Comment on Rating down at 77%
SwampYankee@mander.xyz 9 months agoStarfield has the advantage of 100+ hours of hand-crafted, voice-acted quest content, of course. What they need to do about the procedural content is the same thing Hello Games did, just add more procedural pieces that can get put together in novel ways, so the planets and outposts aren’t so obviously exactly the same. I’m hoping the system that inserts buildings on planets will just take new content, because modders could really blow that wide open.
Cethin@lemmy.zip 9 months ago
Yeah, this is the big issue. The facilities and stuff should have been procedural as well. They should be a ton of handcrafted components, but they procedurally pick pieces and put them together.
Preferably they’d also take into account where they are to make things more interesting. If there’s Helium 3 around, make it generate a helium 3 facility with plenty of explosives and stuff sitting around. Things like that.
As it is, it’s the same few facilities that have the exact same layout at all locations. They even have the same loot in the same positions most of the time, and things like the heat leaches are always at the exact same spot.
They went halfway with procedural generation and it doesn’t really work to make the game feel full.
SwampYankee@mander.xyz 9 months ago
To be fair, the assets themselves are top notch. The textures & models are as good as I’ve seen in any game. The art direction is excellent. It’s obvious they spent a huge amount of time just making these things; we may have gotten as many as they could make in a reasonable amount of time. Compared it to NMS where procedural buildings cut into the terrain in awkward, unrealistic ways and have glitchy invisible walls - or Cyberpunk where the textures & models frankly aren’t very impressive but are made up for with excellent art direction & graphical/lighting techniques.
That said, yeah, it’s an understatement to say it’s way too noticeable that they’ve copy-pasted a handful of facilities & natural features. You notice it when you see the second one. They didn’t even try to hide it.