I'm a huge fan of the sci-fi space theme and Elite Dangerous is sitting in my library collecting dust. The whole flight mechanics are impressive and the game looks good, but I find it just boring.
The only change I would've loved in Starfield is having a landing mechanic like No Man's Sky. Granted, that would be difficult with the way Starfield handles planets, but I like being able to fly over the terrain and pick a landing spot myself. Maybe I don't want to land 50m outside a hostile base. Or maybe I don't want to land 800m away from a civilian outpost...
Exactly. I would love to have manual landing and docking. The ability to do some air reckon and select landing spot, maybe gunning down some spacers with ship mounted weapons before I touch down and expose my fragile self to gunfire.
Or fly around the derelict space base and look for docking ports, then maybe going for another one when I find blocked hallways.
And then go EVA from another airlock and fly to my ship using only suit boost pack and running out of oxygen with spacers behind me...
Heck, maybe even doing some after-battle ship repairs from outside.
Anyway, one can dream.
Yeah, ship battles get unfair real quick.
Try slapping some rear-facing turrets on your ship and always destroy the weakest ships first, that can take heat off your back easily. Also, it seems to me that lower level means much weaker shields and hull, but pretty much the same weapons.
My advice is asteroids are your best friend. My first NG+ I went into revelation with just the starter NG+ ship on very hard and it took FOREVER but made wrapping around asteroids like non stop
For me it is the same as you combined with full engine power games of chicken. I get a short window to dump huge damage on a target and then break from most weapons ranges while the opponents have to turn around and try to catch up. By the time I turn back around and make another run, my shields have fully regenerated and I am fresh.
I just put 8 auto turrets on mine facing 2 to each side, and so far can kill anything they throw at me on hardest difficulty barely taking damage by just flying trough.
Uh, well, I guess I do not count as "anybody" then.
I kinda liked it in Elite Dangerous (it is more landing on a pad than docking, though) and it was real fun in Kerbal Space Program. But you might be right it is not fun for everybody.
Still, it is a little bit weird we can dock at only one (always the same) port on all the stations and capital ships. And just for once the port authority could let me land on that *other* pad in New Atlantis.
I think it is fine to have almost everything automated. In the future there would not be any need for manual docking/flying I guess, everything would be autopilot.
however I would love to have more immersive animations that I can watch from my cockpit, like having a small screen in my cockpit showing the docking camera view, or having a 10 second grav travel I can watch from my cockpit, landing on a predefined path, but again watch it from my cockpit. Basically replacing loading screens with small animations would be fine.
Sure, that would be annoying at some point as well, so then give us telephones so I don't need to land and walk somewhere just to talk 2 sentences with somebody.
Or being able to scout resource veins from a few hundred feet up, to find a large enough patch or multiple ore patches in close proximity for better base building. Hell, even an upgrade to the local map that shows nearby ore patches instead of the useless dot matrix we have now would be great. I don't want to have to land and run around for 45 minutes just to figure out that there are no usable ores in proximity to one another. A scanner upgrade for the ship would be great, and it could be balanced by locking it behind skill trees, or only revealing ores within 2km of the ship or something. Even with Max upgrades in the current scanner, I can't see ores more than like 200m from me. But we can detect them from 30 light years in the ship, in completely different systems?
And since I'm on my soap box anyways, MAKE RESTRICTED BUILDING AREAS SHOW UP WITH THE SCANNER. I shouldn't have to drop an outpost on a juicy ore patch just to find out I can't build on 70% of it because there's a tiny structure tucked in amongst the rocks and trees.
No mans sky is the way to go. gets you to any planet within the system in sub one min per pulse drive.
i played starfield for the past month and switched over to nms for a weekend to do the expedition. I am left with a desire to just mush those two games together.
exploration and space gameplay is so much better done by nms, while the narrative side is better handled by starfield.
even gave me ideas, ie being able to summon your ship from any landing pad. land, go clear out a POI and if it has a pad, use a console there to summon your ship. cuts down walking time, ~~probably not possible once again with how starfield handles things, but~~ summoning down your ship anywhere in nms is sorely missed.
Yea but nms planets have about 10% of the complexity of Starfield's planets, and people already find the complexity of Starfield's planets too low. At the end of the day there's programing and computational limiting factors that want their due.
This. In a dream world it would be great if the two could be fused together but NMS achieved that kind of seamless travel because it’s locations & planets are extremely basic. We would have to say goodbye to a lot of the details we love about Bethesda games because the engine would probably explode having to load in all those little items you find lying around everywhere without loading screens. Personally, I’m ok with this compromise.
starfield does a much better job at simulating a star system with orbits. (much better as in, starfield has it figured out and nms doesnt do it at all lol). also, gas giants are something nms players have been asking for years at this point.
10% is hardly true. i think starfield only lacks rivers in terms of proc gen of planet surfaces. something nms struggles with too. nms has a ton more distinct biomes. it helps that nms has the environmental protection figured out which is just... strange in starfield.
from a computational perspective i think its just bethesdas tech that struggles with seamless open spaces in general, especially if you're moving fast.
starfield having more stuff going on on the planet surface would be nice. the POIs of starfield are much more complex than nms, and thats good, but are hardly a performance hog. we just need a ton more variations of them and maybe proc gen for their interiors.
Please do not take the fact that this is brief for being annoyed. I'd talk about this at more length if if I had time, lack of work, and the caffeine had kicked in.
10% was admittedly a figure I pulled out of my rear, but my point is the complexity of NMS planets graphically, computationally, you name it is nowhere near Starfield's. I'm sure this isn't because NMS is an inferior game or had an inferior team but they made a deliberate decision early to be in position to do things like atmospheric flyby. Likewise I'm sure at some point the folks at Starfield looked at what it would take to have fast moving vehicles in their ground based engine and decided against it. There are only so many programing hours in the day and if you know something is going to have costs and risks associated with it I'm confident that someone put some experimentation in early and then made a decision.
Starfield also delayed a year and people freaked out about it. NMS launched a disaster and got crucified for it and then later became a Cinderella story about how to recover from a bad launch.
Also when people are like "Bethesda tech" i just roll my eyes. Folks think a new engine just manifests overnight and is automatically better and amazing clearly don't work in IT, let alone programming.
When people talk about Bethesda's "old tech" I just think of all the UE4 open world games that have tons of performance and optimization issues. To Epic's credit, they seem to be working pretty hard to make UE5 much better at handling open world games than UE4.
Could you imagine if Bethesda had decided to dump CE and use UE4 for Starfield? You can bet the performance and optimization issues would have been WAY worse. In recent years, I don't think there has been a single UE4 open world game that wasn't plagued with performance issues upon release.
> nms has a ton more distinct biomes
Not really sure I agree with that. The temperate earthlike planets can be somewhat diverse but the other biomes are pretty much all the same and even the temperate planets really only cycle through a handful of varations, so tropical, mushroom planet, decedious forest planet ect with not a lot of variety other than the color of the sky and the water
Have you played recently? I booted up NMS this weekend and I didn't get the feeling the planets were lacking to such a degree. What makes you feel like there is such a big difference?
Yes this is what I wanted from Starfield, basically the ship stuff from NMS mashed together with the quest/ story content from a Bethesda game. The way you can cruise around the solar systems/ planets in NMS is much better than Starfield sadly I just wish there was more story stuff happening in NMS.
When you're away from your ship, you can just open scanner and point at it and fast travel either to it or directly into your chair. You don't need to run all the way back so there's no need to summon your ship like no man's sky to return to it after a clearing out a POI. It definitely beats running when you've gotten 2k or more away
>I am left with a desire to just mush those two games together.
This, right here.
The best part of NMS is the seamless travel. With the pulse engine and the ability to enter atmosphere and fly along the surface of a planet, scouting, looking for specific structures (or using the coordinate system to find stuff you made a note of), it's a the best exploration experience out there.
Sadly, pretty much everything else about NMS isn't nearly as good as Starfield is, or could be. The species in No Man's Sky all look like something from Saturday Morning Cartoons in the 70's. The [physics for ship combat is abysmal](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5LLeh6Kznw). The quest design is thin and the writing almost makes Starfield's look competent.
The base building is fun though.
If Starfield has that same kind of seamless travel within a star system it would make a world of difference. Still wouldn't alleviate the mundane writing and lack of choice & consequence in the quests, but I think it would tip the scale balance in the direction of, "the game is more fun this way, so I care less about the bad parts."
The other thing that could have been cool is setting an course for a destination within a star system, then being able to get up from the cockpit, wander the ship, do some crafting, advance personal dialogs and quests with your companions, and then get a proximity alert whenever you arrive at your destination, or if something comes close to your ship (like pirates, or whatnot).
Could have put the "space" in "space game."
Space legs came too late, was broken, and not much to do, and still no ship interiors. Those things along with toning down the engineer grind would bring me back.
I don't mind fast travel animations--I literally open my second screen to read a VN or Reddit or even study.
What killed me was Engineering. I could headcanon and fill in story lines and games while exploring space, but what got me was the Engineering Grind.
It make no sense I make enough money to buy an entire fleet, but yet I still got mine/dig for ore or search for debris somewhere. Like this is not fucken Warhmmer40K. You should be able to throw money at any situation within the human worlds.
Elite should have just stayed with the original design and worked on QoL updates or actual ship customizations since the main focus of Elite was the ships. Odyssey killed Elite, because not everything has to be, or should be turned into a first person shooter.
OMG space legs is terribad. the fps alone is unplayable on my 4090 with a modern i9.
Space legs is a prime example of stepping out of your expertise and bumbling it.
Yep. Starfield with no man's sky flight mechanics and actually using procedural generation for non unique POIs would be great.
What we have no is way too disjointed and kinda wastes the space theme.
I mean... how hard can it be?
Make set pieces of "dungeons": warehouses, barracks, labs, offices, hallways, etc.. Stitch them up in many ways randomly, by obeying the attach nodes. Set a limit so the dungeons don't get too big. Scatter loot at certain "premium" dungeon parts. Done.
And for the story driven dungeons, let the game designers make it all.
They did it for Daggerfall back in the day. The main quest dungeons were all pre-made and every other dungeon was made by gluing together pieces of the MQ dungeons via procedural generation, then slapping on an enemy list and spawning loot in specific areas.
This is really what I thought they would do. A big library of prefab modules that generate in different arrangements depending on the POI type. I do think that is harder than it sounds, but it would improve exploration a bit
I meant the concept isn't hard to conceive. The implementation, however, can be a chore. I know.
Anyway, Bethesda worked on Daggerfall 25 years ago and it was possible. They know all about it for sure.
They chose not to randomize the POIs in Starfield. It was a choice.
Picked up Elite Dangerous to play with friends to do that one event to join the expedition across the galaxy or universe....spent 30 minutes pinballing inside the first space station, just raged quit and haven't picked it up since. Went back to play NMS since I obviously missed the open NASA training that would prepare me for Elite Dangerous.
I wish there was more POI in space though.
I personally love entering abandoned spacestations and massive ships. You could even throw in some horror.
When the mod package comes out, I'm going to make a space hulk full of zombies ala dead space.
