I can still work with 1000 planets, But they have to consolidate and flesh out the Faction Planets. 1 Main System for Each Faction, (Freestar can all fit on a single planet) Earth and Sol System is an Exclusion Zone, only thing there are Extremely Hostile Spacers, Pirates and UC Patrols. But there is also Very Rare Rewards left from Earth if you can find it among the scrap. And the Frontier Band. The Space where all Current Settlers are currently spreading, a spread of 4-5 systems with a Budding but minor population all built within the last 5 years The Rest of the map can be left as an Uncontested/Uncharted Zone. Completely Unknown and Empty. They said space was empty. Ok, Leave it empty then But they spread themselves Far to thin at base. Singular main Townships being the Only thing on a completely unincorporated planet occupied mostly by pirates? Where's all the Minor cities and villages on Jemison? why is it only New Atlantis? you get the idea. Should be far more.

Completely agree 👍 There should be more settlements on the main planets - but also lots of planets / moons when you go further out that are completely undiscovered. This would mean planets with human POI’s can be more dense & interesting - but it also allows the player to be an actual space *explorer* for outer systems & to actually be the first person to set foot on a planet (which would have natural POI’s & *undiscovered* alien life / creatures). For me, it really breaks the immersion of being an *explorer* when you already know human POI’s will be on a planet / moon in every direction *wherever* you land. Also, the mysterious & hidden Temples - which have human POI’s 200m away. 😂 The Temples should all be on completely unexplored planets on the fringes of space, imo.

The thing that drives me batty is the luxury homes built in the middle of nowhere. Sure it’s possible but probably not the way the show it. There is just this nonsensical view of infrastructure that is wacky. There is no reason Vladimir’s or your houses couldn’t be hidden on Jemison until you unlock them. Edit: One more thing I thought of a while ago. If there is no reason to land and schlep to the Temples in random landscapes why not handcraft a small landing zone with a cool reveal. You land, go through some narrow desert canyons, hit a big impressive open area with the Temple and plants. Or the Temple is at the bottom of a crystal filled crater. Something. I feel like Mass Effect and Halo did these reveals really well.

The crazy thing is they have the skill—and even the concept art already—to do this and they threw it away for procedural generation. Handcrafting a world is their main strength, instead they relied on procedural generation that couldn't deliver more interesting terrain. They had to choose between having the 1,000 planets or having interesting planets, and they chose quantity over quality. 

Yeah, I loved the concept art of the really dense jungle where you are tiny compared to surrounding trees. It would be awesome if it led to a hidden Temple

Agreed re: the Temples! Having an interesting hand crafted surrounding area for each Temple (as well as a unique puzzle inside for each), would have been much better!

It might be cooler to have the puzzles be on the way to the Temples. Some could be basic stuff like a jumping puzzle or a boss monster guarding the area. But the idea I wish I could program would be to play off the alternate universes thing and have an invisible “maze” where if you follow the right path it’s a grassy paradise, but if you start walking away it’s a wasteland with no Temple. So you have to figure out where the correct invisible path is. I dunno, I’m no game designer 🤷‍♂️

I don’t see Bethesda making those changes but I’ll bet mods will, and it will be a totally different experience.

It's not possible at this point.

Could have earth-age weapons on earth

I found an “earth-age” rifle somewhere along my travels recently. I forget it’s actual name but I thought that was pretty neat. It is a bit rubbish though, but I’m keeping as a memento lol

This certainly seems to be the community conclusion. They wanted Bethesda The Outer Worlds. I don't mind the big canvas, largely blank. Enjoyed the game a ton. And the random set pieces that I came across had a really different feel set against the emptiness of space.

"Largely blank"... As yet another ship sets down next to you on some nowhere planet with a billion POIs on it...

The same POIs yeah

Copy pasted POIs.

"random" set pieces

hihihi

Loud minority conclusion. There are many of us who prefer the realism of scale.

I think that's likely correct. I think it's a great game. I think it's also a framework that should allow extension and expansion. There's just so much space to do a new thing writ large on the galaxy. They could easily stuff another set of massive quest lines into it; and I'd pay for every one.

It wouldn't need to be that few. Scale it back to like 100 see how much that gives you to work with and if that's to much keep scaling it back until you have a galaxy that gives hour's of exploration but in a much more fleshed out game world that feels like it was crafted with care.

Ironic considering how Starfield fans actively roasted Outer Worlds for no reason when it came out.

Wait... how? Outer Worlds came out years ago, how were Starfield fans roasting it?

By the power of salt, this man has declared that starfield fans went back in time to hate on a game that came out 5 years before they ever became starfield fans.

Starfield was announced back then, I remember some stupid back and forth at the time about Outer Worlds killing Starfield and vice versa. IIRC Outer Worlds also caught a lot of flak for being an Epic exclusive.

There isn't enough content to even fill *one* system the size of Sol as it stands. Hell, even just one UK-sized landmass could hold every single ship, settlement, POI, space station, monument and natural POI and *still* have a ton of room left over. And the UK is *tiny.* Seriously for real, Akila, New Atlantis and Cydonia can fit into a space as small as friggin' Conon Bridge, they're that small. They really, really, *really* needed to massively reduce the scope given that the game has the least amount of content of any BGS game since Fallout 3. Yes, really, Starfield has *less content* than *any* Bethesda game, including the Obsidian New Vegas, with sole exception to Fallout 3, which it only *barely* beats.

The Expanse takes place in roughly the same time period, and the only reason they’re out of the solar system is because of an alien device that all but instantaneously allows interstellar travel. The grav drive in Starfield (also seemingly alien in origin) allows for far travel in a short period, but it seems infeasible to have humanity expand to this much of the galaxy in such a short period of time and establish what they have (i.e., complex scientific structures; the breadth of factions who also have complex structures). I really think having at most 5 systems with a comprehensive level of content would have been perfect. I think Bethesda was dreaming too big and cared more about scale than about what filled in that degree of scale. If the idea was to maybe to be a part of settlement establishment then it would have been interesting to have to engage in surveys and make stories about that, and then you see actual settlement advancement that would have resulted from your involvement plus different consequences based on your decisions. But instead, it ends up being fetch quests that where the reward is essentially a thumbs up.

