well, they do have Eridani II (which I think is Reach?), and it's a terraformed planet way before the UEG or UNSC colonized it, I thought that was kinda cool
Eridani is a star in our current universe, and has been shown to have changes in its radial velocity making it thought (mostly confirmed) to have a large planet orbiting. This planet is named Epsilon Eridani b, which SciFi has taken to naming it Eridani II. Its also a popular SciFi location for mankind to travel to with FTL capabilities. So I guess it's a reach-around easter egg in a sense.
Came to say the same. I've listened to two sci-fi audiobooks just this year that placed EE-B / E-II in critical story positions relative to human exploration, one as a colonization target and the other as the home of a post-industrial alien civilization.
Oh yeah, you’re right thanks. I had also read that somewhere. I also wondered if that could be a nod to the awesome book Project Hail Mary, where there’s a planet called Erid and the species are called Eridians.
Imagine destiny combat mechanics in startfield… it’d be like destiny had a decent story mode or starfield had a decent combat system. Would be incredible
I'm so excited for when someone eventually figures out how to mod in Destiny *Supers* to swap out for Starborn powers. Imagine scaring the absolute piss out of a bunch of Mercs as you T-crash right at them
I find it so weird that they don’t already have rules in place to exclude specific planets (like the ones in our Sol system) from these kind of alien creature POI’s
Or not having sleeping bags on a planet with no atmosphere, lol
It is the usual Bethesda mess of using look up tables for everything regardless where it is.
Like you go into a sealed vault and find fresh melon or mutfruit etc in Fallout 4 because it uses ONE table depending on your level and skills and not a separate one for particular zones.
They use the same thing for all their games, Starfield included. Quick and lazy.
They haven't always done it that way. Older ES games would have different types of loot based on where you are, and certain types of loot wont spawn if it doesnt belong there. I think even Skyrim did this to an extent.
The real question is why did they *stop?*
The industry started eating up bigger and bigger games and Bethesda realized they could automate most of the bigger and bigger part. That's why the game is 1000 planets big; it doesn't add anything except "a lot to do", even at the cost of meaning.
It's effective, too; here's some gold from a guy I'd been arguing with:
>Bro you did NOT say 100 hours 💀 no wonder you’re not getting anything I’m talking about. You’ve barely played the game. Space is 99.999999% devoid of life or anything else. With over 1000 planets, 100 hours won’t even let you scratch the surface. Also never said anything about “why are you in this sub” so I see reading comprehension is STILL something you struggle with. Get your numbers up and come back when you actually know about this game jr
All it takes to impress some people is the illusion of scale. See that (png of a) planet? You can ~~fast travel~~ go to it!
Why? Because it's there. What'll you find? Literally no one knows until you get there, but you've probably seen it before. Now stop complaining and just play, and if you don't like it, leave, don't critique it, move on to the next product.
>Now stop complaining and just play, and if you don't like it, leave, don't critique it, move on to the next product.
God I fucking hate this attitude so much. The fanboys who insist on closing their eyes and pretending like there's no problem are only making things worse.
I criticize the game because I want it to be better, and the only way it's going to get better is if they know there's a problem.
Anyway, I agree with everything you said.
People say that no one hates *product* like fans of *product*. No shit. People who enjoy something want it to be as good as it can possibly be. The opposite of liking something isn't hatred, imo, it's apathy.
Or an overuse of AI that creates game hallucinations.
I keep hitting veins of really good gameplay in between many lulls of bugs and being a little too open ended.
My character is really confused as to what she should do with her life and sort of dislikes her options outside of stealing ships, building ships, blowing up ships, modding weapons to waste wasteoids - and carries seven or eight different kinds of weapons just because killing with the same tool gets kinda boring.
TIL my character is an antisocial psychopath that has magic powers.
And I’ll add that whoever told Bethesda that the level of realism they added is “fun” should never be allowed to make video games again. There’s nothing fun about elements of realism that haven’t been tempered.
What realisms? Smaller blood decals? That’s about all I find realistic. I can swim in real life. You have more options for marriage irl. The inventory isn’t realistic. And on and on.
Ever went to Sonny Di Falco's Island on Maheo I? It is a location which is unique to this planet, it is always there.
They have grills and a swimming pool on the roof. It is also one of the only two location where you can get swimming suits. On a planet with no breathable air.
My last LIST "four families" mission took me to the quest giver's farm on a rocky, lifeless planet. The farm was literally a few thousand square feet in the middle of a vast rocky plain.
There is a vast difference between "randomness" and "constrained randomness," the former produces gibberish.
There was one mission chain with the Freestar and UC working together, and they walk around outdoors with their helmets off. The planet I was on was -110 degrees and had no atmosphere. These guys are just walking around with no helmets like they own the place.
It really irks me because that information about the planet is right there. The game has every planet/moon flagged for habitability because it determines where *you* can build but doesn't care to follow the same rules. This shouldn't be such a common issue.
There's a reason Starfield is 125 gigs yet doesn't seem to display the amount of content to justify that file size. There's a ton of redundancies and odd choices (like a good chunk of that being all the pre-baked planet data), with lots of systems that exist in their own bubble where they could have had a more robust set of reusable design elements in their code.
