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!
The real difference between procedurally generating a 50 square kilometer area and an entire planet is minor, in terms of gameplay impact. Both are immensely vast spaces that you’ll never actually explore full of generic landscapes. Daggerfall was much smaller than an entire planet, but just a ridiculous amount of boring empty space nevertheless.
No Man’s Sky’s procedurally generated planets are like 70 miles in diameter. Is that too small? Nah, it’s completely indistinguishable inside a videgame.
The Outer Worlds has maps on on multiple planets with multiple landing points.
The big different though is one planet was chopped down into smaller separate disconnected maps for each landing point, but the template is there.
Yeah he’s just being a whiny little fuck.
Oh I also love how their site doesn’t have comments. Cowards.
Awww. Who cares what I think (edited unconstructive remark).
There is definitely some angst among what aspirations people project into Starfield.
Personally, I don’t see Fallout 76 as an indicator of its quality and I’m fine with it using its technology as it sees fit.
Planet landings without transitions would add nothing to the gameplay for me (can be replicated with varied maps at landing points) and just add issues.
But we’ll see. Everything I’ve seen so far tells me it’s going to be an awesome time if what you expect is what the studio has done before with added space related features.
F76 has no direct implications on Starfield’s quality, but it does indicate that Zenimax is willing to release a fundamentally broken (as opposed to just janky) game. Then again, since that happened Microsoft acquired them, so hopefully that changed, or they learned their lesson.
An interesting thing is how they specifically said you could land anywhere on the planet. I’m curious as to whether people really know that they won’t support orbit to planet transition, or if they just assume you can’t because they didn’t show it. Maybe it’s just too janky right now?
I mean, for all of its faults, start citizen pulled this particular thing off flawlessly, much better than any other game did. It seems like Bethesda could achieve such a thing.
To me, everything I saw tells me that you will land anywhere and the cut scene will transition you to one of the premade maps for the planet. The cut scene has to land you in a suitable spot whatever you pick. You aren’t in control. So makes sense to use that to place you in a map since you don’t have a seamless transition taking you to the exact point you saw from space. In SC, you can pick out a feature from space and just fly there then land. But the planets here seemed very non descript as seen from space.
No one assumed anything, check upthread for Todd Howard interview with IGN that they got 3 or 4 news stories out of. He said they decided early on for space and planets to be separate things. The relevant quote from him:
“People have asked, ‘Can you fly the ship straight down to the planet?’ No. We decided early in the project that the on-surface is one reality, and then when you’re in space it’s another reality.”
Maybe this is the same thing as Fallout 3’s 200 endings. Smoke blowing up are asses. A total load of Molyneux…
Agreed. Anytime Starfield wants to add a loading screen to cut out meaningless space to get me to the actual content, I’m all for it.
I wouldn’t necessarily expect any meaningful gameplay impact per se, but seamless transitions from space to atmosphere to ground would massively aid immersion. You want to go to Italy, you’re in orbit, so you aim straight for the boot.
To be clear, this is not a big deal for me and I think it’s silly to complain about it-- but the image of the perfect space RPG game in my head? That one definitely has it.
Starfield isn’t gonna be that game. It never promised to be that game.
Certainly not, and I never said it did.
One area where people might be disappointed is the lack of sentient aliens. I could be very wrong, but my suspicion is that the only intelligent aliens present are whatever created the mysterious artifacts. This might even be a first-contact scenario driving the main storyline. Personally I think humanity not having met sentient aliens matches well with the game’s “NASA-punk” aesthetic. Working with a near-future space game as opposed to a far-future space game seems like it could be a lot of fun.
It definitely seems like some people just aren’t happy with the idea of a space adventure in which a lot of sentient alien species aren’t running around.
Capital ship battles or GTFO.
I don’t get the abject hate that some seem to be giving it :) I don’t “love” Starfield but I am excited about the prospect of a new game from Bethesda. They definitely dropped the ball on FO76, but I’ve loved Skyrim, FO3, FONV and FO4. I think/hope they learned their lesson on FO76 and to me the delay in the game gives credence to the idea that they don’t want to release a half baked game, that they want it more polished upon release. Maybe their games are no longer for you, that’s fine. But some/many of us are excited to see a new IP from Bethesda, and I’m excited that it’s sci-fi rather than fantasy.
We don’t need to pass judgement on this game a year before it comes out.
I mean, maybe it’ll be cool. Maybe it’ll be trash. We’ll see.
I expect it to be like most Bethesda games, where it’s a cool game with supremely awesome jank that makes it even better if you don’t take things too seriously.