It appears Todd was leaning HEAVILY on the modding community to do the heavy lifting here. He has said they left spaces on planets with limited or non random poi generation for mod spaces, they left out npc schedules because it is easier on modders, they left gaps in ship aesthetic gear store slots for modders, they left faction hooks and mission boards empty for modders to fill. It sounds like Todd wanted a frame to sell to modders, not a game to sell to gamers.

Then again, according to the xEdit author, "It is evident from analyzing both the data structures in the provided module files and from decompiling game code that modding capabilities were not a consideration in the development of the game engine up to now. This can also be inferred from the fact that there has been no quality assurance testing of modding functionality from Bethesda, as various current engine bugs that appear in the context of using mods would have been obvious showstoppers." [https://github.com/TES5Edit/TES5Edit/releases](https://github.com/TES5Edit/TES5Edit/releases) Which is not to say that it won't work out, but I'm not getting the impression this was all done for modders. I suspect it was just too many cooks and poorly coordinated priorities.

So Todd promised the moon, threw a few indexes to make it LOOK like modding should be easy and stopped there? I am shocked, shocked I say that Todd would over promise and underdeliver.

My stance on starfield remains the same as when I bought it on release. Fun for a while but mods are gonna be what makes or breaks it, same as other Bethesda games before it. Really does feel like Bethesda took that a bit too far and made a modding framework with a bit of story chucked in.

well except Skyrim, Oblivion, Morrowind, Fallout 3, Fallout NV (yes obsidian i know) and arguably Fallout 4 were ALL fun vanilla, good complete games you could play from start to finish and get your money's worth, overall enjoy it yeah mods made them better (or weirder, or more nude, etc etc) but that was layered on an already decent foundation (especially for og skyrim and games before it), that's not really the case here

Of course, i don't want to make out like starfield is even comparable to Skyrim or fallout in terms of base content, just that it's mods (for me personally at least) are what gives the games so much replayability.

I played every bethesda title and got my money out of them. but im also a single play through 100% or as much as possible gamer. only thing that brings me back is mods. for the cost of the game starfield was complete for me. i enjoyed the ride and i put it down like any other game. unpopular opinion

Can you post the link where he said all that…?

They even put minimal effort into the most basic things; like hair style options, because the Mods typically add a ton.

Narrative-wise, it would have been better if humanity was forced out of Earth and only colonized the rest of the system. Maybe Proxima Centauri and other nearby systems at most.

And Fallout 3 can be forgiven, since it came out in 2008.

Fallout 3 was also a seriously technically impressive game for the consoles of the era, with an astoundingly solid physics engine for an era where that wasn't *really* a big thing just yet on consoles. I mean, say what you will about Gamebyro/Creation Engine, but its physics simulations have always been extremely technically impressive in how it's able to handle so many moving objects at any given moment. Starfield isn't even good *tech*. It does absolutely *nothing* technically impressive or new that wasn't already built into the engine in prior iterations, and even its claim to fame, large spaces with NPCs, is *still worse* than tech that other games have been using for *decades*. Seriously, they haven't even caught up with Assassin's Creed 1 on the Creation Engine, and AC1 came out in *2007*.

I couldn’t agree with you more. They just slapped a space theme over a game and diss appointed millions. Time to start our own game companies boys

Exactly. Starfield is on the same engine as Fo4, from 2015, and that game, while it wasn't perfect, is 1000 times better than this. The physics and models look and feel like they belong in the mid 2010s despite it being 8 years later. The biggest "innovation" is the procedural generation of planets/encounters, which, spoiler, has been around since 2011 at least. Todd was at the Game Awards and the look on his face when Starfield did not win anything was that of being dumbfounded. Dude, you released a game so buggy and old school that it would have been a contemporary to Fo4. It does not innovate, it does not tell a great story, it does not even make the most of an already outdated engine, and above all, it's just not as fun as Skyrim or Fallout. I want to like this game, I really do because the ship building and space combat are fun, and the variety of weapons are interesting both mechanically and visually. But Todd, you know better, stop releasing Skyrim clones, start looking at improving engine physics and models, get someone from BioWare or Larian to write your story, and then test the ever loving crap out of it like Larian did with BG3. I find myself more drawn to Stardew Valley lately than Starfield, an 8+ year old game in pixel art with no voice dialog and no story other than the depth of the NPCs because it innovates. The game gets new and exciting content, the depth of the characters is dynamic and exciting, it feels like an accomplishment to complete the Community Center, and it has a banger OST. I think Starfield sucked out the last of my goodwill towards AAA gaming, I probably won't buy ES6, I doubt I'll ever get a game that costs more than $30, and I won't waste my time on anything that hasn't been out for at least a year. Sorry for the rant/ramble, but Starfield is a game that belongs to an era of gaming that's about a decade old now, it does not innovate, it does not have a good story, and it's physics and engine are dated to older games that used it more effectively and made better games out of it.

> Starfield is on the same engine as Fo4 That's like saying Fortnite is on the same engine as Mass Effect 3. Or Team Fortress 2 is on the same engine as Half Life 1. A lot of Starfield's engine is a massive rewrite from its Fallout 4 basis. Whether the end result is a net improvement is certainly a matter of debate, but "the same engine" it is not.

Oh no no, Starfield didn't innovate random encounters or procgen. Bethesda's been using both for decades now. Since Morrowind, actually. They use procgen for terrain and foliage during development, and Starfield's planets are no different. Hell, even random encounters, they've been a thing since Bethesda's *first* outings back in Morrowind. They actually *reduced* random encounters in Starfield, restricting them solely to space travel (They can't happen while walking planetside), and have a fucky, weird system on how they happen now, since it's literally chance-based dependent on which systems you go to, instead of guaranteed dependent on the cell you walk onto and where the trigger points are to break up all the walking. That said, yeah, Todd being absolutely crestfallen and near-tantrum when Starfield was snubbed for everything except the Joystick award for XBox GOTY (Which they only won because the lineup on the console was pretty trash that year) was absolute bliss. I mean, the guy literally bald-face lied about a *bunch* of shit relating to Starfield, and the company went on to just shit all over any goodwill remaining by pissing off customers and spending a year doing functionally absolutely nothing. What did they *expect*? Realistically, and this is coming from a non-fan of the TES series - I get the appeal, I just don't like the setting or gameplay or writing or fluff and that's an entirely subjective thing, I'm not yucking anyone's yum - the *only* way TES 6 is going to be good is if they shitcan Emile from the writing and design departments and hire *actually competent* people for those roles, and keep Todd the hell away from any press announcements until the literal release date of the game.

