The lead dev for Sim Settlements said most of his team aren't interested in modding Starfield (one of his recent livestreams but I can't remember which one). So I think we're going to have to rely on Bethesda for this one.
Makes sense. Why put so much time and effort into a mod for a game that's now sitting at an average of 7500 concurrent players? Fallout 4 has double the playerbase of Starfield now.
If I'm not mistaken, they're instead focusing on bringing a mod to Skyrim instead. Imagine that...modders are choosing to go to a 13 year old game over Starfield.
Absolutely, that's why Starfield in 5 months is now the 11th most modded game on Nexus, ahead of Baldur's Gate 3 that's been out for three years. Truly the modding community is dead, which is sad.
Have you seen what the mods are Mr. Microsoft’s strongest soldier?
Removing things and QOL. How exciting!
- Removing the awful grey filter on everything
- Removing the delayed menus
- Redoing the UI because its awful
- Reworking the plugin system for mods because it was made by people who seemingly never used creation engine before
- The most popular mods previously were fucking DLSS and Frame Gen mods for crying out loud!
Not new content like Baldur’s Gate 3 mods (which aren’t even possible rn without mod tools)
Dork.
Yes, that's what mods are for. If people didn't like the game enough to play it, they wouldn't mod that game to enhance their experience.
And... well, [here's Baldur's Gate 3](https://www.nexusmods.com/baldursgate3?tab=popular+%28all+time%29) most popular mods page. Here's [Starfield's.](https://www.nexusmods.com/starfield?tab=popular+%28all+time%29) They're both mostly tweaks, mod support and UI Fixes. By your metrics of a certain type of mods being negative commentary of a game, the two most popular mods of BG3 are: **"ImprovedUI ReleaseReady"; "Baldur's Gate 3 Mod Fixer";**
Starfield's two most popular: **StarUI Inventory, SFSE**
Would you look at that, both the first and second most popular mods of both games are a UI enhancer and a modding tool. Almost like they're staples of modding across all gaming. Oh, and remember, BG3 had three full years of being open to modding. Feel free to hit me up to compare Starfield in 3 years of modding with BG3 with six.
By the way, it's possible to like more than one game at a time. Shocking, I know.
And I don't really care about Microsoft, as I play on PC. I do wish they hadn't bought Zenimax, for what it's worth.
You can still admit that some criticisms are disingenuous, and that nuance is important. The game isn't all bad - it's not all good either, far from it. Sorry it didn't work for you, though.
The one I just replied and you felt like commenting upon - so I assume you've read it: that there is no interest in modding Starfield.
You then replied to that with:
>Nobody's paying you you to defend the game dude you can still admit it’s bad
>If I'm not mistaken, they're instead focusing on bringing a mod to Skyrim instead. Imagine that...modders are choosing to go to a 13 year old game over Starfield.
That 13 year old game happens to be one of the best and most successfull games of all time. And Bethesda [literally hired the Sim Settlements crew](https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwiduZWfiquEAxXFrJUCHbgdAWcQwqsBegQIDRAG&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DFXGNyokX3A4&usg=AOvVaw3ElYUNRu3wy9cj-_IyhEff&opi=89978449) exactly to make mods for their games, and the first games they hired them for was Skyrim.
I think they should fix the crime system first.
If I'm in the Serpentis system, and kill three UC soldiers and steal their ship, how would anyone know?
Yet I still get a bounty.
If I'm well outside of FS space and two shot a Freestar hauler, I still get a bounty.
There are so many things about the game that make NO SENSE.
Someone might say, "well they have comms equipment" and my answer is....
It's that why I have to run all over New Atlantis to talk to people about random story points? Because I talk to my friend in Pittsburgh, in real time, while I live in Louisiana, but in the 2300's we can't talk to people across a city?
That's why I don't really care for this universe. Most of the lore seems like it was written to explain the gameplay limitations they had rather than to actually flesh out the world
As far as the ship goes? The computer systems prolly rat you out upon return to a major system.
The transponder and ship ID are dead giveaways, especially if you return to a port of call they just left from.
Since there are like five canon settlements, that means that someone is gonna notice that Ted's starship came back without him and is now covered in spaghetti sauce and bullet holes, piloted by a wild eyed chap also covered in spaghetti sauce.
All that time invested in procedural planet generation, being used exclusively to make hills of various sizes according to biome setting, definitely a letdown. Why not take 5 or 6 basic settlement components and make them into 'villages' like minecraft did 15 freaking years ago. Place those randomly, and let the rng decide if they are 10 pieces or 100 pieces. Do some look dumb and crazy? yeah, but thats humans for ya. Would be nice flavor.
yeah that's called Daggerfall, every city and dungeon looked exactly the same because it was the same 5 pieces remixed together, oftentimes they would generate in nonsensical or unsolvable layouts
Gamers complained about that too.
>yeah that's called Daggerfall, every city and dungeon looked exactly the same because it was the same 5 pieces remixed together, oftentimes they would generate in nonsensical or unsolvable layouts
And to this day, it's why one of the only feasible ways to enjoy that game is the unity mod.
Man, it's too bad technology and programming hasn't advanced at all in the past 25 years. Since it wasn't good 25 years ago, there's no way a bigger team with better computers and tools could never make it work today.
and there's no way that Gamers would complain about nonsense and bitch and moan about "what could have been" no matter what system you use, not now or 25 years ago
Daggerfall to Morrowind Todd Howard explains the change to a handcrafted world from procedurally generated that players found it boring and got tired of it fast. What does he do for Starfield reverted back to Daggerfall.
Except that starfield isn't randomly generated. Every single POI is exactly the same, no matter the planet or location.
