The Starfield section of the Xbox extended show was boring: a Pete Hines interview. He mentioned two new things: - we can craft ship parts and not just buy them - we can steal ship (suggested, not clearly mentioned like that).
I'm a bit skeptical about the ship parts crafting, because it's not a section in the research screen and everything came from companies in the ship building demo in the trailer.
IGN will release an interview they did with Todd once the showcase is over too. They apparently have juicy stuff to share. Maybe we will get more precisions in that.
Old article, but I'm definitely hoping that we can bring our romantic interest on the ship so we can go around for adventures!
It will probably be follow Fallout 4's system, the romance options were a subset of the companions in it and you had to bring them along to raise their affinity for them to like you and unlock the "romance" option.
Todd's IGN interview resumé: - They will probably deep-dive on how they generated the planets later (procedural generation is part of it but as Todd mention, they have been used that for years), but the game has the most handcrafted content of any games they have made. - Lots of iceballs in space, so they asked themselves "what is fun about an iceball?" when designing them. - It will be oblivious what is handcrafted and what is procedural.
- They want their space combat to feel unique (from existing space sims) and they want it to be slow (Todd used FTL and MechWarrior as examples/inspiration, it's not supposed to be twitchy). - Disabling ship, boarding, stealing, smuggling all confirmed. Quest(s) related to docking/boarding actions.
- Total backgrounds ~20 (Todd isn't sure at 100%, they removed/changed some). Comes with dialogue options.
- New Atlantis is the biggest city in the game and the biggest city BSG has ever built. The game has 4 main cities (NA, Akila, Neon and ?) - Also space stations are confirmed
- Main Story length will be longer their usual 25 hours (~20% more, they are still fine tuning it, could be toward 40 hours long). - Factions quest line confirmed
- Constellation was described as NASA + Indiana Jones + League of Extraordinary Gentleman and the artifacts are referred to as "Old Earth" artifacts (or they are looking for Old Earth stuff and discovered something new, a bit unclear).
- Confirmed no manual space-to-atmo-to-ground flying, since space and ground are two different "realities" in the game engine (early design decisions).
- Lines of dialogues now at 200k (Skyrim had 60k, Fallout 4 had 111k with a voiced protag).
So with me (re)playing Fallout 4, I have some more thoughts about Starfield now.
Todd saying the game was going to support smuggling and the lore beyond Neon (only place Aurora is legal and they produce it), I think this game will have drugs like Fallout does, but we will be able to smuggle them instead of just getting addicted and we won't be able to sell to whomever. We might have to find secret labs who produce the stuff (not called Aurora) too. Or maybe we will be able to produce some of them via our outposts.
--- I'm starting to think the research/crafting windows in the gameplay video were placeholders. The mods were all listed with I and II, but the way they change the weapons looks is very similar to Fallout 4 weapon/armor mods (which I had totally forgotten about). I think Starfield will have a very similar system for the mods with actual names instead of generic I at release, but this time we have to research to unlock the recipes before crafting the item (like in MEA).
--- The gun combat looks a lot like Fallout 4 now that I re-experienced it. Also, I saw the Fallout 4 "favorite wheel" in that gameplay trailer.
--- I wonder if we can make pipe guns in Starfield or make self-repairs with duck tape in our ship...
Looks like it could end up being pretty cool. I just hope all the resource gathering and outpost building can be simplified. While I think it's awesome to have all the building and customization options available for those who love doing that, I'd really just love being able to put down prebuild outpost and save a ton of time
Confirmed no manual space-to-atmo-to-ground flying, since space and ground are two different "realities" in the game engine (early design decisions)
That's a bummer but was to be expected. The NMS community can relax now, they'll still have this cool feature in their favorite game. (There is a lot of resentment in the NMS community for some reason over the constant comparison, people are weird...)
So I assume there won't be any flying over the surface of planets either. I hope whatever vehicles we can use to traverse these big ass planets will be fun.
I wonder how big the maps of the planets really are. In NMS the planets are so big it would take you weeks (or years?!) in real life to cross them. I don't think anybody has ever done that. And there really is no point to it either. So I'd be fine with just exploring a large zone and then having to fly to another point on the planet that's another large zone in maybe a different biome.
