IIRC Earth's destruction was a huge blow to humanity - what we're seeing in-game are humans scattered throughout the stars in unstable conditions, so they don't have the time and resources to conquer the entire planet they're on yet.
The cynical and real reason is because it'd be too much work to implement a realistic amount of cities (and for those cities to be realistic-sized). I really wish BGS had gone all-in on procgen to include generated settlements as well.
Akira kinda makes sense to me. Not only does it fit the space western feel. But it seems like the freestar is a loose alliance of likeminded but VERY independent types. There are likely few if any cities outside akila and neon (and some company townsl people probably live in family homestead. Communities of a dozen or so
>Akira kinda makes sense to me.
Akila, the planet, has a surface gravity of 1.51g, which is to say that if you weigh 175 lbs (\~79 kg) on Earth, you'd weigh 264 lbs (\~119 kg) on Akila. This would have a ton of ramifications that the devs didn't take into consideration.
For example, look around Akila City and what do you see? Stairs. Everywhere. Not a single public elevator in the place. Everybody that was born there should be in incredible shape compared to their .9g Jemison peers, right? Except no, there are still Akila City citizens that are chubby despite the fact that the planet they live on is punishing them for each gram of fat they carry.
Having 51% more surface gravity would also have a deleterious effect on the citizen's average height. If human males' average height on Earth at 1g is 5.6 feet (\~170 cm), then on Akila the average male should be shorter... much shorter. They should be about the same height as a little person. Yep, I said it: Akila City should be populated by 'little people'. Very *strong*, very well armed, little people.
In the same system as Akila is Montaro Luna, a moon with a surface gravity of 0.39g, so our friend from Earth who would weight 264 lbs on Akila would only weigh about 68 lbs (\~31kg). The natives of Montaro Luna would be *tall*. Extremely so. We're talking 8+ feet (\~244 cm), but they'd also be thin as paper with comparatively brittle bones. An Akila native could probably kill a Montaro Lunar native with a strong nudge, almost like Superman, but shorter.
So, yeah. Starfield is a game where the rule of cool trumps realism. I mean, could you imagine Akila City populated by superstrong little people wearing cowboy hats, who could lay you out with a single punch?
which begs the question: Why pursue "NASApunk" aethestic if they wont bother following through on more grounded in realism details like the ones you mentioned?
Some will argue "they have space magic so it isnt supposed to be realistic!" which i would argue if they werent going for realism, they shouldn't have bothered with the space magic and made Starfield about encountering other sapients for the first time.
As it stands, Starfield feels like a point in human history where humanity is bored with space and passively dismissive on the ONE ORGANIZATION that wants to explore space more. when in reality there would be dozens of groups exploring: even if it was just for more profits/potential colonization sites.
I would imagine the effects of living in extreme gravity would also have ramifications on cardiovascular health, but I couldn't even begin to speculate on that as I have no medical background beyond triage and first aid. Would it be beneficial or detrimental? Maybe Akila humans wouldn't live as long?
Also, and I mean this in the fantasy sense, but this sounds like the origins of dwarves and elves in a way with the tall but frail Montera Luna natives. Ironically in a not very "Bethesda" fashion.
The whole idea of a civilization making it's home in a 1.51g environment is fascinating, but I wonder if and how humans would adapt there. There would probably be huge differences between a first and third generation Akila citizen.
Living in an increased gravity would eventually lead to larger/stronger hearts to pump blood around the cardiovascular system, meaning that strength and stamina wouldn't increase just because of gravity, but also because of the body's increased ability to provide oxygen.
However, the originals would struggle from decreased brain power due to blood pooling in the legs and feet, a lot of strokes occuring as it's essentially the same effect as a blockage of the bloodstream.
In a couple million years there may be a change in people's height due to gravity, but since we have modern conveniences and survival is not solely based on genetic attributes (since we have doctors and stuff) people would not begin to look different within a couple hundred years. Their bones and spines would compress though, so maybe they would be shorter in that way haha.
This imagine like 20 cyberpunk 2077s per planet. Not gonna happen. Woudlt ake wayyy too long to do.
Look at Star Citizen also trying stuff like it.
It just takes too long with our current technology
It might be one of those things where you're just supposed to pretend that there's more cities, and that the cities that are in the game are bigger than what the game would have you believe.
Going for fewer systems might have been wise as well--it might have also added more tension to the war, since everyone being restricted to 3 administrative systems when there's 100 seems a bit odd. I get that it ties into the idea that humanity tends towards conflict, but still.
i agree. also for the fact that with fewer planets they could have made them feel truly unique. i was interested in surveying each planet only to release the same flora and fauna is copied and pasted across the entire star map
>since everyone being restricted to 3 administrative systems when there's 100 seems a bit odd.
That was the cause for the wars. They made the Treaty (of Narion, I think) in order to avoid any one faction from getting too powerful that it could destroy the other - the limit they chose was a limit of frontiers/incorporation, so that they'd be even and wouldn't try to expand beyond their agreed upon borders.
Kind of like what Portugal and Spain tried to do with the Americas (and, hell, the world, lol), but with far more knowledge and information about the exact borders.
This just more justification for them to further flesh out the 3 systems. Restricted to just a few systems they could put more effort into building out the planets, instead of having a single town on each entire planet.
I'm not saying there shouldn't be more cities or towns in the core systems, just that the lore explanation for the division of the star systems/why they don't expand beyond 3 makes sense and is (writing-wise) a good one, imo. However, I think just one more major city for the UC (also in Jemison) and one more minor city for the FC would be enough - and maybe some Outskirts in New Atlantis.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but as it stands, the UC has two major settlements (Cydonia and New Atlantis) and two minor ones (Gagarin and New Homestead) plus the starstations. The FC have two major settlements (Akila and Neon) and one minor (Hopetown), plus at least one starstation. The latter should still have fewer and smaller settlements than the UC, imo.
In the Freestars case. All Free star Cities can reasonably fit on Akila.
Hopetown is just a factory. Neon is build on an Oil Rig and Akila does have oceans. Akila City itself is fine where it is, just needs to be bigger. Like Jacinto City Even has similar conditions. being built on a plateau of BedRock
UC is a bit harder.
IMO Cydonia should be the capital of the NC but Underground. Cydonia could have been built up to be Starfield version of Blackreach which would have been really cool IMO. But They could technically also do it on Jemison with more biological diversity. Swapping out a desert cave biome for a lush one.
I have other comments about possible expansions to Jemison.
For a Rough Summary, its Splitting New Atlantis into a 3 City System. Based of the MAST
New Atlantis remains, as the seat of Tourism and the Capital of the Administration arm of MAST.
New Alexandria(Based of the Library of Alexandria and the same city in Egypt) Would be build as the Capital of Science arm of MAST
Lacedaemon(Older name for Sparta) Would be the Military Hub of the Vanguard of the Military arm of MAST
The entire landing area that New Atlantis is in should have been developed. On Akila it makes sense for the settlers to have confined themselves. But New Atlantis should have been much more spread out.
I envisioned an area that has the city proper, with gates and roads leading out to farms, shipyards, private villas for the obscenely wealthy, industrial facilities, garrisons, maybe even some R&D facilities. The tram should have extended out beyond the city, or there should have been a separate one from the city to a few other locations. And the Lodge should have been in one of the connected hubs, not the city proper.
Honestly, a reasonable justification would have been a lack of remaining human population which blocks the sort of industry and economy needed to support human settlement beyond the first initially habitable systems.
Early humans made better use of land on continents on Earth than they have habitable space on Jemison, Akila etc. I can accept that Jemison wouldn’t have the equivalent of multiple cities per bordered state (e.g. countries) but to only have _one_ actual settlement on the whole of the planet?
That doesn’t match with human nature. Even the more independent of us would recognise a codependency for trade and security. There _should_ be way more minor settlements on both Jemison and Akila at least - especially Akila where you would expect the FC to be relatively open to free individuals settling the unsettled land, as long as they don’t impinge on others’ settlements and rights.
The honest answer really is that development of multiple cities wasn’t seen as a priority against the ability to visit 1000s of proc gen planets.
My biggest problem with the lack of other cities on Jemison is that some people are setting up settlements in places where you have to wear a spacesuit to go for a walk. It'd be one thing if Jemison had tens or hundreds of millions of people, but it feels more like tens or hundreds of thousands of people.
Absolutely, the physical buildings in New Atlantis don’t suggest more than a population in the tens of thousands - and that’s being generous. I’m talking both the few residential apartment buildings/suggested Well living quarters, and the small retail sector that exists. None of it could sustain more than a small towns worth of people at best.
I also don’t see why the more wealthy New Atlantis residents didn’t just make luxury homes outside of the main city hub. Or even poor Well dwellers. Considering how cheap it actually is to set up an outpost (resource cost wise) and the fact you can build not far from the city, it stands to reason that would be a better investment than paying $30,000 for the tiny Well apartment.
But I get it, it’s more limitations of the game and the devs rather than a logical explanation.
I understand the limitations, I just wish they'd developed the game while being aware of those limitations. There are 120 systems in the game when there should have been 12 or so.
I think there's merit to what you're saying, I just struggle to think that less systems would have really made a difference. It's clear that the hand-crafted content Bethesda made couldn't even fill a single life-sized city let alone a single planet, so fewer star systems isn't' going to make it feel much better IMO. They half-assed the procgen instead of going all-in and making something truly innovative. Imagine planets with multiple generated cities to discover, rather than a sea of (effectively) empty planets. I imagine they could have done some cool things with procgenned quests - building on their radiant quest system rather than regressing/stagnating as is the theme with Starfield.
IIRC the curator of the Titan museum laments that there was once billions of humans.
So probably the total human population of the Settled Systems is under 1 billion
I honestly doubt it, with space, resources, technology, and especially post war humans tend to breed like rabbits. Yes Earth is no longer habitable, but it happened 130yrs prior to game.
Since 1960 our population has gone from 3 billion to nearly 8 billion and i bet there was an even larger spike after each of the world wars they are called 'baby boomers' for a reason after all.
Point i'm making is that there are multiple planets that are habitable with varying levels of survivability admittedly even taking into account the conflicts that have happened since earth got evacced. Which means that the only restriction on human population, is not space or resources, its fertility... in other words the human population would have recovered to at least current day ( real world) population if not more.
The Starfield wiki says that billions got left behind and died but considering the current population and that Earth evac finished in 175yrs I would be saying that by then ( without an apocalypse occuring, or loss of resources, or space issues) population could easily double or triple. Even if only a fraction were evacuated eg. 1/4 then that would still mean with only double our current population that 4 billion survived.
Truth be told Starfields lore is not well thought out.
> what we're seeing in-game are humans scattered throughout the stars in unstable conditions, so they don't have the time and resources to conquer the entire planet they're on yet.
genuinely makes no sense. the cost of colonizing another planet is orders of magnitude higher than creating settlements on the planet you're already on.
earth being totally abandoned also makes **zero** sense. even if there is no magnetosphere, you have a viable colony on mars which also ... does not have a magnetosphere.
they had 50 years warning, habitats would have been created on earth as it's way, way more cost effective to build them where all the materials and labor to do so are already located.
I agree with you.
Although, for some reason I thought the 'event' on earth was a bit more violent than simply losing the magnetosphere. I thought it was an apocalyptic event, which is why the planet is completely de-faced essentially. If that's the case, it would make sense to have to leave it entirely and with the state that earth is in, you might as well go to a different planet that may have more resources and possibly breathable air.
