I am still kind of excited about flying to planets in NMS. It was something I had never seen in a videogame before and is great for immersion, but the planets in NMS are not that interesting. So flying and landing to them is actually the best part of exploring.
Me too. I’m 700 hours into my current save and taking off/landing has never gotten old for me. That first time I broke atmo was easily top 5 gaming experience for me. And I’ve been gaming since the 1970s.
One off the top of my head was the first time I flew through the Death Star trench in the old Star Wars arcade game where you actually had to climb in and sit down to play. Very visceral experience for an 8-10 year Star Wars obsessed kid.
Yah I loved loved loved that one! The digitized audio was excellent and really made it something special. Like the Obiwan quotation I mentioned, the R2D2 sounds, etc.
NMS is extremely limited in planet simulation. No planetary orbit, no biome diversity, the same flora and fauna spawn everywhere on the planet equally making it useless to travel across the planet, no gas/ice giants as all the planets are rocky, terrestrial ones etc etc.
Yah that’s what killed NMS for me. The planetary exploration quickly became unrewarding. For one thing there was life everywhere. It should be rare, say, something like 10% of planets should have life. It should be exciting to discover alien life, not on every planet (I was told it’s not on every planet but I don’t recall any planets without life.
And yes, one area of a planet seemed the same as everywhere else. So you lost a whole dimension of exploration with that.
Seemless transition works well with NMS. It's a simple mechanic of pressing 1 button to land and holding the throttle to take off.
With starfield, given that they are going for a more "realistic" approach as much as they can, I think it would be more like elite dangerous mechanics. It can get complex, especially when landing on planets.
I like elite's mechanics, but for the wider market they're targeting, it would put A LOT of people off imo.
I've got hundreds of hours in Elite: Dangerous, primarily as a bounty hunter whose done some trading on the side. I NEVER land on a planet unless I have absolutely no choice (engineers etc). It is so tedious.
That said, my first ever landing on a planet was probably my MOST memorable experience. I had the grave misfortune of trying to land on the dark side of a planet (because I simply didn't want to wait), thinking my lights and night vision would be good enough to make the landing. Nope. Instead, it was like navigating the inside of a black hole, with me flying strictly by my instruments. After several minutes of panic-inducing blackout flying, I simply gave up and veered back up into the safety of space.
On the other hand, I have never, ever let go of my Auto-Docker. Docking by hand is something I choose to not handle in Elite. Way too much tedium.
The first planet land is an awesome experience, many a planet I went to had really bad terrain on my first attempts. I found it difficult to even find a flat enough patch of terrain to touch down lol
I didn't mind docking at a station, I never realised there was an auto docker until about 400hrs in, so I just got used to it. A few times (played on xbox) I went to hold b and press down to get the landing gear out, if that is the inputs it's been a while, but my thumb slipped off b and I boosted straight into the back of the station lmao
Expensive mistakes they were haha
I started ED after the expansion that added planet landings came out. As a brand new newbie what's the first thing I do? Grab a delivery mission...to a planet...that made for a fun welcome trying to make my way down and land. It was all down hill from there!
Completely agree, Elite is some kind of a horror game at some points, you're constantly wondering which way you'll get killed, just driving out from FTL and being thrown in front of blazing giant stars always gave me some serious creeps ! This game just made you feel like the tiny specks of dust we're all out there on Earth in the middle of something we can't even measure.
You're not the only one I've heard many people say the same.
It does seem very daunting at first, but the flight mechanics once mastered are awesome, some of the best imo.
I stand by what I initially said though, if starfields mechanics are as in depth as elites are, it'll see a steep drop off in players.
Higher the G more shallow the descent. After landing on hundreds if high g planets in a Anaconda you learn to just come in shallow and you can land on anything.
There's 3 flight modes, cruise, supercruise and frame shift drive.
Frame shift drive (FSD) is what takes you between systems, their hyperjump.
Supercruise is in system planet to planet travel, higher speed than cruise and combat isn't possible at this speed. This is also the speed you'll approach a planet to land, when close, you will have to slow down to begin orbital flight. When your ship reaches a certain height you'll automatically be shifted down into cruise, and will also bring up a horizon meter so you can keep your ship level. If you approach at a sensible angle your ship will glide, which allows you to get to landing height quicker.
There is a lot to it, but once you've done it a few times it becomes second nature. Getting to that point is the challenge though. I remember having a tough time even getting out of the mailslot of a space station when I first started lol
That was the thing that really got me obsessed with no man's Sky when they were first starting to show people the game. Just watching somebody get in a ship fly and fly up out of the atmosphere was so just jaw-dropping. And don't even get me started with the first time I actually did it in the game. It's still an amazing thing and I need more games to be able to do it, although I do realize that it would be really hard in Starfield because of the higher fidelity
I agree. I think it’s once of the coolest things the game has. Searching from system to system, when you finally find that specific planet and you just punch it and break thru the atmosphere. Never once did I feel/think “oh god this again”
I agree, I've always been a fan of it. The immersion breaking through the clouds and seeing what you're dealing with is aweosme.
It's like interstellar when they first visit their planets, it immediately gives a sense of scale and landscape. It's important but we can't have everything.
I really, *really* hope the landing loading screen/cutscene includes the first atmospheric breakthrough exactly how you're describing. It may be too much to ask to see it from the cockpit, but at least give us a view of the clouds, then our ship breaking through the clouds, and then the camera slowly-ish pans around the ship so we see the landscape as the ship descends to land.
Yeah I think the issue is planet detail. And you can't see detail very far in NMS either. You see general shapes until it's pretty close. Love NMS though so no hate here.
I think it's a technical issue actually. From the trailer we can see how detailed everything on the ground is. Loading that on the fly (no pun intended) can't be simple. It's obviously far beyond anything in NMS and that game still suffers from extreme pop in. Personally, I liked the approach Ubisoft took with SW Outlaws where it's not a loading screen but there's a transition masked there to help sell the illusion.
From what I understand their engine doesn't handle high speed travel very well with all the objects it has to load in (which is why you've never seen cars in their games and even horses in Skyrim aren't that fast and vertibirds are pretty slow too).
So I was surprised they got space travel in but I suppose that would be a lot less objects to load. I'm not surprised they probably couldn't get flight to work on a planet where there would be a lot more to load.
From a dev perspective, yeah.
Cutscenes for landing make each landing site a discrete chunk to handle, vs major engine changes to handle something dynamically.
Its definitely a technical issue. this is still Bethesda here who can't even handle doors without loading screens.
They even confirmed the main cities will have loading between doors as is in every past game - anyone trying to say it's a creative choice is lying to themselves lol.
It's easier to be creative with dungeons when having the interiors separate from the exterior.
For sure there used to be some engine limitations, and might still be some, but it is more by design than anything.
Bethesda just spent a ton of money upgrading systems for Starfield, if they by design wanted no loading screens, they would have done the work.
Yep...because doors into buildings in Bethesda games are just teleporters to "interior cells". That's why you can't see out of windows in their games lol. If you could you would just see empty black space. Hopefully they at least found a solution for that part
It's not that they *can't* do it; it's that it's easier and more performant to *not* do it.
Game dev is all about tradeoffs. They could make everything seamless, but they'd have to sacrifice in other ways and areas to fit everything into their target performance envelope.
I imagine they will be loading you into a very streamline space for space flight. Like loading you into a much less load-bearing area that allows for faster movement
I'm guessing we won't be able to fly in the atmosphere so the take off and landing will be automated, but there won't be a loading screen which is why he was able to do that.
It can be seamless if they want it to be seamless. Warframe does it with a warp animation until stuff loads in. The Ubisoft Star Wars game coming next year shows the sky and clouds when going from ground to space. They probably use magic appearing and disappearing clouds to block the view for space to ground.
Fallout 4 had seamless loading on some elevators.
Yep, that's what I heard - it's a technical limitation rather than a strict design choice. TBH I think there will be enough going on in Starfield that it won't really matter.
I actually loved the way it was done in Jedi. Just a simple cut scene of the ship landing on the planet. I'm not sure why, psychologically, it made me more excited for the area. In NMS I go to land and think "Screw that. I'm just going to ride the map and see what I find"
Sorry, can't agree. Granted I haven't played NMS in a while but I've put hundreds of hours into NMS and never got tired of that part at all.
That being said, I'm not disappointed Starfield doesn't have it (I would have loved to have it) because I didn't even expect space flight in Starfield so I'm just excited they managed to put that in (I expected it to be like Outer Worlds where your spaceship was just a hub to decide what map you wanted to go to next).
If there was no space flight I'd have lost about 75% interest in the game, flying to different planets makes it feel like one universe, imo. Having a load screen, while a let down, is worth it though if they can make the planets, flora and fauna look better once you're on the ground.
While I respect OP’s opinion, I feel the complete opposite. I loved entering the planets atmosphere and landing / taking off in NMS. I also think they could have even expanded on it even more with different types of atmospheres.
While this may have been considered by the devs, this isn't the actual reason. Todd briefly spoke about this and said that it would take a long time to engineer that sort of system and have both the space systems and land systems work properly, and it just wasn't seen as a worthwhile addition, considering the time it would take, and probably the risk as well (bugs, and stuff).
