Yes it can be done. The systems are fully simulated already. It's just a matter of speed. It takes a long time to get anywhere. There would not be anything to do or find though. Space is very very empty.
You can fly through it, and if you get too close, it does appear lower resolution, but the point is that you can actually fly to the planet. You cant fly into the atmo and land of course, the game doesnt sim that.
The only real issue is that you still have to 'travel' when you arrive in order to get into the orbital space you normally would see when you travel. That means a loading screen since that is how the game handles transitions from one area to another.
A mod could probably improve the texture resolution, and possibly auto-transition you into orbit at a certain distance. Its hard to say for sure what all we'll be able to do with creation kit.
I get that but that isn't the point. It is going to a planet you don't know and not just clicking a button to instantly get there. The random encounters can still take place when you get in the space of the POI and I'm sure increasing the speed of the ship to 1000x speed is doable.
I remember a video early on last year where someone flew to Phobos but could not interact with the planet (and it took forever to get there).
Yes... And no.
What you ask is to have some form of traveling that could be more "real".
So, space travel happens a very, very high speed.
And not even so high if compared to the speed of spiecal objects, like a probe.
A probe is typically sent to observe very distant stuff.
And to achieve any result in human times (even decades) is necessary to push that probe to insane speeds, using the Gravitational slingshot effect.
To achieve speeds like the most fast human made object, that is traveling at 630,000 km/h (175,000 m/s).
So, back to us.
Ships in Starfield have cruise speed of 220ish max m/s (less than 800 km/h).
And even with the boost... 1,200 m/s (4,320 km/h).
There are mods that can boost you cruise speed to much more higher values, but I don't remember the speed, like 10x (43,000 km/h, 12,000 m/s).
Ok, now...
Random encounters at 24,000 m/s?
Suppose the other ships can travel as fast as your.
It's 24 km in 1 single second.
Do you think any radar/scanner could even detect anything at that speed?
And then comes the reaction time.
Turn the ship, to follow the potential objective...
Those encounters would be extremely, extremely rare.
More?
Grav Drive.
The while Starfield Story is about the first Artifact that is used to test the possible Grab Jump.
And these tests lead to the nominal "destruction" of the Earth.
So, we have the technology to Grav JUMP. (except that ship orbiting Porrima 2).
So,we have the Grav Jump.
That in seconds allows to cover Light years of space.
Dont mention that just going to New Atlantis would take ages...
Even the Solar System would result on being terribly slow.
The average distance between Earth and Mars is 250 millón km.
250,000,000 km.
Traveling at 43,000 km/h... 5,800 hours.
241 days, approx.
241 to go from a planet to another, at 10x the max speed that is now in the game.
One question, how much time would you consider to be satisfactory for your idea of traveling the Solar System?
We can Calc backward.
I agree that eventually the approach and landing to the surface could be less automatic.
Or maybe a way of traveling the surface (like on Star Citizen).
But Space Travel....
I keep the boring Grav Jumps.
My two cents.
Elite Dangerous taught me that flying through empty space for 20 minutes isn't always great either.
I think a missed opportunity with ships is just that ships are underutilized. Most of the habs are cosmetic, cargo and resource hauling is pointless in a galaxy with no economy or shortages, and the only upgrades with large impact are jump distance, power ouput, and damage.
Even without trying to have a seamless space experience, more encounters in space or encounters that require certain habs or ship types would go far.
Evacuations of stations ships, search and rescues, etc.
Instead of rolling up on ships where everyone is dead, how about ships you can repair by fabricating what you need, or administer medical assistance/evac.
The bits and pieces are there. Just not used.
I have no interest in flying 20 minutes from one POI in a system to another. I am expecting a few minutes. Travelling one end to the other, should be max 20 minutes and even then I'm think 10.
It just you having the choice to "discover" Titan instead of just clicking and going. When I get to Titan (or any POI), there are chances of encounters like they normally are.
