Starfield’s 1k planets may be leap for game design | Hacker News Reader

Starfield’s 1k planets may be leap for game design

nytimes.com

17 pointsbookofjoe42 comments

I don't see how. I haven't played Starfield yet, but from what I've read, all the planets are pretty much the same with a few textures and biomes swapped out and a few random encampments added. You can't even explore the entire planet, just whatever the game engine decides is a planet.

No Man's Sky already did the "trillions of planets" thing, and with that game you could seamlessly go from planet to planet, where in Starfield, it's all loading screens.

Seems like a paid, propped up article, to promote a mediocre game.

Yeah like maybe it was anti astroturfing, but I read that many people found themselves in the same exact buildings multiple times throughout the main quest and side quests… which is something Mass Effect did more than 10 years ago.

I cant think of why this article exists unless it’s an extremely naive reporter or an advertisement

Luke Stephenson reported this in his review, and if you are familiar with his work, he's very thorough and not particularly biased against Bethesda or these types of games.

As someone who has 20 hours in it, this game is nothing like No Man’s Sky. It actually has a story, way more story on just three worlds than the entirety of NMS.

Absolutely, but the claim of the article is "Starfield’s 1,000 Planets May Be One Giant Leap for Game Design" which it's not, as parent points out.

You could say it's a step to combine the idea of "massive worlds with 1000s of planets" together with story and heavy RPG elements, but that's different.

I’m not sure I buy people’s surprise that it’s not 1000s of world filled with unique content. How exactly would that be done? LLMs? Not available when they started making this game. Anyone with even the most limited of game design and/or programming knowledge would know it’s going to be 10 really well fleshed out worlds and 1000 seed based procedurally generated worlds. And the procedural generated worlds are great for firefights and resource mining.

Why do you think people are surprised by the fact that the thousands of worlds are, in fact, quite same-y? I haven't heard or seen anyone actually be surprised by that. Seems like it's meeting everyone's incredibly toned-down expectations.

A lot of YouTubers are complaining about exactly that, that many of the thousands of worlds feel “same-y”. I don’t care, I’m having a great time with the game.

Wishing for diversity of planets / environments isn't really the same as expecting it.

I wonder why would they be. Skyrim also had pretty much samey dungeons. Same textures, same puzzle, and same route back from boss...

Why would new game be any different...

> not 1000s of world filled with unique content.

Because then it's not a game with "leap in game design"

NMS holds no interest for someone like me. No story, no drama, unrealistic graphics. This is nothing like that.

Theme parks vs sandboxes.

NMS has added some story and it’s really good if you like to role play for a lack of a better word.

Like with every Bethesda game I’ll wait about a year for bug fixes and mods to fix the game then will try starfield.

Hopefully it would also run better since 4090 can’t get 60 native at 4K and 3060 can’t get 60 at 1080p low native.

I think the difference is following a set story vs making your own story. I prefer the latter...

Blistering barnacles

Yeah, Stanfield doesn't even guarantee consistency like NMS does. Already a couple screen shots around with different encampments for different players on the same terrain/landing site.

SF is also limited to short distance travel from the landing site.

How many people walk around a planet in NMS? Or even fly that much around a single planet? I usually just jump around to a few points of interest then I’m off to the next planet.

NMS provides continuity, and starfield does not. Very different experience. Clip-show of starfield ruins immersion a lot. As example, if you want to go from surface to space, in NMS you summon your ship, go inside, takeoff, fly. With starfield you just select destination, press X and you're there (even if destination is on other planet). At most you can teleport to your ship

They're so different games though that a different experience is warranted.

People play NMS for the seamless planet-to-planet experience and exploring things with you ship.

Starfield is played for it's story and RPG elements, same as every BGS game, not for aimless driving around in a ship from/to space.

I've played Starfield for maybe 20 hours so far, and I'm happy I don't have to manually take off and land, would have been too annoying.

Although it would have been fun to have the option, but it doesn't take away from the main features of the game for me.

I would trade both and ten more of similar titles to experience Outer Wilds one more time

> You can't even explore the entire planet

You can't explore seamlessly, engine limitation (basically Morrowind engine with layers upon layers of new features/fixes/bugs). You can land on a different spot and continue exploring. Whole exploration aspect is clearly heavily inspired by No Man's Sky, done a bit differently. Some aspects are way worse, some a better. Besteda has much bigger team and it shows (doesn't mean its that good, just there are many things to do). No Man's Sky turned out (eventually) fantastic for such small team.

