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Daggerfall in SPAAACE - Starfield

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silentorphan said:
:???: The Outer Worlds, as done by Bethesda this time?
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Ford Prefect said:
It's closer, conceptually speaking, to No Man's Sky.
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The branching line where Obsidian was around the ideas WAS very clear and theres a lot of cross pollinated DNA that invokes images of NMS and Star Citizen amd Destiny.

It took NMS six years to smooth out the core premises to deliver on the ideas it was selling, and that makes me skeptical of this games ambition. We are in the world of post Cyberpunk and No Mans Sky, we know whats blocking those ideas.
 
Fernandel said:
Skyrim, for all that it was eurojank as fuck without being euro, was incredibly ambitious and had incredibly coherent art direction and striking aesthetics. You can see it in the vistas and every horizon you look to.

If Starfield is similarly consistent -- and I certainly hope it will be -- then it will its audience even if it as jank as we expect it to be from a Bethesda title.
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Yeah, like on the one hand the bit about being able to land anywhere on any world, out of 1000 possible worlds, makes me roll my eyes because realistically it's gonna be 20-50 tops planets that are carefully crafted and cool and well designed and then 980-950 planets that are a mix of a few variables (biomes/orbits/tidally locked/whatever) with some scattered pre-fab bases with a handful of pirates and some loot and neat lore scraps.

Basically, a very big Mass Effect 1. Big, empty, cool ideas, jank.

But on the other hand, Big Mass Effect 1 sounds pretty cool? Even if there's only 50 planets worth visiting, I hope those 50 would be neat and interesting and jam packed with story and things to do, and if I have to scrape up some Matriarch Writings Codex Entries resources on the fourth icy moon today, eh it might be worth it?
 
Why 1000 planets? Why not 10 planets? This is why I really get irked with Bethesda and the Big Numbers. 10 planets, hell, even FIVE planets, that are detailed with numerous biomes are not only far more manageable but also far more memorable.
 
I'd go with ten systems. Ten planets doesn't leave you with that much room once Sol is done.
 
LordInsane said:
I'd go with ten systems. Ten planets doesn't leave you with that much room once Sol is done.
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That's variable, yeah? You can put ten Fallout 4s or ten Skyrims on a single planet. But of course flying is a big part of it so I expect landing on moons and the odd Space Hulks to fight space raiders.

One good thing is the background options. Having parents means they're alive and you can visit them but give 10% of all earnings to them, and you can even start off owning a home but be 50k Space Credits in debt. I cannot belive I am looking forward to the return of Daggerfall banks.

Where the power armor tho. There is no way there's no power armor.
 
Fernandel said:
The other main concern is that the game is being made with a massive amount of crunch, and if I am being honest, I have to assume that this is the case as with FO76.
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Eeegh. That all but guarantees it'll be a buggy mess at launch (just as FO76 was), even ignoring the obvious moral objections. "Crunch" is counterproductive; overworked people do bad work, simple as that.
 
Also, something I didn't see but hope for is dynamic boarding operations. if I can't go over the rail with a brace of plasma pistols it's not really naval combat now is it?
 
Hykal94 said:
Why 1000 planets? Why not 10 planets? This is why I really get irked with Bethesda and the Big Numbers. 10 planets, hell, even FIVE planets, that are detailed with numerous biomes are not only far more manageable but also far more memorable.
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If you're making a game about space exploration putting everything there could possibly be on five or ten planets is pretty ... well it's not exactly space exploration lol

I understand being sceptical but there is something to be said about a game where you can go out into the galaxy and not know what you're going to find. Or maybe find nothing, which is a thing that can happen when you're exploring and that's not necessarily a bad thing. You can go literal lightyears and maybe find something, and if you find something cool you can let your friends know, and they can follow in your footsteps. Or maybe you hear about something and you go off an a journey based on that information.

I know that density is the byword for good open world design, but this is a game about space. Not every game set in space needs to about scale and scope, but this one is.
 
Hykal94 said:
Why 1000 planets? Why not 10 planets?
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Someone high up on the dev team got real hard for daggerfall nostalgia and wanted to make it IN SPACE, that's why.