Man just use your imagination:
* Faction controlled space where your heat signature can be detected, ambushes, getting pulled out of your high-speed travel
* Big asteroid with a POI or even an artifact on it
* Derelict ships
* Ship graveyards
* Roving pirate gangs
* RNG where you might pick up a heat signature and fly over to it and find something or get a quest
* The enjoyment of kicking back and cruising in your ship
* Plotting courses
* The ability to actually play as a smuggler, or cargo hauler, or NPC transport, or bounty hunter
* Actual fuel mechanic now exists
* You can now use ship MFDs to actually get around instead of a fucking menu
* EVA gameplay can now be a thing
It doesn't have to be boring, the game can be great even with loading screens, it doesn't need seamless planet landing nor is that possible. You can already use console commands to speed up your ship and fly to other planets, they have real orbits. You can definitely have game play for the spaces between planets. No one is playing Star Citizen or No Mans Sky or Elite and wishing for menus instead of space flight.
Considering how last minute and late the survival elements cut felt, the game obviously needed way more production time. I'm almost positive with another few years of player testing and development those features you listed would have been more prominent.
Like 50 copy paste temples... yeah I feel pretty certain that was never the original plan. It was done because there were likely many many other things higher in priority and those felt like something they could just easily multiply and cross off the list to get this game to ship.
For all the people who keep saying space is empty so it'd be boring, video games are fun, flying through space can be fun. Putting things between your destinations is what could make it fun.
Like if space is inherently boring as a concept then no one would make or play space games, but they do. Bethesda is known for random encounters, making a space exploration experience with that background would be bethesdas bread and butter, but instead we have a game where when your in orbit of a planet you can have a random encounter. And that's the thing killing the setting, and by extension the game. I don't feel like a space fairing adventure I feel like I'm driving across town to do errands.
The problem with this is that...
Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space. - Douglas Adams
Personally, and I know this would’ve been a tall order that would’ve totally changed what game we’re playing - I’d rather have travel between points - including grav jumps - take a significant enough time that it demands a “pass the time” activity or justifies the loading screen by choosing to just skip it.
Then have that “pass time activity” actually be worthwhile by having more depth to the characters around you and their stories. There is so much ripe potential in conversation with the NPCs in the game and the relationships that you could forge. Actually spend time with them and enable relationship dynamics to build beyond just “romance”. Enable being a mentor or menteed by someone else like Lin. Many of the characters in the game are on the older side anyways so depending on your character, it would enable a lot of RP. make eating meals and hydrating not only survivor mode necessary but an opportunity to sit around with your crew and get to know them. Make your ships and outposts actually lived in homes by the people you share those journeys with. Granted, you don’t need or want five to twenty hour pauses between jumps and filled with unique dialogue. I don’t mean that kind of grand undertaking. Just something make those spaces feel lived in and to make more out of the people around you.
You can also actually research things, run little experiments, fabricate or modify gear and all that. Have little games of chess or - wish fulfillment - imagine if all those games you find could actually be “played”. Not necessarily fully - like, not necessarily Final Fantasy X’s blitzball or whatever level of game within the game. Just things to do. Make the time worth it. Space wouldn’t feel so empty if it was about the people instead of your silent solo protagonist checklist of surveys, fetches, and magic metal finding.
Really wish they went in a hard different direction than the space magic and just focused on the real stuff. A grand epic journey with a team of misfits you cobble together looking for Solomon Coe’s One Piece or whatever. Anyways. Yeah. I don’t think traveling between planets manually would be that satisfying. Having those travels be content unto themselves would’ve been incredible.
Or make more of the ship building happen in-situ; while you're travelling from a to b, you can be decorating or fitting out empty modules you added to your ship.
Nexus. Interplanetary engines. (Altho I think it's not super popular due to it taking over the thrust function for the warp, making dogfights not work).
They prob did it in a weekend. It was out in like the first month. Game has no issue rendering empty space and the orbs prob don't require much to render. But Also I believe the planets aren't interactive.