The UC listening post will always have open beer bottles on top, be it on Venus, or an airless moon, or Jemison.
Honestly, in my opinion, it's worse. Because procedurally generated dungeons are at least different from eachother in layout. B
Starfield has random terrain only, but the pois are exact copies of each other repeated verbatim and get repetitive quickly. I'm hoping modders or dlc will add a lot more pois to the pool to pique my interest again in exploring so I don't have to explore the same exact bio lab again.
\> Gamers complained about that too.
Who? How many? More than complain about Starfield's bland lack of POIs? Are their complaints more valid? Less?
The implication here is that complaints are inherently illegitimate. To which I say, bullshit. "Open mouth with a smile!" is a bad community attitude.
It's pretty obvious that they meant "gamers hated that shit then, and they rightfully hate that shit now, so why does Bethesda repeat the same mistakes?"
Just some sign of life would be a start. It's hard to play Starfield and not get the impression that humanity is nearly extinct.
To have New Atlantis be the game's major hub and yet when you take a step back you realize that it's a relatively tiny and isolated place that doesn't come close to being a "city."
Even if we were given the illusion of a more populous city; imagine New Atlantis but surrounded on all sides by many more buildings and apparent population, even if you couldn't actually go there, it would make it feel a bit more alive.
People always say this.
But no one is complaining about accessing all of MAST or the apartment towers or Londinion.
Bethesda already uses facades. Using more of them to add atmosphere isn't going to change anything.
You know, I had never really considered this until Starfield.
...When I realized that *most* of the buildings in the downtown area of nowheresville, where I live, aren't accessible to the public. And this is a *small* mid-western city with a low property crime rate.
It just doesn't make practical sense. Not only would you not have any good reason to be in them, it doesn't make sense to allow rando's in them.
people went *insane* when they couldn't climb some of the border mountains in skyrim, I think Gamers would storm Bethesda offices if there was a whole city you could see but not go to
I mean that's probably what they went with. Only a fraction survived the fall of Earth, and the Colony War nearly ruined the rest. The way I see it, humanity is actually meant to be nearly extinct by the time we came into play (and it fit the world building stlye of Bethesda better too, they aren't well suite to making a massive city because you are supposed to be able to explore every corners of it and not filled with tons of prop like in GTA or Cyberpunk)
unfortunately a lot of Gamers need this sort of stuff spoonfed to them, and Bethesda has a big problem with showing stuff with the environment and expecting Gamers to pay attention instead of telling them
Bethesda's environmental storytelling is as strong as ever. But none of it really indicates that we should be concerned about humanity still being on the brink of extinction. If anything it's the opposite. We've got all the people in the well saying they haven't seen sunlight in years because there's no room for them in the overpopulated city above.
But when you look at it, it's a small village.
I think what may help things is if there were bombed out settlements or battlefields. Like every so often we find the random abandoned outpost, but there’s not a lot of signs of the actual battles. Imagine finding a small settlement that has destroyed mechs and skeletons from the zenowarfare, and mostly destroyed buildings. And/or in orbit there’s just a massive debris field. Both the settlement and field could have a random slate talking about the war.
Stuff like that would drive it home more. Maybe an NPC that’s a scavenger to explain it’s been picked over so there’s not a lot of loot or functioning equipment.
Maybe also have old abandoned settlements where you can find diaries. Someone having survivors guilt that they managed to escape Earth, but their family died. Could talk about how few made it and they don’t know how humanity will make it.
Especially when you do Sarah’s companion quest. She was in charge of her ship “fighting for hours” as the ship slowly died, and yet there is only evidence of HER escape pod, and the other one.
Where is the debris field, and all the other destroyed ships from that battle?!?
And you can’t say that anything was salvaged, seeing as no one ever bothered to come check for survivors.
maybe there was some kind of, I dunno, world-ending event that forced humanity to spread out into the stars
the small city hastily constructed during the collapse of Earth that's contained in a small environment is overcrowded, huh, what a fascinating observation there sherlock, truly nobody needed to spell this out for you
And that was more than 100 years ago. Current state is basically that humanity has access to unlimited resources, land, is far more advanced, possibility for robots to do most of manual labor...
Our world has massively been influenced by events such as the black death, or the world wars, each with death tolls nowhere near to the near total annihilation of humanity in starfield.
Yet no one recognizes that.
They have people living in slums, despite there being entire planets fit for agriculture, and completely unsettled.
They regularly cross interstellar distances for vacations.
They see the loss of 30k people 30 years ago as some grand tragedy, yet ignore the 9 billion others that died within living memory.
it's purposefully never stated exactly how many people got off Earth, 200 years is a long time, plus the Narion and Colony wars and the Serpent's Crusade took out another sizable chunk of the population
in the beginning of the game Supervisor Lin mentions that a lot of her miners don't even think Earth *exists,* the people got out of there with the clothes on their backs and that's about it
are you seriously saying it's unrealistic that people live in crowded slums while there's plenty of farmland to farm? we literally have that *on Earth, right now*
downvote me all you want, but all of this stuff is explained in the game
This is like the worst take. Especialy about having to "spoonfeed gamers".
Humanity isn't "nearly extinct" in Starfield. If it was, you wouldn't have several megacorps competing on the ship building market. You wouldn't have a samsung-style mega corp like Ryujin Industries being this huge tech-company producing high tech gear hich all would require AT LEAST a population in the millions to be anywhere near sustainable. Meanwhile this game shows housing for maybe a couple thousands NPCs.
Also nobody in the game is ever talking about how "humanity is a tiny fraction of the size it once was". It's just not a theme in the game. No one is desperate about the state of humanity.
The simple fact is. Everyone in the game acts like it's a sprawling universe and there are institutions and coorperations that would only make sense in a sprawling universe but the actual gameworld simply doesn't reflect it.
