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[Gambit2483]

This is one of the Starfield concept art images Bethesda showed off last year during one of their behind-the-scenes development videos.

Looks great! But it's only art...I just find it weird how they wouldn't show ANY water to help distinguish just how diverse their planets are. Not even a planet with a lake or pond. It's just weird...but I guess we will see eventually...

 

[Balducci30]

The more I hear about the planets and the traversal elements the more this sounds like pre-patch NMS, but without the seemless real time inter-planetary travel.

Hopefully the RPG elements and world building make up for it.

These type of takes confuse the hell out of me. If the entire game was just traversing through space and landing on planets and mining or whatever I’d understand. But it’s not. That’s the major difference between this game and NMS and Star Citizen - those are solely focused on the space systems - they’re glorified tech demos - sure they will do some things better but thats besides the point - this its just the framework within which the game operates.

 

[adamsapple]

Looks great! But it's only art...I just find it weird how they wouldn't show ANY water to help distinguish just how diverse their planets are. Not even a planet with a lake or pond. It's just weird...but I guess we will see eventually...

It feels like they haven't showed a lot of the game, the direct only had 2, 3 seconds of what looked like biotic powers. They're holding back from revealing too much but if standard game marketing cycle holds true, we'll probably have a lot of that shown by the launch day trailer.

 

[Setsuna Mudou]

I too am disappointed that no land vehicles are currently in the game, but it sounds to me like you created false pretenses and expectations of what Starfield actually is.

Starfield is not like No Man's Sky (seamless galaxy). Nothing in the marketing so far has pointed towards that. Anything that has made you believe that is your own wrong impression (which you have self proclaimed). Please point towards something if you have seen otherwise.

The videos and marketing have been very clear... you have to manually click on planets to land where you want. Todd Howard was very clear and direct in the 45 minute presentation of what to expect with Starfield.

To your earlier thought... Starfield is actually open world... but not open galaxy. Once you land on planets – you can explore the entire planet on foot – no invisible walls and no loading screens. Again, I entirely agree with your point about no land vehicles. I do not want to explore a planet without vehicles, so I will likely only land close to content zones. This is the most disappointing thing I have seen about this game, but it is not disappointing enough for me to not purchase this game.

Sure you can be disappointed that Starfield didn't deliver what you expected... but don't confuse your own wrong impressions with what Starfield actually is.

I never said I saw direct information stating you could navigate planets the same way as NMS or Star Citizen, all the information I got was from people that seemed pretty hyped about the game itself. So are they deceived as well and thinking that something a game that came out on PS4 by a team of 4 guys and a hamster managed to do is something we should expect here?
The way the game is talked sure as hell sounded like this was a given, but again, you are technically correct. I never saw any official statement saying so, hence why I was taken aback by it.

The entire 30fps thing for me is now completely inexcusable for this game. It's single player, the content is instanced and the graphics are nothing spectacular. The same people that criticized redfall for the 30fps should be blasting Bethesda for this one. At least Redfall had the excuse of online multiplayer even if it failed in many aspects.

I'm absolutely skeptical about your claim that you somehow can transverse the entire planet without invisible walls if they don't allow in planet flight or transport. That is screaming they made levels that you pre-load, play cutscene and boom you're there. Sounds like the dungeons in skyrim that you also had to load once you entered from the main map.
I guess someone can test it once the game comes out. Land on a planet, put some duct tape on the W key and go away for a few days. then let's see how far they got in the world on foot.

 

[Gambit2483]

It feels like they haven't showed a lot of the game, the direct only had 2, 3 seconds of what looked like biotic powers. They're holding back from revealing too much but if standard game marketing cycle holds true, we'll probably have a lot of that shown by the launch day trailer.

Hopefully you're right, because it's not like they don't know how to do water/underwater based gameplay so I see no reason it would be absent from this particular game...but yeah there's clearly much much more we haven't seen yet so, like I said, we will see eventually..

 

[OceanGaming]

For all the "geniuses" in this thread whining about %10 thing, that's the ratio of Goldilocks Zone planets to Non-Goldilocks planets (Either too distant or too close to their respective Sol if you understand). So, unless you want to completely throw any semblance of realism out of the picture, YOU WILL NOT HAVE YOUR ALIEN LIFE IN GODDAMN PLUTO, simple as that.

 

[Yoboman]

• No controllable land vehicles when you land on a planet. On foot and boost pack traversal

Guess we are calling it a walking sim from here on out

 

[Vol5]

For all the "geniuses" in this thread whining about %10 thing, that's the ratio of Goldilocks Zone planets to Non-Goldilocks planets (Either too distant or too close to their respective Sol if you understand). So, unless you want to completely throw any semblance of realism out of the picture, YOU WILL NOT HAVE YOUR ALIEN LIFE IN GODDAMN PLUTO, simple as that.

