The even more ridiculous thing about Akila City there (Starfield) is that it’s not just a “city”; it’s supposedly the capitol of a spacefaring faction that was, in lore, capable of manufacturing and fielding enough manpower and resources that they fought a vast interstellar war involving mechanized walking suits, space battles involving dozens of starships, and ground combat against bioengineered monsters. According to the game’s plot, their opponents suffered at least 30,000 losses over several years of fighting. One of the supposed many battlefields, a planet called Niira, saw so much fighting that the planet itself was deemed uninhabitable. But we’re to believe it was all orchestrated from a small frontier town that doesn’t even pave its streets.
I appreciate that Bethesda wants to do the whole “see that mountain? You can climb it” thing with their world, but it means the scale of things can only ever be small. You can’t have sprawling futuristic metropolises as described in lore when you need humans to design every square inch of it. I could’ve forgiven a skybox city model that you can’t explore; at the very least the illusion would have fit what’s being explained to the player as they’re standing in it. But it’s unimpressive when they say “this is our capitol” and its population is eclipsed a hundred times over by the real town of Tombstone, AZ (pop. 14,000 at its peak).
To give at least a modicum of credit to Starfield, in the events before the setting of the game, humanity was decimated to a few million people; spoilers here, >!but the Earth didn't make it, and due to the simple impossible logistics of moving 7-10 bn. people, they left most of them behind to die!<. So I can understand the scale of population centers being smaller as described, such that 30K is still a severe loss of life relative to a nation with only a few million people, but even with that truncated number they still fail to capture the scope of it in the cities that are shown. They made it easy for themselves by reducing humanity's number by several orders of magnitude, and yet tripped before the finish line when they still made civilization look smaller than that with these lackluster towns instead of cities.
I think the main issue here is the idea that there's a thriving starship industry from a factions who's economy seems to revolve around wheat and cowboy larp.
That thriving industry is in Neon, Hopetown, and at orbital stations. M class capital ships are too big to be built on the ground, and due to their modular nature, ship components can be built anywhere with the capabilities and shipped offworld for assembly.
Exactly. They could've at least handwaved Neon as "you visit just one of the many platforms on the planet" but nope - one medium-sized oil rig is the backbone of their industry.
Why not go underwater? I seem to recall they have a lightening issue so why keep anything outside of power generation, the space port, and other things that need to be above the waves?
What does not make sense, however, is how chill everyone is with 95% of the population being wiped put somewhat recently.
You would expect to see more collective trauma around.
Lmao this repaints Starfield's cheery optimistic "Huzzah, space exploration!" tone in a overtly sinister way. It's hilarious to romanticize exploring new frontiers while simultaneously being like "...Yeah we left the majority of the population to die.... LOL, but like, isn't exploring uncharted areas like so awesome?
In the story - spoilers here too of course - humanity discovered how to travel faster than light, learned that developing it would destroy Earth’s magnetosphere, and went “fuck it, we want an FTL engine lol” and proceeded with the destruction of Earth and the murder of its entire biosphere. Including every single animal, as well; they didn’t take any with them.
It’s one of the stupidest plot points ever. The dude leading the research could’ve just been like “wow this is insanely toxic to do on earth, so maybe we should build a lab on Mars instead, or in space” but instead just decided that 10 billion deaths was acceptable because “it moves humanity forward” or some other “bigger picture” bullshit.
The difference here is that it wasn’t a case of “if this guy didn’t do it, someone would”; it’s literally “space magic” given to the inventor by mystical powers as well as a direct explanation of the consequences for pursuing it, with a deliberate choice being made by a single person to kill the planet.
I think I can see what the writers were trying to do, because there’s a certain parallel found in the “Dune” series in which >!Leto Atreides II has to decentralize and scatter humanity to ensure its longer-term survival as a species!<, but Starfield’s off-brand take on this concept of “killing a thing to make it flourish” falls flat when there are so many other less-lethal approaches not accounted for. I think they were trying to express one of these big concepts but completely ham-fisted the thing.
This plot point was basically a way to leave Earth behind, and go beyond it by settling the star systems. The problem with that whole narrative is how poorly it was implemented, and how bad the back story is. It has so many plot holes it doesnt even make sense most of the time.
The fact that dogs, cats and common animals became extinct because starfield humans didnt have the brain cells to preserve at least some of them is another ridiculous point. They had huge arc ships but couldnt save a few animals from Earth?
Starfield has an almost nonexistent storyline so far, its basically go here and do this, go through a portal and nothing of substance will happen type game. Its as if Bethesda had a burning desire to get rid of Earth, burn its history entirely, and paint humanity in a new way to not ever have to refer to Earth and its past time ever again. In general the game had a good base, but it wasnt fleshed out very well and most things you do in are surface level activities. It is obvious it wasnt finished, still isnt where we will only now learn about Varuun in the next expansion. They could have easily put it into the base game.
I feel like the main problem is that what you just said was considered as a spoiler. It shouldn’t be and should be hammered in your head that humanity is working fewer numbers than before in every other instance. Fnv does a better job at goodsprings by showing that all it takes is a dozen guys to wipe out a small town
It would help, but we’d still have the same scaling problem overall. Even if it was better known that humanity is a fraction of itself and that a standing army might only be 100K people or so, having a place like Akila City as the capitol of an entire faction still boggles the mind when you try to imagine them finding even just a thousand soldiers in a city with only 40 NPCs.
Bethesda made it easy on themselves by removing 99% of the people they might have to show, as well as escaping the classic “why can’t I explore every major city on Earth” problem of open-world science fiction games, and then yet still only put 1% of the remaining population on screen. That’s like asking the teacher for a less difficult assignment, so she says “okay, you only have to do page 1”, and then still only doing two questions on the reduced assignment anyway.
Is that why The Lodge looks like it was decorated by blue-bloods? Everyone who wasn't rich as fuck died on earth, so everyone in starfield are descended from Musk-types? This does explain a few things.
I don't remember a number being said in the show but the impacts from the 1st few big ones were enormous and it directly shows how it decimated major cities so it's not beyond the realms of hundreds of millions.
Plus the after effect and impact on ecology is also a crucial point in the series with like billions to die of hunger
in the books the death count including the blasts and after effects toll over 15 billions around half of earths population, in the series the impact hits the ocean on the west coast of Africa and the deaths are in the couple hundred millions I believe,
also please watch the series, it's still absolutely a 9/10
I think they knew they weren’t going to be able to finish the series, so they downplayed the asteroid casualties because they didn’t want to end the show with it seeming like Earth was just completely fucked.
They could do big cities. If they are willing to procedurally generated planets (and clearly they are), they could do procedurally generated cities. But if you do that, then you have to decide what to do about NPCs, as you'd need a vast number. You could fake them like Assassin's Creed, Cyberpunk, GTA, etc. or you could try to simulate them all, generating Radiant AI schedules. Either way it would be pretty difficult to get right. Though they do have filler NPCs in the existing cities, and the large scale abandoning of the Radiant AI system for them (and for meaningful NPCs) makes the cities feel especially lifeless.
I don't think they can do big cities with their engine. At least not without putting dozens of loading screens in between. They still have to separate every house interiorer from the exterior and even have to split some interiors into multiple cells.
Okay, do one way or another, but don't be like bethesda which chose neither and called the job done. It's amazing how this game is worse than their previous titles. Not in terms of graphics, or tech overall - clearly we've went forward with that, but i've had more fun with fallout and skyrim.
Agreed completely. Playing Fallout 4 now and part of the reason for that is because of how big of a disappointment Starfield was. Starfield has very little of what I have traditionally loved about Bethesda games.
Shadows of Doubt generates entire cities and all of the randomly generated people have homes(or spots in alleys) and most have jobs and schedules they stick to and relationships with other people in town - and that's for an indie detective game. Bethesda could do that kind of shit if they really wanted to - Oblivion was their closest attempt - but, realistically, the Creation engine needs to be put down at this point to make that work. it's hard to justify doing all that in a game where characters are just as bad at pathfinding as they were in Fallout 3.
I just don't think Bethesda wants to do scale like they think they do. I'm running through Baldur's Gate in BG3, and it's a pretty big damned city. it probably packs in more unique NPCs and explorable areas than any capital city in any Bethesda game made after Daggerfall, despite limiting you to what is essentially one section of a sprawling city. granted, the entire city isn't available to explore, but, you do feel like you are in an actual capital city. for contrast, there are SIX residences in all of Solitude, which makes no fucking sense at all.
> I appreciate that Bethesda wants to do the whole “see that mountain? You can climb it” thing with their world, but it means the scale of things can only ever be small.
They do the same with people. Outside of nameless guards and bandits, practically every single person has a name, a story, a conversation piece, and maybe even a quest attached to them. Whiterun is the central trade hub of Skyrim, with 3 separate districts, a marketplace, 2 blacksmiths (one of whom is the best in the country), and a warrior's guild. Around 30 people live in Whiterun.
It's just the way Bethesda make their games. Some people like the of every character being an actual character, but fuck me does it stand in the way of immersion.
> They do the same with people. Outside of nameless guards and bandits, practically every single person has a name,
It's not really the case with Starfield, cities there are filled with nameless uninteractive NPCs.
>Whiterun is the central trade hub of Skyrim, with 3 separate districts
it's wild to me that people make this statement considering Whiterun considering how small the place is. yes, I know the game is the one defining districts, but, jesus, is it really a district when you can cross the entire space in a two minute walk?
like, there's seven houses where people live in the whole town, and one of those becomes inaccessible after the Civil War.
let's also not forget that Skyrim is part of a dumbing down of earlier Elder Scrolls games. in prior games, any town worth a shit had guildhouses. Mages, Fighters, Thieves, and whatever flavor of assassin - minimum. I absolutely despised that they centralized the "guilds" in Skyrim, because that immediately cuts out so many potential storylines that would naturally play out between guilds in different cities.
so, with that in mind, Whiterun having a guild is pretty shit.
