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

[xXx: State of the Union]

Three questions: how big is the main city relative to the Imperial City, how many cities are there, and of those, how many are Bravils?

I don't really know how to accurately answer this, it's definitely smaller than Imperial City because despite there being a bunch of superfluous citizens walking around there aren't a lot of superfluous interiors.

I'll include a map so you can decide for yourself (note: there is an underground area called "The Well" that isn't shown accurately on here that adds a few more shops and stuff, but also isn't that big. I'd equate it to maybe a single district of the Imperial City)

There are at least two other cities that are the same size, and I've run into a few space ports and such that are maybe the size of the North area of New Atlantis. (there may be more I haven't stumbled upon, they were never part of the main story and I'm just getting into exploring and doing side content)

Then there are a bunch of random civilian outposts that are just like a few ships and a warehouse that sells you shit on random planets.

@TVBForever I certainly hope he likes it. I like it and I feel like I wasn't hyping it up as much as him but I got exactly what I expected from the start.

 

[Drain Todger]

I'm using a few mods, now, to get it running better on my Odyssey G9 ultrawide.

https://www.nexusmods.com/starfield/mods/327

https://www.nexusmods.com/starfield/mods/1003

https://www.nexusmods.com/starfield/mods/761

After I replaced the hex edit with a modded .ini generated by Bethini Pie, my framerate started to dip into the 30s in some spots. With the DLSS-G mod installed (only works on RTX 4000-series cards), I got it back up to 120. I tweaked the sharpness down to 30% to get rid of some of the flickering on the plants, and it looks pretty good.



The planetary terrain looks really, really flat, for some reason. They have a lot of fogging to create an impression of depth, but a lot of these scenes still look inexplicably flat. This was something I noticed in the 2022 trailer. On some planets, when the sun is directly overhead, you get this crude, flat, "Baby's First Real-Time Global Illumination" look where it feels like you're not looking at a 3D scene, but a flat matte painting or poster or something. Very often, it's the texture colors themselves that are at fault. There's not enough contrast. You have hills all over the place on some planets that are the same exact color as their surroundings and don't stand out very much.

In RDR2, for a counterexample, even when the sun is directly overhead, the terrain still "pops".



Am I just talking crazy, or do people see what I'm seeing?

 

[Epoch]

The planetary terrain looks really, really flat, for some reason. They have a lot of fogging to create an impression of depth, but a lot of these scenes still look inexplicably flat. This was something I noticed in the 2022 trailer. On some planets, when the sun is directly overhead, you get this crude, flat, "Baby's First Real-Time Global Illumination" look where it feels like you're not looking at a 3D scene, but a flat matte painting or poster or something. Very often, it's the texture colors themselves that are at fault. There's not enough contrast. You have hills all over the place on some planets that are the same exact color as their surroundings and don't stand out very much.

God those trees in the Starfield pic are awful, and you can see the uniformity and they are even spawning on the rocky looking hill on the left. I think the reason it looks so flat is the lack of real atmospheric fog, its just a volumetric fog that only covers a certain height, where as proper fog would blend into the sky colour at a distance, which you can see in the RDR2 screnshot. There is also no overhangs or much in the way of vertical breakup, its just a flat landscape with no kitbash art overtop, so it ends up being very smooth and rounded with nothing that casts a shadow when the sun is overhead because nothing overlaps. A few random boulders strewn about evenly distanced doesn't come close to hand placed cliff edges and ridges that prior Bethesda games had, and you can also see that in the RDR2 picture.

Obviously I don't think Red Dead was done by hand, but most likely using the procedural artist driven tools I explained before, and the larger assemblies like the cliff face would be hand placed. Its the difference between a hand made world and babies first random generation. There is a reason Minecraft dropped 2d noise back in alpha and went with 3d noise, without overlapping details the world looks flat.

