Hacker News Reader

Comment by adoxyz | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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"

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.

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 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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com