As a person who knows nothing about this game and only understands kerbal space program:
- Why are you thrusting forward while trying to decrease speed?
- That re-entry angle and velocity are far too steep and fast. 1000% chance of death.
Starfield is more an ‘Open World’ rpg. Exploration on foot with fight and quest is more prominent than exploration in space. The space part is more like a mean to travel between planet where you could find quest. Sometimes, there’s a space fight, or boarding other ship/station. But ship simulation isn’t the purpose of this game. You can still build a ship, but you’re more focused on look than : ‘Will it work ?’.
So basically they could replace space travel with a magic portal and it would be a fantasy game?
Yeah, your ship is basically a somewhat customizable base and the navigation computer is just a fast travel portal that moves your base, at least in the update I played a couple years ago.
A space fantasy game, sure.
well there is a reason why scifi and fantasy books are usually lumped together in book stores.
It looks like this is a baked animation though. There’s no reason it couldn’t be more realistic. The biggest issue though would be time. This is already much longer than the vanilla experience. Doing it “properly” would extend it to probably minutes. Minutes every time watching a baked animation would get old fast.
This is a mod.
In the original game, flight is limited to space and is very arcade-y. Press ‘W’ to activate thrusters and move forward.
KSP, Flight of Nova, Elite: Dangerous - there are plenty sims out there catering to those who want realism.
I think that forcing a completely realistic re-entry would be a bit much for most players, though it would be awesome for the option to be available to those who want a hardcore experience.
At the end of the day, most games are more enjoyable when you suspend disbelief. This is a game where people wear spacesuits in a vacuum, get shot multiple times with blood effects, and carry on fighting without experiencing violent depressurization.
As a Flight of Nova player, I just saw death. Yes, this is extremely unrealistic, approaching a planet at that speed you’d just vaporize as soon as you hit the atmosphere. It looks like a tiny planet, though, which wouldn’t have enough gravity for a thick atmosphere. Probably just scaled down, like Kerbin, which is smaller than Charon.
I’ll have to give flight of nova a try. Looks like a fun game!
Oh, it’s great, highly recommended. Scratches an itch that Elite Dangerous couldn’t. I’ll warn you that at the moment, there’s only fast forward when docked, so you’ll need some patience for longer trips, plan accordingly. The main planet is actually the size of Earth, and a full orbit takes about 90 minutes. Always plenty of short to medium range missions to warm up, though. The two moons they just added are much closer than Earth’s Moon so at least transfers are less of a wait than they could have been. Eventually we’re going to get interplanetary (there are other planets but they’re unfinished and not intended to be visited yet) and probably in-flight fast forward, looking forward to those.
It’s a shitty game that makes no sense.
TL;DR: This is impressive, however for me personally seeing cool Bethesda mods is so bittersweet at this point. Like imagine the kinds of things you could do if you put that effort into somewhere more appreciated. Idk.
I certainly don’t mean to insult anyone’s efforts, I imagine Bethesda games do offer some real value for budding game developers in the form of a very accessible entrypoint into modding and I think that’s great.
But what would be even better is if this company weren’t basically entirely surviving off the coat tails of their community of unpaid laborers. The only reason why these games are so moddable is because Bethesda as a company wouldn’t survive if they weren’t. The product being given by itself is so bad and Bethesda so inept that it compelled people to learn how to fix it themselves just to deliver on what could’ve been.
Bethesda basically sells you the idea of a game, delivers about 60% of it and then asks you to make up the difference. Anyone playing Skyrim or Fallout 4 could see how good those games could’ve been even with no prior game design knowledge, it’s just an innate feeling.
this “bethesda depends on mods” thing completely falls flat when you point out how popular the games were on console long before mods were able to work on console
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Not really, Bethesda games are mainly PC games so the market for console is always gonna be smaller. Their console versions are always inferior, lacking updates or even just the amount of polish compared to their PC counterparts. I played some of my favourite Bethesda games on console first and I can attest that console players have always been sort of second-class citizens in terms of priority.
I think Bethesda hands console players a shittier deal and most people just have to put up with that because even in the times we live in now a console is still cheaper in up-front costs than a PC capable of performing the same games at the same level.
no i dont think so, i prefer a vanilla experience and i know most console players agree. betheda game are definitely cream of the crop of modded experiences but thats not all that they are. vanilla experience is still top tier
Still haven’t bought it…I tried at launch. Laughed and cried, then refunded. How is it now? Except the unchangeable fundamental flaw (to me!) of procedural generation.
