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Count me in the 'intrigued-to-get-back-into-Starfield-but-busy-with-Fallout-4' crowd. Bethesda stays winning either way I suppose.
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May 3, 2024 15:02
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Bethesda's cities have always been tiny, and they've not shied away from maps. I suspect fumbled development.
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May 3, 2024 15:37
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I'd wager it is more about how obvious the procedural generation is on the new surface map, they made it the dots to hide it and then made the cities match for consistency
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May 3, 2024 15:56
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Starfield could really use a suburban proc gen biome with ruined variants for variety and to make the setting seem more suited to the actual game. It's not a major issue but I do appreciate it when devs can successfully sell the illusion that the scale matches the setting.
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May 3, 2024 17:18
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FishMcCool posted:That's what the cynical in me thinks. New Atlantis looks even more ridiculously small with that aerial perspective. It also looks weirder because the city area just ends abruptly, there aren't any smaller houses or anything, just massive towers and then suddenly nothing.
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May 3, 2024 19:02
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Falcorum posted:It also looks weirder because the city area just ends abruptly, there aren't any smaller houses or anything, just massive towers and then suddenly nothing. I can see New Atlantis being like that because you have an authoritarian government that probably wants to maintain that picturesque view and is already confirmed as willing to shove anything unsightly underground. They could probably do a better job of conveying that though, have NPCs talk about zoning regulations that prevent construction or something. Meanwhile Akila is small because nobody is willing to front money to build more walls, and Neon is a repurposed oil rig. We'll have to see if Shattered Space adds a new settlement and what their excuse for being undersized will be.
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May 3, 2024 19:44
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It's also just a huge narrative/setting problem with the scale. Jemison is habitable world; an entire planet! Where are the other cities!? Why do you need more systems to colonize, you clearly haven't fully inhabited this planet! It's funny because you don't go more places in Mass Effect, but in that game you get the sense of a densely inhabited galaxy where you're just visiting certain places. In Starfield, and maybe I'm just projecting from Fallout and Elder Scrolls, I get the feeling that if it's not in the game, it's not there in the fiction. Aside from the serpent world(s) I can't recall any NPC speaking of any location that wasn't an actual place in the game, with maybe a couple exceptions for "this place used to exist but got blow'd up".
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May 3, 2024 20:23
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BGS simply made their regular cities, plopped them across a bunch of planets, and skipped the handcrafted maps and relied on a too short a list of randomly selected POIs.
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May 3, 2024 20:32
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Pinely posted:Starfield could really use a suburban proc gen biome with ruined variants for variety and to make the setting seem more suited to the actual game. It's not a major issue but I do appreciate it when devs can successfully sell the illusion that the scale matches the setting. Like The Outer Worlds did, you mean?
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May 3, 2024 20:54
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Jack B Nimble posted:It's also just a huge narrative/setting problem with the scale. Jemison is habitable world; an entire planet! Where are the other cities!? Why do you need more systems to colonize, you clearly haven't fully inhabited this planet! This is another reason why landing anywhere on any planet is a bad idea to base your game on.
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May 3, 2024 20:55
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Flowing Thot posted:This is another reason why landing anywhere on any planet is a bad idea to base your game on. I stopped landing on random planets like 5 hours into my game when I jumped all the way to edge of the galaxy just to find the same science facility with the same bad guys that I had just found right outside Akila city.
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May 3, 2024 21:18
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Yeah I don't mind compact cities as a gameplay constraint, I can abstract from what NA or Neon looks like to "this would be much larger in reality", but when you start adding random pirate outposts miles apart from your supposed capital city on planets which allow you to land anywhere, it all falls apart and you don't even need 3d maps to notice. They seriously needed lower density settlement PoIs to place on city planets, and to tune the procgen/spawn algorithm differently because it really, really doesn't make any sense at all, in a way that's extremely obvious thanks to how they structured the game around fast traveling to/nearby PoIs on empty planetoids. orcane fucked around with this message at 21:21 on May 3, 2024 |
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May 3, 2024 21:18
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Honestly the most logical way to handle it would be like... "Colonized" planets don't let you land anywhere, there's a specific registered spaceport and you can land there and it's relatively small because it is set up for visitors and guests, the average person isn't zooming off into space on a regular basis. There are cities outside of that but you're not allowed to go there because of... let's say "Terrormorph protocols" where visitors from other planets are required to remain in a separated area because nobody knows how those things spread and we want to avoid an outbreak. You can land anywhere on a shithole nowhere planet but you can't land anywhere on an important planet. Maybe add a second 'backdoor' spaceport to one or two planets you can only access if you have smuggler contacts.
