Yes, I’m hoping it’s a game that rewards exploration. I feel like it will.
@BrianRubin @Misguided Starflight had the advantage that our imaginations were doing a lot of the heavy lifting (and we were okay with that back then), but it was fun going around finding ruins, mining, or capturing creatures.
This moves me over to cautiously optimistic. I’m a sucker for games with base building mechanics, if I can spend my time finding cool spots and building outposts I’ll be happy. Hopefully the ship customization isn’t just for combat, and you can build out a ship that’s good at exploration that tells you where you should try landing on those planets.
I was only talking about the flight when I mentioned Freelancer. As for both compelling space and ground stuff, in the same game, that’s very hard to get right and few games have succeeded.
The game looks intriguing, I’m sure it will be good warts and all as its Bethesda. Like the build your own ship and have a crew aspeect. Hoping the crew is as deep as the characters in a ME game… but thats asking alot i think,
Sad to see no space cheese wheels.
I’ll say that the animations we saw seemed a lot less jankier than previous games. I especially thinking about the first set of alien creatures that we saw that moved off from the player character. Relatively lifelike IMO.
I think that looks like a blast
ESO has an excellent vid on character creation:
I am prepared to be disappointed but I thought that video was great - the game looks awesome, and it feels like something I’d play a crapton of. I am surprised there isn’t more foaming at the mouth over the video. Maybe I missed that stage of everyone’s enthusiasm.
We are old, old men :)
We foamed a fair amount over in the E3 (or equivalent) video thread.
There are some wildly optimistic hopes in this thread!
My prediction for the best case scenario is that this synthesizes the best of what No Man’s Sky can do with the best of what Bethesda RPGs can do. If there’s any “new” magic to Starfield I think it will be found in interesting combinations of those influences, but I don’t actually know what that will look like.
I don’t think we’re going to get groundbreaking gameplay experiences with space exploration, with “over 1,000 planets” there’s no way they’re going to be interesting.
Look at something like the Citadel in Mass Effect. It’s a “busy” hub, and obviously it’s way more interesting than any space station you’ll find in NMS. But it’s still just a collection of specific NPCs and locations that are meaningful in a setting that suggests a sprawling society but which doesn’t involve any meaningful scale.
All of that is good and appropriate, the Citadel is great. But think of how much work that is. It would be ambitious to have two dozen such cities (or colonies or space stations) in a single game and maintain even that low bar for making them feel interesting and worth visiting and exploring.
Now make me believe Bethesda (or anyone) can make 1,000 planets worth my attention. It’s all just artifice. Best case you’ll have lots of interesting, “hand crafted” locations, and then an order of magnitude more procedurally generated (or something similar, maybe not hands-off, but only lightly curated and hand-designed) locations that are just places to gather resources or stage combat or whatever, and you could have more of both of those types of settings than any video game ever and still not feel restricted while setting it all on a single planet. Or continent.
There won’t be 1,000 worlds worth your attention. That’s not the way space works, and I seriously doubt it will be the way Starfield will work. Some will have more stuff than others I imagine, some may just be an outpost, or a mine. Or even nothing whatsoever.
Regarding No Man’s Sky - man, my interest in that game went off a cliff. I was fascinated with it for a good week or two - there was so much to do and see and discover! And then I went to a new system and I got to do it pretty much all over again. No Man’s Sky has a wonderful breadth, but it felt to me like it was a mile wide and an inch deep. Once I found all it had to offer, that was all there was to do except rinse and repeat.
Now, in their defense, they are constantly adding new stuff to do, so that breadth just keeps growing. I think that’s awesome. I just wish there was more to dig into, and I’m hoping Starfield offers that depth.
Well, as long as you get to scan those lifeless dull planets… ;)
Totally agree. It seemed incredible initially, but very quickly the curtain parted revealing what was behind it.
I’m not expecting a thousand hand-crafted worlds, but I expect that if I pick a place to land on there will be something interesting there. If it’s a procedurally generated something, that’s ok, but at least give me cool loot for finding it. Or maybe it’s a quest you find that does lead to a hand crafted location.
It doesn’t have to be 1000 x Skyrim. Imagine Cylons are pursuing you and you have to establish the base for humanity to hide out in. Then you’ll be glad of your 1000 worlds.
Or you have to set up trading routes, by finding and choosing suitable planets to set up your trade posts on.
Lots of SF type scenarios might depend on the layout of the nearby systems, rather than treating each planet like a fantasy RPG.
You might have to do the Kessel run in less than 12 parsecs.
More like No Man’s Skyrim heh