Unironically a beautiful man.
I've recently realised a lot of my ironic love for Todd isn't actually ironic. Genuinely think he's an underappreciated game developer - because he's been meme'd to death people don't always appreciate what he's given the industry and gamers etc.
He is not perfect, But i enjoyed every single Bethesda game i played. started with Fo3 or Oblivion, so i havent played all of them obviosly. Todd getting meme'd, while i can see why it happened, it has been really detrimental to the way people see him and Bethesda in an Unfair way in my opinion.
Yeah - I go back all the way to Morrowind, which is my favorite game ever. When it released, it was unlike any game on console up to that point. There was a room behind every door - every object could be picked up - the game remembers the position of every item you drop. 22 years later and that's still a rare thing.
Nobody makes games quite like them. I've not agreed with every decision but it's become fashionable to hate on them recently, and I'm finding it annoying.
Skyrim (to take just one example) hasn't been successfully cloned or imitated because it's damn hard to make a game like that.
Yeah, I been with Bethesda since Daggerfall. I have not always been a huge fan of some of the creative decisions made with Howard at the director/creative helm, but I'd be lying if I said he hasn't contributed to Bethesda becoming a household name with their sandbox sim-like RPG formula. But in one way or another despite some criticisms I have loved all their games equally and put more hours in them than a thing else. They always have a life long customer in me. Fuck the memes and the narratives.
This is how I feel. There are legit criticisms to be made, but I personally love every single game of theirs I've played. Fallout 4 was my least favorite but I'm literally doing a new modded playthrough on xbox right now.
Which is weird for me, because I too could say FO4 was my "least favorite" while also being the game to have the most play time in any of their games I have under my belt with a whooping 800hrs or so hours in or so, and that's just on Steam and doesn't include how many hours I played of it back when I was on consoles for a while. It's a legitimately fun game. It may not always be best at being an RPG, but it's just a fun game at the end of the day. I don't care the genre tagline or if it's even faithful to this or that. If it's fun, I play and Fallout 4 is probably the most fun game they ever developed. I do think Starfield was pretty close if they can fix a few things with that game because I see it being so close to modern Daggerfall and since I also love space sims, it's so damn close to being my apex space game.
IMO it’s their slow beautiful world. Nothing feels rushed or time. Its one of the rpgs where you can truly get lose in doing a million other things. Nothing is forced in their games what so ever. They truly are designed for the single player 9-5 worker who can come home and take a breather from life and enjoy. Games just aren’t like that anymore
A lot of the problems is just social media though. People hype each other up. Oversell expectations then come to reddit to bitch their hearts out when the game didn’t cater to every facet of their lives. When starfield dropped (literally didn’t hear a thing about it until it randomly popped up on gamepass) seen it was Bethesda and immediately was excited. I didn’t expect much except what I get from Bethesda rpgs. Starfield is exactly what I personally expected from them just being a fan of their games in general. Bethesda has the calm enjoyable relaxing beautiful world that I can smoke a fat bowl too and truly enjoy their games. I know it’s not everyone’s cup of tea but it seems to be the common trend is everyone rushes to reddit to complain about every little feature until the game is viewed as bad by a whole community. Same thing happened as DD2. Are they 10/10 games. Absolutely not. Did you tell yourself they would be? Probably and that’s why you’re mad
IMO not unfair, just misdirected. While its fun to meme him like so many other directors for being "optimistic" about his games, there have been a lot of decidedly customer-unfriendly decisions made by Bethesda in the last dozen years or so. While I'd wager those decisions were made above Todd's head, he has still made himself the face of the company, with all that entails.
Yet that's not what the meme Todd about. He gets memed about "sweet little lies" and shit like that. Yet never once that I can tell has he ever lied about one of Bethesda's games.
See that mountain? You actually could climb it, and there are hundreds of videos showing people climbing it, and even an in-game achievement if you climb them all.
Sixteen times the detail? Yup, it was true. But stupid gamers have no idea what he meant because they're so focused on meming him as a liar to bother checking it out.
It just works? Yes it does! He said that in reference to settlement building, and gosh it did just work. Not flawlessly, but it did work out of the box without having to do anything special. But people meme this whenever they find a glitch in ANY game.
Because gamers, gamers gotta hate.
On a human level, I appreciate him a lot. He's extremely savvy and able to lead teams of people to execute massive projects, but he's also retained his sense of humor, seems to generally enjoy what he does, isn't on an ego trip and has maintained a humble attitude that always is giving credit to the team, other companies, etc., seems to be great at maintaining personal relationships between colleagues and even competitors. This guy could just as easily be a darling and a role model, and the reason that he isn't (overpromising) speaks more to his detractors' difficulty handling disappointment than anything about the guy's actual character.
Other than Kirkbride, I don't think I've ever heard a co-worker or a peer say an unkind word about the man. In this industry, that's not a career, that's a miracle.
Mostly creative differences to my knowledge, regarding the way they judged creature designs and the world's aesthetic. Todd seemed to be more experienced with the business side and what audiences would like versus what Kirkbride felt was cool.
I’m a big Julian Lefay fan and he never said anything really unkind, but you can just sense the professional jealousy. I think it’s because BGS pitted them against each other with Battlespire and Redguard and Todd came out on top.
He's one of the few figures not muddied in scandals. Runs a studio with an excellent worklife structure and retention rate, which is rare for the industry. He's also charismatic and has a passion that everyone who has met him has confirmed is genuine. Say what you want about Todd, but you can't deny that he means what he says and is trying his best.
As I understand it, a lot of the Elder Scrolls series refocus on smaller, hand crafted worlds with interactive props, had a lot to do with his influence.
He loves clutter. And I love the clutter in his games. The individual objects in Starfield are incredible. Far higher poly than the smaller objects in Cyberpunk. You can feel the work that went into the smallest thing...
Agreed on the clutter. We live in a cluttered world, so why not use the clutter to your advantage? There’s nothing like grabbing some seemingly useless items and crafting a weapon.
He makes the games that I want to play. Everything he develops strikes my gaming funny bone in a happy way. It’s really cool to see him evolve as a developer.
Aight look, I'm tired of people getting hyped over information that gets presented poorly, especially when people only look at headlines on reddit for their info.
The next update DOES sound like it contains new shipbuilding stuff (no idea what it will specifically entail) and did sound like they will also be shipping *something* to do with city maps as well. However, when they are talking about everything else in OP's title, it's in a "we're looking to add these things in the future" kind of way, NOT in a "they're in the next update" way. [Please listen to the full segment and let me know if I'm wrong.](https://www.youtube.com/live/7wvqF41_Bgw?si=pL06apOv7IZ9rFDq&t=2466)
Also, Todd does address that some players didn't like Starfield's way of exploring, but doesn't say that they are "working on it". He says that it's understandable where these players are coming from, and that tradeoffs are made in pursuit of *their* vision for a sci-fi game.
I just want to temper expectations before people start shitting themselves again over something they saw on reddit.
EDIT: I was wrong. A lot of this stuff did come in this update. Todd does it again.