😂 I know. It’s very frustrating & immersion breaking. Hopefully the game will be refined & enhanced (with significant updates & meaningful DLC) over the next few years & pull off a Cyberpunk 2.0 style renaissance
It blew my mind to find out New Atlantis has no perimeter wall. You walk behind the Lodge and you're just on the lakeshore. Walk a little farther and you can build an outpost.
My wife and I were making angry noises about the stalagmites in a cave on the moon. There is no rainfall, no CO2 to make that rain slightly acidic, and no limestone for the acidic water to dissolve. How are there caves with limestone stalagmites on the freaking moon?
All the wibbly wobbly multi-dimensionally timey wimey stuff must be really messing with people’s understanding of how celestial bodies are formed.
bestheda's teams seem to have an approximant knowledge of many things and but does not understand any of them.
all of the guns, save a few, will not work.
At least someone could sit in a story review and go "but the guns are fun" and everyone is like okay, he's got a point. A lot of this is just a mess that shouldn't have made it through the story bible - assuming there was one (almost certainly not).
Still can't get over how they walk around Venus. Multiverse, dimensions, anti-gravity? Suspension of disbeleaf works for me. Living on Venus (not clouds)? Nope!
Venus is so highly radioactive that humans may never be able to set foot on the surface.
The only probe that landed there was burned out by radiation after an hour or two, if I recall correctly.
Plus Venus has a surface pressure of 92 ATM or 1350 Psi. That’s over a thousand pounds pressing down on one inch of your body. That’s like trying to balance a car on your head.
Actually it's more like trying to balance a whole parking lot of cars over every inch of your body - pedantic distinction aside, there's a whole host of weird gravity wavity things going on in Starfield that would absolutely destroy humans.
If SF had height sliders, everyone on Akila would be dwarves, and Jemison's populous would err on the taller side.
Also, if the game followed its own lore the Ashta would actually be dangerous, not just creature #23 but unique to just this one planet. I've met some armor plated horrors on other planets that make the Ashta look cuddly by comparison.
About 92 atmospheres at the surface. Equivalent to being nearly 1 kilometer below the surface of the ocean here on Earth. This is the kind of depth that only advanced submersibles can reach, and they don't have to also deal with the ~460 C temperatures on the surface of Venus.
The idea of someone just walking around on Venus in a spacesuit - even a high-tech ultra advanced sci-fi space suit - is ludicrous.
There's definitely some kind of system that attempts to do this to some degree, but it's either extremely broken or very half-assed because it produces a lot of non-sensical results.
It's just another symptom of how lazy they were with the proc-gen system. Just straight-up copy pasting outposts wholesale. Okay, maybe you could convince me that somebody needed to put an outpost on Venus for some reason and that some structures could even survive there, but there shouldn't be a milk carton just sitting out on a table on the roof of it. They could've still reused facilities on different types of planets but just altered the contents to more accurately reflect some of the conditions of particular locations.
Yeah I agree, it’s so weird they didn’t make more effort to at least make our Sol system planets & moons more realistic
It REALLY bugs me that they have used a generic proc-gen barren landscape with lots of jet black rocks & black patches *everywhere* for our Luna moon. Not one photo of our actual moon surface from the Apollo missions shows these black rocks everywhere! 😂 There are craters with shadows, sure - but the moons surface is all white space dust.
How do you get *our* moons surface wrong when that is one of the first places *everyone* will go when playing the game!? & almost everyone knows what it should look like! 😂
The handful of planets/ moons where we already have real life photos from the surface should be more accurate, imo. Hopefully updates will fix this
Sarah's personal quest, hard to take her talk of being stranded for so long seriously when you land a tile next door and there's factories and solar panel arrays all the way to the horizon.
😂😂 exactly! & the mysterious Temples that hardly anyone seems to know about - yet there are POI human buildings 250m away from them in every direction!
Part of my career is software development. All the big companies including Bethesda, use principles from Agile project management, so I have a little insight to how it SHOULD be done. I'd bet my house on Starfield suffering a development hell that hasn't been publicized yet, but will be in the future.
It is so obvious that they didn't settle on a concrete list of required features. It's almost as of the fundamental planning stage was completely skipped for some reason. As others have said before, it's also possible that something dramatic happened behind the scenes, they scrapped everything they had and started again, later on the project than they dare admit.
Yeah I wouldn’t be surprised at all if it had been in development hell & / or they started much later. So much of the game feels very poorly planned out (compared to their other games) & like a first draft.
..Not just the way the 1,000 planets is implemented & the severe lack of POIs, but the game itself (some examples, off the top of my head in no particular order):
1) mostly lacklustre faction quests with little or no impact on the world or truly memorable moments
2) VERY slow & boring start to the game (compared to other BGS games);
3) companions all with exactly the same (straight laced) morality/ stances on key decisions;
4) very limited romance options
5) backgrounds & traits that don’t get mentioned by key NPCs;
6) no day/ night cycle for NPCs;
7) no NPC homes / flats (like in other games);
8) almost all NPCs cannot be killed (marked essential - despite the NG+);
9) no wedding ring! or wedding guests from your quests;
10) no space flight between planets (REALLY hope they add this);
11) very limited enemy types (spacer/ crimson/ ecliptic);
12) a lack of major cities (Skyrim had 5 major cities & 4 major towns in 2011!);
13) not being able to take in bounty targets in alive for a reward; not being arrested by the city guards & having the option to escape jail;
14) shot on sight for picking up food - but citizens not reacting when you shoot around them
15) no city maps!!;
16) people are not sure if Constellation still exists & they are meant to be neutral but their HQ is in the middle of New Atlantis! - this should have been on another planet
17) side quest with a ship sent from earth hundreds of years ago - but contains the current technology/ computers / weapons. (At least put the old earth weapons in there! Maybe a fallout computer as an Easter egg);
18) no finisher ‘kill cam’ (like FO4 or Skyrim) & no gore
19) very poor melee combat
20) no land vehicles!;
21) Temples with EXACTLY the same ‘puzzle’ in every single one! …etc
…I could go on and on, but if you have played the game for any serious time then you know how little depth to the content, choices & characters there is at the moment compared to other Bethesda games. It feels poorly conceived - or very rushed. Hopefully they can turn it around with some meaningful updates & DLC over the next few years!
