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HughJanus ,

Video games are supposed to be a fun escape of reality…

FluorideMind ,

Bro I’ve spent at least ten hours just building cool space ships.

Erk ,

The ship builder is just tons of fun. I wish the controls were a little bit more obvious but once you get the hang of it, I think it’s my favourite in genre. I love building something neat and then going to check out the interior walkthrough, particularly. I think I need a save where I just cheat in millions of credits so i can experiment for a while

totallymojo ,
@totallymojo@ttrpg.network avatar

What are you gonna do with it when you are done?
Photo mode in space?

Jakeroxs ,

There is space combat

SpacetimeMachine ,

It’s pretty garbage though :/

OldPain ,

1v1 me in space punk

Jakeroxs ,

Is it? I find it pretty fun, sure games like everspace did it better, but that is literally a space dogfighting game lol.

NMS space combat is noticably worse in comparison, and some of the upgrade paths and the ability to adjust your reactor usage (very reminiscent of FTL) make it interesting enough for me.

cyanarchy ,

Your ship is kinda like a player home you bring around with you. Having one that uniquely suits your needs and preferences is cool, and also I want a damn weapon workbench.

Katana314 ,

To give an impression of what it’s been like for me:

I had a quest where I needed Iron. I found a random planet that had it, and picked a spot in the middle of the scan readouts. Arrive, looks like a barren rock - but that’s fine because I only wanted rocks. However, I see something in the distance, and check it out. On the way, I find a wandering trader taking her alien dog for a walk, and sell some stuff weighing me down. I find a cave, where a colonist is hiding out with a respiratory infection - and am able to help them get out as a little mini-quest, though the infection spreads to me.

I come past a little mining installation, where I find a bounty hunter that tells me of a bounty nearby she’s offering to split with me. We do so, fighting a base full of raiders to get to their captain, and I finally decide to leave.

The key here is, I don’t think any of those quests are amazing - they’re likely very dynamically generated. But they’re also not fun to “seek them out” - just to come across them in some other mission, like trying to make an outpost or mining for stuff.

gringo_papi ,

Sounds like work tbh

Katana314 ,

I mean, I can’t even argue against that. Some people find some forms of work fulfilling, and even switch to games because their own jobs don’t actually give them that feeling of fulfillment.

Monster Hunter is a prime example of a game that sets such elongated goals that it’s regarded as a “grind-heavy” game - but its players like the grind. Heck, the entire space simulator genre often involves quite a lot of “Space Truck Simulator” gameplay, where you’re just engineering good ways to ferry cargo around.

Which is not to say that’s what Starfield aims for. From what I’ve played, it’s closer to Sea of Thieves, having adventurous interruptions - where you start a boring, routine mission to bring Sugar from one merchant post to another, but then get ambushed by a skeleton ship, then a giant shark, then find a map to a buried treasure nearby.

chatokun ,

Half the reason I play Elite is space trucking. I’m only raising my empire rank to get the largest ship… in order to space truck better. The Fed Corvette I plan to make a combat vessel, but the Cutter will be my space truck.

sheogorath ,

I found that flow of the game works a little bit better if you just don’t fast travel at all. I played a lot of Elite and it gave me a little bit of Elite vibes when I just walk to my ship, go thru inside it and sit down. Then I take off “manually” using the button and jump to the target system by manually targeting it and press the jump button.

What Bethesda can do better is to just mask the loading with a flight animation, for example when you’re taking off from a planet the loading should be replaced by an animation where you’re going out of the atmosphere. And when you’re jumping between star systems, the loading should be replaced by something similar to Elite when we’re jumping through the witch space.

All in all, my experience with Starfield has been fine. I loved the weird stuff happening when you’re just fucking around. Although the main quest has taken a step back with their sense of urgency, compare it to previous Bethesda games, where there’s a big stake going on that pushes you to at least complete the main quest once. In Starfield there’s no such sense of urgency.

It seems like Bethesda is leaning heavy on their sandbox side, just letting people go around and do stuff.

