Starfield - Bethesda's new space IP: will probably be full of fun and easily trackable bugs

[Begemot]

Todd's right that it doesn't HAVE to be seamless in game transition, but there needs to be something that doesn't break your immersion too much, something that allows to play pretend with the fantasy of being an astronaut and blasting off and landing, that is literally a core element of the entire point of the game, you're an astronaut and you're exploring space, if it's just pulling up a menu, selecting "go to space" and boom, there you are (after a loading screen) that's is absurdly fucking gay.

But at least we we're way beyond Mass Effect 1 where you can only explore a square of a planet and space exploration is watching a lame little model of your ship float around a map, actually being able to directly fly around your ship in space and explore an ENTIRE planet? That's a legit "whoa" idea, I'm just worried about the transition from space to planet and planet to space, but hopefully they're smart enough to have some sort of workable compromise.

Nice to actually have a western game to be excited about again, shit was looking pretty bleak for a while there, it's also nice to think of finally having a good Bethesda game after 10+ years.


I really can't say enough positive about it's aesthetics, while maybe a few things are a little too generic, overall they nailed it, they managed to make a sci fi space faring aesthetic that looks realistic but not generic.

They're really leaning in hard on specifically a "NASA" look to everything, how NASA designs suits, ships etc and I fucking love it.

Outer Worlds went for retro futuristic but they picked the wrong one, it should have been Flash Gordon instead of "wild west in space" and while maybe the aesthetic was fine, the writing and "comedy" of the game was awful, pure Reddit soyness, the gameplay was incredibly boring as well.

I feel like it's pretty safe to say Starfield will be better than Outer Worlds.

Yeah, Mechwarrior 5 has the whole choose a planet on a map and you get the same cut scene schtick. I know space exploration isn't the main focus but it gets dull.

 

[BALLZ-BROKEN]

You know what I wonder? Remember how Fallout 4 had the Pip Boy minigames? I can see you going to your quarters on the spaceship, interacting with the computer terminal, and next thing you know you're hearing "Hey, you. You're finally awake." and you come to the horrifying realization that bastard Todd sold another copy of Skyrim to you!

 

[Stabmaster Arson]

I'd be more excited for the spaceflight than the grimdark run and gun aspect of this game.

From what I've seen released so far, the spaceflight isn't going to be the brunt of the game. Hope I'm proved wrong.

 

[HeyYou]

I'm cautiously optimistic. They specifically pointed out certain things like a voiced protagonist and the dialogue system from Fallout 4 and said "yea that sucked we're reverting those changes back to our classic game systems."

Bethesderp is far from perfect but it's nice to see a developer be like "yea we fucked up sorry" and not doubling or tripling down and calling their fans bigots like everyone else seems to do.

Todd's sweet little lies have won again.

 

[Titos]

The fact you have to actually route power to the different parts of your ship make me hopeful space combat and ship building won't be utter trash.

The best part of this game is still the fact that by the time Scam Citizen "comes out" all of it's ships, models, and mechanics will have been modded into Starfield and Chris Roberts will commit suicide by blowing himself up on his yacht he bought with the money retards "donated" to his cult. At least Todd gives you funny glitches when you join his cult, all Chris gives you is mounting debt to pay for your imaginary ship that will totally exist when the game "comes out" in Gregorian Calendar TBD.

 

[AmpleApricots]

The problem with space in games is that space is fucking boring. Space is space. It's empty. Nothing happens in space. Early space games like Wing Commander and Privateer solved that by the autopilot mechanic, where you basically jump to the next part of the action by pressing a key, stopping you to having to fly in a straight like through the blackness for minutes. Then somewhen in the following decades, games forgot that that was a thing you can do and somehow made space games all about that space part which is an understandable, albeit big error. (it's like, programmers hear about fractals and procedural generation algorithms and find it all very tempting -basically to solve the problem of game content algorithmically- but it's the wrong road to go down on a space game. It really is!)

That said this game will be utter trash. SciFi space games are notoriously hard to make interesting and I just don't see it with Bethesda's dedication to half-assedness. Maybe the modding community will pull it out of the fire. Maybe Bethesda is clever enough this time to basically make something that's a sandbox for modders, everything anyone ever wanted from them. I doubt that one also, though.