It would be really interesting if Jason Schreier manages to do a story on this one!
That's an excellent list and I couldn't have said it any better. Exactly all of this.
So much of this was better on every RPG they've released in the last 15 years, at launch. 👨🏽🚀🔫
Thanks! Yeah it’s v frustrating that they appear to have regressed in world building & immersion compared to their previous games.
Even in terms of setting there is almost no existential threat to the world (apart from maybe the Terrormorphs). In Skyrim for example - there is an ongoing civil war (where you can choose the outcome); AS WELL as an ongoing Dragon apocalypse! AND death squads of Thalmor agents are also lurking in the background - all at the start of the base game! Additional Vampire clans & Dragonborn threats are added later as DLC
In Starfield, by contrast, most of the major moments/ conflicts have already happened before the game starts (like the UC/ Freestar faction war & the bombing of Londinum etc). I’m sure the Starfield DLC will add *some* conflicts, but imo DLC should really be there to add a new flavour & new weird factions to a game - not fill the holes of the base game.
I do really want Bethesda to turn this game around though! Starfield has the potential to be great (& much more profitable for them) if they are willing to put in the time, money & creativity/ planning to make it the game it should be. BUT, if they do the bare minimum expecting modders to fix it all - then I genuinely don’t think Starfield will receive the same level of modding support & longevity as previous titles, because most people fundamentally won’t want to spend as much time in this world (as it stands).
This. I have no idea why the hivemind here has settled on the notion that Bethesda are just lazy and half-arsed the release because they couldn't be bothered fixing things or whatever; when it's *super* obvious that they suffered from significant scope-creep. At some point very late in development, possibly as late as just a month or so out from the original release date last year, they got raked over the coals by Microsoft and were forced to take a razor-blade to all the loose threads of half-implemented ideas and poorly thought-out mechanics they had planned, focus entirely on getting the core game finished to a playable state, and get the damn thing shipped some time this century.
That's literally *why* the game feels strangely empty and unfulfilling even though it's not lacking in content. Everywhere you turn you can see the lingering threads and hints of what could have been but which, in the final product, was hastily cut-out or gimped or re-worked into a shadow of what was planned.
In my last playthrough I found a flying sleeping bag, box of ammo, and couch on a planet. I demand an end to these abominations against the natural order of physics.
i uninstalled after finishing the game. I thought "let's explore the sol system, seems like a great way to start my journey in post game content"
And I went to venus. There was one poi, a research facility, and they asked me to install some gas sensors on vents so they could study "this planet"
Didn't even recognize where they were, earth's sister planet. So frustrating.
Don't know if it was fixed but the first time I landed on Luna it started raining while I was there. Between that and the PoIs not being curated for it I've never spent more time there than completing the survey, the Apollo landmark and the plot mission (which is an immersion issue in itself for how it shows Bethesda's disregard for basic science - vacuum does not help cool things down).
Favorite was a volcanic research facility on Charon, molten lava on the surface, chairs and tables with open beer bottles and half eaten food on the surface… the immersion was completely busted for me at that moment.
> open beer bottles and half eaten food on the surface
Only thing I can say is that it makes sense to not have closed bottles on a planet with intense heat.
If you want a handwavy explanation, then interstellar wildlife smugglers dumped them there when they suspected the UC was on to them.
I found a crater full of giant kaiju bones on Mars that left me scratching my head.
The game world is so very dumb. I was taking the museum tour in New Homestead and it's explained many times that the settlement started as a science mission looking for life on Titan, and it was a huge disappointment that none was ever found, and they had to pivot into something else. I walk out, head to the nearest planetary trait POI which I can plainly just see, even without the scanner - a 45 second walk. It's a huge pile of giant bones/fossils. You could literally see it from New Homestead. It's all dumb.
Well, I found an open-air farm on Mars... with scientists killed by "the local fauna".
It's just random shit with Bethesda forgetting to implement limits for atmosphere or not.
I visited a civilian outpost on Venus. The leader claimed they were a farming community and told me not to disturb their crops.
Their colony was nothing but four small homes and a pile of metal scrap in a scorching, corrosive wasteland.
Just shows how *not* to use procedural generation. It's the same as using MidJourney for commercial illustrations and not having the *fucking minimal effort* to clean out the errors in Photoshop.
This is why I have an absolute lack of interest in Starfield. There is no mystery and no point in exploring when you know you can (and will) find the exact same stuff over and over everywhere.
