Game Discussions Bethesda Softworks Starfield Space RPG
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That's what the modders are for /s
He's right, maybe?
If he's talking about the mechanics of landing a ship - yes, correct, nobody that matters actually cares about or wants to manually land their ship. In the current versions of Elite it's basically an easter egg and most players avoid it, and resent it on the rare occasions that they're forced to to do it.
If he's talking about flying down from orbit through atmosphere down to the surface of a planet - yes, correct again. Elite has this and people mostly hate it. Granted it's done really poorly in Elite and it's both cumbersome and immersion-breaking with the constant loading between supercruise and glide and then Slow Mode (and back again and again and again if you mess up a step or pick the wrong spot to drop in from), but even in No Man's Sky, where it's about as fast and smooth as possible, it's mostly a chore, and when it's working at its best, it's so automated that it may as well be a canned animation anyway.
If, on the other hand, he's talking about flying across the surface of a planet, surveying the landscape and picking a spot of interest to set down on and investigate - if he's handwaving that one - well he'd dead wrong. And honestly if you can't do that - if you can't fly across the surface of a planet and settle down at any spot that catches your eye - well then his pitch about being able to explore the entirety of these planets is basically a lie.
My Bartender has a sweet voice - too bad that more often that not i seem to be wasting her time
Agreed. Nobody's gonna miss (re)entry or exit. Probably people will miss not being able to fly around the skies on planet though.
Still, think about planetary flight in NMS. Is it a thing? Not really. It's glorified fast-travel. The best kind, but still just fast-travel. Enjoying flight is really something that requires immersion elements and especially a good flight model. If they aren't doing all of that, it might end up just like NMS, so really, how much is lost? Better for NMS if Starfield isn't NMS.
On the topic of Elite's re-entry system in the supercruise glide, I always thought it was really, really good. Pretty much all you could want from something doing what it was designed to do, which is hide loading and synchronize instancing. Other than the slight freeze when you hit glide there's pretty much zero downside IMO.
Fast Travel is loading screens instead of traversal, where you pick a point and suddenly you are there. Even the most basic form of traversal is better than Fast Travel because it allows for moment-to-moment discovery, and because you can survey your surroundings as you travel, and may decided at any moment to head in a different direction if something catches your eye. Without traversal, you aren't really exploring; you are just Consuming Content.
NMS would be much, much, worse if you explored planets by scrolling around a globe and picking a map spot to suddenly appear on top of, which is what it seems like the best-case scenario for Starfield is going to be. That said, Starfield will hopefully be denser with content and hopefully more consequential content than NMS at that, so it may balance out somewhat in terms of overall "being a good game," just not much of a space exploration experience.
Part of the thing about controllable space-surface transitions is that they add a whole load of pre-requisites that not only aren't required for most space games, they're actively counterproductive to interesting gameplay.
1) Realistic-scale planets.
- not at all necessary for a Skyrim-like game, and even Daggerfall in space would still have less terrain than the smallest Elite potato world while still being larger than any one player could reasonably explore.
- if you want people to stumble across C while going from A to B, it isn't likely to happen if A and B are 2000km apart.
2) Realistic-shape planets.
- having compressed the planet to a few thousand square kilometres of surface, if it was actually spherical then the horizon curvature would be incredibly obvious. Map it instead to a flat surface with wrapping and it's both easier on the engine and not so obvious that there's not actually much planet there. Depending on the audience you might even be able to get away with torus rather than sphere topology...
3) Extreme speed scales
- Elite Dangerous I think handles the supercruise/orbital cruise/glide/normal flight transitions pretty well, but it's still unnecessary complexity for most games
- the other alternative is time acceleration, which also gets messy given the need for 100x or even 1000x acceleration.
4) Fly/land anywhere
- confining landing (or less restrictively, starting locations for low-speed flight) to specific places actually makes it easier to set up interesting situations
- e.g. in Elite Dangerous there's nothing really stopping you dropping out of glide right on top of a base and bombing the whole thing, except that it has excessively powerful "you can't do that" guns. Whereas if you couldn't start low-speed flight within 100km of it, there'd be plenty of room for dogfights, long-range missile defences, etc. on the way in to either fight through or sneak around.
1) Realistic-scale planets.
