“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.
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.
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.
Honestly, no judgement on Bethesda here, but it sounds like it’s more about retroactively justifying tech limitations they ran into.
A place can have a barren atmosphere and aesthtic while also having content to find, even if that content is more sparse or minimal, suited to that lonely environment. I think it’s more that they simply created more space than they could reasonably populate without taking more time on the game, so they try to pitch it as a feature.
Again, not a judgement on the worthiness of the game over-all, but more a practical observation that they perhaps bit off more than they could chew in that respect.
A place can have a barren atmosphere and aesthtic while also having content to find, even if that content is more sparse or minimal, suited to that lonely environment
That’s exactly what they’ve done.
A “barren” planet still has stuff. In the 5 minutes or so that I did random exploration I found a colonist hut that was razed by pirates with a hidden chest with like 3k credits, and a random vendor who was going a little nuts for being alone so long. Nothing incredible, but enough to make the place not feel dead on a random frozen moon.
i found a random trader with their alien dog
I just figured they put it there for some modder to let people build their own bases.
When it comes to the barren planets, it just adds a bit of immersion IMO. Nobody is forcing you to visit those rocks, and you probably won’t ever land on most of them, but it’s cool that you can. So to me, it’s not something that has a negative effect on my enjoyment of the game.
Makes sense to wait for a sale though. Mods and updates will no doubt vastly improve the game. Personally, I just play it on gamepass.
I’m the same way. Even just going from the “lore” most planets aren’t going to have colorful interesting cities in it with unique locations and things to do. A lot of the rocks are going to be desolate with nothing on it, because they should be. When you find something of interest in the desolate void of space, it’s gonna be interesting. Every planet having the same formulaic procedurally shaped bar, merchant, and a fetch quest would have people foaming at the mouth about how Bethesda replaced their specific crafted environments with shitty generated ones with no soul.
Ah, I see you’ve played No Man’s Sky, too!
I actually have never even downloaded it! Heard good things post-release, but it never really drew me in.
Yeah, it’s all part of the freedom the game offers for what you want to do. If you want to be a cargo hauler you’ll rarely see a barren planet as you’re delivering to settlements. If you want to be a bounty hunter, you may see them once or twice when a bounty has holed up there, but if you want to be a space prospector, you will need to spend more time exploring and locating resources to set up extraction plants for.all valid methods of interacting with the universe with different needs for the barren planets.
I haven’t played it yet (A second play through of BG3 sounds more appealing right now), but in general for an singleplayer RPG I would prefer a small full setting to an empty large one. If the environment has almost nothing of interest in it, then I’m going to just be glued to the objective marker, which while not a deal breaker, definitely hurts the experience. In a more curated environment I would ignore the objective marker and go off in a random direction. This means my experience is more unique and gives a proper sense of exploration which can make the game feel bigger even though it is technically smaller.
Yout have to factor in the life sim-element of Bethesda RPGs too. You can theoretically become a mining magnate in Starfield using those planets and resource extraction outposts. That content is there for those kind of players. If you just want to do the directed side content, then as you say, you’d just follow the markets and not need to interact with it. Your exploration will be in the “dungeons” looking about for lore and loot.
I wouldn’t shape any of your decision to playor not play on this particular detail. It really has little to no impact on the game whatsoever. There are a lot of really interesting worlds to explore, it’s really not worth the amount of discussion lately.
Not saying this means “this is the game for you”. Just that this one facet shouldn’t enter into your assessment at all, in my opinion.
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.
I haven’t played Starfield, but that sounds like No Man’s Sky when it first released. A few points of interest per planet, nothing else of note to do there, and the entire planet just became a rather boring trip from point A to point B to point C and nothing more.
The difference being that was NMS whole loop at launch. Exploring barren and mostly empty planets is just side content to a lot of directed story and side missions here.
You’re saying that doesn’t describe the current state of No Man’s Sky? The only notable buildings I’ve found are the same 3 tiny cookie-cutter outposts dotted randomly all across most planets. Oh sorry, 4 now if you count the camps from the Interceptor update and happen to be on a dissonant planet.
I feel like it wouldn’t take much effort to do better so that’s sad if Starfield hasn’t.
It’s similar, though the the actual points of interest are way more fleshed out than in NMS and sometimes have unique quests etc.
that would be perfect, maybe a vehicle with scanner and some mining tool so you could analyse and collect few minerals along the way. would be great QOL improvement.
imo the entire game needs a once over to add in a ton of QOL improvements.
I will say, finding a vehicle and not being able to drive it was a bit disappointing. But otherwise, I just wish there were more resources on the barren worlds.
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”.
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.
I kind of think it does apply to modern graphics and game design in the same way. A fast paced action shooter still needs moments where you catch your breath, it’s never just an endless constant flood of enemies. A visually beautiful game still has bits that aren’t particularly interesting or you’d get an overdose of visual information and wouldn’t be able to identify what was important.
Similarly, starfield has a lot of small barren moons that don’t have a lot of resources. They are boring compared to the green worlds (there are tons of these too though, which every repeat of this thread has glossed over), but they still have stuff going for them. I spent my evening last night exploring a smuggler base that I randomly fell into while looking for a place to put an aluminum mine on a barren moon. The night before it was a (very cool) mission on an abandoned mining platform.
However, in the process of going to and from these sites, I definitely felt like I was travelling across a barren, dusty moon. That helped the feel. Both those quests had storylines that were inherently tied to the fact that the setting was a barren, dusty moon, rather than a teeming, thriving planet.
Bottom line, I think this one over-shared article says nothing of importance. If you go to one of these ‘boring’ moons there’s lots to do, just not ‘explore and identify the planetary life’ kind of stuff. you can tell at a glance which planets are more likely to have settlements and things from space, and there’s more of them than any one person can explore, so it really doesn’t matter that there are also a bunch that aren’t like that.