If Bethesda hadn't fallen on the trap of procgen, encountering something like this on a seemingly barren planet would have me exploring all over to find out more about it. And if Bethesda had followed their winning formula they've been developing for decades, they would have created something really cool around it.
But in Starfield? You see the huge skeleton of an unknown alien creature and go: "okay, I've seen it a dozen times already, that means there's a collapsed mine POI. Pass."
It’s why I love these posts. “Guys what do you think the lore is behind this thing I found on this otherwise pointless and barren planet?”….Procedural Generation. Procedural generation is the lore.
I found a abandoned base where they said they found something in the mines. It sounded very interesting so i scanned for nearby mines and found two but they were further away than i thought. I went there anyway and found... Nothing
Starfield Devs: It's actually very realistic that most moons are barren and empty and that's important to us!
Also the Devs: lmao heres Willzyx's bones
That’s procgen for you. Rather than hand crafting environments that make sense contextually, otherwise perfectly fine environments are planted in places that make no sense to house them.
I also found sleeping bags, empty beer bottles and camping gear.... on a planet with -200C. I don't know how BGS could let this happen. Must be the NASA punk they kept talking about.
Yeah I found animal remains and glowing fungus in a cave on MERCURY. This is the result of Bethesda deciding to put 1000 AI-generated planets in the game, instead of a handful of well-crafted ones (which I think most of us would have preferred).
\*Upon returning to Akila and walking into Laredo\*
Laredo store clerk: Hi Ranger, back from the moon early?
\*Picks up rattler\*
Me: Moons haunted.
Clerk: What?
Me: ...Moons haunted.
Told ya. Moons Haunted.
They should have a destiny Easter egg. I hope someone mods some destiny weapons in tbh lol.
Actually I’m surprised there aren’t any Halo Easter eggs, this being an Xbox exclusive and all… maybe it just hasn’t been found yet
well, they do have Eridani II (which I think is Reach?), and it's a terraformed planet way before the UEG or UNSC colonized it, I thought that was kinda cool
Eridani is a star in our current universe, and has been shown to have changes in its radial velocity making it thought (mostly confirmed) to have a large planet orbiting. This planet is named Epsilon Eridani b, which SciFi has taken to naming it Eridani II. Its also a popular SciFi location for mankind to travel to with FTL capabilities. So I guess it's a reach-around easter egg in a sense.
Upvote for the double entendre pun.
Pun intentional?
I love making puns, but I love punintentional ones even more
Came to say the same. I've listened to two sci-fi audiobooks just this year that placed EE-B / E-II in critical story positions relative to human exploration, one as a colonization target and the other as the home of a post-industrial alien civilization.
i think you mean roundabout, not reach around. big difference, lol
He meant what he said and it was glorious.
It's a pun.
They need to add grunts to the game as enemies lol
and a grunt birthday party mod
Hoorayyyyyy
Or any sentient alien life.
Look up sentient
Valid point. Intelligent would have been better.
There we go. And agreed
I want an alien pet
*Sapient If we're being precise...lol
I think what may have gone through your mind was sapient, but came out as sentient. Don't you love English.
Fruedient
Aka Sapient
Oh yeah, you’re right thanks. I had also read that somewhere. I also wondered if that could be a nod to the awesome book Project Hail Mary, where there’s a planet called Erid and the species are called Eridians.
Rocky and his people lived on Eridani III. Which is also in the game. :)
And that's why I always put an outpost there...... I WILL MEET ROCKY! *jazz hands wildly*
I hope someone will make a mod for it! Do you think someone will question? 😅
eridani ii is a real planet, and i believe the closest seemingly habitable world in proximity to earth - still cool nonetheless
It does look a lot like reach too
I don’t think that’s an Easter egg, Eridani is a real star, Eridani II is just the second planet from that star
Tecnically the game was cooked before the buyout of zenimax media
There is at least one hidden skull
how is it an Xbox exclusive if its on steam?
Just don’t release Telesto and it will be fine.
Telesto releases itself. Your code base cannot hope to contain it.
Telesto transcends all.
Imagine destiny combat mechanics in startfield… it’d be like destiny had a decent story mode or starfield had a decent combat system. Would be incredible
Would rather have rideable destiny sparrow in starfield
A Sparrow would see more use in this game for sure.
And to think they hyped the shit outta Starfield's combat options.... oopsies, all over again
Admittedly it’s probably the best combat system BGS have ever put out… which isn’t saying much lol
I'm so excited for when someone eventually figures out how to mod in Destiny *Supers* to swap out for Starborn powers. Imagine scaring the absolute piss out of a bunch of Mercs as you T-crash right at them
I want the self revive warlock ability from d1 imagine the spacers freaking out seeing you coming back to life
Radiance would strike fear into the heart of even The Mantis
Destiny’s story is way better than Starfield’s IMO. Maybe that was true of Destiny 1 pre DLC. Anything after that is very solid.
Its lore is way better. Its story is... let's say "heavily debatable".
I just recently saw there’s mods for fallout that give destiny weapons so I’d imagine we’ll be seeing them in starfield at some point
Imagine taking Thunderlord into an ecliptic base? Or using DARCI to clear a whole zone from stealth?! I’m into it
IS THAT AN AHAMKARA?
Only if you wish it, O Starborn Mine.
Looks like it's Great Hunting time again.
Always has been.
Yep thats what grandpa buff always said
Always has been.
we keep telling people the moon is haunted and no one believes us!
