Mod Creators Thoughts

[tiddlyoggy]

Hi People

Hopefully, it's okay for me to post this here

Anyway, I'm about to do a reasonably in-depth review of this game and I would appreciate your thoughts (in terms of modding), I've always felt that Bethesda games survive and thrive due to the modding community, and your work will be incredibly important to the longevity of this particular game and I want that reflected in my review

Now I know we all have opinions of this game both good and bad, but what are your views on the following:-

Do you see this game as a waste of your time with no possibility of redemption, or maybe you believe the game will slowly disappear so you don't want to invest your time

Do you see this game has real potential and so many planets will give you a huge canvas to stretch your imagination and skills?

Any other thoughts you may have, but if you don't mind please post your reasoning as I don't mod myself and have no insight into this world (though I am very tempted to start)

Thanks a million in advance, and I'm very grateful to all and any replies 

Tiddly

[HeyYou]

Starfield has the potential to be a modders paradise. We already have folks figuring out how to add new star systems, re-implement features that were cut from the game, (refueling your ship, require ammo for some weapons), etc. Consider the number of mods for this game already, and the tools haven't been released yet.... Once the CK comes out, I expect to see some truly amazing mods hit Nexus. After all, modders have done what was considered 'impossible' on several of the older games.

The game is ok, fun to play, but, WAY too repetitive. Adding a variety of POI's is something I expect to come out fairly quickly. That will help a lot..... (I fully expect 'new pois' are going to be rather popular among both mod authors, and mod users.) And of course, the Outpost building system will be expanded DRAMATICALLY. Should be interesting.

And yes, mods WILL contribute to this game hanging around for quite some time.

[Pellape]

Starfield is more immersive than other games right now. I do feel some stuff gets repetitive, like the interacting with the merchants, but I do have tools ready to solve that really, made in Skyrim and published there so it might be easy to just reuse the papyrus scripts really.  My plan is not to reinvent the wheel twice.   

I love these games, played them now for 19 years and I am tired of TES right now so being able to just go to space, use new and cool menus, new types of weapons and to fly a real space ship is awesome. The possibility to build your own bases and your own ships is extremely immersive as well and we will see loads of variations within ship building later on, some good, some less good but that is a matter of taste I guess, like I am not so interested in walking around in space naked but other players do like it.    I guess we will later see odd space suits    Just look at the arena outfit in Oblivion that Bethesda made as it is not protective at all but that is what the Romans did like, that the Gladiators did risk their own life and the Greeks ran around naked in the Olympics, covered in oil 2000 years ago. It is all about amusing the audience. But still, it must fit in the right environment.    Sarah, did walk around at the moon the other day, without space suit. I tried to disable and enable her, but it did not help but after a while, she found her suit and put it on. I have seen similar issues in Oblivion as well and such bugs are a bit annoying. Other bugs I did find is many items that we cannot reach and I will make a list that I provide to the bug fix team later as I do not expect Beth to fix them really.

No, I modded since 2004 and played the first game 1996, Daggerfall.

Edited December 9, 2023 by Pellape

[LarannKiar]

5 hours ago, HeyYou said:

The game is ok, fun to play, but, WAY too repetitive. Adding a variety of POI's is something I expect to come out fairly quickly. That will help a lot..... (I fully expect 'new pois' are going to be rather popular among both mod authors, and mod users.) And of course, the Outpost building system will be expanded DRAMATICALLY. Should be interesting.

I agree, it's a good game but unfortunately it's repetitive because earlier games of theirs weren't based on as many runtime created ("templated") objects as Starfield. Most locations in the game world were "hand made" which gave a rather unique design to them, making revisiting them hundreds of times possible. It was the "Federal Ration Stockpile", "Abernathy Farm" or the "Safari Adventure" and not the twentieth "Mining Outpost" of the day. Discoverable (i.e., not inaccessible) buildings were made of panels and Pack-Ins (basically a collection of structural objects) while NPCs and smaller non building sized objects were spawned by algorithms (e.g., random encounters). The feeling of exploring unique places can't be achieved by generated content based on predefined location, biome and planet data. Unique locations, spaceships, staryards are much less boring to revisit. Though I probably shouldn't compare Starfield to their earlier titles because it wasn't intended to be a sequel of them.

