I love the game but Exploration is really bad!

[PrometheusTS]

I love the quests, the artstyle, the classic Bethesda game, but really , planets that are just a random square repeated over and over, with no resulting link to the actual visual appearence of what seen from space, that recycle over and over the same plants with dull and saturated cartoon colors, this game looks better only when on random anonym moons rather than actual biosphere planets. The whole set of planets tech is beyond primitive, I mean even random youtubers can make 64bit coordinate system with space flights from planet to moon and beyond in seamless mode, allowing the player to land where he wants. The top disapointment in exploration is when I had to land 50 times on a planet coast to find out that they are just always over and over the same tile with random spread of the items over and that its borders if I run up a decent height hill I can see the square angle cut, especially visible on coasts , where you clearly can see the square ...

I am not sure if we can expect an upgrade of this system in a dlc but I doubt , the whole system was not thought apparently to work seamlessly and I doubt even modders can do anything about it , but at least a respect for the actual map showed in space would have been nice , to know that if "you saw that mountain on the planet , you could go there!"

 

Edited September 19, 2023 by PrometheusTS

[zanity]

Quote- I love the game...

 

There's the problem right there. Todd knew he could put out any old DEI riddled low effort rubbish, and many would fawn over it so long as it repeated the Beth open world formula to some degree. I can honestly say the Beth open world formula is, as a game genre specific implementation, much stronger than the curiously lacking industry competition. But that is the only reason people respond well to Fallout 4 and Starfield, two games that were/are inexcusably dreadful in so many ways when one considers what they could have been.

 

Fallout 3 was a work of genius, and Skyrim wasn't far behind. Both benefited from excellent engine coders, but more importantly a young concept artist with outstanding skills. This young artist was taken from us at such a young age, and artistically Beth has been running on fumes ever since. The art of Starfield in uninspired in every way- the result of a lot of hard work by artists who are journeymen rather than masters.

 

However, as second rate as the artistic vision is, the real issue is a technical one. The space concept needed excellence in coding, but Todd, under MS ownership, now only does agenda hiring. Truly excellent coders wouldn't even want to work at Beth, where they'd have to accept much lower wages than completely unskilled managers whose jobs were gifted under DEI initiatives- the current issue in all West based AAA dev companies operating under major publishers that aren't Sony. There's a very good reason MS, EA, and Ubisoft in particular have seen a collapse in their game quality, as their gaming budgets explode.

 

Space needs people who have training in maths. Have you witnessed the collapse of maths skills in general US education across the recent years- and the growth of the idea that people with skills are 'bad'?

 

To render entire planets is trivial on our current hardware, but that's looking from a computational POV. Some has to write the code and craft the streaming data structures. Worse, procedural systems need an even higher ability in maths- especially an ability to track down and understand current papers in the field. Steam is riddled with tiny team projects that do amazing things in this area. Which makes many of you here say "if 3 people with no budget can create truly amazing code, why can't Beth with 5 years, hundreds of millions of dollars, and thousands of workers do the same and better?"

 

-The way in which Starfield does spaceships landing and taking off is the worst solution imaginable.

-The way Starfield does spaceships in 'space' is the laziest way possible, and lacks all imagination

-The way Starfield handles interstellar travel is abysmal, and lacks any artistic or SF vision.

 

But the biggest disappointment, as you said, is the player's relationship to the planets. Essentially there is none. Starfield's approach to the problem is the worst of all worlds, killing the fun of 'exploration' present in earlier Beth games. And, as you said, they didn't even have the ability to implement a deep horizon data structure, where the crude nature of the square plot of land would have at least been 'hidden' by a Hollywood movie style backdrop of distant detail in the vista.

 

Day One, most thoughtful gamers stated they'd rather have fewer planets, and a 'Skyrim' type land situation on those planets, with a massive continuous land area with multiple settlements/cities and points of interest. So each planet would be a space you could spend an age exploring. Starfield's actual planets don't even have the quality of the bigger DLC for earlier games- how awful is that?

 

The system reduces the idea of the 'random' planets worthless to the gamer. They are just an 'opportunity' to bump into 'pirates' at too high a level, with complex building structures IDENTICAL to those you've already explored five times earlier. What could be more wretched and pointless?

 

The best modders will be asking themselves "can we place multiple planet tiles next to one another, forming a mega-space?" I can answer that right now- NO!. A better question is can one tile be made somewhat larger- maybe, but I'd still bet the answer is no, with the limitations on size being hard-coded in the engine.