 

[Drain Todger]

God those trees in the Starfield pic are awful, and you can see the uniformity and they are even spawning on the rocky looking hill on the left. I think the reason it looks so flat is the lack of real atmospheric fog, its just a volumetric fog that only covers a certain height, where as proper fog would blend into the sky colour at a distance, which you can see in the RDR2 screnshot. There is also no overhangs or much in the way of vertical breakup, its just a flat landscape with no kitbash art overtop, so it ends up being very smooth and rounded with nothing that casts a shadow when the sun is overhead because nothing overlaps. A few random boulders strewn about evenly distanced doesn't come close to hand placed cliff edges and ridges that prior Bethesda games had, and you can also see that in the RDR2 picture.

Obviously I don't think Red Dead was done by hand, but most likely using the procedural artist driven tools I explained before, and the larger assemblies like the cliff face would be hand placed. Its the difference between a hand made world and babies first random generation. There is a reason Minecraft dropped 2d noise back in alpha and went with 3d noise, without overlapping details the world looks flat.

Yep, that's it. No overhangs, no shadows, and the fog is screwy. It looks a little bit better at sunset/sunrise when there are actual shadows being cast by the randomly distributed rocks and trees and such, but the foliage is still hilariously fugly for some reason.

 

[TVB]

@TVBForever I certainly hope he likes it. I like it and I feel like I wasn't hyping it up as much as him but I got exactly what I expected from the start.

What can I really expect from him seeing as how he's a complete Bethesda fantard straight from plebbit?

 

[Drain Todger]

This setting is a pretty horrifying post-apocalypse if you actually stop and think about it for a few minutes. They don't say, explicitly, how many people escaped Earth (LOL, Hollow Earth has a higher likelihood of being real than the Earth's atmosphere and magnetosphere disappearing over the course of a few decades), or what the population of the Settled Systems is, but if you look around, the largest settlements are still tiny. The Freestar Rangers only have a dozen full-fledged Rangers at any given time. I don't think there are more than a few million humans alive in this setting at the most. Some tens of millions max is my best guess. The ethnicity ratios are like South Africa, and every city is teeming with more faggots than San Fran. People live in pods and eat bugs, and if they're not eating mealworms from a foil packet, they're eating minced fish guts, or artificially flavored soylent shaped into cubed replicas of the foods people used to eat that have been caked in food coloring and glazes. There are swarming mongol hordes of pirates, mercenaries, and murderhobos just waiting to skullfuck anyone who leaves the comfort of New Atlantis. This may just be one of the most depressing visions of the future I have ever seen.

 

[Lord of the Large Pants]

Are there any followers for evil or even morally grey characters?

Everyone I've recruited so far cries and shits their pants if a civilian or sometimes even a quest NPC dies.

I miss Cait and Strong. This fucking sucks, Bethesda are the ESG hard.

Strong disliked that.

 

[xXx: State of the Union]

This setting is a pretty horrifying post-apocalypse if you actually stop and think about it for a few minutes. They don't say, explicitly, how many people escaped Earth (LOL, Hollow Earth has a higher likelihood of being real than the Earth's atmosphere and magnetosphere disappearing over the course of a few decades)

I mean, Earths destruction is basically caused by space magic so why would it be realistic?

And are we sure that we are supposed to believe there's barely any humans left or is this just typical "it's a fucking game" stuff that has always been present with Bethesda titles. (There only being like a thousand NPC's in Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim isn't meant to be taken literally since, you know, they're games)

 

[Epoch]

And are we sure that we are supposed to believe there's barely any humans left or is this just typical "it's a fucking game" stuff that has always been present with Bethesda titles. (There only being like a thousand NPC's in Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim isn't meant to be taken literally since, you know, they're games)

There are seemingly more abandoned outposts than actual functioning outposts, it felt very bleak when I played it because of that.

 

[Rockzo]

View attachment 5332695

This is like walking on a Mass Effect 1 planet without the Mako. It was be 30 - 40 minutes per featureless enviroment but with the Mako it's 5 - 10 minutes of bouncing around the terrain.
Are vehicles just an anathema for the Creation Engine?

 

[ShitlordroltihS]

Is this main story really this short and shitty or is it just me?

