Let’s be real. The other option would be a 10 year-old pre-alpha with barely 4 planets and a few moons with like 20 unique POIs total.
I think this is a totally acceptable compromise. And it’s not like you can’t explore more of the planet. It’s just a small loading screen in between. Like going from the overworld to a dungeon in Skyrim.
Yeah, but i don’t get the obsession with these 1000 planets, except that it sounds good. Why not 5 well crafted planets to actually do things. I know everyone likes different things but going from cutscene to cutscene to traverse seems like anti fun.
Yup a thousand empty planets is just empty content for marketing purposes
It is a hybrid approach.
It’s primarily hundreds of hours of hand crafted content that’s seamlessly integrated into a procedurally generated landscape.
So for example there might be a mine colony gone wrong after a disaster.
If you have been mostly interested in playing on desert planets that facility might be loaded into the desert planet. If someone else has been focused on arctic planets, it might be on their arctic planet.
The same handcrafted content, but dynamically integrated into the spaces that each player naturally gravitates to in their own open universe.
This also makes the modern behavior of using a wiki to guide play much more complicated, and encourages self-driven discovery rather than community driven guides.
I think people worried about procedural generation because of how it was done a decade ago might be in for a significant surprise.
People often overlook that aspect of Star Citizen, the planets, albeit few in numbers, are:
- Unique to each other and have detailed moons with varying resourcs
- Incredibly detailed given the real time, smooth transition from space to planet and vice versa.
- Given atmospheres, clouds and weather events.
- Given unique cities and POIs due to the lore.
So yeah, I’m almost as annoyed with the state of SC as the next person but I’m one of the very few people I’ve seen actually respect what has been done and compare that to progress from mainstream games. I’m as astounded by CIGs progress as I am their procrastination and marketing team.
Slightly dissapointing, but it was to be expected I guess. It’s unreasonable to expect Elite or NMS-level seamless exploration out of that engine, and by the looks of it a cell will be around half a skyrim map, so not bad at all.
I wonder what this means for potential planet rovers, though. My suspicion is rhat Bethesda will not release any, as exploring with a vehicle will make the cell feel a lot smaller.
Todd already confirmed vehicles aren’t in. It’d probably be a massive undertaking for DLC, so I suppose they’re leaving them out.
I don’t mind the boundaries, with so many planets I wouldn’t expect them all to be completely populated with actual content, and I have no desire to roam a bare or uniformly generated planet just to be able to say I can walk over the whole thing.
So’s Mass Effect and you most certainly can’t roam entire planets there. Gotta keep that scope realistic for the type of game they’re making. Stretch it super thin so it can pretend to be a space sim, or keep it realistic for a Bethesda title as they always do and have boundaries.
This is something that other games by much smaller companies (like NMS) have already solved. Seems frankly ridiculous that Bethesda can’t fix up their damn engine and their big space game consists entirely out of instanced bubbles, with no way to move between them besides loading screens. Even within your owns ship there are loading screens.
I guess I’m one of the few Fallout/Skyrim fan that isn’t excited at all about this game. The minute they said they would be using the same engine for Starfield I lost all interest. Elder Scrolls was their baby so the passion was there, the Fallout IP is just so whimsically interesting that it draws me regardless.
Bethesda making a generic space-exploration game is just so bland and uninteresting. Maybe I’ll be proven wrong, but from the stills and brief clips I saw; it’s “Bethesda game with space paint” and that’s all I can see.
What are you even talking about? Starfield does not use the ‘same’ game engine as Fallout 4, and even if it did would you have the technical know how to explain why that would be a bad thing?
The problem isn’t the engine itself, it’s that Bethesda hasn’t given it the attention it needs.
Unreal Engine 5, for example, is built from the original Unreal Engine. But there has been so much work put into it that it’s nearly impossible to tell. Meanwhile, the creation engine literally has some of the same issues that the Gambryo engine had back during Morrowind.
To Bethesda’s credit, this isn’t entirely their fault. There’s a reason that proprietary engines have been dying out in favor of engines like Unreal, and that’s because maintaining and improving game engines is incredibly time consuming and expensive. And unless you’re directly profiting off of your engine, like Epic does, you don’t have a massive incentive to endlessly polish it. Doing so is time you could be spending working on your next game, which you do directly profit off of.
Personally, I want Bethesda to keep using the Creation Engine, or whatever they turn it into next, because of its incredible mod support. However, it’s nowhere near as polished or advanced as other engines, and understandably probably never will be. There’s really no easy solution imo.
The same engine ? Of course not… It most likely serves as base, as it should, but there’s no reason to think it is the exact same engine from Fallout. It can’t be, since it’s a different game with different systems… even just from the visuals you can easily tell it’s modern. Why are you worried about this ?