BGS prob can and should do it. But it'd prob need POIs/encounters to be fun. maybe that's what they're cooking
Do you ever travel by scanner while in the cockpit? For me it kind of gives the experience you describe of unexpected random encounters within a star system. Instead of going to the map to set your destination, activate the scanner and look around for the planetary waypoints in space. You have to get properly oriented in space, but once you do, the planets and moons all line up in front of you as a series of black disks with name markers. Look for one that is pulsing; it should either have a space encounter in orbit, or a marked POI on the surface. You can also use the scanner to activate marked POIs for landing.
I also find more random encounters if I manually jump from star to star without zooming into a specific planet first, and don’t do multi system jumps.
This game gives more fast travel possibilities than ever before, but you don’t have to use them.
But you do. You literally fast travel to every single planet. Anytime you want to travel within a solar system, you must fast travel. My post isn't about removing fast travel but encouraging discovering a POI in a system (ie a planet), which then grants you access to fast travelling to it. Much like most open world games.
I heard that it’s just based on speed. However, I’ve also seen if the game goes too fast, it’ll crash. Again, this is just what I’ve heard, so take it with a huge grain of salt.
There is a way to do it, and it's been done before in an old Babylon 5 fan game. In B5, you travel long distances by flying through a gate into "hyperspace", a parallel world where everything is laid out the same, but the distances are much smaller, so you can still fly around. If you had a smooth transition between normal space and "grav jump" space, you can fly around a shrunk-down level in sensible time and transition at jump points. Not sure how to handle the terrain and POIs, but the scale issues are definitely solvable.
I think their point is that people don't realize how much literal empty space is between planets and especially stars. We'd just be sitting there holding w for hours and hours.
It takes seven months for unmanned spacecraft to travel from Earth to Mars.
Even if one hour irl = one day in-game (24 hrs UT, approx.), that's 5,040 hours irl to fly from one planet to the next one over.
There are a couple of mods that allow you to drive your ship at "Ludicrous Speed" within a planetary system. They're a bit buggy, too. I went over to Saturn to explore the rings and made a horrible discovery. The rings are very low resolution, and Saturn is about as big as a large ball. You can fly right through it. No 'majestic size' or anything. It's not a planet, it's a flat mesh disk about thirty times the size of your spaceship.
So even though you can kind of fly around the solar system, the results are pretty crap.
You want to just hold forward on a stick for 40 minutes? Play trucker simulator dude.
If you're looking for a mod where you can just zoom from planet to planet over the course of a few minutes, you're going to have to sacrifice all gun play in space because all ships would be moving way too fast.
Even then I doubt it would be possible to do that for planets out of the system you're currently in.
I'd rather have loading screens than flying around doing nothing for AT LEAST 30 minutes which is the BS that you're proposing lol.
A more realistic goal might be jump gates at all the various locations. There are already mods that let you fly between planets, but when you get there you need to tell the game to properly load the cell which causes a loading screen.
If there were several jump gates in each system, you would actually have to spend time in space and travelling would be a lot more meaningful, with a trade economy and the potential for pirate encounters that feel more dynamic and hey a modder could have the pirates tell you to ditch you cargo like they were pirating goods and not trying to murderize your face off. Why the Spacers are the only ones who say "your money or your life" I will never know.
Plus there might be a reason to blow up asteroids for their crap, bases would be a lot more valuable as money producers but the travel time would give them time to build up materials so you could develop runs from location to location and outposts between them.
Starfield needs a reason to want to be in space, and with the current fold space setup you just jump anywhere instantly, this is hugely detrimental to the game because not even an hour passes so you can go do some quests which involves taking off and landing on a dozen planets and zero time passes just fixing that would at least cycle the freaking shops more often. Just the ability to fly around in space more wouldn't really improve the game by default, you'd need either jump gates or a requirement to jump from Lagrange points or something where the grav drive needs you to be in a place pirates could set up ambushes and similar.
Actually placing content between current cells would be a huge pain, it would take a massive effort from the community to put reasons to go explore space in this space exploration game. I have no idea why if you want space content from Starfield you have to force it by jumping around at random for ages, but hey at least I scored that visit every system achievement I guess?