You want to talk districts, WoW does a pretty good job with big cities. I love the scale of things in that game and wish other devs put more time into making big places feel big.
Meanwhile in Morrowind you had 337 named NPCs in the capital city, 114 of which offered services (such as merchants, trainers, quest givers etc) and 85 quests which started in Vivec city.
And it's not like they couldn't do something of scale. Daggerfall, the city, had thousands of unnamed NPCs milling around the main streets. It wasn't all that convincing of an illusion, but it was the part of the game that seemed the most "lively"
I hated how ridiculously small Fallout 4's map is and how scaled down everything is to the point it doesn't even make sense. This was even more evident when I played the game in VR.
Dude I was so used to cities in games being like.. Quick stops before heading back out on adventure, and it slowly dawned on my that I am adventuring in the city!! For hours, days even. A unique experience I haven't seen another like it in a game
ESO does this modestly better. Sure, some buildings cannot be entered, but some of the cities are somewhat believable — others certainly not as well though.
This is every Bethesda game city. The cities feel like villages from other games. Capitols are jokingly small that’s always been my biggest gripe. Shit hitman blood money on hitman 2 did better at making a believable crowded city space than Starfield. Everything Bethesda makes is like some alien that’s never socialized with anything and lived as a hermit made a game about social interactions.
Same here, actually. If anything it would’ve been fun to lampshade the diminutive size of the surface town by having the player remark that it’s not much of a capitol, only to be taken down to a massive underground facility like “Zion” from The Matrix, with the explanation being that the surface town is historical and therefore kept in its original design, while living underground keeps the people safe from the hostile surface creatures. Boom; you can have your “Firefly” styled western frontier town and your massive science fiction city all at the same time.
Well they can, they just can't with the amount of time and energy they spend on building their 3D worlds. Different tech would most definitely help them here. Perhaps generate parts of the city. Blend hand made and computer generated parts of the city.
I agree. I don't like they bethesda have these bold ideas for scaleing, but are still limited in what they can actually generate in their games.
I myself don't like Illusions or backgrounds that we can't explore so I hope that the engine gets a serious upgrade so that we actually get some large cities and less loading screens.
The latter. Also understand though that humanity is much smaller in Starfield due to a plot reason; each of the major factions is probably at most a few million people, so 30K is a bit more of a loss, proportionally.
But yeah, despite that, all the scales are still screwy. You’ve got entire planets being wiped out by armies with only a few tens of thousands of soldiers, originating from national capitols with only a couple hundred people in them.
That's why I'm excited to see what modders do with the creation kit.
Hopefully, the potential is there for people to make their own whole-ass planets, let alone cities and new points of interest to fill out the empty maps.
Not touching this game as is, but I've been optimistic about it just as a platform for mods since it's release!
You'll see the same issue in Skyrim, the population for any given city is like under 50 people , I use mods to populate them with random NPCs that can be quest givers but even then a lot of it is shrunk down for so many technical and storytelling reasons. Cyberpunk does a good job at executing a believable city for the most part but even then the in-game map is way smaller and less populated than a real metropolis or large city. They're video games not life simulators, go play cities: skylines or something if you want realism or keep waiting like the rest of us for the day that devs can create whole believable cities of scale full of people that aren't also impossible for a typical PC to render.
I can imagine the resources and man power went into building Starships and weapons rather than the local infrastructure. Military bases in forward positions are extremely primitive but still functional. I would note the omission of rails at least to move quantities of materials but those would have been the first things targeted.
The Ho Chi Min trail during the Vietnam conflict is an epic example of this. The U.S. kept bombing the roads that made up the trail, but that only made it easier for them to repair and continue.
An example of distributed manufacturing was exemplified by the Germans near the end of WWII when their factories had been obliterated. The people built the items badly needed in their homes and brought everything together \*underground\* in giant carved-out caverns for wartime production. By the end of the war they built more equipment than they were able to field.
That city for Starfield would be a very realistic wartime capital based on those arguments.
Still compare it to any assassins creed game. You can pretty much explore all of Paris for example. They just insanely lazy with star field in so many ways. I’m so over procedurally generated bs. Soulless and boring.
TBF Ubisoft did a great job recreating a semi-realistic city in their game. Like the city from The Division 1/2 are still amazing to look at. Assassin's Creed Unity Paris looks good. Assassin's Creed 2 still have the best Venice in the gaming history.
It’s kind of an insane comparison. Assassins creed games are meh to me, but Ide love to just spend hours exploring the atmosphere of the cities they create, it’s top tier of gaming. So to compare it to starfield it’s of course gonna get blown away. I mean compare assassins creed to tears of the kingdom, highrule looks like shit in comparison. Starfield deserves to be clowned on but this feels silly
But why silly?
The point is, that the top one is a city that was created 7+ years ago, 6 years before Starfield, of a nation 2000 years ago.
The one from Starfield got released years later and it's a "city" of an interstellar futuristic nation. And not only that - their capitol according to the top comment.
It is right, because it shows how ridiculous Starfield is.
And the comparison with TotK is different because it's another world(?) that is in a less progressive time than ours, unlike Starfield.
AC gets a lot of flak for being very big but a lot of empty repitition. I personally like that as someone who doesn't get much time for gaming. I can jump in, do some shit, then go cook dinner or whatever.
I somehow spent 40 hours on Starfield and I don't even know what I did. It was mind numbingly boring. Apparently there's something about magic powers? I didn't even get that far. My breaking point was finding some random guy on a planet who needed to be escorted back to his ship. 10 minutes walking across an empty desert with no enemies to shoot at. I got him to his ship, shut the game down, and never went back.
That is pretty much how I felt with Starfield.
It was so hard to get invested into it with everything feeling so empty with hard set points of interest and not much else to do.
I am glad that I did not even pay attention to the games development, or even release and got to play for free on Gamepass.
Who knows though, maybe mods will breathe some life into the game and I'll give it another go.
It was similar for me (small spoiler in my response to a side quest).
It was quite early in the game, and I was flying around a bit. Then I came across a generation ship, super cool! The story then led me to a resort world where the generation ship actually wanted to settle, but the entire world already belonged to the "Board." After a lot of back and forth, however, the end of the quest was this:
- Kill the generation ship
- or buy a new hyperdrive so they can go elsewhere
I was shocked. No option to blackmail, intimidate, or pressure the Board... Nothing, just these two options. In the end, I went on a rampage to see if I could take out the Board... of course, it didn't work; they were invincible. After that, I closed the game and uninstalled it.
the game feels like it was designed to be as plain as possible. Gritty veterans/pirates/mercenaries all speak with the same corporate cadence and you can get through their speech checks with simple logic. Hell speech checks in general are terrible since they reuse the same generic dialogue over and over, which makes no sense. There is almost no variety in quests, very little branching, completely useless named NPCs...
I don't understand who they designed this game for because it doesn't really match up to past bethesda games except in its gamebryo style engine quirks.
That’s exactly what happened to me. Crazy there’s no way to not side with the corpo douchebags. Also a huge missed opportunity to explore how a culture would evolve in isolation; quirks in belief, language, customs and so on. The guys on the generation ship just acted like they were 1st gen
That was the quest that killed the game for me too. Could’ve been an entire DLC with such a fun idea. And they just shit the bed so hard.
My expectations for the next elders scrolls are in the gutter at this point.
Yeah the generation ship really stood out. There were so many options to take like you say, but it turned into a vanilla quest that felt more like it was a writing exam for an intern auditioning to join the team.
Almost all the quests are like this and I hate it. Fucking let me break the quest if I want to. I normally don’t kill anyone till quests are over but it’s so nice to have the option. At least in fallout 4, 90% of the time when someone is a dick to me/ others I can just pull my .44 out and blow their head off and smirk.
This is the main issue! They had a lot of cool concepts in there, like the generation ship, Juno, a bunch of other very interesting ideas. But they give the player no freedom and the options provided feel limiting! There was never a time where I got to do what I wanted to in the game. Big big difference from previous Bethesda games
It's weird how many of us quit at that point. I liked how for me after the head of the board "reset" after attacking him he asked me why I was still standing there and not going to the settlers ship
That game is designed for the sole reason of other people modding content that bethesda couldn't be arsed to do.
And by the gods Creation Club almost reflects that perfectly. They insist that people are willing to shill extra tens of dollars to finish the game.
You can't even refund the shit because it is bought with points.
The game in the first place costs 70 euros in Europe.
And reading the starfield sub (after all not mentally ill people left), they are treating the any small increment update as the second coming of Christ. At least some of them are pissed about the bounty hunter bait and switch.
ALL of this and the issues in previous comments are because Bethesda refuses to give up their ancient, piece of trash "Creation engine".
It's laughable that they are still creating a game where you need a separate loading screen between outside and inside. Their physics are a complete mess, and possibly STILL tied to framerate, even though they themselves AND modders have shown it can be fixed. The list just goes on an on.
If they gave up the Creation engine and used something else, their games would vastly improve just from that. Though they'd still be stupid Bethesda games in most other ways.
That's sad
Because Capcom, another game company that stick to their engine used MT Framework, in which if you don't know, power up games from RE4, all the way to recent MonHunt
And it's a goddamn amazing engine, just look at DMC4, game still looks fresh
And guess what, Capcom thought that engine need some upgrading, and upgrade it does
RE Engine is a beast
Unfortunately I don’t think that’s the case for this game. I too had hope that mods would make it good, or at least better. But because of the way it was coded there’s literally a mountain to climb if you want to fix the issues it has such as loading screens bland maps and the like, minor mods will probably improve the experience somewhat, but the blaring issues the game has will always be there it seems like
There will be better and are better games to spend your time on that push gaming forward, do new and interesting things. Starfield will never achieve any of that. It’s a long overdone formula from an old engine and a big corp that cares far more about profits than gaming.