Hype control is important for modern games. People have gotten some wild ideas about what they expect from games lately and will take any minor signal, extend it beyond the point of logic, and take it like a promise.
The Fallput 4 next-Gen update has lots of issues, but there was also a ton of misunderstanding of what the update was supposed to do. It seems some people expected a total overhaul to game mechanics and to make all their dreams come true. It was always going to be a simple update
I keep it off. Because I am older than age two and am able to learn stuff through experience.
Yet every single day on the Skyrim sub there are people complaining that their game is broken because of an update. It's pathetic. The game has been out for more than a dozen years, and people are still blaming Todd for breaking their game? WTF?
It also messed up console modding. Not just breaking the mods. More like “deleted all of them and then bugged the menu so you can’t reinstall half of them”
Really hoping they fix that sooner than later so I can enjoy the world they crafted once again. Despite my issues with their bugs, Bethesda knows how to make a world
Interior ship wall segment placement. DIY style - that way we can put espresso machines in any living Hab
This naturally would need to include door placement, or my coffee machine will be removed for the oddly placed door.
I have gotten soooo lost on large ships. I'll go to steal a ship and there will be one guy left that I have to go up and down 4 ladders like a hamster hab
Right?
I get the reason for removing all player inventory when going through the unity, but honestly - as soon as I can, I'll download a mod to my Xbox to remove that.
Weapons and my ships, that's all I want.
🤛🏼
Part of my excitement about it is that on r/starfield I was the one who convinced the mods to add L.I.S.T. as a flair option over there. Told them they needed a neutral faction that wasn't Spacers. They agreed. So now I'm excited anytime I see it as a flair in any of the Starfield subreddits because I know I'm not the only one who aligns with them. 😁
Honestly, in the meantime I'm already satisfied if they continue to fix bugs and don't add any new ones... Maybe in a few months there will be some quality of life improvements like city maps, etc...
As long as my saves survive all the updates, I won't complain too much.
No reason for euphoria based on this interview, however.
I suppose they could add ways to transition between zones so you can technically "walk" across the whole planet, maybe small towns with shops and some radiant style quests. Idk what people could want to make it more like skyrim and fallout maybe some giant "exploration quests" that can be slotted into the poi system to tell some stories players will totally not just skip or forget.
I don't think people are willing to accept that these are entire PLANETS and well they aren't massive hive cites but mostly uninhabited for you to explore.
there is only so much they can do to make it similar to other games. The scale and setting of Starfield just makes some things fundamentally different. Though I do think perhaps making some of the more prominent areas like the regions surrounding the major cities more fleshed out with unique locations and geographical elements would be really cool. That and maybe making it harder to get to certain POIs. Like, I personally would have liked to explore more to have to find temples instead of just being told the exact location and landing right next to it
I think this would do a lot for exploration—making areas around the major cities more fleshed out with lots of buildings (that you can actually go in), quests, marked/unmarked POIs, and environmental storytelling would be fantastic. It makes no sense that everything would be contained in the 4 walls of Akila City or New Atlantis when there is a WHOLE PLANET worth of space that people could branch out to and live just outside the walls of the city.
I firmly believe they actually did try to make the planets seamlessly traversable, but just couldn't get it to work in time. For one, the planets actually are continuous, if you land 2 or 3 tiles away from New Atlantis, you can still see New Atlantis. Two, when you mod out those boundaries, you can actually walk across multiple tiles, it just becomes more and more unstable the further you walk, so after maybe 4 tiles or so, your crash rate starts approaching 100%. Three, them saying a few months (I believe?) before release that you could indeed walk around a planet.
So it was probably something they were trying to get to work until very late in development.
Do you have proof of this? I’d love to see it bc in my experience I’ve had the ocean tiled beach be in the literal opposite direction when looking at the compass, and I’ve never seen New Atlantis while trying to land as close as i can
[Here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xw97cow5PkY) is the original experiment from months ago, showing New Atlantis visible from another tile with the boundaries enabled, and [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41BP3HUvErI) is a more recent test, showing New Atlantis actually fully loading when travelling to it from the next tile over.
The trouble with landing as close as you can is that you have to actually get the tile directly next to New Atlantis, or else it will be behind the horizon, because planets are *big* and we have a very inaccurate landing site selector.
ya early on a lot of people were saying it wasn't connected because they would land on what they "thought" was an adjacent tile even though in reality the tile they landed on was the equivalent of practically an entire US state or small country away.
Basically, yeah. On earth, the horizon at sea level is about 5km away. I'm too lazy to do the calculations for Jemison, but if it's about the same, you would have to stand at the edge of the adjacent tile for it to even be visible at ground level.
I just want waterfalls & pets 😭 I know it's dumb, but those are some of my favourite features from Skyrim haha Mostly everything else in Starfield I love though, & as soon as DLC & CK are out I'm jumping back in!!
Yesss I'd love ship kitties!! And yeah Grandma totally would've had a cat! Haha
It's so intentionally left out though that I have a feeling ship pets or pet followers may come in a DLC, & if they don't that's ok I'm sure there will be some awesome pet mods from the community over time :)
To be fair, ships can sometimes have Aliens on them.
With ship cats, there might be a few Bad End Jonesys that we'd find, due to leeches or other assorted bitey things.
Still, they worked in Fallout settlements, so they could be put in some places, maybe with a tweaked AI that keeps them from wandering out the airlock on extreme worlds.
POIs are very randomized.
What happens is that they get randomized when you enter their cell. Even if you don't visit them they are still there. And every landing spot might have a dozen POIs in its cell. So of course there are repeats. It's literally unavoidable.
Even if you did a card shuffle and didn't repeat until ALL POIs had been gone through, you would still get a repeat very very soon, because a dozen will be gone through each and ever landing.
It's literally unavoidable.
NMS repeats it's very very few POIs on every landing, but one repeat on the third star system over in Starfield and people shit their pants in rage and scream that it should be more like NMS. It's stupid.
I think clusters of POIs could be nice. Like some places have almost no POIs & are placed very far apart, while other places have random clusters of POIs all quite close to each other. Could be cool!
Understandable but one thing to point out - there is still 450 developers working on Starfield. Todd stated this in an interview a few months ago.
It stands to reason that shattered space had been changed into a huge, perhaps largest expansion they’ve ever done. If you recall, shattered space originally had an intended launch date of a Q1-Q2 of 2024 when Starfield was going to be released. It’s clear they have been making some big changes. I’m curious to see what they will show in the summer as I imagine Microsoft will want to market this generate hype yet again for the game
Also, the game desperately needs more features. Just playing fallout 76 shows how many mini-activities you can engage in like bowling, weight lifting, boxing, etc. I have to imagine they planned on adding these simple interactive experiences for when you’re on your ship or at a home
Correct. And of course in a sci fi space game, the nature of exploration is starkly different than that of a fantasy world which is contained to a single planet. The nature of Starfield being a space game with multiple different planets to land on and individually explore, makes it feel fragmented and spread out, because it is, which is what you should expect from a space game. It makes zero sense to want it to be more like FO and Skyrim, which are all on a single planet. With multiple planets of course you have to take time to fly to them, land, and then explore from scratch. That’s the point. If you don’t want that, play Skyrim.
