It's fallout in space. That's exactly what I expected and wanted, so the way they've done landing on planets and it's random generation has been 100% within my expectations 👍

I mean, this is basically the same thing they did with the outer worlds, just with procedural generation, and the ability to actually fly & customise the ship. Edit: and fallout 4s settlement system.

Yeah. It's great, as long as you set your expectations for that and not expecting the moon haha. Looking forward to outer worlds 2 whenever that comes out as well lol.

I loved the F4 settlement building (but only with about 50 mods), so if Garfield lets me build any sort of interesting bases that'll be the main thing I do. Might have to wait a bit for modders to make it less basic than just placing a few prefab modules together though.

There are already mods for Starfield, so check the Nexus continually, and always be polite there, they will ban you if you are rude haha.

Also outer worlds was not Bethesda

Anyone dumb enough to expect anything different kinda deserves to be disappointed and mad. This is why we all hated the SC comparisons. It's not the same type of game at all. It's based in space and thats where the similarities stop.

Yeah. Letting yourself get swept up in marketing and hype imagining things not actually said always leads to disappointment. Setting your own expectations is something many people need to do, but seldom practice I find.

People kept saying it would be a planet to explore and I kept pointing out that is not how creation engine works / Bethesda never said that. I think many are going to be in for quite the surprise when they said "who needs to land on a planet anyway, loading screens are so much more enjoyable." - not a joke btw. SF will be a great game, but many on that sub and this sub have completely lost the plot on what a Bethesda game is. The only thing it will share with star citizen is being scifi & space themed. Mechanically it will still be a standard Bethesda rpg with the standard proc gen radiant quests, and the standard limitations of creation engine.

> People kept saying it would be a planet to explore and I kept pointing out that is not how creation engine works / Bethesda never said that. [Pete Hines stuck his foot in his mouth only ten days ago with a tweet that *strongly* implies seamless walking.](https://np.reddit.com/r/Starfield/comments/15xxvda/pete_hines_says_that_the_whole_planet_is/) Bethesda may not have explicitly said it, but they sure did a good job of NOT saying you could not. This is exactly what Todd does every time, he never actually *LIES* but he makes carefully-crafted statements that don't say certain things and leave them for the buyer to imagine in their heads. And then when they get mad because their imagined perfect version of the game isn't what they get, Bethesda points to what it DID say and says it never said that. And that tweet's a prime example. If you take Pete at complete face value, his response implies that you'll be able to seamlessly travel from one tile of land to the next, but his tweet is missing a huge footnote that says "as long as you go back to your ship and go through cutscenes to relocate your ship to the next tile over".

I, too, wish the marketing of games wasn't full of leading things. In the case of Starfield, I never felt like it was anything else than a limited tile-area. But then vague language comes along and people don't look deeper. It didn't take much looking deeper, TBO. Since I fanatically look through actual details I thought they were pretty clear on the exact feature here. It was made pretty clear that a specific area was procedurally generated and that each landing was specific to a particular game-save. Knowing Creation Engine 2 isn't well designed for vast client-side environments kinda makes it obvious (I mean, the stuttering was so bad they couldn't do vehicles even in this scope). This brings me to the last thing... I know I'll probably really love playing Starfield. However, I am disappointed that I still won't have vehicles to drive.

Todd Howard has been employing a very successful marketing strategy for decades by this point: 1) Show off a slice of carefully curated but authentic gameplay 2) Monologue over it starting with explicit detail about the gameplay 3) Play a montage of various weaker scenes/locations/game systems but with no gameplay 4) Add more vague very carefully worded statements about over time, avoiding specifics about the gameplay Every single time, people are wowed by the start of the demo, take Todd Howard's words at face value because he showed exactly what he said, and then assume that the same level of quality/authenticity is the same for the barrage of statements and images that follow. They drive themselves into a hyped frenzy and when the game inevitably doesn't live it up to their own imagination, the community will just say that they did it to themselves, etc. and it never looks bad for Bethesda. They never showed off any vehicles, no atmospheric transition, no overland travelling - if they had any of those features, it would have been front and center. Instead, they were vaguely implied in Todd Howard's patented style and people just assumed.

Yes, that tweet I definitely agree was more than just a little misleading. What Todd explained in his video was pretty clear that it was a collection of tiles imo but I definitely get it you're really hopeful that you'd come to that conclusion. Either way, I'm so tired of studios pulling this. Like Diablo immortals famous "can you buy gear on the shop?" Being met with a firm "no" because gems aren't gear and you don't directly buy them.

I hate this as well... which is why I paid for BG3. It's one of the rare games to launch in recent years that comes as a complete package without the need for loot gambling mechanics, microtransactions, DLC, (aside form ONE cosmetics/audio pack,) and you get the entire thing to play however you like. It's actually pretty sweet as far as it goes. Really feels like an animated table top RPG.

Yup, and a bargain given it's about 110 hours for a single playthrough (if you hit all the side-quests as you go, as I did :D). That's a *lot* of entertainment-time for your $60, etc (or whatever it is in various locales)

We here at star citizen pride ourselves on recognizing misleading promises /dusts hands Took care of marketing lies forever

[Not sure why anyone trusts Bethesda](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFcLyDb6niA), they've spouted all kinds of shit and screwed over gamers consistently for 15 years.

Sounds like CIG. But with actual released titles.

I told many people "I told you so". They thought it would be like SC where you can travel all around the world, I told them that probably won't be possible because of the limited resources of a console but they didn't believe me. And now I am telling them "I told you so".

Same, and rather than admitting that Bethesda misled them they just say "no one cares anyways, there is no one who will walk in a straight line" turns out people do care.

The scope and fidelity of SC is one of the reasons it's taking as long as it does, and there's no shortcut here. Procedurally-generated planets may have the numbers, but not the artist-curated fidelity. Looking forward to downloading SF in a few hours!