With optimized settings from the HUB YouTube channel, my FPS never went below 60.

glimse ,

Sounds like play lol I mean it’s a game about exploring

If exploration isn’t fun to you, that’s ok. There’s plenty of games out there that are more linear.

tormeh ,

Yeah, but since it’s dynamically generated it’s likely the 10th time you see those quests.

Fraylor ,

Yeah I literally do all of this stuff near daily in my 9-5 bounty hunting job.

thanks_shakey_snake OP ,

That sounds pretty fun, actually!

MysticKetchup ,

Starfield sounds like an okay game but all the PR responding to complaints sounds like an absolute disaster. Stop letting Todd answer these things directly

TechnoBabble ,

I’ve flipped flopped my consensus about the game a couple times, but my conclusion is this…

Starfield is not going to be what you expected from Skyrim in space, at first. It will seem weird and claustrophobic and broken.

But if you give yourself a bit to acclimate to the world they’ve built, there is a surprisingly engaging game underneath.

I believe they’ve left most planets barren on purpose, so they can easily shove DLC wherever they want for the next 10 years.

“New facehugger planet, 20 hours of exciting quests and valuable loot! - $29.99”

That’s 100% going to happen.

abraxas ,

So far, Starfield is exactly like Skyrim in space to me. There’s as many carefully crafted cities, and quite a few carefully crafted locales. There’s just a lot more space in Starfield (estimated about 500x more. Skyrim is 15sq miles, and those 1000 planets are each a couple square miles ingame). Sounds like there may be less hand-crafted content in Starfield than Skyrim, but that’s hard to tell.

I’m definitely not finding Starfield to be claustrophic. On the contrary, a bit agoraphobic.

dmrzl ,

Are you certain that you know what Agoraphobia is? Tip: it is not the opposite of Claustrophobia.

abraxas , (edited )

I had agoraphobia growing up. I know exactly what it is. And I had moments of it exploring the planets. I found myself hugging to keep buildings in range and not wanting to stray out into the great wide open. For some odd reason, I got more of that in Starfield than in NMS.

I’m also still fairly early into the game, so perhaps I’ll spend more time indoors than I have so far.

EDIT, also, it kinda is the opposite of claustrophobia in some ways. There are some overlaps and nuances (both fears sometimes include fear of crowds). I had a grandparent with really bad claustrophobia who never used an elevator in her life. Ironically, we could relate on a lot. But they were still opposite issues.

dmrzl ,

I don’t know, been agoraphobic for quite some time. Never had problems in elevators (alone), but trains or tunnels are the worst. Guess that’s why it’s hard for me to imagine how a game could ever transport that.

100 ,

I think there’s definitely more handcrafted content in Starfield than Skyrim, there’s also tons tons more dead space with nothing at all.

abraxas ,

Some folks say there’s only about 25 hours of handcrafted stuff. I’m not late enough in to know for sure.

100 ,

Yeah no way. I’ve played longer than that and I haven’t even done the main quest.

abraxas ,

I’m approaching that, but I have to admit I take my time and revisit towns a lot.

I’ve only gone to a dozen dungeons so far that were hand-crafted. There were literally hundreds of them in Skyrim. I’d love to get real numbers.

So far, I am enjoying the hell out of the game, if my lack of twitch reflexes is hurting that a lot. I keep having to juggle between ship upgrades (my Mantis keeps dying to small fleets more than 10 levels lower than me) and face-to-face. Usually by now in other Bethesda games, dying is rare. I’m too stubborn to drop the difficulty, though, so I suppose that’s on me.

There’s a pirate fleet in orbit around the planet I want to build my first output. Last 5 times I tried to go there, fleet keeps showing up and killing me. That’s somewhat annoying.

100 ,

Save in space often. There’s a semi common bug I’ve just run into that will cause your ship to vanish and it somehow retroactively removes it from all previous saves. No recreateable way to get it back. The only thing that saved me was a previous save where I was in orbit, still lost a few hours of progress.

abraxas ,

Weird. I haven’t heard of that one yet.