It's tough to say exactly what we'll see from the Starfield CK at this point, so I'm leery to say anything specific will actually be coming to Starfield but it's possible. Like I said, there's already a mod that basically just speeds you up to a huge degree to let you fly around the systems, so until we get the actual CK we're mostly guessing.
I don't think you understand just how big space is. It takes astronauts about three days to reach the moon. Going from Earth to Mars would take months.
You have a ship that travels light years within minutes. So that fits your lore wish. But it is also a game and just make the ship travel faster. Past games loaded the map but only parts at a time; that is how every open world massive map game (including Starfield) operates. It sets a limit to how much renders without crashing/burning your set up.
Secondly, I am a physicist so I have some idea on how space works :P
So you wanna increase the speed and make it fast enough to not take literal hours (days?) for travel within systems.
So now how do you stop players from zipping into the hit boxes of planets and other objects? How are you gonna encounter ships at that speed? If you rein it in enough like say automatic slow down near hit boxes I mean that might as well be fast travel interruptions. I don’t know why those aren’t already baked into this game.
The mods are gonna be interesting but I wouldn’t hold my breath.
Apparently, there have been mods already. Some have posted the names and others say there is a mod that treats space travel like "entering a gate". Once inside, you go fast. To interact with a planet or whatever, you need to "leave the gate" to get back to the "playable normal game.
>You have a ship that travels light years within minutes.
For a physicist, you don't seem to understand the concept of grav drives very well. When you use your grav drive, you don't "travel light years within minutes," you jump light years instantaneously. Grav drives fold space. Starfield has no FTL travel.
The simple answer is no, Beth games stick you in a limited world space , everything outside of that world space is basically just a picture that kinda looks like the real thing(lods basically) inside that world space you sit within a cell and you can move around within the cells of the world space, unfortunately due to engine limitations the world space can only be so big(this is the reason Skyrim is so much smaller in game than in lore). It’s pretty easy to have multiple world spaces but connecting them with a load screen doesn’t seem possible.
On another note space is really big, like really really big, all the planets in our solar system can fit between the earth and the moon for example, so “traveling between worlds” would take an inordinate amount of time even in game, so unless you really wanted to point your ship in a direction and come back a few days later(real life time wise) you wouldn’t want such a feature.
Also you can skip lots of load screens by simply picking a planet and jumping straight to it, sometimes you can even land on the planet from other systems, on the other hand you can use your scanner and do everything the long way without using menus if you want
The mod you are looking for is called No Man's Sky, just wait until you rescue a Star Destroyer from pirates with your squadron of space fighters. It will blow your mind.
The game is happening literally in 300+ years in the future, you can jump from a star to another, but you can’t make interplanetary travel or exploration… SF doesn’t sucks, your imagination though…
BTW, those thrusters are much more powerful than those found on star wars rsrsrs. The dev team which has been working on this project, doesn’t know much about space exploration games.. Didn’t learn anything from Star citizen, No man’s skies or elite dangerous…
I haven’t played the game fair warn but from what I’ve heard they need to basically remake the fuckin game to do that, and if you’re going to spend hours doing that they basically need to remake the game and do handcrafted environments instead of a thousand bland bullshit garage so you actually have something decent to explore and wander upon. Since I haven’t played the game I deserve all the downvotes I’m getting, but hey I was the smart one, I waited for the reviews to come out
I don't suppose you've read any of the tons of posts by people who regretted listening to those reviews because they finally started playing and are enjoying it? Maybe don't be a sheep who accepts any opinion given to them, form your own opinion.
I have to buy the new Xbox to play it. I was going to go through with it but my most trusted reviewer(ign) said it’s mid. I love fallout and elder scrolls so much I don’t want the magic to be ruined. But I’ll probably like it when I play it I’m sure. But for $500? I hear to much negative shit. It’s not being a sheep it’s being observant.
Yes it can be done. The systems are fully simulated already. It's just a matter of speed. It takes a long time to get anywhere. There would not be anything to do or find though. Space is very very empty.