- not at all necessary for a Skyrim-like game, and even Daggerfall in space would still have less terrain than the smallest Elite potato world while still being larger than any one player could reasonably explore.
- if you want people to stumble across C while going from A to B, it isn't likely to happen if A and B are 2000km apart.
2) Realistic-shape planets.
- having compressed the planet to a few thousand square kilometres of surface, if it was actually spherical then the horizon curvature would be incredibly obvious. Map it instead to a flat surface with wrapping and it's both easier on the engine and not so obvious that there's not actually much planet there. Depending on the audience you might even be able to get away with torus rather than sphere topology...
3) Extreme speed scales
- Elite Dangerous I think handles the supercruise/orbital cruise/glide/normal flight transitions pretty well, but it's still unnecessary complexity for most games
- the other alternative is time acceleration, which also gets messy given the need for 100x or even 1000x acceleration.
4) Fly/land anywhere
- confining landing (or less restrictively, starting locations for low-speed flight) to specific places actually makes it easier to set up interesting situations
- e.g. in Elite Dangerous there's nothing really stopping you dropping out of glide right on top of a base and bombing the whole thing, except that it has excessively powerful "you can't do that" guns. Whereas if you couldn't start low-speed flight within 100km of it, there'd be plenty of room for dogfights, long-range missile defences, etc. on the way in to either fight through or sneak around.
Fair points. In my own personal experiences, NMS's flying is so simple while also being over so quick that it's basically little besides fast travel.
You're right though, sometimes you do just come across a base and plop down to it. But that didn't happen to me often. And the exact same thing happens on foot.
Depends on what you want. You want simishness you want seamless transitions. You want adventure - you cut out the fluff in between.
Mmhm, kinda depends on the the game world size and transition times. I played FOs where I would solely use feet or vertibird for map travel, but the world is decently sized for that. Skyrim I used fast travel because the carriage and horse didn't cut it.
Thing is, in order to use the fast travel - you have to explore that part of the map in the first place, so it's really no issue because it is dependent on exploring the map beforehand.
My concern has less to do with whether there are “seamless transitions,” and more to do with whether I’ll be allowed to fly the ship I designed while down at the surface, as well as space. The former is on my “nice to have” list, but the latter is fairly high on my “must have” list. It’s not on my “deal breaker” list, though. I’m willing to accept “Privateer” style landings if the other gameplay is attractive enough, but it would be enough to move it from my “Resist buying it from day one” list to “Wait for a Steam Sale” list.
From what i read, they consider two worlds: Planets and Space. They tech is not up to make it seamless. And the Space is not open world like in Elite, but more like pockets of space that you can travel too.
This is of course diminishes the role of Space Ships in the game. With that in mind this game becomes more like Mass Effect: Andromeda, and less like Star Citizen and NMS.
They explained that space and planetside will be two different scenes and in order to get most of both worlds they had to make a choice on how to conect these two.
It doesn't diminish the role of spaceships imho, there is quite some stuff to do in space to, stations you can land at, other ships you have to fight or disable them in order to dock with them and take them over.
I don't think your spaceship wil be just a taxi to get you from point A to point B.
I can't imagine them put such a comprehensive shipbuilding option in the game and let that ship function as a taxi only.
You can also hire npc crew on your ship (and you can actually see them working and walking around unlike ED), maybe a weapon specialist will have influence on the effectiveness of your ship's combat capabilities etc.
I told myself not to get hyped anymore over a game, I learned my lesson well from Fdev, but this is getting mighty close.
Yeah, assuming were back to more normal game development in this thread..
The transition Is one thing, but if they didn't have some sort of atmospheric flight, all the proc gen tech would be a likely waste. Surely they thought through making people bunny hop to space and back to move around resource worlds would cause memes and the feature to get unused?
I'm not for a minute thinking Bethesda have frontier standards of care, but it is curious they didn't show it. What is that last panning clip.of? Was a bit worrying the angles were so perfect.. canned I think.
The transition Is one thing, but if they didn't have some sort of atmospheric flight, all the proc gen tech would be a likely waste. Surely they thought through making people bunny hop to space and back to move around resource worlds would cause memes and the feature to get unused?
I'm not for a minute thinking Bethesda have frontier standards of care, but it is curious they didn't show it. What is that last panning clip.of? Was a bit worrying the angles were so perfect.. canned I think.
