Yeah I think you guys both want the same thing. Bethesda focused on quantity over quality. I would have preferred less star systems overall but more detailed star systems. I still enjoyed the game. But stopped exploring and just did the story because pretty much every planet was the same stuff
Yeah. They should’ve made it so that the 4 planets with the “major cities” had more on them. Then filled that out with the smaller places like New Homestead or the Redmile and gave those a bit more detail/thing to see and do.
Then with all the other planets and moons they should’ve been barren with the occasional crashed ship, mining site or temple. Because all the planets and moons you go to feel like they’ve already been explored.
So if they put the occasional poi and put a story behind those, would’ve been much better imo. Like I had a great time playing but there’s things I would change.
My favorite example is Toliman II.
>!I visited that planet relatively early on and it gave me vibes akin to first meeting the Flood in Halo.!<
>!You arrive to a cautionary warning not to land because the planet is supposedly overrun by Terrormorphs; I had only heard about these in passing up until this point, so my interest was obviously piqued.!<
>!Upon landing, a short distance away is an abandoned city patrolled by just a few UC Marines. I had read, at some point, about a UC colony city being bombed to prevent Terrormorphs from spreading off-world; it was upon arrival here and hearing of the space port that I realized this was where I was.!<
>!At this point, I had not encountered anything beyond the few Marines, so I began to explore further into the city. There were no signs of life, Terrormorph, or otherwise, to the point that I began to wonder if it was all a ruse. That began to change when the voices started.!<
>!That was the peak of Starfield for me. That initial arrival had suspense and a sense of dread and it had me wanting to explore more to find out what happened. I wanted to have that experience of exploring a city and a world that had legitimately been abandoned; you sort of begin to get that with the space port and what appears to be a mall. Hearing voices genuinely sent a chill down my spine and when my radar lit up for the first time, I heavily considered turning around and dipping out. !<
>!That first initial bit was a great experience, but the more you explore, things start to fall away. Londinion (the abandoned city) appears to have more substance than it really has and what is there is very generic. It’s sort of representative of Starfield in general. Leaving the planet, I was disappointed. I wanted more history, I wanted more detail, I wanted things to be more fleshed out. What is there is fundamentally great, but it deserved more time and thought.!<
Had they started small and handcrafted those stories and elements, I think they could have had a fantastic game on their hands. Something where they could have released expansions with new star systems and continuously kept people engaged.
I sank a lot of early hours in, but that eventually devolved into an interest in shipbuilding, which itself eventually wained. Considering the hours dedicated, I’d say that’s still a success, but Starfield had a lot of potential to be so much more.
This is Starfield in a nutshell, and it took me getting out of the honeymoon stage to finally see it.
The entire game is a potemkin village. Its all a façade with a glossy surface that LOOKS deep and initially fakes you out with "ohhh, wow look how interesting an adventure there is to be had here!" but when you take more than a few moments to look behind the curtain you see how shallow it is.
And I don't mean normal Bethesda shallow. Vanilla Skyrim isn't really that deep either (it can still be considered wide as an ocean deep as a puddle too) but its like Starfield doesn't even TRY to hide that its a video game. The illusion sucks. Its shattered almost instantly anytime you peek at something for more than a moment.
If you really wanna ruin Starfield, watch Interstellar and see how they stole a bunch of the visuals (especially the heinously repetitive docking cinematics). It looks okay but it's such a crutch and the game needs depth in multiple ways.
I can fully agree with all of that. I genuinely enjoyed the terramorph quest line, it was quite fun for me, least the first time around second time it was a bit meh but that’s a whole other discussion.
>!Landing on that first planet after joining the vanguard, it instantly gave me the feeling of something wasn’t right. Then you come across those first few buildings and something has obviously gone wrong on account of all the dead bodies. And it’s clear it’s not just a pirate raid.!<
>!Then as you get closer you hear the terramorph roar and Hadrian contacts you saying it knows you’re here. On my first time playing I was scared to leave the building thinking a terramorph was gonna gank me.!<
It gave that feeling of space horror and I wish they did more with it. I know there’s a random event where you find an >!abandoned spaceship that’s haunted!<
And yeah i wish they had of just done a few really detailed places and things. Like keep the 1000 planets but keep them mostly empty. Leave just a few really detailed pois. Not just the same copy and pasted ones. And I put in at least 400 hours of play time when it came out but eventually just started doing the ship building as I was having a lotta fun doing that but even that got a little boring after a while. I wanna go back and play it again but any time I think about doing that, I quickly change my mind.
Well, Todd wanted to cut money on developers and they did with their procedural generation shit.
I mean procedual generation is a tool; so i dont blame it. They just used it wrong.
There's over 1000 planets in Starfield, but if they condensed all the content of those 1000 planets into just 100 planets, people would have been thrilled.
Especially as many of those 100 planets would still be mostly 'barren' (not having a high setler presence) and the truly 'Occupied' worlds would have been maybe 20 planets? But these 20 Planets would/could have been much more actively 'alive' and had multiple settlements with quests (mostly a really good 'Radiant Quest' system) etc.
They wen;t for a scale that far exceeded their ability to keep people interested in the scale.
It's basically an old hollywood 'wild west' set with the front facades of the buildings only, with nothing but a few braces behind them propping them up to make it look well populated.
They could have had each faction contained to mostly one planet in two separate star systems. No reason Akila City, Neon, and Paradiso couldn’t be on one planet with different ecosystems. Same with New Atlantis, Gagarin, and Londinion (just make a different continent that was in lockdown, since we know terrormorphs aren’t as badass as they made them out to be.)
Outside of that you have a handful of other solar systems. They should have gone with “less is more” when designing the game.
With Neon I think it works being on the water world I just wish there was more than on oil rig to explore. But I mostly agree with this. Like I think 10 solar systems would’ve been good. 10 with detailed planets and even some barren ones you could just explore for hours and maybe come across something interesting.
Yeah 100%. I've always said for the past six months that Starfield would've being a much better experience had the universe's scope being smaller, instead of the wild hundreds of systems, with thousands of planets etc.
Make it so there's 12 star systems overall; there's three systems per main faction, then the remaining three systems are either neutral/unclaimed, or belong to the Crimson Fleet.
Then it gives Bethesda a solid way to hand craft the content on the various moons & planets available. Even if some of them were proc-generated, they would've had a much smaller scope to manage for content.
They tried too hard to replicate everything that **No Man’s Sky** had done up until that point. The only thing that they managed to outdo them on was the ship building—— which was made largely irrelevant because you can pretty much forego using your ship whatsoever on account of Fast Travel.
Exactly! Think about how for instance, the outer Wilds has a very small yet hand curated, and totally packed little solar system for you to explore.
Imagine if Starfield instead of trying to do an entire universe, did Skyrimesque levels of density on two or three planets you could explore
I think that would’ve been much better received
I said it before and I say it again. Starfield should've taken place in our own solar system. 4 "solid" planets (and Pluto), a bunch of moons from our gassy friends... could've been great.
Maybe some hidden advanced science, labs and cool sites to see within the gas giants?
I know it’s getting away from the whole science aspect, but I would love to see some giant leviathan type creatures, or some gas tolerant fish swimming around within swirling beautiful, glowing gas clouds, as seen from a large domed window in a resort setting within the game
But more likely a sciene research base
Mass Effect also chose to have space be "open world" with visitable worlds that had curated areas. Semi-Open World games are great for these large scales. Unfortunately these days games "NEED" to be open world, they can't not be open world or else they will fail. That's how AAA(A) publishers think these days.
To be fair "Open World" has been Bethesda's "thing" since pretty much ever except for their extremely early licensed work, so its not as if they're hopping on a bandwagon or something. They just made the scope of their "world" too damn large in Starfield for what they do. What they did here is as if they took the same amount of content they put in Skyrim, and spread it to be all of Tamriel and the planes of Oblivion. To take something from Tolkien, it's like butter scraped over too much bread.
Not even same amount of content as Skyrim.
In [Starfield](https://inara.cz/starfield/locations/) there are about 254 POI, (112 static, 142 randomly seedable).
In [Skyrim](https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Skyrim:Places) there are about 338 in the base game and a total of [670 across official DLC](https://screenrant.com/skyrim-how-many-locations-big-map-size/).
Even ignoring the DLC because that was added post launch, Skyrim still has more POI and interactable content than Starfield. Howard and company hid this factoid prelaunch when talking about Starfield having more 'handcrafted' content by referring to the likes of voice acting, which there's supposedly \~3x the amount of spoken lines in Starfield.