 

[Panoramic Overton Window]

I was really looking forward to this game but now with everything I have learned I can't be bothered to even buy it. It never should have been made. FO5 or ES6 woiuld've done double in sales and been carried so much just on the strength of their amazing lore and settings alone.

 

[bango skank]

I just spent nearly three hours scouring a planet for an outpost location that had the resources I wanted, built and configured everything to set up an xp/credit farm, flew back to the main city to edit my ship and flew back only for it to completely disappear from my maps and now it might as well not exist.

I built a landing pad, I assigned crew members to work there and theyre still assigned there in my crew list, but i cant actually get to the place because its not an actual fucking planet its randomly generated terrain populated around wherever you landed thats not actually fucking connected to anywhere else on the “planet.”

I’ll take most bugs in stride, hell I put 100+ hours into cyberpunk at launch and it’s one of my favorite games of all time, but when bullshit like this happens and completely invalidates the time you’ve put into a game it practically guarantees I’m never touching it again.

 

[Male Idiot]

So you can only build on special designated camping planets... and the rest procedurally get wiped?

Lol. Lmao even.

 

[derpherp2]

Day 2 of trying outpost bullshit.
Holy fucking christ levelling all outpost skills is agony, you need to build a lot of unique outposts on different planets I'm going to try satellite bases next but fuck I need to level these retarded shit.

Also workbenches are bugged for outposts, you have to constantly reload your game since the outpost loads retardedly and can forever be stuck loading an asset that doesn't exist disabling both workbenches and build mod. So nice going there bethesda.
Oh and almost all crafting mats for outposts is the manufactured shit, so have fun going back and forth your workbench just to build a fucking computer that doesn't even work.

To make no mention of the lack of showers, and how retarded "hab" walls are so wall-mounted furniture will spazz out, especially with sinks.

How in the fuck do you make an even worse outpost building system + crafting system than Fallout 4. HOW???

On the bright side figured out how "crafting" organic items work, long story short. Scan everything, if you scan flora/fauna enough times it should say "outpost viable" at some point. So now at least I know what the game wants me to do to get spice. Now I need to magically find a planet that has a spice outpost viable fauna. Somehow. Since I totes love planet hopping for 5 pieces of lead and some fucking mrs dash.

So you can only build on special designated camping planets... and the rest procedurally get wiped?

Lol. Lmao even.

The only reason im even entertaining this bullshit is because I noticed I can build an outpost ON TOP of space florida for some dumbfuck reason. So I'm going to.

 

[bango skank]

So you can only build on special designated camping planets... and the rest procedurally get wiped?

Lol. Lmao even.

I dont think it was an intended effect, as far as the game is concerned the outpost still exists because my crew members are still there and I got achievements for the resources that are being extracted there while I was flailing trying to find the fucking place, I just have no way of actually getting there.

As far as I can tell, landing on a planet basically generates an area of terrain to explore with random points of interest in a limited space, if you go back to orbit and pick a new landing zone it repeats the process and you can’t actually get to any other LZs that have been generated regardless how near or far they might be. Meaning since the game deleted the waypoint for the LZ created by the landing pad I built it might as well not fucking exist and my time would’ve been better spent with my thumb up my ass.

 

[derpherp2]

Okay I've noticed a thing involving biome generation. Good job forcing me to notice by hamstringing my attempts at making ONE actual base btw bethesda. vry nice.
It's worse than fucking rimworld, it doesn't generate biomes in relation to nearby landmasses.

I can't explain properly how retarded it is, but you can tell that their "biome generation" isn't even random as well as other people have said. Not just the landmarks are in the same fucking areas, but the overall design of wide flat land + mountains. Like look at how retarded it is with X+coast biomes it's disgraceful.

The entire game is essentially one NMS biome generated and the emil jizzed on like 3 planets, giving it a sense of life. While those homunculuses decided to space travel and slowly populate some planets, and then almost all died off. Like we're playing someone's rimworld save that had save our ship 2 but fallout 4 got added somehow and in the process of this freakish abomination rimworld got down syndrome.