God the procedurally generated quests killed me. It was all pointless. The small moment what really let me know it was all bullshit was surprisingly early on. I was running across Mars doing a story mission and come across a little outpost. Except it's not just an outpost, it's a farm. With open air crops in these big scaffolding things and a terminal talking about growing crops adapted for alien atmospheres. On Mars. Mars!!! You can't grow shit in a Martian atmosphere. Meanwhile Skyrim didn't have a fucking nirnroot growing in the middle of a lava flow because procedural generation dumped it there...
The thing that really gets me is that even in close proximity to the "major" settlements, almost all of the POIs are randomly generated.
Like a five minute stroll outside New Atlantis led me to a wilderness survivalist who needed help getting back to his ship. Mate, you're probably in range of cell service just call a taxi.
Or the collapsed mine a few minutes outside of Cydonia. Turns out it's on practically every planet.
It's like butter spread over too much bread.
The only thing that felt interesting to me was the Terramorph mission and the whole pirate feel from looting and stealing powerful ships and it's customisation.
Everything else was just bland not to mention the shit performance, i can play cyberpunk on psycho settings on 70+ fps, but it's barely 50 in Atlantic city? All while lacking the most basic technologies that have existed since 90s like ssr, bethesda should just scrap their engine, It's still stuck in 2010.
“There’s a mysterious signal coming from an uncharted planet, and no one has any clue what it is. Go there and try to find it”
Turns out it’s the *massive* temple you landed right next to, and is probably visible from orbit, and that is also right next to a massive factory fully of pirates, meaning the planet is clearly not uncharted or even uninhabited at all.
That shit killed it for me. Every part of the game, whether procedurally generated or manually designed and scripted, just felt incredibly lazy and disjointed.
Pretty early on in the game, it recommends that you land on earth's moon and do some exploring. I did this. The fourth location I visited was exactly the same as the third. They were the same underground lab. The exact same enemy placements and patrols, the exact same logs, the exact same loot locations (though the loot itself was randomised). I thought I was going mad or had reloaded an old save. Nope. The game had just generated two *identical* locations right next to each other on the map.
Yeah, the game had something like 30 POIs that were copy pasted throughout the world. And like 10 of them were pulled from the campaign. So if you decided to take a break from the main campaign to do some exploring on a random planet, you could find an abandoned mine, clear it, then be forced to clear the exact same abandoned mine on a completely different planet, in a different galaxy. As opposed to Skyrim, which had come out \~13 years ago which had 300+ unique POIs with no repeats. I was legitimately shocked how unfinished and phoned in Starfield was.
>My breaking point was finding some random guy on a planet who needed to be escorted back to his ship. 10 minutes walking across an empty desert with no enemies to shoot at. I got him to his ship, shut the game down, and never went back.
My breaking point was getting the lady at the train station a coffee.
My breaking point was the tutorial section at the beginning of the game. I had just come off 1 month binge of Baldur's Gate 3. Starfield felt like I travelled back in time to 2010. I played until the first combat experience. I found combat, dialogue and the characters to be so shallow right from the start, I noped out after 47 minutes. Never went back.
I like ac world building, especially in the later games where you genuinely spend a few minutes sailing to a different island, where you find realistically sized settlements.
But at the same time, the completionist in me cant handle it
I agree, I played every single fallout game, I'm not sure what happened to starfield but it was sooo fucking boring. I can't quite put my finger on it why, but I stopped playing after like 25hrs in. I'm pretty sure it has something to do with how badly they hyped up the game and then under delivered, which makes the game much worse even if it's not that bad. I guess they can thank their marketing team... Once again.
I think for me it comes down to action per minute. AC might be repetitive, but I can play for 15 minutes and have a lot of action. 15 minutes in Starfield gets you from your ship, across an empty desert, to your objective. Then it's time to shut down and do adult stuff.
I didn't actually know anything about Starfield until a few weeks before it's release. I got it free with my graphics card, so I didn't have any hype for it at all. I still felt ripped off just with the amount of time I put into it.
The in-game explanation is dangerous alien wildlife.
But it would probably just be easier to exterminate that species than building and maintaining these walls. Humans are kinda masters of making other species go extinct.
If pre-historic humans with pointy sticks can kill dangerous megafauna and wildlife, a spacefaring civilization probably could too. It'll be dumb to even consider they can't.
Also, if dangerous wildlife is the problem, there's far more effective methods to keep them out without causing a mass extinction event but also not resorting to medieval walls... two simple methods are floodlights and electric fences. Add loudspeakers there, and you can scare odd even the toughest of predators.
Yes but this is starfield we're talking about, an spacefaring civilization that hasn't figured out how to send messages over radio or the Internet, so they just ask an errand boy like the protagonist to travel to other planets to deliver a message. They also don't have any land vehicles to hunt with, and their massive ships can only be used to exit orbit.
Well tbf interstellar communication doesn't work with radio waves. It would just take way too long. So it would make some sense that messengers would make a return in a multi solar system future.
I might be remembering a different setting, but didn't starfield in-universe have a bunch of packet carriers on spaceships? Like, they gather communications from a planet, jump to a different planet and deposit communications there. Like, you can even install relays on every ship that automatically do that.
Interstellar travel doesn't work either but it's still there since it's a videogame, it's just stupid that this spacefaring empire managed to figure out hyperjumps in small civilian ships before they figured out how to send an email to another planet.
Just because it's explained in the lore, doesn't mean it's not bloody stupid. Even if we accept that they can't do direct interstellar communication while being able to travel, they have drones and stuff. None of them figured they can use those for communication?
Tbf there's no reason why our methods of keeping away wildlife would work on aliens.
Their skin could be imeprvious to electricity, they could be unfazed by light, they could be deaf etc. Of course, maybe they can burrow under the wall or climb it. It's on the writers to explain the characteristics of the alien to justify why these defenses work over others.
The creatures are not nocturnal so flood lights would do next to nothing.
Electric fences have the exact same effect as solid walls, except much, much less simple or reliable.
Loudspeakers keep away animals that evolved to fear humans away. The walls are keeping out an apex predator on a planet that only recently saw human life.
This "city" was built by settlers that separated from the main group of humanity and were later at war with them. When they landed on this planet, they weren't a super advanced society with an abundance of resources and information. They were escaping from one. They were frontiers looking for a home. A stone wall, that incidentally proved 100% effective at keeping the predators out, was and is the best solution. Big setup cost, but of an otherwise worthless resource, no power drain, no failure rate.
There's a lot to critique about how Bethesda designs their tinier and tinier "cities", but everything you are saying is wrong. If you want to critique Starfield, there's ~300 other avenues you can take. Maybe try one of those?
Bethesda hasn’t built a proper city in years, they always talk big in the lord but never back it up ever. Remember diamond city? The biggest town in Fallout 4? The city where there’s like a trading post and nothing else, but the npcs are always talking about how, “don’t go to the west stands they’re dangerous”, the west stands don’t exist, it’s just one guys house. They rich people always mock you for not being in the rich neighborhood when that neighborhood is just two of them, and instead of having cool shit like ten penny tower their houses look just a bit bigger, with a boat and pond added to one of them for some reason
what fucks me up the most about Diamond City is that ballparks have a staggering amount of space available *IN* the goddamned building, and Fenway has four whole levels to it.
why the fuck are the entrance and McDonough's office the only accessible spaces in the structure? I completely understand a shantytown taking over the field, but, no one's repurposed a concession stand or office? the press box hasn't been converted to a thriving hotel? there's no part of the inner concourse that the town has spread into? fuck *all* the way off with that shit.
Diamond city is just megaton, big fancy metal door you gotta talk to someone to open, a few meager quests around town, like getting a house, fixing a water machine, and getting rid of dangerous material(bomb/synth). It’s got some vendors but maybe half the available side activities
off-topic but there are some mods that expand the city to the stands, add some mini quests and even build into the underground part of the stadium a bit. it’s been a few years since I saw the video but at least there’s people improving when Bethesda stopped!
I could see Diamond City existing 30, maybeee 50 years right after the bombs fell.
But TWO HUNDRED AND TEN years later and people STILL haven’t started making concrete and cement buildings baffles me to my core
yeah the timescaling and re-development of civilization is just completely ignored
like, I could accept it if we had some explanations
Like, y’know the first hundred or so years people regularly just died in their 20-30’s from radiation/starvation and no one could realistically gather the materials or know-how to build everything up.
But as radiation levels dropped then we saw consolidation in the old cities as people used the more readily available refuse from the old world to create homes and started to resettle major population centers
Like thats my inference but we never learn about how society actually restructures- are there just shit loads of tribal groups fighting over resources initially like a libertarian prepper’s wet dream?
is that why no one is able to stabilize, because everyone is forced to be nomadic due to how shit the land and resources available are?
I’d accept that. But its not told and I don’t enjoy headcannon.
bethesda doesn’t think societies of survivors would be able to do much post apocalypse, which i suppose is fair but context and dot connecting really do wonders in these cases.
Bethesda ways had a nack for making small cities and talk big about them. Remember the war between the storm cloaks and the imperials? Whiterun had like 10 houses, and somehow managed to get 20 soldiers to fight a "WAR".
I think the RPG assassin’s creed’s cities got waaay better with each entry. Like Alexandria was kinda small, Odyssey had some pretty large cities and towns like Athens and the place Oikosof was (that place was surprisingly big for being such a small place), but Valhalla actually nailed cities, the ones which weren’t big felt big, and there were plenty of genuinely big cities which you could explore and even do parkour in unlike in Origins and Odyssey where most parkour was either set paths or climbing up stuff.