Elite: Dangerous has 400 billion star systems - that's star systems

Each of those systems has at least one star, or black hole.

There can be zero planets, or other stars or black holes, or a combination of stars, black holes, or planets and their moons.

The makeup of each star system is dependent upon various origin parameters, e.g. star type, combined system mass, where the system is in relation to the centre of the simulated Milky Way galaxy.

Elite's simulated Milky Way galaxy is based on actual scientific theory at the time it was designed and generated. It is an incredible achievement. I don't understand why NYT is making those claims about Starfield.

I think starfield missed the mark for me as it breaks the ethos of see that mountain and go there planet side. I don't mind instanced planets but the loading land masses around the ship for expiration is sad when it could have been seamless. However, what No Man's sky doesn't do is item persistence across the entire universe. This has implications for the 10 sandwiches that just put in a toilet on one planet. Those sandwiches will still be there after exploring 30 more planets. This leads me to believe why it might be such a CPU heavy game.

>I don't understand why NYT is making those claims about Starfield.

They were likely compensated to do so.

See: http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

Definitely a paid/hype article. People has been doing the "lots of automated generation" stuff for a long time. It won't work because if there is one thing our human brain is good at, it is pattern recognition. And no matter how advanced or detailed the generation is, we will see the pattern and get bored with it.

Even something as sophisticated as the LLMs get monotonous really quick after a while.

The article addresses the failure of No Man's Sky's procedural content generation. The point of the article is that we're a generation ahead of that now in game design.

Starfield's procedural generation is not a generation ahead. It's worse.

From everything I've read, it seems that Starfield is a generation or three behind that on NMS.

They're two very different games. Yes, they're both in and about space, but that's it when it comes to the similarities. Starfield is a story-driven RPG game, NMS is a different beast.

You should try it. Starfield is the best Bethesda since New Vegas at least, for the story, and since morrowind for the liberty,imho.

I'll take you all back to 1986. Starflight was released. 270 star systems and 800+ planets. In Starflight, you have the freedom to visit any random planet, discover a collection of artifacts, select just one artifact to take, depart from the planet, spend an additional 20 hours exploring various other planets, engaging in battles, saving your progress, and more. Afterward, when you return to the same planet, you will encounter everything exactly as you left it, with the cluster of artifacts still intact, except for the one you previously took. You can't even do this in Starfield - perhaps from a glitch or something else, scenes can reset, loot can respawn.

Or go back to 1984, when the original Elite had 2000+ planets -- running on a 48K machine!

Make a little stop off in 1996, when Elder Scrolls: Daggerfall was procedurally generated and the map took 70 hours to cross. Buggy, empty-seeming and many issues with persistence.

Procedural generation has always been Bethesda's goal. They pre-cooked the generation for a while instead of doing it real-time in pursuit of quality. They're just returning to their roots.

Back when text adventures were popular, games used to brag and publish ads on how many rooms the game had. It didn't matter and still doesn't.

Everyone mentioning Elite, NMS are forgetting spore, which I think came out in 2010?

Let's give some credit to one of the better games ever made, Star Control 2, which had 3000+ planets and a rich story and wonderfully-written characters. I'm surprised no one has brought it up yet.

It's worth noting that because the authors (Fred Ford and Paul Reiche) are such great people, the game has been freely available for a long time now.

https://sc2.sourceforge.net/

SC2 is one of the top-10 games ever created

When I played No Mans Sky close to launch the planets got boring fast. When I played Fallot 4 this weekend I kept getting funneled to the same places I had been over and over with almost no change. It soured me on playing Starfield even though it’s basically free. Maybe I’ll get it in 5 or 10 years when it’s feature full. But after x number of planets you start to notice the similarities and not the differences.

If you have game pass I suggest you try it. Give it a couple hours, just mess around with side quests and do a few constellation missions. The story is good, which is all that matters to me, at least.

This reminds me of another game, Squadron 42, which is a standalone single-player game set in the same universe as Star Citizen, I haven’t seen any new live demo for a long time.

Sigh... world is just bonkers. Time for a thermonuclear war.

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