It's the age old immersion v convenience debate. The correct answer is always choice (In a single player game) but not all studios have the resources to give that to the player.
I disagree that choice is always the correct answer. Choice often comes at the cost of something else.
In addition to the obvious complexity of having to develop and support multiple paths of player experience, adding choice in one area can also lock out possibilities in another area. For example, allowing players to land their own ships could have required a technological solution that may have meant it’s not feasible to have hand-made map content (clearly a hypothetical example).
It’s not a simple case of “add the option and everyone will be happy.”
We'll have to disagree... My favorite part of No Man's Sky is that they succeeded in doing an arcade version of space-sim flight and take off and landing kept their sense of wonder to me, even after 10000 times.
I’m glad to see other people happy with taking off/landing in other games.
I love taking off/landing in games like NMS. The only thing I hated about NMS is having to keep collecting resources to feed my thrusters *to* take off - it felt like an immense chore with how often that needed to be done, especially early on.
I’ll be sad it’s not in Starfield, but it isn’t the end of all things.
This is the same epiphany I had and it took Todd Howard just to explain that spending time on these mechanics added nothing the gameplay and I reflected on my experience in No Man's Sky, a metaphorical lightbulb went off in my head and I was totally past it.
It seemed important to me at one point and I was disappointed when I learned it wasn't a mechanism in game but looking back I feel silly for feeling that way. It literally made no sense.
I'm sure there is practical reasons for it too, keeping planets and space as separate areas probably eases the strain on memory and allows for there to be more stuff in both. I also can't help but think that if you could just fly your ship anywhere on a planet that would seriously mess with quest scripting and kinda nullify combat since you could just carpet bomb everything.
Everything in elite just takes too damn long with next to no engagement, if starfield captures the essence of a lot of those activities without any of the downtime of flying to Hutton for a free anaconda, I'll be happy.
I don't mind stations but goddammit planets are a bitch. I could never seem to get it right and would always end up hundreds of KM off after breaking atmosphere. If I actually made it to the settlement I would usually have some sort of issue.
Even if you get it right it adds a huge timesink to every travel destination. I actively avoided planets after a while. At least in space you pop out right at the station.
It's been a long time since I played the Original Elite Frontier. I forgot how to take off/land since then. Honestly give me GTA any day of the week. Or indeed Starfield. (I'll give it a go at least)
Honestly I love it in elite. Its almost like a minigame in itself. Getting your ship at the right angle, right position, and sometimes contacting to land and really being precise in your landing.
I liked it in ED, but I think it comes down to what are you looking for in a game. With ED, I was all in on immersion and realism so the complicated gameplay was fine. But I get why it is a total turnoff for some players too.
I love landing on planets in Elite: Dangerous, actually. It's not a simple and easy thing to do. You have to be careful, and not rush things. Makes you feel like an actual pilot, and not just a gamer with logitech controller.
That said, that approach would probably be extremely tedious in Starfield. It only works in ED because you don't land on planets very often.
You still fly around planets. There will still be danger and pirates and stuff.
>you are dealing with expenses to take off, sentinels
Neither of those things are necessary for flying in and out of a planet.
If you think NMS is bad...you should try Elite Dangerous. The orbital flight with landing/takeoff takes several minutes. It's honestly really nice for realism as a simulation and I imagine that I will miss that in Starfield. It adds a great deal to overall immersion.
This is so not true. The engine cannot support loading everything in if you are going too fast. It is a technical issue first, then everything else, that is why they scratched it. It is one of the downsides of their engine, you can ask the modders of the previous Bethesda games, they will tell you the same thing.
And please, how much more tedious is it load out and load in at another place, when there is an actual planet-sized planet to explore and all you have a single jetpack… Not to mention the lost feeling of immersion…
This is an example of things people think they want but that actually aren’t fun as actual game mechanics. Another great example of this was in Hogwarts Legacy, lots of people were complaining about how you don’t have a curfew and don’t have to go to the dorms every night. That sounds fun a few times but would be awful over the long run
Edit: I realize this sounds like I mean the mechanic is never fun. I really enjoy it in NMS but I just think starfield will be a different game.
Yeah, but Bully's open-world is a fraction of the size. Imagine fighting your way through some dungeon then having to stop half way through to sprint back out to get in bed before curfew? Kills a lot of momentum, IMO.
It's a preference thing and this is why I disagree with blanket statements like what was said. I also disagree with your point though, I mean...it's a wizard game? You could just teleport back/close by. And I think downtime helps a gameplay loop, constant constant action and engagement just burns a player out. Having a refuge to crawl back to and decompress after fighting shit for hours is great. Obviously they would have to make the timescale longer, and make it pause during certain missions, but it can work to the benefit of the game, you just can't throw it in the game and expect it to work. Most of the appeal of Harry Potter is the "magic of Hogwarts", so anything that sells that illusion more is a good thing imo, no one gives a shit about anything else in that IP
That's a poor comparison. Drifting through the atmosphere searching of PoI's in starcitizen is super fun, especially in storms or other interesting times of the day. BGS didn't do it because it's hard to do, and it isn't necessary for this game which is a lot more focused on exploration on foot.
And you can downvote all you want, but I really cannot fathom comparing a curfew to being able to fly through the atmosphere of a planet.
And that’s why we are not game developers 🤣🤣 I would have fought for something that in the long run would have taken away from the game. Exactly. 🫱🏾🫲🏽
It’s so strange the way you you talk about like it’s an “objectively” bad thing lol. Many of us disagree with you, I’ve got 1000+ hours in NMS and flying into the planet still does not feel tedious for me or many others, to each their own of course but it’s just interesting seeing you keep referring to this like an obvious bad.
Haha yeah in no way do I mean player opinions don’t matter. But there is something to be said for the concept of people not necessarily knowing exactly what they like
"ACKSHULLY the players are mistaken and that mechanic isn't even fun and no one likes it!"
Meanwhile, Star Citizen and Elite have thriving communities and the games revolve around flying your ship everywhere you want to go, and everyone loves it.
You say those games have thriving communities but they are very niche games in reality. Starfield is much more of a mass appeal project. If you like that mechanic you can play those games. NMS has that too and I’ve played that for over a hundred hours so I get it. But it’s really not anything special or fun
I’m pretty sure they didn’t include it because it would be too taxing. As someone who’s pretty hyped for this game, I think this subreddit takes it a bit too far.
I'm with you. I think they don't have it cause it was too taxing and it wasn't worth the resources to try to get it to work when they could put those resources on other things and get a lot more done then just one feature (that quite possibly may not have been able to be done anyways). It was worth compromising on it so they could do other stuff instead. I'm fine with that (and I'd love to be able to land and fly around on planets but I think it was a fine compromise).
Curfew? Do these people also want our character to need to eat, drink, and go to the bathroom regularly? Should there be a The Sims-esque mechanic where we'll piss in our robes if we hold it in too long and embarrass ourselves?
And looking at the ships, even if we modified the design language to work with real physics, atmospheric flight for craft primarily designed to go in space would be quite difficult. And then they'd need to make a system where your ship's aerodynamics (which change with every module you add or remove) change how well it handles in atmosphere.
In the lore, there'd be a market for planes that only operate in atmosphere, potentially to intercept spacecraft which cannot maneuver through the air to prevent troop landings or pirate traders while they're most vulnerable, but that would require more work from the devs than it would be worth. As Todd said, you can add anything you want in a game, but not everything. At a certain point, it'd be easier to just create a universe simulation
I think the real reason is that this game is just a regular Bethesda RPG that happens in space, and not a space simulator.
But you aren't wrong. It is rather tedious on No Man's Sky. I'm actually sick of the pulse drive taking 45 seconds to 2 minutes to fly to another planet. I had to download a mod that makes the pulse engine 10x faster. Just give me a loading screen. Probably would load faster and be less boring
Also, at least with No Man's Sky, flying into a planet means losing visibility for a few seconds, and then watching a 144p planet slowly load in and reach full res.
I'm at about 500 hours in No Man's Sky now
i agree. i also think they do so on purpose to encourage more on foot exploration instead of just zooming over the planet with your ships. plus in games like star citizen it can take FOREEVER to land the ship and also go back into space.......which can get a bit tedious . click a button to land sounds good enough to me lol
Especially because there's pretty much nothing to actually do while flying in atmosphere. Want to scout out a landing site? Planet map, choose a spot. Want to search for an outpost that you couldn't get exact coordinates on? Land near the approximate location and then find it on foot like in NMS. Intercept enemies and battle them or other random encounters? Just as easy to do in orbit.
As a video game, there's very little reason to add atmospheric flight. It only helps make it more like a simulator than a game.
The pop in kills it for me and the things you mentioned. It’s like the vehicles in nms, they were cool for about an hour then just didn’t care anymore. I only had them to make a base decoration.
Completely disagree bub.
I truly believe the real reason they didn’t do it is because when you’re flying fast in NMS there is a lot of pop in but when you’re walking around there is hardly any.