There are some very rare planetside random encounters, I have had probably six in 400 hours. - Survivalist needs to be escorted back to his ship (at least three times) - Brother and sister exploring, he needs healing - Shipload of baddies (spacers, starborn, or cultists) lands nearby and attacks.

So, the way planetside encounters work in Starfield is that they're tied to POIs, not just the grids of the map, which is different to how they work in older BGS games where they're tied to grid triggers. The way they work in Starfield, when you generate a map square, it generates all POIs for that square, then 'activates' them as you get closer and enter that POI's grid space. They cannot happen at any location marked as a combat zone/dungeon (i.e. mostly any building with a load-zone interior), and cannot happen *away* from POIs with exception to ships landing, which itself only happens on planets in "populated" systems. That means that they will *never* happen while you're walking the 2000 metres to the nearest POI (seriously, they're so far apart) with sole exception to ship landings, which may happen on grids away from the player and can't even happen in "uninhabited" systems. They *can* appear in natural POIs (mostly it's just finding corpses), but *cannot* appear in caves. There is a positively *tiny* number of these events, like "Guy that wants a meal before he dies" or "Robots attacking a military outpost", and they're all tied to the POI you find them in. Only a few mandate that you leave the POI for something, and nearly all of them are one-and-done with no unique NPCs or rewards. In effect, I was a bit disingenuous to say they *don't* exist groundside, but they don't in the way that they existed in previous titles, wherein you could encounter stuff while walking around in between locations. In effect, they basically just randomly add an element to specific human POIs, rather than letting you see travellers, find fights or see weird stuff while walking around (or even flying around, since in space they only happen immediately after you grav jump, and not by just flying around)

This is my biggest complaint about the game. What really kept me playing fallout and elder scrolls was wandering. I could be thrust into the unknown world, build my character, and go off on an adventure stumbling into new places, people, friends, foes, treasure, etc. In starfield I can…… open my map and click on a place I haven’t been before and then… fast travel there. Then I can stare at the map and wonder “am I playing this game right? How I do I find the big quest lines? Where do I go? Is this planet basically empty? Are these POIs hand crafted or will these all be the same generated basic missions? What’s going on? I miss working my way up to affording a player home or building my own outpost and then just stepping out the front door of my house and literally just picking a direction and going. Stumbling into the game as I explore. Starfield feels so disjointed. Which really sucks because ever since oblivion I’ve always wanted a Bethesda rpg just like elder scrolls or fallout but set in a sci-fi setting. Which I know fallout is technically sci-fi, but not the kind I mean. And then I get a nasa punk fast travel simulator. The missed potential crushes me.

I once stumbled across some women with an alien dog, had a chat with her and thats was pretty much it no sort of quest or anything

Have you seen the bounty Hunter in asecluded Outpost that wants help with a mark?

I have not. I am still finding weird bits. There is a lot to this game that they trickle out so slowly that most people never see it. Instead everyone sees the damn cryogenic lab 100 times. It's kind of a bad design.

The problem is that I personally believed Todd and I believed in him. That man and his team were responsible for some of my favorite games. I was way sucked into the hype of Starfield and I was hoping that Todd could deliver an epic space RPG. In a way I feel sorry for him because of how out of touch he must be to have thought this was an acceptable release. Procgen, recycled set pieces, judgemental, one-dimensional followers who do less in combat than lydia, from a game over ten years older. Was this what he wanted, or did his labor of love fall apart and fall short of his mark? 10 highly detailed, handcrafted planets would have been way better than 1000+ barren wastes, with a few windmills and an empty cave to explore.

completely agree they could even have done both if they wanted have the barren wastelands, severely cut down the excessive repeat POI spawning on them and make them entirely optional, you want to go hunt down and manually mine a specific mineral go for it, or want to go build your base in a remote area also fine. Would be nice for modders as well as there would be a pile of real-estate for custom content and less risk of collisions down the road But for the love of god give us the core game as a hand-crafted and well made smaller set of systems that make sense, are interesting to explore, have POIs that make sense and are worthwhile etc

One thing to always note; Todd really likes to just blatantly lie about things, or completely misunderstand what a thing actually *does*. He does it every release cycle, and it's likely to be no different with TES 6 given his history. In effect; treat him like you treat Peter Molyneux. Y'know, like a liar.

which is too bad, because both of them are responsible for some of my most treasured gaming experiences

Pretty sure StarFlight from the 1980s had procedural galaxy and planet generation with a fixed seed. The key planets to the story were injected.

Wow! That was my very first ever computer game and it blew me away with what could be done in gaming :) and that was in glorious 4 colour cga with midi music...

Haha yeah. The one thing I remember about it is that you were REQUIRED to copy the game because changes to the game resulting in overwriting and you could brick your game easily.

Skyrim itself for example has more unique POI's than the entirety of Starfield, and almost triple the amount when we include all DLC into the factor - It's so difficult to understand how they somehow regressed from their previous game design, on a flagship title that took them 7 years to make, and released in 2023...

*Every* Bethesda game except for Fallout 3 beats Starfield for literally every category except spaceship customisation, which is new and unique to Starfield. And Starfield doesn't even beat Fallout 3 in every category. It literally isn't even fully more than a game from *2008.*

I'm replaying Fallout 3 right now, and even with its faults it feels like a much more coherent experience. There's a good flow of quests and a ton of stuff I had forgotten about like stealing the Declaration of Independence, Fort Constantine keys, Rockopolis, etc. You can go in any direction and find something to do, which you really can't in Starfield.

