Game Discussions Bethesda Softworks Starfield Space RPG

[Astaran]

I see those flora behind you, I hope they're not an endemic species. Did you file the propper forms to the Environmental Protection Agency? Let me see your mining permit!

I own the universal 11mm full-auto mining permit. That's 50 rounds of negotiations with the Enviornmental Protection Agency

Spoiler

Would you guys classify NMS as open world? I guess it kinda is but somehow I feel procgenned content isn't sufficient to be a (good) open world.

What's with the repeating names like "Kreet". Can I assume this is a story-related place and has some "designed" world-building? [/spoiler]

It's the name of a system, but so far the storyline (level 21) hasn't brought me there.

Imo, you need a good skeleton of crafted world to even make it a true "world". I'm not so much about the "open" in the definition - it's the worldbuilding part that I care:

• Are the places decently paced in distance and travel modes? [/spoiler]

Distance between POIs is decent. A few minutes walk at most. From a gameplay perspective the distance is fine, from a "logical" point of view, there might be too many POIs in each landing zone (no matter where you land, there are at least some human POIs like Abandoned Bionics Labs or Abandond Mine or Relay Towers). For a videogame, it's nice that you land on a planet, walk a few minutes and get right into the action.

• Do the places refer to their surroundings. Do they make sense? What is their place in story and world?

There are often notes and files that explain the story of the POI. They differ greatly in complexity and size. Some are just a "camp", some are large unterground facilties (behind a short loading screen)

• Do the places persist? Do they interact with other places?

Random POIs in a random landing zone don't stay after the landing zone has been deleted, but there are "semi" random POIs (on the planetary map, e.g. Mining Outpost, Research Facility) that are persistent for your playthrough (Not necessarily for another playthrough). POIs or random encounters can sometimes lead to some other encouter or location.

• Do places fit into the environment?

So far, yes. I haven't seen anything that would be totally out of place in the environment.

Basically none of that matters in NMS. The places are "beliebig" (arbitrary). In true worlds the places aren't - they matter (more or less).

Autonomy is important. But for me that is not the whole thing about open worlds.

As far as I know (and the way I understand the "game world" at the moment) it's somewhat "Wild West", so you can often build outside regulated space and that's why large corporations or other groups can just plop major facilities on some random planet

 

[Northpin]

It's the system that requires a permit rather than planets. IIRC there isn't a system you can access that has a planet that requires a permit

Wrong.
There are bodies that are permit locked - check Sol

Also, during the Proteus Wave narrative Fdev permit-locked the HIP 22460 10 b

 

[Garix]

Wrong.
There are bodies that are permit locked - check Sol

Also, during the Proteus Wave narrative Fdev permit-locked the HIP 22460 10 b

I stand corrected. Cheers. Honestly can't remember last time I visited Sol.

 

[Northpin]

I stand corrected. Cheers. Honestly can't remember last time I visited Sol.

they are hand placed for story requirements and usually the permits are not obtainable so yea, there is that - not to be confused with the generic permit systems where permits can be obtained from a certain faction

 

[Shurimal]

I can only guess in Skyrim the errors mostly reside in positional errors?

AFAIK, positional errors and physics. Never tested these things myself, it's what I've read from modding discussions.

Orbiter had topography since 2016, that's a bit too far in the past for it to be very late

By 2016 Orbiter was already 10+ years old, and Orbiter 2016 is the last release yet. So, yeah, topography was added late in the development cycle.

It wouldn't surprise me if they changed the open world exploration because that is where most of the crashes have traditionally happened in Bethesda games.

Crashes in Creation Engine happen mainly due to deleted references and corrupted meshes (the old 32 bit version was more fickle mostly due to memory constraints, but 64 bit version is generally considered very stable). You can get the impression that it happens randomly during long exploration simply because the game never tried to load a problematic asset before you came too close to some random cell where it is present. Or crashes because you decide to equip something that has a corrupted mesh—you could carry it in your inventory, drop it to the ground, put it in a container and never suspect there's a problem with a modded weapon or armor. The moment you equip it, bang, it's express elevator to desktop I remember one mod that added rain splashes caused game to crash for some users near dragon mounds when raining—seemingly a random crash, but it still has very precise and concrete cause. Troubleshooting these kind of "random" crashes is a royal pain in the after quarters, though. I myself had trouble with an SMP version of vanilla hair mod crashing Creation Engine like a clockwork when loading certain cells—took me several days until I figured that out.

 

[varonica]

It's the system that requires a permit rather than planets. IIRC there isn't a system you can access that has a planet that requires a permit

Sol, once you get Sol permit the moon and Triton (I think) still require a permit.

I think it's a masked loading screen. Normal travel doesn't require one because there is enough time to load the desired assets. And it doesn't really matter if it's a loading screen. It's a masked one and a plausible one and the game goes on as if it didnt happen.

Pretty sure it's not, I can see ground stations from above glide height on the night side of planets.