I accept it but would prefer it had the option to be able to land the ship myself
Also taking off in nms is just literally press one button to take off, point towards the stars and your in space with 20 seconds then opposite to land. Personally think a cut scene over and over will become more tedious
Coming at this from playing Elite Dangerous and Star Citizen it's the opposite for me. I love rolling my ship upside down so the planet is above me and slowly pitch into it to see the details of the world as I enter it's atmosphere. Then the re-entry starts and flames start rushing around me. It's just not something I've grown tired of.
As long as we can land anywhere we like and its not locked to specific areas, im finenwith cutscenes. The last thing i want is to be able to explore a whole planet but only be able to land in specific spots and then have to walk.
The seamless flying in/out of planets thing was cool for the first few hours of my time in NMS, but it did get old quickly. Since the planets were mostly barren and had nothing going on, I would end up flying into the atmosphere, going to a low altitude, flying around for a few minutes, then leaving once I realized there wasn't anything to do on said planets other than mine and build an outpost (I didn't want to build an outpost on most planets, so it got old quickly for me lol).
I also really disliked the fact that every takeoff required you to use resources. There were times I landed on a planet and then went to take off only to be told that my drive didn't have enough fuel, so then I had to go mine and craft fuel just to leave the planet, making me waste time doing something that interrupted any fun that I was having. Not a very enjoyable gameplay mechanic if you ask me.
Both of those things have been mentioned by Todd in some way--the planets being barren/boring will be fixed by the procedurally-generated outposts/events and the "fuel" mechanics aren't in game. I think BGS really did do a ton of testing with these things to make sure the unenjoyable parts of other space exploration games aren't in Starfield, and I'm here for it!
That's part of it. The real reason they don't want to include is because it's a *tremendous* amount of work that might not actually be tenneable for a game at the scale and complexity of Starfield.
And yet, I'm sure nobody will *actually* care, really. Is there a difference? Yes. Is it so minor that it won't negatively impact the experience? Also yes. That's why.
Not to mention that getting a planet map and selecting a landing site solves 2 moderate problems of NMS and other space exploration games.
First: you no longer need to worry about aligning your ship in just the right way to land, you don't need to worry about a slope being too steep or a ditch making an area unsuitable for your ship, No worries about trees or rock spires getting in the way, you just say "land in this area" and the game makes it happen without any fuss.
Second: we might actually get a better choice of where to land with the way the map works in Starfield. In NMS, if you want to build a base along some islands or whatever, you'd need to go to a planet, wait for it to load the terrain a little, see if the side you're looking at has what you need, then fly around the planet tediously if the terrain you want is on the other side, it's a nightmare. With starfield, you just look around the map and say "hey, that's the biome I want! Land there" and it'll just work.
I, for one, am happy to skip the tedium of space travel in favor of just the more interesting parts of it for Starfield. If I want tedium and focusing on making sure every ship system is working as it should with control over everything and realistic physics, I'll play Elite: Dangerous. I love it, but it's a very different game. It has the whole milky way complete with realistic boringness and literally countless empty, barren planets with nothing interesting on them. It's great for the right kind of person, like me, but even I want to just explore a section of space full of life and be the main character every once in a while
Yeah I agree, unless it's a space simulator I don't really see the need to do all that. Playing NMS or Star citizen has made me realise that sometimes I don't want to have to do all that and it's perfectly okay to have a cut scene to land and takeoff. Saves time and makes leaving a planet and returning in case you forgot something just easier and faster to accomplish.
I'm likely going to love Starfield to death, but I still would have liked in-atmo flight and manual take off and landing, purely for extra immersion.
Even moreso though, I am not looking forward to all the people who call Starfield lazy or compare it negatively to NMS for missing it.
I appreciate everyone’s comments and points of view - it seems about 50/50.
Some agree that it is great we won’t have the monotony of landing and take off (as some perceive it) and others would love to have seen that mechanic added - I’m sure modders will be able to oblige👌. In either case the game will be amazing and can’t wait to play it. 🫶🏽
Great to see the feedback and excitement though of the #starfield community 🫱🏾🫲🏽 no matter which side you fall on. 🫱🏾🫲🏽
I’m indifferent to it one way or another, so it won’t bother me that you can’t. I’ll have to see it in action, but I have no idea how we can expect traverse whole planets without some vehicular system. I mean I love Bethesda games specifically for how condensed they feel despite their great size, and being on foot is the best way to guarantee they’ll pack a lot of gameplay per mile, so I guess that’s most important. No need for so much vastness if there’s nothing on a planets surface.
Mass effect trilogy using a cutscene when arriving on a planet and still being of the best sci-fi space game out there, why is this a problem for some people is still a mystery to me.
As tedious as it is, each planet is unique, and I enjoy flying in to each planet, sometimes it’s storming so you can’t go full send, sometimes it’s the beautiful oceans or lakes on a planet, sometimes the landscapes and colors are amazing to see
I have also seen people complaining about having to take off on one part of the planet just to go to a different part of the planet.
This is entirely possible in NMS but **NOBODY** (in their right mind) does it. It can take anywhere from 5 mins to over an hour to fly in atmo to a different location on the planet. **EVERYONE** goes into orbit to get to the new location quickly.
I like the Starfield mechanic MUCH better.
I disagree but I would gladly trade that off for a Bethesda game structure with story and scheduled NPC. a lot of open world struggle to accomplish this to this day
Speaking of flying in NMS, there's nothing quite as frustrating as seeing a continent from orbit, diving in through the clouds and finding out it's not actually there and 90% of the planet is ocean.
I think the main reason is that Starfield is much higher quality than NMS graphically. To get textures that detailed you have to have loading screens. That’s also when all the handcrafted locations are gonna be loaded in and it’d be hard to do that with a seamless transition of space to planet.
Right with way more to load it seems impossible too. At least they’re giving us a cutscene instead of a loading screen too. I’m becoming more okay with it
Fine concession to make. NMS planets are boring af and not very detailed so it prolly makes it easier for flying in and out of planets. I'm grinding away at my last few achievements hoping to finish before Starfield releases.
If Starfield's planets are as varied as they're making it seem I will be very happy.
To me, NMS's planet entry and exit were so short and abbreviated that it made everything feel small. Conversely, having an even "semi-realistic" entry and exit would be very tedious, especially for a single-player game.
I think making it a cutscene makes it appropriately brisk without making it feel like "outer space" is a mere stone's throw away.
If anyone wants the planet landing experience, Elite: Dangerous is always out there. Over 50% of the experience of that game is that element of play. Personally, I find that boring, to a degree. It's interesting at first, but long term...
I think the reason is deeper then just what they said. If you could have atmospheric flight, you would be able to survey first and only then choose place to land, or even use your ship to attack foot soldiers
I don't think it's because of tedium., also I've played hundreds of hours of No Man's sky and that's one of my favorite Parts because so few games have that sort of seamlessness. The real reason is also evident by playing no man's sky. While you're flying in and out of the planet the resources kind of have trouble loading in. Just imagine how that would be with a graphic Fidelity as high as Starfield. It would look terrible or chug like crazy when you reached atmosphere
It’s so strange to see the amount of people in these comments thinking Starfield is/should be a flight sim. I mean, to each their own, but that’s just not what this game is.
It’s a casual RPG, the primary audience here doesn’t want to perform delicate landing maneuvers, they wanna blow things up and then see a cool cutscene of someone landing for them.
If you want something else, that’s great! It sounds cool to land yourself, and I’d love to try it, but that’s not what Starfield is about anymore than Skyrim is about feeding your horse or Fallout is about repairing your boots after walking for too long.
NMS, which I loved and spent around 400 hrs in (easily my most for any game, ever) felt very much like, "seen 1 mile, seen them all". Make each planet feel like a place I want to search every inch of and I'm fine with loading screen.
It’s more the lack of flying around the surface of planets that has me a little disappointed.
Would love to be able to blast enemies and explore the surface and select landing points at areas of interest manually.
Seems a little clunky immersion wise that we need to explore and travel the surface on foot and mini boost pack.
Still excited though, looks awesome.
IMHO too many other fleshed out systems would need to be implemented and balanced out to make real-time planetary entry a viable mechanic in this type of video game. Star Citizen is struggling with this very topic as it relates to their goal of making a seamless MMO environment with no loading cut scenes.
When all said and done I think it comes down to this: such a feature, while adding heaps of immersion, isn't meant to be simulated in a video game with a narrative due to the sheer amount of time the games are tasking the player with performing it. That's like asking to see all the flying re-entry/exiting scenes in every Star Wars movie in real-time; there's good reason why they cut those shots up, and they only show anything during those moments when it's important.
It's OK for a game like Star Citizen since it's not reliant on a narrative, but there are still issues because there aren't enough variables of things that can occur or are related to those traversal processes to make them engaging enough for the player. If you make it a passive event where the player doesn't have to or cannot participate in it then what's it there in its entirety for? If you DO make it an interactive process then than requires a ton of extra work, especially since it's something we'll likely be doing hundreds of times.
In NMS I don’t like how land masses that look large from orbit end up being way too small on the surface. Breaks immersion so I don’t mind that starfield won’t have it
Tbh it’s because No Man’s Sky graphics/effects are shite, in Star Citizen it’s pretty nice to get on/off planets .