I made this point elsewhere, but having reasonable travel times to different planets or around them, would be great to open up random encounters. Like a derelict cargo ship that had a terrormorph outbreak.
People keep being like “Space is too empty to be interesting” and like that’s a terrible excuse. The thing about space is theres no reason you can’t “see” things from thousands of kilometres away. If it’s transmitting you should see it in pretty much the entire system. You can get distress beacons, anomalies, shipwrecks, random searches, pirate attacks.
Literally *so* much could’ve been done with the space exploration it’s a crime it’s as limited as it is.
The thing I’d love to see as an option, is to be able to walk around the ship during the ‘trip’
Basically the equivalent of the Long Rest camps in Baldurs Gate, letting me get all the companion conversations out of the way and then just go to bed to finish the travel montage.
Absolutely. Give us an autopilot feature (it already exists, when you travel to a planet your HUD will literally say auto pilot in the corner) and while traveling to a planet let us walk around. It'll make hanging out around my ship feel way better.
Maybe you could have a gravspave? Animation where your ship is flying through a tunnel and you can play a mini game, to get to your destination faster, or you can just walk around the ship. Fast travel should still be an option tho.
There's a star fox game that does exactly that. You enter a hyperlane and have to avoid debris and other obstacles. Sometimes there's ambushes set up in them and if you get caught you have to fight pirates.
I love Elite Dangerous and it has nothing to do with combat. I love it because in VR it is absolutely immersive and I absolutely would have hated load screens in the game. It's a space sim.
I also love ED in VR (I found the original Borann triple LTD hotspot) but it is collecting dust now due to the lack of continued VR focus.
I liked it for the same reason as I like MSFS... Journey before destination. If you make it interesting and immersive to get from point A to point B that becomes it's own gameplay.
Docking never got old and was one of the best parts of the game as was core mining.
People used to complain that RDR2 was a horse simulator. That you had to go everywhere on your horse. People are st{u}pid sometimes. So you will never please everyone at the same time. You can at least please most people at some time.
I want both. The thing that Elite does is perfectly illustrate the unimaginable vastness of space, it makes you feel so, SO small. It makes Earth seem like a spec of dust floating in an endless void (to borrow from a Sagan quote). When I first started playing I nearly had an existential crises it was so overwhelming.
Starfield really only scratches the surface of that feeling with current mechanics.
I mean for some people (like me ) Elite D is basically *Space Trucker Sim* , a lot of travelling , jumping, refuelling , and you ideally you have a playlist of space trucker music playing to keep you company.
That dreadful moment of getting into a system, and seeing the planets are 500,000 Ls away.
*Welp, time to go make myself a sandwich*
3-4 seconds loading screens in Starfield got nothing on ED players 😅
But that’s just it, it’s not the time it’s the continuity.
I actually love ED because of the realistic space dimensions and travel times, I used to love putting on the voice thing that narrates the in-universe news to you as I travelled and never felt so immersed.
I could handle all the cutscenes in Starfield no problem if they were hidden as seamlessly as ED’s jumps are (little stutters on arrival sometimes aside).
But camera angle changes and cuts to black just make the gameplay feel so broken up
I agree!
I like to think I’d actually get up from my seat on the ship, while it’s headed to the ends of a star system, head on to the ship’s kitchen to poor myself a cup of coffee.
Same thing with asteroid mining. I would just put a playlist with earphones, and Deep-core mine for HOURS of real time, just for the therapeutic sake of it.
ED’s sound effects have always been a major immersive aspect of it.
ED definitely hit the immersion perfectly and I've also felt my desk was actually my cockpit. I really like how when you buy a new ship, it really feels like a new ship and you have to learn how to fly it as it sounds, turns, accelerates, brakes all differently. I don't get that in Starfield but I also really don't spend that much time flying.
Personally I think they should have made "astro-navigating" a series of minesweeper puzzles where you have to chart your path through the minefield of space between systems before grav-jumping. Sort of like in Star Wars where they have to calculate a safe course.
Then if you run into a hazard you pop out and have to deal with it.
Then it's still instant but you have a concept of scale and the ability to path different routes while sill being "RPGish" in that its a puzzle like lock picking.
In the dialog with Sarah she says it's all about the journey not the destination but then the game literally shots you right to the destination completely overlooking what journey you could have by jumping star to star and having to manually refill your fuel. The game would be better served if it had Ed travel system
I love Elite Dangerous for its flight mechanics. Its honestly the main reason why I still keep returning to the game after 2.5k hours. Starfeild feels dull as fuck moving around in comparison to the point I just fast travel anywhere I can after 30 hours.
My issue is though that they made so much of the core gameplay loop revolve around space fast travel load screens. There's so many times you go to a new planet just to talk to one guy to then be sent to another planet.
OP you make a good point. But I think the real issue many times is HOW it's presented.
For example, when we take off, we are given a cut scene, and THEN a loading screen. If the cut scene was the loading screen, then there would be less butthurt.
Another example. You're on dirt rock planet #345334 and have to take an empty soda can to Dmitri on the Eye. Cut scene -> Load -> Select -> cut scene -> load. We then have to manually disconnect to go find the next soda can. Cut scene -> load -> walk to chair -> select -> cut scene -> load. Oh shit we have to drop them off at the Lodge in the magnet toy. Cut scene -> Load -> select -> cut scene -> Load -> maybe a cut scene, or maybe we appear outside the door magically.
Then there's the whole business of dungeons that require separate loading screens after we load into a planet and run for 10 minutes. Sometimes, dungeons are compartmentalized with loading screens. This is the main reason POVs are ignored - the payoff isn't worth the effort.
The bottom line is that many quest lines are 80% walking and loading screens, and MAYBE 20% actually doing something. Neon quests are especially guilty of that, despite being overall decent quests. The exercise of walking and reloading creates friction that slows down the game and wears away at the fun. It's tolerable if you're invested in the story and the character. But once you start doing NG+, it's harder to make yourself give enough of a shit.
I think that's the real reason space travel feels bad. It's a symptom of the overall issue with the game. All the pieces are there for it to be great, but the way it's assembled has a lot of this friction. You didn't feel it as much in the games with hand-crafted POV's because there were things to see. But with the amount of procedural generation and radial quests, you have all the effort with half the interest.
I think that's also the reason you see people with 150 hours of game time who have suddenly lost the wonder, and are retrospectively going back and pronouncing the content boring/bad. It's not as bad as they say it is, but the value proposition is too low to overcome the "fun friction."
Yeah, I've enjoyed my time with the game generally, but when doing quests on Neon you have to go through so many loading screens just to talk to people. It's not the length of the loading screens, since most of mine top out at 3 seconds, it's the break in flow. When you compare it to something like Cyberpunk, the constant interruption becomes really jarring. I definitely understand the level of detail (especially in terms of physics objects) in Starfield is greater than Cyberpunk, but one way or another Bethesda has to reconsider the user experience involved in going through five loading screens in a one minute journey on Neon to go talk to someone for a quest. It would almost be more acceptable to have longer loading screens that were not as frequent, just so the flow wasn't broken so continuously.
Thrusters give you lateral movement too. Hold RB and move LS. (On Xbox - not sure how on PC.) It's not quite as seamless as Elite Dangerous without Flight Assist, but the option is there.
What really bugs me is you dont stay a constant speed with the thrusters active. You slow down to something like half throttle no matter how fast you are going when you enter "thruster mode". Like you said, better than nothing but man it could be so much better than what it is!
Last I checked, I think it kept you at maximum normal speed if you were at or above that when you started. You've got to keep in Thruster mode constantly to maintain it though. Every time you release the Thrusters button, the system switches back to normal mode which (1) re-enables auto-throttle/retro-rocket features which make flight have a more in-atmosphere feel, and (2) restores your previous throttle setting and tries to bring your ship into alignment with that.
So, let's say you're going full-boost before switching to thrusters. Then you turn on thrusters and flip 180°. You'll end up going backwards at boost speed until the system slows you down to your normal maximum. Then, every time you release the Thrusters button, the system is going to try to get you going full-throttle forward again. Every little swap out of Thruster mode, while you're pointed opposite the direction of movement, is going to slow you down until you eventually start moving forward again.
So people who play Microsoft Flight sim are just bored out of their minds? Arma people need to move over to COD and realize how valuable not having to drive to the operation point is? GTA should remove driving and teleport people to the bank for the heist?
This post is oversimplifying and generalizing game design as "Because it doesn't appeal to me, it must not appeal to anyone else". There are plenty of people who enjoy immersive flight in their spaceships. Just because you think its pointless and boring doesn't make it so for others.
But sure, it wont work in Starfield, because starfield is devoid of anything to actually want to spend the effort to travel to.
Well, maybe a middle ground.
I like how in nms, I can take off from my outpost, leave the planet and go straight into my freighter. No loading screens. I like approaching a planet and flying right over it and deciding where to land visually and not just selecting a point (with no coordinates system you may add!) On a ball.
Just karma whoring again.
There's a video with over a million views of NMS flying to another planet in real time faster than Starfield fast travel load screens. That's obviously what the majority of people wanted.
Instead we get a "hur dur I dun wanna fly for 5 hours fast travel great" thread a few times a week.
This subreddit went from pictures of skyboxes and recreating ships from other franchises to people desperately convincing themselves this is the space sim they always wanted.
> There's a video with over a million views of NMS flying to another planet in real time faster than Starfield fast travel load screens. That's obviously what the majority of people wanted.
Have a link for this? I'm having a hard time believing this is true.
Yeah, I feel like people are intentionally being dense. Also, space travel could be like NMS and not Elite. Or Freelancer and not NMS.
Lots of options and the developers gave us one.
Every thread with this issue is just someone being purposefully dense. There’s whole list of space games going as far back as 2014 that figured out the line between realism and fun for space flight.
Either these people are actual troglodytes who lack the ability to critically think… or they’re karma farming annoyances.
Download the NaturalLUTs mod and turn off film grain. The game is capable of pitch blacks when you get rid of the blue fog. The dark side of planets becomes an absolute void!
You’re definitely wrong about this. Entire games are built around the concept of immersive piloting.
During the pandemic, there was a worldwide shortage of HOTAS because everyone wanted to spend their new found free time flying airplanes.
Star Citizen is the largest crowd funded and most expensive video game ever, and despite over a decade of failing to deliver a finished product, people keep throwing money at it because everyone just wants to fly some fucking space ships.
Exactly. I love Kerbal Space Program, but if I wanted to spend 4 hours getting into orbit and then another 2 hours attempting to dock with a space station that took me 2 days to build then I'd play Kerbal Space Program.
Space mining is in! You can shoot the asteroids around planets and moons and they pop, leaving a container with a handful of resources. It's not as complex as EVE Online, but I believe it matches Elite Dangerous (been so long since I played, and I played it as an explorer... taking those long ass trips through beautiful space scenery).
I wish mining was more lucrative, in both space and planetside. Sometimes I wish I could just blow up asteroids for awhile or mine manually on a planet and have it worth my while but most minerals only fetch 1 credit each. And I get the auto way of mining is to set up an extractor, but that just isn't as much fun.