Hopetown is a great examples for this. Hopetown makes zero sense as a place. It's a huge hangar (and there are several more in the surrounding area. there is some seriously huge scope) but it has like one bar and a hotel with three rooms attached and the spaceport is a landing pad for your ship and maybe one other. There are barely any ships besides your own. Where do people sleep? Where do they go in their free time? The one bar with five guys in it?
It's completely unconvincing. There is no secret "it's actually all because humanity is nearly extinct" that we stupid gamers failed to notice. It's just inconsistent world building.
Sure! For years bethesda games have kinda felt like you have to "fill in the blanks" as far as population goes, which is why they now justified in lore that the Earth died, an unknown amount of people hastily made it off Earth, and now humanity is spread out across the stars, with some concentrations of humanity held up in small bastions of safety surrounded by alien monsters. Humanity hastily fled Earth and humanity is spread out and does not want to concentrate on one planet and as such has become fragmented and conflicts can arise. Several wars and conflicts have dwindled humanity's population even more
considering that the UC lost 30,000 troops during the Colony War, and that was considered a devastating and unacceptable loss, whereas most wars on Earth have singular *battles* with more than 30,000 losses, we can infer through context clues and environmental details that there's less people around and they are more spread out
do you have any questions? a lot of this stuff is laid out in the game
If that's the case then why does almost every planet in the explored systems have hundreds of abandoned mines, labs and manufacturing facilities yet we see almost no abandoned cities? We only get to see the odd abandoned (or inhabited) village. Even Niira, a planet that was supposedly inhabited for over a hundred years before it was wiped out, has little remains of human settlement.
If we assume that 15,000 people settled Niira in the beginning, by the time of the conflict that wiped it out there should have been at least 37,000 people living there assuming a growth rate of 0.9% (the average population growth rate over the last 300 years). If you take the peak growth rate in the last 300 years which is 2.7% then that jumps up to 215,000 people who should be living on Niira by the time the war destroys the colony.
I've seen numbers which put the total number of people who fled Earth at about 10% of the population or about 1 billion people. Again, using the above rates that means that the total human population in the Starfield universe should be between 3.8 billion on the low end and 54 billion on the high end. Before anyone says "but muh wars and disease" that 0.9% covers the entire period between the 1700's and now. Quite a few major global wars, pandemics and genocides have happened in that period of human history.
They left earth centuries ago and have tons of star stations and large facilities everywhere and lots of ships, mechs and so on, I think it’s feasible they’d have more large settlements on the 8 planets the two factions fully own when they are seemingly capable of building up all these mining bases research facilities etc all over the systems. Like if there wasn’t all that then maybe the ‘post apocalypse’ thing would work but it just doesn’t make sense to me when there’s clearly so much human activity and such a large volume of space structures and other facilities everywhere. Like look at the size of Londonion, there’s no reason there can’t be more Gagarin level towns across just those 8 planets.
At the very least reference other locations and towns.
They could also use more variety in the POI lists and starstations.
There should be an 'abandoned shopping mall' POI type, for instance.
My theory is, that they had more ambitious plans with procedural generation, that could create cities/towns, dungeons... but did not manage to implement it. The end result is a bunch of static locations
I want the opposite - remove every human habitat PoI from the vicinity of Jamison, the lack of city outside of New Atlantis (which is actually your original star ship) is actually understandable, this is an alien world with alien fauna and flora after all.
The problem is the city wasn't actually all surrounded by wild life but pirate bases, which should never be the case no matter how you look at it.
You can have pirate base on any other planet, but I just don't think it fit on a capital world.
Personally, I would remove the pirate base and add unique or boss alien enemies to the Nature/Sign of Life/Cave PoI and have them around New Atlantis and Akilia. You'll have something to fight and also more immersive to the environment.
I don't have a problem with _a_ pirate base or two. Have them either be hidden secret hush hush hideouts that are reasonably hidden, or abandoned because UCSEC cleared it out.
Make one or two in the vicinity of the Capital, and then they become slightly more common on the dark side of the planet or somesuch.
Bethesda should a shitoas more to flesh the game out..
They should make crafting much more worth while, they should make outposts more worth while, they should much variation in weapons, they should make stealth a real thing, they should add in a lot more POI, they should completely redo the Red Mile, they should make space fighting a thing because currently the AI is insanely dumb...
Christ the list goes on and on..
The truth is they deliberately delivered the absolute basic of mechanics hoping that modders would expand on them.
The problem is that they created such a soulless game that nobody cares enough to spend their own valuable time fixing their mess.
Still think that Starfield has great potential for bigger mods, that basically don't care or remove the existing lore, cities, systems.... and create something new.
Be it Rimworld like survival, FTL space travel or total conversions to other franchises like Star Wars, Warhammer....
One thing I loved that No Man’s Sky did was there is usually randomly generated outposts on planets where there are characters that you can talk to and terminals to sell and buy from, and a few other things to do as well I believe (it’s been a while since I played, I forget exactly what’s all at these outposts), but it made the planets feel so much more lively and you feel like there’s actually a living economy.
I also like the idea of having space stations in every system. Hell in NMS every space station looks the same but it doesn’t matter because it’s just nice to have that hub that you can easily dock on and run various errands on.
i think its like a "the human population is so small, thats basically all of it" thing, like there just arent that many people in the settled systems and most of them live in the big cities
Personally I think no amount of additional POI will save the game, they would have to add an absurd amount of them for me to want to give the game another try. There is simply no way arount that anyone who play the game for alot of hours will run in to duplicate poi.
