You know, a submarine is kind of like a spaceship, so who knows maybe that's there as well.
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Starfield gameplay revealed
- Thread starter Biosnake
- Start date
I'm down to clown in Elder Scroll alien town lol.
I agree, some people on Era just seem like they are down on a lot of games right off the bat. Happened in the LoUR thread as well. Some of it might be platform warring, some might be just people being overly negative.
Yeah I think most people who like previous BGS games will probably enjoy what Starfield has to offer. I just like exploring in Bethesda games. This seems to have that in abundance.
A laptop with an R7 5800H and RTX 3060 would easily play Starfield. On paper, and please stress the "on paper" so I don't get jumped, the 3060 isn't far behind the PS5's GPU in performance.
With the Xbox Series S existing as the baseline for performance, midrange PC GPUs are going to last a long time. That's what happens when thee weakest console is slower than even the 1660 Ti.
Yuup.
Feels like in spite of record sales and generally positive reception over the decades, BGS has a double hill to climb on Era.
There was always that vocal minority here that felt the need to dump on them at every turn, much like a jilted lover. But then when you throw exclusivity into the mix, well. We know how that "I never liked you anyway" song & dance goes.
It's all good though. You'd have to be medically diagnosed as blind not to see the fidelity leap from F4 to SF. And for those signed up for the unique brand of BGS sandbox exploration, that should be more than enough to encourage optimism.
Guess there's still unknowns regarding writing & story progression. We can cross our fingers and hope for the best. But the basic fundamentals look solid enough for studio fans.
Like I said, for the right person 7-9 review average would be just fine for Starfield. Genre fans know what they're getting into. They know it comes with caveats. They also know BGS offers a unique experience virtually unparallel in the space.
I'm personally hyped af. I know it won't look as good as GoW or play as well as Destiny. But ultimately that's not what I'm here for. It'd be great if it had all that, but I value sandbox immersion and gameplay freedom over those elements personally.
BGS ain't perfect, but damn if they aren't perfect at delivering a wholly unique gameplay loop few have rivaled over the decades.
And that sounds just fine.
The game seams to be going for a hard-sci fi vibe so I guess that the handcrafted locations will be things like colonies, outposts etc, with the rest of the planet uncharted (aka procedurally generated). Essentially handcrafted dungeons surrounded by procedurally generated terrain.
You could still funnel players into set pieces if they can only land on specific landing pads while in urban areas, but allow them to freely land anywhere they want in the wild.
There are definitely things that looked good (and I enjoyed Fallout 4 - modded that is) but I echo the sentiment that I don't trust Bethesda to ship out a game that runs well at release. Guaranteed it'll be fun, after a ton of patches and mods lol
I don't know if this has been posted but here is a super high-quality (13411x9000) photo of the thumbnail art
Not sure if this has been pointed out yet, but it looks like you can allocate your ship's power just like in FTL.
You're not wrong, and it's funny that a lot of the apathy and hyperbole has come from posters that are primarily Sony fans. Obviously I'm not saying people can't be critical, but at least put your bias aside. Not all are platform warring, but there's definitely an element of that going on. The same thing happens with some Xbox fans with Sony first party games too. Some grown people just like to console war.
Yeah the graphics and animations and especially the ambition are all definitely a step up from FO4. For a game of this scale, and everything it's doing, I think it looks amazing.
I'm hyped for the game too, I always put hundreds of hours in to Bethesda games. I can't wait to see what the community does with mods as well.
Looked incredibly rough honestly so hopefully they aren't going to rush it out the door. Gunplay and the combat encounters looked horrendous. The ship customization and space exploration, as well as mods is without a doubt the most enticing thing for me right now.
As someone who has put in hundreds of hours into No Man's Sky since launch, I was surprised to see how much Starfield bit off of NMS. I didn't know much about what Starfield was supposed to be, but I really wasn't expecting that. I guess the reality is just that NMS has had a huge impact on space-based games.
There were things I thought were cool -- like the extensive ship building, and hirable crews (something I've wanted in NMS for ages) -- and things that were not so cool, like the boring space combat and well...that Bethesda wonkiness. The procedural algorithms for the terrain generation look really nice, and more diverse than NMS in some ways. Not sure about the flora and fauna, but suspect they'll be pre-baked instead of procedural. But I also think exploration will suffer the same issues that NMS does without more moment-to-moment surprises and exploration goals. Maybe it will have that, but if they're populating a 1000 planets with content, I'm skeptical.
From a gameplay perspective it looks like they combined Skyrim, Fallout, and NMS. I'm not sure the end result will be enjoyable, but I'm glad that they're trying it.
My burning question (that no one else cares about) is how long their day-night cycle will be. NMS's day length is 20 minutes, truly pitiful considering how big the planets are.
There were things I thought were cool -- like the extensive ship building, and hirable crews (something I've wanted in NMS for ages) -- and things that were not so cool, like the boring space combat and well...that Bethesda wonkiness. The procedural algorithms for the terrain generation look really nice, and more diverse than NMS in some ways. Not sure about the flora and fauna, but suspect they'll be pre-baked instead of procedural. But I also think exploration will suffer the same issues that NMS does without more moment-to-moment surprises and exploration goals. Maybe it will have that, but if they're populating a 1000 planets with content, I'm skeptical.