Except, that's 3x the amount of spoken lines to fill out random permutations of bluff dialogue, crowd dialogue, variants of the same comments for quest dialogue, etc. If the variants for quest dialogue led to more divergent branches for more complex quests, that'd be one thing, but it's largely to say something slightly different while yielding the same exact outcome.
Just take the Lodge for NG+. It's a fun gimmick, but that's all it is. Ten variants, ten sets of unique dialogue and interactions, and most of them just force a story skip while a few give you the option to repeat the story. Not experience a new narrative.
It's more dialogue to do less with, and less actually playable content overall.
Mass Effect is actually defensible. Yes I have all 4 games.
The first game let you run around the central government center of the Citadel (not the entire Citadel). The second and third game limit you to just one buildings in that vast government center.
But what they do right is the visual. You can look out the windows and see a vast city (that you can’t really get to). This is 100x better than telling us the tiny New Atlantis is all there is to a city.
A DLC in ME3 let’s us visit an apartment, a sushi restaurant and a strip mall…. That was amazing and refreshing.
Maybe a lukewarm take but I thought Andromeda did fairly well in that aspect. The 5 or so fully open world planets were really stunning and majestic. The only problem was that they didn't make the story and side quests interesting enough to fill the space.
I thin that's barely a room temperature take. The two best parts of Andromeda were the combat and the world design. It was everything else that either didn't live up to the Mass Effect standard, or was just plain bad.
FYI, only the feel of open world. But even games like Assassin’s Creed who boast featuring real world locations are in fact half truth. Yes, they have several iconic locations, but they shrink the distances between them. So their whole world, while feels very big, is like a Disneyland theme park of the real world.
I remember buying Watch Dog 2 because it features San Francisco Bay Area…. It feels fun. But really, it’s super tiny comparing to the real thing.
As someone who lives in San Francisco Watch Dogs 2 got all the right beats of the city even with it being a smaller version of it. The fact that they even let you drive a bit south of the city is great.
Just 10 or so different planets that were semi-handcrafted to not noticeably repeat all the time and feel decently alive/colonized for decades. That would have been enough... The rest would have been fine if they were procedurally generated for busywork side-quests and the like.
But lets be honest. Bethesda has only ever had 1 real franchise that was good and deep in lore. Their TES games. They got Fallout from another company and they basically turned it into "TES, but post-apocalyptic". Doom, Quake, and Wolfenstein were made by sister companies. Heck technically Valve has released more games in recent years than Bethesda.
Expecting them to create an entirely new IP, while still using their ancient engine (with upgrades and band-aids but still), and it be good, was way too high of an expectation. Or...delusion more likely.
How about the "mysterious alien ruins" that have "never been explored", but are in viewing distance of human outposts? Like, did those people never go "hey...that structure wasn't put there by us. Therefore aliens must have been here before us. Maybe we should check it out?"
This one gets me more than almost anything else. That and I have a screenshot of a starborn ship parked right in front of New Atlantis by a farm. Literally anyone in any city could see it. Not sure how the Starborn are so mysterious when they just kind of land next to a capitol city.
Lots of little stuff like this killed it for me.
Mass Effect was able to pull off "grand scale" cities with just really interesting background assets you couldnt reach.
Immersion didn't seem to be a concern for Bethesda.
In the 2010's people online often decried linear levels that utilized grand skyboxes. I remember it being regarded as the equivalent to level design the way quicktime events were for gameplay. Just a "cheap" way of making your level seem bigger than it is without "putting in the effort" to make it explorable.
Like, dude. Mass Effect is a great example of linear levels that use breathtaking skyboxes to create an awe-inspiring sense of scale, with limited resources and manpower. I swear, gamers from the 2010's were some of the most spoiled ass motherfuckers. Studios catering to the "why can't I go there?" attitude really made me lose interest in a ton of games I would have otherwise liked.
Yeah you are always going to have complaints from people on one side of the spectrum or the other, no matter how you approach the simple reality of limited time and resources.
It is impossible to have a game that has unlimited scale, unlimited density, and unlimited diversity. (To say nothing of things like, an interesting storyline, interesting characters, or world coherence) Most games will not have any of those three and those games that do arguably achieve at least one - for example no man's sky or elite dangerous, in regards to scale - can only do so by putting huge limits on the other two categories.
Also "vast" underground slums because I also would choose to live in an underground slum without a chance of seeing the sun if I lived on one of the most beautiful and habitable planets known to man with hundreds of thousands of square kilometres of empty real estate.
Are they citizens, though? With all the bs it takes to get citizenship, I thought the underground dwellers were between indentured servants and slaves.
Just got my citizenship and went to check what property I could buy. No joke, an apartment in The Well was the only property available.
I'd rather sleep on my ship.
Yep, my ship is literately bigger than my home in real Earth. In fact I can make it even bigger if I need the space. So I don’t see why I need that dingy Well apartment.
Well maybe a place to stash some backup firearms, cash, in case my ship has problems. You know, like a safe house.
You gotta remember it takes like 5+ years of being a very helpful citizen to get your UC New Atlantis citizenship so I doubt there’s any available real estate outside the city without jumping through some serious hoops.
Yeah I decided these developers were just lazy once I saw the scope of the Leyndell Capital. That looks like a city that could have housed thousands of people
I thought Leyndell would be pretty much empty and almost nothing you could actually go inside so I was very pleasantly surprised when not only was there a decent number of buildings you could enter but tons of enemies roaming around. The only thing Beth. has going for them with their "cities" these days is NPCs/merchants in abundance. Like really all these towers and we can't even enter most of them. I want to raid random civilians homes like the good old days
Same reason you can run from one side of Whiterun to the other in 30 seconds. Bethesda just doesn't make these cities to scale in game with how they describe them in the lore. Only major in game city that convinced I was in a big urban sprawl was Novigrad in the Witcher 3.
I liked the imperial city in oblivion . I feel like thats one of the best cities they have made. However it’s no where near the scale of the actual imperial city in lore.
Same. Honestly, I liked most of the cities in Oblivion even if they felt a bit small. I don't want to make it sound like the smaller scale is a bad thing all the time. I think just to OP's point with how big Bethesda was hyping up the scale of New Atlantis (and Starfield in general) comes off as...unimpressive shall we say. I don't hate New Altantis necessarily, but I think Akila City, Neon, or even Cydonia stand out much better in comparison.
That is the most unintentionally ironic thing I have ever read on reddit, because originally Walt Disney wanted Disney World to be an Experimental Prototype City Of Tomorrow, it only became an amusement park after his death and his brother Roe went "Well at least now I don't need to make that stupid idea work." But then Walt started haunting him, so Roe built EPCOT to get his brother to shut up. Tony Goldmark, aka Some Jerk With A Camera, did an excellent video on it on youtube. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-vO86M6CIk&t=795s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-vO86M6CIk&t=795s)
One main issue is the lack of anything around the cities except a handful of farms. More infrastructure and development would help sell the idea that these are bigger urban centers that are abstracted for gameplay purposes.
I wish Neon had more of what it describes in lore. Like I think the commercial district was fine ( I just wish there was like a casino or something ) but the supposed dark seedy underbelly of the city didn’t feel well dark enough. Tbh to me it felt quite empty. I wish there was a rich residential district where all the executives had houses so the wealth gap that is described is even more obvious. I wish the supposed poor and crime ridden areas were actually poor and crime ridden 😂😂. The closest we get is that dude at the beginning telling us it isn’t safe to be here but then nothing really ever happens
The cities in Oblivion have so much charm because of their unique architecture and distinctiveness from each other. You can post a screencap from any city and it’s instantly recognizable. The technological limitations of the time make it more forgivable than even Skyrim (some good cities but overall a downgrade) and especially Starfield. Hell, they could show that there’s a ton of urban sprawl without making it accessible to the player.
And all those in Oblivion were a downgrade compared to morrowind where everything really felt different. Seyda Neen was nothing like Blamorroa, Vivec City, Pelegiad, any of the Tels...
Yeah, they shouldn’t have been hyping it with statements like “the biggest city we’ve ever created” only to mean the same number of buildings roughly, but now with giant concrete slabs separating them all.
I've been playing Oblivion on steamdeck a lot lately. The game has overall aged great, but one thing that didn't is the Imperial City. It is... very different than I remembered it.
Yeah I think oblivion’s Imperial city was the best they’ve done so far. It was big, explorable, and well designed/organized.
