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Comment by walrus01 | Hacker News Reader

> Every planet is 'different', every site on the planets are 'different', but not different in any meaningful way.

This is also the problem with the procedurally generated planets and moons in Starfield. Yeah, there's a whole lot of them, but they're also all populated with the SAME points of interest. You can only see a cryo lab or abandoned radio station so many times before it completely loses any meaning. It's basically the antithesis of the hand crafted world of Skyrim.

It's done so badly that you get points of interest spawning with outdoor food and beverage, folding chairs, umbrellas in icy moons that have no atmosphere and -200C temperature.

The alien creatures in Starfield were at least all designed by hand, and are somehow 'assigned' to specific planets and biomes in a way that's hard coded into the game.

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The procedurally generated planets and moons from Starfield are a bit like the radiant quests of Skyrim, they just pad the game time a bit with procedurally generated content. The main difference is that the radiant quests in Skyrim typically sent you to locations you hadn't visited yet within a hand-crafted world, while in Starfield the world around the locations isn't interesting and the locations themselves start repeating way too quickly.

>This is also the problem with the procedurally generated planets and moons in Starfield. Yeah, there's a whole lot of them, but they're also all populated with the SAME points of interest. You can only see a cryo lab or abandoned radio station so many times before it completely loses any meaning. It's basically the antithesis of the hand crafted world of Skyrim.

Eh with a planetary cluster of that scale they have little choice. And Proc Gen is also in Bethesdas history, its how they built Arena and Daggerfall IIRC.

My issue isnt that you can see the same base on every planet, my issue is largely that when you have reached a sufficiently high level, most planets will be absolutely plastered with pirate bases. The universe goes from empty to full of RNG pirates and mercenaries so damn quickly. They really needed to create more unique encounters, but less of each kind, and spread them out a lot further.

I haven't played Daggerfall, but Arena had hand-crafted main dungeons. There were side quests that took you to proc gen dungeons (that sucked) and a massive proc gen wilderness outside the cities that you never had any reason to go into. The towns were also proc gen, but that mostly amounted to just shuffling around the inns and shops, to give weight to the "ask NPCs for directions" mechanic.

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