And you thought one of the problems with Starfield was too many stars and planets...

[brown66]

It's like saying that one of Skyrim's problems is having too many cities and too many inhabitants within each city.

 

 

[Just Don't]

No? That's the complete opposite. More cities and inhabitants would make it more interesting if we keep to the handcrafted design of scenarios and get to have a bigger and more populated map as a result of this change. That's why there has always been an active effort to bring more NPCs, towns and locations to populate Skyrim's map, or expand Skyrim's already existing cities, towns or terrain and landscape itself.

Having thousands of empty planets with the same POI distributed at random doesn't make a compelling galaxy to explore. Ditching the handcrafted scenarios is what makes SF so lackluster in comparison to previous Bethesda tittles, even if SF is technically bigger in scope than previous games. It's a scenario and level design problem, not a numbers problem. Having 10x the amount of locations to explore wouldn't solve SF problems.

Edited February 5, 2025 by Just Don't

[Simpossible_xx]

 

It's not about too many planets, its about too many

 

10 minutes ago, Just Don't said:

empty planets

 

[brown66]

18 hours ago, Simpossible_xx said:

 

It's not about too many planets, its about too many

 

 

 

You've never played this game, have you?

 

The thing is, if you had actually played the game you would know that empty planets are something that don't exist in Starfield. And look, I've been trying hard to find them!

 

Since I've done almost every quest in this game at least once, I'm no longer in a "rush to play all the quests", so I have fun, after landing on a planet, turning on the scanner and going to all the points of interest on a map. And what initially appears to be a map with just one or two points of interest at most, sometimes turns into a map with almost a dozen points of interest, some with a small mission. And because of this, lately it takes me two or three days to "sweep" an entire map of a planet, going to all the points of interest, killing all the pirates I find, collecting resources and doing all the possible small missions that exist to do on that map of the surface of an "empty" planet. And a planet can have many "empty" maps!

 

And you will say: Ah, but the outposts repeat themselves after some time, as well as those small missions!

 

And I'll ask you: Do you know any game with random missions that don't repeat themselves after a while? If so, tell me which one. In Skyrim and Fallout 4, random missions always repeat themselves in the same places, with the same bandits, and I don't see many people complaining about that.

 

But this thing about empty planets not being so empty after all will only be discovered by the Y generation that hates this game so much when, in a few years, the cheapest computers are powerful enough to run Starfield without any problems, in addition to this game already being on sale for a pittance, with all its DLCs included, and also being available on PlayStation. At that moment they will say that the game is finally saved!

 

This is why Skyrim and Fallout 4 are so popular with the younger crowd. You can run it on your potato computer or PlayStation and they are cheap games to buy.

Edited February 6, 2025 by brown66

[Just Don't]

If you like exploring the same POI in random planets go for it. Nobody is saying you shouldn't like it. But again the comparison to TES or Fallout games does very little favor to your point. People like those games for different reasons. SF would be more like Daggerfall than any post MW Bethesda tittle. And that's fine if it's what you like. But having more content won't make people disliking SF's design to suddenly like the game.

[brown66]

22 hours ago, Just Don't said:

No? That's the complete opposite. More cities and inhabitants would make it more interesting if we keep to the handcrafted design of scenarios and get to have a bigger and more populated map as a result of this change. That's why there has always been an active effort to bring more NPCs, towns and locations to populate Skyrim's map, or expand Skyrim's already existing cities, towns or terrain and landscape itself.

Having thousands of empty planets with the same POI distributed at random doesn't make a compelling galaxy to explore. Ditching the handcrafted scenarios is what makes SF so lackluster in comparison to previous Bethesda tittles, even if SF is technically bigger in scope than previous games. It's a scenario and level design problem, not a numbers problem. Having 10x the amount of locations to explore wouldn't solve SF problems.

 

It seems you didn't realize the irony of the few words I wrote in my initial post. This irony was referring precisely to the people who criticize this game for having overcrowded planetary systems, with empty planets and few cities. I don't know if you know, but if humanity survives the next few years and one day manages to colonize other planets, things will be very similar to what is shown in Starfield - few colonies of people and these spread across planets isolated from each other, since habitable planets are the exception and not the rule. And on habitable planets, resources will not be as abundant as they are on Earth, so their population will also be small, that is, the colonies will be small.