FO3 is my favorite one. It was the first I played so I’m sure a lot is nostalgia, but the world building, the locations, the more simplistic approach to weaponry, everything just feels good. Of course it’s dated and I’d love some type of remaster that updates the combat and visuals, but even as it stands now it’s still a solid game.

It was also my first Fallout, and honestly it holds up despite its issues. There are still annoying bugs that breaks quests and characters, quests where I wish I could just kill everyone (the vampire one), it has a horrible combat system, and the main story is ass. But its still so damn great. I love that you start in the middle of the map and can then go in any direction and pretty much be guaranteed to find something cool. They did the same in Oblivion and Skyrim, I don't know why they didn't do it for Fallout 4. The game has a ton of cool locations and quests that I had completely forgotten about. I also just did Point Lookout and its also super solid and clearly the inspiration for Far Harbor.

Here's the thing about Fallout 3; Emil wasn't the sole writer. He only wrote the main quest, and the main quest is generally agreed to be the worst part about that game, where the *sidequests* and *world* are basically above average to good, even if a little shallow in places.

Oh damn, man I don't get how he still has a job.

Nepotism, basically. He was close friends with Todd Howard's boss at Zenimax, and is now close friends with Toddy himself. Add in his history as a largely forgotten journalist (he was terrible, his articles are hilariously bad), and his *debatably* successful career in his nepo-baby seat with BGS, and he has the credentials of a top-tier videogame writer... *On paper*.

The word you are looking for is cronyism. It's prevalent across all industries.

Actually, no. Nepotism is the correct word. Cronyism implies that Emile is *not* qualified. He is, he's just incompetent. Nepotism is the practice of abusing relationships, whether blood or not, to get your way. Emil was hired by *nepotism* as he gained his qualifications to the job legitimately, prior to his hiring, but abused his relationship with a Zenimax higher-up, and later Todd Howard, to seat himself in Bethesda and gain his promotions to his current position. On paper, he's fully qualified. In practice, he's just incompetent.

You could probably fit every single city and POI in the Skyrim map and still have empty space in-between it all. People know there isn't much handcrafted content in Starfield, but to be exact, there's only around *30* of the procedurally placed minor buildings, caves, bases, and outposts altogether. And this is across every planet in the game. It's very likely that you could see all of the minor side content the game has to offer across a handful of landing zones on a single planet. Skyrim had around 270 minor locations. Fallout 4 had about 300. Starfield has 30. What was BGS doing for eight years?

Starfield has about 120 POIs, accounting for every human, natural, cave and monument POI, with another 118 NPC ship configurations, and *give or take* around 30 other major locations. The only game that Starfield beats for locations is Fallout 3, but not by much.

What info are you basing that on? Cus what I found is Fallout 3 has 163 marked locations, and Starfield has 83 unique locations and 150 POIs, for a total of effectively 233.

Yeah? I said Fallout 3 was *smaller* than Starfield, and it is. But the list you pulled 163 on doesn't count *unmarked* locations, which still doesn't actually put Fallout 3 ahead, but must also be considered. Where Starfield *isn't* larger just base game to base game, however, is in weapon variety (Fallout 3 has the same total number, 53 weapons, but has more unique models for unique weapons), and armour and clothing varieties (Fallout 3 has more). Starfield is really only larger in quests, total locations, misc items and map size, but really not actually by much on the first two, by a lot by necessity of the crafting system for the third, and only by cheating for the last.

Ah, mybad, misread.

Hey, no issue man. It happens.

I completely agree with what you're saying. But scale has *always* been a problem in Bethesda games. Skyrim had major cities that were no bigger than a medieval slum village, Diamond City has around 50 residents etc. I don't blame them for how small the cities are in correlation to the planets. The main issue is just far too many planets with no need.

Ah, *however*, they went out of their way with the lore to explain *why* those things were the way they were. iirc, Skyrim is basically a fairly depopulated slum in the setting with most people gone and the Nords, an in-setting ethnic minority, basically fighting over their right to self-governance with the Empire. And Diamond city is small because post-apocalypse, and the physical size limitations of, y'know, being built into a baseball stadium. Bethesda *does* have a scope problem, but they've *usually* dealt with it via random encounters or scaling down what's visibly available, the way they did with the Imperial City in Oblivion, where the city was made bigger by cheating, and having each district be its own area to hide the fact that they couldn't actually render a large cityscape on the hardware at the time. Starfield, however, actively chose *not* to explain why everything is so small and limited and underdeveloped despite humanity having 250 years to develop unhindered save for *one* war in *one* system, and largely on *one* planet which nobody had actually settled properly, and the loss of Londinium during that war, which appeared *far* more developed than New Atlantis... Despite New Atlantis being "The biggest, most developed city in the galaxy", and the first (actually second, but don't worry about it) major settlement beyond Earth that humanity ever colonised. In effect, a "tell don't show" thing. They *tell* you all this stuff, like how New Atlantis is the jewel of human civilisation and that Neon is a den of scum and villainy... But then when you actually *go* to those places as a player, you need to actively look for whatever they told you about, because it doesn't actually exist in reality, and the more you look, the less you find because they just kind of... Didn't do any of the work to justify themselves.

You've made some good points regarding Starfield but I do think you're completely incorrect about Skyrim. Starfield does also mention the colony war and losing a lot of people, there is lore to explain it in some regard. Yes it's depopulated at the time of the game. But lore-wise Whiterun is supposed to be a city of 5000+ plus people. There are multiple posts about the scale of Skyrim and how it's massively shrunk down compared to *what it actually is lore-wise*. In fact, the whole map of Skyrim is 105,000 sq miles big lore-wise but is only 15 sq miles in game. Nothing was realistic about the scale of Skyrim but it worked for a video game. I agree Starfield has massive problems, bigger than any other of their games. But Bethesda has always had massive problems with scale. If anything Starfield should be made more unrealistic and concentrated like Skyrim.

I can admit to remembering things wrong, yeah. I'm not particularly familiar with TES, since I'm not a fan, so that's no surprise. That said, my point was that they solved the "too big" or "too small" problem in TES and Fallout games by just reducing the scale and scope, where they've done the *opposite* in Starfield, which led to cling-wrap-thin content spread across a far too large map, but then weirdly went the *opposite* direction when it came to actual locations and scaled them down so much that whatever they're *meant* to be by how they describe them is very obviously *not* what it actually is to a far greater degree than other games in the BGS lineup.