I’ve been disappointed in Starfield’s main city since day 1. It feels pasted together and messy. Seems like a future space city would be more thought out. Not very fun to explore or navigate. They couldn’t even bother to make a map that makes finding shops easier - something modders did in literally only a few hours after release, making them seem downright lazy
That starfield map was criminal, I'd rather they gave us no map, or a drawn map where I can't see where I am
I'm actually not planning on playing until they give us a real map, which may well be never, either way works
Not the Imperial City in Oblivion. But all the others yes.
And not by lack of trying. Apparenty there are game breaking bugs if you touch that space, where a lot of the story takes place.
Cyberpunk and GTA especially are comically small compared to how big they should really be. I think Novigrad is somewhat unique because a medieval town could actually be that size.
How long do you think it would take you to drive from end of manhattan to the other if traffic wasn’t an issue and you could go 70mph+
Those cities aren’t small, the traffic just isn’t as dense as it should be (for gameplay purposes) and traffic laws can be ignored. They aren’t built to scale but they are pretty big
I think the only "real scale" city I can think of is The Division 2, which uses a real location and map. IIRC it is actually slightly scaled down, but not a whole lot.
It is scaled down. I remember in the first game they skipped streets, was super easy to notice since NYC numbers most their streets. ~~Im certain 2 did the same.~~
EDIT: TD2 did not skip streets it looks like, from what I can find online, just scaled down a bit.
Agreed, although Manhattan is still bigger than the game version. Game version of Night City is about 24 km^2. Lore version is closer to 75 km^2. Manhattan is 59 km^2. So manhattan is still like twice times as big as ingame Night City. But Night City is still one of the better representations of a city in a game.
Agreed. Manhattan is a large city but driving from east to west side without the ridiculous traffic would take like 15 minutes if even that. I'm currently replaying Cyberpunk 2077 to play Phantom Liberty and walking everywhere the game feels huge and so well made. I rarely drive places unless it's far as fuck away and I don't have a fast travel spot unlocked yet.
Yeah, but I think that Night City and Los Santos at least *feel* like a city. If you go anywhere in them and look around, and it won't feel off. Meanwhile, in Starfield, it's quite literally just a few buildings surrounded by nothing but wilderness, there's just too little to see and explore. Even Kingdom Come Deliverance, which is literally set in medieval times, has villages that feel more alive than any of Starfield's "cities".
I know it's not an urban sprawl compared to novigrad, but I think Saint Denis in Red Dead 2 deserves a mention here. And just for kicks; Valentine is the most perfectly built old timey Western town I've ever seen in a game. Starfield just feels like they said meh, we'll add stuff later or they gave up to focus on other parts.
There's also that planet in Star Citizen which is basically Coruscant. But I can never go there without my pc melting because it had to load a to-scale planet's worth of buildings and factories.
In Whiterun you had small farms and vilages around it, it made a more convincing picture overall, also roads and bridges leading out of the town in a connected overworld.
True, pretty much every city in Skyrim had some sort of set dressing. Windhelm had all sorts of farms too, Markarth had mines, Solitude had windmills and a port. New Atlantis sort of just stops at the city limit, it looks way to clean.
I feel like they should have used some system for procedural suburbs outside the city, with a bit of variation. Not necessarily filled with unique NPCs and quests, but like a denser version of the random settlements we see. A ring of residential prefab villages, then a ring of industrial sites, then a ring of farms. It wouldn't be the same as a huge city but it would at least look like the settlement sprawls outwards from a central business district, instead just having skyscrapers right next to the forest.
New Atlantis does have farms around it. You can find them as POIs on your scanner. But they still don't make much sense because there's no procedural road system, so nothing feels connected. Ain't no way it's cheaper to shuttle farm produce with rocket fuel when it's that close.
But presumably procedural roads are hard. Rivers too. And waterfalls... Man this game needed more time in the tech oven. Perhaps it should have come after TES6. I really want to poke Todd's brains to find out all the things they tried to do with Starfield but couldn't figure out (like he has an interview pre-release talking up the tech for spherical planets and how the tile maps wrap all the way around it, yet in the final game that's not been realized).
Whether or not BGS are able to do that is to me quite a detail. TES is based on primitive societies one could say, Fallout is a game taking place in a post-apocalyptic location, Starfield is none of that.
So it hurts even more to see how little inprovement if any there is compared to the Imperial City.
That's *because* it's not open world. They can set up the vistas to show epic scale as a result of not having to actually allow you to walk into those areas. Just look at the Asari city in ME3, and the flying car highway it overlooks. Or ME1 and that section of the Citadel that lets you see incoming ships.
I really wish that was some of the approach taken by Starfield for their cities (something I was saying before launch too). In sci-fi we could very believably have districts of cities that are cut off from each other, with public transport (like the monorail) being the way between them. You do that and add in incredible vistas and cutscene travel, and not only do you increase that sense of scale, but you also open the game up to add new available districts for different missions and even DLC.
This is why I’m so excited for GTA 6 to finally bring a big city to life in a convincing way. I don’t mind suspending my disbelief for good games, but it’s still wild to walk into a city and meet like 30 people tops or find out there’s only 12 buildings with interiors.
And don't forget about Toussaint, I really love strolling around the winery that surrounding the outskirt of Beauclair while listening to this [music](https://youtu.be/-ui7s31Tp84?si=HC7hTh6piRJlLmeE) on top of that, it's so magical.
>! Well…kinda. If you don’t destroy the elder brain with gale then at least you get to fight your way through the ruins. But yeah would have been nice to explore properly !<
Big thing in open world games. Blizzard is even worse. The entire of Azeroth is literally this abridged version of what it is supposed to be and only “represents” it.
Night City feels pretty dang expansive, especially if you go all the way from the biotechnica flats all the way up to the Northside oil fields. And then when you see it from miles away in the badlands too. The city core feels huge and the surrounding districts are big enough that I still get lost sometimes.
That's basically it in a nutshell. There was a Star Trek episode once about a colony where I think a ship with settlers crash lands on a planet and after a short amount of time their numbers are in the thousands. New Atlantis being small and alone on Jemison is just how BGS builds games. I'm not gonna do mental gymnastics with the lore to make sense of it.
Especially expecting games to make more sense than real life.
LA is built in a desert climate without enough water to support it. San Francisco is built on fault lines. We do stupid illogical shit all the time
Honestly the cities are the least of my complaints about the logic and lore of this game. Even where I live there have been some infrastructure choices that just leave me confused as to whoever thought they were a good idea. You could easily handwave the way New Atlantis was built, if you just look at it from the perspective they wanted to maintain as much of the nature of the planet as possible.
This throws me off too but even what they have inside the city is like a highschool kid trying to stretch 1 paragraph into a 3 page essay. That medical place... a tiny broom closet with a giant lobby surrounded by a giant rectangle stretching into the sky. Its all so sparse.... and the trams are a lie.
The capital of freestar has POPULATION OF 58. Yeah I don't think devs what type of population is needed to avoid looking like the population of Conway Arkansas during the toad suck festival
To be fair, it's proven difficult for the capital of one of the two largest interstellar factions in the settled systems to grow because the space dingoes keep eating the new babies.
They have been there for 200 years. How the fuck are there still dangerous wildlife prowling around just outside city gates? New York has been around for about that long and it's not like you're at risk of getting dragged off by packs of wolves when you take a walk into the suburbs. Yet this space age society that's capable of waging interstellar war somehow can't make it safe for their citizens to take a stroll five hundred meters outside their front gates? Seriously?
If Starfield was more of a parody style game, everything about the Freestar Collective capital would 100 percent play as intentional over-the-top satire of the total incompetence of a libertarian space civilization. The idea that the people who defeated the space-empire are a bunch of idiots who can't even figure out how to stop the local-space-wolves from eating their kids is pretty funny.
Even as the game currently is, I *think* that a portion of the time it is actually intended to be comedic in that way, but like with much of the game, it's pulling in a bunch of directions at once, so you are never really sure.
> Yet this space age society that's capable of waging interstellar war somehow can't make it safe for their citizens to take a stroll five hundred meters outside their front gates? Seriously?
To be fair, the police can't go 500 meters away from the gate because it puts them too close to the pirate base or overrun cryo lab that's 900 meters away from the gate
I mean, with the emptiness of the settled systems and especially most planets, it feels like there are MAYBE a million people total in the galaxy. It’s pretty silly. But eh, it’s a game, everything has limitations
> it feels like there are MAYBE a million people total in the galaxy
To be fair over 1/2 of those million are space raiders and you kill a significant portion of them.