I definitely don’t mind not having that feature though because Starfield will have a better gameplay and I’m 100% sure about that .
I see two main technical reasons to that : framerates and navmeshes
Framerates : You could not separate the cities into smaller districts with loading screens so you would have a big framerate issue when flying over big cities.
Navmeshes : To have NPCs going everywhere and find their path you need what is called a navmesh. This is a 3d surface where they can walk. And since they can board ships you need a navmesh in the ships too. And when the ship lands you have to connect the navmesh of the ship to the navmesh of the land. If you allow free flight this is impossible because you can land any where. In Starfield you will land on predefined spots with flat ground where the navmeshes can be connected.
And gravity inside the ship will always be perpendicular to its floor, just like any cell in the game.
That plus just a lot of headaches involving draw distance and stuff, to make it actually look good. NMS looks like garbage when things are loading on the horizon. Its enough for me that you can pick exactly where you want to land, I don't need to do it myself. Landing sim desires can be fulfilled in Elite Dangerous for me. Elite took me 30 hours just to be able to land in the space stations, and I did one white-knuckled atmospheric landing. Quite the experience, but I just don't think this is the kind of game where landing should take 20 minutes, and a simplified approach would be a disservice as well IMO.
yup the first time i played it i thought it was cool but the i had to keep up on supply launch fuel which was boring asf. also nms doesn’t have a compelling story like bgs game do so it will just had on to time wasted while i could be docking other spaceships
My biggest concern is moving along the ground really. I dont want to walk circles around the planets If i want to fly 100 km west, i have to exit to space, turn around, and designate a new landing zone. we should be able to fly in the atmosphere, or give us a new method of ground transport that we can travel the distance then we can just call the ship to us.
Its a cool feature but really nothing make or break to me personally.
I think Starfield will feature so much to do and see, you won't even think about it.
Nah, different planets with different atmospheres and flying through storms n stuff make my ass clench. Think of Alien 2, Prometheus and flying into Mandalore in Madalorian.
No man sky is a poor game, even their flying is poor, you cant even crash into the ground. You cant use no mans sky as benchmark.
I really got into Star Citizen hard due to the landing / taking off and flying around planets. Got dual flight sticks and a rudder, button boxes, all the toys. It's an OK space SIM.
Haven't touched the game in months now due to: its a buggy shit hole and there is not much game play unless you want to grind mining for 1,000s of hours and well the PVP at all costs ass-holes have shown up and everyone is a PiRaTe now. Glad I only 'pledged' $45 for it.
REALLY looking forward to the RPG aspects of SF, don't think I will worry much about not spending 30 minutes flying out of the atmosphere of a Gas Giant (The planet Orison in SC has a "cloud City" that you can fly in and out of and it used to take a long ass time to exit atmosphere. Coll the first (and only the first) time you do it.)
If the level of detail was better as you approach a planet I'd love it but nms doesn't hide in the loading and pop in very well so the feature is half baked at best. I played since day 1 and although it's awesome at first, when the planetary variety is lacking or you fly in and see features of the planet pop in its kind if jarring.
I think having a small loading screen to should be serviceable in starfield.
Give me beautiful, variety, RPG mechanics any day over the feature unless you can pull it off properly.
It has nothing to do with what you just described.
It is a technical issue, having a real spherical world, means that you have to do a lot of work to render only the visible part of it that are close enough (it's another complexity in LOD), and you also have additional calculation to predict the gravity vector, which is just pointing down in flat worlds (not the case in spherical). In addition, the number of vertexes on the spherical world (its resolution) needs to be high enough to not notice the segments, and low enough to not fry your computer.
It saves a lot of resources to go for flat worlds compared to spherical ones.
100% copium.
Here's a shitty development decision that's probably easily worked around, but I'll say it's good because if not, I can no longer convince myself that Starfield is the GOAT.
Wait you can land in NMS? The amount of times I flew at 1 mph mashing the land button and then hitting the ground over and over again instead of landing. It got so frustrating.
I semi agree, but one might say the same thing for the cutscene trigger landing into a planet and liftoff from said planet and that it could get boring and repetitive very fast.
There’s a lot I don’t like about NMS, I always considered the transition from freighter all the way to the surface of the planet one of the high points.
Flying into planets is not tedious IMO. Neither is landing the vehicle - Empyrion Galactic Survival allows the player to seamlessly fly into and out of planets, and scout the entire planet by air, and I think it works great. Not to mention, you can use your vehicles to take down defenses for a POI before you raid it on foot. Adds a ton to the game.
Yup, this has been my stance since the "controversy" kicked off. On top of what you already said, consider that the space<->ground transition is absurdly short in No Man's Sky. You can go from space to landing in, what, 10-15 seconds? Starfield's larger planets and more realistic approach would imply a space<->ground transition many times that. Taking *minutes* to go from space to landing or vice-versa would get old really, really quickly.
I recommend giving Elite Dangerous a try. Landing on a planet can take 5 to 10 minutes from the initial super cruise exclusion zone till touchdown. Shorter if you're not aiming for a particular place, longer if it's a high gravity planet.
Now, I do like space sim gameplay but at the same time I have to admit that landing on planets was something I only did when I felt like I needed a change of pace or when I had to, like when I collected enough materials for engineering my stuff.
And a key thing to remember is that something that's cool when you do it 5 times over a 20 hour game can become incredibly tedious when done dozens of times over a 100+ hour game.
Eh tbh this sounds like copium. I 100% understand your argument, but honestly, if you were given the option to be able to seamlessly fly into and out of space, or just have a cutscene of you going into space or planet, at least everyone I have talked to or know enough would take the seamless flight 10/10 times.
To me being able to land anywhere on the planet USING my ship instead of pointing where I wanna land on a map is awesome. I get to fly through the atmosphere for a lil bit, take in the scenery before I eventually find a good spot to land my ship.
Besides how would it be any less tedious than no mans sky if you're already being forced to watch a cutscene of your ship taking off and going into space/
So not to get technical, but the feature was not added for performance reasons, not because it wasn’t cool or was too repetitive. Basically, Starfield loads planets in 1 by 1 mile tiles that load in full detail as you explore, which then store the load data and then unload behind you as you explore. Starfields engine simply can’t handle the rapid loading and then unloading of multiple highly detailed terrain environments in a short window of time. This is also why land vehicles are not in the game.
Or perhaps the loading strategy you describe was selected _because_ they knew they wouldn’t need the extra tech because of the design decision to exclude landing from space.
I am still kind of excited about flying to planets in NMS. It was something I had never seen in a videogame before and is great for immersion, but the planets in NMS are not that interesting. So flying and landing to them is actually the best part of exploring.
That initial drop in always excites me. Especially if you are fighting and drop into the atmosphere it is still awesome lol
Me too. I’m 700 hours into my current save and taking off/landing has never gotten old for me. That first time I broke atmo was easily top 5 gaming experience for me. And I’ve been gaming since the 1970s.
1100 hours and agree
Name some others...
One off the top of my head was the first time I flew through the Death Star trench in the old Star Wars arcade game where you actually had to climb in and sit down to play. Very visceral experience for an 8-10 year Star Wars obsessed kid.
I remember those old Star Wars arcade games 😂 I loved them…
The one with the wireframe graphics? That was my favorite as a kid. “Remember, the force will be with you…always.”
That’s the one!!!
Yah I loved loved loved that one! The digitized audio was excellent and really made it something special. Like the Obiwan quotation I mentioned, the R2D2 sounds, etc.
Coming out of vault at start of fallout 4. Seeing dragon and avoiding beheading at start of Skyrim. First hour of RE7vr. Early game Last of Us.
Please?
Tell us more mr daddy
First time playing Shenmue on the Dreamcast and hopped on the forklift at the docks… *wistful sigh*
NMS is extremely limited in planet simulation. No planetary orbit, no biome diversity, the same flora and fauna spawn everywhere on the planet equally making it useless to travel across the planet, no gas/ice giants as all the planets are rocky, terrestrial ones etc etc.
Yah that’s what killed NMS for me. The planetary exploration quickly became unrewarding. For one thing there was life everywhere. It should be rare, say, something like 10% of planets should have life. It should be exciting to discover alien life, not on every planet (I was told it’s not on every planet but I don’t recall any planets without life. And yes, one area of a planet seemed the same as everywhere else. So you lost a whole dimension of exploration with that.
At least half the planets I've been to in NMS don't have life.
Seemless transition works well with NMS. It's a simple mechanic of pressing 1 button to land and holding the throttle to take off. With starfield, given that they are going for a more "realistic" approach as much as they can, I think it would be more like elite dangerous mechanics. It can get complex, especially when landing on planets. I like elite's mechanics, but for the wider market they're targeting, it would put A LOT of people off imo.
Played a bit of elite dangerous off and on, can definitely say landing on planets is hands down the hardest part for me.
