Game Discussions Bethesda Softworks Starfield Space RPG

[Cosmo]

Details On First Starfield Early Access Patch

But yea, an interesting layer that the "Supercruise" cut scene in ED generally solves in a decently neat and tidy way (IMO).

Supercruise is a fast travel mode within a star system. It's not a cut-scene in ED cause we can directly control the ship.

I think the devs of Starfield had no intention for players to manually travel to planets. If it's possible then a mod could increase the ship speeds.

 

[Dooguk]

For any of you Constellation edition buyers (like me), here are the Android and Apple links for the watch companion phone app...

Android
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bethsoft.starfieldwatch&pli=1

Apple
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/starfield-watch/id6453560201

 

[Astaran]

For 100$? hard pass.
I'll get it for 10$ from Game Pass, than spend another 30$ on C2077 Phantom Liberty DLC. And still have 60$ left. ( Will probably buy Alien Dark Descent for 30$ and MechWarrior 5 upcoming DLC for 15$)

Mods will take long time to make anyway. So no point in wasting 100$ or even 70$ now. 1 month with game pass should be enought to get throught whole game over and over.

yup, if it hadn't been for my birthday last weekend, I wouldn't consider pre-ordering at all. So, I can either spend that money on Starfield or spend it to fill the tank of my car...once

 

[Dutchman141]

I'm reading hints that starfield pretty much won't have spaceflight,

I'm not sure what you mean by spaceflight, do you mean traveling between planets and such?
In the Starfield Direct they showed flying around with your ship, in first and in third person, combat, docking to stations and other ships, boarding crippled pirate ships, etc. So there is spaceflight, you even have to distribute power to engine, shield, weapons and whatnot.

So my guess is you mean traveling between locations like planets etc.?

 

[Navigare Necesse Est]

And I was fine with Surviving Mars when it came to maps. While I would've preferred to have procedural generation ones, there was enough variety in resource placement, that each of the 50,000+ locations on Mars don't feel the same to me.

YMMV, needless to say, but I agree that the soundtrack of the game is awesome.

You don't get many instances of visiting a planet that has widely known named features. Seeing those with own eyes is a dream. The ressource placement DID mix it up, but I always want maps with height differences and that limits the selection quite.

 

[Navigare Necesse Est]

Come to think of it, I've never actually played a PC game RPG! Played plenty of paper and pencil games, but never an actual PC game RPG... The thought never even occurred to me. Now I am REALLY excited!

Really? Right now, Badur's Gate 3 earns quite some acclaims for being exceptional. That is more a classic RPG. Starfield will be an action RPG. Which one is better? Hard to say. Starfield will have you and the protagonist meld in perspective - the most immediate way to "play a character", just like in a table top. These games however tend to impose on you with their question marks littered around maps and questline markers. Some like to deactivate these (I did in The Witcher 3 with good success). If you can ignore the "game" and play your character like you envisioned at the start, you get a good RPG. Skyrim made me experience Khajit thief like no other.
Then again Dragon Age Origins was the best female dwarf princess I ever played out. It's a mix of story and character narration. Games like SF and Skyrim? You make the Role Play in your head for a big part.

 

[Navigare Necesse Est]

...(in X4, if I have to move from one side of the galaxy to the other, I still have so much stuff to do that I'm STILL busy designing stations, issuing orders or managing fleets while my ship is already standing indle in space).

Or you jump in another place and do something different, let the pilot do the flying and jump back again at the destination later.

 

[Navigare Necesse Est]

My hunch... A supercruise mod would probably need a POI generation component. Otherwise, there would be absolutely nothing to do but steer and watch the timer count down.

This thinking based on seeing all space flight in SF being in "real space" speeds, meaning like ED, usually under a few hundred meters per second. This eliminates the need for POI markers, since any POI is simply visible through the windows. An asteroid. A derelict ship. A pirate. The slow speed allows turning to investigate, shoot, and stop to dock, etc.

Once speeds get high enough for "supercruise"... meaning minutes of waiting, instead of 5 hours, It probably would become visually impossible to even see an asteroid or derelict ship. In fact I'd say completely impossible, if we are just traveling at just 1C, an object would pass the window instantly. (And some ship "tech" to avoid crashing into these objects when they are moving so fast you can't even see them.) There would have to be some generating POIs and put markers, to avoid absolute clock watching.

But yea, an interesting layer that the "Supercruise" cut scene in ED generally solves in a decently neat and tidy way (IMO).

The supercruise isnt even a game feature of design - it's out of necessity. Vast distances have to be bridged, you do that either with speed or time dilation. Time dilation is impossible in a MP game so it's speed. And because MP you have an upper limit of speed so it doesn't get out of sync too quickly. So the annoying thing is MP and the choice of a really unsuitable world with too large distances for MP in the case of ED. They tried making a procedural universe that resembles milky way and they succeded. Then they tried to shove a MP game into it and mostly failed.

 

[Cosmo]

In this video Todd Howard talks about blended and wrapped tile tech (59m 47s).

Todd said on November 29, 2022: they built a system for realistic tiles of landscape are generated offline with some handcrafted stuff and the system wraps those around a planet and blends them all together. However, based on numerous leaked info the adjacent tiles (landing areas) do not blend together. So why doesn't the EA version have blended tiles for neighboring areas?

yup, if it hadn't been for my birthday last weekend, I wouldn't consider pre-ordering at all. So, I can either spend that money on Starfield or spend it to fill the tank of my car...once

If you can accept that Starfield is not a simulation (or very light) then you'll enjoy it for 80+ hours. I hold out hope that mods will bring major improvements.