Panurge987 ,

How can one person have a consensus?

another_lemming ,

It’s only a problem when they can’t.

fadingembers ,
@fadingembers@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

When they have dissociative personality disorder :D

Yepthatsme ,

I have no clue what people are talking about? I have beaten it twice and surveyed an entire solar system and there was plenty. You can fly around to any point in most planets and moons and have stuff generate at each landing, within hiking distance.

I feel like the game is so big and good, the haters are just hating and being stupidly immature about it.

CraigeryTheKid ,

Beaten it twice? like the main story? Honestly I forgot Skyrim had a story too. I always wandered for so long I forgot what I was doing.

vitriolix ,
@vitriolix@lemmy.ml avatar

I think here we are reacting to the colossally dumb reasoning in the quote from the article. Astronauts had a few things to be excited about that gamers… won’t

totallymojo ,
@totallymojo@ttrpg.network avatar

*Fast travel around to any point.

dangblingus ,

Everything in the game is “within hiking distance” because that’s how the game generates planets. You don’t just “land on a planet”. You go through several hidden loading screens and arrive in a 1km x 1km square of planet.

Jakeroxs ,

Your point is?

tomi000 ,

Thats exactly what they were saying

Kilamaos ,

Ng+2 ? Any more change at +2 over +1, apart from the item & ship? Does the suit even improve ? And the ship ?A good mantis still is better I found

OldPain ,

Didn’t this game come out like last week?

dan1101 ,

I’m an Elite Dangerous veteran and have no problem with that. I think it’s more realistic.

I’m about 18 hours in and the illusion of variety hasn’t worn off yet. Plenty of things to find, with some travel time though. Unlock/upgrade your backpack boosters and it’s almost like Tribes though, as you go flying across the landscape in short bursts to keep moving forward in the air.

ipha ,

Shazbot!

thanks_shakey_snake OP ,

“It’s almost like Tribes” are the four magic words to get me interested in any game.

Rodeo ,

New match starts and half the team instantly spams

“I’ve got the flag!”
“I’ve got the flag!”
“I’ve got the flag!”
“I’ve got the flag!”

ipha ,

“I am the greatest!”

“No.”

“I am the greatest!”

WhatWouldKarlDo ,
@WhatWouldKarlDo@lemmygrad.ml avatar

Yeah, I’m right here with you. I’ve explored hundreds of systems in Elite. I get excited when I find an interesting planet. It would be really weird and immersion breaking for me if every planet was interesting.

hypelightfly ,

Oddly enough, it's misleading. Planets are covered with procedural generated POIs what he meant is that the environment of most planets is barren. I wish there were actually unexplored planets that weren't covered in POIs too.

lorty ,
@lorty@lemmygrad.ml avatar

Starfield at least lets me have some fun on foot. Elite built their ground component in a very punishing way that made it very annoying to deal with.

ebenixo ,

Looked boring af, now getting confirmation it’s boring af

jsdz ,

The moon is boring, so every planet in the universe must be boring. Earth is mostly capitalist right now, so every planet with humans must be one form or another of late capitalist dystopia. A whole galaxy made of inert rocks, fast travel, and people eager to exchange gunfire with you.

I haven’t played it yet, but from what I’ve seen the setting looks even more bleak and depressing than Bethesda Fallout.

Skiptrace ,

The setting is actually really cool. New Atlantis is actually quite utopian looking. I haven’t gotten too deep into the game yet, only about 3 hours so far.

jsdz ,

New Atlantis does look pretty cool, but I worry that it seems a bit empty. From what info I can find it seems to have maybe half as many named NPCs as the average Skyrim city even if it is three times the size. But maybe there are many more and they just haven’t all made it to the wiki yet? I don’t know, it’s little things that annoy me. Like it’s the glorious spacefaring future and every city is still full of fast food franchises selling coffee in what look like exactly the same kind of disposable cups with plastic lids we use today? Maybe that’s a failure of imagination too small to complain about in itself, but it seems representative of how everything is when you look closely. Is it meant to be allegorically examining the social problems of our current world rather than presenting future humanity as doing something genuinely new? If so what’s it trying to say about that, exactly? Where’s the deep lore? Where are the characters you’d actually care about as people rather than video game NPCs that help you advance a quest? I was hoping for Skyrim in space, but to me it looks more like Fallout 4 in space. Never mind the reviewers who compared it to Oblivion and got my hopes up. The only thing it has in common with Oblivion is the Annoying Fan who I must admit is genuinely annoying.

