Too bad that game is an unstable mess. It could have been something good.
Just another billion and the game will be almost ready fam!…
Are you mixing up Starfield with Star Citizen? Starfield is already out, it was just kinda mediocre.
That’s Star Citizen
A) That was not seamless. There was an artificial cloud layer as the loading seam.
B) That was the least realistic entry I have ever seen in any media. How are you gonna go from orbit to the ground thrusting toward the ground (at a really steep angle too) the entire way down. You would be either be letting the atmosphere slow you down with friction or thrusting away from the planet the entire time to counter gravity.
C) How was it hovering flat to the ground midair with the only visible thrusters being in thw rear of the ship? Also those thrusters were still firing but the hovering ship wasn’t moving forward.
For a game about space exploration, they give surprisingly few shits about even the semblance of realistic physics.
Keep in mind that, as outlined in the title, this is a work in progress mod.
A) The unmodified game still has to load the game world during the transition. True seamless probably requires an engine overhaul beyond the scope of a mod, cloud cover to mask the loading of assets and make it feel seamless is a fair compromise.
B) I think that forcing a completely realistic re-entry would be a bit much for most players, though it would be awesome for the option to be available to those who want a hardcore experience.
KSP, Flight of Nova, Elite: Dangerous - there are plenty sims out there catering to those who want realism.
No Man’s Sky compromises on this to keep the game casual and fun.
C) In the original game, flight is limited to space and is very arcade-y. Press ‘W’ to activate thrusters and move forward. Vertical thrusters are present in the unmodified game and visible during landing cutscenes, so the modder may be able to tap into those animations as they continue work on the mod. I recall most of those thrusters being attached to the landing gear though.
At the end of the day, this is a game and most games are more enjoyable when you suspend disbelief. This is a game where people wear spacesuits in a vacuum, get shot multiple times with blood effects, and carry on fighting without experiencing violent depressurization.
As a person who knows nothing about this game and only understands kerbal space program:
- Why are you thrusting forward while trying to decrease speed?
- That re-entry angle and velocity are far to steep and fast. 1000% chance of death.
It’s a shitty game that makes no sense.
This is a mod.
In the original game, flight is limited to space and is very arcade-y. Press ‘W’ to activate thrusters and move forward.
KSP, Flight of Nova, Elite: Dangerous - there are plenty sims out there catering to those who want realism.
I think that forcing a completely realistic re-entry would be a bit much for most players, though it would be awesome for the option to be available to those who want a hardcore experience.
At the end of the day, most games are more enjoyable when you suspend disbelief. This is a game where people wear spacesuits in a vacuum, get shot multiple times with blood effects, and carry on fighting without experiencing violent depressurization.
As a Flight of Nova player, I just saw death. Yes, this is extremely unrealistic, approaching a planet at that speed you’d just vaporize as soon as you hit the atmosphere. It looks like a tiny planet, though, which wouldn’t have enough gravity for a thick atmosphere. Probably just scaled down, like Kerbin, which is smaller than Charon.
I’ll have to give flight of nova a try. Looks like a fun game!
Answers
1: future magic
2: future magicBut yes, that fireball would be spectacular even if the ship could somehow survive.
Starfield is more an ‘Open World’ rpg. Exploration on foot with fight and quest is more prominent than exploration in space. The space part is more like a mean to travel between planet where you could find quest. Sometimes, there’s a space fight, or boarding other ship/station. But ship simulation isn’t the purpose of this game. You can still build a ship, but you’re more focused on look than : ‘Will it work ?’.
It looks like this is a baked animation though. There’s no reason it couldn’t be more realistic. The biggest issue though would be time. This is already much longer than the vanilla experience. Doing it “properly” would extend it to probably minutes. Minutes every time watching a baked animation would get old fast.
So basically they could replace spacce travel with a magic portal and it would be a fantasy game?
well there is a reason why scifi and fantasy books are usually lumped together in book stores.
Yeah, your ship is basically a somewhat customizable base and the navigation computer is just a fast travel portal that moves your base, at least in the update I played a couple years ago.
A space fantasy game, sure.
TL;DR: This is impressive, however for me personally seeing cool Bethesda mods is so bittersweet at this point. Like imagine the kinds of things you could do if you put that effort into somewhere more appreciated. Idk.
I certainly don’t mean to insult anyone’s efforts, I imagine Bethesda games do offer some real value for budding game developers in the form of a very accessible entrypoint into modding and I think that’s great.