 

[Milwaukee Macho Man]

The problem with space in games is that space is fucking boring. Space is space. It's empty. Nothing happens in space. Early space games like Wing Commander and Privateer solved that by the autopilot mechanic, where you basically jump to the next part of the action by pressing a key, stopping you to having to fly in a straight like through the blackness for minutes. Then somewhen in the following decades, games forgot that that was a thing you can do and somehow made space games all about that space part which is an understandable, albeit big error. (it's like, programmers hear about fractals and procedural generation algorithms and find it all very tempting -basically to solve the problem of game content algorithmically- but it's the wrong road to go down on a space game. It really is!)

I want to be like "Nigga, this is Bathesda, of course there will be fast travel."

But then I could see them being dumb enough to finally listen to fast travel whiners and remove it or make you have to travel *everywhere* before you can use it and make this shit more boring than sailing in Wind Waker.

 

[Serbian Peacekeepers]

There's something I got to know about this game and can't get quite clear on, how exactly does transition from space to planet and vice versa works? Not seamless is disappointing but they need to at least have some of the illusion where you blast off, fly in the air for a bit, then maybe a loading screen and you're in space or you're flying towards the planet, entering it's atmosphere and then loading screen and you're in the atmosphere, a loading screen I can pretend to ignore well enough, but just give me at least some of the illusion and not all selecting shit from menus like ME1, I HATED that shit.

They showed for a second in the reveal that theres a 3d map of the world and your rotate it yo choose a landing spot, hopefully its a hidden loading screen where the cutscene of you flying into atmosphere is the loading screen so you are never thrown to a bland screen.

 

[Dom Cruise]

I'm actually ok with the idea of vast stretches of nothing in between the somethings, especially in the context of a space game.

I always thought the 3D Fallouts needed vast stretches of empty wasteland, sort of like how the 2D games did it with the map screen but in actually explorable 3D, I'm not a believer that open world games need to be theme parks where you can't swing a dead cat without hitting something, there's something to be said for giving shit room to breath.

That said sometimes you do just want to get somewhere in a hurry so there does need to be some form of fast travel, even if in universe it's just "you got there after X amount of time" than literally teleporting or whatever.

They showed for a second in the reveal that theres a 3d map of the world and your rotate it yo choose a landing spot, hopefully its a hidden loading screen where the cutscene of you flying into atmosphere is the loading screen so you are never thrown to a bland screen.

I noticed that too but I hope it's at least not a bland loading screen.

I used to feel people were too hard on Bethesda, but Fallout 4 was mediocre and Fallout 76 was a debacle, but the fact that Starfield has an aesthetic that is what you think of when you think "space" but also somehow manages to avoid being too generic is a neat trick and an encouraging sign I feel.

 

[HeyYou]

I'm actually ok with the idea of vast stretches of nothing in between the somethings, especially in the context of a space game.

I always thought the 3D Fallouts needed vast stretches of empty wasteland, sort of like how the 2D games did it with the map screen but in actually explorable 3D, I'm not a believer that open world games need to be theme parks where you can't swing a dead cat without hitting something, there's something to be said for giving shit room to breath.

That said sometimes you do just want to get somewhere in a hurry so there does need to be some form of fast travel, even if in universe it's just "you got there after X amount of time" than literally teleporting or whatever.

There's a huge difference between 14km maps with some breathing room between locations and 1000 planets that are almost entirely dead and give no reason to land on them except grinding resources for your base. One is good pacing, the other is wasting your time with busywork.

 

[BALLZ-BROKEN]

That said this game will be utter trash. SciFi space games are notoriously hard to make interesting and I just don't see it with Bethesda's dedication to half-assedness. Maybe the modding community will pull it out of the fire. Maybe Bethesda is clever enough this time to basically make something that's a sandbox for modders, everything anyone ever wanted from them. I doubt that one also, though.

I can see MS / Bethesda hiding the modding tools behind a paywall. They'll make it free, of course, but only if you sign up to be a Creation Club member (or whatever they're gonna call it in the latest iteration.) There's a reason the Creation Club sucked for Skyrim, it came out in 2017, several years after all of the better, free mods were already made! I don't think Bugthesda is gonna make that mistake again!