It depends on where you go and how you interact with the game content, main story is the weakest part of Starfield you want to do it up to a point if you care about unlocking some extra gameplay features. Other than that, the factions storylines are much better and really fun. Also the game has few very good side quests you can google to find where they are and just go do them.
The procedural generation only control where and what POI spawn at the zone you land inside. The POIs themselves are handcrafted and they are actually well made. They are some of the best bethesda ever created in terms of dungeons and locations to explore, many of them are massive, detailed, full of stuff and pretty unique.
The problem is if you visit a POI once then if it spawn again you don’t want to revisit it, because the PG won’t change anything in the POI and they will feel very repetitive.
The latest update has added a few really good stuff too by introducing a new resource called X-Tech which has big effect on your character weapons, ships and powers. You get it from multiple sources, but most importantly you get it as a reward at the end of a POI. So, now you have this extra incentive and nice reward for exploring these POIs.
It also add way more handcrafted POIs to space through the new Free Lanes feature. Same thing apply from the planets POIs: They are really well made, but if you run into one you did before skip it.
It’s overall a 7 out of 10 game sometimes even less, but there’s some stuff that really fun and well done inside it if you are willing to look for them
being critical id give it as high as an 8 and as low as a 6. you could argue 5 and personally for me its a 9 but anything below 5 is just a broken ratings scale
Thanks for the details. So the POIs are great once and maybe even twice but that’s it about the “endless space” basically.
So mainly story and discovering all POIs plus a metric ton of mods to pimp it up. 7/10 is kinda okay, unless you already use 583820 mods 😁
I only use around 20 mods mostly of QoL features like more inventory size, vendors having more money, better UI, valuable loot glow, etc.
I would consider those qol mods absolutely essential 😁
I also haven’t bought it, but have played it a few times via the high seas (and never finished). Two years post release was better, though mostly due to mods.
There’s a Star Wars conversion underway across many mods. It added some life but didn’t map precisely to the game (especially voice lines differing from the text). It’s still going and may sway me to buy it for $20.
A) That was not seamless. There was an artificial cloud layer as the loading seam.
B) That was the least realistic entry I have ever seen in any media. How are you gonna go from orbit to the ground thrusting toward the ground (at a really steep angle too) the entire way down. You would be either be letting the atmosphere slow you down with friction or thrusting away from the planet the entire time to counter gravity.
C) How was it hovering flat to the ground midair with the only visible thrusters being in thw rear of the ship? Also those thrusters were still firing but the hovering ship wasn’t moving forward.
For a game about space exploration, they give surprisingly few shits about even the semblance of realistic physics.
Keep in mind that, as outlined in the title, this is a work in progress mod.
A) The unmodified game still has to load the game world during the transition. True seamless probably requires an engine overhaul beyond the scope of a mod, cloud cover to mask the loading of assets and make it feel seamless is a fair compromise.
B) I think that forcing a completely realistic re-entry would be a bit much for most players, though it would be awesome for the option to be available to those who want a hardcore experience.
KSP, Flight of Nova, Elite: Dangerous - there are plenty sims out there catering to those who want realism.
No Man’s Sky compromises on this to keep the game casual and fun.
C) In the original game, flight is limited to space and is very arcade-y. Press ‘W’ to activate thrusters and move forward. Vertical thrusters are present in the unmodified game and visible during landing cutscenes, so the modder may be able to tap into those animations as they continue work on the mod. I recall most of those thrusters being attached to the landing gear though.
At the end of the day, this is a game and most games are more enjoyable when you suspend disbelief. This is a game where people wear spacesuits in a vacuum, get shot multiple times with blood effects, and carry on fighting without experiencing violent depressurization.
Yeah, the artificial cloud transition was a bit more obvious when the terrain changed drastically from a yellowish color to a snowy white.
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Are you mixing up Starfield with Star Citizen? Starfield is already out, it was just kinda mediocre.
That’s awesome!
I’m surprised so many people make this a big deal. It’s a complaint I heard since launch of the game. Some people even stopped playing or didn’t even purchased the game because of this!
Yaaaay, now we can do something No Man’s Sky could do 10 years ago, yaaaaaaay!
Yaaaay, now we can do something Frontier could do 33 years ago, yaaaaaay!
Sure, some games have features others don’t. I’m just surprised its a big deal for so many.
Well, for me, it adds a ton of immersion.
Us space flight sim enjoyers like that kind of thing. When Starfield was announced we kinda expected it to be a default feature, so obviously when we saw it wasnt a feature it was disappointing.