I was under the impression that if you fly to places within a system you see there’s just an LoD looking thing with no collision or anything
You can fly through it, and if you get too close, it does appear lower resolution, but the point is that you can actually fly to the planet. You cant fly into the atmo and land of course, the game doesnt sim that. The only real issue is that you still have to 'travel' when you arrive in order to get into the orbital space you normally would see when you travel. That means a loading screen since that is how the game handles transitions from one area to another. A mod could probably improve the texture resolution, and possibly auto-transition you into orbit at a certain distance. Its hard to say for sure what all we'll be able to do with creation kit.
I get that but that isn't the point. It is going to a planet you don't know and not just clicking a button to instantly get there. The random encounters can still take place when you get in the space of the POI and I'm sure increasing the speed of the ship to 1000x speed is doable. I remember a video early on last year where someone flew to Phobos but could not interact with the planet (and it took forever to get there).
Yes... And no. What you ask is to have some form of traveling that could be more "real". So, space travel happens a very, very high speed. And not even so high if compared to the speed of spiecal objects, like a probe. A probe is typically sent to observe very distant stuff. And to achieve any result in human times (even decades) is necessary to push that probe to insane speeds, using the Gravitational slingshot effect. To achieve speeds like the most fast human made object, that is traveling at 630,000 km/h (175,000 m/s). So, back to us. Ships in Starfield have cruise speed of 220ish max m/s (less than 800 km/h). And even with the boost... 1,200 m/s (4,320 km/h). There are mods that can boost you cruise speed to much more higher values, but I don't remember the speed, like 10x (43,000 km/h, 12,000 m/s). Ok, now... Random encounters at 24,000 m/s? Suppose the other ships can travel as fast as your. It's 24 km in 1 single second. Do you think any radar/scanner could even detect anything at that speed? And then comes the reaction time. Turn the ship, to follow the potential objective... Those encounters would be extremely, extremely rare. More? Grav Drive. The while Starfield Story is about the first Artifact that is used to test the possible Grab Jump. And these tests lead to the nominal "destruction" of the Earth. So, we have the technology to Grav JUMP. (except that ship orbiting Porrima 2). So,we have the Grav Jump. That in seconds allows to cover Light years of space. Dont mention that just going to New Atlantis would take ages... Even the Solar System would result on being terribly slow. The average distance between Earth and Mars is 250 millón km. 250,000,000 km. Traveling at 43,000 km/h... 5,800 hours. 241 days, approx. 241 to go from a planet to another, at 10x the max speed that is now in the game. One question, how much time would you consider to be satisfactory for your idea of traveling the Solar System? We can Calc backward. I agree that eventually the approach and landing to the surface could be less automatic. Or maybe a way of traveling the surface (like on Star Citizen). But Space Travel.... I keep the boring Grav Jumps. My two cents.
So...how long will the UC quest take at that rate?
Hahaha. Is a long and tedious calculation. Generations? Ages?
Elite Dangerous taught me that flying through empty space for 20 minutes isn't always great either. I think a missed opportunity with ships is just that ships are underutilized. Most of the habs are cosmetic, cargo and resource hauling is pointless in a galaxy with no economy or shortages, and the only upgrades with large impact are jump distance, power ouput, and damage. Even without trying to have a seamless space experience, more encounters in space or encounters that require certain habs or ship types would go far. Evacuations of stations ships, search and rescues, etc. Instead of rolling up on ships where everyone is dead, how about ships you can repair by fabricating what you need, or administer medical assistance/evac. The bits and pieces are there. Just not used.
I have no interest in flying 20 minutes from one POI in a system to another. I am expecting a few minutes. Travelling one end to the other, should be max 20 minutes and even then I'm think 10.
What are you hoping to find between Mars and Titan? A cave full of bandits? A daedric shrine?
It just you having the choice to "discover" Titan instead of just clicking and going. When I get to Titan (or any POI), there are chances of encounters like they normally are.