Edited December 9, 2023 by LarannKiar

[HeyYou]

7 hours ago, LarannKiar said:

I agree, it's a good game but unfortunately it's repetitive because earlier games of theirs weren't based on as many runtime created ("templated") objects as Starfield. Most locations in the game world were "hand made" which gave a rather unique design to them, making revisiting them hundreds of times possible. It was the "Federal Ration Stockpile", "Abernathy Farm" or the "Safari Adventure" and not the twentieth "Mining Outpost" of the day. Discoverable (i.e., not inaccessible) buildings were made of panels and Pack-Ins (basically a collection of structural objects) while NPCs and smaller non building sized objects were spawned by algorithms (e.g., random encounters). The feeling of exploring unique places can't be achieved by generated content based on predefined location, biome and planet data. Unique locations, spaceships, staryards are much less boring to revisit. Though I probably shouldn't compare Starfield to their earlier titles because it wasn't intended to be a sequel of them.

Even if the locations/number of NPCs at a given POI were a bit more varied, it would help..... as it stands, they are EXACTLY the same, right down to the locations of the bad guys.....

[tiddlyoggy]

Thanks for the input, very much appreciated, so essentially you all think  the base game is good but limited to a certain extent, however I gather you see it as blank canvas for modders... It will be interesting to see how many people will invest their time into this game and what they create 

 

Thanks again 

[HeyYou]

1 hour ago, tiddlyoggy said:

Thanks for the input, very much appreciated, so essentially you all think  the base game is good but limited to a certain extent, however I gather you see it as blank canvas for modders... It will be interesting to see how many people will invest their time into this game and what they create 

 

Thanks again 

I am VERY MUCH looking forward to seeing what modders do with this game. There are already some truly killer mods out, and the tools haven't even been released yet.

[Pellape]

Yes tiddlyoggy, and that is what Todd Howard also did mention in a lot of videos as well before the game got launched, that Bethesda also want to see what the community will be able to do for the community.    There are so many tools we miss that are under the development, like NifScope that will allow us to read and write NIF.s, the Blender NIF importer/exporter and Niftools really needs to fix their broken homepage. For me i want to get started with some 3D stuff...     I wanna export a lot of the stuff I made for Oblivion 2020-2022 and also make new stuff.

Stuff I do not like is the ground maps and that we cannot see whats North, South etc in the compass. I should really search to see if any modder made a descent compass really, right away     I do hope we will be able to see the resource patches later inside the ground maps as now it is so frustrating to find the resource areas, both with the scanner and also if we drag around the place and control outpost scanner. That is what I am doing in game right now by the way, look for good sots that gives several resources and it is really frustrating.

[aurreth]

50 minutes ago, Pellape said:

Yes tiddlyoggy, and that is what Todd Howard also did mention in a lot of videos as well before the game got launched, that Bethesda also want to see what the community will be able to do for the community.    There are so many tools we miss that are under the development, like NifScope that will allow us to read and write NIF.s, the Blender NIF importer/exporter and Niftools really needs to fix their broken homepage. For me i want to get started with some 3D stuff...     I wanna export a lot of the stuff I made for Oblivion 2020-2022 and also make new stuff.

Stuff I do not like is the ground maps and that we cannot see whats North, South etc in the compass. I should really search to see if any modder made a descent compass really, right away     I do hope we will be able to see the resource patches later inside the ground maps as now it is so frustrating to find the resource areas, both with the scanner and also if we drag around the place and control outpost scanner. That is what I am doing in game right now by the way, look for good sots that gives several resources and it is really frustrating.

There are no ground maps because every tile on a planet is procedurally generated when you land on it.  Do the "place outpost and remove it" to remove the landing marker, take off, and land in the same spot and things will be completely different.  Generating a usable map every time would be a processing nightmare, unless you want a 5 minute loading screen every time you land.

There actually is a "North" on the compass.  One of the pips on it is slightly different, a dot I think.  I haven't really bothered to see how well that coincides with the ground "map", but it's something you could look at.

[HeyYou]

1 hour ago, aurreth said:

There are no ground maps because every tile on a planet is procedurally generated when you land on it.  Do the "place outpost and remove it" to remove the landing marker, take off, and land in the same spot and things will be completely different.  Generating a usable map every time would be a processing nightmare, unless you want a 5 minute loading screen every time you land.

There actually is a "North" on the compass.  One of the pips on it is slightly different, a dot I think.  I haven't really bothered to see how well that coincides with the ground "map", but it's something you could look at.

The city maps won't change though. That was one of the complaints. And you DO get a rudimentary "map" of your landing zone, it is just severely lacking in detail.