Thanks for all the info I'm too lazy to gather myself. I watched the show again yesterday on my PC screen with headphones (phone screens suck!) and I'm even more excited now. Friend claims to have recognized several BioWare voice actors. He even said at which point and I couldn't make out any of them, lol. I'm bad with voices though. But take with a grain of salt. He says he heard Jennifer Hale, Jo Wyatt, Raphael Sbarge (Kaidan), guy who voices Wrex, guy who voiced Javik. I have no doubt that the voice acting will be great in any case.
Confirmed no manual space-to-atmo-to-ground flying, since space and ground are two different "realities" in the game engine (early design decisions)
That's a bummer but was to be expected. The NMS community can relax now, they'll still have this cool feature in their favorite game. (There is a lot of resentment in the NMS community for some reason over the constant comparison, people are weird...)
So I assume there won't be any flying over the surface of planets either. I hope whatever vehicles we can use to traverse these big ass planets will be fun.
I wonder how big the maps of the planets really are. In NMS the planets are so big it would take you weeks (or years?!) in real life to cross them. I don't think anybody has ever done that. And there really is no point to it either. So I'd be fine with just exploring a large zone and then having to fly to another point on the planet that's another large zone in maybe a different biome.
Thanks for all the info I'm too lazy to gather myself. I watched the show again yesterday on my PC screen with headphones (phone screens suck!) and I'm even more excited now. Friend claims to have recognized several BioWare voice actors. He even said at which point and I couldn't make out any of them, lol. I'm bad with voices though. But take with a grain of salt. He says he heard Jennifer Hale, Jo Wyatt, Raphael Sbarge (Kaidan), guy who voices Wrex, guy who voiced Javik. I have no doubt that the voice acting will be great in any case.
I have no idea why people compare Starfield to NMS so much. Yes, both are space sims, but the gameplay loop is different. Starfield is a lot more like Star Citizen gameplay-loop wise (minus the persistent multiplayer universe and Star Citizen is a lot more into being realistic).
Going by the trailer I will say no flying in the atmosphere. It's all auto-landing/take-off. It's also unclear if there are ground vehicles, but there was one in a concept arts so they did think about them. Going by what Todd said, the planets will be spherical, but I don't think they will have realistic size.
There is no Hale or Wyatt in the trailer. I don't hear Wrex either, Sbarge is a maybe. Javik is correct thought: the NC Def commander sound a lot like Ike Amadi (and it's not his first BSG game). The "mine boss" is Sumalee Montano (American female Inquisitor in DAI, but I mostly knew her from GW2). The rich dude with a piece of artifact is Stephen Russell (aka half the male voices of Skyrim and Fallout 4). The Constellation dude who talks to "mine boss" sound like Oblivion Redguard's voice actor: Micheal Mack. The very first voice in the trailer is Todd Howard, he often has uncredited roles in his games. I'm not quite sure who are the Freestar Collective and Crimson Fleet "commanders" voice actors. The filter for Vasco (the robot) makes it very hard to ID his VO.
I'm pretty sure I heard the Constellation lady voice somewhere, it's not Jo Wyatt or Hale, and it's been bugging me that I can't put a name on her.
Wes Johnson will be in it, he never missed a BSG games since Morrowind. Linda Carter too. Bethesda reuse their voice actors way more than BioWare.
The game will have more than 300 voice actors so it will most probably have BioWare ones...and 300 actors was when they had 150 dialogue lines last year.
So yeah, the whole planetary exploration and "landing anywhere" aspect has me more and more confused at this point. IMO, there are 3 possibilities:
Best case: Planets are fully realized. We just pick a landing spot. There will be a Mass Effect: Andromeda style landing cutscene and then we can explore the planet from there. It will theoretically be possible to go all the way around a planet and arrive back at the starting point eventually.
Middle case: We can land anywhere on the planet. Once we do that (outside of a handcrafted/dedicated landing zone, which we can find by scanning), the game will automatically generate a map for us, depending on the biome, maybe some course geography settings (so if we choose a spot near a coastline, that will be there) and some other pre-defined parameters. That map may be generated on and on as we explore or it may just end at some point ("You have left the range of the scanners Commander. Now I've gotta bring you back." ).