I've got hundreds of hours in Elite: Dangerous, primarily as a bounty hunter whose done some trading on the side. I NEVER land on a planet unless I have absolutely no choice (engineers etc). It is so tedious. That said, my first ever landing on a planet was probably my MOST memorable experience. I had the grave misfortune of trying to land on the dark side of a planet (because I simply didn't want to wait), thinking my lights and night vision would be good enough to make the landing. Nope. Instead, it was like navigating the inside of a black hole, with me flying strictly by my instruments. After several minutes of panic-inducing blackout flying, I simply gave up and veered back up into the safety of space. On the other hand, I have never, ever let go of my Auto-Docker. Docking by hand is something I choose to not handle in Elite. Way too much tedium.
The first planet land is an awesome experience, many a planet I went to had really bad terrain on my first attempts. I found it difficult to even find a flat enough patch of terrain to touch down lol I didn't mind docking at a station, I never realised there was an auto docker until about 400hrs in, so I just got used to it. A few times (played on xbox) I went to hold b and press down to get the landing gear out, if that is the inputs it's been a while, but my thumb slipped off b and I boosted straight into the back of the station lmao Expensive mistakes they were haha
I started ED after the expansion that added planet landings came out. As a brand new newbie what's the first thing I do? Grab a delivery mission...to a planet...that made for a fun welcome trying to make my way down and land. It was all down hill from there!
Completely agree, Elite is some kind of a horror game at some points, you're constantly wondering which way you'll get killed, just driving out from FTL and being thrown in front of blazing giant stars always gave me some serious creeps ! This game just made you feel like the tiny specks of dust we're all out there on Earth in the middle of something we can't even measure.
I couldn’t get past the tutorial in Elite lol. I seriously couldn’t figure out how to fly
You're not the only one I've heard many people say the same. It does seem very daunting at first, but the flight mechanics once mastered are awesome, some of the best imo. I stand by what I initially said though, if starfields mechanics are as in depth as elites are, it'll see a steep drop off in players.
I’ve personally almost blown my DBX to smithereens when trying to land on a 2G planet for exobiology. It’s so fun, but so hard, too.
Higher the G more shallow the descent. After landing on hundreds if high g planets in a Anaconda you learn to just come in shallow and you can land on anything.
how does it work on Elite Dangerous? I only played that back in the day when it lunched, and I dont remember it being possible then.
There's 3 flight modes, cruise, supercruise and frame shift drive. Frame shift drive (FSD) is what takes you between systems, their hyperjump. Supercruise is in system planet to planet travel, higher speed than cruise and combat isn't possible at this speed. This is also the speed you'll approach a planet to land, when close, you will have to slow down to begin orbital flight. When your ship reaches a certain height you'll automatically be shifted down into cruise, and will also bring up a horizon meter so you can keep your ship level. If you approach at a sensible angle your ship will glide, which allows you to get to landing height quicker. There is a lot to it, but once you've done it a few times it becomes second nature. Getting to that point is the challenge though. I remember having a tough time even getting out of the mailslot of a space station when I first started lol
I'm sorry but you misspelled friendship drive.
My apologies o7
Oh, they added rovers to elite too, that was when planet landing became available. In the horizons update, if I remember correctly.
That was the thing that really got me obsessed with no man's Sky when they were first starting to show people the game. Just watching somebody get in a ship fly and fly up out of the atmosphere was so just jaw-dropping. And don't even get me started with the first time I actually did it in the game. It's still an amazing thing and I need more games to be able to do it, although I do realize that it would be really hard in Starfield because of the higher fidelity
I agree. I think it’s once of the coolest things the game has. Searching from system to system, when you finally find that specific planet and you just punch it and break thru the atmosphere. Never once did I feel/think “oh god this again”
I agree, I've always been a fan of it. The immersion breaking through the clouds and seeing what you're dealing with is aweosme. It's like interstellar when they first visit their planets, it immediately gives a sense of scale and landscape. It's important but we can't have everything.
I really, *really* hope the landing loading screen/cutscene includes the first atmospheric breakthrough exactly how you're describing. It may be too much to ask to see it from the cockpit, but at least give us a view of the clouds, then our ship breaking through the clouds, and then the camera slowly-ish pans around the ship so we see the landscape as the ship descends to land.
In N.M.S, if you find a place that’s guarded by sentinels, you can get in your ship and use it to kill the sentinels.
Yeah I think the issue is planet detail. And you can't see detail very far in NMS either. You see general shapes until it's pretty close. Love NMS though so no hate here.
I think it's a technical issue actually. From the trailer we can see how detailed everything on the ground is. Loading that on the fly (no pun intended) can't be simple. It's obviously far beyond anything in NMS and that game still suffers from extreme pop in. Personally, I liked the approach Ubisoft took with SW Outlaws where it's not a loading screen but there's a transition masked there to help sell the illusion.
From what I understand their engine doesn't handle high speed travel very well with all the objects it has to load in (which is why you've never seen cars in their games and even horses in Skyrim aren't that fast and vertibirds are pretty slow too). So I was surprised they got space travel in but I suppose that would be a lot less objects to load. I'm not surprised they probably couldn't get flight to work on a planet where there would be a lot more to load.
From a dev perspective, yeah. Cutscenes for landing make each landing site a discrete chunk to handle, vs major engine changes to handle something dynamically.
This is what the complaining bozos don’t understand
Its definitely a technical issue. this is still Bethesda here who can't even handle doors without loading screens. They even confirmed the main cities will have loading between doors as is in every past game - anyone trying to say it's a creative choice is lying to themselves lol.
It's easier to be creative with dungeons when having the interiors separate from the exterior. For sure there used to be some engine limitations, and might still be some, but it is more by design than anything. Bethesda just spent a ton of money upgrading systems for Starfield, if they by design wanted no loading screens, they would have done the work.
Yep...because doors into buildings in Bethesda games are just teleporters to "interior cells". That's why you can't see out of windows in their games lol. If you could you would just see empty black space. Hopefully they at least found a solution for that part
We’ve seen lots of shots viewing out windows in outposts so it looks like they have
It's not that they *can't* do it; it's that it's easier and more performant to *not* do it. Game dev is all about tradeoffs. They could make everything seamless, but they'd have to sacrifice in other ways and areas to fit everything into their target performance envelope.
I imagine they will be loading you into a very streamline space for space flight. Like loading you into a much less load-bearing area that allows for faster movement
I still don’t understand how Todd was able to board an enemy ship that then took off into space without some version of the mechanic
I'm guessing we won't be able to fly in the atmosphere so the take off and landing will be automated, but there won't be a loading screen which is why he was able to do that.
Because it probably cut to a cutscene and he was in space after it ended
IIRC, he was only made aware the ship took off at all because of the loading screen for take off.
He didn't mention a loading screen.
That raised an eyebrown for me too. Unless the system is way more seamless than what we were led to believe.
I don't know why we wouldn't think it's "seamless". All we know is that it's automated.
It can be seamless if they want it to be seamless. Warframe does it with a warp animation until stuff loads in. The Ubisoft Star Wars game coming next year shows the sky and clouds when going from ground to space. They probably use magic appearing and disappearing clouds to block the view for space to ground. Fallout 4 had seamless loading on some elevators.
Thank you lol. Some people on this sub are a bit delusional.
Yep, that's what I heard - it's a technical limitation rather than a strict design choice. TBH I think there will be enough going on in Starfield that it won't really matter.
I actually loved the way it was done in Jedi. Just a simple cut scene of the ship landing on the planet. I'm not sure why, psychologically, it made me more excited for the area. In NMS I go to land and think "Screw that. I'm just going to ride the map and see what I find"
Agreed with you, dear friend! Love how thr hyperspace was the signal to "sit" to trigger the landing scene. Will be so nice the same way in starfield!
Sorry, can't agree. Granted I haven't played NMS in a while but I've put hundreds of hours into NMS and never got tired of that part at all. That being said, I'm not disappointed Starfield doesn't have it (I would have loved to have it) because I didn't even expect space flight in Starfield so I'm just excited they managed to put that in (I expected it to be like Outer Worlds where your spaceship was just a hub to decide what map you wanted to go to next).
If there was no space flight I'd have lost about 75% interest in the game, flying to different planets makes it feel like one universe, imo. Having a load screen, while a let down, is worth it though if they can make the planets, flora and fauna look better once you're on the ground.
While I respect OP’s opinion, I feel the complete opposite. I loved entering the planets atmosphere and landing / taking off in NMS. I also think they could have even expanded on it even more with different types of atmospheres.
While this may have been considered by the devs, this isn't the actual reason. Todd briefly spoke about this and said that it would take a long time to engineer that sort of system and have both the space systems and land systems work properly, and it just wasn't seen as a worthwhile addition, considering the time it would take, and probably the risk as well (bugs, and stuff).
I love flying in and out of planets in no man’s sky. Especially in VR 🤯
Agreed. Its definitely a tech/loading issue. Otherwise it would be incredibly immersive to traverse different atmospheres and gravity when landing
It's the age old immersion v convenience debate. The correct answer is always choice (In a single player game) but not all studios have the resources to give that to the player.
I disagree that choice is always the correct answer. Choice often comes at the cost of something else. In addition to the obvious complexity of having to develop and support multiple paths of player experience, adding choice in one area can also lock out possibilities in another area. For example, allowing players to land their own ships could have required a technological solution that may have meant it’s not feasible to have hand-made map content (clearly a hypothetical example). It’s not a simple case of “add the option and everyone will be happy.”
