I kind of wish the game was more like NMS when it came to space exploration. I have trouble feeling like everything is actually connected. Everything is basically a load screen apart. Would be cool to take off and then aim up and then fly off the planet to get to space. And then the same thing for landing. It just felt better and made NMS feel gigantic.
Imagine in Skyrim if you walked out of a cave, took 10 steps to go into the forest, and then another 50 or so steps in the forest to get into the sand dunes, and then another 25 steps to get into the cave you want to get into.
I kind of wish the game was more like NMS when it came to space exploration. I have trouble feeling like everything is actually connected. Everything is basically a load screen apart. Would be cool to take off and then aim up and then fly off the planet to get to space. And then the same thing for landing. It just felt better and made NMS feel gigantic.
Imagine in Skyrim if you walked out of a cave, took 10 steps to go into the forest, and then another 50 or so steps in the forest to get into the sand dunes, and then another 25 steps to get into the cave you want to get into.
Ultimately yeah, it's less seamless than Skyrim. It also has dramatically more landmass than Skyrim, and that's just the stuff with handcrafted content in it.
The #s aren't nearly as extreme as that in my experience. It's more like 1000 steps to go to the forest and sand dune? The walkable surface on a single "area" of a planet is about half the size of the entire Skyrim landmass.
Skyrim has plenty of loading screens, which I guess is where this conversation confuses me a bit. You load into caves, you load into shops, you load into cities. Yeah, the "wilderness" in Skyrim is more seamless. You get more of it cumulatively in Starfield though -- there is a tremendous amount more of seamless open space to wander, with PoIs and all of that.
A typical quest in Skyrim (which is what your analogy seems to be comparing) is something like 500 steps to go into a cave, loading screen. Clear out half of cave, loading screen into second area. Walk out of second area, loading screen into cave first area, out of first cave area, loading screen to wilderness. Walk 500 steps to town, loading screen. Walk 20-50 steps to building that has quest giver in it, loading screen.
Ultimately yeah, Skyrim has one big landmass that is larger than any single map in Starfield (about 2x the size from the measurements I've seen). Starfield has dozens of these (counting just the handcrafted stuff), representing multiple different planets. It's hard for me not to compare that to like, a theoretical "Elder Scrolls VI: Tamriel". You have multiple different provinces (worlds) representing different cultures and biomes. It's not going to be one big map that's like 12x the size of Skyrim with the same density of content -- that's just not practical. It would be multiple different "zones", one representing each province, and the provinces are going to not all be as large and fully fleshed out as Skyrim, because there are substantially more of them and you're not getting 10x Skyrim or whatever it is in one.
Skyrim has plenty of loading screens, which I guess is where this conversation confuses me a bit. You load into caves, you load into shops, you load into cities. Yeah, the "wilderness" in Skyrim is more seamless. You get more of it cumulatively in Starfield though -- there is a tremendous amount more of seamless open space to wander, with PoIs and all of that.
But it's all largely unmemoriable and interchangeable. An empty plain with occasional resource nodes and points of interest that are basically the same as any other point of interest. I found an interesting oil rig looking place once, but for that I've seen like five basically interchangeable science facilities.
By comparison, I would say I am intimately familiar with at least the environs around Whiterun, and many of the major roads between. And I can be like "yes this is that particular cave".
While racing light mechs, your Urbanmech comes in second place, but only because it ran out of ammo.
But like... I felt like there was some sort of interconnectivity between the streets and the cities and the shops in Skyrim. In Starfield it's basically a menu UI to get to other planets to walk around a mostly empty planet with some flora and fauna. I don't know.. I can see why the game got lots of 7s and 8s out of 10. Game is good but I was hoping for more. And with NMS as a good baseline for exploration feeling.
Keeping in mind that I'm level 7 and off the heels of BG3 which was an incredible immersive experience. So it's possible that I ruined it by doing this immediately afterwards.
Skyrim has plenty of loading screens, which I guess is where this conversation confuses me a bit. You load into caves, you load into shops, you load into cities. Yeah, the "wilderness" in Skyrim is more seamless. You get more of it cumulatively in Starfield though -- there is a tremendous amount more of seamless open space to wander, with PoIs and all of that.
But it's all largely unmemoriable and interchangeable. An empty plain with occasional resource nodes and points of interest that are basically the same as any other point of interest. I found an interesting oil rig looking place once, but for that I've seen like five basically interchangeable science facilities.
By comparison, I would say I am intimately familiar with at least the environs around Whiterun, and many of the major roads between. And I can be like "yes this is that particular cave".
The whole of space was, by design, not meant to be a theme park.
There is a strong simulationist slant in the environmental design that also allows for the scale too. But it's space. As a whole it's meant to be this way. It's... shockingly, as advertised and explained.
It's not 1000 planets all with unique and exciting things on every one. It's ... 1000 planets.
“I used to draw, hard to admit that I used to draw...”
That requires you to have a mission at the destination however.
This is true. I still like feeling the navigation and animation, so I do it that way. I think of the mission selection like entering things into a nav computer.
Just one last shot of my baby before I move on to NG+, since apparently almost nothing comes with.
It's basically just a ship built around an array of engines - it has a top speed of Yes and is at the point where nothing can really fight back, so alas it's time to move on.
Skyrim has plenty of loading screens, which I guess is where this conversation confuses me a bit. You load into caves, you load into shops, you load into cities. Yeah, the "wilderness" in Skyrim is more seamless. You get more of it cumulatively in Starfield though -- there is a tremendous amount more of seamless open space to wander, with PoIs and all of that.
But it's all largely unmemoriable and interchangeable. An empty plain with occasional resource nodes and points of interest that are basically the same as any other point of interest. I found an interesting oil rig looking place once, but for that I've seen like five basically interchangeable science facilities.
By comparison, I would say I am intimately familiar with at least the environs around Whiterun, and many of the major roads between. And I can be like "yes this is that particular cave".
Yeah I have been playing skyrim a bit recently and agree. You run out in skyrim and there’s a sense of place after you played it a while. Like I pretty much can straight up tell you where stuff is and can navigate without the arrow at this point. I can walk out of skyrim and walk to riverwood, rorikstead, markath, morthal, ivarstead, riften, etc without using a map. There are certain places The same thing I can say about elden ring or Fallout 3 and 4. There is a walkable map and you can go places.
