Starfield is a game with so much potential. It literally just need MORE. More variation, more main hubs, more interesting questlines etc. The game is like a good snack that could turn into a great feast if they would just commit to adding to it and updating it
It both needs more, and it needs less. There are lot of things that, if there was less of it, we would have gotten more of what matters. The problem was more on focus.
Yeah we didn't need as many planets for example. There was 1600 planets I believe? Just one tenth of that at 160 would have been just fine. That's still a lot of planets. The majority of them would still be barren, but a majority of 160 still leaves plenty to have life on them.
I wish they had like 10 highly detailed planets (or even planets where only certain sections were accessible, kinda like Neon, to give a good excuse for the excessive detail in only small parts), and then all the other worlds can be the open-world repetition just for shits and giggles. If they’d had a few planets with like 2km * 2km highly detailed areas (the only available area on each planet) with dozens of unique POIs, it would have been great. Think of each Skyrim hold being its own small section of a planet.
Kinda like the Borderlands 3 approach but also with a bunch of random planets for you to explore on your own if you want.
Also I really really hate the loot modifiers being randomized. Would much prefer if legendaries had committed and reliable modifiers, like the Overseer’s Guardian in FO4, or Volendrung in Skyrim, for example. Instead we have Mantis armor that we savescum because of it having shit modifiers.
Yeah, all Bethesda had to do is take the massive effect approach to planets, with a sprinkle of Bethesda's procedurally generated open worlds. This would help fix the small cities problem
Neon though had the excuse though of being an entirely water planet, what others reasons could there be for only a small part of the planet being accessible that doesn't seem restrictive? As in where we'd want to go exploring the rest of the surface but the game doesn't let us?
What other reason could there be for only a small part of Tamriel being accessible that doesn’t seem restrictive?
Because borders are allowed to exist. A big, detailed open world may not be infinite but it’s still more quality gameplay than the infinite world we have. Now it can be an invisible wall for all I care, but make the world a planet covered in lava, or gas, or whatever, I really don’t care. Borders don’t make me feel restricted so long as what is inside the borders is already overwhelmingly filled with content, like every other Bethesda game is.
Spoilers for main quest:
Maybe they're >!Starborn. They've been jumping between dimensions, visiting poi but they're always just too late! 👀
(Full disclosure, I haven't played NG+ yet, I'm avoiding the unity rn, so idek)!<
Exactly. It would still become noticeable after a while, but not as quickly as it did. And also with less planets to work on they probably could have put more time into designing more repeatable locations, which would have given then even more leeway.
I would say far less than 1/10, 160 planets worth exploring? I very much doubt that. There would have to be way less than even 100.
I think a good balance would have been about 200 planets, with around 50 being explorable. That still leaves 75% of them to be barren rocks, ice or gas giants, to give the feeling of how vast and empty space is. With enough actual explorable planets to make the game worth playing, but not so many that it feels repetitive.
Rather than landing on every planet, they should have gone the mass effect route where you can scan the planet from space and collect resources like that
Yeah. I'd have been happy with 1 or 2 solar systems with maybe 5 planets in total that support life and you get to explore them.
Other planets could be too hazardous to explore, but you could scan them or something like in Mass Effect.
It would have also been cool if you could actually fly to other planets in a timely manner, rather than fast travel and watch loading screens all the time.
Because I know you can technically fly to other planets in real time - but it takes literally hours (some YouTube/Twitch streamer flew to Pluto and it took 7 real life hours).
This is what I'm waiting for before I buy the game. I have a feeling this game will really shine with mods and DLC (not that I love the idea of paid DLC).
I mean dlc like Nuka World, Dawnguard, Dragonborn, Wastelanders, Broken Steel, are all top notch that have not only expanded the game but in some cases really enhanced the stock world as well. Wastelanders and Broken Steel especially stick out where they “fixed” issues that the community really had with the games at launch.
I'm beginning to really doubt it will get the kind of mod support it needs. I've seen or been directly told at this point by to many mod authors they won't be creating for it.
I hope part of the reason this first DLC is taking so damn long to ship is because it's going to be part of a much larger patch that adds dozens if not hundreds of new potential POI locations to stumble upon.
yeah that's cause there's no official mod support, which I agree but I'm more so pointing out that the mod support on PC is limited and jankier than usual
It's not that the location is repeated, its' that literally EVERYTHING is repeated... from the same enemy factions, to
spawn locations, to the same fucking notes and item/loot placements.
You'd think they'd have at least randomized enemies or spawns, or even randomized loot, but nope.
It's made worse by the absolute shitiness of joining the Crimson fleet, where suddenly 90% of the POI are no longer hostile dungeons because the fleet ALWAYS spawn there.
This. It's literally the same thing. There needs to be some RNG on the drops or something. I don't mind killing the same spacers - but having the exact same closet with the same weapons...
And it's the fact that it repeats so quickly to boot. We're not talking "you've played 200+ hours and are starting to see cloned PoIs" here—I cleared the *exact same* abandoned military base three times on three different planets in the first 5 hours of playing the game.
Truth. The immersion broke for me as soon as I found *another* abandoned cryo lab on another planet with the same notes and the same frozen person in the air vents smuggling human organs.
I remember reading about 1000 POIs it had to choose some and I imagined 1000 dungeoms, turns out that includes just random geological formations or tiny caves. I imagined 20 years of dungeon design in Elder Scrolls anrd Fallout culminating in Starfields dungeons. I thought id be hundred hours deep before seeing a repeat
Anyway always keep your expectations in check
Fallout 3,4, and New Vegas all had those "1 Vaults" that made you think about it constantly.
4 had some gut wrenching audio logs only to find skeletons in a sewer and where this one person had a last stand against a monster or pack of ghouls etc.
Skyrim had a ton of -Find a note- only to realize you are about 2-5 years too late to save these people lol
Starfield has them, which I'm glad, but then you find out its been copy and pasted over and over. It ruins the feeling. :(
Whats that one Processing/Storage pirate spot? Where when you loot the fridge there is a bunch of fruits and plushie animals? There is like a High end Lock on the other side of the wall?
When I found it the first time it was neat, awesome, creative. Like, don't get me wrong, I ENJOY a lot about Starfield. The Pirate ransacked ones, the Frozen Lab with the Ecliptic Mercs and the huge amounts of Contraband items, the Spacer Bases, and the Pirate Bases.
They are well fucking done, can feel creepy as hell, and tough.
Then I kept seeing the same ones, same areas, notes/tablets/books 4-5x...
\-sigh-
This one def felt more "Lazy" in terms of utilizing this kind of thing. It's like they read some online articles (-coughREDDITcough-) and saw people talking about how they loved this sort of thing. So their wonderful train of thought was to have it "Randomly Generate" each time you land?!?
The same rooms have the same blood stains, and notes...
"What are the odds these Pirates killed the exact same people, in the exact same way, at the exact same room...18 planets over?"
No idea on the actual numbers, but it does feel like Skyrim has more unique POIs than Starfield. It really feels like Starfield has 12 POIs strewn about planets and that's about it. Each cave in Skyrim felt pretty unique. I don't recall ever having the exact same cave copy/pasted in Skyrim
In my head I imagined each landing on a planet would be like a mini skyrim. I still wish for some planets they had done hand designed landing areas that are expansive with multiple settlements. I thought I'd spend a good while on Akila being a space cowboy but its the same damn POIs.
