#starfield #proceduralgeneration
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Starfield is an action role-playing game developed by Bethesda Game Studios and published by Bethesda Softworks. It was announced during Bethesda’s E3 presentation in 2018. The game takes place in a space-themed setting, and is the first new intellectual property developed by Bethesda in 25 years.
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You make a fine point there, the Pattinator.
This is a very well done and reasoned video, one of the best I've seen in a long time actually! Great video and I agree with you completely.
I suspect that they are expecting Modders to fill in the gaps with cool content.
i might be an asshole but I just want to kill people in this game and bethesda ruined it…
Bethesda is too lazy for polishing their game.
That's far from it's biggest problem. The biggest problem is the 20 year old game engine. Procedural Generation can be improved as No Man's Sky has shown, the game engine can not.
Exactly, procedural generation needs to have a fun reason for being implemented.
Having a lot of variation in maps makes me excited when I think of something like “Binding of Isaac” because it gives a different experience and difficulty each time.
In a game like Starfield, when they are offering whole new planets, the amount of options they need to build in for the generation are insane.
Instead they just put in barely over the minimum needed for something so huge, then try and say that there are thousands of different planets to explore.
Yea technically there are…but in such huge game, they feel strangely small and boring.
Edit: Also fuck the whole bullet sponge thing, it’s a really unsatisfying part of the game.
Wait but no mans sky is procedural generated. So im confused. There are people bitching about starfield but praise no mans sky. But ive tried no mans sky and i couldnt do it. It never bothers me when Im playing starfield. We got what we wanted. A space rpg and it is epic. The story, the guns, the planets, the exploration. Fucking nasa. If you dont like it dont play it. Yeah you would want every planet to be crafted by bethesda but youd be bitching about "why is it taking so long"
Bethesda called this a space rpg. Not a space sim. Star citizen isnt even done or on the xbox. So what the fuck do people want??? If it affected you then you just dont enjoy the game so hop off it. That's it.
Don't call it proc-gen. It is degrace to proc-gen. Call it copy-paste.
When Starfield makes Mass Effect Andromeda look like the good kid of the bunch…something's deeply f*cked up.
slight nitpick, but Nords have naturally immunity to the cold. So them not completely covered in fur clothes make sense in universe.
It's not procedural generation at fault, it's too-simple procedural generation. The permissible variations are way too granular; the number of things which can vary at all is orders of magnitude too small. We don't need every rock, tree, and dungeon hand crafted, we just need so many of them we can't spot the repeats.
Think about it for a moment: nature does weathering and growth according to a certain list of rules, but you don't hear complaints about Hall's Canyon looking exactly like The Grand Canyon but scaled down.
There are a few massively immersion-breaking things in Starfield. (and yet, I still enjoy the game). The things that bug me the most are that every planet with anomalies and Temples also has man-made structures. Most often occupied by spacers, pirates, or Ecliptic. And yet, the only people who know about artifacts & temples are Constellation & Starborn. Really? It should based on the surroundings – old news.
While I enjoy surveying planets, I have to ignore the fact that 100's if not thousands of people were there before me – did no one already do a complete survey?
Constellation tells me that they are the only Explorers left – well, yeah, we've put stuff on every inhabitable and uninhabitable planet in the Galaxy, and people don't consider scavenging to be "Exploration."
– It's annoying, so I try to ignore it, and generally I do.
These are interesting problems, and I think we will figure out how to do better environmental story telling with procedural gen. at some point. There would still be something missing, one of those things being relevance to your story. Also only contrived reasons to walk across it when you can fly.
Would have been cool if we had better variations of those randomly placed dungeons. Got tired seeing the same bloody pirate cave with exact same placement of everything from items to enemies to dead bodies. I know it's soulless but at least try to trick me otherwise.
Please leave the background music out next time. It is hard to focus on what you are saying and the vibe you are giving to the video is: what I am saying doesn't matter.
God damn all yall do is complain. Go play Baldurs Gate.
"Brazilian" NPCs did it for me.
Procedural generation is not inherently linked to AI, procedural generation can be produced by any number of basic or complex algorithms, from something as simple as a drunk walk to way more involved stuff. I'm sure you can use "AI" for it too but its not inherently linked to it. Good video, just pointing out the definition.
I REALLY wanted to play Starfield, so ibought NO MANS SKY. 😅
After the Fridman interview it was to be suspected Bethesda would utilize proc-gen in much wider scope in order to make the 99% of planets without fixed story line locations explorer friendly. I think this would work in favour of exploration minded palyers if the occasional emerging instances of loot and battle were much more procedually generated as they are. As of how the game is now, assets you find on barren ice covered worlds if not being in a environmental or story continuum they break the impression of vastness because they are all the same.
@14:00: Thanks from all arachnophobes for leaving out the spiders as Skyrim's typical enemies! 🙂
Procedural generation isn’t the reason the game is bad. The game is bad because it is fucking boring.
space is flat
Scamfield or Starfailed ?
When people talk about the amount of content, that itself is a trap. Repeating that there is endless content etc plays into developer's hands – what we should be saying is there is a large amount of repeated, generic padding. Don't let them get away with it!
