I played SF for hundreds of hours, and for me, it feels devoid of meaning. Oddly, it also lacks some fundamental aspects of previous Bethesda games like a day/night cycle, benefits for helping struggling colonies, and especially, the serendipitous stories tucked away in odd locations. It feels lifeless and barren.

I think the biggest issue is that Bethesda doesn’t seem to care about these worlds as much as a fan would. There’s no massive temple hidden deep underground in some random unrelated cave, no _unique_ location like an abandoned bar with a story to tell and _UNIQUE_ gear to find. And arguably most importantly NO QUEST TAKING YOU ON A GUIDED TOUR, at most some off handed reference in a book somewhere. Im pretty sure the “biggest” secrets that have been found are some frozen fish on some icy planets (would be more impressive if life wasn’t _evenly_ _spread_ across the universe like some uncaring algorithm made them) and a mech factory that I’m also fairly certain you could encounter an EXACT clone of just over the next hill.

(seriously, finding the exact same note from the exact same people having the exact same problem in the EXACT SAME abandoned location (without universe hopping) is inexcusable and was incredibly disheartening to find.)

I suspect part of their thinking was to give lots of room for modders to play in. Skyrim has limited space to work with, as large as it is. So when dozens of modders create new locations, they can get in each other’s way if more than one wants to put a location in the same location. In Starfield, they can pick from over 1000 mostly empty planets to locate a special quest and location. …. so it is nearly impossible to have this issue.

Size is irrelevant when the companions are BORING. Andreja is the only complicated character, and yet all still boring. Typically modern.

Yes

Thing is, Starfield actually isn’t big enough, but not in the way someone could think: Starfield lacks content. There is only nine significant settlements, two PMCs and one organised pirate fleet for whole humanity. There is only four characters, with who player character can be close, compared to how many of them was in Fallout 4. This list can be continued. Someone started a mediavirus, that Starfield has boring generated dungeons, but thing is, dungeons aren’t generated and it is boring, because there is dozen or two of them, and most of them are repeated and every time they are very same: you can visit six abandoned mines on six different planets and every time it will be same abandoned mine, identical to one, that you’ve visit last time. I like Starfield but I will not deny that it is underdeveloped for a game, that was in development for eight years.

Va’ruun’kai fixes this problem imo and I think BGS should update Akila City and New Atlantis to be more like Dazra

They should have went the death stranding route. Making the planets and the environment and whether on the planets the main enemy. Space suits should have been how the suits in death stranding is. There is no creativity in the planets themselves or their environments the weather effects needs a graphical overhaul. The two planets in the movie in the interstellar have way more creativity in them than starfield.

I love this game. 800+ hours in.
Starfield is exactly how long you want it to be. If you think it’s too small or short then keep exploring deeper into the universe. If you think it’s too big then stay put and live where you are. After all my hours played I’m STILL discovering new locations, characters, worlds, etc. That I haven’t come across in previous playthroughs.
So just live in the universe, take your time, read the documents, listen to characters speak and go through their quests. The stories are out there to be discovered. I love this game. As a matter of fact, I don’t even have the shattered space DLC. It feels like I won’t need it for another 2 to 3 years.

I totally agree regarding New Homestead! Felt like I was playing Oblivion. Came across it naturally while exploring

Balance… I don’t care that there are 1000 planets, it was such a small amount of work for them that it ultimately doesn’t even matter if they are there or not tbh. The real issue is that the hand crafted stuff, isn’t even hand crafted stuff. New Atlantis has the permanent city, but the surrounds are proc gened everytime you land. If you had 1 planet with one large traversable map like Skyrim has, where Neon, Akila and New Atlantis, etc, we’re all on the same world space that was traversable, and then you also had 1000 proc gen planets to dick around on if you wanted to, space travel wouldn’t feel so important, it wouldn’t be constantly locking me into loading screens and the world would feel alot better and make alot more sense. Everything is currently too spread out to be meaningful and conflicts feel silly af and space exploration is ruined by constantly finding traces of human architecture or straight up just finding other ships and humans on almost every other planet.

It’s not that it was too big, it’s that it failed to deliver us a real map at all, which destroys exploration and didn’t give us anything exciting to replace it with like true survival mechanics or anything. This game is Skyrim but if all the city maps had to be fast travelled to and the entire exterior world was proc gen… it wouldn’t feel good, regardless of how much forest you walked through, it would feel like a shit game with nothing to do as you walked for hours, never reaching the next town or city.

too bland.

I haven’t watched the video yet, but the question asked by the title “too big or to small” is my exact feeling/confusion when playing starfield

It has to much of nothing, and to little of anything interesting.

what’s going on with your hair dude

It is too boring

“….& that puts the onus on the player to really roleplay & draw these worlds & features together in their mind”.

