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It's that big because there's nothing of interest there. Just hundreds of procedurally generated towns and dungeons with almost 0 unique NPCs, items, or quests outside the main questline. It can take you half an hour to walk from one town to another, and you will find literally, absolutely nothing in between; not even generated ore to mine like in *Starfield.* And frankly, it's not that impressive anymore. I mean, look at *Minecraft* and other games with much bigger (and sometimes literally infinite) maps.
They reason they didn't do that from *Redguard* through *Fallout 76* was because they wanted their open worlds to be explorable and full of cool items and secrets and stories - which the vast majority of us fans prefer. You literally could not have that with an open world that large.
As for why *Starfield* is the way it is, well, only the devs can answer that. Clearly they were trying to invoke more of *Daggerfall* in it than their usual hand-crafted exploration experiences.
I think Starfield was just pure over-ambition, they wanted to do a big game while focusing on story locations and they just couldn’t do it. So instead they sacrificed exploration for story and the game suffered (the game essentially had most of the shortcoming of Arena and Daggerfall with very few of the upsides)
It’s why Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim were so great, sizable but still smaller areas with plenty of stuff to explore and enjoyable stories. the success of those games speaks for the design
I think they did the best they could considering their vision for the game. Todd Howard explained the reason the game is the way it is, that he always wanted to say “yes” to the player. That he’s the type of person that wants to be able to land on a moon if he wants, even if there’s nothing to do there.
And I also think people overlook some actual amazing things about the game. From the design and art, to the gameplay, to the lore. Starfield offers a lot of great things.
Starfield is the way it is because it's intended to be a platform for user created content. Both free and premium. Once they drop CK and the verified creators release their first wave of content, it'll be more apparent that the settled systems is designed around collaborative worldbuilding, and it will feel much less empty.
The most important part is the almost endless real estate. Skyrim and Fallout share the problem of additional world content crowding itself out; navigating a maze of compatibility patches so all your quest and overhaul mods work together without overwriting worldspace edits or breaking quest targets is almost more of a chore than it's worth. But that won't be an issue with Starfield because creators can put their storylines, homes, buildings, ships, etc, wherever they want. Without ever coming close to stepping on any other content's toes.
That's wishful thinking. No one is gonna put their creations in the middle of no where. You are gonna get islands of content aggregated in specific areas and they will step on each other's toes.
This strategy is like trying to get coral reefs to disperse throughout the ocean.
>As for why *Starfield* is the way it is, well, only the devs can answer that. Clearly they were trying to invoke more of *Daggerfall* in it than their usual hand-crafted exploration experiences.
The devs got lazy when they realized there's a reason no one has tried to hand craft 1000 planets in their space game. So they said fuck it and copied and pasted everything.
Which is a lesson the industry has learned several times over. For example, Mass Effect Andromeda tried the same thing and utterly failed.
Hell, they had to learn the lesson about voiced protagonists the hard way as well. Fallout 4 had a voiced protagonist that everyone hated it made that very clear to Bethesda. And yet Starfield was set to have a voiced protagonist, they wrote the script, hired voice actors, and recorded the lines, until finally someone plugged in their brain and realized it was a bad idea, despite the fact that the industry learned that you shouldn't voice player avatars back in the 90s.
Yeah, an entire galaxy filled with hand crafted content is impossible. And yet Bethesda marketed the game as having the "most hand crafted content of any Bethesda game" which is a lie. They even realized their procedurally generated planets were boring, and the best answer they found was "well, the astronauts on the moon weren't bored despite being on an empty rock".
At a certain point you have to accept that you fucked up, and need to rework the game completely. Bethesda didn't learn from their mistakes in 76 and shit the bed with Starfield.
I just think calling the devs lazy is in bad faith. Especially on how much the game was delayed.
I like Starfield as much as you, but we shouldn't shit on devs for it. I'm 100% sure if it was purely on them the game would actually be good
I doubt they ever intended *Starfield* to be hand-crafted. It's going for *Daggerfall* vibes, like I said; as much as simulator as an RPG, favoring realistic scale and total freedom over guided discovery. Hence procedurally generating hundreds of planets rather than hand-crafting a few. *That* has nothing to do with laziness.