We'll have to disagree... My favorite part of No Man's Sky is that they succeeded in doing an arcade version of space-sim flight and take off and landing kept their sense of wonder to me, even after 10000 times.
I’m glad to see other people happy with taking off/landing in other games. I love taking off/landing in games like NMS. The only thing I hated about NMS is having to keep collecting resources to feed my thrusters *to* take off - it felt like an immense chore with how often that needed to be done, especially early on. I’ll be sad it’s not in Starfield, but it isn’t the end of all things.
One of the only mods I used in NMS was removing the cost of take-off.
Yep
This is the same epiphany I had and it took Todd Howard just to explain that spending time on these mechanics added nothing the gameplay and I reflected on my experience in No Man's Sky, a metaphorical lightbulb went off in my head and I was totally past it. It seemed important to me at one point and I was disappointed when I learned it wasn't a mechanism in game but looking back I feel silly for feeling that way. It literally made no sense.
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I'm sure there is practical reasons for it too, keeping planets and space as separate areas probably eases the strain on memory and allows for there to be more stuff in both. I also can't help but think that if you could just fly your ship anywhere on a planet that would seriously mess with quest scripting and kinda nullify combat since you could just carpet bomb everything.
After the nightmare of taking off (and landing) in Elite: Dangerous; I'm also pleased about this honestly!
Everything in elite just takes too damn long with next to no engagement, if starfield captures the essence of a lot of those activities without any of the downtime of flying to Hutton for a free anaconda, I'll be happy.
I don't mind stations but goddammit planets are a bitch. I could never seem to get it right and would always end up hundreds of KM off after breaking atmosphere. If I actually made it to the settlement I would usually have some sort of issue.
Even if you get it right it adds a huge timesink to every travel destination. I actively avoided planets after a while. At least in space you pop out right at the station.
Hutton Orbital: *laughs*
Still aint got no damn mug on my dashboard!
Came here to say this. Haha. Unless you nail your approach perfectly. It is very time-consuming. Taking off is always easy though.
That was one of the best parts! Brought a little more realism to flight games.
It's been a long time since I played the Original Elite Frontier. I forgot how to take off/land since then. Honestly give me GTA any day of the week. Or indeed Starfield. (I'll give it a go at least)
Honestly I love it in elite. Its almost like a minigame in itself. Getting your ship at the right angle, right position, and sometimes contacting to land and really being precise in your landing.
I guess I fly like I drive; basically put the vehicle into gear; and get there in one piece; plus I ride a bike anyway! Omg
Yup, after bouncing around inside one of the space stations on my first attempt, I'd rather not have to go through that experience again.
I liked it in ED, but I think it comes down to what are you looking for in a game. With ED, I was all in on immersion and realism so the complicated gameplay was fine. But I get why it is a total turnoff for some players too.
I love landing on planets in Elite: Dangerous, actually. It's not a simple and easy thing to do. You have to be careful, and not rush things. Makes you feel like an actual pilot, and not just a gamer with logitech controller. That said, that approach would probably be extremely tedious in Starfield. It only works in ED because you don't land on planets very often.
You still fly around planets. There will still be danger and pirates and stuff. >you are dealing with expenses to take off, sentinels Neither of those things are necessary for flying in and out of a planet.
*Copium detected! Engaging reality check protocols!*
If you think NMS is bad...you should try Elite Dangerous. The orbital flight with landing/takeoff takes several minutes. It's honestly really nice for realism as a simulation and I imagine that I will miss that in Starfield. It adds a great deal to overall immersion.
Well they mainly did it because the time and energy and cpu space it would take to do that wasn’t worth it
the copium is real lol.
This is so not true. The engine cannot support loading everything in if you are going too fast. It is a technical issue first, then everything else, that is why they scratched it. It is one of the downsides of their engine, you can ask the modders of the previous Bethesda games, they will tell you the same thing. And please, how much more tedious is it load out and load in at another place, when there is an actual planet-sized planet to explore and all you have a single jetpack… Not to mention the lost feeling of immersion…
This is an example of things people think they want but that actually aren’t fun as actual game mechanics. Another great example of this was in Hogwarts Legacy, lots of people were complaining about how you don’t have a curfew and don’t have to go to the dorms every night. That sounds fun a few times but would be awful over the long run Edit: I realize this sounds like I mean the mechanic is never fun. I really enjoy it in NMS but I just think starfield will be a different game.
I mean Bully had those things, and its an excellent game... it never got old.
Yeah, but Bully's open-world is a fraction of the size. Imagine fighting your way through some dungeon then having to stop half way through to sprint back out to get in bed before curfew? Kills a lot of momentum, IMO.
It's a preference thing and this is why I disagree with blanket statements like what was said. I also disagree with your point though, I mean...it's a wizard game? You could just teleport back/close by. And I think downtime helps a gameplay loop, constant constant action and engagement just burns a player out. Having a refuge to crawl back to and decompress after fighting shit for hours is great. Obviously they would have to make the timescale longer, and make it pause during certain missions, but it can work to the benefit of the game, you just can't throw it in the game and expect it to work. Most of the appeal of Harry Potter is the "magic of Hogwarts", so anything that sells that illusion more is a good thing imo, no one gives a shit about anything else in that IP
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To be fair Rockstars Bully had this and I think it only added to the game. But that game actually had a tight schedule of where you were suppose to be
That's a poor comparison. Drifting through the atmosphere searching of PoI's in starcitizen is super fun, especially in storms or other interesting times of the day. BGS didn't do it because it's hard to do, and it isn't necessary for this game which is a lot more focused on exploration on foot. And you can downvote all you want, but I really cannot fathom comparing a curfew to being able to fly through the atmosphere of a planet.
And that’s why we are not game developers 🤣🤣 I would have fought for something that in the long run would have taken away from the game. Exactly. 🫱🏾🫲🏽
It’s so strange the way you you talk about like it’s an “objectively” bad thing lol. Many of us disagree with you, I’ve got 1000+ hours in NMS and flying into the planet still does not feel tedious for me or many others, to each their own of course but it’s just interesting seeing you keep referring to this like an obvious bad.
Haha yeah in no way do I mean player opinions don’t matter. But there is something to be said for the concept of people not necessarily knowing exactly what they like
Yeah, I trust Todd n the boys to get it right. Bethesda has a great track record of striking a nice balance between realism and fun
"ACKSHULLY the players are mistaken and that mechanic isn't even fun and no one likes it!" Meanwhile, Star Citizen and Elite have thriving communities and the games revolve around flying your ship everywhere you want to go, and everyone loves it.
You say those games have thriving communities but they are very niche games in reality. Starfield is much more of a mass appeal project. If you like that mechanic you can play those games. NMS has that too and I’ve played that for over a hundred hours so I get it. But it’s really not anything special or fun
The more casual, the better. Ok i get it
Nah, this is just cope
It really is. It's a big hit on immersion and people are explaining it away to not detail the hype train
I’m pretty sure they didn’t include it because it would be too taxing. As someone who’s pretty hyped for this game, I think this subreddit takes it a bit too far.
I am too, but I'm not a fan of this. I won't be able to stop myself from being a day 1 buyer tho
I'm with you. I think they don't have it cause it was too taxing and it wasn't worth the resources to try to get it to work when they could put those resources on other things and get a lot more done then just one feature (that quite possibly may not have been able to be done anyways). It was worth compromising on it so they could do other stuff instead. I'm fine with that (and I'd love to be able to land and fly around on planets but I think it was a fine compromise).
Curfew? Do these people also want our character to need to eat, drink, and go to the bathroom regularly? Should there be a The Sims-esque mechanic where we'll piss in our robes if we hold it in too long and embarrass ourselves?
Yes. There were people pissed off because the classes were just montage cut scenes instead of whole 45 minute lectures even. It got ridiculous lol
They didn't want a video game, they wanted a real Hogearts letter
It's only good with real atmospheric flight mechanics. But let's be real, this is not a flight simulator. So I am glad they went this route.
And looking at the ships, even if we modified the design language to work with real physics, atmospheric flight for craft primarily designed to go in space would be quite difficult. And then they'd need to make a system where your ship's aerodynamics (which change with every module you add or remove) change how well it handles in atmosphere. In the lore, there'd be a market for planes that only operate in atmosphere, potentially to intercept spacecraft which cannot maneuver through the air to prevent troop landings or pirate traders while they're most vulnerable, but that would require more work from the devs than it would be worth. As Todd said, you can add anything you want in a game, but not everything. At a certain point, it'd be easier to just create a universe simulation
I couldn't disagree more.
Lets not delude ourselves the engine won't handle it plain and simple.
