Starfield Pre-Release Thread [GAME RELEASED, GO TO NEW THREAD]

[Crispy]

until you realize they offer nothing to do

I hate playing Devil's Advocate for Bethesda since it makes me feel so dirty but having so many planets that can be explored and having so much open space with nothing interesting in it is going to make the eventual discovery of something interesting.... well, interesting.

I see nothing wrong fundamentally with the concept that, without prior knowledge of a POI or a mission objective, or anything out of the ordinary, the process of discovery in a game about space exploration is going to be actually meaningful.

Besides, anything worth seeing in the game is going to be spoiled on the internet within weeks or days of release.

 

[Drakortha]

until you realize they offer nothing to do

I hate playing Devil's Advocate for Bethesda since it makes me feel so dirty but having so many planets that can be explored and having so much open space with nothing interesting in it is going to make the eventual discovery of something interesting.... well, interesting.

A good analogy for it would be like accidentally stepping in dogshit.

You routinely take walks every morning without incident. You might call it a bit boring and uneventful. But once in a while you might accidentally step in a piece of dogshit.

Your whole Devil's Advocate is based on the assumption that the small nuggets of discovery would actually be worth your time. Did you even play Fallout 4? It's such a huge piece of shit. Never tried 76 myself, and I'm not going to. I seen enough in Fallout 4.

 

[Crispy]

Your whole Devil's Advocate is based on the assumption that the small nuggets of discovery would actually be worth your time.

I don't think you really understand why Devil's Advocate is called what it is, but yes, you're right. They may not be worth my time. Then again, it's my time to value.

Did you even play Fallout 4?

Yup.

It's such a huge piece of shit. Never tried 76 myself, and I'm not going to. I seen enough in Fallout 4.

Great. Have fun continuing to post in Bethesda-related threads, though.

 

[Lemming42]

Fo4 was standout awful, but I'm really hoping they can just recapture Skyrim's quality of dungeons. It's not even hard - just relatively linear corridors with a few traps and enemy rooms, a couple of side areas, and some big memorable thing at the end with a loot reward. I dunno what the fuck was going on in some of Fo4's shitty dungeons but hopefully they learned their lesson.

 

[Drakortha]

Great. Have fun continuing to post in Bethesda-related threads, though.

I will, thanks.

 

[Zombra]

Fo4 was standout awful, but I'm really hoping they can just recapture Skyrim's quality of dungeons. It's not even hard - just relatively linear corridors with a few traps and enemy rooms, a couple of side areas, and some big memorable thing at the end with a loot reward. I dunno what the fuck was going on in some of Fo4's shitty dungeons but hopefully they learned their lesson.

Skyrim's dungeons weren't great that I can remember. First room, see an opening up on the wall that you can't reach (because Skyrim removed flying). Then, go through a single corridor with rooms along the way. At the very end, find the treasure chest, then jump down out of the opening and you're back in the first room. Disgusting. A character with a stepladder could have bypassed 95% of all dungeon content. I don't remember any dungeons that deviated from the formula though I guess there must have been some.

 

[Modron]

I don't remember any dungeons that deviated from the formula though I guess there must have been some.

I think there may have been a couple non-circular ones with different entrances and exit.

 

[Lemming42]

Fo4 was standout awful, but I'm really hoping they can just recapture Skyrim's quality of dungeons. It's not even hard - just relatively linear corridors with a few traps and enemy rooms, a couple of side areas, and some big memorable thing at the end with a loot reward. I dunno what the fuck was going on in some of Fo4's shitty dungeons but hopefully they learned their lesson.

Skyrim's dungeons weren't great that I can remember. First room, see an opening up on the wall that you can't reach (because Skyrim removed flying). Then, go through a single corridor with rooms along the way. At the very end, find the treasure chest, then jump down out of the opening and you're back in the first room. Disgusting. A character with a stepladder could have bypassed 95% of all dungeon content. I don't remember any dungeons that deviated from the formula though I guess there must have been some.

That's a fair description of most of them, but that's all they really needed to be to service the gameplay loop of "walk into somewhere, hit everyone, go through a trap corridor, see a boss, kill the boss, open the boss chest".

