Let’s be real. The other option would be a 10 year-old pre-alpha with barely 4 planets and a few moons with like 20 unique POIs total.
I think this is a totally acceptable compromise. And it’s not like you can’t explore more of the planet. It’s just a small loading screen in between. Like going from the overworld to a dungeon in Skyrim.
Yeah, but i don’t get the obsession with these 1000 planets, except that it sounds good. Why not 5 well crafted planets to actually do things. I know everyone likes different things but going from cutscene to cutscene to traverse seems like anti fun.
People often overlook that aspect of Star Citizen, the planets, albeit few in numbers, are:
- Unique to each other and have detailed moons with varying resourcs
- Incredibly detailed given the real time, smooth transition from space to planet and vice versa.
- Given atmospheres, clouds and weather events.
- Given unique cities and POIs due to the lore.
So yeah, I’m almost as annoyed with the state of SC as the next person but I’m one of the very few people I’ve seen actually respect what has been done and compare that to progress from mainstream games. I’m as astounded by CIGs progress as I am their procrastination and marketing team.
It is a hybrid approach.
It’s primarily hundreds of hours of hand crafted content that’s seamlessly integrated into a procedurally generated landscape.
So for example there might be a mine colony gone wrong after a disaster.
If you have been mostly interested in playing on desert planets that facility might be loaded into the desert planet. If someone else has been focused on arctic planets, it might be on their arctic planet.
The same handcrafted content, but dynamically integrated into the spaces that each player naturally gravitates to in their own open universe.
This also makes the modern behavior of using a wiki to guide play much more complicated, and encourages self-driven discovery rather than community driven guides.
I think people worried about procedural generation because of how it was done a decade ago might be in for a significant surprise.
Slightly dissapointing, but it was to be expected I guess. It’s unreasonable to expect Elite or NMS-level seamless exploration out of that engine, and by the looks of it a cell will be around half a skyrim map, so not bad at all.
I wonder what this means for potential planet rovers, though. My suspicion is rhat Bethesda will not release any, as exploring with a vehicle will make the cell feel a lot smaller.
Todd already confirmed vehicles aren’t in. It’d probably be a massive undertaking for DLC, so I suppose they’re leaving them out.
I don’t mind the boundaries, with so many planets I wouldn’t expect them all to be completely populated with actual content, and I have no desire to roam a bare or uniformly generated planet just to be able to say I can walk over the whole thing.
But
It’s sci-fi…
So’s Mass Effect and you most certainly can’t roam entire planets there. Gotta keep that scope realistic for the type of game they’re making. Stretch it super thin so it can pretend to be a space sim, or keep it realistic for a Bethesda title as they always do and have boundaries.
This is something that other games by much smaller companies (like NMS) have already solved. Seems frankly ridiculous that Bethesda can’t fix up their damn engine and their big space game consists entirely out of instanced bubbles, with no way to move between them besides loading screens. Even within your owns ship there are loading screens.
I guess I’m one of the few Fallout/Skyrim fan that isn’t excited at all about this game. The minute they said they would be using the same engine for Starfield I lost all interest. Elder Scrolls was their baby so the passion was there, the Fallout IP is just so whimsically interesting that it draws me regardless.
Bethesda making a generic space-exploration game is just so bland and uninteresting. Maybe I’ll be proven wrong, but from the stills and brief clips I saw; it’s “Bethesda game with space paint” and that’s all I can see.
well this game has been Todd’s dream since the 90s. he has always wanted to make a space game. this is like their 2nd baby
And this is why I’m happy it’s on Game Pass day 1. I don’t have to spend a cent on it. So any enjoyment I get out of it is free lol
What are you even talking about? Starfield does not use the ‘same’ game engine as Fallout 4, and even if it did would you have the technical know how to explain why that would be a bad thing?
The problem isn’t the engine itself, it’s that Bethesda hasn’t given it the attention it needs.
Unreal Engine 5, for example, is built from the original Unreal Engine. But there has been so much work put into it that it’s nearly impossible to tell. Meanwhile, the creation engine literally has some of the same issues that the Gambryo engine had back during Morrowind.