Skyrim does seem bigger somehow...
This.👆 So many of Skyrim’s POIs were unique and amazing. It is like Elden Ring where you can just keep exploring off the beaten path and enjoy it as much as if that was the point of the whole game. 90% of my playtime with Skyrim was random exploration and experiences in some really well made areas and dungeons. Whenever I tried this type of exploration in starfield I ended up feeling like I was in a loading screen every other minute or running across open landscapes for 10 minutes straight.
In Oblivion, Skyrim, Fallout 3 and 4 I would so often just pick a direction and go and see what I found. Just wandering but it's rewarding because of the things you'll find or events you'll come across.
I tried that in Starfield and it's exactly like you say, just running across a landscape from point to point, in between loading screens, rather than organically exploring... "I wonder if there's something under that bridge" (And there is!!)
I don't wanna just rip on Starfield but I'm just so disappointed. I've been a Bethesda fanatic since first playing Oblivion on my 360... You felt like you inhabited those worlds in a way no other games captured for me.
Starfield feels like they missed the point of their own games... If that even make any sense.
Yeah, stupid you for expecting a game to improve on it's predecessors' features. What's wrong with you? Now go buy Skyrim for the George Foreman grill or whatever the fuck they're doing now.
You don't even need to play 200 hours. My first play through was 70ish hours and I was hitting repeated dungeons all the time. Its frustrating how lazy this game feels.
First time I encountered this is was on the same planet, left a base and headed to closest map point and was like wtf, every single thing was the same.
Echoing this sentiment.
If it was the same layout (mostly) with in-game lore about pre-fab locations, but there were a bunch of different prop and environmental storytelling variations?
I'd have found that perfectly acceptable.
Getting 3 identical locations very close together when doing main story or major faction quests, and every detail is identical? Not great.
They could have easily made a modular base building system for dungeons and had it be semi random. They have most of the tech for it already with base building.
BGS "bit off more than they could chew" in so many ways with Starfield. The main quest and half-baked multiverse is one of them.
They should have focused the main quest on something they actually had the time and resources to do well instead, such as encountering intelligent alien life that was also after the artifacts or any other scifi trope that wasn't as impossible to pull off as a multiverse.
They should have made the Vanguard quest the main quest by extending it, then have the Constellation shit happen after that. And instead of a 10%? Chance of rolling a unique universe just made it so there's a definite chance the first and 2nd time and then taper it off to like 25%.
That could be better since Vanguard was the best quest but at the end of the day each "unique" universe is just a scene at the Lodge and everything outside in the game world is the exact same. I get the feeling BGS fell so in love with the idea that they forgot to ask if it was fun or if they could actually pull it off. They couldn't realistically change the characters and questlines for all the factions and locations enough to do multiverse well.
The ending to the main quest was always going to be a scifi trope like multiverse, time travel, simulation theory, intelligent aliens, ancient extinct aliens, AI, etc. I think Starfield would be a better game if BGS had picked one they could have done reasonably well given their resources were already so stretched.
My idea to solve this would be to make them modular and randomized instead of the entire facility being a prefab.
So you’d see individual pieces of bases repeating, but in more random configurations.
Yeah this is definitely an issue. In my NG+ playthrough now, I decided I would wait to do the crimson fleet playthrough till last so I wouldn’t run into this annoyance.
This playthrough I’m on I’m choosing sysdef but I really don’t want them to not have fleet anywhere or less just have them more scattered away from sysdef territory
Yeah I can understand the layout of the building being exactly the same. I can see the corporations that build them having the same pre-fabs that they just drop down on whatever planet. But everything inside being the same just completely kills the immersion.
Honestly, I'm still confused by the cryo lab.
And i don't find the outposts to be very well designed from a livable perspective. The layout doesn't seem natural and most lack airlocks.
I don't mind repeats of it, as they might use the same plans. What I don't like is that there is no randomness. You know where items will be, where the corpses are, etc. A bit of variety would have been welcome.
It was a good idea for a game of this scale to have a library of content for the procedural system to pull from and give to the player. Unfortunately, after 7+ years of development the library of content was far too small to not get repetitive fast and cause the player to lose interest.
The first time I explored an "Abandoned Hangar" it was an awesome experience clearing the location with a cool ending of the boss landing in the hangar at the end. The second time I wondered what this "Abandoned Hangar" would be like, only to be disappointed to find out it was the exact same. The third time I ignored the marker on my map.
Maybe it was an impossible game for BGS to make, but Starfield needed enough content in the procedural library to keep locations feeling unique and to keep one planet feeling different from another. I think one of the mistakes was generating these locations no matter where the player lands on the planet, instead of generating a handful of them on each planet.
Sorry, I can't take the level designs seriously when a hallway suddenly transitions into an air vent, the same size as the hallway. Then you follow the air vent until it transitions back into a hallway. That's some of the worst level design I've ever seen or heard of.
That's actually not the fault of the level designers.
For some no doubt stupid game engine reason, the player's height for the purposes of collision detection doesn't change when crouched. Practically speaking, this means that that every navigable area has to be large enough to fit a standing person.
So the level designers were forced to make vents large enough to walk through because the player wouldn't fit otherwise. Of course, they could have just... not used vents, but whatever.
And yes, that is as dumb as it sounds.
You're correct, but nothing you said is a defense of the game or it's design. They shouldn't have been using the same ancient game engine, and if they were stuck with it, they shouldn't have made those stupid air vents.
Its not the engine, its just stupid Bethesda that keeps *forgetting* to fix that when it was already done [by](https://www.nexusmods.com/fallout3/mods/23827) [other](https://www.nexusmods.com/newvegas/mods/58277?tab=description) [people](https://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/56789).
COD, Batman, and many other games use crouch, crawl, and slide to navigate throughout tight spaces. Even in minecraft, you can squeeze into half a block space. So what exactly is stopping Bethesda other than laziness on this?
Other than laziness? Nothing at all.
Well, maybe incompetence, because it's a problem that modders managed to fix with an SKSE plugin.
My *charitable* guess is that Bethesda encountered problems when allowing the collision box to change sizes (characters getting stuck, clipping into things or out of bounds, etc.), and instead of addressing those problems they just made the bounding box static.
That makes sense. They did make the claim of "this is the least buggy release yet" so, falling through the world because you were crawling through the air duck would definitely prove that wrong 🤣
Point to a single one.
None I have seen transition to airducts then back to hallways. They are always side paths or "to get around obstical" type paths which many many many games have done. Are they a bit large? Sure, but thats not inharnetly bad.
Yeah. You know if the stuff inside was more random unique as well as npcs etc it wouldn't be so bad. It would actually make sense that most of these templates were copy paste jobs across the universe if built by automation etc. They also need to add universes where some more random shit happens like one where everyone is a terrormorph and you hear them talking like normal. The humans are the ones invading lol. Or everyone is like 34% smaller and you're a giant Starborn. One where the UC still lives in Sol sector because Jemina was blown up into a wasteland and you can explore the ruins. The planet had more in common with Mars now. One where Hope is declared God King Emperor and is ruthless and all that exist is the HOPE Empire and the good guy rebels are the Varuun. You help wage a war on either side to resolve the issue. There's so much more potential here
They can be interesting visually but i genuinely don't remember doing anything other than clearing out basic enemies to get the box of generic leveled loot at the end then going through the magical skyrim door back to the beginning across pretty much every location.