... dunno if I'm here for it (I still haven't played anything bethesda post oblivion, despite owning both skyrim and one fallout >2 or another), but I'm not immediately opposed to Daggerfall IN SPACE, either. If they let you (or your spaceship!) get laser eyes at some point, I might actually become interested. I will also accept giant robots of some sort, but only if they're acceptably chonky.
 
Frumple said:
Someone high up on the dev team got real hard for daggerfall nostalgia and wanted to make it IN SPACE, that's why.

... dunno if I'm here for it (I still haven't played anything bethesda post oblivion, despite owning both skyrim and one fallout >2 or another), but I'm not immediately opposed to Daggerfall IN SPACE, either. If they let you (or your spaceship!) get laser eyes at some point, I might actually become interested. I will also accept giant robots of some sort, but only if they're acceptably chonky.
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It may even be Todd Howard himself. Daggerfall was the third Bethesda game he worked on, and the first that wasn't of an external IP (plus, he's already been able to indulge in Terminator Future Shock/Skynet nostalgia through Fallout).
 
Ford Prefect said:
If you're making a game about space exploration putting everything there could possibly be on five or ten planets is pretty ... well it's not exactly space exploration lol
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You can make an entire space exploration game centered around just a single solar system. Several games have done just that.

There's no reason Starfield couldn't have stuck to, say, a dozen systems if each system was jammed full of a generous amount of planets, moons, stations, etc. 1,000 systems might be an impressive number for marketing, but how much of that is going to be interesting exploration content?
 
Derpmind said:
There's no reason Starfield couldn't have stuck to, say, a dozen systems if each system was jammed full of a generous amount of planets, moons, stations, etc. 1,000 systems might be an impressive number for marketing, but how much of that is going to be interesting exploration content?
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I don't know. I guess we'll have to go and find out!
 
Frumple said:
Someone high up on the dev team got real hard for daggerfall nostalgia and wanted to make it IN SPACE, that's why.

... dunno if I'm here for it (I still haven't played anything bethesda post oblivion, despite owning both skyrim and one fallout >2 or another), but I'm not immediately opposed to Daggerfall IN SPACE, either. If they let you (or your spaceship!) get laser eyes at some point, I might actually become interested. I will also accept giant robots of some sort, but only if they're acceptably chonky.
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Todd pulling in DF influences is something I'm excited for because man, Daggerfall Unity is so fun.

Ford Prefect said:
I understand being sceptical but there is something to be said about a game where you can go out into the galaxy and not know what you're going to find. Or maybe find nothing, which is a thing that can happen when you're exploring and that's not necessarily a bad thing. You can go literal lightyears and maybe find something, and if you find something cool you can let your friends know, and they can follow in your footsteps. Or maybe you hear about something and you go off an a journey based on that information.
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It took FromSoft since the end of Dark Souls 3 to make Elden Ring and nothing in that game was pregen. I sincerely doubt that even with the best random generator algorithm they'd even make a single planet as good as Lindsell. Hell, even handcrafted I doubt they could do it.

The 1000 planets thing is basically a red flag about shallow puddles. Sure, maybe this game could go Big Scale but does it need to be 1000 planets big? Do they have enough assets to make each of those planets unique?

The game that actually nails down random gen worlds is actually Minecraft and they've been working on that for a decade.
 
Hykal94 said:
It took FromSoft since the end of Dark Souls 3 to make Elden Ring and nothing in that game was pregen. I sincerely doubt that even with the best random generator algorithm they'd even make a single planet as good as Lindsell. Hell, even handcrafted I doubt they could do it.
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And? Almost no game world of any size is as good as anything in Elden Ring. That's not the necessary standard for you to have fun with a video game.

Frankly, the shallowness or depth of a given planet in a game of this scale doesn't necessarily matter. Your experience of a game about space exploration is not found by looking at your boots on the ground.
 
Obviously I can't speak for everyone who plays video games, or likes science fiction. But speaking personally, in a game like this, I don't really care about the relative density and distribution of programmatic game content. To me, the most compelling image in that reveal trailer was the spaceship lifting off from the cycling surfaces of a number of entirely different planets. That, to me, is the most important thing for a game about space exploration.

You aren't necessarily going to find anything on an airless ball of ice orbiting 18AU from Gliese 1. But do you need to? Do you really need to find something to make that journey meaningful to you? Do you need Todd to tell you that this place that you picked to be your destination is important? Isn't it important because you picked it?