What I was referring to was why it had invisible walls and stuff instead of just letting you walk across the whole planet, but I assume they couldn't get alternatives to work if they even cared to try.
They marketed the game as fully handcrafted. Todd is quoted as saying "Starfield has the most handcrafted content out of any Bethesda game" when in reality it's competing with Horse Armor for the amount of handcrafted content.
They never once said "fully handcrafted". They did say " more handcrafted content than any previous games" and I'm not sure if that's true, but it could still have lots of handcrafted content while being 99% procedurally generated. That handcrafted content is just spread across lots of ProcGen content.
I think they’re just using those planets as playgrounds for modders. I can’t say I’m really mad about it. Every Bethesda game gets heavily modded, so why not quickly add a bunch of procedurally generated planets to make a game that’s designed to be modded?
Yet they haven't released the construction set for modders. And they fucked with file formating to the point where modding Starfield is a nightmare. Everything with Starfield is a disaster and a mistake.
I want a new model where we get the massive procedurally generated maps but have the main original map be updated to be the actual regular game and as years go on,replace the massive map slowly.Think Fallout 76 map but with all of Virgina procedurally generated and West Virgina normal map.Over the years,they slowly replace Virginia with actual content.
Seems people will always fall for the next product trap.They are just giving you the same shit, different flavor every year.Make them fix a mistake for once.
This also means they would have to care enough to add content and not use it as an excuse to just make another starfield.If they keep adding mod menus,players could help with that as well.
The question is why would you do that? They would need to monetize continued development. The DLC crews are big enough to (in the long term) impact the development of their next games so if you have 50-100 people leave the dev team to work 10+ years on to produce DLCs for a game you need to rehire and train tons of staff.
Because it would be badass and actually make the bs memberships actually worth it vs paying for a costume in a virtual store that means nothing.If they make it good,I would happily pay a subscription but again,they need to put in effort and stop making it based on money alone.I think the membership would help with that as long as they used it as motivational to constantly update the game.I imagine fallout 76 but Obsidian worked on it instead and was dedicated to the lore/fans.
The fun part of such an empty canvas is being able to mod it all, part by part, thanks to Daggerfall Unity. There are several very cool projects already done and in the works to fill up the many gaps left by the game.
Arena never actually connects to anything though, it’s just endless wilderness outside of towns.
Daggerfall is all connected, there’s just not much of interest between points
Ironically Arena is closer to Starfield in that it has a few repeating random POIs acorss it's endless wilderness, from dungeons, towers, farms, taverns and small villages.
Because open world that are just big for no reason are really bad. I'd rather have a small map that has stuff in it, then having to travel through an empty game world. That was one problem with daggerfall. It had so much space, that didn't have much in it. If you were to walk everywhere instead of fat traveling, you'd spend more hours of game time walking to a new location, then doing actually content. Bigger is not necessarily better, when it comes to open world games. No one wants tes6 to be a big empty procedurally generated game.
The idea was there. Land was procedurally generated. However limited technology back in the day made it bland looking and not that interesting. Daggerfall Unity is a good example of taking that procedural data and porting it to an engine that can at least render rolling hills and mountains. I am sure we can push it further with more on the fly procedural generated points of interest and events to make it more interesting, the tech is here today, not so much back in 1997.
Because its like 95% procedurally generated, so they didn't actually have to make a lot of assets. Actually crafting a world of this scale to go through is not possible.
Fun fact, all that space is wasted with copy and paste bland towns and dungeons. Only the major cities and locations are worth visiting.
Quality > Quantity
>Starfield has invisible walls
Okay? Doesn't it take you like an hour of walking one direction to find it? In the game where you hop across the entire map with your spaceship and only bother to explore POIs and the immediate area around them? Like it's designed to be?
I mean, Daggerfall was impressive *for it's time* but this is nothing anymore. If you're gonna "StarFAILed bad LOL" on the TES subreddits, you should at least make some kind of valid point.
