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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 10th, 2023

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  • Imho its because the procedural underpinnings are so close to the surface. How are you supposed to stay immersed when you know roughly how many POI’s there will be and that you will see the exact same POI on multiple planets, right down to object placement? They will all be within running distance of the ship etc etc.

    Its not the first game to do it, NMS is pretty immersion breaking in this respect, but at least its somewhat masked by being able to cruise around the surface, use vehicles etc. But I think proc gen for POI’s is a trap for devs. If they do go down that path there needs to be a deep well of content to stitch together so that things feel unique.

    I suspect the use of AI in game design (not necessarily in runtime) will go a long way to improving this sort of thing. Its one reason I think the Creation Engine is a dead man walking so to speak and a really bad call for ESVI. I doubt they will be able to shoehorn in AI to the dev pipeline effectively.




  • Its a great game, if it was released in 2013. Now its just average. They have doubled and tripled down on the formula, chucked a coat of paint on the engine and called it a day. Whats astonishing is that they spent so long doing it. I’ve done the MSQ, one faction questline and half of another and I’d say thats at least 1/3, probably closer to 1/2 of the curated storyline content of the game. All of it was ok I guess, but nothing in it jumped out as particularly well written, let along consequential and meaningful. I’m struggling to see how it ate so many dev hours.

    I think these days we have a much more mature gamer audience, and Starfield seems squarely targeted at teens. There just isn’t the depth of more modern game storytelling. Some I blame on the engine (well alot tbh) but some is squarely on Bethesda for playing it so safe. Does not bode well for ESVI.