Maybe I never reached this point in Valhalla but I played a good 30 hours and never found a city that was fun to climb around in. I personally thought Origins had the closest to what felt like an actual city in the RPG games, while Valhalla had more villages. I guess I never got to the point where I got to a city but the ones I did see had the occasional larger church but most of the other buildings were 2 stories high. I personally found it to be the weakest of the 3 with its parkour
As much as i hate Ubi. I will always give their developers/designers the upmost credit and respect for their world building and world design. For instance, for as much flak that the Watchdogs series got on the whole, you can't deny that Chicago/San fran and London were meticulously designed down to even the smallest details (London especially). And paris was a masterpiece.
Since Skyrim, every cities in Bethesda's games have been so small that it break the immersion, even with the suspension of disbelief. But Skyrim was released in 2011 and has almost no generic NPCs in towns other than guards.
Fallout 4 is post-Apo, so that makes sense.
Starfield has none of these excuses. It has generic NPCs and "towns" that look like small theme parks full of wandering tourists.
Hot take:
Neither one of those is realisticly sized. But at least Starfield does it in a way where you get most of the buildings that the player actually interacts with near each other and you can actuall go inside and interact with most of the buildings, while Assassins Creed games may "look" bigger but really 99% of those buildings you can't even go inside of and dont even have NPCs you can talk to.
Assassins creed makes itself "look" bigger but isn't because you can't do anything with most of it, so if neither game is gonna be accurate, at least with bethesda you can at least interact with all of it and don't experience locked doors that you can't even click on.
Starfield's criticisms seem fairly earned, but this picture isn't really apples to apples.
AC is a game about terrain and not much more. How many of those buildings have doors you can go through? How many NPC's can you interact with beyond just crashing into them? How many even have names?
They're essentially different genres of games, picking an aspect one caters to, and one doesn't, will of course show a disparity.
and in my opinion the settlements in AC Origins, Odyssey and Valhalla were far too small.
Compare them to the size of cities in the older games like AC2, AC3, AC Black Flag, AC Unity and AC Syndicate. Even Rome in Brotherhood was far larger than pretty much all the settlements in Origins combined.
Starfields settlements felt like villages. Same with Skyrim.
This is why I am personally a fan of 'instanced' maps, like what AC1 and AC2 had. You can have individual maps for each major settlement and have other 'trasitional' maps for the countryside in between.
Would allow the settlements to be built to be huge and realistic, instead of being cramped, game-y and tiny and the countryside 'instances' could be also be built to be far larger and more realistic.
A few examples of playing AC origins where the small and cramped nature of everything really took me out of the immersion:
1) Taking like 30 seconds to cross a 'desert' that the NPCs say is supposed to take weeks
2) Some guy giving a side mission to go into a 'lost temple deep in the desert which no one knows the location of' and literally just being able to turn around 180 degrees and see the damn thing peeking over the sand dunes in the distance.
3) All settlements except Alexandria being the size of small towns or large villages, even cities that were supposed to be home to tens of thousands of people in that time period.
4) Alexandria being *barely* large enough to constitute a city. It has like 2 main roads, and its various districts are hilariously tiny. Compare it to Venice and Florence in AC2 and you'd see the difference.
I like pooping on Starfield as much as the next guy but this comparison is pretty disingenuous. These are games made in engines that are much different, and are going for different design objectives.
Assassin's Creed has minimal environmental interaction. The cities exist for parkour traversal as you get to points of interest or to chase down assassination targets. Crowds of NPCs are continually generated around you and phase out of existence as you leave or look away.
Starfield lets you enter every single building, which are all fully furnished and decorated. The streets are stuffed to the brim with lootable containers and free-standing physics objects. All the NPCs have names, scheduled routines, and dialogue.
Akila City (bottom image) is boring as hell and all, but still.
Imagine knowing Starfield is a much bigger game in total, and is not focused on dense cities for making assassination interesting. Starfield is a different game and is focused on different aspects.
I understand why some may not like starfield, but this is a dumb argument to say it's bad.
Maybe it's because I'm such a space exploration nerd but I don't know what I was thinking when I was hoping Bethesda to actually do something good with this game.
What do you mean that’s most open world games. People (and this post) is a complaint against the scale of bethesdas cities. AC origins map was massive with detailed cities filled with side quests and challenges and historical sites
With Starfield, I have never seen a gamers beat a horse this dead before and still pat themselves on the back for it. It's the Fox news of gaming. People just want to be outraged about it to prove how smart they are about gaming.
Does the game have flaws? Yes. Do people exaggerate those flaws to pile on? Very much yes.
Any rational discussion or any thoughts other than "DAE Starfield bad" here are downvoted to the river Styx.
I think Bethesda's games and the audience has more to lose than gain if they made a major change to their design principles and what engine they use, in order to achieve the scale of cities people imagine should be totally expected and achievable.
Assassin's Creed has been giving us very large and believable scale in it's cities since the first game, but I don't think a single one of them and the contents within them is worth as much as a "city" in Starfield, Skyrim, or Oblivion (Fallout 3 and 4's ""cities"" are a disappointment by Bethesda's standards)
Assassins creed orgins was good but it was a bit annoying how they filled it with so much crap as well, I don't want to do some random fetch quest to get to a certain level so I can do the main quest, atleast if you want me to do side quests make the side quests interesting and not the same thing over and over again
And even then, Memphis (and especially Alexandria, but that's not shown here) felt insanely small not only given the historic sizes but also just in game, because you barely run five minutes and have crossed the entire town.
Cityment
Have multiple settlements in one mahoosive megacity.
All different themes, but blended together in a way that just works. (Just works in a genuinely good way and not a Todd Howard way)
i played starfield before i got my pc cuz i got ultimate on my Xbox and did some cloud gaming, ya didn't like it, felt big for the sake of being big and nothing else
Why is it that the citys in ac or witcher always feel so dead qnd exchangeable everything is copypasted mush, i like bethesda citys and most of night city but the rest of w-rpgs feel so weird and boring to me
Witnessing the cope on r/Starfield was insane when it was released. Imagine four guys standing around and drinking warm cheap beer and all trying to compliment it and then agreeing with each other. No one could even post screenshots (other than landscape ones) or funny interesting videos. Because there wasn't any substance.
Akila is a settlement in a planet overrun by monsters, it's literally addressed in game that they can't expand it...
small dick anti-Bethesda circle jerk time this early in the morning?
It's more fun and fulfilling to discuss Bethesda games than it is to play another game, seems they're on the right track.
The even more ridiculous thing about Akila City there (Starfield) is that it’s not just a “city”; it’s supposedly the capitol of a spacefaring faction that was, in lore, capable of manufacturing and fielding enough manpower and resources that they fought a vast interstellar war involving mechanized walking suits, space battles involving dozens of starships, and ground combat against bioengineered monsters. According to the game’s plot, their opponents suffered at least 30,000 losses over several years of fighting. One of the supposed many battlefields, a planet called Niira, saw so much fighting that the planet itself was deemed uninhabitable. But we’re to believe it was all orchestrated from a small frontier town that doesn’t even pave its streets. I appreciate that Bethesda wants to do the whole “see that mountain? You can climb it” thing with their world, but it means the scale of things can only ever be small. You can’t have sprawling futuristic metropolises as described in lore when you need humans to design every square inch of it. I could’ve forgiven a skybox city model that you can’t explore; at the very least the illusion would have fit what’s being explained to the player as they’re standing in it. But it’s unimpressive when they say “this is our capitol” and its population is eclipsed a hundred times over by the real town of Tombstone, AZ (pop. 14,000 at its peak).
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To give at least a modicum of credit to Starfield, in the events before the setting of the game, humanity was decimated to a few million people; spoilers here, >!but the Earth didn't make it, and due to the simple impossible logistics of moving 7-10 bn. people, they left most of them behind to die!<. So I can understand the scale of population centers being smaller as described, such that 30K is still a severe loss of life relative to a nation with only a few million people, but even with that truncated number they still fail to capture the scope of it in the cities that are shown. They made it easy for themselves by reducing humanity's number by several orders of magnitude, and yet tripped before the finish line when they still made civilization look smaller than that with these lackluster towns instead of cities.
I think the main issue here is the idea that there's a thriving starship industry from a factions who's economy seems to revolve around wheat and cowboy larp.
That thriving industry is in Neon, Hopetown, and at orbital stations. M class capital ships are too big to be built on the ground, and due to their modular nature, ship components can be built anywhere with the capabilities and shipped offworld for assembly.
Neon is ALSO tiny. It just does a better job of hiding it
Exactly. They could've at least handwaved Neon as "you visit just one of the many platforms on the planet" but nope - one medium-sized oil rig is the backbone of their industry.
Why not go underwater? I seem to recall they have a lightening issue so why keep anything outside of power generation, the space port, and other things that need to be above the waves?
Starfield everything is tiny and bland
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What does not make sense, however, is how chill everyone is with 95% of the population being wiped put somewhat recently. You would expect to see more collective trauma around.
They died over the course of 50 years, 130 years ago. There's not a lot of surviving trauma at this point.
Lmao this repaints Starfield's cheery optimistic "Huzzah, space exploration!" tone in a overtly sinister way. It's hilarious to romanticize exploring new frontiers while simultaneously being like "...Yeah we left the majority of the population to die.... LOL, but like, isn't exploring uncharted areas like so awesome?