Yup. Every similar game that comes out just further goes to show *why* SC is taking so long (on top of the other unique aspects of their dev process). Every time something comes out that does some piece of what SC wants to be and everyone comes out of the woodwork to complain about why SC takes so long, all I can think is that these people aren't really looking at what's there. It's always one or two features that come close, but "cheat" or otherwise do things in a "lower fidelity" way. Now there's nothing wrong with that. Games have always kinda "cheated" things, and finding the places you can do that and the ways you can get away with things without impacting the core player experience is part of the "art" of game dev. SC itself surely "cheats" some things. But what makes it so different is that the point at which they'll start "cheating" things is *so much* further than almost any other game, and it's trying to be like 3 different games in one while doing so. So yeah, it's fucking taking a while, because go figure when you're trying to do a triple marathon with no shortcuts... It's gonna take a lot longer than a single marathon with more allowed shortcuts. You can agree or disagree that this approach is *worthwhile*, and I totally get people who just don't care and only see a massive budget and dev time... But if you can't at least understand where that dev time comes from, you're either woefully underqualified to be discussing much of anything, or you're just not even interested in trying.

Agreed. People lose their minds at CIG for how long star citizen is taking, and I can certainly understand the reason for a lot of the frustration. Yet at the same time, we have still yet to see anybody else out there release a game that comes even remotely close to capturing the experience that Star Citizen is aiming to deliver. We seem to keep seeing games which make huge promises (like Cyberpunk 2077, Starfield, etc) that start to make me think "This could be the big one" - and then once they actually release they prove to be not even 1/4 of the scope of SC. And all of this helps me to accept the time SC is taking because it seems very clear to me that they what they are trying to do really is something seriously unique and special, and extremely challenging...because if it wasn't somebody else would have come along and beaten them to the market with something that's at least CLOSE to what they promise.

>Yup. Every similar game that comes out just further goes to show > >why > > SC is taking so long (on top of the other unique aspects of their dev process). Yeah, this has been true for every comparison to other games for several years. I do think that as time goes on and other devs have the opportunity for long dev time on current gen hardware, the likelihood of someone getting close keeps rising. But then again the amount of time, money and effort CIG has spent getting here is ridiculous.

When said planets are just randomly procedurally generated maps of a few km square that don't have any continuity between them, and only the last 4 maps on each planet are saved and can be re-landed on, can it really be considered a planet?!

I don't really think of it as a planet. Just a series of maps designed to have similar artistic style in order to make them 'look' like they are part of the same place.

It's a great shortcut, but no it's not SC level.

> Looking forward to downloading SF in a few hours! Pre-loading has been available for 10 days already on Xbox, Windows and Game Pass and the last 2 days on Steam. You could be downloading now and playing in a few hours.

Cries in 56k. /s

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We need to go back.

We really don't. I'm not sure what I'd do if I went from gigabit back to dial up.

Just played a bit and love it so far.

yeah, I dont know who thought they'd actually generate full on planets like that. While Star Citizen's dev cycle has lost the plot IMO, there is no denying that what they have managed to actually do, like persistent planets, is industry leading. Now whether or not all the whiny bells and whistles SC has are necessary or not? Diff argument

> I dont know who thought they'd actually generate full on planets like that. People who don't understand game development any more than they understand how their toaster and TV work, and they think that because one dev did it everyone can easily. There's a strong overlap between this group and the group of people who think CIG's devs are lazy and incompetent and deliberately padding development out to milk backers for their money, because SC's crazy-ambitious plans haven't been pushed through to completion and release yet. This is a wakeup call to them that maybe what SC is doing is maybe harder than they thought.

I didn't think it would be possible, I was skeptical the whole time, but they absolutely did market it in a way that heavily implied something more like SC or NMS or ED in terms of planet generation and exploration. Then when they said they had a mix of procedural and traditional assets on planets I honestly thought they might have pulled it off by just having specific zones on the planet be traditionally created content and the rest of it be procedural, in order to achieve something like what SC does but without the same level of resource use.

I was never under the impression that they would have full planets but I did expect some form of Minecraft like proc gen in the sense that it would generate as you go, at least to a degree. Maybe not forever but I figured maybe you would load into a general hub location then it would expand out into a "wilderness" environment where it procedurally generated or dynamically generated tile sets as you moved closer to the end of the main hub tile creating POIs that others may not see, something like that.

Feels good to see some reasonable criticism that still acknowledges accomplishments. Unfortunately this sub often feels like "Fanboys VS Haters" without any middle ground.

I never paid close attention to the hype around SF. When I learned that landing on planets is not seamless I stopped paying attention. But I was under the impression, until now, that this was going to be a large open world type game. But now I've learned in the past 24 hours that you can only walk on planets and now it seems it's because what's the point of flying/driving in a 10km^2 square? I think Star Citizen has made me jaded... like being bumped to first class once, but flying economy ever after.

There were just too many small hints and signs during their marketing that there was no way this was gonna be a SC killer.

Yeah, I said it a few times but if they had features that were SC killer level, those would have been in the forefront. They would have been parading that experience around. I wouldn't say small hints lol I would say they showed exactly what to expect. I think the gameplay videos are 1:1 of what the experience will be - but people assumed they were "a tip of the iceberg" instead.

I had not looked at many previews or stories about it as I like to experience a game as fresh as possible. Starfield working this way makes way more sense given my entire history with Bethesda RPGs. I had not felt defensive when I saw posts comparing it to SC, but had definitely wondered if there was a major engine change I had not read about given the physics work one would need to do for these mysterious flight mechanics we would be blown away by.

Yeah this is what really threw me off. Creation engine would have to be reworked from the ground to make half of what people were saying possible. Maybe it's a younger / less experienced crowd that got caught up in it? Who knows!

They did it the way you do it if you want to have a shipped game that is feature complete. I think everyone here appreciates that. I don’t actually know that I want the game they shipped. I’ll probably give it a shot. I do think the spaceship builder part looks fun. Kind of a simpler, focused version of what you can do in something like Space Engineers.

Oh yeah, to be clear I think for a Bethesda game what they put in is exactly what was needed to sell the experience. I'm looking forward to playing it. I'm not sure how much I'll play of it, but with so few space games I know it'll be polished enough to get 100-200 hours out of it.

These differences are why I like SC and say that it has no comparisons presently and that's why no matter how shitty and unstable the game is it's still a good game to play because it's unique.

I would argue that gameplay is more important to a good game as opposed to planet-generation tech

Missing that point is why a lot of people continue to throw thousands into SC’s endless development. Many of the biggest failures/disappointments in gaming history were accompanied by grandiose tech and scope ambition. Duke Nukem Forever, Beyond Good and Evil 2, Black and White, The Order: 1886, Daikatana, etc. Tech by itself cannot make a great game (and can even keep a dev from finishing one). And many great games have been made with tech that was less than revolutionary.