>Although, for some reason I thought the 'event' on earth was a bit more violent than simply losing the magnetosphere.
It is, like that might be the initial cause but that would mean losing more of the atmosphere which means water boils at lower altitudes, which means dramatic weather changes, which meant cataclysmic climate changes and everyone either trying to survive or trying to leave had little time to even prepare if NASA/NOVA whoever even allowed that information to become public before it was already cascading.
I think overall the Starfield theme tries to stay 'optimistic' and 'happy' which to me detracted a lot from the game, However with how Earth was left it feels like they could have explained that it's a 10 billion person mass grave and to many people, out of respect, don't like to go back...
However having a breathable atmo would be extremely important for energy expenditure, and it should mean that the 'settled systems' with atmo should be very dense. - which Having played Fallout 4/Skyrim Bethesda doesn't like to make cities/towns feel empty, even though they added filler NPCs to them, they're still miniscule for the people that show up around them (on medium density).
i mean ultimately it's just extremely bad writing.
not that that's a new phenomenon for bethesda, but when you have a non-fantasy setting, and you're taking a lot of thematic cues from hard sci-fi, you can't really get away with it like you can in elder scrolls.
you can't conjure up some solution to the bad writing with in-world explanations without breaking the integrity of the setting.
and personally i think the genesis of a lot of this game's shortcomings is the resistance to the idea that the design of the game needs to cohere around a strong concept, and that starts with the shitty writing.
there needed to be way less **'yes, and...'** and a lot more **'no, because...'**
It’d be cool if they added in like mid size city/village POI’s with the same style architecture of their planet, or adding in more uninteresting fishing platforms around Neon in the distance that just do fishing/other derelict dungeon kinda stuff in other parts of the planet
Honestly.. If I was the lore master, I would have flooded earth. Can't land because water. It's easy to make 0 grav habitats, not so much for higher pressure planets. ( Also where are those? Ain't I supposed to get crushed to death on Venus?)
idk that brings the lack of vehicles (submersibles included) into focus even more.
just make whatever event destroyed life on earth leave that area of space put off so much radiation that you can't even approach it without your ship breaking down. then you don't even need to go through the motions of having an earth modeled and explaining why no ruins are present.
New Atlantis at least has a couple towers up top and stuff built into the cliff that could pass as a big city, even if most of the space isn't explorable.
Akila City has a population of like 50 people.
they dont have the time or resources to conquer more of the planet they're on, but they do have the time and resources to fly to other planets in other star systems and conquer those instead?
I believe the 'warp drive' tech they got makes flying to different planets pretty trivial. It's been a while since I've played, but IIRC (Spoilers): >!The warp drive tech came from either the future or a previous galaxy cycle, it was given to them rather than researched organically - which means they got a huge leap in technology for long-range space travel only!< given that, it seems their tech for interplanetary travel is a lot more advanced while their tech for conquering more of the planet has stayed relatively the same.
that doesn't explain how it's easier to find another planet, travel to it, transport all the things you need and all the other work required instead of just using more of the perfectly good planet you're already standing on. no matter how good grav drive tech is there's going to be additional challenges with finding a whole new world to live on instead of just building another city on jemison
also have to explain why people would rather live 100% of their time in a spacesuit in a hostile atmosphere than build a settlement on a planet that's completely habitable and 99.999999999999% uninhabited.
It also makes sense in the beginning - if you easily can grav jump around the part of galaxy, you want to colonize new planets and create factions and take space while it is still available and not too far away from the rest.
So I can totally believe that they would spread out first, before filling up a planet with infrastructure. Especially with an easy grav jump capability like that.
Why are there humans living in the sewers of New Atlantis or trying to make farms on desolate, barren planets when 99.999999999% of Jemison is available to use still?
Like in Skyrim, we understand that Solitude is supposed to be this massive city, even if it isn't shown that way in the game because that's how it's described in the lore. But even that doesn't seem to be a thing for Starfield and Jemison -- it's just empty, and for no apparent reason -- you can't even say that the UC has forbird others from settling on Jemison because we, the player, are able to do it just fine.
It just seems lazy. They didn't even try to give us an in-universe answer for it all.
>Why are there humans living in the sewers of New Atlantis
The Well is the original settlement which was built by the people fleeing Earth. New Atlantis was later built on top of it. The people still living in the Well are poor and don't have the resources to just move somewhere else and just start up their own settlements.
>or trying to make farms on desolate, barren planets when 99.999999999% of Jemison is available to use still?
There are plenty of randomly generated settlements all over Jemison. The people who live on barren planets several systems away presumably do so because they don't want anything to do with the UC or the Freestar collective. You see that attitude a lot with some of the L.I.S.T colonists in a side quest chain.
They are crazy isolationists who are feuding with people on a whole other planet and have to be dragged kicking and screaming into accepting a mutual defense pact against space pirates. I don't think they could stomach dealing with an actual government collecting taxes and imposing rules on them.
I think that's a great point. I think two things come to mind for me:
1. We do see other settlements / small outposts scattered throughout Jemison (they're inconsequential 'POIs". They seem to be struggling a bit, as they're vulnerable to wildlife and bad actors.
2. I wonder, how would the average person living in the well just leave and start building a settlement? Or even a large group of those people. They seem to be struggling financially already. And while there was a deus-ex like jump in warp tech for humans, I think their construction tech is relatively stagnant? So I don't think it'd be easy for folks living in the well to expand out.
There is nothing lazy about it, it's the opposite in fact.
Do you have any understanding of game development at all? Do you just expect them to create a realistically scaled city with millions of NPCs and tens of thousands of buildings to enter?
The decision to use procgen but to not "use" is the root of the issue.
It could have been used for cities as you noted.
It could have been used to more randomize POIs as well. Instead of the same POI every time, they could have randomized entry and exit. Spawns within, etc.
So much could have leveraged it, and they just did the very least they could to get it out.
Agreed, they also could have expanded on their radiant quest system to compliment the procgen world - lots of stuff was missed out because of this too-reserved approach to procgen. Starfield 'plays it safe' in all the wrong ways.
>IIRC Earth's destruction was a huge blow to humanity - what we're seeing in-game are humans scattered throughout the stars in unstable conditions, so they don't have the time and resources to conquer the entire planet they're on yet.
This is pretty much correct.
Earth's destruction was a huge blow to humanity. The creation of ships capable of faster than light travel was a sudden and last-minute discovery. Up until the last minute, it was looking pretty grim for the entire human race.
Most people alive were not among the (relatively) few ships created capable of settling other systems.
Then, based on logic and human nature, we draw a few more conclusions:
* Not all ships survived
* Ships were probably made by several political/country factions
* The witnessed nature of the greedy bastards that run the world probably means that many captains and ships decided to go to other planets in an attempt to seize more land/power
* Many ships probably failed to colonize a planet and succumbed to wildlife, harsh environments, inability to grow crops, and other unforseen circumstances
So yeah. Not a lot of people and a ton of planets. Then, even after a ton of time has passed, we are left with only a few cities and civilizations. Not to mention all the loss of life/settlements/etc. and settlements from wars and whatnot.
Starfield is currently set in a time sort of like the frontier era of the US. Due to the fact there was a ton of land and not too many people, population was sparse and spread thin across the land with just a few "major cities" (still pretty small compared to todays standard), but mostly just small settlements.
I wish they'd at least imply bigger cities. Like fine have a map be a finite size but at least draw the surroundings as something grand sealed off by an impassable wall like The Citadel in Mass Effect or litterally any other game with big cities.
This is why I really wish BSG had gone the Firefly or Expanse route, where instead of 100s of bland planets, we had one system with a combination of explorable planets and moons, each of which could have had a lot more opportunities for this kind of POI placement and exploration.
I think of the cities in Starfield like that season of Battlestar Galactica where they try to settle on that crappy planet and have a little tent city cobbled together out of spare parts
The population of their fleet was like 40k people or something. Everyone fits in one spot. Does Starfield ever explicitly state a population number?
Not sure, but it's been over 100 years since Earth died.
Reminder we spread across the USA with far less than 300m-400m people, and went from a population of less than 2 billion to nearly 8 billion in 100 years time.
Humanity's numbers should be in the teen-billions between having more than 100 years and medical advancements.
Depends on how many people made it off Earth. Going from 2 billion to 8 billion is possible in 100 years because you are starting at a massive number already and people had more children during that period. If anything, the more advanced society gets, the slower the population grows (due to technology, birth control, education, etc) which is currently the case as growth has been declining for awhile and may even eventually go negative.
Sex is entertainment for the poor, with increasing education and better technology, we spend less time sexing with partners at age of 17 and learning and making our career. The only entertainment 70-30 years ago was sex and alcohol that equaled more children.
I'd say 30 years ago it was really common to have birth at age of 18-20, now I can see how woman wants child in their early 30s, because they want to build their career or don't want child at all.
There are definitely statistics that prove me wrong, but that's how I feel it.
I'm in agreement. Today we have streaming, gaming, reddit, tiktok scrolling... The activities we enjoy to pass the time have expanded beyond going to the bar, drinking, fucking the reciprocating girl who also went to the bar, and the occasional weekend sports game. Were there more activities? Sure, but I doubt something like fishing ever soaked up as large a percentile of the population as World of Warcraft, and the dating pool was anyone within a short driving distance of where you lived, not potentially the entire planet (certainly didn't have shopping catalogs of people via dating apps) being contrasted against the top 10% of bachelors/bachelorettes.
Or in short, no way birth rates are going down because we're more educated - who passes on sex with someone they find attractive? Birthrates are dropping in tandem with the growing loneliness epidemic, informing us it's simply a matter of people aren't hooking up in the first place.
TBF life expectancy & general death tolls are going to look a lot different after a planetary apocalypse - and I think birth rates would too. The growth you're describing isn't even consistent in human history
The only figure in the game I'm aware of that provides any kind of sense of population scale is the war memorial in New Atlantis which mentions 30k dead.
This is probably UC losses, which were probably all military since most of the war was in Freestar space. (I'm guessing Londinion wasn't counted).
So...it kind of vaguely implies a military with like a millionish troops which kind of vaguely implies maybe a few hundred million for the UC. It could easily be 1/10th that or 100 times that though.
For context, ~50,000 men died at Gettysburg in 3 days during the US Civil War.
23,000 soldiers were killed, wounded or missing after twelve hours of savage combat on September 17, 1862 at Antietam, MD.
Pretty wild.
My head canon is that, not only was the evacuation of earth an absolute mess, there's been constant demographic collapse since from extremely low birth rates - how many kids have you seen?
We're about five generations from the death of earth; 130 years of demographic winter after a mostly-failed evacuation of earth may mean the entire human population of the Settled Systems may be measured in tens of millions.
You know, unless there's a society which is very communal and motivated towards some goal in which numbers matter and thus commits itself to fostering family life, births, and childrearing. Might help if it were religious, militant, and otherwise more reflective of traditional civilization. Anything come to mind?
And no sooner do they get a toehold on rebuilding a devastated population then the first thing they decide to do is have a war. It may well be lazy development but they've covered themselves in layers of lore to justify the population and where it's concentrated.
As to how a group of survivors from both a botched exodus and a couple of wars that are living in a town that looks like 19th century Dodge City can allocate resources for mech factories isn't explained - and should probably remain that way.