Worst case: When Todd said "you can land anywhere on the planet" he actually meant "anywhere your scanner finds something", meaning we would be more confined to certain locations on the planets which are curated. I doubt this is the case (if it is, shitstorm incoming for Bethesda) but in order to keep my expectations in check I will consider this possibility as well. The reason I am bringing it up is because in the showcase Video, you can see the "land" button available everywhere on Jemison but in the beginning, New Atlantis is there already as a landing zone. Do we really know that "land" doesn't just still refer to that even though they have rotated away from it? (see 13:14 in the video) And then, later, when they show the same planetary view later for the moon Chawla and when they have no landing area on the planet, there is also no "land" button (see at 13:22) It would go quite a bit against what Todd said but then, Todd has phrased things weirdly in the past as well. The montage at the end also certainly implies a lot of free exploration but then, it is still a lot of implication in this so I'll wait and see.
Last Edit: Jun 15, 2022 14:30:05 GMT by AnDromedary
So yeah, the whole planetary exploration and "landing anywhere" aspect has me more and more confused at this point. IMO, there are 3 possibilities:
Best case: Planets are fully realized. We just pick a landing spot. There will be a Mass Effect: Andromeda style landing cutscene and then we can explore the planet from there. It will theoretically be possible to go all the way around a planet and arrive back at the starting point eventually.
Middle case: We can land anywhere on the planet. Once we do that (outside of a handcrafted/dedicated landing zone, which we can find by scanning), the game will automatically generate a map for us, depending on the biome, maybe some course geography settings (so if we choose a spot near a coastline, that will be there) and some other pre-defined parameters. That map may be generated on and on as we explore or it may just end at some point ("You have left the range of the scanners Commander. Now I've gotta bring you back." ).
Worst case: When Todd said "you can land anywhere on the planet" he actually meant "anywhere your scanner finds something", meaning we would be more confined to certain locations on the planets which are curated. I doubt this is the case (if it is, shitstorm incoming for Bethesda) but in order to keep my expectations in check I will consider this possibility as well. The reason I am bringing it up is because in the showcase Video, you can see the "land" button available everywhere on Jemison but in the beginning, New Atlantis is there already as a landing zone. Do we really know that "land" doesn't just still refer to that even though they have rotated away from it? (see 13:14 in the video) And then, later, when they show the same planetary view later for the moon Chawla and when they have no landing area on the planet, there is also no "land" button (see at 13:22) It would go quite a bit against what Todd said but then, Todd has phrased things weirdly in the past as well. The montage at the end also certainly implies a lot of free exploration but then, it is still a lot of implication in this so I'll wait and see.
You need to set a landing target first (there is a button for it at the bottom of the "map"). That's why there is no landing button for Chawla, despite it having a structure on it, it's not selected as a landing target.
You need to set a landing target first (there is a button for it at the bottom of the "map"). That's why there is no landing button for Chawla, despite it having a structure on it, it's not selected as a landing target.
Ah, good catch. That was hidden under the youtube interface.
But still, that button doesn't fully answer the question for me, how it's gonna work exactly.
I hope we can really land anywhere on any planet and that it loads in a full planet but which is small in scale. So you can walk in a circle back to your starting point in, say, an hour. I expect everyone to find the same stuff in the same spot on each planet. Otherwise I don't see how bases and buildings added by mods would work if the terrain just generates around the player and stretches out indefinitely.
I REALLY hope there is vehicles even though I didn't like the Nomad in Andromeda because it required a certain type of terrain. No dense vegetation as a result except for the one that is specifically on foot exploration, forgot the planet name. The jungle one. MEA's maps were boring. Nothing to see and do between point A and B. Terrible design imo, but I digress.
The vehicles in NMS are beyond useless because they are so slow... But I very much want a vehicle for the barren planets to get around quickly. It would be super weird if there weren't one. While I rarely use mounts like horses in games because it gets in the way of looting and the immersion of close up exploration, I want to get to my outposts and mining spots quickly.
Putting down fast travel beacons anywhere or at least having one to your base would work but that would be awkward and unimmersive if the only option. That said, I fast travel in NMS as much as possible between my bases. But that's different because there is NOTHING of interest to see on the way. Every inch of a planet looks the same, no matter where on it you are. That's the major drawback of the algorithm of NMS. It gets boring fast, I usually only spend seconds on a planet because one planet of a certain biome looks like the other for the most part.
I think the comparison to NMS comes from what people were hoping would be in Starfield as well, such as full space flight and manual landing. I mean, it WOULD have been amazing to have NMS's seamless flight transition in a realistic AAA RPG but that was never going to happen. Would have meant Star Citizen scope but actually finished and fully playable. Yeah, no.
