this post was submitted on 13 Sep 2023
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No Man's Sky
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A defining trait of those games, to me, is having everything in one big world you can wander around in (besides DLC areas, of course). The engine can't support doing that on an interplanetary scale, so Starfield feels less open to me despite the much larger scope.
I can't speak for everyone (including you) but I just can't understand that feeling. It's hugely open, it just uses tricks to capture that openness in a few places. It's nice to, say, fly down to a planet seamlessly in NMS, but we all know it's also kind of a pain in the butt sometimes, it can be annoying to land and it can take a long time and when you've done it a bunch it essentially turns into just another loading screen. Flying to or from a planet in SF is slightly less immersive but for me, it's just a tiny detail that could have been a bit better but doesn't materially impact the game.
And I've so far never reached the edge of an on-planet instance, the fields are huge and it seems to me you have to actively go hunting for the borders.
Yes, but they're also completely empty of anything interesting. In Bethesda's previous games, there were also large swaths of nothing, but there was always something hand-crafted if you ventured far enough. There is no point to going anywhere outside of the hand-crafted areas in Starfield, all of which you must fast travel to. It really kills the exploration aspect of the game, usually one of Bethesda's strong points.
Huh?
My chief complaint has been that there are too many things. If you go to a moon in the middle of nowhere, your landing site will have an abandoned research station and a secret factory and an observation post all within a couple KM around it. These aren't tied to the location, but they are hand-crafted, and as soon as the mod API drops I plan to decrease the frequency they show up, because my only complaint is that I hear after a while they get repetitive. So far I've been doing enough different things that I haven't found the same one twice, a hundred hours in.
Many of these sites contain their own storylines and characters, and links to other quests.
Maybe you and I just have different definitions of interesting. I actually got annoyed at one point during a survey mission because I kept going past something new and compelling that I wanted to explore, but I also really wanted to finish the mission I was on.
edit to add: I think it's specifically interesting to compare this to NMS, which has the exact same problem but a far lower variety of locations to stumble on, none of which have any story or link to each other at all... yet I think we're all okay with the exploration in NMS?
You're right that "interesting" is very subjective, and I don't begrudge anyone who finds Starfield's randomly generated areas interesting. It's true that there are a bunch of hand-crafted areas which are randomly placed in such areas, but as you said, it's far too easy to find copies over and over again. I just don't find the way Starfield handles random exploration fun the way I did in their previous titles. No Man's Sky does indeed have the same sort of issues, but that's kind of its whole thing, being a Minecraft-style creativity sandbox. You don't have nearly the same amount of control over creative options in Starfield.