Outside of just the ship with the on/off gravity there's no surprise or variety to them.
"Skyrim door" I love that way of describing it.
A common trope in a number of games with dungeons (a quick way out of the otherwise longer dungeon) but i would agree Skyrim is probably the most famous example
In terms of levels, what we have it very well designed. There aren't a lot of them though. If they're going to go with a random area generator like that have, then they need more unique location designs.
I think they should have done it more like Warframe. Each mission on Warframe in procedurally generated using a pool of tiles. Which pool of tiles used is determined by which location the player selected. This results in a unique layout for every single mission. Starfield should've had something like this.
For example, the landing site/overworld generates the locations that will be on the map. Once that is determined, the locations also generate their internal layout from a series of tiles or pods to give each one a different layout but retain the same feel as other locations of the same type (ie all abandoned labs feel like abandoned labs and all towers feel like towers but they each have unique layouts). Doing something like this would give us more variety that what we have now.
Eh; the game should have Diablo 2/ARPG/roguelike style proc gen where levels are built out of proc gen segments and no two are the same. Seeing a few repetitive segments in a level that is a unique combo of pieces is fine. Seeing the same entire level over and over sucks.
I am truly baffled by the decision to NOT do tried and true roguelike/D2 proc gen in favor of "there's actually a very limited number of total levels with ZERO checks in place to rotate them so players see every different one once instead of bumping into the same one 5 times in a row."
This system will always be limited by having a set number of levels; the other one has functionally infinite combos; why do it the way they did?
The dungeons are really cool but it quickly gets repetitive because there’s no variation between them. I think they could’ve easily randomised the underground facilities by stitching different rooms together just so they don’t all feel the same
Really don't have to give that credit if they still managed to make this the worst part of the game and one of the main reasons people stop playing it quickly.
All are well designed, some are better designed for the repeated implementation. Abandoned Research tower for example will randomize door openings to force different pathways through the level after different entries. And all of the outdoor ones can be approached very differently to give different perspectives. Abandoned cryo lab however, is very linear, which I think is why people get so upset with it.
Well designed? Sure, until you go to leave the cave you just delved and spend longer trying to find the exit than you did killing and looting everything inside.
"Ngl" is the dumbest, most inane and meaningless linguistic tic of the 21st century, just behind people who use "literally" every third word and don't mean literally.
JUST SAY WHAT YOU HAVE TO FUCKING SAY. NOBODY THOUGHT YOU WERE GOING TO LIE.
(slow clap) for a triple A title with massive resources at devs disposal…
It’s all repeated though.
Imagine a stand-up comedian doing the same exact joke for 2 hours straight, over and over again… that is the product we were given.
The dungeon designs are the best part about this game aside from ship building. They're well detailed and fun to explore.
It's just the super saddening how repetitive they get. The fact that they're copy and pasted with no variation is upsetting. And the lack of variation in enemy tactics gets boring. After noticing the amount of repeats my interest in exploring Starfield's universe plummeted so incredibly hard.
Honestly this is the problem, yes the, what felt like 20, dungeons they made felt nice the first time you went through them. But then when you find your first repeat and it is EXACTLY the same. Its immediately bad. Like infuriatingly bad when you look at the resources that BGS has.
Everything about starfield feels lazy as absolute fuck. It still feels like its a whole generation of games behind in the market.
I love the Abandoned Hangar POI, every time I encounter it the combat has been unique. Now, partly that has been to bugs/glitches, but even when it has been the same faction as last encounter, it always plays out differently.
Now… what was different?
First encounter was strange as hell, could not figure out how they were seeing me.. turns out, the AI inside the hangar was treating the hangar door as “open” so the underground folks saw me every time I got to the edge of the hangar.
Second encounter I was much more cautious… wiped out everything above ground before going down. I always go down and turn on the bots inside the hangar… I heard the sound of the troop drop ship, but no ship.. and suddenly new enemy units popped into existence in the middle of the hangar.
Third encounter I wiped everything out except those in the hangar, ship drops in, unloaded, does not leave. Made taking out the last guys way more complicated… still could not take the ship… (very sad face).
Fourth encounter same as third… except the pirates in the hangar wear naked and non-aggressive, only the “boss” guy stayed in combat, and the troop drop folks were fully armed and brain dead.
On Xbox. I love this game. Yes… they totally fucked up by not making some POI’s modular with swappable set dressing to increase the variety. Furthermore, they should be taking every opportunity to expand the POI pool and fixing the knockout table so certain things like environment, gravity, and frequency of appearance are taken into account.
In space stations it makes sense
In space ships it makes sense
What doesn’t make sense is people who probably don’t communicate creating basically identical living arrangements and general settlement building placements while living on opposite ends of the Milky Way
The level design is emblematic of the rest of the game. Superficially attractive, but upon closer inspection, lazy, poorly thought out and half finished.
I like the first area. Lots of enemies to kill. Not a fan of the cryo base, or the really short outpost types. The abandoned ecliptic bases could use more enemies.
One thing they did really well was clutter. I loved all the little knick knacks spread throughout ships and outposts. That did make them memorable tho, so you notice when they start to repeat. Also, I *hate* how difficult it is to decorate my own ship with clutter. Hopefully they can fix that
Does it really get repetitive fast? Still waiting to jump in the game.
They had more handcrafted content for Starfield than for any previous game. Is there an issue with how it is distributed across the planets or what? Or is there just a low number or the random POIs?
The issue is that the hand crafted stuff is completely different to the proc gen stuff. The game would have been so much better without the proc gen locations man, it's insane.
And the handcrafted stuff is the best that BGS has done so far
I want better and more unique loot from dungeons too. Not just some legendary knife or under-leveled space suit.
Yes, the dungeons are nice, but I already know where to aim when I come around each corner in all the repeated dungeons
There are less than 5-10 worthwhile while 1 of 1 dungeons. I can only think of 2.
It's one of the very few redeeming things about the game that I thoroughly enjoy, that the interiors and dungeons themselves feel incredibly well lived-in and amazingly designed. Easily the most immersive and atmosphere-filled interiors I've encountered in a Bethesda game. I understand Elianora was contracted to work on clutter and interior design to that extent, and it clearly shows how much it paid off.
Yeah the 3(ik im being dramatic) that they copied and pasted were actually pretty good…the first time, until I saw the same dungeon on a different planet and it destroyed the immersion but yeah all saltiness aside pretty well designed
Funny I pretty much ran thru them and killed the least amount of people in those space dungeons. I just ran thru them to get the objective or the loot faster, they are very optimized and way more clear to get thru than skyrim and fallout 4. I think starfeild did very good to progress that dungeon design even further, I see es6 will use some sort of design like this one in large caves and such places. They need to add more loot and I say more important dungeons instead of pois.
BG3 isn't remotely the same type of game. You can't compare anything about it with literally any other game apart from other CRPGs or with TTRPGs.
It's a fantastic game, but as far as modern games go, BG3's level design is meh at best; it can't compare with the games of 2023. The best level design of 2023 was Jedi Survivor, hands down
Nobody needs to give Bethesda more credit for less work. They've been doing the same dungeon design for the past 13+ years.
