Procedual generation shows its ugly head

[Grump]

I'm enjoying the game. But man...man man MAN I wish I didn't have to see some of the same stuff from one star system to another. Like oh boy a collapsed mine! There's a body that has a note saying "I've found the mother load woohoo!" I proceeded to loot and leave. Then on a different planet on another solar system I find the same collapesed mine with the same corpse with the SAME "WOOHOO! I'm the same guy that found the motherboard AGAIN!" This game really wants you to focus on the missions and side missions bc yeesh when off the beaten path you will sometimes feel like you are role playing a character that is suffering a bad case of deja vu.

[doomleika]

Reason why Mass Effect 1(2007) decided to drop exploration in 2(2010) is it's really boring and snoozefest. It's amazing seeing others made the same mistake again.

[fauxpas]

Yeah, I feel as if the game punishes completionists and you are expected to leave a planet just as soon as the survey (with upgraded skills) is complete.

[Doctor Zalgo]

It's not even good proc gen. I asked GPT4 to generate me 1000 news headlines across science, politics, religion, culture etc and it churned out 1000 distinct headlines without breaking a sweat.

I asked it to do another thousand and include undertones of a interstellar war and it did it incredibly well. There was even some indirect stuff like "Mercury Galaxies star player killed during fleet operations in Alpha Centauri" and "Medical shortages continue as casualties mount".

Proc gen doesn't need to be the same as ♥♥♥♥♥♥ anymore. It just needs a bit of care and shaping.

[Zalzany]

Its also why I get bored of NMS after 4-8 hours it gets me back every update then I remeber why I got bored, get the new shiny and leave sigh.

[HuffingJenkem]

Exploration should have been picking a target system, loading up on supplies (with fuel having a cost and not auto refilling), dropping a bunch of drones, they scan the planet for you, you get alerted to interesting POIs which you then explore yourself. Make fuel mean something, make outposts useful and necessary for extending your range, give the drones a cost and add unique rewards only available via exploration so there's a risk/reward to consider and a reason to do it beyond grinding XP.

But, this is Bethesda, and so everything has to be a tedious, pointless grind and has to be done manually by the player.

[76561198292722533]

Publicado originalmente por doomleika:

Reason why Mass Effect 1(2007) decided to drop exploration in 2(2010) is it's really boring and snoozefest. It's amazing seeing others made the same mistake again.

Agree but there's still quite a hype on ME1 being the best from those crap:
- Generated planets with awful exploration.
- Awfully bad mini games vehicle combats.
- Obvious copy paste dungeons on those planets
- And multiple areas with bigger dungeons but low qulity filling and many boring trash combats.

Sigh.

[Doctor Zalgo]

Publicado originalmente por HuffingJenkem:

Exploration should have been picking a target system, loading up on supplies (with fuel having a cost and not auto refilling), dropping a bunch of drones, they scan the planet for you, you get alerted to interesting POIs which you then explore yourself. Make fuel mean something, make outposts useful and necessary for extending your range, give the drones a cost and add unique rewards only available via exploration so there's a risk/reward to consider and a reason to do it beyond grinding XP.

But, this is Bethesda, and so everything has to be a tedious, pointless grind and has to be done manually by the player.

I'm now 90% convicted they only added scanning plants and animals because they couldn't add vehicles because the zones are so small and you needed something to do while walking.

[Sparhawk122]

Yup. Not enough variety.

The side missions and main questing is good. But the procedural content overshadows that. With things like copy and paste points of interest. Even NPCs are copy and pasted too much.

Example with NPCs. Ignoring that their faces are ugly. I walked into a mining outpost once and the 4 NPCs in there were all the same female NPCs with the exact same faces. Same things happens with soldiers. Mostly female with the same face models.

[HuffingJenkem]

Publicado originalmente por Mazovian Socio-Economist:

Publicado originalmente por HuffingJenkem:

Exploration should have been picking a target system, loading up on supplies (with fuel having a cost and not auto refilling), dropping a bunch of drones, they scan the planet for you, you get alerted to interesting POIs which you then explore yourself. Make fuel mean something, make outposts useful and necessary for extending your range, give the drones a cost and add unique rewards only available via exploration so there's a risk/reward to consider and a reason to do it beyond grinding XP.

But, this is Bethesda, and so everything has to be a tedious, pointless grind and has to be done manually by the player.

I'm now 90% convicted they only added scanning plants and animals because they couldn't add vehicles because the zones are so small and you needed something to do while walking.

I play lots of Starsector, usually as an explorer, and exploration in that is actually satisfying - you've got to plan your expedition, prioritise good targets, work out what risks you're willing to take, and then you hopefully come back to the core systems with holds full of recovered goods, lost technology, some promising colony sites and survey data to sell.

Starfield exploration just feels like a chore.

[DEAD MEAT]

They should have put those lame ass puzzles from Mass Effect in this game too.
if you're gonna' torture the Player's you mind as well do it right.

LOL
sorry, that just kinda' slipped out.

[doomleika]

Publicado originalmente por Garlandenor:

Publicado originalmente por doomleika:

Reason why Mass Effect 1(2007) decided to drop exploration in 2(2010) is it's really boring and snoozefest. It's amazing seeing others made the same mistake again.

Agree but there's still quite a hype on ME1 being the best from those crap:
- Generated planets with awful exploration.
- Awfully bad mini games vehicle combats.
- Obvious copy paste dungeons on those planets
- And multiple areas with bigger dungeons but low qulity filling and many boring trash combats.

Sigh.

I'd argue this is the same as 10's "filler content" to combat rentals. Its very similar. Game gets unnecessary long filler contend to keep the disc in the tray and delay the rentals so first hand copies sells more.

For starfield it's about time spent in XGP so you have better metric.