Starfield doesn’t feel like that, it feels like Outer Worlds or Kotor or a CRPG where you just click a place on the world map and go there and every individual “place” is a discrete area. And people keep saying things like “well that is how it was designed” when people bring that up. And thats fine, bethesda can make a game however they want, they can do an Outer Worlds style if they want to or whatever. I just personally don’t feel like the game has as good of a feel without the connectivity of past titles. Its the same as when I played Outer Worlds vs New Vegas. Its not that its bad, it’s just that I feel like a connected world is more immersive for this style of game.
I honestly feel like what they need for Elder Scrolls 6 is something better with combat.
I feel like with skyrim there were a few weaknesses:
1. Building and architecture variety. Too much of the same farmhouse everywhere.This is pretty much a solved problem with mods - cities of the north, great villages+towns, etc.
2. Not enough variety in dungeons, enemies, environments- again the expansions and mods pretty much solve this.
3. Combat. Elden ring just spoiled me too much. Even with things like enairim or simonrim it just feels bad. Its the one thing I really felt like mods can’t touch.
Skyrim has plenty of loading screens, which I guess is where this conversation confuses me a bit. You load into caves, you load into shops, you load into cities. Yeah, the "wilderness" in Skyrim is more seamless. You get more of it cumulatively in Starfield though -- there is a tremendous amount more of seamless open space to wander, with PoIs and all of that.
But it's all largely unmemoriable and interchangeable. An empty plain with occasional resource nodes and points of interest that are basically the same as any other point of interest. I found an interesting oil rig looking place once, but for that I've seen like five basically interchangeable science facilities.
By comparison, I would say I am intimately familiar with at least the environs around Whiterun, and many of the major roads between. And I can be like "yes this is that particular cave".
Yeah I have been playing skyrim a bit recently and agree. You run out in skyrim and there’s a sense of place after you played it a while. Like I pretty much can straight up tell you where stuff is and can navigate without the arrow at this point. I can walk out of skyrim and walk to riverwood, rorikstead, markath, morthal, ivarstead, riften, etc without using a map. There are certain places The same thing I can say about elden ring or Fallout 3 and 4. There is a walkable map and you can go places.
Starfield doesn’t feel like that, it feels like Outer Worlds or Kotor or a CRPG where you just click a place on the world map and go there and every individual “place” is a discrete area. And people keep saying things like “well that is how it was designed” when people bring that up. And thats fine, bethesda can make a game however they want, they can do an Outer Worlds style if they want to or whatever. I just personally don’t feel like the game has as good of a feel without the connectivity of past titles. Its the same as when I played Outer Worlds vs New Vegas. Its not that its bad, it’s just that I feel like a connected world is more immersive for this style of game.
I'm sure if you could spend your entire playtime in a single landing zone in Starfield, you would get a similar sense of place as Skyrim. But Starfield has at least several hundred thousand different landing zones, each one nearly the size of the Skyrim map, and you spend very little time in any one of them. So you'll never build a sense of place from that alone. And even if those zones were seamlessly connected, it wouldn't add much to the sense of place because the sheer amount of land on even a single planet is too vast and you're more likely to keep moving towards new areas than to continually revisit old ones to create that sense of place. NMS has this exact problem. It's easy to wander too far and lose track of where you've been and are unable to revisit any of those places again.
Just remember that half the people you meet are below average intelligence.
Skyrim has plenty of loading screens, which I guess is where this conversation confuses me a bit. You load into caves, you load into shops, you load into cities. Yeah, the "wilderness" in Skyrim is more seamless. You get more of it cumulatively in Starfield though -- there is a tremendous amount more of seamless open space to wander, with PoIs and all of that.
But it's all largely unmemoriable and interchangeable. An empty plain with occasional resource nodes and points of interest that are basically the same as any other point of interest. I found an interesting oil rig looking place once, but for that I've seen like five basically interchangeable science facilities.
By comparison, I would say I am intimately familiar with at least the environs around Whiterun, and many of the major roads between. And I can be like "yes this is that particular cave".
The whole of space was, by design, not meant to be a theme park.
There is a strong simulationist slant in the environmental design that also allows for the scale too. But it's space. As a whole it's meant to be this way. It's... shockingly, as advertised and explained.
It's not 1000 planets all with unique and exciting things on every one. It's ... 1000 planets.
You described the challenge they faced --- the issue is not that space is vast, it's that Bethesda didn't find a solution for making space a meaningfully immersive and rewarding experience. Everyone saw "1,000 empty planets" and "soulless procgen" coming, but there was hope that Bethesda could make it work. They tried, but they couldn't. So, they made a good game, but they couldn't deliver Skyrim in Space.
This is akin to traditional roguelikes where you die all the time, usually quickly. That's the environment for that game. But it's still supposed to be fun, that's the design challenge. A roguelike where dying is un-fun is just a badly designed roguelike. And a space game that makes every location feel like a paper thin prop in a load screen bottle has similarly just failed as matter of design.
But like... I felt like there was some sort of interconnectivity between the streets and the cities and the shops in Skyrim. In Starfield it's basically a menu UI to get to other planets to walk around a mostly empty planet with some flora and fauna. I don't know.. I can see why the game got lots of 7s and 8s out of 10. Game is good but I was hoping for more. And with NMS as a good baseline for exploration feeling.
Hey I get that. Ultimately, it was never going to be "NMS but with tons of handcrafted content", I knew that going in, and I've been happy with the result.
It's interesting because a lot of this feels like inverse NMS. When NMS came out, okay yeah the developers flat out lied about some features being in that weren't in at all (multiplayer!). But moving past that -- I was stunned by the amount of people that expected this infinite procedural generation thing that would also have tons of cool quests and all of these cool gameplay systems layered on that they had dreamed up from the relatively sparse previews.
It was sort of a "You guys get how proc gen works, right?" thing on my end. No, a fairly small indie team just isn't going to pull off this amazing infinite universe that also feels like a AAA game minute to minute. No matter how fancy their proc gen is, you need humans to add hand crafted content to define it. You can have random radiant quest stuff, but you need writers to come up with the templates, and you need a lot of writers writing for a long time to come up with content that doesn't start to feel really samey really quickly.
The reaction to Starfield feels like that from the opposite direction (though much more grounded overall -- the game is like an 87 on opencritic and has as many 9s and 10s as it does 7s and 8s). Okay, we have a big team with experience making lots of quests and doing voice acting and hand crafting environments and cities and all of that stuff. They did that! The stuff they said about having more writing and content and more lines of dialogue than their past games by a pretty healthy margin is completely true. The game is massive!