The 1000 planets thing DOES kind of beg the question how it's going to be handled. And the only game that has a shitton of planets to explore is NMS. Or at least that's the only one I've ever played. Don't know if Elite Dangerous let's you land on every planet. But yeah, the two games are about different things. Or rather, NMS is so shallow still that Starfield will be a completely different beast. I like NMS and it's impressive what this small dev team has pulled off in terms of procedural generation, but it seriously lacks interesting things to do long term. Maybe that's why the NMS community is so defensive. Starfield will be everything that NMS is not except for the free flying. But NMS has its own art style and atmosphere going and is a nice chill experience when you just want to relax. So I don't think Starfield is going to snatch up all NMS players. Will soak up many Star Citizen fans though, I'm sure. But without proper space flight at least it isn't totally obsolete after Starfield comes out, lol.
Sorry for the rambling...
Last Edit: Jun 15, 2022 15:53:12 GMT by Kappa Neko
I really doubt we'll see vehicles or at least I doubt we'll see any that are significantly faster than walking speed.
Unless they have seriously overhauled the engine, basically remade it, I don't think Bethesda's way of handling environments could handle it. IIRC, Ebthesda's environments are generated in cells, which are little chunks of the world that are streamed in and out at various levels of detail depending on your location. So if your location changes too quickly (e.g. when you are driving a fast vehicle), I think the engine would have trouble streaming properly.
So yea, I am not keeping my hopes up for high speed vehicles.
As for the maps, I think I'd rather have bigger planets that we cannot just go "around" than small ones that we can just circumnavigate in an hour or less. That would feel somewhat silly to me, like we are the little prince or something.
It's good that Todd confirmed that you can't manually land early so people can temper their expectations. So far Bethesda is doing a solid job of not letting the hype carry the game unlike say CDPR with Cyberpunk.
I hope we can really land anywhere on any planet and that it loads in a full planet but which is small in scale. So you can walk in a circle back to your starting point in, say, an hour. I expect everyone to find the same stuff in the same spot on each planet. Otherwise I don't see how bases and buildings added by mods would work if the terrain just generates around the player and stretches out indefinitely.
I don't think the game will procedurally generate land during gameplay, even Daggerfall didn't do that despite being 99% procedurally generated. BSG procedurally generate maps during development and then goes over to put handscrafted stuff on it (or smooth them out as Todd say). That's how they have been doing their game maps since Oblivion.
As for size, I expect some variance there. Moons should be smaller than a full planet and one hour might be short in some cases. Also, BSG has always used reduced scale since Morrowind. For example, Skyrim's map was 14.8 square miles in-game, but in the lore it's ~125k square miles. So I don't expect the planets/moons to have realistic size at all. Actually, I'm not sure if there is a game that does real life scale off planets. I know that Star Citizen use a ~1:6 scale. Astroneer's planets aren't that big (20-30 minutes to go around), but still big enough to get lost...
As for landing anywhere, I'm sure there are limits, some places are not going to be stable enough to land: mountain top, buildings, forest canopy, body of water. Actually, the landing gears during the shipbuilding section of the trailer have some interesting labels/descriptions that might suggest some might be more accurate than others to land near the requested landing target.
Post by therevanchist25 on Jun 18, 2022 17:50:36 GMT
Personally, I find it highly amusing that Bioware is apparently the only studio that can't achieve procedural generation technology. Because I feel like Starfield is literally what Bioware wasted 5 and half years trying to make, and Bethesda will have started, and finished the whole process within the same 7 year span that Bioware had.
Mind you, this isn't exactly what I want Mass Effect to be, but I feel like this very much resembles what Bioware was trying to do originally.
I think Starfield was in development further than that and besides, I believe procedural planets were really tough to implement. I mean No Man's Sky had an entire engine dedicated to that and even they struggled mightily with it at first.
Personally, I find it highly amusing that Bioware is apparently the only studio that can't achieve procedural generation technology. Because I feel like Starfield is literally what Bioware wasted 5 and half years trying to make, and Bethesda will have started, and finished the whole process within the same 7 year span that Bioware had.
Mind you, this isn't exactly what I want Mass Effect to be, but I feel like this very much resembles what Bioware was trying to do originally.