 

[rootsrat]

Crashes in Creation Engine happen mainly due to deleted references and corrupted meshes (the old 32 bit version was more fickle mostly due to memory constraints, but 64 bit version is generally considered very stable).

Oh yeah, I wonder when the SFEdit will be released

And if we'll need to clean SF's ESM's

God I missed that! In a way...

 

[varonica]

Distance between POIs is decent. A few minutes walk at most. From a gameplay perspective the distance is fine, from a "logical" point of view, there might be too many POIs in each landing zone (no matter where you land, there are at least some human POIs like Abandoned Bionics Labs or Abandond Mine or Relay Towers). For a videogame, it's nice that you land on a planet, walk a few minutes and get right into the action.

Yeah that's always been an issue with ED, not that there are to many, but there once were to many and they were removed due to silliness. For instance you could fly to Beagle Point and encounter crashed ships/mining outpost and pirate bases etc on almost every planet and moon on the way, the very hugeness of the play area in ED means any placement of POI's in a manner that a pilot would be sure to encounter them would mean the total number of things like mining bases in the galaxy would have to run into the quadrillions. That doesn't work intellectually for a lot of players.

 

[Shurimal]

Oh yeah, I wonder when the SFEdit will be released

And if we'll need to clean SF's ESM's

God I missed that! In a way...

Starfield Script Extender and running DynDOLOD for 1000 planets

Also, fetish mods. Lots and lots of fetish mods. The good folks at a certain modding site that is not Nexus are going to have a field day

 

[varonica]

Starfield Script Extender and running DynDOLOD for 1000 planets

Also, fetish mods. Lots and lots of fetish mods. The good folks at a certain modding site that is not Nexus are going to have a field day

We're talking like, Tomb Raider type mods? Ah, I remember when..........

 

[Shurimal]

We're talking like, Tomb Raider type mods? Ah, I remember when..........

I'm 101% sure it's going to be way more wild than any Tomb Raider mod.

I mean, from Starfield videos I've learned that in vanilla game there are tentacled monsters roaming the planets, so...

 

[CMDR Karrde Sun]

If a certain setting seems to stand out with regards to performance impact, you can edit the preset ini files to tune things further.

Yeah. So naturally half an hour later, i was up the stairs in the mast building, and the framerate tanked again. Back to the drawing board (which has me giddy in pleasure). I ended up using modded ini files for high and ultra, a custom configuration for my machine, and low latency mode was required at 1 (not off or ultra). Now its... not bottlenecked by anything indoors, and hopping back and fourth around 30 in that forest courtyard. I even walked to the top of the bridge, peered over, and it was very bearable.

Now to start again and actually play the game.

I'll just have to not think about what those ini files might taken away. Also its probably not an issue again to anyone but under the minimum spec like me, but where you can tell the difference between ultra gtao and possibly shadows is in the toys on the constellation clubhouse. Naturally id prefer to suffer than not see that eye candy.

Also hilarious... i downloaded the art book and clicked on video tour.. and went "oh thats how its supposed to look".... /facepalm

 

[Darkfyre99]

Would you guys classify NMS as open world? I guess it kinda is but somehow I feel procgenned content isn't sufficient to be a (good) open world.

Based on what I know about the game, I would classify it as an Open World game... once you get past the forced tutorial, which is so heavily on rails I never actually bothered to complete it. Part of the allure of survival games for me is playing them in Iron Man mode, where my goal is to see how far I can get before I die.

What's with the repeating names like "Kreet". Can I assume this is a story-related place and has some "designed" world-building?

Kreet is the unskippable first stop on the story train. There seems to be a number of set "tiles" on the map itself:

• Where Frontier landed
• Building you have to visit

The others may change with the playthrough. Here's the exact same vista, as close to the same point in the campaign as my saves allowed, just to the left of Frontier's boarding ramp.

The first was from my actual campaign:

Spoiler

The second is from a "test" playthrough, where I tried to refuse Barrett's offer.

Spoiler

There's a hills on the right side of the picture where there used to be an artificial structure. Didn't bother playing the save past this point, to discover whether the structure on the left is the same on both saves. I only played long enough to sate my curiosity... edit: when I reloaded that save, the structures on the left had changed to solar panels, so it doesn't look like it's a fixed POI either.

Imo, you need a good skeleton of crafted world to even make it a true "world". I'm not so much about the "open" in the definition - it's the worldbuilding part that I care:

• Are the places decently paced in distance and travel modes?
• Do the places refer to their surroundings. Do they make sense? What is their place in story and world?
• Do the places persist? Do they interact with other places?
• Do places fit into the environment?

Basically none of that matters in NMS. The places are "beliebig" (arbitrary). In true worlds the places aren't - they matter (more or less).

Autonomy is important. But for me that is not the whole thing about open worlds.

You're talking about verisimilitude, which is definitely a YMMV thing. The thing I like about procedurally generated maps is that no two maps will be the same. A completely hand crafted (for example, Fallout 4 or Subnautica), is that once you've fully explored a map, there's nothing left to discover. I'm willing to sacrifice a bit of verisimilitude for the sake having new things to discover... though I'm beginning to suspect that Starfield has sacrificed a little too much of the former for the sake of the latter.