Adding the alien levels or regions would be interesing, but then you need many more aliens to fill your worlds, but that is expensive and starfield is just cheap. also the devs had noone to copy the ideas from so its ended like this…
Bethesda do NOT have dedicated writers or designers. Everyone does every type of job. Working on the level design for the bottom of Boston? Congrats! You now have to write, design and implement a quest drawn from the hat of ideas (a literal hat with slips of paper in it) and now you have to write and design 5 characters, build the quest areas, script the events for the quest. And wala! That's how you get the "Kid in a fridge" quest line. A stupidly lore breaking quest line in which makes the whole rest of the game look worse for its inclusion…..but hey, at least we didn't waste any budget on people who just write all day lol
100 planets with 80 barren, 16 procedural and 4 large entirely handcrafted would have been much better
I find even the handcrafted stuff in starfield pretty crap and half-baked.
But for those that do like it, I would be curious what the game would look like if modders removed all the proc gen and placed every thing in fixed locations on 5 or 6 planets
You don't own Minecraft? What the hell that was the biggest takeaway from this video, go buy it bro.
Starfield has nearly no Procedural Generation. the only Actual procedural Generation is Planet Layout and POI placement. Meaning POI's are not random, they will ALWAYS look the same, the only difference is Who occupies them.
The bigger games get, the more you wish they were smaller with more detail. More isn’t always better, glad this was on game pass
I couldn't put my finger on what's wrong with Starfield, but you point it exactly. Thanks.
How can a game with "so much content" be so empty?
I really dissapointed with how samey the random generated building there's no variance to the "abandon cryo lab" or "abandon mining outpost" etc
If there's at least variance to it the radiant or side quest or just exploring random point on the map could be more interesting
Isn't the reason so many people love Bethesda because of the massive handcrafted worlds you can walk around in freely? Clearly the logical thing to do is create a new game with 90% procedural generation and fast travel is also required because Bethesda isn't even close to having the tech needed to make a good space game
What I didn't like about the exploration was that they never took advantage of the the other side of it. Yes, it can be beautiful and fascinating, seeing things that you've never seen before and marveling at the colors and phenomena around you. But remember: this is mostly uncharted territory. There should have been actually dangerous storms like lightning that shook the earth, comet storms, giant flaming geysers as the planet releases pressure, desert sands that are soft like oceans and can swallow you whole. Imagine they have a device that can scoop matter from a planet's orbital rings that is dangerously close to breaking down so you're trying to save the crew before the craft is consumed, hearing and feeling the thing slowly break down as the scoop starts losing power and gets trampled by high-speed matter crashing into it… Space can be amazing, but also terrifying. Part of why Constellation has its name should have been because, despite all that could happen, they dare to brave the unknown and find out WHY these things happen. That's what they advertise, but you never really get to take part in that. Such a shame.
Procedural generation is great for padding. And when you look at most, maybe all, design decisions chosen for Starfield, they chose the one that pads the game time the most while requiring least effort.
I had no interest in any of th waypoints on random planets. I did one cave and all that was in there was propaganda or whatever the fuck it’s called and realized exploration isn’t worth the combat and dialogue is where all the meat is
Honestly I made it as far as finding Constellation. As soon as they told me what my main mission would be I noped out hard.
I think random generation can work, but Starfield did the absolute minium to qualify. The pool of potential "Points of interest" is very small, and when they do appear they are basically exactly the same. Enemies spawn in the same locations, loot is in the same spot etc.
If you want random generation in games to be useful, it needs far more options to work with, and hopefully some over lap between them to make memorable moments. I always think of MInecraft. The sheer number of Seeds in that game is nuts.
The way terrain is generated often blending between one and another is impressive, then you have resource placement like Ores, various Structures that not only spawn but can be affected by where they spawn. You have villages hanging off the edges of mountains, Mine shafts that are exposed due to a nearby ravine etc.
Simply put Minecraft did it better years ago, and only has improved over the years.
Im just gonna say it Starfield is absolute garbage and BGS should be ashamed of themselves for it. Not a single redeemable quality imo… not a single thing that other games havent done far better and even games in thier own catalogue which makes it so much worse. BGS may have died and us fans are just holding on to the past at this point. Sad man…. Not much hope if at all for ES6 now which is heartbreaking for me as ES is one of the favorite franchises of all time no question.
It's just ironic that Starfield is a game with "1000 PLANETS", yet it feels a lot smaller than a game like FO4.
There's like a handful of "places" you just go to in Starfield… the planets are huge, but there's like only a dot in the map where you *want* to go.
And you know what, I'm calling it right now.
Starfield was an "experiment" of Bethesda / Microsoft / Game industry, of making a game with 90% of it being made by AI.
I just cannot fathom how any of these was created by a person. Everything feels "enough" but in the "stupid enough" way.
I honestly hate more then I like in this game
it really just feels like they made the bare minimum requirements for an actual game made the engine better for modders so they can generate all the content to fix the game
funny how you mention Rimworld in the end, a large chunk of the beauty of that game is from the absolutely dizzying number of interacting mechanisms within the unassuming 2D graphical presentation.
Starfield – at least from what I've seen come across my feed here – has little to no "under the hood" work done to make the setting Feel alive. if anything, I think the brunt of script work is just for the Engine's procedural generation, which can't really work with Creation itself without making a rather butt-clenching number of compromises with the Cell Loading limitations it has.
No it doesn't, hell procedural generation was in Daggerfall, was hated by the community being said wide as an ocean deep as a puddle, but years later people have now realized how amazing Daggerfall is.
I bet my soul in years time the same people saying Starfield is shit, mid, bad etc will flip flop and start saying they never hated it, its a classic, an underrated gem. Just like what happened with Daggerfall.