*S*T*A*R*F*I*E*L*D* / Starfield

It can get dust on the fan but nothing a low powered hover hose can't sort.

Getting a bit hyped for this! I have a huge backlog again though, had managed to get through it during lockdown. Need a new virus. Or early retirement.

This sounds terrible, but not sure whether we have the most recent XBox to play it on. I think my youngest might have one, but he's mainly a PC gamer. He won't notice if I borrow it.

Darn it I think I might have convinced myself to give in and start a Gamepass sub for this… CD keys XB Live with the £1 upgrade to GP seems to be cheapest “legit” method?

Yep

That's cool.


Also, Pete Hines confirms the range of planetary exploration you can do: (All of it.)

Settle down, Beavis.

Yes muted browns and greys are dull but it's also realistic. I'm certainly hoping there is variety in atmospheric conditions, weather and terrain but I don't need garish colours and artificial colour. Desolate places can be beautiful.

For example I found the art design in Outer Worlds quite off-putting. I know the tone of that game was less serious but it didn't feel particularly 'space-y'.

Follow up question: Will I find anything

Nope

Walk on, bored explorer

The main problem with exploration of generated content is that developers seem to think they have to randomly and evenly spread out all points of interest. It might seem exciting at first to find new stuff behind every corner, but once you've seen enough of the different types of points of interest that they start repeating themselves, you kind of lose the motivation to explore any further at all.

It would be much better to cluster a few points of interest together and spread those clusters out far more. Then also give each cluster a variance that makes it different from the previous cluster. Granted, this is much more complex to achieve and actually needs some meaningful relations between points of interest and clusters of them.

Maybe I'm just spoiled from playing Dwarf Fortress and expect a similar level of interesting generated content to explore that simply cannot be achieved by a huge team of professional developers.

This was the reason why I got bored of No Man’s Sky so quickly. “Oh, it’s one of those thingies in a purple dip”, “Oh, it’s one of those other thingies on top of a beige rock”, “Oh, it’s another one of those first thingies in a purple dip, but with less grass than before”…
There was no actual exploration of any real worth, no actual new and captivating scenes to unfold, just the deck of cards reshuffled in ever so slightly a new way each time.

I actually suspect Starfield will be even less than the sum of the aforementioned parts.

I’d like to think they’ve learned from No Mans Sky a bit.

Hand crafted then copy pasted 100 times

Do you reckon there’s an Easter egg planet that’s just Skyrim? And you can just go there, freak everyone out and then shoot them all to bits.

Maybe not in the base game but there will be mods galore for this for all your space based sci-fi needs.


Wonder if I can build a TARDIS .. ?