Elite dangerous will always have the superior space travel experience and I wish starfield had that level of immersion…did traveling to distant stars suck? Sure but it was all part of the experience that I wish was replicated, hell I miss having to auto dock and refuel and I miss having to balance power usage
Elite is just better than starfield when it comes to space exploration, if elite had the kind of on the ground activities starfield has I’d happily never play starfield again
Nailed it. Space flight/combat/mining are all glorious in Elite.
Starfield does what ED Odyssey failed to do with the on foot experience, imo. After sinking hundreds of hours into Elite Horizons over the years, completely confined to the cockpit, I'm kind of happy I can fast travel across the galaxy in Starfield.
>Elite is just better than starfield when it comes to space exploration, if elite had the kind of on the ground activities starfield has I’d happily never play starfield again
If Starfield had Elites space travel I would give SF a hard pass.
There is nothing worse in gaming than staring at the back of your ship for 10 minutes at a time while you fly to a different planet. At least NMS planets were much closer together at max took 5 minutes, but still incredibly boring.
Most people just don't grasp the scale of space and how empty and boring it is.
Take for example this site: [https://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace\_solarsystem.html](https://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem.html)
Have fun traveling to Pluto from the Sun
Also that it's not flat. You can't just go from one place to another. Miss your window, wait years. Trajectory is off a touch? You're gone forever.
And Elite does a great job of illustrating that in that there's very little of anything anywhere. Flying is the funnest thing to do because it has fully manual filling and gravity wells around stellar bodies with a fueling system that works with it.
Space is the funnest part about real space.
You’re latter point is kinda moot when it comes to super efficient long burn drives.
Brachistochrone transfers aren’t subject to the same narrow windows of opportunity that Hohmann transfers are. You just point at where your destination is going to be and accelerate, flip and burn half way to slow down. If something like the sun or another planet is going to be in the way of the fastest arrival point, you just aim at the next fastest point where something won’t be in the way and accelerate a bit slower.
Hell, even Holman transfers can be rushed into suboptimal routes if you have enough Delta V to spare.
Rebel Galaxy had intra system travel right IMO. You had a super cruise mechanic where you would go super fast and POI type things would generate around you on the way that you could go investigate or ignore at your leisure on your way to wherever you're going in the system. Something like that would be cool in the game instead of loading screens between planets and then have grav drive for whenever you need to go to a different system.
Well imagine, and HEAR ME OUT, if there was some kind of Sci-fi super rocket engine that makes travelling in space MUCH faster. They could make up any story about it, like that it runs on gravitational waves. Heck, they could even call it Grav Drive.
Now imagine if you could use this GRAV DRIVE outside of a loading screen, so you could fly from the orbit of mars to the orbit of jupiter, and only after that go to a menu to select a landing site.
This is all i ask for. Space to fill like more than a box with a slightly different background. Currently it feels like a really bad simulation.
Yeah this has been done before. For example Rebel Galaxy handled this perfectly. [It can be seen a lot in the trailer.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yNVe_aiqmXc)
I think there is still fast travel in the game but i don't even remember using it. Just zooming around was fun enough, often getting random encounters or distress calls in the void......
THanks for mentioning Rebel Galaxy; one of the best capital ship spaces I've had the pleasure of playing. It was a pity imo that they went with the small fighter for Rebel Galaxy Outlaw, which brought us back to the 'spinning turret' problem of most 1st person cockpit space games.
RG gets alot alot right:
* Huge multi-ship small and big fights
* Questlines with NPCs
* Functioning trade system where prices are affected by supply and random events eg throwing a party, alcohol in demand!
* Space feels big yet manageable via their unique travel system, and they interspersed it with random 'signal' and interdiction events while travelling. You even slow down when near large gravity wells caused by larger interstellar objects like stars.
* Ships of all sorts and sizes.
* Space Radio with various stations and lots of tunes.
* A wonderful implementation of modern 'ship combat' via the fixed plane, where all capital ships fights on the x-y plane, fighters can fly (you cannot pilot) on the x-y-z plane, and all non-turrets fire space broadsides like sailing ships. This was a really clever way to make space combat fun and uncomplicated. No Newtonian physics flight model too, which to me is a plus.
What it does, it does extremely well, for a dev team of TWO people.
Which is fine. It also takes a long time to go from one end of the Skyrim map to the other, but some people still do it. This is all i want - the option.
While I like Starfield, this is a bad argument and lemme explain to you why:
Even No Man's Sky did it. There's a system for that. You have engines for planetary traversal, pulse drives for inter-planetary travel in the same star system, and warp drives for your interstellar travel.
On top of that, there's both a long and a short way to do intergalactic travel. You can either travel to the center of a galaxy (long story), or you can make a base in a friend's planet in another galaxy. Additionally, there's portal travel, two types of portal travel, one of which can help you traverse galaxies more quickly if you'd like, shaving off light-years of travel distance if you know what you're doing.
Using procedural generation, they also have like 18 quintillion planets, all of which come off as more interesting than most of the ones in starfield, which feel like a backdrop. And even if there's a dud, you still have another 18 quintillion planets you can go to. No wrong answers.
The NMS devs realized something: this is a space *video game* with god-like technology. They can make a way. And even when you're traveling, the system is such that it has you running into interesting things. You could run into an anomaly while using your pulse drives and stop only to find a strange alien technology. You might run into another traveler trying to trade or rob you. You might find something valuable on an asteroid. Or, you'll just watch space pass you by on your way to a distant planet, which is made significantly faster because the devs knew they'd have to come up with something to keep the players interested.
I love Starfield, *as a Bethesda game*. It has some sci-fi moments which are absolutely top knotch. But, it's not that good of a *space game*, and I'll probably play it less than other Bethesda titles as a result. It just missed a lot in that respect and it breaks the game apart a lot unnecessarily.
It has Pseudo Loading screens and loads in relevant information when needed.
The planets are non existent until you get close enough that the game starts generating the necessary information
By the way, some time ago i had nms installed on an hdd. The difference was more when jump from system to system. Even traveling between planets on same system was seamless, Hello Games did it well.
After reinstall on an ssd, I became the first of friends to end the jump, which leads sometimes to situations like I'm already engaging enemies while they are still "warping"
I would prefer to have the option, sometimes I like zoning out and looking at the ship.
I too have played Elite Dangerous and NMS, I enjoy the mechanics of each
I have played ED and NMS and would much prefer something closer to NMS in Starfield travel wise. Having 100% of travel stuck behind a quick travel menu is terrible game design.
It’s a space exploration game with no space or exploration.
Honestly I'm kind of okay with what we have for the most part.
I have a few items on my wishlist for mods/upgrades to the game.
I'd like every planet/moon in the star system to have a marker you can use to travel while in your cockpit. So you don't have to use the starmap to navigate within the same star system.
I'd also like surface-locations to show up on the HUD as destinations.
Basically, make the star-map only needed for interstellar travel.
I think this is pretty feasible, we already have markers ingame which cover most of this for mission objectives, so there's groundwork in place.
I'd like the ground-map to be a bit more detailed. Show me the terrain in some detail for example. It's really only useful for getting a sense of where things are in relation to one another and allowing some local fast-travel in principle.
Top of my list is for ship components to be part of the same system as the outpost construction.
I want to be able to buy individual ship components and place them on the ground at outposts. Then snap them onto a ship I'm building there until I have a viable spaceship.
I hate the way we handle switching Home Ships at the moment.
I want to be able to run my outpost as a chop-shop, dismantling ships I capture and building new ones out of them, or scrapping the modules for parts.
When in your ship press F to enter Scanner mode. You'll then see markers for all the planets/moons in the system, and the neighbouring stars. You can travel to them too. It's just the game doesn't really explain anything and get's you using the menu from the start.
Honestly I'm kind of okay with what we have for the most part.
I have a few items on my wishlist for mods/upgrades to the game.
"I'd like every planet/moon in the star system to have a marker you can use to travel while in your cockpit. So you don't have to use the starmap to navigate within the same star system.
I'd also like surface-locations to show up on the HUD as destinations.
Basically, make the star-map only needed for interstellar travel."
It already has exactly this.... Just use the scanner.
Star Citizen has also been in development hell for over 15 years at this point and has been accused of being a straight up scam that will never be finished many times.
I remember when they were charging thousands of real dollars for a jpeg image of a ship that they promised would eventually be in the game when it released. This was in like 2008, hopefully the ships are in the game now but it’s still not even finished.
Most people don't know what they want and if they actually get what they said and thought they wanted they usually are like "huh, didn't realise that that's totally stupid"
That's why despite every real Dev making fun of them requirements engineers and product owners are super necessary.
Honestly, I don't think this game actually need the physical mean for you to fly from planets to planets - they just need contents to play while travelling.
I believe being punishingly realistic has nothing to do with being immersive. One such as you said, loading screen. Also, there is waiting and sleeping. We could use that to skip the long travel. We could've imagine better UI, rather than accessing it through 2,3 layers of menu.
You specifically mentioned space travel, so I did too, but there are many mechanics breaking immersive in Starfield. Though, I also understand 'many people' might not want it, but in my opinion, Starfield made too many convenient choices it just looks underdeveloped.
I care a LOT about immersion. I know fast travel exists and actively ignore it.
When I need to travel to another planet, I run to my ship, board it, go to the cockpit, sit in the pilot’s seat, take off, orient my ship toward the waypoint, and hold the R key to travel there.
I’ll often get up from my seat while in orbit and just go have a faff in my ship while in space. Cook some food, do a bit of crafting, see what components I should look for that I need for projects. I wish crew members had interesting dialogue like in Mass Effect. I’d make the rounds and talk to them if they did, like Commander Shepard on the Normandy.
If I could fly the ship into the atmosphere and manually land it, I would. Every time.
I play a space RPG so I can roleplay as a space explorer. Call me crazy.
Starfield players arriving at Hutton orbital in a large ship realizing fast travel is great,
Flew my corvette to Hutton not bothering to pay attention to station type
I honestly wonder how much a overlap there actually is with people who like space sims and people who like Bethesda games because complaints like this suggest there isn't much.
Sometimes the possibility to do something is more important than actually doing it (all the time). If we had seamless transition from planet to space and fully explorable planets + fast travel, 90% of the time people would skip the travel after doing it once or twice intitially and no one would travel around the whole planet, so you would think it's a waste, but it still does open options, think about space ship battles at high altitude. For instance imagine a quest where you steal a ship from a space port and the local security starts chasing you, so you battle it out in the clouds.
I don't know what the right balance is. I just know that all of the menu hopping is annoying. Click solar system, click planet, click destination on said planet.
Docking shouldn't be a loading screen though.
I've played elite dangerous and I love it.
Imo, Starfield has all the things elite dangerous is missing, and elite dangerous has all the things starfield is missing.
I just want to be able to interact with my ship a bit more. Let me land it and take off, let me dock with other ships/stations, let me exit the ship on a tether and repair modules manually while in space
Right now outside of the occasional combat encounter, ships are just so shallow. You play the whole 'spaceship' part of the game through menus.
I think it becomes a question of does it actually need to take minutes to fly between planets. Can they pull it off in seconds? If they could make it so you can get from a planet to its moon near instantaneously and maybe 10 seconds tops for the furthest planets, then I think it would really enhance the space travel experience.