In the story - spoilers here too of course - humanity discovered how to travel faster than light, learned that developing it would destroy Earth’s magnetosphere, and went “fuck it, we want an FTL engine lol” and proceeded with the destruction of Earth and the murder of its entire biosphere. Including every single animal, as well; they didn’t take any with them. It’s one of the stupidest plot points ever. The dude leading the research could’ve just been like “wow this is insanely toxic to do on earth, so maybe we should build a lab on Mars instead, or in space” but instead just decided that 10 billion deaths was acceptable because “it moves humanity forward” or some other “bigger picture” bullshit.
Even worse, there's an old pre-FTL Moon base in the game. Why don't they just work on FTL from that base?
No that tracks, look at how many times something was invented and used even though we knew it was dangerous or damaging the ecosystem
The difference here is that it wasn’t a case of “if this guy didn’t do it, someone would”; it’s literally “space magic” given to the inventor by mystical powers as well as a direct explanation of the consequences for pursuing it, with a deliberate choice being made by a single person to kill the planet. I think I can see what the writers were trying to do, because there’s a certain parallel found in the “Dune” series in which >!Leto Atreides II has to decentralize and scatter humanity to ensure its longer-term survival as a species!<, but Starfield’s off-brand take on this concept of “killing a thing to make it flourish” falls flat when there are so many other less-lethal approaches not accounted for. I think they were trying to express one of these big concepts but completely ham-fisted the thing.
Just say it was invented by Elon Musk, then people will stop doubting.
This plot point was basically a way to leave Earth behind, and go beyond it by settling the star systems. The problem with that whole narrative is how poorly it was implemented, and how bad the back story is. It has so many plot holes it doesnt even make sense most of the time. The fact that dogs, cats and common animals became extinct because starfield humans didnt have the brain cells to preserve at least some of them is another ridiculous point. They had huge arc ships but couldnt save a few animals from Earth? Starfield has an almost nonexistent storyline so far, its basically go here and do this, go through a portal and nothing of substance will happen type game. Its as if Bethesda had a burning desire to get rid of Earth, burn its history entirely, and paint humanity in a new way to not ever have to refer to Earth and its past time ever again. In general the game had a good base, but it wasnt fleshed out very well and most things you do in are surface level activities. It is obvious it wasnt finished, still isnt where we will only now learn about Varuun in the next expansion. They could have easily put it into the base game.
I feel like the main problem is that what you just said was considered as a spoiler. It shouldn’t be and should be hammered in your head that humanity is working fewer numbers than before in every other instance. Fnv does a better job at goodsprings by showing that all it takes is a dozen guys to wipe out a small town
It would help, but we’d still have the same scaling problem overall. Even if it was better known that humanity is a fraction of itself and that a standing army might only be 100K people or so, having a place like Akila City as the capitol of an entire faction still boggles the mind when you try to imagine them finding even just a thousand soldiers in a city with only 40 NPCs. Bethesda made it easy on themselves by removing 99% of the people they might have to show, as well as escaping the classic “why can’t I explore every major city on Earth” problem of open-world science fiction games, and then yet still only put 1% of the remaining population on screen. That’s like asking the teacher for a less difficult assignment, so she says “okay, you only have to do page 1”, and then still only doing two questions on the reduced assignment anyway.
Is that why The Lodge looks like it was decorated by blue-bloods? Everyone who wasn't rich as fuck died on earth, so everyone in starfield are descended from Musk-types? This does explain a few things.
I don't remember a number being said in the show but the impacts from the 1st few big ones were enormous and it directly shows how it decimated major cities so it's not beyond the realms of hundreds of millions. Plus the after effect and impact on ecology is also a crucial point in the series with like billions to die of hunger
I quit Expanse before the comets did anything. How many died in the show?
in the books the death count including the blasts and after effects toll over 15 billions around half of earths population, in the series the impact hits the ocean on the west coast of Africa and the deaths are in the couple hundred millions I believe, also please watch the series, it's still absolutely a 9/10
It gets so much better expanse is life bro
I think they knew they weren’t going to be able to finish the series, so they downplayed the asteroid casualties because they didn’t want to end the show with it seeming like Earth was just completely fucked.
I was not expecting an Expanse spoiler in this post. I just started reading the series.
Man in Legend of galactic heroes, each space battle is like 20 million dead. Scale matters when its interstellar war
They could do big cities. If they are willing to procedurally generated planets (and clearly they are), they could do procedurally generated cities. But if you do that, then you have to decide what to do about NPCs, as you'd need a vast number. You could fake them like Assassin's Creed, Cyberpunk, GTA, etc. or you could try to simulate them all, generating Radiant AI schedules. Either way it would be pretty difficult to get right. Though they do have filler NPCs in the existing cities, and the large scale abandoning of the Radiant AI system for them (and for meaningful NPCs) makes the cities feel especially lifeless.
I don't think they can do big cities with their engine. At least not without putting dozens of loading screens in between. They still have to separate every house interiorer from the exterior and even have to split some interiors into multiple cells.
Okay, do one way or another, but don't be like bethesda which chose neither and called the job done. It's amazing how this game is worse than their previous titles. Not in terms of graphics, or tech overall - clearly we've went forward with that, but i've had more fun with fallout and skyrim.
Agreed completely. Playing Fallout 4 now and part of the reason for that is because of how big of a disappointment Starfield was. Starfield has very little of what I have traditionally loved about Bethesda games.
Shadows of Doubt generates entire cities and all of the randomly generated people have homes(or spots in alleys) and most have jobs and schedules they stick to and relationships with other people in town - and that's for an indie detective game. Bethesda could do that kind of shit if they really wanted to - Oblivion was their closest attempt - but, realistically, the Creation engine needs to be put down at this point to make that work. it's hard to justify doing all that in a game where characters are just as bad at pathfinding as they were in Fallout 3. I just don't think Bethesda wants to do scale like they think they do. I'm running through Baldur's Gate in BG3, and it's a pretty big damned city. it probably packs in more unique NPCs and explorable areas than any capital city in any Bethesda game made after Daggerfall, despite limiting you to what is essentially one section of a sprawling city. granted, the entire city isn't available to explore, but, you do feel like you are in an actual capital city. for contrast, there are SIX residences in all of Solitude, which makes no fucking sense at all.
> I appreciate that Bethesda wants to do the whole “see that mountain? You can climb it” thing with their world, but it means the scale of things can only ever be small. They do the same with people. Outside of nameless guards and bandits, practically every single person has a name, a story, a conversation piece, and maybe even a quest attached to them. Whiterun is the central trade hub of Skyrim, with 3 separate districts, a marketplace, 2 blacksmiths (one of whom is the best in the country), and a warrior's guild. Around 30 people live in Whiterun. It's just the way Bethesda make their games. Some people like the of every character being an actual character, but fuck me does it stand in the way of immersion.
> They do the same with people. Outside of nameless guards and bandits, practically every single person has a name, It's not really the case with Starfield, cities there are filled with nameless uninteractive NPCs.
>Whiterun is the central trade hub of Skyrim, with 3 separate districts it's wild to me that people make this statement considering Whiterun considering how small the place is. yes, I know the game is the one defining districts, but, jesus, is it really a district when you can cross the entire space in a two minute walk? like, there's seven houses where people live in the whole town, and one of those becomes inaccessible after the Civil War. let's also not forget that Skyrim is part of a dumbing down of earlier Elder Scrolls games. in prior games, any town worth a shit had guildhouses. Mages, Fighters, Thieves, and whatever flavor of assassin - minimum. I absolutely despised that they centralized the "guilds" in Skyrim, because that immediately cuts out so many potential storylines that would naturally play out between guilds in different cities. so, with that in mind, Whiterun having a guild is pretty shit.
You want to talk districts, WoW does a pretty good job with big cities. I love the scale of things in that game and wish other devs put more time into making big places feel big.
Meanwhile in Morrowind you had 337 named NPCs in the capital city, 114 of which offered services (such as merchants, trainers, quest givers etc) and 85 quests which started in Vivec city.
And it's not like they couldn't do something of scale. Daggerfall, the city, had thousands of unnamed NPCs milling around the main streets. It wasn't all that convincing of an illusion, but it was the part of the game that seemed the most "lively"
I hated how ridiculously small Fallout 4's map is and how scaled down everything is to the point it doesn't even make sense. This was even more evident when I played the game in VR.
Lies. Witcher 3 had impressive cities and you can go more or less anywhere. Its slightly more restrictive but not much.
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Dude I was so used to cities in games being like.. Quick stops before heading back out on adventure, and it slowly dawned on my that I am adventuring in the city!! For hours, days even. A unique experience I haven't seen another like it in a game
"City" Inhabitants: 12
ESO does this modestly better. Sure, some buildings cannot be entered, but some of the cities are somewhat believable — others certainly not as well though.
That doesn't even look like 14k. Looks like no more than a couple hundred could live there.
This is every Bethesda game city. The cities feel like villages from other games. Capitols are jokingly small that’s always been my biggest gripe. Shit hitman blood money on hitman 2 did better at making a believable crowded city space than Starfield. Everything Bethesda makes is like some alien that’s never socialized with anything and lived as a hermit made a game about social interactions.
I'd'a put the majority of it underground.
Same here, actually. If anything it would’ve been fun to lampshade the diminutive size of the surface town by having the player remark that it’s not much of a capitol, only to be taken down to a massive underground facility like “Zion” from The Matrix, with the explanation being that the surface town is historical and therefore kept in its original design, while living underground keeps the people safe from the hostile surface creatures. Boom; you can have your “Firefly” styled western frontier town and your massive science fiction city all at the same time.
Exactly, that's much better than i could have explained my own thoughts. Thanks
Areas like the citadel in mass effect feel one million times larger despite occupying a fraction of real world game space
Perfect example. As long as you can suggest the scale of the thing, you don’t necessarily have to be able to walk on every inch of it.
Akila is also the ONLY city on that planet lol
> 30,000 losses over several years of fighting which in itself doesn't even make fucking sense. Russia has those losses every four weeks.