Eh well, it’s a Bethesda game. I’ll probably give in and play it eventually.

BigBananaDealer ,
@BigBananaDealer@lemm.ee avatar

this game is a lot more like KOTOR than any of the bethesda games. if you loved KOTOR you will probably love starfield

and people will always bitch about the NPC amount, whiterun is too little (but everyone is unique). well okay, we’ll add an actual city population but now everyone is just a random citizen (but it looks like a city size population)

TechnoBabble ,

For all the problems the game has, the major thing they get right is the environment.

Almost every area looks more than great, some are industrial, luxurious, barren, creepy, outright hostile, or cozy, but they are usually always gorgeous.

The environments are what pushed me to keep giving the game a chance after the initial shock of not having a cohesive overworld.

HawlSera ,

Bethesda, are you high?

banana_meccanica ,

They thought they had a brilliant idea, but it’s not. It’s a classic. The space is beautiful, of course, but it’s the interactions that make a game unique. No interaction, no party.

Treczoks ,

Just wait then DLCs start to populate the void...

Apart from that, what I've seen on some YT videos is impressive - When they populate a planet, they really mean it.

Otome-chan ,
@Otome-chan@kbin.social avatar

"1000+ planets are dull on purpose"

No, they're dull because no human team could make 1000 planets worth of interesting content in a single game development cycle.

Starshader ,

Chris Roberts : Hold my beer, for another 50 years.

Rinox ,

Yeah, it’s already stale and expired by now

Dubious_Fart ,

You know someone is gonna make a mod that generates random and unique bases from hab complex assets.

And thats exactly why Bethesda doesnt put the effort in. cause they make the game, then the modders make it good for free… Or it used to be that, now they want to charge for mods and take a cut of the profits for shit they didnt make.

Otome-chan ,
@Otome-chan@kbin.social avatar

At a scale of 1k planets you're going to have to rely on reused assets and procedural generation. At which point people not into procedural generation say that it's "repetitive". Especially if you only gen once for everyone and not each run lol.

AI generation of assets and code will theoretically eventually resolve this, but that's quite a ways off. They're not even usable for such with human assistance yet. And if you have ai generating the content, it's not really a human team making that stuff lol.

SatansMaggotyCumFart ,

I knew one of the planet designers. His favourite part was coastlines.

He was particularly fond of some fjords he made on the coast of Norway, I think he won an award for them.

conciselyverbose ,

Slartibartfast?

SatansMaggotyCumFart ,

Gesundheit.

Dubious_Fart ,

They could at least make the random PoI’s interesting if there was some…randomness to them.

Like, I walk into a PoI, I already know where the chests are, the locked doors, are, where the stupid fucking corpse in the shower is, etc etc. cause I’ve ran through this PoI 20 times.

I dont know why at least the locations of chests and locked doors cant be randomized. Make things at least marginally interesting, instead of cookie cuttered to extreme.

abraxas ,

While I agree, I’ve been saying that about NMS for years. Not that we want to be comparing Starfield to NMS, of course.

Otome-chan ,
@Otome-chan@kbin.social avatar

You can, but randomizing chests+locked doors is kinda complicated, and the more "interesting" your generations the harder it is to code and the more dev time it takes. And for a AAA game release you can't really do that.

Key+Lock randomization is something that has been solved, and has been used most notably in procedurally generated zeldalikes. But that's still niche indie territory, and not used for major game releases.

zalgotext ,

Hasn’t this game been in development for like 5 years? And they built it on an existing engine that they have tons of experience with. You could have said “they were limited on how much they could randomize POIs because of the old engine” and I would have believed you because that sounds way more plausible than “it’s hard to code, so AAA games can’t do it”. Like what?