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May 3, 2024 21:22
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Philippe posted:Like The Outer Worlds did, you mean? Kinda, in the sense Monarch and whatever the fish factory was called have a bit of a sprawl. I was actually thinking more like 7 Days to Die, which can procedurally generate adequate urban and suburban environments, albeit ruined because it's a zombie apocalypse. Probably not possible with the engine, but it would go a long way to making Jemison seem less absurd if parts of it were more populated, even if that just means bigger civilian outposts closer together than usual.
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May 3, 2024 21:22
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They could’ve leaned into the limitations of their game with some more work on the storytelling and setting. Like, make these planets extremely hostile. Not garden planets uninhabited for no apparent reason.
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May 3, 2024 21:29
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Alternatively, knowing that they were going to make the same tiny hamlets they've been doing since Morrowind, they could have spent more than 3 minutes on world-building and actrually tried to work out a universe where human society is sparse and scattered, with the implications it has on culture, trade, factions, stories, quests... Single tiny settlement on planets isn't that shocking in itself when instant interstellar travel exists and livable planets are all over the place, but it just really doesn't work out with the dramatic story of human conflict depicted in the military museum.
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May 3, 2024 21:35
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FishMcCool posted:Alternatively, knowing that they were going to make the same tiny hamlets they've been doing since Morrowind, they could have spent more than 3 minutes on world-building and actrually tried to work out a universe where human society is sparse and scattered, with the implications it has on culture, trade, factions, stories, quests... Macross an old anime had the Earth get destroyed, after that they intentionally spread out thinly across the galaxy so they intentionally wouldn't be nearly extinct in one attack ever again. Should of done that here gives an excuse for so many spread out settlements.
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May 3, 2024 21:39
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They confused "you can go anywhere in our games" with "where you go is all there is". If Starfield just had little blurbs about each planet on the map and the major planets had unique skyline style distant terrain, and you understood that were just landing in one particular place on a world, that could have done it. Like, I don't think that Citadel Station is nothing but the handful of areas I explore in mass effect, or that I saw all of LA in Vampire Bloodlines. But BGS took tbe implicit logic of ES and Fallout, that you can view every square inch of a particular place, and ported it over very poorly into an incongruous pseudo modern setting.
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May 3, 2024 21:40
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I should write up my explanation in detail later, but Starfield should have had Synths and the Institute as its galaxy planning plot. It's a great science fiction concept that is a poor fit for Fallout's kind of science fiction, but would be infinitely more interesting in Starfield and on a galactic scale.
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May 3, 2024 23:42
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Old Doggy Bastard posted:I should write up my explanation in detail later, but Starfield should have had Synths and the Institute as its galaxy planning plot. It's a great science fiction concept that is a poor fit for Fallout's kind of science fiction, but would be infinitely more interesting in Starfield and on a galactic scale. Literally anything other than Todd Howard's 2023 A Space Odyssey.
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May 4, 2024 00:16
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Jack B Nimble posted:They confused "you can go anywhere in our games" with "where you go is all there is". If Starfield just had little blurbs about each planet on the map and the major planets had unique skyline style distant terrain, and you understood that were just landing in one particular place on a world, that could have done it. Mass Effect did something like this, and just reading brief descriptions of most planets that hinted at things was far more interesting than any random exploration I did in Starfield. Ironically, the rover portions of ME were also some of the more dreary aspects of the game, but at least they were limited. I think Bioware once talked about trying to do the '1000 explorable worlds' thing but eventually backed off, either because of time or the realization it was a bad idea, and Bethesda should have learned from that.
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May 4, 2024 00:37
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Simiain posted:Count me in the 'intrigued-to-get-back-into-Starfield-but-busy-with-Fallout-4' crowd. Bethesda stays winning either way I suppose. I feel like even though they’re updating the game and pitching missing stuff in it might just make sense to wait until the dlc comes out and see how it plays then.
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May 4, 2024 01:03
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Punished Ape posted:Mass Effect did something like this, and just reading brief descriptions of most planets that hinted at things was far more interesting than any random exploration I did in Starfield. Ironically, the rover portions of ME were also some of the more dreary aspects of the game, but at least they were limited. I think Bioware once talked about trying to do the '1000 explorable worlds' thing but eventually backed off, either because of time or the realization it was a bad idea, and Bethesda should have learned from that. Yeah, that was Andromeda, the hilarious posterchild for "they did it, realized it wasn't fun, and bailed on it" that Starfield didn't learn from quote:But spaceflight and procedurally generated planets were causing some problems. “They were creating planets and they were able to drive around it, and the mechanics of it were there,” said a person who worked on the game. “I think what they were struggling with was that it was never fun. They were never able to do it in a way that’s compelling, where like, ‘OK, now imagine doing this a hundred more times or a thousand more times.’”