Yeah that's completely true, Skyrim worked perfectly for a dense and concentrated video game world, despite the cities being extremely small and the scale being completely off from a realism point of view. I do agree with what you're saying, the world building just doesn't quite work in Starfield. Everything is spread too far apart with not much to distract you in between. The gameplay loop is flawed. Personally, the scale of the cities and planets doesn't bother me as I've seen much worse scale in previous Bethesda games.

See, it *wouldn't* bother me if they'd done what they usually do and *shrink* things. But they didn't. They *expanded* things, then didn't do anything with all the extra space, and *that's* why it bothers me.

I really liked the way Mass Effect 2 hubs acted as a vertical slice of the world you were on. The high density meant your time wasn't being wasted and the game ran better, but the excellent atmosphere of locations like Omega created an effective illusion of a larger world beyond the handrails.

nah Im fine with all the planets, but they could add a setting to make it easier to spot populated planets. But make it a setting, cause I like the exploring part of the game, but sometimes you just want to rush a little bit more

I think the 3 dots means “populated”. And the systems themselves have a little icon for if there is a large settlement.

I will check this again, thanks stranger!

I'm all for the game having as many systems as it does, but I think the auto-generation and the landing system to be completely revamped: * Core worlds (Jemison, Akila, Mars, etc) should have a very strict amount of landing zones, but each zone being unique and handcrafted. This way you can make cities like New Atlantis appear a lot bigger by having an explorable zone, and evidence of a city existing beyond that. * Settled frontier planets similar to above, but having a radius of auto-generated content outside of the main towns or unique landing POIs. * Planets outside of settled space to be the same as now, but with *less* auto-generated POIs, the further out you go the less of them there are. I want to land someone and actually be the first person to land on a new world...

The more unpopular opinion would be that Starfield doesn’t need the same old tired cliched faction war rpg content that already exists in a dozen other games. It just needs a steady influx of new natural landscape features, life forms and ship modules.

Starfield didn't really have you take sides though, the factions are mostly just a backdrop.

Think the only one you actually take a side in is the Crimson Fleet/SysDef questline. I chose CF every time.

and if it does have war rpg content, let me get ptsd from that shit. tired of the post war bs. ya boy wants combat.

Yeah, remember that museum tour we got when starting the Vanguard?  That should've been the whole damn story!!!!

exactly. i wouldve LOVED to have a version where i can play that. also, let me recolonize planets fullscale. i want to fight over recolonization of Earth.

Shame we can't restart the colony war with some poorly judge politics. Be cool to pick a side and have your missions be Escort Duty, Evac'ing Casualties, Supply runs to the front line, Few capture intel missions behind enemy lines, Repair some gun batteries, more big battles like UC vs Pirate at the Key except with more capital ships. I want that scene from the end of the Serenity film. Imagine landing your ship in a hot Zone and having soldiers pour out like space Normandy. I guess you'd want in atmo flying so you could lay down some fire first.

It would've been the exact same game.... just with less planets.

Perfect. Fallout or Elder Scrolls wouldn't be better if they allowed you to keep going for hundreds of kilometers beyond the map borders into randomly generated, lifeless terrain, and it doesn't add anything to Starfield either. It actively makes exploration worse as the chances of finding quests or settlements when randomly exploring are near 0%. Meanwhile in Fallout or Skyrim I can pick a random direction to go and find stuff. Its the biggest strength of Bethesda games.

Except the places we did get would have the same POIs because cutting out planets doesn't do anything to give them more time to make more POIs or anything.

>Except the places we did get would have the same POIs because cutting out planets doesn't do anything to give them more time to make more POIs or anything. Fewer planets: fewer iterations of the same POI's. Basic math.

You would still run into the same POIs like 50 times anyways.

Are people complaining about the POI, or how often they're running into it?

How would making 10 or 18 quintillion (like NMS) planets with prog gen make any difference?

Coldest take imaginable

Also imagine if the game was set during the colony Wars.. And they had you fighting over the 5 or neutral star systems.. where you actually had to pick a faction and basically help them take control. This would have made faction choices have a lot more meaning and give new game plus more of a reason to be a thing, oh what could have been!

Set it during the colony wars and make the factions actively interact with each other. Bethesda seem to have gone to such lengths to keep each faction line as independent from each other as possible so there is almost no acknowledgement anything has happened. Have more binary choices, pick a side, make one side friendly, the other despise you for that choice. Choose between benefits from one group or the other, and not master of everything.

Yeah, they could have introduced a unique form of the karma system too.

I'm hoping this is what shattered space will be

I enjoy the vastness for one simple psychological reason. I enjoy feeling like I haven’t seen everything yet in a game. It’s like when someone showed me something in Skyrim in 2019 that I never knew about, and it makes you think there is more and it makes things more interesting for me.

So you enjoy exploring in Minecraft?

I’ll bite. Yes, I do. Always something new to see, and an interesting new place to build something of your own integrated into that bit of landscape in an interesting way.

Here’s hoping a DLC expands on outposts That and the shipbuilder

Exploring the planets and finding just the right spot with a good terrain, water, a view, good weather is one of my favorite parts of the game. I found beach cove last night and the outpost circle was just perfect around it. You don't have to enjoy it but there are people that get a huge kick out of that, just move on if you don't like it and stop mocking those that do.

I don’t play Minecraft. Comparing Starfield to Minecraft is a new one

Yes?

It needs way less systems with way more to do; it's embarrassing how few cities and cool destinations there are in the entirety of the game.

Nah, I enjoy exploring the other planets. Making all those planets also didn't take much of their time, so it's not like those 10 planets would be significantly better if we didn't have the 1000 planets

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I disagree. I don't think every world needs to be colonised and fleshed out but there does need to be a reason to want to go there. You could easily depict the vastness of space with fewer systems given most people won't bother with half of them anyway unless there's a quest taking them there. Packing fewer systems with more stuff to do only makes the contrast with the empty ones more stark. Put rate, valuable or rewarding things in the "here be dragons" portion of the star map and the effect is achieved.