Otome-chan ,
@Otome-chan@kbin.social avatar

The issue with procedural generation is the game has to be built for it from the ground up and in a modular way. AAAs try to make themselves appealing by using novel new high quality assets that aren't modular.

I haven't played starfield so idk what they ended up doing, but from the sound of it they have pre-made assets/areas that they then place onto pre-generated worlds in a randomized way.

To make one of these "areas" procedural in itself, they'd then have to code a whole system for that. With AAA/3D the hard part is making modular environments without it looking repetitive or ugly.

My point isn't so much that it can't be done in a AAA game. But rather that it's risky to do (not all players like it), and you have to structure your development around it. Lots can go wrong, there's stuff you gotta sacrifice to make it work, etc.

If starfield is on the old bethesda engine then that's even more of a reason. You can't just plug and play an entire procedural generation thing in there without some fairly large overhauls or just gluing on an unrelated system.

In practice, bethesda probably took the lazy route: using their existing engine without major changes, then just making new assets for it, throwing stuff about a bit randomly, and calling it a day.

That's the thing about procedural generation is: it's a lot of effort and sucks up a huge part of the game's development and comes at some pretty strict costs (repetitive looking environments/gameplay, reduced novelty, larger programming dev time to make it work). It can be done, but for a cost-cutting AAA studio they're not gonna bother.

XenoStare ,

They already have once though. Many of Morrowind’s dungeons were procedurally generated in development then edited a bit after, that was the same engine. Same with Daggerfall altho that was a diff engine.

Very different game but Amnesia: the Bunker has plenty of procedural generation as well.

It’s not at all impossible for one of the largest game development studios to have some procedurally generated, essentially dungeon content. Doing a bit more than the exact same place copied and pasted would be a huge undertaking yes, but if they wanted to they could have. There are plenty of 3D rogue-likes out now as well. Returnal is AAA and haa procedurally generated levels, far more complicated than neccesary for Bethesda to do in order to populate planets in their game about planet exploration.

Otome-chan ,
@Otome-chan@kbin.social avatar

I didn't say it's impossible. Just that it's harder, takes deliberate effort, etc. For AAA games they don't bother with that kind of thing because it's larger expense and larger risk.

Dubious_Fart ,

Just to wheel things back onto the road.

I was never asking for fully procedurally generated dungeons.

I just said randomize chest locations and door locks. It cant be that hard for a company that has been using the same game engine for almost 22 years to implement a node system to roll a spawn chance for a chest, or a door to be locked or not (with a higher chance of node spawns behind locked doors).

Hell, they could have even gone the lazy way and just copy and pasted the PoI a few times and manually changed the cosmetics/appearances.

With space and prefab buildings, they have the ultimate excuse for why every dungeon is identical (at least until you get into the underground caves…), but not every one of them should have the same dead body inthe same location in the same shower, the same succulent on the same shelf. move the body to a different location! Have a chance for a cluster of books to spawn instead of the succulent! Its a prefabricated hab structure, but that doesnt mean they come with such strict instructions as “Only succulent A on this shelf”

maltasoron ,

Couldn’t they just have copied the locations a few times and changed up the doors and chests by hand? Seems like an easy fix.

Otome-chan ,
@Otome-chan@kbin.social avatar

yes. I haven't played the game so idk the details of what's up. but at 1k+ planet-sized spaces it's hard to have a team go over that by hand. Planets are large. But I have no doubt that bethesda team was probably super lazy as well.

sirico , (edited )
@sirico@feddit.uk avatar

Cool, so you put in intricate research discoveries and generations of inventions and innovation and matched the sense of wonder being the handful of people that stepped foot on a non-teristrial surface?

Edit link I intended to hyperlink

massive_bereavement ,
@massive_bereavement@kbin.social avatar

<Press X to land on the moon>

cobra89 ,

Did you mean to post a YouTube video about a bicycle car?

sirico ,
@sirico@feddit.uk avatar

Haha no :D

skhayfa ,

Can they let gamers or modders fill those? I’m sure many would love to claim a planet and get creative in it.

