Starfield should have been fake 3D like Daggerfall

[ind33d]

Only way to make a universe without the budget and codebase becoming unmanageable, which clearly happened. Is anyone making a fangame like this?

 

[Baron Tahn]

What they maybe should have done instead is Outer Wilds schtick - set it on one system with fleshed out planets/moons, with proper spaceflight mechanics and a subspace warp sorta engine to cross the distance.

Probably still would have been way overscoped but could still attempt procgen for most of the planets with all the design focused around certain capital cities/colonies/orbital stations. Write it in somehow - like the sun is pouring out too much radiation so everyone is bunkering down into domes or something.

 

[Be Kind Rewind]

What they maybe should have done instead is Outer Wilds schtick - set it on one system with fleshed out planets/moons, with proper spaceflight mechanics and a subspace warp sorta engine to cross the distance.

Smaller contained single solar systems are rare in the science fiction genre and I'm not sure why. It seems sensible that if you're going to start somewhere smaller and then scale that up if you make it work, despite this developers always go hog wild with the concept and almost always do scope creep until there are more planets than they could possibly come up with unique designs for and end up procedurally generating a lot of empty rocks. Outer Wilds is easily one of the best because of how restrained it is and does away with the issue people have with "exploring" algo generated content.

This is verging off topic, but since I've been playing Suzerain I have been asking myself why strategic space games don't do what that game does. The default when it comes to the genre is to give you the reins of an galactic empire with planets in the hundreds, depending on when the game was made and engine could handle. But micro-managing that many planets, when there is an optimal build order, is not that great in terms of playing a game. So why isn't there a game that places you in the role of a planetary or star system governor, within a wider federation, empire, or any other organized space civilization? It wouldn't take away from the big large scale space opera people seem to want, and it would limit the game's scope into something that would be fun to play.

It's one reason why most space 4X games feel so bland, one planet is much like any other, and you're going to micromanage them all, or let the AI do it for you so the game plays itself. On a smaller scope you could give each planet a rich history, unique characteristics and more importantly a reason for the player to care about them and get a feeling for them. Just like how every planet of Outer Wilds gives you a totally different experience with diverging considerations to take into account when navigating them.

Is anyone making a fangame like this?

I don't understand what the point of it would be, empty bland procedurally generated squares of nothing wouldn't be much better if it was a Daggerfall Unity mod turning the fantasy sluts into overweight Abbos.

 

[Gregz]

Starfield wasn't a technical failure, it was a social failure.

 

[ind33d]

Starfield wasn't a technical failure, it was a social failure.

It also had basically no marketing other than Rockstar energy, right? Makes sense considering it's demoralization propaganda. Why advertise the product at all?

 

[Gregz]

Starfield wasn't a technical failure, it was a social failure.

It also had basically no marketing other than Rockstar energy, right? Makes sense considering it's demoralization propaganda. Why advertise the product at all?

It is indeed demoralization propaganda.

 

[Saint_Proverbius]

The default when it comes to the genre is to give you the reins of an galactic empire with planets in the hundreds, depending on when the game was made and engine could handle. But micro-managing that many planets, when there is an optimal build order, is not that great in terms of playing a game. So why isn't there a game that places you in the role of a planetary or star system governor, within a wider federation, empire, or any other organized space civilization? It wouldn't take away from the big large scale space opera people seem to want, and it would limit the game's scope into something that would be fun to play.

I remember tinkering with nearly all the planets I gained in the original Master of Orion. That's something I don't do to nearly the same degree in modern 4X games. You remember the Reach for the Stars remake that came out in the late 1990s? It was a graphics upgrade to an older DOS game, but also added so many automated controls that the game pretty much played itself with a few clicks of the mouse. Master of Orion 2 was pretty decent, not as fun as the first, but the third MoO played itself as well. There's a reason not too many people mention it. I haven't tried the most recent Master of Orion, so I'm not sure how it is.

There's a tricky balance games like these need between automation, complexity, and how long things take. The last one is something that a lot of people seem to miss, since it directly affects the other two. You can have something complex, but if you hit the player with dozens of things every turn, the player gets overwhelmed by "winning", having too many planets and other things going on. I have a feeling the classics in the 4X genre accidentally hit this balance. That's why they're remembered, because they were complex enough to be fun, weren't so automated that the player felt they were doing something, and things happened at a pace where the player was engaged but not overwhelmed.

It's one reason why most space 4X games feel so bland, one planet is much like any other, and you're going to micromanage them all, or let the AI do it for you so the game plays itself.