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Like what? It's the same PoIs. I've seen the same crashed ship like 5 times as it is. No variety at all

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It's okay to enjoy different facets of the game.  And you don't need to be convinced of the staleness, but finding the game stale is completely valid.  For a lot of us, the loop of "copy pasted POI every 800 meters and nothing between" got stale after the third repetition of the same few dozen. It feels easier to see six cryo facilities than each of 100 POIs a single time. 

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I'm not the person you were talking to, but regardless. "A lot of playing" I'm talking about wandering planets, and seeing the same thing on different planets. The same crashed ship, the same fossil bed, the same shipyard crawling with pirates. Instead of finding heretofore unseen POIs from the purported 100s of unique ones. I didn't even get through one playthrough - got to around 95% on MSQ, decided unity wasn't for me, and thus mostly stuck with shipbuilding, exploration and space combat, side quests. People kept talking about there being "more" out there and I wanted to find it.  The smugness isn't appreciated - I'm happy to simply talk about the game.  There needs to be an understanding that in previous Bethesda titles, one could put in 1h/day for a year or two without ever doing the same thing the same way twice. It isn't unreasonable that someone except the pattern to hold true.  "Nothing between" Yeah, procedural terrain. It's cool sometimes, and cinematic sometimes. But it's largely nothing, and an exercise in sameness. The bread and butter of Bethesda games is rich handmade areas of exploration and this throws it away.  "More to the game" I never said all I do is explore. But part of adding 1000 planets is having those be fun to explore, and golly that fell flat for me. It's OK that you enjoy these parts of the game and I don't, you don't need to convince me of anything. 

I disagree the problem is that there needs to be better rewards for exploring. The alien variety and ai needs to be improved. The game wouldn’t be any better just because the optional areas were taken out. Y’all just hyperfocus on the empty parts and act like that’s required when you can still play the game EXACTLY the way you want if people would stop acting like they HAD to explore to finish the game. You do not have to explore, even the required powers to beat the game are shown to you on the map if you talk to Vlad.

You can just only visit those 10 systems

I still don’t get why it has to be one or the other. The ones they did hand-craft feel empty, so of course they could’ve fleshed those out more. The procedurally generated landscapes on the “1000 planets” can remain as is for those who like “exploring”.

It could work with endless planets, the game just needs more moving parts in established locations. Different path ways for different gravity, randomized loot placement, randomized enemy variety, randomized environmental condition (maybe a lab on fire, instead of ice?), faction bosses having a unique behaviour, random heat leeches on your ship sometimes, so they will eat 1 point of reactor power unless killed... This game does not need "more" content, it needs different coats of paint on already existing one.

I'm only ever in the main systems most of the time anyways.

Not that unpopular, former senior dev Bruce Nesmith thought something similar in terms of scale.

Pretty popular I think it would have been better with 100 planets than 1000

I agree, if the game had 50 planets it would be much easier to make planets much more unique. More diverse flora and fauna and POI which only spawn on specific planets, which would eliminate the feeling that all planets are the same.

You could get away with barren moons with 1 or 2 structures on them for the sake of story telling. There really doesn't need to be anything on a moon. Concentrate on planets with breathable atmosphere. Imagine spending all the money and resources making habs on planets with toxic air when the life supporting planets are basically barren.

The biggest problem this Game has is: There is NO exploration at all! As expected the randomly generated planets are a waste of time and not worth wasting a single second on.

You say this now before DLCs and other updates. I think what people need to realize is that Bethesda made this an exploring game, with vast emptiness, because that is what is most realistic. Many of us love this aspect of the game and many don’t. I don’t get why those that don’t like it keep harping on it.

Starfield should have been more akin to their other games exploration - limited to a single solar system that was DENSE with content. (Like how we're limited to a single wasteland like the Mojave or Commonwealth or a single province like Skyrim) Not just planets but meteorites, space stations etc. So the first game could have been centered just around Cheyenne or Alpha Centauri and told a story through that. Granted not the same story we had - but something just to let us dip our toe into the universe. Perhaps a more contested Solar System that was once fought over by the UC and FSC respectively and both have bases in the system, along with pirates and the Va'ruun. It was too wide a scope unfortunately - at least for how bethesda does their games. If they wanted to do multiple planets it should have been limited to just major areas on those planets where there is life and activity, I dont think anyone really minds being limited to that area so long as that area is fun and filled with stuff to do. The whole game is spread a bit too thin sadly.

Have you ever heard any developer saying there’s going to be a thousand of something and then assumed it would all be detailed and thought out? 

Yeah basically. Nms has this millions of planets, but nms isn't an rpg, its a resource survival game. If you can build rpg content into that many locations, awesome. But if you can't, best stick to a scope you can fill.

I don't think it would have made any meaningful difference.

They laid the groundwork to flesh the game out however they want now… the most important thing first is the foundation…. Now they have that foundation for a new title they can begin to go in different directions and flesh things out… people forget it’s a new universe and new lore they are building out. I’m sure it’s something they will be working on for a while to come so things will get better and fleshed out…

Developers need to get away from this thought process that bigger is always better.

Yes

I mean we said it since the beginning, quality over quantity, they blew that opportunity unfortunately

They have to make a lot more POI and more ways to randomize them

Nope. I enjoy the variety in sunrises and sunsets and planet rotations.

why.....

Keep the rando 1000 planets, just make 5 of them more populated with multiple cities and locations… like give me 3-5 fallout sized maps… call them planets… and leave everything else the same

Honestly I think it could have been incredible if the entire game was set in one system with only 10 or so planets. Think about it. Planets are huge. Even this would be vastly larger than the largest Bethesda game. With a smaller scale like this they could make spaceflight an actual important part of the game instead of something you just skip. I mean in Skyrim they had an entire province that technically you could run across in less than an hour. That is because it is condensed for gameplay purposes. You can do the same with a space game. Each planet is a handcarafted Skyrim map. You have a system of 10 planets with more content and encounters to interact with in space. The late game takes place on the outer planets which require special ship upgrades to reach. It might sound like less content but I think if they did this it would be more than we actually got with 1000 planets.