 

[Titos]

I can see MS / Bethesda hiding the modding tools behind a paywall. They'll make it free, of course, but only if you sign up to be a Creation Club member (or whatever they're gonna call it in the latest iteration.) There's a reason the Creation Club sucked for Skyrim, it came out in 2017, several years after all of the better, free mods were already made! I don't think Bugthesda is gonna make that mistake again!

I kinda doubt it. The Bethesda launcher is dead and so is creation club most likely. They didn't put the mod tools for MCC behind a paywall, I doubt they'd be dumb enough to pull a paid mods thing again. Although maybe Todds soothing lies will change the minds at MS to let him do it.

Regarding mods, as long as the mod tools are actually good I think the whole "thousand empty planets" thing will actually be a positive for the game. Instead of downloading a mod and it impacting the main game like in previous games modders will basically have a bunch of almost blank canvases to fuck around with. I just want two mods, a furry planet, and an orbital bombardment mod for obvious reasons.

 

[Raoul_Duke]

Maybe we could have an Elder Scrolls mod/planet in Starfield. That way, Todd is still selling us Skyrim!

 

[AmpleApricots]

Maybe we could have an Elder Scrolls mod/planet in Starfield. That way, Todd is still selling us Skyrim!

Don't make fun, it's the only way for him to achieve orgasm. That's a hard life.

 

[Super Hans]

I want to be like "Nigga, this is Bathesda, of course there will be fast travel."

But then I could see them being dumb enough to finally listen to fast travel whiners and remove it or make you have to travel *everywhere* before you can use it and make this shit more boring than sailing in Wind Waker.

I want some diagetic form of travel, but I hope to Todd that they don't make it like Elite Dangerous. It's fucked that you can have 15-20 real-time minutes of travel from jumping into a system to your destination in it.

 

[Aldeland]

I want some diagetic form of travel, but I hope to Todd that they don't make it like Elite Dangerous. It's fucked that you can have 15-20 real-time minutes of travel from jumping into a system to your destination in it.

The most fucked one could take almost an hour. Accidentally taking missions that ended there was always painful if you weren't really paying attention.

 

[Titos]

Maybe we could have an Elder Scrolls mod/planet in Starfield. That way, Todd is still selling us Skyrim!

Someone will mod one of the planets to just be the entirety of Skyrim, DLCs and all. Only this time you'll have guns. This will cause people to call Starfield a Far Cry 3 clone.

Edit: In regards to fast travel, the footage they showed off building ships you could see the maximum "jump" distance listed out in light years as well as total fuel. So maybe it's a kind of compromise in regards to fast travel, where you can fast travel most of the way there but from there on out you have to fly or find more fuel.

 

[Agent of Z.O.G.]

According to leaks, the spaceflight was really rough. I would assume they want to avoid a FO76 situation.

Fallout NV's Frontier mod had vehicles and even a spaceship segment. (Look up what else it had.)
Will starfield manage to exceed it?

 

[scathefire]

Someone will mod one of the planets to just be the entirety of Skyrim, DLCs and all. Only this time you'll have guns. This will cause people to call Starfield a Far Cry 3 clone.

That sounds stupid but also fun. I kinda do hope now that the planets are moddable to be basically whatever you want.

 

[Kane Lives]

The problem with space in games is that space is fucking boring. Space is space. It's empty. Nothing happens in space. Early space games like Wing Commander and Privateer solved that by the autopilot mechanic, where you basically jump to the next part of the action by pressing a key, stopping you to having to fly in a straight like through the blackness for minutes. Then somewhen in the following decades, games forgot that that was a thing you can do and somehow made space games all about that space part which is an understandable, albeit big error. (it's like, programmers hear about fractals and procedural generation algorithms and find it all very tempting -basically to solve the problem of game content algorithmically- but it's the wrong road to go down on a space game. It really is!)

That said this game will be utter trash. SciFi space games are notoriously hard to make interesting and I just don't see it with Bethesda's dedication to half-assedness. Maybe the modding community will pull it out of the fire. Maybe Bethesda is clever enough this time to basically make something that's a sandbox for modders, everything anyone ever wanted from them. I doubt that one also, though.

Until today, I think EVE still has the best immersive implementation of space. Everything happens around points of interests, so for most of the travel is just you boosting towards said POIs. They even exist on a 3D representation of the star system! You can be a madlad and try to slow-burn your way across the solar system but iirc it takes IRL weeks of travel. Elite wisely decided to emulate this model.