Dude you have a gift! 😂

Starfield is very weird & awkward, but i just can’t help but love it.

The great thing about the way starfield uses procedural generation is that it’s like exploring real life nature.

When you find something truly special it really does feel special & it does so because it WASN’T handcrafted & placed there awaiting your discovery.
These are the locations at which when i find them, i drop a beacon so i can return.

Nothing i’ve ever played comes close to this. (Although i understand it’s probably equally possible in NMS & ED).

I wouldn’t say it’s better than exploring in skyrim or fallout 4, but it’s new & different & those are things i like.

I come from Elite Dangerous. Starfield can’t ever be too big. ED has 400 billion procedurally generated starsystems with many of them with nothing in them. Still a lot of players go and explore that. Fully exploring every single planet and moon in Starfield in my base playthrough was just a warming up excercise.

Either way it’s as dead as a doorknob and is equally bland and uninteresting, so it doesn’t really matter in the end.

First of all it’s empty

It’s too empty.

If Bethesda Didn’t have the brand behind them no one would be talking about these games. The developer as you knew them is dead move on.

With 1200 hours in Starfield, I found Elite Dangerous. Never even looked back.

Even the building is pointless. get the home with the build out and it’s better than anything you could ever build.

New Atlantis was made by hotel corporate tycoons

Only here to say snorefailed was trash

I have literally seen EVERYTHING there is I’ve been to every biome of every planet, I’ve seen all there is multiple times lol.

neither its writing is just so bad the story should be removed

The civilizations in this game don’t make any sense. They’re spread across different star systems, yet there are barely any urban centers. Each faction has only about three “major” towns, except for the Varun, which apparently have just one city and planet. They also fought a major galactic war over territory, despite barely being able to populate a single planet. This happens just a few years after evacuating Earth’s destruction, when you’d think the survival of human civilization would take priority over politics and infighting. Somehow, the only cultures that survived are Modern-day Space America and Space Old West America. There are just too many cracks in the story and lore of this universe to take it seriously. It’s as vast as an ocean but as shallow as a puddle.

Just filled with too much empty procedurally generated landscapes, loading screens, and bland writing. This is what boring would be if it was a game

Its not too big but rather a mess of a game lore wise. Uncharted planet head there and survey it. Is it really uncharted when space ships are so prevalent that a grandma floating around in orbit of said uncharted planet and invites you over for cookies? Its silly game story wise. And then you land on the yet to be seen by humanoid eyes and as your landing space ships are landing and taking off in your vicinity of said massive planet. its so immersion breaking Starfield I uninstalled and have no reason to go back.

both

its too shitty

xenoblade chronicles x for the wii u executed starfield better than starfield

The actual handcrafted parts of the game are too small, while the randomly generated parts are too big. The game is literally as wide as an ocean but as deep as a puddle.

Too bad.

I dont like when criticisms go like “it should be an entirely different game”. Starfield is what is is, but given its blueprint, it could have made different choices inside the same framework:

– I would have made every planet consist of a single tile per biome and make each tile’s geography really memorable (canyons, volcanoes, weather etc).

– the interiors of the poi’s in vanilla arent procedural, unlike the planets themselves. I would have made hundreds of procedural interiors and outpost exteriors and added different set dressing variations for each of these poi’s also using procedural techniques.

– procedural human colonies poi’s spread among the central systems and completely uncharted planets as you venture further out.

– mechanics to make traversal and space exploration difficult, dangerous and costly.

Lots of these alre already implemented or being implemented by modders as we speak. Once this framework is achieved we should start getting tons of new quests content, almost like bite sized expansions every 2 to 3 months.

It’s either too big for announcing 1,000 planets, or too small for not having a dedicated team refine the procedural stuff to have multiple overlapping layers and levels to ensure that the unexpected can happen even hundreds of hours into the game. E.g. more needs to be randomized than the the uniforms being worn by the enemies. There needs to be more paired locations to give the impression of actual habitation. There needs to be layers of rare or even unique locations seeded across the galaxy in addition to the static stuff. There needs to be more to do in space, more to the economy, more ship parts(seriously, Bethesda advertised people spending 26 million hours in the ship builder and yet gave 0 new ship parts in the DLC), an actual point to Outposts beyond grinding XP/chems, they need to finish the ‘build your own station’ content and let you plop down a colonization foothold in a system of your choice(brand it as a “research expedition” to avoid violating any political treaties), etc. For being so vast there is little point to any of it once the initial novelty wears off.

Big. Thanks for an easy one. Wish you were my teacher as a kid

To continue your point, Bloo, I also really enjoyed Gagarin. I liked the struggling colony working to expand at the expense of its personality. I also liked that their borders had a similar reasoning to Akila City. It’s too dangerous to go alone.

