Starfield is no Skyrim in Space

this is Starfield the newest Bethesda game that earned itself quite polarizing reviews following the successes of the previous titles you finally awake as well as some disasters Starfield had both high expectations but also quite a bit of doubt that it would live up to them Additionally the expectations were not just for the overall quality of the game but also for the familiar gameplay exploration and more importantly for the ability to get immersed in a well-crafted fictional world for many people some of those expectations were not met and it all comes down to the change in the setting that ended up affecting more about the game than it might seem at first I refuse to be a corporate slave oh it doesn't save in the prologue well this is Starfield Skyrim was and 12 years later still is a massively popular game so much so that Fallout 4 was often described as Skyrim with guns and despite how reductive that sounds I've got to say that it's surprisingly accurate there are obvious differences between these games and yet the core Remains the Same they're both action role-playing games where the player explores a world filled with points of interest in such a way that there's always something new to grab their attention and make the player hop from one place to the next and this seamless flow the points of interest themselves are generally varied though often rely on the same gameplay Loop of kill enemies scavenge the loot go to next point and then repeat and while the loop itself is very simple the numerous systems like NPC simulations random events a cycle with the weight system and so on are all adequate enough to make the process feel more authentic and as a product of that make the player more invested in this world Starfield mostly fits the same description and so following the same logic it was dubbed Skyrim in space but a change to space exploration is a much bigger leap than a transition from fantasy to a post-apocalyptic setting and the reason for it is scale previous Bethesda games all have fairly large maps and while it's a lot of work to fill them with enough varied and interesting content those Maps would only cover but a fraction of respective fictional planets so how would you go about filling hundreds if not thousands of entire planets with content in case a player ever wants to visit them clearly it's not feasible but traditional means and so compromises have to be made either players are to be limited in where exactly they land on planets and can only explore the small pre-built area or alternatively the continent planets is procedurally generated with the downside being a potential drop in the quality of set content prioritizing more realistic simulation Bethesda chose the latter planets themselves the Landscapes you know pretty much all procedural they even seem to acknowledge and embrace that less habitable planets will be mostly Barren and provide a different experience and I do think there's a certain Beauty to landing on a strange Planet being somewhat the only person there and honestly for an immersive experience that sounds great and they deliver it a game with realistic space exploration which embodies the spirit of Bethesda in their iconic that mountain is not just a backdrop who can walk all the way to the top of that mountain though now on a much bigger scale that isn't just a backdrop that moon is actually there orbiting the planet yes you can visit it too except you can't well kind of it takes unreasonably long to cover any meaningful distance and even if you spend hours to manually land on a planet you'll just clip right through it instead you're meant to Traverse Space by selecting your destination on the map and then watching a short cutscene before being teleported this is how space exploration is handled through nothing but menus lifting often landing on planets traveling between them jumping to other star systems all is done through a glorified fast travel system and while previous Bethesda games had fast travel to previously visited locations they also gave you an option to completely ignore the system for those seeking more immersive experience with Starfield however fast travel is the only way in space for both previously visited and new locations alike and while most players would undoubtfully default to fast travel to save time not giving any other options for traversal really damages believability of this world more problems arise once you actually land on a new planet only to have trouble finding a city you'll landed right next to or the border between the two biomes you've selected or the shore ah there it is on the wrong side of the map the reason for these inconsistencies is not bugs but instead the system used for terrain generation basically whenever you choose a custom place to land on a planet all it does is it looks up what kind of biome it is and what resources it should contain and only having this information it generates a new map for the player and fills it with random content around the lending point in other words it doesn't matter if you choose to land on a tiny island or a coast of a continent both cases would generate equally Samy terrains that have nothing to do with the context of your selection on a global map and probably this is also the reason why the ground map was designed to be so terrible to make those inconsistencies more obscure by only showing players location with respect to other points of interest what's even more surprising is that the same map is used in the cities and it just feels bizarre but I digress and coming back to procedural generation the main question is whether the content