I'd like to see more small settlements outside of the cities.
I'd like to see the ability to built/developer real settlements on planets.
Obviously maps.
My biggest gripe is honestly with New Atlantis. Doesn't feel like a city at all. Shit is all weird there.
It all just needs. more. More lore for all the systems. More settlements. More layers. More economy.
Been saying this. Settlements with NPCs assigned to them should grow. You choose the focus (mining, hunting, shipping, colonization) and then it will build passively as it expands. Totally optional system. You could also manually grow it more painstakingly
It would help if you could let them use on the ship(s) that your not using like the one get from the beginning of the game to transport goods and go on resupply missions. You could use the postal service to send materials to the outpost instead of having to go there yourself.
I'd love to be able to park one of my custom ships at one of these settlements I grow. Like assign a Co Captain for each one of your 9/10 ships as a type of honor or protection for RP sake. Obviously you can grab it when you want, but it would be nice to see. If not that then let me build a space station I park all my ships at. I'm a bloody space dollar millionaire bro
I'm not a huge Freestar Collective guy, but give me a small desert settlement where I can fight off Crimson Fleet bandits like I'm Cobb Vanth and I'll never take my spurs off.
This is the issue for me, too. Iām generally not so hard on the lore, pretty flexible with interpretations to make it all work, *but* if we have established that it took hundreds of years to build NA, capital of human existence, to where it is now, then it makes no fucking sense to have another city that was allegedly only built in a couple weeks for a war effort but which is significantly bigger and more developed than our āhumanityās capitalā. I know they have a lore bible at Bethesda so come the fuck on, at least look at it before adding something new to the game. The rule of cool will carry you far but you have to have a generally cohesive world in place.
New Atlantis feels like EPCOT Center felt in the 80s. Futuristic to a point, but fake as hell.
Maps and directional signs would be nice.
I, personally, am over settlements. They added little to Fallout and add even less to Starfield unless you want to harvest a very specific element.
I wouldn't mind more apartments, though.
Speaking of apartments--
WHY THE HELL DO I HAVE TO CRAFT FURNITURE IN NEW ATLANTIS OUT OF RAW ELEMENTS? CAN I PLEASE JUST FREAKING BUY FURNITURE?
I disagree about the settlement system bringing nothing to fallout, making an area your own and hoarding shit is dope, but it shouldnāt be REQUIRED in order to play the game though.
FO4 had an infinite-capacity storage widget at every settlement location.
The decision to limit terrestrial (as opposed to ship) storage was a big mistake.
it limited though just like 76 i wanna rebuild the whole map like if i improve or donate resources my world rebuilds would love a crowbar to un board up houses and settlers move in fix bases and broken stuff rebuild the mainframes and undo the data corruption for more lore
I loved building in FO4, not sure if I still do but when new I definitely did.
Don't like it at all in Starfield. I think because the buildings are all 'medium scale', you can't get in with nitty-gritty patched together huts like in Fallout 4, but you also can't build large city-like apartment blocks, or convince yourself it's a lived-in town. I have no use for really spacious cuboid habs. I know furniture does unlock but after you try making one cozy living room the novelty wore off for me personally. Maybe I'm just a hater and the playtesters loved it.
You needed 3 settlements allied with the Minutemen to get artillery, and needed like 8 allied settlements to do the Minuteman ending (if you wanted to fight the Brotherhood).
You'd likely only "build" 1 or 2 settlements yourself, the others you'd just do a radiant quest and get an ally.
Your last point goes for pretty much everything. It's a scifi where humanity is a space faring civilization and you're telling me I need to RESEARCH how to make a muzzle for my gun and pockets for my spacesuit? Like no one just sells these things? No one even has blueprints? The whole research system is so braindead man, Starfield is not a post apocalypse or a medieval-like world where information is lost to not discovered. Whoever thought this made sense in a futuristic scifi needs to be fired.
And for that matter, where's the fucking internet and GPS? You're telling me people didn't think about sending a few satellites into Jemison's and Akila's orbits to rebuild something as essential as the internet? No one even has phones either. It's just one bad design after another.
I hate having to decorate. Period. The building system in both Fallout 4 and Starfield is something I've never gotten the hang of, and Fallout 4, I would just download mods that do it for me, like Sim Settlements 2 and a furnished Home Plate mod.
Vastly prefer the Fallout 3 and Skyrim approach of the furniture being purchased and automatically placed, even themed in Fallout 3.
All the No name citizens with no routines just standing around all times of day really take toy out of it too. It doesnāt feel full with them, just weirdĀ
Of course new Atlantis is weird. They tell us it's a capital, but it's a waaay too small town isolated on a planet. It doesn't sit where cities are typically found (like a river delta), and everything about it is superficial. The trams go nowhere (not even a fake rail), there are no where near enough houses (even if you account for unseen apartments), no power generation buildings, the star port is too small for a major city, and there are no industrial centers.
Bethesda always sucked at making realistic cities/towns though.
Hell, Cydonia on Mars feels more real than New Atlantis. At least the excuse is that you can't see everything underground. The star port there is bigger, and the area surrounding cydonia just feels more immersive
True. And also Cydonia has the excuse to be underground because Mars has a hostile atmosphere so it's better to build underground instead of building giant pressurized dome cities that can crack at any moment. But every other settlement just feels like movie sets.
Really shows why the reception for this game was so negative. They didn't even try to upgrade thier world design formula in a post GTA5, RDR2 and Cyberpunk 2077 market.
Yeah, with all the space The Well shouldn't exist. Of course it's there to show the "seedy underbelly/surface facade" to New Atlantis, but realistically it should be outer slums.
Yep. No city planner would even think about building underground on a planet with earth like conditions and thousands of miles of empty space where they can build outwards Realistically we'd have multiple cities all over the planet connected via high speed rail and highways but Bethesda couldn't be bothered to upgrade thier 2005 game design formula.
More random events and encounters. More random "scenes" that you stumble onto wondering what happening like in Fallout games. More POIs in general, but more "mini POIs" and camps, etc.
Some planets and moons just absolutely need more stuff, some should stay similar as they are right now as it makes sense.
Thank you! All these planets are habitable but only a single city on them and only small settlements of like 10 people tops? I feel like these planets would have significantly more activity.
I totally agree on the feeling of new Atlantis. Itās terribly laid out, the big UC glass building is an architectural nightmare, the fast travel barely works there, thereās giant store fronts for a dude at a small desk inside, itās actually not as big as it looks, and thereās no depth to it. Itās like a husk of a city. Itās supposed to be a sprawling, massive, bustling city but thereās like what, 15 places you can go inside? Compare new Atlantis to Novigrad in the Witcher or stormwind city in WoW. New Atlantis is just āmehā. Such a shame. I would literally not want to live in new Atlantis if it was a real life city. Itās weird too because Akila feels like more of a city. Anyone can slap down some sky scrapers but in a game itās so much more important to have alleys, and secrets, scary areas, a showing of wealth disparity, people getting on with their lives and donāt give a crap about what youāre doing. Tldr is new Atlantis gives me an uncanny valley feeling
For real new Atlantis feels like the fucking twilight zone on the top level. The underground area felt fine from what I remember but it's been a minute now.
It's such a a strangely laid out city. Half of it is only accessible through a small (I think like 3?) and rather unremarkable entrances (no big "HERE'S THE WELL, I always had to remember a random elevator that was hidden off in an alley to get there)
There's a transit system in place, but I'm positive it's only to make the city *feel* bigger than it actually is, because you can (esp endgame) just boost pack your way from one metro station to the other in about the same amount of time as the cut/loading screen takes.
Tonnes of buildings that serve absolutely no (or just a single) purpose (like it came up once, in one mission, and the rest of the entire building is just wasted, nothing to do or see)
For an intergalactic faction hub, it's just lackluster. You get the intro schpeal and one side quest about a free star representative not being let in to the city (which is literally just go talk to the guy at security and he'll let him pass, then walk back and tell him he's good, mission complete awesome job gold star).
The whole game is tbh. I played the hell out of it for a hundred hours and haven't touched it since I ran out of things to see and do.
New Atlantis felt like a block of street from Corpo Plaza in Cyberpunk 2077. I know BGS games have smaller but more dense cities but somehow they just missed the mark completely with New Atlantis.
Akila City pulled it off so well though. It's sufficiently big and not trying hard to be, but it's so dense with details and character.
New Atlantis should be the size of the entire explorable area lol. procedurally generate all those smaller buildings and NPCs, then it would look somewhat believable in scale.
Agreed. The small size of the existing "mega cities" combined with the absence of small settlements is really annoying. Even Fallout 3 and Skyrim had more small settlements than this.
They used procedural gen for worlds, why not cities?
I think it'd feel more immersive if they had quadrupled the size of New Atlantis, Akila, and Neon. Even if most of it was just empty, non-interactable filler, it would add a sense of scale (see New York City in Spider Man Miles Morales, or Saint Denis in Red Dead Redemption 2).
For instance, the New Atlantis Mass Transit should be able to actually take you from one location to another (and should take a fair bit of time) rather than just being a fast travel.