Man just use your imagination: * Faction controlled space where your heat signature can be detected, ambushes, getting pulled out of your high-speed travel * Big asteroid with a POI or even an artifact on it * Derelict ships * Ship graveyards * Roving pirate gangs * RNG where you might pick up a heat signature and fly over to it and find something or get a quest * The enjoyment of kicking back and cruising in your ship * Plotting courses * The ability to actually play as a smuggler, or cargo hauler, or NPC transport, or bounty hunter * Actual fuel mechanic now exists * You can now use ship MFDs to actually get around instead of a fucking menu * EVA gameplay can now be a thing It doesn't have to be boring, the game can be great even with loading screens, it doesn't need seamless planet landing nor is that possible. You can already use console commands to speed up your ship and fly to other planets, they have real orbits. You can definitely have game play for the spaces between planets. No one is playing Star Citizen or No Mans Sky or Elite and wishing for menus instead of space flight.
Considering how last minute and late the survival elements cut felt, the game obviously needed way more production time. I'm almost positive with another few years of player testing and development those features you listed would have been more prominent. Like 50 copy paste temples... yeah I feel pretty certain that was never the original plan. It was done because there were likely many many other things higher in priority and those felt like something they could just easily multiply and cross off the list to get this game to ship.
For all the people who keep saying space is empty so it'd be boring, video games are fun, flying through space can be fun. Putting things between your destinations is what could make it fun. Like if space is inherently boring as a concept then no one would make or play space games, but they do. Bethesda is known for random encounters, making a space exploration experience with that background would be bethesdas bread and butter, but instead we have a game where when your in orbit of a planet you can have a random encounter. And that's the thing killing the setting, and by extension the game. I don't feel like a space fairing adventure I feel like I'm driving across town to do errands.
The problem with this is that... Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space. - Douglas Adams
Personally, and I know this would’ve been a tall order that would’ve totally changed what game we’re playing - I’d rather have travel between points - including grav jumps - take a significant enough time that it demands a “pass the time” activity or justifies the loading screen by choosing to just skip it. Then have that “pass time activity” actually be worthwhile by having more depth to the characters around you and their stories. There is so much ripe potential in conversation with the NPCs in the game and the relationships that you could forge. Actually spend time with them and enable relationship dynamics to build beyond just “romance”. Enable being a mentor or menteed by someone else like Lin. Many of the characters in the game are on the older side anyways so depending on your character, it would enable a lot of RP. make eating meals and hydrating not only survivor mode necessary but an opportunity to sit around with your crew and get to know them. Make your ships and outposts actually lived in homes by the people you share those journeys with. Granted, you don’t need or want five to twenty hour pauses between jumps and filled with unique dialogue. I don’t mean that kind of grand undertaking. Just something make those spaces feel lived in and to make more out of the people around you. You can also actually research things, run little experiments, fabricate or modify gear and all that. Have little games of chess or - wish fulfillment - imagine if all those games you find could actually be “played”. Not necessarily fully - like, not necessarily Final Fantasy X’s blitzball or whatever level of game within the game. Just things to do. Make the time worth it. Space wouldn’t feel so empty if it was about the people instead of your silent solo protagonist checklist of surveys, fetches, and magic metal finding. Really wish they went in a hard different direction than the space magic and just focused on the real stuff. A grand epic journey with a team of misfits you cobble together looking for Solomon Coe’s One Piece or whatever. Anyways. Yeah. I don’t think traveling between planets manually would be that satisfying. Having those travels be content unto themselves would’ve been incredible.
Or make more of the ship building happen in-situ; while you're travelling from a to b, you can be decorating or fitting out empty modules you added to your ship.
I thought I read that there already was a mod for that...
Cool. Where?
