Same. The interface looks kinda cool, but the UX is awful, and the story is boring. The biggest reason it doesn’t capture you IMO is you just jump around from place to place instantaneously right from the start and there’s no obvious reason to just go exploring somewhere. In Skyrim you’re literally on foot and the world slowly expands around you and you become interested in it.
In Skyrim you’re literally on foot and the world slowly expands around you and you become interested in it.
Yeah, and exploration wisey I prefer Oblivion even more. Skyrim feels smaller and less varied, and horses and other fast-travel options are cheaper and easier available.
I got to hear a talk from a level designer who worked on Skyrim at Bethesda who had since left the company, and we needled them with some questions about Starfield and it was interesting at the time but even more interesting in the hindsight of now playing the game.
We kind of intuited through some of their answers that it sounded like they felt that with Skyrim, individual level designers and programmers and people had way more freedom to put stuff into the game; many of the more memorable side quests and interactions were never remotely planned to be in there but were just threwn together by a couple people who stayed overnight recording voices and programming in these quests and interactions and stuff, and it sounded like they did not think that was was the case with Starfield and it was a much more rigid and controlled dev environment, which would explain why so much of the stuff feels like it’s randomly generated stuff you’ve already seen instead of coming across these weird handcrafted things.
They also talked a lot about open world level design in general and talked about how good open world level design is often inspired by Disney world, where they pay super close attention to sightlines where ever you are to make sure there’s always (ideally multiple) interesting things to see and explore. You shouldn’t need a waypoint or hud marker ideally, you should just walk out of one thing, look around and go “hey that looks neat let me go see what’s over there”, discover something magical, walk out and repeat. That kind of feeling made sense and resonated with me at the time and made me think of the new Zelda games and some of the better open world games I’ve played, but now in the context of Starfield, it feels like the loading screens between planets pretty fundamentally broke that cycle, and disrupted that feeling of exploration that Skyrim gave you.
I was at a talk by Bruce Nesmith for a game development club I was in in college shortly after FO4 released (and also shortly after they filed the trademark for Starfield but before we knew anything).
One thing I remember well is him saying how they messed up with the FO4 dialogue options. Every one was “yes, no (for now), sarcastic yes, and more information.” I had a reasonable amount of faith at least that would be fixed in Starfield. It isn’t, though it’s like they thought it being presented on a wheel was the part people were upset with, not the complete lack of choice. In Starfield the choices are identical but they’re now presented in the classic box at the bottom of the screen.
The “Disney effect” is exactly what’s missing from Starfield that makes it so boring. Because of the format of the planets and star systems, you can’t just see something to go to. Discovery is done through a menu, which is incredibly boring.
And on top of that, when you do land on a planet, there’s literally nothing to do and see. It feels like there are no more than 10 unique buildings that get swapped in and out… once you’ve seen them, there’s nothing left to discover.
It would have been infinitely better had it been 1 star system with like 4 planets and 20 moons. Each one with multiple locations on the surface. Instead of this thousands of planets but basically all randomly generated none of them really interesting.
They kept saying that’s realistic because most plants are boring but it’s a RPG not a SIM so that logic doesn’t track.
The best space game is still The Outer Wilds and that game has only about 5 planets with the largest one only been about half a mile across. Scale isn’t everything.
Same. The interface looks kinda cool, but the UX is awful, and the story is boring. The biggest reason it doesn’t capture you IMO is you just jump around from place to place instantaneously right from the start and there’s no obvious reason to just go exploring somewhere. In Skyrim you’re literally on foot and the world slowly expands around you and you become interested in it.
Yeah, and exploration wisey I prefer Oblivion even more. Skyrim feels smaller and less varied, and horses and other fast-travel options are cheaper and easier available.
I got to hear a talk from a level designer who worked on Skyrim at Bethesda who had since left the company, and we needled them with some questions about Starfield and it was interesting at the time but even more interesting in the hindsight of now playing the game.
We kind of intuited through some of their answers that it sounded like they felt that with Skyrim, individual level designers and programmers and people had way more freedom to put stuff into the game; many of the more memorable side quests and interactions were never remotely planned to be in there but were just threwn together by a couple people who stayed overnight recording voices and programming in these quests and interactions and stuff, and it sounded like they did not think that was was the case with Starfield and it was a much more rigid and controlled dev environment, which would explain why so much of the stuff feels like it’s randomly generated stuff you’ve already seen instead of coming across these weird handcrafted things.
They also talked a lot about open world level design in general and talked about how good open world level design is often inspired by Disney world, where they pay super close attention to sightlines where ever you are to make sure there’s always (ideally multiple) interesting things to see and explore. You shouldn’t need a waypoint or hud marker ideally, you should just walk out of one thing, look around and go “hey that looks neat let me go see what’s over there”, discover something magical, walk out and repeat. That kind of feeling made sense and resonated with me at the time and made me think of the new Zelda games and some of the better open world games I’ve played, but now in the context of Starfield, it feels like the loading screens between planets pretty fundamentally broke that cycle, and disrupted that feeling of exploration that Skyrim gave you.
I was at a talk by Bruce Nesmith for a game development club I was in in college shortly after FO4 released (and also shortly after they filed the trademark for Starfield but before we knew anything).
One thing I remember well is him saying how they messed up with the FO4 dialogue options. Every one was “yes, no (for now), sarcastic yes, and more information.” I had a reasonable amount of faith at least that would be fixed in Starfield. It isn’t, though it’s like they thought it being presented on a wheel was the part people were upset with, not the complete lack of choice. In Starfield the choices are identical but they’re now presented in the classic box at the bottom of the screen.
The “Disney effect” is exactly what’s missing from Starfield that makes it so boring. Because of the format of the planets and star systems, you can’t just see something to go to. Discovery is done through a menu, which is incredibly boring.
And on top of that, when you do land on a planet, there’s literally nothing to do and see. It feels like there are no more than 10 unique buildings that get swapped in and out… once you’ve seen them, there’s nothing left to discover.
It would have been infinitely better had it been 1 star system with like 4 planets and 20 moons. Each one with multiple locations on the surface. Instead of this thousands of planets but basically all randomly generated none of them really interesting.
They kept saying that’s realistic because most plants are boring but it’s a RPG not a SIM so that logic doesn’t track.
The best space game is still The Outer Wilds and that game has only about 5 planets with the largest one only been about half a mile across. Scale isn’t everything.