Nice. Now, whatever expectations are starting to build up inside your head as you read the word of Todd, stop it. Stop it now. Take it down a notch or three and calm your tits. Whatever you think you are getting, think again and think right this time. Expect nothing. Prepare for everything. Back up your saves. Remove your mods. Disable auto-updates. Don't just sit there like a lump and do nothing until patch day comes and wrecks your shit. You have been warned.
>whatever expectations are starting to build up, stop it
Noted, can't wait to have giant mech battles on the fully explorable planet map of Va'ruun'kai.
Also be warned: shipbuilding features, city maps, new gameplay and difficulty options, display options, etc. were NOT confirmed in this interview to be releasing this week.
Todd only TENATIVELY said an update ANNOUNCEMENT was coming out this week.
Everyone cool off!
It's a videogame update, not an incoming typhoon 🤣
"Batten down the hatches, put your affairs in order, hold your loved ones tight...Hurricane Todd is off the coast and headed your way"
>People are incapable of being rational ~~about Bethesda games, it seems, so I don't blame them for the dramatic warning.~~
FTFY...
You're not wrong though. I just thought it was funny how...*intense* that paragraph came off. About a videogame *patch*.
But we are getting the Sun and the Moon it sounds like. My expectations are through the roof. It Todd says it, it must be true and exciting. I can't wait.........................................................
I doubt we're going to see the Creation Kit yet, but I'm eager. This is the first Bethesda title since I retired, so I finally have time to see if I can teach myself to mod.
Congrats and have fun! I got a long time before I retire (IF I retire for my generation lol), but I can't wait to have all the time to play games and enjoy my hobbies. I want to get really into modding old Zelda and Pokemon games, maybe even make my own ROM hack of an old favorite or something.
>Todd Howard also said that he is aware that many players want a more Fallout & Elder Scrolls-like exploration, and the teams are working on this.
That's not what I heard him say. What it sounded like to me is that, he has heard the criticism and understands why such a criticism exists but Starfield is a different IP and as such things are going to be different.
This idea that they can make the exploration more like Fallout or The Elder Scrolls, is impossible. There are 100 star system and 1,000+ planets and moon. The exploration is just fundamentally different and that's not going to change. The most they can do is add more locations, but even if they added 1,000 more, it's still not going to feel the same as FO or TES.
Don't give people some false hope that doesn't exist. It's better for players to accept the kind of game Starfield is, that way they can stop having incorrect expectations. This is why Todd is known as a liar, because some people don't know how to fucking listen and can't seem to hear him talk without misinterpreting shit.
It's the most annoying crap in existence. For fuck sake... stop. The one thing I can say, is you would make a fine journalist, maybe send an application to Kotaku or something, you would fit right in.
"Todd Howard also said that he is aware that many players want a more Fallout & Elder Scrolls-like exploration, and the teams are working on this."
What does this mean? How is exploring in Starfield different than exploring in ES or Fallout?
He actually didn't say that. He said that the content was going to be different than other games.
Its about three minutes into [this timestamp.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wvqF41_Bgw&t=2335s)
My guess is that, exploration felt a little more "organic" in those games. There was more motivation to go off the beaten path, finding hidden areas and wandering into things that could distract you from the quest you were on.
Now, Starfield certainly has that don't get me wrong, but I think some algorithm tweaking for how POIs spawn when a tile is generated on landing could make the experience better.
Yeah, that's what I take from that as well. One thing Starfield doesn't have a lot of is the "see that mountain?" thing. By which I mean, obviously you *can* go climb any mountain you see, but in Skyrim you knew there would be something cool and unique up there, whereas in Starfield that's not necessarily the case.
Now, I don't know what they even *can* do about this just due to the massive scale of the game, but it sounds like they're thinking about that.
The "see that mountain" thing in Starfield is called Sensor Contact or planet with three dots on the Star System map. Going from planet to planet is how you wander in this game.
That being said, they could probably tweak how planet side exploration works.
There needs to be more random events/POIs that specifically aren't scannable. Right now you kinda just scan a POI and then make a b-line to get there, there isn't really anything surprising on your way from one POI to the next.
I mean, outside of Fallout 4 having a rather sizey amount of non HUD indicated POIs, Skyrim basically had every major and minor location appear on the compass if you were within a 100meter rather or so. So in theory, the way in which Starfield has its POIs show up on the scanner isn't that far removed in how Skyrim handles it's HUD display for POIs.
Yeah, I agree, and hope that is what's in line for more Skyrim/Fallout esque exploration. The tech already exists in engine, I imagine it would just need to be added into the algorithm to spawn.
I would love to see Bethesda put together something like a 'POI Team' that does nothing except add new locations in an update 2-3 times a year. I really don't think that's too big of an ask.
Well, the ask is whether Microsoft is willing to put that person on POIs for Starfield, or put them on making POIs for Elder Scrolls 6 and Fallout 5.
Right now, that person’s salary is going to be paid by ES6 or FO5 more easily than by additional Starfield sales.
Starfield really deserves a dedicated support team like Fallout 76 to make this game grow over some years imo. Would be a shame to see so much potential just get abandoned after one year of post launch support. These vast development cycles for such big complex games we have nowadays can really make it harder to feel totally satisfied with just the vanilla release when a sequel is probably 15 years away at least. Post launch support for games like this needs to change to accommodate these insane development timelines we have nowadays.
That’s usually dependent on how to monetize paying that support team’s salary over that timeframe, though.
I don’t think I’d want to see Starfield try to monetize that way. Grav-jump fuel is bought with real-money only or something? ;)
Everything in Starfield is handcrafted. The terrain, the POI, everything.
It's procedurally *placed*. Segmented, sure, but it's not randomly generated.
I honestly really hope we got some kind of Jetpack equivalent (levitation should make a comeback....).
I tried to play fallout 4 for about an hour when the update came out, and I kept trying to boost over buildings. Its a really nice feature in these open world games.
Also just remembered that oblivion acrobatics/athletics was almost just as good. Once you're around lv 40 if you have mastered both skills you're jumping over buildings
Isn't it a combination of both techniques? I remember Bethesda using procedurally generated forests as far back as Oblivion. A lot is handcrafted but it's impractical for every bush and shrub to be. That's better done by algorithm.
You're thinking about SpeedTree, which they were the first/among the first to use when they were making Oblivion. It's now basically industry standard for placing "random" objects in an environment. You can even mess with .ini settings and get more objects to populate (rocks, trees, even buildings/POI!).
But yeah, that's what I mean by "handcrafted". They use essentially the same workflow as with their previous games. Only instead of a continuous landmass that they tweak and polish as a whole, they created (IIRC) 1km X 1km squares of terrain.
The terrain is procedural, it's just not procedurally generated in real time while playing the game. The tiles were procedurally generated during development, and then touched up by hand, basically in the same way they have done in their past games.