Obviously more complex dungeons would be better*, but I was more trying to criticise Fo4's dungeons than outright praise Skyrim's. Skyrim's are mostly ultra-linear rollercoaster rides that push you through a corridor of traps and combat encounters and then hand you a reward at the end, but even that's a step up from whatever was going on in Fo4, every dungeon in Fo4 felt totally aimless to me.

*then again, I don't think anyone's too eager for a return of Oblivion's endless Ayleid ruins

Also, just in response to the question of whether or not there were any non-linear dungeons in Skyrim - there are a few with multiple entrances and exits, there's Blackreach which is pretty unique, and there's a Dwemer one I forgot the name of where the floor opens up and sends you flying half a mile underground, forcing you to work your way back up (which can lead you into a couple of other nearby dungeons through an underground cave network, iirc).

 

[Ryzer]

Might and Magic 6 handles dungeons fairly well and should be an inspiration for other devs on how to design dungeons: traps/ enigma / hidden doors compartment.
Or to a greater extent, dungeons from Blobbers should be the holy grail.

 

[Butter]

until you realize they offer nothing to do

I hate playing Devil's Advocate for Bethesda since it makes me feel so dirty but having so many planets that can be explored and having so much open space with nothing interesting in it is going to make the eventual discovery of something interesting.... well, interesting.

I see nothing wrong fundamentally with the concept that, without prior knowledge of a POI or a mission objective, or anything out of the ordinary, the process of discovery in a game about space exploration is going to be actually meaningful.

Besides, anything worth seeing in the game is going to be spoiled on the internet within weeks or days of release.

Do you explore the Daggerfall map? It's really great having huge swathes of nothing punctuated by a POI every 6 hours, right?

 

[Zombra]

Lemming42 Interesting. I have better memories of F4's interiors to be honest. They were more aimless because they felt (to me anyway) more like real spaces. Like an office building with a big lobby with rooms all around and a staircase up to the next level, with monsters roaming here and there. Or a skyscraper with a broken elevator and climbing stairs up to landing after landing. They felt like they made sense for what each space was and the combat was less predictable. To be honest I hope for spaces like that in Starfield, spaces designed for their function in the world, not endless corridors with convenient waist-high cover.

Off topic, I was just fantasizing about what it might be like to have Daggerfall-style dungeon generation in a game with decent combat and UI. Starfield shouldn't be that game but what if for TES 6 ........
And actual fucking 3D maps for 3D spaces, like Daggerfall had. We haven't seen anything like that for Starfield but come on Bethesda, if ever there was a game where 3D spaces are fully supported surely this would be the one.

 

[Crispy]

It's really great having huge swathes of nothing punctuated by a POI every 6 hours, right?

Actually, yes, it is great. It's more realistic. It puncuates, accentuates the gigantic gameworld, the wonder of how vast it all is, the sense of isolation if you didn't have access to fast travel options.

But you do have access to fast travel options. So that might lead one to ask, what's the point of having a huge gameworld then, when all anyone really cares about are the points of interest? To which I would reply, "That's an excellent question."

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

But you do have access to fast travel options. So that might lead one to ask, what's the point of having a huge gameworld then, when all anyone really cares about are the points of interest? To which I would reply, "That's an excellent question."

Every proper Open World game will be scaled down relative to the environment it simulates, in order to allow the player-character to directly traverse the game world in a reasonable amount of time. This avoids the self-defeating Open World design of Daggerfall, in which the player is reliant on a fast travel system to move between settlements and dungeons, without actually traversing the game world because the time required is prohibitive. A good Open World can still deliver the impression of being much larger than it actually is, even if not to the degree of the geographic area it emulates, as was the case for Morrowind.

 

[Crispy]

the self-defeating Open World design of Daggerfall

I will grudgingly allow you this description only because of the lack of technology available back then to make the empty spaces between cities anything more than flat planes of color interspersed with pixelated trees, with an occasional wandering monster. Oh, and maybe a random dungeon if you're lucky.

The point in this thread, however, is that the technology is available now, if we are to believe Todd and his sweet little lies, to *possibly* make the manual exploration of the vast spaces between known POIs worth it, if one were to stumble upon another, new POI, albeit one possibly procedurally generated.