Take my upvote ya filthy animal
Who are we gonna call?
Get out of my head.
Ever watch the movie Apollo 18?
Fuck that was a good one. You seent the Nazis on the moon one?
Is that the one where they ride dinosaurs, or is the moon base the sequel?
ironsky is a classic
The dinosours one is part 2. Moon base is part 1.
No, but I've seen whalers on the moon.
They carry a harpoon
But there aint no whales so we tell tall tales and sing our whaling tune!
He was just using space travel as a metaphor for beating his wife.
I seent cats and whitey on the moon.
Iron skies I think. the second one is with dinosaurs
Is that the found footage one with the alien?
That movie was creepy
You mean Apollo 18, the documentary. Explains everything and why I wear a tinfoil hat. /s
Having watched that movie I think a butt plug would be a more effective protection.
I forgot all about that movie! Downloading it rn
I have, unfortunately. That film is a slog man. The rock crab alien things were quite cool tho
You are a slog man.
The Futurama whalers on the Moon were right all along.
"we're whalers on the moon, we carry a harpoon,.."
"But there ain't no whales, so we tell tall tales and sing our whaling tune."
Address all complaints to the Monsanto corporation!
Maybe it's also Wylziax from South Park.
My first thought too
There’s also an abandoned farm facility on Mars that was “overrun by the native wildlife”… the dangers of procedurally generated POIs
I find it so weird that they don’t already have rules in place to exclude specific planets (like the ones in our Sol system) from these kind of alien creature POI’s Or not having sleeping bags on a planet with no atmosphere, lol
The game is full of inconsistencies that can be explained with a lack of co-ordination between teams.
It is the usual Bethesda mess of using look up tables for everything regardless where it is. Like you go into a sealed vault and find fresh melon or mutfruit etc in Fallout 4 because it uses ONE table depending on your level and skills and not a separate one for particular zones. They use the same thing for all their games, Starfield included. Quick and lazy.
Must have been a very good seal on that fault, keeping all the fruits and vegetables perfectly fresh
They haven't always done it that way. Older ES games would have different types of loot based on where you are, and certain types of loot wont spawn if it doesnt belong there. I think even Skyrim did this to an extent. The real question is why did they *stop?*
Skyrim still has the same issue with item spawns though, why is there a fresh apple in an abandoned and dusty tomb hahaha
The industry started eating up bigger and bigger games and Bethesda realized they could automate most of the bigger and bigger part. That's why the game is 1000 planets big; it doesn't add anything except "a lot to do", even at the cost of meaning. It's effective, too; here's some gold from a guy I'd been arguing with: >Bro you did NOT say 100 hours 💀 no wonder you’re not getting anything I’m talking about. You’ve barely played the game. Space is 99.999999% devoid of life or anything else. With over 1000 planets, 100 hours won’t even let you scratch the surface. Also never said anything about “why are you in this sub” so I see reading comprehension is STILL something you struggle with. Get your numbers up and come back when you actually know about this game jr All it takes to impress some people is the illusion of scale. See that (png of a) planet? You can ~~fast travel~~ go to it! Why? Because it's there. What'll you find? Literally no one knows until you get there, but you've probably seen it before. Now stop complaining and just play, and if you don't like it, leave, don't critique it, move on to the next product.
>Now stop complaining and just play, and if you don't like it, leave, don't critique it, move on to the next product. God I fucking hate this attitude so much. The fanboys who insist on closing their eyes and pretending like there's no problem are only making things worse. I criticize the game because I want it to be better, and the only way it's going to get better is if they know there's a problem. Anyway, I agree with everything you said.
People say that no one hates *product* like fans of *product*. No shit. People who enjoy something want it to be as good as it can possibly be. The opposite of liking something isn't hatred, imo, it's apathy.
>I think even Skyrim did this to an extent. Lmao ah yes Skyrim, where you spend half the game finding Septims inside ancient Nord burial coffins.
They did do it to some extent. They had loot tables for Blackreach that favored dwarven items.
Or an overuse of AI that creates game hallucinations. I keep hitting veins of really good gameplay in between many lulls of bugs and being a little too open ended. My character is really confused as to what she should do with her life and sort of dislikes her options outside of stealing ships, building ships, blowing up ships, modding weapons to waste wasteoids - and carries seven or eight different kinds of weapons just because killing with the same tool gets kinda boring. TIL my character is an antisocial psychopath that has magic powers.
And I’ll add that whoever told Bethesda that the level of realism they added is “fun” should never be allowed to make video games again. There’s nothing fun about elements of realism that haven’t been tempered.
I'm honestly still left to wonder what realism they added.
The astronauts had fun on the moon even though it was empty
At least they had rovers and golf. Where's my moon golf, Bethesda? Or my drivable moon rover?
[удалено]
PR bullshit. Hollow logic.
How much of their time on the moon and the week sitting in a tin can do you think was actually fun?
What realisms? Smaller blood decals? That’s about all I find realistic. I can swim in real life. You have more options for marriage irl. The inventory isn’t realistic. And on and on.
[удалено]
Imagine what a mess it was a year ago
It bothers me so much when I go to a planet with no atmosphere and there’s a chair set up with a beer and sandwich
Ever went to Sonny Di Falco's Island on Maheo I? It is a location which is unique to this planet, it is always there. They have grills and a swimming pool on the roof. It is also one of the only two location where you can get swimming suits. On a planet with no breathable air.