There have been plenty of space games in the past, and a majority of them have essentially been empty volume. But that's the joy of it, because it's set in space.
 
I think one factor that's being overlooked in the discussion is the confirmed (and entirely unsurprising) existence of modding support.

It's true that there's no way that Bethesda is going to make significant content for even a tenth of those planets. But that just means they're leaving them open for modders to work their magic. Which means that Starfield has even more potential then Skyrim to act as a basis for some incredible quantity and quality of player created content.

Furthermore, just because all 1000 planets won't receive anywhere close to substantive development doesn't mean there can't be areas that are developed and compelling. If we receive a Skyrim's worth of content (however the hell you measure that lol) and a massive blank canvas for modders to work off of then I would call that a resounding win.
 
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Dear Gods, y'all. At least let the game come out before you start lambasting it for the grave 'crime' of being a Bethesda game.
 
Ford Prefect said:
And? Almost no game world of any size is as good as anything in Elden Ring. That's not the necessary standard for you to have fun with a video game.
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It is, to me. The shallowness does matter. You could still have the take off of a ship and landing on the ship but if the planet is as desolate and with empty volume, then it is to me, completely meaningless. The joy of it 'being in space' is nice and all, but if it devoid of meaningful content, of cool things you can do. And there's some irony to this statement, as if Elden Ring will not be the standard open world games will be compared to (thus Breath of the Wild's delay to next year).

Space exploration is not exploration if it doesn't have cool things, much like how Skyrim would not be fun if you didn't bump into cool things, like going into a bandit cave and suddenly finding yourself in a vast Dwarven city. I simply do not comprehend this mindset, this 1000 planets is a good thing, but not the content of those 1000 planets.

You want to look what a vast sprawling world with pregen content looks like? Look at vanilla Daggerfall, and tell me if that world the size of Great Britain is anywhere as good as its sequels.

Astrid Fornhoff said:
Dear Gods, y'all. At least let the game come out before you start lambasting it for the grave 'crime' of being a Bethesda game.
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No one is doing that, Astrid.
 
"mods will fix this" is in theory a much stronger argument for accepting the world generation in this game, as in theory and with some coordination between modders (i.e. some way to find space that doesn't have another mod for it on the Nexus), you could actually have a bunch of worlds filled with crafted content. If downloading the thousand mods required didn't collapse your game into a digital singularity.
 
Somebody mentioned No Man's Sky before; I've played that, and it really is fun to just explore procedurally generated planets. And it's really the only way to make a large, non-simple environment to explore. Handmade content is generally better on a one-to-one basis, true; but it's inherently limited in quantity, and once you've seen it, you've seen it.
 
Ford Prefect said:
Space is cool.
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Space IS cool. Landing on the samey looking planet for the 12th time isn't, fighting the samey monsters/bandits, getting the samey rewards, meeting the same Preston Garvey settlers, isn't. That is my worry, and I don't think that is an unreasonable worry. To just discard the rest of my post like that, to me, is a little bit frustrating.

Like I made that Fallout 76 thread, bright eyed, optimistic, so sorry I'm being a little bit cynical, what with the news that just came out that Bethesda abused their workers.
 
Hykal94 said:
Space IS cool. Landing on the samey looking planet for the 12th time isn't, fighting the samey monsters/bandits, getting the samey rewards, meeting the same Preston Garvey settlers, isn't. That is my worry, and I don't think that is an unreasonable worry. To just discard the rest of my post like that, to me, is a little bit frustrating.
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I just think you're being shortsighted. But like, if you don't want to play it you don't have to play it.
 
Ford Prefect said:
I just think you're being shortsighted. But like, if you don't want to play it you don't have to play it.
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Shortsighted? I don't know man, that abuse really put me off and really making me looking at this game with twice the intensity. I'm sorry for bullying Poor Bethesda, the company that reaps millions for re-releasing Skyrim five times in a row without fixing their bugs the and can't pay their beta testers their due. How mean of me!

I think there's absolutely nothing wrong with being apprehensive for the next big Bethesda open world game. You dismissing these concerns, to me, is far more shortsighted and comes off as very fanboyish.
 
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