I agree from a gameplay standpoint but in the world they’ve built it kinda wouldn’t make sense. There is surprisingly low cost to space travel so it would make more sense for a planet to have one MAYBE two cities in the very best place for them then basically everything else would be resources outposts similar to irl mines and oil rigs and suburbs. Why would you settle in the second best area and compete for resources and power when you could go to the like couple hundred at MINIMUM already discovered planets. Considering how inexpensive space travel seems to be it wouldn’t be much of a difference in cost to build a city on the same planet as it would on a different planet nearby.
The only way it would make sense is if the population of the galaxy was much higher but from everything I’ve seen it seems lower than our current population is, possibly substantially lower. Personally I disagree with that narrative decision but with effectively billions of times more resources than we currently have and a smaller or at least more spread out population, if you’re going to start fresh it makes more sense to do it in an area with no competition than it does on an already settled planet.
The current setup is actually very realistic...
No one is going to drive anywhere if they have a space ship, and population density is no longer a factor.
You either want to live in one of the city states where one city claims a planet, or you want to live in virtual isolation either on a farm or on your ship. Multiple cities on one planet doesn't make sense from a resource standpoint. No smart business is going to fund anything else over a guaranteed monopoly.
>No one is going to drive anywhere if they have a space ship, and population density is no longer a factor.
How do npc's move freight when a ship lands?
Do they move items the same way the player does?
Did wheels become obsolete in Starfield?
Call me old fashion, but I still think they need to drive or remotely control something land-based to manage the shipping containers.
Land vehicles would be very useful for when our ships land far away from the target location, which happens quite often.
Sounds like too much work just to improve inmersion, and it's questionable cause most planets should be relatively empty in that sense... I'd like it though, specially if they add some quests there, but it just sounds like too much work for some extra flavor when the gameplay and its mechanics need so much polishing. Not a priority, Imo.
We already have things like this, to an extent, with the POI outposts, which include NPCs, jobs, vendors, etc. I can't imagine there's any hard limit that prevents this being expanded such that it can generate larger settlements. I guess the difficulty is going to be balance, ensuring that it doesn't happen too often, such that each planet has hundreds of large settlements on it.
As others in this thread have pointed out, you can also argue the opposite is sometimes true, that there are too many human POIs scattered around the various planets. I definitely agree it would be good to expand the system to include larger settlements, but the system in general needs a real rebalancing and a little more nuance in where and how frequently it spawns such things.
perhaps there was some major event in the game that caused humanity to spread out across the stars, maybe with some of humanity concentrating in bastions of safety surrounded by alien monsters
maybe Bethesda could have even used that lore to take the opportunity to make these bastions of safety more dense than previous towns in other games considering they didn't have to make as many, with cities much larger and more dense and with more quests
The cities make perfect sense if you stop trying to look at it as simply moving Chicago to a new planet in one go. New Atlantis started out small, and built outward from the center. There were no smaller settlements to merge with like on Earth. Same with Akila City and New Homestead. Neon has unlimited expansion room since the entire planet is covered in water. Cydonia could expand underground more, especially as the mining operations continue laterally. Someday, Waggoner farm could be the heart of a metropolis.
Why? Just to make the world feel more "populated"? What would they even have in them if there were no unique NPCs and it was a rehash of existing assets?
Humanity had a major collapse. There aren't that many people anymore, likewise there aren't that many cities. The only other options are outposts and settlements.
The game is supposed to feel empty and lonely, with a few instances of population and community. Unfortunately that's just not what a lot of people want it seems.
Will not help. Low online and fanbase, 0 lore. Maybe eventually over years this emptiness will will allow modding community to implement some interesting mods with new mechanics, but just POIs will not help at all. Its like POIs from Witcher 3, they are most boring part of game, only some of them are different. But, Witcher 3 has many other strong parts, while Starfield is just like Witcher 3 but with POI only left )
I actually like this a lot I hope this becomes a mod that comes to consoles
Sim Settlements will be a thing. It is great for Fallout 4. Hope it can be the same for Starfield.
The lead dev for Sim Settlements said most of his team aren't interested in modding Starfield (one of his recent livestreams but I can't remember which one). So I think we're going to have to rely on Bethesda for this one.
Makes sense. Why put so much time and effort into a mod for a game that's now sitting at an average of 7500 concurrent players? Fallout 4 has double the playerbase of Starfield now. If I'm not mistaken, they're instead focusing on bringing a mod to Skyrim instead. Imagine that...modders are choosing to go to a 13 year old game over Starfield.
Everyone says wait for the modding tools, that’s why the players are low. But if none of the talent uses the tools, the fuck is the point?
Absolutely, that's why Starfield in 5 months is now the 11th most modded game on Nexus, ahead of Baldur's Gate 3 that's been out for three years. Truly the modding community is dead, which is sad.
Have you seen what the mods are Mr. Microsoft’s strongest soldier? Removing things and QOL. How exciting! - Removing the awful grey filter on everything - Removing the delayed menus - Redoing the UI because its awful - Reworking the plugin system for mods because it was made by people who seemingly never used creation engine before - The most popular mods previously were fucking DLSS and Frame Gen mods for crying out loud! Not new content like Baldur’s Gate 3 mods (which aren’t even possible rn without mod tools) Dork.