Is this new A.I.-generated content going to be worth discovering, though? Can it ever be?

 

[Zombra]

I still remember how fucking annoying it was that Oblivion started with fast travel points enabled for all major settlements. You could step out of the starter dungeon and teleport across the world immediately at no cost. So fucking stupid.

With Skyrim (and F4) you at least had to walk to a place once before teleporting back to it at any time.

My favorite model is probably Red Dead Online, with fast travel posts in every town, and you can only teleport between posts, so it's still easy to feel alone and far from things way out in the wilderness. And there is a decent monetary cost.

Oh also, let's remember that Daggerfall actually factored in travel costs too. You couldn't FT unless you had a few coins to spend. Nothing prohibitive but it was there. I miss that.

I honestly wonder how Starfield will handle all this. Probably in the feeble short attention span way we all expect where you blip around with no transition necessary ever.

 

[Robotigan]

Fo4 was standout awful, but I'm really hoping they can just recapture Skyrim's quality of dungeons. It's not even hard - just relatively linear corridors with a few traps and enemy rooms, a couple of side areas, and some big memorable thing at the end with a loot reward. I dunno what the fuck was going on in some of Fo4's shitty dungeons but hopefully they learned their lesson.

Skyrim's dungeons weren't great that I can remember. First room, see an opening up on the wall that you can't reach (because Skyrim removed flying). Then, go through a single corridor with rooms along the way. At the very end, find the treasure chest, then jump down out of the opening and you're back in the first room. Disgusting. A character with a stepladder could have bypassed 95% of all dungeon content. I don't remember any dungeons that deviated from the formula though I guess there must have been some.

Levitate is a bad ability. Waterwalking, acrobatics, athletics, fortify jump, even climbing can all be genuinely missed but not levitate. I know the real reason they removed it was to protect instanced cities, but I don't think it should return or should only return in a very limited way. It's simultaneously completely busted and also boring. It breaks level design because it trivializes platforming when you can go wherever you want with pinpoint precision. Meanwhile it conveys no sense of acceleration or momentum. I think Bethesda realizes this too because they've started doing jetpacks instead which is like levitation but good. I think people just miss it because the lore application was really cool and it made Vivec City less annoying.

Also I'm pretty sure Skyrim dungeons are straight out of Todd Howard's Indiana Jones fantasies which is why they work the way they do.

Oh also, let's remember that Daggerfall actually factored in travel costs. You couldn't FT unless you had a few coins to spend. Nothing prohibitive but it was there. I miss that.

Believe or not, FO76 has this. I'm not going to get worked up over fast travel. If you don't want to use it... don't. But the purpose is clear, it's to reduce commuting. Traveling to some part of the map diegetically is really cool the first time, still pleasant the second time, and a nice optional hike thereafter. But if you're trying to grind for resources and have to constantly ferry them between two locations over and over again, that's when it becomes tedious. And I'd wager that's what most people use it for, not to skip the map exploration. Everyone loves the map exploration.

 

[InD_ImaginE]

Frankly I don't get the "muh hardcore no fast travel gameplay" people are pushing for

Outward is like that and is frankly a massive boring slog. You literally press button and avoid all fight anyway from point a to b and just fucking see the screen moving for 30 minutes

 

[Robotigan]

the self-defeating Open World design of Daggerfall

I will grudgingly allow you this description only because of the lack of technology available back then to make the empty spaces between cities anything more than flat planes of color interspersed with pixelated trees, with an occasional wandering monster. Oh, and maybe a random dungeon if you're lucky.

The point in this thread, however, is that the technology is available now, if we are to believe Todd and his sweet little lies, to *possibly* make the manual exploration of the vast spaces between known POIs worth it, if one were to stumble upon another, new POI, albeit one possibly procedurally generated.

Is this new A.I.-generated content going to be worth discovering, though? Can it ever be?

Realistically proportioned spaces aren't that fun. I should know, I've driven through Indiana several times. The goal of a large scale open world game is to make the player feel like they're traveling vast distances while always ensuring there's something interesting just around the bend when they start to get bored.