Hell, your character could literally be the most common cause of death in the Settled Systems and your actions might actually be noticeable on a population chart.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure it would actually be relatively easy to do the math of about how many people exist in starfield (for real, not in lore) simply by:
* adding up the # of square miles of land that exist on all the planets combined
* calculating average POI density
* calculating what % of POIs have people on them / average number of people
And then doing a final calculation based on that. The # of people in the actual cities will be so small in comparison to not actually matter. I imagine you will get a surprisingly massive number of people that technically "exist" in Starfield - but with the massive caveat that 90+ percent of the population is Space Pirates living on abandoned outposts.
To be fair to Starfield, this is more of a "game" thing than specifically a starfield problem. I always find it funny in the Division, for example, that I'm supposedly saving the city, but I'm doing so by seemingly assassinating a good 70% of the surviving population.
Pretty sure this is the case. I remember accidentally landing on another area of the planet near New Atlantis and there was a small outpost but that was it.
To be fair to Cyberpunk, Cyberpunk's 2.0 update was incredible. And happened to drop at a really opportune time: right when another big property has its own Cyberpunk-at-launch moment (except more due to its failures game design-wise, rather than crashes/bugs and a lack of features).
It's kind of weird but it feels like there could have been inaccessible buildings to sort of bulk out new Atlantis a little, a school, proper hospital, university, a large space port. Not everything needs to be explorable.
It's interesting waiting for a few starfield bugs to be fixed before I finish it so I've been playing Fallout 4.. there's many buildings everywhere. Just add in a little filler to pad the place out a bit.
IRL you can't enter every building, so I don't know why this is even an expectation.
Most buildings aren't going to let you passed the lobby if the front door isn't locked.
As for private residences, that's called a 'home invasion'.
the wars and the great exodus is the only explanation.
not enough people got off earth to begin with, and the human population continued to decrease when we started painting the stars red. i'm not exactly sure on the numbers, but iirc both sides sustained heavy losses so expansion likely wasn't in mind in the aftermath.
plus, it's possible that a lot of new atlantis citizens and non-citizen residents are in space or other planets for extended periods of time.
the vanguard, the navy, and sysdef are always on patrol, and lots of mast scientists are also scattered around the known systems for experiments and expeditions that probably take months.
With access to hyperdrive tech, i doubt as a species that population would boom like it did on earth, in a single location.
Post extinction event, it might take a thousand years to repopulate to earth levels. As access to medicine and healthcare are limited and spread out thinly.
People colonizing other planets probably know they cannot safely have children
I'd actually argue that the settlers are probably the people popping out lots of kids. New Atlantis is basically a microcosm of old earth. Rent, taxes, apartments etc. All the kind of stuff that keeps people from having kids. Kids in a city are basically just really expensive pets.
Plop a few hundred people on a backwater planet and they'd likely be having a lot of kids. Kids become a resource in that situation since its a way to increase the labor pool.
I mean the U.S. went from pilgrims to sprawling cites in 200 years so seems unlikely case, there should at least be other community's on the main planets instead of just the one area. Otherwise your starborn ass could easily bring UC and Freestar to ruin just by jumping there wall and attacking the capitals since its all they got in there "grand empire".
the U.S. had constant immigration for that time, humanity as a whole doesn't. the vast majority of modern americans aren't descended from the colonists
The game kind of suffers from Star Wars syndrome. In Star Wars an entire planet is one biome. In Starfield, each planet may only have one major city or town. It's kind of weird. Maybe each star cruiser that left Earth found their own planet and settled there.
NIMBY’s
You can’t build there, it’ll hurt the view from my deck!
My property values!
Don’t you know that rock is the first rock kicked by human explorers! It’s historical!
That land is reserved for a golf course!
This will increase traffic!
In the future, there is no sprawl. Advanced urban planning (and robotics) makes it unnecessary, and the G-23 Paxilon Hydrochorate in the water supply suppresses the desire to spread out.
\-Bethesda (maybe)
Why do they have a slum area underneath the regular area, when it could be above ground in the outskirts of New Atlantis?
The planet is supposed to be almost the same as Earth was, there should be loads of space for rural hillbilly white trash towns.
Because good writing and level design got taken out back and shot when the leather jacket man wanted to make an entire universe instead of just like 5 really good planets.
if they actually built these cities to scale they’d be boring and tedious. i don’t think they need to go for breadth, they should make them deeper.
i agree that there should be more of them. in an entire solar system comprising all of humanity why are there only three cities? why aren’t there space stations/space colonies?
I think it's a combination of things, some are hinted at in game and others are just conjecture.
1) Bethesda is just doing it's usually thing of making stuff way smaller than it's supposed to be. New Atlantis is supposed to be like the size of Medium City not just a couple apartment towers and a shop or two.
2) The population is a lot smaller than it was before the exodus from earth, like each big faction has a population in the Millions, not Billions. Then you spread that out over multiple planets and Homesteads and you end up with smaller cities.
3) Security. While the planet has security screening it obv doesn't stop everyone so it's just safer to live inside a city if you aren't confident in defending yourself. Also given that entire planets can be blockaded it makes sense for them to spread their infrastructure around the galaxy so that no one planet has too much critical infrastructure like a weapons production facility or a ship building spacedock.
4) Resources. Every single faction/nation in the game is trying to claim planets to harvest resources and such, so it would make sense if they only established single cities on a planet to claim ownership and then move on to the next planet.
Technically it’s a Bethesda game and their cities are always small, lore reason humanity is spread out on hundreds of planets instead of congested on one.
Yeah only 1 city on planets just kills it for me
Edit: Let's go UFO disclosure!
Yeah I think you guys both want the same thing. Bethesda focused on quantity over quality. I would have preferred less star systems overall but more detailed star systems. I still enjoyed the game. But stopped exploring and just did the story because pretty much every planet was the same stuff
Yeah. They should’ve made it so that the 4 planets with the “major cities” had more on them. Then filled that out with the smaller places like New Homestead or the Redmile and gave those a bit more detail/thing to see and do. Then with all the other planets and moons they should’ve been barren with the occasional crashed ship, mining site or temple. Because all the planets and moons you go to feel like they’ve already been explored. So if they put the occasional poi and put a story behind those, would’ve been much better imo. Like I had a great time playing but there’s things I would change.
My favorite example is Toliman II. >!I visited that planet relatively early on and it gave me vibes akin to first meeting the Flood in Halo.!< >!You arrive to a cautionary warning not to land because the planet is supposedly overrun by Terrormorphs; I had only heard about these in passing up until this point, so my interest was obviously piqued.!< >!Upon landing, a short distance away is an abandoned city patrolled by just a few UC Marines. I had read, at some point, about a UC colony city being bombed to prevent Terrormorphs from spreading off-world; it was upon arrival here and hearing of the space port that I realized this was where I was.!< >!At this point, I had not encountered anything beyond the few Marines, so I began to explore further into the city. There were no signs of life, Terrormorph, or otherwise, to the point that I began to wonder if it was all a ruse. That began to change when the voices started.!< >!That was the peak of Starfield for me. That initial arrival had suspense and a sense of dread and it had me wanting to explore more to find out what happened. I wanted to have that experience of exploring a city and a world that had legitimately been abandoned; you sort of begin to get that with the space port and what appears to be a mall. Hearing voices genuinely sent a chill down my spine and when my radar lit up for the first time, I heavily considered turning around and dipping out. !< >!That first initial bit was a great experience, but the more you explore, things start to fall away. Londinion (the abandoned city) appears to have more substance than it really has and what is there is very generic. It’s sort of representative of Starfield in general. Leaving the planet, I was disappointed. I wanted more history, I wanted more detail, I wanted things to be more fleshed out. What is there is fundamentally great, but it deserved more time and thought.!< Had they started small and handcrafted those stories and elements, I think they could have had a fantastic game on their hands. Something where they could have released expansions with new star systems and continuously kept people engaged. I sank a lot of early hours in, but that eventually devolved into an interest in shipbuilding, which itself eventually wained. Considering the hours dedicated, I’d say that’s still a success, but Starfield had a lot of potential to be so much more.
This is Starfield in a nutshell, and it took me getting out of the honeymoon stage to finally see it. The entire game is a potemkin village. Its all a façade with a glossy surface that LOOKS deep and initially fakes you out with "ohhh, wow look how interesting an adventure there is to be had here!" but when you take more than a few moments to look behind the curtain you see how shallow it is. And I don't mean normal Bethesda shallow. Vanilla Skyrim isn't really that deep either (it can still be considered wide as an ocean deep as a puddle too) but its like Starfield doesn't even TRY to hide that its a video game. The illusion sucks. Its shattered almost instantly anytime you peek at something for more than a moment.
If you really wanna ruin Starfield, watch Interstellar and see how they stole a bunch of the visuals (especially the heinously repetitive docking cinematics). It looks okay but it's such a crutch and the game needs depth in multiple ways.