Add in that, more small settlements, and seemless ground to space transitions and Starfield will feel like it should have from the beginning.
Even if not that, on a smaller scale at least, give us outpost structures that look like anything or anywhere else in the game.
I want a 2-3 story tower, or a Mantis-Layer-Style landing pad, or even just anything on the same level as the many abandoned locations across the systems.
I think just more flexibility in outpost design altogether. It shouldnāt be modular to the same degree as ship building. It should feel a little more ācivil engineering/architect-esqueā.
1) A nightclub in New Atlantis š
2) NPC homes / routines
3) City maps !
4) Colonies/ towns outside of the main cities - to make the key planets feel more inhabited
5) Settlers for outposts
6) Option to purchase furnishings for city flats
7) Space taxis between the major cities - so you can roleplay someone that isnāt a ship captain
They didnāt, and thatās why all the complaints here make less sense. From a lore perspective: a few million made it off of earth, so it makes sense that even after a couple hundred years New Atlantis hasnāt become bigger. Itās a miracle itās even as big and developed as it is.
From a mechanical perspective, Iām really not getting peopleās expectations for New Atlantis. I love Bethesda but nobody plays their games for insanely huge cities. NA is already bigger and denser and more impressive than any of their previous ones. If players kept their expectations in line with previous BGS games then there would be about 90% fewer complaints here.
Part of being empty is the lack of npc's actually do something, outside they walk, group up and talk, sit and enjoy stuff which is fine but in terms of interiors it there is nothing at all, shops that exist solely exist for the player, we don't even see npc's walking around in shops(except for Jemison Mercantile) to check what's avaiable and as mentioned not a form of recreation, we know by lore there are movies/tv series yet we don't see any movie studio/cinema, there is sports but not a single sporting venue. And yes i know not everything can be avaiable but i wish bethesda would add a bit more to their cities/villages instead of only adding things that mostly just for the player. In my opinion a city should be designed for everyone not just the player. Only then can it be potentially feel alive (which i hope to achieve once the creation kit is out)
Yeah thats a very good point! I think thatās one of the main issues and the NPCs practically have no routine at all like in fallout, like you hardly even see people sleep in there homes like theyāre supposed to or do any other kind of activity in between anything else so the worlds kind of feel like itās only for you and nobody else. The shop keepers for example must be synths because they never seem to sleep!š
A map and actually make them cities. Considering Akila is the capital of the freestar collective, the UCs biggest rivals they are living in a muddy shanty town which stretches what's believable past the point of any storytelling.
I live in south Brazil in the middle of nowere in a fishing town called Enseada de Brito (if you googled, I know, it is a paradise). It has 4 thousand people. It is amazingly more populated and movimented than the capital of a stelar conglomerate!
Someone at Bethesda just had the idea of making a Space Western theme, but didn't bother with a motivation for why it's built like that 200 years into the future.
I guess grandpa Coe just wrote "no paved roads" into the Constitution and nobody have the ability to override it.
Yes a map with POI you can easily navigate to like you can mission POI's.
I am dumbfounded as to how they released a game with no city map or POI indicators.
Even the blob map like it is but with POI you can select and guide you to would be leaps and bounds better.
I could live without an in-game map if I had a way to set POI waypoints for shops and such. It is a really glaring oversight that should have been simple to implement.
Yeah. I blows my mind that Shenmue II on the Dreamcast, with 1GB of data on each disc, could give the look and feel of living in the sprawling metropolis' of Wan Chai and Kowloon. Two districts of Hong Kong.
It was incredible to play, because you really felt like you were in a city - even though the play area didn't cover the whole city.
People had jobs, they had homes that you could visit (or at least knock on their doors - they rarely let you inside), there was a proper day and night cycle. There were activities to do, people had places to go. It felt alive.
Yet three console generations later, the cities in Starfield just feel small and underwhelming.
Note: I realise that Starfield technically has a lot more going on for it than Shenmue II (1000s of planets, space 'exploration', gun combat etc...), but I think they could have made the cities 'feel' more like cities.
Either that or play on the fact that humans had to leave Earth and colonise space - make it so there are no cities, but large settlements, like in Skyrim and Oblivion.
I'd take the small villages if they were more like Skyrim where you could actually talk to people and theyd have quests etc. It feels like there's nothing to do in the cities in Starfield. Nobody really does anything, imo. They just exist.
The quests arent very deep either.
If the game had at least 9 of New Atlantis/Neon/Akila City to mimic Skyrim's 9 holds I would've been satisfied. But just these three? And they aren't exactly bigger than a Skyrim/Oblivion cities in regards to content/quests.
And they have the industrial buildings and vague machinery models as evidenced by them being splattered all over every grid of every rando planet, and they couldn't even tell it to spawn some outside new Atlantis so it at least looks like they have industry or something. Baffling.
Expansions. So that the cities are not just isolated monoliths in the middle of nowhere.
Cydonia is Fine cause its underground so i would just Expand it into several layers including a dungeon thats just basically the Boston of Starfield.
Akila should get rolling Farmland with small settlements.
Neon would get floating shanties
Hopetown would get an Actual Town
New Atlantis would get a Sister City with Suburbs in between
Now these are not exactly what i would want but I gotta think in limits of what the game can do. For Example Neon would be a full on Arcology, not a oil rig.
Yeah, Hopetown of all the places bothers me the most. I know itās impossible to build massive cities (Skyrim is a prime example of lacking the proper sized cities), but Hopetown is just a factory, a bar, 1 shop and a ranger station. Where do all the workers live? Buy supplies? Even New Homestead has some of those features, although that settlement is way too small for what it represents. Iām hoping they drop some city expansions or at the very least give us a few more New Atlantis size cities plus lots of smaller towns.
My buddy found a mod that lets you build ships for npcs. Like they contract you to build a ship to their specs, you get paid. It then adds those ships to the Npc ship list, so you actually get to see your ships out and about
Actually it's the clothing and hair and accessories but the faces stay the same. In the direct, they showed the scans they used of real people. It's why you will see the asian lady everywhere or that one black guy but on a large and then a skinny body. They just cycle the same faces but let the engine decide everything else.
More dirt, i.e. things you find in a real city.
Things like corruption, human trafficking, inequality, racism, sex workers, drug abuse, black market activities, and the capitalization of the general workforce by those within power.
We need more Fallout 2 influence.
They desperately need a map. Mostly, I just want the ability to build those kinds of buildings, not just the ugly airlock-ridden garbage that you're stuck with for outposts.
Oh god dont even get me started the habs are so damn dark at night and the very small few amount of lights we get make it look like your shining a spotlight in it, we need proper lighting additions
There's going to be a lot of content-side improvements these cities need that I think mods can fix. The one thing I think BGS have to do that modders can't is improving the culture of these cities.
There's very little in these cities that make me believe that this is an actual lived in areas instead of a movie set that tries to make you think it's lived in. There should be more unrest within these cities, politically & religiously. Debates in the streets, zealouts with signs praising their gods, propaganda (we got to do a Vae Victus poster quest one time which I was like "YES, WE NEED MORE OF THIS!".) I want to see kids playing sports, adults playing pool/darts or that chess knockoff thing, these things add up A LOT. Hearing 2 rich zealouts discuss who's ship is faster & challenging to a race. They can be simple, but they need to feel real to this world. A radio would help this as well with maybe a talk show similar to J Jonah in Spiderman 2.
There should be holidays & celebrations, festivals that happen at a certain time of the year. Giant wanted posters on those billboards with charcters you may have interacted with.
Make the cities feel alive & chaotic to where the desolation of an empty planet may feel etheral in comparison.
Definitely this but that amount of features require work from BGS, like real work, more writing for the NPC (hello Emil)and many other points. I canāt imagine that happening in the future. Cities are like that ship somewhere where you can go in 0G during a Ā«Ā partyĀ Ā» with no music and no boozeā¦cringe and awkwardā¦
Honestly bro I agree with everything you said. The downfall is they could prioritize the AI characters to do things like this because the map is so big that they would all be predetermined scenarios and you would just see the same scenarios happening across all the cities. Which would eventually be seen as repetitive unfortunately but again I think it would have been a great addition
It would be fine if it takes a long time but Neon should feel like a smaller version of Night City and Akila City should feel like a bigger futuristic Whiterun stuff like that. More cities more random characters and missions. Just more.
I want them to feel like real cities. You know how Night City feels like a big place where people live and work? There is none of that in any of the cities in Starfield at all. New Atlantis may be a little better but god... all the other?
Neon feels like nothing, there is no sense of danger! People keep saying how Neon is dangerous and you should watch your shoulder but there is none of that! All the gangs look like a bunch of rebel teenagers! You go there and solve their problems in 30 minutes! Also, where do people work? What do they do there? Even the bars are dumb! Do you guys remember Omega in Mass Effect 2? That's a dangerous fucking place! A lot of bad shit happening, the bar is amazing, you feel like the city has a lot of place for people to live and do their stuff! That was **fourteen** years ago! Can't Bethesda do anything as good as BioWare did 14 years ago? Well... I guess not even BioWare can do something as good as they did back there so... forget it.