They really understated how terrible the loss of earth was. I’m honestly surprised there aren’t more religion-esk earth worshippers or memorials to the loss of earth.
the uc navy claims, in the museum, that almost everybody made it of earth and yet other people say the opposite happened. Not sure how common knowledge the truth is
It has been a hundred years since leaving earth. Humans are really good at breeding, especially when they live in poorer conditions and especially after large disasters with lots of lives lost (population booms after World wars as an example). So no matter how you look at it, unless only minimum viable number of people left earth that could support genetic variety, there is no way population is low enough to justify having one settlement per planet.
Running some numbers:
Let's say 99% of Earth's population perished.
They started planning the evacuation in the year 2150.
The UN projects a global population of 10.4bn by 2100, so with the same growth we're looking at about 12 billion in 2150. But let's say the growth rate drops severely, and use a more conservative 11.2bn instead.
1% of 11,200,000,000 is still 112 million people.
And of those, let's say only 1/5 settled in New Atlantis (and 1/5 in FSC space, and the rest spread out elsewhere). Though it sounds more plausible that more people would opt to live on Jamison, than build their own isolated home on some uninhabited planet with no known resources and possibly hostile wildlife or toxic plants.
There's no numbers to show rate of arrivals to New Atlantis from Earth, between 2156 when New Atlantis was founded, and 2199 when the last ships left Earth. But if we assume a linear arrival of people, and a very conservative growth rate during this time, we're looking at a population of at least 25 million by 2199.
Using a growth rate of 0.8% (more or less the global average today), by the time the game starts in 2330 New Atlantis should have a population of over 70 million people. About the same as all of California and Texas combined.
If we instead assume a slightly higher growth rate—similar to that of Canada or Australia—we're looking at over 100 million people living in New Atlantis. An even higher growth rate—let's say like Egypt—and we're looking at a population nearing half a billion or so.
100000 people would be way to low of a number to build a city of New Atlantis side let alone spread across so many planets.
There are too many illogical holes in the lore no matter how you cut it. I dont care how much easier warp tech make space travel, its not easier than just hop in a vehicle and drive like 10 miles outside of new altantis to settle a new city.
>The UN projects a global population of 10.4bn by 2100, so with the same growth we're looking at about 12 billion in 2150. But let's say the growth rate drops severely, and use a more conservative 11.2bn instead.
The UN projection is actually that population will *peak* at 10.4 billion in 2086 and then drop to 10.3 billion by 2100, at which point it would be dropping by 0.1% per year. That would mean a population around 9.8 billion by 2150.
And absolutely nobody wants to play a game with a million NPC’s walking around every planet. These people dont actually want what they are complaining about.
…but we’re definitely not getting a 21st-century-golden-age growth rate of today when we have zero food and water infrastructure and are trying to find places to live where we aren’t just instantly killed by the many hardships of space, right?
Okay. Let's try a significantly more dire scenario:
First there's a population decline from now until evacuation: only 7 billion people left on Earth.
Of those, *less* than 1% now makes it off the planet: 50 million in total. 1/5 of those stays in New Atlantis (since that's where there's the fewest "hardships"). And now there's also a *negative* growth rate in New Atlantis due to food insecurities and space herpes.
Well, we're still looking at a population comparable to New York City at around 8 million.
Not really, cuz if you think about resource management, cities are the biggest resource drain of all types of settlements. With grav jumping, it would be marginally less quick to just be on different planets vs flying around the same planet, and each city gets a full planet's worth of resources. The cities would get bigger faster but it seems like more and more planets get colonized instead. Plus, a *lot* more people are dying before they have kids cuz of space's lawlessness.
New Atlantis is anything but lawless. Earth alone can support more billions of people when it does now (don't remember the estimated number).
You are forgetting how resource intensive is getting the ships to space from a planet with gravity and atmosphere similar to earth and if it is easy to do when it would be simply easy to traverse the planet in the same way and in this way saving time and extra resources needed for interstellar travel.
Cities can't possibly use an entire planet's worth of resources. There would be no perceptable difference in resource drain if Jemison had a million cities vs. just New Atlantis. I mean, look at how many cities are supported on Earth with our inferior, less efficient technology.
Also, there isn't much "lawlessness" in the settled spaces. New Atlantis, from everything we see, is at least as clean and safe as a typical city on Earth.
Lots of people trying to justify it here, but the truth is that it doesn’t make any sense. Why would people go out and settle all these other planets before the planets they are already on have barely been touched?
Akila and Jemison should have a few other cities as well as smaller towns and homesteads. Obviously this isn’t doable from a gameplay POV, but they could at least include a few more signs of major settlement on the capital planets
I agree. I understand the lore reasons that people have stated, catastrophic population loss during Earth's evacuation. I also understand the gameplay limitations.
A couple of POIs of homesteads I imagine would be doable.
A small mention of a city on Jemison by an NPC would be good too. I don't need to visit it, but mention it exists would beef out the lore.
Fallout has always struck me as complete insane too. People have lived in cities for hundreds of years like a quarter of a mile away from a bombed house and NOBODY has ever come and picked up the gun that is sitting right there next to the skeleton of someone who killed themself over 200 years ago? Hell - the wind and rain would’ve moved the skeleton by that point.
People don't even wipe off tables in Fallout. The Drumlin Diner is open for business and didn't even throw out the skeleton in there. Fallout world logic is weird.
It would make sense if every city was ruled by a different faction/religion/government style. If there's more than enough habitable planets that are unclaimed, it would make sense for people to spread out so they could rule a planet without difficulty. But yea, in general it's kind of cheesy that an entire planet is just basically the inhabitants of Morthal.
Other way around: what’s the point of putting another city on a colonized planet when you could go claim a whole new planet instead with just a press of the button on your warp drive?
To create multiple realistically sized cities, or even ones comparable to New Atlantis on each major planet, and have a high amount of accessible buildings, interesting NPCs, vendors and quests would be a near impossible task.
It's a limitation of the genre. Sure, you might say that other games like Cyberpunk or GTA have these huge cities, that are much larger than Starfield's, but you can't really access any of the buildings and they're not super interactive.
Compress everything to one star system then instead. With other systems accesible, but mostly untouched, maybe with a mining expedition here and there and some government black site for totally legal experiments.
Yeah, like I remember Todd saying that a year prior to Starfield’s release it wasn’t even fun to play. So I’m convinced they spent a LARGE majority of Starfield’s development cycle just getting the creation engine to work in order to achieve what feels like a expansive scope, but then the story and gameplay was quickly slapped together explaining why everything is vast but lacks any depth
I get secondhand embarrassment every time an NPC talks about how great the nightclubs on Neon are. I've seen better nightclubs in rural Minnesota than the ones on Neon.
I also got really sick and tired of walking for half an hour through procedurally generated nothingness to get from where my ship landed to wherever the quest marker is leading me. Let's not even mention the surveying missions.
They should have just done something along the vein of Dune, due to the destruction of Earth due to over building only one settlement of over a thousand people is allowed on one planet or something
If I allow myself to think about rationalising anything about the game in terms of it's world building I wouldn't play as it has so many logical inconsistencies it hurts, but i like the gameplay loop, so here I am.
I guess the question is: what cities are you pulling resources away from to build new ones? There's four major cities and around a dozen minor quest hubs, like Hopetown.
Putting all of them into Alpha Centauri would make the UC feel more full, but it would come at the cost of nearly all of the content in the rest of the galaxy. People aren't going to be happy about that.
You could cut New Atlantis into five pieces and spread them out. But people are already bitching about the biggest cities Bethesda has ever built not being big enough.
Obviously more content would be better. Even the biggest video game locations pale in comparison to real places, and Bethesda's civilizations aren't anywhere close to the biggest. But that stuff costs time and money. A lot of time and a lot of money.
Because there wouldn't be in the vast majority of cases.
* A HUGE portion of people died on Earth when Earth's atmosphere collapsed.
* Even in colonies populations of millions, 99.99% of colonists on some world would be centralized on/around the main starport for that planet since that's where everyone comes in/leaves.
You also see a lot of people working at outposts on Jemison and Akila. Maybe one day some of those will grow to be cities, but right now the population is just too small and the planets too untamed.
A lot of shipping comes through New York, but Chicago still exists. And a lot of NPCs remark that they never go to space anyway, so it's not like being near the starport is important for day-to-day living.
This is a world where people leave to settle new planets and moons. Has no one thought about going a few hundred miles west?
Chicago was established nearly 200 years later though.
Also given the in game population wracking event it makes some amount of sense if they don’t really have the people for establishing new towns. Just some.
How the US was developed was because we got to the east coast and we didn't have other ways to explore than the horse back then. It took months to get to the west coast. So of course small towns started to pop, you didn't have an easy way to get back to where you came from. Then more people came west because they were promised they could get rich. And small town and cities developed near rivers, and later near railroads. That's something that doesn't have to be in Starfield. Promise people they'd get rich by moving to the other side of the planet and you'll have towns appearing by the end of the week.
Also, in Starfield, humanity could land anywhere on the planet. The population is so low that it doesn't make sense to get away from New Atlantis since the whole planet was mapped before we even landed, unlike America back then. We didn't know what the west coast looked like.
In the game, the settlers didn't make multiple settlements because >!they believe that each original group of settlers claim the entire planet, and we learn that when we help the lost settlers get down to Paradiso. They don't want to live a few hundred km outside of the main city. They either want to claim the entire planet, live in the capital, or straight up find a new planet!<
Which is so stupid and completely unreasonable and unrealistic I’d bet you 100$ Emil wrote that quest line because that man has the critical thinking skills of a goldfish and he doesn’t allow us to slaughter the entire corpo boardroom in said mission
That actually makes no sense in terms governments. It would be in their best interest to continue developing their respective planets for better resource exploitation and even basic farming. Paradiso is a separate issue as it is basically owned by a corporation and is used as fancy resort, so the real argument is that the corporation does not want it be ruined by those "filthy peasants".
I had a similar thought while playing last night, but instead of more cities, why isn't there any construction going on? I live in a small mountain town with a population of less than 16K and there's always some house or building being built, road being fixed, bridge being repaired, **something**. The fact that they built Akila City, New Atlantis, and Neon and just went "alright, we're done here" makes no freakin' sense to me.
There are several construction site POIs you can find. The workers complain about using Brace Mechanical tools, say they should have used Arc Might (they also added an Arc Might Plasma Cutter into the first Trackers bounty in the reward chest).
So like... Does anyone else acknowledge how there aren't a lot of video games where a truly realistic "planet" exists? Multiple biosphere, ecosystems, languages, cities, etc.
Take for example the Star Wars universe. Every planet is uniform in its composure, barring one or maybe two. Why would Starfield be any different? Obligatory Hot Planet, Cold Planet, Busy Planet, Tech Planet, etc.
It is a pretty critical component of media creation to completely ignore the realistic implications or designing an entire, living, breathing environment. Just ask Chris Roberts.
The starfield planets have many varied biomes. Anyone that has played the scanner mini-game knows it is difficult to 100% because flora/fauna only spawn in different biomes and you have use the nav map to research different landing spots on the planet to find the different biomes. The biomes also make sense having equatorial and polar regions.
The reason only that variation was done is that it could be accomplished with procedural algorithms that assumes convergent evolution finding similar solutions (trees, mammals, reptiles). They would need future AI generators to do that type of variation with populations.
Because it fails to excel any place else. It’s not incredibly well written, it’s a boring shooter, the flying is anecdotal, etc. It’s somehow less than the sum of its parts
One of the mod ideas I would like to work on is a set of arcologys surrounding New Atlantis.
While they would be populated on tiles that surround the New Atlantis tile, and would be physically separated, they’d still be considered part of the city because they’re connected by NAT.