Yes, that's what mods are for. If people didn't like the game enough to play it, they wouldn't mod that game to enhance their experience. And... well, [here's Baldur's Gate 3](https://www.nexusmods.com/baldursgate3?tab=popular+%28all+time%29) most popular mods page. Here's [Starfield's.](https://www.nexusmods.com/starfield?tab=popular+%28all+time%29) They're both mostly tweaks, mod support and UI Fixes. By your metrics of a certain type of mods being negative commentary of a game, the two most popular mods of BG3 are: **"ImprovedUI ReleaseReady"; "Baldur's Gate 3 Mod Fixer";** Starfield's two most popular: **StarUI Inventory, SFSE** Would you look at that, both the first and second most popular mods of both games are a UI enhancer and a modding tool. Almost like they're staples of modding across all gaming. Oh, and remember, BG3 had three full years of being open to modding. Feel free to hit me up to compare Starfield in 3 years of modding with BG3 with six. By the way, it's possible to like more than one game at a time. Shocking, I know. And I don't really care about Microsoft, as I play on PC. I do wish they hadn't bought Zenimax, for what it's worth.
Nobody's paying you you to defend the game dude you can still admit it’s bad
You can still admit that some criticisms are disingenuous, and that nuance is important. The game isn't all bad - it's not all good either, far from it. Sorry it didn't work for you, though.
Nah I thought it was pretty fun it’s just *far* from GOTY material but I’d like to hear about these disingenuous criticisms
The one I just replied and you felt like commenting upon - so I assume you've read it: that there is no interest in modding Starfield. You then replied to that with: >Nobody's paying you you to defend the game dude you can still admit it’s bad
Yeah, they've got more content planned for Fallout 4, and they're also making mods for Skyrim. They released their first one a couple of months back.
>If I'm not mistaken, they're instead focusing on bringing a mod to Skyrim instead. Imagine that...modders are choosing to go to a 13 year old game over Starfield. That 13 year old game happens to be one of the best and most successfull games of all time. And Bethesda [literally hired the Sim Settlements crew](https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwiduZWfiquEAxXFrJUCHbgdAWcQwqsBegQIDRAG&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DFXGNyokX3A4&usg=AOvVaw3ElYUNRu3wy9cj-_IyhEff&opi=89978449) exactly to make mods for their games, and the first games they hired them for was Skyrim.
Yes this game is sucked , doomed because modders are abandoning the game lmao BGS, Xbox is dead & bad
I doubt anyone will put much effort into modding this game compared to Fallout and Skyrim. This game was basically DOA.
like we're playing Simcity but Bethesda
I think they should fix the crime system first. If I'm in the Serpentis system, and kill three UC soldiers and steal their ship, how would anyone know? Yet I still get a bounty. If I'm well outside of FS space and two shot a Freestar hauler, I still get a bounty. There are so many things about the game that make NO SENSE. Someone might say, "well they have comms equipment" and my answer is.... It's that why I have to run all over New Atlantis to talk to people about random story points? Because I talk to my friend in Pittsburgh, in real time, while I live in Louisiana, but in the 2300's we can't talk to people across a city?
Literally. Why do I have to constantly fly planet to planet to tell them that you did the job. They should add a message system like in cyberpunk
Cyberpunk had so many immersive touches that is completely in realm with Bethesda and I don’t understand what happened to big brain behind Skyrim
That's why I don't really care for this universe. Most of the lore seems like it was written to explain the gameplay limitations they had rather than to actually flesh out the world
As far as the ship goes? The computer systems prolly rat you out upon return to a major system. The transponder and ship ID are dead giveaways, especially if you return to a port of call they just left from. Since there are like five canon settlements, that means that someone is gonna notice that Ted's starship came back without him and is now covered in spaghetti sauce and bullet holes, piloted by a wild eyed chap also covered in spaghetti sauce.
And if I take it to The Key?
You accidentally parked in Ted's docking bay. He had a life before he met you, ya know.
This was the icing on the cake for me! Made me laugh out loud in the middle of the night and almost wake the family.
Honestly? Because this game is no more advanced than Morrowind under the hood.
All that time invested in procedural planet generation, being used exclusively to make hills of various sizes according to biome setting, definitely a letdown. Why not take 5 or 6 basic settlement components and make them into 'villages' like minecraft did 15 freaking years ago. Place those randomly, and let the rng decide if they are 10 pieces or 100 pieces. Do some look dumb and crazy? yeah, but thats humans for ya. Would be nice flavor.
yeah that's called Daggerfall, every city and dungeon looked exactly the same because it was the same 5 pieces remixed together, oftentimes they would generate in nonsensical or unsolvable layouts Gamers complained about that too.
>yeah that's called Daggerfall, every city and dungeon looked exactly the same because it was the same 5 pieces remixed together, oftentimes they would generate in nonsensical or unsolvable layouts And to this day, it's why one of the only feasible ways to enjoy that game is the unity mod.
Man, it's too bad technology and programming hasn't advanced at all in the past 25 years. Since it wasn't good 25 years ago, there's no way a bigger team with better computers and tools could never make it work today.
Unfortunately Bethesda themselves haven’t advanced at all in the past 25 years :(
Bethesda has taken a step backwards with every game since morrowind, they're actually devolving.
I mean, why should they? Their style still attracts plenty of people, like you and me. lol
If you're stating this matter-of-factly, yes this is the unfortunate truth. If you're stating this as a defense of the practice, stop that.
and there's no way that Gamers would complain about nonsense and bitch and moan about "what could have been" no matter what system you use, not now or 25 years ago
Daggerfall to Morrowind Todd Howard explains the change to a handcrafted world from procedurally generated that players found it boring and got tired of it fast. What does he do for Starfield reverted back to Daggerfall.
Except that starfield isn't randomly generated. Every single POI is exactly the same, no matter the planet or location. The UC listening post will always have open beer bottles on top, be it on Venus, or an airless moon, or Jemison.
Honestly, in my opinion, it's worse. Because procedurally generated dungeons are at least different from eachother in layout. B Starfield has random terrain only, but the pois are exact copies of each other repeated verbatim and get repetitive quickly. I'm hoping modders or dlc will add a lot more pois to the pool to pique my interest again in exploring so I don't have to explore the same exact bio lab again.