Starfield is a video game - 10% of life on planets equates to 900 planets without anything on them....the point of that is what, considering the entire game traversal system is fast travel? Gather resources by selecting a planet from the fast travel map, land, find resources (press x for resources), then go back to your ship (again by fast travel) then select another destination (by fast travel)....It sounds incredibly tedious. It would have been better to have an economy, trading system or a feature to send your team out to find resources without you having to do it.

 

[analog_future]

Starfield is a video game - 10% of life on planets equates to 900 planets without anything on them....the point of that is what, considering the entire game traversal system is fast travel. Gather resources by selecting a planet from the fast travel map, land, find resources (press x for resources), then go back to your ship (again by fast travel) then select another destination (by fast travel)....It sounds incredibly tedious. It would have been better to have an economy, trading system or a feature to send your team out to find resources without you having to do it.

The point of that is exploration, resource mining, setting up base camps for farming, finding Easter eggs or other rarities, etc.. etc..

Just because it doesn’t have something to kill, doesn’t make it a waste of time.

 

[OceanGaming]

Starfield is a video game - 10% of life on planets equates to 900 planets without anything on them....the point of that is what, considering the entire game traversal system is fast travel? Gather resources by selecting a planet from the fast travel map, land, find resources (press x for resources), then go back to your ship (again by fast travel) then select another destination (by fast travel)....It sounds incredibly tedious. It would have been better to have an economy, trading system or a feature to send your team out to find resources without you having to do it.

Starfield is NASAPUNK. What you are asking is no different that "Why can't Ellie have 4 arms in LoU2?" If a game targets how real life astrobiology and astrophysics works (or should work) thus achieves internal consistency by actually adhering to real life laws of the nature, it is not a legit argument to say "it's a video game lol". Let's say that i want to fly everywhere with my jetpack in Starfield but i understand gravity levels exists in many planets such that even if i want to jetpack very high in every planet, if some of those planets has higher than 1 G , depending on how much higher, it would be extremely difficult to nigh impossible.

%10 argument is dumb, always has been and always will be. If you want games that INTENTIONALLY break realism or internal consistency, then Starfield is not for you.

The point of that is exploration, resource mining, setting up base camps for farming, finding Easter eggs or other rarities, etc.. etc..

Just because it doesn’t have something to kill, doesn’t make it a waste of time.

Also ^ . Not everything you like is a thing some other person likes and vice versa. I would have disliked and put off if ice balls that are far away from their respective sun are teeming with life. What you are asking for ACTIVELY DECREASES MY ENJOYMENT.

 

[GymWolf]

That sweet sweet PR Speak

Were you expecting something different?

They don't have randomly made creatures, just handcrafted ones, you put the same 10-20 maybe 30 aliens creatures (hopefully double that number) in all the 1000 planets and the game would lose the immersion of a giant galaxy pretty fast.

Handcrafted creatures have their pro and cons.

And even human wise, they can only make a certain number of random events and sidequest, if you have them in every planet they could get boring after 20 hours.

The game is gigantic but of course they don't have even remotely enough original content to fill all the planets.

This is why IA made content could shine in the future.

 

[IDKFA]

So only 100 of the planets will have life and 900 of them will be barren. That probably means the vast majority of planets are gonna be pretty boring resource gathering hubs.

I’m also skeptical of the degree of hand crafted sections on each planet. He’s saying that every planet will have a hand crafted section. I find that hard to believe. I expect that all that will look like is slightly different arrangements of fairly similar looking buildings in the majority of cases.

I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s only 20-40 truly large hand-crafted fully fleshed out worlds to explore. People should keep their expectations realistic.

At first, I was expecting each planet to be actual planet size, with loads of cities, landscapes and oceans to explore. Planets so big that they'd take years and years of real time to fully explore just one.

However, that isn't the case. I'm now expecting each planet to be a map the size of Skyrim or FO4. Only 10% will contain life, but like the Skyrim or Fallout maps, there should be hundreds of locations (towns, outposts, cities, caves, mines etc) to explore on each planet. I don't believe there'll be totally barren planets with nothing on them.

Basically, imagine 1000 Skyrim games stitched together, with a hint of Star Trek. That's what I'm expecting.

I've gone from pure hype, scepticism to pure hype again. It's now my most anticipated game of all time.

 

[DevilMayFlyForAWhiteGuy]

I can’t watch the video at work; was anything mentioned about the Xbox version getting mods like Skyrim and FO4 did?

 

[adamsapple]

I can’t watch the video at work; was anything mentioned about the Xbox version getting mods like Skyrim and FO4 did?