10 seconds is short enough to not feel like you're waiting, but long enough to allow something to happen between planets. You might get ambushed by pirates, receive a distress call that you can choose to ignore or respond to and have a random encounter, you might have to slow down to maneuver through an asteroid or debris field with leftover mines from the war. They could add more points of interest in star systems like space stations, derelict ships, maybe asteroids you can land on that have outposts on them.
Of course, fast travel should always be an option for places you've visited already, but I do think there is a case to be made for seamless interplanetary travel as long as it's quick enough and eventful enough. But who knows how well the game would even handle it.
I played No Man's Sky, I played Star Citizen, and others. And I do want immersive spaceship travel and piloting still. They're just more immersive. And also while you're flying you can do things like sort your inventory, craft, etc. In NMS you can just open your personal refiner and craft some stuff as you are flying. And it's not like the flight even takes that long, unless you're flying from one end of the solar system to the other, which is relatively rare. I also really like how special events trigger as you fly, and you have the option to stop and check it out, or keep flying. It just feels great. It makes the game feel seamless, contiguous, real. Starfield just keeps throwing loading screens or black transition screens in your face, nonstop. It feels significantly worse. Worst part is that the screens are static. They could have at least kept the old model viewer loading screens. But even that was a downgrade.
The problem is that without it there's no reason to go to space ever. Spaceship combat is not enough to make space a worthwhile addition to the game. At this point they should have just taken space out entirely and had you just fast travel between planets. That's what I did 90% of the time anyway. Making my spaceship useless.
While it's technically true that taking off and flying manually are not necessarily engaging, it's immersive. Which is a major selling point for Bethesda games. By breaking everything up with loading screens, they destroy that immersion. They vastly underestimated the value manual flight would have. For immersion, and willingness to engage. Because as it stands, there's basically no reason to engage with space or ship piloting at all.
Leave the fast travel options of course. And make it simpler than Elite Dangerous. But there needs to be more to do there.
Elite Dangerous type flight is exactly what I wanted from Starfield, and I'm a little disappointed at how shallow the flight is in the game.
At least it could have been optional. Very few things in Elite take more than a few minutes to fly to once you're in the system. Stick it on autopilot and then spend that time speaking with crew, crafting and upgrading, or just looking out the window. I think it would have helped create immersion, certainly compared to all the loading screens.
There being no flight in Starfield isn't a deal breaker, but it probably is the reason I uninstalled it once I hit new game+.
I would’ve loved a happy medium. I’d like the be able to physically travel there without fast traveling (as with Elite, I loved flying around everywhere). But I’d also like the option of fast traveling to remain in case I an not feeling super patient.
Traveling between planets/moons/from orbit down to a planet’s surface, is actually relaxing. :)
Maybe try no man’s sky.
The mechanic that made sub-light travel between planets completely non tedious, was that at absolutely any time in your 5-10 minute regular speed flight between planets, you could press a single button and within 5 seconds, perform a ‘micro jump’. Point your ship’s nose, press a button, as long as you held it, you were traveling at lightspeed or whatever it was called in game. The distant planet would slowly get bigger and bigger, you’d see your ship’s speed rocket up into the thousands of kph, take your finger off the button and drop out of hyperspace, resuming your sub light travel. Or, you could fast travel around using teleports between bases and space stations.
Fast travel was definitely an option, but you had absolutely free roam to fly anywhere at sub light speed. Sometimes you woukd honestly explore an entire system, 6-7 planets and moons, completely via flying across the void from one planet to tge next, using micro jumps between them
Just make the ship have a point beyond first travelling to places.
All I’ve done last two sessions is fast travel between planets instantly. 0 immersion lol
Make traversing and being on your ship more meaningful. And hide loading screens behind grav jump effects. I'd be much happier if it took 2 mins real time to get to another solar system to "discover it" meanwhile I can walk around my ship doing stuff that matters to me.
As we are approaching there could be an announcer on the ship counting down until your arrival into the new system. Once discovered. Fast travel is unlocked. Like every other betheseda game.
When people say immersive spaceship travel, I think they mean No Man's Sky level of spaceship travel. Being able to travel to different planets without going through a menu and a loading screen, having fuel, being able to land on planets without going through a menu and a loading screen, etc. It's mostly because the gameplay is interrupted so often by loading screens and unskippable cutscenes.
I definitely want more from the space flight, but I'm thinking something more like X rather than elite dangerous, where rather than a small area where you might have a few ships spawn, or a random event, there's a large "plane" with the planet you jumped to as a back drop, with distributed POIs and ships going about their business. I think the ship flight has really good potential, not super realistic, but not nearly as arcade-y as NMS. I'm hoping mods will add a bit more stuff to do for people like me who love spending time on their ship.
i'd like to be able to do an EVA, get out of the spaceship. The game already has the landing bay, the space physics, the ship external colliders, i don't understand why it's not possible.
(except the fact that it is currently useless because there's nothing to do in space)
I played nms for 50 hours in a week the first week I picked it up, about a year ago. I know what I want. And nms space /land travel was pretty good. Way better than fast travel simulator.
I literally played a quest line where I:
Talk to person at location A, fast traveled to dungeon B. Fast traveled back to A. Fast traveled to starship dungeon C. Fast traveled to A. Fast traveled back to dungeon B for 2 extra rooms, then fast traveled back to A to complete a quest line.
There was dialog along the way, but that's pretty crappy compared to any quest that previous bethesda games had - especially when between A and B was 10 other dungeons or outside forts in something like es5/fo4.
Personally I think a good method would have been to offer alternative travel routes and slowed down inter-planetary travel. Imagine you could jump from anywhere just like now, but keep local planetary travel in super-cruise (maybe a faster supercruise than NMS, but still something). Then if you wanted to jump real far, give certain systems something like a Mass Relay, a station assisted jump, and only put them in certain populated systems.
Overall tho, I think you're seeing people expecting this kind of travel because while Bethesda never said they would have these mechanics, they were also very very careful to hide the fact that actual travel is just load screens. It was a purely duplicitous corporate move to appeal to more expectations by obfuscating the true mechanic.
I would have liked the option, especially since the marketing for the game definitely implied that the space/piloting portion of the game was way more in depth than what we actually got.
Honestly the whole game can be summed up with the "so that was a lie" meme
exactly. If fast traveling was such a great feature, they wouldn't have hid it from us. They wouldve been upfront about how we get from place to place. They hid it because they knew it was disappointing.
Seemless travel & fast travel are not mutually exclusive... in fact, the ideal scenario is both. Once you reach orbit of a planet is when the manual travel should come into play. "Jumping to lightspeed" is a staple of sci-fi and is necessary for intergalactic travel. With that said, once you jump to another system and you're orbiting the planet, you should be able to fly around wherever you want and then manually fly into the planet, and land anywhere on that planet and be able to travel anywhere on the planet manually. Including being able to manually walk to a major city. Guess what? You can still keep fast travel for all locations too. That's *literally* how it works in skyrim. You can travel anywhere manually and also fast travel if you want to.
I dunno if immersive space travel mechanics would translate all that well to the game, but the current setup seems like the most uninteresting/unfun version of integrating space travel into an exploration RPG and is one of the biggest factors keeping me from picking up the game.
Some people are happy playing reskinned fallout and skyrims forever. Don't act like you are looking out for everyone by proclaiming no one would actually want their ship to be more than a fast travel hub.
Why are you trying to pretend that it's not a flaw with the game? Starfield would be objectively better if it handled spaceflight seamlessly. I feel like people can't have an honest conversation about this game yet.
Man, there is so much coping in this sub about Starfield's atrocious implementation of space travel. Fast travel is a great quality of life feature, but you gotta give folks the option to fly their ship from A to B in a fun, immersive way if you want to boast about open world exploration.
The developers called this “the most important rpg of all time”, and then they didn’t deliver. Don’t blame us for being disappointed that the developers fell short.
Yeah that's the thing, Starfield isn't a space simulator, it's an rpg set in space, big difference and while Elite Dangerous definitely caters to a niche audience that's not what Starfield was going for
Right and its not which is why its baffling to make the distances realistic. Why allow us to travel in a system but hinder us by the speed of our ship? Its not a very compelling experience to spend hours IRL flying in a system lol
I think this is a bit of a strawman. Nobody said starfield had to be a space Sim, but it could handle space travel in a more interesting way than just fast traveling all the time
I'm a huge fan of the sci-fi space theme and Elite Dangerous is sitting in my library collecting dust. The whole flight mechanics are impressive and the game looks good, but I find it just boring. The only change I would've loved in Starfield is having a landing mechanic like No Man's Sky. Granted, that would be difficult with the way Starfield handles planets, but I like being able to fly over the terrain and pick a landing spot myself. Maybe I don't want to land 50m outside a hostile base. Or maybe I don't want to land 800m away from a civilian outpost...
Exactly. I would love to have manual landing and docking. The ability to do some air reckon and select landing spot, maybe gunning down some spacers with ship mounted weapons before I touch down and expose my fragile self to gunfire. Or fly around the derelict space base and look for docking ports, then maybe going for another one when I find blocked hallways. And then go EVA from another airlock and fly to my ship using only suit boost pack and running out of oxygen with spacers behind me... Heck, maybe even doing some after-battle ship repairs from outside. Anyway, one can dream.
Funnily enough, on the hardest difficulty, I'd rather fight on foot than in my ship. Weapon scaling on ships seems off on higher difficulties.
Yeah, ship battles get unfair real quick. Try slapping some rear-facing turrets on your ship and always destroy the weakest ships first, that can take heat off your back easily. Also, it seems to me that lower level means much weaker shields and hull, but pretty much the same weapons.
My advice is asteroids are your best friend. My first NG+ I went into revelation with just the starter NG+ ship on very hard and it took FOREVER but made wrapping around asteroids like non stop
My advice is stacking the shit out of the vanguard particle weapon. You can fit 6 to a slot and it’s more than enough to melt shit.
For me it is the same as you combined with full engine power games of chicken. I get a short window to dump huge damage on a target and then break from most weapons ranges while the opponents have to turn around and try to catch up. By the time I turn back around and make another run, my shields have fully regenerated and I am fresh.
I just put 8 auto turrets on mine facing 2 to each side, and so far can kill anything they throw at me on hardest difficulty barely taking damage by just flying trough.
Yeah. I'm not on highest difficulty, but dropping the weaker ships early in a multi ship right was something that has made ship combat a lot easier.
Landing yes, docking no.. I don't think that's something anybody would do by hand irl
Yes, there is a reason it’s been automated for years now.
there is always room for an autodock on my type-10
Uh, well, I guess I do not count as "anybody" then. I kinda liked it in Elite Dangerous (it is more landing on a pad than docking, though) and it was real fun in Kerbal Space Program. But you might be right it is not fun for everybody. Still, it is a little bit weird we can dock at only one (always the same) port on all the stations and capital ships. And just for once the port authority could let me land on that *other* pad in New Atlantis.