I’ve recently picked up Starfield again, after losing interest. Two words, Bloo: magnetic holsters. I have no idea why, but it has made all the difference.

The “galactic scale” or rather the stars within 30 light years from the solar system might seem great, but the human spread is far thinner, especially for your ssd. Do we say “oh no lets not develop a game like that, lets just copy paste london & miami and let people be the best criminals they could ever desire in some city of yonder thots like every ps5 player wants”

No thanks. Let us have our space rpg that isn’t a SA simulator.

What do you mean there’s nothing there to discover??? 1:38
You reach a land, it’s barren. You’ve been travelling through space, you should be damned grateful you finally touched land. Heck i know almost every person would have their head prostrated on the ground with tears in their eyes that they escaped the death of space, for land.

And out of the many many square miles of land you can visit, you can plop an outpost. And build. And with creation kit, create your own quests, your own new npcs. It’s literally a doll house in a sand box.

funnily enough, because none of the major questslines (neither faction nor MQ) ever directs to you New Homestead, i went on for hundreds of hours without ever being awareof its existance, and it wasn’t until i did one of those radiant quests on a randomly generated mining facility where some miners needed to be ferried to the nearest settlement that i discovered New Homestead.

Keep in mind, Todd Howard said himself that Starfield is the first game they are going into with the intention of supporting it with content for years to come. He said abandoning Skyrim and FO4 development too early was a regret the team had.

That said, as an older gamer I much prefer Bethesda’s sandbox style open worlds over the more popular AC/Witcher style themeparks.

Someone said Starfield is like an enormous pizza crust with a tiny patch of pizza toppings somewhere in the middle.

I’ve been saying “it has no Between,” for ages.

You are on point, and you reminded me of another related dichotomy in Starfield, which I would describe as “Void vs. Melting pot”

Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is, as Douglas Adams said. There are in general two ways how to approach it:

Realistic scifi works use this concept. Getting everywhere takes long time (even FTL means months), and main themes of the story are usually isolation, claustrophobia and solitude, Think Alien, but also non-horror works like The Expanse or Elite Dangerous (the game has sooooo many flaws, but it really does the space justice). Civilisiations are just tiny specks flying on tiny rocks in unforgiving void, and your ship is not just a vehicle, but literal key of your survival, and help takes months to come.

Then you have the Star Wars approach. Traveling by FTL is roughly equivalent of riding your car and using highway. Space is not scary. Is populated, you can almost always make it to some port, and there are civilisations everywhere.

Both of these are valid approaches, and its more like a scale, with most works being somewhere on it (For example Star Trek is somewhere in the middle). But Starfield is all over the place (scale). On one hand, civilisation is really scarce, with only small cities on few planets. On the other, there are outposts full of pirates/zealots everywhere. Ship desing goes for fairly realistic “Nasapunk”, yet travel seems to practically instant. Ships seems to be lived in and equiped for long hauls, but, once again, travel feels instant (and I actually was paying attention, and nowhere does the game suggest that Grav jump trips take long time). People one hand talk about settled system being few systems, other talk about “galaxy” when talking about interstellar afairs.

From gameplay dev perspective, I think the biggest issue is a lack of space gameplay. If you actually had to travel some real time to your destination (atleast for a first time), you would appreciate the destination more. If your space is big and empty, make it feature atleast. This would also elevate the best feature of Starfield, which is a ship builder. If you actually spend meaningful time on your ship.

I liked New Homestead too – mainly because I found it when I was just exploring. That said, I do like Starfield anyway and I do hope that they continue to update it.

Too Big and Too Small is the most conscise way to explain the issues with Starfield

I liked New Homestead, but it was also an accidental major disappointment for me. It was pretty early on in my play through and I was exploring around outside. I saw a building in the distance and ran out to it. It was the abandoned mining rig that is infested with those hostile alien swarm creatures. The dataslates said they broke through some sort of shelf in the ground with their drill and then those things swarmed out and killed everyone. After I cleared it I ran back to town to warn them because they mine the ice shelf they built the homestead on for their water. I figured this was a location specific to New Homestead but it wasn’t. It was just random luck that it appeared next to a settlement. That was when I realized that even the structures around the hand built stuff are randomized and not connected in any way. I feel like my perspective of the game never fully recovered from that.

The way Starfield’s civilizations are built seems really odd.
I wish that all the major cities were mini Skyrims with the lands around the city full of settlements, farms, and production facilities with commerce and quests of all kinds going on.
The surrounding nearby systems should have colonies and all the wartime abandoned installations. The outer systems should be uninhabited, but full of things to discover that could be in demand by the core systems. None of the flora and fauna should have names. The player gets to name them and the player should be able to do scientific experiments to discover what uses they could have. This would mean Constellation actually has a use. As it is now, I feel like they aren’t really needed. The needs of the core systems would give you reasons to explore space.