But what would be even better is if this company weren’t basically entirely surviving off the coat tails of their community of unpaid laborers. The only reason why these games are so moddable is because Bethesda as a company wouldn’t survive if they weren’t. The product being given by itself is so bad and Bethesda so inept that it compelled people to learn how to fix it themselves just to deliver on what could’ve been.
Bethesda basically sells you the idea of a game, delivers about 60% of it and then asks you to make up the difference. Anyone playing Skyrim or Fallout 4 could see how good those games could’ve been even with no prior game design knowledge, it’s just an innate feeling.
this “bethesda depends on mods” thing completely falls flat when you point out how popular the games were on console long before mods were able to work on console
Not really, Bethesda games are mainly PC games so the market for console is always gonna be smaller. Their console versions are always inferior, lacking updates or even just the amount of polish compared to their PC counterparts. I played some of my favourite Bethesda games on console first and I can attest that console players have always been sort of second-class citizens in terms of priority.
I think Bethesda hands console players a shittier deal and most people just have to put up with that because even in the times we live in now a console is still cheaper in up-front costs than a PC capable of performing the same games at the same level.
no i dont think so, i prefer a vanilla experience and i know most console players agree. betheda game are definitely cream of the crop of modded experiences but thats not all that they are. vanilla experience is still top tier
It’s such an intrgral feature for space flight games (IMO) and it saddens me to see that after all these years they still haven’t implemented it, and the community has to step in.
Isn’t that pretty par for the course with mainline Bethesda games?
i just think the entire idea of spreading out a Bathesda RPG over an entire galaxy was flawed even if it had seamless planet landing from the beginning. constantly flying between solar systems for different quests, often in the same quest, is just tedious as hell even if it was seamless.
In order for it to work they need to make the spaceflight/combat/space itself more compelling and worthwhile. In Elder Scrolls and Fallout, exploration between quests is fun because there are chance encounters, side quests, unmarked dungeons, easter eggs, etc. There was almost none of that in Starfield, although you could tell they tried to inject some.
Not to mention most of the planets are randomly generated. There aren’t really any unique things to discover, just the same buildings randomly pasted around. Even the planets that are supposed to be unique like the capitals of the factions are so underwhelming. You’re telling me that this interstellar faction that rules over a dozen planets is run out of a dingy Western looking ass town with 300 inhabitants?
I’ll stick with Elite Dangerous. Can already do this, and it has a whole galaxy to explore, and costs like $15. And it doesn’t have tons of bugs and crashes… and works great on Linux.
I played elite dangerous for a while, was fun. But I got tired of grinding for new ships. I was just going out to kill ships for money all the time. I dont remember exploring much… What is there to explore?
What is there to explore?
A whole galaxy…
…of the same 5 types of solar systems, 5 types of tasks and 5 types of stations with randomized distances in between.
I really hate this reductionist attitude towards the game. I can promise you there are much more than 5 types of systems - there some 15 star classes, but then there are giants, sipergiants, you have planetoids, star orbiting othed stars, planets orbiting pulsars, moon-moons, sheperd moons, hot jupiters, gas giant pairs and many more variantions and that’s just orbital mechanics, before you even get planetside or before you see the dozens of space anomalies. Stations, yes, are about 5 main types, but there are settlements, outposts, the odd science station and megaship, tourist outposts etc. The game offers a diversity in exploration that i’ve yet to see NMS match, despite it having landable earth likes and alien life. And Starfield somehow can’t even match what’s in NMS, despite todd bragging about exploration being the main focus.
Elite is a game about flying your spaceship in a space sandbox. If you like the flight model, the combat model, the symphony of sounds your ship makes you’re gonna love doing whatever with it.
Now the game has plenty of flaws, and yes it is grindy ( or it used to be, as it’s been lessend lf late ) but anything is grindy if you’re just doing the same thing over and over. If you find you liked the game but got bored with it, maybe join a community, or join an outgoing expedition. Elite’s community is unmatched in its awesomeness.
Apologies for the rant but I hate people besmirching the good name of Elite.
Not besmirching, but that game is nowhere near being too complicated to have stopped console support. I think it’s just lazy development. The same reason why there’s close to no story or quests in it.
It’s just an empty sandbox. A fun one. But empty nonetheless.
Yes, it’s hyperbole. I didn’t mean there are literally only 5.