 

The last important question is whether an existing tile size can be stuffed with much more content- of course it can in the simple sense, but will it render at any acceptable framerate? I think here the answer is mostly yes, so long as the tools for streaming and occlusion are made available and well documented.

 

PS MS leaked all of Beth's future game plans today. We get a Fallout 3 remake, and Oblivion remake, and sequels to money losing flop titles, namely Ghost Wire 2 and Dishonored 3. The remakes won't be done in-house as far as I know. So creatively Beth is now running on fumes, happy that the Microsoft money tree is always in leaf.

[lvlnd]

It is sad that now when doing exploration I hit auto run then have started watching videos on another computer. The bases encountered are too identical. I get it, they were built by the military during war. Variety wasn't the name of the game, just slap em up and make it quick. But why do they have to have the exact same loot placements throughout! The other thing that kills me is an airless moon with agricultural colonists. I even ran across one where they lived in open shipping crates, no hab moduals....they weren't even trying.

[Ixmore]

I honestly see Starfield as more of an experiment from Bethesda on how to incorporate the travel system and random encounters from the first two Fallout and Elder Scroll's games into a modern game. If that's the case, then I can imagine in the next Elder scrolls game, we'll be able to vistit various locations within "Hammerfell" if that's where the game is taking place while traveling from place to place will be replaced with procedurally generated landmasses that you are placed in during random encounters or making your own base giving an illusion that Hammerfell is bigger than it actually is. If that's true we might get more in depth locations that are fixed. Either way, the modders are given a canvas they can play with.

[PrometheusTS]

I honestly see Starfield as more of an experiment from Bethesda on how to incorporate the travel system and random encounters from the first two Fallout and Elder Scroll's games into a modern game. If that's the case, then I can imagine in the next Elder scrolls game, we'll be able to vistit various locations within "Hammerfell" if that's where the game is taking place while traveling from place to place will be replaced with procedurally generated landmasses that you are placed in during random encounters or making your own base giving an illusion that Hammerfell is bigger than it actually is. If that's true we might get more in depth locations that are fixed. Either way, the modders are given a canvas they can play with.

Whatever the case the game engine is better used for fantasy or classic medieval stuff, but for SCI FI its just too outdated and not up to the level , it doesn't give the right technological background to feel imersed, I mean if you climb a hill on a planet you can see the surrounding borders its justa tiled square, and this is totally immersion breaking.

[dicere]

PS MS leaked all of Beth's future game plans today. We get a Fallout 3 remake, and Oblivion remake, and sequels to money losing flop titles, namely Ghost Wire 2 and Dishonored 3. The remakes won't be done in-house as far as I know. So creatively Beth is now running on fumes, happy that the Microsoft money tree is always in leaf.

 

Bethesda are playing it safe, they aren't pushing creative boundaries anymore. It's a real shame. I have fears ES6 will be a repeat of the mistakes of starfield.

[gnarly1]

[HDMFanatic]

What I find funnier is surveying gas giants. All you have to do is scan them from orbit and you instantly get the 100% surveyed. I understand you can't land on gas, but there's such a huge difference between surveying gas giants compared to the Earth-like planets and rock/ice planets and moons that it's kinda stupid. Like why can't you just scan any planet from orbit and get the 100% surveyed without having to land on every biome and scan everything from the ground?

[DeckardKain]

 

I honestly see Starfield as more of an experiment from Bethesda on how to incorporate the travel system and random encounters from the first two Fallout and Elder Scroll's games into a modern game. If that's the case, then I can imagine in the next Elder scrolls game, we'll be able to vistit various locations within "Hammerfell" if that's where the game is taking place while traveling from place to place will be replaced with procedurally generated landmasses that you are placed in during random encounters or making your own base giving an illusion that Hammerfell is bigger than it actually is. If that's true we might get more in depth locations that are fixed. Either way, the modders are given a canvas they can play with.

Whatever the case the game engine is better used for fantasy or classic medieval stuff, but for SCI FI its just too outdated and not up to the level , it doesn't give the right technological background to feel imersed, I mean if you climb a hill on a planet you can see the surrounding borders its justa tiled square, and this is totally immersion breaking.

 

Because it needs to run on potato consoles, we can easily fix this on high-end PCs, but it's going to cost performance