SaakoPaahtaa ,

As per bethesda modding standards, the community has to go through 10 years of genitalia before any mods worth checking out start to pop up

sylverstream ,

I really don’t understand all the negative comments. It feels like a very fun game and I can’t wait to play it again.

TauriWarrior ,

If your enjoying it then don’t worry about the negative comments. Unlike some other space games you dont do much travel yourself, you fast travel everywhere which means seeing the same non-skippable cutscenes again and again, i fast travel to the system, then fast travel to the planet, then fast travel to the surface; then if i want to go elsewhere on the planet i have to fast travel back to orbit then back down to the planet. Its “fast travel:the video game” Given that similar games have managed to let you fly your ship from space down and around the planet for years now I dont why you cant in this, im constantly pulled out of playing for a loading screen

OrnluWolfjarl , (edited )

You can’t because the engine is bad, and they need a lot of loading screens to connect the small-sized playable areas. Other Bethesda titles pull the same trick, but you don’t realize it, because there’s no loading screen. Instead it’s doors that handle that (which is quick because rooms are small) and pre-loading of neighbouring grids when you are outdoors (which is why sometimes you’ll see creatures popping out of thin air, or walking out from behind walls/trees/rocks to hide the popping.

Bethesda always advertises their “new engine”, but really it’s exactly the same engine they’ve been using since Morrowind, with minor logic improvements and updates to the graphical assets. It’s to the point where a lot of bugs have ancestry trees.

sederx ,

im sick of this excuse. since its not one. nobody is forcing them to use that engine

Dreyns ,

The will of the dev is not the will of the producer.

sederx ,

then change it? or just cope hearing your game is not very good

Dreyns ,

Oh yeah things were that simple, just change it ! Man who would have thought ! Hey we need your help on other issue what can we do about the economic crisis, world hunger or civils wars ?

Dubious_Fart ,

Bethesda always advertises their “new engine”, but really it’s exactly the same engine they’ve been using since Morrowind, with minor logic improvements and updates to the graphical assets. It’s to the point where a lot of bugs have ancestry trees.

Yep. Call it Gamebryo, Call it Creation Engine, Call it what the fuck ever.

Its still NetImmerse.

They can keep slapping fresh makeup on it, and keep wraping new ducttape around it when the old stuff wears out and fails, but it’ll always be the same engine, regardless of the name changes.

They dont want to invest in making a whole new engine (which, given Bethesda, would be just as bad or worse than what they use now), and they don’t seem to want to license anyone elses engine. Which is weird, cause subsidiary studios don’t seem to have the same issue… Like, Ghostwire Tokyo is built on Unreal Engine 4.

DangerDubhain ,

Not arguing with the crux of your argument here, but most fast traveling I’ve done is way more direct than that. New planet, sure there’s a few stages, but anywhere you’ve been before you can pretty much fast travel to directly from anywhere.

TauriWarrior , (edited )

How often are you just hopping between places you’ve already been?

As to the people saying you can fast travel back to cities, last time (which was about 5 mins ago) i went to go back to New Atlantis i had to faat travel to the system first before i could even select the city, but other times ive been able to directly select the landing spot and fast travel there from another system so I dunno.

I just went and did stuff in Sol, i fast travelled to the system, fast travelled to the city, ran to the bar close to the landing pad, ran back to the ship, fast travelled to orbit, fast travelled to Venus, killed 3 ships, interacted with satellite, fast travelled to staryard, fought a decent amount of people which was good, fast travelled to Neptune, short fight, board, kill 3 or 4 peeps, fast travel to lodge. Then fast travel to mining planet system, fast travel to planet, talk, fast travel to different system, fast travel to planet run to ship, no bad guys just a quick convo, then fast travel back to ship, fast travel to orbit, and now fast travel to different planet.

