I'm finding ways to enjoy Starfield but
this is gonna get torn apart hahahahahah
Outer Worlds was um, better. It looked better too. This is higher polish, but looks, worse? It's so odd.
Try turning upscaling off for a trip. The game looks WORSE at full res. The FSR2 blurry mess makes their assets look more cohesive than they are, your brain takes it as ground/contact shadow.
Had a think, and the stuff in Starfield I'm reacting negatively to is almost entirely stuff that mods fixed in previous games. It's just been ages since I played one of these de-modded.
"Huh, these environments look like someone just kitbashed random plants down, and they don't even change when you harvest": mod-fixed
"Huh, the way they did fast travel completely undercuts any sense of adventure": mod-fixed
"Huh, this UI is catastrophically poorly put together": mod-fixed
"Huh, the way they've chosen to further limit armor/gear options really undercuts what choices you can actually make": mod-fixed
"Huh, this is all just random loot that doesn't seem well thought out, which gives everything this vague sense of being proc-gen": mod-fixed
Never play a naked Bethesda game. This is no exception. Heh. Whatever, I'm still having fun, and good news, this feels EXACTLY like their Skyrim engine++, meaning all the mod tools should still work and be as powerful as they were before.
Also, if anyone was worried about the Starfield planets being huge infinite expanses of open-world proc-gen?
Well, no. What actually happens is you land on one, and you get this big stretch of (procedural? semi-procedural?) planet, and it populates it with Radiant-ish quests and locations, and if you keep walking, you hit a wall.
They're zones. They're semi-procgen zones. It feels VERY much like Skyrim, even here. I doubt mods will be able to populate entire planets because (the planets don't exist, they're just piles of potential random encounters that the engine picks from when populating your little semi-random square).
Which is actually very good! This does NOT feel like No Man's Sky, once you hit the limit and realize what they're doing.
What they've done is looked at NMS gameplay, and realized most players land in one random spot, look around, and then leave. They've optimized for that behavior. There's always Cool Shit happening where you land, because they just throw up a wall past that. It reduces the oatmeal feel, somewhat.
I'd have to play more to see, but I'm 50/50 on whether these planet chunks are even truly random.
I'd lay odds that what's actually happening here is that any given planet has a handful of potential maps it loads, and then it peppers procedural stuff over top. It'd fit their toolset a lot better.
Oh and there's also no atmospheric flight, or transitions from atmosphere to space, or ANY of that. It's all obviously, nakedly just loading between spaces. But that REALLY helps avoid a ton of NMS oatmeal-vibe problems too.
@glassbottommeg Yeah, I've been reading a lot about reactions to #starfield and I think having played NMS (I actually never got super far into the game as its meandering nature always got the best of me - and when I see all these expansions, I have no idea how to have the kind of fun these trailers advertise), I am totally okay not wandering a contiguous proc gen planet.
Are you having fun with the game? I'll play when it hits games pass. Still too engrossed by BG3, so thankfully no FOMO. :P
Megan Fox
SKUNK 🏳️⚧️
Vivi, The Heinous Witch
che chou 