on the so far questionable planets is comparable to that of bethesda's previous titles the short answer is obviously no procedurally generated content is just not on the same level yet as handcrafted set pieces but is the quality of the final result at least acceptable is it fun to explore those planets this question is harder to answer partially due to its subjective nature and as disappointing as it is but it depends mostly on your playstyle which would affect how much you end up interacting with procedurally generated content but also on your expectations and a bit of luck it's to give you an example a full exploration of this area around the lending site revealed to me four subsurfaces two crystalline matrices and two deserted relay stations among 12 points of interest which means that almost half of these locations were repeat content just on this Landing site your experience may vary but regardless after a couple of Planet Explorations things will start to get samey still Avid fans would defend the game saying that you're not meant to engage with this content as much and it's only there for people that try to 100 Planet surveys for them to have a bit more optional variety but this begs a question of what is the intended main content and oftentimes the answer is quests Bethesda is not exactly known for amazing writing and their previous titles were heavily criticized for it so while nobody had especially high hopes for writing in Starfield it would have been nice to see some improvement on that front because while the content associated with quests is generally a bit more developed and interesting there are numerous moments where writing gets in the way one of such moments for me was the main companion quest for one of the most important characters in this game sir after becoming friends with her she tells the player her story the gist of it is that 20 years ago she took part in a military operation during which her ship broke down and crashed on an inhibited planet she survived and after almost a year was rescued but she also had a crew that uses a different Escape pod before the crash and they were never found truth be told nobody even tried looking for them despite having the coordinates of their landing position and now 20 years later with the player's help Sarah finally decides to start searching the reason for such a delay is never explained and that's not even the worst part because as it turns out not only did some of Sarah's crew members survive but they had a child there living in isolation for years and yet if you walk a hundred meters in any direction from their base you'll see Farms factories and other industrial buildings filled with people just casually working some suspension of this belief is necessary to enjoy pretty much any game but Bethesda really outdid themselves here this example shows an obvious conflict between two different systems a quest that implies that the planet is uninhibited and procedurally generated points of interests that are just trying to give the player more interesting things to do lack of communication or rules set up between these systems is what caused such an awkward result after her parents died poor girls years surviving on that hostile world alone I'm sorry I had no idea how could we have possibly known and while it's one of the worst examples that I can give Starfield has lots of different systems at play and as a result a lot of potential conflicts still it is precisely these systems that make Starfield what it is and despite how flawed they are how limited Base building is how by passable Contraband system is how an intuitive ship building is at first how underdeveloped space combat turns out to be how utterly broken stealth is and persuasion Romancing Inventory management and so on together it makes a massive albeit flawed game that can be played in countless different ways and while there is a lot to criticize trust me there's also a lot to be enjoyed in The Uncanny combination of all these and many other systems and I think that this is the main strength of a Bethesda game they don't have the best combat or writing or graphics probably for any of the mechanics seen in these games there are other games that have done them better but combining them all together in a neat package of an interesting world to explore it has always been in bethesda's DNA still that doesn't mean that the end result should not be criticized as seems to be the sentiment of some devoted fans protesting any non-universely positive feedback Bethesda knows that similarly to Skyrim Starfield will be played for many years and they've communicated their willingness to keep working on making the game better lost launch and constructive criticism is crucial for that yet at the same time blind hatred sometimes seen on the opposite end of discussion is equally disappointing reactionary content especially that involving anger is infectious which is why it's so prevalent on social media but we should always try to take a step back from it and form our own personal opinions instead of jumping on a bandwagon of spreading somebody else's exaggerated emotions yes Starfield is flawed but many of its weaknesses May yet be addressed even not by developers but then at least by modders but right now this is Starfield and you might like it or you might hate it but for better or worse it's more than just simply Skyrim and space thanks for watching foreign [Music]

Channel: Umbriferous

Views: 15,355

Keywords: starfield, skyrim, fallout, bethesda, nms, bugs, analysis, critique, space

Id: lvyWX5zwbHE

Length: 15min 27sec (927 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 19 2023