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I must say it is not the best RPG out there, but I feel like it would have earned more. I personally have a lot of fun playing.
While it was not a Cyberpunk-grade overhype, I think it must still have been overhyped. Because if you see it as Skyrim with better graphics, it is pretty much what you’d expect.
Some of the common criticism seems to be intrinsic to the sci-fi genre. In Skyrim, you walk 100 meters and then you find some cave or camp or something that a game designer has placed there manually with some story or meaning behind it. And as a player, you notice that, because most locations in Skyrim feel somehow unique. Even though for example the dungeons have rooms that repeat a lot. Having a designer place them manually with some thought gives them something unique.
In interstellar sci-fi, a dense world like this is simply impossible. Planets are extremely large so filling them manually with content is simply not possible. And using procedural generation makes things feel meaningless. Players notice that fast. So instead, Starfield opted for having a few manually constructed locations that are placed randomly on planets, unfortunately with a lot of repetition. But that is a sound compromise, given the constraints of today’s game development technology. The dense worlds that we are used to from other genres simply don’t scale up to planetary scale, and as players, we have to get used to that.
I don’t think OP made the point clear, but I agree with the spirit.
Fundamentally it is this:
Sense of scale
Meaningful content at every turn
CHOOSE ONE
Examples
Daggerfall - infinite scale, but quests, dungeons, meaningful content have to be specifically targeted or else be lost in the gigantic procedurally generated world.
Elite Dangerous - spending 20 minutes supercrusing across a binary star system really makes you feel the size, but also that’s 20 minutes of not doing anything.
No Man’s Sky - The universe is effectively infinite, and there is something useful almost everywhere! But (almost) none of it is handcrafted, so the random content gets stale in the scale.
Star Citizen - Basically no content, but absolutely unmatched as an immersive space experience, as it doesn’t compromise on scale for QoL or filler content in the slightest. Worth noting that most people hate this.
Meanwhile Skyrim is impressive because the world is pretty big, but there’s also something interesting to do every 5 steps. Starfield tries to maintain this while also tossing in some NMS-style randomized infinite content, but ends up suffering the same feeling of staleness once you spend any time exploring it.
This is the best, most succinct, and fair assessment I’ve seen of Starfield since launch.
Starfield has the advantage of 100+ hours of hand-crafted, voice-acted quest content, of course. What they need to do about the procedural content is the same thing Hello Games did, just add more procedural pieces that can get put together in novel ways, so the planets and outposts aren’t so obviously exactly the same. I’m hoping the system that inserts buildings on planets will just take new content, because modders could really blow that wide open.
Yeah, this is the big issue. The facilities and stuff should have been procedural as well. They should be a ton of handcrafted components, but they procedurally pick pieces and put them together.
Preferably they’d also take into account where they are to make things more interesting. If there’s Helium 3 around, make it generate a helium 3 facility with plenty of explosives and stuff sitting around. Things like that.
As it is, it’s the same few facilities that have the exact same layout at all locations. They even have the same loot in the same positions most of the time, and things like the heat leaches are always at the exact same spot.
They went halfway with procedural generation and it doesn’t really work to make the game feel full.
To be fair, the assets themselves are top notch. The textures & models are as good as I’ve seen in any game. The art direction is excellent. It’s obvious they spent a huge amount of time just making these things; we may have gotten as many as they could make in a reasonable amount of time. Compare it to NMS where procedural buildings cut into the terrain in awkward, unrealistic ways and have glitchy invisible walls - or Cyberpunk where the textures & models frankly aren’t very impressive but are made up for with excellent art direction & graphical/lighting techniques.
That said, yeah, it’s an understatement to say it’s way too noticeable that they’ve copy-pasted a handful of facilities & natural features. You notice it when you see the second one. They didn’t even try to hide it.