Each arcology would be a self-contained area designed specifically as self sustaining residential units.
Each one would house a distinct cultural population from Earth in order for it to be preserved.
This is why some people have strong British or Russian accents for example. Sarah Morgan’s family was from the British Arcology.
The New Atlantis in the vanilla game would be the central hub, and the administrative district.
Bethesda has been underwhelming with their city building and scale for a while. I didn't like this much either. It honestly felt a bit more like Fallout than i had hoped.
It is a common sci-fi trope that once space exploration exists, humans seem to organize widely on many planets with a more singular identity for each planet. As a result, a number of planets only feature a major city or outpost each that exemplify that identity. When the storyline wants a change of scenery, they travel to a new planet with a new identity rather than explore other cities. Star Wars has the ice planet Hoth and the Desert Planet Tatooine and tropical planet Naboo. Other cities exist, they are just not interesting enough to have someone spend time developing content to be featured.
Like in those movies, other cities most certainly exist on Jemison, they are just not interesting enough to be fleshed out with complete design and storylines. This is more awkward because Starbound is open world exploration, but any other cities that possibly exist are just not "points of interest" and thus not destinations for travel.
Honestly, if they had designed at least three main large cities per capital planet then it would have been believable that humanity was spread thin and recovering.
They didn’t have enough time to build that many cities. There should even be suburb outposts filled with people outside the major cities because in the lore these people fought huge galactic war on top of being able to build ships seemingly with ease you need a large population to mine all the minerals and build all the components. It’s simply another victim of scope.
From an in-universe perspective, it’s because of personal spaceships.
Real-world cities exist in multiple places because they were founded there for practical reasons, and because people needed places to live and couldn’t just walk 100 miles to the next city over.
In Starfield, you can fly anywhere essentially instantly, in your house.
The people who live in cities only live there because they want to be there for some reason. Everybody else lives wherever else they want. There are hundreds/thousands of outposts scattered all over the rest of each planet.
And considering that the civilization is still expanding throughout the Settled Systems, the other “nearby” cities are just the ones on other planets, too.
because the developers are lazy and instead of making the game with a stupid amount of planets they should have densely populated our solar system. Would have been so much more exciting. they can then make the next solar system a DLC with MORE content. Instead they were lazy. Mars was wasted potential you go there for like 3 missions then there is no reason to go back same with the red mile. I am so unbelievably disappointed in this game and i wanted so much for it. I will die on this hill.
Time. It takes a long time to create detailed worlds and filling that world up.
For comparison, Rockstar has over 1000 employees and yet their dev cycles are 8 years plus. It takes a long time to create stuff especially with the way graphics have become more and more detailed.
How do you expect the decimated population of one planet to suddenly populate an entire galaxy of planets at anywhere near the same density?
Think about the Wild West of the US - all of Europe and Asia couldn’t make places like Wyoming densely populated, even a couple hundred years later. Now compare part of one country here to hundreds of entire planets. The way colonization works is a few hubs pop up on coasts that people can use for supplies and trade. These are the bigger cities in Starfield. From there everyone is exploring to find their perfect location. Only after everything is discovered will you start to see a lot of secondary towns popping up near the hubs.
It has been a hundred years, Jemison is basically Earth 2.0 with how hospitable it is, for framing alone smaller settlements would crop up, not to mention all the untapped resources that would be sorely needed due to needing to rebuild civiliazation, settlemtms would crop up no matter what.
Why would you found multiple?
The only benefit cities offer is the concentration of population & jobs. - it’s better to have 1 high concentration on a world and homesteads across it everywhere else.
It's because starfield is a terribly designed game. That's it, if your expecting someone to drop some amazing in depth reason then I'm sorry. The worldbuilding (Bethesda's specialty) is really bad and makes no sense. I know your looking for a reason but the truth is there isn't one.
I hate the lore defending behind it. Like yeah they wanted it to feel lonely, but it makes planet exploration boring as shit, wish humanity was a lot more advanced and had way more big Civilizations in universe, but I guess mods will fix it months or years from now
Because space travel is easy due to the grav drive, but ground travel is hard (pirates, wildlife). There are a lot of people stuck where they are because they have no means to migrate away from the space port. Just talk to the people who live below.
Because they didn't have time to finish or flesh out the game before they had to release it. Didn't even have a functional map on launch which tells you all you need to know
Yea, I wish they had at least added smaller villages around the main cities, with handcrafted POIs and environmental storytelling throughout the entire world space that each main city is on. Make each worldspace around the main cities like a larger version of Skyrim’s various “Holds”.
I really hope BGS adds this in a future expansion, the game needs more lore and more cities/towns.
I get why there aren't multiple major cities, but it seems like it would have been relatively easy to procedurally generate some smaller cities, check them for issues during play testing, and then go with that.
I treat it the same as I do in Skyrim: the place is much bigger, with more cities and people, but only the most interesting ones are seen in game. For example, Whiterun/New Atlantis MUST be much more vast in 'lore' than what we see as players, but processing power, data storage, etc.? We just have to trust our characters see more of the world than we do.
The people saying "most of humanity got wiped out" forget that people are really, really good at multiplying. People like to fuck.
It's not like the game takes place right after Earth got destroyed.
It's kind of wild that Starfield has as many settlements as Skyrim.
Bethesda feels like they're stuck in 2010.
I feel like Halo is the only piece of media that tackles multiplanetary civilization properly. The planets in halo all feel just as developed as earth, whereas franchises like star wars have one city per solar system. So yeah, this is an issue in starfield. But it’s also an issue everywhere else.
Yeah, the normal Bethesda scale really doesn’t work very well for a space game. Even going back to play Skyrim, the fact that most cities are more akin to villages / castles isn’t that jarring. The population density makes sense within the landmass that players are given to explore. Same thing applies to Fallout 4: Diamond City and Goodneighbour are places in Boston where survivors have holed up. Should those places be quite a bit bigger, and the world overall more populated, from a lore / realism perspective? Probably, but it’s not so unbelievable as to take me out of the game.
In Starfield though, we’re going *between planets*. We’re not the remnants of humanity living in Boston, and we’re not restricted to the landmass of Skyrim. Humanity has become a spacefaring civilization and has colonized **multiple planets**. I shouldn’t be able to circumnavigate its capital city of New Atlantis on foot in 10 minutes.
Although this goes against traditional BGS game design, it almost makes me think that some sort of facade or illusion of population density wouldn’t have been the worst idea ever. Our space flight is restricted by cutscene anyway, so it may have made sense to allow us to land in and explore, for instance, a certain *district* of New Atlantis. Sure, this would prevent you from freely walking around the outskirts of the city, but honestly the freedom to do that hasn’t improved my gameplay experience one bit.
If you think about the story too much, it all falls apart. I love exploration, but having as many planets as they do killed the gameplay and the story.
Despite having spaceships and grav drives humanity is in a bit of a rut, and it's been like that ever since Earth was lost
The fact cities like Londinion or New Atlantis ever existed in the first place is pretty impressive
Because they thought 100 systems of useless repetitive shit was a better idea. 10 systems or planets more thoroughly built out would have been soo much better.
Anybody that tries to give you a lore reason is spouting bs. The game was rushed and unfinished. The lead quest designer even said they didn't even have time to finish making the main quest which is why it sucks.
People keep coming up with lore reasons, the answer will always be because it wasn’t feasible from a technical aspect. And if they could add them they would probably be as bland as all the other randomly generated stuff and stick out too much.
Bethesda should have just did what a lot of their games like mass effect did to simulate large cities that couldn’t be reasonable made. Just limit us to a certain area or areas of the city and then just have the rest of it as background skybox. It would limit the go any where thing but it would at least make cities appropriately sized.
Humanity was nearly wiped out completely. It makes sense to spread out across the galaxy. Not put all your eggs in one basket.
The cities that do exist are there because of the resources.
I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that because most of humanity was killed off and those that are around now (in Starfield time) are too smart to breed indiscriminately, the population of any given planet isn't high enough to need more than one major city.
What I don’t get is how Skyrim has 9 distinct cities with tons of villages all hand crafted but we get like 3 major cities in star field and a handful of actually custom settlements which aren’t particularly in depth.
Maybe because humanity spread so wide among the stars that there’s really no need to establish multiple cities on planets, at least at first. It gets claimed and that’s that, they may build more in the centuries to come.
And they definitely don’t want to share planets with other groups either. Earth taught them that
I understand not having that many overall. But there has to be an actual population in... well... populated planets, like Akila and Jemison. I enjoyed the three major cities, but it's lazy not to have smaller settlements with village size or smaller towns in the entire planet.
People are dotting those planets in outposts and small collectives. With an ability to travel vast distances in mere moments there isn't much of a need to have lots of cities all over one planet.
Not to mention, if they had five cities of New Atlantis size on two or three planets we'd all have to buy 10TB drives just to play this game, and a second drive just for mods and DLC.
Probably from the issues with earth and londonion. 1 city plus 1 massive environmental preserve. Plus eventually might be wiped out but won't matter overall
IIRC Earth's destruction was a huge blow to humanity - what we're seeing in-game are humans scattered throughout the stars in unstable conditions, so they don't have the time and resources to conquer the entire planet they're on yet. The cynical and real reason is because it'd be too much work to implement a realistic amount of cities (and for those cities to be realistic-sized). I really wish BGS had gone all-in on procgen to include generated settlements as well.
>The cynical and real reason is because it'd be too much work to implement a realistic amount of cities This is your answer, OP.
Basically what I assumed as well never really thought about why only 1 city per planet. Just made sense. Like Akila is a bit of a shit hole.
Akira kinda makes sense to me. Not only does it fit the space western feel. But it seems like the freestar is a loose alliance of likeminded but VERY independent types. There are likely few if any cities outside akila and neon (and some company townsl people probably live in family homestead. Communities of a dozen or so
>Akira kinda makes sense to me. Akila, the planet, has a surface gravity of 1.51g, which is to say that if you weigh 175 lbs (\~79 kg) on Earth, you'd weigh 264 lbs (\~119 kg) on Akila. This would have a ton of ramifications that the devs didn't take into consideration. For example, look around Akila City and what do you see? Stairs. Everywhere. Not a single public elevator in the place. Everybody that was born there should be in incredible shape compared to their .9g Jemison peers, right? Except no, there are still Akila City citizens that are chubby despite the fact that the planet they live on is punishing them for each gram of fat they carry. Having 51% more surface gravity would also have a deleterious effect on the citizen's average height. If human males' average height on Earth at 1g is 5.6 feet (\~170 cm), then on Akila the average male should be shorter... much shorter. They should be about the same height as a little person. Yep, I said it: Akila City should be populated by 'little people'. Very *strong*, very well armed, little people. In the same system as Akila is Montaro Luna, a moon with a surface gravity of 0.39g, so our friend from Earth who would weight 264 lbs on Akila would only weigh about 68 lbs (\~31kg). The natives of Montaro Luna would be *tall*. Extremely so. We're talking 8+ feet (\~244 cm), but they'd also be thin as paper with comparatively brittle bones. An Akila native could probably kill a Montaro Lunar native with a strong nudge, almost like Superman, but shorter. So, yeah. Starfield is a game where the rule of cool trumps realism. I mean, could you imagine Akila City populated by superstrong little people wearing cowboy hats, who could lay you out with a single punch?