 

[Crank Larson]

It always amuses me when people judge a game before they've had a chance to play it, or take what limited information has been provided and come to grand conclusions about how the game works (and therefore how enjoyable it is).

I'm looking forward to Starfield. I've only watched the one intro, though. That's all I needed. It's piqued my interest so I'll give it a go. Thankfully there are no hypetrain stations near me.

 

[Navigare Necesse Est]

It always amuses me when people judge a game before they've had a chance to play it, or take what limited information has been provided and come to grand conclusions about how the game works (and therefore how enjoyable it is).

I'm looking forward to Starfield. I've only watched the one intro, though. That's all I needed. It's piqued my interest so I'll give it a go. Thankfully there are no hypetrain stations near me.

I'm mostly pain tolerant for new stuff. Gotta be open for a game concept, you want just the one game or this set of features? Good luck finding a candidate. I can see the problem of WYSIWYDG concerning the map, but in the end I expect a good RP game, lotsa boom, biotics and I've seen ragdolls, so I might like a character with big fists and a punch like a steam drill.

 

[Ralph Vargr]

I totally agree with you.
I was incredibly hyped when I learned about Elite's development and release, I gave up pc gaming a long time ago but bought the Xbox One, the latest back then, purely for Elite and got every newer Xbox after that, I now have the Series X and I like it a lot.
I wasn't disappointed in Elite Dangerous for a bit and loved the game, for 4000+ hours.
Then Frontier started to bolt on features to the game that never got the follow up it needed and became half baked.
When Odyssey was announced I started to get a little more hope again until they stomped that to the ground by tossing further console development out the window, I was gutted to say the least.
Now, after a great while since Odyssey's release, I'm not that disappointed anymore because Odyssey doesn't look all that great after all.

There were quite some features I would've liked to being added to Elite, interactive ship interiors for one and visible crewmembers too.

Now Starfield is coming around answering numerous features I would've loved being implemented into Elite, the above mentioned features but also things like boarding other ships and capturing them.
Starfield is a complete different game and I'm well aware not to expect a flight model the likes of Elite's for example, or full planets you can roam on seamlessly but as it seems now Starfield will provide me the features I would've loved in Elite.
Besides all that, I love a good rpg and Starfield's setting is ticking a lot of boxes for me, if it's as good as it seems at the moment.

Elite failed in trying to be Starfield?

 

[Dutchman141]

Elite failed in trying to be Starfield?

Read before you reply

 

[Ralph Vargr]

Read before you reply

No sense of humor. Oddy attempted what Starfield, et al, are doing now. They tried it with the wrong engine, and wrong time. They shoved it out the door broken.

 

[Mole HD]

In this video Todd Howard talks about blended and wrapped tile tech (59m 47s).

Todd said on November 29, 2022: they built a system for realistic tiles of landscape are generated offline with some handcrafted stuff and the system wraps those around a planet and blends them all together. However, based on numerous leaked info the adjacent tiles (landing areas) do not blend together. So why doesn't the EA version have blended tiles for neighboring areas?

If you can accept that Starfield is not a simulation (or very light) then you'll enjoy it for 80+ hours. I hold out hope that mods will bring major improvements.

Could the tile issue be related to memory limitations perhaps?

 

[Navigare Necesse Est]

Elite failed in trying to be Starfield?

ED isn't really a RPG. I mean I role played a character. And many do in fact. That is possible in basically any 1st person perspective game. But the story, characters and world building is very lousy.

 

[Navigare Necesse Est]

Could the tile issue be related to memory limitations perhaps?

Nah, don't think so. maybe rather a planar projection thing? Member the orange peel and maybe you tried putting in flat on a table? There's gonna be bumps. Don't beat me, but there is a hex grid game I forgot the name of now. The hex mesh represents a globe. Oh - RIMWORLD! - it's the Rimworld. Now on map pick you get view of planet with hexes. You pick a hex and start the game on that hexy sub map. However, the countless hexes you saw before were a lie! In all the mesh there are hexes which get dropped, because what you see is a rectangle on a globe and that just doesn't fit like a glove and so they cheat.
Memory should be of no consequence. The seed determines the outcome and the algo is the same - you get the same outcome.

You know in games like Space Engineer we build rectangular stuff on spheres. I always wondered where they trick us, but they do it well. You can see the cracks in Dyson Spehre Program really clearly.

 

[Cosmo]

Could the tile issue be related to memory limitations perhaps?

Probably, they put a limit of 4 custom landing areas per planet, because otherwise the save file would become too bloated. I think it could be higher for PC.

Ledge grabbing video - https://streamable.com/d2jz4s

 

[LeSabre]

Fallout/skyrim/eldar scrolls but with a space backdrop sounds like fun to me, MSFS 2023 in space does not, but everyone has differing tastes and expectations.

Always enjoyed Bethesda games, so I'll probably enjoy SF too, especially when the modders get up to speed and producing. Not riding the hype train.

 

[Arioch]

Quite pleased to see this tidbit from the senior level designer:

"I also really like our derelict ships - we built a bunch of handcrafted derelict ships that focus on the tragedies and perils of space travel that the player can explore and discover the stories behind.”

Sounds like what I wanted from Elite’s megaships with SpaceLegs