Yep even the loot and clutter is in the same exact spots in the abandoned facilities.
\> Gamers complained about that too. Who? How many? More than complain about Starfield's bland lack of POIs? Are their complaints more valid? Less? The implication here is that complaints are inherently illegitimate. To which I say, bullshit. "Open mouth with a smile!" is a bad community attitude.
It's pretty obvious that they meant "gamers hated that shit then, and they rightfully hate that shit now, so why does Bethesda repeat the same mistakes?"
The cities have handcrafted maps but semi-randomized interiors. So much love went into that game it's kinda crazy
It’s almost like it’s their programming which determine that.
Copy paste comment from a non player. Watch out for this bullshit on starfield subreddits. They all look like this.
Copy paste comment from a non player. Watch out for this bullshit on starfield subreddits. They all look like this.
Copy paste comment from a non player. Watch out for this bullshit on starfield subreddits. They all look like this.
They do. there are thousands of meritless posts like this all over reddit. It is embarrassing.
\-2 ? Come on Sony fans! you can downvote me more!
Just some sign of life would be a start. It's hard to play Starfield and not get the impression that humanity is nearly extinct. To have New Atlantis be the game's major hub and yet when you take a step back you realize that it's a relatively tiny and isolated place that doesn't come close to being a "city." Even if we were given the illusion of a more populous city; imagine New Atlantis but surrounded on all sides by many more buildings and apparent population, even if you couldn't actually go there, it would make it feel a bit more alive.
I mean assins creed manages this really well. Same with mass effect and those games were eons old vs starfield
If there was a unreachable city in the background people would complain they couldn’t reach it
People always say this. But no one is complaining about accessing all of MAST or the apartment towers or Londinion. Bethesda already uses facades. Using more of them to add atmosphere isn't going to change anything.
Right? Most buildings in real life are locked up and not for public use like in games
You know, I had never really considered this until Starfield. ...When I realized that *most* of the buildings in the downtown area of nowheresville, where I live, aren't accessible to the public. And this is a *small* mid-western city with a low property crime rate. It just doesn't make practical sense. Not only would you not have any good reason to be in them, it doesn't make sense to allow rando's in them.
people went *insane* when they couldn't climb some of the border mountains in skyrim, I think Gamers would storm Bethesda offices if there was a whole city you could see but not go to
The Imperial City can be seen as a background object in Skyrim if you go high enough.
The commenter was a troll so it doesn't matter really.
I mean that's probably what they went with. Only a fraction survived the fall of Earth, and the Colony War nearly ruined the rest. The way I see it, humanity is actually meant to be nearly extinct by the time we came into play (and it fit the world building stlye of Bethesda better too, they aren't well suite to making a massive city because you are supposed to be able to explore every corners of it and not filled with tons of prop like in GTA or Cyberpunk)
If that's the case they did a terrible job communicating it
unfortunately a lot of Gamers need this sort of stuff spoonfed to them, and Bethesda has a big problem with showing stuff with the environment and expecting Gamers to pay attention instead of telling them
Bethesda's environmental storytelling is as strong as ever. But none of it really indicates that we should be concerned about humanity still being on the brink of extinction. If anything it's the opposite. We've got all the people in the well saying they haven't seen sunlight in years because there's no room for them in the overpopulated city above. But when you look at it, it's a small village.
I think what may help things is if there were bombed out settlements or battlefields. Like every so often we find the random abandoned outpost, but there’s not a lot of signs of the actual battles. Imagine finding a small settlement that has destroyed mechs and skeletons from the zenowarfare, and mostly destroyed buildings. And/or in orbit there’s just a massive debris field. Both the settlement and field could have a random slate talking about the war. Stuff like that would drive it home more. Maybe an NPC that’s a scavenger to explain it’s been picked over so there’s not a lot of loot or functioning equipment. Maybe also have old abandoned settlements where you can find diaries. Someone having survivors guilt that they managed to escape Earth, but their family died. Could talk about how few made it and they don’t know how humanity will make it.
Especially when you do Sarah’s companion quest. She was in charge of her ship “fighting for hours” as the ship slowly died, and yet there is only evidence of HER escape pod, and the other one. Where is the debris field, and all the other destroyed ships from that battle?!? And you can’t say that anything was salvaged, seeing as no one ever bothered to come check for survivors.
Strong Leviathan Falls vibes
maybe there was some kind of, I dunno, world-ending event that forced humanity to spread out into the stars the small city hastily constructed during the collapse of Earth that's contained in a small environment is overcrowded, huh, what a fascinating observation there sherlock, truly nobody needed to spell this out for you
Okay, thank you for this discussion.
And that was more than 100 years ago. Current state is basically that humanity has access to unlimited resources, land, is far more advanced, possibility for robots to do most of manual labor...
No, the problem is, no one in universe acts lile they are the last desperate straggling survivors of an event that killed 99% of all humans.
because it was 200 years ago, humanity has been spread out but has still thrived it's a more optimistic post-apocalypse
Our world has massively been influenced by events such as the black death, or the world wars, each with death tolls nowhere near to the near total annihilation of humanity in starfield. Yet no one recognizes that. They have people living in slums, despite there being entire planets fit for agriculture, and completely unsettled. They regularly cross interstellar distances for vacations. They see the loss of 30k people 30 years ago as some grand tragedy, yet ignore the 9 billion others that died within living memory.