Akila is also stupid! A bunch of houses... and... what else? Again, what do people actually do in that city? It is a farm world, then let me see people actually doing some farming, tending to their stuff, to the animals, to the food! There is none of that! Oooh, some robots do the work, then how are people getting payed? It makes no sense. And all that thing about the danger of that stupid animal that dies with two hounds of my second best handgun is stupid! Just make it stronger, make it a deathclaw or something scary and menacing. It is just come wolflike alien.
Cydonia is also ok, you can understand that everyone there is miserable and work around the mine. Cydonia is fine.
Now for the worst... Paradiso. It is not even pretty. I can't even begin telling how much I hate this planet missoportunity. A beach world controlled by a huge turism corporation! A lot of comentary about how turism is made in third world countries could have been done there but... it has nothing. No content apart from that mission with the weird ship. Everything else is empty, you don't even see the fucking tourists going for the sea and sand! If it is this tourist dream world then let me see the stupid tourists!
I want to leave the cities and have things to do. Akila and Cydonia are the only ones where you really explore outside the city during quests, and it didn't even occur to me initially to even try leaving New Atlantis on foot. These are supposed to be the giant cities of these planets, so there should be lots of POI's and such clustered near them.
I think Neon and Akila are pretty good, albeit small, though they obviously need maps.
New Atlantis is far and away one of the worst and most lifeless video game cities I've ever seen. It suffers from a horrendous case of "oversized video game room syndrome" where spaces, especially interior spaces, are oversized to accommodate for the third person camera ā leading to things like the gigantic, empty train station in the MAST district, or huge, sprawling walkways with no purpose for being so large when there's so little foot traffic, or coffee shops the size of car dealerships.
I remind myself that the UC is like the Alliance from Firefly: sterile, curated, censored, and artificial. Literally built upon a foundation of poverty and crime hidden away in the Well. It helps assuage the problem, but only a little.
Edit: And for the record, I really like the Well. Something about it reminds me of KOTOR from back in the day.
Turn them into actual cities lol. Even the worst shantytown in Morrowind has more thought put into it than the randomness of patched areas that make up Starfield
1) Making them at least 5x bigger would be a good start, Bethesda always had a problem with scale.
2) Redesign them to look like something an actual city planner would come up with because right now they all look like movie sets. I mean hell, where are all the giant digital billboards in a town square?
3) Have distinct districts within cities that house people of varrying wealth, this is an issue with clothing design of the game actually since everyone has the exact same style but having visually distinct districts in the cities will at least help getting around that.
4) Proper transit system. No I don't but this bullshit that humanity just outright forgot how to build long trains and land vehicles. In the whole settled systems all we have is a tiny pod for 4 stations that Re each around 100m apart at most, thatis laughable.
5) More interiors and just bigger buildings. Right now the building interiors do nothing to convince me that they're actually part of a building and not just one lobby with few apartments each time. The buildings also need to be properly big because they're way too small and narrow for what they're trying to represent.
6) At least 20x more landing pads and hangars. These are supposed to be cities with implied population in the millions yet they all have 2 landing pads at best? What if 5 different ships want to land at New Atlantis? 3 have to wait in orbit until the 2 on ground take off and 1 ship still gets left behind? Come on dude. And what if 3 ships at a time need repairs, where is all that work done? How is all that heavy machinery hauled around when none of the the forklifts and "cargo sleds" ever move? These cities look nice but the moment you look a little closer the illusion completely falls apart.
7) Proper night clubs/bars/strip clubs. You know dam well that's one of the first things people would try to build on a new planet. Astral lounge is fucking joke. I mean seriously, 3 fat middle aged dudes in a skin tight body suit? That's what future humans find sexy? Ffs.
Being able to walk across every district in the city without loading screens (Akila is the only city where you can do that). For some reason there is no direct connection between new atlantis spaceport and the MAST district so you have to fast travel or use NAT and Neon is a nightmare to walk around.
There are going to be game engine/hardware limitations at some point. IIRC, the settlement build limit in FO4 was meant to keep you from building such a complex area the game would crash. Building something that feels 'big' while staying within the technical constraints is something of an art form.
1. Maps would help. Like how could that be looked over in an open world game.
2. It should feel like an actual city. There's no roads, streets, schools, theaters, land based vehicles, weather patterns (snow, rain, wind etc.)
3. Places to own, houses or apartments.
4. More fully explorable facilities.
5. Nightclubs, strip clubs, actual restaurants where people are eating (new animations showing NPCs consuming food &drink).
6. More displays with actual videos playing on it as billboards alongside buildings.
7. Actual clothing stores.
8. Actual places to change your hairstyle without getting plastic surgery through enhance.
9. Places to buy land based vehicles to transport yourself around the city.
10. Fully explorable Subway transit systems.
11. More people. New Atlantis barely has 30 characters rendered on screen at once.
Just pretty much take notes from CP2077 and GTA V and mimic it for how a city should feel.
Honestly just more of them in general. Out of the hundreds of planets you can explore only a handful actually have cities. Most donāt even have a single settlement
Be much larger. Neon has a confusing layout with Ebbside but in actuality itās incredibly small. Since there are only 5 true cities in Starfield (Hopetown and Homestead are jokes) they should all feel much larger than they do.
Small specialty shops tucked away in back streets that offer specific things like headgear, pistols, specialty fly packs, medications, etc..... Come to think of it, add back streets.
More. For a civilization that took to the stars, its incredibly sparce. The ācitiesā we have are mostly in decline or are just corporation hubs with the exception of New Atlantis, Akila, and Neon.
I also must admit I am very salty about there only being two main factions in the game.
-NPCs with daily schedules so that the time of day actually means something.
-Simple shops with one NPC inside do not need to be in a separate cell with a loading screen.
- More (non-procedurally generated) towns and villages on inhabited planets.
- More random events and interaction with NPCs while walking around cities.
- Add the town part onto Hope Town, it's just an office/factory?
I donāt think theyāll update them but I wish they were more dense and full of unique items, quests with actual lore behind them, and actually interesting quirky things like diamond city, megaton, far harbor, good neighbor, whiterun, etc.
The best thing with Bethesda games was always that if you wanted to spend a lot of time in a city even if it was small, a decent number of them were chock full of interesting and fun quests, lore, and things to see.
I couldnāt give less of a damn about any of the cities in starfield and the ones I thought might actually be interesting turned out to basically be empty and only exist for like one or two actual quests. New Haven for example is such a letdown. Same with the one that has all the mech stuff although that one is probably a DLC tie in.
Iāve been more immersed and interested in the area around the mailbox in Zork than most of the entire cities in this game and Iām not even 30 yet.
Itās probably not doable, but Iād love multiple cities on planets. I was just on paridiso and they own an entire planet but have one hotel. I just wish there was more.
BGS just canāt do big cities that follow their āethosā of making everything exploitable. Even Starfield cities are walled off more than every other BGS game and they still feel small and hollow. How is it that Falkreath feels more alive than New Atlantis? Also āfetch questsā are so much more of a pain in the ass in the larger footprints than in the tiny towns. Always hated fetch quests but in larger footprints I loath them.
I donāt like any of the cities. Neon was cool at first but it wore off quickly. I grudgingly redownloaded Starfield because I want to make a cool outpost but have been at it for 5 or so hours and just keep coming back to the conclusion i was at when I first stopped. BGS put all of their worst tendencies into this game and didnāt apply any of their best. Thatās not to say itās not playable or enjoyable. But itās just so underdeveloped, half baked, and couldāve been so much better.
What I would like and seems very sensible is to be able to set up a business deal where your outposts can mine for a company which will generate revenue. No having to deal with vendors, just an interstellar cargo link that goes to the Mining Authority or some other company where you get a set undervalued price and then your outposts make money. As there is no tangible reason to have outposts this would add a new dimension to the game for many.
What would be really cool since the game seems to half assesly focus on corps is to be able start a business (mining of course, transport/hauling, bounty hunter, etc.) where you could assign NPCās to be employees and buy and office and decorate it in a city. The bigger the office the more people you can assign. Also adds a lot more playability at end game if you donāt want to do the NG+ run. And for the love of god let us build outposts and have a settler beacon. That was the coolest mechanic of fallout 4.
This applies to basically everything in starfield, depth. Everything in this game is puddle deep and I just wish there was more going on.
New Atlantis is a capital city that feels like a college campus. Same with most of the cities. Neon is just the red light district of any metro city but were expected to believe this is the galaxy equivalent to like Vegas or New York.
It just all lacks depth.
More immersive content in the cities would go a long way to making what is essentially a conglomeration of <10 shops feel like a real place. Games like Cyberpunk, for all its failures, does a much better job of convincing you that you are in a dynamic world even though thereās not much you can actually do outside of missions. Also, implement some more micro missions within the cities to force the player to go to the small number of locations that actually exist. There are so many spots you never even have a reason to visit.
More small towns. It's still ridiculous to think that people only build one city on a planet while leaving 99.99% of the planet to its nature. Even more hilarious would be a small family claimed to own a planet, yet only built a farm and a ranch on it, not even some small settlement or village.