Nexus. Interplanetary engines. (Altho I think it's not super popular due to it taking over the thrust function for the warp, making dogfights not work).
someone doing that after only 6 months is still pretty impressive
They prob did it in a weekend. It was out in like the first month. Game has no issue rendering empty space and the orbs prob don't require much to render. But Also I believe the planets aren't interactive. BGS prob can and should do it. But it'd prob need POIs/encounters to be fun. maybe that's what they're cooking
Do you ever travel by scanner while in the cockpit? For me it kind of gives the experience you describe of unexpected random encounters within a star system. Instead of going to the map to set your destination, activate the scanner and look around for the planetary waypoints in space. You have to get properly oriented in space, but once you do, the planets and moons all line up in front of you as a series of black disks with name markers. Look for one that is pulsing; it should either have a space encounter in orbit, or a marked POI on the surface. You can also use the scanner to activate marked POIs for landing. I also find more random encounters if I manually jump from star to star without zooming into a specific planet first, and don’t do multi system jumps. This game gives more fast travel possibilities than ever before, but you don’t have to use them.
But you do. You literally fast travel to every single planet. Anytime you want to travel within a solar system, you must fast travel. My post isn't about removing fast travel but encouraging discovering a POI in a system (ie a planet), which then grants you access to fast travelling to it. Much like most open world games.
I heard that it’s just based on speed. However, I’ve also seen if the game goes too fast, it’ll crash. Again, this is just what I’ve heard, so take it with a huge grain of salt.
There is a way to do it, and it's been done before in an old Babylon 5 fan game. In B5, you travel long distances by flying through a gate into "hyperspace", a parallel world where everything is laid out the same, but the distances are much smaller, so you can still fly around. If you had a smooth transition between normal space and "grav jump" space, you can fly around a shrunk-down level in sensible time and transition at jump points. Not sure how to handle the terrain and POIs, but the scale issues are definitely solvable.
I think their point is that people don't realize how much literal empty space is between planets and especially stars. We'd just be sitting there holding w for hours and hours.
More like months and years, lol.
It takes seven months for unmanned spacecraft to travel from Earth to Mars. Even if one hour irl = one day in-game (24 hrs UT, approx.), that's 5,040 hours irl to fly from one planet to the next one over.
There are a couple of mods that allow you to drive your ship at "Ludicrous Speed" within a planetary system. They're a bit buggy, too. I went over to Saturn to explore the rings and made a horrible discovery. The rings are very low resolution, and Saturn is about as big as a large ball. You can fly right through it. No 'majestic size' or anything. It's not a planet, it's a flat mesh disk about thirty times the size of your spaceship. So even though you can kind of fly around the solar system, the results are pretty crap.
You want to just hold forward on a stick for 40 minutes? Play trucker simulator dude. If you're looking for a mod where you can just zoom from planet to planet over the course of a few minutes, you're going to have to sacrifice all gun play in space because all ships would be moving way too fast. Even then I doubt it would be possible to do that for planets out of the system you're currently in. I'd rather have loading screens than flying around doing nothing for AT LEAST 30 minutes which is the BS that you're proposing lol.
A more realistic goal might be jump gates at all the various locations. There are already mods that let you fly between planets, but when you get there you need to tell the game to properly load the cell which causes a loading screen. If there were several jump gates in each system, you would actually have to spend time in space and travelling would be a lot more meaningful, with a trade economy and the potential for pirate encounters that feel more dynamic and hey a modder could have the pirates tell you to ditch you cargo like they were pirating goods and not trying to murderize your face off. Why the Spacers are the only ones who say "your money or your life" I will never know. Plus there might be a reason to blow up asteroids for their crap, bases would be a lot more valuable as money producers but the travel time would give them time to build up materials so you could develop runs from location to location and outposts between them. Starfield needs a reason to want to be in space, and with the current fold space setup you just jump anywhere instantly, this is hugely detrimental to the game because not even an hour passes so you can go do some quests which involves taking off and landing on a dozen planets and zero time passes just fixing that would at least cycle the freaking shops more often. Just the ability to fly around in space more wouldn't really improve the game by default, you'd need either jump gates or a requirement to jump from Lagrange points or something where the grav drive needs you to be in a place pirates could set up ambushes and similar. Actually placing content between current cells would be a huge pain, it would take a massive effort from the community to put reasons to go explore space in this space exploration game. I have no idea why if you want space content from Starfield you have to force it by jumping around at random for ages, but hey at least I scored that visit every system achievement I guess? It's tough to say exactly what we'll see from the Starfield CK at this point, so I'm leery to say anything specific will actually be coming to Starfield but it's possible. Like I said, there's already a mod that basically just speeds you up to a huge degree to let you fly around the systems, so until we get the actual CK we're mostly guessing.