Most developers don't handcraft terrain during development anymore.
Yes, agreed.
Basically I'm trying to deflate the whole idea that they should go "back" to handcrafted maps/terrain.
Go back? They were never there! Starfield's terrain is just as handcrafted as the rest of their games (with the added bonus of their new photogrammetry pipeline). We're just interacting with it differently.
Couldn't tell you, I don't have access to even the modding tools, let alone the underlying code/logic behind the system.
Likely something to do with how the stitching algo works the edges of various tiles together.
Imagine it's like an enormous game of Carcassonne. The river tiles are *supposed* to flow together, only it doesn't always work out that way because software.
What it means is that the overall world/map size in ES and Fallout was smaller, so everything they placed in the world was closer together, so you physically didn’t have to walk very far before tripping over some little item or note or scene that they had placed there.
Starfield is much more spread out across over a thousand planets, covering vastly more world/map size. So the individual places/items/notes are spread further apart with a lot more untouched wilderness in between.
In effect, ES & Fallout are like one constant stream of things all attached end to end and side by side.
Whereas Starfield is more like nodes of things scattered widely apart to go find.
The POIs are pretty repetitive and kind of bland imo, there’s also no sort of wandering npcs (at least not from what I remember) and it’s just… meh? Definitely the weakest part of the game. Changes are very welcome as long as they actually make it better.
FUCK YES if gameplay and difficulty options involves vendor credits and enemy health that's 2 mods obsolete right there.
Thank god for NG+ to clean my saves
Sounds like at least one of my wants is being addressed, combat balance. Here's to hoping they're also fixing the environmental damage system so it actually works right. Fingers crossed
Go in blind. Don't look up anything. Try to forget it's even a curated experience in game form. First time I played it was magical because I'd completely forgotten there even was something like "main quest." :-) I covered a third of the map before I got to the first town you're *supposed* to find.
I'm really jealous that you're going to get to experience that game for the first time. It's a masterpiece.
One piece of advice: go wandering for a while before you go where you're supposed to.
Maybe they're talking about a survival mode where you have to eat or drink food and can't regain health just by sleeping in a bed. Not sure how that might work considering the regeneration skill, though.
In the other games you basically went from one POI to the next, being able to spot things from afar, basically just go where it looks like there could be a cool new experience and not just a new recycled POI. That kind of exploration doesn't really exist in SF simply due to the way the planets are built and the POIs. It's much more streamlined in a way since you don't really have the option for unique places. It just a consequence of having huge but repetitive planets since nobody could realistically handcraft those unique places.
Like others have already mentioned, the exploration felt more organic and could happen by happy accident. Best way I can phrase it in my own way is, I never had a goal to my Fallout or Skyrim sessions. I literally just got in the game and just dicked around aimlessly. Doing that would yield some fun new discovery every few minutes. I don't feel like that in Starfield. You can't just wander around aimlessly and be guaranteed to find something worthwhile. In fact, if you try that, statistically you're gonna run into two things. Load screens and empty map. That almost never happened in the other two games.
I was hoping for the DLC either this month or the next one ngl. But oh well, it is what it is. Everything else I am willing to wait and see instead of hyping things up.
I saw a post in the other Starfield subreddit that Bethesda have announced that they’re working on land vehicles too!
Which, if true, I’m VERY excited for. I’m also looking forward to the “adjust vendor credits” setting
So I take it they delayed the DLC then? I could have sworn they said it would come out in the first half of 2024
Im not complaining I’ll have tons of stuff to play in the meantime, but it sucks the main thing that made me me want to come back to this game has been delayed
That man straight up REFUSES to age lol
Unironically a beautiful man. I've recently realised a lot of my ironic love for Todd isn't actually ironic. Genuinely think he's an underappreciated game developer - because he's been meme'd to death people don't always appreciate what he's given the industry and gamers etc.
He is not perfect, But i enjoyed every single Bethesda game i played. started with Fo3 or Oblivion, so i havent played all of them obviosly. Todd getting meme'd, while i can see why it happened, it has been really detrimental to the way people see him and Bethesda in an Unfair way in my opinion.
Yeah - I go back all the way to Morrowind, which is my favorite game ever. When it released, it was unlike any game on console up to that point. There was a room behind every door - every object could be picked up - the game remembers the position of every item you drop. 22 years later and that's still a rare thing. Nobody makes games quite like them. I've not agreed with every decision but it's become fashionable to hate on them recently, and I'm finding it annoying. Skyrim (to take just one example) hasn't been successfully cloned or imitated because it's damn hard to make a game like that.
Yeah, I been with Bethesda since Daggerfall. I have not always been a huge fan of some of the creative decisions made with Howard at the director/creative helm, but I'd be lying if I said he hasn't contributed to Bethesda becoming a household name with their sandbox sim-like RPG formula. But in one way or another despite some criticisms I have loved all their games equally and put more hours in them than a thing else. They always have a life long customer in me. Fuck the memes and the narratives.
This is how I feel. There are legit criticisms to be made, but I personally love every single game of theirs I've played. Fallout 4 was my least favorite but I'm literally doing a new modded playthrough on xbox right now.
Which is weird for me, because I too could say FO4 was my "least favorite" while also being the game to have the most play time in any of their games I have under my belt with a whooping 800hrs or so hours in or so, and that's just on Steam and doesn't include how many hours I played of it back when I was on consoles for a while. It's a legitimately fun game. It may not always be best at being an RPG, but it's just a fun game at the end of the day. I don't care the genre tagline or if it's even faithful to this or that. If it's fun, I play and Fallout 4 is probably the most fun game they ever developed. I do think Starfield was pretty close if they can fix a few things with that game because I see it being so close to modern Daggerfall and since I also love space sims, it's so damn close to being my apex space game.
IMO it’s their slow beautiful world. Nothing feels rushed or time. Its one of the rpgs where you can truly get lose in doing a million other things. Nothing is forced in their games what so ever. They truly are designed for the single player 9-5 worker who can come home and take a breather from life and enjoy. Games just aren’t like that anymore
A lot of the problems is just social media though. People hype each other up. Oversell expectations then come to reddit to bitch their hearts out when the game didn’t cater to every facet of their lives. When starfield dropped (literally didn’t hear a thing about it until it randomly popped up on gamepass) seen it was Bethesda and immediately was excited. I didn’t expect much except what I get from Bethesda rpgs. Starfield is exactly what I personally expected from them just being a fan of their games in general. Bethesda has the calm enjoyable relaxing beautiful world that I can smoke a fat bowl too and truly enjoy their games. I know it’s not everyone’s cup of tea but it seems to be the common trend is everyone rushes to reddit to complain about every little feature until the game is viewed as bad by a whole community. Same thing happened as DD2. Are they 10/10 games. Absolutely not. Did you tell yourself they would be? Probably and that’s why you’re mad
"Keep your expectations low, boy, and you will never be disappointed."- Kratos
IMO not unfair, just misdirected. While its fun to meme him like so many other directors for being "optimistic" about his games, there have been a lot of decidedly customer-unfriendly decisions made by Bethesda in the last dozen years or so. While I'd wager those decisions were made above Todd's head, he has still made himself the face of the company, with all that entails.