 

Yes, I would also like Starfield to have more cities and even cities on planets that already have cities, like the planets Jameson and Akyla. However, I know the technical limitations that this imposes on a space game that doesn't want to be reduced to half a dozen planets (in that case it wouldn't be a game in space, right?) and if you know Skyrim seriously you also know these technical limitations and its weaknesses in having practically only unique NPCs (except for the bandits, the guards and most of the critters that are generated by the computer).

 

Unique NPCs are too heavy for any PC and or console. Especially when those NPCs have a lot of scripts associated with them, as is the case with Bethesda's RPGs. This is why in Skyrim and Fallout 4 you usually have no more than 20-30 unique NPCs per town, if you can even call them towns.

 

This is also why CD Projekt Red, in addition to unique NPCs, also uses automatically generated PC NPCs in their RPGs. The consequence of this is that cities in CD Projekt Red's RPGs are large and full of people. 

 

This is also why Bethesda, which was accused of having cities in Skyrim and Fallout 4 that looked more like small villages, went down this path of auto-generated NPCs in Starfield. There was no other way, because although computers and consoles today are more powerful than they were in 2011 or 2015, the years these games were released, the jump in power, especially in processors, was not as great as many hardware YouTubers like to make people believe it was.

 

Furthermore, in 2011, Skyrim was already very heavy on PCs, at the expense of having almost only unique NPCs and lots of draw calls, in addition to a graphical environment that made little use of culling and clipping, techniques to save PC resources that many modern games use and abuse. At that time, Skyrim was one of the first games to scream “put me on a 64-bit operating system.”

 

Besides being a game with a lot of draw calls (how do you think it's possible to change almost everything in the scenario of a Bethesda RPG?) and scripts, which makes these games very heavy on the CPU, Skyrim, Fallout 4 and especially Starfield use very open environments, making the viewing distance in a scenario very large. This prevents the use and abuse of culling and clipping techniques, which are a way of preventing very heavy parts of a game's scenario from being drawn, reserving these PC resources to graphically enrich the limited area of the game that the player sees. It is with the use and abuse of this technique that Cyberpunk 2077 and other modern eye candy games, such as Black Myth: Wukong, show scenarios that appear graphically much more detailed than Starfield, but on the other hand are very restricted in the visible distance in this scenario. Unfortunately, few players talk about this, because few players realize how games are "optimized".

 

In Starfield, this game uses and abuses the number of ultra-realistic individual objects, each of them being a draw call and each of them with its own physics, making the game very heavy on the CPU (and also on the GPU), even in scenes indoors. It is no coincidence that there are interior scenarios in Starfield that in terms of FPS do not manage to surpass the already low numbers (generally they never exceed 100 FPS, even if you use an i914900K or a Ryzen 9800X3D) that you see in Akyla City.

 

That and considering that Starfield also had to run on the Xbox (and was even supposed to run on the PlayStation, before Microsoft bought Bethesda), explains why Bethesda, in wanting to keep in Starfield the features that make its RPGs so realistic, had to cut the number of cities and unique NPCs per city, resorting to the heresy that is the use of NPCs automatically generated by the PC, so that the cities in Starfield would not look like the villages in Skyrim and Fallout 4 again.

 

There is much, much more to say about this, but the text is already too long. Let me just talk about maps that are automagically generated by the PC, rather than being hand-drawn.

 

If you haven't actually played Starfield, as I think you haven't, you probably don't know that the auto-generated maps on the planet surfaces are pretty good! You may rarely see defects in the joining of textures on the ground or even in meshes, but, as you may already know, we also have defects like this in Skyrim and Fallout 4 that were made by hand. But the most important thing about these automatically generated maps of the planets' surfaces is that they seem very natural to me and I generally feel like they were copied from some existing place in the real world. They don't give me the feeling of exaggeration and grotesque details that I sometimes feel in Akyla City or the artificiality that I sometimes feel in New Atlantis, places that were made by hand! Curious, isn't it?