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May 4, 2024 01:05
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ImpAtom posted:Honestly the most logical way to handle it would be like... Yeah I actually like this idea - at least for the main settled worlds you can only land in designated spaceports. Hell, when you scan/approach the planet it should look like the settlement spreads over a large area of the planet, then on the ground you basically have a matte of "distant buildings" instead of an invisible wall. Handwave it away as "oh that's where all the plebs live, there's nothing interesting over there". Like when you're in Dubai and look down the coast to see dozens of huge buildings, then realise that's where all the At the moment there's only a handful of listed POIs per planet, but where I think that falls over is that wherever you land you'll still find POIs. Would've worked better if you land at a specific POI that's what you find, but if you land "anywhere" on the planet there's no POIs at all, just resources. Or maybe a couple of small terrain POIs like the geysers, asteroid craters etc, so there's still things to find. Maybe a few small crashed spaceship kinda things. But overall it's incredibly stupid to present the furthest reaches of the galaxy as completely inhospitable and dangerous, but when you go there, it's just the same research labs and mining outposts within a kilometre of each other. Oh and the absolute lunacy of the Temples just existing a few hundred metres from some existing settlement, and nobody has thought to mention it. Ursine Catastrophe posted:Yeah, that was Andromeda, the hilarious posterchild for "they did it, realized it wasn't fun, and bailed on it" that Starfield didn't learn from Also, extreme lol at this.
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May 4, 2024 02:10
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I half suspect the "explore a billion worlds in space" thing is the devs reading too many forums and the internet as a whole. You've absolutely got a hard core of nerds who really want a galactic scale life simulator that they can try and make their forever game. poo poo, this is the entire thing that the Star Citizen grift hinges on. And those people are very loud online, talking about how much they want to be space truckers and spend 8 hours walking between outposts on a desolate moon. Meanwhile the other 99.9% of the game buying public is just happily playing games on their xbox or whatever and isn't hitting forums talking about how much they want to do this weird thing. Eventually the devs get echo chambered into thinking that having a billion procedural worlds for people to walk around on is what will make a hit. See also: people asking for multiplayer fallout. Like, yeah, some people want a co-op Fallout. But the answer wans't FO76. Also see also: how poisoned the Bioware writers got by paying attention to the gigglesquee waifu contingent of their forums.
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May 4, 2024 02:29
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Cyrano4747 posted:Also see also: how poisoned the Bioware writers got by paying attention to the gigglesquee waifu contingent of their forums. The waifu contingent was at least half of BG3's sales, though.
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May 4, 2024 02:37
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Eh, I think multiplayer and ever-larger worlds are broadly appealing to gamers, even if they're not necessarily my thing. They're probably appealing to higher-ups too, both as a hype generator and potential for increased monetization, and that's why they're not killed off early.
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May 4, 2024 03:31
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Cyrano4747 posted:Also see also: how poisoned the Bioware writers got by paying attention to the gigglesquee waifu contingent of their forums. Bioware's writing had been poisoned for a long time before that. Their head writer was on their forums defending how the rapist he wrote and had confess to rape wasn't actually a rapist as far back as 2009. Some of their games just stopped being fun enough and competently-made that it stopped being as easy to overlook how narratively shallow and paper-thin things were. It's an apt comparison for Bethesda right now, though Bethesda's writing has always been far, far worse.
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May 4, 2024 06:46
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I mean it’s not like they hadn’t done it in previous games. The Tribunal(?) expansion for morrowind was just a gated city. Do that for new Atlantis, make it look more urban from space, and the weirdness would go away. It would also make more sense narratively for there to be space pirates on empty/ abandoned planets, while maintaining the same scale they have now.
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May 4, 2024 06:57
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booted up this great game again tonight to try the beta patch and this really sums it up
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May 4, 2024 09:29
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CLAM DOWN posted:booted up this great game again tonight to try the beta patch and this really sums it up Were it not for snek lady, my first guess would have been Star Citizen. 
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May 4, 2024 09:39
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CLAM DOWN posted:booted up this great game again tonight to try the beta patch and this really sums it up This is what life is like when you don't skip a single leg day. Take a seat? No thanks, brought my own
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May 4, 2024 10:58
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FeculentWizardTits posted:This is what life is like when you don't skip a single leg day. Take a seat? No thanks, brought my own I know it's a lot easier when your feet are locked in place like that. Not as impressive.
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May 4, 2024 12:12
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