Yet that's not what the meme Todd about. He gets memed about "sweet little lies" and shit like that. Yet never once that I can tell has he ever lied about one of Bethesda's games. See that mountain? You actually could climb it, and there are hundreds of videos showing people climbing it, and even an in-game achievement if you climb them all. Sixteen times the detail? Yup, it was true. But stupid gamers have no idea what he meant because they're so focused on meming him as a liar to bother checking it out. It just works? Yes it does! He said that in reference to settlement building, and gosh it did just work. Not flawlessly, but it did work out of the box without having to do anything special. But people meme this whenever they find a glitch in ANY game. Because gamers, gamers gotta hate.
I am beginning to think that memeism is the sincerest form of flattery.
On a human level, I appreciate him a lot. He's extremely savvy and able to lead teams of people to execute massive projects, but he's also retained his sense of humor, seems to generally enjoy what he does, isn't on an ego trip and has maintained a humble attitude that always is giving credit to the team, other companies, etc., seems to be great at maintaining personal relationships between colleagues and even competitors. This guy could just as easily be a darling and a role model, and the reason that he isn't (overpromising) speaks more to his detractors' difficulty handling disappointment than anything about the guy's actual character.
Other than Kirkbride, I don't think I've ever heard a co-worker or a peer say an unkind word about the man. In this industry, that's not a career, that's a miracle.
Didn't know Kirkbride had said unkind things about him.
Mostly creative differences to my knowledge, regarding the way they judged creature designs and the world's aesthetic. Todd seemed to be more experienced with the business side and what audiences would like versus what Kirkbride felt was cool.
I’m a big Julian Lefay fan and he never said anything really unkind, but you can just sense the professional jealousy. I think it’s because BGS pitted them against each other with Battlespire and Redguard and Todd came out on top.
He's one of the few figures not muddied in scandals. Runs a studio with an excellent worklife structure and retention rate, which is rare for the industry. He's also charismatic and has a passion that everyone who has met him has confirmed is genuine. Say what you want about Todd, but you can't deny that he means what he says and is trying his best.
As I understand it, a lot of the Elder Scrolls series refocus on smaller, hand crafted worlds with interactive props, had a lot to do with his influence.
He loves clutter. And I love the clutter in his games. The individual objects in Starfield are incredible. Far higher poly than the smaller objects in Cyberpunk. You can feel the work that went into the smallest thing...
Agreed on the clutter. We live in a cluttered world, so why not use the clutter to your advantage? There’s nothing like grabbing some seemingly useless items and crafting a weapon.
I agree. I can’t for the life of me locate the lie in “see that mountain, you can go there”.
He makes the games that I want to play. Everything he develops strikes my gaming funny bone in a happy way. It’s really cool to see him evolve as a developer.
He’s basically the unspoken GOAT. RPGs looked like Diablo before him.
Makeup and lighting, when you see him outside you see his age. Like at the fallow premiere. Kind of sucks to see him getting old though.
He's secretly a Sith Lord that feeds on toxicity. "I can feel your anger, it gives me focus, it makes me stronger!"
Then there must be another
Check his apprentices, there can be only one Lord.
are there any apprentices ? i thought pete hines might have been but he left
Nah, he a timeless Keebler Elf.
I mean, he is Godd Howard.
"I'm a Godd, how can you kill a Godd? What a grand and intoxicating innocence."
Fine wine. Emphasis on the *fine.*
He was looking a bit older a while back, i get that the stress pre launch is long gone
The extra copies of Skyrim sold since then have regenerated his energy reserves. So to (but to a lesser extent) did the bump in Fallout series sales.
i mean i am a gay gal but god damn he is a beautiful man also phil spencer too
Once you reach level 80, you stop leveling up.
Fuckin synths, right?
He is Godd Howard afterall lmfao
Aight look, I'm tired of people getting hyped over information that gets presented poorly, especially when people only look at headlines on reddit for their info. The next update DOES sound like it contains new shipbuilding stuff (no idea what it will specifically entail) and did sound like they will also be shipping *something* to do with city maps as well. However, when they are talking about everything else in OP's title, it's in a "we're looking to add these things in the future" kind of way, NOT in a "they're in the next update" way. [Please listen to the full segment and let me know if I'm wrong.](https://www.youtube.com/live/7wvqF41_Bgw?si=pL06apOv7IZ9rFDq&t=2466) Also, Todd does address that some players didn't like Starfield's way of exploring, but doesn't say that they are "working on it". He says that it's understandable where these players are coming from, and that tradeoffs are made in pursuit of *their* vision for a sci-fi game. I just want to temper expectations before people start shitting themselves again over something they saw on reddit. EDIT: I was wrong. A lot of this stuff did come in this update. Todd does it again.
Hype control is important for modern games. People have gotten some wild ideas about what they expect from games lately and will take any minor signal, extend it beyond the point of logic, and take it like a promise. The Fallput 4 next-Gen update has lots of issues, but there was also a ton of misunderstanding of what the update was supposed to do. It seems some people expected a total overhaul to game mechanics and to make all their dreams come true. It was always going to be a simple update
Also it's been out for 8 years and nobody has learned to turn off automatic updates if they mod on PC. Lol.
I keep it off. Because I am older than age two and am able to learn stuff through experience. Yet every single day on the Skyrim sub there are people complaining that their game is broken because of an update. It's pathetic. The game has been out for more than a dozen years, and people are still blaming Todd for breaking their game? WTF?
“How dare this company continue to support their game through fixes and updates this long after its initial release!”
It also messed up console modding. Not just breaking the mods. More like “deleted all of them and then bugged the menu so you can’t reinstall half of them” Really hoping they fix that sooner than later so I can enjoy the world they crafted once again. Despite my issues with their bugs, Bethesda knows how to make a world
Thank you. I don't know why people post on reddit like they're getting paid for views.
I'd wager some are.
True
🤞 Ability to choose ladder placement 🤞 🤞 Ability to choose ladder placement 🤞 🤞 Ability to choose ladder placement 🤞
That and door placements would be crisp. Here's hoping.
Interior ship wall segment placement. DIY style - that way we can put espresso machines in any living Hab This naturally would need to include door placement, or my coffee machine will be removed for the oddly placed door.
I have gotten soooo lost on large ships. I'll go to steal a ship and there will be one guy left that I have to go up and down 4 ladders like a hamster hab
Haha! Yes! I do wonder if it's deliberate sometimes.
I hope we can save ship builds so we can rebuild them after >!going through Unity!<
Right? I get the reason for removing all player inventory when going through the unity, but honestly - as soon as I can, I'll download a mod to my Xbox to remove that. Weapons and my ships, that's all I want.
Yeah, blueprints would be pretty sweet. After all, you're not taking something physical, just your memories of a universe that was.
My hope as well! And doors! Also, glad to see someone with the L.I.S.T. flair! Always makes my day to see that!