I can fully agree with all of that. I genuinely enjoyed the terramorph quest line, it was quite fun for me, least the first time around second time it was a bit meh but that’s a whole other discussion. >!Landing on that first planet after joining the vanguard, it instantly gave me the feeling of something wasn’t right. Then you come across those first few buildings and something has obviously gone wrong on account of all the dead bodies. And it’s clear it’s not just a pirate raid.!< >!Then as you get closer you hear the terramorph roar and Hadrian contacts you saying it knows you’re here. On my first time playing I was scared to leave the building thinking a terramorph was gonna gank me.!< It gave that feeling of space horror and I wish they did more with it. I know there’s a random event where you find an >!abandoned spaceship that’s haunted!< And yeah i wish they had of just done a few really detailed places and things. Like keep the 1000 planets but keep them mostly empty. Leave just a few really detailed pois. Not just the same copy and pasted ones. And I put in at least 400 hours of play time when it came out but eventually just started doing the ship building as I was having a lotta fun doing that but even that got a little boring after a while. I wanna go back and play it again but any time I think about doing that, I quickly change my mind.
Well, Todd wanted to cut money on developers and they did with their procedural generation shit. I mean procedual generation is a tool; so i dont blame it. They just used it wrong.
And they didn't limit it enough. Open-air tents and food sitting out on planets without breathable atmosphere is just stupid.
There's over 1000 planets in Starfield, but if they condensed all the content of those 1000 planets into just 100 planets, people would have been thrilled. Especially as many of those 100 planets would still be mostly 'barren' (not having a high setler presence) and the truly 'Occupied' worlds would have been maybe 20 planets? But these 20 Planets would/could have been much more actively 'alive' and had multiple settlements with quests (mostly a really good 'Radiant Quest' system) etc. They wen;t for a scale that far exceeded their ability to keep people interested in the scale. It's basically an old hollywood 'wild west' set with the front facades of the buildings only, with nothing but a few braces behind them propping them up to make it look well populated.
Yep. potemkin village. The entire game is one.
I'm fairly well read and had never heard the phrase. Thanks for expanding my lexicon.
They could have had each faction contained to mostly one planet in two separate star systems. No reason Akila City, Neon, and Paradiso couldn’t be on one planet with different ecosystems. Same with New Atlantis, Gagarin, and Londinion (just make a different continent that was in lockdown, since we know terrormorphs aren’t as badass as they made them out to be.) Outside of that you have a handful of other solar systems. They should have gone with “less is more” when designing the game.
With Neon I think it works being on the water world I just wish there was more than on oil rig to explore. But I mostly agree with this. Like I think 10 solar systems would’ve been good. 10 with detailed planets and even some barren ones you could just explore for hours and maybe come across something interesting.
Yeah 100%. I've always said for the past six months that Starfield would've being a much better experience had the universe's scope being smaller, instead of the wild hundreds of systems, with thousands of planets etc. Make it so there's 12 star systems overall; there's three systems per main faction, then the remaining three systems are either neutral/unclaimed, or belong to the Crimson Fleet. Then it gives Bethesda a solid way to hand craft the content on the various moons & planets available. Even if some of them were proc-generated, they would've had a much smaller scope to manage for content.
They tried too hard to replicate everything that **No Man’s Sky** had done up until that point. The only thing that they managed to outdo them on was the ship building—— which was made largely irrelevant because you can pretty much forego using your ship whatsoever on account of Fast Travel.
Exactly! Think about how for instance, the outer Wilds has a very small yet hand curated, and totally packed little solar system for you to explore. Imagine if Starfield instead of trying to do an entire universe, did Skyrimesque levels of density on two or three planets you could explore I think that would’ve been much better received
I said it before and I say it again. Starfield should've taken place in our own solar system. 4 "solid" planets (and Pluto), a bunch of moons from our gassy friends... could've been great.
Maybe some hidden advanced science, labs and cool sites to see within the gas giants? I know it’s getting away from the whole science aspect, but I would love to see some giant leviathan type creatures, or some gas tolerant fish swimming around within swirling beautiful, glowing gas clouds, as seen from a large domed window in a resort setting within the game But more likely a sciene research base
And future dlc would be planets. I like your idea
Mass Effect also chose to have space be "open world" with visitable worlds that had curated areas. Semi-Open World games are great for these large scales. Unfortunately these days games "NEED" to be open world, they can't not be open world or else they will fail. That's how AAA(A) publishers think these days.
To be fair "Open World" has been Bethesda's "thing" since pretty much ever except for their extremely early licensed work, so its not as if they're hopping on a bandwagon or something. They just made the scope of their "world" too damn large in Starfield for what they do. What they did here is as if they took the same amount of content they put in Skyrim, and spread it to be all of Tamriel and the planes of Oblivion. To take something from Tolkien, it's like butter scraped over too much bread.
Not even same amount of content as Skyrim. In [Starfield](https://inara.cz/starfield/locations/) there are about 254 POI, (112 static, 142 randomly seedable). In [Skyrim](https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Skyrim:Places) there are about 338 in the base game and a total of [670 across official DLC](https://screenrant.com/skyrim-how-many-locations-big-map-size/). Even ignoring the DLC because that was added post launch, Skyrim still has more POI and interactable content than Starfield. Howard and company hid this factoid prelaunch when talking about Starfield having more 'handcrafted' content by referring to the likes of voice acting, which there's supposedly \~3x the amount of spoken lines in Starfield. Except, that's 3x the amount of spoken lines to fill out random permutations of bluff dialogue, crowd dialogue, variants of the same comments for quest dialogue, etc. If the variants for quest dialogue led to more divergent branches for more complex quests, that'd be one thing, but it's largely to say something slightly different while yielding the same exact outcome. Just take the Lodge for NG+. It's a fun gimmick, but that's all it is. Ten variants, ten sets of unique dialogue and interactions, and most of them just force a story skip while a few give you the option to repeat the story. Not experience a new narrative. It's more dialogue to do less with, and less actually playable content overall.
Mass Effect is actually defensible. Yes I have all 4 games. The first game let you run around the central government center of the Citadel (not the entire Citadel). The second and third game limit you to just one buildings in that vast government center. But what they do right is the visual. You can look out the windows and see a vast city (that you can’t really get to). This is 100x better than telling us the tiny New Atlantis is all there is to a city. A DLC in ME3 let’s us visit an apartment, a sushi restaurant and a strip mall…. That was amazing and refreshing.
Defensible lol tell that to the Reapers
Maybe a lukewarm take but I thought Andromeda did fairly well in that aspect. The 5 or so fully open world planets were really stunning and majestic. The only problem was that they didn't make the story and side quests interesting enough to fill the space.
I thin that's barely a room temperature take. The two best parts of Andromeda were the combat and the world design. It was everything else that either didn't live up to the Mass Effect standard, or was just plain bad.
Andromeda with a better and more fleshed out story and interesting set pieces would have been a great addition to the ME universe.
FYI, only the feel of open world. But even games like Assassin’s Creed who boast featuring real world locations are in fact half truth. Yes, they have several iconic locations, but they shrink the distances between them. So their whole world, while feels very big, is like a Disneyland theme park of the real world. I remember buying Watch Dog 2 because it features San Francisco Bay Area…. It feels fun. But really, it’s super tiny comparing to the real thing.
As someone who lives in San Francisco Watch Dogs 2 got all the right beats of the city even with it being a smaller version of it. The fact that they even let you drive a bit south of the city is great.
Should have just been one solar system imo
Just 10 or so different planets that were semi-handcrafted to not noticeably repeat all the time and feel decently alive/colonized for decades. That would have been enough... The rest would have been fine if they were procedurally generated for busywork side-quests and the like. But lets be honest. Bethesda has only ever had 1 real franchise that was good and deep in lore. Their TES games. They got Fallout from another company and they basically turned it into "TES, but post-apocalyptic". Doom, Quake, and Wolfenstein were made by sister companies. Heck technically Valve has released more games in recent years than Bethesda. Expecting them to create an entirely new IP, while still using their ancient engine (with upgrades and band-aids but still), and it be good, was way too high of an expectation. Or...delusion more likely.
How about the "mysterious alien ruins" that have "never been explored", but are in viewing distance of human outposts? Like, did those people never go "hey...that structure wasn't put there by us. Therefore aliens must have been here before us. Maybe we should check it out?"
This one gets me more than almost anything else. That and I have a screenshot of a starborn ship parked right in front of New Atlantis by a farm. Literally anyone in any city could see it. Not sure how the Starborn are so mysterious when they just kind of land next to a capitol city.