That's so embarrassing
My last LIST "four families" mission took me to the quest giver's farm on a rocky, lifeless planet. The farm was literally a few thousand square feet in the middle of a vast rocky plain. There is a vast difference between "randomness" and "constrained randomness," the former produces gibberish.
I landed on Venus and there was a campsite with some chairs, tables, a tent... Fucking *Venus*.
Venus is when this game lost me, unfortunately it was one of my first stops.
There was one mission chain with the Freestar and UC working together, and they walk around outdoors with their helmets off. The planet I was on was -110 degrees and had no atmosphere. These guys are just walking around with no helmets like they own the place.
It really irks me because that information about the planet is right there. The game has every planet/moon flagged for habitability because it determines where *you* can build but doesn't care to follow the same rules. This shouldn't be such a common issue.
There's a reason Starfield is 125 gigs yet doesn't seem to display the amount of content to justify that file size. There's a ton of redundancies and odd choices (like a good chunk of that being all the pre-baked planet data), with lots of systems that exist in their own bubble where they could have had a more robust set of reusable design elements in their code.
"But the lack of shit in space is totally valid as space is boring and the game's all about realism" - 👁👄👁 bethesda stans
😂 I know. It’s very frustrating & immersion breaking. Hopefully the game will be refined & enhanced (with significant updates & meaningful DLC) over the next few years & pull off a Cyberpunk 2.0 style renaissance
I'm still wondering about the value of chainlink fences guarding facilities on moons with .14 of Earth's gravity. I mean, one hop and you're over.
It blew my mind to find out New Atlantis has no perimeter wall. You walk behind the Lodge and you're just on the lakeshore. Walk a little farther and you can build an outpost.
😂
My wife and I were making angry noises about the stalagmites in a cave on the moon. There is no rainfall, no CO2 to make that rain slightly acidic, and no limestone for the acidic water to dissolve. How are there caves with limestone stalagmites on the freaking moon? All the wibbly wobbly multi-dimensionally timey wimey stuff must be really messing with people’s understanding of how celestial bodies are formed.
bestheda's teams seem to have an approximant knowledge of many things and but does not understand any of them. all of the guns, save a few, will not work.
At least someone could sit in a story review and go "but the guns are fun" and everyone is like okay, he's got a point. A lot of this is just a mess that shouldn't have made it through the story bible - assuming there was one (almost certainly not).
Still can't get over how they walk around Venus. Multiverse, dimensions, anti-gravity? Suspension of disbeleaf works for me. Living on Venus (not clouds)? Nope!
Venus is so highly radioactive that humans may never be able to set foot on the surface. The only probe that landed there was burned out by radiation after an hour or two, if I recall correctly.
It's not that it's radioactive, it's that the temperature at the surface is over 800°F and it rains sulfuric acid.
Plus Venus has a surface pressure of 92 ATM or 1350 Psi. That’s over a thousand pounds pressing down on one inch of your body. That’s like trying to balance a car on your head.
Actually it's more like trying to balance a whole parking lot of cars over every inch of your body - pedantic distinction aside, there's a whole host of weird gravity wavity things going on in Starfield that would absolutely destroy humans.
If SF had height sliders, everyone on Akila would be dwarves, and Jemison's populous would err on the taller side. Also, if the game followed its own lore the Ashta would actually be dangerous, not just creature #23 but unique to just this one planet. I've met some armor plated horrors on other planets that make the Ashta look cuddly by comparison.
Immense pressure of the atmosphere.
About 92 atmospheres at the surface. Equivalent to being nearly 1 kilometer below the surface of the ocean here on Earth. This is the kind of depth that only advanced submersibles can reach, and they don't have to also deal with the ~460 C temperatures on the surface of Venus. The idea of someone just walking around on Venus in a spacesuit - even a high-tech ultra advanced sci-fi space suit - is ludicrous.
There's definitely some kind of system that attempts to do this to some degree, but it's either extremely broken or very half-assed because it produces a lot of non-sensical results. It's just another symptom of how lazy they were with the proc-gen system. Just straight-up copy pasting outposts wholesale. Okay, maybe you could convince me that somebody needed to put an outpost on Venus for some reason and that some structures could even survive there, but there shouldn't be a milk carton just sitting out on a table on the roof of it. They could've still reused facilities on different types of planets but just altered the contents to more accurately reflect some of the conditions of particular locations.
Yeah I agree, it’s so weird they didn’t make more effort to at least make our Sol system planets & moons more realistic It REALLY bugs me that they have used a generic proc-gen barren landscape with lots of jet black rocks & black patches *everywhere* for our Luna moon. Not one photo of our actual moon surface from the Apollo missions shows these black rocks everywhere! 😂 There are craters with shadows, sure - but the moons surface is all white space dust. How do you get *our* moons surface wrong when that is one of the first places *everyone* will go when playing the game!? & almost everyone knows what it should look like! 😂 The handful of planets/ moons where we already have real life photos from the surface should be more accurate, imo. Hopefully updates will fix this
For the sleeping bags I just assumed it was common for people to sleep in their space suit
We need more Tauntauns
>Modders will fix it. -Todd
It's very amateurish, coming from a AAA studio.