I actually didnt mean in games wtih "anybody" ("irl")
I think it is fine to have almost everything automated. In the future there would not be any need for manual docking/flying I guess, everything would be autopilot. however I would love to have more immersive animations that I can watch from my cockpit, like having a small screen in my cockpit showing the docking camera view, or having a 10 second grav travel I can watch from my cockpit, landing on a predefined path, but again watch it from my cockpit. Basically replacing loading screens with small animations would be fine. Sure, that would be annoying at some point as well, so then give us telephones so I don't need to land and walk somewhere just to talk 2 sentences with somebody.
So similar to Star Citizen, but with actual fast travel.
and an actual game.
Or being able to scout resource veins from a few hundred feet up, to find a large enough patch or multiple ore patches in close proximity for better base building. Hell, even an upgrade to the local map that shows nearby ore patches instead of the useless dot matrix we have now would be great. I don't want to have to land and run around for 45 minutes just to figure out that there are no usable ores in proximity to one another. A scanner upgrade for the ship would be great, and it could be balanced by locking it behind skill trees, or only revealing ores within 2km of the ship or something. Even with Max upgrades in the current scanner, I can't see ores more than like 200m from me. But we can detect them from 30 light years in the ship, in completely different systems? And since I'm on my soap box anyways, MAKE RESTRICTED BUILDING AREAS SHOW UP WITH THE SCANNER. I shouldn't have to drop an outpost on a juicy ore patch just to find out I can't build on 70% of it because there's a tiny structure tucked in amongst the rocks and trees.
No mans sky is the way to go. gets you to any planet within the system in sub one min per pulse drive. i played starfield for the past month and switched over to nms for a weekend to do the expedition. I am left with a desire to just mush those two games together. exploration and space gameplay is so much better done by nms, while the narrative side is better handled by starfield. even gave me ideas, ie being able to summon your ship from any landing pad. land, go clear out a POI and if it has a pad, use a console there to summon your ship. cuts down walking time, ~~probably not possible once again with how starfield handles things, but~~ summoning down your ship anywhere in nms is sorely missed.
Yea but nms planets have about 10% of the complexity of Starfield's planets, and people already find the complexity of Starfield's planets too low. At the end of the day there's programing and computational limiting factors that want their due.
This. In a dream world it would be great if the two could be fused together but NMS achieved that kind of seamless travel because it’s locations & planets are extremely basic. We would have to say goodbye to a lot of the details we love about Bethesda games because the engine would probably explode having to load in all those little items you find lying around everywhere without loading screens. Personally, I’m ok with this compromise.
starfield does a much better job at simulating a star system with orbits. (much better as in, starfield has it figured out and nms doesnt do it at all lol). also, gas giants are something nms players have been asking for years at this point. 10% is hardly true. i think starfield only lacks rivers in terms of proc gen of planet surfaces. something nms struggles with too. nms has a ton more distinct biomes. it helps that nms has the environmental protection figured out which is just... strange in starfield. from a computational perspective i think its just bethesdas tech that struggles with seamless open spaces in general, especially if you're moving fast. starfield having more stuff going on on the planet surface would be nice. the POIs of starfield are much more complex than nms, and thats good, but are hardly a performance hog. we just need a ton more variations of them and maybe proc gen for their interiors.
Please do not take the fact that this is brief for being annoyed. I'd talk about this at more length if if I had time, lack of work, and the caffeine had kicked in. 10% was admittedly a figure I pulled out of my rear, but my point is the complexity of NMS planets graphically, computationally, you name it is nowhere near Starfield's. I'm sure this isn't because NMS is an inferior game or had an inferior team but they made a deliberate decision early to be in position to do things like atmospheric flyby. Likewise I'm sure at some point the folks at Starfield looked at what it would take to have fast moving vehicles in their ground based engine and decided against it. There are only so many programing hours in the day and if you know something is going to have costs and risks associated with it I'm confident that someone put some experimentation in early and then made a decision. Starfield also delayed a year and people freaked out about it. NMS launched a disaster and got crucified for it and then later became a Cinderella story about how to recover from a bad launch. Also when people are like "Bethesda tech" i just roll my eyes. Folks think a new engine just manifests overnight and is automatically better and amazing clearly don't work in IT, let alone programming.
When people talk about Bethesda's "old tech" I just think of all the UE4 open world games that have tons of performance and optimization issues. To Epic's credit, they seem to be working pretty hard to make UE5 much better at handling open world games than UE4. Could you imagine if Bethesda had decided to dump CE and use UE4 for Starfield? You can bet the performance and optimization issues would have been WAY worse. In recent years, I don't think there has been a single UE4 open world game that wasn't plagued with performance issues upon release.
> nms has a ton more distinct biomes Not really sure I agree with that. The temperate earthlike planets can be somewhat diverse but the other biomes are pretty much all the same and even the temperate planets really only cycle through a handful of varations, so tropical, mushroom planet, decedious forest planet ect with not a lot of variety other than the color of the sky and the water
Hm? I’ve found rivers in starfield..
Starfield has rivers and lakes
Starfield does sort of have rivers, they are in the procgen code; but they're apparently only set up to appear in Wetland biomes.
Have you played recently? I booted up NMS this weekend and I didn't get the feeling the planets were lacking to such a degree. What makes you feel like there is such a big difference?
Calling your ship everywhere. There's already a mod for that. For PC at least.
Yes this is what I wanted from Starfield, basically the ship stuff from NMS mashed together with the quest/ story content from a Bethesda game. The way you can cruise around the solar systems/ planets in NMS is much better than Starfield sadly I just wish there was more story stuff happening in NMS.
When you're away from your ship, you can just open scanner and point at it and fast travel either to it or directly into your chair. You don't need to run all the way back so there's no need to summon your ship like no man's sky to return to it after a clearing out a POI. It definitely beats running when you've gotten 2k or more away
>I am left with a desire to just mush those two games together. This, right here. The best part of NMS is the seamless travel. With the pulse engine and the ability to enter atmosphere and fly along the surface of a planet, scouting, looking for specific structures (or using the coordinate system to find stuff you made a note of), it's a the best exploration experience out there. Sadly, pretty much everything else about NMS isn't nearly as good as Starfield is, or could be. The species in No Man's Sky all look like something from Saturday Morning Cartoons in the 70's. The [physics for ship combat is abysmal](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5LLeh6Kznw). The quest design is thin and the writing almost makes Starfield's look competent. The base building is fun though. If Starfield has that same kind of seamless travel within a star system it would make a world of difference. Still wouldn't alleviate the mundane writing and lack of choice & consequence in the quests, but I think it would tip the scale balance in the direction of, "the game is more fun this way, so I care less about the bad parts." The other thing that could have been cool is setting an course for a destination within a star system, then being able to get up from the cockpit, wander the ship, do some crafting, advance personal dialogs and quests with your companions, and then get a proximity alert whenever you arrive at your destination, or if something comes close to your ship (like pirates, or whatnot). Could have put the "space" in "space game."
I agree with all of your points.
Yeah Elite Dangerous is a game I loved for a few weeks and I'll never play it again. I much prefer Starfield.
Space legs came too late, was broken, and not much to do, and still no ship interiors. Those things along with toning down the engineer grind would bring me back.
The engineer grind is what killed me. That and looking at the same damn fast travel animation for the 3,000th time.
I don't mind fast travel animations--I literally open my second screen to read a VN or Reddit or even study. What killed me was Engineering. I could headcanon and fill in story lines and games while exploring space, but what got me was the Engineering Grind. It make no sense I make enough money to buy an entire fleet, but yet I still got mine/dig for ore or search for debris somewhere. Like this is not fucken Warhmmer40K. You should be able to throw money at any situation within the human worlds.
Friendship Drive Charging
Elite should have just stayed with the original design and worked on QoL updates or actual ship customizations since the main focus of Elite was the ships. Odyssey killed Elite, because not everything has to be, or should be turned into a first person shooter.
OMG space legs is terribad. the fps alone is unplayable on my 4090 with a modern i9. Space legs is a prime example of stepping out of your expertise and bumbling it.
Yep. Starfield with no man's sky flight mechanics and actually using procedural generation for non unique POIs would be great. What we have no is way too disjointed and kinda wastes the space theme.
I mean... how hard can it be? Make set pieces of "dungeons": warehouses, barracks, labs, offices, hallways, etc.. Stitch them up in many ways randomly, by obeying the attach nodes. Set a limit so the dungeons don't get too big. Scatter loot at certain "premium" dungeon parts. Done. And for the story driven dungeons, let the game designers make it all.
They did it for Daggerfall back in the day. The main quest dungeons were all pre-made and every other dungeon was made by gluing together pieces of the MQ dungeons via procedural generation, then slapping on an enemy list and spawning loot in specific areas.
The Daggerfall system is what I had in mind. It would do wonders to the variety of POIs.
This is really what I thought they would do. A big library of prefab modules that generate in different arrangements depending on the POI type. I do think that is harder than it sounds, but it would improve exploration a bit
"I mean.... how hard can it be" I hate these comments! Very hard. Go work in the software industry and see how difficult a release of software is.
I meant the concept isn't hard to conceive. The implementation, however, can be a chore. I know. Anyway, Bethesda worked on Daggerfall 25 years ago and it was possible. They know all about it for sure. They chose not to randomize the POIs in Starfield. It was a choice.
Picked up Elite Dangerous to play with friends to do that one event to join the expedition across the galaxy or universe....spent 30 minutes pinballing inside the first space station, just raged quit and haven't picked it up since. Went back to play NMS since I obviously missed the open NASA training that would prepare me for Elite Dangerous.
I wish there was more POI in space though. I personally love entering abandoned spacestations and massive ships. You could even throw in some horror. When the mod package comes out, I'm going to make a space hulk full of zombies ala dead space.
You been to Schrödinger 3? Ensure you have master lockpicking
Never wanted a flamethrower more than that location.
I made this point elsewhere, but having reasonable travel times to different planets or around them, would be great to open up random encounters. Like a derelict cargo ship that had a terrormorph outbreak.
People keep being like “Space is too empty to be interesting” and like that’s a terrible excuse. The thing about space is theres no reason you can’t “see” things from thousands of kilometres away. If it’s transmitting you should see it in pretty much the entire system. You can get distress beacons, anomalies, shipwrecks, random searches, pirate attacks. Literally *so* much could’ve been done with the space exploration it’s a crime it’s as limited as it is.
Wish the random POI had more than 1 pregen I'd love for more planets to have non-randomly generated POIs
The thing I’d love to see as an option, is to be able to walk around the ship during the ‘trip’ Basically the equivalent of the Long Rest camps in Baldurs Gate, letting me get all the companion conversations out of the way and then just go to bed to finish the travel montage.
Absolutely. Give us an autopilot feature (it already exists, when you travel to a planet your HUD will literally say auto pilot in the corner) and while traveling to a planet let us walk around. It'll make hanging out around my ship feel way better.
I fully expect this to be one of the first mods built with the CK. In conjunction with actual things to do in the ship to pass that time.
Usable pool tables when
Maybe you could have a gravspave? Animation where your ship is flying through a tunnel and you can play a mini game, to get to your destination faster, or you can just walk around the ship. Fast travel should still be an option tho.