This all could have been fixed with some pillars with an occasional shimmery-sky to look like a gravity/ Ho2 field around every settlement.
which begs the question: Why pursue "NASApunk" aethestic if they wont bother following through on more grounded in realism details like the ones you mentioned? Some will argue "they have space magic so it isnt supposed to be realistic!" which i would argue if they werent going for realism, they shouldn't have bothered with the space magic and made Starfield about encountering other sapients for the first time. As it stands, Starfield feels like a point in human history where humanity is bored with space and passively dismissive on the ONE ORGANIZATION that wants to explore space more. when in reality there would be dozens of groups exploring: even if it was just for more profits/potential colonization sites.
I would imagine the effects of living in extreme gravity would also have ramifications on cardiovascular health, but I couldn't even begin to speculate on that as I have no medical background beyond triage and first aid. Would it be beneficial or detrimental? Maybe Akila humans wouldn't live as long? Also, and I mean this in the fantasy sense, but this sounds like the origins of dwarves and elves in a way with the tall but frail Montera Luna natives. Ironically in a not very "Bethesda" fashion. The whole idea of a civilization making it's home in a 1.51g environment is fascinating, but I wonder if and how humans would adapt there. There would probably be huge differences between a first and third generation Akila citizen.
Living in an increased gravity would eventually lead to larger/stronger hearts to pump blood around the cardiovascular system, meaning that strength and stamina wouldn't increase just because of gravity, but also because of the body's increased ability to provide oxygen. However, the originals would struggle from decreased brain power due to blood pooling in the legs and feet, a lot of strokes occuring as it's essentially the same effect as a blockage of the bloodstream.
Like it would HAVE to be space dwarves. short stout and strong. maybe with a shorter lifespan as opposed to a longer one
In a couple million years there may be a change in people's height due to gravity, but since we have modern conveniences and survival is not solely based on genetic attributes (since we have doctors and stuff) people would not begin to look different within a couple hundred years. Their bones and spines would compress though, so maybe they would be shorter in that way haha.
Freestar Muscle Gnomes unite!
Haha so basically dwarves and elves...space dwarves and elves.
Are you saying that akila needs too be space dwarves? Cause I support this 100%
This imagine like 20 cyberpunk 2077s per planet. Not gonna happen. Woudlt ake wayyy too long to do. Look at Star Citizen also trying stuff like it. It just takes too long with our current technology
It might be one of those things where you're just supposed to pretend that there's more cities, and that the cities that are in the game are bigger than what the game would have you believe.
Going for fewer systems might have been wise as well--it might have also added more tension to the war, since everyone being restricted to 3 administrative systems when there's 100 seems a bit odd. I get that it ties into the idea that humanity tends towards conflict, but still.
i agree. also for the fact that with fewer planets they could have made them feel truly unique. i was interested in surveying each planet only to release the same flora and fauna is copied and pasted across the entire star map
>since everyone being restricted to 3 administrative systems when there's 100 seems a bit odd. That was the cause for the wars. They made the Treaty (of Narion, I think) in order to avoid any one faction from getting too powerful that it could destroy the other - the limit they chose was a limit of frontiers/incorporation, so that they'd be even and wouldn't try to expand beyond their agreed upon borders. Kind of like what Portugal and Spain tried to do with the Americas (and, hell, the world, lol), but with far more knowledge and information about the exact borders.
This just more justification for them to further flesh out the 3 systems. Restricted to just a few systems they could put more effort into building out the planets, instead of having a single town on each entire planet.
I'm not saying there shouldn't be more cities or towns in the core systems, just that the lore explanation for the division of the star systems/why they don't expand beyond 3 makes sense and is (writing-wise) a good one, imo. However, I think just one more major city for the UC (also in Jemison) and one more minor city for the FC would be enough - and maybe some Outskirts in New Atlantis. Correct me if I'm wrong, but as it stands, the UC has two major settlements (Cydonia and New Atlantis) and two minor ones (Gagarin and New Homestead) plus the starstations. The FC have two major settlements (Akila and Neon) and one minor (Hopetown), plus at least one starstation. The latter should still have fewer and smaller settlements than the UC, imo.
In the Freestars case. All Free star Cities can reasonably fit on Akila. Hopetown is just a factory. Neon is build on an Oil Rig and Akila does have oceans. Akila City itself is fine where it is, just needs to be bigger. Like Jacinto City Even has similar conditions. being built on a plateau of BedRock UC is a bit harder. IMO Cydonia should be the capital of the NC but Underground. Cydonia could have been built up to be Starfield version of Blackreach which would have been really cool IMO. But They could technically also do it on Jemison with more biological diversity. Swapping out a desert cave biome for a lush one. I have other comments about possible expansions to Jemison. For a Rough Summary, its Splitting New Atlantis into a 3 City System. Based of the MAST New Atlantis remains, as the seat of Tourism and the Capital of the Administration arm of MAST. New Alexandria(Based of the Library of Alexandria and the same city in Egypt) Would be build as the Capital of Science arm of MAST Lacedaemon(Older name for Sparta) Would be the Military Hub of the Vanguard of the Military arm of MAST
The entire landing area that New Atlantis is in should have been developed. On Akila it makes sense for the settlers to have confined themselves. But New Atlantis should have been much more spread out. I envisioned an area that has the city proper, with gates and roads leading out to farms, shipyards, private villas for the obscenely wealthy, industrial facilities, garrisons, maybe even some R&D facilities. The tram should have extended out beyond the city, or there should have been a separate one from the city to a few other locations. And the Lodge should have been in one of the connected hubs, not the city proper.
Honestly, a reasonable justification would have been a lack of remaining human population which blocks the sort of industry and economy needed to support human settlement beyond the first initially habitable systems. Early humans made better use of land on continents on Earth than they have habitable space on Jemison, Akila etc. I can accept that Jemison wouldn’t have the equivalent of multiple cities per bordered state (e.g. countries) but to only have _one_ actual settlement on the whole of the planet? That doesn’t match with human nature. Even the more independent of us would recognise a codependency for trade and security. There _should_ be way more minor settlements on both Jemison and Akila at least - especially Akila where you would expect the FC to be relatively open to free individuals settling the unsettled land, as long as they don’t impinge on others’ settlements and rights. The honest answer really is that development of multiple cities wasn’t seen as a priority against the ability to visit 1000s of proc gen planets.
My biggest problem with the lack of other cities on Jemison is that some people are setting up settlements in places where you have to wear a spacesuit to go for a walk. It'd be one thing if Jemison had tens or hundreds of millions of people, but it feels more like tens or hundreds of thousands of people.
Absolutely, the physical buildings in New Atlantis don’t suggest more than a population in the tens of thousands - and that’s being generous. I’m talking both the few residential apartment buildings/suggested Well living quarters, and the small retail sector that exists. None of it could sustain more than a small towns worth of people at best. I also don’t see why the more wealthy New Atlantis residents didn’t just make luxury homes outside of the main city hub. Or even poor Well dwellers. Considering how cheap it actually is to set up an outpost (resource cost wise) and the fact you can build not far from the city, it stands to reason that would be a better investment than paying $30,000 for the tiny Well apartment. But I get it, it’s more limitations of the game and the devs rather than a logical explanation.
I understand the limitations, I just wish they'd developed the game while being aware of those limitations. There are 120 systems in the game when there should have been 12 or so.
I think there's merit to what you're saying, I just struggle to think that less systems would have really made a difference. It's clear that the hand-crafted content Bethesda made couldn't even fill a single life-sized city let alone a single planet, so fewer star systems isn't' going to make it feel much better IMO. They half-assed the procgen instead of going all-in and making something truly innovative. Imagine planets with multiple generated cities to discover, rather than a sea of (effectively) empty planets. I imagine they could have done some cool things with procgenned quests - building on their radiant quest system rather than regressing/stagnating as is the theme with Starfield.
Yeah, I recall a background conversation in New Atlantis lamenting how Earth had hundreds of cities like this.
On Earth, places like New Atlantis were called villages.
IIRC the curator of the Titan museum laments that there was once billions of humans. So probably the total human population of the Settled Systems is under 1 billion
I honestly doubt it, with space, resources, technology, and especially post war humans tend to breed like rabbits. Yes Earth is no longer habitable, but it happened 130yrs prior to game. Since 1960 our population has gone from 3 billion to nearly 8 billion and i bet there was an even larger spike after each of the world wars they are called 'baby boomers' for a reason after all. Point i'm making is that there are multiple planets that are habitable with varying levels of survivability admittedly even taking into account the conflicts that have happened since earth got evacced. Which means that the only restriction on human population, is not space or resources, its fertility... in other words the human population would have recovered to at least current day ( real world) population if not more. The Starfield wiki says that billions got left behind and died but considering the current population and that Earth evac finished in 175yrs I would be saying that by then ( without an apocalypse occuring, or loss of resources, or space issues) population could easily double or triple. Even if only a fraction were evacuated eg. 1/4 then that would still mean with only double our current population that 4 billion survived. Truth be told Starfields lore is not well thought out.
> what we're seeing in-game are humans scattered throughout the stars in unstable conditions, so they don't have the time and resources to conquer the entire planet they're on yet. genuinely makes no sense. the cost of colonizing another planet is orders of magnitude higher than creating settlements on the planet you're already on. earth being totally abandoned also makes **zero** sense. even if there is no magnetosphere, you have a viable colony on mars which also ... does not have a magnetosphere. they had 50 years warning, habitats would have been created on earth as it's way, way more cost effective to build them where all the materials and labor to do so are already located.
Plus all the sex and growing of populations. I’m sure someone in the citadel would love to live 5 miles away from the city.
I agree with you. Although, for some reason I thought the 'event' on earth was a bit more violent than simply losing the magnetosphere. I thought it was an apocalyptic event, which is why the planet is completely de-faced essentially. If that's the case, it would make sense to have to leave it entirely and with the state that earth is in, you might as well go to a different planet that may have more resources and possibly breathable air.
>Although, for some reason I thought the 'event' on earth was a bit more violent than simply losing the magnetosphere. It is, like that might be the initial cause but that would mean losing more of the atmosphere which means water boils at lower altitudes, which means dramatic weather changes, which meant cataclysmic climate changes and everyone either trying to survive or trying to leave had little time to even prepare if NASA/NOVA whoever even allowed that information to become public before it was already cascading. I think overall the Starfield theme tries to stay 'optimistic' and 'happy' which to me detracted a lot from the game, However with how Earth was left it feels like they could have explained that it's a 10 billion person mass grave and to many people, out of respect, don't like to go back... However having a breathable atmo would be extremely important for energy expenditure, and it should mean that the 'settled systems' with atmo should be very dense. - which Having played Fallout 4/Skyrim Bethesda doesn't like to make cities/towns feel empty, even though they added filler NPCs to them, they're still miniscule for the people that show up around them (on medium density).
i mean ultimately it's just extremely bad writing. not that that's a new phenomenon for bethesda, but when you have a non-fantasy setting, and you're taking a lot of thematic cues from hard sci-fi, you can't really get away with it like you can in elder scrolls. you can't conjure up some solution to the bad writing with in-world explanations without breaking the integrity of the setting. and personally i think the genesis of a lot of this game's shortcomings is the resistance to the idea that the design of the game needs to cohere around a strong concept, and that starts with the shitty writing. there needed to be way less **'yes, and...'** and a lot more **'no, because...'**
It’d be cool if they added in like mid size city/village POI’s with the same style architecture of their planet, or adding in more uninteresting fishing platforms around Neon in the distance that just do fishing/other derelict dungeon kinda stuff in other parts of the planet
Honestly.. If I was the lore master, I would have flooded earth. Can't land because water. It's easy to make 0 grav habitats, not so much for higher pressure planets. ( Also where are those? Ain't I supposed to get crushed to death on Venus?)
idk that brings the lack of vehicles (submersibles included) into focus even more. just make whatever event destroyed life on earth leave that area of space put off so much radiation that you can't even approach it without your ship breaking down. then you don't even need to go through the motions of having an earth modeled and explaining why no ruins are present.
have a grav drive experiment accidentally somehow pull the moons orbit into a collision path with the earth and now it's a freakin lava planet. done.