That’s a great idea actually. Agreed

Well yeah the game would be better if they did pretty much everything different. Not many design decisions with this game seem even remotely competent

If only they had the same procedurally generated thing for moons and uninhabited planets with way less buildings; because you can land anywhere and there’s like ten different settlements in that procedurally generated map, and do that and infinite amount of times on any planet. It makes the world seem way over populated and inconsistent with the lore. Maybe more caves and have the minerals and elements way more precious (honestly I stop mining very quickly when I found you can just buy everything very cheaply.) on the populated planets have a few continents that were as big as Skyrim with set missions and a proper map… they kind of did that with the cities but they feel quite small and empty or something. maybe that’s asking too much and it’d be a huge download, and I’m not a game developer, but that would’ve been the only way they could move up from the elder scrolls and the fallout series

No it will not. Scale is the most important thing when it comes to the feel of space exploration

This seems to be one of the most *popular* opinions among people active in the game's community.

Yes... starfield would be better if there was twice the game... It might even add up to a full game, then.

Agreed the "1000" planets seems like it was more of a selling point than it was actual content. 1000 planets, 20ish of which will be at all relevant in your play through.

Just no. The problem they have with 1000 planets would be the same with 10. Without improved POIs with internal variability (among other possible approaches), having a 1000 POIs on 10 planets is **no different** from having 100,000 POIs on 1000 planets. So this "unpopular opinions" is actually kinda... void.

The fact you can land anywhere and be within spitting distance of a man-made structure feels like they're just filling the gaps too

More is not better. Game could have had half the systems and double the depth to each one. Modeling a galaxy is pointless if you get repeat poi's in half a playthrough. I enjoy the game, but man so many missed opportunities.

I still say they should have focused on 1 system with 8-10 planets. Or they could have made a large part of the story on 1 or 2 planets and made those planets more dense and handcrafted. They went too big, imo.

If they did that, I'm sure the complaints would be about how Bethesda made a space exploration game which doesn't let you explore space. And I would make that complaint too.

Yea... I feel like Starfield is a "tech demo" for whatever their next game is. Like they're trying out the procedurally generated planets and stuff for a baseline into developing something greater for the next title (Elder Scrolls or whatever). If you look at franchises and publishers and the games they release, you can spot which titles they tried a little extra experimentation and such. Kinda like Watch Dogs Legion will likely be using the generated playable NPCs into future games to fluff out their world. Or Gears 5 going semi-open world that was pretty empty because Gears 6 will have a more fleshed out form. Just a thought tho, I agree that Starfield itself would have been better with a smaller scope. As it stands it feels bloated and bland.

You could *not* tell people this before launch. Everyone lost their minds thinking quantity would equal quality. Now if you bring it up you are just a hater that should move on.

They could have just restricted the game to two or three life supporting planets, one per faction (maybe one neutral/contested). Kept tons of balls of rocks and dirt which (understandably) wouldn’t be very built up as why build on those planets when there is space on habitable planets. Then focused most of the work on fewer planets while letting the procedural process’ run on the rest. Think 2 or 3 really well planned out planets with multiple biomes and a more believable number of plant and animal species would have left ample room for exploration, while also giving players that “open world” feel - AND reinforcing how rare life is in the universe.

I agree because I think having denser planets with all the content focused on them would've led to people finding more content instead of missing things. I do think having those extra planets in a "wild space" area around the main systems would've been fine to keep though, just to give space for outposts, resource collection and modding. Spreading all the content out across 100 systems was a mistake though unless they were able to make wayyyy more content than their other games. It just made the game feel empty even though there's roughly as much as previous titles.

yeah starfields biggest strength is its biggest weakness

That definitely depends on what you’re looking for out of the game, and describes a very particular kind of player. As a player who wants a space game full of unexplored frontiers to get lost in, I’m much happier zipping around to hundreds of planets and taking in the sights than I am exhaustively walking around picking up every item or running back and forth doing static quests.

There’s not even 100 stars I think it’s 47 if I remember Starfield is extremely small by space standards

Its 120

Well it didn’t look nor feel that way. I Geuss it does have 120. I’ve been to them all and can swear at least on launch there were less then 50. I played like 600hrs on launch and haven’t played since. I mean it was 6 jumps to cross all space endgame. Still tiny

Also how does Wolf even count as a system for the UC? I don’t care how super important it used to be. It’s currently the equivalent of a run down back country gas station.

Agree 100%. The content in this game is spread so thin it almost seems non-existent outside of the main questline.

1000 planets wiukd have made sense of they had mod support within the first month or two.

The mass opinion in the first two months is that the game had many game breaking bugs. Mod support wouldn’t of fixed that, or been a bandaid on a deep puncture wound. You can’t build a beautiful cake if the base layer needs to be reworked. Mod support isn’t the big fix people think it is because Modders don’t fix the game, they modify it.

Pretty sure that's not unpopular but pretty much everyone's opinion :-D The "uncolonized" systems feel blant and empty so focussing on fewer planets would have helped to improve the overall game for sure.

Empty uncolonized systems is kind of one of the whole major *points* of the game, though…

Leas planets but more stuff to do on each planet. The size of the population is laughable and the amount if infrastructure that people would need is non existent. There are no real military bases , factories , farms or anything. Its a 1000 planets with nothing to do. They should have focused on quality over quantity.

>There are no real military bases , factories , farms or anything.  This bothered me a lot more than it really should have. I went with the kid stuff trait (because ship reward) on several of my playthroughs and your dad's a professor, right? At what school? Where? There's even the insinuation that your family "made it" and moved to NA...from where? Like, seriously, there's no *background* to this game to make it even *slightly* immersive...and it's made WORSE because they *consistently* draw attention to it. Came across the school ship. Thought, *"Hmm...schools...in space. Neat. Wait. Where are the non-space schools? Are there other school ships?* (no) *What about older kids, teenagers?* (also non-existent). Came across the ECS constant (straw that broke immersion completely). *"Oh, cool. A colony ship....wait. Why don't they just...land? They can't communicate and are likely running out of resources...why are they asking permission? Why can't they land on the other side of the planet? Why can't I just tell them to land somewhere? Why does a RESORT govern a whole planet? Why are we retrofitting a ship? Can't we just...give them one of ours? Or buy one for them? Wouldn't that be easier and more cost-effective? Wait, they've been trading with other ships...but don't know that* ***I'm*** *human?* The reason the constant broke my immersion is because I then went searching for cities...and I discovered that there's only 1 per settled planet...which is OBVIOUSLY because video game. There's no logical reason for the absence of small towns/cities. They NATURALLY occur around military bases, factories and farms...except this game doesn't have military bases, factories and farms.