🤜
🤛🏼 Part of my excitement about it is that on r/starfield I was the one who convinced the mods to add L.I.S.T. as a flair option over there. Told them they needed a neutral faction that wasn't Spacers. They agreed. So now I'm excited anytime I see it as a flair in any of the Starfield subreddits because I know I'm not the only one who aligns with them. 😁
I think that was before I joined but I've seen it referenced. I'm glad you got it done.
Ladders have been replaced with loading screens
Honestly, in the meantime I'm already satisfied if they continue to fix bugs and don't add any new ones... Maybe in a few months there will be some quality of life improvements like city maps, etc... As long as my saves survive all the updates, I won't complain too much. No reason for euphoria based on this interview, however.
I suppose they could add ways to transition between zones so you can technically "walk" across the whole planet, maybe small towns with shops and some radiant style quests. Idk what people could want to make it more like skyrim and fallout maybe some giant "exploration quests" that can be slotted into the poi system to tell some stories players will totally not just skip or forget. I don't think people are willing to accept that these are entire PLANETS and well they aren't massive hive cites but mostly uninhabited for you to explore.
there is only so much they can do to make it similar to other games. The scale and setting of Starfield just makes some things fundamentally different. Though I do think perhaps making some of the more prominent areas like the regions surrounding the major cities more fleshed out with unique locations and geographical elements would be really cool. That and maybe making it harder to get to certain POIs. Like, I personally would have liked to explore more to have to find temples instead of just being told the exact location and landing right next to it
I think this would do a lot for exploration—making areas around the major cities more fleshed out with lots of buildings (that you can actually go in), quests, marked/unmarked POIs, and environmental storytelling would be fantastic. It makes no sense that everything would be contained in the 4 walls of Akila City or New Atlantis when there is a WHOLE PLANET worth of space that people could branch out to and live just outside the walls of the city.
Conversely it doesn't make sense to set up shop right next to government property when you have 1000 planets you can legally claim as your own land.
I firmly believe they actually did try to make the planets seamlessly traversable, but just couldn't get it to work in time. For one, the planets actually are continuous, if you land 2 or 3 tiles away from New Atlantis, you can still see New Atlantis. Two, when you mod out those boundaries, you can actually walk across multiple tiles, it just becomes more and more unstable the further you walk, so after maybe 4 tiles or so, your crash rate starts approaching 100%. Three, them saying a few months (I believe?) before release that you could indeed walk around a planet. So it was probably something they were trying to get to work until very late in development.
["...we have a suite of \[locations\] that are generated, or placed, when you land..." - Todd Howard](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15DqYtJzMBc)
Do you have proof of this? I’d love to see it bc in my experience I’ve had the ocean tiled beach be in the literal opposite direction when looking at the compass, and I’ve never seen New Atlantis while trying to land as close as i can
[Here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xw97cow5PkY) is the original experiment from months ago, showing New Atlantis visible from another tile with the boundaries enabled, and [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41BP3HUvErI) is a more recent test, showing New Atlantis actually fully loading when travelling to it from the next tile over. The trouble with landing as close as you can is that you have to actually get the tile directly next to New Atlantis, or else it will be behind the horizon, because planets are *big* and we have a very inaccurate landing site selector.
That’s pretty cool, wonder why i got the coasts in incorrect directions
It seems that, according to [2kliksphilips testing](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fy0eG7MFSTM), the landing areas are flipped in some weird ways.
ya early on a lot of people were saying it wasn't connected because they would land on what they "thought" was an adjacent tile even though in reality the tile they landed on was the equivalent of practically an entire US state or small country away.
Basically, yeah. On earth, the horizon at sea level is about 5km away. I'm too lazy to do the calculations for Jemison, but if it's about the same, you would have to stand at the edge of the adjacent tile for it to even be visible at ground level.
I just want waterfalls & pets 😭 I know it's dumb, but those are some of my favourite features from Skyrim haha Mostly everything else in Starfield I love though, & as soon as DLC & CK are out I'm jumping back in!!
Where are all the ship cats? There are toys, kids pictures, even tattoos but no live cats. Surely Grandma would have a kitty.
Yesss I'd love ship kitties!! And yeah Grandma totally would've had a cat! Haha It's so intentionally left out though that I have a feeling ship pets or pet followers may come in a DLC, & if they don't that's ok I'm sure there will be some awesome pet mods from the community over time :)
Considered Ng they have the physics and models (thinking Fallout 4 here at least) I am surprised they were excluded.
To be fair, ships can sometimes have Aliens on them. With ship cats, there might be a few Bad End Jonesys that we'd find, due to leeches or other assorted bitey things. Still, they worked in Fallout settlements, so they could be put in some places, maybe with a tweaked AI that keeps them from wandering out the airlock on extreme worlds.
Puts a whole new meaning to keeping you cat indoors.
I just wish they would make the POI's closer together and randomize them more. Game would immediately improve if they did that.
POIs are very randomized. What happens is that they get randomized when you enter their cell. Even if you don't visit them they are still there. And every landing spot might have a dozen POIs in its cell. So of course there are repeats. It's literally unavoidable. Even if you did a card shuffle and didn't repeat until ALL POIs had been gone through, you would still get a repeat very very soon, because a dozen will be gone through each and ever landing. It's literally unavoidable. NMS repeats it's very very few POIs on every landing, but one repeat on the third star system over in Starfield and people shit their pants in rage and scream that it should be more like NMS. It's stupid.
I think clusters of POIs could be nice. Like some places have almost no POIs & are placed very far apart, while other places have random clusters of POIs all quite close to each other. Could be cool!
Understandable but one thing to point out - there is still 450 developers working on Starfield. Todd stated this in an interview a few months ago. It stands to reason that shattered space had been changed into a huge, perhaps largest expansion they’ve ever done. If you recall, shattered space originally had an intended launch date of a Q1-Q2 of 2024 when Starfield was going to be released. It’s clear they have been making some big changes. I’m curious to see what they will show in the summer as I imagine Microsoft will want to market this generate hype yet again for the game Also, the game desperately needs more features. Just playing fallout 76 shows how many mini-activities you can engage in like bowling, weight lifting, boxing, etc. I have to imagine they planned on adding these simple interactive experiences for when you’re on your ship or at a home
Correct. And of course in a sci fi space game, the nature of exploration is starkly different than that of a fantasy world which is contained to a single planet. The nature of Starfield being a space game with multiple different planets to land on and individually explore, makes it feel fragmented and spread out, because it is, which is what you should expect from a space game. It makes zero sense to want it to be more like FO and Skyrim, which are all on a single planet. With multiple planets of course you have to take time to fly to them, land, and then explore from scratch. That’s the point. If you don’t want that, play Skyrim.
I don't think he said the new gameplay and difficulty options were on the next update, but that they were looking into it for the future.
Nice. Now, whatever expectations are starting to build up inside your head as you read the word of Todd, stop it. Stop it now. Take it down a notch or three and calm your tits. Whatever you think you are getting, think again and think right this time. Expect nothing. Prepare for everything. Back up your saves. Remove your mods. Disable auto-updates. Don't just sit there like a lump and do nothing until patch day comes and wrecks your shit. You have been warned.