Also fuel auto refills after every jump just seems to mean more fast travelling if you need to go further

If your enjoying it then im happy for you not trying to detract, just sharing my experience, i just wish they pushed what could be done more

100 ,

I think if there’s a patrol scanning your cargo you have to hit the system before landing, otherwise you’d fast travel your way past contraband scans. I’m having a lot of fun in the game, I agree there’s too much fast traveling though.

Cr4yfish ,
@Cr4yfish@lemmy.world avatar

You can actually fast travel directly to cities, even when you’re in a different system.

hypelightfly ,

Yes, you can. There are several levels of fast travel and you can use it how you prefer.

Xiaz ,

taking the other side of the argument, planetary landings in E:D are just loading screens at 10x the length. Travelling to a planet at .3 C is neat the first time but then you look at trade routes as “how long do I sit paying attention in case of an interdiction?” StarCitizen falls into the same trap. QD is neat but then it takes you 5 minutes and a fuel stop to go from one side of a system to another. Its mundane trudging for reality rather than getting the boring monotony out of the way of the player.

Just because the tech exists doesn’t mean it makes for compelling gameplay.

Obi ,
@Obi@sopuli.xyz avatar

I can agree with this but I do wish it involved fewer loading screens and clicking through each time. If you’re gonna skip the “realism” to make it more convenient then make it actually convenient.

With that said despite that and the fact I’d love to fly the ship over the planets manually, I’m really liking it so far (2h in).

Erk ,

Yeah I can’t really disagree with people’s assessment of how much travel-by-loading-screen there can be, but like… while it’s there, I just mostly haven’t noticed it. Thirty hours in now and I find I’m mixing up fast travelling wide distances with “manually” travelling by launching into orbit and jumping place to place fairly regularly, I don’t think I’d even have thought to criticize it without coming here.

I like how immersive travel can be in a game like NMS, but it’s not like it’s all that exciting or fun to pull into the atmosphere for the 500th time and maneuver to your landing pad, or spend longer than a loading screen amount of time to boost out of atmosphere to hit the jump button. We’re exchanging one form of slightly tedious load for a different one.

Xiaz ,

The best answer I have to minimizing the interaction is setting routes from your mission list. On PC this cuts down to L > click mission > R > hold X.

It is still 4 discrete inputs, which sucks, but it is substantially better than navigating by the star map which is how my brain defaulted to fast travel for most of my first play through.

jsdz ,

There are all kinds of possibilities, and for one example of a video game system for travelling among the stars that gives you a sense of actually going somewhere without getting too dull I’d point to EVE. You can go anywhere, but there are distant and dangerous places that take actual effort to get to. It lets you get some kind of sense of the distances involved. Having made that comparison it’s hard to avoid noticing that the space combat (even against NPCs) and ship outfitting are quite good too compared to how it looks in Starfield. Planetary interaction was pretty tedious when I played it, but EVE is mostly really good at the space stuff.

Another example would be good old Star Control II, another of my favourite space games. Another one that managed to make space feel big. You had to carefully manage fuel and resources, and if you wanted to go all the way across the map you’d have a long and interesting journey during which many things would happen. Combat and navigation were primitive compared to what people expect today, but still it made it feel like you were exploring a vast space, not just a big catalogue of planets.

As for Starfield, I don’t know whether it does that or not since I haven’t played it yet; I’d sort of like to find out before I spend $ on it.

Xiaz ,

you cant really compare gate-to-gate traversal to the other primary space games though. unless you are in a capital ship, generally you have a warp around 3-5 so even Niarja (minus dock workers) only takes a few seconds to cross. If we just focus on hub routes, I don’t recall the exact number, but Amarr to Jita/Dodi is between 25-60 jumps depending on your risk tolerance. That is 25 discrete load screens, with a Leopard and no 0 tick gate camps thats still around 10-20 minutes of just loading. EVE is an exceptionally bad example to pull and why I excluded it.

