Starfield on Steam
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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.

  • CMLVI@kbin.social
    3·
    1 year ago

    I think that’s what some people are missing with the world gen. Landing on some random planet in a random system probably shouldn’t yield some uniquely woven tapestry of civilizations that were once there, or a story about a family persevering through harsh climates and conditions only to have a random encounter with the Ecliptics and be wiped out. It’s a random planet in a vast universe.

    There is stuff to find and stories to be made, but you’re pulling a ball out of a bag full of balls and hoping that it’s made of gold. Bethesda quest lines traditionally have unfolded with exploration because they were pretty limited in area with which to work. Skyrim is 60km x 60km, backfill from there, spread things out as needed. It can’t really work like that with Starfield.