Starfield on Steam
store.steampowered.com
Starfield is the first new universe in 25 years from Bethesda Game Studios, the award-winning creators of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and Fallout 4.

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.

  • Archmage AzorEnglish
    9•1 year ago

    I don’t think the engine allows for such an open world. The engine is built around cells, and BGS shot itself in the foot by making a game in a setting that requires open-ness using an engine that only works with enclosed spaces.

    • DarkThoughts
      1•1 year ago

      Implementing dynamic asset streaming would’ve been a massive hurdle that would’ve likely broken so many other things and delayed the entire release by a year or two. I can understand why they didn’t go that route, especially during the pandemic. For what its worth, the terrain gen and all is still pretty impressive, even if you cannot seamlessly travel around.

      I agree that they could’ve hidden some parts better though, like why can’t I select an existing landing spot from within the ships cockpit instead of having to use the map? They already show you the markers when you’re in the scanning mode anyway so that could’ve been a pretty quick thing to do. After all it works with other targets already too.

      A lot of the negativity seems to stem more from the fake outrage though.