But no, we're not also getting the depth of proc gen stuff and seamless exploration that NMS has after 10+ years of development. That's the entire thing of that game, and after a tremendous amount of revision post launch it does a damn good job of doing that. I guess I just never expected to have the best of both worlds, and unlike Hello Games, Bethesda actually laid that out pretty early on. It was never supposed to be NMS + Bethesda game, yeah there are elements of NMS in there, but the idea that it would be able to fully replace NMS was never in the cards, and fortunately never sold as being in the cards in the same way Hello Games completely mismanaged the hype train for their launch. Bethesda was clear super early on "yeah some of the planets are going to be boring lifeless proc gen rocks, because Space", and "No you're not going to have full seamless take off, through the atmosphere, into space. It's not a space sim and that's not our focus."
I just don't think you get games that are "the best of good game X and the best of good game Y" like that. There's no generational leap forward in development techniques or processes that really gets you that, and every single time a developer has made a claim like that the result is completely different than the promise in quality or quantity.
To me, the proc gen does what I want. It gives scale to planets, and it gives me content to run when I don't feel like doing another quest. I don't sit down and do proc gen stuff for 10 hours at a time, and that's fine with me, but it's nice to be able to land on a planet and have it feel different and uncharted and unknown, and I can get my fill of random stuff. I like scanning stuff on the way to quest objectives and PoIs, but I'm not the type to spend a week just running around scanning stuff in either this or NMS. It's a nice accessory to the game that improves the experience, but not the main feature by a long shot.
Skyrim has plenty of loading screens, which I guess is where this conversation confuses me a bit. You load into caves, you load into shops, you load into cities. Yeah, the "wilderness" in Skyrim is more seamless. You get more of it cumulatively in Starfield though -- there is a tremendous amount more of seamless open space to wander, with PoIs and all of that.
But it's all largely unmemoriable and interchangeable. An empty plain with occasional resource nodes and points of interest that are basically the same as any other point of interest. I found an interesting oil rig looking place once, but for that I've seen like five basically interchangeable science facilities.
By comparison, I would say I am intimately familiar with at least the environs around Whiterun, and many of the major roads between. And I can be like "yes this is that particular cave".
The whole of space was, by design, not meant to be a theme park.
There is a strong simulationist slant in the environmental design that also allows for the scale too. But it's space. As a whole it's meant to be this way. It's... shockingly, as advertised and explained.
It's not 1000 planets all with unique and exciting things on every one. It's ... 1000 planets.
You described the challenge they faced --- the issue is not that space is vast, it's that Bethesda didn't find a solution for making space a meaningfully immersive and rewarding experience. Everyone saw "1,000 empty planets" and "soulless procgen" coming, but there was hope that Bethesda could make it work. They tried, but they couldn't. So, they made a good game, but they couldn't deliver Skyrim in Space.
This is akin to traditional roguelikes where you die all the time, usually quickly. That's the environment for that game. But it's still supposed to be fun, that's the design challenge. A roguelike where dying is un-fun is just a badly designed roguelike. And a space game that makes every location feel like a paper thin prop in a load screen bottle has similarly just failed as matter of design.
I mean... exploration at large is not always meaningfully immersive and rewarding experience. Even on Earth, there are literally hundreds of thousands of square miles of "nature" that is just filled with nothing of interest (unless you're like a researcher and that's your thing). For the most part though, it's just rocks and bugs biting you. But they were pretty clear about Starfield being grounded in reality... this was back in November 2021.
And to be super clear: The thing I like about NMS is HOW they do the space exploration. Hopping in your ship, pointing to the stars and GO. To fly away from a planet you look away and just fly. To land on one you look at it and fly towards it. That made it feel like I was actually in space. It has nothing to do with the procedurally generated planets and how much "stuff" there is to do.
I actually really liked NMS from the start. I was looking forward to space exploration.
I actually did too! I liked the cool lonely lost in space vibes. At some point it started to feel samey to me, but the music was and still is awesome, and I got a good 40-50 hours out of it at the time and was generally pretty content.
I just really like Starfield it turns out! I wasn't exactly expecting to. I love sci-fi, but fantasy is my #1 and by a healthy margin. I didn't really care about the new property, NASA-punk sounded okay but overall kind of unremarkable. I barely followed it after launch, and probably best fit into the "Aww can you just make Elder Scrolls 6 instead?" category. Eventually it was like "Welp this is the first Big New Bethesda Game since Fallout 4 really (fallout 76 was pretty clearly their crack at 'Fallout Ark' and never interested me a ton)" and I had to give it a shot.
I hope you find something to love too! I know you're early in and it's not hitting all of the beats you wanted yet. You're never going to feel lost in space, but there is other cool stuff that I've really enjoyed. The characters are a lot of fun, I really like the ground and space combat (I've found myself succeeding Persuade checks then being sad I don't get to kill all of the heavily armored bodyguards and shoot them in the face anyways to get a nice scrap), and there's just so many damn quests and cool things to find around every corner that I can't stop playing.
Skyrim has plenty of loading screens, which I guess is where this conversation confuses me a bit. You load into caves, you load into shops, you load into cities. Yeah, the "wilderness" in Skyrim is more seamless. You get more of it cumulatively in Starfield though -- there is a tremendous amount more of seamless open space to wander, with PoIs and all of that.
But it's all largely unmemoriable and interchangeable. An empty plain with occasional resource nodes and points of interest that are basically the same as any other point of interest. I found an interesting oil rig looking place once, but for that I've seen like five basically interchangeable science facilities.
By comparison, I would say I am intimately familiar with at least the environs around Whiterun, and many of the major roads between. And I can be like "yes this is that particular cave".
Yeah I have been playing skyrim a bit recently and agree. You run out in skyrim and there’s a sense of place after you played it a while. Like I pretty much can straight up tell you where stuff is and can navigate without the arrow at this point. I can walk out of skyrim and walk to riverwood, rorikstead, markath, morthal, ivarstead, riften, etc without using a map. There are certain places The same thing I can say about elden ring or Fallout 3 and 4. There is a walkable map and you can go places.
Starfield doesn’t feel like that, it feels like Outer Worlds or Kotor or a CRPG where you just click a place on the world map and go there and every individual “place” is a discrete area. And people keep saying things like “well that is how it was designed” when people bring that up. And thats fine, bethesda can make a game however they want, they can do an Outer Worlds style if they want to or whatever. I just personally don’t feel like the game has as good of a feel without the connectivity of past titles. Its the same as when I played Outer Worlds vs New Vegas. Its not that its bad, it’s just that I feel like a connected world is more immersive for this style of game.