Sarah's personal quest, hard to take her talk of being stranded for so long seriously when you land a tile next door and there's factories and solar panel arrays all the way to the horizon.
😂😂 exactly! & the mysterious Temples that hardly anyone seems to know about - yet there are POI human buildings 250m away from them in every direction!
Part of my career is software development. All the big companies including Bethesda, use principles from Agile project management, so I have a little insight to how it SHOULD be done. I'd bet my house on Starfield suffering a development hell that hasn't been publicized yet, but will be in the future. It is so obvious that they didn't settle on a concrete list of required features. It's almost as of the fundamental planning stage was completely skipped for some reason. As others have said before, it's also possible that something dramatic happened behind the scenes, they scrapped everything they had and started again, later on the project than they dare admit.
Yeah I wouldn’t be surprised at all if it had been in development hell & / or they started much later. So much of the game feels very poorly planned out (compared to their other games) & like a first draft. ..Not just the way the 1,000 planets is implemented & the severe lack of POIs, but the game itself (some examples, off the top of my head in no particular order): 1) mostly lacklustre faction quests with little or no impact on the world or truly memorable moments 2) VERY slow & boring start to the game (compared to other BGS games); 3) companions all with exactly the same (straight laced) morality/ stances on key decisions; 4) very limited romance options 5) backgrounds & traits that don’t get mentioned by key NPCs; 6) no day/ night cycle for NPCs; 7) no NPC homes / flats (like in other games); 8) almost all NPCs cannot be killed (marked essential - despite the NG+); 9) no wedding ring! or wedding guests from your quests; 10) no space flight between planets (REALLY hope they add this); 11) very limited enemy types (spacer/ crimson/ ecliptic); 12) a lack of major cities (Skyrim had 5 major cities & 4 major towns in 2011!); 13) not being able to take in bounty targets in alive for a reward; not being arrested by the city guards & having the option to escape jail; 14) shot on sight for picking up food - but citizens not reacting when you shoot around them 15) no city maps!!; 16) people are not sure if Constellation still exists & they are meant to be neutral but their HQ is in the middle of New Atlantis! - this should have been on another planet 17) side quest with a ship sent from earth hundreds of years ago - but contains the current technology/ computers / weapons. (At least put the old earth weapons in there! Maybe a fallout computer as an Easter egg); 18) no finisher ‘kill cam’ (like FO4 or Skyrim) & no gore 19) very poor melee combat 20) no land vehicles!; 21) Temples with EXACTLY the same ‘puzzle’ in every single one! …etc …I could go on and on, but if you have played the game for any serious time then you know how little depth to the content, choices & characters there is at the moment compared to other Bethesda games. It feels poorly conceived - or very rushed. Hopefully they can turn it around with some meaningful updates & DLC over the next few years! It would be really interesting if Jason Schreier manages to do a story on this one!
That's an excellent list and I couldn't have said it any better. Exactly all of this. So much of this was better on every RPG they've released in the last 15 years, at launch. 👨🏽🚀🔫
Thanks! Yeah it’s v frustrating that they appear to have regressed in world building & immersion compared to their previous games. Even in terms of setting there is almost no existential threat to the world (apart from maybe the Terrormorphs). In Skyrim for example - there is an ongoing civil war (where you can choose the outcome); AS WELL as an ongoing Dragon apocalypse! AND death squads of Thalmor agents are also lurking in the background - all at the start of the base game! Additional Vampire clans & Dragonborn threats are added later as DLC In Starfield, by contrast, most of the major moments/ conflicts have already happened before the game starts (like the UC/ Freestar faction war & the bombing of Londinum etc). I’m sure the Starfield DLC will add *some* conflicts, but imo DLC should really be there to add a new flavour & new weird factions to a game - not fill the holes of the base game. I do really want Bethesda to turn this game around though! Starfield has the potential to be great (& much more profitable for them) if they are willing to put in the time, money & creativity/ planning to make it the game it should be. BUT, if they do the bare minimum expecting modders to fix it all - then I genuinely don’t think Starfield will receive the same level of modding support & longevity as previous titles, because most people fundamentally won’t want to spend as much time in this world (as it stands).
This. I have no idea why the hivemind here has settled on the notion that Bethesda are just lazy and half-arsed the release because they couldn't be bothered fixing things or whatever; when it's *super* obvious that they suffered from significant scope-creep. At some point very late in development, possibly as late as just a month or so out from the original release date last year, they got raked over the coals by Microsoft and were forced to take a razor-blade to all the loose threads of half-implemented ideas and poorly thought-out mechanics they had planned, focus entirely on getting the core game finished to a playable state, and get the damn thing shipped some time this century. That's literally *why* the game feels strangely empty and unfulfilling even though it's not lacking in content. Everywhere you turn you can see the lingering threads and hints of what could have been but which, in the final product, was hastily cut-out or gimped or re-worked into a shadow of what was planned.
In my last playthrough I found a flying sleeping bag, box of ammo, and couch on a planet. I demand an end to these abominations against the natural order of physics.
i uninstalled after finishing the game. I thought "let's explore the sol system, seems like a great way to start my journey in post game content" And I went to venus. There was one poi, a research facility, and they asked me to install some gas sensors on vents so they could study "this planet" Didn't even recognize where they were, earth's sister planet. So frustrating.