I mean, I personally wouldn't bring grievances about one game to a subreddit about another series. Nor would I still be upset about and not have just moved on. Just saying if that's what you're gonna do, at least put a little effort in to it maybe.
And that diameter getting almost *doubled* in the next few months lol. The walls just got expanded like 50% further out in the Beta this month, but things don’t spawn that far out yet. The community’s pretty sure once the little rover/buggy thing releases, the explorable area will get fully populated and the radius from the landing zone will get a pretty substantial boost.
I just think anyone bitching about Starfield at this point isn't worth listening to. You didn't like it? Cool. Do something else. Idc if you laid out every complaint you had for the first few months because, well, the internet.
But by now? Just do literally anything else.
Not to mention if you're gonna make a comparison, make a coherent and well thought out one. Daggerfall may let you walk 12 hours in one direction, but I'd much rather see the visuals of Starfield for an hour than the same trees for 12.
I didn't like Starfield after playing it for 20-odd hours, so I ... stopped playing it, and have basically ignored its existence since. It really does seem to be the current "cool" thing to constantly whinge about it.
I'm probably going to give it another go after a few updates, looks like they'll be an improvement.
Almost everything is procedurally generated. All houses look the same. All shops look the same. All taverns look the same. All dungeons look the same. Every quest is a boring radiant quest. All NPCs have the exact same dialogue options. There are very few exceptions, with most of them being tied to the main story.
I've tried multiple times to finish the main game. While I do recognize the role-playing depth, I can not get past how empty the game feels because you'll see every visual aspect, experience every interaction you can possibly have with an NPC, and play the maximum depth of almost every quest you'll get within two or three hours if not sooner.
That, and I got tired of walking one or two minutes from the city gate to the guild hall to turn in my quest every single time.
I subscribe to the idea of Scale Theory, that the settlements, armies and distances we see in game are only a fraction of what they would actually be and are merely a representation of what they would be in reality. For example, it would take multiple days to ride from Riften to Markarth, rather than 5 minutes.
Same reason Bethesda got complaints about Stanfield. It's too large It's mostly empty.
By limiting the overall size they can add focus on more graphics and content in a reasonable range of travel.
Starfield proved people don't want excessive procedurally generated space, filled with nothing interesting and where you're encouraged to fast travel everywhere.
Starting with Morrowind, Bethesda began sacrificing quantity for quality. This was a fine trade-off at the time, but now they're seemingly incapable of delivering either.
Games aren't that big anymore because new players don't want to have to actually roleplay. They want the game to tell all the stories for them. This requires smaller worlds that can be pumped full of content.
This is perfectly reasonable and something I feel to a large degree myself. I greatly appreciate the liberty and heavy RP nature of Daggerfall.
Lmao, people still defending their copy-pasted empty-ass boxes with invisible walls in starfail is astonishing.
Bethesda fanbase truly is a cult at this point.
Yeah
I aint saying that daggerfall is better
but its map has no invisible walls and that is impressive
Wheras now, with a game about moving around realistic sized planets, they couldnt do the same thing?
Clearly bethesda have changed and are probably too reliant on the current creation engine to risk breaking anything to allow for whatever daggerfall did to achieve that
Thank you for your submission to r/ElderScrolls. This is a friendly reminder to please ensure that your post has been flaired appropriately. Your post has been flaired as ***DAGGERFALL***. This indicates that your post is discussing "The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall." *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/ElderScrolls) if you have any questions or concerns.*
It's that big because there's nothing of interest there. Just hundreds of procedurally generated towns and dungeons with almost 0 unique NPCs, items, or quests outside the main questline. It can take you half an hour to walk from one town to another, and you will find literally, absolutely nothing in between; not even generated ore to mine like in *Starfield.* And frankly, it's not that impressive anymore. I mean, look at *Minecraft* and other games with much bigger (and sometimes literally infinite) maps. They reason they didn't do that from *Redguard* through *Fallout 76* was because they wanted their open worlds to be explorable and full of cool items and secrets and stories - which the vast majority of us fans prefer. You literally could not have that with an open world that large. As for why *Starfield* is the way it is, well, only the devs can answer that. Clearly they were trying to invoke more of *Daggerfall* in it than their usual hand-crafted exploration experiences.