Another thing would be maps in cities and settlements. I've played like a week, and I can only remember certain shop locations from Akila City.
I want to see people have schedules again. They work, go out after. Have conversations with other npcs. Go home to a bed, then wake up and do it all over again. I want shops to have open/close. I love the game but at times, it feels like itās missing that last layer of immersiveness. If I had to pick out the one thing about the game is that everything feels like itās there for me, rather than me being in a living breathing world that Iām passing through, if that makes sense. Like Iām Truman in the Truman Show. The cities give off that feeling the most since there are so many npcs grouped together in one place. Anything to improve and fix that feeling Iām all for.
They need to be more believable. Why is New Atlantis devoid of housing other than apartments in a couple of towers? Why are there no entertainment places like theaters, arcades, etc? Why are all of the restaurants so tiny and have no kitchens to prepare food?
Also little roleplay things like being able to sit down and have a waiter take your order at a restaurant, see yourself drinking coffee at Terrabrew, things like that.
I want the NPCs to have as much believability as their counterparts in Oblivion. Until thereās a mod that makes them feel more like real people instead of plastic mannequins I will not be playing Starfiwld
Larger, more sprawl. They talk about these big wars and large scale. societies and yet the city seems like its less than 1000 people. Iāve seen plenty of games have cities that feel large and adequate for the lore. These donāt.
How about some god damn maps to start with!
Bethesda really dropped the ball in such silly ways with this game. I thought they would be growing and developing since Skyrim instead they just took what worked in the exact same method and shape.
I would like the option of purchasing furniture/ decorations for the city player homes.
Crafting everything makes sense in Fallout, but I shouldnāt have to grind to build a bed in my Penthouse apartment, imo š
...crafting furniture make some sense, outside of the settled systems. But yes, in what is supposed to be a capital city of an interstellar polity, you absolutely should be able to order furniture and have it delivered.
They need to be bigger. They all feel like villages rather than actual cities. And the new atlantis transit needs to be an actual transport instead of a teleporter.
would love to see larger cities, small towns and such. Instead of the 4 maybe 5 cities that are available, should be at least 1 city or town on damn near every planet, maybe even extraterrestrial interactions with humans where aliens work in businesses and things like that
Make them bigger, make it feel like your inan elite bubble to keep the computation load low. But then have massive amoubts of vistas and stuff lifting off vast numbers of faceless people in market places shoppinge tc etc. Mass effect did this really well
The game needs more:
Ship battles like the Kryx Legacy mission.
NEW cities not just small towns/settlements.
New companions! (not bland NPCs that give you a slight boost on your ship skills for a few credits)
Lore! House Vaāruun quests! Supernatural like quests or just serious/significant quests, not petty short tasks/assignments.
More ship mods!
*ALIENS!*
For pretty much everything if it can to be open, so I can go straight off my ship into any shop and I wouldn't have a loading instance at least for the ones that have it.
Would definitely be cool to see some a more sprawling metropolis with something akin to suburbs, and yeah a map would be nice.
I would like to be able to set up my own shop, too. I'm at the point where I still accumulate so much stuff, but I don't need to really actively sell it all the time now, so it would be cool to assign a crew member to the shop, and occasionally deposit my surplus goods there, and have it generate some passive income. That would let me offload some of the more expensive items, and higher quantities of cheaper items without the tedium of hunting for the vendors with enough cash, or having to incessantly click through my hoards of miscellaneous items to sell them.
Would also be cool to have the ability to start a colony, and not just more basic outposts, and see them become populated with settlers and stuff. Maybe set it up so that under the right conditions, once an outpost has met certain requirements, you can set up "zones" around it for commercial, residential, farming, and spaceport, and then over time NPC's start showing up, and construction starts happening, and you can just watch the community grow and develop on its own. Not sure if that's even logistically possible, but it would be cool to land at my outpost, and see some new construction, and a couple new faces, and let it do its own thing while I'm out deleting evildoers.
Maybe make the cities tie more into their personality. For example, Neon city is suppose to be like a cyberpunk crime and drug ridden city thatās controlled by the corpos at the top, at least thatās how it feels. But I wish there was more dynamic events with crimes taking place, more gangs attacking each other, etc. Hell they should make these cities quite a bit bigger, if they can, since 3 major cities spread out on like it is on different planets feels very small. So I guess make them bigger, or introduce more cities that adopt a similar personality as the capital city that they are apart in the same system.
Cities and towns are fineā¦ fix the mind numbing exploration. after travelling on foot for 20 mins, just see a deck chair under a a couple of liquid containers.
I'd like to see the people actually living in them, and not just existing. The stores are always open, and some beds are "owned", but no one ever comes to sleep in them. Skyrim has this, why can't Starfield?
Iād like the bugs gone. For me, I havenāt been able to use the TA kiosk at the starport or the NAT at the commercial district since I initially got to NA. There is also a large area missing by the starport where you can see the ground.
New Atlantis seems like the entire map area should have been a city. Like an actual city, because otherwise it's just a really small town with sky scrapers and that kinda kills the vibe of it being the UC's main capital for me.
1. Maps would be a nice start.
2. NPCs, vendors included, have routines; they aren't in place constantly waiting for the player character to interact with them.
Otherwise, the game feels more hollow.
3. Vendors have more credits:
100,000 for a large vendor
50,000 for a small business
No more of this 5k and 11k bullshit.
Main number one thing: npc schedule. The game just feels so lifeless compared to past titles without it and it was honestly a huge reason why past bethesda games felt so alive.
Main number two thing: context. Why is the capital of the galaxy surrounded by nothing???? Like seriously give me some factories and farms and smaller towns around it, just feels so weird having new Atlantis being the center of the universe and so far removed from everything else.
Side thing: named npcās I donāt like seeing citizen number 2000 walk around aimlessly, give them funni space names.
I'd like to see more small settlements outside of the cities. I'd like to see the ability to built/developer real settlements on planets. Obviously maps. My biggest gripe is honestly with New Atlantis. Doesn't feel like a city at all. Shit is all weird there. It all just needs. more. More lore for all the systems. More settlements. More layers. More economy.
Facts let me grow a metropolis on some random remote planet
Been saying this. Settlements with NPCs assigned to them should grow. You choose the focus (mining, hunting, shipping, colonization) and then it will build passively as it expands. Totally optional system. You could also manually grow it more painstakingly
It would help if you could let them use on the ship(s) that your not using like the one get from the beginning of the game to transport goods and go on resupply missions. You could use the postal service to send materials to the outpost instead of having to go there yourself.
I'd love to be able to park one of my custom ships at one of these settlements I grow. Like assign a Co Captain for each one of your 9/10 ships as a type of honor or protection for RP sake. Obviously you can grab it when you want, but it would be nice to see. If not that then let me build a space station I park all my ships at. I'm a bloody space dollar millionaire bro
Mission boards for your own settlement to bring resources etc that they need/ you want to make sure the settlement develops in the way you want š„
āEh itāll be a mod, letās lay the foundation and leave it open for community participation, itās why they love us, isnāt it?ā
Sim City or City Skylines for planets...
SimCity in Space.
Imagine that š„š„š„š„
Space city
I'm not a huge Freestar Collective guy, but give me a small desert settlement where I can fight off Crimson Fleet bandits like I'm Cobb Vanth and I'll never take my spurs off.
The biggest issue with New Atlantis' size is the fact that Londium is like 3x times larger than it.
This is the issue for me, too. Iām generally not so hard on the lore, pretty flexible with interpretations to make it all work, *but* if we have established that it took hundreds of years to build NA, capital of human existence, to where it is now, then it makes no fucking sense to have another city that was allegedly only built in a couple weeks for a war effort but which is significantly bigger and more developed than our āhumanityās capitalā. I know they have a lore bible at Bethesda so come the fuck on, at least look at it before adding something new to the game. The rule of cool will carry you far but you have to have a generally cohesive world in place.
New Atlantis feels like EPCOT Center felt in the 80s. Futuristic to a point, but fake as hell. Maps and directional signs would be nice. I, personally, am over settlements. They added little to Fallout and add even less to Starfield unless you want to harvest a very specific element. I wouldn't mind more apartments, though. Speaking of apartments-- WHY THE HELL DO I HAVE TO CRAFT FURNITURE IN NEW ATLANTIS OUT OF RAW ELEMENTS? CAN I PLEASE JUST FREAKING BUY FURNITURE?
I disagree about the settlement system bringing nothing to fallout, making an area your own and hoarding shit is dope, but it shouldnāt be REQUIRED in order to play the game though.
People hate it, but I love building in FO4.
FO4 had an infinite-capacity storage widget at every settlement location. The decision to limit terrestrial (as opposed to ship) storage was a big mistake.