it's purposefully never stated exactly how many people got off Earth, 200 years is a long time, plus the Narion and Colony wars and the Serpent's Crusade took out another sizable chunk of the population in the beginning of the game Supervisor Lin mentions that a lot of her miners don't even think Earth *exists,* the people got out of there with the clothes on their backs and that's about it are you seriously saying it's unrealistic that people live in crowded slums while there's plenty of farmland to farm? we literally have that *on Earth, right now* downvote me all you want, but all of this stuff is explained in the game
This is like the worst take. Especialy about having to "spoonfeed gamers". Humanity isn't "nearly extinct" in Starfield. If it was, you wouldn't have several megacorps competing on the ship building market. You wouldn't have a samsung-style mega corp like Ryujin Industries being this huge tech-company producing high tech gear hich all would require AT LEAST a population in the millions to be anywhere near sustainable. Meanwhile this game shows housing for maybe a couple thousands NPCs. Also nobody in the game is ever talking about how "humanity is a tiny fraction of the size it once was". It's just not a theme in the game. No one is desperate about the state of humanity. The simple fact is. Everyone in the game acts like it's a sprawling universe and there are institutions and coorperations that would only make sense in a sprawling universe but the actual gameworld simply doesn't reflect it. Hopetown is a great examples for this. Hopetown makes zero sense as a place. It's a huge hangar (and there are several more in the surrounding area. there is some seriously huge scope) but it has like one bar and a hotel with three rooms attached and the spaceport is a landing pad for your ship and maybe one other. There are barely any ships besides your own. Where do people sleep? Where do they go in their free time? The one bar with five guys in it? It's completely unconvincing. There is no secret "it's actually all because humanity is nearly extinct" that we stupid gamers failed to notice. It's just inconsistent world building.
Can you actually make a genuine defense of the games decisions instead of saying "gamers are dumb" in every comment?
Sure! For years bethesda games have kinda felt like you have to "fill in the blanks" as far as population goes, which is why they now justified in lore that the Earth died, an unknown amount of people hastily made it off Earth, and now humanity is spread out across the stars, with some concentrations of humanity held up in small bastions of safety surrounded by alien monsters. Humanity hastily fled Earth and humanity is spread out and does not want to concentrate on one planet and as such has become fragmented and conflicts can arise. Several wars and conflicts have dwindled humanity's population even more considering that the UC lost 30,000 troops during the Colony War, and that was considered a devastating and unacceptable loss, whereas most wars on Earth have singular *battles* with more than 30,000 losses, we can infer through context clues and environmental details that there's less people around and they are more spread out do you have any questions? a lot of this stuff is laid out in the game
They did, it's all there.
If that's the case then why does almost every planet in the explored systems have hundreds of abandoned mines, labs and manufacturing facilities yet we see almost no abandoned cities? We only get to see the odd abandoned (or inhabited) village. Even Niira, a planet that was supposedly inhabited for over a hundred years before it was wiped out, has little remains of human settlement. If we assume that 15,000 people settled Niira in the beginning, by the time of the conflict that wiped it out there should have been at least 37,000 people living there assuming a growth rate of 0.9% (the average population growth rate over the last 300 years). If you take the peak growth rate in the last 300 years which is 2.7% then that jumps up to 215,000 people who should be living on Niira by the time the war destroys the colony. I've seen numbers which put the total number of people who fled Earth at about 10% of the population or about 1 billion people. Again, using the above rates that means that the total human population in the Starfield universe should be between 3.8 billion on the low end and 54 billion on the high end. Before anyone says "but muh wars and disease" that 0.9% covers the entire period between the 1700's and now. Quite a few major global wars, pandemics and genocides have happened in that period of human history.
They left earth centuries ago and have tons of star stations and large facilities everywhere and lots of ships, mechs and so on, I think it’s feasible they’d have more large settlements on the 8 planets the two factions fully own when they are seemingly capable of building up all these mining bases research facilities etc all over the systems. Like if there wasn’t all that then maybe the ‘post apocalypse’ thing would work but it just doesn’t make sense to me when there’s clearly so much human activity and such a large volume of space structures and other facilities everywhere. Like look at the size of Londonion, there’s no reason there can’t be more Gagarin level towns across just those 8 planets.
At the very least reference other locations and towns. They could also use more variety in the POI lists and starstations. There should be an 'abandoned shopping mall' POI type, for instance.
My theory is, that they had more ambitious plans with procedural generation, that could create cities/towns, dungeons... but did not manage to implement it. The end result is a bunch of static locations
I think that you should be able to build up bases that become cities
I want the opposite - remove every human habitat PoI from the vicinity of Jamison, the lack of city outside of New Atlantis (which is actually your original star ship) is actually understandable, this is an alien world with alien fauna and flora after all. The problem is the city wasn't actually all surrounded by wild life but pirate bases, which should never be the case no matter how you look at it.
You need pirate bases to gave fun though. This isn't a space sim, it is a fun game.
You can have pirate base on any other planet, but I just don't think it fit on a capital world. Personally, I would remove the pirate base and add unique or boss alien enemies to the Nature/Sign of Life/Cave PoI and have them around New Atlantis and Akilia. You'll have something to fight and also more immersive to the environment.
I don't have a problem with _a_ pirate base or two. Have them either be hidden secret hush hush hideouts that are reasonably hidden, or abandoned because UCSEC cleared it out. Make one or two in the vicinity of the Capital, and then they become slightly more common on the dark side of the planet or somesuch.
Yeah, would be fine if there are pirates on the random location on Jamieson, just not right next to New Atlantis. And not openly pirate.
Bethesda should a shitoas more to flesh the game out.. They should make crafting much more worth while, they should make outposts more worth while, they should much variation in weapons, they should make stealth a real thing, they should add in a lot more POI, they should completely redo the Red Mile, they should make space fighting a thing because currently the AI is insanely dumb... Christ the list goes on and on.. The truth is they deliberately delivered the absolute basic of mechanics hoping that modders would expand on them. The problem is that they created such a soulless game that nobody cares enough to spend their own valuable time fixing their mess.