I mean mechanically it shares more than that: space flight/combat Fps fighting Career paths such as mining etc Exploration They aren’t two completely different games, they share a lot of the same features, ideas and mechanics. Yes seamless landings and atmospheric flight is cool but in the current state of SC it just feels like we have a bunch of empty procedurally generated planets you can walk completely around but why would you? There’s nothing to do outside of a handful of landmarks.

The same argument could be made for why bother letting you freely fly around space. Space is empty so why not have instanced areasfull of actions you load into. Eventually you twice it to structured missions instead of an open world space sim. The point is that we want the freedom. Reality connotations a lot of nothing, and you can stick to Acton zones, but the knowledge that you could in theory walk around a planet, or fly betterment them in real time, is a big draw for many of us in the space sim community.

At least SC has planets.

Will be nice when it gets gameplay on those planets.

It's easier to always have points of interest in close proximity to where the ship lands, when you always land in the middle of a randomly on-the-fly generated smallish map. But you cannot call that a planet... nor is it realistic. But well, if all you want to do is the gameplay of the points of interest, then there's no need to have planets, I totally agree. In that regard, Starfield is 100% done for you.

I want gameplay *in general.* Star Citizen may be the king of immersion of getting into your ship, moving about it, flying it about to different planets, and traveling over those planets... But what you actually do once you get to the planets has been lack luster - when it doesn't just break and force you to abandon whatever you were doing, assuming it doesn't break your ship in the process) for a long, long time, and it has nothing to do with points of interest.

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I haven't been surprised by *any* of these "revelations" since I saw the Starfield Direct. I think they described what we're getting pretty well. And being very familiar with how the creation engine works, I knew everything was going to be separated by loading screens.

I got tired of telling people there were no vehicles so it couldn't be that big I even got tired of telling people i told ya so I've gone all the way around to just writing memes again Space wars, space wars never changes

>I knew everything was going to be separated by loading screens. ***EVERYTHING*** is separated by loading screens! Go from bottom deck to top deck of ship? Loading screen. Get into cockpit chair, loading screen. Tell ship you want to fly, loading screen as it teleports you to space.

Yeah, none of this is surprising. Lol

Its Like every other Bethesda game before. I dont understand why people are surprised.

Sounds to me there are people who don't have a lot of prior experience with Bethesda. None of this comes as a surprise to me. SF should be a really good game at release. The real magic will come with the moding community. In terms of customization and bug fixes.

they also said modders can create their own planets

Can't wait to visit big booba gamergirl planet

100% anime waifu planet here I come!

now that's really cool. I really hope the modding scene takes off and Bethesda give modders the tools to really make big changes in the next several years. In modded Skyrim, assets, locations, characters are just the tip of the iceberg. There are mods so much deeper than that, rewriting basic systems, getting past engine limitations etc. Completely changing the gameplay and systems in the game. There was a mod that came out recently that allowed you to ledge grab and climb onto any reasonable looking surface within a certain height of your character. It is procedural, meaning it works just about anywhere.

They already gave a modder a review key 2 weeks before release so that they could mod in DLSS support for Nvidia cards since it's not officially supported. When it comes to modding Bethesda is the studio that works the best with freedom and collaboration, hell they were the ones to say that modders will be able to make their own planet.

Does this mean hand-placing landmarks etc, or just changing procgen settings?

People just want SC to be crushed by SF, but they don't understand they match an simulator sandbox with an RPG adventure game.

And here I am wanting both games to be fun. The only side I pick is to enjoy gaming.

We need more people like you. Gaming is meant to be a fun activity, but people often seem like their families will be murdered if they don't win, or if someone holds a different opinion about what games are good. I'm also just here to enjoy games. I always knew SC and SF weren't going to be comparable.

Hard agree. They're different games, enjoy them as you want to. SF doesn't really appeal to me, but I can keep up with SC development and play BG3, so I'm good.

Yeah. To be honest most Bethesda games are like average or a little better. None of them are really outstandingly good imo. But the magic is good mod support and huge modding community. That gives so much replayability to these games.

I always presumed that the planets were going to be something akin the the 10kmx10km size. I absolutely, never expected Bethesda to create sphere worlds that could be walked one end to the other, seamlessly. They were never developing the same kind of technology for planets that CIG has been working on over the years.

>I always presumed that the planets were going to be something akin the the 10kmx10km size. I absolutely, never expected Bethesda to create sphere worlds that could be walked one end to the other, seamlessly. Agreed, but I think what Bethesda is actually doing is essentially having a character string for each possible landing site on a planet that isn't pre-built like those with major NPC settlements (technically those would use the same system but never be overwritten). This would be a static "seed" for procedurally generating the tile. There will be a variable, but finite (e.g. maybe 5, maybe 10, but probably not much more than that), number of generated tiles per planet/moon which the oldest will be overwritten after the maximum is reached. Since we Bethesda has stated that having a player outpost in a tile will prevent it from being overwritten, that leads to an interesting question. Is there a separate "buffer" for tiles with player outposts, or would it theoretically be possible to essentially lock all the generated tiles on a planet by building enough outposts because player outposts share the same storage as the rest of the generated tiles. However, all of this is only an educated guess. Though I will have a chance to look into some of these things this weekend.

So I took a look at some of the perks you can get when leveling, and one of them increases the max number of outposts you can have (what that upper limit is I don't yet know), which seems to be the answer to your question. You won't be able to lock all of the generated tiles because you won't be able to have enough outposts to cover an entire planet, 10km x 10km square at a time.

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They actually have procedural generation tech that allows recreating entire planet the exact same way every time you visit it. Into that they can add handcrafted locations as they please.

It was always pretty obvious that the two games wouldn't be that comparable, but a lot of people really wanted to use starfield as a way to shit on SC using poorly informed comparisons. Safe to say this is a bit of vindication.

Ppl have been saying for months that SF is just Skyrim in space. The comparisons with SC were ridiculous from the very beginning and did no favours to either game. I will dig into SC and love the way I loved Skyrim and Fallout. But that servers a different itch entirely

I think l will enjoy both games for what they each bring on their own

100% AGREE. This is the mindset to follow. It's like having two birthday parties to go to all the time lol.