These are my criticisms of the game I’ve played since the closed beta. Namely that it all feels the same. Yes, like I said in my other comment, there’s inevitably repetition in any game, but Elite is very shallow compared to most other sandbox games I’ve played.
Star types exist, yes, but they’re just floating orbs of fire with different colors. Stations and outposts etc exist, but you interact with them in the same way. What is there to interact with? How does it affect the system around it or the gameplay? Factions at war spawn conflict zones, but aside from those, there’s very little to make you feel like a war is actually taking place. Exploration? I haven’t done that in a long time, but at least before, it consisted of you jumping to a system, honking your system scan and then going to the next system. Engineering is “hey, let’s play around with a random number generator”, and then wasting a lot of resources you’ve managed to collect in various places over a not insignificant amount of time.
Yes, it’s a sandbox and I don’t mind repetition, but if after a week of playing you feel like you’ve seen pretty much everything there is to see, barring the things you need to grind for, I wouldn’t consider it worth the entrance price.
If you consider that “besmirching” the game, then I would call you excessively defensive. It’s just a game, and it doesn’t need you to defend it.
Yeah this is what worries me.
I don’t mean to suggest Elite is necessarily a bad game because of it. Every game is ultimately limited in some ways. I’ve enjoyed most of my time playing it, until I hit the part where any kind of grinding just makes me unwilling to participate. I do occasionally install it, fly around a bit in VR and blast some enemies. That keeps me entertained for a few hours. Then I uninstall it and forget it exists for a few years.
So you might have fun playing it, you might not. There’s a fair amount of grinding required to get the better ships or a big number in your credits account. If the limited amount of variety isn’t an obstacle for you, then there’s a decent chance you’ll have fun.
I, ngl, could grind money trading for days in elite. Never was a problem for me, and haulers do generate money fast. I hate engineering though. It’s unnecessary tedious. The amount of planning and time wasted just to get AX ready ship is ridiculous. And pvp balance with fdl meta somewhat puts me off. Add to this that separate arena pvp mode in elite is dead. At some point I got Soo bored that I couldn’t really continue playing it. No matter what, their ass engineering is too much for me. And linear progression killed any reason to even bother with that. And recent updates don’t seem to really fix any of the existing issues. They tried to make engineering less painful by making rates and activities you get materials from more consistent. But it never fixed core issues with engineering. Like broken balance, or pathing that can take days to fully upgrade the ship if you have life outside of the game. Also the fact that you have to use outfit sites and inara for almost anything route related, because UI in the game is not really done in a good way puts me of playing it on steam deck as well. Elite could be a great game, but somehow it feels that devs maintaining the game and not developing it when it comes to ship related gameplay. Oh right, f-ing potato servers that will kick you from the game even if you are in solo mode on the busy weekend is painful too. Not to say that I prefer starfield. Starfield is not even on my radar, I will prefer elite any day over starfield. Just elite state is frustrating as hell for me.
Yeah I did that when the game was almost new. And I dont mind some grinding for better stuff, it’s just that I felt that grinding was the entire game. I was hoping to be able to buy and sell resources and transport them across star systems for a profit, under the danger of pirates attacking me. Stuff like that. But its not that kind of game.
I guess more like the original elite game worked, but with modern graphics. That would be so cool.
So no man’s sky with less variation?
Haven’t tried NMS, but I’d guess probably? “A mile wide and an inch deep” is the phrase I’ve commonly seen used with regards to Elite. Sure, there’s a whole galaxy worth of systems, but they’re all pretty much the same, with the same activities.
ED is OG too. One of the pioneers.
I’m surprised so many people make this a big deal. It’s a complaint I heard since launch of the game. Some people even stopped playing or didn’t even purchased the game because of this!
I was never too bothered by the landing animation ( or the multitude of loading screens for thag matter ) because I figured it’s a limitation of their engine so they won’t be able to fix it easily or at all - and besides other games have been getting away with it: Mass Effect, SW Outlaws etc.
What irks me about this is that a modder has been able to actually do it, without access to their engine and supposedly doing it in their spare time and for free. It really shows how lazy bethesda have become and frankly don’t hold much hope for their future games.
You just answered your own question…
I get what you mean, but it makes sense in context.
Immersive “Open World” Sims with ground and space exploration have a hard time tying the two together. Often they feel like two separate games, and one of them often feels like the “second class (star) citizen”. Not that making them seamlessly connected actually makes the two mechanically complimentary, but separating them by a loading screen makes this dichotomy all the more obvious. Starfield was no exception.