Not at the moment, no. He just said the game will be a modders paradise.

 

[MMaRsu]

Guess we are calling it a walking sim from here on out

ever heard of mods

 

[MMaRsu]

At first, I was expecting each planet to be actual planet size, with loads of cities, landscapes and oceans to explore.

why

 

[MMaRsu]

That's what i just found out. No. It's like a level. If you want to go somewhere else in the planet, load in, load out, puff, you're there. Fucking unbelievable

we already knew this

 

[MMaRsu]

Its Skyrim in space guys, it's no No Mans Sky where there's literally nothing to do.

 

[IDKFA]

why

More realistic.

Also it would take decades in real time to fully explore each planet. It would truly be a forever game.

 

[analog_future]

More realistic.

Also it would take decades in real time to fully explore each planet. It would truly be a forever game.

And in what world did you believe it was possible for a developer to hand craft a game where it would take decades to explore each of the 1,000 planets in the game?


Ya'll are fucking insane lol

 

[IDKFA]

And in what world did you believe it was possible for a developer to hand craft a game where it would take decades to explore each of the 1,000 planets in the game?


Ya'll are fucking insane lol

Obviously not by hand. That's not possible. However, they could just use AI to do the job for them. They could just run a script that tells the AI to add into the planet X number of biomes, 200 settlements, 700 caves, 8 deep sea oceans etc etc.

 

[MidGenRefresh]

Looks great! But it's only art...I just find it weird how they wouldn't show ANY water to help distinguish just how diverse their planets are. Not even a planet with a lake or pond. It's just weird...but I guess we will see eventually...

There’s lake outside of New Atlantis. It’s visible from space and it’s visible in the ground footage showing city skyline. So yeah, water is definitely in the game .

 

[anthraticus]

All sounds pretty incredible, giving me those original Mass Effect vibes of exploration with the deeper mechanics Bethesda is known for.
This is going to be the defining moment of this console generation.

Holy shit....have some more of Toddlers kool aid!

 

[Kvally]

All sounds pretty incredible, giving me those original Mass Effect vibes of exploration with the deeper mechanics Bethesda is known for.
This is going to be the defining moment of this console generation.

 

[Hemingwayoffbase]

Maybe it’s just because I play in my living room far from my tv, but I legit fist pumped when I saw “large font mode.”

 

[analog_future]

Maybe it’s just because I play in my living room far from my tv, but I legit fist pumped when I saw “large font mode.”

I do a lot of Remote Play on my G Cloud and I did the same lol

 

[Gambit2483]

There’s lake outside of New Atlantis. It’s visible from space and it’s visible in the ground footage showing city skyline. So yeah, water is definitely in the game .

I must've missed that (will check it out). Still, it would've been nice if they focused on water as a major planetary diversity..

 

[adamsapple]

Couple of key excerpts from the interview transcribed by tweak town.

On the games economy and survey data aspect, looks like the space economics play a very big part in the game.

"We have a lot of biomes, we do look at temperature, we look at the radiation, we look at all of those things on a planet so that your suit and your protection...you can get certain ailments if you're ready, certain other things can come through with all of that.

"There are obviously planets that might have one type of biome, and there are planets that have a whole bunch. The creatures and plants and everything go with the biome, so there's a whole part of the game where surveying a planet, discovering all of the flora and fauna and resources.

"Planets usually have traits, geological things that are inherent to that planet.

"If you fully survey a planet, that data is actually worth a lot of money, a lot of credits, in the game that you can sell. The whole part of the game with just doing that is a little more zen-like."

"You can get experience and rewards for fully surveying planets and fully surveying a whole system," lead systems designer Kurt Kuhlmann said during the Starfield Direct showcase.

Starfield allows players to sell planet survey data, set up interstellar economies

Bethesda's executive director Todd Howard talks about how Starfield feeds into player motivations and rewards around discovering and exploring planets.

www.tweaktown.com

On Xbox's support in fostering the games ambition.

Q Do you feel like you're carrying the weight of Xbox on your shoulders right now, when that's kind of the narrative that's emerging? Do you think Starfield is going to be the standard-bearer for Xbox this year?

"I think I was feeling better before you asked that question.

"We're focusing on what we can do on this game. I'll say that Xbox has been, their support has been incredible on this, Phil, Matt Booty, and the team over there. Obviously we worked with them for a long time, going back 20 years with Morrowind.

"But being a part of Xbox and their support, it really has allowed us to be this ambitious and take these risks...and fingers crossed."

Xbox's support has allowed Bethesda to 'be this ambitious' with Starfield

The support of the Xbox games business enabled Bethesda to amp up their ambitious ideas and plans with Starfield: 'Their support has been incredible'

www.tweaktown.com