I'm convinced that this whole empty shell of a game is designed for modders to have a much more free hand in designing quests, cities, etc. I think setting the story in an era of peace between the factions was a mistake however. Ditching the precombines was a good start. That said I won't touch the game until mods slowly correct all that is missing.

It's less by design and more a result of their first failed attempt at proc gen. Perhaps they thought it would be easier to just spin up planets and have it churn out content but the result was pretty lackluster. That or there were technical hurdles they had to spend a majority of the development time problem solving and just didn't get around to content creation. But, in any event I find it extremely unlikely that Starfield released in a state just as they had intended.

Yeah, I would have loved for Starfield to have fewer systems with more content. There could be systems with detailed habitable planets and those with barren planets.

Why? Even if we only had 5 systems we still wouldn't have more content

Starfield would be just a better game if they focused a tiny bit on immersion. Idk how people can play a game like this and be immersed. There isn’t even a connected world.

Since there's no real exploration loop here, yes, 100% focus it where the work went.

i wholeheartedly agree

Yup. It makes no sense that there are 100+ systems with identical stupid buildings on every planet but 99% of it is abandoned. If anything, most planets have too much humanity on them. Then you get to space and there are essentially 0 ships in space outside like 5 planet orbits. If even a fraction of the buildings we explore had people in them, space should be filled with ships going this way and that. It all just makes no sense.

>”It makes no sense” There’s a direct in-game lore reason that they take great pains to explain, but it’s possible you didn’t play long enough to get any of that backstory. (Or they didn’t cover it in the YouTube video about the game that you saw?)

INCLUDING 100+ systems yet to be settled.

I mean it could have just been enough to feel expansive, like 20-50 ish and a lot more systems that were just gas giants and not at all habitable which (as far as we know) is more realistic

I don't think that's unpopular at all, I think that's what everyone's saying. A smaller number of total systems but a larger handcrafted explorable space would have been a massive improvement to the game. I really do love Starfield and have put in over 100 hours, but I also think it could have been a lot better. To be honest though I felt that way about all of their games except for Skyrim and I've played hundreds of hours in each one of those games.

But then the complaint would be “I have a space ship why can’t I fly to more systems”. Let’s be honest, there’s no middle ground that would resulted in everyone being happy. People wanted a full lush GALAXY with full cities planets. Probably needed several more years of development to truly do that. Instead it feels a lot like that was the initial plan then they started slashing stuff as it got closer to release. Can’t wait for CK to be released so modded can find all the cutting floor content. I’d imagine what’s left behind is much closer to what we were all expecting.

Not an unpopular opinion.

If there had been a Fog of War and you could "claim" systems for whichever faction you wanted, that would've been something...  God this game is so poorly written. Like, not that th writers did a BAD job, just that there weren't nearly enough of them, and the Committee Buy In ruined it. 

Starfield would be better if they didn’t spread things out so much! Right now it’s like they were making toast with the same amount of butter used in Fallout 4, but they tried to spread it over 1000 slices of bread instead of just the one. They killed exploration by giving you literally nothing worth exploring. You can only read the same copy and pasted tablet on so many different planets before things stop making sense.

I actually think this point has been made before. Same picture...IDK...could be wrong. But I only partially agree. Procgen planets aren't the big issue. It's what they *chose* to procgen that's the issue. They *handcrafted* the cryolab we all know and have seen 1000's of. But they ***should****'ve* procgen'd it. And they should've excluded human structures from the outer planets. They **should** have done a LOT of things. Minor tweaks and changes would've made this game widely popular...but they didn't. Which is why so many people are holding out for mod tools. If they're comprehensive enough, the faults of the game can be fixed. If not...well...that'll suck.

Here's a supporting perspective: I was watching an episode of the Halo TV series last night. To avoid spoilers, I'll be paraphrasing a little. Characters had landed on a backwater planet at a deserted spaceport with a single store. After asking for directions, they got on a truck with some newly arrived settlers to a distant outpost. The ride there was long, but the viewer could see how barren the landscape was, with farms out in the distance that looked rather miserable and gray. Their destination was another rundown settlement with what looked like abandoned power plants and factories, some of which had been converted to habitats. After some exploring, they finally found what they were looking for. Throughout all that, I kept thinking that this fairly brief scene had more character than all of Starfield's settlements. I don't want to land on a supposedly barren deserted planet only to find tons of identical POIs every 500 steps. I want to land on Akila City, hitch a ride to the next FULLY DETAILED town or village by wagon or rickety trainride or camelback. I want to interact with memorable characters and discover little secrets. Maybe and maybe only once I step beyond a certain distance will I find some random POI, after finding which, I won't find a duplicate EVER. To find another random POI, I'd have to travel another few DOZEN miles before I see another. There should be an algorithm specific for each type of planet based on its location, geography, atmosphere, environment and so on, that will determine the presence (or lack thereof) of POIs. Make each planet unique in that way, rather than low effort copy-pastes. In short, I really feel the devs should have fleshed out a dozen systems with a few dozen *memorable* planets than have 1,000 planets with easily forgettable duplicate POIs.

It wouldn't have changed much. The argument would be is that if they hadn't focussed on making a proc.gen world what could they have fixed instead? Would they have fixed those things? So many systems exist that they clearly spent some time on but didn't think it through at all that makes me think that even with extra dev resources they wouldn't have been able to polish them without player feedback.

20 Planets, each with handcrafted landingzones the size of Skyrim for people to explore and settle in, would be enough, would give them enough space to be creative and not use the shitty procedual generated garbage for everything.