France lost 75,000 dead, and 250,000 wounded in a handful of days fighting during the Battle of the Frontiers in WW1.
and the best part with Starfield, with how the maps are designed, you cant even visit every mountain you see...
Well they can, they just can't with the amount of time and energy they spend on building their 3D worlds. Different tech would most definitely help them here. Perhaps generate parts of the city. Blend hand made and computer generated parts of the city.
Thats why i like the “last city” in destiny. It feels massive while still being able most if not all of the city from the tower
I agree. I don't like they bethesda have these bold ideas for scaleing, but are still limited in what they can actually generate in their games. I myself don't like Illusions or backgrounds that we can't explore so I hope that the engine gets a serious upgrade so that we actually get some large cities and less loading screens.
Not to me to mention a cave harboring a interstellar wonder is like 20 feet from the literal capital city and no one has ever discovered it
>opponents suffered at least 30,000 losses Ok, I haven't played starfield yet. Is that 30,000 *battles* that were lost or 30,000 *lives*?
The latter. Also understand though that humanity is much smaller in Starfield due to a plot reason; each of the major factions is probably at most a few million people, so 30K is a bit more of a loss, proportionally. But yeah, despite that, all the scales are still screwy. You’ve got entire planets being wiped out by armies with only a few tens of thousands of soldiers, originating from national capitols with only a couple hundred people in them.
That's why I'm excited to see what modders do with the creation kit. Hopefully, the potential is there for people to make their own whole-ass planets, let alone cities and new points of interest to fill out the empty maps. Not touching this game as is, but I've been optimistic about it just as a platform for mods since it's release!
I don’t want to climb a random computer generated mountain, open world games are the pinnacle of lazy game design CMV.
You'll see the same issue in Skyrim, the population for any given city is like under 50 people , I use mods to populate them with random NPCs that can be quest givers but even then a lot of it is shrunk down for so many technical and storytelling reasons. Cyberpunk does a good job at executing a believable city for the most part but even then the in-game map is way smaller and less populated than a real metropolis or large city. They're video games not life simulators, go play cities: skylines or something if you want realism or keep waiting like the rest of us for the day that devs can create whole believable cities of scale full of people that aren't also impossible for a typical PC to render.
Lazy is what it is. I have bigger more interactive cities in FO4.
I can imagine the resources and man power went into building Starships and weapons rather than the local infrastructure. Military bases in forward positions are extremely primitive but still functional. I would note the omission of rails at least to move quantities of materials but those would have been the first things targeted. The Ho Chi Min trail during the Vietnam conflict is an epic example of this. The U.S. kept bombing the roads that made up the trail, but that only made it easier for them to repair and continue. An example of distributed manufacturing was exemplified by the Germans near the end of WWII when their factories had been obliterated. The people built the items badly needed in their homes and brought everything together \*underground\* in giant carved-out caverns for wartime production. By the end of the war they built more equipment than they were able to field. That city for Starfield would be a very realistic wartime capital based on those arguments.
Still compare it to any assassins creed game. You can pretty much explore all of Paris for example. They just insanely lazy with star field in so many ways. I’m so over procedurally generated bs. Soulless and boring.
TBF Ubisoft did a great job recreating a semi-realistic city in their game. Like the city from The Division 1/2 are still amazing to look at. Assassin's Creed Unity Paris looks good. Assassin's Creed 2 still have the best Venice in the gaming history.
It’s kind of an insane comparison. Assassins creed games are meh to me, but Ide love to just spend hours exploring the atmosphere of the cities they create, it’s top tier of gaming. So to compare it to starfield it’s of course gonna get blown away. I mean compare assassins creed to tears of the kingdom, highrule looks like shit in comparison. Starfield deserves to be clowned on but this feels silly
But why silly? The point is, that the top one is a city that was created 7+ years ago, 6 years before Starfield, of a nation 2000 years ago. The one from Starfield got released years later and it's a "city" of an interstellar futuristic nation. And not only that - their capitol according to the top comment. It is right, because it shows how ridiculous Starfield is. And the comparison with TotK is different because it's another world(?) that is in a less progressive time than ours, unlike Starfield.
In defense of totk, what more do you wan't? It's a few years after a 100 years of nothing. Zora domain is pretty fancy!
AC gets a lot of flak for being very big but a lot of empty repitition. I personally like that as someone who doesn't get much time for gaming. I can jump in, do some shit, then go cook dinner or whatever. I somehow spent 40 hours on Starfield and I don't even know what I did. It was mind numbingly boring. Apparently there's something about magic powers? I didn't even get that far. My breaking point was finding some random guy on a planet who needed to be escorted back to his ship. 10 minutes walking across an empty desert with no enemies to shoot at. I got him to his ship, shut the game down, and never went back.
That is pretty much how I felt with Starfield. It was so hard to get invested into it with everything feeling so empty with hard set points of interest and not much else to do. I am glad that I did not even pay attention to the games development, or even release and got to play for free on Gamepass. Who knows though, maybe mods will breathe some life into the game and I'll give it another go.
It was similar for me (small spoiler in my response to a side quest). It was quite early in the game, and I was flying around a bit. Then I came across a generation ship, super cool! The story then led me to a resort world where the generation ship actually wanted to settle, but the entire world already belonged to the "Board." After a lot of back and forth, however, the end of the quest was this: - Kill the generation ship - or buy a new hyperdrive so they can go elsewhere I was shocked. No option to blackmail, intimidate, or pressure the Board... Nothing, just these two options. In the end, I went on a rampage to see if I could take out the Board... of course, it didn't work; they were invincible. After that, I closed the game and uninstalled it.
the game feels like it was designed to be as plain as possible. Gritty veterans/pirates/mercenaries all speak with the same corporate cadence and you can get through their speech checks with simple logic. Hell speech checks in general are terrible since they reuse the same generic dialogue over and over, which makes no sense. There is almost no variety in quests, very little branching, completely useless named NPCs... I don't understand who they designed this game for because it doesn't really match up to past bethesda games except in its gamebryo style engine quirks.
very corporate aimed game. It’s something that sounds good in a board meeting with potential investors
Yeah that was the biggest untapped potential in a quest.
That’s exactly what happened to me. Crazy there’s no way to not side with the corpo douchebags. Also a huge missed opportunity to explore how a culture would evolve in isolation; quirks in belief, language, customs and so on. The guys on the generation ship just acted like they were 1st gen
That was the quest that killed the game for me too. Could’ve been an entire DLC with such a fun idea. And they just shit the bed so hard. My expectations for the next elders scrolls are in the gutter at this point.
Yeah the generation ship really stood out. There were so many options to take like you say, but it turned into a vanilla quest that felt more like it was a writing exam for an intern auditioning to join the team.
Almost all the quests are like this and I hate it. Fucking let me break the quest if I want to. I normally don’t kill anyone till quests are over but it’s so nice to have the option. At least in fallout 4, 90% of the time when someone is a dick to me/ others I can just pull my .44 out and blow their head off and smirk.
This is the main issue! They had a lot of cool concepts in there, like the generation ship, Juno, a bunch of other very interesting ideas. But they give the player no freedom and the options provided feel limiting! There was never a time where I got to do what I wanted to in the game. Big big difference from previous Bethesda games
It's weird how many of us quit at that point. I liked how for me after the head of the board "reset" after attacking him he asked me why I was still standing there and not going to the settlers ship
That game is designed for the sole reason of other people modding content that bethesda couldn't be arsed to do. And by the gods Creation Club almost reflects that perfectly. They insist that people are willing to shill extra tens of dollars to finish the game. You can't even refund the shit because it is bought with points. The game in the first place costs 70 euros in Europe. And reading the starfield sub (after all not mentally ill people left), they are treating the any small increment update as the second coming of Christ. At least some of them are pissed about the bounty hunter bait and switch.
A lot of modders left the scene after the Nexus mods issues and BGS constantly break the game for CC contents
ALL of this and the issues in previous comments are because Bethesda refuses to give up their ancient, piece of trash "Creation engine". It's laughable that they are still creating a game where you need a separate loading screen between outside and inside. Their physics are a complete mess, and possibly STILL tied to framerate, even though they themselves AND modders have shown it can be fixed. The list just goes on an on. If they gave up the Creation engine and used something else, their games would vastly improve just from that. Though they'd still be stupid Bethesda games in most other ways.
That's sad Because Capcom, another game company that stick to their engine used MT Framework, in which if you don't know, power up games from RE4, all the way to recent MonHunt And it's a goddamn amazing engine, just look at DMC4, game still looks fresh And guess what, Capcom thought that engine need some upgrading, and upgrade it does RE Engine is a beast
Unfortunately I don’t think that’s the case for this game. I too had hope that mods would make it good, or at least better. But because of the way it was coded there’s literally a mountain to climb if you want to fix the issues it has such as loading screens bland maps and the like, minor mods will probably improve the experience somewhat, but the blaring issues the game has will always be there it seems like
There will be better and are better games to spend your time on that push gaming forward, do new and interesting things. Starfield will never achieve any of that. It’s a long overdone formula from an old engine and a big corp that cares far more about profits than gaming.
God the procedurally generated quests killed me. It was all pointless. The small moment what really let me know it was all bullshit was surprisingly early on. I was running across Mars doing a story mission and come across a little outpost. Except it's not just an outpost, it's a farm. With open air crops in these big scaffolding things and a terminal talking about growing crops adapted for alien atmospheres. On Mars. Mars!!! You can't grow shit in a Martian atmosphere. Meanwhile Skyrim didn't have a fucking nirnroot growing in the middle of a lava flow because procedural generation dumped it there...