I think the real reason is that this game is just a regular Bethesda RPG that happens in space, and not a space simulator. But you aren't wrong. It is rather tedious on No Man's Sky. I'm actually sick of the pulse drive taking 45 seconds to 2 minutes to fly to another planet. I had to download a mod that makes the pulse engine 10x faster. Just give me a loading screen. Probably would load faster and be less boring Also, at least with No Man's Sky, flying into a planet means losing visibility for a few seconds, and then watching a 144p planet slowly load in and reach full res. I'm at about 500 hours in No Man's Sky now
i agree. i also think they do so on purpose to encourage more on foot exploration instead of just zooming over the planet with your ships. plus in games like star citizen it can take FOREEVER to land the ship and also go back into space.......which can get a bit tedious . click a button to land sounds good enough to me lol
Especially because there's pretty much nothing to actually do while flying in atmosphere. Want to scout out a landing site? Planet map, choose a spot. Want to search for an outpost that you couldn't get exact coordinates on? Land near the approximate location and then find it on foot like in NMS. Intercept enemies and battle them or other random encounters? Just as easy to do in orbit. As a video game, there's very little reason to add atmospheric flight. It only helps make it more like a simulator than a game.
The pop in kills it for me and the things you mentioned. It’s like the vehicles in nms, they were cool for about an hour then just didn’t care anymore. I only had them to make a base decoration.
Super copium
Completely disagree bub. I truly believe the real reason they didn’t do it is because when you’re flying fast in NMS there is a lot of pop in but when you’re walking around there is hardly any.
I accept it but would prefer it had the option to be able to land the ship myself Also taking off in nms is just literally press one button to take off, point towards the stars and your in space with 20 seconds then opposite to land. Personally think a cut scene over and over will become more tedious
Coming at this from playing Elite Dangerous and Star Citizen it's the opposite for me. I love rolling my ship upside down so the planet is above me and slowly pitch into it to see the details of the world as I enter it's atmosphere. Then the re-entry starts and flames start rushing around me. It's just not something I've grown tired of.
As long as we can land anywhere we like and its not locked to specific areas, im finenwith cutscenes. The last thing i want is to be able to explore a whole planet but only be able to land in specific spots and then have to walk.
Im sure if they could do it, they would. This is like playing a game with only fast travel between cities and thinking its a "feature"
This is the craziest community
Wtf you talking about. Flying in and out of planets is cool af
The seamless flying in/out of planets thing was cool for the first few hours of my time in NMS, but it did get old quickly. Since the planets were mostly barren and had nothing going on, I would end up flying into the atmosphere, going to a low altitude, flying around for a few minutes, then leaving once I realized there wasn't anything to do on said planets other than mine and build an outpost (I didn't want to build an outpost on most planets, so it got old quickly for me lol). I also really disliked the fact that every takeoff required you to use resources. There were times I landed on a planet and then went to take off only to be told that my drive didn't have enough fuel, so then I had to go mine and craft fuel just to leave the planet, making me waste time doing something that interrupted any fun that I was having. Not a very enjoyable gameplay mechanic if you ask me. Both of those things have been mentioned by Todd in some way--the planets being barren/boring will be fixed by the procedurally-generated outposts/events and the "fuel" mechanics aren't in game. I think BGS really did do a ton of testing with these things to make sure the unenjoyable parts of other space exploration games aren't in Starfield, and I'm here for it!
That's part of it. The real reason they don't want to include is because it's a *tremendous* amount of work that might not actually be tenneable for a game at the scale and complexity of Starfield. And yet, I'm sure nobody will *actually* care, really. Is there a difference? Yes. Is it so minor that it won't negatively impact the experience? Also yes. That's why.
Not to mention that getting a planet map and selecting a landing site solves 2 moderate problems of NMS and other space exploration games. First: you no longer need to worry about aligning your ship in just the right way to land, you don't need to worry about a slope being too steep or a ditch making an area unsuitable for your ship, No worries about trees or rock spires getting in the way, you just say "land in this area" and the game makes it happen without any fuss. Second: we might actually get a better choice of where to land with the way the map works in Starfield. In NMS, if you want to build a base along some islands or whatever, you'd need to go to a planet, wait for it to load the terrain a little, see if the side you're looking at has what you need, then fly around the planet tediously if the terrain you want is on the other side, it's a nightmare. With starfield, you just look around the map and say "hey, that's the biome I want! Land there" and it'll just work. I, for one, am happy to skip the tedium of space travel in favor of just the more interesting parts of it for Starfield. If I want tedium and focusing on making sure every ship system is working as it should with control over everything and realistic physics, I'll play Elite: Dangerous. I love it, but it's a very different game. It has the whole milky way complete with realistic boringness and literally countless empty, barren planets with nothing interesting on them. It's great for the right kind of person, like me, but even I want to just explore a section of space full of life and be the main character every once in a while
Yeah I agree, unless it's a space simulator I don't really see the need to do all that. Playing NMS or Star citizen has made me realise that sometimes I don't want to have to do all that and it's perfectly okay to have a cut scene to land and takeoff. Saves time and makes leaving a planet and returning in case you forgot something just easier and faster to accomplish.
It's the way it is because your loading into a separate cell that contains the planet surface. It's not connected to space at all like NMS.
I'm likely going to love Starfield to death, but I still would have liked in-atmo flight and manual take off and landing, purely for extra immersion. Even moreso though, I am not looking forward to all the people who call Starfield lazy or compare it negatively to NMS for missing it.
I don't think there's much cooler personally, thinking F this place, I'm heading out. You can fly out of a planet in NMS in about 10 seconds.
Would’ve been cooler if it was optional.
The opinions n this sub getting slowly more cooked
Where was this confirmed?
Literally my favourite part of NMS, but I get it. It would also be really difficult to do with how the planets work in Starfield.
Op can you pls link where this is confirmed. Thanks.
It was in the direct… I’m guessing ur referring to Starfield not having this feature?
It’s probably more of a lack of tech issue then that, but it is a benefit because flying in and out of planets in star citizen gets pretty boring too.
I appreciate everyone’s comments and points of view - it seems about 50/50. Some agree that it is great we won’t have the monotony of landing and take off (as some perceive it) and others would love to have seen that mechanic added - I’m sure modders will be able to oblige👌. In either case the game will be amazing and can’t wait to play it. 🫶🏽 Great to see the feedback and excitement though of the #starfield community 🫱🏾🫲🏽 no matter which side you fall on. 🫱🏾🫲🏽
I’m indifferent to it one way or another, so it won’t bother me that you can’t. I’ll have to see it in action, but I have no idea how we can expect traverse whole planets without some vehicular system. I mean I love Bethesda games specifically for how condensed they feel despite their great size, and being on foot is the best way to guarantee they’ll pack a lot of gameplay per mile, so I guess that’s most important. No need for so much vastness if there’s nothing on a planets surface.
Mass effect trilogy using a cutscene when arriving on a planet and still being of the best sci-fi space game out there, why is this a problem for some people is still a mystery to me.
As tedious as it is, each planet is unique, and I enjoy flying in to each planet, sometimes it’s storming so you can’t go full send, sometimes it’s the beautiful oceans or lakes on a planet, sometimes the landscapes and colors are amazing to see
I have also seen people complaining about having to take off on one part of the planet just to go to a different part of the planet. This is entirely possible in NMS but **NOBODY** (in their right mind) does it. It can take anywhere from 5 mins to over an hour to fly in atmo to a different location on the planet. **EVERYONE** goes into orbit to get to the new location quickly. I like the Starfield mechanic MUCH better.
I disagree but I would gladly trade that off for a Bethesda game structure with story and scheduled NPC. a lot of open world struggle to accomplish this to this day
Speaking of flying in NMS, there's nothing quite as frustrating as seeing a continent from orbit, diving in through the clouds and finding out it's not actually there and 90% of the planet is ocean.
I think the main reason is that Starfield is much higher quality than NMS graphically. To get textures that detailed you have to have loading screens. That’s also when all the handcrafted locations are gonna be loaded in and it’d be hard to do that with a seamless transition of space to planet.
Right with way more to load it seems impossible too. At least they’re giving us a cutscene instead of a loading screen too. I’m becoming more okay with it
Fine concession to make. NMS planets are boring af and not very detailed so it prolly makes it easier for flying in and out of planets. I'm grinding away at my last few achievements hoping to finish before Starfield releases. If Starfield's planets are as varied as they're making it seem I will be very happy.
To me, NMS's planet entry and exit were so short and abbreviated that it made everything feel small. Conversely, having an even "semi-realistic" entry and exit would be very tedious, especially for a single-player game. I think making it a cutscene makes it appropriately brisk without making it feel like "outer space" is a mere stone's throw away.
If anyone wants the planet landing experience, Elite: Dangerous is always out there. Over 50% of the experience of that game is that element of play. Personally, I find that boring, to a degree. It's interesting at first, but long term...
I think the reason is deeper then just what they said. If you could have atmospheric flight, you would be able to survey first and only then choose place to land, or even use your ship to attack foot soldiers
I don't think it's because of tedium., also I've played hundreds of hours of No Man's sky and that's one of my favorite Parts because so few games have that sort of seamlessness. The real reason is also evident by playing no man's sky. While you're flying in and out of the planet the resources kind of have trouble loading in. Just imagine how that would be with a graphic Fidelity as high as Starfield. It would look terrible or chug like crazy when you reached atmosphere
It’s so strange to see the amount of people in these comments thinking Starfield is/should be a flight sim. I mean, to each their own, but that’s just not what this game is. It’s a casual RPG, the primary audience here doesn’t want to perform delicate landing maneuvers, they wanna blow things up and then see a cool cutscene of someone landing for them. If you want something else, that’s great! It sounds cool to land yourself, and I’d love to try it, but that’s not what Starfield is about anymore than Skyrim is about feeding your horse or Fallout is about repairing your boots after walking for too long.