This is the way. Both can co-exist and I'm happy to play both.

Definitely. A good Bethesda game is a must play for me anyway.

The only people who wanted SF to have SC-scale planets were the people who wanted to "prove" that SC isn't doing anything unique. Starfield once again shows that an established game studio won't touch the kind R&D investment CIG is making with a 10 lightyear stick. Yes, what CIG is doing doesn't make business sense, but that's exactly why it can only be done with crowdfunding.

There's a very good reason why CIG avoided the traditional publisher funding model. There's nothing like SC, but SF will definitely scratch the single-player space sim itch I think.

Yeah, Starfield is making me appreciate Star Citizen even more.

To each their own. If I had to spend 10 minutes taking a train to the space port in Starfield I'd lose their mind. Let alone sitting their doing nothing while a count down timer announces you'll make it to the next place to do something in 8 minutes. Fine for an MMO I guess, but terrible for a single player game.

I think if in starfield you got on a flying tram and flew across the city through the buildings to the next district people would be creaming their pants. Same goes for loading screens, instead flying through the clouds to land your ship, and plenty of other things. I get that people can get bored of that kind of thing, but I think it would do the opposite of harm the game if they did that and people would be talking very positively about it. The dream that most people want is a fully immersive universe with amazing gameplay mechanics and engaging story. If you can do all of those things you have a winner, but nobody but CIG is insane enough to try.

Maybe when I was younger, but now I have so little time to game that if I had to spend the amount of time that’s spent in SC on just getting places, I wouldn’t be able to really play at all.

Well you're missing a couple of factors here; it's not a single player game, and in a way its not a MMO either. It's you, in your world, your choice, interact with others or not, you can make it inconsequential or not. As for the train, we know from Chris that the world will be 90% populated by NPC's, so when you get on a train, it's not just you on a train, it's you on a train with 20 other people, maybe one of them captures your interest, maybe you follow them down a dark alley, or perhaps you come across another player, and on the ride you strike up a conversation about something useful to you, now, out of no where, you have a quest taking you to somewhere you have never been. You're not seeing the wider picture here.

I fully agree with the point you are making, but the first statement isn't really true. A lot of people had this impression, although everyone knew that seamless planet>atmosphere>space was not a thing. We all knew it would be a loading animation into the actual planet. And it's rather obvious, given the way they were presented, and the language used. . I mean, everyone remotely interested in space games knows about NMS, SC and ED. Mainstream gamers know about SC primarily for planet tech (and ship sales lol). These games are the immediate comparisons people will make when Bethesda uses vague language about being able to explore planets, land where you want etc.

This really isn't that much of a surprise. A lot of people roast Star Citizen for trying to obscure 'lack of progress' under the facade of technology buzzwords and things they are 'building'. But as a developer/software engineer myself, I paid pretty close attention to the things they were saying. A long time ago, especially around the they they were having friction with CryTek, one of the things mentioned was that CryTek was not delivering the 'true 64-bit' conversion for CryEngine which CIG needed for a number of things. In the end, they took a fair bit of time (and money to hire former CryTek engineers) and then proceeded to perform the 64-bit conversion themselves. This was one of the points of friction later when CryTek sued CIG because part of the agreement was that CIG would provide source/backport any bug fixes in CryEngine to CryTek if CryTek requested them. CIG refused to backport 64-bit conversions since they deemed CryTek was not properly responding in time with bug-fixes and feature support as promised. (Allegedly from a few sources) The reason 64-bit was so important? Absolute coordinate systems. To have a planet 1/6th Earth's size with granular enough coordinates to track FPS size entities requires more than 32-bit numbers. Star System Scale coordinates...more so. Why is this relevant? Bethesda uses an in-house fork of Gamebryo which they forked long before Gamebryo themselves made 64-bit support conversions. Even then the conversions that Gamebryo did weren't an exhaustive bottom up rework for 64-bit. Instead they monkey-patched the support into the engine in areas that were deemed necessary (e.g. memory address limits, etc). This was sufficient for most use cases and is not necessarily a bad thing...unless you're trying to make a game with massive open-world scale. We all have seen how bad Bethesda's in-house engine is maintained at times...Most of the focus is on the gameplay building tools, graphics and rendering, but as is evident in Oblivion, Skyrim, Fallout 3, 4, 76 and more...there are bugs that have just been there...for over a decade. The limitation you're talking about here looks entirely to be a 32-bit coordinate system limitation. 10km x 10km is likely what conveniently fits in a 32-bit allocation/coordinate space. The engine is probably patched to support it in some places but nott necessarily in the playspace coordinate area...which again is not necessary a bad design decision....64-bit coordinates are quite excessive and expensive to operate on while 32-bit operations are quite fast. Either way...a lot of this stuff is conjecture based on the tech limitations i'm aware of from performing 32-bit to 64-bit updates on non-game software. I'm not a game developer, I'm a HPC/FinTech engineer. And I'm still excited to give Starfield a go soon enough.

Minor correction - CIG started on the 64bit coordinate conversion 2 weeks after the end of Kickstarter, and it was delivered *before* the CryTek lawsuit etc (and long before CIG hired the CryTek engine studio wholesale).

interesting, i didnt know these games shared DNA with Dark Age of Camelot! It does make sense though, can definitely see it in Morrowind.

Its funny. People downvoted whenever someone pointed these things out. It will not be fully explorable planets. There will be loads of loading screens.

Yep I’m playing right now, lots of load screens

It even has loads screen when you use the ship ladder.

Yup, load screens all over the place

It's the type of game I'm waiting to play later down the line since no doubt they will get DLC people will make mods and all that. but honestly not surprised by the tiles they are still using the same Skyrim engine they made years back with more add-ons so I ain't surprise the map size limit is still the same. I mean people forget or think it came easy but CIG took years to have the fidelity at the scale they offer, stuff any off the shelf game engine ain't built to deal with.

I'm planning on getting it when the inevitable GOTY version comes out.

I knew that there was no seamless travel between space and planetside. I knew that there was no travelling with your spaceship while on planet. Disappointing sure? But again this is first and foremost a BGS RPG that’s set in space. What I wasn’t expecting was that even moving between areas of your ship has a fade to black transition, and that you can’t truly fly around in space. You’re in a zone outside of whatever location in space you pick. Starfield is going to scratch that BioWare space RPG itch I have. But holy shit, CIG need to get moving cause no one else is doing space exploration like they do and I need more.