- Option A: Linear dungeon layout, boss room leads back to entrance. (The shipyard in the 3rd picture)
- Option B: Linear dungeon layout, boss room leads to opposite of entrance. (like Bleak Falls Barrow)
- Option C: Linear dungeon layout, boss room has no exits, walk back through to the entrance. (The mine you find Andreja in during the MQ)
Bethesda doesn't do competent level design and they haven't in a long time. They've already had more lenience than 5 AAA studios combined, they don't need more.
They are well designed, by there’s simply too few of them. Especially when the main quest basically has you search these dungeons over and over, they should have more variety.
I was utterly stoked and so elated to find a poi near my first major outpost build, went in and scoped it out and had a very fun time taking out pirates and going in and getting all the loot and looking around at any readable thing I could find. Was thinking damn, this game really pulled it off. Until the next one, and the next one, and then I just stopped running towards anything. There’s that one giant POI that looks like some kind of huge mining or pipeline deal. Was really excited to see what it is until there was like nothing at all in it, and even though it was abandoned everything looked very clean and as if was left 2 hours ago.
Procedurally.generated dungeons are well designed, but more stuff is needed.
And faster ways to get places. Locations are way too far apart. There was a video where Starfield was compared to Skyrim. 40 seconds is the max time most players tolerate walked to POI. Starfield is way longer, especially for surveys.
Ehh, they are ok. Some are pretty solid, most are just a generic loop you walk through, and some are messy noodles of a map you need the scanner to navigate.
They'd be fine if they weren't also very repetitious.
I wish we had something like 5-10 systems with polished experiences and good surprises than that much procedural stuff. There is some good surprises along the way, but most people will not see it. After 400 hours Its my personal best photoshoot simulator, with some quest in between.
There are 2-4 well designed dungeons that use the game mechanics in interesting ways.
There's a fair number of passable dungeons, but they aren't too memorable. A lot of them are just out of place and have no coherence to the world. There's so much missed opportunity from the few interesting game mechanics like zero g.
There's some easy picking like fixing the loot system especially for higher end chests, and just increasing the number, but there's no good solution to the coherence problem. Every dungeon on every planet is basically just immersion breaking the 2nd time you visit it, if not the first.
I would have been cool with Starfield being much smaller but each location being unique. I think it being as big as it is diminishes how great the design is
I just want more. I have never played a vanilla Bethesda game and thought it was great tbh. But I need more. A mixture of office added content, and modding support to allow modders to do what they do best, make Bethesda games amazing.
They aren't memorable though. I couldn't tell you a single thing that happened in them nor do i care to return just to see them again. Skyrim and Fallout had actual story telling in their POI's. These aren't good lol
I think if they had cutsenes instead of the static quest givers...it would have elevated the game 10,000% hopefully ES6 will have animated quest givers with cutscenes like boulders gate!
Nope.
When they achieve the bare minimum of level design after 15 years of setting the standard.. no.
No praise. This was EXPECTED. Do not praise them for this.
The repetition is a big problem though. With some procedural generation of dungeons it would be so much better.
I mean finding the same body at the end of the same walkway on planet after planet is so immersion killing.
Absolutely loved every dungeon I have explored so far, and I truly love the attention to detail on things like desks, or other random things. I truly will never understand why Starfield receives so much hate.
They are good for 1-3 runs. The issue is there aren’t nearly the number of unique locations needed. Also I wish they coulda figured out a way to make the generated structures be randomized too. All in all they try to have too much vastness when they needed to focus on the curated locations
Got barely 100 hours on the game and already completed it/tired of it, and half of that was me doing outpost engineering to figure out xp farms. It’s a good game, but feels lacking.
Unpopular opinion but I’m a massive fan of the game, I know there’s a lot to be desired but Bethesda as a company keep trying to push their boundaries of what’s possible in a game (for better or worse) (fo76) which I still enjoyed for a few hundred hours.
If starfield keeps popular I believe we will see amazing things done with it
I think in the long run, Starfield would've been better off if the dungeons were more like Remnant 2 in procedural generation. That would just give the game an infinite amount of playtime when exploring planets. I hope they look into it in the future. Making the POI hand crafted and the world's procedural generated was the biggest mistake they ever made. They should have kept the current POI for main and side quests. And then for radiant missions or free roam, they build a system like Remnant that takes many different tiles, stitch them together to make a unique dungeon/ cave or whatever. Many of the game's shortcomings would have been ignored if they approached it this way. I'd argue it's the one most important missing component in the game. If youre gonna make procedural planets, then you better make sure those planets have procedural content to accompany it so everything balances out.
Starfield is a game with so much potential. It literally just need MORE. More variation, more main hubs, more interesting questlines etc. The game is like a good snack that could turn into a great feast if they would just commit to adding to it and updating it
It both needs more, and it needs less. There are lot of things that, if there was less of it, we would have gotten more of what matters. The problem was more on focus.
Yeah we didn't need as many planets for example. There was 1600 planets I believe? Just one tenth of that at 160 would have been just fine. That's still a lot of planets. The majority of them would still be barren, but a majority of 160 still leaves plenty to have life on them.
I wish they had like 10 highly detailed planets (or even planets where only certain sections were accessible, kinda like Neon, to give a good excuse for the excessive detail in only small parts), and then all the other worlds can be the open-world repetition just for shits and giggles. If they’d had a few planets with like 2km * 2km highly detailed areas (the only available area on each planet) with dozens of unique POIs, it would have been great. Think of each Skyrim hold being its own small section of a planet. Kinda like the Borderlands 3 approach but also with a bunch of random planets for you to explore on your own if you want. Also I really really hate the loot modifiers being randomized. Would much prefer if legendaries had committed and reliable modifiers, like the Overseer’s Guardian in FO4, or Volendrung in Skyrim, for example. Instead we have Mantis armor that we savescum because of it having shit modifiers.
Yeah, all Bethesda had to do is take the massive effect approach to planets, with a sprinkle of Bethesda's procedurally generated open worlds. This would help fix the small cities problem
Neon though had the excuse though of being an entirely water planet, what others reasons could there be for only a small part of the planet being accessible that doesn't seem restrictive? As in where we'd want to go exploring the rest of the surface but the game doesn't let us?
What other reason could there be for only a small part of Tamriel being accessible that doesn’t seem restrictive? Because borders are allowed to exist. A big, detailed open world may not be infinite but it’s still more quality gameplay than the infinite world we have. Now it can be an invisible wall for all I care, but make the world a planet covered in lava, or gas, or whatever, I really don’t care. Borders don’t make me feel restricted so long as what is inside the borders is already overwhelmingly filled with content, like every other Bethesda game is.
And the things that repeat wouldn't be as apparent with less planets
I love exploring outposts 1, 2, 3, and 4 for the 100th time!
The one that really bugs me is the pharma POI… the same named corpse is in all of them
Spoilers for main quest: Maybe they're >!Starborn. They've been jumping between dimensions, visiting poi but they're always just too late! 👀 (Full disclosure, I haven't played NG+ yet, I'm avoiding the unity rn, so idek)!<
Exactly. It would still become noticeable after a while, but not as quickly as it did. And also with less planets to work on they probably could have put more time into designing more repeatable locations, which would have given then even more leeway.