From a gameplay perspective it looks like they combined Skyrim, Fallout, and NMS. I'm not sure the end result will be enjoyable, but I'm glad that they're trying it.
My burning question (that no one else cares about) is how long their day-night cycle will be. NMS's day length is 20 minutes, truly pitiful considering how big the planets are.
This game imo has a lot of potential to take advantage of using the Cloud by generating planets at high detail. In theory, you could have an infinite amount of planets.
I missed out on voting (not really sure why the poll is closed already) but I thought it looked pretty damn awesome. It still looked like a Bethesda game for sure but this is the most impressed I've been by a look at a Bethesda game since 2010/2011.
Nope. Me too. I never was bugged too much by what nms was missing when it came out but that is one thing I was disappointed with. Sean at one point promised finding a planet with life would be rare. Instead finding a planet without life is rare. I was looking forward to being excited when I found a planet with life. It's just not as exciting with the reverse, finding the odd planet without life. It makes the more interesting planets a lot more exciting to find and explore. In fact I'd argue nms made a mistake by not keeping that promise. People would probably complain less each planet feels the same cause it would be more exciting to even find that planet with life and that was different from most others.
I care too!
I believe Skyrim and Fallout 4 ran at x20 Speed, so 72 Minutes in a full 24 Hours.
But to add to your question...do other planets have different Day-Night Cycles!?
Also, NMS's Day is actually 30 Minutes...which is still shockingly low.
I think the exciting part for me about finding a planet with no life- is that you can be the first explorer to place roots there and build an outpost.
I don't really understand how so many people believe for the essential things that have not been shown, instead of the one that's are there.
I don't think we will have planetary landings by hand, or even fully explorable planets at all, because they've surely would have shown it and not wildly cut between space/planet environments. Same with landing anywhere instead of fixed points if interest. They've also only shown your outpost on a separate, limited place, so I'll fully expect this to be the case. They haven't shown any multiplayer despite having the chance multiple times, so it's likely not gonna be in. Same to cool and special looking planets, random cities and structures, that sort of stuff, or any extended sim like gameplay.
The more i watch it, honestly, the more I miss the incredible coherent and interesting landscaping of Skyrim and even Oblivion/Morrowind, but I never was a fallout fan to begin with.
I don't think we will have planetary landings by hand, or even fully explorable planets at all, because they've surely would have shown it and not wildly cut between space/planet environments. Same with landing anywhere instead of fixed points if interest. They've also only shown your outpost on a separate, limited place, so I'll fully expect this to be the case. They haven't shown any multiplayer despite having the chance multiple times, so it's likely not gonna be in. Same to cool and special looking planets, random cities and structures, that sort of stuff, or any extended sim like gameplay.
The more i watch it, honestly, the more I miss the incredible coherent and interesting landscaping of Skyrim and even Oblivion/Morrowind, but I never was a fallout fan to begin with.
While I'm sure they've taken a good long look at how NMS accomplished various things, I don't think Starfield exists in this format (1,000 open world planets) because of NMS. Multiple star systems with proc-gen planets and moons was always my assumption for how a Bethesda space game would play out, because they lean hard into the sim and sandbox elements in their games. It's not much of a space sandbox without space exploration. And plenty of other space games over the years have taken this approach too. NMS might be the first to have accomplished planetary entry without loading screens though? Or maybe that was Elite Dangerous, I'm not sure. Still curious to see how Starfield is approaching this if you can land anywhere but they haven't confirmed seamless atmospheric entry is in the game yet.
Yes! Definitely. I think it's really important to have the majority of planets/moons as lifeless. They'll still be filling a role as resource points. They'll still have POIs like smuggler outposts and crashed ships etc. We'll also be able to construct bases anywhere we take a liking to it seems. But mostly I think it's important they fill a role as, essentially, detailed and more interactive skyboxes, selling the scope of the game. I hope the flight model is fun because Star Citizen has demonstrated really well how enjoyable barren worlds can still be when you're flying between POIs:
The exact wording is "you can land and explore anywhere on [a] planet." They then rotated the planet. The implication is pretty clear.
I hope they go crazy with planets and there isn't just normal types like "sand" and "snow" etc etc. Like have ones with crazy gravitational effects, or ones that are completely barren on top but below there is a massive ocean full of life that you need to drill into to access. Have gas giants where you get to fly a little mini ship to explore or ones with very little gravity so you can leap about. Or where it rains lava or has lakes of methane etc etc. Just go crazy.
It could be because we watched the gameplay demonstration that confirmed most of these things? On landing anywhere and fully exploring planets, here's the timestamped part where Todd confirms that's in for every planet in the game (13m9s if the timestamp doesn't work for you):
Regarding base building anywhere rather than the conclusion you jumped to that it's limited to a single area just because they only showed one area, you can see throughout the demo when the scanner is used there is an option to place an outpost, along with the number 30 in brackets which potentially suggests a current cap of 30 outposts? Timestamp 2m47s in the above video if you want to check.