I'm sure if you could spend your entire playtime in a single landing zone in Starfield, you would get a similar sense of place as Skyrim. But Starfield has at least several hundred thousand different landing zones, each one nearly the size of the Skyrim map, and you spend very little time in any one of them. So you'll never build a sense of place from that alone. And even if those zones were seamlessly connected, it wouldn't add much to the sense of place because the sheer amount of land on even a single planet is too vast and you're more likely to keep moving towards new areas than to continually revisit old ones to create that sense of place. NMS has this exact problem. It's easy to wander too far and lose track of where you've been and are unable to revisit any of those places again.
Not really honestly. Skyrim and elden ring have bespoke handmade made areas, Starfield has small islands of real areas in the middle of random procgen content. Its not really the same.
Skyrim has plenty of loading screens, which I guess is where this conversation confuses me a bit. You load into caves, you load into shops, you load into cities. Yeah, the "wilderness" in Skyrim is more seamless. You get more of it cumulatively in Starfield though -- there is a tremendous amount more of seamless open space to wander, with PoIs and all of that.
But it's all largely unmemoriable and interchangeable. An empty plain with occasional resource nodes and points of interest that are basically the same as any other point of interest. I found an interesting oil rig looking place once, but for that I've seen like five basically interchangeable science facilities.
By comparison, I would say I am intimately familiar with at least the environs around Whiterun, and many of the major roads between. And I can be like "yes this is that particular cave".
The whole of space was, by design, not meant to be a theme park.
There is a strong simulationist slant in the environmental design that also allows for the scale too. But it's space. As a whole it's meant to be this way. It's... shockingly, as advertised and explained.
It's not 1000 planets all with unique and exciting things on every one. It's ... 1000 planets.
You described the challenge they faced --- the issue is not that space is vast, it's that Bethesda didn't find a solution for making space a meaningfully immersive and rewarding experience. Everyone saw "1,000 empty planets" and "soulless procgen" coming, but there was hope that Bethesda could make it work. They tried, but they couldn't. So, they made a good game, but they couldn't deliver Skyrim in Space.
This is akin to traditional roguelikes where you die all the time, usually quickly. That's the environment for that game. But it's still supposed to be fun, that's the design challenge. A roguelike where dying is un-fun is just a badly designed roguelike. And a space game that makes every location feel like a paper thin prop in a load screen bottle has similarly just failed as matter of design.
I mean... exploration at large is not always meaningfully immersive and rewarding experience. Even on Earth, there are literally hundreds of thousands of square miles of "nature" that is just filled with nothing of interest (unless you're like a researcher and that's your thing). For the most part though, it's just rocks and bugs biting you. But they were pretty clear about Starfield being grounded in reality... this was back in November 2021.
Yeah, again no one is really arguing that they didn’t mean to do what they did or that it isn’t accurate to space somehow.
Its just at some point you have to think about the impact something has on the game.
Like I could make a part of a racing sim game where you have the option walk around your car for half an hour and do a safety inspection before you race. I might put a lot of work into making it accurate and detailing it out. But if I did the person going into the game expecting a racing game might wonder what the point was. Its probably something most people would do once or twice and forget about.
Thats where the random planet exploration is for me right now.
Skyrim has plenty of loading screens, which I guess is where this conversation confuses me a bit. You load into caves, you load into shops, you load into cities. Yeah, the "wilderness" in Skyrim is more seamless. You get more of it cumulatively in Starfield though -- there is a tremendous amount more of seamless open space to wander, with PoIs and all of that.
But it's all largely unmemoriable and interchangeable. An empty plain with occasional resource nodes and points of interest that are basically the same as any other point of interest. I found an interesting oil rig looking place once, but for that I've seen like five basically interchangeable science facilities.
By comparison, I would say I am intimately familiar with at least the environs around Whiterun, and many of the major roads between. And I can be like "yes this is that particular cave".
Yeah I have been playing skyrim a bit recently and agree. You run out in skyrim and there’s a sense of place after you played it a while. Like I pretty much can straight up tell you where stuff is and can navigate without the arrow at this point. I can walk out of skyrim and walk to riverwood, rorikstead, markath, morthal, ivarstead, riften, etc without using a map. There are certain places The same thing I can say about elden ring or Fallout 3 and 4. There is a walkable map and you can go places.
Starfield doesn’t feel like that, it feels like Outer Worlds or Kotor or a CRPG where you just click a place on the world map and go there and every individual “place” is a discrete area. And people keep saying things like “well that is how it was designed” when people bring that up. And thats fine, bethesda can make a game however they want, they can do an Outer Worlds style if they want to or whatever. I just personally don’t feel like the game has as good of a feel without the connectivity of past titles. Its the same as when I played Outer Worlds vs New Vegas. Its not that its bad, it’s just that I feel like a connected world is more immersive for this style of game.
I'm sure if you could spend your entire playtime in a single landing zone in Starfield, you would get a similar sense of place as Skyrim. But Starfield has at least several hundred thousand different landing zones, each one nearly the size of the Skyrim map, and you spend very little time in any one of them. So you'll never build a sense of place from that alone. And even if those zones were seamlessly connected, it wouldn't add much to the sense of place because the sheer amount of land on even a single planet is too vast and you're more likely to keep moving towards new areas than to continually revisit old ones to create that sense of place. NMS has this exact problem. It's easy to wander too far and lose track of where you've been and are unable to revisit any of those places again.
Not really honestly. Skyrim and elden ring have bespoke handmade made areas, Starfield has small islands of real areas in the middle of random procgen content. Its not really the same.
Skyrim has plenty of loading screens, which I guess is where this conversation confuses me a bit. You load into caves, you load into shops, you load into cities. Yeah, the "wilderness" in Skyrim is more seamless. You get more of it cumulatively in Starfield though -- there is a tremendous amount more of seamless open space to wander, with PoIs and all of that.
But it's all largely unmemoriable and interchangeable. An empty plain with occasional resource nodes and points of interest that are basically the same as any other point of interest. I found an interesting oil rig looking place once, but for that I've seen like five basically interchangeable science facilities.
By comparison, I would say I am intimately familiar with at least the environs around Whiterun, and many of the major roads between. And I can be like "yes this is that particular cave".
The whole of space was, by design, not meant to be a theme park.
There is a strong simulationist slant in the environmental design that also allows for the scale too. But it's space. As a whole it's meant to be this way. It's... shockingly, as advertised and explained.
It's not 1000 planets all with unique and exciting things on every one. It's ... 1000 planets.