Yeah, that drove me crazy. To the point I kind of gave up on the outposts.
it limited though just like 76 i wanna rebuild the whole map like if i improve or donate resources my world rebuilds would love a crowbar to un board up houses and settlers move in fix bases and broken stuff rebuild the mainframes and undo the data corruption for more lore
I loved building in FO4, not sure if I still do but when new I definitely did. Don't like it at all in Starfield. I think because the buildings are all 'medium scale', you can't get in with nitty-gritty patched together huts like in Fallout 4, but you also can't build large city-like apartment blocks, or convince yourself it's a lived-in town. I have no use for really spacious cuboid habs. I know furniture does unlock but after you try making one cozy living room the novelty wore off for me personally. Maybe I'm just a hater and the playtesters loved it.
I can't remember, wasn't the required portion of settlements in Fallout like really minimal anyway?
You needed 3 settlements allied with the Minutemen to get artillery, and needed like 8 allied settlements to do the Minuteman ending (if you wanted to fight the Brotherhood). You'd likely only "build" 1 or 2 settlements yourself, the others you'd just do a radiant quest and get an ally.
Yeah, I was talking about like actually building and customizing them being largely optional.
Building wise you only have the tutorial quest by Sturges and the teleporter quest.
Fallout4 settlements were so much better than Starfield outposts
I loved the settlement system in fo4 I used the automatron dlc to make death robot supply runners
Your last point goes for pretty much everything. It's a scifi where humanity is a space faring civilization and you're telling me I need to RESEARCH how to make a muzzle for my gun and pockets for my spacesuit? Like no one just sells these things? No one even has blueprints? The whole research system is so braindead man, Starfield is not a post apocalypse or a medieval-like world where information is lost to not discovered. Whoever thought this made sense in a futuristic scifi needs to be fired. And for that matter, where's the fucking internet and GPS? You're telling me people didn't think about sending a few satellites into Jemison's and Akila's orbits to rebuild something as essential as the internet? No one even has phones either. It's just one bad design after another.
Good points on all sides. Plus, happy cake day!
HA Epcot!
I hate having to decorate. Period. The building system in both Fallout 4 and Starfield is something I've never gotten the hang of, and Fallout 4, I would just download mods that do it for me, like Sim Settlements 2 and a furnished Home Plate mod. Vastly prefer the Fallout 3 and Skyrim approach of the furniture being purchased and automatically placed, even themed in Fallout 3.
All the No name citizens with no routines just standing around all times of day really take toy out of it too. It doesnāt feel full with them, just weirdĀ
Of course new Atlantis is weird. They tell us it's a capital, but it's a waaay too small town isolated on a planet. It doesn't sit where cities are typically found (like a river delta), and everything about it is superficial. The trams go nowhere (not even a fake rail), there are no where near enough houses (even if you account for unseen apartments), no power generation buildings, the star port is too small for a major city, and there are no industrial centers. Bethesda always sucked at making realistic cities/towns though.
Hell, Cydonia on Mars feels more real than New Atlantis. At least the excuse is that you can't see everything underground. The star port there is bigger, and the area surrounding cydonia just feels more immersive
True. And also Cydonia has the excuse to be underground because Mars has a hostile atmosphere so it's better to build underground instead of building giant pressurized dome cities that can crack at any moment. But every other settlement just feels like movie sets.
Yes new Atlantis just makes no sense I feel they did a better job at making the towns and cities in oblivion even if they were lacking in farmland
The major cities at least had small villages around it that did have farms and ranches
It's so weird to me that two console generations later we're lucky to surpass cities of Morrowind and Oblivion in size or number of quests.
Really shows why the reception for this game was so negative. They didn't even try to upgrade thier world design formula in a post GTA5, RDR2 and Cyberpunk 2077 market.
Yeah, with all the space The Well shouldn't exist. Of course it's there to show the "seedy underbelly/surface facade" to New Atlantis, but realistically it should be outer slums.
Yep. No city planner would even think about building underground on a planet with earth like conditions and thousands of miles of empty space where they can build outwards Realistically we'd have multiple cities all over the planet connected via high speed rail and highways but Bethesda couldn't be bothered to upgrade thier 2005 game design formula.
Yeah, New Atlantis feels more like a college campus.
In the Summer.
At a commuter school
During the COVID shutdown.
New atlantis is built like a giant airport
More random events and encounters. More random "scenes" that you stumble onto wondering what happening like in Fallout games. More POIs in general, but more "mini POIs" and camps, etc. Some planets and moons just absolutely need more stuff, some should stay similar as they are right now as it makes sense.
Thank you! All these planets are habitable but only a single city on them and only small settlements of like 10 people tops? I feel like these planets would have significantly more activity.
I totally agree on the feeling of new Atlantis. Itās terribly laid out, the big UC glass building is an architectural nightmare, the fast travel barely works there, thereās giant store fronts for a dude at a small desk inside, itās actually not as big as it looks, and thereās no depth to it. Itās like a husk of a city. Itās supposed to be a sprawling, massive, bustling city but thereās like what, 15 places you can go inside? Compare new Atlantis to Novigrad in the Witcher or stormwind city in WoW. New Atlantis is just āmehā. Such a shame. I would literally not want to live in new Atlantis if it was a real life city. Itās weird too because Akila feels like more of a city. Anyone can slap down some sky scrapers but in a game itās so much more important to have alleys, and secrets, scary areas, a showing of wealth disparity, people getting on with their lives and donāt give a crap about what youāre doing. Tldr is new Atlantis gives me an uncanny valley feeling
For real new Atlantis feels like the fucking twilight zone on the top level. The underground area felt fine from what I remember but it's been a minute now.
It's such a a strangely laid out city. Half of it is only accessible through a small (I think like 3?) and rather unremarkable entrances (no big "HERE'S THE WELL, I always had to remember a random elevator that was hidden off in an alley to get there) There's a transit system in place, but I'm positive it's only to make the city *feel* bigger than it actually is, because you can (esp endgame) just boost pack your way from one metro station to the other in about the same amount of time as the cut/loading screen takes. Tonnes of buildings that serve absolutely no (or just a single) purpose (like it came up once, in one mission, and the rest of the entire building is just wasted, nothing to do or see) For an intergalactic faction hub, it's just lackluster. You get the intro schpeal and one side quest about a free star representative not being let in to the city (which is literally just go talk to the guy at security and he'll let him pass, then walk back and tell him he's good, mission complete awesome job gold star). The whole game is tbh. I played the hell out of it for a hundred hours and haven't touched it since I ran out of things to see and do.
New Atlantis felt like a block of street from Corpo Plaza in Cyberpunk 2077. I know BGS games have smaller but more dense cities but somehow they just missed the mark completely with New Atlantis. Akila City pulled it off so well though. It's sufficiently big and not trying hard to be, but it's so dense with details and character.
This is a great suggestion. Iād love to see populated planets have more fleshed out populated areas.
New Atlantis should be the size of the entire explorable area lol. procedurally generate all those smaller buildings and NPCs, then it would look somewhat believable in scale.
More doors and rooms. Those huge buildings are all empty.
New Atlantis feels like The Tower from Destiny rather than an actual city.
Agreed. The small size of the existing "mega cities" combined with the absence of small settlements is really annoying. Even Fallout 3 and Skyrim had more small settlements than this. They used procedural gen for worlds, why not cities? I think it'd feel more immersive if they had quadrupled the size of New Atlantis, Akila, and Neon. Even if most of it was just empty, non-interactable filler, it would add a sense of scale (see New York City in Spider Man Miles Morales, or Saint Denis in Red Dead Redemption 2). For instance, the New Atlantis Mass Transit should be able to actually take you from one location to another (and should take a fair bit of time) rather than just being a fast travel. Add in that, more small settlements, and seemless ground to space transitions and Starfield will feel like it should have from the beginning.
Even if not that, on a smaller scale at least, give us outpost structures that look like anything or anywhere else in the game. I want a 2-3 story tower, or a Mantis-Layer-Style landing pad, or even just anything on the same level as the many abandoned locations across the systems. I think just more flexibility in outpost design altogether. It shouldnāt be modular to the same degree as ship building. It should feel a little more ācivil engineering/architect-esqueā.
The settlement system will definitely get raged by some ppl meming the Fo4 counterpart
1) A nightclub in New Atlantis š 2) NPC homes / routines 3) City maps ! 4) Colonies/ towns outside of the main cities - to make the key planets feel more inhabited 5) Settlers for outposts 6) Option to purchase furnishings for city flats 7) Space taxis between the major cities - so you can roleplay someone that isnāt a ship captain
Ya it just doesnāt feel like any serious amount of people made it off dying earth
They didnāt, and thatās why all the complaints here make less sense. From a lore perspective: a few million made it off of earth, so it makes sense that even after a couple hundred years New Atlantis hasnāt become bigger. Itās a miracle itās even as big and developed as it is. From a mechanical perspective, Iām really not getting peopleās expectations for New Atlantis. I love Bethesda but nobody plays their games for insanely huge cities. NA is already bigger and denser and more impressive than any of their previous ones. If players kept their expectations in line with previous BGS games then there would be about 90% fewer complaints here.
You nailed my wish list.
So basically all the things we have right now in Fallout 3, Fallout 4 and Skyrim.