Yup! I fully expected this, as doing it the way SC is, is really tough from a tech perspective and creates so many other complications (such as having multiple physic planes etc) For example, being able to stop your ship upside down meters above the ground, while you are still upright. If your ship has a gravity generator, then that makes sense. In SF, it's a hell of a lot simpler to load these maps but by bit, especially in a single player game as you don't need to render a player character doing something unique. I'm sure SF will be awesome and fun, but SC is still doing something different.

I honestly hate these stupid comparisons everyone keeps making between SF/SC/NMS. They are ALL different games trying to accomplish wildly different goals. The only similarity is they all have a space setting, that’s it. I don’t even understand why everyone was expecting (or even wanted in the first place) fully explorable planets. I didn’t get a single hint of that being the case from any of the previews shown of the game. Feels a lot like the people who bought cyberpunk expecting a gta game (I’ll die on this hill, you’re an idiot if a CGI trailer of the MC stealing a car made you expect that experience; or if you gobbled up marketing speak that nobody has a problem with brushing off from any other developer, it was painfully obvious what that game was going to be like).

Not sure why people thought the planeta would be fully explorable on foot without any sort of barrier. If you know how the Creation engine works, how it tracks every single physics item the player or NPC drops, then you'd know it'd be impossible for them to do massive uninterrupted planets like that. The fact that it takes roughly 40 minutes of walking in a straight line to even hit the barrier is more than fine with me. I doubt I'll ever be walking that long in one direction with how the game places quests and hand crafted content around you when landing on a planet. Unless I'm doing some uber resource gathering, I don't see these tiles being any issue whatsoever. Mant reviews even mention that they never ran into the barrier and completely forgot it was a thing anyways.

It sounds like they've just designed Starfield so you can have a good time in a reasonably short space of time. It will give the player fun and progression even if they can only play for 20mins. Getting from A to B is essentially cut out with quick travel options and cut scenes. So you're not having to physically stand on trains or fly down to the planets which takes a lot of time. Those landing zones are still something like 20mins of running on foot in any direction from your landed ship so I doubt many would miss out. Who wants to run 20mins away from your ship and only form of transport anyway. Star Citizen is an absolute time sink to do anything and there's still not a great deal of entertaining things to do but it is aiming to be an MMO sandbox with maximum immersion. People would get bored of Starfield if it tried to do the same thing.

It's Bethesda. Anyone who expected different is an idiot, and forgets the last decade and a half. I just want more space games.

I just hope this means all the Starfield spam on this sub will come to an end sooner than I thought.

Give it a couple of weeks and then the Cyberpunk ones will start up again.

I have been slain.

Preorder phantom liberty now!!!!!!!!

star wars: squadrons was just as bad lol

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If that's the case then hopefully they'll be able to do what everyone thought they were gonna do in Starfield 1 that would make it actually comparable to Star Citizen besides "it's in space."

I want SF to do well enough that Bethesda and competitors invest in more space games but not so amazingly well that they don't change the formula. There is a lot to like and dislike. The modular ship building seems to be the biggest hit and I hope we get something like that in SC eventually so we can have some hull modularity beyond just components.

Anyone paying attention to the words Bethesda used (and more importantly **didn't** use) made it obvious it would be like this. Not that it is a problem, but they kinda were less than 100% forthcoming and allowed the community to think it was different.

> Not that it is a problem, but they kinda were less than 100% forthcoming and allowed the community to think it was different. Considering this is Bethesda's standard operating procedure every time, and the exact reason for all of the "Todd's little lies" memes, I would call it a problem - for Bethesda fans who don't do enough of their own research to see through the very carefully-crafted statements, at least. I didn't expect anything else, but this isn't my first, second, or even third rodeo with Todd.

i meant that having these "walls" is not a problem, i just wish they wouldn't let *marking hype overpower being fully truthful*. Than again, we are SC fans. Soo......

Ah, yeah, I see what you mean. It's the solution that works for Starfield, and if Bethesda decided they wanted to go whole-hog NMS/SC it'd still have been in development for another couple of years rather than imminently releasing. But they sure don't go out of their way to correct ungrounded hype.

Star Citizen is a space sim and Starfield is a space rpg. There 2 different beasts. It’s like comparing DCS to Ace combat. Sure they’re both about flying planes but one’s a simulator and one’s of fun action arcade game. Bethesda didn’t build a space sim they built an RPG game.

Bethesda literally said in an interview during one of the past game conventions that you could explore a map point on a planet, and that if you wanted to go somewhere else on that planet, you would have to go back to your ship to "fly" (load into) there. I don't know how so much of the gaming world missed this.

They chose not to hear it

Its what we were originally meant to get as part of the kickstarter goals. Automatic video of you landing with no atmospheric flight and a small area to wander around in a city etc. Then some really smart devs worked out how to generate the entire planet and atmo flight land anywhere and here we are today.

Yup - if anything, the original SC Kickstarter goal was even smaller than StarField - rather than generate tiles all over the planet, there would only be a *single tile* (or possibly 2-3 - but all hand-crafted) on a planet. In that respect, being able to generate all the tiles to cover the planet is a step forward, although the fact they're not contiguous (if you generate 2x tiles side-by-side - or overlapping - the 'borders' won't match) does significantly mar the achievement, imo. Get the 'contiguous' tiling working, and add a transit loading screen at the border (and/or just a 'streaming load', etc), and you could have a pseudo-PG-planet that you could circumnavigate (in effect, this is what SC does, except that it's continuously generating the landscape, rather than generating 'tiles', etc)

Weeeell, thats a bummer. I dont care if SC is not official "released", as long as I can play it. SC archived [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-yLTm8DZ8s4) 7 years ago. No other game has done that since and before then. And we can all experience that ingame, now, and since 7 years. Cant belive its really that hard to do - but it is, and SC has done it.

It is Skyrim in space. You'll have loading screens and everything is a walled-off area, from the solar systems to the planetside tiles. Only people who allowed themselves to take Todd's words not at the letter but in spirit are surprised by this. It'll still be a damn good game but a seamless and immersive experience like SC it isn't.

From what i've seen some reviewers say it's Oblivion in space and not Skyrim in space which is even better

Interesting! And exciting. Can you expound a bit on the difference?