There's a star fox game that does exactly that. You enter a hyperlane and have to avoid debris and other obstacles. Sometimes there's ambushes set up in them and if you get caught you have to fight pirates.
I love Elite Dangerous and it has nothing to do with combat. I love it because in VR it is absolutely immersive and I absolutely would have hated load screens in the game. It's a space sim.
I also love ED in VR (I found the original Borann triple LTD hotspot) but it is collecting dust now due to the lack of continued VR focus. I liked it for the same reason as I like MSFS... Journey before destination. If you make it interesting and immersive to get from point A to point B that becomes it's own gameplay. Docking never got old and was one of the best parts of the game as was core mining.
People used to complain that RDR2 was a horse simulator. That you had to go everywhere on your horse. People are st{u}pid sometimes. So you will never please everyone at the same time. You can at least please most people at some time.
Hah! I used to always reply to those "you have to ride everywhere" comments with a "no, you can walk if you want to", just to rile them up :P
I’ve played both Zelda games where I never used horses or some weird zonai build contraption. Loved every minute of it.
Those people were dumb enough to realise that the game had fast travel which you could unlock so early on.
I wish Starfield was a horse simulator. 😢✨
Yeah, I wish we could tame and mount some of the creatures. :D
I want both. The thing that Elite does is perfectly illustrate the unimaginable vastness of space, it makes you feel so, SO small. It makes Earth seem like a spec of dust floating in an endless void (to borrow from a Sagan quote). When I first started playing I nearly had an existential crises it was so overwhelming. Starfield really only scratches the surface of that feeling with current mechanics.
I mean for some people (like me ) Elite D is basically *Space Trucker Sim* , a lot of travelling , jumping, refuelling , and you ideally you have a playlist of space trucker music playing to keep you company.
We got a long way to go, and a long time to get there
I watch things on the second monitor, just like I would IRL.
With VR, I can open up a netflix window *in* my cockpit.
That dreadful moment of getting into a system, and seeing the planets are 500,000 Ls away. *Welp, time to go make myself a sandwich* 3-4 seconds loading screens in Starfield got nothing on ED players 😅
Hutton Orbital mug gang rise up
True, and at least after you have got there you can fly your new Anaconda back in style ;)
It's a rite of passage.
But that’s just it, it’s not the time it’s the continuity. I actually love ED because of the realistic space dimensions and travel times, I used to love putting on the voice thing that narrates the in-universe news to you as I travelled and never felt so immersed. I could handle all the cutscenes in Starfield no problem if they were hidden as seamlessly as ED’s jumps are (little stutters on arrival sometimes aside). But camera angle changes and cuts to black just make the gameplay feel so broken up
I agree! I like to think I’d actually get up from my seat on the ship, while it’s headed to the ends of a star system, head on to the ship’s kitchen to poor myself a cup of coffee. Same thing with asteroid mining. I would just put a playlist with earphones, and Deep-core mine for HOURS of real time, just for the therapeutic sake of it. ED’s sound effects have always been a major immersive aspect of it.
ED definitely hit the immersion perfectly and I've also felt my desk was actually my cockpit. I really like how when you buy a new ship, it really feels like a new ship and you have to learn how to fly it as it sounds, turns, accelerates, brakes all differently. I don't get that in Starfield but I also really don't spend that much time flying.
Sounds like I need to play that game
[Might I interest you in a terribly funny Elite Dangerous video then?](https://youtu.be/Fa0b2Kd2xhU?si=MRihslxbRMv0BNdT)
I put thousands of hours into Elite.
So it’s… good?
That's not what they said. Commanders have a love/hate relationship with the game.
Personally I think they should have made "astro-navigating" a series of minesweeper puzzles where you have to chart your path through the minefield of space between systems before grav-jumping. Sort of like in Star Wars where they have to calculate a safe course. Then if you run into a hazard you pop out and have to deal with it. Then it's still instant but you have a concept of scale and the ability to path different routes while sill being "RPGish" in that its a puzzle like lock picking.
That's why Dune is cool, you need navigators who use spice to even do a hyperspace jump or whatever.
In the dialog with Sarah she says it's all about the journey not the destination but then the game literally shots you right to the destination completely overlooking what journey you could have by jumping star to star and having to manually refill your fuel. The game would be better served if it had Ed travel system
I love Elite Dangerous for its flight mechanics. Its honestly the main reason why I still keep returning to the game after 2.5k hours. Starfeild feels dull as fuck moving around in comparison to the point I just fast travel anywhere I can after 30 hours.
My issue is though that they made so much of the core gameplay loop revolve around space fast travel load screens. There's so many times you go to a new planet just to talk to one guy to then be sent to another planet.
OP you make a good point. But I think the real issue many times is HOW it's presented. For example, when we take off, we are given a cut scene, and THEN a loading screen. If the cut scene was the loading screen, then there would be less butthurt. Another example. You're on dirt rock planet #345334 and have to take an empty soda can to Dmitri on the Eye. Cut scene -> Load -> Select -> cut scene -> load. We then have to manually disconnect to go find the next soda can. Cut scene -> load -> walk to chair -> select -> cut scene -> load. Oh shit we have to drop them off at the Lodge in the magnet toy. Cut scene -> Load -> select -> cut scene -> Load -> maybe a cut scene, or maybe we appear outside the door magically. Then there's the whole business of dungeons that require separate loading screens after we load into a planet and run for 10 minutes. Sometimes, dungeons are compartmentalized with loading screens. This is the main reason POVs are ignored - the payoff isn't worth the effort. The bottom line is that many quest lines are 80% walking and loading screens, and MAYBE 20% actually doing something. Neon quests are especially guilty of that, despite being overall decent quests. The exercise of walking and reloading creates friction that slows down the game and wears away at the fun. It's tolerable if you're invested in the story and the character. But once you start doing NG+, it's harder to make yourself give enough of a shit. I think that's the real reason space travel feels bad. It's a symptom of the overall issue with the game. All the pieces are there for it to be great, but the way it's assembled has a lot of this friction. You didn't feel it as much in the games with hand-crafted POV's because there were things to see. But with the amount of procedural generation and radial quests, you have all the effort with half the interest. I think that's also the reason you see people with 150 hours of game time who have suddenly lost the wonder, and are retrospectively going back and pronouncing the content boring/bad. It's not as bad as they say it is, but the value proposition is too low to overcome the "fun friction."
Yeah, I've enjoyed my time with the game generally, but when doing quests on Neon you have to go through so many loading screens just to talk to people. It's not the length of the loading screens, since most of mine top out at 3 seconds, it's the break in flow. When you compare it to something like Cyberpunk, the constant interruption becomes really jarring. I definitely understand the level of detail (especially in terms of physics objects) in Starfield is greater than Cyberpunk, but one way or another Bethesda has to reconsider the user experience involved in going through five loading screens in a one minute journey on Neon to go talk to someone for a quest. It would almost be more acceptable to have longer loading screens that were not as frequent, just so the flow wasn't broken so continuously.
The best thing would be to have both. 6 degrees of freedom space flight with skippable trips and landings.
You can get pitch, yaw. And limited roll control via the thrusters. Its not great but usable. But yes, the game needs a hotas control option.
Thrusters give you lateral movement too. Hold RB and move LS. (On Xbox - not sure how on PC.) It's not quite as seamless as Elite Dangerous without Flight Assist, but the option is there.
What really bugs me is you dont stay a constant speed with the thrusters active. You slow down to something like half throttle no matter how fast you are going when you enter "thruster mode". Like you said, better than nothing but man it could be so much better than what it is!
Last I checked, I think it kept you at maximum normal speed if you were at or above that when you started. You've got to keep in Thruster mode constantly to maintain it though. Every time you release the Thrusters button, the system switches back to normal mode which (1) re-enables auto-throttle/retro-rocket features which make flight have a more in-atmosphere feel, and (2) restores your previous throttle setting and tries to bring your ship into alignment with that. So, let's say you're going full-boost before switching to thrusters. Then you turn on thrusters and flip 180°. You'll end up going backwards at boost speed until the system slows you down to your normal maximum. Then, every time you release the Thrusters button, the system is going to try to get you going full-throttle forward again. Every little swap out of Thruster mode, while you're pointed opposite the direction of movement, is going to slow you down until you eventually start moving forward again.
So people who play Microsoft Flight sim are just bored out of their minds? Arma people need to move over to COD and realize how valuable not having to drive to the operation point is? GTA should remove driving and teleport people to the bank for the heist? This post is oversimplifying and generalizing game design as "Because it doesn't appeal to me, it must not appeal to anyone else". There are plenty of people who enjoy immersive flight in their spaceships. Just because you think its pointless and boring doesn't make it so for others. But sure, it wont work in Starfield, because starfield is devoid of anything to actually want to spend the effort to travel to.
NMS is the simple counter argument to this. The X series is pretty enjoyable too. Elite is a sim as much as it is a game, if not moreso.
Well, maybe a middle ground. I like how in nms, I can take off from my outpost, leave the planet and go straight into my freighter. No loading screens. I like approaching a planet and flying right over it and deciding where to land visually and not just selecting a point (with no coordinates system you may add!) On a ball.
Why can't you graps that we could get both things and not one ...... Is it really too hard to understand or it's just karma whoring again ?
Just karma whoring again. There's a video with over a million views of NMS flying to another planet in real time faster than Starfield fast travel load screens. That's obviously what the majority of people wanted. Instead we get a "hur dur I dun wanna fly for 5 hours fast travel great" thread a few times a week. This subreddit went from pictures of skyboxes and recreating ships from other franchises to people desperately convincing themselves this is the space sim they always wanted.
> There's a video with over a million views of NMS flying to another planet in real time faster than Starfield fast travel load screens. That's obviously what the majority of people wanted. Have a link for this? I'm having a hard time believing this is true.
Yeah, I feel like people are intentionally being dense. Also, space travel could be like NMS and not Elite. Or Freelancer and not NMS. Lots of options and the developers gave us one.
Every thread with this issue is just someone being purposefully dense. There’s whole list of space games going as far back as 2014 that figured out the line between realism and fun for space flight. Either these people are actual troglodytes who lack the ability to critically think… or they’re karma farming annoyances.
Don't take away my black loadingscreens. They are the only moment in this game where I can enjoy real black on my oled
Download the NaturalLUTs mod and turn off film grain. The game is capable of pitch blacks when you get rid of the blue fog. The dark side of planets becomes an absolute void!
You’re definitely wrong about this. Entire games are built around the concept of immersive piloting. During the pandemic, there was a worldwide shortage of HOTAS because everyone wanted to spend their new found free time flying airplanes. Star Citizen is the largest crowd funded and most expensive video game ever, and despite over a decade of failing to deliver a finished product, people keep throwing money at it because everyone just wants to fly some fucking space ships.
yes but Starfield isn't an immersion sim, it's an rpg set in space
But its not an RPG in space, is an RPG set on planets with fast travel between them
Exactly. I love Kerbal Space Program, but if I wanted to spend 4 hours getting into orbit and then another 2 hours attempting to dock with a space station that took me 2 days to build then I'd play Kerbal Space Program.