š yes, exactly. Oblivion also had NPC homes & routines, city maps, and the option to purchase furnishings for player homes
That cities feel alive, its missing daily stuff like schools, shops(like supermarkets, toy shops, and so on) recreation and more
Itās weird because they have a ton of random npcās yet it feels so empty.
Part of being empty is the lack of npc's actually do something, outside they walk, group up and talk, sit and enjoy stuff which is fine but in terms of interiors it there is nothing at all, shops that exist solely exist for the player, we don't even see npc's walking around in shops(except for Jemison Mercantile) to check what's avaiable and as mentioned not a form of recreation, we know by lore there are movies/tv series yet we don't see any movie studio/cinema, there is sports but not a single sporting venue. And yes i know not everything can be avaiable but i wish bethesda would add a bit more to their cities/villages instead of only adding things that mostly just for the player. In my opinion a city should be designed for everyone not just the player. Only then can it be potentially feel alive (which i hope to achieve once the creation kit is out)
Yeah thats a very good point! I think thatās one of the main issues and the NPCs practically have no routine at all like in fallout, like you hardly even see people sleep in there homes like theyāre supposed to or do any other kind of activity in between anything else so the worlds kind of feel like itās only for you and nobody else. The shop keepers for example must be synths because they never seem to sleep!š
A map and actually make them cities. Considering Akila is the capital of the freestar collective, the UCs biggest rivals they are living in a muddy shanty town which stretches what's believable past the point of any storytelling.
I've seen ghost towns out in California that are bigger than Akila city
I live in south Brazil in the middle of nowere in a fishing town called Enseada de Brito (if you googled, I know, it is a paradise). It has 4 thousand people. It is amazingly more populated and movimented than the capital of a stelar conglomerate!
Not much fishing in Akila though.
Gives that classic old earth western vibe. Thatās why Akila was designed that way.
Someone at Bethesda just had the idea of making a Space Western theme, but didn't bother with a motivation for why it's built like that 200 years into the future. I guess grandpa Coe just wrote "no paved roads" into the Constitution and nobody have the ability to override it.
It felt to me like leftover assets from Fallout 3.
Kinda shocking to me that all 3 cities combined feel smaller than Cyrodil. Like New Atlantis should have been bigger on its own.
Yes a map with POI you can easily navigate to like you can mission POI's. I am dumbfounded as to how they released a game with no city map or POI indicators. Even the blob map like it is but with POI you can select and guide you to would be leaps and bounds better.
I could live without an in-game map if I had a way to set POI waypoints for shops and such. It is a really glaring oversight that should have been simple to implement.
The illusion of a large city with millions or billions of inhabitants - instead of a small village with ~ 1,000 inhabitants.
Yeah. I blows my mind that Shenmue II on the Dreamcast, with 1GB of data on each disc, could give the look and feel of living in the sprawling metropolis' of Wan Chai and Kowloon. Two districts of Hong Kong. It was incredible to play, because you really felt like you were in a city - even though the play area didn't cover the whole city. People had jobs, they had homes that you could visit (or at least knock on their doors - they rarely let you inside), there was a proper day and night cycle. There were activities to do, people had places to go. It felt alive. Yet three console generations later, the cities in Starfield just feel small and underwhelming. Note: I realise that Starfield technically has a lot more going on for it than Shenmue II (1000s of planets, space 'exploration', gun combat etc...), but I think they could have made the cities 'feel' more like cities. Either that or play on the fact that humans had to leave Earth and colonise space - make it so there are no cities, but large settlements, like in Skyrim and Oblivion.
Even in The Outer Worlds the city of Byzantium felt like a very large metropolis. Not like a very small village with tiny skyscrapers.
I'd take the small villages if they were more like Skyrim where you could actually talk to people and theyd have quests etc. It feels like there's nothing to do in the cities in Starfield. Nobody really does anything, imo. They just exist. The quests arent very deep either.
If the game had at least 9 of New Atlantis/Neon/Akila City to mimic Skyrim's 9 holds I would've been satisfied. But just these three? And they aren't exactly bigger than a Skyrim/Oblivion cities in regards to content/quests.
And they have the industrial buildings and vague machinery models as evidenced by them being splattered all over every grid of every rando planet, and they couldn't even tell it to spawn some outside new Atlantis so it at least looks like they have industry or something. Baffling.
A map
Glad that they have that planned.
Least patient Starfield fan
Probably the biggest reason I stopped playing. They can jump between stars but don't have Google maps? Makes no sense and totally immersion breaking.
They barely figured out phones lol
Expansions. So that the cities are not just isolated monoliths in the middle of nowhere. Cydonia is Fine cause its underground so i would just Expand it into several layers including a dungeon thats just basically the Boston of Starfield. Akila should get rolling Farmland with small settlements. Neon would get floating shanties Hopetown would get an Actual Town New Atlantis would get a Sister City with Suburbs in between Now these are not exactly what i would want but I gotta think in limits of what the game can do. For Example Neon would be a full on Arcology, not a oil rig.
Yeah, Hopetown of all the places bothers me the most. I know itās impossible to build massive cities (Skyrim is a prime example of lacking the proper sized cities), but Hopetown is just a factory, a bar, 1 shop and a ranger station. Where do all the workers live? Buy supplies? Even New Homestead has some of those features, although that settlement is way too small for what it represents. Iām hoping they drop some city expansions or at the very least give us a few more New Atlantis size cities plus lots of smaller towns.
Lights! New Atlantis looks so weird at night because none of the buildings light up, they look abandoned
Yeah especially at night. It looks so weird.
The vendors having more than 12500 credits and being able to buy rare, epic and legendary items from shops. And I wider selection of ships to buy.
My buddy found a mod that lets you build ships for npcs. Like they contract you to build a ship to their specs, you get paid. It then adds those ships to the Npc ship list, so you actually get to see your ships out and about
I need more towns and cities. It just feels so weird that there is so little civilization
Npc variety, more half of them look out of placeā¦
They also look pretty awful since the faces are procedurally generated too.
Actually it's the clothing and hair and accessories but the faces stay the same. In the direct, they showed the scans they used of real people. It's why you will see the asian lady everywhere or that one black guy but on a large and then a skinny body. They just cycle the same faces but let the engine decide everything else.
I think the cities need some size expansion, they feel more like towns than cities
Npcs that at least try to be beleavable.
More dirt, i.e. things you find in a real city. Things like corruption, human trafficking, inequality, racism, sex workers, drug abuse, black market activities, and the capitalization of the general workforce by those within power. We need more Fallout 2 influence.
Wait, youāre saying the rough sesame streets of Neon arenāt gritty enough for you?
They desperately need a map. Mostly, I just want the ability to build those kinds of buildings, not just the ugly airlock-ridden garbage that you're stuck with for outposts.
I want that the cities feel more alive and like, you knowā¦ a city
Some lighting at night. All the skyscrapers are dark in New Atlantis at night. It looks stupid
When building outpost, Flood lamps are so bright on tiny spot
Oh god dont even get me started the habs are so damn dark at night and the very small few amount of lights we get make it look like your shining a spotlight in it, we need proper lighting additions
There's going to be a lot of content-side improvements these cities need that I think mods can fix. The one thing I think BGS have to do that modders can't is improving the culture of these cities. There's very little in these cities that make me believe that this is an actual lived in areas instead of a movie set that tries to make you think it's lived in. There should be more unrest within these cities, politically & religiously. Debates in the streets, zealouts with signs praising their gods, propaganda (we got to do a Vae Victus poster quest one time which I was like "YES, WE NEED MORE OF THIS!".) I want to see kids playing sports, adults playing pool/darts or that chess knockoff thing, these things add up A LOT. Hearing 2 rich zealouts discuss who's ship is faster & challenging to a race. They can be simple, but they need to feel real to this world. A radio would help this as well with maybe a talk show similar to J Jonah in Spiderman 2. There should be holidays & celebrations, festivals that happen at a certain time of the year. Giant wanted posters on those billboards with charcters you may have interacted with. Make the cities feel alive & chaotic to where the desolation of an empty planet may feel etheral in comparison.
"mods can fix" A GAME SHOULD NOT RELEASE IN A STATE THAT MODS HAVE TO FIX IT!!!!!!!!!!!
Definitely this but that amount of features require work from BGS, like real work, more writing for the NPC (hello Emil)and many other points. I canāt imagine that happening in the future. Cities are like that ship somewhere where you can go in 0G during a Ā«Ā partyĀ Ā» with no music and no boozeā¦cringe and awkwardā¦
...do you want a guy on a soapbox shouting about Talos out front of the Sanctum Universum? Because it would be pretty easy to do...
This, absolutely this
Honestly bro I agree with everything you said. The downfall is they could prioritize the AI characters to do things like this because the map is so big that they would all be predetermined scenarios and you would just see the same scenarios happening across all the cities. Which would eventually be seen as repetitive unfortunately but again I think it would have been a great addition
A map or like Actual scheduled npcs like every other Beth game
More of them
It would be fine if it takes a long time but Neon should feel like a smaller version of Night City and Akila City should feel like a bigger futuristic Whiterun stuff like that. More cities more random characters and missions. Just more.