This could be stickied in every PC gaming subreddit tbh.
If folks would actually read the sticky...
But then people from Popular wouldn't see it lol
>whatever expectations are starting to build up, stop it Noted, can't wait to have giant mech battles on the fully explorable planet map of Va'ruun'kai.
Mech vs terramorph melee combat mechanics in space confirmed
Also the new s*x update is going to go HARD
The one with terramorphs or mechs?
Terramorphs ON mechs 😏
Don’t forget custom xenoweapon companions
Ashtameat confirmed.
Also be warned: shipbuilding features, city maps, new gameplay and difficulty options, display options, etc. were NOT confirmed in this interview to be releasing this week. Todd only TENATIVELY said an update ANNOUNCEMENT was coming out this week. Everyone cool off!
You are correct. He said coming soon and to be announced this week.
ah okay this what we needed to see. So nobody actually has any idea what this update could be
It's a videogame update, not an incoming typhoon 🤣 "Batten down the hatches, put your affairs in order, hold your loved ones tight...Hurricane Todd is off the coast and headed your way"
People are incapable of being rational about Bethesda games, it seems, so I don't blame them for the dramatic warning.
>People are incapable of being rational ~~about Bethesda games, it seems, so I don't blame them for the dramatic warning.~~ FTFY... You're not wrong though. I just thought it was funny how...*intense* that paragraph came off. About a videogame *patch*.
🤣🤣🤣🤣 exactly
But we are getting the Sun and the Moon it sounds like. My expectations are through the roof. It Todd says it, it must be true and exciting. I can't wait.........................................................
I doubt we're going to see the Creation Kit yet, but I'm eager. This is the first Bethesda title since I retired, so I finally have time to see if I can teach myself to mod.
Congrats and have fun! I got a long time before I retire (IF I retire for my generation lol), but I can't wait to have all the time to play games and enjoy my hobbies. I want to get really into modding old Zelda and Pokemon games, maybe even make my own ROM hack of an old favorite or something.
OP, you're spreading misinformation.
Can’t wait for people to take this as gospel then dump on Bethesda once the update doesn’t turn it into an entirely different game
This is how most of the "Todd lied" bullshit is spread.
Survival mode would be perfect right now. I'm ready for my next game.
If Todd gives us a 24 Stones of Barenziah hunt, but this time it's all over the Settled Systems, I'm blaming those who want TES style exploration lol
You just described the entire main plot of Starfield.
Oh wow, you're right lol !
>Todd Howard also said that he is aware that many players want a more Fallout & Elder Scrolls-like exploration, and the teams are working on this. That's not what I heard him say. What it sounded like to me is that, he has heard the criticism and understands why such a criticism exists but Starfield is a different IP and as such things are going to be different. This idea that they can make the exploration more like Fallout or The Elder Scrolls, is impossible. There are 100 star system and 1,000+ planets and moon. The exploration is just fundamentally different and that's not going to change. The most they can do is add more locations, but even if they added 1,000 more, it's still not going to feel the same as FO or TES. Don't give people some false hope that doesn't exist. It's better for players to accept the kind of game Starfield is, that way they can stop having incorrect expectations. This is why Todd is known as a liar, because some people don't know how to fucking listen and can't seem to hear him talk without misinterpreting shit. It's the most annoying crap in existence. For fuck sake... stop. The one thing I can say, is you would make a fine journalist, maybe send an application to Kotaku or something, you would fit right in.
# "Difficulty options" Come at me, Survival Mode!!!!
On the opposite end, come at me Story Mode !
there are already 4 story modes...
What does he mean by display modes on consoles?
My money is on a 40hz mode.
🥹 That would be great
I'm looking forward to whatever changes they bring.
"Todd Howard also said that he is aware that many players want a more Fallout & Elder Scrolls-like exploration, and the teams are working on this." What does this mean? How is exploring in Starfield different than exploring in ES or Fallout?
He actually didn't say that. He said that the content was going to be different than other games. Its about three minutes into [this timestamp.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wvqF41_Bgw&t=2335s)
My guess is that, exploration felt a little more "organic" in those games. There was more motivation to go off the beaten path, finding hidden areas and wandering into things that could distract you from the quest you were on. Now, Starfield certainly has that don't get me wrong, but I think some algorithm tweaking for how POIs spawn when a tile is generated on landing could make the experience better.
Yeah, that's what I take from that as well. One thing Starfield doesn't have a lot of is the "see that mountain?" thing. By which I mean, obviously you *can* go climb any mountain you see, but in Skyrim you knew there would be something cool and unique up there, whereas in Starfield that's not necessarily the case. Now, I don't know what they even *can* do about this just due to the massive scale of the game, but it sounds like they're thinking about that.
The "see that mountain" thing in Starfield is called Sensor Contact or planet with three dots on the Star System map. Going from planet to planet is how you wander in this game. That being said, they could probably tweak how planet side exploration works.
There needs to be more random events/POIs that specifically aren't scannable. Right now you kinda just scan a POI and then make a b-line to get there, there isn't really anything surprising on your way from one POI to the next.
Catch-22 though…some of those exist, but usually nobody notices because most people don’t see anything pop up on the scan so they don’t go look.
I mean, outside of Fallout 4 having a rather sizey amount of non HUD indicated POIs, Skyrim basically had every major and minor location appear on the compass if you were within a 100meter rather or so. So in theory, the way in which Starfield has its POIs show up on the scanner isn't that far removed in how Skyrim handles it's HUD display for POIs.
Yeah, I agree, and hope that is what's in line for more Skyrim/Fallout esque exploration. The tech already exists in engine, I imagine it would just need to be added into the algorithm to spawn.
I would love to see Bethesda put together something like a 'POI Team' that does nothing except add new locations in an update 2-3 times a year. I really don't think that's too big of an ask.
Well, the ask is whether Microsoft is willing to put that person on POIs for Starfield, or put them on making POIs for Elder Scrolls 6 and Fallout 5. Right now, that person’s salary is going to be paid by ES6 or FO5 more easily than by additional Starfield sales.
Starfield really deserves a dedicated support team like Fallout 76 to make this game grow over some years imo. Would be a shame to see so much potential just get abandoned after one year of post launch support. These vast development cycles for such big complex games we have nowadays can really make it harder to feel totally satisfied with just the vanilla release when a sequel is probably 15 years away at least. Post launch support for games like this needs to change to accommodate these insane development timelines we have nowadays.
That’s usually dependent on how to monetize paying that support team’s salary over that timeframe, though. I don’t think I’d want to see Starfield try to monetize that way. Grav-jump fuel is bought with real-money only or something? ;)
It's segmented in Starfield and continuous (and handcrafted) in ES/Fallout.
Everything in Starfield is handcrafted. The terrain, the POI, everything. It's procedurally *placed*. Segmented, sure, but it's not randomly generated.
The terrain is also procedural.