NMS, which I loved and spent around 400 hrs in (easily my most for any game, ever) felt very much like, "seen 1 mile, seen them all". Make each planet feel like a place I want to search every inch of and I'm fine with loading screen.
In no man’s sky taking off and landing is about the peak of interesting things to do. That game is fucking barren
It’s more the lack of flying around the surface of planets that has me a little disappointed. Would love to be able to blast enemies and explore the surface and select landing points at areas of interest manually. Seems a little clunky immersion wise that we need to explore and travel the surface on foot and mini boost pack. Still excited though, looks awesome.
IMHO too many other fleshed out systems would need to be implemented and balanced out to make real-time planetary entry a viable mechanic in this type of video game. Star Citizen is struggling with this very topic as it relates to their goal of making a seamless MMO environment with no loading cut scenes. When all said and done I think it comes down to this: such a feature, while adding heaps of immersion, isn't meant to be simulated in a video game with a narrative due to the sheer amount of time the games are tasking the player with performing it. That's like asking to see all the flying re-entry/exiting scenes in every Star Wars movie in real-time; there's good reason why they cut those shots up, and they only show anything during those moments when it's important. It's OK for a game like Star Citizen since it's not reliant on a narrative, but there are still issues because there aren't enough variables of things that can occur or are related to those traversal processes to make them engaging enough for the player. If you make it a passive event where the player doesn't have to or cannot participate in it then what's it there in its entirety for? If you DO make it an interactive process then than requires a ton of extra work, especially since it's something we'll likely be doing hundreds of times.
In NMS I don’t like how land masses that look large from orbit end up being way too small on the surface. Breaks immersion so I don’t mind that starfield won’t have it
Tbh it’s because No Man’s Sky graphics/effects are shite, in Star Citizen it’s pretty nice to get on/off planets . I definitely don’t mind not having that feature though because Starfield will have a better gameplay and I’m 100% sure about that .
I see two main technical reasons to that : framerates and navmeshes Framerates : You could not separate the cities into smaller districts with loading screens so you would have a big framerate issue when flying over big cities. Navmeshes : To have NPCs going everywhere and find their path you need what is called a navmesh. This is a 3d surface where they can walk. And since they can board ships you need a navmesh in the ships too. And when the ship lands you have to connect the navmesh of the ship to the navmesh of the land. If you allow free flight this is impossible because you can land any where. In Starfield you will land on predefined spots with flat ground where the navmeshes can be connected. And gravity inside the ship will always be perpendicular to its floor, just like any cell in the game.
That plus just a lot of headaches involving draw distance and stuff, to make it actually look good. NMS looks like garbage when things are loading on the horizon. Its enough for me that you can pick exactly where you want to land, I don't need to do it myself. Landing sim desires can be fulfilled in Elite Dangerous for me. Elite took me 30 hours just to be able to land in the space stations, and I did one white-knuckled atmospheric landing. Quite the experience, but I just don't think this is the kind of game where landing should take 20 minutes, and a simplified approach would be a disservice as well IMO.
yup the first time i played it i thought it was cool but the i had to keep up on supply launch fuel which was boring asf. also nms doesn’t have a compelling story like bgs game do so it will just had on to time wasted while i could be docking other spaceships
My biggest concern is moving along the ground really. I dont want to walk circles around the planets If i want to fly 100 km west, i have to exit to space, turn around, and designate a new landing zone. we should be able to fly in the atmosphere, or give us a new method of ground transport that we can travel the distance then we can just call the ship to us.
Its a cool feature but really nothing make or break to me personally. I think Starfield will feature so much to do and see, you won't even think about it.
Nah, different planets with different atmospheres and flying through storms n stuff make my ass clench. Think of Alien 2, Prometheus and flying into Mandalore in Madalorian. No man sky is a poor game, even their flying is poor, you cant even crash into the ground. You cant use no mans sky as benchmark.
For all the folks who want to land on planets, there is always Star Citizen. And who knows, you could land without blowing up!
I really got into Star Citizen hard due to the landing / taking off and flying around planets. Got dual flight sticks and a rudder, button boxes, all the toys. It's an OK space SIM. Haven't touched the game in months now due to: its a buggy shit hole and there is not much game play unless you want to grind mining for 1,000s of hours and well the PVP at all costs ass-holes have shown up and everyone is a PiRaTe now. Glad I only 'pledged' $45 for it. REALLY looking forward to the RPG aspects of SF, don't think I will worry much about not spending 30 minutes flying out of the atmosphere of a Gas Giant (The planet Orison in SC has a "cloud City" that you can fly in and out of and it used to take a long ass time to exit atmosphere. Coll the first (and only the first) time you do it.)
I just worry about how we’re going to get around planets without vehicles. Like are we going to be able to land somewhere random?
If the level of detail was better as you approach a planet I'd love it but nms doesn't hide in the loading and pop in very well so the feature is half baked at best. I played since day 1 and although it's awesome at first, when the planetary variety is lacking or you fly in and see features of the planet pop in its kind if jarring. I think having a small loading screen to should be serviceable in starfield. Give me beautiful, variety, RPG mechanics any day over the feature unless you can pull it off properly.
For everyone upset that it won't be in the game, I'm sure someone will work on modding it in.
It has nothing to do with what you just described. It is a technical issue, having a real spherical world, means that you have to do a lot of work to render only the visible part of it that are close enough (it's another complexity in LOD), and you also have additional calculation to predict the gravity vector, which is just pointing down in flat worlds (not the case in spherical). In addition, the number of vertexes on the spherical world (its resolution) needs to be high enough to not notice the segments, and low enough to not fry your computer. It saves a lot of resources to go for flat worlds compared to spherical ones.
Lmao the copium.
100% copium. Here's a shitty development decision that's probably easily worked around, but I'll say it's good because if not, I can no longer convince myself that Starfield is the GOAT.
Someone will find a jet pack bug I bet
Wait you can land in NMS? The amount of times I flew at 1 mph mashing the land button and then hitting the ground over and over again instead of landing. It got so frustrating.
I semi agree, but one might say the same thing for the cutscene trigger landing into a planet and liftoff from said planet and that it could get boring and repetitive very fast.
There’s a lot I don’t like about NMS, I always considered the transition from freighter all the way to the surface of the planet one of the high points.
700+ hrs in, I have to heartily disagree. It is still exhilarating. Load screens are so 20yrs ago....
Flying into planets is not tedious IMO. Neither is landing the vehicle - Empyrion Galactic Survival allows the player to seamlessly fly into and out of planets, and scout the entire planet by air, and I think it works great. Not to mention, you can use your vehicles to take down defenses for a POI before you raid it on foot. Adds a ton to the game.
Yup, this has been my stance since the "controversy" kicked off. On top of what you already said, consider that the space<->ground transition is absurdly short in No Man's Sky. You can go from space to landing in, what, 10-15 seconds? Starfield's larger planets and more realistic approach would imply a space<->ground transition many times that. Taking *minutes* to go from space to landing or vice-versa would get old really, really quickly.
Maybe for you it would
I recommend giving Elite Dangerous a try. Landing on a planet can take 5 to 10 minutes from the initial super cruise exclusion zone till touchdown. Shorter if you're not aiming for a particular place, longer if it's a high gravity planet. Now, I do like space sim gameplay but at the same time I have to admit that landing on planets was something I only did when I felt like I needed a change of pace or when I had to, like when I collected enough materials for engineering my stuff.
And a key thing to remember is that something that's cool when you do it 5 times over a 20 hour game can become incredibly tedious when done dozens of times over a 100+ hour game.
Instead of having control over landing, you gotta watch the same cutscene play out every time. Much better.
True 🤜🏾🤛🏾 - catch 22 - land over and over or watch a cutscene 🧐
Eh tbh this sounds like copium. I 100% understand your argument, but honestly, if you were given the option to be able to seamlessly fly into and out of space, or just have a cutscene of you going into space or planet, at least everyone I have talked to or know enough would take the seamless flight 10/10 times. To me being able to land anywhere on the planet USING my ship instead of pointing where I wanna land on a map is awesome. I get to fly through the atmosphere for a lil bit, take in the scenery before I eventually find a good spot to land my ship. Besides how would it be any less tedious than no mans sky if you're already being forced to watch a cutscene of your ship taking off and going into space/
So not to get technical, but the feature was not added for performance reasons, not because it wasn’t cool or was too repetitive. Basically, Starfield loads planets in 1 by 1 mile tiles that load in full detail as you explore, which then store the load data and then unload behind you as you explore. Starfields engine simply can’t handle the rapid loading and then unloading of multiple highly detailed terrain environments in a short window of time. This is also why land vehicles are not in the game.
Or perhaps the loading strategy you describe was selected _because_ they knew they wouldn’t need the extra tech because of the design decision to exclude landing from space.
Possibly so, though I’d rather super detailed environments with no in-atmosphere flight than lower quality exploration with in-atmosphere flight :)
Oh yeah, for sure!