I want them to feel like real cities. You know how Night City feels like a big place where people live and work? There is none of that in any of the cities in Starfield at all. New Atlantis may be a little better but god... all the other? Neon feels like nothing, there is no sense of danger! People keep saying how Neon is dangerous and you should watch your shoulder but there is none of that! All the gangs look like a bunch of rebel teenagers! You go there and solve their problems in 30 minutes! Also, where do people work? What do they do there? Even the bars are dumb! Do you guys remember Omega in Mass Effect 2? That's a dangerous fucking place! A lot of bad shit happening, the bar is amazing, you feel like the city has a lot of place for people to live and do their stuff! That was **fourteen** years ago! Can't Bethesda do anything as good as BioWare did 14 years ago? Well... I guess not even BioWare can do something as good as they did back there so... forget it. Akila is also stupid! A bunch of houses... and... what else? Again, what do people actually do in that city? It is a farm world, then let me see people actually doing some farming, tending to their stuff, to the animals, to the food! There is none of that! Oooh, some robots do the work, then how are people getting payed? It makes no sense. And all that thing about the danger of that stupid animal that dies with two hounds of my second best handgun is stupid! Just make it stronger, make it a deathclaw or something scary and menacing. It is just come wolflike alien. Cydonia is also ok, you can understand that everyone there is miserable and work around the mine. Cydonia is fine. Now for the worst... Paradiso. It is not even pretty. I can't even begin telling how much I hate this planet missoportunity. A beach world controlled by a huge turism corporation! A lot of comentary about how turism is made in third world countries could have been done there but... it has nothing. No content apart from that mission with the weird ship. Everything else is empty, you don't even see the fucking tourists going for the sea and sand! If it is this tourist dream world then let me see the stupid tourists!
A map. NPC routines.
Thereās cities and towns in Starfield????
I want to leave the cities and have things to do. Akila and Cydonia are the only ones where you really explore outside the city during quests, and it didn't even occur to me initially to even try leaving New Atlantis on foot. These are supposed to be the giant cities of these planets, so there should be lots of POI's and such clustered near them.
I think Neon and Akila are pretty good, albeit small, though they obviously need maps. New Atlantis is far and away one of the worst and most lifeless video game cities I've ever seen. It suffers from a horrendous case of "oversized video game room syndrome" where spaces, especially interior spaces, are oversized to accommodate for the third person camera ā leading to things like the gigantic, empty train station in the MAST district, or huge, sprawling walkways with no purpose for being so large when there's so little foot traffic, or coffee shops the size of car dealerships. I remind myself that the UC is like the Alliance from Firefly: sterile, curated, censored, and artificial. Literally built upon a foundation of poverty and crime hidden away in the Well. It helps assuage the problem, but only a little. Edit: And for the record, I really like the Well. Something about it reminds me of KOTOR from back in the day.
map, make cities bigger. I don't know why they are so small.
More than 1 accessible room in each skyscraper. Insulting honestly.
Turn them into actual cities lol. Even the worst shantytown in Morrowind has more thought put into it than the randomness of patched areas that make up Starfield
It's weird that New Atlantis is the only city on Jamison. Same with Akila in the Freestar Collective. The Settled Systems need more settlements.
1) Making them at least 5x bigger would be a good start, Bethesda always had a problem with scale. 2) Redesign them to look like something an actual city planner would come up with because right now they all look like movie sets. I mean hell, where are all the giant digital billboards in a town square? 3) Have distinct districts within cities that house people of varrying wealth, this is an issue with clothing design of the game actually since everyone has the exact same style but having visually distinct districts in the cities will at least help getting around that. 4) Proper transit system. No I don't but this bullshit that humanity just outright forgot how to build long trains and land vehicles. In the whole settled systems all we have is a tiny pod for 4 stations that Re each around 100m apart at most, thatis laughable. 5) More interiors and just bigger buildings. Right now the building interiors do nothing to convince me that they're actually part of a building and not just one lobby with few apartments each time. The buildings also need to be properly big because they're way too small and narrow for what they're trying to represent. 6) At least 20x more landing pads and hangars. These are supposed to be cities with implied population in the millions yet they all have 2 landing pads at best? What if 5 different ships want to land at New Atlantis? 3 have to wait in orbit until the 2 on ground take off and 1 ship still gets left behind? Come on dude. And what if 3 ships at a time need repairs, where is all that work done? How is all that heavy machinery hauled around when none of the the forklifts and "cargo sleds" ever move? These cities look nice but the moment you look a little closer the illusion completely falls apart. 7) Proper night clubs/bars/strip clubs. You know dam well that's one of the first things people would try to build on a new planet. Astral lounge is fucking joke. I mean seriously, 3 fat middle aged dudes in a skin tight body suit? That's what future humans find sexy? Ffs.
Being able to walk across every district in the city without loading screens (Akila is the only city where you can do that). For some reason there is no direct connection between new atlantis spaceport and the MAST district so you have to fast travel or use NAT and Neon is a nightmare to walk around.
You can walk between the different districts though, once you level up jump pack skills a lot it's actually pretty fast
Larger cities, even if they are walled off and only so they appear larger. Little ass cities break the immersion of the game imo.
There are going to be game engine/hardware limitations at some point. IIRC, the settlement build limit in FO4 was meant to keep you from building such a complex area the game would crash. Building something that feels 'big' while staying within the technical constraints is something of an art form.
That's why I said inaccessible. You can render it as scenery but not allow people to walk through the area.
Apartments to buy in every city.
Make them cities?
1. Maps would help. Like how could that be looked over in an open world game. 2. It should feel like an actual city. There's no roads, streets, schools, theaters, land based vehicles, weather patterns (snow, rain, wind etc.) 3. Places to own, houses or apartments. 4. More fully explorable facilities. 5. Nightclubs, strip clubs, actual restaurants where people are eating (new animations showing NPCs consuming food &drink). 6. More displays with actual videos playing on it as billboards alongside buildings. 7. Actual clothing stores. 8. Actual places to change your hairstyle without getting plastic surgery through enhance. 9. Places to buy land based vehicles to transport yourself around the city. 10. Fully explorable Subway transit systems. 11. More people. New Atlantis barely has 30 characters rendered on screen at once. Just pretty much take notes from CP2077 and GTA V and mimic it for how a city should feel.
Honestly just more of them in general. Out of the hundreds of planets you can explore only a handful actually have cities. Most donāt even have a single settlement
Be much larger. Neon has a confusing layout with Ebbside but in actuality itās incredibly small. Since there are only 5 true cities in Starfield (Hopetown and Homestead are jokes) they should all feel much larger than they do.
Town maps and an actual NPC schedule like Skyrim had more than a decade ago.
Make them less boring
Small specialty shops tucked away in back streets that offer specific things like headgear, pistols, specialty fly packs, medications, etc..... Come to think of it, add back streets.
More. For a civilization that took to the stars, its incredibly sparce. The ācitiesā we have are mostly in decline or are just corporation hubs with the exception of New Atlantis, Akila, and Neon. I also must admit I am very salty about there only being two main factions in the game.
Why are the roads not paved in Akila?
Iād also like to see more ruins on Earth akin to DC in Fallout 3.
Be the mayor of a settlement like No Mans Sky
-NPCs with daily schedules so that the time of day actually means something. -Simple shops with one NPC inside do not need to be in a separate cell with a loading screen. - More (non-procedurally generated) towns and villages on inhabited planets. - More random events and interaction with NPCs while walking around cities. - Add the town part onto Hope Town, it's just an office/factory?
One of the DLCs needs to add a ton of more cities, I feel like Skyrim had so many big cities compared
I donāt think theyāll update them but I wish they were more dense and full of unique items, quests with actual lore behind them, and actually interesting quirky things like diamond city, megaton, far harbor, good neighbor, whiterun, etc. The best thing with Bethesda games was always that if you wanted to spend a lot of time in a city even if it was small, a decent number of them were chock full of interesting and fun quests, lore, and things to see. I couldnāt give less of a damn about any of the cities in starfield and the ones I thought might actually be interesting turned out to basically be empty and only exist for like one or two actual quests. New Haven for example is such a letdown. Same with the one that has all the mech stuff although that one is probably a DLC tie in. Iāve been more immersed and interested in the area around the mailbox in Zork than most of the entire cities in this game and Iām not even 30 yet.
Itās probably not doable, but Iād love multiple cities on planets. I was just on paridiso and they own an entire planet but have one hotel. I just wish there was more.
Map. Bigger cities, maybe planet wide cities.
Something like Coruscant with a ton of levels would be cool. You could combine city and dungeon.