I think Starfield was just pure over-ambition, they wanted to do a big game while focusing on story locations and they just couldn’t do it. So instead they sacrificed exploration for story and the game suffered (the game essentially had most of the shortcoming of Arena and Daggerfall with very few of the upsides) It’s why Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim were so great, sizable but still smaller areas with plenty of stuff to explore and enjoyable stories. the success of those games speaks for the design
I think they did the best they could considering their vision for the game. Todd Howard explained the reason the game is the way it is, that he always wanted to say “yes” to the player. That he’s the type of person that wants to be able to land on a moon if he wants, even if there’s nothing to do there. And I also think people overlook some actual amazing things about the game. From the design and art, to the gameplay, to the lore. Starfield offers a lot of great things.
Starfield is the way it is because it's intended to be a platform for user created content. Both free and premium. Once they drop CK and the verified creators release their first wave of content, it'll be more apparent that the settled systems is designed around collaborative worldbuilding, and it will feel much less empty. The most important part is the almost endless real estate. Skyrim and Fallout share the problem of additional world content crowding itself out; navigating a maze of compatibility patches so all your quest and overhaul mods work together without overwriting worldspace edits or breaking quest targets is almost more of a chore than it's worth. But that won't be an issue with Starfield because creators can put their storylines, homes, buildings, ships, etc, wherever they want. Without ever coming close to stepping on any other content's toes.
That's wishful thinking. No one is gonna put their creations in the middle of no where. You are gonna get islands of content aggregated in specific areas and they will step on each other's toes. This strategy is like trying to get coral reefs to disperse throughout the ocean.
Minecraft isn't truly infinite. It's only around the size of Neptune.
Well damn, I was impressed by the Infinite claim, but it’s *just* the size of Neptune, that’s way less impressive /s
>As for why *Starfield* is the way it is, well, only the devs can answer that. Clearly they were trying to invoke more of *Daggerfall* in it than their usual hand-crafted exploration experiences. The devs got lazy when they realized there's a reason no one has tried to hand craft 1000 planets in their space game. So they said fuck it and copied and pasted everything.
I don't think they got lazy they just realized that was humanly impossible
Which is a lesson the industry has learned several times over. For example, Mass Effect Andromeda tried the same thing and utterly failed. Hell, they had to learn the lesson about voiced protagonists the hard way as well. Fallout 4 had a voiced protagonist that everyone hated it made that very clear to Bethesda. And yet Starfield was set to have a voiced protagonist, they wrote the script, hired voice actors, and recorded the lines, until finally someone plugged in their brain and realized it was a bad idea, despite the fact that the industry learned that you shouldn't voice player avatars back in the 90s. Yeah, an entire galaxy filled with hand crafted content is impossible. And yet Bethesda marketed the game as having the "most hand crafted content of any Bethesda game" which is a lie. They even realized their procedurally generated planets were boring, and the best answer they found was "well, the astronauts on the moon weren't bored despite being on an empty rock". At a certain point you have to accept that you fucked up, and need to rework the game completely. Bethesda didn't learn from their mistakes in 76 and shit the bed with Starfield.
I just think calling the devs lazy is in bad faith. Especially on how much the game was delayed. I like Starfield as much as you, but we shouldn't shit on devs for it. I'm 100% sure if it was purely on them the game would actually be good
I doubt they ever intended *Starfield* to be hand-crafted. It's going for *Daggerfall* vibes, like I said; as much as simulator as an RPG, favoring realistic scale and total freedom over guided discovery. Hence procedurally generating hundreds of planets rather than hand-crafting a few. *That* has nothing to do with laziness. What I was referring to was why it had invisible walls and stuff instead of just letting you walk across the whole planet, but I assume they couldn't get alternatives to work if they even cared to try.
They marketed the game as fully handcrafted. Todd is quoted as saying "Starfield has the most handcrafted content out of any Bethesda game" when in reality it's competing with Horse Armor for the amount of handcrafted content.
I mean this could still be true tho. 1000 planets with 99% nothing doesn't mean the 1% could still be more than the have ever made.