You described the challenge they faced --- the issue is not that space is vast, it's that Bethesda didn't find a solution for making space a meaningfully immersive and rewarding experience. Everyone saw "1,000 empty planets" and "soulless procgen" coming, but there was hope that Bethesda could make it work. They tried, but they couldn't. So, they made a good game, but they couldn't deliver Skyrim in Space.
This is akin to traditional roguelikes where you die all the time, usually quickly. That's the environment for that game. But it's still supposed to be fun, that's the design challenge. A roguelike where dying is un-fun is just a badly designed roguelike. And a space game that makes every location feel like a paper thin prop in a load screen bottle has similarly just failed as matter of design.
I mean... exploration at large is not always meaningfully immersive and rewarding experience. Even on Earth, there are literally hundreds of thousands of square miles of "nature" that is just filled with nothing of interest (unless you're like a researcher and that's your thing). For the most part though, it's just rocks and bugs biting you. But they were pretty clear about Starfield being grounded in reality... this was back in November 2021.
Yeah, again no one is really arguing that they didn’t mean to do what they did or that it isn’t accurate to space somehow.
Its just at some point you have to think about the impact something has on the game.
Like I could make a part of a racing sim game where you have the option walk around your car for half an hour and do a safety inspection before you race. I might put a lot of work into making it accurate and detailing it out. But if I did the person going into the game expecting a racing game might wonder what the point was. Its probably something most people would do once or twice and forget about.
Thats where the random planet exploration is for me right now.
If when you made your racing game you spent a fair bit of time pointing out that you can do the inspection, etc repeatedly and then someone bought it and was like "why is all this inspection stuff here? nobody inspects things!" without noticing that there are people who do enjoy car inspection as much as racing and this was put in for those people... well, then it would kind of be on that person.
The game could have the best base building interface anyone's seen and it still wouldn't change the fact that I find base building boring and wouldn't engage with it. But I don't sit there wondering why there is base building in the game.
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“I used to draw, hard to admit that I used to draw...”
And to be super clear: The thing I like about NMS is HOW they do the space exploration. Hopping in your ship, pointing to the stars and GO. To fly away from a planet you look away and just fly. To land on one you look at it and fly towards it. That made it feel like I was actually in space. It has nothing to do with the procedurally generated planets and how much "stuff" there is to do.
Different strokes for different blokes.
I really like the way they cut out the travel time. Space is big empty nothing. I like that I can just push the button and be at a new poi, instead of for instance elite dangerous.
And to be super clear: The thing I like about NMS is HOW they do the space exploration. Hopping in your ship, pointing to the stars and GO. To fly away from a planet you look away and just fly. To land on one you look at it and fly towards it. That made it feel like I was actually in space. It has nothing to do with the procedurally generated planets and how much "stuff" there is to do.
Different strokes for different blokes.
I really like the way they cut out the travel time. Space is big empty nothing. I like that I can just push the button and be at a new poi, instead of for instance elite dangerous.
Okay but that's not what I'm talking about. I'm just saying being able to fly directly at a planet and have it look like I'm actually landing on that planet would go a long way with me into feeling that the whole universe is interconnected. Everything is just separated by UI auto-landing and stuff. I'm not saying you have no way to fly to a distant planet without pressing forward and going. I'm okay with the lightspeed travel.
I do think that so much of the loading skips feels like accounting for outside of a very few sections you can skip space entirely if you don't want to do it. Much like settlements are entirely what you feel like doing, and even combat feels almost "whatever you want" outside of fisticuffs because jesus fists you don't do anything at all.
So you have to be able to go from planet to space and back with a push of a button if you expect people to be able to skip space if they don't like doing it. And once you've made the decision to do that, it feels like wasted resources to have the player actually land on a planet when you know 90% of your player base wont.
Just like in my first play through I would manually walk to pilot my ship for like the first 30 hours, and now unless I accidentally forget hitting cockpit I never do.
I would like some money because these are artisanal nuggets of wisdom philistine.
Just feels like kind of a waste to have this set in space if it's there to be an annoyance to a large portion of gamers. But I guess that's where we're at in life.
First few days I enjoyed planet exploration from a find a place to loot and kill dudes over and over mechanic, like stumbling into random caves in Skyrim
But now I decided to build outposts and im enjoying it from a “try to find a planet where one outpost can cover multiple resources” mode
This game is 6 or 7 out of 10 for each thing it tries to do but it’s better than the sum of its parts so im really enjoying it. I can see getting sucked into outposts and ship building a ton.
Expansions that focus on that, in more of a dwarf fortress, factorio game in space could be amazing.
Lean into procedural content for that. Let me expand my own space empire/fleet
So... what layout do you guys prefer with your ships? This is how most of mine have wound up going:
I like the ladder into the ship landing bays along with the ladder-style docking bay. What's the preference?
Anybody do more than 2 levels on their ships?
lol, penis ship
I like the idea of different decks for different areas (science/engineering, living quarters/mess hall, etc), but the ladders kind of make it tedious. I'd love a 2 story hab with stairs going to the next level, or a turbolift. But for the most part, whether I want multiple decks depends on the size of the ship. I like the YT-1300 feel of a single deck up to a certain size.
So... what layout do you guys prefer with your ships? This is how most of mine have wound up going:
I like the ladder into the ship landing bays along with the ladder-style docking bay. What's the preference?
Anybody do more than 2 levels on their ships?
I actually like to use whatever layout the ship comes with and just adjust to it, makes boarding other ships easier because I know the lay out better.
I kinda like asymmetric. Most walks are to the pilot seat or airlock from the pilot seat or airlock.
So if I can stick those as close as possible then all the rest kinda end up either going behind them (leading to a ship with a very weird and far profile) or an asymmetric ship in the vein of the millennium falcon
Edit: asymmetric ships also have other advantages if they’re general purpose. Mainly in that being as close to the airlock and docking apparatus makes precise positioning in docking much easier. (This of course having nothing to do with the game but making a lot of sense in like the actual designs of starships)
Lots of the little things in this game make me excited for Elder Scrolls 6 though. So I hope they learned a lot from this little space adventure!
I have the exact opposite reaction. Modders made an infinitely better UI in like a week. Everything about this game is aggressively mediocre. What I'm taking away for Elder Scrolls 6 is actually just wait a year to buy it, at which point the community will have made it an actually great game.
While racing light mechs, your Urbanmech comes in second place, but only because it ran out of ammo.
Yeah is there any reason to own more than one starship beyond having some for different tasks? I can't hire a crew to go on missions for me right?
I've only scratched the surface on Outposts and I like what I see. Just need to commit some skill points to it and get some resources to build up.