 

As I said before, I also wish Starfield had many more cities and especially more cities on the same planet, but I also know that if it were to be like that, the game would still be being made to this day, instead of being available to play right now. And my Ryzen 9800X3D, with a now old RTX 4090, would possibly become a potato computer and would not be able to play this game in 4K, with FPS between around 75 and 120.

 

Play the game for real, put several hundred hours into it (I'm close to 1500 hours into the game) and then we'll talk more about what can actually be improved in this game. Repeating here the supposed flaws that you see others say, who also repeat what others before them have also said, without even having actually played the game, is a waste of time in life. Better to spend that time playing Skyrim, if you don't have a gaming machine that can still play Starfield.

 

Have fun!

[Allnarta]

4 hours ago, brown66 said:

You've never played this game, have you?

 

Only person that would deny too many empty planets issue is actually the one that never played a game or played very few hours.

You begin to notice this issue after some time of playing, not the opposite.

[Just Don't]

14 minutes ago, brown66 said:

It seems you didn't realize the irony of the few words I wrote in my initial post. This irony was referring precisely to the people who criticize this game for having overcrowded planetary systems, with empty planets and few cities. I don't know if you know, but if humanity survives the next few years and one day manages to colonize other planets, things will be very similar to what is shown in Starfield - few colonies of people and these spread across planets isolated from each other, since habitable planets are the exception and not the rule. And on habitable planets, resources will not be as abundant as they are on Earth, so their population will also be small, that is, the colonies will be small.

That's cool. That doesn't make for a compelling game if all you do is get loading screens between randomly generated and distributed locations. If you like that fine, more fun for you. But it clearly didn't do the trick for most people, even those who were a bit excited for SF before launch.

 

[Simpossible_xx]

5 hours ago, brown66 said:

 

You've never played this game, have you?

 

The thing is, if you had actually played the game you would know that empty planets are something that don't exist in Starfield. And look, I've been trying hard to find them!

 

Since I've done almost every quest in this game at least once, I'm no longer in a "rush to play all the quests", so I have fun, after landing on a planet, turning on the scanner and going to all the points of interest on a map. And what initially appears to be a map with just one or two points of interest at most, sometimes turns into a map with almost a dozen points of interest, some with a small mission. And because of this, lately it takes me two or three days to "sweep" an entire map of a planet, going to all the points of interest, killing all the pirates I find, collecting resources and doing all the possible small missions that exist to do on that map of the surface of an "empty" planet. And a planet can have many "empty" maps!

 

And you will say: Ah, but the outposts repeat themselves after some time, as well as those small missions!

 

And I'll ask you: Do you know any game with random missions that don't repeat themselves after a while? If so, tell me which one. In Skyrim and Fallout 4, random missions always repeat themselves in the same places, with the same bandits, and I don't see many people complaining about that.

 

But this thing about empty planets not being so empty after all will only be discovered by the Y generation that hates this game so much when, in a few years, the cheapest computers are powerful enough to run Starfield without any problems, in addition to this game already being on sale for a pittance, with all its DLCs included, and also being available on PlayStation. At that moment they will say that the game is finally saved!

 

This is why Skyrim and Fallout 4 are so popular with the younger crowd. You can run it on your potato computer or PlayStation and they are cheap games to buy.

I've never played this game, nor do I want to. Honestly, it’s just not my cup of tea, and I’m not a fan of sci-fi as a genre. But besides my personal preferences, I don’t see anything catchy in reviews about Starfield that would make me want to play it. I don't see anything impressive or new about this game that make it worth $70, or $42 on sales, since you've mentioned them.

 

Blaming people for hating the game because they have potato computers is just wild. And you’re right, Skyrim and Fallout 4 are cheaper and popular among younger, but not only them, audience. Despite the fact, that their worlds are much smaller than Starfield's, they are much more live and immersive with compelling storytelling. Now, what can Starfield offer to that audience? Hundreds of not-so-empty planets filled with repetitive quests and lifeless open worlds? Good luck trying to sell that!

[Simpossible_xx]

I'll give Starfield credit tho, it has good graphics, some good game mechanics, and probably an interesting plot. However, in my opinion, I'd rather prefer to explore half a dozen unique and fully developed planets, with more added in DLCs, rather than playing on hundreds of generated planets with same patterns. Just because it's like the real world doesn't mean it is fun or interesting to play.