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.
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!
When the astronauts went to the moon, there was nothing there. They certainly weren’t bored.
Because it wasn’t just a rock, but the first time entering another natural body of mass in the universe, apart from our earth. Something that never happened before. In contrast, over a million players have discovered planets in Starfield by now, including all customly made content by Bethesda for the planets.
The astronauts where excited and happy as they achieved a huge step for humanity - somewhere I heard that before - while one could literally only achieve one small step for a human in Starfield.Yeah, and it’s not like the astronauts just put up a flag and left. They took soil samples, set up sensors to measure tectonic activity, etc. Rocks are interesting when you can interact with them.
You mean pointing a laser at a rock for a few seconds until it pops isn’t interesting? /s
OK, then why fucking make them? Aren’t games supposed to be fun?
This whole genre really bugs me, and I’m someone who LOVES space games. The best game in the genre IMO is elite dangerous, because their ship to ship combat is so damn fun to play that I can hop in for a bit and have a blast without having to engage with the other systems that are often painfully boring.
The problem here is that people what the feeling of being explorers and finding new things, but video games inherently can’t provide that. There aren’t computers strong enough to produce thousands or millions of planets that all have genuinely interesting features on them that are worth exploring for. “Exploration” in current space Sims is basically “stick your name on something someone else hasn’t already stuck their name on, maybe grab some resources from it, and leave.” That gets dull very fast.
Developers COULD choose instead to make a couple of good, big planets that are interesting and full of actually good content. They could give you a reason to explore beyond “look other planets cool.”
If you made 1000 planets and only 10 of them are at all interesting, and your game is centered on exploring other planets and not really focussed on much else, you’ve made a boring game.
Elite dangerous space combat is literally the most lackluster and boring space combat I have ever engaged in. It’s such a slog.
I find combat where you have less control (weak strafing) and more maneuvering to be more interesting. That said, I think Microsoft allegiance probably did 6dof in space combat the best.
/Sidenote
The game isn’t centered on exploring other planets, though. Have you played the game?
The article quotes Todd Howard as saying a design goal was providing the player with a feeling of being an explorer.
There aren’t computers strong enough to produce thousands or millions of planets that all have genuinely interesting features on them that are worth exploring for.
I don’t think there is an infinite amount of “genuinely interesting features” so it’s hard to imagine we’ll ever get a game with this.
So just wait for mods, then. Got it.
(I really do want to play this game, I like Bethesda games. But there are always inevitable shortcomings, which modders will fix.) Also by then perhaps it will be cheaper.
At least if a modder picks a random spot for their content it’s unlikely to conflict with any other mods.
I want to like Bethesda games. I liked fallout 3 a lot and their doom games, which is different i guess. But man, i’m not a trash collector that collects trinkets. It’s not enjoyable to me. It doesn’t matter where the setting is. And the fact that the characters still look like the game is made in 2010, with the same shitty zoomed in dialogue and awkward ass eye contact is just driving me away. This isn’t some indie company that want to make thir dream game, this is Bethesda that wants to make a 80 dollar game with as little effort as humanly possible.
Bethesda was only the publisher for Doom, Id software were the developers.
Yeah, I’m rather bored with the wide-but-shallow approach Bethesda games take. Tons of geography with maybe 20% filled with things of consequence. I am uninterested in collecting 42,000 wheels of cheese or finding some random space hobo on a planet.
It really just feels like Bethesda needs to just build world so we can populate them however we choose. They know the public and modders like their framework so they create settings. Fantasy, Nuclear Wasteland, Space. They know modders keep games alive.
It’s not a bug. It’s a feature.
What’s that quote from originally? I’ve always assumed it was Todd but now that I think about it I’ve never seen anything that would prove it, I supposed I’ve always just associated it with bethesda games lol.
It’s a running joke in programming
It’s just a general software development joke. Eventually your customers will rely on that bug, because thats how it works right? So you can´t fix it later as it would break workflows thus that bug becomes a feature.
It’s probably from the 60’s or 70’s
I’m getting no mans sky release flashbacks. Hopefully they keep working on it like the no mans sky team did
I guess that depends on the amount of copies sold and the ‘refund ratio’.
If both are within acceptable parameters, they won’t do anything. Just leave it to the modding community to fix whatever needs fixing. They already have your money, don’t they…
It’s the Bethesda way.
I really don’t think it’s anything like that.
It’s a design decision, in the sense a bit like elite dangerous where the planet generation is realistic, as far as we know, even at the expense of being boring.
Remember when Sean Murray said prior to NMS launch that it was part of their vision for you to be alone in a vast uncharted universe with nowhere to call a home? That was code for, “we don’t have multiplayer or basebuilding, and there’s not really anything interesting enough for you to stay there long term”.
Give Starfield a few years, they’ll figure out what to do with those planets.
The modders will, if nothing else
If it’s "dull on purpose, " Modders are the only way anything is gonna happen.
It’s very strand-like in that sense.
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.
It’s a Bethesda game, albeit on a larger sci-fi setting. If you enjoyed Elder Scrolls of their Fallouts you’ll be right at home.
That’s mean the entire game is also dull and boring combined with Beth’s mediocre story writing it’s should not cost more than a sack of potatoes
This is getting a lot of flak, but I mostly agree. I have enjoyed the exploration of random planets as a pleasant aside to quests. Yes, they’re dull. It’s a lot of scanning flora and fauna, if they exist. Wandering slowly around.
But in that sense, it’s actually one of the most immersive activities in the whole damn game. If Starfield has an issue with anything, it’s immersion.
One thing I didn’t like about NMS, frankly, is that every planet seems to be teeming with life. It makes that life feel uninteresting when you find it, because there is no yin to the yang.