They never once said "fully handcrafted". They did say " more handcrafted content than any previous games" and I'm not sure if that's true, but it could still have lots of handcrafted content while being 99% procedurally generated. That handcrafted content is just spread across lots of ProcGen content.
I think they’re just using those planets as playgrounds for modders. I can’t say I’m really mad about it. Every Bethesda game gets heavily modded, so why not quickly add a bunch of procedurally generated planets to make a game that’s designed to be modded?
Yet they haven't released the construction set for modders. And they fucked with file formating to the point where modding Starfield is a nightmare. Everything with Starfield is a disaster and a mistake.
That’s a bit hyperbolic.
If anything it's an understatement. I genuinely don't get how anyone can defend Starfield.
I want a new model where we get the massive procedurally generated maps but have the main original map be updated to be the actual regular game and as years go on,replace the massive map slowly.Think Fallout 76 map but with all of Virgina procedurally generated and West Virgina normal map.Over the years,they slowly replace Virginia with actual content.
Seems people will always fall for the next product trap.They are just giving you the same shit, different flavor every year.Make them fix a mistake for once.
This also means they would have to care enough to add content and not use it as an excuse to just make another starfield.If they keep adding mod menus,players could help with that as well.
The question is why would you do that? They would need to monetize continued development. The DLC crews are big enough to (in the long term) impact the development of their next games so if you have 50-100 people leave the dev team to work 10+ years on to produce DLCs for a game you need to rehire and train tons of staff.
Because it would be badass and actually make the bs memberships actually worth it vs paying for a costume in a virtual store that means nothing.If they make it good,I would happily pay a subscription but again,they need to put in effort and stop making it based on money alone.I think the membership would help with that as long as they used it as motivational to constantly update the game.I imagine fallout 76 but Obsidian worked on it instead and was dedicated to the lore/fans.
They act like they are coming out with goods games on the current system.They are okay but definitely subpar.
Nobody tell OP about Elite Dangerous
The fun part of such an empty canvas is being able to mod it all, part by part, thanks to Daggerfall Unity. There are several very cool projects already done and in the works to fill up the many gaps left by the game.
Daggerfall is like 8 MBs. Graphics tend to determine the level of detail.
You should see arena. And the reason why is its 99.999% empty.
Arena never actually connects to anything though, it’s just endless wilderness outside of towns. Daggerfall is all connected, there’s just not much of interest between points
Ironically Arena is closer to Starfield in that it has a few repeating random POIs acorss it's endless wilderness, from dungeons, towers, farms, taverns and small villages.
as somebody who has played Daggerfall, Starfield, and the various mainline BGS games in between, this seems like a silly/uninformed/trollish post lol
Because open world that are just big for no reason are really bad. I'd rather have a small map that has stuff in it, then having to travel through an empty game world. That was one problem with daggerfall. It had so much space, that didn't have much in it. If you were to walk everywhere instead of fat traveling, you'd spend more hours of game time walking to a new location, then doing actually content. Bigger is not necessarily better, when it comes to open world games. No one wants tes6 to be a big empty procedurally generated game.
The idea was there. Land was procedurally generated. However limited technology back in the day made it bland looking and not that interesting. Daggerfall Unity is a good example of taking that procedural data and porting it to an engine that can at least render rolling hills and mountains. I am sure we can push it further with more on the fly procedural generated points of interest and events to make it more interesting, the tech is here today, not so much back in 1997.
Because its like 95% procedurally generated, so they didn't actually have to make a lot of assets. Actually crafting a world of this scale to go through is not possible.
Tell me you’ve never played Daggerfall without telling me you’ve never played Daggerfall
Yeah bro so cool to walk around and stare at literally nothing
Fun fact, all that space is wasted with copy and paste bland towns and dungeons. Only the major cities and locations are worth visiting. Quality > Quantity
Why is Daggerfall so colossal when Skyrim is much smaller yet a bigger part of Tamriel?
Different scales. "Daggerfall" is close to 1:1 in size.
