Starfield's New Maps Are Great, But Boy Those Cities Are Tiny

Comments

• GlitterInfection@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  They felt extremely small, too.

  Because they are extremely tiny.

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  • xmunk@sh.itjust.works ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    If you want them to feel really big, try walking around fully encumbered.

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    • maxenmajs@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      New Atlantis actually feels even smaller when that one guard next to the landing pad can finish delivering his only line every time you haul 1000 kg past him.

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  • metaldream@sopuli.xyz ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Crazy to me how Witcher created a believable medieval city in 2013 and Bethesda still can’t do something similar 10 years later.

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    • sushibowl@feddit.nl ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Bethesda has always had an approach to designing cities where they feel you must be able to enter every building and talk to every NPC. You can see this since at least Morrowind. This design constraint makes it prohibitively expensive to design large cities with hundreds or thousands of inhabitants. That’s why you see “cities” in Bethesda games with several dozen houses at most. In Oblivion, there are less than 200 people living in the capital of an enormous empire, the imperial city (300 if you count the guards). Skyrim has a total population of 700 or something.

      In the Witcher series they don’t feel the need to do this and can just plop down buildings without any interior, and NPCs that only give you a generic voice line. That makes it feasible to create larger cities, although there’s a sort of suspension of disbelief required. Most of the people you meet don’t actually have a house and just walk around. If you try to investigate the city as more than decor the illusion quickly falls apart.

      Not saying one approach is better or worse than the other, just different tradeoffs.

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    • Iapar@feddit.de ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      That is because they don’t have to.

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    • exocrinous@startrek.website ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Or even earlier, Assassin’s Creed

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• RGB3x3@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Fuck me, those maps are still so bad.

  Just make a normal map like every other game ever made.

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