this post was submitted on 11 Sep 2023
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Starfield
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I cannot possibly disagree more with your assessment that the interstellar setting is necessarily boring and that’s something we should accept.
But, if so, then why would we need to “just get used to it”? I’ve certainly never felt compelled to force myself to play a boring game
I don't think OP made the point clear, but I agree with the spirit.
Fundamentally it is this:
Sense of scale
Meaningful content at every turn
CHOOSE ONE
Examples
Daggerfall - infinite scale, but quests, dungeons, meaningful content have to be specifically targeted or else be lost in the gigantic procedurally generated world.
Elite Dangerous - spending 20 minutes supercrusing across a binary star system really makes you feel the size, but also that's 20 minutes of not doing anything.
No Man's Sky - The universe is effectively infinite, and there is something useful almost everywhere! But (almost) none of it is handcrafted, so the random content gets stale in the scale.
Star Citizen - Basically no content, but absolutely unmatched as an immersive space experience, as it doesn't compromise on scale for QoL or filler content in the slightest. Worth noting that most people hate this.
Meanwhile Skyrim is impressive because the world is pretty big, but there's also something interesting to do every 5 steps. Starfield tries to maintain this while also tossing in some NMS-style randomized infinite content, but ends up suffering the same feeling of staleness once you spend any time exploring it.
This is the best, most succinct, and fair assessment I’ve seen of Starfield since launch.
Starfield has the advantage of 100+ hours of hand-crafted, voice-acted quest content, of course. What they need to do about the procedural content is the same thing Hello Games did, just add more procedural pieces that can get put together in novel ways, so the planets and outposts aren't so obviously exactly the same. I'm hoping the system that inserts buildings on planets will just take new content, because modders could really blow that wide open.
Yeah, this is the big issue. The facilities and stuff should have been procedural as well. They should be a ton of handcrafted components, but they procedurally pick pieces and put them together.
Preferably they'd also take into account where they are to make things more interesting. If there's Helium 3 around, make it generate a helium 3 facility with plenty of explosives and stuff sitting around. Things like that.
As it is, it's the same few facilities that have the exact same layout at all locations. They even have the same loot in the same positions most of the time, and things like the heat leaches are always at the exact same spot.
They went halfway with procedural generation and it doesn't really work to make the game feel full.
To be fair, the assets themselves are top notch. The textures & models are as good as I've seen in any game. The art direction is excellent. It's obvious they spent a huge amount of time just making these things; we may have gotten as many as they could make in a reasonable amount of time. Compare it to NMS where procedural buildings cut into the terrain in awkward, unrealistic ways and have glitchy invisible walls - or Cyberpunk where the textures & models frankly aren't very impressive but are made up for with excellent art direction & graphical/lighting techniques.
That said, yeah, it's an understatement to say it's way too noticeable that they've copy-pasted a handful of facilities & natural features. You notice it when you see the second one. They didn't even try to hide it.
I've honestly never seen this much of an unapologetic shameless dogshit take. To actually think, "no, it's the players who are wrong" in this situation takes some real delusion.
Like this is the most "mask off" fanboy post.
Empyrion is such a different game, but so many times on that my buddies and I would just land somewhere to get fuel and spend hours exploring and building on some random planet with plenty to find, explore, and fight. And that is entirely procedurally generated with randomly placed points of interest.