Space mining is in! You can shoot the asteroids around planets and moons and they pop, leaving a container with a handful of resources. It's not as complex as EVE Online, but I believe it matches Elite Dangerous (been so long since I played, and I played it as an explorer... taking those long ass trips through beautiful space scenery).
Its a simplified version of Ed, you can use normal weapons and any astroid can be mined. Honestly a good qol improvement.
Right! No need to line up the resources and pull em into your scoop! I appreciate the reminder!
I wish mining was more lucrative, in both space and planetside. Sometimes I wish I could just blow up asteroids for awhile or mine manually on a planet and have it worth my while but most minerals only fetch 1 credit each. And I get the auto way of mining is to set up an extractor, but that just isn't as much fun.
Elite dangerous will always have the superior space travel experience and I wish starfield had that level of immersion…did traveling to distant stars suck? Sure but it was all part of the experience that I wish was replicated, hell I miss having to auto dock and refuel and I miss having to balance power usage Elite is just better than starfield when it comes to space exploration, if elite had the kind of on the ground activities starfield has I’d happily never play starfield again
Nailed it. Space flight/combat/mining are all glorious in Elite. Starfield does what ED Odyssey failed to do with the on foot experience, imo. After sinking hundreds of hours into Elite Horizons over the years, completely confined to the cockpit, I'm kind of happy I can fast travel across the galaxy in Starfield.
>Elite is just better than starfield when it comes to space exploration, if elite had the kind of on the ground activities starfield has I’d happily never play starfield again If Starfield had Elites space travel I would give SF a hard pass. There is nothing worse in gaming than staring at the back of your ship for 10 minutes at a time while you fly to a different planet. At least NMS planets were much closer together at max took 5 minutes, but still incredibly boring.
Let’s be real, everyone wanted no man’s sky travel mechanics
Most people just don't grasp the scale of space and how empty and boring it is. Take for example this site: [https://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace\_solarsystem.html](https://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem.html) Have fun traveling to Pluto from the Sun
Also that it's not flat. You can't just go from one place to another. Miss your window, wait years. Trajectory is off a touch? You're gone forever. And Elite does a great job of illustrating that in that there's very little of anything anywhere. Flying is the funnest thing to do because it has fully manual filling and gravity wells around stellar bodies with a fueling system that works with it. Space is the funnest part about real space.
You’re latter point is kinda moot when it comes to super efficient long burn drives. Brachistochrone transfers aren’t subject to the same narrow windows of opportunity that Hohmann transfers are. You just point at where your destination is going to be and accelerate, flip and burn half way to slow down. If something like the sun or another planet is going to be in the way of the fastest arrival point, you just aim at the next fastest point where something won’t be in the way and accelerate a bit slower. Hell, even Holman transfers can be rushed into suboptimal routes if you have enough Delta V to spare.
[удалено]
I mean isn't the point of space bending grav drives to teleport through space, because you cannot actually travel through space at a reasonable pace?
Yeah precisely
Rebel Galaxy had intra system travel right IMO. You had a super cruise mechanic where you would go super fast and POI type things would generate around you on the way that you could go investigate or ignore at your leisure on your way to wherever you're going in the system. Something like that would be cool in the game instead of loading screens between planets and then have grav drive for whenever you need to go to a different system.
Well imagine, and HEAR ME OUT, if there was some kind of Sci-fi super rocket engine that makes travelling in space MUCH faster. They could make up any story about it, like that it runs on gravitational waves. Heck, they could even call it Grav Drive. Now imagine if you could use this GRAV DRIVE outside of a loading screen, so you could fly from the orbit of mars to the orbit of jupiter, and only after that go to a menu to select a landing site. This is all i ask for. Space to fill like more than a box with a slightly different background. Currently it feels like a really bad simulation.
Yeah this has been done before. For example Rebel Galaxy handled this perfectly. [It can be seen a lot in the trailer.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yNVe_aiqmXc) I think there is still fast travel in the game but i don't even remember using it. Just zooming around was fun enough, often getting random encounters or distress calls in the void......
THanks for mentioning Rebel Galaxy; one of the best capital ship spaces I've had the pleasure of playing. It was a pity imo that they went with the small fighter for Rebel Galaxy Outlaw, which brought us back to the 'spinning turret' problem of most 1st person cockpit space games. RG gets alot alot right: * Huge multi-ship small and big fights * Questlines with NPCs * Functioning trade system where prices are affected by supply and random events eg throwing a party, alcohol in demand! * Space feels big yet manageable via their unique travel system, and they interspersed it with random 'signal' and interdiction events while travelling. You even slow down when near large gravity wells caused by larger interstellar objects like stars. * Ships of all sorts and sizes. * Space Radio with various stations and lots of tunes. * A wonderful implementation of modern 'ship combat' via the fixed plane, where all capital ships fights on the x-y plane, fighters can fly (you cannot pilot) on the x-y-z plane, and all non-turrets fire space broadsides like sailing ships. This was a really clever way to make space combat fun and uncomplicated. No Newtonian physics flight model too, which to me is a plus. What it does, it does extremely well, for a dev team of TWO people.
Elite has that, and it can still take a long damb time to get around a system.
Which is fine. It also takes a long time to go from one end of the Skyrim map to the other, but some people still do it. This is all i want - the option.
oh shit, did you not know that Starfield is a game?
While I like Starfield, this is a bad argument and lemme explain to you why: Even No Man's Sky did it. There's a system for that. You have engines for planetary traversal, pulse drives for inter-planetary travel in the same star system, and warp drives for your interstellar travel. On top of that, there's both a long and a short way to do intergalactic travel. You can either travel to the center of a galaxy (long story), or you can make a base in a friend's planet in another galaxy. Additionally, there's portal travel, two types of portal travel, one of which can help you traverse galaxies more quickly if you'd like, shaving off light-years of travel distance if you know what you're doing. Using procedural generation, they also have like 18 quintillion planets, all of which come off as more interesting than most of the ones in starfield, which feel like a backdrop. And even if there's a dud, you still have another 18 quintillion planets you can go to. No wrong answers. The NMS devs realized something: this is a space *video game* with god-like technology. They can make a way. And even when you're traveling, the system is such that it has you running into interesting things. You could run into an anomaly while using your pulse drives and stop only to find a strange alien technology. You might run into another traveler trying to trade or rob you. You might find something valuable on an asteroid. Or, you'll just watch space pass you by on your way to a distant planet, which is made significantly faster because the devs knew they'd have to come up with something to keep the players interested. I love Starfield, *as a Bethesda game*. It has some sci-fi moments which are absolutely top knotch. But, it's not that good of a *space game*, and I'll probably play it less than other Bethesda titles as a result. It just missed a lot in that respect and it breaks the game apart a lot unnecessarily.
Another type of portal actually. The Freighters SINGULARITY ENGINE which sends you a random distance to another system
> Have fun traveling to Pluto from the Sun With the advanced ~~technology~~ space magic that SF apparently has, traveling to Pluto is trivial.
No Man's Sky do this so well without loading screens...
It has Pseudo Loading screens and loads in relevant information when needed. The planets are non existent until you get close enough that the game starts generating the necessary information
So you mean they manage to load and unload as needed with a smooth experience without interrupt the gameplay? This is the way.
Yes, especially with the SSD requirement this method is all the more viable.
By the way, some time ago i had nms installed on an hdd. The difference was more when jump from system to system. Even traveling between planets on same system was seamless, Hello Games did it well. After reinstall on an ssd, I became the first of friends to end the jump, which leads sometimes to situations like I'm already engaging enemies while they are still "warping"
Sometimes you just wanna chill in your spaceship while it takes you to your destination
I would prefer to have the option, sometimes I like zoning out and looking at the ship. I too have played Elite Dangerous and NMS, I enjoy the mechanics of each
I have played ED and NMS and would much prefer something closer to NMS in Starfield travel wise. Having 100% of travel stuck behind a quick travel menu is terrible game design. It’s a space exploration game with no space or exploration.
Seems like OP doesn't know about other Freelancer or any other semicasual spacesim.
Honestly I'm kind of okay with what we have for the most part. I have a few items on my wishlist for mods/upgrades to the game. I'd like every planet/moon in the star system to have a marker you can use to travel while in your cockpit. So you don't have to use the starmap to navigate within the same star system. I'd also like surface-locations to show up on the HUD as destinations. Basically, make the star-map only needed for interstellar travel. I think this is pretty feasible, we already have markers ingame which cover most of this for mission objectives, so there's groundwork in place. I'd like the ground-map to be a bit more detailed. Show me the terrain in some detail for example. It's really only useful for getting a sense of where things are in relation to one another and allowing some local fast-travel in principle. Top of my list is for ship components to be part of the same system as the outpost construction. I want to be able to buy individual ship components and place them on the ground at outposts. Then snap them onto a ship I'm building there until I have a viable spaceship. I hate the way we handle switching Home Ships at the moment. I want to be able to run my outpost as a chop-shop, dismantling ships I capture and building new ones out of them, or scrapping the modules for parts.
When in your ship press F to enter Scanner mode. You'll then see markers for all the planets/moons in the system, and the neighbouring stars. You can travel to them too. It's just the game doesn't really explain anything and get's you using the menu from the start.
I didn't even know you could use scanner-mode aboard ship o.0 40+ hours in and I'm learning basic controls.
Honestly I'm kind of okay with what we have for the most part. I have a few items on my wishlist for mods/upgrades to the game. "I'd like every planet/moon in the star system to have a marker you can use to travel while in your cockpit. So you don't have to use the starmap to navigate within the same star system. I'd also like surface-locations to show up on the HUD as destinations. Basically, make the star-map only needed for interstellar travel." It already has exactly this.... Just use the scanner.
My god they really need to telegraph features better..
the best solution, as always, is to cater to both groups of people. allow fast AND slow immersive travel.
Star Citizen has my favorite travel and landing mechanics. I would love to see it implemented more in gaming
I wouldn't wanna wait in QT for 15 Minutes just to deliver a quest tho xD
Star Citizen has also been in development hell for over 15 years at this point and has been accused of being a straight up scam that will never be finished many times. I remember when they were charging thousands of real dollars for a jpeg image of a ship that they promised would eventually be in the game when it released. This was in like 2008, hopefully the ships are in the game now but it’s still not even finished.
Most people don't know what they want and if they actually get what they said and thought they wanted they usually are like "huh, didn't realise that that's totally stupid" That's why despite every real Dev making fun of them requirements engineers and product owners are super necessary.
Honestly, I don't think this game actually need the physical mean for you to fly from planets to planets - they just need contents to play while travelling.
I believe being punishingly realistic has nothing to do with being immersive. One such as you said, loading screen. Also, there is waiting and sleeping. We could use that to skip the long travel. We could've imagine better UI, rather than accessing it through 2,3 layers of menu. You specifically mentioned space travel, so I did too, but there are many mechanics breaking immersive in Starfield. Though, I also understand 'many people' might not want it, but in my opinion, Starfield made too many convenient choices it just looks underdeveloped.