I get what you mean, but it makes sense in context.
Immersive “Open World” Sims with ground and space exploration have a hard time tying the two together. Often they feel like two separate games, and one of them often feels like the “second class (star) citizen”. Not that making them seamlessly connected actually makes the two mechanically complimentary, but separating them by a loading screen makes this dichotomy all the more obvious. Starfield was no exception.
To exacerbate this, Bethesda made its brand the “You see that mountain? You can climb it!” game makers (Which, to be honest, I think they started to lose the plot on what made their games good when they started saying this. But that’s a different conversation.). So when they made their foray into space exploration, they really had no one else to blame when folks expected a similar “You see that planet? You can fly to it!” design philosophy.
Though I think it would have been overlooked if the game was… good? At the very least, if it was way less bloated with low effort copy pasted fluff content. Complaints like this only tend to become so focal when people have more disappointment to express than meaningful critique can adequately convey.
Though I think it would have been overlooked if the game was… good? At the very least, if it was way less bloated with low effort copy pasted fluff content. Complaints like this only tend to become so focal when people have more disappointment to express than meaningful critique can adequately convey.
Guess this is a good point here. It’s an easy point to talk about specific failures (from perspective of the player) when they don’t like the game much. To me it sounds like an excuse not to play or not to like, and this is something they can blame. I don’t know for me it wouldn’t be a big deal, at least not to this scale. I get that many and long loading screens are terrible. Maybe I’m not the person looking into a virtual reality like immersion and are not affected by such details, therefore don’t have the empathy for players missing this feature.
That’s fair. And like I said, seamless landings and planetary travel are cool, but they don’t make a game good on their own.
That said, I’d call it less an “excuse not to like the game” and more a tangible thing players can point to when the real problem is harder to put into words. For a lot of longtime Bethesda fans, imho, that problem is that Starfield failed to deliver the Bethesda-style “believable world.”
Bethesda were never just the “see that mountain, climb it” developers. They were the “every object has a 3D model, every building has an interior, every town has a history, and not everything exists for the player” developers. That put them in a unique spot in the industry. That level of simulation let players believe in and explore their worlds in a way most games simply don’t allow. It’s why Bethesda games get such oddly specific critiques: where do the NPCs sleep, what do they eat, where do they go to the bathroom?
This doesn’t matter to everyone, so I imagine a lot of these complaints sound trivial or even insane from the outside. But for the people it does matter to, Bethesda was one of the few developers filling that niche.
So when I see complaints about seamless travel, or shopkeepers not caring that you’re standing behind their counter, or nobody reacting when you fire a gun in a crowd, or so many raider bases on an isolated planet with nobody to raid, I don’t see an excuse to not like the game. I see players struggling to express their disappointment that the game feels artificial and gamified, and that it failed to capture the soul of a Bethesda game.
That makes sense. Most people, especially so gamers, are not good at expression their concerns or even know why it is a problem to them. I actually meant my original comment about “excuse not to like the game”, just expressed it wrongly myself. The irony right now.
I actually meant what you say, by people not knowing how to express some other issues, or not thinking about it (but being affected), the focus goes to more obvious and easy to point issues. And to some extend it is actually an excuse, because not having seemless landing I think wouldn’t be a big deal if everyone had fun.
But maybe I’m wrong about this, because games and gamers evolve too. And for such simulation styled games going in and out of planets its a given to them to have a feature like seemless transitions. So when I say that I struggle how this is a game breaking issue to them to a point the refund or stop playing, or don’t even buy it, it sounds too extreme. Especially players who didn’t experience the game yet and never will just because of it.
I was never too bothered by the landing animation ( or the multitude of loading screens for thag matter ) because I figured it’s a limitation of their engine so they won’t be able to fix it easily or at all - and besides other games have been getting away with it: Mass Effect, SW Outlaws etc.
What irks me about this is that a modder has been able to actually do it, without access to their engine and supposedly doing it in their spare time and for free. It really shows how lazy bethesda have become and frankly don’t hold much hope for their future games.
What irks me about this is that a modder has been able to actually do it, without access to their engine and supposedly doing it in their spare time and for free.
Okay, that’s actually amazing and crazy. Modders never stop amazing me. Bethesda still works on the game, so there must be technical reasons why they don’t do it then. Maybe there are edge cases when this doesn’t work well or has side effects. I can fully see why someone gets disappointed if this is actually possible.
So timely!