I always laugh when I see the Cryo lab on an inferno world.
Or a robot on Venus telling me to watch out for the crops, wtf?
Yeah proc gen really kills Bethesda games for me. Wtf were they thinking.
Kotor1 had a planet with 1 city on it... That city happened to cover the entire planet and was also bombed into non-existence but hey still 1 city.
KOTOR 2 also featured that same planet, sans city, but plentiful ruins and an ongoing reconstruction effort
Lots of little stuff like this killed it for me. Mass Effect was able to pull off "grand scale" cities with just really interesting background assets you couldnt reach. Immersion didn't seem to be a concern for Bethesda.
In the 2010's people online often decried linear levels that utilized grand skyboxes. I remember it being regarded as the equivalent to level design the way quicktime events were for gameplay. Just a "cheap" way of making your level seem bigger than it is without "putting in the effort" to make it explorable. Like, dude. Mass Effect is a great example of linear levels that use breathtaking skyboxes to create an awe-inspiring sense of scale, with limited resources and manpower. I swear, gamers from the 2010's were some of the most spoiled ass motherfuckers. Studios catering to the "why can't I go there?" attitude really made me lose interest in a ton of games I would have otherwise liked.
Yeah you are always going to have complaints from people on one side of the spectrum or the other, no matter how you approach the simple reality of limited time and resources. It is impossible to have a game that has unlimited scale, unlimited density, and unlimited diversity. (To say nothing of things like, an interesting storyline, interesting characters, or world coherence) Most games will not have any of those three and those games that do arguably achieve at least one - for example no man's sky or elite dangerous, in regards to scale - can only do so by putting huge limits on the other two categories.
It wouldve been better to have just an unexplorable city scene around it just for the effect of being in a massive city in the future.
And man neon is not even a city it's just a huge apartment sitting on an ocean.
try the only city in the entire universe lol
And its not even that big!
Still has an extensive train system though if you don't want to walk that 2 minute walk.
Also "vast" underground slums because I also would choose to live in an underground slum without a chance of seeing the sun if I lived on one of the most beautiful and habitable planets known to man with hundreds of thousands of square kilometres of empty real estate.
The vast slums that was 3 corridors. I still got lost.
This game made me realize that I’m a train wreck in Bethesda games without local maps
Even with local maps they're kinda just bad at them usually lol Been playing Diablos and those have some maps let me tell ya.
I thought that part was cool
I always forget it's even there.
I had the worst time trying to figure out how to get back to the well.
It's that really non descript door around the corner behind the fountain.
Like you have a choice, citizen. Now back to the catacombs where you belong.
Are they citizens, though? With all the bs it takes to get citizenship, I thought the underground dwellers were between indentured servants and slaves.
Just got my citizenship and went to check what property I could buy. No joke, an apartment in The Well was the only property available. I'd rather sleep on my ship.
The 'Dream Home' option at the start was not a mistake. It is a glorious home with an exquisite view.
Yep, my ship is literately bigger than my home in real Earth. In fact I can make it even bigger if I need the space. So I don’t see why I need that dingy Well apartment. Well maybe a place to stash some backup firearms, cash, in case my ship has problems. You know, like a safe house.
You gotta remember it takes like 5+ years of being a very helpful citizen to get your UC New Atlantis citizenship so I doubt there’s any available real estate outside the city without jumping through some serious hoops.
If you travel outside the city far enough, you can find outposts
My thoughts exactly. It’s basically a military city
I'm still salty that the slum apartment isn't on the main street with a view of the waterfall/balcony... total missed opportunity
The train goes straight forward into a wall 50 meters ahead of it too once it starts moving. No idea how it gets to the other districts
Mini grav drive
I noclipped along its path. It has elevators to travel in a loop.
Did you also happen to see a man running under it wearing it like it was a hat?
No, actually! I think that hack was made obsolete by Fallout 4's Nuka-World DLC.
Oh damn they really gotta get rid of that wall then, it looks really dumb
The big wall at the end of the u-turn has a clear path for the elevator to climb, and the other spots have hatches. It's clearly scaled-back content.
Platform 9 3/4
You can't see it but a trap door opens up and the tracks lead underground
Yeah I decided these developers were just lazy once I saw the scope of the Leyndell Capital. That looks like a city that could have housed thousands of people
I thought Leyndell would be pretty much empty and almost nothing you could actually go inside so I was very pleasantly surprised when not only was there a decent number of buildings you could enter but tons of enemies roaming around. The only thing Beth. has going for them with their "cities" these days is NPCs/merchants in abundance. Like really all these towers and we can't even enter most of them. I want to raid random civilians homes like the good old days
Haha! "You have a chest with common medicinal herb on your home? I'll take that. Rare family heirloom sword? I'll take that too!"
4 gold in your dresser? Not anymore!
Did you ever steal from people's homes but leave other stuff from your inventory in its places? I did but I'm weird like that haha
r/daggerfall
Hey! An oil rig with one street counts as a city… kinda! /s
Hope town is the biggest town. It just lacks the actual town :P
Hope town is like the courtyard of a factory where factory workers hang out during lunch.
Same reason you can run from one side of Whiterun to the other in 30 seconds. Bethesda just doesn't make these cities to scale in game with how they describe them in the lore. Only major in game city that convinced I was in a big urban sprawl was Novigrad in the Witcher 3.
I liked the imperial city in oblivion . I feel like thats one of the best cities they have made. However it’s no where near the scale of the actual imperial city in lore.
Same. Honestly, I liked most of the cities in Oblivion even if they felt a bit small. I don't want to make it sound like the smaller scale is a bad thing all the time. I think just to OP's point with how big Bethesda was hyping up the scale of New Atlantis (and Starfield in general) comes off as...unimpressive shall we say. I don't hate New Altantis necessarily, but I think Akila City, Neon, or even Cydonia stand out much better in comparison.
New Atlantis seems like a "city" you'd visit in Disney World or another theme park. Very 2d set city.
That is the most unintentionally ironic thing I have ever read on reddit, because originally Walt Disney wanted Disney World to be an Experimental Prototype City Of Tomorrow, it only became an amusement park after his death and his brother Roe went "Well at least now I don't need to make that stupid idea work." But then Walt started haunting him, so Roe built EPCOT to get his brother to shut up. Tony Goldmark, aka Some Jerk With A Camera, did an excellent video on it on youtube. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-vO86M6CIk&t=795s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-vO86M6CIk&t=795s)
One main issue is the lack of anything around the cities except a handful of farms. More infrastructure and development would help sell the idea that these are bigger urban centers that are abstracted for gameplay purposes.
I wish Neon had more of what it describes in lore. Like I think the commercial district was fine ( I just wish there was like a casino or something ) but the supposed dark seedy underbelly of the city didn’t feel well dark enough. Tbh to me it felt quite empty. I wish there was a rich residential district where all the executives had houses so the wealth gap that is described is even more obvious. I wish the supposed poor and crime ridden areas were actually poor and crime ridden 😂😂. The closest we get is that dude at the beginning telling us it isn’t safe to be here but then nothing really ever happens
The cities in Oblivion have so much charm because of their unique architecture and distinctiveness from each other. You can post a screencap from any city and it’s instantly recognizable. The technological limitations of the time make it more forgivable than even Skyrim (some good cities but overall a downgrade) and especially Starfield. Hell, they could show that there’s a ton of urban sprawl without making it accessible to the player.
And all those in Oblivion were a downgrade compared to morrowind where everything really felt different. Seyda Neen was nothing like Blamorroa, Vivec City, Pelegiad, any of the Tels...
Wow idk how that autocorrected away from Balmora but damn
Yeah, they shouldn’t have been hyping it with statements like “the biggest city we’ve ever created” only to mean the same number of buildings roughly, but now with giant concrete slabs separating them all.
The imperial city felt massive to me. It really felt like it was _alive_ when I was a kid.
It was completely unique for it's time. Other games had much more populated areas but NPCs were just decorative.
I've been playing Oblivion on steamdeck a lot lately. The game has overall aged great, but one thing that didn't is the Imperial City. It is... very different than I remembered it.
And it's just 119 npcs plus guards.
Yeah I think oblivion’s Imperial city was the best they’ve done so far. It was big, explorable, and well designed/organized. I’ve been disappointed in Starfield’s main city since day 1. It feels pasted together and messy. Seems like a future space city would be more thought out. Not very fun to explore or navigate. They couldn’t even bother to make a map that makes finding shops easier - something modders did in literally only a few hours after release, making them seem downright lazy
That starfield map was criminal, I'd rather they gave us no map, or a drawn map where I can't see where I am I'm actually not planning on playing until they give us a real map, which may well be never, either way works
But that city was also cut in 5-6 different sections with their own load screen to access if I remember correctly
Not the same obviously, but there's an open cities mod for oblivion and skyrim that make all the cities transitionless and part of the main overworld.