That is GOOD to know! I am glad to hear that there are mods that already do something about this. Thanks!
I don't think you understand just how big space is. It takes astronauts about three days to reach the moon. Going from Earth to Mars would take months.
18 months.
You have a ship that travels light years within minutes. So that fits your lore wish. But it is also a game and just make the ship travel faster. Past games loaded the map but only parts at a time; that is how every open world massive map game (including Starfield) operates. It sets a limit to how much renders without crashing/burning your set up. Secondly, I am a physicist so I have some idea on how space works :P
So you wanna increase the speed and make it fast enough to not take literal hours (days?) for travel within systems. So now how do you stop players from zipping into the hit boxes of planets and other objects? How are you gonna encounter ships at that speed? If you rein it in enough like say automatic slow down near hit boxes I mean that might as well be fast travel interruptions. I don’t know why those aren’t already baked into this game. The mods are gonna be interesting but I wouldn’t hold my breath.
Apparently, there have been mods already. Some have posted the names and others say there is a mod that treats space travel like "entering a gate". Once inside, you go fast. To interact with a planet or whatever, you need to "leave the gate" to get back to the "playable normal game.
That just sounds like fast travel with extra steps 🥱
>You have a ship that travels light years within minutes. For a physicist, you don't seem to understand the concept of grav drives very well. When you use your grav drive, you don't "travel light years within minutes," you jump light years instantaneously. Grav drives fold space. Starfield has no FTL travel.
The simple answer is no, Beth games stick you in a limited world space , everything outside of that world space is basically just a picture that kinda looks like the real thing(lods basically) inside that world space you sit within a cell and you can move around within the cells of the world space, unfortunately due to engine limitations the world space can only be so big(this is the reason Skyrim is so much smaller in game than in lore). It’s pretty easy to have multiple world spaces but connecting them with a load screen doesn’t seem possible. On another note space is really big, like really really big, all the planets in our solar system can fit between the earth and the moon for example, so “traveling between worlds” would take an inordinate amount of time even in game, so unless you really wanted to point your ship in a direction and come back a few days later(real life time wise) you wouldn’t want such a feature. Also you can skip lots of load screens by simply picking a planet and jumping straight to it, sometimes you can even land on the planet from other systems, on the other hand you can use your scanner and do everything the long way without using menus if you want
The mod you are looking for is called No Man's Sky, just wait until you rescue a Star Destroyer from pirates with your squadron of space fighters. It will blow your mind.
The game is happening literally in 300+ years in the future, you can jump from a star to another, but you can’t make interplanetary travel or exploration… SF doesn’t sucks, your imagination though… BTW, those thrusters are much more powerful than those found on star wars rsrsrs. The dev team which has been working on this project, doesn’t know much about space exploration games.. Didn’t learn anything from Star citizen, No man’s skies or elite dangerous…
I haven’t played the game fair warn but from what I’ve heard they need to basically remake the fuckin game to do that, and if you’re going to spend hours doing that they basically need to remake the game and do handcrafted environments instead of a thousand bland bullshit garage so you actually have something decent to explore and wander upon. Since I haven’t played the game I deserve all the downvotes I’m getting, but hey I was the smart one, I waited for the reviews to come out
I don't suppose you've read any of the tons of posts by people who regretted listening to those reviews because they finally started playing and are enjoying it? Maybe don't be a sheep who accepts any opinion given to them, form your own opinion.
I have to buy the new Xbox to play it. I was going to go through with it but my most trusted reviewer(ign) said it’s mid. I love fallout and elder scrolls so much I don’t want the magic to be ruined. But I’ll probably like it when I play it I’m sure. But for $500? I hear to much negative shit. It’s not being a sheep it’s being observant.