Starfield by Bethesda -- PC and Xbox exclusive -- 09/06/23

The landing from orbit thing is pretty much perfected by star citizen, but I’m not sure how critical it is to an actual game.

Again, people looking for something to whine about. They said they looked at it and the amount of resources it would take and decided those resources were better spent elsewhere. Seriously, some of the nitpicking on this game is getting tired.

There’d be one loading screen for the stratosphere, one for the ionosphere, one for low orbit and then up, up and… one for high orbit, then AWAY!

I agree. And it’s pretty ironic, gamers wishing this was more like No Man’s Sky after how viciously that game got treated upon release.

Speaking like you are unaware how far that game has come since it launched. I still don’t get the abject love for Starfield that exists around here. I hope it turns out great, don’t get me wrong, but I’m at best cautiously optimistic.

Not sure why you think that, but I’m aware. :)

Did you think I was expressing abject love for Starfield?

I’m not calling anyone specific out.

I don’t know about ‘love’, but for me it’s simply that something new from Bethesda Game Studios is always a bit of an event. Morrowind, Oblivion, Skyrim, the Fallouts - there’s nothing else quite like them, even if they’re all buggy, clunky, and kind of ugly in places. Looking forward to playing whatever they deliver!

I can understand that, but for me Fallout 4 had many problematic design/mechanics issues, and then Fallout 76. So it’s been 11 years since they have really been what I like in RPGs in enough ways to not get an auto pass. The direction in game design moves along a path I am not sure about yet.

Kerbal Space Program of course. Maybe Elite?

I still don’t get the amount of anxious griping and rivet counting that is going on currently with Starfield - just wait and see when we get actual reviews, instead of being so pessimistic already.

I also am not calling anyone specific out.

As one that has over 1500 hours in Skyrim, across many platforms, hundreds of hours in Fallout 4 as well (Not to mention ESO, Morrowind, Daggerfall and Oblivion), I am naturally interested in this. Fallout 76 I dislike, but that doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy the next game Bethesda releases.

I won’t speak for SPACE games but in RPGs a seamless world is actually really cool and prevents developers from cheating the environment/level design.

See Dark Souls, or even Dungeon Siege. You can’t enter a house and have it be magically bigger on the inside. It has to fit the actual size of the house.

I don’t think Bethesda will do this though. They have always cheated.

Fallout 4 was pretty great. With Fallout 76, the writing was on the wall well ahead of time - it wasn’t even really made by the main Bethesda team that makes their RPGs. I looked and felt like corporate cash-grab pushed down from above.

(Nowadays, after several patches, Fallout 76 makes for a decent enough Fallout 4.5.)

Starfield may not be perfect, but it certainly won’t be a Fallout 76.

For the record, I hope your right.

F76 was a historic disaster. The dev team made every mistake imaginable in the most inexcusable possible manner, not learning from other MMOs that came before. It was a clown-shoes mickey-mouse big-money spectacle of the highest order, and quite amusing from the sidelines. Who could have imagined that Zenimax would allow such a thing to happen to their second most valuable IP? How many levels of managemental ineptitude led to the game even being released in that state?

Given the above, sure-- Starfield could very well be awful. Hopefully not, but they permanently damaged their reputation with F76.

The thing that struck me about this article is we still have sci-fi fans desperately searching for the game they’ve dreamed about playing their entire lives.

There’s no hope for Starfield to live up to this. Meanwhile, I’m concerned the game will be evaluated against a dream instead of for what it is.

Eager transitioners do have NMS, Star Citizen and Starlink. Brian says Rodina and Evochron do it too. Starfield-specific worries seem a bit… specific.

Elite too maybe, though it’s not big on dialog trees.

If we want them to craft those big, environmental storytelling-filled areas Bethesda is so good at, it can’t be that you can just land anywhere on the planet. The total amount of area that needs to be made this way for a large number of planets is inconceivably huge. You’d then need a whole bunch of procedural generation, with the result being that it’d be quite generic and boring for the most part.

I seriously do not care about seamless transitions from planet to space. If a game has them, then great. If a game doesn’t, then as long as the other systems work well I’m okay.

With Starfield, I’m more worried about the general jank all Creation Engine games have, as well as the mediocre to poor walk/run/combat animations for characters.

This makes a lot of sense to me, now that you point it out like this. Thanks!