Absolutely makes sense for most planets to be rather barren. What I found a bit disappointing so far - keeping in mind I started yesterday and I’m only a few hours in - is how mostly when you land on a planet there is a key point of interest (an outpost, a mining facility, a city etc) at a landing site and then immediately a whole lot of randomly generated nothing around it. No roads or paths, NPCs, houses etc. I haven’t really been to a place where I got that Skyrim feeling of going out into the wilderness and finding interesting things. I hope that later on there are at least a few areas with more substantial exploration. Still enjoying the game though.
It could really benefit from some sort of vehicle as well.
I land on a planet, sprint 300m to the first point of interest, 900m to the next, 700m to the next etc. and most of it is just sprinting through nothing…
Feels like it’s just wasting my time, as there is literally nothing in between. I think a little hover bike would be a great addition to the game.
Absolutely makes sense for most planets to be rather barren.
This idea is something I’ve heard a lot about Starfield and is why I don’t think I’ll pick it up, at least until a big sale. To me, it seems like they made a fair number of design decisions around what “makes sense” rather than what’s fun.
I haven’t played Starfield yet. That being said, I think I will enjoy most planets being rather dull (as long as you still occasionally have reason to go there). I very much love the stance of “When everything/everyone is remarkable, nothing/noone is.” One of the bigger reasons (aside the gameplay usually not being quite to my liking) why I don’t play MMOs anymore is, because about every MMO culminates in 80% of the people wearing “the armor of fabled legends” and being “Slayer of Demonlord and Demigod Sckholzhlak”.
there are definitely dull planets, but there are also planets i have explored just for the hell of it and found a lot of cool stuff, like a facility run entirely by robots and the robots tell me not to interfere with their work or i will die
Mhmm, I played a couple dozen hours now and I like the game a lot!
I very much love the stance of “When everything/everyone is remarkable, nothing/noone is.”
Counterpoint: it doesn’t make everything/everyone unremarkable, it just raises the standard and the bar for what remarkable is. Imagine using that argument for modern graphics, game design, etc, and that you want things to be lackluster because it really highlights the occasional times that they aren’t.
Fair point. I would agree to say there should be a healthy middle ground. I think coming across theme park-like spectacle around every corner would remove a lot of immersion and most authenticity (specifically trying not to default to “realism” because then we’d specifically want 99,999% of areas to be lifeless rock) not only from Starfield but many many games. Fallout, Elder Scrolls, Red Dead Redemption and the Metal Gear series would be incredibly different games, if it was just from one action sequence to another and then a beautiful story cutscene immediately and with only loading screens separating them from each other.
I guess I’m trying to say that immersion into and attachment to a game is increased if you give opportunity for (or sometimes force) the player to calm down. Red Dead 2, for example, does this masterfully by its generally slow and deliberate pace for most actions (cooking steak by actually making you hold the meat over fire for a couple seconds, making you walk/ride for long passages to get somewhere even during missions, etc.) and by sprinkling in quite a number of relaxing quests, like watching a movie with your girlfriend, in a game that’s mainly known for shooty tooty cowboy action.
To wrap up that wall of text, I guess I’ll see if the ratio of interesting tidbit for every dull landscape is too low for me in Starfield once I get my hands on it c:
Update: Game’s good, if your expectation was “Space game made by Bethesda”. I like it and am very happy with the amount of barren planets for every lush world. Sure, they lack the “discover flora and fauna” activities but there’s still plenty fun stuff to do.
“Dull on Purpose” is a hell of a box quote. Do you think that will be on the Game of the Year edition?
I hope it becomes the game’s unofficial slogan.
Good to know. I’m hoping to hear more about the game from players before deciding to dive into this.
Granted, I’m only like five of the twelve hours in I’m supposed to be before the game starts getting good, but my god they made some baffling design choices here. Possibly the most egregious is the fact that every skill comes with leveling requirements - for example, the worst offender I’ve seen is the oxygen (stamina) skill requiring you to completely exhaust your meter 20 times before you can put a second point in. (Worth noting, ‘completely exhaust’ in this context means deplete both the regular O2 meter and max out the CO2 meter, which depletes more slowly than the O2 refills) The only way to reliably and safely do this, considering you only really need stamina in short bursts when playing normally, is to literally just run fucking laps. Bad and boring, to the point that I will say, without a hint of sarcasm, that the person responsible for making it this way should be moved off the team. I cannot fathom how that person arrived at the conclusion that doing chores was somehow the most exciting and innovative way to spice up FO4’s perk system, because that’s all it is underneath, and it is an aggressive waste of time.
