Game Discussions Bethesda Softworks Starfield Space RPG

[Astaran]

I have no use for odyssey, never did. I wanted the makers of Elite to start fleshing out all the 'stubs' they put in the game I started playing in '16. But they never did. So I find that I am much happier with X4 for my space sim game at this point, and I have FPS type games that are much better than odyssey for when I want that type of gameplay. X4 as a space flying sim is (IMO) much better than the emasculated/castrated limitations forced on the player by elite.

I have no pre-conceived notions about Starfield, and will take the game mostly as presented, along with a mod or two here and there. With any luck, it will be better than the games I currently play.

Funnily I was never opposed to the idea of space legs in Elite. My condition was always "It needs to be well done and well integrated into the core game loops". More than 2 years later, it still isn't and I don't think it ever will be. i had hoped Fdev would include abandoned settlement POIs to exploration, similar to the INRA sites with audio logs and mysteries to solve. But nope. I hoped FDev would introduce new Guardian and Thargoid POIs to explore in foot. Nope, again.
Starfield is focusing heavily on that "space legs" gameplay and considering Bethesda's experience with Fallout and Elder Scrolls, I am rather confident that they'll that part of the game (POIs, visual story telling, character progress, combat).

Footage of Space Combat reminds me a lot of No Man's Sky at the moment. A bit "arcade-ish" with that third person view. I think X4 hits the sweet spot between fast paced and fun without turning into a arcade-style shooting gallery. Maybe it's a question of the difficulty setting and maybe modders can improve this experience as well.

I'm almost tempted to pre-order. I will buy Starfield anyway and I will most likely buy the first expansion, too. It's a Bethesda game after all and they've never let me down (I enjoy(ed) even Fallout 76). I still have one or two days to think about it, so there's no rush to make a decision just yet

 

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I'm almost tempted to pre-order. I will buy Starfield anyway and I will most likely buy the first expansion, too. It's a Bethesda game after all and they've never let me down (I enjoy(ed) even Fallout 76). I still have one or two days to think about it, so there's no rush to make a decision just yet

I can't tell if you're joking and messing with us or serious.

 

[Northpin]

Let's face it, it's not the game for you is it?

Well, technically it's not the game they're hyping

 

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Well, technically it's not the game they're hyping

We get that a lot today.

 

[Darkfyre99]

The soundtrack of Surviving Mars is extensive and quite good quality for a game of this caliber. Today I discover I almost exclusively listened to Quantum Sonic radio station.
"Rockets" is probably my most favourite song (and they ARE actually songs, with singing)
The game might have been a big letdown in the map department but it made good with it's soundtrack collection.

Maybe SF's strength is neither the procgenned episodes.

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.

 

[Dooguk]

Well, technically it's not the game they're hyping

I feel exactly the same about Star Citizen. I just laugh about it.

 

[wrmiller]

Funnily I was never opposed to the idea of space legs in Elite. My condition was always "It needs to be well done and well integrated into the core game loops". More than 2 years later, it still isn't and I don't think it ever will be. i had hoped Fdev would include abandoned settlement POIs to exploration, similar to the INRA sites with audio logs and mysteries to solve. But nope. I hoped FDev would introduce new Guardian and Thargoid POIs to explore in foot. Nope, again.
Starfield is focusing heavily on that "space legs" gameplay and considering Bethesda's experience with Fallout and Elder Scrolls, I am rather confident that they'll that part of the game (POIs, visual story telling, character progress, combat).

Footage of Space Combat reminds me a lot of No Man's Sky at the moment. A bit "arcade-ish" with that third person view. I think X4 hits the sweet spot between fast paced and fun without turning into a arcade-style shooting gallery. Maybe it's a question of the difficulty setting and maybe modders can improve this experience as well.

I'm almost tempted to pre-order. I will buy Starfield anyway and I will most likely buy the first expansion, too. It's a Bethesda game after all and they've never let me down (I enjoy(ed) even Fallout 76). I still have one or two days to think about it, so there's no rush to make a decision just yet

I don't recall Elite having anything "well done and well integrated", but that is just my opinion.

As for pre-ordering, well I did that yesterday (steam), for reasons of my own. Come on Friday!

 

[Astaran]

I can't tell if you're joking and messing with us or serious.

Pre-order depends highly on the publisher or game studio for me. For example, I pre-ordered Baldur's Gate 3 and wasn't disappointed (well, as BG1 and BG2 fan I miss the open world and some of the companions are just annoying, but overall it's a great game). I won't pre-order any games or DLC from Paradox or FDev anymore and that decision has been vindicated as well (looking at you, Victoria 3).

As for Starfield. I'm not "hyped" for that game. The last time I was "hyped" for any game was Odyssey and look how well that turned out It's essentially a "rational" decision: I know that I WILL buy Starfield eventually, because Bethesda is known to build solid games (with some quirks, granted) that I like to play and the modding community always turns those games into an exceptional experience. There's nothing indicating it won't be the same with Starfield. So, instead of buying it next week for the same price, I buy it now and get some cosmetics on top.