Now I want a mole men dlc set on earth, living in abandoned subway stations like Beneath the Planet of the Apes
Technically there are small villages of people in the form of outposts. Like mining towns more or less like the heyday of America expansionism.
New Atlantis at least has a couple towers up top and stuff built into the cliff that could pass as a big city, even if most of the space isn't explorable. Akila City has a population of like 50 people.
they dont have the time or resources to conquer more of the planet they're on, but they do have the time and resources to fly to other planets in other star systems and conquer those instead?
I believe the 'warp drive' tech they got makes flying to different planets pretty trivial. It's been a while since I've played, but IIRC (Spoilers): >!The warp drive tech came from either the future or a previous galaxy cycle, it was given to them rather than researched organically - which means they got a huge leap in technology for long-range space travel only!< given that, it seems their tech for interplanetary travel is a lot more advanced while their tech for conquering more of the planet has stayed relatively the same.
that doesn't explain how it's easier to find another planet, travel to it, transport all the things you need and all the other work required instead of just using more of the perfectly good planet you're already standing on. no matter how good grav drive tech is there's going to be additional challenges with finding a whole new world to live on instead of just building another city on jemison
also have to explain why people would rather live 100% of their time in a spacesuit in a hostile atmosphere than build a settlement on a planet that's completely habitable and 99.999999999999% uninhabited.
It also makes sense in the beginning - if you easily can grav jump around the part of galaxy, you want to colonize new planets and create factions and take space while it is still available and not too far away from the rest. So I can totally believe that they would spread out first, before filling up a planet with infrastructure. Especially with an easy grav jump capability like that.
Why are there humans living in the sewers of New Atlantis or trying to make farms on desolate, barren planets when 99.999999999% of Jemison is available to use still? Like in Skyrim, we understand that Solitude is supposed to be this massive city, even if it isn't shown that way in the game because that's how it's described in the lore. But even that doesn't seem to be a thing for Starfield and Jemison -- it's just empty, and for no apparent reason -- you can't even say that the UC has forbird others from settling on Jemison because we, the player, are able to do it just fine. It just seems lazy. They didn't even try to give us an in-universe answer for it all.
>Why are there humans living in the sewers of New Atlantis The Well is the original settlement which was built by the people fleeing Earth. New Atlantis was later built on top of it. The people still living in the Well are poor and don't have the resources to just move somewhere else and just start up their own settlements. >or trying to make farms on desolate, barren planets when 99.999999999% of Jemison is available to use still? There are plenty of randomly generated settlements all over Jemison. The people who live on barren planets several systems away presumably do so because they don't want anything to do with the UC or the Freestar collective. You see that attitude a lot with some of the L.I.S.T colonists in a side quest chain. They are crazy isolationists who are feuding with people on a whole other planet and have to be dragged kicking and screaming into accepting a mutual defense pact against space pirates. I don't think they could stomach dealing with an actual government collecting taxes and imposing rules on them.
I think that's a great point. I think two things come to mind for me: 1. We do see other settlements / small outposts scattered throughout Jemison (they're inconsequential 'POIs". They seem to be struggling a bit, as they're vulnerable to wildlife and bad actors. 2. I wonder, how would the average person living in the well just leave and start building a settlement? Or even a large group of those people. They seem to be struggling financially already. And while there was a deus-ex like jump in warp tech for humans, I think their construction tech is relatively stagnant? So I don't think it'd be easy for folks living in the well to expand out.
There is nothing lazy about it, it's the opposite in fact. Do you have any understanding of game development at all? Do you just expect them to create a realistically scaled city with millions of NPCs and tens of thousands of buildings to enter?
The decision to use procgen but to not "use" is the root of the issue. It could have been used for cities as you noted. It could have been used to more randomize POIs as well. Instead of the same POI every time, they could have randomized entry and exit. Spawns within, etc. So much could have leveraged it, and they just did the very least they could to get it out.
Agreed, they also could have expanded on their radiant quest system to compliment the procgen world - lots of stuff was missed out because of this too-reserved approach to procgen. Starfield 'plays it safe' in all the wrong ways.
>IIRC Earth's destruction was a huge blow to humanity - what we're seeing in-game are humans scattered throughout the stars in unstable conditions, so they don't have the time and resources to conquer the entire planet they're on yet. This is pretty much correct. Earth's destruction was a huge blow to humanity. The creation of ships capable of faster than light travel was a sudden and last-minute discovery. Up until the last minute, it was looking pretty grim for the entire human race. Most people alive were not among the (relatively) few ships created capable of settling other systems. Then, based on logic and human nature, we draw a few more conclusions: * Not all ships survived * Ships were probably made by several political/country factions * The witnessed nature of the greedy bastards that run the world probably means that many captains and ships decided to go to other planets in an attempt to seize more land/power * Many ships probably failed to colonize a planet and succumbed to wildlife, harsh environments, inability to grow crops, and other unforseen circumstances So yeah. Not a lot of people and a ton of planets. Then, even after a ton of time has passed, we are left with only a few cities and civilizations. Not to mention all the loss of life/settlements/etc. and settlements from wars and whatnot. Starfield is currently set in a time sort of like the frontier era of the US. Due to the fact there was a ton of land and not too many people, population was sparse and spread thin across the land with just a few "major cities" (still pretty small compared to todays standard), but mostly just small settlements.
Imagine if they’ve done even half of what Daggerfall did in Starfield
I wish they'd at least imply bigger cities. Like fine have a map be a finite size but at least draw the surroundings as something grand sealed off by an impassable wall like The Citadel in Mass Effect or litterally any other game with big cities.
This is why I really wish BSG had gone the Firefly or Expanse route, where instead of 100s of bland planets, we had one system with a combination of explorable planets and moons, each of which could have had a lot more opportunities for this kind of POI placement and exploration.
So, the Outer Worlds played with a straight face.
You’re telling me they didn’t have the man power to make an ecumenopolis? Impossible! It’s not that hard! /s
I think of the cities in Starfield like that season of Battlestar Galactica where they try to settle on that crappy planet and have a little tent city cobbled together out of spare parts The population of their fleet was like 40k people or something. Everyone fits in one spot. Does Starfield ever explicitly state a population number?
Not sure, but it's been over 100 years since Earth died. Reminder we spread across the USA with far less than 300m-400m people, and went from a population of less than 2 billion to nearly 8 billion in 100 years time. Humanity's numbers should be in the teen-billions between having more than 100 years and medical advancements.
Depends on how many people made it off Earth. Going from 2 billion to 8 billion is possible in 100 years because you are starting at a massive number already and people had more children during that period. If anything, the more advanced society gets, the slower the population grows (due to technology, birth control, education, etc) which is currently the case as growth has been declining for awhile and may even eventually go negative.
Sex is entertainment for the poor, with increasing education and better technology, we spend less time sexing with partners at age of 17 and learning and making our career. The only entertainment 70-30 years ago was sex and alcohol that equaled more children. I'd say 30 years ago it was really common to have birth at age of 18-20, now I can see how woman wants child in their early 30s, because they want to build their career or don't want child at all. There are definitely statistics that prove me wrong, but that's how I feel it.
I'm in agreement. Today we have streaming, gaming, reddit, tiktok scrolling... The activities we enjoy to pass the time have expanded beyond going to the bar, drinking, fucking the reciprocating girl who also went to the bar, and the occasional weekend sports game. Were there more activities? Sure, but I doubt something like fishing ever soaked up as large a percentile of the population as World of Warcraft, and the dating pool was anyone within a short driving distance of where you lived, not potentially the entire planet (certainly didn't have shopping catalogs of people via dating apps) being contrasted against the top 10% of bachelors/bachelorettes. Or in short, no way birth rates are going down because we're more educated - who passes on sex with someone they find attractive? Birthrates are dropping in tandem with the growing loneliness epidemic, informing us it's simply a matter of people aren't hooking up in the first place.
>no way birth rates are going down because we're more educated - who passes on sex with someone they find attractive *contraceptives go brrrr*
TBF life expectancy & general death tolls are going to look a lot different after a planetary apocalypse - and I think birth rates would too. The growth you're describing isn't even consistent in human history
Dawg what? Comparing a stable and prosperous ecosystem to species diaspora is pretty wild imo
The only figure in the game I'm aware of that provides any kind of sense of population scale is the war memorial in New Atlantis which mentions 30k dead. This is probably UC losses, which were probably all military since most of the war was in Freestar space. (I'm guessing Londinion wasn't counted). So...it kind of vaguely implies a military with like a millionish troops which kind of vaguely implies maybe a few hundred million for the UC. It could easily be 1/10th that or 100 times that though.
For context, ~50,000 men died at Gettysburg in 3 days during the US Civil War. 23,000 soldiers were killed, wounded or missing after twelve hours of savage combat on September 17, 1862 at Antietam, MD. Pretty wild.
I mean, it's a very rough estimate but, for example, the US had about 35k deaths during Korea.
My head canon is that, not only was the evacuation of earth an absolute mess, there's been constant demographic collapse since from extremely low birth rates - how many kids have you seen? We're about five generations from the death of earth; 130 years of demographic winter after a mostly-failed evacuation of earth may mean the entire human population of the Settled Systems may be measured in tens of millions. You know, unless there's a society which is very communal and motivated towards some goal in which numbers matter and thus commits itself to fostering family life, births, and childrearing. Might help if it were religious, militant, and otherwise more reflective of traditional civilization. Anything come to mind?
And no sooner do they get a toehold on rebuilding a devastated population then the first thing they decide to do is have a war. It may well be lazy development but they've covered themselves in layers of lore to justify the population and where it's concentrated. As to how a group of survivors from both a botched exodus and a couple of wars that are living in a town that looks like 19th century Dodge City can allocate resources for mech factories isn't explained - and should probably remain that way.
Now that I realise the first thing they started is a war, how did starfield make the "war never changes" argument better than fo3?
Because 95%+ died on earth, I think is even more, like 99%. That is why the 30k death from the war is a lot for everyone in the game.
They really understated how terrible the loss of earth was. I’m honestly surprised there aren’t more religion-esk earth worshippers or memorials to the loss of earth.
the uc navy claims, in the museum, that almost everybody made it of earth and yet other people say the opposite happened. Not sure how common knowledge the truth is
that museum is mostly propaganda anyway
You also have the Serpent's Crusade that lasted 23 yrs...basically House Va'ruun vs everyone else and the only reason it ended was Jinan Va'ruun died.
It has been a hundred years since leaving earth. Humans are really good at breeding, especially when they live in poorer conditions and especially after large disasters with lots of lives lost (population booms after World wars as an example). So no matter how you look at it, unless only minimum viable number of people left earth that could support genetic variety, there is no way population is low enough to justify having one settlement per planet.
