It's definitely a Bethesda game. Their dialogue choices and roleplaying has always been shit. People like Bethesda games primarily because they're given a large open world to explore. But they made most of this one procedurally generated so they've lost their main good quality. I really hope the players are pushed by the stories and side quests to the hand-crafted worlds and the procedurally generated are mostly in the background for players that want to go off the beaten path.
Comment on Starfield - Review Thread (87/100 OpenCritic)
WarmSoda@lemm.ee 10 months ago
exploration in the game is unfortunately weak in many aspects; This is due to the large reliance on procedural generation of environments. Also, the role-playing elements do not have a strong presence or impact.
That’s what I was afraid of.
Neato@kbin.social 10 months ago
Kaldo@kbin.social 10 months ago
I was really hoping proc-gen would be just for the terrain and surrounding areas and the interesting setpieces would be as handcrafted (or as close as possible) to a regular TES/Fallout experience. I guess they had to trade in a lot of these to make the big universe happen though...
WarmSoda@lemm.ee 10 months ago
That’s how they described it, too. Oh Todd you done it again!
Looks like there’s not much to do on the planets. One review even said the classic “get lost on the way and end up doing ten other things” just doesn’t happen in this game anywhere. It can happen in a city, but then they also said the cities are pretty meh.
That sucks to hear.
Ashtear@lemm.ee 10 months ago
I really hope I’m wrong about this, but it looks like No Man’s Sky did even more damage to the space sim genre than we thought. We’re in a year with great handcrafted experiences that still feel vast: Tears of the Kingdom, Baldur’s Gate 3, even Everspace 2 in a similar setting (and Everspace 2 wouldn’t have had the same, fatal loading screen issue if it was a AAA game). Starfield went the other direction.
By chasing the procedural generation dream, from everything I’ve seen, Bethesda really hamstrung the space exploration to get there. Fortunately I really like the old Bethesda formula, so hopefully the Skyrim/Fallout experience that’s still there will be enough for me to want to put hundreds of hours into it. I’m just hoping developers don’t keep trying to do this for games in space settings.
Wookie@artemis.camp 10 months ago
It sounds like No Man’s Sky. You’re supposed to be able to explore the whole galaxy and see many creatures, environments, etc but they all being end up the same so exploration is boring, at least to me it was
EnglishMobster@kbin.social 10 months ago
This is the core issue with all procgen games, IMO.
You are promised "infinite exploration", but in truth there are countable variants of the procgen algorithm. Once you see all those variants, you've effectively seen everything. Sure, you'll see small variations, or new ways to combine the existing variants... but when you see all the "tricks" the veil falls.
iHUNTcriminals@lemm.ee 10 months ago
So it’s like using mainstream
social mediaentertainment, and politics.theterrasque@infosec.pub 10 months ago
I firmly believe procgen can be good, but the games featuring it heavily are very bland. The potential is there though, I’m sure of it.
tkohldesac@kbin.social 10 months ago
I felt similarly. Exploring is just another thing to "do" to get credits/nanites. It was cool to see genuinely new things like the huge Dune-styled worms but once you see one you've seen them all.
That extends to base building too. I have no reason to build a base anywhere else in the galaxy once I have a capital ship that does all my crafting for me. Except resource collecting, I guess. But meh, different strokes for different folks. I don't think there's been a non-MMO continually-updated game that I've come back to as often as NMS but coming back is usually pretty short-lived.
saucyloggins@lemmy.world 10 months ago
That’s what makes this even more of an issue. The game isn’t procedural. They used procedural tooling but everything is set in stone now. They could’ve gone through and cleaned up and tweaked everything so it didn’t feel bland. Doesn’t sound like they did.
I knew the writing/rpg aspect was going to be shallow like all of Bethesda games but, they always had fun exploration so this is unfortunate to me. It sounds like they reuse assets a lot, even in the main quest line. Like same buildings with the same enemy placement just on a different planet.
c0mbatbag3l@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Damn they’re gonna pull a Mass Effect 1.