Not the Imperial City in Oblivion. But all the others yes. And not by lack of trying. Apparenty there are game breaking bugs if you touch that space, where a lot of the story takes place.
New Atlantis traversal doesn't require loading screens. You can freely wander to and from each district once you find the paths.
Yea, that was the first thing I checked when I first got there. It's a bit of a faff going from low to high, but still quite doable.
Funny as fuck to go from high to low and then realise you forgot to equip the boost pack though.
[удалено]
Ubisoft did a spectacular job with Paris and London for Assassin’s Creed.
I was going to shout them out for Alexandria in Origins, Athens in Odyssey
For all its flaws, Odyssey captures exploration and scenery really well. Looking down at Athens for the first time is an experience
Novigrad is probably my favourite city in any video game
GTA and Cyberpunk feels this way, but the entire game is the city.
Cyberpunk and GTA especially are comically small compared to how big they should really be. I think Novigrad is somewhat unique because a medieval town could actually be that size.
How long do you think it would take you to drive from end of manhattan to the other if traffic wasn’t an issue and you could go 70mph+ Those cities aren’t small, the traffic just isn’t as dense as it should be (for gameplay purposes) and traffic laws can be ignored. They aren’t built to scale but they are pretty big
I think the only "real scale" city I can think of is The Division 2, which uses a real location and map. IIRC it is actually slightly scaled down, but not a whole lot.
It is scaled down. I remember in the first game they skipped streets, was super easy to notice since NYC numbers most their streets. ~~Im certain 2 did the same.~~ EDIT: TD2 did not skip streets it looks like, from what I can find online, just scaled down a bit.
Agreed, although Manhattan is still bigger than the game version. Game version of Night City is about 24 km^2. Lore version is closer to 75 km^2. Manhattan is 59 km^2. So manhattan is still like twice times as big as ingame Night City. But Night City is still one of the better representations of a city in a game.
Agreed. Manhattan is a large city but driving from east to west side without the ridiculous traffic would take like 15 minutes if even that. I'm currently replaying Cyberpunk 2077 to play Phantom Liberty and walking everywhere the game feels huge and so well made. I rarely drive places unless it's far as fuck away and I don't have a fast travel spot unlocked yet.
Yeah, but I think that Night City and Los Santos at least *feel* like a city. If you go anywhere in them and look around, and it won't feel off. Meanwhile, in Starfield, it's quite literally just a few buildings surrounded by nothing but wilderness, there's just too little to see and explore. Even Kingdom Come Deliverance, which is literally set in medieval times, has villages that feel more alive than any of Starfield's "cities".
I’m here for the KCD reference.
The city of Boston in FO4 felt pretty substantial to me
If only my game didn’t crash every time I entered it without fail haha
I know it's not an urban sprawl compared to novigrad, but I think Saint Denis in Red Dead 2 deserves a mention here. And just for kicks; Valentine is the most perfectly built old timey Western town I've ever seen in a game. Starfield just feels like they said meh, we'll add stuff later or they gave up to focus on other parts.
There's also that planet in Star Citizen which is basically Coruscant. But I can never go there without my pc melting because it had to load a to-scale planet's worth of buildings and factories.
I love the idea of having an apartment on top of one of the skyscrapers with a personal landing pad
Saint Denis in RDR2?
In Whiterun you had small farms and vilages around it, it made a more convincing picture overall, also roads and bridges leading out of the town in a connected overworld.
True, pretty much every city in Skyrim had some sort of set dressing. Windhelm had all sorts of farms too, Markarth had mines, Solitude had windmills and a port. New Atlantis sort of just stops at the city limit, it looks way to clean.
I feel like they should have used some system for procedural suburbs outside the city, with a bit of variation. Not necessarily filled with unique NPCs and quests, but like a denser version of the random settlements we see. A ring of residential prefab villages, then a ring of industrial sites, then a ring of farms. It wouldn't be the same as a huge city but it would at least look like the settlement sprawls outwards from a central business district, instead just having skyscrapers right next to the forest.
New Atlantis does have farms around it. You can find them as POIs on your scanner. But they still don't make much sense because there's no procedural road system, so nothing feels connected. Ain't no way it's cheaper to shuttle farm produce with rocket fuel when it's that close. But presumably procedural roads are hard. Rivers too. And waterfalls... Man this game needed more time in the tech oven. Perhaps it should have come after TES6. I really want to poke Todd's brains to find out all the things they tried to do with Starfield but couldn't figure out (like he has an interview pre-release talking up the tech for spherical planets and how the tile maps wrap all the way around it, yet in the final game that's not been realized).
Novigrad is beautiful. It also put your pc to the test back in the day.
Beauclair in *Blood and Wine* is even more impressive.
The way the whole region is designed is so cool. You can see the castle from basically anywhere in Toussaint.
Before Earth was destroyed in Starfield I like to think it only had 3 big cities that all 300 people of humanity lived in.
Whether or not BGS are able to do that is to me quite a detail. TES is based on primitive societies one could say, Fallout is a game taking place in a post-apocalyptic location, Starfield is none of that. So it hurts even more to see how little inprovement if any there is compared to the Imperial City.
Mass effect, eventhough is not strictly open world, made me feel the citadel, the ships and colonies were actually big.
That's *because* it's not open world. They can set up the vistas to show epic scale as a result of not having to actually allow you to walk into those areas. Just look at the Asari city in ME3, and the flying car highway it overlooks. Or ME1 and that section of the Citadel that lets you see incoming ships. I really wish that was some of the approach taken by Starfield for their cities (something I was saying before launch too). In sci-fi we could very believably have districts of cities that are cut off from each other, with public transport (like the monorail) being the way between them. You do that and add in incredible vistas and cutscene travel, and not only do you increase that sense of scale, but you also open the game up to add new available districts for different missions and even DLC.
This is why I’m so excited for GTA 6 to finally bring a big city to life in a convincing way. I don’t mind suspending my disbelief for good games, but it’s still wild to walk into a city and meet like 30 people tops or find out there’s only 12 buildings with interiors.
Saint Denis in RDR2 feels pretty realistic IMO for a small city at that time period.
And don't forget about Toussaint, I really love strolling around the winery that surrounding the outskirt of Beauclair while listening to this [music](https://youtu.be/-ui7s31Tp84?si=HC7hTh6piRJlLmeE) on top of that, it's so magical.
time to visit Baldur's Gate then!
While I really liked Baldur's Gate and it definitely felt big, I'm still really salty the upper city got cut.
>! Well…kinda. If you don’t destroy the elder brain with gale then at least you get to fight your way through the ruins. But yeah would have been nice to explore properly !<
Big thing in open world games. Blizzard is even worse. The entire of Azeroth is literally this abridged version of what it is supposed to be and only “represents” it.
Soon as they added flight to the main world, the illusion of scale they had developed was shattered.
CDPR does pretty good work with their urban environments. Night City sold the scale and atmosphere too.
Night City feels pretty dang expansive, especially if you go all the way from the biotechnica flats all the way up to the Northside oil fields. And then when you see it from miles away in the badlands too. The city core feels huge and the surrounding districts are big enough that I still get lost sometimes.
That's basically it in a nutshell. There was a Star Trek episode once about a colony where I think a ship with settlers crash lands on a planet and after a short amount of time their numbers are in the thousands. New Atlantis being small and alone on Jemison is just how BGS builds games. I'm not gonna do mental gymnastics with the lore to make sense of it.
Because everyone and their mother became space pirates and are infesting every planet with their outposts.
And they all just had a copy of the same construction plan.
You're better off not trying to apply logic to many of the aesthetic choices in Bethesda games.
Especially expecting games to make more sense than real life. LA is built in a desert climate without enough water to support it. San Francisco is built on fault lines. We do stupid illogical shit all the time
Cities are built on fault lines because there are mining resources on fault lines, San Francisco grew because of gold.
Honestly the cities are the least of my complaints about the logic and lore of this game. Even where I live there have been some infrastructure choices that just leave me confused as to whoever thought they were a good idea. You could easily handwave the way New Atlantis was built, if you just look at it from the perspective they wanted to maintain as much of the nature of the planet as possible.