To exacerbate this, Bethesda made its brand the “You see that mountain? You can climb it!” game makers (Which, to be honest, I think they started to lose the plot on what made their games good when they started saying this. But that’s a different conversation.). So when they made their foray into space exploration, they really had no one else to blame when folks expected a similar “You see that planet? You can fly to it!” design philosophy.
Though I think it would have been overlooked if the game was… good? At the very least, if it was way less bloated with low effort copy pasted fluff content. Complaints like this only tend to become so focal when people have more disappointment to express than meaningful critique can adequately convey.
Though I think it would have been overlooked if the game was… good? At the very least, if it was way less bloated with low effort copy pasted fluff content. Complaints like this only tend to become so focal when people have more disappointment to express than meaningful critique can adequately convey.
Guess this is a good point here. It’s an easy point to talk about specific failures (from perspective of the player) when they don’t like the game much. To me it sounds like an excuse not to play or not to like, and this is something they can blame. I don’t know for me it wouldn’t be a big deal, at least not to this scale. I get that many and long loading screens are terrible. Maybe I’m not the person looking into a virtual reality like immersion and are not affected by such details, therefore don’t have the empathy for players missing this feature.
That’s fair. And like I said, seamless landings and planetary travel are cool, but they don’t make a game good on their own.
That said, I’d call it less an “excuse not to like the game” and more a tangible thing players can point to when the real problem is harder to put into words. For a lot of longtime Bethesda fans, imho, that problem is that Starfield failed to deliver the Bethesda-style “believable world.”
Bethesda were never just the “see that mountain, climb it” developers. They were the “every object has a 3D model, every building has an interior, every town has a history, and not everything exists for the player” developers. That put them in a unique spot in the industry. That level of simulation let players believe in and explore their worlds in a way most games simply don’t allow. It’s why Bethesda games get such oddly specific critiques: where do the NPCs sleep, what do they eat, where do they go to the bathroom?
This doesn’t matter to everyone, so I imagine a lot of these complaints sound trivial or even insane from the outside. But for the people it does matter to, Bethesda was one of the few developers filling that niche.
So when I see complaints about seamless travel, or shopkeepers not caring that you’re standing behind their counter, or nobody reacting when you fire a gun in a crowd, or so many raider bases on an isolated planet with nobody to raid, I don’t see an excuse to not like the game. I see players struggling to express their disappointment that the game feels artificial and gamified, and that it failed to capture the soul of a Bethesda game.
That makes sense. Most people, especially so gamers, are not good at expression their concerns or even know why it is a problem to them. I actually meant my original comment about “excuse not to like the game”, just expressed it wrongly myself. The irony right now.
I actually meant what you say, by people not knowing how to express some other issues, or not thinking about it (but being affected), the focus goes to more obvious and easy to point issues. And to some extend it is actually an excuse, because not having seemless landing I think wouldn’t be a big deal if everyone had fun.
But maybe I’m wrong about this, because games and gamers evolve too. And for such simulation styled games going in and out of planets its a given to them to have a feature like seemless transitions. So when I say that I struggle how this is a game breaking issue to them to a point the refund or stop playing, or don’t even buy it, it sounds too extreme. Especially players who didn’t experience the game yet and never will just because of it.
Adds a hell of a lot more immersion than a loading screen.
Us space flight sim enjoyers like that kind of thing. When Starfield was announced we kinda expected it to be a default feature, so obviously when we saw it wasnt a feature it was disappointing.
Starfield is NOT a space flight sim. It’s a CRPG set up in a space traveling society, so it has… space travel.
The ‘flight model’ is absolutely arcade-ish and oriented to have fun while pew-pewing pirates or space jihadis, not to provide the player with a ‘sim’.
Yaaaay, now we can do something No Man’s Sky could do 10 years ago, yaaaaaaay!
Yaaaay, now we can do something Frontier could do 33 years ago, yaaaaaay!
Sure, some games have features others don’t. I’m just surprised its a big deal for so many.
Bethesda half-assed Starfield at almost every point they could. I’ve intentionally never bought the game because I knew I’d get a more fleshed out spacefaring experience with almost any other dev.
Hell, a Minecraft spacefaring mod would be more entertaining, from the gameplay footage of Starfield I’ve seen.
It’s effectively a very fancy Fallout 4 mod. Same base engine, same crafting and upgrade system, same style of gameplay, same level up system (with very minor changes).
It even has the lack of world content that a mod project would!