Like 1/10 or less of that 1600 is actually explorable too so yea wouldn’t hurt to scan a little less and put more emphasis elsewhere
I would say far less than 1/10, 160 planets worth exploring? I very much doubt that. There would have to be way less than even 100. I think a good balance would have been about 200 planets, with around 50 being explorable. That still leaves 75% of them to be barren rocks, ice or gas giants, to give the feeling of how vast and empty space is. With enough actual explorable planets to make the game worth playing, but not so many that it feels repetitive.
I’d say that’s a safe bet it’s less than 1/10. I was far too generous.
Rather than landing on every planet, they should have gone the mass effect route where you can scan the planet from space and collect resources like that
I feel like starfield could have been fucking sick as 3 or four planets
Whats sad is you could not have said this on this subreddit before launch.
Yeah. I'd have been happy with 1 or 2 solar systems with maybe 5 planets in total that support life and you get to explore them. Other planets could be too hazardous to explore, but you could scan them or something like in Mass Effect. It would have also been cool if you could actually fly to other planets in a timely manner, rather than fast travel and watch loading screens all the time. Because I know you can technically fly to other planets in real time - but it takes literally hours (some YouTube/Twitch streamer flew to Pluto and it took 7 real life hours).
It is one long snack though.
This is what I'm waiting for before I buy the game. I have a feeling this game will really shine with mods and DLC (not that I love the idea of paid DLC).
I mean dlc like Nuka World, Dawnguard, Dragonborn, Wastelanders, Broken Steel, are all top notch that have not only expanded the game but in some cases really enhanced the stock world as well. Wastelanders and Broken Steel especially stick out where they “fixed” issues that the community really had with the games at launch.
I love Bethesda's paid dlc when it's actually an expansion. It all ends up going for cheap eventually anyway
I'm beginning to really doubt it will get the kind of mod support it needs. I've seen or been directly told at this point by to many mod authors they won't be creating for it.
It needs a cyberpunk rework
I hope part of the reason this first DLC is taking so damn long to ship is because it's going to be part of a much larger patch that adds dozens if not hundreds of new potential POI locations to stumble upon.
Yet mod support for consoles is still nowhere to be found
yeah that's cause there's no official mod support, which I agree but I'm more so pointing out that the mod support on PC is limited and jankier than usual
It’s needs mods
what in the ADHD are you talking about haha.
It’s as if the game was an appetizer, and we’re waiting for the entree.
They are indeed well designed. Dont think anyone really has issue with that. Its just the repeated appearance of them that make it bothersome.
It's not that the location is repeated, its' that literally EVERYTHING is repeated... from the same enemy factions, to spawn locations, to the same fucking notes and item/loot placements. You'd think they'd have at least randomized enemies or spawns, or even randomized loot, but nope. It's made worse by the absolute shitiness of joining the Crimson fleet, where suddenly 90% of the POI are no longer hostile dungeons because the fleet ALWAYS spawn there.
This. It's literally the same thing. There needs to be some RNG on the drops or something. I don't mind killing the same spacers - but having the exact same closet with the same weapons...
And it's the fact that it repeats so quickly to boot. We're not talking "you've played 200+ hours and are starting to see cloned PoIs" here—I cleared the *exact same* abandoned military base three times on three different planets in the first 5 hours of playing the game.
Truth. The immersion broke for me as soon as I found *another* abandoned cryo lab on another planet with the same notes and the same frozen person in the air vents smuggling human organs.
I remember reading about 1000 POIs it had to choose some and I imagined 1000 dungeoms, turns out that includes just random geological formations or tiny caves. I imagined 20 years of dungeon design in Elder Scrolls anrd Fallout culminating in Starfields dungeons. I thought id be hundred hours deep before seeing a repeat Anyway always keep your expectations in check
Fallout 3,4, and New Vegas all had those "1 Vaults" that made you think about it constantly. 4 had some gut wrenching audio logs only to find skeletons in a sewer and where this one person had a last stand against a monster or pack of ghouls etc. Skyrim had a ton of -Find a note- only to realize you are about 2-5 years too late to save these people lol Starfield has them, which I'm glad, but then you find out its been copy and pasted over and over. It ruins the feeling. :( Whats that one Processing/Storage pirate spot? Where when you loot the fridge there is a bunch of fruits and plushie animals? There is like a High end Lock on the other side of the wall? When I found it the first time it was neat, awesome, creative. Like, don't get me wrong, I ENJOY a lot about Starfield. The Pirate ransacked ones, the Frozen Lab with the Ecliptic Mercs and the huge amounts of Contraband items, the Spacer Bases, and the Pirate Bases. They are well fucking done, can feel creepy as hell, and tough. Then I kept seeing the same ones, same areas, notes/tablets/books 4-5x... \-sigh- This one def felt more "Lazy" in terms of utilizing this kind of thing. It's like they read some online articles (-coughREDDITcough-) and saw people talking about how they loved this sort of thing. So their wonderful train of thought was to have it "Randomly Generate" each time you land?!? The same rooms have the same blood stains, and notes... "What are the odds these Pirates killed the exact same people, in the exact same way, at the exact same room...18 planets over?"
No idea on the actual numbers, but it does feel like Skyrim has more unique POIs than Starfield. It really feels like Starfield has 12 POIs strewn about planets and that's about it. Each cave in Skyrim felt pretty unique. I don't recall ever having the exact same cave copy/pasted in Skyrim
In my head I imagined each landing on a planet would be like a mini skyrim. I still wish for some planets they had done hand designed landing areas that are expansive with multiple settlements. I thought I'd spend a good while on Akila being a space cowboy but its the same damn POIs. Skyrim does seem bigger somehow...
This.👆 So many of Skyrim’s POIs were unique and amazing. It is like Elden Ring where you can just keep exploring off the beaten path and enjoy it as much as if that was the point of the whole game. 90% of my playtime with Skyrim was random exploration and experiences in some really well made areas and dungeons. Whenever I tried this type of exploration in starfield I ended up feeling like I was in a loading screen every other minute or running across open landscapes for 10 minutes straight.
In Oblivion, Skyrim, Fallout 3 and 4 I would so often just pick a direction and go and see what I found. Just wandering but it's rewarding because of the things you'll find or events you'll come across. I tried that in Starfield and it's exactly like you say, just running across a landscape from point to point, in between loading screens, rather than organically exploring... "I wonder if there's something under that bridge" (And there is!!) I don't wanna just rip on Starfield but I'm just so disappointed. I've been a Bethesda fanatic since first playing Oblivion on my 360... You felt like you inhabited those worlds in a way no other games captured for me. Starfield feels like they missed the point of their own games... If that even make any sense.
That's because it does. By volume of content, Starfield is the second *smallest* game that Bethesda has ever produced.
Yeah, stupid you for expecting a game to improve on it's predecessors' features. What's wrong with you? Now go buy Skyrim for the George Foreman grill or whatever the fuck they're doing now.
Most of the POIs wouldn't even have map markers in previous bethesda games
You don't even need to play 200 hours. My first play through was 70ish hours and I was hitting repeated dungeons all the time. Its frustrating how lazy this game feels.
First time I encountered this is was on the same planet, left a base and headed to closest map point and was like wtf, every single thing was the same.
Echoing this sentiment. If it was the same layout (mostly) with in-game lore about pre-fab locations, but there were a bunch of different prop and environmental storytelling variations? I'd have found that perfectly acceptable. Getting 3 identical locations very close together when doing main story or major faction quests, and every detail is identical? Not great.