[brown66]

believe it or not, you find this with Lin

21 minutes ago, Just Don't said:

If you like exploring the same POI in random planets go for it. Nobody is saying you shouldn't like it. But again the comparison to TES or Fallout games does very little favor to your point. People like those games for different reasons. SF would be more like Daggerfall than any post MW Bethesda tittle. And that's fine if it's what you like. But having more content won't make people disliking SF's design to suddenly like the game.

 

For over a year I've been talking, mostly on YouTube, to players who say they love Skyrim and Fallout 4 and hate Starfield. Interestingly, when I ask them specific questions about missions in these games, especially Starfield, such as why Earth became uninhabitable, practically none of them answer. You can find examples of this in this forum!

 

That's why, as I've said before and I stand by what I say, the vast majority of people who don't like Starfield and who say they love Skyrim and Fallout 4, are people who have never played Starfield, apart from the possible two hours before asking for a refund, after discovering that they couldn't play this game because it was too heavy on their PC. Not to mention the PlayStation fans! And there are even supposed players who haven't even played Skyrim or Fallout 4! Because if they had played it, they would know that, prefacing some critics of Bethesda RPGs, it is always the same type of game, just in different scenarios and with different NPCs and stories.

 

However, one thing is certain. The stories in Starfield are more mature, have a bit more philosophy and moral issues and address some themes that are not very pleasant for new players, such as:

 

- poverty;

- lack of jobs;

- fear of losing one's job;

- exploitation in jobs;

- resorting to crime as a means of avoiding eternal poverty, even if one works hard and honestly;

- the obsession with a professional career to the detriment of a family life;

- single parenthood;

- loneliness (including that of children with hard-working parents);

- the traumas and injustices of war;

- segregation and social prejudice;

- defamation;

- religious beliefs and religious fanaticism, a very difficult topic to include in a game without triggering a chorus of criticism;

- the scapegoats that societies find to purge their heavy social consciences (this is the case of Hadrian Sanon, one of my favorite followers);

- professional companionship (believe it or not, you find this with Lin);

- fights and hatred between people in the same family;

- and, a subject where I think Bethesda exaggerated a bit in its importance and frequency, the issues of homosexuality.

 

And that's not to mention the moral judgment that is made on your actions, throughout the game, by your followers, be it Sarah, who younger players hate, or even Andreja, who curiously the same younger players already tolerate and even love (could it be because she has the tearful eyes of a troubled teenager?). 

 

But the worst thing, for many younger players, is seeing the consequences of your actions, when you do NG+, which in reality is nothing more than a Bethesda copy of what happens, for example, in Witcher 3. Not to mention that many players get furious when they discover that choosing to stay with the Crimson Fleet is not all roses, it also has its thorns! Or or that they are persecuted if they attack an innocent citizen, something that, mind you, also happened in Skyrim!

 

Don't worry. These players who now hate Starfield and say they love Skyrim and Fallout 4, in a few years, when they are more mature and cheap PCs are more powerful, will play and love Starfield.

 

😈

[brown66]

1 hour ago, Allnarta said:

 

Only person that would deny too many empty planets issue is actually the one that never played a game or played very few hours.

You begin to notice this issue after some time of playing, not the opposite.

 

Weren't you the one who said you wouldn't waste any more time talking about this game here? Are your problems with Starfield the empty planets or are they of some other nature?

[Just Don't]

You clearly care more about this game than me. It's not for me and I don't need to invest dozens of hours to find out this. Have fun.

[Gray User]

Most of complaints I see about SF seem like

 

'my computer is a potato and the game will not run well and takes long to load' Yes, game has high spec, maybe there is a potato graphic mod to make run better on old computers? with high end machine, there are no load times. GPUs would be less expensive if less people bought them for garbage AI and sh*tcoin farming, but cannot fix people. 

 

'I do not like games with spread out content that I have to find and wanted a smaller game where every person had name and custom dialogue and no npc or location that are not part of main plot' which is like going to Indian buffet and complaining that there is too many foods and not enough of them are burgers.  