 

[Hard Toothbrush]

A sequel to this, in UE - with actual seamless planets and no loading screens, and Metahuman for the characters - would be kick-ass.

First time I've seen seamless planet landing and procedural planet generation on a "modern" system was Infinity: Quest for Earth tech demo made by like one guy in fucking 2010.

I'm pretty sure some Evochron-series games did it even before that. If you want to get specific, fucking Elite 2 did seamless landing on a goddamn Amiga and Atari ST.
It's 2023 and a team of what is it, 500 people plus fartzillion of subcontractors can't handle that and yet expect you to shell out $60 for the "experience" of populating the bland game world yourself with outposts and NPCs from the Kronenberg universe. I'll give Starfield one two things though. One - it got me back to Freelancer. Nothing beats exploration in that game imo. Two - and this is the most horrifying thing - it made me seriously consider Star Citizen as a viable alternative to get my space exploration fix.

 

[tulskij_tochnyj]

Day 2 of trying outpost bullshit.

Outposts are fucking useless in this game. In FO4, if you invested enough time, you could basically automate the process of collecting scrap, which made crafting much easier. Settlements within trade network had shared inventories and infinite capacity containers.
In Starfield, there's like half of the Periodic table of elements + organic resources + manufactured resources. The best spots that I have surveyed (and I have fully surveyed over 50 planets) contained 3, maybe 4 types of mineral deposits. To cover even basic building and crafting needs (Fe, Al, Cu, Ni, Be, W, Ti) I had to build 4 outposts (and I spent around 15 hours looking for sweetspots for them).
Then, meet Soyfiled logistics. I had an outpost producing Be, Al and He3. He3 was fueling inter-system links and was therefore constantly drained from the "incoming" container. Since Be and Al weren't needed most of the time, their proportion in the container increased. At one point, it climbed to 300/300, link stopped working and the entire network of inter-system links turned off. There's no sorting, no programmable switches that could've prevented this. And the capacity of outpost containers is a joke. 75 for a small, 150 for medium and 300 for large. Starting ship has larger cargo hold. I.e. you need to build a wall of containers to be able to store anything.
When it comes to manufacturing, every container is considered a single entity. So, you either autistically sort resources by hand and remember which container holds what, or you create gorillion of output links from your container wall to fabricator (I'm not even sure you can do that).
And farming organic resources is just insulting. You need feed and seed for animals. Some planets have animals, but don't have appropriate feed and seed. You can't put plants from one planet into a greenhouse on another. It's so fucking overcomplicated for no reason.

TL;DR Outposts are time-consuming convoluted trash that doesn't pay off, it's easier to buy resources (especially organic) from vendors and put huge cargo hold and crafting benches on your ship.

 

[Asian tech support]

I don't really know how to accurately answer this, it's definitely smaller than Imperial City because despite there being a bunch of superfluous citizens walking around there aren't a lot of superfluous interiors.

I'll include a map so you can decide for yourself (note: there is an underground area called "The Well" that isn't shown accurately on here that adds a few more shops and stuff, but also isn't that big. I'd equate it to maybe a single district of the Imperial City)

There are at least two other cities that are the same size, and I've run into a few space ports and such that are maybe the size of the North area of New Atlantis. (there may be more I haven't stumbled upon, they were never part of the main story and I'm just getting into exploring and doing side content)

Then there are a bunch of random civilian outposts that are just like a few ships and a warehouse that sells you shit on random planets.

Facinating. New Atlantis really is just that one building. Space mystery meats spent hundreds of years building a single suburban corporate block and forgot how to make cars. No wonder the population is a billionth of what it should be. Is there a planet to explore outside the city and if so, is it one of the half dozen that got human attention?

For a title that is allegedly Bethesda's biggest project yet, they seem to have spent eight years building three IC district sized hamlets, a barely functional planetary procgen system, a disconnected spacebox, and outsourced the spaceship building/settlement building to a subsidiary studio. If the cities were even a quarter the size of Night City, I'd have been impressed. You'd think cities would have been a priority as they definitely knew how bland and gay exploration is.