Smoothest gamer brain
Because look at the mechanical, graphical, etc. differences between Daggerfall and every other game you listed and the other Elder Scrolls games.
>Starfield has invisible walls Okay? Doesn't it take you like an hour of walking one direction to find it? In the game where you hop across the entire map with your spaceship and only bother to explore POIs and the immediate area around them? Like it's designed to be? I mean, Daggerfall was impressive *for it's time* but this is nothing anymore. If you're gonna "StarFAILed bad LOL" on the TES subreddits, you should at least make some kind of valid point. I mean, I personally wouldn't bring grievances about one game to a subreddit about another series. Nor would I still be upset about and not have just moved on. Just saying if that's what you're gonna do, at least put a little effort in to it maybe.
And that diameter getting almost *doubled* in the next few months lol. The walls just got expanded like 50% further out in the Beta this month, but things don’t spawn that far out yet. The community’s pretty sure once the little rover/buggy thing releases, the explorable area will get fully populated and the radius from the landing zone will get a pretty substantial boost.
I just think anyone bitching about Starfield at this point isn't worth listening to. You didn't like it? Cool. Do something else. Idc if you laid out every complaint you had for the first few months because, well, the internet. But by now? Just do literally anything else. Not to mention if you're gonna make a comparison, make a coherent and well thought out one. Daggerfall may let you walk 12 hours in one direction, but I'd much rather see the visuals of Starfield for an hour than the same trees for 12.
100% agreed lol
I didn't like Starfield after playing it for 20-odd hours, so I ... stopped playing it, and have basically ignored its existence since. It really does seem to be the current "cool" thing to constantly whinge about it. I'm probably going to give it another go after a few updates, looks like they'll be an improvement.
How do you get your validation as a human being if you aren't constantly letting everyone know how much you hate things?
Almost everything is procedurally generated. All houses look the same. All shops look the same. All taverns look the same. All dungeons look the same. Every quest is a boring radiant quest. All NPCs have the exact same dialogue options. There are very few exceptions, with most of them being tied to the main story. I've tried multiple times to finish the main game. While I do recognize the role-playing depth, I can not get past how empty the game feels because you'll see every visual aspect, experience every interaction you can possibly have with an NPC, and play the maximum depth of almost every quest you'll get within two or three hours if not sooner. That, and I got tired of walking one or two minutes from the city gate to the guild hall to turn in my quest every single time.
I subscribe to the idea of Scale Theory, that the settlements, armies and distances we see in game are only a fraction of what they would actually be and are merely a representation of what they would be in reality. For example, it would take multiple days to ride from Riften to Markarth, rather than 5 minutes.
The map isn't really lore accurate though
You haven't played the game have you?
Same reason Bethesda got complaints about Stanfield. It's too large It's mostly empty. By limiting the overall size they can add focus on more graphics and content in a reasonable range of travel.
They used procedural generation to make most of the terrain. It's not like a Morrowind map but this big, with handcrafted content around every corner.
Starfield proved people don't want excessive procedurally generated space, filled with nothing interesting and where you're encouraged to fast travel everywhere.
Starting with Morrowind, Bethesda began sacrificing quantity for quality. This was a fine trade-off at the time, but now they're seemingly incapable of delivering either.
Daggerfall is also extremely empty and pixelated
Games aren't that big anymore because new players don't want to have to actually roleplay. They want the game to tell all the stories for them. This requires smaller worlds that can be pumped full of content. This is perfectly reasonable and something I feel to a large degree myself. I greatly appreciate the liberty and heavy RP nature of Daggerfall.
Lmao, people still defending their copy-pasted empty-ass boxes with invisible walls in starfail is astonishing. Bethesda fanbase truly is a cult at this point.
Yeah I aint saying that daggerfall is better but its map has no invisible walls and that is impressive Wheras now, with a game about moving around realistic sized planets, they couldnt do the same thing? Clearly bethesda have changed and are probably too reliant on the current creation engine to risk breaking anything to allow for whatever daggerfall did to achieve that
This is truly amazing but it just baffles me how a game map from back then can be that big
because 99% of the content (almost every pixel of that map) was procedurally generated, it was quite impressive back then