[hhh7775]

Honestly, as a relative fan of Starfield, the problem isn't that planets are specifically empty, its that there isn't really much reason to explore the overwhelming majority of them. 

To compare it to another game that I think shares some similar issues, and is honestly one of the most similar in design ethos to this game, lets compare its POI's to Oblivion. 

Both games feature a fair amount of procedural generation as to how they handle their "dungeons" so to speak. The problem is that Starfield, even with its procedural generation, has FAR too many POI's that are nearly, and at times entirely the same as other POI's both on the very same map at times, and naturally from planet to planet. Compared to Oblivion where, yes, the dungeons I think aren't amazing and have aged poorly in some cases, even look downright the same in many instances visually, but they do have a degree of handcrafted elements to them which offers enough variety that none really end up being the same in design, even if they give similar experiences. If Starfield had this, or it was at least less obvious given how frequently you'll run into duplicate POI's, it would honestly be far less of an issue, not to mention some of the other elements that make exploration a lot more lackluster, and at times meaningless compared to other titles by the same company.

Personally, I do see what they were trying to go for with Starfield, and I even like the attempt that was made, but I think it ended up being a misstep overall, and sadly has even damaged the identity of procedural generation in the public more than some other games ever could. I'm probably somewhat on the extreme end when it comes to this opinion, but I wish they had leaned even MORE into procedural generation and just kind of went wacky with it if this was there idea from the start, take more inspiration from Daggerfall as I had hoped they would, and kind of leave their POI's a bit less restrained and downright carbon copy feeling, even if I do think if they followed Daggerfall TOO closely it wouldn't exactly be a public success still, but it was what I was hoping for personally on some level. A sci-fi life sim RPG that could just be played downright near endlessly in terms of personal roleplay potential, just like I view Daggerfall, but with some more handcrafted touches and perhaps less archaic/convoluted design when it comes to its more unique content, like the main story line and faction questlines and such. Unfortunately, by and large it just kind of winds up feeling like a watered down version of both ideas, the more hand crafted content of usual modern Bethesda titles, and a far more watered down version of the procedural generation we saw in a game like Daggerfall.

All in all, I still got a good 80 hours out of Starfield on launch, and I'm still super psyched for the day I feel like coming back to it when mods reach a point that I'd really enjoy doing so (NSFW in nature in particular), but as it stands the vanilla game just lacks a bit of oomph for me, and probably even more so for many others given the hype that was built up around the game. Beyond that, and I know some do exist already, having mods that add a bit more life to the NPC's and the actual unique locations in the game themselves is another step in the right direction I'm looking forward to, beyond just the wild dream of getting to have a suped up open world Star Wars modfest with plenty of NSFW bits slapped together here and there. 

Game has potential, just need more time to get there really with mods particularly. Though, even liking the game, I do think Bethesda ended up squandering the premise and potential of the base/vanilla game in the end, even if it could make for a fun base to build off of for a potential, more lively, better handled sequel if they feel the desire to do so in half a decade to a decade from now.

[sen4mi]

Hmm....

 

I tend to agree with the topic author here.

 

That said, I think starfield could benefit from a much larger variety of "mini-pois" and/or some way of autobuilding layouts of micropois? (And maybe that's something some modders could get into?)

Edited February 12, 2025 by sen4mi

[snoopy102]

The problem isn't too many stars and planets, it's that the locations are generic, boring and repetetive. Add to this that Bethesda made some very bad design decisions, like "Earth is a barren rock" in order to avoid having to create a future explorable Earth, which has lead to the situation of a great galactic war ... between only a couple of hundred people, apparently, since even the cities in SF feel so empty. So billions just withered and diesd ? Never made an attempt at escaping during the decades before the apocalypse ? Leaving a human "empire" spreading over dozends of star systems but with only a handful of people in each location ?

I mean "the second largest colony in the UEE" is a hole on Mars ? 

I think what we see are the limitations of the game engine, but if it is so limited then why nnot reduce the scope to something the game engine can handle ?

It feels to me like they plotted out this great galactic adventure, ran into limitations with the engine and had to cut back more and more. Until the game was only a shell of it's former ambition. It certainly feels that way.