 

[Cosmo]

In No Man's Sky it took Dirt The Gamer 25 hours to walk around a planet and this isn't the largest planet. Such freedom of exploration feels a lot better than Starfield's disconnected, confined square maps with incorrect topography compared to the planet. The SF maps only exist if you select a landing spot. Then they're randomly generated. Each planet has a limited amount of landing spots. The only consistent aspects of a custom landing spot are the biome type and special POI.

Bethesda is too lazy to change their Creation Engine 2 to enable seamless planetary terrain. Bethesda chose the unambitious route of working around these technical limitations. The graphics are very pretty though. Thus various technical limitations of their previous games including frequent loading screens remain in SF. Maybe they're counting on modders to do it for them, which is a tall order.

 

[KillaALF]

In No Man's Sky it took Dirt The Gamer 25 hours to walk around a planet and this isn't the largest planet. Such freedom of exploration feels a lot better than Starfield's disconnected, confined square maps that only exist if you select a landing spot.

Yep and all he saw was the same procedurally generated stuff over and over and over again, ad nauseum. Not dissing NMS here, I quite like it myself, but it is what it is. As soon as I've discovered all animals (for the nanites) and a good portion of plants and minerals I'm outta there. I neither need nor even want this from Starfield. Maybe you guys need to just realize it's not the game you wanted and/or hoped for and leave it at that. No amount of bellyaching is going to change that.

 

[Cosmo]

Yep and all he saw was the same procedurally generated stuff over and over and over again, ad nauseum. Not dissing NMS here, I quite like it myself, but it is what it is. As soon as I've discovered all animals (for the nanites) and a good portion of plants and minerals I'm outta there. I neither need nor even want this from Starfield. Maybe you guys need to just realize it's not the game you wanted and/or hoped for and leave it at that. No amount of bellyaching is going to change that.

The amount of diversity in flora, fauna and POI per planet are another matter. Starfield will have plenty of that, but it sets an artificial limitation on how many landing spots are allowed per planet. I prefer to have a seamless virtual planet vs disjointed tiles of self-contained maps the size of 2x Skyrim. Many people hoped Starfield would have both a vast scale of stuff per planet and seamless exploration.

 

[Surefoot]

Marketing team show a bit of self awareness there, but not enough to restrain themselves:

Starfield – PlayerAuctions Blog

blog.playerauctions.com

Of course what's PR dept. here missed is the bar is very low.

 

[Ralph Vargr]

Are there really that many gamers out there who haven't played a Bethesda RPG? It would seem so.

I'm one of them.

 

[Cosmo]

Marketing team show a bit of self awareness there, but not enough to restrain themselves:

Starfield – PlayerAuctions Blog

blog.playerauctions.com

Of course what's PR dept. here missed is the bar is very low.

SF is their least buggy game cause they had an extra year to fix bugs since Microsoft told them to. Yep, the bar for Starfield is actually low in terms of planetary tech. They just went for 2x Skyrim procedural map generation rather than simulate a whole planet. They couldn't match the planetary topography with these maps, because they are not contiguous. Simulating a whole (downscaled) planet was too difficult for Todd Howard and his team. They failed to adequately upgrade their old Gamebryo engine aka Creation Engine 2. The space exploration is a separate mode which they connected with the proc-gen ground level maps.

P.S. people who say entire planets are explorable in SF are lying. In vanilla Starfield: the planetary topography as seen from space does not match the proc-gen landing spots on the surface. The boundaries between maps are inconsistent. We cannot see landmarks in adjacent landing spots either.

 

[Surefoot]

Yep, the bar for Starfield is actually low in terms of planetary tech. They just went for 2x Skyrim procedural map generation rather than simulate a whole planet.

Let's see what's what when the game releases shall we. Skyrim had just a flat map engine, so for starters there's an issue for generating spherical maps, coordinates will be messed up, everything will be wonky, ask anyone who has tried Star Citizen for example...

 

[Ralph Vargr]

5 will get you ten theres already a coven of Star Wars nerds out there pouring through every source possible to create a 'accurate' Tatooine.

Mustafar and Hoth.

 

[Ralph Vargr]

I consider a sandbox game to be a subclass of open-world game, where you're expected to build most of your own toys, rather than have them provided for you.

NMS?

 

[Hank]

I'm one of them.

I've never played a Bethesda RPG. ME:A is my only experience with RPG / in space. I'm playing SB2 atm so I guess it qualifies.

I won't be pre-ordering SF and will most likely wait a few weeks before buying it after release. Reason: I have other games I want to concentrate on a little longer plus, I'm contemplating buying a new console bundle with SF but I haven't made that decision yet. This will shock ppl here, but I've never owned a "modern" console game system (XBox or PS). OH My!! The big draw for me with SF is ship interiors, crew (droids) and apparently many systems to explore.

Friends and Many family members have one console or the other. I did own an Atari back in the Missile Command era. I always played on PCs.
Good Day to All

 

[Cosmo]

I'm contemplating buying a new console bundle with SF but I haven't made that decision yet.

You should get the PC version, because the free mods will make it the ultimate in terms of graphics and pushing the game to new heights. There will be mods for Xbox, but not every mod is allowed on their platform. The Xbox version only has 30 FPS. Xbox has too few console-exclusive games. Nearly every Xbox game is also on PC.

 

[Comandante]

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!