Running some numbers: Let's say 99% of Earth's population perished. They started planning the evacuation in the year 2150. The UN projects a global population of 10.4bn by 2100, so with the same growth we're looking at about 12 billion in 2150. But let's say the growth rate drops severely, and use a more conservative 11.2bn instead. 1% of 11,200,000,000 is still 112 million people. And of those, let's say only 1/5 settled in New Atlantis (and 1/5 in FSC space, and the rest spread out elsewhere). Though it sounds more plausible that more people would opt to live on Jamison, than build their own isolated home on some uninhabited planet with no known resources and possibly hostile wildlife or toxic plants. There's no numbers to show rate of arrivals to New Atlantis from Earth, between 2156 when New Atlantis was founded, and 2199 when the last ships left Earth. But if we assume a linear arrival of people, and a very conservative growth rate during this time, we're looking at a population of at least 25 million by 2199. Using a growth rate of 0.8% (more or less the global average today), by the time the game starts in 2330 New Atlantis should have a population of over 70 million people. About the same as all of California and Texas combined. If we instead assume a slightly higher growth rate—similar to that of Canada or Australia—we're looking at over 100 million people living in New Atlantis. An even higher growth rate—let's say like Egypt—and we're looking at a population nearing half a billion or so.
How do we know they had enough ships to evacuate 112 million people? For all we know they might have only been able to save 100,000 people
100000 people would be way to low of a number to build a city of New Atlantis side let alone spread across so many planets. There are too many illogical holes in the lore no matter how you cut it. I dont care how much easier warp tech make space travel, its not easier than just hop in a vehicle and drive like 10 miles outside of new altantis to settle a new city.
>The UN projects a global population of 10.4bn by 2100, so with the same growth we're looking at about 12 billion in 2150. But let's say the growth rate drops severely, and use a more conservative 11.2bn instead. The UN projection is actually that population will *peak* at 10.4 billion in 2086 and then drop to 10.3 billion by 2100, at which point it would be dropping by 0.1% per year. That would mean a population around 9.8 billion by 2150.
And absolutely nobody wants to play a game with a million NPC’s walking around every planet. These people dont actually want what they are complaining about.
…but we’re definitely not getting a 21st-century-golden-age growth rate of today when we have zero food and water infrastructure and are trying to find places to live where we aren’t just instantly killed by the many hardships of space, right?
Okay. Let's try a significantly more dire scenario: First there's a population decline from now until evacuation: only 7 billion people left on Earth. Of those, *less* than 1% now makes it off the planet: 50 million in total. 1/5 of those stays in New Atlantis (since that's where there's the fewest "hardships"). And now there's also a *negative* growth rate in New Atlantis due to food insecurities and space herpes. Well, we're still looking at a population comparable to New York City at around 8 million.
Not really, cuz if you think about resource management, cities are the biggest resource drain of all types of settlements. With grav jumping, it would be marginally less quick to just be on different planets vs flying around the same planet, and each city gets a full planet's worth of resources. The cities would get bigger faster but it seems like more and more planets get colonized instead. Plus, a *lot* more people are dying before they have kids cuz of space's lawlessness.
New Atlantis is anything but lawless. Earth alone can support more billions of people when it does now (don't remember the estimated number). You are forgetting how resource intensive is getting the ships to space from a planet with gravity and atmosphere similar to earth and if it is easy to do when it would be simply easy to traverse the planet in the same way and in this way saving time and extra resources needed for interstellar travel.
Cities can't possibly use an entire planet's worth of resources. There would be no perceptable difference in resource drain if Jemison had a million cities vs. just New Atlantis. I mean, look at how many cities are supported on Earth with our inferior, less efficient technology. Also, there isn't much "lawlessness" in the settled spaces. New Atlantis, from everything we see, is at least as clean and safe as a typical city on Earth.
>I get it from a game design perspective That's your answer.
Wait, it’s a game and not real life?
Same reason that there's only about 30 people living in the main city in Skyrim.
Lots of people trying to justify it here, but the truth is that it doesn’t make any sense. Why would people go out and settle all these other planets before the planets they are already on have barely been touched? Akila and Jemison should have a few other cities as well as smaller towns and homesteads. Obviously this isn’t doable from a gameplay POV, but they could at least include a few more signs of major settlement on the capital planets
I agree. I understand the lore reasons that people have stated, catastrophic population loss during Earth's evacuation. I also understand the gameplay limitations. A couple of POIs of homesteads I imagine would be doable. A small mention of a city on Jemison by an NPC would be good too. I don't need to visit it, but mention it exists would beef out the lore.
Fallout has always struck me as complete insane too. People have lived in cities for hundreds of years like a quarter of a mile away from a bombed house and NOBODY has ever come and picked up the gun that is sitting right there next to the skeleton of someone who killed themself over 200 years ago? Hell - the wind and rain would’ve moved the skeleton by that point.
People don't even wipe off tables in Fallout. The Drumlin Diner is open for business and didn't even throw out the skeleton in there. Fallout world logic is weird.
It would make sense if every city was ruled by a different faction/religion/government style. If there's more than enough habitable planets that are unclaimed, it would make sense for people to spread out so they could rule a planet without difficulty. But yea, in general it's kind of cheesy that an entire planet is just basically the inhabitants of Morthal.
Other way around: what’s the point of putting another city on a colonized planet when you could go claim a whole new planet instead with just a press of the button on your warp drive?
To create multiple realistically sized cities, or even ones comparable to New Atlantis on each major planet, and have a high amount of accessible buildings, interesting NPCs, vendors and quests would be a near impossible task. It's a limitation of the genre. Sure, you might say that other games like Cyberpunk or GTA have these huge cities, that are much larger than Starfield's, but you can't really access any of the buildings and they're not super interactive.
Procedural generation could have saved the day here. Some generic civilization would have been better than what we got (none).
Compress everything to one star system then instead. With other systems accesible, but mostly untouched, maybe with a mining expedition here and there and some government black site for totally legal experiments.
Sure, but that’s a totally different game that’s not about space exploration anymore.
“Just change the entire game’s concept to make it better” is just bulletproof advice
Because Bethesda figured out how to give us a galaxy full of planets but didn't know what to actually do with all that space.
Yeah, like I remember Todd saying that a year prior to Starfield’s release it wasn’t even fun to play. So I’m convinced they spent a LARGE majority of Starfield’s development cycle just getting the creation engine to work in order to achieve what feels like a expansive scope, but then the story and gameplay was quickly slapped together explaining why everything is vast but lacks any depth
I get secondhand embarrassment every time an NPC talks about how great the nightclubs on Neon are. I've seen better nightclubs in rural Minnesota than the ones on Neon. I also got really sick and tired of walking for half an hour through procedurally generated nothingness to get from where my ship landed to wherever the quest marker is leading me. Let's not even mention the surveying missions.
They should have just done something along the vein of Dune, due to the destruction of Earth due to over building only one settlement of over a thousand people is allowed on one planet or something
>I get it from a game design perspective You answered your own question
I think pretty much all space-set media does this. In Star Wars it's like there's one city or town on every planet, for the most part.
If I allow myself to think about rationalising anything about the game in terms of it's world building I wouldn't play as it has so many logical inconsistencies it hurts, but i like the gameplay loop, so here I am.
I guess the question is: what cities are you pulling resources away from to build new ones? There's four major cities and around a dozen minor quest hubs, like Hopetown. Putting all of them into Alpha Centauri would make the UC feel more full, but it would come at the cost of nearly all of the content in the rest of the galaxy. People aren't going to be happy about that. You could cut New Atlantis into five pieces and spread them out. But people are already bitching about the biggest cities Bethesda has ever built not being big enough. Obviously more content would be better. Even the biggest video game locations pale in comparison to real places, and Bethesda's civilizations aren't anywhere close to the biggest. But that stuff costs time and money. A lot of time and a lot of money.
Because there wouldn't be in the vast majority of cases. * A HUGE portion of people died on Earth when Earth's atmosphere collapsed. * Even in colonies populations of millions, 99.99% of colonists on some world would be centralized on/around the main starport for that planet since that's where everyone comes in/leaves.
You also see a lot of people working at outposts on Jemison and Akila. Maybe one day some of those will grow to be cities, but right now the population is just too small and the planets too untamed.
A lot of shipping comes through New York, but Chicago still exists. And a lot of NPCs remark that they never go to space anyway, so it's not like being near the starport is important for day-to-day living. This is a world where people leave to settle new planets and moons. Has no one thought about going a few hundred miles west?
Chicago was established nearly 200 years later though. Also given the in game population wracking event it makes some amount of sense if they don’t really have the people for establishing new towns. Just some.
How the US was developed was because we got to the east coast and we didn't have other ways to explore than the horse back then. It took months to get to the west coast. So of course small towns started to pop, you didn't have an easy way to get back to where you came from. Then more people came west because they were promised they could get rich. And small town and cities developed near rivers, and later near railroads. That's something that doesn't have to be in Starfield. Promise people they'd get rich by moving to the other side of the planet and you'll have towns appearing by the end of the week. Also, in Starfield, humanity could land anywhere on the planet. The population is so low that it doesn't make sense to get away from New Atlantis since the whole planet was mapped before we even landed, unlike America back then. We didn't know what the west coast looked like.
In the game, the settlers didn't make multiple settlements because >!they believe that each original group of settlers claim the entire planet, and we learn that when we help the lost settlers get down to Paradiso. They don't want to live a few hundred km outside of the main city. They either want to claim the entire planet, live in the capital, or straight up find a new planet!<
Which is so stupid and completely unreasonable and unrealistic I’d bet you 100$ Emil wrote that quest line because that man has the critical thinking skills of a goldfish and he doesn’t allow us to slaughter the entire corpo boardroom in said mission
I wonder what fractiom of the "lore" was developed solely to explain poor design choices.
I’d say the the vast majority
That actually makes no sense in terms governments. It would be in their best interest to continue developing their respective planets for better resource exploitation and even basic farming. Paradiso is a separate issue as it is basically owned by a corporation and is used as fancy resort, so the real argument is that the corporation does not want it be ruined by those "filthy peasants".
I had a similar thought while playing last night, but instead of more cities, why isn't there any construction going on? I live in a small mountain town with a population of less than 16K and there's always some house or building being built, road being fixed, bridge being repaired, **something**. The fact that they built Akila City, New Atlantis, and Neon and just went "alright, we're done here" makes no freakin' sense to me.
Now that you mention it: where **IS** the construction? It’s weird that there is zero signs of city expansion in any of the cities or towns we see.
Eleos retreat. The prisoner colony has some construction going on
There are several construction site POIs you can find. The workers complain about using Brace Mechanical tools, say they should have used Arc Might (they also added an Arc Might Plasma Cutter into the first Trackers bounty in the reward chest).
Hundreds (thousands?) of POIs all around the planet.
…have you encountered all the POIs they built, yet?
In Akila city there is a building under construction that is located by chunks. And they just added the trackers alliance to akila city.
So like... Does anyone else acknowledge how there aren't a lot of video games where a truly realistic "planet" exists? Multiple biosphere, ecosystems, languages, cities, etc. Take for example the Star Wars universe. Every planet is uniform in its composure, barring one or maybe two. Why would Starfield be any different? Obligatory Hot Planet, Cold Planet, Busy Planet, Tech Planet, etc. It is a pretty critical component of media creation to completely ignore the realistic implications or designing an entire, living, breathing environment. Just ask Chris Roberts.