 

[Lemming42]

Daggerfall's scope is appealing because the gameplay allows for abstraction (via fast travel) while still letting the player have the experience of actually being in an enormous, to-scale world. You don't generally have reason to travel through the countryside, but you do have reason to travel through towns which are more or less 1:1 scale.

The scale of the world also does have a constant effect on gameplay, because almost all your quests are timed, meaning that not only do resources like money (for ships/inns) come into play, but also your travel speed. This combines with other mechanics like poison, disease and fatigue. You need to get a sense of where you are in the world, how easy it'll be to travel to your destination, and how long it'll take, or you'll start to time out on your quests. Travelling at the "cautious" speed, staying in inns and sailing on ships is generally the best bet, but it's not always something you can afford, either in money or time.

Yeah it'd be better if the wilderness was populated with procgen-placed camps or forts or whatever, but I don't agree at all with people who think Daggerfall's scale is a gimmick or a failed experiment. It literally has a constant effect on the game and the way you play it.

The removal of time quests from Morrowind onwards does mean that the advantages of having 1:1 scale worlds would be limited, though.

 

[HarveyBirdman]

Without trying to defend potential lack of customized content anywhere but considering we're talking about space here in general, outside of resource gathering it would seem sensible that most places would be void of anything all that interesting to do.

Sure, but a highly advanced multi-solar spacefaring civilization should have more than 4 cities and 4 people to hang out with. The scale is way out of proportion.

 

[Zombra]

Frankly I don't get the "muh hardcore no fast travel gameplay" people are pushing for

It's about designing a game space and activity loop that people don't want to skip. Adding fast travel is planning for failure.

Outward is like that and is frankly a massive boring slog. You literally press button and avoid all fight anyway from point a to b and just fucking see the screen moving for 30 minutes

These devs learned the wrong lesson then. Instead of making a game people don't want to skip, they made a game people do want to skip and removed the option to skip it. That's really not the same thing.

 

[Clockwork Knight]

the self-defeating Open World design of Daggerfall

I will grudgingly allow you this description only because of the lack of technology available back then to make the empty spaces between cities anything more than flat planes of color interspersed with pixelated trees, with an occasional wandering monster. Oh, and maybe a random dungeon if you're lucky.

The point in this thread, however, is that the technology is available now, if we are to believe Todd and his sweet little lies, to *possibly* make the manual exploration of the vast spaces between known POIs worth it, if one were to stumble upon another, new POI, albeit one possibly procedurally generated.

Is this new A.I.-generated content going to be worth discovering, though? Can it ever be?

Sounds like Minecraft. But without the "mine" aspect it might amount to landing somewhere and departing if there's no interesting features nearby.

 

[WHATAMESS]

Without trying to defend potential lack of customized content anywhere but considering we're talking about space here in general, outside of resource gathering it would seem sensible that most places would be void of anything all that interesting to do.

Sure, but a highly advanced multi-solar spacefaring civilization should have more than 4 cities and 4 people to hang out with. The scale is way out of proportion.

People here have no fucking idea about how a to-scale space RPG would be literally IMPOSSIBLE to make now or even in 100 years. I'm no Bethesda shill, but they have a team size in the low hundreds. It would take decades to fully realize such a setting. People here should criticize the game for what it is, not for their insane impossible expectations.

Bethesda's the only RPG developer that makes cities that are that interactive, with every NPC being named and having unique homes with physics objects and daily schedules. No other developer does things that way. Think of the fucking TIME it would take to even make a Rockstar-scale city but with Bethesda's level of interactivity and NPC detail.

 

[TheEntitledOne]

Imagine you finish a six month shift mining asteroids. You get paid, head straight to the nearest strip club and this is what you find.

Now imagine that with Bethesda animations and character models in their full glory

 

[Kiste]

It's not even hard - just relatively linear corridors with a few traps and enemy rooms, a couple of side areas, and some big memorable thing at the end with a loot reward.

Yeah, the loot reward. I was always at the edge of my seat every time I opened that chest at the end of the dungeon. What will it be this time? Some coin, a fork and a cheese wheel or maybe some coin, a plate and a loaf of bread?