If you want something like Star Control then running the bubble in E:D is your best option, just never install a fuel scoop.

jsdz ,

What I want is just something where travel takes enough time and effort that interesting problems can arise during the course of it that aren’t just generic random encounters. Something where different parts of space have local character, something like geography rather than a flat isotropic void where distance is meaningless. In each case the technology used for moving about is entirely fictional, so I don’t see a reason not to make it interesting. I was just pointing out examples of that being done, not advocating for either of them being the one true way to do it.

Xiaz ,

transit in EVE isn’t really anything to write home about though. Target, align, warp, jump, target, align, warp, jump.

Gate camps are player based RNG with a difficulty slider. Do you take the shorter run thru Niarja or do you add an extra 30 jumps for relative safety barring CODE affiliates.

if what you want is a completely bespoke experience where a system has only explicit experiences then you immediately lose out on the design intent behind Starfield and the storyline within is immediately hollowed out and meaningless.

besides, its a video game. everything is a generic random encounter rolled on a table hidden from the player. if you want a better experience, Starfinder is there.

jsdz ,

I used to make a living hauling valuable stuff from the outer edge of low-sec in to Jita and such places. Sure it got to be pretty much routine after a while. Well, most of the time. But then it’s always possible in that game to go off and do something else instead. The experience of exploring it all for the first time though, having not yet gathered the knowledge and resources to do it in anything like safety or comfort, was fantastic. If you could just teleport instantly from one place to anywhere without significant cost it wouldn’t even be a game. I’m not saying that the mechanics of transportation should dominate every game like they do EVE, but having at least some of that sort of thing seems like a good idea in a game that’s supposed to be about exploring a space of any kind. I disable fast travel in Skyrim too. It makes things too quick and convenient.

Xiaz ,

Well, guess what? You can walk to the starport, open the door to your ship, walk into the cockpit, sit down, launch into space, target your next system navpoint, power up your grav driv, and jump to the next system. You won’t be on a planet, you will be in space. Will you find a trader? System security fighting pirates? A bounty hunter wanting to cash in on you? An old lady that wants you to come over for tea? Dunno. But you aren’t fast traveling. Genuinely the crux of your complaint has been “i dont know how it works but its bad and I dont like it”

jsdz ,

As for Starfield, I don’t know whether it does that or not since I haven’t played it yet; I’d sort of like to find out

Anyway, thanks, I guess that question is more or less answered.

HipHoboHarold ,

I haven’t had a chance to play it yet. Moving and still have to get through BG3. But I’m actually excited for it. Like I see posts over and over and over and over and over and over about the the fact that it’s not NMS. Sure, kind of disappointing. And I will agree that if you keep running into the same exact structures over and over, maybe they could have done something different. Have some sort of procedurally generated structures.

But that seems to mostly be it. Every review I’ve watched talks pretty positively about the other aspects. It’s got some bugs, which is to he expected, and apperantly the melee combat isn’t clunky and awkward. But those seem to be the biggest complaints outside of not being able to land.

So I’m gonna do what I’ve seen a lot of people said to do. I’m gonna go into the Bethesda game and play it largely like it’s a Bethesda game. Gonna go through the main story, the different factions, do some side quests, etc.

It’s not No Man’s Sky. Cool. Call of Duty isn’t Escape From Tarkov. I have played both of those and loved them both for completely different reasons, and I don’t expect them both to be the same. If anything I got bored of No Man’s Sky after a bit. Partially because I’m just not into the base building, and itnfelt like that was the main thing to do outside of explore. Little to no stories. Last I heard we still don’t have the faction system they talked about when the game was first launching. Starfield has things going for it over NMS.

thanks_shakey_snake OP ,

For me, the criticism is more directed toward the PR and hype. There’s still lots to like about the game, it’s just frustrating how they spin it.

I’m glad you’re enjoying it!

Afrazzle ,

I think people had their expectations too high. People are expecting it to be as good as skyrim was for 2011 but in 2023, but I went in expecting it to be as good as (vanilla) skyrim is now and so far that’s what I feel like I got.

sylverstream ,

Yeah, I had no expectations and I like it. I always get disappointed when I have high expectations.

Tbh I’m mainly disappointed in the graphics of the surroundings.

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