The reason to have more than one ship, beyond temporary "ownership" to sell a stolen one or just to collect ones you like, is if you're doing cargo transport missions or passenger transport missions. Cargo pods are very heavy and fitting a lot of cargo space on a ship will make it slow, lumbering, and short ranged and thus iffy if you get jumped by pirates. I prefer decent speed/maneuverability/jump range on my daily driver which tends to limit it to the 1000-2000 kg range which isn't enough for hauling missions when it's already mostly filled with my own junk. Some passenger missions can require a substantial number of berth habs that will heavily dictate the design of the ship that you may not prefer the aesthetics on for your daily driver.
Just remember that half the people you meet are below average intelligence.
Lots of the little things in this game make me excited for Elder Scrolls 6 though. So I hope they learned a lot from this little space adventure!
I have the exact opposite reaction. Modders made an infinitely better UI in like a week. Everything about this game is aggressively mediocre. What I'm taking away for Elder Scrolls 6 is actually just wait a year to buy it, at which point the community will have made it an actually great game.
I get that people don't like the "that's just Bethesda" thing,
but,
the UI scenario is the most Bethesda thing. Every UI post Morrowind has been terrible because they try a one-size-fits-all solution for console and PC instead of designing one specific to each.
Aaand every game post Morrowind has had a substantially better UI within like a week.
Is it dumb that Bethesda does this? Yes.
Is it something that bothers me a ton, given that it's always fixed within a week and I still have lots of fun with the first few days of huge console interface? No, not really losing any sleep on that one.
I'll just call it right now -- Elder Scrolls 6 is going to have a pretty dumb interface, particularly on PC, and modders will fix it within a week.
Of course, my acceptance comes from not thinking the game is aggressively mediocre. I think it's cool as hell, to the point I'm using PTO to take off work tomorrow to play more, two weeks after launch.
Yeah is there any reason to own more than one starship beyond having some for different tasks? I can't hire a crew to go on missions for me right?
I've only scratched the surface on Outposts and I like what I see. Just need to commit some skill points to it and get some resources to build up.
The reason to have more than one ship, beyond temporary "ownership" to sell a stolen one or just to collect ones you like, is if you're doing cargo transport missions or passenger transport missions. Cargo pods are very heavy and fitting a lot of cargo space on a ship will make it slow, lumbering, and short ranged and thus iffy if you get jumped by pirates. I prefer decent speed/maneuverability/jump range on my daily driver which tends to limit it to the 1000-2000 kg range which isn't enough for hauling missions when it's already mostly filled with my own junk. Some passenger missions can require a substantial number of berth habs that will heavily dictate the design of the ship that you may not prefer the aesthetics on for your daily driver.
Ah yes... "jobs". I.. forgot you can do them.
I thought it was weird when Stroud gave me 1000 credits, as if that was a lot... but then I remembered that normal people probably don't regularly show up to shops with hundreds of kilos of weapons and gear to sell... or "salvaged" ships from the deep. Spacer lord main character.
“I used to draw, hard to admit that I used to draw...”
Yeah is there any reason to own more than one starship beyond having some for different tasks? I can't hire a crew to go on missions for me right?
I've only scratched the surface on Outposts and I like what I see. Just need to commit some skill points to it and get some resources to build up.
The reason to have more than one ship, beyond temporary "ownership" to sell a stolen one or just to collect ones you like, is if you're doing cargo transport missions or passenger transport missions. Cargo pods are very heavy and fitting a lot of cargo space on a ship will make it slow, lumbering, and short ranged and thus iffy if you get jumped by pirates. I prefer decent speed/maneuverability/jump range on my daily driver which tends to limit it to the 1000-2000 kg range which isn't enough for hauling missions when it's already mostly filled with my own junk. Some passenger missions can require a substantial number of berth habs that will heavily dictate the design of the ship that you may not prefer the aesthetics on for your daily driver.
Yeah that's kind of what I meant in the first part.
Yeah when you start rolling in space credits people act like giving them 20k is life changing. Lady that was just an abandoned lab on the rim, twenty rounds of ammunition and 2 digipicks, but live your best life you've earned it
I would like some money because these are artisanal nuggets of wisdom philistine.
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Imagine in Skyrim if you walked out of a cave, took 10 steps to go into the forest, and then another 50 or so steps in the forest to get into the sand dunes, and then another 25 steps to get into the cave you want to get into.
Ultimately yeah, it's less seamless than Skyrim. It also has dramatically more landmass than Skyrim, and that's just the stuff with handcrafted content in it.
The #s aren't nearly as extreme as that in my experience. It's more like 1000 steps to go to the forest and sand dune? The walkable surface on a single "area" of a planet is about half the size of the entire Skyrim landmass.
Skyrim has plenty of loading screens, which I guess is where this conversation confuses me a bit. You load into caves, you load into shops, you load into cities. Yeah, the "wilderness" in Skyrim is more seamless. You get more of it cumulatively in Starfield though -- there is a tremendous amount more of seamless open space to wander, with PoIs and all of that.
A typical quest in Skyrim (which is what your analogy seems to be comparing) is something like 500 steps to go into a cave, loading screen. Clear out half of cave, loading screen into second area. Walk out of second area, loading screen into cave first area, out of first cave area, loading screen to wilderness. Walk 500 steps to town, loading screen. Walk 20-50 steps to building that has quest giver in it, loading screen.
Ultimately yeah, Skyrim has one big landmass that is larger than any single map in Starfield (about 2x the size from the measurements I've seen). Starfield has dozens of these (counting just the handcrafted stuff), representing multiple different planets. It's hard for me not to compare that to like, a theoretical "Elder Scrolls VI: Tamriel". You have multiple different provinces (worlds) representing different cultures and biomes. It's not going to be one big map that's like 12x the size of Skyrim with the same density of content -- that's just not practical. It would be multiple different "zones", one representing each province, and the provinces are going to not all be as large and fully fleshed out as Skyrim, because there are substantially more of them and you're not getting 10x Skyrim or whatever it is in one.
But it's all largely unmemoriable and interchangeable. An empty plain with occasional resource nodes and points of interest that are basically the same as any other point of interest. I found an interesting oil rig looking place once, but for that I've seen like five basically interchangeable science facilities.
By comparison, I would say I am intimately familiar with at least the environs around Whiterun, and many of the major roads between. And I can be like "yes this is that particular cave".
The whole of space was, by design, not meant to be a theme park.
There is a strong simulationist slant in the environmental design that also allows for the scale too. But it's space. As a whole it's meant to be this way. It's... shockingly, as advertised and explained.