Viajero
Volunteer Moderator
Agree, I must also be one of those "that dont matter"
One of the key selling points in Elite is precisely that freedom of navigation, wherever. That plus the 1:1 scale make the feeling of immersion in Elite unrivalled. At least for me. StarField wont have that, but that is also ok, it will be a different game with different strengths around the RPG and quest elements.
The thing that threw water on the coals of my enthusiasm (enough to create steam but not put out the fire) was Starfield's demoed system map. Do we know if that map is intentionally "artistic" compared to the actual solar system, or is the solar system itself a child's mobile?
Viajero
Volunteer Moderator
No idea. But since there is probably no equivalent to supercruise there is no reason to make star systems at real scale. As for space navigation between bodies and star systems I think we need to look at Starfield mostly as an Outer Worlds on steroids. The part that we still need to understand better is the flight once you arrive to a planet.The thing that threw water on the coals of my enthusiasm (enough to create steam but not put out the fire) was Starfield's demoed system map. Do we know if that map is intentionally "artistic" compared to the actual solar system, or is the solar system itself a child's mobile?
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Only just caught this, saw the video, an am now looking forward even more to this.
I've never looked for an Elite replacement - now, for myself, not even Elite can replace Elite, if that makes sense?
Base building, custom ships, skills, equipment modification... All sounds great. Didn't get much of a feel for walking around ships though I've only seen the video once and am away with work ATM in the middle of nowhere so have capped data limit. I like the threaded story line too, whatever it's about.
Skill tree is the one thing I miss from Elite. Seems odd that you can be an Elite 5 on-foot veteran and have a one-week n00b sprint past and outrun you because they bought a suit from a store with some servos and springs stuck to the joints.
Only heard about this last Autumn (I think), and the more I hear, the more I like.
If I spent 50 bucks on this and got a few weekends out of it, I'd be happy. If I played it as much as I played Elite (when I used to play)... Well, that would be awesome.
I've never looked for an Elite replacement - now, for myself, not even Elite can replace Elite, if that makes sense?
Base building, custom ships, skills, equipment modification... All sounds great. Didn't get much of a feel for walking around ships though I've only seen the video once and am away with work ATM in the middle of nowhere so have capped data limit. I like the threaded story line too, whatever it's about.
Skill tree is the one thing I miss from Elite. Seems odd that you can be an Elite 5 on-foot veteran and have a one-week n00b sprint past and outrun you because they bought a suit from a store with some servos and springs stuck to the joints.
Only heard about this last Autumn (I think), and the more I hear, the more I like.
If I spent 50 bucks on this and got a few weekends out of it, I'd be happy. If I played it as much as I played Elite (when I used to play)... Well, that would be awesome.
Haa haa, the child's mobile is NMS, I liked the solar system layout, a bit like a Orrery layout. The size differences in orbits and planet size, the sheer scale of the solar system make it impossible to represent accuratelyThe thing that threw water on the coals of my enthusiasm (enough to create steam but not put out the fire) was Starfield's demoed system map. Do we know if that map is intentionally "artistic" compared to the actual solar system, or is the solar system itself a child's mobile?
The orrery is fine. Remember how everyone asked for it in ED.. Wish there was one in SC too given how terrible the nav system can be.
Actually Elite II Frontier was a bit more convincing with no FTL per se (but cryo sleep or stasis if I recall correctly, and accelerated time).
Let's see:
ED(O) has a magic Friendship Drive. FWIW capital ships go through "witch space", that's very little effort beyond "it's magic !". Ships have a speed limit in regular space, and that's even more obvious. SC has "Quantum Drive" which is kinda funny considering the Heisenberg uncertainty state of that project (both a released game and alpha). I'm sorry but I fail to see a more "convincing explanation" here.
Actually Elite II Frontier was a bit more convincing with no FTL per se (but cryo sleep or stasis if I recall correctly, and accelerated time).
Why then ? I dont get it, unless you just admit you dislike Bethesda games or Todd Howard (or both). What if they are rambling about makes sense "in universe", and that's coherent with other aspects of the game, and actually serves a gameplay purpose (or helps it) ? IMHO universe building and story telling has always been the strong point of Bethesda games, given how everything else was always a bit janky (maybe excluding 2D Fallout games which were near perfect honestly)...
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