There's also a minimalistic thing going on as well. I remember playing Elite for the Amiga for months. The planets in Elite were pretty vanilla considering the game was originally developed for a 2MHz 6502 processor that only had 32k of RAM to play around with. Believe it or not, Elite's galaxy was actually procedurally generated, but it used the same seed for every game. That's why everyone had the same map, but that map isn't part of the game's data. I could land on a planet, check the planet I was on, check the map of planets nearby, and judge for myself what to buy and where to go next to sell that stuff.

Starfield wasn't a technical failure, it was a social failure.

It was both. It was a space game that gimped exploration. It was an open world with not much in it, but they also shoved in their hand made stuff. You hit the hand made stuff, were entertained for a bit, and then back to nothingness when you tried to get that same level of stuff from the space game. It was clearly a technical failure because they just keep reshaping the same old engine in to a new game, and the limits of that engine were completely wrong for this type of game.

Look at No Man's Sky. You can fly to any planet. You can fly along the surface of any planet. You can get in a fast moving vehicle and drive around that whole planet. No matter how you move around, or even how fast, you never run in to problems. Now look at Starfield and what all the modders have been bitching about. You hit a planet, and it gives you a frame of reference for where you are on the planet, the "origin" point. You can move away from the origin, but not too quickly. The faster you move, the more the chunks develop errors with your location. No Man's Sky was developed from the ground up to be this type of game with the the ability to deal with these things as they happen.

 

[Be Kind Rewind]

I remember tinkering with nearly all the planets I gained in the original Master of Orion. That's something I don't do to nearly the same degree in modern 4X games.

There's a reason I keep an installation of Master of Orion 1 on every computer I use, and that's because despite being very early to the genre it was as close to perfection it ever got. By making planetary development a couple of sliders but with a depth to them that makes it worth paying attention to, they avoided the usual boring optimized build order routine of 4X games that take inspiration from the Civ series, like Master of Orion 2. Planetary size had impact on your max population, and different climates made planets inhabitable until you could figure out the technology, and later on you could terraform them.

Increasing complexity is what led to Master of Orion 3. Audiences thought they wanted MOO2 but with a larger map that took up more than one static screen, something that made it feel like you were ruling a galactic empire with all of what that entailed, hundreds of space colonies, but when you scale that up and put it through the Civ formula you either get a game that plays itself or that gives you carpal tunnel syndrome, which wasn't helped by how many submenus MMO3 had. Take that even further and you might end up something like Distant Worlds that is more of a simulation than it is a proper game, which can be fun for the toy-like boy's first steam engine or antfarm aspect of it, but unsatisfying if you want something more akin to a boardgame.

It's not just about complexity, simulationism and automation, but meaningful decisions. In Suzerain, which isn't a 4X game or even a real strategy game, but more like a visual novel for people with an interest in geopolitics, a big infrastructure project is a big decision, what it will be, what entity will be responsible for the building of it, and in terms of power structures and alliances. Do you scratch the back of oligarchs that might fuck it up by being cheap? Do you hire a new company that gets things done the fastest but is unproven? Do you allow the slow and corrupt state construction company deal with it? This is an interesting decision with all sorts of interesting implications with long and short term consequences.

In MOO the few sliders you have might not seem like much at first, but they will decide if a planet is going to be a defensible place in the future, if it will be an industrial zone dedicated to producing your interstellar armada, or perhaps a planet of the best and brightest gather for military R&D. Every adjustment you make to the sliders have a huge impact on your empire. Then there is the ship designs, where a newly researched weapon could change the course of a war. Suddenly you might have death spores and can purge alien worlds of their populations with ease and no longer have the need for large invasion forces on the ground. Because this was such an early game in the genre what was implemented was justified by the impact it had on the game.

Fast forward to Paradox's entry into the space 4X genre with Stellaris and the gameplay now consists of micro-managing hundreds of worlds with buildings, while getting worthless popups each turn with "story" that gives you 1% bonuses and tiny material boosts to your silly Warcraft 1 styled resource bar or space mana. It's one of the worst games of the genre I've played, much worse than MOO3 even, and that's because nothing you do in that game ever feels impactful at all. You might play as a race of undead parasites attempting to take over the living of the galaxy, or a machine civilization, or the Star Trek space federation and it all is very samey. Meanwhile the race you played in MOO had huge consequences to how you played the game. Playing as quickly multiplying space frog-dinosaurs was radically different from playing as grey techies or the infiltrating and spying cloaked assholes that'd be leeching off you when you played as the greys or blowing up your factories if you were the robots expert at mass production. Because the systems were so simple any change to that was massive.