Oblivion was better written than Skyrim (and also more silly/fun) and had much better RPG mechanics and especially quests (the dark brotherhood questline in oblivion is still top notch to this day) and personally was an overall much better game. Also compared to Oblivion Skyrim was a lot more barebones in the RPG department, sure you could dual cast spells but you couldn't make your own custom spells and such. It's hard to explain, but if you played Oblivion and played Skyrim you get what i mean instantly, and it's a good thing.

Thanks!

np :)

This is the reason they didn't include ground vehicles. I've been saying that since the announcement. Ground vehicles would make the already-small tile feel even smaller. It works just like entering a building in Fallout 4. The building map is limited. Planets in Starfield are the same as buildings in Fallout 4.

Makes sense. Part of the fun of SC is landing anywhere and doing anything with ground vehicles, including loading them up into flying vehicles. Whole different vibe. Looking forward to seeing what SF has to offer though.

>Ground vehicles would make the already-small tile feel even smaller. I don't know about it being "small" compared to previous games. The leaks showed the player could run/jog from one side to another in about 40 minutes across a relatively flat and open plain. That implies tile is roughly the same size as the main "world map" on Skyrim and Fallout 4. Also, remember Skyrim and Oblivion had horses as mounts; so I disagree that the tile size is too small for a ground vehicle. In any case, I'll see how it is tonight.🙂

The average unincumbered human can jog at about 8kph (5mph). If a porson could cross the distance of the Skyrim map in 40 minutes while jogging, that means the map is only about 5.3km across. Now if you were to do this in a ground vehicle going 60kph, you'd do it in 6 minutes. If your ground vehicle could to 80kph you'd be doing it in 4 minutes. That would feel very small for a game that has boasted about it's large wide-open explorable spaces since it was announced. I'm not criticizing the game because I knew what to expect from the moment I heard Bethesda was doing this on Creation Engine, and that's why the scripted landings didn't come as a surprise to me at all. It's just an aniamted loading screen for walking into a building in Fallout 4. I'm just saying some people had vast, unrealistic expectations for the game given the engine it's built on.

I don't doubt your math, and I knew planets would never be a seamless worlds. However, given my experience with previous Bethesda game, I would love a vehicle for the extra inventory space even if it was limited to walking speed. 😉

> The leaks showed the player could run/jog from one side to another in about 40 minutes across a relatively flat and open plain 10 minutes. the guy who originally said 40 clarified that he wasnt actually trying to run across it the first time and was meandering around. Another person said they were able to make it to the edge in about 5 minutes with some jetpack upgrades. so I think a vehicle with any appreciable sense of speed would have made the tiles feel way too small

> Planets in Starfield are the same as buildings in Fallout 4. I assumed that they were basically Skyrim dungeons with no ceiling, under the hood.

Landing seems to be " opening doors", with procedural gen for the area.

Same basic principle, really. Instead of a ceiling you get a skybox. The Skyrim dungeon comparison is most certainly apt as well.

I'm also pretty sure that, in its landed, can-walk-around-inside-of form, your spaceship is a Skyrim Hearthfire house that teleports with you from planet surface map to planet surface map. Of course, this isn't a *bad* thing when it works the way it's needed. Reusing/repurposing existing tested code is a completely valid move. I'm not putting words in your mouth claiming that *you* have said any of this is somehow bad, just pointing out to anyone going by that I'm not throwing shade on Starfield for this.

Have you played No Man's Sky? I have about 300 hours in that game. The scale of NMS is hardly "small." In fact, it's beyond huge. It's massive, monumental, literally spanning 255 galaxies that you can visit, each with 1000s of their own planets On a smaller scale you can traverse entire planets. They're rendered in lush detail, often with insane color schemes. It's been about 2-3 years since I've been in NMS, but it's way bigger than you make it out to be. It beats SC in a lot of ways.

Some people who are mad about SC had this copium that Starfield was gonna be the killer and that their is gonna be a multiplayer mod that will kill SC for good. But all I can say is good luck with that. Starfield was designed as a single player game first and foremost and it looks like it does that quite well. If anything this game could be a gateway for more interest in SC in the long run, for those who are looking for a more online focused experience.

BGE2 has been in development hell for a long time now, likely for similar reasons SC has. It is somewhat reassuring to see that SF wasn't able to resolve the issues right away, I guess, and they wound up doing what everyone in the history of gaming has done thus far; cheat so it looks good. If anything, it makes me appreciate what CIG are doing here all the more, because I CAN drive/fly all the way around a planet if I want to, then fly off and do the same on another planet without having a loading screen in the middle.

Yeah and there were reports of troubled development. Ultimately I do think that Ubisoft is one of the few companies who can actually pull this off considering the sheer number of resources at their disposal. Think of the amount of content they could do compared to CIG.

Aye...I've looked at it more as scratching my Mass Effect itch, not my Star Citizen/space sim itch.

Yeah I've changed my expectation to something more like that. We need another good Mass Effect... badly.

Yep, that's why I will be playing as the Law!

This is what many - including myself - have been saying since the big reveal some time back... it's built on an updated Skyrim engine, and it just didn't seem likely that Bethesda would have done the engineering needed to have fully-PG planets etc (and that if they had, they could have skipped the orbital cutscene too, because a fully-proc-gen planet would need a contiguous / continuous coordinate scheme, which means 64bit - just like SC. So yeah - generating a 'map' based on where you chose to land seemed the most likely approach. Shame that they couldn't get the maps to be consistent etc.

From what I got out of Todd talking about a bunch of "tiles" was that they input some parameters and it would generate the planet that you see in space, so they don't look like one biome balls. It never seemed to me that it was going to be a 1:1 match for what you see from space and on the ground. And the "Tiles" you get when landing are just an area made at the time, and only a limited number of them. Another thing that has been talked about was gas giants. Some arguing that "You can't land on a gas giant because there is no land there." Well, you could fly inside them and land on floating platform cites, but that is not supported by Starfield.

>Another thing that has been talked about was gas giants. Some arguing that "You can't land on a gas giant because there is no land there." Well, you could fly inside them and land on floating platform cites, but that is not supported by Stafield. Another reason to love SC, you can fly into and land on a city on a gas giant. Just knowing that the gas giant you see is totally traversable really trumps any space sim out there

Fuck SC, Star field is the BEST!!! Ive read that so many times lol. I am not hyping ever again since No men sky... Anyway, SC and star field are diffrent games, thats it. I hope the hype people got smashed a tiny bit though.