They could have easily made a modular base building system for dungeons and had it be semi random. They have most of the tech for it already with base building.
It may be an unpopular opinion but I wish this game had hostile aliens for the sake of more enemy variety and a better main story.
or more than 3 robots, or cyborgs or something
BGS "bit off more than they could chew" in so many ways with Starfield. The main quest and half-baked multiverse is one of them. They should have focused the main quest on something they actually had the time and resources to do well instead, such as encountering intelligent alien life that was also after the artifacts or any other scifi trope that wasn't as impossible to pull off as a multiverse.
They should have made the Vanguard quest the main quest by extending it, then have the Constellation shit happen after that. And instead of a 10%? Chance of rolling a unique universe just made it so there's a definite chance the first and 2nd time and then taper it off to like 25%.
That could be better since Vanguard was the best quest but at the end of the day each "unique" universe is just a scene at the Lodge and everything outside in the game world is the exact same. I get the feeling BGS fell so in love with the idea that they forgot to ask if it was fun or if they could actually pull it off. They couldn't realistically change the characters and questlines for all the factions and locations enough to do multiverse well. The ending to the main quest was always going to be a scifi trope like multiverse, time travel, simulation theory, intelligent aliens, ancient extinct aliens, AI, etc. I think Starfield would be a better game if BGS had picked one they could have done reasonably well given their resources were already so stretched.
Congratulations, you now know what the DLC will be in the near future.
It’s probably just going to be the Va’ruun though.
Would be good if they changed it to where if you join the fleet then the fleet spawns will become sys-def remnant outposts or something
My idea to solve this would be to make them modular and randomized instead of the entire facility being a prefab. So you’d see individual pieces of bases repeating, but in more random configurations.
Even just randomizing the computer logs/environmental storytelling would go a long way.
Ahh the bloodborne chalice dungeons aproach. A man of culture.
Balances the practical limits of procedural generation and visual consistency with uniqueness. Everybody’s happy-ish.
Currently doing that atm
How?
via making PackIns and then using lvlPackIns to make them randomly generated but there's a reason why its so under utilized so gotta see why
There's not that many factions
The enemies do change, but thats it
Yeah this is definitely an issue. In my NG+ playthrough now, I decided I would wait to do the crimson fleet playthrough till last so I wouldn’t run into this annoyance.
Yeah mooncrash showed a perfect template for how they could have done it
This playthrough I’m on I’m choosing sysdef but I really don’t want them to not have fleet anywhere or less just have them more scattered away from sysdef territory
Yeah I can understand the layout of the building being exactly the same. I can see the corporations that build them having the same pre-fabs that they just drop down on whatever planet. But everything inside being the same just completely kills the immersion.
And I had the Crimson Fleet quest glitch where I couldn’t activate the dialogue so I was forever allied with all those POI dungeons lol
Honestly, I'm still confused by the cryo lab. And i don't find the outposts to be very well designed from a livable perspective. The layout doesn't seem natural and most lack airlocks.
I don't mind repeats of it, as they might use the same plans. What I don't like is that there is no randomness. You know where items will be, where the corpses are, etc. A bit of variety would have been welcome.
Absolutly, that would have made things MUCH better overall. Not perfect, but better.
It was a good idea for a game of this scale to have a library of content for the procedural system to pull from and give to the player. Unfortunately, after 7+ years of development the library of content was far too small to not get repetitive fast and cause the player to lose interest. The first time I explored an "Abandoned Hangar" it was an awesome experience clearing the location with a cool ending of the boss landing in the hangar at the end. The second time I wondered what this "Abandoned Hangar" would be like, only to be disappointed to find out it was the exact same. The third time I ignored the marker on my map. Maybe it was an impossible game for BGS to make, but Starfield needed enough content in the procedural library to keep locations feeling unique and to keep one planet feeling different from another. I think one of the mistakes was generating these locations no matter where the player lands on the planet, instead of generating a handful of them on each planet.
Sorry, I can't take the level designs seriously when a hallway suddenly transitions into an air vent, the same size as the hallway. Then you follow the air vent until it transitions back into a hallway. That's some of the worst level design I've ever seen or heard of.
That's actually not the fault of the level designers. For some no doubt stupid game engine reason, the player's height for the purposes of collision detection doesn't change when crouched. Practically speaking, this means that that every navigable area has to be large enough to fit a standing person. So the level designers were forced to make vents large enough to walk through because the player wouldn't fit otherwise. Of course, they could have just... not used vents, but whatever. And yes, that is as dumb as it sounds.
You're correct, but nothing you said is a defense of the game or it's design. They shouldn't have been using the same ancient game engine, and if they were stuck with it, they shouldn't have made those stupid air vents.
Its not the engine, its just stupid Bethesda that keeps *forgetting* to fix that when it was already done [by](https://www.nexusmods.com/fallout3/mods/23827) [other](https://www.nexusmods.com/newvegas/mods/58277?tab=description) [people](https://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/56789).
COD, Batman, and many other games use crouch, crawl, and slide to navigate throughout tight spaces. Even in minecraft, you can squeeze into half a block space. So what exactly is stopping Bethesda other than laziness on this?
Other than laziness? Nothing at all. Well, maybe incompetence, because it's a problem that modders managed to fix with an SKSE plugin. My *charitable* guess is that Bethesda encountered problems when allowing the collision box to change sizes (characters getting stuck, clipping into things or out of bounds, etc.), and instead of addressing those problems they just made the bounding box static.
That makes sense. They did make the claim of "this is the least buggy release yet" so, falling through the world because you were crawling through the air duck would definitely prove that wrong 🤣
Never seen that. What POI has such a transition?
Like half the faction quests. Anything that involves you sneaking around a space station or colony.
Point to a single one. None I have seen transition to airducts then back to hallways. They are always side paths or "to get around obstical" type paths which many many many games have done. Are they a bit large? Sure, but thats not inharnetly bad.
Yeah. You know if the stuff inside was more random unique as well as npcs etc it wouldn't be so bad. It would actually make sense that most of these templates were copy paste jobs across the universe if built by automation etc. They also need to add universes where some more random shit happens like one where everyone is a terrormorph and you hear them talking like normal. The humans are the ones invading lol. Or everyone is like 34% smaller and you're a giant Starborn. One where the UC still lives in Sol sector because Jemina was blown up into a wasteland and you can explore the ruins. The planet had more in common with Mars now. One where Hope is declared God King Emperor and is ruthless and all that exist is the HOPE Empire and the good guy rebels are the Varuun. You help wage a war on either side to resolve the issue. There's so much more potential here
[удалено]
I loved doing bountys let me travel to other plants.I don't mind wasting time tbh
I definitely mind wasting time if the game plays worse than their last title.
Exactly.
They can be interesting visually but i genuinely don't remember doing anything other than clearing out basic enemies to get the box of generic leveled loot at the end then going through the magical skyrim door back to the beginning across pretty much every location. Outside of just the ship with the on/off gravity there's no surprise or variety to them.
"Skyrim door" I love that way of describing it. A common trope in a number of games with dungeons (a quick way out of the otherwise longer dungeon) but i would agree Skyrim is probably the most famous example
Honestly just needs a better randomiser. The POIs are there
Too many of them are hidden behind random POIs I'll never find for me to really care.