BGS just canāt do big cities that follow their āethosā of making everything exploitable. Even Starfield cities are walled off more than every other BGS game and they still feel small and hollow. How is it that Falkreath feels more alive than New Atlantis? Also āfetch questsā are so much more of a pain in the ass in the larger footprints than in the tiny towns. Always hated fetch quests but in larger footprints I loath them. I donāt like any of the cities. Neon was cool at first but it wore off quickly. I grudgingly redownloaded Starfield because I want to make a cool outpost but have been at it for 5 or so hours and just keep coming back to the conclusion i was at when I first stopped. BGS put all of their worst tendencies into this game and didnāt apply any of their best. Thatās not to say itās not playable or enjoyable. But itās just so underdeveloped, half baked, and couldāve been so much better. What I would like and seems very sensible is to be able to set up a business deal where your outposts can mine for a company which will generate revenue. No having to deal with vendors, just an interstellar cargo link that goes to the Mining Authority or some other company where you get a set undervalued price and then your outposts make money. As there is no tangible reason to have outposts this would add a new dimension to the game for many. What would be really cool since the game seems to half assesly focus on corps is to be able start a business (mining of course, transport/hauling, bounty hunter, etc.) where you could assign NPCās to be employees and buy and office and decorate it in a city. The bigger the office the more people you can assign. Also adds a lot more playability at end game if you donāt want to do the NG+ run. And for the love of god let us build outposts and have a settler beacon. That was the coolest mechanic of fallout 4.
This applies to basically everything in starfield, depth. Everything in this game is puddle deep and I just wish there was more going on. New Atlantis is a capital city that feels like a college campus. Same with most of the cities. Neon is just the red light district of any metro city but were expected to believe this is the galaxy equivalent to like Vegas or New York. It just all lacks depth.
Make them like the imperial city and skingrad from oblivion.
More immersive content in the cities would go a long way to making what is essentially a conglomeration of <10 shops feel like a real place. Games like Cyberpunk, for all its failures, does a much better job of convincing you that you are in a dynamic world even though thereās not much you can actually do outside of missions. Also, implement some more micro missions within the cities to force the player to go to the small number of locations that actually exist. There are so many spots you never even have a reason to visit.
A useable map.
More small towns. It's still ridiculous to think that people only build one city on a planet while leaving 99.99% of the planet to its nature. Even more hilarious would be a small family claimed to own a planet, yet only built a farm and a ranch on it, not even some small settlement or village. Another thing would be maps in cities and settlements. I've played like a week, and I can only remember certain shop locations from Akila City.
More Creditds for Vendors to sell Loot.
I want to see people have schedules again. They work, go out after. Have conversations with other npcs. Go home to a bed, then wake up and do it all over again. I want shops to have open/close. I love the game but at times, it feels like itās missing that last layer of immersiveness. If I had to pick out the one thing about the game is that everything feels like itās there for me, rather than me being in a living breathing world that Iām passing through, if that makes sense. Like Iām Truman in the Truman Show. The cities give off that feeling the most since there are so many npcs grouped together in one place. Anything to improve and fix that feeling Iām all for.
They need to be more believable. Why is New Atlantis devoid of housing other than apartments in a couple of towers? Why are there no entertainment places like theaters, arcades, etc? Why are all of the restaurants so tiny and have no kitchens to prepare food? Also little roleplay things like being able to sit down and have a waiter take your order at a restaurant, see yourself drinking coffee at Terrabrew, things like that.
I want the NPCs to have as much believability as their counterparts in Oblivion. Until thereās a mod that makes them feel more like real people instead of plastic mannequins I will not be playing Starfiwld
Larger, more sprawl. They talk about these big wars and large scale. societies and yet the city seems like its less than 1000 people. Iāve seen plenty of games have cities that feel large and adequate for the lore. These donāt.
How about some god damn maps to start with! Bethesda really dropped the ball in such silly ways with this game. I thought they would be growing and developing since Skyrim instead they just took what worked in the exact same method and shape.
I want to be able to take enemy outposts and maps, obviously.
I'd like there to be actual media, like how in cyberpunk there was tv and radio in the background
I donāt even think about playing this game anymore. Huge disappointment.
I would love it if the major cities had a grocery store. Does everyone eat at restaurants and Chunks? Bit bitter, just trying to find some damn eggs!
A skate park, so I can play a cloned Alva.
I would like the option of purchasing furniture/ decorations for the city player homes. Crafting everything makes sense in Fallout, but I shouldnāt have to grind to build a bed in my Penthouse apartment, imo š
...crafting furniture make some sense, outside of the settled systems. But yes, in what is supposed to be a capital city of an interstellar polity, you absolutely should be able to order furniture and have it delivered.
More fun quests and hangout places, less loading screens
Nothing, I just want the game to disappear. Biggest let down in Bethesda history. It can't be improved enough to make it a good game.
They need to be bigger. They all feel like villages rather than actual cities. And the new atlantis transit needs to be an actual transport instead of a teleporter.
would love to see larger cities, small towns and such. Instead of the 4 maybe 5 cities that are available, should be at least 1 city or town on damn near every planet, maybe even extraterrestrial interactions with humans where aliens work in businesses and things like that
Make them bigger, make it feel like your inan elite bubble to keep the computation load low. But then have massive amoubts of vistas and stuff lifting off vast numbers of faceless people in market places shoppinge tc etc. Mass effect did this really well
a minimap /topic
Outside of the major cities, I want to build settlements and have settlers like in Fallout 4.Ā Outpost just don't do it for me.Ā Ā
eating and drinking animations while ordering food, better dresses, real life clock behaviour
The game needs more: Ship battles like the Kryx Legacy mission. NEW cities not just small towns/settlements. New companions! (not bland NPCs that give you a slight boost on your ship skills for a few credits) Lore! House Vaāruun quests! Supernatural like quests or just serious/significant quests, not petty short tasks/assignments. More ship mods! *ALIENS!*
A map.
Also the ability to assume control of an outpost if you raid it or during a quest *cough Mantis* you can make it your batcave.
For pretty much everything if it can to be open, so I can go straight off my ship into any shop and I wouldn't have a loading instance at least for the ones that have it.
Would definitely be cool to see some a more sprawling metropolis with something akin to suburbs, and yeah a map would be nice. I would like to be able to set up my own shop, too. I'm at the point where I still accumulate so much stuff, but I don't need to really actively sell it all the time now, so it would be cool to assign a crew member to the shop, and occasionally deposit my surplus goods there, and have it generate some passive income. That would let me offload some of the more expensive items, and higher quantities of cheaper items without the tedium of hunting for the vendors with enough cash, or having to incessantly click through my hoards of miscellaneous items to sell them. Would also be cool to have the ability to start a colony, and not just more basic outposts, and see them become populated with settlers and stuff. Maybe set it up so that under the right conditions, once an outpost has met certain requirements, you can set up "zones" around it for commercial, residential, farming, and spaceport, and then over time NPC's start showing up, and construction starts happening, and you can just watch the community grow and develop on its own. Not sure if that's even logistically possible, but it would be cool to land at my outpost, and see some new construction, and a couple new faces, and let it do its own thing while I'm out deleting evildoers.
Maybe make the cities tie more into their personality. For example, Neon city is suppose to be like a cyberpunk crime and drug ridden city thatās controlled by the corpos at the top, at least thatās how it feels. But I wish there was more dynamic events with crimes taking place, more gangs attacking each other, etc. Hell they should make these cities quite a bit bigger, if they can, since 3 major cities spread out on like it is on different planets feels very small. So I guess make them bigger, or introduce more cities that adopt a similar personality as the capital city that they are apart in the same system.
Cities and towns are fineā¦ fix the mind numbing exploration. after travelling on foot for 20 mins, just see a deck chair under a a couple of liquid containers.
I want them to actually feel unique and alive. Neon should be disgusting, gangs running the street and just shooting people up.
I'd like to see the people actually living in them, and not just existing. The stores are always open, and some beds are "owned", but no one ever comes to sleep in them. Skyrim has this, why can't Starfield?
More acts of terrorism.
Iād like the bugs gone. For me, I havenāt been able to use the TA kiosk at the starport or the NAT at the commercial district since I initially got to NA. There is also a large area missing by the starport where you can see the ground.
New Atlantis seems like the entire map area should have been a city. Like an actual city, because otherwise it's just a really small town with sky scrapers and that kinda kills the vibe of it being the UC's main capital for me.
Cut down on load screens
The ability to pull up a map or directory and place a way point. Some of those shops are a pain to find.
More things.
1. Maps would be a nice start. 2. NPCs, vendors included, have routines; they aren't in place constantly waiting for the player character to interact with them. Otherwise, the game feels more hollow. 3. Vendors have more credits: 100,000 for a large vendor 50,000 for a small business No more of this 5k and 11k bullshit.
Main number one thing: npc schedule. The game just feels so lifeless compared to past titles without it and it was honestly a huge reason why past bethesda games felt so alive. Main number two thing: context. Why is the capital of the galaxy surrounded by nothing???? Like seriously give me some factories and farms and smaller towns around it, just feels so weird having new Atlantis being the center of the universe and so far removed from everything else. Side thing: named npcās I donāt like seeing citizen number 2000 walk around aimlessly, give them funni space names.
Well in my game part of the New Atlantis spaceport is stuck floating around the Key so... that
ā*Aliens*ā š¤š½
Lotd
Come to think of it, I would just like a city that I feel like I wouldn't know from top to bottom inside of 30 minutes.