Starfield on Steam
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Starfield is the first new universe in 25 years from Bethesda Game Studios, the award-winning creators of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and Fallout 4.

I must say it is not the best RPG out there, but I feel like it would have earned more. I personally have a lot of fun playing.

While it was not a Cyberpunk-grade overhype, I think it must still have been overhyped. Because if you see it as Skyrim with better graphics, it is pretty much what you’d expect.

Some of the common criticism seems to be intrinsic to the sci-fi genre. In Skyrim, you walk 100 meters and then you find some cave or camp or something that a game designer has placed there manually with some story or meaning behind it. And as a player, you notice that, because most locations in Skyrim feel somehow unique. Even though for example the dungeons have rooms that repeat a lot. Having a designer place them manually with some thought gives them something unique.

In interstellar sci-fi, a dense world like this is simply impossible. Planets are extremely large so filling them manually with content is simply not possible. And using procedural generation makes things feel meaningless. Players notice that fast. So instead, Starfield opted for having a few manually constructed locations that are placed randomly on planets, unfortunately with a lot of repetition. But that is a sound compromise, given the constraints of today’s game development technology. The dense worlds that we are used to from other genres simply don’t scale up to planetary scale, and as players, we have to get used to that.

  • SwampYankee@mander.xyzEnglish
    3·
    10 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. Compare 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.