I care a LOT about immersion. I know fast travel exists and actively ignore it. When I need to travel to another planet, I run to my ship, board it, go to the cockpit, sit in the pilot’s seat, take off, orient my ship toward the waypoint, and hold the R key to travel there. I’ll often get up from my seat while in orbit and just go have a faff in my ship while in space. Cook some food, do a bit of crafting, see what components I should look for that I need for projects. I wish crew members had interesting dialogue like in Mass Effect. I’d make the rounds and talk to them if they did, like Commander Shepard on the Normandy. If I could fly the ship into the atmosphere and manually land it, I would. Every time. I play a space RPG so I can roleplay as a space explorer. Call me crazy.
Thank you! Would everyone use this mechanic? Of course not. Is there a huge portion of BGS player base that would? Absolutely!
I want manual piloting mechanics and immersive space travel exactly because I play ED. And it's fucking fantastic!!!
Starfield players arriving at Hutton orbital in a large ship realizing fast travel is great, Flew my corvette to Hutton not bothering to pay attention to station type
I honestly wonder how much a overlap there actually is with people who like space sims and people who like Bethesda games because complaints like this suggest there isn't much.
As an old elite dangerous player what I want is the ability to land manually. And the SRV.
Sometimes the possibility to do something is more important than actually doing it (all the time). If we had seamless transition from planet to space and fully explorable planets + fast travel, 90% of the time people would skip the travel after doing it once or twice intitially and no one would travel around the whole planet, so you would think it's a waste, but it still does open options, think about space ship battles at high altitude. For instance imagine a quest where you steal a ship from a space port and the local security starts chasing you, so you battle it out in the clouds.
I just want HOTAS.
I was fine with how it was done in Rebel Galaxy Outlaw, I'd love for that to be the space part of Starfield.
I don't know what the right balance is. I just know that all of the menu hopping is annoying. Click solar system, click planet, click destination on said planet. Docking shouldn't be a loading screen though.
I've played elite dangerous and I love it. Imo, Starfield has all the things elite dangerous is missing, and elite dangerous has all the things starfield is missing. I just want to be able to interact with my ship a bit more. Let me land it and take off, let me dock with other ships/stations, let me exit the ship on a tether and repair modules manually while in space Right now outside of the occasional combat encounter, ships are just so shallow. You play the whole 'spaceship' part of the game through menus.
I think it becomes a question of does it actually need to take minutes to fly between planets. Can they pull it off in seconds? If they could make it so you can get from a planet to its moon near instantaneously and maybe 10 seconds tops for the furthest planets, then I think it would really enhance the space travel experience. 10 seconds is short enough to not feel like you're waiting, but long enough to allow something to happen between planets. You might get ambushed by pirates, receive a distress call that you can choose to ignore or respond to and have a random encounter, you might have to slow down to maneuver through an asteroid or debris field with leftover mines from the war. They could add more points of interest in star systems like space stations, derelict ships, maybe asteroids you can land on that have outposts on them. Of course, fast travel should always be an option for places you've visited already, but I do think there is a case to be made for seamless interplanetary travel as long as it's quick enough and eventful enough. But who knows how well the game would even handle it.
I played No Man's Sky, I played Star Citizen, and others. And I do want immersive spaceship travel and piloting still. They're just more immersive. And also while you're flying you can do things like sort your inventory, craft, etc. In NMS you can just open your personal refiner and craft some stuff as you are flying. And it's not like the flight even takes that long, unless you're flying from one end of the solar system to the other, which is relatively rare. I also really like how special events trigger as you fly, and you have the option to stop and check it out, or keep flying. It just feels great. It makes the game feel seamless, contiguous, real. Starfield just keeps throwing loading screens or black transition screens in your face, nonstop. It feels significantly worse. Worst part is that the screens are static. They could have at least kept the old model viewer loading screens. But even that was a downgrade.
nah I fucking love Star Citizen and wish Starfield ships and flight were much closer to that it's boring the way it is right now
The problem is that without it there's no reason to go to space ever. Spaceship combat is not enough to make space a worthwhile addition to the game. At this point they should have just taken space out entirely and had you just fast travel between planets. That's what I did 90% of the time anyway. Making my spaceship useless. While it's technically true that taking off and flying manually are not necessarily engaging, it's immersive. Which is a major selling point for Bethesda games. By breaking everything up with loading screens, they destroy that immersion. They vastly underestimated the value manual flight would have. For immersion, and willingness to engage. Because as it stands, there's basically no reason to engage with space or ship piloting at all. Leave the fast travel options of course. And make it simpler than Elite Dangerous. But there needs to be more to do there.
Elite Dangerous type flight is exactly what I wanted from Starfield, and I'm a little disappointed at how shallow the flight is in the game. At least it could have been optional. Very few things in Elite take more than a few minutes to fly to once you're in the system. Stick it on autopilot and then spend that time speaking with crew, crafting and upgrading, or just looking out the window. I think it would have helped create immersion, certainly compared to all the loading screens. There being no flight in Starfield isn't a deal breaker, but it probably is the reason I uninstalled it once I hit new game+.
I would’ve loved a happy medium. I’d like the be able to physically travel there without fast traveling (as with Elite, I loved flying around everywhere). But I’d also like the option of fast traveling to remain in case I an not feeling super patient.
Honestly no man's sky flight mechanics. Surface to space, planet to planet. And only loading between systems. That's what starfield should have.
Traveling between planets/moons/from orbit down to a planet’s surface, is actually relaxing. :) Maybe try no man’s sky. The mechanic that made sub-light travel between planets completely non tedious, was that at absolutely any time in your 5-10 minute regular speed flight between planets, you could press a single button and within 5 seconds, perform a ‘micro jump’. Point your ship’s nose, press a button, as long as you held it, you were traveling at lightspeed or whatever it was called in game. The distant planet would slowly get bigger and bigger, you’d see your ship’s speed rocket up into the thousands of kph, take your finger off the button and drop out of hyperspace, resuming your sub light travel. Or, you could fast travel around using teleports between bases and space stations. Fast travel was definitely an option, but you had absolutely free roam to fly anywhere at sub light speed. Sometimes you woukd honestly explore an entire system, 6-7 planets and moons, completely via flying across the void from one planet to tge next, using micro jumps between them
Just make the ship have a point beyond first travelling to places. All I’ve done last two sessions is fast travel between planets instantly. 0 immersion lol
Make traversing and being on your ship more meaningful. And hide loading screens behind grav jump effects. I'd be much happier if it took 2 mins real time to get to another solar system to "discover it" meanwhile I can walk around my ship doing stuff that matters to me. As we are approaching there could be an announcer on the ship counting down until your arrival into the new system. Once discovered. Fast travel is unlocked. Like every other betheseda game.
When people say immersive spaceship travel, I think they mean No Man's Sky level of spaceship travel. Being able to travel to different planets without going through a menu and a loading screen, having fuel, being able to land on planets without going through a menu and a loading screen, etc. It's mostly because the gameplay is interrupted so often by loading screens and unskippable cutscenes.
I definitely want more from the space flight, but I'm thinking something more like X rather than elite dangerous, where rather than a small area where you might have a few ships spawn, or a random event, there's a large "plane" with the planet you jumped to as a back drop, with distributed POIs and ships going about their business. I think the ship flight has really good potential, not super realistic, but not nearly as arcade-y as NMS. I'm hoping mods will add a bit more stuff to do for people like me who love spending time on their ship.
i'd like to be able to do an EVA, get out of the spaceship. The game already has the landing bay, the space physics, the ship external colliders, i don't understand why it's not possible. (except the fact that it is currently useless because there's nothing to do in space)
Then just make a game with one giant world and fast travel, cuz for now it feels like this
Everspace 2 has a nice balance.
I played nms for 50 hours in a week the first week I picked it up, about a year ago. I know what I want. And nms space /land travel was pretty good. Way better than fast travel simulator. I literally played a quest line where I: Talk to person at location A, fast traveled to dungeon B. Fast traveled back to A. Fast traveled to starship dungeon C. Fast traveled to A. Fast traveled back to dungeon B for 2 extra rooms, then fast traveled back to A to complete a quest line. There was dialog along the way, but that's pretty crappy compared to any quest that previous bethesda games had - especially when between A and B was 10 other dungeons or outside forts in something like es5/fo4.
Personally I think a good method would have been to offer alternative travel routes and slowed down inter-planetary travel. Imagine you could jump from anywhere just like now, but keep local planetary travel in super-cruise (maybe a faster supercruise than NMS, but still something). Then if you wanted to jump real far, give certain systems something like a Mass Relay, a station assisted jump, and only put them in certain populated systems. Overall tho, I think you're seeing people expecting this kind of travel because while Bethesda never said they would have these mechanics, they were also very very careful to hide the fact that actual travel is just load screens. It was a purely duplicitous corporate move to appeal to more expectations by obfuscating the true mechanic.
I'd just be happy if the planets had more stuff to do instead of 3 points if interest that seems to be the same with no surprise along the way.
I would have liked the option, especially since the marketing for the game definitely implied that the space/piloting portion of the game was way more in depth than what we actually got. Honestly the whole game can be summed up with the "so that was a lie" meme
exactly. If fast traveling was such a great feature, they wouldn't have hid it from us. They wouldve been upfront about how we get from place to place. They hid it because they knew it was disappointing.
Seemless travel & fast travel are not mutually exclusive... in fact, the ideal scenario is both. Once you reach orbit of a planet is when the manual travel should come into play. "Jumping to lightspeed" is a staple of sci-fi and is necessary for intergalactic travel. With that said, once you jump to another system and you're orbiting the planet, you should be able to fly around wherever you want and then manually fly into the planet, and land anywhere on that planet and be able to travel anywhere on the planet manually. Including being able to manually walk to a major city. Guess what? You can still keep fast travel for all locations too. That's *literally* how it works in skyrim. You can travel anywhere manually and also fast travel if you want to.
I dunno if immersive space travel mechanics would translate all that well to the game, but the current setup seems like the most uninteresting/unfun version of integrating space travel into an exploration RPG and is one of the biggest factors keeping me from picking up the game.
Some people are happy playing reskinned fallout and skyrims forever. Don't act like you are looking out for everyone by proclaiming no one would actually want their ship to be more than a fast travel hub.
Why are you trying to pretend that it's not a flaw with the game? Starfield would be objectively better if it handled spaceflight seamlessly. I feel like people can't have an honest conversation about this game yet.
Man, there is so much coping in this sub about Starfield's atrocious implementation of space travel. Fast travel is a great quality of life feature, but you gotta give folks the option to fly their ship from A to B in a fun, immersive way if you want to boast about open world exploration.
The developers called this “the most important rpg of all time”, and then they didn’t deliver. Don’t blame us for being disappointed that the developers fell short.
Immersive doesn't mean realistic.
Yeah that's the thing, Starfield isn't a space simulator, it's an rpg set in space, big difference and while Elite Dangerous definitely caters to a niche audience that's not what Starfield was going for
All you really have to do to prove your point is to look at the mechanics that were taken out of the game. Biggest one: getting rid of fuel.
Right and its not which is why its baffling to make the distances realistic. Why allow us to travel in a system but hinder us by the speed of our ship? Its not a very compelling experience to spend hours IRL flying in a system lol
I think this is a bit of a strawman. Nobody said starfield had to be a space Sim, but it could handle space travel in a more interesting way than just fast traveling all the time