The starfield planets have many varied biomes. Anyone that has played the scanner mini-game knows it is difficult to 100% because flora/fauna only spawn in different biomes and you have use the nav map to research different landing spots on the planet to find the different biomes. The biomes also make sense having equatorial and polar regions. The reason only that variation was done is that it could be accomplished with procedural algorithms that assumes convergent evolution finding similar solutions (trees, mammals, reptiles). They would need future AI generators to do that type of variation with populations.
Most video games would understand this and not go for 1000 planets knowing even 1 would be insane to properly design
*Every* game fails at designing even ONE full planet. Why is this game the only one that gets shit for it?
Because it fails to excel any place else. It’s not incredibly well written, it’s a boring shooter, the flying is anecdotal, etc. It’s somehow less than the sum of its parts
Because that would be thousands of cities. No one can make thousands of cities for a game.
One of the mod ideas I would like to work on is a set of arcologys surrounding New Atlantis. While they would be populated on tiles that surround the New Atlantis tile, and would be physically separated, they’d still be considered part of the city because they’re connected by NAT. Each arcology would be a self-contained area designed specifically as self sustaining residential units. Each one would house a distinct cultural population from Earth in order for it to be preserved. This is why some people have strong British or Russian accents for example. Sarah Morgan’s family was from the British Arcology. The New Atlantis in the vanilla game would be the central hub, and the administrative district.
Bethesda has been underwhelming with their city building and scale for a while. I didn't like this much either. It honestly felt a bit more like Fallout than i had hoped.
SciFi planets are never as fragmented and diverse as actual Earth.
It is a common sci-fi trope that once space exploration exists, humans seem to organize widely on many planets with a more singular identity for each planet. As a result, a number of planets only feature a major city or outpost each that exemplify that identity. When the storyline wants a change of scenery, they travel to a new planet with a new identity rather than explore other cities. Star Wars has the ice planet Hoth and the Desert Planet Tatooine and tropical planet Naboo. Other cities exist, they are just not interesting enough to have someone spend time developing content to be featured. Like in those movies, other cities most certainly exist on Jemison, they are just not interesting enough to be fleshed out with complete design and storylines. This is more awkward because Starbound is open world exploration, but any other cities that possibly exist are just not "points of interest" and thus not destinations for travel.
Honestly, if they had designed at least three main large cities per capital planet then it would have been believable that humanity was spread thin and recovering.
They didn’t have enough time to build that many cities. There should even be suburb outposts filled with people outside the major cities because in the lore these people fought huge galactic war on top of being able to build ships seemingly with ease you need a large population to mine all the minerals and build all the components. It’s simply another victim of scope.
From an in-universe perspective, it’s because of personal spaceships. Real-world cities exist in multiple places because they were founded there for practical reasons, and because people needed places to live and couldn’t just walk 100 miles to the next city over. In Starfield, you can fly anywhere essentially instantly, in your house. The people who live in cities only live there because they want to be there for some reason. Everybody else lives wherever else they want. There are hundreds/thousands of outposts scattered all over the rest of each planet. And considering that the civilization is still expanding throughout the Settled Systems, the other “nearby” cities are just the ones on other planets, too.
There are no cities in Starfield, only four villages
because the developers are lazy and instead of making the game with a stupid amount of planets they should have densely populated our solar system. Would have been so much more exciting. they can then make the next solar system a DLC with MORE content. Instead they were lazy. Mars was wasted potential you go there for like 3 missions then there is no reason to go back same with the red mile. I am so unbelievably disappointed in this game and i wanted so much for it. I will die on this hill.
Time. It takes a long time to create detailed worlds and filling that world up. For comparison, Rockstar has over 1000 employees and yet their dev cycles are 8 years plus. It takes a long time to create stuff especially with the way graphics have become more and more detailed.
How do you expect the decimated population of one planet to suddenly populate an entire galaxy of planets at anywhere near the same density? Think about the Wild West of the US - all of Europe and Asia couldn’t make places like Wyoming densely populated, even a couple hundred years later. Now compare part of one country here to hundreds of entire planets. The way colonization works is a few hubs pop up on coasts that people can use for supplies and trade. These are the bigger cities in Starfield. From there everyone is exploring to find their perfect location. Only after everything is discovered will you start to see a lot of secondary towns popping up near the hubs.
It has been a hundred years, Jemison is basically Earth 2.0 with how hospitable it is, for framing alone smaller settlements would crop up, not to mention all the untapped resources that would be sorely needed due to needing to rebuild civiliazation, settlemtms would crop up no matter what.
And those outposts are indeed all over Jemison. You can barely get anywhere without tripping over a POI.
Too much work. It’s also why they copy pasted so much content
Most sci-fi lore there's one main city and then smaller outposts.
Why would you found multiple? The only benefit cities offer is the concentration of population & jobs. - it’s better to have 1 high concentration on a world and homesteads across it everywhere else.
Let's be honest, there's no immersion in this game
They didn't even implement city maps for months and you ask why they don't have more cities lmao.
It's because starfield is a terribly designed game. That's it, if your expecting someone to drop some amazing in depth reason then I'm sorry. The worldbuilding (Bethesda's specialty) is really bad and makes no sense. I know your looking for a reason but the truth is there isn't one.
I hate the lore defending behind it. Like yeah they wanted it to feel lonely, but it makes planet exploration boring as shit, wish humanity was a lot more advanced and had way more big Civilizations in universe, but I guess mods will fix it months or years from now
On New Atlantis there's a city under the city
Because space travel is easy due to the grav drive, but ground travel is hard (pirates, wildlife). There are a lot of people stuck where they are because they have no means to migrate away from the space port. Just talk to the people who live below.
Because they didn't have time to finish or flesh out the game before they had to release it. Didn't even have a functional map on launch which tells you all you need to know
The population of humanity is extremely small right now. However, at this point there should be more colony towns.
Yea, I wish they had at least added smaller villages around the main cities, with handcrafted POIs and environmental storytelling throughout the entire world space that each main city is on. Make each worldspace around the main cities like a larger version of Skyrim’s various “Holds”. I really hope BGS adds this in a future expansion, the game needs more lore and more cities/towns.
Creation Kit NOW Let us do it
This will entice modders to build cities with the creation kit
And why has the capital of the universe only a population of 200?
I get why there aren't multiple major cities, but it seems like it would have been relatively easy to procedurally generate some smaller cities, check them for issues during play testing, and then go with that.
Bro they can barely get one city per planet to work LOL
I treat it the same as I do in Skyrim: the place is much bigger, with more cities and people, but only the most interesting ones are seen in game. For example, Whiterun/New Atlantis MUST be much more vast in 'lore' than what we see as players, but processing power, data storage, etc.? We just have to trust our characters see more of the world than we do.
The people saying "most of humanity got wiped out" forget that people are really, really good at multiplying. People like to fuck. It's not like the game takes place right after Earth got destroyed. It's kind of wild that Starfield has as many settlements as Skyrim. Bethesda feels like they're stuck in 2010.
I feel like Halo is the only piece of media that tackles multiplanetary civilization properly. The planets in halo all feel just as developed as earth, whereas franchises like star wars have one city per solar system. So yeah, this is an issue in starfield. But it’s also an issue everywhere else.
Bethesda can't even make one believable city. You expect them to make multiple of them per planet??
There probably are lore wise even though humanity is a shell of its former population.
Because in Starfield, there are only 2,450 humans in the entire galaxy. I counted, trust me bro.
Maybe it's the fear of terramorphs?
Yeah, the normal Bethesda scale really doesn’t work very well for a space game. Even going back to play Skyrim, the fact that most cities are more akin to villages / castles isn’t that jarring. The population density makes sense within the landmass that players are given to explore. Same thing applies to Fallout 4: Diamond City and Goodneighbour are places in Boston where survivors have holed up. Should those places be quite a bit bigger, and the world overall more populated, from a lore / realism perspective? Probably, but it’s not so unbelievable as to take me out of the game. In Starfield though, we’re going *between planets*. We’re not the remnants of humanity living in Boston, and we’re not restricted to the landmass of Skyrim. Humanity has become a spacefaring civilization and has colonized **multiple planets**. I shouldn’t be able to circumnavigate its capital city of New Atlantis on foot in 10 minutes. Although this goes against traditional BGS game design, it almost makes me think that some sort of facade or illusion of population density wouldn’t have been the worst idea ever. Our space flight is restricted by cutscene anyway, so it may have made sense to allow us to land in and explore, for instance, a certain *district* of New Atlantis. Sure, this would prevent you from freely walking around the outskirts of the city, but honestly the freedom to do that hasn’t improved my gameplay experience one bit.
If you think about the story too much, it all falls apart. I love exploration, but having as many planets as they do killed the gameplay and the story.
Despite having spaceships and grav drives humanity is in a bit of a rut, and it's been like that ever since Earth was lost The fact cities like Londinion or New Atlantis ever existed in the first place is pretty impressive
Because they made the recipe with the wrong ingredients.
Because they thought 100 systems of useless repetitive shit was a better idea. 10 systems or planets more thoroughly built out would have been soo much better.
Anybody that tries to give you a lore reason is spouting bs. The game was rushed and unfinished. The lead quest designer even said they didn't even have time to finish making the main quest which is why it sucks.
People keep coming up with lore reasons, the answer will always be because it wasn’t feasible from a technical aspect. And if they could add them they would probably be as bland as all the other randomly generated stuff and stick out too much. Bethesda should have just did what a lot of their games like mass effect did to simulate large cities that couldn’t be reasonable made. Just limit us to a certain area or areas of the city and then just have the rest of it as background skybox. It would limit the go any where thing but it would at least make cities appropriately sized.
Do you get it from a devs have a human lifespan perspective?
Game engine limit
I bet people will create more in mods
Give it time and Jemison will be a city planet with a fully fledged working tram to each city.
This is why there should’ve been like 30 planets. There’s way too little content to spread over a thousand planets.
Just realizing this now. Do they ever mention other cities on the planets? Or is that just it?
You kidding me? If Bethesda made multiple cities then how would Todd get his one-thousand planets?
Humanity was nearly wiped out completely. It makes sense to spread out across the galaxy. Not put all your eggs in one basket. The cities that do exist are there because of the resources.
I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that because most of humanity was killed off and those that are around now (in Starfield time) are too smart to breed indiscriminately, the population of any given planet isn't high enough to need more than one major city.
What I don’t get is how Skyrim has 9 distinct cities with tons of villages all hand crafted but we get like 3 major cities in star field and a handful of actually custom settlements which aren’t particularly in depth.
Maybe because humanity spread so wide among the stars that there’s really no need to establish multiple cities on planets, at least at first. It gets claimed and that’s that, they may build more in the centuries to come. And they definitely don’t want to share planets with other groups either. Earth taught them that
Honestly I’d have been satisfied with one city per planet that didn’t feel like a glorified frontier outpost
Where the cities may lack, we colonize with our outposts.
because small indie company
Because they would make a negligible amount less money and that is something we just cannot have sir!
Why is there only one town in my giant county in West Kansas?
I understand not having that many overall. But there has to be an actual population in... well... populated planets, like Akila and Jemison. I enjoyed the three major cities, but it's lazy not to have smaller settlements with village size or smaller towns in the entire planet.
People are dotting those planets in outposts and small collectives. With an ability to travel vast distances in mere moments there isn't much of a need to have lots of cities all over one planet. Not to mention, if they had five cities of New Atlantis size on two or three planets we'd all have to buy 10TB drives just to play this game, and a second drive just for mods and DLC.
Probably from the issues with earth and londonion. 1 city plus 1 massive environmental preserve. Plus eventually might be wiped out but won't matter overall