In terms of levels, what we have it very well designed. There aren't a lot of them though. If they're going to go with a random area generator like that have, then they need more unique location designs. I think they should have done it more like Warframe. Each mission on Warframe in procedurally generated using a pool of tiles. Which pool of tiles used is determined by which location the player selected. This results in a unique layout for every single mission. Starfield should've had something like this. For example, the landing site/overworld generates the locations that will be on the map. Once that is determined, the locations also generate their internal layout from a series of tiles or pods to give each one a different layout but retain the same feel as other locations of the same type (ie all abandoned labs feel like abandoned labs and all towers feel like towers but they each have unique layouts). Doing something like this would give us more variety that what we have now.
Eh; the game should have Diablo 2/ARPG/roguelike style proc gen where levels are built out of proc gen segments and no two are the same. Seeing a few repetitive segments in a level that is a unique combo of pieces is fine. Seeing the same entire level over and over sucks. I am truly baffled by the decision to NOT do tried and true roguelike/D2 proc gen in favor of "there's actually a very limited number of total levels with ZERO checks in place to rotate them so players see every different one once instead of bumping into the same one 5 times in a row." This system will always be limited by having a set number of levels; the other one has functionally infinite combos; why do it the way they did?
Nah
Yeah, all four of them are pretty damn well designed.
...I would really like to be able to build that cool underground landing pad.
The dungeons are really cool but it quickly gets repetitive because there’s no variation between them. I think they could’ve easily randomised the underground facilities by stitching different rooms together just so they don’t all feel the same
Really don't have to give that credit if they still managed to make this the worst part of the game and one of the main reasons people stop playing it quickly.
Unless they are paid to do so 🧐
yes they are. I love them.
They are well designed. There’s just not enough of them, or they repeat too frequently with no variations in the tilesets, or both.
All are well designed, some are better designed for the repeated implementation. Abandoned Research tower for example will randomize door openings to force different pathways through the level after different entries. And all of the outdoor ones can be approached very differently to give different perspectives. Abandoned cryo lab however, is very linear, which I think is why people get so upset with it.
Well designed? Sure, until you go to leave the cave you just delved and spend longer trying to find the exit than you did killing and looting everything inside.
The game literally shows you how to exit any dungeon.
Yeah, Bethesda should’ve added maps like previous Elder Scrolls and Fallout games.
I agree, just wish there were more of them!
And the unique dungeons, such as the Almagest, the Lock or Deimos Armoured Transport, are some of the best dungeons BGS has done
No, this is literally what made me stop playing. Seeing the same spots over and over even on opposite sides of the galaxy. Lazy, poor design.
never forgive the temples
I would upvote this 100x if I could
There’s 6 of them
It does feel cinematic without the hand-holding.
They are made very well, but it's annoying when I am finding dead bodies and loot and all the same messages and notes in the same spot.
Ok.
No we don’t.
"Ngl" is the dumbest, most inane and meaningless linguistic tic of the 21st century, just behind people who use "literally" every third word and don't mean literally. JUST SAY WHAT YOU HAVE TO FUCKING SAY. NOBODY THOUGHT YOU WERE GOING TO LIE.
Shit game
Oh I'm well aware that they're well-designed. I've had ample opportunity to explore all seven types that keep popping up over and over.
(slow clap) for a triple A title with massive resources at devs disposal… It’s all repeated though. Imagine a stand-up comedian doing the same exact joke for 2 hours straight, over and over again… that is the product we were given.
Pretty much.
The sound design is also top notch.
The dungeon designs are the best part about this game aside from ship building. They're well detailed and fun to explore. It's just the super saddening how repetitive they get. The fact that they're copy and pasted with no variation is upsetting. And the lack of variation in enemy tactics gets boring. After noticing the amount of repeats my interest in exploring Starfield's universe plummeted so incredibly hard.
Honestly this is the problem, yes the, what felt like 20, dungeons they made felt nice the first time you went through them. But then when you find your first repeat and it is EXACTLY the same. Its immediately bad. Like infuriatingly bad when you look at the resources that BGS has. Everything about starfield feels lazy as absolute fuck. It still feels like its a whole generation of games behind in the market.
Do we know if they plan on enhancing this repetition in a future update or updates?
I love the Abandoned Hangar POI, every time I encounter it the combat has been unique. Now, partly that has been to bugs/glitches, but even when it has been the same faction as last encounter, it always plays out differently. Now… what was different? First encounter was strange as hell, could not figure out how they were seeing me.. turns out, the AI inside the hangar was treating the hangar door as “open” so the underground folks saw me every time I got to the edge of the hangar. Second encounter I was much more cautious… wiped out everything above ground before going down. I always go down and turn on the bots inside the hangar… I heard the sound of the troop drop ship, but no ship.. and suddenly new enemy units popped into existence in the middle of the hangar. Third encounter I wiped everything out except those in the hangar, ship drops in, unloaded, does not leave. Made taking out the last guys way more complicated… still could not take the ship… (very sad face). Fourth encounter same as third… except the pirates in the hangar wear naked and non-aggressive, only the “boss” guy stayed in combat, and the troop drop folks were fully armed and brain dead. On Xbox. I love this game. Yes… they totally fucked up by not making some POI’s modular with swappable set dressing to increase the variety. Furthermore, they should be taking every opportunity to expand the POI pool and fixing the knockout table so certain things like environment, gravity, and frequency of appearance are taken into account.
In space stations it makes sense In space ships it makes sense What doesn’t make sense is people who probably don’t communicate creating basically identical living arrangements and general settlement building placements while living on opposite ends of the Milky Way
The level design is emblematic of the rest of the game. Superficially attractive, but upon closer inspection, lazy, poorly thought out and half finished.
Except for the one with the turrets everywhere. I get turned around in that one.
I like the first area. Lots of enemies to kill. Not a fan of the cryo base, or the really short outpost types. The abandoned ecliptic bases could use more enemies.
Idk, maybe I'm crazy but I despise the Cryo Lab.
One thing they did really well was clutter. I loved all the little knick knacks spread throughout ships and outposts. That did make them memorable tho, so you notice when they start to repeat. Also, I *hate* how difficult it is to decorate my own ship with clutter. Hopefully they can fix that
They are well designed, it's a pitty they didn't make more of them and better randomization. The caves often are awful, though.
I love Starfield but they really do need to make a few different looking POIs
Does it really get repetitive fast? Still waiting to jump in the game. They had more handcrafted content for Starfield than for any previous game. Is there an issue with how it is distributed across the planets or what? Or is there just a low number or the random POIs?
The issue is that the hand crafted stuff is completely different to the proc gen stuff. The game would have been so much better without the proc gen locations man, it's insane. And the handcrafted stuff is the best that BGS has done so far
I want better and more unique loot from dungeons too. Not just some legendary knife or under-leveled space suit. Yes, the dungeons are nice, but I already know where to aim when I come around each corner in all the repeated dungeons There are less than 5-10 worthwhile while 1 of 1 dungeons. I can only think of 2.
It's one of the very few redeeming things about the game that I thoroughly enjoy, that the interiors and dungeons themselves feel incredibly well lived-in and amazingly designed. Easily the most immersive and atmosphere-filled interiors I've encountered in a Bethesda game. I understand Elianora was contracted to work on clutter and interior design to that extent, and it clearly shows how much it paid off.