Though unless I'm save scumming, it won't functionally matter, which is something I don't bother doing.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

That's interesting, didn't know that. Does this mean that permit locks on planets only work with the supercruise transition?

No, they work if you try to fly in normal space too.

What they don't work on is the SRV because - as with a lot of things the SRV is mysteriously immune to (speed limits, neutron jets, etc) - no-one ever thought it possible for the SRV to get into that situation in the first place, and then they didn't want to take away the fun when it was discovered.

So: land on the non-permit planet, get out the SRV, build up enough speed in that to end up on a Newtonian transfer trajectory to the permit planet, wait (logged in, because a relog will zero your velocity) until you get into the other planet's sphere of influence, then reverse the process as much as possible to survive the landing. It's not easy and except for the specific HIP 22460 case where the two moons were in a close binary orbit you'd never get there before the Thursday reset forced a relog.

 

[Navigare Necesse Est]

It's the system that requires a permit rather than planets. IIRC there isn't a system you can access that has a planet that requires a permit

Sol?

 

[Navigare Necesse Est]

Based on what I know about the game, I would classify it as an Open World game... once you get past the forced tutorial, which is so heavily on rails I never actually bothered to complete it. Part of the allure of survival games for me is playing them in Iron Man mode, where my goal is to see how far I can get before I die.



Kreet is the unskippable first stop on the story train. There seems to be a number of set "tiles" on the map itself:

• Where Frontier landed
• Building you have to visit

The others may change with the playthrough. Here's the exact same vista, as close to the same point in the campaign as my saves allowed, just to the left of Frontier's boarding ramp.

The first was from my actual campaign:

Spoiler

The second is from a "test" playthrough, where I tried to refuse Barrett's offer.

Spoiler

There's a hills on the right side of the picture where there used to be an artificial structure. Didn't bother playing the save past this point, to discover whether the structure on the left is the same on both saves. I only played long enough to sate my curiosity... edit: when I reloaded that save, the structures on the left had changed to solar panels, so it doesn't look like it's a fixed POI either.



You're talking about verisimilitude, which is definitely a YMMV thing. The thing I like about procedurally generated maps is that no two maps will be the same. A completely hand crafted (for example, Fallout 4 or Subnautica), is that once you've fully explored a map, there's nothing left to discover. I'm willing to sacrifice a bit of verisimilitude for the sake having new things to discover... though I'm beginning to suspect that Starfield has sacrificed a little too much of the former for the sake of the latter.

Though unless I'm save scumming, it won't functionally matter, which is something I don't bother doing.

The structures, or PoIs on such maps, are they random or clustered around the LZ? Is there a point of venturing beyond the first immediate discoveries around the LZ?

 

[Sublime]

There is a lot I don't like about Starfield--it's got most of the Bethesdaisms that have been annoying me for the better part of thirty years. The age of the engine shows; it runs at half the frame rate I'd expect a game that looks the way it looks to run and the lauded GI effects would have looked lackluster in 2005. The space travel aspects are even more basic than my rather pessimistic expectations--but it has to be doing several somethings right, because I've got 20 hours on it and I haven't left finished causing an ecological and humanitarian catastrophe on Kreet yet.



I counted three directories and one on-demand service. After turning off a bunch of settings in the launcher, it is rather unobtrusive...which is a big improvement from when I had my own account back in 2004. Still don't like Valve's business/DRM model, but for playing games I get for 'free', the client seems fine.



As low as the frame rates are, it's well controlled and fairly consistent.

This is pretty accurate to how I feel about it. Yes, the space flight sucks, but there’s still something about the game that draws me back in. I’m definitely not new to Bethesda RPGs so I had certain expectations to what I was getting into.

At this point I’m just treating it as Skyrim in space, with a bigger, more varying world to explore. From that stand point, it is not disappointing and I’m definitely feeling that initial Skyrim magic drawing me in.

I look forward to seeing what modders will do with this game in the coming years. The sky’s the limit.

 

[Agony_Aunt]

At this point I’m just treating it as Skyrim in space,

I'm calling it No Man's Skyrim.

 

[Northpin]

That's interesting, didn't know that.

What they don't work on is the SRV

Yeap, it seems that i forgot to mention the whole deed was done in a SRV, which it a feat in itself

FDev solution to this shenanigan was to Permit Lock Hip 22460 10 A too
Simple and effective

 

[Northpin]

Reloading a save before you get close enough to a POI can potentially change what type of encounter is there. My first bug (that I had noticed) required a reload, and the only one that was available was nearly ten minutes old, which changed what was an interesting encounter with scientists to another instance of zero-law rebellion, where once again robots had killed everyone to “save” them from hazardous jobs.

A game of 2 saves if i get this right, correctly?

One before creating a POI to land and one after you land - so if you like what random tile you got but blunder it, you can reload the save after you landed, else you can reload the save before the POI generation and you will get the chance of a better / more interesting tile (maybe)