On random cities and structures: Why would you want random cities? The game has multiple cities, and showcased them here. Random meaning proc-gen cities? Hand built cities are what most people wanted here so that they're all integrated well into the lore, economy, galactic politics etc and referenced consistently by NPCs, quests etc. It would be odd for entire cities to exist without reference. But for random structures, like smuggler outposts, mining operations, space stations, etc I'm sure a lot of those are in (many shown in the video), likely serving as "dungeons" in a lot of cases.
On cool and special looking planets, just look at the montage right at the end of the video. They had desert coral-like rocks, crystalline formations, giant fricking dinos in tropical environments. Maybe that does nothing for you, and that's fine, but for a grounded approach to space where most planets will be rocky, it looks like there's still a lot of unique stuff going on here waiting to be discovered.
Planetary entry they haven't shown, for sure, but I don't think anyone here is saying it's definitely in. A lot of discussion has been around whether it will be or not, and how they might solve landing anywhere without it (which we know is in). Multiplayer, unlikely, they've said all along it's a singleplayer RPG. Shocking revelation for a BGS RPG.
Ah thanks for the correction, but yeah I think NMS just copied Minecraft's day length. Which makes sense for that game's gameplay loop, but not so much when you're just wandering around a planet that's hundreds of square miles big. And yes, a very good followup question!
Well sure, after all NMS was heavily influenced by the old procedurally generated '80s Elite game. But when I saw my dude bust out their mining laser to blast some rocks, it was hard not to see the inspiration behind some parts of Starfield. And Todd Howard has chatted probably more than once with Sean about NMS even prior to that game's release and had very kind things to say. And NMS sort of revolutionized space games with their techniques for procedurally generating 3D planets and yeah, seamless entry from space to a planet's surface. I don't think it's a negative and I'm sure Hello Games wouldn't be bothered by it, but it's hard not to see the influences.
I hope these mods come to those of us who will be playing on console.
Got to have been XSX given the sub-30fps framerate. If they were showing it on PC they could have brute forced the framerate with a 3090 or something.
I thought it looked OK, but it indeed gave me a very "oh, is outer worlds but grey" vibes.
The gunplay seemed bad, but let's see how the building and space-combat mechanics are. There could be something really nice there (dreaming is free and I'll check it on game pass)
Probably although you never know with Bethesda games. It looks like they pushed out LoD very far, stuff like that can still tank a 3090 if not optimised. But yeah, if they were just using a 3090 they could get a good balance with performance. With the Series X, if they want to push the visual side, they might be stuck with pretty poor performance given the current state of optimisation. Anyway, I was impressed with what I saw. I think it looks much less boring and more vibrant than Fallout 4 at least.
I feel like there's a weirdly palpable amount of defensiveness ITT, more than there has been in any other games in recent memory. I liked FO4 more than most people did, so I'm not bothered by Bethesda jank or graphics, it's just the way the seem to approach exploration that has me hesitant. Especially Todd choosing to highlight "1000 planets" as the seemingly major selling point. It tells me they either have got their priorities all wrong or mistakenly thought their playerbase would prefer quantity to quality.
Pretty sure Microsoft have been working hard to overhaul this issue with Game Pass on PC and allow for full file modification. Not sure if the fix is live yet or still in beta, but I get the feeling Starfield was a big motivator for the update =P I'm sure it will be solved by the time the game releases, if it's not already.
Watched the 4K vod on an OLED instead of 1080p streamed to a laptop. Looks pretty gosh darn good. I enjoy the space ground textures and geometry. It's gonna be fun hanging around in space.
I think they've started to open up modding, but that it's still in some kind of open beta state
My biggest question is how big the worlds will be. I can't imagine them being to scale, or even as big as a No Man's Sky planet, but who knows.
I assume the game launches an instanced zone whenever you choose a landing spot on a planet.
I expect the 1000 planets to basically have a similar place in the game as the landable ones in the original Mass Effect. Basically they be there to make the universe feel big as well as side activities like the outpost building and resource gathering. I'm sure they'll be some cool stuff hidden in them though. The main game would take place mainly in the hand crafted areas.
One of the things I'm curious about is if they want this huge amount of land mass because of more ambitious plans for modding? If each planet essentially runs independently then it could allow for essentially 1000 huge "mod slots" with far less compatibility issues to worry about.
One of the things I'm curious about is if they want this huge amount of land mass because of more ambitious plans for modding? If each planet essentially runs independently then it could allow for essentially 1000 huge "mod slots" with far less compatibility issues to worry about.
Swell. Hope there is some new info at the extended showcase as well!
They helped out on FO4, so it's safe to assume they had some input on Starfield. I actually thought the gunplay in the latter was really solid, especially when you got hold of some better, customised weapons, so I'm not too worried about Starfield.
I really want to see melee combat - that's the one area I would like to see Beth give a serious mechanical overhaul.
So what are the odds of the new release date being May 7, 2023?
Didn't some GamePass promo picture indicate March release? Or am I thinking some other game?
