I haven’t played Starfield yet. That being said, I think I will enjoy most planets being rather dull (as long as you still occasionally have reason to go there). I very much love the stance of “When everything/everyone is remarkable, nothing/noone is.” One of the bigger reasons (aside the gameplay usually not being quite to my liking) why I don’t play MMOs anymore is, because about every MMO culminates in 80% of the people wearing “the armor of fabled legends” and being “Slayer of Demonlord and Demigod Sckholzhlak”.
there are definitely dull planets, but there are also planets i have explored just for the hell of it and found a lot of cool stuff, like a facility run entirely by robots and the robots tell me not to interfere with their work or i will die
Mhmm, I played a couple dozen hours now and I like the game a lot!
I very much love the stance of “When everything/everyone is remarkable, nothing/noone is.”
Counterpoint: it doesn’t make everything/everyone unremarkable, it just raises the standard and the bar for what remarkable is. Imagine using that argument for modern graphics, game design, etc, and that you want things to be lackluster because it really highlights the occasional times that they aren’t.
Fair point. I would agree to say there should be a healthy middle ground. I think coming across theme park-like spectacle around every corner would remove a lot of immersion and most authenticity (specifically trying not to default to “realism” because then we’d specifically want 99,999% of areas to be lifeless rock) not only from Starfield but many many games. Fallout, Elder Scrolls, Red Dead Redemption and the Metal Gear series would be incredibly different games, if it was just from one action sequence to another and then a beautiful story cutscene immediately and with only loading screens separating them from each other.
I guess I’m trying to say that immersion into and attachment to a game is increased if you give opportunity for (or sometimes force) the player to calm down. Red Dead 2, for example, does this masterfully by its generally slow and deliberate pace for most actions (cooking steak by actually making you hold the meat over fire for a couple seconds, making you walk/ride for long passages to get somewhere even during missions, etc.) and by sprinkling in quite a number of relaxing quests, like watching a movie with your girlfriend, in a game that’s mainly known for shooty tooty cowboy action.
To wrap up that wall of text, I guess I’ll see if the ratio of interesting tidbit for every dull landscape is too low for me in Starfield once I get my hands on it c:
Update: Game’s good, if your expectation was “Space game made by Bethesda”. I like it and am very happy with the amount of barren planets for every lush world. Sure, they lack the “discover flora and fauna” activities but there’s still plenty fun stuff to do.
Absolutely makes sense for most planets to be rather barren. What I found a bit disappointing so far - keeping in mind I started yesterday and I’m only a few hours in - is how mostly when you land on a planet there is a key point of interest (an outpost, a mining facility, a city etc) at a landing site and then immediately a whole lot of randomly generated nothing around it. No roads or paths, NPCs, houses etc. I haven’t really been to a place where I got that Skyrim feeling of going out into the wilderness and finding interesting things. I hope that later on there are at least a few areas with more substantial exploration. Still enjoying the game though.
Absolutely makes sense for most planets to be rather barren.
This idea is something I’ve heard a lot about Starfield and is why I don’t think I’ll pick it up, at least until a big sale. To me, it seems like they made a fair number of design decisions around what “makes sense” rather than what’s fun.
“Dull on Purpose” is a hell of a box quote. Do you think that will be on the Game of the Year edition?
deleted by creator