It's not 1000 planets all with unique and exciting things on every one. It's ... 1000 planets.
This is true. I still like feeling the navigation and animation, so I do it that way. I think of the mission selection like entering things into a nav computer.
It's basically just a ship built around an array of engines - it has a top speed of Yes and is at the point where nothing can really fight back, so alas it's time to move on.
Yeah I have been playing skyrim a bit recently and agree. You run out in skyrim and there’s a sense of place after you played it a while. Like I pretty much can straight up tell you where stuff is and can navigate without the arrow at this point. I can walk out of skyrim and walk to riverwood, rorikstead, markath, morthal, ivarstead, riften, etc without using a map. There are certain places The same thing I can say about elden ring or Fallout 3 and 4. There is a walkable map and you can go places.
Starfield doesn’t feel like that, it feels like Outer Worlds or Kotor or a CRPG where you just click a place on the world map and go there and every individual “place” is a discrete area. And people keep saying things like “well that is how it was designed” when people bring that up. And thats fine, bethesda can make a game however they want, they can do an Outer Worlds style if they want to or whatever. I just personally don’t feel like the game has as good of a feel without the connectivity of past titles. Its the same as when I played Outer Worlds vs New Vegas. Its not that its bad, it’s just that I feel like a connected world is more immersive for this style of game.
I feel like with skyrim there were a few weaknesses:
1. Building and architecture variety. Too much of the same farmhouse everywhere.This is pretty much a solved problem with mods - cities of the north, great villages+towns, etc.
2. Not enough variety in dungeons, enemies, environments- again the expansions and mods pretty much solve this.
3. Combat. Elden ring just spoiled me too much. Even with things like enairim or simonrim it just feels bad. Its the one thing I really felt like mods can’t touch.
I'm sure if you could spend your entire playtime in a single landing zone in Starfield, you would get a similar sense of place as Skyrim. But Starfield has at least several hundred thousand different landing zones, each one nearly the size of the Skyrim map, and you spend very little time in any one of them. So you'll never build a sense of place from that alone. And even if those zones were seamlessly connected, it wouldn't add much to the sense of place because the sheer amount of land on even a single planet is too vast and you're more likely to keep moving towards new areas than to continually revisit old ones to create that sense of place. NMS has this exact problem. It's easy to wander too far and lose track of where you've been and are unable to revisit any of those places again.
You described the challenge they faced --- the issue is not that space is vast, it's that Bethesda didn't find a solution for making space a meaningfully immersive and rewarding experience. Everyone saw "1,000 empty planets" and "soulless procgen" coming, but there was hope that Bethesda could make it work. They tried, but they couldn't. So, they made a good game, but they couldn't deliver Skyrim in Space.
This is akin to traditional roguelikes where you die all the time, usually quickly. That's the environment for that game. But it's still supposed to be fun, that's the design challenge. A roguelike where dying is un-fun is just a badly designed roguelike. And a space game that makes every location feel like a paper thin prop in a load screen bottle has similarly just failed as matter of design.
Hey I get that. Ultimately, it was never going to be "NMS but with tons of handcrafted content", I knew that going in, and I've been happy with the result.
It's interesting because a lot of this feels like inverse NMS. When NMS came out, okay yeah the developers flat out lied about some features being in that weren't in at all (multiplayer!). But moving past that -- I was stunned by the amount of people that expected this infinite procedural generation thing that would also have tons of cool quests and all of these cool gameplay systems layered on that they had dreamed up from the relatively sparse previews.
It was sort of a "You guys get how proc gen works, right?" thing on my end. No, a fairly small indie team just isn't going to pull off this amazing infinite universe that also feels like a AAA game minute to minute. No matter how fancy their proc gen is, you need humans to add hand crafted content to define it. You can have random radiant quest stuff, but you need writers to come up with the templates, and you need a lot of writers writing for a long time to come up with content that doesn't start to feel really samey really quickly.
The reaction to Starfield feels like that from the opposite direction (though much more grounded overall -- the game is like an 87 on opencritic and has as many 9s and 10s as it does 7s and 8s). Okay, we have a big team with experience making lots of quests and doing voice acting and hand crafting environments and cities and all of that stuff. They did that! The stuff they said about having more writing and content and more lines of dialogue than their past games by a pretty healthy margin is completely true. The game is massive!
But no, we're not also getting the depth of proc gen stuff and seamless exploration that NMS has after 10+ years of development. That's the entire thing of that game, and after a tremendous amount of revision post launch it does a damn good job of doing that. I guess I just never expected to have the best of both worlds, and unlike Hello Games, Bethesda actually laid that out pretty early on. It was never supposed to be NMS + Bethesda game, yeah there are elements of NMS in there, but the idea that it would be able to fully replace NMS was never in the cards, and fortunately never sold as being in the cards in the same way Hello Games completely mismanaged the hype train for their launch. Bethesda was clear super early on "yeah some of the planets are going to be boring lifeless proc gen rocks, because Space", and "No you're not going to have full seamless take off, through the atmosphere, into space. It's not a space sim and that's not our focus."
I just don't think you get games that are "the best of good game X and the best of good game Y" like that. There's no generational leap forward in development techniques or processes that really gets you that, and every single time a developer has made a claim like that the result is completely different than the promise in quality or quantity.
To me, the proc gen does what I want. It gives scale to planets, and it gives me content to run when I don't feel like doing another quest. I don't sit down and do proc gen stuff for 10 hours at a time, and that's fine with me, but it's nice to be able to land on a planet and have it feel different and uncharted and unknown, and I can get my fill of random stuff. I like scanning stuff on the way to quest objectives and PoIs, but I'm not the type to spend a week just running around scanning stuff in either this or NMS. It's a nice accessory to the game that improves the experience, but not the main feature by a long shot.
I mean... exploration at large is not always meaningfully immersive and rewarding experience. Even on Earth, there are literally hundreds of thousands of square miles of "nature" that is just filled with nothing of interest (unless you're like a researcher and that's your thing). For the most part though, it's just rocks and bugs biting you. But they were pretty clear about Starfield being grounded in reality... this was back in November 2021.
Source
For full context, the vidoc articles referenced at that time. Relevant quote being around ~4:00 Minutes.
I actually did too! I liked the cool lonely lost in space vibes. At some point it started to feel samey to me, but the music was and still is awesome, and I got a good 40-50 hours out of it at the time and was generally pretty content.