At the end of the day video games are supposed to be interactive experiences, and the more a game makes you think about your decisions, be it an RPG character build, a story choice, or how to manage a space colony, the better it is. Typically the more you scale things down the more impact your decision will have. If you have hundreds of points to spend to give you minimal % buffs in stats or attacks this becomes a non-decision and doesn't respect the player, but if you have one or two points to spend, and this will add +1 or +2 to a D6 or 2D6 diceroll under task resolution checks of some kind, this is huge. The same is true for any genre, 4X, or space exploration games. Landing and walking around on each planet in Outer Wilds is radically different, landing on any of the 100 planets in Starfield feels exactly the same, so why have the 100 planets, what's the point? Again, it's about respecting the player, making interactivity meaningful.

Believe it or not, Elite's galaxy was actually procedurally generated, but it used the same seed for every game.

It was a technical requirement back then for that type of game, Starflight had a procedural galaxy to explore, that was static and didn't very between playthroughs, but had to be generated on the fly. You could land on planets, interact with the wildlife and things like that. It got its character from the aliens that populated the stars, with very varied attitudes and distinct personalities, and gave the world distinctness more by the lore and story you'd find on distant planets moreso than through the depictions of the alien worlds themselves. This was in 1986 though, and the focus was on the scale and fantasy of having a crew aboard a spacship, landing on alien planets and exploring them, and meeting strange new life. The planets in Elite are more like the towns and colonies in Sid Meier's Pirates, ports to trade with, pit stops on the road, since the focus was on space itself and dogfights, and I don't think you can compare that to what Starfield is attempting.

 

[Saint_Proverbius]

There's a reason I keep an installation of Master of Orion 1 on every computer I use

It's one of the first few things that follows a DOSBox install on any piece of hardware I put DOSBox on. I have yet to check out FreeOrion, which I need to check out at some point since I've liked most of the open source civilization games more than the main line actual releases since Civ3. Although, and I didn't know this before just now, there's FreeOrion for Android.

Oddly enough, did you ever play Imperium? There was apparently a DOS version, but I played it on the Amiga. It's one of those older 4X games which had me addicted for quite a while. The interesting thing about this game was a mechanic where you found a way to extend your life and the life of your governors artificially. If I remember right, you also had to keep getting re-elected. You had to keep the life extending drug in a steady supply to make sure you stayed alive and it also made your governors happy. You could cut them off of the drug, which would piss them off, but would also kill them off if they were "old" in terms of years lived. It's funny you mention MoO3's gigantic galaxy when Imperium was mostly a GUI interface with only the map having graphics for the most part.

Fast forward to Paradox's entry into the space 4X genre with Stellaris and the gameplay now consists of micro-managing hundreds of worlds with buildings, while getting worthless popups each turn with "story" that gives you 1% bonuses and tiny material boosts to your silly Warcraft 1 styled resource bar or space mana. It's one of the worst games of the genre I've played, much worse than MOO3 even, and that's because nothing you do in that game ever feels impactful at all.

It's what got me thinking about everything spamming the player with information every turn, honestly, and thinking part of the issue with getting in to newer 4X games versus the older ones, might also be the timing of events. I wouldn't say it's a bad game, but it's probably just a little too complex for it's own good. I'm not sure why the Hell they kept releasing more and more DLC for it, since the core game is a bit much.

Landing and walking around on each planet in Outer Wilds is radically different, landing on any of the 100 planets in Starfield feels exactly the same, so why have the 100 planets, what's the point?

That's one thing about No Man's Sky after several patches. When it was first released, it seemed like "A Whole Lot of Nothing". Now there's quite a bit of stuff to find on the planets and the plants and animals seem pretty different. The planets can have trade bases, little cities, player made things, crashed ships, crashed capital ships, abandoned structures/derelicts, and so on. In fact, I managed to get a broken down clunker I found crashed on a planet up and running and I've been slowly repairing it. Maybe one day I'll get it completely fixed.

 

[Cogemesiter]

Many people get turned off by the idea of a game that isn’t 3rd or 1st person. For example the best all around (imo) space game is Starsector. Several factions, tons of different ships, be a pirate, etc. not to mention the thousands of different mods if you are into that, but most people will not want to play it since it’s 2d.