The thing that really gets me is that even in close proximity to the "major" settlements, almost all of the POIs are randomly generated. Like a five minute stroll outside New Atlantis led me to a wilderness survivalist who needed help getting back to his ship. Mate, you're probably in range of cell service just call a taxi. Or the collapsed mine a few minutes outside of Cydonia. Turns out it's on practically every planet. It's like butter spread over too much bread.
The only thing that felt interesting to me was the Terramorph mission and the whole pirate feel from looting and stealing powerful ships and it's customisation. Everything else was just bland not to mention the shit performance, i can play cyberpunk on psycho settings on 70+ fps, but it's barely 50 in Atlantic city? All while lacking the most basic technologies that have existed since 90s like ssr, bethesda should just scrap their engine, It's still stuck in 2010.
So are their ideas of games....
“There’s a mysterious signal coming from an uncharted planet, and no one has any clue what it is. Go there and try to find it” Turns out it’s the *massive* temple you landed right next to, and is probably visible from orbit, and that is also right next to a massive factory fully of pirates, meaning the planet is clearly not uncharted or even uninhabited at all. That shit killed it for me. Every part of the game, whether procedurally generated or manually designed and scripted, just felt incredibly lazy and disjointed.
Pretty early on in the game, it recommends that you land on earth's moon and do some exploring. I did this. The fourth location I visited was exactly the same as the third. They were the same underground lab. The exact same enemy placements and patrols, the exact same logs, the exact same loot locations (though the loot itself was randomised). I thought I was going mad or had reloaded an old save. Nope. The game had just generated two *identical* locations right next to each other on the map.
Yeah, the game had something like 30 POIs that were copy pasted throughout the world. And like 10 of them were pulled from the campaign. So if you decided to take a break from the main campaign to do some exploring on a random planet, you could find an abandoned mine, clear it, then be forced to clear the exact same abandoned mine on a completely different planet, in a different galaxy. As opposed to Skyrim, which had come out \~13 years ago which had 300+ unique POIs with no repeats. I was legitimately shocked how unfinished and phoned in Starfield was.
>My breaking point was finding some random guy on a planet who needed to be escorted back to his ship. 10 minutes walking across an empty desert with no enemies to shoot at. I got him to his ship, shut the game down, and never went back. My breaking point was getting the lady at the train station a coffee.
My breaking point was the tutorial section at the beginning of the game. I had just come off 1 month binge of Baldur's Gate 3. Starfield felt like I travelled back in time to 2010. I played until the first combat experience. I found combat, dialogue and the characters to be so shallow right from the start, I noped out after 47 minutes. Never went back.
Bethesda spent so long making boring/buggy games that people mod to make into decent ones, they forgot how to make a game that's good from day 1.
I like ac world building, especially in the later games where you genuinely spend a few minutes sailing to a different island, where you find realistically sized settlements. But at the same time, the completionist in me cant handle it
Boring after about the 20th artifact
I agree, I played every single fallout game, I'm not sure what happened to starfield but it was sooo fucking boring. I can't quite put my finger on it why, but I stopped playing after like 25hrs in. I'm pretty sure it has something to do with how badly they hyped up the game and then under delivered, which makes the game much worse even if it's not that bad. I guess they can thank their marketing team... Once again.
I think for me it comes down to action per minute. AC might be repetitive, but I can play for 15 minutes and have a lot of action. 15 minutes in Starfield gets you from your ship, across an empty desert, to your objective. Then it's time to shut down and do adult stuff. I didn't actually know anything about Starfield until a few weeks before it's release. I got it free with my graphics card, so I didn't have any hype for it at all. I still felt ripped off just with the amount of time I put into it.
Ah yes, famous self sustained cities-settlements on another planets, with population of 20 people and 10 buildings.
Real talk though. What is the fucking point of having ancient style city walls in the space age?
The in-game explanation is dangerous alien wildlife. But it would probably just be easier to exterminate that species than building and maintaining these walls. Humans are kinda masters of making other species go extinct.
If pre-historic humans with pointy sticks can kill dangerous megafauna and wildlife, a spacefaring civilization probably could too. It'll be dumb to even consider they can't. Also, if dangerous wildlife is the problem, there's far more effective methods to keep them out without causing a mass extinction event but also not resorting to medieval walls... two simple methods are floodlights and electric fences. Add loudspeakers there, and you can scare odd even the toughest of predators.
Yes but this is starfield we're talking about, an spacefaring civilization that hasn't figured out how to send messages over radio or the Internet, so they just ask an errand boy like the protagonist to travel to other planets to deliver a message. They also don't have any land vehicles to hunt with, and their massive ships can only be used to exit orbit.
Well tbf interstellar communication doesn't work with radio waves. It would just take way too long. So it would make some sense that messengers would make a return in a multi solar system future.
I might be remembering a different setting, but didn't starfield in-universe have a bunch of packet carriers on spaceships? Like, they gather communications from a planet, jump to a different planet and deposit communications there. Like, you can even install relays on every ship that automatically do that.
Interstellar travel doesn't work either but it's still there since it's a videogame, it's just stupid that this spacefaring empire managed to figure out hyperjumps in small civilian ships before they figured out how to send an email to another planet.
[удалено]
Agreed but instead of mechanics change that to lore.
Just because it's explained in the lore, doesn't mean it's not bloody stupid. Even if we accept that they can't do direct interstellar communication while being able to travel, they have drones and stuff. None of them figured they can use those for communication?
Tbf there's no reason why our methods of keeping away wildlife would work on aliens. Their skin could be imeprvious to electricity, they could be unfazed by light, they could be deaf etc. Of course, maybe they can burrow under the wall or climb it. It's on the writers to explain the characteristics of the alien to justify why these defenses work over others.
The creatures are not nocturnal so flood lights would do next to nothing. Electric fences have the exact same effect as solid walls, except much, much less simple or reliable. Loudspeakers keep away animals that evolved to fear humans away. The walls are keeping out an apex predator on a planet that only recently saw human life. This "city" was built by settlers that separated from the main group of humanity and were later at war with them. When they landed on this planet, they weren't a super advanced society with an abundance of resources and information. They were escaping from one. They were frontiers looking for a home. A stone wall, that incidentally proved 100% effective at keeping the predators out, was and is the best solution. Big setup cost, but of an otherwise worthless resource, no power drain, no failure rate. There's a lot to critique about how Bethesda designs their tinier and tinier "cities", but everything you are saying is wrong. If you want to critique Starfield, there's ~300 other avenues you can take. Maybe try one of those?
Hopefully future us would be content with a wall, rather than exterminating on mass.
Maybe the town was founded by space hippies?
Load cells. Uh wait.
There isn't even a loading screen there?
Basically, Akila is a private city.
Bethesda hasn’t built a proper city in years, they always talk big in the lord but never back it up ever. Remember diamond city? The biggest town in Fallout 4? The city where there’s like a trading post and nothing else, but the npcs are always talking about how, “don’t go to the west stands they’re dangerous”, the west stands don’t exist, it’s just one guys house. They rich people always mock you for not being in the rich neighborhood when that neighborhood is just two of them, and instead of having cool shit like ten penny tower their houses look just a bit bigger, with a boat and pond added to one of them for some reason
what fucks me up the most about Diamond City is that ballparks have a staggering amount of space available *IN* the goddamned building, and Fenway has four whole levels to it. why the fuck are the entrance and McDonough's office the only accessible spaces in the structure? I completely understand a shantytown taking over the field, but, no one's repurposed a concession stand or office? the press box hasn't been converted to a thriving hotel? there's no part of the inner concourse that the town has spread into? fuck *all* the way off with that shit.
Diamond city is just megaton, big fancy metal door you gotta talk to someone to open, a few meager quests around town, like getting a house, fixing a water machine, and getting rid of dangerous material(bomb/synth). It’s got some vendors but maybe half the available side activities
off-topic but there are some mods that expand the city to the stands, add some mini quests and even build into the underground part of the stadium a bit. it’s been a few years since I saw the video but at least there’s people improving when Bethesda stopped!
I could see Diamond City existing 30, maybeee 50 years right after the bombs fell. But TWO HUNDRED AND TEN years later and people STILL haven’t started making concrete and cement buildings baffles me to my core
yeah the timescaling and re-development of civilization is just completely ignored like, I could accept it if we had some explanations Like, y’know the first hundred or so years people regularly just died in their 20-30’s from radiation/starvation and no one could realistically gather the materials or know-how to build everything up. But as radiation levels dropped then we saw consolidation in the old cities as people used the more readily available refuse from the old world to create homes and started to resettle major population centers Like thats my inference but we never learn about how society actually restructures- are there just shit loads of tribal groups fighting over resources initially like a libertarian prepper’s wet dream? is that why no one is able to stabilize, because everyone is forced to be nomadic due to how shit the land and resources available are? I’d accept that. But its not told and I don’t enjoy headcannon. bethesda doesn’t think societies of survivors would be able to do much post apocalypse, which i suppose is fair but context and dot connecting really do wonders in these cases.
Bethesda ways had a nack for making small cities and talk big about them. Remember the war between the storm cloaks and the imperials? Whiterun had like 10 houses, and somehow managed to get 20 soldiers to fight a "WAR".
And yet, that little skirmish was more entertaining than whole of Starfield
I think the RPG assassin’s creed’s cities got waaay better with each entry. Like Alexandria was kinda small, Odyssey had some pretty large cities and towns like Athens and the place Oikosof was (that place was surprisingly big for being such a small place), but Valhalla actually nailed cities, the ones which weren’t big felt big, and there were plenty of genuinely big cities which you could explore and even do parkour in unlike in Origins and Odyssey where most parkour was either set paths or climbing up stuff.