To Bethesda’s credit, this isn’t entirely their fault. There’s a reason that proprietary engines have been dying out in favor of engines like Unreal, and that’s because maintaining and improving game engines is incredibly time consuming and expensive. And unless you’re directly profiting off of your engine, like Epic does, you don’t have a massive incentive to endlessly polish it. Doing so is time you could be spending working on your next game, which you do directly profit off of.
Personally, I want Bethesda to keep using the Creation Engine, or whatever they turn it into next, because of its incredible mod support. However, it’s nowhere near as polished or advanced as other engines, and understandably probably never will be. There’s really no easy solution imo.
The same engine ? Of course not… It most likely serves as base, as it should, but there’s no reason to think it is the exact same engine from Fallout. It can’t be, since it’s a different game with different systems… even just from the visuals you can easily tell it’s modern. Why are you worried about this ?
Aww that sucks if true. I swear someone from Bethesda said you could run all the way around the planet if you want, so we’ll see. If you can I bet we’ll see vehicle mods early on if technically feasible.
10 mins from end to end is fine. This is just a section of the planets. So with how many sections there are bound to be I that’s more then enough space.
Agreed. I just want to steal everyone’s sandwich like that one dev.
It always had to be this way, lest Starfield actually be Star Citizen and never release at all.
How many people ever actually walked round a whole planet in NMS or Elite? I tried to see how far I could get on a planet in NMS when I first tried it and got bored in five minutes and went back to my ship.
This is how I feel. Yeah I’m disappointed that it’s more like a hub based thing than truly open world,
but it’s still large enough that I think most people will get bored trying to walk all over one tile if what I hear is true (30 mins of walking to get to the end)Edit: the article says 10 minutes end to end. that is maybe a little small for my taste… Oh well. :/
A bit off topic, but will the game really only support be locked to 60fps on PC? If so that’s DOA for me and a no buy :(
The article words it confusingly:
It’s also worth noting that Starfield will only support 60fps on PC.
If you follow the link in the article, what they are actually saying is: 4k 60 ain’t happening on Xbox, and 60fps is only possible on PC. They aren’t saying PC is locked to 60fps.
It’s only locked on XBox, afaik there will be no fps lock otherwise
if it’s like previous iterations of their engine, the physics break above 60fps
I read that, but I don’t believe it. I was able to get my FPS up way past 60 on my current playthrough on Skyrim, and they both use the same core engine code. Of course, I’m using mods to do it, so that may be the reason why my physics isn’t borked. But I’ll be using mods on Starfield, too, so no loss.
What’s “core engine code” ? It’s just code, they can rip out and replace any part of it. What’s true for Skyrim isn’t necessarily true for any game that happens to run on a variant of that engine
Where did you hear that? I haven’t seen any PC frame rate announcements, just the Xbox ones. I didn’t watch the video to prevent too many spoilers. FO76 can do above 60 and so can the VR ports, so chances are good, but can’t say for sure until an announcement or release.
Hard to judge because the video was taken down, any mirrors? Just gonna casually mention this didn’t happen in No Man’s Sky…
On another note, the game runs in 30 FPS on Xboxes…? WTF? What year is this? This is a bigger issue than those boundry loading. I no longer regret the game won’t be released on PS5.
since when has FPS ever mattered? i swear this is a brand new problem created just to complain about something
Ever since games existed? I remember being thrilled at how much smoother Doom played when I added 4MB of RAM to my old 286.
To your point, I thought 60 FPS didn’t matter, 30 was enough. Then I played on 60 FPS and fealt the difference when I went back. The same thing happened when I got a 144hz screen. Now I can instantly tell between 60 and 144 fps. Now I have a 4090 and 240hz screen and I can tell, but it’s diminishing returns.
So, yeah. It matters.
well you shouldn’t worry then, sounds like you have PC. the game is not fps capped on it
Where does it sound like I’m worried?
Note: This is how pedantic internet arguments start.
where you say FPS matters, or maybe the big paragraph you put explaining your reason for FPS mattering? idk something about that made it seem like you cared about the FPS of games
I do care. I’m just not worried.
yeah I barely ever got beyond 30fps in the past 25 years I’ve been playing video games, I can only do it easily today because I got a decent rig
If you care about fps switch to pc
