this post was submitted on 28 Apr 2025
7 points (81.8% liked)
Starfield
2988 readers
1 users here now
Welcome to the Starfield community on Lemmy.zip!
- Follow instance rules (no spam, keep it civil and respectful, be constructive, tag NSFW)
Helpful links:
Spoiler policy:
- No spoilers in titles; if you want to share images with spoilers, preferably post the image in the body of the post. If you do make an image post, mark it NSFW.
- Add
[Spoilers]to your title if there will be untagged spoilers in the post. - Game mechanics and general discoveries (ship parts, weapons, etc) don't need a spoiler tag.
- Details about questlines and other story related content are spoilers. Use your best judgement!
Post & comment spoiler syntax:
<spoiler here>
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Starfield would be great if it was a single solar system and they actually designed each planet by hand. Instead of these generated planets all having identical copy pasted abandoned labs and outposts...
Arguably, Starfield is full of handcrafted content that is pretty good. However, they decided to fill in the space they can't fill by hand with repetitive unsatisfying content. So as a new player, I went after these random things and got disappointed and bored and dropped the game.
I'm now playing a second time from the beginning, and simply stick to where quests guide me, and explore only very little by myself. Looking into a new star system is still fun, but if there is no reason to land on a planet, then I don't do that anymore. I mostly stick with quests. And that's so much more fun, many of the questlines actually have some interesting story behind them, and there are also fun random encounters when travelling between the stars. Now I actually enjoy it.
Skyrim did a better job at guiding the player, due to there not being any empty space, or space filled with meaningless content. You could basically explore everywhere and always find something nice and interesting. But then Skyrim also had a very small world compared to starfield.
I hope that in the next decades game studios will find ways to create these kind of immense worlds as in starfield, while making it very obvious where things are interesting and where not. It took a little too long to learn that in starfield.
The pessimist in me believes that Starfield, and the Oblivion remaster, are testing probes to see how their community/customers will accept big changes to bethesda-style games.
Starfield testing if gamers will accept the abandoning of Bethesda hand crafted worlds with lots of detail and hidden little unmarked interest points, and replacing it with low effort, low cost random generation.
Oblivion Remaster an attempt to test if gamers will accept Bethesda abandoning modding, since Oblivion:Remastered does not support mods (but players/modders still found a way to force them, only because everything but the graphics is still on the old, original engine)
and I think both of these should be ringing major alarmbells for what they are planning with TESVI
edit
and just to clarify. I dont think theres anything wrong with proper use of random generation. Their dungeons are already basically tile sets, Which can be the basis for a great randomly generated dungeon system, That would keep things fresh and new and interesting.. especially in Starfield, where there is basically 1 of each type of PoI, and if you've explored it once, you've explored the entire games worth of content.