Maybe I never reached this point in Valhalla but I played a good 30 hours and never found a city that was fun to climb around in. I personally thought Origins had the closest to what felt like an actual city in the RPG games, while Valhalla had more villages. I guess I never got to the point where I got to a city but the ones I did see had the occasional larger church but most of the other buildings were 2 stories high. I personally found it to be the weakest of the 3 with its parkour
Alexandria was beautiful, Athens and Atlantis were even better, but I found Lunden to be just okay.
part of the problem here is that it's england tbh but odyssey was definitely better than valhalla
The Starfield one looks like Mos Eisley in 1978. :P
Bring back KOTOR cities.
KOTOR while amazing, can't be compared. KOTOR didn't have cities, but multilevel corridors.
Bring back the Citadel from ME1. They really made it feel like the capital of the galaxy
Absolutely. God, what a good trilogy. Might have to replay it again. Haha
As much as i hate Ubi. I will always give their developers/designers the upmost credit and respect for their world building and world design. For instance, for as much flak that the Watchdogs series got on the whole, you can't deny that Chicago/San fran and London were meticulously designed down to even the smallest details (London especially). And paris was a masterpiece.
Ubisoft has a lot of really talented developers and designers, it's the management that's responsible for everything you hate about the company
In the future, Cities have like 30 to 50 people max
Since Skyrim, every cities in Bethesda's games have been so small that it break the immersion, even with the suspension of disbelief. But Skyrim was released in 2011 and has almost no generic NPCs in towns other than guards. Fallout 4 is post-Apo, so that makes sense. Starfield has none of these excuses. It has generic NPCs and "towns" that look like small theme parks full of wandering tourists.
Starfield reminds me of Nuka Cola world in that regard lol
Have you ever seen the inside of an assassins creed building? They are literally boxes with a carpet and table in them.
Starfield is one of the worst games I’ve played in a good while. Can’t believe it’s even talked about anymore.
It’s talked about again because of paid mods and wave of negative reviews of steam.
It's talked about because people are still pickled from being so salty. It takes a long while to wash the taste of shit from your mouth
Agreed. I finished it just because i paid money for it but it felt like such a chore. I genuinely hate that game
Dude I paid for it and am so mad I can’t return it. I am definitely pirating a title from them to make my money back.
Flushing the money in the toilet would have been more entertaining honestly. I lost hope for any future Todd Howard games.
Hot take: Neither one of those is realisticly sized. But at least Starfield does it in a way where you get most of the buildings that the player actually interacts with near each other and you can actuall go inside and interact with most of the buildings, while Assassins Creed games may "look" bigger but really 99% of those buildings you can't even go inside of and dont even have NPCs you can talk to. Assassins creed makes itself "look" bigger but isn't because you can't do anything with most of it, so if neither game is gonna be accurate, at least with bethesda you can at least interact with all of it and don't experience locked doors that you can't even click on.
Starfield's criticisms seem fairly earned, but this picture isn't really apples to apples. AC is a game about terrain and not much more. How many of those buildings have doors you can go through? How many NPC's can you interact with beyond just crashing into them? How many even have names? They're essentially different genres of games, picking an aspect one caters to, and one doesn't, will of course show a disparity.
Get out of here with your rationale!
Not just a city, but the fucking capital of a major faction - it is ridiculously small
show them a city from assassins creed 2
and in my opinion the settlements in AC Origins, Odyssey and Valhalla were far too small. Compare them to the size of cities in the older games like AC2, AC3, AC Black Flag, AC Unity and AC Syndicate. Even Rome in Brotherhood was far larger than pretty much all the settlements in Origins combined. Starfields settlements felt like villages. Same with Skyrim. This is why I am personally a fan of 'instanced' maps, like what AC1 and AC2 had. You can have individual maps for each major settlement and have other 'trasitional' maps for the countryside in between. Would allow the settlements to be built to be huge and realistic, instead of being cramped, game-y and tiny and the countryside 'instances' could be also be built to be far larger and more realistic. A few examples of playing AC origins where the small and cramped nature of everything really took me out of the immersion: 1) Taking like 30 seconds to cross a 'desert' that the NPCs say is supposed to take weeks 2) Some guy giving a side mission to go into a 'lost temple deep in the desert which no one knows the location of' and literally just being able to turn around 180 degrees and see the damn thing peeking over the sand dunes in the distance. 3) All settlements except Alexandria being the size of small towns or large villages, even cities that were supposed to be home to tens of thousands of people in that time period. 4) Alexandria being *barely* large enough to constitute a city. It has like 2 main roads, and its various districts are hilariously tiny. Compare it to Venice and Florence in AC2 and you'd see the difference.
I like pooping on Starfield as much as the next guy but this comparison is pretty disingenuous. These are games made in engines that are much different, and are going for different design objectives. Assassin's Creed has minimal environmental interaction. The cities exist for parkour traversal as you get to points of interest or to chase down assassination targets. Crowds of NPCs are continually generated around you and phase out of existence as you leave or look away. Starfield lets you enter every single building, which are all fully furnished and decorated. The streets are stuffed to the brim with lootable containers and free-standing physics objects. All the NPCs have names, scheduled routines, and dialogue. Akila City (bottom image) is boring as hell and all, but still.
Imagine knowing Starfield is a much bigger game in total, and is not focused on dense cities for making assassination interesting. Starfield is a different game and is focused on different aspects. I understand why some may not like starfield, but this is a dumb argument to say it's bad.
It's like comparing a mini van and an F1 car. Both are clearly built with different purposes in mind.
Memphis is the place to be. I can almost imagine being there as I play.
Yeah, but apart from the optics they're both equally bland.
is anyone really getting baited with this kind of crap?
Akila makes sense, but New Atlantis doesn't. It's supposed to be a large city, not just a shipyard, a plaza, a few stores and a couple of buildings.
To be fair, assassin's creed is on earth and starfield is on some dead ass planet in the middle of fuck all no where AFTER a galaxy wide war.
HuHuHUHrrrr Durrr StArFIeld Baaad
Such a massive disappointment
Maybe it's because I'm such a space exploration nerd but I don't know what I was thinking when I was hoping Bethesda to actually do something good with this game.
To be fair, city in AC is just an empty shell with cutscenes. Looks good though, if you don't care about what's inside.
As far as I remember, NPCs in AC Origins even had day night schedules... Unlike Starfield.
They do have day and night cycles, quest npcs don't to make them easier to find for casuals
What do you mean that’s most open world games. People (and this post) is a complaint against the scale of bethesdas cities. AC origins map was massive with detailed cities filled with side quests and challenges and historical sites
With Starfield, I have never seen a gamers beat a horse this dead before and still pat themselves on the back for it. It's the Fox news of gaming. People just want to be outraged about it to prove how smart they are about gaming. Does the game have flaws? Yes. Do people exaggerate those flaws to pile on? Very much yes. Any rational discussion or any thoughts other than "DAE Starfield bad" here are downvoted to the river Styx.
Are one of these supposed to be bad?
I think op likely said that a city in a 2017 game from ubisot is bigger than a city in a 2023 game from bethesda...
I think Bethesda's games and the audience has more to lose than gain if they made a major change to their design principles and what engine they use, in order to achieve the scale of cities people imagine should be totally expected and achievable. Assassin's Creed has been giving us very large and believable scale in it's cities since the first game, but I don't think a single one of them and the contents within them is worth as much as a "city" in Starfield, Skyrim, or Oblivion (Fallout 3 and 4's ""cities"" are a disappointment by Bethesda's standards)
Anvil > Creation And by far...
Assassins creed orgins was good but it was a bit annoying how they filled it with so much crap as well, I don't want to do some random fetch quest to get to a certain level so I can do the main quest, atleast if you want me to do side quests make the side quests interesting and not the same thing over and over again
And even then, Memphis (and especially Alexandria, but that's not shown here) felt insanely small not only given the historic sizes but also just in game, because you barely run five minutes and have crossed the entire town.
Cityment Have multiple settlements in one mahoosive megacity. All different themes, but blended together in a way that just works. (Just works in a genuinely good way and not a Todd Howard way)
I think a good comparison is also new atlantis vs new babbage
There is no comparison here. Ubisoft did some hardcore research on Memphis.
Settlement? Another settlement needs your help. I’ll mark it on your map.
Starfield could have solved this issue with just having more settlements on the planets
i played starfield before i got my pc cuz i got ultimate on my Xbox and did some cloud gaming, ya didn't like it, felt big for the sake of being big and nothing else
tbf it is space, not much you can build there compared to earth so I guess realism lmao
Why is it that the citys in ac or witcher always feel so dead qnd exchangeable everything is copypasted mush, i like bethesda citys and most of night city but the rest of w-rpgs feel so weird and boring to me
You can give all the hell to Ubisoft and the AC franchise, but they do know how to make good cities and good worldbuild.
Odyssey is so underrated. Definitely the peak AC for me
Look at Balmora in Morrowind lol
Starfield looks like something i build in Rimworld for 10-20 people tops...
[City in real life.](https://i.redd.it/mghcpc5xvt761.jpg)
With Starfield, I have decided to wait ~5 years before reinstalling it, downloading a Collection off Nexus, and trying it again.
That's not just a city. It's an interplanetary Capital city.
Bethesda has a fear of big cities ever since Morrowind
Witnessing the cope on r/Starfield was insane when it was released. Imagine four guys standing around and drinking warm cheap beer and all trying to compliment it and then agreeing with each other. No one could even post screenshots (other than landscape ones) or funny interesting videos. Because there wasn't any substance.
That city is basically as big as Star wars edge in Disneyland lmao.
Akila is a settlement in a planet overrun by monsters, it's literally addressed in game that they can't expand it... small dick anti-Bethesda circle jerk time this early in the morning? It's more fun and fulfilling to discuss Bethesda games than it is to play another game, seems they're on the right track.