Bethesda has procedural tech for land, and other things like NPCs, dungeons and quests, since they worked on Daggerfall in the early/mid-90s. Even Arena might have had its landmass procedurally created considering its size, but I'm more aware of what they did for DF.
When they switched engine, Morrowind only had its height map generated from what I remember, but by Oblivion it included natural overland content as well. Skyrim/Fallout3/4 landmass were all generated that way too. It doesn't feel super procedurally generated because the environmental artists smooth things over and add handcrafted content here an there. They are doing the same thing with Starfield, you can listen to Todd's IGN interview which is available a few posts back, he talks about it.
I'm currently playing Fallout 4 and when you get near the map limits you can see the repeating "patterns" a lot more clearly as those areas were no as smoothed over. Starfield will have have larger "unsmoothed" ground area.
They had to develop more tech for the space part of the game, ground is just the same thing they have been doing since Oblivion.
Personally, I find it highly amusing that Bioware is apparently the only studio that can't achieve procedural generation technology. Because I feel like Starfield is literally what Bioware wasted 5 and half years trying to make, and Bethesda will have started, and finished the whole process within the same 7 year span that Bioware had.
Mind you, this isn't exactly what I want Mass Effect to be, but I feel like this very much resembles what Bioware was trying to do originally.
Personally, I find it highly amusing that Bioware is apparently the only studio that can't achieve procedural generation technology. Because I feel like Starfield is literally what Bioware wasted 5 and half years trying to make, and Bethesda will have started, and finished the whole process within the same 7 year span that Bioware had.
Mind you, this isn't exactly what I want Mass Effect to be, but I feel like this very much resembles what Bioware was trying to do originally.
This is what Andromeda should've been.
Should've? I wouldn't say that. A thousand barren planets with nothing to do except build settlements/scan flora and fauna is exactly what I don't want to be doing in Mass Effect personally, at least not as the thing that's going to drive the majority of your playtime hours. If I wanted to do that crap I would just play No Man's Sky. Also, this is Bethesda, so the companions are probably gonna be ass, again, not something Andromeda should have emulated, despite the ones in Andromeda being bad already. Combat is typical garbage Fallout 4 combat. If there's one thing Andromeda did well it was that, so again, not something to emulate. Storyline about ancient alien artifacts and uncovering mysteries? Andromeda did in fact do that, it was just lackluster. But again, this is Bethesda, their story writing is typically not that good either, As bad as Andromeda's plot was, Skyrim's plot is a literal meme it's so terrible. Let's not forget their newest release, 76 literally didn't even have human npcs and told the entire story through fucking holotapes. That's as bad as it gets imo. Honestly the only thing from this game that I personally would want to see Mass Effect adopt would be some form of space combat and immersive space traversal.
Should've? I wouldn't say that. A thousand barren planets with nothing to do except build settlements/scan flora and fauna is exactly what I don't want to be doing in Mass Effect personally, at least not as the thing that's going to drive the majority of your playtime hours. If I wanted to do that crap I would just play No Man's Sky. Also, this is Bethesda, so the companions are probably gonna be ass, again, not something Andromeda should have emulated, despite the ones in Andromeda being bad already. Combat is typical garbage Fallout 4 combat. If there's one thing Andromeda did well it was that, so again, not something to emulate. Storyline about ancient alien artifacts and uncovering mysteries? Andromeda did in fact do that, it was just lackluster. But again, this is Bethesda, their story writing is typically not that good either, As bad as Andromeda's plot was, Skyrim's plot is a literal meme it's so terrible. Let's not forget their newest release, 76 literally didn't even have human npcs and told the entire story through fucking holotapes. That's as bad as it gets imo. Honestly the only thing from this game that I personally would want to see Mass Effect adopt would be some form of space combat and immersive space traversal.
Mass Effect wasnt open world game. Despite BW efforts to transition their game concept to that. The difference is that the open world RPG a la Bethesda uses the world as the gameplay. The story is just there to guide the player around thenpoints of interest. NMS does this also, but of course the procgen doesnt deliver predictable vistas and interesting sights they tie the story to game activities and loot progression since more loot allows you to do wider range of activities.
Post by Pounce de León on Jun 22, 2022 12:04:50 GMT
And since the FO76 holotapes came up: That narrative element reminded me of the collectible notes in DAI, at some point I stopped bothering about them.I doubt I would have bothered for the holotapes either.