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Bethesda says most of Starfield's 1000+ planets are dull on purpose because 'when the astronauts went to the moon, there was nothing there' but 'they certainly weren't bored' (www.pcgamer.com)
submitted 3 years ago by to c/gaming@lemmy.ml
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Sure Todd, lol

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[–] 7 points 3 years ago (10 children)

taking the other side of the argument, planetary landings in E:D are just loading screens at 10x the length. Travelling to a planet at .3 C is neat the first time but then you look at trade routes as “how long do I sit paying attention in case of an interdiction?” StarCitizen falls into the same trap. QD is neat but then it takes you 5 minutes and a fuel stop to go from one side of a system to another. Its mundane trudging for reality rather than getting the boring monotony out of the way of the player.

Just because the tech exists doesn’t mean it makes for compelling gameplay.

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  • [–] 6 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    I can agree with this but I do wish it involved fewer loading screens and clicking through each time. If you're gonna skip the "realism" to make it more convenient then make it actually convenient.

    With that said despite that and the fact I'd love to fly the ship over the planets manually, I'm really liking it so far (2h in).

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  • [–] 3 points 3 years ago

    Yeah I can't really disagree with people's assessment of how much travel-by-loading-screen there can be, but like... while it's there, I just mostly haven't noticed it. Thirty hours in now and I find I'm mixing up fast travelling wide distances with "manually" travelling by launching into orbit and jumping place to place fairly regularly, I don't think I'd even have thought to criticize it without coming here.

    I like how immersive travel can be in a game like NMS, but it's not like it's all that exciting or fun to pull into the atmosphere for the 500th time and maneuver to your landing pad, or spend longer than a loading screen amount of time to boost out of atmosphere to hit the jump button. We're exchanging one form of slightly tedious load for a different one.

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  • [–] 0 points 3 years ago

    The best answer I have to minimizing the interaction is setting routes from your mission list. On PC this cuts down to L > click mission > R > hold X.

    It is still 4 discrete inputs, which sucks, but it is substantially better than navigating by the star map which is how my brain defaulted to fast travel for most of my first play through.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 years ago* (6 children)

    There are all kinds of possibilities, and for one example of a video game system for travelling among the stars that gives you a sense of actually going somewhere without getting too dull I'd point to EVE. You can go anywhere, but there are distant and dangerous places that take actual effort to get to. It lets you get some kind of sense of the distances involved. Having made that comparison it's hard to avoid noticing that the space combat (even against NPCs) and ship outfitting are quite good too compared to how it looks in Starfield. Planetary interaction was pretty tedious when I played it, but EVE is mostly really good at the space stuff.

    Another example would be good old Star Control II, another of my favourite space games. Another one that managed to make space feel big. You had to carefully manage fuel and resources, and if you wanted to go all the way across the map you'd have a long and interesting journey during which many things would happen. Combat and navigation were primitive compared to what people expect today, but still it made it feel like you were exploring a vast space, not just a big catalogue of planets.

    As for Starfield, I don't know whether it does that or not since I haven't played it yet; I'd sort of like to find out before I spend $ on it.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago (5 children)

    you cant really compare gate-to-gate traversal to the other primary space games though. unless you are in a capital ship, generally you have a warp around 3-5 so even Niarja (minus dock workers) only takes a few seconds to cross. If we just focus on hub routes, I don’t recall the exact number, but Amarr to Jita/Dodi is between 25-60 jumps depending on your risk tolerance. That is 25 discrete load screens, with a Leopard and no 0 tick gate camps thats still around 10-20 minutes of just loading. EVE is an exceptionally bad example to pull and why I excluded it.

    If you want something like Star Control then running the bubble in E:D is your best option, just never install a fuel scoop.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago (4 children)

    What I want is just something where travel takes enough time and effort that interesting problems can arise during the course of it that aren't just generic random encounters. Something where different parts of space have local character, something like geography rather than a flat isotropic void where distance is meaningless. In each case the technology used for moving about is entirely fictional, so I don't see a reason not to make it interesting. I was just pointing out examples of that being done, not advocating for either of them being the one true way to do it.

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  • [–] 0 points 3 years ago (3 children)

    transit in EVE isn’t really anything to write home about though. Target, align, warp, jump, target, align, warp, jump.

    Gate camps are player based RNG with a difficulty slider. Do you take the shorter run thru Niarja or do you add an extra 30 jumps for relative safety barring CODE affiliates.

    if what you want is a completely bespoke experience where a system has only explicit experiences then you immediately lose out on the design intent behind Starfield and the storyline within is immediately hollowed out and meaningless.

    besides, its a video game. everything is a generic random encounter rolled on a table hidden from the player. if you want a better experience, Starfinder is there.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago (2 children)

    I used to make a living hauling valuable stuff from the outer edge of low-sec in to Jita and such places. Sure it got to be pretty much routine after a while. Well, most of the time. But then it's always possible in that game to go off and do something else instead. The experience of exploring it all for the first time though, having not yet gathered the knowledge and resources to do it in anything like safety or comfort, was fantastic. If you could just teleport instantly from one place to anywhere without significant cost it wouldn't even be a game. I'm not saying that the mechanics of transportation should dominate every game like they do EVE, but having at least some of that sort of thing seems like a good idea in a game that's supposed to be about exploring a space of any kind. I disable fast travel in Skyrim too. It makes things too quick and convenient.

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  • [–] 0 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    Well, guess what? You can walk to the starport, open the door to your ship, walk into the cockpit, sit down, launch into space, target your next system navpoint, power up your grav driv, and jump to the next system. You won’t be on a planet, you will be in space. Will you find a trader? System security fighting pirates? A bounty hunter wanting to cash in on you? An old lady that wants you to come over for tea? Dunno. But you aren’t fast traveling. Genuinely the crux of your complaint has been “i dont know how it works but its bad and I dont like it”

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago

    As for Starfield, I don’t know whether it does that or not since I haven’t played it yet; I’d sort of like to find out

    Anyway, thanks, I guess that question is more or less answered.

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