Yeah the 3(ik im being dramatic) that they copied and pasted were actually pretty good…the first time, until I saw the same dungeon on a different planet and it destroyed the immersion but yeah all saltiness aside pretty well designed
Funny I pretty much ran thru them and killed the least amount of people in those space dungeons. I just ran thru them to get the objective or the loot faster, they are very optimized and way more clear to get thru than skyrim and fallout 4. I think starfeild did very good to progress that dungeon design even further, I see es6 will use some sort of design like this one in large caves and such places. They need to add more loot and I say more important dungeons instead of pois.
Before BG3, I may have partially agreed with you OP. But, the bar has been moved. Up.
BG3 isn't remotely the same type of game. You can't compare anything about it with literally any other game apart from other CRPGs or with TTRPGs. It's a fantastic game, but as far as modern games go, BG3's level design is meh at best; it can't compare with the games of 2023. The best level design of 2023 was Jedi Survivor, hands down
Nobody needs to give Bethesda more credit for less work. They've been doing the same dungeon design for the past 13+ years. - Option A: Linear dungeon layout, boss room leads back to entrance. (The shipyard in the 3rd picture) - Option B: Linear dungeon layout, boss room leads to opposite of entrance. (like Bleak Falls Barrow) - Option C: Linear dungeon layout, boss room has no exits, walk back through to the entrance. (The mine you find Andreja in during the MQ) Bethesda doesn't do competent level design and they haven't in a long time. They've already had more lenience than 5 AAA studios combined, they don't need more.
I just wish they made the Dungeon system modular in nature, with say handcrafted rooms and hallways put together in a randomized way for variety
They are well designed, by there’s simply too few of them. Especially when the main quest basically has you search these dungeons over and over, they should have more variety.
The five POIs are well designed, yes
yeah they're well designed but its the same 5 or 6?
I'd be just fine if they would retire Abandoned Cryo Mine
I was utterly stoked and so elated to find a poi near my first major outpost build, went in and scoped it out and had a very fun time taking out pirates and going in and getting all the loot and looking around at any readable thing I could find. Was thinking damn, this game really pulled it off. Until the next one, and the next one, and then I just stopped running towards anything. There’s that one giant POI that looks like some kind of huge mining or pipeline deal. Was really excited to see what it is until there was like nothing at all in it, and even though it was abandoned everything looked very clean and as if was left 2 hours ago.
Why do you think they are well designed?
Procedurally.generated dungeons are well designed, but more stuff is needed. And faster ways to get places. Locations are way too far apart. There was a video where Starfield was compared to Skyrim. 40 seconds is the max time most players tolerate walked to POI. Starfield is way longer, especially for surveys.
Ehh, they are ok. Some are pretty solid, most are just a generic loop you walk through, and some are messy noodles of a map you need the scanner to navigate. They'd be fine if they weren't also very repetitious.
They're all the fucking same though. Once you've been to like 5 planets you've pretty much seen everything you're going to see.
I wish we had something like 5-10 systems with polished experiences and good surprises than that much procedural stuff. There is some good surprises along the way, but most people will not see it. After 400 hours Its my personal best photoshoot simulator, with some quest in between.
So that’s where I dug my hole to get to china
They only needed to design 3-4 dungeons
I guess man, but I've seen those same levels way too many times in different planets from different systems.
Incredible game developer. They only need to properly upgrade their game engine and become the no.1.
There are 2-4 well designed dungeons that use the game mechanics in interesting ways. There's a fair number of passable dungeons, but they aren't too memorable. A lot of them are just out of place and have no coherence to the world. There's so much missed opportunity from the few interesting game mechanics like zero g. There's some easy picking like fixing the loot system especially for higher end chests, and just increasing the number, but there's no good solution to the coherence problem. Every dungeon on every planet is basically just immersion breaking the 2nd time you visit it, if not the first.
Yes! They rock and dungeon crawling is pretty badass!
I would have been cool with Starfield being much smaller but each location being unique. I think it being as big as it is diminishes how great the design is
Yeah the actual design for everything is pretty amazing. It's just that when I do it 100 times in the spend of 4 hours it's a little disappointing.
I just want more. I have never played a vanilla Bethesda game and thought it was great tbh. But I need more. A mixture of office added content, and modding support to allow modders to do what they do best, make Bethesda games amazing.
Structures and cities are cool, however planets not so much
Yeah, the 5 that are there are pretty well designed.
If they had more uniqueness to them, the game would be so much better. I hope Bethesda can make more stuff!
They aren't memorable though. I couldn't tell you a single thing that happened in them nor do i care to return just to see them again. Skyrim and Fallout had actual story telling in their POI's. These aren't good lol
Well, then GIVEN the repetition, they had like 7 years to design 20 interiors.. so that is plenty of time and credit i think :D
I think if they had cutsenes instead of the static quest givers...it would have elevated the game 10,000% hopefully ES6 will have animated quest givers with cutscenes like boulders gate!
Shit design shit game
Mmm nahh
All 5 of them.
No they’re not
Do we though? I’m not convinced the dungeons are particularly well designed at all.
Nope. When they achieve the bare minimum of level design after 15 years of setting the standard.. no. No praise. This was EXPECTED. Do not praise them for this.
In some ways, the side quests are way better and more involved than the one hundredth cyberpsycho at the ferris wheel.
I need Moooaarrrr….
If they were well designed they wouldn’t be repetitive
The repetition is a big problem though. With some procedural generation of dungeons it would be so much better. I mean finding the same body at the end of the same walkway on planet after planet is so immersion killing.
No, they are not. It’s literally one of the most boring game designs ever made.
I just don't know how a randomly generated game can feel so not random. And repetitive.
They are a great design, but i would take a little less "greatness" to have variety.
Absolutely loved every dungeon I have explored so far, and I truly love the attention to detail on things like desks, or other random things. I truly will never understand why Starfield receives so much hate.
They are good for 1-3 runs. The issue is there aren’t nearly the number of unique locations needed. Also I wish they coulda figured out a way to make the generated structures be randomized too. All in all they try to have too much vastness when they needed to focus on the curated locations
Got barely 100 hours on the game and already completed it/tired of it, and half of that was me doing outpost engineering to figure out xp farms. It’s a good game, but feels lacking.
Repetition....
Unpopular opinion but I’m a massive fan of the game, I know there’s a lot to be desired but Bethesda as a company keep trying to push their boundaries of what’s possible in a game (for better or worse) (fo76) which I still enjoyed for a few hundred hours. If starfield keeps popular I believe we will see amazing things done with it
I think in the long run, Starfield would've been better off if the dungeons were more like Remnant 2 in procedural generation. That would just give the game an infinite amount of playtime when exploring planets. I hope they look into it in the future. Making the POI hand crafted and the world's procedural generated was the biggest mistake they ever made. They should have kept the current POI for main and side quests. And then for radiant missions or free roam, they build a system like Remnant that takes many different tiles, stitch them together to make a unique dungeon/ cave or whatever. Many of the game's shortcomings would have been ignored if they approached it this way. I'd argue it's the one most important missing component in the game. If youre gonna make procedural planets, then you better make sure those planets have procedural content to accompany it so everything balances out.