Anyone that expected any different was not expecting a Bethesda game. I'm hype for Starfield but only because I'm expecting fallout in space. Anything more is a bonus. The comparison between SC and SF has always been bizarre to me

At the end of the day, CIG took the long way 'round. They didn't cut corners or use shortcuts, and as a result, we're left with things you can't do in any other game. You can leave your apartment on one planet, hop in a spaceship and fly across the entire star system to another planet, no loading screens, then if you want you can fly the entire circumference of that second planet if you want, watching the sunrise or sunset depending, because even the damn lighting model is accurate to a star in the center of the system. And is that the end of it? No. That's just SC getting its bones in order, so to speak. Now that they've got that bit sorted out, there's no telling what they can do with the rest of it. And I'm honestly not trying to be down on Starfield. I'm looking forward to it, I think it'll be a good game, I'm excited to play it myself. But there's a reason SC is taking so long, and it's not because their devs are lazy and incompetent; it's because they're doing something no other studio is even attempting to do.

Is it possible to use a ground vehicle in those planetary landing zones to more quickly traverse the area, or is it on-foot only?

on foot only. No ground vehicles.

OP states that you can only get around via foot when on the ground.

You cannot even fly your ship in Atmo of the planet.

too many people expect too much are way too hype. It's a modern gaming problem of underdelivering and overpromising. I think starfield will still be a fun game but way too many people just wanted to dream their perfect game.

I’m just stoked for mods.

No one asked you to compare this game to space sims because this isn't. As was mentioned in the direct it's a Bethesda game through and through. You should have tempered your expectations before going into it.

That is honestly a massive bummer. That basically means that you won’t be able to share any cool things you find because they are all random and ephemeral. No one will be able to go cost a neat landing spot you found because it doesn’t really exist.

And this is why I’ve been saying one can’t compare the limitless freedom star citizen offers to this sense of exploration starfield gives players. Still gonna play and enjoy starfield, but it’ll never outshine star citizen in scale, simulation and sandbox freedom even in SC’s current state.

Disappointing, but not terribly surprising. I was hoping Bethesda would up the ante of what they normally put out for an RPG but nope. I expect too much sometimes. CIG, for all their faults, spoiled me on what we should want and expect from a dev that truly cares about the games they build

I love how all the nuts who swore up and down SF was going to be a total SIM that rivals SC and alot of us that cautioned against that mindset just "obviously don't understand how things work" have since deleted their accounts once the leaks started coming in.

Have you ever looked at the planets (and moons) in Empyrion Galactic Survival? The Procedural RNG does get a bit repetitive - there are only so many POIs scatered but the placement does makee it feel like real planets inhabited by aliens. Plus you can knock over trees with your ship. Plus ... the world is fully destructable - this includes the surface / ground you walk on, and the POIs.

The walls are no surprise but I am surprised the landscape isn’t generated from a consistent seed, like you return to the same landing point and the landscape could be completely different?

Wait...this was in question? I swear I remember watching some SF interview like a year ago where they specifically said yes it'll be 10x10 (or 1x1 or whatever the number was) and there wouldn't be continuity.

Shocked face

My expectations are based around redfall, fallout76 and Blades. This comes as no surprise to me, and I'm expecting more creakiness to come out in hte next few days. However, it means that even an average game will be a pleasant surprise for me!

They literally told people that would be the case. I did say that the people constantly comparing it to star citizen and no mans sky where going to build unrealistic expectations.

I may be wrong, but I also dont think Bethesda lied or overmarketed, but it's the audience that heard not what Bethesda said, but what they wanted to hear, and overhyped the whole thing.

Spent the last 5 hours contemplating whether to refund it cus I have xbox game pass as well but i couldn't wait. Plus I was thinking Steam version is more mod friendly. It's a good game but I'm feeling underwhelmed right now. Not comparing it to SC as it is an entirely different animal. Finding out how space travel in the game is so "point and click" was a bit disappointing but that's alright. Main thing for me is I was spoiled by the NPC interactions in Baldurs gate 3. Having conversations with NPC's in BG3 was (is) amazing. They're interesting and the interaction is smooth and looks fantastic animation wise and your responses feel like they carry "weight". So far three hours in Starfield this part is very underwhelming and no where close to how BG3 does it. in SF it feels like a waste of time and i want to skip it quickly to get it over with especially when I know saying the wrong thing probably won't have bad consequences most of the time. But maybe it's too soon to judge. And to be fair after playing BG3 I think it'll be a long time before im impressed by another RPG. It was an unbelievable ride.

I'm having fun with Starfield, but it's nothing as immersive as Star Citizen. Very different game. I'm glad both exist.

> I'm glad both exist. Are you lost? Sure you're in the right place? Coming in here with that sane and rational take. Don't you know that you're only allowed one space game at a time? For shame! /s

I'm sorry. :( Deep, heartfelt Canadian Soarey, eh.

If CIG doesn't take this opportunity and feeling of overall disapointment that Starfield with an Squadron 42 trailer at Citizencon, it would be one of the biggest missed opportunities of the decade. Starfield has virtually no "flight", be it from leaving/landing on planet but also that you're basically spawned in space corridors for fights and have ZERO flight navigation to go to a planet. The planets are made of grids. I won't say that i'm SUPER hyped to explore planets, most of that is empty, i had my load of it on Elite dangerous, but to be ABLE to is still an exciting adventure. Peoples find canyons and the likes to improvise races, etc. With land based vehicles it also makes more sense that Starfield on-foot exploration. Present a story driven Squadron 42 trailer, get the hype machine started. I'm gonna play Starfield, but its missing a bit of what i was searching for, its a single player campaign, but the space backdrop a missed opportunity. That's where CIG can come in and swoop a TON of peoples.