I picked up NMS pretty recently after being thoroughly disappointed with Starfield and to be entirely honest it seems to just be the same game but better, in almost all aspects. It hits all the same core notes, did it first, and did it better.
I like No Man’s Sky quite a lot, but I don’t think I’d say it scratches the same itch at something like Starfield.
Well, for me, it adds a ton of immersion.
Especially when they knew it wouldn’t have it before the game even launched.
Still haven’t bought it…I tried at launch. Laughed and cried, then refunded. How is it now? Except the unchangeable fundamental flaw (to me!) of procedural generation.
It depends on where you go and how you interact with the game content, main story is the weakest part of Starfield you want to do it up to a point if you care about unlocking some extra gameplay features. Other than that, the factions storylines are much better and really fun. Also the game has few very good side quests you can google to find where they are and just go do them.
The procedural generation only control where and what POI spawn at the zone you land inside. The POIs themselves are handcrafted and they are actually well made. They are some of the best bethesda ever created in terms of dungeons and locations to explore, many of them are massive, detailed, full of stuff and pretty unique.
The problem is if you visit a POI once then if it spawn again you don’t want to revisit it, because the PG won’t change anything in the POI and they will feel very repetitive.
The latest update has added a few really good stuff too by introducing a new resource called X-Tech which has big effect on your character weapons, ships and powers. You get it from multiple sources, but most importantly you get it as a reward at the end of a POI. So, now you have this extra incentive and nice reward for exploring these POIs.
It also add way more handcrafted POIs to space through the new Free Lanes feature. Same thing apply from the planets POIs: They are really well made, but if you run into one you did before skip it.
It’s overall a 7 out of 10 game sometimes even less, but there’s some stuff that really fun and well done inside it if you are willing to look for them
Thanks for the details. So the POIs are great once and maybe even twice but that’s it about the “endless space” basically.
So mainly story and discovering all POIs plus a metric ton of mods to pimp it up. 7/10 is kinda okay, unless you already use 583820 mods 😁
I only use around 20 mods mostly of QoL features like more inventory size, vendors having more money, better UI, valuable loot glow, etc.
being critical id give it as high as an 8 and as low as a 6. you could argue 5 and personally for me its a 9 but anything below 5 is just a broken ratings scale
Nothing has changed enough to make it worth checking out again. If you didn’t like it at launch, you still won’t like it now.
Well, if you ignore mods maybe. But now there are a lot of mods that can fix everything. The problem is it is pretty time consuming to get all the mods set up and its not very user friendly to need to use mods from the start of the game.
There are mods that make the story better? That add environmental story-telling? That make the AI behave more intelligently than a zombie? That give a reason to engage with most of the systems that fall completely outside the standard loop?
Theres that whole Star Wars Genesis total conversion mod that changes basically everything, yeah. I haven’t tried it myself yet, but it makes a lot of changes.
Though honestly if those are all your complaints, it seems like you don’t want to play the game regardless, whether its modded or not. You just want to play a completely different game. That’s like asking if adding various spices and switching different kinds of cheeses makes a Cheeseburger into a Lobster dinner.
This. I played it a bit at launch and gave it another fair shake recently. There were some QoL mods that fixed a few major issues I had with the game, and some of the updates they added since were appreciated.
But I think the game is just flawed at its core. It’s got a lot of neat set dressing around it, but it’s missing some key central pillars to support its gameplay loop. I can’t say it’s a bad game because I still ended up sinking a good few hours into it, but both times I walked away from it, it was from lack of motivation to continue.
For me at least, I think I couldn’t stop comparing its various systems to better games.
I could play Starfield for the story and RPG mechanics, or I could play Cyberpunk 2077.
I could play Starfield for the planetary exploration, or I could play No Man’s Sky.
I could play Starfield for the base building and resource economy, or I could play Satisfactory.
Now, none of those other games individually attempted to do what Starfield did in a single package, which you’d think should still give it a niche of its own. But when all of these systems in Starfield just sit in isolation and don’t really cross one another, it means you’re basically playing several “meh” games instead of one decent one.
The only thing really enjoyable, imo, is the shooting. And even that could be seriously improved if the NPCs didn’t mostly just stand in one place making themselves easy targets. I do like the guns, tho. The Mag type weapons especially.
It’s also pretty sad that it has Fallout 4’s settlement system, which was fine, could have been better… But they somehow made it even more irrelevant.
So timely!
That’s awesome!