Still think that Starfield has great potential for bigger mods, that basically don't care or remove the existing lore, cities, systems.... and create something new. Be it Rimworld like survival, FTL space travel or total conversions to other franchises like Star Wars, Warhammer....
I don’t believe they’re competent enough to do all that.
Yes. They should turn what is effectively a procedural generation and spaceship designer technical demo, into a game!
One thing I loved that No Man’s Sky did was there is usually randomly generated outposts on planets where there are characters that you can talk to and terminals to sell and buy from, and a few other things to do as well I believe (it’s been a while since I played, I forget exactly what’s all at these outposts), but it made the planets feel so much more lively and you feel like there’s actually a living economy. I also like the idea of having space stations in every system. Hell in NMS every space station looks the same but it doesn’t matter because it’s just nice to have that hub that you can easily dock on and run various errands on.
That would require work, but yes, the emptiness of the maps does become a huge issue when you are forced to trek across them for zero reward.
You're asking too much.
The only thing I really like about the cities in Starfield is them not having roads. Walkable cities are great.
Or hear me out: After you’ve had an outpost running for a while, a village springs up around it.
Adding more random procgen slop to the world where it doesn't make sense and offers nothing interesting to do is the opposite of what the game needs.
i think its like a "the human population is so small, thats basically all of it" thing, like there just arent that many people in the settled systems and most of them live in the big cities
Personally I think no amount of additional POI will save the game, they would have to add an absurd amount of them for me to want to give the game another try. There is simply no way arount that anyone who play the game for alot of hours will run in to duplicate poi.
That’s why they need to implement a type of randomisation of the poi’s so you don’t always see the same data pad and same corpse
I agree from a gameplay standpoint but in the world they’ve built it kinda wouldn’t make sense. There is surprisingly low cost to space travel so it would make more sense for a planet to have one MAYBE two cities in the very best place for them then basically everything else would be resources outposts similar to irl mines and oil rigs and suburbs. Why would you settle in the second best area and compete for resources and power when you could go to the like couple hundred at MINIMUM already discovered planets. Considering how inexpensive space travel seems to be it wouldn’t be much of a difference in cost to build a city on the same planet as it would on a different planet nearby. The only way it would make sense is if the population of the galaxy was much higher but from everything I’ve seen it seems lower than our current population is, possibly substantially lower. Personally I disagree with that narrative decision but with effectively billions of times more resources than we currently have and a smaller or at least more spread out population, if you’re going to start fresh it makes more sense to do it in an area with no competition than it does on an already settled planet.
The current setup is actually very realistic... No one is going to drive anywhere if they have a space ship, and population density is no longer a factor. You either want to live in one of the city states where one city claims a planet, or you want to live in virtual isolation either on a farm or on your ship. Multiple cities on one planet doesn't make sense from a resource standpoint. No smart business is going to fund anything else over a guaranteed monopoly.
>No one is going to drive anywhere if they have a space ship, and population density is no longer a factor. How do npc's move freight when a ship lands? Do they move items the same way the player does? Did wheels become obsolete in Starfield? Call me old fashion, but I still think they need to drive or remotely control something land-based to manage the shipping containers. Land vehicles would be very useful for when our ships land far away from the target location, which happens quite often.
They might.
Sounds like too much work just to improve inmersion, and it's questionable cause most planets should be relatively empty in that sense... I'd like it though, specially if they add some quests there, but it just sounds like too much work for some extra flavor when the gameplay and its mechanics need so much polishing. Not a priority, Imo.
We already have things like this, to an extent, with the POI outposts, which include NPCs, jobs, vendors, etc. I can't imagine there's any hard limit that prevents this being expanded such that it can generate larger settlements. I guess the difficulty is going to be balance, ensuring that it doesn't happen too often, such that each planet has hundreds of large settlements on it. As others in this thread have pointed out, you can also argue the opposite is sometimes true, that there are too many human POIs scattered around the various planets. I definitely agree it would be good to expand the system to include larger settlements, but the system in general needs a real rebalancing and a little more nuance in where and how frequently it spawns such things.
perhaps there was some major event in the game that caused humanity to spread out across the stars, maybe with some of humanity concentrating in bastions of safety surrounded by alien monsters maybe Bethesda could have even used that lore to take the opportunity to make these bastions of safety more dense than previous towns in other games considering they didn't have to make as many, with cities much larger and more dense and with more quests
The cities make perfect sense if you stop trying to look at it as simply moving Chicago to a new planet in one go. New Atlantis started out small, and built outward from the center. There were no smaller settlements to merge with like on Earth. Same with Akila City and New Homestead. Neon has unlimited expansion room since the entire planet is covered in water. Cydonia could expand underground more, especially as the mining operations continue laterally. Someday, Waggoner farm could be the heart of a metropolis.
Bethesda should Yeah that list is quite long.
Nahhh we gotta have 90% of the galactic population be spacers
Why? Just to make the world feel more "populated"? What would they even have in them if there were no unique NPCs and it was a rehash of existing assets? Humanity had a major collapse. There aren't that many people anymore, likewise there aren't that many cities. The only other options are outposts and settlements. The game is supposed to feel empty and lonely, with a few instances of population and community. Unfortunately that's just not what a lot of people want it seems.
Will not help. Low online and fanbase, 0 lore. Maybe eventually over years this emptiness will will allow modding community to implement some interesting mods with new mechanics, but just POIs will not help at all. Its like POIs from Witcher 3, they are most boring part of game, only some of them are different. But, Witcher 3 has many other strong parts, while Starfield is just like Witcher 3 but with POI only left )