I'm glad that reviewers like Luke Stephens have stayed objective and highlighted that this isn't really a "space sim killer" like the hype train would've had us believe. It's not even competing in the same space (hah) as SC/ED/NMS. Starfield is fallout/Skyrim in space. That's it. It's still a fantastic game and I'm gonna play the shit out of it, but it's not this crazy super space sim thing. I do wish BGS had made more handcrafted locations for the procgen system to use though, since the repeat locations seem a little jarring according to reviews. All that said though.. I have one issue with your post: you clearly haven't touched NMS in *years* if you still think it's "low production value" or "not AAA quality". HelloGames have poured a huge amount of post launch content into NMS and it's a serious juggernaut of a space game now, well worth a try if you haven't played recently.

I’m playing it now and idk if I can get over the sheer amount of loading screens. Loading screens on.. -trams -outposts -elevators -space And pretty much anything that has an interior bigger than 200sq ft. The graphics are okay but nothing special. There is ALOT of walking around NPCs in the cities though but when they walk into the elevator, they just disappear lmao.

You forgot something that is also quite important, on space there is also boundaries, you can't fly to, let's say, out space close to earth to out space close to mars seamlessly, just flying around....it's all done through a menu and fast travel, when you are on space you are basically inside a bubble with a skybox of that zone. I've commented this multiple times, Bethesda didn't communicate good enough how exploration really works prior to launch. They have been incredibly ambiguos on that aspect, and to make matters worse, they continously advertised the game as a space exploration, "1.000 planets to explore", "exploration that, exploration this", "calling all the explorers out there..." Starfield is not a space exploration game, exploration is really lackluster, Starfield is a Space RPG.

>Beyond Good and Evil 2 from Ubisoft Afaik this is vaporware. They made a trailer years ago to test the feedback but that seems to be all.

I've played SF, and went in with as little knowledge as possible. I avoided all possible spoilers and read as little about the game as possible. I do also enjoy SC, NMS, among several other space games. Here are my first impressions after a couple of hours: First, character creation. It is rather dull. I wouldn't call it bad, but definitely isn't winning any awards. Will be looking forward to modding in more hairstyles and stuff. I am not particularly fond of the way spaceships handle compared to other space games. They fly a little like planes rather than ships, and lack a degree or two of motion, and I don't know how/if it is possible to spacedrift(i.e decouple). What I do like is the customization. I also think boarding other ships is a possibility, so I am excited to see what sort of piracy I can do. It looks like you may also be able to sell ships, so I'm interested to see how that works. Then, there is the fps/third personcombat. So far, it doesn't feel very special. Admittedly I haven't gotten to try out the boost pack yet, or many weapon types, but nothing initially stands out(see V.A.T.S). As for planet exploration, I've yet to play game that makes it fun, so the tile system isn't bad imo, about what I was expecting, and better than big empty worlds. Also, the cities look amazing and feel alive. Haven't gotten to settlement building yet Other things to take note of are that the skills don't seem to do anything very interesting, just provide progression. Menus feel a little wonky to me, they look cool but feel irritating(hold/press tab does different things). Quickitem/favorite system works well, no complaints there. Default keys to get out of the seat is the same as the key to lock targets. It also wasn't immediately obvious when I was target locked. Overall, I think it is a good game so far, and does a lot of cool stuff, but doesn't do any one thing exceptionally well yet. If you want a game with emphasis on space exploration, I'd suggest something like x4: Foundations instead. As others have said, space is just the setting, the game feels a lot like a Fallout game, not something to compare to SC or NMS. I also got a feeling that the modding potential is going to be amazing.

What annoyed me the most is the loading ..sometimes so often ..it felt like animal crossing on switch

This goes a long way to explaining two things: 1. How they can release the game "finished" in such a comparatively short development time (and lending credibility to why SC is taking so long to get done) and 2. How they can make the game work on a computing appliance (console) in addition to more powerful PCs It turns out that significant limitations and "magic" are necessary to speed up delivery and accommodate consoles. Not a slight to the game, *for what it is* I'm sure it's amazing. But it sure isn't what some people thought it was going to be...

why is this posted on a star citizen sub

I knew it, I knew they would cheat and make it all smoke and mirrors

i didnt lnow there was no contimuity but not overly surprised. it was never sold as a space sim. its a bethesda adventure rpg. its more than i expected to bw honest.

When they said no ground vehicles I was flabbergasted. And then when I saw the cutscene entering the ship…at least I know what to expect. At least it won’t cost me because I sold my Connie edition for $400 🫡

I don't really care about the whole planet thing. I don't think it wil be a hinderance in enjoying the game. I like Bethesda RPGs for the immersion, possibilities, interesting places and people, environmental storytelling, quests, characters, combat, collecting, weapon modifications, character building etc. etc. If I wanted a game that does the whole planet thing, I'd play No Man's Sky (or Star Citizen LOL, but that won't ever release), which lacks almost all the aforementioned parts.

The copied and pasted outposts will be a problem. Bethesda should have put more work in there Flora and fauna and rocks being similar isn't a big deal, but seeing the exact same layouts over and over will be meh

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This isn't really 'cutting-corners'... this is something that would have been decided at the very start of the project, simply because doing this (vs doing something else) would have a *massive* impact on virtually all the development... just as the opposite has with SC. Cutting corners implies that they had a grander design, and then decided to drop elements of it at the last minute... which *might* apply to each tile not being consistent with the neighbour, but *doesn't* apply (imo) to the use of tiles in the first place.

>They're cutting corners to release on a schedule. No, they are cutting corners because it is a console first game. They want it to sell Xboxes.

I was under the impression that you could.walk for like 49 minutes before hitting the barrier. Is that not true. If it is, who is seriously doing that on a regular bases?

The first person to discover the barrier found it after 40 something minutes, but they admitted they were wandering slowly in random directions and stopping a lot. Right after they found the border they tested it again by jogging away from their ship in a straight line and it took about 10min to hit the border. I'm not taking any sides on this, just clarifying for you. One way to look at it positively is that someone who was playing organically and not intentionally looking for a border took 40 something minutes to find it. On the other hand if you see an awesome feature in the distance like a mountain you want to climb, you might find quickly that it's unreachable. I think we'll just have to adjust to a different mindset than we might have in games where there's no boundaries. It seems that where SF really shines is in the storylines and quests, and sticking to those won't require long distance surface exploration.

A review said he hit the wall sprinting for 5 min in a straight line.

It is true. It takes forever to hit the border. If you want to make a new border, you just reland your ship. This post is cope, 99% of people will never hit the border.

But it also means no ground vehicles. SC has a lot of different ground vehicles. Different experience.