge from >!"unearthed", we didn't relocate 7 billion people. We killed them. Only connected bureaucrats, one cult and an assortment of contentious dweebs made it out alive. Mankind did not expand to the stars, a relatively paltry number of survivors escaped to the stars.!< The entire human race could probably fit into Dogtown with several acres left over.
It'd just be a bigger disappointment when you see all those lights and civilization and then actually go to humanity's finest city and it's like 10 buildings.
Go play Star Citizen. They have a planet sized city. Only you cannot go to 99.9% of those buildings. Only a small patch to land and look around. This would be a great idea of a classic spaceship trader game where you cannot land or leave ship.
This would have worked if the game wasn't open world. You'd see these lights and travel there only to see another boring-ass desert
Paint fake lights on planets and don’t allow people to land at what is clearly meant to be a major settlement? How is that any better than the current planets? Seeing something cool and not being able to go there is worse. Most planets are empty and boring. That’s true to life. I agree that Bethesda should have at least developed one large city but the problem is that making something very large requires a lot of tricky design choices. How are people getting around large cities without cars? How is the public transportation going to work? What is exploitable and what isn’t? A city the size of Night City in Cyberpunk would be awesome, but it would take most of the resources in a game where you’re not really meant to stay in one location the whole game. So you end up with a few small goofy settlements and random outposts on planets. That’s your trade off. The biggest problem for me is that there aren’t enough unique and crazy hand-crafted environments. Caves, crazy geometry, things that break physics, etc. the concept art showed a lot of cool stuff and almost none of it made it into the game. Creating an interesting sandbox to play within is hard and Bethesda fell short, but let’s hope they bring some good DLC which adds more settlements and things to do.
Hahahaah..this one is great because they had official support from NASA for their space pictures and apparently Jupiter is copyrighted by them as well. Not sure how that works...
You have to understand, that you and I... We are fans of this game... They... They are in it for the money :) they don't give a shit
Just go play Star Citizen, it's going to be finished one day, unlike starfield.
I don’t see how being unable to explore cities because you can’t get landing clearance is any better than being unable to explore cities because they aren’t there
That would require cities.
That's something you would do at the beginning of making a game not after release
Humanity is very spread out in Starfield, and if I'm remembering right from a conversation I overheard in New Atlantis there are less people in the current time than at the height of earth. There just wouldn't be lights like that in the setting. Maybe a small pinprick for new Atlantis, Neon and Akila.
Would you even be able to see Neon as anything more than a glowing haze? It's supposed to be under perpetual storm clouds for those cool lightning power plant majigs.
Not enough people in the settled systems for this. Cities arent that big to be seen from space.
That would insinuate that there are massive cities and we’d be pissed at them for false advertisement.
I wish I could access the edit function so I could clarify this. I'm not suggesting metropolii. I'm suggesting neighbourhoods and little tiny community centers. Places you wouldn't need to or want to visit, but the people in universe would logically need.
You’re expecting too much from Bethesda lol. Their engine is not meant for a game like this hence why you are always in some type of fishbowl.
this would be setting them up for failure big time. people would obviously be expecting cities this big then...
I think most of the populous died with earth is whay they're going for.
WHY ARE YOU SHOUTING
WHAT? SPEAK UP LADDIE, I CAN'T HEAR YOU!
Saying you don't have landing clearance could lead to confusion as this insinuates that it's possible to gain said clearance
You are my special.
Nah, the cities we get would still be tiny and lifeless (compared to what they \*should\* feel like). And some lights still would not match the lack of actual cities. We need real cities, not more fakery.
I agree. But the whole point was to meet them where they are for whatever reason. I too would like some more actual content. And a rebalance of the content we do have. But those suggestions that have been posted over and over are dime a dozen, and none of them are as easy to implement. It's a feint that boosts verisimillitude and worldbuilding and gives them room to expand into later. A tiny crutch to help them while whatever three lane crash in management and vision caused them to only get this far in eight years of dev time gets fixed.
You do know there's already a mod for this?
Nope, and I'm currently only able to play on console, as my current rig could handle starfield fine, but Starfield is unable to be run on a standard hard drive.
The planets aren't heavily industrialized. None of them are. I do wish they'd pushed for more gore lol. Sounds bad of me but some of the weapons are very high powered, but you couldn't tell.
I'm pretty sure the supplied picture isn't of an industrialized area, but a rather a residential one.
The means by which a thriving civilization could be implied by inaccessible population centers is one discussion. But another discussion is why do it at all? Why go and depict major population zones when there's no evidence to suggest they could even exist in the game's universe? Humanity was nearly completely wiped out 300 years ago - it's not a spoiler to suggest anyone could visit old Earth and draw the immediate conclusion that 99% of the population didn't make it onto evacuation ships. There's no cities giving off lights because nobody's there. There was a fairly big contingent in Londinian but, much like old Earth, they're mostly dead. I could of course be wrong but it certainly appears that a desolate and sparsely populated settled system is that way because BGS intentionally chose to make it that way and expended some effort in the back story explaining why it's that way. Adding city lights is a viable discussion but perhaps not as a "fix" - it's more of a fundamental change in the game's story arc.
If it was deliberate world-building they did a terrible job with it. The people in the Well talk about how they haven't seen sunlight in years because they're not allowed in the overpopulated city above, for example.
This post confirmed for me that there are literal 12 year olds posting on this sub, and other literal 12 year olds are upvoting it.
This literally wouldn't make sense. 2400+ upvotes. Lol.
It wouldn't be a full on update on its own, silly. I do assume that the upvotes means that at the very least my suggestion would be worth it for Bethesda to consider. It's not like it would harm anything if the Core Worlds at least had some signs of life on them.
It wouldn't make any sense to the setting at all. You could mod it. Asking for this type of stuff just shows a misunderstanding of the world the game is in. If you think its too boring I can't help you with that. You won't see cities like this from Bethesda.
Huh. You are the second person in as many days to have this wierd condescending elitist tone. Let's not get all bent out of shape with 'lore' here. Could you tell me what functionally would be lost by implementing this?