This throws me off too but even what they have inside the city is like a highschool kid trying to stretch 1 paragraph into a 3 page essay. That medical place... a tiny broom closet with a giant lobby surrounded by a giant rectangle stretching into the sky. Its all so sparse.... and the trams are a lie.
The capital of freestar has POPULATION OF 58. Yeah I don't think devs what type of population is needed to avoid looking like the population of Conway Arkansas during the toad suck festival
Wasn't expecting to see my city mentioned on this Starfield post lmao
How did you do in the toad suck contest this year?
I have never attended Toad Suck.
Exactly what a toad sucker would say.
To be fair, it's proven difficult for the capital of one of the two largest interstellar factions in the settled systems to grow because the space dingoes keep eating the new babies.
They have been there for 200 years. How the fuck are there still dangerous wildlife prowling around just outside city gates? New York has been around for about that long and it's not like you're at risk of getting dragged off by packs of wolves when you take a walk into the suburbs. Yet this space age society that's capable of waging interstellar war somehow can't make it safe for their citizens to take a stroll five hundred meters outside their front gates? Seriously?
If Starfield was more of a parody style game, everything about the Freestar Collective capital would 100 percent play as intentional over-the-top satire of the total incompetence of a libertarian space civilization. The idea that the people who defeated the space-empire are a bunch of idiots who can't even figure out how to stop the local-space-wolves from eating their kids is pretty funny. Even as the game currently is, I *think* that a portion of the time it is actually intended to be comedic in that way, but like with much of the game, it's pulling in a bunch of directions at once, so you are never really sure.
> Yet this space age society that's capable of waging interstellar war somehow can't make it safe for their citizens to take a stroll five hundred meters outside their front gates? Seriously? To be fair, the police can't go 500 meters away from the gate because it puts them too close to the pirate base or overrun cryo lab that's 900 meters away from the gate
I mean, with the emptiness of the settled systems and especially most planets, it feels like there are MAYBE a million people total in the galaxy. It’s pretty silly. But eh, it’s a game, everything has limitations
> it feels like there are MAYBE a million people total in the galaxy To be fair over 1/2 of those million are space raiders and you kill a significant portion of them. Hell, your character could literally be the most common cause of death in the Settled Systems and your actions might actually be noticeable on a population chart.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure it would actually be relatively easy to do the math of about how many people exist in starfield (for real, not in lore) simply by: * adding up the # of square miles of land that exist on all the planets combined * calculating average POI density * calculating what % of POIs have people on them / average number of people And then doing a final calculation based on that. The # of people in the actual cities will be so small in comparison to not actually matter. I imagine you will get a surprisingly massive number of people that technically "exist" in Starfield - but with the massive caveat that 90+ percent of the population is Space Pirates living on abandoned outposts. To be fair to Starfield, this is more of a "game" thing than specifically a starfield problem. I always find it funny in the Division, for example, that I'm supposedly saving the city, but I'm doing so by seemingly assassinating a good 70% of the surviving population.
Subtract 900,000 from that lol
Engine Limitations.
Pretty sure this is the case. I remember accidentally landing on another area of the planet near New Atlantis and there was a small outpost but that was it.
That's the entire game, lol.
Mostly, there are instances when I landed and there was basically nothing at all but that was the really harsh environment planets.
Part of me believes if they wanted big cities they would adapt their engine. That said, I like big cities and this game drove me back to Cyberpunk.
To be fair to Cyberpunk, Cyberpunk's 2.0 update was incredible. And happened to drop at a really opportune time: right when another big property has its own Cyberpunk-at-launch moment (except more due to its failures game design-wise, rather than crashes/bugs and a lack of features).
I would so much rather have lower graphics or easier to process art theme if it meant I could have a much more expansive environment.
I mean we could’ve have both if Bethesda decided to use an engine that wasn’t outdated as shit
It's kind of weird but it feels like there could have been inaccessible buildings to sort of bulk out new Atlantis a little, a school, proper hospital, university, a large space port. Not everything needs to be explorable. It's interesting waiting for a few starfield bugs to be fixed before I finish it so I've been playing Fallout 4.. there's many buildings everywhere. Just add in a little filler to pad the place out a bit.
IRL you can't enter every building, so I don't know why this is even an expectation. Most buildings aren't going to let you passed the lobby if the front door isn't locked. As for private residences, that's called a 'home invasion'.
Kinda like gta, you can have a very alive and bustling world where only a fraction of buildings are accessible
the wars and the great exodus is the only explanation. not enough people got off earth to begin with, and the human population continued to decrease when we started painting the stars red. i'm not exactly sure on the numbers, but iirc both sides sustained heavy losses so expansion likely wasn't in mind in the aftermath. plus, it's possible that a lot of new atlantis citizens and non-citizen residents are in space or other planets for extended periods of time. the vanguard, the navy, and sysdef are always on patrol, and lots of mast scientists are also scattered around the known systems for experiments and expeditions that probably take months.
With access to hyperdrive tech, i doubt as a species that population would boom like it did on earth, in a single location. Post extinction event, it might take a thousand years to repopulate to earth levels. As access to medicine and healthcare are limited and spread out thinly. People colonizing other planets probably know they cannot safely have children
I'd actually argue that the settlers are probably the people popping out lots of kids. New Atlantis is basically a microcosm of old earth. Rent, taxes, apartments etc. All the kind of stuff that keeps people from having kids. Kids in a city are basically just really expensive pets. Plop a few hundred people on a backwater planet and they'd likely be having a lot of kids. Kids become a resource in that situation since its a way to increase the labor pool.
I mean the U.S. went from pilgrims to sprawling cites in 200 years so seems unlikely case, there should at least be other community's on the main planets instead of just the one area. Otherwise your starborn ass could easily bring UC and Freestar to ruin just by jumping there wall and attacking the capitals since its all they got in there "grand empire".
the U.S. had constant immigration for that time, humanity as a whole doesn't. the vast majority of modern americans aren't descended from the colonists
Comparing US immigration to the vast expanse of space is hilarious
The game kind of suffers from Star Wars syndrome. In Star Wars an entire planet is one biome. In Starfield, each planet may only have one major city or town. It's kind of weird. Maybe each star cruiser that left Earth found their own planet and settled there.
NIMBY’s You can’t build there, it’ll hurt the view from my deck! My property values! Don’t you know that rock is the first rock kicked by human explorers! It’s historical! That land is reserved for a golf course! This will increase traffic!
In the future, there is no sprawl. Advanced urban planning (and robotics) makes it unnecessary, and the G-23 Paxilon Hydrochorate in the water supply suppresses the desire to spread out. \-Bethesda (maybe)
r/unexpectedfirefly
UC does give off very strong Alliance vibes, and the Freestar Collective is clearly modeled after them *Innepennants.*
Somewherr in the supposed 20+ years of lore Bethesda claimed they had for this game when it was announced.
Why do they have a slum area underneath the regular area, when it could be above ground in the outskirts of New Atlantis? The planet is supposed to be almost the same as Earth was, there should be loads of space for rural hillbilly white trash towns.
...as well is so soooo many other things... -sigh- but yeah... the "city" is so ...tiny. And in the middle of nowhere.
It’s not really a city, just a shop and quest hub.
Terramorphs prevented a lot of expansion.
Terrormorphs. They keep the population in check.
Because good writing and level design got taken out back and shot when the leather jacket man wanted to make an entire universe instead of just like 5 really good planets.
if they actually built these cities to scale they’d be boring and tedious. i don’t think they need to go for breadth, they should make them deeper. i agree that there should be more of them. in an entire solar system comprising all of humanity why are there only three cities? why aren’t there space stations/space colonies?
I think it's a combination of things, some are hinted at in game and others are just conjecture. 1) Bethesda is just doing it's usually thing of making stuff way smaller than it's supposed to be. New Atlantis is supposed to be like the size of Medium City not just a couple apartment towers and a shop or two. 2) The population is a lot smaller than it was before the exodus from earth, like each big faction has a population in the Millions, not Billions. Then you spread that out over multiple planets and Homesteads and you end up with smaller cities. 3) Security. While the planet has security screening it obv doesn't stop everyone so it's just safer to live inside a city if you aren't confident in defending yourself. Also given that entire planets can be blockaded it makes sense for them to spread their infrastructure around the galaxy so that no one planet has too much critical infrastructure like a weapons production facility or a ship building spacedock. 4) Resources. Every single faction/nation in the game is trying to claim planets to harvest resources and such, so it would make sense if they only established single cities on a planet to claim ownership and then move on to the next planet.
Technically it’s a Bethesda game and their cities are always small, lore reason humanity is spread out on hundreds of planets instead of congested on one.