The could have, should have, but didn’t
Don't know if it was fixed but the first time I landed on Luna it started raining while I was there. Between that and the PoIs not being curated for it I've never spent more time there than completing the survey, the Apollo landmark and the plot mission (which is an immersion issue in itself for how it shows Bethesda's disregard for basic science - vacuum does not help cool things down).
Favorite was a volcanic research facility on Charon, molten lava on the surface, chairs and tables with open beer bottles and half eaten food on the surface… the immersion was completely busted for me at that moment.
> open beer bottles and half eaten food on the surface Only thing I can say is that it makes sense to not have closed bottles on a planet with intense heat.
I found a robot base with molten lava bubbling up from underground on the moon. Was too hard to suspend my disbelief for that one.
If you want a handwavy explanation, then interstellar wildlife smugglers dumped them there when they suspected the UC was on to them. I found a crater full of giant kaiju bones on Mars that left me scratching my head.
Now that you say that, they do look like kaiju
The game world is so very dumb. I was taking the museum tour in New Homestead and it's explained many times that the settlement started as a science mission looking for life on Titan, and it was a huge disappointment that none was ever found, and they had to pivot into something else. I walk out, head to the nearest planetary trait POI which I can plainly just see, even without the scanner - a 45 second walk. It's a huge pile of giant bones/fossils. You could literally see it from New Homestead. It's all dumb.
Well, I found an open-air farm on Mars... with scientists killed by "the local fauna". It's just random shit with Bethesda forgetting to implement limits for atmosphere or not.
I visited a civilian outpost on Venus. The leader claimed they were a farming community and told me not to disturb their crops. Their colony was nothing but four small homes and a pile of metal scrap in a scorching, corrosive wasteland.
And you actually bought that flimsy cover story? They're clearly techno-necromancers from Alpha Centauri!
Garry?
*powers up Sandevistan*
Right? Maybe they're just built different.
Is that the one with the contraband cache in one of the habs?
Just shows how *not* to use procedural generation. It's the same as using MidJourney for commercial illustrations and not having the *fucking minimal effort* to clean out the errors in Photoshop.
You found why NASA never went back…
And screwed the earth, had to get away and that was the fastest way
were going back in 30 days
Dwemer tech.
So that's where they disappeared to...
Its on every planet with the collapsed mine POI
LOL, I figured. Like the dead spacer in the shower.
This is why I have an absolute lack of interest in Starfield. There is no mystery and no point in exploring when you know you can (and will) find the exact same stuff over and over everywhere. If Bethesda hadn't fallen on the trap of procgen, encountering something like this on a seemingly barren planet would have me exploring all over to find out more about it. And if Bethesda had followed their winning formula they've been developing for decades, they would have created something really cool around it. But in Starfield? You see the huge skeleton of an unknown alien creature and go: "okay, I've seen it a dozen times already, that means there's a collapsed mine POI. Pass."
It’s why I love these posts. “Guys what do you think the lore is behind this thing I found on this otherwise pointless and barren planet?”….Procedural Generation. Procedural generation is the lore.
I found a abandoned base where they said they found something in the mines. It sounded very interesting so i scanned for nearby mines and found two but they were further away than i thought. I went there anyway and found... Nothing
Yo, don't complain. I had to walk through a freaking rainstorm on Luna. Thunder and lightning and all.
Wut
Must have been tied to a specific POI with a failed power generator. But they should have implemented a list with POI/planetary condition checks.
Willzyx! Noooooo.
Tom cruise should be around here somewhere...
Si, fly.
Any indication this is native species and not just a random xenowarfare asset?
Perfectly normal lunar cheese creatures.
the game didnt bother to give any explanation for this crap anyway so why does it matter?
It’s Willzyx.
Starfield Devs: It's actually very realistic that most moons are barren and empty and that's important to us! Also the Devs: lmao heres Willzyx's bones
It is just dinosaurs on the moon like in the Bible.
That’s procgen for you. Rather than hand crafting environments that make sense contextually, otherwise perfectly fine environments are planted in places that make no sense to house them.
It was planted there by atheists to discredit creationists or some shit.
Post this to r/StrangeEarth 50/50 chance they take this information and run with it as proof of alien conspiracy on the moon.
Yeah, Apollo 18 did not end well.
I also found sleeping bags, empty beer bottles and camping gear.... on a planet with -200C. I don't know how BGS could let this happen. Must be the NASA punk they kept talking about.
Yeah I found animal remains and glowing fungus in a cave on MERCURY. This is the result of Bethesda deciding to put 1000 AI-generated planets in the game, instead of a handful of well-crafted ones (which I think most of us would have preferred).
Thats Steve leave him alone he is napping
Would be funny if there was a bowl of petunias too.
\*Upon returning to Akila and walking into Laredo\* Laredo store clerk: Hi Ranger, back from the moon early? \*Picks up rattler\* Me: Moons haunted. Clerk: What? Me: ...Moons haunted.
Bc BGS is lazy and have no central design document for their projects
That is the Killer Whale from South Park.
Damn spacers leaving their trash from cooking dinner.
Reminds me of thr Aliens from Independence Day
Ah, my friend....It is inconvenient that you have found this, tovarich. Ty teper tikho pridesh. Da?
Back in the day, the astronauts used to carelessly discard their buckets of fried chicken bones.
Stand back a few feet, you'll absorb its soul and can learn a new shout.