I just really like Starfield it turns out! I wasn't exactly expecting to. I love sci-fi, but fantasy is my #1 and by a healthy margin. I didn't really care about the new property, NASA-punk sounded okay but overall kind of unremarkable. I barely followed it after launch, and probably best fit into the "Aww can you just make Elder Scrolls 6 instead?" category. Eventually it was like "Welp this is the first Big New Bethesda Game since Fallout 4 really (fallout 76 was pretty clearly their crack at 'Fallout Ark' and never interested me a ton)" and I had to give it a shot.
I hope you find something to love too! I know you're early in and it's not hitting all of the beats you wanted yet. You're never going to feel lost in space, but there is other cool stuff that I've really enjoyed. The characters are a lot of fun, I really like the ground and space combat (I've found myself succeeding Persuade checks then being sad I don't get to kill all of the heavily armored bodyguards and shoot them in the face anyways to get a nice scrap), and there's just so many damn quests and cool things to find around every corner that I can't stop playing.
Not really honestly. Skyrim and elden ring have bespoke handmade made areas, Starfield has small islands of real areas in the middle of random procgen content. Its not really the same.
Yeah, again no one is really arguing that they didn’t mean to do what they did or that it isn’t accurate to space somehow.
Its just at some point you have to think about the impact something has on the game.
Like I could make a part of a racing sim game where you have the option walk around your car for half an hour and do a safety inspection before you race. I might put a lot of work into making it accurate and detailing it out. But if I did the person going into the game expecting a racing game might wonder what the point was. Its probably something most people would do once or twice and forget about.
Thats where the random planet exploration is for me right now.
If when you made your racing game you spent a fair bit of time pointing out that you can do the inspection, etc repeatedly and then someone bought it and was like "why is all this inspection stuff here? nobody inspects things!" without noticing that there are people who do enjoy car inspection as much as racing and this was put in for those people... well, then it would kind of be on that person.
The game could have the best base building interface anyone's seen and it still wouldn't change the fact that I find base building boring and wouldn't engage with it. But I don't sit there wondering why there is base building in the game.
Different strokes for different blokes.
I really like the way they cut out the travel time. Space is big empty nothing. I like that I can just push the button and be at a new poi, instead of for instance elite dangerous.
Okay but that's not what I'm talking about. I'm just saying being able to fly directly at a planet and have it look like I'm actually landing on that planet would go a long way with me into feeling that the whole universe is interconnected. Everything is just separated by UI auto-landing and stuff. I'm not saying you have no way to fly to a distant planet without pressing forward and going. I'm okay with the lightspeed travel.
So you have to be able to go from planet to space and back with a push of a button if you expect people to be able to skip space if they don't like doing it. And once you've made the decision to do that, it feels like wasted resources to have the player actually land on a planet when you know 90% of your player base wont.
Just like in my first play through I would manually walk to pilot my ship for like the first 30 hours, and now unless I accidentally forget hitting cockpit I never do.
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I like the ladder into the ship landing bays along with the ladder-style docking bay. What's the preference?
Anybody do more than 2 levels on their ships?
But now I decided to build outposts and im enjoying it from a “try to find a planet where one outpost can cover multiple resources” mode
This game is 6 or 7 out of 10 for each thing it tries to do but it’s better than the sum of its parts so im really enjoying it. I can see getting sucked into outposts and ship building a ton.
Expansions that focus on that, in more of a dwarf fortress, factorio game in space could be amazing.
Lean into procedural content for that. Let me expand my own space empire/fleet
I actually like to use whatever layout the ship comes with and just adjust to it, makes boarding other ships easier because I know the lay out better.
pleasepaypreacher.net
I've only scratched the surface on Outposts and I like what I see. Just need to commit some skill points to it and get some resources to build up.
me going into the astral lounge:
*wide-eyed stare*
god I love when video games have cool places like this
reminds me of the afterlife from Mass Effect 2
lol, penis ship
I like the idea of different decks for different areas (science/engineering, living quarters/mess hall, etc), but the ladders kind of make it tedious. I'd love a 2 story hab with stairs going to the next level, or a turbolift. But for the most part, whether I want multiple decks depends on the size of the ship. I like the YT-1300 feel of a single deck up to a certain size.
I kinda like asymmetric. Most walks are to the pilot seat or airlock from the pilot seat or airlock.
So if I can stick those as close as possible then all the rest kinda end up either going behind them (leading to a ship with a very weird and far profile) or an asymmetric ship in the vein of the millennium falcon
Edit: asymmetric ships also have other advantages if they’re general purpose. Mainly in that being as close to the airlock and docking apparatus makes precise positioning in docking much easier. (This of course having nothing to do with the game but making a lot of sense in like the actual designs of starships)
pleasepaypreacher.net
I have the exact opposite reaction. Modders made an infinitely better UI in like a week. Everything about this game is aggressively mediocre. What I'm taking away for Elder Scrolls 6 is actually just wait a year to buy it, at which point the community will have made it an actually great game.
The reason to have more than one ship, beyond temporary "ownership" to sell a stolen one or just to collect ones you like, is if you're doing cargo transport missions or passenger transport missions. Cargo pods are very heavy and fitting a lot of cargo space on a ship will make it slow, lumbering, and short ranged and thus iffy if you get jumped by pirates. I prefer decent speed/maneuverability/jump range on my daily driver which tends to limit it to the 1000-2000 kg range which isn't enough for hauling missions when it's already mostly filled with my own junk. Some passenger missions can require a substantial number of berth habs that will heavily dictate the design of the ship that you may not prefer the aesthetics on for your daily driver.
I get that people don't like the "that's just Bethesda" thing,
but,
the UI scenario is the most Bethesda thing. Every UI post Morrowind has been terrible because they try a one-size-fits-all solution for console and PC instead of designing one specific to each.
Aaand every game post Morrowind has had a substantially better UI within like a week.
Is it dumb that Bethesda does this? Yes.
Is it something that bothers me a ton, given that it's always fixed within a week and I still have lots of fun with the first few days of huge console interface? No, not really losing any sleep on that one.
I'll just call it right now -- Elder Scrolls 6 is going to have a pretty dumb interface, particularly on PC, and modders will fix it within a week.
Of course, my acceptance comes from not thinking the game is aggressively mediocre. I think it's cool as hell, to the point I'm using PTO to take off work tomorrow to play more, two weeks after launch.
Ah yes... "jobs". I.. forgot you can do them.
I thought it was weird when Stroud gave me 1000 credits, as if that was a lot... but then I remembered that normal people probably don't regularly show up to shops with hundreds of kilos of weapons and gear to sell... or "salvaged" ships from the deep. Spacer lord main character.
Yeah that's kind of what I meant in the first part.
pleasepaypreacher.net