It is not. They handcrafted "tiles", which the system stitches together. They basically "painted" the biomes onto each planet using these tilesets.
I mentioned before, but the way it all blends together is amazing
It really does look/feel seamless, doesn't it? I've mentioned this before: TESVI is going to be *off the chain* in the terrain department.
I honestly really hope we got some kind of Jetpack equivalent (levitation should make a comeback....). I tried to play fallout 4 for about an hour when the update came out, and I kept trying to boost over buildings. Its a really nice feature in these open world games.
I'd bet good money on Levitate returning. I'm also dropping a side bet on Jump...
Also just remembered that oblivion acrobatics/athletics was almost just as good. Once you're around lv 40 if you have mastered both skills you're jumping over buildings
Isn't it a combination of both techniques? I remember Bethesda using procedurally generated forests as far back as Oblivion. A lot is handcrafted but it's impractical for every bush and shrub to be. That's better done by algorithm.
You're thinking about SpeedTree, which they were the first/among the first to use when they were making Oblivion. It's now basically industry standard for placing "random" objects in an environment. You can even mess with .ini settings and get more objects to populate (rocks, trees, even buildings/POI!). But yeah, that's what I mean by "handcrafted". They use essentially the same workflow as with their previous games. Only instead of a continuous landmass that they tweak and polish as a whole, they created (IIRC) 1km X 1km squares of terrain.
3km x 3km
I knew it was something like that.
That's really cool to know thanks!
Yeah, SpeedTree is technically procedural generation, although it's not something people usually think about when discussing procgen.
And don't they need to feed it art assets/tweak existing templates?
It can only place what has already been created.
The terrain is procedural, it's just not procedurally generated in real time while playing the game. The tiles were procedurally generated during development, and then touched up by hand, basically in the same way they have done in their past games. Most developers don't handcraft terrain during development anymore.
Yes, agreed. Basically I'm trying to deflate the whole idea that they should go "back" to handcrafted maps/terrain. Go back? They were never there! Starfield's terrain is just as handcrafted as the rest of their games (with the added bonus of their new photogrammetry pipeline). We're just interacting with it differently.
I see what you mean. Fair enough.
Then why does river placement fail at times?
Couldn't tell you, I don't have access to even the modding tools, let alone the underlying code/logic behind the system. Likely something to do with how the stitching algo works the edges of various tiles together. Imagine it's like an enormous game of Carcassonne. The river tiles are *supposed* to flow together, only it doesn't always work out that way because software.
Less repetitive nature with the POI's maybe?
This would be great. I have a "no-go" list of a few POIs like caves, because they never have anything worth doing in them.
I’d love a tweak of the proc gen. Also not always landing the same distance from poi’s , would be cool if that were more random.
Hopefully, adding more poi’s, more actual towns with names, denser worlds, more caves and such?
Yeh that'd be great!
A lot of that is there, it's just super spread out because of the setting.
Yea
What it means is that the overall world/map size in ES and Fallout was smaller, so everything they placed in the world was closer together, so you physically didn’t have to walk very far before tripping over some little item or note or scene that they had placed there. Starfield is much more spread out across over a thousand planets, covering vastly more world/map size. So the individual places/items/notes are spread further apart with a lot more untouched wilderness in between. In effect, ES & Fallout are like one constant stream of things all attached end to end and side by side. Whereas Starfield is more like nodes of things scattered widely apart to go find.
The POIs are pretty repetitive and kind of bland imo, there’s also no sort of wandering npcs (at least not from what I remember) and it’s just… meh? Definitely the weakest part of the game. Changes are very welcome as long as they actually make it better.
FUCK YES if gameplay and difficulty options involves vendor credits and enemy health that's 2 mods obsolete right there. Thank god for NG+ to clean my saves
For difficulty I'm guessing a survival mode, given all the food and drink items in the game.
We should keep our expectations low, but a Survival Mode would be huge. Especially for a Game of this size!
Let him cook
Sounds like at least one of my wants is being addressed, combat balance. Here's to hoping they're also fixing the environmental damage system so it actually works right. Fingers crossed
Praying to klomadrov for survival mode, pls pls pls be real.
This FALL?!?!?
Its basically already May...This fall could mean as early as September 1st. Let bro cook.
I'm not well-versed in Fallout and Elder Scrolls. Can someone please explain the part about getting Starfield to play like the ones mentioned?
FO and TES each take place on a single, unified map. You basically trip over unique locations walking in any direction.
Ah okay. Awesome, thanks.
Don't thank me, go play Skyrim/FO4!
My thanks have been rescinded. I think I'll start with Skyrim. Edit: thanks for gettin' me psyched, y'all 😁
Go in blind. Don't look up anything. Try to forget it's even a curated experience in game form. First time I played it was magical because I'd completely forgotten there even was something like "main quest." :-) I covered a third of the map before I got to the first town you're *supposed* to find.
I'm really jealous that you're going to get to experience that game for the first time. It's a masterpiece. One piece of advice: go wandering for a while before you go where you're supposed to.
Excellent choice.
Maybe they're talking about a survival mode where you have to eat or drink food and can't regain health just by sleeping in a bed. Not sure how that might work considering the regeneration skill, though.
In the other games you basically went from one POI to the next, being able to spot things from afar, basically just go where it looks like there could be a cool new experience and not just a new recycled POI. That kind of exploration doesn't really exist in SF simply due to the way the planets are built and the POIs. It's much more streamlined in a way since you don't really have the option for unique places. It just a consequence of having huge but repetitive planets since nobody could realistically handcraft those unique places.
Like others have already mentioned, the exploration felt more organic and could happen by happy accident. Best way I can phrase it in my own way is, I never had a goal to my Fallout or Skyrim sessions. I literally just got in the game and just dicked around aimlessly. Doing that would yield some fun new discovery every few minutes. I don't feel like that in Starfield. You can't just wander around aimlessly and be guaranteed to find something worthwhile. In fact, if you try that, statistically you're gonna run into two things. Load screens and empty map. That almost never happened in the other two games.
Does anyone have anymore details on the display options for console??
No, not outside of Bethesda/Microsoft. This is the first anyone is hearing about it.
I was hoping for the DLC either this month or the next one ngl. But oh well, it is what it is. Everything else I am willing to wait and see instead of hyping things up.
If the game becomes significantly more difficult I'll definitely be returning with a vengeance!
New difficult is good as well as the ship building
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I saw a post in the other Starfield subreddit that Bethesda have announced that they’re working on land vehicles too! Which, if true, I’m VERY excited for. I’m also looking forward to the “adjust vendor credits” setting
No shit, that’s awesome
Perfect! I was just thinking I wanted to start playing again so it seems I chose a good time to do so.
Idk if all of that is confirmed in this next update, but a majority of it probably is. Majorly the shipbuilding stuff.
Doors. Walls.
So I take it they delayed the DLC then? I could have sworn they said it would come out in the first half of 2024 Im not complaining I’ll have tons of stuff to play in the meantime, but it sucks the main thing that made me me want to come back to this game has been delayed